But "never happen again" sounds so bold!

     As a college student, I despised frats, everything they represented, and most of the people in them. As I got older, I met people who were actually decent human beings,

Today's column channels me circa 1982

despite membership in the Greek system, and I softened my attitude toward them, or tried to. But when the SAE incident of a racist chant caught on video came to light, my former self and my current self wrestled over how to view the situation. My former self won. 

     When I was a student at Northwestern University, I kept a fraternity paddle in my dorm window.
     Emblazoned upon it, rather than Greek letters, were the initials “GDI” — God Damn Independent — and a knight holding his thumb to his nose and blowing a raspberry.
     I displayed it because fraternities are such a big deal at NU and, being among the self-excluded, I felt a certain public pride was in order.
     It boggled me, I explained at the time, how anyone, finally freed from parental authority, would run directly into the arms of organizations set on constraining and abusing them. ”I didn’t come to NU to crawl across the Quad at midnight, my hands tied behind my back, rolling an egg with my nose,” I used to say.
     Agreed, the Greek system is large, and many, perhaps most, fraternities and sororities indeed focus on good works, fellowship and the joy of learning. But we all have biases and, to me, that’s a smokescreen, a fig leaf to cover their true purpose: extreme partying, sneering contempt for anybody outside of the charmed circle, and exactly the kind of insular bigotry that got Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s University of Oklahoma chapter in such trouble after a video surfaced of members singing a racist song, celebrating the unwelcome black students face at SAE.
      What’s surprising is they seem to think their problem is an exception that can be banished by apology and programs, and not a flaw intrinsic to elite, self-glorifying groups.

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Photo atop blog by Jackie Kalmes. The New Image Restaurant, May 1982. 

Lost tree found

     No Sunday Puzzler because, frankly, I couldn't think of a good one. With the book due tomorrow, I'm surprised I can think of ANYTHING. But the "every" part of the blog title must be respected, and there is one tidbit I want to share before the snow recedes completely into memory.


     Could bunnies eat a tree? The budding ... well, I wasn't sure what it was. I called it a "Scotch pine" because a Scotch pine had been nearby, once. But it died, so I was grateful to salvage what I considered its progeny, this seedling. It sprouted nearby, and looked Scotch pinish. After a few seasons it was a hale two feet and growing fast.
      Then gone. After a heavy snowfall. I kept searching for it, which was sad. The stick I had placed beside it, to keep me from stepping on the thing when it was tiny, was right there, a tip-off. Hungry rabbits, or maybe scavenging deer. We've had deer—they eat our lilies. Ravenous squirrels—I wouldn't put it past them. Hate those squirrels, they're capable of anything. Still ... a prickly tree. You'd have to be really hungry to eat it. I entertained theories. Malicious neighborhood children? Doubtful. Though they'd have to be psychic to go after that particular tree. I gave up hope. Besides, they'd have to go outside, and kids don't do that anymore.
     Whatever the cause, the tree was gone and never coming back. Trees don't get lost.
     Then the snow melted, and I noticed what I at first thought was the green stump of this tree. Hope! I ran into the garage and grabbed a spray bottle of Deer-Snu, or whatever the liquid fence is called—I figured, protect the pathetic remnant from further assault. Another few years of watching it slowly grow back. That's life. Sigh, start again.
    On my knees, pushing the wet slushy snow away, spray bottle in hand. I discovered, it wasn't a stump. The whole tree had simply been crushed under the snow. It was horizontal, pressed against the ground. I brushed the snow off, and it sproinged back up, good as new.
     I didn't know trees did that. 
     Nothing makes you appreciate something like fearing you lost it. Here's hoping that your early spring is a time of unexpected rebirth.  I don't know if finding a lost tree counts as rebirth, but I choose to count it.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Spring showed up, thank merciful God, last evening at 5:45 p.m. CST And while the first flowers are still pushing their green shoots up through the chill dirt, I thought I would share this bountiful crop of colorful beauties, that I spied Thursday during my wanderings around the city.
     "Spring" is an interesting word, occupying more than five densely-packed pages of my Oxford English Dictionary. It began in Old English describing water "rising or issuing from the ground, the source or head, of a well, stream, or river" a meaning it of course still retains. Then naturally it was applied to other things that also spring forth: vegetation, lions,  coiled metal contraptions, a usage more than 500 years old. 
    All that springing plant activity led, in the 14th century, to the season we have now gratefully entered being called "springing time" then, a century later, "spring-time" as well as "spring of the leaf" and finally, just "spring," which by Shakespeare's era was being used frequently to denote the season, plus anything, such a love or life, enjoying its first flowering. 
      Noah Webster's 1828 dictionary downplays the time of year, starting with"1. n. a leap; a bound; a jump; as of an animal" and gives nine other meanings, including "a fountain of water" before getting to "11. The season of the year when plants begin to vegetate and rise."
     There are of course more definitions; the slang usage of getting someone out of jail being among the most recent, dating back only to about 1935.
    But enough etymology—who has time to waste on that with the weather finally becoming a little nicer? Where is the above flowery mural? The winner receives one of my equally stunning, if not as colorful, 2015 blog posters. Please post your guesses below. 

