Django at 108; or That Toddlin' Town

I couldn't help but notice Tuesday is the birthday anniversary of Django Reinhardt, the celebrated master of "gypsy jazz" who was one of the first guitar players to use the stringed instrument as the lead for his music, rather than just strumming chord patterns in the background for rhythm.

Reinhardt, of course, is long departed from our realm of existence, dying of a stroke in 1953 at age 43. If he were still with us, he'd be 108 now. And yes, the centennial of his birth was celebrated with, amongst other places, a tribute concert eight years ago at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park.

YES, I'LL ADMIT that while I enjoy listening to recordings of Reinhardt and his guitar playing (which I can't even come close to matching myself), I'm writing this copy in part to give myself a break for the day. Regular commentary will return Wednesday. I'm sure Donald Trump (or Bruce Rauner) will have said something stupid by then.

But I'll leave you with a couple of recordings to sample his work -- one of which is his take on that classic tune of our city, the one that boasts of us as "that toddlin' town" (and which I always prefer to that other Chicago tune that was the theme song from the Frank Sinatra film Robin and the Seven Hoods). Along with an actual video snippet of Reinhardt playing "live."

I hope you can enjoy his playing similar to how I do.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: For those of you who can't comprehend the existence of anything prior to 1980, there was that Woody Allen-directed film from 1999, "Sweet and Lowdown," starring Sean Penn as Emmett Ray, a guitar player who billed himself as the "Second-greatest" guitarist in the world, right behind Django. Personally, I still get a kick out of the Penn character's reaction upon actually meeting Reinhardt himself.

Obama Day in Illinois is bound to become a politically partisan fracas

Beginning next year, we in Illinois are going to have the concept of Obama Day.

Some will sing 'Happy Birthday,' others will boo

Everybody duck! Take cover!!! You just know the very notion is going to get some people amongst us all riled up.

PARTICULARLY SINCE IN this Age of Trump, we’re supposed to be repudiating everything that our nation’s 44^th president ever stood for. So how dare anybody think that Barack Obama’s memory is in any way worth veneration?

Yes people, my foot is leaning extra heavy on the gas pedal of the sarcasm engine in writing that last sentence. Although I don’t doubt there are individuals who are going to be grossly offended Illinois really took such action.

Personally, I feel having Illinois acknowledge publicly one of the few presidential figures who had ties to this state isn’t that inappropriate. It’s probably the least the state can do (and yes, Illinois is usually capable of doing its least on any issue).

But there are those who want history rewritten in such a way that the Obama memory becomes one of great shame that our nation was ever deluded enough to choose “one of THEM” to be president.

THESE ARE THE same people who want to believe that the man who got 46 percent of the vote in last year’s presidential election really won by a majority! Because they want to believe people who had no business voting were amongst those who voted for Anybody But Trump!

Although one can also make the legitimate argument that Obama’s legacy is heavily tied to his inability to overcome the political hostility he faced during his eight years in office. More bluntly, he was too weak to overcome the bigots of our society.

Who are now going to get all worked up over the fact that Gov. Bruce Rauner signed off on the measure that turns Aug. 4 (Obama’s birthday anniversary) into the aforementioned Obama Day.

Will Rauner face backlash for backing Obama Day?

The bill specifically says that Obama Day is not one of the official holidays for which state government closes. It’s purely ceremonial.

YET THAT WILL be enough to bother the ideologues who went through the 2008 and 2012 election cycles desperately determined to spare this country the humiliation of a non-Anglo working in the Oval Office.

It didn’t matter that with his Ivy League education (Columbia and Harvard Law), his credentials were remarkably similar to many of the other white men who have served as president. He still wasn’t good enough.

In fact, I suspect much of the hostility that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., faces these days for refusing to support the efforts to blindly dump the health care reform measures implemented by the Obama administration is more frustration that McCain lost that 2008 presidential campaign.

The bitterness remains. Just run through the anonymous rants appearing Sunday on various newspaper versions of the Obama Day story. One implied Illinois should honor a “REAL president from Illinois … The Gipper” (even though it could be argued his preferred Ronald Reagan abandoned Illinois after finishing college).

WHILE ANOTHER LAMBASTED Obama for “setting race relations back 300 years … demonized law enforcement and wrecked healthcare.” And a third mocked that such a day should only be “commemorated in Kenyan mosques.”

