Chi-Raq: "Tomfoolery"

     Spike Lee's new movie "Chi-Raq" opened nationwide Friday, and while I planned on seeing it eventually—you kinda have to, given its theme of gang violence in Chicago—it was the sort of obligatory, I better-go-to-the-doctor-and-get-that-checked duty I might have put off for a while, if not forever, had not Ald. Joe Moore (49th) held a community forum to show the film Thursday, and invited Washington Post Syndicate columnist Esther J. Cepeda, who invited me. 
     It seemed an opportunity.
     As a fan of the classics, I admired Lee's bold decision to take Aristophones' 5th century BC Greek comedy "Lysistrata," about a sex strike trying to end the Peloponnesian war, and translate it to 2015 Chicago. A daring conceit that worked, complete with its rhyming dialogue and serpentine narrator, Samuel L. Jackson, dressed in candy-colored suits and carrying a cane like Baron Samdi, the voodoo spirit of death.
     It worked for about the first 20 minutes, that is. Truly, I began to suspect I was witnessing some kind of masterpiece, from the opening song, "Pray 4 the City," to Father Michael Pfleger's stern voice-over to the scene of a rap concert erupting into violence at a club. The movie is raw, funny, and strange. Teyona Parris, a statuesque goddess straight from the Pam Grier school of acting. She strides with far more authority than she delivers her lines. She's Lysistra, in love with Demtrius "Chi-Raq"  Dupree, a heavily-tattooed Nick Cannon, and their initial roll in the hay gets interrupted by a fire set by Cyclops, the head of the rival gang, the Trojans, played for laughs with eyepatches matching his outfits by Wesley Snipes. 
      Just to remind viewers that there's something tragic at the heart of this, Jennifer Hudson is Irene, the mother of a young girl cut down in gang crossfire. Hudson is the best thing in the film, obviously there in an attempt to prove that Lee isn't just having fun with the tragedy of others. In one scene Hudson tries to wash her daughter's blood off the street, ending up only spreading it further and further, in a widening circle, which is how violence goes.
     If only the rest of the movie were like that. But it isn't. The trouble with "Chi-Raq" is that it chews on its one great idea, and never offers another. The movie doesn't go anywhere from there, just grinds through the sex strike with a variety of set pieces and gags. "This is the longest movie I've ever seen in my life," I whispered to my companion, who was already checking her emails. "This is longer than Dr. Zivago." (It clocks at a couple minutes under two hours, in real time, but watching it felt like sitting through "Tristan und Isolde.")

    I wouldn't have guessed that it was possible to make sex, or lack of it, and violence so boring, but Spike Lee manages it. At times the movie is so poorly made I had trouble figuring out what's going on. Lysistrata, taking a page from John Brown, apparently, leads her chaste women to seize the Illinois National Guard Armory, after a ludicrous encounter with a white general in Confederate flag underpants that I guess was supposed to show how we white folk are really all closet racists.  The Armory scenes go on and on, her Valkyries snapping their fingers and repeating vows of chastity, the cops — their chief played with set-jaw brio by peerless Chicago artist Tony Fitzpatrick -- surrounding the place. I do give credit to Lee for repaying Rahm Emanuel's cack-handed attempts to water down the film's title with D.B.Sweeney's spot-on parody of the mayor's high pitched, stressed-out whine, although by that point things had become too surreal to carry any kind of satiric punch. If Rahm sees it — he has a way of ducking things you'd expect him to have seen—he'll probably just giggle and think: Cool, I'm parodied in a Spike Lee film.
     The final reconciliation scene, where the white-clad principles sign some kind of peace pact and then are promised new trauma centers that they wouldn't need if the shooting were going to stop , well, let's say that I wondered if a bunch of Ewoks were going to show up and burst into a joyous dance of celebration. It's just stupid.
     The community leaders that Ald. Moore gamely assembled to comment after the film were equally unimpressed.  
     "My mother once told me, if you don't have something good to say about something, don't say anything at all," began Charles Hardwick, tactfully. A former gangbanger with 14 years in prison, now director of the Howard Area Resource Center, working to help felons integrate back into society, Hardwick compressed the film into one word: "Tomfoolery."
     That's perfect. It's too trivial a film to get too overwrought about. It's like decrying "Cleopatra Jones" in the early 1970s. There are bigger fish to fry.
     "Hollywood did what it's supposed to do," Hardwick said (I'm not sure if Hollywood is supposed to turn out crap. It just does). 
     Hardwick offered a clearer view on the causes of violence than the film does, talking about how children are abused and neglected, then pass it on. "All your life, the one discipline you ever know is violence from your parents," he said. (The only child in "Chi-Raq" is Patti, dead and under a sheet, her bow visible). But then Hardwick lost the thread, along with several others, slipped seamlessly into vague references to plots behind all the problems of the urban poor: guns, violence, drugs and gangs. 
      "There's some people believe there's a conspiracy," he said. 
      At least he didn't blame AIDS on Jewish doctors, at least not at Ald. Moore's forum. The remarks—he wasn't alone in the observation—reminded me of Gore Vidal's deathless line about the rich: "They don't have to conspire because they all think alike." Perhaps the poor do too. There's no need for shady outside forces to impose these woes; folks lap 'em up, unaided. I would call "Chi-Raq" a noble failure, but there really isn't much noble about it.  The flick gives off a distinct reek of Quentin Tarantino homage. A mess of unerotic sex and cartoony violence that, for all Lee's stabs at its significance, is still too unreal, too prettied up far too much, despite Jennifer Hudson's bravura attempts to put a human face on the whole garish spectacle. 
     Oh, and John Cusack is in it, playing a Hollywood version of Father Pfleger. Cusack is slack-faced and raspy and radiates the tightly-wound, glum indignation that Pfleger sinks into more and more as the years go by. But Cusack is only a shadow of the real thing and his scenes just lay there, wheezing.  Which I suppose could be said for the film as a whole. To be charitable, I imagine being stuck in a life of senseless violence and endless drug use quickly become dull too, and in that sense "Chi-Raq" reflects that reality by being tedious for the last two-thirds of the movie. Which would be a kind of genius if Lee intended it to be that way. But my guess is he didn't. 


