You are not going to win the lottery

     So much of what's left of media criticism consists of slagging various competitors when they make a perceived misstep, I thought I'd pause for a moment to praise a colleague who did something today we see too little of, and is appreciated, at least by me.

WBBM reporter Bernie Tafoya

     Coverage of the Powerball Lottery is generally a relentless ballyhoo,  where the media, for some unfathomable reason—tradition, I suppose—falls over itself to promote this tax on desperation, focusing on the jackpot and the long lines, interviewing people about how they'll spend the millions they're not going to get.
    Rarely does anyone mention the infinitesimal odds. Rarely are the majority of people, who shun the lottery, given their due. We're all gripped in a fever! Every. Single. Time.
    Thus I was impressed to hear two reports on WBBM 780 AM Wednesday by veteran newsman Bernie Tafoya, that offered perspective, talking of people who weren't playing Powerball, either because they didn't gamble or they knew they wouldn't win, and highlighting the just about impossible odds.
        That's refreshing. The truth is, the majority of people never play the lottery, and of those who do, almost all never win anything of significance. It's a sucker's game, and the media does its audience no favors by downplaying that. The odds of winning Powerball are minuscule: worse than the odds of picking one person randomly from among the 315 million living in the United States and having that person turn out to be Barack Obama or his wife Michelle. When the lottery rolls over, the media emphasizes that the jackpot has grown even larger. The excitement builds! It never points out that the rollover means you could have purchased every single ticket sold and you'd still lose. I once figured out that the odds of winning the Powerball lottery is the same as hovering in space above the continental United States, flipping a quarter toward the entire country, where odds were even it could land anywhere on the US landmass, and having the quarter come down inside Wrigley Field.
    If the lottery is news—and I can see the argument—then it is bad news, or at least depressing news: people spending being charged to dream when dreaming of course is actually free, plus government becoming addicted to vice taxes to prop up what's left of its operation. Good for Bernie for telling it like it is. 

A visit from Sheriff Steinberg

     My apologies in advance for this, perhaps best read aloud, or not read at all, particularly if you are in the habit of writing outraged emails to newspapers, bitterly complaining that your sensibilities have been offended. As the following tries to illustrate, it’s a big world, with many people other than yourself in it, alas, and sometimes the world makes accommodations for them. This is one of those times:

     Welllll friend, I’d say what we have here is a situation.
     Alabama, a state we all thought was a member o’ the You-nited States ah ' merica, has succeeded once again, with the venerable chief Judge Roy S. Moore — he of Ten Commandments in the courtroom fame — announcin’ that fed’rall court rulings are more gentle suggestions, more like helpful hints, as opposed to binding orders, at least when it comes to the subject of quote–unquote gay marriage.
     And if Alabama probate judges, drawing ‘pon the guidance of their own hearts, and the fine Suth’n tradition of oppressin’ folks who have always been oppressed down theh, well, if those judges prefer to ignore those federal rulin’s, say, and not ish-eh marriage licenses to ho-mo-sekshul Alabamans, whale, that’s just fahhhhhhn.
     And Mundeh, when it were to have been legal, had the United States of America authority actually extended down that fah, 52 of the 67 Alabama judges decided that Judge Roy S. Moore was rahhhhht.
     So in honah that, in honah Judge Roy S. Moore — don’t ya justlove that name? — I’m dippin’ two fingers in a pouch o’ Red Man, drawin’ out a generous chaw o’ tobaccah, insertin’ it with practic’d skill, settin’ back in mah chair, and revivin’ a heretofore vanished American stereotype: the grinnin’ Suth’n sheriff.
     O-fensive? Why sure it’s o-ffensive. That’t the point, frind. What you have to ask yerself is, “Am I o-ffended ’cause I’m ‘gainst classifyin’ groups ah people, all groups of people, in an unfair and derogatory fashion? Or am I o-ffended’ cause I just don’t liiiike it when it happ’ns t' me?”

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Why bother with Wagner?

