If you have an argument, you can pretend it isn't just hate

     You know what I admire about bigots? And I’m not referring to the merely-prejudiced, mutter-out-of-the-corner- of-their-mouth bigots, but the real wackos, the warped, scary, neo-Nazi, open Klansman, proudly-sign-their-name haters.
     You know what’s kinda great about them?
     At least they’re candid. No pussyfooting around for them. They state their hate boldly, cast their slurs loudly and only then try to back it up with whatever false theories they believe support their irrational hatreds.
     For everyone else, it’s the other way around. They timidly roll out their specious argument first, as if that were the important part, the crucial logic that made up their impartial minds, and led to their subsequent negative opinion, an unfortunate by-product.
     “Gosh, I’d love to end the permanent legal limbo and semi-serfdom that millions of Hispanics living in the United States endure, but gosh-darn it, their entry was ILLEGAL, so I find myself forced to insist they all be loaded onto cattle cars and sent back to what will always be their true home.”
     And when you try to call them out, and ask, for instance, what other misdemeanors this laudable passion for the law forces them to view as eternally unforgivable — Speeding? Tax evasion? —they just stare at you blankly. Because they are unable to look up at the puppeteer pulling their strings. It’s easy to view hatred as evil, but it’s really a kind of willed ignorance. Since a measure of cowardice is also involved, being bigoted requires you to advocate dumb arguments, in an attempt to hide your loathsome beliefs.
     We saw this on full display this week in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, as attorneys from Wisconsin and Indiana tried to justify their bans on gay marriage.
     The facts are simple: Gays make no worse spouses or parents than anyone else. But an argument must be made, and since the "We hate them," and "They wreck straight marriage" tacks have finally been hooted down as too embarrassing, the states claim that 1) it's better for children to be raised by two parents, and those parents generally are straight so 2) gay marriage should be illegal.
    The first is true, sort of, though a gross simplification. But aren't gay parents also two people? In a not-so-deft sleight of hand, the focus is put on the number, since the true concern — the sexuality of the couple — is a nonstarter. So the talk was of vague cultural norms, though Judge Richard Posner saw through that smokescreen.
     When Wisconsin's assistant attorney general cited "tradition," Posner shot back: "It's based on hate" and the "history of rather savage discrimination against homosexuals."
     While die-hard bigots spout invective, those trying to be subtle attempt a kind of magic act. You distract the audience's attention fluttering one hand while the other lays the key card. Zealots say, "Oh no, it isn't about fearing gays at all. It's about respecting my religion, which orders me to oppress gays (even though I ignore lots of other stuff my religion orders me to do and could ignore this too if I didn't hate gays so much)".
     They leave off that last part.
     Similarly, anti-Semitism, which hardly needs a faux reason to stir, is having a field day with the Israeli crisis in Gaza. Their logic is: Israel does bad stuff, therefore Jews, who support Israel, are fair game. You see that, and almost expect it, say, in a French mob burning a Jewish store. But I noticed it this week in the letters section of The New York Times, from a surprising author.
     "The best antidote to anti-Semitism would be for Israel's patrons abroad to press the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for final-state resolution to the Palestinian question," wrote ... no, wait for it. It's too ironic to reveal immediately.
     "Israel's patrons abroad." Hmm. He doesn't mean the fundamentalist Christians and far-right pundits who offer knee-jerk approval of whatever Israel does. Can't be them: what's their connection to anti-Semitism? Then who? Oh, right! "Patrons abroad" means Jews, as if many weren't deeply ambivalent about Israel and eager to remedy this situation (and notice how the mystery writer says nothing about the Palestinians, as if they have no say in their destiny at all, which gives you a hint that the passion people feel about this is not entirely fueled by actual Middle Eastern reality).
     The author is the Rev. Bruce M. Shipman, the Episcopal chaplain at Yale, which had trouble admitting Jews before Israel existed.
     Here's where hate-first bigots and their rationalizing cousins merge: Both groups love to pin blame for their hatred on their victims. Not my fault; if only you were different then I wouldn't be forced to feel this way. It's a dumb argument, but bigotry does that.

Peter Max, or minimum?

   When I heard that Peter Max was having a show of his distinctive colorful artwork, opening at Northbrook Court on Friday, I couldn't help but flash back to a previous time his work was spotlighted there and I wrote about him.

