Phthursday Musings: Serendipity

Several years ago, I first read about Lustron houses, probably this article from Preservation. Fewer than 3,000 were constructed. They were made of prefabricated enameled steel panels, 2’ x 2’. I found the idea highly alluring. Here’s what one such home looks like today:

Over time I’ve come across stories of Lustron houses. One day I even found one. As a family we were driving through Des Plaines, checking out neighborhoods, and I saw one, and got super excited, and of course my poor wife thought it was all mad, but she must think everything is mad, and who could blame her?

A few weeks ago, the local weekly newspaper, the Riverside-Brookfield Landmark, ran an article about a guy here in our town who is clearly far more fascinated by Lustrons than I am. Dirk Fletcher has photographed 250 extant Lustron houses. (The above is one of his photographs; see his Lustron Project online here.) And a display of some of those photos was - and, as of today, still is - on display at the Riverside Township Hall.

This past Friday, I finally went over to Riverside to take a look at the exhibit for myself.

We’ll come back to this.

The Chicago Red Stars are the local NWSL (National Women’s Soccer League) team. The roster includes USWNT players, World Cup champions even, people you may have heard of like midfielder Julie Ertz and goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher.

The Red Stars play at SeatGeek Stadium, formerly Toyota Park, in Bridgeview, which is about three suburbs over from us. (SeatGeek is an online ticketing site; the name is atrocious, but what can you do?) The Chicago Fire played there for a long time, but last year decamped back to Soldier Field, leaving the Red Stars as the only tenant of what is honestly a very nice soccer-specific stadium that’s kind of in the middle of nowhere.

I started taking my goofy kid to Red Stars matches four years ago, when we were still living in Chicago. We’ve gone to some Fire matches too. Here’s my argument. MLS games feature excellent soccer players competing at a high level. But NWSL games feature some actual world champions. Arguably the world’s best striker, Sam Kerr, was with the Red Stars for two seasons. And the women’s game looks like actual soccer, whereas some of the MLS games we’ve seen have looked kind of like wrestling matches. I think that NWSL is a lot more compelling than MLS in a lot of ways and will only become more so as the women’s game grows stronger below the national level. And I want my kid to watch boys and girls play professionally. (I’ve written about that before so I won’t belabor it now.)

Here’s another thing about soccer matches: They last less than two hours. I love going to a baseball game, but they really can test your patience when they push four hours for no reason other than the pitcher being so busy rocking the baby or whatever those dudes are doing these days. Soccer? We can go on a Sunday late afternoon and it’s not like it wipes the day out.

This year there are 10 teams, Louisville being the newest entrant, and so they expanded the playoffs from 4 teams to 6. The final weekend, the Red Stars won - indeed they’d been on a winning streak - and with a couple other favorable results, they finished in fourth, earning a first round playoff game hosting Gotham.

We went, and it was a really tight affair, and the Red Stars were outplayed in the first half but it was scoreless at halftime. Then they started applying more pressure. At one point they got a corner kick. It was cleared out, but in the ensuing buildup, midfielder Morgan Gautrat made an aggressive move to intercept a pass, which sprung a rapid attack, leading to a Mallory Pugh shot from close distance. That was all they needed: Red Stars 1, Gotham 0. (This wound up being the final game for the great Carli Lloyd, who retired from the USWNT this year.)

At the beginning of the match when we sat in our seats, we were blinded by the sun. But across the field, there was almost nobody sitting on the shaded side. They hadn’t opened ticket sales for that side - the TV cameras face the sunny side - so one side was quite crowded, the other side almost empty, and we had our Red Stars hoodies with us so we were fine sitting in the cool shade, and so we just switched seats.

We were not in a hurry at the end of the match because our next destination was 15 minutes away and we had an hour to get there. So we dawdled. We’re good at dawdling.

A woman came up to us - a reporter! They still exist!

This reported was Alison Moran. She asked questions about whether we’d been to games before, what we thought, etc. She mentioned her paper, a name I didn’t actually recognize. Even took our picture. I thought, who knows, maybe we’ll be online this week. I figured I’d look later, or I’d just let the standing Google News search for my name return it. (There’s exactly one person alive with my name, so I may as well see what the newspapers are writing about me, no?)

Well, then I took the boy off to our next destination, and promptly forgot all about the reporter.

Warren Ellis is an Australian multi-instrumentalist, primarily a violinist, best known for being part of the Dirty Three, and in turn a member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. He’s been collaborating with Nick now for over 25 years.

I first saw the Dirty Three in 1995, opening for Pavement at The Rave in Milwaukee. Warren was an absolute heap of a man that night, rampaging through his instrument. Oh, he was clearly blasted on something, but who was I back then to guess what that might be? Nobody was paying much attention to the Dirty Three so my friend Dan and I did the only logical thing, and laid down on the floor, because that was clearly the most appropriate vantage point for watching this unhinged beast of a man violently attack his instrument.

