City Council: Let’s Try Destroying Chicago Music

The specimens that inhabit the Chicago city council chambers are an odd lot. When they raise upon their hind legs and bleat as one, the strangest, most alien ideas are aired. Ideas that do not boggle so much as numb the mind with their breathtaking vacancy. Kafka is merely the quaint reference point for the depths of the council’s legal absurdism - when this governing body flies by the seat of its pants and burps up legislation without the direct cajoling of the Mayor, you can always bet on comedy gold.

This time, they have decided that this city’s most well-known and precious cultural resource - music - needs fixin’. And they’re gonna fix it good.

Pointing to a five year old tragedy that may not even have involved live music, the E2 nightclub stampede of 2003, the city council is proposing to create an incredibly draconian series of licensing, background checking, police notification and insurance ordinances for all promoters of live music — except, of course the ones who already own or control the city’s largest rooms.

The proposed law, being voted on tomorrow and published in its full, impenetrable ancient Greek on Jim DeRogatis’s blog, is bad news for anybody putting on small shows in Chicago. The ordinance’s definition of “promoter” is insanely loose and will include bands putting on their own shows.

Normally, city council members don’t have such a antagonistic attitude toward entrepreneurism, and it’s almost certain that even this ridiculous proposal, if passed, would be enforced as selectively as clout with City Hall allows.

In any case, this is a time when resistance needs to be mounted. Sign this petition. Show up tomorrow to city hall if you can.

UPDATE: Reportedly this ordinance has been tabled and will not be voted upon tomorrow. More details forthcoming, but at this point it looks like public outcry got the council’s attention. Really.

In related news, pigs are appearing on the radar screens at Midway Airport and volcanos are spewing crushed ice.

Slumping White Sox Explore Alternatives To Euthanasia

Greg Walker, Chicago White Sox batting coach and oft-touted fall guy for the team’s sleepy offense might not have been the one to dream up last night’s profoundly retarded clubhouse exhibit, but I bet nobody’s happier to have his name out of the papers for a few days.

In a move one might better expect from a Duke-graduate Cubs fan planning a bachelor party in Kenilworth, the Sox clubhouse was decorated with a tableau of blow-up dolls and baseball bats. Now get this, some of the hee hee bats were haw haw inserted into the dolls dude!

Yeah, it’s a regular Algonquin Round Table in Major League Baseball.

While the Sox have every right to be concerned about repeating - with depressing exactness - the awful 2007 season of wasted pitching via petulant non-hitting, this is the wrong approach. As badly-needed motivational initiatives go, instead of one reeking of moronity, desperation and latex, I suggest the Sox consider all the options the world of sport has to offer.

For example, Saturday’s Kentucky Derby reminded us that for some competitors, the end of a bad day comes not in a clubhouse but in a little white trailer staffed with a doctor, a syringe and a map to the glue factory.

Let me be clear: I am not, under any circumstances, advocating that 2B Juan Uribe (Avg .181) be led into that trailer.

I only suggest renting and parking that trailer in 3rd base foul territory, so that repeated trips back to the dugout while going 0 for 4 include for each batter a glimpse of what might be.

That’s got to work better than proxy-rape humor - the whole point of a wake-up call is that it’s something you don’t hear all the time.

Officer-Bob.com Starts His Shift

I was born in Chicago. I’ve lived in this town, this state, this country for forty years. I’ve been making artistic choices of one kind or another for more than twenty-five of those years. More often than not, these choices were about balance.

I became interested in balance when I learned what exactly happened in the world that gave me - of all the billions of the earth - the options I have. What happened was empire. Empire is my counterbalance.

I have spent my life in the interior of the world’s most powerful empire. I am surrounded by proof of this in the form of an unending stream of immigrants, a parade in which my own ancestors marched during the 19th and 20th centuries.

If the imperial character of my home ended there, I might even be a fan of empire. Of course, it does not, and I am not.

This empire, as all before it, breeds its own demise in the form of rampant authoritarianism, official corruption and intellectual stagnation. My friends and I have always tried to stand in opposition to these things, to varying degrees of success.

