Feeling blue

     Blue Man Group, the popular and increasingly-pervasive trio of mute drummers putting on a surreal show, was purchased last week by Cirque du Soleil, a marriage of like minds if ever there were. While I've seen and enjoyed Blue Man Group over the years, I was also ambivalent about them, as reflected in this first piece about it, which ran almost 20 years ago. I'll share a couple more blue stories—on Tuesday, a daft 2008 lawsuit against Blue Man, and on Thursday a visit to an audition at the Briar Street Theatre. 

     In today's column, I left out the best line. When my friend—actually my editor at Doubleday—said he's rather see Blue Man than Medea, I slapped my palm to my forehead and said,  sarcastically, "Oh Bill, let me savor this moment: the guy editing my books would rather see three men painted blue stuffing Captain Crunch into their mouths than experience a cornerstone of Western drama for the past 2500 years. Is that the case?" It was. I probably didn't put that in because I didn't want to treat him too roughly. I needn't have bothered; shortly thereafter we parted ways after an argument, me drifting steadily downwards toward the nether regions of publishing, he ascending toward the presidency of Doubleday. Just as well. We were an ill fit.

     Once I forced my wife to go see Samuel Beckett's dark masterpiece "Waiting for Godot," performed by the National Theatre of Ireland. At the end of the minimalist classic, she turned to me and said: "That was so depressing!"
     Maybe the humor of her answer isn't immediately apparent. Imagine taking somebody to the circus and having them turn to you, shocked, and say, "My word, but there are clowns here!"
    "It's Beckett!" I wanted to scream. "It's supposed to be depressing! That's the entire point!"
     I feel like I'm in an ever-shrinking minority of people who love a really good tragedy. The darker the better. My idea of fun is sitting down with my battered copy of Death of a Salesman and re-reading Willy Loman's funeral.
     Tragedy is out of fashion, however. Most people have lost their stomach for sorrow in their entertainments. Focus groups and market research have ruined us, creating a nation of babies who demand refunds if the hero dies at the end or if bad things happen to good people.
     The movies are hardly worth addressing. When was the last time a movie ended on a down note? "Gone With the Wind," maybe? I still can't get over the imperial troops being defeated by a bunch of teddy bears at the end of "Return of the Jedi." Imagine how much more effective that movie would have been if the last scene had been Princess Leia's arm being zupped up in Jabba the Hutt's slobbering mouth. Talk about impact.
     But back to theater, specifically, the "Blue Man Group."
     Now, I have nothing against the "Blue Man Group" per se. I saw it when it opened in New York years ago and found it amusing, tolerable stuff. They drum. They splash paint and toss marshmallows. It's like a high school cafeteria.
     But I felt too guilty watching "Blue Man Group" to really like it. Maybe because I was in a theater. Being there for that kind of show seemed like trespassing, or supporting the manic slapstick that will keep theaters in business in the future, after people have entirely lost their taste for shows where actors speak actual words.
     It's getting worse. Look at what else has been packing them into theaters: "Beauty and the Beast." And don't even get me started on "Lord of the Dance."
     Sometimes I wonder if we'd get tragedies at all onstage if it weren't for certain actors having pangs of conscience and insisting. Would the Goodman be putting on these lovely Eugene O'Neill epics if Brian Dennehy didn't feel the need to periodically atone for his Hollywood potboilers?
     And at least my wife went to "Godot." Once I went to New York just to see Diana Rigg in "Medea." I knew better than to try to get anyone to go with me, but, at the last moment, in New York, I broke down and tried to persuade a friend to tag along to the Greek tragedy.
     "No way," he said.
     OK, I countered -- I must have been really lonely -- how about if I pay for your ticket?
     "No," he said. "I'm just not up to seeing 'Medea.' "
     "OK," I said, "what is it you feel like seeing?"
     "Blue Man Group," he said.
      I saw "Medea" alone.
                                      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 2, 1997

