Game theory

     Maybe because I get a steady trickle of aggrieved emails from religious sorts, flabbergasted by this new world of ours, but I found myself thinking about games Wednesday. You know, games—Monopoly, Risk, Scrabble, Trouble, Clue, Life—played with tokens and dice, folding boards and decks of cards. 

     Games have rules. You know, rules. Pass Go, collect $200. Seven tiles in your rack, no more, no less. The queen goes on her color. 

     You have to play by the rules. Oh, with some games, you can alter the rules, a little, if everybody agrees beforehand. In our house, the fines in Monopoly go into the middle, a payday when you land on the otherwise dull Free Parking space. A common house rule. If you have the letter that a blank is played to represent in Scrabble, you can swap it for that blank on your turn. Thus blanks are recycled, and the games are higher scoring. 

     But you can't break the rules, you can't make up new ones as you go along, or cheat. There was never much of that in our household anyway—we respect games— though occasionally, when very young, a boy would toss the board over in a huff or stalk off, unhappy with a certain turn of events. I remember being aghast, just horrified. What about the game? Quitters lost all respect.

      The metaphor of games, and their importance, is the best way I can understand those who are deeply bothered by same-sex marriage. Because at first glance it's ludicrous to be upset by this. Why care that people you don't know are forming unions that don't affect you? Not in any real sense. It doesn't raise your taxes, or pollute our air. And it's already happening. Where's the harm?

       Yet the anger, the outrage, the sputtering indignation. It reminds me of myself finding a game spoiled. And that I think the idea of games, of their importance, can help us understand what is happening here. Forget religion, or bigotry, or morals, or the other buzz words thrown around. Those are symbols, tokens, cards. Faith could lead you to embrace same-sex marriage as easily as forbid it, morals to respect other people rather than condemn them for some bedroom practice. What is at issue here is a certain game, a set of rules, an understanding of how things are supposed to be. The way American life as it has been played, up to now. The way they grew up playing it. It's always been played this way. The rules are on the box lid, put there by God, no less. The game is fun and beloved, the time passes and nobody challenged it. Nobody would dare, introduce a third die into Monopoly, a few countries on the Moon in Risk. The right to gaze into the bag before picking letters in Scrabble. And yet here are these people, these newcomers to the game, wanting to do this new thing that is just completely contrary to how we've always done things. Changing the rules after play has commenced.

       I sympathize with the purists, I do. In the framework of the game, it all makes sense. It hurt to scrap the game. I remember clearly. Our oldest, the last time we played Monopoly, a few years back, bought one property of every color and refused to trade. So nobody could get houses and nobody could win. "It's a real estate trading game!" I said, hotly. But no, he enjoyed messing it up. Big smile. We played for a while, but the game was a stasis. It was suddenly pointless, stupid, endlessly circling the board, and play petered away in animosity. I was truly mad at him, spoiling our Monopoly game for reasons that struck me as perverse. How much more angry then are people who see their whole idea of how life should be played, of what the rules are, rules they grew up with, spoiled by this group of people they consider perverse already, just for existing?  No wonder they're mad. 

      I'm not apologizing for the vocal opposition. I'm trying to understand them, to grasp why they cling to this irrationality. And why bother trying to understand them? They lost, forget 'em. Why grant them the respect they deny others? For that very reason. Because they expend so little energy trying to understand my view, or the view of gays and lesbians who now have won these civil rights. It's an effort I wish they'd make. The golden rule says, "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." I would have them try to understand a bit harder, to take a little of the energy they use defending themselves, clinging to the fading status quo, and attacking the change and instead try to grasp what's going on here. And perhaps find the sympathy waiting there. But since they don't, I will, if only to show them how it's done, if only for the satisfaction of understanding a little better myself. It's cool to figure out what's happening. I wish more people could see that. When you realize that gay marriage is like introducing apartment buildings into Monopoly, like scribbling a third level of rents under those for the houses and hotels, you get a glimpse of how strange this all must be for some people. No wonder they're indignant. 

