Carbondale celebrates eclipse, if clouds don't spoil the party

Overcast skies above Carbondale Sunday

    CARBONDALE — “Happy eclipse, guys!” a young woman on a bicycle called out to complete strangers on a busy Saturday night in the heart of this bustling downstate college town. Happiness seemed a central theme — alongside science, commerce and partying — as tens of thousands of visitors converged for what has been dubbed the Great American Eclipse, the intercession of the clockwork cosmos into our disordered daily doings.

     Happy, that is, if the weather holds, an increasingly dicey proposition as clouds moved in Sunday afternoon.
     “There are more ways we can get clouds here than not,” said Jim Cantore, a meteorologist and host for The Weather Channel, arriving on the Southern Illinois University campus to do a broadcast, fretting about nearby storm systems. “I’m worried about a few clouds. That would be a disaster.”

   Rain or shine, clear or cloudy, on Monday the moon will move between the earth and the sun. The 70-mile-wide shadow the moon casts will sweep across the length of the continental United States, starting at Salem, Oregon, at 9:06 a.m., Pacific time, moving southeastward at about 1,500 miles an hour, passing directly over Caspar, Wyoming, where amateur astronomers are having their annual meeting, brushing Kansas City and St. Louis, then reaching Carbondale at 1:21 p.m., plunging the area into darkness for 2 minutes and 39 seconds — 2 seconds shy of the longest period of “totality” in the country, before hurrying onward, reaching Charleston, South Carolina an hour later and passing on to the Atlantic ocean.
     Being in the path of “totality,” the moon will completely cover the sun — the two discs are approximately the same size, by a fluke of nature; the sun is 400 times larger than the moon, but also 400 times farther away. With the sun's blinding photosphere obscured, the sky will turn dark, the stars will come out, insects will grow quiet, and the 60,000 or so who have gathered in Carbondale will see a black disc where the sun should be.
     Unless it's cloudy.
     Because Chicago—where forecasters also predict clouds at eclipse time—is 350 miles north, the moon will only cover 87 percent of the sun, a lot, but not enough to make it safe to look at without proper eyewear. Residents cannot look at the partially eclipsed sun without wearing special eclipse glasses. Otherwise, they risk burning their retinas and causing permanent damage that might take weeks or months to appear.
     SIU started thinking about this eclipse three years ago, when it received an email from an eclipse watcher in England wondering about their plans, of which there were none. They got busy, along with the town of Carbondale, which was flying a special yellow eclipse flag beside Old Glory. The city of 26,000 has gone through difficult economic times, and, expecting 50,000 free-spending visitors, suspended its open container laws in the downtown district, temporarily, to encourage a carnival mood.
     The school realized that its first day of classes this year was to have taken place on the same day as the first total eclipse above Illinois since the Grant administration. So classes got bumped to Tuesday, though the school cannily had its 15,000 students move in last week, so hundreds were available to work everywhere as yellow-shirted volunteers, manning booths and giving directions
      "I just think the eclipse is a great event, bringing lots of people to campus and showing them that SIU is a great place to be," said Bridget Moroney, 19, a sophomore from Downers Grove studying communications.
     Eclipses were among the first natural phenomena that humanity began to understand. The Babylonians could predict eclipses, which appear in the Bible and are helpful to archeologists in dating ancient texts that refer to them.

