Don't be afraid: it's just poetry

     The great Gene Weingarten, the Washington Post's two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, called me out over this column in a Twitter exchange (from Aussie hookers to the best columnist working—I piss off 'em all). Actually, he wasn't mad, just questioned whether something could be poetry if it doesn't rhyme. I answered an emphatic "YES!" but he held his ground. There is no accounting for taste, and I'm trying to forget that he finds "Death of the Hired Man" by Robert Frost to be tripe. To me this is all a quibble over semantics: poems are what people call poems.

     Friday was cold and windy. Getting dressed for the Cubs home opener, I thought: better put on my Under Armour. Which is usually reserved for skiing or when it’s 15 below zero. But I worried that high-tech long johns were overkill, so I fired off an email to a Cub fan buddy, who would be at the game. Is wearing long underwear to the ballpark in April, I asked, a “prudent precaution” or a “shameful stratagem?”

     You’ll notice the alliteration in that question. Not an accident. “Prudent precaution” came naturally, then I paused, searching for the right “s” word to put after “shameful.”

     Not poetic, of course, but a reminder that we can all use language to decorate and enhance the most ordinary moments of our lives, like checking with a pal to see if wearing long underwear to Wrigley Field will mark a guy as a weakling. (“I will be wearing mine,” he answered, a reply I was grateful for when the wind picked up and the temperature dropped after the sixth).

     Cut to the next day, around Sheffield and Fullerton, I noticed the sleek Pegasus logo of the Poetry Foundation on a placard atop a taxi cab. Oh right. April is National Poetry Month, and while the commencement of baseball is marked in Chicago with pomp, solemnity and mass ritual, events like Poetry Month are shrugged off by the vast majority, which is just plain wrong. 

     First, poetry is important. Yes, as with long underwear, there is a whiff of effeminacy to it that many guys find off-putting. A cultural slur you’d think we would have abandoned long ago. Soldiers write poetry, not only a century ago, such as  Wilfred Owen’s classic “Dulce et Decorum Est,” about a World War I gas attack (Go online and read it right now, “As under a green sea, I saw him drowning/In all my dreams, before my helpless sight/He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.”) 

     But also soldiers fighting today. Brian Turner, in his collection “Here, Bullet” sees a sergeant shoot a crane in Iraq. "It pauses, as if amazed death has found it/here, at 7 a.m. on such a beautiful morning, before pitching over the side and falling/in a slow unraveling of feathers and wings."
     Second, poetry is useful. It's a tool, like a screwdriver or a hammer. Though I suppose that depends on who you are. If you are Mr. Equanimity, smiling at the clouds as you stroll happily along, your neighbors setting their watches as you pass by, well, maybe the stuff has not much use for you.
     Even then, there are always lighter poets, like Billy Collins, who runs up to the reader waving his poem like a 6-year-old showing off a new toy. "To take a poem/and hold it up to the light/like a color slide/or press an ear against its hive./I say drop a mouse into a poem/and watch him probe his way out."
     Me, being a dark sort, I've been revelling in the poems of Louise Glück, such as "Stars." She inventories her scant world. "I have a bed, a vase/of flowers beside it,/ and a nightlight, a book." Life itself questions her: "Do you dare/send me away as though/you were waiting for something better?/There is no better/Only (for a short space)/the night sky . . ." To which she hisses back: " I was brave, I resisted,/I set myself on fire."
     And third, Chicago is a poetry town. Do you think Wrigley Field, built in 1914, is old? Poetry Magazine was founded here in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, and has fielded better players and enjoyed a better past century.
     Chicago is a city not only with statues to poets such as Goethe, but with an apartment building and a parking garage named for poets. There is the Uptown Poetry Slam at the Green Mill on Sundays, now in its 27th year, and why that isn't a standard Chicago tourist stop along with Wrigley and the Art Institute is an utter mystery. There is the Poetry Foundation itself, which put up its airy and attractive building on West Superior to help sop up the Lilly $100 million fortune that drenched it, a dubious boon they've coped with better than expected.
     There is nothing superfluous about good poetry. It guides and instructs. I picked up "Leaves of Grass" a 150-year-old poem, and read one sentence that resonates today.
     "And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy," Walt Whitman writes, "walks to his own funeral, dressed in his shroud."
     That's it, I thought. That's what our political problem is right now. Not enough sympathy —for other people, that is. We overflow with sympathy for ourselves and puzzle that others don't share it, when we are so stingy doling it out. Maybe we should take our cue from Whitman and pause from marching graveward to cast off our blinding burial cloth, force ourselves to feel compassion for the other guy, even if we don't like him. Here poetry helps, or could help, if only we let it.

Shutting up is an art form

   "Honey," my wife called from downstairs. "The Bulls game is on."