HIstory will just shake its head

     It's overdue. It's important. But in the way that each step in the journey of 1,000 miles is important. I'm glad the Illinois House and Senate approved same-sex marriage Tuesday. But we also need to moderate our self-congratulation and crowing about history being made by realizing what we're doing is extending basic human rights to a group of people long and cruelly denied them. History won't see this as a joyous victory so much as an inexplicable slog that took too long. We tend to forget history — when did women get the vote in Illinois? 1920? Wrong. April, 1914, as the states gradually did what the federal government was reluctant to do (sound familiar?) How can we claim we are making history now when we don't even know the history we've already made? Nor is the struggle over....
     Okay, I'll stop. I know I'm splitting hairs—a lot of people worked very hard to bring this day about: congratulations, and thanks.

     Don’t be fooled. Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2013, will not go down in history, at least not in the kind of popular history that regular people readily remember.

     Yes, the Illinois General Assembly finally approved same-sex marriage, as well as an amendment that puts the law into effect in June — a fine season for weddings.  The state Senate immediately gave its consent Gov. Pat Quinn is certain to sign the law, if he hasn’t already.

     A welcome, overdue and, with the protests and last-minute ear-twisting needed to gather the votes, dramatic development.

     But historic?  No. Because the idea that gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry and share the kind of regular civil rights that straight citizens have always enjoyed will someday be seen as such an accepted part of life, such a no-brainer, the fact that it was once otherwise is what will puzzle and astound our descendants.
     This isn't the first irrational bias set aside. They tend to be tucked away, as if society were embarrassed. Nobody remembers the year, never mind the day they started letting women work as postal carriers. (Any idea? Guess. With many men away during World War I and labor unrest at home, the post office in 1917 allowed women to deliver mail despite doubts "whether women could stand the strain for any length of time without seriously impairing their health.")
     That's how progress is made. Pioneers push for change, the old verities are waved as excuses. But they buckle, circumstances shift and the truth prevails, eventually.
     As with female postal carriers, people won't even remember the year gay marriage got the legislative OK in Springfield. This isn't like 1920, when a sweeping change in the Constitution gave women across the United States the legal right to vote. Gays are winning their rights piecemeal. Illinois is the 15th state, plus Washington, D.C., to approve same-sex marriage; not the first, not the last. But in the first half — not exactly a reason for state pride, but better than some.
     Which is fitting, in a way, for a movement without any identifiable central leader: no Gandhi, no Martin Luther King. Just millions of anonymous people who 30 years ago refused to die of a mysterious ailment that their government didn't care about — AIDS — so they took a truth that was once a shameful secret and made it public. They told their families, friends; they marched in the streets and refused to be ashamed. It is the Gay Pride Parade for a good reason.
     This is not to say that this day won't echo in individual lives. Just as wedding anniversaries are personal (not public) celebrations, so countless Illinois gay couples — and their children — will remember when the Land of Lincoln decided to join the 21st century and recognized these couples for what they are.
     That's something that can't be stated too plainly: There is a bedrock of fact here. Gay people do not make worse spouses or worse parents. You could argue they must make better parents, since every kid they adopt is from a straight couple, somewhere, who can't or won't care for them. If gay couples had a similar record of failure when it came to parenthood, they'd never have reached this point. But they don't.
     A word should be said to those who recoil in horror at all this, who hold up their well-thumbed Bibles, the several passages addressing homosexuality highlighted. To you, this is oppression, the dashing of your religious rights. Don't be silly. Religion might have helped mold the law originally, but as the law adapted to an increasingly democratic, increasingly free, increasingly humane time, it diverted from religion. Long ago. If you stone your daughter for speaking disrespectfully, the Bible will not excuse you. If you try to sacrifice an ox in your driveway, quoting Scripture won't help. You lost this argument; it's tiresome now. Sorry you haven't gotten the message, but it isn't all about you. Time to move on already.
     So, not historic. But significant. Put an asterisk by Nov. 5, 2013. An overcast day in Illinois, made suddenly sunny by our skittish state legislators, who after a misfire last spring finally did the right thing.
     If you're glad, congratulations. And if you think the world is crumbling, take comfort that you are completely wrong, and flatter yourself with the tantalizing possibility that you might someday realize it. Look around. The world is not ending. Some regular folks will be getting married. Normal people who love each other will be openly pledging their troth in Illinois, too. Just like 14 other states and Washington, D.C. Just like countries around the world. Your great-grandchildren will be amazed that it wasn't always thus.
     

