Making beautiful music together

Greg Sapp in his workshop.

     Three factors determine the price of a violin, Mel Sapp explained, just as I was leaving the bright, airy shop she and her husband Greg run in Batavia: one is workmanship. Two, materials. And three, the name of the luthier who built it.
     “You notice I didn’t say, ‘sound,’” she added. “Sound is subjective. You can change it.”
     Indeed, most masterpiece instruments of old —by Amati, Guernari, Stradivari — have been modernized over the years, their necks and fingerboards lengthened, to bring them into line with current musical tastes.
     I am not in the market for a violin, alas. But I visited Sapp Violins earlier this month because of a quip. When the shaky future of journalism is being discussed, with what colleagues I yet retain in a rapidly contracting profession, I’ll sometimes attempt to both sound a positive note and move the conversation along by observing, “They still make violins.”
     Meaning, even antique trades thrive, for some.
     Though it got me wondering: How is the violin business doing? Chicago, being home to one of the world’s great orchestras, is unsurprisingly also a center of violin craftsmanship. After I visited Sapp, the January Chicago magazine took an in-depth look at John Becker, the Fine Arts Building luthier to the multi-million dollar instruments of musical stars such as Joshua Bell, the article by Elly Fishman itself a finely constructed marvel.
     So how does one get into the violin making biz?
     Greg Sapp was a music education major at Duquesne University in the mid-1970s when he had a realization that often comes to those whose ambitions lie in the arts:
     “This isn’t going to work.”
     Luckily, senior year, he had a class with the very 1970s name, “Creative Personality.” His final project was constructing an Eastern European folk instrument called a “prim.”
     “It’s kind of like a mandolin,” Greg said, pointing to the ur-instrument, displayed on the wall. “I was the only one in my class that made something so functional.”
     That wasn’t a complete accident — his father was a woodworker and singer.
     Greg moved to Chicago in 1978 to attend the Kenneth Warren & Son School of Violin Making (now the Chicago School of Violin Making). He also bumped into Mel, whose car had broken down and needed a lift to the train station. When Greg told her he was going to violin school, Mel, who’d known her share of prevaricating creeps, assumed he was lying.
     “How do I find these guys?” she asked herself.

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EGD Orphan #1: Alexander Woollcott

Alexander Woollcott (Bettmann Archive)

     The book inspired by this blog, "Every Goddamn Day," has been out for more than three months.  I'm assuming you've all bought a copy by now and if you haven't, well shame on y... whoops, I mean, your admirable restraint has been rewarded, as the University of Chicago Press is now offering it among their bestsellers at 30 percent off in their Great Chicago Book Sale. You can access their catalogue here.  

    "Every Goddamn Day" is a daily history of Chicago, with 366 compact essays keyed to the date. When writing the book, occasionally I'd find a new story for a particular date that would efface something I'd already done. That is, I'd prepare a vignette for a day, then research would cough up another for the same day that I liked more, either because it was inherently more interesting, or better added to the mix of themes in the book. So the original tale got bumped. But I kept the banished stories in a file called "Orphans" thinking I might serve them up here when their dates came around. 

     The tale below, while interesting — how often do radio commentators die on the air? — was only loosely tied to Chicago, and didn't reach the level of Clint Youle, "Mr. Weatherman," perhaps the first television meteorologist, predicting a chance of snow in a windowless WMAQ studio in 1951 while a blizzard howled outside, the episode included in the book for Jan. 23. 

     Looking over the vignette below now, after not reading it for a year or so, I think I would have added an explanation of how the Tribune, at least among those conversing on the program in 1943, was seen as a moral stain and journalistic embarrassment, sort of the way Fox News is viewed by liberals today.

Jan. 23, 1943: Alexander Woollcott said a lot of witty things. It is he, in 1921, who coined the term "ink-stained wretches" to describe "those who turn out books and plays." It is Woollcott, one of the founders of the Algonquin Round Table group of clever inebriates, who launched a million refrigerator magnets when he quipped "all the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening." 

     His final remarks are not so much sharp as knotty, a moral question to be untangled. On the CBS "People's Platform" coast-to-coast radio program, Woollcott responds to one of his fellow panelists trying to put some daylight between Hitler and the German people by saying, "Germany was the cause of Hitler just as much as Chicago is responsible for the Chicago Tribune." 
     This is less a defense of Germany and more an indictment of both. The suggestion is made that this is perhaps unfair: there is a chance that Germany at least, may someday return to the realm of decent places. 
     "I think time may do it," allows Woollcott, his last public utterance. Time does indeed do it, to him anyway, and has its revenge. Woollcott suffers a stroke, on air, is hustled out of the studio and dead by midnight, at age 56. The hazards of live broadcast. 

