'A temporary insanity'

Fashion models, Paris

     Regular readers know that I have dictionaries — dozens of them, from the oft-cited Oxford English, Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster dictionaries. to much more obscure volumes: Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, the Continuum Dictionary of Religion, or Room's Dictionary of Distinguishables, which parses the difference between, oh, jam and marmalade (the former, made from the whole fruit that has been crushed or pulped, usually sweet and sugary, the latter, a jelly in which small pieces of fruit, often citrus, including the rind, are suspended, making it tend toward the sharp and tangy).
     Speaking of sharp and tangy, today being Valentine's Day, I thought I would gather my thoughts on romance and, having none, I sought inspiration in my copy of Ambrose Bierce's "Devil's Dictionary," words filtered through the mordant wit of my fellow Ohioan, who served in the Civil War, and used that grim experience to write memorable stories such as "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge."
     His literary bias was on full display in his definition of "romance" purely as a sub-genre of literature, beginning, "Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They Are. In the novel the writer's thought is tethered to probability, as a domestic horse to the hitching-post, but in romance it ranges at will over the entire region of the imagination — free, lawless, immune to bit and rein..."
     There's more, and I'm sure it was howlingly effective in 1906, when the book was published, but frankly it fell flat for me. Pressing on, I tried the entry for "love" and was rewarded by this classic definition that might ring a bell: "A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. This disease, like caries and many other ailments, is prevalent only among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient."
     I almost left out the "civilized races" part, worried it has a tang of colonialism to it. I mean, how would he know? And I'm not entirely sure what that last part, about the physician and the patient, are supposed to mean. Mybe you can help. 

      Before I returned the book to its place, I checked on "Marriage," which had the shortest definition yet: "The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two."
     Hard to argue that one. Whatever condition you find yourself in this Feb. 14, I hope the day goes pleasantly for you. Bierce, as you might know, vanished mysteriously in 1913 after joining Pancho Villa's army in Mexico. Which offers up another definition of romantic.

Flashback 2009: It won't matter, until it does

     The good news is I wrote an interesting, unusual column Thursday, related to Black History Month — if you feel reading it half as much as I felt writing it, you'll get a lot out of it. 

      And long — three times the length of a usual column.

      The bad news is that, to find that much real estate in the paper, I had to push it to Sunday. Which left me both drained and with nothing to run today.

      Thank goodness, Saturday is Valentine's Day, and I have countless Valentine's Day columns slumbering in the archive. Such as this, the bulk of which is in the form of a poem — though I would remind my slower readers that Robert Pinsky isn't coming to the Art Institute — this ran in 2009. Seventeen years ago. You missed him.

      Ron Huberman lasted less than two years as head of the Chicago Public Schools, quitting to join a private equity firm when Rich Daley announced he wouldn't run for mayor in 2011.

      The column ran when it filled a page, and I've kept the original headings in.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     Sometimes I'll be droning on to my wife about my day and I'll stop, suddenly realizing that I've overlooked the really interesting part.
     "Whoops," I'll say, "I buried the lede. . ." — "lede" being the opening paragraph and most important aspect of a story, which in news articles often are one and the same.
     More than a few readers, enjoying Fran Spielman's excellent profile Sunday of mayoral favorite Ron Huberman, no doubt had a similar moment when, at the end of paragraph 11, they learned that the new chief of the Chicago Public Schools is gay.
     Not so long ago, that bit of information would have been the lede, the headline and grounds for dismissal. Newspapers were forever feigning surprise that gay people not only lived among us, but held jobs — "He's a postman! And he's gay!"
     We have thankfully moved beyond that, though the implication in the story that Huberman's orientation will not matter at all isn't entirely correct either. It won't matter in the execution of his official duties. But it will matter, perhaps enormously, to some he had to deal with, particularly those who object to some action of Huberman's and are searching for what they consider a fault to bludgeon him with.
     Performance, not private life, should be the most important factor when it comes to educating our children. But it isn't always that way. I remember when local school councils were considered the solution to our perennial school crisis -- the notion that involved, engaged, vigorous parents would succeed where the bumbling bureaucrats of Pershing Road had failed.
     That was the theory. The reality was that parents can be just as misguided as paper pushers can be, and more than one outstanding principal got the bum's rush by his local school council because his racial background didn't match his student population's. Like the bureaucrats, the parents failed because they cared about the wrong thing.
     Huberman is nothing if not savvy, and his choosing this moment to go public with this open secret is no doubt part of some greater strategy ("Who accuses himself," Publilius Syrus wrote, "cannot be accused by someone else.") His opponents, trying to besmirch him, will certainly at some point invoke his sexual orientation, not realizing it is themselves they indict.

