A Communique from Beyond the Des Plaines

Most inner suburbs really aren’t that different from the outskirts of Chicago. Oak Park, Niles, Skokie, Cicero: While all have a distinct character, both from the city and from each other, it is an essentially urban character. But travel west of the Des Plaines River, and things change. It is as if the psychic pull on a people corresponds to the continental drift, that all the land that drains into Lake Michigan has one orientation, while the land draining into the Illinois River (and eventually the Mississippi River then the Gulf of Mexico) has another. In short, my new home of Villa Park sometimes feels like it was carved out of farm country, even though most of the town has been around since the 1920’s and is firmly enmeshed in the Chicago grid.

A lot of folks have asked me about what it’s like living in the suburbs. Now, I know that these questions are made mostly out of politeness, along with maybe a little hope that I might dish on some of the absurdities of the suburban lifestyle that I’ve encountered, but I also figure that there is at least a little genuine curiosity behind some of them. Over the past three months, I’ve gotten acquainted with our new town while still having that sense of otherness that goes with being an outsider. So I thought that I’d use this year-end missive to summarize my findings (with the understanding that, while I may aim to be a Margaret Mead on the Prairie, most of my insights are probably more like an admixture of the venom of Philip Wylie with the platitudes of Rick Steves).

Villa Park, much like the city’s Northwest Side where we previously lived, is a bastion of the white working class. While integration has come to both places, they remain very much expressions of an old working class sensibility. There is a real sense of everyone taking care of their neighbors, but also an unspoken understanding that everyone will get down to the business of keeping the place in order, of not letting their neighbors down.

We are one house off the corner, and the odd angle of that corner means that we share a front yard with one of our neighbors, whose name is Bob. On the day we moved in, before most of our stuff was even out of its boxes, Bob came over and noted that typically he and the owner of our house share lawn mowing duties. Two days after that, Bob was out, dressed in a thick flannel shirt and an old hunting cap, mowing our lawn, even though the grass looked perfectly nice to me. I had to tell him that my lawnmower was a piece of junk, that I didn’t move it from the old house, and that it was October already and I wasn’t really planning on mowing the lawn again until spring.

Out here, a person’s yard is an act of personal expression, but there are a limited subset of acceptable ways that this self should be expressed. This is not the kind of neighborhood that looks kindly on unkempt lawns. Nor is it the kind of place where folks pay others to do the yard work for them, although I did notice one house about halfway up the block that has yard service. But in general, it is just assumed that people will do these kinds of domestic tasks themselves. At one point, I told Nancy, one of the neighbors on the other side of us, that we were thinking about getting a housekeeping service to clean our place a couple of times each month, and her jaw dropped so low that I thought she was going to catch flies. It was like I had just told her that I had hired a personal manservant to help clean my private parts. I imagined her thinking, “What kind of yuppie debutantes do we have moving in here?”

Our block is a friendly place. Most folks say “hi” to anyone who walks by. The neighbors on either side of us each bought little Christmas presents for our 17-month old son. All our immediate neighbors have a little post-Christmas get-together each year, and Bob is hosting this year’s party, this coming Sunday. So, it’s a very neighborly place. But then so was our block on the Northwest side. From my experience, that’s just how these working class neighborhoods are.

In this sense, I am instinctively much more comfortable here than I would be in, say, Evanston or Naperville, two of the many suburbs for which I admit having what amounts to an irrational dislike.

Naperville is pretty easy to dismiss as the star child of planned suburbs, a place where the city fathers have somehow managed to maintain its image as a rural haven while becoming the fifth largest city in the state, a place where many of the fancy downtown Chicago restaurants have set up satellites, with the added benefit that the homeless are not welcome there, a place where you can have your cul-de-sac monstrosity with attached garage to keep your Sequoia nice and warm yet still eat overpriced linguine and swing with the neighbors on the weekend.

Evanston is a somewhat different story. It is the kind of town to which a lot of urban bohemians flee when, like us, they have kids and are looking for a bigger home, as Evanston has the requisite bookstores, cafes, and art movie houses to keep them in touch with the aspects of contemporary culture that have become defining parts of their identity. I actually had a short debate with extended family at the Christmas dinner table over my idea that Evanston is a pretty insufferable place. My argument, in a nutshell, is that the town was founded back in the 19th century by teetotaling Methodists as a refined refuge from the hustle-bustle of Chicago, and that everything about its development, from its lack of expressway access to its beaches, where city residents are not welcome, reeks of the kind of North Shore privilege that makes me want to punch someone. To me, the current residents, all these pseudo-bohemians, drinking fair trade coffee and feeling good about themselves, are really the contemporary equivalent of the uptight folks who originally founded the town. Hey, I know a fair number of otherwise fine and decent people who decided to move there, and I don’t begrudge them this, to each his own utopia, but living in a town like that would raise my blood pressure by at least 20 points.

Villa Park, on the other hand, is pretty much a creation of the Greater Chicago working class. Founded in the 1920’s around the Ovaltine factory, the housing stock is a mix of comfy 1920’s Queen Anne and Tudor homes (like the one we recently moved into), 1950’s ranch houses and bi-levels (like the kind my sister-in-law just bought), and post-WWII apartment complexes. The Ovaltine factory itself, which had been vacant since the company moved its operations to Minnesota in the 1980’s, was recently turned into relatively upscale condos.

Villa Park’s shopping pleasures trace mostly to its working class roots, and foremost amongst these joys are the pleasures of drink. I can walk to a handful of local watering holes, including the ubiquitous Irish pub with good beer and tolerable food, along with Lunar Brewing, a great brew pub that features not only its own first rate suds but also most of my favorite beers on the planet on tap, from European imports to Midwest microbrews, almost all for $4.50/pint. Up on North Avenue, about a three-minute drive away, there is Chicagoland Winemakers, which not only sells everything you need to brew or ferment your own elixir, but also makes its own stash of home brew on the premises, which after throwing a couple of hints you’ll usually be offered to try. I can vouch for their first-rate pilsner, a relatively hard beer to brew at home due to its low fermenting temperature and a crisp taste that can’t hide any off flavors. I also like the fact that the husband-and-wife team who own the place are direct and courteous but don’t kiss any ass. There is no pretense of them being extra nice to you just because you are giving them your money. And right across the street from the winemakers shop, up against Salt Creek, is the Golden Pheasant, with a biker bar up front and a supper club in back, reminiscent of small town Wisconsin. The German food they serve is quite decent, and on Sunday they feature a buffet of homemade desserts, including some of the most awesome sugar cookies on the planet.

The shopping area on Villa Avenue south of St. Charles Road is just a five minute walk from our home and features the kind of quirky stores that tend to congregate in dilapidated downtowns. There is Pioneer Garden & Feed, which specializes in bird feeders and where, if business is slow, one of the owners will give you a short dissertation about anything from the local forest preserves to how to attract birds to your home. The Rampant Lion is just down the block from Pioneer Garden & Feed. Most of the small storefront is devoted to folk CD’s and Celtic trinkets, although I’m intrigued by the bagpipe classes they have every Wednesday night. The mini-mall at Villa and St. Charles includes a butcher shop, a bakery, a coffee house, and a used bookstore housing mostly old paperback mystery novels and pulp science fiction. Other than the butcher shop, none of these places ever seems to be doing much business, raising the question of how they pay their rent each month, let alone find the cash to pay their employees. But that is the great thing about a neglected old downtown: the place is so sleepy and I assume the rent is so comparatively minimal that it allows the space for small, quirky businesses to open up shop and survive, if not thrive.

