The Secret Life of Groceries: a book review

On a whim I picked up Benjamin Lorr’s investigative journalism book, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket, and walked away with a newfound respect for the people who allow us the modern miracle (dark as it may be) of having almost unlimited food options in every grocery store in the western world. We forget that the grocery store as we know it is a fairly new invention, coming into being last century and used as propaganda to bolster support for capitalism. That food is as inexpensive and as abundant as it is, is indeed a miracle when considering the course of human history.

But oh, the price we pay for such convenience and abundance. Lorr doesn’t resort to preachiness, pointing an accusatory finger at greedy Americans. In fact, he willfully acknowledges all the benefits of today’s grocery stores, while highlighting many of the downsides of the grocery industry, particularly as it pertains to the challenging lifestyles of many of the people who devote their careers to meeting consumer demands. Lorr spends significant time with the people who make it all possible: the founder of Trader Joe’s (Joe Coulombe), a Whole Foods employee manning the seafood counter, a female long-haul trucker, an entrepreneur trying to get a new condiment onto grocery store shelves, a man who’s spent years on a shrimping boat. Lorr shines a light on the people we take for granted, and does so in a caring, meaningful way. Hearing directly from his subjects as they share stories about their often-difficult lives, I felt not only sympathy for them, but gratitude that they make my comfortable life possible.

Surprisingly, The Secret Life of Groceries isn’t a call to action in the obvious sense. Lorr doesn’t end the book with “five things American consumers should be doing to make the world a better place.” He actually does the opposite, offering little more than a shoulder shrug at our current plight, conceding that there is virtually nothing consumers can do in their purchasing habits to change the system. Rather, “any solution will have to come from outside our food system, so far outside it that thinking about food is only a distraction from the real work to be done. At best, food is an opening, like any maw, that might lead us inside.”

What about buying organically certified foods? Or products produced from cage-free chickens? Or going vegan? Of this, Lorr writes that seals and certifications “promise us that moments of individual action can create a type of change that in reality only institutional forces like labor laws, unions, and trade deals can begin to approach. They allow us to purchase our ideals from others without ever having to enact them on our own.”

Perhaps not the message readers would like to hear, but also kind of refreshing. It’s not going to stop me from buying 100% recycled paper or using canvas bags, but I get it: my actions aren’t solving the problem; they’re making me feel good. Lorr concludes, “…we have got the food system we deserve. The adage is all wrong: it’s not that we are what we eat, it’s that we eat the way we are.”

If for no other reason than to get a better understanding of all that’s involved in the global industrial food complex, I highly recommend this book.

Jeanne Dielman: a Film Review

You may have recently heard about the 1975 movie Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Bruxelles, as it was declared the greatest film of all-time by the esteemed British film magazine Sight and Sound, a slot formerly held by Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo and the 1941 Orson Welles film Citizen Kane. Jeanne Dielman may be unfamiliar to many movie lovers, as it was for me, and despite it running over 200 minutes, I felt compelled to give it a viewing last week (it’s currently streaming on HBO Max and Prime). It was directed by the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman who died by her own hand in 2015 at age 65, but not before dedicating her life to portraying women’s lives through dozens of feature films, short films and documentaries. And indeed, Jeanne Dielman, which Akerman directed at age 25, is astounding if for no other reason that it’s almost exclusively about a woman (played by Delphine Seyrig) doing household chores, not the stuff of most cinema, especially in 1975. The movie is almost universally praised by critics and has even garnered an audience approval rating of 82% on Rotten Tomatoes. Not too shabby for a long film with little plot.

But if I’m being honest, I found the film to be a slog. I know, it’s supposed to be a slog, as it depicts a widowed housewife whose days are spent doing menial tasks such as peeling potatoes, running errands, dusting chotchkies and preparing meals for her teenage son, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the slog is worth it.

