Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

   
     The problem with paintings in public spaces is they tend to be garish modern works of the lowest quality, bought no doubt by the square meter from art farms in China. Or generic seascapes in doctors' office, of similarly bland, lifeless, unaesthetic works, a vast assemblage of the unskilled and the unmemorable.
    Then there is this, spied in a public building in one of the suburbs ringing Chicago. It caught my eye for the almost Seurat-like pointillist style, the nice use of complimentary colors, green and orange, and the lovely young lady in the center who is, upon second glance, doing something quite out-of-the-ordinary.
    Yes, there is a certain amateurism about it—that's a hint—if you look to the left to the rude rides of grassland abruptly yielding to brown, like a stripe in a flag, the way the water seems to pull up a foot from it, or how the young lady seems to be more hovering above the water than sitting on the grass.
     So where is this? I'll give you another hint: it's not in a museum, obviously, though I suppose it could get away with being folk art. A difficult challenge requires a better-than-usual prize, so no poster. The winner gets a copy of my new book, "Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery," written with Sara Bader, and published a week from Monday by the University of Chicago Press. Place your answers below, and good luck.

Postcript
    An alert reader, Tate, points out that this painting is an homage to Pissarro's "Woman Bathing Her Feet in a Brook" in the Art Institute. 

Criticize me and you criticize everyone like me

     Being black and being stupid are two entirely separate, independent conditions. Blackness does not make you stupid any more than stupidity makes you black. If it did, a lot of Donald Trump supporters would wake up aghast to find themselves suddenly African-American (though not as horrified as African-Americans would be to suddenly have all these Trump supporters in their midst).
     The two conditions can, of course, reside in the same individual, such as former Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun who was both black and dumber than a rock. She manifested this in a variety of alarming ways, including, as I pointed out during her quixotic bid for mayor in 2011, by ballyhooing a deeply flawed poll that suggested she would defeat Rahm Emanuel which, let the record show, she did not.
     When I wrote a column elaborating upon that theme, Moseley-Braun howled that I was a racist — you can go on YouTube and see videos of her minions picketing the paper, demanding I be fired — arguing that to criticize her was to criticize all African-Americans.
     This came to mind when the senator currently holding her seat, Mark Kirk, said Barack Obama was “acting like a drug dealer in chief” and Kirk’s opponent, Tammy Duckworth, called the remark “unhinged,” which Kirk denounced as an attack on all stroke survivors everywhere.

