Flashback 2004: Maximizing their advantage

     I'm on vacation. This ran back when living in the suburbs still felt uncomfortable, like new clothes that didn't quite fit right.

     Every morning at the train station I buy the Sun-Times. Of course I get it delivered at home, but I leave that for the wife. Besides, I enjoy the banter at the station coffee stand, aptly named, "The Grind." One day last week they were out of Sun-Times—stripped clean—so I went to change a buck.
     "Can I have four quarters, Connie?" I asked.
     "You can have anything you want, dear,'' she said.
     "Could you teach my wife to say that?'' I said, happily palming the coins and heading to the platform. There a man with a salt-and-pepper beard was struggling with the Sun-Times box. It sometimes sticks.
     "It takes a bit of finesse," I said. He collected his change, and I plugged in my two quarters. The box opened smoothly. I took out a newspaper and held the door so this guy could get one. He did and began to walk away.
     "Hey!" I said. "You're supposed to put your money in!"
     "It won't take my money!'' he said, shrugging, smirking and hurrying off down the platform.
     I wasn't going to let this idiot rip off some poor delivery guy—with me as an accessory, no less. I pumped in the money for him. The train arrived. I sat steaming. That's what I loathe most about suburbanites. They have a trait I call "maximizing their advantage." Rushing across the tracks is only the start. They park their SUVs in the fire lane. They cut in line. They'll shave any corner to scramble up the ant hill. I thought of searching the train, finding this guy, screaming "THIEF!'' in his face. Not just once, but every day on the platform. The pure Javert-like craziness of that made me smile. I would find out where he worked, become a constant nuisance, bursting into meetings, clad in white Biblical robes, demanding 50 cents. "Let it go,'' I told myself. At least he's a reader. But I kept shaking my head all that morning over the man who leapt at the chance to sell his integrity for 50 cents. Shameless.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 31, 2004 Monday

Don't be a vector

   This was written in late January, obviously. It got nudged aside by other posts, but I like to think is still worthy of being read.     

     4:55 a.m. I can lay in bed and stare at the ceiling and wonder where January went. 
     Or I can get up and take a crack at the column that's going to be on page two of the Sun-Times tomorrow.
     I get up.
     Into social media, my blog, of course Facebook. One message, from an old friend."Man.... you get attacked something fierce on Twitter...."
     I wince, ponder my response. I'm feeling stern, so I decide to be stern.
     "Don't be a vector," I reply, curtly, then immediately wonder if she'll know I mean. "Vector" is most commonly a direction, an arrow, diverting in a particular direction.
      Into Google. "Vector definition" The first one, as I had feared, "a quantity having direction as well as magnitude, especially as determining the position of one point in space relative to another." 
     That isn't it; hopefully, she will push on to the second, which is the one I meant here, "an organism, typically a biting insect or tick, that transmits a disease or parasite from one animal or plant to another."
     Good common advice, for those of us who have survived 2018 and are now trying to make 2019 into something meaningful. The Internet is filled with malice, with mean people freed by the frictionless anonymity of the online world, its general lack of repercussion. 
    This is not news. Yet a great number of people haven't yet figured this out. To them, malice online is significant.  A few weeks back I wrote a column about an elderly lawyer. A former colleague phoned me, practically vibrating with excitement. The lawyer's family, he said, was composing a letter denouncing me, citing this and that, dipping their hands into the muck of the past and flinging it in my direction, like baboons at the zoo hurling feces at visitors.
     "I thought you should know," he said solemnly.
     I thanked him, confident I would never hear anything more from the family, and I haven't and don't expect to.  His passion made me very glad that I generally do the write-one-thing-then-move-on quickstep. He was fixated.
     Nor do you need have some dripping glob of third party ill-will to be a vector. Sometimes friends will be the vessels cherishing some past shred of misfortune you unwisely shared with them, long ago. You've moved on, forgotten all about it. The sun is shining, and you bump into them and they immediately scoop the handful of dark cloud they've been carrying around in their pocket and display it to you. Remember this? 
     As a newspaper columnist, curiosity is your bread and butter. But sometimes it is better to stifle curiosity. I never went on Twitter to see what my friend was referring to. Because I don't care. Not that I ignore valid criticism. But Twitter is a free fire zone. It took me several years, and both Rush Limbaugh and Fox News reviling me by name, to get to that point. Sometimes people build cases, make points. But just as often, what people do is grab whatever they consider a damning detail and try to rub your face in it.

     I understand where this impulse comes from. The old dynamic is that once upon a time we were individuals who lived in groups we had to get along with, and if people in the group thought less of you, you wanted to engage them, understand the trouble, fix things, so as not to undermine your status in your town, family, block, whatever.. If Missy is talking smack about Cindy, well, their friend Sue might intercede, reveal what's going on, pour oil on the waters.

    There is no doing that online. These are faces flashing by in the crowd. The paper stopped publishing comments because vetting reader's often profane and unhinged observations was becoming more time intensive and consumed more energy than writing the stories that sparked them. 
     My general philosophy when it comes to online reaction is: Keep the poison out. For certain readers, I don't even read the subject headings of their emails, the equivalent of throwing letters out unopened, something I also do. You know what they are going to say because they always say the same thing. Not the specifics; the tone.     

