The Electron Pencil

My AM coffee pal Pat put it to me: Whadja think of Nancy Pelosi’s speech?

Pelosi Perorates.

My response: Duh. What?

Truth is, I’ve pretty much been avoiding the news — national, global, even local — for a week now. Actually, a couple of weeks.

There’s an atom of regret in there, that minuscule voice telling me I’m being irresponsible. By golly, the voice nags, what the hell kinda good citizen are you?

I don’t usually let that voice prattle on too long. I’m a fine citizen, I tell myself. Part of my fine citizenship is my need and practice, on occasion, to take a goddamned break now and then, now and then.

A good citizen is a sane citizen. And the constant barrage of President Gag flotsam and jetsam can drive even the most mentally balanced human being (a superlative level, in fact, that I’m not within a light year and a half of in any case) bonkers.

So, yeah, Nancy Pelosi gave a big old long speech on the floor of the US House yesterday. About DACA or ACA or something. That’s all I know about it now.

An even bigger truth: Everything’s carrying on apace — nationally, globally, even locally — w/o me.

I’ll stick my nose back into things political just as soon as I feel mentally and emotional capable again. Meanwhile, there’s a baseball season for me to get ready for — pitchers and catchers report to the 30 spring training sites Tuesday and Wednesday next week.

Marilyn Monroe Accompanies Hank Majeski to the White Sox Camp in 1951.

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To The Barricades!

It’s Big Talk Thursday. Bloomington’s political and civic doyenne Charlotte Zietlow joins me at 5:30pm to talk about the revolutionary 1971 local election here. Tune in to WFHB, 91.3 FM, or come on back here tomorrow for the podcast link.

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Next Time, Try Infinitesimal

BTW: Isn’t there a word in your vocab. that you, w/o fail, misspell? I mean, every time you type it in, it comes out wrong, right? One of mine is the above-mentioned minuscule. Guaranteed, every time I clack it into a post, I plink an I rather than a U. Miniscule. And WordPress’s spellchecker always flags it. And, every single solitary time, I bark, No! It’s okay! Goddamned spellcheck! And then I have to look it up and, yep, spellcheck was right. Curses.

Trust me, minisc…, I mean, minuscule ain’t my only lexicographical bugbear.

Now That’s Minuscule!

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So, apparently, some kind of thing happened in the stock market Friday and Monday. It always seems to be Fridays and Mondays when all these stock traders, or what in the hell ever they are, start getting all nervous breakdown-y.

Some sort of points were down by a thousand. I have no idea what that means. I know of no sport in which scores range into the thousands.

Indexes and averages were down. Yields, too. These things must mean something the unlettered layperson can grasp, right?

Bears were seen roaming the streets outside the stock exchange. Isn’t that what some people claimed? If so, wouldn’t that be good? I mean, I’d be all on the side of bears in a cage match versus stock traders. Bears are cool. Anyway, I could see what all the folderol is about if this bears story were true but, I’m learning, it’s only a metaphor.

This thousand-point thing, or whatever happened, is very, very traumatic. Awfully bad for the nation, don’t you know. The world, too.

This Happened: I’m Told It Ain’t Good.

Me? I didn’t feel a thing.

Last time there was some kind of stock market tragedy, back in 2007-08, the wealth The Loved One and I possess took some kind of beating. Then, a few years later, our little pile of Monopoly dough, miraculously, had grown as tall as it had been before that financial trauma. Like I said, I didn’t feel a thing.

Anyway, loads of people on TV, the internet, and in coffeehouses and bars are wringing their hands. Fingernails are being chewed. Cases of Pepto-Bismol swallowed. The papers are loaded with pix of guys in garish smocks staring dolefully at computer screens up on the walls of what I assume to be where they trade stocks. Or hide out from bears. Or whatever. So I figure I’d better try to understand this economics business once again, for the 23 jillionth time.

Fortunately, every news website, every paper, every TV station, is running its own little tutorial. The Stock Market Plunge Explained goes the headline. So, I read a few.

