So there I am at my kitchen table, drinking my morning coffee and reading the latest column in the New York Times by Tom Friedman, who I disagree with more often than not.

I read pretty much every column by Friedman, Bret Stephens, David Brooks, and other writers with whom I disagree, on the outside chance that they might write something so enlightening that I proclaim, Eureka! I see the light.

It hasn’t happened yet—though I suppose that doesn’t mean it never will.

Anyway, this column is about Friedman’s recent lunch at the White House with President Biden. Their conversation was “off the record,” but the menu was not. 

So he reveals what he ate: “a tuna salad sandwich with tomato on whole wheat bread, with a bowl of mixed fruit and a chocolate milkshake for dessert that was so good it should have been against the law.”

But he conceals what Biden said. In short, the relevant stuff remains privileged information.

Sort of like a mayoral response to a FOIA request.

The column’s point is that Friedman is distressed by divisions in our country. Which, OK, so far so good.

But as soon as he starts enumerating examples of these divisions and explaining how a centrist like himself has no home in either party, I know what’s coming . . .

The dreaded false equivalency. As in this nugget . . .

“With every passing day, every mass shooting, every racist dog whistle, every defund-the-police initiative, every nation-sundering Supreme Court ruling, every speaker run off a campus, every bogus claim of election fraud, I wonder if he [Biden] can bring us back together.”

Centrists, please—think about what you’re saying.

You’re saying a mass shooting—in which a white man armed with a rifle gunned down random Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo—is the same as some douchebag right-winger getting cat calls at a college lecture hall.

You’re saying that “defund-the-police initiatives” are as dangerous as attempts to steal a presidential election, as Trump tried in 2020 and Republican legislators throughout the country are clearly trying to do in 2024?

You don’t really believe that—do you?

As for a “defund-the-police initiative,” it’s not an actual thing. It’s a figment of MAGA’s imagination, a tool MAGA uses to frighten centrists, like Friedman, into sullying the base of the Democratic Party so they can tell swing voters: a pox on both their houses.

Defund the police was a cry that erupted in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Then came the protests and the unrest of the summer of 2020, followed by the inevitable backlash. And pretty much every Democrat sprinted away from the defund concept.

In fact, Democrats seem to outdo Republicans in their attempt to rail about defunding the police.  Just look at the recent evidence here in Chicago.

For a relatively brief moment, Arne Duncan, former secretary of education, hinted he might run for mayor on a platform of shifting funds from policing so more money could go to intervention or mental health response teams. Mayor Lightfoot immediately pounced, blasting Duncan as a police defunder.

“People all over the city, neighborhood after neighborhood—they don’t want to defund our police department. They want our police department to be respectful and constitutional in the work that they do; but they want the police to protect them,” Lightfoot said in regards to Duncan.

Duncan decided not to run. And I’ve not heard one word about defunding the police from any citywide candidate ever since.

You know, it’s sad that the main Democratic takeaway from George Floyd’s murder seems to be stay away from “defund the police.”

Let me pause to point out the obvious. There is no moral equivalence between Democrats and Republicans at this point in time.

Even if you think that “defund the police” is an outrage, the number of elected officials in the Democratic Party who actually call for it are a tiny fraction of the party as a whole.

Whereas over 50 percent of Republicans say they believe President Biden stole an election that he actually won. And Republican legislators all over the country are feeding that paranoia by trying to pass election laws that would enable them to essentially turn the 2024 presidential election over to MAGA if they don’t like the outcome.

As the New York Times—Friedman’s newspaper—has reported.

In Illinois, not one Republican gubernatorial candidate has dared to refute Trump’s election lie. Not even Richard Irvin, the so-called moderate in the primary.

They’re all beholden to Trump in one way or another. Either they agree with him or they’re too frightened of a voter backlash to admit they don’t. 

Meanwhile, back in Chicago, a city supposedly run by “radical leftists,” if you believe MAGA propaganda . . .

A City Council committee met last week to consider Mayor Lightfoot’s proposal to lower the curfew for minors. 

Many alderpersons—even conservative ones—predicted a lowered curfew would not cut back on violence. They noted the city was barely enforcing curfew laws already on the books. They predicted new laws would be selectively enforced, with Black teenagers getting the brunt of arrests. And so on . . .