According to some of the contemporaneous and modern reviews I’ve read, the film is meant to portray the oppressive nature of women’s existence, which boils down to serving men, whether they’re husbands, sons, bosses and – in Jeanne Dielman’s case – clients who pay to have sex with her, a different man visiting her apartment each afternoon. And look, if the film is meant to capture three days in the life of one particular woman who’s clearly suffering from depression, then okay. I can buy the premise and its conclusion, but that doesn’t mean I particularly like it, that I wasn’t bored when the main character peeled potatoes for not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven, but for eight minutes, or that I’ll ever watch it again, but okay. The film is completely unique. The subject matter is completely unique. And the artistry of the framing and motionless camera cannot be denied.  

But the problem for me is that others claim that the movie has a more general insight about women’s plight everywhere, and for me that’s where the film falls short, as if Akerman supposed that because she was depressed and alone that women everywhere must also be. Akerman is said to have based the film on the post-World War II generation of women that she observed in her younger life. If that’s truly the case, then I not only stand corrected, but I’m truly sorry, because Akerman must have been surrounded by a bunch of sad sacks. But I honestly don’t buy it.  Yes, many women over the decades have been completely justified in their dissatisfaction with living life as homemakers, but that doesn’t mean they lived like robots, absent of all feelings, sleepwalking through life.

The character Jeanne Dielman is a joyless, expressionless, friendless dud. A complete and utter pill. She shows no joy toward her son. No joy toward an acquaintance she runs into while running errands. No joy in music. No joy in receiving a letter from her sister in Canada (indeed, she reads it aloud with the same intonation one would use to read a cookbook recipe). No joy toward a neighbor’s baby, whom she watches for five minutes each day (this, to me, was the most revealing. How can you look at a baby and not smile and engage?). She admits to not having loved her husband who died six years ago, marrying him mainly to leave her parent’s home. And she apparently has made no friends over the years, which is odd. She is alone, lonely and depressed. Oh, and instead of getting a job where she could earn some money and be part of society, she chooses to prostitute herself (I have a hard time imagining how she found her clients, given how socially inept she appears to be. How exactly did the word get out? And how do men find satisfaction in what is — in essence — screwing a mannequin?).  

And this is meant to portray women’s experience everywhere? I don’t think so. The only things that ring universally true are the necessity to get married in order to leave home and to be in charge of housework by default. I get that. In the 1960s, my mother had aspirations of being a doctor, but coming from a modest family at a time when women “didn’t become doctors,” that dream was denied her. She married my father after a very brief courtship. At that time that was what women did. Either that, or they were stuck living in their parents’ homes, life suspended without the aid of a man. And I know she wasn’t entirely satisfied with being a mom and with running a household. But neither was she joyless. She still had some agency in her life, some control of her aspirations and how she viewed the world. She still played. She got together with friends. She dated after my parents split. She worked at a place of legitimate employment. Despite the similarities of their plights, my mother bears almost no resemblance to Jeanne Dielman.

In the film, the main character’s son says almost nothing throughout and offers not a finger of assistance to help his mother. In an episode of the wonderful podcast Filmspotting the hosts — both of whom love the movie— admonish the son and how unhelpful and ungrateful he is. What they fail to highlight is how uninterested Jeanne is in her son. In a revealing scene at the end of the film’s second day, Dielman’s son finally opens up to her, practically begging her to sit down and have an actual conversation. Instead, she’s impatient and dismissive, offering a quip and telling her son to go to sleep. You can chastise the son all you want, but if Dielman’s current disposition is any indication, her fatherless son has never actually been loved, merely tolerated. No wonder he shows no love for his mother and no propensity to help her with tasks.

The parent-child relationship in Jeanne Dielman reminds me of the parents in the film Revolutionary Road played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, who view their kids at best as a nuisance and at worst as obstacles to their true ambitions. I liked that film quite a lot, but I reject the notion that somehow it represents American suburbia in the 1960s. Yes, it beautifully portrays the isolation and dissatisfaction associated with being a suburban mother lacking in agency. But the mother also failed to see the beauty right in front of her.

