Taste and decency

     Whenever I write on a topic that crosses the border into disgusting, I hear an echo of Australian press lord Nigel Wade's voice ringing across the newsroom on the fourth floor of 401 N. Wabash. "STEINBERG!" he'd bellow. "I was eating my POACHED EGG when I read that!!!" So a warning to those who might be enjoying their breakfast, or just unwilling to read an essay that includes reference to Amy Schumer's husband's anal orifice. You might want to set this aside to read later, or not at all.

 

     "Taste and decency." Now there's a concept that doesn't get floated much nowadays. Yet there it is, twice in one brief Daily Herald article by Jake Griffin on vanity license plates. Honestly, I find even unobjectionable vanity plates — "MOMS VAN" or "LAWYER" or whatever — somewhat suspect. A little blurt of "look-at-me!" that most of us manage to do without. Though I suppose if you're popping $100,000 for a car, what's another $94 to put your own individual spin on it?
     To be honest, I'm reluctant to present myself as the champion of taste and decency in any particular situation. First, it's the oldest gripe in the book. There are cuneiform cylinders sitting unread in drawers in the Oriental Institute (speaking of objection, weren't they going to change their name in January? I see by their website they're still using the language of hate) complaining that these kids nowadays don't give proper reverence to the gods.
     Besides being an antique qualm, taste and decency are both relative. I've heard from enough people to whom just the name of this blog is an objectionable slur on the deity, far outside the bounds of propriety. I once wrote three out of four columns about picking up after my dog. I've written about being flogged by a dominatrix and the people who open the jars of shit at Cologuard. Still, I'd never consider myself "tasteless," though I do like to dance along the boundary, convinced that is often where interest lives.
     Unless it doesn't. Pop icon Madonna recently announced her first tour in years. I was never a particular Madonna fan, from the very start. I happen to remember the first time I saw her first video, "Like a virgin," on that modern marvel, MTV. It was about 1983. She was in her waif-in-lingerie get up, shimmying on a gondola in Venice, if I recall properly. I leaned in, fixed my gaze at her bare midriff, and thought: I'd better get a good look at this bimbo because I'm NEVER seeing her again.
     Predicting the future, not my forte. And apologies for the "bimbo" which indeed was the word that formed in my head nearly 40 years ago. I was 23. I hope we aren't at the point where certain people aren't allowed to express a risque thought.
     That sure doesn't hold for Madonna. "Madonna’s upcoming tour will defy society’s limits on female pop stars" is the headline on the Post critique, by Robin Givhan, which lionizes the singer for "40 years worth of club dancing, provocative shape-shifting and sex-positive proselytizing."
     All true. Back in the Reagan era, when anyone who wasn't Ward and June Cleaver was encouraged to keep out of sight, Madonna put what then were the fringes of human society into her songs, music videos and at least one coffee table book. (I'm old enough to recall when you could reasonably expect her 1992 metal-covered $50 coffee table book, "Sex," to be on a hip Chicago coffee table. I still remember certain shots — the baby powder — so it must have pushed some buttons). That was real society approval, and it's worthwhile to remember that, beside all the commercialism and camp and self-regard, she did do real good. Not to forget the music, which was okay.
     The Washington Post story on her return linked to the video where she announced her "Celebration" tour. She's sitting at some Mad Hatter dinner — an homage to her 1991 "Truth or Dare" movie, apparently — with Jack Black and a few guffawing confederates, playing the adolescent challenge game. At first I focused on Madonna's face, which has that unmistakable immobile plastic surgery mask-like look that makes me think of a line from Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast" about the bedribboned World War I vets he'd see drinking in the 1920s in almost every cafe in Paris. “I watched… the quality of their artificial eyes and the degree of skill with which their faces had been reconstructed. There was always an almost iridescent shiny cast about the considerably reconstructed face, rather like that of a well packed ski run.”
     Madonna takes up a basket of bread rings.
     "I want you to show me, with this bread," she says to Amy Schumer, "how you lick your husband's asshole."
     Ewww. Maybe I'm outing myself as 62, or a prude, but that wasn't something I wanted to know.
     "This is kinda like sad and gross," observes tablemate Eric André, immediately reading my mind. Which is as far as curiosity would take me. Maybe they brilliantly turned the conversation around to why anyone would pop $250 or $500 or $1,000 or whatever tickets cost. But I didn't stick around to find out.