      
    
     

How do you do it?

     Jim Kokoris is not a literary genius. His writing does not crackle. His characters are not clockworks of complexity; his plots do not pinball from Venice to Venezuela. They tend to stick around suburban Chicago, although his new novel manages a drive east across the country.
     In short, Kokoris writes as if he were a career public relations man who lives in LaGrange, which he is. One who, through hard work, talent and luck managed to do what many PR guys dream of and never do: carve out a career as a novelist.
     His four novels are stacked on my desk. Grab one — "Sister North" — and flip it open to a random page. 114.

"We still have customers," Leo said. Meg glanced up at Sam."I'm leaving," he said. He finished his beer in two swallows, as if he had somewhere to rush off to, as if he had some home to protect, kids to pick up.

     Simple, direct, with a family lurking problematically nearby. That's Kokoris' oeuvre. Reading him, I can't decide if his writing is simple as in Hemingway or simple as in "Open can. Heat soup." But I lean toward the former. Even those few, random sentences draw you in, don't they? Where's Sam going in such a hurry?

   His latest novel, "It's. Nice. Outside.," published next week by St. Martin's Press, revolves around John Nichols, a 50-something novelist with a severely autistic 19-year-old son, Ethan. Kokoris crafting this story was not a bravura feat of imagination on par with, say, Frank Herbert conjuring up "Dune:" Kokoris is also a 50-something novelist who has a severely autistic 19-year-old son, Andrew.
     "He is the Ethan character," Kokoris said. "Everything else is pretty made up, I'd say half of John Nichols is me, in terms of personality."
     In the book, Nichols has his older daughter's wedding to attend, and decides to drive with Ethan, despite his need for continual potty breaks and tendency to dissolve into embarrassing public meltdowns. His hidden goal is to take Ethan to a group home in Maine afterward, and either introduce him to an exciting new phase in his life or dump him with strangers.
     "It's. Nice. Outside." is a book that you can't stop reading, even though at times you might want to. If you've ever spied a harried father shepherding an adult child with exceptional needs, or whatever the current euphemism, and wondered what that man's life might be like, this book will tell you. Though Kokoris suggests this is the sanitized version.
     "I didn't want to make such a downer book," he said. "At the end of the day, I'm a humorist, and needed to make people laugh. I wanted this not to be a depressing book."
     The book isn't depressing. It's riveting, a journey with a family broken in several places — the constant demands of Ethan, absorbing the attention his sisters could have used. Nichols' failed marriage. The wedding itself which — well, better not give too much away.
     The book seesaws on an issue all too real for parents like Kokoris.
     "It's not necessarily a book with a cause, but I do worry what's going to happen when we're not around anymore," he said. "Where are these people going to go when they age out of the system and when their parents die? That's my biggest fear now."
     How do you do it?
     "I ask myself that every day," he said. "It definitely gets easier. You just accept. The terrible first year. [You say] 'This can't be happening to me.'"
     But you adapt.
     "You know how to navigate the minefield, 'We can't really do this, but we can do that.' You just minimize the bad times. It does get easier.
     "Many times, it's pleasant too, good days and bad days. Good days you enjoy and bad days you try to get through. Let's put it this way: You will go home to a very different house than I will."
     I wrote a column on Kokoris in 2001, after his first book. How is the transition from first-time novelist to seasoned pro?
    "I was pinching myself back then, it was like a dream," he said. "I had the movie deal"— two of his novels have been optioned by Hollywood, but neither has been produced. "That was a lot of excitement. But after 14 years you kind of know the drill, I temper my hopes now. I'm very, very lucky just to be published. Still, you always hope for the best, to find your happiness."