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A brief visit to Seattle

     Eric Zorn asked if I've ever told this story on the blog, and I said no, I don't think I have. While it is probably much improved by being told in person, with me goggling my eyes and wildly gesticulating to emphasize the quivering horror of the thing, I will do my best to convey it here with all the brio at my disposal.
    The subject is book signings, an odd ritual of authorhood occasionally remarked upon, usually to underscore the humiliation of sitting at a table in the back of a bookstore, puffing out your cheeks, watching strangers cast you indifferent glances as they hurry past to the cookbook section. Every writer goes through one of those. 
     I try not to worry about book signing disasters, since I've already had the worst signing humanly imaginable, at the old Barnes & Noble on Diversey. They put me in the coffee shop at the section of the store. My wife and a pair of our oldest friends had tagged along; the idea was to share in my glory, but they turned out to be unfortunate witnesses. Some harried clerk introduced me at a podium. The dozen or so folks sitting at tables, drinking coffees, busily cribbing from Foder's guidebooks they were too cheap to buy, swiveled their heads up in unison. I began to read. Their heads swiveled back down, again in unison. I soldiered gamely on, my voice both amplified and muted at the same time. Chairs scraped. People came and went. Old friends greeted each other, loudly. Sweat cascaded down my face. It was so awful I really don't have much of a memory beyond that. If my wife told me she sponged me up with a mop, a puddle of shame, and carried me home in a bucket, I couldn't contradict her with confidence. 
      That wasn't the incident Eric had in mind. Too bleak to make a good story. 
      I should point out, that I have had my share of successful signings. I don't want to paint myself as a sad sack. I once spoke at the Arizona Kidney Foundation's literary luncheon and, afterward, 247 people stood in line and bought a book. I remember the number distinctly and, if I ever get a tattoo, I think it would be "247." 
    But signings are a random thing, and success one day doesn't guarantee success the next. The Arizona triumph was for my "Failure" book, which was published by Doubleday, a big publishing house that, in the pre-Internet mid-1990s, would send authors around promoting their work. They arranged to send me to Seattle in October, 1995.
     I wasn't sure if I should go at all. My wife was more than eight months pregnant. What if she had the baby early? We decided I was really only a few hours away—I would phone from the airport in Salt Lake City, where there was a layover, and if labor had started, I would turn around and immediately fly home.
    As the event approached, another reality began to dawn on me. The signing was on Oct. 17, at an hour which also happened to be the middle of the sixth game of the American League Championship series at the Kingdome between the Seattle Mariners and the Cleveland Indians. Nobody but nobody was going to skip the ballgame and go to my signing. I was tempted to duck out myself, and go see my beloved Indians play. I grew up, remember, in Cleveland.
    "You have to cancel this!" I begged the publicist.
    That was impossible, she informed me, I was doing television—some forgettable midday news show on KOMO. I was doing radio. We had to fulfill our obligations. No canceling. 
     I flew out like a man condemned. Met at the airport by Chic, my handler, a man in his 50s. That is an actual job: squiring authors to publicity events, or was, I imagine it has melted away along with so much involving words. But at the time the publishing house not only sent you to cities to drum up publicity, but when you arrived there was a perky local fellow or gal to take you where you needed to go, chatting all the way about actual authors, authors other than yourself, that he has been privileged  to meet. A sort of primitive Uber.
      He took me to the Hotel Alexis, a small boutique hotel downtown. I repaired to the bar for a few quick Jack Daniels. The wonder isn't that some authors drink, but that they all don't. Then we were off to my signing.
      I can still see the Borders in Tacoma, Washington as we approached, lit up like a cruise ship on a flat sea, the parking lot. A couple cars—staffers—and nothing. Lines on asphalt. We were met by a bookstore clerk who, at least in my green-tinged memory, was wringing his hands in embarrassment. He conveyed us to a back section of the store, where there were 30 chairs set up and a lectern and a metal pitcher of water.
     I can see the chairs, empty but for the clerk, gamely holding down the first row. I can see the pitcher, the beads of condensation on it. The empty glass.
    So what do you do in a situation like this? What is the graceful, charming way to redeem the situation? Pour a slug of water, crack open my book, glance around at the empty chairs and, with a brisk, welcoming nod, begin to read.
      Eventually, a couple drifted by. In my memory they are a "hippie couple," a pair of moldy 1960s sorts with stringy hair, the sort of people who would be at Borders in the middle of the Mariners/Indians playoff game at the Kingdome. They perched tentatively on their chairs. So now I had an audience. I began to read with extra gusto. But something about their body language said they were poised to flee. Very quickly I stopped reading, closed the book, and addressed them directly. 
    "You're not going to buy this book, are you?" I said, breaking the fourth wall. Perhaps the lingering effects of those bourbons.
     They looked at me, befuddled.
     I reached into my jacket pocket, withdrew my wallet and removed a business card.
    "Tell you what," I said, leaning over the podium, waving the business card in the air. "Take my card. Buy the book. If you don't like it, send the book back to me and I'll refund your money."
    Still silence. They sat there, looking at me, perhaps wondering if they could make a break for the door with me in howling pursuit. 
     We looked at one another.
     "Okay," I said, improvising. "How about this. Take my card. I'll go to the register with you and buy you the book, for you. Read it, and if you like it, send me a check."
     That worked, not in that they let me buy them the book, but that it shamed them into buying it themselves. I observed from a respectable distance as they performed the transaction. They never asked for a refund.
      Later that night, in the hotel bar, I discovered the Indians had won the pennant for the first time since 1954. I flew home the next day. Exactly one week later, my son was born.
     The moral? As I tell young authors, if you don't care about your writing, then nobody will. Sometimes you fly to Seattle to sell one book. I've actually performed greater feats of desperate salesmanship than pressing a book on that couple. Once, in Washington, D.C., at another solitary signing, I convinced a bookstore clerk to buy the book. The idea of these trips is to move copies. They're hard enough when a publishing company underwrites your trip, but an even more queasy odyssey when you pay for them yourself—which is what I'm doing when I go to Cleveland, which sparked this whole book signing conversation in the first place.
     What's another couple hundred bucks after nearly five years of work? People make the mistake of valuing their money but not their time, when it should be the other way around. The ash heap of those five years sits cooling behind me, the only tangible product, this new book in my hands. The trip, striking another match that might or—much more likely—might not set anything ablaze. Maybe there's some guy who's going to be browsing in that Barnes & Noble, someone who'll hear my voice, wander over, and his life will be changed. Could happen. But you never know, and if you don't try, well, you know how that works out. You know the butterfly effect: who knows what ripples of success will echo forth from that 1 p.m. signing at the Barnes & Noble in Crocker Park on Sept. 17? "It is," as I tell my boys, "called 'trying.'" Or put a better way.
    "I will be conquered," Samuel Johnson once said. "I will not capitulate." 

A Cell by any other name will smell as sour

    Whenever the corporate naming of ballparks comes up, I try to remind people that "Wrigley Field" is also product placement, named for a brand of chewing gum. It doesn't seem that way because we've had it for so long Wrigley feels like it was named by Abner Doubleday, and many no doubt suspect the gum took its name from the field. It didn't. 
     So I am not broken up by the change, announced Wednesday, of U.S. Cellular field to "Guaranteed Rate Field." Yes, such names evoke David Foster Wallace's classic "Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment." Yes, I imagine "Guaranteed Rate" is a new, utterly meaningless company to most people—that might be why they're putting money into naming baseball fields. (Founded in 2000, it is a mortgage company, at least based in Chicago, so there's comfort there). 
     But the honest truth is I don't have a dog in this race. As a North Sider, I've always said that I'd rather pay to go to Wrigley Field than go to U.S. Cellular for free, and that holds true whatever they call it. The Cell is an ugly, unpleasant place to see a ballgame, and changing the name won't change that. South Siders will disagree, but then, they always do. 

A lavish lifestyle and business success are not the same thing

Alberto Giacometti, "The Nose," Hirshhorn Gallery, Washington, D.C.

     I’ve been on Fox News more than I’ve watched it.
     That might be a slight exaggeration. They did go on about a column of mine earlier in the summer. And I was a local Fox pundit for about a year, adding my little segments to the end of the 9 p.m. broadcasts. I said anything on my mind — once I compared opera and hockey (better music at operas, better looking fans at hockey games). The checks cleared, and I’d be doing it still but a new regime took the program in a different direction. Or not — as I said, I never watched the show, I was just on it.
     I did tune in for Fox’s GOP debate, the one where Megyn Kelly so upset Donald Trump by asking him pointed questions as if he were running for president. I was impressed with the journalistic job Fox did.
     That rigor seems to have been an exception based on the latest tempest swirling around another Fox host, Sean Hannity, who is rolling at Trump’s feet like a puppy. Having never watched Hannity, I’ll have to trust the judgment of others.
     “Fox News host Sean Hannity isn’t just shilling for Donald Trump,” Erik Wemple wrote in the Washington Post. “He’s not just orchestrating applause for the candidate’s most abhorrent policy positions. He’s not just facilitating and reciting every Trump talking point in marathon interviews. . . . He’s also advising the candidate.”

