Met Notes #1: "Reframing history."

Visible Storage at the Met

     We visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City on Monday and popped into what it calls "Visible Storage" in its Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art. A jumble of paintings and sculptures, empty frames and stacked china, silver, tables and chairs, hundreds of linear feet of treasures jammed together with almost no note or explanation.  It's like the best flea market of all time, except nothing's for sale.  

     Once, years ago, I was pleasantly startled to turn a corner in Visible Storage and come face-to-face with John Singer Sargent's "Madame X" hanging from a slotted metal wall as if the famed painting were just another art print in somebody's closet.

     "Madame X" was back in her usual place in a public gallery Monday — the sitter was an American creole socialite from New Orleans, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau; Sargent concealed her name so as to avoid scandal over both her suggestive pose and her skimpy dress (originally, one strap had slipped down, but Sargent later quailed and repainted it in place.

          The Sun-Times reported Wednesday that The Art Institute received a $75 million gift to expand how it presents its modern art. That's welcome news, as museums struggle to stay relevant and show off their collections in creative ways. 

     Of course, you don't need to construct a new building to shake up how artwork is presented. Museums lately have been vigorously trying to expand the contours of Western art. A current fashion is juxtaposition — placing contemporary works by underrepresented artists alongside greats of the Western canon. For instance, the Met decided to hang Elizabeth Colomba's 1997 "Armelle" immediately to the left of Sargent's masterpiece.

"Armelle" by Elizabeth Colomba

     "The parallel between Armelle and Madame X is caustic and ironic," Colomba notes on an explanatory card. "Both are creoles: X descends from a colonialist family; Armelle from one that would have been in bondage. Bestowing the same pose on my model, I challenge stereotypes, reframing history to apply a different narrative for the character."
    The standard circle-the-wagons response would be to howl that a portrait from an artist born in 1976 has been allowed to invade a gallery of Sargent portraits. The same see-no-evil approach that has Red States purging their libraries of books that offer clear-eyed views of the nation's racist history. That's fear. And timidity. The presence of Colomba's work made me linger over Madame X longer than I would otherwise, certainly when it is hung without comment in Visible Storage.   

     Not far from the Sargent hall was a painting that demonstrates this trend even more eloquently: "Belizaire and the Frey Children." Painted in the 1830s, this portrait is of "an enslaved Black subject depicted with the family of his enslavers," the aforementioned Belizaire seen at the upper right, in a beige frock coat, arms crossed, rather dubiously regarding his charges.   

      Sometime around the year 1900 the descendents of the children had their caretaker painted out, in the fine tradition of erasing Black people from historical memory. But in 2022, careful conservation returned the figure, and transformed what was otherwise a muddy and unexceptional family portrait of three long-dead children into a touchstone of one of today's most pressing social issues, at least in Red states. In Blue states, we just call it history and don't get bent out of shape studying it, perhaps because we don't sympathize with the Confederate losers in the bottom of our cold dead hearts.

     You probably wouldn't notice it on the scale reproduced here, and nothing in the materials suggested this point. But I looked at Belizaire's eyes, and the eyes of the Frey children, and noticed a certain similarity. Slave-owning men did have a habit of contributing to their own stock of chattel, and Belizaire might have been depicted among the Frey children because he was one of the Frey children. A half sibling anyway. You can see why those attracted to white supremacy would want this to continue being swept under the rug, as their forefathers routinely did. And why that urge must be assiduously squelched. Me, I like a little history served up with my artwork. Otherwise, museums are just big halls lined with pretty pictures.

    

  

Sept. 11, 2024

 

     The New York City subway and the commuter Path line both stop at Cortland Street, and the weird white Oculus mall/hub. So it was natural to meet at the 9/11 Memorial Sunday morning to begin our day. We didn't think ahead of what it would be like to wait there.

