Review #4

     Online etiquette demands that you do not steal the copy of other publications, even your own. So I post the first four paragraphs of my Sun-Times column here and link back to the paper, so as not to drain away their all-important readership. 
     But this review, in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, is just four paragraphs long, so I'm posting only the first paragraph and linking to the rest, and using their lovely graphic. I hope that's okay. 
    It isn't a review so much as a notice, but given that the Sunday Book Review is the epicenter of literary America, just being on the field is a great boon. The shout-out not only speaks well of the book, but of the team behind it—this was no accident, but the result of in-the-trenches effort— and I am grateful to everyone at the University of Chicago Press, who worked hard to make this happen. 

     “Alcoholics Anonymous,” commonly referred to as the Big Book, helped to establish the 12-step program. It’s been an indispensable guide for millions since it was published in 1939. A new, very different kind of book, “Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery,” by Neil Steinberg and Sara Bader, aims to be a complementary comfort.

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"Alt-right" — because "mean crazy neo-Nazi online bully trolls" is such a mouthful

     Blinking red light on the phone. A message.
     “Neil, this is Arlene K—, I live in Oswego. I really enjoy your columns. Would you please do a column on alt-right and explain it? I don’t know what that’s about, and I’m starting to get worried about it.”
     This column is not a lounge band; I don’t take requests.
     However, in this case: an excellent question, Arlene, one much in the news.
     “Alt-right” is the new, sanitized term that includes a rogue’s gallery of haters, loons, tinfoil-hats, bullies and misfits, united by unmerited self-regard and a contempt for modern American life and most of the people who comprise it. They are a far right fringe, have always been with us, and surged into the public eye lately thanks to the presidential nominee of the Republican Party, Donald J. Trump, who used the rock they live under as the cornerstone of his campaign.
     When Trump says “America is a hellhole and we’re going down fast” or when he says political correctness is “killing” America, he is speaking alt-right, or a more formal version, like “vous” versus “tu” in French, the plural, polite form more suited to a national political election.

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Another milestone in the newspaper death march

It's in the middle, to the immediate left of the square dark brown building.

     How much do I hate the Tribune Tower? When I went to post this assignment, I realized, to my amazement and chagrin, that I have never taken a photograph of the building, not one, in all the years I've been wandering around, downtown, snapping. I can see the logic: "Eeeyew, yuck. Why take a picture of THAT?!" But that is overstating the case. To be honest, I never considered the possibility. But I did finally find it peeking out of this group shot.

      The Tribune Tower is a gothic horror show of a building, a retro throwback that bucked every trend in 20th century architecture when it was designed in the mid-1920s. While the Bauhaus was conjuring up streamlined structures in Germany, the Midwestern burgermeisters in Chicago held a widely ballyhooed architecture contest for the new headquarters of their self-proclaimed World’s Greatest Newspaper. Batting aside progressive blueprints from the likes of Walter Gropius and Adolf Loos, they chose a New York firm’s vision of what is in essence a 36-story medieval cathedral skyscraper, complete with flying buttresses, gargoyles and fleurs de lis. All it lacks is a crypt and a nave.
     Despite being all wrong, it was the perfect choice. The Tribune Tower somehow seemed to fit the newspaper within—mighty, unsubtle, backward-looking, with chunks of ancient buildings seized around the world by the newspaper’s far-flung foreign correspondents brought home as prisoners, in tribute to American exceptionalism.
     Walk into Tribune Tower, and along with the bromides to freedom and the supremacy of the press was an enormous map of North America, as if the rest of the world didn’t matter, which it largely didn’t. With WGN—“World’s Greatest Newspaper” don’t you forget—adding first radio, then television to the mix, the Tribune Tower was meant to exude permanence, power, authority, control, with a bomb shelter in the basement, just in case.
     As the building fit the fat, Republican avatar of the status quo for decades, so its sale, announced Tuesday, to a Los Angeles developer for $240 million, also seems apt for the current journalistic moment: Gut shot by the Internet a decade ago, tumbling for years in free fall and retreat, finally hitting the hard bottom with a splat, shaking itself back to life like a cartoon character, and crawling off to some obscure place a lot less public than the corner of Michigan and Wacker Drive, if not to die, then to morph into whatever decimated, enervated, shadow of its former self that daily journalism is well on the way to becoming. The amazing thing is it lasted this long.
     Tribune Media CEO Peter Liguori, a former entertainment exec for Fox, explained the move with characteristic lack of sentiment: "Monetizing the significant assets of Tribune Media's real estate portfolio is a strategic priority for the company," he was quoted saying in the Tribune press release, "and we are extremely pleased with the outcome of this sales process."
     I bet they are. Grandeur is not a significant asset anymore, at least not in the communications biz. As long as three bulleted headlines squirt into your phone on command, you don't care where they come from. Downtown Chicago, downtown Mumbai, it's all the same. Heck, half the country doesn't even care if they're true.
     No gloating here. No working journalist can take pleasure in this sale. "The end of an era," television reporters will say, unaware of the threadbareness of the cliche.
     A better metaphor would be a milestone on the newspaper Death March. We are having our fingers pried off the tangible world, the world of buildings and offices and desks and paychecks. All cooking in the same pot. The Sun-Times sold its less iconic, but equally hideous building to developers a dozen years ago, and Trump Tower went up on the spot where we once stood. Future home of the Midwestern White House, perhaps.
     Newspapering has moved to the margins of our cultural conversation, and whether the Tribune is produced in a tall thin version of Reims Cathedral, or out of the giant windowless box of the Freedom Center printing plant on West Chicago Avenue, or in Naperville, or not at all, hardly seems to matter much at this point.

