Mary-Kate, Ashley and Me

    Everything is online, where it can easily be found. But because of the endless mass of information, some tidbits hide in plain sight. Google my name—go ahead, plug "Neil Steinberg" into the search engine. You'll see, on the left, a listing, my Wikipedia page and this blog and such. On the right, a little box, with the fly-on-the-ceiling column bug perspective the paper took years ago, and some of the books that nobody but me thinks about anymore.
    And movies. I don't talk about the movies much, for reasons that will become clear. But in this Me Too moment, I suppose I should get ahead of the curve and spill the beans myself.
     "Getting There," "Our Lips are Sealed" "Passport to Paris" —what are those? They are the direct-to-video movies made by the Olsen Twins, Mary-Kate and Ashley. I was the producer of the movies. If you are unfamiliar with Hollywood, the producer puts up the money and makes profit—or, as it often turns out, takes the loss. 
     How did that happen?  The Olsen Twins were fairly big stars at the time. They debuted as infants on "Full House" and had a variety of cameos while developing themselves as pre-teen fashion icons.
     It was a different era. The late 1990s, I took several protracted leaves, supposedly to raise our newborns with my wife. But I had time on my hands—they napped a lot. I got bored, money was tight—these were unpaid leaves—and I took a variety of freelance assignments. Rolling Stone asked me to profile this pair of 12-year-olds, the Olsen Twins, who were introducing their own line of glitter that was popular among music fans.  They came to Chicago as part of their promotional tour—FaceFantasy the stuff was called—and I went down to the Ambassador East and met them and their manager.

     Journalists know how difficult it is to interview children, even one-on-one. Now make it two kids, two girls, two 12-year-old twins who have been famous literally their whole lives. They never took their eyes off the big television in their suite, but laid on their stomachs, watching. When their manager snapped it off and asked them to look at the nice man and answer his questions, they shot me a single glance of searing annoyance and contempt that is burnt into my retinas to this day, let out a howl of laughter and began gibbering to each other in their own private language, twaddling their fingers together in some kind of private twins code.
     Not an auspicious start. The manager—April Fowler, I can't forget that name—and I repair to the bar where, many martinis later, I had learned of her woes, how difficult the twins were to work with, what a fortune could be made for the person who would snap the whip and get them in front of a camera. 
     I woke up the next morning with the worst hangover of my life, notes scribbled on a bunch of bar napkins, and a contract to produce the next three direct-to-video Olsen Twins movies. My wife thought I was insane, but she was bearing the brunt of a newborn and a toddler. I had money from a book. Next thing I knew I was paying for gaffers and best boys and set designers while flying around the country, trying to find bigger fools and convince them to kick in even more money into our movie.
     Given the Olsen Twins history of successful ruinous litigation against anything critical written about them, I suppose the less I say now, the better. Let's just leave it that the movies had a way of departing radically from my initial concept as producer. For instance, what I proposed as "Nursed by a Wolf," casting the twins as female versions of Castor and Pollux and retelling the founding of Rome as a madcap adventure turned into "Passport to Paris" a romp through that exceedingly expensive city. "Our Lips Are Sealed" began as a meditation on duality in Western culture, yet ended up a chase movie set in even-more-expensive Australia. 
     Economics and my own demands at home left me little time to visit them on set or exert the control I probably should have as producer. I remember the last check I wrote—$1,234 worth of long-distance phone calls between Sydney and some boy in Montclair, New Jersey. Then I was depleted and nudged aside by investors with deeper pockets, retaining producer credit and what little of my pride remained. 
    Anyway, enough of this. I'm kind of sorry I brought it up. The Olsen Twins actually deal with my stint as their money man in a somewhat kind fashion in their recent biography, "Our Struggle" (Knopf: $26.99). You can read their description here. 


     
     

Flashback 2013: Congratulations Toronto!

