Wilmette Notes: Something’s in the air. A malevolent stealth variant for one.

     So I went to an art show opening in Pilsen Thursday night. Nobody asked for proof of vaccination. Only a few people wore masks. I wasn't one of them, because that's where I am right now. Leaving the party, I walked to my car down 16th Street under this viaduct and didn't feel scared at all. I mention that, well, as a counterbalance to Caren Jeskey's Saturday report. I don't have to wonder where my sense of alarm went: it seems to have somehow migrated to her. 

By Caren Jeskey

     “Are times stranger than usual?” pondered a client this week. 

    “Yes. They are. Period. Yes,” was my not very therapist-like retort. There is no way to sugarcoat the suffocating nature of too many hardships at once. Armageddon theorists have it all wrong. It’s not a god we have to fear. It’s terrifying humans, savage viruses, and atmospheric catastrophes. They are tangible and are here, all at once.     

     Last Saturday I ventured out (masked, of course) for a trim and a bit of a hang in my old stomping grounds, Lincoln Square. Shoppers with bags from Gene’s Sausage Shop carrying paper coffee cups and holding loved ones’ hands sure made it seem that the world is normal, and fun. And safe.
     Then a flash of a suffering person in Ukraine flickers across my mind’s eye and it looks surreal, this Norman Rockwellesque scene. I recall the story of the meter man who beat someone up in front of Gearheard across from the Square last week. I heard the voice of a man tell me that his mission in life is to get Evil Joe out of office. There's just no escaping the layers of stress and violence that are rippling through the world, all because of a misguided sense that there is an us and a them.
     As if war rife with crimes against humanity (and misinformed crazies* denying it), which is the worst thing one would ever have to live through, isn't bad enough, BA.2 is here (and misinformed crazies* are denying it). Folks are still dying, young people I know are still getting very sick with the virus, long term COVID is real, and this isn’t over ’til it’s over and it may never be over. In the past three weeks, nine folks I know (either directly or with one degree of separation) have been diagnosed with the pesky newest strain.* I stopped using the word crazy many years ago, but in this case I believe it sums things up. A bunch of reactive, impulsive, goofs with poor attention spans and the inability to have a conversation without shouting at or mocking you is one scary thing. And they stigmatize mental illness? Ha.
     After spending the day post-haircut at a sandwich shop (that I feel compelled to say requires proof of vaccination, and I was seated a good distance away from other patrons), I decided to be even braver. It seems time to step out a bit in an effort to balance good COVID sense with some degree of living, and finding inspiration and comfort in community and culture. A friend had called to say she wanted to get together — maybe I could drive to her place downtown? My first instinct was to say no 1) because I am scared of the city with crime double what it was back in Austin, Texas, and worse than it's been in years in Chicago, and I don't want my dear little Honda to get 'jacked and 2) I had not until that point been into anyone’s home other than my parents' for about six months or more. Plus she had a recent case of COVID in the household.
     I have come to realize that even though my extreme hermit lifestyle isn’t so bad and solitude can be golden, it has its down side — there’s only so much talking to plants, singing and dancing alone in one’s living room, and laughing aloud to podcasts and Netflix shows in an empty room that is reasonable for me — so I agreed to see her. Not at her house, but at a (vax required) show at Old Town School of Folk Music.
     David Bromberg Quintet was playing, and we scored a small table in the 2nd row that had been released that day for an otherwise sold-out show. As we settled in (N95 secured) Jordan Tice, a tall young man in faded jeans with a mop of black curls and clear brown eyes stepped on stage. He regaled us with tales sung and expertly strummed in a jaunty, yet philosophical lilt.
     “Mama said relax boy. Lighten up your load. Don’t bring too much down life’s long hard road. Just do what you can. Move a little more down the line. You’re gonna make it where you’re going in a matter of time.”
     When Bromberg stepped on stage his mega-fans whooped and hollered, then quickly settled down when he stepped to the mic, a captain at the helm of his lifeboat. My friend and I enjoyed this expert showman's set. I feel lucky that I have access to such high quality places and people in the entertainment field.
     I won’t tell the story of how Bromberg lost his shit when a man in the front row requested a song, because I don’t have to tell you that it’s hard to keep it together these days.

