Fall color

     When our house was built, around 1905, it was surrounded by an apple orchard that continued to the north and west. At some point the property was divided up into lots, and the line between our land and our neighbor's was marked by a sugar maple tree.
     We bought the house 24 years ago, and one of the countless arborists we hired over the years observed that a root that had grown wrapped around the maple's trunk. It would eventually strangle the tree and kill it, he said, but we couldn't cut the root, because that would kill the tree too.
     Sad, because it's such a beautiful tree.
     Well, nearly a quarter century later, predictions of the tree's demise turned out to be premature. It was particularly beautiful Sunday morning, with the sun first striking the leaves. I snapped a few photos, then just stood there in the center of the street, admiring the colors.
     I appreciated the beautiful colors, spontaneously, then was glad that, despite everything going on, I could appreciate them. A sort of double gladness, soon replaced by pedestrian concerns. But I had it for a moment. Sometimes, a moment is all you get.

     Autumn is upon us; enjoy it while it's here. Who knows what life will be like for any of us come winter?

The Stag at Eve

     It's been a while since I thought a New Yorker cartoon was funny.
     In fact, I can't remember when that last happened.
     I almost said, "It's been a while since a New Yorker cartoon was funny." But I have that superpower of stepping out of my own perceptions and realizing that I'm not the only person in the world. They still print them, after all. Young people might find them hysterical. They probably do. I sure hope so. Me, I just find them strange.
     Once, New Yorker cartoons were great fun. I just pulled seven large format New Yorker cartoon collections off my shelf, looking for a certain cartoon I mentioned in the comments Thursday in my cri de coeur about the New York Times muffing its coverage of our gathering national disaster. 

     Flipping through the pages, I was immediately reminded just how fleeting humor can be. Lots of bosses chasing secretaries around desks. Not so funny anymore. All the Black people were jungle tribesmen or servants. Not so funny anymore. A reminder that we communicators have got to change with the times. I try to keep my frame of reference current, but sometimes it feels like I'm always rushing to keep up with some change I don't care for in the first place. Sometimes I envy those guys who just fold their arms and stop adapting. Staying on top of things is exhausting. There are so many ways to screw this up. But I have a professional interest not to let myself be stuck in the 1990s.
     A couple rarities. "The Seventh New Yorker Cartoon Album" was published in 1935, 10 years after the magazine was founded. I can't find any information about it online, but my hunch is it's the first album and the "Seventh" is a joke, or an attempt at one anyway. Not to disparage that brand of chuckle — senior year of college, the humor magazine published its 50th anniversary issue, crafting a half century of clips to highlight, even though it wasn't four years old. We thought it a bravura performance at the time and maybe it was.
     And "The Stag at Eve," a thin, softcover 1931 volume of mildly risque cartoons, mostly prurient, a few vaguely anti-Semitic, by top New Yorker artists, including several by William Steig. "Trouble with you, Baby, is you need awakening," says a pint-sized Steig lothario, leering at a female pal with a big ribbon in her hair as he arches toward her on a sofa.
     My guess is an attempt to monetize cartoons that couldn't make it into the magazine — something New Yorker artists also did that in more recent years — see 2006's "The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker."

     The title, "The Stag at Eve," is worth noting, a reference to the male deer that often pops up in the background of paintings of Adam and Eve, a reminder of the introduction of sin into paradise and the, umm, need for redemption through Christ. A sly reference to the off-color jokes within).
     Oh, the cartoon. I was trying to capture the strange way the East Coast media is clinging to the rituals of a normal presidential election, even while covering the campaign of a liar, bully, fraud and traitor who very clearly will tear apart American democracy and impose a dictatorship if given the chance. And I thought of this cartoon. Odd, in my memory, the view of the boat was closer up, and I could see it in the style of Edwin Booth, a New Yorker cartoonist known for his daft, complicated eccentrics. But it wasn't.
     It was drawn by Bruce Petty, and ran Nov. 28, 1959.
     I did not learn that flipping through my stack of cartoon collections, of course, as pleasant an interlude as that was in the pre-dawn dimness of my office. But in three seconds searching online. The reality, once I finally tracked it down, wasn't as impressive as it had been in memory. That happens a lot.

It's my truth and I'm sticking to it!

