If you don't get this app, this dog might die

Kitty

     A dog cannot clear its throat, exactly. What Kitty, our little 15-year-old Shichon, does each morning is appear at my bedside about 6 a.m. and emit a low grumbling sound. My cue to get up, get dressed, pop in earbuds and take her for a walk.
     Center Avenue is empty at that hour. Tree-lined, nice houses. You'd think the pleasant vista of leafy suburban comfort, set to my favorite tunes, would put me in maximum good spirits.

      And it does, to the degree that anything can. Yet, after we return home, the first thing I do is fill her water bowl to the brim, thinking, "I want her to have plenty to drink in case we drop dead and nobody notices for days."
     A grim thought. And a rather improbable one — I mean, yes, people our age, mid-60s, do die abruptly. But the odds of both my wife and me  expiring at the same moment are slim. How would that even happen? An awful coincidence, perhaps. She steps in front of some idiot on an electric scooter blasting down a Loop sidewalk at the same moment I stumble headlong down the stairs at home.
     Morbid stuff. Where did that dog-dying-neglected thought even come from? I'd like to blame Gene Hackman — he and his wife died in February, unnoticed for over a week, and one of their dogs perished in a crate, horribly. But I was having this thought long before.
     Looking for relief, I wondered if there might not be some internet gizmo that will sound the alarm if you don't check in.
     Snug Safety is a cheerful, well-designed little app that sends a text every day at a set time with a big green button to tap. Fail to tap, and it alerts an emergency contact. Hit the button, and you're rewarded with an affirmative little quote.
     You can pay — $199.99 for a year, $19.99 for a month — for access to a human dispatcher. But the basic service is free.
      Every day, a big green button. Then the quote. First day:
     "We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men." — Herman Melville

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If the headline rings a bell, yes, it is
an homage to this classic National 
Lampoon cover.

Nothing here to see

U.S.A. Flag, by Claes Oldenburg (National Gallery of Art)

     Once we get into the practice of ignoring reality, the exact nature of the reality being ignored hardly matters.
     I've said that before. But it bears repeating.
    Donald Trump's mind is a guarded by a kind of mental gate where praise is welcomed with wild cries of delight and criticism is loudly rejected. Real, unreal, is not an issue. He has created his own reality where glory — whether true or not — is greedily accepted, assuming it wasn't generated himself, while criticism is dismissed as fantasy.  Those are the rules.
    Somehow, this mindset of delusion and self-puffery was embraced by half the country, and tens of millions live by it still. Our nation spent a decade, more or less, sprawled before one deeply unfit man, serving his ego. With no end in sight.
     So when this sordid Epstein saga — which clearly Trump has always been a part of, because that's who he is — flared up again, I was sincerely bewildered. What's new here? The only thing different is that some of Trump's followers have had their faces to the ground for so long they don't seem to realize that a frank assessment of the Epstein crimes would tar their guy even more than he already is. More slime on a man dripping with it. 
    Or would tar him, if they cared about that kind of thing. Which they don't. On this Donald Trump and I seem to agree. We both don't think it matters — except, in his case, he believes that's a good thing.

You never actually own a City Council seat, you merely look after it for the next generation

 

Created with ChatGPT

   The bad news is that I'm stepping down. The good news is that my son, Neil Steinberg Jr., will be taking over this space. So it'll still be Neil Steinberg writing this. It just won't be me.
     I know what you're thinking: "But this Neil Junior" — I call him Sport — "is he any good?' Will he similarly hold us captive with his biting wit and hard-hitting journalism? It isn't as if writing well is a heritable trait, like my green eyes or wide feet.
     OK, OK ... the above is untrue, mostly, except for the lack of a column-writing chromosome. I'm sticking around. And as pompous as I can be, I didn't name either of my sons after myself — Jews don't generally do that. Neither of my boys feels it worth his super-valuable, billable-by-the-1/10th-hour time to regularly read my column, never mind consider taking a pay cut to write it.
     What inspired the above is Fran Spielman's Friday article on Ald. Walter Burnett (27th) wanting to bestow his City Council seat upon his 29-year-old namesake.
     "Don't judge him based on him being my son," said Burnett, pere, as if there were any other reason the lad is being finessed into City Hall. "Judge him based on what he can bring to the table ..."
     He went on at length to extol his son's many excellent qualities. I don't fault him for that. I'm a big fan of my kids, too. I just wouldn't have the chutzpah to try to hand one my job as if it were my wedding china. Not that he'd want that either.
     You know who never says a peep in Fran's story? Despite being invited to do so by the dean of City Hall reporters.
     That's right, Walter Redmond Burnett, the alderperson-in-waiting. The man can speak, correct?
     I know he can because Block Club recently cornered him at a coffee shop, where he addressed such crucial matters as what he likes to be called — "Red" — and why this isn't yet another case of, in Block Club's words, "classic Chicago nepotism." The story also mentions, in the 14th paragraph, that Burnett the Younger spent "almost a decade in New York" as an investment banker.

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Judgment call

Mrs. George Swinton,by John Singer Sargent
(Art Institute of Chicago)

     My wife works in the Loop on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and usually comes down to the kitchen to get her lunch together about 7:30 a.m., while I'm sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and scanning the papers — okay, pretending to read the paper and drink coffee, actually just lingering, there simply to enjoy the pleasure of her company before she vanishes for the next 10 and a half hours.
    On this particular day, this past week, she was wearing white linen pants, a robin's egg blue knit top, and a sort of a shirt-jacket that brought the blue and the white together. A very soigné ensemble. I thought of taking a photo; then thought better, and didn't. A private person, she.
    As much as I like to use the word soigné — French, for "elegant, put together" — I did not say that. What I did say was, "You look very summery ..."
      The next thought came to me, and I manfully resisted it for a fraction of a second, then gave in to the inevitable, adding, "...if you will forgive a summery judgment."

      We both froze a moment. 
     A pun, for you non-lawyers, on "summary judgment," when a party asks the judge to, in essence, decide a case before it goes to trial, based on some aspect of the facts and the law. 
     Yes, she groaned. But it was a good groan. A groan of appreciation. Or so I tell myself. 

'Why would you want to write about things that hardly anybody cares about over and over again?'

The Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, a haven for ventriloquist dummies, is one of the countless subject that nobody gives a shit about, at least until I write about them. Then they tend to.

      As a rule, I try to let the commenters on my blog post comment, and not get involved in the discussion unless there is some question I'm in a position to answer. I've had my say; now the readers get theirs.
      But sometimes questions are raised that merit my involvement. Such as this, after Friday's post on museums, from Bill:

Question,

There's two different kinds of people which one are you?

When you go to a place That's open to the public say a restaurant or a museum for instance and there's almost nobody else there do you say to yourself I'm so lucky I'm so smart nobody else came here out of the 7 billion people on earth I'm the only one here lucky me or do you realize that no one else gives a s*** and that's why you're in there alone because it's of no interest to anyone else?

You are a very fine writer most of the time you write about things that a fair number of people care about why on earth would you want to write about things that hardly anybody cares about over and over again?
Are you writing for you or are you writing for us?

I know that's more than one question but I figured you got to write about something

     In another mood, I might not have even posted that — the "I'm so lucky I'm so smart" is nearly an accusation — I'm an arrogant bastard — the standard MAGA mind trick of imagining something stupid and then projecting the thought into the mind of people they hate. "I'm lucky I'm so smart" is not a thought I have often, certainly not compared to, "I'm lucky I blundered here through blind fate, despite the fact that I didn't want to come here because I never want to go anywhere."
    But he said something complimentary. And that "Write about things that hardly anybody cares about over and over again" is fairly accurate. 
     I considered, and answered on the blog this way:

That's a valid question. The short answer is: I'm writing for me, absolutely, 100 percent. The fact that other people who aren't myself want to read it is a continuing marvel. As far as the nobody gives a shit aspect, I would reply with a question: 1) "Who appointed you their spokesman?" and then make an observation: "And yet you're here." But this seems a topic worthy of expansion, so I'll write tomorrow's blog post about it. Thanks for asking.