Not long after that performance I got my hands on their self-titled album, and the next year I promptly got a copy of their followup Horse Stories. The Dirty Three being an all instrumental band was a particular novely back then - this arrived before even Mogwai - and them being Australian added to the overall mystique. There’s long been something particularly fascinating to me about the music coming out of Australia and New Zealand in particular.

Last month, Vish Khanna interviewed Warren for an episode of Kreative Kontrol, primarily to discuss his new book Nina Simone’s Gum, which is sort of but certainly not entirely about the night that he retrieved a wad of Nina Simone’s gum and then held on to it as a cherished possession. The interview wound up dwelling a great length on the subject of serendipity.

Serendipity is one of those wonderful words which I find to be oddly self-referential. I like the simple Oxford definition of “unplanned fortunate discovery”. The thing about discoveries is that they can happen over and over again. I actually find stumbling into a conversation about serendipity to itself be serendipitous. And there’s also just this very pleasant sound to the word.

Warren Ellis is a conjurer, his bow something akin to a wand. I’m not quite sure that he takes himself entirely seriously, nor do I believe anyone else should, and this indeed is part of the magic. The interview just seemed to be a wild trollop on its own. I can’t wait to get my hands on the book.

What I especially liked is how he seemed to stop short of either declaring the serendipitous to be acts of fate - or otherwise. He seemed to regard it all as merely part of a larger mystery. And this makes a lot of sense. If it were all fate or destiny then how serendipitous could it all be, really? And yet if it were all just random, that wouldn’t quite be right either. It’s something inbetween. Serendipity lives in that inbetween.

The Dirty Three live in that inbetween as well. I’ve watched a lot of these things over time and is this not the most mysterious Tiny Desk Concert of them all:

To me, Creation isn’t fate. Or, maybe it is. But Creation is the mystery.

Riverside Township Hall is exactly as advertised: It is the building where the government offices for the Village of Riverside and Riverside Township can be found.

I found Dirk Fletcher’s exhibit on the walls of a short corridor toward the back. But before I got there, I took stock around me, of a couple of rooms where some sort of government transactions seemed to be occurring, and then of a bench, upon which there appeared to be a stack of newspapers. I looked and the picture at the top was from the Red Stars match. I picked it up, and, well, here’s the cover of the November 11, 2021 edition of the Desplaines Valley News:

Yeah, that’s me and the goof on the front page.

Was he impressed when he came home from school that day and I showed him on the front page of a newspaper? Of course not. He barely knew what it was! He’s eight and this is 2021! And whenever anything happens in his world, he just seems to figure, that’s what happens!

Wednesday afternoon, my wife saw on Facebook that there will be a Nick Cave and Warren Ellis tour of North America in the spring. (If you watched the Tiny Desk Concert shared above, Warren was advising people to get off of Facebook… back in 2012.)

We got our tickets today.

Later last Friday, we piled in the car and drove off for the ancestral motherland. You might call it P-town. At one point hunger was declared, distances were evaluated, a right turn was had. We found a surprisingly good Neapolitan pizzeria in Ottawa, then followed the map instructions on the most direct route from there to Peoria.

It was along that route, just south of Lacon, when I saw the deer. Alas, I either saw it a split-second too late, or a full second too early, and although I almost had us at a complete stop, he ran into the car. The car got beat up, the driver’s side mirror was ripped off, the windshield cracked. But we could drive, and the deer, although injured, was able to run off.

We figured this would probably dash the plans for the weekend following. No, the deer was not an agent of serendipity.

We got home Sunday after a grueling drive, bad crosswinds, a heavily duct-taped mirror reattached, a broken windshield… ugh. Made it home at about 4:30, which so happened to be just in time for the NWSL semifinals. The Red Stars were on the road in Portland, the Thorns having finished the regular season in first place. A lot of the Red Stars were out. It didn’t look good.

And oh, they looked overmatched early. And then Kealia Watt got hurt. And then… Katie Johnson scored an absolutely shocking goal from a ridiculous angle, and the Red Stars went on to win 2-0.

And by the end of that, well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say I took it as a sign, but I figured, ahhh, let’s just go for it anyway.

So this Saturday, down in Louisville, we’ll be in the stands for the NWSL Championship between the Red Stars and the Washington Spirit, wearing the same hoodies as seen on the front page.

We’d talked about going to Louisville for the weekend before, mostly to see family, with the match a potential tack-on, but it didn’t seem all that likely the Red Stars would get that far given all of the injuries and illnesses and such. But they’ll be in Louisville, and so will we, and maybe it doesn’t make sense, but, I don’t think I’d have wrapped my mind back around and said let’s just go, if not for the newspaper.

And I’d have forgotten all about the newspaper if I hadn’t been at Riverside Township Hall the day after it came out.

And I’d never before been, and likely never again will be, in Riverside Township Hall, but I was there because I was intrigued by seeing a small exhibit of photos of Lustron houses.

Thank you, Katie Johnson!

Thank you, Alison Moran!

Thank you, Dirk Fletcher!

Thank you, Lustron Corporation!

Thank you, Warren Ellis!

And apologies for Warren’s foul language, but I really must leave you with this: