Who will save Chicago from George Lucas' Space Mountain?

     If cutting-edge architecture were pleasing to the masses of ordinary folk, then it wouldn’t be cutting edge, would it?

     So of course, being a regular Joe, my immediate, visceral reaction to Chinese architect Ma Yansong’s design for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, planned for the lakefront, was to sigh, then shake my head in bewildered sorrow, then jump onto Twitter to lay claim to what I hope will be its derisive nickname attached to it in the same way that Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” is affectionately referred to only as “The Bean.”

     “I’m not in love with George Lucas’ Space Mountain design,” I tweeted. “It looks like landscape of the planet the UFO landing on Soldier Field comes from.”

     A little awkward, that last sentence. But Twitter’s 140-character limit can throw you off your stride.

     “Space Mountain,” of course, is the cheezy roller coaster at Disney World.

     I am not an architecture critic, so I figured it is a done deal if they’re releasing the sketches, and understood that, not being an expert, the wonders of Yansong’s design were perhaps beyond my ken.

     So I was gratified to see that the Tribune’s Blair Kamin, who is an architecture critic, and a good one, gave both barrels to the Lost Alp last week, calling the “widespread public revulsion” toward the design understandable because “this cartoonish mountain of a building would be glaringly out of place” on Chicago’s lakefront. Amen.

     If you want to see where a building like this belongs, look at the Denver International Airport, a series of peaks not unlike a CGI droid army of the ski slope that George Lucas plans to build downtown. The style was sorta hip 20 years ago, but even located in the middle of a Rocky Mountain nowhere, it’s hard to view it kindly. I’ve been through it many times, and my primary thought is: I bet they saved a bundle, putting up a tent, as opposed to constructing an actual roof.

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Lucas museum

     If cutting edge architecture were pleasing to the masses of ordinary folk, then it wouldn’t be cutting edge, would it?
     So of course, being a regular Joe, my immediate, visceral reaction to Chinese architect Ma Yansong’s design for the  Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, planned for the lakefront, was to sigh, then shake my head in bewildered sorrow, then jump onto Twitter to lay claim to what I hope will be its derisive nickname attached to it in the same way that Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” is affectionately referred to only as “The Bean.”
     “I’m not in love with George Lucas’ Space Mountain design,” I tweeted. “It looks like landscape of the planet the UFO landing on Soldier Field comes from.”
     A little awkward, that last sentence. But Twitter’s 140-character limit can through you off your stride.
     “Space Mountain,” of course, is the cheezy roller coaster at Disney World.
     I am not an architecture critic, so figured it is a done deal, if they’re releasing the sketches, and understood that, not being an expert, the wonders of Yansong’s design were perhaps beyond my ken.

      So I was gratified to see that the Tribune’s Blair Kamin, who is an architecture critic, and a good one, gave both barrels to the Lost Alp last week, calling the “widespread public revulsion” toward the design understandable because “this cartoonish mountain of a building would be glaringly out of place” on Chicago’s lakefront. Amen.
     If you want to see where a building like this belongs, look at the Denver International Airport, a series of peaks not unlike a CGI droid army of the ski slope that George Lucas plans to build downtown.  The style was sorta hip 20 years ago, but even located in the middle of a Rocky Mountain nowhere it’s hard to view it kindly. I’ve been through it many time, and my primary thought is: I bet they saved a bundle, putting up a tent, as opposed to constructing an actual roof.
     Contemporary architecture can be aesthetic. Look at Jeanne Gang’s sinuous Aqua Tower. Everyone who lays eyes on it knew immediately it was something different, creative, interesting, beautiful. Even Frank Gehry’s Pritzker Pavilion bandshell; it might have been wildly out of place, a peeled back tatter of stainless steel permanently flapping in the wind, but it had its own internal energy and, more so, is obviously a Gehry, which allowed us to accept something that otherwise would be mocked, the way a metal baboon designed by Pablo Picasso was given a place of honor in the heart of our city, while an identical baboon designed by Pico Pablono would have been given the bum’s rush.  Maybe someday having a Ma Yansong will mean something; but that day is not now. It’s just a white tent with a halo, which looks like an artificial snow cap peak sporting a lenticular cloud.
     How to react? Surrender? You can’t win every time. Even a city as  noted as Chicago has its share of famous duds. I can’t pass by the salmon and blue monstrosity of the Thompson Center and not comfort myself by imagining Helmut Jahn tarred and feathered and being rolled down State Street in a tumbrel, with mobs lining the streets, shaking pitchforks as he heads to the Daley Center for his show trial, punishment for the aesthetic sins his building imposed.
      Or fight?  The Friends of the Parks, clinging to the idea that we don’t live in a city where the mayor can do anything he wants, so are pushing the antique viewpoint that building anything on our forever free and clear lakefront is against the law. And Rahm himself was cool to this mountainous mass, leading us to hope that this was just a sketch tossed off on a the napkin, with the actual design of the real building to come later.
     Not that anyone’s looking to newspaper columnists for ideas, but given that this whole project is honoring a Saturday afternoon movie cliffhanger space opera —Buck Rogers on steroids—the problem is they’re suddenly putting on modern airs. Why not build something based on Queen Amidala’s Thneed Royal Palace on Naboo, all domes and minarets and Iberian excess? It would fit right in with the Field Museum and  the other various Edwardian and Deco relics scattered around the museum campus. And the people who actually go to this thing will have their beloved movie world spread out in front of them, which I thought is the whole point of this; I mean, it isn’t really being built so that the public can view Norman Rockwell paintings without having to travel to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, is it?
If we are stuck with it, we’ll just have to look on the bright side. Suddenly the addition dropped on top of Soldier Field isn’t quite so god awful ugly, by comparison, is it?

