You can take the girl out of the city...

     The lonely stretch above is Miller Road, just east of 155 and west of the Prairie Creek in Hopedale Township, about 160 miles southwest of Chicago.
     We stopped in that unlikely spot because, in the fields beyond, a variety of pieces of big equipment were doing some harvesting that I was interested in observing for a story I'm working on, one you can expect in a couple weeks. 

      In the half hour we lingered there, one car, maybe two came by, and didn't stop.
     We did have a good laugh. As we walked away from the car in the picture, that lonely speck, a blue Ford Focus, toward the muddy field, we heard a distinctive double beep.
     "I locked my car and put on my flashers," marveled Ashlee Rezin, the Sun-Times photo editor, who was driving. "Could I be more of a city girl? I am a through and through city girl." 

     Old habits die hard. Though we were in depopulated and — it is assumed — relatively safe rural heartland, the idea of not taking prudent precautions, well, is not cast casually cast aside.

     That happened several times, frequently enough that a local remarked on it, also with a laugh. Unnecessary safety steps by anxious city slickers are funny. We don't lock our cars here. 
     Later we grabbed lunch in Morton, "The Pumpkin Capital of the World" and sampled their pumpkin-flavored ice cream, pumpkin-spiked chili, plus pumpkin cake pops. When I had called the village hall the day before, getting the lay of the land, an employee warned me that with the Pumpkin Festival going full swing, parking might be a problem.
     "Oh, I imagine we'll manage," I said. If agrarians smile at our consciousness of criminality, we return the favor regarding what they think of as crowded. I thought back to the parking meters in Lemont accepting pennies last time I was there — albeit a while ago. 

     Let's just say parking was not a problem for a professional newspaper photographer. We managed.

     I hadn't been out for a story for two months, since I had my rotator cuff repaired in late July, and it felt really good to hit the road, eyeball an expanse of this beautiful state, talk to some hardworking, interesting people, including my colleague, who I hadn't seen for quite a while. We talked and talked and talked — I was hoarse when I got home. I left the house shortly before 7 a.m. and returned shortly after 7 p.m. It was a day very well spent.

      
 

Muzzling Macklemore changes nothing. What now?

"From Jerusalem," by John Singer Sargent (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     I hate to pile on Macklemore, the rapper recently yanked from Ed Sheeran's tour, further muddying his reputation by association. But I kinda like him, primarily for his song "Starting Over," an explicit look at sobriety and relapse. I did smile at first listen, because he presents himself as "some wise monk" and a big famous celebrity, since I'd both never heard of him before and — to me anyway — there is something limp and ersatz about white rappers, though Eminem seems to do OK.
     I paused before using the present tense, "I like him" in the opening paragraph. I still like Macklemore, based entirely on that song, despite the controversy over his remarks related to Palestinians. Then again, I have an oddball view on this subject, one perhaps unique to myself — I see it as a highly emotional issue, where people of goodwill believe deeply across the spectrum. So I don't feel the need to flutter my fingers at my sternum and gasp whenever someone says something I disagree with. I certainly don't see how stifling anybody helps. I would no sooner want to see Macklemore silenced than I would want to be silenced myself.
     I also thought before I used "related to Palestinians" rather than "pro-Palestinian" because I don't quite understand how shouting "Free Palestine" in various circumstances, whether from a concert stage, or at random Jews going about their business in the street, is actually helpful to Palestinians. I wouldn't shout "Down with Trump!" at someone wearing a cross because evangelicals tend to back the president. Macklemore-like outbursts certainly don't relieve an iota of suffering in Gaza, or get any closer to a solution to this intractable problem. Maybe it helps the person shouting, giving themselves a big wet kiss of virtue signaling.
     And yes, I know that beside his "Free Palestine" remarks, Macklemore also once went onstage wearing a false Jewish hooked nose and beard. I wear something similar myself, permanently affixed to my face, everywhere I go, so heck, the more the merrier. Mel Brooks once dressed as Hitler and performed a rap song — that isn't an endorsement.
     We are allowed to tune him out. I deleted both Instagram and Facebook off my phone because I was tired of the endless "Punch & Judy Show" on this subject. Everybody's talking, nobody's listening. If I could inject a thought into the slipstream — and I guess I can, through the vehicle of a newspaper column, which isn't quite writing a broadsheet with a quill pen and pasting it to the post office wall, but close — I would point out, to Jews, that the true peril is not from tertiary musicians making earnest speeches, but the U.S. government using your cause to squash free expression. I care about Israel, but care 10 times more about this country, and since there is a risk of Jews being eventually seen as the folks who hurrahed Donald Trump while he ravaged the Constitution, I want to add an emphatic: Not In Our Name.
     As to Palestinians and their supporters, well, I would point out that being the darlings of Hollywood and college sophomores did not help Tibetans, still under the heel of China last time I looked. If your point is that Israel should never have been created in 1948, I can understand that. But it's still there, your feelings notwithstanding. The relevant question is: What happens next?