Grounding the Butter and Salt Flight

   When Spiaggia opened on Michigan Avenue in 1984, my wife and I of course were younger, still of an age where trying out new restaurants seemed a sort of civic responsibility, a duty to contemporary culture. 
   Being young, we were also on a budget, so went to Cafe Spiaggia, the 2nd tier, farm team eatery attached to Spiaggia, for those who only wanted to spend a lot of money on dinner, as opposed to an obscene amount of money. What I remember from that long-ago meal was a big white plate -- big plates were hot then -- with an arrangement of tiny triangular raviolis circling the rim. 
    The other thing I remember is that we went directly from Cafe Spiaggi to the Dunkin' Donuts on Rush Street, because we were hungry. 
    One of the joys of aging is the realization that it's okay to avoid trendy restaurants -- all those new chefs who serve spoonfuls of foam and eye cups of distilled essence, who waft scents in your face while flicking morsels of food at you. You pay a lot for a little; I imagine it helps to be drunk, and since I don't drink, that's another reason such places are easily avoided. 
     But sometimes I'm not the one in charge of dinner, I'm meeting other people, and they have their own ideas about where to go. Being polite, and deferring, I get dragged to new places that way. One drawback of being polite, an over-rated virtue.
     Saturday night, for instance. I was meeting two college friends in Evanston. When I am in Evanston I always go to the same restaurant, Dixie Kitchen, and get the same thing, blackened catfish with red beans and rice. It's always excellent, and ordering anything else would be diminishment. When my friends asked me where we should meet, I said, "Dixie Kitchen." 
     That didn't fly, for some reason. Maybe not trendy enough. I didn't ask. Polite. They suggested The Cellar at the Stained Glass. The name itself worried me. Something pretentious about those two "The's." "The Lord of the Manor House." The Stained Glass is a contemporary restaurant; the Cellar, a satellite beer bar appended to it that serves small plates of food. Same owner, same kitchen. Kinda like Spiaggia and its ancillary Cafe Spiaggia.
      I arrived early to the Cellar at the Stained Glass, was allowed to wait at the Bar in the Cellar at the Stained Glass, and looked at the Menu for the Bar in the Cellar at the Stained Glass.  One item leapt out: the "Butter and Salt Flight," which was described as: "Parmigiano reggiano butter with fleur de sel; goats milk butter with Himalayan pink salt; truffle butter with truffle sea salt. Warm French bread." 
      All for only $6.50. 
      Strip away the superfluous adjectives, and what they have contrived to do is charge for the bread basket by trotting out some fancy butter and salt. Six bucks fifty cents for a loaf of bread would obviously be larceny, even at a trendy spot. A kind of genius really—social mores dictate you can't charge for the bread; that would be like charging for a napkin. So charge for the butter and salt. And why not? They charge for fancy water now. Sea salt and mountain salt and what have you is supposed to be in the same vein, though it doesn't appeal to me, and I can't imagine how it appeals to anybody. Still, I wanted to take that test flight, for professional purposes.
      "We have to order it," I told my table mates, wearing my journalism hat. A marvel should be fully experienced. But my friends, alas, were wearing their order-something-good-for-dinner hats, and turned up their noses at the suggestion. If I insisted, it would involve pushing their wishes aside for my own interests, so I let it go. Hobbled by good manners.
      So maybe the Butter and Salt Flight is the most profound gustatory experience you can have in Evanston for $6.50. I can't damn it in full cry without having tried it, which is frustrating. Or maybe it is another new age scam, designed to use the crowbar of pretense to separate the status-conscious diner from his or her hard-earned cash. 
     I'd like to say that, in pursuit of truth, I'll go back there next time I'm in Evanston, soar with the Butter and Salt Flight, then deliver a full report. But over at Dixie Kitchen, they give you a basket of pancakes with your meal. The pancakes come nestled in wax paper, served with regular butter. The salt is on the table—basic NaCl white salt. But it costs nothing, is not called "A Flight of Pancakes," which I never realized was a blessing, but I do now. They taste just fine. All things being equal, I think I'll go back there next time for my catfish and let the Salt and Butter Flight remain a mystery. Some things are better left unknown.