FLASH: POET TO SPEAK IN CITY!

     I could write a book of the blank looks
     People gave me when I shared the news
     Robert Pinsky, the poet, is coming
     To read at the Art Institute
     Thursday, Feb. 5 at 6 p.m.
     For free.

     Not incredulous, not curious
     As why I would miss the 5:12, the 5:25
     The 5:30, 5:50, 6:19, 6:55, and 7:35
     And pin my homeward hopes on the 8:35
     Submerge myself on the damned 8:35
     To face that train window face.
     Those green-gray faces, like moles, like drowned souls
     Nibbling on sacks of stinking fast-food fare
     Asking myself "What was the need?"
     A question from Pinsky's "Round."

     My boss, my friends, my wife, not one
     Bothered asking "Why bother?"
     It must seem a pointless task to ask
     Though I tried explaining anyway.
     You see, he translated Dante's "Inferno."
     Better than Longfellow, no mean poet
     But Henry's "renews the fear" can't touch
     "The old fear stirring."

     Plus, Valentine's Day two weeks away
     The guy behind "The Handbook of Heartbreak."
     (The title itself a poem) the man who wrote,
     "It was as if she had put me back together again
     So sweetly I was glad the hurt had torn me."
     About his mom

     So go, not to put on airs, since no one cares
     Go alone, to be there. "What was the need?"    

     Imagine yourself a painter of signs
     Big coffee cups splashed across bigger brick walls
     "DRINK PERK-U-UP COFFEE EVERY DAY."
     Scaffolds, ladders, turpentine
     Might you not admire a cup begot by Harnett
     His sable strand dipped in thimbles, not your broad brush
     So real you reach toward the cup, as if you could touch it
     As if, with your low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand
     You could ever grasp someone who reaches a heaven
     That's shut to you

     To paraphrase Robert Browning's poem
     About a mediocre painter justifying himself
     To a disinterested young thing with better places to go
     "How could it end in any other way?" and
     "This must suffice me here." Comforting himself
     Which I find comforting, I
     Who could write a book of the blank looks
     People gave me when I shared the news
     Robert Pinsky, the poet, is coming
     To read at the Art Institute
     Thursday, Feb. 5 at 6 p.m.
     For free.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

     Publilius Syrus was an Assyrian writer of maxims who lived 2100 years ago. While a number of his sayings apply directly to Ron Huberman -- "You should not live one way in private, another in public" -- only one struck me as vaguely humorous:
     We are born princes, and the civilizing process makes us dogs.

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 2, 2009

Orchids hunger for your flesh

      If orchids vaguely frighten you — and I find them creepy — there's good reason. Orchids are saprophytic; that is, they obtain their food from decaying organic matter. Other plants, usually. But your rotting body would serve in a pinch.
    Orchids are also deceitful. The flowers of certain species mimic territorial enemies of bees. There's a great term for this, "pseudoantagonism," as opposed to the all-too-real-antagonism we humans experience. With the pseudo version, male bees strike at the insect-imitating petals, trying to drive the illusionary foe off, getting pollen on themselves in the process. Other orchids mimic the smell of nectar that isn't actually there, and hungry bees root around, looking for it, getting dusted with pollen in the process before flying off, disappointed.  

Slipper orchid

        

     Despite orchids' seedy reputation and behavior, my wife and I, being faithful, card-carrying members of the Chicago Botanic Garden, go every February to see the CBG light up the mid-winter darkness with their annual Orchid Show. This year's, "Feelin' Groovy," has a 1960s theme, and while perhaps not as natural a pairing as last year's marriage to subcontinental India, is not bad either. When was the last time you saw a yellow Volkswagen Beetle?
    Orchids are all about inclusivity — they're found all over the globe, including four species above the Arctic Circle. Some grow on bare rocks — several species grow on cacti. They're associated with the tropics, but several species thrive in deserts, and the environment you'd expect them in most, rain forests, are not really best for orchids. 
    They're luxurious plants, mostly good only for show or, in the disapproving words of the Encyclopedia Britannica, "the family is notably lacking in species from which products are derived." 
    With one big exception — vanilla, extracted from Vanilla planifolia. Found in Madagascar, Mexico, Indonesia, various Pacific Islands and ... wait for it ...  Puerto Rico, which I emphasize because, well, Puerto Rico is having its moment in the spotlight, are they not? Enjoying the same Bad Bunny Bounce that caused Democrats to hope that we aren't as royally fucked as we seemed to be last week. 

