Auto Show Flashback: 2012: Tesla Model S electrifies Chicago

2012 Tesla Model S

     The Chicago Auto Show opens to the public Saturday at McCormick Place, so I reached back into my almost limitless supply of car stories and came up with this, when I was one of the first people to drive a Tesla Model S. I think I assessed it well — mentioning range anxiety and cost. It's poignant to remember Elon Musk back when he was just a brilliant business innovator and not a logorrheic Henry Ford wannabe troll, egomaniac and cheerleader for right wing nuttery. Ah well. Enjoy.

     From the curb, the Tesla Model S does not look radically different from other new cars. Attractive, yes, sleek and streamlined, this one a pleasant gray, with a hatchback and a certain Jaguar-ish quality.
     But not the sort of vehicle that has the kiddies pressing their faces to the van window, shrieking “Look! Look!” as it blows past.
     Slide behind the wheel, however, as I got the chance to do last week in Oak Brook, and some of its more distinctive features present themselves. There are no physical gauges or buttons — just a screen where the speedometer would be, and, to the right, where a radio would be, a 17-inch diameter flat screen, the largest in any car, according to Tesla. The car has no gas tank, no tailpipe, no engine; in electric cars it’s called a motor.
     Electric cars are no longer new — regular readers will recall my blowing around town in a Nissan Leaf last year. But the Tesla Model S is unique, in that it is the first luxury sedan designed from the ground up as an electric car — a necessity, since the company producing it, Tesla Motors, has built only one previous model, its short-lived Roadster.
     Indeed, the company is perhaps more interesting than the car. Tesla, founded in 2003, is that rarest of birds — a new independent American car company. And while the initial temptation is to lump it with previous quixotic attempts to start a car company — Tucker, Bricklin, DeLorean — Tesla might be different, in light of the jaw-dropping resume of past successes of its billionaire co-founder, Elon Musk: PayPal, the online payment system; plus SpaceX, a private rocket company, contracted to NASA to supply the International Space Station, and more.
     What is Tesla selling? The Model S has an all-aluminum body, a low center of gravity, its motor giving torque that pins you back in the seat when you mash the accelerator.
     There’s no key to turn, no button to push. Sitting in the driver’s seat is enough.
     “When you sat down in the car, your butt turned it on,” said Shanna Hendriks, Tesla’s communications manager, noting the weight sensor in the seat (and yes, I couldn’t resist the inevitable reply: “It’s been a long time since my butt turned anything on.”)
     Range is still an issue. At first I was impressed the Model S advertises a 300-mile range between charges, but that is for its top-of-the-line $85,000 model with a brawnier battery. The basic $57,400 model has a range of 160 miles. Which is more than most drive in a day, but a big part of our love affair with cars is the illusion of endless possibility, and not being certain you can make it to Rockford and back is something of a buzz kill, but one Tesla insists people will get over.
     Then there is the stereo volume control.
     “It goes to 11,” said Hendriks. “I don’t know if you’re a Spinal Tap fan, but it goes to 11.” This has to be the first cult movie punchline to find its way into automotive design.
     “That was Elon Musk’s idea,” she said.
     The Model S also has way-cool door handles, smooth oblongs of chrome flush with the door until you touch them, when they gracefully glide out to be opened.
     The rear window is small, but the biggest design flaw I noticed is the cup-holders — there are just two, hidden under the center armrests, which slide back to reveal them, meaning you drive with the point of your elbow sitting on your coffee cup. Hendriks assured me they are working on a console to hold cups out of harm’s way.
     If you buy a Model S now, expect delivery around July 2013; you’re behind the 10,000 or so fans who put down deposits three or four years ago. “People have waited a long time for this car,” said Hendriks.
     The Tesla business model is also distinctive. There is nothing as 20th century as dealership lots crowded with cars. You can try a Model S — I was permitted 10 minutes behind the wheel — but you aren’t allowed to purchase the car you drive and take it home. This is no impulse buy. Rather, you order the Model S, like kitchen cabinets; pay $5,000 to prove you mean business, then wait three months until the factory is ready to turn its attention to you, when you pony up another $5,000 and specify colors and options.“Every car we sell is custom built,” said Hendriks.
     This year, Tesla Motors is making 5,000 cars — intentionally fewer than demand — but next year it plans to produce 20,000.
     The cynic in me is tempted to shrug off the Tesla Model S as the new Tucker Torpedo — snazzy but foredoomed. Making cars is a very costly undertaking. Ford has a tough enough time staying in business, and they’ve been doing this for a while. Upstarts can flourish, for a time, then wither. At least up to now. The Oak Brook dealership has a very clean, well-thought-out feel — think the Apple store but for cars. The sense I left with is that while launching a successful American car company — the Model S is made in California — is still a longshot, if anybody can pull it off, these people can.
        — Originally published in the Sun-Times, August 2, 2012