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Fortune (sometimes) favors the bold

     The biggest catastrophe's are covered by the sands of time. If that isn't clear, tomorrow is Aug. 24, and if Aug. 24 does not resonate—and I imagine it doesn't—just remember that Sept. 11 will also be just another day in a string of same, if we wait long enough. 
     Aug. 24, 79 A.D. was the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, burying the ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Not the sort of anniversary the media typically notices, and to be honest, I might have overlooked it, had not we visited the H & M downtown last week. 
     Notice the shirt above, as I did, waiting for the boys to pick out their purchases. The "good" is some fashion designer's notion; it's implied in the general saying, common for nearly 2,000 years, that "Fortune favors the brave."
     Unless it isn't implied. Because while the line did become an aphorism, it originated, or at least be most famously used, in Virgil's reworking of Homer, "The Aeneid." There, in book X, the Latin is "audaces fortuna iuvat"—"fortune speeds the bold" — uttered by Turnus, rallying his men to fight anew on the beach. 
     Though there might be some irony at work here. "Speeds" is not the same as "favors." Your bravery could be hurrying you toward doom, which is kinda what happens to Turnus. Yes, he wins  his duel, planting a spear into Pallas' chest. But this enrages Aeneis, and the gods, who basically boot Turnus away from the field of battle.  He does not end well.
    Seeing the shirt did not make me think of Virgil, however, that would be pretentious. The truth is worse. It made me think of Pliny the Younger, who was 17 years old when Mt. Vesuvius erupted. Twenty-five years later, he wrote a letter to the historian Tacitus describing the death of his uncle, Pliny the Elder, who commanded the fleet.  
    "On 24 August in the early afternoon, my mother pointed out to him the appearance of a cloud of unusual size and form," Pliny the Younger writes.
     In his account, Pliny the Elder orders a fast ship, and invites his nephew to come with him. "I replied that I should prefer to continue with my studies," another example of the under-appreciated life-saving qualities of studiousness.
     So Pliny the Elder sets out to save a relative who was close to the eruption: "He hurried to the place others were fleeing from, setting his course straight for the dangerous area."
     Ash rains down on the ship, then pumice and burnt stones. "My uncle hesitated a bit, wondering whether to turn back, but then said to the helmsman who warned him to do just that, 'fortune favors the brave.'"
     Not in this case. Though Pliny the Elder boldly made landfall unscathed, he decided to push his luck and linger there. The gases and fumes overcame him and he died. So yes, sometimes fortune favors the bold, and others boldness speeds you to destruction. Worth bearing in mind. Fortune may — or may not — favor the bold, but safety hangs around the meek. 

Donald Trump and the Bottomless Pit

     If you plug "bottomless pit" into Google, as I just have, the results are surprisingly slim. There are many references to a musical album of that name, and some Bible citations—a bottomless pit is opened in the Book of Revelations. 
    But no comprehensive cultural examination. So I'm going to have to wing it. There is something juvenile about bottomless pits—they seem, along with hot lava, to be the type of perils conjured up by  very young boys on playgrounds.  Guessing they might also show up in dusty adventure stories, in 1001 Tales of Arabian Nights and such, I began looking in the Tarzan books, which had a single reference.  When I shifted to the downscale Roy Rockwood boys adventure novels, there was the 1930 Bomba the Jungle Boy on the Underground River, or, The Cave of Bottomless Pits. 
     Not much.
     I was thinking about bottomless pits because, while there were developments in the Donald Trump campaign—old campaign team out, new one in, again, gross sweeping insult to African-Americans Friday, cloying 180-degree pivot pandering to Hispanics Saturday—the whole thing seemed exhausting, ungraspable, bottomless. Not that it couldn't be understood, but that doing so was complicated and not worth the effort in the end of August because the thing you're trying to capture keeps plunging out of reach, twirling as it goes, spouting new, apparently relevant details as it goes.
    Then I thought of a Joe Martin cartoon—Martin, as local cartoon fans know, is a brilliant cartoonist who at one point had three funny strips in the Chicago papers: Mr. Boffo, Willy & Ethel and Porterfield. 
    The strip I was thinking of stars Mr. Boffo—a shape-shifting character, like Trump, also balding but with a bulbous nose, who like Trump is usually found in a variety of surreal tableaus, though for Boffo they are classic cartoon settings: in hell, heaven, on a desert island, chained to a dungeon wall. 
    In this particular cartoon—I couldn't find the strip, so am working from memory here—the first panel shows three men plunging into an abyss, their faces masks of terror, arms and legs flailing. The caption is "Three men falling into a bottomless pit."
    The second panel shows the men, still plunging, but expressions of boredom on their faces, heads propped on palms. The caption is, "The same three men, six months later." 
    Or some such thing. 
    And you realize—and Martin was a genius in making this kind of connection—that without a bottom to eventually crash against, the bottomless pit isn't so much a doom as a consignment to eternal tedium. 
     That's where I am regarding Trump. Bottomless boredom. It isn't as if we're not plunging toward disaster. Truly, we are. It's just that you can't sound the alarm every day. Forty percent of Americans, knowing what they must already know by now, somehow still support the man. So what's the point of drawing a red circle around the latest jaw dropping development? If you haven't figured it out by now you never will. 
    And the rest of us, we get it, big time. We get to star in our own real-life nightmare where we run up to oblivious bystanders at some unfolding disaster and grab at their shirtfronts and scream in their faces—"The place is on fire you have to get out!!!"—and they just shrug grin idiotically and stand there. 
    Of course, the pit only feels bottomless. We arrive at the ground with a crash Nov. 8. Then either Trump wins—and after the Brexit vote, no amount of confident polls can give anyone complete assurance. Trump wins and then the graves open and Biblical doom is upon us. Or Trump loses and this all seems a hideous dream, and the zombies he conjured up hiss and thrash and maybe Texas withdraws from the Union.  That's coming. But right now, we've been falling in this pit for so long, it's hard to even imagine that the bottom is there at all, somewhere, rushing up at us.
   