      The typical story would be the kind of respectful though toothless treatment that the Chicago Jewish News gave to Max this week, stressing his Jewishness, of course. When I wrote my piece, I asked an impolite question: is this art? And if so, what kind of art?

     So I interviewed him, and the column below was published. The publicist who pitched the story at me was aghast, enough to call me up and yell. But Max, to his credit, was intrigued. He appreciated being treated as a serious artist, even if battered a bit in the process. I think he liked my even raising the question, since most people don’t.  

     We sat down for lunch, and something happened that has never happened to me before or since: we sat talking until dinner. Red wine was involved, but it was also the tenor of the conversation, the ideas. I didn't take notes, and the only thing I remember is us discussing was his autobiography, which I volunteered to write, suggesting that instead of producing the typical coffee table book, he write something candid talking about his art as a business, and what it was like, as a man, to be rich and famous for the previous 30 years. I told him the problems a pal was having trying to write Hugh Hefner's autobiography, because Hefner thought he was an important figure in the history of free speech, like Thomas Paine, when the average reader was more interested in him screwing Barbi Benton on his round bed.

     The idea of my writing his bio lingered a bit —I remember him phoning late one night from his studio shortly thereafter. And he did send the boys a pair of posters signed to them, which are still framed in our rec room. But that was it. A few years later, the standard coffee table book came out, written with the usual self-satisfied rosy glow. Looking back, of course he would never take a hard, honest look at life: why start now and spoil a good thing? But it works for him, and he does have his ardent fans. This was originally publishing the Sun-Times in February, 2000:

    Yoga is back, big time. Tie dye, too. The Beatles—though they never left—are hot again; they just sold 600,000 copies of a new CD. 

    So why not Peter Max?

    When I heard Max is coming to town—he'll be at the North Shore Gallery the  weekend of the 16th—my first thought was, to be blunt, "He's still alive?"

    Sure, I remember him from the late 1960s. A thin guy in a Doug Henning mustache churning out wild, Day-Glo-colored images of running men and psychedelic heads. They covered the walls, floors, notebooks, lunch boxes and just about every other flat surface of my youth.

    But surely he had—oh, I don't know—gone into real estate or stepped in front of a bus or done a Cat Stevens and disappeared into religion.

    In fact, Max is where he has always been, in New York City, doing what he has done for more than 30 years—churning forth a jaw-dropping output of images, covering everything from a Continental Airlines 777 to Dale Earnhardt's NASCAR racer. He has been turned to for a burst of colorful whimsy by big events from Woodstock to the Super Bowl and big corporations from Target to Playboy.

    Therein lies the rub.

     If art has a myth, it is the outlaw, the renegade, the Impressionist masterworks banned from the Official Exposition. Artists thrive on scorn—the right kind of scorn, public scorn—while Max thrives on approval. His press packet is filled with the presidents he has painted, the awards won, the corporations he has bedded down with.

    Needless to say, this drives the art world crazy. Trying to express my own inarticulate Max angst—which I must have leached from the atmosphere—I called my pal, renegade artist Tony Fitzpatrick. The mere mention of Max's name was like taking an ax to a beer keg; out came a geyser of scorn.

    "Peter Max basically took all the ideals of the '60s generation, all the flower power stuff, pretended to be this voice of a generation and really was a corporate hack," said Fitzpatrick, taking a breath. "Peter Max was never in the real art world. He pretended to be some kind of countercultural element, and the guy was whoring himself to corporate America. Also his work sucks."

    Fitzpatrick went on in this vein for 20 minutes, but you get the idea.

    I don't want to leave Tony out on a limb. I was nodding and smiling with him the whole time. How dare Max present himself as an artist, and make his millions, when people like Tony and me know what real art is?

    And then I slipped on my sheep's clothing and slunk off to interview Max.

    Shock  No. 1. His voice. He didn't sound like I expected. He was no flipped out patchouli-oil-scented hippie marinated in a money cocoon for the past 30 years. He sounded like my Uncle Max, his voice rich with the Brooklyn of his youth. (He was born in Berlin in the late 1930s, his parents fled to China, and he ended up as a teenager in Flatbush.)

    Second shock. He was interested not in touchy-feely mysticism, not in promoting his newest swami, but in science, in math, in concepts.

    Third shock. His first love was old-school realism.

    "In 1967, before I got into that commercial wave, I was a full-time painter, a la John Singer Sargent, Rubens, Velasquez," he said. "Real academic stuff. I was so good at realism. Then the Beatles came to America."

