GOP cheers a ghastly crime

By Barbar Kruger (Art Institute)

     When liberals are being routinely dragged out of their beds at night and killed in the street, decent Americans awaiting their turn will ruefully remember Paul Pelosi.
     Not the crime against him, terrible though it is. David DePape, a man apparently deranged by years of drugs and Republican demonization of Nancy Pelosi, is accused of breaking into her home in San Francisco last Friday, shouting “Where’s Nancy?” — the same words used by the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
     In the federal complaint, DePape is quoted saying he was there to break her kneecaps. She was away, so he had to settle with shattering her 82-year-old husband’s skull with a hammer.
     Awful. But that isn’t the haunting part. The haunting part is the reaction after. The gales of GOP laughter, mingled with the lies they immediately, reflexively formed to shrug off responsibility for crime. They imagined the home invasion a hookup gone bad; it is San Francisco, after all, wink wink. Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, used his $44 billion megaphone to magnify that lie.
     None of this is new. The GOP has settled into a kind of lurid, unashamed performative cruelty. Yet this reaction to the attack against an elderly man in his home adds a new dimension of true horror to their mockery. Nobody thought of Donald Trump Jr. as anything but a leering, entitled idiot. But to see him tweeting photos of hammers, joined in by his father’s typical gauzy speculation about the reality of various slurs and frauds. It was disgusting in a fresh way. And given the six years of moral collapse this country has been experiencing under the grotesque mass of ethical rot represented by Trump and his imitators, that’s really saying something.

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Smashing pumpkins

Richardson Adventure Farm invites visitors to smash pumpkins from a tall tower.

    
     Unlike the Internet, stories printed in a newspaper are finite. You can't fit everything in.
     For instance, my column on pan de muerto in Tuesday's paper, focusing on a Jewish-Mexican bakery called Masa Madre, originally included a three-paragraph digression into the history of Jews in Mexico, which I ended up cutting because the column was just too long. Anyone who read the abbreviated story and thought "Jews in Mexico? Tell me more!" was flat out of luck, and had to dig on their own.

     Or the article Wednesday on page 10, "Pumpkin disposal—a smashing (green) idea to consider," a fun piece by Indira Khera at WBEZ about breaking up pumpkins for compost.

     When simply thrown away, "pumpkins end up in landfills as food waste," she wrote. "Buried under heaps of trash, they rot and release methane — one of the most potent greenhouse gasses."
     But smashing and composting pumpkins "reduces methane creation and transforms the pumpkins into useful, organic nutrients for soil or mulch."

     Which is fine, as far as it went. But the story left me wondering: smashing pumpkins and composting pumpkins reduces methane creation how? Why is it that pumpkins buried under  old diapers and other garbage vent lots of methane, while those diced and mixed with coffee grounds put out less? What physical process is at work? 

     I formed theories — exposure to air, light, certain bacteria — then poked around the Internet looking for confirmation. Finding much about the alternates of making those pumpkins into beer, or drawing off the methane to create energy, but nothing that would explain the differing methane output. Granted, I didn't look very long. 

     Giving up, I queried Khera. What's going on here? Honestly, just asking seemed fraught. We were colleagues, true, now, in theory. But didn't know each other. I wasn't sure she'd even respond, or if she did, she might feel somehow criticized, that I was questioning her article, calling it deficient.  I took the risk, since I was curious, and the Sun-Times and WBEZ are  supposed to be covalently compounded now, our atoms intermingled, bound together by the strong force of media synergy. Seemed worth a try.

     Khera, a recent graduate from the University of Chicago with a degree in biology, welcomed the question  and answered fully:

     "When food waste goes to a landfill, it sits in these giant heaps — there's no oxygen, and the microbes present use anaerobic digestion (digestion done in the absence of oxygen). This process produces something called biogas, which includes quite a bit of methane.

     "In compost (most common type, aerobic compost) — food waste isn't piled. It's mixed together and turned over on a regular basis. The microbes use aerobic processes (digestion in the presence of oxygen), and produce far less methane due to the chemical nature of the process. There is some literature that has found a small amount of methane production at the bottom of compost heaps (naturally, things are a little more piled up and there's less oxygen). But much less than a landfill / driven by the nature of aerobic vs anaerobic processes."

