Chicago Pride Parade ’17

The 47th annual Chicago Pride Parade, which was held yesterday on the North Side, is easily the most colorful parade I’ve ever seen.

Chicago Pride Parade 2017And the most exuberant since the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. The girls and I posted ourselves on the west side of Broadway, a few blocks north of Irving Park Blvd., toward the beginning of the parade route.

That area had the advantage of a relatively thin line of spectators, at least compared to what the crowds must have been like further south along North Halsted St., which is in Boystown proper.

Chicago Pride Parade 2017 As it was, the girls found a spot next to the street, and I stood behind a street parking collection box, since I was tall enough to see over it without a problem. The weather was made to order for a parade, low 70 degrees F., partly cloudy, some light winds.

We were there for more than two hours, watching — and though overused, the word fits here — the diversity parade by: floats, trucks, buses, motorcycles, riders, dancers, and walkers with private organizations and clubs, public agencies, corporations, churches, synagogues, advocacy groups, and entities without easy definition.

Sound systems provided most of the music, though there were a few bands, with the paraders and parade-watchers not shy about making their own noise. Beads, candy and other trinkets were tossed freely.

All kinds of attire were part of the parade, as well it should have been.

Chicago Pride Parade 2017Chicago Pride Parade 2017Chicago Pride Parade 2017Chicago Pride Parade 2017Chicago Parade Parade 2017Chicago Pride Parade 2017

Chicago Pride Parade 2017

Chicago Pride Parade 2017

Chicago Pride Parade 2017

Chicago Pride Parade 2017

Various politicos were on hand, including aldermen, other local officials, state office holders, and a number of candidates for governor. U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth rode by.

Chicago Pride Parade 2017 - Tammy Duckworth

The standard rainbow flag was ubiquitous, but I also saw a few less familiar designs, such as a Libertarian rainbow and a Star of David rainbow.

Chicago Pride Parade 2017There was less political content than I expected, but there was some.
Chicago Pride Parade 2017Mostly the event had the feel of a big party, rather than a protest. With a party comes balloons. A lot of balloons. I’ve never seen such a concentration of balloons, many of them attached in some way to parade-walkers.

Chicago Pride Parade 2017

More than mere attachments, there were also examples of balloon-wear.
Chicago Pride Parade 2017Some floats blasted confetti, too.

Chicago Pride Parade 2017There was an acrobat, tossed into the air suddenly.

Chicago Pride Parade 2017Glad they caught her. Him. The acrobat.

Who was this bozo? Bozo, of course.
Chicago Pride Parade 2017For once not the most colorful attendee of the parade.

Flag Day, Such As It Is

It occurred to me today, before I went out on some errands and for no particular reason, that it was Flag Day. So I decided to take note driving along whether there seemed to be more American flags than usual flying in my slice of the northwestern suburbs. The answer: not that I could tell.

Adam Goodheart, writing in 2011 in the former NYT blog Disunion, wrote about the origin of the day, which falls on the anniversary of the adoption of the flag by the Second Continental Congress: “It was destined, eventually, to become the runty stepchild among American national holidays. One hundred and fifty years after its original creation, no one ever hosts a Flag Day cookout or sends a Flag Day greeting card. Nobody gets to take a long weekend from the office. Even the most customer-hungry car dealers don’t advertise Flag Day sales.

“…exactly 150 years ago after it was first celebrated [in Hartford, Conn.], almost no one seems to have noticed the anniversary. Google searches for ‘sesquicentennial of Flag Day’ and similar phrases yield exactly zero hits.”

The day might not have endured as much more than text on calendars, but reverence for the flag has very much endured. I didn’t see no U.S. flags during my drive today, just flags where they usually are, which is a lot of places.

“Before 1861, the American flag had served mostly as a military ensign or a convenient marking of American territory, flown from forts, embassies and ships, and displayed on special occasions like the Fourth of July,” wrote Goodheart. “But after the Southern states began to secede — and the Union garrison at Fort Sumter took its stand as a lone bastion of resistance — the Stars and Stripes began to fly, as it still does today, from houses, from storefronts, from churches; above village greens and college quadrangles.”

