Bean there, done that

Those protesting on behalf of a man allegedly held hostage inside the Cloud Gate sculpture in Millennium Park are clearly echoing the "Birds Aren't Real" movement

8-21-2025 (issue No. 206)

This week:

• The Man in Bean liberation movement is sharp satire and keen performance art

• Last week’s winning quip

• News and Views — Hot takes, fully baked

• That’s so Brandon! — Updates on the misadventures of Chicago’s maladroit mayor, whose approval ratings have quadrupled!

• Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go

• Squaring up the news — Where Charlie Meyerson tells readers where to go

• Cate Plys — Down a Chicago history rabbit hole to find echoes of the past

• A graphic to show why gerrymandering is so insidious

• Media notes — The Trib’s Michael Phillips takes a buyout as the paper eliminates the position of movie critic

• Quotables — A collection of compelling, sometimes appalling passages I’ve encountered lately

• Quips — The winning visual jokes and this week’s contest finalists

• What’s on “The Mincing Rascals” podcast this week

• Good Sports — Have mercy on us duffers!

• Green Light — A recommendation for a countryfied, slowed-down rendition of “I’m a Believer”

I will be chatting with WCPT-AM 820 host Joan Esposito today, Thursday, at 3:30 p.m.

Birdbrain protesters are demanding the release of a man they say has been trapped inside “The Bean” since 2004

About a dozen protesters have been rallying at Cloud Gate, the iconic Millennium Park sculpture known informally as “The Bean,” and chanting, “Hey hey, ho ho, Anish Kapoor, let him go.”

Kapoor is the sculptor behind the Bean, and the contention of the protesters is that he stole a baby 21 years ago and locked the child into the 66-foot-long, 33-foot-high legume of polished stainless steel.

ArtNet:

The group’s pamphlets described a man “living in complete isolation” behind a one-way mirror, with “air and food vents that sustain a meager and desolate life within the chrome.” They even claimed that “when the sun hits the Bean just right, you can see a faint outline of the man,” and that construction projects that closed the plaza at various points over the years were “covert operations by Anish Kapoor to supply the man in the Bean with rations.”

from https://www.instagram.com/maninbean/

The point of these plainly satirical protests strikes me as similar to the point behind the “Birds Aren’t Real” movement in which leaders earnestly contend that all actual birds are dead and the birds we see today are government surveillance drones.

Both cleverly mock bonkers conspiracy theories such as those promoted by the QAnon movement of right-wing nutcases, just as the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster satirizes religion by advancing absurd but irrefutable assertions.

The Man in Bean Coalition surfaced on the first day of Lollapalooza on July 31 and has amassed more than 37,000 followers on Instagram. Its flyers urged supporters to contact Ald. Brendan Reilly, 42nd, and demand freedom for the man. Reilly, who told the Sun-Times that his office was hit with “about 200 emails and phone calls” asking him to take action, issued a whimsical statement of his own:

I am happy to confirm that a man has not been trapped inside “Cloud Gate” (a.k.a “The Bean”) for the past 21 years. In fact, the man was freed years ago. Further, we can neither confirm nor deny that Soldier Field is actually a flying saucer secretly relocated from Area 51 back in 2003.

Satire is a powerful weapon, as I wrote in Tuesday’s post “When Trump goes low, Gavin Newsom goes lower, and it's delightful!” It tends to draw a wider and more appreciative audience than invective, as laughing at someone tends to hurt more than yelling at them.

Last week’s winning quip

I accidentally passed my wife a glue stick instead of her lipstick. She’s still not talking to me. — unknown

Here are this week’s nominees and the winner of the Tuesday visual-jokes poll. Here is the direct link to the new poll.

News & Views

News: “The conservative network Newsmax will pay $67 million to settle a lawsuit accusing it of defaming a voting equipment company by spreading lies about President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.”

View: Well, it pales next to the $787 million Fox News had to pay on a similar claim, but I’m glad to see more punishment being meted out to this dishonest sore losers blindly trying to curry favor with their Dear Leader.

News: “Developer Sterling Bay has put up for sale the only building it completed at the massive Lincoln Yards site on Chicago’s North Side” while “Bally’s Chicago completes its $250M IPO, falls short of fundraising target.”

View: I’m still not sure which project history will be judged to be the greater disappointment, Lincoln Yards or the Bally’s casino complex, which recently sold only a quarter of the 10,000 Class A shares made available to the public.

News: 5th District Democratic U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley of Chicago tells Mary Ann Ahern that he’s “leaving the door open” for a run for mayor.

View: He won’t run. He’s passed on previous chances, and the job has gotten much tougher in recent years.

News: Ignorance is state Sen. Napoleon Harris’ excuse for misusing campaign funds.

View: Harris must not have paid any attention to the Jesse Jackson Jr. story. From the Sun-Times:

A year after the Chicago Sun-Times reported state Sen. Napoleon Harris appeared to be using his main campaign fund as a personal piggy bank — spending thousands of dollars on high-end department stores, swanky hotels and luxury car dealers — he’s preparing to pay back at least $20,000 to cover expenses that shouldn’t have been made from the fund. …

The reimbursements are likely to include money Friends of Napoleon Harris paid over the last few years to a private school in northwest Indiana that at least one of Harris’ children apparently attended, and likely some vehicle and clothing expenses. … Harris’ campaign fund spent $2,257.50 four days before Christmas in 2020 at the Neiman Marcus store in Oak Brook on “clothing and supplies.” Another $1,452.08 was spent at the Chicago Nordstrom at 55 E. Grand Ave. in November 2022, though the expenditure didn’t list a “purpose” as required by election rules.

Jackson famously went to prison for similar, though far more flagrant, violations of laws that require campaign funds be spent for political purposes.. His attorney said Harris “had been handling the campaign’s finances and did not understand all of the restrictions.”

News: Fact-checkers point out that 34 countries use mail-in voting, contrary to President Donald Trump’s assertion that “we are now the only country in the world that uses mail-in voting."

View: It’s no surprise to me that Trump lies and lies and lies. It’s predictable. Yet I do remain surprised that so many of those who support him — who fly into a rage when Democrats stretch the truth — shrug off Trump’s compulsive, flagrant mendacity.

That’s So Brandon!

Updates on the misadventures of Chicago’s mayor

Johnson’s approval ratings have quadrupled!

A poll released in February by M3 Strategies found Mayor Brandon Johnson’s approval rating at an astonishingly dismal 6.6%. But last week came a poll from the the University of Chicago Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation showing MBJ’s approval rating at 26%. Even assuming that the earlier poll was an outlier, Team Johnson has to be encouraged by the apparent direction of his approval numbers, dismal though they still are (and similar though they are to a year ago).

The multiple budget crises he’s facing — the city, the schools, mass transit — are not reflecting well on his leadership. And in “Inside Brandon Johnson’s shakedown of Chicago Public Schools,” Last Ward Substacker Austin Berg writes of Johnson’s effort to have Chicago Public Schools make a pension payment that the city is legally obligated to make:

Johnson clearly doesn’t see financial harm (to the schools) as a downside. In fact, the mayor’s team and (the Chicago Teachers Union) believe further financial distress at CPS gives them leverage to demand more money from Springfield — akin to setting your house on fire in hopes of collecting an insurance payout.

Macquline King, the interim CPS CEO appointed by Johnson, reportedly opposes the borrowing plan, and “elected board member Jessica Biggs of the South Side’s District 6 said the way the board acts now could affect the state’s willingness to collaborate on funding solutions. ‘We’ve heard the state express that they really are interested in seeing some long-term reform before they come to the district’s aid,’ she said.”

Begging and shaming ain’t going to work.

Land of Linkin’

• Wide World of Sports: Watch highlights of the performance of world yo-yo champion Hajime Miura and a brisk game of “Einkaufswagen parken” (shopping cart parking), a bowling-like competition in which contestants on a German TV game show try to roll grocery carts into the corral.

• MeidasTouch network interview with Gavin Newsom (YouTube)

• Flashback to when Neil Steinberg came clean at last.

• Axios: “Eight of the top 10 cities with the highest murder rates and populations of at least 100,000 were in red states — Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri, Tennessee, Ohio and Louisiana, Axios found.” But the only cities President Donald Trump bleats about when it comes to crime are in blue states.

• MS SMH: In which I take a dim view of MSNBC’s new rebrand.

• The best NFL commercial ever? (Here is a key to who’s who in the wild rumpus.)

• The Federal Trade Commission is suing LA Fitness and its subsidiaries for “opaque, complicated, and demanding” policies related to canceling gym memberships.