    One fact about Chicago that only gets whispered in the place self is that while dynamic cities hurtle forward in population, we've remained frozen at 2.7 million people, as residents seek better jobs, flee violence, and new parents take a look at the school system and bolt for the suburbs (turns out, it wasn't just me).

     When this ran six years ago, Toronto had just edged past us in population. Now Canada's premiere metropolis has lost 60,000 people and we've gain 10,000. So maybe we can edge past them though, having established that population isn't a very good judge of a city, I won't be able to boast, at least not without gulping a heady draft of the shameless hypocrisy being quaffed coast-to-coast of late.

     The Canadians, in all their damnable fairness, are too decent to crow.
     So if you look at, oh, the Canadian Business magazine website Wednesday, it will reluctantly point out, that yes, Toronto is now North America's fourth largest city, nudging ahead of Chicago, its 2,791,140 residents to our 2,707,120. Yet it also cautions, in the very first paragraph: "But hold off on the confetti for one moment. Because while that's true, it's only half the story."
     What follows is an exercise in humility that would make the average chest-thumping, We're No. 1-howling Chicagoan shake his head in utter, visceral disgust.
      You see, it points out, had Toronto not "amalgamated"—Canadian for "sucked up nearby communities"—in 1998, "it wouldn't be nearly as big as Chicago."
     That's like saying O'Hare Airport wouldn't be in Chicago if Dad Daley hadn't twisted a few suburban arms to grab it in the mid-1950s. To which the Chicago answer is a shrug and a mutter of, "So what? We got it now."
     The magazine calmly points out that the Greater Toronto Area is about 6 million people, while Chicago has almost 9.5 million, and that many claim "Toronto still has a long way to go to catch up with Chicago."
     Well, um, yeah, it would have a long way, were that possible, but it isn't . . .
     See, their approach takes all the fun out of this. How can you swing at an opponent who starts the fight by lowering his gloves and smiling and complimenting your robe?
     Chicago doesn't have a third the population of New York City, yet that has never stopped us from standing on tiptoe, jutting our jaws out, pinwheeling our fists and snarling, "Oh yeah? You and what army?"
     We've been doing it for 100 years. The "Windy City" moniker—and everybody knows this, but there might be a reader or two who doesn't—isn't a reference to our gale-scoured lakefront, but to the hurricane of boostery braggadocio that accompanied our quest for the 1893 World's Fair.
     To be honest, even to parse the Chicago/Toronto comparison is an insult to our city. The two don't compare, except in numbers of people, now, apparently, and that doesn't mean anything. The top of the list, the very most populous city in North America is—and it was a surprise to me, not because it didn't make sense, but because I never thought about it before —Mexico City, with 8.8 million people.
     Now I've never been to Mexico City, so don't want to put it down. But it isn't as if the sense is that Mexico City is three times better than Chicago. Maybe they just hide their wonders very, very well.
     Ditto for Toronto. I've spent some time there so don't want to give the impression that people who live there are anonymous ciphers grinding through joyless lives devoid of charm or significance. They have . . . ah . . . Tim Horton's doughnuts shops, which I've eaten at, and which offers perfectly adequate doughnuts—not the excellent, artisanal doughnuts you'll find on every block nowadays in Chicago. But they will do, in a pinch, if you're hungry.
     So I won't start waxing on the generic, anodyne nature of life in Toronto. Its nondescript skyline whose only noteworthy element is a TV antenna. Its generic monuments; the Monument to Multiculturalism in front of the Fairmont Hotel comes to mind. The city also has a memorial to people killed in industrial accidents—I kid you not. I'm not doing that, because, thanks to the Internet, it would only jab at some nice people who, as it is, already sit crouched in slush with their hands locked around their knees, gazing poutingly over the border to the south, paralyzed with envy, disdain and longing—they just wish we cared about them enough so they could have the chance to scorn us.
     But we don't and never will.
     Toronto is slightly larger than Chicago in population, though they can hardly admit it.
     "For now, any way you slice it, Toronto is roughly the same size as Chicago," the Canadian Business article ends. "But if both cities stay on their present paths, ours will eventually become noticeably bigger."
     Well said, my brother journalist in the frosty North. Toronto will eventually become noticeably bigger. I think that sums up the situation. I prefer words I once told a friend considering leaving Chicago to take a job in Toronto: "Why? I'd rather be the 500th most important person in Chicago than the King of Canada."
     There are things that can't be measured in numbers, and judging a city by its population might seem significant, but that's like judging a book by its weight, or a song by the number of musical notes.
     So congratulations, Toronto, on the extra people. Let us know when you can make a decent pizza, or build a building that bears a second glance. Or when somebody writes a song about Toronto. Or shoots a movie in Toronto that actually takes place in Toronto. We'll be here, waiting, humming "Chicago."