Tucked between the hustle-bustle of Oak Brook and the cut-rate emporiums on North Avenue, downtown Villa Park remains an odd backwater, at least in part due to the history of its train lines. Originally, four rail lines ran through town, mostly to transport goods and raw materials to-and-from Chicago. Two of these rails, the Great Western freight line, which ran right by the old Ovaltine factory, and the old Elgin passenger line, have long since been decommissioned, and both have been turned into extended bike trails, where you can ride from the inner suburbs all the way out into farm country. The two remaining rail lines, the Union Pacific and Canadian National tracks, both of which are within a few hundred yards of our home, are still actively used, and it is not unusual to see 100+ car trains rolling on the tracks near our house.

Eighty years ago, the Elgin line was the main transportation node to get out of town. When the Elgin line shut down, the Union Pacific became the only line with passenger rail service in Villa Park, and the train station was moved to what had been the backside of town. As a result, Villa Park is one of the few suburbs that does not have a commercial business district abutting their Metra station, while its old downtown lacks the accompanying foot traffic and is somewhat stranded.

I’ve always gravitated to the working class. I just feel more comfortable around them. This dates all the way back to high school. If I told you that I grew up in Newport Beach, California, you’d probably imagine some kind of fancy house on the ocean. Well, there are parts of Newport Beach that are like that, but we lived in the “heights”, a plateau about a mile away from the water (as the crow flies), a neighborhood of cute, California bungalows, mostly built between 1945 and 1960, homes not that different from the ranches and bi-levels of north Villa Park.

In high school, the two kids in my class who lived nearest to me were Ivan Kovalenko, who lived a block away, and Alex Olson, who lived the next block over. Both grew up in small bungalows and were being raised by single mothers who didn’t have a lot of spare cash. Along with Eric Hesse a few blocks over, whose Chilean father worked as an electrical engineer while investing all his spare money in local real estate, they were the closest I had to good friends as a teenager. To be honest, we really weren’t that close, but they were nonetheless a significant part of my life. The first few times I got drunk were with Alex, and it was at his house that I first heard the Sex Pistols (some skateboarding friend of ours brought “Never Mind the Bollocks” by one afternoon). What I remember best about Ivan is that he used to like challenging me to wrestling and/or boxing matches, where he would ritually kick my ass (it helps being 30 pounds bigger and raised by two older brothers). But there was an unspoken bond, in that we had none of the gifts of the guys growing up on the waterfront, neither the cash and the confidence of the Lido kids nor the hip flair of the surfer dudes from West Newport. We weren’t very good athletes and only adequate students. We were all rather awkward around girls. What we had were the things that most working class kids have, a willingness to push the envelope and our love of rock ’n roll.

To be strictly factual, my dad was a real estate broker in Southern California and not a factory worker in the Midwest, and there were some years when he made a lot of money. But there were others where he made nothing, and we lived off my mother’s teaching salary. Which means that we never struggled, but also that we never had the rather ridiculous prosperity of the families down on the water. So I guess, strictly speaking, you would probably label my family upper-middle class, but I hung with the working class kids because they were my neighbors. And I think those associations have shaped me to this day.

This has presumably influenced why I feel so at home in Villa Park. Now, don’t get me wrong. Once I get on the main suburban drag, I often feel like a beached sea creature, or maybe a whale trapped in the shallows, awaiting the inevitable harpoon. For instance, I refer to the intersection of Butterfield and Finley Roads as Shithole Central. Every crappy concept restaurant in the corporate firmament seems to have landed in this blighted moonscape: Red Lobster and The Olive Garden, of course, but also the Jimmy Buffet-inspired Cheeseburger in Paradise and something called “Fudruckers” (what you’d serve at a place called “Fudruckers” is beyond me, but I assume it’s another corporate concept, and I’m sure it’s ruckin fun). One Friday night not long after moving here, I got the brilliant idea that we would follow up some remarkably bad Thai food we got at a mini-mall on Roosevelt Road with a quick visit to the Verizon store, situated within the 4th circle of one of these big Butterfield malls. I just assumed that the store would be relatively empty that late on a Friday night, but we could barely navigate the traffic jam in the parking lot, and once I was inside the store I was then asked to “put my name on the list” if I wanted to speak with a representative. The store was full of people, encompassing a wide gamut of Chicago’s diversity. Just about every age, every shape, every ethnicity was represented in this room, all united by the pleasures of a full belly followed by the prospect of conspicuous consumption. I quickly drew two conclusions: first, that the U.S. economy really couldn’t be doing that badly; and second, that this kind of life is fucking crazy. This was quickly followed by a third thought: Get me out of here! I would much rather spend my Friday night hanging out with my wife and son at home, without a new cell phone.

And that, my friends, is why I like my suburban life. I’ve gotten to the point where I really don’t need all that crap, the latest phone or culturally significant book, to be happy. In fact, I’ve still got a bunch of old, unread texts gathering mold on my bookshelf that could fill my time for the next 20 years. But I like my yard, I can play music in my basement until the wee hours without disturbing the rest of the family, and I like being within easy access of the dog park for my Schip and an indoor pool for my son. If I can also walk down the street and enjoy a nice IPA, so much the better.

Boys Night Out

Melissa, my wife, sometimes jokes that my allusions all seem to relate to one of three things: punk rock songs, Monty Python, or episodes of Star Trek (actually, I think she’s a little off base, as she never even mentions Stanley Kubrick films or my lengthy analogies to the game of tennis).

“I married such a nerd,” she’ll note.

In that vein, I remember an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” when Picard left the ship for a little R&R, only to be embroiled down on the planet in some convoluted intrigue with the locals, which left him little time for any R or R. But by the end of the show, Picard realizes that this adventure was his R&R, and it was just what the doctor ordered.

Last weekend, I went into the city for my first night out since moving to the suburbs a couple months ago (not counting an indy rock show that I attended on my way home from Bible study one Wednesday). I met three buddies at the Globe Pub, where we drank pilsner beer and watched the Fire lose their MLS semifinal match to Real Salt Lake in a penalty shootout.

That was a bit of a downer, so after the game we walked around the corner to the Lincoln Restaurant, where the College of Complexes was holding court. In explanation for the uninitiated, the College of Complexes is a loose collection of misfits and outsiders who have been debating a wide range of topics of the day for the past 58 years, an organization which I believe has its roots in the public debates of Bughouse Square.

It was around 10PM, and the meeting began at 8PM, so we were a little late, but a waitress snuck us in through the back door of the “meeting hall”, essentially an annex of the restaurant where the College holds session each Saturday night.

