"If you want drama, go to the opera"— Top Opera Movies

     Scarcity creates value.
     So when computer graphics were new and expensive, and therefore unusual, films crammed with eye-popping special effects and feats of physical-impossibility were just the thing to draw an audience. 
     Now every mangled tale of a forgotten B-list Marvel superhero of the '70s conjures up a convincing army of physics-defying orcs and droids and CGI ho-hum magic whatever. Common as dirt. Far harder to find are actual human stunts, performed by actual human stars. So they stand out, despite being a practice that traces back to silent picture days.
     Or at least one stunt was enough to draw me to the cinema to see the latest "Mission Impossible" installment. Just as Tom Cruise bouncing around the top the Burg Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai forced my ass into a seat to see "Ghost Protocol" in 2011, so his heavily-publicized take-off clinging to the outside of an airplane as it takes off was lure enough to compel me to see "Rogue Nation" a couple weeks back.
    Boy-howdy. The short review is, it's everything it's supposed to be. A superb thriller, packed with the sort of stuff that a movie like that is supposed to be packed with. And the airplane stunt, at the beginning of the movie, was truly memorable.  I don't know if  Cruise does his own stunts because he's crazy, or to show off the physical prowess of the Scientology lifestyle, or with the exact cynical intention of drumming his movies.
    But it works.  
    I even, at one point during the film, said to myself: "Okay Tom, so be a Scientologist then." Not that it isn't still a scary, vindictive cult. But really, what faith isn't?
     The movie is not without flaw: a few BMW product placements too many, intrusions that stop the plot as surely as if John Cameron Swazye stepped from behind a pillar and attached a Timex watch to the frame of Cruise's motorcycle to illustrate its durability. And the hero-is-about-to-be-tortured-but-gets-away trope has to be proclaimed officially dead and buried after "Rogue Nation." No mas. 

Tom Cruise and Rebecca Ferguson at the Vienna Opera.

     But that's not why I'm writing about it. This quasi-review is just prelude, and could be left in the capable hands of my colleague, Richard Roeper. No, the reason I'm focusing on the new "Mission Impossible" movie is because one product placement is far more satisfying and subtle than constantly flashing the BMW logo: a good 10 minute chunk of the film, at least, takes place at  the Vienna State Opera House. 
    Sure, the segment is another cliche, an attempt on the life of the Austrian prime minister by a team of bad guy assassins,  interspersed with satisfying snatches of "Turandot." Though the set piece is forgivable because it contains the immortal line, "You want drama, go to the opera." 
    Exactly. And its very derisiveness made me think of the many, many great opera movies that are not only fun to watch, but help introduce newcomers to the art form. This being a humble blog, I will limit myself to my favorite six opera movies, though feel free to add your own (though not "Pretty Woman," which I didn't forget, but am excluding, because it's a romantic comedy about a streetwalker who looks like Julia Roberts, and whose prostitution leads to wealth and happiness, which is like writing a musical about a heroin addict who looks like Taylor Swift and who, thanks to her addiction, finds love and fulfillment).
     I'm also leaving out the Bugs Bunny shorts that introduced most of us to opera, since they aren't technically "movies," and probably deserve a post of their own someday. 
    So, with no further throat-clearing, my list of Great Opera Movies, in order of their greatness..

Tom Hulce

1. Amadeus. Thirty years later, I still remember shock of seeing Pinto from "Animal House" cast in the role of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. But it worked.  Milos Forman's movie version of the Broadway hit not only  offers up a gloss of Mozart's greatest compositions, but explains how they were created, including a wonderful "Queen of the Night" aria from "The Magic Flute" and the chilling climactic moment from "Don Giovani" that set me up for disappointment when I finally saw it live at the Lyric. Winner of eight-Academy Awards, including best actor to F. Murray Abraham, in his one-hit-wonder star turn as Antonio Salieri, the court composer, enemy of Mozart, and narrator of the film. Elizabeth Berridge  steals the show as Mozart's bright-faced, scheming wife, Constanze Weber.

2. Moonstruck. I would have put this first—it's one of my favorite movies—but didn't want people to smirk. Norman Jewison's wonderful 1987 family comedy stars Cher, of all people, who is surprisingly capable, despite what you think of her. She is the aging accountant, 

Cher and Nicholas Cage at the Met

Loretta Castorini, who, seven years after her husband was hit by a bus, is poised to marry a schlub—or whatever the Italian version of a "schlub" is—Danny Aielo, when she meets maimed baker Nicholas Cage, back when he could still act. The movie begins with the Met preparing to stage "La Boheme," and pivots on their date to the production. "I didn't really think she was going to die," Cher says through tears afterward. "I knew she was sick...."  Then the movie is filled with memorable lines, Cage seems to get most of them, including the useful "I ain't no freakin' monument to justice!" and a poignant meditation on love. "Love don't make things nice—it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren’t here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die." Sounds like the plot of every opera.

Klaus Kinski

3. Fitzcarraldo. No movie captures the obsessive passion of the opera fan like Werner Herzog' 1982 tale of an Irishman, improbably played by Klaus Kinski, who wants to build an opera house in the middle of the South American rain forest. To do so, he needs to make money—how else?—in the rubber industry, and to do that he does the only sensible thing: try to drag a 320-ton steamship across a jungle portage with  an army of Peruvian peons, while blasting Caruso on his gramophone, it's the perfect metaphor for art and human passion giving the finger to the indifferent forces of nature.

4.  The Untouchables. Kevin Costner in a historically-iffy but satisfying portrayal of Elliot Ness and his battle against Al Capone in Jazz Age Chicago. Sean Connery is the street smart

Robert De Niro at the opera

Chicago cop who utters his classic definition of the "the Chicago Way." Not only is there a thrilling homage to the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin" filmed in Union Station's Great Hall, but Connery is gunned down in a a classic back and forth between Capone, played by Robert DeNiro, enjoying that most cliched of movie opera moments, Pagliacci's "Vesti la giubba" aria while director  Brian De Palma cuts from the opera to the unfolding murder (used again in "Godfather III, "which doesn't make our list, well, because it's "Godfather III"). 

5. A Night at the Opera. The only way Margaret Dumont could be any stuffier was to make her a wealthy dowager interested in investing in the New York Opera Company. What opera goer hasn't, at one point or another, wished the Marx Brothers would burst in an bring some interest to a production? Here they switch the sheet music to "Il Trovatore" for "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and in general make a hash of the production (including a chase in the rafters that isn't anything like the one in "Rogue Nation.")  This 1935 classic—No. 12 on the American Film Institute's list of all-time funniest movies— did much to kidnap "Pagliacci" and hold it for ransom in popular culture, with Groucho adding his own lyrics. "Ridi, pagliacci, I love you very much-ee." 

