But I Always Thought That I'd See You Again

"I’ve been walking my mind to an easy time... "

Funny how a person is there, and then they are not. Forming days as much as the movement of the sun, the inexorability of the lower-right computer clock, or the distant, serial roar of the El. Someone who's an indelible tincture--a Sharpie that leaked in a pants pocket. The petal-hue of a dried flower on the bookcase.

Then something happens. And maybe another thing, or four--one worse, one slightly better, one perplexing.

Then they're gone. Alto relievo, then bas-relief, matrix...concavity...trace... invisibility.

And the sun keeps moving, 1:46 PM changes to 5:02 PM to a week from next Wednesday, train cars glide and roar. One day one of those cars bucks a bit, a filly spooked by a crow, and people cry. Cups of coffee are drunk, Starbucks or Dunkin, rainclouds squinted at, hands held, puddles skirted, shotglasses clinked, snow tasted, oceansurf kicked, all-nighters pulled, chords remembered, chicken stir-fried, knots worried, eight-balls pocketed, uppercuts punched, mistakes made anyway, flowers pruned, cars rented, cigarettes stubbed, hard drives control-alt-deleted, resolve mustered, jukebox buttons pushed, lashes curled, dryers de-linted, brides dressed, ceilings stared at, scenes initiated, Franzes Ferdinanded, texts messaged, chips gambled all-in, thighs caressed, noodles slurped, five-minute calls called, street bumps biked over, caskets closed. New songs--digital kudzu--graft over old playlists, and there's a springy night when drive-thru fries in the car taste better than they ever have, ever.

I've seen these things, and more. And though there's a dry, smooth beach at dawn where feelings used to beat, I always thought I'd see...

I did.

Going Off the Rails On a Crazy Train...

My friend Sarah and I have always thought it would be sorta neat if there was a problem with our Blue Line commute, and we had to exit the train into the subway tunnel and escape. Edge along the tunnel wall, maybe see a rat and get totally skeeving freaked out, and then exit some stairs into fresh air around Kinzie and Milwaukee Avenues, ready to tell the tale of near-terror over beers for the next 37 months.

Ummm, I don't think that sounds so cool after all.

And Take You To Your Special Island

I love "Captain Jack."

I know it's about using smack, but it makes me feel like I'm in a smoky, dark wood-paneled bar with ornate brass fixtures somewhere below 14th Street. Except it will no longer be smoky, and I probably can't afford a place just below 14th Street. That's why this has to happen in 1973, when the song appeared on Piano Man.

I wonder if the line

"I did go from wanting to be someone
Now I'm drunk and wearing flip-flops on Fifth Avenue"

from Rufus Wainwright's "Poses"

is an homage to Billy's

"So you stand on the corner in your New English clothes
and you look so polished from your hair down to your toes
Ah but still your fingers gonna pick your nose"

...if only for the dawning thought in both, found on the most street cornery of cities, that what you want can ultimately, insiduously, consume what it is you want.

I wish I was going to New York this summer. It's time to find that mythic place in the Village and stare dreamily out a cab window at 4 am thinking "I'm in a New York State of Mind."

Spirit of 76

A campaign to save an iconic sign is in full swing.

Has anyone seen any 76 Balls around Chicago? I did see them in Los Angeles when I was there.

I guess I'd have felt the same way if the Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket signs were all pulled down in one fell swoop.

They're only signs -- but also landmarks of youth. The fried chicken bucket--summer Sunday night dinners at my grandparents, riding in the front seat of my aunt's royal blue VW Bug, probably around 1976, chirping up the street to pick up a chicken Bucket and a Barrel at the Kentucky Fried that's now a homegrown bar-food restaurant, an Applebee's pedigreed for the Chevy Chase set (who probably never appreciated the proximity but rather deplored the presence of a fast-food restaurant in their backyards).

I saw a bucket-KFC a couple months ago, also in Los Angeles. For a modern city obsessed with appearance, our ugliest but most cherished consumerist past is preserved a lot longer out there.

What I'd really like, though, is to find that Bucket font and use it.

The Girls Don't Seem To Care What's On, As Long As It Plays Til Dawn

I just discovered this Yacht Rock thing today: a Behind the Music exposing the behind of a heretofore unclassified musical genre popular between 1976-1984, "really smooth" rock music purveyed by hitmakers like Christopher Cross, Michael McDonald, Toto, and Yacht Rock-the-show's primary progenitors, Kenny Loggins and Jim Messina.

The show, clever, esoteric five or so-minute shorts in which the famed musicians are distinguished from each other by really bad wigs, ran on the Channel101 website through, well, a couple of weeks ago. I just discovered it thanks to Chicagoist (which I read with teeth on edge because it oh-so-wobbily walks the line of annoying and edifying ).

Ironically, Channel101's creators are Rob Schrab and Dan Harmon, they of the Scud The Disposable Assassin comic, begun during the glory days of The Dead Alewives sketch troupe back in Milwaukee. I always thought what those guys did was cool, but the problem was just that--they were all guys. Maybe that's when the seed of my ambition to be a sketch-comic chick germinated.

Anyway, ironically-even-more, I actually like a lot of these artists. I mean, you must realize by now that I do enjoy some music that is universally regarded as craptacular [This phrase is hereby fully credited to J. Maravegias --Ed.]. I mean, I can get into some "99" by Toto. That piano breakdown at the end is pretty jive.

