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| Folk art, Smithsonian Institution, Museum of American History |
We went to Wicker Park Friday night and saw Mitchell Bisschop's one-man show, "Royko: The Toughest Man in Chicago" at the Chopin Theater. I liked it, while at the same time felt my colleague Bob Chiarito nailed its shortcomings in his review. Both can be true because I'm the rare audience member who is also a working newspaper columnist. I actually choked up when, as the Chicago Daily News folded, Royko cast his reaction in the voice of a kid on the last day of summer pleading to play just a little bit more. C'mon guys! Don't end this yet. Just one more hour. I feel that way every day.
Royko's widow, Judy, was there — she said it was her fourth time seeing it — and when a friend introduced us, her frosty, "I know who you are," before turning on her heel and walking off reminded me how her late husband hated younger columnists and treated us like crap at every opportunity — apparently deputizing his family members to carry on the tradition for him, from beyond the grave. Nice to see you too, Mike, and thanks for the reminder — that's why I'm always elaborately kind to whatever ambitious young journalist comes my way. Not that many do.
The play highlights a Royko column about Leroy Bailey, and I mentioned it to a friend who invited me to see the play that I dredged up Bailey 20 years ago when the VA was in the news for treating its veterans shabbily. She expressed interest in seeing it, and I said I would post it here. It's from when the column ran a thousand words and filled a page, and I kept the other items here , in case you're interested. The really cool part is that, after it ran, Tom McNamee tracked down Bailey and visited with him. Alas, that column isn't online.
Opening shot
Of the several thousand columns written by Mike Royko, the absolute best is easy to pinpoint: It was published Dec. 10, 1973, in the Chicago Daily News and told the story of Leroy Bailey, the man without a face.
Bailey had had a face when he went into the Army and was shipped to Vietnam. Then a rocket slammed into his tent and exploded. Eyes, nose, teeth, gone. He was living in his brother's basement in LaGrange, knitting wool hats, when Royko found him. The doctors at Hines Veterans Hospital had told him nothing more could be done for him. But an Oak Brook doctor thought he could reconstruct Bailey's face enough so that he could eat solid foods, instead of taking his nutrients by squirting them down his throat with a syringe. The doctor began the series of operations that would allow Bailey to eat normally. But the VA had refused to pay because they decided that the treatment was for something "other than that of your service-connected disability." Eating like a person, the VA decided, was a needless luxury.
This will sound grimly familiar to readers who were aghast this past week as the Sun-Times detailed the delay and indifference of the VA here, how vets have to struggle for benefits they have already paid for with their blood, and how Illinois is among the most stingy states in the nation when it comes to helping vets. Not only is it a disgrace, but — as Royko's piece reminds us — it's nothing new.
Americans fall over themselves to pay lip service to our military. We love a parade, and act like anybody who doesn't support our troops is a coward and a traitor. And then we turn our backs on the most deserving — the wounded vet — not by accident, not individually, but en masse, as a matter of policy.
Whoops! Hey, sorry . . .
I know you're not supposed to think about the stuff on television. That, for the most part, it's moronic mush designed to roll unchallenged over viewers too tired and numb to extend critical thought. But my God. Perhaps the Orwellian name "The Learning Channel" implies some kind of higher, educational standard, but the lurid fare it serves up as entertainment gets under my skin. I was flipping the channels last week, and I settled on a TLC program. In my memory it was "Medical Miracles," but it could have been "Surgical Surprises" or even "Hospital Hootenanny."
The story was of a 6-year-old girl, severely burned after her father thought it would be a good idea to use gasoline to jump-start a fire in the fireplace. The story focused on the medical challenges, on the skin grafts and surgeries, introducing the heart-tugging aspect of the twin sister, who at age 6 consented to have some of her own skin stripped away so that her sister could live, complete with poignantly plinking pianos over photos of the pre-burn sisters hugging each other. While dad did address his judgment error that sent a fireball rolling out of the fireplace, burning his daughter over 80 percent of her body, the term he used, I believe, is that he felt "bad" (though he might have said he felt "very bad" or even "terrible." But that was it).