Letting go of department stores

     “I’m going to visit my mother,” I’ll say, then catch myself: “My parents.” An easy mistake to make. Because while my mother, 87, is alert, attending concerts, reading the paper (hi Mom!) my father, 91, is well along his slow retreat from the world. I’ve come to think of him not so much as my father as the box my father came in. A bit cold? Perhaps. But if we can't change things, at least we can call them what they are.
     Here, yet not here. A sad state, and common. I visited Macy’s downtown this week, inspired by Lynn Becker’s elegy in the Sun-Times last week, headlined “The long decline of Macy’s in Chicago, now a shell of a once-great department store.”
     A shell it is. The store is still open, still here. But also not here, the physical place without its essence. The still-grand Marshall Field’s box with crumbs of Macy’s rattling around inside.
     I entered into the vast women’s fragrance department. It wasn’t deserted. A few customers, contemplating bottles. A few clerks. I moved toward the men’s department — Macy’s covers a city block. An enormous, neck-craning atrium, with a Tiffany glass dome. We’ll miss that splendid bigness, like the waiting rooms of long-demolished train stations.
     Nature tapped me on the shoulder. A quick detour into the basement, and its vista of carefully folded towels, large platters, gifty housewares. I didn’t notice any china. My wife and I picked out our wedding pattern here; now china is a shunned, outrageous, indulgent affectation.
     No one to ask. I searched for a sign. Finally, in Barbara’s Bookstore, a clerk, who pointed.
     Book department. Stamp department. Stationery department. Did a young man really once order dove grey personal stationery, the address, 2948 N. Pine Grove Avenue, embossed in glossy black letters, because fans writing an author deserve something classy in return? I must have been insane.

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Diving into Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap

Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap,  1172 E. 55th Street

     They roll the sidewalks up early in Hyde Park. Surprisingly so, for a college town. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists conversation about their Doomsday Clock that I moderated at International House — thank you everyone who came out — ended shortly after 7 p.m. Pulling myself away from enthusiastic Sun-Times readers who wanted to say hello, share a story, or register complicated opinions regarding past columns, took 15 minutes or so. By 7:20, and we headed to dinner, first trying a noodle shop, but that was about to close, so we went next door to Medici on 57th.
    The waiter seating us said the kitchen closed at 7:45 p.m. — I glanced at my phone — 7:35.  He added that, if we want dessert, we should order it now. We passed on dessert. I got the steak sandwich, which was excellent, the bun fresh, the meat tender and garnished with a pleasing medley of diced peppers and onions. A generous helping of coleslaw, shaming the eyecup that most places serve. 