The only thing better than opera: free opera

     Popular pleasures require no explanation. Nobody says, "You watched a FOOTBALL GAME on Sunday — whatever for?" Opera, alas, is not one of those assumed pleasures. I've had more readers say, "What IS it about opera?" or act like I'm constantly writing about opera, which I'm not — just a couple columns a year, two or three tops, including this one, announcing our Sun-Times Goes to the Lyric sweepstakes, which began five years ago to test the hunch that, once people actually go see and hear an opera, the mystery and fear falls away and they understand what the fuss is about. Which has proven to be the case. I was a little worried that the contest wouldn't get pulled together this year—it's like holding a high tea in a sailing ship rounding Cape Horn in raging seas—but the resourceful folks at the Sun-Times not only managed to get it together, but did so early this time. Thanks to everyone involved, both at the paper and at the Lyric.

Giuseppe Verdi

     A courtesan is not a prostitute. Let’s be clear about that from the start. Violetta, the heroine of Verdi’s “La Traviata,” which 100 lucky readers will attend with me for free later this month in the 6th annual Sun-Times Goes to the Lyric Sweepstakes, does not sell her favors for money, though she is sometimes treated that way—cash is thrown at her by her angry beau at one point in the story.

     Which leads to the question of what a courtesan is, exactly. My New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines “courtesan” as, umm, “A prostitute, esp. one whose clients are wealthy or upper-class.”

     Well yes, but there’s much more to it than that. Prostitutes today are not public figures (insert your own joke about Congress here) and courtesans definitely were. They were widely known as fashion leaders, party throwers, famous wits and beauties who held salons and accompanied famous men: Marie Duplessis, inspiration for the Alexandre Dumas fils novel that the opera is based on, also inspired composer Franz Liszt so much he wanted to move in with her.

     “There really isn’t an equivalent in our world,” said “Traviata” director Arin Arbus, making her debut with this production at the Lyric. “I actually think that’s one of the aspects of the opera that’s most challenging to convey to contemporary audiences.    Certainly it’s very different from our contemporary understanding of prostitution.”
     Not that courtesans were necessarily popular when "Traviata" debuted in Venice on March 6, 1853, one of the most famous fiascos in the history of opera. "Foul, hideous and immoral," one critic squawked.
     Though that wasn't the reason for its initial failure. The audience hated it, in part, for being put on in modern dress (modern then, though now, thanks to the turning wheel of time, it has become colorful elegant Italian fashion, bumped into the 1860s by designer Cait O'Connor, who added some massive wigs to give what she calls a "Victorian going for Baroque" air to the opening party). The soprano playing Violetta in the original was also portly, as sopranos sometimes are, which made her . . . spoiler alert . . . death from consumption a moment of hilarity for the audience at the debut, and not the tragedy Verdi intended it to be.
     That isn't an issue with the Lyric's star, Latvian soprano Marina Rebeka, who makes her Lyric debut with this production but is no stranger to the part, having sung Violetta in Vienna, Hamburg, Berlin, Florence — around the globe. She has definite opinions on the courtesan question and Violetta.
     "She was not simply a prostitute," said Rebeka. "She was like a Lamborghini or a Ferrari. If you paid for her, if you had her at your party, it meant you were very rich. She was a beautiful, clever, cultured woman, but also a girl, irritated by the illness that made her subject to such changes of mood."
     To me, getting bogged down in the characters of an opera or, God forbid, the plot, is to risk missing the central point — the music — and Verdi outdid himself here. Anyone worrying about sitting through three hours of it should rest assured, "La Traviata" is one of those special operas you can listen to 100 times without it getting old: thrilling, vigorous, exuberant, mournful.
     Our time frame is compressed this year — last year we went to "Hansel & Gretel" in January. This year we're attending opening night of "La Traviata" on Nov. 20.
     Sixteen days away. Act quickly. You have from this week until Nov. 11 to go online and enter at suntimes.com/win (you'll find the full rules there) or to mail a postcard or letter (postmarked by Nov. 9, received by Nov. 11) to Sun-Times Goes to Lyric Opera, P.O. Box 3455, Chicago, IL 60654. Include your name, phone number, address and email. Winners will be notified by phone around Nov. 15.
     We give away 50 pairs of tickets, and each year about 1,500 people enter, so your odds — about 1 in 30 — aren't bad. We've had 500 people win so far, and I've never heard a complaint. The only risk you run is that you'll get hooked on opera and want more, which is the whole idea, from the Lyric's point of view.
      This is a brand new production, created here at the Lyric, and then heading on to the Houston Grand Opera and the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto. But you'll get to see it first, the color and decay, the parties and loneliness, feminine wiles and male power, and the flash of real love, which of course is swept away in the profane heartbreak of regular life, with a moral you'll be chewing on long after you leave the theater.
     "One has friends only when one is well," sings Violetta.
     Well, yeah, that sounds about right.

