Lucas museum might seem like a good idea, now...

     Have you been to the Flash Gordon Museum yet? Right next to the Adler Planetarium? Lots of fun. There’s a mock-up of Ming the Merciless’ throne room on the planet Mongo, and you can reach out and touch the fearsome Sea Beast ...

     OK, OK, there is no Flash Gordon Museum next to the Adler, and a good thing too.

     If you are unfamiliar with Flash, he was very big in the 1930s, first as

George Lucas

a newspaper cartoon, then as a movie, then a movie serial, which kids in the 1950s and 1960s saw endlessly rerun on television.

     I bring up Flash as a reminder that fame fades, even huge fame, even “Star Wars”-level fame. It bathes its creator George Lucas in a golden glow now but will not last forever. Watching the city bend over backward to put his proposed museum on the Chicago lakefront, I hate to be a spoilsport, but I have to ask: Do we want this museum?

     What’s going to be inside? The museum’s website — still is clunkily wooing San Francisco, a move rejected by those in charge of the waterfront park where Lucas first wanted to put it — describes it this way:

     “The Lucas Cultural Arts Museum will be a center highlighting populist art from some of the great illustrators of the last 150 years through today’s digital art used to create animated and live-action movies, visual effects, props and sketches,” alongside paintings from Norman Rockwell — Lucas owns 57 — plus other classic illustrators such as Maxfield Parrish and J.C. Leyendecker.

     All good. So it’s not just going to be Mel’s Drive-in from “American Graffiti” and Indiana Jones’ fedora from “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Your average tourist in 2024 won’t care much about those.

     I should confess here. I’m the rare moviegoer who liked “THX 1138,” Lucas’ first movie, a jarring sci-fi film with Robert Duvall, far more than “Star Wars.”
     I can remember seeing the first "Star Wars" debut in the summer of 1977, as a 17-year-old, worldly as a kitten. I walked out of the theater, disappointed and puzzled. Here you have a movie that is basically a two-hour running gun battle at close range between minions of the evil Galactic Empire and these four rebels, one of whom is 7 feet tall, and the ooh-scary stormtroopers can't so much as graze the wookiee's ear? Weak.
     It was downhill from there, and by the time the Empire was overthrown by teddy-bear escapees from a toilet paper TV commercial, the charm was lost on me.
     To give Lucas the benefit of the doubt, I assume he's savvy enough that his museum will take its "cultural arts" name seriously and not just be a showcase for his dusty mementos, though I note that "warehouse" is part of its description. Between the gravitas of the Art Institute and the edginess of the Museum of Contemporary Art, there is room for a museum that showcases the more popular aspects of culture: not just movies, but advertising, illustration, fashion.
     Still, someone should ask: Are tourists, for whom "Star Wars" carries the emotional heft of "Buck Rogers" - another big science-fiction movie series of yesteryear - going to line up for a museum dedicated to Arrow shirt ads and magazine covers, and the magic behind movies they've never seen?
     For the record, Lucas museum could be a great idea, something that graces our lakefront and gives the nearly 50 million tourists who visit Chicago another place to go.
     Or maybe not. Private museums can be bland money-making tourist traps, as anyone who has gone to, oh, the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., knows. If all the Lucas museum is going to offer visitors is a chance to pay $24 to see R2-D2 and C-3PO's actual costumes and then be shunted into the biggest gift shop of all time, is that really what the city of Chicago should support? It's not as if Lucas were putting his $300 million behind the DuSable Museum and relocating it to the lakefront. Given the educational and civic roles of the Adler, the Field and the Shedd, we need to look closely and ask what exactly Lucas is offering, who will control it, and do we really want it, not only now, but in the future?
     Museums as entertainment have a way of getting dated, fast. Look at the scrap of Disneyland that Springfield built around Abraham Lincoln. It opened in 2005 at a cost of $170 million, yet already is showing its age, in need of a big face-lift despite infusions of state cash. It's like Six Flags Great America regularly requiring a new high-tech roller coaster to draw a quickly bored public. Time passes, fame fades. We are all happy George Lucas is hanging around Chicago, where the winters are cold but the people are warm. Of course, let's consider his museum. But take a long look at it first. Because once it's there, it'll be there for a long time.