The room was packed, but the four of us were able to find a spot at an unmanned bar in the back. Looking around, my first thought was that this is a room full of folks who aren’t getting any, unless by “any” you mean social security checks, either due to old age or the early retirement known as functional insanity.

The main presentation had been long concluded, as had the question and answer period, but we arrived in time for what is typically the best part of these gatherings, the rebuttal period where audience members get 5 minutes to respond to the presentation. From our perch on the barstools in back, we sipped our Weiss beers and absorbed the knowledge.

“I agree with tonight’s speakers: the New World Order is behind the war in Afghanistan,” said a relatively young guy at the podium. “They were behind 911; they are behind our wars; they are behind the chemtrails (this triggered giggles in the audience). Hey, the chemtrails are real, just look it up. I’ve got a list of websites right here if you’re interested. Just find me when this is over and get some education.”

A middle aged gent with black plastic glasses stood up to declare: “You ask why we are at war in Afghanistan. I’ll tell you why. It’s because we are at war with Islam, and for good reason (this was met with some guffaws and hissing from the crowd).”

A woman in her 30’s whose hard nipples, the business end of pendulous, sagging breasts, faced towards the floor at a 45 degree angle and were clearly visible through her shirt, got up to pronounce that she was “shocked and angered that anyone could say we were at war with Islam.” She said a bunch of other stuff, but I was too distracted to tell you what.

A young black guy, probably in his early 20’s, tried a softer approach, saying that his Christian faith teaches him that love is a better response than the urge for retribution and asked the dude in the black glasses to live by a more positive philosophy.

I was almost persuaded by the kindness in this kid’s demeanor and the reasonableness of his argument, but then another conservative old crank spieled off all the strategic reasons to have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, noting as an aside the math and logic demonstrating that the World Trade Center towers were brought down by Muslim terrorists flying commercial aircraft into the buildings, and that the masterminds of said attacks have since admitted as much.

It didn’t look good for the conspiracy theorists and their left-wing sympathizers, as the eight original speakers stood up in their matching “Investigate 911” T-shirts to defend themselves. A couple of younger white guys, who I’d bet dollars-to-doughnuts were full-time political protestors and part-time Kinko’s employees, stumbled through more minutiae about chemtrails and the melting point of metal alloys used to construct skyscrapers, but they managed neither to convince nor entertain. The crowd grew restless. A young Muslim started solidly, stating that “Islam is a religion of peace”, but two minutes later he was talking about his visit to Pakistan and that it wouldn’t be long before bombs would be blowing shit up in this country, and the wistfulness which he had for said bombings pretty much refuted the main thesis of his argument. Like I said, it didn’t look good for the home team in this one. But then an old black dude approached the podium, leaned over the mic, and stood up for the dignity of the New Revolutionary.

“I remember Vietnam, when pappy raped me in the ass,” he began. “I remember Iraq, when pappy raped me in the ass. I remember Tuskegee, when pappy raped me in the ass. And now, here we are in Afghanistan, and pappy’s raping me in the ass again. I gotta tell you, I’m tired of gettin’ raped in the ass.”

It was the most fun that I’ve had in awhile. I laughed my ass off, it riled me up, and on my drive home I entertained myself with a series of exuberant interior monologues, a couple of which I will elucidate for you now.

The first relates to Islam being a religion of peace, a platitude you hear a lot these days. I know it’s a real downer for a lot of folks, but I think we must be willing to dive into some pretty deep waters if we are even going to attempt to understand what it means for 1.3 billion people on this planet to call themselves “Muslim”. Maybe a lot of them are only culturally Muslim, sort of like my dad and many in his generation were culturally Christian. Maybe, like my own generation, their children will slide into the secular melting pot, in which there are no religious beliefs to interfere with being a good consumer, where the vestiges of their forefathers gets ameliorated by a safe, accommodating pragmatism. I know this is the vision with which most of the prosperous parts of our country and our planet have comforted themselves.

But what about those several hundred million Muslims who actually believe in the tenants of their faith? Let’s start with the most elemental of these beliefs, namely that Mohammed was a prophet who brought us the final revelation of God, and that the manifest destiny of Mohammed’s revelation is for Islam to rule the world, at which point there will be ushered in an era of universal peace and submission to the will of God. Without this belief in the manifest destiny of their religion, Islam loses much of its potency; it’s like Christianity without the Resurrection or Judaism without the part about being the chosen people of God.

Anyone who has made even a cursory exploration into the faith understands this. The problem is that most of our cultural elite, from educators to politicians, believe that the ultimate goal is to make the world’s religions more ecumenical, filing off their rough edges until they become safe, if not all together irrelevant. So they conveniently ignore prima facie evidence that most practicing Muslims believe in the ends if not the means of Al Qaeda.

My second thought is about how the new revolutionaries, if that is what you call these conspiracy theorists, are playing into the hands of the old right. Last year, on a trip to L.A., I debated the merits of the current wave of political conspiracies with my friend John. I defended their enthusiasms, if not their logic or evidence. But John argued that the shaky basis of their theories was precisely the point, as a truthteller without the truth on his side is nothing more than a sideshow, a distraction that facilitates the twisted powers who were behind the rise of the latter Bush Administration, who still lurk in the shadows, looking to resume pilfering the country and undermining its laws.

So John, if you are reading this, let me acknowledge that, after closer examination of these folks, I think that you’re right. As you pointed out to me, it’s no wonder that a show like “Coast to Coast”, whose bread and butter are conspiracies ranging from the government cover-up of UFO’s to the secret history of the Fed, comes to you courtesy of the same broadcast network that brings you Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Most of these conspiracy theorists, while anti-establishment, are carrying the water of the Right, because by focusing on chimeras like death camps and chemtrails, they distract from the real public betrayals right under our nose.

What this country needs are acts of radical moderation, not self-absorbed radicalism. The laissez-faire capitalists who spearheaded the deregulation of the banking industry want you to forget that this deregulation caused the current economic crisis. Every citizen more concerned with the lingering influence of the Rothschilds than the more recent malfeasance managed by Greenspan and company is a victory for the folks who put this country’s economy at risk. In a parallel vein, the Republican Party is more than happy to have you fret about chemtrails, as it distracts attention from their gutting of consumer protections and environmental laws over the past 25 years and the very real harm this has caused. From Bush’s “Healthy Forest Initiative” to the billionaires who bring you Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, their Orwellian Newspeak and its poisoning of the American mind is the greatest crime of this new century, and the sad fact is that we probably ain’t seen nothing yet.

These are the things that I’ve been thinking about since coming back from my little Saturday night out with the boys. I know that my life would be less complicated and more titillating if we were the kind of guys who thought about nothing but sports and titties (whereas these two subjects take up no more than a strong plurality of our time), but much like Captain Picard in that Star Trek episode, I got the kind of night out that suits my nerdy and unequivocally combative brain.

Living in Skinner’s Box

What follows is a tale of just desserts, where the protagonist (namely me), makes a life altering decision on what began as mere whim, partly out of greed, partly out of boredom, and partly on the innocent notion that the world really is all flowers and jellybeans, and that everything is bound to turn out fine in the end. So prepare yourself, my dear reader, to feast on a healthy portion of schadenfreude.