Books on the nightstand: the Patrick O'Brian novels

     Boars are conservative.    
     "Deeply conservative," in fact, according to Patrick O'Brian. "Devoted to the beaten track."
     Aren't we all?  Most of us anyway. Humans as well as tusked swine.
     That perceptive observation comes near the beginning of The Nutmeg of Consolation, the 14th book of what are known as O'Brian's "Aubrey/Maturin novels," historical fiction of British naval life set 200 years ago, at the time of the Napoleonic wars.
    And yes, I've read the previous 13. Or at least listened to them on audiobooks, which is approximately the same thing.
    "Aubrey" is Captain Jack Aubrey, tall and blond, dashing, if perpetually overweight and florid, as human a hero as ever raised a cutlass. "Maturin" is his "particular friend," naval physician, natural philosopher, Irish nationalist and, let's not forget, highly effective secret agent, despite a tendency to tumble off ships and into dungeons.
     It shouldn't work. Just setting down the details above sounds trite, as if I'm describing some musty maritime cliche. But I have not only read the previous baker's dozen books, but done so almost daily, one after another, over the past six months, and as someone with a highly evolved reflex to reject fiction for being predictable, hackneyed, cliched, or just not good enough, O'Brian's books are none of these.
      The bit about the boar is an illustration why. Whatever is going on in the books, whether boars are being hunted by Maturin, shipwrecked with 156 crew mates on a deserted South China sea island, or battles being fought yardarm-to-yardarm, sails raised, legs amputated or pudding cooked, it is done so with a wealth of well-researched detail and veracity that sings off the page. I've literally never heard a false note.
     The characters are real. His pig killed, Maturin absent-mindedly wipes his hand on his white jacket, immediately fearing for the reaction of the gloriously-named servant Preserved Killick, "an awkward, slab-sided creature," a maestro of the muttered complaint, with his own distinctive way of speaking and a habit of beginning sentences with "Which."
    "Which there ain't no stern galley, sir, now we've been degraded to a sixth grade," Killick cries "with malignant triumph" in The Ionian Mission. "Stern galleries is for our betters, and I must toil and moil away in the dark."
     Yet somehow Killick, with his fetish for cleanliness and rank, is endearing, both to the readers and to his supposedly superior officers. Maturin is terrified that in gutting the boar he soiled his jacket, creating more work for the over-burdened Killick. Maturin tries to sort it out in his own mind as he heads toward his inevitable dressing down.
    "It wasn't even Killick was his servant with a servant's right," he thinks, dreading his encounter.
     "A servant's right" could support a book on it's own, and one of the series' many joys are the lesser, able-bodied seamen characters, their brief exchanges and rituals, superstitions and philosophies. Yet never does it become routine. A lesser writer, penning his 13th book, would have had Killick upbraid the doctor his characteristic "high, shrill, penetrating voice." But Killick doesn't. He looks at the doctor's mirthless light blue eyes, his general disorder from his boar hunt, and uncomplainingly goes about his business, for a change.
    O'Brian knows that human beings are not clockwork. They might have qualities, but they also diverge from them, and one of the truest things about the books are how his characters don't always behave as they're usually do. Aubrey, devoted to his Sophie, still finds himself fathering a child out of wedlock and almost two. Maturin, the man of science, nevertheless becomes an addict of laudanum, a form of opium, and his mental gymnastics rationalizing and hiding his slavery rings completely true. Diana Villiers, Maturin's love interest, is sometimes free-spirited and careless, sometimes devoted.
     Those characteristics that do endure start to develop a power. About the fifth time Aubrey describes Lord Nelson once asking him to be so kind as to pass the salt, the vignette takes on a deeper meaning, one it hadn't possessed before, speaking to the desperate way we cling to our brushes with fame.
     At some point I need to express my gratitude to my older son Ross. I had seen the movie version, "Master and Commander," with Russell Crowe as Jack Aubrey, and loved it extremely—like the books, it really is a disquisition in leadership. Maybe a decade ago, Ross gave me the novel as a birthday present, but I never got around to reading it until now, really just to stop him from holding that up as a lapse in paternal devotion. It took a few pages to gel, but once it did, I was hooked. Reading O'Brian has embroidered the mundane routine considerably. 
     I don't believe you should recommend a work of art while spoiling it, so I won't give away the surprises, except to say the best moment in the first 13 books comes in The Reverse of the Medal when Aubrey finds himself convicted of stock manipulation—he can be a dunce when it comes to his landward finances—and sentenced to an hour of humiliation in the pillory.  Tears in my eyes.
     The action ranges from Boston to Australia, from Sweden to the Cape of Good Hope, from Antarctica to the equator. There are schemes and traitors, alehouse whores and wheezing admirals. The exchange of letters, the constant consumption of alcohol, the crude medicine, the closeness to the natural world. Some books end in epic battles, others quietly. There is never a sense of repetition, and little crude coincidence—one almost-too-timely rescue, the in-the-nick-of-time arrival of a Polynesian outrigger in The Far Side of the World when Aubrey and Maturin were literally paddling together in the trackless ocean. Then again, it wouldn't do to have Aubrey and Maturin drown in Book 10, would it?
     I won't belabor the point. I've listened to most of the books on tape—a fine alternative to thought, to brooding on the ominous news of the day. I finally joined Audible to do it, since the library didn't carry the full 20 books—O'Brian, an enigmatic figure, died writing the 21st.  I can recommend them wholeheartedly to anyone, particularly during our own difficult days, when men of heroism and backbone, and a bit of escapism are not only welcome, but necessary. 

Rahm Emanuel, the New York Daily News, and "outrage porn"

Sculpture by Damien Hirst, (Palazzo Grassi, Venice)

     The voicemail system at the Chicago Sun-Times takes messages up to 6 minutes long. I know this because some guy phones me late at night and fills up three or four messages.
     He’s been calling for years. I used to listen. Now I dump it the moment I hear his opening sneer: “Mister Steinberg, your ‘column’ is the typical li. . . .” Some people speak so you can hear both italics — a drawl dripping sarcasm — and quote marks: an incredulous stutter-step. Delete, delete, delete.
     While I’m all for hearing other perspectives, “you stink,” isn’t exactly a road map for self-improvement.
     Then again, a guy doesn’t leave 20 minutes of grumbling abuse for my benefit, but for his. It must satisfy him somehow.
     There’s a term, “outrage porn,” that seems a handy concept for understanding much that passes for discourse lately. Like porn porn, outrage porn offers up not real life but a fun-house-mirror parody of real life. Life distorted to reflect the users’ fantasies. Outrage porn serves up pat little vignettes of indignation to get the reader excited, leading to the release of full-throated condemnation. Unlike porn porn, outrage porn is not a private vice but one you invite your friends to share.

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Deep dish

Burt's pizza

     Chicago didn't invent pizza. But it did invent deep dish pizza. In 1943, at Pizzeria Uno, supposedly—documentation is sketchy, though nobody else claims the honor.
     Uno's is still around, though I never go there unless I'm squiring somebody from out of town. The cornmeal crust at Uno's, well, I understand there are people who like it, and while I'll eat it if it's set before me, I don't go out of my way to have it set before me, if you catch my drift.
     Lou Malnati's is excellent. It's the tomato sauce; pure and perfect. Their deep dish with spinach and mushrooms, on their Buttercrust crust. When we order pizza, it's what we order, unless my wife insists on indulging her passion for thin crust, which I agree to do because fair's fair and, besides, I know I won't eat much of it.
     But Lou Malnati's, though it styles itself as "the absolute best" is not, in fact, the best deep dish pizza the city has to offer (hmm, now I'm starting to see why they don't advertise. Candor and good business sense are not friends). That distinction goes to Burt's Place, in Morton Grove. Burt's offers up a caramelized, almost burnt pizza that is beyond words.
     And if you are saying, "But Burt's closed in 2015" you are right. It did close in 2015. And Burt Katz, its quirky, not always pleasant owner of 26 years, died the next year. One interview I put off a little too long.
     But Burt's re-opened in March, without Burt And I went back there as part of a pizza fest my oldest son insisted upon before he exiled himself to the pizza wasteland of Los Angeles. We went to Chicago Pizza Oven and Grinder, where I don't even order pizza (salad, Mediterranean bread and, if I'm feeling decadent, a meatball grinder). Then Lou's, ordered in. Then Burt's.
     Third time's the charm.
     The Burt's pizza was so good it made me happy. Briefly at least. Happy to be there and eat it. Happy afterward on the way home, just that something so damn good exists and the public has access to it. Not so brief, now that I think about it. I'm still a little happy, thinking about my next visit to Burt's.
     At the old Burt's, you had to order your pizza a day ahead of time, which made going there difficult. The new Burt's has put in an extra oven, so ordering ahead on weekends is not necessary. I spoke with one of the new owners, and he seemed ... I don't want to say "struggling," so let's say, "working hard" to keep the place humming along. It's hard to run a restaurant; harder still when you are learning on the fly. Nor was it as crowded on a Friday night as the only restaurant offering the best deep dish pizza in Chicago ought to be.
      What I'm saying is, go to Burt's. And so will I. And between the two of us, we'll keep the place afloat. In the meantime, if there is a better deep dish pizza in Chicago, I'd like to hear about it though I'll tell you right now: I don't believe you. It's Burt's.

