Show the damn movie

    
    UPDATE: Late Wednesday Sony Pictures cancelled the opening of "The Interview." So file the below under "Bravado, Useless Examples of." Although the point stands. Security is a real concern, but so is the ability of repressive regimes to drag us toward their worlds where security trumps all. It's a surrender on our parts.

     I've never seen "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" or "Knocked Up." I somehow missed "Superbad," and "Pineapple Express," and all the other other Seth Rogen movies. I didn't see a single one, unless you count "Kung Fu Panda" which I do recall catching on TV, though he only did a voice for that, so I'm not sure that counts.
     Still, I am planning to attend "The Interview" when it opens Christmas Day, provided that it does open, that American movie chains don't really cave in, as they seemed to do on Wednesday, bowing to one anonymous threat, announcing they will refuse to show the movie because Kim Jong Un doesn't like it. 
    The Hollywood Reporter is saying that the top five movie chains are refusing to show the comedy, whose plot revolves around a CIA attempt to assassinate the North Korean dictator. Sony Pictures, which produced the movie, told theater owners to go ahead and drop the movie, if they wish, and Regal Entertainment, AMC Entertainment, Cinemark, Carmike Cinemas and Cineplex Entertainment did exactly that. 
      All due to a fractured warning that does seem translated from the Korean.  
       “Keep yourself distant from the places at that time," something called Guardians of Peace intoned, referring to screenings of "The Interview." "If your house  is nearby, you’d better leave.”
     It was like the fist-shaking monologue of a bad movie villain: 
     "Soon all the world will see what an awful movie Sony Pictures Entertainment has made. The world will be full of fear. Remember the 11th of September 2001.”
      Well, we won't be seeing it if we let ourselves be threatened, will we? And the world is already full of fear, apparently. On one level, I understand that. Nobody wants to be a victim. The news is filled with atrocities lately. Remembering the Aurora, Colorado "Dark Knight" slaughter, why volunteer to be cannon fodder for some international vengeance bloodletting masterminded by a humor-deficient Korean madman?
     I can think of a good reason. What kind of precedent is this setting? Making a threat on-line is the easiest thing in the world. If this works, won't any halfway edgy creative work that offends anyone anywhere then be fair game? Cower now, and we'll spend our lives cowering. I'd say the theater chains should lay in some extra security, show the damn movie, and patrons should show up to demonstrate that we are still America, still a free country, where satire dares to show its face. I know I'll be there.
    Oh, and I did see that James Franco movie, "127 Hours." Quite good. That gives me hope that seeing "The Interview" won't be purely an excercising in preserving free speech. 

"llinois orchards are apple shy"

     Well, THAT was easy!
     The way it usually works is that a questions comes to mind — such as "Hey, what happened to the apples this year?" The apple tree in our backyard didn't offer up a single Golden Delicious. Unless the squirrels (boo, hiss) stripped all the apples before I could even see them. But that's doubtful.
     So the question forms, then I dig, in this case probably call the Chicago Botanic Garden, whatever National Apple Board is out there, find the truth, write it, serve it up here piping hot.
      But the apple question, well, it formed, but never got answered. Other stories crowded it out. I dropped the ball, err, the apple. I forgot.
      Then Edie and I were walking Sunday in the Botanic Garden, taking advantage of the mild weather. The Botanic Garden can be surprisingly beautiful in winter, even without its flowers, offering up a muted palette of soft browns and quiet grays. We were strolling through the apple orchard, and came upon this sign. 

      There we go. I should point out that the apple harvest for the nation as a whole was up this year. Washington State is the center of American apple production,  harvesting more than 100 times the apples that Illinois does, and there the weather in 2014 was just fine.  The apple crop was depressed in the Upper Midwest, and even then, other states fared better than Illinois, which is fourth, apple wise, after Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. 
     Okay, better end it here, before this turns into another grapefruit story. I was certainly interested in that, and if you aren't, my apologies, and we'll try this again tomorrow. 

Hanukkah songs "a politically correct sop."

     Well, it's Hanukkah time, again. As a reminder to try not to make too big a deal of it, so as not to ruin our holiday the way other, umm, holidays unnamed are often made into such a huge-honking production by certain unspecified people that their spirit is lost, I've reached into the vault for this reality check.

