Lemon Rice Soup
For at least a decade now, whenever my best friend and I have had to drive from our current homes in Chicago back into Northwest Indiana where we grew up, for weddings or baby showers or, alas, now also funerals, we have a little running joke about it.
We’ll look around at the scenery, usually while we’re tooling down the same roads where we practiced first learning how to drive as teenagers. And we’ll say to each other:
WE’LL NEVER NOT BE FROM HERE. No matter what happens and where else we may go in life, we’ll ALWAYS be from here. If anyone ever asks us, “where are you from?” we’ll ALWAYS have to say Dyer, Indiana.
For some reason, the absolute permanence and finality of that fact always strikes us as hilarious. There are so many ways that we have the power to change and rearrange our lives, but the sheer, literal unavoidability of our origins can never be altered. The nearly cosmic absurdity of it just hits us square in the funny bone.
*
“It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home,” muses Pip in Great Expectations, and, well, not for nothing is it my all-time favorite novel. Though I probably never would have come straight out and said I was ashamed of being from Northwest Indiana, on many occasions have I sniffed something to the effect that it “just wasn’t the place for me.”
And, it isn’t. Or wasn’t. Or.
Suddenly, though, I find myself more simply interested in Northwest Indiana. In the fact of it. In its more elusive, underlying, animating spirit. I guess it’s a similar impulse to when folks get the genealogy bug and start tracing their way through the generations of their family tree. But for me it feels less like I want to specifically reclaim my own Hoosier identity and more like I’m interested in reappreciating the genuine pockets of the place’s uniqueness and specificity that people who grew up in other parts of the country or world would never otherwise know about. A more nuanced take on those clickbaity “You Know You’re From the Region If…” listicles, so to speak.
Part of this, I’m sure, stems from the fact that I’ve been in a relationship for the past six years with someone who was born and raised in Connecticut. In addition to all the other things about him that totally fascinate me, I find his essential East Coastness endlessly intriguing. (My standard line about this is always that I never really got Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground until I met him. Now I get it.)
I delight in hearing my boyfriend tell stories about his childhood in Waterbury. I see and appreciate more deeply certain facets of his personality that only come to the fore whenever we travel there to visit his family. Just the landscape alone tells me so much about his psychology. And that’s not even factoring in seemingly minor but actually super meaningful stuff like what local grocery chains his family shopped at, what TV stations they watched, and whether the elementary schools he and his sister went to stopped at fifth or sixth grade.
And, much like the American who realizes that she too speaks accented English when she hears a Brit or an Australian parrot her own voice back to her, I began to realize that, of course, my place of birth has stories and history that inform the way that I understand and carry myself in the world too.
Like, just off the top of my head, lemon rice soup.
The constellation of context and meaning surrounding this simple side dish is actually so complicated that I’ve been idly doing research on all the contributing factors that make it such a uniquely Northwest Indiana thing. I mean, I’ve been looking up the patterns of immigration of Greek families to the Chicago area, how and why that community found such success as restaurateurs, and what confluence of factors led to avgolemono becoming a staple of those restaurants’ menus. All these details must then also be funneled through a more personal recollection of why everyone I know from my childhood and teen years is obsessed with the stuff. And how it’s now just as much a part of our identities as it assuredly was for the Greek families who most likely nicked their Yia-Yia’s special recipe in order to cook up thick, steamy vats of it to serve their patrons by the bowlful.
Earlier this summer, my boyfriend and I drove from Chicago to Valparaiso, Indiana, to hear Roger McGuinn play a solo concert at the Memorial Opera House. We had just enough time before the show to grab a quick bite to eat at a restaurant nearby. Overjoyed to see lemon rice soup on the menu, I greedily ordered a bowl and insisted on posting a photo of it on Facebook. “Introducing Brian to the ancestral dish of my homeland,” I captioned the shot, and my friends lost their minds. A flurry of comments and reminiscences began unspooling under the photo, and I felt the profundity of that shared point of reference in a way that I don’t think I ever had before. I mean, I’m Polish, I’m nowhere close to being Greek; but it really kind of is the ancestral dish of my homeland.
I’d wanted to share the specificity of that with my boyfriend, to show him this strange, tiny part of my heart, but in a lot of ways it was more about me finally recognizing the significance of that collective memory for myself.
Growing up, I’d often bemoaned the Nowheresville quality of my hometown. I used to think that if I were from elsewhere in Indiana, I’d at least be able to claim a certain sort of aw-shucks Heartland corn-fed wholesomeness that people would understand. Or that, obviously, if I’d grown up in Chicago—rather than an hour outside the city on the wrong side of the state line—every new person I met would have an easy, instant shorthand for the overall essence of where I was from. “The Region,” as it’s colloquially known, always just seemed to me like an unfortunate armpit part of the state that had no true identity.
But in the grand tradition of James Joyce writing about Dublin while living far, far away in Europe, I suppose I’m becoming a similar sort of more local ex-pat who can finally wrap her head around her place of origin now that she’s no longer living there. The absolute permanence and finality of having grown up in Dyer, Indiana, turns out to be a lot less permanent and final than I’d once thought. Just as new roads get bulldozed through farm fields and seemingly indestructible structures like the high school I graduated from get torn down and completely rebuilt, even if the facts of my past won’t change, my understanding of them most certainly can, and will.
In Search of Lost Words
In high school, I developed this theory about my personal vocabulary.
The theory went that I was allotted a certain number of words throughout the day, and once I had used them up, they were gone until they regenerated the next morning. I came to this conclusion when I noticed that on days after long theater rehearsals or other tasks that stretched late into the night, I would find myself spluttering to get my thoughts and feelings across, which inevitably led to my swearing like a sailor more avidly and frequently. It seemed to make sense that, if I’d used up everything else over the course of the day, all I would have left by the end of the night was curse words.
(This was well before the current theories on decision fatigue had been documented, so I guess there was some kind of intuitive grain of truth to my otherwise silly notion.)
Similarly, later on in college, I noticed that I would go through these weird phases where I would just straight-up lose words.
The first one I noticed was “thermometer.” I’d have this blanked-out moment of aphasia where I’d be looking at a long glass thing filled with mercury that was divided into evenly spaced units of measurement, and it would take me several generous beats before I could pull the word “thermometer” to the surface of my consciousness.
The next one to go was “report card.” It got to the point where, when I couldn’t wait those extra few seconds for the right phrase to appear out of the depths of wherever it had gone missing in my brain, I’d improvise a close-enough equivalent. I remember having a conversation about grades at some point and breezily referring to “you know, the summary report.” An Anglophile friend often accepted these substitutions with a laugh, suggesting that I should just pass them off, if ever questioned, as obscure British slang.
So, this is just a thing that happens to me for whatever reason. (The reason usually being that my mouth is moving way faster than my brain.)
*
Recently at my day job, two women in our marketing department were telling me that the new CFO, who was just hired this summer after leaving his gig at a big fancy publisher in New York City, had been scrutinizing the editorial department’s invoices. He was wondering why we’d recently ordered a set of bound galleys from Printer A rather than Printer B. The implication being that we were foolishly wasting money by using Printer A since Printer B could do the job a buck or two cheaper.
This has been a recurring power struggle over the years, and I, as the person in charge of tracking the book budgets, have had to explain to numerous people numerous times that while we do still use Printer B on occasion, it’s often more trouble than it’s worth, despite the relatively minor cost savings. Printer B will take three or four rounds of corrections just to get all the text on the front and back covers right, and their schedules are often unpredictably slow, which causes trouble downstream for our publicists, who are trying to get galleys out the door to their contacts at magazines and journals as soon as possible. So, the extra money that we pay to Printer A is worth it to us, because they get the job right the first time and routinely turn around the finished copies in two weeks or less.
Even though I know the women I was talking to probably knew this, my temper still flared a little bit and I ran them through this basic explanation all over again. Exasperated, I rolled my eyes and assured them, though, that the only reason the new CFO, with all his East Coast bravado, was suddenly bugging us about this was that he was…and here I hit one of my aphasic moments.
Deep in the caverns of my brain, I’m pretty sure I was looking for the phrase “throwing his weight around.” But as I shouted through the climax of my monologue, not wanting to take a breath and ruin the illusion that I was the second coming of Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, what I managed to spit out was that the CFO was just “feeling his bones.”
Guys, I am literally laughing out loud about this right now as I type. Feeling his bones! What the! Holy shit. “Feeling his bones.”
Though I knew it made no sense as soon as I heard the words come tumbling out of my face, I was so committed to being professionally annoyed that I couldn’t bring myself to stop and acknowledge the ridiculousness of what I’d just said. But maybe that’s the ultimate revenge of my perpetual inner mischief-maker. Maybe, all along, it’s not that the words necessarily disappear. Maybe it’s that, when I’ve devoted myself to other people’s projects for too long and have ignored my deep inner thirst for pure silliness too egregiously, they’re just temporarily taken out of commission so that I have no choice but to get a little playful with the weirder and funnier substitutions I reach for to replace them.
Eating Spaghetti at the Vatican
Really, I’d been planning this trip to Italy since late 2001.
It all began around Thanksgiving-time, the year that I graduated college. I was headed back to Northwest Indiana after several months of aimlessness that saw me go from housesitting for a professor in Bloomington, Indiana, to interviewing for an internship in New York City, to bumming around Seattle for a while with a friend who’d recently moved there for work. I came back both to be with my family for the holidays and to be around for all the last-minute activities leading up to my best friend’s wedding in late December.
The night before her bridal shower, I went with my maternal grandmother to some kind of spaghetti potluck fundraiser being held at a local church. I have no recollection what it was raising money for, or why my grandma had specifically invited me to go. Mostly I remember being in some typical but nondescript church hall or basement, the kind that I’d spent years of my life in, whether it was helping my dad load gear in and out of for wedding receptions, attending funeral luncheons, or performing Christmas carols with various school choirs. Sitting on a folding chair at a long table narrowly butted up against several other long tables packed with folding chairs, I shoved forkfuls of starchy spaghetti with tomato sauce into my mouth and stared down at the paper placemat that had an outline of the shape of Italy on it. And I thought to myself, “yeah, Italy. Now that I’ve been to both France and England, that’s the place I’d like to go to next.”
It was a somewhat random thought, likely influenced by a handful of late ’90s/early ’00s movies that were in the air—The Talented Mr. Ripley, Nurse Betty, Life Is Beautiful. I’d even tried to teach myself a bit of rudimentary Italian a couple years before, from an Italian for Dummies book, but I’d way overestimated my prowess for language acquisition and stalled out almost as soon as I began. But beyond that, I didn’t have much of an affinity for Italian culture or history. Even as a film major, I’d never even had a class on Italian Neorealism. Italy had never really been on my radar, until suddenly it was.
