Replogle sold the globe to the world

    

     Memory fades. It's ironic that such a grim truth should be revealed, not just in one but in two ways, in Monday's frothy post about the carnival surrounding Kim Kardashian's Brobdingnagian butt. 
     But I suppose it's also apt. New wonders push into the space where old stuff used to be. 
     First, I used the word "steatopygic," (and I'm going to dial back on the big words. Enough already, with the big words, as my mother would say*) and cited Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" for teaching it to me. Though the word isn't there. An alert reader cited a passage containing "callpygian" which means about the same thing (actually "well-shaped" as opposed to "fat"). Several readers mentioned "callipygian," which is a little scary. That must have been the source of my error, though how one morphed into the other I cannot imagine. I would have sworn...

     The second reminder of the corrosive effect of time on memory was my use of "Replogle desk globe." I was not trying to be obscure (I'm never trying to be obscure; it just happens).  To me, it was a just a bit of local color, like saying "Radio Flyer sled" or "Jays potato chips." But several readers wrote in to say, "huh?"
    Replogle was a Chicago institution for 80 years, from 1930, when its factory opened in Broadview, to when the company laid off 84 workers at the end of 2010 and sold the brand name to an Indianapolis maker of school globes. Though the world's largest globe maker in a town once known for maps—Rand-McNally (a map publisher, I don't want to mystify people again) got its start here in 1856—somehow, Replogle never quite entered Chicago's consciousness.   

     Though not for lack of me trying to put it there. I've had an old Replogle globe on my desk for more than 30 years, and was keen to see where those lion's paws feet were carved. Here's my visit to their factory, ulp, almost 17 years ago.

     Take the geopolitical complexity of maps. Add woodworking. Season with metalcraft. Blend in the little-called-upon art of making spheres from flat surfaces, and you have a recipe for the odd mix of skills used making globes.

     In the case of Replogle Globes, a million globes a year, from 4.7 inch desktop models to the office-eating 32-inch diameter Diplomat globes, cradled in their hand-rubbed mahogany frames.
     Few nations on Earth are without a Replogle globe -- they sit in schoolrooms from Chile to China (the place names in Spanish in the former, of course, and Chinese in the latter -- the company also makes globes in French and German). There has been a Replogle globe in the Oval Office of the White House ever since Hoover. Replogle make globes not only of the Earth, but of Mars, Venus and the moon -- a big seller in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Not so popular now.     
     The company was started in 1930 by Luther Replogle (pronounced Rep-logel), a Chicago school supplies salesmen who began making globes in his basement.
     The latest incarnation of that operation occupies 250,000 square feet on 25th Avenue in Broadview. Perhaps the best way to envision the factory is to think of it as three factories: globe production, metalworking and a woodshop.
     The smaller globes are stamped from cardboard. Sheets of cardboard are cut into a 12-pedaled daisy shape, as are the paper maps that go over them.
     The two flat pieces are molded together on enormous industrial flywheel presses, turning them into hemispheres. The eight-foot-tall presses with their tons of force seems enormous for the little 9-inch half spheres produced.
     Globes that light up are made from plastic -- vacuformed in molds. The larger light-up globes are pasted over hollow polypropylene spheres.
    For the largest globe, orange-peel-shaped map segments -- called "gores" -- are laid by hand on the spheres, carefully smoothed and stretched into place using special paste so there are no flaws or gaps. Customers paying up to $6,500 — the cost of the top model — can't be expected to put up with a lot of bubbles.
     Laying the map over the large globe can take eight hours; and if the last gore somehow doesn't line up -- "I sit down and cry then pull them all up and start over," an employee says.
     The hemispheres are trimmed, one at a time, and then "polar washers" are inserted — metal rings intended to let the globes spin for years without their cardboard giving away. Then a cardboard ring is glued into one hemisphere around the equator and the other hemisphere tamped onto it with a machine that gives the upper half a firm tap.
      Finally, a tape is applied to mark the equator and — conveniently — hide the seam dividing the halves. The globes are sprayed with a UV protectant, so they don't fade.
     Tumbling the globes on a conveyer belt would damage them, so they move around the plant suspended from hooks on an overhead chain system. At times the factory seems like a giant clockwork cosmos, with worlds of green and blue and black and sepia all moving at various speeds and directions and levels.
     In the metalworking area, coils of steel are turned into circular bases, stamped, then decorated. The rings some globes sit in are "butt welded," the ends of the loop welded together then buffed so there is no seam.
     Finally there's the woodshop, a large room filled with lathes and saws and stacks of lumber, waiting to be turned into legs and wood bases.    
     Despite the care put into buffing metal and finishing wood, the trickiest part of any globe is definitely the map. Replogle is one of the few companies around whose products can be made obsolete by events thousands of miles away.
     The world is always changing. Arctic regions shift. Islands are cut in half by storms. Then there are the political upheavals, which have been kicked into overdrive this past decade.
     Keeping track of the shift and flux of world borders is the job of LeRoy Tolman, chief cartographer, in his office one flight above the factory floor.
     Sometimes he hits changes on the nose. The day West and East Germany re-united, a globe showing the unified German state was rolling off the lines.
     Replogle sells 40 different types of globes; the largest, the Diplomat, has over 20,000 names on it. Updating takes time.
     "We were kept busy for a year after the Soviet Union broke up," Tolman says.
     Part of Tolman's job is determining the accepted outline of a nation. He spreads a big map of Egypt out over his desk, responding to an irate Egyptian government complaint that its southern boundary with Sudan is shown as it actually is, and not how it exists in the fervent hopes of the Egyptians.
     Not much of a market in Egypt, so Tolman, after checking with the U.S. State Department, keeps the border where it is in actuality. That isn't always the outcome. The company wants to sell globes and doesn't flinch at following a customer's interpretation of what the world looks like.
     Globes going to Arab countries retained "Palestine" years after Israel was founded. Japanese globes show the country as still possessing the Kirin Islands, which the Soviets stripped away in 1945.
     So if Saddam Hussein placed a big enough order, he could get globes showing the United States as a possession of Iraq?
     "All but Illinois," said Tolman. "Economics is the prime factor."
          —originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 2, 1998