Call me a cynic. (And the choice nowadays seems limited to "cynic" or "idiot.") But if I had the members of this star-crossed family in front of a camera, happily re-creating their nightmare for a moment of TLC fame, I would have given another 30 seconds to the issue of dad setting little Mandy, or whatever, ablaze, and not just dismiss it with a two second kiss-off. And if I were that dad, I don't think I could bring myself to blandly sit in front of the camera and rehash my moment of bottomless stupidity that had so wrenched my child's life.
Funny. We relentlessly censor the bloody images of real carnage streaming in daily from Iraq because the public squeals if forced to see the handiwork of our policies. Then we fill the void with the wildest Grand Guignol TV can get away with. If there isn't an Autopsy Channel, it's not because somebody hasn't tried to start one. Maybe next year.
Yeah, that's us
Last week, I wrote about the unique Canadian ability to fixate and complain about the United States. Canadian sympathizers sent in a lot of flak (including a charmingly succinct if unpersuasive "You're wrong!"). But after the column was reprinted in the Nagging Neighbor to the North, a number of its denizens recognized truth when they saw it, such as Montreal radio host Ted Bird, who writes:
"Saw your Canada piece this week, reprinted in the Montreal Gazette. I'm no self-loathing Canadian, but man, have you got us pegged. It's actually quite embarrassing. Please be advised that the self-styled intellectual left doesn't speak for all of us, and there is a silent majority of Canadians who still consider America to be their closest friend and ally, and a force for good in the world. Most of the rest are system-sucking crackpots like welfare recipients, erstwhile flower children whose grandkids wish they would get a haircut, and students with heavily subsidized tuition practicing their right to free speech that was bought with blood in epic battles detailed in history books that they've never bothered to read. I wish they would find the energy to mobilize mass protest every time our outrageous income taxes take another jump, but then, they'd actually have to have jobs [to] be affected by taxes."
Was the sponsor Guinness?
Americans would rather be bored than offended; most places, it's the other way around. Thus, 500 art world types in Britain, surveyed by Gordon's Gin, sponsor of that country's prestigious Turner Prize, just voted Marcel Duchamp's 1917 "Fountain" — an ordinary porcelain urinal the artist signed — as the most influential work in modern art. They're right, sadly. The idea that an artwork should be finely wrought or — God forbid — beautiful went out along with sock garters. What I want to know is this: If the idea of art as whatever shocking item you can pluck out of the junkyard, is 87 years old and counting, and is aped in every museum and gallery in the world, doesn't that mean we can move on to something else? Something new? Or — dare I say it — old?
Neil Steinberg will discuss his new book, Hatless Jack, from 9 to 11 p.m. Tuesday with Milt Rosenberg on WGN-AM (720).
Opening shot
Of the several thousand columns written by Mike Royko, the absolute best is easy to pinpoint: It was published Dec. 10, 1973, in the Chicago Daily News and told the story of Leroy Bailey, the man without a face.
Bailey had had a face when he went into the Army and was shipped to Vietnam. Then a rocket slammed into his tent and exploded. Eyes, nose, teeth, gone. He was living in his brother's basement in LaGrange, knitting wool hats, when Royko found him. The doctors at Hines Veterans Hospital had told him nothing more could be done for him. But an Oak Brook doctor thought he could reconstruct Bailey's face enough so that he could eat solid foods, instead of taking his nutrients by squirting them down his throat with a syringe. The doctor began the series of operations that would allow Bailey to eat normally. But the VA had refused to pay because they decided that the treatment was for something "other than that of your service-connected disability." Eating like a person, the VA decided, was a needless luxury.
This will sound grimly familiar to readers who were aghast this past week as the Sun-Times detailed the delay and indifference of the VA here, how vets have to struggle for benefits they have already paid for with their blood, and how Illinois is among the most stingy states in the nation when it comes to helping vets. Not only is it a disgrace, but — as Royko's piece reminds us — it's nothing new.
Americans fall over themselves to pay lip service to our military. We love a parade, and act like anybody who doesn't support our troops is a coward and a traitor. And then we turn our backs on the most deserving — the wounded vet — not by accident, not individually, but en masse, as a matter of policy.
Whoops! Hey, sorry . . .
