Puzzles are the anti-TikTok, the antidote to mind-numbing social media

     If you asked me to list the three greatest cartoonists from a century ago, the first two would be easy: No. 1, George Herriman, whose “Krazy Kat” created a surreal world around the love triangle of the titular, gender-fluid feline, her — or, sometimes, his — unrequited love for the brick-throwing Ignatz Mouse, both kept in line by Krazy’s secret admirer, Offissa Pupp, all capering across a stark Arizona scrubland conjured up by Herriman’s madly creative pen.
     Then Windsor McKay, whose “Little Nemo in Slumberland” plunged readers into Art Nouveau dreamscape where a little boy peers over pillows while his bed, its legs impossible long, strides down Fifth Avenue.
     As for the third, I’d be hard-pressed. But Rube Goldberg would certainly qualify. His wildly complicated machines entered the vocabulary, a “Rube Goldberg device” being any overly-engineered contraption which, though perhaps not involving a goat gnawing through a rope releasing a boot to kick a ball through a hoop, uses more steps than necessary.
     That said, I would not have noticed, never mind purchased, “The Rube Goldberg Puzzle Book,” if it weren’t created by my former NU classmate — and ace New Yorker cartoonist — Robert Leighton. Friends buy friends’ books — the sales pitch getting harder and harder, year by year. Everyone is so busy.
     Yeah, busy flipping through Instagram.
     Which I do too, for 30 minutes at a throw, watching snippets of “Peaky Blinders” and “The West Wing” and whatever other mind-decaying fluff some string of code decides is going to mesmerize me today.
     But having purchased a puzzle book ($16, not bad for a hardback) there was a complication I hadn’t foreseen. I then had to do puzzles, based on Goldberg’s drawings. Initially, they were quite simple — a four-panel comic strip is scrambled. “Can you figure out the proper order to tell each story?” Robert asks. Well, you can, but you have to read the panels first, then find the fractured narrative by thinking. And thinking is the one thing you don’t do flipping through TikTok.
     But I felt compelled to push on. Not only was the book written by a pal, but the introduction is by Jennifer George, Rube Goldberg’s granddaughter and chief creative officer of the Rube Goldberg Institute, “a not-for-profit organization that uses my grandfather’s work to inspire joy, curiosity, and creativity through inefficient machines.” That also scratched my particular itch — I’ve been gazing into my newly arrived second grandchild’s face a lot lately, musing on two things: first, what could his world possibly be like, say, in 2076? And second, what passing thought, if any, might he someday have for a certain old guy who huzzahed him into the world?

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Thank you for not mentioning my betrayal of America today...

     My Wednesday column, an obituary of CSO violinist Samuel Magad, was written because a relative of his, a friend and former colleague, asked me to do so. 
     It drew this note. I receive nearly identical versions of this email every single time I write about a subject other than Donald Trump. I thought I'd share this one, representing 100 others:

     You wrote a great column today. You are a very talented writer, don’t waste your talent writing about Trump. There are plenty of other writers bashing Trump, we need you writing pieces like today’s column.  Thanks Mike R.

     My response:

     It's funny how relieved dupes are when I write about anything other than the fraud they blindly follow. I always wonder why. What should cross your mind — but won't — is that a guy who's a talented writer, in your view, on every other subject except your crazy obsession is also a talented writer when explaining how you betray every American value you pretend to hold. Thanks for writing.  NS

Samuel Magad, an 'impeccable' violinist for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for 48 years, dies

 

