Crunchy and beautiful

     Okay, give it up for Trader Joe's.
     I admit, I resisted them, for years. First, because I am a Sunset Foods guy — well run, lots of selection, nice staff who I tend to know on a first name basis, starting with jovial pater familias Ron Bernardi, part owner of the chain who nevertheless will still sometimes pitch in, bagging. 
     Second, because I'm a brand guy. I don't want ketchup, no matter how supposedly marvelous, from some esoteric catsup company. I want Heinz Ketchup. I want General Mills Cheerios, not whatever Oaty Os knock off someone is trying to sell. Anything off brand makes me think of those white boxes of generic food we had in the 1970s. Sure, my wife picks up Kirkland olive oil and I will use it in my stir fry. But I'm not happy about it. I don't want to eat chocolates that have the same brand name as batteries.
     Like Costco, Trader Joe's is heavy on store brands. And their graphics were initially sort of cheesy. I remember when the first Trader Joe's promotional materials started showing up at the house, I looked at their low rent, clip art illustrations and thought, "What the heck is this?" 
     But my wife became a fan — they are constantly cycling through their offbeat products, and you never know when one will disappear. I tag along with her, eyeing all the bounty, noting how much of the store is given over to booze and snacks, thinking of that line from The Band's "Up on Cripple Creek" — "A drunkard's dream if I ever did see one."
     Admiration, perhaps, but grudging admiration. Except of course for the free sample — a chunk of cranberry pie last time we were there. What kid doesn't love free samples? Trader Joe's also has the most energetic, pleasant staff imaginable; really, once I almost invited one home for Thanksgiving.

     Still, I held back. Trader Joe's, just not my type. 

     Then I noticed a bag of their Fall Leaf Corn Tortilla Chips. Why? Because the bag was beautiful, the burnt sienna and orange and yellow, the leaf shaped chips. I didn't say a word, but my wife caught whatever psychic signal I was sending out, swept over and grabbed a bag ("I don't have to speak," The Band sings, "she defends me.")
     Normally salty snacks are the one thing I'm armored against. But these I had to try. They just looked so good. And they taste good, are good, complicated chips — with not only white and yellow corn flour, but tomato, carrot and pumpkin powders, along with a "trace of lime." Great with Red Gold salsa.
     She's bought two more bags since then. Yes, the product could vanish at any time, like that blueberry sauce she bought when the boys were small and they all still talk about, the Lost Eden of blueberry sauces. But until then...
     Don't get me wrong. I'd still rather hop on my Schwinn and head to Sunset for a basket full of food. And the Fresh Farms on Milwaukee has my heart, with their Valencia juice oranges — oddly hard to find, even in the affluent North Shore. They also have dozens of different varieties of bulk Russian and Polish candies. Plus — and I love this detail — a little garbage can, always filled with wrappers, as if to say, "Spokojnie, spróbuj jednego. Masz pozwolenie" — sorry, "Go ahead, try one. You have permission."
     And the bread. Don't get me started on the breads baked at Fresh Farms. Worth an entire column. In fact, if I had any sort of confidence that I could actually make it happen, I'd love to walk the aisles of Fresh Farms with its owner, talking about just how incredible the place is.
     Wait, we were talking about Trader Joe's. Sorry. I do get carried away. Fall Leaf Corn Tortilla Chips. Tasty and beautiful. Get 'em while you can.

Balloon Museum a temporary escape from the daily disaster

"Airship Orchestra," by ENESS

     If you want relief from the growing national crisis — and at this point, who doesn't? — the Balloon Museum, which opened last Thursday at the Fields Studios, 2828 N. Pulaski Road, offers escape for an hour or two to a place where inflation is a good thing, and denizens are puffed up only with air, not ego and malice.
     "EmotionAir: Art You Can Feel" is less museum, more sprawling play zone along the lines of Meow Wolf, the "artertainment" immersive experiences out West whose purpose is to give visitors something big, colorful and unusual to pose in front of on Instagram.
     Workers were busily tacking down carpets when I got a sneak peek last Wednesday, which might have detracted from the overall effect. Though I also didn't have to pony up $39.83, the weekday toll for teens and seniors (more for adults, and more on the weekend) which no doubt honed my sense of childish wonder. Kids under 3 are free.

     I admired the colorful benignity of ENESS' "Airship Orchestra," the first of 18 tableaus — artworks if you're feeling generous — 16 stolid, striped, violet and blue squashlike balloons, some with bunny ears, all with eyes, to get visitors off on a cheery, anthropomorphic foot.