     Eclipses have also proven valuable tools for advancing scientific knowledge.
     On Aug. 18, 1868, French astronomer Pierre J.C. Janssen, who traveled to India to study the total eclipse, saw an unexpected band of color in a spectroscopic analysis of the sun's corona and realized he had discovered a heretofore unknown element. A few months later, British astronomer Norman Lockyer confirmed the discovery and, assuming it had to be a metal, named the new element "helium," from the Greek helios, for sun. It would be 13 years before the element was detected on Earth.
     In 1919, an element of Albert Einstein's new theory of general relativity was proven when scientists used an eclipse to show that the immense gravity of the sun bends light from stars behind it.
     Using the eclipse to improve our understanding of the cosmos is to continue, weather permitting, with Monday's eclipse, which will be tracked across the country by volunteers participating in CATE—or the Citizen Continental-America Telescopic Eclipse Experiment.
     Sixty-eight teams will use identical 80 mm refractory telescopes to take high definition images of the total eclipse, which will be gathered by NASA into a 90 minute video of the sun's corona, the analysis of which is hoped will be helpful in understanding the sun's temperature fluctuations and magnetic qualities. Group 41 of the CATE Experiment is manned by SIU students at a special "dark site" on SIU's University Farms, one of four CATE locations in Illinois.
     "There's this gap in our knowledge," Christopher Mandrell, a graduate student involved in the project told the Daily Egyptian. "We'll see what it looks like in the outer corona. We don't know what happens in this zone when we can't look at it."
     How much science will get done if it's cloudy?
     "Not much," said Mike Kentrianakis, who has viewed 20 eclipses, in Carbondale representing the American Astronomical Society.
     Clouds or no, there is still money to be made. SIU charged $25 a ticket to fill Saluki Stadium with 14,000 people for the eclipse, and $848 for three nights in a spartan dorm suite with four beds in Schneider Hall - available because the student population is 40 percent lower than it was in the 1980s, when the university had a national reputation as a party school. The Carbondale Holiday Inn was asking $550 a night.
     Local artists created eclipse T-shirts, jewelry, posters and paintings, bakeries made eclipse cookie, and bars offered eclipse drinks. Denny's dubbed its pancakes "Mooncakes" and offered all you can eat for $4 with a free pair of eclipse glasses thrown in.
     There was an art fair, and "Eclipse Comic Con," which drew participants dressed as comic characters to campus. Blending right in were about 80 members of the media, including the BBC, Swedish television and the Old Farmer's Almanac. Visitors came from 40 different states.
     John Mannion flew in from New York with his wife, Janice Wiesman.
     "This is my third try," said Mannion, who traveled with his family as a youth to see eclipses in Nova Scotia and Georgia, only to be disappointed by the weather. "Now I'm trying again."
     A "computer guy" with the Bank of New York, he studied weather patterns and came to Carbondale because of "good odds for a sunny day."
     His wife added that "given what happened in Charlottesville" and all the unrest in the country, she hopes the eclipse is visible, because we could benefit from an experience often described as an awesome, spiritual, life-changing, something to remind squabbling Americans that we are only part of an enormous natural system.
     "It's really just physics; it's astronomy," she said. "It would be nice if people could get together for something meaningful, if this is a turning point, reminding everybody we are just a tiny little planet in a tiny little galaxy.
     Unless of course it rains. If that happens, the Carbondale area can take comfort in the fact that, through another fluke in the cosmos, the next total eclipse here will occur seven years from now, in 2024.
     "This is just a dry run," said Lou Mayo, an astronomer with NASA's Goddard Space Center.

  

Astronomy buffs attended lectures before the eclipse. 

That pesticide must be stronger than they thought

     Look at this sign, spied last week along Chicago Avenue, just east of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Take your time. Study the photo. See if you notice what I noticed immediately, stopping in my tracks and snapping this photo.
     No? It was a bit of a misleading request. Notice, not the sign, but the ground.  Anything missing? How about grass? These large, stark, yellow and black signs are warning about pesticide that isn't applied to a lawn that isn't there. Almost a koan.
    I can only imagine that there was once grass, and the sign either warned of regular though ultimately ineffectual pesticide treatment or—my guess—they were just put there cynically, to keep pets from being allowed to relieve themselves on the grass. That's a theory of mine. I always pull my dog off lawns—when there are actual lawns— marked with these sort of signs.
     I can't be sure they're sincere—some part of me says that there is no danger. I even have doubts such pesticides are used in residential areas. I mean, have you ever heard of a dog being sickened by pesticide that was put on a lawn? 
     Me neither. Heck, I don't even hear the word "pesticide" anymore. I don't know what they call it nowadays. Organic-Earth Insect Discourager. Or some such thing. "Pest" is like "problem," one of those words that got banished when we decided to use euphemisms for everything.  Now it's "otherwise-valued creature" and, of course, "issue."
    Not the biggest observation. But the sun is supposed to go out tomorrow. And while we're fairly confident it'll click back on, well, you never know, and I'd hate to spend my last hours beavering away here.

Why should we sit at home?

