Holy Earth

    

     Over the past six weeks, I've been to three funerals. My mother; the son of my wife's late parents' last living friend; and Lori Cannon. All at Shalom Memorial Park in Arlington Heights. I'm getting thoroughly sick of the place.

     Which is not a criticism. Shalom Memorial Park is very nice. The funerals are run briskly and efficiently. The place is beautiful. True to its name, quite parklike. There are no headstones — the grave markers are bronze, flush to the ground.
     No headstones, but a few monuments there are — scattered benches, a mausoleum or two — more testaments to the futility of wanting to be remembered than any kind of aggrandizement of the wealthy.

    A sylvan setting. Just not the place I want to keep circling back to. Though I suppose, if I have to contemplate the brevity of human life, it might as well be here.
     To be honest, I didn't have to go to the last two. But my wife was going to the second, and I go where she goes. And Lori's, well, I considered it a sign of respect. She always showed up.
     In each ceremony, after the casket is lowered, there comes a piece of funereal business where a packet of "Holy Earth" from the Mount of Olives is produced by the funeral director or rabbi, and scattered on the coffin lid. It is explained to the gathered mourners that since the Jew can't be buried in Israel — the ideal, apparently, though I don't remember a vote — a bit of Israel is brought to them.
     Despite all the pre-ritual conversation, nobody told me this would be done at my mother's funeral, and while I wasn't about to object, I wasn't entirely comfortable with it either. She would have preferred dirt from Rocky Mountain National Park. 

    What does "Holy" even mean? "Touched by God" by sounds right. Infused with the divine. Using that definition, either every square inch of the planet is holy, along with each and every one of us. Or none of us is. 

    The alternate, selective holiness, well, we see how well that's working out.

     I'm reminded of last time I was in Israel, over 20 years ago. I took a tour of the Temple Mount, led by an Israeli of the type I usually associate with Israelis — brash, irreverent, candid. He told us that the Western Wall — it used to be called "The Wailing Wall" — is not actually part of the destroyed second temple, but a remnant of the retaining wall used to create the mount on which the temple stood. He also reminded us that there is nothing holy about it. "The stones there are as holy as the stones in my backyard," he said. "A stone is a stone is a stone. Jews don't worship stones."
     Or dirt, for that matter. After the second and third funerals, I considered breaking off from the line of cars, finding where my mother is buried and ... I don't know, standing there, feeling sad. But the second time, we were heading to the shiva at the apartment of the father of the deceased, to pay our respects. And the third time, after Lori's funeral, I just wanted to get out of there. My mother could wait.
     "She isn't going anywhere," I told myself. 

'We know what's best for the people'

Danielle Carter-Walters

     The president sat in the Oval Office Friday, praising the National Guard. In mid-August, he deployed the D.C. guard to Washington, where they patrol the National Mall, keeping a careful eye on tourists — what tourists there are, considering the number of visitors to the United States is down by 22%, a loss of $12.5 billion, thanks to America's performative hostility to foreigners.
     Fresh from that triumph, he said Chicago is next.
     Why us? Why are we so fortunate?
     "The people in Chicago ..." the president said, "are screaming for us to come."
     They are? Did I miss that? Who in Chicago, exactly, is screaming?
     The president gave hints. Chicagoans who "are wearing red hats, just like this one."
     He himself was wearing a jumbo baseball cap emblazoned "TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!" Part of his new line of Trump merchandise that includes "Trump 2028' and "4 More Years" hats. There are photographs.
     "They are wearing red hats," the president continued. "African American ladies, beautiful ladies, are saying, 'Please, President Trump, come to Chicago, please."
     They are? I was about to laugh this off as mere mendacity. But for all the slander directed at the media, we still do that truthy-facty thing. Before I could ridicule the notion of Black Chicago women begging for troops to frisk them at bus stops, I had to go looking.
     I quickly found Danielle Carter-Walters, a personal fitness trainer. She indeed has been pleading for precisely this.
     "We knew he had been listening to us," said Carter-Walters, a co-founder of Chicago Flips Red, a group of Trump supporters. "When I saw it, I said, 'Oh, wow.' We've been asking for it in our videos. Now, he's doing it."
     So I asked: She sincerely believes Chicago will benefit from the National Guard patrolling its streets?
     "Yes, I do," said Carter-Walters, who lives in Marquette Park. "Our communities are out of control. The destruction. The devastation of what's happening. We are being displaced out of our homes by illegal aliens.
     "I stay on the South Side of Chicago. I'm living the experience. You can't sit in your car without worrying about being robbed, mugged, shot, carjacked. We definitely need something to be done."
     She said her group has only eight members, but more are out there.
     "There's a lot of us, thousands, silently supporting us," she said. "People think that Black women can't be MAGA. People are starting to see there's a lot of us."
     I did not start writing today's column intending to platform a Trump fan. But the story led me there.