     When Samuel Magad auditioned for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as a 26-year-old vet fresh from the U.S. Army Orchestra, he of course was accepted — the violinist had already debuted with the CSO as an 11-year-old prodigy during World War II.
     But there was one issue.
     "You're a good player, but could you get a better violin?" asked music director Fritz Reiner, who studied under Bartok.
     No, that wasn't possible, in the short term.
     "I had a junk violin, but I was broke," Magad recalled. "I had a wife, two babies and not a penny. He said, 'I'll take you anyway.'"
     In the long term, however, a better violin would come. By the time Magad's nearly half-century with the CSO ended, he was playing the 1710 Stradivari "Vieuxtemps Hauser."
     After a lifetime of playing music at the highest levels, including as the backbone of the CSO for 48 years, Magad died in Buffalo Grove on May 25 at age 94.
     "It’s mind-boggling to think of the changes Sam navigated during his years under four very different Chicago Symphony music directors," said Wynne Delacoma, the former longtime classical music critic at the Sun-Times. "He arrived in 1958 during the reign of the legendarily precise Fritz Reiner and rose to assistant concertmaster in 1966 during Jean Martinon’s relatively short tenure. Georg Solti named him concertmaster in 1972, and Sam held that front-row seat for two decades as the high-octane CSO-Solti chemistry turned the orchestra into an international powerhouse. He was a steady presence during the next 15 years when Daniel Barenboim’s approach to a piece of music could change from one performance to the next. Sam’s impeccable technical skills and open mindset were invaluable assets to whomever was on the podium."
     The concertmaster is the unsung backstop who not only cues the A note — usually played by the oboist — which the orchestra tunes their instruments to at the start of each piece, but he sees that the conductor's wishes are obeyed and facilitates logistics. If a star violin soloist breaks a string mid-performance, the concertmaster will swap instruments.
     Some concertmasters are mere mouthpieces of the conductor; not Magad.
     "Magad saw himself as a colleague of the orchestra's players, walking the players' side of the divide with management," Anne Mischakoff Heiles writes in "America's Concertmasters." "Giving voice to their concerns, he endeavored to use his voice to promote the welfare of his colleagues."

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Now if he can just pressure Berkeley into signing up...

 

Macbeth and the Witches (1770: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     I try not to traffic in the obvious — always pausing to suppress the urge to add a final k to that word and make it "traffick," which to me would give it more of an archaic, Salem witchcraft deal with the devil vibe. But it's not a modern word, and I usually decide against it.
     So there was no point to draw attention to developments that are already clear, like the grotesque criminality and self-dealing of Donald Trump's $1.8 billion slush fund. More of the same, on a larger scale. Besides, everyone else already has decried this leap into large-scale naked corruption, and there is no need to join in chorus. 
     Yes, I was tempted to point out that while Republicans objecting to this enormous shit upon the rule of law, rather than emitting the usual "baa" and shuffling in whatever direction Trump points, might be considered a mildly hopeful sign, if you're feeling upbeat, the GOP has in the past occasionally put up feeble resistance to other departures from ethics, law, reason, sense,  tradition, decency, etc., only to eventually revert to form and get back on their knees. Don't have the we've-come-to-our-senses party quite yet.

    However, when I read Monday that the president, in his continual thrashing trying to extricate himself from the tar pit of a war with Iran that he swan dove our country into, alone, was now suggesting that Iran, and other Middle East nations — Saudi Arabia, Qatar — consider joining the Abraham Accords, and recognize the state of Israel, I did have a thought that might merit sharing:
     Maybe, while he's at it, he could also entice a few American universities to join in recognizing Israel as a legitimate nation, despite its doing bad things, like every other nation, and existing on land somebody else wants, like every other nation. Now that would be an accomplishment. 

Flashback 2009: Intrusion — or solemn reminder?

 

The dignified transfer of Army Spc. Lukasz D. Saczek of Lake in the Hills, Ill., at Dover Air Force Base.   (US Air Force photo/Roland Balik)

     Today is Memorial Day, a time to remember soldiers who have fallen in defense of our country. Now, as in 2009, we are a nation that hardly notices the war we're fighting, despite our president's repeated vows that it will end ... any moment now. This ran back when my column was a thousand words and filled a page. Daniel Hauser's parents eventually did agree to his chemotherapy.

OPENING SHOT . . .

      This is a photograph of Spec. Lukasz Saczek's arrival at Dover Air Force Base earlier in the month.
     Saczek, 23, was a soldier in the Illinois Army National Guard, Company D, 1st Battalion, 178th Infantry, based in Woodstock.
     He died May 10, in what the Army describes only as a noncombat-related incident.
      I wanted to publish the photograph in advance of Memorial Day, as a reminder that we are still a nation at war, that American soldiers are dying both in Afghanistan and Iraq.
     Such photos were banned by President George H.W. Bush during the first Iraqi war in 1991. The ban remained in effect for 18 years, until reversed last month by President Obama.
      The policy now is that the Pentagon asks families of deceased soldiers whether they wish to allow photographers at the homecoming, and the families decide.
      That is how it should be because such photos are not viewed neutrally. Some people consider them an intrusion, a political statement, a focus on personal loss and an implicit criticism of the war.
      Others see them as honoring the sacrifice by displaying it in real terms, reminding us at home that while we grill hot dogs and drink beer, young men and women are fighting and dying in Afghanistan and Iraq and wherever else they're ordered to go.
     You, of course, are free to interpret this photo however you like — the benefit of a free country. Myself, I see it as a solemn reminder to a nation that sorely needs reminding. It seems to me that of all the divides in this country, Democrat and Republican, North and South, black and white, there is also a chasm between the military, their families, friends and communities, which know all too well the cost of war, and the rest of the country, which can hardly be bothered to glance at it, even on Memorial Day.
     Spec. Saczek leaves behind a widow, Katie, 19, and a baby daughter who will be 2 months old on Monday.