And yet it overwhelmingly passed. It hasn’t come before the full council yet. But I predict it will eventually be passed. Why? Because it’s like railing against defunding the police. No elected official wants to look soft on crime, even in so-called lefty Chicago.

So comparing fictitious police defunders to very real democracy deniers is a form of gaslighting. It’s not real and yet we’re led to believe it. All part of an effort to win over swing voters by saying extremists on both sides are bad. 

Even though one is clearly far worse than the other.

Funny thing is—this strategy won’t work. No matter how many times centrist Dems denounce “defund the police,” MAGA will accuse them of pushing for it.

And the gaslighting of America continues.

The Latest from the Ben Joravsky Show

Read More

Nobody gets rich writing cookbooks, but I’ve always assumed that Hugh Amano wrote his way off the dole.

Amano is best known as the opening sous chef at Fat Rice who, after leaving the restaurant in its first year, cowrote the acclaimed The Adventures of Fat Rice, followed by two outstanding comic cookbook collaborations with artist Sarah Becan: Let’s Make Ramen! and Let’s Make Dumplings! I’ve covered each of these books in their time, but I first wrote about Amano long ago during the Great Recession when he launched Food on the Dole, an achingly personal blog about life as an unemployed chef (with an English degree) whose survival schemes predated the pandemic pivots I’ve reported on in recent times.

I know better, but I still cheered up at the fantasy that it was possible for mass-market publishing to lift an overworked chef off the line. Turns out, the only way Amano could’ve written any of those books was because of the nine-to-five gig he took on in 2013 making lunch for a couple dozen employees of a low-profile commercial real estate firm.

“If you’re a chef your identity is always with your restaurant,” he says. “It’s programmed into you like, ‘Where do you work? Who do you know?’ It’s ride or die, and you devote your life to this pirate ship. For me it just got to be, ‘Fuck it. I don’t give a shit about that. I just wanna cook.’”

Amano’s new, relatively predictable, and shortened workday allowed him to research, travel,and write, even as his place of work grew into the often reviled developmentjuggernaut known as Sterling Bay. “It’s just been sort of this frog in boiling water,” says Amano, who now makes a family-style lunch for 100 each weekday in the company’s Fulton Market HQ, in a kitchen of his own design. “In nine years it’s just been me in the kitchen, and I rely on my own curiosity. That’s a great place to be for me. I’ve learned more here than anywhere else.”

“I do try to push them—and myself,” Amano says of his Sterling Bay colleagues.
Credit: Kevin Hartmann

He found fulfillment in introducing his captive, largely midwestern coworkers to foods they might not seek out on their own (Haitian pork griot with pikliz, Filipino adobo). “I do try to push them—and myself.” 

“I send out a menu every week so they know what’s coming down the pipe, and serve lunch at noon on the dot. It’s like ringing a dinner bell. I send an email out and it’s like this stampede of wildebeests coming down.”

Amano stayed on the payroll even when the office closed in the spring of 2020. “I just thought,‘They’re taking care of me. I need to contribute somehow.’” He started by sending out a daily recipe over companyemail (homemade granola, Crying Tiger, harissa). “‘Food is starting to suck because no one knows how to cook, so every day I’m gonna send you one new recipe.’ It was really received well and it was just a nice thing to look forward to, a little bit of light in an uncertain time.”

That summer Amano compiled most of them into a 238-page cookbook, Building Flavor, photographed and designed in-house, and distributed as a year-end gift for staff and associates. “It’s basic things, and then there are some more aggressive things I’ve made that people might not know of or care to explore unless it’s free and right in front of them.” (Like smoked tofu in red curry and beef kalbi.)

After Let’s Make Dumplings! published last summer, Becan and Amano agreed to take a break from graphic cookbooks, but he still had lots of ideas he wanted to pursue. Building Flavor was so well received internally, and the process of bringing it to life was so free of the financial and creative pressures inherent in mainstream publishing, that he wondered if the company would underwrite more outward-looking food-writing projects. To that end he pitched the brass on the idea of a biannual culinary travel journal.