     My hunch about air was right (anaerobic = without oxygen; aerobic = with oxygen). She then shared a number of resources — something from the heretofore unimagined Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry (unimagined by me that is; obviously Khera is clued in) and some general information on composting from the Environmental Protection Agency.
     Funny. I had lunch Wednesday on the balcony of the Cliff Dwellers Club with a well-known business executive who had a hand — actually, a central role — in marrying the paper with the radio station, and she asked me how I thought the union is going.
     I almost replied, "Just great; I contacted a 'BEZ reporter today asking for clarification about her story on rotting pumpkins and she didn't get ruffled or act like I had somehow threw shade on her work, but enthusiastically shared the information I was looking for!"
      But that seemed, oh, small ball compared with the vast world of tectonically shifting money that my friend dwells in, so I kept mum. But it seems a hopeful sign.

Hope wafting up from Brazil

Metropolitan Museum of Art

     Last weekend I flew to Texas on a quick reporting trip. As we were shuffling off the plane, it struck me how fortunate the United States is to be so big yet still a single country.
     Almost a thousand miles from Chicago to Dallas. Yet no customs to go through, no passport control, no immigration lines. No reason to pause from plane door to cab stand.
     That was once very different in Europe. Also about a thousand miles from London to Berlin, with the Netherlands, France and Belgium jammed between. Differing currencies, contradictory rules and burdensome duties. Time-wasting security and regulations.
     A lot of friction going from A to B, both people and products. Wouldn’t it be better, economically, to mimic the United States? To have one unified financial system? A European Union?
     So they built one. Wasn’t easy and took years. Few liked the idea of being dictated to from Brussels about how to make cheese. Currencies that went back centuries — the franc, the lira, the mark — were abandoned for one currency, the euro. That stung.
     It worked, but time passes, and things can go so well that you forget what got you there — as we saw with vaccines. And the European Union had what some considered downsides. Brits worried that Greeks or, worse, Turks, would start showing up as their neighbors in Devonshire. A movement grew to drop out of the EU, fanned by nationalists building their castles of power upon the sand of hatred.
     On June 23, 2016, Britain voted, and 51.89% chose to leave the EU, 48.11% voted to stay — it’s astoundingly consistent how evenly divided the world is right now between those who want to proceed into the future and those who want to try to claw their way back into the past.

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Baking the bread of the dead

  

     Tamar Fasja Unikel, left, sets out pan de muerto as Elena Vázquez Felgueres works on a
          laptop at Masa Madre, their "virtual" bakery blending Jewish and Mexican traditions.

     “We’re about to bake the pan de muerto,” says Tamar Fasja Unikel, heading into the depths of the Hatchery, the vast East Garfield Park restaurant and food service incubator.

     Fasja Unikel is half of Masa Madre, an artisanal bakery fusing Mexican and Jewish traditions. Pan de muerto, literally, “bread of the dead,” are sweet, pillowy round loafs, decorated with symbolic bones, that can be eaten plain, dipped in coffee or hot chocolate, or reverently placed along with marigolds and photos on an ofrenda, the altar honoring the memories of departed loved ones (both family and pets). Placing food there is an act of both love and sacrifice, since you don’t eat those offerings yourself. You mustn’t; it’s their food.
     In kitchen D-119 waits her business partner, Elena Vázquez Felgueres. The two met about 10 years ago at Centro, an arts and fashion school in Mexico City. Both moved to Chicago with their spouses independently, then reconnected here and decided to go into business together.
     Why not pursue fashion?
     “Chicago is not a fashion-forward city, so we had to change gears,” says Fasja Unikel.
     True enough. Chicago has always been a far greater source of food than fashion. More cow, less leather jacket.

     Though the women’s training is subtly reflected in the unusual rose aprons they wear — crossing in the back, straps spaced wide, hanging from their shoulders instead of their necks.
     “When we first started it was just two of us, we were baking long hours. The other aprons that go on our neck hurt a lot,” says Vázquez Felgueres. “We tried this shape and it’s very comfortable. You can wear it all day.”
     They can and do, at least Wednesday through Friday, their baking days, which begin at 4 a.m. and run until orders go out about 11:30 a.m. They lead a team of four bakers, but are very hands-on, plucking finished breads from the oven, painting them with butter, handing them over to be doused in sugar.
      Masa Madre is a “virtual” bakery — they work in a single rented space, a kitchen crammed with baking racks and tables and stacks of boxes. They have outlets and take orders for pick-up and delivery, but hope to open a bricks-and-mortar bakery in the West Loop next year.
     Masa Madre means “mother dough.” They chose the name because back when they started in 2018, buying ingredients at Costco and baking at home, they focused on sourdough, with its venerated eternal starter.