6. To Rome With Love. While the funniest part of Woody's Allen's 2012 movie is Roberto

Fabio Armilato can only sing when wet.

Benigni's Leopoldo, an ordinary man who wakes up one morning to discover he's become a wildly-popular celebrity, one of the movie's sub-stories involves a mortician named Giancario, an amateur opera singer who can sing beautifully, but only in the shower. So Allen's character, Jerry, a vacationing American opera director, arranges for him to sing—"Pagliacci," of course—in the shower on-stage. It might not be the Marx Brothers, but if you can't laugh at a man standing in a shower stall on stage in a concert hall, singing opera in front of an audience, well, you can't laugh at anything. 

Anyway, those are mine. Did I miss any?

(Yes, I have. Readers on Facebook have been suggesting their own favorites, and one mentioned the heartbreaking scene in  7. "Philadelphia" Jonathan Demme's ground-breaking 1993 movie about a lawyer with AIDS, where a dying Tom Hanks, who won the Academy Award for his role, tries to explain "La mamma morta" from "Andrea Chenier"—sung by Maria Callas, no less—to Denzel Washington. "The place that cradled me is burning..." Notice the moment when Washington glances at his watch. That's what we're up against. Just love that scene. I can't believe I forgot it).

Scott Walker's handful

Scott Walker

     So how many Muslims aren't radical terrorists?
     Take your time.
     You don't have to come up with an exact figure.
     I would say, "the vast, overwhelming majority."
     Or, for the mathematically inclined, 99.99 percent.
    First, because that's demonstrably true. While quite a bit of the bloodshed in the world can be traced to those acting in some crazed notion of Islam, the fact remains that almost all of the 1.6 billion Muslims are, like most people everywhere, trying to go about their business.
    If that weren't true, we'd all be dead. 
    Or a lot more of us would be dead. 
    Not everyone thinks this way of course. I've had otherwise sensible readers tip-toe toward it, saying, "Yeah, maybe, but what about ISIS and the mullahs in Iran." It's important for them to establish, at the very least, that Islam is more bloodthirsty than Christianity is, at the moment. 
     I think, in their view, it means they win. 
     But some aren't satisfied playing that sorta sad exercise in playing nyah-nyan-we're-more-peaceful-than-you.
    Scott Walker, on the campaign trail in New Hampshire this week, squinched his eyes shut and came up with an estimate of how many Muslims aren't murderous terrorists.
     His guess:
     "A handful."
     You can listen to the quote in context here.
     I imagine he'll eventually apologize—groups like CAIR are already demanding he do so. 
     Or maybe he won't. As Donald Trump amply demonstrates, being the big dog means never having to say you're sorry.
     Besides, this was no gaffe. It is a received truth of the Republican party that, just as Mexican immigrants tend to be rapists, murderers and criminals, so followers of Islam are hot to wage deadly Jihad, if not one and all, then the vast majority. Those who haven't struck yet are perhaps biding their time.
     This is important more than an illustration of gotcha politics. Scott Walker and his like-minded soul mates are in league with the terrorists they so strenuously condemn. The reason terrorists commit those acts is because they want to drive a wedge between Islam and the West. 
     So when hacks like Walker take the bait, they are doing the work of terrorists. Walker is what the Communists would call "a useful idiot."  A phrase that, applied to Walker, is only half true.
     The second half.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     There are hundreds of gas stations in the Chicago area. 
     So how are you expected to nail the exact location of this sign, colorful though it may be?
     Well, you just are.  Because this is not your run-of-the-mill gas station sign, and I'll leave it at that.  And to be honest, my gut says it'll be pretty easy—it's either this, or one that I worry is too hard, and somehow I hate to inflict the too hard one. It feels like cheating. 
     So where is this green and pink neon beauty? Place your answers below. The winner gets one of my red and black wonders, the 2015 blog poster sign. Good luck. 

Trump isn't winning; the rest are losing

     For weeks, the nation has been watching Jeb Bush, waiting for him to finally push back against the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of Donald Trump. 
     Bush was comatose at the debates. Since then, while Trump prances and preens like Mussolini in the spotlight, outlining a platform that is, in turns, racist, misogynist, unworkable, cruel and insane, Bush has been crawling around the campaign shadows, looking for his manhood with flashlight. 
     Then Thursday, on the stump in New Hampshire, it happened. Bush lit into Trump ... wait for it ... not for his economy-killing and immoral plan to deport all illegal Mexican immigrants. Not for his complete lack of political experience.
     No, Bush damned Trump for not being conservative enough. 
     "There's a big difference between Donald Trump and me," Bush said in Kenne, New Hampshire. "I'm a proven conservative with a record. He isn't."
      Ohhh, so that's the problem, is it? That's like saying the difference between myself and Hitler is that he's a vegetarian and I'm not. 
     Bush went on to palaver about taxes, about abortion, about insurance, claiming that Trump, who has rode to the top of the polls and stayed there by directly channelling the poisonous id of the far right, is insufficiently right wing. The man used to be a Democrat! 
     Maybe so, Jeb. But he sure ain't a Democrat now.   
     When he wasn't weakly trying to repudiate Trump for lacking GOP blue blood, Bush was aping him. Only two years after Bush wrote a book outlining a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, he suddenly started tossing around the phrase "anchor babies" Thursday and was defending it at his press conference after his speech, asking what else he should call children of undocumented workers.
    Umm, suggested a reporter, how about "children of undocumented workers?"
    Too long, Bush replied. 
     Lots of things are too long. Election campaigns. Trump's comb-over. Bush's dithering. The time the public has been forced to endure Donald Trump's personality. Though I've said it before, and I'll say it again: The man could win. Although watching Jeb Bush in action, I would finesse that notion. It isn't that Donald Trump is winning, so much as the rest of them are losing, badly. 

Ashley Madison is like the lottery: many play, few win

     In 1965 Mike Royko took a look at Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and came to a surprising conclusion.
     "I'm not sure that Hefner is a playboy," the great columnist wrote in the Chicago Daily News. "He seems to be as middle class as the people he criticizes in his giggle-giggle philosophy."
     Real playboys, Royko said, "have sensational affairs with famous actresses, singers and countesses." They gamble at casinos, sail yachts, drive race cars. "Rome on Monday. Paris on Wednesday, Saturday night in New York, and breakfast in Rio."
 