‘Nothing without integrity’

Sam Mendenhall

    “Exclusive video,” Fox 32 News promised a few days ago, “shows ex-’Empire’ actor’s first moments in Cook County Jail.”
     Sigh.
     I don’t blame the media. Have you ever driven past a car wreck and not taken a look? Nor do I blame the audience. There is something compelling about the Jussie Smollett case, an echoing mystery: How could this rich, handsome, apparently smart young man so methodically destroy his career?
     Even now, with the actor convicted of staging a hate crime hoax out on bond and all of us waiting, maybe for a year, to see whether he has to spend a few richly-deserved months in jail. Attention must be paid.
     Okay then, let’s pay attention.
     But is there a law that says everything about the Jussie Smollett case has to be about Jussie Smollett?
     Why not meet Sam Mendenhall instead?
     Haven’t heard the name? Dan Webb, the special prosecutor assigned to the case after Kim Foxx made an absolute hash of it, wanted the jury to measure Smollett’s character, or lack of same, against a man like Mendenhall, a partner at Winston & Strawn.
     “That is absolutely correct,” said Webb, executive co-chair at Winston. “The juxtaposition between Jussie Smollett and everything he did, compared to down-to-earth Sam Mendenhall, telling it like it is, talking about the evidence. He is a great lawyer.”

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Flashback 2009: Don’t be frightened, it’s just a book

     Republicans across the country, in their junkie scramble to find somebody to consider themselves better than, are assailing books that treat transgender children with dignity. They have some kind of argument, but the bottom line is they identify subgroups they feel safe to attack, and then do so. Plus it's key for them to deprive their children of any kind of broadening literature or experience to help guarantee they grow up to be fearful lunkheads like themselves.
     We're safe from that kind of crap in Chicago, generally, though nine years ago the the Chicago School Board did briefly suppress Marjane Satrapi's well-respected graphic novel Persepolis, until hoots of derision caused them to reverse course and pretend it never happened. But not before I wrote this column: 

     Can children be hurt by books?
     I’m not talking about the lifelong lower back problems, herniated discs and such, that no doubt will come from dragging around those text-crammed 35-pound backpacks. Sometimes I go to relocate a backpack belonging to one of our boys from the center of the living room floor, and it’s like trying to pick up a fire hydrant.
     I mean in the sense — always unspoken, always just assumed to be true — behind every book-banning controversy, such as the still-smoldering brush fire set off when the Chicago Public Schools booted Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” off its seventh-grade curriculum.
     Could reading a certain book hurt a child?
     “Research does not show any kind of direct connection between what is in a book and any kind of harm to a child,” said Barbara Jones, executive director of the Freedom To Read Foundation of the American Library Association. “There really is none.”
     A child encountering a supposedly “inappropriate” book will, she said, more likely just read over the alleged offensive parts.
     “The research shows when a child doesn’t understand a particular part of a book, they’re likely to skip over it,” Jones said.
     Given that Chicago is a city crawling with academics examining precisely how children learn, I figured it would be easy to find experts on this. It was. I turned to the Erikson Institute, probably the nation’s top graduate school teaching childhood development.
     “The important thing about a book is that it invites lots of discussion and debate,” said Professor Gillian McNamee, director of teacher education at Erikson.
     Can’t some difficult books jar sensitive kids?
     “Life experiences just don’t come at us that way,” McNamee said. “If we go see a movie, encounter a book, no one thing in life damages us. We might wish we hadn’t seen it or hadn’t read it. I remember reading “The Jungle” and just being furious and upset by it. Did it hurt me? Yes. But that was the power of the experience.”
     Of course, keeping children from powerful experiences, from the pain of discovering stark truths, is the principle behind these controversies. It’s the hangover from the Victorian era — childhood as a secret garden of fairies and flowers where scary real life must never intrude. Who still holds that view?
     “I’ve come to believe people mean well, they want to make a difference in world,” said Jones. “In the case of ‘Persepolis,’ torture is on the minds of all Americans. People want it to go away, and they think that by taking the book away, it’s an easy way to solve the problem. Only it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t solve the problem.”
     McNamee wondered if the people who decided to remove “Persepolis” from the seventh-grade curriculum even understand what the kids have been studying up to that point.
     “They’ve studied slavery in America by then,” she said. “They’ve encountered and chewed on some unhappy circumstances, both in their lives and in history. We’ve obviously heard about war. Hard times and brutal experiences are not unknown to them.”
     The ironic thing is, stark moments in literature, rather than somehow scarring children, instead help them overcome the actual troubles in their real lives.
     “Understand the power of fairy tales,” McNamee said. “You have these wrenching situations — ‘The Three Little Pigs,’ the Number One favorite story of generations. That’s a pretty bleak story. The mother sends her pigs away — two of the three get eaten. That’s exactly how we feel every day — two out of three times we get chewed up. But we rebound and learn to build an inner house that has some stability. We learn we can protect ourselves from the wolves. When you get these juicy stories, we open up and get distance from our own experience so we can start processing it. We ought not to be saying that book is going to jar somebody, when the whole point of literature is to wake us up and give us some space for a conversation.”
     She noted the CPS comment that teachers may not be ready to deal with the book.
     “That’s their job,” she said. “Our schools are filled with children who are vulnerable but might feel healed and stronger and wiser because we had a great discussion about a powerful book. Instead, they’re worried that this might upset somebody.”
     Teachers should be worried, not about kids possibly being shocked by a sentence or a drawing, but about them instead being bored by pabulum guaranteed not to offend.
     “The biggest threat is students who are not engaged,” McNamee said. “Not talking about what they’re hearing, reading, seeing. Ironically, what state standards now want is students who are able to get inside a book and wrestle and argue and debate about it, using text-based evidence. If young people are reading bland literature and things that aren’t engaging them, that’s really a problem.”
          —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 20, 2013

