Buoyed by birds

      Zoos make me sad.  There's no other way to say it. I'm not coming from a PETA, liberation, pity-the-captive-animals point of view. I'm not unhappy that zoos exist — at this point they have an important role in guaranteeing the future of species that might not always be found in the wild.
     I mean, just the experience of going to a zoo. We had a fun meal at North Pond, then walked south to Lincoln Park Zoo. 

     Boom, a nameless melancholy. So many people, so few animals. And the ones that are there are hiding, often. Best zookeeping practice demands that animals be allowed to escape the pressure of our prying eyes — zoos actually plant hedges and erect barriers — and more often than not the animals prefer privacy. It's like going to visit your neighbors only to have them hide inside their house and not answer the bell.
     Part might be nostalgia. For almost five years we visited the zoo pushing what I called "The bus" — a big double stroller holding the two boys. Every animal was a joyous discovery. So seeing the zoo, boyless, well, it's like going to Chuck E. Cheese with your wife, the two of you, for the pizza. Or so I imagine, having never done such a thing.
     The lions were beautiful. But like so much, they kept reminding us what aren't there — what goes with lions? Right, tigers. Wrong — gone, since 2016. At least there were bears, polar bears. Oh my.
     The rhino was sufficiently prehistoric. Like seeing a dinosaur. But the rhino also lives in what used to be the elephant area. Gone for 20 years now.  I'm sure it leads for happier, more productive lives for some herd of elephants, somewhere, enjoying a better place than the North Side of Chicago. But it blows for visitors. Nothing sets your spirits right like an elephant.
     And the gorillas. It was naptime when we went, and they were sprawled, listless, their eyes dull. The enclosures seem small. Hard not to pity them, while at the same time relating to their predicament. As these days of Trump 2.0 grind on, with no end in sight, it's difficult not to get a little glassy-eyes ourselves. How did we end up here? How could we have been so careless as to let ourselves be lured into that trap? By banana? As helpless now to alter our fate as animals in a zoo.
     "Yeah tell me about it, buddy," I want to say. "Not quite the rich pageant we were promised."
     We were about to drift disheartened out of the place, and begin our miserable crawl back to the suburban hellscape from whence we came, when I had an idea.
    "Let's see the birds," I said. 

Green Broadbill

     We made a beeline over, encountering a massive polar bear, pacing back and forth, along with a sign telling visitors not to be alarmed by the pacing. Perfectly natural. 

     Sure it is.
     The birds were a different story. We saw a bright Green Broadbill and a Tawny Frogmouth that looks like an owl. A pair of Luzon Bleeding Heart doves who immediately started to form what Othello called "the beast with two backs" — though in this case it as more a two-tier dove pile — the moment I looked at them. 
     The main bird exhibit doesn't have bars, and you can watch the birds at close range, including a pair of Inca Terns. I think it helps that the birds are relatively small, compared to apes. They have more room to roam. And there are so many different kinds.
     "I don't know what those birders are making such a big fuss about," I said. "Look at all the species of birds we're spotting, right here in Lincoln Park."

Nicobar pigeon

 

New book illuminates Wrigley Building

 

