Anjanette. Mahalia.

It's hard to get Anjanette Young out of my head after experiencing the "I Am Her" exhibit at the DuSable. Young is the victim of a Chicago Police raid that raided the wrong house back in 2019. That horrible incident is the basis for the exhibit which also delves into the plight of black women in this country more generally.

After wandering the DuSable I went on a tour of Englewood with Dilla and he mentioned various musicians that came up from New Orleans, settled in Chicago, and would become legends. This includes the legendary Mahalia Jackson who is singing in my ears right now.

The Corona Diaries Vol. 120: Mixing memory and desire

(Listen to the prelude.)

(late April 2024)

It wasn’t long after March had given way to April that we got a snowstorm. Nature was not quite ready to breed lilacs out of the dead land.

Since the temperature hovered around freezing, we ended up with a real slushy mess out there. Still, I rather enjoyed it as I love snow and knew that I’d be sweating and uncomfortable in 80+ degree temps soon enough. Besides, I don’t drive to work, so I could let the bus drivers deal with my commute.

Within a week the snow was gone and we had a lovely sunny day for a solar eclipse. While we weren’t in the path of total blackout, Madison would see something like 85% of that refulgent orb in the sky obscured. Some co-workers and I wandered over to the south side of the building to catch a glimpse as it started. I was equipped with a shiny new pair of solar glasses that I had bought last month on my visit to the planetarium. After putting them on and gazing upwards, I felt a bit like I was in Sunshine staring at the sun from that viewing room.

I saw this:

Or rather my phone did. But that is a fair representation of what I was able to see through my glasses.

A co-worker without special spectacles did the old pinhole trick.

It was rather creepy just how dark it got at midday and I can imagine that it was very scary for my ancestors to witness this without friendly astronomers around to explain what was happening. 

Another co-worker who had a much more expensive phone caught this image as close to totality as we got:

Someone remarked that they thought that the birds that would normally be seen on the parking ramp were missing. Perhaps all those Mourning doves decided to lay low as the sun dimmed. I wondered if Piper was reacting to the eclipse. More than likely she was sleeping and hadn’t noticed. Otherwise she was simply annoyed that the big heat source outside the window had been turned down.

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Just a few days later I was to be found getting set to head down to The Big Easy. The purpose of the trip was ostensibly to visit The National WWII Museum but, as you can imagine, more hijinks ensued.

It was one I had hoped to take with my brother but it never came to fruition. My father was a huge World War II history buff and the apple didn’t fall far from the tree in my brother's case. Although I am fairly well-versed in the history of that conflict – certainly better than most people – the apple fell a bit further afield in my case. I am not able to give precise casualty numbers for both sides at the Battle of Guadalcanal, for example, while my father and brother could. There were many times when I was watching a war movie with my brother and he’d note that the tanks onscreen had not yet been introduced at the time being portrayed.

“There were no Panther tanks when Germany invaded Russia in 1941!” he’d rant before helpfully concluding, “They weren’t introduced until ’43!”

This is the level of history nerdiness that I had to contend with in my fraternal relationship.

I really don’t recall why we never took the trip. There may have been financial reasons or perhaps we were just too lazy to actually organize things. In addition to not visiting the museum, I found a story that my brother had been writing that lay unfinished amongst his things when we were clearing his stuff out of his apartment.

Vita brevis.

After my brother died, I took the adage carpe diem to heart. More to heart, anyway. Do it before it’s too late. Putting something off more than likely means it will never happen.

At some point, I broached the subject of the museum visit with a couple of friends, T and P, whom I got to know through my brother and who are also big World War II buffs. Together they formed a triumvirate of history nerds who could spend hours arguing over the strategy of German General Heinz Guderian during Operation Barbarossa or discourse on the effectiveness (or lack of it) of the Japanese kamikaze pilots. What better people to go to The National WWII Museum with? We hemmed and hawed for a bit but finally decided we’d take the trip this spring. And so plans were laid. P, T, and T’s wife, L, would join me on the Official Memorial Trip for my brother.

L is not particularly interested in World War II history but my brother was her companion on the couch to watch many a tennis tournament.

