Katsura tree

     No matter how many times I visit the Chicago Botanic Garden, I always notice something new. Friday afternoon — sunny, mild, in the mid-60s — it was this katsura tree, caught by the afternoon light in full autumnal splendor.  I'd swear I've never seen it before. One of only two members of its family, cercidiphyllaceae, so named because the leaves, apricot-colored in fall, look like those of a redbud, cercis, though the two are not related.
     The katsura hails from Asia. An ancient Chinese legend places a katsura tree on the moon. As the "katsura man" prunes it, the moon wanes (I haven't found an explanation of what happens when the moon waxes — maybe the leaves grow back). 
    Though Asian cultures tend not to put men on the moon, in the Western fashion, but rabbits. As to why the rabbits don't trim the tree, since they're there, well, nobody says these myths must be consistent. 
     Wood from the katsura tree is used to make Go and chess boards, for its warm hue and beautiful grain, like ripples from a pebble thrown into a pond. 

     Tree experts praise the katsura for being interesting to look at in all four seasons, even in winter, due to "handsome winter branch architecture." I'll have to make sure to circle back and confirm that. The scent of the leaves in autumn is also said to smell like caramel, or cotton candy, or "freshly baked muffins." I photographed the leaves up close, but didn't know enough to come in close and take a whiff. Now I do; good reason to go back to the Botanic Garden soon, as if another reason were needed.

Books on the nightstand: The Whore of Akron

     Really? It's been seven years since I offered up a new installment of "Books on the Nightstand"? Negligent of me — or of you. You're supposed to keep me on my toes, chide me about such things. "Hey Neil! Aren't you reading anymore? Spending all your time watching clips of 'Young Sheldon' on Instagram, are ya?"

     No. Still reading, still researching. Which is how I stumbled upon Scott Raab's "The Whore of Akron: One Man's Search for the Soul of LeBron James." Published in 2011, the book is an example of that once common, now rare literary form: a philippic, a screed against an individual, an ad hominem attack, in this case keelhauling LeBron James, NBA superstar and the titular whore, roundly damned him for abandoning his Cleveland Cavaliers and flouncing off to Miami in search of championship rings.
     Not the sort of book you'd imagine me reading; me, who nearly asked Michael Jordan who he was when I met him. But I am working on something related to our mutual hometown, came across the book, and figured it would fill holes in my knowledge base.

     Boy, has it ever.
     Frankly, I was a little surprised I hadn't heard of Raab previously. We share at least half a dozen common characteristics, being both: 1) from Cleveland; 2) Jewish; 3) alcoholics in recovery; 4) prone to fatness; 5) associated with Esquire; 6) experience drinking with Wright Thompson, the ESPN scribe. It's a big world, I suppose; you can't keep track of everything. 
     Though Raab far surpasses me in #4 (topping out at 388, while I never weighed more than 225) and #5 (he started as a writer-at-large for Esquire in 1997, while I wrote one profile and contributed a few items to the "Dubious Achievement Awards.")
     What makes "The Whore of Akron" well worth seeking out is Raab's voice. I sincerely couldn't give a shit about LeBron James or his championship hopes in the first decade of the 21st century. But Raab performs the same magic trick that Robert Caro does — taking someone you'd otherwise care nothing about and turning him into a font of fascination, though the book is about Raab far more than LeBron. The author is virtuosic at plumbing the queasy mix of pride and resignation that afflicts all who harbor a little patch of Cleveland in their hearts, starting with his Lost Eden, the 1964 Cleveland Browns championship, which he had the misfortune — in my view — of attending as a 12-year-old.

     "That flag still flies in my soul," he writes. "The roar still echoes in my ears. The vision — of Cleveland triumphant, of Cleveland fans in communal thrall to a joy beyond all words, of a Cleveland team lifting the town's immortal heart to heaven — still fills my eyes."