* Did you notice the irony of my swearing off big words almost immediately after deploying the Swiftian term, "Brobdingnagian"? I didn't, not until the third time I read this. Brobdingnag was, you might recall, the land of the giants in Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels," and "Brobdingnagian" is a fancy term for "very big." I left it in because, well, perhaps you're as amused by my inconsistencies and oversights as I have learned to be. God knows I can't correct them at this point.

Birds, squirrels and the trouble in Israel

      Today's column has an unusual backstory. My former colleague at the Sun-Times, Rich Cahan, once a photo editor, now a busy publisher of books of historic photography, emailed me Monday to say that Wednesday his show of portraits taken in the West Bank opens in River North. 
     Suppressing my immediate reaction—"kinda short notice, huh?"—I told him sure, I'd be happy to meet him as he set up the exhibit at The Art Works Projects studio, an attractive little gallery tucked in the shadow of the expressway at 625 N. Kingsbury.
      Rich spent a week in the occupied territories last year, and took the portraits in the show on his final night, basically by knocking on doors and asking whoever answered if he could take their picture. 

Rich Cahan 

     In one sense, they are unexceptional photos of ordinary people. Though in the context of the Israeli/Palestinian crisis, ordinary people, who are neither soldiers nor protestors, leaders nor spokespeople, perpetrators nor victims, are exactly the individuals who are least noticed or heard. 
     Rich was obviously moved by what he had found during his stay, and focused on one aspect: raids by the Israeli military at night, because, he said, "it was as much as I could physically comprehend, night raids."
     We talked about the dilemma of being an American Jew, wanting to support Israel, but being uncertain where, if anywhere, the current Israeli policy is going. I told him that I try to begin slowly when attempting to converse with my unwaveringly what-Israel-does-is-by-definition-right friends, starting with something like, "The Palestinians, they're people too, right?" but even that tack usually doesn't get me far.
     Passions are high on this here as well as there. Rich went on the trip with 10 others, including Brant Rosen, the controversial Evanston rabbi who had to leave his congregation this year due to conflict over his impassioned support of the Palestinian cause. Myself, I find blindly boosting the Palestinians is as unsupportable as reflexively backing the Israelis. There's plenty of blame to go around.