     The power of the place hits you instantly. What happened there, 23 years ago today.
     The rendezvous, my wife and I from our hotel near Madison Park, and our daughter-in-law from her home in Jersey City, the sort of small happy life event forever stolen from the people who died that day, and from their friends and loved ones. Stolen forever.
    My wife and I got there early, and did what you are supposed to do — pause, fall silent, reflect, remember that day. Gazing at the names, the cascading water, the new One World Trade Center looming above. 
     I'd been to the memorial before, several times, and found the design completely apt — if you haven't visited, you should. The memorial consists of a pair of square pits that outline the original footprint of the fallen twin towers, bordered with the names of those who perished in the attacks, cut into smooth brass. The letters cut just wide enough to insert a flower stem. 
     Inside, water cascades down the walls, and disappears into a smaller pit whose bottom is too deep to see. Beyond our ability to perceive, like the carnage itself. The memorial itself is huge; standing by one square, you can't see the other. Its size, like the Vietnam Memorial, suited to the enormity it is intended to commemorate.
     If you want to read something about 9/11, I wrote a more indepth reflection three years ago, at the height of COVID. Honestly, I don't have anything to add today. Fly the flag, try to dial back the hate that is the root of such disasters. Other than that, who can contemplate the unimaginable for long? I took off my cap and bowed my head. Our daughter-in-law arrived, and we proceeded to a much happier place, the South Street Seaport, alive with life and food and commerce.  The two sites only a few minute walk apart, one frozen in the unalterable and tragic past, forever fixed on the echoing void caused by the bloodiest day on American soil since the Civil War. All those names, all those precious lives were snuffed out by bitter hatreds. The other, particularly Jean-Georges Tin Building, is sort of an anti-9/11 Memorial. Not that it is against it, but that it represents a completely contradictory set of emotions. Coffee and muffins, commerce and seafaring. We drank our coffee and ate our sandwiches and looked out at another perfect September day, another clear blue sky, just like the one torn asunder on Sept. 11, 2001. 

One World Trade Center towers above the memorial site. At 1776 feet, it is the tallest building in the Western Hempisphere, and was designed by Chicago's Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The building marks its 10th anniversary next month. 

Flashback 2009: 'Losing Mum and Pup' is frank and funny

The Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

    A long, busy weekend in New York City. Much fun, running around — lunch with a writer pal at the Century Association, a visit to the Treasures room at the New York Public Library, lunch at abcV, dinner at the Thai Diner, cheesecake at Caffe Reggio. Strolling Central Park AND the West Village AND the South Street Seaport and the reason we went here in the first place, a lovely wedding of a friend's son in Brooklyn.

     Monday morning we had a few hours free and headed to the Met, popping in on the Temple of Dendur. A small 2,000 shrine to the sons of a Nubian leader shouldn't be affected by a contemporary American humor writer. But I can never see the place and not think about Christopher Buckley. I don't believe I've ever shared that column here — let's fix that.

      Our parents leave us with a puzzle. If we're lucky, it's a simple, move-the-stack-of-discs-from-one-peg-to-another kind of puzzle we can solve with a little effort and then feel darn good about ourselves. Clever children.
     If we're not lucky, it's one of those jangly metal messes of bent nails and twisted loops, something we struggle over for the rest of our lives, flinging it aside in frustration only to pick it up again and again, determined to figure the thing out, somehow.
     And when our parents die, all hope of help is gone — no chance of anyone taking the jumble from our hands and saying, "Oh here, you do it like this . . . " A quandary millions of Baby Boomers are experiencing, and Christopher Buckley has done us a service by setting aside his usual job — crafting comic novels — to chronicle a grim period in 2007 and 2008 when his parents, conservative ringmaster William F. Buckley Jr. and New York socialite Patricia Taylor Buckley, both died.
     The book was published last week and its title — Losing Mum and Pup —hints at what Buckley has accomplished. I winced when I first heard it, chatting with him last September about his recent novel, Supreme Courtship. Rich people, writing frankly about their lives of privilege will, unless they are very careful, end up sounding like Thurston Howell III complaining about his daiquiri. The words "mum and pup" give off a tennis-anyone? tang of the snobbery that smoothed every polished river pebble syllable spoken by William F. Buckley. My affection for him being what it is — nonexistent — I worried that his son, one of the few contemporary novelists I really like, was about to veer off the path.
     My worry was misplaced. Christopher Buckley is so frank, so funny, that all class envy is defused. One forgives him his Swiss boarding school and yacht parties as he struggles to send off his difficult parents, who weren't always there when he needed them, but certainly are here now. After his mother's death, he keeps his ailing, channel-surfing father company. He writes:
     "I was supposed to leave mid-July on a long-planned trip to California. One night as we watched the first of three — or was it four? — movies, he said apprehensively, 'When are you leaving for California?'
     " 'I'm not, Pup, I'm going to stay here with you.'
     "He began to cry. I went over and patted him on the back. He recovered his composure and said somewhat matter-of-factly, 'Well, I'd do the same for you.' "
     "I smiled and thought, Oh no, you wouldn't. A year or two ago, I might have said it out loud, initiating one of our antler clashes. But watching him suffer had made my lingering resentments seem trivial and beside the point."
     Either that moment sends you bolting for the bookstore, or you've been bequeathed the puzzle page from Highlights and don't know it. Not being a fan of his father's, I wasn't offended, as some conservatives were, by Buckley's depictions of humiliating medical problems and agonizing hospital scenes. Certain details do stagger — his mother's memorial service is held at the Temple of Dendur, the Nubian temple rebuilt inside New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The bill for the event's audio/visual salute comes to $20,000, a detail Buckley delivers as farce:
     "The audiovisual subcontractor, a competent and agreeable man named Tony, presented his estimate. I whistled silently at the $7,000 price at the bottom of the e-mail, but I thought, Well, we're only going to do this once. A month later, my learning curve took a sharp turn upward when Tony presented his final bill and I realized that I hadn't read quite all the way to the bottom of his e-mail attachment. The $7,000 was for equipment. The labor cost came to an additional $13,000 on top of that. As I type this a year later, I'm able to chuckle — finally — at my ineptitude at e-mail attachment reading. I can hear Mum's ghost muttering, Twenty thousand dollars? For a few television screens and a microphone? Have you completely taken leave of your senses?"
     He hasn't. Buckley retains his wits and his wit — in several spots I laughed out loud, and found myself, for the first time, interested in William F. Buckley. I've never read anything by him; he was never exactly the hot author in my squishy liberal Democratic circle. But after I finished Losing Mum and Pup I felt compelled to trot off to the Northbrook Library and check out Right Reason.
     Our parents help us, then we help them. We begin as their dream, the poet said, then they become ours. Christopher Buckley has sketched his parents at their lowest, last moments and used the crisis to frame a portrait of their lives that is rich and alluring, heart-breaking and hysterical. It is filled with interesting tidbits — the Washington Monument is 555 feet high; Henry Kissinger cries easily — and practical advice: Don't smoke. If you're a veteran, make sure your family knows the location of your DD-214 certificate, proving your honorable service, if you want military honors at your funeral.
     And lastly, love pardons many sins. Buckley could have taken these same facts and written a version of Mommy Dearest if he didn't so obviously adore his parents, warts and all, a reminder that the love we give to our children is returned to us, if we are lucky, when we need it most.

