Chicago could use a new poet

     Think about your mother.
     How would you describe her, to a stranger?
     "Nice smile" or "brown hair" or "made angels out of copies of The Reader's Digest, folded over and painted gold"?
     Here's Patricia Smith, writing about her mother:

     Whenever I dream her young, I see red dust on her ankles and feet. Those feet were flat and ashy, steady stomping, the corn on her baby toe raw and peeled back. No shoes could hold them. Those feet were always naked, touched by everything, stones asked her to limp and she didn't. Low branches whipped, sliced her skin, and they urged her to cry and she wouldn't.

     And that was her mother only below the ankles, as a child, still in Alabama. Though that changed after what another writer would describe as, "she took a bus north."
     This is how Patricia Smith put it:

     Apple cheeks, glorious gap-tooth fills the window of the Greyhound. For the occasion, she has hot-combed her hair into shivering strings and donned a homemade skirt that wrestles with her curves. This deception is what the city asks. I dream her sleeping at angles, her head full and hurting with future, until the bus arrives in the city.

    The city she's heading toward is Chicago, so Smith can be born here, 60 years ago, and become our city's poet.
     What? Chicago's poet is Carl Sandburg? Really? Still? Nice guy, played the guitar. But he's been dead almost 50 years. "City of the Big Shoulders" first appeared in print 101 years ago. Saying Carl Sandburg is the city's poet is like saying the Cubs star is Gabby Harnett.
     Better off with Patricia Smith. A living city deserves a living poet. Smith writes poetry that sears and sizzles on the page. Like Sandburg, she worked at a Chicago newspaper, the Sun-Times, which she joined on March 23, 1987 — I know that date precisely because I was hired on the same day. We two made up the staff of The Adviser, a Wednesday insert that taught readers how to organize their garages and exile Japanese beetles from their lawns.

Patricia Smith

   We didn't like each other. In her eyes — she never said it, but she didn't have to — I was a privileged white guy, buffed by Northwestern University to a bright white guy sheen and deposited near the summit of the hill that she had to drag herself up by hard work.
     I called her "Queen of the Nile," behind her back, a sort of backhanded compliment to her air of dignity, if not hauteur. She wrote her poems in the newsroom, on the glowing green ATEX computer screens.
     Smith left the paper, went to the Boston Globe, then left journalism, under a cloud that becomes less worth recounting with each new honor given her: last year, a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, early this year, the Library of Congress' Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. There's many more, but you get the idea. She teaches at the College of Staten Island now.
     She does get back to Chicago. She has won four National Poetry Slams, and reads at the Green Mill, whose Uptown Poetry Slam would be the pride of Chicago, if the city knew enough to take pride in the pivotal place Chicago holds in American poetry. Home to Poetry magazine, which published T.S. Eliot's first poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" when both were young, and continues to offer wonder, every month.
     I've seen Pat read at the Poetry Slam. Jaw-dropping, and it'll be interesting to compare her performance in the loud, crowded, boisterous bar to how she manages the austere glass shrine the Poetry Foundation built to itself at 61 W. Superior when she reads there at 7 p.m. Tuesday, joined by fellow poet Reginald Dwayne Betts. I'm going, and my wife, after I read her "Building Nicole's Mama," is eager to go, and you want to go too, even if you don't know it yet.
     Because as powerful as Patricia Smith's poems can be to read — and some are delivered like a slap — they really should be read aloud, preferably by the poet herself. But until then, here, try this, from the essay about her mother I quoted above:

     Chicago. Say it. Push out the three sighs, don't let such a huge wish languish. Her world, so big she didn't know its edges, suddenly not enough. She's heard the dreams out loud, the tales of where money flows, and after you arrive it takes, what, a minute? to forget that Alabama ever held sugar for you.