       "We travelled all over," Rich said, "but spent most of our time in Bil'in"—a small town of about 1,800 people that gained notoriety because of its residents' resistance to Israel's security wall.
      "Because I took it in this town, there are people who say that gives it a particular political statement," he said. "But it could have been any town in the West Bank."
      I asked him if he was worried people will view him as a tool.
     "I don't know who I'm a tool of," he said. I also wondered whether, being Jewish, he had been scared spending a week in the West Bank. He said he certainly felt threatened, but not by Palestinians.
     "We did fear the IDF," he said, using the initials of the Israeli Army. "Our group was tear-gassed three times."
      Cahan's show "Night Raid in Bil'in" opens Wednesday, Nov. 19—there is a reception from 6:25 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the gallery at 625 N. Kingbury. It runs for a month, though the gallery keeps irregular hours, so you need an appointment to get in, though there are several scheduled events you can learn about on their web site. It is part of a program called "Occupied Territories/Contested Lands; Part 1," which strives for an encouraging, and rare, balance: another installation focuses on the difficulties Israelis face—there are photos of families gathered outside their rocket shelters, for instance. 
     I've never had anyone adequately explain to me why supporting Israel demands that I deny the humanity of the Palestinians, or how recognizing their tragic situation somehow is a betrayal of my own heritage. In my view, being Jewish, if it is to mean anything beyond blind team loyalty, demands it. 
     The column below was written Tuesday morning, while waiting to go to the gallery. I wrote it as a placer column—in case I got hit by a bus on the walk over, and assuming I'd scrap it after I talked to Rich and plug what I learned there into it. 
     But I decided to keep it as is.

     Let’s see if we can solve the Israeli/Palestinian problem right now, shall we?

     The Palestinians want Israel, their former home, to be their home again. While waiting, they dwell in misery in the occupied territories, passing the time by lobbing rockets and committing various atrocities, like Tuesday’s slaughter of four Jews in a Jerusalem synagogue. They call it self-defense.

     The Israelis, meanwhile, aren’t about to give up their land to the Palestinians and are content to keep them under guard — not without reason, given the facts outlined above—responding to their attacks with devastating force. Meanwhile, the years click by and the Israelis, not realizing it, grow nearly as divided, angry and extreme as their enemies, as David Remnick grimly describes in a recent New Yorker.

     Have I plainly stated the situation? Good. Now, on to the solution.

     The Palestinians could have their state, but not the state they want. And the Israelis could allow the Palestinians back into their country, but then it wouldn’t be a Jewish country. Plus there’s no reason to think Palestinians would give up the killing that has been their central mode of self-expression.

     The solution, therefore, clearly is ... umm.

     This direct approach isn’t working.

     Let’s try a metaphor. Maybe that’ll help.

     I love birds, and for the usual reasons. They fly. They sing. They’re beautiful.

     I hit upon the strategy of attracting birds by feeding them, and I stuck a wrought-iron pole in the backyard, hung a feeder off it, kept it stocked with seed. It worked. Blue jays and red-winged blackbirds, yellow swallows and brown robins flock to it, to my joy.

