The grasshopper is no burden, yet.

 

     The summer is over, gone, the cold gathering, settling in. Leaves are already dead, falling, and yet I haven't mentioned one of the most notable events of the whole season, now past. I saw this grasshopper, hidden among the leaves of my Persian Spear. I don't remember ever seeing a grasshopper in years and years. Crickets, yes, cicadas, God knows. But this fellow, straight out of Aesop. I had just enough time to frame a photo and he was gone.
     I believe it is a differential grasshopper (Melanoplus differentialis) based on the distinctive "inverted chevrons along the hind femur." But there are 11,000 varieties of grasshoppers, at least, so I am open to the idea that I might be mistaken.       
     Had I been thinking quickly, I might have reached out and crushed it.  Grasshoppers are notorious pests, going back to the Bible. "The grasshopper shall be a burden." (Not to confuse them with locusts, which are similar, physically, but have even worst culinary habits. Think of locusts as grasshoppers gone bad).
     But no, upon reflection, I probably would not have done that, even had it crossed my mind. Too beautiful. Besides, they gobble ragweed too.
     That quote from the Bible is deceptive, as quoting out of context so often is. That line, in the Book of Ecclesiastes, part of a memorable passage about advancing age. Here is the entire thing, taken from the New King James version, 12:1, with a few, ahem, alterations of my own, done to enhance comprehension 

Remember now your Creator in the days of your youth,
Before the difficult days come,
And the years draw near when you say,
“I have no pleasure in them.”
While the sun and the light,
The moon and the stars,
Are not darkened,
And the clouds do not return after the rain;
In the day when the keepers of the house tremble,
And the strong men bow down;
When the grain grinders cease because they are few,
And those that look through the windows grow dim;
When the doors are shut in the streets,
And the sound of work is low;
When one startles at the cry of a bird,
And all the daughters of music are brought low.
Also they are afraid of heights,
And of terrors in the way;
When the almond tree blossoms,
The grasshopper is a burden,
And desire fails.
For man goes to his eternal home,
And the mourners go about the streets.

     Quite grim, I know, particularly when the faith in God isn't on the table as balm and narcotic. "When the almond tree blossoms" is an allusion to white hair. And the grasshopper reference isn't because of their crop-devouring, or incessant chirping. It's their lightness. Older people are plagued by grasshoppers means eventually even your light burdens are difficult.
      Hmm, how do I pull out of this one? Maybe by quoting scripture of a different sort. When Warren Zevon was dying, he said a variety of very smart things. He talked up poetry, carrying a copy of Rilke's "Duino Elegies" with him. He kept working. "Work is the most effective drug there can possibly be," he said. True dat. And when David Letterman asked him what he had learned from the cancer that would kill him at age 56, he replied, 'How much you're supposed to enjoy every sandwich." Do that, or try to.   

Ravenswood Notes: Senses

   The whole point of these little italic intros is to alert the inattentive reader that they are not reading something by me, but the Saturday report of our esteemed Ravenswood correspondent, Caren Jeskey. Because occasionally readers, particularly new ones, will miss that. However, with today's  post, and its plunge into the world of Jeff Yang and his art, I don't think there's much risk of confusion. I try to get about, but usually end up on the sofa with a book, while Caren, indefatigably buzzes from flower to flower, gathering her sweetness and light. 

  

   Graffiti artists sprayed paint on large canvases on either side of the stage during a DJ set at the last Sundays on State for the season back in September. I had just marched with Clamor and Lace Noise Brigade playing my flute (well, mostly pretending to play since I could not really see the sheet music affixed to my arm on a bracelet of sorts—my first attempt at a marching band), and dancing along as the crowd lit up. It was so much fun! Shortly thereafter I pulled out of the band since I do not have the time or dedication to give them their due rewards for being so awesome.
     The spray paint art brought me back to the days at The Hot House when it was on South Wabash. An artist would paint while a band played. I’d become transfixed, watching the strokes of paint on canvas in time to the music, or to the rhythm in the artist’s head.

Jeff Yang, in his shop.

     I recently reconnected with an acquaintance from the past. We had brunch at Five and Dime and then I walked with him back to his violin shop in Evanston. Jeff Yang played with Mannheim Steamroller for many years, before leaving that world in 2015 to pursue another path.
     “My ultimate goal is to change the way arts and music are being viewed and consumed right now," said Jeff, who brings all of the senses into his creations. Music, olfactory stimulation, visual stimulation, color, and even gastronomy.
     As Jeff talked about his passion for awakening all of the senses simultaneously, I flashed back to my one and only visit to Alinea. Discreet round speakers were placed in the ceiling above each chair, and sounds played to coincide with the dining experience. For example, when one was eating a crisp caramel glaze, the speaker would emit a tinkling sound as the caramel cracked .
     Jeff is intrigued by the power of sound. He has learned that sound frequencies create varying patterns. “Circles, triangles, snow flakes. There is an order that sound is incorporated into.”

