Trump critic in "pig heaven"

     

     Pity the poor satirist.
     You select a subject worthy of your scorn, of everyone's scorn. You train your well-honed powers of ridicule upon your victim.
     You open up with both barrels, hot cartridges of contempt flip hissing over your shoulder as you rake your victim.
     Everyone has a good laugh.
     The smoke clears.
     He's still there. Untouched.
     A pang of confusion and disappointment. What? You mean you guys elected Bruce Rauner anyway?  Haven't you been listening to a word I said?
     Or lately, Donald Trump.
     A hundred Talmud's worth of criticism has been flung at Trump, continuously, for the past 30 years, meticulously explaining his crassness, his P.T. Barnum-like hucksterism, his falsity. All for naught. The man strides toward the presidency, unhindered, and while we media elite assume he just has to blow up at some point, it ain't happened yet. It may never happen.
     This summer, as Trump swelled from balloon to blimp to zeppelin, I kept thinking about Spy Magazine, the sharp New York satirical monthly of the late 1980s, which I was honored to write for. Trump was first among Spy's A-list of New York socialites and business people whose venality made writing satire more an act of stenography than journalism.
     What would Spy's editors have thought, I wondered, had they known what was coming for Trump?
     Heck, what do they think now? I put in a call to Kurt Andersen, one of Spy's founders.
     "It's the best," Andersen said. "I am in pig heaven."
     Come again?
     "In the late '80s and early '90s, I was a student of Trump," he continued. "We brought his egregiousness to the world's attention. Then, frankly, I lost interest in him. Once the world became more Trumplike and gave him his own reality show, he ceased to be interesting to me. I never watched 'The Apprentice.' I didn't care."
     So in a sense, by running for president, Trump was born anew.
     "Now that he has upped the ante, and brought this craaaazy, postmodern character that he's always been into this new realm of presidential politics, well, I'm excited," said Andersen. "Amazingly, he was flirting with running for president back in the '80s. He was talking about it. Back then, our attitude was, 'Please, please, please.' Nothing would be better than Donald Trump running for president."
     And here I thought I was cynical. But this is a new level. My Midwestern yokel's stab at sophistication wilted after a single draft of the 151 proof East Coast version. Next to Andersen, I felt like Dorothy Gale.
     "But what if he wins?" I whispered.
     "I don't want him to be president," Andersen said. "He is awful and interesting. When he became a birther, it was the first time, really, that I felt, 'Nah, this is no longer amusing. This is hideous. I can't laugh.' The fact that he's running for president, and a quarter of the Republicans are supporting him. It's too astounding for me to resist, as an observer."
     Andersen said it wasn't so much that Trump spouts the "ugly, xenophobic, racist, sexist" beliefs that are the secret shame of Republicanism, but he represents the opposite of the polished politician, who "people have come to hate."
     Not Trump, said Andersen. "He speaks like the guy who has three drinks at the end of the bar. He just talks."
     Andersen believes the risk of Trump becoming president has gone "from absolutely zero to just above zero." I repeated my own mantra: If America elects Donald Trump, then we deserve him.
     "Ross Douthat had a very interesting line," Andersen said of the conservative pundit. "Essentially, he said Trump may be the guy that a decadent American imperium deserves."
     Indeed. Donald Trump is America's punishment for being America. Andersen, who became a best-selling novelist after selling Spy, views the Donald in narrative terms.
     "You can't make this up," he said. "It's beyond fiction. At the moment we're all supposed to be worried about inequality — about a rigged system and the the middle class not getting a fair shake — this rich guy is your avatar. It's incredible. If you wrote this in a novel, people would say, 'It's funny, but come on!'"
     At a time when reality beggars satire, Andersen, has shifted to writing nonfiction. His next book is titled "Fantasyland."
     What is it about?
     "America," he said.
     Of course.

Dow falls: "an air of holiday menace"

    I don't usually have a Tuesday column. But after I posted a vignette about my wife's timely advice Monday, the paper asked me to write something about the stock market, so I wrote this, taking that story and expanding upon it.

