Oh good, more public art...

     I've blasted public art in Chicago several times, but don't think I've ever explained what first sensitized me to it—when my wife was in law school, she wrote a paper on Irene Siegel's mural in Ravenswood's Sulzer Regional Library, a stark black fresco based on The Aeneid. Local residents and library patrons immediately hated the crude and graffiti-like artwork, protesting the work and suing to try to get rid of it. To no avail; it's still there. A reminder that you need to careful putting this stuff up because, once it's on our city streets, it can be very hard to take down. Not that art should be done by committee or put to a vote, but it was sad to have this brand new, classical and beautiful library open with one room turned over, with very little input from the people who would live with it, to this crude defacement with literary aspirations. I've searched the web for a picture of it; nothing. I'll have to head over this week and take some pictures. It's strange to have an image so controversial not be online -- none of the news articles include photos. Maybe a reader has one...

     Most art is garbage. I think we can all agree on that. You could take 99 percent of the paintings ever painted and burn them, using 99 percent of the poems ever written as kindling, and the world would be no poorer for it.

     It’s determining what constitutes the 1 percent worth keeping that sparks debate.
     I can’t decide if outdoor art is particularly bad because it’s not hidden away in museums and galleries, where at least you don’t have to look at it. Or because Chicago is uniquely cursed with particularly godawful public art, starting with Picasso’s rusty steel baboon (OK, he meant it to be a lady) in Daley Plaza, to Miro’s imbecilic brush-head doll across the street, to Dubuffet’s horrendous dirty white “Snoopy in a Blender” in front of the Thompson Center (because, you know, Helmut Jahn’s salmon and blue mounded monstrosity just isn’t ugly enough, not without a fiberglass whatsit jammed into the too-small plaza in front of it).

     Although, in defense of even the worst public art—that would be the stuff scattered around Oakton Community College, which makes my fingers itch for a blowtorch and a jackhammer—it could be argued that it is better than nothing, which must be the rationale behind the Langham Hotel's push to install Chinese artist Ju Ming's bronze tableau of 11 businessmen carrying umbrellas. A Crain's post by Abraham Tekippe reports that the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, which balked at allowing the scrum near the former IBM Building, the last American office building designed by modernist icon Mies van der Rohe, now says it'll be OK if moved by the river where, one assumes, the statue won't be so noticeable.
     The Sun-Times building used to be across the street from that plaza, so I am particularly familiar with it, and had to smile, in an ironic, rueful kind of way, to read the remarks made before the landmark committee. The plaza should "remain open," said an activist who himself lives safely across town.
     "Open." This being the same plaza where they installed posts crisscrossed with ropes in the winter, so that what few pedestrians dare navigate it have something to cling to against the canyon-fed gusts that, at times, blew out revolving doors on the building.
     The statue "does compromise the overall purity" of the plaza, another expert said.
     Well yeah, in the same way that building a house compromises the overall purity of a vacant lot. Mies' brutalist internationalism is a dead end; they were already slipping settees and coffee shops into the bare stone and glass box Mies inflicted upon Wabash Avenue. I have to see this new sculpture before judging, but if it injects a human scale into the severe, the Fueher-Will-Be-Pleased massivity of Mies' handiwork, I'm all for it.
     Art is too important to be left to artists, or their advocates. For instance, public statues should never be commissioned by grieving relatives. That's how you get ­­— sorry Pat — such oddities as the Jack Brickhouse sculpture in front of Tribune Tower, its pedestal crowded with carved achievements that would look excessive under a bust of Nebuchadnezar. As for the aborning Roger Ebert sculpture — sorry Chaz — well, let's just ask: What would Roger say about it?
     The good news is that we aren't actually stuck with public art forever; it just feels that way. Remember Jane Byrne's "Children's Fountain" in the middle of Wacker Drive? The one that Rich Daley had cut up and carted off, either as a necessary component of traffic improvement or as a big Screw-You-Jane - it isn't as if Daley will ever tell, about that or anything else.
     Art should affect people. As much as I personally dislike the Picasso, give it credit: Kids like to slide on the thing. Chicago is blessed with the most successful public sculpture since the Statue of Liberty: Anish Kapoor's 100-ton Bean (or, if you must, "Cloud Gate"). All you need do is watch how people react to the piece, how happy it makes them, the amazement it confers. That's why I liked that giant Marilyn Monroe installed, alas temporarily, next to Tribune Tower. Tourists loved it, loved posing next to it, loved looking up for a peek at Gigantic Marilyn's Gigantic Panties. It was fun, and took the edge off the Gothic horror show of Trib Tower, all flying buttresses and chunks of rubble that Col. McCormick pried out of actual landmarks across the globe.
     So welcome, bronze businessmen to the former IBM Plaza. At least soon there will be a reason to go there, once, to eyeball them. And good that the expanse of barren void will no longer be generally vacant, but always occupied by these 11 bronze guys, who can keep an eye on the cyclone-swirled trash. That's something to celebrate, maybe.