     And squirrels.
     The squirrels ruin everything. I hate squirrels. They dart. They twitch. They have, in the past, attacked my home, in the city, trying to chew through the accordion slide next to a window air conditioner, my wife shrieking while I mobilized to our defense.
    Squirrels have the run of my backyard. They are interlopers and don't belong. I'm willing to cede the trees to them; what choice is there? But I've tried to keep them off the feeder. That's the birds' food they're gobbling up. At first greasing the iron pole worked - not so much making them slide, as they're loath to get coated in the stuff.
     But the grease weathers away and is overcome by the squirrel onslaught. Before I know it the iron pole is thick with fur, and the squirrels are gobbling the seed again. They chewed apart my previous feeder, so I bought a sturdier, caged model. I've tried a wide, anti-squirrel baffle, but they just leap upon that and use it as a base. I suppose a 10-foot pole with a baffle might work, but then filling the feeder would be a chore, which it already is, with squirrels that can easily eat three pounds of birdseed a day.
     At the back door, watching twitchy squirrels knock seed down to their grinning confederates, I've had dark thoughts, considered installing spikes or razors. I could buy a .22, shoot a few, nail their limp bodies around the feeder as a caution to others. I know of guys on my block who do that. It might not work, but it would make me feel better. Although it is against the law - the shooting guns in Northbrook part.
     And I measured the impulse to shoot the squirrels and nail up their bloody carcasses against the philosophy I was supposedly acting under—my love of birds—and found it lacking. Killing squirrels would be unworthy of bird love, would diminish it. Remembering what started all this, I had an epiphany.
     The squirrels actually belong in the yard. They've always been there. My not liking them doesn't change that and says much more about me than it does about them.
     Maybe I could learn to like squirrels. Say this for them: The squirrels don't eat the birds; rather they all peck away at the seed fallen to the ground, oblivious to each other.
     It might be easier, I realized, instead of constructing lethal feeders or attacking the squirrels, to simply accept that they are here to stay and try to find value in them. True, doing so will incur more expense (a lot more seed). But so would buying a .22.
     To circle back on the subject at hand. I hope the metaphor doesn't elude you ("Steinberg says Palestinians are squirrels! Calls Jews birds!"). The only solution is a shift in mindset, on both sides. If the Jewish aspect of Israel is merely another brutal faith oppressing those who don't fit, what's the point? If Palestinians really want to go back to Israel, what's their plan for accepting the Jews who have always been there?
     This is a realm where humans fall far short of squirrels which, despite all their shortcomings, coexist with birds just fine.

Welcome to Chicago, Archbishop. Keep an eye on the soup...

     Welcome, Archbishop Cupich, to Chicago, a city whose Catholicism is entwined with its entire history. As you may know, we were discovered in 1673 by a priest, Jacques Marquette S.J., and the first non-native religious services here were the daily masses he held for the Kaskaskia Indians. When Chicago incorporated in 1833, there were 130 Catholic inhabitants, and a log cabin Roman Catholic church, St. Mary’s, at Wacker and Lake.
     No sooner was the first Catholic church built, however, than the minister of the first Protestant church, Jeremiah Porter, knelt outside and prayed for its downfall. A reminder that, as Catholic a town as this is, there has always been hostility. An anarchist put arsenic in Cardinal George Mundelein’s soup at the banquet welcoming him in 1915. A hundred of the faithful were poisoned, one died, though Mundelein survived, an important quality in a cardinal. “It takes more than soup to get me,” he quipped; 250 churches were built in the archdiocese during his quarter century as cardinal.