      —Originally published in Sun-Times, March 8, 2013

The Saturday Snapshot #32

     I only saw it once, parked all by itself in an auxiliary parking lot at the Chicago Botanic Garden: a Volvo P1800, my dream car, the first car I ever owned, though mine had seen hard use—an engine salvaged from a 144, a coat of white paint that was neither original nor glossy, but more of an eggshell matte. Nothing at all like this car, which was pristine: rehabbed and repainted, done with love and attention to detail. I stopped our van, hopped out and took a few photos. Why not? It was beautiful.
     That was a few years ago. Three or four. What is surprising is that now, whenever I pass the spot where the P1800 had been, as I do a few dozen times a year after visiting the garden, I give it the briefest glance of inquiry and longing, as if I expect the P1800 might somehow be there. Of course I do. The heart is a lonely hunter, but not very bright, and it returns , the poor dumb beast, to where it has found success, even when there is little hope of success. I never saw the car again. But it could be there, someday. Why not? It was there once..

Flashback 1999: It's a life of hard work in hardware business

  

      I am on vacation, and will be out-of-the-loop for ... a while.  In the meantime, I hope you don't mind if I disinter a few of my favorite columns of yesteryear that have somehow eluded previous expeditions back into the past. One of the great things about my job is the way you can peer into other people's lives, but sometimes it's heartbreaking to do so. 


     Sponges. Springs, all different sizes. Bins filled with black nails. Zud Cleaner. Wooden ladders. Spools of chain. Glue. White rubber sink stoppers. Latex gloves. Kleencut shears.  

     Life hands everybody something different. Michael Mages, it handed a hardware store: Mages Hardware, 3653 Irving Park Road. The same store, under the same tin ceiling, that his father ran for his entire life. The same store, in the same place, that his grandfather opened May 20, 1919: 80 years ago this month.

     It is a narrow world, 20 feet across the storefront. Mages began working here as a child of 8 or 9. Now he is 45.
     "This is a treasure," he says, by way of greeting, walking across the ancient wooden floor, faded to a dull gray, with a sloping topography of gentle rolling hills and valleys all its own.       "The building was built in 1910. It was a bakery before my grandfather bought it."

