Northshore Notes: Namaste, asshole

 

     We haven't completely come out of our COVID shells yet, have we? I thought we had. But lately suspect we've merely accustomed ourselves to a new, more isolated way of living. Or as Bruce Springsteen sang, "Sooner or later, it just becomes your life." A topic our Northshore bureau chief, Caren Jeskey, explores in today's post:

 

By Caren Jeskey

    “The ego is a terrible master but it’s an excellent servant.” 

     During screen time with a friend in California the other day, he dropped this bomb. Not an original thought, but that’s okay. He thought it important to say.
     COVID isolation allowed those of us who lived alone and far away from family to enjoy a solitary— selfish, even— life. I loved it. I found out I’m not an extrovert.* There were many benefits to 18 months alone in Texas. I was able to hear myself think, and feel emotions deeply. The noise and haste of the world were avoidable. I recognized that I was not simply “okay” or “fine,” or “pissed” or “happy;” there were countless nuances. The quietude uncovered heretofore subconscious corners of my inner landscape. I realized that I’d been living from an external locus of control, with the more ideal approach living from an internal locus. In other words, being true to, and trusting, oneself. 

     I used Ken McGill’s tools to increase emotional self awareness. He also gave me great tips on how to communicate honestly and succinctly with others.
     The key to a better world, in my opinion, is humans who know themselves and use self-knowledge to thrive, and also to behave better. Good cogs in the wheel of life, as yoga teacher Rich Logan once said to to me back in the good old days when we were footloose and fancy free young adults. I find myself asking if I am being a good cog when I’m on a walk, bike ride, drive, or with others. (I have failed miserably more than a time or two, but it's getting easier with effort).

     With the gift of ample free time mixed with the fear of death, there was plenty of time and a dire need to meditate. Meditation improves cognition, and oils our internal neurological functioning. It helps us grow accustomed to sitting with discomfort and coming to peace with what’s happening inside— the good, the bad, and the ugly— instead of numbing or denying the truth of who we are. Being more mindful of how you feel, and how you want to act, is the first step to behaving better towards yourself and others.
     Sitting on a meditation cushion or yoga mat, in a place of worship, with a trusted mentor, in a support group, at a desk with a journal or recorder, or any other means towards introspection is crucial. Inner work can translate to being a better outer person. It’s at least worth a try. We owe it to future generations. It’s acceptable that this is a bumpy journey. We will make mistakes, but as long as we can apologize when we need to, that’s the best we can be expected to do. As my left coast friend said, if we value personal responsibility in enhancing the quality of our beings, as well looking out for others to the best of our abilities, life gets easier. Anger, fear, dread, judgment of others and greed will not get us there. Pick the most difficult person in your life and send them good thoughts. It works.
     I suggested that a client use a simple loving kindness phrase, silently in her mind, when confronted by her irritable spouse. She was pleased to share that silently repeating “may you be well, happy and peaceful” diffused her anger. Well, she added “you son of a bitch,” to the end. It's easy to be angry at others for not doing what we want them to do, if we are not careful. Bitterness kills.
     To assuage my fear of death, I studied with a death doula once. I do not believe in heaven, or an after life. I feel that I can come to terms with death if I live a life that is tolerable at the least— coping with pain and the other challenges of being human, and aging — and a life that’s often joyful at best. The more comfortable we are with realizing that we are simply corpses waiting to happen, the less seriously we can take ourselves. The more quickly we can accept life on life's terms, rather than letting the dangerous parts of our egos run the show, the more we can settle down.

     Self-knowledge mixed with effort, humility and courage can lead to a more authentic self. This is illustrated beautifully by Desiree Ford who told her story on the This Is Actually Happening podcast. After extensive rehab for a traumatic brain injury that resulted in a coma, her memory started returning. She tried to get back to her old self, and the harder she tried, the worse she felt. She finally realized that she must embrace the new version of herself, and then she found relief.

“Your life is yours to create.
You may only exist in your mind
It seems like everyone is sleepwalking through their waking life,
Or wake-walking through their dreams
I am just trying to get a sense of where I am
Just wake up.”
— Waking Life, film by Richard Linklater

* Editor's note: She IS an extrovert.  