Is Anthony Weiner an addict or just a jerk?

     “Addiction,” Philip Seymour Hoffman once said, “is when you do the thing you really, really most don’t want to be doing.”
     For Hoffman, the thing he really, really most didn’t want to be doing was take heroin. He had gotten clean, become one of the most respected actors in America. Then Hoffman decided it would be a good idea to go back to using heroin. The decision cost him his life.
     Or was it a decision? Addiction is a complicated issue, where brain chemistry and free will collide. A lot of people think addiction is just a scam — the Get Out of Jail Free Card that jerks desperately wave after being caught, trying to be excused their misdeeds. Hoffman had been clean for more than 20 years. He was free. Or was he? Did he decide? Or did the addiction slumber within him, like a cancer, biding its time?
      I can’t answer that one. If it was a bad choice, it was a bad choice that many make. Fifty percent more Americans died of drug overdoses in 2014 than died in car crashes: 47,000 people, a staggering toll. That in the face of such stats anyone would pick up a drug speaks to the human genius for both feeling special — bad things happen to other people — and for seeking that elusive zing across the frontal lobes that gives life savor.

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Cookie the Cockatoo, Brookfield Zoo's oldest resident, dead at 83

     I was going to simply post my visit to Brookfield Zoo's elderly bird from three years ago and be done with it. But I kinda liked the idea of jumping in for a rare Tuesday column on a big breaking story like the passing of Cookie the cockatoo. 

     He was crusty, a curmudgeon, as only the elderly can be. Sometimes he would shriek. While he did tolerate certain people, others he just wanted to bite.
     "If he didn't like you, he let you know it," said Tim Snyder, a business associate. "He was like a cranky old geezer."
      Then again, he had reason. He had his infirmities — osteoarthritis and osteoporosis, cataracts. And perhaps the lingering effects of a broken heart.
     "Back in the 1950s, we tried to introduce him to a female," said Snyder. "She was not nice to him. He didn't want anything to do with her."
     But Cookie the cockatoo, 83, who died Saturday, was seldom alone. He was the coddled patriarch of the Brookfield Zoo. His years of putting on shows, and being on TV and on public display, were behind him, and he was cared for, outside of the public gaze, in an office at the Reptiles and Birds House. Cookie was the oldest Major Mitchell's cockatoo known, a fact recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records. He was one of the zoo's "biggest stars," and the last of 270 animals present at what was then called the Chicago Zoological Park when it opened June 30, 1934, in Brookfield, on land donated by Edith Rockefeller McCormick. He had come from the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia and was estimated to be a year old.

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Cookie the Cockatoo remembered

Cookie in 2013

     Sad news from the Brookfield Zoo that Cookie the Cockatoo passed away Saturday at the ripe old age of 83. I had the privilege of spending time with Cookie in 2013 and wrote this report, which I share now in honor of the famed bird.

