Fox News' Jedi Council of Baffled White Folk

     I try not to dive into the latest media tempest-in-a-teapot. First, because by the time I notice them, they're usually just about over. Second, because they're typically stupid and transitory and repetitive. Third, because everybody else has said everything there is to say. And fourth, it happens so often; continuously, really. If I made a point of reacting to nonsense on Fox News, it would be all I'd ever do. But sometimes you just can't resist.   

   Looking for a representative of the authentic black experience in America? Why that would be me. I know what it’s like to grow up in a completely white, middle-class suburb, to see my father come home after a not-so-long day exploring particle physics at a NASA research lab, to have no personal experience of prejudice, to go to new, first-rate schools, then play on a quiet street with my fellow white kids knowing violence was a mere 30 miles away in Cleveland — actually, not knowing, because the concept never crossed our little kickball-obsessed minds.

    OK, so maybe I’m not the voice of authentic black experience. Scratch the “maybe.” Definitely. That’s why, when the subject comes up, I often fall back on an old reporter’s trick called “talking to black people” to find out their perspective on certain subjects. Maybe it’s a newspaper reporter’s trick, because I watched a video of Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly defending herself in the kerfuffle over her declaring Santa Claus is white. The Left media, which makes an easy living gleefully marveling at the almost-beyond-parody stupidities of the Right, took this to mean that she is so dumb she doesn’t quite realize that Santa is a mythical character.

     It's worse than that. What really amazed me was ... well, first, a little background.
     This particular cultural snowball was set rolling by a blog post on Slate by Aisha Harris, who says that though her house was filled with dark-skinned Santas "in the form of ornaments, cards and holiday figurines," that this wasn't enough, since she still saw the prevalent, Coke-tray white Santa beyond her home as the authentic one, and thus felt "insecurity and shame" due to this "incredibly powerful image" of a white Santa.
     Gosh. It could by argued that any adult, black or white, whose lingering childhood shame comes from Santa already is way ahead of the game. But she has a point, about what she calls the "whole 'white-as-default' notion endemic to American culture," and suggests that a penguin be substituted for old St. Nick. "People love penguins," she writes.
     Then Kelly and her crew of experts at Fox—whose network slogan might as well be "White-As-Default"— weigh in­, and, since it defies belief, I'll ask our Sun-Times graphics folks to include photographic proof of the panel that Fox assembled to critique this black blogger's opinion. Notice anything odd?
     Incredible, right? You don't have to be black to comment on race. I do it all the time. But I'm one guy. It's another thing to assemble a quartet that looks like four white eggs, then let Kelly mock the idea of cultural inclusion. "I kinda laughed, this is so ridiculous," she said.
     Ha ha. One of her fellow panelists prefaced her remarks by calling Harris' view more "politically correct nonsense," then haltingly suggested that maybe a child of color could possibly feel excluded if cultural icons are of a different race. Perhaps a penguin would makes all children feel more welcome. ...
     "No, no," Kelly insisted. "It makes all birds feel welcome."
     That settles it, huh? You can eat at the lunch counter. But don't mess with our Santa.
     Then Kelly said something that summarizes the entire problem that the Republican Party has, not just with blacks, but with gays, immigrants, the whole shifting modern world that looks less and less like Mayberry.
     "Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn't mean it has to change," she said. "Jesus was a white man, too. How do you just revise it in the middle of the story and change Santa from white to black?"
     Can't you just see the gears grinding in the dim recesses of Kelly's head? Come on! It's a white, Christian nation! We can't just change!
    At this point I should just end the column because, really, what more need be said?
     But to point out the obvious: We can change, do change, are changing. In 1960, non-Hispanic whites were 85 percent of the U.S. population. In 2060, the figure will be half that. You can fight it, welcome it, ignore it or, like the idiots at Fox News, stare gape-mouthed at it, a chorus of confused, agog, blank faces shrugging at each other on their befuddled white-folk Jedi Council. If you view the self-pitying defense that Kelly aired later, she ends by portraying Fox News as the true victim, as always. They never learn, never change, but that's OK. The world learns, the world changes. Fox and friends don't have to like it or even understand what's coming down the road. Upset about Santa? Ha. Just wait.

Chicago duo revives the gramophone

The challenge of this story was not buying one on the spot, not jumping on Kickstarter, putting down the $250, then circling May on my calendar and waiting. But that's a lot of money for an impulsive purchase. Still, I want to have that horn on my desk. want to listen to music coming out of it. So I'll hold off, for now, just to give myself something to look forward to. 

     Early last January, college friends Pavan Bapu and Jeff Parrish were walking through Wicker Park when they passed an antique store and saw a 1920s Magnavox R3 gramophone in the window.