About three weeks ago, Melissa and I moved from our old home, a small, 1920’s-era bungalow in Portage Park on the Northwest side of Chicago, into a two-story Tudor house of similar vintage in the suburb of Villa Park.

The move was rather impetuous. While we’d talked about buying a bigger home for the past couple of years, it was an amorphous plan, filled with vague dreams about dark, quiet skies and sitting by the fireplace, of having enough space so I could play music while at the same time Melissa and Milo enjoyed the peace of an early bed in another part of the house.

While we liked our home in Portage Park, and we liked our neighbors, the house is essentially a subdivided box with a kitchen and breakfast nook attached at the end. The three bedrooms, living room, and dining area all occupy the same sonic space. I could be working on the computer in my office, located in a small back bedroom, and hear Milo’s every peep in the front bedroom, even with his door closed.

Any talk about moving, however, had been just that. When faced with a specific opportunity, we’d demure. This summer, our friend Beth noted that her mom was looking to sell their 1920’s Queen Anne in Villa Park. At the time, we knew almost nothing about the town, and while the price was a little steep for us, Beth said that her mom might be willing to negotiate, and so we drove out there one Friday afternoon, more on a summer joy ride than with any serious intent.

We really liked Beth’s mom’s place. It had charm, the town seemed sweet, and her house was next to the Prairie Path, an old rail right-of-way that had been converted into a 50-mile long bike path from the inner suburbs out into farm country. However, Melissa’s dad, who’s done most of the major work on our house in Portage Park over the past several years, noted that Beth’s mom’s house was in need of significant repair (and, at least in my mind, essentially implying that he’s getting too old to be bailing out his clueless son-in-law every time some new “emergency” cropped up). So, much like the condo in Palm Springs and the farm house in Wisconsin that we considered earlier, we held off.

However, mostly out of curiosity, we decided to go on a few more Villa Park house tours. We are so stupid-innocent-crazy about these things that we found three more houses that next week we wanted to put an offer on. The first one was a little out of our price range and ended up being sold to another buyer before we could make a move. The second was on a fairly busy street, so we were able to walk away from the property without making an offer. But on one of these house tours, we found a place where it was harder to walk away. It had pretty much everything we wanted: a large, beautiful backyard that was fully fenced; a large deck for hanging out and having barbeques during the summer; three upstairs bedrooms; a living area on the first floor with four rooms, a fireplace, and a lot of old school charm; and a finished basement that could serve as both an office and music studio for me. The house had new windows, a new roof, a remodeled bathroom on the first floor, and had been very well maintained. And the asking price was significantly less than the other options we had been considering. Melissa and I toured the house twice, three times if you count the inspection. We looked out on the sunny backyard and imagined spending many a tranquil afternoon out there with our son and our dog.

In one of the disclosure statements, the old owners had checked the “Yes” box when asked if there were noise issues associated with the house. Our realtor said that the box was checked due to occasional noise from the airplanes flying in to O’Hare, about seven miles away. I peppered her with questions about this, as our realtor lives just a block away from the house, but she didn’t seem to think that the aircraft noise was a big deal. Besides, we had been in Villa Park several times over the previous few weeks and never noticed any airplanes. At the walkthrough, the day before we were closing on the sale, there were some planes flying overhead, but I kind of shrugged it off. After all, the property was about the same distance away from O’Hare as our old place in Portage Park. How bad could it be?

Since we’ve moved in, I’ve found out how bad. It turns out that on days when the wind is blowing in from Lake Michigan, Villa Park is directly on the path for the planes heading towards the 4R landing strip, which is tilted at a SW-NE angle. During the balmy August days when we’d visited the house, the wind had been blowing from the west, but in the three weeks since we’ve moved, the wind has been blowing from the northeast a lot, including virtually the entire week after we first moved in.

Which means that a significant percentage of the nation’s air traffic has been flying over our house. And I mean RIGHT over our house. Well, I guess that’s not strictly true. I’ve triangulated it on my dog walks. From best I can tell, the bull’s eye of their trajectory is about four houses to the north of us. With GPS, they are pretty exact in following this path, although there is the odd straggler that may drift 50 feet in one direction or the other, with the bell curve of flights running from somewhere right above our house to somewhere about 150 feet to the north. These flights start at around 6AM, with an interval of five minutes or so, and then increase in frequency, to the point where they are running about every 150 seconds during much of the day, before tapering off in the evening and then typically stopping for good somewhere between 9:00-9:30 PM.

I can be a bit neurotic about lights, noises and other distractions around my home. As soon as we moved in, I was semi-consciously looking for something that would bother me. Could it be the traffic on Villa Avenue, a block away? No, it’s really not that bad, except during the afternoon rush when folks are trying to avoid the traffic on Kingery Highway about a half-mile further down the road. What about the traffic on Kingery? Hmm. No, it’s only audible late at night, and then as nothing more than very low, white noise. Actually, during those first couple of evenings, the first seed for my ire was a bright light that one of our neighbors kept on all night above his side door and which shined right in most of our windows, including into two of the upstairs bedrooms and three of the rooms on the main floor.

“Do you see how bright that light is?” I kept asking Melissa. “I think it’s going to drive me crazy.”

Well, now that the planes have begun their relentless descent, I’m certainly not worried about the neighbor’s nightlight anymore. I guess in this one way, the fact we are on a flight path towards one of the world’s busiest airports has done me a favor, in that it’s given me a legitimate target to focus my neurotic obsession. I am like an animal who just paid a lot of money to live in his own Skinner’s Box, getting a steady series of little psychological shocks every time I notice another plane is roaring over our home.

I’ve always known that Chicago is a place with a mostly man-made topography. Other than Lake Michigan, a few rivers, and a series of very small permutations separating the higher land from what are essentially the drained remains of frozen swamp, the rest of our landmarks have all been shaped or created by people. This is true not just of the buildings and the urban grid that contain us, but even the forest preserves and a lot of city parks were originally lowlands and other difficult places that the early pioneers decided to leave alone and which then got forever defined as open spaces by our city planners.

But the reaction of most suburbanites living around O’Hare takes this to a level I had heretofore never known. The planes flying in to O’Hare are our Old Faithful, an external clockwork in the sky that all of us living below can keep time to.

“About twenty more seconds, and we should get another plane,” I find myself noting. This is a thought process that might eventually drive me totally batty if it doesn’t somehow extinguish itself. Which, at least according to most of my new neighbors, it will. Besides, we’ve been given assurances by folks from Park Ridge to Addison that next year the 4R runway will be moved as part of the O’Hare reconfiguration, and that Villa Park will no longer be directly under the flight path. It seems that almost everyone who lives in these ’burbs knows the fine details about the airport master plan. O’Hare is like a relentless and unmerciful god, a Sumerian deity raining jet noise and diesel fumes down on a different set of victims, depending on the vicissitudes of the Chicago aviation commission and the Midwestern winds.

Like the hitters at Wrigley Field, I’ll be hoping that the wind will be blowing out all year, as those balmy southwest winds will not just be lifting baseballs out of the ballpark but will keep all the planes coming in off the lake and away from my new home.

