Joe & Lacey—or is it "Lacy"?—4ever

     "Why do people write graffiti?" my wife asked.
     We were sitting on a bench, eating our lunch at Starved Rock State Park, having decided to take in a few days of fall color. While the park was beautiful, the signage and fence rails were well-scribbled and gouged.

  "I suppose it's their stab at immortality," I replied. Although in a park such scrawls are doubly bothersome, first in that they disturb the beauty of nature, particularly when they are scrawled over trees and stumps, a common practice at Starved Rock. And second because they show a failure to grasp the essential message of nature: she endures, perfect by definition, while we pass through, momentary, evanescent, making our little dent in a field somewhere, and then returning, more or less immediately, to the utter oblivion from whence we came. Carving your name in a tree perpetuates your being, in the grand scheme of things, only a second longer than tossing a rock into a pool does. A few ripples and gone. 
     We were at "Beehive," a lookout point, enjoying our sandwiches, and I noticed a particular graffiti to my left, just because it was so  

bold and fresh. Last year's have already faded. Turning my attention ahead, I saw a second version. You'll notice that the girl's name is spelled differently in each. So one of them is wrong. You have to wonder about the story behind that. Did the swain really not know how to spell his girlfriend's name when he went to immortalize their love along with Romeo and Juliet? What was the moment of correction like? With anger or pity or a laugh? A reminder of another reason people do graffiti: because they're stupid. Never underestimate the importance of stupidity in the business of the world. Sometimes it seems the central operating principle. 


     

Why not add some moral support to that hotline number?

    I'm a fairly opinionated person. Which is good, in the main, because I'm in the business of presenting opinions, bolstered by a scaffolding of fact, of course, to give them form and structure.
     So if I don't have a view on something, I tend not to write about it. Thus, no columns on ... oh for instance ... golf. Never done it. Don't have strong feelings about those who do. If you like golf, well, go for it. It's a free country, at least for now.
     But on Sunday I wrote about the sign at right that Metra has put around its station in Northbrook in order to discourage suicides. I felt ... uncertain ... about them (they are two that I noticed). But I couldn't exactly say why. There was discussion here, but there was also a spirited conversation on my Facebook page, and reader Sarah E. Lauzen offered a key to my unease by posting this flier:

     This struck me as something of actual use to people considering suicide. Don't get me wrong -- a phone number for a suicide hotline no doubt helps certain people. But there is also a not-my-table aspect to it — the problem isn't being addressed, it's being delegated. The above could save a person immediately. Then I thought of Galway Kinnell's lovely poem "Wait," which I used to frame the Time chapter in my new book. Kinnell wrote it for a student who was considering killing herself after a failed love affair. It begins:

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.

     You can read the entire poem here.
    Metra should post the "Everything is Awful" questions, or the Kinnell poem, AND the hotline number. To just have the number is minimal and reeks of the same societal indifference that nudges people toward suicide in the first place. Which is why the signs troubled me. It's as if, on the bridges downtown, they placed, not a life ring behind glass, but a number to call to request a life ring. Big difference.
    Oh. And while we're on the subject of Sunday. I used the word "Masonic" to describe the sign with the shaking hands. I was not implying something dark or indifferent about Masons, not suggesting they wouldn't leap to assist those in need. It's just that Masonic banners sometimes use the shaking hands iconography being discussed. As Sigmund Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Nancy Pelosi: "This is what they had; their white-man-ness."

 
     As the Trump presidential campaign drifts away from the iceberg of that recording of The Donald bragging how he uses his celebrity to grope women, alarm bells clanging, staffers rushing around the tilting decks, the vessel of his ambition settling into the water, beginning, at long last, it seems, the final plunge to the bottom, we are left with a question:
     Why isn't the prospect of the nation's first woman president a bigger deal?
     When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, there was a pervasive sense of history. A nation that spent its first 87 years with legal slavery was now choosing a black man as leader.
     This should be even more significant, because, if you look around the world and over the ages, prejudice against women is far more widespread and severe than bigotry against blacks ever was.
     But don't trust me on that.
     "When I ran for Congress, when I ran for president, I met more discrimination as a woman than for being black," said Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman elected to Congress — in 1969 — and who also sought the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination.

To continue reading, click here.

Don't do it.

