The Hairy Who?

Untitled, by Suellen Rocca

     My intention was to take the bus from 900 N. Michigan to Union Station Monday afternoon. But as we passed The Art Institute, I saw the Hairy Who? show had opened, so hopped off, figuring I'd catch a later train.
      Right away I learned something, before  even getting through the museum lobby. The six Chicago artists who formed the colorful 1960s art movement, listed on the banner—Jim Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum—did not, as I had always thought, include Ed Paschke. I don't know where I got the impression that he was part of the group; he just seemed to fit, I suppose, along with Roger Brown, who wasn't involved either. 
    I vaguely knew about the Hairy Who? artists, glanced here and there over the years. Looking at so many of their paintings and drawings, not to mention comic books, chairs, posters, and all the other self-promotion. I couldn't help feeling ... I'm going to hell for this ... underwhelmed. The artwork had a sensibility that echoed everything else of the era, from "Yellow Submarine" to late Salvador Dali, all amateurish and derivative and slapdash. The little glyphs and hollow-head doodles made me think these people were the best high school artists ever.
     That's too harsh. Gladys Nilsson had a certain children's book illustration whimsey, a Richard Lindner-y quality that I admired, or tried to. And I could see Paschke's lucha libre wrestlers and static-wavy TV images prefaced in Karl Wirsum's work. This moment really is the only coherent artistic movement to come out of Chicago, which doesn't elevate so much as condemn us. Maybe we really are the hicks those New Yorkers consider us to be.
      As I moved through the galleries—it's a big show, on two floors of the Art Institute—I started to suspect that perhaps the true genius of the group was not in any one image, even in any one artist, but how these half dozen managed to band together and, collectively, puff their talents, such as they were, into something celebrated half a century later. That takes doing. That's certainly art, of a sort.

Hairy Who? 1966-1969 runs through Jan. 6, 2019.

The Great War of the Wonder Woman, by Gladys Nilsson

Christine Blasey Ford may yet be more important to history than Brett Kavanaugh

     “Is this the little woman who made this great war?” Abraham Lincoln supposedly said when meeting Harriett Beecher Stowe in 1862.
     She wasn’t, of course — the mechanism for the Civil War had been set in motion with the founding of our country, 80 years earlier. Its creation an untenable balance, with an equal number of slave states and free states together in a nation supposedly based on liberty. The conflict was inevitable; Stowe merely wrote a book, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” that helped galvanize Northerners against an injustice all too many were willing to accept.
     The question of slavery seemed settled in 1865, with the defeat of the Confederacy. Though the question of who is a person, who counts, is still the essential issue of America, asked again and again throughout our history — should these former slaves be allowed to have careers in the military? To go to school with white kids? Should employers be obligated to hire them? And what about women? Are they human beings fully formed enough to vote? To fight as soldiers?
     The most recent instance unfolded dramatically last week, as Brett Kavanaugh was not waved onto the Supreme Court by his fellow members of the powerful, ruling class, but instead found himself confronted by an accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, who claims he tried to rape her at a party when they were both teenagers.
     Does it matter? Does she matter? How you answer the question depends on where you stood before asking it. The Republicans, having elected a man who admits molesting women, and contort themselves to tolerate any lie and ignore any infamy, say “No.” They didn’t even want to investigate her claims, because a year into the #MeToo movement, such questions are better left to Hollywood.
     Democrats disagree.

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Just walk out?

 



  