     Mages is the only employee. His mom keeps the books. He had to let his last part-time worker go — business is that slow. He opens the store at 8:30 a.m. and closes it at 5:30 p.m., six days a week. His main hobby is bowling. Mages belongs to two leagues. His average is 125.
     Other men might have rebuffed life's gift. That's what Mages' older brother, Charles, did. He's a big wheel at Motorola.
     But Michael Mages never thought of tossing back the cards life dealt him and asking for a fresh hand. He is fighting to keep the store open in an age of hardware giants that can undercut him in price, overwhelm him in selection, outdo him in every category that doesn't involve considerations such as the appeal of oak cases with curved glass fronts, or the tactile sense of having a purchase wrapped up in brown paper and twine, then rung up on a cash register made in 1922, back when they still felt the need to make the metal look like mahogany.
     "I always enjoyed being in the hardware business," says Mages, no relation to the sporting goods store tycoon. "It changes every day. One day you're selling hammers. The next day pipe. The next day fixing windows. I like challenges. I liked doing the sales and promotions. They were always successful up to about 1990. Then the big boys came in, and people didn't notice your fliers, and it was harder to make an impact with an individual sale or promotion."
     You get the sense that at times the joy fades a little.
     "I'm not getting rich doing this," he says. "It's a tough grind. A small store has to struggle."
     Mages is always trying. He asked the Irving Park Historical Society to route its housewalk through his store. It declined, for good reason.
     To be honest, the store is old, but no Taj Mahal. There is dust. The beautiful cabinets are, for the most part, covered up. The items are not displayed in a particular order, although Mages bristles at that notion.
     "There is an order," he says, "I know where everything is."
     A sheet of white paper is taped to the wall behind the counter, next to a price list for rock salt (10 pounds: 79 cents). On it are names and dates: Max Mages, 82, born 1881, died Dec. 16, 1963; Sam Mages, 78, born Oct. 30, 1916, died April 15, 1995. And other family members who worked here.
     I ask Mages why he has the names posted, and he points out some cryptic numbers and letters by each name.
     "Grave locations," he says. "I go to the cemetery."
     He still misses his father, who died four years ago.
     "We worked well together; we had a system," he says. "If somebody brought in a window to be repaired, I would take out the old window; he would put the new window in."
     He brings out a gold-plated Stanley hammer mounted on a plaque.
     "At the 75th anniversary he was pretty sick," says Mages. "He was in seventh heaven with this thing. He brought it to show people at the synagogue. He did everything but take it to bed with him. It was the one thing I did in my life for him that he really appreciated."
     That last sentence hanging in the air, I ask why he does it. The relatives worked hard, but they're gone. He could earn more elsewhere.
     "It's hard to explain," Mages says. "I feel for my father and my grandfather, trying to make it, having a dickens of a time. This is their store. The product of their sweat."
     Does he ever regret his choice. He might have seen the world.
     "Are you kidding?" he says. "I don't care about that. You might travel around the world. But you almost always end up back in the same place."
     It is a place where he is at least appreciated. Art Staniec, a funeral director from Holenbach Funeral Home, walks in and buys $ 6.72 worth of steel wool. I ask him how long he's been coming here.
     "Forever," he says. "We prefer dealing with a family business. That's what we are. I don't mind paying a little bit more to Mike. If we don't support each other we're all going to be screwed."
     Wooden clothespins made in West Paris, Maine. Deadlocks. Ka-Bar Knives ("A Fistful of Quality"). A Madison Maid ironing table.
     "I really, in my heart, feel that this is a lost treasure," says Mages.
                            —Originally published May 30, 1999

Flashback 1999: Medical-photo business not always a pretty picture

  
     I am on vacation. But before I simply hang out a "Gone Fishing" sign, I've rounded up a few of my all-time favorite columns for your reading pleasure.  Today's and tomorrow's are linked: the subject of tomorrow's column read this, and contacted me, wanting a similar treatment.
     I tried to find a trace of Custom Medical, but it seems to have vanished obliterated in the general media conflagration caused by the online world.  No need to puzzle why: the image of bacteria above, labeled free for re-use, was pulled off the internet in seconds.

