The Era of Contempt

     People try to soften the sting of whatever humiliation Donald Trump is inflicting upon the nation today by pronouncing it "the bottom," but that is based on the giddiest kind of optimism, the faulty logic that just because our leadership has sunk to a startling new low, it can't get worse. 
     When in fact, if a stone is sinking, experience tells us it'll keep going deeper and deeper. Yes, there's a hoped-for bottom, somewhere, in theory. But merely being deep underwater doesn't mean we're there. Stones don't bob back up to the surface just because they've sunk a long way.
     With a new low every day, or nearly, there is no reason to even suspect that today's depth will not be exceeded by worse tomorrow. I would be sincerely delighted if I believed this is as bad as it is going to get.
    But I don't. Rather, it will go on for years and years and get worse and worse and this country will be severely damaged. We're damaged already, in ways we haven't begun to consider.
     That said, I am human too, and like to comfort myself, when I can. Not by saying that today is as bad as it'll get, but by remembering that it must end. It has to. Not now, alas, not even soon, but someday. 
     Someday it'll be over and we'll have the luxury of looking back and wondering what it meant. Someday there will be history books, I hope, and one chapter in those as-yet-unlived histories will be about now. And as is common with such texts, the chapter will begin with a descriptive phrase. "A Nation Sundered" for the Civil War, and such.
     For our current betrayal of American values and norms, I'd like to nominate "The Era of Contempt." Because that is the basic operating principle here: yes, there is ignorance, and vanity, and greed. But those are specifics, related to a particular situation or three. Contempt — visceral disregard and scorn—is the overarching principle, the general theme. It's what Donald Trump appeals to and has always appealed to. It's why he was elected. He touched Americans in a certain spot and they reacted with a purr. He stroked the meanest, basest, most scornful and scoffing core of many Americans, and told them it was okay be like that. In fact, it was great.
     And they believed him. Believe him. Always will believe him. Why would they not?
     His followers manifest this sneering disdain like tuning forks. It's really all they ever say. I hear it every day. They do not write to argue, or observe, or reflect. They write to mock, to ridicule, not realizing that, to an outside observer, since the ridicule is coming from a person such as themselves, really, how much weight can their thoughts be given? Not only don't I write back, but I'm not even tempted to write back anymore. And say what? "You know, the low opinion of someone going hog wild for a bully, fraud, liar and most likely traitor just doesn't carry the heft you seem to think it does."
     In their defense, their opinion certainly counted in November, 2016. It's counting now, on an international scale. 
     Why bother talking back? Even if you would score points—and you can't, even if you could defeat them rhetorically—and you won't—well, congratulations: you bested a moron.
     So I silently put such people in the filter, where they gibber to each other, sometimes for years. Every few days I look in the spam filter, like a man looking at eels swimming around a watery pit. Letters still arrive, and I tend to throw them away unopened if they don't have a return address, and most don't. Maybe open them and read I line or two if I'm bored.
    But this one had a pre-printed sticker, with name and street address—Alan Leonard of Tinley Park. So I started reading, maybe because the handwriting is so neat. And that purple stationery. I read to the end, and decided it is in some ways an epitome, a classic example of its genre. It should be presented for your shock and edification. I originally said, "for your entertainment" but it really isn't funny. Rather, it is funny, but it shouldn't be. That future history will not be kind to us, and this is why. Should we survive this era and anyone bother to write fact-based histories, which is not the certainty it was two years ago. 
     No comment is really necessary, though you are free to remark upon its various wonders. It wasn't the only letter he sent me this week. Once they start, they seem to have trouble stopping.

What's with tomato soup and grilled cheese?

Morton's, 3/8/18

      The 100 lucky winners of the Sun-Times Night at the Opera contest had a wonderful time Tuesday at Lyric Opera of Chicago — the voices were tremendous, the music thrilling, the staging ... umm ... made us appreciate all the more the voices and music. At the pre-show party, waiters passed around crab cakes and lamb burgers — thank YOU Jewell Events Catering — and cups of tomato soup with cubes of grilled cheese sandwich.
     The soup was really, really good, which made me feel really, really guilty.
     Why? Because January, National Soup Month, is come and gone. February was cold, a good time to talk about hearty fare. Yet here March is flying by and I haven't shared my thoughts on tomato soup. Every time I try, Donald Trump, flailing in his high chair, gets his hands on another cherished aspect of democracy and smears strained carrots all over it. But we seem at a lull in the chaos. So let me whip this in the paper and be done with it.

