Tattooing inks rich Chicago history

 

     Large portraits of tattoo icons Tatts Thomas and Ralph Johnstone watch over Nick Colella as he works.
     "Both of those guys tattooed on the 400 block of South State Street where the Harold Washington Library is," said Colella, owner of Great Lakes Tattoo on Grand Avenue.
     Tattoos go way back. The oldest known tattoos are on Ötzi the Iceman, a body preserved in the Alps for over 5,000 years. Tattooing was common in ancient Egypt and is found on mummies, mostly women, who often etched fertility signs onto their bodies.
     Chicago is part of that history.
     "Chicago plays a vital role in tattooing in the country," Colella said. "That area of State Street, you had all the sailors come from Great Lakes Naval Base. That's why this place is called Great Lakes Tattoo. You had this naval training base here where all these sailors in wartime came to train, then went down to State Street to see girls and get tattoos. All the arcades had tattooers. All the burlesque shows had tattooers. This stuff on the walls is all from those arcades."
     The walls of Great Lakes Tattoo are jammed with framed selections of classic art: swooping eagles and beribboned daggers, grinning skulls and flaming hearts. Like any fashion, tattooing goes through phases. Polynesian tribal tattoos were popular in the 1990s, then strands of barbed wire on the upper arm.
     But the snarling panthers and cheesecake ladies are always in style.
     "That's pretty much what I do: traditional American tattooing," Colella said. "That's what Danni's doing: repainting in the same tradition they repainted 80 years ago."
     Danni Nievera, at the next stall — 10 artists work at Great Lakes — carefully dabbed red onto a dragon on a sheet of paper.
     "I'm just using gouache, adding color," she said.
     I was not there to get tattooed — I have a hard enough time picking out a new pair of glasses — but to visit World Tattoo Gallery, a small exhibit space downstairs, and see a show of Tony Fitzpatrick's colorful paintings. Tony was heavily tattooed himself, and his art was influenced by tattoo art. Popping in, eyeballing his pictures, then leaving seemed a lost opportunity. So I asked to talk about tattooing while there.
     Besides aesthetics, the old designs carry the spirit of their originators.
     "I like tattooing off these old designs because that's what keeps those guys alive," Colella said. "That's what the history of it is. That's the tradition of it. I'm doing their designs in the current manner with better tools and nicer inks."
     What does Nievera, 30, like about tattooing?

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Danni Nievera

Flashback 2003: Lumbering fears not all that bad

     For a guy who likes to loaf, I hate being sick. I suppose most people do. That drained, feverish feeling. Gobbling Tums to settle the stomach. Hours sprawled in bed, flipping through a book — P.G. Wodehouse, not as funny as I recall — or the random hodgepodge of Facebook videos. I looked at a table saw on the Home Depot yesterday, and today half the videos are woodworking porn. I can't figure out how to make it stop,
     At 4 p.m. I ventured into my office to figure out something for tomorrow. Maybe Robert Louis Stevenson, the bard of being sick at home. "When I was sick and lay abed, I had two pillows at my head..."
     Nah, too much effort. Into the archive, looking for columns that take place in bed. I found this, too fun not to share. This was part of the "Hammered and Nailed" series of columns I wrote about repair in our home section. You might recall, I outlined the Fort last November.  Too soon for another installment, but I really feel as if someone hit me behind the ear with a sock of nickels, so this will have to do. If you decide to read it, strap in: it's twice as along as my usual column. Back in the day when we had time on our hands and newsprint to fill.

     Night. Bed. Sleep. A crash and then the tumble of lumber. Unmistakably. I was on my feet in an instant, moving fast toward the door, thinking, "The Fort has fallen over." I stopped, went back, got my pants, started to leave, then checked the clock: 3:19 a.m.
     Hurrying through the darkened house, I braced myself for the sight. Timbers lying in a shattered heap. All that work and money for nothing. My wife would laugh at me about it for the rest of my life. The Fort has fallen over.
     Still, somewhere deep down I was relieved. Cart the ruins away, I told myself. Be done with it. My own fault. My folly. I had haughtily rejected the premade forts as beneath my fever dreams of fatherhood, instead designing my own Taj Mahal Fort, 15 feet high with a 90-square-foot floor plan. The lumber alone cost $1,700.
     When I began work, on Father's Day, at 5:30 a.m., I was energetic, excited. I had marked with four little red flags on metal rods where the concrete supports would go. Concrete a yard deep. I would do it right. I had carefully dug around the 10-inch cardboard concrete form, removed the circle of sod, and then dug down. And down.
     If you've never dug a hole, it's hard work. Not so much the first foot, or even the second foot. But that third foot. Each hole took about 90 minutes to dig. Still, the process was very satisfying. It's hard to mess up a hole. Sometime that morning my wife and boys came out with a glass of lemonade and sang "Happy Father's Day," and that was nice.
     After digging the first two holes, I poured the concrete. Also a backbreaking-yet-satisfying experience. I mixed the concrete with a shovel in a big plastic trough, then spooned it into the holes. Before it set, I positioned the big metal brackets for the 6-by-6 beams. I carefully checked them with a level, ensuring a solid foundation.
     At the end of the day, I cleaned up, hosed out the trough, looked at these two little 10-inch circles of concrete, with their metal brackets sticking out. It seemed a lot of work for two holes.
     The second day I did it again, for the other two holes. The work seemed to go easier. There was one truly frightening moment — I thought I had put the brackets in too soon for the first holes, so I waited until I had filled the fourth hole with concrete before I tried to sink the bracket in the third. Big mistake. I went to shove the metal into the wet cement. It went down halfway and then stopped. Sick with fear, I contemplated having to dig up the entire mess of drying concrete and repour it.
     At that moment my wife wandered over. She can smell panic, and has a genius for happening by at the pinnacle of crisis. She stood smiling at me, her Mister Handy.
     Sweating like a pig, I fixed a false grin on my face and gave the metal bracket a mighty push. It went in, barely, but was skewed hard to the left.
     "You know honey," I grunted, through gritted teeth, trying to muscle the bracket upright, "this is not ... the best moment."
     That was a weekend's work. The next weekend, I bolted in the legs of the Fort — huge honking 6-by-6ers. I was a little concerned that the cut was not exactly flush, but went halfway across the broad end of the beam and then jumped up 1/16th of an inch. The lumber place must not have had a saw big enough to do it in a single cut. A few of the beams also had cracks in them.
     Not terrible cracks, I decided. Normal, probably. I couldn't imagine dragging those beams back to Craftwood. So I pressed on. Across the top of the upright 6-by-6 beams, two 4-by-4 horizontals then a series of 2-by-6 joists, to hold up the floor, nearly 6 feet in the air (this was before the deadly porch collapse; I'd use 2-by-12 joists now. Instead, I will just have to hope that genetic Steinberg unpopularity prevents my boys from having too many friends over).
     As I began contemplating putting the floor down atop the joists, I ran into a problem. The Fort is basically a little house sitting on a 9-by-10-foot platform, with a little railed porch in front. The little house is framed by 4-by-4 beams, and I knew that if I merely screwed the beams to the floor, they wouldn't be as sturdy as if I put them through the floor and bolted them to the joists. But doing that meant making complicated cuts in the flooring, cuts my fancy new DeWalt chop saw couldn't do.
     I pondered: easy and unstable or difficult and locked in? The thing was wiggly as it was. The beams seemed to sway on the concrete footings. I was standing there, trying to figure out how to proceed, my stomach in a knot, when wife happened by — "Howzit going?" she said breezily. I started trying to explain the dilemma.
     "Do I bolt the post to the floor or have it go through the floor and bolt it to the beam?" She just looked at me. I said it several more times, in several ways, and she still didn't understand, and then I did something that scared both of us: I slammed my head against the joist, deliberately, out of frustration, a quick dip to the side and then a thud. I've never done something like that before in my life. She remembered something she had to do in the house.
     Things actually got worse from there. Taking the tough road — always the tough road — I fished a jig saw out of the basement and made the cuts in the first floorboard to accommodate the Fort beams, a laborious process, but mismeasured, and put one cut in the wrong place, so that the beam couldn't pass through. I thought of taking the jigsaw to my throat but, collecting myself, grabbed a new $14 cedar board and measured again, more carefully this time, measured twice in fact. The new board was an even better job — the cuts neat and precise — and I joyfully went to put the board in place. I was on the ladder, moving it into position when my wife came by, smiling.
     "I don't believe it!" I said, aghast. "I've done it again."
     "Done what?" my wife asked.
     "Cut the board wrong. I screwed up the measurement again!" She had a bright idea, but I just didn't want to hear it.
     "Can I suggest ..." she began.
     "No!" I shouted. "No you can't suggest! Leave me alone. I can't believe it. I did it again."
     "Can I share an idea with you ..." she said quickly.
     "No!" I snapped angrily. "No ideas. This is a disaster. I can't understand it." I raved on in this vein for a bit, until my wife said,
     "Flip the board over."
     Flip. The. Board. Over. Hope dawned. I wasn't as stupid as I thought, not at least in this instance. I flipped the board over. It fit. I had measured correctly, but then turned the board around.
     At that point I had decided to call it a day. Now 12 hours had passed. It was 3:19 a.m. and I was at the back door, hurrying to see my collapsed Fort. I flipped on the floodlights. The Fort was there, intact. I couldn't understand it. I had heard a crash then a tumble of lumber. It was not a dream. I walked out into the cool night, walked all around the Fort in the darkness, looking for a shattered timber, something, touching it lightly with my hand as if I couldn't believe it was still there. But it seemed fine. Eventually I went to bed, mystified.
     Later that morning, when the sun was out, I went back to look at the Fort. I walked around the Fort once, twice, then I noticed something in the driveway. The garbage can, where I had piled some wood scraps, was knocked over, probably by hungry raccoons. The lumber scraps had tumbled out — that was the crash and tumble I had heard. Not the Fort. At that exact moment my wife walked over and I unwisely told her what had happened. It took her five minutes to stop laughing.
        — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 10, 2003

In Chicago and across a polarized America, old and young join 'No Kings' protest

Victoria Eason, left, and her mother Jennifer.

     "The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches ... but always most in the common people," Walt Whitman wrote in his preface to "Leave of Grass," lauding "... their deathless attachment to freedom."
     As satisfying as it is to offer such quotes at face value, as eternal truths — Walt Whitman said it, he's famous, so it must be true — this one might merit a little picking apart.
     First, the line was written in 1855. Meaning the American public's attachment to freedom wasn't so deathless that the country wouldn't soon be ripped apart in civil war over whether fellow human beings should be kept as slaves.
     Who were these common people, anyway? Who are they now? The millions who turned out Saturday for massive "No Kings" rallies across the country? Or the millions more who voted for the president three times? Who support him now, and who will continue to do so no matter what. Even if he runs for a third term in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution?
     We were divided then. We are divided now. In 2024, 49.8% of voters cast a ballot for Donald Trump. And 48.3% voted for Kamala Harris. Almost an even split.
     Once, a tight election might have led to efforts toward bridge building, reconciliation. Now Trump is implementing radical change by executive fiat, without congressional approval or concern for public reaction, which was in full cry Saturday.
     I slid over to the "No Kings" protest in Highland Park and was immediately struck by just how old everybody seemed. Gray hair, walkers, wheelchairs.
     Why is that?
     "It's an older crowd because we remember the way America was, and we want to get it back," said Betty Kleinberg, 83, of Deerfield. "It wasn't perfect, but it was better than it is now. We're doing this for our grandchildren."
     "I'm a very active member of our community and am so appalled by everything going on," said Joanne Hoffman, 92. "As long as I still have my wits about me, I'm going to keep doing this."
     You must really want to be here, I told Phil Reinstein, 87, tapping his rollator.
     "I do," he said. "To try to save this country."

Grace Goodrich

     But as I looked around, I realized something — the impression of an elderly crowd was premature, formed by noticing other cautious seniors such as myself who showed up half an hour early. A self-selected group. As the event unfolded, I realized there were plenty of families and children, too.
     "We need more young people," said Grace Goodrich, 25, of Northbrook, there with her father, Paul. "It's going to eventually affect us more. We need to stand up for what makes this country great."
      Jennifer Eason came with her 9-year-old daughter, Victoria.
     "I'm here because Donald Trump is doing bad things," the 4th grader said.
     Betsy and Curtis Porter of Glencoe brought their 6-year-old son, Ethan, already at his second protest — he also went to the first "No Kings" protest in June. I asked him why he was there.
     "America is free," said the 2nd grader.
     And what does being free mean?
     "We make our own choices," Ethan said.
     Sometimes those choices conflict. Several came to protest but didn't want their own voices cited. A woman holding a sign reading "I'M A 77 YEAR OLD GRANNY FOR FREEDOM" quailed at the prospect of having her photo in the newspaper.
     "I want to live," she explained, fleeing.

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Betty Kleinberg, 83, right, and Paulette Vainstock, 81

Censorship is stupid

"Mexican News," by Alfred Jones, after Richard Caton Woodville (National Gallery of Art)

   
 

     Face the music. Accept the news, good or bad. Move on.
     That seems so simple. Though it requires a spine, which so many folk just don't have. And brains. Also often in short supply. 
     I'm thinking about the mess at Indiana University. Last week the administration abruptly fired the student media director and cancelled all future editions of the Indiana Daily Student, pretending it was a regular business decision to "align with industry trends."

     The fired adviser told The New York Times that the move was taken because the college wants the newspaper to stop printing news, and only feature be-true-to-your-school boostry fluff. 
     Student journalists suspect they were angry that the newspaper wasn't chirping loudly enough about Homecoming weekend, and if they had to spike the 158-year old newspaper to amp up school spirit, so be it. It's only the students. It's not like something important. Like donors.
     So what happens? The issue, that would have burned for a few hours on campus in Bloomington, is fanned into a national wildfire that goes on, day after day, in stories such as this one in the Washington Post.
     And in one of those moments of selflessness that seal a story forever in the public mind, the  Exponent, the paper at rival Purdue, two hours north and living in a different century, apparently, printed a special edition outlining the Indiana dust-up, then "crossed enemy lines" from West Lafayette and filled Indiana Daily Student boxes around the Bloomington campus with a special edition outlining the situation.
     "WE STUDENT JOURNALISTS MUST STAND TOGETHER," the front page headline reads, according to a story in the Herald-Times.

    You have to love that, right? Another ham-handed college administration ballyhooing their own inadequacy. Yes, it's all taking place in Indiana, the Mississippi of the Midwest, and so can be lumped together as matters beneath notice. But with truth under attack on a daily basis across our country, even a victory in a minor skirmish in an overlooked place is worthy of notice. 

The threat of an American king

Reception of the Grand Condé at Versailles by Jean-Léon Gérôme (Musée d'Orsay)

     A regular reader in Norway writes:
     "I’m trying to understand the phrase 'no kings' in modern discourse. Given that constitutional monarchs in Europe today hold no real political power and function largely as symbolic figures within democratic systems, it’s unclear to me why monarchy is still viewed as a threat. Could you clarify this perspective?"

     It is not monarchy itself that is a threat — nobody is worried that Donald Trump will start wearing a crown and an ermine robe; though, at this point, I wouldn't put anything past him. Nor are we talking about quaint modern European royalty. We aren't worried about Queen Beatrix on a bicycle. Rather it is the absolute power, unquestioned obedience, mandatory worship and grotesque abuses once associated with kings that are a growing concern for many Americans.

     Better late than never.

     We are used to a government that tries to address the needs of its citizens. Or at least pretends to. Remember why our nation was created. If we read the Declaration of Independence, the very first thing it declares — with considerable hypocrisy, given that slavery would be legal for most of the next century — that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
     Respecting those rights is the purpose of having a government in the first place.

     "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men," it continues, "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." 

     Kings don't derive their power from the consent of the governed — it is given by God. It cannot be taken away, in their own estimation. 

     Sound familiar?
     Look at the actions of the second Trump administration. Immediately stripping away the government, diverting money that once went to help citizens to his rich pals. Elon Musk basically bought unfettered access to the United State government for a $278 million bribe to the Trump campaign, and his minions raged through the government, firing workers and mining our data.
     Trump's central values seem to be revenge — the Justice Department, purged of its ethical employees, now pursues sham cases among all who opposed Trump. Who tried and — alas — failed to bring him to account for his continual crimes. Democratic states get budget cuts and masked thugs plucking brown people off the street. Red states get factories spurred by Trump's random and autocratic tariffs.
     This is where the "No Kings" phrase comes from. There is no government anymore, just Trump. He makes the decisions, or his handpicked lackeys and lick-splittles. We were a nation founded on division of power — Congress had an important role, passing laws, approving budgets, a role it has abandoned. It took an extended summer recess and, with the government shut down, barely functions and when it did was busy salaaming before Trump, treating the bare Republican majority as a mandate from God.
     The courts, meanwhile, are a funnel up to the Supreme Court, which Trump managed to pack with three partisan toadies during his first term, and now has a solid MAGA majority whose primary function is to clap like seals at whatever he does.
      Thus we find ourselves with a king, in all practical terms, if not in name. Trump has turned the Oval Office into a gilded horror, reflecting his own tin-plated superficiality and lack of substance. He has unveiled plans to deform the White House with an enormous ballroom, and to construct an enormous imperial triumphal Roman arch worthy of Hadrian to mark the 250th birthday of the United States and its transition into an oligarchy. 

     But it feels trivial to focus on aesthetic lapses when the structural, fundamental damage he does is so great. The hornet's nest of conspiracy theories, lies and calumnies buzzing in his brain has become national policy. Truly, had the Russians conquered us militarily, and set out to dismantle and cripple the country, they could hardly have struck upon a campaign as destructive as the one we've seen over the past nine months.

     The public who aren't dancing around the Golden Calf of Trump have few options at this point. We can pine for the 2026 election to restore a Democratic majority in Congress, but Republican gerrymandering has decreased the odds of that, and the election might not happen anyway or, if it does, the government might not respect the results. Kings don't have to, and Trump has been very clear that the only elections he recognizes are those that go his way.
     Thus the "No Kings" protests, the desperate act of desperate people who see the country they love slipping away or, more accurately, being handed on a platter to a would-be tyrant who encompasses literally every negative quality that can be found in a person. It's a very sad, dangerous state of affairs.

     Does that answer your question?

Do 'No Kings' protesters hate America? Or love it?

No Kings rally, Des Plaines, June 14, 2025

     Protest is as American as apple pie and baseball. Our nation began with colonists decrying an oppressive tyranny from across the sea. As soon as our Founding Fathers broke away and formed a government, they protected protest in the First Amendment. A nod to freedom of religion, speech and the press, then boom: Congress will make no law prohibiting "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
     That doesn't mean our current leaders aren't blasting contempt at this most enshrined of American traditions.
     Saturday, Oct. 18 is the second "No Kings" protest, which has been receiving volleys of condemnation. House Speaker Mike Johnson, doing his special mind-reading trick, looked into the hearts of millions of people, many who haven't yet decided whether to go or not, and called it a "hate America rally" sponsored by the hidden hand of terrorists.
     "They have a 'hate America' rally that's scheduled for Oct. 18," Johnson told Fox News. "It's all the pro-Hamas wing and the Antifa people."
     And he knows that ... how?
     Oh right. He doesn't. He's just making stuff up. There's a lot of that going around.
     "This will be a Soros paid-for protest where his professional protesters show up," said Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas).
     George Soros is a 95-year-old Hungarian-American philanthropist whose name has become a dog whistle for "Jewish money."
     The "No Kings" organizers deny they are in the grip of the flailing tentacles of octopoid globalists.
     "I am a volunteer," said Kathy Tholin, on the board of Indivisible Chicago and an organizer of the local protest. "We are all volunteers. Every single individual; none of us are paid by anybody."
     Why would people venture out for a "No Kings" protest?
     "One of the clear goals of the Trump regime is to isolate and depress us," said Tholin [begin italicsMission accomplished!end italics I thought], "and make us think there is nothing we can do to make a difference. It is incredibly energizing to spend time with the many, many people who refuse to submit quietly and are willing to speak out. That kind of solidarity, that kind of working together with friends and neighbors, is what is going to save us from this authoritarian suppression."
     While I haven't attended a protest, as a protester, since the Northwestern University anti-draft registration protest in the spring of 1979, I can vouch for the accuracy of that statement. Rather like Mike Johnson, I also tend to take a dim view of demonstrations. Maybe because, growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, there were so many of them. For civil rights. Against the war. Some of them were stupid — yippies trying to levitate the Pentagon.
     And what did they accomplish? Really?
     Sixty-two years after Dr. King's March on Washington, civil rights have been rebranded "wokeness" and are in full retreat.
     But I blundered onto the first "No Kings" last June 14. We were driving through Des Plaines, saw hundreds of people gathered on street corners, and pulled over. I donned my figurative reporter's hat, grabbed a pen and notebook and went to investigate.
     Maybe because it was in Des Plaines. Regular, open, salt-of-the-earth people. No pretense, no showing off. Des Plaines is home to the Choo Choo Restaurant. They bring your basket of a cheeseburger and fries aboard a little model train. How can you not love the community supporting that?

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'Solace in time of woes'

 

     The interview at the Pittsfield Building on Wednesday ran a little over 90 minutes, from 9:30 a.m to just after 11. I didn't have to be at Siena Tavern for lunch until noon. That gave me almost an hour. 
       I walked a couple blocks south to Iwan Ries at 19 S. Wabash, on the second floor of the Adler & Sullivan-designed Jeweler's Building. Run by the fifth generation to own the company since its founding in 1857, Ries is the second oldest family-owned business in Chicago (the first being, surprisingly, Baird & Warner, founded in 1855).
      Iwan Ries has a fancy BYOB cigar lounge, but that costs money to use. As it was, the stogie put me back $16 and change. It also has a little side room with a few chairs and ashtrays. That was good enough for me to sit and relax and read the newspaper for 20 minutes. They didn't have my go-to smoke, a Rocky Patel 1990 Vintage toro, so I took the recommendation of the clerk, Harry, and tried the Rocky Patel Number Six, which was delightfully smooth, so much so I bought a second for another day. I'm a creature of habit, so it's good to have an occasional reminder that being forced out of your rut sometimes has advantages.
     The place is exactly as it always was. I tried to remember when I first came here, and couldn't. Over 30 years ago. As I left, I told Harry that it was nice to come across something that hasn't been ruined, yet. 
     "We never change," he said.    

The title is line from the Rudyard Kipling poem, "The Betrothed." 

What part of 'autism is genetic' doesn't RFK Jr. understand?

     My father has blue eyes, but I do not. Mine are a lovely green. My older son nevertheless has blue eyes, as does his daughter, my granddaughter.
     The reason is obvious. The winter and spring of 1932, when my grandmother was pregnant with my father, were particularly chilly in New York City. While 1960 was exceptionally warm in Ohio. Cool weather, as you know, breeds eyes that are blue, a color associated with cold. While warmth sprouts green. This year was quite balmy, but my son keeps the air conditioning cranked up — his apartment is like a meat locker — and so we can assume that had a significant role in their daughter's ice blue eyes.
     If you're nodding in agreement, here's bad news. The above paragraph is nonsense, cooked up for illustrative purposes. Eye color has nothing to do with environment. It's genetically determined. Nothing that occurs after the moment of conception has any influence on eye color at birth (afterward, it can shift. Most white newborns have blue or gray eyes — Black newborns generally have brown eyes — but that often changes as the melanin pigment in the iris manifests itself).
     How then can someone with captivating green eyes, such as myself, and a classic Van Morrison brown-eyed girl, such as my wife, have a child with blue eyes? Genes are paired, one from each parent. The gene for blue is recessive, meaning it gets overshadowed by a dominant brown gene. If your mom gives you a brown gene, and your dad provides a blue, your eyes will be brown. But you can still turn around and pass that thwarted blue gene along to your child, which, matched with your mate's recessive blue gene, is why a baby born of two non-blue-eyed parents like my wife and myself can still have blue eyes.
     Are you following this? Accepting it? Good, because it is true. It's not controversial. So why run this little genetics lesson in a busy metropolitan newspaper? Here, take my hand, and let's take the leap together. One, two, three, go!
     Autism is genetically determined. Like eye color. I could have mentioned this when U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Donald Trump held their press conference three weeks back to blame Tylenol for causing autism. But honestly, I was so gobsmacked by their dangerous suggestion that babies not be vaccinated against hepatitis B, I focused on that.
     Last Thursday — it seems a century ago — the secretary of HHS and the president drove this particular crazy bus into the spotlight at a Cabinet meeting, claiming that boys who receive circumcisions at birth get autism at twice the rate as the noncircumcised, citing a 2015 Danish study (doubling it into two studies, perhaps out of habit) that suggests the pain of circumcision could be related to autism. RFK Jr. made the leap to conclude that wee snipped bairns are often given Tylenol, aka acetaminophen, aka autism juice. QED, more proof!

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'The annual wreckage'

 

     "What's that?" my wife asked, pointing to a plant poking out of my sage, a scarlet-stemmed intruder with oval light green leaves and deep blue, almost black, berries.
     Heck if I know. We had gone over to the late-October garden to admire an unexpected tomato. Spherical, bright red, rare enough that I'm surprised I recognized it on sight.
     I took a photo — the phone, I discovered, will tell you what a plant is if you press your finger on a photo of its leaves, the "LOOK UP" function. Only it didn't work. Sometimes it doesn't work.
     Google Image Search did the trick. "Common pokeweed," a web site called Gardening Know How sniffed. Native Americans used them in medicine and Southerners sometimes bake the fruit into pies, but you have to handle it gingerly: "A native plant that grows in disturbed soils, such as fields and pastures. It's a tenacious grower that can grow up to ten feet (3 m). The plant is hazardous to livestock and all parts of the plant are considered toxic."
     "Disturbed soils." I'll have to tuck that one away for when the National Guard hits downstate. Oh, right, they're never going there. 
     The web site encouraged people who find them to dig them out, getting all the roots, as they come raging back, and produce 48,000 seeds, distributing more pokeweeds.
     Have to do that ASAP. Until then, I did some poking myself, and came up with Amy Clampitt's poem, "Vacant Lot with Pokeweed."
     "Tufts, follicles, grubstake biennial rosettes," she begins, none too promisingly, "a low- life beach-blond scruff of couch grass."
     The poem picks up in the second stanza, observing "weeds do not hesitate," another useful phrase to slip into the literary toolbox.
     The third stanza has "magenta-girded bower," also good. In the fourth and last, she compares the fruit to a garnet — not perfect, but not bad — and ends strong, with: "salvage from the season's frittering, the annual wreckage."
     It's going to be difficult, from now on, not to refer to my garden as "the annual wreckage." Amy Clampitt, by the way, was born in Iowa, attended Grinnell College, and did not publish her first collection of Poetry until she was 63. She received a MacArthur "genius" grant in 1992, and used the money for her first major purchase: a neat little gray clapboard house in Lennox, Massachusetts, chosen for its proximity to Edith Wharton's "first real home."
     Clampitt died of ovarian cancer two years later, and preserved the home through a writer's residency program — you get to live in the Berkshires with your spouse and children, if you have them, but no pets, for six months, and the Amy Clampitt Fund pays you $4,000, which is not bad for a poet. You have until June 15 ,2026 to apply here. Good luck.

Tony Fitzpatrick, a Chicago treasure: 'You notice how lucky you are'

Tony Fitzpatrick examining a newly-completed painting at his Wicker Park studio in 2024. 

     "I'm playing with house money, pal," Tony Fitzpatrick told one of the conga line of well-wishers who visited his hospital room last week. "If this winds up being it, I got way farther than anybody ever thought I would, including me."
     That he did.
     Tony, who died of heart failure at Rush University Medical Center on Saturday, was a renowned artist, writer and actor. His work is in the collections of The Art Institute, the Museum Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and others. He published books of stories and poetry, and starred in the television series "Patriot," in Spike Lee's "Chi-Raq" and on stage at Steppenwolf. He had a relentless work ethic.
     "I got more to do; I ain't done yet," he said, three days before he died. If "you see me out there fighting a bear, help the bear."
     Tony was guiltlessly commercial, his art appearing on album covers, puzzles and beer cans. Despite being gravely ill with lung disease, he was pushing boxes of holiday cards on Facebook. Why bother?
     "What are we going to do?" he replied, "Sit around and go, 'Poor me!'"
     Not Tony's way. He needed a new pair of lungs. Yet he was still working on a screenplay with his children, Max and Gaby.
     Tony adored birds, which figure prominently in his work, colorful renditions surrounded by wild collages of ephemera.
     "They are miraculous," wrote Helen Macdonald, author of "H is for Hawk." "In their frames they perch amongst the symbolic and material detritus of our lives: constellations, jewels, staves, flowers, logos, cartoon figures crossword squares. Eyes, faces, hands, and stars flicker and burn around them. So do epigrams and notions and scrolls of fiercest poetry. The more you look at these pictures, the more things change and speak inside them. ... They are pictures of birds. But they are also lessons in nostalgia, history, love and hurt."
     Tony was fearlessly political, always outspoken, a generous patron and unshakable friend. Countless times he lent encouragement, support and gallery space to new artists. In the weeks before his death, he shared a chain of photographs on social media praising the kindness of the medical staff at Rush.
     "They've been amazing," he said. "I feel so good being around them. These are the best people in the world. This calm sort of extra expanded humanity."
     That was Tony, too.
     "The generosity," marveled Bill Savage, a professor at Northwestern. "He spoke to my Chicago Way class at NU one year, and one of my students was in the program and struggling. He sat with that kid after class for a good long time, talking sobriety. The student told me later it made a huge difference for him."
     Tony has recently been cheering on Ted Kooser, an 86-year-old Great Plains poet. For Tony, that meant being driven to Nebraska last month to visit Kooser for 90 minutes.
     I asked Kooser, who won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and was the U.S. poet laureate, to assess Tony's writing. Kooser wrote: "His poetry made me think of those circus acts where somebody rides a bicycle through a flaming hoop and rides on with streamers flying behind him. His poems had that sort of raw energy."
     "He is a Chicago legend who belongs next to all the names we say, like Royko and Studs and Sandburg and Algren," said historian Thomas Dyja. "And now Fitzpatrick."
     Days from death, Tony spoke of gratitude.

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Flashback 2012: You always cut the one you love

"The circumcision," by Giovani Bellini (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     With RFK Jr. drawing circumcision into his pantheon of boogie procedures, along with vaccines (because snipping leads to Tylenol) I couldn't resist disinterring a pair of past columns on the topic, leading up to what I expected would be Monday's swan dive. Note the prominent reference to vaccines, a reminder that Trump didn't create the current crop of American crazy, he merely monetized it.

    Although, as my late mother-in-law used to say, we plan and God laughs. The genetics column was pushed to Wednesday, as I want to pay tribute to my friend of 25 years, Tony Fitzpatrick, who died Saturday. I passed the news on to the paper, but could not write about it. We are allowed to pause, think, grieve. That'll be tomorrow.

     New parents are sinkholes of concern. Some of their worries are indeed valid — should I let the baby play with tigers? Is the house on fire? — but not all parental dilemmas pass the rationality test.
     Exhibit A is the New Age reluctance to have your kids vaccinated, a particularly selfish and ignorant decision. Selfish because your kids will probably be OK anyway, since most other kids are still immunized, and so your children benefit without being exposed to the minuscule risks associated with getting a shot. And ignorant because it reflects lack of knowledge of just how wide a swath of illness and death that plagues like diphtheria and whooping cough and meningitis once cut through the youth of the world.
     Exhibit B for over-inflated parental concern is reflected in circumcision rates, which have dropped — from nearly 80 percent in the 1970s, to a little more than half today — in part because parents get all squishy at the thought of altering their supposedly perfect babies, and don’t realize that not being circumcised makes men more prone to all sorts of horrific venereal diseases and bacteriological infections, including a greatly increased chance of contracting HIV.
      While the issue waxes and wanes, the cost in ill health of being uncircumcised has long been known. Now a paper in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine has put a figure on the cost in dollars — $2 billion, so far, with billions more to be spent if rates in this country continue to slide toward rates in Europe, where only about 10 percent of men are circumcised.
     Being Jewish and the father of boys, of course I’m biased. The tribe has definite views on circumcision — we sort of came up with the idea, a reminder of the ancient importance placed on Not Being Like Them.
     To be honest, the health factor didn’t motivate me, back in the mid 1990s-when it came time to have the deed done to my boys. Nor did I see myself as bending to the will of the Lord God Almighty. That isn’t my table. Frankly, it was a matter of tradition, of having to take it upon myself to end an unbroken chain of ritual stretching from me to every man in my family back to Moses. That didn’t seem like a break I was willing to make, and my wife, in many ways a traditional gal herself, was right with me on that one.
     So each of our boys had a bris, as the ceremony is called, where your friends and relatives gather at your place to eat babka cake and drink Crown Royal and witness — sort of, through latticed fingers, if a woman, or out of the corner of one eye, while whistling and staring at the ceiling with your hands folded over your midsection, if you’re a man — the specially trained rabbi, called a mohel, make the skillful cut which most guys never think about again, yet someone must, since it keeps popping up in the headlines.
     Is circumcision a strange ritual imposed on innocent babes by musty tradition? You betcha. But guess what? Society inflicts all sorts of strange stuff on us, sooner or later, including — sometimes — asking young men to go off and die in distant places for obscure causes. At least with circumcision you are allowed to suck some sweet wine off a piece of gauze first, to calm your nerves.
     As a newspaper reporter, I’m aware that some people feel circumcision is not just wrong, but a huge, quivering wrong — perhaps the greatest wrong inflicted on humanity, ever. For years I got the NO-CIRC newsletter, the house organ of a California group filled with tales of botched circumcisions and men who do not feel “complete.” The publication always struck me as one of the more curious artifacts of zealotry, right up there with UFO enthusiasts and vocal opponents of fluoridated water. Some people feel circumcision is the original sin that has destroyed their lives — some men actually undergo reconstructive surgery, to get the bit put back — and while, in my view, they are cases to be analyzed in a psychiatric rather than a journalistic setting, it’s a free country, and you may obsess upon what you wish.
      Or it was a free country. Much of the declining rates are due, not to parental scruple, but to Medicaid cuts: Low-income parents tend to have the procedure done, if it’s paid for, and tend to skip it if its not. Budget minded states have been scaling back on paying for circumcisions, because they’re not medically essential. A false economy, we now discover, and a reminder that state funding for health care also avoids more expensive procedures down the road — with circumcision, a simple five-second procedure helps avoid, for instance, treating someone for AIDS for years.
     But sticking my arm into the circumcision fanatic cage is bad enough without also sticking the other arm into the ObamaCare cage, so let’s wind up, and what better way than with a joke? The only joke I recall my grandfather ever telling. Question: Why do rabbis get paid better salaries than mohels? Answer: Because mohels get all the tips.

