Wozzeck, again

From "Wozzeck," photo courtesy of the Lyric Opera

     Are you tired of the Saturday fun activity? I am, sort of. Okay, a lot. Plus I'm running out of halfway enigmatic photos, not that you guys ever are stumped. 
    So let's take a breather, at least for today. If this is a rend in the fabric of your universe, let me know, and I'll continue it next week. If you heave a sigh of relief, let me know that too, so I can be confident I judged correctly.
     For today, I've unearthed this chestnut, in honor of Wozzeck, the Berg opera that opens at the Lyric Sunday. This 1998 column is one of the first I wrote that mentions opera, and is significant for several reasons. 
    First, it mentions Wozzeck, which I had seen as an entry-level subscriber when the Lyric last presented it in 1992. My central memory is of screeching, and a woman on a swing, and wanting to get out of there with a passion that could not have been greater had the place been on fire.
     Second, while there are many criticisms that can be leveled at the atonal, jarring piece, I manage to malign it falsely in two ways, by alluding to its length—at 100 minutes long, it's one of the shortest operas—and an intermission, of which there are usually none because of the aforementioned brevity. 
     Third, after this column appeared, I received a scorching letter from Magda Krance, then and now the proud spokesperson for the opera. The letter ended up a crumpled ball hurled across the newsroom—just can't do that with email, alas. So I can't check what was in it, but I remember her saying that I had become Bob Greene, a low insult for any writer, but particularly barbed because Magda and I had collaborated on the takedown of Greene that had appeared in Spy magazine in the late 1980s.
    What I remember most about this episode was sitting at my typewriter, pounding out a reply, a number of replies, actually one after the other. I would write a letter in a hot fury, seal it up, stomp over to the mail basket, put it in, stomp back to my desk, fume, then leap up, stomp back, pluck the letter out, tear it up, return to my desk and write a new one.  I did this at least three times. 
    A luxury lost in our digital, send-it-and-regret-it age. 
    The letter I finally sent began, "Ignoring your letter..." and suggested that a publicist doing her job would have taken me up on my offer of donating some proper light plates for the lobby of the Lyric, which has grand marble and brass and these sad industrial electric outlets. 
    It is a tribute to the plasticity of the human condition, and our respective professionalism that Magda and I managed to get past that little speed bump in our relationship, and have worked together lo these many years and become bosom buddies as I went from being a subscriber, sitting in the uppermost balcony, to a frequent commentator with a better seat. 
     I'll be attending Wozzeck later this week, and am keen to discover if my tastes have changed in nearly a quarter century. 
    In the meantime, let us return to the years of Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, a scandal whose annoyingness our young columnist tried to express by way of operatic metaphor. It's not a very good column, but then I was new to the job.

