"For a piece of bread you can hear God sing"

Tony Fitzpatrick at the DePaul Art Museum

     Birds do not loiter. They dart and dive, swoop and soar. Occasionally, they'll pause at a spot, and if you're lucky, you can steal a glance, close-up.
     I was lucky Wednesday, crossing a bridge in Northbrook; a flash of red caught my eye. I looked up and got a good three second's study of a scarlet tanager lingering on a branch, right in front of my nose.
     Wow.  

     Is it me, or are there more birds around Chicago this spring?
     "We've had a solid month of rainy weather, and that's not ideal for birds," said James Steffen, ecologist at the Chicago Botanic Garden.
     "Some springs are better than others, but it's been pretty typical," said Josh Engel, a research assistant at the Field Museum. "I wouldn't say it's different."
     Okay, it's me.
     “Maybe you have more free time,” suggested Jo Fessett, of the Illinois Audubon Society.
     It’s true that I’ve been in a birdish mood since I was lucky Tuesday to have Tony Fitzpatrick invite me to walk through “The Secret Birds” before the show opened Thursday night at the DePaul Art Museum. It’s the largest exhibit of the Chicago artist’s work to date, focusing on his distinctive drawings/collages of birds.

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Design just has to work

     Certain things are so iconic, so ubiquitous that it's odd to think that someone designed them, and they have an official name, like this classic of industrial seating, the GF 40/4 Chair, designed by David Rowland, who spent eight years, from 1956 to 1964, perfecting it.
    I noticed the chair last week at the Art Institute of Chicago in, appropriately enough, an exhibit on the influence of architects on chairs (and some people think the Van Gogh bedrooms are the most exciting thing going on there now!)  The "GF" in its name is for "General Fireproofing," the Youngstown, Ohio company that made a variety of iconic office furniture: swivel desk chairs, metal bookshelves, generic office desks. The "40/4" part of its name is because 40 chairs can be stacked four feet high. It was shunned by "skeptical manufacturers," according to the exhibit, who didn't believe the wiry chair could support human weight and stand up to hard use. Until Skidmore, Owings and Merrill ordered 17,000 for the new University of Illinois at Chicago campus in 1964, and General Fireproofing happily took the job. Millions more of the chairs have been made since then, though I would bet many of those original  U of I chairs are still in service. A reminder that design doesn't have to be beautiful; it just has to work, in order to endure.

When did Saudi Arabia become more progressive than the U.S.?

 

Giant Coal Lump, Jim Thorpe, PA.

   Saudi Arabia, despite great wealth, is one of the most socially backward countries in the world. Women can't drive, or open a bank account without permission of a male relative. They only got the right to vote, in municipal elections, in 2015, a year that saw Saudi Arabia conduct 151 beheadings.
     Despite being mired in the 12th century, Saudi Arabia still manages to be forward looking when it comes to important business matters.
     Such as oil. Oil is what brought Saudi Arabia from being a sandy nowhere of nomadic tribes to a wealthy global power. So it might be surprising, to those paying attention, to see a dramatic shift this week. I will spare you which ministers are ousted and which are in, and give you the first three paragraphs a May 10 story on Gulf News Saudi Arabia headlined, "Shake Up Moves Saudi Arabia Down New Path":

     RIYADH: In a series of sweeping royal decrees on Saturday, King Salman of Saudi Arabia replaced a number of top ministers and restructured government bodies in the first moves of an ambitious plan to chart a new direction for the kingdom.      The decrees were among the first concrete steps in the plan, which was announced late last month to great domestic fanfare by the king’s son and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is about 30, oversees economic policy and runs the Defence Ministry....

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Just another gravel barge....

    Expectations mold perception.
    What you think you're going to see colors what you think you saw.
    This can't be emphasized enough, since most people never get beyond using their current beliefs, not only as a screen to mask out information that doesn't agree with those beliefs, but as a filter to distort what they're seeing. You can't convince them otherwise because they don't allow themselves to process contradictory information. They can't even perceive it's there.
     I'm no different, as illustrated by this momentary exchange on the Madison Street Bridge a couple weeks ago.
    A long gravel barge was moving up the river. I've often seen these barges, loaded with gravel, heading to points elsewhere. Something about it — the lookout on the bow maybe — made me whip out my phone to take a picture of the gravel barge going by.  My wife observed that it was probably destined for Oak Street Beach.
    "The gravel?"I said, as we started to walk.
    "No, the sand," my wife said. "It's a barge full of sand."
    "No, it's...." I began, then stopped, and actually looked at the barge disappearing under the bridge. Wouldn't you know it? She was right. It was sand.  I would have sworn it was gravel. In my defense, I never really focused on what the barge was carrying, just that it was a barge full of something. Usually, it's gravel. This time it wasn't. 
     I'd be an idiot to insist that, appearances notwithstanding, it's still a barge of gravel because that's what I thought it was, initially. So sad that those surveying our political or cultural landscape can't adjust their perceptions with similar ease. They're expecting gravel because it all looks like gravel to them, and by God, it must be.

