Flashback 2003: Ground down? In a rut? Just go fly a kite

The original 1903 Wright Brothers Flyer (Smithsonian Air & Space Museum)

     Not only do I write for the Sun-Times, but I read it, and can tell you, one of the central joys of being a subscriber is watching Lee Bey hit it out of the park on a regular basis — bam bam bam bam. Monday was his front page story on how the Museum of Science and Industry ... oh, all right, the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry — is further defacing itself, not just in name, but in physical reality, by adding a nearly 30-foot-tall, 458-foot-wide "Welcome Hall." The thing is, well, let Lee describe it:

     The Welcome Hall is too tall and much too wide. It promises to sit there like a carbuncle in the park. And its arched grass roof makes the structure resemble a displaced section of Teletubbyland.

     It also eradicates the north lawn of the museum, which not only is visually important, but serves an important civic function as well, such as the kite festival this 2003 column relates, eventually. I apologize for the unashamed bitching of the first 2/3 of the column; I must have thought it was funny, at the time, or at least honest, and was trying to build up to the glorious end, not realizing that half the readers would probably never get there. Plus I didn't mention the facts of the story — Glen Ellyn airplane enthusiasts had spent four years hand-constructing an exact copy of the Wright flyer, and 2,000 people — including my family — gathered on the MSI lawn to watch them try, and fail, three times to get the thing airborne, in honor of the centennial of the first manned, powered flight at Kitty Hawk. The type of event which can't be held should the Griffin Carbuncle be built.
     Anyway, I offer up this 23-year-old chestnut as back up to Lee's scoop. 

     On my way to and from work I often cut through City Hall and the County Building. They're two halves of the same massive, square, block-filling structure, as you probably know if you work downtown. The nearly century-old corridors bustle with genuine Chicago types--loitering knots of cops, engineers clutching hard hats and pastel logs of rolled up blueprints, bright young good government sorts surging out of brass-faced elevators, while the older, shady, yellow-plaid-jacket crowd they inevitably become lope in to replace them.
     Then there's the architecture: marble, curving mosaics on the ceilings, brass frou-frou fixtures that would spark three scandals if the government paid for them now but which at the time seemed simply giving civic life its proper due.
     I cut through the building because it's cheering and, frankly, on some days I need cheering. Nobody who isn't in a refugee camp or a burn ward has the right to complain, of course, but I'm sorry; the routine gets oppressive. Like most people — perhaps like you — life gets dull. After three years in the suburbs and eight years with the children and 13 years being married and 17 years at the newspaper, well, I'll tell you, buddy, on some days the sparkling sense of newness and wonder just ain't there. The last time I walked through City Hall, I barely broke stride, even when a big poster caught my eye — "Mayor Daley's Kids & Kites Festival" it read.
     "Right," I said to myself, eyes forward, hurrying on, squelching the urge to stop and see where the festival was, thinking, "No way I'm dragging the crew to one of Hizzoner's bread-and-circuses."
     I'd rather have jumped on the L and gone out to O'Hare and charged a plane ticket to Fiji, where I'd end up standing at a grass shack bar like a character out of Conrad, gazing for hours at the flat blue horizon, silently nursing my wounds and my dark rum, the focus of glances and whispers. "The Mystery Man."
     Only I wouldn't. The Fijian authorities would track me down after three weeks and ship me home and I'd be right back where I am right now, another gray-faced workadaddy grinding back and forth in his rut between job and family, bouncing like a rubber ball from home hassles to work woes and back again, stumbling each morning from the company of my inert, mutely waving neighbors in the bland, soul-sucking suburbs through the grimy indifferent city, to the stasis of my office and my shrugging, impassive co-workers, then back to the changeless shoebox diorama of Northbrook, now bathed in twilight, to mark time until it begins anew next morning.
     Only, after Fiji, I'd have another $10,000 in credit card debt.
     Fortunately, I have a rule that I would like to pass along, just in case it might prove helpful to you. And that rule, which kicks in like a computer logic loop at these bleak moments — okay, bleak minutes and hours and whole days -- of vinegary unhappiness and boredom, is this: life is not dull or unpleasant, not generally, and certainly not in a great city such as Chicago, and thus anybody finding it dull or unpleasant needs to kick himself in his ample backside. The world does not fade to black merely because you happen to close your eyes.
     That is why I did not stay home and work as I should have Saturday morning, particularly with the book due April 1, a date whose ironic, mocking aspects only strike me now that I set them down.
     I wanted to. But despite the looming due date and the whole house liable to collapse in a puff of asbestos dust, I blew off my responsibilities and took the family downtown to see the Wright Flyer fly. It didn't, merely putted along a track on the windless front lawn of the Museum of Science and Industry, as earthbound as a root.
     But somehow that was all right. After an hour, we went inside the museum, and it was great. Normally, I occupy myself searching for signs of corporate spin in the displays, all of which seem to have been paid for by oil companies.
     But this time I just enjoyed the exhibits, particularly the new ToyMaker 3000. They've set up a faux toy company, and we learned about design and marketing and then were set before an automated production line where, for three bucks apiece, my kids watched their own cool gyroscopish Gravi-tron toys assembled and customized before their popping eyes.
     But that wasn't the best part. The best part came about 3 p.m. We had been in the museum for four hours, which is a lot, even with lunch. The boys were melting down. It was time to go home. Normally, just going outside after four hours in a museum is a diver-breaking-the-surface delight, a return to sunlight and air.
     But Saturday we went out the museum's front doors, and there was the kite festival. I had ignored it, but it had found me. Surprise intensified the wonder of an expanse of blue sky filled with multicolored kites of all shapes and sizes. A brass band played jazz. People of all races and ages enjoyed themselves, flying kites, strolling, picnicking. I can't begin to express the joy of the thing. It was like God reaching down and ruffling my hair and smiling. I stood on the steps for a long time, trying to burn the image in memory, and then hurried after the boys, eager to join the excitement.

               — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 26, 2003

At least Joe Biden isn't being airbrushed away — yet

 

   In this job, it helps to have stock phrases. That way, you don't have to think up something new and clever every time you answer an email. Not when something old and clever will do.
     For instance, if a reader writes to me, confused — my lucid, well-reasoned argument is just crazy to them — demanding I hold their hand and explain it to them again, perhaps using a felt board, I barely pause.
     "Sir, I have found you an argument," I reply, quoting Samuel Johnson. "But I am not obliged to find you an understanding."
     Not many actual Nazis write. But when imitators and admirers share their thoughts, to stretch the term, often in an argot I call the Fascist Plural, "We were amused at your feeble Semitic attempt at..." I often deploy a line that is my own, though well worn from use.
     "You know, the whole Nazi thing didn't work out so well for the Germans."

     It really didn't. What gets overlooked in the glare of their crimes — at least 70 million people killed in World War II — this toll includes 7 or 8 million German citizens and soldiers. Quite a lot really. Not to mention their country pulverized and divided in half, with the Soviets ushering in a half century of jackboot repression.
     What I'm really saying is, "Look to history." Because history is a guide.
     We see how hatred blows back in the face of the hater. The old adage "hatred is taking poison and expecting someone else to die," is true, and on a national scale, multiplies. Didn't end well for Hitler. Despots, surrounded by yes men, make awful blunders. Mao's Communists remained in power, so got to write their history. But 30 million Chinese died in Mao's incompetence-induced famines.
     They don't teach that in China. Squelching history is what totalitarians do. And budding totalitarians.
     This past week, the U.S. Interior Department announced it will be putting warning signs outside the Smithsonian, advising the displays within are hopelessly biased (every accusation of this administration is a confession) because they include bad stuff, and not the cavalcade of greatness leading up to the apotheosis of national joy, triumph and achievement of Donald Trump, Imperator Supremus Maximae Gloriae.

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Farm kitten

 

      Cute kitten, right?
      I try to have a point to these posts and columns, but can today's be simply that? A kitten that is cute. Do we really need more?
      Perhaps. There could be more. Cats are certainly having a good week. The first new cat species identified in more than a century, leopardus tilcayo — or the tilcayo tiger cat — was discovered in the Bolivian cloud forest.
     Admit it — just reading "cloud forest" gave you a certain thrill, did it not? Our reward for pushing for something beyond "cute kitten." The very cute kitten above was one of five kittens crawling around a tractor at a farm I was visiting Friday. My first thought was to simply put out my hand and say, "I'll take this one," as my wife and I are currently catless, a condition underlined by minding, for the past month, Casper and Boo, the pair of troublemakers that belong to a certain peripatetic lad, his equally peripatetic wife and their surprisingly-peripatetic-for-a-4-month-old child (peripatetic adj. traveling from place to place).
     But nobody offered me the kitten and though rich in chutzpah, I'm not forward enough to ask, remembering the demands of caring for kittens, which might involve eye droppers and expensive vet visits and general household disruption. Plus she (or he) might not be weaned. Plus I don't think we're ready for one, the departure of Natasha still being too fresh. My wife says she's just not ready for a new cat. And I'm trying to make my life easier any way I can, not more complex.
     There was a moment when all five kittens and their mom were gathered in one spot, but I was slow on whipping out my phone for a shot and they scattered. Just as well. The concentrated cuteness might be overwhelming.