I know you're not supposed to think about the stuff on television. That, for the most part, it's moronic mush designed to roll unchallenged over viewers too tired and numb to extend critical thought. But my God. Perhaps the Orwellian name "The Learning Channel" implies some kind of higher, educational standard, but the lurid fare it serves up as entertainment gets under my skin. I was flipping the channels last week, and I settled on a TLC program. In my memory it was "Medical Miracles," but it could have been "Surgical Surprises" or even "Hospital Hootenanny."
The story was of a 6-year-old girl, severely burned after her father thought it would be a good idea to use gasoline to jump-start a fire in the fireplace. The story focused on the medical challenges, on the skin grafts and surgeries, introducing the heart-tugging aspect of the twin sister, who at age 6 consented to have some of her own skin stripped away so that her sister could live, complete with poignantly plinking pianos over photos of the pre-burn sisters hugging each other. While dad did address his judgment error that sent a fireball rolling out of the fireplace, burning his daughter over 80 percent of her body, the term he used, I believe, is that he felt "bad" (though he might have said he felt "very bad" or even "terrible." But that was it).
Call me a cynic. (And the choice nowadays seems limited to "cynic" or "idiot.") But if I had the members of this star-crossed family in front of a camera, happily re-creating their nightmare for a moment of TLC fame, I would have given another 30 seconds to the issue of dad setting little Mandy, or whatever, ablaze, and not just dismiss it with a two second kiss-off. And if I were that dad, I don't think I could bring myself to blandly sit in front of the camera and rehash my moment of bottomless stupidity that had so wrenched my child's life.
Funny. We relentlessly censor the bloody images of real carnage streaming in daily from Iraq because the public squeals if forced to see the handiwork of our policies. Then we fill the void with the wildest Grand Guignol TV can get away with. If there isn't an Autopsy Channel, it's not because somebody hasn't tried to start one. Maybe next year.
Yeah, that's us
Last week, I wrote about the unique Canadian ability to fixate and complain about the United States. Canadian sympathizers sent in a lot of flak (including a charmingly succinct if unpersuasive "You're wrong!"). But after the column was reprinted in the Nagging Neighbor to the North, a number of its denizens recognized truth when they saw it, such as Montreal radio host Ted Bird, who writes:
"Saw your Canada piece this week, reprinted in the Montreal Gazette. I'm no self-loathing Canadian, but man, have you got us pegged. It's actually quite embarrassing. Please be advised that the self-styled intellectual left doesn't speak for all of us, and there is a silent majority of Canadians who still consider America to be their closest friend and ally, and a force for good in the world. Most of the rest are system-sucking crackpots like welfare recipients, erstwhile flower children whose grandkids wish they would get a haircut, and students with heavily subsidized tuition practicing their right to free speech that was bought with blood in epic battles detailed in history books that they've never bothered to read. I wish they would find the energy to mobilize mass protest every time our outrageous income taxes take another jump, but then, they'd actually have to have jobs [to] be affected by taxes."
Was the sponsor Guinness?
Americans would rather be bored than offended; most places, it's the other way around. Thus, 500 art world types in Britain, surveyed by Gordon's Gin, sponsor of that country's prestigious Turner Prize, just voted Marcel Duchamp's 1917 "Fountain" — an ordinary porcelain urinal the artist signed — as the most influential work in modern art. They're right, sadly. The idea that an artwork should be finely wrought or — God forbid — beautiful went out along with sock garters. What I want to know is this: If the idea of art as whatever shocking item you can pluck out of the junkyard, is 87 years old and counting, and is aped in every museum and gallery in the world, doesn't that mean we can move on to something else? Something new? Or — dare I say it — old?
Neil Steinberg will discuss his new book, Hatless Jack, from 9 to 11 p.m. Tuesday with Milt Rosenberg on WGN-AM (720).
—Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 6, 2004
Oooh...oooh...witchy woman. Excuse the typo. Perhaps the Widow Royko, or someone in her inner circle, reads EGD, and sees how he gets shredded here routinely, for having been such an arrogant posterior orifice for so many years. Looks like at least one of them has picked up where he left off, in 1997. But what the hey, she didn't threaten to break anybody's legs.