• Politico explains why Brazil ain’t budging in response to the tariffs that Donald Trump wants to impose on the nation in defense of his right-wing authoritarian buddy Jair Bolsonaro.

Squaring up the news

This is a bonus supplement to the Land of Linkin’ from veteran radio, internet and newspaper journalist Charlie Meyerson. Each week, he offers a selection of intriguing links from his daily email news briefing Chicago Public Square. This week’s selection is far shorter than usual because Meyerson’s on vacation, and I snagged a few links from last Thursday and Friday I thought you might find interesting:

■ “A browser that actually does your work for you.” Neuron’s impressed by a new artificially intelligent web browser, Comet. Reviewer Corey Noles: “Search becomes conversation, and conversation becomes action.”

■ Weird Al, interrupted. In the face of Trump’s power grab at the Smithsonian, Weird Al Yankovic has put on hold his plans to donate memorabilia to the institution.

■ For the first time in years, Pulitzer-winning columnist Dave Barry brings back “Mister Language Person … the only leading grammar authority to have been recognized by both Walmart and the American Society of English Teachers on Drugs.”

■ Beware those bugs. Chicago’s Department of Public Health has upped the risk of catching the mosquito-borne West Nile virus to “high.”

■ The Reader’s Leor Galil argues that it’s “Time to dump Spotify.”

You can (and should) subscribe to Chicago Public Square free here.

Cate Plys: What went around is coming around again

Chicago journalist and historian Cate Plys — a member of the “Mincing Rascals” podcast team — goes deep in her Substack “Roseland, Chicago: 1972.” Here’s the latest from her:

Every 221 years, a massive onslaught of cicadas hits Chicago when two separate broods synch their schedules and emerge simultaneously—the 13-year variety and their 17-year buddies.

And every 50 years, the Bears threaten to move to Arlington Heights while a top Illinois politician threatens to redraw the state’s Congressional districts mid-decade.

What’s that? You don’t remember the last time, in 1975?

Click the link and pull up a chair. The details are just as loud and ugly as the cicadas, but thankfully less crunchy under your feet.

Last century’s Bears/redistricting convergence is also more fun than the 2025 version, because it features the real Mayor Daley in both onslaughts instead of Gov. Pritzker and Mayor Johnson. Younger readers, this is the Chicago history equivalent of “It stars Brad Pitt.”

Picture a Chicago mayor who (nearly) decides when the state of Illinois will hold its primaries. A mayor who draws a new Congressional district map all by himself in the middle of a decade and pushes it into the Illinois legislature. Who tells U.S. representatives where to move so they’ll live in the district where he says they belong.

Yep, it all happened. Mayor Daley drew his own map in 1975 because, he said, the 1971 map was a “Chinese Wall” built by Republicans around Chicago to throttle city representation. That whole romp lasted about two months and featured a cameo from future Mayor Jane Byrne.

In the end, Mayor Daley lost his map battle when downstate Illinois Rep. Clyde Choate popped up to collect on some sweet, cold vengeance. He’s practically straight out of Dudley Doright.

See, Clyde Choate figured he’d make Speaker of the House when the Democrats won a majority in 1974. Mayor Daley backed Choate, but Daley’s nemesis, Gov. Dan Walker, backed his own candidate. After a week of tense unsuccessful voting, Daley and Walker agreed on a bland compromise candidate.

Flash forward a year later to the Daley remap vote. Choate controlled over 17 House votes, and he saw a way to screw Daley and Walker at the same time by killing the map — because Walker privately wanted Daley’s map to pass, so he could veto it and score big points with anti-Daley liberals. The political night is dark and full of terrors.

At the exact same time that spring, the Bears tried dumping Chicago for Arlington Heights, planning for a 80,000-seat stadium situated on the race track grounds — if they could get the village to pay for it.

Papa Bear Halas pulled an uncharacteristically squirrely move by holding a “hastily called press conference” while Mayor Daley was out of town on vacation in the Florida Keys. Like today’s Bears, the 1975 team insisted their stadium had to happen within months or it would all fall apart — Arlington Heights needed to approve the stadium and issue $30 million of bonds so the Bears could start building by October.

When Mayor Daley got back, he wasn’t having it. The “performance,” wrote Mike Royko, was “done in living color, mostly blotchy, angry red.”

And this time, as we know, Mayor Daley got his way.