As we were finishing up and leaving the church hall, I grabbed a clean placemat from another table and folded it up and tucked it in my purse with the intention of hanging it on my wall as some sort of talisman. Like pinning a photo of yourself in a bathing suit on the refrigerator door as inspiration to lose weight, this would be an aspirational reminder of my next travel goal, which I was sure would come to fruition imminently.
My grandma dropped me off at my dad’s house and then she drove herself the few short blocks back to her own home and that was that.
The next morning I made my way to the wedding shower for my best friend, but a few hours later I got a call from my dad. My grandma had been feeling ill all night and had asked him to take her to the emergency room that morning sometime not long after I’d left for the shower. She was a tough old broad, so this concerned me a great deal, that she’d been feeling bad enough not only to have to go to the hospital, but also that she needed someone else to take her there. Especially since, obviously, I had just been with her the night before and she’d seemed fine. He told me not to worry but that she’d had a perforated ulcer and that while she was in surgery for it, one of her lungs collapsed. She was out of surgery by that point and was stable, but she would need some time to recover and there would be a lot of follow-up appointments to track the progress of her healing.
In the next days and weeks, after a lot of conversation with my dad and my uncles, it seemed to make the most sense for me to be the one to take over my grandmother’s day-to-day care. Since I was back home in Northwest Indiana and wasn’t otherwise employed at that point, I, luckily, would have the flexibility to drive her to her various check-ups and appointments during the day. Of course, right around the time I assented, I finally heard back from the magazine in New York about the internship. They weren’t going to be able to grant me the position after all. I was sad about it but rationalized that, immediately post-9/11, they probably wanted to hire someone who was already living in the city anyway. It made sense that they wouldn’t want to be responsible for flying some bumpkin from Indiana all the way out to the Big Apple just for a couple months of filing and photocopying tasks. So, rather than to the East Coast, I moved into the spare bedroom of my grandmother’s house and embarked upon six months of loose ends and loneliness before her death in June 2002.
So, when, in late 2016, my boyfriend’s father decided that he wanted to celebrate his upcoming retirement by taking a whirlwind tour of several European countries, including Italy, and asked us if we’d be interested in joining him, I waited a demure half-second before insisting that my boyfriend report back to him YES. We would, in fact, be interested in joining him.
This was it! This was my big chance! This was my big chance to FINALLY go to Italy!
My boyfriend’s dad researched a handful of tour group companies and eventually booked us an itinerary that would fly us into London before making additional quick stops in Paris, Lucerne, Venice, Florence, and Rome over the course of eleven days total.
My chance to go to Italy, though, turned out to be exactly that—a chance to go to Italy. It wasn’t really even a vacation as much as it was simply a chance for me to be in Italy for four days before I got back on a plane to fly home to Chicago again. The pace of the tour we were on was so fast and so relentless that essentially all we did was walk past or through the most obvious of tourist-trap highlights, the icons that immediately spring to mind when someone says the words “Venice” or “Florence” or “Rome.”
Although I didn’t do any specific magic for it in the way that I did for my perfect cupcake, all the energy that I’d invested over the years in this idea of “going to Italy” pretty much had the same be-careful-what-you-wish-for effect. Clearly, the fact that I never conceived of exactly what I would want to do or see or experience or feel there meant that the emphasis was on my physical presence in the country and that’s all.
I mean, yes, of course, a lot of the tourist-trap obvious stuff we saw was really amazing! Famous stuff is often famous for a reason! And, bottom line, I got to go to Italy. I’m totally happy about that fact. But still, words matter. As I’m slowing realizing about myself and my preferences for travel, I’m most attracted to experiencing the mundane aspects of any given destination that I happen to be visiting. Staying put in one place for a generous amount of time, wandering through the city streets, finding delicious hole-in-the-wall restaurants, poking around used bookstores, basically LARPing what my own life would be like if I just happened to live there instead of Chicago. So, guess what—fast-paced, multicountry, large group package tours probably aren’t the right thing for me. I’ve learned that about myself now! And I can set more accurate intentions going forward for the kinds of trips that do inspire and light me up.
On the final day of the trip, our tour group was somehow granted special permission to tour the Vatican museum before it officially opened its doors. We skipped the line that was already beginning to form out front and breezed right in. It was lovely to be able to enjoy the art without being bumped and jostled by masses of other tourists all trying to take photos of the same things.
My boyfriend and I marveled at the extreme homoeroticism of much of the art.
I nerded out about the fact that there were statues of the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet in a special display.
I turned on my psychic sense in the Sistine Chapel when we acknowledged to each other that we felt ever so slightly unimpressed by it—and, no wonder—it’s not a place for spirituality at all. It’s basically a board room (for “functionary papal activity” as Wikipedia delightfully puts it). I got the feeling that Michelangelo was like the kid in elementary school that had a knack for art, so all the other kids would ask him to draw sketches of their favorite superheroes for them. Just instead of “Mikey, do me one with Batman punching a shark!” it was “Do me one with all the badass stuff from the Old Testament!” (In contrast, we found his Pietà at St. Peter’s Basilica much more affecting; it seemed very clear to me that he’d worked on that one on his own time to please himself.)
After whizzing through the galleries and St. Peter’s Square, we of course were ferried past a gift shop where we’d have some time to buy trinkets and eat some lunch before the group would be taken by bus to the Colosseum. I picked up rosaries and holy water and candles, then shuffled over with my boyfriend and his father to what was basically a glorified cafeteria.
And when I finally sat down, squeezing myself in at a long table that butted up against a bunch of other long tables, and started to dig in to my plateful of starchy spaghetti with tomato sauce, it occurred to me that everything had truly come full circle.
From the first inklings of my desire to travel to Italy that originated in a church basement in Northwest Indiana to the culmination of that desire that brought me to, essentially, the ultimate church basement in Vatican City, there was a comforting continuity to the unglamorous familiarity of it all. It was like some sort of fishes-and-loaves miracle effected not for the sake of a huge crowd, but across sixteen years and two continents, all for the sake of one girl very hungry with wanderlust.
Qodèxx Recording Diary
One of the best possible examples that my dad set for me, as a creative person, growing up, was that he collaborated with people.
Photo courtesy of Ed Bialon.
As I’ve talked about before, it’s hard to explain exactly what kind of musician he was. But the one thing he definitely wasn’t was the stereotype of the isolated solo artist, tortured by the melodies in his head that no one else could hear, pushing people away while he perfected his craft.
Was he a monomaniacal, controlling, obsessive, perfectionist Virgo? Yes. It was his way or the highway, especially if he felt like you weren’t on his level, professionally. He would damn well tell you how the part should be played, how the song should be sung, how the arrangement should be arranged.
But if he respected you as a musician? He actively wanted to collaborate and play together. He was a band guy through and through. Whether it was his trio, a musical theater pit band, or the praise-and-worship musicians at church, he wanted your opinion. He wanted your voice. He wanted your talent. He loved and respected his musical friends with the enthusiasm and ferocity of his entire being. He was not shy about expressing his admiration if there was anything he liked about someone’s technique or style.
Photo courtesy of Ed Bialon.
For better or for worse, when I was a child, he often treated me like a tiny adult, like his little musical protégé. It’s hard for me to say for certain now, as an actual adult, how much of my musical talent and musical interest was innate and specific to me, and how much of it was just that I learned very quickly that I would be praised and rewarded for demonstrating musical aptitude. Not that it matters much at this point; you can’t unring a bell, as they say, and I’m grateful for the inadvertent musical boot camp that I went through in the years before I turned eighteen. But when I take personality assessment inventories or try to work through journaling prompts that suggest I think back to the stuff that I most loved doing as a child in order to determine where I might find greater joy as an adult, it’s hard for me to untangle the threads of how much pleasure I gleaned from music in and of itself and how much I just wanted to feel like I belonged to something—such as the not-so-secret club of musicians that my dad spent a lifetime gathering around himself. Of course it’s natural for a child to seek a parent’s praise; his was just particularly high octane, especially when it came to his area of expertise.
I would cringe with shame bordering on terror when I botched something while I was still learning to play the piano—not so much because I thought he was going to yell at me (since he was trained as a teacher, he could actually be very gentle with beginners, despite his temper), but more because I hated revealing myself as, frankly, a child. He treated me more or less like a peer, so I put a lot of pressure on myself to rise to the occasion.
I remember once excitedly wanting to play for him a piece that I’d recently taught myself from a book of sheet music. The time signature was 4/4, but somehow I ended up miscounting some of the syncopation, which meant I was playing a few bars in something like 7/4. I was so impressed with myself when I sat down on the piano bench, and then gutted when, in the middle of the song, he straight up laughed at me.
In retrospect, I’m guessing that his laughter wasn’t meant to be derisive. In a weird way, it was probably even tinged with respect, since, how in the hell does some preteen piano-playing kid just accidentally end up bashing through something in relatively consistent 7/4 time? But I was instantly flooded with shame. (I am not a shrug-and-get-over-it kind of person. I go instantly to shame and I wallow there.) I’d revealed myself to be an amateur. I’d overestimated my own abilities and then had been given my comeuppance. He immediately sat down and showed me how those measures should be played, but it hardly mattered. By that point, I hated the song; I hated myself. I was clearly deficient. I should have known better. I should have been better if I wanted to be part of his beloved inner circle.
Luckily, though, since my dad never thought of himself as much of a singer (for as gifted as he was in so many ways, he was a lackluster harmonizer and his tenor range was limited), and since I actually loved to sing, that became an easier dynamic for me to inhabit. Him at the piano, me standing behind his shoulder, the two of us reading the music together, working as a team, as something approaching equals.
I felt less shy about asking for his help in that capacity, asking for him to count me out a rhythm or asking for a suggestion for how to finesse the feel of a certain idiom. Though there were many, many fraught aspects of my childhood, especially after my mom’s death when the stresses of single parenting made his already hair-trigger temper extra sensitive, there was also a lot of joy. And filling the living room with music, often just for the sake of amusing ourselves, was the surest way to create and sustain that joy.
*
In my 20s, when I went through a long stretch of being single and would moan about it absolutely any chance I got, a friend once tried to cheer me up by telling me that she could imagine me ending up with a music teacher. “I could really see you with some cool young music teacher who plays guitar.” I inwardly cringed when she said it, thinking, oh god no, I don’t want to be the cliché of the person who ends up dating someone who resembles her own parent, subconsciously attempting to replicate the familiarity of her early childhood imprinting.
But on the other hand…yeah. It had always been easy for me to gravitate to creative people of all disciplines. It never surprised me to meet people in some totally square context and then discover that they could shred on a Flying V guitar, that they had won piano competitions as a child prodigy, that they were semi-professional stage actors on nights and weekends, that they had an MFA in photography. Those were just my people. I found them, they found me, we routinely found each other. And I just expected it. It seemed second nature to me after the example that my dad had set with his crew. I also couldn’t deny the appeal of getting back to a life where I could share and collaborate on music as a matter of course; this time, though, hopefully a little bit more on my own terms.