In praise of enthusiasm

   "I wish I was that excited to go places."
     It wasn't what she said so much as how she said it.
    We were walking through the passenger area at the Lime Kiln dock on Put-in-Bay, hurrying to catch the ferry back to the mainland after a long weekend with old friends. Our dog Kitty, in a burst of zeal, extreme even for her, strained forward on her leash, making emphatic, urgent noises that sounded, I swear to God, like a chimpanzee going "Ooo! Ooo! Ooo!"
     As we passed the ticket taker, she said, "I wish I was that excited to go places."
     On the page, that statement might seem a wry observation of the dog's boundless energy. But spoken, there was a flatness, almost a deadness to it that chilled me, causing me to pause and look back at the speaker. A standard issue young person, female variant. Shorts and a Miller Boat Lines shirt. The aviator sunglasses kids wear nowadays.
     Some young people are buoyant, filled with squeals of delight and flights of wonderment. Others are languid. New to the world, they measure it and find it lacking. And they don't know about the second conditional tense. It really should be, "I wish I were that excited to go places," assuming she wasn't talking about wishing she had been more excited at a specific time in the past. But we'll let that go.
      Enthusiasm is pretty much squeezed out by the time adulthood hits.  Except of course for sports. And game shows. People go nuts on game shows.
      I would never hazard whether people are generally more or less enthusiastic now than before. They certainly seemed more worked up in previous times The 19th century gave us over-the-top art forms like opera and melodrama. And other cultures seem to froth quicker than ours. Few whirling dervishes twirl in Protestant Christianity. 
     Enthusiasm shouldn't be mistaken for zeal. We have no shortage of glittery-eyed fanatics and one-note obsessives. Mania isn't excitement, though perhaps the former has given the latter a bad name.  Howard Dean let loose one guttural "Hyaaaaah!" like he was driving cattle in 2004 and his campaign fell over dead.
     I'm as much immune to enthusiasm as anybody. Times when excitement seems in order I tend to dull it with literary references. I remember, heading to Wrigley Field to watch my younger son throw out the first pitch at the Cubs/Sox game, I described myself as feeling like Willy Loman heading to the Polo Grounds to watch Biff play in the championship. I guess that was my way of saying I was thrilled.
     I'm happy to go places, to get away, to Put-in-Bay, last April to Italy and France, last year to Japan and Washington, D.C. I'm glad to get away. But excited? Gee-I-can't-wait-to-get-there excited? Not really. 
     Maybe I should be grateful not to be susceptible to ardors. Many a folly has started with a whoop, hats thrown into the air and then over the top of the trench, into the teeth of the machine guns. Enthusiasm is by definition short-lived. "There is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake or an eternal fever,” Lord Byron wrote. “Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?”
     Still, the choices aren't continual enthusiasm or a life of sighing torpor. Maybe that teen's remark caught me off guard because I feel the same way. "I wish I was excited to go places." But how do you get that way?

 

   

The Fourth of July: Year One of the Trump Era

     Patriotism is a wonderful feeling. Love of country, your native land. Your home and all that comes with it: baseball, mom, apple pie and Chevrolet, or Ford, if you prefer. 
     The story of its birth, of brave men resisting tyranny, marshaling high ideals and lofty words to defeat a king. The flag, bold stripes of red and white, its original circle of 13 of stars representing "a new constellation," now a mighty grid of 50, one for each of our scattered, proud and distinctive states.
     Sure, that pride would have to be tempered with sadness. To love America doesn't require that you think her perfect. Conquering the continent came at the price of slaughtering the native inhabitants. The original sin of slavery, written into our Constitution, leading to a fratricidal Civil War. More Americans died fighting the Civil War—about half a million—than died in World War II, the Korean and Vietnam wars, combined. 
    But those sorrows were safely confined to the past, and what country did not have worse? Looking around the world, at the legacy of madness burdening other nations, of repression and poverty and horror, we had to feel pretty good about ourselves. We may have troubles, but we sure aren't them.
    Now look at us.
    How are patriotic Americans supposed to place their hands over their hearts and say the pledge with the country in its present state? Having elected a fraud, a bully and a liar, bent on systematically tearing down our Democratic traditions—respect for the electoral process, the courts, the press. Our nation as an in-gathering of immigrants? A place where science is respected, where women and minorities, gays and lesbians, enjoy equal protection under the law? 
     The first 4th of July under the Trump presidency. A buffoon king propped up by his court of cringing underlings, flattering toadies, traitors, psychopaths and henchmen. The first of four, or eight, depending on how things go. And we really have no idea how that will unfold. Are we in the lull before the true calamity starts? Is it spring 1914? August 1939? Where all the elements of disaster are in place, waiting for the spark to touch it off. Half the nation is already in lingering shock that we could have elected someone so unfit. Will the other half quickly learn the cost of their folly, when some irreparable harm is done? Will they never learn, and race off toward calamity with an enthusiastic whoop?
    Has that harm already happened? Are we on the other side of the mirror now, bouncing down the proverbial slippery slope, watching mileposts of the unimaginable, boundaries of the unacceptable, flash past as we tumble into our new world? Will we look back on Trump with nostalgia as we squirm under the boot of a true tyrant? 
     Some days I worry that we are over-dramatizing the situation. We have sunk to some truly low states, endured truly mediocre presidents. Warren G. Harding. Richard M. Nixon. And even the okay presidents have committed extraordinary blunders. Lyndon B. Johnson is generally viewed as a competent president, who battled poverty and passed the Voters Rights Act, though his reputation was tarnished by Vietnam. Some 57,000 Americans died in that war; so that's a bit more than "tarnish." Trump hasn't caused anywhere near that kind of damage. Yet.
     Sometimes it seems we are under-reacting. One shock piles upon another and before any given misstep can be reacted to we are on to another. Reeling, half the country in a narcoleptic stupor, mumbling how they wish he's stop Tweeting, as if it were the expression of the president's thoughts that is the problem, and not the thoughts themselves—infantile, combative, petty, mean, stupid, preening.
     It's odd to take comfort in America's lapses. Interning its Japanese citizens. Institutionalizing racism. Enthroning one religion over another. But remembering those helps balance the shock of the present moment. We made mistakes, we recovered. We are a great country—still, despite our electoral calamity—not because we've never erred, never blundered, never betrayed our values. But because we always manage to right ourselves when we do. The march of freedom carried on.
    At least up to now. Anyone who feels our democratic liberty is guaranteed isn't paying attention. With a conscienceless buffoon swinging a pick axe daily, if not hourly, at our institutions, nothing is certain. The battle is going on right now, today, this minute. Anyone who ever wished they could have been there at the nation's birth, a cobbler in Lexington, a baker in Concord, so he could have heard the call, set down his hammer, his bowl, taken up his flintlock and rose to the defense of our aborning country, has to be a little grateful to be alive at this moment, this 4th, when the country needs every sound head and every stout heart it can muster. Every man and woman who believes in the United States of America at its best, not at its worst. This is the gravest sort of crisis—one self-imposed, by the cowardice of our leaders, the selfishness of our electorate, the loss of faith in ourselves and in each other. People have never needed an America more, and America has never needed her people more. This 4th of July, it might be hard to feel good about what our country is now. But we certainly can celebrate what it once was, and what it might yet be again. 