Russian lies mirror our own

     Why are liars so bad at lying?
     When the grisly images of atrocity started coming out of Bucha — the mass graves, the civilians with their hands tied behind their backs — the Russians immediately replied: it didn’t happen, the accusation itself another “provocation” against them. The photos were staged, or, if killings did occur — as the presence of hundreds of bodies would seem to imply — then it was from Ukrainians shooting their own citizens to make the Russians look bad, because nations do that.
     The speed of the reaction was breathtaking. No hesitation, no flutter of false concern, no “Atrocities? Gosh, we’ll have to look into it right away!”
     Instead, straight to wild conspiracy theories.
     That shouldn’t surprise anybody. The whole war was birthed in lies. When their army massed around Ukraine, Russia dismissed the idea there might be war as an American fantasy. Once it started, calling their “special military operation” a “war” could land you in prison.
     The Russian approach to the truth sure rings a bell, doesn’t it?
     The world was once divided between East and West, Capitalism and Communism, liberals and conservatives. Now it is between those who navigate the difficult world of fact and those sprawled in self-constructed sties of easy fantasy, rooting around the thick, warm mire of self-glorying falsehood.
     Russian rhetoric is characteristic of chronic liars. The nimble, shape-shifting quality. Their reaction this week echoes Alex Jones, the toxic radio host.
     Jones, if you recall, insisted the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary didn’t actually occur, but was a false flag operation, perpetrated by the government to encourage gun control. Jones whipped up his listeners to harass grieving parents.
     Where did that come from?

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Mina Zikri agiatamente

 

      For all the years I've been schlepping downtown to Orchestra Hall to go to the Chicago Symphony, I've never—before Sunday—gone to the Northbrook Symphony, now in its 42nd season. It's certainly easier to get to, playing at the Sheely Center for the Performing Arts, which is a fancy way of saying the auditorium at Glenbrook North High School. A solid five minutes from my house.
     We settled in for the all-Beethoven program, Symphony No. 4 in B flat major, Op. 60, and Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, Op. 55, "Eroica." I'm sure Andrew Patner would have had no trouble pointing out the glaring differences between NS and the CSO, but he is no longer with us, and I really couldn't. Maybe the music was less bright, less defined, a certain softness, but that could just be me groping for differences. Heck, maybe the Northbrook Symphony is better. I don't know. What I do know is that the Northbrook Symphony's next performance, an evening of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev, is May 29, and I'll certainly go, if I can.
      The conductor, Mina Zikri, invited the audience to stay after the performance to hear a brief talk on the music, so Edie and I lingered. We recently saw the Oistrakh Symphony of Chicago, which he founded, playing along with a performance of the DePaul Chorus. 
    Zikri began by talking about rehearsals—the Northbrook Symphony had only three for Sunday's performance. They must be quick learners. A member of the audience pointed out that he didn't conduct from a score, and he talked about how familiar the music is to him.
     One key, he said, is to accept the inevitable slip-up.
     "I have enjoyed music a lot more in my life when I realized it's okay if I make a mistake—you're not the Chicago Symphony." That struck me as a laudable attitude to have. People either propagate their upbringings or push against them, and Zikri, who had a strict Russian musical education as a youth in Cairo, has obviously decided not to pass along the rigors he's endured.  Though he did run down Wagner—the operas are very long, and he bragged about dozing off in one, which almost soured me to him. If you don't value Wagner, fine. But at least have the good sense not to crow about it. Don't diss the Old Sorcerer; it only reflects poorly on yourself.
     Still, I stuck with him, and he recovered.
     Someone asked Zikri how he put his particular stamp on "Eroica," and he said, in essence, at his age, he doesn't have the right to, not yet. He's still learning.
     "A real conductor isn't a conductor until he's 60 years old," said Zikri, 41. "There are things you can only gain by experience. Self discipline, so you don't have to put your take over everything."
     Of course a soft touch is a take, albeit a humble one, realizing that you can perform a couple Beethoven symphonies without leaving your claw marks all over them. I wish more people had that kind of humility. We are, after all, merely passing through this world, and should want to leave it in roughly the condition we found it. 