    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 18, 2009

'Everybody Needs an Editor.' Always has been true, always will be.

     Communication is hard. It must be, because we're so bad at it. Many of us, anyway. Sometimes. Often. Not that we tend to be aware of it. We thunder away online, oblivious, pouring forth an endless stream of tweets and texts, manifestos and slideshow presentations that border on criminal dullness and inaccuracy.
     To reach an audience consistently, delivering an intended message, you need to work at it, constantly. I've been writing a newspaper column since I was 15, and though I've managed to achieve a certain facility, the process still requires concentration and effort. I still manage to fail spectacularly now and then, if I'm not careful and sometimes even when I am. It's hard to develop an edge and easy to lose one. Frequent sharpening is required to avoid dullness.

   To this end, a welcome whetstone for communicators is being published this Tuesday: "Everybody Needs an Editor: The Essential Guide to Clear and Concise Writing" (Simon Element $24.99) written by a pair of Chicago communications professionals, Melissa Harris and Jenn Bane, and edited by former Sun-Times colleague Mark Jacob. It's a boon for those who don't have a clutch of eagle-eyed newspaper editors picking over their prose.
     For those weaned on Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style," reading "Everybody Needs an Editor" will be an eye-opener (I almost called it "ENAE," but took to heart the advice on page 144: "Don't overuse acronyms"). It outlines how to write email subject lines and speeches, how to fire someone and how to resign. Filled with useful tips, both specific and general, the book warns against overuse of quotation marks, of shouting via ALL CAPS (they do have a habit, either good or bad I can't decide, of illustrating what not to do by doing it), and encourage vividness. I was surprised to see several tricks I thought were genius divinations of my own — such as to use photo captions to tuck in additional information you couldn't fit into the body of your story.
     "Everybody Needs an Editor" also offers a primer on the role of artificial intelligence.
"AI can improve your writing," they write (at least I assume they wrote it, as opposed to merely prompting a machine to do it, then buffing the result). "Think of it as a tool, like spell-check: It should be used in conjunction with human judgment and expertise."
     Soon writers will polish AI-generated copy more than they compose original work.
     "Increasingly, writers will not be putting the first draft down; 100% of their writing experience will largely be editing," said Harris in a Zoom interview. "We truly believe that editing [AI] ... making it better, is going to be the future."