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Hug that job!

     

     Hang around long enough, you may even become fashionable.
     I have that thought every time I read something about the new hot trend toward non-alcoholic cocktails.
     "Look at me, I'm a trendsetter," I'll tell Edie. "Beat 'em by about 20 years." (Next month, in fact. How the time does fly).
     I meant to get a six-pack of NA White Claw — aka flavored seltzer — so I could write something using Wood Allen's bit about buying the rights to "My Fair Lady," removing the songs and turning it back into "Pygmalion." 
     But that seemed a lot of effort to recycle a joke

     Saturday I glanced at my email and saw that clinging to your job has finally become fashionable.

     "Job hugging" is the fab new Gen Z term for not hopping from employer to employer.     

     Next they'll be discovering monogamy.

     "The newest career trend," FastCompany reveals, citing a report from "global organization consultancy" Korn Ferry, which seems agitated at the prospect.

     “At an alarming rate, more and more employees are displaying what is colloquially known as ‘job hugging’—which is to say, holding onto their jobs for dear life,” the report reveals.

     Korn Ferry never explains why the pejoratives — "alarming," "dear life." Perhaps we're all supposed to instinctively understand why staying in one position is inherently not a good thing, though they go on to limn those.

     "Experts say that employees putting down roots is not all doom and gloom, and can in fact bring companies some opportunities, beginning with a financial boon: Without pressure to match outside salaries, organizations face less of a need to raise wages. At the same time, with less turnover, recruitment and training costs dwindle."

    You can pay barnacles less, and don't have to constantly explain to newcomers where the bathrooms are.

     Myself, I'm going to miss the job-hopping trend — not that I ever partook. But ... choosing my words carefully ... there was always a certain comfort in knowing that, should you bump up against a bumbling manager — and sometimes there doesn't seem to be any other kind — that if you wait three years, they'll be on the road again, heading for another gig.

     Still. The arrival of "job hugging" does make me feel a little stupid for staying at the same job for ... 38 years and counting. In my defense, I do like my job, most of the time. And did quit, once, though allowed myself to be lured back. And was poised to quit another time, when the New York Daily News started running my column in 2005, which focused the attention of my bosses at the Sun-Times in a good way.

     Plus I took almost two years away from the paper, aggregate, between paternity leaves, time off to write a book, rehab and various surgeries.  Absence makes the heart grow founder, in both directions.

     Still, loving your job (and, if I may, being extraordinarily good at it) does make one vulnerable to experience the pain of job hugging. Sometimes when I really should have at least pretended to be poised to split. But I just couldn't do it.

     I remember some head hunter pairing me with some executives who were — if I recall — breaking away from Sunbeam and forming a carbon monoxide detector company. We had a lovely lunch at RL and afterward they offered me the job as a the communications head of the new enterprise. In on the ground floor, as Sam Wainwright would say.

      I told them I'd need to discuss it with my wife (again, what George Bailey does in "It's a Wonderful Life") and as we were leaving one of them said how impressed they were that I had worked for the Bohle Company in Los Angeles. 

     I froze, like Jimmy Stewart shaking Mr. Potter's hand. I'd hated the Bohle Company.

     I'm sorry, I said. I don't need a day. I don't need to talk with the wife. I can't go work for you. I can't sell carbon monoxide detectors. 