"How can they even DO that?"

     For a few months now, the trusty old iMac has been regularly serving up stern messages, "START UP DISC FULL" which I at first ignored, and then tried to placate with a desultory housecleaning of applications I don't use and files that just sit there.
     Which bought me time. But time passed, and the problem would return. Lately, I go to save a regular document and I couldn't because there was no memory available, which even I know is a bad sign. I asked a tech guy at work, and he sent me a diagnostic that told me, of the 290 gigabytes of memory on my computer, more than half are home movies that I digitized five years ago, when I bought the thing.
     The obvious answer: buy a hard drive, slide the precious images of crawling babies and family barbecues over to it, free up space.
     The tech guy advised me to avoid the Apple store. Expensive, he said, looking disgusted, suggesting a slew of brands I never heard of, "Lacie' and such. ("L-A-C-E-Y?" I asked, wanly, thinking that didn't sound like a proper name for a technology brand). I looked online, but the drives I found cost $149, and no guarantee if they were right to the task. Plus the money would go to Amazon, which is in the process of taking over the world. And I'd have to wait until they got delivered. I ended up fleeing to the Apple store, because there would be a person there. A lot of people, actually. 
    "We must have come on Free Day," I muttered, as we joined the scrum. My 17-year-old came with me, for moral support—I find this kind of decision stressful, worried I'll come back with a useless device. "Oh, you bought the rat? You were supposed to buy the mouse!" 
     That changed the dynamic enormously. Instead of being a solitary quest, one I was certain to bungle, it was now a Father-and-Son Outing. The boy, normally the most indifferent of individuals, guided me toward to the new iMacs: bigger, thinner, yet costing the same: $1800.
     "Computers have cost $1800 my entire life," I told him. "I think my Kaypro cost $1800 in 1986."
     "Your computer is like 10 years old," he said, gravely. "You're not supposed to keep them more than a few years." I didn't even argue. 
     "It's very thin," I said. "Maybe I should just buy a new one." But I noticed that $1800 just got me in the ballpark. I'd be out $2500 before I knew it. ("You'll want the thermal core memory," the clerk would say, "and that's another $199, plus the $99 we charge you for adding the charge on your bill...")
     A man in blue came by, I explained my quest and he directed me to a wall of hard drives. The first drive I picked cost $499. I returned it, and after checking the backs of several boxes, found a G Drive Mobile USB which had 500 gigabytes and cost an encouraging $89.99, which seemed a bargain. Almost too low. "That's in Apple Dollars," the clerk would dryly explain. "An Apple dollar equals four regular dollars..."
    I wondered aloud what the difference was between the 90 buck drive and the $500 one. Maybe because it's orange, which must jack up the price. 
     "It's smaller," Kent explained. "For laptops."
     "Well, not an issue for us," I said, clutching the small box.
    I found another guy in a blue shirt, who offered to ring my purchase up, standing there -- no cash registers anymore. I handed him the box. He looked at it and made a face.
     "I'm going to swap this," he said, stepping over to the wall and putting it back, taking another. While he did, I pondered. The box hadn't been damaged, as far as I could tell. But he must have noticed something that made my drive unacceptable. What was this about?
     "Twice as much memory for $10 less," he explained, handing me a different box. One terabyte of storage versus 500 gigs. 
     My trust in Apple is such I never even looked at the price until I was in the car. While still in the store, I was grateful and slightly confused.
     "How can they even DO that?" I protested. I assume that twice as much memory means twice as much, oh heck, memory jelly, or something. 
     "I don't know," he said. "I just try to get you the best deal."
     I left feeling buoyed, like I had gotten a bargain. Twice the memory for 10 bucks less. I went home, unwrapped a black device and plugged it into the computer. Shifting the movies from iMovie onto the drive would have been impossible based on my technical skill, but Kent, suddenly keen to help, jumped online and showed me how, though each movie takes about 10 minutes to transfer. When I'm done, I imagine my computer will be clean as a whistle and good for a while more, until I work up the  courage, and scrounge the two grand, for the new, bigger, thinner, faster model. 
    The new hard drive is the size of a large cell phone, has a terabyte of storage, giving it more than three times the capacity of my entire computer. I tried to think about those movies actually flowing into it, but really couldn't come up with a mental image. I know that data is stored as zeros and ones, but how? What's inside there? Yes, circuits. Silicon. I squinted. I wish there were a way to conceptualize how this works, to really understand it. I worry that, someday, for most of the population, it will be a mystery, if not magic. Maybe that day is here already.