As Daniel Burnham Spins In His Grave

While relatively quiet about it, I was a proponent of Chicago’s Olympic bid. My friends and acquaintances seemed to be about evenly divided on the matter, reflecting the populace at large, at least if the polls that the local media conducted on the issue are to be trusted.

I found the fairly widespread and often passionate opposition within Chicago to hosting the Olympics a bit perplexing. Leaving out the usual knee-jerk opposition by the confused fringe who oppose any kind of civic improvement as a matter of course, what remained were two legitimate gripes: first, that the Olympics might not make money like it’s organizers imagined, eventually sticking the Chicago taxpayer with the bill; and second, that many of the contracts generated by the games would wind up in the pockets of the well-connected.

But these opponents were all playing small-ball. The reality is that the Summer Olympics have been a consistent game changer for at least half a century, vaulting the host city into the rarified air of places that matter.

Before hosting the Olympics, Atlanta, Munich and Barcelona were each a center of their respective regional economies but lacked a significant global footprint. For each, the Olympics were a coming-out party of sorts, helping to catapult them to the forefront of the global imagination, at least for a couple of weeks, and, coincidently or not, the fortunes of all three have been much brighter since hosting the games. Atlanta vaulted into a clear frontrunner as the first city of the New South; Munich has become a more prominent economic and political force within Germany; and Barcelona has become a preeminent tourist destination while Catalonian culture in general has gotten a boost.

This civic boost is even true for some of the more powerful and influential cities to host an Olympic games. Take Beijing. I was there to speak at an agricultural conference in 2005, three years before the 2008 games. Never mind that the city itself was an irredeemable shithole, with 17 million people plopped into a barbaric outpost on a dry, dusty plain without a source of decent drinking water, subject to lung-wrenching smog and periodic dust storms that could literally blot out the sun on a cloudless day. The city was out to transform itself into a worthy capital of what will soon likely become the most powerful country on the planet, and that optimism was expressed in every crane that dotted the city skyline. There wouldn’t be just one crane working on a building, there would be seven, and the hotel or the aquatic center would span two city blocks. Beijing may have been an unlikely spot to build a capital, but the collective will of that town was out to prove that the city could be a worthy host to the rest of the world.

The actual profit or loss that a metropolis makes hosting the Olympic Games is essentially irrelevant. So are whatever jobs that come with hosting the games. What counts is the prestige that goes with hosting the Olympics, particularly if you run the games well.

I lived in L.A. in 1984, and I can tell you first-hand that it was a lot of fun to be in the city when the Olympics were there. The Los Angeles Olympics were not just well-run but profitable. To be blunt, it was a two-week demonstration of the pleasures of fascism. Peter Ueberroth, the organizer of the games, worked out an arrangement with the business leaders of the city, and for two weeks, the oil refineries in San Pedro didn’t run during the day, and most of the major corporations staggered their work schedules. The result was that, over virtually the entire Olympic fortnight, there was an almost total absence of traffic jams and smog. The L.A. Basin reverted to its natural state, the kind of sunny utopia it must have been when my grandparents first pulled up stakes from central Illinois and southeast Kansas, respectively, and made California home.

I pictured Rahm Emanuel leaving his role as White House Chief of Staff in 2014, knocking heads and taking names, making the trains run on time, providing Chicago with two weeks of its own taste of beneficent fascism. There aren’t many opportunities in our tawdry democracy where one can enjoy the benefits of that kind of corporate-state coordination, and I was really looking forward to it.

But alas, Chicago was not chosen by the International Olympic Committee. In fact, it was the first city eliminated in the final round of voting, leading to a lot of soul searching in this town as to why, a question being asked by both proponents and opponents of the bid. I think the answer is three-fold but fairly straightforward, and that it is important to correctly ascertain these reasons because they imply a call-to-action and because the truth serves as a necessary corrective to some of the wishful thinking and misinformation being sold as insight in this town, including ridiculous ideas like that Chicago lost the bid because of the corruption of its government leaders (The International Olympic Committee has to be one of the most corrupt and bribe-able institutions on the planet, and the inside deals made in the corridors of power of Brasilia or Beijing make what goes on inside the Daley Center seem like child’s play. And does anyone remember the personal favors that Mayor Andrew Young, former ambassador to the U.N., called in to have Atlanta chosen over Athens on the 100th anniversary of the modern Olympics? If anything, the Chicagoans who came to Copenhagen last week needed to be more corrupt, or at least not so wide-eyed and innocent at their prospect of winning a fair vote).

First and foremost, Chicago didn’t get the Games because the bid leaders put all their chips on an out-and-out gamble of being everyone’s second choice, a calculated risk taken by necessity, because even these Chicagoans believed that Rio de Janeiro had the strongest emotional appeal. Meanwhile, Madrid and Tokyo focused their energies on an entirely different strategy, namely not being the first one out. Both were long shots, and thus tried to solidify a base of support in that first round, to the point where Juan Antonio Samaranch, the leader of the Madrid bid and former head of the IOC, gave a teary-eyed speech asking the committee to give him this last vote before he died (conveniently ignoring the fact that Barcelona hosted the Summer games in 1992). The result was that Madrid, which was never going to get the games, ended up with the most votes in the first round, while Chicago was knocked out of the competition. For all we know, Chicago may have won a one-on-one matchup with Rio de Janeiro, but it got outplayed early and would never get the chance to attempt it’s gambit of being everybody else’s second choice.

The second reason Chicago lost goes to the point of why the bid leaders felt the need to play the role of pragmatists: Chicago really didn’t really believe in itself. If everyone agrees that Rio de Janeiro is the most exciting option, then you have to find another angle. But we did, and still do, have a competing story to tell the world, that Chicago is the great American city, capital of the Midwest, heart of the nation’s breadbasket and an elemental part of the American character. Chicago in the summer is a stunning place, from our beautiful lakefront to our skyline and architecture, a metropolis freed from the grip of winter whose pent-up energy is then released in a thousand ethnic and neighborhood festivals. But we never really attempted to tell this story, never tried to make the rest of the planet truly excited to come here.

Lastly, the Chicago bid did not have the whole-hearted support of the city, and this has its roots in the Daley Administration’s top-down distrust of the people. Actually, I don’t entirely blame them for this. The reality is that there is a big chunk of our populace who shouldn’t be trusted. As a community, most of us collectively realize this, and that’s why we keep voting to reelect the Mayor, because we intuitively understand the man’s arrogance is a necessary bulwark against most of the blow-hards and ignoramuses who skulk around City Hall or have the phrase “activist” attached to their shingle.

The problem is that the Mayor’s arrogance, which one brimmed with enthusiasm to remake the city, is now a tired arrogance, a paint-by-numbers authoritarianism. Once he signed on to the Chicago Olympic bid, he got together the requisite civic and business leaders and then assumed he could set up a Potemkin Village of public support. Hey, it’s not like Brazilian President Lula da Silva doesn’t have his own underclass that he needs to sweep under the rug, it’s just that he was able to generate enough civic pride and enthusiasm that the activists decided to come on board.