Northshore notes: Hitchhiking

Female musicians, Egypt, c. 1400 BC (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Today's finds our Northshore bureau chief, Caren Jeskey, in something of a dark place. Yet her two word directive at the start of the sixth paragraph, well ... I've never heard it said so plainly before. 

By Caren Jeskey

     EGD reader John once commented that times have never been simple. It’s hard to believe that they have ever been this messy and out of control, but I am sure they have. Perhaps during World War II when my grandfather, and many of your ancestors, had to leave home and fight when their brains were still trying to develop. When much of the world was suffering.
     My Great Uncle Tommy never recovered from landing at Normandy. My mother and I visited Utah Beach once, which brought the horror to life. Many of our vets have been abandoned, but all is not lost. Unprescribed is a documentary that shines a light on the effective use of THC for the recovery of PTSD. (Rx’d medication is necessary at times; what an evil racket it’s become). 

     My optimism is wearing thin, as maturity sets in. There is no “them” to take care of us. Systems are failing, from health insurance to the post office to EMS and police services. An attempt to level out the playing field by defunding the police was premature. We do not have the systems in place to provide resources to criminals to ease them out of their dangerous lives. A discouraged, dwindling PD means more suicidal officers, and more crime.
     If we are lucky individuals, we’ve developed a support system that helps us thrive, and get our needs met when we get ill, or when we are down on our luck. Health insurance is a joke for many of us. I pay nearly $7,000 a year for shoddy insurance with a $9,000 deductible. My annual checkup last year cost over $300 out of pocket, plus over $500 for the plan. Absurd. I just hope that when my times comes, friends and family will help take care of me, and I won’t be placed in a scary situation and die a painful death, alone.
    So what’s the solution?
    Ignore it. Focus on other things as long as we still have the breath in us, and the ability to read a blog post. There’s no possible way to change the system, other than in dribs and drabs by voting and other social responsible action.
    I say sing more. Dance more. Hang out at the beach. I’m telling you, it works. If your get up and go has got up and went, call someone, anyone, who can lend you some energy until you have your own again.

                    “The only thing better than singing is more singing.” —Ella Fitzgerald

     “Adults age 60 to 85 without previous musical experience exhibited improved processing speed and memory after just three months of weekly 30-minute piano lessons and three hours a week of practice, whereas the control group showed no changes in these abilities.”
     We don’t have to be good, we just have to play. I pick up a flute many days of the week. With this newly discovered statistic about brain training, yesterday I decided to call The Music Institute of Chicago’s East Evanston Campus to get the ball rolling on flute lessons. Once a week, and then three hours of practice per week. I’m not yet 60, but I am sure it will do me well.
     There are free online voice lessons; perhaps that can also be a place to start such as The Beginner’s Singing Lesson offered by this energetic teacher.
     If you feel you are not up to singing or learning an instrument, “in research by Ferguson and Sheldon (2013), participants who listened to upbeat classical compositions by Aaron Copland, while actively trying to feel happier, felt their moods lift more than those who passively listened to the music. This suggests that engaging with music, rather than allowing it to wash over us, gives the experience extra emotional power.”
      Some of my wealthy friends are living their best lives. Routine travel to islands, the best healthcare in the world, new cars, boats and houses. Pools and ice rinks that kept them saner during COVID. For me, living well means finding moments of joy in each day and staying connected to others IRL and even on Zoom. I’ve had some very dark days in the past few years. I am grateful, today, that I still have the ability to pick up a flute and make some sounds that don’t sound half-bad.
     I have been ever so lucky to have Neil allow me to ride along on a part of his journey of success. And his writing always hits home. Wishing you all well today. Or, as my friend Marsha says, “wishing you at least a decent day.”

     “Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone. Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find all their teams going the other way; every god will leave us. Work rather for those interests which the divinities honor and promote, – justice, love, freedom, knowledge, utility.”                                                        —Ralph Waldo Emerson

