Danes make bikes work; so can we.

Bikes parked at the Copenhagen train station.

     I first rode a bicycle in downtown Chicago the summer of 2000. We were about to move from East Lakeview to Northbrook, and I figured this was my chance to bike to work. I took the lakefront bike path to Grand Avenue, then cut over to the paper, then on Wabash.
     Or tried to.
     Nearly a quarter century later, I still remember that terrifying gantlet of zooming cars and idling trucks. I felt lucky to get to 401 N. Wabash alive.
     That might have also been my last bike ride downtown. But in the summer of 2013, Chicago introduced the Divvy bikeshare system. Pay a few bucks, undock the heaviest bicycle ever made and ride around the city to your heart’s content. A dock was installed right outside the paper: duty called.
     Starting small, I’d Divvy to lunch spots a bit farther than comfortable walking distance. Before I knew it, I was a pro, riding in February, my hands snug in their pricy lobster gloves. Zipping up the center of LaSalle Street at noon felt like being 12 years old again and standing on the pedals of my green Schwinn Typhoon. Riding a bike meant freedom, happiness.
     The Divvy led to adventures. Riding a Divvy, I was mocked by both Rahm Emanuel (rolling down the window of his SUV to give me grief in traffic) and Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, the president of Mongolia. (I went to his opening of the new consulate here in 2013 because there was a Divvy dock out front. As the only journalist present, I was bustled over and told to ask a question. I inquired about their border with China. “That’s a stupid question,” the Golden Swallow of Democracy replied, to general hilarity.)
     I haven’t Divvied since COVID struck — I’m not downtown enough to justify the annual fee. But my experience left me attuned to the struggles of those who navigate Chicago by bike, or try to.
     My social-media-formerly-known-as-Twitter feed is filled with reports of riders killed by careless motorists and the frustrating struggle to make Chicago more bike-friendly, which can seem one of those impossible tasks like building affordable housing or reforming the police.
     It was certainly on my mind during my recent trip to Copenhagen and Amsterdam, which can be considered the bike heaven and bike hell of Europe.

To continue reading, click here.

The sheer tenacity of clematis

 

  

     Were I to ask you to start naming flowers — rose, daisy, daffodil, marigold — I believe that no matter how long you went on — zinnia, astor, petunia, iris — you would never get to clematis.
     Which is curious, because they're everywhere, especially now. An enormous bank of clematis is in front of a charming brick bungalow on the next block, putting off a sweet scent so intense that it presented itself while I was still across the street and several houses down.  An almost powdery floral smell, like sticking your face in a powder puff and breathing deeply.

      This is apparently typical.

     "Though well adapted for walls, trellises, pillars, and such like positions in the dressed garden, this plant is perhaps never more effective in pleasure-ground scenery than when planted on some rocky eminence," Thomas Moore and George Jackman write in the 1872, The Clemitas as a Garden Flower, "where, being allowed to assume a decumbent habit, its myriads of pure white blossoms seem to pour down the declivities like masses of drifting snow, at the same time embalming the air with their fragrance."

     There are some 380 species of clematis, some quite similar, but I'm going out on a limb and guess that these are Sweet Autumn Clematis, Clematis Paniculata J.F.Gmel.

     Maybe one reason clematis don't reside easily among the other flowers is because it's named, not for the delicate blooms, but for the plant below. "A genus of twining shrubs" is how the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, citing it as a direct borrowing from Latin, clematis, or "some kind of climbing or trailing plant, prob. periwinkle," and the Latin stemming directly from ancient Greek, κληματίς.

     Given the word's age, and the proliferation of the flower across the northern hemisphere, it's surprising how little the plant has twisted into our conscious. It's not a very literary flower (though there is a Victor Hugo clematis, with bold purple blossoms). Maybe because, unlike "rose," very little rhymes with "clematis." Bursitis? "Come fight us?" See the problem?

     Shakespeare doesn't mention clematis, though he does cite woodbine — with Oberon's "Quite over-canopied with luscious Woodbine" in "Midsummer Night's Dream" and some scholars think the term might have been referring to the wild clematis.

     There is a truly awful poem by Scottish poet Alexander Bathgate called "The Clematis" that punishes those who push through its far too numerous two dozen lines by calling the flower "Emblem of a perfect wife" whose work is unnoticed until it somehow benefits her husband and others remark on it. Ewww.

     Irish poet Eamon Grennan, who often cites flowers in his poetry and even wrote one poem about killing his houseplants, does a better job in "The Search," where he lauds the clematis for its perseverance, beginning: “It’s the sheer tenacity of the clematis clinging to/ rusty wire and chipped wood-fence that puts this/ sky-blue flare and purple fire in its petals."