In terms of corruption, I viewed the Olympics a lot like I view Millennium Park. For years, all we heard about about Millennium Park were the politically-connected dealings, the construction snafus, and the cost overruns. But now that it is finished and part of our urban landscape, who isn’t glad that it’s there? Millennium Park is our generation’s gift to our posterity. I understand that the city is going to take a lot of my money, and a lot of that money will probably either be wasted or end up in the hands of shady characters. All I ask it that I get something real in return. Give the people a Millennium Park, modernize the CTA, make a real attempt at a Midwestern high speed rail network, and I’ll gladly give you my taxes and barely squawk when you skim off the cream. But don’t raise my taxes just to keep your patronage army in place.

The Chicago Olympic bid never should have been about money, or jobs, or even neighborhood redevelopment. It never should have been about getting “what’s mine”. Rather, it should have been a call to civic pride, of being part of something greater than yourself.

The Olympics should have been our coming-out party, probably the first time since the Columbian Exposition when Chicago was the center of the world. And we all blew it, from the mayor on down, because of a begrudging pettiness.

Renouncing My Faith

After almost 30 years of diligent, if sometimes skeptical, service, I have made the irrevocable decision to renounce the faith of my peers. I am speaking, of course, about the faith into which we were all indoctrinated in our youth, the faith in liberal democracy.

For these past three decades, I have almost always done my civic duty, voting the Democratic party line ever since I was an undergraduate (although I couldn’t bring myself to vote for Rod Blagojevich in the last governor’s race, and I voted Ed Clark for President on the first election when I could cast a ballot, back in 1980, as neither Carter nor Reagan seemed like an acceptable option).

But I’m fed up. Maybe this has been a long time coming, maybe it is a reckoning postponed for the past eight years by the unmitigated disaster of the Bush administration, a national calamity that we were all civically obligated to oppose by any and all means at our disposal, but I no longer can be held captive in the liberal democratic tent (both small and large L and D) by fear alone.

I realize this is a declaration that, combined with my impending move to the suburbs, may get me excluded from all the finest cocktail parties in Andersonville. But, much like many a lapsed Catholic, I have finally grown so tired of the hypocrisy of my religion that I seek to make a clean break.

So, like a Christian is asked to reject the Devil and all his empty promises during baptism, I hereby renounce the tenants of my old faith. I invite you to do the same as I echo the old ritual:

Do you renounce the Democratic Party and all its empty promises?

I renounce it.

Do you renounce modern American liberalism, with its need to creep into every nook and cranny of our private lives, scolding us for eating meat or drinking bottled water, finding new taxes and old causes with which to cudgel the general populace, seeking to mold the planet in its own image, one ordinance at a time?

I renounce it.

Do you renounce a public educational system that stifles creativity, forcing our boys and girls to sit in chairs all day and behave themselves, getting them well practiced at giving the correct answer, a system that resists oddity and enthusiasm unless it fits into the lesson plan?

I renounce it.

Do you renounce a university system that rewards the go-getter and the do-gooder, that confuses a hollow academic consensus with truth, that recognizes the value of almost all cultures other than the Scotch-Irish rednecks and hillbillies, my forebears, the ones who by and large tamed this country, won its wars, and made it a place worth living in?

I renounce this system.

Do you, fellow Chicagoan, renounce a police force that identifies more with the criminal than the citizen, who seems uninterested in enforcing property crime but is voracious in ticketing the working man and then booting his truck, in skimming cream off the top but not enforcing the law?

I renounce it.

Do you renounce a judicial system that is too weak-willed and weepy-eyed to impose justice on the motley lot with which we share our great metropolis, too lazy and dumb to track down the perps of most murders but only too eager to slap the cuffs on the easy targets, such as the violators of our draconian drug laws or those engaged in high profile white collar crime?

I renounce it.

Do you renounce a political class that looks at public service as a hereditary right, rejecting the decentralized origins of our Republic, turning our political capitals into modern versions of ancient Rome, where the patricians debate what’s best for the rest of us between trips to the vomitorium and canoodling in the public baths?

I renounce them.

Do you renounce the government as a massive public works project, where pork barrel projects are handed out to the politically connected and where everyone is guaranteed a job for life and a comfy pension, all on the public’s dime?

I renounce it.

Do you renounce everything you were told to believe, out of hand, be it right or wrong, if for no other reason than to get a new lease on life and to quit behaving like a well-trained seal?

Yes, I renounce everything I have been told to believe.

So, where does that leave us? For one, I hereby christen myself an urban libertarian, never to look back on the safe harbor of knee-jerk liberalism. I live in the city, not a cave in the wilderness, so I expect a government that will protect its people from the ravages of laissez faire capitalism, to keep our prescription drugs safe and our water clean. I look for a government that will expand and then maintain a reliable public transportation network, that will do its best to see that all of our children have a shot at a decent education. I believe in public parks, and public roads, and public safety. So I remain eager to contribute to the commonweal but am unwilling to be its slave.

I want my government to rescind its claim on vast tracts of our public landscape. I want it to quit trying to bamboozle the people with a hollow egalitarianism whenever it needs to justify another power grab. I think one reason academics and politicians have reached an understanding is that most of them are like children, counting on the government to give us everything we need, as most of them have never had to balance a budget or meet a payroll. To them, government is like a benign sugar daddy, handing out candy and watching out for the weak. But that thinking is a trap, man. It’s poison. It’s the reason why our founding fathers revolted from the motherland. It’s the reason my family has fought and died for this country untold times over the past 200 years. And they did not shed their blood just so America could become yet another nation of semi-informed busy bodies, another council tenancy.

A Pox on Both Your Houses

Let me preface my vitriol by noting that I have been waiting almost 30 years for our country to elect a leader wise enough to shepherd some type of health insurance reform through Congress. I voted for Barack Obama at least in part under the assumption that he could be that man, and I remain somewhat confident that this year a common sense health bill will still become the law of the land.

But listening to the public debate over the past few weeks, I am inclined to wish a pox on the houses of both the supporters and opponents of changes to our health care system. More ominously, the nature of the discussion has me fearing for the future of our Republic.

I believe in freedom. The freedom to lead our lives, to raise our families, and to openly engage in public debate is why this country is still worth dying (and killing) for. But one of those freedoms should be the freedom to get sick, or more specifically the reassurance to know that you will be cared for if you are unlucky enough to become ill. That is a freedom that many of us don’t have. Not even counting the millions of uninsured Americans, I think most of us at one time or another have kept a job that we hated at least in part because we did not want to lose our health care coverage. The stark reality is that we have become a society of shriveled minds and aborted potential, and our country’s employer-based health insurance system has played at least a small role in this shrinking, as the perils of the Cook County Hospital or the L.A. public health care system hang over our necks like Damocles’ sword.

So, let’s start with a few common sense proposals, all of which the Obama Administration has proposed and all of which would make the lives of almost everyone in this country a whole lot better: When someone leaves or loses their job, they should be able to keep their health care coverage. Insurance companies shouldn’t be able to deny coverage to anyone because of “pre-existing conditions”. For those of us who are either self-employed, work for small businesses, or are between jobs, there should be some type of insurance exchange where we can find and buy the right kind of insurance to meet our needs. While medical care shouldn’t be free, it should be affordable, and we as a society should find a way for everyone to be able to buy into some type of basic plan.