     By 8:20 Medici had almost completely emptied out. I wasn't going to make the 8:35 Metra. There wasn't another train until 9:45. But we couldn't stay here. I asked a waiter if there was somewhere to get dessert, maybe ice cream. He mentioned Insomnia Cookies, a student hangout. I made a face — big soft melty oversweet cookies aren't my thing. "Or the CVS," he ventured. "Something to go...." Eating a Little Debbie Cake in the car didn't sound like a good idea.
     How about a bar? I asked, and Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap was mentioned. "I've never been to Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap," I said, and that sealed it. Over to East 55th Street. "I don't drink, but I still like to go to bars," I said as we walked in, and my companion, who doesn't drink either, agreed. The place was hopping, but two open stools beckoned us right in the middle of the bar.

     "Do you have any NA beers?" I asked.

     "Yes," the bartender said. "Heineken Zero and Coragghle..." The last word was lost in the bar noise. Heineken 0.0 is adequate, the imported version of O'Doul's. A fan of novelty, I told him I'd have the second one, whatever it was. My companion ordered a Shirley Temple.

     Conversation ranged from what is a Shirley Temple — ginger ale with a splash of grenadine — t0 the role of a good bartender. I mentioned Phyllis Smith, the bartender at the Billy Goat on Washington. "We got to be good friends," I said. "I visited her at her home when she was dying of cancer. She'd been to my house, for parties." 

     Some accounts of the Woodlawn Tap allude to Dylan Thomas drinking there, as if it were some hazy, unverifiable rumor lost in the mock heroic past. It was no rumor; the great Welsh poet drank there on March 16, 1950, stacking his empty glasses up, one after another, and the bar's guest book has his signature to prove it.

     There is much to recommend drinking, while not-drinking is often given a short shrift as some kind of deprivation. But you know what real deprivation is? Being dead. Dylan Thomas died at 39. I might wish I had come up with something like "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," but I wouldn't swap the past quarter century of being alive for it. Not drinking is its own kind of fun. I've grown to like it. One makes fewer mistakes. My faux beer arrived, a Corona with a lime jammed in its neck. I never drank that sort of thing back when it was popular — apparently it still is — but gave it a try. Actually quite good — the lime providing a citrus note, the malt very beerlike.  

     There is something about sitting at a bar that encourages confidentiality, even if you aren't drinking, and we leaned against the deeply gouged bar and talked about important things for half an hour. Time passed quickly. I looked around the place, thinking to take a photo of something distinctive, but Jimmy's, with its black walls, didn't really offer up a lot of decoration, beyond a backlit university seal, which I positioned in the upper right corner of the photo above. It's a classic dive bar, beloved by locals, famous for mixing all types, mechanics and professors — though I imagine, nowadays, the former does better than the latter. 

     The food looked good, and is indeed supposed to be very good. I'll certainly be returning to Jimmy's soon. It's the sort of place where, back in the day, I'd enjoy a cheeseburger and a Jack on the rocks or three. But now just the cheeseburger will do fine.

Great moments in symbolism

"The Treachery of Images," Rene Magritte (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