     The reader preference feedback loop is the bedrock of much social media — you click on a video of a turtle being cut out of a net by a diver, and suddenly your feed is inundated with aquatic animal rescue, Artificial Intelligence thinking, "More animal rescue!" 

      And we worry AI is going to take over the world.

      "Give the lady what she wants," was the slogan for Marshal Field's. Instead, I see myself as a sifter. I go to these very dull and ignored subjects that for some reason catch my attention, dig up handfuls of facts regarding them and toss them onto my fine-mesh sieve of a mind. Then begin to shake. Out drops the parts that not only aren't dull, but interesting. Those, I share.

    I'm the guy who, 30 years ago, wrote a chapter in my book on the National Spelling Bee. This was before all the novels and plays — in fact, I like to think I had a small hand in creating the literary bee genre. The spelling bee was an obscure and strange American institution that got grudgingly reported on and generally ridiculed at the end of May. I followed a girl through a year of the bee, beginning in her middle school, then proceeding to  state, and ending at the national bee in Washington, D.C.

     The chapter, called "Shiver Like Rhesus Monkeys" is one of my favorite pieces. It gives every word my champion, Sruti Nadimpalli, received in a year of the bee, but is never dull, and others joined me in that estimation.  Granta, the esteemed London literary quarterly, republished it on their cover.

    Returning to Bill's question, my writing about things nobody cares about is not an accident. I set out to do that. Because the things people do care about — sports, celebrities, today's political crisis — are already covered like a damp shirt by a thousand other writers. Why join the scrum?    To me, the greatest accolade is to walk an untrodden path. And while people don't care about the topics before I address them, by the time I'm done, they care more than they did before. Sometimes a lot more.

     I loved visiting Neenah Foundry to watch manhole covers being made because it was a dream of mine, and took me about five years of badgering to get them to agree, and because what I found there was gold, well, okay, iron, but you get my point. Before the story ran, I took the time to check the Sun-Times, Tribune and Daily News files, and found that, in the 100 years Neenah has been making manhole covers for the city, nobody from the Chicago press had ever found a way to drive up there and write about the process. Not once. I was the first. That, to me, is something to be proud of, to be that guy, the guy who asked Cologuard, "Who opens the jar?" For many subjects, I'm the only one who wrote a particular story in the Chicago press over the past 40 years — the social lives of transvestites. A factory making table pads. What it's like to visit a dominatrix. The fact that nobody has written before, or since, and no reader was waiting for the answer, isn't a reason to pause. It's a reason to hurry forward. A plaudit. Icing on the cake.

    Does that help, Bill? Because if you don't find this stuff interesting, nobody is putting a gun to your heads. As I sometimes tell people who complain: But I don't write this for people who don't like it. There must be stuff you like. Go find that. Because I'm certainly not changing to suit the displeased.

 