Happily, the past six years of my life have been just that, thanks to Brian, my perfect cupcake, a guitar-playing teacher after all. Our most recent co-creation is the soundtrack to our friend Gene Kannenberg Jr.’s asemic graphic novella Qodèxx.
Photo courtesy of Gene Kannenberg Jr.
What is an asemic graphic novella, you ask? Feast your eyes (and make a purchase) here. Qodèxx has been praised as a masterpiece by none other than Emil Ferris, author of the hugely popular and successful graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, and has also recently been featured on Nebraska Public Radio.
On Saturday, July 29, Brian and I will be playing a 20-minute-long set of completely new and original music at the Qodèxx release party in front of a slide show projection of the interior illustrations from the novella, almost like the organ accompaniment to a silent movie. A full downloadable recording and a physical CD will subsequently be made available as well. (Think of it as the contemporary version of a Power Records book-and-record set.)
Photo courtesy of Gene Kannenberg Jr.
Brian and I have spent the past month working through the songs together, bolstering each other’s weak spots and leaving plenty of space for each other’s strengths. Learning any new song is always still frustrating for me; I just want to know it already, to be well into the meat of the thing, where the real magic can start to take shape. So though the days spent hashing out the arrangements were necessary, and satisfying in their own way, it was once we’d gotten the basic parts nailed down and then started tearing them apart again that my spirits truly began to soar.
For several days, we fell into a delirious, delicious routine, where I’d come home from my 9 to 5 day gig to find Brian sitting on the living room floor, hunched over the digital recorder, brows furrowed in concentration, headphones on his ears, surrounded by guitar pedals and other miscellaneous gear.
After listening through what he’d spent the afternoon recording on his own, we’d have a bit of dinner and then get right back to the music. I’d track a vocal line, he’d ask if I could invent a harmony, we’d play through everything a few times and smooth over any rough bits, and suddenly full-blown arrangements existed where there’d once only been acoustic sketches.
As my life feels increasingly fragmented by all the identities and duties that impinge upon me, from work to family to friends to my own health and even meditation practices, it was thrilling to get to concentrate so intensely on one thing for hours at a time, several days in a row. How does this sound? Can we make it better? What should it sound like? Can we simplify it even further? Even our cat Rosie knew something special was happening in the living room and would sit quietly with us, more peaceful than she almost ever is.
There is a quality of listening that activates in my head when I’m deeply engaged with musical creation and evaluation with someone I trust, approaching that vaunted state of flow, where I’m momentarily free from shame.
TO LEARN MORE
About Terry Felus, click here.
About Qodèxx the graphic novella, click here.
About the Qodèxx Happening at Creative Coworking in Evanston, click here.
About the soundtrack to Qodèxx, click here.
About previous recording diaries, click here.
Peach Buzz: Guide to Rogers Park
Back in 2015, when my boyfriend and I were planning on moving out of our apartment in Lakeview and we were going to be looking at a new place we hoped to sign a lease on in Rogers Park, I took the the red line up to Loyola to find that Rogers Park was just really Rogers Parkin’ it up for me.
It was a beautiful spring day, one of those first utterly perfect days of the year when Chicago absolutely comes alive. Blue sky and sunshine blazing overhead, the first thing I saw was an adorable cupcake truck selling treats on the corner nearest the El! Walking a few feet down the sidewalk, I brushed past a woman wearing the most gorgeous emerald green sari! A few feet beyond that, two happy-looking pups were tied up outside the Chipotle on Sheridan, greedily eyeballing everybody’s tacos! It was such a Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood moment. It was all just heart-meltingly perfect.
And yes, a few weeks later, we signed the lease on the place we’d been there to look at, and we’ve been happily ensconced there ever since.
I’ve always had an affinity for Rogers Park. As an eighteen year old, fresh out of high school, it was one of the first neighborhoods I spent any time in, before I knew much of anything at all about the different sections of Chicago. I vividly remember being taken for the first time to what I now know was the Heartland Café. I was there with one of the writers whom I was working with on an ambitious but ultimately doomed “sitcom on stage” project called Higher Grounds. (Long story for another time.) I felt cooler than cool, lunching with this professional comedian, talking about the craft of writing, dining on some sort of vaguely healthy sandwich-with-fries situation, being waited on by a gorgeous hippie-punk goddess with armfuls of tattoos. This, as far as I was concerned, was it.
And then again after college, in the no-man’s-land year I spent living in my hometown after graduating but before getting my first big-girl job, I spent endless hours driving into the city in order to hang out at a dear friend’s grad school apartment, which was, yes, just a couple buildings down from the Heartland. Rogers Park consequently became one of the main places that convinced me I didn’t know as much about Chicago as I thought I did.
Having grown up just an hour outside the city in Northwest Indiana, I was super jaded about it. When I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, I immediately wrote the city off. “Eh,” I thought to myself. “I know Chicago. I belong in New York or London or someplace glamorous like that.” My dad had worked downtown for most of my childhood and often brought me into the city for the Taste of Chicago or to see touring productions of Broadway musicals. Of course my elementary school had frequently taken us on field trips to the museums, and in high school, my choir even performed at Soldier Field as part of the 1994 World Cup opening ceremony. I, naively, figured these experiences had shown me all there was to see in the city. But once I finally spent an appreciable amount of time in Rogers Park, I realized there was so much more to Chicago than downtown and Grant Park. My “eh” turned to an “ohhhhh….” As in “ohhhhh, there are all these neighborhoods!” I fell in love with the city, and its magic, for real at that point.
After I officially moved into my first apartment in the city, although it’s almost inconceivable to me now, I would make the long trek between the Ukrainian Village and Rogers Park on public transportation at least once a week…Chicago Avenue bus to the red line, red line up to Morse, and then back again at the end of the night…just to hang out at my friend’s apartment on Lunt watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD, eating greasy Chinese food from the takeout place on Glenwood, and reveling in the freedom of being, blessedly, young and independent.
Or, as the narrator puts it in chapter 25 of Great Expectations:
“Herbert was my intimate companion and friend. I presented him with a half-share in my boat, which was the occasion of his often coming down to Hammersmith; and my possession of a half-share in his chambers often took me up to London. We used to walk between the two places at all hours. I have an affection for the road yet (though it is not so pleasant a road as it was then), formed in the impressibility of untried youth and hope.”
After over a decade spent living in various other (very charming!) parts of the city, even though I’d never actually lived in Rogers Park before myself, when my boyfriend and I signed the lease on our new place off the Loyola stop, it felt like a homecoming of sorts to me.
In that spirit, then, I’d like to present my highly biased, nostalgically informed, and personally skewed Guide to Rogers Park.
THE LAKE
Holy shit, the lake!!! My boyfriend’s dad, who’s lived his whole life in Waterbury, Connecticut, and thus harbors a passionate, lifelong animosity for New York City, always marvels at the accessibility of the lake here in Chicago. And nowhere is it more accessible than in Rogers Park, thanks to the fact that you don’t have to cross Lake Shore Drive to get to it.
Sitting on a bench near the shore at dusk on a beautiful warm summer evening (or even a chilly autumnal one) is one of the great rewards for making it through a dreary and confining Chicago winter, and the fact that it only takes me about six minutes to walk there from my front door continually blows my mind.
Energetically, I always feel the lake as the feminine counterpart to the masculine energy of the Chicago River. Whereas the river, in all its reversed-flowing glory, divides the city and contributes, I feel, to all the many ways that Chicago is deeply, often disturbingly bifurcated, the lake holds us with a more catholic embrace.
And though yes, of course, everyone in the city flocks to the lakefront at all different times of year, the denizens of Rogers Park seem to take to it a little more avidly, thanks to their easier access to it. Between the Artists of the Wall event that paints the seawall with beautifully colored murals every year over Father’s Day weekend, the crowds that gather to watch the fireworks exploding over downtown on the Fourth of July, the families that prepare elaborate picnics and tie up hammocks between trees, and the Loyola students that get stoned and toss frisbees to each other, the beaches in Rogers Park come alive as very obvious representations of the way that so many different communities inhabit the neighborhood, so successfully.
THE ARMADILLO’S PILLOW
6753 N. Sheridan
Although there are many other bookstores in Chicago that I absolutely adore, the Armadillo’s Pillow has become my favorite for a certain kind of bibliomancy.
Mostly I mean it’s the kind of place where I always find something, usually on the jumbled front table in the main entryway, that I had no hope of ever finding or that I had no idea that I needed.
My boyfriend and I will often stop in there on a Friday or Saturday night, after dinner or before a movie, or just if we need a destination to get us out of the house for a bit. Like any self-respecting used bookstore should be, it’s soaked in the scent of incense, and they often curate a completely bonkers selection of music on the soundsystem. It’s right next door to a place that teaches kung fu, so you’ll often hear a muffled thump-thump-punch through the wall.
I eavesdropped on the most amazing conversation in there recently. A high school-aged kid, completely in earnest, came up to the clerk at the front counter and said, “I’ve never been a big reader, but I recently read one of Elie Wiesel’s books in school, and now I want to start reading a lot. Can you recommend any other stuff like that to me?” What a bookseller’s dream! I didn’t see what the kid left with, but the clerk engaged with him enthusiastically, showing him a good handful of places to start, with both fiction and nonfiction. I couldn’t stop grinning about it for hours.
NEW 400 MOVIE THEATER
6746 N. Sheridan
Apparently this four-screen movie theater dates back to 1912, and for a while in the early 2000s, its age really showed. I remember going to see Minority Report there in the summer of 2002 and literally sitting next to a bucket that was catching drips from the ceiling (let’s hope from the air conditioning). And although it’s been remodeled in recent years with a slightly nicer lobby and some slightly less rickety seating, it’s still pretty rough around the edges, which makes me love it all the more. Gorgeous temples of cinema with reclining leather seats and fancy snacks have their place, of course, but more often than not, I’d prefer to give my money to a neighborhood joint like this, where garbagey mainstream Hollywood blockbusters feel a little more appropriate, where the ambiance of the theater itself is not somehow trying to fool me into mistaking the latest superhero franchise installment for anything resembling high art. Which, in turn, actually makes whatever garbagey mainstream Hollywood blockbuster I’m there to see just that much more viscerally satisfying.
I’ve had some of my favorite recent moviegoing experiences at the New 400. It’s where I saw the Denzel Washington version of The Magnificent Seven, the John Wick sequel, the unexpectedly devastating final Wolverine movie Logan, and, of course, Get Out. We don’t currently have a TV in our home, so if I find myself in the mood to watch something, the choice is to squint at a download on my laptop or walk a few minutes over to the New 400. I just inherently love going to see movies on a big screen and am delighted to have this squalid little gem right around the corner.