Review #3

    This is the first newspaper review of "Out of the Wreck I Rise," written by Jim Coyle for the Toronto Star's online Star Touch tablet app. I'll admit being a little surprised at his take, seeing the book as a "sampler of thoughts" about alcohol, and missing, entirely, the idea that the book is supposed to help those in recovery. "This book's title alone will please imbibers of a literary bent" made me wince, as did calling the book a "pub crawl." Perhaps I'm being overly-sensitive, but pleasing imbibers is not what we were going for. But I don't want to be unappreciative—it is certainly positive, in its own way, and looks great on their mobile app, and at least presents the book as noteworthy. It'll be interesting to see if future reviews, should there be any, follow in this vein.  God I hope not.

     The celebrated American writer John Cheever, who knew a thing or six about the topic, described a moment when he discovered alcohol’s merciful capacity for curing the many torments that plagued him.
     Preparing for an intimidating social gathering, “I bought a bottle of gin and drank four fingers neat,” he wrote. “The company was brilliant, chatty and urbane and so was I.”
     Words. Stories. Wit. Repartee. Le mot juste. All to the clinking of cocktail glasses. Who wouldn’t say, “Why, yes, barkeep, I think I will have another!”
     Cheever was neither the first nor last to draw a link between drink and yarn-spinning. Nor was he breaking new ground in the monumental self-delusion that chronic intoxication can produce.
     No matter. His words accurately capture a sensation the habitually besotted will recognize. The idea persists that charm and creativity are the salubrious byproducts of alcoholic intake....

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It will find you

     Both boys are home, briefly, in the interim between the end of their summer internships and the beginning of classes. Which explains what I was doing on the 2nd floor of Nordstrom's downtown Thursday—shopping—though, in our defense, we did all our buying at the far more reasonable H & M and Macy's.
     We blundered in, I suppose under the theory that it is somehow connected to Nordstrom's Rack, looked at the prices, then ran out shrieking as if the place were on fire, the boys in the lead. My wife and I felt we had raised them well.
     There just long enough for me to notice this big ass bar set up in the middle of Nordstrom's men's department. That's something of a trend—every supermarket worth the name has a wine bar, if not a full bar, and guys can be seen pushing their carts with one hand and drawing off their sloshing cup of brew in the other. It makes sense. The stores are desperate to make shopping in bricks-and-mortar retailers more of a destination experience, and what sweetens any destination like alcohol? Let's see Amazon do that.
     This would have been ideal for me, back in the day, and now just leaves me I suppose slightly amused, my reaction to those cruise ship ads that show the boat plying a giant martini, as if you can't drink at home but need to go to Norway to do it properly. Bars cropping up in unexpected places does echo, in my mind, back to those people I see on Twitter urging that liquor advertising be banned from the airwaves, under the See-No-Evil/Do-No-Evil rule. 
     I find that naive. When I gave up drinking, a decade ago, I immediately understood that you can't base your sobriety on not knowing where the booze is or how to find it. It's everywhere, and having a mini-Bennigan's pop up in the middle of the shirt department is a perfect example.  Even if you don't set out to find it, it will find you, so you had better be ready, particularly in this era when so many people can't sip a cocktail without first delightedly sharing a photo of it on Facebook. You can't wallpaper the world; you have to armor yourself. 

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Now this is an odd structure. I had never seen it before, but stumbled upon it during my wanderings around Chicago this week.  I'm hoping it puzzles you for a few minutes; I had a tough time figuring out what it was when I was standing before it, but eventually I saw a plaque that gave away the game.
    What is this beige-pinkish thing and where might we find it? The winner gets ... oh hell ... one of my endless supply of 2015 blog posters, complete in its own Chicago Mailing Tube cardboard tube, along with my best wishes.
     Remember to place your guesses below. Good luck. 

Mayor Daley's book

      My colleague Mike Sneed reports that former Mayor Richard M. Daley is interested in writing a book about "running an American city." 
      My immediate thought was, "didn't he leave off the 'into the ground' part?" Running an American city into the ground?
      The next thought was identical to the one I had five years ago when Daley previously mentioned writing a book: the man lacks the necessary candor, the self-criticism gear essential to writing a book. 
      A good book, I mean.
      Oh sure, he could no doubt, with help of the ghostwriter he's supposedly fishing around for, manage a clip job recapitulation of his 22 years at the helm of Chicago, something along the lines of First Son, by Keith Koeneman.  At the risk of being unkind to a fellow University of Chicago Press author, let's just say that those of us who soldiered through the 2013 biography were left with the conviction that Robert Caro's trilogy on Lyndon Johnson was not in risk of being nudged off the summit of the biographer's art. 
     The fault is not the author's. Daley is so oblique—trying to understand him, one Chicago wag once quipped, is like trying to peel a ball bearing with your thumbnail—that there is the whisper of a chance he could surprise us. That the book will be titled, How I Ruined Chicago and detail, with charts, how the scion of America's biggest boss swept into office in a blaze of tradition and self-regard and created a financial time bomb, by lack of planning and greasing his army of allies, that is now hollowing out the city so it becomes a fragile pension program that also fights fires.
    That is possible.
    But I severely doubt it. More likely is the outcome of the vast majority of people who intend to write books: nothing. Because writing books is hard. Besides, as my agent would say, "And who is going to buy this book?" Tap any of Daley's former cringing underlings on the shoulder, after they've toweled his spittle off their faces, and ask them: "Do you really want to know what's going inside that man?" I'm not sure they do, or I do, or anybody does. Not that Daley could disgorge it, even the help of a ghostwriter, a team of amanuenses and Sigmund Freud.
    Jane Byrne wrote a surprisingly good book, My Chicago, about growing up in the city and the rise to the only elective office she ever held. But Byrne was a voluble party gal who couldn't shut up, who would phone newspapers randomly, in the bag, late at night just to talk more. She was candid, to the degree of admitting she was often out-to-sea once she got her hands on the levers of power.
    Daley is a stone who admits nothing, who had a hard enough time squeaking out three sentences that made sense at a press conference, with a bank of microphones in front of him.  The idea of a book is tempting, as a way to airily suggest you have something important to say, that you aren't merely gadding around the shoebox's worth of Chicago where you feel comfortable, hoping you don't get indicted. But the reality of a book is hard—take it from a guy who's written eight. That's why most people who would like to write one never do. And a good thing too. 