Officer Bob is one such attempt. It’s a black humor protest of the widening acceptance of senseless force and corrupt officialdom. It’s a counterbalance and a spit into the abyss of history awaiting us.

What I’m trying to say is Officer Bob will never, ever appear on Oprah.

4.5 Hz Bass Solo Felt From 200 Miles Away

Bass! How low can you go?

This morning at around 4:30 AM, I experienced my first earthquake, courtesy of the downstate Illinois New Madrid Fault. I woke to a dark bedroom and a low but regular thumping sound. My first thought was that one of our cats was doing that scratch-the-ear-with-hind-paw thing, as the thumping had that regularity to it.

Then I noticed that the whole house was gently, but insistently swaying north-south in time with the thumping. Probably a couple of inches each way.

If this was a cat, it was twenty feet tall.

It lasted about one minute - one supremely weird minute. The thought “earthquake?” did occur to me at some point, but right when the shaking ended, I heard the furnace fan also shut off by coincidence, which let me shrug off the whole thing and get back to sleep.

What was most striking about the quake was its creepy, regular oscillation. I don’t know why I thought this, but I always assumed a quake would be more irregular / noisy than this one was. It was downright pro forma and mechanical. The ground tugged and released the house at what I reckon to be a steady 4.5 Hertz (shakes per second) for about a minute, making maybe 270 total oscillations.

I measured the frequency later in the day by firing up Audiomulch and dialing a low frequency oscillator until I found what seemed like the right frequency. The exact reading is 4.6273 Hz, but I rounded because I’m not a geek.

News and USGS reports called the quake a 5.2 on the Richter scale, centered in a small town about 200 miles south of my house.

Whenever the ground you’re occupying acts like a fluid, it will get your attention. Like waves on a calm surface radiating outward from a thrown pebble, an utterly enormous volume of dirt was bunched and stretched into hundreds of waves that reached as far north as Michigan and as far south as Atlanta. Our house rode these waves - four and a half of them a second. Wow.

Also, let me take the time to debunk a myth about animals during an earthquake. Supposedly, animals are able to hear crazy events like quakes and freak out a little bit before they hit. We hear this a lot from our friends in California.

Uh huh. Put down the bong, Peace Bear. Not even the neighbor’s dogs — who will bark at grass — uttered a peep.

Meet Officer Bob

Once, the internet served a different purpose than it does today. When the boys in the 1970s Pentagon basement finished the military communications project that eventually became the web, the last thing on their minds was the global distribution of porn and smart-ass cartoons.

Luckily for all involved, I don’t make porn.

Meet Officer Bob, the first in a series of titles forthcoming from Aught-Seven a cash bonfire satirical new media studio begun by myself and an enigmatic malcontent named Chris Kreb with pixel-wrangler par excellence Heather Smith.

Bob voice: yours truly (wrote it too) with art direction and animation by the lovely and talented Heather.

More titles are on their way, along with the requisite titters, chortles and yucks. Austinians: If you happen to spot Heather at SXSW Interactive this week, it’s best to not ask questions: simply offer decongestants and beer. She might favor you with a sticker…

Zut Alors! Camus, Debord, and Kezdy Get A Metra Pass

So a couple of weeks ago, I heard for the first time the Effigies’ first new record in 400 years, Reside. (It came out in ‘07, so I’m late — sue me. Wait, on second thought, please don’t sue me.)

Even though the shimmering tones and arabic modes of original guitarist Earl Lettiq are missed, Bob McNaughton does a fine job. Add to this the rhythmic litigation excellence of the firm of Economou and Zamost and Reside signifies as a pretty remarkable piece of work all the way through. What has me scratching my head is the burial of the album’s best track “Haz-Mat” at the end of the record.