Matt Chorley

     Lies are durable. They are waterproof, shock resistant. They are tungsten. They persist. resisting all attempts to chip away or efface them. Particularly when they flatter or comfort people. Then they adhere to the lie, barnacle-like, and nothing, nothing, nothing can dislodge them.
     How can we ever deceive ourselves otherwise?
     A perfect example on Friday. A BBC5 show in Manchester, England has a segment called "The politics of..." and wanted to do hats. My book, "Hatless Jack," came out in England 20 years ago, and someone there caught whiff of it. I knew nobody related to the show had read it because they never do.
     I talked with a 23-year-old producer Thursday, as a sort of pre-interview, and laboriously explained to him that Kennedy didn't kill hats, that hats had died 50 years before his inauguration when he did, contrary to popular opinion, indeed wear a hat — he was the last president who wore a silk top hat to his inauguration.
     He seemed to understand. But either kept the information to himself or said it but was not perceived by whoever wrote the introduction, which was read to me as I waited to go on the air: "Neil Steinberg is a columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times and author of 'Hatless Jack,' a book about how John F. Kennedy killed off men's hats by not wearing one to his inauguration.' Or words to that effect.
     No, I said, "Make it 'a book about the untrue myth that John F. Kennedy killed off men's hats.."
     Of course the host, Matt Chorley, introduced me repeating the untruth about Kennedy, which I then corrected. No quicker way to turn off a host than contradict him, and he shifted to some British fashion historian for so long I thought he wasn't going to return to me. If you tapped him on the shoulder, I guarantee you the substance of what I said would vanish, and he'd just say I was a bad guest. He didn't seem interested in that his premise was utterly wrong.

     If someone is bound so tightly by an untruth that has no bearing on them — I assume nobody at the BBC particularly cares whether John F. Kennedy killed off hats. Rather, it was inertia at work. They came in with this belief. They were jolly well going to go out with it.
     I hold the BBC in reverence. Or did. We grew up with a Hammarlund Super Pro short wave radio in my father's den and would use it to listen to Alistair Cooke's "Letter from America," Who knows — I was a child — maybe that was a tissue of error too.
     It made me very sad. That said, I can't pronounce factuality dead. Maybe, as with hats, concern for veracity died long ago, and only now we are noticing. Some of us anyway. That sounds about right.

   

These hot wings will make them talk!

Jenna Ortega, right, fields questions from host Sean Evans ((Photo courtesy of First We Feast/Hot Ones)

     When he was growing up, my younger son and I did the usual dad and lad activities. We attended the opening night gala at the Lyric Opera and visited fun places across the country, from the Morgan Library in New York to the Getty Villa in Los Angeles.
     OK, we also did normal stuff too. Baseball games and camping. We went fishing, once. We fired weapons. I even swallowed hard and took him to see a hockey game — the one time I attended a Blackhawks game in a nonprofessional capacity.
     All fond memories. But one I cherish above all others, because it was his idea and was, by far, the most normal guy thing I have ever done in my life. We went to a Buffalo Wild Wings and sampled hot wings. I'm serious here. He asked me to go, and I went.
     Did I sense a trap? Sure. Did I go anyway? You betcha.
     Did my lips burn for three days afterward? Absolutely. Would I ever do it again? Never. But I remember thinking to myself, as we slid into the garish plastic interior of our local B-Dubs, that this must be what regular dads do all the time. No arias. No Gutenberg Bibles. Just a couple of regular Joes, mano a mano, ingesting fiery foodstuff.
     This is a long way of saying that I was primed when my cousin Harry mentioned "Hot Ones," a talk show where A-list celebrities are grilled while eating progressively hotter wings. At first I couldn't believe it was real; it had to be some feature of a dystopian novel presented as fact and accepted by a gullible public.
     "Hot Ones" has been on YouTube for nearly a decade. They've produced 339 episodes.
     While I couldn't pick most guests out of a lineup, "Hot Ones" regularly snags big names: Ricky Gervais, Chris Hemsworth, Gordon Ramsay, Scarlett Johansson, Conan O'Brien. One must begin somewhere, so I started with Will Ferrell — star of one of my favorite movies, "Stranger than Fiction."
     The 10 progressively hotter wings, lined in a row, really jar these celebrities out of their comfort zones.
     "I enjoy spicy food, to an extent," Ferrell said at the start, already uneasy.
     As the conversation progressed, I was impressed with host Sean Evans, an Evanston native with a genius for carefully crafted questions and unexpected lines of inquiry. He asked Ferrell how he discovered sportscaster Harry Caray.
     "I just couldn't believe the stuff he would say in the middle of a game," Ferrell replied.
     Then on to exotic foods Ferrell ate in Sweden. How was that grilled reindeer eyeball?
     "The eyeball was slimy and gelatinous, and then you crunched down on the cornea, and then you get into that middle squishiness," said Ferrell, who obviously has a knack for placing himself in culinary distress.
     Plunging into the oeuvre, I watched "Wednesday" star Jenna Ortega's episode. She was remarkably composed.