    Then there's Hefner who, if you puff away the PR smoke, is a sedentary Midwestern guy married to his job who wants nothing more than to hang around his own living room night after night, guzzling Pepsi and listening to the stereo.
     "Except for the fact that it is bigger and all paid for, he's put together an overgrown split-level, right out of a "better homes" magazine," Royko wrote. "Hefner's kingdom is the same kingdom the 5:15 suburban commuter is rushing home to. Item by item, it's middle-class, sub-development living."
     In other words, don't let the sexy image deceive you.
     Good advice when considering Ashley Madison—to bring those who are just joining us up to speed—the online dating service for married people that was hacked last month, with names, emails, credit card numbers and sexual fantasies of its 37 million members snagged by a group outraged by Ashley Madison's business model. Earlier this week, the hacked details were posted on the notorious Dark Web, the hard-to-access land of bulk narcotics and illegal drug deals. Technically minded souls have already re-posted the data where suspicious spouses can check if their honey had been trolling for a special pal.
     The media of course eats this up. The would-be-Lothario humiliated is the oldest trope in literature, the stuff of countless Elizabethan dramas. The Washington Post speculated that "millions of users held their breaths" after the data theft was revealed.
     Maybe. My guess is those members don't have much bad behavior to worry about coming to light. As we learn about Ashley Madison, the more we'll find that, rather than some online game of musical beds, its clientele consists of a tiny portion of swinging adulterers who actually hook up with each other, and then a vast population of duped sad sacks and desperate house fraus ponying up their credit cards in pursuit of some unattainable dream. An image as romantic as a city laundromat at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday night.
   Give Ashley Madison credit for monetizing married ennui. The most incredible thing about that membership list is its size: 37 million. Quite a lot. That's about ... 16 percent of the adult population of the United States. Though it turns out Ashley Madison also has a big international membership (some of whom, located in repressive countries that frown on this kind of thing, now have their lives put in peril by this breach. It's all good fun until somebody gets hurt).
      The details of how Ashley Madison works are fairly jaw dropping. It's basically a text service. Women can send messages for free to men—who make up 70 percent of members— while the men must pay to read them and pay to reply. The web site—and this is astounding—generates fictional women who send bogus messages to men to gull them into participating.
     The closest thing to Ashley Madison, in my view, is the lottery, where most pay for a dream that comes true only for a very few. Though I might be showing my age. Ashley Madison could be seen as a slightly raunchier subbasement of online dating which, if you haven't been paying attention, has morphed into a billion dollar industry. Match.com is 20 years old; 20 percent of young adults have dated somebody they met online, and some significant number of people who get married —studies range from 5 to 30 percent—are wedding people they met online. The taint of desperation that used to hang over online dating is pretty much gone.
      Not so for Ashley Madison. The secrecy and attraction implicit in its logo—a pretty woman holding her finger to her red, red lips in a "shhhh" gesture—is belied by this hack. Though 80 percent of Americans think that infidelity is "always wrong," we shouldn't take too much pleasure in Ashley Madison's secrets spilling out, because next it could be us, our bank, our hospital, our email, our secrets. Let he who is without something to hide cast the first stone.

FM radio poet

Lin Brehmer

     The dog needed her teeth cleaned. Her appointment was at 7:30 a.m. Monday, so I left the house at 7:15, which put me in perfect position to listen to Lin Brehmer's "Lin's Bin" on WXRT, 93.1 FM, which airs Mondays and Fridays, at 7:15 a.m., repeating at 6:15 p.m.
    I'm not sure how to describe Lin's Bin for someone who hasn't heard it. A little poetic digression, answering a listener's question, which can range from the prosaic ("Why are teenagers so grumpy?") to pop culture ("What are the best album covers?") to the profound, ("Can you explain string theory?"). 
     His answers start on the surface of his subject of the moment, then dive into the depths of existence, holding a profound mirror on modern life. Brehmer's droll, steady commentary is interspersed with clips from movies and songs, a sort of aural montage of words and music. He's been doing the twice weekly segment since 2002. 
    Monday's was a question from Chris DeRosa of Westmont. "Lin, after living with my parents, my college friends, and now my fiance, I noticed one similar oddity: Why does every household have a junk drawer?" 
     That's a simple, almost obvious question, one you'd never hear addressed on WBEZ. They'd use the time to tell you about building a road in Guatemala, and would shrug off the junk drawer as lacking in gravitas. 
    Which is why Lin Brehmer can be in turns funny and profound. He has no gravitas, no political agenda, other than to puzzle over the same world we're all puzzling over. His catch phrase, "It's great to be alive," is a 50-50 mix of sincerity and sarcasm. Brehmer understands the small ball most of us play, the tiny interests and flickering, selfish concerns that occupy our lives, somehow redeemed by occasional flashes of wonder. Friday's Lin's Bin was a riff on the phrase, "Take care of you" which he spun into an ode to love and sacrifice that brought a tear to the eye.  
     To my eye, anyway. 
     Monday was more typical, half rumination, half romp.
     "Why does everyone have a junk drawer?" Brehmer asks. "...the junk drawer is just a manifestation of our postponement,  of all the junk we accumulate, the curios that wind up in a drawer are just a mental map of our random lives. The best part of this question is how it forces us to go through our junk drawer and  revisit tokens of our own common existence. Matchboxes from shuttered restaurants. A cheap James Brown wrist watch that doesn't work. . . Our junk drawer is not to be judged or abridged, because we need a place to hold onto what is least important."

    As a person with several junk drawers at home—because one just isn't enough—his existential reflection on our worthless-yet-precious stuff struck home, particular since it evoked —I swear to God—a description of the surface of a desk, my favorite passage from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow:

