Yes, I wrote the below, re-read it and thought, "Man, this is the most trivial shit EVER." I could feel the ghost of Andy Rooney, laying his big, dyspeptic paw on my shoulder. "The torch is passed to a new generation..."
So be forewarned. You no doubt have more important things to do, to read, to think about. Go to it, and power to you.
For the rest of us, however.... at least it isn't long.
You'd think people designing cereal boxes would step back and examine their work, from a distance, to see how it looks on a shelf. which obviously didn't happen when the current iteration of the Cinnamon Toast Crunch box left the drawing board. Glance at the little anthropomorphic square of cereal gazing down into the bowl, right under the "ch" in "Crunch."
Fiercely frowning, right? Maybe pulling back in revulsion. It's almost as if he's looking, not into a bowl, but a pit, an open grave with the bodies of his fellow squares, face down, after having been shot perhaps..
Now look closer. There is a little smile, a black crescent, high up, right under the downcast eyes. What I took for a frown is just a pronounced vein of cinnamon.
And who knows? Maybe it's intentional. A bit of cognitive dissonance thrown in to cause shoppers like me to pause, look a second time. That's no doubt giving them too much credit. If intentional wrongness in marketing isn't actually subtle science, it should be. Tuck a single tiny ant in the bowl of cereal and see what happens to sales.
Not that it helped here. I've never tasted the stuff, have no intention to—tastes like a bunch of cinnamon wheat crunchy cereal, right? Who wants a bowl of cinnamon? At best you want a dash, a sprinkle on your vanilla yogurt. No wonder the little guy is frowning.
Luxury is a scam, right? A trick to see how much more rich people will pay for something that's only a little better than the usual. I've driven a Bentley: nice car. Double-glass windows. Breitling clock. But a price tag of about $180,000. If money means nothing, and you want those windows, and that clock, I suppose you might as well pop for it. What's the difference? But the truth is, a person who can get by with regular windows, and an ordinary digital clock, can drive a perfectly good car and pocket the extra $150,000.
When I first visited Ancient Aire, the faux Roman baths opened late 2017 in an old factory on West Superior, I was impressed. Big, dim, quiet and, since I was in the media, free. Free is a sauce, a spice, that enhances any experience. I was also by myself, and as I soaked and cogitated, I thought, "I should really take my wife back to this." So I did, last Valentine's Day. Our friends were jetting off here and there, I had this big trip to South America coming up, and rather than fly somewhere nice, we thought we'd explore our home town—a "staycation" Edie calls it.
Ninety minutes of burbling hot pools and aromatic steam rooms. Plus a half hour massage. Not hideously expensive—$276 for the two of us, plus tips. We couldn't both fly to Cleveland for that. Overall, a positive experience. Indulgent fun. I paid the tab. We were almost out the door.
But stapled to our receipt, was this little card. Selling an Ancient Aire candle in a box. For $54.
That card irked me. It's as if they were saying, "Before you go, we're curious: just how gullible ARE you? After all, you came here, paid a lot of money for, in essence, the hot bath you can take at home. Maybe you'll shell out half a C-note for a votive candle in a black box."
There's no way to tell scale. Maybe the box is a yard square, but I doubt it. I would expect it to be, oh, three inches on a side . And maybe it smells nice. But really, it would have to release the perfume of paradise to justify that cost. (Checking online: bingo for the size, about 3 inches. And it smells of orange blossoms).
It is limited, if that helps. That's what the fine print says, "Limited to 250 pcs. of bathrobes and 250 pcs. of candles." That wasn't written by a native English speaker, was it? "250 pcs. of candles." You'd think, for $54, they'd perfect the translation in their ballyhoo.)
I shudder to imagine what the robes cost. ($65, not bad really, though that also underlines the scam aspect of luxury, as if the prices were assigned randomly and not dependent upon market forces).
So the candles are limited, but it doesn't say limited by what. The dreams of avarice, I assume.
