Sam Adams brewer crafts full-bodied prose

     In a man's life, there are many beers. Sloshed into red plastic cups or sipped out of icy cans, they blur into one frothy river of suds.
     But I clearly remember my first bottle of Sam Adams, though I drank it 31 years ago this month.
     I was visiting a former college roommate, Didier, in Boston. Di is Belgian, and Belgians know beer. He had already introduced me to Chimey, the Trappist ale.
     We found ourselves at a campus hangout, Grendel's Den.
     "You have to try this new beer," he said.
     We ordered Samuel Adams Boston Lager, which had gone on sale the month before, the pipe dream of a sixth generation brewer.
     Not too dark, like Guinness, a bite, but not too much. It tasted like ...

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Hatred is stupid

     We're getting into the hateful part of April.
     We just passed the anniversary of the Boston Marathon Bombing.
      Today is the anniversary of the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. 
     And tomorrow is the anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School and, perhaps not coincidentally, Hitler's birthday. 
     Which brings to mind an old saying...
     I actually try not to use old sayings.
     As a writer, I try to conjure up fresh stuff.
     But there's one that's so true, and, unfortunately, so handy, it deserves mention:
     "Hate is like taking poison and expecting someone else to die."
     That's it, in a nutshell (one reason to avoid old sayings: one leads to another). I thought of it, again last week, when I was hearing on Twitter from Mississippi's Neo-Nazi community, who were upset when I compared their hate-based philosophy to ISIS's. 
      Instead of responding—what would be the point?—I would look at their Twitter pages. Considering the source (a cliche more than a saying) with graphics straight out of Julius Streicher's Der Stermer. I reported a few that were over-the-top to the authorities at Twitter and, to my surprise and satisfaction, Twitter took a few of the most hateful pages down.
     I didn't chat too much with the White Supremacists because "you can't fix stupid," another useful saying—but if I did, I would tell them, "This Hitler you so love. This Nazi stuff.... You do know, it didn't work out well for the Germans."
     Five million German soldiers died in World War II, a fact that doesn't get aired much because the world withheld its sympathy from the monsters who started the war. Another half million German civilians died, unmourned, even, in a way, by the Germans themselves, who had the good sense, post-war, to be revolted by what they had done (generally; the East Germans, denied freedom of thought, never quite got it). 
     Bigotry is a form of ignorance—that isn't an aphorism, I made that up myself. And so if you don't know that people are pretty much the same, you don't know that your self-adoring worldview inspires you to do self-destructive things, and to throw away your one precious life, either focusing on the thing you hate, or in some spasm of violence. 
    Underline "self-adoring." These hateful world views are a blend of ignorance and unrestrained ego. Hegel told the Germans that Providence intended them "to occupy the supreme place in the history of the universe," and, stupid and pompous, they believed him.
     The stupidity of hatred is not remarked upon enough; it should be. Otherwise, the haters have an easier time fooling   themselves that they are somewhere in the realm of the acceptable. They're not. They feel emboldened now, with Donald Trump giving the a double thumbs up, to wander into the public sphere and air their idiocy. When I would hear vicious things from White Nationalists, I'd sometimes reply, "Given the bullshit you seem to believe, who could possibly care what your opinion is?" They never reply, and I'd be tempted to think it might sink in, a little. But then, the truth has to be, if they were capable of self-assessment, they wouldn't be the way they are.

Milt Trenier is still here

Milt and Bea Trenier

    The Chez Paree is gone. The Blue Note is gone. Mister Kelly’s, Le Bistro, Birdhouse: gone, gone, gone, and forgotten, mostly.
     The performers who played there? Mickey Brant and Peggy King and Enzo Stuarti? Also gone.
     But Milt Trenier is not gone. Having played everywhere and known everybody — Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett — he’s right here, where he’s been for the past 40 years, living happily with his wife, Bea, in Skokie.
     “It’s been a very good life, a wonderful life,” said Tenier, 86, unleashing a rich, baritone “ha-ha-ha” laugh that comes to him as easily as breathing and almost as frequently. “I’m feeling good.”
     You may not remember his group, The Treniers. Their lone Top 10 hit, “Go, Go, Go” was in 1951. They were certainly famous: cameos in classic rock movies — “The Girl Can’t Help It,” “Don’t Knock the Rock” — and guest spots on the top TV shows: Ed Sullivan, Jackie Gleason, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson.
     Still, time passes. It’s more likely you remember his club, Milt Trenier’s Lounge, a cabaret he opened in 1977. Sammy Davis Jr. would stop by. Muhammad Ali once played the piano there. Dennis Farina was the bouncer. But Trenier closed the place in 1997...

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The Titanic: stay at your station until relieved

     Friday was the 104th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic—it snuck up on me this year. I wrote something four years ago, for the centennial, that bears repeating.

"Oh, they built the ship Titanic,
to sail the ocean blue
And they thought they built a ship
that the water couldn't go through.
But the good Lord raised his hand,
said the ship would never land.
It was sad when the great ship went down."

