Mina Zikri agiatamente

 

      For all the years I've been schlepping downtown to Orchestra Hall to go to the Chicago Symphony, I've never—before Sunday—gone to the Northbrook Symphony, now in its 42nd season. It's certainly easier to get to, playing at the Sheely Center for the Performing Arts, which is a fancy way of saying the auditorium at Glenbrook North High School. A solid five minutes from my house.
     We settled in for the all-Beethoven program, Symphony No. 4 in B flat major, Op. 60, and Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, Op. 55, "Eroica." I'm sure Andrew Patner would have had no trouble pointing out the glaring differences between NS and the CSO, but he is no longer with us, and I really couldn't. Maybe the music was less bright, less defined, a certain softness, but that could just be me groping for differences. Heck, maybe the Northbrook Symphony is better. I don't know. What I do know is that the Northbrook Symphony's next performance, an evening of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev, is May 29, and I'll certainly go, if I can.
      The conductor, Mina Zikri, invited the audience to stay after the performance to hear a brief talk on the music, so Edie and I lingered. We recently saw the Oistrakh Symphony of Chicago, which he founded, playing along with a performance of the DePaul Chorus. 
    Zikri began by talking about rehearsals—the Northbrook Symphony had only three for Sunday's performance. They must be quick learners. A member of the audience pointed out that he didn't conduct from a score, and he talked about how familiar the music is to him.
     One key, he said, is to accept the inevitable slip-up.
     "I have enjoyed music a lot more in my life when I realized it's okay if I make a mistake—you're not the Chicago Symphony." That struck me as a laudable attitude to have. People either propagate their upbringings or push against them, and Zikri, who had a strict Russian musical education as a youth in Cairo, has obviously decided not to pass along the rigors he's endured.  Though he did run down Wagner—the operas are very long, and he bragged about dozing off in one, which almost soured me to him. If you don't value Wagner, fine. But at least have the good sense not to crow about it. Don't diss the Old Sorcerer; it only reflects poorly on yourself.
     Still, I stuck with him, and he recovered.
     Someone asked Zikri how he put his particular stamp on "Eroica," and he said, in essence, at 
his age, he doesn't have the right to, not yet. He's still learning.
     "A real conductor isn't a conductor until he's 60 years old," said Zikri, 41. "There are things you can only gain by experience. Self discipline, so you don't have to put your take over everything."
     Of course a soft touch is a take, albeit a humble one, realizing that you can perform a couple Beethoven symphonies without leaving your claw marks all over them. I wish more people had that kind of humility. We are, after all, merely passing through this world, and should want to leave it in roughly the condition we found it. 

Regarding the title of today's piece, "agiatamente" is an Italian musical notation meaning "relaxed" or "at ease."

Tracking down the family and the famous

 

     What do we owe our departed loved ones? The people once behind the faces that stare at us — happily or blankly or beseechingly — from those black-and-white photographs?
     I’ve been thinking about that lately, moving my parents here from Colorado, packing up box after box of albums jammed with fading Kodak photos of ordinary moments and once-in-a-lifetime vacations. Albums now in storage; albums no one might ever want to look at again.
     I know I’m not alone here. But I was pleasantly surprised Saturday to see the big front page treatment the Sun-Times gave Friday’s unlocking of the 1950 U.S. Census Bureau data by the National Archives. I thought the joy of plunging into old records and tracking down relations was a personal quirk. Apparently not. 

     Saturday morning I dove into the database, starting with my mother’s father, Irwin Bramson. Too easy. Go to the website, https://1950census.archives.gov/. Go to “Begin Search.” Plug in the state and city, in this case Cleveland Heights, Ohio. There was exactly one result. Zoom in on the photographed census form. There is his little household: wife Sarah, my mother June, then 13, her younger sisters, Carol and Diane. My grandfather’s nation of origin was Poland and his job, an accountant in a factory — Accurate Parts Manufacturing, maker of clutches. My grandmother was born in Russia. Nothing surprising there.
     My father’s father I knew would be harder. A more common name in a far bigger pool. When I plugged “Sam Steinberg” into the census for the Bronx, New York, up popped 4,585 hits. The machine learning used to read scrawled cursive entries can be maddeningly imprecise. One of the hits was “Sam Silibority.”