     A woman jumped in front of the train at the Northbrook station a few weeks ago. I wrote about the small memorial that sprouted on the spot for a couple days. Now a more permanent memorial, of sorts, has been established—this sign, an attempt to reach out to whatever tormented souls might be in the general vicinity and considering suicide. 
     I couldn't decide what I thought of it — rare for me. 
     On one hand, there was a desperate, we've-got-to-do-something quality to it. What are the odds that someone approaching the tracks intending to kill themselves will even notice it, never mind seize the aid offered? Given the general nature of the problem, isn't this an extraordinarily localized solution? Not much help to those wanting to end it all a block away. And what's with the handshake imagery? Is that really what a suicidal person wants? A good solid handshake? There seems something wrong, something oblivious and Masonic, something lacking about it. But I can't put my finger on it beyond that. 
     On the other hand, really, what else could be done? And it seems a problem that should be addressed somehow. Nearly three dozen people have been struck and killed by Metra trains this year, most of those suicides. Not a number to be shrugged off.  The Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority put such signs in after a spike of suicides in 2012, and officials there consider them effective. 
     Maybe so. Still, it's such an small gesture at an enormous problem, it somehow feels inadequate, somehow both not enough and too much.  It's a very big sign. I wouldn't be surprised if it sparked more despair than hope, if it gives more people the idea of ending it all than people it gives aid to. An unintended consequence, the way certain anti-drinking campaigns encourage drinking. It made me sad to see it though, again, I'm not sure why. Maybe you have ideas.

Several readers mentioned my use of the word "Masonic" in the above. I wasn't implying something malign about Masons, merely thinking of imagery such as the above.

    

The Great Creepy Clown Panic of 2016

     Up until Thursday, when my boss asked me to look into the creepy clown phenomenon, I had studiously avoided the subject, just because it seemed one of those scraped-from-the-corners-of-the-Internet kind of things.  In mid-August someone dressed as a clown tried to lure children into the woods in South Carolina — maybe — the thing got on the Internet, where all sorts of scary clown videos and reports sprouted like mushrooms after a rain. Maybe a prankish teenager or two or 10 jumped the gun on Halloween and wore masks to frighten younger children, and a squad of Barney Fife police chiefs in various Hickburgs dutifully issued press releases and threatened any Bozos who would use their face paint and rubber nose to cause alarm to steer clear of their particular Mayberry.
      It did not add up to anything significant, in my view, except for connoisseurs of mass delusions. I am neither frightened nor intrigued by clowns. They just seem another inexplicably popular and widespread phenomena, like stock car racing.
     But I am nothing if not a dutiful employee, and if my boss wants me to "find one of these scary clown guys," that's exactly what I would attempt to do. Looking online, I saw the outlines of what seemed a classic case of hysteria — children seeing things — given a 21st century twist as the sparks of immature fancy were been fanned into a brushfire by the Internet.
     "These are illusionary clowns," I told my boss. "They don't exist in the living world."
     Except. One college student detained by security at University of Illinois—Chicago. There was a photo of his apprehension, though he explained that he was a "performance artist" doing some innocent, non-threatening activity, and they let him go. That seemed a good inroad into this nonsense. I phoned U of I and invited them to reach out to this unnamed student and offer him a chance to tell his tale of miscommunication, perhaps plug his particular brand of art (which, to be honest, I also doubted the existence of, assuming that "performance artist" was the lame excuse this mope blurted out upon apprehension).
     But nothing was forthcoming from the school. I considered going to campus and poking around but, to be honest, that did not seem smart use of my time.
     My boss was disappointed.
     "I'd like to talk to one of these guys to understand why they thrill themselves by scaring people," he said.
     I almost said, "Who doesn't?" I'm the guy who told my boys there was a monster living in our basement (in my defense, it was a scary, perhaps dangerous basement, and I was trying to forestall their exploring it). I also seem to recall telling a tentful of sleepover boys the "Hook" story and then returning to rake my fingernails along the side of the tent. It's the sort of thing people are doing now with clown masks and finding themselves subject to arrest.
     I did observe that the Guardian had actually dispatched a reporter to South Carolina, as Ground Zero for the Clown Epidemic. No clowns were found, but a lengthy story nevertheless ensued, one of dozens if not hundreds. Perhaps I'd best set off Southward in search of scary clowns. Dedicate some resources. Work the story in the fine tradition of investigative journalism.
     My offer was not snapped up.
     As I like to say, sometimes it is better to be lucky than good. As I was heading out the door on Friday, I noticed the mask above at our tech bar. Its owner, a colleague in her 40s who I should add is niceness incarnate, explained that they were yanking them from the stores so she snapped it up, for only $12. Her daughter was having a bonfire -- perhaps she would put it on and creep around the house. Or wake up another child with the mask.
     You could see her savoring the thought.
     But then the cold reality of our tremulous times sunk in.
     "I'm hesitant to do that in my own yard!" she said, indignant. "You'd think people would have better things to worry about."
     Which is the rub of it, in my opinion. They do. Which is why we have a clown scare, the same reason people worry about sharks but not heart attacks. These mass hysterias are caused, in part, by stressful time. Between the Scariest Clown of Them All, Donald Trump, still having a shot at the presidency, and Syria and ISIS and Zika and God knows what else, of course the kids would start seeing clowns in the woods, or thought they were seeing them. Mix that into a safety fetish that threatens to deform our proud culture beyond all recognition, a zero tolerance lack of discernment on the part of lower level authorities like school officials, then we have our current Clown Crisis based on next-to-nothing. And suddenly it is a terrorist act to wear a clown mask, just as joking was made into a crime by the TSA.
     Enough. The Web is our Great Aggregator, and it can magnify things which are very small. Every hamlet has a walking man, some poor soul with mental challenges wandering the margins, muttering to himself.  But if every small town paper began reporting on him, it would seem an invasion, and the larger outlets would investigate the Army of Muttering Men while pundits analyze What It All Means.
     It means, to me, that — stop the presses — people are frightened and imaginative. That pattern recognition lends disparate occurrences the illusion of cohesion, of significance. That despite falling away in big chunks, there is still an awful lot of media. Maybe too much. Put "scary clown" into the Nexis database and 501 articles show up over the past month. Now that's really frightening.