Benjamin Netanyahu has second thoughts...

     Well, we’ve sailed off into new territory here, haven’t we?
     Given that “cynicism” was the adjective of choice the media used to describe Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s last-minute vow that there would never be an independent Palestinian state under his watch, just as his nation went to the polls Tuesday, what term should be used to describe his immediately reversing that promise once he was safely re-elected?
     “Super-cynicism?” “Double-dishonesty?”
     “I don’t want a one-state solution,” Netanyahu told MSNBC Thursday. “I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution.”
     We should introduce the man who said that to the man who, 48 hours earlier, when asked by an Israeli news blog if his being re-elected would mean that no Palestinian state would be established, answered “correct,” then elaborated: “I think that anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands is giving attack grounds to the radical Islam against the State of Israel. Anyone who ignores this is sticking his head in the sand.”
     That actually makes sense. I was nodding in a kind of grim attempt at understanding Netanyahu’s sudden promise to block the Palestinian state. Those who like to paint Israel as mere evil forget the nation didn’t tack hard right without a reason. All the squishy, lefty, let’s-make-peace overtures got them nothing but missiles. Maybe a hard-line stance would lure the Palestinians into demanding their new state, insisting they live in peace as neighbors.

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Google Play Music

    Morning. Coffee. Facebook. Not sure why. Facebook's for old people.
    Oh. Right. If the shoe fits...
    Why not? I've got nothing. See what the Hive Intelligence is up to. 
    A fuchsia square. Advertising.

    "Find the perfect station for your current mood."      
    My current mood? My current mood. Nah, you don't want to do that...
     What would that station be?
     WOLD? KRAB?
    "Find the perfect track for any mood. Google Play Music...."
     Something like "Volga Boatmen," maybe? 
      And "Google Play Music"? Is that what it's called? Really? It sounds like it was named by a chimp. "Tarzan Love Jane." "Baby Go Potty."
    Google Play Music. What IS that?
    "Google Play Music has expertly curated stations for when you need to chill out, wake up, or just dance."
     "Expertly curated." Who needs an "expert" to pick—whoops, to curate—their music? Okay, a DJ, sometimes. A hip guy in sunglasses, at parties. But an "expert"? How did these tin-ear imbeciles at Google ever get to run the world? I hope their coders are better at their jobs.
     "Chill out, wake up, or just dance." Those are my choices? It's too early to chill out. I actually don't think I've ever chilled out. I thought that chilling out is something arguing felons are urged to do when they're separated in a day room Cook County Jail. Coffee is for waking up. "Just dance." Happily. With whom?
   Enough. I'll bite.
   This Google Play Music, tell me more. I click on Google Play, and find myself, not at an infinity of music stations, expertly curated to match my increasingly shitty moods, but a "Product/Service" page, with 814,840 "likes." A photo of a fat-cheeked baby. Which catches my interest, as babies will. "Today, we open the time capsule featuring moments by you and amplified with 'Glory' by Jean-Michel Jarre & M83, an excerpt from Jean-Michel Jarre’s forthcoming studio album." This must be the beginning of my curated experience. A clap of thunder and blooping synthesizer that was dated in 1981. Spoken words. "What do you like about living on earth?" Certainly not the skill of online marketing morons. 
    Okay, try again. Interested customer here, trying to access the product dangled before my eyes. Plug "Google Play" into Google.  Up pops the Google Store. A series of games. "Hay Day." "Angry Birds Stella POP! "King of Thieves."
    Where's the music?  Ah, on the side. Click music. What about "Pandora"? Reminds me of the chef who named her restaurant "Scylla," not realizing it was "the yelping horror" to be avoided at all costs. The classics are faded, but we're supposed to open Pandora, right?  
     "Great music discovery is effortless and free with Pandora..." Well, at least it doesn't release evil into the world. 
    "Great music discovery is effortless and free..." That wasn't written by a native English speaker, was it?  Because a high school English teacher would have gone with "Discovering great music..." 
     "Create up to 100 personalized radio stations..." One will do, but okay, I'm game. 
     Clicketty-click.
     "You haven't accessed the Google Play Store app..."
    Oh, of course. My apologies. Right away.
    I access the store, but for some reason I end up looking at cell phones and "A Nest Learning Thermostat."
    "Fuck this," I think (I should create the "Fuck this!" app, sending a shriek of disapproval back at whatever nonsense is being dangled in front of you. It would be worth $100 million in a month).
    Go to Plan B.
    Fire up the Gramovox on my desk. Within seconds, it's pumping out Billy Corgan's "A-100," curated because it begins with "A" and thus is the first song on my song list. Live. An audience going nuts. Then that gorgeous fuzzy bass comes in.
       "Stay with me just a little," Billy sings, "lay with me, just a little...."
      Turns out that was what I needed to hear all along. Gets the blood going. And realizing how even Google, with its twee-yet-artful doodles and global domination, can on some days still seem to be run by the utterest idiots, well, that is life-affirming too, and a kind of happiness.