GOP cheers a ghastly crime

By Barbar Kruger (Art Institute)

     When liberals are being routinely dragged out of their beds at night and killed in the street, decent Americans awaiting their turn will ruefully remember Paul Pelosi.
     Not the crime against him, terrible though it is. David DePape, a man apparently deranged by years of drugs and Republican demonization of Nancy Pelosi, is accused of breaking into her home in San Francisco last Friday, shouting “Where’s Nancy?” — the same words used by the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
     In the federal complaint, DePape is quoted saying he was there to break her kneecaps. She was away, so he had to settle with shattering her 82-year-old husband’s skull with a hammer.
     Awful. But that isn’t the haunting part. The haunting part is the reaction after. The gales of GOP laughter, mingled with the lies they immediately, reflexively formed to shrug off responsibility for crime. They imagined the home invasion a hookup gone bad; it is San Francisco, after all, wink wink. Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, used his $44 billion megaphone to magnify that lie.
     None of this is new. The GOP has settled into a kind of lurid, unashamed performative cruelty. Yet this reaction to the attack against an elderly man in his home adds a new dimension of true horror to their mockery. Nobody thought of Donald Trump Jr. as anything but a leering, entitled idiot. But to see him tweeting photos of hammers, joined in by his father’s typical gauzy speculation about the reality of various slurs and frauds. It was disgusting in a fresh way. And given the six years of moral collapse this country has been experiencing under the grotesque mass of ethical rot represented by Trump and his imitators, that’s really saying something.

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Smashing pumpkins

Richardson Adventure Farm invites visitors to smash pumpkins from a tall tower.

    
     Unlike the Internet, stories printed in a newspaper are finite. You can't fit everything in.
     For instance, my column on pan de muerto in Tuesday's paper, focusing on a Jewish-Mexican bakery called Masa Madre, originally included a three-paragraph digression into the history of Jews in Mexico, which I ended up cutting because the column was just too long. Anyone who read the abbreviated story and thought "Jews in Mexico? Tell me more!" was flat out of luck, and had to dig on their own.

     Or the article Wednesday on page 10, "Pumpkin disposal—a smashing (green) idea to consider," a fun piece by Indira Khera at WBEZ about breaking up pumpkins for compost.

     When simply thrown away, "pumpkins end up in landfills as food waste," she wrote. "Buried under heaps of trash, they rot and release methane — one of the most potent greenhouse gasses."
     But smashing and composting pumpkins "reduces methane creation and transforms the pumpkins into useful, organic nutrients for soil or mulch."

     Which is fine, as far as it went. But the story left me wondering: smashing pumpkins and composting pumpkins reduces methane creation how? Why is it that pumpkins buried under  old diapers and other garbage vent lots of methane, while those diced and mixed with coffee grounds put out less? What physical process is at work? 

     I formed theories — exposure to air, light, certain bacteria — then poked around the Internet looking for confirmation. Finding much about the alternates of making those pumpkins into beer, or drawing off the methane to create energy, but nothing that would explain the differing methane output. Granted, I didn't look very long. 

     Giving up, I queried Khera. What's going on here? Honestly, just asking seemed fraught. We were colleagues, true, now, in theory. But didn't know each other. I wasn't sure she'd even respond, or if she did, she might feel somehow criticized, that I was questioning her article, calling it deficient.  I took the risk, since I was curious, and the Sun-Times and WBEZ are  supposed to be covalently compounded now, our atoms intermingled, bound together by the strong force of media synergy. Seemed worth a try.

     Khera, a recent graduate from the University of Chicago with a degree in biology, welcomed the question  and answered fully:

     "When food waste goes to a landfill, it sits in these giant heaps — there's no oxygen, and the microbes present use anaerobic digestion (digestion done in the absence of oxygen). This process produces something called biogas, which includes quite a bit of methane.

     "In compost (most common type, aerobic compost) — food waste isn't piled. It's mixed together and turned over on a regular basis. The microbes use aerobic processes (digestion in the presence of oxygen), and produce far less methane due to the chemical nature of the process. There is some literature that has found a small amount of methane production at the bottom of compost heaps (naturally, things are a little more piled up and there's less oxygen). But much less than a landfill / driven by the nature of aerobic vs anaerobic processes."

