All The Bells And Whistles

The 00s: A Short List of Good Records from the Last Ten Years (Part 2)

Laurie Anderson, Live at Town Hall, New York City, September 19-20, 2001

Quotes from the show — some spoken, some sung, some in sing-speak:

From the Opening — We want to dedicate our music tonight to the great opportunity that we all have to begin to truly understand the events of the past few days, and to act upon them with courage and with compassion, as we make our plans to live in a completely new world.

From Love Among the Sailors at the close of the concert — And if this is the work of an angry god / I want to look into his angry face. / There is no where to land on, no safe place. / Come with us, into the mountains / Hombres, sailors, comrades.

From O Superman, first released in 1981: This is the hand / The hand that takes. / Here come the planes. / They’re American planes. / Made in America.

Look at the date on this. The fact that Laurie Anderson held the concert at all was statement enough. The music she makes is smooth and uneasy, submerged, dreamlike. Her voice sounds omniscient, compassionate and detached. There are moments of playfulness and there are thoughtful moments. But the entire show is brave, as Anderson uses art to open up her audience to a world full of fear, closing rapidly around them.

by Timothy Imse

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Benny Jay: New Trier Literary Man

It’s Literary Fest at New Trier High School, and I’m dashing up the stairs to tell all the kids who have come to hear me speak – and I just know there’s a multitude of them – all about this great thing I do called journalism.

So here I come – through the halls, past a security guard, and into the library, where I see….

Two girls and one boy sitting around a desk.

The door slams shut behind me. “This is it?” I ask.

“This is it,” says the boy.

I look at the schedule of speakers. They’ve got quite an impressive list of writers on tap for the festival and I’m up against the most impressive of them all: Harold Ramis, who’s speaking in the auditorium. That’s Harold Ramis as in the big-time Hollywood director, actor and screen writer who’s written such classics as “Caddyshack,” “Groundhog Day,” “Stripes,” “Analyze This” and – oh, you get the picture.

Basically, the kids had a choice: Me or Harold Ramis. I feel like a re-run of MASH on Superbowl Sunday.

“Maybe we should just go to the auditorium and hear Ramis,” I suggest.

“Can we?” asks the boy.

“Okay,” I say. “That was a joke….”

I sit in a chair at their table. They’re smiling – good, at least they’re cheerful.

“Do any of you ever read a newspaper?” I ask.

They shake their heads.

“Do any of you want to be journalists?”

More head shaking….

“So why did you sign up for this lecture?” I ask.

“We didn’t,” the boy explains. “A teacher told us to come here.”

It hits me – they were dragged here so I would have someone to talk to. As opposed to, you know, sitting in an empty library for the next hour or so, talking to myself.

I sigh, take a deep breath and launch into a rambling oration about journalism. As I talk I  see from the glassy glaze in their eyes that they couldn’t care less about anything I have to say. It’s not that they’re disrespectful – they’re not. Just bored out of their minds. I might as well be talking in a foreign language for all they’re retaining. In fact, I’m thinking of switching to Flemish — just to see if they notice.

Mercifully, I stop. “Let’s try something different,” I say. “Lets’ play the question game. You’re the reporter and I’m the subject. You’re interviewing me to gather information for a story. Okay?”

They nod.

“Only here’s the thing. You have to ask follow-up questions that play off my answers, which means you have to listen and think at the same time. Get it?”

They nod.

“Okay — go!”

One of the girls asks: “What’s your favorite band?”

“The Beatles….”

The boy asks: “What’s your favorite Beatles song?”

“`In My Life.’ I love that song. Do you know it?”

“No,” he says.

“Oh, my God — it’s a great song.” I clear my throat and start to sing: “There are places I remember….”

“Oh, I know that song,” says one of the girls….

Which is a miracle considering how I sing it.

“But these memories lose their meaning….”

I can’t remember the words — I never can remember words — so I’m winging it….

“When I think of love and what remains….”

Here’s the thing – they’re bobbing their heads. You know, like they’re into it.

“In my life, I love you more….”

Done.

Silence.

“Yeah,” I say. “Great song….”

More silence.

“Anyway, next question,” I say to one of the girls.

“Why do you like it?” she asks.

“It reminds me of John Lennon. I love John Lennon. After he got shot, my sister and I went to Lincoln Park for a memorial service. We stood on Cricket Hill at Montrose with a bunch of other people and we lit candles and everyone sang `In My Life.’  Every time I hear it, I think of John Lennon. It’s been twenty-eight years, but I still can’t believe someone shot John Lennon….”