 

Anthony Freud, second from left

     The Lyric Opera announced its 2015/2016 season on Monday. I thought I'd stop by the press conference, though I regretted that decision as I walked to the Civic Opera House, feeling first the customary anticipation of  running into my colleague Andrew Patner, as always, followed immediately by the realization that no, he of course wouldn't be there. Then a few seconds went by, and I'd go through the whole cycle again. It felt lousy.
     For some silly reason I thought this was my own private sadness, and so was surprised, and gratified, when  the Lyric's executive director, Anthony Freud, began his remarks this way:
     "Thank you all for coming. Great to see so many of you here. I just want to start this morning by saying of course there is one person who's not here—Andrew— I have to admit I'm still reeling from the shock of his death, I really can't quite believe it's happened. He was such a great, wise man with a deep passion for culture, and a passion for Lyric. All I can say is that we already miss him terribly and there's nothing like an occasion like this just to emphasize the fact he's no longer with us."
    At which point the great critic Wynne Delacoma broke up the room by adding, "Of course, he might not be here at this point" alluding to Andrew's tendency to come bustling in at the last second.
     I don't want to pick apart next year's schedule. They're doing "Merry Widow" again, only six years after last time because—not that anyone said this but, reading between the lines—Renee Fleming is singing it at the Met and wants to sing it here too.      
      We can parse the whole schedule another time, or not. What I want to discuss is the composer currently being sung across the footlights—Richard Wagner, whose "Tannhauser" opened Monday night. 
     I love Wagner. Not the man, the music. That opinion needs explaining. A lot of people despise Wagner on principle, associating him only with Nazism and enormously long works, and that's a great injustice. Well, not the second part. This article was designed to remedy Wagner-aversion, or at least explain why I don't suffer from the common malady. It was written referring to his lighthearted "Meistersinger" and ran only two years ago, but merits revisiting, particularly since a good number of you no doubt missed it to the first time around, having arrived in the past year as the blog's readership has soared. 

     So why bother with Wagner?

     Not the Lyric Opera of Chicago—it has to bother. To its credit, despite the occasional frustration of loyal subscribers, the Lyric views its duty as an artistic organization to not just endlessly reprise two dozen favorite “barn burners,” as Sir Andrew Davis, principal conductor at the Lyric, calls the most popular operas -- an endless rhondo from "Carmen" to "Madama Butterfly" to "La Traviata" and back -- but to explore the entire range of the musical form, which sometimes means poking into the difficult, atonal, obscure, even despised modern works, or the feverish subchambers of Richard Wagner.

     That’s why Lyric puts them on. But why would anyone go? The works of Wagner are long -- in fact, “Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg’’ which opens Friday, is his longest. Five and a half hours with intermissions. 

     Then there is Wagner himself, German nationalist, fierce anti-Semite, who referred to “the Jewish race, the born enemy of humanity” as vermin who must be destroyed, which they nearly were by his biggest fan, Hitler. Isn’t enjoying his work today, with its heroic mythologizing of German culture, a kind of tribute? An endorsement, really, of a guy who helped nudge Europe toward ruin?

     “That is in the back of your mind as you’re listening,” said Lyric dramaturg Roger Pines, an expert on Wagner. “It depends on how much you decide you want to know about him. His life is an awful lot more complicated and awful lot more interesting than any other composer you can find.”

     Some people willfully ignore Wagner, the man, and just listen.  “Of course, you can sit there and let the music wash over you,” said Pines. But that is not the path of the hero.

      “I had never really heard anyone be as direct and eloquent until I talked to our director, David McVicar,” said Pines. “He was the orignal director [of this production] He thinks the only responsible way to love Wagner’s art is to be fully aware of the dark side of him. It’s the only way to appreciate how wonderful the operas are.”

    Wagner, who died in 1883, is usually put in the context of how he was later embraced by the National Socialists, who used his triumphant orchestrations as the soundtrack for their Reich. But to understand where Wagner was coming from, as he worked, you have to realize he was in the middle of the revolutionary swirl of 1848 that began to form modern Germany and forced him to flee to Zurich. (As opposed to when fled to London to escape debt. Wagner had a tumultuous personal life and I admired this sentence in one bio: “It is not possible to summarize his many marital and financial difficulties.”) 

     The glib line I use to rationalize appreciating the work of those who turn out to be anti-Semites is that if a person limited his enjoyment to artists who weren’t anti-Semites, it would be pretty slim pickings—reading Isaac Bashevis Singer, looking at Marc Chagall and listening to klezmer music.  Grim.

     The facts about Wagner, true, strain this facile approach, but that leads to a realization even more satisfying. The Nazis insisted on binding art to the artists who create it. Their “Degenerate Art” exhibits were meant to ridicule art done by Jews and others they considered sub-human. To separate our ability to enjoy art from the  flaws, whether perceived or real, of whoever created it strikes me as a refutation of the  screwy Nazi worldview of purity and contamination. I  can think of no greater revenge upon the poisonous failed philosophy of Wagner, Hitler, et al than for a Jew in 2013 to park his latke-larded butt into a seat in the Civic Opera House and savor beautiful music, despite the ugly aspects of the guy who wrote it.