    Max saw a revolution going on. Everything was media, pop, pizzazz. He gave up painting nudes and opened an ad agency. His clients were J.C. Penney and beer companies. Awards racked up; people loved his colorful style. Then somebody asked him to design a restaurant. He did, but something was missing.

    "I said to the owner of the restaurant that a restaurant is not a restaurant unless it has a poster," he said. "Think of `(Le) Moulin Rouge.' If (Toulouse-Lautrec) hadn't done a poster, nobody would know what it was. He said, `OK.' "

    A year later, Max had sold 9 million of his "crazy, wacky" posters. In 1969, some 700 commercial products carried his designs. Max had 55 people working for him in the early 1970s. Now he has 110.

    "I've got people who stretch canvases, people who do just backgrounds for me," he said, citing a constant need to draw and to change.

    "Many artists stay in the same style—Chagall or Miro. Miro spent half his life in the same style," he said. "I wanted to be more like  Picasso. To allow my style to change constantly."

    I began to see where Max ran into trouble. Any artist who compares himself with Rubens while pooh-poohing the limitations of Miro is just begging to be kicked. As we talked, I could see him torn between two mutually exclusive goals: to continue his fabulous marketing bonanza and to gain the kind of respect the art world has always denied him and probably always will. (Though, hey, they finally gave Norman Rockwell his due, so you never know.)

    An hour into our conversation, the charming, personable Max had won me over so completely that it occurred to me that I had been co-opted and had better run to the mountain to get some sort of final wisdom on the matter.

    I called my old teacher, the renowned artist Ed Paschke, fresh from Paris where he went for the unveiling of his work in a show at the Louvre.

    "It's a heady experience," he said. "Usually you have to be dead."

    I outlined the dilemma. On one hand, all this art world outrage damning Max to critical hell for being popular. On the other hand, lots of people like him, and he's a really, really nice guy who's sending posters to my kids.

    "You're caught between a rock and a hard place," Paschke said. "He's captured this kind of whimsical spirit of optimism that characterized the flower child generation. He's not somebody the serious art world takes seriously. Yet he has somehow managed to stay in the public eye many years."

    Isn't that art? How can someone like Jeff Koons pull all sorts of commercial stunts, and the critics roll over like puppies. But Max is damned because his work is on scarves?

    "Jeff Koons was a student of mine," Paschke said. "Jeff was trying to outrage the status quo, as Peter Max was trying to play the mainstream as an audience. It's about pushing the edge of what's acceptable. Koons is trying to push the buttons for shock purposes. Peter Max is trying to satisfy a safe, conservative, mainstream point of view."
     It's a shame, really. If only Max had written a manifesto declaring that he intended to shock art critics by playing to the unwashed public — God, the critics would love his daring, his rude gesture of contempt for the higher art circles. But he was too candid in his aspirations; that'll get you every time.

     Max, who's still into yoga, has no regrets.

     "When the posters happened to me, I realized I was in the right groove," he said. "That's when I made my decision: to walk one foot in fine art and the other in media. Media became my canvas. People who don't understand it, or who are jealous, or whatever—or even if they're right—I don't care. I have re-examined making that move, and I'll tell you one thing: I have made the right move. People love me around the world."