     "We both did a double take," said Parrish. "We ended up tracking them down on eBay and bought one to play around with it."



     The graceful curving horn was originally made to amplify thick 78 rpm discs. The two, who met at UIC, decided they could do better.



     "We figured out a way to modernize it, to make it suitable for people now," Parrish said. By February they had a prototype: a Bluetooth receiver within a sleek wooden base, attached to the gramophone horn.



     "It was pretty big," said Parrish.


    
Bapu put some images and a description on a website and 500 people liked it. That got them thinking.



     "What if we scaled this thing down, made it less intimidating, less filling somebody's space?" Parrish said. "We tried out a number of different sizes, and settled on three-quarters [of the original] - big enough to have amplification and presence, and small enough to fit on somebody's table."



     They decided they had something to sell.



     Pavan handled the "nitty-gritty electronic stuff" using knowledge he picked up clerking at Best Buy.


    
"We created our own proprietary audio driver and printed circuit board inside, acoustically optimized for this product," said Bapu, 27. "So we didn't just do a hack job. We put in something that resonates with the harmonics of this horn."



    Parrish's background is engineering and industrial design; Bapu's is communications. "Between the stuff I know and the stuff Pavan knows, we've got our bases covered," Parrish said. "We both have a good bunch of contacts that we've got from our time in school and from various employment opportunities since then."



     They started out putting drawings online, searching for manufacturers.



     "We got quotes from people around the world. It's pretty cool," Parrish said. "Pavan found people by Googling what we need."



     They need people to give money, for instance. Pavan went on Kickstarter, saw a video he liked and contacted its creator, who produced a video for them. Their Kickstarter campaign went up Nov. 26. In fewer than three weeks, they've raised $120,000; more than their goal. The Gramovox devices cost $299, or $250 for those who contribute on Kickstarter, and they plan to start shipping in the spring.



     As much as I like the design, which I noticed on my Facebook stream, I love that these two guys, who have never started a business before, quickly went from seeing an obscure antique in a window, to manufacturing and selling their own version. "In less than a year we went from concept to prototype to production," Bapu said. That's what our country is about, or should be.



     I wanted to hear it, so I biked over to Pavan's apartment at 11th and State. Pavan played Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine." There was a resonance to it. Then Nancy Sinatra singing, "Bang, Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)." I'm used to an iPod, which has the acoustics of mud, but you could hear Sinatra forming the consonants - the Bs, the Ds - as if she had her lips against your ear. Then Louis Armstrong, "When You're Smiling." What more perfect way to hear a master's horn than out of the bell of a metal horn?



     I took my iPhone out to see how the Bluetooth aspect works, and within seconds was playing George Gershwin's "Tip-Toes." It filled the room.



     Lest audiophiles descend on me, I should point out it's still a unidirectional 1920s horn. I'm sure any Polk Audio speaker has better acoustics. My perception was no doubt skewed by how much I admire the thing. There's a wonderful aesthetic to the horn, and I'm the son of a radio operator, who has, displayed in my office, his Turner X-22 crystal microphone and his chrome-plated Vibroplex telegraph key, because they're lovely, to me.



     Whether the world will find the Gramovox Bluetooth Gramophone lovely too, well, we'll find out in a few months. They ship in May. I can see it as the big audio gift of Christmas 2014 because it looks so good, sounds crisp, doesn't cost all that much and points society back to a place it used to be: where you listened to music with other people, together, out of a curving horn.


     They've raised more than $130,000 on Kickstarter, well more their goal. You can see their complete fundraising presentation and excellent video by clicking here.

Pavan Bapu, with the Gramovox. 

Lights on but nobody home

There are very few blogs that I make a point to look at on a regular basis, and one of my favorites is Messy Nessy Chic. Written by Vanessa Grail, a young Briton living in Paris, it has a wonderful aesthetic, looking at the obscure, the decaying, the forgotten and submerged. I wrote a column about her last spring and she was kind enough, when she went overseas for Christmas, to allow me to write a post for her blog. This is the beginning of the post I wrote, which went up on her site Friday. If you click the link at the end, you'll be taken to Messy Nessy Chic, and can see how she does it, plus find a lot more pictures.

     Chicago is justly famous for its architecture. Birthplace of the skyscraper, home to the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere (still, the emotion-driven claim by New York’s One World Trade Center, based on the dodge of calling an antenna a spire, is easily dismissed) Chicago offers a panorama of architectural marvels. So many icons that you usually have to live here before you start noticing structures that are not famous and important, but merely intriguing and fun. Such as the charming little fake buildings that electrical company Commonwealth Edison puts up to camouflage its  substations.