     Then came large grey cylinders that slowly collapse — rather like our democratic norms — and reinflate, a hopeful touch. Leading into "ADA," by Karina Smigla-Bobinski, a white room with an enormous clear helium-filled balloon, studded with charcoal sticks like a sea mine, a "self-forming artwork" that will cover the walls with black streaks by the time the show ends April 6. It did make me think of an actual artist: Iceland's Olafur Eliasson, who had a diverting show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2009.
     The enormous ball pit is clearly a highlight, though concern that I not lose my phone in the thing squelched whatever gleeful abandon one is supposed to experience. Here being ahead of the crowd helped. One visitor during the Balloon Museum's New York run reported the wait to get into the pit "felt like forever."
     "Invisible Ballet," a storm of silver balloons, is disorienting fun. I felt compelled to take a video and toss it onto social media, where the first response taught me a new term, "timeline cleanse," meaning something that isn't an Edvard Munch scream of shock at the latest offense against social decency.
     Next came Momoyo Torimitsu's "Somehow, I Don't Feel Comfortable," the one display that — in my opinion — rose to the level of actual art. Truly, you could cart it over to the MCA and it would fit right in.
     A trio of enormous inflatable pink rabbits, crammed against a too low ceiling, "Somehow..." is a comment on kawaii, the culture of cuteness that has gripped Japan for the past half century. Kawaii sells $4 billion a year worth of Hello Kitty stickers and backpacks. But it is also the happy face on a straitjacket of enforced helplessness and passivity, an attractive trap of being "something innocent, pure and small that should be protected" that many women spend their lives trying to escape.

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 "Somehow, I Don't Feel Comfortable," by Momoyo Torimitsu

Fall back

Clock with perpetual calendar, by Jean Antoine Lépine (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

         It's Sunday, Nov. 2. Did you remember to set your clocks back?

        Just an hour. Though we live in an era where some people seem stuck on pushing time even further backward, to some mythic time in their distant past. They're never very specific as to exactly when. Vague glory days, perhaps immediately after World War II, though that recedes past memory for most. Once I pressed a reader — what year are you talking about when things were better? Pick one? She replied 1952, and I wrote a blog post on just how grim that year actually was — polio rampant, the Korean War raging, Jim Crow deforming the South, McCarthyism creating a pall of fear.

     I actually don't think it is a specific era that MAGA is trying to regain — when American was "great" — but a social order where the people they don't think should count today indeed didn't count for much. Votes were suppressed — a future they're striding for. The national narrative was scrubbed of Blacks and gays and women. White folks were top dog, by definition. The world was their oyster. In theory. In memory.

    There is a useful word for this hunger: revanchism. A policy of trying to claw back what has been lost, to retaliate against those who have taken it, in your estimation. We see this everywhere. Vladimir Putin decides that Ukraine belongs to Russia because of something that happens in the 10th century. Encouraging diversity undermines merit — merit being what white folks display when they collect the cream. A world where we were top dog, and called the shots. We said "Jump!" and the world responded, "How high?" 

     At least in our memory. In the memories of some. Or, rather, their fancies, since they don't actually remember such a time. Because it never really existed.

    We do fall backward an hour every autumn. And just that one change throws people. The truth is, there is no going back, only forward. I grew up in a time when, with an eye on the 21st century, there was a lot of talk about the future, speculation about what things would be like. Now, not so much. Now our potential futures seem grim, from the authoritarian state being imposed by Donald Trump, to the violent storms caused by global warming, to the menace of artificial intelligence (though why people should fret over the hazy possibilities AI, and not the climate change ravaging the world right now, right before our eyes, is a mystery. Or maybe not such a mystery — it's always easier to consider esoteric danger than true threat. That's why we obsess over shark attacks, but not heart attacks).

      The future is coming whether we consider it or not. It could hold for us a decent society, where people are free to speak, write, think, vote. Where health care is a right for all, not a privilege for a few. Where education mattered. Or it might not. We seem headed for a very different future, a crude patchwork cobbled out of impressions of the past. Do we really want to go back there? Falling back an hour is hard enough. We can't fall back years and years, and shouldn't try.

Restaurant field notes: Smoque

     Certain restaurants exert a sort of tractor beam. You might not head there for a night out, but if you are in the neighborhood, if you stray into their field of attraction, you are inevitably drawn in. It really isn't a choice — their allure pulls you.

     Such is the case with Smoque, the barbecue joint at 3800 North Pulaski. I found myself a dozen blocks south, checking out the Balloon Museum experience — I'll share that Monday. That required I show up about 11 a.m. So when I finished experiencing giant balloons, about 12:30, there was no doubt where I was going to lunch.
     The only question was what to eat. Trying to avoid bread, I nixed the sandwiches, and happened to have ribs for dinner the night before. So no ribs. My mind quickly settled on the brisket platter.  Sure, I could have got it with slaw and two sides — but one of those sides would have to be beans, and the other probably corn bread, and while I did have my insulin with me, I didn't want to overload on carbs. The full platter also cost $27.50. Which is quite a lot of for a quick solo lunch on a Wednesday.
    So I opted for the a la carte platter, depicted above. Which cost ... I almost said "only cost" but that isn't quite right ... $18.50. Or $4.62 per slice. Quite a lot, really. 
    Although. It is very, very good brisket, falling apart at a touch. And the sauces are superb. I went from looking at my order rather dubiously, prior to the first bite, thinking, "That's it?" to eating it, quite quickly, and realizing, with satisfaction, "That's it!"

