Northshore notes: Alive to the Dead

     I never know what Caren is writing about until I read it on Friday, and sometimes odd synchronicities present themselves. Next week, I'm planning a five day run featuring songs about lawyers, for reasons which will be made plain. And I too never much liked the Grateful Dead, or their unwashed legions of fans, though I was extraordinary fond of "Friend of the Devil." Enough prelude. Here is Caren Jeskey's Saturday report:

By Caren Jeskey

              Shall we go, you and I while we can
              Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds?
                                 — Grateful Dead

     In the Rogers Park neighborhood where I grew up, music-loving hippyish intellects abounded; there were many Jerry Garcia fans around during my formative years. Yet the Grateful Dead never made sense to me. I thought of them as a mediocre band with a boring cult following. When people identified as Deadheads, I’d quickly write them off as potential friends — what could we possibly talk about? Tie-dye? 
     When groups of my peers packed up to go camping at Alpine Valley to “follow the Dead” I never had FOMO. I’d rather be clubbing it up at Kaboom right here in the city.
     Dead & Company is coming to Cubs Park soon and there’s a lot of buzz about it. I decided to pop the song "Truckin’" onto Apple Music to see what all the fuss is about. I was surprised to discover that, not only was I familiar with many of the other songs, I knew quite a few well enough to sing along with at least the chorus. I felt uplifted by the simple, bright, plucky sounds of the band as Apple fed me more. 

     It seems I was subconsciously indoctrinated into the world of the Dead by many years of listening to WLS, The LOOP, and accidentally catching the Grateful Dead Hour on WXRT. I also lived with a bunch of people from Barrington for a year or two in the late 80s and our 6-CD multi disc player was always loaded up with their music. The Dead occupied one of those slots on many a Saturday night as we danced around and pregamed before going to Hamilton’s on Broadway. I didn’t pay much attention, but the songs have stuck in my craw.
     Thanks to my roommates and their crew, I finally got to know Ian Anderson, CCR, Van Morrison, the less well-known Americana of David and David, and a band that became one of my all time favorites, The Silos. My new friend group was apparently full of Deadheads and I even made out with one of them once— he had long blond hair and wore pastel colored tie-dyed shirts— outside of a dive bar on Sheffield.
     Before I had taken the time to listen this week, I rudely said to a self-proclaimed Deadhead (I promise I did know know about this identification when our friendship organically sprouted up) “They’re not good,” and I laughed when I noticed dancing bears embroidered into his clothing. He’s a very pleasant person so just smiled and commented “you’re right. The band isn’t that good.” Looks like I owe that person an apology.

     I learned that the band played songs differently each and every time, in their live shows. The audience was watching art in action; a canvas that was freshly painted based on how they were feeling at the time, I'm guessing often with the use of mood altering substances. “Fortunately we had a chance to play [Estimated Prophet and Terrapin Part I] three times onstage and it made a huge difference," Bob Weir once said. "Then we came back and we knew what the songs were about.”
     I found the song "Estimated Prophet" worth more than one listen, and Bob Weir’s voice compelling. I wanted to listen with over the ear headphones to catch the trippy nuances of sound and composition more clearly but I broke my pair. This has inspired me to replace them soon.
     While I’m writing this I’ve had the album Terrapin Station playing in the background, and I’m soothed by the cheerful sounds of Donna Jean Thatcher Godchaux-MacKay’s "Sunrise" and the sweet harmonies between her and Weir in "Passenger."
     MacKay wrote the 2007 song "Passenger," which is sadly apropos today. “I hear the sounds of war. And they say, we are not to blame Today, let the anger take aim. Piercing to the heart and to the soul.”
     This trip I’ve taken with the marching bears (which I did not place under my tongue, by the way) has helped me with humility. The Dead don’t suck. I need all of the reasons I can find to stay connected to others these days, not more reasons to establish an us and them delineation. The next time I see someone with one of Jerry’s bears subtly incorporated into the cuff of a shirt, instead of scoffing I’ll see if they know some kind of Zen secret I’d be better off embracing.

