Supreme Court gets religion

Latin for "Hear the other side."

     Well, enough birthday cake and self-administered back pats. There's a world out there. The folks at the paper's Early & Often political site asked me to react to the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby ruling, and this is what I wrote:

     Religion keeps pushing.
     That’s what religion does. That’s how something becomes a religion and not a collection of strange ideas held by a few scattered and marginal groups. By pushing, hard, for centuries and never giving up.
     Faith will use any legal means, and whatever non-legal means, it can to push you into the fold, or get you to behave as if you were.
     In eras when it can stone you, it stones you.
     In eras when you can be ostracized, or shamed, or put in the stocks, it does that.
     In 2014, it declares that Hobby Lobby, a family-owned corporation based in Oklahoma City that sells arts and crafts supplies at a nationwide chain of stores, is not only a person, but a religious person, and its right to keep its employees from easy access to the contraception it scorns trumps those employees rights to easily get that contraception.
     And on Monday the United States Supreme Court went along, ruling that the owners of Hobby Lobby, joined by a Pennsylvania furniture maker, are within their rights when opting out of Affordable Care Act including contraception in a spectrum of benefits, since birth control violates the company’s religious beliefs....

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One more time!

Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall,
ninety-nine bottles of beer.
Take one down, pass it around,
ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall.

Ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall,
ninety-eight bottles of beer.
Take one down, pass it around,
ninety--seven bottles of beer on the wall...

I sang the song all the way through once, beginning to end, down to that very last bottle of beer on the wall. I was 17, working in the kitchen of the Bob Evans restaurant in Berea, Ohio. My job was to bake biscuits, batch after batch, hour after hour, and, well, in that era before iPods, heck, before Walkmen, one sometimes sang to oneself. 

Or at least I did.

Eventually I hit upon this old, endless camp song, and went the distance.

Which came to mind when I thought about today, June 30, being end of the first year of this blog, Every goddamn day.

I can see why. Both are exercises in persistence.  You have to keep singing, keep writing, to tell yourself it's somehow meaningful, or at least worth doing. I did indeed go the distance, every goddamn day, bare none. So ka-ching, the digit turns tomorrow, Year One in the bag...

The odd thing is, it wasn't hard. Unlike many writers, I actually like to write, the physical sitting in a chair, mashing words together and molding the thing into something half decent. It's fun—I probably shouldn't use that word. How good could something be if you have fun doing it? People who are having fun, well, you wonder how much gravitas they really possess. Which is fine. I'm not going for gravitas.

What am I going for? Something interesting. Or amusing. Or both. To have a little thoughtful piece of something, along with a picture, for you to read and see, every day. And it's working, as far as I can tell. Readership grows, slowly. Some 40,000 hits a month now—more than 42,000 in June, the best yet—which is about 30 percent more than the first few months when this began.

Not a lot of complaints, which is gratifying, in this gotterdammerung of griping that is the Internet. I've tried to be my own critic, asking myself whether writing it every day, every goddamned day has made me watered-down, facile, repetitive, trivial. And I don't think so. At least no more than when I'm on top of my game. I never cringe when I go back and read something I've posted previously. I hope that isn't an alarming complacency. Satisfaction sounds very close to self-satisfaction, to smugness. But the thing feels about as good as I can make it.

The most surprisingly thing is that I was never stuck. Posts were like picking raspberries—you might have to dig into the leaves a bit, at times, but there's a lot of juicy stuff there, if you look for it. About a third came from things I was writing for the newspaper, which didn't mind my posting them here, so long as I link to the paper's site and don't just swipe my own work.

How did the blog do? We are all about metrics—probably the worst thing about the Internet age; we care so much about being popular that we don't think about being good. But looking at the stats, this year the blog has had ... checking ...385,676 hits; 1,056 visits day, on average. I usually write one post a day, but sometimes events demand a second, for a total of 420 posts. The most successful, Welcome to the Steinberg Bakery, a comment on businesses that feel their religious freedom is being impinged having to serve gay customers, drew nearly 10,000 hits. The pieces often have staying power. Its follow-up, Welcome back to the Steinberg Bakery, was posted at the end of March, but got 2,000 hits on Monday alone, thanks to the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision (and a much-appreciated retweet from Dan Savage). 