      — Published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 23, 2012

Flashback 1987: Circumcision — The procedure, the controversy

"The circumcision of Christ," by Giuliano Traballesi (Met)

     Circumcision is back in the news, unfortunately, now that Donald Trump's pet psycho, RFK Jr., has tied the practice to autism, through the administration of Tylenol to the wee snipped bairn. It is a subject I have dealt with occasionally, and this weekend I'm disinterring two examples from the dusty past. This story is nearly 40 years old, but nothing has changed. It led to years of squirming, as an unwilling subscriber to the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers' NO-CIRC newsletter, the joys of which I will allude to tomorrow. 

     It is a painful surgery, holding the potential for rare but hideous complications, performed on most men in this country before they are 10 days old. It is usually done without anesthesia and — according to many medical experts — has no medical value whatsoever.
     If the procedure wasn't circumcision, or the removal of the foreskin of the penis, it probably would have died out a long time ago.
     But circumcision holds a special place in our society. It is perhaps our only modern operation that comes with its own cultural baggage — commanded by God in the Bible as a covenant and practiced by Jews and Moslems as part of their religions, it also has, over the years, developed the nonsectarian image of cleanliness and sophistication.
     The traditional medical reasons for circumcision are cleanliness and lower incidence of disease. Circumcision eliminates the need for careful penile hygiene by removing the foreskin, which otherwise would trap skin cells and oil that combine to form a substance known as smegma.
     The diseases associated with uncircumcised males — penile cancer, phimosis, urinary tract infections — while rare as a group, are also eliminated or reduced by circumcision.
     Improved sexual function is one reason given for circumcision, but sexual problems with uncircumcised men are rare and treatable.
     "You occasionally get pain on intercourse," said Dr. Domeena Renshaw, professor of psychiatry at Loyola University Medical Center and director of its Sexual Dysfunction Clinic. Renshaw added that the pain usually occurs only during a man's first experience with sexual activity.
     A more significant problem among uncircumcised men is attributing sexual problems, caused by other factors, to their lack of circumcision.
     "Occasionally, a man of 20 will go to the urologist asking for a circumcision when absolutely nothing is wrong," said Renshaw. "There have been studies in England and Israel, and there is no difference in incident of sexual difficulties. Israelies, with circumcisions, still have premature ejaculations."
      In recent years, the question has been, do the medical benefits of circumcision outweigh the risks of the procedure, which include bleeding, pain, infection and mutilation.
     As far back as 1971, the American Academy of Pediatrics said "no." In a position paper summing up these medical arguments, the AAP concluded there were no valid medical reasons for circumcision, stating that the benefits of circumcision were the same benefits that can be had by good hygiene.
     "Surgery is a rather drastic substitute for soap and water," said Dr. Thomas Sisson, a neonatologist at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. "Cleanliness is the usual rationale given, but that is the weakest excuse."
     Since the mid-1970s, the practice of circumcision among Americans has decreased dramatically. A study of 427,698 infants born in U.S. Army hospitals between 1975 to 1984 saw the rate drop from 85 percent to 70 percent. Illinois Masonic Hospital reports that out of 1,145 males born there last year, only 50.5 percent were circumcised.
     St. Francis Hospital in Evanston reports having 52 percent of its babies circumcised last year (although it should be noted both hospitals serve a considerable Hispanic population, Hispanics being one of the ethnic groups that, as a rule, do not circumcise).
     The most important change in the general medical view of circumcision is the realization that, contrary to what was thought before, the process hurts.
     "For a long time, the general opinion was that the pain of circumcision was brief and relatively minor in the newborn, simply because the newborn's nervous system was relatively undeveloped," said Sisson. "We now know that this is nonsense. They do hurt. The nerves are there. Cutting the skin in order to remove it is a painful procedure. If you ever watched one, babies really scream."
     Several groups have sprung up to combat circumcision, expanding on the medical profession's position that it is a medically unnecessary procedure with the claim that it is also an atrocity.
     "We've only begun to hear from all the men who were devastated by what has been done to them," said Marilyn Milos, director of the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers. "If you want to circumcise your dog, the humane society will be after you, but somehow removing an important, functioning body part of a baby boy is all right."
     "My own concern about it arose when I realized that people had memories of it," said Dr. David Chamberlain, a California psychologist. "I know a couple of professional men who say they still, even as adults, have definite memories of being circumcised, and of course it was not a comfortable or pleasurable experience."
     Indeed, there are at least half a dozen doctors in the country who perform foreskin restorations - processes that, through surgery and other means, restore circumcised foreskins.
     Many parents, however, do not really take the medical pros and cons into account when deciding whether to have a circumcision. Rather, the decision is made on a cosmetic basis, the decision being made so the child will resemble his father, brothers, or friends at school.
     "Of the hundreds of people coming here, desiring to (have their children) be circumcised, I have yet to convince anybody not to have one," said Dr. Mark Zaontz, a pediatric urologist at Children's Memorial Hospital, who said he is opposed to circumcision, but performs them anyway because he feels the procedure is not as damaging as critics claim.
     If you decide to have your child circumcised, here are some guidelines:
     Make provisions beforehand. Some hospitals delegate circumcisions to interns, and while they need to practice on somebody, you probably will not want them honing their technique on your child. Organizations such as NO CIRC have a field day collecting gruesome circumcision mistake stories, most of which are the result of sloppy or incompetent technique. Find a doctor — preferably a pediatric urologist — who has been doing circumcisions for a long time.
     Insist that a local anesthetic be used. While many might question whether men carry with them submerged memories of their circumcisions, nobody questions that the process hurts babies a lot. There is no reason the doctor should not use a local anesthetic to numb the area.
     Take proper care of the circumcised area. A baby's diaper is not precisely the best area for a wound to heal. Making sure the dressing is in place, changing it frequently, and religiously following any other instructions from your doctor to prevent infection.
     If you decide not to have your child circumcised:
     Get information about hygiene. The AAP has an informative pamplet, "Care of the Uncircumcised Penis," that will tell you just about everything you need to know, and should be available from your pediatrician or the hospital. The most important thing to bear in mind is not to forcibly retract the foreskin — it is naturally adhered to the glans of the penis for some time in infants, and will retract later of its own accord.
     Be aware of the possibility of complications. The most common problem is phimosis, which affects between 2 percent and 10 percent of uncircumcised infants. Phimosis is a condition when the foreskin is too tight around the glans to permit an unrestricted flow of urine, causing the urine to back up and balloon out the foreskin. Should phimosis occur, circumcision will be necessary.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 13, 1987