    To be honest, I was inclined against “Meistersinger” not because it is Wagner, but because it is a comedy, his only one. Just as, if I see Eugene O’Neill, I don’t want to see a watery “Ah, Wilderness,” his lone comedy, but his 100 proof “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” so if I’m going to see Wagner, I want horned helmets and Valkyries and those low rumbling notes that sound like the 20th century yawning and waking up.

     As for the length.
     “You can’t deny the fact it is as long as it is,” said Pines. “But in a good "Meistersinger"—and this is going to be a great "Meistersinger"— slides by. The music is glorious. You’re not conscious of the length. You’re taking in all the stimuli, the beauty of what you’re looking at and what you’re listening to. The beauty is all-consuming and the lengthy becomes  irrelevant. It’s a total immersion experience.”

     It is.  Surrender to this world where cobblers are wise and work in libraries and maidens give their hand to the winners of song contests takes an act of will, but the rewards are there, in both pleasure and understanding. “Meistersinger” helps you grasp Wagner, and Wagner  is a key to comprehending the madness that gripped the Germans, because he reveals what was going on in their backs of their minds all the while. 
                                 --Originally published February 8, 2013

Twitter vows to be less vile

     The other day I almost downloaded the Uber app so I could try the controversial ride service.
     That’s a lie.
     I thought about downloading Uber. Not that I need it. I Divvy most places, even in winter. But I could use Uber a few times, then write something. Though the issue seems pretty clear already: Either cabbies need the expensive licensing and training required of taxi services or they don’t.
     So the thought passed.
     I am not what is called an “early adopter.” By the time I try something, it’s passe. Although I did join Twitter early enough — nearly four years ago — to snag the @neilsteinberg tag, which means the other Neil Steinbergs, like the movie producer in Los Angeles and the business leader in Rhode Island, have to make do with other names.
     Because of this, occasionally someone thinks I’m a different Neil Steinberg, particularly the businessman, and sends something like this actual tweet: “Whom would you suggest I discuss funding for the programs at We Share Hope?”
     I paused over that, licking my chops, itching, just itching, to tweet back: “What the fuck do I care? I live for cold brew and bodacious babes!”

     Or some such thing.
     Because it would be funny, or my idea of funny at the moment, tossing that back at the serious, Let's-Build-a-Better-Rhode Island-type trying to tap this other Neil Steinberg's Babbity brain, getting the wesenheimer instead. Quite an awkward encounter at the Rhode Island Rotary after that.
     But I didn't. Because I can do that Think-About-What-Happens-Next trick learned slowly, after a sufficient number of years kneeling on a rail in an editor's office. I wrote back coolly: "Try the Neil Steinberg who is some kind of businessman in Rhode Island, and not me."
     A lot of people don't take that step. They just blurt out what they think is funny or mean, or both. They think cruelty is funny - they'll mock a 5-year-old who dies of cancer. That's why there's no comments section in newspapers anymore, because it's a full-time job - several full-time jobs - plucking out the nasty remarks, the racist jeremiads, the insane blather.
      Twitter has become a free-fire zone, with threats and condemnations pinging endlessly about. That isn't news. What surprised me is that their boss admits it.
     "We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years," Twitter CEO Dick Costolo wrote in a memo to his company posted by The Verge website. "It's no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day."
     Robin Williams' daughter renounced Twitter after being mocked in the wake of her father's suicide. Feminist comic writer Lindy West recently did a moving segment on public radio about one troll who set up a Twitter account masquerading as her father.  
     "I got a message on Twitter from my dead dad," she told "This American Life." "I don't remember what it said exactly . . . but it was mean, and my dad was never mean, so it couldn't really be from him. Also, he was dead."
     Twitter abuse is especially bad for women like West, whose outspokenness is met with a endless barrage of rape and death threats. Not that feminists can't be nasty too when attacking a man for straying from the path of political correctness. Trust me here. And there is a wave-the-bloody-shirt quality to recounting these threats, displayed as evidence of one's place on the slippery pole of significance. Yet it is undeniable that, as in society, women get the short end of the stick online.
     Costolo vowed that Twitter is going to do better at helping people chase trolls like West's out from under their bridges. If that seems unusually candid for a CEO, remember that Costolo is a Midwesterner - a University of Michigan computer grad who came to Chicago for the comedy, made millions in the tech boom, left because of the weather, for California, where he made even more money heading Twitter. Usually money drowns candor, but that doesn't seem true here.
     "I'm frankly ashamed of how poorly we've dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO," he continued. "It's absurd. There's no excuse for it. I take full responsibility for not being more aggressive on this front."
     Then again, abuse is bad for business. While profits are strong, Twitter's growth is flat. There's only so much scorn users are willing to take.
     It's an interesting question, whether the Internet makes us more vile, by offering opportunities to hurt strangers anonymously. Or whether people already are horrible and the Internet merely reflects it. I'd say a bit of both. If you look at history, people can live amicably for years, then there's a social disruption and suddenly they're slaughtering their neighbors because they can.
      Bottom line: People will generally be as vile as permitted. The Internet allows it, so it's there. Good for Twitter trying to dial the nastiness back. Every kindergarten class starts to act up the moment the teacher steps out of the room. Sadly, one truth about freedom is that it's abused until somebody imposes limits and consequences..