     My hunch about air was right (anaerobic = without oxygen; aerobic = with oxygen). She then shared a number of resources — something from the heretofore unimagined Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry (unimagined by me that is; obviously Khera is clued in) and some general information on composting from the Environmental Protection Agency.
     Funny. I had lunch Wednesday on the balcony of the Cliff Dwellers Club with a well-known business executive who had a hand — actually, a central role — in marrying the paper with the radio station, and she asked me how I thought the union is going.
     I almost replied, "Just great; I contacted a 'BEZ reporter today asking for clarification about her story on rotting pumpkins and she didn't get ruffled or act like I had somehow threw shade on her work, but enthusiastically shared the information I was looking for!"
      But that seemed, oh, small ball compared with the vast world of tectonically shifting money that my friend dwells in, so I kept mum. But it seems a hopeful sign.

Hope wafting up from Brazil

Metropolitan Museum of Art

     Last weekend I flew to Texas on a quick reporting trip. As we were shuffling off the plane, it struck me how fortunate the United States is to be so big yet still a single country.
     Almost a thousand miles from Chicago to Dallas. Yet no customs to go through, no passport control, no immigration lines. No reason to pause from plane door to cab stand.
     That was once very different in Europe. Also about a thousand miles from London to Berlin, with the Netherlands, France and Belgium jammed between. Differing currencies, contradictory rules and burdensome duties. Time-wasting security and regulations.
     A lot of friction going from A to B, both people and products. Wouldn’t it be better, economically, to mimic the United States? To have one unified financial system? A European Union?
     So they built one. Wasn’t easy and took years. Few liked the idea of being dictated to from Brussels about how to make cheese. Currencies that went back centuries — the franc, the lira, the mark — were abandoned for one currency, the euro. That stung.
     It worked, but time passes, and things can go so well that you forget what got you there — as we saw with vaccines. And the European Union had what some considered downsides. Brits worried that Greeks or, worse, Turks, would start showing up as their neighbors in Devonshire. A movement grew to drop out of the EU, fanned by nationalists building their castles of power upon the sand of hatred.
     On June 23, 2016, Britain voted, and 51.89% chose to leave the EU, 48.11% voted to stay — it’s astoundingly consistent how evenly divided the world is right now between those who want to proceed into the future and those who want to try to claw their way back into the past.

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Baking the bread of the dead

  

     Tamar Fasja Unikel, left, sets out pan de muerto as Elena Vázquez Felgueres works on a
          laptop at Masa Madre, their "virtual" bakery blending Jewish and Mexican traditions.

     “We’re about to bake the pan de muerto,” says Tamar Fasja Unikel, heading into the depths of the Hatchery, the vast East Garfield Park restaurant and food service incubator.

     Fasja Unikel is half of Masa Madre, an artisanal bakery fusing Mexican and Jewish traditions. Pan de muerto, literally, “bread of the dead,” are sweet, pillowy round loafs, decorated with symbolic bones, that can be eaten plain, dipped in coffee or hot chocolate, or reverently placed along with marigolds and photos on an ofrenda, the altar honoring the memories of departed loved ones (both family and pets). Placing food there is an act of both love and sacrifice, since you don’t eat those offerings yourself. You mustn’t; it’s their food.
     In kitchen D-119 waits her business partner, Elena Vázquez Felgueres. The two met about 10 years ago at Centro, an arts and fashion school in Mexico City. Both moved to Chicago with their spouses independently, then reconnected here and decided to go into business together.
     Why not pursue fashion?
     “Chicago is not a fashion-forward city, so we had to change gears,” says Fasja Unikel.
     True enough. Chicago has always been a far greater source of food than fashion. More cow, less leather jacket.

     Though the women’s training is subtly reflected in the unusual rose aprons they wear — crossing in the back, straps spaced wide, hanging from their shoulders instead of their necks.
     “When we first started it was just two of us, we were baking long hours. The other aprons that go on our neck hurt a lot,” says Vázquez Felgueres. “We tried this shape and it’s very comfortable. You can wear it all day.”
     They can and do, at least Wednesday through Friday, their baking days, which begin at 4 a.m. and run until orders go out about 11:30 a.m. They lead a team of four bakers, but are very hands-on, plucking finished breads from the oven, painting them with butter, handing them over to be doused in sugar.
      Masa Madre is a “virtual” bakery — they work in a single rented space, a kitchen crammed with baking racks and tables and stacks of boxes. They have outlets and take orders for pick-up and delivery, but hope to open a bricks-and-mortar bakery in the West Loop next year.
     Masa Madre means “mother dough.” They chose the name because back when they started in 2018, buying ingredients at Costco and baking at home, they focused on sourdough, with its venerated eternal starter.