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Sean Evans (Photo courtesy of First We Feast/Hot Ones)

The New York Times misses the forest behind the tree

 

     The New York Times downplayed the Holocaust. I assume everyone knows that, but maybe they don't. For a variety of reasons — the Times's Jewish owners didn't want to seem to be going to bat for the Jews. The Roosevelt administration didn't want the considerable portion of America that harbored sympathies for Hitler to think the war was being fought to save Jews. And, in the Gray Lady's defense, no one could quite believe what was happening. The NYT wasn't alone in getting things backward — check out the Milwaukee Sentinel above.

     At least the Holocaust was semi-hidden. What is harder to understand how the Times can now botch reporting on the latest manifestation of evil — Donald Trump's quest to retake the White House and destroy democracy. There's no other way to say it. The man is a traitor, lapdog of Vladimir Putin, would-be buddy of tyrants and strongmen everywhere, whose ruthless authority he envies. Liar, bully, fraud and felon. That isn't an opinion. It's mere fact. Obvious fact. 
     It amazes me how the Times just doesn't get it, even when they act like they do. Their front page story Oct. 6 on Trump's "extensive cognitive decline" might be reassuring if it were news. But it isn't. It's what I call "Napoleon escaped from Elba" news. News that isn't new. Trump has been full-blown batshit crazy, a raving loon since Day One. On Wednesday, they ran a story spotlighting a single, minor lie, "Trump Says He Visited Gaza, but There's No Record of It." At this point, that is like sharing news that Hugh Hefner went on a date. The miss-the-forest-behind-the-tree aspect is staggering.
     A scrupulous journalist — oh for instance me — might frame that story differently. "Donald Trump lied about visiting Gaza, which is no big shocker because he lies CONTINUALLY about EVERYTHING! But we thought we'd share this latest mote of falsehood anyway, a drop of water in a torrent, in the name of thoroughness."

     Why not print that sentence? Is it not utterly true? In the same edition of the paper, Jess Bidgood's On Politics "Trump's Ugly Closing Argument" column ends with this: "Democracy experts have expressed deep concern that Trump is seeking to stoke doubt in the result of the election, laying the groundwork for him to contest it if he does not win."
     Really, "deep concern"? Is that what the "Democracy experts," whoever the fuck they are, have? Let's recast that sentence to better reflect reality. "Anyone with eyes in their head and brain behind them has watched with growing horror as Donald Trump vigorously stoked doubts regarding past and present elections like a blacksmith at his bellows, laying the groundwork when he tries to overthrow the result of the election, again, which he absofuckinglutely will do if he doesn't win outright."
     Which version do you feel better reflects the true situation? Maybe this is a minor point. The people voting for Donald Trump aren't reading the New York Times. Or me for that matter. But why not speak the truth plainly? Because we sure as hell won't be able to after he is elected.

Brandon Johnson's public spectacle of grievance is getting old

 

     Respect the mayor. No matter what he says or does.
     I'm semi-serious here. As Brandon Johnson boils and accuses and flails about, a certain clarity sets in among the onlookers. Well, me, anyway.
This is not a guy charting a course, but someone reacting to the chaos going on around him, much of his own making. He isn't building bridges, but burning them. How else could he snap at every single shiny lure dangled in his face?
     Respect is earned. I can't recall ever saying "Respect me!" to anyone who wasn't a pair of mischievous preschool boys. But I do sometimes preface a statement with, "As someone who's been on staff for 37 years ..." Meaning, "You know, sport, I've been doing this since before you were born. Perhaps, before you explain to me your keen new system cooked up in a meeting yesterday, you might consider what I have to say."
     Since he brings up the governor, let's imagine JB Pritzker — a deft politician — answering a question the same way.
     "So you're going to Japan, Gov. Pritzker — plan on eating any sushi while you're there?"
"Why do you insult me so? Oh sure, ask the big guy if he's eating something healthy, huh? Ask the Jew if he's going to chow down on smoked salmon."
     It would never happen.
     It never works anyway, and I don't demand respect from new associates or random strangers because I respect myself, plenty, and try to always consider the source. I couldn't check my email otherwise.
     So when Brandon Johnson is served up an obvious gotcha question — do you really want to be going to London for a Bears game this weekend? — he could have stayed cool, could have pivoted onto a topic most Chicagoans can relate to — our 3-2 Chicago Bears.
Did he do that? Eventually, yes. But caught off guard, as always, this is what he prefaced it with:
     "It's disrespectful and condescending that the Black man is going to London for a game. It's disrespectful. It is. The governor went to Tokyo to attract business. And I'm going to London to attract business."