Photo courtesy of the Chicago History Museum

     Resolved: the Wrigley Building is a beautiful, beloved jewel of Chicago, though not great architecture. Discuss.
     "Beautiful" is a value judgment, one I endorse fully. Glazed terra cotta in six shades of white, shifting toward creamy yellow as it nears the top. Festooned with dragons, griffins, cherubs, rams. That four-faced clock, 20 feet tall.
     "Beloved" is not open to debate — any survey of popular Chicago buildings includes the Wrigley Building.
     "It was made to be liked," said Robert Sharoff, whose new coffee table book, "The Wrigley Building: The Making of an Icon," (Rizzoli Electa) with photographs by William Zbaren and commentaries by Tim Samuelson, shines a spotlight on a structure that's been well-illuminated for over a century.
     "The more I shot it, the more joyous it became," said Zbaren. "It's so playful."
     The Wrigley Building is just fun. Perched at the confluence of Michigan Avenue and the north bank of the Chicago River, the historic heart of Chicago — the outlines of Fort Dearborn are in brass across the street — the tower has always been a font of fascination, to me anyway,
     Starting with it being in reality two buildings, built at different times, with different addresses, 400 and 410 N. Michigan, connected at the 14th floor by that metal skybridge, a rococo detail that seems pulled from those dreamlike early 1900s fantasies of the urban future, with plump zeppelins and streamlined elevated trains and mustachioed gentlemen in bowler hats pedaling through the air on penny-farthing bicycles with wings.
     "The Wrigley Building" bristles with glorious facts that even I didn't know, starting with the clock initially being hand-wound by someone turning an enormous crank, winching up weights that once drove the mechanism.
     The authors come down firmly in favor of "great architecture," not surprising in a book bankrolled by Wrigley Building owner Joe Mansueto. Though they insist the Morningstar billionaire gave them a free hand, which they use to massage the life of the architect, Charles Beersman, who does not have a deep portfolio — his other building of note is Cleveland's Terminal Tower. Both of his signature structures are riffs on the Giralda Tower in Spain, with notes of New York's Municipal Building stirred into Wrigley.
     To me, he had one idea, and it was someone else's. But in this book, Beersman might as well be Michelangelo — we're given nine of his 11 childhood addresses in San Francisco, in a note.
     What we get far less of are the critics who lined up over the years to give the Wrigley Building the backhand. Lewis Mumford referred to its "safe mediocrity." The Wrigley Building is "just what the name implies," sniffed Frank Lloyd Wright — admittedly not famous for kindness toward other architects — noting it “illustrates the principle that an ugly building by day, if illuminated, will be ugly by night as well.”

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Restaurant field notes: North Pond

     The kids wanted to meet for brunch at North Pond on Sunday.
     Which itself is parking the ball onto Waveland Avenue, parenting-wise. Really, if your grown children, having successfully launched and escaped the paternal clutches, nevertheless regularly circle back and say, "Hey old people — are you free?" that's snagging the brass ring.
     As if we weren't buoyed enough just by the invite, walking into the lovely little Lincoln Park restaurant at 2610 N. Cannon Drive, with its gorgeous Arts and Craft interior, drove us to maximum good spirits. The hosts are excellent at welcoming — a lot of places fall down on this. Smiles, warmth, and took our coats.

     The place is so well-constructed you can be forgiven for assuming you're enjoying quality from an earlier age. Actually, though it was built in 1912 as a shelter for skaters on the pond and was nothing fancy. It went through a variety of incarnations — it was a hot dog stand for most of the time we lived three blocks to the northwest, before North Pond Cafe opened in 1998. It has to be the only restaurant to win a Michelin star that was once a homeless shelter. (The star has since been snatched back; but such glory, once conferred, lingers).
     True, my wife and I bobbled the first  challenge. Our server set down a "Hot Chocolate Menu" which the savvy diner would have taken as a tip from the cosmos to order the hot chocolate. We did discuss it. But I've got that diabetes thing, and my wife has that preserving her girlish figure thing, so we opted for coffee. Though I presciently mentioned during our pre-ordering analysis  that higher end restaurants which nail every other aspect of the dining experience often botch the coffee part for reasons I do not understood. My theory is, in their frantic quest for excellence, fancy eateries forget to clean the coffeemakers regularly. My wife believes they opt for chi-chi coffee that is acidic.
     Anyway, the coffee arrived. I sipped, then silently dosed mine with cream, the international signal that the coffee is no good. My sharp-eyed wife noticed. Meanwhile, my daughter-in-law's hot chocolate arrived and she raved about it. I thought of quietly dipping into hers a spoon to try it, but she's new to the family, and that seemed, oh I don't know, an over-familiarity.
     Then I did an uncharacteristic thing. The next time the waiter swept past, I handed him my nearly full cup, said the coffee wasn't to my liking, and asked for a cup of cocoa. Typically, I wouldn't send a bowl of grease from the drip pan back if a place served it to me. But fortune favors the bold. And that hot chocolate looked so good.