    Every day—make that, every goddamn day—I tell a story, or give my opinion in this space. And you, indulgent friends that you are, read it, which I deeply appreciate.
     Though now I'm looking for your opinion, because I'm confused.
      Last week I just had to visit the new Amazon Go store on South Franklin, part of the $1 trillion sell-everything-to-everybody-all-the-time company's efforts to eliminate all minimum wage jobs from the world by automating a range of jobs from delivery drivers to cashiers. I'm not sure who's going to be able to buy their stuff if nobody is employed, but I guess that's an issue for another day. Though, now that I think of it, judging from the number of employees, in orange fleeces or polos, overseeing the aisles of bottled water and prepackaged sandwiches at Amazon Go, Amazon still has a while to go before it fulfills its corporate dream. 
     Anyway, in the spirit of experiment, I bolted in, grabbed a thin can of iced coffee, and left, the glass gates smoothly sliding apart for me, as $2.49 (plus six cents tax, which seems suspiciously low) was deducted from my credit card account.
     In the two minutes, 13 seconds I was in the store (they time you, like it's a race) I noticed this array of coffee mugs announcing "JUST WALK OUT," the source of my question today:
     "JUST WALK OUT"—is that an appealing slogan? Do you want to own a coffee mug with "JUST WALK OUT" on it? "JUST WALK OUT?" Is that something good? Something to be desired? Aren't the situations where you "just walk out" uniformly bad? Burning buildings. Lousy plays. Crowded restaurant lobbies. 
    It might be nice, I suppose, to grab a few goodies without having to interact with a slack-jawed clerk, whom I end up thanking despite the fact it should really be the other way around. But not so nice that I want to pay $5.99 to celebrate this development on a coffee cup. 
    Or—and here is where you come in—am I missing something? Does "JUST WALK OUT" have some kind of edgy hip appeal which, being old, I am oblivious to? I'm sincerely curious? How did Amazon get to rule the world with such a tin ear? Or is the fault mine?

The Saturday Snapshot #8: The enormous hopscotch

     Thursday was a grim day for our nation. Another grim day. The testimony of Christine Blasey Ford in the morning, composed yet tremulous, laying out her accusations of assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Then, in the afternoon, his angry, self-pitying response. As if the aspirations of women in America were running full bore into the brick wall of entrenched patriarchal power. 
     When the dust cleared, the wall was still there. Not a scratch on it.
      About 5 p.m. I had had enough, and took the dog for a walk, running into a neighbor, walking her dog.  We strolled our neighborhood, exchanging our bewildered assessment of it all. 
      A few blocks away, we passed a pair of girls. Maybe 10. I didn't know them. "Cute dog" one of them said, and I glanced at her—freckles—smiled and thanked her. My neighbor and I stepping smoothly to the grass, so as not to trample on what they were drawing with colored chalk.
      What they had created, I saw the next morning, was an enormous hopscotch. Not the simple 8- or 10-box hopscotches typical of schoolyards, but an epic, 90 square masterpiece that went on forever, angling around the corner, taking up the better part of a block. I approached it from the reverse side, starting at 90, with radiant rays celebrating its completion. Every 10th numbers paused for the same spray of triumph. Around the corner, the creators had left their portraits, a sort of signature to the work. 
     I took the liberty of photographing the hopscotch, concerned about intrusion, but deciding the expectations of privacy on a public sidewalk are not great. Besides, it couldn't really be photographed properly: too big, too expansive for documentation. I walked away, thinking about my younger boy, and his bedroom-filling forts, constructed of yarn and blankets, requiring hours of solitary construction, solemn events of high importance, somehow, achievements that had to be respected. I wondered whether the enormous hopscotch would become a cherished part of their childhood, something the two girls would think of in future years with awe. Remember when we....?
    I didn't think about it again until Friday afternoon, when I went to walk the dog. It was raining, a cold, autumnal rain, and we didn't go as far as the hopscotch, which I imagined was being washed away at that very moment.
      The rain made me glad I had photographed the enormous hopscotch during its brief existence. Less than a day. I don't know why, but the elaborate artwork encouraged me, as a kind of counterpoint to the raw political and emotional ugliness unfolding in Washington. The unpretentious ambition of the thing. The physical challenge—of course the girls must have tried to hop it, tried to make it all the way to the end, 90 squares without a misplaced step, which had to be very difficult. The creativity of its conception, the daring, the brushing aside of accepted boundaries. Imagine what people could accomplish, girls and boys, men and women, if only society didn't constraint them the way it does, crush them down with limits,  pressing with its weight of expectation, tradition, the density of lies, of men imposing their power, their strength, their fragile egos and the untruths needed to prop up those egos, to keep them from sagging under their own enormity. 
     Who knows what the future holds, and how it will look back on our sorry time? There are elderly ladies alive today born when women could not vote. Where will these girls go and how will they remember this era, so troubling to live through? The sexism and repression of this country are not relegated to history. These regressive forces are strong, here and now. We saw the anger in Kavanaugh's aggrieved outpouring. It was not the complaint of an innocent man, but the whine of the entitled, frustrated to see his smooth glide interrupted by people who aren't supposed to matter. The forces that would drive us back today control the government, pushing their program of revanchism, a return to the bad old days. Remember what this is all about: taking away self-determination from women. Finding a man who will help strip women of their rights, help hobble these girls, limit their possibilities, even before they've had a chance to skip off their block and into the wide world.
    The old ways are winning. At the moment. But they have not won. The stakes, maybe not so clear before, are becoming ever clearer. Or should be. Meanwhile, the young are coming up, forming their worlds, thinking for themselves, pushing limits, unbroken. As always, they will see how things are done, will startle at the smallness of our world, its meanness and restriction, and will imagine something larger, will seek to manifest themselves in daring and creative ways. Big, bold, ways. They will demand something different. Something better than what we settle for now. 