     I really like tomato soup, particularly this time of year. Not because it's the best, most sublime foodstuff. I wouldn't even argue it's the best sort of soup. I just like it. A lot. If I visit a restaurant, and they have tomato soup, I'm almost compelled to order it.
     Why? Curiosity, mostly. Tomato soup is the measure of a restaurant. If they can't do that, they can't do anything. Some places nail it — Petterino's, RL. I was having lunch at the Kitchen with owner Kimbal Musk, and launched into my tomato soup spiel.
    "Some places make it taste like spaghetti sauce," I said. Their soup is quite good, and Musk called the chef out to talk about the recipe and draw a promise that their tomato soup will never change.
     Sometimes I order it when I don't even want it. I was meeting ... drawing the veil ... a certain grand lady of my acquaintance, a blue blood benefactress, at the Farmhouse in Evanston so we could trade cruel political gossip, and noticed they have tomato soup. With it, we split a grilled cheese sandwich — grilled cheese goes with tomato soup the way milk goes with cookies.
     Why is that?

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Visiting Mayan ruins

Caracol

     "Caracol" is Spanish for "snail," our guide told us, and the Mayan ruins we were approaching in jolts and sways were so named, he continued, either because of the snails found on the ground there everywhere, or because of the jarring van trip over pot-holed roads to get there.
     A joke, that second part, certainly. Though I was glad he mentioned it, since I otherwise might have overlooked the pale dime-size shells that were indeed everywhere, and quite beautiful. While I'm all for not stripping natural locations bare of their treasures, I did bend over and select a promising shell as a souvenir of my a week in Belize at the end of January. Judge me if you wish.
    It's odd. I think of my life as pretty much an unbroken shuffle through unbroken routine and relentless work, and it is, for the most part. But there are exceptions, and as I wondered about subject matter for today, it occurred to me that I hadn't mentioned visiting Mayan ruins, which is perhaps the definition of out-of-the-ordinary. I suppose because I felt that doing so falls under the rubric of "travel writing" and thus of not much interest to anyone. You probably are never going to Belize so why would you care? I'd be like one of those oblivious hosts pulling out the slide projector and the screen and a few boxes of carousels for his squirming guests. The dimmed lights, that hot slide projector smell, the thunk of the machine cycling through the static, dull photographs.
     So I'll make it quick. Since it might be worth alerting people to their presence.  I certainly had no idea. I mean, I knew they were there, vaguely.  Hunkered down in Mexico, in Central America, the sort of thing that blissed-out spiritual types seek out, I don't know, to get closer to the sun or something.  Not something I'd ever act upon or even consider acting upon.
     But we had a niece's wedding to attend — at a small Mayan ruin — and being nothing if not a practical person, I decided I wanted to make the most of being in the vicinity and a) hike in the rain forest b) explore a coral reef and 3) visit a Mayan ruin. 
      Actually, we went to two. The first was called "Lamanai" Yucatec Mayan for "submerged crocodile," and yes, we saw those too, on a 25-mile boat trip down the New River to get there.  The trip itself was an adventure, the guide stopping to point out birds and sleeping bats and various spots of interest.
     Lamanai is in a nature preserve, and the hike in had much to recommend it—our guide plucked leaves from an all-spice tree and had us chew them—I always thought "all-spice" was a melange of spices but it's not: it's a tree that tastes like a mix of cinnamon,  nutmeg and cloves.