     I have to point out that service at Smoque is excellent, as warm and inviting as their brisket. None of the take-this-and-get-out tone found at too many places. I ordered a side of mac and cheese to go, for my wife for dinner, and the smoked beans for myself. Taking my tray, I wondered where they were, and was told the sides were already bagged and tucked in a hot box, waiting until I finished my meal — which, lingering, took all of three minutes. That's the thing when you're selling gold — even a little bit, well, it's still gold. 

    

The U.S. Labor Department dreams of an Aryan America

     My profession has a saying, coined right here in Chicago: "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." Good advice, particularly now that building airy castles of fabrication is official U.S. government policy, and social media is awash in engaging untruths, making each of us a little paper boat buffeted by an endless typhoon of lies. Anything unusual enough to catch attention merits immediately asking: Is this true?
     A few days ago I noticed a grid of 15 images supposedly created by the U.S. Department of Labor, assembled by Geoff Bowser, a Brooklyn real estate attorney with fewer than a thousand followers on Bluesky. "I made an image of all the art posted by US DOL on X since approximately Labor Day," he wrote.
     A dozen of the images were versions of the same broad-shouldered white hunk, with stern admonishments like "BUILD YOUR HOMELAND'S FUTURE" and "AMERICANS FIRST." The other three were a family straight out of "Fun with Dick and Jane," right down to the white-collared shirtwaist dress on the little girl.
     The standard 1950s dream images of a white-bread America that never existed — not without squinting away a whole bunch of folks who didn't count, then, and apparently still don't. An America that exists even less today, except in the fever dreams of those, now sadly in power, trying to stuff our country back into the confines of their narrow cookie-cutter molds.
     Why is this surprising? It perfectly meshes with everything else going on. Chicagoans are being snatched from the streets by masked thugs for the crime of being Brown in public. Black people are scrubbed from of our nation's history on official websites and driven out of positions of authority in the military. 

     Yes, I know that one reason totalitarianism succeeds, at first, is that decent people can't quite believe what they're seeing. You carefully pack your suitcase per instructions, not realizing it's going to be yanked away on the train platform. You show up for your job interview with a haircut and your best suit, not realizing they're never going to hire a person who looks like you.
     But could the Department of Labor really be representing America as a white man and only a white man, with no minorities in sight, and women, who make up half the work force, delegated to gazing with adoration at a daughter — in a pink bonnet! — at church?
     The United States is 19% Hispanic. Twelve percent Black. Six percent Asian. More than a third of the population. Is the Labor Department really giving them all the cold shoulder?
     I jumped on X to check — "if your mother tells you she loves you" etc.— and examined the Labor Department's X feed.
     The images are in support of Operation Firewall, the department's move to restrict visas.
     "The American Dream belongs to the American People," the department announces over one poster. And we know who those people are.
     "Initially, I just went to X out of curiosity to see whether the art that was posted was representative of the full extent of the art they used," Bowser told me. "When I saw that it was all white men as workers ... I felt compelled to share it as a composite to draw attention to the propaganda and racism."
     Why bother putting together that grid and disseminating it?
     "I'm angry and heartbroken about what Trump is doing to this country," said Bowser, who has two boys, 3 and 6. "On a more basic level, I'm doing it because it's something I can do. I don't want to have to tell my sons that I didn't try to stand against this."
     I reached out to the Labor Department for comment, forgetting that the government is shut down until further notice.

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Tricked by a bug

   