Trump administration's immigrant crime math is for the birds

"Sparrow and Hibiscus"
by Utagawa Hiroshige
(Metropolitan Museum)

     In crazy times, do the math. The circumference of a circle is always 3.14159265 plus a smidgen times the diameter; 2+2 = 4, no matter how the president feels this morning.
     Math might be hard to focus on with Texas soldiers prepping to wander wandering the streets of Chicago, cosplaying an occupying force. Practicing scaring people, so they'll be ready come the 2026 elections.
     But I've been fiddling with numbers. Specifically related to crime, since tamping down immigrant violence is the pretext for bringing in soldiers to help kick them out.
     Looking at numbers underscores the lies we are being fed by the Trump administration. Since I don't want to drown you in figures, and I know MAGA sorts read this and are easily confused, let's consider just two groups: babies and immigrants.
     Republicans love babies. In their constant effort to drag America back to a 1950s Eden that never really existed, they push for more kids.
     Are babies dangerous? Yes, they are. Why? Because they grow up into adults. And how dangerous are U.S.-born adults? According to the CATO Institute, about 1.2% of U.S.-born citizens in their 30s have been incarcerated at some point, compared to 0.6% of immigrants without legal status undocumented immigrants and 0.3% of immigrants with legal status.
     How can that be? In case you have trouble grasping the complex math outlined above, allow me to offer a helpful metaphor.
     Imagine that if you are caught speeding, say going 45 mph in a 35-mph zone, you could be arrested and deported to a country you left as a toddler. You'd drive slower, right? That is the simple explanation for the lower immigrant crime rate. I only wish everybody was, you know, capable of absorbing new facts and altering their opinion based on those facts. I can; it's a beautiful thing.
     So to summarize, while Republicans push having babies and demonize immigrants, it is the babies who'll more likely turn into criminals, at a rate between two and four times the immigrants.
     Why isn't this more generally known? Because our leaders try to frighten us by waving specific cases of immigrant crime, as if that were proof. An example or two is not proof or — warning! foreign language ahead! — as the Germans say, "Eine Schwalbe macht noch keinen Sommer," or "one swallow does not a summer make."
     The phrase scans better in German. Because in English, "swallow" has two meanings. Primarily an action causing something to pass down the throat — either literally, like swallowing gum, or metaphorically, like swallowing a load of hooey because Fox News tells you over and over that it is true. In German, the word for swallow, in the gulp sense, schlucken is very different than swallow in the return-to-Capistrano sense, schwalbe.
      In English, only as an afterthought does "swallow" refer to the bird, and so the confusion that we are obviously prone to can occur. Does "one swallow" refer to ingesting, either food or nonsense; or a member of the family of songbirds with thin, streamlined bodies and long, pointed wings, suited to hunting insects, long-distance migrants who can cover ... ?
     Oops, I said a naughty word, didn't I? "Migrants." My apologies. Please stop gnawing the doorjamb. Although, let's go with that. The avian swallows in Illinois migrate from South America. It's almost as if nature herself dictated dictates immigration as an adaptive plan to encourage survival. Which, spoiler alert, she does.

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A lovely day in the city

Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2025

      I'm not a spot news kind of guy. Not anymore. My years of racing to a breaking story are long past — the paper has kids doing that. I thought of toddling over to Broadview to inject myself into the chaos. Then thought better of it. Judge me harshly if you wish.

     Truth is, most days I don't go into the city. But my pal Tony is not feeling well, so I wanted to visit him at Rush hospital on Wednesday. Since I was venturing downtown, it made sense to go eyeball the supposed war zone that Donald Trump claims demands his sending in the Texas National Guard, already in Illinois and on their way, to do ... God know's what.
     A plan was in order. Search for troops, then troll for ICE. So I patrolled Wacker Drive, from Union Station to the Wrigley Building, hoping to encounter soldiers. Only there weren't any soldiers. Not on North Michigan Avenue, up toward the Water Tower. 
     Realizing I was drawing a blank, I turned around, cued up Gang of Four's "I Love a Man in a Uniform" on iTunes — that seems apt — and headed south, to Lake Street. Not so much as a lone sentry leaning against a rifle. 
     Just lots of tourists of every description on a glorious sunny October day. Which might be itself be news, maybe even important news. The media has an idiot capacity to all look at the same thing, the same block of discord and nowhere else. Don't get me wrong, regular Chicagoans blocking ICE operations in Broadview is significant and needs to be reported, day after day after day. 
      But also important is the rest of the city going about its business in relative peace and harmony. That doesn't seem to get mentioned as much. We need to remember that this is oppression for oppression's sake, a practice crackdown built on lies. The city is fine.
      Onto the Pink Line at the Thompson Center, or whatever Google calls the place now. A quiet ride to 18th Street, scanning the streets for squads of soldiers, or for menacing vans disgorging faceless militias. Nothing.   

     To Panaderia Nuevo Leon, with its quaint glass-doored wooden cabinets.  I took the traditional metal tray and tongs to load up on marranitos — ginger pigs — for myself, and a big bag of sugar cookies, muted pastels and dun browns, shaped like hearts and watermelons and oblongs, for Tony. Or rather —  I suspected, correctly as it turned out— his nurses, important too, as they work long hours, need a steady supply of sweets, and appreciate a good freshly baked cookie. A happy nurse is an attentive nurse.   

    I wanted to ask the two ladies behind the counter, "Are you afraid?" But there was a language issue and, besides, when I asked if I could take their photo, they said no, which itself is an answer.

     Quickstep over to 5 Rabanitos, where I bumped into State Senator Celina Villanueva and exchanged greetings and a few words about The Situation. I urged her to get in touch with me so we can have a formal conversation for the paper. She probably won't. But maybe she will. Stranger things have happened. I'll give her a call today and try to prod the process along. But politicians aren't battering down my door anymore. I'm sure they have their reasons.

     The place was packed, by the way — a good sign. I got what I usually get — the grilled chicken in a garlic honey marinade with vegetables. O...M...G! Initially, I thought I might take half of it home for later, but failed in that intention. 

     Then into the National Museum of Mexican Art — free, as always. There was something new — the doors had "THIS IS PRIVATE PROPERTY" signs designed to prevent ICE from storming in and arresting the Mona Lupe, the museum's wry rendition of the Mona Lisa by Cesar Augusto Martinez. To be honest, I like it better than the original. You don't look at her through thick lucite in a crowded hall that smells like a high school locker room either. 

