Artificial intelligence is still pretty stupid.

Not a Christmas tree.

     I pay Apple some set sum — I think it's $14.95 a month, though it might be part of my phone plan — for access to something called "Apple Music." It's a fairly intuitive, comprehensive selection of more music than I could listen to in a thousand lifetimes, if a rip-off for artists who instead of getting a dollar when I buy their 45 now get .00001 of a penny when I listen to their song. If that.     

     Still, I listen to music a lot, particularly when exercising, or walking the dog, or doing chores, like folding laundry. I usually play my own "Library," of self-selected songs, though recently I discovered a feature called "Neil Steinberg's Radio" that plays songs which ... well, I'm not exactly sure what the curation procedure is. Some are often-played favorites. Others songs I've never heard from groups I'm unfamiliar with.
     What I've noticed is how really bad it is. How often it repeats songs I declined to listen to an hour ago. How many times it has served up "27 Jennifers." The thing has all of recorded music to choose from and ends up serving up a half-appealing mash, supposedly based on my own tastes. 
     And I take comfort in that. If AI can't pick songs that are halfway intriguing, it probably isn't near able to take over the world. Or maybe that's part of the plan. AI is being honed every day, and I assume, once it gets its algorithm together, it will cause all sorts of havoc in our lives — whether being monitored and influenced by the totalitarians even now tightening their grip around the throat of the body politic.
     Until then, I happily note each AI stumble and blunder. Maybe that's my way of blinding myself to he growing peril. Still, you can't help but be more impressed by its failures than its successes. So yes, when I asked iPhoto to serve up photos of a "Christmas tree" to illustrate the blog yesterday, most pictures were evergreens trimmed with tinsel and ornaments. But also my wife and boys wearing pointed birthday hats. And a house with a conical turret. And a Nick Cave sock monkey suit, above and Félix González-Torres' "Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)" at the Art institute of Chicago below. One of the rare artworks in a major museum that you can not only touch, but take a bit of. Visitors are encouraged remove a candy, and the pile is replenished regularly, kept at 175 pounds, the weight of the man being honored, who died of AIDS in the early 1990s.
      I know that. AI thinks it's a Christmas tree. Hardly seems a fair fight. So far.

Also not a Christmas tree.

Not every Christmas memory involves Marshall Field's windows.

 

     Merry Christmas! I hope you're having a memorable one. Of course I'm working. And honestly, some of my most memorable Christmases have been thanks to Xmas duty at the Chicago Sun-Times.
     There was the Christmas Eve I spent in the back seat of a Chicago police cruiser — observing, not arrested, shadowing a pair of rookies as they tried to keep the night silent in Englewood. The memory of that night always makes me wish the CPD still trusted its officers enough to let the media watch them in action.
     Pulling a story out of the stillness of Christmas Day is always a challenge — one Christmas I made the rounds of Thai and Chinese restaurants, talking to diners — not only Jews, but Muslims, too. Though the really memorable moment came afterward; a rabbi phoned me, outraged, because I quoted someone saying that Chinese food on Christmas is "a Jewish tradition." This, the rabbi fumed, is an insult to Jewish tradition. By the time we were done talking, well, let's say meetings and apologies were involved.
     Otherwise, Chicago history offers up several noteworthy Christmases. These are from my latest book, "Every Goddamn Day," which the paper is giving away in a drawing to five readers who subscribe or donate here through Dec. 31 at midnight.
     There is 1904, when the city of Chicago was broke and the treasurer went to La Salle Street and secured personal loans to make the city's payroll on Christmas Eve. There was the "boisterous crowd" gathered in 1955 in front of the Oak Park home of Dorothy Martin, who had announced the world would end on Christmas while spacemen arrived to usher herself and her followers to heaven. Or 1973, when a 350-pound slab of marble fell off the newly constructed Standard Oil Building, the overture in an engineering disaster that would end with the entire stone skin of the 82-story tower being replaced, at an expense greater than the original cost of construction.
     And my favorite: Christmas 1945. For the three Christmases before that year, 12 million Americans in uniform had dreamed of one thing — to be home, instead of at whatever rocky Pacific atoll, British bomber base, Alaskan radar station or German POW camp they happened to find themselves.
     The trains were utterly full — the Southern Railroad estimated 94% of passengers were service men and women. Six Marines grabbed a cab in San Diego and hired the driver to take them to New York City. Illinois servicemen who borrowed a furniture van in Denver spent Christmas snowbound in Kansas City.
     As a major rail hub, Chicago hosted an occupying army of stranded servicemen — over 100,000.

