Scouting report

Christine Goerke with Sir Andrew Davis

     Opera must really be an odd taste, because it sticks in readers' minds, festering, and even though I only write a handful of columns about opera, it's often the go-to topic when angry correspondents are looking for something to toss back in my face. Outraged with my position on their pet fixation, they'll snarl, "Stick to opera!"
     Happily, at least for today, though it's a subject that, even after years, I'm still in the early stages of understanding. When someone accuses me of being an opera expert, I instantly correct them: No, I'm an enthusiast. An expert commands a body of knowledge and an acuity of perception that I can't touch. Andrew Patner, may he rest in peace, was an opera expert. Alex Ross is an opera expert. 
     I'm just a fan. I find that opera gives my life unique pleasure, scope and meaning. Opera is my version of following pro sports, only, you know, interesting. Though I'm open to the idea of eventually developing a better grasp of opera. Having dabbled, I've begun to notice certain glimmerings of a more subtle understanding, a few green shoots of insight. When the Lyric announced they'd be doing "The Merry Widow," next year, my first thought was, "What, again?" and then I smiled, realizing, "Ah, Renee Fleming wants to star in it. That's why it's back so soon. Now I see." 
     Or reading Alex Ross's "Musical Events" column in the May 11 New Yorker. I was on familiar ground from the get-go, since it begins talking about one of my favorite operas, Ruggiero Leoncavallo's "Pagliacci," currently on-stage at the Met, paired, as is typical, with Pietro Masagni's "Cavalleria Rusticana."
     Of course, knowing of Cav/Pag isn't much—they're two of everybody's favorite operas, among the most familiar operas of all time. Pagliacci's "Vesti la Giubba" is the soaring aria evoked when popular culture wants to convey "Opera." Cavalleria is only a little less famous.
    Then Ross pivots from those pair of one-hit wonder composers to the workhorse of all opera, Richard Wagner. First Houston, an unexpected oasis of culture in the Texan intellectual desert, where "Die Walkure" is starring Christine Goerke. He moves to Eric Owens, singing "The Flying Dutchman" at the Washington National Opera.  
     Hey, wait a second, I thought. Goerke. Owens. I KNOW those guys. I MET them.  Goerke at a press conference announcing Lyric's ambitious presentation of Wagner's full four opera Ring of the Nibelung cycle, which will be performed at the Lyric Opera beginning in the fall of 2016 with "Das Rheingold." And Owens,  an excellent Porgy in last season's "Porgy and Bess," participating via Skype, will be the Ring's Wotan.
    Not that Ross mentions any of this. I was tempted to wave the oversight as a bloody shirt, more evidence of the unfortunate invisibility of Chicago to the Gotham elite. But Ross once commented on this blog—thank you Andrew—so I decided his heart is pure, and he probably just didn't have the space, and since I hate it when local media fusspots zing me without gathering the courage to ask for my perspective, I checked with Ross: slight to Chicago or not enough room? He replied:

Thanks for the note, and for giving me a chance to respond! Comments about New York ignoring Chicago are seldom unjustified — Andrew Patner might well have chided me on this very point — but in this case I don't feel guilty as charged. I had very little space to discuss the performances, and so I chose to focus entirely on what I heard in DC and Houston. Not only did I omit Goerke and Owens's future engagements in Chicago, but I also made no mention of Goerke's appointment to sing Brünnhilde at the Met in 2018-19. In other words, it was a rare case of New York ignoring both New York and Chicago. Needless to say, I am very eager to hear Owens's Wotan — I've been anticipating the occasion on my blog for several years — and plan to attend the Rheingold in Oct. 2016.