ROYAL COFFEE
6764 N. Sheridan
Don’t let the name fool you–this is more than just a cozy little coffee shop. Royal Coffee also has a pretty amazing food menu, most notably its selection of Ethiopian dishes. If you’re in the mood for tasty injera and perfectly spiced lentils, but don’t want to commit to one of those insanely huge platters that you’ll get at some of the other well-known restaurants nearby in Edgewater, Royal Coffee is the perfect, lighter compromise.
Memorably, my boyfriend and I ended up here the night of the anti-Trump protests in Chicago this past January. I’m pretty sure we were the only people in the restaurant other than the proprietor, and we all quietly watched the footage together on the television on the back wall. It felt somehow right, to be engaging with this very Chicago moment in a public yet intimate space, sustained by the goodness of local community and true diversity.
HEARTLAND CAFE
7000 N. Glenwood
The one, the only, the legendary Heartland Cafe. If you’ve lived in Chicago for any length of time, chances are you’ve been to the Heartland at some point. If you’re visiting or new to Chicago, chances are someone will suggest the Heartland to you if you’re asking for good local places to eat. It’s been a mainstay in the city for the past 35 years, and though a financial crunch almost shuttered them for good back in 2010, they eventually pulled through and kept their doors open. The next step was to hire a new executive chef in 2013 to revamp the hippie-style menu a bit, and then they further updated the physical space by bringing True Nature Foods under their roof to replace their own in-house general store.
Look, I’m not going to sugarcoat it–the Heartland can be a disaster. They will inexplicably be out of menu items that they should never be out of. (No tofu, at all? Huh??) The wait time for food will often be way out of proportion to the number of people in the dining room. The service can be surly, and/or non-existent. (We once went there with friends for brunch on New Year’s Day, and some of their scheduled servers flaked on coming in, so there was only one poor person, just sweating and apologizing for their entire shift, waiting on an entire roomful of famished and/or hungover customers.) They will often forget a portion of your order, especially if you want a smoothie, which is apparently made in an entirely different part of their kitchen from where the entrees are prepared. And on and on.
But, like, that’s part of the charm?
Because, make no mistake, this is a neighborhood joint. I feel like it’s supposed to give you the same kind of vibe you get with family or good friends whom you love with all your heart, who will also drive you up a wall with all their peculiar little tics.
Besides, when the Heartland is on point, their food is also some of the tastiest vegetarian fare you’re going to find anywhere (even if there are actually fewer vegetarian options on the menu than there used to be). The servers can be the fucking coolest, funniest, most helpful and attentive, endearingly weirdest folks you’ll run across. And overall, the place just feels like a true hub for the neighborhood. It’s been there long enough that it feels like an institution while implementing just enough changes to keep things fresh and forward-moving.
I’ve been pooped on by a bird on their outside patio. I’ve eaten a bison burger there as a prelude to a road trip across the country to Chelan, Washington. I’ve played music there with my band. I’ve celebrated my birthday there with my best friend and her three-month-old firstborn child. I’ve sat there, rapt, while a friend narrated the story of his incredible secret elopement in New Orleans. Now that I live within walking distance, I can never go too long without sliding in for a bite of whatever my current menu obsession happens to be. I repeatedly fall all over myself suggesting to friends who are in from out of town that I take them there for a meal. The Heartland, in the best possible way, will always be synonymous with Rogers Park to me.
The OKness of Being Not OK
I wrote a short post on social media this year saying that Mother’s Day bothers me less than it used to.
In contrast, though, the anniversary of my mom’s death, on May 26, affects me more, and more deeply, every year, the farther I get away from it. This year, I’m 30 years away from it. I’m sure that a lot of the nature of my reaction is that I’m finally safe enough to feel, in my body, the overwhelming sadness and confusion of it, in a way that I couldn’t at 8 or 18 or 28.
So, in one sense, that’s great. That means I have a great life. That means I’m thriving. But it also means that I’ve been having panic attacks all week.
I’ve always been an extremely trusting (some might say gullible) person. I take things at face value; I believe what people tell me. I have believed it, for my whole life, when people tell me that I’m strong, that I’m brave, that I’m a big help to my family.
And yes, it’s true–I am strong, I am brave, and I am a big help to my family. But the new revelation to me is how much I needed to hear from someone, and never did, that things were not OK. A lot of things sucked, and were hard, and were sad. But because I never heard that, because I believed that I was supposed to be strong and brave and helpful, I experienced my own not-OKness as wrong, and therefore profoundly isolating. And, empathetic little sponge that I was, I also then felt responsible for trying to process and make everyone else’s not-OKness OK because…it was all supposed to be OK. All that processing has been exhausting for me. Trying to be nice and polite and not make anyone around me wrong takes an awful lot of effort.
And I get it, I do. Who wants to tell an eight year old whose mother just died, “hey, guess what? The bad things that are bad? They will continue to be bad.” But, all I can see now is how much that wish to save me pain in the moment has only postponed, prolonged, and obscured it.
Writer and tarot reader Angeliska Polacheck wrote a stunning blog post this Mother’s Day about her own experience as a motherless daughter. Our stories are quite divergent in many ways. I’ve never wanted to have children the way that she has; my dad never remarried, so I didn’t have the complexities of a stepmom relationship to negotiate; I know with absolute certainty how much my mother loved me. But so much more is remarkably similar–our mothers’ difficult labors, the young age at which we experienced that irrevocable loss, the bottomless pit of longing to be loved and resulting anxious attachment, the years of persistent effort that have gone into making sense of what’s true and what’s not in the tangle of memories that dictate how that lack has shaped us. I sobbed while reading her words the first time and have kept the post bookmarked for the past two weeks, just because I find it comforting to know that someone else out there knows what it’s been like to survive this, emotionally.
I do my best to comfort my friends who are losing their mothers now. I do my best to sit, and listen, and let them know that their not-OKness is OK. I try not to rush to spiritual or philosophical commentary or bullshit platitudes. I also know that I fail in this often. Because, what do I know about what it’s like to have had a genuine relationship, no matter how potentially fraught, with a mother? I’m hamstrung by the fact that my loss is a child’s loss, not an adult’s. My frame of reference is in growing up without that bond, not in having had it and then needing to remake my world without it.
My devastation is a major part of me. But I hate having to learn to live with it. I hate that I don’t get to be a shimmering rainbow of unicorn sparkles all the time, or a coolly detached scientist of emotions who sees and understands Human Feelings without needing to deal with them personally.
The other story that always sticks with me from the time that I spent with extended family in rural Indiana in the immediate aftermath of my mother’s death is that, one night, I fell asleep watching a movie with the other kids. I awoke to being carried up to bed by my dad’s cousin’s husband. Desperately embarrassed, I faked being asleep until he tucked me in, turned out the light, and left the room.
All I can see now is the kindness of it, how natural it would be for a father of two girls of his own to extend his care to poor, bereaved little me. The fact that this family had let me stay with them for however many days, cared for me, included me in their daily goings-on, attempted to give me some normalcy after the chaos of the previous days, all the while certainly managing their own grief, completely floors me with its generosity when I think about it now.
But at the time, I was obsessed with the idea that I needed to leave no trace of myself, and my human needs, behind me. Over the course of my mother’s cancer treatment and multiple hospital stays, I’d clearly internalized that the highest virtue, my greatest contribution to the family, was self-reliance. Not being tough enough to stay awake while watching a movie meant I was a failure, that I was vulnerable. I hated that I needed help doing something as simple as going to bed. I would have preferred to have been shaken awake and told to walk upstairs on my own.
When I was in clairvoyant training, I once explained to my classmates that the way I psychically visualized my own emotional range was like a piano with all the middle keys missing. My feelings were all the high tinkly notes and low boomy ones–not so much in a manic depressive or bipolar way, as that I didn’t really know how to live into my own everyday humanity. It’s a combination of denial, and repression, and profound embarrassment.
The tears and yowls and hiccuping sobs and red-faced keening that I’ve unleashed on my boyfriend in this week leading up to the 30th anniversary of my mother’s death have been unavoidably human and horrifyingly embarrassing. They are also the long held-back truth of my life. I am slowly, painfully, necessarily learning to be OK with my own not-OKness. I am slowly, painfully, necessarily learning to let myself be carried.
On The Divine Comedy’s IN MAY
To the best of my knowledge, In May is this: a chamber opera for one voice, its narrative unfolding as a series of letters from a youngish man dying of cancer to his father who is living in California. The songs are all titled by the dates of the letters, the time counting down to the young man’s inevitable death (um, in May). In the course of the piece you learn some facts about his life—that his (former) girlfriend’s name is Anna, that his mother is dead, that his doctor is named Eisenstein—but beyond that, it’s mostly day-to-day ruminations on his mundane activities which of course take on a sense of profundity in light of his imminent passing.
It’s also this: a collaboration between lyricist Frank Alva Buecheler and composer Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy. From what I can gather, Buecheler was inspired to write the piece after visiting a friend who was dying at a young age. After first putting together a set of (fictionalized) letters in German, he had them translated into English and then approached Hannon, basically out of the blue, about contributing the music: “I told him his Divine Comedy songs were dramatic pieces—and that I thought he was an opera composer.” The piece has only been performed live a handful of times and now has been released as a new recording that was made available as part of the deluxe edition of the most recent Divine Comedy album Foreverland. As written, however, the piece is actually meant to be sung by the character of the ex-girlfriend Anna.
There are a few glancing evaluations of In May online, primarily in reviews that came out around the time that Foreverland was released. The bulk of these reviews tend to just mention Hannon’s collaboration with Buecheler or describe something of its chamber music setting of strings and piano and leave it at that. But I haven’t really seen anyone give it a proper full-length write-up or come right out and say what I overwhelmingly felt when I finally listened to the whole thing for the first time: that this is the best work Hannon has done in almost twenty years.
I’ve lived with The Divine Comedy’s music longer and cherished it more fervently than pretty much any other band I can think of, so I say this with nothing but love and admiration in my heart, but—the albums that Hannon has put out since 2001’s Regeneration have been spotty at best. There have been glorious individual compositions like “Our Mutual Friend” from 2004’s Absent Friends and “A Lady of a Certain Age” from 2006’s Victory for the Comic Muse, but too often these 21st century albums, as a whole, have had a jokey, shrugged-off quality that felt a bit like phoning it in.
Neil has said in the press that he realizes his cultural relevance is well behind him and that he enjoys the freedom that gives him. But I have to wonder how true that is, how much spin is being put on the issue, because it feels a bit like the thing he actually never recovered from was his mid-career attempt at a sonic pivot into Britrock territory.