A half-inch tall, tree-gobbling Godzilla

Emerald ash borer-damaged tree on Bryn Mawr Avenue in Chicago.

If you love trees -- and I do -- then the arrival of the emerald ash borer is a calamity. Actually, you don't have to love trees to grieve the billions of dollars that will be spent to fight the borer and repair the damage, the streets marred for years. It is extra personal for me because the one tree that has done the best in my yard is a lovely cimmaron ash planted a dozen years ago to replace a tree destroyed in the micro-burst of 2000. It's taller than the house now, and it kills me that a half inch beetle will probably spell doom for it. The tree is slightly set apart at the side of the house, and my hope is that if I keep treating it, the borer will kill all the surrounding ash trees, and then die off with them and somehow spare mine.  Futile, I know.

     That said, despite my personal interest, I'd have never thought to explore the borer situation in Chicago in detail. But my editor asked me to, and I was happy to comply, if unhappy at what I found. The news is not good: 

City worker Arce Vales inoculates an ash tree in Chicago. 

     A beautiful autumn purple ash tree stands on the west side of St. Louis Avenue, a few steps south of Bryn Mawr.
     It is healthy, so far — a little woodpecker damage — but if you want to see the grim fate awaiting this tree and every one of the 85,000 ashes on public streets in Chicago, all you need do is look west, where a few feet away stand two ash trees ravaged by the emerald ash borer, the blight that arrived from China a dozen years ago, landing in Michigan in 2002, and has been eating its way southward since, decimating ash trees in the Midwest — 20 million trees have been killed so far in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Iowa — and causing billions of dollars in damage.
     An estimated 1 million trees in the greater Chicago area will be dead within five years if not treated, and the blight might end up costing $50 billion nationwide by the time it runs its course, when you factor in the expense of treating healthy trees — chemical inoculations will keep the beetle away, but they must be repeated every few years — plus removing diseased trees and replacing them, plus lowered property values on suddenly treeless streets.
     The bark of a blighted tree on Bryn Mawr is pulled off with a gentle tug by John Lough, one of the city of Chicago’s four full-time foresters, to reveal the telltale S-shaped trails the borer nibbles.
     Beside financial cost, the infestation is an ecological disaster.
     “It is,” he said, “widespread throughout the city.”
     Before the frost, the city finished inoculating 37,000 trees against the ash borer. Some municipalities have given up on their ash trees; not Chicago.
     "The benefits we receive from our ash trees are immense," Lough said. "They make a huge contribution to the urban canopy. We'd like to save as many as we can, to preserve the environmental benefits. We're really fortunate this year for Mayor Emanuel's insightfulness and environmental connection to the situation. If he hadn't done anything, these would all be gone."
     The treatment lasts for two years. The 20-year-old autumn purple ash on St. Louis, in front of a sign for Northeastern University's campus, is still hearty, and last month park district worker Arce Vales knelt and drilled eight holes around its base.
      She injected three pressurized puffs into each hole.
     Vales was hired in January, one of 37 inoculators who have been going around the city treating ash trees.
     Another 37,000 ash will be inoculated in the spring, and if you do the math, you'll notice that 10,000 ash trees will not be treated because they are too far gone. They'll have to come down.
     In Illinois, tree experts have been watching the blight march southward.
     "Basically the northern third of the state is infested," said Jeff Squib, a spokesman for the Illinois Department of Agriculture.
     He said the beetle was first found in Kane County in 2008, but whether that was because the infestation started there or because that's where the ag department has its DeKalb nursery program to notice it is an open question. The ash borer cannot fly far, and much of its quick spread is thought to be because of human activity, such as transporting firewood. The borer was just detected in Colorado, for instance.
     "It didn't fly to Boulder," said Stephanie Adams, a research specialist in plant health care at the Morton Arboretum. "Humans are a really big problem when it comes to invasive species."
     The city of Chicago has 560,000 trees on public land; 17 percent are ash. But those are just the city's trees; the Chicago region has an estimated 12 million trees, and 8 percent of those are ash - a million trees.
     And if that seems like a big share for one kind of tree, some communities have twice that: in Arlington Heights and Wheaton, a third of the trees are ash.
     Other towns are feeling a budget squeeze; Evanston couldn't keep pace with the speed of the borer invasion and cut down 500 trees without yet replacing them. Hanover Park cut down 1,100 ash and so far has planted only 100 replacements.
     But then varying tree selection is not something communities did well before the emerald ash borer. Despite previous historic blights such as Dutch elm disease or, more recently, the Asian longhorn beetle, which attacked maples, the lesson was not learned. Ash are cheap, fast-growing and pretty; some subdivisions around Chicago are 90 percent ash
     When you project what this half-inch bug is going to do nationwide, the cost of treatment, removal and replacement becomes enormous.
     "I've heard figures of $47 billion nationwide," said Scott Schirmer, manager of the Illinois Department of Agriculture's Emerald Ash Borer Program.
     The cost to each community can be considerable. Five years ago Carol Stream set aside $2.25 million to deal with ash-borer related problems.
     Of course, what the cost is depends on what strategy is taken. Cut your ash down now and get new trees going? Or treat them and allow residents to enjoy them as long as they can?
     Now that the Chicago area is infested, ash trees are considered doomed over the long haul.
     "If an area has an infestation, all ash in that area will eventually succumb to the beetle," Squib said. "Once you start the treatments, you need to continue them. It's not a one-time treatment. You also need to realize eventually the tree will succumb to the beetle. Some homeowners will prefer to prolong the tree's life and therefore their enjoyment of it. Others will prefer immediate removal of the tree and replace it. Eventually, the beetles will move to the treated tree. But who knows? In some respects you're buying time, treating the tree to fend off the beetle. Perhaps an effective treatment will be discovered."
     Some communities are not bothering to inoculate their ashes at all, deciding it is only expensively postponing the inevitable. Some are inoculating, but not to save the trees, just to stagger their removal and not have expanses of dead ashes.
     "There's been a lot of questions whether treatment is worth it," Adams said.
     You can't be in the tree business and not look at the long haul, and arborists are trying to do that when it comes to the emerald ash borer. Some communities are passing ordinances to prevent one type of tree from dominating their streetscapes ever again and perhaps fall victim to some future scourge on par with the borer. They're also trying to change residents' aesthetic view: For centuries, people admired uniform canopies of trees. With the risk of a whole genus of trees being wiped out by invasive predators, that might be a luxury that communities can no longer afford.
     "All the same color, all the same size. You need to look at it from a dynamic viewpoint," Schirmer said. "[This crisis is] really providing an opportunity to make streets more interesting. A lot of residents live in the now, versus arborists, who have to look 20 or 30 years down the line."