    Looking for context as the market was in free fall Monday, I pulled down my journal from 1987 and checked what I wrote on Oct. 19, another Black Monday, when the Dow shed nearly a quarter of its value.
     It was the biggest one-day loss ever, far beyond anything in the Great Depression, or this Monday's stomach twisting dive and return and dive again.
     Young me was surprisingly disengaged on Oct. 19, 1987.
     "Much interest and speculation over plunging stock market, which lost 550 points by late afternoon," I wrote, noting that the event cast "an air of holiday menace over the day, like a storm when you are a child."
     I was nearly a child, 27, and didn't have any investments to speak of, and could afford to be blase. But even now, twice as old with an all-important nest egg the only thing between me a an impoverished old age, "holiday menace" still sounds right. You saw that 1,000 point drop and thought "Wow!" almost whistling in admiration, without necessarily associating it with the money you've just lost.
     Like most investors, my strategy is a blend of fear, ignorance, superstition, snatches of conversation overheard in locker rooms, , various articles skimmed in doctor's offices, and did I mention fear?
     Fear is my primary motivator; 2013 was a very good year for stocks. More than 29 percent up. Even I knew that was a lot. So knowing that such a rise had to be followed by a considerable fall, I began pulling out.
     Slowly. That's a second mantra. Do everything slowly, gradually. Be a snail investor. Fear and dawdling.
     So in 2014 I begin slowly pulling out. Slowly. While the market goes up another 10 percent, I'm shifting my money into dull-but-safe 1.6 percent a year bond funds.
     It's very hard to make money at 1.6 percent a year.
    This year, I figure time to nudge back in. Which brings up my third motivator: greed. Fear, dawdling and greed. The market is pretty flat. It's gotta start coming back.
     Or not. Last week. Pow pow pow pow. Four down days. And we all know what you do when the market goes down. You buy.
     So on Sunday, I move a big hunk of change into the market. Trying to be the smart investor that I'm really not.
     Now it's Monday morning, in bed with the wife. The clock radio stirs us with the doom from the East. The Chinese market is down 8.5 percent.
     Summoning courage, I tell my wife I just pushed a big chunk back into the market.
     "A couple thousand?" she said hopefully.
     "No," I said. "A lot more."
     "The markets haven't opened yet," she suggested. "Maybe you could cancel your order."
     "I don't think it works like that," I said.
     I had no idea how it works. To me, investing is just pushing stuff around. I don't have a broker, just a computer screen. I feel like a child deploying his toy soldiers across a carpeted playroom.
     I went upstairs, logged in, went to transaction history, which I had never done. There was the automatic deposits, my previous nudging of funds back into the market. And one pending transaction. Plus two words. "Cancel Transaction." Yes! I clicked on them. The transaction was cancelled.
     I flew downstairs to congratulate my wife for being a genius. And so greeted the 1,000 point swoon with more relief than the average investor--choosing to focus on my dollars who were safe on deck instead of joining those flailing around in the sucking vortex of loss and volatility. Yes, some money was going down the drain. But not as much as could have been.
     Better for amateurs to ignore this stuff, lest it drive us crazy. Take a set amount, have it automatically sacrificed into a 401(K). Adjust as your night terrors dictate, but don't fret about it. It's all lost money anyway. Either the market will eat it, or I'll die suddenly and my wife will spend it on Aegean island cruises with her new boyfriend. Or she'll go and I'll blow it on babes and bourbon. Or we'll both linger and the money will be hoovered up by whatever grim hellhole of a nursing home we'll end up in. Or we'll both go, and the boys will stare with shock and disappointment that this, this was all their parents managed to sock away from a life of toil.
     However the chips fall, it's a losing game, eventually, whether the market goes up or down.