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Why don’t schools ban the Bible?

     April Fool's Day was low-key this year. I noticed only two attempts at pranks—Manny's delicatessen announced they were moving to Arlington Heights and shifting to a vegetarian menu, which didn't make it over the skepticism bar—I smiled at the attempt but never believed it for a second. Though Yasso unveiled a mouthwash, which did catch me for a single moment, as I initially mused, "This is an odd brand extension for a line of frozen yogurt bars..." before realizing, "Ohhhhh!"
     Understated seemed the way to go—maybe because reality seems so incredible and distorted that one hesitates before adding to the confusion, even toward a humorous end. My own humble effort, explaining my drift toward becoming the paper's beekeeping reporter, was undersold enough that a number of readers fell for it, which pleased me greatly. But it did require holding my Friday column until today.

     William Blake’s engraving of Laocoon and his sons is what art historians call “busy.”
     OK, I doubt art historians call it that. Doing what journalists call “checking” — consulting the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism — I see the preferred term seems to be “cluttered.”
     So, cluttered, then. Whatever you call it, there’s a lot to unpack. Not just the unlucky Trojan priest, who tried to warn his citymates not to take that large wooden horse into the walls of Troy, and was rewarded by being crushed, along with his sons, by a sea serpent sent by Athena.
     But all that writing, in several languages. A wordy fellow, Blake. Which I guess makes us soulmates. I do go on.
     Though today, I’m only interested in a single line, written perpendicularly in the right margin: “Is not every Vice possible to Man described in the Bible openly?”
     The only honest answer must be a resounding “Yes!” Murder, for starters (Cain). Incest (Lot). Drunkenness (Noah). Selling your brother into slavery (Jacob). Debauchery, cheating, stealing, war. Onan spills his seed. God tortures Job as a lark.
     The whole book is practically one long grindhouse movie. Yet do school boards ban the Bible? Never. Why is that? Maybe because such bans are never about the pretexts supposedly inspiring them.

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"Pity" by William Blake (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Wilmette Notes: Life Passing By

 

"Chicago Taking a Beating" by Roger Brown.

    Our past follows us wherever we go like a pull-toy duck. North Shore Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey's has been quacking particularly loudly of late, as she relates in her Saturday report:

By Caren Jeskey

   Living in a tiny rental home in Wilmette means that I am up against memories of childhood that I haven’t had in decades. It’s as though I’m watching my life pass by slowly through a train window, vignettes flickering past while I try to ponder them. I’m seeing myself probably too clearly now in this COVID navel gazing solitude complicating my return home. 

    It was nice to be in Texas for those 7 years, where there was no chance of feeling that I had stepped into a time machine filled with youthful (well, ok, some not so youthful) mistakes.

     Now, in the past few weeks, four people I know have all gotten BA.2. So for now, I'm back only dining in pods at Napolita in Wilmette or Fiya in Andersonville, or in dining rooms where vaccination cards are still required like Jerry's Sandwiches in Lincoln Square. As if life weren't strange enough, I'm eating in plastic bubbles.       