IF THE ANGEL TARRIES

     The government shouldn't dictate to parents what medical treatment they must give their children.
      And yet, parents also should not be allowed to injure their kids just because their faith permits it.
      Between these two sensible viewpoints falls the case of Danny Hauser, the 13-year-old Minnesota boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma whose mother, Colleen, fled with him rather than allow the chemotherapy that doctors say will save his life.
      There are enough issues here to fill a textbook. Does it matter that she was inspired by an obscure holistic belief system and not a more mainstream form of medical denial, such as Christian Science? Would it be different if the treatment options were less clear-cut than the 90 percent cure rate with chemo, in this case, vs. almost certain death without?
      To me, the key fact in this situation is that a judge ordered the boy to have the treatment — that's why we have judges, to make tough calls. As a society, we tend to automatically respect faith and doubt jurisprudence, which seems backward.
      Courts get a bad rap, mainly from people who dislike their decisions. But somebody has to stay Abraham's hand so he doesn't slay his son Isaac, and if the angel tarries, a judge will do. For Danny Hauser, a court's ruling is the only thing between him and an early, unnecessary death.

RADIO NOTES

     WGN has always appealed to the housewife, the farmer, the night clerk and everybody else who wanted a rock of homey sanity to stand on for a minute or an hour or the time it takes to drive to Peoria to deliver a few bushels of peaches.
     Homey sanity hasn't always been in fashion, but that was sort of the point — you could go to Steve Dahl if you wanted sarcastic and funny commentary — once upon a time — or Howard Stern if you felt the need to feel superior to strippers.
     There are others — the urbane and intelligent Roe Conn, the freewheeling John Howell.
      But WGN was a mainstay, there at the base of the Tribune Tower, and at its heart was the "Kathy & Judy Show" — Kathy O'Malley and Judy Markey. I never actually set eyes on Kathy — she was always on vacation when I would stop by and spend an hour or two chatting with Judy, a smart, bighearted woman with a curious mind and a quick wit. It was shocking to see WGN show them the gate Friday, as the station tarts itself up to appeal to kids who won't listen anyway.
      There is no schadenfreude in this, no gleeful mocking of TribCo when it is down. We are all cooking in the same pot. But I couldn't let my former colleague, current friend and permanent Chicago icon slip out of town without saying how much she is liked and how much she will be missed, as we scan the constantly mutating local media landscape and try in vain to find a friendly, familiar face.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE . . .

      With Mother's Day two weeks in the past, we gardeners are in full frenzy. My tomatoes are in and caged, the flower box that had been causing flooding has been removed and a very promising burning bush put in its place.
      Sometimes I puzzle whether something should be pulled up or nurtured, and so appreciate this handy definition from Gallagher:
      If you water it and it dies, it's a plant. If you pull it out and it grows back, it's a weed.
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 24, 2009

Flashback 1999: A club that's for all kids

     Facebook served up this column from 1999, which I posted a dozen years ago when the Boy Scouts were enduring one of their regular spates of controversy. Since then, the popularity of the Scouts has continued to crater — from 4 million members, back when I was part of the organization in the 1970s, to about 1 million now. Shaken by social changes, criticism over its tardy decision to stop excluding gay scouts followed by the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't exodus of Mormons plus, I imagine, the isolating effects of social media and an increased tendency of people not to join groups in the living world.  The Camp Fire organization, on the other hand, while significantly smaller, is going strong.