An inch of progress in a hundred-mile crawl

   This was my column in the Sun-Times yesterday—I didn't post it here because I wanted to comment on Jimmy Armstrong on the day of his funeral. But I didn't want this to sink into the mists either. Not a ton of reaction to it, which is a shame. I think the subject might be too grim for people to think about.  

   Linda Brown is not as famous as, say, Rosa Parks. Yet she is a civil rights pioneer too. As a 9-year-old third-grader in Topeka, Kansas, in 1950, Linda wasn’t allowed to attend the Sumner School, a few blocks from her home, along with Mona and Guinevere and her other friends living in their integrated neighborhood.

     Rather, she had to walk half a mile and catch a bus to the all-black Monroe School, two miles away.

     Her father, Oliver Brown, joined a group of 13 black parents suing the school board in February 1951 — the famous case is named after him because he was the sole male plaintiff, so his name was listed first. The case became Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court ruling whose 60th anniversary was Saturday.

     The case ended the “separate but equal” legal fiction used to justify segregation of black students from white.

     “To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race,’’ the Court declared, “generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”

     Prophetic words, particularly since the system of segregation wasn’t undone. Now instead of being enforced by law, it’s maintained by economics and geography.

     What happened? The law changed, but hearts and minds did not, especially white hearts and minds set on keeping old ways. The ruling was met with a formal rebellion known as “massive resistance” in the South — a decade of chaos, as black students tried to enroll in white schools. It could take a platoon of National Guardsmen to do it.

     Up in the broad-minded North, we savored the show, forgetting that segregation here was just as extreme but maintained in a different style. In Chicago, it was the result of brutally enforced residential segregation, whose logic was: A black family couldn’t move into a house in a white area if their potential neighbors burned it down first. If thwarted, white Chicagoans fled rather than mingle with blacks, first to private and parochial schools, then to the suburbs.

     The Brown court case shouldn't be celebrated as a change so much as mourned as a lost opportunity. This is a problem that we should put our full attention to, not nod at on anniversaries. If all people are created equal—and they are—then the relative poverty and dysfunction of poor black areas of the city is an artifact of the past, as is the comfort and success of upscale white areas.
     In 1980, whites comprised half the city but only 18.4 percent of public schools when the Justice Department sued Chicago Public Schools for having a "continuing system-wide effect of segregating students on a racial and ethnic basis."
     The white school population kept shrinking. Now it's below 9 percent. Trying to desegregate CPS, a wag wrote, is like trying to bake an apple pie with a teaspoon of apples.
     White flight guaranteed desegregation never got a chance to work. Nor was the problem relegated to the '50s. In 1990, Carroll Elementary in Ashburn/Wrightwood was 37 percent white. Then a white man was shot and killed during a robbery in 1993, and a realtor and a woman she was showing a house were raped. Suddenly the neighborhood flipped. In 1999, Carroll Elementary's white population was 1.7 percent.
     As important as the issue is, to talk about blacks in the public schools is to miss a key point. Between 1970 and 1990, the white population of CPS fell by 75 percent. But the Hispanic student population climbed by about the same amount. African-Americans aren't even the majority of the city's public schools anymore. CPS is 44 percent Latino, 41 percent black; in 1986 it had been 60 percent black. A reminder that while we're looking back at the unresolved civil rights struggles of the past, a new unresolved struggle—the integration of Hispanics into national civic life—generally is ignored.
     Today, the law isn't the problem. Official brutality isn't the problem. The problem is the inertia of a system built up and maintained by both, continuing on its own accord in this segregated city, a Frankenstein's monster America created over centuries and can't stop now. As bad as the past was, at least then some thought this might be fixed. Who believes that now? Sixty years is a long time. But not long enough to untangle this knot of tragedy and lost opportunity that our grandparents and great-grandparents wove and left for us. Thanks, gramps.
     Oliver Brown, by the way, died of a heart attack in 1961. His daughter Linda still lives in Kansas, where she helped create a foundation to foster educational equality.

Jimmy Armstrong, dead at 55.

