Meeting Mayor Emanuel(s)
Meeting my Heroes is an occasional essay series from Matt Carmichael.
On the power of creating and community and making “good nights…”
In the history of Twitter, two things stand out to me as the best uses of the platform. These are two instances of people who took advantage of its strengths and did something unique and special. Oddly, I know both dudes involved in these very different uses and both turned their use cases into books. The first is Andy Carvin, whom I’ve name-checked here before. He’s a friend from college, another of the amazing people who lived in Willard’s room 121 at some point. While working at NPR, he used Twitter to report on the mid-East uprising known as Arab Spring. Using the platform to find (and fact check!) on-the-ground sources, he quarterbacked coverage in real-time, and at great personal cost. You can read about it in his book, Distant Witness. Andy probably merits his own post here, but I do find it odd to write about people I actually know well. He’s since gone on to do heroes work with one of the great challenges of our time: fighting disinformation, which I interviewed him about for What the Future.
But today I want to tell the story of the other guy, Dan Sinker. Dan is a Chicago journalist, muck raker, punk chronicler, zine publisher, educator, genre-bender, the Candle King of Kickstarter, and (and this is how I met him) dad. When Rahm Emanuel began his quest to be Chicago’s Mayor, Dan started a Twitter feed called @mayoremanuel. Except no one knew who was behind it at the time. It chronicled a parallel universe to Rahm’s actual campaign. There were amazing characters developed like a campaign sidekick duck named Quaxelrod (a nod to Rahm advisor David Axelrod). There were otherworldly plot arcs. People around town, including Rahm himself, speculated about who was behind it, but everyone was talking about the feed and had alerts set up on their phones to let them know when new posts dropped.
It’s hard to explain how amazingly epic this story was, and all done when Twitter still had its 140-character limit. It made a small corner of the world a better place for a brief moment in time.
The story built to a Sopranos-style crescendo on election night. It a night that was apocalyptic in so many ways including the Thunder Snow blanketing the city.
After the election, Rahm offered $5,000 to the charity of @mayoremanuel’s choice if he would come forward. Dan Sinker couldn’t refuse that and the two met up on WLS. Dan donated it (it was upped to $12,000 I think with some matching donations) to Young Chicago Authors, and its program Louder than Bombs, a non-profit that supported teen poets.
All of this also got pulled into a book. Twitter founder Biz Stone wrote a forward to it.
I went to the book launch party at Chicago’s legendary Hideout. It was a crazy mix of people. John Tolva, then the CTO for the City of Chicago DJd. Oh, over there is Harper Reed and a bunch of folks from Obama’s campaign tech team. Hey, Cook County commish John Fritchey, how ya doin’
Dan read from the book of course. Kids from Louder than Bombs read their poetry. But there were two special guests who kind of stole the show.
One was Rahm Emanuel, himself. Yeah, for real. Pulls up in his mayoral SUV with his security detail. Chats with guests for a while, chats with Dan and splits. Shook some hands, and likely disinfected after.
Dan had a copy of his book for attendees to sign as a guest book, an awesome idea that I later stole for my own book party. Rahm graciously autographed it, with the inscription, "You're an a$$hole."
I caught Rahm on the way out, and since I always have a Sharpie, I asked him to sign my copy, too. So my copy is signed by both mayors.
But the true highlight comes based on a vignette in the book itself. In real life, Wilco were playing a fundraiser for Rahm. In @MayorEmanuels’ universe that came with an unusual string and one singer Jeff Tweedy pushed back on. From the feed:
“Tweedy's being pissy because he doesn't want to play any Black Eyed Peas songs. What the fuck? People love that shit. Not saying they're a good band--they're fucking terrible. But if you want people with money to give that shit away, play the Black Eyed Peas. But no, Tweedy's pulling this fucking ‘I'm in Wilco, so I'm going to play Wilco songs’ bullshit, like he knows anything about fundraising.”
Now, I mentioned that Dan had some roots in the punk scene as the founder of the Punk Planet zine. Through it he knew Sue Miller, the co-owner of Lounge Ax, a venue so special it got its own post. She was also… Mrs. Tweedy. So he reached out with a crazy idea, which she loved and passed on and then somehow Jeff Tweedy showed up to play at the book launch. “If you want someone who has an incredible legacy to do something really stupid, the best route is through their spouse,” said Dan in the introduction. And, you guessed it, Tweedy came and performed the songs of the Black Eyed Peas, including a strained and yet perfect rendition of “I Gotta Feeling” and a dramatic reading of “My Humps.” Sue would email Dan with updates as Tweedy “hilariously” rehearsed in their basement. Please, please watch those videos.
“I’m not saying anything bad about the Black Eyed Peas, I do think, having spent some time with their material, that they are evil geniuses. My children are worried for me, I’m worried for me, my wife is worried for me and I really hope I can get these song out of my head before I have to tour again,” said Tweedy before launching headlong into “Rock that Body.”
In the end, the event was covered by NBC, the Sun-Times and more but the best recounting is on Scott Smith’s blog, of course. NBC’s post mentions that Rahm even retweeted a photo of the event. The link to the photo platform that was hosted on is gone now, but I can share the photo here, because the photo Rahm retweeted was mine. So yeah, I went to a book signing by the fictional Mayor Emanuel, met him and the real Mayor Emanuel, had them both sign my book and then had the real Mayor retweet my tweet about the twitter version of him.
All of this because someone had a creative idea and just went with it. Both Dan and Andy looked at a new platform, looked at what everyone was doing with it and thought, “You know, we can use it, better.” They made something entirely new possible, and did it with incredible amounts of dedication and passion.
That, my friends, is Chicago. And one of my most favorite Chicago memories.