   

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     This portrait of perhaps the whitest Jesus, ever, is in the window of what is one of my favorite truly weird places in Chicago. I assume everybody who passes by has puzzled over this oddity; I actually went inside and tried to figure it out, and will post the column I wrote about it, years ago, after someone cracks the place.
      Where is this portrait, with the glyphic writing in the background (and the ode to the Constitution displayed atop the blog). Even though it might be easy, I just got a crate of "You Were Never in Chicago" from the University of Chicago Press, in hardback yet, and if you guess—remember, no Dales please, at least not until I walk him over his prize from the last time he won—I'll sign it to you, or whomever you please. Remember to post your guesses below. Good luck. 

"No, no... actually, it never struck me before..."

Margaret Dumont

    Much humor involves embarrassment; we laugh instead of cringing with shame, on our own behalf or for the sake of others. The Marx Brothers' crazy hijinks wouldn’t be nearly as effective performed by themselves in a locked room as they were in the middle of an elegant dinner party hosted by a horrified Margaret Dumont, struggling to maintain her dignity and a sense of order. Borat would have just been a disturbed Eastern European oaf, but played against a backdrop of earnest American politeness, he was hysterical.
     Of course, when something embarrassing happens to you, at the moment it is occurring and, often, for years afterward, that sense of fun can be elusive.
     Look at this bunny statue. It’s positioned by a tree in the front yard of a house on my block. I see it almost every day, walking the dog in that direction, and I think of ... well, I’m getting ahead of myself.
     Look closely at the photo. Note the position of the rabbit's paws The juxtaposition of the tree. What does that bunny look like he's doing?  Any thoughts? Perhaps does he look like someone relieving himself in an alley in Wrigleyville, right? Disposing of the last few innings worth of Old Style while glancing over his shoulder to check that the coast is clear, yes?
   Hold that thought a moment.
   I couldn’t tell you the bunny owners' name. A pair of landscapers. I wouldn’t recognize on sight. That happens with surprising frequency in suburbia. People keep to themselves. I've met this couple only once, that I recall, but it was memorable. Being introduced, looking for a topic of conversation, I  said: “I really admire the bunny statue in your front yard.”
     They looked at me blankly, and expression I took to mean: "Admire?"
     “I mean, it’s very wry, peeing against the tree like that. Wherever did you find it?"
     “I beg your pardon?” the wife said, confused.
      “Well, it’s a peeing bunny, right?” I said, trying to maintain my bright demeanor, but the smile slowly dying on my face. “It’s urinating against your tree.”
     They drew back, slightly.
     Gosh, the husband said, or words to that effect, exchanging embarrassed, where-did-this-idiot-come-from glances with his wife, “we never thought of it like that.”

