The burden of our illusions

   

     Saturday morning I handled two cutting surfaces.
     The first was a small cutting board, a white, plastic, five-by-eight inch rectangle. We were having lox and bagels for breakfast, and I used it to slice up some cucumbers to go on top. Typically tomatoes are used for this purpose, but this isn't the season for tomatoes and, frankly, I like cucumbers better.
     The other was an enormous butcher block that I moved a few feet to vacuum underneath. It occurred to me that it has been many years since I've cut anything on it; typically it sits in the corner of our dining room, with a strip of South American cloth on it. Not the ideal spot for a cutting board — it belongs in a kitchen. But there isn't room there.
     How, you might wonder, does a person end up with such a thing? And the answer is, well, embarrassing. But I'll give it anyway. When I was a young man, and began to work, and receive a regular paycheck, from holding a job, there were two purchases that I considered with my newfound solvency.

     The first was a set of stamps, Scott #C13-15, the Graf Zeppelin set. I'd been a stamp collector growing up, with a special fondness for airmail stamps, and an aesthetic appreciation for zeppelins. They looked cool. I had always wanted this particular set, produced specifically for letters carried aboard that famous airship. They cost about $600 back then. But I saw that purchase as impractical.
     So instead I bought this butcher block at J.D. Brauner on Ashland Avenue. Something useful, a kitchen tool. I know I custom ordered it, nearly 40 years ago, because I remember pondering whether to get it with wheels or not. On one hand, I thought the wheels would detract from the clean line of the legs. On the other, I also knew that butcher blocks are intensely heavy, and that being able to roll it would be of practical value. Butcher blocks also tend to be square, and I got this one in a rectangular shape, to make it less massive. So in the spirit of practicality, I ordered the wheels.

     Why? Well, the honest answer is, that as a young man, I felt I needed a butcher block. To cut up things. And to add to the continual festivity that would be my life. Indeed, I remember, when we lived on Logan Boulevard, using it to dice meat to go into enormous pots of jambalaya and chili, and cut bags of citrus to go into the rum punches which I liked to prepare. The block did see use, based on the cross-hatching of cuts slashed across the top, which I used to regularly dose with block oil. 

   I'm only mildly embarrassed by all this, because I imagine most people have some tangible representation of their youthful illusions, whether an object, or a tattoo, or a scar — some people manage to combine a butcher block with a scar, a professional chef of my acquaintance who contrived to pull hers over — they are top heavy — and broke her foot. Looking back, I wish I'd gone with the zeppelin stamps instead — they're more beautiful than a butcher block, and a mint set will run you $1,750, so their value tripled, while I doubt the butcher block would draw much from anybody — I'd probably have to pay someone to haul it away.

     My wife would get rid of it in a heartbeat. But I've refused. Sure, it's been useless these past, umm, nearly 40 years. But maybe it's just biding its time, waiting for its true use to manifest itself. As it is, it stands very stolidly in the corner of our dining room, holding whatever is put upon it very steadily and without complaint. It represents something, that big hunk of wood. I'm not sure exactly what. The burden of our illusions perhaps. Anyway, I imagine — or at least hope — that I'm not alone in this. 

   So what's yours? 

Flashback 1989: Viewers rate eclipse a total joy

"Two Men Contemplating the Moon," by Caspar David Friedrich (Metropolitan Museum)

     My job sends me places. I decide where, mostly, like the Nowruz celebration — Afghan New Year — at Northeastern Illinois University Thursday night, where I shot the photo atop the blog. It didn't generate a story — none presented itself. But I was invited, so I went.

     Back in the day, after I first joined the staff of the Sun-Times — 37 years ago today — I'd show up for work, for a while at 7 p.m., and be sent somewhere unexpected, whether a zoning board meeting or a church fire or an alley where a man had leapt out of window and been cut in half on the sharp edge of a dumpster.  I never knew where I might be going or what I might find when I got there, which was both a blessing and a hardship.

    For this story, one warm summer evening, I was told to go over to the Adler Planetarium. Two memories stick out. First I walked from 401 N. Wabash. And second, as I did, I wondered, "Who the hell is going to go to bother going there watch an occurrence they can see as easily literally anywhere?" A thought I held until I got to the point where I crested a rise and the planetarium hoved into view. A lot of people, as it turned out, gathered on the lawn for the communal thrill of it. That isn't in the story, for some reason. I clearly remember Willard Fontain sitting on a lawn chair, in a yachtsman cap, a portable radio set to soft music. As well as the lip-smacking relish he used after I asked him why he was there and he replied: "I'm a moon watch-ah!"

     Willard Fontain raised a snifter of cognac toward the moon, a dusty smudge of deep rose, and offered a toast as it was eclipsed for the first time in seven years Wednesday night.

     "A very beautiful sight," said Fontain, who went to Adler Planetarium with his friend Jerry Williams to watch the moon on its 3 1/2-hour transit through Earth's shadow.
     "It lets you know there's really a man up above," he said.
     The first hour of the eclipse was partially obscured by clouds, but the spectators' enthusiasm wasn't dampened. Hundreds of people on the grounds of the planetarium cheered when they saw the last glimmer of light disappear in a gauzy haze, and people waxed poetic while the moon waned.
     "The moon's always been a romantic thing; it symbolizes the unattainable," said Bob Pejovic, of Chicago, fiddling with his telescope. "We'd like to reach out and touch it, like Neil Armstrong did. But in the meantime, we look."
     For the planetarium, the eclipse drew a rare nighttime crowd, pressing around the exhibits and packing lecture halls to hear astronomers speak of the eclipse and to watch it on video monitors.
     "I think it is very good for the planetarium," said astronomer Larry Ciupik. "People don't understand eclipses, and they want to learn more."
     At the Images Lounge, on the 95th floor of the John Hancock Center, the crowd was less welcome.
     "It's been crazy," complained a waiter. "I don't know what the moon does to people, but it's been nuts."
     The moon was completely covered for one hour and 36 minutes, just 11 minutes less than the maximum time physically possible.
     A lunar eclipse occurs when the moon, the Earth and the sun are in a straight line, with the moon in the Earth's shadow.
     As the moon began to pass out of the Earth's shadow, at about 10:30 p.m., student filmmaker Hal Marshall, 24, began packing away the 16-mm. camera he used in taking stop-action photographs from the Hancock's observation deck.
     "It's a symbol of the highest thing that man's attained," he said. "Our machines are there. The American flag is planted there."
     The next total eclipse of the moon will occur on Dec. 9, 1992.
           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, August 17, 1989

Inspired Home Show, umm, inspires

Sami Xia

     Hualien is on the eastern coast of Taiwan, a beautiful area of beaches covered in flat, round stones, a short distance from Taroka National Park, its waterfalls and thermal pools tinted a stunning blue due to calcium carbonate leached from limestone in the ground.
     I've been there, years ago. Not much of a connection but, arriving at McCormick Place Monday and confronting the 360-degree visual overload of the Inspired Home Show, it was enough to point me in the direction of Hualian Ceramics, not immediately noticing the difference between "Hualien" and "Hualian." I wondered what is new in the world of china.
     "Matte glaze is a popular trend," said Sami Xia, a customer manager at Hunan Hualian China Industry Co.
     It took a moment to get my mind around "matte glaze" — it seemed a contradiction in terms, like "dull shiny" — and in that spirit of clarity we should probably address the 2024 show's new name.
     If the "Inspired Home Show" drew a blank, that's because prior to the 2022 show, it was the International Home + Housewares Show. Of course I had to know how that happened. It's like changing the name of the Chicago Auto Show to the Impressive Wheels Show.
     "The Inspired Home Show name connects not only buyer to seller but also product to lifestyle, and the housewares industry to the consumer mindset," explained Debbie Teschke, a senior manager in public relations and communications at the International Housewares Association.
     OK then. As an admirer of tangible objects — they have such solidity compared to the evanescent, flapping luna moths of words — I like to go to the show, whatever it's called, to revel in bowls and cups, mops and sponges.

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Matt Hall of Matt Halls — no possessive — Toilet Table greets Lise Schleicher of Basket Works.

     

"I have a voice!"