(And at Ft. Sumter to this day.)

Ft Sumter 2017“The adulation of the national banner hardly diminished during the years that followed… As for Flag Day, it seems to have remained a largely local observance during the Civil War and Reconstruction years, despite occasional efforts in Congress… to have it declared a national holiday. Official federal recognition came only in 1916.

“The holiday’s popularity seems to have crested in the period of the two world wars and the early cold war. Then, for the 1960s generation, it became more or less the epitome of square: a vaguely embarrassing grade-school memory to be filed alongside duck-and-cover drills and mandatory prayers.

“Flag Day never regained much of its former cachet in the decades that followed. And yet, holiday or no holiday, this June 14 — as on all other days of the year — the American flag remains as ubiquitous and as venerated as the most pious citizen of Hartford could have wished in 1861.”

Thursday Trifles

My wooden back scratcher — one of earliest inventions of mankind, for sure, and still one of the best — still has its label attached. I just noticed that. A product of Daiso Japan, it was acquired in Japan early this year and brought to me as o-miyagi.

The label is in Japanese and English. The English WARNING says:

Please understand that there is a risk of having mold and bugs since this is made of natural material.
Please do not use this for any other purpose than what it should be.
Please follow the garbage segregation rules imposed by local municipality.

Here’s a picture from Lou Mitchell’s last month. “A Millennial Couple at Breakfast.”

Millennials

The flag between them is a Cubs W flag. They were all over when the Cubs were in the World Series, and you still see them sometimes. Ann asked me what it stood for. I said, Win. She said, couldn’t that be for any team anywhere? I assured her that that kind of reasoning has no place in sports fandom.

Here’s an article about Carvana. That’s a company that develops automobile vending machines. Or rather, mechanical towers that dispense cars previously acquired online. I’d never heard of it before. They’re in Dallas, San Antonio and Austin, among other places, so maybe I ought to take a look at one.

A few weeks ago, there was a thing going around Facebook: List 10 musical acts, nine of which you’ve seen, one you haven’t. Others are invited to guess which is the one you haven’t seen. Pointless but harmless. I refuse to do it on Facebook, but I will here. Alphabetically.

The Bobs
Chubby Checker
Irwin Hepplewhite & the Terrifying Papoose Jockeys
Gustav Leonhardt
Bob Marley
Natalie Merchant
Bill Monroe
Taj Mahal
They Might Be Giants
Francis Xavier & the Holy Roman Empire

The 606 in ’16

On Saturday we went to the city for a few hours. Yuriko went to a cake-making class offered by a woman she knows who lives near Humboldt Park. I was the driver, since it’s complicated to get there by train and bus, and driving in the city unnerves her.

As it should, with cars everywhere, parked and in motion, operated by sometimes careless or aggressive drivers and often closer than you think; delivery trucks blocking the way; road construction crews doing likewise — though the rough surfaces and potholes never seem to go away; buses acting as if they own the road; bicyclists passing between you and parked cars suddenly and with inches to spare; random pedestrians all over the place, a few with no sense; people opening their car doors in front of you without warning, emerging onto the street (some with children in tow); large intersections without the benefit of turning signals; and stretches of street being resurfaced, but not completed just yet, which on a dry June day raises clouds of dust through which you must pass.

Then there’s the matter of parallel parking. Yuriko doesn’t care for it. A lot of people would say the same. I never knew how to do it until I moved to Chicago in the late ’80s. Then I learned it well. It’s an essential skill for owning a car in the city. I also learned what to expect driving in a place like Chicago. Or New York or Boston or Washington DC or Atlanta or Miami or Dallas or Los Angeles or Seattle — all harrowing in their own sweet ways.

I’ll say one good thing about driving in Chicago, though: it’s easy to know roughly where you are all the time. The streets mostly form a grid, with major streets at regular intervals, and just about every street, even the most minor, marked with an easy-to-see, well-placed and legible street sign. Not every city has such luxuries, and I mean you, Boston.