    If Madonna really wanted to transgress societal norms, she should have let herself grow old. I believe women should be allowed to grow old, to age and sag and get wrinkles, just like men do. Judge me harshly if you must.

     Honestly, my self-protective instinct urges me to walk away at this point. With the Washington Post casting every Madonna's excess as the triumph of a female pioneer, any objection becomes by definition the bile of sexists and haters and male pigs, none of which I consider myself to be. To me, based on the brief clip I saw, Madonna is not in the vanguard, but like a dotty old aunt well into the prosecco prattling on about the guys she balled at Woodstock while her younger female relatives exchange worried looks. If Madonna is so freeing, then I'm free to disapprove, yes? Maybe not. 

     Anyway, no hard feelings. I saw Madonna perform once — the paper sent me to a show for her "Blond Ambition Tour" at the Rosemont Horizon in 1990. It was memorable, in that I still remember aspects of it: skillful theatrics at the Rosemont Horizon, with lit candles rising out of the stage, vigorous male dancers, the song "Like A Prayer" and an audience that included 6- and 7-year-old girls in lace bustiers and gloves. But that's about it.

     

Making beautiful music together

Greg Sapp in his workshop.

     Three factors determine the price of a violin, Mel Sapp explained, just as I was leaving the bright, airy shop she and her husband Greg run in Batavia: one is workmanship. Two, materials. And three, the name of the luthier who built it.
     “You notice I didn’t say, ‘sound,’” she added. “Sound is subjective. You can change it.”
     Indeed, most masterpiece instruments of old —by Amati, Guernari, Stradivari — have been modernized over the years, their necks and fingerboards lengthened, to bring them into line with current musical tastes.
     I am not in the market for a violin, alas. But I visited Sapp Violins earlier this month because of a quip. When the shaky future of journalism is being discussed, with what colleagues I yet retain in a rapidly contracting profession, I’ll sometimes attempt to both sound a positive note and move the conversation along by observing, “They still make violins.”
     Meaning, even antique trades thrive, for some.
     Though it got me wondering: How is the violin business doing? Chicago, being home to one of the world’s great orchestras, is unsurprisingly also a center of violin craftsmanship. After I visited Sapp, the January Chicago magazine took an in-depth look at John Becker, the Fine Arts Building luthier to the multi-million dollar instruments of musical stars such as Joshua Bell, the article by Elly Fishman itself a finely constructed marvel.
     So how does one get into the violin making biz?
     Greg Sapp was a music education major at Duquesne University in the mid-1970s when he had a realization that often comes to those whose ambitions lie in the arts:
     “This isn’t going to work.”
     Luckily, senior year, he had a class with the very 1970s name, “Creative Personality.” His final project was constructing an Eastern European folk instrument called a “prim.”
     “It’s kind of like a mandolin,” Greg said, pointing to the ur-instrument, displayed on the wall. “I was the only one in my class that made something so functional.”
     That wasn’t a complete accident — his father was a woodworker and singer.
     Greg moved to Chicago in 1978 to attend the Kenneth Warren & Son School of Violin Making (now the Chicago School of Violin Making). He also bumped into Mel, whose car had broken down and needed a lift to the train station. When Greg told her he was going to violin school, Mel, who’d known her share of prevaricating creeps, assumed he was lying.
     “How do I find these guys?” she asked herself.

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EGD Orphan #1: Alexander Woollcott

Alexander Woollcott (Bettmann Archive)

     The book inspired by this blog, "Every Goddamn Day," has been out for more than three months.  I'm assuming you've all bought a copy by now and if you haven't, well shame on y... whoops, I mean, your admirable restraint has been rewarded, as the University of Chicago Press is now offering it among their bestsellers at 30 percent off in their Great Chicago Book Sale. You can access their catalogue here.  