Technology is always changing, except for the Shure Model 55

     There was a lot more I wanted to fit into here, such as the fact that the first time electric loudspeakers were used in public was in Chicago -- at the Olympic Theatre in September, 1912, when Bell Telephone and Western Electric rigged 10 speakers to transmit sound effects from backstage. Or that "microphone" is like "cursor," one of those words that started with one kind of technology and ended with another. Two hundred years ago "microphones" were ear trumpets—something the hard-of-hearing used to make small noises larger, hence the name. Still, I really enjoyed my visit to Shure, and hope some of that enthusiasm came across. 

     Of course it stands out.
     In an era when hi-tech design means some version of the Apple lozenge, all brushed steel and rounded corners, how could you fail to admire an example of 2016 technology that owes its look to the chrome grille of a 1937 Oldsmobile.
     The Shure Unidyne Model 55 Dynamic Microphone debuted in 1939 and has been in production ever since, more or less unchanged. A few tweaks: the quarter-sized diaphragm inside, glued to a coil of wire that turns sound vibrations into electrical impulses, went from aluminum to Mylar. The inner windscreen, once cloth, is now foam.
     The company that sells them, Shure Incorporated, started in Chicago in 1925 and has staked out an enviable position both revering its past and working at future innovation, or so it seemed to me when I toured its Niles headquarters.
     I assumed the Helmut Jahn building was designed for Shure, since its decorative screening so boldly evokes a microphone. Actually, it was built for Ha-Lo Industries.
     “They went bankrupt building the building,” said Michael Pettersen, director of corporate history, overlooking a few other factors, like Ha-Lo’s disastrous purchase of Starbelly.

To continue reading, click here. 

Musings of 18th century giant still relevant today

   

     Sometimes I surprise myself with what I can get away with putting in a newspaper column, which tend to be about, you know, news.  Samuel Johnson isn't close to news — has been dead for 232 years, and his life isn't exactly crackling across our social consciousness. It should be. I called up this column to share it with an acquaintance and realized, while I was at it, I should share it with you here.