How are we going to make it through six months of this?

     Trump v. Hillary.
     Coming soon to a theater near you.
     Well, not really coming to a theater.
     That might be the one place it's not coming.
     And certainly not coming soon.
     A full six months.
     Quite a lot, really.
     So tell me. How much would you pay to cut to the chase? To have the election over, the results known?
     A dollar? A hundred dollars? A thousand? I suppose it depends on the state of your pocketbook.
     I would pay a lot. Because the next six months will be what the New York Times described Saturday as "the ugliest, most cringeworthy presidential contest of the modern era ... a half-year slog through the marital troubles, personal peccadilloes, financial ambitions, social-media habits and physical appearances of 'Dangerous Donald' and 'Crooked Hillary.'"
     A grim prospect. And pointless too. What can we possibly learn about either that we don't already know?
     I keep flashing on the O.J. Simpson trial. Day after day of Johnnie Cochran and Marcia Clark, the lost eyeglasses, the glove. I wanted to clamp my hands over my ears, squeeze my eyes closed and scream, "Make it stop!"
     Not the most laudable sentiment for a newsman, I know. But sincere nevertheless.
     The cold truth is, life must be lived, one day at a time. And we must get ourselves to Nov. 8.
     "To bear," as the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell writes, "is to conquer our fate."
     So how do we bear this? How to endure a campaign guaranteed to be agony, at least for those of us who aren't whooping for Trump? His supporters are having fun, energized, like kids excited to be allowed to stay up late, thrilled to find they suddenly have permission to let their fears and bigotries strut about unashamed at mid-day, the bedrock of the Trump appeal. To be honest, I don't really blame Trump. People were already like this: he's just the mirror, the blowhard wind stoking their flames.
     What about the rest of us? Those for whom Hillary is like the firefighter who bursts through the door of our burning house—not necessarily the best person in the department, but who cares? She's the one we're counting on to escort us down the ladder to safety.
     We could try to view it through the long lens of history. A thrilling, knock-down, drag-out fight harkening back to the bare knuckled era of the early Republic. When Ted Cruz, already a fading memory, just one week ago accused Trump of being a serial philanderer struggling with venereal disease, the historian in me wanted to dig up when charges like that were being flung around in a presidential election. My guess: Jefferson v. Adams in 1800 (Bingo. Jefferson's followers even presaged our current bathroom fixation, detecting in Adams a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman" while Adams' camp referred to Jefferson as "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.")
     So this is history. Or will be, when we get through it.
     Something to look forward to.
     Plus, Clinton's going to win, right? I mean, between Trump proposing catastrophic schemes, and his offending Hispanics, women and Muslims, then continually re-offending them over the next six months with his leering, ham-handed, Taco Bowl attempts to regain their good favor, she has to win.
     Though if Trump is evidence of anything, it is that certainty has left the building.
     I have a quote I've been repeating—I'm not sure why it helps, but it does.
     "Why, this is hell," Christopher Marlowe writes, "nor am I out of it."
     I guess it helps because it implies that one day, eventually, we will be out of it.
     And we will. On Nov. 9.
     Although, whether that marks the end of one hell or the beginning of another, worse one, well, we'll find out.

"The world has changed, you perfidious bigot you."

      Happy Mother's Day, first of all. 
      If you are a mother, I hope you take this moment to bask in the outpourings of affection being showered upon you, from those for whom you sacrificed the best years of your life, trying to raise them into some semblance of maturity. 
     And if you are a child—and who among us is not?—I hope you remember to thank your mother or, if that is not possible, to remember her, as fondly as you can.
      And since it's springtime, and May, and Mother's Day to boot, a cheery thought, as my own little Mother's Day gift to you. 