   

Jimmy Armstrong

     The great James Thurber once wrote, years after he had settled on the East Coast, that the clocks that struck in his dreams were often the clocks of Columbus.
    That's how it goes, not just for us guys from Ohio, but for everyone.
     When you leave your home town, it stays with you, lodged in your heart like a little snow globe, one that you take out on fewer and fewer occasions as time grinds on and give a gentle shake, trying to see the people inside through the swirling snows of yesteryear. It gets harder and harder to make them out, their figures fading as the years fly past. But they are still there, and occasionally one flickers into view, a faint ghost, to whirl once again for a moment before vanishing altogether.

     In Berea High School in the late 1970s, like all high schools, there were the jocks and the greasers—"racks" we called them, for murky reasons. There were the band geeks and the brains, the popular kids and the outcasts.

      And then there was Jimmy Armstrong, in a class all by himself. He was a cool cat. He proudly smoked cigarettes and drank black coffee, as well as other things, and philosophized. He played music. I remember pausing between classes, in the doorway of the school auditorium, listening, rapt, while he sat alone on stage in the empty room and noodled on an electric piano, all alone. He was good. 

     Jimmy was handsome, but had a deformed upper lip—it was a little thicker than it was supposed to be. He was sensitive about it—you were never supposed to ask him, and I never did. A substitute teacher once made a passing crack, probably in reaction to his mouthing off, and he stood up and pointed at her then chewed her out in a way I never forgot. I was dumbstruck that a kid could talk like that to a teacher, but that was Jimmy. The rules did not apply. He was Huck Finn.

     I can't remember why we hung out—it's been too long—but I know that once or twice I was at his house, near the fire station, and he was at mine. My guess is that Jimmy was cool, and coolness was something I sorely lacked, while he probably admired my smarts. I remember I used a word, "valkyrie," that he had never heard before. I explained to him what it meant, and he was just delighted. He was, he said, going to write a song about it. He was so happy, it made me happy. I'm not sure if he ever did, but I liked the idea of having an impact on someone who was creative, someone who was a musician, an artist. 

    For a few years after college I'd call Jimmy when  I went home to Berea to visit my folks. In 1984, he was opening for the Eurythmics at the Agora, and I went to see him play—at least I think it was him. There's this video online that gives you a sense of the music.  His brush with fame came in 1986, when he was on the TV show "Star Search" with Ed McMahon. But it was just a brush. I can't tell whether he was good or not, but either way, he never made it out of Berea. As the last line of his obituary put it: "But the ability to make something of his own inherent creativity continued to elude him." You grab, but the thing you're grabbing at dances mockingly away. I can relate to that.

    The last time I spoke with Jimmy was 20 years ago—I was on the Oprah Winfrey Show, talking about a book, and he phoned me in Chicago, so excited. Jimmy could have this little kid quality that cut through all the hipster pretense, an enthusiasm that was more endearing than hauteur could ever be, and I remember hearing him enthuse about seeing me on Oprah and smiling, thinking, "Not so cool now, are we, Jimmy?"
    The past 25 years of his life, I really have no idea. I went back to Berea with Edie, and he rolled by my parents' house with a friend. But the visit didn't go well; Jimmy was abrupt, even rude—I can't quite put my finger on why; perhaps in his view I was now conventional and domestic, playing house with this gal, while he was courting greatness. Maybe I caught him on a bad day. Edie didn't take to Jimmy, naturally, and that was that. Though that is not something to judge a person on. A woman who wrote to me from Berea a few days ago said she and her mom would often see Jimmy at church. "My mom and I always noticed how kind he was to his mother, how much he seemed to enjoy taking her to mass." That says a lot, but I couldn't tell you if he was generally a good or bad person, whether he lived a happy or sad life. Probably some mix of those, like most of us.

    The obituary on the Cool Cleveland web site mentions his "substance abuse demons"—The Plain Dealer specifies it as heroin.  Jimmy was the first person I ever heard mention "AA"—I think we were still in high school. I do remember bumping into him once downtown and us deciding to go to the state store to buy a bottle of wine, which we shared under a bridge in downtown Berea. Something novel for me, but a routine that Jimmy seemed familiar with. That sounds more debased that it really was—Berea was our hometown, as comfortable as an old shoe. Ducking under a bridge was something kids did on a summer's day, then. Some of us did, anyway. When we finished the bottle, I walked away thinking, "That was fun, but not how I want to spend my time." Maybe Jimmy should have left town and tried his luck at the big time. Maybe he did—I really didn't know him well. So maybe he did, though that can just end in another kind of disappointment.