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| Robert Falls |
Shakespeare can be heavy lifting. All those fardles and bodkins to bear and bare. Modern audiences struggle, though usually they go in with at least a rough idea of what to expect, such as the too-familiar Hamlet, bearing his troubles — fardles — while trying not to end it all with a naked knife, aka, a bare bodkin. King Lear, Macbeth, Richard III, all familiar stories.
But "The Winter's Tale"? I read both an analysis by Harold Bloom and an essay in The Riverside Shakespeare and was still lost; a problem, because the Sun-Times and the Goodman Theatre are giving away 25 pairs of tickets to the May 16 performance.
I can't urge you to see a play that I don't understand.
Trying to do better than "something about a king," I had lunch with Robert Falls, who is directing the play at the Goodman.
Falls, for the unfamiliar, is the bad boy of Chicago theater. His previous foray into Shakespeare, "Measure for Measure," had audiences nearly rioting in their seats. Before that, "King Lear" ... well, the phrase "eyeballs sizzling on a grill" should give a sense of the impact.
The bar is high. How will "The Winter's Tale" top those?
"It won't," Falls said. "It's an extremely difficult production. They're all difficult plays. But this one ... we'll see. I'm worried it'll disappoint you, Neil. No eye-gouging. No severe violence. No nudity. No in-your-face stuff."
Nothing's perfect. But the play — what's the play about?
"I've been working on it for a year and I barely know what it's about," replied Falls
Tuesday is garbage day in the old leafy suburban paradise. Which makes Tuesday a better day to walk the dog, because people roll their big sturdy green garbage cans to the curb, affording me a range of disposal options after Kitty has done her business. No need for carrying the blue New York Times bag with its load of doo, not for long, not on Tuesdays. Detour a few steps over to a can, a tad guiltily, lift the top and flip the bag inside.
I don't know why I feel guilty—it isn't as if the homeowner will mind, me using their can for such a purpose. Or maybe they would. Of course they would. We can be very jealous of our prerogatives, we suburbanites, and I can imagine some homemaker gazing worriedly out her window. "That disheveled man, the one with the limp who is always walking that ratty little dog. He just came by and used our garbage can!"
The police have been notified for less.
Anyway, this Tuesday, turning down Greenbriar, I noticed this surprising sight. A stuffed white unicorn, corralled in a little pink stall, set out very deliberately on the curb. The mythical beast just seems out of place—it almost looks photo-shopped above, doesn't it? The square of fuchsia against the green and beige? Believe me, it was very real.
I try not to anthropomorphize objects. But it seemed a little sad, this equine playmate put out to pasture while still generally bright and pink and new. Maybe they're hoping someone adopts the beast—it wasn't in the can, after all, where it could have been jammed. Maybe circumstances changed—they grow up fast, kids nowadays.
Still, I couldn't help but detect a little sorrow, about the eyes, of the unicorn. It looks dejected, does it not? As if gazing inward, a little stunned, to find itself in that position. A trick of the eye, I am sure. And there is enough real sorrow in the world without ginning up imaginary suffering. That said, I hope somebody rescued it—her?—before the garbage truck rumbled past. Not likely, not in a swank place like Northbrook. No second hand toys for our darlings. A pity. I'm sure there are kids across the city who would have welcomed her with open arms, if only she could have found her way to them.
The world is not only getting warmer, it's getting older, too; the planet, plus the thin, scattered organic layer of humans upon it. For the first time in history, more people are over age 65 than under 5.
Don't blame me. I'm only 58. But I see what's inching closer to me — or rather, I'm plodding closer to it, rolling as I go from osteoarthritis in my right hip. I learned about it five years ago when I banged up my knee skiing in Colorado — a good, youthful ailment! — and the doctor looked at the hip as well.
"Bone-on-bone osteoarthritis" he pronounced or, in English: the goo that once lubricated the hip socket has vanished to that place where youthful dreams go.
The prime-of-life approach to medical care is something goes wrong, you fix it. But old person medicine isn't that straightforward. Conditions are chronic and tricky. There are reasons to postpone hip replacement. The surgery, like all surgery, can kill you, whether by botched anesthesia, or blood clots, or infection. And infection is a permanent problem — a mechanical hip can get infected by having your teeth cleaned.
