Bob Dunning takes a bow

     "Journalism," G.K. Chesterton famously observed, "largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive."
     That's a good thing — better late than never. Also unavoidable. Even the most educated person is ignorant of nearly everything. By necessity much of what we read is bound to be news. Also a good thing — my definition of boredom is being told what you already know.

     When a reader forwarded without comment the last column of Bob Dunning, who wrote for a California newspaper for 55 years and was unceremoniously sacked this week, I did not feel embarrassed that it was my introduction to the man. Nothing shameful there, even though he's written for The Davis Enterprise since I was in 4th grade. Davis has a population double that of Northbrook, and is 2,000 miles away. A local oddity myself, I understand and accept my status as a mote of dust in a continent-wide wordstorm. If after writing for the Chicago Sun-Times for 40 years, one out of 10 Chicagoans were vaguely familiar with me, I'd be surprised and gratified. It's probably closer to one in 100. 

     When others of my ilk deliver their swan songs, it's typically how the greater world first learns of us. Birth announcement and funeral pyre in one brief flash, a tiny puff of smoke far away on the horizon alerting outsiders to our existence even as we vanish.
    Dunning's ave atque vale begins:

    "This is a column I thought I’d never have to write. Through these many years, the local owners of this newspaper regularly told me that as long as The Davis Enterprise existed, I would always have a job. ..."

     And you believed them? Well, there's your mistake right there, Bob. The owners of the Sun-Times never gave me such assurances, nor would I put any stock in them if they had. Any boss who flashed me a vulpine grin, and cooed, "Don't worry, Neil, you'll be here forever...." would leave me shaken. And I have the security of a union. If it weren't for the Chicago Newspaper Guild, I would have been put out to pasture years ago. I might still be, despite it.  It's happened before.

     Quality has nothing to do with it. The Tribune allowed the consistently excellent Eric Zorn to go without even trying to keep him. The great Gene Weingarten, who won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for the magnificent "Fiddler in the Subway," was banished from the Washington Post for the sin of making a joke about Indian food. If it can happen to them, who can't it happen to? Certainly Bob, or me. We are all dead men walking.
     "I upheld my end of the bargain," Dunning continued. "They did not."
      What are you saying? That life isn't fair? Let me jot that down for future reference.
      Sorry. I'll stop now. It takes a lot of ego to fill that blank space, day after day, year in and year out, and a lot of humility to realize it doesn't matter to anyone else a fraction as much as it matters to you. Easy for that delicate balance to get out of whack, particularly in moments of duress. I don't want to critique the dying gasp of a colleague, even one I've never met or knew existed. When my time comes, I like to think I'll tip the executioner and lower my head to the block with quiet dignity. But who knows? I might clutch the radiator and shriek like James Cagney at the end of "Angels with Dirty Faces." 

     I'll try to stop, anyway. One does drone on, as I'm illustrating here. Dunning expended over 2300 words, triple the word count of my daily column, to valorize his exit. That's like the last act of "Tristan & Isolde." You can really like Wagner and still think, "C'mon, get it over with." I've been on staff at the paper for 37 years. However I go, I'm not going to shake my fist at the sky and demand, "Why Lord, why?!?" I know why: the profession is falling apart in big chunks. I'm not indispensable.  On days my column doesn't run, they still publish a newspaper. It was a good run. 

     Dunning writes with candor — he mentions his pay, which most writers would not, particularly when that pay is $26 an hour. He wasn't doing it for money, clearly, he was doing it for love, and nothing feels worse than love unrequited.  He has my sympathy. The Davis Enterprise should have treated him with a modicum of human compassion. Stop the presses: that is in short supply in newspaper owners. 

     Then again, life is precious because it ends. We all have an arc, and now that I'm well into my downward plunge, and see the canyon floor racing toward me, I hope I can splat with a certain finesse and not too much indignation.  The world has changed. Newspaper columnists offer the answer to a question fewer and fewer bother asking.