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Housekeeping notes

     The first time I sent a letter by fax, I made a photocopy beforehand, to retain for my files.
     So join me at that moment, in the late 1980s, as I stood in the newsroom of the paper, and fed my to-be-faxed letter into the roller of the modest little beige device. Then watched as it slowly slid out the bottom and into a tray.
     Oh. Yes. Right. The letter remains. It doesn't actually squirt through the wires.
     Which I knew, at some level. Yet still made the copy, my thinking being "You send something, you no longer have it."
     I recount this dusty tale of technology confusion to help you better understand the guy struggling to send out a morning email so you can link to this blog. I first got the idea for emailing the blog every day from Chicago Public Square newsman Charlie Meyerson, who generously, along with Eric Zorn, beat the bushes and got me hundreds of new subscribers. It seems a very common and effective way to get and hold readers, and the rare days I didn't send the email, readership of the newest post plunged.
     I'd send it using my personal dailysteinberg@gmail.com account.
     Only on Saturday, the email wouldn't send. Gmail wouldn't do it. Nor on Sunday, when Google also suspended my account. I guess blasting emails to hundreds of readers is no longer smiled upon in the Google world. You'd think they'd tell you, but that is applying my old fleshbag human standards. Which means not only couldn't I send or receive email, but everygoddamnday.com, which is linked to my account, was gone.
     Luckily I realized this only after I got it all back, with a few apologetic clicks. But it did make me understand that the blog, which I thought I might donate to the Newberry Library so it could live on as a kind of rump immortality, was more likely to just vanish without a trace one of these days, perhaps gobbled by an AI worm.
     I did grab a few posts that I'd miss terribly if they vanished and tucked them safely in my Samsung T7 Shield (a portable hard drive, for those less savvy than myself).
     If you're curious as to the very first post I saved, it was "Those Winter Tuesdays" from 2015. I just love having that little moment from my ordinary life as a father, and wouldn't want it to vanish, as all things will.
     Anyway, to the matter at hand. I am going to try sending out the daily content — awful word — on Substack, instead of a letter linking to the writing, to save you a click, which seems to be important to some. And to be clear, this little rumination IS the blog post for today. The same material — also a bad term, it makes it sound like I'm weaving cloth — will also be on my blog, for those who go straight there. I think I'm going to investigate — in a few weeks, give myself time to adjust — having Mailchimp send my emails. That costs something like $60 a month, but should be worth it, particularly since — I hope — some of you are going to pay for it, after I activate whatever Give Me Money button will facilitate that. I did notice that, the moment I signed onto Substack, readers started pledging money. Which I appreciate, even if I haven't yet attempted to figure out how to collect it. Money, as you know, not being a big motivator for me.   I don't like doing this; don't like change at all. I'm only comfortable with the writing part, and sometimes not even with that. Though in this case it was forced upon me, and I'm trying, as always, to — as REO Speedwagon sang — roll with the changes, best I can.

Wait! You mean we don't gotta pay taxes?