And I can’t believe this — I’m getting all choked up. In the New Trier library at the New Trier Literary Fest, no less. My God, please don’t let this get around.

“Ask me another question before I start to cry….”

“I can’t think of a follow up,” says one of the girls.

“Any question then….”

“Okay,” she says. “what’s your favorite animal?”

“A dog,” I say. “Next question….”

“What kind of animal would you like to be?” asks the other girl.

I think: What the fu – where did that question come from?

I say: “I don’t know. What kind of animal would you like to be?”

“A wolf….”

“A wolf?”

“A wolf….”

“Why?”

“Cause they’re kinda brave and – I don’t know. I just would want to be a wolf….”

“Well, I’d want to be a bird….”

“A bird?”

“Not just any bird. But  a high-flying one, like an eagle. The funny thing is I don’t like heights. I won’t even go up on a ladder to change a light bulb. But I want to fly. Maybe I want to fly cause I secretly want to overcome my fear of heights….”

My God, I’m baring my inner soul to these kids.

The bell rings — time to go.

“Good job,” I tell them. “You got enough stuff to write a story.”

And so do I….

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Big Mike: An Institution Paralyzed By Porn

Some of us old bastards haven’t adapted very well to new technologies. Take one guy I know — I don’t want to name any names but his initials are BJ — he is to computers and the Internet as the newly discovered tribes of the Amazon are to advanced avionics. I’ll allow that he knows how to turn a computer on but generally within a couple of minutes he’ll have crashed it into the ground.

Then there are those who learned how to handle the Mac Plus or an MS-DOS get up way back in 1986 and there they’ve stayed. They remind me of people who adopted a style in high school when it was the hottest thing going but then, 20 years after the fact, they were still walking around wearing mullets and black stretch jeans.

I just started working in a place called The Book Case on Courthouse Square in beautiful downtown Bloomington, Indiana. (Come to think of it, calling it downtown Bloomington seems a tad generous, considering Six-Corners or Lincoln Square in Chi are exponentially more bustling.) Anyway, it’s an old family-owned business, run now by the last-in-line daughter, Constance, who took over only after every other relative who really was interested in the trade passed on.

The Book Case is a Bloomington institution. It has creaky wooden floors, an ancient cash register, shelving that was fabricated long before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and customers who just love the feel of books in their hands. Neither Constance nor any of her predecessors became rich running the place, but it has provided a good solid living for every one of them.

Her father sold newspapers and magazines as far back as the Great Depression, gradually adding books as the years passed. All he needed to run his successful business was ambition, a healthy selection of merchandise and a good safe cash drawer.

Constance first put a computer in the back office years ago, when the big book distributors like Ingram started switching to online-only ordering systems. So it’s not that she necessarily wanted to go high-tech but the industry dragged her, kicking and screaming, into the late 20th Century. She bought Lotus 1-2-3 to keep track of her inventory. She became an expert in it. She can show anybody how to use it. Only Lotus 1-2-3 is the AMC Gremlin of computer databases. Still, her system has worked very well for her — until yesterday.

Today was my second day on the job. I walked in and Constance greeted me thusly: “Welcome to our panic. We’re in the middle of an emergency!”

The truth is, Constance didn’t appear at all panicked. She cuts a rather round figure, moves glacially thanks to arthritic knees, and really doesn’t let anything bother her. She smiled as she said those words.

The “emergency” was her inability to get online. She had no idea why, only that every time she hit the Mozilla Firefox icon, she got a message telling her she wasn’t connected to the Internet. Yet, whenever she gave her HP Pavilion a command, it opened up Internet Explorer and sent her to any of several porn websites. Oops, her rig had been hijacked.

Constance has warned every employee not to muck around on the Internet on her computer. Someone must have ignored her. Someone — or someone’s visiting boyfriend — spent last night surfing websites that cater to a clientele fascinated by, say, BBWs or twinks or even plushies. Busted!

Constance is sure that’s how her computer got hijacked. She even tried to look at her Internet history to see who’d gone where but it all had been deleted, an act analogous to a second-story man wiping his fingerprints off the doorknob.

Now she can’t order books until her brother-in-law, who she says works at the Indiana University cyclotron and therefore is an expert in all things more complicated than an electric can opener, takes a look at her computer. What he’ll probably have to do is wipe the entire hard drive clean and reload Windows XP.

Acknowledging that, Constance asked me to copy all her Lotus 1-2-3 files onto a CD. I suggested she go to Office Depot and buy a $20 flash drive. She opened her safe and brought out a handful of them to show me. “I can’t get them to work with my computer,” she said.