    His funeral is today at St. Mary's Church in Berea, Ohio.  Jimmy Armstrong was 55.

Nothing to celebrate

   I thought about putting the flag out Saturday to mark the 60th anniversary of Brown v. the Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling that ended legal segregation. And why not? It was a patriotic holiday, of sorts.
     Though the ruling didn't end segregation. It ended the legal underpinning of segregation which, as it turned out, was not really necessary for segregation to continue. It continues in Chicago to this day, and is the source of much that is wrong in the city.
     You can't even call Brown v. the Board of Education the beginning of the end, since segregation hasn't ended yet. You might be tempted to paraphrase Churchill and say it was the end of the beginning, but it wasn't that either.
     So what was it?
     Not quite nothing. A step, say, maybe not even a big step, but we told ourselves it was, at the time, because it seemed kind of big.  So a medium size step that caused a lot of commotion and a little change. And yes, things are different now, for some people. There are no whites-only drinking fountains. We have a black president.
     But are they different enough? Given how long this journey has been, how slow, how glacial progress, is it really honest to point at some dusty perceived breakthrough and pretend it was something it wasn't? Lies are bad enough without venerating them.
     In writing Monday's column, on this subject, I was reminded of just how little that ruling actually did. If you look at our problems today, in Chicago, so much is due to the legacy of segregation and racial bias. So many black people in the city are poor, and live in crappy neighborhoods and go to lousy schools and shoot each other as a matter of routine. Few people seem very surprised about it anymore. We sort of expect it. So do they.
     A good part—most, maybe; my guess would be a third—of white Chicagoans cling to the centuries-old notion that the black folk prefer it this way. That the current situation is their choice, their fault. Some percentage of the white and comfortable seem to believe that some people on the South and West sides, people whom they haven't met and don't know at all, somehow choose to be poor, go to lousy schools, to shoot each other, etc. Meanwhile, the white and comfortable folks—smart us—do the hard work and carry the intrinsic worth that allows people like ourselves to succeed. We're just better, somehow, and reap the rewards of our efforts.
     That's horseshit, of course.
     Yes, nobody's life is handed them on a platter. Yes, everybody struggles. But the struggles of some bear far more fruit than the struggles of others. Some have hope. Some have tools. Others don't. And race tends to be the deciding factor. Less so than in the past—thank you Brown v. the Board of Education. But still enough to be too much. Still enough to make any festivities feel hollow and delusional.
     Celebrating the anniversary seemed wrong; it should be mourned more than honored. Mourned as a lost opportunity. Another lost opportunity. Mourned as a reminder of how far we haven't come. Which I do in my column in the Sun-Times tomorrow. I didn't put out the flag.

Saturday Fun Activity: Where IS this?

     In my 30 years of reporting for the Sun-Times, I've had cause to be there exactly twice, the second time last week. It is probably the most prominently-located yet completely-obscure place in Chicago—known to a select few, the masses not only kept out, but kept in ignorance of its existence. It wants no publicity. 
     Which is a shame, because the place has a wonderful back story, of why it's so improbably there, where it was no longer supposed to be.  I'll tell you the story of its endurance after somebody guesses where this is—this might be one of those that gets cracked early, by somebody who, like me, was invited in once or twice. Or maybe not— everyone I mention this to just gives me a blank look. Then again, maybe I just travel in lumpen circles. Maybe you go there all the time. Lucky you. Either way, hard or easy, today's question is: where are these lovely double swans? What IS this place? Since my stock of posters is dwindling, the winner will get ... a copy of my 2012 memoir, You Were Never in Chicago. Post your guesses below.  Good luck. 

POSTSCRIPT: Location cracked, but not at 12:05 a.m. this time, so I consider today's puzzle a success. Here's a shot I didn't want to print earlier, so as not to give away the game, to show you where today's location, revealed below, is located—that lovely oval dining room is secreted within this all black building, tucked behind the John Hancock's parking garage. 