A simple illustration of how gerrymandering can skew the will of the people

Variations of this graphic are common online and illustrate the basic idea behind how partisans can turn numerical disadvantages into electoral success — something that’s gotten much easier with computerized analysis of precinct-level voting patterns.

Media notes

Tribune eliminates the position of local movie critic, so Michael Phillips is moving on.

The editors gave Phillips a valedictory column (gift link), which posted online Wednesday afternoon.

The Tribune has eliminated the position of film critic, as part of a newsroom reorganization. This leaves me with two options: stick around for reassignment or take a buyout. I’m voting buyout. I’m opting in for opting out. … The Tribune has been good to me. They took a chance on me back in 2002 and I’m grateful. The place has brought me so much to love in this city. Plus the paper underwrote 10 trips to the Cannes Film Festival, with my name on the festival badge, once upon a time. … From here, I’ll continue to show up on the long-running “Filmspotting” podcast, broadcast on WBEZ-FM, whenever the hosts Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen see fit. Over on Classical WFMT, I’ll continue my weekly segments for the film music program “Soundtrack,” which I adore. Next month I plan to begin my 11th year as advisor and mentor of the University of Illinois College of Media Roger Ebert Fellowship, which is the grad school I never knew but now I know.

This is a loss for readers — Phillips is a thoughtful and entertaining analyst whose reviews are useful even for those of us who tend to wait for movies to be available on the stream.

I understand why a newspaper needing to trim expenses while focusing on its core mission would turn to the newswires or syndicated material for content that is national in scope. The thinking is similar to the thinking that went into the Tribune eliminating all its foreign and domestic reporting bureaus earlier this century. The pre-online days when readers had to rely on their local newspaper for reviews of movies opening nationwide are long gone.

I have no idea what the Tribune balance sheet looks like to the owners at Alden Global Capital or what their market research is telling them, so I can’t say whether the recent layoffs and the elimination of Phillips’ position were sound business decisions or further examples of Alden’s vulturous greed. I do know that the Sun-Times has shown no inclination to replace film critic Richard Roeper, who took a buyout in March, which suggests that the move is an ominous sign of the times.

My 42% solution

A postcard arrived Monday telling me that the Tribune was hiking my subscription price by 42% — from $29.12 for 13 weeks of digital access to $41.47. Though I wouldn’t mind paying a bit more than $160 a year to support the newspaper, I am so damn tired of their sneaky, predatory subscription pricing practices that I called customer service — 312-546-7900 — to ask to keep the old price. Inflation is not (yet) 42%, so what’s the justification?

“That promotion has ended,” the operator told me.

Bullshit.

Online, the paper is offering new subscribers $25.87 for a 13-week subscription identical to mine. My threat to cancel was real — I’ll never go without the Tribune, but I will quit and then quickly resubscribe — and the operator put me on hold for several minutes before returning with the news that I could keep paying $29.12.

Sun-Times/WBEZ gets a new editor-in-chief

News release:

Kimbriell Kelly will become the organization’s editor-in-chief, effective September 2. Kelly, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and newsroom leader, will oversee the integrated Chicago Public Media editorial team, which includes WBEZ, Vocalo and the Chicago Sun-Times.

Kelly replaces Jennifer Kho, who became executive editor of the Sun-Times in mid-2022, and will be “starting a partnership with Chicago Public Media on a project about the future of public media.”

Kelly was the editor and publisher of the Chicago Reporter before decamping for the Washington Post in 2012, where she was on a team that won the Pulitzer Prize, and then to the Los Angeles Times in 2019. I appeared on a couple of media panels with Kelly in the old days and was very impressed with her. I’m looking forward to seeing how she handles a very challenging assignment.

The Athletic hires Bears beat writer away from the Tribune

Former Trib veteran Dan Wiederer has left the paper to become a senior writer for the Athletic, New York Times’ sports site, where he will again be covering the Bears.

Foundations are committing $36.5 Million to boost threatened public media outlets

The MacArthur foundation announced Monday that grants from a coalition of philanthropic organizations will target “the most vulnerable stations—particularly those in communities where public media is the sole source of local information,” and noted that “some 115 stations—serving 43 million people—are losing more than 30 percent of their budgets.”

Unfortunately it will put only a small dent in the $1.1 billion in funding recently yanked back from the Corporation for Public Broadcast.