     I'm 63. Bob Dunning is 77. So maybe I'm displaying the casual cruelty of youth — not something I get the chance to trot out much anymore. But the end can come at any time from any direction. When that sad day arrives, it isn't up to us, but to others to determine what value we  had, if any. When my time comes — tomorrow, or next week, or next year, or at 77, or 90 — I hope that I don't go on and on telling what few readers who have stuck around how unfair it all is, and how much I enjoyed writing for them. Hopefully, they'll already know. 

Cicadas won't eat you, but you can eat them

Metropolitan Museum of Art

     Let's cut to the chase: How do cicadas taste?
     Papery. A tad bitter.
     Which I know, not from dry research, but direct personal experience. This is not my first rodeo, cicada-wise. Seventeen years ago, I was knocking cicadas off my spirea — the bugs covered my yard, "like the invading insect army in a horror movie." Inspired by a colleague, I raised a glove bearing one of the five-eyed beasties to my lips and popped it into my mouth.
     Not at all unpleasant.
     I also fried them up, for my boys, then 10 and 11.
     This is the week trillions of cicadas are expected to emerge in Illinois — ground zero, cicada-wise, due to the overlap of the 13-year and 17-year cicada broods, an alignment not seen since the Jefferson administration.
     "We're going to start to be able to see them," said David Horvath, a certified arborist with The Davey Tree Expert Company. "Right now, squirrels and raccoons and possums are running around, having a field day chowing down on cicadas."
     Which is also why there are so many — they're flooding the zone.
     "Their whole survival strategy is predator satiation," Horvath said. "They're going to overwhelm the predators; it's impossible for squirrels to consume them all."
     I was concerned after reading Kade Heather's piece in the Sun-Times quoting the Morton Arboretum warning about the advisability of protecting young trees with netting. I have a lot of young trees — planted 15 at the end of 2022. Like anyone facing something they don't want to do, I sought a second opinion, from Northbrook forester Terry Cichocki.
     "The tree species cicadas favor are oaks, maples and fruit trees," she said. "However, if you don’t do anything with the smaller trees, they will most likely have some damage, but not life-threatening. The cicadas prefer the mature trees. The damage would show up as broken branch tips, which could recover."
     Horvath finds netting something of a 2024 fad.

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Cicada flashback 2007, Pt. I: "And then you die...

Figure of a cicada (China, late 18th century; Metropolitan Museum of Art) 

     The cicadas return this week to find me just where they left me 17 years ago: writing a column for the Sun-Times. I'm going to lay out the welcome mat properly on Monday — though I'll be hard-pressed to top how I greeted them in 2007. Back then, the column ran over a page. This item was toward the bottom.

AND THEN YOU DIE . . .

"Males die soon after mating."
          —Cicada-palooza, Chicago Sun-Times, May 20, 2007

     Darwin was right. You pop the kids out, lick them into presentable shape, pay for college and then hang around as long as modern medical science permits, growing silly and superfluous while your pleasures are, one by one, plucked off your plate.
     No wonder people distract themselves with elaborate cosmologies, dragooning God and angels and nature itself in one vast dance of self-significance — the universe exists as one big frame for you, a gilded stage on which your soul struts forever, in glory.
     Pretty to think so. But my reluctant hunch is that the cicadas — who make their once-every-17-years appearance this week, if the cool weather breaks — are a better indicator of how reality works than any gem-crusted icon. Wake blinking into life, eat something, pass along your DNA, then waddle off to die.
     OK, enough of that. The Sunday Blues. I'm actually looking forward to the cicadas, as a change of pace. The primordial beasties won't be much of a big deal at my half-acre of the world, I expect, because it already boasts about every known pestilence — mice and rabbits, moles and raccoons, wasps, hornets, bees, ants, grubs, flies, mosquitoes, spiders, earwigs. No cattle disease, yet, but I assume that's coming.
     Over the weekend, I removed a nest of tent caterpillars from a newly planted crabapple tree, reaching in with my gloved hand and grabbing fistfuls of the squirming, furry caterpillars, to my wife's cringing revulsion, and dropping them into a plastic bag.
     I tossed the bag into the fire pit, doused it with a blurp of gasoline and lit it with my Zippo — the resulting "foof!" of flame was the highlight of the week.
     Which is how we refute the bad news of the cicadas: Post-reproductive life might be a pointless ordeal, but it's all we have, and we should enjoy ourselves as best we can.
               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 21, 2007

"I'm a weirdo; all my friends are weirdos" — more from Steve Albini

 

     When a reader makes a suggestion, I sometimes testily reply that I'm not a Holiday Inn lounge pianist or short-order cook. I don't take requests. Other times I nod and get busy. I suppose the difference is what the request is..
     A reader pointing to a line in my second 2021 piece about sound engineer Steve Albini — "I only wish I could have printed more of our conversation" — and observing that now, with his untimely death last Tuesday, would be an apt moment to fulfill that wish, well, I nodded and checked, and found a lengthy transcript. Normally I like to flit from one topic to the next, but it's a pleasure to hang with Steve, let's do it a little longer. I hate to pile on, but the New York Times gave his obit 2/3 of a page on Friday, so it's not just me. I'll begin with a few observations from a version of the story that never ran.

     "I miss Steve," I thought, which was odd, because I hadn't seen him in nearly 40 years, when we were both students at Northwestern. I helped run the humor magazine, Rubber Teeth, and he drew for the magazine. He also was a punk musician, and I was on the far periphery of the campus music scene because my freshman roommate had been guitarist in a popular band.
     Albini had made a name for himself, as a student, by confronting the calcified strata of mouth-breathing frat certitude that encrusted Northwestern like a coral reef. He was most notorious for inviting his enemies to throw things at him — a stunt I witnessed, or remembered witnessing, Steve crouched behind a plexiglas shield as a kind of performance art piece....

     Like any old college classmates, we talked about school, and teachers who inspired us. Albini said he really admired David Protess, who taught journalistic ethics and ran The Innocence Project. I said I felt lucky to study drawing with Ed Paschke.

     "He and I became friends," Albini said. "My wife threw an elaborate birthday party for my 35th birthday, I was really touched he showed up. When he died, I met his son, corresponded with his son.
     "He was easily the best educator at Northwestern. He had a really interesting relationship with his own work that I really admired. He had a regular thing he would do where he would take his class to his studio, and he would have work all around his studio, and he would tell his students they were free to add anything they wanted to to his paintings. If you wanted to do something to one of his paintings, go ahead. I didn't understand that at the time. We talked about it afterward, and he said, 'Every once in a while someone would do something really intrusive and really bold. Or sometimes people would just do some really tiny thing, continue filing in a color, something like that.' He said that was an interesting display of their relationship with someone else's work, whether they would be respectful, or make their mark on it.
     "The most important thing it did for him, it gave him a problem to resolve, he saw most of his work as solving the problems that are presented by the image. If you are trying to convey something , and it's not there yet, that means there's some problem you need to find the problem and address the problem and that will get you on your way to finishing the image. I really admired that for a number of different reasons. It was very playful. His paintings were sold on subscription, anything, they were selling for astronomical sums, $100,000 and more, and here he was willing to let some sophomore fuck it up."

     We talked about Northwestern.

     "What was a big shock to me, I had never been around people with money before," said Albini. "People my age who had no concern with money. Bottomless wealth at their disposal. One of my first roommates, Lauren James Godfrey III. He had a leather valise. A freshman going through his stock portfolio. . . "

     I mentioned my roommate Kier helped widen my musical horizons. I showed up at school liking Bob Dylan and Elton John, and he was playing the Talking Heads and the Buzzcocks.

     "Kier Strejcek is actually an important musical figure," Albini said. "His brother, Nathan Strejcek was in The Teen Idles with Ian MacKaye who later started Minor Threat and Fugazi."
     "Can I tell him you said that?" I asked. Albini was nothing if not an arbiter of cool.
     "He knows that," Albini said. "It's his brother..."
     "No," I replied. "...that he's an important musical figure."
     "He was revered. He was the big brother, well literally, to the hardcore punks in Washington DC. who started a movement. He was sort of seen as the older brother who knew... he learned to play guitar before everybody else. He was in bands before everybody else. He moved away, he had a band when he moved out here. He's a seminal though not necessarily critical figure."

     I told him a story about Kier and I giving a ride to Nathan Kaatrud, the future Nash Kato of Urge Overkill, a pompous poseur who sneered at people like Kier and myself as grinds who work for a living while artists like himself soared into the empyrean.

     "That's an early indication of what a piece of shit that guy was," Albini said. "He was my roommate for years. Putting everyone else down is super fun."

     We talked about how to live a moral life.

     "My ethics are principally about my behavior," Albini said. "On a personal level I don't want to be involved in things I don't respect. As professional, whatever walks in the door I have to do a good job on it doesn't matter what it is. I'm not very selective with my clients. That surprises some people just because I am fairly rigorous about the way I conduct myself and the way my band behaves.

Electrical Audio

     "The money is not really a big part of it here. Everything operates on a knife edge in the music scene at the moment. Pandemic aside, the margins people operate on in the music scene are so so small. The amount of money that can be made off a recording has dwindled over the years because physical formats are less and less, though recently there has been a huge resurgence in vinyl, which is heartening. A lot of record labels will do a release, it's an official release if there is vinyl. That's the only physical format that sells anymore.
     "It's weird being involved in music," he said. "You're at this nexis between youth culture and broader culture and artistic ambition, creative impulse and whatever, and then all these secondary material concerns that impinge on it in a million different way. I love making records and love working with musicians, people I admire and respect. The people that work in the studio, I would take a bullet for any of those people. But that I have to do it in a capitalist system is oppressive, that I have to do it as a business owner, and be the president of the organization in order to have standing in certain scenarios.
     "When I first got into music, the music I was attracted to was weirdo music. I'm a weirdo. All my friends are weirdos." Here he laughed. "My peer group is weirdos. All the music that I've ever done has had, it's never bothered me who listened to it. My main consideration was I wanted to do it and I wanted to do it in a way I felt good about. The way my bands have always conducted themselves has been internally consistent. We knew why we were doing things the way we did. We had a process we were going through . The end result was we were going to make music and we would perform it if people would have us. Other people just don't enter into it. I described it once as an extremely selfish enterprise. Shellac of North America — we are the only three people on earth that matter, in terms of opinions about our music. We don't do press releases, don't do advertising. We don't do any kind of promotion for our records at all. We will announce our tour dates, and when a record comes out there is an announcement that it is coming out. But we don't advertise it, we don't do active promotion of any kind because I've always been bothered by things being thrust at me. I detest advertising. I have TIVO for watching television at home. I haven't seen a commercial in 10 years. I have ad blockers on all my computers. Don't see ads on YouTube videos. I don't see it. That's intentional, I don't like having that kind of commerce intrude into my experience. I think it's cheap and crass when someone is trying to make money from my attention. Someone wants my attention, and their purpose is to try to extract value from me. That seems like a dishonest relationship and I just won't participate in it.
     "How many of our records sell? I have no idea. We make money. I don't know how we do relative to our peers. I don't know what a good selling record is, what a bad selling record is. We make music exclusively for ourselves and we're lucky enough that other people like it and buy it.
     "The music scene, because it's so cliquish, with so many different subcultures contained in the music scene. My band is well known, within our circles, right? But I'm smart enough to know our circles aren't very large."
     He laughed again.
     "If you took a random sampling of people, I used to say from the phone book, random sampling from any neighborhood in Chicago, if you got a thousand people you might find one that knew my name. And that's in the city I live in at the time I'm alive."

     There's more, but that should do. We did talk about what he'd do when his hearing went, I suggested he write a book. He said that he did get asked to write things pretty regularly, and that he would love to write "a comprehensive manual of recording practices" including "all the institutional knowledge we have inside the building." I put him in touch with my editor at the University of Chicago Press, but nothing came of it, which is a pity, because Steve Albini was a true professional and unique, unsparing, fearless voice. He will be missed by many.

