Chicago Sinfonietta honors Día de los Muertos

If you've ever glanced at the little bio sketch over there on the right, you noticed that I am both a marketing consultant to the performing arts community and a freelance writer. I recently had the opportunity to combine both skill sets for the Chicago Sinfonietta, which is one pretty cool orchestra. (Full disclosure: I toiled as the Sinfonietta's Marketing Director for several years.) On November 9 in Naperville and November 11 in Chicago, they will present their fourth annual concert honoring the Mexican holiday of Día de los Muertos.  

They asked me to research and write program notes for both their website and the book that they hand out at the concert. I initially found the project a bit challenging because, though honoring a Mexican holiday, there were no works by Mexican composers being performed. That forced me to look a little deeper into the commonalities between Dia and the Catholic All Souls' Day, which are both, not at all coincidentally, on November 2. As I (virtually) traveled back and forth between Argentina, Austria and Spain, the commonalities that bridge cultures became apparent, as well as the changes that occur when customs, rituals and practices migrate from one place to another.  As that sort of cultural exchange is the underlying theme of this blog, I thought I'd share the results of my work with you here.

First, there's the "Digital Guide" that appears on the Sinfonietta website. Besides brief essays on the composers, performers and works being performed, there are embedded videos that illustrate the selections and uniqueness of the artists. Because of the dictates of marketing, the essays are short and (hopefully) snappy, designed to intrigue you enough to watch a video and then (ca-ching!) buy a ticket.

The program notes were a chance to stretch out and explore the themes of the concert with a bit more depth and thoughtfulness. Please read on, and let me know if I succeeded.

Maybe I'll see you at the concert!
___________________

The Mexican holiday of Día de los Muertos (or Day of the Dead) has origins in pre-Columbian Mexico. Rituals celebrating the deaths of ancestors have been observed there for as long as 2,500–3,000 years.  On the Aztec calendar, it was a month-long celebration occurring in August. The conquering of the “New World” by Spain changed all that. As a matter of cultural survival, indigenous customs and beliefs were often disguised by their practitioners as Catholic rituals to hide them in plain sight from their conquerors; the holiday now corresponds to the Catholic observance of All Souls’ Day. In this way, Aztec rituals were combined with those of Spanish Catholic origin to create the holiday as we know it. Further, because of this Spanish connection, some version of the holiday is also observed throughout much of the Americas. 

The holiday honors the remembrance of departed loved ones, mourning their absence while simultaneously celebrating their lives and the continuing spirit that they leave with us. Graves are cleaned and decorated. Shrines, or ofendras, are built in their honor. Favorite foods and beverages are brought and offered. The intent is to encourage visits by the souls, so the souls will hear the prayers and the comments directed to them. Here, death is not thought of as an ending, but rather a continuation of life in a different form. Celebrations often take a humorous tone, as celebrants remember funny events and anecdotes about the departed.

With our concert, the Sinfonietta captures both sorrow and joy with an aural and visual spectacle worthy of those who have passed before. We’ll travel from stark tragedy to celebratory revels, passing back and forth between the Americas and Europe, illustrating a universal yearning that all of humanity shares.

Our journey begins in early 20^th century Spain, by way of Argentina, but anchored in religious and cultural traditions that pre-date both. Composer Osvaldo Golijov was born to a Jewish family in La Plata, Argentina in 1960. His mother was a piano teacher, his father, a physician. He was raised surrounded by classical, Jewish liturgical and klezmer music, and the nuevo tango of Astor Piazzolla. He studied piano and composition at the local conservatory before moving first to Israel, and then the United States to continue his studies. His music is a reflection of these multiple influences, rendered as a cohesive whole. 

Ainadamer, his first opera, premiered in 2003. The title is Arabic for “Fountain of Tears”, and the story, by noted playwright David Henry Hwang, is based on Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca and his partner and muse, the Catalan actress Margarita Xirgu. The story is told in a series of flashbacks, as Xirgu remembers García Lorca’s life and the circumstances leading to his death. Ainadamar has features of both an opera and a passion play, as it examines the powerful symbolic role García Lorca has embodied, especially among other artists, following his murder during the Spanish civil war. In this symbolism, the poet becomes a martyr in the name of freedom of artistic expression, and his soul and spirit stay alive.  