     I walked down Michigan Avenue to the paper, kicking myself, I was a slave. I didn't even try to wrangle a raise out of it. Some of us were designed to stay put. No point in beating myself up over it now.

Flashback 2007: Satisfaction guaranteed

     I was searching the archive and noticed this. Too much fun not to share. The good news is that Archie McPhee is still in business, and still promises to return unsatisfactory or defective items. Alas, the pig catapult must have caused too much trouble, as it is no longer offered among their line of novelty products. No do they notionally employ the fictive Molly Primrose to interact with the public. David Wahl, however, still works at the company. 

SATISFACTION GUARANTEED

     My older son's pig catapult broke. Not surprising, considering the workout he gave it, stalking about a family gathering, peppering his aging relatives with small pink plastic pigs.
     Behavior that a judicious parent would quickly halt — or so you might imagine, until you try actually saying the words, "Stop pelting people with pigs!" Easier to just ignore him. Besides, they're very small pigs, less than an inch long. It isn't as if they hurt.

     The device — sort of a blue plastic handgun with a contraption for flinging — broke very quickly anyway.
     Here the tale might have ended.
     But his mother, always ready to rally behind her cubs, noticed the lad still had the cardboard packaging from the catapult — saved because it has a "Pig Bull's Eye" on the back, to aid in honing his pig-pelting skills.
     She went online, to the manufacturer's Web site.
     "My son recently purchased a pig catapult made by your company," her note began. "The toy was quite fun. However, about one week after he purchased it, the portion that holds the pigs snapped off after the catapult was fired. It appears to have snapped off where the tension rod places pressure on the plastic catapult. Can you please replace this faulty pig catapult?"
     Here again the saga might have ended. One reason our world is so vexing is that companies build their bottom lines by shaving away customer service. It's hard enough to find anyone at Apple to care about your busted $400 iPod, never mind receive satisfaction for a broken $4.95 pig catapult made in China.
     Yesterday, a box arrived. It contained not only a new pig catapult, but this letter:

     "Dear Edie:
     "I am so sorry to hear that your Pig Catapult was defective. Here is a new one for you. Also here is a small gift to say we are sorry for any trouble this may have caused you. Thank you for bringing this to our attention so we could fix it for you!"

     Not quite a second sun appearing in the sky, but close.
     The gift, by the way, was a box of bandages designed to look like strips of bacon. My wife loved it.
     Here too, the tale might have ended. But there was one more paragraph.
     "I have enclosed an Archie McPhee Catalog for your enjoyment. Archie McPhee is our retail business."
     The catalog "of surprising novelties, good jokes and useful articles" hit our household like a t-bone steak tossed into a tank of piranhas.
     How to describe the product line? Simple toys and toys with an edge. Plastic ants and "Just Like Dad!" brand bubble gum cigarettes. Rubber ducks and gummy banana slugs.
     Bacon is fun, apparently. In addition to bacon bandages, there is bacon air freshener, a bacon wallet ("Not made from real bacon"), bacon tape, bacon gift wrap and Uncle Oinker's Gummy Bacon.
     Jesus too, must be amusing, in certain circles. There is the classic dashboard Jesus, plus a bobblehead Jesus, Jesus gift wrap and not one but two Jesus Action Figures, one with wheels "for smooth gliding action," another, deluxe set, complete with plastic loaves and fishes and "glow-in-the-dark miracle hands."
     An invigorating blasphemy pervades the enterprise. Beyond the Jesus goods, there are Last Supper After Dinner Mints ("Tasty & Religious"), a boxing rabbi puppet, Buddha pencil toppers and, so nobody feels left out, Nihilist Chewing Gum ("No flavor -- We don't believe in flavor.")
     Here, again, the curtain might fall. But the letter was signed "Molly Primrose." Must be a made-up name, I decided. A blanket identity to personalize customer service off-loaded to India.
     I wanted to take the catalog to work with me, but any possible argument ("Boys, it's my job") seemed feeble in the face of the passion with which they were selecting and discarding various items from their imaginary orders, toting up the balances so as to absorb every last penny in their possession.
     "Dad," said Ross, as I was leaving, "do you think I should get a Monkey Groan Ball? When you squeeze it, it's like a monkey groaning . . ."
     "Sounds great," I said.
     My morning's work became tracking down Molly Primrose. Such a pretty and unusual name — there is only one person named "Primrose" in the Chicago White Pages — it had to be a fiction.
Hadn't it?
     I contacted the company and waited. Carol Marin envisioned Molly as an older woman, walking a bunny on a leash — a lovely image. I thought of her as mid-20s, tattoos on both arms, bravely trying to keep her poetic soul alive while answering letters complaining about pig catapults.
     Finally David Wahl, Archie McPhee spokesman, called. I could tell he didn't want to say it, so I said it for him.
     Molly Primrose isn't real, is she?
     "It's our contact name for customer service,'' he said, reluctantly. "It's a rotating series of people who do it. We take it very seriously for a company that sells such stupid, useless things."
      Of course, one shouldn't pull back the corporate skirts too much. Still, upon reflection, it struck me that the only thing more wonderful than there being an actual Molly Primrose is there being a business in this day and age that feels compelled to make one up.
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 24, 2007