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The opposite of "great."

Head of Medusa, by Damien Hirst

    That the Russians have been pouring money into the pockets of popular Trump influencers comes as no surprise. It's not the smoking gun in Donald Trump's hand, yet. But if it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck... The man has no beliefs other than larceny, and his almost canine devotion to Vladimir Putin ... well, what explains it? You almost hope Trump's in the Russian's pocket; you'd hate to think he's doing this for free, panting at Putin's feet year after year just because he so admires dictators. Somehow that would be even worse. Though that could very well be the case. Nothing would surprise me anymore.
    Not true. It is astounding to see how easily the Republican Party follows along, swinging 180 degrees around to his way of thinking.  From huzzahing for Tail-gunner Joe McCarthy to cheering as the Russians savage Ukraine or, at the least, claiming the invasion of a European democracy and slaughter of its civilians is none of America's business. Heck, Russian tanks could roll down Pennsylvania Avenue and the Republican leadership of today would turn out in their slinkiest dresses, ready to service them. 
     These latest revelations will mean nothing at all, to his supporters. To those of us committed to saving American democracy, it is another reminder, as if one more is necessary, of  how high  the stakes are, and what we are fighting for.

    

Flashback 2006: Fighting the Middle East war in a Chicago cab

July 2014 Pro-Palestinian march

     Some extra reaction to my Wednesday column, thanks to Fox News, which did that thing they do where they break my column apart and post it, exaggerating the most controversial bits. I think they do it to sic their readers on me — ring the Pavlovian bell, get the pack salivating. I won't reprint any of it. Let's just say: not the best goodwill ambassadors for the State of Israel. 

     In that column I mention that I've written about the Palestinian-Israel situation occasionally over the years — not much, because it never changes. This column from ... 18 years ago is evidence of that. It's from when the column filled a page, and I've kept in the subheadings. Fox News is free to do with it what they will. 

OPENING SHOT

     "What do you think about the war?"
     The day wasn't going well already. I had an interview in Evanston but absent-mindedly got on the Kimball instead of the Linden train. Now I was in Albany Park. So either catch a train back or grab a cab. I was supposed to be there in five minutes. So a cab, and a cabbie glaring at me in the rearview mirror. I didn't need to read his license to know where he was from.
     "The war . . . in Lebanon?" I said, buying time. "It's a tragedy, of course. The Palestinians, they need a place to live. . ."
     That was enough. "The Palestinians have a place to live,'' he fumed, "it is the Zionists who must find somewhere else. . ."
     I gazed out the window. He went on and on.
     "One soldier!" he spat. "One soldier is killed and for that hundreds of children must die! Children are being blown up."
     ". . .and not by us. . ." I imagined him adding. The hypocrisy moved me to argue.
     "Hezbollah fires missiles from residential neighborhoods," I said. "It's as if you used a baby as a shield to rob a bank, then blamed the police for shooting the child."
     This of course made things worse. The cabbie quickly moved on to Hitler, and he once thought Hitler was wrong but now he sees how right he was. . .
     "Pull over," I said. We were miles from where I was going.
     "Aha!" the cabbie said. "What I'm saying makes you mad."
     "No," I said, wearily. "I've heard it before. I'm just not going to pay to listen to it."
     So I got out, on Broadway, the cabbie lowering his rear window so he could hurl a few parting tidbits.
     My question is this: How long until it breaks out here? The crisis in the Middle East, slugged out by proxy in the U.S. Because you know it will. Somewhere. Some day.

'RACISTS GO HOME!'