Night work daily

     CATAWBA, Ohio — People seem to believe our country has become one vast undifferentiated nowhere because there are McDonald's and Walmart's in every town and, in some cities, on every corner. But the truth is, there are subtle differences, if you look for them.
    Such as here at Bergman's, a 158-year-old farm stand on the north coast of Ohio, where we always stop on our way home from Put-in-Bay to load up on peaches and sweet corn, local honey and unusual spreads such as, this visit, carrot cake jam. We also bought shortcake because, really, how often do you get the chance?  
     It was before lunch, and my eyes immediately went to the various bags of Ballreich's potato chips. As I did, a certain odd word popped out. "Marcelled." 
     Marcelled. As a lad, I had read numerous books about the 1920s, and always thought of marcelling as something done to hair. I had never seen the word applied to potato chips, though it harmonized with the bold declaration "Since 1920." (Well, I must have seen the word; I've been coming to Bergman's for years; but  I never really noticed it before). 
     I knew what they meant, yet how did the word get to potato chips, one of the last consumer food products to resist globalization. Yes, Chicago's own Jays—no possessive since there is no "Jay"—went bankrupt in 2007 and suffered the indignity of having its brand taken over by Snyder's and production moved to the barrens of Indiana. But many regional diehards remain, such as Zapp's in Louisiana and Utz in Pennsylvania.  
     As if Ballreich's, made in nearby Tiffin, expects customers to be perplexed, the bags contain this definition on the back:

     Helpful. But it did not strike me as definitive. If someone challenged your source, "I got it off the back of a bag of potato chips" is not likely to convince. Something more authoritative was in order. 
     The corporate web site mentions the word early in their history: "Ballreich's chose to call their potato chips "marcelled" (which means "wavy"), taken from the popular ladies' wavy hairstyle of the 1920's.     
     But how did "marcel" come to describe hair? That seemed easy. I like to form theories of words as I go to look them up, and marcel was likely to come from some French hairdresser, Monsieur Marcel, or some such thing. I knew exactly where to look, too. The Oxford University Press' highly-useful 2oth Century Words. Sure enough, there it was.

   marcel v (1906) to wave (hair in the 'Marcel' fashion. This was a kind of artificial wave (known as a Marcel wave) produced by using heated curling-tongs. Fashionable around the turn of the century, it was named after Francois Marcel Grateau (1852-1936), the French hairdresser who invented it.

     Too easy. It's almost disappointing to strike gold so fast, and nail it so closely ahead of time—saps the thrill of the hunt, though it was a few years earlier than I—and Ballreich's—imagined.

Marcelled hair

      Of course that definition could mask earlier meanings. Off to the full Oxford English Dictionary. No "marcel" but the very close "marcella" which is defined as "a kind of twilled cotton or linen cloth," with "twilled' meaning having a series of parallel ridges, rather like the hairdo. And "marcela" dates back to 1802, so obviously M. Grateau was casting his seed onto well-tilled and fertile ground when his name was being lent to hair waves and, eventually, potato chips. 
     I don't want to give the impression that I spent my whole time in Put-in-Bay hunting for novel words. We went for walks on the beach, got ice cream in town, watched the parade and the arrival of the Budweiser's Clydesdales. There was the uncovering of unusual cuisines. Such as Friday night, at Mossbacks—no possessive, a lapse in my view— a bar/restaurant downtown. I didn't intend on ordering a burger, but scanned the list of burgers anyway, searching for novel approaches, and boy did I find one. 
     

