Donald Trump and the Bottomless Pit

     If you plug "bottomless pit" into Google, as I just have, the results are surprisingly slim. There are many references to a musical album of that name, and some Bible citations—a bottomless pit is opened in the Book of Revelations. 
    But no comprehensive cultural examination. So I'm going to have to wing it. There is something juvenile about bottomless pits—they seem, along with hot lava, to be the type of perils conjured up by  very young boys on playgrounds.  Guessing they might also show up in dusty adventure stories, in 1001 Tales of Arabian Nights and such, I began looking in the Tarzan books, which had a single reference.  When I shifted to the downscale Roy Rockwood boys adventure novels, there was the 1930 Bomba the Jungle Boy on the Underground River, or, The Cave of Bottomless Pits. 
     Not much.
     I was thinking about bottomless pits because, while there were developments in the Donald Trump campaign—old campaign team out, new one in, again, gross sweeping insult to African-Americans Friday, cloying 180-degree pivot pandering to Hispanics Saturday—the whole thing seemed exhausting, ungraspable, bottomless. Not that it couldn't be understood, but that doing so was complicated and not worth the effort in the end of August because the thing you're trying to capture keeps plunging out of reach, twirling as it goes, spouting new, apparently relevant details as it goes.
    Then I thought of a Joe Martin cartoon—Martin, as local cartoon fans know, is a brilliant cartoonist who at one point had three funny strips in the Chicago papers: Mr. Boffo, Willy & Ethel and Porterfield. 
    The strip I was thinking of stars Mr. Boffo—a shape-shifting character, like Trump, also balding but with a bulbous nose, who like Trump is usually found in a variety of surreal tableaus, though for Boffo they are classic cartoon settings: in hell, heaven, on a desert island, chained to a dungeon wall. 
    In this particular cartoon—I couldn't find the strip, so am working from memory here—the first panel shows three men plunging into an abyss, their faces masks of terror, arms and legs flailing. The caption is "Three men falling into a bottomless pit."
    The second panel shows the men, still plunging, but expressions of boredom on their faces, heads propped on palms. The caption is, "The same three men, six months later." 
    Or some such thing. 
    And you realize—and Martin was a genius in making this kind of connection—that without a bottom to eventually crash against, the bottomless pit isn't so much a doom as a consignment to eternal tedium. 
     That's where I am regarding Trump. Bottomless boredom. It isn't as if we're not plunging toward disaster. Truly, we are. It's just that you can't sound the alarm every day. Forty percent of Americans, knowing what they must already know by now, somehow still support the man. So what's the point of drawing a red circle around the latest jaw dropping development? If you haven't figured it out by now you never will. 
    And the rest of us, we get it, big time. We get to star in our own real-life nightmare where we run up to oblivious bystanders at some unfolding disaster and grab at their shirtfronts and scream in their faces—"The place is on fire you have to get out!!!"—and they just shrug grin idiotically and stand there. 
    Of course, the pit only feels bottomless. We arrive at the ground with a crash Nov. 8. Then either Trump wins—and after the Brexit vote, no amount of confident polls can give anyone complete assurance. Trump wins and then the graves open and Biblical doom is upon us. Or Trump loses and this all seems a hideous dream, and the zombies he conjured up hiss and thrash and maybe Texas withdraws from the Union.  That's coming. But right now, we've been falling in this pit for so long, it's hard to even imagine that the bottom is there at all, somewhere, rushing up at us.
   

Review #3

    This is the first newspaper review of "Out of the Wreck I Rise," written by Jim Coyle for the Toronto Star's online Star Touch tablet app. I'll admit being a little surprised at his take, seeing the book as a "sampler of thoughts" about alcohol, and missing, entirely, the idea that the book is supposed to help those in recovery. "This book's title alone will please imbibers of a literary bent" made me wince, as did calling the book a "pub crawl." Perhaps I'm being overly-sensitive, but pleasing imbibers is not what we were going for. But I don't want to be unappreciative—it is certainly positive, in its own way, and looks great on their mobile app, and at least presents the book as noteworthy. It'll be interesting to see if future reviews, should there be any, follow in this vein.  God I hope not.