A reader notes that my mention, later in the column, of Rich Daley cutting up and carting off Jane Byrne's Children's Fountain suggests it's gone — which I thought it was. It was actually re-located to Lincoln Park in 2005. 

CTA Holiday Train wows kids, commuters

   

      ‘We’re waiting for the Santa Train,” said Sharon Moreira, of Riverside, sitting on a bench with daughter Izzy, 31/2, decked out in a pink Disney princess coat and Santa hat, on the Orange Line L platform at 4 p.m. one day last week at Midway.

     Officially, it’s the “Holiday Train,” CTA’s light-spangled, ribbon-wrapped, tinsel-draped, Santa-squiring contribution to Chicago’s Yuletide festivity, but “Santa Train” or “Christmas Train” will do just fine.

     “It’s a beautiful thing,” said Jorge Rivera, the train’s driver, who’ll keep it below 40 mph, instead of topping out at 55, in deference to Old St. Nick, braving the elements in his sleigh on an open flatbed car, posing for pictures with kids at each stop.
     But not posing for long. One aspect of the Holiday Train that might elude the causal observer is that though it is festooned with lights, staffed by CTA workers dressed as elves, handing out candy canes and Holiday Train schedules (which you can find online at transitchicago.com/holidaytrain) it is also a working L train, costing the usual fare, stopping at every stop, plying a regular route around the city from now until Dec. 23. Thus, its passengers are a mix of delighted children brought there especially by their parents to experience the Christmas magic, and regular commuters who just happened to step aboard this particular train in their journeys from points A to B.
     “It’s nice to have bright colors in the gloomy fog,” said Barbara Lamb, of Cape May, N.J., who had just arrived at Midway, along with her sister Carol Kennessy, of Denver, and the two were traveling downtown to meet other members of their family for a city reunion.
     They were surprised and pleased to find the Holiday Train waiting for them.
     “It was just here,” Lamb said. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, can we ride this?’ It’s amazing.”
     “It smells like cinnamon,” Kennessy said.
     That it does; cinnamon scent is wafted through the ventilation system (pine was tried, but riders complained it smelled like Pine-Sol) and Christmas carols burble over a PA system that also calls out station stops.
     The most unexpected aspect of the train, when you take time to examine it, is the detail. This isn’t a day’s work with crepe paper and tinsel. A complete six-car L train is pulled out of service in September, and the months of October and November are spent getting it ready. The seats are covered with reindeer and Santa material, advertising placards are replaced with ones ballyhooing the North Pole Barber Shop and, perhaps an echo of the hard times still at hand, toy-making jobs available at Santa’s workshop.
     The tradition began in 1992 with the CTA decorating an out-of-service train to deliver food baskets to community groups. The public was allowed on the train in 1996.
     The train pulled into the State/Lake station. Burl Ives singing “A Holly Jolly Christmas” was interrupted by an announcement. “This is the Holiday Train, making all stops.”
     One might think the CTA would have trouble coaxing employees into elf outfits to spend the month of December listening to carols and handing out candy canes. But the assignments are a perk, so popular CTA workers compete — in a contest of transit skills — for slots aboard the Holiday Train.
     “I like doing this, being among people,” said Sandra, a CTA employee who didn’t want to give her last name. “To see the excitement on the kids’ faces, even the adults. If you’re not in the Christmas spirit, you come on the train, listen to the music, and it puts you in the Christmas spirit.”

Visions of sugar plums danced in their heads

   

 There's not a lot of singing in "The Nutcracker." 
     Okay, there's no singing at all.  
     Which, as an opera buff, took me a while to get used to.
     Not a lot of plot development either. It's Christmas, in an well-to-do 1850s household. The boys get swords and bugles. The girls get dolls. Then a mysterious guest in a black cape arrives and dispenses more marvelous gifts, mechanical dolls that dance. An older girl, Clara, is given a nutcracker figure, which her naughty brother promptly breaks.