ReplyDeleteOther than the rebuff, Mr. S, how did you like the play? [smirk]
Sounds like Mike got the brush, too...and it was dipped in a coating of whitewash.
I'm convinced that modern abstract art was created when some idiot nouveau riche American went to an artist's garret & studio in Paris & saw the canvas the artist wiped his brushes on as art & bought it. So the painter & his friends thought that if they could sell that crap to stupid rich Americans, they could sell crap they created that were just as bad.
ReplyDeleteThus modern abstract art was born & the idiot public fell for it & even worse, the moronic art critics loved it!
I still remember the winner of some contest the Art Institute ran in the 60s. It was a large canvas, with two irregular stripes of black paint, separated by two irregular stripes of white paint. Most people thought the AIC has gone mad, but those fools kept it & I saw it on the wall of one of the galleries & just marveled at how appallingly stupid people are.
For an ever better example of terrible excuses of alleged art, just drive north on McCormick Road through Lincolnwood & Skokie, where they have installed some of the ugliest & most idiotic sculptures you've ever seen & then have the gall to call it a Sculpture Park. The worst being the Turd, a tall, rusting pile of steel, looking just like that, a demented birthday cake & a collection of old highway info signs bolted together!
Sort of off-topic, aren't we Clark St? Or are you referring to the part of the play about the Picasso? My wife, by the way, loves that sculpture park.
Deleteclark st. off topic?
DeleteI think Clark was referring to the item from the original column about the urinal.
DeleteBruno is correct, that absurd urinal is a disgusting joke by Duchamp!
DeleteI like some of the things in that sculpture park, am baffled by others. But I think it's better than NOT having a sculpture park there as one rides by on one's bike. Though the occasional stench from the North Shore Channel does it no favors...
DeleteRe: Modern art, in general. I've long thought that the best thing about the Modern Wing of the Art Institute is the view out the northern windows into the prairie garden and Millennium Park, backed by the buildings on the other side of Randolph.
I find the visual arts to be both things I like and things I have to think more about
DeleteMuch like music a pleasant or catchy toon is easy to listen to. Then there is jazz ,classical hip hop, and the avant garde where you need to pay more attention or educate yourself to it's meaning or significance.
It's easier to dislike than to discover.
I've been gifted a ticket for the beat tour where they will interpret the work of king crimsons trilogy from the 80s .Have been listen to recent performances and it's growing on me . Virtuosity comes in many forms.
Sometimes though a pile of scrap is just crap.
Stay away from widows at the altar of one-man theater worship. What were you thinking? He was your competition and she stayed married to the active alcoholic. Vipers in a pit. Consider yourself lucky to have moved on.
ReplyDeleteOh, I had to see it. I'm not that timid. And I do consider myself lucky — "blessed" in fact. In Mrs. Royko's defense, I get cut by most older media sorts — it's just there way. I have a post about trying to say hello to Steve Dahl a few years back. Turns out, he was still simmering over something I wrote about him a dozen years earlier. I ended up never posting it because my wife convinced me it was too mean to do so. I try to be kind, after my fashion.
DeleteWhatever Royko thought about younger columnists and however he treated you, there is the possibility that his widow's opinion of you may be influenced by the numerous times you've chosen to disparage him (and his son) when you've felt like doing so.
DeleteYeah Jakash, I'm sure you're right: she's keeping up on every blog post, and flinching when I crack wise about him. I told that son robbing a bank story twice, the last time in 2017.
DeleteShe wouldn't need to keep up with every post or be a Twitter follower of yours to be aware (or have been made aware) of some of the things you've written. 2017 was a while ago, but not *that* long ago, for instance. You may have only writtten about it twice, but I believe it was occasionally part of your stock reply to the "You're no Royko" trolls.
DeleteRegardless, I suppose I should have been guided by the sage advice you sometimes prescribe: "Shutting up is an art form."
I somewhat remember a column Royko wrote late in life about the newer, younger reporters he worked with. He wrote highly of their skills, and said (paraphrasing here) that they were much better educated and smarter than his generation of ink-stained wretches, and praised their more liberal outlook on social and economic issues.
ReplyDeleteI guess he didn't practice what he preached.
There was a lot of that.