Toni Preckwinkle was reforming bond court when Willie Wilson was busy in China

Toni Preckwinkle, right, talks with Justice Anne Burke, left and
 Hanke Gratteau, direct of the Sheriff's Justice Institute,
after visiting the new bond court.

     Tuesday’s field trip to bond court was scheduled long ago and, to be honest, I expected Toni Preckwinkle to cancel, assuming that her spare time is now taken up by this bothersome running-for-mayor business.
     I had underestimated her, as many do.
     “Today is all about pre-trial services,” said the Cook County Board president as her Chevy Suburban headed toward 26th and California.
     I put on my pouty reporter face. Nothing about the three-ring circus primary? Aww…
     “I have talking points…” she replied, glancing down at a piece of paper. “In September of 2017, Chief Judge Evans provided a general order to judges in bond court, that the default position should be I-bonds. Two thirds of the people, when we started, got cash bonds and one-third got either electronic monitoring or I-bonds. Now it is the reverse. … But we still have a very good compliance rate; about 89 percent of felony defendants released as of March 31 have appeared for all court dates.”
     Or in English: Last year, most of those arrested had to put up money to get out of jail (a D-bond, for example, requires posting 10 percent of the bail amount). Now most either wear an electronic bracelet, which costs less than half of what being kept in jail does, or are trusted to return (that’s an I-bond) because if they don’t they’ll be in even more trouble.
     Fixing bond court has been a passion of Preckwinkle’s — she took me there in 2011, her first year as president. Prisoners were being held, not due to the severity of their crimes, but the lightness of their pocketbooks.

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Flashback 2011: Toni Preckwinkle; "Most people in the jail are guilty of being poor."

Toni Preckwinkle at the jail, 2013

     I spent Tuesday afternoon with Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle—I'm writing about that in the paper tomorrow. The visit made me remember our first visit to the bond court together in 2011, and I thought I'd dig out this column, even before clown car candidate Willie Wilson held a press conference, also Tuesday, claiming that Preckwinkle is trying to steal credit for reforming the bond court system, credit that he, Willie Wilson, somehow deserves, a notion which is ... searching for a word that isn't actionable libel ... poppycock. 
     The following was published in 2011, a year when Willie Wilson was busy expanding his medical supply company to China.

     It's lunchtime, but Toni Preckwinkle isn't eating lunch. Instead the president of the Cook County Board is in a black Chevy Suburban, heading to the criminal courts at 26th and California to take a field trip.