Regeneration was released in 2001 and was produced by Nigel Godrich, who was at that point most well known for his hugely successful and influential work with Radiohead and Beck. This album was meant to help Hannon “leave behind” what he perceived as the stuffy fussiness of the suits he wore on stage and the literary pretentiousness of his songs and their arrangements. But, despite being 16 years old at this point, Regeneration actually sounds way more dated than any of the albums he made between 1993 and 1998 (the ones that were, ahem, full of literary pretentiousness and featured Hannon wearing suits on the album covers). It’s a solid album, to be sure, but I’ve always had the somewhat intuitive impression that he was surprised and disappointed that it never catapulted him into Radiohead-level success. Absent Friends, the album he made a few years after Regeneration, though delightful and lovely in its own way, always reads to me like a retreat into the familiar, a resigned sigh heaved in determination to just give the people what they want.
And while he hasn’t necessarily suffered, career-wise, from that commitment (he routinely continues to sell out tours all over Europe and is able to make new albums every few years when he feels like it), I think there’s a slight misunderstanding, on his part, of just what it is “the people” actually want. I think that he thinks, given the fairly massive UK success of his song “National Express,” that his fans want more dorky joke songs, clever lyrics, and cheeky historical references. And, yeah, all those elements are a huge part of what people came to love about The Divine Comedy. It’s a huge part of what I love about The Divine Comedy. But why were those elements so appealing? From my perspective, it’s that they were always folded in with an extremely grounded sense of mortality.
All his best songs have always been steeped in death (eg, “Lucy,” “Tonight We Fly,” “Eric the Gardener,” “Absent Friends,” etc., etc.). My favorite Divine Comedy album, Fin de Siecle, which, for a very long time I considered my favorite album full-stop, is about the death of a whole century. The joke songs were never the point of The Divine Comedy; they were merely context and contrast and comic relief to the true meat of his ruminations on life, death, the universe, and everything. In mistaking what his true gifts are, it’s almost like Hannon took the diametrically opposite path to his idol Scott Walker—rather than veering hard into nearly unlistenable experimentation and impenetrable high-art conceptualism, he went toward softball/cheeseball/cornball dork-pop.
Happily, though, In May is a return to form. Maybe it’s that he was freed from the pressures of writing “clever” lyrics since he was only responsible for the music; maybe it’s due to the fact that his own father was in the late stages of Alzheimer’s while he was working on the piece; maybe it’s because he’s also getting on in age. Whatever the case, he’s finally given me the album I’ve, in many ways, been waiting for him to do since I first heard Fin de Siecle.
While certainly not a perfect album, especially with nearly twenty years of hindsight, Fin de Siecle has always appealed to me for its combination of gigantic orchestral arrangements, Hannon’s delightfully cheeky baritone croon at the peak of its richness and clarity, and lyrics surveying a panorama of late 20th century white Western middle class concerns and observations (from newspaper scandals and gossip and the romance of public transportation to disease, environmental collapse, technological dystopia, war, and death). For me it’s always hit a sweet spot of sounding amazing and being fun to listen to while dealing with serious subject matter with a thoughtfully light touch, while also still being capable of smashing your heart into a million pieces with the melancholy dance-tronica of “Eric the Gardener” or Neil’s first explicit reference to having grown up in Northern Ireland in album-closer “Sunrise.”
Bringing all these elements together so seamlessly and effectively was a delicate balancing act, one that he’d seemingly built up to over the course of his three and half previous albums. It would have been impossible to sustain or repeat. I’ve always thought that the song “Too Young to Die,” which was recorded for his singles collection A Secret History, was a fairly bald-faced admission that he didn’t even want to try to replicate it, that he felt he was too young to allow himself to remain aesthetically pigeonholed. In some sense, it was no wonder that Regeneration sounded the way it did; it was a necessary palate cleanser, a way of honoring just how special Fin de Siecle was by leaving it standing as its own monumental achievement, by going off in a totally different direction.
However, with In May, Hannon has finally worked himself back up to an equal pitch (over the course of, yes, three more albums and a handful of side projects). Except here he’s working not at the scale of a whole century but instead in miniature—within the sonic limitations of a string quartet, single piano, one voice, and someone else’s lyrics (lyrics which narrate just six months of one man’s life, in an environment limited to the man’s house, mind, and very immediate surroundings).
The musical reference points in In May’s compositions range from familiar Hannon touchstones like Scott Walker and Michael Nyman to English musical theater composers like Leslie Bricusse and Lionel Bart but also, crucially, The Divine Comedy itself. Freed to shop his own back catalog, presumably by the assumption that the theatrical audience for In May wouldn’t necessarily cross over to his own fanbase, he’s able to lift familiar little idiosyncratic intervals and motifs that are most recognizable from the Divine Comedy’s heyday. There’s Promenade’s urgent, sawing string parts, A Short Album About Love’s down-tempo grandeur, and Liberation’s deep sense of place and space.
All those elements would of course be present in any production of the show, wherever it might be staged. But in this specific recording, there’s also Hannon’s use of his own speaking voice. He’s always been a bit actor-y in his music, slipping into the characters he’s invented for his songs, but usually with a heavy dose of wink-wink, nudge-nudge archness. At last, here he’s allowed himself abandon that hammy self-consciousness and to just breathe through the material. And I really mean breathe–just listen to when he sighs, “oh, my lovely feet!” in “3rd of January,” when his voice cracks on the word feet.
There’s no wink, no quote marks around it, no referring back to well-known podiatric literary references of the Western canon. It’s simple, intimate, honest, and completely soul-stirring.
The soaring perfect fifth at the conclusion of the whole piece, that big “your son!” at the end of “31st of May”, is the same interval as the one at the end of Fin de Siecle’s album closer “Sunrise.”
Sonically linking his hope for peace and reconciliation after The Troubles to a man’s final goodbyes to his loved ones after a rapidly progressing terminal illness is, when you take the long view, just a completely brilliant encapsulation of The Divine Comedy itself—his ability to marry the inevitability of darkness and death to a defiantly buoyant embrace of hope and beauty through the interplay of words and music.
But I think it also points, again, to the strengths that I don’t think Hannon even realizes he has. While he’s busy assuring everyone “I’m just basically a show off,” it’s his ability to craft these intensely personal, intimate, honest, unadorned moments that has fueled my love of his music for close to twenty years. Hearing him finally embrace this, at length, without apology, is enormously heartening. After all the musical deaths of 2016, how wonderful that no one actually had to literally die here in order for a great burst of life to be breathed back into the whole project of The Divine Comedy.
For the Thrill and the Wonder of Adventure
Early my sophomore year at Indiana University, I went to an orientation session for students who were interested in volunteering at the campus radio station.
In my typically over-serious fashion, I was worried that I hadn’t sufficiently taken advantage of the many social and extracurricular activities at the school during my first year there, and so this was one of my attempts to address that perceived lack.
I’d spent my four years of high school ensconced in the music and drama departments and made most of my friends that way. (Well, I guess it wasn’t so much “making friends” as “spending all my waking hours outside class with a certain cross-section of people who became my closest friends by fortunate default.”) But since I had no intention of pursuing performance at the university or professional level, I suddenly found myself adrift without a scene or (I feared) an identity. The radio station seemed like an ideal place to bridge my interests and concerns—listening to and appreciating music, yes, but also performing that appreciation by talking about music on the air, and hopefully also meeting other music obsessives who might want to be my friend.
I dutifully filled out the form applying for my own show and indicated that I’d also be happy to be part of the committee who would review incoming CDs. (That job mostly entailed listening to music and then noting which songs were interesting and cool and worth listening to, but also, crucially, which contained swear words that couldn’t be broadcast on the air.) I, like the asshole English major I was, corrected a bunch of typos on the intake form. Despite being that girl, when the station manager sent out assignments subsequently, he granted me a two-hour on-air placement—which he took the liberty of dubbing “The Grammar Rodeo.” (It was literally years before I found out that that was actually a Simpsons reference.)
The kicker, though, was that my show was scheduled for 4-6am on Tuesday mornings, pretty much the worst time slot imaginable—too late for most night owls to still be awake, but also too early for early risers to be getting up. But, Monday nights I’d do my best to get a few hours of sleep, then peel myself out of bed around 3:15 so that I could set off on foot across campus around 3:30, so I could get to the station in time to take over at 4 for the guys who were on the air before me.
This was, perhaps needless to say, not the ideal time slot for socializing and making friends—no one else was ever at the station during those hours, for obvious reasons. (This would have been the fall of 1998, and thus the infancy of widespread internet use, though, so the station actually had an online feed that broadcast the shows from their website. This enabled a dear friend of mine who was attending the University of Southern California to be able to listen to my show during his own late-night study sessions, which was one of the nicest things that anyone had ever done for me at that point.) But, thanks to my solitude, it was at least a great time to nerd out and listen to music for two hours straight.
At some point that semester, I had reviewed and put into rotation an album called Adventure by a group I’d never heard of called Furslide.
As I’ve written about before, I’d never had that much interest in electric guitars. (This was right on the cusp of my burgeoning obsession with Jimi Hendrix.) My dad was a piano player and trumpet aficionado, and, good girl that I was, my tastes had followed suit—I liked anything that was “jazzy” or that hearkened to the show tunes that I’d spent my life listening to and performing. I was way too square and sheltered to have had any interest in Riot Grrl in the early ’90s, and I generally sniffed my nose at most of the more mainstream, Lilith Fair-approved artists as well. All of which is to say, if I’d not been assigned, at random, to review the Furslide album, there’s very little chance I ever would have encountered it otherwise.
But, oh, how fortuitous! I fell head over heels in love with Adventure.
Unbeknowst to me at the time, Furslide’s lead singer and guitarist, Jen Turner, was already something of a legend among guitar nerds for her work on Natalie Merchant’s Tigerlily, especially “Carnival.”
But, similar to how I came to love Jimi Hendrix’s vocals as much as his guitar playing, I was first and foremost bowled over by Turner’s voice.
As a musician myself, I always paid extra attention to any woman vocalists who were doing stuff that I couldn’t replicate while singing along with them in the privacy of my car—whether that was Tracey Thorn’s soulful croon on Everything but the Girl’s Amplified Heart or Alanis Morissette’s stratospheric yelp on the ubiquitous Jagged Little Pill. With Turner, it was that shred at the top of her range that really killed me. Check out what she does when she really gets cranking at around 2:59 in the song “Shallow” and you’ll hear what I mean:
And even though I willfully harbored an almost complete blind spot for most contemporary electric guitar playing, I couldn’t deny how much I loved the punch and crunch of her sound. It was playful yet edgy, somehow spacious inside its laser-sharp rhythmic dexterity and sonic density.