Operable bollards

     Some words you're proud to know.
     "Neurofibromatosis," for instance,  the medical term associated with what people think of as The Elephant Man's disease. It feels like an accomplishment just to pronounce the word, and I admit, after learning it while writing an article on facial disfigurement last year, I let it roll off my tongue a few times more than I needed to, just to savor the mastery of saying it.
      And other words are something of an embarrassment.
     "Bollard," for instance—those squat posts used to keep vehicles out of certain areas. I'm quite ashamed, actually. Maybe I just assume that nobody knows what "bollard" means, that it's too esoteric a word. Maybe it sounds somewhat naughty, like "bollocks."

Bollards

      Which is why I took a small comfort from this sign. "Operable Bollards," which must baffle some people -- it refers to those circles in the ground to the left. The bollards rise, either manually, or pneumatically, at the touch of a button in some engineer's office, to cut off the driveway to the Allen Center at Northwestern University. (It was the lower sign, "Authorized Vehicles Only," that prompted me to park my car, stupidly, and walk to the building, while other cars, either authorized or, more likely, not as cowed by signage as myself, came and went).
     I seem to recall a Wall Street Journal article, years ago, about bollards that rise out of the ground being a thing in Los Angeles, both a status symbol and a way to make certain that nobody is going to steal the Ferrari parked in your driveway. I did a bit of digging. They're also known as "retractable" or "telescoping," bollards, and will set you back about $500 if you raise and lower them manually, ten times that for automatic bollards that rise up using a mechanism. 
     The word, by the way, is not that old—an 1840s nautical term, according to the OED, referring to the posts on ships where ropes are secured. The Oxford guesses that it comes from "bole," a term for tree trunk that dates to the 1300s. 
     Now the question is, knowing "bollard," how long will it be until you're showing off to friends. "There's the store, just past those bollards." My bet is, if you read this blog, it'll be sooner than later. You can blame me.
     

Drone encounter

     Heading to the train Thursday afternoon, I noticed a white drone hovering about 15 feet above the center greenery of Wacker Drive, just south of Lake Street. A DJI Phantom drone, operated by a young man who toggled a joystick on a remote control box. 
     I shot a brief video of its flight. 
     Drones are buzzing around the public imagination, and not in a good way. Much in the news, and worrisome to people who assume they'll be peering through our windows and killing us randomly. Though as a student of the history of technology, if I know one thing, it is that every new advance is greeted as an unacceptable threat. As if we have this deep well of terror in our souls and grab out a handful to smear on every new thing that comes along. 
     Electric light, the telegraph, the telephone, TV, computers, all were the opening gong of doom.  Yet each was woven into the daily tapestry of our lives, no longer unacceptable, because each did change us, in ways great and small. What we didn't realize was, being changed, we were not the same people who fretted at their arrival. Even that most perilous of advances, nuclear energy, proved tamable in the long run, or at least didn't kill us all, as we once expected, and not without good reason.
        Right now drones are little more than expensive toys. The drone I saw costs about $1,000. I know that'll change, and soon. I can't imagine the air will someday be thick of them, hurrying on their business. But then I couldn't imagine we'd all carry cell phones either. 
      I know this. Yet every time I hear about Amazon wanting to deliver packages by drone, I still think, "Huh? How is that going to work?" A drone is going to take off from the roof of an enormous facility in Des Plaines, motor over to my place, to drop off a book?  That can't be. They still seem like their cousins, jet packs, as one of the will-0-the-wisps of the future that we pine for but never achieve. They'll be good for taking arial shots of real estate and not much else.
     Said the guy who hasn't ordered a ride on Uber yet.

     When the young man brought his drone down, I asked him what it was for. School perhaps?
     "We're doing a project right now, for something called Radpat," he said. I should have quizzed him more, but I had a train to catch, so thanked him and hurried to Union Station, assuming I'd be able to figure out what "Radpat" was. 
     All I could find is a project measuring background radiation, which makes sense, I suppose. That might be something a drone could be helpful with, though I'm not sure how. Maybe he meant "Radpad," a service for finding apartments. That could work too. 
     Anyway, Nov. 5, 2015 I saw my first drone hovering above Chicago. I figure, I might as well make a note of it, to look back on when they crowd the sky like migrating geese. 