     These are different days. Churches are closing instead of being built. Though it’s still a good idea to keep a close eye on the soup (metaphorically; our anarchists are much better behaved nowadays).
     Chicago has had eight archbishops and 55 mayors, which should give you an idea of their relative importance. Archbishop Cupich (pronounced "Soo-pich") won't officially become cardinal for a few years yet.
     Mundelein’s successor, Cardinal Samuel Stritch was a “Southern gentleman” who nevertheless helped integrate the church. He was replaced in 1958 by scripture scholar Albert Meyer—that always struck me as a rather Jewish name for a cardinal. He also tried to improve race relations. “Christian faith knows not the distinction of race, color or nationhood,’ he said.
     So expanding the boundaries of who is welcome on Sunday is nothing new.
     His replacement was Cardinal John Cody, who served from 1965-82. Some of your flock still resent the Sun-Times for its 1981 expose on his diversion of church funds to a female friend. About a million dollars. He was called "a truly evil man" and a "perfect monster," but not by us; that's a quote from the editor of the Chicago Catholic. One historian said that Chicagoans were "more relieved than saddened" at Cody's passing.
     The exact opposite was true of his successor, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, the gold standard when it comes to your job.
     "I am Joseph, your brother," Bernardin said when he greeted the media in 1982. He was beloved for his gentleness, for the grace with which he faced the accusation of abuse directed at him, a charge later recanted, and his courage in the face of illness. Journalists covering his funeral openly wept. A Sun-Times photographer, John White, was one of his pallbearers.
     Then to Cardinal George. This is not the day for frank assessments of his tenure. Let's just say he didn't set an impossible standard for you to surpass. I happened to be among the media scrum standing at the foot of the driveway to the mansion on George's first day, when he came barreling out of the driveway in his black SUV, and I remember the cameramen and reporters tripping over each other as we all leapt out of the way so as to not be run over by God's chosen vessel in Chicago. It was an unpleasant moment that augured more to come.
     In general, the rule is: be nice to the media and the media will be nice to you. The press is not actually an arm of the church, though it can seem that way. With 40 percent of the population of Chicago and vicinity Catholic — about the same as it was in 1833, oddly enough — 40 percent of the audience is thus Catholic, so the media do not go out of their way to antagonize the faithful, though they are no longer dutiful lambs. So expect us to side with them, not you, when your interests conflict. Still, we're more a hallelujah chorus, as you're seeing.
     The media also tend to be liberal, thus are cheered by Pope Francis' fresh approach: that the church needn't harp on sexual matters that the modern world long ago delegated from God to individuals. You seem in sync with the pope, but remember: that also means expectations are high. There will no doubt be low points to come; like priests, the press has our calling and must follow where the news leads. Hint: Don't put your step-cousins up at Lake Point Tower.
     I would hope you'll tuck away your rapturous greeting from the press, along with Cardinal George's polite farewell, as a reminder that, for all our periodic muckraking, the media is a champion of the status quo. We're the mirror and will reflect what you do, good or ill. I hope it's mostly good. God knows Chicago could use the help.