Just about everyone is in favor of these things. You think that it wouldn’t be that hard to pass a bill that provides them to the American people. But instead, what we’ve witnessed in the public square over the past few weeks is a display of our internal ugliness, of selfishness, ignorance, paranoia, and delusion on one side, and of thinly-disguised paternalism and cultural imperialism on the other.

Because they are the easier target, let’s start with the right wing nut jobs carrying around firearms and pictures of the President photoshopped into Adolf Hitler to what are billed as “town hall meetings”. Actually, the behavior of these goof balls doesn’t surprise me. We’ve become well acquainted over the past couple of decades with the lunatic fringe of the right wing in this country and their tactics. Do the words “Oklahoma City” mean anything to you? Rather, I’m surprised that a modern version of the Black Panthers hasn’t stepped forward to confront these S.O.B.’s head-on. But then, the race war all these wigged-out crackers have fantasized about will be on, so we should probably thank all the black activists for their restraint.

If you bother to sort through all the “death camp” mumbo jumbo being bandied about by the opponents to health care reform, what’s left is a bunch of mewling by folks on Medicare or Medicaid, worried that they will no longer be able to get elective hip surgery for free, or that the copays for their son with some rare genetic disorder will go up. In essence, they are saying: “I’ve got mine, so screw you.” The reality is that Medicare and Medicaid will break this country over the next quarter century if we don’t do something about it, just like excessive government entitlements are well on the way to breaking most of the economies of Western Europe.

My wife Melissa works at a nursing home, and she marvels at the ridiculous expenditures being paid for by Medicaid, like giving calcium pills or cholesterol medicine to a 92-year old who has nine months to live. Everyone from the nursing homes to the drug companies make money off this system, and the bureaucrats running it don’t want to upset a constituency, so they rubber stamp a lot of this stuff. Almost like it wasn’t their money (OK, it’s not, it’s actually ours, or more accurately our children’s and grandchildren’s, as we will just add it to the burgeoning debt that they already owe on our behalf).

To me, the symbol for all this waste is the motorized “scooter” that Medicare will buy for folks when they reach the point of no longer being able to get around on their own. Have you seen those ads on TV where some old woman is being presented with a new scooter? “For most patients, this will be paid for entirely out of Medicare,” the commercial assures us. Then you see the old lady in the commercial doing a 360 with her new scooter, a smile beaming on her face. Talk to anyone in the health care profession. These scooters are generally a big waste of money. Once a patient’s body is so degraded that they can no longer use a walker to get around, their minds tend to be in similar shape, and they have little or no ability to control their new scooter, which will soon either sit in a corner gathering dust or be returned to the seller.

But here is Howard Dean boasting about how, whatever else happens to the health care bill, the Democrats are going to see to it that included in the bill is an expansion of government-run healthcare, even if that means just an expansion of Medicare. Screw all the parts of the bill that will actually help the average American, Howard Dean and his ilk will jettison that in order to expand the government’s role in our lives, whether we want it or not. If, as you get older, you need a motorized scooter or hip replacement surgery, they’ll see to it that you are not denied, and then send the bill to your children to pay, twenty years down the line.

Like I said, I believe in freedom. And all of those advocating a “public option” regarding the country’s health care are advocating anything but. Rather, they are offering us more servitude to our government, gratitude to the politicians spending away our children’s futures, and a legacy of debt. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life, it’s that when a doo-gooder starts talking about how he is going to improve the world for the rest of us, it is time to grab your wallet and run.

But more than just healthcare, it is the entire American ethic that is in trouble here. I certainly cannot advocate the tactics nor the positions of most opponents to President Obama’s health care proposals. But neither can I relate to all the East Coast social engineers out to “improve” society.

I trace the roots of our current “culture war” back to the presidential campaigns of William Jennings Bryan. In 1896, Bryan was a defining Populist, out to topple the East Coast moneyed interests then running the country. He wanted to support the little man, he wanted to stop America from becoming an imperial power, and he wanted to break the hegemony that the Wall Street banks had on our economy. And he almost became President, except the Republicans in power found a cultural wedge to separate Bryan from the immigrant communities in the big cities who should have been a natural constituency, portraying Bryan as a hayseed who can’t be trusted. It worked. Instead, most of the recent immigrants in the cities voted for William McKinley, a supporter of corporate monopolies and global adventurism. America got a friend of the Wall Street bankers in the White House. We got the Spanish-American War, and new colonies in Cuba and the Philippines.

In “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”, Thomas Frank portrays a rural underclass convinced to ignore it’s own economic interests through the ruse of a cultural war. In reality, the state of America is just the opposite. Most of us urban Americans value our freedoms above almost anything. We picture ourselves as “urban pioneers”, happy to engage with all the various cultures around us, proud of our independent spirit. Unfortunately, we’ve been bamboozled by a class of political apparatchiks who run our governments and who’ve convinced us that their opponents are a bunch of hayseeds, not to be trusted.

And certainly, someone like Sarah Palin is not to be trusted. She encompasses all that is wrong with America’s populist tradition: it’s willful ignorance, it’s knee-jerk defiance, and a cultural inferiority complex that plays itself out as an almost comic bluster.

But it is all these self-righteous folks from places like upscale Vermont who are to blame for her success. They are the ones who have, as a political strategy, intentionally marginalized a huge chunk of the country. White evangelical Christians are about 35% of our population. Guess how much of the student body they make up at Yale. Or Harvard. Or any Ivy League school. In most cases, it is well down into the single digits. If a white evangelical Christian makes it to a major university, the chances are good that he has done it on a football scholarship. An evangelical girl? Well, I guess there’s always women’s crew. The odds are probably better that a white evangelical makes it into the NFL than that he makes it into Harvard. It’s easier for him to compete against some black dude who can run a 4.5 40 than it is to fight the social and economic headwinds working against him. Is it any wonder that they are suspicious of the decisions made by this country’s elite? It is a club in which they are not welcome. While promoting “affirmative action”, we’ve become increasingly comfortable throwing them and their belief system under the bus. Little wonder that they now threaten to respond with guns and bile.

Pitchfork 2009

I attended the first two nights of the Pitchfork Music Festival, which is held in Union Park, an otherwise anonymous patch of ground tucked between Ashland Avenue and the Lake Street El.

I am conflicted about these outdoor music fests. On the one hand, they get me out of the house and into the world of music. But I hate their casual nature, their I’m-in-it-for-the-long haul-so-let’s-bring-out-a-blanket-and-get-stoned mentality. I’m sorry, but I love music too much to hang with that kind of crap. There are plenty of occasions when I might want to stare mindlessly at the sky or talk with a friend, but being 50 feet from the stage is not one of those times. And, in my middle age, I have developed an almost complete intolerance for the reprobate behavior of oblivious jackasses.

