These bicycles are brought to you by....

     Here's a contradiction: I love brands but hate branding. 
     Certain products, packing, logos and labels simply have a beauty to them: Heinz ketchup in a glass bottle. The Tabasco sauce label. The Apple iMac. Ketchup in a plain glass bottle would seem generic, wrong.
     Liking the product itself can be secondary; I don't smoke but admire the Lucky Strikes pack.
     But it's somehow different when some non-product is slapped with a logo. A shiver goes down my back when  a heretofore unbranded space become branded. It seems bad, the seizing of public space by private enterprise.  I complained first and loudest that Chicago got nothing for its bike system while New York pried $42 million from CitiBank—hence "Citi Bikes." But now that Blue Cross/Blue Shield has stepped up, almost a year after the Divvy program commenced and is slapping its name on the bikes, well, I'm torn.
    Yes, the $12.5 million is helpful, for more bike stations and bike lanes. A tad more than a quarter of what New York got —we'll try not to think about that.
     But something about it...maybe because Blue Cross/Blue Shield has particularly ugly logos. A stick figure crucified on a crude blue cross, and the snake-on-a-stick caduceus. And what kind of company has two logos? You'd think they'd combine them into one decent logo.
     Maybe it's the year? We've bonded with Divvy, at least I have, and now it's changing. Maybe the change itself is unsettling. The United Center came into the world as the United Center, and therefore seems benign. If it had been the Bulls Center, first, that might have been different. It would be like the parents of a 1-year-old baby announcing that no, he isn't Charlie anymore, he's Ben. It would be weird.
     So maybe it's the retrofitting the brand onto the up-and-running sky blue image of the Divvys that's vexatious. Or it's a reminder that our government is broke and needs to raise cash, and this is how we like to do it. Taxes bad, branding good. So our communal space sells off parts of itself with a whiff of cowardice to boot. Hidden fees, fines, tickets, ads, anything that can't be called a "tax" by a political opponent.
      Maybe the worry is that someday our culture will resemble a NASCAR race car, festooned with sponsors. The bike system now, parks later. At least it's not school buses, not yet. Other places have tried that. Double unsettling, because kids are involved. "Attention class. This restroom break is sponsored by Gatorade..." I suppose we should be lucky it's not currency, not yet. The postal service has already sold off space on stamps to whoever wants it—and the joke is, few do.
     The logo started showing up on bikes last week, cluttered and unbeautiful and unwelcome.
     I suppose we'll get used to them. Or perhaps when the Blue Cross sponsorship is up in 2019, it will pass to other "blue" themed companies. Jet Blue, Blue Moon Brewing, IBM ("Big Blue," remember?).
     Maybe in time it'll even seem natural. The Wrigley Field name is so sacrosanct people forget it's hawking a brand of gum. But it is.

Saying goodbye to books

     Books are worth less.

     Not worthless, I rush to point out. Worth less. An important space between those two words. Still worth something, but not worth what they once were.

     That’s been obvious for some time. Being a bookish guy, I resisted admitting it. Struggled to believe that physical books — pages of paper, covers, possessing both mass and volume — have an intrinsic value that will conquer the destructive twins of time and technology. Books would survive the Web revolution for the same reason violins survive: they perform better than a facsimile.

     Now I’m not so sure.

     It started as a tickle. Standing in Half Price Books in Highland Park a few years back. So big, and the books were so cheap.

     Almost . . . too . . . cheap.

     This is a transitional phase, I began to realize. Half Price Books will occupy the margin between the books that customers tote in by the bagful to sell and the ones they buy and carry out, until the books start backing up, as more people want to sell, but fewer want to buy a hardback for $12, or $6, or $3 or $1.50. When a bunch of electrons can be had for nearly nothing, those readers are going to keep asking themselves “Why?” The margin will keep getting thinner. Eventually books will be used for insulation if not fuel.  

     Traditions change. Look at what employees carry their stuff in. A decade ago backpacks were for students. Now someone carrying a leather briefcase — heavy, expensive, limited — is practically indulging in an affectation. He might as well carry an ebony cane and wear a cape while he’s at it.