    "Welcome to Ohio!" my friend laughed, when I pointed out the delicacy. The waitress stopped by at that moment. 
     "How drunk do customers have to be to order the Peanut Butter and Jelly Burger?" I asked. This didn't register.
     "I sold one tonight," she said.
     "Have you tried it?" I continued.
     "Not yet." 
     I could tell from her tone and expression that this interchange was entirely puzzling to her—I could have been inquiring what exactly was Gallic about these "French fries" and whether anyone actually ordered them. I let the matter drop and we ordered.
     The six-hour drive home Monday left plenty of time for musing over signs. Just as we were passing through Port Clinton one read "Fowl Foolers" which had me craning my neck, puzzled, examining the place of business as we rushed by and wondering exactly what the establishment could possibly do: produce tofu meals disguised as chickens? Perform chicken-oriented entertainments to soothe birds on their way to slaughter? The graphic—a duck in mid-flight, just begging to be shot out of the sky—gave away the game.
     "Decoys!" I said, triumphantly. (And bird calls. And more! Their web site). 
      The last challenge was on 94, heading north. An electronic sign that read, "NIGHT WORK DAILY." It communicated its message: Every night the construction that goes on during the day will go on into the the night. But it also bothered me. something was wrong. "WORK NIGHTLY" would be shorter and convey the same meaning. Though some drivers could be confused and mistakenly believe they were being urged to labor after sundown. "DAY WORK NIGHTLY" might be better or, better still, "ROAD WORK NIGHTLY."  
     That sign entertained me for minutes. "'Night Work' has an edge to it, like 'Sex Work,' I said to my wife. "Good title for a thriller."
     Back home, happily before my iMac, I logged into Amazon. Half a dozen novels entitled "Night Work," plus "Nightwork" by Irwin Shaw. There's nothing new under the sun, as we are told in Ecclesiastes 1:9.  
     

Hey! We have one of these back home!

    The stuff in the Louvre museum is original. That's sort of the point.
     That lady smiling enigmatically? The actual Mona Lisa, not a photocopy, but really painted with actual paint by Leonardo Da Vinci. The Winged Victory of Samothrace? A bona fide 2200-year-old white marble Hellenistic sculpture discovered on the island of Samothrace. If it were white styrofoam from Cleveland, well, it just wouldn't be the same. 

     Which is why I was a little flabbergasted, during my recent visit to Paris, to turn a corner and see the 20-foot wide, 16-foot tall Assyrian winged bull of Sargon II. Which, to my knowledge was still at the Oriental Institute in Chicago. Excavated in what is now Iraq by University of Chicago archeologists in 1929, it had been shipped back to Chicago and been on display there since 1931. What was the beast doing here? Had it flown the coop?

    A little on-the-scene sleuthing uncovered this clue: 

     Even my junior high school French could make sense of "Reproduction." 

     Though still a mystery. Why place, among all those actually treasures, a copy of this particular piece?  I mean, it's nice, in a brawny, blanked-eyed way. But couldn't they do without it? They had lots of other fabulous ancient stuff—the Code of Hammurabi, for instance. 

     After a few seconds of on-line sleuthing, I learned that the "M. Bourbon" on the plaque was Michel Bourbon, a Parisian artist who came to Chicago in 1991 and led a team of craftsmen to create a mold around the 40-ton, 2600-year-old sculpture. It was a difficult job. To keep the limestone from absorbing the silicon used to make the mold, they had to rub it first with a special conservation soap.

    The Louvre wanted the model because, before the Maroons plucked away the 40-ton winged bull, the French had excavated the site, Dur-Sharrukin at what is now called Khorsabad, in northern Iraq and carted off Sargon II's throne room, with the exeption of the bull. Now they wanted the whole room displayed en suite. The odds of the Oriental Institute parting with its treasure were nil, so a copy of the big guy seemed in order. Four pounds of raw potatoes were rubbled inside the mold to smooth out the silicone. 

    They also used 8,000 pounds of plaster of Paris shipped from France. Not because the French plaster was considered superior to Midwestern plaster, though I suppose it was. But rather the work was sponsored by Lafarge Copee, a large French concrete and plaster company, and part of the deal was they fronted the cash, but the conservators were required to use their stuff. The potatoes, I assume, were local. (It was a good investment, if you notice the mention of "avec le concours de Lafarge"—24 years of subtle product placement at one of the landmarks of global culture; not bad for four tons of plaster).

    The moral of the story. Whenever we talk about antiquities being removed from the ancient world, the default attitude is that it's plunder. However it was acquired, we swiped their patrimony and ought to give it back one of these days. But the truth is more complicated. This giant winged bull was found at a site not far from Mosul, where ISIS just blew up an ancient mosque. If European nations hadn't spirited it to safety, a lot of this stuff would not have survived to this day. Then all we would have are copies.

State of the Blog: Year Four

     Year four, in the bag? As of midnight Friday. A little unsettling. When I started the blog, one of those glib little packets of online advice observed that most people abandon their blogs too soon, before they have a chance to succeed. Give it at least three years, they counseled. 

    And now I've given it four.
    Has it succeeded? Numerically, hell yeah. Year One brought 385,679 hits. Year Two, 499,423. Year three, 577,617. And this year added ... 730,955.