Live your dream life at beautiful Edgewater Plaza

      Conveniently nestled in the heart of the scenic 48th ward, the Edgewater Plaza is a 39 floor condominium tower at 5455 N. Sheridan Road.
      Now I will admit that stretch of Sheridan Road, lined with similar high rise buildings, has never been my favorite corner of Chicago. I think if it as a neighborhood of Miami Beach that came unmoored and drifted northward, where it has to content with three months of warm weather every year instead of 11 and a 1/2.
      But that was before Edgewater Plaza Chief Engineer Thomas V. Hedeen requested one of my new blog posters, to display on the bulletin board where Edgewater Plaza's happy residents, in Tom's words, "post notices of sales and events, and performers and artists post information about their upcoming shows."

Pool at Edgewater Plaza, 5455 N. Sheridan Rd.

     See? That's why you can't form preconceptions about a place just by driving by. For years I've passed Edgewater Plaza, never imagining the dynamic social and creative life buzzing within its 465 well-maintained units and cheery public areas. It's practically Florence at the dawn of the Renaissance. The building has a 24-hour doorman, a rooftop deck, a business center, two party rooms,  a library, and this beautiful tile-bordered Olympic-sized outdoor pool. 
     Built on the site of the historic Edgewater Beach Hotel, the Edgewater Plaza is only steps from the welcoming shores of Lake Michigan. You can bike the lakeshore, stroll over to Andersonville,  or grab a late dinner at Little Vietnam.
     But I saved the best for last. You can have pets. Other nearby buildings don't allow it. They hate pets. Next door, at 5445 N. Sheridan, which also calls itself "Edgewater Plaza," attempting to sow confusion and steal a bit of 5455 N. Sheridan's glory, brazenly announces "No Pets" on their web site, so that prospective residents will know that their lives will be wasted dwelling among similarly joyless and selfish individuals who can't so much as to put themselves out to care for a cat. Who are so busy making whatever botch job of their lives and sowing misery wherever they go that dumping a half cup of kibble into a bowl is just too great of a demand for them to even consider, forget the deep personal commitment that walking a dog three times a day, the highlight of my life, involves.
     But enough of them. Just make sure, when you go look at your future home, that you visit the pet-friendly, pool-graced Edgewater Plaza at 5455 N. Sheridan, and not its arid, poolless, petless, joyless doppleganger just to the south.
     But hurry, if you plan to see my poster, as Tom has affixed it rather tenuously, and not, as I would have done, cemented the poster with epoxy and then covered it with a sheet of Lexan screwed into the wall.  
     Enough. If you have a place of public accommodation you'd like to see featured here, merely request a poster, put it up, then send me a picture, and perhaps I'll write something about it.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     The thought was there.
     A vacant city lot. A chance for urban blight or ... something wonderful.
     Whether they were successful or not, well, I'll leave that up to you.
     I am not an art connoisseur. So when I say it seemed to me like a lot of random junk jumbled together, that is not a judgment for the ages. That is jut my own individual impression. Perhaps you find it sublime. That's the beauty of art, or junk purporting to be art: we can all form our own conclusions.
     Anyway. Your task is not to pass judgment on this assemblage, but to pinpoint where in the city it is. The winner will receive one of my immensely artistic 2015 blog posters, which are flying out the door at $15 a pop, plus postage and handling, but which you can have for zippity-doo-dah if you guess correctly the location of this ... assemblage.
     Please remember to place your guesses below.
     And if for some unfathomable reason you don't want the poster ... maybe it isn't your taste ... there's always Bridgeport coffee, which has an artistry all its own.
    Oh, and a bit of housekeeping. This is the last contest that will post at midnight, because my wife points out that, given the frequency with which it is solved at 1 a.m., I'm cutting all those readers who aren't insomniac nightowls with solid Google search skills from participating. So from now on, it'll post at 6 a.m. Saturdays, to give early risers more of a fighting chance. Thanks everybody for playing.