In late December, I posted a six month assessment. Then we were averaging 914 hits a day, and I was hoping that by now they'd have more than doubled, to 2,000. What I got was an extra 142. Not the success I was hoping for, but it will have to do. A little more than a thousand people a day.

So small ball, in the wide sweep of the Internet. Nothing went viral, no six figure days. I am happy to nail my thousand hits by lunch, feel extra satisfied if it gets to 1,500, and thrilled at 2,000 and beyond. My victories were humble ones. Alex Ross, the New Yorker's music critic, weighed in on a piece I wrote about opera. David Axelrod retweeted something I wrote. Dan Savage was a frequent supporter. Gene Weingarten at the Washington Post. Eric Zorn at the Tribune was supportive, and Nancy Nall Derringer, and other bloggers I respect. I like days when the blog sends out a ripple. Some days it doesn't. Some days it feels like singing in the shower, but those days happen in the paper too, and being a professional means soldiering through those days and waiting, crouched in your foxhole, for the illusion of relevance to return.

I did make a little money from it—Eli's Cheesecake ran paid ads in November and December, and BasketWorks traded a cache of black Moleskine notebooks for ad. Not much, but I used part of the cheesecake money to commission a poster from Hatch Show Print in Nashville, and I got a kick out that, selling a few dozen, and giving the others away to publicize the blog in a fashion I found satisfyingly retro. Some places have had them up for six months. I plan to print up a new one for 2015. The poster made me happy. Heck, the tubes I sent the poster out in made me happy. They're solid tubes.

My wife has encouraged me to stop at some point—hang up the "Gone Fishin'" sign in August and pick the thing up in September. But then it wouldn't be every goddamn day, would it?  I think it's okay to haul something good out of the archives, when relevant, and so long as I don't do it too much. I'm going to replay my home repair series in August, since it'll be new to most readers, and I will appreciate the breather. That said, I believe showing up every day, getting in the traces and pulling the plow. On days when I hit the wrong button ("Save" instead of "Publish") and the new post doesn't go up at midnight, someone complains. True, it's only one reader, but I don't want to keep him waiting. 

A thousand people seems like a lot to me. If a thousand people showed up at your door every morning, you'd find a way to say something to them. Many a minister labors over a sermon that not 10 people, never mind 100, never mind a thousand, will hear. Kindergarten teachers sweat their lesson plans for two dozen 5-year-olds. So I can't see pitching this so I can have an extra half hour a day to play Candy Crush Saga. If I keep it up, maybe next year we'll be doing that 2,000 a day, on average, then 4,000, then 8,000. There are successful ventures that have had slower starts, though none come to mind. You can't quit your way to the top.

Disappointments? I wish the thing resonated more. The readership seems pretty local to the Chicago area, with a few expats in California. I wish the newspaper would tuck the blog somewhere on its web site. It feels a snub that they don't, but maybe it'll work out for the best, in the long run. If the paper had its imprint on it I couldn't say "fuck" when the occasion calls for it. 

What else? The Google Blogger system froze up after I created my template, so I can't change the fonts or the colors. I've tried to figure out what the problem is, but can't, so that's maddening.  Then again, they provide this platform for free, so I suppose I shouldn't complain.

Back in that hot kitchen at Bob Evans, when I finally neared "One bottle of beer on the wall," I had an inspiration. I got done, paused for one second, then called out, "One more time!" and began to sing the damn thing a second time.

Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall,
Ninety-nine bottles of beer...

So here we go into Year Two. One more time! 

At least.

But first.

Thank you everybody who took the time to read what I had to say this past 365 days. And thank you to everyone who will read in the next year. If it's half as fun to read as it is to write, then you're enjoying yourselves a lot. As my friend Rick Kogan likes to say: onward.

—Neil Steinberg

Family ties, literally

     "At least I brought my shoes home."

     Spoken with a certain defensiveness, almost a note of pride. Hey, cut me some slack dad, I've got the shoes.

      Time: 11:15  p.m. Maybe 11:30. Earlier this week.
      Place: our living room in the leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook. At dinnertime, our 18-year-old former high school senior, on the cusp of heading off to college, had announced that he and some pals would be eating their dinner at Prairie Grass, Sarah Stegner and Rohit Nambiar's excellent restaurant.
      Some kind of two-for-one burger special had caught their frugal teenage eye. Kids like bargains. 

