We fished five weights mostly, 9 foot with floating lines and 4x leaders. The Driftless streams would have been perfect for bamboo rods, but I’m done with rod buying I think.
At least until I buy another rod.
Reading
I re-read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead to get ready for Iowa. In our plane trip to Rhode Island, I kept reading excerpts to Kris out loud, because so much of it deserves pondering. I hope the people around us didn’t mind.
I re-read Shoeless Joe (and of course re-watched Field of Dreams). There is a surprising amount of good writing tied to Iowa, mostly because of the University of Iowa creative writers workshop. There’s Jane Smiley, W. P. Kinsella, Flannery O’Connor, W.D. Snodgrass, Wallace Stegner, T. C. Boyle, Sandra Cisneros . . . Frankly, I don’t see how anyone ever wrote a word without going to Iowa first.
I had such success with cooking in New Mexico, I bought a copy of The Flavor of Wisconsin by Harva Hachter and Terese Allen with the plan to try some of the recipes in our Air BnB. I didn’t. It’s a wonderful book, the kind of historic/cultural study of food culture that every state deserves, with a general survey of the food history of the state and then a lot of recipes. The problem is that Wisconsin food is kinda, I don’t know, unappealing in the abstract. Maybe I’ll go back and make that recipe for beef and kidney pie. I’m going to go to my grave though without having eaten the potato and turnip whip.
I’ve written about the Driftless Cafe already, and about trying to find Frito pie in Iowa. There are, I’m sure many good things to say about Midwestern food (and face it, Midwestern food is what we’re talking about here), but the only good thing I can say about those breaded pork tenderloin sandwiches in Iowa is that if you covered them with cream gravy and left out the bread, they’d be a reasonable substitute for chicken fried steak.
You can find 20-year old cheddar in Wisconsin, for obscene amounts of money. They take their cheese seriously.
What We Didn’t Catch
Muskie. Notwithstanding how much I liked the Driftless, I still regret not catching muskie in Wisconsin.
Where We Didn’t Go
We talked about driving to Minneapolis/St. Paul for a Twins game, but we didn’t. I’ve been to Minneapolis; Kris hasn’t.
I’d like to have canoed in the Boundary Waters.
I really wanted to drive through the Amana region of Iowa. I’d been once before, a long time ago, and I liked it. Because of a flat in Missouri we ran out of time. By the way, the family minivan doesn’t have a jack and a spare, but instead has a flimsy fix-a-flat kit, which notwithstanding my distrust, worked fine. Did you know that all the tire repair shops in rural Iowa close on Saturday afternoon? We had a nervous 100 mile drive to Dubuque where we found a Discount Tire that fixed the flat for free. I love Discount Tire, but I’d still rather have a spare tire.
Corn
We crossed Iowa, south to north, in late fall, and the corn stalks were ready for harvest, I suppose for feed? There didn’t appear to be any actual ears of corn. I grew up around wheat and cotton and sorghum and cattle pasture, but I have never seen such monoculture as Iowa corn. There is a lot of corn in Iowa, and that doesn’t even come close to a description. There is more than a lot of corn. There is a plethora of corn, the universe of corn, the place where corn is born and goes to die. No wonder corn fields show up in movies as the place the supernatural comes from; the amount of corn is spooky.
I realized that despite my rural upbringing, I had only the vaguest notion of what silos are for; they could be guard towers, to protect from roving bands of children of the corn? There sure are a lot of them.
Missouri
We were probably in as much of Missouri as anyplace, though we didn’t fish there. We spent a night in Kansas City on the way, at the 21c Museum Hotel. They’re great hotels and pet friendly, but more often than not located in peculiar places–at least if you’re not from there. Louisville and Lexington, Kansas City, Bentonville, Oklahoma City . . . they’re opening a new one in Des Moines. We also drove by the hamlet in north central Missouri where my grandmother was born in 1890, Osgood. I visited Osgood as a child in the early 1960s, and stayed with a great aunt who had no indoor plumbing, and visited a great uncle who kept horse feed in the spare bedroom. It was an adventure. There’s not much of Osgood left, if there ever was much of Osgood. Certainly there’s no tire repair shop.