     They do hang on. I've had some planted before my front porch, and they go up the trellis and over the rail forming an enormous mat that I finally cut away last year, discovering that my tolerance of the thing had caused significant portions of the wood underneath to rot. So no affection here. Though no hard feelings either. The clematis are quite pronounced on my front porch, though nowhere near as grand as the house above. Springtime gets all the good press, but autumn is not without its compensations.

 

Danish notes #3 — Eats

Smørrebrød  

     So why Copenhagen? Nobody asked, but I'll answer anyway. Simple. Because the best restaurant in the world, supposedly, noma, is in Copenhagen, and announced it's closing in March ... so we decided to go.

     To Copenhagen, that is. Not to noma. Due to an editing error, where the ellipsis is in the above should contain the words "and our older son, a dedicated foodie, was taking the time to swing by for a bite."
     Honestly, I never considered eating there. With dinner at noma running about the price of one round trip Chicago-to-Copenhagen airplane ticket, we satisfied ourselves hanging out with him during the time he wasn't lapping up chow like a marinated pine cone.
     Not that we didn't eat very well in Copenhagen. I don't want to say lining up at the food trough is why we travel. But it certainly because a key factor. You're in a new place, you try new stuff.

   As soon as we parked our bags at the Coco Hotel, we headed for breakfast to the oldest bakery in Copenhagen, Sankt Peders Bageri, founded in 1652. So they've had a lot of practice, and it shows. There was a line out in the street, though that is more a sign that other people can search Google too. In this case, the treats were well worth it. Fresh, delicate. I particularly enjoyed the pistachio number with the green frosting — although, just as they don't call them French fries in France, so there are no Danish in Denmark. 
     The Danish national dish is called smørrebrød — literally "butter bread" — but it's really a slice of dark rye with a lot of food piled on it. The next day, for lunch, we headed to the sprawling Torvehallerne food market and got in an even longer line at Hallernes Smørrebrød, which was good, because it gave us time to debate a large array of options. There were so many varieties that just ordering one seemed a failure of imagination , so we each got two — I went for pork loin with pickled cabbage and one with roast beef with fried onions and horseradish, and my wife got salmon salad with smoked salmon and caviar and liver pate with lingonberries and pickled beets. We finished them handily — we walked a lot, and built up an appetite.

     Our other smørrebrød experience was at the more stylish Schonnemann, which advertises itself as "the best traditional lunch in Copenhagen" which struck me as completely on the mark. Founded in 1877, it had the feel of the old Berghoff before it went out of business in 2006 and was replaced with a facsimile. The waiter was a welcoming mix of brisk and friendly, explaining the importance of schnapps to the herring experience — we ordered curry, mustard and elderberry varieties. I satisfied myself with a TeeDawn Gentle Lager, one of the many excellent NA beers I sampled in Copenhagen.
     We only ate at one "high end restaurant" — Kappo Ando, which served us a dozen skewers of yakitori. I can't say I was overwhelmed by the food, but the process took two hours, and made for a restful evening of chow and conversation.

     My wife and I agreed that one of the best meals we had was a 6o kroner — about $10 — boar hot dog at Johnny's, the hot dog cart at the Copenhagen train station, which came with marinated onions and a corn relish. (Though be advised — the boar hot dogs are only available on the weekends, the proprietor told us).
     Oh, and noma? Our son showed us the obligatory photo of every course, and while they looked intriguing, and he certainly enjoyed the experience, and felt the venture worthwhile, I can't say I was stricken with remorse over not going. Although there was one dish, a soup made of flower petals, that was quite beautiful, and I asked him if he would share a photo of it with you, and he agreed.

Call them by their name: ‘refugee camps’

UN Photo/Mark Garten (used with permission)

 

    They’re refugee camps.
     Who does the city thinks it’s fooling, calling their plan to call 2,000-person settlements “winterized base camps.” They’ve got tents. They’ve got refugees. They’re refugee camps.
     Regular readers know that I’m all for immigrants. They’re what makes America great; not taking away women’s reproductive choices, not burning books, not demonizing vulnerable youth.
     Immigrants. They’re why we’re not in a demographic death spiral, like Japan. Immigrants. C’mon in guys, make yourselves at home, grab a shovel, start digging, maybe your kid’ll go to Yale. If you want to celebrate your nation-of-origin’s independence day by driving around, waving flags, that doesn’t bother me a bit. Native-born Americans celebrate our country’s birth with cheap explosives that blow off their fingers and scare their pets. I can’t argue that’s any better. We’re a nation of personal freedom. Which is one reason you’re here.
     But in this great, free country, words are important. A “base camp” is what Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay set up at the foot of Mount Everest before pushing for the summit. Base camps are where the rebels operate from in the Nicaraguan jungle.
     That plural is also important. Not a camp but camps, as in a number of them. Fran Spielman’s story Thursday mentioned one possible site, at 115th and Halsted. Where will the others go?
     I know why the city balked at calling them by their proper name. Refugee camps are just not places we expect to find in 2023 America, or in America at any time, for that matter. Looking back over the sweep of history, I see what were at the time called “internment camps” — where American citizens of Japanese descent were imprisoned after being ripped from their West Coast homes during World War II, moved inland under the spurious belief that their racial ancestry trumped their patriotism. Spoiler alert: it didn’t.
     Maybe we can soften “refugee camps” by branding them. Can we sell naming rights? The Kenneth C. Griffin Outdoor Residential Facility? Goose Island Lager Gulag? Chicago was slow in branding Divvy when it was rolled out 10 years ago, and left millions on the table. Don’t make the same mistake again.