     Or so the version went that we sang at Camp Wise, in Chardon, Ohio, in the 1970s, a song that had been sung at summer camps for the previous 50 years, is sung still, and might very well be sung forever.
     Exactly 100 years this Sunday, the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, taking the lives of 1,500 passengers. With a weekend sure to be dedicated to its memory, the question is: why? Why this shipwreck? What about it so resonates in the public's mind? The Lusitania, torpedoed in 1915, took 1,198 lives and is a trivia question. Nobody sings about it.
     The obvious answer is that the Titanic story has something for everybody. There is luxury and poverty, heroism and cowardice, its midnight iceberg rendezvous a payback for the boast of being "unsinkable." Movies and books keep the memory alive, as does its presence in the language—almost everybody knows what rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic means.
     As the son of a radio operator, who grew up listening to the urgent chirpings of Morse code coming out of the Hammarlund Super Pro radio receiver displayed in his den, the part of the Titanic story that always gets to me is the heroic tale of the Marconi operators, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride.
     As the junior radioman—he was just 22—Bride had the night shift. It was just after midnight, April 15, 1912, and he was telling Phillips to go to bed, when the captain stuck his head into the wireless room.
     "We've struck an iceberg," Captain Edward Smith said. "You better get ready to send out a call for assistance."
     Ten minutes later Smith was back, telling them to start calling for help.
     Phillips began tapping out "CQD" ­- "CQ" meant "calling all stations" and "D" meant "distress"—as well as the ship's location and call letters, "MGY."
    "He flashed away at it and we joked while he did so," Bride recalled. "All of us made light of the disaster."  
     Bride told Phillips that here was his opportunity to send an "SOS."
     "It's the new call and it may be your last chance to send it," Bride said. "We picked up first the steamship Frankfurt. We gave her our position and said we had struck an iceberg and needed assistance."
     Phillips reached the Cunard liner Carpathia. "Come at once!" he signaled. The liner replied it was 58 miles away and "coming hard." Phillips told Bride to tell the captain. "I went through an awful mass of people to his cabin," he later said. "The decks were full of scrambling men and women."
     Over the next two hours, as the ship slowly sank, Phillips kept sending out distress signals, hoping to find a closer ship— there was one, but its radio operator had gone to sleep. Bride kept tabs on what was going on outside.
     "I went out on deck and looked around. The water was pretty close up to the boat deck. There was a great scramble aft, and how poor Phillips worked through it, I don't know," Bride later recalled.
     Phillips suggested "with a sort of a laugh" that Bride look out and see if all the people were off in the boats, or if any boats were left. Bride found one collapsible boat left, only because the men were having an "awful time" trying to get it free. Captain Smith returned to the radio shack one last time.
     "Men," the captain said. "You have done your full duty. You can do no more. Abandon your cabin. Now it's every man for himself."
     "I looked out," Bride said. "The boat deck was awash. Phillips clung on sending and sending. He clung on for about 10 minutes, or maybe 15 minutes after the captain had released him. The water was then coming into our cabin. He was a brave man. I learned to love him that night and I suddenly felt for him a great reverence to see him standing there sticking to his work while everybody else was raging about."
     Bride returned to the collapsible boat, and was holding onto it when a wave crested over the deck and washed it away. He turned for one last look at the ship, "smoke and sparks were rushing out of her funnel." Bride lost hold on that boat and had to swim through the icy water to the other boats, as the band played "Autumn" on deck. Hands pulled him into another lifeboat. Phillips perished.
     For me, the Titanic radio operator story is a metaphor for life. It signals to us something about duty and perseverance in the face of difficulty. You're not the captain. You didn't design the ship. You don't own it. But you stay at your station, no matter what, tapping out your messages with all the skill you have, as long as you can, until relieved.

      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 13, 2012

"A rigged, disgusting, dirty system"

     After being hectored to ignore Donald Trump, the media did just that after he lost Wisconsin to Ted Cruz.
     Suddenly the air was out of the balloon, the billionaire's mojo gone, or severely bummed out.
     For a few precious days.  But he has a way of bobbing to the surface, like the piece of ... Trump that he is. 
     So now he's back, demanding his due.
     Let's give Trump his due.
     Yes, he's leading the polls, typically double-digits over Ted Cruz, depending on the poll, which is sorta like preferring acid to poison. He's expected to rock the New York primary on Tuesday. He'll be twirling in the limelight like a prima ballerina, no doubt.
      But Trump is all hat and no cattle, as Lyndon Johnson used to say. Without forming an organization or grasping the workings of Republican primaries, he is allowing Cruz to suck up the delegates, and the GOP is plotting to yank the nomination out from under Trump's nose if he doesn't reach the magic number of 1237, the number required to win on the first ballot. So the win in New York will be hollow.  
      Which sparked an aria of complaint from Trump early last week, aimed at the media of course.

"The media itself is so dishonest. Honestly, I do wonder. I’m millions of votes ahead, which they don’t even mention, they don’t even talk about. They talk about delegates. And I’m hundreds of delegates ahead but the system is rigged, folks. It’s a rigged, disgusting dirty system. It’s a dirty system and only a nonpolitician would say it."

    The cry continued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Friday:
    "The only antidote to decades of ruinous rule by a small handful of elites is a bold infusion of popular will," Trump wrote, sounding very much like Bernie Sanders.

     Pardon me, but boo-fuckin'-hoo.

     For a winner, Trump seems to be jumping straight from doing battle to bitching about the outcome without even going through the formality of defeat.    
     "A rigged, disgusting, dirty system"
     Well, yeah. So is international trade. So is war. So is our judicial system. So are most if not all of the problems that will land with a thump on his desk, should fate be so cruel to the United States as to allow him to be president. I don't hear Obama complaining, and he spent seven years pushing against the Confederacy of Obstructionist Idiocy who'd happily see the country fail if it means Obama fails too. Don't hear him moaning about it, though.
     What happened to win-win-win? What happened to winning so much that we'll get bored with winning? Why doesn't he just start winning right now, so we can see him winningly win his way toward the White House.
     Right. We know. Because it's all lies and bluster, lies and bluster that about 50 percent of the Republicans in this country nevertheless lap up. 
    I swear, it seems 50 percent of the country will believe anything.  Well, better be exposed as a fraud now than wait until he's elected. Which still might happen. 

Chicago police aren't plagued by racism: we are.

     Sigh.
     You know what’s happening. I know what’s happening. Do I have to say it? I guess so. It’s my job.
     OK. Here goes.
     Of course the very fact that there was a police task force is part of the well-oiled machinery of doing nothing with flair. Crisis 101 teaches you to appoint a task force, buy time, create the illusion that change is occurring, when what you are really doing is kicking the can down the road, again.
     The can tumbled to earth with a bang Wednesday in the scathing “Recommendations for Reforms” report, documenting what everybody knows, including the kind of succinct assessment that makes good headlines. “Chicago police ‘have no regard’ for lives of black people, report says” is how the Washington Post put it. And Napoleon escaped from Elba. Sorry if I’m the one to tell you.
     The Sun-Times online headline was “Racism, lack of accountability plague Chicago Police Department"...

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"When you've see one stripper, you've seen them all"

Little Egypt

     A reader, reacting to yesterday's column about the City Council considering changing the strip club law regarding booze accused me of "dowdy puritanical moralizing." Ouch. I hope that's not the case. Maybe I didn't explain myself clearly. This column, from four years ago, might provide some background, and help explain where I'm coming from regarding this subject.

