Flashback 2013: Hello, I’ll be your flu for today . . .

     A lot of illness going around: flu, COVID, RSV — that last one being some kind of lung infection. Whatever it is, I went to get the vaccine Wednesday night. Nothing worse than a sore arm. I'm taking some vacation days from work, but sick or well, I'll still be posting here, a rigor that didn't start with Every goddamn day, but led to it, as this column reminds us. It ran back when the column filled a page, and I've kept the old headings — and the part about going to the opera, a reminder of a lost world.

     Being a workaholic (God, both a workaholic and an alcoholic — I should get some kind of prize) my first thought, when I suspected that the flu jamming emergency rooms and scything through offices is knocking on the side of my head, was to get this written, quick, so I can collapse in a corner and hope to be better 48 hours from now.
     Sure, I could just call in sick, but calling in sick is for the weak; I hate doing that — you’re not in the paper, you might as well be dead; besides, in most offices the present sit around plotting the demise of the absent.
     Plus, it might not be the flu; maybe it’s just some cosmic hand that has reached into my skull, snatched out my brain and is squishing it before my eyes, grey matter oozing through its fingers. Not a terrible feeling, really; a dizzy exhausted numbness. This must be what stupid people feel like all the time.
     Thank goodness I have a few housecleaning topics I’ve been meaning to put in the paper, which shouldn’t demand too much brainpower to relate, or to read, and will keep me in your I hope unflu-flummoxed minds until Friday, when I plan to be better.

Opera winners off to swell nite

     Speaking of Friday . . .
     The Sun-Times is a do-it-yourself kind of place. Not a lot of meetings or memos. No legmen, rare secretaries, certainly none for me, few interns — I’ve never asked anybody to fetch me a cup of coffee in my entire career, frankly because there was never anyone around who I was confident wouldn’t reply, “Get it yourself, you pontificating baboon.”
     Thus when a rare situation arises where I have to depend on other people, it makes me nervous that they will actually hold up their end of the bargain. A trust issue, I suppose.
     Such as my Sun-Times Goes to the Lyric Opera contest — 100 lucky readers and I will enjoy “Hansel and Gretel” this Friday at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, with a pre-party at the Rittergut wine bar nearby.
     With the date looming, you can imagine my relief when I got this email from a reader.
     “I am over the moon thrilled,” wrote Lisa Cristia, a Chicago massage therapist, who said she has been in the opera house, kneading a diva, but never actually seen an opera. She’s taking her mom, Darlene, who has never seen an opera either, but adds, “it’s one of those events that you should have on your bucket list to do at least once in your lifetime whether you are an opera fan or not.”
     That it is. I am happy she is excited, but even happier that she was notified. So thanks to Kristen Davis and all the other Sun-Times marketing folk who handled the heavy-lifting. I appreciate it. And congratulations to the 50 winners and their guests. See you Friday.

Correction

     Whenever our digital future is discussed, the typical reaction is to bemoan what will be lost — no folded newspaper tossed at the end of the driveway every day, no chance to shuffle curbward each morning to sample the weather, to dip your toe in the day ahead.
     That’s true enough — the brief stroll is always infused with optimism. But there are advantages to the electronic, the central one being the correction of errors: bam, they’re fixed. As opposed to the typical print way to address significant goofs: run a correction and hope people see it. A hastily applied bandage, at best — the error was given bold play, while the correction is coughed into a fist long afterward. I tend not to run them much, first because I, ahem, tend not to make them, and second because space in print is limited, and I am reluctant to shave off what I’m writing today to revisit some past blunder.
     But being sick, this is an ideal day.
     A few weeks back the phone rang — it was Ald. Ed Burke; no, make that “long-serving alderman” Ed Burke; no, rather, “the longest serving ever” as he informed me, having taken office on March 11, 1969, a date that found me in Miss Maple’s fourth-grade class.
     He was not sharing this information out-of-the-blue, but because, in a column gingerly seizing one Ald. James Cappleman (46th) between my thumb and forefinger and holding him under a bright light for his pigeon fixation, I had wrongly written Ald. Dick Mell (33rd) is the “longest serving alderman” (in my defense, I was listing aldermen off the top of my head, so checking seemed unfair).
     Anyway, in my blubbering, yes-sir-alderman-so-sorry effort to apologize, I told Burke I would run a correction, and then promptly forgot about it, until Mell himself, not satisfied at inflicting one relative, son-in-law Rod Blagojevich, on the world, made news applying political lube to ease his daughter, Deb, into his seat. Not her fault; she seems a good egg, and if my dad could name me to some pantheon of 50 well-paid writers who get to make speeches and send staff for coffee, I’d likely tell him to go ahead, though with a bit more guile than Mell is capable of.
     Anyway, the Sun-Times and I regret the error.
                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times, January 9, 2013