    Fair enough. So to bring this lengthy overture to an end, and get to the point of this: Ross's scouting report from the Grapefruit League in Texas and the swamplands of DC. (New York isn't the only city that gets to snap open the lorgnette and squint at smaller places). How did Goerke and Owens do, Wagner-wise? 
     "Both singers fell short of technical perfection," Ross writes, "at a few moments of high pressure, they issued tremulous, imprecise sounds. Yet they delivered portrayals of acute, pulsing emotion, belying the stereotype of the well-trained American singers who is expert in various styles and native to none."
     Good news, in the main (you should read his entire piece by clicking here).  Ross calls Owens "the most overtly human, openly wounded Dutchman I have heard live" and Goerke's entrance "ricocheted through the house and radiated joyous strength." 
     Joyous strength is good. That's what I go to Wagner to hear. Falling short of technical perfection won't even register on my score card. When I mention Wagner to people and they make a face and talk about his operas, which they haven't heard, taking a long time, I think, So does being alive. Ross said he paired these two singers because they are both "new" to Wagner—Owens first sang Wagner five years ago. It would have been nice if he had the room to tuck in that this duo will share a stage here for years. But his not mentioning it meant that I had to, sort of a gift, which mirrors how I came to writing about opera in the first place. Wynne Delacoma  had retired, yet the opera world somehow carried on, and I said to myself Someone has to pay attention to this. 

Consumer Reports: "Don't suffer in silence"

   To be a responsible citizen, you ought to vote in each election, raise your children, and subscribe to Consumer Reports.
     Though not in that order.
     If I had to lose one of the three, I'd say skip voting and stick with the magazine. Every month Consumer Reports examines our vast, sprawling, shifting culture of consumption and asks not the standard question we ask ourselves — What should I buy next? — but tougher questions such as "Is this any good? Will it harm you? How can I push back against it?"
     I was reading the June issue.
     And you tend to really read Consumer Reports. Not a lot of skimming, because it tends to be so interesting, even focusing on stuff you never wondered about before, such as this issue's "Special Report: How Safe is Your Shrimp?"
     Like you, my entire thought process about shrimp can be summarized as: Oh there's shrimp? Gimme shrimp. Am I taking too much shrimp? Can I have more shrimp? It never crossed my mind that there might be more to the subject. And I'm a curious guy.
     Seven pages on "choosing the healthiest, tastiest, and most responsibly sourced shrimp." It leaps out of the box with interesting facts about American's love affair with shrimp — four pounds a year per person, three times what we ate 35 years ago.
     I had no idea where shrimp came from. The sea, I assumed. (Wrong: Most is farmed in huge industrial tanks and football-field size artificial ponds.) It never dawned on me that there are different types of shrimp (beyond size, that is, tiny to jumbo). Four thousand varieties, the top six profiled in the magazine.
     By the time I was done reading the article, I felt like an idiot, shrimp-wise, with my snout stuck in a bowl of prawns, never pausing to wonder, Geez, could this stuff be treated with harmful chemicals or silly with disease? (CR: You betcha!)
     And I hadn't even gotten to the cover story, on the gathering peril of the "Internet of Things," as your refrigerator and your thermostat start spying on you and sharing your data with potentially everybody.
     It's cool that your car can talk to your house and tell it to kick in the air conditioning as you near home. But "that convenience comes with a trade-off. The devices can also send a steady flood of personal data to corporate servers, where it's saved and shared, and can be used in ways you can't control." Not only loss of privacy, but exposure to hackers. In Britain, cruel pranksters took over baby monitors to scream at sleeping infants.
     Something for society to look forward to. While it might be too early to truly worry that your Crock-Pot slow cooker is informing on you, it isn't too early to be aware of it.
     There's more. Bicycle helmets. Getting the most out of your used car. And, as always, my favorite part, the back page snickering at the stupidest marketing blunders of the month. Consumer Reports not only takes citizenship seriously, but encourages readers to do the same, with a section, "Actions You can Take In June" ("Ask Congress for safer detergent pods" since thousands of children find them, think they're candy, and eat them). There's a call to arms against inaccurate, illegible unit pricing. "Don't suffer in silence. Tell a store manager."
     And that's just June, with sunscreen and mosquito repellents and more on deck for July.
     Consumer Reports spent nearly a half million dollars testing shrimp. Yet the magazine has no advertisements — itself incredible, in our ever-more-branded world. The government can't get by without selling out to corporations. But Consumer Reports manages. That's why it's important to not just read it, but to subscribe — it's only $29 a year, the cost of a couple pounds of dubious shrimp. It's something that should be supported. I almost called Consumer Reports a fifth branch of government, but then I realized that the press is the fourth branch, and CR is the press, though its gimlet eyed, let's-buy-every-model-and-test-them mentality is so out of keeping with mainstream journalism, and its general, tongue-lolling, seal-clapping applause for whatever junk is being flung at consumers, that it might deserve a category of its own.    