     Chicago was once home to a now vanished class of entertainer: the famous American stripper. It is where Little Egypt danced the Hoochee-Coochie, at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, and where Sally Rand — who took her name from another local institution, Rand McNally — flashed her feather fans, at the 1933 Century of Progress.
     They were of course only the most notorious of an army of bump-and-grinders who once entertained at venues around the city, in the days before they were swept away leaving Chicago — singularly among major American cities — a virtual desert when it comes to strip clubs.
     Chicago's lone outpost that serves up both liquor and female flesh, VIP's on Kingsbury, last week seemed to finally survive a nearly two-decade legal effort to close it, with the city deciding it would rather get the millions of dollars in tax revenue than eliminate what had been an occasional irritation.
     When VIP's was "Thee Doll House" it had its moment of front-page infamy, when an accountant embezzled $250,000 from his firm and spent it there, somehow, a reminder that such clubs are often seen — not without reason — as fronts for prostitution, as well as invitations to organized crime. Known as "clip joints," unwary conventioneers might find themselves presented with enormous bills which, if they declined to pay, would lead to a sidewalk beating while complicit police whistled and looked the other way.
     Avoiding fleeced patrons — and to protect dancers from drunken groping — was the rational for separating liquor and striptease, and explains boozeless strip emporiums such as the Admiral Theatre on Lawrence Avenue.
     Once, though, Chicago had countless strip clubs. New Yorker critic A.J. Liebling devoted a surprising amount to this topic in his 1952 "Second City" report on Chicago.
     "There are scores of strip-tease joints," he wrote. "The performances ... are always the same, but they are invariably unpleasant. ... One of the girls, introduced as 'Mlle. Yvonne Le Vonne, straight from Paris — and I mean Paris, Illinois, ha ha,' then goes through the familiar business of removing most of her specially constructed clothes, which have none of the sexual quality of other clothes. She does this with an idiot gravity, and as a climax puts one foot on each side of the microphone shaft and does several kneebends. She then shakes herself as if she had just sat down on a spilled beer, and ends up posing on one foot, with the other leg bent behind her. After that, she comes down into the crowd to cadge a drink, but she will settle for a cigarette if only the regular customers are present. Why they are present, night after night, is their own pathologically mysterious business."
     Chicago's strip club strip — along West Madison and North Clark Street — was swept away after Richard J. Daley was elected mayor in 1955. A man so devoted to order that he once had his limo stop to clean up after a man who dropped a newspaper on Michigan Avenue, Daley plastered the city with "Keep Chicago Clean" signs and purged it of what he considered moral sinkholes.
     The suburbs stepped in to fill the void — of course Cicero, and places like Heavenly Bodies in Elk Grove Village.
     My job has brought me to many strip clubs at one point or another, and I can't say I was terribly impressed. The Admiral was just strange — pneumatic-breasted porn stars standing on their heads. Heavenly Bodies led me to the theory — formed while chatting with a quite beautiful gal while she performed a lap dance — that men visit these places not so much to look at the women as to have the women look at them, to gain the attention of someone who normally wouldn't give them the time of day, even if it costs $10 to do so.
     Thee Doll House was simply excruciating; I was assigned to extract information from the dancers about the guy who dropped the $250,000. This proved impossible, and by the end of the second day trying, I was on the phone with my editor, begging him to pull me out of there before the boredom killed me.
     "Burlesque strippers are a great deal like elephants," Joseph Mitchell once wrote, "when you've seen one, you've seen them all."
     Speaking of "burlesque:" under that moniker an under-the-radar, steampunk-meets-stripping renaissance, of sorts, has taken place in Chicago over the past decade. Rather than relying on specific established clubs, which can attract unwanted city attention, as V.I.P.'s has learned, dancers, as they view themselves, pop up at bars, usually later at night, perform a show and then vanish.
     I met one such stripper through Facebook a year ago. We had lunch— a perfectly nice young lady, bright-eyed, ambitious, filled with lofty aspirations to art that strippers invariably embrace to masquerade the essential tawdriness of what they do. Afterward, I witnessed a late night show performed by her and a few of her friends— joined by my wife, I should probably add — thinking it might be fodder for a column. It was an energetic review, well intentioned, with a certain costumed solemnity, like the R-rated grown-up version of preschoolers putting on a pageant with bumblebees and smiling suns. I thought of the Mitchell quote, as well as the dictum, "don't take a bazooka to a flea," and never wrote anything about it. 
                       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 18, 2012

Block the booze and bosoms bill

Charles Ray, "Fall '91, 1992," The Broad, Los Angeles.

     A confession: I never quite got strip clubs. They seem so dreary and beside-the-point. (“You just haven’t gone to the right strip clubs,” growled a colleague, when I aired this theory in the newsroom, praising Indiana strip clubs with a gleam in his eye that made me want to rush out and investigate the situation. …)
     Sorry, where were we? Yes, strip clubs. Kinda like paying to go to a restaurant where they wheel the meal out, let you look at it a bit, and then return the food to the kitchen untouched. What’s the purpose of that?
     The Chicago City Council is threatening to change the city’s long-standing separation of booze and bosoms. Right now, if one of Chicago’s four strip clubs wants to have topless dancers, it can’t sell beer. Except for one club, VIP’s A Gentleman’s Club on Kingsbury, which has somehow skirted the law by paying millions of dollars in back tax in 2012. (Well, four clubs and numerous steampunk “neo-burlesque” special events that pop up at midnight shows all over town, but they dwell in the shadows, in ephemeral, quasi-legality and aldermen seem not to know about them).
     Ald. Emma Mitts (37th), chairman of the licensing committee, was sponsoring an ordinance that would allow alcohol in strip clubs. Underline “was.” In the kind of Keystone Kops confusion typical of the council, she said Tuesday she was shocked, shocked to find that her law allows full nudity. The law appears to have been written by VIP’s owner, Mitts suggested, and the alderman only glancingly acquainted herself with it before adding her support. So rather than the law being voted on Wednesday, she has clawed it back for airbrushing....

