Finding the fun in functional

Ben Graham, left, examines a jacket designed by Columbia College fashion students.

     Fashion is cool and fun, daring and young.
     You can see that just walking into Reyes Witt’s classroom at Columbia College Chicago and noticing what her students are wearing. The sleeveless cowl T-shirt on Adam Salame, 20. The off-the-shoulder black batwing blouse on Paige Bernby, 20. The black slip worn as a dress over a turtleneck on Sandra Walkowicz, 21. Not to overlook Madison Chain’s hot pink beret worn with a sequined miniskirt and white knee-high boots.
     But fashion can be functional as well as fun, geared toward seniors instead of kids, as evidenced by the course name, “Design Solutions for Fashion Design,” and by what Witt’s students have been up to for the last 15 weeks: creating clothing to be worn by those facing physical challenges, such as the mobility limitations of the elderly, or being in a wheelchair, wearing absorbent undergarments or requiring help to dress.
     Students conceived their designs while learning to use new 3D design software, then created prototype garments. Today the top three designs are being presented to Joe & Bella, a new Chicago company that designs and sells adaptive apparel for seniors and people with disabilities.
     Once the students are ready, that is.
     “Some people are still sewing,” says Witt, as the class begins.
     Ben Graham, vice president of marketing at Joe & Bella, arrives.
     “We’re going to pick one, pass it on to our design team to finish it,” he says. “Put it up on our website and sell it.”
     First up is a convertible unisex blue jacket with zip-off sleeves.
     “We had a few issues,” says Salame, pointing to the prototype on a seamstress dummy. “We used this material that we discussed last time.”

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How can we miss Elon Musk if he won't go away?

     Hunkering down is a survival skill. There are times to fight, and times to flee, and times to keep your head low and wait.
     That last option seemed the only thing to do when Tesla mogul and Space X founder Elon Musk rode into town as the new boss of Twitter in late October. Yes, I began ballyhooing my stuff on Mastodon, or whatever they call their imitation of tweets ("PUBLISH!" the purple button says). But the service is even more random and ineffectual than Twitter, which is saying a lot, given how little traction my work gets there. Mastodon seems more like storing a few gallon jugs of water stashed in the basement — a symbolic gesture that won't really help much should  disaster occur.
     Besides, whatever change Musk was fomenting — inviting antisemites out of their holes to strut around in the light of day, banning a few journalists who had the temerity to write stories about him — didn't affect me in any direct sense. Twitter has always been a free-fire zone of malice and 99.999 percent of the stuff flying around I never see anyway. It's a breeze upon which to send my little balloons of writing wafting off into the aether.
     Honestly, I wouldn't have noticed a change except that I lost about 400 followers. I was closing in on 10,000, which is nothing in the larger picture, but a milestone in my dusty corner of the Sunset League. Now I've sunk below 9,500 and falling steadily, though I can't tell whether those are people more moral than myself fleeing the service, or robot followers being evaporated by some more efficient purging system put in place by the new regime.

    Now Musk has done one of his spurious polls to see whether he should step down as the head of Twitter, and the answer was a resounding "yes"—57 percent of 17 million voters said, "Don't let the door hit you in the ass, Elon." Never mind that those polls can easily be manipulated by the spambots and web robots that supposedly proliferated after the people in charge of getting rid of them were fired, or quit, when half the staff left upon Musk's arrival. It seems as if Musk will ignore the result anyway, in classic MAGA it's-only-fair-if-I-win style.
Last week I did ask myself if, by staying, I'm passively enabling evil, the good German sweeping his front step and not looking at the smoke coming from the crematorium. But all human systems are freighted with bad, and tweeting once a day doesn't seem like participating in wrongdoing any more than paying taxes or buying products. Leave reaching for moral purity to the vegans. Donald Trump was president for four years and I didn't go anywhere; how is this different?
     Musk has said he will abide by the people's choice, and maybe he will. Hard to tell when you're dealing with such an established hypocrite and liar. He could always bring in some even bigger asshat to run the thing. One hopes he goes back to running Tesla's, whose stock cratered in his absence, losing a third of its value over the past six months (including the 5 percent leap for joy it did Monday on learning Musk might stop spending his days sniping at people on Twitter).
     The poll strikes me as a fig leaf. With both Twitter and Tesla hemorrhaging value, the farce is bound to end sooner than later, as adults nudge Musk aside to a setting better suited to his ranting and preening.