Sure enough, I tried a few of her old flash drives and her computer couldn’t recognize any of them. So I copied all her files on some blank disks.

“Now I’ll call my brother in law,” she said.

She punched his number into the phone. After a moment, she said, “Hi, it’s me. Don’t you just hate computers?” Presumably, the voice on the other end told her no, so she amended her greeting. “Okay. Don’t you just hate my computer?” Her subsequent laughter tipped me that he wholeheartedly agreed.

Constance’s brother-in-law will come in to the The Book Case tonight, after work, to see what he can do about her computer problem. I never did find out what he does at the cyclotron. He may be a nuclear physicist. He may keep the facility’s computers in tip-top order. He also could be the janitor. Whatever, he works at the cyclotron — he can fix anything.

One thing Constance’s father never had to worry about was employees staring at pictures of naked people in a daisy chain on his time.

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Benny Jay: The Future Looks Bright

I  know I can be one of those geezers who moans about the current crop of kids – don’t get me talking about how much better music (Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, Dylan, The Beatles)  back in the day.

But allow me to sing a different song, at least for one day….

On Sunday, Sammy came by for a visit. He’s the son of Jeff, one of my oldest friends. Used to live down the street. Played football for my younger daughter’s high school. He was the lead blocker for Jordan, Daddy Dee’s son. Daddy Dee and I call him the Battering Ram, as in Sammy puts down his head and moves heaven and earth to get Jordan some running room.

He’s tough as nails, this boy Sammy. In his senior year, he found out he had mononucleosis just a few days before the big game against Lane Tech. My younger daughter told him: Sammy, if you play in that game, you could kill yourself.

He said I know, and played anyway. You’ve got to understand — it was the Lane game.

He played the whole game, too — on both sides of the ball. Pushed those big Lane Tech boys all over the field. The game came down to one play when Lane went for the bomb on third down when they were up a few points. Some kid from Sammy’s school picked off the pass and ran it back and, just like that, Sammy’s team won. To this day whenever Daddy Dee and I talk about that game – and we talk about it all the time – we ask ourselves: What the hell was that Lane coach thinking?

Anyway, Sammy and I stay up til two in the morning talking about this, that and the other thing. The kid’s 19-years-old and starting up his own business. He’s going to make millions before it’s said and done. We started reminiscing about the good old days when he and all the other neighborhood kids used to watch porn over at Joey’s house.  That’s this boy who lived down the street. Opened my eyes — I didn’t even know they played porn on cable TV til my daughter told me all about it. Hey, don’t say you can’t learn something from the younger generation.

Anyway, I’m walking the dog this morning – and, by the way, what else do I do? – when who do I bump into? Joey. That’s right. Turns out he plays guitar in a rock `n roll band and he got a job working on the field crew at Wrigley Field. He’s making good money, seeing all the games, meeting all the players and getting a nice tan. Damn, some kids get all the luck.

I tell him I knew another twenty-something-year-old guy who worked at Wrigley. His name’s Dave and he used to date Nora, one of my oldest daughter’s roommates.

Joey says, yeah, he knows her. And we talk about other kids – like Kimberly, who used to play basketball with my daughters and joined the Marines last year.

Well, guess what happens next. I go home. Pour myself some coffee. Fix myself a muffin (um, um good), crack open the newspaper, going to read an article about how great Joakim Noah’s been playing (is life good, or what?) and my cell phone rings. It’s Nora. Truth. Not making any of this up. She’s calling to say she got into the senior year honor’s writing program at college and she’s going to be studying play writing.

Man, let me tell you – this girl’s got talent. The other day she sent me one of her short stories.  About a boy who winds up killing half his family, or something like that. I love Nora like a daughter but this shit is weird. I tell my daughter – make sure you keep the bedroom door locked when you go to bed. Just kidding – sorta.

The deal on Nora is this – if she keeps this up (practice, girl, practice), she’s going to be the next Stephen King. Just remember – you heard it here first.

After talking to Nora, I’m flying high. As I told you, I tend to talk about how better things were back in the day, but truth be told, I love these kids to death. Always have. Always will.

Oh, one last thing – best news of all. That little girl Kimberly, who joined the Marines? Joey told me that she’s not getting shipped to Iraq or Afghanistan. Instead, they’re sending her to Japan and, get this, she’s going to learn Japanese. She already speaks Spanish and English. I’m telling you, she’ll wind up working at the United Nations, if this keeps up. And I’ll tell everyone – that girl used to play on my grammar school basketball team.