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Museum to the result ignores the cause

     John Kerry is in Hiroshima for Group of Seven talks, and on Monday toured the city's Peace Memorial Museum, becoming the first sitting secretary of state to visit the museum and take its grim journey through the dropping of the atomic bomb.
     Kerry said "everybody" should tour the museum, including President Obama, who visits Japan next month, and having toured it myself this past March, I agree with him.
     It's a somber place, by necessity, but as stark as the story it tells, of the atomic bomb exploding above Hiroshima at 8:15 on the morning of August 6, and the toll on the humans living below, it is also an incomplete story as well.
      You can't be a human being and not be saddened by the experience—Kerry called it "gut-wrenching." But I was also struck by the subtle dishonesty of the exhibits, which emphasize the deaths of school children over just about anything else. Again and again. Mannequins holding their tattered uniforms, photos of their injuries. It would be possible to visit the museum and miss the fact that there had been a war at all, one started by the Japanese invading Manchuria, a brutal global struggle for survival which the Americans, who were fiercely isolationist, unfortunately, were drawn into only when the Japanese attacked our base at Pearl Harbor one Sunday morning in December, 1941, killing 2,000 American servicemen.
    This is not a minor point. Though I suppose the Japanese can be forgiven for not emphasizing it, since we do such a poor job of teaching the story ourselves. Many Americans don't know we fought the Japanese in World War II, never worry about fine points like the atomic bomb. That was illustrated this week on my Facebook page, in a discussion of Germany, someone mentioned Japan's failure to come to terms with the horrors it inflicted on its neighbors in World War II. 
    "Japan is a pretty peaceful place," a woman replied, "what we did to them was horrible."
     In the discussion afterward, it turned out, she didn't know that Japan was responsible for some 10 million deaths prior to the dropping of the atomic bomb, most in China, which it invaded in 1937 and brutalized. Americans alive at the time were profoundly grateful for the bomb—85 percent approved its use, according to a Gallup Poll in September, 1945—which saved uncounted American lives — and Japanese — lives that would have been lost had we been forced to invade the island. Guilt over its use is based on anachronism: applying the values of today to the past, conveniently forgetting large swatches of history including the fact that, awful as the bombing of Hiroshima was, it did not prompt the Japanese to surrender. A second bomb, dropped on Nagasaki, was required to do that.

   

There's a lot of that cult of personality thing going around

     Xi Jinping.
     Any idea what that means?
     Here, I’ll make it easier: A) Street slang for “Extreme Jumping,” the practice of leaping off tall buildings, cliffs, etc., in one of those flying squirrel suits while taking a video for YouTube
     B) Korean for “Sin Juniper,” a kind of gin made with radioactive juniper berries
     C) the president of the People’s Republic of China for the past three years
     Too easy, right? It’s “C,” though don’t feel bad if you guessed differently. We’re Americans, we can’t keep track with every detail in this big old globe of ours. I imagine a third of the country, if you asked them to name the leader of China, would say “Mao Zedong,” and he died in 1976.
     You’re certainly not alone.
     “I never heard of him,” Bill O’Reilly said on Fox News last September, after laboriously reading Xi’s name off a piece of paper. “I don’t know who he is.”

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Really important people show up for the bris

     Politics has become such a free fire zone, the tendency is to blast away at everything, big or small, without any sense of balance. Thus Hillary Clinton can be assailed for a policy statement, for something her husband did 20 years ago, for her relationship with Wall Street banks, and her smile, all in the same breath, all with the same vigor, as if those were all equivalent. 

     I try not to do that. Given Donald Trump's utter unfitness for president in thought, word and deed, between his preying upon the darkest impulses in the submerged American psyche and his tacit union with xenophobes of all stripes, who cares whether his wife posed for risque fashion shots or that his hands are tiny? Why traffic in trivialities?

    So it is not significant that the man skipped his own grandson's bris to campaign. If the three marriages don't show that Trump doesn't hold family life in high regard, nothing will. Though the delicious irony that Trump has the White Supremacist vote locked up; the existence of his Jewish grandkid must be one of the many things they don't know. Reading a story laying out the whole situation—Brisgate, we'll call it—it struck me that the average, non-Jewish reader might not get the significant of brises, something that I explained back in the 1990s, when I hosted a pair. 

     Elsewhere in the paper today, my colleague Jim Ritter has a calm, sober look at the current state of the art of medical thinking regarding the practice of circumcision.
     Poor guy.
     I wish I could have gotten to him beforehand and warned him: Jim, buddy, don't do this. Listen to me, the voice of experience. Write a story about podiatry.
     You see, I, too, wrote a story about circumcision, about 10 years ago. And have found myself, ever since then, placed on the mailing list of NO-CIRC, the California group that feels circumcision is the greatest atrocity visited upon mankind since the Romans crucified slave rebels along the Appian Way.
     So every quarter, for the past decade, the NO-CIRC newsletter lands in my mailbox. It's an arresting document, filled with tales of botched circumcisions, of doctors who now see the light, of men declaring their lives ruined by circumcision (they speak of not being "complete"). There are all sorts of heretofore unimagined practices, such as submitting to reconstructive surgery to have the little bit put back.
     I should be strong and just pitch the newsletter out, unread. But that would take a more solid will than my own. Curiosity always gets the better of me, and I need to flip through it, marveling that what is for me and everyone I've ever met a forgotten bit of surgical business buried deep in our unremembered pasts is, for these people, a defining wrong and peerless crime they set their lives to fighting.
     Hope you enjoy it, Jim, because they've got your number now.
     Of course, I'm biased. Circumcision is one of my people's rituals. Eight days after a boy is born, you get everybody over to the house. A mohel—or rabbi trained to do the deed—shows up, puts on a little show, does a few deft slices, and then everyone breaks out the Crown Royal.
     I've hosted two bris ceremonies in the past three years and would love to host another, if the opportunity arrives. They're fun. True, there is a certain anxiety among the male guests, who tend to whistle silently, their hands folded in front of them, protectively. They stare with sudden interest at the light fixtures while the act itself is being performed.
     But the newborn boys, snockered on Manischevitz sucked off a piece of gauze, took it like, well, men. A little crying, and then back to normal. Maybe they'll hate me someday for it and join NO-CIRC, but I sort of doubt it.
     And the ceremony had meaning to me. Not so much the ageless covenant going back to Abraham, an unbroken chain from Chicago leading to the sands of the Sinai Desert. No, what I found most amazing was that people showed up. A bris has to be done at a set time - eight days after the birth, during the day. Which means that it is rarely conveniently scheduled. People don't come out on a Tuesday morning because they want to watch a surgical procedure and grab a free bagel. They come out because, I assume, they care about you, they're proud you've had a boy and want to share in it.
     A good thought. I concluded, after the two bris rites, that as a general rule the people who took the time to attend were the people I was going to expend energy worrying about. Several times, when faced with a friend's less-than-friendlike behavior, I comforted myself with the thought, "Heck, they didn't come to the bris—what did I expect?"