     Those who can’t go home, call. Bell Telephone reported all of its long-distance operators were on duty, a first. In part, because the pricey calls were being given away — 1,000 wounded vets recovering at Great Lakes Naval Hospital each get a five-minute call home, paid for by the Phone Home Fund, financed by readers of the Chicago Times, a predecessor of this newspaper.

     Compounding the chaos, Chicago, like much of the Midwest, was glazed by ice, the worst since records have been kept. A Navy plane carrying nine sailors landed at Municipal Airport (now Midway) but couldn’t take off. Dale Drew and June Kemper, two ticket agents for Consolidated Airlines, saw the Pacific vets moping around the airport in the morning. The agents phoned their mothers, already preparing family Christmas dinners for 11 and eight, respectively. What’s a few more? They divvied up the swabbies, each taking some home, where presents for all nine of them materialized under the trees.

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Might as well make merry

     The holiday cookies are at the front of the store as you walk in — they know their business at Sunset Foods — and I was pausing to admire them when a burst of plaid entered my field of vision. Ron Bernardi, whose four uncles, the Cortesi brothers, started Sunset in 1937. Or, more accurately, a red plaid tuxedo jacket with Ron Bernardi inside. He was joyous. 

    "Get the shoes," he ordered, when I took a photo close in, concentrating on the jacket, and I stepped back to capture the full effect.
     Ron is 81, and has worked at Sunset longer than I have been alive. I can't recount our conversation Monday except that he had me feel the velvet of his lapels. I wished him Merry Christmas and he wished me Happy Holidays as other shoppers — the parking lot was full — nudged me aside to claim their Ron time.
     I've heard people say that this holiday is muted, between our nation electing a moron as its  president, again, and ... well, that's about it, isn't it? But honestly, I don't feel downcast. Myself, I find the holidays highly welcome. Might as well be festive; we'll have reason aplenty to be glum in February. 

The plaid jacket had these sunglasses 
in the pocket when Ron got them, no 
doubt to shield the original owner from 
the harsh Vegas sun.

    

     Maybe it helps that Hanukkah begins on Christmas Day, one of those rare congruences when the two holidays line up. We're partying at the same time this year. Otherwise Hanukkah ranges over the calendar, starting as early as Nov 28, or as late as Dec. 27 (in 2013, Hanukkah and Thanksgiving overlapped).  Since Jews, like Muslims, are old school, and set their holidays based on a lunar calendar. 

     We aren't holding our family party until toward the end of Hanukkah's 8-day span (it runs until Jan. 2). But we have to fit everyone's ever-more-complex schedules. Twos boys, both married in the past year, two new brides, flitting around the globe like luna moths.
     "Thirty people," my wife said, looking around the kitchen with a flash of desperation.

     Nothing fancy. Beer, brats, latkes — since EGD has so many new readers, and Jews have slipped a bit from their position as America's Official Also-Ran Faith, I should probably explain that a latke is a potato pancake fried in oil. 

     Hanukkah being close to Christmas might increase the usual confusion of what the holiday is actually about,  and sometimes non-Jews query me: "Hanukkah is sort of your Christmas, yes?"

     No, it's not. It's more like V-E Day. Hanukkah celebrates a military victory — the rededication of the temple in Jerusalem after the surprise triumph of Judah and his Maccabees over the occupying Greek-Syrian army in 200 BC. (I could expand upon this fact to make several salient points about more current events. But it's Christmas so let's keep it light. My guess is that crowing about military victories won't be quite so enthusiastic this year).

     Previously, I've compared Hanukkah to Arbor Day, grown massive by its proximity to Christmas, like those ants exposed to radiation in a 1950s horror flick. I hobbyhorsed the Arbor Day metaphor at length in one of the first columns I wrote for an online platform — actually, one of the first columns anybody wrote for an online platform, as this was in 1996 for American Online. It was a surprise feature, an Easter egg — back then,  you would click on the AOL logo and get a cartoon, or an essay. The editor was John Scalzi, who went on to considerable wealth and fame as a science fiction writer (I recommend his Collapsing Empire trilogy; much fun).