Cindy Mayer can't care for us all

Cindy Mayer

    “Kookamonga!” Henry Radom, 86, answers the phone brightly, his opening salvo at telemarketers who are often on the other end.
      Sometimes he answers “George Clooney.” Or “Godzilla.”
     “Hi dad,” replies Cindy Mayer cheerfully. “I’m going to come by in a bit. Don’t disappear on me.”
     She hangs up.
     “He does that sometimes,” she explains, sitting in her Norwood Park living room. “Blood tests; it’s easier to take a powder.”

Henry Radom 

      Mayer is a professional caregiver for Home Instead Senior Care, which pairs her with senior citizens who need help in their homes. In her spare time, she tends to her widowed, legally blind father with unrelenting good cheer.
     “It’s hard to raise parents nowadays,” she says, heading over to his tidy home, about 15 minutes away in Jefferson Park. “With my dad I can have a constructive argument. It’s hard, because you can’t treat them like children. I don’t tell my dad, ‘You’re grounded. No smoking for two weeks.’ That doesn’t go very far.”
     Mayer is the vanguard of a new health care front in this country. As the population ages, more and more people will be called upon to care for their elderly relatives, or, barring that, will be paid to care for strangers.
     She represents an unexpected aspect of senior care.
     “Most care actually occurs in the home,” said John Schall, CEO of the Caregivers Action Network in Washington, D.C. “It isn’t in a hospital or medical clinic. It isn’t in nursing homes. Eighty percent of care occurs in the home. That surprises a lot of people.”
     With nobody sure which wire to snip on the pension time bomb, and climate change increasingly clear, even to heretofore head-in-the-sand Republicans, I hate to add another immense social problem to the list of crises we aren’t coping with. But the elderly population is exploding. For all of human history you could view population as a pyramid, with a broad base of children, a smaller, yet substantial level element of young adults, fewer people in their prime, fewer above them in late middle age, tapering year by year to a small apex of elderly atop the pyramid.
      That was the past. Now the population pyramid increasingly resembles a tower, where there are almost as many older adults as there are children. In the next 45 years, the world will add 1.1 billion people between the ages of 60 and 75, a 130 percent increase. Meanwhile, the number of children and teenagers will increase by only 9 percent.
      So expect the youth culture spawned by the Baby Boom to give way to a senescent culture. Clorox has already rolled out Care Concepts, a line of medical items normally found in nursing homes — non-latex exam gloves, hand sanitizer, stain remover, germicidal non-bleach spray, disinfecting and deodorizing sprays — now marketed to private caregivers through stores, a growing business.
     “If you took economic value of unpaid family care giving is $450 billion a year, twice as much as nation spends on all nursing home care and all paid in home care combined,” Schall said.
    Most of us will grow old. The lucky ones will have a Cindy Mayer looking after us.
    “When I’m not working, I’m trying to meet my dad,” she says, noting how isolated older people can become at home.
      “He doesn’t suffer from dementia, he suffers from LDD — long damn day,” she says. “My mom’s gone nine-and-a-half years. It was hard for him. I stayed with him a few weeks. My dad was never a social butterfly.”
     “I don’t know the washer from the dryer.” her father told her.
      “Dad, as long as I’m alive, you don’t need to,” Mayer replied.
      Elderly people prefer home care for a variety of reasons. It’s cheaper. They’re in a familiar place.       
     There are none of the social stresses that can make a nursing home seem like a junior high school, only with meaner cliques.
     “It’s pretty much an unrecognized issue, which is surprising, given the tens of millions of people who are family caregivers,” said Schall, whose group has a website, caregiveraction.org, designed to help those caring for others.
     “Families caregivers themselves don’t immediately self-identify as family caregivers. They don’t know there’s a word or a term. They think of it as just what they do for their family or loved ones.”
    Well, not everybody. Mayer has tales of seniors ignored or neglected by their families.
     “I have families who just want to write the check,” she says. Some don’t even want to do that. Mayer views the chance to care for her dad, who came to Chicago from Poland in the 1950s, as a blessing.
     “I’m very grateful that my dad is still at home,” she says. “We don’t live too far from one another. I’m there every day, sometimes more. I help him with all his banking [and] bills. Neither of our homes look how they should be. But it’s OK. You have to laugh this stuff off.”
     Mayer points out that the care she gives to her dad is the same care she gives to elderly people she visits, whether in their homes or in nursing homes.
     “I’ve been in nursing homes where the residents are lined up in wheelchairs — it’s very sad,” Mayer said. “If you could just say ‘Good morning’ to somebody, that’s all, they’ll probably talk about that little interaction for the rest of the week. It’s very important, what we do. Not the best-paying job. People think it’s an easy job, but it’s not. You’re responsible for someone’s loved one. A human being.”