     Not to give women any ideas ... but praying mantises do not always need a male in order to reproduce.
      Sure, they can do it the standard birds-and-bees way, with male praying mantises famously being eaten by the female after serving their purpose. And usually, they do. But females can also reproduce through parthenogenesis, laying eggs that are clones of herself, without needing to  bother with the annoyance of involving a male, and all the drama that entails.
     And yes, the female occasionally eats their special friend after copulation. This happens mostly in captivity though, where males have been seen continuing to mate even with their heads gone, which is also par for the course. Though the nymphs — young mantises — also eat each other, and mantises are so generally voracious that they inspired a rare bit of wordplay in the no-nonsense Encyclopaedia Britannica, which ends its entry for mantids (a variant they prefer to "mantis"): "Since all mantids are ferocious carnivores, 'preying' rather than 'praying' may better describe them.") Touche!
     I spied this fine specimen on our doorpost Wednesday morning.
     "Hello gorgeous," I said. "Where have you been all summer?"
     She hadn't been there the evening before — at nearly four inches long, I could hardly have missed her at eye level — but then praying mantises are crepuscular (coming out at twilight) and nocturnal. She probably showed up in the night. I was surprised to see her — it's been getting a little cold for such an ectothermic (drawing heat from the outside rather than generating it from within; I know people like that) creature.
     I admired how still she stood as I snapped her portrait — I assumed it was a female, who had just laid her eggs, in a protective egg case called an ootheca, a lovely word that seems to have a pair of eggs right there in the beginning, coined by 19th century science, turning to the Greek, of course, ōon meaning egg, and thēkē meaning container. (Ootheke is ovary in Greek; mantis is straight Greek, for "prophet," which enhances the praying part).
     It was only later, when I passed by our doorpost a second time, did I remember the iron fist that nature hides within the velvet glove of all that beauty. My mantis wasn't holding still; she was dead. 

     Or so I thought. I returned later in the morning, thinking I would collect the corpse and perhaps deposit it on a shelf in my office, as a wintertime companion. But she was gone. I looked on the ground, figuring she had fallen off. No mantis. Maybe a bird got her.

      Then I noticed her, a few inches down, head facing earthward. Front arms definitely wiggling with life. And I remembered that mantises — and there are nearly 2,000 kinds, the praying mantis is only the most familiar — are mimics, imitating flowers, leaves, stems, blades of grass. There are orchid mantises and stick mantises, dead leaf mantises and mantises that mimic ants.  They blend in. 

     I'd been fooled. By an animal with a brain the size of a mustard seed, one that can carry on a meaningful romantic life with its head bitten off. I smiled, admiringly, and wished her well as she carried on with her Wednesday, and I continued with mine.

Donald Trump: Every brag a blot.

My father's carving of Don Quixote, bought in Spain in the 1950s.

     Donald Trump was praising himself on social media the other day. No news there. Now if a day passed when he didn't puff himself — that would be something special. Otherwise, to even report the fact of our president prattling on about his own superlative self is like sharing  the bulletin that molecules are flitting through the air, or that water is rushing across the landscape, seeking its own level — it happens everywhere all the time, and to notice it is to state the obvious.
     Yet this week, regarding some droplet flung from his firehosing self-puffery, spattering more salve at the festering open wound that is his ego, I thought again of a line from Cervantes, translated by Edith Grossman as, "Self-praise is self-debasement" mentioned in my 2017 examination of our then-new president through the lens of Don Quixote.
     But for some reason, this time I paused. Something wasn't quite right. There is a problem with that quote, particularly "self-debasement." A clunky word, not one you'd ever use. You'd never say, "I'm not that good at bowling — this isn't self-debasement; it's true."
     We can do better. 

     I wondered what the original was, and found it in Chapter XVI. Don Quixote is ruefully singing his own praises, pointing out, in Miguel Garci-Gomez's translation: "though self-praise is degrading, I must perforce sound my own sometimes, that is to say, when there is no one at hand to do it for me."

    Which makes Trump's constant upchuck of auto-flattery all the more puzzling, because it is so unnecessary. There is always someone at hand to do it for him; many someones. He's surrounded by a hallelujah chorus of lackeys, lickspittles and lapdogs — and those are just the L's — scrambling over each other to pay tribute like piglets fighting for position around a sow. He needn't bother. But bother he does. Because that echoing void where a soul might go demands to be fed, 24-7, and as an addiction expert once said, "It's hard to get enough of something that doesn't work in the first place." I am often accused of hating the man but the bedrock truth is, I pity him. I can't imagine a worse punishment than just being who he is.
     "Self-praise is degrading" is an improvement on "self-praise is self-debasement." But we could still do better. Let's look at the original Spanish for clues: "Las propias alabanzas envilecen."
     "Propia" is own, as in your own self. "Alabanza" means praise, often in religious sense, as in worship. There is Alabanza Christian music, singing of the glories of God. So "Las propias alabanzas" means, literally, "The self-praise." We could flip it to "praising yourself," which sounds better.
     "Envilecen" is a verb, meaning to debase, or degrade.
     We could try, "praising yourself is shaming yourself." An improvement on the translation I used in 2017, "self-praise is self-debasement," though the doubled "yourself" grates as much as the doubled "self" did. Or spice it up even more with a bit of the vernacular: "singing your own praises is cutting your own throat"? Even better. 

     But we live in a time when language is sandblasted into an endless series of smooth bloops and bleeps, thoughts polished smooth like pebbles so we can continually slingshot them at one another through social media. It's often said of our president that every accusation is a confession, so why not build on that and observe that every brag is also a blot? "Every brag a blot." Now, that's a keeper.