Hat in the ring

 

 

     Do people even use the phrase "throw your hat in the ring" anymore? I imagine not, since they don't really wear hats anymore, not ritualistically, and those hats, more often than not, are some cheap fleece job, as opposed to something of quality and substance.
     That's what gave the phrase its meaning. To throw one's hat into the ring — sometimes quite literally, into a boxing ring — meant you were committing yourself to something. Why? Because your hat was there, in the ring, or wherever, and your hat was not only perhaps the most expensive thing you owned, but it had been chosen and molded and formed to match your personality. Where it went, you went, and vice versa.
     A month ago I was downtown, and stopped by Optimo Hats in the Monadnock Building for the pure joy of standing in the store, a glorious jewelry box of a place displaying hats that are luscious and finely crafted. The master was there, Graham Thompson, and we got to to talking. When I encounter people I automatically assume they don't know who I am, have never read anything I've ever written and don't care to start. But Graham actually read my book, "Hatless Jack" and remembered it — there aren't many books looking at men's hats as a socio-historical lens through which to understand culture. Just mine in fact.
     Did I know, he asked, that he had written a book. I did not. He bestowed one upon me, a lovely coffee table book. I began to read it — gorgeously written, an ode, not so much to hats, as to the lost art of craftsmanship, to appreciation of things of quality, increasingly rare in this mass-produced, use-it-once-and-throw-it-away world.
     I closed the book, excited to read it cover to cover. And then a month went by. Whatever I was doing, it wasn't reading Graham's book. Which is a lapse, on my part. So the purpose of this post is to throw my hat in the ring — I'm not going to let another month go by. As a book author, I know how frustrating it is, waiting for someone to read my damn book. So by ... Valentine's Day, I'll have it read and a column in the paper. Feel free to hold me to that and hound me if I don't. My apologies for the delay. I find sometimes the thing you want to do the most is the thing you never get around to doing.

Meh microphones are not the Chicago way

     “What’s this? This car? This stupid car?” John Belushi’s Joliet Jake demands, early in “The Blues Brothers,” having just been picked up from prison in a beat-up old cop car by his brother Elwood. “Where’s the Cadillac? The Caddy. Where’s the Caddy? The Bluesmobile.”
     “I traded it,” Elwood says tersely.
     “You traded the Bluesmobile for this?” Jake says, aghast.
     “No, for a microphone,” says Elwood.
     “A microphone?” Jake replies, incredulous. Then he pauses to think. “OK,” he concludes. “I can see that.”
     Of course he can. Microphones are important. And cool. And Chicago. The nation’s preeminent microphone company, Shure, has been based here for 99 years. Under the radar, since microphones are the unsung heroes of the electronic age. Even though every phone call you make, every note of every song you hear, every desperate demand put to Alexa, is conveyed through a microphone. They matter.
     Thus is it made me wince to see another important, cool and very Chicago icon, urban historian Shermann Dilla Thomas, do his TikTok videos holding this tiny little microphone between his thumb and forefinger, like a man about to pop a peanut into his mouth. Sometimes it was just the wire from earbuds. Thomas is 6-foot-5. The microphone looked dinky.
     I said nothing. For months. Shutting up is an art form that requires practice. People don’t take criticism well, no matter how nicely couched. I’ll read a colleague’s story and think, The lede is in the sixth graf. But say nothing. There’s no point. The story’s printed. They wouldn’t fix it; they’d just hate me.
     But Thomas’ work is ongoing. And he obviously cares about what he does. So how could I sit here, silently judging him, with the solution at hand? I had to make an effort. First I reached out to the Shure folks and acquainted them with the situation. They nodded happily. Then I messaged Dilla. “I hope I’m not being presumptuous,” I began. “But lately, watching your videos, I had an odd thought, ‘He needs a better microphone....’”