     —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, March 2, 1999

Hugh Hefner, advocate for family values

     Today is Hugh Hefner's 90th birthday. The Playboy founder has long been in California, but was born and raised in Chicago, started Playboy on the kitchen table of his Harper Avenue apartment, and ran his empire here until the mid-1970s.
     Some people are captivated by Hef. I am not one of those people. I always shared the opinion of Mike Royko, who once wrote:

     He is the world's most over-rated playboy. In fact, I'm not sure that Hefner is a playboy. He seems to be as middle-class as the people he criticizes in his giggle-giggle philosophy.

      Bingo. Not that there's anything WRONG with being middle-class. I certainly am. Still, I don't pretend to be the avatar of sophistication, which Hefner certainly did. Nor do I suggest that crass commercialism and unexamined carnality amounts to the nine-fold path to enlightenment. 
     That said, he was a personage of significance, no doubt about that. In this 2000 column, I found myself at one of his parties, and thought I'd share the experience, such as it was, to mark his birthday.

     The principal of Queen of Peace High School phoned. Could I, she asked, come to their event on Monday?
      Gee, I said, I'd love to, but I'm going to Hugh Hefner's party. He's showing off his twin girlfriends, Sandy and Mandy.
     I could have just said, "Sorry, I'm busy." But I provided details, succumbing to the shameful braggadocio that sends people to such parties in the first place. Look at me! I was saying. I'm big and important!
     Within such pride are the seeds of its own punishment. Having bragged about going, when Monday night came, I had to actually go.
     That cuts across my core personality, which is to rush home each night and read Hop on Pop. First, I'm a tired guy, I like to rest. Second, when I go out, I avoid crowds. Why risk having your elbow jostled? Third, I have the most persuasive lobbyist in the world working on me not to linger downtown, in the form of a 2-year-old on the phone saying wistfully, "You come home fwum work now?"
     But Hugh Hefner? The man is an icon. What guy doesn't cast a long, envious look at the life Hefner has had? Rich. Famous. All the babes in the world.
     My wife thought I was going to ogle the centerfolds. But really I was going to ogle Hefner.
     That view is not shared by all. The principal, for instance, surprised me by expressing disdain. Why, she asked, her voice registering part wonder, part icy disgust, would you want to go there?
     I've met the principal, and like her, and was a little embarrassed to be caught bragging about something so clearly loathsome to her. Her displeasure hovered above me and kept me from joining in the easy dismissal of those protesting naming a street in honor of Hefner.
     At first, the protest seems like a time warp, just for the terms used: "pornography," "provincialism," even that hoary 1920s chestnut, "free love."
     It is easy to forget that the mainstream of America is a very conservative place. The fact is that sex and nudity send a big chunk of America screaming for the exits, and as fun as it is for hip urbanites such as ourselves to smirk at them, many people feel that the entire Playboy philosophy is grotesque and damaging to family life.
     They're wrong, of course. Hugh Hefner has done more to foster family values than anybody. His party, for instance, was one long infomercial for being married and spending your nights at home playing Scrabble.
     About 500 people packed into a dimly lit room. Unidentifiable techno disco wumping out of big speakers. Hef and three or four identical, improbably constructed women, the twins apparently among them, somehow transported through the crowd and placed on a raised podium surrounded by a nose-high wall. On tiptoe, you could just see them.
     "Watch Hef dance!" a media pal urged. I gazed over the wall. Hef danced like my Uncle Max, his hands in little fists, feet planted, shoulders waggling happily for about 10 seconds.
     Later, I tried to ascend to the empyrean to greet him, but was rebuffed. Having shown off to a high school principal, I was punished by being told to go stand with the other supernumeraries in the crowd scene.
     My wife—her mind addled by love—had actually worried that I would become lovestruck by some Playboy centerfold and hie away with her to California. But in reality, such women are more anatomical curiosities than lust objects; closer to giraffes than people.
     Frankly, the next morning, ears ringing, stomach uneasy, I realized, too late, that I would have had more fun at Queen of Peace High School, reminded yet again of the essential fact missed by both critics and defenders of Playboy: It's an illusion, harmful only to those who seek it out in reality.
            —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, April 13, 2000

Gay Talese takes us inside "The Voyeur's Motel"

Gay Talese

     My use of the word "incredible" to describe Gay Talese's book "The Voyeur's Motel" in this column turned out to be prescient. When it was published in late June, journalists more rigorous than myself poked holes in his accounts, and Talese renounced the whole thing.  It sucks to get old.

     When I’m 84, I just hope to be somewhere. Sitting on a comfortable chair in the sun, perhaps, plaid wool lap rug neatly tucked, flipping through Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and someone to bring a fresh cup of tea. Sign me up right now.
     The thought of being Gay Talese, 84 and at the very top of his game, roiling the media world two, maybe three, different ways in the span of a week, well, it’s unimaginable.
     And no, I don’t mean the Twitstorm over his telling a crowd at Boston University on April 1 that, as a young man, he wasn’t inspired by female reporters. That’s called candor, and the shriek rising up from the Internet is only news because we’re still accustoming ourselves to it. It’s too omnipresent and witless to have actual value, and someday will be seen not as news so much as similar to how we view the writing inside toilet stalls: a trivial element of modern life of interest only to those who find themselves directly before it.
     No, I mean his article, “The Voyeur’s Motel,” in the April 11 New Yorker.  An incredible story, leaving behind important questions, something they’ll discuss in journalism schools 50 years from now (assuming, of course, there are journalism schools 50 years from now) the way we’re still talking about Talese’s profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” published 50 years ago this month in Esquire (the anniversary being Talese’s third source of notoriety this week)....