Jim Kokoris will read from and sign "It's. Nice. Outside." Dec. 4 at Anderson's Bookshop in LaGrange and Dec. 8 at the Book Stall in Winnetka.

Who cares why they do it?

    Who cares why they do it?
    Why does the motive matter? 
    Another day, another mass shooting — this one in San Bernardino, California. We only have two questions now: how many dead? And why did the killers do it? 
     The answers can't matter to the victims, of course. Or their families. If your son or mother or wife or brother is gunned down in a public place, do you care, particularly if they were a lone victim, or one of a 100, or whether shot by someone for the greater glory of Allah, or because someone imagines fetuses are the Gerber baby, or because a guy's dog told him to kill people? It can't matter, all that much.
     So is it just idle curiosity? Something to think about a bit more abstract than the gross specificity of carnage?
     Maybe we care because the cops care. It is something for them to find out, to investigate. Keeps them busy, gives the appearance of activity. Guilt is typically sitting right there in plain sight. Seldom a big mystery to these shootings. But there are valid questions. Is this part of a conspiracy? Are there others?
    And the public cares. Why? My gut tells me it's because we have rhetorical slots to fill. The Planned Parenthood killings—Friday's mass shooting—seem to have been done by a guy upset about that Planned Parenthood video. As well as someone a few bricks shy of a load. That first explanation suits political purposes, as another example of why the superheated rhetoric of the Right is unacceptable. It's part of a pattern of violence that Republican leaders at least tacitly encourage. I see that. Words have consequences, sometimes.
    Wednesday's slaughter in San Bernardino was conducted by Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik—Muslims, so that's fresh meat for those who hate Muslims anyway, who want to bar refugees. Though it might have been just a well-planned workplace rampage. Someone on Twitter asked, When is a crime defined as terrorism? and I almost answered "When a Muslim does it." But that seemed too glib for the circumstances. Though there is truth there too. If there's a pattern of responsibility behind the Planned Parenthood killings, there has to be some responsibility here as well. I know I always stress that the vast majority of Muslim people have nothing to do with these atrocities, because that is the most important thing to keep in mind, lest the public begin taking its cue from ISIS. But if there is a vigorous campaign within Islam to tamp down such violence, to stress how wrong this violence is to the devout and undercut it happening in the future beyond canned condemnations, well, let's say they're hiding it. We've seen the outrage a cartoon can unleash. When does this carnage evoke anything close?
    To be honest, after this latest rampage, I'm beginning to suspect that motive doesn't matter. We can conduct our political Punch & Judy without dipping our fingers in the fresh blood of others to illustrate our point. The only thing that's significant is that this  is another random gun killing. And for a ray of hope, you hear politicians—the president, Sen. Dick Durbin—talking about the need for gun violence legislation. I first heard the phrase, "gun violence legislation," and smiled and thought, "ooh, good word. "Gun violence." Good use of rhetorical jujitsu. Cause we can't control guns. But gun violence? That's a different matter.  I'm being semi-sincere. It's about time the Democrats got themselves out of their intellectual rut on this issue, gathered up the broken pieces of their courage, and started to do something about this.

What's it like to be a novelist?