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Dance of Death

From "The Immortal Plena" by Antonio Martorell

     It's Monday, but I don't have a column in the paper today because the column I wrote, involving an unexpected mix of Judaism, Mexico and baked goods, is also keyed to the Day of the Dead, Dia de Muertos, which begins tomorrow (The holiday really should be called "Days of the Dead" since it continues Wednesday, two days, but it's not my holiday, so I shouldn't nitpick). 

      Speaking of which, my editors,  in that earnest, direct manner that comes from continually creating a mass market product intended to be readily grasped by the distracted general public, thought it should run tomorrow, on the actual beginning of the holiday.
     Okay, it was my idea, but they embraced it. Teamwork.

     Solving their problem created one for me, what should go here instead. Luckily. I have something to share with you. Tomorrow's column required me to drive to East Garfield Park last Thursday, and on my way home I took Kedzie north and spied an improbable melange of turrets and gables, a brick structure with a reddish brown tile roof. I pulled into the parking lot of the building — originally a stable, and then the office of Jens Jensen, who designed Humboldt Park.
     Now, I don't want to suggest that I'd never seen the building before, or had no idea it existed. That would be crazy, and, more important, would go against my brand as the all-seeing-eye, the omniopticon of Chicago. Particularly if you skipped around the structure as a child and knew about it intimately for your entire life and hold in lip-curled contempt anyone who has been pinballing around the city for 40 years yet somehow didn't know it was there until last Thursday. Really, to admit that would be to risk a taunting note from Lee Bey, assuming he cared enough about what I know or don't know about Chicago architecture to do that, which, spoiler alert, he doesn't. 

     So yes, certainly, I have much experience with the building, so much that it took on a weight and mass of its own and sank into my subconscious, unretrievable, so that seeing it again struck me as a fresh discovery, as did the fact that it holds the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture.
     Having ballyhooed the National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen, it seemed only fair that I go in and see what the Puerto Ricans have going.   

     There I met Elias Carmona-Rivera, the manager of visitor experience, who greatly enhanced my experience visiting by leaping up and showing me the museum: one the ground floor, "The Immortal Plena," a show of the colorfully morbid celebration of the danse macabre by artist Antonio Martorell, which seems very apt to share today, it being Halloween.
     And upstairs, "Nostalgia for My Island," works of artists in America celebrating their homeland.
     As we walked, I showed off the fact that I actually know something about the Puerto Rican community — that it really was the first ethnic group to immigrate to the United States entirely by air. That the great majority of Puerto Rican immigrants came to Chicago from small villages, so had the triple challenge of adjusting to a new country, a foreign language, and the challenges of city life. As with every immigrant group that ever came to Chicago, their more-established countrymen alternated between helping them and ripping them off.
     This I know thanks to my new book, "Every Goddamn Day," which, among its wonders, spotlights the enormous growth of the Puerto Rican community in the 1950s. In 1950, there were 255 Puerto Ricans living in Chicago. By 1960, there were 32,371. 

     Funny, when Amazon rated my book as the No. 1 best-seller in immigration history, I thought, "Huh? How so?" But now that I think of it, related to not only Puerto Ricans, but Jews, Germans, Poles, Mexicans, Japanese, Chinese ... quite a long list ... I do go into details about a number of immigrant groups. I guess I just thought of it as Chicago history, not immigrant history. The two are inseparable. 

     The day I feature related to Puerto Ricans is June 20, 1966 when, after a riot on the near northwest side that awoke greater Chicagoans to their presence, the Daily News decided to focus on a single, anonymous Puerto Rican immigrant, "Jose Cruz," to see what his life was like. The unrest also prompted the newspaper to run an editorial on its front page, in Spanish. “Puerto Ricans must not be strangers in our midst,” it said, translated. “Their culture — the oldest in the Western hemisphere — and their language — revered in world literature — must become part of the life in Chicago. This cannot be done by violence.”

     Much better to do it with institutions such as the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture, and I was pleased to see a school group attentively listening to a guide while I was there. The Martorell show runs through the end of December, and is a spooky delight. The museum is open Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m.  to 5 p.m. and Saturday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Admission is free.