Giving thanks to those who gave us life

     Motherhood is a simple biological fact. One that encompasses the condition of a woman — or, I suppose nowadays, a person of any gender identification — who gives birth to a baby. Or adopts a child. Or becomes a foster parent. Or enters into an ad hoc care relationship with a younger dependent.
     Not so simple after all.
     Reminding us that motherhood is also a social construct. Traditionally wrapped up with duty — a mother must care for her, or their, baby; the child, grown, is then obligated to care for its mother, if need be. That's only fair.
     The details, however, shift according to age group, religious affiliation, geographical location. Should mothers stay home and focus entirely on their children? Work full time at demanding careers? Both?
     The image also shifts over time.
     When I was young, the popular motherhood cliche retained a whiff of the prairie. Put an old lady in a coal scuttle bonnet, give her some knitting and sit her in a rocking chair, and the image said, "Mother." Words were not necessary. Think James McNeill Whistler's "Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (Portrait of the Artist’s Mother)."
    Our impressions of motherhood today often come not from paintings, but from commercials — think of all those women lunging after spills, their faces twisted in horror. Then there is "Strong," a commercial that Ohio consumer products manufacturer Procter & Gamble ran in conjunction with the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Every Mother's Day I post "Strong" on my mother's Facebook page, and it's the rare commercial that I'll sometimes call up and watch for pleasure, the way you'd watch a movie. If you have access to YouTube, I suggest you go watch it now.
     Created by Wieden+Kennedy, a global, independent creative agency, the "Strong" spot grabs you in its first second, both visually and aurally. The opening scene is the back of a little girl, frozen, transfixed in horror at an angry tornado churning up the horizon. A siren wails.

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Steve Albini: The last genuine punk rocker

Steve Albini

     "That hits hard," a college classmate texted from Los Angeles. "Albini always seemed like someone who would be eating pancakes on our graves."
     When the paper called with the news that the influential Chicago sound engineer had died, at work, of a heart attack at 61, my reaction was shock, followed by doubt. Were they sure? Because faking his death, well, if anyone was going to do that...
     Yes, it was confirmed. Did I want to write his obituary? No. I hate writing obituaries for people I know — it seems like seizing their corpses and trying to dance with them. The highest tribute I could pay to Albini was not to presume to explain him, not to look through my keyhole perception, colored with nostalgia and affection, and pretend I had any special insight into his essence. Let someone who listened to Big Black for pleasure do that.
     Last August, Jeremy Gordon, writing in the Guardian, nailed Albini's complicated personality:

     Albini – and I can’t say this without it sounding a little silly because of the way the music industry has conspired for decades to sand off the edges of any once-transgressive cultural movement, but more on that later – is a genuine punk rocker. Not because he plays music with distorted guitars or exudes contempt for pretentious establishment figures – though he has done plenty of that – but because throughout his career he, perhaps more than anyone else, has attempted to embody the righteous ideological tenets that once made punk rock feel like a true alternative to the tired mainstream.

     Chicago musical historian Mark Guarino did a fine job encapsulating his life for WBEZ. 

     I had my swing at his life three years ago, reaching out during the long COVID slog. I'm not sure why — we hadn't communicated in 40 years. But I read a quote from him, and I missed his fearless intelligence — most people have nothing to say and, besides, would be too timid to say it if they did — and went to visit him at Electrical Audio, his Belmont Avenue studio, and then to lunch. 

     I ended up writing two pieces — the first, about his work as a sound engineer — he sneered at being called "a producer" — that ran on Labor Day. I deliberately did not mention that he had, his feelings notwithstanding, produced Nirvana's last album, because everybody cites that, prominently, and it was, I guess, either an attempt to honor his non-starstruck integrity, or just as a way of kissing up. The second, we discussed life and success and the future. I found him softened, kinder, humbler. There was much I left out — he's a professional poker player, and we discussed the high stakes poker scene in Chicago. I mentioned my former roommate, who had a band at college — they practice in our dorm room for a while — and he said some generous things about him, his music, and his brother's music.
     "You're not going to believe what Steve Albini said about you..." I told my friend, in the car leaving the interview. Albini cast a cold hard light that showed the ugliness of a lot of what passes for culture. But it could also warm the few he approved of. I won't claim that Steve Albini was a nice guy, though he could be kind — he probably wouldn't want me to say that. But it's true. 