      If you've ever sat through a really terrible opera, one of those
four-hour jobbies, always modern — say "Wozzeck" by Berg — that the
Lyric Opera seems to feel compelled to inflict upon its audience,
periodically, perhaps as penance for the joys of Mozart and Verdi,
then you might have already struck upon my technique of escape
visualization.
     It is the second act. Having spent the intermission begging my
wife to leave and salvage what remains of the evening (she refuses,
out of the charmed notion that the performers, 100 yards and two
balconies away, will feel badly if we do), I slump down in my red
plush seat. The opera unfolds, hideously.
     So I leave, not in reality, but in imagination. I narrow my eyes
and go through the process: getting up, murmuring apologies, sliding
down the row, trying not to grind my butt in the faces of seated
patrons.
     Quick-step up the aisle. Pass through the door into the light.
The relief of the unmobbed coat check desk. The giddy reunion between
man and coat. The rush down the stairs. The careful noting of the
crooked beige plastic electric wall socket plates in the lobby, an
amazing lapse amid the glorious marble and brass (I'm going to dip my
toe into philanthropy some day and raise the money to buy the Lyric a
half dozen real brass socket covers for its lobby — the Neil
Steinberg Memorial Wall Plates). The final release into the
revivifying night air.
     I found myself engaging in a similar escape last week, when
struck by the tsunami of the Lewinsky; Tripp tapes, followed hard by
the typhoon of the impeachment hearings. (We never have thought of a
proper name for this nightmare, have we? Maybe we should take a cue
from Conrad, and just call it the Horror).
     How will this end? When will the face of the general public —
turned away in relief since the elections, now roughly grabbed and
shoved, like a naughty dog, back into the noisome mess — once again
be permitted to turn skyward and view the stars?
     My personal moment of squirming despair came Thursday. I was in
a cab, on Lake Shore Drive. Of course, the radio was turned to Ken
Starr (all radios and televisions were; you could keep up with the
farce by just walking down the street, like with the Cubs in a
playoff game).
     Cab radios only have two volumes, tantalizingly soft and
eardrum-piercing loud. Straining to hear Starr's pious palaver, I
asked the cabbie to turn the radio up. As punishment, I was forced to
endure Starr's voice sawing full volume through my head for the rest
of the trip.
     When will this be over and what will that be like? Can we
conjure up a scenario that, like a fantasy tiptoe out of the opera
house, can give us a bit of balm against the nightmare grinding out
before our eyes? Since relief tarries, might we not at least imagine
relief?
     My first impulse would be to say: No, it's not possible. Steven
Calabresi, a professor of constitutional law at Northwestern
University, floated a scenario in which the Senate would still be
arguing this issue in January, 2001. And that was his short version.
He also suggested the Senate could hold some sort of hearing hounding
Clinton after he leaves office (after? after!) to legally bar him
from holding future office.
     With all due respect to Calabresi, he's out of his mind, showing
the sort of oblivious wish-fulfillment that has led the Republican
Party to the precipice and is now inspiring them to leap over into
the abyss.
     If this nonsense is still being debated into 2001, there won't
be a Republican in Congress to vote on the matter. Bank on it.
     As with all moralists who periodically grab the reins of the
nation and drive us toward a cliff, they don't get the idea of a gray
region. The moderate mass of America doesn't think in absolutes —
we're trying to get through the day, which often requires compromise,
a concept lost on zealots. Abortion is bad, but banning it is worse,
so the rights of the fetus, such as they are, are trumped by the
rights of the mother. Smut on the Internet is a problem, but
appointing a committee of bluenoses to try to sweep it clean is
worse. Clinton lied under oath, but he lied under oath about his sex
life in a proceeding that grew out of a garbage lawsuit mounted by
his enemies who hated him prior to all his supposed crimes and only
hate him more now.
     But it will end, right? I bring you good news. It will. The
inquiry will grind on, the Republicans trying to expand it,
desperately. But society, which cares little now, will begin to care
less. The hearings will continue, but we won't notice them anymore.
New developments will get pushed to the back pages, to the last
segment before the weather. Newspapers will run a small box, back by
the astrology tables: "Today is the 147th day of the impeachment
hearings. Rep. Hyde said . . ."
      This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.

    —Originally published in the Sun-Times Nov. 22, 1998

Gun Shop Rules: Part II

      This is the second part of my gun range visit, begun yesterday. I seem to have not written anything about the actual shooting session with the boys itself, probably because it was unexceptional, possibly because I considered it private. All I recall is the younger boy didn't like it much at all—guns are loud, even with ear protection—and neither asked to shoot again, leaving me slightly disappointed, as I half hoped it would become a family activity we'd do from time to time. I was fully prepared to buy a gun, for target practice purposes, should it become necessary. But it wasn't. So I didn't, a thread of logic that eludes many—our right NOT to own guns—and is the source of much tragedy.