Lake County lessons echo

     Lesson #1: The coroner takes the heat.
     That's his — or her — job.
     They not only have to examine dead bodies all day, a tough enough task, but then must share their findings, even when they contradict what powerful people wish were the truth.
     It's a lesson we've been taught before, but the jaw-dropping case of Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz reminds us again, a necessary lesson, because we keep forgetting. Nor is it the only lesson here.
     For those just tuning in: law enforcement in Lake County has been dealt a triple black eye.
     First, a corrupt cop stole money. If that weren't bad enough, he stole it from a fund set up to benefit kids, then considered murdering the official questioning his finances.
     Second, he killed himself and made it look like he was attacked by three assailants, sparking a manhunt, that briefly rounded up innocent suspects.
     Then the third, self-inflicted blow: Dr. Thomas Rudd, the Lake County coroner, examined the body, assessed the evidence, could not rule out suicide and was raked over the coals by Lake County law enforcement, loudly criticizing Rudd for "unprofessionalism." The commander of the Lake County Major Crime Task force said Rudd's findings put "the entire case at risk."
     Thank God he did.
     Before we in Chicago ride off on that high horse we've climbed up on, let's take a trip down memory lane, to 2009.
     This case should seem familiar.
     Two words: Michael Scott.
     Remember him?
     President of the Chicago School Board and pal of Mayor Richard M. Daley. He walked to the edge of the Chicago River, shot himself and tumbled in.
     The Cook County medical examiner at the time, Dr. Nancy Jones, examined the body, and said it looked like suicide, which enraged Daley, who denounced her as a publicity hound.
     "Her claim to fame, she has claim to fame — you know her name," squeaked the mayor. "That's why the Chicago Police Department has to do a thorough investigation, regardless of what the medical examiner says. They have to do a thorough investigation and come to the conclusion. He or she can say anything they want. But they have a responsibility to the family and society."
     A week later, the police department's thorough investigation said, umm, yeah, suicide.
     The mayor never apologized to Jones, and I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the Keystone cops in Lake County to apologize to Dr. Rudd.
     Apologies are overrated anyway. What we need are guidelines. We've reviewed one. This terrible case underlines two more that might help us grasp the next time this sort of thing happens, which it will:
     Lesson #2. Cops always circle the wagons. They support their own, until the last moment it can be plausibly be done and long beyond. Truth is an airy abstract of no interest. Justice is what happens when the case goes their way. Toward that end, they'll ignore the obvious, plant evidence, lie on the stand, whatever it takes to back each other up (and expend a good deal of bile lashing out at anyone rude enough to mention it; trust me here). The reason police violence is constantly in the news is because the abuses that police once casually committed and routinely covered up now can be posted online for all to see.
     Lesson #3. Nobody wants to believe a loved one committed suicide. Ever. Not without a note, and often not even then. After Scott killed himself, Chicago magazine ran an elaborate conspiracy theory explaining why he was done in by shadowy forces. This despite the fact that the Chicago police had video documenting Scott's last minutes. To the defense of grieving families, suicide seems such an negation of their love, such a rude gesture in their direction, they'll clutch at anything that suggests otherwise. And suicide can be a very rude gesture, make no mistake. Phil Pagano was the head of Metra. He knew, better than anybody, the trauma that Metra engineers suffer when people jump in front of trains. He knew that, and made eye contact with the engineer driving the train as he stepped onto the track in front of it.
     Neither of these three truths are pretty or pleasant, and the one about police is hard to take. Yes, cops can tell the truth, when convenient. But when it comes to other cops, well, let's put it this way: remember that time a Chicago cop faced the wrath of his fellow officers to expose a dirty cop? Me neither.

