Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Dropping the Saturday fun activity must have been a good idea, because nobody ever mentioned it, never mind complained, and I never gave the change a second thought. 
     Until Monday. My pal Bill Savage, Northwestern literature professor, baseball scholar, and salvager of lost works, was talking about the Women's Christian Temperance Union and prohibition at the Whiskey Thief bar in Evanston. I thought I'd slide by for illumination. I enjoyed listening rather than taking notes, so can only touch upon how he wove the national drive against alcohol to class, culture and politics. 
    Let's put it this way: the goal wasn't so much to suppress booze as to thwart the sort of people who drank it. 
     The talk was to promote publication of George Ade's "The Old-Time Saloon," a 1931 celebration of drinking establishments that Bill rescued from obscurity and released, with the help of the University of Chicago Press, including his own sharp forward and notes. 
      When Bill was done, I thought I would lead the charge and buy a copy. The trouble was, I already have two copies of my own. A dilemma I brushed aside by rationalizing that I could give the book away here, by reviving the contest just this once. I asked him to sign it to the winner and he did.
     A toughie, I know. But one reason I was so happy about scrapping this is that you guys always solve it within the first 10 minutes. Not so, I have reason to believe, today. Where is this charming old car dealership sign? Because it is so difficult, I will give a hint: it is more than 80, but less than 100 miles from Chicago. The prize is a funny, thought-provoking and timeless read and well worth the effort. Good luck. 

What part of health insurance doesn't the GOP understand?

"Lamentation over the Death of the First-Born of Egypt" by Charles Sprague Pearce 

     A short quiz. Two simple yes-or-no questions, which half of the readership will nevertheless fail.
     Ready? Then let's begin.
     1: Do you want to pay the health care costs for strangers? a: Yes. b: No.
     2. Do you want health insurance for yourself? a: Yes. b: No.
     You can almost hear the thunderous "No!" to 1. Particularly the day after House Republicans finally fulfilled their dream of scuttling Obamacare. Those victorious congressmen and the citizens they represent frequently recoil in indignant horror at the notion of paying for the health care of others. As former Congressman Joe Walsh succinctly put it in a tweet: "Sorry Jimmy Kimmel: your sad story doesn't obligate me or anybody else to pay for somebody else's health care."
     He's referring to talk show host Kimmel's on-air appeal for health care, using his newborn son's heart condition as an illustration.And Walsh is indeed correct — a rarity for him. The poignant plight of others does not obligate him or anybody else to pay for their health care. But you know what does? Possessing health insurance. Paying for the care of others is the definition of health insurance.

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Mercato Centrale

     Chicago has much to recommend it. But one thing the city lacks is a thriving central market.
     Oh, they've tried,  ginning up that French Market next to Ogilvy Center. But the place seems tepid and marginal and unpopulated whenever I go there, which isn't often, as I can never think of a good reason to stop by. It suffers from ersatzness, a certain lack of distinctiveness.
     Which might be why my wife and I so enjoy visiting real markets in other cities. There's a great one in Los Angeles we've visited several times, called Central Market, and another in Philadelphia—the Reading Terminal Market.
     In Florence, it is called the Mercato Centrale, and even in our limited time, we found ourselves drawn back, to stock up on gifts and lunch for our train trip to Venice.

    Dried cherries and fresh bread, marzipan seashells and pork sandwiches, with a break for espresso at a stand-up bar. It was the place to buy gifts—small bottles of Limonchello and discs of panforte.
    I assumed the place had been there forever -- the hulking iron building it is located in was built in 1874. But the truth is it opened three years ago. So not old, but certainly authentic. Maybe that's why people throng there—you get a sense of farmers and butchers stacking the food they've created. While at the French Market the vibe is of clerks heating up grub.
    I wish I could explain why theirs bustles while Chicago's languishes. Maybe readers have an idea.
       

Would this read better if Medill were accredited?

 

     Good for Medill.
     I admit, when I first heard that my alma mater, Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism (we'll get to its official name later) had let its academic accreditation lapse, my immediate instinct — call it "Columnist's Reflex" — was to draw back my foot and deliver a kick.
     What is college but reputation? And Medill Dean Bradley Hamm's assessment of the review process — "It's relatively superficial, extremely time consuming and doesn't lead us to a goal of significant improvement. It's sort of a low bar." — is true for college in general. And yet they still encourage young people to attend.
     Then I reconsidered. Why does a journalism school — excuse me, a journalism, integrated marketing, storytelling and whatever else they fancy themselves this week school — need official sanction? A merit badge, a Good Housekeeping seal, a kiss on the forehead from some pooh bah? Look around. The number of newsroom jobs is half what it was 20 years ago. Circulation and ad revenues hemorrhage. People get their news from three bullet points on their smartphones. While the president of the United States daily damns the entire profession to his millions of reality-challenged followers who lap it up, being the sort of people who believe the "Fast and Furious" films are documentaries.
     Do you really need to go to an accredited journalism school to slave for some obscure website? I don't think so. Fog a mirror, agree to grind out steaming piles of content for whatever Dickensian online workhouse they're running and you're in. Frankly, the higher quality school you went to, the more galling the penury that awaits. Five years after graduating from Medill, I was unemployed for the third time, telling myself that my patchwork of humiliating low-level jobs was a freelance career....