Financial advice: listen to your wife

     My column is not bristling with investment tips, because I'm a buy-and-hold type of guy. There are better things to worry about, and I'm not financially savvy and don't have many insights to pass along, other than, "Save for retirement." 
     But after posting something like 25 percent gains in 2013, I figured the prudent card sharp knows when to take his winnings and go home, and so began slowly pulling out of the market, some, because it can't go up 25 percent every year. Still, 2014 was a solid year, and I missed out on some of that. You can't get very far on the 1.4 percent paid in bond funds, so began slowly trying to creep back. Every time the market fell a substantial amount,  I'd toss a few handful of cash back in.
     With the Dow tanking last week, I figured time to deploy even more of the sidelined resources, such as they are. 
     Even as I made the transaction Sunday, I felt a little squeamish. What if stocks weren't done plummeting yet?
     Bingo. Monday morning the clock radio clicked on with news of continuing free fall in China, certain to infect here. 
     "I just put a bunch of money back in the market," I said, feeling slightly queasy.
     "How much?" my wife ventured, hopefully. "A couple thousand?" 
     "No," I said. "More."  I told her how much.
     "Maybe you can cancel it. The markets haven't opened yet."
     "I don't think it works that way," I said.
     But I got out of bed. Because the truth was, I really didn't know. I padded upstairs, logged onto our 401K, leaned forward. Squinted. 
     One click. "Transaction cancelled."
     I skipped downstairs, gave her a kiss.
     "Honey," I said. "You just saved us thousands of dollars."
    I don't know if this counts as financial advice. But with the Dow Jones cratering, you need some kind of guiding investment philosophy, and mine is, at least for today: it pays to listen to your wife.
   
 

Tommy Wong: "Everyone is like your family"

     "Number three!" the maitre d' growled.
     We were standing outside Lao Sze Chuan, in Chinatown. With college looming, my boys have been ticking off must-visit restaurants before being consigned to university food service fare: High Five Ramen. Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder, Cross-Rhodes in Evanston and now Tony Hu's flagship restaurant.
     We had "14" on a square of cardboard. A 40 minute wait.
     "Why don't you go explore the mall," I said to the family, "I'll wait here."

Tommy Wong

     A ploy, to get them out of the way—my boys cringe when their dad takes a picture—because I wanted to photograph the maitre d', who had a very distinctive look. Large Harry Caray eyeglasses. An orange polo with the collar turned up. Dripping with bling. A sparkly earring the size of a pea. A wide jade bracelet on one wrist, an enormous gold watch on the other. Eight rings, two to a finger. A pendant His name, "Tommy," on a white tag.
     "Do you mind if I take your picture?" I asked, tentatively because of his fierce growl. He posed for a pair of demure shots, hand on hip, and then raced back to the maitre d' station and returned with a black fan, which he held in a variety of tai chi poses, one knee in the air, arms back.

      "I am the teacher!" Tommy Wong exclaimed. "I am the master!" He vanished into the restaurant, and came back with a sword.

     The Chicago restaurant scene goes through various trends: sushi wanes, steakhouses blossom like mushrooms after a rain. But one aspect of the eating out experience has fallen from popularity and shows no risk of returning: the colorful host. He—and it was always a man—added to the dining drama, picking up where the food left off.
     It could be a maitre d'--the old world charm of Arturo Petterino at the Pump Room. It could be a chef. The beef wellington at the Bakery on Lincoln Avenue was justifiably lauded, but the moment you really waited for was when Louis Szathmary, looking exactly like a chef in a Maurice Sendak children's book with his snowy mustache, tall toque and ample stomach--would make the rounds.
     The apex of the form was Petros Kogiones at Dianna's Opaa on Halsted Street. I never went anywhere else in Greektown. How could I? Because more than flaming saganaki, which he claimed to invent, we wanted Petros, the lanky host welcoming us with shouts of "Cousin!" kissing our girlfriends, quieting down the restaurant to perform what was in essence a one-man floor show. On the very rare nights you went to Dianna's and Petros wasn't there, you felt robbed.
     All gone. I suppose a few remain: Cesar Izquierdo, doing his spinning top tricks at Taste of Peru on North Clark Street. The fact he also feeds you is an added bonus.
     And now Tommy Wong. A couple days later I returned to get to know him better, or try. No sooner did we settle at a table in the back then he hopped up again.
     "Excuse me," he said, hurrying to the door.