O doughnut chain! U.S. snatches Canada's sweet round heart

     Brand loyalty is a funny thing.
     Because it’s a kind of love.
     And love is a funny thing.
     Take Burger King.
     I do not love Burger King because I’ve never loved Burger King. McDonald’s, all shiny white and red tile, showed up and won me when I was a wee lad. They didn’t offer seating, and you ate in your car, itself a thrill for a 6-year-old. McDonald’s lodged in the spot in my heart—metaphorically, though it probably lodged in an actual spot in my physical heart as well, though I try not to think of it—a place reserved for cheap, fast, alternatingly repulsive-and-attractive food.
     But Burger King? The first one I remember is on Orrington Avenue in Evanston across from what was then the Northwestern Apartments. Eating there was a sign that I had absolutely nowhere else to eat. And the odd thing is, I’ve always believed that Burger King burgers, flame-broiled on toasted buns, taste better than McDonald’s predigested mash of a burger. No matter. I still prefer McDonald’s, the way you love your mother and not the more fun and more interesting neighbor lady down the street.
     Love is a funny thing.
     So had the news Tuesday been that Burger King was going out of business, except for sincere sorrow at the loss of jobs; I’d be indifferent. Ta-ta, BK Lounge.
     But instead the news is that BK is buying Tim Hortons, the Canadian doughnut chain, and while we barely note it in passing here, north of the border it is a huge deal.
“Why not just cancel hockey while we’re at it?” The Globe and Mail editorialized.
     The name Tim Hortons might not resonate with you if you’ve never been to Canada. (Although, really, never? It’s a five-hour drive. Go. They have the metric system and different colored money and everything).
     The word people tend to use over and over to describe Tim Hortons is “beloved”
     “Extremely beloved,” said Robyn Doolittle,  star reporter at the Globe and Mail and author of “Crazy Town,” a new best-seller chronicling her city’s doughnut-larded mayor, Rob Ford. “It’s as much a part of our culture as hockey is and we do love our hockey.  It’s such a ritual part of life, especially small town life. You drop you kid off at hockey and grab your Tim Hortons.”
     Tim Hortons was founded in 1964 by a famed Toronto Maple Leafs defenseman named - wait for it—Tim Horton. It has 4,000 stores, and a staggering 8 out of 10 cups of coffee sold in Canada are sold there.
     The BK news echoed across Canada.
     "It's a huge deal," Doolittle said, "front page of the paper, the lead story on the national news."
      But what is it about the place? The United States has its own big chain, Dunkin' Donuts. It's not part of our national identity. A Tim Hortons doughnut is practically on the Canadian flag next to the maple leaf. Why?
     "We talk about it," Doolittle said. "We're conscious of how odd it is. We ask, 'What is up with Tim Hortons?' The best I can come up with is its consistency."
     "It's kind of mysterious," said Patricia Cormack, a sociology professor at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. "I've been trying to figure this out for 10 years."
     She cites "quite aggressive marketing."
     "They have this very confident positioning of themselves," she said. "It's more than just hockey, but collectivism, statism—Canadian values. They're very unpretentious, even though we're very pretentious about our unpretentiousness."
     Of course, whether the chain's popularity says more about Tim Hortons or more about Canada is an open question. My family sought refuge there from time to time during our trips across the country, and I couldn't decide if we went there because the doughnuts were good or simply because we were in Canada and had to do something to pass the time.
     Given Canadians are prone to crises of the soul over anything involving the United States (the Globe and Mail editorial suggested the government block the sale), I imagine that an American company buying their national icon might be a source of some angst. Though perhaps not so much, since the plan seems to be for Burger King to shift its headquarters north, for tax purposes. So Canada is not so much losing a doughnut chain as gaining a burger giant.
     Or to put it another way: Iconic Canadian beer company Molson's has been headquartered in Colorado since its 2005 merger with Coors. They still drink the stuff up north. And lest we be too smug—an American trait for sure—our red-white-and-blue national beer brand, Budweiser? For the past five years owned by InBev, a Belgian brewer.

Experience is the teacher of all things

     "Experience is the teacher of all things," Julius Caesar wrote, in his Commentary on the Civil Wars.
     That's obvious, of course. But sometimes, particularly amongst us brainy folk, it can come as a rude little surprise. We expect to learn things from books, to pick up new facts in conversation, but there's something a little head-slapping about life taking you by the hand and showing you the best way to do a thing through the process of you doing it wrong first. You feel a little thick, like you should have known.