     As I watched the spectacle unfold Friday at the Auditorium Theater, opening night of the Joffrey Ballet's holiday favorite, which runs until Dec. 28, I idly wondered what it all was about. Not the story—that's plain enough, simplicity itself by opera standards. No mistaken identities, no jealous pharaohs or magic rings. But the subtext. What's the message here? Beauty, of course, and grace, and fantasies of young girls, and the luscious music by Tchaikovsky. "The Nutcracker" is about perfection, about heaven, achieved in our dreams at Christmas.
     In the first act, I suspected there might be some deeper, more subtle significance related to the boys, with their martial music, newspaper hats and drawn swords, swooping in and attacking the girls, on their knees, playing with their dolls. Maybe because earlier in the day I had viewed this video from Time magazine, "How Far We Haven't Come: All the Terrible Ways the Media Treated Women in 2013 in One Video." Gender politics was squirming uncomfortably in a chair at the back of my mind, waiting to have its say. 
      But "The Nutcracker" doesn't belong in Time's list. First, it's 120 years old. Nothing is more dreary than taking our supposed contemporary enlightenment and trudging off into the past to measure, judge and condemn things. It's ballet, an inherently sexist endeavor —the men lift the women, not visa versa. Chalk it up to biology, another inherently sexist endeavor, which still has a say in our world, whether we like it or not. And besides,  the Joffrey folk do the best with the material they've got -- Clara, I noticed, runs in and delivers a timely crack onto the head of the Mouse King, one of those see-we're-not-sexist moments so de rigueur in popular entertainments it is almost itself offensive. Or maybe I'm reading in too much. Maybe artistic director Ashley Wheater just needed to give Clara something to do at that point.
     Second, it's grand Russian ballet. I don't want you to think I sat there trying to extract great sociological meaning out of it. (I was trying to keep my eyes open — not to take anything from the performance, but it's been that kind of week). I just settled in my seat, occasionally pinching an earlobe, hard, with a fingernail to focus my attention, and listened to the music, watched the smooth, graceful, precise and beautiful dance, and enjoyed. As with "La Traviata" last month, I lack the technical facility or depth of knowledge to properly critique the thing -- nobody fell over, that I noticed, or dropped another dancer, or collided with any scenery a la the hippos in "Fantasia." The Sugar Plum fairy, April Daly, was a perfect specimen of dancer who seemed to do exactly what she was supposed to do with flawless precision. The children were delightful and enthusiastic. The costumes were lovely, dresses of teal and purple and rose and deep blue. The set too. I even enjoyed the audience, which was well freighted with tall, enthusiastic young girls with muffs and spangled headbands, one of whom, maybe seven, practiced her pirouettes at intermission in the lobby of the Auditorium, her hands folded over her head, spinning lightly around, a prima ballerina by the popcorn counter. That alone was worth going to see.


Photos courtesy of the Joffrey Ballet/copyright Cheryl Mann
     

A is for Atheist

     If people spent more time focusing on what they themselves believe and less time obsessing over what everybody else believes, or doesn't believe, we'd live in a better world. I believe I'd like to walk across Daley Plaza without having the earth's major religions conducting a weird holiday beauty contest one month out of every 12. It isn't as if Christmas — or Hanukkah, or Kwanza, or atheism—would get overlooked if the government didn't dedicate its land to drawing attention to it.

     Readers sometimes accuse me of being an atheist, based on my complete non-belief in God. I always correct them. I am not an atheist. Atheists are zealots, too, elevating denial of the divine into a kind of faux religion, complete with pieties, and manage to be as aggressive and joyless as those who at least can blame a higher power for making them the way they are.

     Rather, I am an agnostic. Agnostics know what we know but don’t make such a fuss. We’re the Unitarians of the non-belief community.

     Why? Rob Sherman for one. Anyone who has lived here long remembers the Buffalo Grove atheist gadfly, storming into board meetings, trying to get crosses off of water towers in such a heat of unpleasant legalistic dudgeon that it indicted the very notion of opposing government-endorsed faith. Northbrook could paint the bleeding heart of Jesus Christ on its water tower and I’d hesitate to complain, thinking of Rob Sherman.

     Maybe that makes me timid.