         Tantivy's desk is neat, Slothrop's is a godawful mess. It hasn't been cleaned down to the original wood surface since 1942. Things have fallen roughly into layers, over a base of bureaucratic smegma that sifts steadily to the bottom, made up of millions of tiny red and brown curls of rubber eraser, pencil shavings, dried tea or coffee stains, traces of sugar and Household Milk, much cigarette ash, very fine black debris picked and flung from typewriter ribbons, decomposing library paste, broken aspirins ground to powder. Then comes a scatter of paperclips, Zippo flints, rubber bands, staples, cigarette butts and crumpled packs, stray matches, pins, nubs of pens, stubs of pencils of all colors including the hard-to-get heliotrope and raw umber, wooden coffee spoons, Thayer's Slippery Elm Throat Lozenges sent by Slothrop's mother, Nalline, all the way from Massachusetts, bit of tape, string, chalk ... above that a layer of forgotten memoranda, empty buff ration books, phone numbers, unanswered letters, tattered sheets of carbon paper, the scribbled ukulele chords to a dozen songs including "Johnny Doughboy Found a Rose in Ireland" ("He does have some rather snappy arrangements," Tantivy reports, "He's sort of American George Formby, if you can imagine such a thing," but Bloat's decided he'd rather not), an empty Kreml hair tonic bottle, lost pieces to different jigsaw puzzles showing parts of the amber left eye of a Weimaraner, the green velvet folds of a gown, slate-blue veining in a distant cloud, the orange nimbus of an explosion (perhaps a sunset), rivets in the skins of a Flying Fortress, the pink inner thigh of a pouting pin-up girl ... a few old Weekly Intelligence Summaries from G-2, a busted corkscrewing ukulele string, boxes of gummed paper stars in many colors, pieces of a flashlight, top to a Nugget shoe polish can in which Slothrop now and then studies his blurry brass reflection, any number of reference books out of the ACHTUNG library back down the hall—a dictionary of technical German, an F.O. Special Handbook or Town Plan—and usually, unless it's been pinched or thrown away, a News of the World somewhere too—Slothrop's a faithful reader.

    There, now you can say you've read most of a paragraph of Gravity's Rainbow. If you think that was tough sledding, imagine getting through 776 pages of similar. Exhausting, but satisfying too. When you're done, you know you've accomplished something, and it sticks with you, obviously, or at least that part stuck with me.
    Brehmer's words also stick with you, a blend of personal and universal, an oasis of intelligence in a media landscape that too often seems as if it has hit the bedrock of stupid and is struggling to drill deeper. I sat in the van outside the veterinarian's office, listening, scritching my dog, waiting for Lin to finish his segment. You only get two chances to hear each "Lin's Bin" on air, then it vanishes. While he will post scripts on line, occasionally, the finished product, with its fun acoustic embellishments, does not exist on the web. Because of the medley of music and movie clips, and the insane hash of our copyright laws, he can broadcast it, but not post it. So you have two chances to hear it and then it disappears. 
     Which is both regrettable and apt. Because one of the points underlying Lin Brehmer's writing is, I believe, that life is not only great, but fleeting, and we have to appreciate what's in front of us while it's there and while we can.

Amazon's white collar sweatshop

    Treating your employees like crap is not a new concept.
     In fact it's very old. Peer into the past and you see it everywhere. The 12-hour day. The six-day work week. Children in thread factories. Lose your hand in the spinning exposed gears? You're fired and the next guy takes your place.
     Nor do we have to go back in time to find Dickensian conditions. The reason our stuff is made in China is because decent workplaces, which cost money, are scarce there. Workers packed into dormitories, nets under the windows to catch the suicides, factories belching pollution. No pesky EPA there, and the fact that 4,000 Chinese citizens die of air pollution-related illnesses every day, well, there's plenty more.
     How do we compete with that?
     We used to fancy we'd be smarter, more productive, more innovative. That was a decade ago; we seem to have given up that dream.
     Now the plan is to compete by emulating them. We'll work all the time too, embracing an insane Horatio Alger pluck and luck and email ethic. There is always an element of America who wants to imitate our foes. In the 1950s, that meant instilling the same thought-police, loyalty-oath fear tactics that we decried in the Soviet Union. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Now we're going to out-hustle China.

     I'm writing this in the aftermath of reading a lengthy, jaw-dropping exploration of the corporate culture of Amazon that ran in the New York Times  They spoke with more than 100 employees, past and present, of the Seattle-based online retailing giant, and portray a white collar sweatshop where a set percentage of employees are fired each year on general principles. Where failing to answer a midnight email is unacceptable, and employees unfortunate enough to contract cancer or have children can find themselves shunted toward the exits for being insufficiently committed.
     And like Communist China, it works great, on one level. Amazon is worth a quarter trillion dollars. Founder Jeff Bezos is the fifth wealthiest man on earth, with 188,000 employees working like plow horses to make him fourth richest.
     But on another level, the notion that employees should have full, rounded lives, with hobbies and families and relaxation, it's a failure.
     Their entire philosophy seems to be that the customer is king. the assumption being that all customers want is to get their "Minions" DVDs delivered in 20 minutes, by drone if possible. But customers also care, maybe, a little, about where the stuff they buy comes from, and as much a disincentive it is to buy books on Amazon, knowing how it has been chewing up publishing, it's even more off-putting to realize you're supporting a dehumanizing hive.
     But not that off-putting. Amazon will not suffer much from a story in the Times. Horrid conditions in China might make us shake our heads, but we still buy their khakis.
     Why? Maybe somewhere we lost our humanity. Maybe decent work environments were a phase, a mid-20th century American fad, and now we are reverting to form. The philosophical groundwork is certainly being laid. Politicians used to paint themselves as the workers' friend. Now a truly loathsome billionaire like Donald Trump can be the darling of the party of Lincoln, just because he promises to bring his secret rich guy knowledge to the table. Scott Walker is running on his success at crippling public unions in Wisconsin, and Bruce Rauner is aping him. We went from a society that asked itself why teachers don't get paid like athletes do, to a society that wonders why teachers get paid so much, and tries to see that it stops, in the name of economy.
     Reading the Amazon story, I uttered a silent thanks for the career I've had. A good union salary to do work I love for tolerable management. Now people line up to do that work for free under the dubious proposition that making Arianna Huffington rich will rebound well to them in some nebulous fashion.
     Our only hope is that working for free, like abusing workers, is an untenable business model, long run. You can dupe people for a while. But they don't like being unpaid drones. No dogma of well-polished MBA phrases hides that forever, and so coercive ideologies, whether communism or our current technology stoked wealth worship, won't prevail. People are not that stupid. At least I hope they're not that stupid. Donald Trump is still topping the polls