“I love the experiences I’ve had writing cookbooks for Ten Speed Press, but what if I can kind of be a free agent and do this kind of stuff in the same way that I talk about how I’ve learned a lot here? There’s that same level of freedom to explore, without the pressure to sell stuff. And what creative person wants that pressure versus just creating?”

Last OctoberSterling Bay published the first issue of Bon Vivant: A Culinary Journal, focused on Amano’s obsession with wood-fire cooking. At 102 pages, lavishly documented by house photographer Kevin Hartmann and laid out by graphic designer Alexis Teichman, it’s a technique-heavy collection of recipes that features a piece on John Manion’s El Che Bar, as well as travel stories about hunting and cooking along the Provo River in Utah (johnnycakes, ember-braised pork guiso), and a visit with an old culinary school pal in Montana (elk and venison sausages, willow-skewered trout). There’s also a piece on cooking paella on the banks of the Chicago River along a flattened stretch of Sterling Bay’s Lincoln Yards development.

Issue two comes out Memorial Day and explores the food of the two Mexican states on the Baja Peninsula, with a focus on what and where to eat in Tijuana, Ensenada, Valle de Guadalupe, and Todos Santos. The 16 recipes (birria de res, fish tacos, ceviche, aguachile) also include a deep dive into tortilla making with Aaron Harris of Molino Tortilleria and Jonathan Zaragoza.

Until now Amano had been low-key about his day job, but unlike Building Flavor, Bon Vivant is available for anyone to buy online. He wants to get it into neighborhood stores on consignment too, “but that’s kind of a challenge ’cause it’s like, ‘I’m here from Sterling Bay and I want to sell this in your tiny shop.’”

What’s in it for the company? “Hugh’s contribution to the company goes well beyond his food,” according to CEO Andy Gloor, via text. “He’s always been a big part of Sterling Bay’s culture, expanding our perspective through a culinary lens, so when he pitched Bon Vivant to us it made perfect sense in a lot of ways, including as a great gift for employees and friends of the firm—many of whom Hugh has fed for the better part of the past decade.”

Amano wants Bon Vivant to be self-sustaining, if only to keep his patron on board for more. In future issues he wants to focus on the food of Toronto or Miami,regional barbecue, and a world survey of noodle-making, to name a few. “It’s just the spirit of giving a shit about things,” he says. “Doing things with your hands and doing things from the gut—and the thing that is super near and dear to me, which is understanding other cultures via food, which is the best way to do it.”

And it’s a way to keep learning on the company dime. “Anytime you write a book it’s like taking a college course.”

Read More

Drummer Makaya McCraven has always been a bit of a rabble-rouser. He mixes audio from his live gigs with studio overdubs in intricately layered tracks that feel like jazz approached with a DJ’s sensibility. Like McCraven’s 2020 Gil Scott-Heron tribute, We’re New Again (XL Recordings), last year’s Deciphering the Message remixes snippets from a source outside his band—this time the hefty catalog of Blue Note Records, one of the towering tastemakers of jazz, with a special focus on material by Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Blue Note also released Deciphering, making McCraven the first Chicagoan in more than a decade to sign to the legacy jazz label. The album follows in the footsteps of other sample-happy Blue Note experiments from the 1990s and 2000s (Madlib’s Shades of Blue, for example, or the label-released compilation The New Groove). For Deciphering the Message, McCraven selected Blue Note tracks and diced them up, shuffling them into new grooves often animated by terse supporting motifs. “Autumn in New York,” derived from guitarist Kenny Burrell’s version of the standard off Blue Lights (1958), trades balladic sweep for a skipping soliloquy based on a petite guitar motif, and McCraven’s take on Horace Silver’s “Ecaroh” builds a funky pyramid from the pianist’s chromatic hook. At his upcoming shows at Lincoln Hall, McCraven will riff on tracks from Deciphering as well as from his back catalog, accompanied by five of his seven compatriots from the album: bassist Junius Paul, saxophonists Greg Ward and De’Sean Jones, trumpeter Marquis Hill, and guitarist Matt Gold. Think of them as remixing the remixes—all live and always a surprise.