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A luxury they will never enjoy

     Hmm.
     Now Tuesday was a really good day. Got to work with a pocket full of nothing, true, but came up with a column about the minimum wage that I wasn't embarrassed to pass on to the editor. Jumped on the Blue Line to Wicker Park. Popped into Myopic Books, one of the great used book stores left in Chicago. Had lunch at my new favorite place, Dove's on Damen, bumped into my pal, Tony Fitzpatrick, the artist, sitting right next to me. Talked about Rahm Emanuel circling the drain. A good time.
     Just as I got home news broke about the governor of Mississippi announcing that, envious of the scorn being heaped on North Carolina, his state too had passed its own ridiculous law making it easy for the state's wasp's nest of haters to use their religion as a pretext to snub and harass gay people who try to patronize their stores, to buy flowers or cakes for their weddings, as if those stores were places of public accommodation in a capitalist society called the United States of America and not religious relic stalls at some market in a medieval village in Upper Slovakia.
     "Is this the hill to die on?" my kids' elementary school principal would ask, when some particularly nugatory bit of nonsense was being fluffed into A Big Honkin' Issue. Apparently yes, since it seems the whole wheel of Christianity turns upon scorn for gay marriage. Who knew?

   Why should bowl-haircut state legislators South of the Mason-Dixon line be allowed to make a fuss about regular American citizens going peacefully about their business, and get no flack back in return? It's deeply satisfying that a company like PayPal fled North Carolina in revulsion. Such courage must be emulated.  I pursed my lips, pulled a picture of some black-clad ISIS group off the Internet, and Tweeted it with this line: "Someone should tell Mississippi that 'sincerely held religious beliefs' really isn't much of an excuse any more."
      I thought it clever, and others agreed — it was retweeted nearly 200 times, with 300 "likes." I went to watch the Bulls game, satisfied that my small role in flying the flag for liberty and justice for all in the United States had been fulfilled.
     By Wednesday, however, well, not such a good day. The motley bund of haters and white supremacists—whoops, excuse me, "race realists"— sulking down in Mississippi began to stir, sniff the air, and mobilize themselves. They cannily deduced, by my name, that I'm a Jew — no slipping anything past these folks — a parasite on my "host" country. 
     Twitter lit up.
     "omg a jew doing jew stuff I'm so surprised omg" wrote something calling itself Ferric Jaggar. Jew stuff? Really? Maybe that's why they call it Twitter; all these twits. How to respond to that? Start by considering the source. Silence would be ideal—what purpose is served by responding?— but it's so tempting to try. I tweeted back: "I assume by 'jew stuff' you mean 'thinking.' Yeah, it's fun, you ought to try it sometime. It's how we stay ahead." For all the good it did. Immediately others were waving it around --see, see? I was claiming that Jews are better than Christians? (Well, umm, this particular one is, at the moment here, compared to morons like you, yeah, I'll stand by that.) 
    Soon it was coming fast and furious. I lost count. Dozens. Scores.
    "What about Israel?" others chimed in. What about the Orthodox view on intermarriage? You could see their logic shining through, like the spine of a tadpole. Of course the Jew stands with Israel. It was the strangest thing. At first I tried to respond. "Don't you have Jews in Mississippi?" Not all Jews are knee jerk supporters of Israel. I'm certainly not. But somehow explaining J-Street ambivalence toward the direction Israel is going at the moment to faceless Aryan Nation bullies who just assume they're hitting me where I live, well, extra stupid.  In fact, we tend to look more askance at some of that country's glaring missteps than Christians do, who adore the nation because it fits into whatever insane End of Time philosophy they've got locked up in their secret hearts.
     It didn't waste the day. But it wasted an hour of the day. Maybe two. I'd focus on my work, manage 20 or 30 minutes, and then jump back on, read a few, wince, block five or 10 replies—I trained myself not to even read them—and then flee back to my job. 
     Still, it managed to cast the afternoon in a mournful, sour pall, to think that such creatures exist, they populate our country, the South especially, it seems, muscles twitching in their jaws, bereft that they can't openly loathe blacks anymore and still keep their jobs at the Piggly Wiggly, determined to keep the one group they can hate, gays (and, I guess, Jews) under their boot.  It must supply them with the self-esteem they lack.
     I don't have energy to pluck out any more specific examples of ugliness. A number seemed to think Israel is responsible for ISIS, or felt outraged that I had pointed out that, like ISIS, the people behind the Southland's pro-bigotry laws are using their faith as an excuse to hurt people. That made them victims, which is how all bullies view themselves, the better to justify their hostility for the world. You haven't lived until someone with "fuhrer" as part of their Twitter handle accuses you of insensitivity.
     I had to keep reminding myself that bigotry is, at its core, a form of ignorance: the uninformed ramping up their fright at something that a non-terrified person would instead learn something about and thus no longer fear. A failure of empathy. A crime against empathy, really. And that for all their attempts to hurt others — like Mississippi's new law — their true victims are themselves, crouched at the keyhole of their worldview, missing life's pageant. A number of my new Twitter pals referred to "white genocide"—their term for a world including minorities and people different from themselves. "White suicide" is more like it, as a culture is defined by its worst elements (another link with ISIS: they slur the thing they would promote by associating it with themselves).
     Enough. I'm not the Idiot Police. That's a mantra of mine. I can't fix them and shouldn't try—there are too many, for starters, and their logic twists in such a way that they always end up right, in their own minds if nowhere else. It's the rule of their existence. The world will step over them, like a pedestrian avoiding dog shit, and keep moving forward. Let time do its work. It seems like the hate is the only constant in some places, such as Mississippi, and various flesh vessels are born, live and spend their lives allowing the hate to inhabit them before they pass it onto their children like a hereditary disease, like syphilis. They not only lost the Civil War, but they're still losing it, still losing, every day, thrashing at the modern world with their limp little noodle of a creed as it rushes past them, cringing at their touch. 
      Not to indict them all. I've been South—the photo above is Durham, North Carolina. They don't all seem to be sputtering haters. Or maybe that's just the polite public face, until they can run to Twitter and reveal their true, hideous selves.