Osgood, Missouri
On the drive nome we paralleled the Mississippi, and stopped in Hannibal to walk around. I’m not sure we saw the best of Hannibal, or if there is any best of Hannibal.
We spent two nights in St. Louis, took our picture under the arch, visited the Feather Craft fly fishing store (I’ve bought mail order from them for 30 years, but in person it reminds me most of a plumbing supply), and saw a Cardinals game. I hate the Cardinals, but they were playing the Cubs, who I also hate. The Astros played too long in the Central Division of the National League for me not to have strong feelings about the Cardinals and the Cubs.
Music
Iowa. The Everly Brothers are from Iowa, and Glen Miller, and Bix Beiderke. Glen Miller got me through law school. Big Band music was the only music I could listen to and still concentrate on reading.
Minnesota. We listened to a lot of Bob Dylan. I’m not a big fan of Prince (who is of course from Minneapolis or St Paul or whatever), but then we listened to a lot of Bob Dylan.
Wisconsin. I’ve been through this list before. It’s still pretty much the same list.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 7, 1864, “The war in Tennessee: Confederate massacre of black Union troops after the surrender at Fort Pillow, April 12, 1864, New York, New York Public Library.
It’s no accident that two of our most violent predecessors, Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821-1877) and Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), were both from Tennessee. I had saved reading an Andrew Jackson biography for this trip, though I’d been thinking about it since President Trump’s election. President Trump compared himself then to President Jackson, and they were both arguably Men of the People, or at least some people anyway. There were also differences. Jackson was a man of great personal bravery, a brilliant general, devoted husband, and from all indications he didn’t really want to be President. Jackson ended up on the $20 bill, though to our modern sensibilities his presence is something of an affront. He was scheduled to be replaced by Harriet Tubman until President Trump’s election.
Hammatt Billings, The Battle of New Orleans January 8, 1815, Abbot’s Lives of the Presidents, engraved print, 1882, Library of Congress.
As a child Andrew Jackson was poor, even by 18th Century standards. He was poorly educated, a duelist, a slave owner, a slave trader, a commander in wars against the Creek and Seminole, and an under-qualified justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court (though to be fair no one else was probably qualified either). He married a married woman, gambled big time on horse racing, and was an uncompromising and violent general, the sort of general who during the Creek War (1814-15) stood in front of potential deserters and told them that if they tried to leave he would order the canon at their back to fire. Of course he was also in front of the canon. To modern sensibilities his greatest sin was the forced removal of the Southeastern tribes to Oklahoma, and the deaths of thousands in that removal.
As a Tennessee congressman David Crockett opposed Jackson’s Indian policies. Defeated for a third term in Congress, Crockett was in Mississippi when a third Tennessean (and Jackson protege), Sam Houston, got in trouble in Texas. Crockett went there to help, leaving us with his immortal line, “I told the people of my district that I would serve them as faithfully as I had done; but if not, they might go to hell, and I would go to Texas.”
Whatever his failings, Jackson was a true believer in democracy in its broadest sense, and the great unionist of his age. The reason Jackson is on the $20 bill is that Lincoln needed Jackson. As President, Jackson had first faced down South Carolina’s threatened secession in the 1832 Nullification Crisis, receiving Congressional authorization to send troops to South Carolina to enforce Federal law. It wasn’t over slavery, it was over tariffs, but it was North-South, and Jackson gave Lincoln his precedent for a military response to preserve the Union. It didn’t hurt Lincoln either that Jackson was Southern. Hence Jackson enters the American pantheon, not merely as a man of action, but as a man central to an idea, the Union, and it was an idea that Jackson revered, both as a general and as President. It’s no accident that his Texas protege, Governor Sam Houston, resigned when Texas voted to secede.
Pierre Langlume, General Andrew Jackson, lithograph, c. 1824, Library of Congress.