It was also a trip I'd hope to take with my Frau but her chronic pain issues continued to plague her and hoofin' it around The Big Easy was out of the question, sadly. While I understood her decision, it was still a great disappointment.

********

We were to fly out of O’Hare on a Thursday morning and so the plan was that I’d drive down to T and L’s place in suburban Chicago on Wednesday after work and spend the night as would P. Wednesday evening rolls around, I throw my luggage into my car, say goodbye to my Frau, and I am off. I make a quick stop at my credit union’s drive thru where I get some cash.

The interstate was fairly busy as the stretch between Madison and Janesville gets a lot of use at rush hour. About 10 miles outside of town the podcast I was listening to suddenly stopped. I glanced at my phone and saw that I had an incoming call. The number looked vaguely familiar – I thought that it was my credit union. What could they possibly want? Well, they’d have to wait as I was driving.

I made pretty good time and got to T and L’s place just as dinner was being served. The four of us spent the evening chatting away and P, who has a 3D printer that is never idle, presented me with this hideous Cthulhu dice tower:

Instead of rolling my dice the old-fashioned way and chancing some kind of unnameable carpal tunnel injury that only people who roll a lot of dice get, I just put them in the back of Cthulhu’s head and they tumble down into the tray. I am sure to fail every sanity check.

The next morning we had a little breakfast, gathered our luggage, and called an Uber (or was it a Lyft?) to get us to the airport. L watched the vehicle’s progress on her phone. At one point, it just vanished from the map and the little messages saying our ride was X minutes away stopped. The driver apparently decided that they didn’t want to drive us to the airport after all. The worrying thing is that the app never gave an alert that the driver had bailed on us. Luckily L had been keeping a close eye on the map. So she ordered up a new ride.

With the new Uber just a few minutes away, we start chatting about the upcoming changes in travel rules, e.g. – the requirement to have a Real ID in order to board a plane. I remarked that I had gotten one and pulled my wallet out to show folks my driver’s license bedecked with holograms and other funky mechanisms to prevent ne'er-do-wells from forging fake IDs.

I was quite surprised to find that my license wasn’t in my wallet.

Immediately I looked in my car thinking that I perhaps didn’t put it back in my wallet after my stop at the credit union and that it had fallen into a crack somewhere. My search proved fruitless and then it hit me. I can only imagine the look on my face when it dawned on me that my credit union surely called me yesterday because I had left my ID in the drive-thru teller machine’s scanner.

Oh *$@#!!!!

Missing a plane was not a big deal but missing this trip was unthinkable.

I threw my bags into my car and told my friends that I’d see them later. My brother was no doubt looking up and shaking his head at this point.

To say I was pissed off at myself on the drive home was like saying Chicago had a little fire back in 1871. Still, I somehow managed to either drive at a reasonable speed or just not encounter any state troopers. Getting pulled over without a driver’s license would have only piled Pelion upon Ossa.

My first stop upon getting back to Madison was the credit union where someone kindly returned my driver’s license to me. Not long afterwards I was home and walking in the door where my Frau was quite surprised to see me. I explained what had happened or rather how I had f*cked up. Then I set out on the Internet and scrambled to find another flight. My brother was no doubt laughing at this point.

About 3 hours later my Frau dropped me off at the airport here in Madison. While MSN is nowhere near as large as O’Hare, it was rather busy and fairly hectic, as things go for a small regional airport. The security line was jam packed but soon enough I was on a plane bound for Chicago where I’d catch a flight to New Orleans.

Once at O’Hare, I made my way to opposite end of the terminal with steely-eyed determination. Nothing short of an act of God would prevent me from missing that flight. I texted my friends with an update on my status and, in return, got pictures of them wandering the French Quarter and relaxing at a tavern enjoying refreshing cocktails without me.

“We wandered the French Quarter…”

“…wish you were here…”

My plane touched ground at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport at around 9:30 that night. I grabbed my luggage and stepped outside to find that it wasn’t blazingly hot yet was still much warmer than home. We had an Airbnb across the river from downtown in the Algiers Point neighborhood which made for a moderately lengthy cab ride. Not much to see on the way there in the darkness and the cabbie wasn’t very talkative. I arrived at the house around 10:30.