Guess what. I still have no goddamned idea what in the hell happened Friday and Monday.

I’ve only ever felt confident in my knowledge of high finance when I realize that the stock market is basically Vegas. And not Vegas-lite, I might add. The wagering, the propositions, the backing and the fleecing on Wall Street all put the Nevada houses to shame. We’re talking trillions of dollars here. Trillions!

Lets look at a trillion:

1,000,000,000,000.

There’s not even that many light years from one end of the observable universe to the other. I forget who wrote this — it may have been Isaac Asimov — but I remember reading once that when we want to say something’s huge, something has a lot of zeroes after it, we call it “astronomical.” And when we want to say something’s modest or small in number, we call it “economical.” It should be, this guy wrote, the other way around. Something that can be counted in the 13-plus figures should be referred to as economical. The economy’s the only realm of human endeavor whose practitioners count so high.

Anyway, I iterate: Only when I see the obvious correlation between hard-core gambling and the stock market do I feel I’ve got a handle on what all this indexes and averages and yields stuff is all about.

The thing is, we warn people all the time about the potential dangers of Vegas gambling. We even have a sort of a safety net for people who get carried away in Vegas: we call it Gamblers Anonymous. A person who can’t tear him or herself away from the baccarat table can go get therapy. There are even pharmaceuticals that purportedly squelch the urge to throw dice.

Those guys in garish smocks gazing dolorously at computer screens on the walls of the stock exchange? They look exactly like broken down horseplayers at some seedy OTB.

For some bizarre reason, though, every four years we vote for the guy who promises most convincingly he’ll make it easier for these degenerates to indulge in their habit.

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Truth is, I love living in a college town. Why? Because I get to do things like participate in the Wounded Galaxies 1968 festival. I read some Rikki Ducornet work Friday night at the I Fell Gallery and then, last night, at the Blockhouse, I read from Studs Terkel‘s recollection of the fabled ’68 Democratic National Convention in Chi.

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Organizers Joan Hawkins, Charles Cannon, Tony Brewer, and the rest are doing a bang-up job thus far, with the academic conference part of the 50-year anniversary festival beginning Thursday. But wait, there’s more pre-conference stuff: New Zealand composer Annea Lockwood performs her legendary 1968 opus, “Piano Burning,” tomorrow, Wednesday, from 5:30-8pm in Dunn Meadow. Here’s Lockwood, in a 2005 essay, describing how this work came about:

It was 1968 and we were burning American flags, political effigies, the status quo, so when the choreographer, Richard Alston, and I started planning “Heat,” a dance work in which the performance space would be heated to the maximum tolerable temperature, and I was casting around for something sonorous to burn and record, it was no leap at all to decide on a piano. I discovered that defunct, discarded pianos were collected at the Wandsworth Borough trash dump. A festival planned for the Chelsea Embankment was willing to haul an old upright from the dump, and I had it over-tuned. Harvey Matusow had several old microphones he no longer needed, so we wrapped them in asbestos and with Hugh Davies’ invaluable assistance, set them inside the piano, and ran the cables into a portable Uher tape recorder. I sprinkled some lighter fluid down in one corner and lit it — only a little fluid is used to start it off, because it is essential that the piano catch fire slowly, and watching the flames move about, catching here and there unpredictably, is mesmerizing.

Lockwood at work.

I had not expected it would be so beautiful. At first a large crowd of onlookers talked their heads off, utterly defeating the tapijng, bu then they fell silent, absorbed. It is a long process, over three hours. A piano’s interior structure if beautiful and the fire reveals it gradually. The various kinds of varnish produce brilliant blues and greens, and snapping strings often sound very resonant. For the corwd at that first bunring, this became an absorbing meditative experience. At the end, with writer Alex Gross as the medium, we repaired to a tent and held séance to arouse Beethoven and ask him to comment — which someone also taped, unbeknownst to me. After Alex had called “Ludi” several times, an electronic-sounding noise appeared on the tape (not audible to us in the tent, and not a malfunction signal we could recognize) and faded. That was my first “Piano Transplant.” Since then it has been repeated several times in England, the USA, New Zealand and now, so many years later, here in Perth (during the 2005 festival*). For something so pragmatic in origin, and so transitory, this persistence is surprising.