      That was 7 p.m. After 11, we started to worry. A long time for dinner. A text went unanswered. Finally we got the word: at his pal Jacob's.
     Whew.

      So now he's back, sprawled on the coffee table—a sturdy coffee table, he's comfortable there—and a thought strikes him.

     "Oh," he says to me. "I left your tie at Jacob's house."
      My boy works a summer job in a law office downtown. He owns no ties of his own—well, a brown bar mitzvah tie, but that's it. Rather than go out and equip him with a new tie wardrobe he might never again need—not a lot of call for tie-wearing in California—he just uses mine, which is fine; I hardly wear them anymore myself. So I wasn't distraught by the news one had gone off reservation. Okay, you left my tie at Jacob's. Just bring it back, eventually.
      Though a troubling thought did bubble up. I didn't suspect it so much as say it as a kind of minor punishment.

     "Was it because I asked you to hang them up this morning?" I asked, half seriously. Yesterday's tie —a red paisley—had ended up a crumpled ball next to the computer in the living room. I had meekly hung it up, but while doing so pointed out that the least he could do is return the things he borrows. I mean, as it is, I have to tie them for him, which is already an indefensible paternal indulgence. He's 18. Not only do I tie the tie, but I then have to slip it around his neck and tighten it, quickly tucking the tie under the back collar; the hardest part, I can tell. There's some tactile discomfort and I try to get it over as fast as possible while he tries not to twist away. To be honest, I kinda like the process. There really isn't anything much else he needs me to do for him anymore; pay the bills and shut up. So the tie business is really the last vestige of physical parenting, of snapping on rompers and pulling on little socks and wiping his nose. A long time coming, as they say, it'll be a long time gone. Maybe he feels that way too, deep down, because every time I suggest he let me teach him how to tie a tie for the love of God, he waves the idea away. Soon but not now.
    What's so hard about tying ties? Not to get all back-in-the-day, but I learned how to tie a tie because I was playing Mr. Darling in the Camp Wise production of "Peter Pan," so not only had to tie it properly, at age 15, but tie it properly onstage in front of 200 people, while reciting lines. "This tie, it will not tie, not round my neck. Round the bedpost, yes, 10 times I've tied it around the bedpost...."
    Or words to that effect It's been almost 40 years. My dad didn't teach me, he was 100 miles away. I don't remember who did; maybe I figured it out myself.
    Anyway, it struck me that, instead of returning it to the tie rack in my bedroom closet as requested, like a decently-raised son would do, he hadn't even returned it to our home. Perhaps even vindictively. The tie was across town, no doubt crumbled in a ball beside Jacob's computer.

     I cast him a doleful look.

     "At least I brought my shoes home," he said, earnestly, sincerely.  That brightened my mood immediately. I'm not sure where that came from—perhaps from the fact that he carried them. Black Oxford wing tips, no doubt uncomfortable as midnight approached, so kicked them off as he ... what did the boys do again? Oh right, poker and ping pong. I looked at him closely. Sober. Alive. Returned under his own power with no intercession from the police necessary. One should count one's blessings.

     "Well, try to get the tie back from Jacob at some point."

     Though to be honest, it is a purple tie with yellow bursts on it. I don't know what madness had gripped me to buy it in the first place. I haven't worn it in years, and probably will never wear it again. If he had dumped the tie in the trash and never told me I'd have never missed it. But he doesn't have to know that.
     Oh, and he brought the tie home a few days later, leaving it for me to find in a crumpled ball on the coffee table. I wordlessly hung it up. I'm going to miss that.

Saturday Fun Activity: Where IS This?

     Chicago has so many famous buildings.
     The Water Tower and the Willis Tower  
     NBC Tower and  and Trump Tower
     And those are just the buildings with "tower" in their names.
     Some are modernist monsters:
     The Hancock and the Aon Center
     Some are beloved old  treasures
     The Monadnock and the Marquette
     And some are in between new and old
      Like Marina City
     This building is none of them.
     I've walked past it for years.
     And never given it a second glance.
     Never really looked at its perfect blue rectangular grid
     Until now, thinking: "That'll stump 'em."
     I can't imagine anyone knowing its name.
     Though, merciful, there is a clue tucked in.
     I'll add another one at 12 noon.
     If it stumps you
     Which I hope it will
     For once
     Post your answer in the comments section
     And remember, you can only win once per year
     So good luck
     Winner will get ... lunch with me at Harry Caray's
     If you're interested
     I told its owner I'd slide by soon
    And this will guarantee that I do.
    Assuming anyone guesses this correctly which
    If history is any judge
    They will. 
 