     My wife did the same. It was worth the effort. Not too sweet, with all sorts of intriguing flavor hints including, another server tipped us off to, lime chantily.

The cuts in the corn bread were my doing.

     Brunch is $59, and under any other circumstances than meeting our beloved son and D.I.L., that itself would have been a dealbreaker for my wife and, honestly, it almost was. She was inclined to suggest something more budget friendly. But I disagreed, observing that we had talked about going to New Orleans, but didn't. So this meal was far cheaper than buying a praline at a candy shop in the French quarter, if you figure in the flight and hotel. And mirabile dictu, that argument carried the day. Plus we could consider it an early Mother's Day Brunch, that being a holiday, like Valentine's, when the savvy restaurant goer dines at home.
     North Pond brunch is three courses, and I opted for the Tart Tatin, as appetizer, the "Beef, Pastry" for the main course, and Chocolate Cake for dessert.
     I stepped away to spread the insulin welcome mat for that feast, then had to take a phone call from the paper. During my absence, an unexpected trio of breads arrived — quite quaint and pretty, with jam and a pair of interesting butters.

It's hard to find a good tart, but this was.

     The tart is described as "Honeyed Carrots, Goat Cheese Ricotta, 'Pop Tart' Dough, Arugula Salad, Lardons" — that last ingredient being a term I wasn't familiar with. It means cubes of fatty bacon, and I did enjoy picking those out. The salad was a tad wet, but welcome. I'm a big carrot fan — I don't think I've mentioned it before. Truly, Bugs Bunny level. I order just about anything made of carrots, did so here, and didn't regret it.
     The Beef, Pastry — no, that comma is not a typo — is described as "Turmeric Pastry Wrapped Grilled Striploin, Sweet Potato Purée, Root Vegetable Pavé, Sherry Jus."
     I wish I had thought to complain about that comma between Beef and Pastry; it would have been the height of the meal. "Waiter — there's a comma in my Beef, Pastry." The sort of thing that enters into Steinberg lore, the way I once ordered the Happy Family plate at Szechuan Kingdom, and met the raised eyebrows — I always get beef and broccoli — with, "I've sampled the 'Happy Family' at every Chinese restaurant I've been to. To compare them. And do you know what I've found?" They gazed at me, puzzled. "All happy families are alike..." I said.

Beef, Pastry worked, despite the comma.

     Tumeric is the It Girl spice of the moment — our older son had been singing its praises recently. A relative of ginger, it is a deep golden orange. The accompaniments struck me as a tad greasy, but the meat was dense and satisfying.
     The Chocolate Cake was no wedge of standard birthday, but "Lapsang Souchong, Raspberry Curds, Sunflower Seed Crumble, Madagascar Vanilla Gelato." I looked up that first term (if I'm spending sixty bucks on brunch I want to know what I'm getting and getting into) and took away that it is a kind of tea.
     I like tea. But in this case, the cake was a reminder of the perils of insufficient research, because I didn't focus on the Lapsang Souchong definition long enough to grasp the "it's by far one of the boldest, smokiest teas out there." Truly,

The Laphroaig of cakes.

Lapsang Souchong is the Laphroaig scotch of teas, and while smoky tea chocolate cake might be an acquired taste, it is not a taste acquired on the first attempt, at least not for me, a judgment my wife confirmed. I mean, I ate it. But my wife's carrot cake was superior, a reminder that one should always, always order the carrot dish.
    Brunch was a case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. The kids adore North Pond — they've eaten there before — and for me, the setting and the service helped pull the food, which honestly I wasn't in love with, over the finish line. I enjoyed the experience sufficiently that I'd go back, if only for the joy of complaining about that comma. Plus the entire staff was truly first rate — the waiter didn't charge us for the misfire coffees, which is only smart service, but not a bar that every restaurant can clear. There was no unsettling 3 percent "because we can" fee. The place was surprisingly uncrowded for 12 noon on a Sunday, another sign recession is sinking in.
     Afterward, we walked to the Lincoln Park Zoo and ... well, we'll visit the zoo here on Thursday.