       

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.

Flashback 2010: They came for Muslims; I was not a Muslim

 

Fajr — morning prayer, Morton Grove, 2013 

     Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year — 5787, for those keeping track at home — began Friday night. My wife and I decided to rouse ourselves and go to synagogue, this being a time when it behooves Jews to manifest being Jewish a little more than they might otherwise, to both remind ourselves and show others. Use it or lose it. Rooting around in the old archive for Rosh Hashana stories to share here, I found this chestnut from a time when Jews weren't getting beaten up as much as they are now over the pretext of Gaza, even though the average Jew no more dictates Israeli policy than we tell Donald Trump what to tweet at 2 a.m. 

    It's worth posting, I think, even though the line about Jews not being condemned by politicians stings a bit, since it's no longer true. But the column does serve as a reminder. Jews tend to go to bat for others when they're down. Maybe those others will decide to return the favor. I'm not holding my breath. But anything's possible.

     'How much do we back down?" Terry Jones, pastor of the Dove World Outreach Center, a grandly named flyspeck of a church in Gainesville, Fla., asked, as he was preparing, or not, to burn a stack of Qurans on Saturday to mark the anniversary of 9/11. "How many times do we back down?"
     Funny you should ask, pastor — your big guy addresses that very question.
     "If someone strikes you on your right cheek, turn and offer the other one also," says Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount. "And if he sues you and takes your coat, give him your cloak too."
     It would be easy — and fun, too — to use Jones as a poster boy for Christianity. I could trot out a snide line of mine: "Christianity is a very loving and tolerant religion, a fact that would be better known if more people actually bothered to practice it."
     But then I'd be indulging in the same vice resorted to by those who tar all Muslims based on the actions of some mullah in a cave, a twist of logic whereby we are allowed to define any group we fear by its worst members. The truth is that, Jones notwithstanding, the vast majority of ministers are indeed preaching love and dignity, as are the vast majority of imams and rabbis. But a few idiots can cause a lot of harm, as Jones demonstrates. Hostility and ignorance are not monopolized, alas, by any one creed or religion.

"Ich schweige; ich war Jude."

     So I went to this Iftar two weeks ago and had fun. We ate dried dates, to start, as tradition indicated. I had never been to an Iftar before, so I can't say if it was an outstanding or a ordinary Iftar, but ...
     What's that? You want to know what an Iftar is? Oh, sorry. Nothing to feel embarrassed about. I didn't know myself, up until I went. An Iftar is the evening meal that Muslims eat during Ramadan, a monthlong festival requiring they fast during daylight hours.
     Let me start a different story of a different religious meal I also attended.
     So I went to this Rosh Hashana dinner Thursday and had fun. We ate matzo ball soup, to start, as tradition indicated. I've been to many Rosh Hashana dinners, so ...
     My guess is that Thursday's dinner requires less explaining to the average reader, who is at least dimly aware that Rosh Hashana is a holiday — the Jewish New Year — and that a matzo ball is a dense dumpling that sits in chicken soup.
     The reason for this is that Jews, having spent decades and centuries bashing our heads against the brick wall of fear and bias surrounding American culture, finally reached a tentative level of acceptance. We aren't seen as scary outsiders with strange habits who just stumbled off the boat anymore. McDonald's sell bagels.
     Sure, Fox hosts still complain about a few hurdy-gurdy Hanukkah songs tucked into the renamed Holiday Pageant. Sure, there is the occasional spray-painted swastika or brick through a window.
     But we don't suffer through full-blown national meltdowns like the New York Islamic center crisis. Nor is our faith condemned by supposedly legitimate politicians like Newt Gingrich. Nor are any pastors burning Torahs this Saturday.
     That's the Muslims' lot, now, and it shocks me that Jews, gathering together for the High Holidays, a time when we normally recognize the peril de jure, can fail to see — blinded, I suppose, by the ire rained down on Israel — that Muslims here are experiencing the same ordeal that we suffered, for the same reasons. They're new, few, different, and the nativists and haters — the muzzling of whom is a recent and maybe passing phenomenon — are in full bay, having been let off the leash by their irresponsible leaders.
     Is there a real chance that America is going to yank its welcome mat away from Muslims? I hope not. Is it perhaps overdramatic to invoke Martin Niemoller? (The German headline means "I remained silent; I was a Jew," a play on his famous sermon on how Nazis first came for the Communists, unionists and Jews, but he did not speak out because he was not any of these groups, and when they came for him, there was no one left to speak out).
     Again yes. Our nation has a great ability to self-correct, to veer away from folly.
     But this current flareup is a fire bell in the night that has been ringing for a month. And for Jews to shrug, to maybe even think, "Hurts, doesn't it?" and to mill about in the crowd of onlookers, silent, is to forget both our faith and our history.
     Don't be deceived because people know what a matzo ball is and you can check into fancy hotels now. Ostracizing the outsider because he's different and someone who belongs to his faith once did a bad thing can still work against Jews, too.
     Perhaps I'm showing the bias of expecting more from your own club. But Jews know something about having their holy books burned. To respond to what Jones has been threatening with, "But they're not our holy books, not this time," is to miss one of the more glaring lessons of history.
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 10, 2010