***
In his study of slavery, Inhuman Bondage, David Brion Davis suggests a number of conditions for slavery to exist, but one of his suggestions, and here I’m paraphrasing, is that we simply have no clue how hard and violent the lives of these people were. They were surrounded by death (50% of infants never reached adulthood), cruelty (corporal punishment of soldiers and sailors wasn’t that different than corporal punishment of slaves), privation, and violence to both man and beast.
I have a family story that I ponder when I think about these people. One of my 16 fourth great-grandfathers (along with 16 fourth great-grandmothers, nature being demanding that way), one Andrew Davidson, was born in 1768 in Rocky Gap, Virginia, and died in 1853 in Bedford, Tennessee. I don’t know much about Davidson, but he is famous enough to have a historical marker in West Virginia:
Even with a historical marker, Davidson isn’t famous enough to have a Wikipedia page, but there are plenty of descriptions of what happened to Mrs. Davidson. Mrs. Davidson, a Rebecca Burke, was pregnant, and she gave birth shortly after her abduction. The raiders drowned the newborn. Two of her other children were murdered and one was taken from her and subsequently died by accident. At some later date she was sold to a white family in Canada. All of her children, the newborn, two daughters, and one son, were dead. Lord only knows what she endured.
Davidson, to his credit, went looking, and it took about three years for him to find her in Canada. He brought her home, and then she died. She was 28. I think about that story when I try to imagine the outlook of these people, the level of violence that must have been, if not exactly their norm, at least not uncommon, certainly not as uncommon as it would be for us. The violence of Jackson and Forrest would not have been alien to Andrew Davidson. Andrew Davidson would probably have admired them both without reservation.
Davidson, by the way, remarried (this time to one of my 16 fourth great grandmothers) and had more children, for which I am grateful.
***
I read H.W. Brands’ biography of Jackson. There were others, including at least one newer, but Brands’ seemed to have the best reviews. Then I read some stuff about Shiloh, and after went on to read Jack Hurst’s biography of the Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Hurst starts out saying that he isn’t a Forrest apologist, but I suspect it’s impossible to write a biography without empathy for the subject, even if the subject is Nathan Bedford Forrest. Notwithstanding his disclaimer Hurst is a bit of an apologist.
After the Civil War, Forrest considered a plan to invade Mexico. He said he had been promised 20,000 muskets. It’s not clear who made the promise, or whether they were able to deliver, but it’s not unusual for a lack of clarity to surround Forrest and his deeds. This was during the 1867 elections when Forrest was almost certainly the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Forest is often reported as the founder of the Klan, but he wasn’t; it had been around a bit before he joined. There’s considerable speculation about Forest’s role in the Klan, but during its first incarnation, first as a social club born in Nashville and later as a violent means of suppressing black and white Republican votes, he was the Grand Wizard. He was almost certainly integral to its post-1868 election violence. The sheets, by the way, were to give the Klansmen the appearance of Confederate ghosts.
The Klan died out in Tennessee by 1871, in part because of Federal suppression, but also because it had accomplished what it wanted: suffrage for former Confederates and suppression of Southern Republican voters, black and white. Some of the credit for the first death of the Klan probably goes to Forrest, who for whatever reasons seems to have ordered it disbanded. It would next rise in Georgia in 1915, in part because of the popularity of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.
Nathan Bedford Forrest, Brady-Handy Collection, 1862-1865, Library of Congress.
Forrest shares a lot with Jackson. He was poor as a child, poorly educated, a duelist, a slave owner, and a slave trader. Forrest made a fortune before the War trading slaves, while Jackson seems only to have dabbled and to have made his fortune as a planter. Forrest was never an Indian fighter, the Southeastern tribes having been removed during Jackson’s presidency. As a boy he did once shoot at a man over an ox, after he’d shot the ox. He gambled at cards, and was an uncompromising and violent field commander. During the war he was shot four times, had 29 horses shot out from under him, and claimed personally to have killed as many Federal troops as he had lost horses. He didn’t drink. He was devoted to his wife and children.