An apology to Poland: Smithsonian scrubbing humbles once great nation

 

     Pride goeth before a fall, the Bible says.
     Well, not really. Like many widely-quoted phrases, that's an improvement on the original, polished smooth by longtime use. The actual line in Proverbs 16 in the King James Bible is "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall."
     Either way, a reminder to tack toward humility. 
     I try to bear that in mind. But sometimes I get carried away.
     Such as in February, 2021. The future was bright. The Trump era had seemingly ended the month before. If you told me the guy who sicc'd a mob on the U.S. Capitol would sweep back into office in four years, I'd have laughed. America was back, and what better way to celebrate than to brag about our freedom?
     It being Black History Month, I chose our nation's bleakest chapter. My column began: "You know the great thing about centuries of slavery in the United States? The big positive that gets 
overlooked ... ?"
     A tease — what could be good about slavery? — to draw readers in, leading to the reveal. The good thing about slavery was:
     "That we can talk about it now, honestly, openly, write and discuss, and contemplate our nation’s difficult and tortured past, unafraid. That is an undeniable greatness of America, one to be proud of. Because not every country can manage it."
     To provide an example, I decided to kick Poland, because that winter, two historians, Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski with Warsaw's Polish Center for Holocaust Research, were hit by a lawsuit by the government-funded Polish League against Defamation, which sued the authors, as I put it, "for recounting history that contradicts their sense of unmitigated national glory."
      The column I wrote was peppered with translated quotes from Yiddish letters from my great uncle, Zalman Bramson, about life in Poland in the 1930s. Let's just say Poles didn't need the Germans to teach them to abuse Jews. 
     “The Holocaust is not here to help the Polish ego and morale,” said Grabowski. “... which seems to be forgotten by the nationalists.”
     Not forgotten. Actively suppressed. Nationalists have a way of pushing the nations into the abyss. History teaches this, so must be prettied up so as not to give away the game.
Feeling myself on safe ground, I indulged in some analysis.
      "Like our own country for the past half decade, and nations around the world, Poland fell in the grip of resurgent nationalism. A shameful political philosophy that believes a country becomes great, not by actually doing great things, but through talk, threats and pressure. Their greatness is declarative — tell everybody “We are great!” Over and over and over."
      The nation of Poland, through its embassy in Washington, demanded the column be taken down, while finding nits to pick — this supposed "historians" I cite, his degree was in sociology!

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Flashback 2008: Walter Netsch "He broke out of the box"

     

Walter Netsch's University Hall at UIC's Circle Campus is consistently cited among
the ugliest buildings in Chicago. In 2018, TimeOut Chicago called it "a larger-than-life
Triscuit cracker" and a "rogue domino." (Photo courtesy WikiCommons)

     Tonight's Sun-Times Roast of the Chicago Skyline Cruise is not the first time I've turned to architecture critic Lee Bey to provide insight and perspective. I checked on Walter Netsch's obituary because I plan to talk about brutalism, of which he was the master — if that is the right word; "victim" might be more apt — and was surprised to see Lee doing yeoman's work  lending a hand here as well. I'm surprised I've not shared it before, it being perhaps the most negative obituary I've ever written, except of course for Morgan Finley, that "monument to corruption." 

