Letter

Saturday I went to Constellation to listen to the Tomeka Reid Quartet. It was beautiful stuff. Especially the work of Mary Halvorson on guitar. I’ve been playing a solo recording of hers called “Meltframe” a lot lately. It’s her take on a bunch of standards, but she completely transforms them into her own thing. It’s rare to hear a guitar player doing something different at this point but she’s definitely doing that. 

Afterwards, I walked out into the construction site which that part of Western Avenue has become. The demolition of the Belmont-Western Overpass has begun and it is a thing to behold. 

Squeezing past the chainlink fence toward the Marathon gas station to get to Belmont, I joined a small crowd of spectators taking in the work of the heavy equipment. Rebar, wiring, and concrete hung ragged overhead, being jabbed and prodded by big machines. There’s something transfixing about watching destruction like this. A fat guy had climbed up the base of a lamppost and was snapping pictures furiously. 

I have some history at this intersection. The Marathon is where American United Taxis used to be based; the first company I rented cabs from in Chicago. That was thirteen years ago. A couple years before that, I bartended at a horrible place called the Blue Light a block north, where the overpass being disappeared now ends. In a few months when this corner is paved over and car traffic resumes, it will be transformed into a new place. Just as it was some forty years ago when the Riverview Amusement Park was demolished to make way for a police station and shopping mall. For my part, this is not a spot I’d ever lobby to preserve as it was, but its current changing will make my memories of it that much more alien and remote. Still, it was something to watch those heaving, poking machines mashing that pockmarked, miserable bridge into dust.

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I wrote about Zach Galifianakis’ great TV show, “Baskets” for the Chicago Reader and reviewed Boris Fishman’s second book for the Trib.

I watched them duck into the door of the Skylark, look at the Cash Only sign and turn around and leave. I couple hours later they were back. The guy asked if his girl could use the bathroom and I said, “Sure.”

“She’s not from here. She’s from Canada and I wanted to show her this place, but I forgot you were cash only,” he told me, while waiting for her to return. I pointed out the ATM a couple feet away but he complained about the service fees. “We went to Simone’s instead. It was like everybody I know stopped by. It was alright but the karaoke over there got a little hectic after awhile. I’ll have to bring her back here next time. The tater tots are on point!” then, with no transition whatsoever, “Have you heard of the EM engine? Particles bounce back and forth against each other and no propellent is needed. NASA’s got it and it’s getting peer reviewed now. Isn’t that something?” His eyes were beaming and his smile overtook most of his face. His girl came back just then and they walked out into the night. 

Thursday I took the Metra out to Downers Grove to see Neko Case and her band play at the Tivoli Theatre. 

I got there early so I could have lunch with my friend Kelly, who sings with the group. 

Neko joined us as well and we ate a fancy French ham-and-cheese sandwich and olives in the hotel’s lobby. 

I felt lucky to be able to be a fly on the wall as they got ready for showtime. Then I doodled through half the concert.

A week or so ago I bought a device to digitize my old cassette tapes. I’ve been lugging a crate of them from apartment to apartment for years. Now there are wobbly towers of them all over the room as I sort through which ones I want to record. I never kept a journal growing up, so these cassettes, with their hand-written labels, form a sort of diary. The most recent is at least twenty years old at this point. It’s been kind of a disorienting process to dig through them. I wrote about two music-related books recently, both written by friends. Tim Kinsella’s All Over and Over in Volume 1 Brooklyn and Alina Simone’s Madonnaland in the Chicago Reader.

A few weeks ago I went with a friend to take in the Greek antiquities exhibit at the Field Museum. On our way out of the south entrance afterwards, we noticed what looked to both of us like a twelve foot column of crap just to the left of the door. Coming closer to read the wall label we were surprised to learn the artist’s name: Herb Alpert.

Walking out toward the parking lot we were greeted by a few more of Mr. Alpert’s creations along the museum steps. Their sight inspired my friend—who’s a few years older than me and came of age during Alpert’s musical hayday—to launch a diatribe against the man and his music. I did my best to defend him, saying the light horn sounds of his Tijuana Brass were mostly harmless. Right now, in virtually every thrift-store in America, you can probably pick up a gently-used copy of “Whipped Cream & Other Delights” as well as a dozen other of his best-selling LPs. Could all those folks have been wrong?

A couple clicks of the mouse reveal that the turd towers we witnessed are actually called “Spirit Totems” and were inspired by seeing the Native American sculpture of the Pacific Northwest. Alpert has apparently been making paintings and sculptures for 45 years, when not busy selling 75 million albums, running A & M Records, and being a world-renowned philanthropist. In the few news items I could find about the exhibit, these pieces are repeatedly referred to as “frozen smoke”, while smoke was certainly not the frozen substance that came immediately to mind to either of us when confronted with them in the flesh. 

We wondered aloud how much it must’ve cost to cast these things in bronze. Tens of thousands of dollars, most likely. And how did they end up gracing our natural history museum? In the news items I read, Alpert is quoted as being thrilled to exhibit there but offers little detail about how it all came to pass. There is no mention of the pieces on the Field’s website either.

The fact that a hugely successful personage gets to indulge their hobbies in public isn’t that newsworthy, I know. I pass an exhibit of the late actor Anthony Quinn’s art displayed on the ground floor of the National Hellenic Museum in Greektown nearly every day on the Halsted bus. You can easily track down Madonna’s movie-director efforts online. Molly Ringwald’s jazz records and James Franco’s books can be had there as well. When you do well in entertainment all kinds of doors open to you.

I had forgotten all about this until seeing the beautiful show of sculptor Martin Puryear’s drawings and prints at the Art Institute last week. There are no public Puryears in Chicago even though he is acknowledged widely as one of the great sculptors of our time and spent significant time here. Perhaps he’d do better to record a light jazz album. Meanwhile we’re stuck with Herb Alpert’s shit sculptures until this fall at the Field.

Coincidentally, Alpert gave a very entertaining interview to Marc Maron last week.