     Just as the Boy Scouts of America were twirling in bad publicity hell after the latest flap over its booting out gay scouts , I received a letter from the Camp Fire Boys and Girls, touting their corn maze down in Ottawa, Ill.
     The maze is immense; more than 10 acres of cornfield. Nothing quite so evocative of sweet late summer as a corn maze. But that wasn't what I was really interested in.
     What I was really interested in was sex. Or more specifically, how Camp Fire manages to sidestep the issue that has so thoroughly bollixed its big brother, the Boy Scouts?
     How do they manage to cook S'mores and pitch tents without getting hung up on the emerging sexualities of their little charges?
     The answer is surprising.
     "Kids are kids and our job is to give them an opportunity to have a really wonderful time growing up," said Jean Lachowicz, executive director of the Metro Chicago Council of the Camp Fire Boys and Girls. "We are very family-oriented. The other issues just don't come into play."
     Surely, I said, she can't be suggesting that Camp Fire Boys and Girls, whose members range from kindergarten to high school, allow gay youngsters to make lanyards and potholders alongside everybody else, as if they were normal people?
     "We don't even get into that," she said. "Who are we to say?"
     What a freakish anomaly. A group that doesn't try to dictate to the personal lives of its members. Practically revolutionary in sex-obsessed, eye-to-the-keyhole, who-do-we-hate-this-week America.
     Just as the Boy Scouts have a credo, filled with a bunch of Victorian hooey about duty and moral rightness, so Camp Fire has its own motto, which it calls an "Inclusiveness Statement." They post it on the wall.
     It reads: "Camp Fire Boys and Girls works to realize the dignity and worth of each individual and to eliminate human barriers based on all assumptions which prejudge individuals."
     Talk about radical. Morality in America is almost always used as an excuse to ostracize people. Very rarely is it offered up as a reason to include them (though, frankly, even if I believed the view of the Boy Scouts — that there is something so radically wrong with homosexuals they can't be taught how to use semaphore flags — I think that would motivate me to want to get them in Scouting all the more, in the hopes that our vigorous outdoor program and credo of moral certitude would win them over and draw them away from perversion. To shun them seems, well, to lack faith in heterosexuality).
     Before parting, I had one more question about Camp Fire. Where did the boys come from? When my sister, Debbie, was a Blue Bird, 30 years ago, it was an all-girl thing. Court order? Lawsuit?
     "In 1975 we switched to boys and girls," said Lachowicz. "We found the clubs were taking in more and more boys , so they decided to change the organization so it is co-ed."
     A huge, cathartic crisis?
     "Nah," she said. "Camp Fire has always been a very, very flexible organization."
And one that doesn't feel it needs to add to the problems of any youngster straying from society's norms.
      "Kids want to be involved in something that's positive and not painful," she said. "We just do what we have to do. Kids who join Camp Fire are really happy. We have a blast."

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, August 17, 1999

Works in progress: Jack Clark in Paris, deux

The Louvre, Paris

     As a certified museum guy, I have to admit that frequent contributor Jack Clark's pride at never visiting the Louvre left me a little ... baffled. It's like not liking chocolate — possible, yes, but not exactly something to be proud of. I'll let you decide if he makes his case. As for the painting that he highlights, I deliberately tucked it into the body of the story, and not the top, so it wouldn't go up to illustrate the post on Facebook, causing the behemoth to perhaps flag and block it as a species of pornography, which is just sad.

     Jack does sidestep the obvious question of what is happening in the painting. According to Wikipedia, the nipple tweak was seen as somehow symbolic of the lady on the right being pregnant with Henry IV's child. In more recent times, it was seen as a wink at lesbianism, though the two subjects are sisters. The sort of puzzle one misses by not frequenting museums.