     So much negative going on. Let’s focus on the positive, shall we?
     Brandon Johnson’s arm-twisting last week led to the meaningless — whoops, “nonbinding” — one-sided City Council resolution calling on Israel to unilaterally stop fighting Hamas, aka a “cease-fire.” The statement didn’t feel the need to call for an end to Hamas attacks on Israel. Good news: It’s not the most antisemitic moment in Chicago mayoral history. Not even close.
     That would be in 1988, after Steve Cokely, aide to Mayor Eugene Sawyer, said Jewish doctors were injecting Black babies with AIDS — not as an offhand remark, which would have been bad enough, but in a taped lecture that the Nation of Islam then offered for sale, because that’s what they do.
     Prompting Sawyer to ... well, maybe I should draw this out. It’s really too delicious to rush past. Let’s play, “You be the mayor.” So your adviser, who has been in your employ for years, disgorges this crazy, baseless, hateful, antisemitic garbage. On cassette tapes. Which he sells.
     As mayor, you need to say something. But what? Craft your own mayoral statement in your mind and we’ll measure it against Sawyer’s actual reaction. Cue the “Jeopardy!” music: Dum, dum, dah, da-da, dum dum dah. ... Got it? Good.
     Here’s what Eugene Sawyer actually offered up: “What Steve Cokely does on his own time, as long as it’s not illegal, is his business.” The mayor of all Chicago then allowed that he would go so far as to suggest Cokely “tune down his rhetoric.”
     Sawyer eventually fired Cokely. And did other mayoral stuff. But when the subject of Sawyer comes up — an uncommon occurrence — that moment springs to mind. Something for Johnson to think about.
     In our present mayor’s defense, the war raging between Israel and Hamas — which is still firing rockets into Israel — brings out the absolute worst in most everybody.
     From those supporters of Israel able to shrug off 26,000 Palestinian deaths and horrendous civilian suffering, to supporters of Palestinians who seem unable to acknowledge that the war was provoked by the worst atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust —1,200 civilians killed in a morning — committed on their behalf by their duly-elected legal representatives. (Although, to be fair, having lived in a nation run by Donald Trump for four years, I get the idea that you aren’t your leaders, necessarily. At least I hope not.)
     The City Council resolution isn’t antisemitic the way, oh, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is antisemitic. Rather, its fault is in omission. None of the 13 paragraphs of “WHEREAS”s setting up the resolution suggests Hamas should stop trying to destroy Israel. There is no mention of tunnels or rockets. A person unfamiliar with the situation would have no idea that generalized “violence” hadn’t spontaneously erupted in Gaza, prompting good-hearted folks in Chicago to call for “a permanent ceasefire to end the ongoing violence in Gaza.” As if it were that simple.

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Work is its own award

                           Kevin Winter/Getty Images for the Recording Academy

     "Do you want to watch the Grammys?" my wife asked, several times over the weekend, leading up to the broadcast Sunday night.
     Honestly? I'm not sure I've ever watched the Grammys. They were always kinda vanilla, mainstream, pop treacle. Making news only for how woefully wrong and out-of-step the winners were. Year after year. 
     But why not? They're music, right? I like music.
     We tuned in late, just in time to hear Billie Eilish singing "What Was I Made For?" the  Grammy-winning — eventually — theme song from the "Barbie" movie.
     A melancholy tune that — Eilish said — took her and her brother a full 30 minutes to compose. I enjoyed it. I like Eilish — nice voice, arresting lyrics, weird in a good way.
     X told me we'd missed the show-stopping duet between Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs, the country singer who revived her 1988 hit "Fast Car" and sent it to the top of the charts — making Chapman to be the first Black woman to write a No. 1 country song, which is sad bordering on shocking. We caught the lovely performance on social media. I admired Combs for respecting the song and not changing the lyrics — like John Prine singing, "I am an old woman" in "Angel from Montgomery." The respect he had for Chapman was obvious, and it was encouraging to see these two people from different generations, races, areas of the country and orientations, making beautiful music together onstage.
     What I remember most about that album, when it came out, is it was one of the first CD's you bought to go with your new CD player — that, or Paul Simon's "Graceland." The pride of Cleveland, Chapman's career never developed much beyond the initial fully-formed talent she arrived on the scene with. But that was enough. To expect more seems ungrateful; though I do wonder what she's been up to for the past 36 years.
     I was glad to be passingly familiar with some of the artists — Lizzo, Olivia Rodrigo. I'd played the song she sang on the show, "Vampire" for my wife, pointing out the lyrics I admired — "You sold me for parts." She didn't much care for it. What intrigued me in the Grammy performance is there was a bit of business where she smeared some blood on her face — this was before the walls started bleeding. But only slightly. At first I thought she'd actually cut herself — it was just a little blood — then realized it was part of the performance. But the blood didn't quite work, and on such a vast stage, there's something refreshing in a bit of show business that goes awry. 