     

Chicago Shapes #4: The triangle

    Since last October, when I examined the parabola, the circle and the square through the lens of Chicago, readers have been besieging me with requests to continue the series, the obvious next candidate being the triangle. So I....
     Oh, that's a lie. Nobody cared whether the series continued or not. Now you can see how very disappointing life can be, at times, for a guy who could even imagine they might. Zeroing in on shapes is the kind of esoteric investigation that I seem to do for my own amusement, at best tolerated by you, my very indulgent readers. I've been meaning to push forward for months and now, theoretically on vacation, seemed the perfect moment to pull my triangle notes together. Though I hit a hitch right out the gate, as you will see if you make it to the end of this.


     Let's start with the Triangle Package Machinery Company.
    —"Why a Triangle?"
     "You'd have to talk to our marketing department. Kim Magon. But she's not in today, so you'll have to call back on Monday."
      —"Can I have her telephone number?"
     "I can't give that out. Call the main number."
     —"Okay."

    So let's not start with the Triangle Package Machinery Company. Though we'll get back to them. Let's start with something else.    
     Let's start with Chicago architect Harry Weese.
    "Harry Weese seems to have been obsessed with triangles," Jay Pridmore notes in "A View from the River." Indeed, there are two buildings in downtown Chicago with pure triangular bases—the Metropolitan Correctional Center, at 71 W. Van Buren, and the Swissotel, 323 East Wacker Drive—and Weese designed both. 
    The MCC's floor plan is an isosceles right triangle, meaning it has two equal sides, one 90 degree angle and two 45 degree angles.
(Triangles, for those slow on the uptake, have three sides and three angles, from whence they get their name: "tri-angle," a word some 600 years old).
      Such a triangle is seen in the floor plan for the MCC at right, which is a cross section of the building above.  A quick glance will remind you of the drawbacks of triangular buildings: instead of big square corner suites you get these narrow points. The ratio of linear wall to floor square footage of such a building is .... nnggg, doing the math .... 34/50. On a square building it is 20/50. So you need 70 percent more wall to enclose the same about of floor. Quite extravagant, really.
   The Swissotel is an equilateral triangle, meaning it has three sides equal length and three angles of 60 degrees.  A cross section of its floor space looks like this. 
     At first I thought Weese was being pigeonholed based on two buildings out of the hundreds his firm designed. But when you look at what they are, Pridmore's use of the word "obsession" seems apt. 
      Take a gander inside Weese's First Baptist Church of Columbus, Indiana. Notice anything? He also designed the distinctive, if not in my mind pretty, Seventeenth Church of Christ Scientist, on Wacker Drive, which is not triangular, but very round, though even that has a hidden irony: it sits on an unwieldy, triangular site which Weese masks with its circular auditorium. 

First Baptist Church, Columbus, Indiana

   His 200 S. Wacker Drive is a conventional square building, but Weese made it two conjoined triangular buildings, one seven stories taller than the other.
    And then there are his River Cottages which you may have seen and wondered about, just north of Wolf Point on the River. Ugly buildings, without question, that look both dated and out-of-place: I'd expect to find this kind of thing on the Sava River in Zagreb. 
    Why a triangle? Some see them as pushing back against the grid brutalism of the modernists.
     "If the Weese vs. Mies opposition is to be believed, this would seem Weese’s clearest rebuttal: triangular instead of square," Ian Baldwin wrote in "Places" journal   
     Not to suggest that Harry Weese is the only thing triangular about Chicago.  There is the "Viagra Triangle," referring to the bars on Chicago Avenue and State Street, with Rush serving as the hypotenuse.  The "Polonia Triangle" formed by Ashland and Division, with Milwaukee Avenue as the hypotenuse. This is the Triangle that shows up in Nelson Algren stories, such as this, from Never Come Morning:

    Udo had been restrained and credit restored, subtly, to the poolrooms and taverns of the Triangle.

    Chicago proved unable to rename a street for Algren (those honorary brown signs don't really count) because residents complained they would need new stationery. So the Triangle seemed an apt spot for a fountain honoring Chicago's bard of the night court. When it was unveiled in 1998, some wondered how the famously-bitter Algren would react. Though if representatives of the Polish Roman Catholic Union could declare no hard feelings and show up (when Algren's books were first published, some in the Polish leadership felt his books painted a dim picture of their community and tried to ban them) I assume Algren would have found it in his aggrieved heart to show up as well, particularly if there were hors d'oeuvres and cocktails after. 
     There's more: the Old Town Triangle,  bounded by North Avenue, Clark Street, and what is charmingly referred to as "the Ghost of Ogden Avenue." There is the "Triangle Offense," used with great effect by head coach Phil Jackson during the Bulls championship runs in the 1990s (the triangle is created by the center, who stands at the low post, the forward at the wing, and the guard at the corner, and if you know what that means, you're a better man than I).