The pinwheel turns

     Before I ever came to Chicago, Chicago came to me, with all its sweet ethnic pride, in the form of Maurice Lenell cookies. I didn't know it, at the time, that these small, sugary emissaries, marching by the millions from their Harlem Avenue plant, were a lingering remnant of the city's vibrant Swedish community, along with Andersonville, Peterson Avenue, and Walgreen's.
     A remnant that will fade out of existence now that the brand has been shut down by its owner, Consolidated Biscuit of Ohio.
     No more almonettes. No more raspberry jelly swirls. No more—sob!—pinwheels.
     Of course there was always more to Maurice Lenell than just cookies. They had the crinkly red paper nest the cookies sat stacked in. The distinctive logo, a lucky boy who had somehow contrived to find a cookie jar larger than himself and climb inside. The cookies were all of a size, about a half dollar, came in two dozen varieties.
     Not that the varieties were equal: there was a hierarchy. At the bottom, the Chinese almond—boring. Next, the chocolate chip -- always a disappointment, never really very chocolate chippy. Better were the hexagonal cookies topped with coarse sugar, and the raspberry jelly swirls, with their tongue-pleasing ridges and glob of red goo—they might call it "jelly," but it was hard, and would embed itself in your molar to be picked out with a fingernail.
     And the empyrean, the best-selling pinwheel. A dense disc of sugar, swirled chocolate and vanilla, with an improbable pink trim.
     They spelled cookie "cooky," "The Maurice Lenell Cooky Co.," a throwback to its origins: Hans and Gunnar Lenell. who opened the Lenell Bakery in 1925, and then joined with friend Agaard Billing in 1937 to start the company at 3352 N. Milwaukee. The company moved to West Belmont Avenue in 1940 and built the last Harlem Avenue plant in 1956 (okay, not in Chicago, but Norridge. Close enough for baseball).
     Speaking of lucky boys, I toured the Harlem factory, though it took some doing. As a card-carrying member of the Division Street Russian Baths, I would take the heat, and one of the sweaty Jewish guys on the bench with me was Wayne Cohen, whose father Sonny bought the company in 1987. He was reluctant to let me visit. Why? I wondered. The machine, he said, for making pinwheels is proprietary. He worried their competitors would learn their secrets.
     "How about this," I suggested. "You don't show me the machine that makes the pinwheels. And I'll promise not to say anything about how pinwheels are made. So between your not showing it to me and my not writing anything about it, the secret will be safe."
     That worked. So I got to walk through the plant, which closed when Lenell went bankrupt in 2008. Passing happily through pools of aroma, puffs of almond, of sugary sweetness. If you like pinwheels from a box, imagine eating one hot off the production line. Bliss.
     For years afterward, at Christmas, Lenell would dispatch a four-pound drum of cookies, sometimes several drums which, ethical journalist I am, I would either set out in the newsroom or convey to the local firehouse. It made a grand procession down Halsted Street, me, holding the big drum, two eager boys skipping along after, on our way to make firemen happy.
     People are rushing to buy up the dwindling stock, but they're just postponing the inevitable. It's sorta sad, spinning the dials of your safe, pulling out that last stack of pinwheels, laying on a chaise in a dimmed room and slowly bringing it to your lips, weeping. 
     I've reached the point where I let stuff go. It's the Willis Tower now. Deal with it. If you love Maurice Lenell Cookies, you've already had better memories of them than you'll get by fetishizing the last ones made by some company in Ohio.
     Better to end with one last Maurice Lenell memory. Then we'll sweep the crumbs into the dust pan of history.
     There was a huge old furnace in the basement of our building at Pine Grove, some 1920s relic too big to remove. I always told the boys that a monster lived there. Now and then I'd suggest we go down and feed the monster in the basement. I can see us, one boy gingerly holding a paper plate containing a couple of Lenell cookies--not all those tins got to the firemen. A boy would timidly set it down, and as they'd bolt for safety, I would sky the cookies off the plate, jam them into my mouth, and follow.
     We'd assemble just outside the furnace room.
     "Go back," I'd whisper. "And see if the monster ate the cookies."
     The younger one cautiously peeked through the doorway, at the bare white plate set before the furnace.
     "They're gone!" he said.
     Now Maurice Lenell is gone too. But they were here, once, and that's the important thing.

Illinois State Fair II: Cows don't have names or say "moo"

     This is Part 2 of my visit to the Illinois State Fair. If you missed Part 1, you can find it here. 

     Pride is a sin, I know. But I'm really, really proud of asking that question about the black sheep.

     SPRINGFIELD — Sheep are not known for their clothing. Usually they are seen sporting nothing more than their own luxurious fleece.
     So here at the Illinois State Fair, I was surprised to find sheep dressed in outfits. Identical getups, fittingly for sheep: blankets and masks, like ovine superheroes from some weird comic book: "Super Sheep Patrol!"
     I had a hunch why — protect their coats for judging — but since a reporter's hunches can be spectacularly wrong when diving into unfamiliar areas, I thought I'd better check.
     "Keep 'em clean," confirmed Kati Grimes, of Peterson Sheep Farm in Kewanee. "It takes a long time to clean the wool; a good hour. After all that hard work, we always want to cover 'em up. The legs will get a little dirty, but you can always rinse them off."
     I had never spoken with a sheep farmer before; as we talked, my attention was drawn to a solitary black sheep in a nearby pen.
     "The black sheep . . ." I asked, keeping my face arranged in an expression of serious inquiry. "Do they pose any particular behavior problems?" 
     She smiled. "The black sheep do not behave worse," she said. "They're actually pretty well-behaved."
     Another myth shattered by solid reporting. Pigs, on the other hand, are as advertised: fat and lazy. Getting pigs to stand for a few minutes of judging takes constant flicks of a whip. Most pigs in pens were inert mounds of sleeping flesh, lightly breathing, ears fluttering, extending a hock in dream.
     The fair has two distinct worlds — that of the visitors, here to eat corn dogs and shriek on the carnival rides and, maybe, pop into a livestock barn for a quick look-see. Then there are the farmers, who are here for the competitions, which are not merely points of pride but solid business opportunities — being a permanent champion raises an animal's value for breeding purposes.

      I watched white-shirted 4-H Club members Abe Henkel, 13, his sister Kate, 10, and 17-year-old twins Cameron and Evan Jodlowski display their Toggenburg goats.
     What's it like to raise goats?
     "Hard work," said Abe Henkel.
     They're sure not here for the rides.