Profane, belligerent and giant-mustachioed John Oates (who calls his smooth-rock nemeses "California Vagina Sailors") had me howling during the early Yacht Rocks, but the final episode, "FM", which details the genesis of the singular Steely Dan contribution to the soundtrack for the 1978 film of the same name, as well as their feud with the Eagles, made me run to my shut my office door so I could expel a worthy cackle. Although Glenn Frey and Don Henley probably didn't noogie Walter Becker and Donald Fagen on a playground, there indeed was a lyrical fracas between the two AOR heavyweights--if you believe that "they stab it with their steely knives" is a response, slipped into "Hotel California," to the Dan's exhortation on "Everything You Did" to "turn up The Eagles the neighbors are listening." Yeah maybe the "steely knives" line is only about the "beast" (drugs? music industry?), but look at these two pairs of guys. They're all a-holes, in their own way. This was the best musical warfare since Skynyrd got cranked on Jack and wrote "Sweet Home Alabama" to flip off Neil Young.



I love that Donald Fagen speaks his own language. Except when he says "eat bat, prick."

Hmm, I've actually never looked at the soundtrack for FM, which all in all is pretty damn good.

At least to a craptacle-loving music fan like me.

Guess Who's Back?

Convicted former Daley patronage chief Robert Sorich:

Eminem:

The Politics of Mmmmm Feeling Good

Okay, did anyone else love it when their local "Mix-FM!" station would play this song? Jut your knit-pants-clad hips around your room? Sing into a letter-opener and narrow your eyes at your toothsome reflection in the mirror? Then widen them in alluring fear as some classified info relating to subversive Eastern European anti-Communist activities was revealed to you by a fellow operative on a smoky-dark dancefloor somewhere between Budapest and Vienna?

Oh, just me, then?

Can You Live This Fantasy Life?

God I love European internet radio. It's so delightfully random.

Where else was I gonna hear this?



I mean, how could I forget? We are talking the Cro-Mag days of MTV here.

Aldo Nova, a Canadian one-hitter, Def Lepparded before those boys even got their legs into spandex, found the mousse aisle at the local druggists and set those Rickenbackers wailin'.

And who knew that a Les Paul could shoot a metal door-blasting laser from its neck?

In Lieu of a "Flux-Capacitor"

Playing a silly (and progressively sillier, as the evening drew on and more Champagne of Beer bottles littered the room) board game with friends some months ago got me thinking about time travel. No, not plopping oneself down in the middle of a clutch of Triceratops or some Braveheart-style gettin' medieval on someone's ass, or, lord, back to Woodstock or something predictably Gen X (okay, my pick would be Rolling Stones' 1972 tour, either Chicago show --with Stevie Wonder opening?!? Need I say more?).

I mean planting one's feet in real life, in someone's life.

The pleasure of snorting and laughing at my friends' responses to questions like, If you could go back in time, what is the one thing you would change about your high school career" has seduced me. Granted, this game-playing Friday night was in, what, February? (Oh, God, no; it was November. Now that is procrastinating). But my desire to know more about who my friends were before I knew who they are hasn't waned. I'll add to this myself, in the comments.

So.

I'll just throw a random year out, with today's date.

So, where were you, June 26, 1986?

And, so as to not appear too nostalgic and I-love-the-80s, a random year: June 26, 1994.

Approximations, guesses, fabrications, exagerrations and fantasies welcome.

North Ave. Bridge Is Falling Down

The Chicago Tribune reported over the weekend that there's a new bridge coming to North Avenue.

The 99-year-old, two-lane red steel bridge over the river's North Branch will be replaced by a four-lane suspension and cable-stay bridge, the first of its kind in the city, said Cheri Heramb, the Chicago Department of Transportation's acting commissioner.

Now while this is welcome news to those (including me) who detest navigating the Yuppie Hell Canyon (North Avenue between said bridge and Halsted) on weekends and rush hours, it is a bittersweet development. The report notes that

The existing bridge is one of the famed Chicago-style trunnion bascule bridges. The leaves are suspended on axles with counterweights--bascule means seesaw in French--and the steel trusses are noted for their curved profile.

What a fabulous description--there's something about a basic thing that, when it's named in French, transforms into another thing infinitely more enchanting. I mean, think of saying assistant instead of aide-de-camp, overthrow instead of coup d'etat, and "last show of the year" instead of season finale.

Apparently Chicago is known for the trunnion bascule bridge. No two are exactly alike, and others are found spanning the Chicago River downtown at Clark and LaSalle streets, and the world's second-longest is at Columbus Drive. The most famous bascule bridge is the Tower Bridge across the Thames in London.

Chicago's first bascule bridge was built across the North Branch at Cortland Avenue in 1902.

It's funny that the North Avenue bridge is being replaced, because the Cortland bridge has been recently rehabilitated. I live near the bridge; much of my routine travel spans that bridge -- to the grocery, biking to work, to the lakefront, Second City, the mattress store, Armitage Avenue to look for overpriced paper and plastic rings.

Florid name aside, I am fascinated by this bridge. There's a dedication plaque on either side, emblazoned with the name of a Chicago mayor whose father was also a mayor, assassinated in 1893 (a crime featured in the excellent Devil in the White City) and born in, of all places, Lexington, Kentucky, my own home. Carter Harrison, Jr., benefactor of the Cortland bridge, was elected in 1897 and served five terms, something his father probably would have done had he not met an untimely demise, shot after giving the closing address at the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition on the South Side of Chicago.


A smaller plaque is found on one of the bridge's thrusts, a boasting reminder that the only thing Carter H. Harrison hefted to open this bridge was probably some scissors to cut a ribbon across its freshly-painted span in 1902. Apparently American Bridge Company was newly-formed in 1901, and soon monopolized the nation's bridge industry and manufactured steel as well. Kind of like the Clear Channel of the turn of the last century.




My favorite part of the bridge is the bridge house, about which I could find no historical information (Google, you tried). Maybe, then, it's just there to be enjoyed, a quiet, tree-shaded place to pause and soak up history buttressed by massive red steel wings.