     To know where books are going, quite fast, all you have to do is look at the statistics. In 2008, 1 percent of book sales were e-books. In 2012, 23 percent of the revenue of the $7 billion book trade was from e-books. Nearly a quarter. Extend that graph out.
     Though it was only last week that I really felt the tremor underfoot.
     On the surface, it was good news, a win for the dusty volumes crowd. The New York Public Library announced it would not, as it had planned, offload its millions of books to New Jersey and turn the ornate Main Reading Room, two blocks long at its 42nd Street flagship, into a computer center. They had spent $9 million on plans for the change.
     So, relief. But I also felt that odd tickle.
     Last summer I was in New York, at the Main Reading Room, dragging my younger son (the way a normal man gathers ballparks, I wanted to add a third Gutenberg Bible to our trip, alongside the Morgan Library's and the Beinecke Library's at Yale. I hope that doesn't constitute child abuse).
     I enjoyed just seeing the place. And yet — and this is the earthquake — I think keeping it the way it is probably is a mistake. The books should rest in New Jersey.
     Why? Twenty years ago, I was researching a book on college pranks. Perhaps the best prank in the book occurred in 1902, when a drinking club at Yale, the Jolly Eight, tricked stern, ax-wielding saloon foe Carry Nation into thinking they were a temperance band, and she was their guest for a day on campus. At evening, they took a photo of her, supposedly toasting to temperance with a glass of water. They airbrushed a cigarette in her hand, as if she were partying with her Bulldog buddies. The Yale Record ran the photo with the caption, " 'I have always taken mine straight,' she said, laughing."
     A fun, satisfying prank. But there was one loose thread: Did Nation ever realize she'd been duped at Yale? Turns out she wrote an autobiography in 1908, "The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation." It is a rare book — you couldn't get it through interlibrary loan. But the New York Public Library had a copy. So I flew to New York to read it. At the Reading Room, you request books, and they bring them to you. I remember sitting at a table in that vast hall, being handed a pair of boards tied together with a blue ribbon. I tugged at the bow. There was the book. I turned to the table of contents, at Chapter XVII started to laugh, out loud, in the otherwise silent hall. Its title? "THE VICES OF COLLEGES, ESPECIALLY YALE." Guess she found out what happened.
     Last week, when I heard the news, I had a hunch and went over to Google Books.
     Sure enough. There it is, Carry Nation's autobiography. You can look at it yourself with a few taps. No plane trip necessary.
     That's far better. Scarcity creates value, but as much as I cherish the memory of that journey, I wouldn't impose it on others.
     Times change and we change with them. That thought was penned, using ink and a nib, by John Owen in 1622. It's as true written on parchment as it is set in type as it is painted upon the screen in electrons.

Fred Cohn: "He was the best. He was a star."

     For some reason obituaries have a bad reputation, as the lowest rung of the newsroom pecking order. I guess that's from the day when they were obligatory renditions of the good works of ladies in the sewing club. But obituaries are allowed to be interesting nowadays, and I love learning about the life of someone I either didn't know or was just vaguely familiar with. When I first looked into this, I had no idea who Fred Cohn was—my connection was I knew his son Yale. What I'm most proud of is that when I phoned Ed Genson, I didn't know that he knew Cohn—I just guessed he probably did, and was right. Ditto for Paul Biebel. This story was researched and written between 9 a.m. and 11:45 a.m. Friday, including two trips down to the clip file in the basement of the building, the second because I had the wrong key the first time. Let's see a computer aggregator do that.

     If Fred Cohn was defending you, you were in trouble.

Fred Cohn and his wife Mary on their wedding day.

     Not for any lack of skill on the part of the University of Chicago- trained criminal defense lawyer.

     “He was the best,” said Timothy Evans, chief judge of Cook County Circuit Court. “He was a star.”

     But Cohn represented some of the toughest cases, such as the 1969 robbery trial of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. If you were facing the death penalty, if you were caught with the shotgun smoking in your hands, if you had killed a cop — or been beaten by one — you wanted Fred Cohn on your side.

     “A singularly outstanding lawyer, an excellent appellate lawyer,” said Judge Paul Biebel, presiding judge of the Criminal Division of the Cook County Circuit Court. “He had a great knowledge of criminal law, and was one of the last of the old breed who would take cases simply because they felt this person needed to be defended.”

     Cohn, 75, died April 30 at Evanston Hospital after a long struggle with cancer.