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But the clocks come with it, right?

     My grandmother was a proud employee of The May Company in Cleveland. Growing up, we bought my clothes there, at the employee discount or, if need be, at Higbee's or Halle's, the other two legs of of the triumvirate of department stores that made up respectable society.  
    To go elsewhere was to slum. I can still feel the cringing humiliation I felt when my mother, no doubt economizing, took me to J.C. Penney's to buy a loathsome polyester black suit suit at one point in the late-1970s. I couldn't have been more horrified had she given me a tambourine and told me to dance for coins in Public Square.
     As an adult, I clung to that mentality. I shopped at Marshall Field's, at Carson's if I were desperate. Toward my late 20s, I grew adventurous, and would buy clothing at Mark Shale. My wife's inclination toward discount stores I put off to a baffling cheapness.
    Then in May, 1999, I was about to leave on a six-week trip, needed certain necessities -- a lightweight tropic sports coat--and had no time, so popped into the Filene's Basement on Broadway. I still remember returning with an armful of purchases, babbling to my wife, "The prices are ... so low." 
    Ever since that epiphany, like many middle class shoppers, I haunt discount outlets like Nordstrom's Rack and T.J. Maxx, with occasional trips to Suits 20/20. Which is why the former Carson's downtown, with its ornate Louis Sullivan frou-frou, is now a Target. Or Macy's, which used to be good at running this sort of thing, announced they'll be selling off the top seven floors of its flagship downtown store to become condos or offices, or what have you.
    This, the latest step in the Great Department Store Die-Off, which will no doubt be melancholy to us folks of a certain age. 
    The spin was that the Walnut Room will remain, and that might provide cold comfort to some. But the Walnut Room never did much for me —a place where grandmothers rested their feet and ate pot pies.
     Looking to see if I ever wrote anything about it, I came upon this, about how Macy's got ripped going in the door a dozen years ago. Maybe not so savvy after all. 

  

"The Clock Mender" by Norman Rockwell

  Did you ever buy a house? What do you do if you really like the chandelier in the dining room and want to make sure the former owners don't take it with them? You write that into the contract. Because people are people, unfortunately, and left to their own devices, they'll pry off the 19-cent light plates on their way out the door. Maximizing their advantage.
     So no sympathy for Federated Department Stores, owner of Marshall Field's, which expressed "hope" that Target Corp. will give them the famous Norman Rockwell painting of a man setting the Great Clock in front of the State Street store.
     The store owned the painting for more than half a century, and Federated seems to have thought it was buying the artwork along with the 60-store chain and was surprised to find a copy hanging in the store's seventh-floor "museum."
     Out with the contracts! Either the painting was included or it wasn't. My understanding is that Target cannily made the swap—shipping the original back to its headquarters in Minneapolis—in spring of 2004, about the time it put Field's up for sale.
     In other words, the chandelier was gone long before Federated bought the place.
     Target does a brisk business in Chicago—my wife makes her second home there, and she offers Target this elegant solution: Donate the Rockwell to the Art Institute. Target gets a tax write-off and is spared any PR unpleasantness. The Art Institute will no doubt cringe away from displaying a painter as proletarian as Rockwell, and happily loan the painting, long-term, to Field's—er, Macy's. And the obscure seventh-floor museum, whose visitors seem to largely consist of Walnut Room patrons looking for the bathroom, will have its $5 million worth of original art back, and there will be joy in Chicago once more.
                        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 21, 2006

    Postscript: The Target Corporation, no doubt coincidentally, did indeed donate "The Clock Mender' to a museum: not to the Art Institute, but to the Chicago History Museum, which proudly has it on display, where I noticed it during a visit earlier this month.

