The Weekend in Foolish Attention

Bits and bytes of the week

ANYTHING BUT A ‘COMMON’ CONCERT. This past weekend marked the 20th Anniversary of Millennium Park and was chock full of events and concerts to commemorate something incredibly unique—a city park in a major city committed to free entertainment and festivals for all citizens surrounded by art and gardens. Saturday was the pinnacle with a collaboration between DCASE and the Grant Park Music Festival with the rapper Common performing with the orchestra. We knew in the planning it would be a huge undertaking and had more freaking TEAMS meetings leading up to it than I could count.

The day started early with the heavy lifting involved in setting up the infrastructure of the seating bowl using security gates and plastic chairs like bits of wood and thatch used by beavers to dam the audience like rushing and unpredictable water. Common wanted the morning’s rehearsal to be closed to the public, a feat that required a series of closures and barriers that seemed ridiculous but effective.

“How are things going?” I asked one of the park’s Operations Managers.

“…mmmmmmm…”

“What?”

“Common and his entourage are lost in the parking garage and they’re pissed at the orchestra admins. No one was there to greet them and take them to the stage.”

“Let’s go.”

“I don’t think you want to get in the middle of this one. They’re really pissed off.”

“Fuck that. Let’s go.”

We walked around the garage until we found what looked like the starting lineup for an NBA team, each man as tall as a freaking tree including the star of the show. They were frustrated but thrilled someone found them and immediately calmed down. We took them to the stage and Common thanked us.

The day was a grind of setting up and solving problems. Then we opened the Pavilion for bidness.

The concert was exceptional and included both a song from Jennifer Hudson and Common dancing with State’s Attorney Kim Foxx and concluded with fireworks from the top of the Pritzker for the first time in history.

Notable Moments in my night:

We were told that thirty minutes following the concert began, we needed to release the seats to those without tickets. Just opening the gates would’ve been chaos (23,000 people in the perimeter and only about a thousand empty seats) so we decided to Studio 54 them and only allow small groups to enter in a more focused release.

My second-in-command did exactly that. Groups of two and four. I, on the other end of the gates, recognized that we had little more than fifteen minutes so I decided to tell them if I pointed at them, they could come in when I drew the scissor gate aside but if I didn’t point and you tried to muscle your way in, I’d eject you from the park.

It was almost chaos but I’m really incredibly loud (an, apparently intimidating although I can’t imagine why) so it worked out well. There was one woman with this dull, dog-like focus trying to push past anyone and everyone. She never made eye contact with me, she pretended that if she didn’t look at me I wouldn’t see her. Finally, I stopped her and looked her directly in the eyes. There was no one home. Only an angry desire to push past. It was weird and startled me. She did not get a seat.

All in all, my second got about 50 people through. I got about 300 people through. Then we had to go deal with more of the issues one has in a confined space jam-packed with enthusiastic concert fans.

˙˙˙

The average number of folks in wheelchairs is ten per concert. For the Common concert, it was around 50. We found places for everyone but that was an unexplained phenomenon.

˙˙˙

At one point, one of my ushers calls for me and he is a panic. It sounds like he’s being attacked by a chainsaw wielding carnival worker. He radios that he is located “House Right” which comprises half the park. It turns out a woman passed out and he freaked out. She was fine but I couldn’t stop laughing at his complete terror.

˙˙˙

And there were fireworks at the close for the first time shot off the top of the Pritzker. It was cool and I hoped we wouldn’t be witness to the beginning of the second Chicago fire…

BLACK MIRROR PREDICTED THIS. The rise of AI simulations of the deceased, or “deadbots” as academics have termed them, raises questions without clear answers about the ethics of simulating human beings, dead or alive. 

Yup. Deadbots. Your wife dies, they resurrect an AI avatar of her and you never move past it. Your husband gets hit by a bus and he still gets to listen to you tell him what a neglectful shithead he is. Me? I’m getting one of David Foster Wallace just to have conversations with.

The Crowdstrike outage disrupted many industries. Hospitals were especially vulnerable.

Suggestion: Apple

LYING FOR A GOOD CAUSE IS STILL LYING. Everyone involved in President Joe Biden’s day-to-day knew. They knew what George Clooney wrote about in his NYT Op-Ed: Uncle Joe had slipped a gear and was not in shape to run again. They knew and they lied over and over. Sure, the fear of a Trump second term was a justification but it was still a fucking lie no different than telling kids there is a Santa Claus or insisting on the concept that when the wealthy get wealthier, it trickles down to the rest of us.

Now, the fact that they all collectively lied is a problem. The bigger problem is that it was such a bad and inept lie. Not only were they lying, they lied badly as if the rest of us were so thick-skulled and gullible that we’d just accept their bullshit like a Catholic accepts a wafer as the deification of cannibalism. Either they expected us to fall in line out of the mounting dread of the Infant King’s Second Seating or that we were just stupid.

“I took on perpetrators of all kinds — predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”—VP Kamala Harris

THE RHETORIC OF SEPARATISM. I remember, in high school, a family that lived a bit on the outskirts of town. The Chandlers. They were dirt poor white people and the parents had so many fucking kids, they named them alphabetically. I don't know all of their names but the kid I went to school with was named Harold.  His older sister was Glynnis. Harold was the eighth kid.

Harold was not a bright high schooler. He was frequently unwashed. His clothes were fourth generation hand me downs. And, because we were in high school and in Kansas (but mostly because we were in high school) we treated Harold like shit. Not because of his appearance so much as because he was a Chandler. A Chandler was poor, white trash. While most of us had never even seen any other Chandlers in our lives, the ease of lumping the whole family into this category to paint with that broad brush of disdain and prejudgment was the kind of easy reserved for the dumbest people in society—namely teenagers.

I would love for this recollection to include some magical moment whereby Harold was such a good human being, an instance when he had done something noble or selfless, that we all learned a lesson from treating him horribly. I wish I could say that but I can't.

Harold was just a dumb kid with some criminal tendencies and was a bit of an asshole. Thirty-five years later, I can say that I wish he hadn't been. It would make it a better story if we had discovered that he or Glynnis or Ferris had been secretly feeding the homeless or taking care of abused animals. There is the argument to be made that our continued treatment only helped to pigeonhole Harold into an inability to rise above his being a Chandler. Whatever the reasons behind it, Harold was unremarkably dull and angry.

In spite of that fact, our prejudice was ignorant and unjustified. Even if all of the Chandlers were dumb and criminal and assholes, our simple-minded broad strokes decision that they were all the same is the rhetoric of hatred and bigotry. It is the rhetoric of separatism.

The fecundity of division is easy. Is someone black? They go in the Black Category. Wearing a blue uniform? Racist Thug Category. White? White Supremicist Category. That rhetoric, however, is only good for inciting division. And division is the opposite of the solutions to create and maintain a fair and just society for every single one of us.

The internet has become a special place for ideologues and prima donnas to spout their self aggrandizing bullshit in order to divide us up so that they can increase their brand potential. There are so many online using the rhetoric of division in broad, ugly strokes that it becomes difficult to even see and hear past it all. Just like wearing a pink ribbon declares solidarity against Breast Cancer and coloring your profile picture with the rainbow indicates solidarity with Gay Pride, the moniker of #BlackLivesMatter is a sign of solidarity with a segment of our people under siege. To use that activism as a way to divide us into an Us vs. Them mentality is grotesque.

Solidarity. Unity. It's the only solution.

---

And that, as the Good Book says, is the week! I’m excited for next weekend because I’m driving down to Kansas to celebrate my lil sister’s birthday and hang with the fam. Thanks for reading!