Phthursday Musings: Playing in Peoria

Usually these Musings are written from my office or from my living room. Sometimes they are written from more exotic locations.

Tonight, I am, naturally, poolside in East Peoria.

It’s given me occasion to muse a bit about time I spent in Peoria two decades ago. I also have musings on some other recent events.

After grad school I wound up back in Normal, and wound up with a weird job. The company was Balancing Precision Inc., a very small union shop in the HVAC test and balance space. It was never especially clear what exactly that job would turn into, how many hours it would be, etc. - all fodder for me to write about at a later time. But I mention it because it explains a bit about how I went looking for and stumbled upon a computer training gig in Peoria.

Illinois Central College has a big campus in East Peoria, but also a lesser known smaller campus in downtown Peoria. It’s at the smaller campus where they did computer training. In the early 2000s they trained on a whole lot of different kinds of software, but the most common things were Microsoft Office programs. Because I had spent three years as a TA (classroom experience) and knew my way around computers and I guess somehow managed to speak to being able to stand in front of people and make presentations, I ticked all of their boxes.

It wasn’t too frequent though - I’d get on average a couple days a month. It paid well for the time though and worked well with my main job at BPI. I could do Word or PowerPoint, but Excel was more of a go-to, and the one where I got the most work was Access. (I even on a couple occasions trained people in VBA for Access of all crazy things.)

Downtown Peoria was, to me, a surprisingly interesting place to be. Caterpillar office workers would stream outside and get food from carts set up along Adams Street. (It was when I had the training gig that I first heard “Big Yellow Father” used to speak of Caterpillar.) On the one hand there was some diversity to the people walking around. On the other hand everyone seemed to be dressed like it was still 1982, weird things like suits the wrong shades of blue and ancient perms bopping about. But you could get an excellent butterfly pork chop sandwich (if so inclined) and the Adams Street Cafe actually had a very good hummus wrap even in 2004 when such things weren’t so easy to find.

Still, even though this all gave me occasion to be in Peoria, I never wandered outside of the immediate downtown. I have zero recollection of anyone recommending a single restaurant or store. The only two points of interest ever mentioned were the solar system model based from the museum and the Uniroyal Gal, Vanna Whitewall:

I finally saw her for myself one day when ICC had me spend a couple days doing on-site training in a conference room at an ethanol plant along the river just south of downtown. Those ethanol plants used to be the sites of major whiskey production before, you know, Chicago sent its shit down the Illinois River.

I especially like the above photo for prioviding the context of where she stands. Ostensibly she’s encouraging you to come buy some tires. But she’s in such weird decrepit surroundings!

As I think back on it all now, that limited time in Peoria was instructive to other thoughts I’d put together. When I ran for State Representative in 2004 and was treated as a serious candidate, I actually got to participate in a real debate sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce. While there I advocated for a tech corridor along I-74, from Urbana to Peoria, an argument that actually generated some visible enthusiasm from well-dressed people sitting near the front of the room. (It was a pretty good idea if I do say so myself - one which would most especially have helped Peoria!) Years forward, having trekked more frequently to Peoria to see my wife’s family, I think a lot of other ideas about Illinois generally have some germination in that time in Peoria.

A friend once told me had a rule: Don’t date anyone from west of the river.

Oops.

The shitshow in Washington this week… if you want extended commentary, I’m sure you can find plenty of it. I’ll try to be brief.

In November there was a lot of weird congratulating going around, about how democracy was still alive and kicking. I mentioned then how weird a take I thought all that was. What we’re seeing now hammers home how weird a take that was.

If I were in a position of political authority in either the Democratic or Republican Parties today, I’d be looking at this whole mess and asking, What is our vision for democracy? Not what the vision is for elections but for democracy more generally. Do we want to foster a sense of community feeling in struggling (and thriving) cities (and small towns) or is that not what we’re about on any level?

The Republicans in Washington today clearly don’t care about any of that, but the Democrats don’t especially seem to care either, except to the extent that it might help bolster voter turnout.

Visions of democracy aren’t transmitted through speeches but through actions. Public actions. Bringing people together, and not just in partisan ways. Facilitating public spaces. All of the hard work that goes into successful communities.

What I think the Democrats are going to take away from this week is that they have a handful of Republicans to target. What I think they should take away is that the American people as a whole are so thoroughly cynical about government altogether that not only is it incumbent on them to do something about it, there’s also tremendous opportunity to establish positive forward visions for communities.

I wish we could see at least a shred of evidence that they get that.

Many years ago, Rockford had a professional basketball team, the Rockford Lightning, who played in the CBA (Continental Basketball Association). This was years before there was an NBA G League. The CBA was, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, essentially AAA level professional basketball. My nephew, inexplicably, was wearing a Rockford Lightning t-shirt at Thanksgiving.

Last week I took my goofy kid to a college basketball game, ISU at UIC. (Aside #1: Even though I’d spent 9 years living in Bloomington-Normal, this was the first live ISU game I’d seen in any sport! Aside #2: UIC is now in the Missouri Valley Conference, which is kind of weird.)

What occurred to me watching the game was: These dudes are better athletes than the guys I watched on the Lightning 30 years ago. They’re not better basketball players - not yet - but in terms of raw athletic prowess, in terms of being chiseled, in terms of being able to make explosive plays, these 20 year olds playing on two middle of the road mid major college basketball teams were goddamn outstanding.

The game 30 years ago was of course a lot different. The NCAA didn’t even adopt the 3 point line until 1986. The guys we watched on the Lightning then played much more of a post-up and mid-range style of game. It’s not that they weren’t excellent athletes - of course they were - but they necessarily had to rely more on basketball skills than raw ability. The ISU and UIC players are still honing their basketball skills. But wow, do these dudes have raw ability.