This was my first Airbnb and I found that it was a nice place.

The decorations were chosen for tourists like us with Mardi Gras colors strewn about, a lot of fleur-de-lis’s, and all the symbols of the city represented including jazz and shrimp.

There was a porch out back that overlooked a small yard while a freeway bridge lingered in the distance although I wasn’t sure which freeway. It was nice to be able enjoy the outdoors in shorts once again. The neighborhood was quiet but it was Thursday. Perhaps all the drunken debauchery would start tomorrow night.

My friends were happy to see me, doubly so because they had had a few drinks and were in a jolly mood. They were attempting to order a pizza but we discovered that there were no pizzerias nearby on this side of the river and the delivery areas of the others in close enough proximity stopped at the shores of the Mighty Mississip.

Oops.

Their munchies went unsated and they learned their lesson: go easy on the Sazeracs unless you absolutely positively have a food source at hand.

And so we sat around outside and chatted in the cool night air. I relayed to them my hastily revamped travel plans and they, in turn, chronicled their strolls about town that day. Also, we talked a bit about tomorrow’s itinerary. We were not far from the Algiers Ferry Terminal so we decided that’s how we’d get across the river and to not hire any taxis. Any taxis with wheels, that is.

My experience with New Orleans until that point consisted solely of driving through it on I10 back in 2002 when a friend and I were on our way to Breaux Bridge, about 2 hours to the west, to attend the crawfish festival there. I knew folks who’d been there, of course, and had heard tell of the fun to be had there. Another friend had attended a conference in New Orleans many years ago and returned to Madison with a black eye, the result of an encounter his face had with one of the city’s sidewalks. While he fessed up to having drank a Hurricane or 3, he noted extenuating circumstances: New Orleans’ sidewalks were in dreadful shape.

I knew the typical northerner kind of stuff: it’s on the Mississippi and has a major port, the New Orleans Saints are the football team, it was part of the Louisiana Purchase. There’s Cajun food and music, jazz, Hurricane Katrina, Bourbon Street, old-timey streetcars – you know, the usual stuff everyone knows.

My goals for the trip were rather simple. Enjoy the company of my friends, honor my brother’s memory by visiting the World War II museum, sample local beer, and eat as much gumbo as humanly possible. It’s what my brother would have wanted.

We awoke the next morning, showered, and were out the door to catch a ferry for downtown. Algiers Point had an odd mix of homes. Not the architecture, necessarily, but rather condition. Our Airbnb had obviously been renovated recentlyish but there were other homes on the block that were in less than ideal shape.

As you can see, the street on our block was pretty rough. So were the sidewalks.

I could now fully grok how my friend had tripped and fallen. They would be fun traversing in the dark. I presumed/hoped that there were no wheelchair users or old folks who used walkers living in the area.

We ran across an empty lot that still had the tile floor and mosaic entryway of the building that had been there.

A disused commercial building sat uneasily next to a church.

But there were also stretches of houses in good condition that made you forget the blighted blocks. For example, there were beautiful homes such as these that I assume are in a French colonial style.

The flora provided a lot of wonderful sights and smells with a lot of trees and bushes that were unfamiliar to me such as this tree with the helix trunk.

I recognized the sight and smell of magnolia trees but we wandered through spots that were sweetly scented and I would bend down to take a whiff of the flowers responsible without any idea what variety they were.

We discovered The Crown and Anchor Pub which had a TARDIS at the entrance.

There was a coffeeshop a block or two away from the pub, Congregation Coffee, and it became our first stop in the morning for the rest of the trip. Well, maybe not our last day in town but definitely the rest.

I got a cup of joe and a couple bags of coffee to take home including their coffee/chicory blend.

On the way out, one of the feline denizens of the neighborhood ambled on by. I tried my best to get it to come to me for some pets but it ignored the Yankee tourist.

We discovered that there is a Louis Armstrong memorial at the ferry terminal. Satchmo has a lock on public transit terminals in this city, it seems.

