Radio was scary too

 
    It was 40 minutes past midnight. Al Katz and his Kittens were playing the Moon Lite Gardens at the Chicago Beach Hotel in Kenwood. The crowd called for "Valencia! Valencia!" the dance craze of the moment— July 10, 1926—and as the group swung into the number. "Its exotic rhythms sent gilded heels gliding across the glistening floor," Radio Digest noted later, after the tragedy. "Sparkling lights, gleaming shoulders, jeweled fingers, radiant faces, brilliant costumes, spotless linen and fathomless black revolved in a kaleidoscopic array."
     Twenty miles away, in Homewood, the transmitter of radio station WOK was broadcasting the fun "throughout the Middle West into homes where lonely  hearts were hungry for happiness and joy." Then a fuse blew. The signal went dead and, in his eagerness to get the station back on the air, assistant operator Lester J. Wolf reached for the faulty connection without first cutting the power, received a 6,000 volt shock, and died almost instantly.
    The Radio Digest called him "the first martyr in the field of broadcasting for public entertaining," as if there might be many more. Hard to tell with a new industry based on a proven deadly technology like electricity and something as new and menacing as radio waves.
     I thought of Wolf—whose grave I encountered while wandering the Homewood Memorial Gardens cemetery in 2011—after reading my pal Eric Zorn's plea "We must ban drones before it's too late."  
     "Treat these small, unmanned flying vehicles the way the law treats machine guns and chemical weapons," Zorn wrote, "as devices so inherently fraught with potential peril that whatever positive uses they may have aren't worth the risks they pose."
     Boy, Eric, if you could somehow manage to include handguns—also dangerous, in their own way—in that treatment, I thought, I would be right there with you, eagerly lending my full support.     

     "A drone capable of delivering a package to your door will also be capable of delivering a small bomb," he wrote. Sure, but the same is true for motor scooters and FedEx. Yet tightly controlling explosives seems to do the trick.
     In his defense, Eric clearly understands the pointlessness of the argument.
     "Do I realize the futility of railing against the tide of progress with feverish hypotheticals? I do."
     Good, then no need to point it out. And I would have let his argument go -- we all have slow days,.
     But what he did not touch upon, and I'd like to, moving the ball forward a few yards, is that all new technology is scary and dangerous. Remember, Alexander Graham Bell's first words over the telephone? "Watson, come here, I need you"? Bell needed Watson because he had burned himself on the damn phone, or, rather, on the acid needed to power its batteries. 
     The risk are clear, the benefits, however, remain uncertain. When Bell initially patented the telephone, he thought he was inventing a device to improve telegraphy. It's not that new technology is without harm, but if a device becomes popular enough to cause lots of harm, we accept that as the price you pay. Cars slay 25,000 people a year in the name of getting to the mall faster. We shrug and accept it. Drones could kill 2,500 a year, and if it meant we got our pizza while its still hot, we'd be okay with that. They might ban a particular usage—no texting while you drive! But the phones remain.
     Radio is not seen as particularly dangerous. Heck, it barely counts as technology anymore. But that's not how it seemed in 1926. Now, if an assistant radio engineer, assuming there is still such a thing, were to electrocute himself, it wouldn't end up on his tombstone. The first person to catch a drone in the back of the head will be a martyr to a dangerous new technology. After a few decades, though, not so much.

Oprah's long goodbye

    I'll admit a guilty secret, even knowing that some readers will tuck it away, like villagers collecting cobblestones, to hurl back at me later on: but I secretly hope that these columns have staying power, an interest beyond the next day. I don't imagine that people are going to be studying them, like British schoolboys learning Horace. But I fancy they aren't yogurt-level ephemeral either, which is probably just crazy, given the inky obscurity awaiting all journalists.
      So  I was pleased, when the paper dug up this "Don't let the door hit you in the ass Oprah" column from two years ago, and gave it a bit of ballyhoo on Wednesday, to mark her shutting down Harpo Studios this week. Not that it's the Gettysburg Address or anything, and it'll have to become meaningless someday, because Oprah Winfrey will become another musty chestnut of television history, along with Jack Paar and John Cameron Swayze. 
     Which puts a whole new spin on this obscurity business. If  oblivion can dislocate its jaw wide enough to swallow an Oprah Winfrey, it'll of course gobble up the rest of us minnows as well and, frankly, vanishing utterly ourselves is a small price to pay if it means Oprah goes away too, eventually, thank God.