     Me, I'd observe that success is an addiction too, like anything else, and if you find yourself wanting something too much, and chasing it too relentlessly over the years, maybe it's time to forswear it and find satisfaction elsewhere.  But I am not a sports fan. A guy who has written every day for 11 years plus shouldn't lecture anybody on abandoning oneself to pointless pursuits.
      Raab is a searing, fearless writer. I thought I was candid, having written a frank book about sailing with my father. Raab writes about trying to kill his grandfather: "Once, my brother David and I tried to kill the old man. While he was at shul, we wedged the front and side doors tight, waited on the upstairs back porch until he came around the back door,and then fired every knife in the house down at himi the hope of poleaxing his yarmulked skull with one of them."
      I deploy my cute little metaphors like paper boats in a bathtub. Raab rakes his cheeks with his fingernails and scrawls his thoughts in blood on a white wall. Reading Raab, I felt an emotion that I can't recall ever feeling reading another writer: shame. I felt kinda ashamed, of myself, and my own weak tea craft, compared to the high-octane heat he brings to cavailing James as a loser and headcase. My favorite passage, the one I read out loud to my wife, is:

"I'm calling my wife now. As ever, I get rolled into voicemail. I try the landline. Hope. I try her cell again. Nada. Landline. Cell. Landline. Cell. Landline. Cell. She is unavailable. Unreachable. I miss her. I want her to be there for me every time I want her to be there for me. I want to whisper in the small pink shell of her ear that as our years together have unfolded, the mystery of our love grows ever more unfathomable, especially the mystery of where the fuck she is or why the fuck she doesn't answer her fucking cell phone."

     That last sentence, the pivot it makes, is brilliant. Though speaking of his wife, the book does have a notable flaw — in my view. And to give you an idea of the gap between us, I can hardly articulate the sin he commits. But here goes. His beloved, respected, wife makes her first appearance in the book when he calls her over for a handjob, an act which is almost a leitmotif in the book. That doesn't seem respectful. While I'd never judge another man's relationship with his wife, I do know that if I presented my wife in that fashion in a book of mine, she would rip my heart out and taunt me with it as I died. So if you do read the book, and you should, know that's waiting in there.
     Otherwise, it's all pain and Cleveland fandom, set out in Hunter S. Thompson level prose that snaps between Los Angeles and Miami and Cleveland. There are descriptions of basketball games, but not too many. A book should create a world, and as someone who only vaguely knew that James eventually won a few of those championships — I think, I'll have to check (four; quite a lot, really) — it's a joy to see him portrayed as a quitter and a crybaby. 

     Yes, I wish Raab could put some distance between himself and the salmon-to-spawn desire for a championship that so animates sports fans, step back, and explore why the self-worth of an individual — many individuals — can rise and fall on the record of a team whose efforts, really, have nothing to do with them. To him, it's a given.

     "I truly believe that Cleveland's collective soul will be redeemed on that great and glorious day," he writes. "Nothing less." 

      Trust me, as someone associated with a city whose baseball teams have won a World Series apiece in the past 20 years: redemption is elusive.

     Plus I wish he could have considered how a guy supposedly in recovery can take that much Valium and Vicodin. 
     But those are quibbles. October hasn't been the best month, and "The Whore of Akron" is one of those books I opened with gratitude and read with pleasure, an escape from grim reality hanging all around like fog. I've already picked up his second book, "You're Welcome Cleveland" and will turn to that next.
     Sometimes, when someone accuses me of being successful, I point out that I'm not even the most successful writer living in Northbrook — that would be Bob Kurson, author of best-selling "Shadow Divers" and other wildly-popular volumes. Now, with the discovery of Scott Raab, I can say I'm not even the most successful alcoholic Jewish writer from Cleveland with a troublesome family. Still, given what Scott Raab has gone through, and how excellent he is at conveying it, I do not begrudge him the title one bit. Okay, well, maybe a little.

16 shots, 10 years later

 

Unarmed, 2016, by Nick Cave (Museum of Contemporary Art)

     Blog posts and newspaper columns are a different species of beast. The blog can be more freewheeling. It can be either more in-depth or more trivial. Whatever the tone, I try to bring the same professional chops to everything I write, blog or paper. So it's flattering when the Sun-Times notices something on the blog and asks me to rework it into column, as with the piece below.  If you want to see how I changed it to run in the paper, you can read Friday's print version here. 

   One traditional job that the media used to do faithfully is to keep track of the passage of time. It's been 10, 25, 50, 100 years since such-and-such an occasion. 