 

     Unlike you, I've earned millions of dollars through writing. True, the bulk of that was in modest, regular increments over a 45-year period, mostly salary from this newspaper, where writing is only one of several duties — there is navigating the web of colleagues and superiors, the strategic cordiality, the gossip, the bowing, the scraping, the "yes sir, that is a brilliant idea," side as well.
     Occasionally — very occasionally, of late — freelance checks show up: article payments, book royalties or advances, and I will announce the sum in my best imitation of a stentorian Bill Kurtis proclamation: "Bumpty-bump thousand dollars!" And my wife, God bless her, dutiful sworn officer of the court that she is, will observe, as if on cue: "Of course, you have to pay taxes on that."
     Silly me, I take her at her word. When April 15 comes around, we do indeed pay whatever portion — and it can be between a quarter and a third — that our accountant says is due the federal government.
     So it was with gratitude that I recently read in the Sun-Times Sunday how Mayor Brandon Johnson's new communications director, Rachel Cohen, deliberately withheld federal income taxes on her freelance work as a protest against ICE. Can we all do that? Because I too have freelance, and I too have serious disagreements with a considerable part of the federal government — the entire executive branch leaps to mind.
     If we can simply withhold our taxes, then not only will I have registered a protest, but saved myself some significant scratch as well, manna I will need on the long slog through retirement, set to begin ... well ... maybe sooner than I care to if I keep turning in stuff like this.
     Don't get me wrong. I'm all for social action. Protests such as last year's at Broadview were not just heroic, but essential. Like colonial minutemen pouring out of their farms and shops to face the British, patriotic Americans poured into the streets to show that we do not want federal thugs grabbing our neighbors out of their cars for the crime of having immigrated to this country, plunging them into some nightmare gulag system, the true horror of which is not yet fully known. We haven't yet saved the United States from despotism, but if it is indeed saved, they deserve ample credit.
     But I'm also a chronic law abider. I can't rip the tag off a new mattress. My fingers tingle seeing how glibly some break the law and get away with it.
     Yes, there is a tradition of tax evasion related to the mayor's office. Mayor Harold Washington, you might recall, did not file his federal taxes for four years in the 1960s — not even as a protest, but due to being disorganized, he later said. The IRS went after him, and though it was determined that he had actually paid the baseline amounts, and only owed $508, that was enough for him to plead no contest and be sentenced to 40 days in the Cook County Jail in 1972, serving 36.
     He "forgot," Washington told the Sun-Times editorial board during his 1983 run, adding "maybe a psychiatrist could explain it." He still won.
     "I'm not proud of this," Washington added, as opposed to Cohen, who seems very proud.

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Flashback 1996: Culture is lovely, but bring on the fat lady

 

Latvian soprano Marina Rebeka, making her Lyric debut as Violetta in "La Traviata" in 2013
(Photo  by Todd Rosenberg, courtesy of the Lyric Opera)

      If I seem more attentive to factuality that the average bear, it's partially because I've left behind a paper trail. Thirty years of writing a personal column have a way of dispelling illusions.

     For instance. I would have sworn on a stack of libretti that it was me who was the opera buff, dragging my unwilling wife to the Lyric. Because there were times, in the heyday — the decade when I attended almost every opera and took 100 readers to a special night — that she declined the opportunity, and I'd take one of the boys.

     But researching my new book, I was writing about being a public Jew — not hiding my heritage, as some do — and became curious what the first reference to being Jewish was in my column. It wasn't some dramatic "I ... am ... Spartacus!" moment, but, fittingly, a light column about the opera, and how my wife was leading the charge to ... well, you'll see in this, which ran 30 years ago today. 

     Thirty years is a long time. And it does please me that this seems solidly in my voice, the way I might write it today. Either consistency, or, I suppose, lack of progress. Or both.