So no, I didn’t particularly like Jeanne Dielman, and like many highly-praised films, I fear that many people claim to love it mostly because they’ve been told to. For me, give me Rear Window or Goodfellas or Beginners or Eternal Sunshine or loads of other films any day of the week. I will not be watching Dielman again.

The film TÁR

The best sermons are ones that leave you with something to chew on, something to apply to your life or someone else’s life, to ponder, to wrestle with.  Something more than just a trifle to forget as soon as it ends.  The same applies to film.  And while I may not rush out to watch Todd Field’s TÁR a second time, I can’t stop thinking about it.  And really, what more could you ask of a work of art?

Cate Blanchett inhabits roles like few others, and her portrayal of conductor, composer and author Lydia Tár is no exception, a mesmerizing tour de force, as she employs not only her prodigious acting talents, but also skills she acquired for the role: conducting, piano playing, and speaking German.  Honestly, it’s ridiculous.  As Vogue writer Taylor Antrim concluded in his review of the film, “Just give her the Oscar.”  I couldn’t agree more. 

The film dives deeply into the world of music, and it helps to have some knowledge of the language of music when watching Tár.  My non-musical wife may have enjoyed the journey, but not as much as I did, and I probably didn’t enjoy it as much as my classical musician friends will, all of whom I immediately texted when I finished watching the movie.  It’s not often that the world of classical music is portrayed on film so thoughtfully and thoroughly, and I think they’ll get to experience Tár on an even deeper level than I did.

But at its core, the world of classical performing is like any other business: there is politics, jockeying for position, mind games, personality conflicts, concerns about marketing and money, and wrestling with loyalty, legacy, family, power and control – and it’s these universal qualities that allow the film to be appreciated no matter what expertise you may or may not bring to the table.  That is, as long as you can handle a running time of 158 minute.

But time in film can stretch and contract just like tempo in music can ritard or accelerate (much like Tár describes in the opening scene of the film when she’s interviewed at a public gathering). What’s amazing is how much time Field spends on the slow build of Tár’s journey, as we learn about her musical expertise, her celebrity, her home life with wife Sharon and adopted daughter Petra, her struggles to tune out extraneous sounds that hamper with the more important tasks at hand… and how little time is spent on the earth-shattering changes that occur within the last half an hour of the film.

This is where Field’s expertise really shines, as he tells us just enough to draw our own conclusions, but not so much that he hits us over the head with an unambivalent outcome (the way, say, Everything Everywhere All at Once did last spring, somewhat marring an otherwise excellent movie).  Other deftly-written scenes lack ambiguity but are amazingly efficient at telling us what we need to know with very little.  I won’t spoil anything, but there are two brief scenes – one in a PR firm’s office, and one in Lydia’s childhood home – that both last no more than 30 seconds and illuminate so much about her life without getting bogged down in the details.  Honestly, Field could have made another film – Tár 2, if you will – expanding the last twenty minutes into a 2-hour feature film.  There certainly would have been enough intrigue to coax me back into the theater (and this film must be seen in a theater if you have the opportunity).  Instead, he speeds up the last half an hour of the film, just as composer might for a symphony’s climax. 

As it is, the film leaves me with questions, something I appreciate in a good movie. Why does Tár throw out a book she receives as a gift, a book adorned by an artistic pattern similar to one on a metronome in her home and to one her daughter makes with clay?  I don’t know.  I suspect there’s something I missed.  Is the scream Tár heard in a park really happening or is it in her head?  What exactly is she guilty of, and were the consequences of her actions just or unjust?

I don’t know.  But I can’t wait to ask my friends about it after they see the movie.

Just like a good sermon.