Forrest is considered to be one of the great cavalry commanders, not just of the American Civil War but of any war, with an extraordinary sense of field tactics and leadership. Of all the Confederate generals of the Civil War, he was probably the most consistently successful. Forrest was born to fight in the violent West, the western theater lacking the patina of gentility present in the east, and part of Sherman’s strategy on his March to the Sea was to keep just enough troops in Tennessee and Mississippi to keep Forrest busy and out of his hair.
During his lifetime, Forrest was most notorious for the 1864 massacre at Fort Pillow on the Mississippi River in Western Tennessee. Forrest always denied that he had ordered the massacre, but 300 Union forces, many of them African-American, were murdered after the fort’s surrender. It is probably the greatest battlefield atrocity of our most atrocious war, and at the time was widely known, now largely forgotten. Instead of Fort Pillow being Forrest’s legacy, his legacy is the Klan.
At the end of his life, Forrest seems to have found religion and was, perhaps, one of the few Southern voices for reconciliation, not only between North-South, but between whites and blacks. Maybe it was too little too late. Like Jackson and Lincoln he’d come to view the Union as the most important thing, the only economic path forward for the destroyed South, and I suppose he deserves some credit for it. Of course that’s not why there are public (and private) statues of Forrest in Tennessee.
Brent Moore, photographer, Nathan Bedford Forrest statue on private land on I-65 in Nashville, 2006. While there are plenty of moral sensibilities that could be offended by a statue of Forrest, I’m not sure that the moral offense isn’t matched by the aesthetic offense of this particular statue. It would deserve to come down even if it wasn’t a statue of General Forrest. That is one ugly piece of fiberglass.
***
Meantime the fishing near Houston, both for bass and redfish, has been outstanding. I had maybe my best day fishing for redfish ever, not so much in the landing, but in the seeing, and Kris did almost all of the day’s poling. The next day I sat in my canoe and watched what must have been a four-pound bass come out of the water to eye level after dragon flies. I never caught that bass, but I caught plenty of other stuff. And sometimes the seeing is the best part.
Now if I’d just remember to get my hand out of the way of the fish photo.
One night last week I woke up in the middle of the night and checked the Washington weather. There were flood warnings again on the Queets and Hoh Rivers. The next morning the Queets was over 13.5 feet, and running at over 15,000 cubic feet per second. I gather that flows below 4,000 cfs are considered safe for wading, so flows of 15,000 . . . Probably not. We were supposed to fish the next day, but we went sightseeing instead.
Meantime that day it was 46° in Quinault, Washington, and 37° in Houston. I didn’t run that morning in Houston; I might have in Quinault.
On social media I viewed a succession of snow pictures from friends in the Texas Panhandle and Vernon and Dallas, which all-in-all were more interesting than the news about the failed Iowa caucuses and the impeachment vote. On a lark I checked the temperatures through the Great Plains. That morning it was 16° in Vernon, Texas, 19° in Wichita, Kansas, 16° in Omaha, and 16° in Fargo, North Dakota. I hope my friends in Vernon were warm. It’s been 45 years since I left there, and I can still remember both the bitter Plains winds and the excitement of a cold, still morning when the earth was covered with snow.
Tra Cardwell, Vernon, Texas, February 5, 2020.
That night Jack called from The Evening Hatch to warn us about what we already knew, that the rivers were blown out for Saturday, but Sunday and Monday might be better. I told him I could get in plenty of guitar practice on Saturday. He said good attitude. I didn’t tell him that attitude was fine but that what he should really wish for was a better guitarist.
Getting ready for our trip to Washington I read some stuff by Washington State writers. I didn’t rereadTrout Fishing in America, but Richard Brautigan was from Spokane. It’s the only Washington State book I ran across that was arguably about fly fishing, but I’d just re-read it two years ago when I started this exercise. I googled its genre because I figured Tom Robbins, a Seattle writer, was similar, and it might give me some insight into their mix of 60s sexual adventurism, improbable plots, and moral superiority. Magical realism came to mind, but I figured magical realism had to be South American, then I saw Robbins and Brautigan described as magical realists. As far as I can tell Washington State is decidedly not in South America, so maybe I was wrong.