     The celebrated American writer John Cheever, who knew a thing or six about the topic, described a moment when he discovered alcohol’s merciful capacity for curing the many torments that plagued him.
     Preparing for an intimidating social gathering, “I bought a bottle of gin and drank four fingers neat,” he wrote. “The company was brilliant, chatty and urbane and so was I.”
     Words. Stories. Wit. Repartee. Le mot juste. All to the clinking of cocktail glasses. Who wouldn’t say, “Why, yes, barkeep, I think I will have another!”
     Cheever was neither the first nor last to draw a link between drink and yarn-spinning. Nor was he breaking new ground in the monumental self-delusion that chronic intoxication can produce.
     No matter. His words accurately capture a sensation the habitually besotted will recognize. The idea persists that charm and creativity are the salubrious byproducts of alcoholic intake....

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It will find you

     Both boys are home, briefly, in the interim between the end of their summer internships and the beginning of classes. Which explains what I was doing on the 2nd floor of Nordstrom's downtown Thursday—shopping—though, in our defense, we did all our buying at the far more reasonable H & M and Macy's.
     We blundered in, I suppose under the theory that it is somehow connected to Nordstrom's Rack, looked at the prices, then ran out shrieking as if the place were on fire, the boys in the lead. My wife and I felt we had raised them well.
     There just long enough for me to notice this big ass bar set up in the middle of Nordstrom's men's department. That's something of a trend—every supermarket worth the name has a wine bar, if not a full bar, and guys can be seen pushing their carts with one hand and drawing off their sloshing cup of brew in the other. It makes sense. The stores are desperate to make shopping in bricks-and-mortar retailers more of a destination experience, and what sweetens any destination like alcohol? Let's see Amazon do that.
     This would have been ideal for me, back in the day, and now just leaves me I suppose slightly amused, my reaction to those cruise ship ads that show the boat plying a giant martini, as if you can't drink at home but need to go to Norway to do it properly. Bars cropping up in unexpected places does echo, in my mind, back to those people I see on Twitter urging that liquor advertising be banned from the airwaves, under the See-No-Evil/Do-No-Evil rule. 
     I find that naive. When I gave up drinking, a decade ago, I immediately understood that you can't base your sobriety on not knowing where the booze is or how to find it. It's everywhere, and having a mini-Bennigan's pop up in the middle of the shirt department is a perfect example.  Even if you don't set out to find it, it will find you, so you had better be ready, particularly in this era when so many people can't sip a cocktail without first delightedly sharing a photo of it on Facebook. You can't wallpaper the world; you have to armor yourself. 

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Now this is an odd structure. I had never seen it before, but stumbled upon it during my wanderings around Chicago this week.  I'm hoping it puzzles you for a few minutes; I had a tough time figuring out what it was when I was standing before it, but eventually I saw a plaque that gave away the game.
    What is this beige-pinkish thing and where might we find it? The winner gets ... oh hell ... one of my endless supply of 2015 blog posters, complete in its own Chicago Mailing Tube cardboard tube, along with my best wishes.
     Remember to place your guesses below. Good luck. 

Mayor Daley's book

      My colleague Mike Sneed reports that former Mayor Richard M. Daley is interested in writing a book about "running an American city." 
      My immediate thought was, "didn't he leave off the 'into the ground' part?" Running an American city into the ground?
      The next thought was identical to the one I had five years ago when Daley previously mentioned writing a book: the man lacks the necessary candor, the self-criticism gear essential to writing a book. 
      A good book, I mean.
      Oh sure, he could no doubt, with help of the ghostwriter he's supposedly fishing around for, manage a clip job recapitulation of his 22 years at the helm of Chicago, something along the lines of First Son, by Keith Koeneman.  At the risk of being unkind to a fellow University of Chicago Press author, let's just say that those of us who soldiered through the 2013 biography were left with the conviction that Robert Caro's trilogy on Lyndon Johnson was not in risk of being nudged off the summit of the biographer's art. 
     The fault is not the author's. Daley is so oblique—trying to understand him, one Chicago wag once quipped, is like trying to peel a ball bearing with your thumbnail—that there is the whisper of a chance he could surprise us. That the book will be titled, How I Ruined Chicago and detail, with charts, how the scion of America's biggest boss swept into office in a blaze of tradition and self-regard and created a financial time bomb, by lack of planning and greasing his army of allies, that is now hollowing out the city so it becomes a fragile pension program that also fights fires.
    That is possible.
    But I severely doubt it. More likely is the outcome of the vast majority of people who intend to write books: nothing. Because writing books is hard. Besides, as my agent would say, "And who is going to buy this book?" Tap any of Daley's former cringing underlings on the shoulder, after they've toweled his spittle off their faces, and ask them: "Do you really want to know what's going inside that man?" I'm not sure they do, or I do, or anybody does. Not that Daley could disgorge it, even the help of a ghostwriter, a team of amanuenses and Sigmund Freud.
    Jane Byrne wrote a surprisingly good book, My Chicago, about growing up in the city and the rise to the only elective office she ever held. But Byrne was a voluble party gal who couldn't shut up, who would phone newspapers randomly, in the bag, late at night just to talk more. She was candid, to the degree of admitting she was often out-to-sea once she got her hands on the levers of power.
    Daley is a stone who admits nothing, who had a hard enough time squeaking out three sentences that made sense at a press conference, with a bank of microphones in front of him.  The idea of a book is tempting, as a way to airily suggest you have something important to say, that you aren't merely gadding around the shoebox's worth of Chicago where you feel comfortable, hoping you don't get indicted. But the reality of a book is hard—take it from a guy who's written eight. That's why most people who would like to write one never do. And a good thing too. 