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Dance of Death

From "The Immortal Plena" by Antonio Martorell

     It's Monday, but I don't have a column in the paper today because the column I wrote, involving an unexpected mix of Judaism, Mexico and baked goods, is also keyed to the Day of the Dead, Dia de Muertos, which begins tomorrow (The holiday really should be called "Days of the Dead" since it continues Wednesday, two days, but it's not my holiday, so I shouldn't nitpick). 

      Speaking of which, my editors,  in that earnest, direct manner that comes from continually creating a mass market product intended to be readily grasped by the distracted general public, thought it should run tomorrow, on the actual beginning of the holiday.
     Okay, it was my idea, but they embraced it. Teamwork.

     Solving their problem created one for me, what should go here instead. Luckily. I have something to share with you. Tomorrow's column required me to drive to East Garfield Park last Thursday, and on my way home I took Kedzie north and spied an improbable melange of turrets and gables, a brick structure with a reddish brown tile roof. I pulled into the parking lot of the building — originally a stable, and then the office of Jens Jensen, who designed Humboldt Park.
     Now, I don't want to suggest that I'd never seen the building before, or had no idea it existed. That would be crazy, and, more important, would go against my brand as the all-seeing-eye, the omniopticon of Chicago. Particularly if you skipped around the structure as a child and knew about it intimately for your entire life and hold in lip-curled contempt anyone who has been pinballing around the city for 40 years yet somehow didn't know it was there until last Thursday. Really, to admit that would be to risk a taunting note from Lee Bey, assuming he cared enough about what I know or don't know about Chicago architecture to do that, which, spoiler alert, he doesn't. 

     So yes, certainly, I have much experience with the building, so much that it took on a weight and mass of its own and sank into my subconscious, unretrievable, so that seeing it again struck me as a fresh discovery, as did the fact that it holds the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture.
     Having ballyhooed the National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen, it seemed only fair that I go in and see what the Puerto Ricans have going.   

     There I met Elias Carmona-Rivera, the manager of visitor experience, who greatly enhanced my experience visiting by leaping up and showing me the museum: one the ground floor, "The Immortal Plena," a show of the colorfully morbid celebration of the danse macabre by artist Antonio Martorell, which seems very apt to share today, it being Halloween.
     And upstairs, "Nostalgia for My Island," works of artists in America celebrating their homeland.
     As we walked, I showed off the fact that I actually know something about the Puerto Rican community — that it really was the first ethnic group to immigrate to the United States entirely by air. That the great majority of Puerto Rican immigrants came to Chicago from small villages, so had the triple challenge of adjusting to a new country, a foreign language, and the challenges of city life. As with every immigrant group that ever came to Chicago, their more-established countrymen alternated between helping them and ripping them off.
     This I know thanks to my new book, "Every Goddamn Day," which, among its wonders, spotlights the enormous growth of the Puerto Rican community in the 1950s. In 1950, there were 255 Puerto Ricans living in Chicago. By 1960, there were 32,371. 

     Funny, when Amazon rated my book as the No. 1 best-seller in immigration history, I thought, "Huh? How so?" But now that I think of it, related to not only Puerto Ricans, but Jews, Germans, Poles, Mexicans, Japanese, Chinese ... quite a long list ... I do go into details about a number of immigrant groups. I guess I just thought of it as Chicago history, not immigrant history. The two are inseparable. 

     The day I feature related to Puerto Ricans is June 20, 1966 when, after a riot on the near northwest side that awoke greater Chicagoans to their presence, the Daily News decided to focus on a single, anonymous Puerto Rican immigrant, "Jose Cruz," to see what his life was like. The unrest also prompted the newspaper to run an editorial on its front page, in Spanish. “Puerto Ricans must not be strangers in our midst,” it said, translated. “Their culture — the oldest in the Western hemisphere — and their language — revered in world literature — must become part of the life in Chicago. This cannot be done by violence.”