     For instance, I was not glad to see that the Freedom From Religion Foundation has erected a white plastic “A” at Daley Plaza.  
     "Very Hester Prynne-ish" my editor sniffed, though it stands not for "Adultery" but for "Atheism" and "Agnosticism" and a bunch of other free-thinking concepts.
     Let's put this new public pronouncement of belief, or rather, non-belief, in context.
     There is the 57-foot official Chicago Christmas tree, a gorgeous Colorado blue spruce festooned with 51,000 colored lights.
     Then, a polite distance away, a brutalist 20-foot stainless steel menorah — the sort of menorah the Germans would have erected at the Nuremberg rallies if, you know, they were into that kind of thing.
     Next to the menorah, a life-size Nativity scene with real straw and, lest anyone miss the point, a chiding placard noting that it was paid for by private donations from those who "wish to keep CHRIST in CHRISTMAS." (And who is taking Him out? We nonbelievers, striding into your churches, disrupting your services? No? Oh, you mean people who don't share your faith pointing out that they live here too and maybe you should consider honoring your particular religion in your own church? Yes, that is tough).
     Not that I mind. Honestly. Have fun. I like Christmas. Carols. Lights. Cookies. It isn't my faith, true, but then Scarlett Johansson isn't my wife, yet I don't mind seeing her either.
    The distinction I make is between celebration and castigation.
    The city tree is a celebration. The creche and the rest, castigation. Protected speech, true, though you wonder what happens when Muslims and Buddhists, Scientologists and Taoists all stake out spots. What the war-on-Christmas crowd doesn't get is there are lots of religions, and if they all set up shop on Daley Plaza soon there wouldn't be room for the big faux German Christmas folk village that's already taken over the place.
     When you're not really a victim, pretending to be one feels good, to you, because you don't understand suffering, so can shroud yourself in the unearned dignity that those who have actually felt oppression — at the hands of your forebears, as it turns out — are entitled to. Those who complain about Christmas being edged out of the public realm are like singers who complain that they can't put on blackface and sing "Swanee River" in a minstrel show. Yeah, that's a shame, but there's history here. Christians have been shoving their faith down people's throats at pain of death for a thousand years, and the key miracle of modern society has been prying their fingers off the levers of government, science and education. Maybe if Christian zealots weren't ripping pages out of textbooks, maybe if they were weren't yanking contraceptives out of women's purses, then Christmas would be welcomed by all faiths. But they do, and thus holiday trappings are a reminder of who has the whip hand, still.
     Agnostics get this. Atheists, well, they're putting up their big plastic A between the shame-on-you creche and Albert Speer's menorah. With a placard, "to encourage the non-religious to come out of the closet."
     OK. I'm out. And here's what I wish you atheists would do. Find something you think is significant and do it. On the day of the winter solstice, don elk antlers and prance around a bonfire at Daley Plaza. I'll join you.
     People sincerely expressing their religion in a public space seldom run afoul of anyone. The Chicago Police do not chase carolers off city sidewalks. Hasidic Jews can dance their brand new Torahs off to new homes. Muslims find a quiet corner and pray.
     For some, that isn't enough. They want to take their faith, or non-faith, roll it into a tube and bop the rest of us on the head. It's not subtle and not joyous and not welcome.