     'How do you know he won't shoot you?"
     Spoken by my wife, standing in the kitchen as I grab the car keys.
     I am hurrying to meet a reader, one of many who offered to go shooting with me after I was turned away from Maxon Shooters Supplies in Des Plaines.
     The thought never crossed my mind; I'm not significant enough to shoot. It isn't as if I'm unearthing atrocities in Chechnya.
     The reader, Chuck is waiting at the gun range when I arrive: black leather jacket, about my age and height, apparently sane. An insurance adjuster.
     He has a small arsenal of weaponry in locked cases — a matte black Browning 9 mm, a Colt .45 automatic, a nickel-plated Smith & Wesson .357 magnum, a .22 Harrington & Richardson revolver and a .22 rifle.
     We sit at a table and go over the guns, only a portion of his collection, the size of which he doesn't specify beyond "quite a few."
     Why so many? I ask, explaining my theory that men assemble big armories as part of elaborate, if unspoken, end-of-the world fantasies.
     No, he says, it's a matter of collecting, of appreciation.
     "They're a work of art," Chuck says. "My wife is into Beanie Babies, and I do this."
     Fair enough. They are sleek.
     He hands me material on gun safety. It takes 30 seconds to read — treat all guns as if they're loaded, don't point them at something you don't want to shoot, etc. — but I shudder to think of how many people buy the ranch ignoring them.
      Then to the range,
      Shooting guns is fun. I could lard that thought with all kinds of caveats and expressions of regret about mass killings. But save politics for another day. I learned a lot — a .22 caliber bullet is tiny next to a .45 slug, a pencil eraser compared to a pinkie. The .357 magnum does not have a kick like in the movies.
      At least not in my hands. A lifetime of video games serves me well — I plant all 16 shots from the .22 in the innermost target ring, and do well even with the large caliber guns. The first shot from a new clip with the .45 is a dead-center bull's-eye.
     "Asshole," mutters Chuck, massaging the word into a compliment.
     I save a pair of human-shaped targets for the boys, figuring they can decorate their rooms with them. Boys love that kind of thing.
     —Published in the Sun-Times April 27, 2007

GOP debate the stuff of dreams

     The conclusion of yesterday's visit to a gun range flashback will be posted at 7 a.m., CST, Oct. 30, 2015.

     When Carly Fiorina said "I'm Hillary Clinton's worst nightmare" at the end of the third Republican presidential debate Wednesday night, I couldn't help mutter, "Hers and everybody else's."
     A glib line and, as is common with glib lines, not actually true. Fiorina might be a bad dream, certainly, but the worst? Sadly no. Called upon to arrange the 10 Republican candidates on stage in Boulder by order of their nightmarishness, worst to least, anyone who cares for this country would have to go first to Ben Carson, the inexplicable front-runner, murmuring his inanities, smiling quietly to himself as they are mistaken for deep truths.
     There's almost no point in explaining how disastrous Carson would be — like Louis Armstrong said when asked to explain jazz, "If you have to ask, you'll never know." An economy-killing tax plan, to start. Morally wrong notions that jab a thumb into the eye of our cherished rights, hard for some to detect because they seem aimed at someone else. Carson's suggesting closing the mosques of anyone found supporting ISIS, translated, means he'd happily suspend the civil rights of any besieged minority (and if that isn't clear, imagine Carson suggesting closing the churches of those who commit crimes. You see? No, still don't get it? Well, as I said, if you have to ask.)
     In close second on the bad-dream scale is Sen. Ted Cruz. Tailgunner Ted, a frightening demagogue hewed from Joe McCarthy's stock of the high-pitched fanatic waving a sheaf of papers over his head. Then New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the albatross of Fort Lee moldering around his neck (and if you spring up and say, "He didn't know about the lane closure!" remember, that's worse, because it means he's fully capable to hire a staff of trusted henchmen and then let them run riot while he's oblivious).
     The rest you can rank yourself, and I'd hate to have to decide if Rand Paul is worse than Marco Rubio. The least nightmarish, from Democratic standards, Gov. John Kasich and former Gov. Jeb Bush, also have the least chance of getting elected. The whole debate was, if not quite a nightmare, then a depressing circus — a David Mamet babble of people talking loudly over each other, shouting well-practiced glib lines that were both untrue and entirely at odds with what they were asked. CNBC seemed to have trouble with the logistics of hosting a debate. It started late, with a strange question, "What's your biggest fault?" that bordered on "What kind of tree would you be?" and most of the candidates rightly ignored it, and pretty much all the other questions the CNBC panel asked, preferring to tear into the media for insulting them by daring to question their impossible schemes. There was no illumination on any kind of policy, except that Donald Trump's thousand mile wall along the Mexican border now has a door in it — which I consider progress. Donald Trump wasn't the worst nightmare on stage, he's not even in the worse half, which is really saying something.
     Trump's brief denouncement of super PACs, plus his dialing back the personal attacks, a little, raised Trump in my estimation. Plus, he isn't Ben Carson — he's Solon the Lawgiver compared to Ben Carson.
     Living in a state where the Republican Party once offered up Alan Keyes as its candidate for Senate, Illinoisans are used to the idea of laughable incompetence passed off as worth by the Republicans. Carly Fiorina waved the threadbare rag of her corporate performance, at best dismantling a failing company (a skill that, alas, might have use in America's future) and at worst a litany of incompetence. For her to then use that to lash at Hillary Clinton, secretary of state in a dangerous world, former senator, wife of one of the more popular presidents in modern history, well, let's just say it showed a hypocrisy so solid you could build a chair out of it. These are the same people, remember, who hooted at Barack Obama for being inexperienced. Now you can select any three candidates off the stage, combine their resumes and find less government experience than Obama was ridiculed for possessing. You have to be a Republican to consider that a good thing. Why it is not in fact a good thing, why it is bad, well, if you have to ask, you'll never know.