     Jim Kokoris' new novel is published next week, and I had hoped today to have in the paper a column looking at the intriguing issues it brings up. But the news has a funny way of pushing the interesting stuff to the back burner. So Kokoris' fourth novel, "It's. Nice. Outside."  will have to wait, just because the superintendent of police got fired. I suppose I could post it here, but the paper gets much better play, and I'm still hoping to get it in Friday. To prepare for that, and since many readers won't be familiar with him, this is the column I wrote about Jim when he published his first novel, 14 years ago. 

Jim Kokoris

     `Novelist," said Jim Kokoris, rolling the word over his tongue, as he sat at the big wooden horseshoe bar at Andy's. "I still definitely feel uncomfortable calling myself that. People introduce me as a `novelist' and I think, `I've only written one.' " Which is one more than most people ever write. Still, at 43, it's hard to think of yourself in a new light. Kokoris' novel-writing dream, like most dreams, was on hold for years. He is, by profession, a publicist. He travels the country for Jim Beam bourbon. That's how I met him. When he said he had written a novel, my first reaction was to cringe. Reading the novels of chance acquaintances is not typically pleasant.
     I don't read novels much. They seem false. Their characters all have names like Zack Kinkaid and Blossom Roadapple and by a page or two, if not in the first sentence, something staggeringly untrue happens. I opened the book gingerly, as if expecting a rubber snake to pop out.
     The first sentence of Kokoris' novel, The Rich Part of Life, set off a warning bell: "The day we won the lottery I was wearing wax lips that my father had bought for the Nose Picker and me at a truck stop."
     Winning the lottery has grown into a literary cliche on par with, "And then I rolled over and it was all a dream."
     I might have given up right there, but as I said, I knew Kokoris. He lives in La Grange Park. He had handed me the book asking if I had any suggestions how he could better shove it under the snouts of an indifferent public. I smiled sadly at this request, itself a sign of naivete. When it comes to publishing, I have lately begun thinking of myself as Ugarte, the greasy Peter Lorre character in "Casablanca" (In case you don't recall, Victor Laslow comes into Rick's Cafe looking for help from Ugarte, who has just been dragged away by the police. "Ugarte cannot even help himself," says a barfly, bitterly).
     I tried to explain this to Kokoris, but it failed to put him off—you don't get a book published by folding up at rejection. So we met for lunch a few months ago, I fed him some platitudes, and he handed over an advance copy of the book.
     I soldiered past the lottery win—a worrisome $190 million. The book is told in first person, the narrator 11-year-old Teddy Pappas. As I read, my concern and hesitation were replaced by interest and enthusiasm. Kokoris does something very clever. Just as the white whale hardly appears in Moby Dick, and then only at the very end, after we have met Ishmael and Ahab and Queequeg and all these wonderful characters, so the $190 million that sets The Rich Part of Life in motion remains distant, over the horizon, as we meet Teddy and his very real, very touching family, his little brother Tommy (nicknamed whatever disgusting habit he has at the moment); bookish, balding Civil War scholar father, and a variety of other oddball relatives and nosy neighbors who show up sniffing after the windfall.
     After I finished I handed the book over to my wife, to see if perhaps my judgment was blurred. She loved it, too.
     Kokoris began the book four years ago, when the dread 40 was staring him in the face.
     "I always wanted to write," he said. "I felt if I didn't get it done this time, it would be tough to do as a 45-year-old."
     Curiosity drove me to ask Kokoris to get together again for more conversation and bourbon. So many, myself included, dream of writing a novel. He did it. What's it feel like?
     "It really hasn't sunk in," he said. "There are moments when that weird thing hits you."
     Such a moment happened recently at the book expo at McCormick Place. Kokoris was scheduled to do a reading of his novel. He took his book, stepped up to the microphone, and surveyed the expectant crowd.
     "I had to step away from the microphone and gather myself," he said. "I was with these big-time writers. What was I doing there?"
     Perhaps the biggest surprise was that its publication date did not throw the world into rosy hues. The heavens did not crack.
     "I definitely had the notion that on May 1 my life would change," he said. "Instead the whole thing is ups and downs, good moments and bad moments. I'll go into one bookstore, and it will be prominently displayed. Then I'll go into another and they'll have to get the ladder out. On the whole it's life as usual."
     Even sale of the book to the movies—Columbia Pictures bought it—has not caused Kokoris to quit his job or buy a bunch of black clothing. He seems to be taking the proper approach, unconcerned how the director—James Mangold, of "Girl, Interrupted" fame—might mangle his story.
     "He paid good money, so he can do what he wants," said Kokoris.
     Before we left, I handed him my copy of The Rich Part of Life to sign. He took a pen, and then botched up the title page.
     "I've ruined more books . . ." he said, trying to fix the inscription. "I always cramp up. It was easier to write the book than to sign it."
     He offered to go run to the trunk of his car and get a fresh copy, but I declined. I like it fine the way it is. It isn't long, the period in an author's life when he nervously defaces his own books. Sophistication sets in. Kokoris is working now on his second novel. I can hardly wait.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 1, 2001