But I also found their work described as Fabulism, which description I really liked, mostly because I initially mispronounced it “fab” as in “Fab Four,” and for me every good impulse in the 60s is summed up in the Beatles. Even if I didn’t exactly like Brautigan or Robbins or even the 60s. On reflection though I figured out it was Fabulism as in fable not Fabulism as in Fab Four, and that made more sense: these books are fables, adult fairy tales with lots of sex but still a moral. I suspect though that the moral is that having sex with the author is a good thing. Honestly, if all young male achievement is driven by the desire for sexual partners (and any male who doesn’t at least suspect that isn’t being entirely honest), Brautigan and Robbins may be the most honest writers ever, even if reading them’s a mixed bag, and if honesty by a fiction writer isn’t quite the point.
I remember pretty vividly the last time I read Tom Robbins, in 1976. The book was Another Roadside Attraction, and I remember the couch I was on and the room I was in when I read it, but I don’t remember anything about the novel itself. This time I tried to read Robbins’ memoir, Tibetan Peach Pie, which made me think of Robbins as the enfant terrible who I might have envied a long time ago; I tried to read the book about the sexual adventuress hitchhiker with the big thumb, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (which happily set off a several-month long binge of Emmylou Harris singing in my head), but I got bored; and I started his last novel, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, but I gave up after four pages, when he said a moth resembled a clitoris with wings. Sometimes a moth is just a moth.
I only got very far with one novel, his second, StillLife with Woodpecker. It’s about a red-headed terrorist bomber nicknamed the Woodpecker having sex with a red-headed princess from a deposed East European royal family. The usual stuff. Sometimes Robbins can be an interesting observer: “That is why virtually every revolution in history has failed: the oppressed, as soon as they seize power, turn into the oppressors, resorting to totalitarian tactics to ‘protect the revolution.’ That is why minorities seeking the abolition of prejudice become intolerant, minorities seeking peace become militant, minorities seeking equality become self-righteous, and minorities seeking liberation become hostile . . .” Mostly though he’s only the enfant terrible: “And, of course, Bernard, as all men, carried around in his trousers the most renowned redhead of all—characteristically funny and dangerous.”
I don’t know whether I’ll finish “Still Life,” but I will recognize that woodpecker is certainly a double entendre, which is a lot of what you need to know about Tom Robbins.
The first 100 pages of Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette, may be the best travel guide to a city, Seattle, I’ve read. Early in the book Bernadette rants off-and-on about Seattle, and her rants describe the architecture, restaurants, rain, private schools, behavior, blackberry bushes . . . all the things that a good description would tell about a city. Bernadette is a bit of a Fabulist as well, and maybe that’s characteristic of a lot of post-WW II literature. But if Robbins’ characters achieve fulfillment through sex, Bernadette is surprisingly chaste: she only achieves fulfillment when she hitchhikes to Palmer Station in Antarctica and signs on to design the new South Pole station. Does that make it a women’s book? It does make me suspect that Maria Semple is built differently than Tom Robbins, and one is certain that Bernadette doesn’t have abnormally large thumbs, nor does she need them.
“They were young and scruffy, like they could all have worked at REI . . .” Was there ever a more Seattle-ish description of anything.
Gunderson’s Snow Falling on Cedars is as far from Fabulism as it gets. It’s a lovely book, with a flaw, but still lovely, slow and descriptive, evocative of a place and unforgettable. It is a story about a death that might be a murder, an accused the reader suspects is wrongly accused, and a moral dilemma for a damaged man. It is a story about a moment in time, post-World War II, when pride in the community mixes with guilt over the treatment of neighbors and friends: the Japanese internment, and the place of the Japanese Americans in the post-war community. It’s a book about a small town, an island in Puget Sound, and people who at their best are careful, deliberate. Their island demands it. The flaw—the accused’s silence—is explainable if not entirely convincing, but then the novel would have been profoundly different if he’d told his story early, like how you can’t have The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn if there were a realistic ending.