Dinner in Texas

 

     The Uber app gives you several helpful pieces of information to facilitate your rendezvous with their driver: the driver's first name, the make, model and color of the vehicle they're arriving in, and a little map showing your ride, a little grain of rice, working its way toward you. A good thing, since one data point can lead you astray. 
     For instance, I was in Dallas Friday night to report on a story, standing expectantly in front of the  Sheraton Arlington Hotel, waiting for a black Chevy Silverado pickup. I checked the map, but also looked around at my Texan surroundings — the snapping Lone Star State flag, and guests coming and going, many wearing Bears regalia. 
     Odd, I thought, thickly. These Texans sure seem to like the Bears. It was only later, after noticing many, many more men in Bears regalia, that it dawned on me that the team is playing the Cowboys nearby on Sunday, and these were not transplants publically yearning for home, but current Chicagoans in town for the game. For a moment I wished I had known, perhaps I might even have stayed over an extra day to go to the game, since. I was there anyway. Then realized I never consider going at home, so why do so here?
     A big black Chevy Silverado pulled up to the curb, and I took a step forward and ducked my head to try to peer through the heavily smoked windows to check my driver. It was a heavily tricked-out truck, with some kind of neon in the wheel wells. But the passenger side had someone in it — not typical for Uber — and I hesitated, consulting the map on my phone. My Silverado was stil four minutes away. I stepped back. Thank you, multiple data points.
     At the appointed moment, another enormous black Silverado pulled up. Fancy wheels, four doors. A special "Texas Edition." It was so impressive I asked my driver if I could take a picture. He said go ahead. I stepped back to take the shot, realized it was so huge I wasn't far enough a way to frame it, stepped back so more, and still it defied complete capture. I gave up, went to get into the back seat, but suddenly that seemed regal, and I asked to ride in the front. He said go right ahead and I climbed aboard.
     One of the great things about Uber, in addition to it smoothly working in Chicago, Dallas, Rome or Santiago and its app's ample information dump, is the tendency of drivers to talk with the passenger, a dynamic I appreciate almost as much as being transported from Point A to Point B. I learned quite a bit about Jeremy, a young man with a shaved head and heavily tattooed arms: he was a cook, his wife worked in the front end of the same restaurant he did, his boy was in college, he had a friend who'd wrecked his life through drink. Riding in a pick-up truck in Dallas seemed an unexpected and welcome bit of authentic Texas, as if, to get to my room, the Sheraton had led me through the halls astride a steer. 
     The restaurant, by the way, was Roots Southern Table, in Farmers Branch, picked by my sister, who lives in Plano. The food, eye-crossingly wonderful. We started with southern greens — baby turnips, potlikker, smoked pork — and cast iron cornbread, which came drizzled with Steen's syrup and a little dish of sweet potato butter that arrived covered with a tiny glass dome filled with smoke, which the waiter dramatically lifted away, a bit of molecular gastronomy theater straight out of Alinea. (A moment captured last year by a photographer for the New York Times, which likened the dish to "a warm embrace" and included the restaurant in its list of 50 best new restaurants in the country.)  I'm not a food critic, so can't really describe my jerk lamb chops other than they were spicy and wonderful, as was the Hoppin' John served alongside. The room was airy, square and large. It's rare that a server's error works to a diner's favor, but we ordered the orange juice cake — how could you not? — and I was three bites into a splendid German chocolate cake when my sister observed that this wasn't what we ordered. Left to my own devices, I probably wouldn't have noticed something amiss until hours later, if ever. I suggested we just eat what we got, but that seemed timid, and we were curious as to what orange juice cake could possibly be, so notified the waiter, who said he misentered the order. I pushed the cake aside, and was a little disappointed when he whisked it away—I was hoping he'd urge us to enjoy it. Just as well. It was replaced with a jumbo rectangle, sitting in orange sauce, with a benediction of whipped cream. It was superlative, but we just couldn't finish it.  You know you've been well-fed when you can't finish half a slice of truly delicious cake.

  

Northshore Notes: Smoothed by Tides

     When Caren turns her essays in, if there is an opening quote, it isn't separated from the text. I add the italics and indentation. So this week, when I read "I want to age like sea glass," I immediately stopped, awed, and thought, "Whoa Caren! You've upped your game!" Then I saw that it wasn't her writing, but a poet she had uncovered. And I realized, for the first time, thank you Caren, that while finding poetry isn't the same as writing it, it is in the same realm, both generous acts of bringing wonder to the wonderless. Enjoy.