I felt like I had come full circle having seen his house in Chicago last year on my Bronzeville tour and now here I was in the city of his birth.

Algiers Point was, as far as I could see, a Janus-like place. Dilapidated houses where nature was slowly reclaiming the land stood next to gorgeous homes in excellent repair and with well-manicured yards. Coffeeshops are usually a sign of gentrification and Congregation appeared to draw a typical middle-class crowd. On the other hand, The Crown and Anchor looked to be something of a dive bar.

I wondered how much of the neighborhood’s condition was due to Hurricane Katrina. As it was, Algiers Point seemed to be a mix of working- and middle-class residents and majority white. The owner of the Airbnb had left a note indicating which parts of the neighborhood we ought to avoid at night but I didn’t see any spots on our morning walk which looked particularly sketchy.

We paid our fares, boarded the ferry, and were soon off to the other side of the river.

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Bonus photo. I may have used this one already but I ran across it recently and it never fails to make me smile. This photo reminds me of my grandmother and all of my great aunts.

 

 (On to the vernal postlude.)

First cup of the day

I am having my first cup of chicory coffee that I brought back from New Orleans.

This is some fine stuff, Congregation. Extra intense nuttiness. Very tasty indeed.

New Orleans ghost signs

Stoopid app

When I was at The National WWII Museum last week, I took oodles of photos. At one point I was looking at some of them on my phone and came across one taken in the gallery about the Holocaust. My photo app made an unfortunate touch-up suggestion for a photo of two Jews being humiliated by some Nazis.

Getting ready to drown in gumbo

The Corona Diaries Vol. 58: Gastronomical

(late June 2022)

(listen to this entry's prelude)

One thing the Frau and I have done a lot this month is eat well. Don't get me wrong, we're not exactly gourmets - more like gormandizers.

For me, the gustatory festivities kicked off when my boss took my work team out for our annual holiday lunch a couple weeks ago. The holiday celebrated here was Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, Saturnalia, Yule - whatever holiday we wanted that occurred at the end of 2021 and, while he is normally not very timely with these lunches, being 6 months late set a new record. We went to a Middle Eastern/pan-Mediterranean place called Petra Bakery and Restaurant. Everyone enjoyed their meals and I was particularly struck by the stuffed falafel. (It also happens to be the only dish I have a photograph of.)

The ball of chickpea was crispy on the outside and tender on the inside with an injection of chili paste and onion and just a dash of sumac adding extra flavor. My fattoush salad w/ shawarma was the perfect lunch for a day of sweltering heat.

After eating this fine meal, I lost the will to cook for a few days and figured, if it’s going to be extremely hot, let us dine out and enjoy the cuisines of cultures from warmer climes. I'll admit that I had an ulterior motive: I didn't want to heat the house by using the stove. Plus I was happy to let someone else stand over a bed of red hot coals in a grill.

 

OK, OK, OK.

 

I was feeling lazy too. High temps make me lethargic.

I noticed that there was a new(ish) Peruvian restaurant not far from home called Mishqui. One hot and humid evening my Frau and I decided the time was right try it out. She had lomo saltado while I had pollo saltado. A side order of sweet plantain could not be filled as they were out. My Frau was disappointed as she had inexplicably acquired a craving for them recently.

With the potato having originated in Peru, I knew enough to expect every dish to have some kind of spud. One thing I didn’t expect was for Peruvian cuisine to have a large Cantonese influence. Thusly I was surprised to read on the menu that saltado is a kind of stir fry. I presume Chinese laborers emigrated there at some point and subsequently left their mark.

It was really tasty. Simple but delicious. For dessert, I brought home a chocolate chip empanada which our cat Grabby found intriguing while I found it chocolicious!

Having eaten Peruvian, I thought that the next logical step would be to keep the South American theme going and eat at the Venezuelan restaurant, La Taguara, that we’d not been to since a year or 2 before Covid.

The place had been upgraded slightly with the counter area now featuring monitors displaying a colorful electronic menu but the smallish dining area was the same as far as we could tell. The Frau and I both thought that the menu had been expanded but weren’t certain as it could have been our memories fooling us after a few years. There were only a couple other customers when we got there so it was nice to see a few people come in for takeout as the dining room began to fill up.