Won't return phone calls.

     We haven't even touched on the symbolic aspects of triangles, when it comes to trinities and love triangles, plus their sturdiness when it comes to supporting loads, as seen in the cross-bracing on buildings like the very non-Weese John Hancock.  I wish there were some folklore aspect triangles suggesting bad faith or laziness, so I could circle back to the beginning, but I can't find any, so we'll have to just grab the lever and pull hard.
    Returning, reluctantly, to Triangle Package Machinery. I must have called them six times over a span of days. Maybe more. Kim Magon-Haller, their supposed marketing representative, never picked up the phone. Never called back, or returned emails. I tried a David Mustiel and he never answered either. Even left a message for the Triangle president, Bryan Muskat—the Full Boy Scout Try, I call it. I just wanted to know, though at some point I suppose it became a quest, a point of honor. No reporter wants to be thwarted by the Triangle Package Machinery Co. Eventually, I thought, "The hell with them" Though they're a fairly large company. I shudder to think what their dissatisfied customers go through. And based on my experience, my guess is that there must be a bunch of dissatisfied customers.   

Reader flashback: Snappled

     One more visit to the trove of spiked pieces that ended up in the Reader in the late 1990s. This was an assignment from Esquire, which asked me to look at how Quaker Oats killed Snapple. In between the time they asked me to write it, and when I turned it in, most of the magazine staff was canned. When I showed up with the article, they just sort of looked at me strangely. But the kill fee was considerable, so I wasn't too broken up, and the Reader was happy to step in and print it. The story won the Peter Lisagor award for business writing. It originally ran May 29, 1997.

     In the basement of Quaker Tower, a mundane office building on Clark Street at the Chicago River, sits a kettle of hot oatmeal. The other Quaker items in the employee cafeteria--the Gatorade and the granola bars and, until recently, the Snapple—cost the employees money.
     But the oatmeal is free. Just grab a ladle and load up as much as you can. Oatmeal is one of the cheapest foodstuffs around. Remember the slogan "Just pennies a serving"? It's even cheaper to make, and a huge profit maker to sell. Hot oatmeal built the company into what it is today.
     Selling it to the employees, well, just somehow wouldn't seem right.
     If the free oatmeal is a nod to the company's distant past, it is just that—a nod. Oatmeal is kind of boring, and not the sort of product that fires up the blood in corporate veins nowadays. Quaker is not about oatmeal anymore. Like most companies today, it is not even about profits, in and of themselves. It's about growth, and stock, and stock prices, and keeping shareholders happy.
     A common enough philosophy lately, but one that led Quaker Oats into one of the great business disasters of the 20th century: the purchase of the Snapple Beverage Company for $1.7 billion in November 1994. When Quaker finally dumped the company this past March, for $300 million, it lost a cool $1.4 billion on the transaction, not to mention the hundreds of millions frittered away on ill-conceived advertising, distribution restructuring, and fat severance contracts gagging executives who know the embarrassing details of the fiasco.
     The mind gropes in vain for a similar calamity in Chicago corporate history. The collapse of Continental Bank, maybe, but that didn't sink with the banners flying and the orchestra at full crescendo, the way Snapple did.
     It's over now. The dust from the explosion is still hanging in the air, and as it settles a question takes shape:
     What happened?

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Puffing words like soap bubbles

     On Monday mornings, along with the traffic and weather, the AM radio news station presents the butcher’s bill from the preceding weekend of violence: 40 shot, nine killed, most recently.
     An average summer weekend in Chicago.
     And those listening, getting dressed, process that information or, most likely, don’t. Which is why the reporters at the station pull a few individuals out of those stats — a 6-year-old girl, shot exiting a car. The 19-year-old son of a police officer, home from college, killed on his front step — in an attempt to raise a tingle in the audience’s anthracite hearts.
     Because I have my own 19-year-old, also home from college, sleeping upstairs, I thought about that particular victim more than the rest. We all draw the circle of concern, with ourselves at the center. We encompass our family. Our neighborhood. Then the circle closes. Who includes the whole city? Chicago is a big place.
     It’s such a fraught subject I can see why most shun it. I usually do, first, because who wants to make a point, even a valid point, using the death of someone’s child? I wouldn’t even try, except for the certainty that, in the wake of such heartbreak, the parents couldn’t care what some fool says or doesn’t say in the newspaper.
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Reader flashback: Swiss Gold

     
     On Sunday I posted a column from the late 1990s that had been spiked by the Sun-Times and rescued by the Reader, which happened on several occasions back then. Another was this one — newspaper journalism has a certain Kabuki quality, and I think the following was just too personal, too forceful for the Sun-Times' audience, but fit right into the Reader's looser vibe.  It originally ran Dec. 25, 1997. 

     The tomato soup was delightful. The quail, neither greasy nor dry. Though I preferred the white wine served with the appetizer to the following red--which seemed a bit casky--I wasn't about to mention this to my host, the ambassador.
     If this sounds like something out of a Henry James novel, well, it felt pretty weird to me too. I was squirming in my elegant chair in a private dining room at the Four Seasons Hotel this past September, snared in a roundup of Jewish journalists and delivered before Alfred Defago, the Swiss ambassador to the United States, so he could tell us how sorry his government is for having played banker to the Nazis during World War II. How much it regrets that for half a century afterward Swiss banks kept the money from thousands of accounts belonging to Holocaust victims, their heirs turned away empty-handed with bureaucratic dodges: I'm sorry, but you'll need to get an official death certificate from the Nazis confirming that they shot your parents in the head and dumped their bodies in a slit trench in some forest in Poland....
     Not that Defago used these words. Everything the ambassador said was correctness itself. Polished. Poised. His words would look good engraved on a coin. And his timing was perfect--a little late in the grand scheme of things, but right in keeping with 1997. This was the year for making nice with history. The Brits apologized for the Irish potato famine. The squeaky-clean Norwegians apologized to the Laplanders for past indiscretions. Even the French, who never apologize for anything, were lining up to say how sorry they were about their various lapses, misdeeds, and crimes during World War II.
     Jews were the favorite object of public contrition but not the only one. President Clinton gathered the few surviving victims of the infamous Tuskegee experiment and invited them over to the White House so he could look them in the eye and repent from the bottom of his heart. Clinton's good at that--from the sincere look of dolor slapped all over his mug, you'd think he was there at the clinic, pretending to treat syphilis and lying to patients. He even trembled on the brink of issuing a mea culpa for slavery but then pulled back, perhaps because there are no ex-slaves still around to summon for a photo op....

