OyChicago articles

Pale Jonny can entertain you, but he's not sure he can fix your motorcycle

Jon Rosenfield, AKA "Pale Jonny,” nee "Jonny Motion,” likes to say he’s from Wheeling, the city with feeling. Today, the self-described extremely amateur motorcycle mechanic calls Logan Square home. By day, Jon does accounting and HR work (he’s is partial to the title Controller). In the evenings, you’ll find Pale Jonny playing bass for Pale Gallery—the band heads to London this month for a big show as part of the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival.

So, whether you like Pale Gallery, have strong feelings about honesty in the Haggadah or enjoy Neil Diamond, Jon Rosenfield is a Jew You Should Know!

1. What did you want to be when you grew up?
When I was in junior high and LA Law was on, I wanted to be a lawyer. What I wanted to be usually depended on my favorite show at the time, for a while it was CHiPs, then LA Law… then in college I wanted to be a rhetoric or literary studies professor. I’m pretty malleable that way.

2. What do you love about what you do today?
Well. As it relates to the band, I like having a creative outlet and it gives me something to cling to for the prolonged adolescence that I am still maintaining.

3. What are you reading?
Hell’s Angles by Hunter S. Thompson and Achewood.

4. What’s your favorite place to eat in Chicago?
I would say that I consistently enjoy Feast. For carryout, I want to make a point to pour out some beer for Manee Thai on Pulaski. We’ve always gotten take out from them and it’s always good. A fire gutted the building last week, RIP, Manee Thai.

5. If money and logistical reality played no part, what would you invent?
For the last couple of years, I have been very insistent that time travel is impossible. I mean, come on, you can’t travel in time. It’s a one-way ticket. So I guess I would invent time travel; why not prove myself wrong.

6. Would you rather have the ability to fly or the ability to be invisible?
I think that I would have to fly because I don’t think I could hold myself to using the invisibility for good. And flying would be cool.

7. If I scrolled through your iPod, what guilty pleasure song would I find?
“Practically Newborn” by Neil Diamond, that shit is sweet. It’s a cool, weird song from the album Velvet Gloves and Spit. It’s pretty awesome.

8. What’s your favorite Jewish thing to do in Chicago—in other words, how do you Jew?
I’m gonna bend the rules on this question. Even if you’re writing a Haggadah for children, you can’t not call the matzah the bread of affliction—that’s what it is and you can’t call it something else. And you can’t gloss over drowning the enemies in the sea—because that’s what happens. I was reading from a Haggadah for children this Passover, and these things weren’t in it and I was very unsatisfied. That’s what I was told as a kid and I didn’t become a violent person.

The Haggadah’s were cute and everything, but I’m sorry, it’s the bread of affliction. The Old Testament is eye for an eye: You part the Red Sea and you smite the enemies. That’s how it works; you can’t candy coat it.