One person's tribute is another's offense

The ideologue nonsense is firmly entrenched in some people, and they’re going to be determined to go through lives snapping at anything and everything that challenges their narrow view. A part of me wonders if the way to truly “Make America Great Again” would be to take away the vote from all the nitwits who wear those caps? An idea that makes as much sense as what some of those people try to pass off as “the American Way.”

A part of me wonders if Rauner is going to get backlash. Such a gesture was probably meant to appease the majority of the people of this state who view the situation rationally. Yet it is many of those irrationals who could be called upon to vote for his re-election bid in 2018.

Personally, I think their hostility toward Obama, even now that the man’s time as a public official of any kind has come to an end, really says more about their own pettiness and ignorance than it does about anything Obama did or did not accomplish.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Yes, I signed the digital birthday card last week for Barack Obama meant to mark his 56th birthday anniversary on Friday. No, I didn't make a contribution to the Democratic Party, which was the real point of the party seeking to honor Obama's memory. And yes, I'm probably a cheapskate!

My day of mourning? I miss my mom!

Thursday is an odd day for me – it would have been a 72^nd birthday for my mother, Jenny; if she were still with us.

 

My mother, as she'd want to be remembered

For my mother, who at the end of her life suffered from diabetes and other ailments, didn’t make it past 66. This is the sixth year that I don’t have to worry about getting her a gift or trying to plan some sort of birthday outing that she’d be able to enjoy.

WHICH WASN’T ALWAYS so easy, since at the end her ability to move about freely was limited. There was just so much she could no longer do.

As it is, I find myself remembering that last birthday celebration in which my late brother, Christopher, and I had her with us.

She was always a big fan of seafood, although any time we tried taking her to nicer restaurants she invariably found something about the experience to dislike. In some cases, the food was just so rich and heavy that she couldn’t keep it down.

That last birthday, she literally insisted on my brother and I taking her to a Red Lobster restaurant – figuring she could handle that experience. And actually, she wound up having a good time.

IT DOES GIVE me some relief to know that my brother and I gave our mother one final birthday experience. Although I wonder what she would have thought of the memorial service we held for her one year later.

For although she died just prior to the Thanksgiving Day holiday in 2010 (the last bit of conversation I heard from her was literally an accounting of all the shopping she had to do in coming days to be able to prepare a holiday meal), we wound up gathering on what would have been Birthday number 67 to pay tribute to her memory.

And now, as the years pass, we’re at what would have been Birthday 72. I find myself wishing I could actually endure the experience of taking her to a Red Lobster again just so I could have a few more minutes of time with her.

But, of course, that will not happen. We all will come and go without any sense of exactly how long we will exist on this planet. It was a lesson that was pounded into my brain during my early days as a reporter-type person as I watched many people senselessly killed.

AND I’M FINDING it reinforced even further with the loss last year of my brother, who when I was going through his belongings in recent weeks to decide what to keep and what to throw away I wound up stumbling onto the belongings that he managed to keep from our mother.

As I write this commentary, I’m fiddling with a watch that he kept solely because it belonged to my mother. It really doesn’t work any longer, and common sense says I ought to dump it.

Although I find I just can’t bring myself to do so – even though it means I’m likely accumulating even more junk that someone is going to have to weed through when that day comes (perhaps many years from now, who knows when?) when I die.

But for now, I’m spending a day Thursday in remembrance of my mother, the woman who in many ways sacrificed so many potential opportunities for herself out of a hope that my brother and I would benefit.

I SHOULD ACKNOWLEDGE one fact that my mother always took pride in; she had a fraternal twin brother. As in my Uncle Johnny.

Which means he’d also be turning 72 on Thursday and be worthy of a “Feliz Cumpleanos” greeting, if not for the fact he passed away some 14 years ago.

I’ll admit to finding some peace in the thought that the two of their souls are probably together, watching out for, and getting on each other’s nerves as they did in life – but coming to each other’s defense if they sensed any outsider was a threat to either.

Meanwhile, I go about my daily routine after wishing both of their spirits a Happy Birthday.

  -30-

What to get Obama for his birthday? He wants cash, as in campaign contributions

By the time you read this, Barack Obama will have slipped into and out of Chicago.