With Yuriko at her cake class, I had a couple of hours to kick around in the late morning. The Puerto Rican Festival in Humboldt Park, Fiestas Puertorriqueñas, was slated to start at noon, as evidenced by people carrying the commonwealth’s well designed flag into the park and the flag being flown by a lot of passing cars. Here’s a vendor selling some.Puerto Rican Day Chicago 2016Since the event wasn’t actually under way, I went elsewhere. I visited St. Mary of the Angels church about 20 blocks to the east, taking a North Avenue bus, and then walking back, partly on the 606, the same linear park we visited on its opening day a little more than a year ago.

This time I saw a bit more of the trail’s eastern end, though not quite to the east terminus. At around 11 am in mid-June, the sun is high and the trail very warm. Temps were in the upper 80s F. That didn’t keep people away.
The 606 ChicagoI was glad to see that the landscaping on the edges is now more lush than a year ago. Also, development of the land nearby continues apace.606 Winchester AveI also noticed that the trail is short on shade. Most of the year, that wouldn’t matter, but in summer it’s important. Even the trailside parks weren’t particularly shady. At Park 567, where the trail crosses over Milwaukee Ave., there were only three or four spots under trees offering any significant shade. I was lucky enough to be able to sit by myself in one sizable pool of shade, though I would have shared the space if anyone had asked.

I got a look at the trail’s first art installation, the serpentine “Brick House,” by a sculptor named Chakaia Booker.606 - Brick House scultpureI’ll consider the title whimsical, since no bricks are involved, or any obvious connection to the song celebrating feminine pulchritude. It’s made of stainless steel and recycled tire rubber. Put in last fall, the piece attracts children, who instantly want to climb it.I would have spent more time on the trail, but I’d forgotten a hat (though not water). The shade, provided by mature trees, is better on many of Chicago’s neighborhood streets, so after about a half mile, I walked the rest of the way on small streets, as well as along North Ave., whose buildings also provided shade at that time of the day, at least on the south side of the street. I’m not the devil-may-care teen I used to be, who sometimes walked miles in clear 90-plus degree weather in San Antonio or Austin.

Dayton ’16

Not long before Memorial Day weekend this year, my professional duties took me to AAA’s web site, and a press release there told me that among American travelers, “the top destinations this Memorial Day weekend, based on AAA.com and AAA travel agency sales, are: Orlando, Myrtle Beach, Washington, DC, New York, Miami, San Francisco, Boston, Honolulu, Los Angeles and South Padre Island.”

We didn’t go to any of those destinations last weekend, as interesting as they all are. (I’ll bet Myrtle Beach has its charms; it’s the only one on the list I’ve never been to.) Instead, we went to Dayton as the primary destination, with shorter stops in Wapakoneta, also in Ohio, along with Indianapolis and Fort Wayne — the last two for meals. So it was a western Ohio trip.

Ohio, land of the curious swallowtail flag. The Ohio Burgee, it’s called.
Ohio BurgeeOr maybe we took an aerospace-themed trip, since we spent the better part of Saturday at the sprawling, extraordinary National Museum of the U.S. Air Force just outside of Dayton, on the grounds of the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. It has a reputation as one of the best aviation museums in the country, often mentioned in the company of the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. Now that I’ve been there, I can see why.

The Wright brothers were from Dayton, and the Wright sister too. Four boys and a girl survived to adulthood, and all but the eldest brother were ultimately involved in the business of flying machines. These days, the city features the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park. Part of the park includes a museum dedicated to the Wrights — and, curiously enough, to Ohioan poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, who did have a remarkable life. After lunch on Saturday, we took in the Wright-Dunbar exhibits, despite our tired feet.

On Sunday morning, as my family lolled in our room, I went to the Woodland Cemetery and Arboretum in Dayton. Covering 200 hilly, wooded acres, Woodland is a fitting name and most aesthetic burying ground I’ve seen since Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

We came by way of I-65 to Indianapolis and then I-70 to Dayton. I didn’t want to return the same way, so we headed north on I-75 to Wapakoneta, boyhood home of Neil Armstrong, and current location of a spaceflight museum. From there, US 27/33 took us to Fort Wayne, a city I’d never visited, despite its relative proximity.