 
   

Check your attic: any Rembrandts?

 

Rembrandt, "Christ in the Storm," stolen March 18, 1990

    Today is the 25th anniversary of the largest art theft in United States history, the looting of the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston. I have a special interest in the crime, as I visited the museum five years before it was robbed, even though at the time I found it a "weird, debilitating collection of dark, gilt baroque pieces, artlessly assembled in dim corridors and mocked by bright flowers assembled in hideous inner courtyard like Sears Garden Center." I still like the place, and went back when I was touring the East Coast with the family, to gaze sadly at the empty frames the museum keeps hung in their places, waiting for their masterpieces back. The FBI marked the anniversary by saying it is closing in on the culprits, but we've heard that before. This is from 1997, when I met with Dr. Walter McCrone, "the Father of Modern Microscopy," to investigate some potential clues. Dr. McCrone died in 2002.

The saga of the biggest art heist in modern history made a pit stop in Chicago last week, in the form of a thimble's worth of paint flecks arriving under escort at the Michigan Avenue laboratory of Dr. Walter McCrone.      The flecks may or may not be from a pair of Rembrandts that were slashed from their frames by two crooks who strolled into Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum dressed as policemen seven years ago and strolled out with $300 million worth of art, including works by Degas, Manet and Vermeer.      If you're not the sort who haunts art museums, then Isabella Stewart Gardner might sound like the name of just another rich benefactress. She was, but an especially charming and egocentric one. She handed over her mansion, built in the style of a 15th century Venetian palace, filled with hundreds of art treasures, with the stipulation that the artworks never be sold, never be loaned, and nothing change in the home she had enjoyed.      And nothing did. I was lucky enough to visit before the thefts. The Gardner wasn't so much like a museum as like the mansion of some dotty rich aunt who had stepped out for a cup of elderberry tea. The place was dark, the guards antiques themselves. Black velvet clothes covered glass cases of medieval rarities—visitors were expected to pull the velvet aside, get an eyeful, then push it back. The place was very low tech, very old and very lovely.      The theft of the dozen artworks shattered this sealed-off little world and made it mournful. The spots where the paintings had been displayed were left empty, marked by placards reading "Stolen March 18, 1990."      The police were stymied. The trail grew so cold that when the Gardner offered a cool $1 million reward, no questions asked, for the return of the paintings, it emphasized that the thieves were welcome to collect the money.      The paintings had been insured for damage, but not for theft.      The flecks of paint under McCrone's microscope were offered up by a pair of characters named Myles Connor Jr. and William Youngworth III, who say they know where the paintings are and will arrange their safe return in exchange for immunity from prosecution and the reward from the museum, now swelled to $ 5 million. And they want one other thing, too: Connor's release from prison. He's in for—guess what? -- art theft.      As evidence that they have the Rembrandts, they turned some chips of paint over to the Boston Herald. The delegation in McCrone's office was from the Herald, with a TV crew in tow, to see if the flecks were indeed the real McCoy.      Authenticating a Rembrandt is tricky stuff even when you have an entire painting to work with. Approximately half of all the pictures that have been called Rembrandts and hung in museums later were determined to be the work of students or disciples or out-and-out forgers.      Ever the cautious scientist, McCrone won't say the chips are from a Rembrandt, only that they aren't not from a Rembrandt. That was enough to cause a whoop of joy in Boston.      "The Boston Herald came out with a headline saying I said it is a Rembrandt, but that isn't what I said in my report to them," McCrone said. "I can say I can't find any reason to think it is not by Rembrandt, and there are lots of positive indications it may well be."      McCrone is one a handful of microscopy experts in the country who aid law enforcement and art curation by gazing at evidence, micron by micron. He debunked the Shroud of Turin—among all but the most die-hard believers—by amassing evidence that it is a 13th century creation.       The key to his work is knowing the history of paints and looking for hues that came into being at a certain time. Prussian blue, for instance, was created in 1704, and since Rembrandt died in 1669, finding that particular blue in a purported Rembrandt is like finding a bar code on a Ming vase.      The flecks were all smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. McCrone, using an optical microscope (he scorns those fancy electron jobbies), looked for colors of paint that would rule out a painting as Rembrandt's.      "Those were all absent," he said. "And the ones there were very typical of the form and composition Rembrandt did use."      McCrone's work is time-intensive, and while he employs a dozen associates at the lab, he still puts in long hours. On a typical day he arrives by 3:15 in the morning and stays until after 6 p.m.      He walks every day, the two miles from his home in the Lake Meadows development by Michael Reese Hospital. "I don't own an overcoat or hat," he said with a certain pride. McCrone is 81 years old.      "Work is my hobby—I've got a lot of interesting things to work on," he concluded. "I've been lucky."     Maybe a bit of McCrone's luck will rub off on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and  they'll get those paintings back.      —Published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 19, 1997