      It's an attractive fantasy.
      I've heard it time and time again from readers.
      Why not, they write, stay home when the Nazis protest? Wouldn't that be something. Let them stand around with their homemade swastika shields and their slack whitebread faces, sieg-heiling each other while the country coughs into its fist and looks away, ashamed. Nobody would be there to see them, hear them. Crickets and litter blowing through the empty streets.
      Even Tina Fey suggested it, jokingly. Stay home and eat sheet cake. It was funny, sort of.
      There was a logic. Deny them the attention they seek. Register your scorn by shunning them. Why not try that?
      But the answer is both simple and complicated. 
      First, it's human nature to want to witness a wonder yourself. To slip under the tent flap and go see the human oddity. To clap eyes on someone so out-of-fucking-touch with reality that they'd say to themselves, "Yeah, the Nazis! That's an ideology I want to embrace. Because it worked so well for the Germans. I'm sure it would be great in a nation as varied and diverse as the United States. That's a good idea!"
    It's hard to believe such people exist until you see them with your own eyes.
      Second, why should such marvels march unopposed? They feel comfortable showing up in public, airing their psycho-fucking bullshit worldview, of violence against people whose skin they don't like, whose hair scares them. They feel entitled to work themselves up into a knot over the shape of people's noses. Because they think it matters. 
      Why shouldn't the non-crazy, those free of hatred, of self-assigned and wrong-as-can-be superiority, not show up? To register their belief in our country, its freedoms, not just freedom of speech, or to—apparently—tote the guns you need to feel less terrified around in public. But the freedom to lives our lives unmolested by shitheads like these guys. To not sign on to the same old tired racist garbage that we spent centuries trying to pry off ourselves. The dead hand of hatred.
    Why shouldn't we shout that from the square? We who, unlike them, have nothing to be ashamed of.
      We who, unlike them, understand consequences. We who can also plan ahead, long term. Haters stress their freedom to speak their minds, to stretch the term, and they do have that. 
      But they are not free from consequences. That's why they strut around talking violence, then weep for their public shame the next day when the people back home realize its Dwayne, good old Dwayne from the Dairy Queen, wearing a brownshirt and talking about the need to push Jews into ovens. 
     What a surprise it is, for them. From being fired from the hot dog stands where they work because their bosses just don't want to be stained by association. From having their neighbors shun and condemn them. The First Amendment says government won't bar you from expressing the poisoned little sphincter in the middle of your chest where your heart should be. It doesn't guarantee your neighbors won't turn and spit in the street as you pass.
     As I write this, the forces are assembling in Boston. The tiny poisoned fragment that wants to goose-step in public, that thinks they're worth something if they can only pretend that others are less than them.
     And everybody else, patriotic Americans, moms and dads, brothers and sisters, who don't want to see the American flag shat on without raising their voices in righteous indignation.
     It's a beautiful thing. 

The dead are never gone on Facebook

    I would never have thought of J. David Moeller again. He was not my friend. I had never met him.
     He was, however, a Facebook friend, who commented on my column, sent in the jokes that used to end my column, right up until he killed himself in 2010.
     His birthday was Aug. 9, and Facebook—like a dim-witted cat dragging something unwelcome into the house—invited me to wish him happy birthday.
     Considering it, I visited his page, saw his actual friends leaving messages of missing and heartbreak. I said nothing, but thought of this column, from seven years ago, that addresses this online world, which was new then, and now is just how things are, for good and ill.

     A Facebook friend killed himself Friday. News came the way news does on Facebook, via a wall post.