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'A really great picture keeps beginning'

 

     Lunch last week was originally set for Tuesday. But my friend asked if we could bump it to Wednesday. No problem. Although I was meeting my younger son and his beloved for dinner at Miller's Pub. Both meals taking place in the city. Meaning I'd have to figure out something to do with the hours between lunch and dinner. Again, no problem. There was always The Art Institute. Or the Museum of Contemporary Art. Or sitting by the fire in the Cliff Dwellers Club.. I considered having coffee with a friend, but that seemed like over-scheduling. In the end, I decided to just not worry about it; something would present itself. And if it didn't, I tucked a cigar in my pocket in case I needed to just stand somewhere, killing time.

Bad form? Discuss among yourselves.

     The lunch friend was artist Tony Fitzpatrick, who is no stranger to EGD readers. For years we met at Dove's, and revelled in their fried chicken. But we are men of a certain age with  vintage, Eisenhower-era hearts to consider. So we've shifted to Yuzu on Chicago Avenue, which is no hardship. Excellent sushi, which I took a picture of, to Tony's displeasure. "So you're one of those guys..." he said, reproachfully. Yes, yes I am. I'm surprised I have any friends at all. 

     We caught up over lunch — he's off to Costa Rica soon on a bird watching expedition. How fun does that sound? I'm plodding away, digging a hole that fills up by next morning, ready to be dug again. At one point he said he had to go back to his studio and finish a painting, and I, with nothing better to do, volunteered to come along and watch. Did I worry about intruding on the creative process? Yes I did.  I'd hate for a docent to pause in front of a glorious bird painting featured on a museum wall 100 years from now and say, "Scholars believe that this would have been Tony Fitzpatrick's masterwork but a forgotten journalist, Ned Stenborg, was there the day he finished it, throwing off his aesthetic sensibility in some ineffable way. His mere presence fucked the painting up!"

     But Tony didn't seem to mind, and we headed over to his studio on Western Avenue.

     The painting was "Chicago Kingfish (and the Women)" and someday its proud owner might enjoy knowing his treasure was completed on the afternoon of Jan. 3, 2024. If you're unfamiliar with Tony's work, his trademark image is a central painting of a bird embellished by all manner of found material, a collage frame, essentially. I watched as he used tweezers to apply tiny pink flowers, little colored dots and shiny silver squares, methodically handed to him by an assistant, Detroit artist, Owen Spryszak.

     "The thing itself presents a map of feeling," said Tony, as he worked. "I want there to be a flowery percussive rhythm to the thing." He's already put in the better part of a week on the painting.

     He took a tiny green chair from Owen with his tweezers, tried it out in three positions, sighed, placed it in four more, then put it back. 

He's right. Luxembourg Gardens

     "Why a green chair?" I asked.

     "All the ones in France are green," he said. "I started making these in Paris. In Luxembourg Gardens. All these green wrought iron chairs. Humboldt's got a few too."

     "I'm thinking of some music notes, kid," he said. "We're closing in on this."

     I asked him about the collage aspect. It obviously comments on and enhances the birds. 

     "The purpose of this stuff is never decoration," he said.

     Conversation ranged from ordinary stuff guys talk about to, unsurprisingly under the circumstances, art. I mentioned that a Facebook friend had posted something about how the world would be unbearable without art, and while I generally avoid getting into Facebook debates, I couldn't help adding Bernard Pomeranz's line from "The Elephant Man" as a refutation: "Art is nothing as to nature."