     Oprah, Oprah, Oprah . . .
     How can we miss you if you never go away? It seems only minutes after your painfully protracted, celebrity-spattered farewell to when your talk show shut down Michigan
     Avenue for days – OK, it was in 2011, but it feels like yesterday – and now we’re being called upon to bid you goodbye yet again, this time as you put your West Side studio complex on the market, and maybe your swank Gold Coast duplex, too.
     Well, ta-ta. It’s been fun. Don’t let the door hit you in your . . .
     No, no – positive thoughts. The high road.
     Well, ta-ta. Don’t be a stranger . . .
     Oh, right, you were a stranger. As much as you liked to float your Chicago street cred when basking in the endless celebrity limelight that trailed you like your own personal sun, it wasn’t as if you were ever really here beyond the confines of your 15,000-square-foot Water Tower Place duplex. Not a lot of Oprahsightings in all those years you did that hall-of-mirrors show of yours. No river of Oprah bucks watering thirsty Chicago charities. More like a trickle.
     Eighty years after Al Capone went to prison, he’s still associated with Chicago, too much. Two years after you left, well, as much as you must think of the city as one vast cargo cult, sitting in the lotus position learned from one of the endless chain of sham gurus you ballyhooed, scanning the skies for your return, well, we’re not....

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Saving the world and sticking Obama, all before lunch.

    When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began his speech before Congress Tuesday, I viewed him simply as a foreign right winger imported by our own homegrown right wingers to embarrass the president in a novel fashion. I was listening with one ear, happily tweeting snark like, "Netanyahu: 'I deeply regret some see my being here as being political. That was NEVER my intention.' Then you should have come in April, pal" when the import of the Iran situation began to sink in a little, enough to at least make me worry that I was being glib about something truly dire, and about this deal that's being brokered, which I really don't know much about. It's not like the administration has been talking much about it. Anyway, I pulled back, and wrote this. Maybe I'm a cheap date, and the talking heads say he wasn't very persuasive, in their jaded eye. But he made enough sense for me to worry, which perhaps was the point. That, and to get himself re-elected in two weeks. And embarrass the president. 

     Bibi Netanyahu used to hang around the Sun-Times.
     In the early 2000s. After a vote of no-confidence, Netanyahu had lost the prime minister's office to Ehud Barak in 1999 and was wandering the wilderness. He toyed with retiring from politics, but that wasn't going to stick. Now he was groping, trying to find his way back. It seemed like he was always stopping by here, and why not? He had a powerful, rich, fanatically loyal pal in our owner, David Radler, who liked to have him around, I suppose, because it made him feel connected and international and generally Israeliffic.
     I remember glancing into an editorial board room, seeing Netanyhu, and tiptoeing quickly away, thinking, "Why don't you get a job?"
     He has a job now, once again prime minister of Israel, for the past five years, overseeing the nation's hard right turn, which might come to a halt in a fortnight, should his Likud party slide in the March 17 elections (Israeli has a parliamentary system, so prime ministers are elected by the dominant party and whatever coalitions it forms). The latest polls are about split.
     Of course that was before he addressed Congress. He's back stateside (or should I say, "he's baaaack"?) not haunting the Sun-Times offices, thank God, but assisting the Republicans in their constant quest to embarrass Barack Obama before he gets out of their clutches and is handed over to history, which is sure to be kinder to him than current events have been.
     John Boehner invited him to address Congress, and he came, to plug the hard-line Israeli view that Obama and his lackey, Secretary of State John Kerry, are about to hand the keys of doom to the Iranians and urge, in their thin, Barney Fife voices, that they please drive carefully.
     Not if Netanyahu can stop it.
     "We must all join together to stop Iran's march of conquest, subjugation and terror," Netanyahu said, to rapturous applause....

