the perfect mango & the most eclectic list

There is no connection between my two topics today. My favourite thing today was a perfect mango that Imelda brought us. There is something about mangos: they slice beautifully, they are so spectacularly orange, they have a complex surprising flavour that changes closer to the skin and closer to the pit, they smell tangy, but most of all their texture is perfect. Something for all the senses. (Shortly after I moved to Ottawa, Erin M wrote and produced a play entitled The Perfect Mango that she put on for about 20 guests. We all sat on the floor in the small space of an art gallery that she'd also started and ever since then I can't experience a perfect mango without also thinking of Erin.)

You have to love the sheer exuberance of Bill's contribution to the 5 things list. I'm including about half of it here: "My problem, being excessive, is giving you a paltry five favorite things. I want to give you a thousand spots to see in my favorite city, and then move on to 5 poems (or a hundred), 5 songs (or a concert), 5 Chicago inflected films ( Ferris Bueller, Blues Brothers, Barbershop, The Fugitive, Chicago, the musical), 5 rockers, 5 novels (Sister Carrie, Native Son, Hard Times, Man With a Golden Arm, Nowhere Man), 5 films, 5 restaurants (Nueva Leone, Al's #1 Italian Beef, Carnitas Michuacan, Harold's, Ribs n Bibs), 5 Chicago writers (Brooks, Cisneros, Wright, Algren, Hansbury), 5 singers, 5 geniuses, 5 legends, 5 heroes, 5 saints and 5 demons. I want to set up special tours for folks beyond the great ones (Architecture, Blues, Gangland) already in existence: Immigrant Chicago, Civil Rights Chicago, Labor Chicago, Underground Chicago, Literary Chicago, Chicago Sports and Games (Montrose Harbor!), Chicago Faith, Chicago Avenues, Chicago Murals, Public Art, Chicago Museums, Chicago Theater, Dumpsters to Dive Into, Halsted Street from the Stockyards to the Shipyards, Chicago Cemeteries (including the graves of Emma Goldman and the martyrs), the Lakefront, Bronzeville, Haymarket Square and the statue, Malcolm X's home behind the Hon. Elijah Muhammad's residence, Hull House, Cook County Hospital, West Madison and the site of Fred Hampton's assassination, and more more more!

I want five essays about social justice, peace and love, novels, poems, people’s histories, memoir and autobiography, plays and film and painting, and the best songs and musicals. I want the classics—where would we be without Marx and Gramsci and Luxemburg?—and the newest stuff too, like Klein and Lebowitz. I want fighters like Che and Tanya and Malcolm and Emma Goldman and Ella and Cabral, and thinkers like DuBois and de Beauvoir and CLR James and Eqbal Ahmed and Edward Said and Freire, and then I want Dylan and Simone and Brooks and Ginsberg. I want manuals and instruction and how-to books, but I want inspiration as well. And, of course, every issue thoroughly covered from every angle: war and peace and empire, the destruction of Mother Earth and the utter madness of capitalism, oppression and exploitation in its endless forms, awakening and resistance and liberation in all its mighty creativity, the dance of the dialectic as it plays in a single life and through all time. I immediately want to assemble a reader with short stuff from every one of my all-time favorites.