Nowruz celebration

           Northeastern Illinois University student Tahmina Herewaie holds the Afghan flag,
                  joined by other Afghan Refugee Transition Program scholarship students.

     The upside of my job is that I get to go interesting places. The downside is that when at those places, I am always working. At some level. Since literally any experience can be captured, retained, understood, synthesized, and shared with others, I need to be always on, listening, taking notes, looking around, processing. Or at the very least the pilot light has to be lit, waiting, ready to leap into action.
     It gets tiring. Sometimes you want to stop, put your pen down, shut your brain off, and live. Like last Thursday night. The Afghan sisters whom I wrote about earlier this month, doing their paperwork at a Loop law firm invited me to attend a celebration of Nowruz — the Persian New Year observed by communities from Albania to Iran— at their school, Northeastern Illinois University. 

      It didn't seem a particularly compelling story — Students Celebrate Holiday With Food. But they invited me. It seemed to mean something to them, and to me too, being invited somewhere, not by an organization, but by a person. So I said I'd go, representing the newspaper at an event held by a growing ethnic community. Colorful Afghan dress was involved, so I assigned a photographer.
     I asked my wife to come along — she is an alumnus of NEIU and hadn't been back since she graduated, decades ago. She agreed. 

     In researching what I was going to — "Nowruz" means "New Day" in Persian and falls on the spring equinox — I came upon a video from Disney, of Mickey Mouse explaining Nowruz. No wonder the Republicans are so mad at Disney, treating other people's faiths as if they have value too.

     Dinner was late — after 7, because it is Ramadan, and devout Muslims can't eat until after sundown. It can be a struggle — someone I was talking to checked his watch as we spoke, said something about Ramadan and bolted for the buffet table. My wife urged me to go up and eat. "I'm not pushing ahead of people who've been fasting all day," I said, keeping my seat, waiting for everybody else to get up first. 

     The grub was worth the wait — succulent chicken kebabs and rice, Jerusalem salad and pita bread, custard and cookies and haft mewa, a traditional Nowruz dessert of nuts and fruit in rose water. 
     Several NEIU officials said hello. Handshakes and introductions. I briefly sat down next to a sociology professor, here to support a student in his class. We talked, but nothing noteworthy came of it. There was music, and poetry, some in English, some in Dari. There was a dramatic moment when some of the young women present, dressed in flowing Afghan outfits, marched in waving an Afghan flag to a stirring patriotic song, Watan Ishq Tu Iftikharm ("Love of my homeland is my pride") and I slipped over, knelt down, took a couple photos.

    Back at the table, taking in general vibe. listening to poetry in a language I don't understand, I had a moment to reflect, yet again, how everybody is pretty much the same: glad to be in this country but proud of where they, or their parents or grandparents, came from. And that thing right wingers are so terrified of — a diverse nation welcoming all sorts of people who get to live their lives, even if those lives are markedly different than the general flow— is a very desirable dynamic and an economic necessity to boot. These red staters are afraid of the very thing that actually does make American great.
     After 90 minutes my wife noted it was getting late, and I went over to offer my thanks and goodbye to one of the sisters, who was so surprised I was leaving that I worried that I'd committed some kind of gaffe. Then she asked when I would be writing something about Nowruz, and I paused. "Never," caught in my throat. But that lit the fuse. Honestly, I didn't think about it again until yesterday, looking through my photos for something to write about today, and saw the shot above of that statuesque young woman waving a flag, and said to myself, "Heck, maybe I could put a few words together; it is the New Year, after all. Why not welcome it in a spirit of generosity?"

'Black Houses Matter' with radio jock treasurer

     "I see trees of green ... I see snowflakes, too," sings Maria Pappas, only a little off-key, accompanying the Louis Armstrong song "What a Wonderful World." "Red roses, too. Nothing's blooming! For me and you. And I think to myself, what kind of city is this? ... Hey hey, this is WVON, 'Black Houses Matter!'"
     It's just after 11:30 a.m. last Monday. The Cook County treasurer is sitting behind a microphone in the River City studio of the historic Black radio station, doing what she likes to do best: reaching out to ethnic communities, trying to give back money overpaid in property taxes.
     "And we are killin' it, killin' it!" she says. "Get these numbers, kids. From 3/20 of 2020, until 3/15 of 2024, we are up to ... almost to $300 million. We're at $285,571,000. How about that?"
     Pappas has brought along five staffers, including one in the chair across from her.
     "I've got Maurice Torrance with me this morning," she says.
     "Like the street," he observes, in classic radio sidekick fashion.
     "Maurice is my guy," Pappas says. "He's in charge of the tax sale in Cook County. He's in the legal department."
     Pappas began the radio show on AM 1690 in 2020, designed to prompt taxpayers in the Black community to find out if they've overpaid their property taxes. Last year, she added "Latino Houses Matter" on WVON's sister station, WRLL-AM 1450.
     "We are ready to roll," Torrance says. "And treasurer, for all those callers out there that are saying, 'Oh no, I never overpay, I never double pay,' just how easy it is to do so? Let's say your mortgage company does and you do, too. Guess what? That's an over-payment. Or if you pay, and the wife or spouse doesn't tell you that they pay, too — it's happened to me already. Guess what? You overpaid."
     The show is simulcast on Facebook Live. Pappas, who publishes an annual calendar illustrated by photos of herself wearing chic outfits, stands up and vamps for her viewers. She is wearing a cornflower blue coat, large round earrings and a white spiky pixie hairdo.
     "Don't throw eggs at me, this is phony fur," she says. "I bought on sale. I got it for 40 bucks. This is not one of these designer things. ... I have something very special to tell you this week. I have a good friend, and she told me to go to — get this! — 7214 N. Harlem. This is called Juju's, J-U-J-U apostrophe S. Vintage, Antique and ReSale Shop ..."
     Pappas takes two prearranged calls from people receiving refunds.
     "Denise! Denise! It's Pappas!" she cries. "How are you? Are you retired?"

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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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