Some thoughts on Kim Kardashian's ass

   

    I have a bunch—say 1,500—of books in my office at home, and in an attempt to ease their retrieval, I try to organize them by category. Thus three shelves of books on presidents, a shelf of Chicago history, a shelf of Dante, a shelf and a half—41 books—by and about humorist James Thurber.
     And one shelf of what I think of as queer books, in the former, “odd” sense of the word, since it holds “Queer Books” by Edmund Pearson, as well as “Bizarre Books” by Russell Ash and Brian Lake, and then books that showed up at the paper and I had to snag because I knew I would never see them again, such as “Handwriting in America: A Cultural History” by Tamara Plakins Thornton and “Dust: A History of the Small & the Invisible” by Joseph A. Amato.
     Here too, the books group together, forming a kind of spectrum, “Dust” shelved next to “Rubble,’ which is about demolition, next to “Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of our Most Primal Fear.” Bernard Mergen’s “Snow in America,” is next to “Ice: The Nature, the History and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance” by Mariana Gosnell.   

    Then a range of body parts.”The Nose,” several cultural histories of breasts, one of the vagina (next to “Flow,” about menstruation), the penis (next to “Castration,” which I haven’t yet found courage to open) and the book I pulled down Friday—easily, without searching, I happily noted—“The Rear View: A Brief and Elegant History of Bottoms Through the Ages,” by Jean-Luc Hennig, a new chapter of which was written last week when a photo of the huge, oiled naked rump of Kim Kardashian roiled the Internet.
     I noticed the enormous tush in my Twitter feed Thursday, and it is indicative of how newspapers lope after popular culture, like a little brother crying, “Wait for me!” that the Sun-Times no doubt cannot print the cheerily frank photo of Kardashian’s collossal keister that was unleashed upon the world.     
     My immediate reaction was gratitude. I had of course heard of Kardashian, and knew she is the supposed embodiment of all that is crass about popular culture. But, in a shocking lapse of curiosity, I hadn’t actually delved into what qualities, if any, she might possess that would make her such a fixture.
    And now I knew. In a flash, an epiphany. “Oh!” She possesses this enormous tush, a vast, steatopygic edifice, like a pair of Replogle desk globes strapped to her hindquarters. (I'll save you the trip to the dictionary, "steatopygia" being, according to the Shorter Oxford— not on a shelf, but in a prime location on my desk, next to "The Chicago Manual of Style" — "a protuberance of the buttocks due to accumulation of fat in and behind the hips." I learned it reading "Gravity's Rainbow"* and waited 30 years for a chance to use it. The perfect word, right?)
     I then fell to reading Hennig's book, which is fascination itself; how could it not be?
     "Among the 193 existing species of primates, only the human species possess hemispherical buttocks which project permanently from the body. Although some people have claimed that the Andean llama also possesses buttocks." I checked; it does.
     These specialized books tend to overstate the case for their subjects, and this is no exception: "Man's buttocks were possibly, in some way, responsible for the early emergence of his brain." There is a partisan joke in there, but I will let it pass (this is a subject that lends itself to joking. I told my editor that I planned to write about Kim Kardashian's butt. "You'll be jumping on the story at the tail end," she deadpanned.)
     So be it. Like any cultural trend, there are many ways to approach this. Feminists who hoped they were making social progress lately with their anti-catcall videos and the subsequent discussion of harassment might see this as a setback, as men make category errors when it comes to women, and have difficulty differentiating between Kardashian trying to build her empire and any random woman just trying to walk on by.
     Though I would suggest that, given the anxiety generated by the wraithlike Kate Moss model of feminine beauty and its dire impact on young girls, the dramatic arrival of Kardashian's heinie has to be a positive development. Say what you will about Kardashian, starved she is not. Though I don't think one photo is enough to make the smart answer to, "Do these jeans make my butt look fat?" become an enthusiastic "Why yes, honey, they make it look enormous."
     With this stunt, Kardashian earns a spot in history. In "The Rear View," avant-garde critic Georges Bataille regards the posteriors of baboons in the London Zoological Garden in 1927 and pronounces them "splendidly comic and suffocatingly atrocious." Exactly.

* A misattribution, as readers pointed out. The word Pynchon uses is "callipygian."

The politics of Porgy

      You can’t write about Chicago and not be interested in race, and I tend to write about African-American issues more than most white columnists do because I find them so important and I’m too reckless to avoid it. Thus when “Porgy and Bess” opened in Chicago in 2008, I saw my chance to explore something that fascinates me: is the depiction of any group exclusively controlled by that particular group, or can others jump in with their perspectives? Obviously, I have a dog in that race. This column appeared six years ago, but Friday I attended the dress rehearsal of "Porgy and Bess" at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and feel it is still as current. I wrote the full word that Ira Gershwin cut in 1952; I remember being aghast when my editor at the Sun-Times dashed it, and consider the use of the eusystolism “n-word” a strange and temporary bit of infantilizing, itself offensive, a white-washing of history (and, sadly, current events) for the exquisite sensibilities of a few. If I can be shown photographs of naked Jewish corpses piled high a Dachau, then black readers can stumble across “nigger” in “Huckleberry Finn.” The world needn’t be wallpapered for the sake of children, particular of the things that are being obscured help guide them to understand how it actually was, and is. That word certainly jolts, but I believe it is a necessary jolt.
     Which is why “Porgy and Bess” is still valuable and always timely, since six years make this column not at all out-of-date; I also added a line I learned researching my contest questions about tickets being given a way free to the 1952 production to try to overcome public reluctance to see what was, at the time, seen as practically a minstrel show. And the music, I hasten to add, is sublime. I was whistling “I Got Plenty of Nothin’” all day Saturday.

     A love story between a "lonely cripple" and a "liquor-guzzling slut," set against a backdrop of drug addiction, gambling, murder, mangled syntax and inescapable poverty whose sweetest moment, the opening number "Summertime," is a lullaby sung to a baby who will pass through the hands of three mothers before the play is over. 