Artificial joints also break or wear out. If you can push the replacement to 70 or later, the thinking is, maybe you'll get lucky and die before you need another one.
I had gathered all this folk wisdom before consulting a surgeon last October, the head of orthopedics at ... let's draw the veil ... a prominent Chicago hospital. He showed up with his intern, or valet, or somebody. I made the mistake of betraying knowledge sniffed out on my own, and this seemed to offend him. He shot me that "Who's the doctor here?" look and soon I was back on the street, thinking, "I should talk to a doctor about this."
Next stop, my own general practitioner. He listened to my symptoms and replied, "Don't wait. Just do it" — easy to say when it's not your hip — and gave me the name of someone at the Illinois Bone and Joint Institute, a massive facility that seemed like it was processing all 340,000 hip replacements done in the United States annually on the day I visited. The surgeon breezed in, looked at my X-rays, said, "You are a perfect candidate for this," and handed me his card. Call and we'll schedule the surgery.
I do not speak Spanish.
So when I went into this tiny shop in the small seaside town of Castro in Chile I did not know what the sign meant. I might not even have noticed it. I was looking for lapis lazuli jewelry, and scarves, and whatever other presents I might find to bring back home.
But as a professional journalist and generally quick on the uptake, I immediately figured out what sort of establishment I found myself in.
It was very small. And while I was taken with the display of inventory, and the calm of the proprietor, I am not the sort that I could just reach into my pocket, take out my phone and start snapping pictures. I was dealing with a human being. Dignity must be maintained.
Thank goodness the guide from the bus was there. I asked him to negotiate a deal. Two dollars worth of cheese, please. While the owner reached for brown paper, I asked if I might take a picture of the owner. I could. I asked his name. "Don Juan." Maybe so. Maybe a pseudonym, a nom de fromage.
The cheese, by the way, was excellent. Don Juan sliced it into convenient sticks, and I handed some to what shipmates were shopping nearby and ate the rest myself, one fresh, creamy slice after another. But I was particularly taken with the shop itself. Those quiet loaves of cheese on the shelves—like objects in a Joseph Cornell box. There seemed to be a lot of cheese here for a town so small. He must sell it all.
A person doesn't travel halfway across the world to go to a cheese shop. It would look silly on a schedule of adventure and exploration. But I can't communicate how glad I was to visit this place, how surprised and happy it made me. To meet these stolid cheeses and serene owner. To sample the cheese.
Heading out, I snapped a photo of the red storefront, with the sign I had overlooked going in: "Quesos."
Do I have to actually say it? For the record, I suppose, yes, I must indeed.
Spanish for "Cheeses."
As the 2020 presidential election looms into view, like an iceberg on the horizon, some liberals are muttering that if Trump wins again, freedom will crumble and democracy collapse. Which is both an exaggeration and defeatist, twin sins Dems suffer from enough without advertising them, apparently as an attempt to spur ourselves to confront a task that should require no exaggeration to take seriously.
Is not the prospect of four more years of Donald Trump motivation enough? Do we really need to toss in the death of the Republic to keep focused?
Besides, the essential truth — and this can't be said enough — is Trump is a symptom, not a cause. The United States reached a certain level of dysfunction and then conjured him up. First the rock split, then the demon emerged from the sulfurous crack.
Maybe we must experience the presidency of Ted Cruz to understand that.
Ample evidence can be found in George Packer's 2013 book, "The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America," where a cast of fellow citizens illustrates our national shattering. Some are ordinary — Dean Price, son of a tobacco farmer, chases the will-o-the-wisp of biofuels. Tammy Thomas, navigates her Rust Belt ruins. Some are famous — Newt Gingrich, whose Dems-are-traitors worldview did so much to poison American political discourse.
And some straddle the two worlds. Jeff Connaughton is a University of Alabama business student when he is first wowed by a young senator named Joseph Biden.
Readers of "The Unwinding" grow disillusioned with Biden along with Connaughton, who works for him. And that is before Biden plagiarizes a speech by a British politician. Connaughton's moment of grim realization comes when, after his years of loyal service, Biden won't place a phone call to help him.