    I almost began the next sentence, "This is important because..." but I'm not sure it is important. Maybe. Anniversary stories do allow readers to mark the passage of time, remind themselves of important events, and I suppose tell those new to the scene what they've missed.      Newspapermen used to roll their eyes at the obligatory Pearl Harbor anniversary stories — readers would scream as if we'd bombed the USS Arizona ourselves if we missed one — but I bet at least a few readers looked at the stories and thought, "The Japanese attacked us? Really?"
     Despite their frequent eat-your-peas quality, as a writer, these stories can still be worthwhile, if you take the time to do a deep dive into the subject. I learned a lot from the piece I wrote in 2017 for the 50th anniversary of the unveiling of the Picasso sculpture in Daley Plaza. The reason I dug into the topic more than usual is because I really hated the Picasso sculpture — it seemed a wiley Spaniard's cruel joke on the artist pretensions of Midwestern rubes — but that didn't seem the route to take when celebrating the half century of the iconic ornament. So looking for someone to tell my why the hunk of junk didn't suck, I talked to everyone from curators at the Museum of Contemporary art to mirrored balloon dog artist Jeff Koons, combed archived, reading oral histories with Gwendolyn Brooks who wrote a poem for the occasion despite thinking the thing "looked stupid." The money was good.
     Or such stories can provide small pauses, a dip of the head in recognition of something significant that happened, and a glance at what has happened since because of it. This Sunday, Oct. 20, is the 10th anniversary of ... what Chicago event? Does anything come to mind? See, this is why these pieces have value. I'd be pressed to cough up an occurrence from 2014 unprompted. The Obama presidency ... that happy world before Donald Trump went down that escalator. And...
     What else? Any guesses? A significant, city-shaking moment. National news.
This is how I describe it in my book, "Every Goddamn Day":
     On the dashcam video you can see squad cars, one, two, three of them. You see Laquan McDonald, 17, walking down the center of Pulaski Road, a little hop in his step before Officer Jason Van Dyke, within two seconds of exiting his car, gets into his shooter's stance and fires 16 shots into the teen, who spins to the ground. 

     That's enough. Van Dyke became the first Chicago police officer in 35 years to be charged with first-degree murder in connection to a duty-related shooting. He was sentenced to seven years in prison and got out after serving three. Detained a thousand days for executing a teen who was walking away from him, carrying a three-inch knife.
     There was other fallout. Mayor Rahm Emanuel decided, well, maybe he didn't love the city as much as he was continually professing, and decided not to run for re-election, leading to a pair of sub-par replacements, first the grim Lori Lightfoot, now the feckless Brandon Johnson. Emanuel slunk off to become the American ambassador to Japan, which is about as far from Chicago as you can get without leaving the earth's magnetic field.
     So a life lost — Laquan McDonald would be 27 now. A competent if jerkish mayor exiled. A city pushed down a bad road. The teen himself part of a skein of wrongly killed Black victims whose recorded deaths would rattle everything — sort of a dry run for George Floyd in 2020. Yet another reminder that there are few situations a gun can't make worse.
     The anger that the Laquan McDonald shooting sparked seems to have run dry lately. Now Black men are drifting away from Kamala Harris because, well ... she's a woman. Or something. Shrugging their way toward a candidate who'd see to it that the Jason Van Dykes of America are never again held accountable. That's the downside of looking back. You hope to find progress, but too often all we see is decay.
   

I don't understand = space aliens did it

 

     People are so stupid. You don't need me to tell you that. Particularly with the election bearing down on us. The news is one endless festival of idiocy. 
     Spend five minutes scrolling ... just about anywhere. X, Instagram, Facebook. Hardly matters. People leaping to establish their "I'm a dope" credentials.
     I don't go around fact checking lies on the internet — if I made a habit of that, it's all I'd ever do.
     But sometimes I can't help myself, and give in. Curiosity gets the better of me. I was on Facebook, the other day, and it served up the post on the right. A huge, well-made stone wall, from antiquity apparently. Since it's posted by "Real UFO's And More" they don't even have to come out and say it. Their readers  do it for them.
     "Aliens," concludes one. "HUGE GIANTS," another. "Proof that our religions and history books are bullshit" (I actually agree with half of that one)
     To be fair, some state the obvious. "Once again this has absolutely nothing to do with aliens or UFOs."
     "Who knows how this was accomplished?" the caption asks.
     Archeologists, I assume. I plugged the photo into Google Image, and instantly found the wall is at an Inca site in Peru called "Saqsaywaman." 