     A sure sign of autumn, as definite as the Canadian freezer air whooshing over the city: my wife searching for the big pasteboard sheet of Lyric Opera tickets, which arrived in the balmy days of summer and was squirreled safely away.
     She found the tickets, alas. I wasn't exactly rooting for them to be lost, but I wouldn't have been heartbroken, either. Six operas between now and Valentine's Day. Six.
      And mountaineers think their sport is a test of endurance. Hah! What can climbing the Matterhorn demand compared with sitting through five hours of "Gotterdammerung"? I did that last season, and should have gotten my picture taken afterward, thumb in the air, a look of giddy victory on my face.
     Granted, the music isn't bad. I even like certain operas. But nothing is so good that it doesn't start to grind you down after a while. If the Lyric offered an evening of naked supermodels performing the opera "Neil Steinberg Is Swell," I still would be fidgeting and glancing at my watch toward the end of the third hour.
     Of course I could have resisted subscribing. I always consider objecting, consider waving the "Money's tight!" flag that my wife so happily hoists whenever I propose an entertainment more costly than tossing cards into a hat.
     Marriage is a give-and-take, however, and I know that resisting opera would only come back to haunt me. I will be struck by some terrible disease, and want to go to the Mayo Clinic to see an expert, and my wife will give me that look and say, "Who's throwing money around now, Mister Fancy Clinic?"
     So I didn't say anything. Besides, she didn't ask me. She got tired of all my throat-clearing and eye-rolling, and just went ahead and got them, without consultation.
     So now opera is officially routine. An established part of our lives now includes plump middle-aged Italian ladies pretending to be German milkmaids at the top of their lungs in a language we don't understand. I'll just have to live with it.
     I know what my wife will say when she reads this. "But you like opera," she'll say, which only shows how successfully I've been fooling her all these years. I see too many of those grumbly, scowling hubbies harrumphing after their terrified wives.
     Can't be like that. Better to go and enjoy what I can and pretend to enjoy when I can't. Being Jewish helps. Like many Jews, I grew up attending services I only dimly understood, and years of neglecting my faith, such as it is, haven't made Hebrew any more comprehensible.
     Growing up, I was trained to sit through it, nodding along and waiting for the parts I could appreciate.
     Rather like opera. I'm surprised the two institutions, opera and Judaism, don't learn from each other. Oh, some synagogues have opera-singing cantors. But why not borrow more? Supertitles, for instance, those translations projected above the stage at operas. They might help enhance prayer services, too.
     Or not. Perhaps too much is lost in translation. While the singer is reeling off a mouthful of Italian — "Il mio sposo! Oh Dei! Son morta. Voi qui senza mantello! In questo stato . . . un ricevuto foglio, la sua gran gelosia" — the supertitle is always something like: "My husband! We're in trouble."
     Congregations might not be too happy to see some cherished prayer — Sh'ma Yisrael, Adonai Elohanu* — projected in front of them as: "Hey Israel! The Lord's One."
     Opera definitely could benefit from a synagogue tradition called "staying until the end." There is a final blessing and everybody kisses one another and shakes hands and goes home and gets something to eat.
     At the opera, about three minutes before the end, a shocking percentage of the audience leaps to their feet and bolts for the exits as if the place were on fire.
     Any subtle sense of pleasure the music may have instilled is wiped away by the shock of watching these people. If your time is so precious, if you can't wait 10 minutes for your coat or a cab, then why are you sitting through five hours of Wagner? Why go out at all? Stay home and work.
     My only hope is that these fleeing people, at some moment in their hectic lives, will realize they have lost their souls. I hope that, kneeling down beside Fluffy after she has been run over by a car, or watching their home burn, or whatever, they will look up and have a flash of insight: "This is because I left early at the opera. This is because we couldn't even stay and applaud for the 50 people who had just spent three hours singing their throats to a pulp. We have earned every bad thing that can ever befall us."
     Me, I clap heartily, big, potching claps, drawing my hands about 3 feet apart and slamming them together, cheering. This is the best part of the opera. It gets the blood, which tends to settle during hours of inaction, going. And I am genuinely delighted and enthusiastic — I mean, the thing is over and we get to home.

       — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 15, 1996

       * In the original, I used the English translation, "Hear O Israel, the Lord is Our God, the Lord is One." But it really only works if I use the Hebrew.

Is truth whatever you want it to be?

Ryan P. Carney, of St. Charles, warms up in an alley before an appearance with the folk group Antony and the Tramps at the Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival in 2015.