     "As beautiful as your birds are," I ventured. "They can't match actual birds."  Tony didn't argue, He was busy channelling his life, his experience, his vision into the painting set before him.   

      "There are more elegant collagists, better draftsmen," Tony said. But nobody who does what he does.  How does he know when a painting's finished?

     "A work of art fails when your eye stops," he said. "A really great picture keeps beginning." 

     I admired the jars of meticulously sharpened colored pencils — Tony took a straight edge and pencilled in a dotted blue line.

     "I think we're done here," he said. The blue tape came up. He held the painting at arm's length, regarded it a moment, then Owen whisked it away to be photographed and begin its journey to a collector's wall. We spoke of other things, and as dinnertime approached, I thanked him for an unforgettable afternoon and made my way to the Blue Line.

‘Melancholy is a vocation in itself’

Josienne Clarke

     Most of the music I listen to is 40 years old. Or more. Trying to keep even a little current, I started seeking out recent artists. One day Apple Music served up a song called “Chicago” by British singer/songwriter Josienne Clarke.
     Drawn by the title, I gave it a listen.
     Now songs about Chicago tend to be very specific. The classic 1922 “Chicago: That Toddling Town,” for instance, not only mentions a particular street — “State Street, that great street” — but Judy Garland’s version names a certain chic restaurant, the Pump Room, and exactly what she’ll be eating there: “On shish kabob, and breast of squab we will feast ... and get fleeced.”
     Clarke’s song is specific in its own way.
     “It’s not Chicago’s fault,” she sings, in a subdued, precise voice, “that no one came to see me play.”
     The moment I heard that line, I knew it had to be based on one very real experience. Nobody makes that up.
     So what happened?
     “That was the 17th of September, 2016,” said Clarke, when I caught up with her by phone at her home on the western coast of Scotland. “I had just signed to Rough Trade Records. One of the first things I did was go over to the States for a tour. We played New York, Boston, Philadelphia. We went into Canada, then to Bloomington, Indiana. Most of those gigs were fairly well frequented. Then we went to Chicago ...”
     To Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont Ave., a beloved Roscoe Village dive bar/jazz venue.
     To be honest, the room wasn’t completely empty.
     “It’s kind of a lie to say that no one came, because there was actually one guy in the back in a red jumper,” she said, using the British term for a sweater. “I feel bad every time I talk about this song and then play it. His whole experience at that gig, I have erased.”
     Then again, feeling bad is something of Clarke’s brand. Or as she put it: “Melancholy is a vocation in itself.”
     She sang her full set to the guy in the red sweater. Then she went to the bar, ordered a big whiskey, and thought about what had just occurred. Here she was, a professional singer with a music contract.

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Sometimes you need a second brain....

     My wife baked corn muffins Saturday. We were joining some friends for dinner from Smoque, and what goes better with barbeque — ribs! brisket! chicken! — than cornbread?
     To make cornbread, you need buttermilk, I was told. So off to Sunset. "Get as little as possible," my wife instructed. I looked for a small, half & half sized container, but there was a choice of one: this Prairie Farms quart.
     The corn muffins were a hit, the buttermilk placed in the door of the fridge to await its doom — being thrown away in a week or two, I imagine. Because what good is it except for baking? In fact, what is buttermilk anyway? I had no idea. Well, a vague idea ... milk with butter in it? But that couldn't be right. Too easy. Am I the only one not to know? A common lapse, or a glaring void in my general knowledge, like not being able to pick out Australia on a globe. Curious, I took a half teaspoon of the stuff. Yuck. Puckeringly sour. Then I consulted Prof. Google.
     The BBC's Good Food blog has a comprehensive and cogent explanation:

     What is buttermilk? 

     There are two types of buttermilk. Traditional buttermilk is a thin, cloudy, slightly tart but buttery-tasting liquid that's left after cream is churned to make butter. These days, however, it is more commonly sold as a thick liquid produced commercially by adding an acidifying bacteria – and sometimes flavouring and thickening agents – to milk. This commercial product can be thought of as a gentler, thinner yogurt, with any buttery flavour likely added.
     Buttermilk is traditionally a drink, but is more often used in baking now. When used with baking soda, it reacts to form carbon dioxide, thus helping mixtures such as soda bread, rolls, scones and waffles to rise.
     It's also used as a marinade, as the acidity can help to make meat more tender and flavourful. You'll find buttermilk used in this way in some chicken dishes.