I have no far-reaching conclusion to offer about this. It’s just something to ponder about. For now. Maybe I’ll get back to you.

In the meantime, having now seen a handful of mid-major college games over the past few years, I heartily recommend it. I think it’s absurd that these guys are playing to crowds which are a fraction the size of what they played before in high school. Next game I’ve got circled is Bradley at UIC on January 29. If you’re in the area and at all interested, give me a shout.

Jeremiah Green, drummer for Modest Mouse, passed away on New Year’s Eve. 25 years ago the band released The Lonesome Crowded West, which within certain circles was huge, extremely significant. I’ll get to all that in a bit.

The reason I immediately recognized the name is because Green also had a second band in the late ‘90s, Satisfact, more of a post-hardcore band, less of what Modest Mouse was. Green was talked about at the time as a particularly important drummer. I saw Satisfact in May 1997 opening for Built To Spill and I remember that they were indeed very good. It’s one of those odd things though - sometimes even big important bands, you don’t remember - if you ever even knew - the names of the musicians themselves.

The Lonesome Crowded West is one of the two albums which in my mind effectively closed the indie-rock era. (The other was Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, and for some similar reasons.) Modest Mouse was still a relatively new band and The Lonesome Crowded West was only their second full album, but the thing is huge, sprawling. It’s a full-on indie-rock album that essentially pushed the medium to its breaking point. The attention naturally focused on frontman Isaac Brock, who was apparently some kind of genius, but it was a band album, also pretty clearly something of a production feat. (No less than Calvin Johnson and Phil Ek recorded the sessions.)

We were used to indie-rock guitarists doing big loud things. Drummers? Not so much, not in an erstwhile old-school type of indie-rock band.

The Lonesome Crowded West is one of those albums where ten different people could cite ten different emotional centers of the album. To me it’s in “Lounge (Closing Time)” when the song spills over from something kind of clipped and lo-fi into something epic. I’ve never heard another song where a drummer did something quite like this. Indie-rock albums aren’t usually cinematic:

There are a lot of reasons why I would personally point to the end of 1997 / beginning of 1998 as kind of the last hurrah for indie-rock. The major label feeding frenzy pretty abruptly ended right around then. Stalwart bands who had released a number of albums were in some form or another clearly fading away (for example the Archers of Loaf released their last album in 1998) and the labels most closely associated with the “indie-rock sound” were also kind of in transition. On a personal level, having spent two years as a Music Director at a college radio station, then heading off to grad school, of course it felt like an end of an era to me.

The Lonesome Crowded West though… where would you go from there? It was lo-fi in parts, big in parts, sprawling all over the place. It feels like a double album, or a concept album, but it’s neither. I look at my still extensive collection and in my mind, nothing especially close to it came out after. Not from Modest Mouse, not from anyone. Modest Mouse somehow continued as a band, but they became a very different kind of band, one which to my ear never again released even a decent album, let alone a great one. (But they did release more popular albums and became a bigger band, and, well, more power to them for that.)

Meanwhile, Satisfact had a little run of three albums and best as I can tell never got a whole lot of notoriety on their own. I have to admit it’s been 25 years since I’ve listened to them. But listening a little now, there’s an argument to be made that while Modest Mouse was shutting down the indie-rock era, Satisfact was anticipating some of what was coming next, bands like Interpol. I mean, just look at how they’re dressed here, and tell me who they look like to you:

Weirdly, I never saw Modest Mouse. The 25th anniversary tour for The Lonesome Crowded West didn’t appeal to me, though I’m having a hard time articulating why. Maybe it’s similar to how I didn’t go see Neutral Milk Hotel’s reunion tour, even though at the time In the Aeroplane Over the Sea came out, I was their biggest acolyte around. I’m not anti-nostalgia - indeed when I see the Archers in a couple weeks, I hope they play “Nostalgia”! - but maybe it’s something to do with wanting to remember a band and an extended moment in a particular way.

It’s always a shame when it’s someone’s death which instigates someone to go back and find out what all they were about. I’m going to listen to those Satisfact albums and also the yet other band he had, Red Stars Theory. Even to this day I find I’m still mining excellent music from the time when I felt like I was mostly listening to new music. I don’t see that ever ending.

Finally, a couple of followup notes from the last couple of weeks.

First, any kind of hot take, even with META-SPIEL, seems bound to arouse passions, and indeed I had responses running the gamut from absolute agreement to angry remonstrance over my comments re: Brach’s butterscotch candies.

I do wish to offer a clarification to the more than one of you who found yourselves dreadfully confused: I was not writing about Werther’s Original. While I did point out that maybe butter in a hard candy was a bad idea, Werther’s is a caramel candy, which is necessarily different. It is also something I never had growing up and I cannot remotely claim to have a four decade long informed opinion about!

Second, to date, I have only had two recommendations for places to visit to satisfy the new Pizza Around Illinois series. One of these was Freddy’s Pizza in Cicero; as it so happens, we were there in August, on the way to seeing Willie Nelson at the Windy City Smokeout festival (and, as it went, catching Covid while there.) The other recommendation is Al & Joe’s in Franklin Park, which seems to be more of a sandwich shop, but which I am nevertheless keeping an eye open for, though admittedly Franklin Park is an unusual direction for us to travel these days.

I do however seem to have multiple excited people on the Mastodon server @toot.pizza who are now looking forward to these writeups!

Meanwhile, although my clavicle is still not fully healed, I at least seem to be in decent running shape, not that the weather anywhere in Illinois is liable to facilitate a run. I hope to get back out perhaps in February. Maybe a race-and-pizza double will be forthcoming soon…