Memories of 9/11 horror still fresh after a quarter-century

     On Sept. 11, 2001, my older son was 5, and some mornings played video games on my computer. So I wasn't plugged into the world that morning. I didn't know that American Airlines Flight 11 had struck the North Tower at 7:46 a.m. Chicago time. I did not own a cell phone.
     At the Northbrook Metra station, stepping onto the 8:17 Downtown, I heard a woman down the platform say something about the World Trade Center being hit by a plane.
     At Union Station, knots of people stood around, talking. I asked one: what kind of plane hit the twin towers?
     "A 767," he said. That startled me. I had assumed it would be a Cessna.
     "That's a big plane," I said, thickly.
     At Wacker Drive, people were pouring out of the Sears Tower, fanning out in all directions. I noticed that, as they hurried along, they looked up, scanning the sky. As if they expected to see a plane go into the building at any moment.
     There was a Billy Goat Tavern on Washington, open for breakfast. I stepped inside. Everyone was just standing there in silence, watching the North Tower collapse on TV. I joined them. You could hear the eggs sizzling on the grill.
     The paper was still at 401 N. Wabash. I was on the editorial board and walked into editorial page editor Steve Huntley's office.
     "How do you spell 'Osama bin Laden?'" he asked. I'd never heard the name but went to my office to find out.
     I used to say there were two shocks about Sept. 11 — the first was that it happened, that four planes were hijacked by 19 men wielding box cutters. Two crashed into New York's World Trade Center, toppling the towers. A third hit the Pentagon and a fourth crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers stormed the cockpit; 2,973 men, women and children died that day.
     There was a time when I wouldn't feel obligated to spell out the details. But more than a third of Americans have no living memory of Sept. 11, 2001, and it would not be surprising if 9/11 is news to some — just another crumb of dusty history they didn't learn in school.
     Leading to the second shock of 9/11: that it went away, or at least ebbed. Because for days and weeks and months, it seemed that 9/11 was a permanent condition, a radiating, bottomless shock, sorrow and stupefaction. But ebb it did, slowly receding, like a tide going out. And now 25 years have gone by, and attention must be paid again.
     We put out "Extras" in those days — special editions to update breaking news stories, hawked at newsstands downtown. Our first was headlined "UNSPEAKABLE HORROR" — I remember looking at "Unspeakable" and thinking, "Really? 'Cause we're trying to flippin' speak it." The second was better: "TERROR!"

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'Jesus won't you fuckin' whistle?' — Songs about recovery

     Facebook gets a lot of crap, and rightly so. What used to be a chance to keep up with your friends has degraded into a sewer of cheap ads and AI slop. I deleted the app off my phone yesterday — not worth the bother.

     But Facebook is great as a mnemonic device. Every morning I check it on the Imac, to see what was going on in years past. Eighteen years and counting; 18 years, flushed down the Facebook toilet.
     For instance, exactly 10 years ago my literary guide to recovery, "Out of the Wreck I Rise," written with Phaidon editor Sara Bader, was published. I've been seeing the various stabs at publicity I took, trying to market the book, and Wednesday saw this post, written for a web site called "Largehearted Boy," which asked me to join the likes of T.C. Boyle, Brett Easton Ellis and Amy Bloom in offering up a playlist that "relates in some way" to my newly published book.