    "Every Goddamn Day" is a daily history of Chicago, with 366 compact essays keyed to the date. When writing the book, occasionally I'd find a new story for a particular date that would efface something I'd already done. That is, I'd prepare a vignette for a day, then research would cough up another for the same day that I liked more, either because it was inherently more interesting, or better added to the mix of themes in the book. So the original tale got bumped. But I kept the banished stories in a file called "Orphans" thinking I might serve them up here when their dates came around. 

     The tale below, while interesting — how often do radio commentators die on the air? — was only loosely tied to Chicago, and didn't reach the level of Clint Youle, "Mr. Weatherman," perhaps the first television meteorologist, predicting a chance of snow in a windowless WMAQ studio in 1951 while a blizzard howled outside, the episode included in the book for Jan. 23. 

     Looking over the vignette below now, after not reading it for a year or so, I think I would have added an explanation of how the Tribune, at least among those conversing on the program in 1943, was seen as a moral stain and journalistic embarrassment, sort of the way Fox News is viewed by liberals today.

Jan. 23, 1943: Alexander Woollcott said a lot of witty things. It is he, in 1921, who coined the term "ink-stained wretches" to describe "those who turn out books and plays." It is Woollcott, one of the founders of the Algonquin Round Table group of clever inebriates, who launched a million refrigerator magnets when he quipped "all the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening." 

     His final remarks are not so much sharp as knotty, a moral question to be untangled. On the CBS "People's Platform" coast-to-coast radio program, Woollcott responds to one of his fellow panelists trying to put some daylight between Hitler and the German people by saying, "Germany was the cause of Hitler just as much as Chicago is responsible for the Chicago Tribune." 
     This is less a defense of Germany and more an indictment of both. The suggestion is made that this is perhaps unfair: there is a chance that Germany at least, may someday return to the realm of decent places. 
     "I think time may do it," allows Woollcott, his last public utterance. Time does indeed do it, to him anyway, and has its revenge. Woollcott suffers a stroke, on air, is hustled out of the studio and dead by midnight, at age 56. The hazards of live broadcast. 

Northshore notes: Hitchhiking

Female musicians, Egypt, c. 1400 BC (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Today's finds our Northshore bureau chief, Caren Jeskey, in something of a dark place. Yet her two word directive at the start of the sixth paragraph, well ... I've never heard it said so plainly before. 

By Caren Jeskey

     EGD reader John once commented that times have never been simple. It’s hard to believe that they have ever been this messy and out of control, but I am sure they have. Perhaps during World War II when my grandfather, and many of your ancestors, had to leave home and fight when their brains were still trying to develop. When much of the world was suffering.
     My Great Uncle Tommy never recovered from landing at Normandy. My mother and I visited Utah Beach once, which brought the horror to life. Many of our vets have been abandoned, but all is not lost. Unprescribed is a documentary that shines a light on the effective use of THC for the recovery of PTSD. (Rx’d medication is necessary at times; what an evil racket it’s become). 

     My optimism is wearing thin, as maturity sets in. There is no “them” to take care of us. Systems are failing, from health insurance to the post office to EMS and police services. An attempt to level out the playing field by defunding the police was premature. We do not have the systems in place to provide resources to criminals to ease them out of their dangerous lives. A discouraged, dwindling PD means more suicidal officers, and more crime.
     If we are lucky individuals, we’ve developed a support system that helps us thrive, and get our needs met when we get ill, or when we are down on our luck. Health insurance is a joke for many of us. I pay nearly $7,000 a year for shoddy insurance with a $9,000 deductible. My annual checkup last year cost over $300 out of pocket, plus over $500 for the plan. Absurd. I just hope that when my times comes, friends and family will help take care of me, and I won’t be placed in a scary situation and die a painful death, alone.
    So what’s the solution?
    Ignore it. Focus on other things as long as we still have the breath in us, and the ability to read a blog post. There’s no possible way to change the system, other than in dribs and drabs by voting and other social responsible action.
    I say sing more. Dance more. Hang out at the beach. I’m telling you, it works. If your get up and go has got up and went, call someone, anyone, who can lend you some energy until you have your own again.