     I don't like focusing on other publications — professional pride. But Consumer Reports is an exception, and if you don't subscribe, you should. And not just for your own good. It's a civic duty.

Tsarnaev should die

     When I heard that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had been sentenced to death for the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, my immediate, unfiltered reaction was "good." I don't think that puts me too far out of the mainstream of American thought.
    That "good" comes despite my opposition to the death penalty
    Generally.
    But not in this case.
    Why? 
    What's the difference?
    If killing is wrong—that's why Tasrnaev's being punished, for murdering three innocent bystanders with the pressure cooker bomb he and his brother built—then isn't it wrong to turn around and kill a killer, even through a deliberative legal process? 
    Good question.
    On one level, the criminal justice system is broken, men are sentenced to death wrongly, as a matter of routine by overzealous prosecutors and colluding cops. It's  skewed against minorities and the poor. If killing is wrong, then the great United States of American should not kill people, for any reason, as an official act. It's bad enough that cops and soldiers kill in the name of society, and how often does that turn out to be error when the smoke clears?
     Let's call that Logic Loop A.
    Logic Loop B goes like this: I'm glad Timothy McVeigh is dead. The Oklahoma City Bomber should not be wondering if there's vanilla cake for dinner, and issuing his occasional manifestos, through his lawyer, explaining why he's glad he blew up the Murrah Federal Building and buried those toddlers alive in the day care center. Society needs a way to express its utter disgust, and jamming him full of poison and letting him die strapped to a gurney just feels right. 
     It's emotional.
     When you look at society's that don't kill such people—Norway sentenced Anders Behring Breivik, the fascist asshat who murdered 77 people, mostly teens, to 21 years in prison—that seems wrong. Justice calls for something more than two decades in a Scandinavian prison. Then again, Norway is Eden compared to the United States, crime-wise, so maybe we should pay more attention to how they do things, and ask ourselves whether killing Tsarnaev feels right because we're a murderous nation of gun nuts who've barely knocked the dust off our Wild West spurs, at least intellectually. Maybe we should worry about this feeling like the right thing. 
     It's a tough judgment call. I can see those who are against capital punishment in any form, far more than I could buy the Texas, kill-'em-all-and-let-God-sort-'em-out approach to criminal justice. 
      Bottom line, for me, is that executing terrorists is good for society. I can't pretend it has deterrent value. These are not long-range thinkers and, besides, half the time they intend on killing themselves anyway. At some point we have to re-establish that we're a culture with limits, and the need to not randomly kill others for your psycho nihilistic cause is a fairly low bar to set. 
    Regular life is so precious, and sweet, someone who would shatter in on a clear spring day, at a joyous civic event, how should that person be dealt with? You could argue that an application of the mercy and humanity that is at the core of our Western culture, or should be. I could see that. But emotionally it jars for me. I don't want to see TImothy McVeigh, out after 20 years, as dictated by our Norwegian stands of justice, in downtown Northbrook, licking an ice cream cone. Better that McVeigh is in hell, and good news that Tsarnaev will be joining him. Not every decision should be made by cool reason. Sometimes you have to go with your gut.   
  