Lamanai

       The pyramids loomed ahead of us as we hiked. There is a lot of really steep climbing, expansive views and the collective weight of history. The Maya lived for over 3,000 years at Lamanai, from 1500 BCE to Spanish colonial times.
     After our trip to Lamanai, in the Northern part of the country, I felt a little bad that we planned to go to Caracol, near the country's western border with Guatemala. I blithely assumed that nothing could be more incredible than what I had already seen.
    I was wrong. Caracol far surpassed it — far bigger, first of all. Not just a pyramid or two but entire complexes, plazas, patrolled by Belize soldiers to guard against Guatemalan infiltrators. Carvings of priests and birds had been recovered, and were on display. The trip itself was an adventure, going and coming — on the way we stopped at the utterly fantastic Rio Frio Cave on the way in, and paused to swim in rock pools on our way back.
     It put everything in perspective, somehow, to stand in front of a carving that someone chiseled 1300 years ago and reflect just how effaced their history is, how lost: whether a period is recorded or lost might depend on whether a stone plaque toppled back, and was preserved, or forward, and had its writing washed away in centuries of rainfall. The mute, green covered hillsides of the pyramids seemed a kind of judgment. 
     We assume such places fell to Spanish invaders, but Caracol was abandoned around 1050 AD, a reminder that no outside force can hurt a society as much as it can hurt itself. A lesson  I knew already, but it was worth flying down to Central America to see it in such dramatic and beautiful fashion. Plus seeing all there was in Belize, a country I had barely heard of, reminded me of just how much world that I, a moderately well-traveled guy, had not only never traveled to, but never wanted to travel to. Better get busy.

Rio Frio Cave

   

‘Long Way Home’ turns ‘Odyssey’ into homage to Chicago

Chloe Johnson (photo courtesy of Chicago Children's Choir)

     “The Odyssey has always been with me,” Emily Wilson writes in a note at the beginning of her new translation of the epic Greek adventure — the first into English by a woman — explaining how her elementary school put on a children’s production when she was 8, which inspired her to eventually learn Greek and Latin and study at Oxford.
     On that scale, I’m late to the party, having only discovered the book in my mid-30s, when Robert Fagles published his masterful translation.
     Like many classics, The Odyssey is not only a thrilling adventure story, but a lens that can be used to view contemporary life.
     All the confusion over gun control, for instance, is clarified by a single, utterly true sentence at the beginning of Book XIX, “Iron has powers to draw a man to ruin.” (“Iron” refers to swords; the sentence is commonly translated: “The blade itself incites to deeds of violence,” though I can’t find where originally).
     And just to show how flexible the classics truly are, that exact same passage can also be used to support gun advocates, since it occurs as Odysseus is hiding the suitors’ weapons so he can more easily kill them.
     You’re allowed to use the classics however you please — that’s half the fun. They belong to everyone, and almost everyone has taken a crack at The Odyssey or its hero, Odysseus. Plato commented, Dante condemned (sticking Odysseus way down in the 8th circle, with the frauds, for “the ambush of the horse.”). The plot has inspired everything from Milton’s “Paradise Lost” to James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”
     So my interest was piqued when I heard the Chicago Children's Choir has turned The Odyssey into a hip-hop adventure called "Long Way Home," being performed this weekend.
     How did that happen?
     It started with the Q Brothers.
     "We're a theater collective in the city," said JQ. "We've been writing hip-hop adaptations of classics for almost 20 years now."
     Mostly Shakespeare; Children's Choir director Josephine Lee saw their "Othello: The Remix."
     "She said, 'I've got to do this with my kids somehow, what can we do? We have to tell the most epic story ever,'" recalled JQ. "I said, 'Well, the most epic story ever is The Odyssey. Let's place it in Chicago and let's set teenagers as the main characters, the heroes."
     Odysseus became "Ody" and female, performed by 17-year-old poet and aspiring filmmaker, Chloé Johnson, a senior at Lindblom Math and Science Academy.
     "It's cool to take on the role," she said. "It's fun learning how to rap over a beat while saying a line."
     Some concepts move with surprising ease from ancient Greece to contemporary Chicago. Odysseus's crew becomes Ody's, well, crew.
     As with translator Emily Wilson, a student Odyssey has piqued Johnson's interest in the original.
     "The opportunity to be part of "Long Way Home" got me to research The Odyssey and learn about it," Johnson said.
     She has been in the choir of a decade, and gone with them to South Africa, Italy and Cuba.
     "It's been an amazing experience, to travel abroad," she said. "This summer we are traveling to Israel."
     Johnson speaks with infectious enthusiasm, sometimes bursting into snatches of song.
     "Next year I will be going to college," she said. "I would like to go into film studies. I'm trying to be an influential woman in film, I am very excited. I am ready to take on the world, ready to leave home, see how I can work independently."
     I couldn't help but think of the reputation burdening Chicago teens, and asked her about it.
     "It is very frustrating," Johnson said. "Chicago is painted as 'Chi-Raq,' people don't realize, our youth, what we are capable of. Chicago is a very segregated city. Not everyone has opportunities, but children who are interested in going into music have that opportunity, to sing and express themselves. My favorite thing about Chicago is the Chicago arts community, Louder than a Bomb poetry, Chicago Children's Choir, the Department of Cultural Affairs. That is what unites the city, its visual arts, its film, its poetry."
     "Long Way Home" has its world premiere at the Studebaker Theater, 410 S. Michigan Ave., on Friday. It runs through Sunday.