    "Just a minute...," I replied, from my office, "I'm arguing with prostitutes in Australia."
    Strange world, this.
    Watching the Bulls play on television with the family is a joy. In the mornings we ask each other, "Are the Bulls playing tonight?" Someone checks the schedule hanging in the kitchen, and, if there's a game, we all sigh in happy expectation. Regular readers know that I'm not much of a sports fan, and generally that's true —I went to the Cubs home opener Friday, reluctantly, invited by a reader, but could not name a single player on the team, before or after. It was nice to sit there and eat peanuts and trade baseball trivia. But the Cubs didn't do anything memorable. One of them hit a home run. That's it.
     The Bulls are different: tremendous athletes, passionate competitors, each an individual, all trying to make the best of a tough situation: Derrick Rose being out for another season with another injury. It's still fun to watch them play. I never thought that passing the ball could be a thing of beauty, but when Joakim Noah does it, it is, sometimes. Often.
     Yet I lingered upstairs Friday. Because there is a strange mix of intimacy and invasion to the Internet, particularly Twitter, which has replaced Facebook and email as the dynamic communications form of the moment (and don't write in informing me that no, it's now Spotify, or LeadPipe, or something even newer. I'm 53 years old. I'm by definition behind the times. I catch up when required).
     What happened is this: Wednesday night I got a call from Attorney General Lisa Madigan's office, telling me that Amnesty International, which generally has a sterling reputation somewhere between Doctors Without Borders and Miss Bianca of "The Rescuers," would be debating, in Chicago, on Friday,  whether to endorse the decriminalization of commercial sex: basically saying that prostitutes, madams, pimps, brothels, should all be legal. Their argument is that selling your body, or someone else's, is a civil right, like voting.
     Madigan passionately believes that is wrong, that all commercial sex is coerced, either now or in the past, the result of child sex abuse. "The reality is, no young girl dreams of becoming a prostitute," she told me, Thursday morning, when I was writing the story. Her view made sense to me.
    I felt confident the column laid out the situation in a balanced way. "The issue pivots on that notion of consent,"I wrote. "Is Madigan right, that prostitution is invariably the result of sex abuse and coercion? Or can it be a choice, a business transaction among consenting adults?"
    Now I admit, I didn't line up testimony to back up that second premise, never thought: "I better find some hookers to talk about how wonderful their lives are." My belief, from 30 years of reporting, is that prostitutes are invariably damaged in some way, typically drug addicts feeding a habit, and fall or are lured into that way of life, trapped without recourse. 
     While no doubt some are working the bar at Gibson's and having a grand time, at the moment, that is rare enough to be insignificant, compared to the general awfulness of the trade experienced by most women. Heroin addiction doesn't become a good life choice merely because Keith Richards pulled it off. That said, I did not do a thorough and comprehensive review of world prostitution. And in posting my story here, I gave, as I try to do on the blog, a little extra background that didn't fit in the paper, a look at the bias I brought to the story:  years ago, I went out with the Cook County Sheriff's Police as they swept streetwalkers off Cicero Avenue. It was a scene from hell; I was amazed that men would pay these women for sex, because I was uncomfortable standing on the same block, breathing the same air.
     That wasn't offered as a sweeping indictment of all sex workers everywhere, but rather a description of what I felt, honestly and sincerely, standing there. 
      The column hit the world of Twitter Friday afternoon, re-tweeted more than 100 times. And a furious opposition sprang up that caught me completely off-guard.
    "Pure hate..."
    "Polemics and damaging stereotypes..."
    "You are afraid of your own sexuality, so you condemn others for theirs. It's fairly textbook..."
     The reaction was not from Chicagoans, but Australian sex workers -- as far as I could tell -- plus various sympathetic sorts: London party boys, Irish good time gals. Dozens of them.
    "So horrendous. Not even slightly professional."
     "Comparing SW to drug dealers rises to a whole new level of cluelessness."
     "Neil Steinberg is a pustulent, rotting WANKCHARIOT."
     The thing to do would be to ignore it all. I had my say, now they have theirs. A columnist should have a thick skin.
     But to me, a thick skin leads to a thick head. What I do requires being sensitive to nuance. It's not a choice, really. Constitutionally, I'm not the shrug-things-off sort. I'm an explain-myself sort. That's how I'm able to do this job. So I waded in, trying to answer all these people, tweeting in batches of five and 10, trying to make them understand my perspective, to tamp down their outrage. But the more I tried, the angrier they seemed to get, and the more personal. My comment about hookers on Cicero Avenue, about not wanting to breathe the same air, really rattled them, and each tweet exaggerated it a bit more, until it was no longer about a certain group of prostitutes on Cicero Avenue, but about all sex workers, then about all women everywhere. 
     I tried arguing back. No, not all sex workers. Actually,  I was thinking about one specific, real person -- Pam Bolton, I remember her name. I talked with her. The cops said she had AIDS. She was scary. Two weeks later she was murdered. I never forgot her. 
     The next thing I know, I'm arguing with a dominatrix in Seattle and Dan Savage, the sex columnist -- and my friend, someone I have had lunch with, talked to, read all his books, and deeply respect—is trying to moderate between us.
      "I know you both," he writes. "If you got together, you guys would get on like a house on fire. 1st round - or 3 - on me?"
     I almost wrote back, "You know I don't drink, Dan," but then too much of my personal life was already being dragged into it, dug up by Down Under doxies racing online, grabbing what sharp details they could find in 30 seconds and rushing back to scratch at me with them. Personal and mean, behaving very much like right wing religious zealots do when challenged, a rare point of commonality between the two groups.
     Dan's becoming involved gave me clarity, because I thought of his recent book of essays, American Savage, and how it frustrated me when, in places, he detours into various pissing matches and inside-baseball parsing with angry people from various sexual subgroups, who do not see Dan as he really is, big picture — an important writer, a man of integrity and courage and humor who spotlights important issues that most people never even thought about, never mind sympathized with — but instead measure him on some partisan standard insisted upon by their particular clique, find him lacking in that one regard, then condemn him broadly for some lone sentence or passing thought plucked out of his decades of writing.
     Which is what I was getting now, from people who didn't know me, but were waving a phrase they didn't like—"breathe the same air"— and trying to smear me across the floor, demanding automatic sympathy for themselves while extending none to me. I was the Bad Man they had uncovered. The classic slasher movie dynamic -- identify someone as evil, quickly establish his guilt and then punish him with all the cruelty that supposedly left you aghast in the first place. You're free to be as vile as you like if you have the right victim.
     I wanted to say, "You know, I was attending secret transvestite dances in Chicago while you were learning the alphabet, honey, so cut me some slack..."  I kept trying to disengage from it, yet kept being drawn back, to face this howl of disapproval. I finally leapt up, fled downstairs, and caught most of the first half of the Bulls game. The Bulls dominated, of course.
     At halftime I was back at my computer. The more I looked at the fireworks on Twitter, the more I recognized the pattern. This is what you get from insular groups—motorcycle riders, gun fanatics, sex workers—who are so used to trading pieties among each other, they forget how to deal with outsiders. They see themselves as besieged. Everybody outside the wall is either a friend or an enemy, a zero or a one. Thus, if I make a statement that seems just a dry, factual rendition of reality—riding motorcycles without a helmet is dangerous; so is carrying a loaded pistol on your hip; prostitutes are mostly degraded victims—expressing that thought flips the switch in their heads, their targeting systems boot up and lock on you, and they automatically blast away. Piling on, flooding the zone, rushing with a snarl down the hillside, clubs raised over their heads, is their mob-mentality response to anything perceived as an insult.  
     Eventually I was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers and their corrosive bile. I started just blocking everybody who commented on Twitter—the examples I gave are actually the mild ones, the ones I didn't block, because the worst ones are gone. When that was too much had the presence of mind to ignore the thing and head downstairs for the fourth quarter—I missed the third trading quips with harlots—where my wife had prepared some peppermint tea. 
     That helped. Peppermint tea always helps.
     The Bulls crushed the Bucks. I came back upstairs, refreshed and determined to extract myself. Consider the source. I looked at the bios of the people writing in. You need a glossary. "Sex-pos Feminist, Bi, Ply, Libsoc, Agorist..."etc. from Wellington, New Zealand. ("Libsoc" is libertarian social philosophy, Agorism is a kind of utopianism where society is based on voluntary exchanges). "Genderfluid Feminist Dominatrix EXTREME MISANDRIST" (hater of men. Well knock me over with a feather.  I had a hunch, but still looked it up, to be sure). 
    You have to marvel at that. "EXTREME MISANDRIST." In all caps. Because a plain old lower case misandrist who merely hates men moderately doesn't do the trick. That took an edge off the criticisms. To be honest, there is something so heartbreaking, it's almost sweet, advertising your own bigotry in your bio and then caterwauling that people aren't treating you fairly. It's like the guy who complained that a supermarket bakery was discriminating against him because it wouldn't put his son's name, "Adolf Hitler," on his birthday cake. Well boo-hoo pal, maybe you should have thought of that before you got into the hating business. 
     It would seem too obvious an irony in fiction, which is why I so love journalism. You can't make this stuff up. A reminder that even marginalized groups can be haters—especially marginalized groups; sometimes, it's all they've got.
     You can't be hurt by that, I kept telling myself. You can't. At least you shouldn't. Because this isn't about you, this fire hose of on-line antipathy. They may have your name, and a few dusty facts they grabbed off Google. But they don't know you, don't know what they're talking about. They're just taking the common dodge of using what they consider their victim status to be bullies. And yet — almost touchingly — they somehow expect respect for it in return. How's that workin' for you guys, as a life strategy? Make many friends that way? 
     Enough. There's no winning, just stopping. The tragic part is, they have a point somewhere. I see that through the haze. I'm not the Welcome Wagon for banning sex work. When not channeling the attorney general, I'm pretty open to any stab at fixing intractable social problems like prostitution. If the goal is to reduce the harm, as with drugs ("Foxxie! He's comparing us to drug dealers again!"), then the solution seems a kind of quasi-legalization that kills the secondary market. If Scandinavia can cut heroin use by giving the drug away for free, under controlled settings, maybe making prostitution legal, for the prostitutes, while keeping being a pimp or a madam illegal, would help. It seems to work in Sweden. Maybe instead of banning brothels, the government should run them. 
    Or maybe not. Given how terrorized and abused prostitutes often are, how they'll testify that the man who beats them and takes all their money is in fact merely their boyfriend, not their pimp, this is an area where glib solutions should be viewed skeptically. 
     Enough. Shutting up is an art form, one that requires practice. I'm bad at it, but I'm trying to be better. I don't understand people who live online, endlessly sparring with others who disagree. Not my idea of fun. Which is why I'm glad I call the shots, and can move on from their world, at a quickstep, while they're stuck there. Though to be candid, I'm glad for this episode, because it taught me, not only what agorism is, and how to crank up the filter on my Twitter Interactions feed, but also the heretofore unimagined notion that some women will claim that being a prostitute is the fulfillment of their childhood dreams (pride is the last possession of those with nothing, and the more abject a person's situation, the more they insist on elevating themselves. I try to remember that when some debased soul is glorying themselves over me). It also reminded me of the importance of walking away and waiting for the storm to pass. 
     None of the women who claimed that prostitution was their childhood ambition took me up on my request that they write in at length, explaining that journey. "Someday mum, I'm going to blow strange men in cars, just like you..." I kept asking my Twitter correspondents, if you have a point to make, why not write to me directly and make it fully instead of getting me in their crosshairs and squeezing off 140-character bursts? Only one, Dan Savage's dominatrix pal, who wrote a column for Seattle's The Stranger for many years, actually did.  This post is already too long, and this letter makes it longer—you might want to take a break and have some peppermint tea; it's revivifying—then return. But I asked for it, so I'm presenting her letter uncut and without comment, and you can judge for yourself. I think she makes some good points:

Dear Mister Steinberg,

Mistress Matisse

You said in your tweets on this subject that you were open to more information, so I’m taking you at your word.  This letter may look long, but the situation is complex, so I hope you take the time to acquaint yourself more fully with the issue of sex worker rights. 

First, some basic terminology. People who exchange sex - or sexy activity, if not actual penetrative sex - are sex workers. That’s a catch-all term that includes everyone. Categories break down from there: an escort, a massage worker, a street worker, a dominatrix, et cetera. Some people write it as one word: sexworkers, and as the Chicago Manual of Style hasn’t yet made a rule for this, either way is acceptable.

Those are all neutral terms. The word “hooker” is a slur, and so is “whore”. Prostitution is a crime, and calling someone a prostitute is making a statement about their legal status, so unless one is talking about a legal situation, it’s better to avoid that word. Those are the terms I’ll be using in talking to you, and that’s how sex worker activists will speak of us in any further reading you may do. 

Background: There is a worldwide sex worker rights movement underway. It’s been going since the ‘80’s really, but it’s been moving in higher gear for about the last decade. In the US, what we want is: any nonviolent and non-coercive exchange of sex/sexy activity for money to not be a criminal offense. Basically, if a sexual act would not be illegal if no money changed hands, then simply adding money to the situation should not transform it into a crime. We have a long way to go in achieving that goal here - America is the last Westernized nation that arrests a LOT of people for nothing more than offering to have sex for money. Not pimps, not traffickers, the actual sex workers themselves. Most of them are women, most of them are poor, and a lot of them are people of color. Some of them go to prison for it, and all of them are seriously harmed by the experience of being harassed by police and arrested. Laws against sex work are unjust and unfair, and we want that to change.  