Why not ponies to go with those 1,000 extra police officers?

     Don't underestimate Chuy Garcia's strategy of not having any idea of what he'd do if elected.
     It worked for Bruce Rauner.
     Besides, the commissioner isn't really running on a platform of what he'd do. Doing stuff is Rahm Emanuel's speciality, and look where it got him. If Emanuel hadn't done so much — closed schools, cut deals — he might have spent more time sitting at community meetings, being screamed at, and maybe he wouldn't be facing such a serious challenge now.
     Rather, Garcia is running on who he is: an earnest, neighborhood guy who has the benefit of not being rich. To fear he'd botch running the city underestimates the roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-the-job-done ingenuity of the regular folk of this great country of ours. He'd do fine. At least he'd do his best.

     Not that Emanuel isn't also doing his best, within his limits as a human being, assuming he is one. A consigliere to two presidents, pin-balling around the halls of power, Emanuel is not a get-your-hands-dirty type of mayor. No pie-eating contests for him. Though he's had his moments among the herd.
     It was four years ago, during Ed Burke's hare-brained scheme to get Emanuel's candidacy spiked because he didn't actually live here, that the mayor-to-be spent a day in a windowless room listening to regular Chicago Joes' crazy conspiracy theories. Emanuel took it well, never losing his famous temper, and you could feel his prospects rise afterward.
     Too bad he didn't absorb the important lesson — you lead people, you have to sometimes set yourself among them, letting them ramble on, wasting your time, time that you could be using to raise more millions. Riding the L occasionally just isn't the same.
     From a newspaperman standpoint, Garcia winning would be more fun. We'd have a First Hispanic Mayor cup to put in the trophy room next to our First Woman Mayor and First Black Mayor. Not an actual tangible accomplishment, of course — not cash money we can put toward Chicago's unpayable pension burden — but there is real value in such a milestone. The axis of power would indeed shift. Harold Washington certainly got public works going in neighborhoods that Jane Byrne had never heard of — when people speak of his main accomplishment in office, they tend to mention sidewalks — though Harold also spiked Jane's elitist dream of a 1992 World's Fair (there was a 1992 World's Fair; any idea where? Any at all? Seville, Spain).          

     But wishing is not enough, as Garcia will discover. Facts butt in. For every African-American voter who supports Garcia for not being Emanuel, for instance, there might be two who don't want Hispanics "cutting in line" and receiving the benefits they still somehow expect. To me, the only question in this election is: Which candidate has the best chance of avoiding the pension time bomb about to blow the city up? Garcia or Emanuel? Which works better with figures?
     Emanuel has trouble with people, true, but Garcia has trouble with numbers. Take his castigating Emanuel for not fulfilling his 2011 promise to hire 1,000 police officers. Riveting campaign theater. The mayor reneged, Garcia shouts, but Chuy will do it! While offering no hint of how to pay for these officers, as if the sticking point were not the cost, but the concept. ("More police officers! Ah. Of course. Great idea. Why didn't we think of that? Thanks commissioner!") To be honest, I could get behind Garcia wholeheartedly, the way I yearned for Mayor Carol Moseley-Braun in 2011, if he promised, along with the thousand cops, to provide a pony for every child in Chicago. Kids love ponies, and taking care of a pony encourages responsibility. Ten thousand ponies cost far less than a thousand cops (the kids can share). Besides, campaigns are for dreaming big, aren't they? We can sweat the details after he's elected.