      Quite the sorry spectacle. And no harm in feeling pity for them, an echo of the empathy they obviously lack. I think it's important not to hate them back, because if you do, then they've won, a little. To be honest, I felt like Dante, pausing at some trench in the netherworld, holding a handkerchief to my nose, half-swooning as I gaze as long as possible upon the horrible sight, the upturned faces of the damned, before hurrying on with a shudder and a sigh. Some people are their own punishment. It's best to linger among them only long enough to remind yourself how good it is to not be one of them, to have the pleasure of getting away from them. It's a luxury they will never enjoy.

Give Wayne a raise already!

     Everyone should have a lousy job in the food industry. At least once: good for the soul. I had two. My very first job — well, not counting the seven years delivering newspapers, starting at age 9 — was the summer I turned 16. At Barnhill's, an 1890s-themed ice cream parlor in my hometown of Berea, Ohio. Pay was $2.30 an hour and I was a soda jerk/janitor since I worked a split shift. I showed up at 5:30 p.m., scooped ice cream for a few hours, shut down the restaurant and returned at 5:30 a.m. to open it back up.
     Grueling. I still remember solitary frustration of mopping the floor, hearing a "pop" above me, being showered by broken glass, and realizing that I had jammed the mop handle into one of the large glass globes around a light fixture.
     That was one summer.
     A few bad jobs later — junior counselor at a summer camp, moving cardboard boxes in a warehouse for J.C. Penney — I became a baker at Bob Evans, a restaurant that prided itself in its biscuits. I would stand at a table in the middle of the kitchen and whip up biscuits. One busy Sunday I baked 250 pounds worth.
     The guy at the dish tank was named Wayne. I can still see him — the back of his head anyway. Crew cut, black plastic glasses held on by an elastic band. He'd stand at the long stainless steel sink, throw the dirty dishes into a big square rack, hose them down with a sprayer dangling on a metal hose. Pull up the metal door, steam billowing out, push the dirty rack in, the glistening clean rack sliding out the other side

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"What wounds are these?"

     It looks like my 20-year-old is going to spend the summer interning in Washington, D.C.. Concerned parent that I am, on Sunday night, learning the address of the apartment he'll likely share with a pal, I plugged it into Google map and ascertained that, yes, there is a Washington Metro station a convenient five minute walk away. 
     On Monday morning, the New York Times ran a front page story thoroughly describing what a godawful mess the Washington Metro has become, after years of managerial bungling and deferred maintenance. Original cars from when the system opened in 1976 are still in use. The only recourse might be to shut down stretches of the system for months at a time, paralyzing the city. 
    The article recounted fatal crashes and shirked safety standards. My first thought was, "We'll have to get him a car." Though cars have accidents too, far more than transit systems do, and, thinking of Washington traffic, decided it is probably better to take our chances with the Metro. 
     Toward the end, the story, written by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Nicholas Fandos, there is a description of a 2009 collision that woke up dozing legislators, noting that "eight riders and a train operator were killed and dozens were wounded." Later, of another collision: "No one was wounded, but the track defect that caused the derailment had been detected a month earlier."
     Does anything pop out at you from those two sentences? For me, it was the word "wounded." I always thought of wounds as something that happen to soldiers in battle. Riders hurt by mishaps on crumbling transit system are "injured."
    I wanted to shake it off—everybody hates a fusspot—but being a writer is nothing if not about sweating the details. Though I realize that the Times can commit howling errors, like any other newspaper—I once saw a front page where they dropped the dateline--it still seemed something worth pointing out.
     Trudging upstairs, coffee in hand, I started to compose my polite note. Not to the public editor, that would seem like ratting out the reporters for a minor lapse. We're all cooking in the same pot. Write to the reporters themselves. First, praise for the interesting story. Then, a reluctant mention of the topic at hand...
    But first, I plugged "wound" into my online dictionary. I have a personal rule that most people who point out errors are themselves wrong, leaping to draw attention to the perceived flaw without ever checking to determine that they are correct. The nameless iMac dictionary defined the verb "wound" as: "inflict an injury on." Period. And while their examples are both military, "the sergeant was seriously wounded," for the verb, and the adjective, "a wounded soldier," there is nothing to exclude the word from being used to describe victims of a wheezing train system soon to be ferrying my beloved child.
    Language changes. Perhaps we're seeing a word in transition. Daniel Webster's 1828 dictionary endorses my meaning, "To hurt by violence." 
    But the full 1933 Oxford English Dictionary definition begins, "A hurt caused by the laceration or separation of the tissues of the body by a hard or sharp instrument, a bullet, etc.; an external injury." and traces it back more than a thousand years, to Beowulf, "da sio wund ongon,"
    That could in theory mean flying glass in a train accident caused by bungling bureaucrats. Seeking something more current than the 1930s, I went on-line and found confirmation from an impressive grammar blog called Daily Writing Tips: 

     "In modern usage, the noun wound [WOOND] refers to any injury that tears the flesh.
     The verb to wound [WOOND], however, retains its earliest meaning: “to inflict a deliberate injury that tears the flesh.”

     Underline "deliberate." So the Times story is indeed on shaky ground, at least using this authority. People have a tendency to stop collecting evidence once they've validated what they already believe, and I'm no different, particularly since I have my own work to get to this morning. 
     I wasn't going to bother writing to the reporters—who'd welcome that email? I tried to proceed with my day, but felt like I was being timid. "The secret wound lives on within the breast," as Virgil writes. So I dashed off notes to the reporters and, to my surprise, heard back almost immediately from Stolberg, who said that the mistake wasn't theirs—they did use "injure"—but the harm to the article was inflicted by some spinning gear elsewhere in the vast New York Times mechanism. She had already made inquiries, and it was quickly fixed in the on-line version. So I'm not the only person sensitive to these nuances. Now if we could only get The New Yorker to stop saying "insure" when they should say "ensure."
     Enough. Having made my share of blunders in print, I hope I haven't belabored this small point too tediously. As Shakespeare writes: "He jests at scars that never felt a wound."

The Left can be as looney as the Right

Untitled, silkscreen by Barbara Kruger (1989, The Broad collection).