There is more to sex worker’s rights than simply not being arrested. But in the US, that’s the biggest hurdle to overcome. What American sex workers specifically want is: Decriminalization. That means that all laws making the offering/purchasing of sex for money a criminal offense are abolished. An example of decriminalized sex work would be the systems used in New Zealand and parts of Australia, where sex workers can work independently or in a brothel, under reasonable business regulations.

Decriminalization is different from Legalization. An example of legalized sex work would be the counties in the state of Nevada where there are a few licensed brothels. The state imposes very strict regulations, not comparable to any other industry, on the daily lives and personal behavior of women who work in the brothels. Women have little control over their surroundings, when they work, and how they meet with clients. They must pay a large part of their earnings, including tips, to the brothel, and they may not work anywhere except the brothel. They must live in the brothel full-time – they cannot work a shift and then go home. If they are not in the brothel, they are not permitted to be anywhere in the county, and are subject to arrest if they are. Sex worker activists do not favor legalization. 

I have been a sex worker for over fifteen years. I am an activist for the rights of sex workers. As part of that, I would like to see a world where no one is forced to do sex work. That does happen sometimes, and it's bad. But forced sex work is not the huge and scary problem some people would like you think it is. It is not okay that it happens at all, but it simply does not happen NEARLY as often as anti-sex workers say it does. The pivotal fact: When lawmakers and anti-sex work activists say “sex trafficking” they mean ANY exchange of sex for money, even if it is between two adults and completely voluntary. Let me say that again, because I think it bears repeating. To an anti-trafficking activist, an adult person, fully in possession of her rational faculties and completely independent of anyone else’s influence, who chooses to exchange a sexual act for money equals: a sex trafficking victim.

I think this is deeply insulting to people who really are victimized. I think one should only use the work trafficked to mean a person who is truly being forced or coerced, or controlled by another person in a way that's harmful or exploitative. I also think it's unjust to invalidate the agency of an adult person. I own my body, and if I, as a consenting adult, choose to have sex with another consenting adult, the state should not have the right to say, "No, we don't approve of your reason for having sex, so we are declaring your act to be a crime and arresting you both." It does not matter if I decided to have sex because someone bought me dinner, or because they offered me a diamond ring, or if they offered me a hundred dollars. Further, no one should declare that I am a "victim" of anything without my consent. It is for the person who has had the experience to identify whether she/he was a victim of something or not. It’s wrong to impose a label on someone they did not choose for themselves. 

Since about 2008, the state rhetoric about any act of sex for money has changed, and the state now defines all of it as "trafficking". That's happened for a variety of reasons, most of them to with the allocation of grant money and the erosion of civil liberties. There is a War On Sex Workers, much like there has been a War On Drugs. There is a system of restrictive ideas about what kind of behavior is socially acceptable, which have been woven into government policy and law, and there are a lot of people whose jobs and money and sense of power are all dependent on keeping that system in place. If there is no social panic about shadowy international crime rings and millions of women and children being abused in sensational ways, those people will lose power. That's why when you read scary headlines about “X Bazillion People Are Being Sex Trafficked", it does not necessarily mean the person is underage, or has been taken from one place to another, or is an undocumented immigrant, or is being forced or coerced into doing sex work against his/her wishes. (It also doesn't mean that anyone can actually see/find those supposed victims, since they are often pure invention.)

People can be abused in systems of sex work - just as they can be abused in non-sex work forms of labor, and in all other social systems. But criminalization and stigmatization of all sex work is not the right answer. People are abused in the social institution of marriage, too. But we do not outlaw marriage and arrest anyone who says, "I do." People are raped, but we do not respond to that fact by outlawing all consensual sex. On a moral level, we do not want anyone to be harmed. But when it comes to allocating public resources to combat that, the current system does not work.  Some of the systems that are ostensibly used to "help" people are not what those people themselves want, and may actually cause even more harm. It is not useful to treat a very wide spectrum of people around the world as if they were all the same one-dimensional “victim”, and neither is it wise to try to condense this multifaceted issue into a few bits of bumper-sticker wisdom. 

To that end, this is the reading that I recommend to get a fuller understanding of the challenges of helping those who need help, without criminalizing, stigmatizing and generally imposing a very binary victim/criminal worldview onto a large and diverse set of people.

A good place to start: "The War On Sex Workers", by Melissa Gira Grant: http://reason.com/archives/2013/01/21/the-war-on-sex-workers

And this, also by Melissa Gira Grant: "What the New York Times (and France) Got Wrong About Prostitution" http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/12/sex_work_laws_the_new_york_times_praises_france_s_new_legislation_and_gets.html

An excellent piece by Maggie McNeil debunking false statistics on sex work and trafficking: "Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics" http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/27/lies-damned-lies-and-sex-work-statistics/

If you just read those three pieces, you’ll have some idea of where we are coming from and what we are fighting against. I can recommend LOTS of further reading if you want it, from big-picture pieces to really granular stuff. There is a lot of good work happening, and good things being said. Ask me for any sort of information about sex worker rights, and I’ll happily direct you to it.

But the best way I can sum it all up is: listen to the sex workers themselves. Not the state, not rescue organizations – the people who do sex work and who suffer under unjust laws. We have voices and we know what we want. We say “Nothing ABOUT us WITHOUT us”, and that’s what we are fighting for. 