Hatch Show Print

    So digital won, right?

    Film is dead, everybody reads books on their Kindles, or soon will, and listens to music compressed onto MP3s. Printing an image means designing it onscreen in about 30 seconds and then hitting a button that says "Print." 

    Yes? 
    No.
    Not quite.

    Allow me to introduce you to Hatch Show Print, a Nashville, Tennessee institution, started in 1879, responsible for iconic music posters for decades, a company which is not going out of business today, as you might expect. Rather is celebrating the grand opening of its sixth, and biggest location, at 224 5th Avenue South, assuming you are reading this Saturday, Nov. 2, brand new quarters of 10,000 square feet, double the size of their old space at 316 Broadway.

     There, you can buy posters from its glory days, but you can also make one of your own—Hatch employs six full-time designer/printers, plus master printer Jim Sherraden, who has been there 30 years. Three-quarters of its sales come from new poster work.  
    And the kicker is, not only have computers not harmed Hatch, but — for your unintended consequences file — they have proven to be good for business. In 1986, sales at Hatch were a paltry $12,000. In 2011, sales were $750,000.

   "One of the reasons Hatch is able to stay in business is, with the advent of computers in the early 80s, it flattened everything from a design perspective," said Celene Aubry, print shop manager at Hatch.   "Digital type is unable to create the texture, the tactile attraction, the layers of color. Our type is handmade, there is more depth to it." 