The train of troubles still rolling

     The Belgian National Railroad did a safety study, the old joke goes, and discovered that most accidents involve the last car on the train.
     So they got rid of the caboose.
     That isn't a very funny joke, but it is an apt one, in light of Tuesday's surprise firing of Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy. You have an understaffed, overstretched police department charged with keeping the peace in the most segregated city in the United States, in a city whose murder rate is three times that of New York City, an ossified department that has proved maddeningly resistant to reform, whose officers — surprise, surprise — reflect all the fears and prejudices found in the society as a whole, and then some. When they screw up, as humans do, they go into their duck-and-cover act, forgetting that everyone has a video camera in their phone, and they're videotaping themselves in the bargain, so lying your way through a crisis just doesn't work the way it used to.

Garry McCarthy

   Solution? Put a new boss on top of that!
     Anyone think that replacing McCarthy with someone new will make anything better? Beyond making life better for McCarthy, that is, who now gets to lope off into the sunset to go lick his wounds as police chief of Rancho Mirage or some such garden spot, somewhere he doesn't have to listen to Rahm Emanuel scream at him twice a day. And the mayor gets to present firing McCarthy as the kind of dynamic action he likes to cite as evidence of his own endless chain of success, even though nothing at all is working for him lately, and the myth is definitely toast.
     Firing McCarthy doesn't solve any of Chicago's problems. In fact, it creates three more:
     Problem One: who replaces him? Someone from within the force who, weaned on the you've-got-my-back-I've-got-yours buddyism that is the air of the Chicago Police Department, knows how things work and could change them were he inclined to. But he wouldn't be; that's how he lasted so long in the first place. Anyone who has risen high enough within the CPD to be on the short list for superintendent should be excluded from consideration.
     Bring in an outsider, however, and the rank and file immediately hate him, on general principles, for being an outsider and suggesting that any young cop who arrives with a gun and dream can't grow up to be superintendent. They'll resist with all their might whatever Supt. Not-From-Here tries to do even more than they'd resist someone from within trying the same thing, not that someone from within would do anything beyond symbolic chair shuffling.
     That's Problem One. Problem Two: how Rahm Emanuel, whose reputation was built on his invincibility, weathers this latest humiliation and keeps from sinking into Early Onset Lame Duckism. Bad enough he was forced into a run-off with Chuy Garcia, a man who at times seemed challenged to fog a mirror. Now revivified by the smell of the mayor's blood, Garcia has reared up from his political grave to claw at the mayor. It's going to be a long three years for Emanuel. And us.
     Problem Three is the real problem, underlying all this. It isn't McCarthy's fault, or Emanuel's fault or even Anita Alvarez's fault, which is really saying something, because everything is her fault. That problem is: how do we fix the grotesque undervaluing of human life that is behind the Laquan McDonald atrocity? It's as if even the public doesn't want to notice. It wasn't the 16 shots, horrible as that was, that was the most horrible part of the video. It was the cops letting the teenager lie dying in the street, unaided, uncomforted, almost unnoticed. As if he were a dog. How do we fix that? Cameras might cow cops into grudgingly doing their jobs better, although Jason Van Dyke certainly wasn't inspired to excellence. Besides, cameras break. We need a police force that knows the people they're policing, the dreaded community policing that was tried and abandoned because it costs money and officers we don't have.
     The $5 million given to McDonald's family is viewed only as hush money. Anybody noticed another awful injustice: the same family that left him a ward of the state after two abuse investigations ​gets a giant payday at his death? You could hire a lot of cops for $5 million. And those cops could get to better know the people they're policing. And then they will be less inclined to shoot them.

