Welcome to all of the members of the Illinois law enforcement community.
And don't forget, glue is powerful stuff!
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If this is your first time, I hope you enjoy Highly Transmissible, a daily newsletter about what to watch during quarantine.
We started the quarantine off with plenty of hand sanitizer. A little rooting through our closet turned out a half dozen of those little travel size containers of Purell, which we had purchased on various trips over the years. We used our last drop this past Friday morning after leaving the grocery store. Like a becalmed ship’s captain watching the supply of fresh water dwindle day after day, we’d been watching our supply of hand sanitizer drop for weeks.
Every time we entered a store, we checked for sanitizer. We scoured all the online marketplaces. We avoided panicking, because what are you going to do? Nothing. There’s nothing you can do. Just conserve it and hope something changes. The headlines talking about small batch distilleries switching to hand sanitizer production were everywhere. (Of course, the FDA did decide to muck around with the process to make it as difficult as possible for distilleries to switch over, but that’s an axe to grind another time.) The stuff is being made by the vat full, only none of it was making it to us.
Until today. We ventured out to replenish our supply of wine and procure a fresh baguette from a local patisserie that miraculously reopened, and there, in the window of a bodega, was a sign saying they had hand sanitizer. It’s a South Korean brand called Zetta Gel that I’ve never seen before, and one pump bottle costs $18.99 (talk about liquid gold), but we can return to destroying our hands with 62% alcohol solution every time we go to the grocery store. Hell yes, the bodega has everything, always. Forget Amazon, your friendly neighborhood corner store has got you covered.
So let’s all raise a glass (not of hand sanitizer, of course) to the global supply chain! Here’s to the South Korean factory workers, the sailors, the stevedores, the truck drivers and the bodega owners who are keeping our hands clean and our days happy. Three cheers for all of the unseen links in the chain, the cogs in the machinery of global commerce that are keeping us safe.
Today’s Film: The Blues Brothers (1980)
The Blues Brothers, written by Dan Aykroyd and director John Landis, makes comedy gold out of the most melancholy of American musical traditions. Joliet Jake and Elwood Blues are two brothers, played respectively by John Belushi and Aykroyd, who share a criminal persuasion and a love of music. When Jake gets out of jail and they learn that the nuns who run the Chicago orphanage where they grew up are going to be bankrupted by overdue taxes, the Blues Brothers set out on a mission from god—to put their band back together and bailout the sisters along the way.
The movie is a nonstop dash through Chicago and features perhaps the best soundtrack in movie history. Rhythm and blues greats including James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan, John Lee Hooker, Ray Charles and Cab Calloway star opposite the two comedians, and lend the film a strange sort of verisimilitude that conflicts with madcap hijinks involving the Illinois Nazis, a country western band, lots of crashed cars, and Carrie Fisher playing a deranged ex-girlfriend with a bazooka.
The heart and soul of The Blues Brothers, though, are Belushi and Aykroyd. Their energy and joy in the roles are infectious, and they dive into dance routines with such vim and vigor that it almost feels like they’re the leaders of a real band. And in a way, they were: The Blues Brothers started as a sketch for Saturday Night Live in 1978, and they subsequently formed a real band that released 19 albums from 1978 to 2017, despite Belushi’s death in 1982 (he only appeared in two more films after The Blues Brothers, and neither had that film’s frenetic energy).
So if you need a good laugh, a pick-me-up, or merely a reminder of what it’s like to be in a club when a band comes on and lights the place up, why not spend a couple of hours in the Windy City with its two most famous sons, Jake and Elwood. Just remember to put on your sunglasses.
The Blues Brothers is streaming on Hulu.
Reading List:
Columnist Barry Ritholtz has a provocative feature in Bloomberg about what it will take for the U.S. to turn around the economy. He argues for massive reinvestment and real public/private partnerships, rather than financial engineering.
Madelein Kripke, who amassed one of the world’s largest collections of dictionaries in her Greenwich Village apartment, has passed away. She was a classic New Yorker, and The Times has a moving obituary.
I’d also like to add a note of thanks and sadness for Dr. McKenzie “Mac” Lewis, who passed away recently of complications from pneumonia. He taught Classics, was the director of the archaeological dig at Villa de Vergigno and was a professor at the Centro in Rome when we studied there. Mac was always ready with a joke and a smile, and was a caring teacher. He will be missed.
Benjamin Reeves is an award-winning screenwriter, journalist and media consultant based in Brooklyn, New York. Follow him on Twitter @bpreeves or write to him at breeves.writer@gmail.com.