Much like how my love for Counting Crows confounded friends who didn’t understand how or why I could like that band’s noisier moments, even I had trouble defending and defining for myself what it was about her sound that I loved so much, or why it was that I loved her playing and specifically didn’t like the playing in, oh, Weezer or Nirvana or Pearl Jam or dozens of other beloved guitar rock bands.
Even though I probably wouldn’t have understood it as such at the time, I think I needed that little bit of inscrutability in my life. I’d always attempted to make myself as legible and understandable as possible, assuming that, even if I were “quirky,” as long as people essentially could get where I was coming from, I’d be easier to love. But silently, unconsciously, I think I was already starting to realize how exhausting that attempt to art-direct my own image was. I was allowed to have a little bit of privacy, to maintain a little bit of mystery, to cultivate a degree of unpredictability.
Not unlike my wandering around an all-but-abandoned campus in the middle of the night in an effort to find a place where I belonged, Turner’s music was something of an island unto itself in the mid to late ’90s. Goddesslike to those in the know, but easily overlooked by those who weren’t, as she sang herself in the song “Hawaii,” “everyone is looking for that fine, fine line / between contentment and the troubled mind of genius.” She, I would argue, found that line on an underappreciated album released in 1998, which gave me a nice little nudge in the right direction to keep looking for my own.
To learn more about Jen Turner and her various other musical projects, check out this great short blog post, which seems to be updated periodically.
Peach Buzz: The Best Hair Stylist in Chicago
For almost as long as I can remember, I’ve Done Stuff to my hair.
I got my first perm in something like first or second grade (which seems insane to me now—all those chemicals!); I got my last perm in the summer of ’93 right before I took my first international trip to France with a group of students and teachers from the high school that I’d be entering that fall. Thinking that I wouldn’t have to futz with my hair too much while traveling, that the curls would render it already “done,” I didn’t anticipate that all the walking around in the sunshine in early August would work its own magic on my chemically treated hair and so I returned home with an incredible mop of orange frizz.
After those curls finally grew out and/or got cut away, I went through a few years with my natural brown hair either in a simple bob with bangs or in a short pixie-esque crop.
And then I went blonde for the first time.
I was a junior in high school in Northwest Indiana and the choir director had taken two of the upper level groups on a trip to sing at some sort of event in Atlanta. One of the first nights there in the hotel, my gorgeous friend Rhonda convinced me to buy a highlighting kit at a nearby drugstore. Thinking I’d just end up with a few tastefully sun-kissed light brown streaks in my hair, we spent the next few hours pulling strands through the plastic cap and baking my head with the bleach mixture we’d mixed up in the hotel bathroom. Well, surprise surprise, I of course came out of the experience a genuine bottle blonde. And I fucking loved it.
Throughout my remaining teen years and early 20s, I would play with various drugstore hair colors, never settling on a cut or color for longer than a few months. I’ve always been extremely bad at predicting my own body’s needs–hunger usually takes me by surprise, resulting in an immediate decree that I have to eat NOW, and it’s pretty much the same with my hair. Especially at that point in my life, I never had the good sense to predict that, yes, after about six to eight weeks, I would need to get some sort of trim or reshaping, so I never settled down with one hair dresser. All my haircuts happened in desperate trips to “walk-ins welcome” chain salons or in poorly lit bathrooms at the mercy of girlfriends with shaky hands and dull scissors.
A couple years after I moved to Chicago, though, I knew it was finally time to find a big-girl salon, to graduate to a real, skilled hair stylist that I could come to rely on, one who would really get to know my hair, help guide me to flattering cuts, and safely apply good-quality color.
And that’s exactly what I found in Bobby Paul at Orbit Salon.
He was initially recommended to me by a friend at work who’d gotten an amazing asymmetrical cut from him that was somehow incredibly punk yet still chic enough to be workplace appropriate.
I don’t remember the first few haircuts that I got from Bobby, but I do remember the first (and last) time that I showed up for an appointment after having unsuccessfully bleached my own hair at home to an unflattering brassy yellow rather than the sunny, shiny blonde I’d been hoping for. It had been several months since I’d had my last cut, and my hair was grown out and shapeless, but I was too embarrassed to show up at the salon with my self-administered terrible dye job. When I couldn’t take it any longer and finally came in for a long overdue trim, I sheepishly admitted that I’d been hesitant to come in because I didn’t want him to yell at me for messing up my hair. He looked me up and down and drawled, in his inimitable Texan way, “girl, I’m not going to yell at you, but . . . do you want me to tone that?!” I think that was really the moment that solidified both our friendship and our working relationship.
The salon where Bobby slings beauty is on Clark Street, just a couple blocks south of Wrigley Field. As the neighborhood and the salon’s clientele grew ever more conservative, I grew more and more bold. As the type of women who wanted crazy cuts and extreme colors moved to other neighborhoods, I became something of a unicorn, the weird one who was more than open to experimenting and having fun.
The first really incredible dye job that I got from him was just before the ombre trend became ubiquitous, so the fact that he deliberately dyed my roots a dark, deep purple while the length was streaked to look like a glowing autumnal forest fire full of reds and glimmering soft browns was like this insane magic trick that left me feeling like I’d literally been transformed into a work of art.
In subsequent years he’s given me varying shades of pink, purple, blonde, blue, and green, many of which elicit gasps of delight from strangers on the street or in the grocery store, who beg to know where I get my hair done.
Currently, I’m rocking a dark purple streaked with one bold orange chunk.
And even though he teases me and calls me Lola Granola when, every once in a while, I feel the need to chop everything off and go completely natural just to give my head a break from all the chemical punishment (and check out how much of my grey has grown in), he always makes me look my best even when I know he’s disappointed that he won’t have the chance to do something fun.
Bobby is nothing short of a hair wizard. And game recognizes game—a dear friend was dating a fancy hair stylist several years ago, and I’ll never forget the time the boyfriend calmly and coldly assessed my hair for a few moments before declaring, “that’s a good hair cut.”
I’ve recommended Bobby’s services to dozens of friends and acquaintances over the years, many of whom he still remembers and asks me about years after they’ve moved to other parts of the country. He’s the consummate professional who makes what he does look easy, who never takes more time than he needs, and who never forces his tastes onto clients and always gives them the best possible version of what they’ve asked for.
My maternal grandmother was a hair stylist long before I was born, long before she went to work as a radio dispatcher at our small town’s police station, though she still kept a hair washing sink and an old-fashioned chair hair dryer in her basement. It was one of the great, glorious pleasures of my young life to have her wash my hair or give my bangs a trim when they needed it, especially when she would also tell me stories of how scandalous it was that she bleached a big strawberry blonde streak into her nearly black hair in the 1940s, when she was a glamorous habituée at all the local dance halls. Maybe an instinctive knowledge of and respect for the transformative power of a good hair cut is in my blood; maybe it’s simply nostalgia for the familial comforts of my early childhood. What I do know is that Bobby Paul gives the best hair cuts in the city of Chicago, and it’s nothing but a complete delight to be remade by his artistry on a regular basis.
Orbit Salon is located at 3481 North Clark Street; call 773-883-1166 to make an appointment.
Good Luck: Street Life in the City of Chicago
I.
Leaving my office for a quick walk to get some fresh air and clear my head after lunch, I eschew my usual path, heading east on busy Chicago Avenue rather than north up relatively quiet Franklin. I don’t put my headphones on like I normally do. I cross the intersection at Wells. About half way up the next block, I see a man stumbling as he walks across the middle of the street. He raises his right foot to the curb but loses his balance and falls back into the street, flat, prone. Instinctively I call out, “can I give you a hand?!” and hear a guy’s voice a few paces behind me ask the same almost simultaneously.
I also hear my mother’s voice, in memory. I see her the way I saw her as a tiny child, opening the driver’s side door of our van while we’re stopped at a stoplight, yelling across the street to a man crossing on foot at the intersection, asking if he needs help. After a few moments, she ducks back into the vehicle and closes her door. “Why did you do that? Did you know him?” I ask. “He’s blind,” she says, her moral compass firm and direct.
The guy and I rush into the street and each grab one of the man’s hands. We help him to his feet and walk him slowly up onto the sidewalk and get him leaning, then sitting, against the wall of the building on the corner. A third man sees all this happening and approaches us, asking if he should call 911. While he does that, we ask the man if he’s OK, if he needs anything. He mumbles, and I can’t understand what he’s saying. I don’t know how to help. It’s cold, and I’m bundled in my overcoat, hat, scarf, and gloves; the man has a hoodie on underneath his jacket but no gloves. He’s wearing a Streetwise ID on a lanyard. His head slumps against his chest as he dozes off or passes out.
The man with the phone says 911 is sending a squad car to the scene, and I blanch inwardly a bit. It’s Chicago. I wish there were some other option available besides the cops. The first guy makes a move to keep going on his way, and, glancing back down at the man on the sidewalk before walking away, he sagely intones to me, “probably heroin.” I’m taken aback by this confident assumption. Maybe he knows more about drug symptoms than I do, and yes, there’s a methadone clinic up the street, but . . . to just jump right to that conclusion?
The man with the phone says he’s going to wait until the police arrive; I say that I’ll stand and wait with him too. A tall man walks past us and then turns around and looks down at the man on the sidewalk. “Adrian, is that you?” he asks, stooping down to flip over the Streetwise ID dangling at his midsection. “I know him,” he tells us, and we give a short narration of what happened. “Probably drunk,” the tall man shrugs and walks away.
The man with the phone and I make polite chit-chat as we scan Chicago Avenue for the arrival of the police cruiser. He asks if I’m a student at Moody Bible Institute; I say, no, that I work at an office down the street and was just out for a walk. He says he was doing the same. I don’t tell him that I actually recognize him from the train; I see him periodically getting off the brown line around the same time as I do in the morning. He says how not that long ago he and his wife had called 911 to report something happening in their neighborhood, but that by the time anyone drove up, it was quiet again. I’ve definitely called 911 before in response to noises that sounded like gunshots or other violent altercations, so I get it, I do, but the assumption that the police are automatically the right people to call when things go bump in the night is . . . complicated. His trust seems, yes, privileged, but also naïve, suburban. Which, I suppose, can be much the same thing. I benignly assent that, yes, sometimes the cops are overworked and can’t get to all their calls in a timely manner.
A young woman approaches us and asks, in a heavy accent, where a certain address is. He and I stammer a bit while we mentally orient ourselves on the grid, trying to figure out if it’s walkable or not, and which direction she should head in. “You should get on this bus,” the man instructs her as the 66 pulls up in front of us, into the spot where the man had tumbled just a few minutes earlier. The bus door opens and the woman shouts her question to the driver; she gets on and I can see them trying to communicate as the bus pulls off. “I think she’s gotta go all the way to, like, Ashland,” I say to the man with the phone, recalling the address that she was asking us about. “That’s way too far to walk from here, especially in the cold.”