I also wanted to drive US 30 from Ft. Wayne across Indiana. It turned out to be a fairly fast way to traverse the state, something like the Trans-Canada Highway out in Saskatchewan or Manitoba; that is, as a divided highway, but not limited access one.

Maxine’s Chicken & Waffles in Indianapolis offered the best meal of the trip, so good and filling that we barely needed to eat the rest of the day after stopping there at about 4 EDT on Friday (but still 3 CDT according to our stomachs). Chicken and pancakes were on the menu, which I had this time around.

When we came out of Maxine’s, I saw something I’d only ever heard about: a Megabus.Megabus, Indianapolis 2016The bus on the Chicago-Indianapolis run. I suppose there on N. East St., toward the eastern edge of downtown, is where it picks up its budget-minded passengers. According to the web site, the price for Chicago-Indianapolis is “from $25.” I’m not sure how much that really would be, but at least the bus offers wifi. They know their market.

Scenes of Naniwa

In July 1991 at Kinokunya Books in Osaka, which had a nice selection of English-language titles, I chanced across a large paperback called Scenes of Naniwa, which seems to be subtitled, “Osaka Time Tunnel.” I’m really glad I forked over the ¥2060 to buy it (about $15 in those days), because I’ve never seen it for sale anywhere else, not even Amazon, though admittedly I only checked the English-language version of that site.

Scenes of NaniwaThe book has 40 short chapters, each well illustrated by black-and-white images, of Meiji- and Taisho- and early Showa-era Osaka, which is to say, the latter decades of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th. In fact, the photographs are the genesis of the book.

It seems that one Teijiro Ueda (1860-1944), who owned a sizable camera shop in Osaka in the early years of the 20th century, also had a sizable collection of photographs of old Osaka. He apparently took some of them himself, though it isn’t always clear which ones. Some of them he probably collected from other photographers.

In the 1980s, with the assistance of Ueda’s elderly daughter-in-law, who had kept track of his 1,300 or so images in a dozen albums, the Yomiuri Shimbun (a daily paper) published the photos and articles to go with them in a serial format. Later the paper put the articles together in book form. A Belgian named J.V.D. Cammen took it upon himself to translate the book into English, and in 1987, Yomiuri published that too. That’s what I have.

I’m assuming that neither Japanese nor English were Cammen’s first language, and if so, he did a remarkable job. The prose isn’t quite as smooth as it might be, but on the whole it’s high-quality writing in English. Someone unfamiliar with Osaka might find the book a chore to read, but the more you know about that city, the more interesting the descriptions will be. You find yourself thinking, “That used to be there?”

It’s a time tunnel all right. The modern urban landscape of Osaka has mostly obliterated the places and sights that Scenes of Naniwa documents. (Naniwa is an older name for the city, and possibly even a poetic one in later times.) As the text notes, “In our time, with ferro-concrete buildings lining the streets, the appearance of Osaka has become almost the same everywhere, but there are plenty of photographs in the Ueda albums of the city before it received this uniformity.”

For example, the book tells of the Osaka Hotel, which used to be on Nakanoshima, a narrow island in Yoda River, which these days is a good place for strolling in fair weather. The book says that: “The hotel [had] arched windows resembling those of palaces in the West. It [had] turrets like castles in the Middle Ages, with dormer windows in the roofs, which [were] covered with asbestos slates, and the ridgepoles too [were] decorated with fine ironwork… The front part of the hotel [was] three-storied, but at the back [was] a basement with a veranda and even an anchorage for the private use of the hotel.”

The structure dated from 1900, but didn’t last long: it burned down in 1924. On the site now is the fine Museum of Oriental Ceramics, completed in 1982.