     "We lost a mutual friend, Neil," Leigh Stone Eckroth wrote. "Actor, writer J. David Moeller took his own life on February 19, he left parting words on his profile, under the photo section . . . Very sad : ( "    
     I knew Moeller from his frequent postings of wry observations and as a contributor of jokes to this column. We never actually met.
     Those who knew him better bid farewell on his Facebook page:
     "David, you were such an amazing and sweet man," wrote one. "Your wit and humor and your intelligence . . . you have left a huge hole in our hearts."
     The sentiments seemed both private and public, a jarring juxtaposition. Once newspapers avoided mentioning the fact that someone committed suicide -- it was seen as intrusive. But that ship seems to have sailed.
     Amongst Moeller's 320 wall photos and 156 profile pictures is the image of a sheet of yellow legal paper. "My Dear Friends," it begins, in neat blue handwriting. "I'm sorry. I cannot go on . . ."
     Moeller was 64. He was a character actor with a half century of bit parts in movies, TV and on stage, doggedly pursuing a career that did not lavish him with rewards.
     "Moeller, who speaks with a faded Texas drawl, grew up in the Lone Star state and knew from the age of 3 he wanted to be an entertainer," wrote Stefano Esposito, in a Sun-Times profile published last year. "He has acted in Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston, Dallas, Geneva, Switzerland -- among other places -- and now Chicago. To make ends meet, he has also driven cabs, done stand-up comedy at a strip club and worked as a telemarketer selling bulk trash bags."
     He could act. Hedy Weiss ended her 2008 review of Irish playwright Owen McCafferty's "Scenes from the Big Picture" with:
     "But it is J. David Moeller, a 'listener' most the time, who brings it all to a gorgeous Beckettian conclusion."
     Suicide is a mystery, and I won't pretend to offer insights here, except to observe that it seems to claim the witty, the kind and the unusual far more than it does the dull, the mean and the ordinary.
     The Facebook aspect makes it all the more unsettling. I know that suicide notes have posted on Facebook before, though there is still a disconnect, at least for me. The venue seems inappropriate. I don't want my children tweeting from my deathbed, and when I die, I don't want anybody posting frowny faces.
     At first, I wasn't even sure Moeller was really dead -- I'm of an era when seeing something on a Web page is only an indication that it might be true. Moeller was certainly waggish enough for us to hope this could be a stunt ("I thought, 'Oh, it was a prank -- he's fine and I took the bait,' " wrote a friend).
     Alas, the Cook County medical examiner's office, a very real institution on Harrison Street, confirms that it received his body. The cause of death is being withheld, pending toxicology reports.
     I joined Facebook because the paper told us to, and have found it a mixed blessing. It does have a practical purpose, providing a sort of hive intelligence to tap into. I remember rolling into Salt Lake City last summer and feeling unmoored -- what was I doing with my boys in Utah? I posted words to that effect on Facebook, and somebody immediately pointed me toward Ruth's Diner. Next thing we knew, we were eating red trout and eggs and chocolate malt pudding and all was right in the world once more.
     Facebook expands your circle. It takes your actual friends—who ironically are less significant on Facebook since you see them in the flesh world—and adds this strange online penumbra of quasi-friends you sorta know.
     Every once in a while one of them pops up in the actual world—remember when that Norwegian lady blew into town last year and married a guy she met on my Facebook page in a ceremony atop the Willis Tower?
     Of course, it was much stranger and more complicated than that. The guy apparently forgot to tell his former wife and children that he was getting remarried, a situation I discovered when his 11-year-son phoned to ask: Who was this lady marrying his father? A very real, deeply awful moment.
     Sometimes I wonder if the drawbacks to Facebook, as both a time sinkhole and an emotional minefield, outweigh the benefits. But I also know the technology genie never goes back in the bottle.
     Posting your suicide note on Facebook feels extra wrong, but then new technology always seems undignified. The teams sent out by the military to notify families of the death of servicemen harken back to the day when it was considered rude to give bad news over the telephone.
     The night before he died, Moeller posted two thoughts.
     The first was completely prosaic, about the Olympics" "Local boy goes good . . . Evan Lysacek wins the Gold!"
     And then, a minute later: "None but we know the rooms we roam, the beds we lie in, the houses of our mind."

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

From J. David Moeller:

     Those baby-changing stations don't work. I put my baby in one, closed it up and when I opened it again . . . it was still a baby. I was hoping for a new laptop.

          —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 24, 2010

Traitors to our country should never have been honored in the first place

Stonewall Jackson, Virginia Military Institute

     Say I take up a hobby: drowning puppies in a bucket, then using a tennis racquet to serve their limp, dripping carcasses at neighborhood children who flee, shrieking, while I laugh and laugh.
     You object to this practice, citing cruelty to animals, to children.
     I reply, "What? You don't realize what a huge problem over-population is among pets? You don't care about animals? And obesity is a major problem among the young. How can you oppose exercise?"
     Welcome to what passes for discourse in America, 2017, where no moral lapse is so extreme that it can't be reframed and explained away.
     A mob of Nazis march, on the pretext of defending Civil War monuments. The marchers clash with counter-protesters, then return to the holes they came from. Decent Americans exhibit their displeasure by pulling down the same monuments the Nazis used as pretext, those honoring traitorous Civil War leaders who took up arm against their own country — our country — in open rebellion trying to preserve the grotesque institution of slavery, monuments often set up in the 20th century as a middle finger to Civil Rights protests.
     Our current leader, Donald Trump, can't bring himself to sincerely denounce racism, so instead expounds on the Nazis' excellence, so much that corporate CEOs, not a group famous for morality, draw away in visceral horror.