Gun shop rules: Part One

"Boy With Toy Soldiers" by Antonio Mancini, from the Barnes Foundation collection. 

     Last week I had an exchange with a supporter of unlimited gun access, whose hostile tone changed dramatically when I mentioned that I had fired guns. I guess that put me on the good guys' side. I posted a photo of myself shooting at the FBI range, and another commentator assumed that was the only time I've ever fired weapons—a way to nibble away at my gun cred, I suppose. It wasn't. I wrote a series of column items in 2007—the column filled a page then, and tended to be broken into smaller bits—about getting my FOID card and taking my boys shooting. Understand, it's madness, in my view. Ideas don't gain or lose legitimacy depending on how much ammo the person espousing them has fired. Still, I thought I'd post them here, the first part today, the second tomorrow, so I have something to calm gun zealots with next time the issue comes up, which it will.

READY, AIM . . .

     Applied this week for my FOID card — that's "Firearm Owner's Identification" for you who are not in the gun world.
     The form takes a minute to fill out — though I paused at question 10. Does "Optional Numbers" mean I have to put down my Social Security number or not? I figured "optional" is an out for the black helicopter crowd. So I wrote the number down.
     Cost me $5 and a recent photo—the form says it takes 30 days and I'll have my license and be all set.
     Regular readers of this column might find this an unexpected development. I have in the past written that guns are dangerous and that certain new gun laws are desirable, such as one banning .50-caliber rifles, which are good for shooting down planes and not much else, or laws that would keep individuals from buying two dozen handguns at a time, to cut down on sales to street gangs.
     That makes me a bed-wetting, liberal, gun-banning weenie in the mind of the National Rifle Association, whose members have "The right to bear arms shall not be infringed" part of the 2nd Amendment tattooed on their necks, but keep conveniently forgetting the "well-regulated" that comes right before it.
     To me, enjoying guns and a reasonable public gun policy are not mutually exclusive. Banning machine-guns is not a step toward a police state, and wanting to doesn't make me anti-gun. I've gone pheasant hunting, and skeet shooting, and fired a handgun a couple of times. Guns have an allure and shooting is safe and fun, done properly.
     So when my 11-year-old son announced Sunday that he wanted to shoot a gun, my response was to jump online and find out the quickest way to get him on a range.
     Gun shops ring the suburbs. They'll rent you a gun and sell you ammo, and a child can shoot if in the company of a parent, provided the adult has an FOID card.
     Hence the application.
     If nothing else, shooting will be something the boys—both want to go now—remember. My father was a government scientist who spent a lot of time in places like Geneva and Johannesburg and London. We didn't do much stuff together. But one day in 1974 we did stand around for an hour or so at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs and blow clay pigeons out of the sky. It felt very adult to tuck a shotgun under my arm, to bring it up to my shoulder, and sight the target. I can hardly wait.
                                     — Published in the Sun-Times, March 9, 2007 

OPENING SHOT . . .

     The list of victims from Monday's Virginia Tech massacre is not complete. Other innocents will also be harmed by this.