     An increase of 153,338
    Or 26 percent.
    Hey...that's pretty good. Not only is it growing, but the growth is growing. The year before it grew 13.5 percent. This year growth almost doubled. (The fiscal year, so to speak, begins July 1 because it was in June, 2013 that I ... well, let's save that story. Let's just say the work situation had darkened).
    Last year we averaged 48,134 viewers a month; this year it's 60,812. Last April was my highest month ever, 65,893, buoyed by my most read post of all time this year, the April 1 Russian postal stamp April Fool's prank, though I'm even more proud that I successfully dragooned Tim O'Brien, a talented New York illustrator to help. That a highly paid professional would donate his work to my effort seemed a kind of validation.
    Speaking of validation, there was money. Eli's Cheesecake once again sponsored the blog during the Christmas holidays, and I thank Marc Schulman for his support. I've been meaning to approach small companies to run ads for a month or two, but haven't got around to it. I like the thought of bringing in companies I like—Lou Malnati's is a natural. A solid Northbrook-based company. They could pay me in pizza, and we could offer some as prizes in the Saturday contest, which I brought back briefly this year. Something to try for next year.
     Creatively, I feel pretty good about it. I've begun re-reading and sometimes reposting whatever was written on a certain day one, two, three (and now, I guess, four) years ago. And while sometimes it's something so topical or slight it doesn't merit a second look, usually it does, and I don't cringe for having written it.
     This past year was of course the Year of Trump, and while I can't even pretend that my contribution to the howl of protest has had any significance—the entire national media shining a klieg light on his flaws couldn't do that—I'm glad to have been doing my patriotic duty, manning my station, blazing away. There's a Norman Rockwell liberty bonds poster that comes to mind—I'll stick it atop the blog. Rockwell was a stickler for detail, and you might want to notice the long cloth ribbon trailing out of the water-cooled machine gun—he's about out of bullets, a nice touch.
     I don't feel like I am. The Internet rewards extremity—I heard the term "outrage porn" for the first time on Friday. So given what succeeds, and the generally contemplative tone that I try to maintain here, I believe my success, gradual though it is, should be encouraging, and I am duly encouraged.
     Thanks to you, needless to say. I'm pleased that the blog has a group of steady followers, Tate and Bitter Scribe and Bernie, Nikki and Wendy and Sandy, Thomas Evans and Paul Fedrick and Dennis Fisher, and all the rest. I generally am able to leave the comments section open and not monitored too closely, though occasionally some nest of malice will stir, acting under the impression that I maintain my blog so unbalanced individuals can post lengthy tirades against me and my family. I don't. The internet has no lack of opportunities to be petty and hateful, and I wouldn't tolerate it directed toward any anonymous commentator who is part of the every goddamn day family, if I may, I certainly won't tolerate it toward the hard-working proprietor. The trolls don't like it, but that's tough. 
     What else? A warm thank you to the Sun-Times, for allowing me to post my work here, albeit demanding that I link back to its godawful web site. Readers often ask me why it can't be improved, and I tell them, in perfect candor, that I have no idea whatsoever and I've never encountered anyone who did, or at least anyone who would admit to knowing. When I make a typo, as I do often (thank you John for your valiant and ceaseless work to birddog my mistakes; I owe you another cheesecake) I leap online to fix it, and I can't understand leaving something unrepaired that so irks loyal readers. (My hunch is that it makes a ton of money being that way). I would normally cringe from criticizing my beloved newspaper home but, really, fix the damn thing already. You said you would.
     But with the sale looming, I suppose that'll be addressed soon enough.
     Let's end on a positive note. Going into Year Five, I sometimes think of the blog as a vast iceberg of my writing. Floating placidly in the enormous electronic sea, buffeted by winds, but with no particular direction except to reflect the weather around it. An iceberg that, unlike regular icebergs, diminishing in the warming winds and relentless sun, will only grow. That the thing will remain, year in and year out, even after I stop. That should I step in front of a bus and the additions abruptly end, the blog will still be here as long as Google runs blogger, safe within the vault of some windowless server farm somewhere. That people might continue to find it, and be glad they did. I like that thought; it's reason enough to keep going.
     

   

News flash! Clinton Street wasn't named for Hillary Clinton

      July 1 is an important date in American history.
     And no, not because, barring a miracle, that date will mark the beginning of the third year Illinois has gone without a budget.
     As if that grim anniversary were not bad enough, this July 1 history taps us on the shoulder and reminds us who we used to be.
     Two hundred years ago Saturday, DeWitt Clinton was inaugurated as governor of New York.
     Who was DeWitt Clinton?  He was a politician who wanted to dig a canal across New York State. That way, Atlantic Ocean commerce could pass through the port of New York, move 150 miles down the Hudson River, meet the proposed canal at Albany, float west 350 miles, then enter Lake Erie at Buffalo.
     A project of this magnitude seemed to demand national effort. Clinton first tried to get the budding federal government to foot the bill. Thomas Jefferson dismissed the canal as  "little short of madness."
     But just as states now are picking up balls dropped by our paralyzed federal government, so Clinton brought the battle home. He ran for governor vowing to build the canal if elected.
     Clinton won, and was inaugurated July 1, 1817. Construction of the canal began ... wait for it ... three days later, on July 4, just outside Rome, New York. The heart breaks.
     The canal — 40 feet wide, four feet deep and 363 miles long — was dug by hand, with shovels and picks, with the occasional black powder explosion. It required 83 locks to surmount 675 feet of elevation. and aqueducts to cross streams. Before the canal, it cost $100 to move a ton of freight from New York City to Buffalo. After the canal opened in 1825, the same shipment cost $10 and got there in a third of the time. Tolls repaid the cost to dig the canal within a decade.

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Cotton Candy Grapes

     Occasionally, I will write about some less-than-urgent subject — walking the dog, a pair of gloves I like, an obscure book that caught my interest — and someone will shout that the state is in financial crisis, or Trump is president, or some other dire situation unfolding at the moment. The implication, or direct assertation, being: "How can you write about this trivial crap while ignoring important matters of extreme urgency?"
     And usually I don't reply, because the person asking has long established themselves as hating what I do anyway; they are just seizing on what they consider an example of my inadequacy to make their opinion known, again. As to why they hang around the blog of someone they hate and find inadequate, well, I can't answer that for them. Chronically unhappy people, I suppose, keeping their furnaces of displeasure well stoked, mistaking the compulsion to abuse others for rational conversation.
     Were I to bother answering, I would point out that I reject the notion that the world benefits by cathectic focus on our woes to the exclusion of everything else. That only by continual ventilating of our myriad of troubles can we ever hope to resolve them. That's zealotry, and mistaken. 
     I am not the only medium for expression, God knows. If a subject is deftly handled a dozen other places, I don't feel the need to pile on with something identical or even similar. If readers come here not knowing if they'll find some oblique approach to a familiar issue, or something about Cotton Candy Grapes, that is my intention.
    They're relatively new.  Created in 1992 by horitculturist David Cain of International Fruit Genetic in Bakersfield, California, not through gene modification, but by breeding together two strains of grapes, making the Cotton Candy Hybrid. They've also created strawberry, mango and pineapple flavors, and are hoping to train consumers to expect grapes in a range of tastes and textures.
     "When you go to the supermarket, there's like 15 kinds of apples — Fuji, Pink Lady, Gala, Braeburn. The list goes on," Cain told The Salt website. "We want to give consumers the same array of flavors for grapes."

    My wife noticed them at Sunset Foods as we were shopping together one evening. As much as I'm against nibbling on food you haven't paid for, she—in good Eve fashion—prevailed on me to sample a grape. It tasted exactly like cotton candy. So we plunked down $3.99 for a one-pound bag. 