     "Hi, welcome, how are you? Four ladies?"
     Then he was back.
     "I've done this job 35 years," he said. "I was born in Hong Kong,"
     How does he see his role at the restaurant?
     "You do the job," he said. "Like a family. Everyone is like your family. your grandmother or brother or sister, who likes your food and he likes your service. I'm very happy to see everybody, I say, 'Hi! How are you?' Like a brother or sister or father or mother. I like to make people happy, come here for lunch and think, 'I like Tommy' I want people to remember me and keep coming back and do business."
     As a hobby, he is part of the society that puts on the Chinese New Year's Parade—he operates the lion's head, he said. Wong is 48, married, one child, 15.
     Before I could ask the teen's gender, he was gone again. I sat for a long time.
     Wong eventually returned, redolent of Baisha cigarettes. He seemed a little surprised I was still there.
     "This is for the newspaper?" he asked. I admitted it was. He left again, returning with a take-out menu, which he pressed into my hands, pointing to the address: "2172 S. Archer Avenue." There seemed nothing left to do but leave, so I did.

"If you want drama, go to the opera"— Top Opera Movies

     Scarcity creates value.
     So when computer graphics were new and expensive, and therefore unusual, films crammed with eye-popping special effects and feats of physical-impossibility were just the thing to draw an audience. 
     Now every mangled tale of a forgotten B-list Marvel superhero of the '70s conjures up a convincing army of physics-defying orcs and droids and CGI ho-hum magic whatever. Common as dirt. Far harder to find are actual human stunts, performed by actual human stars. So they stand out, despite being a practice that traces back to silent picture days.
     Or at least one stunt was enough to draw me to the cinema to see the latest "Mission Impossible" installment. Just as Tom Cruise bouncing around the top the Burg Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai forced my ass into a seat to see "Ghost Protocol" in 2011, so his heavily-publicized take-off clinging to the outside of an airplane as it takes off was lure enough to compel me to see "Rogue Nation" a couple weeks back.
    Boy-howdy. The short review is, it's everything it's supposed to be. A superb thriller, packed with the sort of stuff that a movie like that is supposed to be packed with. And the airplane stunt, at the beginning of the movie, was truly memorable.  I don't know if  Cruise does his own stunts because he's crazy, or to show off the physical prowess of the Scientology lifestyle, or with the exact cynical intention of drumming his movies.
    But it works.  
    I even, at one point during the film, said to myself: "Okay Tom, so be a Scientologist then." Not that it isn't still a scary, vindictive cult. But really, what faith isn't?
     The movie is not without flaw: a few BMW product placements too many, intrusions that stop the plot as surely as if John Cameron Swazye stepped from behind a pillar and attached a Timex watch to the frame of Cruise's motorcycle to illustrate its durability. And the hero-is-about-to-be-tortured-but-gets-away trope has to be proclaimed officially dead and buried after "Rogue Nation." No mas. 

Tom Cruise and Rebecca Ferguson at the Vienna Opera.

     But that's not why I'm writing about it. This quasi-review is just prelude, and could be left in the capable hands of my colleague, Richard Roeper. No, the reason I'm focusing on the new "Mission Impossible" movie is because one product placement is far more satisfying and subtle than constantly flashing the BMW logo: a good 10 minute chunk of the film, at least, takes place at  the Vienna State Opera House. 
    Sure, the segment is another cliche, an attempt on the life of the Austrian prime minister by a team of bad guy assassins,  interspersed with satisfying snatches of "Turandot." Though the set piece is forgivable because it contains the immortal line, "You want drama, go to the opera." 
    Exactly. And its very derisiveness made me think of the many, many great opera movies that are not only fun to watch, but help introduce newcomers to the art form. This being a humble blog, I will limit myself to my favorite six opera movies, though feel free to add your own (though not "Pretty Woman," which I didn't forget, but am excluding, because it's a romantic comedy about a streetwalker who looks like Julia Roberts, and whose prostitution leads to wealth and happiness, which is like writing a musical about a heroin addict who looks like Taylor Swift and who, thanks to her addiction, finds love and fulfillment).
     I'm also leaving out the Bugs Bunny shorts that introduced most of us to opera, since they aren't technically "movies," and probably deserve a post of their own someday. 
    So, with no further throat-clearing, my list of Great Opera Movies, in order of their greatness..