Based as it is on events in Spain, Ainadamer is filled with Iberian musical influences, notably flamenco, but the score also illuminates the Arabic and Jewish predecessors of that familiar sound.  The short Preludio is filled with ominous percussive effects, some of which are the electronically generated sounds of gurgling water and galloping hoof beats, and it segues directly into the Balada. This introduction, for orchestra, chorus and soprano, will be performed at Día de los Muertos.

If Ainadamer has elements of a religious passion play woven into its structure, the evening’s second selection is an authentic liturgical ritual, albeit one written by a master of classical music that is augmented in this performance by elements of theatrical presentation.

As noted earlier, Día de los Muertos occupies the same spot on the calendar as the Catholic All Souls’ Day. One of the rituals of the Church is the requiem mass for the dead. As such, it is also meant to honor their life. Its history and practice date back to the early Roman church. Beginning in the late 15^th century, the requiem mass began to inspire a large number of composers who were drawn to the dramatic character of the ritual’s text. By the 18^th century, requiems became a genre of classical music unto itself as composers began to write them as concert works separate from liturgical use.

Classical music has its share of intrigue, betrayal and people behaving badly. In other words, it’s a lot like the rest of human existence. But even by these standards, the story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem stands apart. It was the composers’ final work. In fact, he died before its completion. The severely ailing Mozart was approached in 1791 by the emissary of an anonymous count who wanted a mass to commemorate the recent of the death of his wife. The composer was given half of a commission, with the balance to be paid on its completion.  The story, though, is that the count, who had artistic pretensions, planned to pass off the composition as his own. Mozart, feverish and near the end of his life, reportedly came to believe he was writing his own requiem. As it turns out, that is pretty much what happened.

After Mozart died, his widow Constanze, not wanting to lose the remaining commission, secretly had it completed by another composer, Franz Xaver Süssmayr. The finished manuscript was delivered bearing Mozart’s forged signature. However, the count’s alleged scheme to claim authorship was derailed when a public performance of the requiem, organized by Constanze, was given before the count presented his. If all of this sounds familiar, it is because a somewhat fictionalized account of the episode appeared in Peter Shaffer’s play (and later movie) Amadeus.

The Sinfonietta’s performance of selections from the Requiem will be dramatized by inventive costumes created by Redmoon Theater that will be worn by members of the choir. The skeleton designs that Redmoon created are strikingly reminiscent of images used in much Mexican folk art. These iconic figures appeared in the work of 19^th century artist and cartoonist José Guadalupe Posada. Considered the most renowned Mexican popular artist, it is Posada’s images that come to mind almost automatically when we think of Día de los Muertos.

The passing of the seasons have long been used as a metaphor for the cycle of life. Who hasn’t heard the phrase “autumn years” (or its gentler counterpart “golden years”) used to describe people deep into their lives? There’s no indication that the Argentine composer and originator of nuevo tango Astor Piazzolla had this in mind when writing Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas (The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires) but there is that passionate and edge-of-tragedy feel that permeates so much of tango, so who knows? Piazzolla has certainly written pieces that directly address death and remembrance; in fact, both Adios Nonino (commemorating his father) and Oblivion have been performed at previous Sinfonietta Día de los Muertos concerts.

Piazzolla was born in Mar del Plata, not far from where Osvaldo Golijov would be born 39 years later. For many years Piazzolla lived something of a double life, playing in tango bands by night, studying classical composition by day.  While studying in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, he was made aware that the ‘classical’ forms he was copying did not reflect his true soul. Returning to Buenos Aires, he began creating what would become nuevo tango. 

Estaciones Porteñas (a porteño is a person born in the Argentine capital) was originally four separate pieces written for his tango quintet. In 1998, Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov wrote a new arrangement with a more obvious link to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons by converting each of the pieces into three-section movements and re-arranging them for solo violin and string orchestra. To strengthen the link he included several quotations from Vivaldi's original work. Of course, in the southern hemisphere, warm and cold months are reversed, so some quotations are not where you’d think they would be. 