          “Such a long, long time to be gone, and a short time to be there.” 

                   —Grateful Dead, "Box of Rain"

Flat-bottomed bags make the eating world go ’round

      Sharise Stamborski packs newly-made bags at Fischer Paper Products in Antioch

     When 7-Eleven stores in Texas suddenly needed to put their hot chicken legs in some kind of bag — thank you, COVID! — they had to find the right little bags to put them in. ASAP. So they made a desperate call to Fischer Paper Products in Antioch, 50 miles north of Chicago
     Typically, it takes 10 to 12 weeks for Fischer to get a new type of bag to a customer, assuming it isn’t one of the thousand varieties they stock. There is design, then creating prototypes, then testing them. Fischer keeps half a dozen fast-food warmers in their break room for product testing.
     “If the food is going to be sitting in this package in a warming oven for an hour, the materials have to hold up to heat or grease,” said Joshua Fischer, company president and grandson of the founder.
     In this case, they got the bag designed, tested and shipped to Texas in three weeks.
     Restaurants, in a two-year-plus state of continual emergency during the society-jarring disruptions of the pandemic — customers staying home, supply chains tied in knots — will gather to blink at each other, celebrate their survival and plot out a future at McCormick Place starting Saturday, for the National Restaurant Association Show, the first in three years.

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We need the eggs

     Social media likes to serve up scary robots. You know what I mean. Those Boston Dynamics Atlas robots doing parkour, like some kind of mechanical stormtroopers come from the future to show us what kind of nightmare will be kicking our asses someday soon. Or, even creepier, the company's headless robot dogs, dubbed "Spot," perfect for exploring the poisonous dead zone half our planet is sure to become. (No need to wait for the dystopian future; you can buy one now for $75,000). Then there are the realistic robots we increasingly see blinking and turning their heads, smiling and chatting, our closest companions in a world I am glad I'll never live to see.
     Me, I take comfort in how short the attempt to ape human behavior fails, as represented in the 16 photos above. Hopping on a box is one thing; discernment something else entirely. Turns out, it's harder to think than dance. The photos are from my iPhoto account. Long ago I learned to plug a location in the search bar, so if I want to use a shot snapped at the Smithsonian Institution, I plug "Washington D.C." in. It can be very precise, down to streets and even buildings.
     But I did not realize, until recently, that you could also plug in nouns—horse, house, train—and the search engine would round up candidates. Or try to.
     The blog's Saturday star, Caren Jeskey, turned in an essay keyed around robin's eggs. She usually offers a photo or two, but this time she hadn't yet. I knew I had photos of the nest that sat on our porch railing one spring. So I plugged "eggs" into the iPhoto search bar, generating the above dozen and a third photos.
     Take a look at the results. Starting at the upper left, we have: my son eating a sunny side up egg topped burger at the old Joe's Diner in San Francisco. A melon patch. A Peter Max poster of Saturn that the artist sent my son. Six glasses of non-alcoholic beer from a taste test at Harry Carry's, viewed from above. A Jeff Koons sculpture at The Broad in Los Angeles. A Murakami painting of flowers. Five images of orange juice balls served as an amuse bouche at Alinea. Three fried eggs, the last two being at one of the best meals I've ever eaten, in Santiago, Chile. And a jack-o-lantern from the Chicago Botanic Garden.  

     Let me show you what the algorithm did NOT find. This:     

     I bet you pegged them as eggs right away, didn't you? God bless Apple, wonderful company. But based entirely on their inability to tag the image at right as containing "eggs" I would say that the robot rebellion is still a work in progress.
    Being human is hard. That should not be an epiphany. Even with our sophisticated wetware, perfected over the past 100,000 years, with software de-bugged over the past 10,000, half the people can't seem to regularly pull off all the high-functioning tasks required of them. Given how consistently humans fail at being human, I don't think we have to worry about machines quite yet. They can do some tasks better some times in some places. But they also have their spectacular failures as well. I'm still clinging to hope. Let's see a computer do that.