Inside the girls' locker room

  

   I had two columns in Wednesday's paper, which was unusual enough. I chose to post the one about Spike Lee's "Chi-raq" yesterday, and save this one, about the controversy around whether Palatine should allow transgender teens full access into their new gender's school locker rooms, for today.

     Though I have to admit, I started to get the nagging suspicion, reading my emails Wednesday, that I side too much with the school district below, and while I'm posting this today (every...goddamn...day) I'm considering taking another swing at this issue, either tomorrow or next week. Maybe I'll get it right this time. In the meantime, your thoughts are appreciated. 

     My wife and I, sitting on the 7:34 into the city Tuesday, immersed in our his-and-hers copies of the Sun-Times, both on the same page, at the same moment, reading the same article, headlined "LOCKED OUT," a story about Palatine School District 211 refusing to comply with Department of Education demands that it allow a transgender teen, transitioning from boy to girl, unrestricted use of the girls' locker room at one of the district's high schools.
     District 211 students are allowed to use locker rooms of the sex they identify with — itself perhaps a shock to those not been paying attention to the whirl of cultural change — but are required to use a curtained area to disrobe and shower. One transgendered student found this stigmatizing and sued. The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights is siding with her. The school district is standing its ground.
      "This is a case where I'm inclined to side with the school district," my wife said.
      "Maybe," I replied. "But wouldn't the same rationale keep lesbian students out of the girls' locker room?"
     No surprise that my wife and I each approached this issue from our own gender viewpoints. She assumed the concern was teenage girls being exposed to the sight of the equipment of this female-in-mind-but-not-yet-in-anatomy transgender teen. While I assumed the problem was allowing someone who is physically a boy, despite her aspirations otherwise, into the girls' locker room, where she might nevertheless ogle her classmates.
     Not the most accurate view of transgenderism, perhaps. But this is a new world we've sailed into, and we should expect a bit of blinking surprise as the new scenery clicks into place. I don't think that makes me a hater.
     It's an astounding debate to be having. If acceptance of gays has been swift, on the glacial scale used to measure progress for women and blacks, then the shift in society's view toward transgendered individuals is doubly astounding. We seem to have leapt overnight from "Boys Don't Cry" contempt to District 211 jumping through gender hoops and the feds threatening to withhold millions of dollars because it isn't high enough.
     Two conflicting interests are in seemingly irresolvable conflict here: the desire of privacy among the cisgender teens, i.e. those content with the gender biology assigned them, and transgender teens who want to be waved into every corner of the locker room with no rude attention drawn to any inconvenient anatomical features.
     "The district really has worked diligently and mindfully on serving the needs of all our students, including transgendered students," said District 211 Superintendent Daniel E. Cates, noting that the district has been scrupulous about adjusting to students' needs.
     "If a transgendered student comes to us, we don't hesitate to change their name, or change their gender within our system," he said. "Many districts are struggling even with bathroom access, which is not an issue with us, because we are able to provide some privacy."
     "Privacy" seems the key concept here. Boys-becoming-girls can use the girls' locker room, but discreetly, behind curtains provided for that purpose. The district expects "commitment from any transgender student to simply observe an individual measure of privacy," Cates said. "We believe transgender students would prefer privacy areas."
     "Wouldn't all students prefer privacy?" I replied. I know two teens — no names please — who went through four years at Glenbrook North High School without ever taking a shower, to my knowledge, a practice which, I am told, is not uncommon. Maybe the result of this delicate matter will be that, in trying to accommodate exceptional students, the long loathed, strip-down-for-your-classmates locker room routine will be banished to history, along with naked swimming and posture lessons.
     "That's exactly what we believe may come out of this," said Cates. "Measures of privacy allow developing teenagers to choose for themselves whether or not to use privacy areas ... safeguarding matters for transgender teens we believe will be helpful to students in our locker room."
     That's how it usually works out. What seems like it might be a burden done for a few ends up benefiting all. While I'm inclined toward kindness toward any teen struggling with sexual identity, their fervent desire to stride easily into the girls' locker room and be welcomed as one of the gang is still, at this cultural moment, constrained if they also possess a penis. Like it or not, society is going to teach them that lesson; they might as well learn it in high school.