Deleteactually, i don't think royko was telling the truth about being impressed by younger reporters being more liberal, since he pretty much turned into a right wing shit once he chickened out and moved to the trib-probably ended up mentoring kass.
Deletemore on topic. our veterans. during the Vietnam war, a segment of the public blamed the war on those compelled to fight it. after the war a huge public relations campaign ensued to never let that happen again attempting to return the type of respect soldiers received after WW ll. to those who serve. that effort has been very successful.
ReplyDeletethe promise to care for those soldiers not so much.
lots of big unnecessary wars leaving so many terribly damaged
war is the priority. the soldiers often an afterthought
Among the many, many great things Lincoln did for the country, besides keeping the country together during the Civil War, creating the Land Grant universities & the Transcontinental Railroad is the motto of the VA: “To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan”.
DeleteBut far too many, mostly Re Thug Licons don't believe or follow anything the first president from their now diminished party do!
I was wondering if you saw the show, and what you thought of it. I thought it would have been interesting to show a bit more of what a... complicated figure he was, especially later in life. But I guess in that case Mrs Royko wouldn't have seen it four times.
ReplyDeleteMy parents pretty much followed Royko as newspaper subscribers, The Daily News when I was little, then the Sun-Times, then the Tribune. I remember as he got older and turned a bit rightward-- an old man complaining about government and taxes-- and often seemed to be phoning it in, but every once in a while he would show his old stuff and his old self.
I quit reading Royko when he sold out to the Tribune -- that's the way it looked to me anyway. Earlier, I took a class by Ed Eulenburg, who invited Royko to address the class. It felt like he was telling us the inside story, just for us, not to be shared with the rest of the world. Which is how it also felt to read his column, when he was at his best. I believe our genial host here has that quality as well, more of the time than not.
ReplyDeletejohn
Neil, I'm a late riser and, given my pattern of life, I rarely get to my computer until afternoon. As a result, I often have the benefit of seeing what others have already posted in response to EGD. Sometimes I cringe, especially when they go off topic. But I usually try to be informative, particularly when it comes to art. Processing the multiple layers of today's EGD, it seems ironic that you posted the opening photo of an eyeball on a square of gauze and then criticize Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain". One must put in perspective that his contribution to modern art was already embedded in the synthetic phase of Cubist collages.
ReplyDeleteIt was the terrible destruction of WWI that led to Dadaism. Artists have always found a way to challenge the norms. It happened in Greece two thousand years ago. It happened in Italy during the Renaissance. It happened in France following the Napoleonic revolutions. And again when modern weapons caused the unbearable suffering of Europe. What happened during the Vietnam War, led to a new kind of social protest in art. I speak from first hand experience when saying that had it not been for the brave artists of the Soviet Union who staged the "Bull Dozer Incident", the Berlin Wall might not have fallen.
Today, we are faced with another transformative reality, one that you write about daily. I am constantly amazed by your knowledge of art history and, like you, wish that art could return to the age of beauty, narrative and aesthetics that elevate the best parts of our humanness. But, like the advances in technology, we cannot move backwards. That may explain why, as new generations come along, our ability to process all of that leaves some of us behind. Consider the art of today in the eyes of young people who have access to AI and are constantly bombarded with images at such a rapid-fire rate that they measure time in microseconds rather than years, months and days. Mike Royko was a complicated man, who sadly lost touch with his younger self. Let's try to be better than that as we move forward.
I think you misunderstood the eye — a prosthetic eye at the UIC Craniofacial Institute, not a comment on art. And I didn't criticize "Fountain," just observed that it was nearly a century old and done to death, and sad to think that THAT was the greatest artwork of the 20h century. It certainly was important.
DeleteI get it. To follow up, in my opinion Picasso's "Guernica" is one of the most important works of art in the 20th century, but I didn't get to vote. Thank you for clarifying.
ReplyDeleteNo argument here.
Deletehttps://www.everygoddamnday.com/2023/10/guernica.html
Neil, I just read your Oct. 2023 post about "Guernica" and am speechless. It is precisely why that is to me the most important painting of the 20th Century. I'm old enough to have seen the painting when it was at MOMA. I'm new to EGD and would encourage everyone reading this to take another look at what you wrote. Many, many thanks my friend.
Delete