Picking over GOP idiocy

Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo in "The Maltese Falcon" (Image courtesy of Warner Bros.)

     “What they shake out of you?” Sam Spade asks a disheveled Joel Cairo in “The Maltese Falcon” after the slimy little crook had been grilled all night by police.
     “Shake out? Not one thing. I adhered to the course you indicated earlier in your rooms,” Cairo protests. “But I certainly wish you have invented a more reasonable story. I felt distinctly like an idiot repeating it.”
     I know the feeling. In that dim, cat-leaving-something-disgusting-on-your-pillow way the media sometimes has, we are batting around the “Replacement Theory” supposedly spouted by the alleged murderer of 10 Black shoppers and staff at a supermarket in Buffalo on Saturday.
     I really wish they’d craft a less stupid worldview for us to pick over. Show some pride. But we must play the hand we are dealt. So here goes.
     The term itself has been spreading in public discourse for almost five years, since August 2017, when hundreds of white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, bearing tiki torches, chanting “Jews will not replace us.”
     Yeah, like Jews want to go live in your mother’s basement with the Nazi flag thumb-tacked over the washing machine.

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Judge a book by its cover

     One of my personal mythologies is that, when it comes to writing stuff, I'm an endless font gushing quality material, a steely newspaper veteran who can firehose a constant stream of columns and blog posts and freelance articles and books, on command. That's being a professional.
     On Monday, however, I hit SEND on the proofread galley of my next book, due out in the fall from University of Chicago Press, and felt, well, about as drained as a human being can feel and not actually be dead. If I were a cartoon, I'd just collapse into a heap of ash and be blown away on the breeze. 

     It's always been an article of faith that the extra writing I do enhances, rather than detracts from, my job as a newspaper columnist. But this past six weeks, well, I was starting to think I was cheating the boss. Not that the column suffered—I think the writing was up to snuff. But I took on a big story on a certain Wisconsin manufacturer that would have been in the paper by now, but kept getting pushed aside. No gas in the tank. Which isn't the worst crime in the world, and a lapse I'm going to leap to address.

     But not now.  After sending the nearly-500-page book on its way (don't get scared; there's art) I sighed, stood up, and went to water the tomatoes, which helped, then folded a load of laundry.
     Now I'm back, good to go and onto the next task, today's post. Let's, ah, umm, share the cover of the book whose copy I have just picked over like an obsessive mother ape going after ticks on her child. For the past six weeks.

     Seeing the cover of a new book is always a moment of excitement and anxiety. It's like seeing your new face, designed by a stranger. This is my ninth book, and some covers I loved on sight, some hated. This one, I liked it when I first saw it, and like even more now. 

     Although when I first saw it, I did have a nagging qualm. I liked it; but I didn't love it, in the sense that what I wanted was a gorgeous Barry Butler photo—I already had one picked out, and helpfully sent to the Press—something that would shimmer like a gem on the shelves at the book shops at the Art Institute and the Chicago Architecture Foundation the way "You Were Never in Chicago" has done for a decade.

    This was bold. But not shimmering. I'm proud of my response, applying one of my superpowers to the situation, the realization that it isn't all about me. People smarter than myself in the art of selling books chose this route. So I didn't complain. Didn't ask or changes. What I did say is, if I've learned anything, it's that the purpose of a book cover is not to tickle the aesthetic sensibilities of the author, but to catch the attention of readers, to draw them in, and this cover will look fantastic on your phone, shrunk to a half inch tall. 

I remember looking at this and
thinking, "Could you MAKE it 
any smaller?"