Quotables

A collection of compelling, sometimes appalling passages I’ve encountered lately

There’s a good chance that (E.J.) Antoni will, in fact, take over the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the result will be the total destruction of one of the world’s greatest statistical agencies — an agency that has, among other things, been a crucial aid to business decision-making. It won’t even matter whether the Trumpists cook the books (although they will.) For from the moment Antoni takes full control, nobody will believe any numbers coming out of BLS. — Paul Krugman

Russia has promised — in 1994, in the 2000s, in the 2010s — that it would not violate Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. And it has violated all of those promises and invaded and killed tens of thousands of people, wounded many more, destroyed or disrupted the lives of millions of Ukrainians. And so there’s no reason why the Ukrainians would be willing to take the Russian government at its word. — Tim Mak, a journalist in Ukraine

Trump: People shouldn’t learn about slavery. Also Trump: We’re reinstalling these monuments of confederate generals who fought to preserve slavery. — OhNoSheTwitn’t

People who want to protect "The Sanctity of Marriage" are always people who voted for a man who raped his first wife, deserted his family of three young children to run off with one of his mistresses, deserted her and their child for another mistress, and then cheated on her with a porn actress. — Betty Bowers

Trump sending the National Guard into Los Angeles was not about immigration or riots. Trump sending the National Guard into Washington, D.C., and federalizing the police was not about crime. His attacks on Harvard and other universities are not about antisemitism. Firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics head is not because they released bad data. There are no immigrants eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio. There wasn't any spigot of water to turn on during the L.A. fires. USAID was not a corrupt criminal organization funneling money to Democrats. This is all about Donald Trump capturing every single aspect of our government, our culture and our society. It is an authoritarian power grab happening before our eyes, and nothing more. So wake the F up. — The Meidas Touch Podcast, 8-15-25

As you get older, all those dumb clichés, they're all true. You only have a certain amount of time left, and you should only spend it doing the things that you want to do. — Rob Reiner

I will never stop until we keep a con man from taking over the party of Reagan and the conservative movement. (Donald Trump is) a con man. … He's telling people, “I'm going to fight for the little guy. I'm fighting for the working class.” Here's what he doesn't tell them: He has spent a career in business — 50 years —sticking it to the little guy. When his companies went bankrupt, the first people who didn't get paid were the subcontractors — the plumbers and the pipefitters and the people who laid bricks and all those people who work for a living. — Marco Rubio, February 2016

Any time you hear political people talk about their own secret polling, it’s like when the guy says his girlfriend is real but just goes to another school. — Gregory Royal Pratt

There is nothing in our political history to compare with the evangelicals’ devotion to Trump. … Nothing will break their support. … Anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of evangelicals knows that we’ve always been susceptible to the sensational, spectacular, and, frankly, the simply unbelievable. Trump knows how to use our collective gullibility for his benefit. … Evangelicals have a long history of falling in line when presented with charlatans and manipulative, vainglorious narcissists masquerading as saviors. … Their bond (with Trump) cannot be loosened by outside forces — not by reports of a souring economy, not by videos of shrieking moms being separated from their children by masked ICE agents, not even by the call of Christianity Today magazine to release the full Epstein files. — Evangelical Christian minister Rob Schenck

You have eliminated healthcare and food assistance for our families; unlawfully cancelled grants for our schools and roads; slashed funding for our universities, hospitals, and research institutions; and deployed military personnel to occupy our streets. These attacks all come back to a common aim: The Trump administration seeks to divide, isolate, and intimidate our cities, and make Americans fearful of one another. — Boston Mayor Michelle Wu in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi

Quips

In Tuesday’s paid-subscriber editions, I present my favorite tweets that rely on visual humor. Subscribers then vote for their favorite. Here is the winner from this week’s contest:

The new nominees for Quip of the Week:

• Does the word “efficiency” really need both of those 'f's? — @garwboy.bsky.social

• Whoever said bad things come in threes clearly couldn't count beyond three. — @wildethingy

• Imagine committing felony breaking and entering just to steal three bowls of porridge and take a nap. — @stevesuckington.bsky.social‬

• It was said that Fast Luke had the quickest hand in the Old West. Too bad everyone else used guns. Luke's final words reportedly were "Pew! Pew!" — @granttanaka.bsky.social‬

• I’m making a list of feats to perform that I think will impress people. I call it my "Tada List." — @WilliamAder