    And here's the strange part. When we got them home, most didn't taste like cotton candy. Maybe chilling them was the problem. Or some dynamic of the store. I'd eat 10, and only one would have a vague cotton candy-like taste. Maybe the effect is psychological, or I got a bad batch. I can't explain it, and the online literature seems to be full of praise, so I'm sure it's me. Though when I tried one in the store, it was like eating cotton candy at the circus. At home, not so much. I can't explain it.

     Not the weightiest question to raise, but you can't walk into a bakery expecting to buy oil for your car. Every establishment is entitled to stock his shelves as he pleases, and I don't see why I should be castigated for not being what I've never  been, wanted to be, or had any intention of becoming. 

Ignoring one baby is immoral, ignoring millions is policy

Sculpture by Damien Hirst

     Let's talk about morality.
     No, not other people's morality; your morality. Parsing the morality of others is too easy. It comes to some as naturally as breathing and almost as often.
     Examining what you think is right for you? A little harder.
     Here's the scenario.
     It's morning. You stroll to the sidewalk to collect your Sun-Times — you subscribe, thank you very much, a good sign, though not the ethics test I have in mind.
     You bend to pick up the plastic-clad cylinder and hear a cry. You stand up. There, on the tree lawn, is a baby. About 6 months old. Chubby arms and legs waving. Gurgling baby noises.
     What do you do?
     Well, first you look around. Hoping to see a parent quick-stepping over to claim their darling. That's natural. Someone take this cup from me.
     There is nobody on the street. You blink a few times. You look down at the baby.
     Still there.

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Going to law against birds and their enablers

     For a number of years I wrote a column in the Reader called True Books. It was the continuation of something I wrote in the True Facts section of the old National Lampoon. What True Books did was present actual books in a deadpan way. Just the title, a dry synopsis, a "Representative Quote" and a then the final "Noteworthy Flaw" acting as a kind of punchline.
    The books were all unexpected, off-kilter, odd. The one lodged is memory is a book of nutritional hoo-ha titled "Sharks Don't Get Cancer," where the noteworthy flaw was, "Sharks do get cancer."
    The premise for the ongoing joke was that creating a book is a considerable effort, involving not only a writer but an editor and a publisher, maybe an agent, printers, proofreaders, a publicist, various friends, and thus the bar for a book being mere idiocy or folly was a little higher. There were certain expectations.
    The same is true for lawsuits. Because you need not only a litigant, but a lawyer to draft and file the suit and a judge to accept it. Oh, individuals can file pro se lawsuits, without an attorney, but those are immediately viewed as suspect. Otherwise, a lawsuit carries a certain gravitas, and are viewed, particularly by the media, as Significant Acts.
    Though they really shouldn't be. Anyone can file a lawsuit about anything. If there is a body of lawsuits so trivial and baseless that attorneys cannot be paid to submit them to a court, I've never heard of them. 
    So news last week of Judy Graves suing Elmhurst Hospital was treated as significant. Two years ago Graves, a woman in her 60s, was menaced by a red-winged blackbird, a particularly aggressive and territorial bird, and fell, injuring herself, according to the lawsuit. 
    She sued — when I first heard the report, on the radio, before they revealed who, and for one delicious moment I wondered if she might not be suing the birds. No, she is suing the hospital, for harboring them. She seeks $50,000 plus legal costs.
    While "bird law" was a running joke in "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," there is a long tradition of going to law to seek redress against animals. To refresh my recollection I turned to one of my favorite books, E.P. Evans essential "The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals," 1906 summation of centuries worth of trials, the majority involving livestock—pigs, mostly, since they were in closest contact with humans.
    Just the summary lines in the Contents are enough to send you leaping for the book. "Animals regarded by the law as lay persons" and "Criminal prosecution of rats" and "Bull sent to the gallows for killing a lad."
    There was, as I remembered (I wrote about it in the "Noise" chapter of "The Alphabet of Modern Annoyances") a parson in Dresden placing a ban upon sparrows "on account of their unceasing and extremely vexatious chatterings and unchastity during the sermon, to the hinderance of God's word and Christian devotion" and the Bishop of Trier anathematizing swallows because they "disturbed the devotions of the faithful by their chirping and chattering, and sacrilegiously defiled his head and vestments with their droppings, when he was officiating at the altar."
    Evans points out, rather reasonably that the Saxon parson "did not expect that his ban would cause the offending birds to avoid the church or to fall dead on entering it." Rather, "by his proscription he puts the culprits out of the pale of public sympathy and protection."
     Which is sort of where the plaintiff puts herself in filing her suit. While the lure of a make-her-go-away settlement is always there, one can't help but imagine that the public—those that think of it at all beyond a smile and a shake of the head—hold little sympathy for someone lashing out at birds and the hospital that harbors them.  (Graves' argument, to the degree she has one, is in that landscaping in an attractive manner Elmhurst Hospital "encouraged nesting and other habitation by wildlife, specifically including birds," which would be sufficient to indict just about any building anywhere beyond a warehouse in an asphalt lot. The lawsuit seems to suggest a certain peevishness.
     But as the person in question is obviously litigious, I should rush to point out that I have no idea about her actual level of peevishness. She could be sweetness incarnate, sadly injured by her fall, caused entirely by flocks of red-winged blackbirds cruelly and deliberately encouraged by the heedless ornithophiles at Elmhurst Hospital. Perhaps a jury will rush to deliver to her the compensation she deserves. 
     These things happen, though rarely. One assumes the lawsuit will be thrown out on a variety of grounds — say, Elmhurst Hospital not being responsible for the criminal acts of third parties who trespass on its grounds, and as the blackbirds were not employees (another possibility marvelous to contemplate) they can no more be held liable than Henkels could be held liable if someone robs you with a kitchen knife. Land owners are not typically held liable to damage caused by wild animals.
    Before we let "The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals" go, we need to mention one more tidbit, not related to birds, but too delightful to keep to myself. That is:

 "a faded and somewhat droll survival of ecclesiastical excommunication and exorcism is the custom, still prevailing in European countries and some portions of the United States, of serving a writ of ejectment on rats or simply sending them a friendly letter of advice in order to induce them to quit any house, in which their presence is deemed undesirable. Lest the rats should overlook and thus fail to read the epistle, it is rubbed with grease, so as to attract their attention, rolled up and thrust into their holes. Mr. William Wells Newell, in a paper on 'Conjuring Rats,' printed in The Journal of American Folk-Lore (Jan-March, 1892), gives a specimen of such a letter, dated, 'Maine, Oct. 31, 1888,' and addressed in business style to 'Messrs. Rats and Co.' The writer begins by expressing his deep interest in the welfare of said rats as well as his fears lest they should find their winter quarters in No. 1, Seaview Street, uncomfortable and poorly supplied with suitable food, since it is only a summer residence and is also about to undergo repairs. He then suggests that they migrate to No. 6, Incubator Street, where they 'can live snug and happy' in a splendid cellar well stored with vegetables of all kinds and can pass easily through a shed leading to a barn containing much grain. He concludes by stating that he will do them no harm if they heed his advice, otherwise he shall be forced to use, "Rough on Rats." 