     Walter Netsch, a controversial Chicago architect whose work was both praised and reviled, as well as a former Chicago Park District board president, died at his home Sunday. He was 88.
     Mr. Netsch specialized in academic structures and designed several significant buildings on Chicago area campuses. He created the tri-towered concrete library at Northwestern University and much of the University of Illinois at Chicago campus.
     An early building that established his national reputation was the soaring U.S. Air Force Academy Chapel at Colorado Springs, which was initially criticized but eventually became an admired tourist attraction.
     His UIC campus, on the other hand, was described as "physically repellent" by university officials who ordered a face-lift when they discovered that prospective students were shunning UIC after visiting the campus because they found its buildings intolerably ugly.
     Prominent Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman once said of Mr. Netsch: ''His buildings create wonderment, in the best and worst sense of the word.''
     In 1986, Mr. Netsch was appointed Park District board president by Mayor Harold Washington. He left the board in 1988 after a stormy tenure, but he is credited with helping to distribute district projects more equitably, focusing attention on poorer areas that had been neglected previously.
     As influential as he was, Mr. Netsch's ideas were often ignored, perhaps justly so. He once suggested closing the two center lanes of Lake Shore Drive and converting them into flower beds.
     Mr. Netsch spent 30 years with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the giant Chicago-based architecture firm. A heart condition in 1979 forced him to retire, and he was plagued by medical problems in his later years.
     He was married for 45 years to former Illinois Comptroller Dawn Clark Netsch, who ran for governor in 1994. The two met when the then-Dawn Clark asked to borrow Netsch's art-crammed Lake Shore Drive penthouse apartment for a meeting of independent Democrats in the late 1950s.
     They wed in 1963 without telling friends beforehand. Judge Julius J. Hoffman performed the ceremony in his chambers. Mrs. Netsch had been a law clerk for Hoffman, who would later go on to gain national notoriety by presiding over the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial.
     Mr. Netsch was supportive of his wife's political ambitions, kicking in nearly $1 million of his fortune -- including the sale of an original Frank Lloyd Wright window for $265,000 -- to help finance her failed gubernatorial campaign.
     Walter A. Netsch Jr. was born Feb. 23, 1920, on 62nd Street on the city's South Side. His father was a meat-packing executive from New Hampshire. His mother was a blue blood from a Yankee family that had owned the first car in New Hampshire, and throughout his life the tall, thin Mr. Netsch displayed a certain patrician air.
     Growing up on the South Side, Mr. Netsch said he felt like an outsider. He was unathletic, artistic, frail and highly intelligent. He went to the opera and took drawing classes. He made cardboard houses for his sister.
     "I was a little scrawny kid, so you flaunt what you have," he once said. "But to show intellectual ability -- at that age that's usually considered an aggressive act."
     He studied architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During World War II, he was stationed on the Aleutian Islands.
     After an apprenticeship with a Kenilworth firm, he went to work for SOM, where he maintained his outsider ways, pursuing his own rigorous esthetic system -- called Field Theory -- a concept of design that employs the repetitive use of geometric shapes according to specific mathematical principles to create complicated crystalline structures. Like Mr. Netsch himself, these buildings were bold, highly abstract and full of contrasts.
     "He saw that UIC could bridge the Eisenhower Expressway, and designed a north side of the campus, [and a] proposed performing art center that was a cluster of hexagram shapes," said Lee Bey, executive director of the Chicago Central Area Committee, and formerly Mayor Daley's deputy chief of staff for architecture and urban design. "[Netsch did] really good architecture that presages the kind of anti-box forms we see today."
     Examples of Mr. Netsch's work include the mazelike Behavioral Science Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, the Miami University Art Museum, and the architect's own Chicago home on North Hudson, whose design inspired the home in the film "Torn Between Two Lovers."
     Bey also said that Mr. Netsch had the vision behind the elegant Inland Steel Building at 30 W. Monroe.
     "Bruce Graham gets the credit because he finished it," said Bey. "As contemporary as it looks now, Walter's earlier version was even lighter, even glassier, even finer."
     Not all critics take such a complimentary view. New York architect Robert A. Stern dismissed some of Mr. Netsch's work as "a landscape of the moon" and "twisted and brutal."
     Even his most famous building had its share of controversy. When unveiled in 1962, the U.S. Air Force Chapel was so hated that Congress held hearings on the matter.
     Mr. Netsch's work at UIC was even more harshly condemned. One critic dubbed it "impersonal concrete brutalism," and part of it suffered that worst fate an architect can face: it was torn down in Mr. Netsch's lifetime.
     In Mr. Netsch's defense, money concerns forced the university to scale back on his plans.
     "The one thing to keep in mind with UIC is it really wasn't built exactly to his design," said Bey. "There was a landscape plan and a lighting plan in his original design, designed to humanize the campus, but they were never completed due to budget problems, so it came off being a cheaper, paler version of what he designed."
     Mr. Netsch never took responsibility for the unpopular campus, pointing a finger at poor maintenance and bad publicity.
     "I did not make a mistake," he said of his original plans. "I will not take the blame." When the architect redoing the campus asked Mr. Netsch to consult with him over the redesign, he refused.
     Mr. Netsch viewed opposition to his work as short-sighted philistinism and felt that his buildings would be vindicated by history.
     "I feel I've introduced something that will be more accepted tomorrow than it is today," he once said.
     His widow said Mr. Netsch was "designing conceptually what cities should look like in the year 2020."
     "He broke out of the box," Dawn Clark Netsch said. "He has left a lot of what was inside of him for others to look at and contemplate, and hopefully also to look at new ways of looking at not only the environment but the world."