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The Great Karmic Wheel of Brian Williams Keeps Turning

     There is a phenomenon in journalism I call the "Near Miss Cycle."
     Two airplanes will nearly collide in some spectacular fashion: one pulling up just seconds before impact, for instance. Or the wing of one plane will actually clip another on the ground. Whatever the circumstances, the story for some reason makes the news.
      Then the media suddenly becomes aware, again, of the concept of aeronautic "near misses," and starts reporting on other examples, of which there are many. Almost every day, it seems, at almost every airport. Maybe not as dramatic — certainly not as dramatic — as the instance that first caught the world's notice. But dramatic enough to feed this newfound interest. 
     For a while. Eventually, the sheer number of near collisions, none of them as compelling as the original, numb the audience, and the story dwindles away into nothingness, where it remains until the next spectacular near miss sets off the cycle once again.
      This phenomenon is not limited to airplanes, alas.
      We are seeing this in the wake of the Brian Williams melt-down.
      Williams, for anybody reading this in 2035, is the superstar NBC network news anchor who lied about being aboard a helicopter hit by a rocket 12 years ago in Iraq, when he was actually in an entirely different helicopter that wasn't hit at all.
     In the pre-Internet age this lie would have caused grumbling in a handful of people who heard the fabrication and knew better. But now, when negative details can find the wide audience hungry for them, such small bore blunders carry big consequences. Last month it caused an enormous scandal, causing NBC, eventually, to suspend Williams for six months. Though I would argue it was Williams' tin-eared attempt at damage control, his flea-bag "I forgot" non-apology that turned what might have been a passing embarrassment into a lingering if not endless career distorting disaster.
     Much conversation about journalistic ethics ensued, which I didn't join into, because I believed that putting this into the realm of journalism is a category error. Williams wasn't reporting on news, he was talking about himself in a speech, and the truly valuable realization in all this to understand that the actual facts about Williams' life that he could have used to puff himself—his being super rich, super famous, super handsome, super important—were not enough, obviously. He felt obligated to invent heroic episodes to further enhance his already glittering reputation.
     In that regard he is like many, perhaps most, men, who feed their egos at every turn, with facts if they can, with fantasy if those facts aren't handy. That sounds like I'm defending Williams, and I'm really not. I'm scrupulously honest, in part, because the fibbing of which Williams is guilty is so common and so cheezy. You could replace all network news anchors with sock puppets and I wouldn't mind. But  if the new standard is that exaggerating braggarts shouldn't be allowed to hold their jobs, well, then a lot of offices will be empty.
     Because attention, like other sublime substances, is addictive, and having a lot today, however much that is, can mean that you want a lot plus just a little bit more tomorrow. The implication in this scandal is that Williams is somehow unique here, and he's not.
     But people missed that. They thought the Williams gaffe revealed something significant, something newsworthy, and so the cycle continues. Last week, it was VA secretary Robert McDonald lying—in a conversation with a homeless man no  less—about being in the Special Forces. Now it's Bill O'Reilly, famous as a font of half-truths and self-inflating nonsense for years, suddenly finding his rampant puffery being fact-checked anew by Mother Jones. Why? O'Reilly fondness for mendacity hasn't changed. It's just that, in this stage of the Williams cycle, being an odious blowhard takes on a darker significance, the way squishy campus 1970s radicalism was, 30 years later, cast in the grim hues of terrorism. I imagine we'll have another month or two of the ponderous dinner speech braggadocio of TV stars being scrutinized as if  they were State of the Union addresses. Until the public gags at the sheer quantity of the stuff, and the media moves on to meat more attractive.  Adulation is addictive, like heroin. We shouldn't be surprised that people overdose and ruin themselves on it too.
   

The search for Erik Nordby

The best way to explain this is that it was Friday morning, and I had to write something. This presented itself and I shrugged and, to quote Molly Bloom at end of Ulysses, "and I thought well as well him as another."

   Friday morning, shaking off the cold, I shed my parka and stomp into the breakroom — whoops, Starbucks/cereal bar social center, because we’re a tech company now — which has a sign on the door: “Closed 2:30-4 p.m. Lightswitch training.”
     Inside, good old Jeremiah, our engineer, and a man I don’t know. They’re inspecting the room.
     “Lightswitch training?” I begin, catching their attention. “Dare I ask?”
     I extend my left arm, pointing the index finger and lifting it with a flourish.
     “OK everybody, together now: ON!” Then a brisk slice of the finger downward. “And OFF!”
     They laugh.
     “I assume it’s for management,” I continue.
     “No. Sales,” Jeremiah says, and at this, I bite my lip and flee. Do not mock the salesforce. “A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”
     But back at my desk, I can’t shake it off. “Lightswitch training, lightswitch training?” What could that be?
     “Lightswitch will shoot, edit and deliver a professional video customized to your business,” the company’s website promises. “We do it faster, better and cheaper than anyone else.” Turns out they’re right here, on Chicago Avenue.
     “We’re a video production company, based out of Chicago,” says Bryce Anderson, director of sales and operation. “We manage crews all across the United States, a network of thousands of video professionals handle all pre- and post-production. We’re 4 years old, but there have been a lot of changes. This model has been around about two years. We have 4,000, 5,000 people, of whom 150 to 200 are core. We send them as much work as we can, and edit it down.”