 

   Reminder: I will be one of the speakers at Chicago Fights Back, "An Evening of Stories, Poetry, History, and Music — focused on Chicago, on change, and on resilience." Wednesday, May 7 at 7 p.m. at the Hideout, 1354 West Wabansia. Raising funds for groups benefiting the homeless and the hungry that are impacted by cuts to the federal government. And yeah, it's a little discordant to mention this after a twee skip through a fancy restaurant. But time is running out — it's tomorrow — and one of my few writing rules is, Be Who You Are, and in addition to being a guy who meets his kid for an expensive brunch, I'm also someone who'll figure out some kind of presentation and drag myself to a gritty bar to help people I've never met. And if you are too, maybe I'll see you there. For more information, click here.

Mark Zuckerburg wants to sell you new AI friends

     Jim and I rode our bikes over to Wallace Lake to check out a lifeguard, Laura. I can still see her, 16 years old, in her white bathing suit, gazing over the splashing crowd.
     That sounds creepier than it actually was since, at the time, almost half a century ago, Jim and I were also teenagers. Jim and Laura have been married for 42 years and have two daughters and five grandchildren.
     Kier and I drove to New York City once. We had dinner at Thai Hut on Devon Avenue, then 12 hours straight east, hitting Manhattan at dawn, just as Little Feat sang, "Don't the sunlight look so pretty, never saw a sight, like rolling into New York City, with the skyline in the morning light."

Me, Cate and Robert, 1983

   And Cate, well, where do I begin? She wanted to be one of my groomsmen, but my wife-to-be put her foot down. I did throw Cate a bachelor party when she got married, with our mutual friend Robert, that involved securing a banquet room at the Como Inn, writing a script and hiring actors. Which was only fair, because Rob and Cate did the same for my bachelor party, at the old Get Me High Lounge in Wicker Park.
     Oh wait, that's four friends. I've gone over my limit, according to Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, who imagines the average American "has fewer than three friends" — where did he come up with that figure? — and could use AI buddies to hang around with. Which he will be happy to sell us.
     The idea being that we're going to pour out our hearts to our AI soulmates and they will — what? Reassure us? Suggest comfort food to buy on Amazon?
     Is that what friends do? Sometimes they're just there. I've been working on not trying to fix friends' problems. Just listen, nod or say, "That's terrible." Will that be any use coming from a silicon chip? Won't it be like writing "there there" on an index card and referring to it when you're blue?
     There are levels of friendship. Outlined above are the best kind: old friends. There are also new friends, work friends, friendly neighbors, Facebook friends, friends-with-benefits, fair weather friends. Friends who are always there when they need you.
     Those friends tend to be situational and transactional, to quote my friend Lynn Sweet's useful description of Barack Obama's approach to relationships. They can be quite real when we're all in the same lifeboat, furiously bailing. Then quickly fade back on dry land.
     Friends ideally are around your level on the struggle up the greased pole of life. I've had good friends who, inflated with success, float off, as if cash were helium. Loyal myself, I cargo cult them, staring at the patch of blue they vanished into. Sometimes for quite a long while. Years. But eventually I sigh, turn away, resigned they're never coming back. And they never do.
     Some friends are like comets — gone for quite some time, then suddenly back, illuminating the night sky again. My former college roommate Didier worked with Catholic Relief and never calls.