     He was born in Brooklyn, came to Chicago to attend the University of Chicago and then graduated from its law school in 1962. He went to work for the Cook County public defender’s office, leaving in the mid-1960s to work for flamboyant criminal defense lawyer Julius “Lucky” Echeles.

     “He was Julius’ guy,” said Ed Genson, a top Chicago criminal defense lawyer, who called Cohn “a lawyer’s lawyer” and a wonderful man with a gift for friendship.

     “We were sort of brothers,” Genson said.
      A big, round, affable man, Cohn approached his work as a vocation, and often tried to rehabilitate and reform his clients, helping them get jobs and turn their lives around.
     "He was such a good man," Genson said. "He felt sorry for everybody he represented. Everybody charged was a victim, every person he wanted to protect."
     After the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in June 1964, Cohn went South and worked as a volunteer civil rights attorney for the summer.
     "He believed everyone had a right to vote," said his wife of 42 years, Mary Cohn. "He knew the situation in the South and felt he could contribute. He felt very strongly about civil rights his whole life."
     The two met in Evanston — Mary Derra was a nurse from Streater; he was running a legal aid office on the same floor as the visiting nurses association office where she worked. The nurses were always good for coffee and cigarettes, and Cohn would pop in for both, eventually taking his future wife to an open house at the Gateway Foundation rehab facility.
     "We knew zip about drug addicts," she said. Cohn was a fervent opponent of drug use who once threw a pair of drug dealers out of a party after he recognized them.
     Cohn was Hampton's attorney at the time he was killed, and represented other Black Panther Party members as well.
     He also taught criminal law and procedure at John Marshall Law School.
     "He was one of my instructors at John Marshall," Evans said. "He was committed to every avenue of justice you can imagine. He was a trial lawyer, primarily on the defense side, but was committed to fairness on all sides. He was my good friend for 40 years. He had a big heart. "
     Cohn lived in Edgewater and was involved in the community — he was chairman of the Edgewater-Uptown Building Task Force, trying to keep up housing standards. He was known to help neighbors with their legal problems for free, or in return for baked goods, home repair and stuffed peppers.
     Genson said that, during the unrest surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, he witnessed Cohn trying to calm the participants.
     "At one end of Grant Park, the policemen were on one side, the demonstrators on the other, and there was Fred in the middle, screaming that they should all sit down and negotiate," said Genson. "And then they charged. For the life of me, I can't understand why he didn't get hurt. He was trying to negotiate. That was Fred. He didn't want anybody to hurt each other."
     "In lieu of flowers, do a mitzvah," said his son Yale, using the Yiddish word for "good deed." "Take someone you love to movies and ice cream. That's what he would do."
     Survivors beside his wife, Mary, and son, Yale, include daughter Kate. The memorial service is private.

Saturday fun activity: Where (and who) IS this?

    Computers, for all their magic, still have a hard time puzzling out a human face, something we humans do continually with speed and accuracy. I happened upon these two large, illuminated photographs in the public area of a well-known building while going about my business on Friday. Of course I instantly recognized the woman in the left as Marilyn Monroe. But—somewhat unsettling to me—I also recognized the couple on the right. At first doing so almost made me feel bad, the realization that I am of an age where I would immediately know who he was. There is a thin line between having historical knowledge at your fingertips and being a bore trafficking in trivia. 
     Which made me wonder if I was alone, being able to place this couple, or whether readers here would instantly recognize them as well. They should—he was once one of the most famous men in the world. And she, well, her dad was pretty famous. The question for today is in three parts: a)who is he?; b) who is she? and c) where is this tableau to be found? The first person to answer all three wins a Every Goddamn Day poster. Place your answers in the comments section below. Good luck. 

Tilting tourists atop the Hancock Center

     There are two Chicagos. Or, rather, many pairs of Chicagos. Some are well known: North Side Chicago and South Side Chicago; black Chicago and white Chicago; rich Chicago and poor.

     Others, are not so well-known. One of the less-recognized Chicago pairs is the city of 2.7 million Chicagoans and a parallel Tourist Chicago, a densely populated land of nearly 50 million transient residents who come each year to the city to eat pizza, ride Segways, puzzle over maps, wander downtown, fill American Girl bags, munch churros at Navy Pier, ask questions in German and take double-decker bus tours to learn of our city’s patron saint, Al Capone.