What is it like to step on a landmine?

     Rahmatullah Merzayee was 11 years old, almost 12, when, walking home from school in Kabul, Afghanistan, one afternoon, he stepped on a land mine.

     “After the explosion, I looked up and saw ... I don’t know the exact words,” he said. “I saw a dark environment, a windy dark, like a breeze, all around me. When I touch my legs I felt nothing. I can’t explain in words.”

Rahmatullah Merzayee, left.

     Merzayee, now 28, spoke to me over the phone from Mozambique, where he is attending an international conference on land mines, officially a mouthful: The Third Review Conference of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction, running through Friday in Maputo, the nation’s capital.

     The conference drew more than 1,000 representatives from nations around the world, and the news, surprisingly, is good for once: since the signing of a global mine ban treaty in the late 1990s, production of mines has almost stopped, casualties have plummeted, and countries such as Mozambique that are riddled with land mines from past conflicts have made great strides in removing them, according to the International Committee to Ban Landmines, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for its work.

     One less cheerful point is that the United States, while pouring money into combating the harm caused by land mines, is still not among the 161 nations that signed the ban.

     “The U.S. has two diplomats here, but we have nothing to report,” said Chris Walljasper, a Medill student who picked up his graduate degree on Saturday and got on a plane Sunday for Mozambique, where he’s preparing for the fall, when Northwestern’s National Security Reporting Fellowship program focuses on the issue of anti-personnel mines.
     The old argument is that the U.S. needs land mines to stave off the North Koreans. But in a world of fast deployment forces, that's not a convincing reason, and military experts have claimed that mines constrict defense more than help. Their scant value must be weighed against the fact that mines are active for decades and deliver horrific injuries to civilians — half of victims are children — far more than they harm combatants. "People put them there and then leave them behind," said Dr. Jeffrey Ackman, chief of staff at Shriners Hospitals for Children Chicago, which sees many land mine victims. "They cause a tremendous amount of damage, devastating injuries, more so in peacetime than in wartime because nobody suspects them."

     In addition to physical damage, Ackman said mines often cause great psychological harm, as villages in developing nations tend to have little access to prosthetics or rehabilitation services, and the loss of a limb often consigns victims to lives of beggary.
     After Merzayee stepped on a mine, a taxi driver rushed him to a hospital, which saved his life but amputated his legs at the knee, the first of seven surgeries. He was in the hospital for five months, and though he received top-notch follow-up — a charitable group flew him to Germany to be fitted for prosthetic legs — it was still hard to bear.
     "I felt isolated; I became unable to do anything in my life," said Merzayee, who walks with two canes. "I will be a burden for myself and my family. I felt really disappointed, felt that I am alive just breathing, not really living, not like an active person. There is nothing I can do for myself, for my family, my community. This land mine changed my life completely, I cannot do anything for my life. That was my feeling."
     But he made progress. "After a year I could stand on my legs and come back to Afghanistan and started school." Since 2008, he has worked for Afghan Landmine Survivors. "This organization is involved in advocacy and awareness," he said, hoping that mines will become beyond the pale of warfare, like poison gas.
     "The United States is a country that is a big donor for other issues around the world," Merzayee said. "[The U.S.] signing would mean we will have a world completely free of land mines, and it will encourage other nonsigners, like Russia and China, to join this treaty. If the United States joined, it will mean the world will be free of land-mine production. No stockpiles, no land-mine victims. We hope that the United States can take the lead and others will follow."
     It's a little late for the U.S. to take the lead, except in the sense of being ahead of Russia and China. One hundred and sixty one nations have traded use of a crude, almost antique weapon that mostly maims children for the moral high ground and signed the land-mine ban. We can too.

