The big wind at the center of the storm

     This week's Time magazine cover, even more apt in light of Thursday's detached-from-reality Trump press conference. It's by Tim O'Brien, who readers of the blog might remember as the artist behind this Little Golden Book parody. 
     Afterward, colleagues, their jaws hanging open, came by my office to ask if I had seen it. I hadn't—I was prepping my column for tomorrow. And given that I know that Trump is a pathological liar and bully, egomaniac and incompetent, somehow forcing myself to view each new example of these qualities, live and in real time well, it can seem like self-flagellation. I just want whatever damning evidence there is of his utter corruption to the Russians to come out, so he can be swept from office, the sooner, the better. Until then, comfort in the arts. 

It isn't April 1st yet, is it?

     On the first April Fool's Day this blog was in existence, I pretended to be in the midst of Kittens in Yarn Week. A comment, I suppose, about the dumbing down of the media.  So it was with a flash of recognition that I got this in my in-box late Wednesday. The heart breaks. And just as newspapers are boldly stepping up in the epic battle to bring down the unfit bully and Russian catspaw, Donald Trump, our own local media conglomerate, tronc (for readers elsewhere: the once respected Tribune Publishing renamed itself "tronc," well, I suppose, because that sounds more like something that would be the source of what regular reader Jakash immediately dubbed a "kitty newslitter.")
     Yes, I know. We're all cooking in the same pot. And newspapers always have had the trivial. The comics weren't exactly The Pentagon Papers either. The Sun-Times prints big posters of sports stars, though I might argue that top athletes are still news figures as opposed to, say, a Pekinese with a bowl of spaghetti dumped over its head. Papers do what they must to survive. Still. Must the Tribune's parent do this? The email went on to inform potential subscribers:

    Which leads me to this question: Do we need the editors of the three of the top newspapers in the country to scour the web for cute animal stories? Isn't that what Facebook is for? And what aren't these editors doing while they're culling "inspiring animal news"? (And inspiring in what way? Just the idea inspires me to want to bite a towel and scream). 
     Sigh. Power to them. I'm sure it'll be very successful. In fact, the question isn't "Do we need newspaper editors to pick our cute kitty stories?" The question is, "Once we're being force-fed our steady stream of 'endearing pet stories and inspiring animal news,' will we need anything else?" Consume too much fluff and you're not hungry for dinner.

U.S. sells more corn than anybody; guess who buys it?

     It's time to play The Fact Game!
     How do we play? First, throw out a fact:
     Corn is a kind of grass.
     Just like rice, wheat, oats, or other cereal grains. Don't let the large seed head — the corn cob — fool you.
     Is that true? Untrue? Well, I read it in a book, Midwest Maize: How Corn Shaped the U.S. Heartland by Cynthia Clampitt.
     "Corn is big grass," writes Clampitt, early in her charming, engrossing book. "It grows faster than other grasses. Its large leaves make it better at capturing sunlight than other grasses. . . . So it's really impressive grass, but it's still grass."
     It sounds right, is written by a noted food historian and printed in a book published by University of Illinois Press, confirmed by a second source (". . . of the grass family" says the Enyclopaedia Britannica).
     I'd say: Fact!
     Again, again! Let's have another "fact":
     The United States is the No. 1 producer of corn in the world.
     Do we accept that as fact? It's good to be No. 1. So yes, we do!

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Unhappy Valentine's Day, for those who lost loved ones

     I have been fortunate, in that I've seldom had to resort to the shadier practices of the journalistic profession. No sneaking photos of the deceased off the mantle during a wake, no pretending to be an assistant coroner to get information.
      The sketchiest thing I ever did, in my opinion was for this story: lurk in a cemetery and accost mourners communing with their dead loved ones. I had heard that cemeteries were busy on Valentine's  Day, and that seemed the best way to go about researching it. To be honest, the bereaved didn't seem to mind the intrusion. It didn't bother them nearly as much as it bothered me.