Then there’s the Tall Lantern (Taka-doro) in Sumiyoshi. I used to live in Sumiyoshi Ward, and south of my residence, about 20 minutes on foot, was Sumiyoshi Shrine (Sumiyoshi-jinja). Not far from there was the Tall Lantern, though not in its original position, as I learned from the book.

“… the Taka-doro was originally an offering made by fishermen to the Guardian Sea-god of the Sumiyoshi Shire at the end of the Kamakura period, but has become best known now for being the oldest lighthouse ever constructed in Japan… In 1950, the Stone Lantern was destroyed by Typhoon Jane, but it was reconstructed in its original form about 200 m farther east. Restored, it stands on its former foundation, is 21 m high, and has a tiled roof like that of a temple.”

Other chapters cover the Juso Ferry (Juso’s a neighborhood; I was married in a church there); the site of the Japanese Mint and its cherry blossoms; the earlier Osaka Stations, before the current and entirely utilitarian one; the site of the Industrial Expo of 1903; a ceremonial arch (long gone) built to commemorate the victory over Russia in 1905; the evolution of the Dotomburi district, which in the age of electric lights overwhelms the eye, but which used to be a home to many kabuki theaters; the earlier iterations of Namba Station and the Nankai Electric Railway; Shitennoji and environs, the clearest memory I have of which is one of the ponds at Shitennoji temple that was infested with an absurd number of frogs; and much more, such as an account of a fire on July 31, 1909, that burned more than 122 hectares of the city and 11,300 houses. Ueda apparently went to the roof of his camera store and took a picture that morning, which shows an enormous billow of black smoke about two kilometers away.

The book also taught me about the miotsukushi. I pulled this image of one, along with a sailboat, from a Japanese web site. The image is in the book, though cropped a bit differently, and dates from about 1877, which surely puts it in the public domain.
miotsukushi1877Scenes of Naniwa tells us that “the Osaka city symbol, the miotsukushi, originates from the stakes used as water route signals which up to the middle of the Meiji period stood planted in the Kizu and Aji Rivers, both debouching into Osaka Harbor. The depth of the water was difficult to judge because of the abundant bamboo reeds growing in the rivers… the miotsukushi planted along both sides of the rivers were signs showing that within those stakes the water was deep enough to sail through safely.”

Though gone by the end of the 19th century, the miotsukushi were well regarded enough to become the city symbol in 1894, and if you spend enough time in Osaka, you start noticing depictions of them in various places, something like the Chicago municipal device.

Before I left Japan in 1994, I went to a flag shop and, after some discussion, managed to order a miotsukushi flag as a souvenir of my time in the city. (I think they had a hard time believing a gaijin would have ever heard of it.) It was a little bigger than a 3 x 5-inch flag, and I had it until 2003, when it disappeared during the move to my current house.

Hall of State, Fair Park

At one end of the Fair Park Esplanade is the Hall of State, a stately hall indeed. “The Hall of State, a museum, archive, and reference library, was erected in 1936 at a cost of about $1.2 million by the state of Texas at Fair Park in Dallas to house the exhibits of the Texas Centennial Exposition and the Greater Texas and Pan-American Exposition of 1937,” explains the Texas State Historical Association.
Hall of State, Fair Park“The structure, designed by eleven Texas architects, is characterized as Art Deco… The front is 360 feet long, and the rear wing extends back 180 feet… The walls are surfaced with Texas limestone. A carved frieze memorializing names of historical importance encircles the building. Carvings on the frieze display Texas flora.”

I went inside for a look, and soon was face-to-face — or maybe face-to-plinth — with six statues of early Texas luminaries: Stephen F. Austin, Sam Houston, Mirabeau B. Lamar, James Fannin, Thomas J. Rusk, and William B. Travis. Here’s Lamar (1798-1859), second president of the Republic of Texas, among other things.
MB LamarPompeo Coppini did the sculptures. I’d run across his work before at the Texas State Cemetery in Austin. If it’s a monumental sculpture in Texas done in the early to mid-20th century, odds are he did it.