      I was excited to see Joni Mitchell perform. Ahead of time. When the moment came, though, I was unsure. She's 80, and picked the perfect song from her genius catalogue to sing. — "Both Sides Now." Her voice retains traces of its magnificence, and she pulled it off, there in her throne. But it was hard not to feel sorrow, to see her, after so many health crises and the ravages of time,  in that chair, tapping her cane. "Steadily life takes away from you, bit by bit, step by step, the quality of fresh involvement," Tennessee Williams once wrote.
     Otherwise, there was plenty of Taylor Swift, standing up, clapping. She won twice. I was taken aback when she first went up and accepted her award, noting this was her 13th Grammy and plugging her new album, announcing she was going to go and social media the cover. All business.
     Jay-Z came up with a young woman. "I hope that's his daughter," I said. It was.
     Toward the end, Billy Joel performed the first new song pried out of him after 17 years of recycling his old hits. It fell completely flat, for me, but then I never liked him much in his prime — "Piano Man," "Captain Jack," "Allentown" and quickly downhill from there. He always seemed like a downmarket version of Bruce Springsteen. "Did I wait too long?" he sang. Yes, Billy, you did. But in his defense, it's a bitch to get old. You lose your spark and have to coast on reputation.
     Thank goodness my mood was saved, by Taylor Swift of course, at the very end, accepting her record breaking fourth Album of the Year Grammy for "Midnights," passing Frank Sinatra, Paul Simon and Stevie Wonder, who all had three. 

     "I would love to tell you that this is the best moment of my life, but I feel this happy when I finish a song," she said. In other words: This is nice, but what I really like is doing the work that leads to this. "For me the award is the work," she said. "All I wanna do is keep being able to do this. I love it so much, it makes me so happy."

     And the truth is, work is enough. Awards are nice — would be nice, I imagine. But even without the awards, the work is still enough, if you love it.

Saul Bellow to earn yet another honor Tuesday

     “Was I a man or a jerk?” Saul Bellow asked on his deathbed in 2005, as depicted on the opening page of Zachary Leader’s two-part biography of Bellow’s life.
     There is ample evidence to support either conclusion. Bellow’s writing certainly racked up several lifetime’s worth of plaudits — Leader calls him “the most decorated writer in American history, the winner, among other awards, of the Nobel Prize for Literature, three National Book Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the Forementor Prize...” and so on.
     Add to that list being featured on a United States Postal Service stamp, to be unveiled Tuesday at his home base of more than half a century, the University of Chicago.
     Of course, given that U.S. stamps have honored Tweety Bird, Raymond Burr and popsicles, that might not be the accolade it once was, and that too is somehow fitting for Bellow, who liked to gnaw on his prizes to gauge their authenticity.
     If you read the James Atlas biography, the J-word certainly suggests itself. The moment burned into my brain is after Bellow won the Nobel Prize in 1976. In later years, when Nobel season rolled around again, he would fall into a funk.
     “Better watch out for Saul Bellow today; he’s in a bad mood,” a friend once cautioned a mutual colleague. “The Nobel Prize is being announced, and you can’t win twice.”
     Speaking of his “jerk” side, well, where does one begin? That he was married five times and had countless affairs is often mentioned prominently. He was an unaffectionate, absent father, according to his son Greg.
     Bellow’s own father certainly agreed he was a jerk.

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Flashback 2012: Barack Obama goes blue

     Last week, Joe Biden referred to Donald Trump as a "sick fuck" and a "fucking asshole." While I would argue that, considering the man in question, those phrases are mere dry, neutral descriptions, and no mere naughty words could touch the obscenity of The Former Guy's assault on the Capitol and democracy. But it did raise the issue of presidential propriety, and made me think of simpler, more decent times under a far, far better human being.

     The end of the interview is the most perilous part, as any politician will tell you and Barack Obama learned anew earlier this month.
As Rolling Stone journalists were leaving the Oval Office Oct. 11, one editor told Obama that his 6-year-old is supporting him.