Why the protests will do nothing

City Hall, Philadelphia

     Don't get me wrong. I'm no fan of Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez or Mayor Rahm Emanuel. They all could quit today and I wouldn't miss any of them. Especially Rahm Emanuel. He failed to deliver the goods, and failure made him even more charmless than he was when he arrived, which is really sayin' something.
      But the protesters demanding they resign, or be indicted, or whatever, are missing the point. These three don't run the show; they just pawns too, really. They step down, and three new ones step in, and what has really changed? "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
      The protestors saying that it is the whole system is corrupt are closer to the mark, but even they have too narrow a focus. 
      The thing is ...
      Let's put it like this.
      Everyone seemed to focus on the 16 shots Officer Jason Van Dyke pumped into Laquan McDonald. And why not? Awful to see—the vast majority of the shots first while the teen was already on the ground. Sixteen. A lot of bullets. Hard to imagine squeezing those off.  Bang bang bang. Bang bang bang bang bang. Bang. Bang. Bang... There's more, but you get the idea. Can't blame a hair trigger on that.
      And as awful and inexplicable as the act is, there is an even more awful part that comes later, something that is, I would argue, both even worse, and more inexplicable.       
      After McDonald is shot, another officer steps into the frame and kicks the teen's little knife away. Just in case the dying McDonald decides to hop up and use it. McDonald of course just lies there. None of the police officers try to help McDonald, or comfort him, or talk to him.
     As if he weren't a human being, dying there in front of them. 
     Which is the true problem. 
     Think about it. You're police officers. A 17-year-old boy is dying in the street in front of you. A teen that one of your brethren shot. They all knew it was an unjustified shooting. They saw it happen. But still, none of them so much as laid a sympathetic hand on the kid, dying, in front of him.
     As if he weren't a person.
     Bingo. The core of the problem, one that no lopping of leaders, no amount of arm-linking in front of Michigan Avenue stores, will remedy. I could say that Van Dyke didn't view McDonald as a human being when he pumped 16 shots needlessly into him, but that unfairly puts the burden on Van Dyke's shoulders. The undervaluation of black lives goes back to the foundation of the this country; it's what slavery was based on, what Jim Crow lasted for a century because of, and whose after effects are so obvious in Chicago every single day. Blacks aren't seen as human by whites. Not really. Not all whites, of course. There are exceptions. But enough.
     Do I overstate the case? I don't think so.
     In their defense, whites do not have a monopoly on the practice. The undervaluing of human lives, the viewing people, not as individuals, but as fungible units of a certain group, is not an exclusive white sin, or a black one, but an affliction plaguing all people in all times, one that drives much of the sorrow and wrong of the world. Blacks certainly do it too. The idiot at University of Illinois who posted his brief threat that shut down the University of Chicago was succumbing to it when, upset about McDonald, he raged against whites he had never met online, destroying his own young life, or at least seriously sidetracking it. Imagine his next job interview, assuming he doesn't go to prison. Another future snuffed out by not holding others in the esteem they deserve, that all people deserve, at least until they demonstrate that they don't. 
    That's why I resist the excitement of the protests, the momentary thrill and romance. I narrow my eyes and think, "Toward what end?" They might as well be protesting gravity. What power can grant them their wish? They think every march is Selma, but if you look at the issue in Dr. King's time—the signs at his Sanitation workers strike said "I am a man"—and now, well, they're still protesting to assert the exact same thing. We believe there has been some progress, and maybe there has. But that could just be another illusion.
    When we all succumb to lumping people together, to a greater or lesser degree. I just did it now, in the previous sentence, and it feels so natural we hardly notice we're doing it. The problem can't be fixed, big picture, but only addressed small picture. Society cannot change us, we have to change society. Try not to generalize so much; try to see each person as the individual  he or she certainly is. It's not much of a solution, and not easy, which is why nobody demands it. But it's the only solution that can work, eventually; I don't see another. 

Celestial Seasonings evicts Sleepytime bear

     "He's drunk!" my wife exclaimed, as we paused in the grocery's tea aisle to gaze in horror at the damage Celestial Seasonings has done to the packages of its popular herbal teas. "The bear's passed out, slumped against the jar of honey he's been guzzling."
      Brand extension has hit Celestial Seasonings.  The once-gently cluttered, brightly colored boxes are now awash in white space. On the shelf was one last familiar green box of "Sleepytime" tea, which I've been gulping after dinner for decades, and I pulled it over for comparison. There, the bear sat in his green chair, safe indoors, dozing before a crackling fire. A cat dozed too, a curved blue radio played, no doubt soft music.
    All gone. The bear is sleeping outside, a hobo bear.  He has been evicted, kicked out into the street, his chair and table too, set out on the curb, under the moon and stars.
    You can compare for yourself:

     I see why they did it. The new boxes are less cluttered, the word "Sleepytime" and the bear bigger, shorn of extraneous imagery. It is now "Classic Sleepytime" to differentiate from all the other brand extensions,  vanilla (bleh) and peach (double bleh) and honey (for those too busy to dip a spoon in actual honey and put it in the damn tea ourselves). 
    Celestial Seasonings must have known people would be dubious, because  "Fresh New Look" is flagged in red on the upper left of the box to tip you off that you aren't hallucinating, and aren't buying little paper baglets of chemicals, but the same blend of chamomile and spearmint, lemongrass and tilia flowers, blackberry leaves and orange blossoms that made up the herbal tea (but no actual tea, as my family learned when we toured the Celestial Seasonings plant in Boulder, for the simple reason there isn't any tea in it). 
    Except if you buy "Sleepytime Extra," which contains Valerian root, a folk sedative. A glimpse online shows all sorts of even more rococo Sleepytime permutations: Sleepytime Echniacea Complete Care and Sleepytime Decaf Berry Pomegranate and Sleepytime Sinus Soother. I suppose Sleepytime Bourbon is next. That's the idea behind brand extension: try to use a name you love to leverage you into buying something you don't want, plus a ploy to block out more shelf space at supermarkets.
      Sighing, we stocked up on a few of the old boxes. I floated the idea of keeping them, and just refilling from the new, blanker boxes.
     "That seems like work," my wife said, dubiously.
      Or tins, I persisted. I seem to remember Sleepytime tins. I could root around online....
      Or maybe, I realized grimly, it is time to look for a new evening tea.  To be honest, the spell is broken. I buy cans of expensive loose Twinings Earl Grey tea and not some cheaper Earl Grey because I'm confident that the stuff is what I've always been drinking, and if they dubbed it EG Classic and made the box neon blue, to not be confused with EG Proustian Lime and EG Morning Blast or whatever, I would be off put. Tea is a comfort beverage—you don't amp yourself up on tea and then hit the town—and a comfort beverage should be comforting.
     Maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm not a typical consumer. I have a certain loyalty -- Heinz ketchup not Hunts, Ritz crackers, not whatever pale rip-off imitation the store is trying to fob off on you.  It's fine to shake it up, sell Ritz's in odd holiday shapes. As long as the old standby is still readily available.
    Brand extensions must work on others, because companies push them enough. One aisle over from the revolution in tealand, I looked for Wheat Chex. When I was growing up, Chex came in three varieties: Wheat, Corn and Rice, the wheat in smaller boxes, because it is denser, more concentrated than Rice or Corn. But eventually I stopped buying the latter two because they just aren't as good. I almost never eat breakfast cereal: it's really fattening and leaves you hungry. And a generous bowl of Wheat Chex and skim milk tops out at about 500 calories, more than a jumbo donut. But still...sometimes you've just gotta have it.
    As I gazed over the profusion of Chexes (that sounds wrong; "Chex" must be both singular and plural, like "fish") I realized, to my horror, that they had chocolate and vanilla, cinnamon and clusters, even something called "Honey Nut." Everything but Wheat.

     Maybe that's what goes in the empty space on the lower shelf.
      Yes, I realize the carnival of indignity that is aging,  that the world is not skewed in your direction anymore and the stuff you care about is revealed as irrelevant idiocy. To marketers, we 55 and older might as well be dead, except for a nether world of adult undergarments and denture creams and such. Companies have to evolve to stay in business.  Someday there will be Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime Pot Brew and 30 other sub-varieties and I'll point out that it used to be just one, plain old Sleepytime tea, to my grandchildren who will shrug. "Whatever gramps," they'll say, not even looking up from their electronic devices, taking all their nutrition in the form of a thick beige liquid sucked from a catheter tube. 
      These changes are a double minor shock: first you feel bad that they happened, then you feel even worse for feeling bad they happened, for being that small and nostalgic a person. And for me, I guess, a triple shock, because I also feel bad that I bothered to tell you about it. To be frank, I'm sorry I brought it up.


     Editor's note: Six months after this post, Celestial Seasonings announced it was returning to the old box. While I would never be so brash as to suggest those two events are somehow connected, cause and effect, I like to think I was part of the chorus of complaint that prompted the company to reverse its folly.