The old and the young reaching out to each other, through the Internet

     On Monday, a colleague sent me a link to this touching video of senior citizens outside of Chicago helping Brazilian students learn to speak English. On Tuesday I was there, at Windsor Park retirement community in Carol Stream, watching the residents interact with students in Sao Paolo. The reality fell far short of the slick on-line presentation, and I had to mesh what I saw in front of me with what the seniors had already experienced. I didn't want to go too easy; this all might be a Brazilian advertising agency semi-scam whose sole purpose was to promote the school. I didn't want to go too hard; the seniors seemed to be having fun, and this kind of interaction could —emphasize "could"—have the potential to become something significant someday.

     ‘How do you live effectively, and not just wait?” asked Ruth Bamford, sitting in the lobby of Windsor Park, a senior home in Carol Stream, posing a key challenge of growing old, but not mentioning the thing being waited on.

     At this moment Bamford, 86, a former dean of student programs at Wheaton College, is waiting to help students in Sao Paolo, Brazil, with their English, part of a new program,  Speaking Exchange, that has caught the Internet’s fickle attention because of a touching video produced for CNA, a chain of 580 English schools in Brazil, that has racked up nearly a million hits on YouTube.

     “My nephew called me this morning and said, ‘Aunt Ruth, you’re famous!’ ” she said.

     The video was shot in April.

     “We were invited to be interviewed by this young man who was making a video for this CNA project,” Bamford said.

     Watching the video, viewers get the impression that this program has been going on for a while and the seniors developed a warm relationship with the students. Actually, the video was shot the first time the six Windsor Park residents and the Brazilian students had spoken. “We just have done it once, and it took us two full days,” Bamford said. “It was really quite a process.”

     Julia, her student, 14, was “quite shy” Bamford said, “so we related on that level. We were both having a new experience.”

     I visited Windsor Park, a luxurious senior facility of 600 residents with a $125,000 entry fee, to watch the second session.

     Two HP laptops were set up in a small social room, with tables and a spread of pastries and soda. Two more computers were across the lobby in a small dining room.
     Marion Carbonari, 85, waited in front of a laptop. Finally, a telephone bell rang and, with an assist from Windsor Park Executive Director Karen Larson, the connection was made. A man wearing a headset appeared.
     "Hi, who are you?" Carbonari said, with precision. "What is your name?"
     "Pedro," he replied.
     "Hi Pedro, I'm Marion. How old are you?"
     "I'm 31."
     "Thirty-one? You're a little bit old for the class." Turned out he was the technician. There was a lot of that. Trouble hearing, slight dismay that the well-scrubbed teens of the first session were gone, replaced by men in their mid-20s with five-o'clock shadows. No matter. The seniors plunged gamely on with questions about life in Brazil and information about themselves.
     "I live in a city called Chicago," Carbonari said, when her actual student, named Vincent, 20, appeared. "It's so good to have someone to talk to in a different country."
     Across the room, Ann Galezio, 75, was laughing, her face close to the screen.
     "Is there a girl in your life?" she asked.
     Seeing the process unfold in real life was reminder that, as with TV commercials, videos online can be deceptive. In the video, all is warmth and heart-tugging music. The process I saw was more hectic and disordered. Some of the media coverage referred to the seniors as "lonely."
     "I saw that," Bamford said. "We're not lonely here. I don't think this community would be described as lonely. I wouldn't ever say that. This is a vibrant community with lots going on every day."
     That said, the program is just beginning, and given what the Internet is mostly used for - buying books and shoes, trading snark, posting photos of your lunch - the idea that young people with something to learn could be paired with seniors with something to teach is vastly appealing.
     "Residents, like all of us, want to be part of something," said Larson, noting that 80 residents have signed up for the weekly program. "This gives them something to be part of, to contribute. The world now leaves this group behind. It's hard to plug them in, and this is an easy way to plug them in. Technology is making it possible; the way technology works now it's so simple."
     Bamford plans to keep being a part of it.
     "There's something so beautiful and exciting," she said. "Even as I watched it myself today, to see this young lady and this old lady speaking together, a thousand miles away from each other, effectively communicating. . . . This is a loving community, and I think it showed. A lot of old people are very loving and tender and kind. I think that emotion showed there. Talking to someone so far away, that you do not know at all, that you've never been introduced to. That's kind of a phenomenon, I think."