     There's a reason children are warehoused in schools and not put in positions of authority. Ego is poison, attention an addictive drug, and people without the moderating influence of humility, maturity and good sense should avoid flailing around in public. Elon Musk spent $44 billion — most of it other people's money, of course — to cement his reputation as a bully with the impulse control of a toddler. From the public point of view, that might be a service, long term. Now we know. At least he was born in South Africa, and so can't be elected president of the United States. It's happened before.
     And then Trump went away. Or at least is in the painful, protracted process of going away. Waiting works. I've worked for my share of bad bosses before. They tend to move on down the pike if you just are patient. They arrive, manifest their inability, flail around, and then head off to explore new horizons while those behind heave a grateful sigh. The model I used was a previous classic business disaster, when Quaker Oats bought Snapple for $1.7 billion in November, 1994, twice its actual market value, ran the brand into the ground, and sold it for $300 million, half its actual worth, in March 1997. The entire fiasco didn't take three years to unfold, start to finish. I can't imagine Musk lasting that long. Heck, at this rate, he'll be gone by springtime.

A better picture of Willie Wilson

Willie Wilson

     “Willie Wilson wishes to speak to you ...” a colleague informed me, passing along his phone number.
     Geez, I thought. What’s this about? I pondered, and it came to me. Must be the column on predictions, where I say his becoming mayor would be “the worst possible outcome.”
     That didn’t bother him. Just the opposite.
     “I like that prediction,” he said. The trouble lay elsewhere.
     “That picture you did of me. ... That looked bad.”
     I apologized. While he was on the line, I felt obligated to pick his brain and started with a question perplexing many Chicagoans:
     What’s wrong with Lori Lightfoot?
     “She feels that being mayor gives her the authorization to do things on her own,” Wilson replied. “I think she’s got a complex. She’s a dictator, in my opinion. She’s getting all these kickbacks.”
     “Kickbacks”? That’s a serious accusation, I told Wilson. Could you elaborate? Kickbacks in the envelopes stuffed with cash sense? That doesn’t seem the mayor’s brand.
     No, he said, contributions to her political fund.
     “When I say ‘kickback,’ I mean people who do business with the city, that set up these PACs,” he said. “That’s a conflict. They set up a PAC so they can put more than the limit of $1,500. They’re putting $50,000 or more, and she’s taking it.”
     I ran this charge by the mayor’s people. Our conversations revolved around a recent Tim Novak expose pointing to the $68,500 Lightfoot accepted from companies belonging to a city lobbyist, Carmen Rossi. Lightfoot’s spokesperson’s reaction, in essence, was: Whoops. That isn’t like us. We gave the dubious money back.
     This is where being really rich helps. Wilson says he’ll accept small donations but not the big chunks of change the mayor accepts if nobody calls her on it.
     “I wouldn’t take that kind of money,” he said. “I’ve always been giving that kind of money away.”

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The other Lori

Lori Cannon

     Saturday afternoon was a cold, bleak, gray day. Outside, in the streets of Chicago, that is. But all was warm and bright and colorful inside GroceryLand, 5543 North Broadway, when I stopped by to visit an old friend and conduct an unusual transaction.

     GroceryLand, run by Lori Cannon, is an Edgewater food pantry for people living with HIV. (And, sometimes, though you didn't get it from me, for people who don't have HIV, such as mothers of hungry families, but who are needy nonetheless. Lori is good at many things, but turning away those who she could help is not one of them. Particularly during COVID).  Lori knows that her clientele spends a lot of their time in drab, institutional settings, and wants her operation to be as homelike and festive as possible. There are two other locations on the South and West sides of Chicago.
     It had been several years since I last visited, and the place was even more warm and inviting than I remembered.
     Lori, who helped found Open Hand Chicago in 1988, produced an article mounted on foamcore that I had written in 1994 when the forerunner of GroceryLand opened. (I posted the article on EGD in 2019 to mark GroceryLand's 25th anniversary). Also in 2019, I wrote about Lori, when she received a Legacy Advocate Award.

     We've both been at our respective professions for a long time. We must really like it.
     She took me on a tour of the place. In one corner, a pile of stacked banker boxes. "Jon-Henri Damski's literary estate," she said, suggesting it should stored somewhere more secure than against the wall of a food pantry, no matter how nice. I suggested the Gerber/Hart Library & Archives and she made a face — apparently they are not up to her standards, which can be very high. My second suggestion was the Newberry Library, and she found that a better idea. I promised I would reach out to them Monday and see what I could do.  Damski was a longtime gay columnist, supposedly the first to use his real name, and while I've seen him referred to as "the gay Studs Terkel," I always thought of him as "Chicago's gay Socrates," since he was always crouching at the gates of Lakeview, disheveled but piercingly intelligent, challenging passersby with his unconventional views. 