Ignore the pea pods

     Work is always there. It waits for us, or sometimes doesn't wait. Sometimes it stalks us.
     Lately it has been, not just stalking, but smacking the back of my calves with a stick whenever I've paused for breath. Not just the column four days a week, with additional days tossed in here and there as need be. That's a given, like getting dressed in the morning. Nor the book, which is actually done, but has entered into a tricky legal phase, securing literary permissions, which is even more arduous than writing it was. This daily blog, of course, but that's like the column, just part of the fabric of the day. Nobody objects to breathing, to brushing their teeth in the morning. You have to do it, so you do it.
     That's the baseline work. Then other tasks are added,, it begins to pile up, and the extra load tends to make the old camel's back sag a little. In New York, Audible is recording an audio book of my memoir "Drunkard"—beginning today, in fact —and I had to work with the actor doing the recording, checking pronunciations and such. Plus —idiot that I am—I started sending him re-writes of sections that got changed in the book, parts that I hated being changed, including a new ending. So there I am, in the basement, dragging old manuscripts out of boxes. A normal person would have let it go, but as I always tell new writers, if you don't care about your writing then nobody else will either. Then add this -- better not say exactly, so as to not jinx it —big honking profile for a big honking magazine I've been writing for the past month, a story that just gets bigger and more honking as I try to make it smaller and smoother. The magazine says, "Great work, do this and that and this and that." By now, I just wish somebody would take the damn thing away from me, which probably means it'll go through another few re-writes. Then I had promised a pal in Paris that I would write a post to run on her blog next week while she's away in Sri Lanka, so I put together something on Com-Ed faux buildings hiding electrical substations. And....
     This isn't complaining. At least I hope it isn't complaining, or bragging, at least not complaining or bragging too much. I like to work. This is what I built up my whole life to do, and I'm grateful and happy to be doing it, albeit a tad on the giddy, punchy, exhausted side for the past few days. When people ask me how I get so much done, I fix them with a steady gaze and say in a flat tone, "I don't watch television. I don't play golf. I don't have friends in the usual sense of the term. All I do is write." It is a joke, sort of, and they laugh, which they're supposed to, but as with any joke, there's a vein of truth running through it. Not regarding the friends—I have many good, old friends, so don't please, don't get your noses out of joint and stomp off, sulking for years, the way my friends sometimes do. No slight intended. Love you guys, the ones who are left, I mean. But they do tend to live in distant cities, which is probably how I've kept them as friends, and those who don't, well, they aren't bursting into the room like characters in a TV show to tell a few jokes and move the action along. Which is just as well, because I've got all this work to do.
     One thing I've noticed about work, and this might be particularly true in writing, but I'm sure it applies to all professions, is that it's self-limiting. If you do it too much your quality breaks down. I hope my quality hasn't broken down too much. Though I woke up this morning and my head felt like an empty shoe box held on to my shoulders with Scotch tape. I waited for it to pass and it did, thank God, and I was able to get a good grip on the stone and roll it a little up the mossy, steep hill. But it also was a message to take a breath. Not here of course. These posts are fun. But time for a break from the other stuff—thank God my younger boy and I are going to Colorado to visit my folks at the end of the month, and even ski a bit. Can't wait. You need to know when to ignore the pea pods for a while, as this woman at the China Town Restaurant on Dempster in Morton Grove was doing on Friday. When I took the photo, drawn by the big pile of green pods, I assumed she was doing the books—my fault for stereotyping—but if you look closely, she's isn't doing work, she's playing some kind of video game. 

Block 37 — still cursed, but now serving snacks

     In the pantheon of urban development nightmares, there is really only one city block that can be described as famous or, more precisely, infamous: Block 37.

     Notorious as “cursed” and “a boondoggle,” the area bounded by Randolph, Washington, Dearborn and State sat mostly empty for 20 years, poorly masked by various half-efforts to hide its yawning vacancy in the heart of the Loop: an ice skating rink; an arts and crafts festival.

     In 1996, a book was published about the doomed efforts to make something take hold there. Ross Miller’s, “Here’s the Deal,” deemed it a “fiasco,” cataloging years of lawsuits and protests over the “gold-plated hole in the ground.”

     Finally, in 2009, a four-story mall opened.

    Then the trouble really began: bankruptcy; more lawsuits; 70 percent vacancy.

     It says something about the outer Neptune orbital ring of Chicago consciousness the north half of the block occupies — CBS Studios is on the southern part, lifting the curse there — when the idea of actually stepping into an establishment on Block 37 never crossed my mind until Monday, after I noticed the Doughnut Vault’s distinctive cornflower-blue 1957 van parked on the sidewalk directly under the Dearborn entrance to what is boldly (or foolishly) called “Block Thirty Seven Shops on State.” 