In these lyrics, singer and lyricist John Kezdy brilliantly redevelops Guy Debord and Albert Camus as a synthesized commuter-train passenger persona who regards the billboards, banal mass obsessions and landmarks of the media wasteland as these whip by at ninety miles an hour. Criticism of spectacle isn’t supposed to rock, but Kezdy and company pull it off:

Morning sheets / unfold on the train

Turn from the glass / stare at the page

…

Review of a billboard / a familiar score

no one is sure / they haven’t seen it before

…

Spectactles by day and night / Haz-mat pulsing blood of life

…

Then at night / they fornicate

Camus’ old quote “A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.” might or might not have been an inspiration here, but it hardly matters. The Effigies are now and have always been a band of modern men who shoulder that particular burden with clear eye and steady hand. I’ve admired their work since I first saw them as a pup in 1982 and I appreciate that they didn’t stop at a single sentence — or 7″.

Comedy Speaks: Kind Kindly Points Out Venerated Chicago Comedy Tradition Has No Clothes

When I heard veteran character actor Richard Kind (pictured) publicly suggest last week that there might be, maybe, a little bit, something sort of wrong with abject worship of Chicago-style improv comedy, the resulting silence in the room was a little tense.

While the crowd at the Chicago History Museum’s “Comedy Speaks” program wrestled silently with Kind’s blasphemy, I felt like applauding. Improv is a sacred cow in Chicago, and perhaps for reasons of guilt over Chicago’s traditional treatment of cows, it enjoys a support base around here that is fairly called fundamentalist. Chicago improv fans are a fiercely loyal and vocal group of enthusiasts who endlessly laud the form and point to its many famous and beloved graduate practitioners as proof of its inerrant genius.

The unfettered fervor for improv Kind was opposing usually comes from actors who don’t want to face up to the fact that improv comedy, like psychotherapy, is a best-left-private development exercise and is usually senseless torture for discerning audiences. To do it humorously requires rare performers who are funny as opposed to plentiful performers who act funny. The reason there are at least six hundred Jimmy Fallons to every Jeff Garlin is because many, many people can mug for laughs but only a few people think or emote in a naturally amusing way. It’s the tiny minority of performers who can be funny by showing how they are as opposed to showing what they can do, and that is the precise difference between the great Eugene Levy and the shut-up-already Mike Myers. As well as the difference between a Bill Hicks and some Pi Kappa Phi brother from Northbrook who thinks he’s hilarious and won’t stop trying to prove it.

To be fair to Kind, he was not trashing the form in toto, but he did express impatience with The Harold, a particularly irritating long-form improv invention of legendary Second City director / ImprovOlympic founder Del Close. The Harold takes normative improv games to artificially extended lengths, (and sometimes into TV series and improv-training franchises.) Kind, bless him, finds the Harold “masturbatory.”

Masturbatory! And he wasn’t hustled out of the room and into hiding!

Well, it’s a form of progress.

Suburban Civics Lesson: Keep Your Mouth Shut

Like a lot of us, sixteen year old Matt Heffernan noticed something was wrong. Unlike most of us, he did something about it, and he is paying a dear price.

The junior at Morton West High School in the Chicago suburb of Berwyn took part in a demonstration on school grounds last week. It was a peaceful sit-in protest against the illegal war in Iraq and the presence of military recruiters at Morton West.

As reported in the Nov. 7th New York Times, the Berwyn police on the scene found nothing wrong with the protest.

But somehow, that wasn’t enough for Berwyn school district superintendent Ben Nowakowski. He felt the police had missed a dire threat in 25 students peacefully speaking and singing. Dr. Nowakowski decided a 2007-style civics lesson - a crackdown - was in order.

Police officers were on the scene, and Berwyn’s police chief, William Kushner, said no arrests were made. “It was all very peaceful and orderly,” he said.

But at the end of the school day, Matt said, Dr. Nowakowski gave the remaining protesters disciplinary notices stating that they had engaged in mob action, that they were suspended for 10 days and that they faced expulsion.

“I was shocked,” said Matt, 16. “We had the sit-in. So I had mixed feelings of confidence — of a job well done — and fright, because my whole educational future is at risk.

The civics lesson continued, according to parents, when Nowakowski’s staff ensured that none of the right students were subject to this risk before he struck:

Parents also complained that deans, teachers and coaches singled out certain athletes and honor students and persuaded them to drop out of the protest.