That said, the lineup for Pitchfork this year was just too strong to pass up. I could have easily gone all three days. In fact, probably the two bands that I most wanted to see, The Thermals and Vivian Girls, were playing on Sunday. But Melissa had to work that day, and we didn’t want to push our baby sitting welcome with her parents.

I caught eight bands over the two days, not counting the ones I only heard on the periphery. Here is my critique of these bands, rated from top to bottom:

1. The Jesus Lizard: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a band change the mood at an outdoor festival like The Jesus Lizard did Friday night. Before their set, it was all beach balls and harmony. If they started blasting Olivia Newton-John’s “Have You Ever Been Mellow?” over the loudspeakers, it wouldn’t have been out of place. Then The Jesus Lizard stepped on stage. The band banged out the opening chords to “Puss”, then David Yow leapt into the crowd and started in with his best yowl. Yow emerged a couple of minutes later, blood dripping from his mouth, a smile on his face. Next to me, a couple of increasingly nervous looking young girls with flowers in their hair hightailed it for the concession stands, but The Jesus Lizard seemed to be conjuring their own animal spirits to take the places of those not up for this kind of full frontal assault. About halfway through the set, some dude so out of his brain he could hardly stand bashed into me at full throttle. He was wearing a lavender shirt and women’s silk culottes. He flashed a smile at me, revealing stained yellow teeth that made me think that he must have just left his day job at the meth lab, apologized for “getting in my way”, and then rushed full-speed into another person in the crowd. The entire experience was electric, and Yow has to be the most intense middle-aged dude this side of Iggy Pop. Perhaps the most fun thing about this is that it came as a total surprise. I’d never been a member of the cult of The Jesus Lizard. The band has some great riffs, but most of their songs have almost no discernible melody, and I always thought David Yow was just another singer with indy rock disease, one in a long line of white guys trying to make up for his lack of singing chops with sheer enthusiasm. But I stand corrected. What I witnessed Friday night was one of the most intense, over-the-top performances by a band that I’ve ever had the privilege to experience. Thanks guys.

2. The National: I heard two great sets at Pitchfork, either of which alone were worth the price of admission. One was by The Jesus Lizard, and the other was by The National. I keep flip-flopping which one I liked the best, because each brought something entirely different to the table. For me, it is kind of a moral judgment. Do I prefer the intensity of the crazy punkers, reviving their old schtick for the uninitiated? Or would I rather hear a set by a band that I’ve seen before, one show among many in their ongoing coronation tour, but a band on their knife’s edge, at the peak of their powers and popularity? Man, I love The National, and Matt Berninger is probably the most magnetic front man in music today, but I think, if I could only be there for one of these sets, it would be The Jesus Lizard’s. First, the crowd was REALLY into The Jesus Lizard’s set, and the band and audience fed off one another. By contrast, during The National, a guy behind me kept trying to quip clever to his lady friend (“try“ being the operative word), which eventually drove me further towards the stage, where I could enjoy the set free from such distractions. And speaking of distractions, that Aussie fiddler player they tour with was driving me crazy with his head-bobbing, foot-stomping, seaside-inspired fun. “Watch out for scurvy, me matey!” I half-expected him to shout every time he approached a microphone. But the crowd ate it up. Which of course is why playing too many shows like this one is probably the best way to ruin a great band, because those cheers get subliminally stored, like Pavlov’s dog, until the band might as well be backing Bruce Springsteen. That said, The National remain a magical act. My favorite moments: When Berninger introduced “Green Gloves” as a love song and sang it so tenderly that you could almost forget it is about creeping into the homes of his friends and riffling through their shit; and hearing a new song, “Blood Buzz Ohio”, that was a revelation, tender yet powerful, which is just what makes the band so great.

3. Tortoise: I really like early Tortoise, everything through “TNT”. After that, they got a little jazzy for me. I prefer the early concept stuff, heavy on the electronics, where they are just tripping out on sounds rather than jamming on guitars. And the great thing about this set was that it featured a lot of that earlier music. I would have rather heard them play the same set at a smaller indoor club, like the Double Door, where everyone was grooving with what they were doing, but it was also fun to see them outdoors, with the storm clouds threatening overhead.

4. Beirut: I have a soft spot for soaring Balkan melodies. I’ve often wondered why some American pop star hadn’t thought of mining this rich vein of musical ideas. Well, now someone has. I love the accordion. I love the horns. Most of all, I love the music’s maudlin flair. Too often, when an American band kypes musical stylizations from some other part of the planet, they are more concerned with mimicking the superficial elements of the sound but totally ignore the music’s passion, it’s purpose, it’s soul (Vampire Weekend comes to mind, but the culprits are many). Thankfully, Zach Condon and company are swinging for the fences here, and their live show had moments of real beauty. Unfortunately, we spent most of the set standing next to a nearby stage, getting a good spot for the National, so I think that I need to see Beirut again in a more intimate setting. But this taste had me wanting more.

5. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: So clean, so young, so poppy, in that 80’s, Teenage Fanclub-meets-the Psychedelic Furs kind of way, I immediately wanted to love these guys. Then I remembered the brief dalliance I had being a Dashboard Confessional fan after grooving on all the young girls screaming along with them at Lollapalooza a few years back, and I was put on guard. In the four years that I’ve done this blog, I’ve only regretted two of the entries, and my review of Dashboard Confessional is one of them because, upon further reflection, I must admit that Dashboard Confessional pretty much sucks. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart looked like well-scrubbed college kids, singing happy songs, so excited to be there, and I tried not to reflexively love them. Yes, they’ve got catchy bass lines, and that atmospheric, 4AD guitar fuzz is a cool sound, but both the male lead and female back-up singer really didn’t have much resonance, at least live, and all their songs were pretty much plowing the same narrow ground. So I kept telling myself at the time. But I’ve caught myself unconsciously humming “Young Adult Friction” several times in the past three days, so they must be doing something right. A bit of a guilty pleasure, certainly nothing original, but a pleasure nonetheless.

6. Built to Spill: I’ll start off by saying these guys were playing a solid set, and they had some catchy hooks, but after Jesus Lizard’s incendiary performance, it was kind of a drag to stand there and watch them slog through their show. Then Doug Martsch began one of his 5-minute guitar solos, and I made my way to the exit.

7. Lindstrom: Let me note that if this Norwegian trance beat composer was blasting his tunes in my backyard, I would probably have danced for hours. But a lot of this was way too hyper for the setting. It was like we were listening to a soundtrack for some 2nd tier 80’s action movie, like Rutger Hauer was about to burst on stage and kick Lindstrom in the groin.

8. Yo La Tengo: I’ve tried with this band, but I just don’t get it. The set list had been requested beforehand online by the audience, so I guess I can’t blame Yo La Tengo for the song selection. But there was a lot of generic rocking out that totally bored me. I’d occasionally perk up when they’d play one of their catchier songs, like “Stockholm Syndrome”. I was about to wind my way closer to the stage, to give them another chance, when Ira let loose with what had to be at least an 8-minute guitar solo, while the rest of the band kept repeating the same 3-note riff ad nauseum. This sent me scrambling away, figuring I’d get a good spot for the Jesus Lizard show. So I guess that I should thank Yo La Tengo for that.