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     I think I take so many pictures of street scenes and inanimate objects because I'm shy about asking people if I can take their photograph. It's awkward for me, makes them self-conscious, and shatters the moment, causing them to stiffen up. Usually I try to photograph people on the sly, while their attention is elsewhere, but something that isn't an option, as with this man enjoying his cigarette in solitude. But I couldn't just pass him by, given his singular outfit. The deep orange jacket is what first caught my attention, and his pork pie hat, rolled jeans, expanse of ankle and dapper mustache. It looks like a costume a child would wear in 1910. I asked if I could shoot his photo, and he said yes, but then his body language was directed at me, and he didn't have the sense of solitude he had when I first saw him. He wouldn't give me his name or other details, beyond the fact that he wasn't visiting, but on a break from his office ... where?
     Where exactly did I notice this young, or youngish man, having his nicotine fix? Guess the correction location—I'm looking for a specific street—and win one of my coveted 2015 blog posters. Any insight into the fashion would be appreciated as well. I can't say I've seen anything like it, other than on gondoliers in Venice. Good luck, and please remember to post your entries below. 

A pocket guide to financial disaster

     Personal experience is overrated. People fancy their closeness to a situation gives them the last word: "Look buddy, it happened to me, I know." When it can just as easily blind them. "I hate Mexicans because I went to Mexico in 1967 and got food poisoning . . ."
     Okay, thank you for your valuable insight.
     So let me start by sharing my bias, and you can decide whether it provides clarity or confusion. In 2009 when Jim Tyree wanted to buy the Sun-Times, the deal offered was the union would surrender seniority, take a 15 percent pay cut and lose our pensions. The choice was that or the newspaper would fold.
     We didn't snap at the deal. In fact, the union rejected it on the first vote. I was the only one, in my recollection, to speak in favor of the deal, and here is what I remember saying, "I'm a Jew and we survive. The purpose of the union is to protect our jobs at the newspaper, but if there's no paper and no jobs, then it really doesn't matter if the union is sound or not." We took the deal, and while I'm sorry to have to work like a hamster on a wheel until the day I die, I've never for a moment regretted taking it. Six extra years at a big-city paper is something.
     So now the come-to-Jesus moment for Chicago's pension fiasco looms. The Supreme Court spiked the fix that our political geniuses spent a year cobbling together because it's illegal. Moody's immediately downgraded Chicago's bond rating to junk status. Which means that massive borrowing, the only thing keeping the city afloat, just got even more expensive. And it's going to cost even more to borrow money, assuming Chicago can find folks reckless enough to lend to it to us.
     What to do? I heard one expert say that digging out of the pension hole will take a 40 percent property tax hike. No, said another, make that 49 percent.
     Let's review, for those who haven't been paying attention. (This problem is not only a tribute to the short-sighted cowardice of politicians, but to the electorate's genius for ignoring gathering disaster.) Politicians gave out pensions — I won't debate whether they're "fat" pensions, let's just call them "pensions" — to government workers, basically promising money the city didn't have and — whoops! — was never going to have. Knowing their own tendency to filch stuff, our leaders built into the law that the pensions, once established, could not be reduced. And the retired folks who receive them, former teachers and electricians and such, worked their various jobs for years, expecting those pensions. It was a promise.
     But you can't give money you don't have. Since it's against the law to cut pensions, Chicago has been cutting everything else. The constitution doesn't demand it provide mental health services or give aid to people with disabilities. No need to pay traffic aides — I didn't see a one downtown at 5 p.m. Wednesday and many Loop intersections were gridlocked, a metaphor for our times.
     These cuts degrade life in the city. That's going to grow worse, as everything gets tossed over the side in order to keep ballooning pensions from capsizing the ship. At some point Chicago will hollow out and become an enormous pension plan that also puts out fires.
     There is no facile solution, just a series of bad choices. A clear-cut sacrifice, like the Chicago Newspaper Guild made, isn't even possible. Retirees can't vote to cut their pensions to save the city and wouldn't if they could. Taxes could be raised, though the common wisdom is that jacking up property taxes or increasing taxes on corporations would cause Chicago residents and companies to flee faster than they already are, leaving those who remain clawing at an ever smaller pie.
     I believe this is referred to as the "death spiral."
     There is no easy solution that doesn't involve going back in time, and the necessary time-travel technology is not in place. Me, I think the city declares bankruptcy and puts the pensioners in line for their dimes on the dollar with all its other creditors. That's bleak. So here, let's end on a light note:
     Anybody wish that Chuy Garcia was on the fifth floor of City Hall? Busily forming his exploratory committee and trying to figure out which wire to cut before this problem sends Chicago up in a mushroom cloud of insolvency? I didn't think so.