Then I entered Great Hall.
Hall of State, Great HallThe TSHA again: “The Great Hall, or the Hall of the Six Flags, in the central wing, has a forty-six-foot-high ceiling. Murals on the north and south walls depict the history of the state and its industrial, cultural, and agricultural progress. These were painted by Eugene Savage of New York.” I’d run across him before as well.

Great Hall, Hall of StateDuring my visit, the Great Hall happened to be sporting an exhibit about Texas musicians, and I will say that I learned that Meat Loaf was from Dallas, something I didn’t know. Actually I didn’t know much about many of the Texas musicians mentioned in the exhibit, such as various bluesmen and Western swing players and Tejano bands.

On the back wall of the Great Hall is a gold-leafed medallion with the Lone Star emblem of Texas surrounded by representations of the six nations whose flags have flown over the state.
Gold leaf!The United States and the Republic of Texas are at the top; the Confederacy and Mexico in the middle; and France and Spain on the bottom. The six together are a persistent theme in symbolic representations of modern Texas.

Parade on the 606

On our way back to Humboldt Ave., where we got on the spanking-new 606 linear park on the Northwest Side of Chicago, and where we planned to get off, we encountered a little parade. Looked like an impromptu to-do.

Parade on the 606, 06-06 Parade on the 606, 06-06Whatever uniforms and instruments you got, bring ’em!

Parade on the 606, 06-06Cheerleaders are OK, but flag girls are where it’s at. That’s how I felt in high school, anyway, and some opinions never quite go away. Incidentally, the flag the woman in red is carrying said “FLAG” (as seen in the previous picture). Her shirt said “I ♥ a Scientist.” And note the Chicago flag wristband; nice touch.

And speaking of flags, this is a variation of the Chicago flag I hadn’t seen before.

Chicago flag variationJust happy chance that we got to see the little parade go by. That, and we showed up at the 606 on opening day.

Treue der Union

The Texas State Historical Association says that “the Civil War skirmish known as the battle of the Nueces took place on the morning of August 10, 1862, when a force of Hill Country Unionists, encamped en route to Mexico on the west bank of the Nueces River about twenty miles from Fort Clark in present-day Kinney County, were attacked by mounted Confederate soldiers… Contentions over the event remained on both sides, with Confederates regarding it as a military action against insurrectionists while many German Hill Country residents viewed the event as a massacre.

“After the war the remains of the Unionists killed at the battle site were gathered and interred at Comfort, where a monument commemorates the Germans and one Hispanic killed in the battle and subsequent actions. The dedication of the Treue der Union monument occurred on August 10, 1866. To commemorate the 130th anniversary of the memorial, the monument was rededicated on August 10, 1996. It is the only German-language monument to the Union in the South where the remains of those killed in battle are buried, and where an 1866 thirty-six star American flag flies at half-staff.”

The memorial stands on High Street in Comfort, Texas, between 3rd and 4th Sts., next to a piece of undeveloped land and across the street from a church and a school.
Comfort, Texas Feb 2105With the names of the dead on the sides. These fell in a later event in October 1862, on the Rio Grande.

Comfort, Texas Feb 2015And a 36-star flag does indeed fly there.

Comfort, Texas Feb 2015Not something you see too often. That flag was only current for two years, between 1865 and 1867, or rather between the admission of Nevada and Nebraska.

Come and Take It

There probably aren’t too many Come and Take It flags flapping in the Illinois wind, but there’s one in my back yard. It’s along with a Stars and Stripes, one of many that a Realtor posted on our block – all near the street – for the Fourth of July this year.

Come and Take ItIt’s the flag I bought as a souvenir of my visit to Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site in April. It was a little long to take in a suitcase on an airplane – and it’s a little pointy, just the kind of thing that might alarm a literal-minded TSA agent and who might indeed take it – so I left it at Jay’s house, intending to pick it up in July, when I could take it back in my car. Remarkably, I remembered to do just that, though it’s been in the car for a few weeks.

Nothing like an obscure historic flag of defiance to brighten up your deck. Unlike the Gadsden Flag, it hasn’t been co-oped by anti-government radicals (anti-government, except for their Social Security and Medicare).