There’s a good movie version, that looks just like the book reads.
If I recommended a single book about the Pacific Northwest it would probably be Timothy Egan’s TheGood Rain, and if I were to recommend a single book about the Texas and Oklahoma plains it would probably be Egan’s The Worst Hard Time. The Good Rain is an older book now, published in 1990, but Egan told me that I was going to a place where the best descriptions might be green, rivers, Pacific, mountains, logging booms and busts, and drip, drip, drip. For Oregon and Washington Egan talks about the right stuff, the history of the place, the natural world, and the people who could only come from there. The book holds up well.
Post script: there was an moment when we were driving through the Olympic Peninsula, re-listening to The Good Rain in the car, and Egan was describing the road we were on. Good timing.
We packed to skip the baggage claim in Chicago. We flew in early on Saturday, and spent the rest of the day looking for things we’d never seen.
The only specialized fishing gear we took were polarized lenses. Our guides, Midwest Waters Anglers, provided all the gear, and it was great gear.
What I lost, Where we didn’t go.
I lost my beloved Bonefish & Tarpon Trust Yeti thermos. I really liked that Thermos.
I wish we’d had time to go to Springfield for the Abraham Lincoln Museum. We could have easily spent more time in Chicago.
What we ate.
By some measures Houston is now the most ethnically diverse city in the US, but that’s somewhat disingenuous. It treats all white people as a lump, which is like treating all Asians and Asian Americans as a lump, or treating all Africans and African Americans as a lump. Chicago’s story is in part a story of 19th and 20th century first-generation Irish, Polish, German, Italian, Welsh, and Jewish immigrants, white immigration that wasn’t from England via New England–the immigrants in The Jungle are Lithuanian. In 2019 the nativist impulse is aimed at immigrants from Mexico and Central America. In 1850 it was the anti-Catholic No-Nothings opposed to Irish and German Catholic immigration. Things never change.
Uncle Sam’s youngest son, Citizen Know Nothing, lithograph, 1854, Sarony & Co., lithographer, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. American political prints, 1766-1876. From Wikipedia. He looks a lot like Lord Byron.
As of 2010, Chicago is 31.7% non-Hispanic whites, 32.9% black or African American, 5.5% Asian, and 13.3% Hispanic, and 16.1% mixed or other, but there are lots of ethnic traditions not covered in those numbers. We wanted Chicago ethnic food, and got a list of restaurants from our friend Tom, who knows these things. He said that there were three great ethnic food cities in the US, New York, Chicago, and Houston, and that the hard part of the list for Chicago was coming up with stuff we didn’t have in Houston. It’s a great list, even if we only made it to three of the places. Some of Tom’s notes are included in quotes:
Min Hing Cuisine – “great dim sum for breakfast (6 kinds of shrimp dumplings is good enough for me).” We went there straight from the airport. Chinese are about 1.6% of Chicago’s population, and first got there before 1860 with the railroads. The population boomed in the 1950s and 60s.
Parachute – “fusion Korean American, in the best way.” This place has a Michelin star, and seems to be everyone’s favorite restaurant, Alinea be damned. Make reservations in advance. We didn’t make reservations, and getting in on a Saturday night without a reservation might be harder than catching steelhead. We didn’t catch any Illinois steelhead either.
Shokran – “Moroccan kebabs and salads, also tangines and couscous. Cash only. BYOB.”
Staropolska or Lutnia Polish – About 6.7% of Chicago is Polish, with Polish the third language, after English and Spanish. We ate at Staropolska, just around the corner from St. Hyacinth Basilica. The young blonde waitress with the Polish accent was proud that it was the oldest Polish restaurant in Chicago. It could use some freshening, but that might ruin the vibe, and the food was great and the service was great.
Staropolska, cabbage rolls and potato pancakes. That red sauce seemed to be heavily paprikad, and was outstanding.