     A new star in the firmament of Tourist Chicago winked into existence this week as Tilt! — the exclamation point is theirs — an attraction on the 94th floor observation deck of the John Hancock Center, opened for business.

     Tilt! is a section of the south face of the observation deck, redubbed 360Chicago, with positions for eight riders, or, rather, standers, who hold onto handrails while the entire glass and steel facade slowly tips forward 30 degrees, allowing customers to look down the side of the building, at the roof of Water Tower Place.
    “Everybody was sweating; it gives you great perspective,” said Ald. Bob Fioretti (2nd), one of about 100 VIPs, media members and guests who attended the champagne ribbon cutting Thursday, and who was among the first to officially try the device, which has been available to the public since Saturday.
     “This is the culmination of a lot of work,” said Eric Deutsch, vice president at Montparnasse 56 USA, the American division of a French company that owns tourist attractions, including the Hancock observation deck. He said that nothing like Tilt! exists elsewhere in the world.
     Local tourist officials on hand predicted that visitors will come to Chicago from all over the world, partially in the hopes of trying out the Hancock’s new attraction.
     “This is going to be another driver,” said Don Welsh, president of Choose Chicago. “We need to have additional demand generators, things that cause people from around the world to want to come to Chicago.”
     Project engineer Christian DeFazio, of the Chicago office of the Thornton Tomasetti engineering firm, said the Tilt! structure weighs 30,000 pounds and is moved by three large hydraulic cylinders, the sort found on construction cranes. DeFazio said this project was a change for his company, which did the engineering work on Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, because what they build is typically static — aka, not moving — while with Tilt! “there was the kinetic side” that demanded testing in a wind tunnel.
     He dismissed concern that the 25-foot-long glass and steel box could tumble out, noting it was designed with help from the city, with “all of the code requirements and a very high comfort level of safety factors.”
     One of the great challenges of its construction, DeFazio said, was getting it up to the 94th floor. Hauling it on a crane would have been prohibitively expensive, so they designed it in three pieces and brought it up through the Hancock’s freight elevator.
     DeFazio said operators can program how long the tilt lasts, and right now the trip takes about 30 seconds, which means that at $5 per admission, not counting the $18 ticket to get to the observation deck, visitors from are paying $600 an hour to gaze down the side of a tall building while bracing a push-up, a business model that would be the envy of the old clip joint operators, and is perhaps fitting in the town that invented the Mickey Finn.
     For those who wonder if Chicago is indeed among the firmament of world-class cities, reflect that the ribbon cutting of what in essence is the briefest, slowest and most expensive carnival ride in the world, albeit one situated very high, drew 100 people and eight TV cameras, and was splashed across the entire front page of one of the city’s major newspapers.
     I did try it, taking the handholds as the pistons nudged eight of us forward together. It reminded me of the old Catskills joke about a restaurant patron who complains about lousy food “and in such small portions.” That said, I imagine people who suffer from vertigo or acrophobia, or who are excitable teenagers, might find Tilt! thrilling. Let’s just say that I suspect this is exactly the sort of thing tourists love. I hope it is, and that it keeps them entertained and off the streets in the awkward hour between stocking up at the Hershey’s store and heading to the Hard Rock Cafe for lunch.

Better a blemish on your record than no record at all

     If I had to sum up the challenge of being a newspaper columnist in one sentence, I'd say, "Be edgy but not insane." You want to offer provocative thoughts that keep people talking—and reading—without saying crazy things that will either cause them to rightly dismiss you or that might get yourself fired.
      Thus I try to step back, from time to time, and look at my opinions, to make sure they aren't drifting from strong into rigid, not going from unexpected to unhinged, or straying from consistent into repetitive. Which I did the other day regarding the upcoming gubernatorial campaign between Gov. Pat Quinn and Bruce Rauner, the Republican challenger. Or tried to.