     No, "Porgy and Bess" is not exactly a brochure published by the NAACP, and as if its subject matter weren't awkward enough, it was written by three white guys: two Jews, George and Ira Gershwin, and a Southerner, DuBose Heyward.
     Yet, a funny thing happened to this great American opera between its controversial debut on Broadway in 1935 and the magnificent production that opens Tuesday at the Lyric Opera in Chicago.
     "Folklore subjects recounted by an outsider are only valid as long as the folk in question is unable to speak for itself," sniffed critic Virgil Thomson, "which is certainly not true of the American Negro in 1935."
     Thomson touches the heart of the issue, not only with "Porgy and Bess," but with a range of cultural flare-ups. Do we judge work by its content or by its creator? Does culture belong to the group that formed it, or can others borrow it for a while?
     Some say they can't. It isn't that Chief Illiniwek's dance is any worse than what's performed every weekend at Native American gatherings; it's that their heritage is being seized and exploited by someone else. Elvis didn't popularize black music; he stole it.
     "Porgy" received the same criticisms.
     "A white man's version of black folkways and characterizations from which their race has fought so painfully to escape," Douglas Watt wrote in the New Yorker. When the opera was performed in the early 1950s in Chicago, civil rights resistance against “Porgy and Bess” was so high that producers had to give away the first week’s worth of tickets—28,000 seats—to get an audience into the opera house.
     My problem with that view is that it's a kind of segregation, suggesting that blacks can only appreciate, understand and write about blacks, and whites can only appreciate, understand and write about whites, because of some barrier that forbids them from peering across and recognizing each other.
     Thus "I Got Plenty of Nothin' " is racially suspect, since the Gershwins imply happy-go-luckiness in Porgy, while—for example—"Baby's Got Back" can't be a racial slur because Sir Mixalot is black.
     That is a political, not an artistic, analysis. I kept thinking about how a disabled advocate would view Porgy, who says things like, "When God make cripple, He mean him to be lonely," and the answer depends on how much you demand that your art flatter your sensibilities. I can enjoy "The Merchant of Venice" even though Shylock isn't the image of the ideal Jew (but then again, those battles are mostly won, while mocking the disabled still carries less stigma than slurring Jews or blacks. The word "cripple" is used again and again in "Porgy;" the word "nigger" was cut out by Ira Gershwin in 1952).
     The bottom line is that African-American artists embraced the work. Both Paul Robeson and Sidney Poitier — neither a cream-puff — sang Porgy. The entire cast is black, as required by the Gershwin estate — in reaction, the story goes, to the horror of Al Jolson pushing to cast himself as a blackface Porgy. (Except for several minor white roles. The whites are the only characters that speak instead of sing—both a stroke of genius and the only racial jab in the production.)
     While a Lyric audience usually has the racial diversity of a Blackhawks game, "Porgy" is a chance to change that, and it was gratifying to see busloads of CPS high school students brought in for Friday's dress rehearsal. At intermission, I talked to a group from Whitney Young, and asked what they thought of the show.
     "Being young, we know some of the stuff they're talking about," said Gillian Asque, 17, a junior, adding that it's "not your usual boring opera."
     Seeing the opera moots all debate. The music transcends, the songs haunt and thrill. The production is lavish — the lighting throws a warm summer South Carolina glow, the shimmery burnt orange slip of a dress that Bess first appears in deserves credit in the program. Ultimately, while the negative elements focused on by those ready to dismiss it are certainly there, so are their opposites. Yes, we have Porgy and Bess, but there are also Clara and Jake — Clara singing to her baby, Jake fishing every day to pay for the baby's college.
     Yes, we have two of the creepiest villains you'll ever see on stage — the sweaty, big-bellied, murderous Crown, and the wiry, lavender-suited, yellow-vested, Sportin' Life, brandishing packets of cocaine like a magician producing a dove.
    But they face their opposites. "Friends with you, low life?" sneers the shopkeeper, driving off Sportin' Life with a meat cleaver. "Hell no."
     There is gambling, but also baptism, at a joyous church picnic where a single verse sums up the appeal of the moral path more succinctly than I've ever heard it summed up before: "I ain't got no shame doing what I like to do."
     When the hurricane hits in the third act, and the grand stage at the Lyric is filled with humanity, on its knees before the wrath of nature, lightning casting stark shadows of their outstretched arms, appealing to the mercy of heaven, they are not black people, not poor people, but just people, and "Porgy and Bess," like all art, transcends its characters and its setting, its era and ours, and is above all else a story, about men and women, ennobled by love, undone by death, bowed yet brave. To say Porgy reflects poorly on blacks is like saying Medea reflects poorly on Greeks because, you know, she kills her kids.
     I left there overwhelmed by a love story between a simple, sweet-hearted man and a vivacious, tortured woman, set against a backdrop of strong community, suffering, hard work, joyous faith and unbreakable hope. And contrary to every critic who has written about "Porgy and Bess" over the last 70 years, I think he gets to New York and he finds her.
       —Originally published in the Sun-Times Nov. 17, 2008

Photos courtesy of Todd Rosenberg Photography.     