     If Block 37 exerts a repulsive force on profits and customers, the Doughnut Vault is the opposite, exerting a magnetic, indeed, mesmeric, power. I bought a doughnut even though I wasn’t hungry and didn’t want one.
     I was chatting with Derek, the guy in the van, when a frantic publicist, seeing my notebook, waylaid me, insisting on personally escorting me that instant into Block 37. It all happened so quickly, it was a little discombobulating, as if a hatch opened in the Bean and a gnome yanked me inside. I would have preferred a bit of ceremony, the way buses entering Jerusalem will pause to let the occupants weep and sing and pray.
     The mall has been open four years, but the second floor has the raw feel of a space opening next month. There is one store.
     Otherwise, a corner of the vacant second floor has been taken over by Nosh, the pop-up food fair that has been appearing at farmers markets like the Green City Market in Lincoln Park and in Logan Square.
     "It's a little slow," admitted Aaron Wolfson, owner of Chicago's Dog House, shooting for a Hot Doug's vibe with exotic franks. I tried the $8 smoked alligator sausage with caramelized onions and sweet chili sauce. Mmm. Another high point was Lindy's Chili, which you normally have to haul yourself to the South Side to experience.
     "We've been doing it a long, long time, so we've got it down," said Rich Wierenga, who owns "the best two" of Lindy's seven Chicago-area outlets, and who showed the proper South Sider's contempt for those north of Roosevelt Road. "It's interesting," he said, of selling chili in the Northlands. "We get a lot of requests for vegetarian chili." By "interesting" he means, I assume, "disgusting in a way that instills me with amusement and contempt" since Lindy's, open since 1924, does not sell vegetarian chili and never will.
     The various restaurants, caterers and full-time pop-up food purveyors won't all be there every day; they rotate. For instance, the Doughnut Vault van is not coming back. So there probably isn't much point to reviewing each of the various booths. Karl's Craft Soup ladled out an interesting smoked-pumpkin bisque, apologizing for failing to master the expected heating technology - one assumes they're fixing that. Gayle Voss has an interesting backstory. She represents Prairie Pure Cheese at farmers markets and found herself next to a Bennison's Bakery booth selling bread. Nearby, fresh butter, and thus was Gayle Grilled Cheese born.
     If you do go, after eating your fill, make sure you wander up to the third floor to gaze respectfully on the expanse of closed stores, noting the brave, sad mural showing the busy, successful food court that isn't there.
     Visit soon. First, Nosh (open 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.) disappears Dec. 13. Second, there is no reason to assume the block's woes are over. One expects a sulfurous hell mouth to open up next, sucking the building down, or a meteor to hit, or some other kind of strange, nowhere-else-but-here calamity. Nothing should be surprising at this point.
     What Block 37 needs is not pop-up food, but an exorcism. Get Bishop Paprocki up here from Springfield. If he can cast out the demon of tolerating gay people, then a simple city block that somehow ran afoul of the Great Karmic Wheel and became accursed by fate should be a snap.

Critical Cycles

    

    
    Somewhere along the line the idea of style and expense became fused in the public mind. Or maybe it's just me. I noticed this bike Monday, locked on Randolph Street, because of its clean lines and unusual orange rims and hand grips. Then the name on the frame,"Critical," leapt out, one of those moments when life seems to become a Greek chorus directing some kind of sly remark at you. "Critical? Why yes I am. What of it?"
     I assumed the bike had to be a costly couture bike, made of titanium perhaps, designed to be shown off more than ridden. Wrong. Critical Cycles, "America's on-line Urban Bike Shop," based in California, slogan "Happiness on Two Wheels." This bike, their Fixed Gear Single Speed Fixie Urban Road Bike: $219, with free shipping. Made in China, natch.
    I can't vouch for the bike itself. Some glowing reviews online, some dismissive ones, claiming that it gets beaten up too easily. But the machine sure looks nice. Doesn't it? One reason the front wheel is so clean is that it doesn't have any front brakes -- "fixed gear," if you are unfamiliar with the term, as I was, means that there is no mechanism that allows the pedals to remain stationary while the wheels turn. This saves weight, and means that you can also slow the bike down using the pedals, thus less need for front brake stopping power (some riders dispense with the rear brake too, though the company discourages this). Fixed gear riding also "gives you a feeling of oneness with your bike," the company claims, "similar to driving a stick shift."
     And "Critical Cycles"? You have to admire the name. Maybe from a closet electronics geek, "critical cycle delay" being a problem in integrated circuit design. Although, to me, it sounds like a term that describes how a particular writer or artist falls in and out of favor as time lopes along. "Strindberg passed through several critical cycles before reaching his current popularity." Now that I think of it, the company name has to be a stab at borrowing a bit of the cool from the "Critical Mass" bike rides that draw hordes of bicyclists to reclaim city streets by weight of numbers. Though between the Divvy bikes and the dedicated bike lanes downtown, it seems that bicycles have achieved a critical mass in the heart of Chicago already, with no packs of riders necessary. 
     A pretty bike, this, though I'm hanging onto my black Schwinn Cruiser, with its balloon whitewall tires, coaster brake and fat ass saddle.  So uncool, it achieves a kind of transcendent coolness all its own, in my own eyes if nobody else's. Of course that's nothing unusual: most coolness is both self-assigned and illusory.