    We spin dreidels — sigh, four-sided tops used in ancient gambling — sing Hanukkah songs which really lag behind Christmas carols. It seems unfair that Jews gave the world "White Christmas" and "Frosty the Snowman" and "Jingle Bell Rock" and half the songs on the radio this time of year, but when it comes to honoring our own holiday it's "I Have a Little Dreidel" which is really like fingernails on a chalkboard, and "Rock of Ages." What cannot be avoided must be endured.

     The moment I really like is lighting the menorahs in the window. Usually Jewish holidays are interior — around the table — or closed away in a synagogue, such as on Yom Kippur. The lighting candles on Hanukkah is really the one moment when the religion really confronts the outside world, lighting our candles against the darkness and saying, "Hey, Jews on your block. Get over it." 

     Well...I think that'll do. It's Christmas after all, nearly. And Hanukkah, almost.

GroceryLand ready for 'wild ride to come' — 'We're here to fight back'

Lori Cannon, center, Jose Jimenez, right. 

     You can't buy shampoo, toothpaste or toilet paper with food stamps. An echo of tightfisted Dickensian notions of charity, making sure the shiftless poor won't be living it up on their dime, washing their hair and brushing their teeth and similar displays of wild extravagance.
     "I don't consider toilet paper a luxury, I consider it a necessity," said Lori Cannon, when I visited her Saturday afternoon at GroceryLand, 5543 N. Broadway, the Edgewater food pantry for people living with HIV and, between us , for anyone else in need who stops by. "What we need are personal care items because people on food stamps aren't allowed to use them for anything but food."
     Cannon prefers donations of goods rather than money, given the very public disintegration of the umbrella organization that used to shelter GroceryLand. "This has been a very stressful year," she said, thanks to "the utter and complete collapse of the Heartland Alliance."
     Heartland Alliance was a major provider of social services in Chicago and considered itself among the oldest social welfare organizations in the country, tracing its roots to Jane Addams.
     Cannon, joined by local AIDS activists Greg Harris, Tom Tunney and James Cappleman, created OpenHand Chicago in 1988 to feed those in the LGBTQ community affected by HIV/AIDS.
     "We had one thing in common," Cannon told the Sun-Times in 2019. "Everyone we knew was either dead, dying or struggling to help someone who was heading there. We were tired. We were scared. We were angry. And we needed to do something other than sew AIDS quilt panels.”
      When I first reported on Cannon's efforts 30 years ago, the idea was to give AIDS patients independence by allowing them to select and prepare their own food themselves, rather than being forced to eat whatever meal was delivered that day.
     Then she was serving 40 people a week. Now it's 400.
     A flamboyant woman with magenta hair, Cannon tries to make GroceryLand as colorful and festive as she is.
     "What we try to do is create a space that doesn't look like a doctor's waiting room or a government office," she said.
     In 2011, OpenHand was renamed Vital Bridges and came under the umbrella of Heartland Alliance Health — a vital distinction, since HAH was spun off and survived when Heartland Alliance collapsed, kicking its staff to the curb.
     Cannon credits her core of volunteers and donors for getting them through.
     "The LGBTQ community is very familiar to being in a place of struggle," she said. "We live another day to fight, and I'm very happy to lead the charge."
     Does Cannon, 74, ever think about retiring?

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No wrapping paper for YOU!

     The wife and I popped into Target for some last minute essentials, including scotch tape and wrapping paper. The store had lots and lots of wrapping paper, and we hurried down aisles lined with red boxes crammed with the stuff at the way reasonable price of $3 a roll. Neither of us had to tell the other what we were looking for, and not finding.

     "Maybe the penguins are supposed to be Jewish," I ventured.

    Not that the wrapping paper was heavily Christian. "Joy" surrounded by a pine wreath. A shark in a Santa hat. It wasn't like they were Three Wise Men Adoring the Christ Child at the Manger paper. But still harkening back to a holiday other than the one we were celebrating. 
     My wife said perhaps they had Hanukkah paper earlier in the season but were cleaned out. But Hanukkah begins on Christmas Day this year, and there would be no reason that Jews would clean out Target while the store groans under Christmas paper five days before Christmas. Hoarding against changes in society? I doubted that. My thought was that we just didn't clear the bar anymore, as a body of customers. They don't sell wrapping paper aimed at the Shakers either.
     "Jews are only 1 percent of the population," I said.