    

"Fagots Stay Out"

     Thirty years. More, thirty-two, almost. No family. No responsibilities beyond a job I loathed. Nothing to do after work but cruise down Santa Monica Boulevard in my 1963 Volvo P1800, maybe grab a few beers and a bowl of chili.
    A long time gone by, drop by drop. Yet it can can come surging back at the oddest times.
    For instance.
     Things were quiet on Wednesday, so rather than cab it back from lunch on North Michigan Avenue, I strolled the great boulevard. Kids were out in those jackets with the "=" equality sign on them—gay rights— raising money, or gathering signatures or whatever it is they do. I thought up a pithy line in case one came up to me—"You've already won, haven't you?"—but nobody approached me and I walked on, suddenly thinking of Barney's Beanery.
     If you lived in Los Angeles, as I did 32 years ago, you know the famous bar with the green and white striped awning, right where Santa Monica Boulevard veers southward, just before it intersects with La Cienega. Opened in 1927, Barney's was a dive with a past:  Charles Bukowski drank there. And Clark Gable. Erroll Flynn too. Clara Bow. Bob Dylan. Just about anybody who was anybody in LA. Janis Joplin ate her last meal here, supposedly. The Doors' Jim Morrison once urinated on the bar, and he and Joplin once got into a fist fight with each other here. 
     I knew of the place, vaguely, through a Tom Petty song, "Louisiana Rain," that has a line "Singing to the jukebox, in some all-night beanery." I'm not sure if Petty was referring to this specific all-night beanery (West Hollywood was not incorporated in 1982, so niceties like closing hours tended to be looser there).  But it was enough to get me inside, and I stayed for the chili and the late hours and the convenient pool tables. I liked to stand at the bar on a Friday, sip my beer, hope to meet somebody, maybe, toward that end, get some quarters and treat myself to a solitary game of pool. 
  So what's the connection between gay rights and this Los Angeles bar? When I frequented Barney's Beanery, in the early 1980s, their distinctive red matchbooks looked like this on the front—I didn't have to grab the image online, but just ducked down into the basement, where I have a big glass apothecary jar filled with dozens and dozens of the matches I once collected as little trophies of my travels and reminders of boisterous times. 
    Flip the matchbook over, however, and you find this.
    From the 1940s onward, Barney's had a sign reading "FAGOTS STAY OUT" in large letters behind the bar and, obviously, on their matches. The story was that in the 1940s there had been a police raid on homosexual acts in the bathrooms at Barney's, and the owner wanted to avoid that kind of thing. Times changed, and there had been protests, around 1970, but they didn't stick. We patrons didn't think much about it—I wasn't a faggot, so didn't mind, and what thought I gave to the matter was sort of a unspoken satisfaction, almost a pride. It was unusual, quirky. I remember thinking the slogan was part of the ambience, a sign that this was a genuine, authentic place, a tough dive that wasn't about to let itself be taken over by a bunch of pansies.
     I was 22. 
     Shortly after I moved back to Chicago, West Hollywood incorporated, and passed an anti-discrimination ordinance. Barney's Beanery took the sign down, and got new matches.     
     A sign of just how alien that idea is now, when I looked at the matches after all these years, I was struck more by the curious spelling—"fagots"—than the odiousness of the expression. It's a relic of times that are gone, thank God, and never coming back, nothing more. I think a lot of people are like that, still, today. Not so much they are haters as oblivious, which is why education like that being offered by the equality kids on Michigan Avenue is still important. Despite all our clear progress, we aren't as far away from "FAGOTS STAY OUT" as we like to think. You don't have to be a hater to be part of the problem, all you have to do is eat your chili and go with the flow.
     Before I returned the matchbook to its glass reliquary, I admired it and, for no particular reason, opened it up, and got a surprise. This: 

   So I must have met somebody there. Who was "Dina"? No idea. "312"—a Chicago number. Maybe I was still carrying the matches, trying to show off my worldliness, after I got back in Chicago. "Yup, just got back from LA." That sounds like my style. Maybe it was a Chicagoan I met one night in the bar at Barney's. Some things are too effaced by time to retrieve. It'll have to remain a mystery. Probably a good thing, too.