                    “The only thing better than singing is more singing.” —Ella Fitzgerald

     “Adults age 60 to 85 without previous musical experience exhibited improved processing speed and memory after just three months of weekly 30-minute piano lessons and three hours a week of practice, whereas the control group showed no changes in these abilities.”
     We don’t have to be good, we just have to play. I pick up a flute many days of the week. With this newly discovered statistic about brain training, yesterday I decided to call The Music Institute of Chicago’s East Evanston Campus to get the ball rolling on flute lessons. Once a week, and then three hours of practice per week. I’m not yet 60, but I am sure it will do me well.
     There are free online voice lessons; perhaps that can also be a place to start such as The Beginner’s Singing Lesson offered by this energetic teacher.
     If you feel you are not up to singing or learning an instrument, “in research by Ferguson and Sheldon (2013), participants who listened to upbeat classical compositions by Aaron Copland, while actively trying to feel happier, felt their moods lift more than those who passively listened to the music. This suggests that engaging with music, rather than allowing it to wash over us, gives the experience extra emotional power.”
      Some of my wealthy friends are living their best lives. Routine travel to islands, the best healthcare in the world, new cars, boats and houses. Pools and ice rinks that kept them saner during COVID. For me, living well means finding moments of joy in each day and staying connected to others IRL and even on Zoom. I’ve had some very dark days in the past few years. I am grateful, today, that I still have the ability to pick up a flute and make some sounds that don’t sound half-bad.
     I have been ever so lucky to have Neil allow me to ride along on a part of his journey of success. And his writing always hits home. Wishing you all well today. Or, as my friend Marsha says, “wishing you at least a decent day.”

     “Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone. Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find all their teams going the other way; every god will leave us. Work rather for those interests which the divinities honor and promote, – justice, love, freedom, knowledge, utility.”                                                        —Ralph Waldo Emerson

The drink no restaurant dares serve

     Chicago Restaurant Week begins Friday. As a guy who really, really likes to tuck into a plate of excellent chow at one of Chicago’s quality eating establishments, I’m going to depart from my habit of nimbly flitting from one topic to another. Instead, I’d like to pull a thread left dangling after Wednesday’s column on Go Brewing and the rise of nonalcoholic beer to ask a question that has long puzzled me:
     What’s with NA wine? You can order nonalcoholic beer at almost any bar or restaurant. But I’ve never seen NA wine on a menu. Not once. Why?
     ”From a wine perspective, we’re a little behind,” said Serafin Alvarado, master sommelier and Illinois wine education director for Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits, the largest distributor in the United States. “In all these beverage trends, wine is the last to join the party. It’s very traditional, very hesitant, not only from producers’, but from the consumers’ point of view.”
     Restaurateurs agree.“We don’t currently have any nonalcoholic wine,” said Grant DePorter, CEO of Harry Caray’s Restaurant Group. ”There’s no market for it.”
     A pity. My go-to NA vino at home is Sutter Home’s Fre. (An ugly name that looks like a typo. They’d have been better off calling it “Home Free”). To me, Fre is soft and round and red, quite winelike and a nice complement to cheese. Connoisseurs disagree. In 2021, the New Yorker’s John Seabrook slagged the NA wine segment in general and Fre in particular.
     ”Nonalcoholic wines make dreadful placebos,” he wrote. “No wine drinker ... would confuse the nonalcoholic Cabernets made by Fre and Ariel, two widely distributed U.S. brands, for the nectar of the gods. ... A vineyard can’t add a lot of other flavors to make up for the absence of alcohol. You’re left with twenty-dollar grape juice that tastes like a kids’ drink.”

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"A safe nonalcoholic space"

   

Dall-E.

     If I want to be on page two in the paper, there's only room for about 750 words, so tangents often must get shorn away.
     For instance.