Sincerely,

Matisse

   

Baseball is a story we tell ourselves

The Cubs home opener was extra melancholy this year. The weather Friday was about 40 degrees, with a brisk wind blowing in from the north, swirling garbage onto the field. The ivy was brown, the ballpark muted under a gray, lowering sky, something straight out of a Thomas Hardy novel. The team, almost needless to say, was lousy, and lost to the Phillies 7-2. Even Wrigley Field, normally so cheery, so special, almost holy, had a dismal quality, its bright new 100 anniversary logos like scarlet make-up slapped upon the cheeks of a dying relative. I couldn't help but squint and wonder what fresh atrocities the Cubs' owners, the Ricketts family, who are starting to seem ever more soul-deficient, will soon be visiting upon the place. It made me remember this tale—actually an assignment, a dozen years ago, when the Sun-Times editor asked me to write something about the netting the Cubs Tribune owners erected in the outfield in 2002 to block the view of the rooftops across the street: This is what I came up with:

     That vacant lot? That charred corner of land? You mean you don't know? I thought everybody knew. Course, how long have you been in Chicago? Just since 2019? I guess you wouldn't know the story then.

     Scary place, eh? Nothing'll grow. Nobody can build anythin'. People walk faster, or cross the street. I've seen a grown man stop and cry. It's a sad tale, that's for sure. Let me tell you.

     That scorched bit of blasted land used to be famous, used to be a ballfield. Wrigley Field, they called it. Oldest park in baseball. Oh, it was a beautiful place. Bricks. Ivy on the outfield wall. And the team, the Cubs. People loved 'em, loved 'em. Win or lose, didn't matter. Fans would pack the park. Just to enjoy the game. It was a pleasure just to sit in the stands, nice spring day, suck back a beer, watch the outfielders spit and the elevated train rumble by.

     Things changed, sure. Back in '88--that must have been before you were born--they put in lights. Last ballfield to have 'em. Lot of the neighbors complained but, frankly, Wrigley was even more popular after the lights. You should have been here on a warm night in springtime. It was like Mardi Gras. Win or lose. People were happy. The team sometimes did well--well enough to break your heart, anyway. Some years they'd start strong and fold, other years they'd start weak and take off at the end when it was too late. Either way, it was always interesting. Until '02, of course.

     I'm getting there, I'm getting there. See, baseball was never the game of hits and outs that the players thought it was, or the game of dollars and deals the owners thought. There was an otherworldly sweetness to it, a soul, a karma, and woe to anyone who crossed the Great Baseball Spirit. Baseball was the only sport that had the concept of the Goat--a player who did something so bad, so clumsy, it forever cursed him. A bobbled pop fly could haunt a player to his dying day.

     Players got cursed. Teams, too. Did you know that the Murmansk White Sox once played on the South Side? That was before Americans completely lost interest in baseball and the teams were scattered around the world. It's true. Sox fans, what fans there were at the end, attributed it to the team refusing to let veteran Minnie Minoso have an at-bat in the 1990s. He had batted in every decade for half a century--beloved guy, just wanted one swing. And the team--a buncha crybabies if ever there were--was heading for the playoffs, and got puffed up, jealous of the spotlight on good old Minnie, and said no. Lost the playoffs--some people said they lost their souls. Anyway, never were the same, and then, pow, off to the Arctic Circle, to grab at inside-the-park home runs with numb, blue fingers, playing in eternal midnight on the permafrost.

     OK, I'm getting there. Wrigley Field. Lights didn't hurt it. A big coral reef of garish sports bars didn't hurt it--they were all in the proper spirit of the game, the spirit of fun. But in '02, the joyless corporate entity that owned the team strayed over the line. It put up a screen, a scary dark green net, over the chain link fence behind the bleachers over on Waveland and Sheffield--you can still see the faint outlines of the streets over there in the parched earth.

     Why'd they do it? Spite. Meanness. A couple hundred fans liked to gather on the rooftops across the street and enjoy the games. They'd spend a dollar that didn't end up in the Cubs' pockets. T'wasn't anything harmful about it. But it drove the team owners crazy--crazy with greed. They put up the dark screen to block the view. To hurt their fans.

     Things went downhill, fast, after that. Strange injuries to star players. Small things at first. Guys got hurt. A relief pitcher broke his foot during practice for no reason at all. Then players were afflicted by all sorts of odd ailments--boils, huge bleeding warts. One was struck by lightning, and his hair turned completely white. Sammy Sosa tripped over a base and shattered like a glass vase.

     Sure, the Cubs tried to make things right. They brought in exorcists, Native American shamans. They even--people say--sacrificed a goat on a stone altar. They looked at everything but the real problem, which even people at the time saw. I remember a feng shui expert, Patty Par, took one look at the dark screen and said: "Oh my God. It is not good. You are taking out the chi energy. The net is like a trap, trapping in bad feelings. People are trapped."

     Par saw only one solution. "I would suggest take it out."

     Did they listen? No. The people who owned the Cubs, well, if nothing else, they stand by their mistakes. They kept the netting--the trap--while the team went, first 2 and 6, then 2 and 60, and finally finished the season at 2 and 156, with four games unplayed due to the hail of burning frogs that started to fall, just on this corner, at season's end.

     Ah well. That's the story. They never did play baseball here again. The Cubs, what was left of them, moved to Brazzaville, where they are the perpetual cellar-dwellers of the Sub-Saharan League. Wrigley Field stood vacant for a few years, forlorn and sad, but was eventually sucked down into the sulfurous hellmouth that opened up underneath it in '09. The only thing left standing was the left field wall, with that dark green netting flapping in the chain link fence. People couldn't bear to look at it.

     Here, here's a handkerchief. I told you it was a sad tale. People just don't know a good thing until they go and ruin it.


(Oh, and if you're looking for the Saturday contest, I thought I'd take a week off, and try to cook up something a little more challenging).

Amnesty International debates going to bat for pimps

     I hated the movie "Pretty Woman," Julia Roberts' fairy tale about prostitution. Having interviewed actual street prostitutes, and seen how they lived, it seemed such a deformation of reality, beyond the pale. "It's like setting a musical in Auschwitz," I told somebody. What was in my mind, watching it, was going out with Cook County Sheriff's police, busting hookers on Cicero Avenue. I couldn't imagine how men would pick up these particular women and have sex with them —I was uncomfortable standing on the same sidewalk, breathing the same air. Anyway, that was what was in my mind when I was writing this column Thursday: 

    This weekend, Amnesty International USA is holding its annual meeting ­— Human Rights Conference 2014 — in Chicago, just as many organizations do.