  

Give Derrick Rose a break

   

      I don't comment on professional sports much, because I have no depth of knowledge there.
     Besides, there are so many people already commenting about sports, there's little left unsaid, and it seems piling on to try.
     However.
     I do watch all the Bulls games, and have for several years.
     We try to go a few times a year—we went to the recent game against the Cavs, so my wife could lay eyes upon LeBron James.
    And I have actually met Derrick Rose. Quiet man. At least with the press. And for good reason.
     This is the thing about the media talking to athletes. 
     They're famous for spouting the lamest cliched crap. All that "team effort" bullshit, all those "we have to try to score more points than them while keeping them from scoring more than us" obviousness.
     Sometimes sports writers cry out for one sentence that is honest, this is real, that is heartfelt.
     And then Rose says something, regarding his limited playing time, that is both candid and sensible:
     “I feel I’ve been managing myself pretty good. I know a lot of people get mad when they see me sit out. But I think a lot of people don’t understand that when I sit out, it’s not because of this year. I’m thinking about long term. I’m thinking about after I’m done with basketball, having graduations to go to, having meetings to go to. I don’t want to be in my meetings all sore or be at my son’s graduation all sore just because of something I did in the past. Just learning and being smart.’’

     Sure, in one sense that cuts across the sports ethic. You're supposed to dive headfirst for the ball, not worry about climbing stairs when you're 40. That's not what you pull down the millions for. 

     But you'd think he spat on the flag.

     "That's just flat-out stupid," Charles Barkley said on "Inside the NBA."“Derrick Rose is making $20 million a year. He’s got a couple of bad knees. That’s disrespectful to maids, people who are in the army who go out and kill people and get killed. They got no arms and no legs."

     Yes, some people supported him.

     "What an honest, reasonable and level-headed answer," Stephen Douglas wrote on "The Big Lead." 

     So there's no need for me to gild the lily here. I just wanted to observe the hypocrisy of this. Here every sports page in America is wondering aloud whether professional football should continue, given the toll taken by concussions, and at that exact moment one injury-plagued professional athlete admits he thinks about his life to come, and would like to avoid permanently crippling himself, and he's accused of lacking determination, which obviously isn't the case for Rose, who has laboriously built himself back, twice, while maintaining a dignified public demeanor. 

     Rose said he "couldn't care less" about the criticisms and I hope that's true. But it would seem to be the lesson here is keep your mouth shut and your true thoughts to yourself, and serve up the same bland bromides everybody else parrots. That's a sad lesson.

     

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     I had driven that road for years. But maybe I had never stopped at that particular light before, and never looked in that particular direction.
     But there he was. 
    Abraham Lincoln, seated on a park bench, of all places, idling the afternoon away, watching traffic.
     Which I think he deserves. 
     Here, I'll blow it up a bit. Lincoln, right? On a blue sofa, more than a bench. 
     He's on a fairly busy street, so I don't imagine he'll stump you for long.
     Nothing seems to stump you.
     Forget "seems."
     Nothing stumps you.
     Period.
     But I'm working on it.
     I'm sort of hoping whoever cracks this can fill me in a bit on this Lincoln.
     Which is my way of being lazy, because I could just drive there, park and, one expects, finds a plaque or something.
     But who has time for that?
     Anyway, where is this place? 
     The winner will receive a bag of fine Bridgeport coffee. They are now an official sponsor of this blog; I would draw your attention to their advertisement, and encourage you to drink it. I do.
     Please post your guesses below. Good luck.