Trump is indeed making America great again

     Remember the domino theory?
     It didn't have anything to do with the pleasant game of deploying spotted oblong tiles. Rather, it was a way to view the world that believed, once a nation became communist, its neighbors would also fall under the sway of Marx, Lenin, et al., working like an infection toward the good old U.S. of A.
     The theory didn't show much confidence in our own system. But it was enough to get 57,000 American soldiers killed in the 1960s and 1970s trying to stop one tiny Asian country, South Vietnam, from being absorbed by its communist neighbor, North Vietnam.
     In the daily anguish that is the Trump administration, I've been using the Vietnam War as a touchstone, a reminder of how bad things aren't, at least not yet. Because you might be forgiven, reading the analyses surrounding Trump's first 100 days in office, for assuming that his administration represents some historic nadir of disaster in the realm of American mis-governance. Vietnam reminds us there are hells below this one.
     Yes, it's difficult to identify disaster aborning. Vietnam simmered for years. But Trump's missteps tend to be utterly stillborn, and he has fallen into a regular pattern of initial zeal for the detestable — to ban Muslims, scrap health insurance for millions, build a nonsensical wall and, most recently, bankrupt the country giving tax breaks to the rich. Each folly in turn is thwarted by the heretofore lamented but now cherished diffusion of power and creaking inefficiency of American government: blocked by the courts, by rebellious fellow Republicans, by fierce local resistance.
     Then Trump shrugs and moves on....

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Mona Lisa selfie

     

      To my credit, I did not plan to visit the Louvre during our recent trip to Paris. For several reasons. First, I saw it during my last trip, 24 years ago. Been there, done that. Second, and more importantly, my wife didn't have fond memories of what she recalled as hulking time-darkened medieval works plastering across endless, packed galleries. And third, both of us much preferred the Impressionist art at the Musee d'Orsay, which we went to immediately.
      But we were in Paris nearly a full week, and the expected exerts a gravitational pull. Something we had already noticed in Florence, when a friend of our son's insisted we visit a certain sandwich shop. The line in front of the shop was long, we waited a half hour, while other shops were empty. When we got our coveted sandwiches they were ... just okay. A reminder that the wildly popular is sometimes better, sometimes not.
    So the tractor beam of the Louvre eventually pulled us in. And once there, we shuffled, zombie-like, toward the Mona Lisa, another pair of lemmings, hurrying cliffward. You have to. There are mute signs, with just her black and white image and an arrow, to both satisfy the common urge and to reduce wear and tear on the guards. Plus, the idea of going to the Louvre and not seeing the painting, it feels almost perverse, like going to Fort Lauderdale and not seeing the ocean. 
     On the way to see the star, we enjoyed the Louvre more than we thought. It was brighter, the pictures, fresher. Maybe a quarter century of general cleaning and restoration. Maybe our tastes are more refined now.
    And it was worth it just for the shock of arriving at the large room containing the Mona Lisa. It's a madhouse, jammed with visitors, all trying to get pictures of themselves with the Mona Lisa in the frame.
    Even before you glimpse the painting, a wave of humidity, sickly sweet, slightly perfumed, hits you in the face. The moisture from all those bodies. It's like being in a crowded locker room with art.

"Portrait of a Woman"

    And why? Because the Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world. And why is this particular painting is the most famous of all paintings? Because ... any idea? No, not the smile. She was just another one of Da Vinci's works, no different than this "Portrait of a Woman" which museum-goers flock by with nary a glance on their way to the Mona Lisa. 
     But in 1911, a worker named Vincenzo Peruggia, hired to cut a pane of glass for the painting, instead walked out of the museum with it. The Mona Lisa was so obscure that it took a full day for anyone to notice it was missing. And it stayed missing for two years, the Da Vinci tucked in Peruggia's trunk while the theft made more and more headlines—at one point Picasso was a suspect, and the chief of the Paris police resigned out of embarrassment. It was only returned after Peruggia, who like most criminals was no Lex Luthor, tried to sell it to the Uffizi Gallery. 
    So that's what you're crowding to see--the after-echo of a true crime mystery. That's why the crowds are there. But why all the photos? Hard to take in a throng, the image muddied by the protective glass. You could buy a perfect postcard in the gift shop for 1.2 euros. But that wouldn't satisfy the "Kilroy was here!" impulse that has us in its thrall, the Facebook urge to document our precious selves. A manifestation of the brainless egotism that has so thoroughly gripped our times.  I'm not excluding myself, though I generally resist the urge to include myself in photos. I know what I look like.
    The Mona Lisa is so popular it almost can't be perceived. Like Grant Wood's "American Gothic." You see it and think of the parodies. To be honest, I enjoyed Da Vinci's "Portrait de la Femme" in the next room far more than the Mona Lisa. I can't tell if the painting is substantively finer, or just less familiar, which are pretty much the same thing in the art world. Nothing kills a work more than over-exposure, and attention has in essence ruined the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa's smile is famously enigmatic, but this unknown woman seemed, to me, downright chilly, even hostile. As if she's saying, "Go ahead, fawn over the bitch in the next room." I looked for a postcard in the gift shop of her, but of course there were none to be had, among the hundreds and hundreds of duplicates of M.L.
       This has to be a transitional phase, all this picture taking. A little gap between the time when we used film, which cost money, and limited our number of shots, and the time when we wear some device that constantly films our surroundings, as a matter of security. No wonder we revere the past, or at least our ragged perceptions of what it might have been  like.