   Jeff partnered with a perfume blogger Victoria Frolova, as well as perfumeries in New York and Tokyo, and launched his first event in 2018. A representative of Pod Majersky's group—of Pilsen art district fame—provided ample space on the Halsted art corridor where Jeff showcased his first event, Elements. The focus was on the five elements of Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Metal.

     The exhibits blended food, perfume, music and art including film. He hired a well known chef from Arun’s Thai, and presented Dining in the Dark with various textures to stimulate the taste buds and overall experience. Jeff encourages the chefs and other artists to go with what they feel, and contribute in a way that makes the experience more fluid between various artists and mediums.
     The Violet Hour sponsored Elements as well, and developed the Juliet & Romeo cocktail in homage.
    Jeff's next performance, In The Realm Of The Senses, (click here for tickets) is coming up next Friday night, 10/29, in Evanston. It was delayed due to COVID, and will celebrate Beethoven’s 250th birthday. A string quartet will play Op. 59 No. 2 and Sergio Gomez will create real time art inspired by improvised music. An ornate floral creation by Stacey Bal will drop down and shower beauty on the crowd while aromas will be diffused throughout the air in a subtle yet awakening manner.

     I will be there for an evening of forgetting about everything else.

Too much white in the palette

A guard stretches at the Barbara Kruger show currently on exhibit at the Art Institute. 

     Harvey E. Clark was a CTA bus driver and World War II vet. In July 1951, he moved his family’s belongings into an apartment at 6139 W. 19th Street in Cicero. Before they could reside there, however, his would-be neighbors went berserk, rampaging through the building while the Cicero police stood by, doing nothing. Thousands of rioters smashed windows and dragged the Clarks’ furniture into the street. The governor had to call out the Illinois National Guard.
     Clark was Black. I am white, but nevertheless can still convey the story of how Cicero greeted the family that would have been the suburb’s first Black residents.
     At least I hope so; it’s in my next book. That hope is open to debate, however. In our current fraught racial moment, who is saying something can count as much as what is being said. Maybe more. The Art Institute of Chicago, like many old guard cultural institutions, is trying to be less lily white, and the museum’s eye fell on its staff of volunteer docents, who were fired en masse Sept. 3. Not for what they were telling visitors; but for who was doing the telling.
     “As a civic institution, we acknowledge our responsibility to rebuild the volunteer educator program in a way that allows community members of all income levels to participate, responds to issues of class and income equity, and does not require financial flexibility to participate,” is how Veronica Stein, the Woman’s Board executive director of Learning and Public Engagement, put it in an email delivering the bad news. “Rather than refresh our current program, systems and processes, we feel that now is the time to rebuild our program from the ground up.”
     Fox News expressed it far more succinctly: “Chicago museum fires all of its mostly White female, financially well-off docents for lack of diversity.”
     I think that’s why I initially ignored the story. Nobody cries like a bully, and while the Red Staters try to blind America to its racist past, labeling honest assessment of history as “critical race theory” and banning it by law, they seek cover by cherry-picking tales of cancel culture overreach, mostly from academia, to pretend that they are victims. Why amplify that?

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I double-dog dare you to post this!

   

     Maybe we don't need the law to rein in Facebook. Maybe eventually people will just get bored with it.
     I certainly am.
     Every morning I dump my column, or blog post, in the little "What's on your mind?" oblong, to afflict others with it ... whoops, so eager readers can find it there. For the clicks. And I at least try to look at what Facebook friends are posting, to see what folks are talking about. 

     But it's a fairly empty experience. People I don't know celebrating their anniversaries. Posting motivational poems. Sharing their vacations. Ads for stuff I don't want. And odd, out-of-left-field challenges. Like this:

     "Someone once said, “When you love someone with dementia you lose them more and more everyday. When they are diagnosed, when they go through different stages, when they go into care and when they die. ‘Rapidly shrinking brain’ is how doctors describe it. As the person’s brain slowly dies, they change physically and eventually forget who their loved ones are. They can eventually become bedridden, unable to move and unable to eat or drink.”