El Sombrero de tres picos (The Three Cornered Hat), the final performance of the concert, has its beginnings in a modest two act ballet by Manuel de Falla. The libretto, derived from a novella by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, is the story of a magistrate infatuated with a miller's faithful wife and his attempts to seduce her. A 1916 performance in Madrid was witnessed by Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who was so taken by the music that he commissioned Falla to score a full orchestral ballet from its themes. The resulting work had its premiere in London in 1919, with costumes and scenery by no less a figure than Pablo Picasso.

You may have noticed that Falla’s ballet was written during roughly the same time and setting portrayed in Osvaldo Golijov’s opera. There is, though, a further connection between the two works. García Lorca, the subject of Ainadamer, was an accomplished pianist, part-time composer and something of a musicologist, especially when it came to flamenco. He and Falla were friends, and together they staged a festival of the authentic form of cante jondo, or “deep song,” as the most substantial branch of flamenco is known. Some of the singing in the complete El sombrero de tres picos is modeled after cante jondo, and flamenco rhythms power the dances. The Suite No. 2, heard tonight, consists of three orchestral dances.

In keeping with the themes of his opera, Golijov brought out flamenco’s ominous, darker underpinnings in his score, as when the sharp percussion echoes the gunshots that killed García Lorca. Falla’s tale, however, is a gentler and often humorous one with an ultimately happy ending, and the music is brighter and more celebratory because of it.

Thus, with this lively conclusion to the concert, we celebrate. But we also remember.

Las Fronteras: The Continuing Journeys of Jorge Drexler and Carla Morrison

Through some alignment of the moon and stars, Chicago was graced with two talented Latin American singer-songwriters in the same week, one three decades into a successful career, the other a rising star of indie pop. I attended both shows, and I can safely say that there was zero crossover of audience between them, separated as they are by nearly a generation.  

Jorge Drexler plants his artistry squarely in the tradition of the wandering troubadour (the album cover pictured here reproduces his passport). His songs are literate observations of multiple identities, and given his background, it seems as though they could be about little else. His father, a German Jew, moved to Montevideo, Uruguay as a child to escape the Nazis. His mother is of Spanish, French and Portuguese descent. He studied medicine and became a doctor (like his parents) but decided to be a musician instead. 

After releasing a pair of albums in Uruguay, he moved to Madrid in the early 90s, where he still lives. He began to garner international attention with his 1999 album Frontera, produced by fellow Uruguayan Juan Campodónico. If that name sounds familiar, it should. Campodónico and Argentine musician Gustavo Santaolalla are the brains and muscle behind Bajofondo’s globally encompassing brew of Río de la Plata music (the waterway separates [or connects, depending on your point of view] the two countries).  Drexler has a Beatlesque melodic touch, and Campodónico’s production illuminates this while simultaneously re-connecting Drexler to the Uruguayan musical traditions of milonga and candombe. Frontera’s electronica-enhanced sound was followed by three more collaborations; Sea, Eco, and 12 Segundos de Oscuridad. I love the sound of all of them, because my senses crave the flavors that these layered musical elements provide. I’m not sure, frankly, that I would appreciate Drexler as much if the arrangements stuck to a more conventional sound.

I brought a slight apprehension with me to the concert hall, as I really didn’t know what to expect. Would there be a band? Or just a guy, a voice and a guitar? The answer, it turns out, was somewhere in between. For the most part, a relaxed and youthful-looking Drexler performed solo on a fairly stark stage, decorated only with a glowing, color-shifting orb positioned at the back. His guitar playing is perfect for his songs, often interrupting simple strumming for odd, jazzy time changes and note choices. He’s a terrific Brazilian guitarist as well. His “band” was a set of foot pedals that sent his voice and guitar through a sequencer, subtly layering the sound of each to create multiple rhythmic and melodic patterns that echoed around the room.  Drexler is clearly enamored of his electro sounds: He brought on a colleague for a few songs to play “percussion” on what looked like a souped-up iPad and even made room for a theremin solo. In the end, Drexler achieved the best of both worlds. The intelligentsia in the audience could experience his contemplative, probing lyrics intimately while the more musically attuned could smile at the ethereal sound, tap their foot and sing along to catchy choruses.