Tom Hulce

1. Amadeus. Thirty years later, I still remember shock of seeing Pinto from "Animal House" cast in the role of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. But it worked.  Milos Forman's movie version of the Broadway hit not only  offers up a gloss of Mozart's greatest compositions, but explains how they were created, including a wonderful "Queen of the Night" aria from "The Magic Flute" and the chilling climactic moment from "Don Giovani" that set me up for disappointment when I finally saw it live at the Lyric. Winner of eight-Academy Awards, including best actor to F. Murray Abraham, in his one-hit-wonder star turn as Antonio Salieri, the court composer, enemy of Mozart, and narrator of the film. Elizabeth Berridge  steals the show as Mozart's bright-faced, scheming wife, Constanze Weber.

2. Moonstruck. I would have put this first—it's one of my favorite movies—but didn't want people to smirk. Norman Jewison's wonderful 1987 family comedy stars Cher, of all people, who is surprisingly capable, despite what you think of her. She is the aging accountant, 

Cher and Nicholas Cage at the Met

Loretta Castorini, who, seven years after her husband was hit by a bus, is poised to marry a schlub—or whatever the Italian version of a "schlub" is—Danny Aielo, when she meets maimed baker Nicholas Cage, back when he could still act. The movie begins with the Met preparing to stage "La Boheme," and pivots on their date to the production. "I didn't really think she was going to die," Cher says through tears afterward. "I knew she was sick...."  Then the movie is filled with memorable lines, Cage seems to get most of them, including the useful "I ain't no freakin' monument to justice!" and a poignant meditation on love. "Love don't make things nice—it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren’t here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die." Sounds like the plot of every opera.

Klaus Kinski

3. Fitzcarraldo. No movie captures the obsessive passion of the opera fan like Werner Herzog' 1982 tale of an Irishman, improbably played by Klaus Kinski, who wants to build an opera house in the middle of the South American rain forest. To do so, he needs to make money—how else?—in the rubber industry, and to do that he does the only sensible thing: try to drag a 320-ton steamship across a jungle portage with  an army of Peruvian peons, while blasting Caruso on his gramophone, it's the perfect metaphor for art and human passion giving the finger to the indifferent forces of nature.

4.  The Untouchables. Kevin Costner in a historically-iffy but satisfying portrayal of Elliot Ness and his battle against Al Capone in Jazz Age Chicago. Sean Connery is the street smart

Robert De Niro at the opera

Chicago cop who utters his classic definition of the "the Chicago Way." Not only is there a thrilling homage to the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin" filmed in Union Station's Great Hall, but Connery is gunned down in a a classic back and forth between Capone, played by Robert DeNiro, enjoying that most cliched of movie opera moments, Pagliacci's "Vesti la giubba" aria while director  Brian De Palma cuts from the opera to the unfolding murder (used again in "Godfather III, "which doesn't make our list, well, because it's "Godfather III"). 

5. A Night at the Opera. The only way Margaret Dumont could be any stuffier was to make her a wealthy dowager interested in investing in the New York Opera Company. What opera goer hasn't, at one point or another, wished the Marx Brothers would burst in an bring some interest to a production? Here they switch the sheet music to "Il Trovatore" for "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and in general make a hash of the production (including a chase in the rafters that isn't anything like the one in "Rogue Nation.")  This 1935 classic—No. 12 on the American Film Institute's list of all-time funniest movies— did much to kidnap "Pagliacci" and hold it for ransom in popular culture, with Groucho adding his own lyrics. "Ridi, pagliacci, I love you very much-ee." 