     Registration begins Friday morning at the JW Marriott on West Adams. As is common with such events, there will be awards and tributes, speeches and seminars, pizza and programs designed to “develop, sharpen, and practice organizing skills.”

     Standard stuff. Except for one item on the agenda, from 6 to 6:45 p.m. Friday, a discussion on “Human Rights Policy: Consultation on the Decriminalization of Sex Work.”

     In case you are tempted to stop by that conversation, you can’t: closed to the public.

     You may, however, join the protest convening in the street at 5 p.m. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan will be there, along with Cook County Commissioner Bridget Gainer, asking Amnesty International why it is using its good offices, usually found spotlighting torture and political oppression, to go to bat for pimps and johns.

     “To me, as a woman, as the mother of two daughters, as the attorney general, I don’t want to live in a world where we say it’s OK to enslave or exploit women,” said Madigan, whose office works to combat child pornography and sexual trafficking. She said the “unspeakable horrors” her investigators uncover is why she is planning on personally attending the protest. “The reality is, no young girl dreams of growing up to become a prostitute. It’s not a choice.”

     Amnesty says the whole thing is a misunderstanding — that it is firmly opposed to sex trafficking and child sex abuse. But . . .
     "The evidence shows that best way to ensure sex workers' human rights is to decriminalize the buying and selling for sex," said Cristina M. Finch, managing director of Amnesty International USA's Women's Human Rights Program.
     "Our goal is to find the best way to protect the human rights of millions of sex workers around the world," the group's Washington office said, in a statement. "Decriminalization of sex work involving consenting adults may assist in that effort."
     The issue pivots on that notion of consent. Is Madigan right, that prostitution is invariably the result of sex abuse and coercion? Or can it be a choice, a business transaction among consenting adults?
     "We believe all policies regarding prostitution should be based on realities, not theories," said Kaethe Morris Hoffer, executive director of the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, who called the idea of prostitutes choosing that life "a myth."
     "The overwhelming majority were first prostituted before they turned 18," she said, "The research makes it clear: Child sexual abuse is boot camp for prostitution."
     She said that not only do movies put a false, bright spin on prostitution, but often the prostitutes must do so themselves.
     "A lot of girls and women in the sex trade, if you ask them, 'Do you have a pimp?' they'll say no," said Morris Hoffer. "But if you ask, 'Do you have a boyfriend to whom you give all the money you make?' they say yes."
     Amnesty International stumbled into this debate last year when a draft "background document" was posted online, which begins, "Amnesty International is opposed to the criminalization or punishment of activities related to the buying and selling of consensual sex between adults. Amnesty International believes that seeking, buying, selling and soliciting paid sex are acts protected from state interference as long as there is no coercion, threats or violence associated with those acts."
     The group is only discussing this proposal, behind closed doors, on Friday. The actual vote will take place in October.
     Morris Hoffer said in the past Amnesty International has initially blundered when it comes to women's issues, for instance claiming that female genital mutilation "was a cultural practice it shouldn't take a position on." Then the group reversed itself and became active in the fight against the practice. Those protesting hope they reverse on this issue too.
     "Virtually all people who prostitute themselves were first prostituted as children and they see no alternative to survive," Madigan said. "No child, no one's son or daughter should ever have to engage in acts they don't want. . . . There's no dignity at all in being a prostitute."
     Even if some minority of prostitutes engage in the practice willingly, as adults, that isn't an argument for permitting the trade.
     "Prostitution needs to be illegal for the same reason child labor and heroin need to be illegal," Gainer said. "Because they're generally harmful and cause harm through society. All these women are forced, one way or another. This is not 'Pretty Woman.' ''

Westward ho, to ... Pomona!

Pomona College

     "April is the cruelest month," The Waste Land famously begins. Though T.S. Eliot is referring to memory and desire, and not to colleges accepting —or, in most cases, rejecting—prospective students in the days clustered around the 1st. But he might as well have been. Everyone comments on how hard this process is on kids, and it is. A vast game of high stakes musical chairs where colleges entice you to apply, flatter and beseech, so they can spin around and reject you, and then point to their low acceptance rate as proof of their desirability. It's a mean trick. 
     But kids are resilient. Like babies, they bounce. Less spoken about is the effect on parents, who see their dreams not just deferred, but rejected altogether. "Cruel" is apt.
     My high school senior is one of those bright kids who parents don't guide so much as applaud. A dozen years of arriving at parent conferences where we walk in and the teacher looks at us and almost bursts out laughing. What's there to say? He's fantastic. You know. Yes, yes we do. Thank you very much.
     Not that we expected top colleges to echo that. We knew it would be a struggle, a crap shoot, to find one he liked, that would also let him in. The top schools reject 9 out of 10, if not 95 out of 100. A lot of good kids are sent packing. Ours could draw the short end of the stick. I told myself that. But I didn't believe it. Not really.  