Three nights later, I again found myself entering a concert hall with questions. Carla Morrison is the latest darling of the Latin indie music set. There are multiple identities and influences at work in her music as well. She was born in Tecate, Baja California. Both of her parents are Mexican, but the name Morrison comes from her father’s adopted name, as he was raised on the San Diego side of the border by an Anglo. Carla moved to Arizona for both high school and college and was immersed in the alternative rock scene there. She studied voice, piano, guitar and ethnomusicology before returning to Tecate, where she was in several bands before starting a solo career in 2007. By 2010, she was independently releasing music, starting with a pair of EPs and then the album length Déjenme Llorar in 2012. She has since moved to Mexico City.

I’ve recently been reading an anthology called The Late Great Mexican Border, which argues that “border culture” is a thing unto itself, distinct from Latin America but also different from Latino identity in the United States. People may live on one side of the border or the other, but their ideas and identities are shaped by both. I think Morrison’s music is representative of this. Her songs are simple, but very well written. She writes and sings almost entirely in Spanish, but the music is indie pop at its most pristine, full of twee touches like ukuleles, toy pianos and glockenspiels. Her voice is charmingly delicate; her lyrics survey matters of the heart, especially heartbreak. Now, heartbreak is a longstanding, perhaps even obsessive subject of Latin pop, but Morrison’s take leans more toward sweet melancholy than to tragedy. I like it enough, but it’s not in my daily diet.

Onstage, Morrison is confident, charming, sincere and playful in equal measure. Her band has surprising heft, powering her songs from quiet ruminations to fairly muscular, almost orchestral pop-rock. The drummer and bassist are rock solid yet capable of much finesse, while each side of the stage is flanked by multi-instrumentalists who supply strongly voiced colors ranging from trumpet to electric guitar (and those ukuleles) and synthesizers. Morrison pretty much owns the rest of the stage, whether pounding out a batucada rhythm on a drum, strumming an acoustic guitar or playing her own gorgeous, white hollow body electric. Seriously, it was the most beautiful guitar I’d ever seen, and Morrison made great use of its rich sound. When she wasn’t playing an instrument, she prowled the stage with a hand held microphone. She switched instruments pretty much between every song, and the result kept the music varied as the set moved back and forth easily from quiet ballads to upbeat power pop, even dropping a quick banda into the mix to acknowledge her Baja birthplace. And, in classic pop tradition, Morrison has a penchant for inserting wordless “ooos” into her songs. On the title track from Déjenme Llorar, piano, glockenspiel and tambourine combine on a spare ballad for a little touch of Springsteen’s E-Street Band. (The Boss has been covering, en español, songs by beloved Latin American poet/songwriters on his South American tour. I’d love to hear what he’d do with this one.)

Morrison has hinted that she would like to one day write and sing in English, but for now she is content to develop her artistic identity in her first language. She seems in no hurry to conquer the Anglo market. Jorge Drexler never has, but he really has no need to. He gained a bit of U.S. fame a few years back for his Academy Award winning theme song to The Motorcycle Diaries, Al Otro Lado del Rio. Other than a cover of Mose Allison’s I Don’t Worry About a Thing (sung with his friend, jazz pianist and vocalist Ben Sidran), he’s continued to record exclusively in Spanish. Well, there was also that Radiohead cover. Anyway, I think the difference is that Drexler is a Latin artist who interacts with the Anglo world by choice, while Morrison, the border artist, has a foot on each side and full artistic claim to both.   

We shall see.

A great festival roars back to life.

photo: Catalina Maria Johnson

Well, I guess I didn’t see this coming.

The shakeups at the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) a few years back left the fate of Chicago’s many festivals and cultural offerings in doubt, and most of what unfolded over the course of 2012 only served to add to the sense of apprehension.

Fortunately, this year has had an entirely different narrative. 

First there was news that the city had formed a department to serve the needs of the local music community. Interesting, thoughtful exhibitions like the recent Spontaneous Interventions started returning to the Chicago Cultural Center. Then DCASE and the Jazz Institute of Chicago announced that the annual Jazz Fest was expanding its programming and moving to Millennium Park from the severely challenged Grant Park site. 