And no, there are no actual coins....

     We are in an era when, if you are not careful, technology will race away from you, and you'll end up a befuddled person confronting a puzzling world of alien systems and incomprehensible institutions. Thus while I don't believe in giddily embracing every new development, in case it becomes popular, you shouldn't ignore the arrival of significant developments either, just because it takes effort to comprehend them.
     Thus the installation of this "Bitcoin" machine recently between the Jamba Juice and the FedEx on the second floor of the Merchandise Mart seemed the moment to pause, bite the bullet, and try to understand what Bitcoin is, and the best way to do that is by trying to explain it to you, assuming that, like me, up to this point you've kept the whole issue on the periphery of your perception. 
    Assuming I'm not that last person who hasn't yet grasped it. If you're buying your pizza and paying your mortgage in Bitcoin, well, laugh away. I haven't joined Uber yet either.
    It isn't as if I have no idea. Bitcoin is some kind of online currency. Though that is the limit of my knowledge, along with the recollection that the whole thing collapsed a while back, which can't be true, as testified by the arrival of this machine.
    So...let's poke around. 
   CNN Money describes Bitcoin this way: "Bitcoin is a new currency that was created in 2009 by an unknown person using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto. Transactions are made with no middle men – meaning, no banks! There are no transaction fees and no need to give your real name. More merchants are beginning to accept them: You can buy webhosting services, pizza or even manicures."

    Well, that is interesting. Its creator being unknown puts it in an elite group of technology—along with fire and the wheel, I suppose.
     So it's like cash, only online. You store it in a wallet in your device or in the cloud, and people have hacked them and stolen them. That said, what good is it? 
    The downside of the CNN Money description is that it doesn't seem to be accurate. Vox published an interesting account in December (only half a year ago, so I'm not lagging behind the curve that badly). Timothy Lee points out that while Bitcoin fluctuates like any currency, sometimes losing alarming portions of its worth against the dollar, despite CNN Money's claim, it actually is not quite a currency, but more of a new, unregulated open financial system, and so has enormous potential. Lee compares Bitcoin to the Internet:

     Because no one owns or controls the network, there are no limits on how people can use it. Some people have used that freedom to do illegal things like buying drugs or gambling online. But it also means there's a low barrier to entry for building new Bitcoin-based financial services.  There's an obvious parallel to the internet. Before the internet became mainstream, the leading online services were commercial networks like Compuserve and Prodigy. The companies that ran the network decided what services would be available on them.

    So what good is it besides buying drugs? Lee says they can do international currency transactions, that while Western Union charges 8 percent, that Bitcoin ATMs charge only 3 percent per transaction (on each end, meaning sending funds would cost 6 percent, and also painting CNN Money's "no transaction fees" as wrong—it isn't as if Malaysia Airlines is their only embarrassment ) an improvement, though hardly worth braving the uncertainties of the Bitcoin world, at least right now. (He also mentions the ATM's were launched in late 2013, and by 2015 there were some 329 of them).
     I explored the glowing orange machine screen, but it seemed to only work if you already had an account, and given that it accepts only $20s and $100s, I didn't quite see the point of pumping big bucks into it just to then try to find a vendor who would take the Bitcoins my money would become. Where's the benefit in that?
     I don't want to merely echo Lee's analysis, you should give it a read. The takeaway is that Bitcoin is to financial networks what Uber is to taxi services: an unregulated, technology-driven twist that might work spectacularly—as Uber has so far—or might crash and burn. The question is whether all that regulation is necessary. My hunch is, given how screwed up our own economy has been—thank you banking industry—that people going into Bitcoin in a big way are going to miss those legal protections.
     Right now, it seems only really useful to those who want to buy drugs online—that wouldn't be me. As for its other uses, I'm not exactly an early adopter. Maybe some of you have some Bitcoin experiences you'd like to share. I think I'll wait, then maybe find a place that accepts them that has something I wish to buy.  Investors have poured some $500 million into it, so somebody thinks it has potential. 