Makaya McCraven, Jeremy Cunningham & Dustin Laurenzi, Fri 5/27, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $25, $20 in advance, 18+

Makaya McCraven, Mxmrys, Sat 5/28, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $25, $20 in advance, 18+

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So there I am at my kitchen table, drinking my morning coffee and reading the latest column in the New York Times by Tom Friedman, who I disagree with more often than not.

I read pretty much every column by Friedman, Bret Stephens, David Brooks, and other writers with whom I disagree, on the outside chance that they might write something so enlightening that I proclaim, Eureka! I see the light.

It hasn’t happened yet—though I suppose that doesn’t mean it never will.

Anyway, this column is about Friedman’s recent lunch at the White House with President Biden. Their conversation was “off the record,” but the menu was not. 

So he reveals what he ate: “a tuna salad sandwich with tomato on whole wheat bread, with a bowl of mixed fruit and a chocolate milkshake for dessert that was so good it should have been against the law.”

But he conceals what Biden said. In short, the relevant stuff remains privileged information.

Sort of like a mayoral response to a FOIA request.

The column’s point is that Friedman is distressed by divisions in our country. Which, OK, so far so good.

But as soon as he starts enumerating examples of these divisions and explaining how a centrist like himself has no home in either party, I know what’s coming . . .

The dreaded false equivalency. As in this nugget . . .

“With every passing day, every mass shooting, every racist dog whistle, every defund-the-police initiative, every nation-sundering Supreme Court ruling, every speaker run off a campus, every bogus claim of election fraud, I wonder if he [Biden] can bring us back together.”

Centrists, please—think about what you’re saying.

You’re saying a mass shooting—in which a white man armed with a rifle gunned down random Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo—is the same as some douchebag right-winger getting cat calls at a college lecture hall.

You’re saying that “defund-the-police initiatives” are as dangerous as attempts to steal a presidential election, as Trump tried in 2020 and Republican legislators throughout the country are clearly trying to do in 2024?

You don’t really believe that—do you?

As for a “defund-the-police initiative,” it’s not an actual thing. It’s a figment of MAGA’s imagination, a tool MAGA uses to frighten centrists, like Friedman, into sullying the base of the Democratic Party so they can tell swing voters: a pox on both their houses.

Defund the police was a cry that erupted in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Then came the protests and the unrest of the summer of 2020, followed by the inevitable backlash. And pretty much every Democrat sprinted away from the defund concept.

In fact, Democrats seem to outdo Republicans in their attempt to rail about defunding the police.  Just look at the recent evidence here in Chicago.

For a relatively brief moment, Arne Duncan, former secretary of education, hinted he might run for mayor on a platform of shifting funds from policing so more money could go to intervention or mental health response teams. Mayor Lightfoot immediately pounced, blasting Duncan as a police defunder.

“People all over the city, neighborhood after neighborhood—they don’t want to defund our police department. They want our police department to be respectful and constitutional in the work that they do; but they want the police to protect them,” Lightfoot said in regards to Duncan.

Duncan decided not to run. And I’ve not heard one word about defunding the police from any citywide candidate ever since.

You know, it’s sad that the main Democratic takeaway from George Floyd’s murder seems to be stay away from “defund the police.”

Let me pause to point out the obvious. There is no moral equivalence between Democrats and Republicans at this point in time.

Even if you think that “defund the police” is an outrage, the number of elected officials in the Democratic Party who actually call for it are a tiny fraction of the party as a whole.

Whereas over 50 percent of Republicans say they believe President Biden stole an election that he actually won. And Republican legislators all over the country are feeding that paranoia by trying to pass election laws that would enable them to essentially turn the 2024 presidential election over to MAGA if they don’t like the outcome.

As the New York Times—Friedman’s newspaper—has reported.

In Illinois, not one Republican gubernatorial candidate has dared to refute Trump’s election lie. Not even Richard Irvin, the so-called moderate in the primary.

They’re all beholden to Trump in one way or another. Either they agree with him or they’re too frightened of a voter backlash to admit they don’t. 

Meanwhile, back in Chicago, a city supposedly run by “radical leftists,” if you believe MAGA propaganda . . .

A City Council committee met last week to consider Mayor Lightfoot’s proposal to lower the curfew for minors. 