     It could have happened Monday; a hot day, 95 in the shade. Several thousand people — not the 5,000 organizers claimed, but a good turnout — filled Federal Plaza, waving blue and white flags around the orange Calder sculpture, supporting Israel.
     Across Dearborn, a counter demonstration alongside the Dirksen Federal Building. Only about three dozen people, but one very loud loudspeaker.
     "Israel is a terrorist state! Stop the killing, stop the hate!" rhymed a young lady wearing jeans and a checkered scarf. "Israel is a racist state! Stop the killing, stop the hate!"
     She led the chant through "Hatikva," the Israeli national anthem and over the "Star Spangled Banner."
     The pro-Israel rally offered up a variety of political leaders — Rep. Mark Kirk, gubernatorial candidate Judy Baar Topinka and Attorney General Lisa Madigan, who spoke forcefully and well.
     "All of us who support democracy and the rule of law must come together and condemn the terrorist acts of Hezbollah and Hamas,'' Madigan said. "We must let Israeli citizens know that people across the world who love democracy support them."
     Meanwhile, across the street, the chant was "Racists go home!"
     The police lined Dearborn to keep the two groups apart. I worked my way across the street and approached the girl leading the chants and stood there, waiting for her to pause. She noticed me and, to my surprise, tried to hand me the microphone, thinking that I wanted to speak next.
     Had I presence of mind, I would have seized my chance to lead an anti-Israel rally, taken the microphone and began shouting, "A secure Israel and a free Palestine, neighbors in peace!" or some such sentiment completely unacceptable to these people. Who knows what might have happened? "HOSTILITIES CEASE IN LEBANON AS WORDS OF SANITY SPREAD AROUND GLOBE. "He touched us," said Fazza al Fazool. "We were so wrong. . ."
     Instead, I raised my notepad and pointed sheepishly at it. She handed off the microphone to somebody else and we stepped aside to talk. She was Lara Elborno, 19, a student at the University of Iowa but from Chicago, a native of Kuwait but an American citizen.
     "Ten times as many Lebanese and Palestinians have been killed than have Israelis," she said. "Israel is aimlessly targeting civilian populations without any accountability, and the U.S. unfailingly supports Israel."
     I went back to the Israeli side, marveling how nimbly Elborno slipped into the language of PC propriety: Israel is a racist state, of course, because of its religious nature, as opposed to say, the whole frickin' Arab world, where Elborno would risk being stoned as a whore for going out in public without her chador, never mind attending college, never mind leading a rally.
     I'm a big believer in words, but sometimes they fall short and lose meaning. Arguments with cabbies, slogans at rallies — Israel exists because its brute force is greater than the brute force of its hostile neighbors, nations that keep their oppressed populations diverted from their own misery by inciting them over a convenient bogeyman.
     The counter demonstration lasted longer than the rally and I stuck around, convinced that if I waited long enough, a candor greater than concern for children would emerge. I wasn't disappointed.
     "From the river to the sea!" Elborno yelled into the microphone. "Palestine will be free!"
     That's more like it. "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." The river she is referring to would be the Jordan -- Israel's eastern border. The sea, the Mediterranean, its Western border.
     And the "free" is not religious freedom, nor freedom of speech, nor of the press. Israel has all those.
     She meant "free" in the sense of "gluten-free," as in, devoid of something, and the something she wants the land devoid of is so obvious there is no need to spell it out: "Palestine will be free of Jews."
     That is why you never hear Palestinian activists speaking of two nations living in harmony. Because that is not their goal. The goal is all the Jews gone and Israel back in Muslim hands. That is why we have this bloodletting year in and year out, and until that changes — or Israel is destroyed — the problem will never go away.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 21, 2006

CTA Blue Line killings a mirror held to society

An unhoused woman on the CTA Blue Line's Forest Park platform in March, 2021.

  

     The Night Ministry is the last strand in Chicago's social safety net, helping those who have nowhere else to turn. If, after reading this, you'd like to donate to The Night Ministry to support their life-saving work, you can do so by clicking here.

     Four Chicagoans were killed on the Blue Line Monday. Execution style.
     Five days have passed, and already the crime is being crowded out by more recent atrocities; another four people — two students, two teachers — gunned down Wednesday at a high school in Georgia. A 14-year-old has been charged.
     But I want to think about that first quartet, on the "L" train. Something should be said. Officials certainly didn't waste time before stepping up and making pronouncements.
     "We believe it's isolated," said Forest Park Deputy Police Chief Chris Chin — the bodies were discovered at the Forest Park station, where the Blue Line ends after its 26.9-mile journey from O'Hare International Airport. "We believe it's random."
     Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx called the murders "inexplicable."
     I disagree with both Chin and Foxx. I believe the crime is not isolated, random, or inexplicable. Just the opposite. It is part of a widespread, systemic and easily understood pattern.
     What is the most common form of political discourse? Identifying groups of people who are different, then conjuring up and exaggerating harms they may commit to justify oppressing them. Because they are unworthy, practically inhuman.
     "Our country is being poisoned," said Donald Trump, a note he has struck many times. Immigrants are "poisoning the blood" of the nation. They are "vermin." There's a list. Immigrants. LGBTQ+. And, at the very bottom, unhoused people. An eyesore and a menace.
     I don't want to make the common media mistake of leaping into the head of a murderer. Police have arrested a suspect, who's been charged with four counts of murder. Maybe they're mentally ill and thought they were shooting into four bags of laundry. We may never know.

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