 
     The first night of Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights, begins tonight at sundown.
     As Jews in Chicago and throughout the world light candles and eat latkes — traditional potato pancakes — the question arises of how much fuss to make over Hanukkah, which is itself a minor holiday marking the victory of the Maccabees in 165 B.C. and the re-dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem.
     Are Jews, by singing Hanukkah songs, putting up Hanukkah decorations and giving Hanukkah presents, attempting to turn the holiday into a semitic Christmas?
     "It's referred to as 'The December Dilemma' — what to do for Hanukkah?" said Susan Schaalman Youdovin, curator of education at the Spertus Museum. "About 20 to 30 years ago, Jews began feeling very pressured by their children to come up with something that would equal the spirit and fun of Christmas."
     Hanukkah songs, commonly added to Christmas programs in public schools, are not a Jewish tradition, said Youdovin, but "a politically correct sop" for the consciences of those who want Christmas celebrations.
     "If we preserved some semblance of the Jeffersonian separation between church and state, we would not sing Christmas songs — or Hanukkah songs — in public schools," she said.
     Nor is gift-giving — beyond giving coins to children — part of Hanukkah, but rather a custom invented recently to curb envy in Jewish children.
     "Gifts are not a traditional custom," said Rabbi Leonard Matanky, assistant superintendent of Associated Talmud Torahs, the central agency for Jewish education in metropolitan Chicago.
     Children at the Bernard Zell Anshe Emet Day School on the North Side get help navigating the tricky area between the two holidays.
     "We have many children whose families have two faiths, so we deal with both Christmas and Hanukkah," said Tzivia Garfinkel, associate head for Judaic studies at the school. "We emphasize that Hanukkah is not the Jewish version of Christmas. . . . We try to instill a sense of pride in what Hanukkah is and a sense of appreciation for what Christmas is."
     Youdovin said that the key to keeping Hanukkah in perspective is to celebrate other, more important Jewish holidays to their fullest.
     "Giving children a sense of joy in a strong Jewish identity is a year-round occupation," she said. "If you wait until December to deal with this, it's too late."

                     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 5, 1996

Dick Cheney waves his bloody hands

     Former vice president Dick Cheney leapt into the news with a snarl this past week, the bloody bone of officially-sanctioned U.S. torture clenched in his dripping jaws. No regret, not from him. "I would do it again in a minute," he said. 
    And who could doubt him? Not me. People in general are like that. They not only do evil, but then try to justify it—they have to, to preserve the exalted self-image that allowed them to stray so far in the first place. Everything they do is right, because they did it, and had results for the same reason. The idea of complexity, shades of gray, trade-offs, ambiguity, unexpected consequences, it's all noise to them. Much easier just to repeat, "I'm right," over and over, which is in essence what Cheney did in the media.
     Some people believe him, and repeat the fiction: these were the 9/11 planners themselves being tortured, they were giving us key information that saved lives. 
     Yet the report is plain. Mistaken identity, bungling and indifference led to the wrong people being snatched and tortured pointlessly, yielding nothing but another atrocity to lay at the feet of our country. It was wrong, and made us less, not more secure.
     A dynamic that reminds me of the one time I set eyes upon Cheney. It was Jackson Hole, Wyoming on the 4th of July, 2009. The boys and I were on our epic 7,000 mile odyssey to the Pacific and back, and had stopped in Jackson Hole to see its Independence Day parade. This is how I describe the scene in The Quest for Pie, my unpublished travelogue of the trip.

     Before the parade had started, rather than claim one spot, we explored the downtown strip of shops. From snatches of conversation, filtering in from the crowd, bits of words like cricket chirps, I got the impression the Dick Cheney, George W. Bush’s vice president, was somewhere nearby, and the boys and I worked our way toward the thickest part of the crowd — his position marked, ironically, by the big beefy security guys, milling around him.  We’d have never noticed him otherwise.  Cheney was sitting in a folding chair, wearing a mustard beige leather jacket and a white Stetson hat — he has a house around here — and I figured the boys might enjoy saying hello to such a prominent political figure.     

     "You want to meet the former vice president of the United States?” I asked them.  Kent made a face as if he had eaten something bad.  “No!”  he said.  “Why would we want to do that?” asked Ross, genuinely puzzled.  We moved on.  I was proud of them for snubbing Cheney — me, I’d have said hello, just for the bragging rights, but I could pass him by with only a faint regret.   

     Once business took me to the White House, and I had a glimpse of George W. Bush and Laura heading to the Marine One helicopter, which had landed on the South Lawn to take them to Camp David.  I waved goodbye like a schoolgirl, happily, sincerely — the president’s the president, at least when he’s standing in front of you.  An 8-year-old’s worldview, but there you go.  It isn’t like turning your back on the president leads to better policy.