He celebrates the big 5-oh on Thursday, officially having been alive for half a century. But the public portion of his birthday celebration was done last night at the Aragon Ballroom.

IT WAS A concert. Obama himself returned to his home city to make an appearance at the concert – which featured such Chicago-native talent as Jennifer Hudson and Herbie Hancock.

Yet before anyone gets the impression that Obama is a man of the people who likes to party hearty, keep in mind that this was a political event just as much as any other he would have attended.

For the tickets to get into the Wednesday night fundraisers went from anywhere from $50 each to $35,800.

People who paid the top price were provided with some food and also likely had some direct access to the president himself. People who paid a little less probably can say they were in the same room with Obama, and saw him in the flesh – but didn’t get any chat time with the Leader of the Free World.

AND IF YOU were cheap enough to shell out merely $50, it means you can say you were in the same building as the president – but you didn’t get anywhere near to him.

Which means you might as well have been one of the masses around the country who took part in what were called “grassroots meetings” that allowed people the chance to pretend they were celebrating the anniversary of the date on which Ann Dunham in Honolulu gave birth to a son by her collegiate boyfriend (Does anyone still seriously believe that’s not true?).

If it sounds like I’m mocking the Aragon event and the smaller meetings, well actually I am.



Former Gov. Jim Edgar's 50th birthday/fundraiser in 1996 gave us a Marilyn Monroe-moment (actually, former state Budget Director Joan Walters). Barack Obama had to settle for a birthday song from Jennifer Hudson (albeit, the real thing, not an impersonator). Photograph provided by Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.



Somewhere in my collection of tacky junk I have accumulated from political people throughout the years is a birthday party “invitation” from then-Gov. Jim Edgar.

THIS CARD WAS issued to announce a very similar event – a reception held at the Illinois State Fairgrounds meant to celebrate Edgar’s 50^th birthday (he turned 65 two weeks ago). I kept the card because of the photograph on the front – an old childhood picture of Edgar, wearing pajamas with the name “Jimmy” printed all over them.

Yet when one looked closely at the card, it was merely an invitation to a political fundraiser. Pay some money, and you can be “included” in the Edgar birthday festivities.

Which was a similar situation to what took place Wednesday night in Chicago for Obama -- although I'm sure the passage of time and inflation and scale of elective office means that Obama was shooting for much more cash than anything Edgar ever hoped to raise that night some 15 years ago.

Barack endured the company of all those people Wednesday night out of a professional obligation. He was raising the money that will help him get re-elected president in next year’s election cycle, and also will help others raise money so that they can get re-elected as well.

IF ANYTHING, THE latter function might be more important. Obama needs allies in government if he’s to be able to accomplish much of anything (I’d say he needs friends, but a political “friend” is really something cheap and worthless – even more-so than a Facebook “friend”).

Political allies come at a price. What did Obama do to help them get elected? Help with finances usually is a good start.

That is what Wednesday night was truly about. It certainly wasn’t about any legitimate birthday celebration – which I would guess Obama will do in the comfort of the White House on Thursday (although I understand there was also an after-concert dinner for up to 100 Obama backers, which also had its political motivations).

Which is why I was somewhat amused to see that the Republican National Committee felt the need to publicly criticize Obama for partaking in a birthday celebration event in Chicago.

“I SUPPOSE THE White House is thinking (Obama) should stick to the part of his job he really likes,” was what came from the lips of a GOP spokeswoman.

The last I knew, fundraising was a legitimate (and essential) part of any elected official’s job, which makes the spokesman’s statement sound like sour grapes that she wasn’t invited to the birthday celebration event.

I only wish these could be billed purely as fundraisers, instead of pretending there was a human touch to the events, such as those people who will now claim that the Aragon Ballroom’s “history” includes a presidential birthday concert.

Actually, I can’t help but think there could be one sure-fire way to raise money with minimal effort off of an Obama birthday tie.

I COULDN’T  HELP but notice a week ago when I shopped for a birthday card for my father the large number of holiday cards that depict Obama, usually offering up some pseudo-holiday greeting.

I’m sure the people using those Obama images are coming up with stock photos or generic drawings for which they don’t have to pay the president a dime. Just think, however, of how much revenue could be generated if every single purchase of such a card kicked in a dime to the campaign coffers?

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