     Or maybe Target's wrapping paper buyer is a 28-year-0ld who went to Oberlin College, who struck us off the list to light a candle for Gaza.
     Gauging one's status in society from the holiday wrapping paper sold at Target is either invalid or inspired. It's probably a better gauge, not of them, but of us. Of unease. Between Israel's reaction to Oct. 7 becoming the oxygen-laden whirlwind that stoked every spark of anti-Semitism into a brush fire, and that person who glided back to the presidency on thick ooze of bigotry, there are reasons aplenty to be uneasy.  The Jews aren't in the crosshairs, yet. But prejudice is practical — it oppresses whomever it can get away with oppressing.

     Liberals get slammed for being inclusive — we kept accepting trans people, it freaked out a chunk of the traditional Democratic base, and they voted for a liar, bully, fraud and traitor instead. There is sense lurking there. In 2016, British people were so worried a Turk would move next door that they left the European Union, shitcaning their whole economic system. Half the country is stretching to include everybody in one big happy family — well, not Jews, of course, thank you Gaza. We don't get a booth on the quad on Oppressed Peoples Day. And the other half is scanning the horizon, looking for someone to beat up. Not Jews, yet. But our number does have a way of coming up.

      On Friday, Elon Musk, dissatisfied with being the shadow president elect in this country, entered German politics as well.

      "Only the AfD can save Germany," Musk wrote to his 200 million plus followers on X. AfD is The Alternative for Germany, the racist, far-right party. Or, if you're in a rush, Nazis. I haven't deleted my account, yet, but I haven't posted there in weeks. I went on and unfriended Musk. Striking a blow for equality. So now he has 208,299,999 followers. Progress.

     Target did offer a quite attractive snowflake pattern wrapping paper, in wintery aqua rather than Christmassy red, and as that wasn't tied in with the celebration of a faith not our own, we bought some.

      For me, it isn't so much fear — I really don't think I'll be strolling down Michigan Avenue this spring, admiring the clouds, when a bunch of grinning jackbooted Red Hats will surround me and pluck out my beard, or force me to scrub the street with a toothbrush. Though the prospect comes to mind easily enough. It happened before.
 

Saturday guest: Bob Katzman Didn’t Disappear Forever

      Saturdays are a day to sleep late, kick back, and let the gears of modern life grind without you for a few hours. As someone who works continually, I like to offer the Saturday slot of EGD to worthy writers who cross my path. Today we feature an essay from a Chicago stalwart who will be known to many of you, Bob Katzman:

     I am that Chicago guy from long ago. Your parents or grandparents knew about me, if you are under forty.
     Maybe if you are old, you may remember my original 4x4 foot wooden Bob’s Newsstand which opened in Hyde Park in 1965 when I was 15, to pay my tuition at The University of Chicago Lab School.
     I ran away from a terrifying, violent home at 14 and had to rebuild my life somehow.

"You weren't kidnapped, were you?" I 
I asked after Bob sent this photo. He 
was illustrating how to fold a paper.

     I grabbed the chance to open a newsstand. I was a good enough carpenter to build it, using tools inherited from my Byelorussian-Jewish grandfather Jacob, who was a carpenter in Chicago.
     That tiny shack eventually became an international newsstand, with 3,000 world periodicals, famed across America with five stores across Chicago. One of the five was that now-vanished newsstand at Randolph and Michigan atop the IC steps, on the north side of the old Chicago Public Library, now a landmark.
     The five stores employed 55 employees at its brief peak, and as Fate turned on me, the stores closed one after another, with the original Bob’s in Hyde Park being the last to go. Turning out the lights in that place was for me the beginning of two years of damning unemployment. No one would hire a former entrepreneur. Many told me, I would leave them the minute I had “two nickels to rub together.” My former fame turned into an anvil.
     I got two jobs, regular jobs – horrible jobs with dress requirements, the worst being after meeting with a head-hunter whose blind ad I’d responded to, and I was hired to manage, of all things, a limousine company.
     But at the end of my tortured year there, through an old friend, I was hired, then bought the old Europa Bookstore at Clark & Belmont. It was a dirty, shabby place; a dimly lit store carrying cheaply printed paperbacks from Europe in five languages. But after 17 years in business, it had very few customers.