In 2012, a hastily scheduled World Music Festival squeaked by with a paltry 7 days, and local rather than visiting artists took an outsized role on stage. When it was announced that this year’s WMF expanded to 11 days, including 5 concerts at Millennium Park’s wondrous Pritzker Pavilion, it was clear that the city was treating the World Music Fest seriously and with the kind of commitment that many, including me, felt had been sorely lacking.

photo: Scott Pollard

Opening night was a spectacular triumph. The Eddie Palmieri Salsa Orchestra enthralled a Pritzker Pavilion crowd of over 6,000 people made up of jazz heads and salsa fans alike with a high energy show opened by Puerto Rico’s Plena Libre. It’s an honest debate as to whether the giant flat screen hanging over the stage is an enhancement or distraction (I go both ways: it’s brilliant when it goes in for close ups, but the camera doesn’t always find the right soloist, and wide shots aren't possible without the heads of the folks in the first 10 rows appearing in the frame) but the fact that DCASE decided it was worth the expense spoke volumes about their commitment to the Fest.

There were other signs of assurance as well. Two Pritzker concerts were devoted to Indian and Pakistani music, and another to Ethiopian and Gypsy music. Perhaps most remarkable of all though, was the all night RagaMala celebration of Indian classical music that took place at the Cultural Center. Talk about commitment! The audacious experiment clearly showed the vision at work from the DCASE artistic programmers, and it was wonderful that the city backed them up and let them run with it. 

Another artistic triumph was hosting the Festival au Desert - Caravan of Peace. When civil strife in Mali cancelled the legendary festival there, a group of Malian musicians banded together to bring the fest to the world. Just weeks before the WMF schedule was announced, I heard someone complaining loudly that it was a disgrace that the caravan wasn’t coming here. And the truth is, it would have been embarrassing if it bypassed Chicago. Given the economics of the situation, though, it is probably only an entity like DCASE that could afford to present such a large undertaking. Audiences were treated to a large Pritzker concert as well as 4 more shows around the city in intimate venues, one of which paired Mali’s Sidi Touré with Cajun zydeco fiddler/accordion player Cedric Watson for a little trans-global cultural exchange.

Speaking of economics: Did I mention that the entire festival was free?

I managed to catch something like 10 shows featuring 20 artists over the 11 days, which means I missed much more than I saw. Such is the nature of such a large event, with nearly 50 concerts at 20 venues showcasing more than 70 artists. Almost everything I saw was terrific, and all of it I dare say was essential. I heard nothing but good things about the stuff that I missed.  As usual, the fest closed with the all day celebration at the Cultural Center, “One World Under One Roof”, where I witnessed what might have been the most unusual and surprising show of the whole Fest with Kiev’s DakhaBrakha, whose stunning visual flair, piercing harmonies and sly manner somehow mixed Ukrainian folk music with a Beastie Boys style hip-hop aesthetic. Yeah, I know. I guess you had to be there…

Thank you DCASE. Transitions are tough, and they can knock you off your feet. But you really stood up and ran with this one.

Bravo! And many happy returns.

Más Miguel

I recently had the opportunity to write a preview of Miguel Zenón's upcoming shows at Chicago's venerable Jazz Showcase. Space constraints and the necessity to focus on the Rhythm Collective band that he's bringing here caused me to continually go back and edit out stuff that wasn't relevant to the preview, but that I nonetheless felt compelled to mention. The MacArthur Foundation "genius" has just done so much in such a short time.

I've got room for it here, though.

The Rhythm Collective release Oye!!! Live in Puerto Rico is best viewed as part of a quartet of releases that move back and forth between the music of Zenón's home on the island and the cutting edge creativity of a forward-thinking jazz musician. Jibaro, Esta Plena, Alma Adentro and Oye!!! all, to some degree, place Afro-Caribbean traditions in a jazz context. It's not precisely Latin jazz, as there are no obvious signifiers and absolutely no fallback on standard rhythms and motifs. Instead, Zenón digs deep into the essence of these two African derived musics to get at an essential commonality.