Jibek Jolu – “dumplings and noodles . . . Uighur.”
Sayat-Nova – “Armenian. Typical middle eastern fare . . . ” It was also in the middle of the Miracle Mile, and we went on the Sunday night of a long weekend when there was still plenty of shopping to be done. After some terrified driving we found a parking garage ($26 for a bit more than an hour, and well worth it). Kris loved Sayat-Nova, and said I have to ask Tom for recommendations wherever we go. I wish Tom could have helped out in Pittsburg, New Hampshire.
Sayat-Nova. Lamb meatballs in yoghurt and mint sauce.
Little Bucharest Bistro – “quality Central European food, excellent service.” Romanian. We didn’t go, but the descriptions on the internet were great. It wasn’t far from Staropolska.
Birrieria Zaragoza – “fast casual Mexican all about goat.” The Mexican population is the fastest growing population in Chicago, so it made sense to include something, but it broke Tom’s rule, sort of. I don’t know of anyplace in Houston that specializes in goat.
The best thing about ethnic Chicago restaurants? Other than the food of course. I could wear my stylish fishing clothes, the ones designed by the fashion-forward stylists at Patagonia, to any of them, which I did.
If that wasn’t enough of a list, Tom provided a supplement: “Ghareeb Nawaz Indo-Pakistani. San Soo Gob San-Korean. Galit-Israeli-Middle Eastern. Kaboobi Persian Grill (North side – our favorite). Cabra Peruvian (Rooftop restaurant). If you have time for breakfast before you leave, make it to Dove’s Luncheonette….”.
Books, Movies, TV.
There are tons of movies from Chicago, and we watched The Blues Brothers, The Fugitive, and The Untouchables. Pretty good Chicago movies. We never watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I may be too old for it now.
Mostly I read about Lincoln. I wonder how he managed to govern so well without Tweets. This is a good time to ponder Lincoln, and there’s a ton of stuff out there. Sometimes we get better leaders than we deserve. Sometimes apparently we don’t.
I read Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Auggie March. I had tried to read Bellow before, but didn’t quite get it. This time was better. I tried to read The Jungle, but found it too painful. I listened to a lot of Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski novels, but never did figure out how to pronounce Warshawski’s name, which is a weak and obscure joke about the inevitable unlikable character trope in every novel. If they can’t pronounce her name, they’re almost certainly the villain. I listened to some Dresden File novels by Jim Butcher, but didn’t think they were nearly as amusing as when I’d listened to them years ago. Michael Harvey wrote some good Chicago mysteries, and I listened to those when I got tired of the others.
Donuts.
We picked up Polish pastries at Kurowski Sausage Shop, pretzel-like crescents lightly filled with an unidentifiable jam, but I was too intimidated to brave the meat case. On Sunday morning we made a quick drive to Oak Park for Donuts at Firecakes Donuts and a quick visit to the Frank Lloyd Wright studio. The donuts were just fine, and I wish we’d had time to look at the scattered Wright houses. Next time.
There are Dunkin’ Donuts everywhere in Chicago. Chicago should do better.
Playlist.
This was a long list, so it’ll be pretty general.
Chicago’s population is 32.9% non-Hispanic African or African American. The percentage of African American population in Houston, a Southern city with significant historic black communities, is only 22.9%. For the Houston metropolitan area, Houston plus the suburbs, the number drops slightly, to 21%, but for Chicago 32.9% plunges to 17% when you add in the suburbs.
The two cities are of roughly the same size, but their largest growth occurs about a century apart. The historic African American population in Houston has its origin in slavery, but much of the dispersion from the city into the suburbs occurred after the Civil Rights Movement, and Blacks apparently moved out to the suburbs in about the same numbers as they stayed in Houston. In Chicago, the boom in African American population occurred in the great migration, from 1910 to 1960, and plenty of movement to the suburbs occurred largely before the Civil Rights Movement. Blacks apparently stuck to (or were confined to) the City.