Anyway, amidst all the gloom and doom in the world today, I thought I’d give you some of the good news for a change.

I’m like the Christopher Walken character from Stephen King’s “The Dead Zone.” I can see things before they happen – and the future never looked so bright….

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Big Mike: The Man With A Country

Arthur retired 22 years ago. Like many other high school music teachers of his generation, he took gigs playing for tenor and jazz bands at country club dances and Elks, Moose and American Legion lodge affairs. He played music every day of the year but you’d never find his name on any Billboard charts. He made a living though, a good one, with a nice pension. He still takes an odd job once in a while, just to keep his trumpet fingers limber and to make an extra buck or two.

He got up this morning, saw the sun shining brilliantly and announced, “What a glorious day! I ordered this for my son.”

He’d just flown in from his Florida winter home Friday so he could attend his youngest son Danny’s surprise 50th birthday party last night.

This morning, he felt expansive and started telling stories. For instance, Danny’s wife Sophia reminded him that he loved to travel.

“That’s right,” Arthur said. “In the car I had an empty plastic anti-freeze bottle. It had a big opening in it. We had the four boys. I didn’t want to have to stop the car every fifteen minutes when we went traveling just so one of the boys could take a leak. They weren’t going to coordinate their bladders just for dear old Dad’s sake. So I had them go in the bottle. Tommy, my second-youngest, would never say he wanted to go but I always knew when it was time. He’d start rocking back and forth in the back seat. I could see him on the rear view mirror. I’d tell him to go in the bottle. I don’t think he was particularly fond of that bottle.”

“I don’t think any of us were particular fond of that goddamned bottle,” Danny said, not necessarily bitterly.

“Well, I wanted us to get where we were going,” Arthur said, smiling at the memory of those road trips. “Yeah, I love to travel.”

“Yeah,” Danny said, rolling his eyes, “We loved to travel with you.”

The talk got around to art, music in particular. I’d remembered hearing Danny once say that his father thought the Beatles were the worst thing ever to happen to American music. I asked him about this (I, too, had come in to the Chicago area for the party and stayed overnight.)

“They were hoodlums who happened to find themselves in a paying job,” Arthur said. “They didn’t know how to play their instruments. And everything was just four chords — tonic, sub-dominant, dominant and back to tonic. Then repeat. Mozart imagined these incredibly complex arrangements in his dreams, then got up the next morning and wrote them down. Two hundred years later, people still want to listen to him.

“I listened to the Beatles and I thought, ‘Is that what art has come to?’

“How about the statue of Aphrodite? Praxiteles chiseled away every single bit of stone that had nothing to do with the perfect female form. Art.

“I was on a cruise ship a few years ago and they had four black comedians as entertainment. Each one of them did an impression of that fellow who just died.” Here, Arthur holds his left hand up to signify a glove. “They all did this” — he places his hand near his crotch — “as if they had a rash in their groin area and they wanted to get some relief.”

“Michael Jackson,” Danny said.

“Yeah, Michael Jackson. That’s what art is now? I’ve looked at Mozart and this Praxiteles and I thought, What have I done in this life that will affect the world as they have?”

“Hey Dad,” Danny piped up. “Have you heard Matty’s new music?” Matty, Danny’s boy, creates electronic music on the computer. He constantly sends out CDs and mp3 downloads to his friends and family. He’s a musical savant.

“Yes, I’ve heard it.”

Now I piped up. “Hey Arthur, maybe that’s something you can leave the world. You can help Matty hone his craft.”

“Well, I’ve told him I admire his ingenuity and his rhythms. Then I told him something about his contrapuntal derivations. And you know what? He didn’t even know what I was talking about! He didn’t know what the word contrapuntal meant.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. This isn’t my country anymore.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I said. “Of course this is your country. You’re here to teach him what contrapuntal means!”

“How do you know he wants to learn what it means?”

“I don’t. But why don’t you find out?”

Arthur thought about this for a moment, then he spoke. “Maybe so. Maybe there is something for me to do here. Maybe I can do anything. I did order this glorious day for my son.”

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Benny Jay: Cold Soup

My wife and I spend the day in Iowa, visiting with our older daughter, and by seven we’re famished: Let’s eat!

But where?

We got lots of choice – there must be dozens of restaurants in this town: Chinese, Sushi, Thai, Barbecue, even Ethiopian. My daughter says there’s this new Mexican place – she’s never been there but she hears it’s good.