     What makes this relevant is Cheney's security men. He must have had four, and, ironically, what benefit they brought in numbers they lost by standing around him, giving away his position. If he been sitting in chair with maybe one security guy sitting next to him, he'd have had ample backup in case some citizen decided to angrily confront him about the shame he brought to our once great country. But three or four towering oafs with curly wires in their ears, twitchy Secrete Service types whose body language practically shouted "Attention! Vice president over here!!!" Now I'm sure if you asked Cheney, he'd insist that no, this squad of giant goons was absolutely necessary, considering his countless enemies. But the truth is, he was less safe because of them. Just as his policy of snatching foreigners off the street and spiriting them away to black site torture centers only undermined what it was trying to protect. Were it possible for him to see it now, he would have realized it then. But of course he can't. That's how he is, and we shouldn't blame Cheney too much. We elected him. Twice.

Blind reps help the tollway help you

     

William Bryant at the Tollway Customer Service Center

     “Thank you for calling the Illinois Toll Road. My name is William. How may I help you?”

     For all the times I’ve heard greetings such as the one above, this is the first time I heard it not through a phone line, not as a vexed caller, but live, in the flesh, sitting next to the person saying it: William Bryant, 49, a Marine who retired on disability.

     We are in the Illinois Tollway Call Center, a large underground room divided by partitions, with 150 customer service representatives in headsets holding similar conversations, gazing at flat-screen monitors.

     After nine months working here, Bryant’s assessment of his job might be unexpected.

     “Enjoyable,” Bryant says. “I enjoy talking on the phone, helping out people a little bit.”

      Then there is something unexpected about the call center itself. First, that it’s new — opened Nov. 1, 2013 — and in Chicago, not Mumbai, or in Texas, where some customer calls to the Illinois tollway used to go, which annoyed tollway trustees, who decided not only to keep the work in-state but spread some of it to the disabled.

      “Just as important as building the roads,” said Paula Wolff, chairwoman of the Tollway Authority. “More important sometimes.”

      Thus the five-year, $61 million contract for the new center went to the Chicago Lighthouse for People Who are Blind or Visually Impaired, to their near-astonishment.
     "I'm amazed the tollway board was so enlightened," said Janet Szlyk, Chicago Lighthouse president.
     Not only is the center in-state, but it's located on the University of Illinois at Chicago campus, inside the UIC student center on South Halsted. Its entrance is next to the bowling alley, leading to stairs down into a lower level where a swimming pool had sat vacant for a decade after the university built a sports facility across the street.
     Half of the 244 workers fielding calls to the tollway, at 800-824-7277, 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. weekdays, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekends, are either blind or veterans, or both, such as Bryant, a lance corporal in the Marines when diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa.
     "The violation has been dismissed, I see. I'll make a note on your I-PASS account."
     If you're wondering how blind people use computer screens, remember that representatives are "legally blind"— with diminished eyesight, but nevertheless able to read text blown up to 2 or 3 inches on a computer screen. Only about 15 percent of the blind have vision so diminished they can't see light. That is also why the "The Chicago Lighthouse for the Blind," founded in 1906, changed its name to the current mouthful in 1999.
      Calls are announced in Bryant's headset with a gentle "beep-beep-beep." There is no standard problem to be dealt with: callers have gotten letters telling them of fines they dispute, or their credit cards have expired.
     "We get various calls," Bryant says during a break. "Some people are nice. Some people are extremely irate."
     As someone who knows what it's like to pick up the phone and find an angry stranger, I wondered if he has tips on dealing with that second group, the irate folks.
     "I try to talk calmly to them, tell them not to worry and if I can help them, I will," he says. "When they get high, I get a little bit lower. It's hard to argue with somebody who's not arguing back. I have a tendency to calm my voice down, talk to them regular, maybe throw a little joke in there, just to alleviate the situation."
     "Be patient," adds Shane Barbosa, whose eyesight was damaged by his albinism. "Let them yell. A lot of people want to vent."
     I'll have to remember that. Better than my own snarl-an-obscenity-and-slam-the-phone-down technique. Though tollway operators can hang up on abusive callers.
     "You can only take so much swearing," said Tom Nemec, the center's customer service manager.
      Employees of the center praise the benefits of working with other visually impaired colleagues, compared to previous jobs.
     "I felt more accepted here," says Marcin Okreglak, who was born in Poland in 1987 and developed toxoplasmosis as a baby due to radiation from the Chernobyl disaster the year before. "[Other employers] weren't as accommodating, weren't really as understanding. You would tell them you were visually impaired, and they would take it you can't see."
      Tollway call center operators start at $10.50 an hour, but after a year are earning $13 or $14. And yes, they are hiring, and yes, they particularly want you if you are blind or a veteran or both.
     "You're good to go. Anything else I can help you with today? Bye-bye."