• I’ve just been camping for the first time in my life, and I have some valuable camping advice: Take everything with you. Everything in your house. Take your whole house with you and live in it. Live inside your house, at home. Stay at home, living in your house with everything in your house. — @cyriak.bsky.social

• I can’t wait to stop complaining about the hot weather and start complaining about the cold weather. — @nayele18maybe

• No matter what’s going on in your life, there’s some form of potato that can make it better. — @Camel_Crushin

• If you say “itch” when you mean “scratch.” I won't correct you, but my esteem for you will be irrevocably diminished. — @jackboot.bsky.social‬

• Whatever you do, always give 100%, unless you are donating blood. — @dexteristwisted

Vote here and check the current results in the poll.

For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Why “quips”? See “I’m rebranding ‘Tweet of the Week’ in a gesture of contempt for Elon Musk.” Also, I’m finding good stuff on BlueSky now as well.

Minced Words

Austin Berg, Marj Halperin and I joined host John Williams on this week’s episode of “The Mincing Rascals” podcast, which started off with a long conversation about alternative publishing platforms and Substack as a possible home for now former Tribune movie critic Michael Phillips. We went on to talk about the possibility of speed cameras on Lake Shore Drive, school finances, and other stories in the local and national news.

Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.

Read the background bios of some regular panelists here.

Good Sports

Memo to golf course designers: Stop inflicting unnecessary pain onto duffers!

High handicap golfers like me know the pain of what I refer to as “you suck” sand traps and water hazards — obstacles in the fairway that are of no concern whatsoever to good golfers but seem designed to ensnare and frustrate those who are already struggling.

A bunker on a par four that’s 120 yards from the tee, for instance. Or a pond that ends 60 yards short of the green. Perhaps an overgrown gully just in front of the tee box that requires a 150-yard carry. Why? To remind us that life is stern and life is earnest?

At its best, golf is a constant risk/reward calculation. Lay up or go for it? Try to cut the corner or leave it safely wide? The game should punish the foolhardy, not the feckless (who are already punished enough on the course).

More bad news for White Sox fans

For a while, it looked as though the 2025 Colorado Rockies were going to end up with a worse record than the 2024 White Sox, the team that set the record for most losses in a MLB season (121). That now seems highly unlikely. After reeling off four straight victories last week and with 35 games left on the schedule, the 37-90 Rockies need just 5 more wins to avoid a date with ignominy. They’re all but sure to get those wins, so I’m discontinuing this feature for now.

This permanent link explains the general situation in greater detail.

DePaul’s men’s basketball games will no longer be heard on terrestrial radio

The Blue Demons used to be on The Score, but starting next season will be available only on SiriusXM and the school’s app. This is not surprising to me. DePaul has been dismal these last few years, and basketball on the radio has never been a great experience.

Green Light

Green Light features recommendations from me and readers not only of songs — as in the former Tune of the Week post — but also of TV shows, streaming movies, books, podcasts and other diversions that can be enjoyed at home — i.e., no restaurants, plays, theatrical films, tourist sites and so on. Email me your nominations, and please include a paragraph or two of explanation and background along with helpful links, perhaps including excerpts from reviews or background articles. For TV shows, please include links to trailers/previews on YouTube and advice on where to stream them.

This slow, countryfied cover of the Monkees’ hit “I’m a Believer” by AJ Lee & Blue Summit had me at the first chorus:

They are performing at the Old Town School of Folk Music in two weeks — Sept. 4 — and I was highly tempted to feature their cover of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” as it better features the vocal stylings of Lee, one of the few Asian American women in bluegrass.

From the band’s website:

AJ Lee & Blue Summit are an award-winning energetic, charming, and technically jaw-dropping band quickly rising on the national roots music scene. Based in Santa Cruz, California, the group met as teenagers, picking and jamming together as kids at local music festivals and jams until one day, they decided they would be a band. … (They) seem unconcerned with mimicking hugely successful jamgrass bands, or making competitive and performatively intellectual new acoustic music, or wishing to establish themselves as the superlative string band in their bluegrass, old-time, and Americana communities. Instead, they’re most interested in discovering themselves, their own music, and sonics and textures truly their own.

Info

Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above. Paid subscribers receive each Picayune Plus in their email inbox each Tuesday, are part of our civil and productive commenting community and enjoy the sublime satisfaction of supporting this enterprise. Browse and search back issues here.

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