    I didn't have to be asked twice. Music is not only a key to recovery — well, my recovery anyway  — but a number of songs are quoted in the book. I would have quoted more, if we could have secured the permissions.
     While my blog page has been grinding along since 2013, I was pleased to see that Largehearted Boy, written by Brooklyn author David Gutowski, is still at it, having begun practically in the antediluvian, 2002.
     I would have sworn I'd posted this list on EGD at some point — I did a post on my diabetes playlist — but never have. So this is a good moment to correct that oversight. It is, by necessity, a decade out of date. New additions would include "Sober," by Tool, which is playing Riotfest Sept. 19. Not that it is a new song, mind you — it was recorded in 1993. But I only recently heard it for the first time. I'm a fan of its sinuous bass line and, for some reason I can't explain, the line, "Jesus, won't you fuckin' whistle?"

     Though if you look at the video — a creepy piece of claymation — linked in the title, they change the obscenity, timidly, in my book, to "Jesus, won't you try and whistle?" I've linked to YouTube videos in all the titles. If you want me to triage the best, I'd say the top three would be Pink's — an eyeful, and I don't mean the establishing shots of gloomy Stockholm; "Some People Change," which is slickly done; and "Lust for Life," with the manic energy of the film.

"Liquor Slave" by Lucky Dube

One of the keys in understanding addiction is that it is not a bad choice, but an obsession. You don't destroy your life through substances because you're stupid, but because you're compelled, enslaved, or as the late South African reggae star sings, "a slave, a slave, a liquor slave."

"S.O.B." by Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats

Part tent revival, part 1950s demon rum scare movie, this hand-clapping surprise 2015 hit puts to music the give-it-to-me-now imperative and intensity of addiction, both the shrugging plunge, complete with shaking hands, crawling bugs and breaking hearts at the realization, even through the fog of intoxication: "This can't be me."

"Cold Turkey" by John Lennon

The former Beatle's agonized trek through heroin withdrawal, complete with desperate, groaning screams. "I promise you anything, get me out of this hell." In our book, which creates a mosaic connecting one thought to another to convey a narrative, it leads directly to Christopher Marlowe's: "Why this is hell, nor am I out of it."

"Detox Mansion" by Warren Zevon

In perhaps the most famous song about recovery, "Rehab," Amy Winehouse never gets there, with tragic results in her real life. For all the hard-partying rock stars, there are very few songs about actually going to rehab. "Detox Mansion," is among the best, conveying the weary cynicism mingled with hope that so often greets recovery. "I'm gone to Detox Mansion, way down on Last Breath Farm," sings Zevon, who struggled with alcoholism for decades, and was sober for 17 years before relapsing hard at the end of his life after he was diagnosed with cancer.

"Sober" by Pink

The pop pride of Philadelphia asks what is an essential question in recovery: "how do I feel this good sober?" Addicts must not only stop using, but construct a life they feel good about, where they find the kind of joy they used to find in substances. In the song, Pink sees herself clearly, a party girl running out of time, determined that this is not the way she wants her story to end.

"Some People Change" by Montgomery Gentry

This country duo is known for its smart, contemporary songs, blending faith and courage. "Some People Change" offers something that can be in short supply with the frequent reversals of recovery: hope. It limns the grimness of alcoholism in a few concise lines, the simultaneous submitting and hating that you're submitting, then celebrates those who can re-write the story of their lives: "Here's to the strong. Thanks to the brave. Don't give up hope. Some people change."

"Fallen" by Sarah McLachlan

A song that manages to be despairing and triumphant at the same time. "Better I should know"—in four words, the Lilith-fair founder deflates the regret that those who have "sunk so low." feel at being forced to give up their addictions and confront their broken lives even though "there doesn't seem a way to be redeemed." But there is, for many, as the Canadian balladeer reminds us.

"New South Wales" by Jason Isbell

Sometimes you just get sick of being sick. Isbell takes the details of recovery, the coffee and the posters, the slogans and the meetings, and find them good. Giving up his old life "holds no trace of sorrow," while the program ferrying him to his new life offers salvation. "God bless the busted boat that brings us back."