      We were on vacation, traveling through the South a few weeks back, accompanied by Kitty, our adorable little dog. Every morning she gets a packetful of this gloppy dog food. At home, I peel back the foil, grab a spoon from the cutlery drawer, scoop the food into her bowl with the spoon, then deposit the spoon in the sink for cleaning.
      But in a dim morning motel room, there was no spoon handy, so I improvised and used the foil lid as a scoop. Necessity is the mother of invention, to trot out another old saying. 
    Worked perfectly. I was congratulating myself on this device, avoiding the necessity of dirtying a spoon, when I noticed, the next day, that I could do it even more easily --just overturn the container over the bowl, and it fell out neatly. Ah....take one dirty spoon off the list of daily tasks.
     I told this little story to a houseguest Monday morning, to pass the time while feeding Kitty in the new, more efficient fashion, marveling at how this being-alive-in-the-world thing holds lessons, even for sharp cookie such as myself. 
    Later that morning, doing the dishes, the little squirt pump for dishwashing soap went dry, as if to drive the point home, though I didn't realize it, at first.
    I lifted the pump out, expecting a narrow cylindrical reservoir to come with it. But up came only the thin plastic tube that went into the reservoir.
     Did I mention my wife is still in California, and I'm having to manage at tasks that don't necessarily fall into my realm of responsibility?
     "Under the sink!" I thought, briskly, opening a cabinet, reaching down, finding it, unscrewing the plastic soap cylinder, removing it, then filling it quite easily with blue dishwashing soap.
      Only now I had to put it back.
      Finding a hole under the sink to screw the top of a filled soap container was not as easy as finding the in-place cylinder had been. In fact, I had to balance a flashlight atop the hole, where the pump went, in order to find it and the bottle up under it, trying first through the reaching in and pushing stuff aside method, then removing the various bins and soap containers under the sink, crawling halfway in, and eventually line the reservoir up with the hole—it glowed an eerie blue— to screw it back in place.
     Did I mention spillage was involved, during the general flailing? It was.
     Also during this sweaty, awkward, messy process, which took maybe five minutes, on my back, my upper body and one arm jammed under the sink, I had this thought: "Remove the push pump. Pour the soap directly into the container, through the hole where the pump goes, leaving the cylinder in place."
      Ahhh... Of course. A whole lot easier that way.
     "Experience is the teacher of all things."

Is Chicago ready for a Great Fire Festival?

     When I first heard that Chicago was creating a funky new folk festival where citizens are asked to ritually burn challenges they hope to overcome, in the form of some grand aquatic celebration of our revitalization after the Great Chicago Fire, I was intrigued. But with the event five weeks away, and few people I know aware of it, well, I'm beginning to have my doubts.

     For a guy who never believed in God, not for a second, not even as a child, I sure am a fan of ritual. I will place two fingers upon the mezuzah on our doorpost and then kiss them, for luck. I put my hands upon my oldest son’s head and blessed him, in Hebrew, before he set out for college in California on Saturday. I’ve always envied the Catholic sign of the cross gesture as being a very useful, nearly perfect gesture to solemnize any moment that calls for it.
     Many people nowadays tend to be flexible when it comes to ritual.
     “Shouldn’t we have some kind of ceremony to mark his leaving?” I said to my wife, busily packing for the boy this week.

Framework for buildings to be burned at festival

     “We’re having Lou Malnati’s,” she replied, an answer I savored for its purity of spirit.
     Which is a long way of saying that I was fertile ground when the city cooked up the idea of a new symbolic civic holiday, “The Great Chicago Fire Festival,” set to debut on the Chicago River Oct. 4 (an auspicious date already, it being Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. I asked one of the publicists ballyhooing the Fire Festival how that happened and she said the date was set years ago, as if Yom Kippur were randomly set each year and determining when it falls in future years is an obvious impossibility).
     Since I doubt I’ll attend the event itself, I slid by Redmoon’s cavernous headquarters at in Pilsen Thursday for an open house and tour of the “Grand Spectacle” preparations.     
     Redmoon is a former puppet company now morphed into producing street parties, corporate blow-outs and birthday bashes for billionaires. It won a $250,000 arts grant last year to put on a party which, in Rahm Emanuel’s words, will mark “the creation of a new large-scale cultural festival that attracts global attention and highlights our city’s cultural assets and heritage.”
     The preview had a hasty, shambolic quality that made me wonder if they’ll pull it off.
     “This is by far the largest thing we’ve ever done,” said Jim Lasko, executive artistic director, said. “We’re cooperating with everyone from the EPA to the Coast Guard, the fire department, police department, mayor’s office, Chicago public school system …”
     What to expect? Think a parade on water. Think floating floats. Think 22 giant buoys of flame bobbing on the river. Think three enormous Victorian homes on barges, burning spectacularly mid-river, after kayaking couriers collect letters of sins to efface or challenges overcome from spectators and convey them to the doomed structures.
    I’m not a fan of fence sitting, but I’m uncertain about all this. On one hand, what’s not to love? Venetian Night was wonderful, with its procession of lighted boats, and this might be a 21st century Venetian Night, with Cirque du Soleil-style massive mechanical whimsy coupled with flame, on the water.
    On the other hand, the thing exudes a certain New Age nuttiness that might not resonate with this especially difficult moment in the life of Chicago. The mayor’s office seems to be drawing away a bit from its baby, since throwing spiritual aquatic flame circuses for those seeking rebirth is not exactly the image Rahm wants to convey.
     “We’re interested in reminding people what it means to work with your hands,” said Frank Maugeri, Redmoon’s producing artistic director. I almost piped up: “A good chunk of the city doesn’t need reminding.”
     Redmoon has cannily — or, to be generous, sincerely — gone into the neighborhoods and quizzed Chicago’s gorgeous racial and ethnic stew about what they would overcome or celebrate, and are going to festoon the riverfront with huge photos of regular folk, silent emissaries from parts of Chicago who might not rush over to the river on a Saturday night to jot “Killings in my neighborhood” on a note to give a kayaking postman who’ll deliver it to be ritualistically burned aboard a purple townhouse.
     “It is an art project, about bringing voice and platform to some of the lesser heard people in the city, that is about celebrating the city, celebrating our spirit of grit and resilience, our capacity to renew and revitalize and change our own story,” Lasko said.
     Bravo. I can imagine it a disaster, with flaming barges drifting off and jamming under bridges, sparking a second Great Chicago Fire. I can also see it becoming a big, beloved fall Mardi Gras on water. I can’t speculate about the future without pointing out that I’m the guy who said a) cellphones were fad and b) “Who is going to haul out to Navy Pier for some tourist pleasure dome?”
      It is something I’d like to see, if I weren’t previously committed. Oh, and should it endure, which it might, Yom Kippur begins the evening of Sept. 22 in 2015, Oct. 11 in 2016. Jews like spectacle as much as anybody.