San Francisco gnashes teeth over loss of Lucas museum

   John King, of the San Francisco Chronicle, posted this insightful analysis about how his city's leaders bungled snaring the George Lucas museum. "While Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel methodically assembled a well-connected task force to explore sites within his city that might captivate the billionaire filmmaker, [SF mayor Ed] Lee made no public gesture in Lucas' direction until early May," King writes.
     And while seeing San Francisco's teeth-gnashing was almost enough to make me proud of Chicago's nimbly snatching it away, I stand by my skepticism about what King refers to as Lucas' "still-vague" museum of narrative art. Maybe it'll be something wonderful, and maybe it'll be the future Flash Gordon Museum, another white elephant that Chicago ties itself to for 75 years because of our civic habit of marrying in haste and repenting at leisure.
    To be frank, seeing Mayor Rahm Emanuel's vigorous courting of Lucas, I wish he had put a bit of that energy into persuading Chicagoans that this is a good idea. But, as with closing schools, the mayor seems to assume that people will simply trust him, or that making his case to the public is somehow beneath him. And there is a point that, once you invite the naysayers and Friends of the Park sorts in, the name of action can be lost in a fog of bickering and debate. So give the mayor credit for plunging forward, the public be damned. We've got the museum, now, and can only hope that Lucas doesn't make it just a shrine to himself, his work and his art collection—that has to be a temptation, or why else is he doing this—and remembers to create something that visitors who never heard of Obi-Wan Kenobe and friends will want to see.
    Let's put it another way. Marshall Field created the Field Museum. It's about nature, not the history of department stores. Let's hope that Lucas gets this, and hope is about all we can do now.

Rarer than a rock star: book design icon visits here

     When Doubleday asked for my input about the cover design for my first hardback book in 1994, I replied, in an Oliver-Twist, please-sir-I'd-like-more stammer,  "Well, I'd like Chip Kidd to do it." 
     I knew that was swinging for the fences, but I was young, and didn't quite realize that my request was like a used car dealer asking the local advertising agency slapping together his late night TV commercial to get Mick Jagger to record the jingle.

     Kidd is the rock star of book jacket design—turning out, in the words of Publisher's Weekly, "creepy, striking, sly, smart, unpredictable covers that make readers appreciate books as objects of art as well as literature."

     He's the one book designer whose work really lodges in the mind—it's been more than 20 years since I saw his treatment of Leslie Fielder's classic, Freaks, but it stayed with me, for obvious reasons. 

     Actually, Kidd is more than a rock star, since there are many rock stars, but there is, to my knowledge, only one famous book jacket designer, Chip Kidd.
     I had the chance to ask him Wednesday: why is that? Why should he be the only book designer of renown?

      "But there're a lot," he objected, after he finished laughing. "I don't know how to answer. There are so many terrific designers working today. There's definitely a second, a third generation." 

      We were talking because he's headlining the 10th annual Printers Ball this Saturday at the Hubbard Street Lofts, 1821. W. Hubbard, a celebration of books, posters, zines, cards and good design in general.
     The event runs from 4 to 9 p.m.  You can find a full schedule of the workshops, readings and performances by clicking here. Kidd speaks from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m., and then signs his new book.
     And what will he talk about?

     "That's a really good question," he said. "I'll be in conversation with my dear friend Dana Arnett, a brilliant graphic designer and partner at VSA Partners. We'll probably just show and talk about recent and work and upcoming stuff." (According to the schedule, they'll discuss Go: Chip Kidd’s Guide to Design and to give us a preview of his forthcoming book, Judge This.)

    What else does Kidd have in the pipeline?

   "I've designed the new Haruki Murakami novel," he said, referring to Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, out later this summer.  Kidd also did the cover for the Japanese surrealist's previous novel, the best-selling 1Q84. He tends to design best-selling books, or perhaps best-selling authors tend to demand him; Oliver Sacks has it written in his contract that Kidd must design his book jackets. Nice work if you can get it.
   "I've been lucky enough, for all intents and purposes to be working nostop for 27 years," said Kidd, who is on staff at Knopf. "I still get these wonderful opportunities to work on books, a lot of which are very popular."

      I asked him if he was worried about the rise of ebooks, pointing out that there are no book covers on a Kindle. 

     He laughed again.

     "No, I'm not worried about Kindles," he said. "If you look hard enough, you can find the cover. Everything that I work on gets scanned, and becomes either a cover or an icon on the screen, and you double click to make it bigger. It doesn't change the design process. It's still the same. I read the book and try to make something."