What if "Chi-Raq" paints too rosy a picture?

"Slaughter of the Innocents," altarpiece detail, Philadelphia Museum of Art

     On a usual day in Chicago, the big story Tuesday would be the release of the trailer of Spike Lee's "Chi-Raq," which would seem to be the fulfillment of the worst fears of City Hall.
     It begins with flashing red letters, "THIS IS AN EMERGENCY," then a gunshot, the red stars of Chicago, dripping blood, and a voice, "Homicides in Chicago, Illinois, have surpassed the death toll of American Special Forces in Iraq."
     But whatever outrage the mayor might be tempted to indulge in should be resisted, given the facts on the ground. A 9-year-old boy gunned down Monday, perhaps deliberately. A few hours later and a few blocks away, a promising young woman murdered.
     Watching Spike Lee's trailer in the wake of that and it seems stylized, funny, wrong. A cartoony, Quentin Tarantino version of something serious as death.
     In non-movie Chicago, Kaylyn Pryor, 20, who a few weeks ago won Mario Tricoci’s 2015 "Mario, Make Me a Model" competition, was standing on a street corner in Auburn Gresham when a car pulled up, shots were fired. She was taken to Christ Advocate Medical Center and pronounced dead. That was 6:20 p.m. at 7300 S. May. Two hours earlier, six blocks west and six blocks south, Tyshawn Lee, 9, was shot in the head and back and died at the scene.
     I haven't seen the movie. That'll be released Dec. 4. And I'm not criticizing it. Maybe it takes the stark horror of crimes like the deaths of Pryor and Lee and makes them real and heartbreaking.
     But it is in rhyme, an update of "Lysistrata," a 2500-year old play about the women of Greece trying to end the Peloponnesian War by withholding sexual favors from their men until they agree to a truce and transporting it to Chicago in 2015 — well, you can't accuse Spike Lee of being derivative. The words seem right.
     "Welcome to Chi-Raq," exclaims Samuel L. Jackson. "Land of pain, misery and strife."
     The words are right. But delivered with a swagger, while wearing an orange suit. The two minutes-and-change trailer makes it seem like "Schindler's List" done as a Warner Brothers cartoon, with Bugs Bunny in the lead.
     I hope I'm wrong.
     But just as all the feel good pink ribbon breast cancer ballyhoo in October is increasingly criticized for making it seem like defeating cancer is a matter of enough positive attitude, so the implication that, even in a fantasy, the black women of Chicago's violent neighborhoods could bring this to an end if only they tried, well, there is something ugly lurking there.
     "We're going to make sure these fools put down these guns," Lysistrata says.
     Uh-huh.
     "Lysistrata" was a comedy, remember. Although it does share one sad fact with "Chi-Raq." Both productions are about wars that were still going on when they debuted. One thing is very clear, whatever the full movie turns out to be. Any embarrassment that Spike Lee's movie brings to Chicago is deserved. We should have been embarrassed by this ongoing human tragedy already, no movie necessary.

Steve Bartman: the song that never ends

     I worked on something I intended for tomorrow, but the topic was so thoroughly trivial — a change in tea box design — that I needed to marshall sufficient oomph to pull it off, and I wasn't able to, yet. Maybe a few days marination might help.
    So in lieu of something substandard or, worse missing a day (Every ... goddamn ... day!) I thought I'd post this, which was in the paper last week, and did cause a bit of a stir, drawing the range of comment, from support to those who felt that the only reason the story is in the public eye is because the media keeps bringing it up (one of those points that isn't half as clever as it seems, since most everything in the public eye is only there because the media keeps bringing it up). 
    Enough prologue. If you're missing baseball already, a parting glance at your favorite fan and mine, Steve Bartman. 