     I've seen some strange weather in Chicago — a day when it was 105 degrees, another, 26 below zero, green skies, monsoon rains and massive snows. But I've never seen a day like Saturday, beginning at dawn with flurries in April, then alternating from blue-skied sunshine to white-out blizzard, and back. Sun, then snowstorm. Clear skies. London fog. All. Day. Long.
     "BI-POLAR VORTEX" a Facebook friends labeled a video of the maelstrom, resurrecting a twitter tag from two years back.
     My poor saucer magnolia blossoms. Open for one day and then, boom, snow and freeze.
     "Where's your global warming now?!" I snarled at the sky.
     "That's not what it means," my wife informed me, perhaps forgetting whom she married.
     Yes dear, I know. A feeble attempt at humor, based on conservatives who, trumpeting their ignorance of all things scientific, declare that really cold days are a refutation of climate change: "How could the world be warmer if it's cold now?" That's like standing in a house engulfed in flame, pulling open the freezer and announcing, "Look! How can there be a fire? The popsicles are fine!"
     But I don't want to rag on the Right. It's too easy. I've started to notice that while the Right's irrationalities get frequent denunciation in the press, the Left has its own irrationalities that receive gentler handling....

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Hoosierland women! Send you little visitor to Gov. Pence.

     It’s a shame that so much attention is going to North Carolina’s new law cruelly scrapping all of their state’s local local anti-discrimination ordinances and raising the specter of police bursting into bathrooms to check on the birth genders of the people using them.
     The latest development there is that not only are major businesses like the NBA, PayPal and IBM lining up to condemn the law and question whether they want to do business with the state, but now the Obama administration is saying that the Tar Heels bigotry-empowerment act could endanger billions of dollars in federal aid, which can be withheld from backwaters that choose to indulge in un-American discrimination.
     As satisfying as all that is, it shouldn’t distract us from the aftershocks rolling across our own little bit of the Southland in the Midwest, Indiana.

       There Governor Mike Pence signed a truly medieval law demanding, among other things, that aborted fetuses be given formal funerals or cremations, and if you think Indiana woman just shrugged and sighed and went back to their washboards and their sad irons, well, think again. 
     Rebellious Indiana women, waking up to this attempt to shove them back into the early 20th century, have created a “Periods for Pence” Facebook page, sharing the governor’s public comment phone number and urging women to keep the Pence informed about their menstrual cycle, since he seems so concerned, including some (apparently) real life exchanges such as...

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My name is Neil Steinberg and I'll be your teacher

     Yesterday was April 1, and so, before we begin, apologies to those loyal readers who were fooled, even upset by my post announcing the end of the blog. I tried to drop enough giveaway clues in it, and succeeded too well, for those who thought the gag was obvious, and not well enough for those who were genuinely deceived. But in general it seemed to be enjoyed by most, and certainly caused some discussion, which is the point of these.
     I almost forgot that I also had a column in the paper Friday, also tied to a certain day — April 1 was the day the Chicago Teachers Union went on their one-day, ill-advised strike. This column also caused a bit of fuss, of a more serious nature, and I thought today being Saturday, I'd slip it in for those who missed it in the paper (and you know who you are!)


     Good morning class.
     Settle down, please. There's room for a few hundred of you in the front: the little kids, please.
     I know there's a lot of us here — 330,000 Chicago Public Schools students, shut out of school Friday due to the one-day teachers union strike.
     Which means the teachers will be walking picket lines, and you'll be, well, somewhere. Hundreds of schools and churches will open their doors, and you might go there to get out of harm's way. Though I'd imagine a good number of you are parked on the sofa at home, killing time as only kids can.
     So forgive me for intruding. I thought I'd try to shoehorn a little education into your day. You can play Call of Duty: Black Ops III all afternoon.
     So, hello, I'm Mr. Steinberg.
     I did pause to ask myself whether this makes me a scab — “scab” is a historic labor term for someone who undermines a strike. The Chicago Teachers Union announced it is monitoring school entrances, threatening to fine any teacher who goes to work today. This was necessary, as opposed to the choir of solidarity that greeted the 2012 strike because, well, times have changed. In four years the economies of Illinois and Chicago have gone from menacing to calamitous, and the union pushing to the front of the line, well, it sparks mixed feelings.
     So flexibility being a survival skill in unions nowadays, I can be a proud member of the Communications Workers of America and still instruct what few students actually drop their eyes upon this today. I’m not on strike.

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The end

     Well, we all saw this day coming, didn't we? 
     At least in recent months.
     Last summer, true, when the blog was clicking along at up to 5,000 hits a day, with some months nearing 100,000 hits, I told myself it would just go up and up, on and on, forever.
     But then, well, it seems people got tired of reading this every goddamn day. To be honest, I got tired of writing it. And while it was amusing to write for thousands of readers, a growing swarm, with praiseful write-ups in Robert Feder's column and the Beachwood Reporter, not to mention the good $10,000 a month or more I was pulling in on blog advertisements, it is something else entirely to write for a couple hundred people a day, with the only income a couple bucks from those pesky pop-up erectile dysfunction ads.
     Frankly, it's just pathetic.  So I'm done.
     Not that it hasn't been a good run. I was proud when Ubilabs named this blog one of "100 Things to Watch in 2011." And excited to have commentators who ranged from John Kass's cousin to Carol Mosley-Braun. Not to mention to create a written legacy of first rate, or at least very good second rate, literary journalism that will glow online like a beautiful radioactive flower until the end of time, or until Google shuts down its servers, whichever comes first. 
    I want to go out on top. Or near the top. Or at least when the top is still a memory, sort of.
    This is goodbye, but not farewell.  You can still read me five days a week in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Me (far right) playing with Eric Zorn's Good Time
  Bluegrass Ramblers.

   In closing, I want to thank you all, you readers, or what readers remain anyway, for sticking with me through the thick and the thin. Thank you for the comments, and for the baked goods. To be honest, I'm looking forward to putting the time that was devoted to writing this blog to more productive pursuits. As you may know, I've taken up the four-string folk mountain harmonium—it's like a banjo—and have been rehearsing with Eric Zorn's Good Time Bluegrass Ramblers, exploring the rich heritage of 1930s Appalachian music. We'll be performing regularly at the Thursday clog dance recitals at the Old Town School of Folk Music—you can check out the schedule here.
     Such farewells should be short. Thank you for joining me on this journey, and I hope to see all of you at our Old Town gigs. Bring your dancing clogs! 

    Best,

    Neil Steinberg