     A former college classmate, my age. Not sharing grim news of her own, but a canned chain letter. It ended:

     "There will be people who will scroll by this message because dementia has not touched them. They may not know what it's like to have a loved one who has fought or is fighting a battle against dementia. To raise awareness of this cruel disease, a special thank you to all willing to post to their timeline."

     Or ..... there may be people whose lives have been abso-fucking-lutely touched by dementia, and are all for "sharing awareness," but just aren't into tiny symbolic gestures, those happy pink ribbons that insulting suggest you can beat back bad old Mr. Cancer if only you keep a really positive attitude, and chafe against the I-double-dog-dare-you-to-post-this ethos that so infects Facebook. Like we're all in sixth grade. I thought of commenting. But that sparks all this Punch-and-Judy bickering that ends nowhere, and I just don't have the energy for that. I unfollowed her instead.
     Yes, it's good for people to be aware. And given how many people don't understand medicine, science, vaccines, who can't differentiate between an example and proof (Colin Powell dying of COVID despite being vaccinated is no more an indictment of vaccines than someone dying in a car crash despite wearing a seatbelt undercuts the advisability of seat belts) they need all the awareness they can get.
     But the flip side of awareness is over-stimulation. Everything, from everyone, all the time. The demonstrably untrue assertion that we can combat something just by lavishing our precious attention over it. That's sometimes true. But you can also combat something by focusing less attention on it. The less time on social media, particularly Facebook, the better. You don't need the government to tell you that.

Goodbye Chicago, hello Tokyo!

     Being a contrarian, I do not share the general consensus that Lori Lightfoot has accomplished nothing as mayor beyond grimly presiding over one disaster after another. In my view, that just isn’t true. For instance, she managed the neat trick of making Rahm Emanuel look good by comparison.
      Think about it. The Riverwalk was Mayor Rahm’s baby. A glittering new facet to the city. Like Rich Daley with Millennium Park, Rahm reminds us that a single landmark bauble can almost outshine a garish jacket woven of blunders.
     And at least you could talk with the man. Yes, that isn’t a quality that resonates with most Chicagoans. But it meant something to us inky wretches. Rahm was trying to accomplish stuff, and it gave the media a warm glow to be let in on the plan. The reason I can confidently credit Rahm with the Riverwalk is because, when he showed up and I asked him what he wanted to do in office, the first words out of his mouth were about improving the riverfront.
     I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve gone over to Team Rahm. Yes, I am rooting for his nomination as U.S. ambassador to Japan to be advanced Wednesday by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — and not just because that would plant him about as far from Chicago as he can get without leaving the earth’s magnetic field. A certain generational sympathy is also at work. It’s hard to be a man in your early 60s trying to carve out a new career.
     Or so I imagine; I’ve managed to cling to my own job with singular, barnacle-like tenacity for a third of a century. But I take a morbid interest in noting where those whose fingers are pried from their professional ledges manage to land. Usually, it isn’t pretty. Usually, there’s a splat.

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Flashback 2012: 'Prairie Home Companion' on its way

     Garrison Keillor is one of those figures like Al Franken, whose careers sank after running headfirst into the Me Too movement. I'll leave it to others to decide if that was fair, or if they were swept up in a furor, like Antoine Lavoisier, the scientist beheaded in the French Revolution. Once the guillotine is set up, it demands new necks to feed upon.

       I've been thinking about seeking Keillor out, maybe trying to interview him. But Keillor was a tough interview before this trouble happened. He hated the press before, and I doubt being publicly cashiered made him any fonder. I remember, after this conversation, telling someone that talking to him was like trying to interview an oak. 

     He's going to be performing "A Prairie Home Holiday" at the Rialto Square Theatre Dec. 11. I don't think I'll go—I've seen him several times, and it's in Joliet. But if you never have, you might consider it. He's the greatest American humorist since Mark Twain, and he won't be coming around forever.