Dueling hells

     "Faust" by Charles Gounod opened Saturday at Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Tuesday 100 lucky winners of the Sun-Times "Night at the Opera" contest will enjoy it with me. It's one of my favorite operas—I love the music—and this production has a new twist: the old guy  who sells his soul to the devil is no longer a philosopher, but an artist. Noted contemporary artist John Frame does the scenery, some intriguing short films and most delightfully, masks for Mephistopheles's little helpmates.      This is the third Lyric production of "Faust" that I've seen. The first was in the early 1990s, when great bass Sam Ramey owned the devil role. The second was a decade ago, when the "Lyric" presented not one, but two "Fausts," a non-coincidence I couldn't help but explore in this 2009 column. 

     When this column is done, hot from the oven and ready to be served, I go over it one last time looking for repetitions, which irk me. A word can be repeated powerfully ("Yes I said yes I will yes") but it also can foul an otherwise serviceable sentence. ("I set the chemistry set on the table and was all set.") 

     Thus it seemed odd to me — if to no one else — that the Lyric Opera's upcoming 2009-10 season includes both "Faust," by Gounod, and "The Damnation of Faust," by Berlioz. 

     Two Fausts? How did that happen? There are hundreds of operas to chose from. 

     " 'Faust' was the first one we picked," said Lyric General Director Bill Mason. Scheduling operas is a delicate mix of art and commerce, based on what singers are available, what sets are free, and achieving the right blend of crowd-pleasing favorites and cutting-edge new productions. 

     "We wanted to do a Berlioz," said Mason, and they puzzled over which one. "The Trojans"? "A monster," said Mason. Others were considered and rejected before "Damnation" was suggested. 

     The coincidence did give them pause (that's a relief — I'd hate to think they first noticed after they printed up the posters). 

     "We thought, 'should we have two Faust stories in the same season?' " said Mason. "But the more we talked about it, the more we thought it was interesting and a good idea. You've got this great epic by Goethe, you see these two French composers, what elements they chose to use and how they fashioned their libretto out of it." 

     The basic story is the same — aging scholar Faust sells his soul to the devil to regain lost youth and score a pretty maiden. How they handle the tale, however, differs from the first moment. 

     "In 'Faust,' in the first scene, Faust sees a vision of Marguerite, falls in love with her and immediately consigns his soul to the devil," said Mason. 

     "As men will do. . . " I ventured. 

     "But in the Berlioz, Faust doesn't agree to give his soul to the devil until the very end when he sees she's in prison to be executed. The first one is pure lust, the second a more altruistic thing." 

     Mason pointed out that there is a third major Faust opera — "Mefistofele" by Boito -- and it would not have been unimaginable to include that one as well. 

     "The infernal hat trick," I said. 

     "I wish we could have done that," he said. "That would have been fun, too." 

     Too bad—can't you just see the posters? The Lyric's Satanic Season. 