Enjoy the national museums while they're still here

     Once upon a time, the Sun-Times had a jazz critic and an opera critic, a book editor and a TV reviewer. All those experts, that passion and specialized knowledge, were washed away in the endless internet storm. Now their titles seem wild indulgences plucked from the deep past, something out of Louis XIV France: the keeper of the king's slipper, the reviewer of rock 'n' roll concerts.
     I don't believe we ever had a museum critic. A shame, in a city like Chicago. I think I could step away from this general interest column hamster wheel and happily devote three days a week apprising you of what's up at the Art Institute, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Field Museum, That Rich Guy in Florida Whose Name Sticks in My Throat Museum of Science and Industry, and all the lesser lights: the radiant National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen, the museum formerly know as the Oriental Institute. And on and on.
     When I was in Washington, D.C., as much as we enjoyed unpacking my son and daughter-in-law and tending, though never jiggling or kissing their new baby, my wife and I would occasionally slip away for a few hours to give the new parents some alone time. Believe it or not, as helpful we certainly were, they never once grabbed us by the lapels and implored, "No no, please stay!"
     First stop was the National Portrait Gallery, an underappreciated wonderland. The good news is the lobotomy that the current administration seems intent on inflicting upon our cultural institutions has not yet manifested itself here. One of the first portraits I saw was of Opal Lee, "the grandmother of Juneteenth," hanging in the entrance hall. I imagine it'll be crated in some warehouse in suburban Maryland next time we visit, replaced by a black velvet painting of Kid Rock. The exhibit of Civil War portraits was so fascinating, my wife and I almost never made it further.
     But I was interested in checking out the "America's Presidents" gallery.
     "I want to see if they're all Trump," I said.
     The other 44 predecessors are still there, starting with Gilbert Stuart's full length George Washington portrait. The past can both comfort and distress, but I've been definitely groping toward the former. I paused a long time before Chester Arthur, not one of history's favorites: He took over after James Garfield was shot by a disappointed office seeker.
     "Though Arthur had long favored this 'spoils' system, he endorsed the Pendleton Civil Service Act (1883)," the placard noted, "which created competitive examination for some federal positions and offered protections from partisan discrimination."
     The president giveth, the president taketh away.
     Arthur also signed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, "the first significant law restricting immigration."
     There would be more to come, a welcome reminder that few jaw-dropping lapses of today are worse than what once passed as ordinary. We're running backward, true, but at least to a place we know how to escape. We've done it before.
     Another day, I popped over to the Hirshhorn Museum, and am glad I did.
     In 2021, the Hirshhorn gave Glen Ellyn native-done-good Laurie Anderson a room, which she painted with slogans and figures, white on black. I spent awhile reading the pithy (and oblique) Andersonian aphorisms.
     "Books are the way the dead talk to the living" and "If you think technology will solve your problems, then you don't understand technology — AND you don't understand your problems." I smiled seeing one — "I dreamed I had to take a test in a Dairy Queen on another planet" — a longer version of a phrase she had on a piece of magnetic tape on a violin bow, played in concert to great effect.

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"Your autograph please"

Rabbi Sally Priesand

    

     Do kids still collect autographs? I have my doubts; the practice must have been ruined long ago by eBay. Busy celebrities are turned off, assuming that their efforts, rather than being cherished forever, will end up for sale by the next afternoon.
     A pity. Because nothing says, "I stood in front of you," quite like an autograph. I probably would never remember meeting Margaret Meade, the giant in anthropology, were it not for her precise signature above the year, 1972 in my little book with "Your Autograph Please" emblazoned on the cover. 
     The first page, I worked practiced making the request by securing the signature of my elementary school principal, the gloriously-named "J. Earl Neptune." Meaning I was in 6th grade.
     After Meade, another autograph I am very glad to have — Lillian Gish, the silent film star. She now seems part of the far distant past. But when I met her, in 1972, the star of "Birth of a Nation" would have been 79.
     And if you're wondering how a bowl-haircut boob in Berea Ohio was bumping into several acclaimed women of the 20th century, the answer is that the sandstone capital of the world was also home to Baldwin-Wallace College, now Baldwin-Wallace University. Luminaries would come through to speak. My mother, hoping to expand my horizons, would take me. Thanks ma.

   Another name in the book is Sally Priesand, whose name won't ring a bell.  But when we visited the National Portrait Gallery last week, the picture above was one of the first we saw.
     "In 1972, Sally Priesand became the first woman ordained as a rabbi..." the placard begins.
     "I was there," I told my wife. Priesand went my synagogue, Beth Israel: The West Temple. I knew I attended her ordination, not because of the book, which did have her autograph. But because of a program, typed and photocopied and folded, that I tucked away after she signed it.
     Although. Now that I look into the history, the ceremony I attended was not her actual ordination — that was June 3 at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. This was two weeks later, a "Joint Service to Honor the Ordination of Rabbi Sally Priesand." 

      Ah well, close enough for baseball.  

      And kids do still collect autographs, according to Prof. Google. Though the practice is now wedded to Disney World, apparently, where visitors get autographs from the various characters prancing around the park. Those certainly are expensive, if not valuable. On eBay, I see that Sally Priesand signatures are starting at $50. Pretty good, though I'm not selling mine.