     "In all the years I've taken them to the fair, they've never once asked to see the carnival," said the Henkels' uncle, Greg Morris. "They're oblivious to the commercial aspects. They're there for the livestock portion. They're farm kids. They'll always be farm kids."
     And if you're wondering how the farm kids view the city visitors, well, let's say on a sliding scale, somewhere between amusement and contempt, depending on the encounter. For instance, I quickly realized the animals aren't given names, and that asking a farmer for an animal's name is like asking an auto mechanic for the names of his wrenches. But I was so thrilled to find the Illini Dairy Club's Milk-A-Cow stall, in a far corner of the fair, that after I paid my dollar, I asked the young man showing me how to squeeze a teat whether the cow had a name. He hesitated for one second, just long enough to convey that he was humoring an imbecile.
     "Bessie," he deadpanned.
     All part of the education process.
     Across the road, in an arena smelling surprisingly of dill, we watched pure white Charolias beef cows walk in a circle of wood shavings
under American flags. Payton Creasey, 15, had just won a red ribbon — second place — in the open show competition with her 1-year-old, and was leading the 1,500 pound animal from the ring when it let out a moo; well, a far more guttural noise than a mere "moo" would suggest, but "mwraerha" looks wrong, so "moo" it is. I might not even have noticed the sound, but my 16-year-old, standing at the fence beside me, said something in utter sincerity that was shocking: "I never heard a cow moo before."
     How sad is that? But also typical. We trot off to the grocery store, load up on milk, vegetables and meat, and seldom wonder about where all this bounty comes from. Every year the movies — most of which are garbage — hold a big awards ceremony for themselves and everybody watches. Everybody pays attention to the Tony Awards and the Pulitzers and all the other self-administered back pats every other profession gives itself. Yet the business that keeps us all from starving to death celebrates and we shrug.
     No, I don't expect that Evan Jodlowski's Toggenburg dairy goat being named Grand Champion at the Illinois State Fair should be up there with this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner. But it's definitely worth showing up at the fair to notice and to clap, and worth looking around—not only to appreciate the variety and beauty of the animals, and the intense, stolid effort of their keepers, but also because the fair's just plain fun, though I think I went the wrong weekend — next weekend is the Monster Truck Competition, the baton twirling and ponytail contests, and the Illinois State Dental Society's Smile Contest. That sounds like something to see.
                              —Originally published in the Sun-Times Aug. 13, 2012

The Illinois State Fair is deep-fried fun

Twilight parade, 2012

    The Illinois State Fair opened Friday, and runs until Aug. 23. While I  can't say that I felt an urgent yearning in my heart to hurry down to Springfield and attend, three years ago my family did go, and it was more fun than we expected. 

Deep-fried dill pickles

     Fried dill pickles from the 17th Street Barbecue. Soft-serve vanilla ice cream in the Dairy Building. Fried walleye from the Walleye Stop. Coconut-flavored watermelon. Fried key lime pie on a stick. Fried cheesecake. Bananas wrapped in rice and fried. A rib-eye beef sandwich, unfried. Shepherd's pie. Greek salad in the Ethnic Village. A fried brownie.
     That does sound like a lot, doesn't it? That was the menu of what I ate, in the order I ate it, during the first four hours of wandering around the Illinois State Fair on Thursday, the evening it opened.
 

Have to try the red velvet funnel cake

   Granted, I didn't eat all of it. I had my family to help. Sometimes I only sampled a forkful. I had only three fried dill pickle slices. The first to try it, to register its hot dill pickleness. The second to confirm what the first had tasted like—not good, not awful, just weird. The third quarter-sized slice because my older son, who had been inspired to buy them, begged me to help.
     "Please have some more," he said, holding the cardboard trough that contained most of the pound or so they gave him for his seven bucks. "I can't finish them all."
     I delivered a little speech about how not finishing everything is a survival skill at the fair, and we pitched the rest.
     So why, having never gone to the Illinois State Fair in my entire life, did I decide to drive the 200 miles to attend now? Several reasons. First, I was in town, not on one of the epic transcontinental vacations we've been taking for, gee, the previous four years.
     Second, I was curious. I went to the fair for the same reason Mallory climbed Mt. Everest: because it's there.
     And third, I heard you could milk a cow. That piqued my interest. I've witnessed a variety of food chain activities—pigs slaughtered, goats fed, turkeys exercised, even watched bloater chubs pulled from Lake Michigan. But I've never been up close and personal with a cow. That seemed a thing to do.
     What I wasn't interested in was snarky urban sneering. Some targets are too wide—I have my pride. Just as I sheathed my dagger when I went to Graceland and Disney World, so I sensed, somehow, driving through the lovely Illinois farmland framed by white expanses of billowy cumulus clouds, that there would be no icon-bashing this trip.

     And indeed, my immediate impressions of the crowds flowing into the fair included none of the standard anthropological clucking. My fellow visitors weren't particularly fatter than anybody you'd see shopping on Michigan Avenue. They weren't rustic in obvious, laughable ways. Just here to enjoy good old-fashioned—if hypercaloric—American fun.
     Maybe it helped that the temperature was in the low 80s, so it wasn't the hell­scape it might be if it were in the upper 90s. There was even a cool breeze.
     The fair opened its 10-day run—until Aug. 19—with a Twilight Parade, led by fire trucks representing entities such as the Illiopolis Fire Protection District. Gov. Pat Quinn led a phalanx of green-shirted supporters. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan seemed surprised to spot me in the crowd.
     "What are you doing here?" she shouted as the parade rolled by.
     "Working!" I yelled back.
     The family shared a table in the Ethnic Village with Kris Theilen, alderman of Springfield's 8th Ward, and supporter Patrick O'Ravis.
     "A lot of people who come to the fair are locals," said O'Ravis. "You get a chance to see people you haven't seen. And it's a great children's atmosphere."
      "For 10 days your routine is different," said Theilen. "I saw people I haven't seen for years. We buy the Mega-Pass. My children ride the rides like you wouldn't believe."

      My boys, while too cool for the Zipper or the Ferris wheel, were placated by the vista of bizarre fried foods — candy bars, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, anything that could be dropped into a fryer — and seemed to be having a good time, or at least as good a time as teens are capable of having with their parents. I had fun, finding the kind of whimsy I admire. One of the food stands is called, "Mom 'n' Pop Corn."
     "My oldest daughter came up with the name," said Mike Paine, who travels the country selling candied popcorn with his wife, Bonnie. "I'm pop and this is mom and the little kernels are back in Minnesota."
     He said business is good. At that moment it began to rain, lightly. I worried it might be bad for the fair, but Paine unexpectedly called to the heavens for more.
     "Quit teasing us with rain!" he commanded the skies, explaining that the drought is affecting his business.
     "My popcorn is not popping like normal," he said—the moisture in popcorn is what causes it to pop, and dry popcorn doesn't pop right. "There's a definite difference. If it's hurting me, imagine what it's doing with the farmers."
     Monday: Cows, both butter and living.

                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 12, 20012

Enigma in an alley

     If you look down enough alleys in Chicago, you will eventually see a cellist in a bowler hat. 
     I know this is true, based on personal experience. Friday evening at the Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival, going on this weekend in Rogers Park, I was doing something utterly mundane: trying to help my younger son find a bathroom. We were proceeding up Glenwood Avenue, when I heard the distinctive sound of cello, turned my head to the left, and saw this tableau.
     When you are confronted with something enigmatic, you can do one of two things. You can either keep going about your business, accepting the gift of its mystery. Or you can investigate, plunge into the thicket, push aside the leaves of the puzzle and try to find the truth within. The former is probably the better path for a life imbued with tantalizing possibility and, even, magic. Had I kept walking, i would forever wonder, and never know when I might glance inside a parking garage and see someone juggling, or hear the flute coming from within a ComEd service vault.  