     He was a star.
     One of Brookfield Zoo's "biggest stars," in fact, though a critic 25 years ago dismissed him as "a bit of a ham" after seeing a performance, suggesting that he talks too much.
     Yes, like other stars, he liked to say his trademark lines: "Peek-a-boo," "Quit your screaming," and "Hi, Cookie."
     That is his name, Cookie the Cockatoo — a Major Mitchell's cockatoo, to be precise — and while his onetime co-stars such as Mora the Capuchin monkey and Maya the Yucatan miniature pig are long gone, Cookie endures.
     He no longer performs in the Animals-in-Action show at the Children's Zoo, or appears on television, as he once did. In fact, Cookie is no longer seen in public at all, but enjoys his retirement in seclusion, ruminatively gnawing on a piece of wood in his cage in the office of the Reptiles and Birds House.
     His feathers, only a little threadbare, retain their brilliant pink hue, shifting to salmon toward the head. His crest ruffles majestically when angry - and this bird is definitely a curmudgeon.
     "He really wants to bite someone," said Kathryn Pingry, lead keeper in the Bird Department.
     Occasionally a zoo visitor will knock on the office door to ask about the 80-year-old bird, the oldest of his breed on record, older than the zoo itself.
     The Chicago Zoological Park opened on June 30, 1934, on land that Edith Rockefeller McCormick donated for that purpose. She thought it should be like the modern zoos she had seen in Europe. Thus it was built as the first "barless" zoo in the United States.
     On opening day, the zoo had 270 animals including Cookie, who came from the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia, and was estimated to be a year old. His hatching birthday was set as June 30, same as the zoo's.
     Over the years, other famed bird stars have come and gone. A quintet of penguins Admiral Richard E. Byrd's second expedition brought back from Antarctica in 1935. Or Sally, another cockatoo, whose deft use of a pie plate reminded keepers of stripper Sally Rand and her bubble, then seen at the Century of Progress fair.
     Cookie was most recently on display in a round window of his own at the Perching Bird House. But five years ago keepers noticed his mood had begun to sour. In the winter, when there aren't many visitors, Cookie would get lonely.
     "He would just sit in his window and had nothing to do," said Pingry. "We noticed he just didn't want to go out there anymore, wanted to stay in his office, where there is always a keeper nearby."
     In 2009 he was permanently taken off display.
     "He was just so much more engaged, and happy to have company," she said.
     Well, certain company. Like other old folk, Cookie prefers the familiar.
     Approach his cage and you might be greeted by an earsplitting shriek.
     "The patience wanes," explained veterinarian Jennifer Langan. "He's not quite as tolerant."
     But if Cookie can be hostile toward humans, they nevertheless still love him.
     "We get calls," said Pingry. "He also gets cards, especially around his birthday."
      So how is Cookie doing? Well, to be honest, he's old. Birds, like humans, suffer from a variety of indignities as they age. Osteoporosis. Cataracts. His left eye is cloudy, his left claw mangled from a long-ago bite. Cookie has to take daily anti-inflammatories, for his joints, plus a "parrot pellet" containing vitamins. He uses a rope perch instead of wood: easier on the feet. He takes frequent naps, and keepers opening his cage to say hello worry about him pitching forward beak-first onto the floor.
     Like many an old bird, there is no more soaring: He doesn't fly anymore, and hasn't for a long time.
     "I worked with him the past 16 years, and he hasn't really flown," said Pingry. "He used to flap a lot in his picture window, but he never actually took off flying."
     Cookie doesn't speak his trademark lines, either, though he'll make "cute happy noises" and the occasional wolf whistle. He can see well enough to have favorites - he likes people in glasses - and dismiss those he has taken a dislike to, people he greets with a sort of annoyed scream of disapproval, characteristic of his breed.
     Up to now, Cookie would be briefly taken out on his birthday, to be greeted by well-wishers. But this year, that's canceled.
     "I think Cookie would like his birthday, but it could be a little too much for him," said Sondra Katzen,Brookfield's media relations manager. "Our top priority is his well-being, and we know he's most comfortable off exhibit."
     So don't worry about Cookie - you may not see him, but he's there. Nor is he without his pleasures. His cage is filled with toys and distractions. He's fed chopped-up apples, oranges, carrots, sweet potatoes and - the day's highlight - two peanuts, unsalted, in the shell, a forbidden treat, like a coveted daily 5 p.m. martini.
     "He really likes that peanut, twice a day," said Pingry.
                                               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 26, 2013

The South Side is the best, doughnut-wise

     “We’re taking a detour,” I said, turning south onto Cicero Avenue from 55th Street. “Five minutes.”
     7 a.m. Sunday. We had just dropped off our oldest at Midway for the flight back to college. A half-hour beyond O’Hare, as I pointed out hurtling past its runways on the Tri-State Tollway. “If your flight were from O’Hare, we’d be there.”
     But he pays for his own tickets now, and the $50 saved is worth it, to him and, I suppose, me. Fifty dollars for driving an hour on a Sunday morning seems smart. Besides, I had a plan to offset the melancholy of his departure.
     My wife came along to say good-bye at the airport. It wasn’t exactly the same teary farewell had he been, say 3, with his name on a big tag pinned to his coat. But close.
     She had no idea where we were going, but she’s sharp and solved the mystery before 67th Street.
     “Doughnuts!” she cried....

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