     If you look down enough alleys in Chicago, you will eventually see a cellist in a bowler hat. I know this is true, based on personal experience. In 2015, I was at the Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival in Rogers Park, heard the distinctive low-rosined rumbling of a cello, turned my head and saw this fellow and his instrument.
     I later wrote something. At the time, I thought it was a story about ignorance, which has its own attractions, and knowledge, which bears its own disappointments.
     This is how I explained it:
     "When you are confronted with something enigmatic, you can do one of two things. You can either keep going about your business, accepting the gift of its mystery. Or you can investigate, plunge into the thicket, push aside the leaves of the puzzle and try to find the truth within. The former is probably the better path for a life imbued with tantalizing possibility and, even, magic. Had I kept walking, I would forever wonder."
     I didn't keep walking; I found out and wrote a blog post. When I stumbled upon it after more than a decade, something struck me, something more important that I missed at the time.
     The opening sentence is a lie.
     Most people, no matter how many alleys they gaze down, will never see a cellist in a bowler hat.
     What made me think otherwise? What made me believe a clear falsehood is actually a general truism? Easy. Because it happened to me. The fog of personal experience blinds us. Push someone with a strong opinion — immigrants out! — as to why they feel that way, and you inevitably find some minor incident. They were disturbed by music being blasted late at night, magnified into unshakable conviction because it happened to them.
     I crafted the opening sentence in 2015, affected by what had just happened. To me. But you weren't there; so why did you accept it? And I bet you did. You didn't stop, pound your fist and say, "No! I'm never going to see that."
     Why? Well, you read it in a newspaper. A trusted source. There is a photograph, right there, of a cellist in a bowler hat, in an alley. For all the AI hubbub, you don't distrust your eyes. Perhaps most importantly: the lie conjures up the romantic image of a city of unlimited possibility we want to embrace. Leading to an important truth: we believe what we want to believe.

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Works in progress: The Emmys Are Self-Sabotaging

 

Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid

     The Emmy Awards are Monday night. This critique is by Chicago teacher and writer Lane Lubell, who occasionally contributes to EGD, most recently in November, when he wrote on the oblique youth term 6-7 and Dictionary.com.

     Choose your favorite fruit. A granny-smith apple, a fuji apple, a Macintosh apple, a red grape, a honey crisp apple, or green grape? Personally, I love apples and grapes, but this list hardly reflects the variety of fruits on the market. No one would look at this list and say that the winner is the definitive king of the fruits because only apples and grapes are represented. This lack of variety reflects precisely what we have been given to choose from at this year’s Primetime Emmy awards.
     Over the years, Emmy nominees have become hyper-concentrated. In other words, a handful of shows are receiving an outsized proportion of nominations. The Academy is aware of this problem, and yet, they seem unable to resolve it, as admitting it exists threatens their ethos, and so, it was left to fester. Now, the Academy must either face reality or become complicit in their own demise.
     For the majority of the Emmys nearly 78-year history, handing out awards for television was a simple enough task: watch the shows live on-air and vote for best ones in a given category.
     Between the 40’s and early ‘70s, most shows on television had substantial viewership among Academy members. That makes sense. After all, there were only three channels. This pool meant that a heterogeneous voting body could reasonably be expected to have knowledge of most of the shows on television. Many would be devoted fans while others may have only seen an episode or two, but almost everyone in the industry would have been familiar with every series’ premise, genre, and look. This awareness was fundamental to the success of the Emmys. After all, how can you vote if you don’t watch all the shows?
     However, this math has changed dramatically over the last 54 years.
     Matters first became complicated around 1972 when HBO first went live. They introduced an entirely new class of shows on an entirely new kind of channel. These shows were not limited in content and rules; they could be edgier, more risqué. The Rubicon had been crossed.
     Soon after, television evolved again, with the introduction of cable networks. Major broadcasters like TBS, MTV, and more crashed into our living rooms and forever changed how we watch TV. Accordingly, cable networks experienced a boom. Suddenly, there were channels for kids (Nickelodeon, Disney, and Cartoon Network); channels for the academically inclined like Discovery, Science, and the History Channel (before they gave all their airtime to prehistoric ufological conspiracists); channels just for golf and college sports. Reality networks like E!, Bravo, and the hilariously misnomered Learning Channel (TLC) added the melodramatic squabbles of the elite into the lexicons of the commoner. Eventually, Comedy Central burst onto the scene with South Park and The Daily Show. Meanwhile, The Food Network and HGTV entertain the lackadaisical voyeur. More premium networks, like Showtime and AMC, soon joined the fray, while Turner Classic Movies fueled the Silents’ nostalgia.
     Gradually, voting became increasingly difficult. By the late aughts, there were hundreds of episodes premiering every day. Viewing every show would be impossible, even with the creation of TIVO.
     Voters’ jobs became even harder with the introduction of streaming. Suddenly, hundreds of new shows with seemingly endless budgets, began popping up. House of Cards, Stranger Things, Ted Lasso. Seemingly every tech company began touting a streaming arm, and were willing to dump billions of dollars into series unable to recoup their losses.
     Today, the Academy finds itself a frog in a boiling pot, wondering when the water became so hot.
     With viewership spread so thin across so many networks and streamers, it has become increasingly difficult for a show to gain sufficient momentum for an award without a robust For Your Consideration (FYC) campaign (i.e., ads and events promoting a show for awards), something many stations simply can’t afford, allowing for a very small number of shows to dominate the awards cycle while others get left behind.
     Moreover, with streamers folding or being absorbed over the last five years, the number of shows that receive those costly FYC has become increasingly slim. Instead, that money is consolidated into backing their subjectively strongest horse. After all, why should HBO campaigns for 15 shows when they know they can get The Pitt across the line?
     So, let’s take a look at some of the Emmy categories this year. How about Best Guest Actress in a Comedy? This is a category that should be extremely diverse because it only expects people to have watched one episode in order to have seen their entire Emmy-eligible performance. So let’s see what we have:

Jamie Lee Curtis — "The Bear"
Betty Gilpin — "Widow’s Bay"
Leslie Bibb — "Hacks"
Cherry Jones — "Hacks"
Laurie Metcalf — "Hacks"
Kaitlyn Olson — "Hacks"
Lauren Weedman — "Hacks"

     Yes, you read that right. Out of all of the guest performances on all of television, five out of seven best just happened to appear in the same ten-episode season. (Gilpin won.)
     This type of hyperfixation is not a one-off either. In the drama category, The Pitt managed to score 13 acting nominations (for a total of 25) for a show about… doctors realistically being doctors. Do their bedside manners really represent the best acting on all of television in every category?
     Look at the nominees yourself. The pattern will be obvious.
     By hyper-concentrating nominees, the Academy denigrates the majority of programming by denying those shows, which serve as the backbone of Hollywood, recognition and promotion. When even one actor receives an Emmy nomination, their entire series benefits. More awards mean more eyes on the show; the more eyes on their show, the more eyes on the show’s less famous actors, which leads to more work for said actors. The chain reaction directly contributes to the economic success of the entire industry.
     Moreover, this concentration results in fewer viewers of the Emmy broadcast. After all, people tune into the Emmys to root for their favorite shows. People won’t watch if they’ve never seen the nominees. If you haven’t seen one of six shows "Pluribus," "Hacks", "Beef," "The Pitt,", "Widow’s Bay," or "Shrinking”, then you might not see a single award go to a show you’ve seen. That's not a healthy way to run a primetime awards show.
     Luckily, all is not lost. There are a couple of ways the Academy can address these problems. The easiest thing they can do is limit FYC spending. This would theoretically allow less-campaigned shows the ability to gain traction with voters.
     More urgently though, the Academy can set limits on the number of actors or episodes nominated in the same category. This rule would give other shows a chance to shine, as there would be more open slots to fill.
     Additionally, the Emmys could adopt a Best Cast Ensemble award. Such a prize would mean that anyone deemed to have a significant role on a series could receive an award alongside their castmates. In turn, you can expect more varied nominations in the individual acting categories, as voters would be less concerned with whether or not actors from their favorite show will be nominated.
     The Academy will never be perfect. However, it is up to the Academy, not the studios and their tech-bro overlords, to create a more equitable and reflective lineup of nominees in the future. Let’s hope that they do.