The Sun-Times regrets the error.

   Grr. Urg. Other expressions of visceral, teeth-grinding frustration.
     Monday morning. All is right with the world. Or right enough, if you squint. The vanhoutte spirea are in their puffy white glory. There are fresh blueberries to put atop my Shredded Wheat. The big challenge of the day is to get downtown and go to Gene & Georgetti for lunch. Maybe get something going for Wednesday, columnwise, so I don't have to reinvent the wheel Tuesday morning.
     Rinse the blueberries. Pour the cereal and the milk. Flip open the Sun-Times to page two — "Every day I'm on page two is a good day," I often tell the wife. There is my lighthearted riff on yo-yos. The story begins:

     “No," I said, puzzled, slow on the uptake, figuring she was coming out of a dream. "Why do you ask?"

     Well, that's how the story begins in the physical newspaper. The actual column, as written, has three paragraphs before that. Bowl of cereal in my hands, I rush upstairs to the computer, to see whether the opening was also sliced off online, or whether it was a print issue. I'm worried that, in copying the opening to post on my blog, I somehow cut it instead, and the mistake was carried unnoticed into the paper. An actual impossibility with the system, but still...
     The story was fine online. Whew, so not my fault. But somebody's. I instantly see what had happened. They put in a big "OPINION" bug as a subtle hint that what you are reading is not the just-the-facts-ma'am impartial news the paper prides itself with, but slant, bias, perspective. Whoever went to grab the copy to put into the paper took the part below opinion and didn't notice the part above, and no sentient eyes gazed up the result.
     Forty years writing for the paper, I can't recall that ever happening to one of my stories. A first for everything.
    I fire off a note to my editor saying as much. Then wait, checking my email for befuddled "Huh?" notes from readers. Instead, I get people enthusiastically upping their subscriptions and donating to the newspaper, which seems an odd reply to a blunder. Then it hits me. Ohhh. The marketing department had asked me to write a letter, rattling the cup. The same morning that my decapitated column hit the street, the letter asking for donations also went out, the type of ironic coincidence which makes life the rich pageant it is. The species of minor indignity that follows me, quacking, like a pull-toy duck. Some journalists won the Pulitzer Prize on Monday, others have their mangled work tossed out into the world with a shrug.
     I knew immediately that I would not be inundated with puzzlement. Readers tend to plow on. And as my wife points out, even the few who notice something amiss, well, most people do not write to newspapers. The physical paper itself goes to, what?, 50,000 readers. Maybe. Not 2 percent of the population. Online is where it's at. Online we draw a full ... well, several multiples of 50,000. I think. Or hope.

     I call my editor, not seeking explanation, more just to have some someone to talk to about this. "The trick to journalism is to both think what you're doing is the most important thing in the world and know that it actually doesn't matter much," I say.  You thunder in a column against Donald Trump, liar, bully, fraud and traitor, as if doing so is the difference between America continuing on in freedom or sliding into a slough of fascism and oppression. And know that you could have written every single article highlighting the Oort Cloud of crimes and errors surrounding him and he would still be right where he is now, poised to retake the presidency. Raising your voice is the most important thing you can do, and nothing.

     The paper is actually doing something surprising. It's reprinting the column today, with the top three graphs in place (I'm told. I haven't seen it yet. It would be funny if the three paragraphs got lopped off again). I didn't ask for that — in fact, almost pointed out that it really isn't necessary. But they feel it was, and I decided not to question their judgment. Besides, I can't ever think of that ever happening in a Chicago paper — a column running Monday, then its corrected version Wednesday. Kinda cool, really. A distinction, almost. I'll take it.
    Onward, as Rick Kogan says.  Apologies for the inside baseball, but that's what I got today. Honestly, when they said they were reprinting the column, my first thought was I'd have a day off, which I can use. No biggie. Mistakes happen. To write is to err or, as I sometimes spell it, "Too right is two air." Even noble Homer dozed. Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes... Okay, you understand. We'll try again tomorrow, and hopefully get it right this time.