To continue reading, click here.

Danish notes #2: You already know a Danish word

    When I travel to French- or Spanish-speaking countries, I usually can suss out a few words, a bit of the language, enough to get by. Hommes are men, si is yes.
     But Danish is another kettle of fish. A difficult language to learn, heard by an English speaker, it's an incomprehensible gabble, like an audiotape being played backward. Luckily every single person we encountered in Copenhagen spoke fluent English. Considerate of them.

     Danish is, as I mentioned Tuesday, a Germanic language, spoken by only about six million people. So knowing a tiny bit of German helped, as did context. Take the sign above — Brug for lid frisk luft? Being a stamp collector, I recognized the word for "air," luft, as in Luftpost, or airmail. Frisk is close enough to "fresh" and lid must be "little." Putting them together, I came up with, "Want a little fresh air?" and was pleased with my growing Danish mastery. I was close: "Need some fresh air?" according to Google Translate. Of course the nearby bike and air hose helped immensely.
     This sign was even more enigmatic: Ungdom giv en fuck for din kommune! Based on the photo of the three happy multi-ethnic young people, it seemed a public service poster of some kind. I wondered: could "fuck" have some separate meaning in Danish? That would be awkward.

     No, fuck means in Danish exactly what it means in English, and the sentence translates out as, "Youth, give a fuck about your community!"

     Well, points for reaching out to kids, and speaking their own language, as it were. But that leaving us with the enigma of why the Danes don't have their own word for "fuck" — why import it from English? 

     Lots of languages import English words — "hamburger" "sexy" "smartphone" and such — just as English borrows lots of words from other languages: "taco," "rendezvous," "stein."

    And many languages have their own version of "fuck" — in Greek it's ya moto," which sounds very Japanese — ironic, since Japanese does not have an equivalent to "fuck" — if they're looking for an obscene expletive, they use kso, or "shit." Many languages do the same, using female body parts, for instance, to convey the sense we have with "fuck."

    Others, like the Danes, just take the blunt English word. In Afrikaans, it's fok. Ditto for Norwegian, it's føkk, which is quite close.

   I tried to find out why some cultures adopt it, and others don't, and pretty much came up empty, except for the general reason to snag English loanwords — because the language is seen in many quarters, still, as young, modern and cool. 

    As for why the Danes would display an obscenity in a context where it would never appear in the United States, that's easy. Remember, we are a nation of busybodies and prudes, the descendants of martinets, religious fanatics and bluenoses. Denmark, on the other hand, is famously liberal. "The Danes are known for being cosmopolitan, well-educated, and open-minded people," the AFS website observes. Not three qualities that could ever be attached to our country, alas. A teacher was fired in Texas for reading "The Diary of Anne Frank" to her eighth grade class. It's starting to feel like, as a nation, we're føkked.

     

    

‘It’s YOUR fault if I hate you!’

     Just over 63 years ago, in the summer of 1960, the “Greenville Eight,” led by 18-year-old Jesse Jackson, were arrested. Their crime was insisting on reading at the main public library in their South Carolina town, despite clearly being Black, and thus not permitted.
     The case led to a federal court ordering Greenville to integrate its libraries. So the town did what it thought was the only decent, moral, Christian thing it could do: close all the county libraries rather than accept the obvious impossibility of letting Black people paw books intended for whites.
     Now nobody could use the library, and it was clear who was to blame.
    “The efforts being made by a few Negroes to use the White library will now deprive all White and Negro citizens of the benefit of a library,” Greenville Mayor Mayor J. Kenneth Cass said in a statement.
     The fault lay with the eight teenagers trying to use the public library, not with the town trying to stop them.
     Bear in mind this nimble sleight of hand, almost a magician’s trick. Because we see it all the time, now, in our day.
     The Greenville Eight echoed when Elon Musk said he was going to sue the Anti-Defamation League because the ADL called for companies to suspend advertising on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, until Musk addresses the neo-Nazis and other hardened haters he permits to run wild there.
     “ADL seems to be responsible for most of our revenue loss,” Musk posted. Not himself and his policies. The pushback is to blame.
     The NAACP also begged advertisers to avoid the website.