   

Grapefruit has thwarted me

  
     There is nothing interesting to say about grapefruit.
     Regular readers will recognize that admission as an earthquake, coming from me.
     Because I believe that there is something interesting to say about everything, if you dig long enough.
     But grapefruit has thwarted me.
     "grapefruit, also called POMELO (Citrus paradisi), citrus tree of the Rutaceae family and its edible fruit," the Encyclopaedia Britannica begins, unpromisingly. "The grapefruit tree grows to be as large and vigorous as an orange tree..."
     That's whole grapefruit story, isn't it? A larger, sourer orange? The orange's dim older brother, who never went to college, and grew bitter over the years, up in his attic room, big and bulky and embarrassing.
     Now, if the subject were oranges, well, that would be another matter. Oranges would be easy. Books have been written about oranges.
     At least one book, Oranges, by the great John McPhee.
     Or limes. My God, limes, just the British naval aspect alone could fill a week's worth of posts: Grog. Limeys. Scurvy. 
     Not to forget key lime pie. 
     There is no grapefruit pie.
     Even lemons. How did troublesome cars ever get called "lemons?" I'd love to find out.
     But grapefruits....
     They're big. And heavy.  And ...
     ... delicious. There is that. I eat a grapefruit almost every day for breakfast. One entire grapefruit — no halving and segmenting; too messy and time consuming. No sugar or sweetening or demure half maraschino cherry placed at the center — defeats the purpose. 
       One grapefruitian orb, peeled, like an orange, eaten in segments, the separation of which can be a true challenge, tearing away all that thick white coating, but worth it, when you pop the first segment, feeling the sweet, nourishing grapefruit goodness coursing through your system, jump-starting your brain. Low calorie, but enough to hold you until lunch. 
     Most of my days begin with a grapefruit—220 breakfasts in 2014, by my count (I record the calories so it's easy to tally them up) which is what prompted this futile exercise: a lot of time with grapefruit. There must be something more to them than just the eating. And I would have consumed even more grapefruit, but our stock periodically runs out, or sometimes I do get tired of them — "grapefruited out" is how I put it — or just feel like an English muffin or a bowl of Wheat Chex instead. But if I do, usually I regret not sticking with the grapefruit. Cereal leaves you hungry; a grapefruit lingers.
     Must be the citric acid, which is in all citrus, of course, or the lycopene, which accounts for the pinkish yellow of grapefruit and it thought to reduce the risk of heart disease. 
     I suppose I could work the nostalgia angle. My grandmother every year would send a case of grapefruits up from Florida in the winter, a great luxury, because how were we supposed to get them otherwise? 
    Or there was the time, at the Royal Cafe in London, when we all ordered grapefruits baked in kirsch, because really, how often do you get the chance? And my mother, having never seen a salt cellar before, and thinking it was sugar, dosed salt all over the warm crusty delicacy. 