    Still, I think vanilla is a big enough deal to make the Britannica's "notably lacking" a little unfair. That's almost like saying wood is not good for any practical use beyond building houses ... and furniture. And paper. And cardboard. Okay, not quite like saying that at all.

    Not many orchids this year presented an appearance I consider "The Screaming Baby Face," which is good because ... 

    Oh hell. Okay, confession time. The only reason I'm writing these words is to have something to frame my photos of the Orchid Show, "Feelin' Groovy," which runs until March 22. That mission is accomplished. Tickets to the show are $16 if you are an adult living in Cook County, and $16 if you don't live in Cook County, which makes me wonder why the Botanic Garden makes the distinction at all. Plus $9 per person to get into the Botanic Garden itself. And $10 parking. 

     If that seems like a lot, remember: annual memberships start at $141 for an individual. It's worth it. We go dozens of times a year. The answer to the question, "Should we go to the Botanic Garden is alway, always, always, "Yes!" Even when there are orchids.

      
    

'None of us can do everything. But all of us can do something'

 

     Readers sometimes ask me what they can do.
     They don't need to explain exactly what it is they want to do something about. You either know already or never will.
     I take the question seriously. The news is both bad and good. On the bad side, there is not much any individual can do in a nation hurtling in a terrifying direction. We are all on the bus. None of us is driving. The cliff looms.
     On the positive side, there is always something, and taking action seems necessary, to some of us. If only to tell ourselves, "I did something. I didn't just sit by and watch it happen." Pointing and shouting "The cliff!" might not stop the bus. But it could help.
     Those protesting the presence of ICE proved that regular people turning up on ordinary days to witness and record extraordinary abuses have an effect. The bus did seem to veer, maybe even slow. For now, anyway.
     I tell people: Do what you can. You have skills; use those skills. I write stuff, much of which boils down to "The cliff!" It's my job. Others are prompted by some detail of the general national catastrophe.
     For retired Chicago TV newsman Phil Ponce, it was seeing that the two Border Patrol agents suspected of killing Alex Pretti in Minneapolis are, like himself, Hispanic.
     "I expected to see someone directly addressing the Latino ICE agents," said Ponce, 76, former host of "Chicago Tonight." He decided to be that someone.
     "I started thinking how Latino agents are interacting with their own community," he said. "What that might be like."
     He saw an opportunity.
     "I put in my mind the figure of somebody who believes in what he or she is doing as an ICE agent and thought, 'How could I meet them halfway, so I could have a conversation?'"
     Ponce spent days writing a script.
     "I agonized over it, trying to walk the line between being overly preachy and too sympathetic," he said. "I thought, 'How would I talk to my children if one of them were an ICE agent?' If I were talking to my own kid, I wouldn't yell at them. That'll not get you anywhere. That's not what a loving parent does. You have go respect someone, attempt to establish common ground."
     This led to "A Father's Message to Ice," a 2-minute and 41-second video shot last week. I saw it on Facebook and encourage you to take a look.
     He begins talking about himself:
     "My name is Phil Ponce. My parents were born in Mexico — I was born in South Texas, McAllen."