     I found Hatch the old-fashioned way -- blundering around downtown Nashville one day in 2007. The place was closed, but what I saw through the front window stayed with me—a vision of hundreds of posters, new, old, monotone, an explosion of colors. Web pages come and go, but a poster stays, a good one does, anyway. I have a poster from the New York School of Visual Arts on the wall downstairs; I've been looking at it for 25 years; haven't gotten tired of it yet.
     Hatch Show Print traces its roots to Rev. William T. Hatch, a northern minister who moved to Nashville after the Civil War to start a magazine, Southern Industries.  The city at the time was a center of printing, particularly of religious material. Hatch died in 1880, but not before his sons, Charles and Herbert, had opened up a print shop on Cherry Street.
     Not only has Hatch endured, like a well-designed poster, but it is going to endure, seeing that, since 1992, it has been owned by the Country Music Foundation, the organization that oversees the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. The latest move was prompted by the museum expanding.
    "Their archives are bursting at the seams," Aubry said. "They needed to expand and go full bore and get Hatch its own space, designed to be a print shop."
     The lay-out resembled the 1924 shop that it had been forced to quickly vacate in 1992. 
     "Placement of type, placement of tables, the presses along an 80 foot window so people can watch us print," said Aubry. "Our typesetting process is much more ergonomic than it used to be. We are in a climate controlled building that's safe, we have access to archivists and historians."

     The phrase "living history" gets bandied about a lot, but with Hatch it's true—your poster might be printed using type that was carved 100 years ago. 

      "Hatch was born the same year as the light bulb," Aubry said. "It was the time of forms of entertainment before electricity. Traveling circuses, traveling fairs. Advertising was on paper—'Come to the fair!' -- billboards on the sides of barns --that's how Hatch made its name, carving those big woodblocks for bold graphics."

     And how big is the largest type Hatch has? Ready? Eighty inches—yes, letters that are more than six feet tall (printed one half letter at a time with 26 by 40 inch blocks, the largest their presses can handle) 

    "Crazy, isn't it?" said Aubry, who studied printing at Columbia College in Chicago and taught letterpress at Lillstreet Art Center here, and is a member of the Chicago Printers Guild and the Amalgamated Printers Association.
    People have tried to reproduce the handmade quality of Hatch, but a) they can't do it and b) it's usually just cheaper to go to Hatch, and companies around the world, from Jack Daniels distillery to a new British snack food maker, have used them. They've done book covers, movie titles, CD jackets and of course posters, both for new bands and old favorites—they've been using the same graphic elements for B.B. King for 40 years.

     Letterpress is hot all over—Chicago has a thriving scene, and Aubry mentioned Starshaped Press on North Ravenswood as particularly good. But they can't touch the tradition, the sheer inventory of typefaces, that Hatch has.

    "She does beautiful work," said Aubry, of the woman behind Starshaped. "But she's 14 years old [her company, that is] and we're 134 years old, so it's not a fair comparison."
    "We have the 134 years of continuous history, we have our collection , the tools we use every day, some date back to 1879," said Aubry. "We have big two-sheet letters carved in 1885. All born here in this shop, and mercifully, a continually operating business, through the good graces of a couple of Nashville business that saw the historical and cultural value of having this shop stay intact. So it all carries forward."

     The print shop has a definite steam punk vibe to it, and a diverse cast of quirky, creative employees -- the youngest designer is 25, and Dan Brown, who runs the presses, is 83. Nothing about letterpress printing feels moribund; in fact, it feels like part of a growing recognition that you can only automate so much.  

      "I think there's a trend in that," she said. "Letter press printing. The idea of vinyl is more popular. I think people are going back to something three-dimensional, something they can experience, something you can connect with the process, as opposed to everything being so removed from who we are and our daily lives."

     For some reason it made me think about journalism, and how some people actually believe its future lies it computerized aggregators and local news assembled by automatons in Lahore and Mumbai. It doesn't.

       "One of the things about Hatch, and I think about anything -- about journalism. There's a connection to people," Aubry said. "When people come to our shop, they're talking to the person making their poster, and connected for the five generations it took to get us to 2013, printing in Nashville. The stories that go along with that, stories our clients bring to the table in terms of interacting with those clients, what we're doing here. So much of that is related to our personalities, to the people making the connection. There is a growing pool of people who are educated what the process is, who recognize what letterpress is."

Which is a very long way of saying that, when I decided I should promote this blog somehow, the first idea I had was a Hatch Show Print poster. So I'm having 100 printed up—50 I'm going to place around Chicago—a poster wants to be hung in public—as well as hand them out to a few friends and supporters of the blog. And 50 I'm going to sign and number and sell to you, for $15 apiece plus $5 shipping and handling.