Zenón has been investigating the cultural connection between Latin and North America since his first release, Looking Forward, in 2002. He's employed straight jazz quartets, lush chamber music and traditional percussion in pursuit of his ideas. A string quartet first showed up on 2008's Awake under producer Branford Marsalis' guiding hand. By 2011, Zenón was writing orchestrations for a large wind ensemble to give proper respect to the Puerto Rican Songbook on Alma Adentro. At the same time, he also spends a considerable amount of time (and some of his "genius" money) bringing the music of North American jazz masters like Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk to small Puerto Rican towns through his Caravana Cultura initiative.

photo courtesy New York Times

Even his projects that haven't been recorded are ambitious. When Zenón was in Chicago a few years back showcasing the (at the time) unreleased Alma Adentro, he also played something from another developing project that he called Identities. That multimedia cultural history project debuted the following year under the title Puerto Rico Nació en Mi: Tales From the Diaspora. It attempted to say something about the complexities of cultural identity when you've never even stepped foot in your country of origin. Video interviews with Puerto Ricans living in the U.S. were intertwined with music by both his quartet and a 12 piece big band. This New York Times review describes its premier in 2012. The project has since been retitled (and no doubt refined) Identities are Changeable: Tales From the Diaspora. It will be presented again in NYC this December.

2012 also saw the release of Rayuela, a collaboration with French pianist Laurent Coq based on an acknowledged literary masterpiece by Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar. The experimental novel takes place in Paris and Buenos Aires and is at least partly a meditation on a trans-global life. When Zenón and Coq began their collaboration, it was quickly decided that Zenón, a Latin American, would write music for the Paris chapters, leaving the French pianist to explore Buenos Aires. They chose unusual instrumentation, namely cello, trombone and tablas to fill out the sound. In a way, Rayuela continues Zenón's exploration of multiple identities as it tackles the work of a writer who split his time between French speaking Europe and South America. Enlisting the help of a French musician working in a distinctly American art form adds additional layers of complexity, with echoes of the lives of the many black jazz musicians who flocked to Paris in the 1940s and 50s.

There are many supremely talented musicians working in jazz, but I'm hard pressed to name another that conceptualizes on such a grand scale, that uses his musical gift to continually explore ideas and ask questions that go beyond music to larger subjects.

I'd say the MacArthur Foundation has invested well, wouldn't you?

The pleasures of the familiar.

When the subject of change comes up, I'm usually in favor of it.

At the very least, I embrace its inevitability, choosing to ask "Well, what now?" and deal with it, even run with it. Cultural exchange is like that. Each party is transformed by the other; neither remains exactly as it was. We're all the sum of our experiences, but the calculus never stops. Every encounter changes you.  Traveling to a new place is experience, yes, but if you don't come back different, what did you learn?

Places are like this, too. We've come up with lots of phrases to describe this ever ongoing transformation: "You can't go home again." "You never step in the same river twice." "Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are."

Technology, of course, has sped everything up. Decades are now years, years mere months. We can lament the fast pace, or we can quicken our step. Music, art, even food, all of them are subject to recombining, reevaluation and renewal as they churn ever onward.

I'm thinking about all of this because I'm sitting in a cafe that I used to frequent, but have only visited a few times in the last seven years. (It was a different time. I led a different life.) And this cafe is a defiant middle finger to everything I've said to this point. It hasn't changed a bit. The walls are the same color, the tables are in the same position, the espresso maker hasn't moved an inch. The same guy with the long grey beard is still doing woodcuts by the window. The overhead music remains light classical before 10am, moody alternative rock mid-morning, lively pop in the afternoon. They still get their bagels from the same Kosher bakery. They are still, wonder of wonders, cash only. The only thing I see different is the coffee supplier, having switched from a Chicago micro-roaster to one from Milwaukee that has more explicitly leftist leanings (and perhaps even better coffee).

This cafe was both my office and my place of refuge. It's where I learned to write, or at least came around to the notion that I could write. It was a tumultuous time in my life. Things were changing, and I was deathly afraid of change. My marriage was dissolving, but that very idea was inconceivable, setting up an internal conflict that I could barely acknowledge. So I came here, and I read, I wrote, I took comfort in being around familiar faces that were nonetheless, with few exceptions, nameless strangers. When the dissolve became a full-on split, it was not I who drove the wedge. Such was the potency of my inertia.