The drink no restaurant dares serve

     Chicago Restaurant Week begins Friday. As a guy who really, really likes to tuck into a plate of excellent chow at one of Chicago’s quality eating establishments, I’m going to depart from my habit of nimbly flitting from one topic to another. Instead, I’d like to pull a thread left dangling after Wednesday’s column on Go Brewing and the rise of nonalcoholic beer to ask a question that has long puzzled me:
     What’s with NA wine? You can order nonalcoholic beer at almost any bar or restaurant. But I’ve never seen NA wine on a menu. Not once. Why?
     ”From a wine perspective, we’re a little behind,” said Serafin Alvarado, master sommelier and Illinois wine education director for Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits, the largest distributor in the United States. “In all these beverage trends, wine is the last to join the party. It’s very traditional, very hesitant, not only from producers’, but from the consumers’ point of view.”
     Restaurateurs agree.“We don’t currently have any nonalcoholic wine,” said Grant DePorter, CEO of Harry Caray’s Restaurant Group. ”There’s no market for it.”
     A pity. My go-to NA vino at home is Sutter Home’s Fre. (An ugly name that looks like a typo. They’d have been better off calling it “Home Free”). To me, Fre is soft and round and red, quite winelike and a nice complement to cheese. Connoisseurs disagree. In 2021, the New Yorker’s John Seabrook slagged the NA wine segment in general and Fre in particular.
     ”Nonalcoholic wines make dreadful placebos,” he wrote. “No wine drinker ... would confuse the nonalcoholic Cabernets made by Fre and Ariel, two widely distributed U.S. brands, for the nectar of the gods. ... A vineyard can’t add a lot of other flavors to make up for the absence of alcohol. You’re left with twenty-dollar grape juice that tastes like a kids’ drink.”

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"A safe nonalcoholic space"

   

Dall-E.

     If I want to be on page two in the paper, there's only room for about 750 words, so tangents often must get shorn away.
     For instance.

     My column Wednesday on Go Brewing, the non-alcoholic brewery in Naperville, lost a digression where I marvel at the tone of the sober movement, citing a line from 2019.  

     "Cindy’s at the Chicago Athletic Association Hotel, has created a safe nonalcoholic space by replacing the word 'mocktail' on the bar’s menus," noted Vox, calling Chicago "a hub of sober curiosity." 

     Where to begin with that sentence? Is "mocktail" pejorative? A kind of NA shaming? Or "sober curiosity," a term that makes not drinking sound almost like a variety of fetish.
     And don't get me started with "safe nonalcoholic space." Wouldn't that be most places? Your car? Your kid's school? Just about anywhere?

     Not that I want to wax snide. I know what they mean. When people are new in sobriety, it can seem the world is one vast bar, their acquaintances, a hallelujah chorus for relapse. I was fortunate in that I immediately understood that nobody can stay sober by pretending they don't know where the booze is. Staying out of squishy places might be necessary in the initial turmoil of rehab. But very quickly you need to be able to not drink even when people all around you are.

     Eventually you realize that nobody cares what you drink. Mostly. I seem to remember that young people, more susceptible to peer pressure, do care. For a while. They like to go out and party and reinforce each other by going after the stragglers. For those who resist joining in on the fun, not drinking can result in real ostracization. Or even for the not so young. I remember being in my early 40s, trying to cut back, ordering non-alcoholic drinks when out with certain boozehound newspaper friends and getting ridiculed. 

     Now people urging me to drink merely draw a sense of amused wonder. "What? Really? You mean you don't know?" For my literary guide to recovery, "Out of the Wreck I Rise," I had to raise a good amount of money to cover legal permissions, the fees to pay poets for the rights to use their work. This I did by hitting up rich folk to donate to the University of Chicago Press, a 501(c)3 charity, which created a special fund for that purpose.

     After the book came out, I went to lunch with one particularly generous soul, head of a Chicago financial firm, at Chicago Cut Steakhouse. I brought him a copy of the book he had helped fund, as a thank-you present. Before lunch, he encouraged me to order a glass of wine, several times. I looked at him, dumbfounded, and was tempted to say, "You have no idea what this book is about, do you?" I managed to hold that back: the man did contribute a hefty sum to my permissions kitty. What I did say was: "No thanks — wine makes me sleepy." That worked.

Dry January, not Beerless January

Joe Chura, right, draws an NA beer at Go Brewing in Naperville.

     Joe Chura is more than halfway through a dry January. Or make that Dry January, capital D, now that it is an official cultural phenomenon.
     One in five U.S. adults told pollsters they planned to go the whole first month of 2023 without alcohol. It’s the same in the United Kingdom.
     Why swear off booze for a whole month?
     “One, I needed to, personally, I wanted to take a month off completely from drinking,” said Chura, a 45-year-old father of three. “But secondly, I wanted to create a challenge for a group of people that wanted to try for the first time or do it again. And I couldn’t have it without myself doing it. This is a very unique experience that someone can come here.”
     “Here” is Go Brewing, the craft brewery that Chura started in Naperville last October that brews only no- and low-alcohol beers — the first in Illinois.
     Regular readers might be aware that every January is Dry January for me — and February, and March, and on through the year. For the past 17 years, which means I remember when you were lucky to find O’Douls at a bar. Now you can buy Bud Zero at Wrigley Field and there are shelves of exotic NA IPAs at Binny’s.
     Four hundred people signed up to do Dry January with Chura, and Go Brewing offers regular activities like CrossFit-style workouts and live-band karaoke nights. (The pub does offer several full alcohol guest beers for those who just won’t be denied.)
     When Chura opened his doors, he expected his average customer to be a “40-year-old who is gaining weight and wants to be healthy.”
     ”The brand was built around that,” said Chura, who was surprised by who walked in.
     “Week one, 50% or more of the people who came in here were in recovery or couldn’t drink for health reasons. I looked at them and thought, ‘Holy shit, I got this wrong.’”