    That's the good news. But bad news is you're going to have to wait until Christmas, or even afterward, to get the chance to see the design and, maybe, order one of the rare copies. Hatch has a seven week waiting list.

Too dumb to know better.

You know what my favorite part of the paper is? Brace yourself: the columnists. And no, not just me. While it's good to get the news, the raw data you need to keep up on the world, more enjoyment is found in a good argument, an interpretation of that news. I don't even have to always agree with it, such as Thursday, when I read Mary Mitchell's column and, right there on the train, started thinking up this:

    Halloween is over, thank God. A pagan death rite morphed into a childhood misbehavior and sugar festival transformed, lately, into a randy adult Saturnalia, a kind of Valentine’s Day for couples who haven’t hooked up yet, but will, big time, as soon as enough Budweiser flows through their systems.

   Actually, scratch the “childhood misbehavior” part from the above — in our safety-mad era, an evening of Tom and Huck soaping windows and taking fence gates off their hinges would end up with them kneeling in the back of a white Homeland Security van, their hands zip-tied behind them.

     Now it’s the adults who act poorly at Halloween, either during their costume beer blow-outs or in the very act of donning those costumes.

     My esteemed colleague, Mary Mitchell, looked at an aspect of this in her column Thursday: the tendency for white folk to don blackface make-up despite the long history of mockery and humiliation it represents.

     “Are people ignorant or just belligerent?” she asked, and I actually looked up from the paper on the morning train and said aloud, “I’ll answer that one for you, Mary.”

     Ignorant. No question. And I have a certain real-life episode in mind. It was last Halloween and … oh, we should draw the veil here … a lovely young woman of my acquaintance announced she would be dressing up at her workplace for Halloween.

     "Oh," I said, smiling, in full friendly chat mode, "and who are you dressing up as?"
     "Michelle Obama," she said, nodding.
     "So ..." I said, "you'll be wearing a mask of some kind, a Michelle Obama mask?"
     "No, no," she said, dark makeup and a wig and a business suit. She was obviously proud of her creativity.

     "Ah," I said.
     What would you do? I am not one to thrust myself into other people's business, but if I can help them avoid pitfalls, I try to.
     "You know..." I continued, or words to that effect, "let me give you a word of advice here, Tiffany (made-up name), you might want to rethink that choice. I don't think Michelle Obama  is a good idea."
     "No?" she pouted, puzzled. "Why not?"
     I looked at her face, as fresh as a field of new-fallen snow and about as white. Here it would have been helpful to have had Mary Mitchell's column as a visual aid, and perhaps a felt board with a few cut-out white and black felt characters to convey the story of slavery, Jim Crow, minstrel shows. Maybe a little square of felt to be the Human Resources department where she would be duckwalked, still in blackface, to be fired.
     The conversation went on for a few days and, eventually, I don't know if my argument prevailed or she just picked a different costume. I suspect it was the latter.
     So, ignorance or belligerence? Never underestimate the pivotal role of stupidity in American society. I don't think frat louts throwing their inevitable slave auction parties are intending to strike out at African Americans. I don't think people like my young friend want to stick a knife in their black co-workers and get themselves fired. They're just ignorant.
     Then again, everyone's a little ignorant of history. Last week, WBBM radio's "Smart Quiz" question was "What year did World War II end?" That saddened me, almost as much as had the question been, "What is the name of the solar object that glows brightly in the daytime sky?" So much that when the seventh caller did not, of course, know the answer, I wasn't further saddened. I had already bottomed out. No surprise.
     So ignorance should be expected. And it is the better option. Belligerence is untreatable. If I know your history and am mocking you anyway, I'm a bigot and a bad person. If I'm just clueless, well, that can be worked with.
     It's easy to laugh at people who don't know anything about the past. It feels good — the glow of righteous indignation — but doesn't win over the ignorant person. Better to be understanding, to use the knowledge we are rightly proud of and gently explain there are many reasons to be aware of the history of race in America, and knowing enough not to cork up at Halloween is just the start of the benefits.
     It's good for all groups, not just blacks, to understand just how lightly others hold their histories. The Holocaust, the slaughter of Native Americans, the oppression of women — whatever wrong burns brightly in your mind is a faint glow, if that, in the minds of many others. They don't know and, sadly, often don't care. You need to tell them and make them care. More than a problem itself, blackface is a symptom of a bigger problem.