     There must be some release in transmitting the awful thing to its subject. I expect friends, people I know in the living world, not to do that, and generally they don't. As you go about social media—and it's our lives now—you should keep that in mind. Don't be the dim cat dragging some mummified mouse up from the basement and leaving it on someone's pillow as a present. Nobody appreciates that.

Flashback 2013: Inter-city spat Pt. II: "Calm down, Canada, it's all good fun"

     A columnist wants reaction, which is harder and harder to get unless you regularly say things that are vicious, insane, demonstrably untrue or—the sweet spot—a combination of the three! As someone who has difficulty with any of those fertile fields, my work has a tendency to shuffle onto the public stage, tap the microphone with its finger, tentatively, and then be yanked off by the Hook of Time. Except when maligning other cities. Sunday's look back at my gentle prod at Toronto would not be complete with this companion piece, about the howl of pain that emanated from our neighbor to the north. The wonder is I ever write anything other than tart critiques of other cities. I suppose because then I'd lose what readers I retain in this one.   

     It was right after the Wall Street Journal reporter called Thursday afternoon, asking for my reaction to Toronto mayor Rob Ford's comments about my column, which at that point hadn't even been printed yet, that I began to suspect we had strayed from the usual daily vaudeville into something odder.
     The column, posted online Wednesday, was nothing extraordinary. An editor had shot me an email, sharing a news item about Toronto surpassing Chicago in population—who knew? —and asking whether I could scrape together a few thoughts about it.
     Well, yeah, sure, happy to.
     The column was done in an hour, posted the next. By the third I was hearing from Canadian television. Then the Toronto Star—the biggest paper in Canada—posted an article that began, "Someone in Chicago has finally noticed Toronto . . . "
     Then Twitter opened up, in salvos, like anti-aircraft fire.
     "Neil Steinberg is everything that is wrong with America," wrote Richard Guy. "Self-centred, ego-driven and uneducated."
     "PLEASE DO NOT LET HIS UNEDUCATED PRESENCE INTO OUR WONDERFUL CITY!" wrote another, to my obvious delight. You have to have lived my life, mocked since grade school as an effete Poindexter rolling out his $5 words, to grasp just how happy that accusation made me.
     But that's the Internet, right? People who think they've been insulted violently lashing out at others they know nothing about.
     Certain words were used again and again; not only "uneducated" but "bitter." A lot of "bitter" coming from Canada, and considering there's nothing remotely bitter in my column —an avuncular chuckle, a mild teasing—I had to wonder whether I was witnessing the common human trait of condemning in others what you can't recognize in yourself. ("Douche" was also used a lot, a word I hadn't heard as an insult since junior high).
     What struck me about most replies was the gravity. Their city under attack! Their nation scorned! Many lunged at Chicago's murder problem—dipping their fingers into the fresh blood of slain children to dab out a reply to a lighthearted essay on civic pride.
     But I hate to generalize—I heard from the nasty and the nice. For every six aggrieved lunkheads, there was a thumbs up from a Canadian who got it, a grateful American expat, or a Vancouverite who assured me the rest of the country isn't too keen on Toronto either.
     I should be grateful; outrage boosts humor. The Marx Brothers would be just a group of strange men lurching around fancy apartments were it not for Margaret Dumont, fluttering her fingers at her throat in dismay.
     Yet somehow, plowing through this reaction, I started to feel bad, in the way I felt bad for ridiculing Jay Mariotti, after it dawned on me that this wasn't merely a person worthy of scorn, but someone who was deserving of pity.
     So there, there, Canada. It's OK. We all look to others for validation. Chicago's own Richard M. Daley, our former mayor, was desperate for some Eurotrash committee of international leeches to tap the city on the nose with their magic wand and declare it "World Class" by saddling it with the Augean Stables labor of hosting the Olympics. We all stood around in public places, numb, gazing at our feet, arms limply at our sides, confetti dribbling out of our slack fingers, when the honor danced past us and into the embrace of that South American slum, Rio de Janeiro.
     No malice here. I'll be candid about what informed my Toronto column. A bit of bleak memory. I took my family to Toronto in August 2006, for five days. Some fun was had. A big Greek food festival. The $91 elevator ride to the top of CN Tower. But much was a let-down. The Ontario Science Centre—so cool and futuristic when my family visited from Cleveland in the 1970s—now threadbare and creaky (though it did have an actual Jacquard loom, so important to the history of computing, and, to me, a thrill to see).
     But by the time we left, however, a certain suffocating ennui set in, a get-us-the-hell-out-of-this-place feeling that has lingered.
     I've also worked for, and with, Canadians, when Conrad Black owned the paper. To a man —and woman—they exhibited a contempt for this hardship post, Chicago, and a narcissism that most Americans would be ashamed to show in public.
     Granted, it was a self-selective group—Lord Black's underlings—but it taught me that Canada was not all Molson beer TV commercial friendliness.
     The Internet will waste your life in empty jousting, so best to limit oneself. I'm turning down Canadian TV requests now, and, moving on, leave you with the truest words ever written about U.S./Canada relations, penned by scholar and Toronto native J. Bartlet Brebner: "Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada while Canadians are malevolently well informed about the United States." Don't hate me for pointing it out.

    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 10, 2013

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