Don't bet on Chicago casino

     There is something garish about plaid suit jackets — a certain Nathan Detroit vibe, particularly if the pattern is on the loud side.
     I have a few such jackets. Though more tasteful than the "Guys and Dolls" wardrobe, I hope, they hardly ever get worn. But my eye recently fell upon a subdued blue and black job, with — geez — an orange thread.
     "Where did I get this?" I asked my wife, holding up the hanger, checking the label. A store in Cannes — and was transported to the South of France, where we intended to go to Monte Carlo. Men visiting the Casino, the guidebooks instructed, must wear jackets and I, with a Slavic peasant's obedience built into my DNA, went out and bought this one.
     A purchase that led me to feel extra stupid the next day, leaning against the vingt-et-un table at the sparsely populated Casino, along with a handful of Eastern European tourists in their motley Members Only plastic windbreakers—"jackets" in the loose sense of the term. I played for half an hour, realized I had the same pathetic pile of franc chips I had started with, cashed out and left
     This is a long way of saying that the casino reality is far from the James Bond fantasy. For both individuals and for cities. If I see one more politician or lobbyist rub his palms together, chortling over the millions untold that Chicago will pull in from its casino, any moment now, I'm going to scream. (Exactly what I'll scream, I'm not sure, maybe: "And George has a piece of land, and we're going to be farmers!")
     First, it might never happen. A Chicago casino has been a political will-o'-the-wisp for decades. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Politicians giving away the ranch, spending money they don't have, telling themselves (and us) that good old Uncle Casino will show up any moment and settle the bill.
     Second, if through some miracle, Chicago finally snags a casino, it might not work, or not work like we hope. When Harrah's opened New Orleans' first casino, its location and construction were so badly botched that revenues were 60 percent below projections, and the whole project, rather than bailing out anybody, went bankrupt. When Cleveland's first casino opened in 2012, Ohio officials estimated it would bring in revenues of $1.2 billion. In 2014, it took in a quarter of that, and state tax revenues have been disappointing. Casino taxes "hardly made a dent" in budget deficits, according to Wendy Patton, senior project director of the State Fiscal Project of Policy Matters Ohio, calling casinos "another blow to local government finances."
     So don't count your eggs before they're in the pudding.
     Which goes for more than casinos. Such as the Obama Library. Well, I guess Chicago is going to get it — all together now, fling your rough wool caps in the air and shout, "Hurrah!" — but is the decision really whether it goes into Jackson Park or Washington Park?
     The whole point of libraries is to turn to the past for instruction and understanding. So let's do that. I pick the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, because one of my strongest memories of using it is the long, long cab ride to get there, stuck on some lonely promontory, jutting into the harbor, leaning forward in the cab seat, watching the meter click, thinking, "Where IS this place?" Kind of odd to have put it here. Wouldn't you think a Kennedy Library would be at Harvard?
     The short answer is, that was the plan. Kennedy himself, a month before his death, visited the future site in Cambridge. So what happened? It took about 10 seconds of sleuthing to find this nugget on the library website:

     In 1975, the Kennedy Library Corporation abandoned plans to build the library on the site at Harvard University originally selected by President Kennedy due to prolonged delays in freeing the site for construction and opposition by some Cambridge residents who feared urban congestion caused by visitors and tourists.

     Well, that would explain it. Note the date. A dozen years of site battle hell. If I would have to bet — and I try not to — I'd say we'll have an Obama Library open, in 2027, due to delays we can't imagine, yet. Still, that'll be long before Chicago sees its first casino.