     Do you prefer to watch new movies or movies you've already seen?
     It might seem an odd question. Who doesn't want to see a new movie? But given how many films are garbage, the question can be seen as: is it better to take a risk, or go for the sure thing?
     Sometimes I prefer the safety of the familiar. I know I'm going to enjoy "Master and Commander" for the characters, the dialogue, the action. Some other film? Who knows, except it probably won't be as good.
      Or "The King's Speech." I can't tell you how many times I've watched the 2010 film about Lionel Logue, the speech therapist who helped King George VI overcome his stutter in the years before World War II.
     Why that movie? A trio of fabulous actors. Colin Firth plays the stuttering monarch. Firth has a presence that somehow far surpasses his bland handsomeness. Viewers have to like him, even when he is playing an aloof king, or, in "Bridget Jones Diary," a jerk barrister. He's also the cuckold Lord Wessex in "Shakespeare in Love," which put him in the same movie with his star here, Geoffrey Rush, who plays Logue with an unshakable dignity, going toe-to-toe with royalty. "My castle, my rules."
     The third is Helen Bonham Carter, as Queen Elizabeth, who is something of an emissary between the royal world and the grungy environs of an Australian self-taught audiologist. Her face is an essay of pained concern as her husband blubbers that he's a naval officer, not a king. The pivotal moment of the movie is hers as she pops up unexpectedly in the Logue apartment and encounters his wife Myrtle, who learns what her husband's been up to by finding the Queen sitting at her dining room table.

      "It's "Your Majesty" the first time," the royal consort explains, a bit wearily. "After that, it's 'ma'am.' As in 'ham.' Not 'mum' as in 'palm.'"

    The writing is just top notch — the royal couple, his brother, the short-reigning King Edward VIII and the woman he loves, Wallis Simpson, plus the Logues at home, the way their children gather around the radio as war is declared, stand-ins for all those young people about to be swept up and perhaps killed.
    What I didn't know was the story of the film, laid out in the obituary of screenwriter David Seidler, who died last week while fly-fishing in New Zealand at age 86. A thoroughly unexceptional Hollywood journeyman, "The King's Speech" reflected his own experience with stuttering, and shows how important first-hand knowledge is to creativity. His other films — "Tucker" and "Come On, Get Happy: The Partridge Family Story" are uniformly ordinary. Only "The Kings Speech," labored on over decades, stands out as extraordinary. He won the Academy Award for best original screenplay.

    If you haven't seen it, well, you know what to do — you can watch the trailer here. Honestly, I'd rather watch one great movie a dozen times than a dozen so-so movies one time each.

Cook County state's attorney race down to the wire

Clayton Harris III

     Election night tests a news organization. Lots of races, lots of information pouring in on deadline. The paper asked me to write about the state's attorney match-up, probably the most significant race decided Tuesday night. 

     Polls closed at 7 pm. My deadline was 7:45 pm. For 15 long minutes, there were no results at all. Then they began to trickle in. I told my editor the column was finished at 7:43 pm.

     How did I do it? Of course, as with any magic act, preparation is key. I'd already written what I call "A-matter." A background story that could run as-is if — say through a computer glitch —we never got any results at all. The trick was to quickly update the existing story with the best information we had on hand. Which was frustrating, because while we could see Burke was ahead, a winner still hasn't been officially declared. So we did the best we could with the information at hand, which might be the definition of a newspaper.

     There are two speeds in the American criminal justice system: too fast and too slow, and society lurches from one to another.
     Too-fast justice fills the jails and wastes law enforcement resources pursuing petty criminals. Too slow lets the small fish escape to become big fish and leaves law-abiding citizens feeling unprotected against the lash of crime.
     The public doesn't like either for very long. Which puts the Cook County state's attorney — the elected official responsible for 700 lawyers prosecuting crimes among a population greater than Ireland's — in a bind.
     The public — the estimated 20% who voted anyway — made their choice in the Democratic primary Tuesday, leaning toward tough-talking former Judge Eileen O'Neill Burke, playing for Team Too Fast, over Clayton Harris III, representing the too-slow faction, with half the votes counted.
     If elected, Burke would be a pivot away from current two-term State's Attorney Kim Foxx, protege of Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who put the brakes on prosecutions, tossing out thousands of cases, declaring the system "inequitable, unfair and totally unjust” and pushing to be more fair ... to accused criminals.
     Theft of items worth more than $300 could be handled as a felony, but she more than tripled that threshold to $1,000 which, combined with the post-COVID-19 hollowing out of downtown, and the George Floyd riots, created a sense of a Loop awash in unchecked crime.

     That might have been forgiven. But Foxx kneecapped herself in the case of Jussie Smollett, the obscure actor who, in an apparent bid for notoriety, beat himself up in 2019. Foxx botched the prosecution of the case, then botched her handling of the botch.