    "Society is held together by communication and information" — a sentiment perfectly true in 2010, though James Boswell wrote it in a book published in 1791.
     Friday I finished reading Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, and while its 1,433 pages cannot be summarized in a newspaper column, I hope you won't mind my trying to anyway. Every 1-0 Cubs/Phillies snooze fest gets reported; why not this?
     Johnson is an epic figure, both for his literary output and his physical person — a huge, unkempt man, his face scarred, blind in one eye, he twitched and muttered, and was both a figure of ridicule and the greatest English man of letters between Shakespeare and Dickens.
     His 1755 dictionary — a massive effort he compiled alone with half a dozen clerks — endeared him to his countrymen, particularly since the French assigned 40 Frenchmen to their dictionary, and they took 40 years to finish. Johnson took seven.
     His would-be biographer Boswell went to London as a 22-year-old Scottish lawyer with a cheerful "desire of being acquainted with celebrated men of every description."
     Boswell succeeded, hanging out not only with Johnson, but economist Adam Smith, artist Joshua Reynolds, statesman Edmund Burke, actor David Garrick, the cream of Georgian London. Unsatisfied, Boswell slips over to France to meet Voltaire.
     Such a man can't help dropping names, and in the same all-caps fashion that zealots use today. Here Boswell's about to dine with Johnson for the first time.
     "I had gratified my curiosity much in dining with JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU, while he lived in the wilds of Neufchatel," Boswell writes. "I had as great a curiosity to dine with DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON."
     Johnson is so fearsome that Boswell is surprised to find good food — veal pie! — on a decently set table.
     "I supposed we should scarcely have knives and forks, and only some strange uncouth, ill-drest dish,"Boswell confesses. "But I found everything in very good order."
     Not cuisine, but Johnson's genius for wit makes the book enjoyable.
     "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," Johnson says.
     "Sir," Johnson says, ending a discussion of the worth of pious resolution. "Hell is paved with good intentions."
     Marrying a second time is "the triumph of hope over experience."
     No one is better at taking down mediocrity.
     "He is not only dull, but the cause of dullness in others," Johnson says.
     The American Revolution is going on. Johnson, a royalist, puts his finger on the hypocrisy that would haunt the new republic.
     "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?" he asks.
     Boswell can't resist jumping in. He dutifully records Johnson's objections to slavery — "No man is by nature the property of another" — and then must register his own objections to such "wild and dangerous" attempts "to abolish so very important and necessary a branch of commercial interest." An institution that — opponents of gay marriage please note — Boswell argues, "in all ages GOD has sanctioned, and man has continued."
     I enjoyed Boswell's hidebound thickheadedness almost as much as Johnson's brilliance. He recoils at someone who shook David Hume's hand.
     "I took the liberty to object to treating an Infidel writer with smooth civility," he says, suggesting instead the philosopher should be kicked down the stairs.
     "An Infidel then shall not be treated handsomely by a Christian," he writes, voicing a sentiment troubling us now that we hear it from other quarters.
     They talk of sexual equality. Boswell is shocked that his father is considering leaving any inheritance to his sisters.
     "You ask by what right your father admits daughters to inheritance," Johnson writes. "Ask yourself, first, by what right you require them to be excluded?"
     They are vexed by the same media problems that vex writers today.
     Booksellers protest to Parliament over threatening new technology, "cheap editions of the most popular English books," causing publishers to "suffer from an invasion of what they had ever considered to be secure."
     Johnson's work is borrowed without payment or credit.
     "It was seized on with avidity by various publishers of newspapers and magazines, to enrich their publications," Boswell writes.
     Johnson is forced to take out an advertisement complaining "those essays are inserted in the newspaper and magazines with so little regard to justice or decency, that the Universal Chronicle, in which they first appear, is not always mentioned."
     Instead, his work is stolen "with the most shameless rapacity."
     In another current touch, there is a comments section in the edition I read. The margins are filled with notes by Johnson's friend, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, who considered Boswell a parasite and a liar and eagerly contradicted him.
     "Not I — never had," she writes, when Boswell quotes Johnson saying she had high regard for the Scot. "I thought him a clever & a comical Fellow." So feedback is nothing new.
     I'm not expecting you to run out and read it — it took me months, and I think you have to be a certain sort to finish. But it was comforting, somehow, to see that the shifting media landscape of today, with its whir of websites, resonates so neatly with a distant time of broadsheets and pamphlets.
     "We must read what the world reads at the moment," says Johnson, waving off suggestions that the "teeming of the press in modern times is prejudicial to good literature, because it obliges us to read so much."
     The spread of information is always good.
    "It must be considered," he says, "that we have now more knowledge generally diffused."

                        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 9, 2010