       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 17, 2008 

Post-wedding pancakes at iconic Chicago diner

     Nick Snow and Roxane Briones found each other on Hinge, the online dating site. Each liked what they saw, and decided to meet in person at Avec, the Mediterranean mainstay.
     But there are two Avecs. He went to the one in the West Loop. She went to River North.
     "I forgot he is new to the city," said Briones, who suggested the restaurant. "He went to the wrong one. I panicked."
     "I walked into the place, looking to meet, and there's no one there," said Snow.
     A phone call was made, an Uber grabbed, and the couple got together. Magic ensued.
     "We hit it off very quick," said Snow. "We joke, after our first date, we felt like we were dating a month. After a week, we felt it was a couple months. Now it feels like we've been together for years."
     Briones, 31, is a cook at Proxi, the coastal Asian place in the West Loop. Snow, 40, is a filmmaker who spent almost 20 years in Brooklyn before moving here last October.
     "It was time for a change," said Snow, who noted that Brooklyn was getting very expensive. "Try a new city for a little bit.''
     Briones had a bit of a head start, coming here from Michigan.
     "I came to Chicago almost three years ago," she said. "I was drawn to the restaurants, and the people that I admire work here. I just packed my bags and took a train. I didn't know anyone. Had to rent an apartment in Pilsen with two random girls, who turned into my best friends."
     The relationship, begun in misunderstanding, deepened by accident. Literally.
     "In February I was trying to teach her how to snowboard," said Snow. "She had never done that, coming from Nicaragua. I took her to the tiniest little hill in Naperville. I'm thinking, 'She's going to be fine. There's no way she can get hurt here.' She was doing pretty good, she was picking it up, and just fell forward, tried to catch herself and broke her wrist."
     "In two places," Briones added.
     Bad for a cook who spends her days chopping and stirring.
     "Her whole livelihood," said Snow. "She ended up living with me while she was recovering for two months. In a weird way, that really helped us. It launched us into this position where we were together every day and fire-tested the relationship. We hadn't been dating too long. Suddenly we're living together and together all the time. I'm caring for her. It feels so right. It didn't feel like a burden. That was a special sign."

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