12 Months of Live Music

When things started opening back up in 2021 after fifteen months of living in a cocoon, I was chomping at the bit. I purchased concert tickets left and right, many from bands that probably wouldn’t have made the cut in 2019, but in my newfound freedom seemed like necessary luxuries. Twelve months later, I look back on a year’s worth of live music. It was a great run. All but two of the acts I had never even seen before. You can read below for details, but Joseph and Sammy Rae & Friends win my two best shows of the year. The War on Drugs earns my worst. Nearly everyone else gets high marks.

September 18, 2021.  Black Pumas, preceded on different stages by Poi Dog Pondering, Moon City Masters and Sheila E.  Sheila E. proved to me that she kicks ass even in her 60s, putting the rest of us aging schlubs to shame.  I was unhappy that I had to leave the end of her show to ensure my attendance at the beginning of the Black Pumas concert, though they were terrific too, easily one of my three favorite bands of the past half a decade.  Sadly, they’ve cancelled shows for the latter half of 2022, leading to questions about the long-term health of the band.  Hopefully they’ll release more music soon.

November 13, 2021.  The Fixx, preceded by Fastball (the acoustic duo version of the group).  The Fixx was fantastic, one of two bands I had seen prior to 2021.  They are in my mind one of the most underrated bands of the 80s and 90s, achieving a level of musicianship and lyrical content that surpasses most of their contemporary and more-popular brethren.  Fabulous.

November 21, 2021. Sammy Rae & The Friends.  I’ve written about this band before, but they are ridiculous.  Sammy Rae’s voice is out of this world, and she really sings, eschewing the vocal shouting that appeals to the masses on shows like American Idol and The Voice.  As gifted and as ebullient a performer as you’ll ever see grace the stage.  One of my top two concerts of the past year.

January, 2022.  Pinegrove.  Postponed due to COVID.  Stay tuned.

January, 2022.  St. Paul & the Broken Bones.  Postponed due to COVID.  I eventually got my money back, but fortunately got to see the band in August at the Sacred Rose Festival.  Stay tuned.

January 15, 2022.  Nate Bargatze.  Not a musician, but a fabulous comedian who manages to be hilarious without resorting to the low hanging fruit of vulgarity and profanity.  Not that I’m a prude, but comedians like Jo Koy assault the audience with F-bomb after F-bomb, and it becomes tiresome.  Bargatze takes another path.

February 27, 2022.  Ralph Covert.  Formerly of acts like The Bad Examples and Ralph’s World, this local Chicago musician played for 2 hours and 45 minutes!  I shit you not.  Playing as a trio for most of the night, Ralph told stories and played selections from throughout his career.  Terrific.

March 27, 2022.  Bright Eyes, preceded by Christian Lee Hutson.  I took a chance on this one.  I only know that band’s final two albums and really dig them, but my dabbling into their earlier efforts has left me mostly unimpressed.  Fortunately, the band brought it with a crazy number of musicians on stage, including at times a mini choir and orchestra.  Led by Colin Oberst, the band clearly has its fanatics, as illustrated by the woman behind me who sang every lyric to every song…loudly.  Admittedly, I was kind of annoyed, but also impressed!  And I didn’t feel that I – a minor fan at best – could possibly bitch to someone who was clearly more passionate than I was.  Great show.

April, 2022.  Spoon.  Cancelled by me due to double-booking.  Damn.  This one hurts a little, as I rank their latest album among the best of 2022, and it looks to have been a great show.

May 4, 2022.  Aimee Mann.  Postponed due to COVID.  To date, this hasn’t been rescheduled.  I haven’t seen Mann perform since Til Tuesday opened up for Tom Petty in 1985!

May 5, 2022.  Steve Hackett.  Performing a short set of solo stuff followed by the entire Seconds Out Genesis album, this was a kick to see live, especially with my son.  Such a high level of musicianship, and I finally got to see Supper’s Ready live!