     But given my personality, and the demands of my trade, I usually take the latter route. My thinking at the moment is, if I don't find out now, I'll never know. I wordlessly handed my glass of watermelon lemonade to my son and went over and approached the man in the derby hat.
     Ryan P. Carney. From St. Charles. Indiana University grad. Plays bass with the folk group, Antony and the Tramps. Opened for Spoon at Taste of Chicago last year, carried by WXRT. Was playing in the alley at that moment for the very prosaic reason that he needed to warm up before Antony and the Tramps went onstage. 
     Of course. Thank you. It all made perfect sense. Which is why, afterward, I was a little sorry I asked. Not to take anything away from Ryan Carney: he was politeness itself. But the truth can be overrated. It's a human desire to want to know the story behind a situation. The explanation falls short of the delightful possibility. You break open a seashell, looking for the source of the swooshing sea, and all you find in your palm are shards of broken shell. 

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     August is half over. Which means that school is beginning soon. Here are some young men at ... well, I shouldn't say where they are. You'll have to guess. And "a school gym" doesn't count. Which school? I think it's knowable. There are subtle clues. I cropped the photo a bit to make it a harder challenge, but if nobody gets it by 12 noon, I'll put up a wider cropped version. Alas, someone will no doubt crack it by then. I could say that I'm batting .000 when it comes to stumping the Hive, but I prefer to view it as you're batting 1.000. 
     Anyway, where are these young men? And bonus credit if you know what it is they're doing. The winner gets ... wait for it ... a 2015 blog poster, complete in its sturdy Chicago Mailing Tube tube. Place your guesses below. Good luck. 

FDA hero reminds us of the need for government meddling

     One evil is so clear to Republicans that it didn't need to be discussed at all during their presidential debate in Cleveland last week: government regulation.
     The 10 candidates jostled to condemn government meddling.
     "We cut regulation by one-third of what my predecessor put in place," bragged New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
     "You get in and change every aspect of regulations that are job killers," said Jeb Bush.
     "We need to have a regulatory budget in America that limits the amount of regulations on our economy," said Marco Rubio.
    By an odd coincidence, one of the better known of those demonized regulators, Dr. Frances Kelsey, died the next day, at age 101.

Frances Kelsey at the FDA

     In 1960, Kelsey, University of Chicago Medical School class of 1950, was a new hire at the Food and Drug Administration in Washington, D.C. One day in September a trio of three ring binders, each the size of a phone book, landed on her desk.
     It was an application from William S. Merrell, an Ohio drug company, that wanted to sell a drug it called Kevadon in the United States. Kevadon was a sedative, effective against nausea in pregnant women. Approval was expected to be routine: the drug was already being sold under various names all over the world.
     But as she read the Merrell application, Kelsey had qualms. "There was something a little different about this one," she later remembered thinking.
     According to law, the FDA had just 60 days to register an objection. Otherwise, Merrell could go ahead and sell the drug in the United States—it was already giving samples to U.S. doctors; eventually 1200 doctors would get them, and starting handing out free pills without telling patients they were unapproved, a field test by the unaware, all completely legal.
     But before the 6o day limit ran out, Kelsey wrote to Merrell saying despite their findings' bulk, they were "incomplete." She had questions about methodology.
     Merrell howled. Executives came to Washington in droves to complain about the "stubborn bureaucrat." They sent letters to her superiors, made phone calls, placed editorials in medical publications denouncing "dilatory tactics which certainly cause a loss to the industry of millions of dollars ... and even loss of life." Kelsey was being "unreasonable and irresponsible." Language any Republican presidential candidate knows by heart.
     While Kelsey was engaged in what Scott Walker would call "out-of-control regulation," a letter was published in the February, 1961 issue of the British Medical Journal noting reports of "a possible toxic hazard" with the drug. After the letter, Merrell wondered if they could perhaps sell their drug with a warning label. As 1961 dragged on, the company expressed concerns it would "miss the Christmas market."
     But by Christmas the struggle was over. In West Germany, where the sedative had gone on sale in 1957, a report linked an epidemic of malformed children to the drug, which was sold under 50 brand names, but generically known as thalidomide. Tens of thousands of children around the world were born with severely malformed limbs resembling flippers, or no limbs at all.

Dr. Kelsey received the President's Award for
Distinguished Federal Service from JFK.

     But not in the United States, except for a few whose mothers got those free samples. President Kennedy gave Kelsey a medal. Laws were tightened. She worked for the FDA for nearly 45 years. Long enough for the thalidomide story to fade from the public mind.
     I don't want to let one dramatic story goad me into extremism. The flip side of the "Frances Kesley ethic" is that valuable drugs are sometimes needlessly delayed. There can be too much government interference in business, as the advent of Uber demonstrates. Certain trades—hair braiding—are licensed that shouldn't be licensed at all.
     That's called "nuance." It might not play well in a sound bite, but in real life there is a balance, or should be, between caution and expediency. We need the government to rein in business because otherwise it'll sell thalidomide and put 12-year-olds to work in thread factories. We know they will because they've done it before. Government regulators make mistakes, but they also do enormous good, and don't deserve the sneering, blanket contempt Republican candidates heap upon it. Nor does the public.
     Among those watching the GOP presidential debate were countless 54-year-old businessmen and Tea Party grandmothers, jaws clenched in righteous anger at the foolishness of government meddling, who owe the presence of their arms and legs, hands and feet, to one stubborn FDA bureaucrat, Frances Kelsey, who understood the need for government regulation. These lucky men and women have no idea of the truth underlying their entire lives. There's a lot of that going around.

Talk about coincidences!

Anish Kapoor says he was inspired by a blob of mercury. 

Dear China:
     As an official representative of Chicago's Media Elite, let me say this: You may have our Bean.
     Which isn't as generous as it sounds, as China, true to form, has already taken it. Or at least a smaller version of it.
     A reproduction, more or less, of the sculpture that has graced Chicago's Millennium Park since 2006 will be unveiled soon in Karamay, a city of 300,000 in China's northern region.
     The Chinese, with typical brio, pretend to have cooked up the idea themselves, an echo of the old Soviet claims of inventing the telephone. The People's Daily crowed about their new “stainless steel sculpture in the shape of an oil bubble." Karamay is a center of oil production.
 

China says they weren't inspired by our Bean.

