(mid-September 2022)
I was at the supermarket earlier this month and ran across a pallet of Frute Brute cereal. Although discontinued back in 1982, it has been resurrected as a limited release for the Halloween season or some such thing. I was thrown back to my childhood as I have a distinct memory of being told by a grocer back then that the cereal was no longer being made.
My memory is of hearing the sad news at a little store at Addison and Eddy or Cornelia. Do any Chicagoans reading this recall a little grocery store in that area? Or is my mind playing tricks on me?
On this same shopping trip I noticed that the coffee creamer cooler was full of pumpkin spice flavored things such as this:
I swear to you not even a full week later that stuff had been replaced by this:
It’s only mid-September but the Christmas product is on shelves already!
I found this last week on a shopping trip to an Asian market.
OK, last food related item here. Nothing too exciting on the culinary front lately but I did whip up a batch of Chicken Paprikash.
As always, I used a mix of smoked and unsmoked paprika and, for once, I got the amounts just right and it had just the perfect amount of paprika flavor. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while, right?
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Earlier this week a couple friends and I went down to Chicago to see the Nordic band Heilung perform at Radius, a newer venue down there that opened in early 2020. It’s on the 600 block of W. Cermak.
“Heilung” is German for “healing” and the core members of the band hail from Denmark, Norway, and Germany and I think they are all neo-pagans/Wiccans who, as they say, follow a Nordic path. Their music is neo-/experimental folk, I guess you’d say. It involves a lot of thunderous bass drums and various other percussion instruments, sundry stringed instruments, and electronics. One guy does throat singing.
In concert, the members wear robes and don antlers.
(Photo found here.)
The band advertise their shows as rituals as opposed to concerts and it’s easy to see why.
Things began with one of the band members coming out onstage clutching a small bundle of what I would guess is sage that was burning. He proceeded to perform a cleansing ritual. After the stage was properly prepared, the music began.
Off to stage left was a guy with a rather large array of large drums before him. On the opposite side of the stage was another percussionist. He was surrounded by a battery of big bass drums but also his own array of various other things to beat on. Three backup singers/dancers joined the core trio of the band who sang, played hand held instruments, and added electronic sounds to the mix.
At one point, a group of about 8 people walked onstage bearing shields and spears. These folks embrace their Viking ancestors! With the drums thundering away and these “warriors” pounding their spears on the stage, I felt like we should probably raid Lindisfarne or some such thing.
That’s Maria Franz and I think she’s playing an old Scandinavian instrument called the talharpa. And that glowing orb is a big drum that people took turns pounding on.
The warriors would wander off and on stage at various moments. During one song they wandered over to centerstage and I noticed that there were a couple women in the ranks. And they were bare-breasted. This was some hardcore ceremonial stuff! One of those women returned a song or 2 later bearing a couple antler racks with the points aflame.
The final song was the epic “Hamrer Hippyer”. It clocked in at around 15 minutes and, by the end of it, everyone in the band, all of the backing musicians & singers, and the warriors were all onstage dancing in an ecstatic frenzy to the insistent beat of those big drums. It was trance-like. One couldn’t help get swept away by the rhythm and those drums vibrating through your body.
Great stuff!
The best way to understand a Heilung show/ritual is to be there but, short of that, take a look at some video.
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A group of us in Madison trekked down to West Chicago for a day of gaming at a friend’s place recently. First up were a couple rounds of 7 Wonders: Architects.
Neither I nor my friends from Madison had ever played it before. You each have a structure and you build storey by storey as you gain construction resources via those cards. Not overly complex but not too simplistic as to not present a challenge. The game goes fairly quickly once you get the hang of it so we played 2 rounds.
Next up was another game that we Madisonians had never played before – Wingspan.
Wingspan was a little more difficult than 7 Wonders. Essentially, you play birds and do things like gather food and lay eggs. The cards are of various birds from around the world and contain a little trivia about our feathered friends. I am told that the game was the idea of an ornithologist or, at least, a dedicated bird watcher.
The next day I spent some time with my youngest stepson. While he was waiting for his girlfriend to return from her parents’ house, he, my Frau, and I played a game of Scoville.
Scoville was designed by a fellow Madisonian named Ed Marriott. You play a farmer of chilies. In order to win points, you grow several varieties of chili peppers, cross breed them, enter chili cookoffs, et al.
The kid beat me by 1 point but the Frau was the winner by 15 points or so after a late game maneuver involving lots of ghost peppers and a massive chili cook-off victory.
Piper got in on the game too. “If it fits, I sits!”
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I recently watched Salt and Fire by one of my favorite directors, Werner Herzog.
It opens with 3 scientists affiliated with the U.N. traveling to Bolivia to investigate an environmental disaster. They are kidnapped by a corporate C.E.O. who is slightly unhinged and who has a henchman played by real life physicist Lawrence Krauss who is even more batty.
The story focuses on the travails of one of the scientists, Dr. Laura Sommerfeld. She is defiant and a real pain for her captors. At one point she is brought out to the Salar de Uyuni – the vast salt flats of Bolivia – and is thrown out of the car which speeds away. In a very Herzogian twist, she finds that she is not alone but has the company of 2 nearly blind children. They have been left with just a tarp and a week’s worth of provisions.
While it will certainly go down in cinema history as a minor Herzog work, I really enjoyed it. There were the requisite characters who were off their rocker and nature as an unfeeling source of peril for we humans. Michael Shannon may not have the full deranged menace of Klaus Kinski but he’s got his own more subdued way of being threatening.
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Bonus photo: I recently discovered that a statue by local artist Sid Boyum that had been awaiting a home has found one. This piece has something of a Hieronymus Bosch kind of thing going on.
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