     GroceryLand's walls were festooned with work of Chicago artist and illustrator David Lee Csicsko. Years of posters for GroceryLand — how many food pantries have a strong graphic presence? — plus a whimsical oil painting of, I believe, Romulus and Remus and the she-wolf.   

     We talked a long time — Lori mentioned that Saturday was the birthday of our late mutual friend, Andrew Patner. She has an incredible memory for names and dates and places, for departed friends and clients, aldermen, mayors, governors, activists, a walking history of the past half century of Chicago gay life, and somebody should sit down with her and a tape recorder and get it all down. 

     Oh, the transaction, I almost forgot. Lori came to my book signing at Atlas Stationers with a big Ziploc bag of ruggaleh, because she's great. Baked herself, and perhaps the best I've ever eaten in my life. My wife, even more impressed, pleaded for the recipe so she could serve them at our Hanukkah party Sunday. Lori said there is no recipe — her mother Bluma taught her and the process just lives in her head — but she'd whip some up for us. We of course tried to dissuade her from going to the trouble; she has more important things to do. But as anyone who has ever tried to dissuade Lori Cannon from doing anything knows, that is not easily done. Impossible really. (A 1996 Reader profile referred to her as a "Demon of Mercy.") So we showed up with all the canned soup we could carry as a donation to GroceryLand, and she gifted us with a tremendous bounty of homemade ruggaleh. Kindred spirits helping, manus manum lavat, one hand washing the other, the Chicago way. Anyway, Hanukkah starts tonight, and I hope those who celebrate have a happy one. And those who don't celebrate it, well, you have the comfort of your own holiday coming in a week. And if you haven't done your holiday good deed yet, GroceryLand could use your cash and your high-quality packaged food items, particularly canned soups. 

Northshore Notes: Silurian Sea

 

Photo by Caren Jeskey

By Caren Jeskey

"Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end."
         — Shakespeare, Sonnet 60

     This Thursday, after an urgent dental procedure in Wilmette, I drove north down Sheridan Road through the ravines. A good way to unwind. I was also craving some beach time before starting my work day and knew I'd find a nice spot somewhere along the way. But first I was in need of soft food, which I found in the form of matzoh ball soup at a Once Upon A Bagel in Highland Park.  

     I called my friend Randy as I headed east from the deli. Randy’s folks live in Highland Park and whenever I’m there I think of him. He lives out West now, where the weather is warm. He also lived on Maui for many years. Smart guy. I had not seen him in ages until this past summer (though our phone and FaceTime hours have been copious for the past several years). We met at Froggy’s French Cafe in Highwood for a meal, the French doors wide open on that temperate night, and a man named Brian quietly strummed his guitar by the bar.
     As we chatted on the phone on Thursday I mentioned I was near Fort Sheridan with a free hour and a half. He heartily recommended that I drive to the lakefront at the end of the Fort, which I did. I snaked along a twisty road lined with condos and homes with big wraparound porches. Eventually, a meadow appeared on a hill over the lake. Tall prairie grasses lit up by the sun swayed in the breeze.
     I parked, then headed through a patch of woods, passed a cannon perched on an overlook, and found the little bit of lakefront I could get to. (Most of the beach is closed to public access). I found a tiny pebbly patch at the end of a drainage pipe that fed into the lake for runoff.
     Although I was wearing leather boots and a peacoat, I could not resist, and scrambled down a narrow patch of sand towards the water’s edge. Granite, lava rocks, fossils, man made concrete, lake glass and other treasures intermingled. There were giant boulders, one replete with fish skulls and crinoid stems from times of yore when Lake Michigan was a shallow Silurian sea over 400 million years ago.      

     I could have stayed there all day with the loud waves lapping and the deep blue expanse, a welcome respite from screens, cities, towns, and people.
     An olive colored stone really caught my eye. I lay on my belly on the fossil boulder and stretched as far as I could. I anchored myself and managed not to slide into the watery soup of pebbles upon which the olive rock gleamed. Once in my hands I got a closer look at the vibrant but matte green and noticed a circular nodule exposing green and red sparkles.
     I had the good fortune of becoming a rock hound the week I wrote this piece in late October. For what’s better than a new hobby that involves fresh air? There’s already a new rock tumbler going 24/7 on my front porch, tossing stones for a four-week grinding and polishing process. My current rock hound friends identified the green find as basalt, with what might be amygdales tucked inside. If it’s a rock full of them it will be an amygdaloidal. A real beauty. It might even have peridot or epidote inside. I plan to keep it intact for now.