Postscript: The Fire Festival itself was a disappointing fizzle. 

The REAL Chicago style: Eat your hot dog however you please

     Last week the Chicago Sun-Times, the newspaper where I have worked for 27 years, ran an editorial, on the fallout from an interview I published with former Park District Superintendent Ed Kelly. At end of the piece, he tees off on Rahm Emanuel, callling him, most woundingly, "not a Chicagoan." 
     Ouch.
     I did pause before passing along that slur, given that it is hurled toward me from time to time, simply because I was born in Cleveland and live in the suburbs, which is so unfair. But I am not a social service, as I like to say, nor a monument to justice. I knew it would get people talking, so I let 'er rip.
     It did cause a ripple. Enough that my esteemed colleague Fran Spielman asked the mayor about it — he claimed it untrue, spooling out his bona fides as Congressman, his cop uncle, blah blah blah.  To be honest, the whole question is the kind of politics of exclusion that Chicagoans and non-Chicagoans alike have supposedly inched away from.
     On Wednesday, the Sun-Times ran a thoughtful editorial on who is a real Chicagoan? Well, thoughtful until it came to this: 

    On Facebook last month, a new meme popped up: “I’m so Chicago…” A typical completion of the sentence: “I’m so Chicago I did nuthin, saw nuthin, said nuthin, was nowhere.” And somebody, of course, offered the usual cliche that he was so Chicago he “never puts ketchup on a hotdog.’’ Then again, that’s true. Ketchup on a hot dog is wrong.

     Ahem. I like ketchup on my hot dog. To which, the guy who wrote the editorial sneered, "Yeah, but you're from Cleveland!" Maybe so, but I am also a graduate of Hot Dog University at Vienna Beef, which is as Chicago as it gets, and have the diploma to prove it. 
      Seven years ago, when the ketchup issue was last raised, I gave the matter a full exploration:

     One lunchtime, 40 years ago, in the small cafeteria at Fairwood School, I saw a fellow child fish a steaming hot dog out of his Thermos, which his mother had ingeniously filled with boiling water. He placed it into a waiting bun.
     Such complex luxury was, of course, beyond my mother, and I gazed at the steaming frank, the way a shivering ape would eye a group of toasty Neanderthals lazing around their fire. Despite being myself deprived, I passed the concept on to my wife, who sometimes varies the usual soups and ravioli with a hot frank.
     She was preparing just such a meal, last week, tucking in the wee packets of condiments.
     "Do you want ketchup for your hot dog?" my wife asked our younger boy.
     "Ketchup on hot dogs is a disgrace . . . to Chicago," he said, unexpectedly channeling the soul of the late Mike Royko. The boy and my wife smiled, turning to regard me with no small degree of mockery.
     "Dad isn't from Chicago," said the boy, 10. "So it doesn't apply to him."
     "Be nice to your father," my wife said. "He's lived here most of his life."
     Twenty-nine years, to be exact. Not that it matters. I'll always be an outlander.
     That's how Chicagoans are. Anything to push somebody outside the circle. Even scorning ketchup on hot dogs, a curious artifact started by Royko — as far as I can tell — and propagated by his imitators.
     What was his beef against ketchup? I delved into the archives. Royko cited three reasons — first, hot dogs weren't served with ketchup when he was growing up.
     Second, Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry character scorned ketchup on hot dogs. And third, and perhaps most importantly, ketchup on hot dogs is decadent, "another symptom of the general decline of standards in our society." Ketchup on hot dogs, Royko wrote, "is wrong because it is not right. Would you put whipped cream on a pizza? Would you put mayo on pancakes or salt on ice cream or pour milk on french fries? Remember, the Romans started putting ketchup on their hot dogs, and look what happened to their empire."
     Maybe we should all eat our hot dogs with ketchup. The Roman empire lasted 500 years. We should be so lucky.