June 25, 2022.  Again with my son, this was the first time I saw Billy Joel since 1990, and he really surpassed my expectations.  Sure, he played it extremely safe with the setlist, but damn, I can’t argue with the quality of the tunes, and I was impressed with Joel’s vocal ability at such an advanced age.  He seems very at ease in the elder statesman role, probably happy to be alive and still performing for appreciative fans.

July 15, 2022.  Adrian Belew.  I kind of went to this one on a lark, unsure if it was worth the hassle.  It was.  The show cost all of $35, and it was sparsely attended, so my friend and I could stretch out in relative isolation during a high-COVID time.  Belew was fantastic, playing the guitar as no other with an unbelievable bassist and drummer to fill out the trio.  The music is weird and not always in my wheelhouse, but he was fun to see live, and I’m thankful he performed “Three of a Perfect Pair,” a favorite of mine.

July 26, 2022.  Pinegrove.  My daughter turned me onto this band, and while I enjoy their output, I can’t exactly name a song by them.  But this was one of those tickets I purchased way back in the fall of 2021, figuring, “What the hell. Take a chance.”  Playing twenty-two songs almost uninterrupted, the band was tight, offering a multitude of changes of tempo and feel, with odd-metered output and crunchy guitar making this a feast for the ears.  I was glad to have the plugs handy!     

August 26, 2022.  St. Paul & the Broken Bones, preceded on different stages by Sierra Hull, White Demim, City and Colour, Punch Brothers, and afterward a half an hour of The War on Drugs.  A stellar opening day of the Sacred Rose Festival in Chicago, I was greeted with a variety of acts, all really good except The War on Drugs, who I found to be ponderous and overly sincere with songs lacking hooks.  Oh well.  St. Paul & the Broken Bones, on the other hand, were stellar, with lead singer Paul Janeway leading the way.  He especially gained my respect after thanking security for getting his “fat ass” back on stage after a romp through the crowd.  Anyone who can laugh at himself is cool by me.  Oh, he can sing too!

August 28, 2022.  Khruangbin (but it was not to be), preceded by The Infamous Stringdusters with Molly Tuttle.  Bad weather made this entire day at the Sacred Rose Festival precarious.  I got to see an abbreviated setlist with the Stringdusters and Molly Tuttle, who were terrific.  Alas, nearby lightening shut things down thereafter.  My friend was particularly distraught after waiting for two hours in the front row to see Khruangbin, only to be turned away.

September 9, 2022.  The Shins preceded by Joseph.  Such a score on this one!  I was a little unmotivated to see The Shins on a weeknight, concluding that I may have been a bit too zealous with my concert ticket purchases earlier in the year.  But then a few days before the show I discovered that Joseph were opening, another band introduced to me by one of my daughters.  I liked their output and wondered how they might perform live.  Wow.  I mean, wow!  Three sisters singing tight harmonies to nothing more than an electric guitar and an occasional MIDI kick drum trigger.  And they killed it!  One of my top two concerts of the past year. I came home and immediately ordered their acoustic album on vinyl.  The Shins came out and killed it as well, offering a lot more urgency and energy than on their studio albums, and singer James Mercer was in great form, nailing the high vocal parts that Mercer could have been forgiven for reworking to accommodate his aging voice.  But no, even on the powerhouse “Simple Song,” he hit those suckers perfectly.  Great show.

And so ended twelve months of live music.  Not too shabby.  At present I don’t have tickets to see anyone, perhaps needing to take a reprieve after such a breakneck pace.  But it was a helluva good run.

The Cheap Trick book, This Band Has No Past

It’s been a long time since my last post, but I’m ready to get things rolling again.

Last spring I wrote about Brian Kramp’s run-in with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a short-sighted entity who temporarily shut down his music podcast, Rock and/or Roll. The silver lining in this fiasco was that it freed up Kramp’s time to complete This Band Has No Past: How Cheap Trick Became Cheap Trick, available now at Bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, and other bookstores. I am not a die-hard Cheap Trick fan by any means, though I do think that Dream Police and In Color are nearly perfect power pop albums. Beyond that I’m a modest fan at best. Nonetheless, I found Kramp’s 300-plus-page read to be a delightful trip to the world of live music in the Upper Midwest during the 70s, and a meticulous record of how this band earned their success. If the book can capture the interest of a casual fan, I think that hard-core Cheap Trick followers will be ecstatic.