Dartmouth

     It is one year and two months since we started the process, flying out to look at Johns Hopkins, Swarthmore and UPenn, the first of 14 schools we would visit. A grueling 14-month trek up Mt. College. "It's all part of the education!" I would quip, putting on a brave face, as we puzzled over maps, tour schedules, admission guidelines. We giddily visited the East Coast: Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, Amherst and such. After each school, I'd suggest we race in triumph to the bookstore, buy him a school t-shirt in celebration. This was the one! Wasn't it? No, he'd say. Wait. These were long shots, my boy explained, even for a guy with a 36 on his ACT. At 17 he viewed the situation with more maturity than I did. I almost didn't believe him. What do you mean you won't get in? Have little faith in yourself! But by the time you slice up the various groups — half the class will be women, a third will be minorities, plus athletes, plus legacies, the number of slots going to the army of bright middle class suburban Jewish white kids are few. That's just the way it is. 
     I admired his level-headedness. He examined the numbers — he's so good at that — and decided to go early decision to improves his chances, for the two schools he had the best shot at, Columbia and the University of Chicago. Plus a dozen more for variety and backup. 
     Win-win, I decided.  Either one would be fine. New York is the center of the world. And I work in downtown Chicago, and immediately formed the fantasy. I could see myself taking the Metra electric train—convenient as heck and only $3 — down to Hyde Park, to the University of Chicago campus. Squiring my young genius to lunch, plus a few of his equally quirky U of C friends. Stopping at Powell's Bookstore, then happily back downtown. I could see myself on the train, on the trip back, contentment rolling off me in waves.
     Early decision verdicts came in February. The news was bad. No Columbia. No U of C. To be honest, at first I thought he was teasing us, pulling our legs, gauging our reaction before he sprang the "Just joking!" My faith in him was that high. No, incredibly, it was true. It seem almost unfair. No lunchtime visits to Hyde Park. I felt cheated — how could this be happening to me?—but rallied. Okay, I thought. "That's God's way of saying he's going to Princeton," I told co-workers. They'd look at me strangely, and it dawned on me that they have problems bigger than mine.
     I knew I was approaching this all wrong. It was his life, not mine. I kept trying to remind myself: this isn't about you, it's about him. His school, his life, his future. And to be honest, he never panicked, or at least never showed it. A quiet, studious boy. Our entire conversation when he didn't get into Columbia went like this: Me: "Are you okay?" Him: "Yes." Me: "Promise." Him: "Yes." I worried because he was too calm. That had to be a bad sign.
     I tried to focus on him. But somehow, this kept slipping back into a referendum on me, as a parent, as a person. Other kids were being waved into the top schools. Somehow, the same malign fate that put stumbling blocks in front of me had turned its attention to my son. I had given him this genetic curse: bad luck.  
     Then at the end of March, the whipsaw. Northwestern admitted him — he was relieved, he said, because he had worried there might have been something faulty in his application.  I was relieved too. I had gone to Northwestern, it's half an hour away, in Evanston, he'd be following in my footsteps, which I wasn't crazy about, but okay. It would have to do. A mild cheer. Hail to purple, hail to white. The next day, Middlebury said yes and NU was forgotten. Middlebury is Exeter and Andover gone to college. It has its own ski slope. We would spend four years visiting Vermont. 
     Then Pomona. I barely recognized the name — a college, right? — and kept pronouncing it "Ponoma," then correcting myself. I had never heard of the place before February. He had an airline voucher to use before the end of the month, so visited his uncle in Los Angeles, took a day and grabbed the train to see Pomona. His idea. That's when I first heard the word. It meant nothing to me. He could have said he was going to Tangelo or Emerita. It sounded like a word plucked from a Beach Boys song. "Oh darlin', climb into my Dodge Daytona/ I'll pop the clutch and we'll cruise the beach road/all the way up to Pomona."

Pomona

     No matter. And now he was going to college there. Pomona it is. I fled online. One of the Claremont colleges. Forbes ranks it No. 2, after Stanford. Not just among liberal arts colleges, but among all schools. No. 2. How could that be? They're kidding, right? How could I have missed it? I asked a friend about the school. "Amazing," she said, adding that David Foster Wallace taught creative writing there. It was 20 years ago, and he's gone, but that for some reason helped — this is not a rational process, much of it, but emotional and intuitive. Asking people helped. Everyone seemed to know about Pomona but me. I visited 14 schools, and he picks the one, not only I had never seen, but never heard of. That seemed a kind of justice, payback, retribution for the hubris I brought to the process. "You want to brag, dad? Brag about this...."
     The boy is thrilled. He went online and bought two Pomona t-shirts. He has no doubt — ordered us to send in the deposit now, not to wait. Being subsequently admitted into Vanderbilt and Wake Forest were shrugged off. "Don't you want to even ...?" No. I put in a halfhearted plug for my alma mater. Northwestern has a great reputation, and is so much closer. He killed off that idea in 1o words: "Why would I pay more money for a worse school?" I'm actually the one doing the paying, but saw his point. 
     So now I explain to people what Pomona is: an amazing school, for smart kids who don't need the ivy cache, and their grandiose parents who are being dealt one of those little lessons that fate occasionally serves up to help make a person less grandiose. California is far away, and has earthquakes, but that's where life is taking him. Taking us. I had wanted him to get into a college that I could beat my chest and brag about. A validation. A gold star. But fate would have none of that, and denied me the pleasure, and forced me to think — is that not what college is all about? — to see the ugly solipsism of my ways, and try to do better. I'm still proud — proud that he will be following a trail that he blazed entirely on his own. It's all part of the education. 
      
  
        

So maestro, what's with the stick?

     A good prank needs some kind of expectations of order to push against, and so the general chaos of the web makes a poor environment for April Fool's jokes. Still, I was pleased that a number of readers yesterday truly thought, at least for a moment, that I was changing the name of my blog to "Every gosh darn day," and a few actually complained, which was extra gratifying. 

      Nothing unusual about today's column. I had a chance to talk to a conductor, and leapt at it, asking some questions I, and hopefully others, have wondered about.

Anthony Barrese

     Only one member of the orchestra is mimicked with any regularity. The average guy doesn’t tape empty soda cans together and pretend to play the bassoon, or sit on a chair and saw away at an imaginary cello. Nobody plays the air flute.

     But who has not picked up a pencil and pretended to conduct? You hear some rousing Beethoven symphony, you almost have to. At least I hope you do and it isn’t just me.

     Either way, I’ve always wondered: what, exactly is the conductor doing? I’ve always meant to ask Sir Andrew Davis, conductor of the Lyric, “What are you doing with the stick?” But if divas are stars, conductors are superstars, and the chance to ask him anything has never arisen (well, once, I saw him smoking a cigarette outside the Civic Opera House, but it struck me that a considerate person would leave him be, so I did).

     But when Chicago conductor Anthony Barrese offered to stop by my office and talk about what he does, I jumped at the chance. My first question was: Explain this waving-the-baton business. Musicians seem fairly intent on their music — they aren’t necessarily even watching you. What’s going on?