     I started studying flute at the Music Center of the North Shore, a mere mile and a half from my current home, when I was in 3rd grade or so. Once a week, a parent and I would ride in a station wagon from Chicago to the school on Green Bay Road so I could have a lesson. My mother became intrigued by the charming school also housed on the same plot of land, North Shore Country Day. By the time I’d graduated from a Chicago public grammar school, my folks had me enrolled at North Shore Country Day for high school. I felt heartbroken and a little scared to be stepping into freshman year with only 47 other students, far from my grammar school buddies. Going to North Shore turned out to be a great gift, as far as education and culture. It’s funny that it took me this long to live close enough to walk to school.
     I thought I was much bigger than I am. Tucked away in the comfort and safety of one of the safest places to live in Illinois, and probably one of the safest places in the country, I see that I’m simply the same person I have always been, and things are much more simple than I had figured. I thought life was about adventure and fun, collecting experiences. Staying on the move. I didn’t realize that all I need to feel alive is having healthy plants to tend, a satisfying career, and peaceful relationships with my family and friends.
     I don’t have much clutter anymore, since I’ve worked for the past few years to pare down. Somehow I’ve managed to hold onto a small carry-on sized suitcase full of letters, cards, and moments that date back to the early 70’s.
     Looking back at some of them this week, I can see things even more clearly. Egad. It’s right there in ink. I’ve always been the kind of person to value kindness, but I’ve also been too hungry for excitement. Rather than settling in with stable, life-long friends, I was drawn to drama. Intrigue. I took a lot of the good ones for granted over the years. I'm grateful to have a small number of true friends, most of whom I met about twenty years ago, but I did not nurture my high school connections very well. Perhaps now is the time.
     When I was lucky enough to be attending a gem of finer education, I kept my eye out for things I should have probably shied away from. Became close friends with a transfer student who stole my father’s phone card number from me and had charged up hundreds of dollars before he discovered what was happening. She later got involved in drugs and sadly, a much darker side of living. Fortunately, we reconnected several years back and she is doing quite well.
     At school, I snuck clove cigarettes in the gymnasium bathroom when no one was supposed to be in the building, which were given to me by a big stoner in our class. She also once got me super high— well OK, it was my choice to say yes— on a drive during a lunch break. As a novice, my tolerance was low and I was baked. I passed out on the Senior Homeroom couch and recall the face of a kind jock looking down at me, concerned, as I slept it off. I remember how scared he looked as he grappled with getting adult help, or leaving me be, as I had asked.
     I feel strangely young and vulnerable these days as I look back at my journey. As a good friend said, the battle is done and the war has been won.

Bee careful what you pretend to be.

 

     Well, this is awkward...

     Regular readers will remember that, at the height of the COVID lockdown, I took it upon myself to delve into the Illinois beekeeping community. The column wasn't a joke, per se. I would never do that. These are real people keeping real hives of actual bees, making real honey. 

     Like all people, they deserve respect, and I treated the whole thing seriously. I was interested. I have an affection for bees—"stout warriors in their waxen kingdom," to quote Virgil's marvelous summation. 

     My opening sentence, however, "But how has COVID affected beekeeping in Illinois?" well it has a certain—what?—a wink, a sparkle. That opening word, "But..." designed to convey a sense of picking up the action in mid-story, in medias res, as the classicists put it. Enough with the vaccines and Trumpies and lockdowns and social turmoil. What about beekeepers!?!?
      Perhaps that was reckless of me. Perhaps I should have foreseen the risk involved. That I was setting myself up, pigeon-holing myself. Kurt Vonnegut wrote a line I feel is very true: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” (from Mother Night, It's important to cite the exact source since, like Mark Twain before him there is a tendency to ascribe any half witty line to Vonnegut, whether he wrote it or not).
     A couple columns about bees—there have been others— doesn't make me the beekeeping reporter, not yet anyway. But money is being infused into the paper, which encourages specialization. We're hiring more beat reporters. A classical music critic. A science reporter. Editorial member Lee Bey was just named the architecture critic, a slot that went unfilled for years. 