Me, Cate and Rob, 2024

     We would have the best conversations — when I phone. I used to say, it's because if he called me, he'd have to take the rag soaked in sugar water off the lips of whatever emaciated child he's succoring. If he ever phoned, a child would die.
     I feared he just didn't want to talk with me. But when my older boy needed to spend the summer at an internship in Washington, D.C., where Di lives, I called him to ask about the various sketchy neighborhoods my kid was considering. Is this safe? Is that?
     He kept saying, "I have a spare bedroom. He can stay with me." The third time he said that, I responded: If you make that offer again, I'll take you up on it, and you'll be sorry. He did. I did, and both parties seemed to enjoy a fun summer together.
     You go out of your way for your friends. Friendship is not, Zuckerberg take note, a moneymaking scheme. And they do the same for you.
     I only lived in Los Angeles for three months, but Jim and Laura, freshly married, came to visit. One night Laura stayed in, and I took Jim in my 1963 Volvo P1800 to go clubbing. At one point he said: "Neil — you're a writer in Los Angeles. You've got this sports car. I'm still in Berea, working for my dad. Why are we friends?"
     We were at a stoplight on Sunset Boulevard. I turned and looked closely at Jim, then gave an answer that stuck with me:
     "Because most people are assholes, and you're not."

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Ingenious device

     

     The tendency is to throw stuff away. So when I noticed a two-inch tear in the fabric at the collar of a blue pajama top, my first impulse was just to rip it open furrther, for good measure, and turn it into rags. I have plenty of pairs of J. Crew pajamas; this one is well worn, obviously. Move forward.
     However. I could also, I realized, sew it. Closing the rend, well, the top could last for ... quite a bit longer. I went to my wife's sewing box, removed one of those little sewing kits you get at hotels. There was a needle and white thread. The needle was very small and I had difficulty threading it. One, two, three, four tries.
     The needle was cheap, its eye very small. I thought I might have a better needle in my desk, with a bigger, more threadable eye, so pulled open the center drawer. There was a second kit, including a device I had never noticed before, nor realized existed. A diamond-shaped wire attacked to a small round metal tab depicting the profile of a woman's face. It was obvious what this thing did — you push the wire through the needle's eye, feed in the thread and pull it back.
   Worked like a charm. I stitched over the rend twice, to make sure it was securely sewn. When I finished I looked at the clock. It had taken exactly 10 minutes. A men's pajama set on J. Crew is $94. Ballpark the top as half that, $47. Factor in depreciation, let's say the value left in the top I repaired is $15. 
    Meaning, doing the math, that I earned more sewing an old pajama top than I earn writing a column for the Sun-Times, because there are 60 minutes in an hour, and six times $15 is $90 — the newspaper does not pay me $90 an hour.

    A sobering thought. Or a liberating one.  A lot of guys would never sew a rip — I wonder if they might now that they know how profitable it can be.
     Leaving me with only two questions: first, who's the lady? Prof. Google has no idea, guessing Arachne or Minerva, Greek gods skilled in needlework. My brother, drawn into the question, put it to Chat GBT, which came up with an answer that sounds right:

     The woman depicted on this item is not a specific historical or famous figure; it is a generic classical or Greco-Roman-style profile, commonly used in the design of needle threaders like the one shown in your photo.
     This image is a traditional decorative motif, not meant to represent an identifiable individual. The design has been used for decades by various manufacturers, often inspired by classical art or a stylized “seamstress” figure.     

     The second question was: who invented this handy gizmo? Searching patent records, the closest I found was the above, from 1859. If you look hard, it's not the same — a sort of tiny tongs, to pull the thread through, as opposed to a diamond shape wire, which is thinner, easier and cheaper to construct. I imagine it's there, in the records, as a later development, but don't feel particularly inclined to search it out. There were also indications it was cooked up in England a few decades earlier.

    As a rule, I assume that if I don't know about something, nobody knows. Though my wife knew about the threader, suggesting that its inventor was probably an unheralded woman. Though she admitted that, in the 19th century, many tailors were men, so a man could have developed the ingenious device as well. 

    Anyway, I thought, with intelligence hit upon hard times, almost any evidence of human cleverness is worthy of mention. 