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Ashland v. Ashland or, don't let the grit blind you

Ashland 

      Chicago's gritty history can lead one astray.
      My friend Bill Savage certainly winces at the "gritty" epithet as "a thoughtless reflex" and urges his students not to use it, as a cliche left over from Chicago's coal-stoked days, similar to the Al Capone, rat-tat-tat gloss that obscures much more than it reveals.
     So it was ironic that the reputation, like a piece of grit, temporarily blinded me to our city's sylvan deep past after reading my WBEZ colleague Erin Allen's fine Sunday piece on why Ashland is sometimes an avenue, sometimes a boulevard, of course quoting Bill, a Northwestern professor and Chicago history expert who is assembling a book on Chicago's grid (and man, am I looking forward to that). 
     Finishing the article, I had one question Erin didn't address (in print; it was raised on the radio): why "Ashland"? An evocative name, and I immediately imagined some 19th century slag heap on the west side of the city.
     Sad.
     I lunged for my copy of "Streetwise Chicago" by Don Hayner and Tom McNamee and was reminded that the past is more than our little shoebox diorama perceptions.
     After observing the street was formerly named Reuben Street, it says "Ashland" was chosen "in honor of the Kentucky estate of Henry Clay, which was surrounded by ash trees."
     Oh right. Ash trees. Never thought of that. Which is doubly shameful, since I planted a beautiful cimmaron ash next to my house and enjoyed its shade for 20 years, until the goddamned emerald ash borer to it, despite my best efforts. 

    In my defense, there actually is a Chicago neighborhood named for sooty refuse. Any idea?

    Ashburn. Ashland is a reminder of the numerous Kentuckians who gave up trying to make it in the hardscrabble Bluegrass State and moved to the greener fields of Illinois (including, remember, a certain carpenter named Thomas Lincoln, whose son Abe would thrive here). 
    Ashland, the estate, is in Lexington, Kentucky and the 672-acre homestead (well, 17 acres of it, anyway) is on the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and boasts a blue ash over 400 years old. Seems well worth a visit. 

     Funny, I was reading about Henry Clay — important congressman who, leaving for Washington, ordered that no tree was to be cut in his absence, defeated for the presidency by Andrew Jackson, twice, in 1828 and 1832 — just yesterday, in Matthew Pinsker's excellent "Boss Lincoln" which I plan to write about for President's Day. Lincoln called Clay his "beau ideal of a statesmen" though declined to visit him at Ashland when he was in Lexington, for reasons mysterious. That's the thing about this job — you can head off in one direction, and end up back where you started.

Also Ashland

Hotel's brush with greatness

 

"Domplatz, Mailand (Cathedral Square, Milan)" by Gerhard Richter

      Hotels are not famous for fine art. Just the opposite. Once showcases for generic mass-produced canvases ranging from kitsch to trash, lately they lean toward cutesy black-and-white photos echoing the visual cliche of the moment. Vintage cars. Soda signs. Cowboys.
     So you are forgiven for missing the fact that, for years, what would become the most expensive painting ever sold by a living artist hung largely unnoticed in a Downtown Chicago hotel lobby.
     It was "Domplatz, Mailand (Cathedral Square, Milan)" by Gerhard Richter, who is still alive. In fact, Monday, Feb. 9 is his 94th birthday. Richter is having a banner year, with a big show in Paris, and since my going is out of the question, the second best thing is to tell how one of his major works ended up next to the front desk at the Park Hyatt Chicago on Michigan Avenue, and why it is now gone.
     The Pritzker family — the clan of Illinois' courageous governor — runs the Hyatt chain of over 1,000 hotels. In 2000, wanting something to jazz up its new crown jewel, the Park Hyatt Chicago, a 70-story edifice at the corner of Michigan and Chicago, the Pritzkers decided to dig deep.

     “When we were building the hotel, my cousin, Nick, said, ‘Let’s go all in and get a great piece of art,'" Thomas Pritzker, then CEO and now executive chairman, of the Pritzker organization, told Sotheby's in 2014. “So he chose the Richter."
     Richter is an abstract German artist whose work is something of the love child of impressionism and photo realism. "Domplatz, Mailand (Cathedral Square, Milan)" was commissioned in 1968 by the Siemens Corp., the German technology conglomerate, for its Milan headquarters and shows a blurry black-and-white image of the Cathedral Square there.
     Hyatt bought the painting in London for $3.6 million — not exactly cheap to begin with — and hung it in the Park Hyatt.
     I could pretend I know about the painting because my thumb is pressed on the pulse of all things cultural. Though the truth may be actually even cooler, in a lunch bucket vibe way. I've never stayed at the Park Hyatt. The only reason the hotel is on my radar is because it was erected during the late-1990s building boom. Tower cranes were everywhere and, curious guy that I am, I started wondering about the cranes — how do they get up there? — so I took a closer look.
     In 1999, crackerjack photographer Robert A. Davis and I visited the crane atop the nearly-completed Park Hyatt. That adventure bonded me to the place — being at the tip of the crane boom as it swung out 600 feet over Michigan Avenue will do that — and I made a point of circling back to see what it looked like when finished.
     The Richter caught my eye; it's hard to miss being 9 feet square. Guiding out-of-town guests through their Magnificent Mile window shopping, I'd detour into the hotel to check it out.
     The painting hung in the lobby for 15 years, except during 2002, when the hotel lent it to the Museum of Modern Art for a traveling retrospective of 40 years of Richter's work that included the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Puerto Rican Chicago history