     "I love you," Ed Caldario said, out loud, in front of the stone marking his wife's grave. Weeping, he set down red tulips.
     "I always brought her flowers on Valentine's Day. She loved flowers. I used to send them to her at work."
     For the fortunate ones to whom Feb. 14 meant only kisses, romantic dinners and funny valentines, it might be good to pause and remember that for other Chicagoans Valentine's Day was a bittersweet time of fierce love tempered by loss and sorrow.
     By noon Sunday, Mount Carmel Cemetery in Hillside was dotted with big heart-shaped arrangements of flowers, plastic valentine decorations and poignant valentine's cards.
     "For the one I love," read the cheery preprinted valentine affixed to a stick before the grave of a woman who died in her 70s. To the generic message of affection, her husband added: "We love & miss you very much."
     Pasquale D'Andrea took his hat off and crossed himself as he joined his wife Angela in front of the grave of her parents.
     "Valentine's Day is a day to remember loved ones," said D'Andrea, of Berkeley.
     Isabel Riveria and her sister, Mary Mendez, brought along a gardener's trowel to tidy up the grave of their nephew, Efrain Perez, who died nearly five years ago at age 18. They also brought some liquid laundry detergent, to clean off the reddish marble marker.
     Riveria said the Valentine's Day visit to Perez's grave is a yearly tradition, as is the visit to the grave of her brother. She said it doesn't detract from their other Valentine's Day festivities because they don't have Valentine's Day festivities anymore.
     "We don't party since they passed away," she said. "We don't celebrate the occasions like we used to."
     "Special days like this, it makes my mother real sad," said Mendez, who brought a red plastic heart reading "Happy Valentine's Day" to plant by the grave. "We try to keep it real quiet."
     Not too far away was the grave of a baby who lived for three days in 1986. Someone thought to bring a heart-shaped helium balloon, with metallic silver on one side, "I Love You!" on the other.
     The balloon was tied to the grave by a ribbon, and it twisted and struggled against its mooring in Sunday's strong breeze, as if trying to break free from earth and fly away.
              —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 15, 1993

Love, soldiers, gypsies and free tickets to 'Carmen'

  

Associate choreographer Sarah O'Gleby at rehearsal for "Carmen" (photo by Andrew Cioffi) 

     "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle . . ."
     "Love is a rebellious bird," Carmen sings, during her famous entrance in the beloved opera, "Carmen," which opened at the Lyric Opera of Chicago on Saturday.
     Just in time for Valentine's Day.
     What does "love is a rebellious bird" even mean? Later she explains: Love; you wait for it, it never comes. But stop waiting, there it is. Think you've caught it? It's gone.
     Sounds about right.
     This is the ninth year the Sun-Times and the Lyric have joined forces to bring 100 lucky readers to "A Night at the Opera," and this is perhaps the most exciting yet because, well, it's "Carmen." Spain. Handsome soldiers. Saucy gypsies. Men fighting with knives. Women fighting with knives.
     And the music. The soul of Spain distilled as only a Frenchman, Georges Bizet, could do it.
    We're going Feb. 28, and there's a party beforehand. Details about how to enter to win one of 50 pairs of free tickets are online. You can enter every day, and if I were you, I would.

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When you see a Bob Falls play, you remember it

Robert Falls directing "Don Giovanni" at the Lyric.

     What I really wanted to do was ... direct. No, kidding. What I really wanted to do was conduct the interview with Bob Falls to mark his 30th anniversary at the Goodman. But my colleague Miriam Di Nunzio snagged that plum. As a consolation prize, though, she kindly allowed me to write about some of my favorite Falls productions. This is in the Sunday Sun-Times.

     It has been more than 30 years since I saw my first Robert Falls' production. While I haven't seen most of his output, I've seen many, and remember them all. They lodge in the mind because, well, he takes the raw material of a playwright's art, whittles it to a point and thrusts it into your eye. I could discuss 15 hugely memorable Falls' productions, but I have room for five.

     1. "In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison" (1984): Performed in the small Goodman Studio Theater, you almost had to dodge William L. Peterson's spittle as he ranted and bashed his head against a filing cabinet. The lights came up after, and my friends and I blinked at each other, amazed to find ourselves back in the real world, in a theater, apparently, after having been hijacked into another realm by Falls' powerful staging.

     2. "Hamlet" (1985): Aiden Quinn walked onto the stage with a can of spray paint and, back to the audience, methodically began to paint "TO... BE... OR ... NOT... TO... BE..." He turned to the audience, jerked his thumb at the dripping paint. "That's the question!"

From the opening scene, in total darkness, the guards on the castle ramparts, cutting the night with their flashlights, to Gertrude, gazing at the king on a green room monitor, her face a Nancy Reagan mask of adoration, to Del Close's Polonius, a bumbling alderman, the play was one daring directorial choice after another.  My favorite: Ophelia, late in the fourth act, drawing on her face with makeup, hiking up her dress. My immediate thought was "She's crazy!" and then — duh! — it's Ophelia. Of course she's crazy. Falls makes the familiar new again...