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"And so rose up, and went away"

     

 
     For the past year, I've been busy securing rights to poems, lines from songs, movies,  stories, and such, for the book, Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery that I've written with Sara Bader. It was a a lot of work, but worth it. I learned a lot about poetry, and was sensitized to the challenges of both being creative and respecting copyright law, which I believe is oppressive.
    A lot of people ignore the copyright laws completely, and the Internet is filled with poems swiped from authors and posted. Particularly the poems of Mary Oliver, one of the nation's most successful and beloved poets.
     And I'd be loath to join the offenders. But I actually paid for this poem, along with a half dozen others of hers, to be included in our book, and so I thought she might not mind if I posted this one here, as a kind of lagniappe, a little gift, like a baker giving a steady customer an extra cookie. I'm posting it not to further the commercial interests of my blog, such as they are, but because it came to mind when the newspaper offered the staff a buy-out.  The poem would bring me comfort, were I leaving the paper, and I thought it might bring comfort to my 15 colleagues who, certainly torn, took the money and rose up and went away. If Mary Oliver objects, I'll happily pay her some more, or take it down—well, not happily, but quickly. I would lop off the last four lines as diluting the proper, powerful ending, "and went away." But I can't; it's her poem, not mine, and she forbids it.  Though you can safely skip them, in my estimation (which, now that I think of it, perhaps moves this piece from expropriation to the realm of literary criticism, where I can, it could be argued, reproduce the words I am commenting upon). 
    The poem is called "The House."   
                       

Because we lived our several lives
Caught up within the spells of love.

Because we always had to run

Through the enormous yards of day
To do all that we hoped to do. 

We did not hear, beneath our lives,

The old walls falling out of true,

Foundations shifting in the dark.

When seedlings blossomed in the eaves,

When branches scratched upon the door

And rain came splashing through the halls,

We made our minor, brief repairs,

And sang upon the crumbling stairs

And danced upon the sodden floors.

For years we lived at peace, until

The rooms themselves began to blend

With time, and empty one by one,

At which we knew, with muted hearts,

That nothing further could be done,

And so rose up, and went away.

Inheritors of breath and love,

Bound to that final black estate

No child can mend or trade away.

Sunday Puzzler No. 1

Kent and Ross as young boys, breaking a code.

      Yesterday, in presenting my Saturday Fun Activity "Where IS This?" photo contest, I asked readers if they were tiring of it; I guess that means I am, a little. Or at least I was on Friday night.
     Most people said they enjoy it, so it'll continue, for the time being. I try to be a full-service columnist.
      A few said they wouldn't mind a trivia question, along the lines of the opera trivia contest I used to pick readers to go to "Porgy & Bess" in December. Though they wondered if questions could be devised that would thwart easy solving on Google.
     That's a challenge, and I'm going to work on that.
     In the meantime, what strikes me as being more Google-proof is not trivia, but logic questions, particularly original ones. When the boys were small, I used to devise puzzles to occupy them, codes and riddles and ciphers, as part of elaborate scavenger hunts I would create to help keep them occupied while I was away on trips.  Here's an example. A bright 8-year-old could crack it fairly easily, so I assume someone out there can too. The first person to answer wins a bag of fine Bridgeport coffee. ("Prizes! Prizes!" cry the Caucus Race creatures in "Alice in Wonderland." Because really, what's the point of a contest without prizes?).
       Good luck, and post your answers below.

     Sunday Puzzler No. 1

     Oftentimes I will think about the alphabet to get to sleep. One night, I sorted letters in such a way that I had a string of 15, with the other 11 not belonging. From that string, I took away another seven, as a challenge to you. Can you recognize the commonality of the remaining eight letters, and supply their missing seven brethren? Don't bother with Google—it won't help you. You have to think. There's no rush; yesterday's puzzle wasn't solved. I'm hoping this won't be either.

     A F I L N V X Z