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Now that I've caught Rattata, what do I do with him?

     The entertainment is so all-encompassing, you forget you’re outside. People are killed blundering in front of trains. Legislators fret.
     “It’s really getting out of hand,” said a councilman in Newport, Rhode Island, promoting a ban on something with the “potential to remove a person from the confines of reality.”
     No, not Pokemon Go, the cellphone game that has millions wandering around in a kind of global electronic walkabout. The above is from 34 years ago, referring to a previous high-tech menace: the Walkman, Sony’s personal tape recorder, which also put people in their own little bubble of oblivion.
     The most amazing statistic about Pokemon Go is not the tens of millions of users, but this: 7/7/16. The thing debuted July 7, meaning we’ve had it for five weeks. The Northbrook police have already held their own Pokemon Go event. The Walkman was around for years before government grew alarmed.
     I learned about Pokemon Go in the quaintest, most low-tech way possible. My wife noticed two young ladies walking up our driveway, phones in hand.

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The Plumber's Dream

    Sunday I met someone who was shooting photos for a calendar on ... well, I better not say, as I plan to write about him this fall. During our conversation, I mentioned a piece I wrote about the Ridgid Tool calendar for the Reader in the late 1990s, and he surprised me by digging it up. It was back in the day when my column was spiked with some regularity, either because our standards were more constricted, or I hadn't learned to self-edit.
    This piece was written for the paper, but snagged on the phrase "Ridgid Tool." I always remember Larry Green saying to me, "It's a bad joke!" and me replying, "It's the name of the company, Larry. It's on the wrench." In my memory, I glared at him and said evenly, "You're not hurting me, Larry. I'll sell this to the Reader and they'll pay me $500. You're hurting our readers, who could read this without dying of shame." That might be a bit of bravado confabulated after the fact—it sounds too bold for me. But that's exactly what happened. The Reader ran this March 25, 1999. Ridgid Tool still makes the calendar. And I still have the wrench. 

     Bought a pipe wrench the other day. The wife was going to call the plumber. "I'm calling the plumber," she said. But I said no. It wasn't just the money. I knew what the problem was—screws, tossed down the bathroom sink drain by our 3-year-old. I knew where the screws were—the U-trap, that curved pipe under the sink. All I had to do was remove it and take out those screws before they ... did something bad. Even I could do that.
     Almost didn't buy the right tool, however. After strolling with the 3-year-old to the hardware store—behold your handiwork, O my child, the heartbreak you have wrought—I almost bought an expandable pliers. Figured that would do the job, would remove the pipe, and be more useful later for other things. For holding hot rivets, say.
     But I had second thoughts. A phrase, "the right tool for the right job," bubbled up from somewhere. From the lips of some long-dead shop teacher probably. So I bought a 14-inch pipe fitter's wrench.
     The pipe wrench—and this will seem ridiculous to those who spend significant time around pipe wrenches—struck me as a wondrous object. Big, heavy, solid. I held the wrench in my hand—all the weight at one end, where the adjustable steel teeth are—and wanted to bash somebody in the head with it, just on general principles. I felt happy, safe....

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Book signings

     A book signing is an odd tradition. The author gathers together his family and friends and what interested parties he can lure into the same room. He subjects them to what is in essence a sales pitch, reads from his book then begs them to buy it. Incredibly, many do, and they line up while he takes a fat marker and scribbles his name all over copies of the pristine book to ... show what? A kind of "Kilroy was here!" territory marking? Because it's the one time in life when you're encouraged to write in books? To make it more valuable should that author turn out to be Hemingway? The odds of that are worse than a lottery ticket. 
     Maybe it's a chance to breath life into the silent, lonely world of books. To hold a kind of church service to something that, like a religion, gives our lives structure and meaning. Mine anyway. For whatever reason the tradition exists, a tradition it is, and I'm not one to buck it.  Just the opposite; I embrace it, as welcome communality in an all-too-solitary profession. 
     I almost forgot this part, but I suppose it's also a chance to meet the author. Never a high priority for me, since there's an author everywhere I go. But I see a certain novel appeal for others.
     The University of Chicago Press is publishing Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery on Sept. 5, and I have a busy itinerary of signings and readings, which you can always find under "Book signings" at the side of my blog. I thought I'd roll it out here, as fit Saturday fare—the contest can wait a week. 

 Thursday, Sept. 8, 7 p.m. -- The Poetry Foundation, 61 W. Superior. Join Tony Fitzpatrick, Rick Kogan and Carol Marin as we read the book's "Family" chapter. Co-author Sara Bader will be there from New York City to answer questions and sign the book with me. 

Friday, Sept. 9, 7 p.m. -- Book Stall, 81 Elm St., Winnetka. A reading and signing at this beloved North Shore institution. I'll be joined by co-author Sara Bader. And yes, there will be wine and cheese.