   Its name, in English, will be "Big Oil Bubble," but it's only a matter of time until they start calling it "Dou," or Chinese for "Bean."
     Anish Kapoor, the British-Indian artist who created Chicago's "Cloud Gate," as nobody calls it, has expressed outrage at the "blatant plagiarism."
     “The Chinese authorities must act to stop this kind of infringement," he said.
     Now that's funny — the naivete of artists. The Chinese authorities haven't stopped the blatant infringement to the tune of billions of dollars of intellectual theft of CDs, DVDs, computer programs, designer handbags, you name it. The odds of them starting now — "Oh gosh, Comrade, Anish Kapoor is threatening to sue us! Tear Great Oil Bubble down immediately!" — are zero.
     I would encourage Kapoor to chill out regarding both the Chinese homage to his work and the Chicago name. Kapoor has been complaining privately that he is not fond of the Bean nickname.
     Two things to keep in mind.
     First, as the owner of a $3 Rolex, which my older boy bought for me during his school jaunt through China, I would observe that these Chinese knockoffs suffer considerably in quality. The Big Oil Bubble is far smaller than our Bean — you can't walk under it — and is strung with red Christmas lights, a grace note of aesthetic wrongness that reminded me of the dinner I had at the Chinese consulate here where they balanced a single Pringle's potato chip on the salad plate as a garnish.
     I don't imagine that the reflection on the Chinese sculpture is painted on, like the smaller dials of my watch. But I would bet it isn't constructed with the solid American craftsmanship that made the Bean. A few seasons in the polluted air of China's chief petroleum producing district and the Chinese Bean will be as reflective as a coffee bean and approaching the same color.
     Second, even if through some miracle of Communist engineering the Bubble/Bean's reflective qualities don't wash away in the acid rain, remember this: the glory of our Chicago bean is that it's reflecting us here, our people and our visitors and the city surrounding us. I haven't been to Karamay and I hope to never go. But Chicago it ain't.
     We're always aspiring to be a "world-class city," right? Well, part of that is having your glories ripped off by lesser cities. Suck it up. Do you think that Paris loses sleep because they built a mini Eiffel Tower in Vegas? I doubt it. These things happen. We can't condemn the Chinese for something we do ourselves. I have not done the research, but I would be very surprised if Pisa, Italy, registered displeasure when the Leaning Tower of Niles went up in 1934 — a rip-off if ever there were. And heck, consider the Great Oil Bubble of China another Chicago trade representative. Some number of Chinese, having gazed at themselves long enough in their version of the Bean, might decide to spend some of their petrodollars to come here to see the real thing.

So you think YOUR sex life stinks?

 
     Flowers do not typically merit news stories. And the rare times they do, their scientific names are usually only mentioned in passing, if that.
     But this is no usual flower and no usual name.

The titan arum has grown five inches since Thursday.

     A stalk of Amorphophallus titanum went on display in a greenhouse at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe Thursday. And while they are referring to it as a "Corpse Flower," for the awful stench it gives off when it blooms — and one has never bloomed in the Chicago area before — there is a reason to grasp that lengthy moniker, because it speaks to what this whole process is really about.
     Those with a bit of classical education can help deconstruct the name. "Amorpho-"—from the Greek, the word "amorphous" might give you a clue — meaning "shapeless, or deformed." Then "-phallus" we all know, and stop that snickering in back. And finally, "titanum" meaning "giant."

    Put it together and we get the "Giant deformed penis" plant, one of the more apt names in botany.

     A native of the rainforest of Sumatra, in the Indonesian archipelago, the corpse flower — it's also called "titan arum" the more demure name that naturalist Sir David Attenborough coined for use on British television — is often referred to as a rock star of a flower, one that causes a commotion whenever it blooms.

     And like many rock stars, the titan arum has a complicated sex life.

     The flower was discovered by an Italian naturalist in 1878, and 11 years later, the first specimen to bloom in the Western world spewed its stink at London's Kew Gardens. The police had to hold back the crowds who showed up to catch a whiff, and thousands are expected to visit the Botanic Garden when their specimen blooms, sometime in the next week to 10 days.

     The titan arum did not first unleash its distinctive stink in the United States until 1937 at the New York Botanical Garden. Its opening was an event of such importance that it was designated the "Official Flower of the Bronx" (though it was replaced in 2000 with the day lily by city officials suddenly concerned that it sent the message, "The Bronx stinks").

     "SIX-FOOT BLOSSOM ABOUT TO APPEAR" headlined a 1937 story in the New York Times, which perfectly described the plant as resembling "a huge ear of corn, with some of the characteristics of the cucumber."

     The Botanic Garden is calling theirs "Spike." There is a tradition of giving specimens visitor-friendly names. Como Park Conservatory in St. Paul named theirs "Bob" when it bloomed in 2008. About four arums bloom each year in conservatories around the United States.

     But don't let the benign names fool you. This is still all about hot sex, albeit hot plant sex. Plants flower in order to reproduce; a flower's scent attract pollinators, and the titan arum smells bad to humans, a "decaying, rancid, rotten stench," but is perfume to flesh flies and corpse beetles, which in Sumatra would crawl into the flower to lay their eggs, bringing with it pollen from other titan arums (since it can't self-pollinate and none of the others are open, the Botanic Garden is looking to get their titan arum in a family way by importing pollen from another conservatory with a blooming titan arum, perhaps Denver).

     When the big moment arrives, the green outer leaves, called the spathe, will curl down, revealing a maroon yellow interior and the squashlike, to be polite, spadix, jutting straight up. The plant also gets all hot and bothered—its temperature raising 10 to 15 degrees, the better to blast out odor. Though be forewarned; visitors in other cities have reported being underwhelmed, expecting to get an intense draught of rotting flesh and finding something less than that.

     The Botanic Garden spent 12 years carefully growing Spike and his eight brothers and sisters (literally both brothers and sisters, as the plant is monoecious, meaning it has both male and female elements), acquiring part of the brood from Plant Delights Nursery in Raleigh, North Carolina (if you simply must have one, Plant Delights sells them online for $75 for a 12-to-18 inch plant).  Crowds are expected, as are Spike t-shirts.

     You can check the Chicago Botanic Garden's website for updates. But once it's time, don't dawdle. The flower is only expected to be in bloom for one day, maybe two, and then the whole thing collapses. Though the garden usually closes at 9 p.m., the night the flower blooms it will remain open until 2 a.m., and waive its usual $25 per car parking fee after 9 p.m.  A rare, short-lived, exotic, odorous, plant sex show in Glencoe: how often do you have the chance to see—and smell—that?