     I figured out what to do with it, now Grand Tour Bookstore, adding bright lights and air-conditioning. It had 100 language-learning systems, thousands of travel books from 150 countries, 200 world flags, foreign candy, imported cigarettes, international newspapers and magazines. Then I got this idea: Printed coffee mugs that would say, “Kiss Me I’m Greek”, etc. It was easy to find Irish mugs like that, but what about Kiss Me, I’m Ethiopian? Queer? Lithuanian? Luxembourgian?
     That idea, unique in America, became mugs about 70 nationalities. I sold thousands of them. Then I made matching buttons and T-shirts. Everything sold. I received publicity and my sales tripled.
     But then came the Black Death for bookstores, from the east. The giant chains rolled across the country killing 5,000 independent stores, including mine, there from 1988 to 1994. At 44, I felt damned. Now what?
     After some scrambling among childhood friends, I acquired enough jack to open a 600 ft. back-issue magazine store at 6400 W. Devon. This grew and grew and grew and then became Magazine Memories in Morton Grove. 5,000 sq ft with 150,000 old periodicals and newspapers back to 1576. 30,000 old posters.
     I ran it until cancer cursed Joyce, my fine wife of 40 years. At 66, I closed my last store in Skokie in 2016. I cared for her for 13 months. Joyce died in 2017.
     Long before all these parts of my life happened, I’d always been a writer, a poet beginning in 1958, at 8. I should mention that between 1951 and now, I’ve had 42 surgeries. As I grew older, my sometimes emotionally wrenching experiences gave birth to story after story – never any fiction.
     Then after brain surgery – twice — in 2004, I was terrified that I’d lose my memory.
     A lifetime Chicago friend, Rick Munden, told me to write down my extraordinary life story.
     When I protested to him, “Who would care about my miserable life?”
     He responded, “Many people are like you. They too have fallen down, then gotten back up, no matter how hard their struggle. Like you, they never gave up.” I was stunned. He offered to pay for printing my first book. This led to book after book after book, selling 7,000 of my first four books from 2004 to 2008. Some first editions of them are still available.
     Neil Steinberg kindly gave me 800 words. I am now 74. Quite forgotten. I’ve completed 25 new books. With my amazing wife Nancy, I created a cool website. I’ve written about Chicago corruption, fighting back against bullies, child abuse, love, sex, Judaism, cops, friendship, Queer rights, anti-Semitism, my Deli-Dali Delicatessen, how to create a store, and more. My Facebook site is Bob Katzman. I’m also a speaker for hire.

     E-mail robertmkatzman@gmail.com Contact: dontgoquietlypress.com

Tales from the propeller beanie trade

Charlie Wheeler

     Charlie Wheeler was walking south on Rush Street Tuesday morning as I turned the corner from Chicago Avenue, heading north toward the Newberry Library. On his head was a gray beanie with an orange propeller. For all the cartoons I've seen featuring guys in pinwheel hats, I'd never had the chance to actually speak with one before. The exhibition on the influence of immigrants on printing in Chicago would have to wait.
     "Do you mind if I take your photo for the Chicago Sun-Times?" I asked.
     Wheeler did not.
     He is 68, from Crown Point, Indiana, and has been in the propeller beanie business for six years. Before that?
     "A little bit of everything," he said.
     How does one get into the pinwheel hat trade?
     "Somebody gave me a baseball cap," he explained. "I don't wear baseball caps — the visor gets in the way. So I removed the visor and looked at it a minute."
     Inspiration struck.
     "And then I thought, 'Oh, no! I know what that needs,'" he said.
     The typical pinwheel beanie, Wheeler said, is a shoddy affair. His creations sell for $40.
     "There's a very high-end hat," he said.
     Juan Bolanos came hurrying over, a big grin on his face.
     "Are those for sale?" he asked. Wheeler admitted they are.
     "I usually charge $40," he began, slipping into his salesman's patter. "But as you seem to be a working-class guy, I'll take 25% right off the top, bringing it down to a paltry $30."
     Bolanos, manager at Devil Dawgs across the street, laughed.
     "You don't have a solid black color?" he asked.
     Wheeler did not.
     "These things are hilarious," Bolanos said. "I love it."
     "This is the closest I have," said Wheeler, producing a two-tone gray.

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