Thursday, Sept. 15,  12-2 p.m., Atlas Stationers,  227 W. Lake Street. There are no bookstores in the Loop, to speak of, so when the "Chicago" book was published, my friends at Atlas stepped up threw me a well-attended signing. They're doing it again. 

Westlake, Ohio

Saturday, Sept. 17, 1 p.m.  Barnes & Noble, 198 Crocker Park Blvd, Westlake, Ohio.  The Plain Dealer is running an interview, so I shrugged and decided to go to Cleveland and sign some books. I'll be on Alan Cox's show on WMMS Sept. 16 at 5:20 p.m.

Monday, Sept. 19, 7 p.m. -- 57th Street Books, 1301 E. 57th. Kennedy Forum executive director Kelly O'Brien and I will talk about the challenges of sobriety, followed by a signing.  

Thursday, Sept. 22, 7 p.m. Bookends & Beginnings, 1712 Sherman Ave., Evanston. This is the site of the old Bookman's Alley bookstore, which I patronized for more than 30 years. It was bought and revitalized by Jeff Garrett and Nina Barrett, enthusiastic supporters of the book. It's a sprawling, comfortable location Roger Carlson hosted a memorable night when "Drunkard" was published, and I'm expecting no less here, as I read my favorite passages from the book and answer questions.

Saturday, Sept. 24, Pygmalion Festival, 1:45 p.m., reading at Exile on Main Street, 100 N. Chestnut, Champaign, Illinois.  

Have a bookstore and want an event? Contact me at dailysteinberg@gmail.com. 

Good news rolls by us, if we only notice

     Trumpless Friday continues. 

     There is no proper history of the garbage can. Not that I could find, anyway.
     A shame. If you look at contemporary American life trying to find evidence of undeniable positive change, improved garbage cans roll immediately into view.

     For me, anyway. Then again, I am of an age that remembers galvanized steel garbage cans, remembers muscling them to the curb and remembers that hideous metal-on-concrete scraping sound.
    Now moving garbage is quiet and easy.  

Rolling garbage can patent

    How did that happen? 
     Jump back 70 years. Garbage was a crisis in Chicago.
     “Almost half the city’s 2,000 miles of alleys have been lined with open piles of filth,” the Chicago Sun noted in August 1946. Only one in seven garbage truck stops were made to empty “tight, strong metal cans.” Thirty percent were to pick up garbage placed in “old washtubs, battered baskets and boxes.” A quarter were at concrete containers, which garbage men emptied using shovels, a process that took five times as long as tipping a can. Another quarter, nearly, were at open piles of garbage.

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Abolishing the 2nd Amendment

   "Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. But the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know."

     By now, Donald Trump's dog whistle to the gun-nuts in the Republican Party has been picked over like a turkey carcass on Dec. 1. There's really only one thing to add.

     That one thing is: Donald Trump's crazier comments mask those remarks that are merely delusional.
     So while the political sphere vibrated with horror over Trump's smirking, coy appeal to violence, and his unshakable fans—any other kind have fled by now—explain that no, he meant 2nd amendment voters, acting as a coalition, something important is overlooked.
     Sighing—a kind of reason fatigue sets in—I want to wrench our bug-eyed gaze from the end of Trump's quote, back to the beginning. "Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment."
     What's that based on? Like many Democrats, Hillary has floated some vague ideas about stricter background checks, a bit of fine-tuning and deck chair arranging that ignores the greater problem with guns in America. Judging from Barack Obama's eight years of inaction, no rational person expects anything more. The 2nd Amendment isn't being abolished; just the opposite, it is eroding the others, draining meaning from all that "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" nonsense.
    A separate issue is the difficulty of changing any aspect of the Constitutional: two-thirds of the House and Senate must approve, then have three-quarters of the states ratify the change. Well nigh impossible in a nation that cannot get rid of the penny. 
    That's clear to those who aren't in the grip of fear. But Republicans, remember, are fear junkies, and if reality won't get them high, they cook something up. They start out scared, and then conjure up new terrors to justify their fear. The Democrats have to be continually plotting to take away guns; otherwise why would they need to keep buying more? I don't know if the whole things a conspiracy of the gun industry, or just a mass psychosis that plays to their economic interest. Probably both. Either way, the result's the same.
    So sad. Were I looking for a genuine reason to be terrified, I couldn't find anything more ominous than a GOP presidential candidate who's a cat's paw of Vladimir Putin, who can't figure out what NATO's for, or why we can't use nuclear weapons—after all, we got 'em! To ignore all that, to miss the truly frightening stuff, and point in horror at the lip-service gumming the Dems do on the subject of guns is a most perverse of hallucinations. 
    Then again, there's a lot of that going around. The least we can do is mention it. 

Suburbia isn't all neatly trimmed lawns anymore

     The front yard has Queen Anne’s lace and coneflowers, both purple and yellow. Joe-Pye weed and ironweed, hydrangea, phlox and more.
     “We have a lot of milkweed,” said Tina Paluch. “Because we like the butterflies.”
     What her yard doesn’t have a lot of is lawn; only about a quarter is grass, and that is uncut. The rest is covered by wildflowers and what some would call weeds, up to 5 feet tall.
     The small brick house sits next door to Greenbriar Elementary School in my leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook. I’ve been walking by for 16 years, admiring the front yard for both its appearance and for what it symbolizes: a departure from the lockstep green buzz cut most homeowners aspire to. The suburbs get a bad rap as cookie-cutter Levittowns of identical ticky-tacky houses and Astroturf lawns. But look closer and there is individuality there too.
     I’d never seen the people who lived there. The exact moment I was passing the house, thinking, “A real reporter would knock on the door,” a woman rolled her garbage can to the curb. Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good. I introduced myself.
     Tina Paluch, 50, lives here with her parents, Anne and Jerry, in their late 80s....
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