Chicago Botanic Garden,  May 4, 2014

      To me the race seems pretty clear. You have Quinn, the former brick-throwing reformer who, through complete happenstance, was elevated from the meaningless sinecure of lieutenant governor  after Rod Blagojevich swan-dived into prison, to the Herculean task of governor. For the first year or two, I hooted at Quinn, this goo-goo blinking in innocent puzzlement at the levers of power, a guy who, in my estimation, was good at criticizing, bad at the brawny arm-twisting involved in actually getting stuff done.
     Then a funny thing happened.
     Quinn, to everyone's amazement, managed to hold off the challenge of right wing dinosaur Bill Brady, and began to actually accomplish things. He achieved essential pension reform, a necessity that so far has mostly danced out of the reach of far-more-nimble politician Rahm Emanuel. He signed gay marriage into law despite his Catholic upbringings. And in general proved a smart leader and a decent man—something in short supply in politics.
     Then you have Bruce Rauner, another bored Republican rich guy sent up from Central Casting, looking for a cherry to put on top of his career. Rauner has no experience in government whatsoever and, like Tea Partiers everywhere, feels that this is an asset, since they hate government and want to be elected so they can dismantle it. You don't need to be a carpenter to tear a house down. His followers demand that we  "Give him a chance" as if being governor of Illinois were a pick-up kickball game and Rauner the new kid who just showed up and is shyly grinding his toe into the dirt by home plate.
     You wouldn't pick a doctor that way. Nor would you, in the middle of surgery, if the patient took a turn for the worse, call in another surgeon, since this one obviously isn't working. You stick with the guy doing the operating.
     Yet. Having delivered a number of kicks to Rauner, I began to worry that this was a rut I was sliding into, that I was becoming shrill—there's enough shrill already without my adding to it—and just as I was wondering if I hadn't made myself too comfortable in the trench I had dug on the governor's side, along comes news of the botched Neighborhood Recovery Initiative anti-violence program that Quinn funded to the tune of $54.5 million. 
     The timing of the funding looks political—designed to push Quinn in black communities in the 2010 election. Not that a black person would vote for Bill Brady under any circumstance, that would be like, in 1938...no, I'm not going there. But something had to get people out and to the polls. The thing was run by Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Dorothy Brown's husband, Benton Cook III, who turned out to be a convicted felon, as revealed by my colleagues in the Sun-Times.
     Welllllll, I thought. This looks bad for Quinn. And I wondered: Could this be the time to jump over to Rauner? I don't want to be one of those guys who clings to his cause even harder as it goes up in flames. Cognitive dissonance —I hate that. At least Rauner downplays the usual litany of right wing social engineering. So far. 
     And then I wondered. This scandal is being placed at Quinn's feet because ... why? Because it happened in Illinois under his watch—a span that covers the past five plus years. He didn't collude with Cook, at worst he addressed violence in a fashion designed to help him, politically, and then didn't pay attention to how it was administered. Which makes sense, since he has the entire state to think about; he isn't the guy who was supposed to keep an eye on Dorothy Brown's husband, at least not directly. Yes, the buck stops with Quinn, but if that's the worst thing he's done, then it isn't an indictment, it's an endorsement. The worst thing his two predecessors have done landed them both in prison. 
     Which brings us back to Rauner, who can't have anything  good, bad or indifferent laid at his feet because he hasn't done anything in Illinois beyond make a pile of money for himself. That's worse than a scandal, isn't it? If the man cares so much now, where has he been? Should a person's first elected office be governor? The Republicans sure cared about experience when it was Barack Obama running. Rauner makes Obama seem like Claude Pepper. But he wants to manage the state, a job that even a straight-arrow, do-gooder like Pat Quinn sometimes has trouble managing, as this scandal demonstrates. To be honest, this problem is a reminder that we need someone in office who knows what he's doing, generally, as opposed to a guy who says the job is easy and he'll do it better because he has never tried before.  I'd rather trust Pat Quinn with a black spot on his five-year record of service than Bruce Rauner with no spots because he has no record.  Returning to the doctor metaphor, who would you rather operate on you:: a doctor who had one of his thousands of patients die? Or a doctor who has never treated anybody at all? I know who I'd pick. Still.
      