     So I was having a conversation with my editor the other day, and he said, out-of-the-blue, "Have you thought about circling back to the beekeepers? What's up with them, bee-wise?"
     I said something about it being only a year and a half since I last wrote about bees, and that it was the sort of topic that one examines every 20 years, if that.
     "I think readers really like that kind of thing from you," he said. "Beekeeping. Robotics clubs. Cheesemaking. Stamp collecting. You're so good at that. People get bored with the political stuff, and that's everywhere anyway. Embrace your uniqueness. Why drive readers away when you can draw them closer?"
     Something shifted in my gut. A sinking feeling. A kind of a shiver. An "Oh, I'm so screwed" dread. You spend enough time in an organization, you begin to know its ways. How things are done.
    Remember when WBEZ acquired the Sun-Times last fall? Some were concerned that it meant the paper, now a 501(c)3 charity, could no longer make political endorsements, through some quirk of law I never did figure out. Not that I minded particularly. As someone who sat on the editorial board for five years, I remember what an enormous pain-in-the-ass assembling those recommendations are, tracking down obscure suburban candidates, getting questionnaires to them and then from them, arranging your face into a look of interest while they prattle on about issues you neither know nor care about.
     So farewell to that stuff, and I'm not on the board anyway. Not my table. But I did kinda wonder if it would end there. Or is there another shoe to drop. When would the after echo of the sale reach me? What form would it take? 

     Now here it was, veiled by unmistakable. Bees. And maybe cheese. The oddities reporter. He kept talking while I sort of tuned him out, lost in my own reverie.
     Why not bees? A fascinating subject. Endangered. Our entire ecosystem depends on them. A complex social system: a queen and her Amazon army, the hive, entirely female, which makes them very of the moment. In a way I'd be returning to my roots—I was the paper's environment reporter for a few years in the late 1990s. And WBEZ is certainly within their rights. It's their newspaper. Why shouldn't they move the chess pieces around? Nobody ever bought a bike and  didn't ride it. The check clears, of course they have a say in the coverage. It's to be expected. Some part of the paper are hands off. I'm sure WBEZ isn't planning to give a lot of direction to the Tim Novaks and Andy Grimms and Frank Mains on the staff. Just sit back while they kick ass and take names and wait for the eyeballs, clicks, plaudits and praise come pouring in. Hard news. Exposes. Deep dives into the financial records of bad guys. That's what people talk about when they talk about the importance of journalism.
     But what about me? Staring with clonic fixation at the trivial, the mundane, the off-base and off-kilter. Occasionally pulling my gaze away from insects to regard the national and international scene with a cry of outrage. Maybe that's what drew this unwelcome attention, if that is what this is. My sense of alarm. It can be so ... visceral. Maybe too visceral for National Public Radio, which prefers to be more zen, shoeless in linen pajamas, sitting cross-legged in a meditation room, pinging whalesong burbling in the background, eyes half mast, murmuring into a microphone, remote, removed, steeped in that make-a-cathedral-with-your-fingers and intone approach. Nobody screams on NPR. Or pants. Or cackles. Nothing extreme, or Rabelaisian about NPR, they aren't crawling through the sewers and making rude noises and bringing you exposes on men who have difficulty peeing in public settings, as I have done. They don't drive to Madison to meet immigrants who open jars of shit for a living.

    I heard a buzzing in my ears, and realized he was still talking. I tuned back in.
    "...and the pieces you did on Fresca," my boss continued. "Those were excellent. People loved those. We need more of that."
     "Ummm, I...." I began. That's how they do it. No orders. No memos. Nothing in writing. Just a series of gentle nudges, water wearing away the rock. 
     "No need to discuss this now," he said brightly, wrapping up, confirming my worst fears. "Just think about it. More Fresca. Less of that other stuff. And more bees. There's a hive on top of the city hall. And a number of top chefs have their own apiaries. What kind of honey trends are coming up for spring? I've sent you a list of bee-related stories you might want to look into."
     You can see the list yourself here.
     I told him I would have to think about it.