     

Chicago Shapes #4: The triangle

    Since last October, when I examined the parabola, the circle and the square through the lens of Chicago, readers have been besieging me with requests to continue the series, the obvious next candidate being the triangle. So I....
     Oh, that's a lie. Nobody cared whether the series continued or not. Now you can see how very disappointing life can be, at times, for a guy who could even imagine they might. Zeroing in on shapes is the kind of esoteric investigation that I seem to do for my own amusement, at best tolerated by you, my very indulgent readers. I've been meaning to push forward for months and now, theoretically on vacation, seemed the perfect moment to pull my triangle notes together. Though I hit a hitch right out the gate, as you will see if you make it to the end of this.


     Let's start with the Triangle Package Machinery Company.
    —"Why a Triangle?"
     "You'd have to talk to our marketing department. Kim Magon. But she's not in today, so you'll have to call back on Monday."
      —"Can I have her telephone number?"
     "I can't give that out. Call the main number."
     —"Okay."

    So let's not start with the Triangle Package Machinery Company. Though we'll get back to them. Let's start with something else.    
     Let's start with Chicago architect Harry Weese.
    "Harry Weese seems to have been obsessed with triangles," Jay Pridmore notes in "A View from the River." Indeed, there are two buildings in downtown Chicago with pure triangular bases—the Metropolitan Correctional Center, at 71 W. Van Buren, and the Swissotel, 323 East Wacker Drive—and Weese designed both. 
    The MCC's floor plan is an isosceles right triangle, meaning it has two equal sides, one 90 degree angle and two 45 degree angles.
(Triangles, for those slow on the uptake, have three sides and three angles, from whence they get their name: "tri-angle," a word some 600 years old).
      Such a triangle is seen in the floor plan for the MCC at right, which is a cross section of the building above.  A quick glance will remind you of the drawbacks of triangular buildings: instead of big square corner suites you get these narrow points. The ratio of linear wall to floor square footage of such a building is .... nnggg, doing the math .... 34/50. On a square building it is 20/50. So you need 70 percent more wall to enclose the same about of floor. Quite extravagant, really.
   The Swissotel is an equilateral triangle, meaning it has three sides equal length and three angles of 60 degrees.  A cross section of its floor space looks like this. 
     At first I thought Weese was being pigeonholed based on two buildings out of the hundreds his firm designed. But when you look at what they are, Pridmore's use of the word "obsession" seems apt. 
      Take a gander inside Weese's First Baptist Church of Columbus, Indiana. Notice anything? He also designed the distinctive, if not in my mind pretty, Seventeenth Church of Christ Scientist, on Wacker Drive, which is not triangular, but very round, though even that has a hidden irony: it sits on an unwieldy, triangular site which Weese masks with its circular auditorium. 

First Baptist Church, Columbus, Indiana

   His 200 S. Wacker Drive is a conventional square building, but Weese made it two conjoined triangular buildings, one seven stories taller than the other.
    And then there are his River Cottages which you may have seen and wondered about, just north of Wolf Point on the River. Ugly buildings, without question, that look both dated and out-of-place: I'd expect to find this kind of thing on the Sava River in Zagreb. 
    Why a triangle? Some see them as pushing back against the grid brutalism of the modernists.
     "If the Weese vs. Mies opposition is to be believed, this would seem Weese’s clearest rebuttal: triangular instead of square," Ian Baldwin wrote in "Places" journal   
     Not to suggest that Harry Weese is the only thing triangular about Chicago.  There is the "Viagra Triangle," referring to the bars on Chicago Avenue and State Street, with Rush serving as the hypotenuse.  The "Polonia Triangle" formed by Ashland and Division, with Milwaukee Avenue as the hypotenuse. This is the Triangle that shows up in Nelson Algren stories, such as this, from Never Come Morning:

    Udo had been restrained and credit restored, subtly, to the poolrooms and taverns of the Triangle.