     It can take a while, walking past, until you realize that the front doors don’t open. Or what look like windows are actually louvers. What is that? you wonder. And what is it doing there?

     The most noteworthy, a faux Georgian mansion in the River North area of downtown, was designed by perhaps the city’s most famous living architect, Stanley Tigerman, former director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

     “The building is somewhat tongue-in-cheek , a bit of a joke,” said Tigerman, who had first designed a restaurant just west of the site. “The Hard Rock Cafe: fake stucco, fake Georgian, nothing real about it. Then they came to me and wanted me to do the ComEd substation next door, but to be contextual, to relate it to this ersatz piece of junk.”

     So rather than construct a bogus building based on a fake, albeit one he designed, Tigerman cut the other direction....

To continue reading on "Messy Nessy Chic," click here.

Accurate statistics for gays still hiding in the closet

     People like things simple, but life is not simple. Even a basic factual, mathematical question—"How many people are gay?"—runs into all sorts of complications: what's a gay person? People having sex with their own gender, of course. But what about attraction? What about bi-sexuality? Do they have to act on that attraction, or is the desire itself enough? I looked at the stats, as best I could in the space of Friday's column:

     Assumptions are tricky. They trip you.

     How things seem and how they really are can be two different matters.

     Ask an American what percentage of their fellow citizens are gay, and they often wildly exaggerate, guessing as much as 25 to 30 percent. The actual number—hard, maybe impossible, to pin down—is from 2 to 5 percent.

    Why? That’s easy: Gays are much in the news, much on people’s minds; it’s the same for Jews or illegal immigrants. We think there are a lot more than there really are.

    Demography is always a hot issue, because numbers drive politics and, in turn, are driven by politics.         

    Groups like to exaggerate their own numbers, trying to boost their significance. For years, gay advocates seized on a 10 percent figure from the 1948 Kinsey report even though it only dealt with men and seemed to include every man who ever thought Clark Gable was handsome.
     With society galloping toward recognizing gays (the preferred term is LGBT, "lesbian gay bisexual transgender," but LGBT doesn't strike me as an acronym Joe Sixpack is going to know), now might seem a time when we can finally get a fix on how much of the population is gay. But it's a complex question.
     "I'm a demographer," said Gary J. Gates, of the UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute, which tracks the nation's gay population, or tries to. "I'm talking to people who self-identify. I'm measuring visibility."
     In other words, people who admit to a pollster that they're gay. Even that is tricky.
     "In Gallup polls, among people under the age 30, more than 6 percent of adults tell pollsters they're gay," Gates said. Above 30, the number abruptly drops in half.
     "Is that really because young people are gayer?" Gates said. "I think a large piece of that is younger people are growing up in an environment where this is acceptable, so they're willing to identify themselves as gay."
     As attitudes change, once-invisible communities rise from the mist. The census doesn't ask about sexuality but does ID same-sex couples. Gates found that between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, "conservative states show the biggest amount of change." Which either means that toleration causes gays to flock to red states—doubtful—or that when it's safe to come out, gays do.
     We were talking in the wake of an intriguing article in The New York Times on Sunday by economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, "How Many American Men are Gay?"
     He used social media stats—Facebook status choices, Web searches for gay porn—to determine "at least 5 percent of American men ... are predominantly attracted to men."
     That 5 percent—or 3, or 7—is distributed around the country. The most interesting point of the Times piece is that, while we might think a place like Chicago, with its Boystown, has a much higher proportion of gay residents than, say, Phoenix, actually what they are is more visible, since gay people, like straight people, tend to stay put.
     "There's no evidence gay or lesbian people are substantially more mobile than any other group in the population," Gates said. "You don't get dramatic differences."
     The Williams Institute statistic for gay men is astonishingly low: 1.8 percent, which doubles if you include lesbians and bisexual men, though that throws the issue back into politics, since some insist that bisexuals are merely men who haven't accepted their gayness yet, while others see them as a distinct category, and experts consider sexuality more a spectrum, or continuum, than a grid of neat cubbyholes people can be tossed into.
     The whole exercise of counting gays could be seen as an echo of their repression, and just as scientists don't stay up nights categorizing straights by whether they prefer blondes or brunettes, so the acceptance of homosexuals into ordinary mainstream American life will nudge keeping track of them into less controversial scorekeeping, like how pollsters keep track of Lutherans.
     The numbers also show the stigma of being gay, while abating, is still strong. A recent Pew Research poll said that half of LGBT people with a living father aren't out to him.
     "That's still an awful lot of people," said Gates, who told me a story more evocative than a ream of numbers. He was at a wedding recently in Washington state—he lives in Seattle. The happy couple, two men "had lived their entire lives together." The vows exchanged, it came time to kiss. But they couldn't kiss, not in front of all those people.
     "They were very nervous," Gates said. "They had lived their entire lives together, cautiously." The attendees urged them that "this is OK, it's what you do at weddings."
     "An awful lot of gay people are like that," Gates said. "Even when you can get married, it doesn't undo everything you've been told."