Regarding the title of today's piece, "agiatamente" is an Italian musical notation meaning "relaxed" or "at ease."

Tracking down the family and the famous

 

     What do we owe our departed loved ones? The people once behind the faces that stare at us — happily or blankly or beseechingly — from those black-and-white photographs?
     I’ve been thinking about that lately, moving my parents here from Colorado, packing up box after box of albums jammed with fading Kodak photos of ordinary moments and once-in-a-lifetime vacations. Albums now in storage; albums no one might ever want to look at again.
     I know I’m not alone here. But I was pleasantly surprised Saturday to see the big front page treatment the Sun-Times gave Friday’s unlocking of the 1950 U.S. Census Bureau data by the National Archives. I thought the joy of plunging into old records and tracking down relations was a personal quirk. Apparently not. 

     Saturday morning I dove into the database, starting with my mother’s father, Irwin Bramson. Too easy. Go to the website, https://1950census.archives.gov/. Go to “Begin Search.” Plug in the state and city, in this case Cleveland Heights, Ohio. There was exactly one result. Zoom in on the photographed census form. There is his little household: wife Sarah, my mother June, then 13, her younger sisters, Carole and Diane. My grandfather’s nation of origin was Poland and his job, an accountant in a factory — Accurate Parts Manufacturing, maker of clutches. My grandmother was born in Russia. Nothing surprising there.
     My father’s father I knew would be harder. A more common name in a far bigger pool. When I plugged “Sam Steinberg” into the census for the Bronx, New York, up popped 4,585 hits. The machine learning used to read scrawled cursive entries can be maddeningly imprecise. One of the hits was “Sam Silibority.”

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Why don’t schools ban the Bible?

     April Fool's Day was low-key this year. I noticed only two attempts at pranks—Manny's delicatessen announced they were moving to Arlington Heights and shifting to a vegetarian menu, which didn't make it over the skepticism bar—I smiled at the attempt but never believed it for a second. Though Yasso unveiled a mouthwash, which did catch me for a single moment, as I initially mused, "This is an odd brand extension for a line of frozen yogurt bars..." before realizing, "Ohhhhh!"
     Understated seemed the way to go—maybe because reality seems so incredible and distorted that one hesitates before adding to the confusion, even toward a humorous end. My own humble effort, explaining my drift toward becoming the paper's beekeeping reporter, was undersold enough that a number of readers fell for it, which pleased me greatly. But it did require holding my Friday column until today.

     William Blake’s engraving of Laocoon and his sons is what art historians call “busy.”
     OK, I doubt art historians call it that. Doing what journalists call “checking” — consulting the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism — I see the preferred term seems to be “cluttered.”
     So, cluttered, then. Whatever you call it, there’s a lot to unpack. Not just the unlucky Trojan priest, who tried to warn his citymates not to take that large wooden horse into the walls of Troy, and was rewarded by being crushed, along with his sons, by a sea serpent sent by Athena.
     But all that writing, in several languages. A wordy fellow, Blake. Which I guess makes us soulmates. I do go on.
     Though today, I’m only interested in a single line, written perpendicularly in the right margin: “Is not every Vice possible to Man described in the Bible openly?”
     The only honest answer must be a resounding “Yes!” Murder, for starters (Cain). Incest (Lot). Drunkenness (Noah). Selling your brother into slavery (Jacob). Debauchery, cheating, stealing, war. Onan spills his seed. God tortures Job as a lark.
     The whole book is practically one long grindhouse movie. Yet do school boards ban the Bible? Never. Why is that? Maybe because such bans are never about the pretexts supposedly inspiring them.

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"Pity" by William Blake (Metropolitan Museum of Art)