"Mariner's Song" by Cowboy Junkies

A beautiful song about loss and yearning, with that trademark fluttering mandolin. It might have nothing to do with recovery, but I chose to hear it that way. "I look for you in every crest I ride, with every trough I travel through" conveys the way the thing stays with you. But one line in particular sums up the best reason to keep on the straight path. "The last of man's great untamed beasts"—what could that be?—"lies lapping at my door. And I would be happy to give it what it wants, but I do know it would just ask for more."

That's it. As tempting as going back might be, there's no end to it. The beast would just ask for more.

"Lust for Life" — Iggy Pop

Trainspotting, Danny Boyle's movie about the Edinburgh drug scene might ask "Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?" but if you listen to the song playing over the opening credits, Iggy Pop's bass-drum driven "Lust for Life," you get a quick course in the pleasure of breaking with all those Johnnies and their enticements. "No more beating my brains, with liquor and drugs," Iggy sings, and makes us want to bounce along with him.

Rejecting cruelty of a nation bent on squashing trans Americans

Moon over Alabama, by Richard Linder

     The war on trans Americans continues unabated. The government cashiers loyal and effective soldiers from the military while trying to quash health care for young people nationwide. Apparently, parents know what's best for their own children only when denying them vaccines. A scary time, and if you don't think it's your problem, then you're ignoring how quickly a cruel and arbitrary government can shift from one target to another. Hate is fickle.
     Civility shouldn't be. I've been defending trans people in print for 34 years. First, because I'm a Jew, and given our history of being on the receiving end of hatred, it's our responsibility not to limit the compass of our sympathy entirely to ourselves.
     But there's another reason, one I've never explained, So today I'll tell the story.
     As a young reporter, I quickly discovered there are two ways to do the job. You can wait for someone to assign you something, and end up covering fires and zoning board hearings.
     Or you can find your own subjects, ones that you are guaranteed to be interested in because you picked them yourself.
     I preferred the second path.
     So I'm combing the classified ads at the back of the Chicago Reader, fishing for leads, when I notice an ad for a boutique on Elston Avenue selling women's clothing in large sizes to men.
     "Now there's an interesting business," I thought, and headed over. Talking to the owner, I realized this is more than one shop. This is a world, a community. I saw an announcement for a dance, and decided to go.
     At the dance I met "Jenny," who I described in the opening paragraphs of my story this way:

     Jenny has sparkling blue eyes, a small, upturned nose and a cascade of curly blond hair tumbling over her right shoulder.
     With a rhinestone nail charm centered on each red fingernail, a dab of blush at her decolletage, and deftly applied make-up, it's easy to believe her when she says she spent three hours getting ready to go out.
     The shimmery blue and silver dress is custom-made, she says, and it's easy to believe that, too, since with the spike heels, Jenny tops out at perhaps 6-foot-7.
     "I'm a bigger girl, I know," she says, smiling radiantly. "I can't go out to a mall — hey, I've got a football player's shoulders."

     What I did not put in the story was my thought processes, standing there in the dim, loud dance, with my narrow pad and pen, as she spoke. Picture me, brow furrowed, gears slowly turning, as I looked up at this young woman, nearly a foot taller than myself.
     "Hmmmm...." I thought. "Three hours. That's a long time. She must really want to do this. You know ... most people do what they really want to do. And in that sense, I'm lucky that what I really want to do is go home and kiss the wife. Because if I wanted to do ... what she wants to do ... I'd be completely screwed. Because I could either do what I want to do, and be this loathed pariah skulking around the shadows. Or I could spend my life not doing what I want to do, and isn't that a sad way to live?"

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Score one for artificial intelligence

     The clematis have been on our front porch as long as I can remember. I don't recall planting them — either they were always there, or just showed up. Or, I suppose I could have planted them years ago and just forgot.

     Whatever the case, Monday, when I put out the flag to honor Labor Day, as I said the pledge, I noticed they had begun to bloom, in earnest, throwing open their white four blade propeller pedals to the world, and had a thought I've never had before:
     Why do they bloom in the fall? When most flowers bloom in the spring? Is there a reason?
     This must be well known — they are, after all, Sweet Autumn Clematis, and, somewhat incredibly, I did a deep dive into them three years ago, name checking Victor Hugo and Shakespeare, ranging from ancient Greece to Scottish poetry without raising the question that puzzled me now.     

     Not wanting to cheat and consult AI, I cracked open the Encyclopedia Britannica, and found them under the buttercup family, and read: "Clematis (clematis, or traveler's joy) with about 230 species in temperate regions especially in the Northern Hemisphere and in tropical mountains of Africa."