I revisited the issue later in the month:

     It's a mystery that demands attention — why ketchup? We don't demonize people who, oh, put mayonnaise on bologna. Why care about this? How did it start?
     It was reading Bob Schwartz's fulsome praise of the Chicago dog [in his book, "Never Put Ketchup on a Hot Dog"] as "a banquet on a bun" that a plausible answer popped up. It is a theory, a thought experiment, but so was relativity, at first. I am confident I have solved the puzzle of ketchup and hot dogs.
     Think back to 1940s humor, to Bugs Bunny cartoons. What was the standard culinary joke? The rube goes to the fancy French restaurant and does what? He asks for ketchup, he slathers the fine French food with ketchup, shockingly, causing the enraged chef to emerge from the kitchen and chase him with a cleaver. You've seen it a thousand times. The no-ketchup-on-hot-dogs rule must be a variant of that, a winking half joke intended — once upon a time — to emphasize the quality of the dogs, to put them in the same league with haute cuisine, a bit of threadbare Vaudeville, perhaps intensified by the mustard-centric German culture that created sausages in the first place.
     People sincerely protesting the use of ketchup are playing the role of the irate French chef. That's got to be it. It's a joke, unmoored from its origins and now loose in the land.
     Remember that, next time you're sneering at someone — me, maybe — for putting ketchup on a hot dog. You're recycling an old joke, a bit of Euro-centric mockery that once tried to make us ashamed of our tastes.

     Sure, it is a small thing. But like the cracked windows theory of law enforcement, sometimes small things add up. Reject those who put ketchup on hot dogs and next you're rejecting nobodies who nobody sent or potential employees of the wrong color — also a true and genuine Chicago traditions. So you think that a real Chicagoan doesn't put ketchup on his hot dog? Well, buddy, my reply is that a real Chicagoan puts whatever he goddamn pleases on his hot dog without looking around to see what some kind of self-appointed taste maven thinks of it. Who would be so base as to diminish his own enjoyment by cravenly caving in to some local folk condiment preference? You can't kill an urban legend like the no-ketchup-on-hot-dogs canard. But that doesn't mean we can't fight against it. I ordered the hot dog above at the Gold Coast Dogs outlet hidden in Union Station.
    "With everything?" the guy behind the counter asked.
    "No," I said. "Just ketchup."
     He didn't blink. I ate the whole thing in about minute. It was delicious. 

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

    We're all so enthralled with the electronic world that we forget it's still possible to turn your back on it, such as this venerable Chicago place of business, where all your credit cards and smart phone wallets are useless. They accept cash money, and that's it. Nor can you use a telephone to let them know you're coming. They don't care. You just show up, unannounced, and you wait—often quite a long time—to receive their goods and service. Then pay your cash money and leave, utterly satisfied.
      Where is this place? What manner of place is it, with its cheezy pine paneling and its brusque cash-only notice? A public business in Chicago. I'm making this an extra hard contest, because I have an extra cool prize: this official, full-size Chicago street sign for the Irv Kupcinet Bridge. It's been on the window ledge in my office since he died in 2003. His son Jerry graciously allowed me to take a memento from his office, and I took this sign. (I contacted Jerry, to see if he wants it, and he already has one).
     So guess where the sign above is, and the sign below is yours, with the stipulation that you show up at my office and pick it up. I'll even buy you a cup of coffee at our in-house Starbucks and shoot the breeze with you a bit before sending you on your way. If you win and don't want the sign, simply say so, and we'll throw the prize open to the first person to claim it. It's a lovely sign, but I'm cleaning my office, and I'm trying to pare back a bit. I'd like to see the sign get a good home. Where IS this?