My Frau had the pabellón which the menu describes as the Venezuelan national dish. Shredded beef is accompanied by black beans, sweet plantain, rice, and an arepita which is small cornmeal pancake.

Having eaten their pabellón before, I will attest to its tastiness. As I noted above, the Frau had been craving plantain and was pleased as punch to finally have some tender nuggets of sweet, starchy goodness on a plate before her. She proceeded to consume them with all the gusto of Donald Trump at a beauty pageant. I did a little sampling (to ensure that my Frau had been served only the choicest delectables, mind you) and really liked the black beans. The identities of all of the seasonings involved proved elusive but these legumes were done just right and tasted excellent. Probably the best I’ve had in town.

I ordered the churrasco criollo which was a steak accompanied by a link of chorizo, yucca sticks, rice, and picadillo salad which consisted of diced tomato, onion, and chili.

The meal was served with a cilantro sauce that I wish ran out of my faucets at home, it was that good. They normally give you guasacaca or Venezuelan guacamole but there was no avocado here – vinegar and lime juice-based instead.

Despite having eaten plenty, we still had sweet teeth. On our way home we stopped for ice cream at Chocolate Shoppe on Atwood Avenue figuring that the cool, creamy spoonfuls would melt and find a home in the nooks and crannies in our otherwise full bellies. The ice cream parlor has a seated area out back which abuts a tree-lined bike path and so offers some shade. I had peach instead of my usual Zanzibar chocolate but cannot recall which flavor my Frau ordered.

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When not overeating, I have spent some time at the movies. Likely in emulation of my grandparents, I go to the movies not only to see a fine film but also because of the air conditioning. One theater here likes to crank it up and it’s a pleasure to sit in the near Arctic conditions watching a flick.

One film I saw was Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story. Shot in 2019, it is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. The movie chronicles the history of the festival and its importance to New Orleans.

We learn about the prominence of music in New Orleans culture beginning with Congo Square where slaves would gather to drum and dance together. This look back proceeds with second line bands, Mardi Gras Indians – music is everywhere down in Nawlins. Louis Armstrong was born and started his career there.

And so we get generous doses of music on the stages of the festival. But some time is also devoted to the city's cuisine – shrimp, crawfish, po’ boys, gumbo, etc. Seeing all of that food on the big screen gave me an appetite. And not just a healthy one. I mean I would have killed anyone that got between me and a plate of shrimp étouffée. So, when I got home, I immediately put my Frau in the car and we drove to our local Cajun restaurant, North of the Bayou. I kid you not.

With all of the great music, history, and food, I couldn’t help but enjoy the movie. My only gripe is that it was more than a little hagiographic and a bit too by the numbers with the obligatory descent into darkness that was Hurricane Katrina followed by the festival bringing light to the grim situation and helping the city heal. Despite essentially being a feature length commercial for New Orleans (in addition to being a potent hunger inducer), I really enjoyed it.

I took another recent trek to the cinema to see the latest film by director David Cronenberg, Crimes of the Future.

 

Cronenberg goes back to his body horror roots here with a future dystopian world where most people cannot feel physical pain and biotechnology has advanced to the point of machines being able to connect to our bodies and do…things…

The film opens with a disturbing scene of a young boy eating a plastic garbage can. We then meet Saul Tenser and Caprice played by Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux, respectively. They are a couple who does performance art together. Tenser’s body has an ability whereby it grows new vestigial organs and the performances involve them being surgically removed.

While it was a weird, disconcerting, and often times gross movie, I found it strangely captivating - perhaps in a rubbernecking kind of way like you experience when driving by a car accident hoping to get a fleeting glimpse of a body. Medical science doesn’t seem to be too far away from brain implants that would allow people to use computers by simply thinking certain things so computer-human flesh interfaces are coming. Plus, I think the movie pokes fun at artistic pretension which can be good for a laugh.

Crimes of the Future certainly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I found it engaging in a peculiar way and enjoyably odd.

 

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Bonus photo: cats!