     “You know, kids have good instincts,” Obama replied. “They look at the other guy and say, ‘Well, that’s a bullshitter, I can tell.’ ”
     Generally true, though kids can also have staggeringly bad instincts — they climb into old refrigerators, leap off roofs with towels pinned around their necks, set fires to school offices.
     Obama’s own instincts, though, were a little off in his unguarded slur of his opponent, Mitt Romney, because as much as our Internet-driven culture has shattered the old standards of polite political discourse — to the extent that they ever really existed — calling your opponent a dirty word, no matter how true, is like handing a stick to your foes and dipping your head to be struck by it.
     As soon as the story broke Thursday, the Drudge Report had a photo of Obama with the offending phrase headlined under him, leaving doubt whether it is referring to Romney, well-known as a chronic liar, or Obama himself.
     It is rare when a president swears to good effect — Harry Truman’s pledge to “give ’em hell” perhaps. Usually the mud he flings spatters back on himself. Such as the general public revulsion felt when the White House transcripts not only showed Nixon as a Machiavellian character plotting to unseat his enemies, but swearing a blue streak while doing so.
     This isn’t even a new problem for Obama. The president was cited on it in his first year in the White House — calling Kanye West a “jackass” while Vice President Joe Biden was quoted saying “Give me a fucking break.” And then there was his chief of staff, the famously potty-mouthed Rahm Emanuel.
     Three years ago, the thinking was that presidents weren’t swearing more, only the media was letting it through more. “Team Obama is no more crasser than administrations past,” Politico wrote in 2009. “It’s just that they are being quoted more accurately.”
     Oh right, blame the media. Only in this case, it’s a fair criticism — if it is a criticism. We’re not publicists — if the president wants to use what once was charmingly called “foul language,” who are we to clean it up? Toward what end? Maybe the problem isn’t that the president swears, but that the old-school media doesn’t, as much, yet.
     Forty years ago, Nixon’s curses were shielded from the public — the famous “expletive deleted” of the Watergate transcripts. Now it is mostly mainstream newspapers that feel the need to dash and obscure, while obscenity — often captured on video — is offered in all its unbleeped glory on the walls of the Internet. Yet the world does not crumble.
     And to be fair, the media has not been consistent in its sense of decorum. The word “bulls---” — as opposed to the thing itself — has already appeared seven times in the Sun-Times over the past 25 years, according to our computer library, the first time being in 1985, in a story from Forbes magazine about corporate firings.
     Every generation flatters itself that it has reached some new low of coarseness, when in reality a certain set of words is perpetually kept in reserve, in a roped-off taboo section of the dictionary, to be used under specific situations where a certain kind of emphasis or impact is needed. Obama let his guard down at the end of his Rolling Stone interview, and provided one of the million meaningless memes that have so defined this election, little moments each side can grab and assign meaning to — the Democrats will use the president’s slip into salty waters as a sign of his humanity, an example of his growing confidence, his newfound aggressiveness. The Republicans will use it as Exhibit No. 12,434 as to why Barack Obama is unfit to be president of the United States, focusing on the earthiness without ever touching upon the critique it makes of their candidate, the most thoroughly recognized prevaricator since Pinocchio.
     I swear a lot, when appropriate and sometimes when not, though never here, of course, but find it a useful arrow to have in my quiver. So while I don’t fault Obama for letting it fly, it seems to embody the second-rate campaign he has run in 2012, at least when compared to 2008, lacking the inspiring speeches, the exhortation to hope and progress, a stumbling slog that required periodic rescue from more skillful campaigners such as Bill Clinton and — gulp — Biden.

     So I’m fairly confident that in a little less than three months from now, when Obama is doing a very different kind of swearing — the swearing in kind — this moment will be just another bump in his bumpy ride to a second term. That said, it will rattle us for the next day or so, until the next bump comes along.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, October 25, 2012