"Drink! Drink! Drink drink drink!!!"

       Jeff Woodman, a fine actor who has read such best-selling works as "Life of Pi" and "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" for Audible.com, recorded my 2008 memoir, "Drunkard" in New York City last week.  
     Beforehand, he phoned to go over some details. I was impressed with how conscientious he was about getting the pronunciations right. We talked for a long time about the book, and when I told him how I always felt bad that the original ending was shaved off, over my objections, by my cleaver-wielding editor—the editor found the ending funny, and funny is somehow bad in a recovery memoir, I guess because it undermines the expected air of penance—Jeff graciously allowed me to return the original ending to the audio version, plus add a few other jokes that got chopped, even though it made more work for him. I was glad to get that ending back on, and I think adds an attractive bonus to the audio edition. So thanks Jeff.

      Audible.com releases the audio book of "Drunkard" next month—they work quick—but a faithful reader asked if, before then, I could share the salvaged ending. Happily—it's extra apt right now, because the scene occurred at a 2006 Lyric Opera production, "Fledermaus" which, coincidentally, debuted this week in a production new to the Lyric.  I'll certainly see it with an easier mind now than I did seven years ago. 
      As a set up to this passage,  you should bear in mind you've just read this excruciating crawl through rehab and reached what was at the time a tentative, hard-fought sobriety:

     A year after all this transpired, a friend from Gene & Georgetti invited Edie and me to the Lyric Opera, to join him and his date in fifth row center seats. The opera was Strauss’s “Die Fledermaus,” a good part of which, we discovered as we watched, is a celebration of champagne. The elegantly-attired singers, ladies in ball gowns, men in white tie and tails, gaily twirled around a sumptuous Viennese ballroom, raising glasses and enormous bottles of champagne high in the air while belting out, in German, “Drink! Drink! Drink drink drink drink!!!”
     As they did, Edie tapped me on the arm. I looked at her. She leaned in toward me.
     “You just can’t catch a break, can you?” she whispered, smiling gleefully.

                                                                                #

Photo courtesy of Lyric Opera of Chicago by Dan Rest

Divvy Diary: If you think it's cold outside, try riding a bike.

     We are chaff, blown by society’s breezes. We don’t think so; proud, we flatter ourselves that we are independent mariners, captains of our destiny, raising our sails of free will to tack in whichever direction we please. It only seems that way. Truth is, a few puffs from culture and we toss our hats in the air, quit our homes and go die in trenches at the Somme.

     Or jump onto bikes when it’s 20 degrees outside, as I did Monday. It occurred to me, striding toward the Divvy stand at the Merchandise Mart, that I have never before been tempted to ride a bike in winter, never mind done it. What changed? The job demanded I go to 11th and State, a perfect distance to try a Divvy in snowtime. The city gives us permission, making these bikes available all winter, ergo, I must go try it. That logic gets you tangled in barbed wire.

     The rack at Orleans offered, at first glance, a row of snowed-in bikes. But closer examination revealed the first truth about winter biking: As long as you aren’t biking immediately after a snowfall, someone else will have already brushed off a bike for you.      

    So I sidestepped the five snow-crusted bikes and picked a clean one, wordlessly thanking the previous cyclist. I hopped on and crossed east between the Mart and the river (going the wrong way, yes, but it isn’t technically a street and besides, it was convenient. I’ve decided not to be the only cyclist in Chicago who strictly obeys traffic laws).

     The Wells Street bridge has that new, green bike lane, and again, it helps to have societal approval, for the city to say, in essence, “You belong here, this is your path.” A kind of benediction, really, and not only did it instill confidence as I rode, but it seemed to affect the midmorning traffic flowing around me with what I perceived as a certain, “let’s not kill him” respect. Or hoped.

     The only problem was my hands ...

     Though an expert had, in this very column, urged the wearing of mittens when winter biking, and though I had read it — heck, I had written it — and found the advice sound, the drawback was it required one to actually go buy mittens, which I neglected to do. What I was wearing was a pair of thin, Under Armour-like gloves beneath ragwool fingerless gloves I had in my pockets, and though technically “layers,” they were completely inadequate.