     Among the sites offered was "EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT SACSAYHUAMAN FORTRESS." 

     The site explains:
     "Despite the Incas being an advanced civilization, they didn’t know the wheel. So they used a technique of hard-work movement. First, the colossal lime rocks were carved in the same quarries of Muyna Waqoto and Rumiqolqa situated 32 kilometers far away. Next, they situated the giant carved stones over oiled logs. These stones were tied down by thick ropes by several people who pulled them. In this form, the stones were sliding over the wooden reeds. Please note that the Incas re-carved these stones, refining them even more, in the same place of construction.
     "According to the chronicler Pedro Cieza de León, more than 20,000 people participated in the construction of this Inca complex, and its construction lasted a century, approx. The process was slow, but the result endured over time to the present."
     Eyewitnesses, watching the thing built. Not aliens. People. 
     I never thought of this before — and as a rule, I try not to see racism crouching under every bush. But maybe part of this whole "aliens had to have made this!" nonsense is ignorant white people who can't conceive of brown folks long ago doing something with a high degree of skill. A problem that plagues us to this day.

"Troubling on all counts"

   

Protester, Republican National Convention, July, 2016

     Readers sometimes write with interesting questions. This, from Alexander B. was slugged, "Israel and the Election."
     "This troubles me," he begins. "First, why is the presidential election apparently so close?"
    Why indeed? Well — and thank you for asking — a number of reasons. 

     First, the dupes are invested in the fraud. That's why there's so little erosion of the Trump base. They've punched the ticket, gotten on the train. They won't get off. They can't. Subsequent developments and revelations do not affect them. Or as I keep saying: Once you get in the habit of ignoring reality, the exact nature of the reality being ignored hardly matters.
     They are joined by various newcomers, dopes on the left. Latinos willing to support the most anti-Latino president in history because they've convinced themselves he isn't talking about them, personally. Blacks who are more comfortable with a bigoted, mean, white man than a joyous woman of color. Palestinians, doing that cutting off their future to spite their past thing that Palestinians are so good at, supporting Benjamin Netanyahu's best friend in the world and a hardened Muslim hater over a member of the current administration. 

     Plus a confederacy of the ugly and malicious, the toxic and terrified. Fear junkies and rage addicts of every race and nationality. Subjugated if pious women who want all their sisters to join them in permanent second class citizenship.

     And never forget the cowardice and short-term self-interest of Republicans, who handed their party over to Trump and grovel in a way that will shame them someday, if our country has a future, and mainstream Christians, who violated every tenet they supposedly embrace in service to their army of imaginary zombie babies.  

     Rich asshats like Elon Musk, who in my dream world will be forever tarred by prancing around Donald Trump, jamming a dagger at the heart of his adopted country when it needed him most. Catiline, Judas, Elon.
     "Second," Alexander continues, " polling seems to show that we don't necessarily favor Harris to handle foreign affairs, wars etc."
     Policy doesn't matter here. This is a tribal issue. It's cute, to me how old line media will publish a chart comparing how Trump and Harris stand on the Law of the Sea and the sugar import tax, when most of America made their irrevocable choice long ago based on their grandparents' political leanings and their own cerebellum lizard brain. 
     "Third, Israel is getting hotter and we're sending weapons systems and troops to help."
     And a good thing too. Israel is our ally, sadly in the grip of a leader as bad as Trump. He won't be there forever. It will only seem that way.
     "Fourth, Netanyahu loves Trump and the feeling is mutual."
     Dictators always support each other. Remember, the World War II axis of Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo and, for a time, Stalin.  Birds of a feather ... When you abandon human values, the first thing you do is look for is company, backup. To pretend your perversion is A-OK.
     "So, is Netanyahu helping Trump because the ignorant voter mass would prefer him to handle war issues?"
     Which ignorant voter mass? Israel's? They did elect Netanyahu, though their parliamentary system led to him making common cause with their right wing religious crazies and die hard fanatical settlers — which is going into the weeds, foreign policy wise, for most Americans, speaking of ignorant voter masses, who view Israel as the place where Jesus was born and will return after the welcome arrival of Armageddon. Which, I have to admit, feels a lot closer today than it did last year. It hailed Tuesday morning. Burning frogs might be next.
     "Troubling on all counts," Alexander concludes.
     No argument here. 

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.