That was, as I indicated, seven years ago. I moved to a different part of town and consciously avoided the old neighborhood. I still came to this cafe on occasion, but with time and distance it happened less frequently. There were other, closer cafes to inhabit. There was one on the corner by my apartment that got their bagels from the very same Kosher bakery, but that placed closed earlier this year. It is worth noting that I find this particular bagel vastly superior to any other.

Which is why I came back here last week. To get that bagel. Some things, it turns out, are just as good in life as they are in memory. In the intervening years, my approach to life took a left turn into uncharted, improbable territory. The unknown was thrust upon me, but much to my surprise, it proved a nourishing wellspring of growth. With that came a perspective on my past as well as a more adventurous approach to the present. The world itself seemed to change. And yet, this cafe has been frozen in time.

It feels almost absurd to think of something as mundane as a cafe as part of traditional culture, but that's exactly what this one is. It's as ritualistic as church in here, and (if you accept its tenets) just as spiritually fulfilling.

It's good to be back.

Centered.

The Chicago Bears had their season opener at Soldier Field this past weekend, hosting the Cincinnati Bengals. I'm generally indifferent to football, and last Sunday was no exception. Nonetheless, the city was alive with optimistic expectation and its sidewalks filled with team jerseys. I was spending the day on my bike enjoying the vibe. My girlfriend had a meeting in Lincoln Park, so we though it would be a good idea to bike down early and spend a little time on the lakefront.

It wasn't the best of days, a bit overcast with a stiff wind pounding waves along the shore. After enduring about an hour of wind whipping, we grabbed a bite at Lito's Empanadas on Clark Street. Lito's owner is from Colombia, but his small counter service storefront isn't there to serve South American immigrants. Rather, it's on a fashionable and gentrified stretch of Clark near Diversey. The empanadas were excellent, though, crisply fried on the outside, yet having a grease-less inner layer enclosing the delicious fillings. My girlfriend prefers hers baked, so she suggested that next time we go to the place run by the Argentinians just up the street.

Our hunger pangs satisfied, she headed to her meeting while I pedaled off on a semi-directionless bike ride through the neighborhood. I lived nearby for a few years back in the 80's, but haven't spent much time here since then, so I was curious to see what had changed, and what was the same.

My meanderings took me past a stretch of sports bars on Webster that were, needless to say, quite rowdy on a football Sunday. It was then that I started to notice that not everybody was wearing a Bears jersey. Not only were there Bengals colors, but Cleveland, Detroit and Green Bay had their representatives as well. I also noticed several bars flying the colors of Ohio State and the Universities of Wisconsin, Iowa and Michigan.

Chicago is the center of the Midwest, and it's tonier precincts are a landing place for the young and the successful. They are migrants in every sense of the world, looking to improve their lives by moving to a place with more opportunity. The principal difference is that their place of origin is typically farther up the ladder and more comfortable than that of migrants from other shores. I realize that's a gross simplification, that there are tech, medical and other highly skilled jobs that are often filled by immigrants. Often, of course, this is because they were a little farther up the ladder back home as well, and could afford to study at U.S. universities, of which Chicago is blessed to be the home of several.

My companion's meeting was over, so we hooked up again and returned to almost the same spot where we had our empanadas. The next store over is the cleverly named Del Seoul, which found its niche a few years back selling that wonderful Asian-Mexican but only-in-America invention, the Korean taco. Kalbi, BBQ pork or sesame-chili panko crusted shrimp served over warm corn tortillas and covered in kimchi. It's a small miracle of multiculturalism.

Like Lito's, Del Seoul opened on this stretch of Clark to serve the general public and introduce wonderful and formerly exotic food from home to increasingly sophisticated palates. The truth is, Del Seoul is more L.A. than Seoul in its inspiration (the first Korean tacos happened when somebody had the brilliant idea of combining L.A.'s iconic taco trucks with K-Town's BBQ), but the flavors are authentic, even as they mash things up even more with Koreanized versions of Montreal's poutine and Vietnam's bahn mi, creating whole new hybrids that I'm not even sure they have in L.A. At the same time, they've added more traditional meals to the menu, and the fair number of Korean students from nearby DePaul University that were earnestly tucking into these reminders of home attested to their quality.

Chicago, where migrants come from Korea, Mexico, Colombia and Michigan to mix and mingle and seek a better life than they had back home. How did I get so lucky as to be born here?