      That was my initial take. Love builds over time, and now that a month or two has passed since I first saw it, I do kinda love the thing. Take a look at it and figure out why. Well, there is the artwork of Lauren Nassef, a Chicago artist and illustrator, who did a masterful job illustrating the book, and was a pleasure to work with (the "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" domed silver server illustrates the Chicago Jewish community's famous, to me anyway, "dinnerless dinner" at the Drake in 1921, to benefit the needy in Europe. It was smartly repurposed to give the sense of presenting the city of Chicago, on a platter). I like the colors, the big bold block letters of "EVERY GODDAMN DAY," the way the server cover just hooks the top corner of the Y. And the way the gloved hand nudges my name up. Okay, I'll say it: I like my name being so big, splayed across the whole cover, and not the tiny type other books have used. Maybe they didn't get the memo from the Humility Department.

     The cover, I should point out, was designed by Isaac Tobin (who happens to be married to Lauren Nassef. Small world). 

     Does it work? Well, you can pre-order the book from the University of Chicago Press (it costs the same as on Amazon, and you aren't underwriting the Leviathan). There's a value to that beyond merely displaying enthusiasm. One way the University of Chicago Press stays in business is by not ordering up vast print runs. My last book, "Out of the Wreck I Rise" kept selling out, especially after Scott Simon interviewed me on National Public Radio. So when it was published, sometimes people would have to wait for weeks while the presses ground out more copies and barefoot children sitting cross-legged in drafty warehouses in Malaysia sewed the bindings (kidding; I believe they use machines now). 

     Although to be honest, I'm not hanging fire on sales. First, it's my ninth book, so I'm familiar with the range of the possible. They always do well, or wellish, or well enough that I get to write another one, which is my main goal. And second, I learned so much doing this one, it was so much fun exploring the wide sweep of Chicago history, blowing dust out of the crannies and taking a peek inside, that I've already had my success. "You don't even have to publish the thing," I told my editor, turning it in. It was worth doing even if I were the only one to read it.

     That said, I'm glad it's coming out—Oct. 21, for those of you who want to mark it on your calendars (what? You haven't ordered yet? Order it! Please).  And I do hope you read it, because, well, it's got a lot in it. I'm glad they gave the book such a kick ass cover. Because despite the old saying, you can judge a book by its cover. People do it all the time.

Why would an 18-year-old kill?

     Eighteen.
     Do you remember being 18? I do. Graduating from high school, going to prom, spending one last summer in my hometown, Berea, Ohio, baking biscuits at a Bob Evans restaurant. There were worries — I’d be going to college in the fall, living in a four-man dorm room. What about the mini-fridge? What if we all rented one? Then we’d have four.
     When news of the shooting in Buffalo broke Saturday night, everyone grabbed a fact that seemed most important and waved it around. Ten people dead! A supermarket in a Black neighborhood! Toxic white supremacism seemed to motivate the alleged shooter! A lunacy once on the fringe of American society, now planted and growing at the center of the Republican Party.
     The preparations this guy took — that helmet and body armor, which kept him from being wounded by the store security guard. He drove 200 miles. With an AR-15 rifle, of course. Few people even mention the gun, because it’s such an accepted part of American life. That would be like pointing out the air he breathed. Air is everywhere; everyone has access to it. Guns too.
     Me, I kept thinking about his age: 18. To be that young, and throw away not only all those other lives, but your own too. To spend your whole life in prison, probably. Worse than being dead. And for what? To scratch your itch for two minutes.
     Think of all the lives he destroyed or altered. Not just the dead: the wounded, the grieving, their city. I almost included us, too, in the circle of the harmed. But that’s bombast. These shootings are both shocking and routine. The Buffalo shooting was Saturday evening. I’m writing this Sunday morning, but first sincerely wondered whether by Monday this will fade so much as to be not worth addressing. Old hat. No, I think I can slip it in before we move on and forget all about it.
     I focus on the apparent shooter’s age because it’s the aspect I can most relate to — I’ve never been to Buffalo, or shot anybody, or wanted to, or been shot. But I was 18. Sitting in Introduction to Russian in the fall. Shto eta? Eta capoosta. “What is this? This is a cabbage.” Russia seemed a direction I might want to go. Because at 18, you can go anywhere you want. Not everyone knows it. Not everyone has the same resources. But most 18 year-olds have choices.