     And read. And read.

     Much discussion of leaves, tendrils, stems. "They are climbing plants..." No kidding. Then this surprise: "The flowers are principally bisexual." I guess they can't serve in the U.S. military then, or hold driver's licenses in Kansas. (Okay, that's trans citizens; work with me). The Britannica veered near the topic, "Perennial herbaceous species usually persist over the winter by means of a rhinzome or condensed rootstock, so that, with the death of the aerial shoots after flowering, a bud emerges from the rhizome or rootstock to give rise to the following years' shoots."

    Right. But why in the fall? I pushed on.

    Pedals. Ovules. Pollen sacs that generally open by valves. Some interesting stuff. But not to the point. 

    I gave up, sighed, and typed "Why do clematis bloom in the autumn?" into Google.

    "Certain clematis varieties, such as the Sweet Autumn Clematis, bloom in the autumn because they grow and flower exclusively on new wood produced during the current growing season." Along with a photo of my clematis. As if the AI knew.

     Following were three bullet points:

     — New wood growth: Unlike spring-blooming varieties that form buds on old stems from the previous year, autumn-blooming types start fresh each year. 

      — Time to mature: The plant needs the entire spring and summer to grow long vines and reach the size required to support heavy clusters of buds. 

     — Seasonal triggers: Shorter days and cooler late-summer temperatures signal the plant to finally open its fragrant white flowers, which last until the first frost. 

     Okay, I know my default has been that AI is balky and flawed and ridiculous. But it wins this round over the august Encyclopedia Britannica. I expect there will be a lot of that in the years to come. As I've said before: technology wins. 

''Work is play for mortal stakes'

     Robert Frost is like Norman Rockwell — an American icon who many wrongly assume to be a purveyor of mere kitsch — since his popular work obscures his more challenging material. Just as Rockwell's depictions of heart-tugging small town tableaus for The Saturday Evening Post — which, to be clear, are both technically brilliant and, to me, emotionally satisfying — are far better known than his unblinking looks at American racism for Look magazine, so Frost's two roads diverging in a yellow wood and wagon ride on a snowy evening eclipse more demanding poems like "Out, Out—" where a boy cuts his hand off on a buzz saw and dies.
     Frost plumbs the thorny questions of work and class, in poems like "The Death of the Hired Man," where farm couple Mary and Warren sit on the front steps musing on the return of Silas, the near tramp who has come by intending to help them hay their field, a poem containing the immortal lines, "Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in."
     On Friday, I looked at work through a different poet, Philip Larkin, author of one of my favorite poems, "This be the verse," one that I was lucky enough to deliver at the the Uptown Poetry Slam at the Green Mill, looking directly into the eyes of my older son, who deigned to attend:

      They fuck you up, your mum and dad

      They may not mean to, but they do. 

      They fill you with the faults they had

      And add some extra, just for you...

     The Larkin column drew some nice emails from that, but the best was from Joseph Harrison, who sent a link to Frost's poem "Two Tramps in Mud Time," which begins:

Out of the mud two strangers came
And caught me splitting wood in the yard,
And one of them put me off my aim
By hailing cheerily "Hit them hard!"

     Which echoes with "Out, Out—" where the doomed boy is also distracted, by his sister calling him to supper:                     

                                    At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—

     In "Two Tramps," nothing more dire comes from the interruption than one of the wanderers wanting to split the wood for pay that Frost is splitting, for free. Making it an apt poem for Labor Day.
     The appearance of the pair leads directly into to two dozen lines about the mercurial weather in April, which can read as a parable about how economic success can evaporate and hard times come on fast:

Be glad of water, but don't forget
The lurking frost in the earth beneath
That will steal forth after the sun is set
And show on the water its crystal teeth.

     Frost, like many a liberal, feels guilty to be doing for pleasure what others do to stay alive.

With what was another man's work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right—agreed.

     "The final stanza of Two Tramps is worth memorizing for times when young people ask for career advice," said Harrison. While I cannot imagine that any young person would ever ask me for career advice, nor grasp these lines, even if I could serve them up, which I couldn't, here they are anyway:

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.

     Although now that I re-read that, it seems awfully grand. And while I can't speak for Heaven, Frost certainly caught the future's eye, as this post is proof. For the rest of us, the considerable pleasure of doing the work, for love or money, and pleasing ourselves, if few else, will have to do. 