     The same weekend the Bears are playing. What a cool coincidence. One even Johnson eventually acknowledged.

     "And while I'm there, I'm going to root for the Chicago Bears."

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Don't rush; you'll die soon enough.

 

     I am a man burdened by thought. Truly. Things that are obviously not supposed to be thought about much, or even at all, well, I think about them. When I was a little boy, my mother would say, "Neil! Don't think so much." She really did. I didn't not listen, then or now.
     Take this sticker. Noticed at the excellent Newberry Library book shop. Now I love the Newberry Library and its book shop. A beautiful little shop. Very well curated. Maybe even too well curated, in that they don't carry any of my books, not even books researched right upstairs at the Newberry Library, where I am a scholar-in-residence. That is their right. Though I mean, really. It wouldn't kill them to carry a book of mine.
     Speaking of dying. Look at the above sticker, on sale at the Newberry Library bookstore, one of the many fun products they carry that isn't one of my books.  A skeleton, sprouting flowers, attended by a friendly snail, snake, spider. The motto: "Honk if you are excited to return to the earth & be one with nature again."
     Let's think about that. What does that mean? It means, I'm fairly certain, "Honk if you're hot to die." Or am I misinterpreting that? I do not think I am.
     A curious sentiment, yes? Particularly one to put ... well, I assume on your car, though I suppose you could put it in your dorm room or tarot shop or messenger bag. The young are so cavalier about life, they invite death as sport. What the Shakespeare line? "He jests at scars that never felt a wound." Romeo and Juliet.

    Then again, maybe it's sarcastic and I'm just missing it. That happens. The thoughtful can be overly serious. Which is scary. I used to be a humorist....
     I went to look at the website for catcoven.com, the name tucked into the corner of the sticker,  to see if this is par for the course, or extraordinary. A handsome selection of pins and stickers, t-shirts and such. They have a statement of purpose:

     "If you are looking for unique gifts with a creepy cute vibe, welcome to Cat Coven! Cat Coven is proudly a queer woman owned business based out of Harrisburg, PA. Cat Coven is a shop for the weirdos, witches, and warriors. All artwork featured is by me, Kjersti Faret. My designs are influenced by a love of nature, medieval art, Halloween, witchy things and cats. It is my mission that you feel empowered, confident, and inspired. My products are produced in small batches to ensure quality. Shop thoughtfully made products like art prints, T-shirts, embroidered patches and more."
     "Thoughtfully made." So we're birds of a feather then. In all honesty, I like the Witchy Worm and its purple hat. Cute. I looked around and didn't even see the above sticker, so maybe it was made in one of those small batches and then discontinued out of respect for old people who don't like mortality being trifled with since they hear its hoofbeats thundering ever closer and it scares us. I seem to recall not minding "Don't Fear the Reaper" when Blue Oyster Cult put it out 48 years ago, and that's practically a musical advertisement for self-destruction.

     Although, I do see, along with the Grumpy Toad Witch and the Halloween Frogs, a "Free Palestine" vinyl sticker. The "...of Jews," unvoiced, but implied in that statement, didn't fit, apparently. Maybe not so thoughtful after all.  It's almost funny, to see this smorgeboard of cutsy items, jack-o-lanterns and cats and unicorns and gnomes. And then this oblivious hate message, prettied up in red and green, with a serene dove, for use by cosplay sorceresses. Five for $12. I'm sure the owner — a lovely person, no doubt — has no idea why it's wrong, and I wouldn't dream to stepping up to be the person to try to explain it to her. Maybe that's why I do so much thinking — trying to make up for those who do so little.

I should post the sign being discussed in the comments below; it topped the blog Oct. 8.