    Chicago proved unable to rename a street for Algren (those honorary brown signs don't really count) because residents complained they would need new stationery. So the Triangle seemed an apt spot for a fountain honoring Chicago's bard of the night court. When it was unveiled in 1998, some wondered how the famously-bitter Algren would react. Though if representatives of the Polish Roman Catholic Union could declare no hard feelings and show up (when Algren's books were first published, some in the Polish leadership felt his books painted a dim picture of their community and tried to ban them) I assume Algren would have found it in his aggrieved heart to show up as well, particularly if there were hors d'oeuvres and cocktails after. 
     There's more: the Old Town Triangle,  bounded by North Avenue, Clark Street, and what is charmingly referred to as "the Ghost of Ogden Avenue." There is the "Triangle Offense," used with great effect by head coach Phil Jackson during the Bulls championship runs in the 1990s (the triangle is created by the center, who stands at the low post, the forward at the wing, and the guard at the corner, and if you know what that means, you're a better man than I).

Won't return phone calls.

     We haven't even touched on the symbolic aspects of triangles, when it comes to trinities and love triangles, plus their sturdiness when it comes to supporting loads, as seen in the cross-bracing on buildings like the very non-Weese John Hancock.  I wish there were some folklore aspect triangles suggesting bad faith or laziness, so I could circle back to the beginning, but I can't find any, so we'll have to just grab the lever and pull hard.
    Returning, reluctantly, to Triangle Package Machinery. I must have called them six times over a span of days. Maybe more. Kim Magon-Haller, their supposed marketing representative, never picked up the phone. Never called back, or returned emails. I tried a David Mustiel and he never answered either. Even left a message for the Triangle president, Bryan Muskat—the Full Boy Scout Try, I call it. I just wanted to know, though at some point I suppose it became a quest, a point of honor. No reporter wants to be thwarted by the Triangle Package Machinery Co. Eventually, I thought, "The hell with them" Though they're a fairly large company. I shudder to think what their dissatisfied customers go through. And based on my experience, my guess is that there must be a bunch of dissatisfied customers.   

Reader flashback: Snappled

     One more visit to the trove of spiked pieces that ended up in the Reader in the late 1990s. This was an assignment from Esquire, which asked me to look at how Quaker Oats killed Snapple. In between the time they asked me to write it, and when I turned it in, most of the magazine staff was canned. When I showed up with the article, they just sort of looked at me strangely. But the kill fee was considerable, so I wasn't too broken up, and the Reader was happy to step in and print it. The story won the Peter Lisagor award for business writing. It originally ran May 29, 1997.

     In the basement of Quaker Tower, a mundane office building on Clark Street at the Chicago River, sits a kettle of hot oatmeal. The other Quaker items in the employee cafeteria--the Gatorade and the granola bars and, until recently, the Snapple—cost the employees money.
     But the oatmeal is free. Just grab a ladle and load up as much as you can. Oatmeal is one of the cheapest foodstuffs around. Remember the slogan "Just pennies a serving"? It's even cheaper to make, and a huge profit maker to sell. Hot oatmeal built the company into what it is today.
     Selling it to the employees, well, just somehow wouldn't seem right.
     If the free oatmeal is a nod to the company's distant past, it is just that—a nod. Oatmeal is kind of boring, and not the sort of product that fires up the blood in corporate veins nowadays. Quaker is not about oatmeal anymore. Like most companies today, it is not even about profits, in and of themselves. It's about growth, and stock, and stock prices, and keeping shareholders happy.
     A common enough philosophy lately, but one that led Quaker Oats into one of the great business disasters of the 20th century: the purchase of the Snapple Beverage Company for $1.7 billion in November 1994. When Quaker finally dumped the company this past March, for $300 million, it lost a cool $1.4 billion on the transaction, not to mention the hundreds of millions frittered away on ill-conceived advertising, distribution restructuring, and fat severance contracts gagging executives who know the embarrassing details of the fiasco.
     The mind gropes in vain for a similar calamity in Chicago corporate history. The collapse of Continental Bank, maybe, but that didn't sink with the banners flying and the orchestra at full crescendo, the way Snapple did.
     It's over now. The dust from the explosion is still hanging in the air, and as it settles a question takes shape:
     What happened?

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