Flashback 1992: Wisconsin Shakespeare Just Plain Delightful

     The blog comments were disabled Friday, for reasons mysterious, but returned Saturday morning. The lacuna, annoying while it was going on, proved valuable, in that it reminded me how important comments are. To be blunt, I missed you guys. Saturday, after my field report on Little Louie's hot dog stand, regular reader Tony Galati mentioned Wisconsin's Mustard Museum, which sparked an "I've been there!" reaction. Thirty-four years ago. I'd have sworn I gave it more than the final paragraph of a story, but that is not the case. I was something of a trendsetter — I really like mustard — as its owner wouldn't be on David Letterman for another three years. This is also notable because it is not a column, but a travel story, though you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference. I did downplay my disgust at House on the Rock — I hated it so much I even hated my family, a little, for liking it, and only got through to the end by imagining calling in an air strike, the F-15s peeling out of the sky, in formation, firing their rampage missiles, me, from a safe distance, watching the whole thing go up with a satisfying "flumph!"

     The problem with getaway weekends is that everybody else in town seems to be always getting away to the same spot you are, so instead of escaping the city, you are only relocating a chunk of it.
     So it was with a certain amount of pleasure that I found myself in the decidedly unhip, genuinely off-the-beaten-trail town of Plain, Wis., with no noticeable points of interest other than being seven miles from Spring Green, where every vacant room was booked with urbanites flocking to the opening of the American Players Theatre's 13th season and to the pouting-puppy-in-stained glass, Emmett-Kelly-in-oils spectacle they call an art fair.
     All the Gothic mansion bed-and-breakfasts we would have normally booked ourselves into were filled, so we had to settle for the Kraemer House in Plain, which in its advertisements looks exactly like the regular, aluminum-sided, any-block-in-suburbia split level it is.
     I had my doubts, but the Kraemer House was a blessing in disguise. Since it was removed from the tourist-trap attractions of Spring Green, I instead had to explore the area around the house, which just so happens to be the sort of unspoiled farmland that makes us people who have at least four deadbolt locks on our doors feel we're really somewhere different.
     Early the first morning, while my wife slept, I took a stroll down Old Highway 23 and found myself walking through a landscape I had only previously seen in Marx farm playsets — mooing cows, flocking sheep, spindly windmills, old silos, growing corn.
     Equally uplifting is the American Players Theatre and its lovely outdoor venue, which also serves great, nearly homemade food and the always-welcome beer (try the Sprecher) and wine.
     I'll admit that, in my heart, I was torn between wanting to watch good theater and wanting my smug Chicago superiority confirmed by witnessing a lame Wisconsin stab at the Bard — a production that I dubbed "Cheesehead Othello."
     Thankfully, except for the costuming mistake of putting ridiculously huge musketeer hats on some of the principals, the production was first-rate: well-spoken, good swordplay, none of that standing-around-waiting-to-say-your-line body language that some regional productions feature.
     (The APT season runs through Oct. 4, alternating "Othello," "Much Ado About Nothing," "Our Town" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Performances are Tuesday through Sunday.)
     And, toward the end, when Desdemona says something about the heavens, there is the pleasure of angling your head up and taking in the stars, twinkling wildly, freed at last from the orange haze in Chicago.
     In addition to the theater we felt the need to take in the tourist sites of Spring Green. Having lived in Oak Park, we passed on Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin, one of the 100 or so examples of his brilliance within spitting distance of Chicago.
     Instead we subjected ourselves to a two-hour forced march through the Jacobian nightmare of the House on the Rock, Route 3 in Spring Green (608 935-3639), an everlasting monument to the idea that if you collect enough mouldering junk, 600,000 people will plunk down $13.72 a head to see it.
      There is no way to adequately describe the House other than to say it is a condensation of the dark, horrific underbelly of American culture, an historical atrocity of unrelenting creepiness offering up unrelated garbage - doll houses, odd figurines, doll-head vases, costume armor, old carriages, ship models, carousel horses, pipe organs and strange plants.
      We fled to the infinitely more-attractive Mustard Museum, 109 E. Main St., in nearby Mt. Horeb. A cheery, small, bright yellow store that offers, in addition to hundreds of mustards, a nose-tingling assortment of sauces, spices, condiments, chutneys, dips and toppings, a dozen or two of which are set out for liberal tasting by the owner and founder, Barry Levenson, a former Wisconsin assistant attorney general. Admission is free. (608-437-3986)