It's Happening

“Go and dance yourself clean
You're blowing Marxism to pieces
Maybe they're arguments, the pieces.”

         LCD Soundsystem, “Dance Yourself Clean”

The LCD Soundsystem CD “It’s Happening” (2010) opens with “Dance Yourself Clean,” which concludes:

We should try a little harder
In the tedious march of the few
Every day's a different warning
There's a part of me hoping it's true

Calling themselves a dance-punk band from Brooklyn, James Murphy and company’s final track on “It’s Happening,” “Hope,” advises: “Grab your things and stumble into the night so we can shut the door on terrible times.”  LCD Soundsystem is about to release its first CD in seven years and has previewed two tracks from it, “Call the Police” and “American Dream.”  The latter is about faded dreams:

Oh, the revolution was here
That would set you free from those bourgeoisie
In the morning everything's clearer
When the sunlight exposes your age
But that's okay

WXRT has been giving “Call the Police” heavy air play because LCD Soundsystem is playing three dates in early November at the Aragon Ballroom.

 Kathy and Miranda in Chicago; photo by Sean Michael

Toni picked up Miranda, Sean, and Kathy Sichaleun (the Americanizing of her Thai name) at the South Shore station. They were exhausted but pumped from their Lollapalooza experience.  Sean recommended I check out ALT-J.  Shortly after they took off for Grand Rapids, Tom and Darcy Wade drove us to Hacienda Restaurant in Long Beach to celebrate Dave’s birthday, along with 17 others, including the Kevin Horn, Robert Blaszkiewicz, and John English families.  We had met at Shoreline Brewery in Michigan City, but there was a two-hour wait. The Hacienda looked familiar.  Spotting someone with an orange creamsicle cocktail, I remembered that Kim and Terry Hunt had taken us there.  I ordered an APA from Three Floyd’s in Munster plus the steak fajita salad, which was so enormous half was left over for lunch the next two days.

At Hacienda for Dave's birthday

Chicago lost to Washington despite two home runs (numbers 20 and 21) from Willson Contreras.  Gabby Hartnett holds the record for Cubs catchers with 37 round trippers in 1930. The following season, Hartnett shook Al “Scarface” Capone’s hand while the gangster was sitting in a first-row box seat.  Within a year, Capone would be a federal prisoner.

Gabby Hartnett and Al Capone

I avoided the Tri-State (80-94) on the drive to IUN but going home took it to the Porter exit.  A quarter-mile after the Broadway entrance ramp, a sign informs whether there is slow or stopped traffic ahead and in how many miles.  Normally I get off at Central, but the sign read “construction in four miles” but nothing about heavy traffic so I chanced it.

Hall of Fame manager (for the Yankees and Mets) Casey Stengel cultivated a persona as a clown early in his playing career for the Brooklyn Dodgers.  At Ebbets Field during pre-game fielding practice he’d station himself in the infield and pretend to snag grounders and throw to first.

Archivist Steve McShane is on vacation, so reserves unit librarian Betty Wilson called to tell me that IUN Nursing secretary Brenda Jenkins wanted to peruse the Calumet Regional Archives collection on the Steel City Chicks, a local softball team active in the 1940s and 1950s.  I let her have access to the two boxes in the Archives and gave her Steel Shavings, volume 45, which has information about the colorful Chicks.  In Steel Shavings, volume 45, I wrote that the Chicks wore blue and gold satin uniforms, including at times short shorts, and rarely lost.  Star pitcher Omega “Big Pitch” Lyons stood five feet nine and weighed over 300 pounds and was a formidable switch hitter.  Coach Fred Price recalled that Omega couldn’t bend over run fast or slide into bases but threw a ball that had a natural drop.  He said: “By the time it reached the plate, it would be about a quarter to a half inch lower than when the batter first saw it.”  The result was that, it batters did hit the ball, it would be an easy ground out.

 Shrine of St. Jude

Mike Chirich’s sister and brother-in-law are visiting Miller for a month, beginning in late August.  He has a doctorate in Religious Studies and is interested in religious myths and superstitions and their role in cultural retention over generations.  I’m planning to give him a copy of “Maria’s Journey” by Ramon (Ray) and Trisha Arredondo.  When Ray was a kid, while playing tag, he had a vision of an old, bearded man in religious robes sitting on a bench and promptly fainted.  Years later, when he took Maria to the Dominican Shrine of St. Jude Thaddeus in Chicago, the statue seemed identical to his childhood vision.  In the Foreword to “Maria’s Journey” I wrote:

Whenever Maria’s children left town, they would solicit Maria’s blessing for a safe trip.  As Ramon recalled: “We’d kneel before my mom and my grandmother when she was alive, and they’d say some prayers and bless us.”

Maria’s husband Miguel was politically radical while she clung to religion to sustain her through difficult times.  She didn’t go to mass, however, and go to confession, once telling a priest when she fell ill, “Do you really think I have time to sin?  I hardly leave the house except to buy groceries.”

In the New York Times Sunday Magazine, I learned the meaning of “Fubu” (for us by us) from Wesley Morris, who wrote about African Americans being “unapologetically black” and cited as an example Beyoncé’s lyrics in “Formation” from the CD “Lemonade”:

You mix that negro with that Creole, make a Texas bama
I like my baby heir with baby hair and afros
I like my negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils

That same issue ended with self-proclaimed feminist Rashida Jones defending pornography – at least nonviolent forms of it.  She mentioned “duck lips" selfies, defined in this manner in Urban Dictionary:

  This is a face used in many teenage Facebook pictures. They stick their lips out in a fashion that resembles a duck's beak. It is meant to be seductive, although why anyone would think ducks are sexy, I don't know. Stay away from these girls; prolonged exposure to them may cause brain cell damage. This is not to be confused with a kissy face, which is a girl making a face as if she were about to kiss someone. This is an okay face under the circumstances that A: She is in a relationship and sending it to her boyfriend because she's traveling far away B: Blowing kisses to her mom or dad through skype C: It's Valentine’s Day. If it is not under these circumstances, then it's just as bad as duck lips.

Michael Jackson with duck lips