We hear a siren in the distance, approaching rapidly. It speeds past and turns a corner a block west of us. A second cruiser blows a stoplight and turns to follow. Then a police van trundles by going in the other direction, driving past us as well. We nervously check the time, wondering if we’ve been blown off. The man is still sitting slumped against the wall, though he’s starting to stir and incoherently mumble again. Neither of us try to engage him, nor does he seem particularly aware of our presence. Another crowd gathers at the bus stop. Another bus pulls up to load them all on.
Finally we see a cop car slow down across the street from us. We wave to them and then they turn around and park in the bus stop. An older woman who’d been intermittently pacing the sidewalk in front of us suddenly stops and asks if we’ve seen her keys. I guess we seemed legitimate now that the police were approaching us.
The cops were both African American women and I felt a small twinge of relief, hopeful that they probably weren’t going to rough this guy up or otherwise unduly hassle him. I also wondered, though, about how they’re treated on the job. Does their supervisor send them out on calls like this that are perceived to be relatively unimportant? Do they get sent out to calls that need “a woman’s touch”?
The man with the phone immediately begins explaining to one of the cops what happened, and I stand by attentively to be sure he’s getting all the details right. The second cop approaches the man sitting on the ground, who by this time had pulled his hoodie up over his head. “Let me see your face, sir,” she asks him, with something like a sense of humor in her voice. Drunk or high as he was, he’s almost acting like a child.
Once we explain to the first officer what happened, and once it seems like I probably won’t be witnessing any human rights violations, the man and I start to walk our separate ways. I thank him for calling 911, he thanks me for sticking around. Genuinely, warmly. I wonder what the social contract between us will be when and if we ever notice each other on the train platform in the future.
“I love you too,” the second cop says back to the man on the ground, and I finally feel OK enough to walk away.
II.
Heading out for a walk after lunch another day, I point myself in the direction of a raw food restaurant a couple blocks away from my office where I want to get something to drink. I leave my headphones off again. I cut down to Superior via Wells, and I feel sad that the old Howard Johnson diner has been knocked down and replaced by an enormous high rise. The last time I ate there was the Fourth of July in 2012 when Brian and I were on our way to see the first Magic Mike in the theater. I had a BLT with real B that day, because freedom. Now there’s gonna be some kind of smoothie place on the ground floor of the building, which, frankly, I’m not not looking forward to. I admit I’m fancy enough to get excited about convenient access to health food.
As I approach LaSalle, I see a line of people on the sidewalk waiting outside the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago. I’m pretty sure they run a midday soup kitchen or food pantry there. I often see a line stretching around the corner when I’m out running errands on my lunch hour. I continue walking east on Superior toward Clark. I see two men walking toward me from the far end of the block, and a dude comes up behind me and zips past, continuing toward them at a much faster pace. As he gets to the end of the block, one of the men asks him something that I can’t hear, and the dude blatantly ignores them and continues walking. When I finally approach them, I smile. About a beat later, just as they’ve walked past me, one of them asks, “are you smiling at my husband or are you smiling at me?” I turn around and chirp, “I was smiling at you both!” The second man continues walking, but I can hear him laughing, which makes the man who called out to me laugh too.
“I don’t know why I said that,” he says to me, trying to pull himself together. “He’s laughing,” he says, looking back at his friend.
“And now you’re laughing too,” I say.
“All we need is a cigarette,” he implores me with a smile on his face.
“Oh, I don’t smoke,” I say lightly, as if it just occurred to me.
“Can I have a hug then?” he asks.
If I were in a worse mood, or if I’d felt threatened at all by the interaction, this would have become complicated. Could this be considered harassment? I realize I do feel slightly pressured not to say no, but I also don’t in any way feel endangered by the request. I wonder if I’m setting a bad precedent, allowing this guy to think he can just ask women on the street for hugs whenever he wants, like their physical affection and attention is owed to him. But also, I feel like, as a human, who asks for a hug unless they just really, really need a hug? And I am nothing if not an enthusiastic hugger. In the split second that it takes me to scan through that analysis mentally, I say, “of course” and reach up to wrap my arms around his shoulders.
“Good luck,” I say to him, in the neutral way I try to end most of my interactions with strangers who stop to ask me for directions or other information.
As we part, he shouts back one more time, “who do you think is going to win—the Bulls or the Bulls?”
Remembering my youthful pride at living in the suburbs of Chicago during Michael Jordan’s heyday, one of the only times in my life that I took any remote interest in sports, I call back, “the Bulls, of course!”
“Duh!” he shouts in response, slightly teasing my girlish affect.
I round the corner onto Clark, heading south, and see a guy who works in my building standing in the middle of the next intersection, leaning into the open window of a fancy car idling at the stoplight. “Congratulations!” he shouts in to driver and other passenger.
III.
At the conclusion of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Samuel R. Delany writes,
Interclass contact conducted in a mode of good will is the locus of democracy as visible social drama, a drama that must be supported and sustained by political, education, medical, job, and cultural equality of opportunity if democracy is to mean to most people any more than an annual or quatra-annual visit to a voting booth; if democracy is to animate both infrastructure and superstructure. . . . It is not too much to say, then, that contact—interclass contact—is the lymphatic system of a democratic metropolis. . . . Contact fights the networking notion that the only “safe” friends we can ever have must be met through school, work, or preselected special interest groups: from gyms and health clubs to reading groups and volunteer work. Contact and its human rewards are fundamental to cosmopolitan culture, to its art and its literature, to its politics and its economics; to its quality of life.
I’ve often spoken about how I feel myself to be a committed city person, but lately I’ve felt ground down by urban life. Not because it’s dirty or because there’s no privacy or because it’s simply too much; because it’s become too clean and because people are too isolated and because certain areas are becoming too much the same. The building where my beloved Thai restaurant Panang used to be is now being converted into Flats apartments; fancy people at Whole Foods would rather avoid eye contact and literally reach around my physical body rather than acknowledging my existence and simply saying “excuse me” as they grab a box of gluten-free crackers.
The city is mutable; of course I know that and of course it has to be. But when I examine my heart for any patriotic impulse and can’t seem to find one, I find in its place a devotion to people. And I cling to an expectation that cities are the best and most reliable places where I can practice my devotion. When my ability to feel connected to the pulse of city life feels compromised for whatever reason, I feel not only concerned, but unmoored. And that’s what I find myself hungering for, as I launch myself back out into the city streets seeking to redress that lack and enjoy what remains.
My Movie Year, 2016
When I was more actively pop culture blogging in my 20s, the end-of-year reports were obviously one of the big highlights.
What was the best music? What were the best movies?
Much of this list-making was performative and ego-based, of course—wanting to appear to have seen and heard the smartest and coolest stuff, to have the “right” opinions on it all, to be unassailably in-the-know, to be safely elevated as some kind of taste-maker even if it was just to my tiny band of followers and friends.
The ego of this wasn’t only to receive praise, to want to, as our dear departed Carrie Fisher once put it, “be the greatest person you ever met…to explode in the night sky of your approval.” There was also the ego-based need to assert some kind of usefulness in the world, to make myself somehow indispensable so that I wouldn’t be so easily cast aside and forgotten.
If you’d asked me at the time about why I wrote about the stuff I wrote about, I probably would have said something to the effect that I just hoped my reviews would be useful to someone, that I hoped they might introduce someone to a piece of art that they would deeply connect with and love, or that I might steer them away from something that would offend, disturb, or disappoint them.
The thing that I never could have admitted, though, was that I also wanted desperately to be given credit, forever, for that service. I wanted to be assured of my worth, to essentially be some kind of helper animal wearing a t-shirt or harness announcing my centrality to the smooth working of the world around me, announcing that I was engaged in doing a very important job, so that I could combat my terrified suspicion that I was, in fact, inconsequential, not only to the wider world but also to those who were kindly but most likely lying about loving me.
Come for the pithy one-liners about George Clooney, stay for the darkly desperate tap-dancing for validation!
Not dissimilarly, as far as searching for my unique place in the cosmos, this year-end list-making always had a touch of the metaphysical or mystical to it. (Perhaps invisibly, but it was folded in there for me at least.) Somehow I thought that the art that I’d consumed over the past twelve months was some sort of oracle that, when regarded as a whole, could teach me about myself, where I’d come from and where I was headed.
I think it’s no coincidence that I eventually ended up in a clairvoyant training program whose whole method entailed teaching students to describe the pictures that they saw in their own minds’ eyes. I think this must be why I took to my psychic abilities so naturally—seeing and reporting on the details and vividness of clairvoyantly received images was, for me, basically exactly like seeing and reporting on the details and vividness of scenes in a movie.
As a film student and amateur critic, I never had a head for plot. Logical contradictions or absurd suspensions of disbelief or internal consistency meant nothing to me. It was all about vibe, emotion, meaningful rhymes with other films in the genre or director’s body of work, subtle betrayals of stated meaning revealed by a carelessly chosen bit of mise en scene or dialogue.
Almost as soon as I recognized this, I shut that blog down.
Partly, yes, it was because I’d been writing there for nearly six years and was simply getting bored with it. Partly it was because my life had become busy in a way that didn’t afford me the time to write there on any kind of regular basis anymore. Partly it was because that busyness also meant that I didn’t have time to see as many movies or go to as many concerts as I used to, hence eliminating the fodder I would have written about anyway. Partly it was because I was finally ensconced in several communities where I had actual, real people to talk to on a regular basis so that I didn’t have to shout into the void of the internet as desperately in order to feel like I had someone, anyone, to communicate with.
But, undeniably, partly it was also because I was getting a purer hit of the drug, so to speak—rather than reading pictures at a remove via a director’s art, I could read the pictures that I was seeing with my own inner vision just by being awake and alive in my own everyday life.
All that being said, it blows my mind a bit that I’ve seen so few films this year. (Or in the past several years, really.) I still get a huge thrill out of going to the movies; I still treasure them as an art form that even well-regarded serial television will never duplicate or replace; their visuals, at their best, still enhance and inform my own inner visions. Even though the stuff I have seen would hardly be considered important or essential or somehow defining of the year just passed, I greedily treasure every moment that I spent dreaming, wide awake, in the dark.
To the best of my record-keeping ability, I’m pretty sure this is everything I saw since January, both first run and revival:
Youth
The Revenant
Chimes at Midnight
Superman vs. Batman
Born to Be Blue
Miles Ahead
Keanu
Captain America: Civil War
High Rise
The Seventh Seal
Love and Friendship
Stranger than Paradise
The Red Shoes
Older than Ireland
Yojimbo
Star Trek Beyond
Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World
The Magnificent Seven (2016, dir. Antoine Fuqua)
Queen of Katwe
Doctor Strange
Gimme Danger
Arrival
Rogue One
Jackie
I think a lot about an interview that Quentin Tarantino gave a little over a decade ago where he said,
A movie doesn’t have to do everything. A movie just has to do a couple of things. If it does those well and gives you a cool experience, a cool night at the movies, an emotion, that’s good enough, man. But movies that get it all right are few and far between. It got to a point in the ’80s when you didn’t even hold a bad ending against a movie, because every movie had a cop-out ending. If you were going to hold bad endings against movies you’d never have liked anything.