And Lauren says — oh, yeah, Dave said it was good. And we’re all impressed cause Dave runs a restaurant so he must know something about food.

That’s how the seven of us — me, my wife, my daughter and her friends — wind up at this hole-in-the-wall joint that doesn’t in anyway look like anything vaguely Mexican. I mean, there are not even any Hispanic people there.

The waiter – a slacker dude – takes our order. I get the chicken soup to go along with my enchiladas.

Then we wait for our food.

And wait….

And wait some more….

Other people come in and get served ahead of us. And still we wait….

Finally, the waiter brings my wife her enchiladas. A minute or two pass and he comes back with my daughter’s chicken mole. Another minute goes by and he brings my enchiladas. Then he brings Anika her fajitas. It’s the oddest thing — he’s bringing the food in dribs and drabs, like the cooks are cooking it one plate at a time.

And here’s the kicker – the food’s cold. All of it – my dish, my wife’s, my daughter’s, Anika’s. You’d think that if they were cooking each dish one at a time, the food would be hot. But….

The waiter brings my soup.

“How is it?” asks my daughter.

“Cold,” I say.

“What a surprise,” says my wife.

“How come you’re eating it with a fork?” asks my daughter.

“They didn’t give me a spoon,” I say.

“This is ridiculous,” says my wife. “Cold soup and no spoon!”

I want the waiter to heat up my food, but he seems so sensitive – like a little pressure might crush his spirit – and I don’t want to overwhelm him with so many requests at once.

So I devise a plan. I ask him to heat up my enchiladas. When he comes back, I ask him to heat up my soup. And so on and so forth, right down to my rice and beans. My daughter and my wife and one of her friends get the same idea, sending their food back to be reheated.

Back he comes with my wife’s enchiladas. The food’s steaming. She’s staring at the plate.

“What’s a matter?” I ask.

“My rice,” she says.

“What about your rice?”

“I don’t have any….”

“They must have run out….”

“No, that’s not it. I had rice when he took my plate to reheat it. Now I don’t have any rice. My rice disappeared. What happened too my rice?”

“Whoa,” I say. “That’s really weird.”

He brings Nora her chicken, then he brings Kewanda her Torta.

“Is it hot?” I ask Kewanda.

“No,” she says.

“I don’t get it,” I says. “Okay, one plate I understand – it gets cold cause they make it too early and it sits while the other stuff gets made. But all the food? It’s like they make one dish, and let it sit until it gets cold while they make another….”

“And my rice,” says my wife. “What happened to my rice?”

I take a  bite of my enchilada and look up to see Lauren looking at my food. She still hasn’t been served and we’ve been here for almost an hour. Poor girl must be starving. Now on top of everything else, I feel guilty. I can’t finish my meal before she’s even been served. I’m taking baby-sized bites and chewing as slow as I can to make my dinner last longer.

“What did you order?” I ask Lauren.

“Tortas,” she says.

Crash! From the kitchen come the sounds of plates falling to the ground and shattering.

I look at Lauren and say: “You don’t think that’s your….”

Crash! More dishes crash to the floor.

“What the hell are they doing back there — having a food fight?”

Meanwhile, other folks keep coming in and soon every table’s taken. I’m wondering: Who are these people and why are they getting served before Lauren?

“Hey, Lauren,” I say. “You gotta talk to Dave….”

“I know,” she says.

“I mean, he likes this place? What’s that about?”

At long last, Lauren gets her food. “Sorry for the wait,” says the waiter. I think he’s on the edge of a breakdown.

The rest of us have finished eating. We watch Lauren as she opens the bun and looks at her meal: Two tiny pieces of chicken about as big as a quarter, under a large leaf of lettuce.

“Well?” I ask, as she takes a bite.

“Cold,” she says.

The waiter brings the check. “I have to tell you,” my wife says. “This is the worst dining experience of my life….”

“Duly noted,” he says.

Here’s the funny thing. We leave the waiter a big tip. Why? Oh, I don’t know — I guess it’s not really his fault. Like I said, there must be dozens of restaurants in this town — we just picked the wrong one.

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Realmuto: Millennium Park Bean

From the series, Cityscenes, by Michael Realmuto.

You can have this! Michael Realmuto loves Chicago. If you do too (and who doesn’t?) you can own one of his gorgeous and vivid watercolors of city scenes, appropriately entitled Cityscenes.

Michael offers fabulous prints like the one above as well as greeting cards and note cards emblazoned with the sights of Chicago. Visit Michael’s website to order now. And keep an eye here for more Realmuto images!

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