Scam Likely

 

     I've carried a phone in my pocket for 23 years, ever since my wife bought me a little Nokia flip phone for my 42nd birthday. A gift that, at the time, seemed such an intrusion into regular life that I considered throwing it in the river.
     But I kept the phone, through increasingly complicated incarnations, to my latest iPhone 12, which I bought instead of a 15 because it does everything I want at a third of the price.
     In all that time, I've never felt the need to shut off notification of phone calls. But since I signed up for Medicare last month, the spam calls have been so frequent, they grew bothersome. Fraudsters from overseas now show a 312 area code, so I don't know if it's a basement call center in Africa or the official I phoned an hour ago, seeking a comment.

     Now, if you aren't in my contact list, then your call gets dumped to voicemail. Which itself is a theft — of time. Friday my mother's doctor's office called, going straight to voicemail, meaning that instead of just fielding the call and dealing with it, I got to play telephone tag for a few hours.  
     In the past, occasionally, Congress would provide some kind of relief from scam calls. Yes, enforcement was spotty and they'd find a way rear up again. 

    But now the problem is bad, and will only get worse, as Trump takes his chainsaw to regulatory agencies, that were already doing a subpar job, allowing us to sometimes carry phones unmolested by crude attempts to rob us. Consumer watchdogs. Regulations against spam. Prosecution of rip-off artists. Out the window.

     When the president is selling access and hawking bitcoin and monetizing fear in an administration that is one giant ongoing grift, it might seem petty to focus on a minor inconvenience like spam calls. But they are also the vanguard of more to come, and we must be constantly on our guard. Years of thefts, large and small, are on deck. We have to try not to fall in, ourselves as individuals, while doing what we can to help our poor country escape from the trick we played on ourselves, the pit we've ... not fallen into. Worse. Dove into, eyes wide open. Climbing out will take all we've got.

World Press Day, an ideal moment to back the media

      "We never make mistakes."
      A credo for totalitarianism, echoing in my brain like a clanking chain after seeing the latest MAGA red hat slogan, "Trump was right about everything," sported by President Trump's adviser, Elon Musk.
     Hard to believe people pay $19.99 to brand that on their foreheads. Points for candor, because belief in the infallibility of Donald Trump is the guiding principle of this American era. As if the flesh of modern democratic society suddenly melted away to reveal the grinning skull of 18th century monarchism that was always underneath.

     "We never make mistakes."
     The stock market disagrees. The American people increasingly disagree. To believe the past three months have been anything but a tearing down of American prosperity, freedom, influence, and prestige, you have to suspend all verifiable reality. Accept empty ports. Accept legal residents yanked off the street without due process and shipped to foreign prisons.
     Who will stop this? Not Congress, clapping like seals. Not the courts, already being ignored and ridiculed by Trump, undercutting anyone who points out that the law and whatever he says today are not the same thing, yet.
     “We cannot allow a handful of communist, radical-left judges to obstruct the enforcement of our laws,” Trump said. And by "our laws" he means, "my will."
     The only avenue open to resist what is happening is to tell the truth, as clearly and frequently and forcefully as possible.
     And who is doing that?
     The media, or what is left of it. Which is why World Press Day — Saturday, May 3 — is extra important. Because if unfettered and fair reporting is valuable during normal times, it is absolutely essential now, if there is to be any hope to thwart gathering authoritarianism. 
     "We never make mistakes."
     Everyone makes mistakes. Some acknowledge it. Tyrants can't. And a few seek to cast light on errors. Since 1948, the Chicago Sun-Times has been in the business of finding mistakes, of honestly assessing and analyzing the world, from the smallest community problem to the largest global crisis. Such as the one we're in right now.
     Like America, we've come on lean times. The Sun-Times has suffered losses — 20% of our staff in March as a cost-cutting move, including the editorial board. Our business model — sell ads and subscriptions — undercut by the digital revolution. Now we depend on donations, as part of the Chicago Public Media 501(c)3 nonprofit. 

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