     Life magazine wants tuberculosis. MTV, blood coursing through a vein. And Newsweek phones, every Friday it seems, seeking bubonic plague, E coli, cancer. They can't wait; they need it now.
     The calls and e-mails pour into Custom Medical Stock Photo, on Irving Park Road, the nation's largest supplier of medical images: 500,000 slides, from the most benign — a happy baby, a vial of pills -- to the most macabre, horrifying photographs of disease and trauma imaginable.
     When I ran into Custom Medical archivist Andy Hess, I knew I had to check out the operation. Making your living by tracking down pictures of brains and tumors seemed worth looking into.
     OK, OK, I'll admit it, there was something else. The way I met Hess will explain the other reason I wanted to go. I was in my neighborhood bar, Friar Tuck's. The bartender introduced herself. "I'm Chris," she said. "I'm Neil," I said. A tall, bearded fellow across the bar stood up. "Neil?" he said, "Neil Steinberg?" He hurried around the bar.
     As he approached me, I did something I'm not proud of. I lifted my hands defensively in front of my face and, cringing, squeaked, "You're not going to hit me, are you?"
     I figured he was an unhappy reader.
     When Hess—whom I had known in college—told me what he was doing now, my first impulse was, Yuuuuck. To counterbalance it, I felt I had to go and see for myself. Otherwise, I would always wonder.
     Custom Medical has 13 employees and occupies an airy space below a dance studio, with high ceilings and sunny glass block windows.
     The company was founded by Mike Fisher, who was a photo retoucher in the 1970s when he saw computers eating into his business. So he went to school to study medicine, hoping to become a medical photographer, when he met microbiologist Henry Schleichkorn.
     "I had 5,000 photographs; he had 5,000 photographs," said Fisher. "We basically looked at each other and said, 'Somebody's got to get these medical pictures from somewhere.' "
     Custom Medical has about 300 photographers and doctors contributing work. If the company doesn't have the image you want, it'll get it. Custom Medical once bought a cadaver and hired a pathologist to cut it up. It advertises for people with exotic medical conditions to come in and get their conditions photographed, for a small fee.
     The pictures end up everywhere. The organs pulled from the cadaver—set upon a glass plate and photographed—ended up as the graphics for a kids toy. A set of scanning electron micrographs were made into animation for an upcoming Patricia Arquette horror movie.
     "We're the kind of company where you see our pictures but you don't know it's us," said Fisher.
     This does not mean that they will sell the images to anyone. The rock group Santana once asked for a photo of a fetus for an album cover.
     "It's awfully inviting to say, 'That's my fetus on Santana's album,' " said Fisher, who refused. "But we're respectful of the material."
     The business is complex. Price of an image depends on how big it will be printed, how long it will be used, and where it will appear, whether in a popular magazine or a textbook. Custom Medical once sold a picture for $20 to appear on the cover of a high school student's science report.
     Some images do better than others. "There's a breast cancer cell that's sold like crazy," said Hess. The most profitable image is a ring of six surgeons—models—shot from below, as if a patient were looking up from an operating table.
     "I lit it and did the shot in 15 minutes," said Fisher. "The picture has sold over 100 times now; it has easily earned over $ 100,000."
     I asked Fisher if he ever saw anything that really upset him.
     "There were images of individuals out of Zambia," he said. "They were the only images that set me back, only because of the lack of medical care. It was really sad. Some of them were children. I've shown them to physicians, and their jaws usually drop."
     Before I left, I asked Hess to break out the really harsh stuff. He did, spreading several dozen slides across a big light table. I won't describe them, since every person to whom I've tried to describe them has stopped me after about three words. Let's just say you should be very careful around farm machinery. If you can avoid being shot, do so. And if anybody invites you to witness abdominal surgery on a horse, decline.
     When I closed my eyes to go to sleep that night, those slides, clear as if they were in front of me, leaped and danced in my mind for a good long time. Sometimes, it's better not to confront your fears.
                 —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 10, 1999

"Look at me!"

 