     Three of my siblings visited us in Paris the other week. We took my brother Kevin and his wife Joanne to hear some music in a club housed in a boat docked on the left bank of the Seine. Kevin’s the real musician in the family. I wasn’t a bit surprised when he ended up on stage singing and playing a borrowed bass guitar.
     My sisters Kathleen and Ryan went to every museum they could find, without me. I didn’t have any problems in that boat on the river but just listening to them talk about the various museums they’d visited made me feel somewhat seasick.
     Being colorblind is a blessing that I’ve used to keep myself out of scores of museums. It’s about more than my abbreviated color perception. I like my art one piece at a time. Museums stuffed full make me dizzy. Once I almost saw blood.
     That was on a visit to the Buffalo Bill Wild West Museum in Cody, Wyoming, back in the late 1980s. I’d always heard it was a great place and I’m a big fan of the old West as portrayed in books and movies. But sad to say, the museum was just as boring as most of the others I’ve tried.
     They had a bunch of Indian mannequins dressed in authentic Indian wear standing around Teepees and looking very. . . Well, actually I forget how they looked. That’s how unimpressive it was. But the woman I was with was having a great time. She’d once worked at the Art Institute so this was right up her avenue. I followed along trying to pretend I was interested and then I wondered where the museum had gotten the clothes. “Probably off of dead Indians,” I answered myself.
      Once I had the thought, I found what looked like bullet holes everywhere, in the back, in the shoulder, in the side. And suddenly, in the midst of horror, I was having a great time. “Look at this one,” I said to my friend. “I mean, moths don’t eat through leather, do they?”
      “Look, right there in the lower back. Isn’t that where the kidneys are?”
     “Jack, would you please shut up?” my friend whispered. “Everybody’s listening.”
     Shut up? She had to be kidding. Here was some actual history. Those Indian villages were a fantasy: the Indians living in peace. When did that ever happen? Not after 1492.
     Some years later, I was driving a taxi and my passenger said he was a history professor at Yale. “What’s your specialty?” I asked. When he told me it was the American West, I asked if he’d ever been to the museum in Cody.
     “Oh sure. I go every other year or so.”
     I told him about those holes and he promised to take a look on his next visit. Who knows? Maybe my observation made it into a Yale class or paper.
     But where did they get the clothes? Who did they belong to? How did they die? Who was on the other end of those bullets? I wouldn’t mind hearing those answers.
     In any museum, I would probably find the answer to, How did they get all this stuff, more interesting than the stuff itself. And remember, most museums have even more stuff in storage.
     Speaking of museums and Paris, I did go to the Louvre once, but I only got as far as the gift shop. This was decades back, I was on my way to Paris to write with my friend Bob Meyer. He was a Chicago artist, writer, and all-around craftsman and artisan, who had moved to Paris to be with his young son. We were turning the 1931 Fritz Lang movie M into the play M the Murderer.

      Bob Horn, another Chicago artist, wanted me to ask Bob to go to the Louvre gift shop and pick up a postcard of the painting, Gabrielle d'Estrées and One of Her Sisters. In the 1594 work, two women in their early 20s are sitting in a bathtub. An older woman is in the background, looking down at her knitting. The girl on the left is reaching out, tweaking one of the other girl’s nipples. Horn was planning a painting based on the original. “Bob will know the painting,” he said.
     (You may notice a trend in those last few paragraphs: We’ve all run out of original ideas.)
     When I got to Paris, Bob Meyer said, “I’ve been here for eight years and I haven’t been in the Louvre yet. I’m not going for Bob Horn.” They were the best of friends, of course, and both were involved with the founding of the NAB Gallery in Chicago in 1974.
     But Bob gave me directions to the Louvre. And then on my legal pad he drew a rough sketch of the postcard Bob Horn wanted. “Just show ‘em that,” he said. “They’ll know the painting.”
     I wasn’t so sure. Bob could make the simplest drawing look sexy and on the border of obscene. But I didn’t see anything like that in the sketch. I folded it and headed for the Louvre.
     On the way, I passed rue Rivoli where there were several postcard stores. I went into one after the other and showed them the sketch. “The Louvre,” everyone said, and some were kind enough to point the way.
     So I went to the Louvre and down to the gift shop where there are thousands and thousands of postcards. How would I ever find the right one? There were two teenage girls behind the counter. I held up my drawing and they both immediately turned bright red. Bob had done it again. Here they were, working in a museum with thousands of nudes. They probably never gave any of them a second glance. But my old friend Bob, with a five-second drawing scribbled on a yellow legal pad, had somehow ignited a flash fire.
     After the girls recovered, they knew exactly in which aisle I would find the postcard. I bought a few extras.
     Aside from transposing the sisters, Bob had drawn the scene perfectly from memory. I guess that’s what you learn in art school. I don’t know where he’d learned to hint at pornography without ever crossing into it.
     I looked at Bob’s sketch for days, but I could never find what had made the two girls blush and Bob, who died in Paris in 2021, wasn’t giving away trade secrets. I’ve got several of his drawings at home. When I look, I rarely see those hidden elements. I think they come with the shock of first viewing. Almost every woman who’s set foot in my apartment has skipped past most of my other art to take long looks at Bob’s drawings. I wish I knew what they were seeing.
     Maybe if I’d spent more time in museums.