6. To Rome With Love. While the funniest part of Woody's Allen's 2012 movie is Roberto

Fabio Armilato can only sing when wet.

Benigni's Leopoldo, an ordinary man who wakes up one morning to discover he's become a wildly-popular celebrity, one of the movie's sub-stories involves a mortician named Giancario, an amateur opera singer who can sing beautifully, but only in the shower. So Allen's character, Jerry, a vacationing American opera director, arranges for him to sing—"Pagliacci," of course—in the shower on-stage. It might not be the Marx Brothers, but if you can't laugh at a man standing in a shower stall on stage in a concert hall, singing opera in front of an audience, well, you can't laugh at anything. 

Anyway, those are mine. Did I miss any?

(Yes, I have. Readers on Facebook have been suggesting their own favorites, and one mentioned the heartbreaking scene in  7. "Philadelphia" Jonathan Demme's ground-breaking 1993 movie about a lawyer with AIDS, where a dying Tom Hanks, who won the Academy Award for his role, tries to explain "La mamma morta" from "Andrea Chenier"—sung by Maria Callas, no less—to Denzel Washington. "The place that cradled me is burning..." Notice the moment when Washington glances at his watch. That's what we're up against. Just love that scene. I can't believe I forgot it).

Scott Walker's handful

Scott Walker

     So how many Muslims aren't radical terrorists?
     Take your time.
     You don't have to come up with an exact figure.
     I would say, "the vast, overwhelming majority."
     Or, for the mathematically inclined, 99.99 percent.
    First, because that's demonstrably true. While quite a bit of the bloodshed in the world can be traced to those acting in some crazed notion of Islam, the fact remains that almost all of the 1.6 billion Muslims are, like most people everywhere, trying to go about their business.
    If that weren't true, we'd all be dead. 
    Or a lot more of us would be dead. 
    Not everyone thinks this way of course. I've had otherwise sensible readers tip-toe toward it, saying, "Yeah, maybe, but what about ISIS and the mullahs in Iran." It's important for them to establish, at the very least, that Islam is more bloodthirsty than Christianity is, at the moment. 
     I think, in their view, it means they win. 
     But some aren't satisfied playing that sorta sad exercise in playing nyah-nyan-we're-more-peaceful-than-you.
    Scott Walker, on the campaign trail in New Hampshire this week, squinched his eyes shut and came up with an estimate of how many Muslims aren't murderous terrorists.
     His guess:
     "A handful."
     You can listen to the quote in context here.
     I imagine he'll eventually apologize—groups like CAIR are already demanding he do so. 
     Or maybe he won't. As Donald Trump amply demonstrates, being the big dog means never having to say you're sorry.
     Besides, this was no gaffe. It is a received truth of the Republican party that, just as Mexican immigrants tend to be rapists, murderers and criminals, so followers of Islam are hot to wage deadly Jihad, if not one and all, then the vast majority. Those who haven't struck yet are perhaps biding their time.
     This is important more than an illustration of gotcha politics. Scott Walker and his like-minded soul mates are in league with the terrorists they so strenuously condemn. The reason terrorists commit those acts is because they want to drive a wedge between Islam and the West. 
     So when hacks like Walker take the bait, they are doing the work of terrorists. Walker is what the Communists would call "a useful idiot."  A phrase that, applied to Walker, is only half true.
     The second half.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     There are hundreds of gas stations in the Chicago area. 
     So how are you expected to nail the exact location of this sign, colorful though it may be?
     Well, you just are.  Because this is not your run-of-the-mill gas station sign, and I'll leave it at that.  And to be honest, my gut says it'll be pretty easy—it's either this, or one that I worry is too hard, and somehow I hate to inflict the too hard one. It feels like cheating. 
     So where is this green and pink neon beauty? Place your answers below. The winner gets one of my red and black wonders, the 2015 blog poster sign. Good luck.