     I'm on vacation, technically. But before I put my feet up, enter radio silence, flip on the Greatest Hits reel and leave the blog to run itself—which might not be much, but is more than the folks reading the paper will get—I have to respond to Donald Trump's unhinged lashing out at his enemies, boosted by what he imagines, no doubt from watching Fox News, is an exoneration in the Mueller Report, when in fact—for those of us who still care about facts—it did no such thing.
     “There are a lot of people out there that have done some very, very evil things, some bad things, I would say some treasonous things against our country,” said Trump, doing his trademark projecting his flaws upon others and counting on his fans not to notice. “And hopefully people that have done such harm to our country — we’ve gone through a period of really bad things happening — those people will certainly be looked at.”
     By "evil things" he means law enforcement seeing whether Trump was the co-conspirator with Russia as they meddled in the 2016 elections—the meddling itself is beyond question—or merely its grinning beneficiary. He means the media that covered those investigations. Which leads us back, again, to that question that can't be asked enough:
     Why did the Russians prefer him to Hillary Clinton?
     Right. Because Clinton could be expected to work for the benefit of the United States of America. While Trump, at all times in all things, looks to his own private benefit, including the frisson of pleasure he gets rolling like a puppy at Vladimir Putin's feet and having his tummy scratched.
     I glanced into my spam filter, and heard ululations of joy coming from Trump supporters—the true villains of this story—who think their man has been triumphant because the special prosecutor did not choose to charge him with collusion. How special for them. For those of us who have not inexplicably sold out our country, abandoned our critical thought and embraced a monster, we have to remember that Donald Trump remains today what he was last week and last month and last year: a liar, bully and fraud who narrowly squeaked into office by making a raft of promises he never intended to fulfill, not to forget a big push over the wall by his pals the Russians. That he is now, then and always, someone who trashed all cherished American norms—respect for law enforcement, acknowledgement of verifiable fact, toleration of the media—and flushed them down the toilet. It hardly needs to be said, and here in the Midwest, no matter how I wave my hand, I'll never catch his attention over the heads of all the East Coast media. But with Trump promising dire consequences for those who point out his galaxy of flaws, I wanted to make sure to stand up and be counted among the righteous. I'm proud to state it as loudly as possible: Trump is a betrayal of everything valuable in American life. This historical moment either ends badly for Donald Trump, or badly for America. There is no middle ground. 
     

Off-Year Election Day

   A sticker? What are the activities where they give you a sticker upon completion? Cleaning your room? If you're under the age of 8, that is, or other chores? Doing the dishes. Picking up your room. The sticker affixed to the charts that organized parents create to try to instill some kind of personal responsibility in their children. 
     We didn't do those for those boys. It seemed beneath the dignity of a child. 
     What else? A well-done paper, again in elementary school. The proverbial gold star. Or a smiley face. I haven't done a survey, but my guess is that by middle school stickers are gone or ironic, the flourish of those teachers who instruct with a smirk of self-knowledge.
     And voting. I already felt silly, heading over to early voting at the Northbrook Village Hall Monday. I had tried to read up on what was involved—be an informed voter! The Northbrook Tower, a surprisingly readable little weekly, took the effort to talk to the school board candidates. But there were three running for three openings. It seemed pointless to care.
     "It's my right and I want to do it," I explained, slightly abashed, to the poll volunteer, who asked if I was the Neil Steinberg.
     "Well, I'm a Neil Steinberg," I said. "There's another in Skokie. Sometimes he gets my mail."
     For some reason that got me a provisional ballot. Something about my signature. Either way, I got to vote. 
     Turns out there were more candidate than positions for Oakton Community College Trustee. I voted for the Jewish names ("I ain't no freakin' monument to justice," as Nicholas Cage says in "Moonstruck").
     The sticker was the icing on the cake. It couldn't have seemed more ridiculous had they given me a lollipop. Maybe the radicals are right. It's all a scam. The illusion of control, of democracy.  Not meaningless, for sure—Donald Trump being elected over Hillary Clinton certainly had meaning. But some kind of joke nevertheless, one we participate in, yet aren't really in on.  The joke is on us.
     I wasn't too upset about the Mueller squib over the weekend because, frankly, the damage is done, and whether Mueller offered a laundry list of dead-to-rights criminal behaviors of Donald Trump, or the document as it stands—and we don't know what's in it, just the attorney generals' big thumbs up—hardly matters. The system groans under the offense being committed hourly against it.  Will it hold? Is this the bottom or is there worse to come?  Maybe this whole voting thing will be done away with, eventually, along with the free press, and we'll miss the ritual, symbolic though it might have been. The next meaningful election is a year from November. At least I hope it's meaningful. Either way, we get a sticker.