[ * Lockwood is referring to the inaugural Totally Huge New Music Festival staged that year in Perth, Western Australia, and again every year since. ]

Coincidence: My idol, Studs Terkel, referred extensively in his writings to the Uher brand, old-school, reel-to-reel tape recorder he used in gathering the countless interviews he would compile into his oral history books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Good War.

The Uher 4000, a “portable” recorder (c. 1961).

In any case, after I’d finished reading Terkel’s reminiscence, I chatted with former Caveat Emptor owner (and now gentleman of leisure), Janis Starcs, who reminded me that as the chant “The whole world is watching” blared out from seemingly every television set in the nation on Wednesday evening, August 28th, 1968, with protesters meeting the police and the Illinois National Guard in the Battle of Michigan and Balbo, many Republicans cheered as if at a football game.

Starcs nailed it. Those Republicans were watching the unraveling of the Democratic Party. It can be argued — and I’ll make that argument — that the effects of the ’68 chaos are being felt to this very day.

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We’re Getting There

With the completion of the Super Bowl on Sunday night (some team won, I understand) we’ve hit the first of my several spring harbinger landmarks. See, in order for me to survive the mental, spiritual, and physical ordeal that is winter I have to look for calendrical mileposts, otherwise I’d roll myself up into a ball of utter depression like a dead spider.

So, yeah, landmark No. 1 is the end of the football season. Check. Next up? Valentine’s Day. Then it’s on to my birthday on March 4th and a bunch of other mileposts in quick succession.

Huzzah! Football’s Over!

Before you know it, it’ll be spring and I’ll be able to breathe again.

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A late post — I’ve been been finishing up a radio news piece and I’ve been rehearsing a reading I’m scheduled to do tonight — and therein lies today’s Big Takeaway. Stop on by The Block House tonight, 7pm, for the William S. Burroughs birthday bash, part of the Wounded Galaxies 1968: Paris, Prague, Chicago conference and festival commemorating and analyzing that annus horibilis 50 years ago.

The b-day fete will include a bunch of locally-produced short films along with avant garde, improvisational music by Urban Deer, as well as the Frédéric Moffet movie, Jean Genet in Chicago, and a reading by me of Studs Terkel’s recounting of some of the street violence during the ’68 Democratic National Convention.

Terkel, that late August week a half-century ago, was gassed and hectored by billy club-wielding Chi. cops during a couple of iterations of the Battle of Lincoln Park and the subsequent Battle of Grant Park. Terkel experienced that mini-civil war with luminaries like Burroughs, Genet, Terry Southern, Alan Ginsberg, and William Styron, along with countless anti-war/civil rights protesters who’d descended upon the city. The events of the week would be described in official reports as a “police riot.” My readings’ll be taken from Terkel’s memoir, Talking to Myself.

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Mayhem in Chicago, August 1968

Pre-conference festivities have been going on for about a month now. This whole shebang is the brainchild of the Burroughs Century folks, including Charles Cannon, Prof. Joan Hawkins, and Writers Guild at Bloomington honcho Tony Brewer and others, and it’s been a smash thus far. The academic conference itself runs from Feb. 8-11, with one of the keynote speakers being the Rolling Stone‘s Greil Marcus.

The opening of the Rikki Ducornet exhibit Friday night at the I Fell Gallery was a super hot ticket and there’s much more to come. Click over to the conference/festival website for all the upcoming events and, again, please stop in at The Block House tonight.

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Revolting!

My guest on Thursday’s edition of Big Talk will be none other than Charlotte Zietlow. She’ll recount another revolutionary (albeit non-violent) historic event: The Democratic Party’s takeover of Bloomington in the storied 1971 election. It was the first American election following passage of the 26th Amendment, mandating the 18-year-old vote.