     My round, jolly Grandma’s name was Olive. I visited her at Rosehill Cemetery recently and hung out with the bucks keeping her and my Grandpa Carl company. I feel even closer to her with my sturdy geological find nestled into my little cottage with me. A way to feel connected even though she’s gone. I’ll be gone one day too, and will be sure to pass special finds like this down to special people.
     Today I’ll open up the tumbler, rinse off what's left, and place them into the next level of grit. I say what’s left because I did not realize it’s prudent to check the hardness of rocks before tumbling, lest you end up with nothing but a bucketful of sand.

“Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?”
       — Henry David Thoreau, Maine Woods

Extroverted? Here’s some tips on how to be quiet and reflective

 

     Going to many parties this year? Me either. None at all, in fact. Which is great. One of the guilty secrets of COVID is that the pandemic is a jubilee for us introverts. You mean we can’t go into crowded places? Or to the office? Or out of the house? Yessssss!
     Introversion always struck me as a personal flaw. We’re all supposed to be salesmen for our own personal brands, striding up to strangers with a gleaming grin and a firm handshake. I never thought of shyness as a valuable skill that could be shared, until I saw this tweet mocking O The Oprah Magazine for printing yet another article on how to be more outgoing:

     “Just once I’d like to see, “Extroverted? Here’s Some Tips on How to be More Quiet and Reflective,” observed Tom + Lorenzo, the brand for Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez, a Philadelphia-based lifestyle and fashion duo.
     The thought bubbled up: Hey ... wait a minute. I could write such an article.
     Perhaps now is the moment, during the holiday hubbub. A bit of introversion might make it easier for everybody involved; might mute, just a little, the chest drumming of the relentlessly gregarious. Especially those who get into arguments, blurt out hurtful opinions they later regret, and otherwise dig a deep hole with their mouths they then have to try to climb out of, somehow.
    It’s worth a try. Here are five tips on how to be more quiet and reflective in social settings:
     1. Shut up. Take your hand and put it against your lips. Are they moving? You might be one of the many who talk continuously, out of habit. Who take the old “Silence = Death” slogan far too literally. Take your fingers and firmly clamp your lips together. If your jaws are still working, and you’re making muffled, “Mmm mmmmm...” sounds, take in a long, deep, slow breath. It’s impossible to inhale and talk at the same time.

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Mayor Willie Wilson and other predictions

     Our managing editor asked for ideas to include in a special looking-ahead-to-the-coming year section, and I suggested remarking on the inexplicable popularity of looking ahead to the coming year, a mystery considering how off base they usually are. To his credit, he said, "Yeah, do that."

     Magazines pile up in my office, no matter how I try to glance at them. It was March before I got around to The Economist’s special year-end issue, “The World Ahead: 2022.” Given that the global order had just been rattled by Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, I couldn’t help but immediately flip to the section on Russia to see how clearly the London-based magazine’s expert had seen trouble coming.
     Short answer: not very.
     Yes, the article had the promising print title “Russia’s battlegrounds.” But neither of the two projected fights involved actual warfare.
     “One is elections,” wrote Arkady Ostrovsky, The Economist’s Russia editor. “The other is the freedom of the internet.” The story, which you can read online here, ended, “The war over the internet will define Russia’s near future.”
      If only. Then again, year-end predictions seldom come true, and it’s telling that a) the media keeps making them anyway, and b) people still read them and c) nobody seems to look back to see how poorly past prognostications worked out.
     Grab any list from last year and the misfires are so wrong, they’re almost funny.
     Forbes’ “Ten Predictions for 2022,” written by Adam Strauss, offered as a guide to help people invest money, at least began by admitting that augury is “tricky” and lowering the bar by adding “predictions can be fascinating and informative, even if many of them turn out not to occur.”
     Which many did not. Not No. 6, Congress legalizing pot. Nor No. 8, “Cryptocurrency and blockchain applications continue to grow,” claiming that, “Bitcoin exits the year with a price above $50,000.” Try about a third of that: $17,757 in mid-December. I bet Forbes’ face-plant wasn’t so fascinating and informative for anyone who made investments based on its tea leaf-gazing.
      Nor did No. 9 come true, Republicans taking control of the Senate. But most of the media botched that, the anticipated red tsunami turning out to be a pink splash. (At least I suggested, right before the midterm, there was hope the red wave wouldn’t come, since Brazil president and Trump manque Jair Bolsonaro got the boot in Brazil.)

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