To continue reading, click here.

Danish notes #1: Spiral city

 

Church of Our Savior, Copenhagen

     "Leitmotif" originated as a German word, used by critics picking apart the works of Richard Wagner. A fitting term to start my reflection on Copenhagen, as Danish is a Germanic language. It means, roughly, a recurrent theme, and in the case of our recent visit to the capital of Denmark, the theme we kept returning to was, of all things, spirals.

Eliasson bridge

    The overture began hours after we landed, with an enigmatic tower glimpsed from the canal tour my wife cannily put us on, in the sound theory that we'd been traveling all day and would need some low energy activity to introduce us to the city. It worked. We saw all sorts of wonderful sights — a bridge designed by Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson that looks like a sailing ship and collapses in on itself to let boats pass. The Rem Koolhaas-designed Danish Architecture Center, which I immediately tweeted at Lee Bey ("EAT YOUR HEART OUT!" I wrote, having decided years ago it is hysterical to taunt Lee, our architecture critic, when I see noteworthy architecture abroad. I can't hope he finds it as funny as I do; but he hasn't asked me to stop, which I take as license to continue). We even locked eyes on the backside of the Little Mermaid statue, sparing us the need to carve out time and face the throng for the obligatory visit.
     Above all, the Church of Our Savior, whose spiral steeple is unlike anything I've ever seen atop a building. Gold and black, we could see tiny figures working their way up the staircase. I wanted to be one of them.

Dragon Spire

     Moments later, we cruised past a second spiral steeple, the Dragon Spire atop the Old Stock Exchange, hove into view, evoking my favorite German saying, Einmal ist keinmal und zweimal ist immer, or "Once is never but twice is always."

     I noticed a trend, but did not expect a third spiral. The next day, however, we were wandering away from the Rosenborg Castle — delightfully downmarket, compared to palaces in Paris and Madrid — and happened upon the Rundetaarn, or Round Tower. We were looking for a particular marketplace, to lunch on their brand of open-faced sandwiches, and I figured atop the tower would be a good vantage point to eyeball it. 

     Don't let the bust of Tycho Brahe outside the tower fool you — the Danish astronomer died in 1601, in exile in Prague, while the Round Tower wasn't completed until 1642.

     The tower has no stairs, but a spiral path  winding seven and a half times around the building, the way the tower of Babylon is depicted. We paid our eight Euros and marched gamely upward. 

     "What's with Copenhagen and spirals?" I typed into Google, expecting all sorts of sites rhapsodizing bout Spiral City. Nothing. A lot about Church of Our Savior.  And that's about it. Nobody seemed to have made the connection before. 

Path up the Round Tower

     So the field is open to me. Readers might remember how in 2015 I used four shapes as a lens to view Chicago — the parabola, the circle, the square, the triangle. A spiral is the perfect representation a city, which also unwinds out from a central point over time — in "The Wizard of Oz," remember, Dorothy starts skipping along a spiraling Yellow Brick Road that leads her to the Emerald City. 

     The Round Tower went up in 1642. The Church of Our Savior spire was added in 1759. So I assumed the former inspired the latter. Not so. The Church of Our Savior website says it is based on the Church of Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza in Rome, and I have no reason to doubt them.

     Those are the only two spiral church towers in the world I could find, which is odd, because spirals are an omnipresent natural design form, from starfish to galaxies. They've been used in architecture since Greek times — the capital of an Ionic column has a pair of spirals. Trajan's Column in Rome, built over 2,000 years ago, still has its spiral staircase inside. Modern buildings use them — Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim comes to mind (though honestly, as a museum warrior, I'm no fan of that ramp). 

    I started to see them elsewhere in Copenhagen, pausing in the middle of the street to snap this spiraling brick chimney, the likes of which I've never seen before.

The Treetop Experience

    The Danes are still twirling. In 2019, a 148-foot-tall spiral ramp the Treetop Experience opened in Gisselfeld Klosters Skove,, a forest an hour south of Copenhagen. The structure is 12 loops around a hyperboloid, for you geometry geeks (an hourglass shape for everybody else) offering visitors a treetop view of the surrounding area. I didn't visit; next time (kidding; there never is a next time).

     My wife wanted to go to Christiana, the hippie commune turned tourist attraction, and I cut short her consultation with bus schedules by suggesting we bike there. 

    On the way, we saw the Church of Our Savior, first in the distance, then looming before us. Turns out, the church is a block from an entrance to Christiana. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. We parked our bikes at the church, and after wandering about Christiana, enjoying an ice coffee, we went up the spire, which, rather than opening out on an observation deck, basically got narrower and narrower until you were jammed into an endpoint below the giant golden ball. It was not something pleasurable to do, but definitely something worth having done.

Fence around the Church of Our Savior.