   But I want to do better than that. I suppose I could troll pop culture. Yoko Ono titled a book of random musings "Grapefruit," but to find out why I'd have to read it cover to cover, and I'm not willing to go that far. A glance is enough.
    Better to find refuge in the cinema. No great movie scene collection used to be complete without Jimmy Cagney mashing a grapefruit into Mae Clarke's face in "The Public Enemy." But given our times, that moment has lost its whimsy. 
     One problem with finding lore on grapefruits is, they're a recent development. Oranges go back thousands of years in China. But what appears to have been grapefruit, referred to as "forbidden fruit" by the British, a nod to the Garden of Eden, were noticed in the Caribbean only around 1700. "It thus appears reasonable to assume that the name 'grapefruit' originated in Jamaica, and has been used since 1814," Walton B. Sinclair writes in his 667-page The Grapefruit: Its Composition, Physiology and Products. Which means the word "grapefruit" is a more recent construction than the word "computer." 
     According to Citrus: A History, by Pierre Laszlo,  the variety of names for grapefruit include pomelo, the British term (the 12 volume 1978 Oxford English Dictionary has no entry for "grapefruit," but tucks the word in a list of derivatives under "grape," identifying it as a U.S. term, so chosen, I found elsewhere, because the fruit bunch in the trees like giant grapes). Laszlo continues with shaddock, then pamplemousse, which is French. He doesn't mention it, but German for grapefruit is .... ready? ... grapefruit. A lack of imagination on their part but then, with grapefruit, that's par for the course. 
     Orange is a color. Lemon is a color. Grapefruit is a ... well ... grapefruit. Its only creative use as an adjective is "Grapefruit League"—baseball pre-season spring training games in Florida, where grapefruits migrated from the Caribbean by 1830. Florida also produces the most grapefruit in the U.S., which leads the world, grapefruitwise. 
     While looking at oranges, some of McPhee's gaze fell upon grapefruit, and, unlike me, he had no problem unearthing grapefruit-related wonders. 
     "Citrus does not come true from seed," he writes. "If you plant an orange seed, a grapefruit might spring up. if you plant a seed of that grapefruit, you might get a bitter lemon." 
      Thus the trees must be grafted to get the proper fruit, a technique sometimes used to dramatic effect.
     "A single citrus tree can be turned into a carnival," he continues, "with lemons, limes, grapefruit, tangerines, kumquats, and oranges all ripening on its branches at the same time."
      Yowza. I didn't know that. And neither did you. But now we both do. 
      The only writer beside myself I know of who loves grapefruit was — not to compare us in any other fashion — Hunter S. Thompson. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is laden with the softball-sized fruit.
     His Samoan attorney orders from room service, along with the club sandwiches, shrimp cocktails and rum, nine grapefruits.
     "'Vitamin C," he explains. "We'll need all we can get."
     In Thompson's book, grapefruits are practically a leitmotif: they're chopped apart with razor sharp knives; they're moved out into the trunk with the luggage; they become Thompson's only source of sustenance at one point: "I'd eaten nothing but grapefruit for about twenty hours and my head was adrift from its moorings." 
     He carries grapefruit in his satchel, pulling one out on an airplane and slicing it apart with a hunting knife, which makes a stewardess nervous. 
      "I noticed her watching me closely, so I tried to smile," he writes, explaining to her: "I never go anywhere without grapefruit...It's hard to get a really good one — unless you're rich."
    A grapefruit is key in one of the oddest sequences in the book, early on, when Thompson hurls one into the bathtub where his attorney is having some kind of drug-induced psychotic breakdown while listening to Jefferson Airplane at full volume.
     "I let the song build while I sorted through the pile of fat ripe grapefruit next to the basin. The biggest one of the lot weighed almost two pounds. I got a good Vida Blue fastball grip on the fucker and just as 'White Rabbit' peaked I lashed it into the tub like a cannonball."
     I can't tell you how often I've thought of that line. Because grapefruit are huge, we store them in the second-hand refrigerator in the basement, and I'll tramp down to get one for breakfast. Walking back up the stairs, that phrase, "a good Vida Blue fastball grip" — Blue was a hotshot lefty for the Oakland As in the early 1970s — pops frequently into mind, and I'll happily bounce the grapefruit on my open palm, sometimes even arrange my fingers around it as if I were about to fire it across the plate, and smile, thinking: mmm grapefruit. 
     Well, I guess we've dug up enough on the subject. Maybe something interesting after all. As I was wrapping up, I bumped into Craig Arnold's lovely little poem,  "Meditation on a Grapefruit," that sums up the breakfast process far better than I ever could. Compare my windy effort above with the concise beauty of this:

                  To wake when all is possible

          before the agitations of the day

          have gripped you

                              To come to the kitchen

          and peel a little basketball

          for breakfast

                          To tear the husk

          like cotton padding        a cloud of oil

          misting out of its pinprick pores

          clean and sharp as pepper

                                      To ease

          each pale pink section out of its case

          so carefully       without breaking

          a single pearly cell

                             To slide each piece

          into a cold blue china bowl

          the juice pooling       until the whole

          fruit is divided from its skin

          and only then to eat

                            so sweet

                                      a discipline

          precisely pointless       a devout

          involvement of the hands and senses

          a pause     a little emptiness

          each year harder to live within

          each year harder to live without

     This perfect paean appeared in Poetry in October, 2009. As a tribute, it turned out, not just to the fruit, but to the poet himself. The previous spring, while exploring Kuchinoerabu-jima, a minuscule Japanese island, he fell into a volcano and died.
     Which is a long way from where we started. But that's the marvelous thing about grapefruit: one will take you a long way. Or at least until lunchtime. 

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     That's a nice fireplace, eh? 
     And the big colorful balls, well, they're there for educational purposes.
     This place, I had never been.
     Not inside, anyway.
     So I'm hoping you've never been either.
     Though somebody probably has.
     I was just passing by. 
     Had an extra 10 minutes.
     So I went in.
     Didn't have to pay nothin'.
     It seemed very interesting, and I left promising myself to come back.
     And give it a longer visit.
     So where is this fireplace? And the beautiful wallpaper atop the blog?
     I'd give you more hints, but somebody probably was there three days ago.
     Anyway, the winner gets a bag of fresh-roasted, Bridgeport Bubbly Creek coffee. 
     Which reminds me, I need to tell you about that unusual name.
     Next week.
     In the meantime, post your guesses below.
     Good luck. 

And yes, I swung on the swing. How could you not?