     "No, no," the wife agreed, obviously horrified. "Not at all..."
     I’ve gone over the conversation a dozen times, and I really wish I could suspect they were dryly teasing me—I mean, look at the thing. How could you not view it that way? How could somebody not notice? But I don’t think they were pulling my leg. They were sincerely baffled.
     That’s why people are so often politely silent, and reluctantly make any kind of observation about anyone else. It's only smart. Because what seems obvious to you, might not be obvious to them. We are a world that slides along on the lubrication of self-deceit.
     To cite another example. I was at Harry Heftman’s final birthday party a few years back. Harry was, you might recall, the much-loved owner of the hot dog stand at the corner of

Harry Heftman, left

Randolph and Franklin whom I often wrote about. As I mingled, a column lede formed in my mind. The opening sentence would be: “Harry Heftman is looking old. Which is only fitting, because Harry Hefman is old.”
     That sounded good. But I know enough about people that I didn’t want to cause any distress to my friend Harry. So I cornered his daughter and asked, “Do you think Harry would mind if I called him 'old' in the paper?” I assumed she'd assure me that I should go ahead.
     Her face fell—she was genuinely horrified. “Oh no, you can't, “ she replied. “Harry would hate that.”
     Harry Heftman was 103 years old. I wrote nothing about his birthday party.
     It says something about vanity, about illusions, about the nature of our society, that a man turning 103 cannot be described as "old," just as I know I’d get in trouble if I called a 300 pound woman “fat.” The obvious is not always obvious, particularly to the person with the closest view.
     To their credit, the couple did not remove the bunny after I cast aspersions on its pose. I'd have hated that. My theory is that it was a comic bunny that they bought sincerely, missing the implications of its posture. Or heck, maybe it's an innocent bunny, and I've simply pissed against too many walls in my day and it's clouded my judgment.

     But it is a reminder that you should always be careful when pointing out something that you assume your listener is vastly familiar with. They may not be.
     It's funny to observe. The definitive example of this is found in Monty’s Python’s classic “Travel Agent Sketch” Eric Idle plays a would-be holiday traveller introduces himself as “Mr. Smoke-Too-Much.”
     “Well, you better cut down a bit then,” Michael Palin's travel agent ripostes.
      “What?” Idle says, taken aback.
      “You’d better cut down a bit then.”
      “Oh I see," he says, realization dawning. "Cut down a bit ... for Smoke-Too-Much."
       “Yes,  Ha ha. I expect you get people making jokes about your name all the time.”
       “No, no" the traveler says aghast, "actually, it never struck me before.”
       An exaggeration, of course, for comic effect. But only a little. That's how people actually are in real life. And why it's funny. When it happens to someone else.

"I would advise everyone I love not to mix with it."