Many alderpersons—even conservative ones—predicted a lowered curfew would not cut back on violence. They noted the city was barely enforcing curfew laws already on the books. They predicted new laws would be selectively enforced, with Black teenagers getting the brunt of arrests. And so on . . .

And yet it overwhelmingly passed. It hasn’t come before the full council yet. But I predict it will eventually be passed. Why? Because it’s like railing against defunding the police. No elected official wants to look soft on crime, even in so-called lefty Chicago.

So comparing fictitious police defunders to very real democracy deniers is a form of gaslighting. It’s not real and yet we’re led to believe it. All part of an effort to win over swing voters by saying extremists on both sides are bad. 

Even though one is clearly far worse than the other.

Funny thing is—this strategy won’t work. No matter how many times centrist Dems denounce “defund the police,” MAGA will accuse them of pushing for it.

And the gaslighting of America continues.

The Latest from the Ben Joravsky Show

Read More

Nobody gets rich writing cookbooks, but I’ve always assumed that Hugh Amano wrote his way off the dole.

Amano is best known as the opening sous chef at Fat Rice who, after leaving the restaurant in its first year, cowrote the acclaimed The Adventures of Fat Rice, followed by two outstanding comic cookbook collaborations with artist Sarah Becan: Let’s Make Ramen! and Let’s Make Dumplings! I’ve covered each of these books in their time, but I first wrote about Amano long ago during the Great Recession when he launched Food on the Dole, an achingly personal blog about life as an unemployed chef (with an English degree) whose survival schemes predated the pandemic pivots I’ve reported on in recent times.

I know better, but I still cheered up at the fantasy that it was possible for mass-market publishing to lift an overworked chef off the line. Turns out, the only way Amano could’ve written any of those books was because of the nine-to-five gig he took on in 2013 making lunch for a couple dozen employees of a low-profile commercial real estate firm.

“If you’re a chef your identity is always with your restaurant,” he says. “It’s programmed into you like, ‘Where do you work? Who do you know?’ It’s ride or die, and you devote your life to this pirate ship. For me it just got to be, ‘Fuck it. I don’t give a shit about that. I just wanna cook.’”

Amano’s new, relatively predictable, and shortened workday allowed him to research, travel,and write, even as his place of work grew into the often reviled developmentjuggernaut known as Sterling Bay. “It’s just been sort of this frog in boiling water,” says Amano, who now makes a family-style lunch for 100 each weekday in the company’s Fulton Market HQ, in a kitchen of his own design. “In nine years it’s just been me in the kitchen, and I rely on my own curiosity. That’s a great place to be for me. I’ve learned more here than anywhere else.”

“I do try to push them—and myself,” Amano says of his Sterling Bay colleagues.
Credit: Kevin Hartmann

He found fulfillment in introducing his captive, largely midwestern coworkers to foods they might not seek out on their own (Haitian pork griot with pikliz, Filipino adobo). “I do try to push them—and myself.” 

“I send out a menu every week so they know what’s coming down the pipe, and serve lunch at noon on the dot. It’s like ringing a dinner bell. I send an email out and it’s like this stampede of wildebeests coming down.”

Amano stayed on the payroll even when the office closed in the spring of 2020. “I just thought,‘They’re taking care of me. I need to contribute somehow.’” He started by sending out a daily recipe over companyemail (homemade granola, Crying Tiger, harissa). “‘Food is starting to suck because no one knows how to cook, so every day I’m gonna send you one new recipe.’ It was really received well and it was just a nice thing to look forward to, a little bit of light in an uncertain time.”

That summer Amano compiled most of them into a 238-page cookbook, Building Flavor, photographed and designed in-house, and distributed as a year-end gift for staff and associates. “It’s basic things, and then there are some more aggressive things I’ve made that people might not know of or care to explore unless it’s free and right in front of them.” (Like smoked tofu in red curry and beef kalbi.)

After Let’s Make Dumplings! published last summer, Becan and Amano agreed to take a break from graphic cookbooks, but he still had lots of ideas he wanted to pursue. Building Flavor was so well received internally, and the process of bringing it to life was so free of the financial and creative pressures inherent in mainstream publishing, that he wondered if the company would underwrite more outward-looking food-writing projects. To that end he pitched the brass on the idea of a biannual culinary travel journal.

