Halloween in Chicago

We spent last Friday, Halloween, in Chicago. We went down for a double-header, Chicago Symphony in the afternoon, and David Byrne at night.

And now it’s only Wednesday, but it feels like it’s already Friday. Maybe because of the time change Saturday night. Maybe because Jasper came on Monday this week, so that I could go to a memorial for someone Mark and I used to work with, though Mark for a lot longer than me.

We started our day in Chicago with a sandwich from J.P. Graziano’s, a deli in the West Loop that seems less gentrified than its surroundings. Or maybe that’s just their marketing ploy, “feeding Chicago since 1937”. They’ve been on a bunch of best sandwich lists anyways, I think I saw them on the Infatuation. Since we were new to the place, we just got a regular Italian sub.

We carried it over to the food hall next to the hotel where we were going to stay that night, and bought drinks and chips to go with. There were quite a few people in costume, including a jellyfish working at one of the food booths, and I saw a mouse ordering Indian take away. Or at least it was a guy in a white suit with a pink belly and a tail, and the head that was thrown back looked like t had little mouse ears.

Then we proceeded on to the hotel where we were able to check in and dump stuff before the symphony. I thought it was actually one of the easiest pre-concert lunch grabs we’ve done.

The Chicago Symphony concert was music-director-emeritus-for-life Ricardo Muti conducting, so the place was packed even at the Friday matinee. The program began with a something short by Johann Strauss Jr., the Overture to the Gypsy Baron. Then the less-heard Mathis de Maler composed by Paul Hindemuth in 1933 and 1934 as he watched Hitler rise to power, based on the life of Matthias Grünewald who also lived in troubling political times. So seemed a bit heavier than the Strauss. This was all followed after the break by the much-more-heard Dvořák’s New World Symphony. And even though we have heard it a lot, the CSO’s performance was outstanding.

We had time to go back to the hotel for a bit, then we walked down to Flo and Santos for pizza. 

We ate plenty of meat to get us through our day.

We walked north towards the Auditorium Theater and stopped at an Insomnia Cookies and shared 2 scoops of ice cream on top of one of their cookies. Looked kind of like this.

David Byrne and company’s show was pretty incredible. I liked it better than American Utopia that we saw at the Auditorium back in 2018. American Utopia was more like a set piece, plain grey background with dancers and musicians creating a pattern. Drum lines. This tour, Who Is the Sky, had more Talking Heads songs (about half, you’ll see on the setlist below) and a lot more video and color – they wore orange jumpsuits, I guess for Halloween – and Byrne talked more, told more stories about the songs. Like “And she was” is about a girl he knew in school who said she took LSD and lay in the grass next to the factory by their school. “Like Humans Do” is kind of about Byrne hearing people together for the first time after pandemic, out riding his bicycle in New York.      

Setlist:
Heaven
Everybody Laughs
And She Was
Strange Overtones
Houses in Motion
T-Shirt
(Nothing but) Flowers
This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)
What Is the Reason for It?
Like Humans Do
Don’t Be Like That
Independence Day
Slippery People
I Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party
My Apartment Is My Friend
Hard Times
Psycho Killer
Life During Wartime
Once in a Lifetime

Encore:
Everybody’s Coming to My House
Burning Down the House

We walked back to the hotel and went to bed.

In the morning we met John & Megan at Cafe Yaya, and this time we got there early enough for a good selection of pastries. John & Megan liked the tahini banana bread. I had one of the delicata squash kolaches, and Mark got an apple galette. 

And of course, there we were in Chicago where people are getting grabbed on the streets by ICE and hauled off ladders in yards where they were working by ICE and dragged out of cars by ICE, and teachers are getting hauled out of schools and daycare centers, and in the Loop and Lincoln Park where we were we saw none of it. 

Oh, and I almost forgot – we went to see Paul Cebar when we got back. He and his band Tomorrow Sound, have a new record, first one in something like 10 years. They were really good – as usual. Cebar – like Spooner – is kind of a Wisconsin hidden gem. The rest of the country maybe doesn’t know so much about them but we here have been enjoying them for 50 years or so. After the break he came back and did a few songs solo, including this one, The Book of Love. Which I did not know till Susan told me the next day, Peter Gabriel had the hit with, and I looked around a bit more and it was written by Stephin Merritt of Magnetic Fields, And it was in this movie with Richard Gere & Jennifer Lopez And Susan Sarandon. Anyways, it was beautiful. You couda heard a pin drop, and that doesn’t happen too often in a club.