     "Carlos Totolero isn't around, is he?" I asked, signing in. The high school teacher who founded the museum and first invited me here, years ago. Otherwise I'm sure that, like most Chicagoans, I'd have never set foot in the place. Just not on the radar, embarrassingly.

     "He comes in sometimes," the receptionist said. "But not today."

     "Well, he can do whatever he wants," I answered. "He's earned it."

"Farmer Skeleton" by Jorge Rosano

      I spent a long time checking out the 39th Day of the Dead show, "A Celebration of Remembrance."  Always colorful and beautiful and especially poignant, keyed toward victims of the Texas and New Mexico floods over the summer. I found myself wishing that ICE could be forced to file through here, the way Eisenhower made the Germans walk through concentration camps. "Look, these as the people you're randomly plucking off the street, you assholes."
     The plan was to walk the 40 minutes to Rush. I started east along 19th Street. High school students were playing on the swings in Harrison Park. A couple fussed over a baby in a carriage. I paused, considered pressing a few questions. "Is ICE worrying you?" I decided against it — heck, ICE is worrying me. And I just didn't want to intrude. They didn't look worried. They looked happy.

     Past the Peter Cooper Public School, just letting out. Lots of security in bright vests shepherding the kids. Pigtailed girls, wearing pastel backpacks dangling small stuffed friends, escorted by a parent or two. One very small girl waved at me, "Hola," she said, smiling. "Hello," I replied, touching my cap, and she echoed it back. "Hello," she said, carefully maybe a little amused, as if trying out the word to see how it sounded in her mouth.

"Mona Lupe,"
 by Cesar Augusto Martinez

     But at Ashland, the No. 9 bus was approaching, and I decided to give the old bones a rest and hop on. People of various races and nationalities go on and off. Nobody shot anyone else. I snaked my hand into the brown paper bag of my private stash and broke off a few chunks of marranito. 
     Tony is in better spirits than I would be, and I'll talk about our conversation another time. I handed the bag of cookies to him, he looked inside, admiringly, then gave it to a nurse, and various nurses over the next hour popped in to thank him for being so considerate. We talked about migratory birds. He shared a friend's poems. I brought him up to speed on the situation at the newspaper.
     An hour passed, and, not wanting to overstay my welcome, I made my exit and popped over to the Blue Line Racine station. Another quiet car of regular folks. I got off at LaSalle, met my wife at her office, first chatting with the guard while waiting for her to sign out and come down. We walked a few blocks west and met our younger son for an early dinner at Bereket Turkish Mediterranean Restaurant, 333 S. Franklin. I'd never been there; our son had birddogged it. Service at the family-owned restaurant was warm and attentive, the kabobs were juicy, and something happened at dessert that literally had never happened to me in a restaurant before. We ordered a square of flan and a chocolate baklava, to share,, and the waitress brought the flan and three baklavah. 
     Oh no, we protested, just the one. We just want to taste it. We tried to make her take the extra two back. That's okay, she said, they're on the house. We tried out baklavah; it was fresh and fantastic — not too sweet. I called the waitress over and insisted we must pay for the three pieces — they were so good, we enjoyed them so much, it was a revelation. 
     "No, it's impossible," she said. "The bill is already made up." We yielded; I tipped 30 percent, and left wondering if that were enough. Our son headed to his car, and my wife and I hit the Metra. 
     Chicago isn't perfect. There is crime and struggle, like every other city on earth. Terrible things are happening now— people are being plucked off the street, families torn apart, immigrants who came here in good faith and worked hard and built lives being victimized out of malice and spite. That's all going on right now, with troops coming to help the grindstones crushing up lives turn more quickly.  We should never lose sight of that.
     But do not let the president's clonic lies poison how we view Chicago. The city is still wonderful. The people are wonderful. The food is wonderful. Protest with all your might. Resist resist resist. And one way to resist is to go about your ordinary business, to still enjoy your life, somehow, and revel in the world they are trying to take away. It's still here.   

"Reinterpretation of a Tumulo," by Alexandro Garcia Nelo (National Museum of Mexican Art)

Patricia Smith, a Chicago poet 'who writes screams'

Patricia Smith

     A great poet forges a world, then invites you in. Open "Leaves of Grass," and Walt Whitman grabs you by the shirt front and draws you down beside him in the sawdust of some 1850s lumberyard. Robert Frost puts you in his sleigh, pausing in a wintry New England forest, watching the flakes fall in frosty silence.
     And Patricia Smith. Having read "The Intentions of Thunder," her selected life's work, plus new poems, published by Scribner last week and named Tuesday as a finalist for the National Book Award, I see her as a kind of heretofore unimagined superhero: WordWoman perhaps. The door explodes off its hinges, and there she is, in cape and purple tights, blasting the reader with her flamethrower of language, leaving us a Wile E. Coyote-shaped pile of crumbling ash, hesitant index finger frozen in air.
     Even the little intros to each section are concise marvels. At her start in 1991, Smith confesses: "She don't know line break. She don't know iamb. She don't know envoi. She knows stage and slam and people's faces when she poems."
     "When she poems." A three-word phrase to pop in your cheek and nurse all day, like a butterscotch candy.
     At least I could. You might draw back, objecting, "poem is NOT a verb!" Then this book is not for you.
     Pity, because you'll miss her heartbreaking evocations of her murdered father, who sired "a daughter who writes screams." Her mother, Annie Pearl Smith, "the sage of Aliceville, Alabama," unimpressed by the moon landing. "My mother saw the stars only as signals for sleep." Smith can pack a lot into a few words.
     Her own maturing, musky self, then a prolonged subterranean journey through the hellscape of America's racial past — and present — that makes Dante's "Inferno" seem like "Pat the Bunny."
     Widely acclaimed ("the greatest living poet," the Guardian wrote, and who is the competition? Billy Collins looking at clouds?), Smith once worked at the Sun-Times, and snatches Chicago, "city of huge shoulders, thief of tongues," away from Carl Sandburg's overlong embrace. The work reflects her raw, slam poetry origins — more menstrual blood here than you'd get from, say, Mary Oliver. There's a surprisingly stark rendition of the Olive Oyl-Bluto-Popeye love triangle that makes me wish Smith strayed far afield more, though I suppose it could be viewed as more sex, displaced onto Miss Oyl, "a stick interrupted by knees."
     The first quarter is mostly fun, which, like all fun, doesn't last. Starting with Hurricane Katrina, Smith serves up a threnody on race that spares nothing: "When a bullet enters the brain, the head explodes ..."
     Being a white guy reading "The Intentions of Thunder" is like crashing a wedding of people you don't know. You sneak in, help yourself to the buffet and the bar, join in the unfamiliar dancing. Then suddenly a funeral breaks out for a child you also don't know. A red-eyed relative leans in and and hotly tells you who's in that coffin and exactly what happened.

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