     The county is spending $109,000 a day on prisoners who can't make a $2,000 bond.
     "If you have a $2,000 bond, you pay your $200 and you're out," she says. "If you have a $2,000 bond and you're impoverished and you don't pay it, are you any more of a risk? No, you just don't have $200. . . . Most of the people in jail are guilty of being poor."
     The solution, she says, is more electronic home monitoring. It costs $143 a day to jail a prisoner but only $65 to monitor somebody.
     "What happens in bond court is our top priority," she says, noting that, when she last visited in June, few she saw got monitoring.
     Saving money is not the only thing on Preckwinkle's mind as we approach court.
     "Eighty-three percent of the people who come in the jail, whether or not there for drug offenses, have illicit drugs in their system," she says. "We are dealing with substantial substance-abuse issues by detaining people in the jail, and we're only detaining of course black and brown people. Basically, you saw a story in your own paper how whites are most likely to use illegal drugs. If you look at bond court you'll never know that. The people there are black and brown. The last time I was there I sat for 45 minutes and I think there was one white person. So the jail is the intersection of poverty and racism. It's pretty stark."
     It sure is. We arrive shortly after noon, and Preckwinkle, about 6 feet tall, strides ahead, leaving her aides scrambling to catch up. She enters Room 100, the Central Bond Court. Associate Judge Donald D. Panarese Jr. is on the bench, hearing the case of Jamal Smith, 29, his hands chained to his waist, wearing the scarlet DOC jumpsuit reserved for notoriously violent prisoners - Smith is accused of attacking a correctional officer.
     It's hard to convey just how fast these cases are handled—from 80 to 100 in a court call lasting a little over an hour. At times it's like listening to auctioneers argue the law - the cases of some defendants are dispatched within less than 15 seconds.
     "What astounds me is how quickly decisions are made to deprive people of their liberty," she says. "It's profoundly disturbing that your liberty is decided in a heartbeat."
     She points at a clerk filling out forms.
     "She's using carbon paper!" Preckwinkle whispers, amazed. In this digital age, carts of files are still wheeled around the court.
     The cases fly by. Aggravated battery. Possession of a controlled substance. Retail theft. Fleeing. Most of the defendants are African Americans, with a few Hispanics and two white women accused of prostitution. Of the scores of defendants we see, exactly one - an Egyptian accused of selling counterfeit goods - has a private attorney.
     Preckwinkle is particularly pained by a pair of 11th-grade boys picked up on a drug charge. "Those kids are going to be in jail because nobody can come up with $200 - and they're 17 years old!" she says.
     She'd like to see pot offenses become tickets, and nonviolent offenders kept from jail.
     Cook County Circuit Court Chief Judge Timothy Evans says that while he is sympathetic, "obviously, our approach is justice first. The statutory requirements we have to follow do not focus on revenue saving."
     For example, he points out that a third of defendants ordered to receive electronic monitoring never get it, a decision made by the sheriff's office for various reasons. You can't home monitor a man without a home.
     This is my first time talking with Preckwinkle; I find her bluntness refreshing. She describes following Todd Stroger this way:
     "Succeeding somebody who is inept is a mixed blessing. On one hand, the bar is low. And on the other hand, things are a mess."
     Will Toni Preckwinkle be able to clean up an enormous system that was allowed to marinate in waste and corruption for decades, to trim and buff it into streamlined efficiency? Can she take the entrenched human disaster we are left with after centuries of slavery and systemic prejudice and recast it into something more economical and just? That's a tall order for anybody. But it sure is encouraging to see someone sincerely and vigorously try, if only as a change of pace.

                   —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 11, 2011

I want my Maypo; I hope I'm not alone in that.

 

     Lance Archibald is a 21st century CEO with all the right credentials: Harvard Business School, of course, via BYU, where he played basketball. He worked at Snapfish and Logoworks before joining his current cutting edge transformative technology company, Homestat Farm, turning abandoned urban industrial spaces into hydroponic gardens growing organic, artisanal produce for ...
     Just kidding: Homestat Farms owns Maypo, the 68-year-old hot cereal, which is why I sought him out. I've been shoveling warm, delicious Maypo Instant Maple Oatmeal into my eager maw for over half a century.
     Maypo had disappeared from shelves at my local Sunset Foods. Must be a restocking issue, I told myself. The intense, cult-like popularity of classic, comforting Maypo must make it difficult to keep in stock.
     But time passed, and nourishing, nostalgic Maypo wasn't returning. I did something completely out-of-character: I asked a manager at Sunset to stock the stuff. "If you carry it, I'll buy it," I promised.
     So — mirabile dictu — they did. A dozen boxes appeared on the shelf. I bought one, enjoyed a bowl the way I like it, doctored with wheat germ, bran and a tablespoon of real maple syrup to enhance the maple effect.
     But I can only eat so much. The rest of those boxes just sit there, reprimanding me. I feel responsible for Maypo, though I'm really not. Lance Archibald is. How did he get himself into this predicament?
     "I bought this business about four and a half years ago from a gentleman in his late 60s, looking to retire," Archibald, 44, told me. "When I looked at this business, I saw a category, the hot cereal category, that is growing, due to health trends, as people get away from cold cereal. I saw this brand, these brands — we also own Wheatena and Maltex — that have a really passionate customers base."

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