Maybe I’d always agreed with that assessment without having had the words to say so. Or maybe I just read that quote at the right moment, while my own tastes and filters were still at the outside edge of being moldable. Nevertheless, I deeply agree. And I make it a point to try to identify those couple of things that a movie does well every time I watch something. Both so that I don’t feel like I’ve wasted my time and money if I happen to see a movie that didn’t particularly appeal to me, and, more cosmically, so that I feel like I’ve made some small attempt, in my own way, to honor the time, effort, and talent that went into making even a subpar film.
Here, then, are a couple of things that have stuck with me the most, from the small selection of what I’ve listed above.
“No! For sport!”
Werner Herzog, at this point, is not only a complete parody of himself but also one of the few remaining directors whose films I will see without question, regardless of whether I’m inherently interested in the subject matter or not. Lo and Behold was tremendously spotty, thanks to both his own pushy first-person intrusions and a few of the vignettes that devolved into holier-than-thou condescension (the bits featuring the family who professed that the internet was the work of the devil and the kids in the rehab facility for game addiction most especially).
But, as ever, there were beautiful moments of humanity revealed. Ted Nelson’s glee near the beginning when Herzog credits him for the elegance of his conception of how hypertext links should have worked was breathtaking in its innocence. But the moment I find myself replaying in my mind again and again is when notorious hacker Kevin Mitnick is concluding his story about worming his way into a major communications company, basically just by making a series of exceedingly polite telephone calls. Herzog asks him something to the effect of, “why did you do this? For malicious reasons?” And Mitnick instantly shouts back, “No! For sport!” with a passionate purity that totally knocked me out. That, to me, is on a par with Philippe Petit walking between the towers of the World Trade Center on a high wire, just for the useless beauty of it, just because he, alone, could.
The last three minutes of “The Magnificent Seven”
Embarrassing admission time: I’ve never seen The Seven Samurai nor John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven. But, I had an unexpected evening to spare this fall and the 2016 Magnificent Seven remake by Antoine Fuqua happened to be playing at the movie theater around the corner from my apartment and I liked the casting enough that I figured why not catch it. So, though the film student in me is dying a humiliating little death right now that I can’t do a proper compare/contrast with the older versions, I’ll just say that the whole point of this particular movie was its final (approximate) three minutes.
After the savagery of the final gun battle, who remained? Among a town now populated and left to be led solely by women, children, and old or somehow infirm men, one young (white) boy looks up to watch the heroes of the day riding off into the horizon. And who were those heroes? A black man, a Mexican man, and a Native American man. This is what I mean about the power of movies to inspire, enhance, and inform our own inner visions—I want to live in that world. I perceive the necessary inevitability of that world. A world where it is unquestionable that young white children should be able to see and know, at an early and formative age, men of color who are heroic, who are depicted as survivors, as powerful, as worthy of emulation and inspiration.
“I shall remember this hour of peace, the strawberries, the bowl of milk, your faces in the dusk.”
Further embarrassing former film student admissions: I’d somehow never seen The Seventh Seal before this year. But, as I am lucky to live near the Music Box Theatre, where I can easily see classic films, on a big screen, on a regular basis, I was able to catch it at a matinee with some friends over Memorial Day weekend.
No one ever told me how genuinely funny this movie is! Having only seen Persona in a feminist film class at Indiana University, I was in no way prepared for the genuine delight woven throughout what popular wisdom led me to believe would be another Very Serious and Important Art Film. (No one ever told me what a babe young Max von Sydow is either.)
And of course the hinge on which the film rests is the incredibly tender strawberries and milk scene.
In about nine short minutes it manages to hit all of my emotional buttons in the way that it celebrates an ephemeral moment of beauty and intimacy among an improvised group of friends and chosen family.
In that spirit, I thank you for sharing time and sweetness, even for just a few moments, with me here.
Fifteen Thoughts About Jimi Hendrix on the Occasion of His Birthday
1. Rock music has, stylistically and technically, never moved beyond Jimi Hendrix. Fact.
2. My dad was a keyboard player with a trumpet fetish who mainly listened to jazz, show tunes, and doo-wop around the house, so I actually grew up hearing very little guitar-centric music. The hair metal bands of the ’80s were mainly heard through maxed-out sound systems in cars speeding past the busy intersection where our home was located. As a child, I found those sounds off-putting, if not downright frightening. The ’90s grunge bands, to me, were even worse, all the moreso because my angsty younger brother adopted Nirvana as his band and would play their albums at deafening volumes in his room. Prissy teenage do-gooder that I was, I fucking haaaaated it. In subsequent years, my brother was eventually inspired to pick up an electric guitar of his own, and my dad optimistically viewed this as their chance to bond over music the way he and I had previously bonded over the piano. In one of his finer and more sensitive moments of parenting, he chose not to criticize the grunge that my brother loved but instead attempted to merely enhance his CD collection with recordings of other great electric guitar players. To this end he’d purchased a copy of the Hendrix compilation Jimi Hendrix: The Ultimate Experience for my brother at some point, but for whatever reason, I dubbed it onto cassette and adopted it as my own.
3. Mainly, I remember driving myself back to Indiana University after some vacation or other and listening to the tape in the car on my way down. The comp is paced really thoughtfully, and I remember getting toward the end and hearing his live recording of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in its entirety for what was probably the first time. I was stuck in traffic somewhere on I-465 and just sat there sobbing my eyes out.
4. After college graduation, I spent a few months bumming around Seattle, living with a dear friend who’d recently moved there for a job as a sales rep with Samsonite. The Experience Music Project Museum (now officially known as MoPOP, I guess) had just recently opened and we were eager to check it out. In one of the first exhibits that we walked through, there was a display featuring Jimi’s handwritten lyrics for “Angel.” I cried standing there in front of it.
5. Thanks to all this, it got to the point where I both considered myself and was known as A Jimi Hendrix Fan.
6. Another good friend gave me a couple Hendrix CDs for either my birthday or Christmas one year. He was a devotee of Eric Clapton and so affixed handwritten speech bubbles onto the covers that said things like, “Allison! Hey, baby. I’m just practicin’ to get better than that dandy Clapton.”
It was cute and it made me laugh but was also one of those does-not-compute moments for me. Like, literally? There are people in the world who actively prefer Clapton to Hendrix? And not only just “people” in the abstract, but one of my best friends?? How is there any contest or comparison between them at all? As Charles Shaar Murray puts it in his book Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and Post-War Pop:
Eric Clapton, on the other hand, played the blues something like Vladimir Nabokov wrote English: with the masterful formal grasp of one who has studied so intensely that he learns the rules of his chosen language or discipline to a far greater extent than many who have always simply assumed them and instinctively operated within them. Like Nabokov—and, for that matter, like Joseph Conrad and Jack Kerouac, both of whom came to English from, respectively, Polish and French—what Clapton was able to create and express through his acquired outlet was both a revelation to and an influence on many native “speakers.” Yet the cultural distance which provides perspective also imposes isolation; and in an art form where nuance is all, sterility is the almost inevitable result.
7. Stupidly, though, I think there were times that I actually forgot Hendrix was primarily revered as a guitar player. Because I actually really loved his singing voice. I know he didn’t consider himself much of a singer and credited Bob Dylan with giving him the courage to utilize his own perfectly imperfect vocals. But, partially because I was a singer myself and partially because I didn’t have much frame of reference for what made him such a uniquely gifted guitarist, I really gravitated and responded to the good humor, ease, and mysticism in his voice.
8. In my early days working as the editorial assistant at my day job, I found myself doing some light production work on Greg Tate’s book Midnight Lightning.
Tate’s writing totally blew my mind, but the bit that really knocked me out was this quote from Albert Allen about Hendrix’s death:
While the other type of sleep, the light sleep is coming upon you, there’s two sockets where you can go into. One socket is death and one socket is the socket to live. I think they call that an “alpha-jerk.” An alpha-jerk is—have you ever felt as though, “Oh wow, I’m going into the wrong hole here”? And you really feel funny, like that’s possibly the hole to die. And the other side is to go ahead and sleep and get into your subconscious and whatnot, which we normally go into. I believe that Jimi, possibly, could have got into his alpha-jerk field and it kind of felt groovy to him because he was high, slightly high, and he said, “Damn, I’m Jimi Hendrix, I wonder if I can die?” And the alpha-jerk came on him and he just said, Fuck it, let me try the alpha, and slipped on out.
9. In early 2011, I’d been singing with the band Tiny Magnets for about a year. In part because we were such a guitar-driven band, I found myself, perhaps naturally, listening to a lot of Hendrix. I’d dump a couple of different comps and maybe Are You Experienced into a playlist on my iPhone and would set the tracks to shuffle. One day on my commute to work, “Can You See Me” somehow came up twice. And then a day or two later, I went to see a friend’s band play at the Empty Bottle and one of the other bands on the bill covered “Can You See Me.” “That’s weird,” the bass player in my band—another huge Hendrix fan—laughed. “That’s not really one of his songs that gets played that often.” We left rehearsal together one night soon thereafter and saw, in an otherwise un-graffiti’d alley, a stencil of Jimi’s face on the garage door across from where we were parked.
11. I was about six months into my formal training as a clairvoyant at that point, so I had no choice but to go into psychic meditation about all these signs and coincidences. And I discovered, with no small amount of incredulity, that Jimi kept showing up because he wanted to be my spirit guide (or tutelary ghost companion). “Hi, Jimi,” I welcomed him, deciding it was best not to let my own energetic signature slip into fawning fan girl mode. He came and sought me out, after all; I thought it was only polite to stay cool, acknowledge his presence, and carry on as equals.
12. Mostly, I called on his spirit whenever I went to band practice. He, quite naturally, loved the noise, loved the energy, and I felt that he just really missed the vibe and camaraderie that arose when a group of people were assembled to play, loudly, in a room together. It was a pleasure to invite his spirit to be present with us. We played really well that spring and through the summer when we recorded and released our album Time to Try.
13. As thanks and tribute to his spiritual influence on my life, I bought this gorgeous necklace to wear to my clairvoyant graduation:
14. My clairvoyant training ended in late September 2011, and Jimi’s energy kind of dissipated from my life after that. My band then ended up playing what would be our last gig in that four-piece configuration in late October.
15. I somehow don’t think the two of those things were unrelated. As much as we might long for him to stick around, Jimi always knows when it’s time to make an exit.