     Honestly?
     The big Republican win Tuesday night didn't bother me much.
     I'm not sure why.
     Cynicism triumphant, perhaps. 
     Given what the Democratic majority in the Senate could accomplish—not much—the Republicans probably won't be able to inflict a lot of damage before they, in turn, are swept out, and it'll be fun to see them try.
     Of course, I'm not one of the 10 million Americans who got access to health insurance for the first time last year under Obamacare, and it'll be difficult to have it yanked away.
     Frankly, I can't quite imagine the Republicans are really going to do that, really kill a successful health care program out of their hatred of the man who created it. But maybe they will, though dismantling a system that is working pretty well, despite their best efforts. That isn't quite the path to the future, is it?
      Then again, none of what they're doing is the path to the future, and that's why I'm not too broken up about the current crop of right wing politicians who, playing our political musical chairs, found their ample butts squeezed into an elective office when the voters lifted the needle off the record.
     This all is cyclical, we should know by now, and the more the Republicans try to drag us back toward their cherished, imaginary past, the more we'll lurch into the future on the backswing, if we just wait a little. 
     The waiting is difficult, I know. But always remember: we're a nation that can't get rid of the penny. Change, even tiny, necessary, change, comes hard to us, to our shame.
     The bottom line, for me, is that while Republicans can ignore facts, facts do not in turn ignore Republicans. They live in our world too, though they don't seem to know it, to realize the realities underlying all this are true for both parties. Sure, they can build their coveted Keystone Pipeline now. But global warming is still real, and at some point we're going to have to pull back from fossil fuels. Maybe the damage won't be as bad as they predict; the world, after all, never did choke on overpopulation, did it? If Republicans have a way of ignoring looming disaster, Democrats have a way of overstating it. Nobody's perfect.
     The incoming Congress can seal the borders. But the country still grows more Latino day by day, and one fine day they're going to wake up, look blinking at one another, realize their numbers, and boom. Suddenly  immigration reform will happen, the way gay marriage suddenly happened, shifting from impossibility to done deal, seemingly overnight (to latecomers; for those fighting the good fight, it didn't happen so fast).
      Keep gay marriage in mind. Sure, Republicans might try to roll back the astounding progress we've made as a society, trying to keep their base of ignorant haters happy. But the change is already done. You can't unring a bell, as the lawyers say. The granite floor to the issue, the bedrock of fact—it can't be repeated enough—is that gay people make no worse spouses or parents than anybody else. Once we're standing solidly on that, it's going to be difficult—I think impossible—for the Republicans to shift the landscape so it's once again based on their little puddle of fear and religious bias. 
     I'm not so sure it won't be diverting to watch them try.
     The Democrats certainly have their share of blame. President Obama has been passive and aloof for months, if not years. I read a lot, yet have no idea what he stands for or what he intends to do, what he's willing to take a risk to achieve. Maybe he has no idea either. In the final analysis, when historians try to figure out what went wrong with him, you won't need too many masters degrees to realize he should have failed more, not less, should have engaged that golden mouth of his for a few causes he really, truly believed in, assuming they exist, no matter how well or how poorly they polled, and tried to ramp things up before the midterms, not put his ethics in a blind trust until after, cravenly trying to avert the disaster that came anyway. 
     Maybe if he had bothered to tell the American people what this election was about, before, they wouldn't have decided it was about him forgetting to be president. 
     I dislike politics, as a rule. It's like sports: the same thing happening over and over. The same overpaid egomaniacs spouting meaningless platitudes. I'm glad this election is over, and maybe we can have a few months respite before the next one begins, assuming it hasn't begun already, which it probably has.  These are not proud days for America, the country is lost in fog, sunk into inertia, screwing up at home and overseas. The Republican victory feels suited to the times. Here's the keys to the country, kids. Try not to smash it up too badly. Bring it back by 2016 when the Democrats will take it for a spin. 
     Then again, this is nothing new either.
     "Politics is such a torment that I would advise everyone I love not to mix with it," Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1800. Advice worth taking.

Hey Bruce, welcome to power, buddy!

      Well, umm, this is awkward.
      Bruce, I mean, Mr. Rauner. Or, rather, governor. Allow me to be the first from the media jackal pack to extend a paw in congratulations.
     I’m hoping we can work together, let bygones be bygones, striving as fellow Illinoisans to try to push our beloved state out of the ditch it has undoubtedly fallen into.
     Sure, hard things were said during the campaign, by both sides. Well, by me at least—you don’t say a whole lot, do you? 
     So hard things, said on almost both sides. But isn’t that always the case? (And heck, you should have seen the barbs that my editor cut out, reluctant to have anyone’s physical abnormalities held up to ridicule, even a rich and, judging by the late returns, suddenly powerful individual who does indeed have lips, thin though they may be. But ho-ho, the less said about that the better!)
     Although, I’d debate how much power an Illinois governor really has. Oh sure, back in the day, he could commute death sentences, and that put a little spine into what is in effect the CEO of a broke and struggling public company, to occasionally have the phone line kept open to the death house, the midnight vigil, the governor like Solomon, weighing the scales of justice, life and death. 
     George Ryan wrecked all that.  Now the governor is inspecting the latest butter cow at the Illinois State Fair and presiding over the general collapse of the American dream, as China sprints past us and we fade.
     What will you do to fix that? We need to gauge our expectations. Those of us who backed Barack Obama expected him to do something, and while the sorta health care system he kinda installed over the frenzied howls of people like you is indeed an accomplishment, particularly from the perspective of  all those who now have access to health care and don’t have to die, we thought there would be more. I sure did. When I look at his first six years, I thought he would close Guantanamo Bay, like he promised, and do something about immigration, and a few other festering problems that instead were left to fester for another 2,000 days.

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