     Mark Twain made a lot of money. Both from his own best-sellers, like "Huckleberry Finn," and from the work of others - he owned a publishing house - particularly the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.
     But he also lost a lot of money. Trying to repeat the Grant success, Twain published the autobiographies of lesser Civil War generals who, it turned out, the American public no longer cared much about.
     And Twain had a genius for bad investment. He bought many worthless patents. Several times in his life he was forced to hit the road to earn money, particularly after the economic panic of 1893, which left Twain bankrupt at 60, forced to travel the world giving speeches to pay off his creditors.
     I think of Twain pulling into Chicago or Berlin and imagine a local gazing at the paper, musing whether to go see the great man, whenever his lone rival over the past century, Garrison Keillor, comes to town, as he will in a couple weeks, and I have to decide if I should go see him again. Usually I do.
     Not that Keillor is financially ruined, I hasten to add. He tours the country with his radio show, "A Prairie Home Companion," because ... well, I had no idea why, so I asked him, before we fell to talking poetry, which you might have read about in my last column. Why not always broadcast from St. Paul?
     "Well, you get to see a better cross-section of people who listen to the show," Keillor said. "That's something a person needs. The longer you're in this business, the more you have to press yourself to get out and be out around people. I like to hang out after the show and talk to people; I want to check out who they are."
     His audiences turn out to be younger than you might expect.
     "A lot of people in their 20s now, and 30s, who more or less were forced against their will to listen as small children - they've made this transition, they come to enjoy something that as young people they thought they loathed," he said. "I'm interested both in the loathing and what they like about it now. So they offer a lot of information, and I want to keep in touch."
     I imagine they like the variety of the show—the songs and humorous sketches, and the highlight, Keillor's snapshot of his fictional hometown, Lake Wobegon, a short story he says is shaped in part by those listening to it.
      "When I sit down to write the show, I'm not writing it for myself. I don't want to," he said. "I'm writing for an audience. It just helps a lot to have some faces in your mind."
     Keillor doesn't read the story, nor does he entirely make it up on the air, but rather a blend, part recalling what he wrote earlier, part extemporizing as he goes along.
     "I'm a writer. The way I think is by putting words down," he said. "I like to have some outline, some story. That's how I do my thinking, looking at a long legal pad, with a pen, making marks. Then I toss it out. Once you write it down, then you don't need it anymore. You extemporize from what you remember of it. You don't make any attempt to memorize. Sometimes you turn it all around in the act of performing."
     What happens then?
     "When you tell a story, the audience will tell you where to go," he said. "They give powerful directions, and that's what you want to rely on. It just looks odd, I think for a man to stand up in front of an audience and read off a script."
     Does he ever forget what comes next? On live radio? What then?
     "It happens often," he said. "And you just have to talk in circles until you find a trail. You're in the woods and sort of crashing around through the underbrush. Eventually you find your way out of it."
     Keillor, 70, has in the past publicly speculated about retiring, but no longer.
     "It's always up in the air," he said. "We have this season pretty much all blocked out," and 2014 "is starting to get sketched in."
     With the election so close, we talked about politics—while the show isn't overtly partisan, it often contains a strong message.
     "I would always rather confuse people than have a label stuck to me," he said. "But I'm an old Minnesota Democrat, no secret about that. I've been involved in Democratic politics up in Minnesota, especially this fall, though my view has broadened with time. The party line doesn't interest me so much as politics is the best way there is to meet people and get to know who they are. Deep down, politics is about civility and about friendship, about the bonds between people. I think that I'm aligned with people who have acquired in their youth a powerful sense of empathy for the outcast, the stranger, the victim, the abused and the unlucky, and so we believe that we allied against the protectors of privilege. To me there's only one side to be on."
           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, October 26, 2012

Why are cops afraid of vaccines?

     Boy, is it beautiful up in Door County. The wife and I had a great time there last week, hiking the parks, going to fish boils. I tried not to think about being right back here Monday morning, poking Chicago’s ball-of-snakes politics with a stick.
     Oh look. The city and the police department are suing each other. That’s normal.
     So let’s talk about the police. Puff aside the fog of BS swirling around them and get down to basics. What is the most important activity performed by the police? The reason for the roll calls and the paperwork. What does everyone, including the police themselves, agree that police are supposed to do?
     Fight crime, right? Any objections? Is the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 7 on board with the whole police-are-supposed-to-arrest-criminals idea? Assuming so — a leap of trust nowadays with anything requiring an ounce of sense — let’s continue.
     This crime-fighting business involves danger, does it not? Puts police in perilous situations. Running into a dark alley where there might be a bad guy with a gun. Charging up the dark stairs of a six-flat. Going into the foul, overheated apartment of some crazy person who might come at you with a razor.
     A dangerous job. If I say, “Chicago cops put their lives on the line every day,” I don’t expect John Catanzara to jump onto YouTube to insist, “No we don’t!”
     So what’s with the vaccine hesitancy? You’ll run into a burning building but won’t get the shots that soon every 5-year-old will need in order to go to school? You let the city tell you what kind of hat to wear, but helping fight the plague that has killed 700,000 Americans is a bridge too far. Why?

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