     I usually watch the Super Bowl — for the commercials — but this year I think I'll pay a bit more attention to the on-field activities, since my wife and I began enjoying this football business watching the last two Bears playoff games.
    It'll certainly be exciting to see Bad Bunny perform. Not that I could name a song of his if you put a gun to my head. But the way MAGA swooned onto their fainting couch of faux victimization when he was named, and, laughably, created an alternate halftime show starring the Michigan excrescence, Kid Rock, well, one wants him to shine. He seems a nice person, based on his Carpool segment with James Corden, which you might want to take a look at. I really admired Corden's opening question: "When did you tell your family you were going to call yourself 'Bad Bunny' and not 'Benito'?"
     Bad Bunny is very proud of his Puerto Rican heritage. I learned something of Chicago Puerto Rican history when I wrote "Every goddamn day." Puerto Ricans are one of the city's most significant ethnic groups, and imagine many are swelling with pride seeing their guy in the spotlight

     The community exploded into Chicago's consciousness in 1966, after Puerto Rican teens clashed with the police:

June 20, 1966 

     Jose Cruz is not his real name. 

     Anonymity is in order when your life is splayed out in the newspaper in detail, from what you earn as a punch-press operator ($2.22 an hour) to the rent you pay for your second-floor West Side walk-up ($25 a week) to the fact that you purchased your refrigerator and television on the installment plan ($27.18 a month).

     “They belong to me,” Cruz tells the Daily News, jumping the gun. They will belong to him if he makes his payments, the kind of detail that can trip up an immigrant. 

      The story in today’s paper is notable for its ordinariness. Cruz is not a criminal or a victim; he has no complaints and the most modest of dreams: “I would like to move out someday to a larger place.” 

      But the profile does appear in an extraordinary context; a city suddenly waking to its Puerto Rican community. The week before, 100 police and 1,000 Puerto Ricans clashed on the Northwest Side. A police car was overturned and burned, firemen pelted with rocks, their trucks looted. The shock came not so much from the episode’s violence but because it happened at all. 

      In 1950, there were 255 Puerto Ricans living in Chicago. That number rose to 32,371 by 1960. Now it’s 65,000 and, during the riot, “to the police it seemed all of them were on W. Division St. between Damen and California.” 

      In the ensuing hand wringing, the Daily News runs a front-page editorial, in Spanish—“Puerto Ricans must not be strangers in our midst,” it says, translated. “Their culture—the oldest in the Western hemisphere—and their language—revered in world literature—must become part of the life in Chicago. This cannot be done by violence.” 

      Why the riot? Some blame is placed on a failure to communicate. Charles H. Percy, Republican candidate for US Senate, suggests teaching police Spanish. Then there is the difficulty of the scale of life in Chicago: 85 percent of Puerto Rican immigrants come from small rural towns. 

      “The Puerto Ricans come here with an inability to cope with the problems of the city,” Rev. Daniel Alvarez, head of La Casa Central, a social service agency, tells the Daily News. “They don’t find the proper services, they run out of money, they lack the ability to find employment, and they get trapped. . . . They borrow money, they risk everything they have for the $106 one-way ticket to Chicago.” 

      That ticket is significant. Puerto Ricans are “the first ethnic group to come to the United States predominantly by airplane.” The suddenness of the transition—no long voyage, no wait at the border—adds to the shock. Despite difficulties, Puerto Ricans are on their way to becoming the second-largest Latino group in the city. 

      “All these things bring problems, problems that did not exist at home,” says Alvarez. “We are trying to solve them. But it will take time—and understanding.”