     “By the time you get to a performance, the great amount of work is done,” he said. “Any conductor who is jumping around, flailing about and wildly gesticulating during a concert, that’s for show. The orchestra is not really paying attention. The real work is done in rehearsal, which you don’t see. By the time you get to a performance, you’re still guiding, you’re still shaping the architecture, musically. But it’s sort of in the hands of God at that point.”

      So why have a conductor at the performance at all? Why not just rehearse, then let them play? Short answer: Stuff happens.
     "The soprano could have an off night," Barrese said. "The trumpet could be nodding off. You're sort of gently keeping it together. You're also trying to inspire."
     Barrese is one of perhaps a dozen full-time conductors who make a living in the Chicago area, including the two stars, Riccardo Muti at the Chicago Symphony and Davis at the Lyric, plus a variety of others who combine university posts and gigs at smaller ensembles. Barrese lives here but conducts for Opera Southwest in Albuquerque and scans the horizon for work, as most do.
     "I do have to cobble together a living," said fellow Chicago conductor Francesco Milioto, who conducts the Skokie Valley Symphony, where he is also musical director, plus is principal conductor of the Highland Park Strings, artistic director at Access Contemporary Music, and fills in as a cover — a replacement conductor — at the Lyric. And he gives vocal lessons.
     "You need a lot of these jobs," Milioto said, but not as a complaint. "I am quite happy. I don't have any other job other than music and am very lucky and very appreciative." (Even stars have multiple gigs: Muti, for instance, conducts here and in Italy while Davis moonlights in Melbourne.)
     Milioto pointed out something I never thought about — that conducting an opera is much harder than conducting a symphony, because not only do you have the orchestra to keep together, but you have to coordinate it with 100 singers and dancers on stage.
     "In opera there is quite a bit of maintaining communication between the pit and the stage," he said. "Half the orchestra is under the pit, so the sense of timing and delay always needs to be dealt with, especially with a chorus on stage. A symphonic performance, it's a little bit easier."
     Barrese started conducting because he needed somebody to conduct his own compositions. While we were on the subject, I had to ask: Classical music of past eras — Mozart, Bach, et al. — is so beautiful; modern music, not so much. What's the matter? Why can't anyone write like Mozart?
     "The more you listen to contemporary music, the less bad it sounds," he replied. "Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was seen as crazy in its time, now we think it's gorgeous. 'The Rite of Spring,' there was a riot, people thought it was horrible. Now any decent college orchestra plays it."
     In other words, the culture moves on, and no matter how great something is, if you merely redo it, then you're just aping the past. No matter how exquisite a nude figure you may carve out of marble, Michelangelo has been there, done that, 500 years ago.
     "I had a composition teacher who said that it would be as if rock 'n' roll musicians today were writing in exactly the three-chord style of Elvis Presley," Barrese said. "Things change. You can't go back. You can't write in the style of Wagner anymore."
     That might actually be a good thing. One Wagner is plenty.

Kittens in Yarn Week: Day 2

     My post yesterday on kitties and why they're so cute was really meant to be a one-time deal, sharing the recent Scientific American story on the topology of cuteness. But the reaction from readers was so intense — extraordinary, really — that I decided to continue the theme and make this into Kittens in Yarn Week.
     For those who missed yesterday, not only did I explore the spatial-dimensional qualities of what makes a creature adorable, based on the Golden Section of antiquity, but I further realized that, because the news of late is so grim, and we spend so much time in negativity, bickering over meaningless political differences, some relief is in order. Isn't it nice to just sit back and look at a cute kitty and smile?  In searching for more images of playful puddy-tats with balls of colorful yarn to run for the rest of this week—and there really aren't enough of them, online, so as soon as I can I'm going to hire a photographer, buy some kitties and get busy — I ran into this kitten and yarn joke on cat joke web site.
    Q: Did you hear about the cat that swallowed a ball of yarn?

    A: She had a litter of mittens.     
    Now I suppose that joke itself could be seen as a little mean — it could be very dangerous for a cat to swallow a ball of yarn. She could choke. So while I should point out that the joke is fictional, and thus no actual cat ingested any potentially fatal yarn, I think by passing along that joke, "edgy" though it be, I'm showing that, under this "Kittens in Yarn" business you'll be reading here for the next five days, I'm still the same old Neil Steinberg I've always been, just mellowed and gratified by yesterday's enormous upswell of readership, not to mention commencement of my support of the good folks at Chik-fil-A. (Which is why, as you read here yesterday, that's I've changed the blog's name — "Every g*ddamn day" was so harsh, so negative. Places like WBEZ were reluctant to mention it, and the name scared off potential advertisers. "Every gosh darn day" is just as effective, and has more the spirit of sharp yet forgiving humor I'm now striving for, with none of the off-putting allusions to the deity. Chik-fil-A in no way was responsible for the change; it was just something I happened to do at the same time their ads went up).
      Just so you know the schedule, tomorrow, for Day 3, I'll be serving up three special recipes for cat food, for those of us who just don't trust commercial cat food because of all the waste water created by cat food production. Thursday we'll look at the yarn side of the equation — I've found several veterinary studies that suggest certain colors and types of yarn are preferred by certain varieties of cats. Friday, I will review the top 10 web sites dedicated to showing photos of kittens in yarn. Saturday I look at the hidden history of posters featuring, not only kittens in yarn, but cats with bowls of spaghetti dumped over their heads, or cats hanging by their paws over a cord with inspirational sayings like, "Hang in there!" And Sunday, being the Lord's day, I'll examine whether kittens can be said to have souls — of course they do! — and why we can be certain, based on hard, Biblical evidence, that our cats and kittens will be purring beside the Pearly Gates, waiting for us when we get to heaven. I'll also share some of the outpouring of comments I've received from yesterday's posting.
     Thanks again for all your enthusiasm, welcome to my new readers of "Every gosh darn day," and I hope you enjoy Kittens in Yarn Week, and will stay on for next week, when I focus on UFOs, ESP and Other Amazing Real Phenomena. For next week's full schedule, just click here.

Everygoshdarnday.com welcomes Chik-fil-A.