Why this is kicking off the music playlist may not be obvious, but there is a lot of great music out of Chicago’s African American community. There are three cities most responsible for the origination of jazz: New Orleans, Kansas City, and Chicago. The earliest migration of the Blues was from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago. This is Great Migration stuff, and stuff that shaped us profoundly.
Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five, 1925, Chicago
There’s another odd thing about Illinois music, there’s a surprising number of good folk/country/Americana musicians out of Illinois. Illinois is our second flattest state after Florida, tucked in as a drainage between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi. It hides all that flatness with a combination of skyscrapers and trees. Anyway, all that flatness makes for great farmland, and except for Chicago, this is Midwest farm country. It’s no surprise that farm country makes for country music and Republican voters.
Jazz
I probably should have done better, but Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong. Armstrong’s first recordings are from Chicago. The singers Dee Alexander and Johnny Hartman, and Herbie Hancock.
Blues
Of course the Blues Brothers was set in Chicago. Where else would it be? All of these musicians were from, cycled through, wrote about, or sang about Chicago: Robert Johnson, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Jimmy Rogers (no, not that Jimmie Rodgers), Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, Little Walter, Luther Allison, Hound Dog Taylor, Jimmy Reed, Slim Harpo, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, Son Seales, Otis Rush, Sonny Boy Williamson, James Cotton, Magic Sam, Lonnie Brooks, Earl Hooker, Freddie King . . . Is Bo Diddley the Blues? We talked about going to a blues bar on Saturday, but we’re old, things start late, and fishing starts early. Next time.
Dovydenas, Jonas, Muddy Waters, Checkerboard Lounge, 423 E. 43rd St., Chicago; Chicago, Illinois, 1977, Library of Congress, Chicago Ethnic Arts Project Collection.
Folk/Country/Americana
John Prine, Allison Krauss, Shawn Colvin, Son Volt, Wilco, Steve Goodman.
Has there ever been a sadder song than Steve Goodman’s A Dying Fan’s Last Request? Not only was Goodman in fact dying, he was a Cub’s fan. There is nothing more pathetic than the Chicago Cubs, but it’s still one of the best baseball songs ever.
Scattered and Inconsisten Rock
In early adolescence, I thought Chicago was the greatest band ever. I liked the brass, I liked the politics, I liked the guitar. I hadn’t listened to them since. Color My World was probably the first song I learned to play on the guitar, though in my defense it was probably before it became the most important high school prom song ever written. I still think 25 or 6 to 4 was a pretty great song. Pretty good song. Ok, I still like it.
Reo Speedwagon, Cheap Trick, Smashing Pumpkins.
When Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville came out in the 90s it got great reviews and I bought a copy, probably without actually reading the reviews. We were on a family car trip and I started the CD in the car. Some song came on, Flower? Fuck and Run? Anyway, it was really not age appropriate, either for me or my children. This trip was probably the second time I’d listened to it. It’s pretty raw in a “I grew up in Chicago suburbs and graduated from Oberlin” sort of way. It may be age appropriate for my children now, but it’s still not age appropriate for me.
Random Stuff
Allister, Somewhere Down on Fullerton.
Mobstability, Crook County (Bond Crusher Mix).
Rhett Miller, The El.
The Lawrence Arms, A Guided Tour of Chicago.
Andrew Bird, Pulaski at Night. Good song.
Common, Chi-City.
Frank Sinatra, My Kind of Town.
Graham Nash, Chicago/We Can Change the World.
Sufjan Stevens, Illinois.
Dan Fogalberg, Illinois.
Ben Folds, Effington.
Twista, Crook County.
Kanye West, Homecoming
Aliotta Haynes Jeremiah, Lake Shore Drive
Jim Croce, Bad Bad Leroy Brown.
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Mahler, Symphony #9 in D. The Chicago Symphony Center Orchestra Hall is magnificent.
Guitar.
Didn’t take one. A guy in the airport told me that he always checked his guitar, and convinced me that I could do the same with a good enough case. Kris thought that was a great idea. Stuffing a guitar in the overhead is a pain. I got back to Houston and ordered a new case.