Rita Maniotis, president of the school’s parent-teacher organization, said the school called her husband to say that their daughter, Barbara, a junior, was participating in the protest and that he should come to get her. He did so, and she was suspended for five days. But other parents were not called and not able to intervene, Ms. Maniotis said. “There’s no rhyme or reason to the punishment doled out,” she said.

The word from Heffernan’s family is Nowakowski’s lesson isn’t over. Not only did the school move to insulate the right students from the crackdown, now the families of the 25 remaining protesters without such cozy insulation are being pressured to “give up” Heffernan and hang the entirety of the disciplinary action on him.

So let’s review the good doctor’s lesson:

• Accomplices to an illegal war are allowed on campus, but legal, peaceful protest is mob action.
• Work within the system to speak your mind and face destruction of your academic future.
• Be anywhere near someone who peacefully speaks his mind and risk your academic future as well.
• Unless you’re an athlete or otherwise politically useful. In that case, you get a pass.

Dr. Nowakowski’s teaching may be more welcome than we might think. Assuming his aim was to demonstrate how things are done in Burma, China, North Korea, Chile, Cuba or Russia, he gets an “A” grade.

But if he’s forgetting that this is the United States, where we take a dim view of repression, coercion, favoritism and runaway authority, then he gets an “F”.

UPDATE: Some recent coverage of the Morton West High story

Triumph Of The (Free) Will (Stewart)

Political and religious philosophers agree: left unsaddled by a healthy fear of an angry, magical clerk in the sky, people behave like real assholes. The (Republican) party line goes: given a fraction of a chance, your fellow man will in his natural state show himself to be a pilfering, hoarding dick. And no self-regulation, it is repeated, can interfere with this imperative of narrow self-interest. Without fear of imposed authority, no drinking well remains unpooped-in for long; there is nothing beyond grabbing or ruining, nobody and nothing beyond encroachment. We cannot make the right choices. Our hopeless flaws can be tamed only by laws - of morality, of the market, of the land.

Fuck that, says Will Stewart. The Texan from Austin, accountant, baseball fan and indisputably good person is the guy in the left field stands who caught Chicago White Sox DH Jim Thome’s game-winning 500th home run ball at U.S. Cellular Field on Sunday. Stewart did something unexpected in a decade history will remember for its appalling culture of greed. Ball in hand, fully aware of the (at least $100K) potential dollar value to Thome, Stewart did not grab. To the chagrin of clergy, cops, and commodity traders the country over, Stewart failed to conduct business as usual by opening with a price negotiation.

Instead, Stewart gave Thome the ball. For no price. While the club has showed their gratitude by handing Stewart a pair of season tickets (which he then donated to Thome’s favorite charity) the fact remains Will Stewart passed up a six-figure payday - in 2007 - out of common decency.

“I feel it is a part of Chicago baseball history,” said Stewart, right after handing the ball back to the White Sox slugger during a postgame press conference.

On the other hand, O.J. Simpson recently enunciated a markedly different take on the ethics of sports memorabilia when he said “Hey, take this fucking pillowcase off and put those fucking balls in it“.

Paging the sky clerk.

Cop Hassles Wienermobile

Bravo Chicago PD! It’s about time someone did something, because nobody wants to see Michigan Avenue become a slow-paced heaven for rubbernecking tourists.

Near noon today, an officer spotted the famed Oscar Mayer fiberglass sausage unattended with its hazards on, parked right at 400 N. Michigan Avenue. Red Line trolley drivers were unavailable for salty, furious comment. From Chicago Tribune:

A police officer approached the Chevrolet vehicle with the 27-foot fiberglass sausage and removable bun roof. The officer radioed for a tow truck.

Matt Smith of the city’s Streets and Sanitation department said the city could handle the job.

“We have access to tow trucks that could have handled a Polish sausage, not just a hot dog,” he said.

The officer wrote the ticket and affixed it with considerable relish to its foot-long side mirror. Ed Walsh, a spokesman for the city Department of Revenue, said parking in a “Parking/Standing Prohibited Anytime” zone is a $50 violation.