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Flashback 2011: One quarter of the country has gone crazy

Generated by Dall-E.

     The good news is that the vise grip that Donald Trump has on the Republican Party seems to be slacking. The bad news is that they don't need him to continue the carnival of crazy. As I've been saying for years about Trump: he didn't create the environment he thrived in. Not a cause, but a symptom. In case this isn't clear, I offer as evidence this column from 2011 that tills the loamy soil that Trumpism, and other fact-free totalitarian causes, bloom in. Trump cut his political teeth as a proponent of birtherism, but didn't even merit mention here.

     The expression "my jaw dropped," is usually metaphorical, the writer reaching for some oomph beyond "I was really surprised."
     But reading the New York Times/CBS poll released last week that 25 percent of all Americans — and 45 percent of Republicans — believe President Obama was born outside the United States, I could feel the muscles in my jaw go slack and my chin dip.
     Why is this so amazing?
     Well, first, let’s review the evidence that Obama was born someplace other than Kapi’olani hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Aug. 4, 1961:
     There isn’t any.
     None, nada, nothing. A slop bucket of rumors and lies. As opposed to the overwhelming hard proof that Obama was born exactly where he said he was born — a state birth certificate, not to mention two local newspapers printing birth announcements.
     So why does a considerable and growing chunk of the country — one in four, the same percentage of Americans who are men over the age of 37 — embrace this fallacy?
     The short answer is they believe it because they want to believe it. Belief and fact have almost no relationship to each other — we should know that by now. There is no situation so clear-cut that it cannot be twisted into a hall of mirrors. The 9/11 attacks were the most documented crime ever. Did that stop the conspiracy theories? No way.
     That said, why do 25 percent of us want to believe Obama was born in foreign soil?
     It’s obvious when you ask yourself what happened in November 2008. The nation elected its first African-American president, a Democrat. Of course that would inspire some to say, "Whoa, wait a second, this isn’t happening. This guy can’t be president!"
     He can’t? Why not? Well, umm, because he wasn’t born here. Yeah, that’s the ticket!
     Conspiracy theories flourish among those who find the truth too uncomfortable to tolerate. America being the victim of terrorist attacks made the nation sympathetic — better, in some minds, to view the United States as the perpetrator. The same dynamic inspires Holocaust denial. People don’t deny the Holocaust because of lack of evidence — those Germans, sticklers for bookkeeping. Rather, the Holocaust is uncomfortable, inconvenient to those wishing for the next one, and thus nutjobs like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad find it easier to just grin and insist it never happened.
     Obama being president of the United States is uncomfortable, inconvenient, for a lot of people, and rather than acknowledge that a majority of Americans elected him to an office he is entitled to hold, it’s easier to declare the whole thing a sham.
     Just as Holocaust denial is, on its face, anti-Semitism, so the birther movement is clearly racism. I’m reluctant to say that because racism has become such a frayed charge in recent years, thanks to professional wolf criers like the Rev. Jesse Jackson or Carol Moseley Braun. But just because some overplay the race card doesn’t mean that racism ceases to exist. Electing a black president might have been a milestone, but it did not make the bigots automatically wink out of existence, unfortunately. Where did they all go?
     To me, the sort of people who in 1961 would say, "Obama can’t be president because he’s a n-----," now, 50 years later, are saying "Obama can’t be president because he’s not an American." Progress!
     Although I refuse to believe that haters constitute a full quarter of the country. My hunch — or perhaps just hope — is that the birther mania is fueled by a hard core, say 2.5 percent, the full-time bigots, psychos and partisan operatives who come up with these lunatic theories and weave loose threads into this elaborate tapestry of delusion. Then the other 22.5 percent look at the "issue," feel it resonate in their guts, let out a few moos to tell a pollster that it all makes sense to them, then drop their muzzles back into the silage.
     You know what? I’m going to start a movement right now, insisting that Obama can’t be president because he isn’t 35, as the constitution requires. Barack Obama is only 32 — he was born in 1979. There, you read it in a newspaper. That this claim is false, contradicted by all evidence and common sense might be seen as a stumbling block, but not judging from the success of the birthers. People will believe anything that scratches their itch, and would much rather change the facts of the world than alter their opinions.
      Twenty-five percent. The jaw drops, the eyes pop, the mind reels, the heart breaks.
        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 24, 2011