Just a reminder — Big Talk is now a stand-alone, half-hour program airing every Thursday at 5:30pm, immediately following the Daily Local News on WFHB, 91.3 FM.

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If I were king, women would be worth more and men would gain something new to emulate.

— Émilie du Châtelet

Born Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Émilie’s one of my favorite figures from history, as noted here once or twice before. She was a big, tall, athletic woman who lived in Semur-en-Auxois in the Burgundy region of France after her marriage at 18 to some Marquis who spent most of his time gallivanting all over the world, sticking his nose into other countries’ wars. That was fine by her because she really never wanted to be the marrying kind, although the mores of her time — she was born in late 1706 — required her to be somebody’s wife.

Growing up, she was something of a wunderkind, her innate curiosity leading her to become expert in mathematics, physics, natural philosophy, and other sciences. Her daddy-o encouraged her intellectual pursuits but her mere did not, reasoning that a woman with brains made as much good sense as an owl wearing a leisure suit. In any case, she took a break from her studies to get hitched. She and her Marquis had three children and then she resumed hitting the books.

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She set up a salon at her manor in Burgundy, drawing smart guys from all over the Continent. She held court with them, and didn’t give an inch to them in terms of scholarly acumen, considering she was an awfully competitive soul (as a teen, she’d been a top-notch fencer, usually kicking the crap out of her male opponents). After Voltaire started hanging around her salon she took him on as a lover, even having secret passageways built into her home so he could visit her in her room late at night when her husband was around during one of his rare stop-overs.

Perhaps her greatest achievement was her translation of Newton’s Principia into French. Now, get this — she even improved on one key aspect of Newton’s work, clarifying the relationships between momentum, friction, and kinetic energy. Wow. Not only that, she’d been working on many of the ideas about vision and light that Newton himself would codify in another of his landmark tomes, Opticks.

In any case, the fact that she’s as unknown to us today as the fellow who picks up our weekly recyclables is a crime. I’ll just put her in Big Mike’s Heretofore-Anonymous-Females Hall of Fame (the HAF-HoF) along with Pauli Murray, whom I raved about the other day.

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There Was A Real Rikki

Have you ever wondered who the Rikki was in the Steely Dan hit, “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number”?

There was indeed such a human to whom Donald Fagen dedicated the song. Her full name was Rikki Ducornet (born: Erica DeGre). She and Fagen were students at Bard College in Annendale, New York, in the mid-Sixties. Fagen met her at a party one night and, even though she was married and pregnant at the time, became transfixed. He gave her his phone number on a slip of paper and, acc’d’g to legend, left her with the words that’d become the title of his future band’s third Top 40 hit.

Ducornet

Ducornet literally grew up on the Bard campus where her daddy-o was a sociology prof. She’d go on to become a cult figure as a novelist, poet, and visual artist. Her books include Entering Fire, Gazelle, and Netsuke.

The I Fell Gallery will host an exhibit of her work with the opening tonight between 6 and 9pm. The show is part of the pre-conference festival for Wounded Galaxies 1968: Paris, Prague, Chicago, February 8-11. The pre-fest includes art exhibits, film showings, music performances, and even a birthday bash for William S. Burroughs (that’ll be Monday, Feb 5, at The Blockhouse). The academic conference will feature noodling about the traumatic year, 1968, during which wars, uprisings, outright revolutions, and assassinations became nearly the norm.

There’ll be reading of Ducornet’s works at the opening tonight and I’ve been fortunate to be asked to participate. I dug up a neat short story of hers so I hope you’ll drop by the gallery at 415. W. 4th St. See you there.

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Talk Link

Here’s your link to yesterday’s Big Talk featuring aerial silks performer and drag king Sue Rall.

Stay tuned next week, Thursday, at 5:30pm, for a chat about Bloomington’s landmark 1971 local election with Charlotte Zietlow.

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First there was Watergate. Then there was The Mirage.