     Nothing tumbles into oblivion quite like baseball immediately after a team is eliminated from the playoffs.
     Straight from full-throated, spotlit frenzy to a dim chorus of crickets.
     Chicago was festooned with blue banners, the media thundering every angle; every 80-year-old coot who kept his ticket stub from the 1945 World Series was paraded blinking into the glare.
     Easy for me to keep quiet, then. But now, with the city settling down, there is a piece of unfinished business.
     Steve Bartman. The one guy the media really wanted in its clutches. Another season of the epic silence maintained — for those lucky few in blissful ignorance — since the eighth inning of game 6 of the 2003 National League Championship series, with the Cubs up 3-0 over the Marlins, when Bartman, tried to catch a foul ball and perhaps, maybe, kept Moises Alou from doing so. The Cubs folded, as they tend to. Bartman had to be escorted from Wrigley Field by security while fans pelted him with trash.
     He issued an apology the next day, and since then has kept mum.
     Bartman had nothing to apologize for. It would not have been the final out. The Cubs blew it all on their own.
     If Bartman had truly intruded upon the play, the umpire should have ruled spectator interference and called the batter out. Yet nobody blames the umpire. The public doesn't even know his name.
     We all know Bartman's name, which is the problem, and this would have melted away long ago had Bartman done what most people do — babble into any convenient microphone. Instead, Bartman refuses comment.
     Noble, perhaps. But also a red cape waved before the foaming bull of the media which, like nature, hates a vacuum.
     I'm writing about this now because I assume the young, talented Cubs team will be in contention again next year, the media will grab its harpoon and set out once again in pursuit of Bartman.
     Maybe, in the quiet of the post-season lull, a seed of sense can be planted.
     What could Bartman possibly say that would reward the media for its dozen-year quest? He could have lived the existence of Job, squatting in dust at the gates of the city, and express it with the eloquence of Joseph Conrad describing Lord Jim's wanderings around the South Seas, trying to escape his shame, and frankly it would still be inadequate. Silence is his best option.
     It is also his right. The way Bartman is being treated is a category error. He's being presented as a kind of baseball goat — an ESPN film in 2011 compared him to Bill Buckner. But Bartman is not a player who muffed a play. He's a fan, or was, before all this started. He's allowed to grab any fly ball that comes within reach. Yes, he might have pulled back. And Moises Alou might have sprouted wings and flown. Both are violations of human nature.
     Bartman should instead be included in that realm of anonymous individuals who are pushed unwillingly into publicity, along with modest heroes and crime victims. We have civil rights in this country, and hounding innocents is un-American.
      His silence has a kind of nobility though, as with noble acts, there is a cost. By not talking, he inadvertently keeps the thing alive. Were I his PR adviser, I'd say spend an hour with Carol Marin and be done with it. As long as he maintains his silence, he'll have ESPN reporters leaping from the bushes. The only way to end it is to feed the beast.
     I thought I would float this past his camp, so phoned his spokesman, lawyer Frank Murtha.
     Why doesn't this ever go away?
     "It somewhat baffles me," he said. "If I thought we'd still be talking about it 12 years later..."

     Instead the story resonates, and not just in sports media.
     "The thing most disturbing in this cycle is The Onion," Murtha said. "That's just outrageous."
     The satiric web site ran a bit where Bartman pleads to be killed in order to lift the Cubs curse. In this post-Charlie Hebdo period, you can see how this might worry Bartman.
     "What are the boundaries of satire?" Murtha asked. "Given the world we live in, people do horrendous acts. We still have some security concerns. We've had actual calls, to his place of employment."
     So for the record. ...
     "Steve won’t be interviewing with anybody about it," Murtha said. "When and if he chooses to speak or comment about it, it will be at a time and place and medium of his choosing. Not to say that time will ever happen."
     I hope he does, simply to make this go away. Because otherwise, it will never end.