Kramp conducted more than eighty interviews for the book, including particularly insightful contributions from original drummer Bun E. Carlos and band manager Ken Adamany. The other original band members – Tom Petersson, Rick Nielsen and Robin Zander – didn’t participate, but their words are well-documented from past interviews, and I didn’t find their lack of direct input to be a drawback. If anything, it may have helped to keep the book focused and allow for more contributions from other players in the band’s history.

This Band Has No Past, a title taken from the mock-biography included in the band’s debut album, meticulously covers the origins of Cheap Trick from its modest roots in Rockford, Illinois, with forerunning bands such as The Grim Reapers, Bo Weevils and Fuse, to the recording of the wildly successful Cheap Trick at Budokan, the album that finally garnered the sales that eluded the band through their first three releases. You might be asking, “How the heck can a 300-page book only cover the band’s first few albums?” Kramp does this in a multitude of ways, all of which I found appealing.

First, he put the band’s evolution in context with contemporaneous events like the Vietnam War and the releases of Jaws and Star Wars, plus events that played tangential roles in band members’ lives, such as the details of the Richard Speck murders (which would inspire the song, "The Ballad of TV Violence") and the story of the plane crash that took the lives of Otis Redding and six others in 1967. As it happened, future band manager Ken Adamany owned the Madison, Wisconsin club where Redding was to appear that night, and Rick Nielsen’s band, The Grim Reapers, opened for what turned out to be somber occasion.

Second, Kramp’s devotion to details that other author’s may have deemed unimportant give the story its scope and vibrancy, such as the story of Chris Crowe, a graphic artist who created the band’s logo, the inclusion of setlists from various shows, and an in-depth analysis of which of the debut album’s sides was supposed to be played first (it’s not as obvious as one would think). Kramp scoured seemingly every publication that included even a passing mention to the band – the Racine Journal Times, the Rockford Register Republic, Estherville Daily News, etc. Seriously, I admire the efforts it must have taken for Kramp to amass so much information and portray it in an entertaining fashion. Hell, he included two pages worth of adjectives that various publications used to describe Cheap Trick, and another two pages of adjectives used to describe at Rick Nielsen. Kind of crazy, but really rewarding!

Which brings me to the third point: just as Kramp appears to have worked tirelessly to write This Band Has No Past, the book highlights just how hard-working the members of Cheap Trick and a multitude of other bands were at the time, playing show after show after show at tiny venues throughout the Upper Midwest, from bowling alleys to high school dances to clubs to festivals. The book serves as a time capsule of the gritty but vibrant live music scene during the 70s, a scene that modern day musicians can only long for. While most of the venues were foreign to me, I have to imagine that anyone from the area who came of age during the 70s is going to be thrilled with this trip down memory lane.

Most illuminating for me was the realization that Jack Douglas, the producer of Cheap Trick’s debut album, hand-picked the songs for that 1977 release, overlooking tracks that would later prove to be very important to the band’s success, most notably “I Want You To Want Me” and “Surrender.” And it’s mind-boggling to me that “Hello There” wasn’t chosen to open the first album; it would have rivaled other great debuts such as “Welcome to the Working Week,” “Let the Good Times Roll,” “Chuck E.’s in Love” and “Runnin’ with the Devil.” A fan of alternative history might ponder what would have transpired if these songs had been released earlier. Perhaps success would have come sooner, but perhaps Budokan wouldn’t have become phenomenon it became

Somehow it all worked out. And thanks to Kramp, much of it has been documented in an enjoyable read, and the book itself is an attractive, sturdy publication with color photos and appealing typesetting, making it well worth the price.