     My column Wednesday on Go Brewing, the non-alcoholic brewery in Naperville, lost a digression where I marvel at the tone of the sober movement, citing a line from 2019.  

     "Cindy’s at the Chicago Athletic Association Hotel, has created a safe nonalcoholic space by replacing the word 'mocktail' on the bar’s menus," noted Vox, calling Chicago "a hub of sober curiosity." 

     Where to begin with that sentence? Is "mocktail" pejorative? A kind of NA shaming? Or "sober curiosity," a term that makes not drinking sound almost like a variety of fetish.
     And don't get me started with "safe nonalcoholic space." Wouldn't that be most places? Your car? Your kid's school? Just about anywhere?

     Not that I want to wax snide. I know what they mean. When people are new in sobriety, it can seem the world is one vast bar, their acquaintances, a hallelujah chorus for relapse. I was fortunate in that I immediately understood that nobody can stay sober by pretending they don't know where the booze is. Staying out of squishy places might be necessary in the initial turmoil of rehab. But very quickly you need to be able to not drink even when people all around you are.

     Eventually you realize that nobody cares what you drink. Mostly. I seem to remember that young people, more susceptible to peer pressure, do care. For a while. They like to go out and party and reinforce each other by going after the stragglers. For those who resist joining in on the fun, not drinking can result in real ostracization. Or even for the not so young. I remember being in my early 40s, trying to cut back, ordering non-alcoholic drinks when out with certain boozehound newspaper friends and getting ridiculed. 

     Now people urging me to drink merely draw a sense of amused wonder. "What? Really? You mean you don't know?" For my literary guide to recovery, "Out of the Wreck I Rise," I had to raise a good amount of money to cover legal permissions, the fees to pay poets for the rights to use their work. This I did by hitting up rich folk to donate to the University of Chicago Press, a 501(c)3 charity, which created a special fund for that purpose.

     After the book came out, I went to lunch with one particularly generous soul, head of a Chicago financial firm, at Chicago Cut Steakhouse. I brought him a copy of the book he had helped fund, as a thank-you present. Before lunch, he encouraged me to order a glass of wine, several times. I looked at him, dumbfounded, and was tempted to say, "You have no idea what this book is about, do you?" I managed to hold that back: the man did contribute a hefty sum to my permissions kitty. What I did say was: "No thanks — wine makes me sleepy." That worked.

Dry January, not Beerless January

Joe Chura, right, draws an NA beer at Go Brewing in Naperville.

     Joe Chura is more than halfway through a dry January. Or make that Dry January, capital D, now that it is an official cultural phenomenon.
     One in five U.S. adults told pollsters they planned to go the whole first month of 2023 without alcohol. It’s the same in the United Kingdom.
     Why swear off booze for a whole month?
     “One, I needed to, personally, I wanted to take a month off completely from drinking,” said Chura, a 45-year-old father of three. “But secondly, I wanted to create a challenge for a group of people that wanted to try for the first time or do it again. And I couldn’t have it without myself doing it. This is a very unique experience that someone can come here.”
     “Here” is Go Brewing, the craft brewery that Chura started in Naperville last October that brews only no- and low-alcohol beers — the first in Illinois.
     Regular readers might be aware that every January is Dry January for me — and February, and March, and on through the year. For the past 17 years, which means I remember when you were lucky to find O’Douls at a bar. Now you can buy Bud Zero at Wrigley Field and there are shelves of exotic NA IPAs at Binny’s.
     Four hundred people signed up to do Dry January with Chura, and Go Brewing offers regular activities like CrossFit-style workouts and live-band karaoke nights. (The pub does offer several full alcohol guest beers for those who just won’t be denied.)
     When Chura opened his doors, he expected his average customer to be a “40-year-old who is gaining weight and wants to be healthy.”
     ”The brand was built around that,” said Chura, who was surprised by who walked in.
     “Week one, 50% or more of the people who came in here were in recovery or couldn’t drink for health reasons. I looked at them and thought, ‘Holy shit, I got this wrong.’”

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