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Flashback 1999: Lasso the kids for Donley's

     I was sad to hear that Donley's Wild West Town is closing after 45 years in business. I was only there once, nearly a quarter century ago, with the boys, then 3 and 4, but I remember it being a fun, unusual place, with a little train, and a jail, and panning for "gold," and energetic employees working hard to give kids a great experience. 

     Usually, my old stuff doesn't make me cringe, but this one did,  a little. You could slice the first four paragraphs off and lose nothing. If this were someone else's work—oh that it were—and they asked me to critique it, I'd say, "You buried the lede. Start with 'I never had heard of the place...'" Or, better, "I'd never heard of the place..." Less awkward. Ah well.

  
     News is by nature negative. Headlines point to the disasters and tragedies of the day. You never see "EVERYTHING'S FINE" in big type.
     That's good, since everything is not fine, as a rule. So the bad gets publicity, and the good can be ignored. Run into something wonderful and enjoy it, but keep it to yourself. You don't want to be a publicist. What is forgotten is that others might enjoy it too, if only they knew.
     So, realizing the risks involved in praise, I have to let this one out:
     Donley's Wild West Town in Union, Ill. Fun. Unexpected.
     I never had heard of the place. Never heard of Union, for that matter. My wife found it. She has been running her own one-woman summer camp, and, in her endless quest to occupy the boys every day, found Donley's in a book. My first thought was: "I've never heard of Union. It must be far away."
     Make that far, far away. A solid hour's drive from Chicago. Plenty of time to dread the kind of cheesy, rundown joint a bitter cynic such as myself would expect from "Wild West Town." Neglect. Decay. A few pathetic attractions, run by indifferent teens forced to wear plastic uniforms.
     It wasn't. Not close. A big area enclosed by neat wooden buildings. For nine bucks, kids pan for gold in a miner's flume and ride a pony and a small choo-choo train. They are taught to lasso and invited to watch a bullwhip demonstration and a 20-minute Wild West show with gunplay and chases and corny jokes and bad guys tumbling from balconies.
     The place had an enormous restaurant where a tired dad could enjoy a beer with his lunch, and a jail cell where the sheriff herds the kiddies into a real old-fashioned lock-up and lets them ponder their imprisonment for a moment before compelling them to sing a song before he lets them out, all with a deft good humor, as if he hadn't done the same thing a dozen times that day, a hundred times that week, and thousands of times over the years.
     That wasn't the best part, however. The best part, for me, was the faces of the employees. They were adults. Men. One face after another, deeply tanned, lined, sun baked. Cowboy faces. Grizzled Marlboro men. A long, white mustache. A Clint Eastwood squint. All dressed like real, genuine cowboys. My kids will remember the pony, but I will always be amazed that the guy leading them around looked like he just stepped out of "Rio Bravo."
     Enthusiastic, authentic employees couldn't be an accident.
     "What we try to do is attract people who have a love of the old West," said Mike Donley, son of the founder, adding that the town has been there 25 years this summer. "We get a lot of retirees looking for something to do. The first thing we try to instill is: We don't pay your salary. Those guys coming through the door do. If those kids go home at night thinking you're camping under the stars, eating beans, then you've done your job. If you haven't, those kids aren't coming back."
     So that's the story. My apologies for sharing something positive. I'm sure I'll be my old self again next time. But with my kids clamoring to return and, incredibly, me looking forward to taking them, I couldn't just sit on this. The bulk of August stretches long and hot before us, and more than a few readers must need somewhere to take the kiddies that is worth the drive.

          —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 3, 1999