    I was at the Hallmark Store in Northbrook this week, looking over the Mother's Day cards, of which there are a profusion, and I noticed that they represent, even more than I can recall them doing in previous years, the full spectrum of the maternal experience. Not just in English and Spanish and Polish and Italian, not just for the religious and the secular, the casual and the formal, the funny and the emphatic. 
     But also cards for people you might not think would get cards today. Cards for "Ex-Mother-in-Law" and "Ex-Daughter-in-Law" (reassuring her, "Some things never change," such as the feelings of their former in-laws) . Cards from one mother to her co-mother, and for mothers whose child has died, and for individuals who were "like a mother" without, apparently, enjoying official motherhood status.
      Which is all wonderful and in keeping with complicated, messy reality as it is lived by real, flesh-and-blood people, and so different from the icy, theoretical, my-way-or-the-highway, white, Protestant, a mommy-and-a-daddy-and-tw0-and-a-half-kids wilted former ideal that so many of our legislators, particularly in the Southland, seem to still be paddling toward, even as it recedes over the horizon.
      Hallmark Cards, based in Kansas City, Missouri, was founded in 1910, and is not known for being on the forefront of social change. They can't afford to be. Printing greeting cards costs money, and if they create a style of card that nobody wants, then they lose money on that card. Lose enough money on enough cards, you don't say in business for 106 years. They also lose money if their brand strays into the odd or the unacceptable. To be included among the realm of individuals to whom Hallmark sells cards is to be normal, by definition, to be acceptable, and on Mother's Day, 2016, acceptability is a very wide net.  
    See? I told you, good news.  Yes, not everyone has gotten the memo yet. It might go down better in a card. "The world has changed, you perfidious bigot you" and you open it up, "Get with the program, bub." Not something Hallmark would sell. Yet. Maybe by the fall

Is your sign straight?

     The sign didn't skew a lot, but it skewed enough—maybe half a brick dip to the left or, if you prefer, half a brick rise to the right. 
      It was crooked. 
      Plus, of course, the old brackets that held the "My Pi" sign from the restaurant before, the pizzeria that came and went, and quickly too. That's what happens. You get one chance.
      Nobody took those brackets down. A man on a ladder could have removed them with a screwdriver in 10 minutes. 
      But no one did.
      Last year, months before the restaurant opened, I was walking down Shermer in the old leafy suburban paradise and saw that sign announcing the new place, "Agave Anejo Mexican Grill," and immediately had this thought:
      They'll never make it.
      Because to survive, a business needs to pay attention to detail. Especially a restaurant. Because you can eat at home. You need to master the details, to not scrimp  and cut corners and do a slapdash job. To thrive, a restaurant has to sweat the small stuff. That's what customers expect, and are paying for.
      This vaguely Star Trek "A" was obviously designed on the cheap, the name itself hard to read, and skewed to boot. Amateur hour. The restaurant was doomed.
      I thought of writing that, a year ago, when I saw the sign. But why torment a small business owner, right out of the gate, some poor guy pursuing his dream? A Mexican restaurant of his own.
     Maybe the food would be great. A culinary genius, oblivious to such non-food matters as signs and skewing.
     Better to err on the side of kindness, if staying quiet was kindness.
     Maybe I should have written my thoughts. Maybe it would have helped him. Maybe not doing so wasn't doing him any favors.
     Nah, he wouldn't have taken the criticism and learned. People so seldom do.
     So the restaurant opened, last August. The grand opening banner stayed up for a month after the grand opening. That, too, was a bad sign, literally. It advertised the grand opening that had come and gone, and didn't come down until one corner fell down, and even then it flapped around in front of the door. For a day or two.
      Of course we ate there, my wife and younger son, we tried the food. And it wasn't bad. A little expensive. Basic Mexican food. I remember a serviceable ceviche. We almost went back for a second try—support the local business, a block from our house.
     But inside, there was no art on the wall. Who starts a Mexican restaurant and has no art on the walls? Not a colorful paper-mache lizard. Not a sombrero. Not a metal cactus. Nothing.
      So we didn't go back. The lack of art gave me almost a contempt. Really? And we were supposed to eat there why? The place never seemed that crowded. A few people in the bar. And then not even that. A week or so ago the restaurant went dark and the "FOR LEASE" sign went up. Too little capital, I would guess, and too little effort. A small dream poorly executed.
      Still, someone's dream, not deferred, but vanished, so nothing to laugh about. Instead, a grim nod, a recognition of the risk that all who strive face, and should be aware of. That tilted sign was the tip-off, before the the first basket of tortilla chips hit the table. Don't be half-assed. If you're going to do something, do it well. Make sure your sign is straight.