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River City Marina

 

    Several Chicago architects are remembered for their fondness for particular shapes. Harry Weese, for instance, loved triangles — the city's two triangular buildings, the Metropolitan Correctional Center and the Swiss Hotel, are his. 

    Bertrand Goldberg worked in curves. He's best known for Marina City, the twin corn cob towers between Dearborn and State, just north of the Chicago River. They were iconic symbols of the city, briefly, between their completion in 1967 and when the Picasso sculpture a few blocks south replaced them at the center of our civic imagination.
      Those aren't the only buildings — and I think I'm correct using the plural, since there are two — Goldberg designed downtown. Business Monday morning took me to two of them. First,  his lesser known River City Marina — sort of a squashed, serpentine, version of Marina Towers, with wide oval windows, also on the river, its southern branch,at Wells and Polk. 
     The ground floor is big, sprawling, spread out, mostly empty and poorly marked, and as I searched for the room I was looking for, I passed the study area above. 
    What caught my eye? The books of course. At first glance I thought they were a wall of decorative volumes, with color coded spines. But a second look revealed it to be something worse — a photo mural of books. The giveaway was how outsized the books are — too big to be real. Kinda nightmarish, really. From font of knowledge to exaggerated graphic device in one generation.

      Which raised the question: why? To create a scholarly atmosphere? Be artistic? Fill a blank wall? Then why not use a photo of actual books at ordinary scale? Or heck, install actual shelves and stock them with real books of some sort. A little more cost and effort, sure. But perhaps worth it. Books are cheap enough nowadays, you can buy them by the yard or the pound. As ersatz as that seems, this is worse.

      The book mural seems a triple whammy — books chosen for their dust jacket color. And then photographed. And then made huge. Is that where we are now? I suppose. It didn't help that I had been the only person in my Metra car consulting an actual physical newspaper. Nearly an affectation, like wearing spats.

     I've only stepped in Goldberg's Marina Towers once, years ago. We were looking for a place to live downtown, and my wife and I figured we'd check out the famous, pie-shaped apartments with their balconies overlooking downtown. Only I never made it past the lobby — too dreary. I didn't even like walking through once, and turned around before I got in the elevators, thinking, "I can't come home here." Maybe they've remodeled it since — I don't want to malign the place unfairly. But River City felt the same — we had been there years ago, my wife and I, scouting out places to live. River City seemed the sort of place you'd live on your way to Mars. An architectural misfire, a literal dead end. Do any readers live there? Am I missing something?

    Oh, and the third Goldberg buildings were the Hilliard Tower Apartments on Cermak, passed on the way from River City to McCormick Place. A pair of big round towers, Hillard seems like Marina City grown squat and fat. Much of that housing is for low income seniors. Perhaps I'll be visiting there next. 

Hilliard Tower Apartments

“History repeats itself” — Hellenic Museum to consider voter suppression

Pericles

    The Illinois primary election is Tuesday. With November's pivotal moment in American history looming beyond that. So now might be an apt time to pause and ask ourselves: this whole voting business, where did it come from?
     Partial credit for citing the American Revolution, 1776 and all that. A major step away from being ruled by kings.
     But where did American revolutionaries get the idea? Voting initially sprang from a very specific time and place — Greece 2500 years ago — and like any new tool, it had a specific purpose: to create a new form of power.
     Elections in ancient Greece represented "the new weapon of the popular vote against the old power of family politics" according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Being in charge because you were the son of the ruler was fine, if you were the son of the ruler. But those non-relatives had begun to chafe. Shouldn't their views count? An idea sprang up — ask people to give or withhold their consent, aka democracy.
     Then the question became: who votes? Could foreigners earn the right? About 451 BC, Greek general Pericles changed the Athenian constitution to require that to be a citizen, you had to have Athenian parentage on both sides.
     In April, Chicago's National Hellenic Museum is putting Pericles on trial for fiddling with the constitution.
     "Hero or tyrant?" is how the museum presents the issue. "Audience members will cast their votes to decide the final verdict."
     Raising the subject of voter suppression and xenophobia can't have been an accident.
     "No accident," confessed retired Circuit Court Judge Anna Demacopoulos, a trustee of the museum and co-chair of the event. "This year's presentation is so relevant. You can actually see the first time somebody was accused of voter suppression. Do you protect your citizens or do you do what it takes to retain your power? Which is exactly what leaders might be grappling with right now."
     As if voting rights and treatment of foreigners were not relevance aplenty, there is also the matter of the status of women.

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