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The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg

    You open the world to your children and then, if you are lucky, they open their world to you.
    I was not particularly fond of contemporary art—I'm more of a French Impressionism fan—but then again, I didn't know much about it either, and ignorance and dislike are brothers. 
     I've grown to appreciate it more over the past couple years, and only now, having spent a few hours at the impressive Takashi Murakami show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, did I realize why: my older boy.
     It was he who prompted us to go to The Broad, the new privately-financed Los Angeles mecca of recent art. It was he who, in April, dragged us to the Palazzo Grassi in Venice to see Damien Hirst's massive "Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable."
    And while it wasn't he who took me to the MCA Tuesday to see a retrospective of Japan's top contemporary artist, the show opened in June, I wasn't racing there either, not until my kid came home Saturday from his internship in LA for a couple weeks. Then my first thought was, "Hey, there's a Murakami show at the MCA—wanna go?"
     He did.  
     Rooms filled with enormous canvases that somehow manage to be both freeform and precise, explosions of color and tracts of black and white. Murakami struck me as the apotheosis of high school artists, his blizzard of arhats, stylized Buddhists recalled faces scrawled on the notebooks of artsy fellow students at Berea High School in the late 1970s, dreamy-eyed girls with names like Ariel and Autumn.
     I particularly liked his Yves Klein tribute flower wallpaper—as I thought of it. Something daft and commercial. 
     If you go, make sure you see the films of Murakami overseeing squads of employees—he has some 250 at five studios around the world— slim youths in colorful jumpsuits and paper masks slathering paint over large wood-framed stencils he computer cuts to make his enormous images. And in the middle, pot-bellied, with a scraggly beard, round glasses and earbuds screwed in his ears, the Artist, transferring his images onto paintings that cover museum walls and sell for millions.
     In one room, with huge resin and steel guardian figures on each end, were a pair of paintings that carried the name of the show—The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg, his comment on the resilience of survival. A Japanese saying about regeneration, the extreme step taken to survive, the moral of the story being the octopus grows a new leg to replace what was lost. 
    In tiny letters on these paintings Murakami had a surprisingly anxious, aggrieved personal statement, about the young artists he tried to help and who "betrayed" him and how generally troublesome his life was. 
     I suppose he could be looked down on for that, but as Walt Whitman said, "How beautiful is candor;" somehow that spirit, the self-exposure, endeared Murakami to me—of course it would, since I too am in the self-revelatory line, though with far less remunerative results.
     Still, it's good to know that someone is making a smash success of whimsical self-pity, and curator Michael Darlings cannily convinced Murakami to present his not-all-that-hot early works in the first room of the show, jammed with young people, to whom this should be an inspiration, because he does not come off as a genius, just someone who combined work and luck and a vision and made it. 
     Murakami thinks of his production process as similar to making a movie—"Star Wars" was an inspiration—and coming out of the show indeed had that return-to-reality sense you have after seeing a good movie.
     The show runs until Sept. 24, but go sooner than later, as the MCA might have to go to timed tickets, just to handle the crowds. 

Trump mocks the pain of Chicago families

      I wrote this Tuesday morning, before Trump's frightening afternoon press conference throwing in his lot with white nationalist haters. Though it was tempting to react to the latest outrage, I had set aside one column already to react to Trump's tweet, and realized there will always be another shock around the corner—you cannot get ahead of the curve with this man—and it was probably better to let this fly and wait for the next shoe from our centipede of disaster to drop.

     "Meanwhile," Trump enthusiast Jack Posobiec tweeted and the president retweeted Monday, "39 shootings in Chicago this weekend, 9 deaths. No national media outrage. Why is that?"
     Ooo, ooo, me me! I'll take that one.
     But first a little background, for those lucky enough not to be reading this at the grim moment of America in mid-August 2017. A nation roiled by a sudden geyser of racial hate—or, rather, being reminded of the hate always seething just under the surface. A tiki torch-bearing mud flow of Nazis and Klansmen and other assorted mutants in Charlottesville, Virginia, vomited out of the earth and into view Friday night. On Saturday they were met by counter-protesters, patriots and regular citizens who reject the never-true vision of America as a white, Protestant enclave.
     One of those haters, allegedly, sped his car into the peaceful protest, killing a woman. And our president, who will leap onto Twitter to denounce a teenager who asks a pointed question, blamed "both sides" then remained mum for days about the source of this attack on our values, perhaps because he knows how popular he is among haters, perhaps because several of his closest advisers seeped out of the same subterranean cesspool.
     Trump's failure outraged the country. Because we are not used to seeing such bald cowardice, such indulgence of the undercurrent of American life.  Not from the president. It's news.
     Chicago, on the other hand, is a big city where shootings happen every day. We are not the most dangerous city in America. We are not the homicide capital. Chicago has a pervasive gang problem and its murder rate is five times that of New York City's. So it has problems with violence, but those problems, while news, do not have the fresh horror of a president winking at Nazis.

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