Ravinia 2011.

I don't want to schedule / Love, I want to pour it out

--even in this cold season love can endure
And be green again, which I do want to believe
Despite my unconstant heart--

gk, concerts on the square.

We went to see Garrison Keillor at Ravinia in Highland Park on Saturday night, and spent Sunday washing and waxing cars, watching 30-year-old Wimbledon tournaments and celebrating Adam's upcoming 20th birthday.




One man leaned out to snap a photograph right in GK's face and GK grabbed his hand and continued singing, "OH, I need your love!"







And two random pictures from about a month ago...







Here are some pictures I shot at Concerts on the Square last Wednesday... the day was the most beautiful of the summer by far.




Bernd, the unwilling subject ;-)

Isolation is a difficult trick for a pedestrian.

I went to church in San Francisco on Sunday, the big stone church on Nob Hill, whose name is an old slang term for a rich person, where a gaggle of railroad tycoons built their palaces high above the squalid tenements of the poor back in the Gilded Age, and there with considerable pomp we baptized a dozen infants into the fellowship of faith and we renounced the evil powers of this world, which all in all is a good day's work.

The term "evil powers" is one you hear only in the church, or in Marvel comic books, or Republican speeches, and it isn't something I renounce every day. I am a romantic democrat, raised on William Saroyan and Pete Seeger and Preston Sturges, and we have faith in the decency of the little guy, and we believe you can depend on the kindness of strangers. But it ain't necessarily so.

Evil lurks in the heart of man, and anonymity tends to bring it out. Internet flamers would never say the jagged things they do if they had to sign their names. Road rage is anonymous; there is no equivalent pedestrian rage or bicyclist rage. (Have you ever yelled vile profanities at a fellow motorist -- a spontaneous outburst -- and then found that you're holding a cellphone in your hand and a female colleague is on the other end? I have and it is excruciating.) War requires very well-brought-up people to do vicious things that they are able to do efficiently because the recipients of their viciousness are unknown to them. The bombardier never sees the quiet shady street of brick houses that he is about to incinerate.

I want to believe in the kindness of strangers. I believe that if voters actually knew gay couples, they would not vote to ban gay marriage. This particular cruelty is the result of social separation, which breeds contempt. I know something about that, having spent time in grad school. When I was 24 I was an insufferable snob, thanks to lofty isolation from the ordinary tumult of life, and what cured me eventually was entering the field of light frothy entertainment. When you strive to amuse a crowd of strangers, you have to drop your pants, and a man without pants gives up the right to look down on anybody.

We liberals can be as rigidly humorless as anybody else: You learn that, writing a newspaper column. Hardshell Baptists have nothing on us when it comes to self-righteousness. Mostly we look down on Republicans and the iconic small-town values that they have exploited so successfully, and yet, deep down, we share those values. We admire personal enterprise, we are wary of the power and blindness of big bureaucracies, and we do not admire self-pity. When I hear long tales of woe -- Poor Me, my benighted life -- my inner Republican thinks, "That was you who poured all that alcohol down your gullet. You. Nobody else. And why didn't you work a little harder in school? Duh. Your mama tried to tell you and you sneered at her. You did it to yourself, pal. You got on the train to Nowheresville and guess what? You arrived."

The center of civility in our society is not the small town but the big city, where you learn to thread your way through heavy traffic and subdue your aggressiveness and extend kindness to strangers. Small-town Republicans are leery of big cities and the anonymity they bestow, but there is no better place to learn the delicate ballet of social skill. Isolation is a difficult trick for a pedestrian, even with music pouring into your ears.

And here, this morning, in a city famous for eccentricity, we strangers in a cathedral embrace other people's children and promise to fight the good fight in their behalf, a ceremony that never fails to bring tears to my eyes. We renounce evil powers. I renounce isolation and separation and the splendid anonymity of the Internet and the doink-doink-doink of the clicker propelling me through six Web sites in five minutes. I vow to put my feet on the ground and walk through town and make small talk with clerks and call my mother on the phone and put money in the busker's hat. We welcome the infants into our herd and though some of them sob bitter tears at the prospect, they are now in our hearts and in our prayers and we will not easily let them go.


GARRISON KEILLOR.

So we should walk softly and not assume too much.

How the press can prevent another Iraq from Nieman Watchdog.
Provocation Alone Does Not Justify War. War is so serious that even proving the existence of a casus belli isn’t enough. Make officials prove to the public that going to war will make things better.
Encourage Public Debate. The nation is not well served when issues of war and peace are not fully debated in public. It’s reasonable for the press to demand that Congress engage in a full, substantial debate. Cover the debate exhaustively and substantively.

God changes with the weather by Garrison Keillor
There is a countervailing faith that says that God is in and of the world and has bestowed vast gifts to be shared with others, and that our understanding of God is faint and incomplete and so we should walk softly and not assume too much.

Moments of Regret from On The Media
It’s from The Los Angeles Times, and here’s the correction: “An item in the National Briefing in Sunday’s Section A said a bear wandered into a grocery store in Hayward, Wisconsin on Friday and headed for the beer cooler. It was Thursday.”

Romeo and Juliet: Just as you misremembered it on NPR
"It is the East, and Juliet is the West."

The Wrong Debate on Torture from On The Media
I have to, therefore, ask you, isn't any reporting on the intelligence pros and cons of torture changing the subject in exactly the way that Dick Cheney wants it changed, from the morality and legality of torture to the efficacy of torture? Aren't you kind of being suckered by your very reporting validating the premise that effectiveness constitutes justification?

The degrading effects of terrorism fears by Glenn Greenwald
What makes all of this most ironic is that the American Founding was predicated on exactly the opposite mindset. The Constitution is grounded in the premise that there are other values and priorities more important than mere Safety. Even though they knew that doing so would help murderers and other dangerous and vile criminals evade capture, the Framers banned the Government from searching homes without probable cause, prohibited compelled self-incrimination, double jeopardy and convictions based on hearsay, and outlawed cruel and unusual punishment. That's because certain values -- privacy, due process, limiting the potential for abuse of government power -- were more important than mere survival and safety. A central calculation of the Constitution was that we insist upon privacy, liberty and restraints on government power even when doing so means we live with less safety and a heightened risk of danger and death. And, of course, the Revolutionary War against the then-greatest empire on earth was waged by people who risked their lives and their fortunes in pursuit of liberty, precisely because there are other values that outweigh mere survival and safety. These are the calculations that are now virtually impossible to find in our political discourse. It is fear, and only fear, that predominates. No other competing values are recognized. […] This isn't exactly new: many of America's most serious historical transgressions -- the internment of Japanese-Americans, McCarthyite witch hunts, World War I censorship laws, the Alien and Sedition Act -- have been the result of fear-driven, over-reaction to external threats, not under-reaction. Fear is a degrading toxin, and there's no doubt that it has been the primary fuel over the last decade.

But you are not defined by your deficits any more than I am.

Sometimes I reread his old Mr. Blue advice columns, and I have nothing but love for him. He says, “But you are not defined by your deficits any more than I am,” and “you know that loneliness is an accident and no reflection on you, and you simply have to see yourself through it,” and “get off this bus and wait for the next one,” and also this: “Life is a mess, we agonize over it, and then we get in the car and go someplace to do something we need to do, and we are showered with mercy and forgiveness.”