Plenty of kids from around the nation got into journalism after reading — or watching — All the President’s Men. The Woodward/Bernstein book and subsequent blockbuster movie detailing the Washington Post journalists peeling away the layers of the stinking onion that was the then-worst political scandal in our nation’s history (it’s since been superseded by the revelation that Barack Obama was a communist, coke-addicted, gay-orgy-organizing, Muslim mole) made the two punk city beat reporters heroes to a generation.

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It had been said a million times that the J-schools were flooded with new students post-W-gate but that turned out to be a myth. The fancy journalism reviews studied J-school admission records in subsequent years and found no great uptick. But those kids who did go into the likes of Northwestern’s Medill School or NYU or the University of Maryland from, say, 1975 through 1985 did so largely because they wanted to do what W/B had done — not necessarily bring down a presidency but uncover massive corruption and an attempt by bad people to, essentially, bring down American democracy. One journalism historian, a fellow named Gene Roberts, said Woodward & Bernstein’s work was “maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time.”

Just three years after Richard Nixon resigned, several reporters and photographers for the Chicago Sun-Times convinced the paper to finance the purchase of a run-down bar in the city’s then-just-as-rundown River North neighborhood in order to get the real dope on the bribery and corruption that passed for normal every day in almost every business that was inspected by city departments at the time.

The white envelope stuffed with cash, the tens and twenties folded into palms and passed by handshake, the “gifts,” the free meals, the booze, whatever would work served as the currency for businesses to get passed by city inspectors. Chicagoans, for chrissakes, were even sort of proud of their town’s corruption. “You t’ink New York’s bad,” we’d all say to each other, ” d’ey got nuttin’ on us!”

The reporters and photogs were part of the Sun-Times‘ investigative reporting staff, something that all too few newspapers have anymore. Pam Zekman, Zay Smith, and Bill Recktenwald, along with camera guys Jim Frost and Gene Pesek for months operated the place, called The Mirage. All the while, the reporters took notes and the photographers, hidden behind false ceilings and walls, clicked away as building inspectors, Fire Department inspectors, liquor license bureau inspectors, and nominal gumshoes of every stripe came in with their hands out and took bribes to overlook violations that, conceivably, could have resulted in tragedy.

And then one day, the Sun-Times ran a huge front page headline that read, simply, “The Mirage.”

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And, oh, how those inspectors wished it all had been. People lost their jobs. People went to jail. At the very least, the money tree’d been chopped down for a lot of city employees. And suddenly, Chicagoans, after reading about this whole dirty business, didn’t feel quite so proud about their corruption anymore.

The Sun-Times last week threw itself a bash celebrating the 40th anniversary of the series. The reporters and photographers were the guests of honor at the very site where The Mirage once operated. It’s now a snazzy, fashionable joint called Brehon’s in the even more snazzy and fashionable River North neighborhood.

Yeah, times change. Municipal corruption now entails big money men throwing big checks at big politicians’ campaign coffers in exchange for big public works projects and big permits to build big shrines to themselves. The little guys who pocketed those folded tens and twenties now are clean as whistles, honest as angels.

And the newspaper investigative reporting unit is as old school, as dead, as disco.

You’ve got to wonder: Have times changed for the better?

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Even Bigger Talk

The new and improved Big Talk is back again this afternoon at 5:30 with my guest, aerial silks performer and drag king, Sue Rall.

Sue Rall On The Aerial Silks.

I’m telling you, I love the new half-hour format. It pained me, back in the days of the eight-minute show, to have to toss away so much good conversation. I still toss away plenty of stuff — my interviews usually last an hour to an hour and a half — but now the Big Talk chat-fests reveal so much more of the humor, the lightness, the seriousness, the whys, the whats, and the essential whos of my guests.

Tune in every Thursday at 5:30pm, immediately following the Daily Local News, and then check back here every Friday morning for links to the online show. And — keep this in mind, if you would — every four weeks the Limestone Post runs a profile, clacked out by me, of that week’s guest. Next one? Coming February 22nd, Brother William Morris, attorney, civic volunteer. host of WFIU’s Soul Kitchen and — most importantly — WFHB alumnus.

Brother William.

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