     Fair enough, and a potential use for our remaining buttermilk. Maybe I'll marinate something. A reminder what the internet is great at — helping fill in awkward gaps in one's knowledge.
     That worked. But sometimes the internet falls flat. At first anyway. For instance, last week suddenly a series of dark lines appeared on Center Avenue. I immediately thought of a sheet music staff — the five parallel lines where the notes are written. (See, the buttermilk isn't the only thing that's cultured around here). Then, while having this semi-sophisticated thought, I actually looked up, to see if there were wires above. Perhaps I was suddenly seeing the shadow of electrical wires I hadn't noticed over the previous 23 years.
     There were no electrical wires. Just uniformly spaced lines in the road, obviously drawn in some kind of liquid, curb to curb and parallel with it. I usually jump on such mysteries, but here let the ball drop. There's a lot going on. Monday afternoon they were back. I googled "Lines on streets in Northbrook" and got nothing. I stopped there, embarrassingly, and put in a call to the Northbrook Village Hall. But it was late in the afternoon, and even the most brisk and efficient municipality could not be expected to reply.

     So I thought I would put it to you. Perhaps we could have a spirited discussion in the comments section that isn't about my deficiencies as a person and host. My theory is that they're some sort of heretofore-unimagined anti-snow prophylaxis, that instead of salting the roads after the snow falls, they now can do so before due to some marvelous advance in road salt technology.
     Or is that insane? As daft as looking up for wires? Because that's the only theory I could come up with. Take a look at the photo below. Does anybody know? Does anybody have any guesses? I hope the phenomena isn't as common as dirt, because it's new to me. 

    I had just explained the above to my wife, about 10 p.m., as she sat on the sofa. She glanced down at her phone, idly, and tapped with her thumb. Three seconds passed.

    "Those grey parallel lines are brine that has been spread to melt snow and ice in advance of a snowstorm," she read. "The brine solution goes on wet but dries after application."

    So my guess was right, which is good. But my search was too feeble to find the answer. Which is bad. The lines are nothing new — at least 20 years old. The problem was, I had searched "Lines on streets in Northbrook" while she searched, "Lines in the street, salt." A reminder that, often, what you look for determines what you find.

Don’t forget what human frailty is

     U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber said he wasn’t feeling well last week, and put off until February the sentencing of the “ComEd Four,” caught up in the investigation of Michael Madigan and convicted of bribery last May.
     Reminding me of something I’ve been meaning to do: put in a good word for one of the guilty parties, Jay Doherty. I’ve known Jay for 25 years, since I started attending the Friday lunches at Gene and Georgetti that our ace political columnist, Steve Neal, held in an upstairs room. The meals were well-lubricated, hours-long affairs, with politicians and power brokers. I always tried to sit next to the former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Dan Rostenkowski, and listen fascinated to his tales of backroom deals in Congress. He had a way of giving your forearm a squeeze — I liked to think of that squeeze as passing from Lyndon B. Johnson to Dan to me.
     Rostenkowski went to prison over trifles. Misuse of postage stamps. Crystal. Some chairs he took home. Petty stuff. What I call “lone trombonist” crimes. The marching band executes a crisp 90-degree turn, but one guy misses his cue and keeps going straight. His friends wince.
     Jay isn’t a friend — I haven’t spoken to him in years — though I did send him a supportive note when his legal woes began. Because I know how lonely it can get when trouble comes knocking. Rather, he was what we in the news biz call “a source.” When the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District was feuding with a Gold Coast condo over use of an alley, the story reached me through Jay, who “dropped a dime” on them, as we old timers say.
     “Let’s have some fun,” he’d said. And fun it was. I was a better informed journalist because of Jay Doherty, and a plugged-in reporter is a happy reporter.

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