                                         —originally published in the Sun-Times, June 1, 2009

Barbie: You always hurt the ones you love

     Saturday we revisited comforting the Ken doll on his 50th birthday. So it seems somehow fitting to pivot to Barbie, and I happen to have this article Forbes assigned me in 2009 on Barbie mutilation, part of a Barbie 50th birthday package. Approaching a story such as this requires a plan: should I quiz female friends? Present myself at playgrounds and try to talk to girls? That seemed a bad idea. I scoured academic websites and posted a request on Facebook, and was surprised at women lining up to tell me about cutting up their Barbies. An early lesson in Facebook's value as a widely-flung net.

     A young girl bakes her Barbie doll in the oven. A San Francisco bar invites patrons to have at the dolls with knives. A New York artist drives nails into Barbie, calling it sculpture.  

     What's going on here? How did Barbie, history's most popular doll, celebrating her 50th year as a beloved plaything for girls worldwide, become an object that females of all ages cut, burn, bend, spindle and mutilate? And what does it all mean?
     Let's start with girls. Barbie is, after all, supposed to be a toy. In 2005, researchers at England's University of Bath, conducting a study of how children play, were surprised at what girls do to their Barbies.
     "The types of mutilation are varied and creative, and range from removing the hair to decapitation, burning, breaking and even microwaving," writes Dr. Agnes Nairn. "The girls we spoke to see Barbie torture as a legitimate play activity, and see the torture as a 'cool' activity in contrast to other forms of play with the doll."
     The study's conclusion--that the abuse means that Barbie is a "hate figure" among 7- to 11-year-old girls--sparked debate all over the world.
     Some felt that Barbie was merely getting her due as a poor role model; others argued that battering a Barbie is no different than, say, battering a red wagon--only with a cultural touchstone like Barbie, we notice.
     The study's conclusions "smack of academic overanalysis," Anastasia de Waal wrote in The Guardian, "of grown-ups getting too excited about the symbolism of child's play. ... Testing the versatility and robustness of one's toys is neither new nor sinister."
     While the study emphasized the hostility suggested by hacking something apart, the girls actually told researchers they didn't despise Barbie so much as feel they had outgrown her.
     "The most readily expressed reason for rejecting Barbie was that she was babyish and girls saw her as representing their younger childhood out of which they felt they had now grown," said Nairn.

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Trump flips the bird to Chicago business and American trading partners

      When we kids asked our mother which of us were her favorite child, she didn't tell the truth — me, obviously, I knew in my heart.

     Rather she would lie, spreading her hand wide, wiggling her fingers and asking which finger she loved most. They must teach that ruse in Mom School, though it doesn't make sense: Who wouldn't prefer their index finger over their pinkie?
     But we bought it; we were kids.
     The government pretends to take that same impartial attitude when it comes to American industries. All are valued; how could it be otherwise?
      But it is otherwise. Like the barnyard critters in "Animal Farm," all are equal, but some are more equal than others. To see the result of this favoritism all you have to do is go to 4656 W. Kinzie St. and survey the weedy expanse east of Cicero Avenue.
      The largest candy factory in the world used to be there. For almost a hundred years, the E.J. Brach plant had thousands of employees — over 4,000 at its peak — turning out millions of pounds of Chocolate Stars and Jelly Nougats, Candy Corn and Conversation Hearts, and my favorite, Sundaes Neapolitan Coconut, those sticky rectangles of chocolate, vanilla and strawberry.
     All gone, a shadow on a map — the ghost plant sketched by a few streets that mysteriously vanish, such as Kenton north of Kinzie. The Brach factory closed down in 2003, thanks largely to congressional efforts to prop up the sugar industry, which is big in places like Minnesota (sugar beets) and Florida (sugar cane) but not so big in Illinois. Sugar in the United States costs two to four times as much as in the rest of the world, thanks to the U.S. government.
      So Brach is gone. (You can see part of the factory being blown up as Gotham Hospital in "The Dark Knight.") Wrigley exiled chewing gum production to Mexico and China in 2005.

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