     By Madison, the pinkies on both hands had gone numb, and I retracted them from the gloves, curling the frosty digits against my palm, a process I repeated for each finger — ring, middle, index — in turn, until I was basically riding with my balled-up fists pressed against the handlebars. Not the safest practice, but it worked. A reminder that newspaper advice is one thing, real-world experience something else entirely.

     Nothing tempers the shame of folly like seeing your madness shared, and I am not the only idiot riding Divvy bikes in the winter. Fred Wu, of Roscoe Village, owns six bikes and races on the SpiderMonkey team, but he also is a Divvy member who on Sunday rode his cyclo-cross bike to Montrose, where he left it by the team tent, checked out a Divvy and rode it in the Montrose Harbor leg of the Chicago Cyclocross Cup state championship.

     “I did it for fun,” said Wu, enthusiastically cheered by the tough cup crowd. “I thought it would be amusing.” He came in last.

     Wu was inspired by cyclists teasing each other about racing a Divvy. The blue bikes (the hue of the stripes on the Chicago flag) have become a de facto symbol of the city. Wedding parties pose with them, as they do with royal blue Citi bikes in New York, a new Gotham tradition (a shame we can’t as easily adopt New York’s custom of making serious money off the bikes; it got $43 million from CitiBank for the branding, while cash-strapped Chicago got zip — another local tradition. The city says it’s working on it).

     It took 25 minutes to bike from the Mart to Roosevelt, pausing at Polk to click my bike into a dock, thaw my hands then jump back on. There was a buffeting icy gale as I crossed Congress, but I dropped my head, stood on the pedals and persevered.

     Docking at Roosevelt and Wabash, I couldn’t help but notice the Red Line station, welcoming and warm. I did my interview and after, heading back to the office, didn’t think twice about taking the L north and grabbing a Divvy at the Thompson Center, for the much shorter, much warmer return jaunt. Blame that free will I keep hearing about — it’s smart to limit your madness — though you could argue that it is just 100,000 years of survival instinct kicking in. And the next time I rode the Divvy — on Tuesday, when it was even colder — I was wearing mittens. They help a lot.

The amazingness of life

     We read for many reasons. To be taken to different times and places, to go on adventures with unusual characters. To learn practical information and find useless pleasure. Me, I read for all those purposes, while always hoping to find what I consider "the telling detail," a little fact that stands out and conveys more than its share of emotion, reality, truth. You rarely come across a really good one. But when you do, it sticks with you.
     The telling detail I'm thinking about when the topic of telling details comes up -- or, rather, when I bring it up, since people aren't always broaching the subject — is from my pal Adam Gopnik's excellent memoir, Paris to the Moon. He writes:
    "That first year we went to a lot of circuses; in Paris there are usually six or seven in residence. We saw the Moreno-Bormann family circus,which is a true family circus. When any performer does anything slightly dangerous, the rest of the family stand around the ring calling out 'Careful!" under their breaths and averting their eyes."
     There is nothing wild or extraordinary about that moment. In fact, just the opposite, it is small, and human, and sweet, and I love it. You can see the family—in my mind's eye they are holding hands, looking alternating up at, and away from, a young man in tights, perhaps walking with a pole across a stretched wire, 10 feet off the ground. whispering, "fais attention, fais attention." "Careful, careful." 
     Another such telling moment popped out of Jack London's drinking memoir, John Barleycorn, while I was reading on the train Monday. The author of The Call of the Wild, turned to non-fiction trying to take advantage of a contract loophole (he had already sold his future fictional output; by writing a memoir, he could get paid again). London is recounting his childhood in 1880s along the coast of San Mateo County, south of San Francisco, a rough and tumble place. At age 7, he tags along with some older neighbors to a dance with immigrant workers. 
     "The young fellows drank and danced with the girls to the strains of an accordion," he writes. "To me that music was divine. The young Italian who furnished it would even get up and dance, his arms around his girl, playing the accordion behind her back. All of which was very wonderful for me, who did not dance, but who sat at a table and gazed wide-eyed at the amazingness of life." 
    Great line, "the amazingness of life." And great detail, the musician reaching around the girl, working the keys of the accordion behind her back. You can almost sense the dilemma of the accordion player — how to provide music and dance with his date at the same time? And the impromptu yet elegant solution. Reach around your date, playing and dancing. You know that Jack London saw the scene because you can't make a thing like that up. It impressed him, and he put it in his book, published exactly 100 years ago, where it delights us a full century later: the ingenious musician, his accommodating girl, faint whiffs of the smoke and the cheap wine, the echoes of their stamping feet and the wheezing accordion, reaching us today, continuing to amaze.