They burned witches once

     Let's linger over over the Supreme Court giving the nod to government-sanctioned prayer. Because while I dealt with it in yesterday's column, there are more aspects to consider.
     Why government? Why aren't prayers said before commercial events? Why don't we pray before the movie is screened, before a concert begins? Those are public venues, like meetings. Why doesn't a restaurant pause for public prayer? Everybody is about to eat—that's a traditional time for prayer. 
     Easy. Because those are commercial undertakings, and businesses don't want to alienate customers. Officially-sanctioned prayer is another government inefficiency and abuse of power. Companies know that it's unnecessary—people are already free to pray wherever and whenever they like. It's the show prayers that are the trouble. A high school game can have a prayer beforehand because they're in some jerkwater Texas town and most everybody is the same faith anyway. But the NFL isn't going to have all the fans bow their heads because it would be ludicrous and turn some paying customers off, by using prayer to stake out territory, to include some and exclude the rest.
     What does business know that government doesn't? Why can government exclude its own citizens, some of them, in this small but real fashion? Because the gesture is so insignificant? Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy said that prayer before public meetings is "ceremonial" —a trivializing comment that sucks the meaning out of prayer and would offend religious sorts, if they were thinking critically, which of course they're not.  
    Plus he's right, to a degree, in the sense that the various officials and residents waiting to complain about stuff aren't earnestly beseeching God to make the Boofaulk County Zoning Commission monthly meeting go smoothly. It's just introductory throat-clearing that they've done forever and few even think about beyond not wanting to stop.  You're not supposed to think about it, but eventually outsiders, Jews and atheists and other rabble, did think about it, and said, "Wait a minute! We thought this was the United States of America. Why do we have to listen to you pray to your God before we talk to the school board about the issue with the high school parking lot?" Thus the lawsuits, and this ruling, kicking us back toward the imaged Eden of the 1950s when white Protestants ruled supreme and the underclass, the foreigners and the colored and the Catholics, knew to keep their mouths shut.
     The ceremony is one of dominance. The prayer is like a dog peeing its territory, a quick marking of the spot: ours. Plus a display of the instruments of torture. We could be passing laws against you. We could be burning you. But instead, generous us, we're having a little prayer—you should be grateful. We'll even let you say your prayers, sometimes, a practice that, should it ever actually become prevalent, will kill off prayer at government meetings, one reason I'm not too worked up about this latest step backward. Various faiths and sects and cults and sub-beliefs lining up to say their prayers will instill within WASPs the value of secular government the same way that Affirmative Action made them embrace race-blind merit admissions. What worked when it was skewed to them won't be so pretty when other people try it. 
     
    Before parting, a word on the reaction to yesterday's column, which was considerable.
     Now the people who would want prayer before government functions, who do you suppose those people would be? The pious? The devout? The godly? No, not at least judging from the many who wrote in:
     "Just got done reading your article on prayer, and, I just wanted to email, the GOOD people finally won one," writes Dan B.  "LIVE WITH IT."

    "I’m sorry Christianity and praying to God to be thankful for what we have has ruined your day," writes Paul L. "You need to grow a little thicker skin."

     You get the idea. I particularly savored the first one, because I think it reflects the mindset behind the practice. "The GOOD people finally won one," "finally," as opposed to defeat after defeat—women dressing like whores, blacks not minding their place, gays forgetting they are going to hell—that they've been suffering. A rare bit of luck for Christianity, score one finally for the team, which has been on the ropes since Calvary. 
    It sounds preposterous, but that's how they think. Bullies are inevitably aggrieved, inevitably have a litany of wrongs and slights that rationalize their pushing other people around. They are the victims who are finally, thank God, finally getting justice.

     The truth is religion has had the whip hand, and it has gotten a pass, up to now, when the lightest restraints are placed gently upon it, and religion doesn't like it. Like any wild beast it wants to be free. Religion is at best a tool, a neutral tool. It can be used for good, and sometimes even is. No question about that. And it can be used for evil, great evil, and has been, continually. It is the rationale to oppress and murder and trivialize. Allowing prayer before government meetings is not itself intolerable. Rather, it is the last gasp of the intolerable.

    Or let's hope it's the last gasp, and not the first birth cry of it all coming back. Society swings through great cycles. They burned witches, once. They'll burn them again if we're not careful. If caring about this seems a big deal—and it does, to it's-our-country-ain't-it? Christians who just can't see what the fuss is about—then better to make a big deal out of it now, when state religion is in the cradle, then wait for it to grow up. Many countries are already there. Government-backed faith is ugly and un-American, and the Supreme Court just took a step in that direction.  Let's not follow them willingly.