“I love the experiences I’ve had writing cookbooks for Ten Speed Press, but what if I can kind of be a free agent and do this kind of stuff in the same way that I talk about how I’ve learned a lot here? There’s that same level of freedom to explore, without the pressure to sell stuff. And what creative person wants that pressure versus just creating?”

Last OctoberSterling Bay published the first issue of Bon Vivant: A Culinary Journal, focused on Amano’s obsession with wood-fire cooking. At 102 pages, lavishly documented by house photographer Kevin Hartmann and laid out by graphic designer Alexis Teichman, it’s a technique-heavy collection of recipes that features a piece on John Manion’s El Che Bar, as well as travel stories about hunting and cooking along the Provo River in Utah (johnnycakes, ember-braised pork guiso), and a visit with an old culinary school pal in Montana (elk and venison sausages, willow-skewered trout). There’s also a piece on cooking paella on the banks of the Chicago River along a flattened stretch of Sterling Bay’s Lincoln Yards development.

Issue two comes out Memorial Day and explores the food of the two Mexican states on the Baja Peninsula, with a focus on what and where to eat in Tijuana, Ensenada, Valle de Guadalupe, and Todos Santos. The 16 recipes (birria de res, fish tacos, ceviche, aguachile) also include a deep dive into tortilla making with Aaron Harris of Molino Tortilleria and Jonathan Zaragoza.

Until now Amano had been low-key about his day job, but unlike Building Flavor, Bon Vivant is available for anyone to buy online. He wants to get it into neighborhood stores on consignment too, “but that’s kind of a challenge ’cause it’s like, ‘I’m here from Sterling Bay and I want to sell this in your tiny shop.’”

What’s in it for the company? “Hugh’s contribution to the company goes well beyond his food,” according to CEO Andy Gloor, via text. “He’s always been a big part of Sterling Bay’s culture, expanding our perspective through a culinary lens, so when he pitched Bon Vivant to us it made perfect sense in a lot of ways, including as a great gift for employees and friends of the firm—many of whom Hugh has fed for the better part of the past decade.”

Amano wants Bon Vivant to be self-sustaining, if only to keep his patron on board for more. In future issues he wants to focus on the food of Toronto or Miami,regional barbecue, and a world survey of noodle-making, to name a few. “It’s just the spirit of giving a shit about things,” he says. “Doing things with your hands and doing things from the gut—and the thing that is super near and dear to me, which is understanding other cultures via food, which is the best way to do it.”

And it’s a way to keep learning on the company dime. “Anytime you write a book it’s like taking a college course.”

Read More

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In October 1982, members of seven LGBTQ+ concert and marching bands from across the U.S. met in Chicago and formed the Lesbian and Gay Band Association. Though the LGBA changed its name to the Pride Bands Alliance in 2021, it still provides “an international network of LGBTQ+ and affirming bands in all stages of development” and stimulates “public interest in the unique art form of community bands in our culture.” The Pride Bands Alliance holds its annual conference here this week, and the festivities culminate with a 40th-anniversary celebration called Sweet Home Chicago on Sunday, May 29, at 7 PM in the Auditorium Theatre. Presented by Lakeside Pride Music Ensembles and hosted by drag stars Denali Foxx and Angeria Paris VanMicheals, the event features music by a dozen composers, including world premieres of new works by Christen Taylor Holmes and Evan Williams; roughly 250 musicians in two full-size symphonic bands will split the program. Tickets are available at sweethomechicago2022.org.

Experimental Sound Studio has announced changes to its acclaimed performance series Option. Longtime bookers Ken Vandermark and Andrew Clinkman will welcome a third curator, cellist Tomeka Reid, for this year’s run—which will also shift to a monthly schedule from a weekly one. The 2022 season starts Sunday, May 29, with a concert in the ESS garden (5925 N. Ravenswood) by Evicshen, aka Bay Area sound artist and instrument maker Victoria Shen. This year’s subsequent Option performers will include Damon Locks, Christof Kurzmann, Mankwe Ndosi, and Endris Hassan.

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