     Whether or not the occupants of No. 6 Incubator Street responded by lawyering up against the rats is not mentioned. 




     

Gagged by caution, Obama choked when the moment called for action

     Donald Trump is right.
     Or at least he raised the right question Friday when he tweeted: "Just out: The Obama Administration knew far in advance of November 8th about election meddling by Russia. Did nothing about it. WHY?"
     He was referring to the newly published Washington Post expose, "Obama's secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin election assault."
     Underline the word "secret." Because last August, when a CIA courier delivered an "eyes only" envelope to the Oval Office, detailing how Vladimir Putin personally ordered Russian intelligence to "disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential election race" in order to "defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump" Obama sprang into inaction, riding out of office on the same skittish horse of deliberation and restraint he had ridden in on.
     Or, as one administration official put it: "We sort of choked."
     Big time.
     Even the goal — punish Russia for cyber meddling in the election — ignored the fact that it was still going on, a concerted campaign of disinformation and targeted leaks. It was a like a fire department pulling up in front of a burning building and busying itself investigating the cause of the fire and trying to punish the arsonist without bothering to first put out the flames raging in front of them.
     There was a reason for this.... 

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Goobye Jimmy Butler

     The idea of being intentionally bad is anathema to sport. 
     Or so I thought. 
     Isn't putting together a crummy team almost like throwing a game? Worse, like throwing many games? Entire seasons of games.
     Apparently not.
     When I offered condolences to my 20-year-old son over the Bulls trading away his longtime hero, Jimmy Butler, he coolly replied, "They had to."
     "They had to?!" I replied, amazed.
     "To build a new team," he elaborated.
     "Why couldn't they build it around Jimmy?" I asked. True, Jimmy's excellence appeared in flashes. He's be a superstar for a game or two, then back to being a regular, very good player for the next stretch.
     But I am old-school, having grown up in the day when players stayed with a franchise and were identified with it. Jimmy certainly thought he was the face of the Bulls, as he told my colleague Joe Cowley, in Joe's exclusive interview after tracking Butler down in France. 
     "I guess being called the face of the organization isn't as good as I thought," Butler said, from Paris, where he was vacationing.
      My son explained that it is all about draft picks. That a team in the middle sinks itself to the bottom by trading away its stars, getting both top draft picks and—he didn't say this, but I surmise it—saving money needed to assemble a winning team down the road. You go up, eventually, by going down now.
     Hard medicine, a kind of pro sports chemotherapy for an ailing team. 
     Necessary or not, I'll still miss Jimmy. He was good with promise of even better to come, a class act and part of a certain period in my life.
     The first time I ever heard Jimmy Butler's name was uttered from the sofa where my 14-year-old son sprawled watching the Bulls games.
     "Put Jimmy in!" he'd cry at the television.
     At first I thought it was some kind of joke, the way Cavs fans in the 1970s would chant the name of Luke Witte, the team's token white player, as a kind of half affectionate razzing. The name meant nothing to me.
      But each year Butler got better. We became acquainted with his inspiring back story—a hardscrabble upbringing from a broken home in Texas. He went to Marquette, and we visited the school, not so much because my boy was considering it, but as an homage to Jimmy.
      I suggested to the folks at Splash, then the celebrity magazine for the Sun-Times, that if they needed someone to profile the Bulls' shooting guard, I was their man. I had already written a cover story on Joakim Noah for Michigan Avenue magazine, so had a track record as a sports writer.
      My real goal was to introduce my kid to him.
      Why? Because I could. Because I figured the lad would like it. And I might, for a moment, sparkle a little, as a connected dad who not only kept track of his kid's likes and dislikes but did what he could to embellish his world.
      It turned out that somebody else was awarded the plum. But I would be allowed to tuck myself and my boy in a corner of presidential suite at the Hilton when Jimmy was posing for the various fashion shots that would accompany the article. 
      We headed downtown gravely, pilgrims to the shrine, stopping at a sports store to pick up a Bulls baseball cap for him to sign.
      We waited a long time, sipping little bottles of mineral water. Finally Butler arrived with his entourage, tall, soigne. He was taken to a bathroom to get his make-up for the photos, and we were summoned.  My boy was mute, so I explained that this kid was vastly familiar with him when I didn't know who he was. 
    "You didn't know who I was?" Butler teased, eyes sparkling. 
     In the years that followed, my boy and I didn't speak of the encounter much, though I took the trouble and expense of framing the jersey that Butler kindly signed for him. Now what do we do with that? The thing seems almost a reproach, a cumbersome token of the guy who will be tearing up the court for the Timberwolves, under the sage guidance of Tom Thibideau, the true coach of the Bulls.
    Why couldn't we build the team by firing Fred Hoiburg? 
    It feels alien to care about these things, but the Bulls are my team. Or were. I guess we'll have to wait until the fall and see just how awful they are. The fact that they are supposed to be awful, well, that's cold comfort. What are fans supposed to do—root for the team to lose so they have a better season in 2020? Root for the Timberwolves? That's tempting...
     As for Jimmy Butler, I'm convinced his best days are ahead of him, which is good, though not in Chicago, which is bad. Except I suppose for those days when Minnesota is here, kicking our ass at the United Center. 
    "Whose team is it?" Butler asked Cowley. "All that means nothing." 
    Tell me about it.