     Much better to do it with institutions such as the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture, and I was pleased to see a school group attentively listening to a guide while I was there. The Martorell show runs through the end of December, and is a spooky delight. The museum is open Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m.  to 5 p.m. and Saturday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Admission is free.

Dinner in Texas

 

     The Uber app gives you several helpful pieces of information to facilitate your rendezvous with their driver: the driver's first name, the make, model and color of the vehicle they're arriving in, and a little map showing your ride, a little grain of rice, working its way toward you. A good thing, since one data point can lead you astray. 
     For instance, I was in Dallas Friday night to report on a story, standing expectantly in front of the  Sheraton Arlington Hotel, waiting for a black Chevy Silverado pickup. I checked the map, but also looked around at my Texan surroundings — the snapping Lone Star State flag, and guests coming and going, many wearing Bears regalia. 
     Odd, I thought, thickly. These Texans sure seem to like the Bears. It was only later, after noticing many, many more men in Bears regalia, that it dawned on me that the team is playing the Cowboys nearby on Sunday, and these were not transplants publically yearning for home, but current Chicagoans in town for the game. For a moment I wished I had known, perhaps I might even have stayed over an extra day to go to the game, since. I was there anyway. Then realized I never consider going at home, so why do so here?
     A big black Chevy Silverado pulled up to the curb, and I took a step forward and ducked my head to try to peer through the heavily smoked windows to check my driver. It was a heavily tricked-out truck, with some kind of neon in the wheel wells. But the passenger side had someone in it — not typical for Uber — and I hesitated, consulting the map on my phone. My Silverado was stil four minutes away. I stepped back. Thank you, multiple data points.
     At the appointed moment, another enormous black Silverado pulled up. Fancy wheels, four doors. A special "Texas Edition." It was so impressive I asked my driver if I could take a picture. He said go ahead. I stepped back to take the shot, realized it was so huge I wasn't far enough a way to frame it, stepped back so more, and still it defied complete capture. I gave up, went to get into the back seat, but suddenly that seemed regal, and I asked to ride in the front. He said go right ahead and I climbed aboard.
     One of the great things about Uber, in addition to it smoothly working in Chicago, Dallas, Rome or Santiago and its app's ample information dump, is the tendency of drivers to talk with the passenger, a dynamic I appreciate almost as much as being transported from Point A to Point B. I learned quite a bit about Jeremy, a young man with a shaved head and heavily tattooed arms: he was a cook, his wife worked in the front end of the same restaurant he did, his boy was in college, he had a friend who'd wrecked his life through drink. Riding in a pick-up truck in Dallas seemed an unexpected and welcome bit of authentic Texas, as if, to get to my room, the Sheraton had led me through the halls astride a steer. 
     The restaurant, by the way, was Roots Southern Table, in Farmers Branch, picked by my sister, who lives in Plano. The food, eye-crossingly wonderful. We started with southern greens — baby turnips, potlikker, smoked pork — and cast iron cornbread, which came drizzled with Steen's syrup and a little dish of sweet potato butter that arrived covered with a tiny glass dome filled with smoke, which the waiter dramatically lifted away, a bit of molecular gastronomy theater straight out of Alinea. (A moment captured last year by a photographer for the New York Times, which likened the dish to "a warm embrace" and included the restaurant in its list of 50 best new restaurants in the country.)  I'm not a food critic, so can't really describe my jerk lamb chops other than they were spicy and wonderful, as was the Hoppin' John served alongside. The room was airy, square and large. It's rare that a server's error works to a diner's favor, but we ordered the orange juice cake — how could you not? — and I was three bites into a splendid German chocolate cake when my sister observed that this wasn't what we ordered. Left to my own devices, I probably wouldn't have noticed something amiss until hours later, if ever. I suggested we just eat what we got, but that seemed timid, and we were curious as to what orange juice cake could possibly be, so notified the waiter, who said he misentered the order. I pushed the cake aside, and was a little disappointed when he whisked it away—I was hoping he'd urge us to enjoy it. Just as well. It was replaced with a jumbo rectangle, sitting in orange sauce, with a benediction of whipped cream. It was superlative, but we just couldn't finish it.  You know you've been well-fed when you can't finish half a slice of truly delicious cake.