Relax: Chicago has done this before

     When news broke Wednesday afternoon that Chicago is being considered as host of the 2024 Democratic National Convention, the reporter behind the scoop, NBC News national political correspondent (and my former colleague) Natasha Korecki tweeted out my story about the 50th anniversary of the disastrous 1968 Democratic convention, which so scarred the city and sullied its reputation.
     While it’s nice to be remembered, I’d hate for that tumultuous event to once again define what happens whenever Chicago hosts out-of-town guests. That disaster isn’t the only convention we’ve had. Chicago is the most popular city in the country for such events, having hosted 11 Democratic and 14 Republican gatherings including the first one in — did none of you pay attention in school? —1860 when the newly-formed Republican Party, worried that huddling in an Eastern city would “run a big chance of losing the West,” picked Chicago as a symbol of “audacity.”
     They gathered at a large log building at the corner of what is now Lake and Wacker Drive and nominated, indeed rather audaciously, a homespun downstate lawyer and failed senatorial candidate named Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was tempted to hurry to Chicago, but his cronies waved him off, worried he would undo the backroom deals they struck to get him the nod. “Honest Abe” was a fine campaign slogan, but could be difficult in practice.
     I won’t go through all the conventions, there are history books for that. Though Chicago can boast that our conventions tend to stand out, and not just because of rioting. There was the 1920 Republican Convention nominating nonentity Warren G. Harding, basically because he looked like a president and nobody knew he had an illegitimate daughter, the deal putting “smoke-filled room” into the political vernacular (actually smoke-filled rooms, 408-10 of the Blackstone Hotel).
     Or the 1932 Democratic convention where Franklin D. Roosevelt helped usher in our modern campaign age with two political firsts: being the first nominee to show up and accept in person, and the first presidential candidate to fly in an airplane. The flight was delayed due to storms, and FDR explained, apologetically, “I have no control over the winds in heaven.”
     Our next convention could very well instead reflect the 1996 Democratic convention, sending Bill Clinton on his way to re-election and helping revitalizing the West Side an in general allowing the city to shine instead of screw up.

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Tempestuous tenure of ‘Jane Byrne’

    This Saturday it will be exactly three years since Lori Lightfoot crushed the once formidable Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and was elected mayor of Chicago by an almost 3-to-1 margin, taking all 50 wards.
     A post-mortem would be premature, as Lightfoot’s still got a year to go. Maybe she’ll manage to pull the ripcord before hitting the canyon floor. I’m rooting for her.
     Yet it’s safe to say that, despite the singular role race plays in Lightfoot’s rhetoric, as a 1,001-uses solvent to be sprayed in all directions, trying to squeeze out of whatever jam she finds herself in, few critics compare Chicago’s third Black mayor (not to forget Eugene Sawyer, though many people, myself included do) to the first, the ebullient Harold Washington, who faced fierce opposition with very few Lightfootian cries of “poor me.”
     The mayor who seems most relevant to Lightfoot, alas, is Jane Byrne. Like Lightfoot, Byrne was female. Like Lightfoot, being mayor of Chicago is the only elective office Byrne ever held. And as to whether Lightfoot will also serve a single term and be shown the door in favor of someone who can actually do the job, time will tell.
     Until then, WTTW is debuting an hour documentary Friday, “Jane Byrne,” kicking off the new season of its “Chicago Stories” series. It’s a solid introduction to Byrne for those who might be unfamiliar. Even those well-schooled in her story — I read her fine autobiography, “My Chicago,” and wrote her obituary for the Sun-Times — will find new nuggets they hadn’t known before.
     In 1960, Byrne was a young military widow. Her husband, a Marine pilot, had crashed approaching what was then the Glenview Naval Air Station. Plunging into campaign work for fellow Catholic John F. Kennedy, Byrne came to the attention of Mayor Richard J. Daley, who found her a role in his administration.
     Her presence was supposed to be a sign of mid-1960s progressivism. The trouble with Janie Byrnes — as Daley called her — was that she didn’t resign herself to being window dressing, proudly displayed in her sinecure as the commissioner of sales, weights and measures.
     Instead, Byrne took her job seriously.

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