By Caren Jeskey 

I want to age like sea glass.
Smoothed by tides, not broken.
I want the currents of life to toss me around, shake me up and leave me feeling washed clean.
I want my hard edges to soften as the years pass — made not weak but supple.
I want to ride the waves, go with the flow, feel the impact of the surging tides rolling in and out.
                —Bernadette Noll

     Sky Tonight is an app (some of you might already have) that illuminates the stories of bright and dim lights in the sky, and those you cannot see at all. It turns your phone into a telescope and reveals an intricate pattern of celestial entities.
     My 9 year old niece was over last Saturday. The day turned into an unseasonably warm October night. She adeptly set up a tripod telescope on the front lawn. One of those perfect moments with the love of a child, soon-to-be-gone autumn grass, and the wonders of the universe just fodder for exploration. Getting ahead of myself — I needed extensive tutoring to get through astronomy class at DePaul — I excitedly said “Look! That’s Venus!” pointing to the brightest star in the west. My niece took my phone and said “nope.” It was another entity that started with a V that was too small for my eyes to make out. Perhaps I need a bigger phone.
     This was my first experience with the app that I had downloaded just that evening, and it opened up a new world. The next morning I awoke before dawn and took a peek at my new toy. It showed the sun just below the horizon in the east. It was a warm day, thus it was easy to get motivated to bike over to the lake for the sunrise. 

     I arrived at the Kenilworth beach overlook as the sun was resting on the lip of the lake to the southeast, a Halloween-orange orb. Waves lapped loudly over the concrete and sand below, and drew me down the stairs. You know you’re a Chicagoan when you arch your face towards the sun as it rises. You know you’re partly Texan when you look for the shade. With enough sun damage on my face to last a lifetime, I took off my boots and socks, and made my way to the water's edge, stopping at the one shady spot on the beach, next to the pier.
     A tiny, bright green object twinkled and brought me closer to the pebbles. Eureka! Sea glass city. First I picked up only what I saw at ground level, and where the waves met the sand and created a catchment area rife with these little gems. I found myself sitting down on the cool damp beach to get a closer look at the treasures, and dug a hole with my hands until I reached water. I filled my fanny pack with smooth pebbles and glass with a plan to make gifts this year. Little clear glass vessels I'll buy at the best store ever, filled with treasures and shipped shore to shore to friends and family. (I'm cancelling Amazon as of November. Time to get back to basics).
     I found the biggest pieces of glass I’d yet discovered in the Midwest, modest in comparison to what friends find on beaches near their tropical island homes. Still, I was more than pleased. A fellow traveler walked towards me, and I kept my head down. The only two people on the beach. I figured she was enjoying solitude as much as I was, and did not want to disturb her. Alas, as she came closer I glanced up and our eyes met, and she said hello. We chatted a bit. She bent down, picked up a rock, and handed it to me.
     It was filled with crystals. A geode. I’d been down there for an hour and a half, and had not found anything as amazing, even though I was trying. She said I can keep it.
     I found myself sitting on the water's edge until ten a.m. I got up, walked barefoot in the water, and let the texture of the sand and rocks, and the cold laps invigorate me. I remembered that I had somewhere to be so headed back to the terrace. I grabbed my boots and sat at a picnic table, wiping the sand from between my toes with a sock.
     I’d also found a giant piece of unfinished lake glass. It still clearly held the shape of a bottle and was not yet as round and smooth as it would be if I threw it back into the lake for the sand and water to polish it further. A man and his son were nearby and I showed it to them. “Cool!” The boy said, and dashed off to find his own treasures. I said to the dad “a friend of mine on an island in the Bahamas would tell me to throw it back.” This friend is the king of sea glass and has spots where he harvests these natural gifts and makes whimsical faces, menorahs, and other sculptures with their shapes and colors. The dad said “which island?” I said Eleuthera. His mouth dropped open. “My wife has owned land there for 23 years. I’ve never been.”
     The combination of this synchronistic experience and the app that’s been teaching me of lesser known constellations like Serpens Caput and Corona Borealis just above us as we sit here in this moment has me feeling pleasantly plugged into life as it is, now. If that were not enough to help me feel connected, I decided to see what poets have to say about sea glass. The first thing that popped up was Bernadette Noll's poem above. You see, she was a favorite neighbor of mine in Texas where I was living in a 288' tiny house until last May. In fact, she also made the two flute bags on a shelf just above me on my desk, as a sweet gift.
    As our guy Carl Jung says, "synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see," and I am sure digging it.