Brian Dennehy with Pamela Payton-Wright in Goodman Theatre's 2002 production of "Long Day's Journey Into Night." | LIZ LAUREN PHOTO

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Black History Month: Why does society value white lives more?

     They call it Black History Month, though public attention has a way of petering out in the early days of February, ground down by the pro-forma parade of familiar icons—Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth and Rosa Parks. Though I suppose they must be fresh revelations to a certain segment of the population, unfortunately, and we shouldn't dismiss anything that slides them under the public nose. 
     But history—black or white or whatever hue it's cast in—shouldn't be rote. Not something dull you memorize. It should live, and be real, and talk to us, and relate to our present moment somehow. Otherwise what good is it?
     Look at this relic of the Civil War, the Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment, by August Saint-Gaudens. The original version is a bronze on display on Beacon Street next to Boston Commons—this is the later, plaster version, in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where I noticed it last June.
 

The Latin inscription translates as "He left all to save the Republic."

     Shaw was a 25-year-old Harvard graduate, the son of wealthy abolitionists, put in charge of the first all-black Union Army unit assembled after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863. Its formation was controversial—racial biases were such that some felt blacks would not follow orders or comport themselves well under fire—and two of Frederick Douglass's sons joined the 54th.
     Their first battle was a suicidal storming of Fort Wagner, the well-defended battery that guarded Charleston, South Carolina. On July 18, 1863, Shaw led the charge and was killed almost immediately. Half the men in his 600 soldier regiment were killed or captured.
    "Not a man flinched, though it was a trying time," Lewis Douglass wrote to his wife. 
     Saint-Gaudens, America's greatest sculptor, spent a dozen years on the sculpture, hiring African-American models to pose for the 16 figures of the black soldiers. On the Boston Memorial, an inscription on the monument begins, "The white officers taking life and honor in their hands cast in their lot with men of a despised race unproven in war." As a reminder of just how despised, when the monument was unveiled in 1897, it contained the names of the white officers who fell, but not of the black officers, though their heroism was noted, and the fact that for the first 18 months they were unpaid. 
     Therein lies a tale. When the War Department approved the idea of black soldiers, it paid them $10 a month, versus $13 for white, and black soldiers refused the unfair slight, until Congress decreed that all soldiers, of whatever race, would receive equal pay. (The pay stand-off was a theme in Edward Zwick's melodramatic film about the 54th, "Glory.") Some 200,000 African-Americans served in the Union Army in the Civil War. 
    Three hundred black men killed or captured. One of those wounded, William Carney, became the first African-American to win the Congressional Medal of Honor. Awarded in 1900 for his role in the battle—Carney snatched the flag from its hurt bearer and, though wounded himself, carried it aloft throughout the fiasco. "Boys," he said afterward, "the old flag never touched the ground." 
    But the monument is to Shaw, whose body was pierced, pierced with bullets, was stripped and thrown into a mass grave with the corpses of his troops. Still, the inclusion of the marching men he led in his memorial was nearly incidental. Saint-Gaudens almost depicted him charging on horseback, alone, but was deterred because the charge was on foot, so the scene depicted is him leading his regiment out of Boston, on the way to fight, past the very spot where the bronze memorial stands.
     The Irish-born sculptor did a masterful job--some call it the greatest American sculpture of the 19th century, and when the version above was displayed at the Paris Exposition of 1900, Auguste Rodin is said to have taken his hat off and stood before it, head bowed in silent veneration. It represents a heroic view of memorializing war that Maya Lin ended with her Vietnam Memorial, a black gash of stone that Robert Lowell predicted in "For the Union Dead," his marvelous poem about the Civil War, memory and the Shaw monument, in these lines:

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

    You can read the entire poem here, and should.
    But his work also reminds us that American society holds the personhood of African-Americans cheaper than whites. It did so in 1863, and in 1897. It also did so in 1989 when Edward Zwick made "Glory" ("I didn't understand why it had to be told so often from the point of view of the 54th's white commanding officer," Roger Ebert writes in his review of the film. "Why did we see the black troops through his eyes — instead of seeing him through theirs? To put it another way, why does the top billing in this movie go to a white actor?")
    Good question. And why does that primacy of white lives over black persist today? Knowing what we know now, why do we still act the way we do? Another good question.