     There will be, for instance, troubled youths on every college campus who reach out for help and instead get their fingers burned.
     Even before this, universities were overreacting and suspending students after they sought treatment for depression.
     Now, with the specter of slaughter haunting already timid college administrators, we can expect more kids will find themselves on the bus home after making the mistake of approaching a counselor.
     That isn't right. Combine the pressures of a new place, the stress of college coursework, the frequency of substance abuse, the pain of complex romantic lives, and a significant slice of any campus is on shaky mental ground.
     The last thing we need to do is make it harder to acknowledge this, to boost the stigma aimed at emotional troubles and the tendency to blithely pretend they do not exist.
     I remember sitting in the waiting room at Northwestern's mental health center when a girl I knew walked in.
     "How's everything?" she asked.
     "Great," I said. "And you?"
     "Oh great," she said. Our eyes met and we burst out laughing because, really, if everything was so great, what were we doing there?
     If we place the suspicion of being a potential spree killer upon everyone who stops by the nurse for a brochure, we will inevitably add to the roll of Cho Seung-Hui's victims.
     No gun for you!
     I got my firearm owner's identification card simply to take the boys shooting. But with guns in the news, now also seemed an apt time to head to Maxon Shooting Supplies & Indoor Range in Des Plaines. I went alone, without the distraction of the boys, as a dry run, to blast away at paper targets.

      Maxon is at the end of a strip mall dominated by a bus firm. Inside, a small square shop, smelling of machine oil. Lots of guns, obviously, pistols in glass cases and rifles in racks along the walls. The trio of clerks seemed occupied, so I busied myself examining the cases. I was struck by the size of the guns -- enormous weapons, .46-caliber revolvers about two feet long. You'd have to be a giant to handle the things comfortably.
     Eventually a clerk glanced in my direction and I explained that I wanted to rent a gun and use the range. You could hear soft, percussive pops coming through the wall.
     He said that they require rental gun shooters to be accompanied by another person. I said I saw that on the Web site—"we ask that you shoot with someone when you rent"—but the gentle wording made me hope it was more of a request than a rule, and perhaps I could get around it.
     No, he said, you can't.
     He seemed to lose interest in the conversation at that point, but now I was curious, and pressed: Why was another person necessary?
     "We've had people kill themselves," he said.
     Oh, I said, and browsed around some more, mulling my next step. I examined a bottle opener crafted from a .50-caliber bullet. So they're not just for taking down airplanes.
     Normally I'd rush to apply the universal solvent of being a columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, which tends to dissolve this kind of difficulty. But the media—which sometimes suggest that guns be regulated by law, and other heresies—are not exactly the darlings of the gun world. Perhaps it was my own discomfort, being in this unfamiliar, cramped armory, but the gun store employees radiated a certain frostiness, the and-who-sent-you low-grade hostility found in certain bars around Sox Park. Waving the newspaper might get me, not special dispensation, but rather the bum's rush.
     Yet I was there, in the wilds of Des Plaines. A shame to leave without shooting. I found myself standing in front of another clerk.
     "Couldn't I pay one of you guys to be my second?" I asked, sounding like a character out of a Russian novel.
     "We're busy," he snapped, flipping through a catalog. Looking ahead, I asked if a child would count as a second person, for rental purposes.
     "How old?"
     "Eleven."
     He said 11 would be fine, and I hurried out of there, uncertain if I could muster the fortitude to return, never mind with boys in tow.
     Driving home, something occurred to me. Faced with the risk of tragedy, the gun store had no problem imposing a rule—a gun control, if you like—constricting their customer's God-given, Second Amendment right to bear arms. A rule designed to prevent people from shooting themselves, or at least to prevent them from shooting themselves with a rented gun at Maxon.
     But if the government tried to do the same thing—some sort of policy where mentally ill people are constrained from arming themselves—well, that's the jackboot repression of a police state.
     Not that I'm advocating such a measure. The rights of citizens were too hard-earned to let the mental health profession decide who gets to exercise them. And yet. . . . The store had a problem — suicides renting guns instead of buying them, and killing themselves messily here rather than going somewhere else to do it. And they address the problem with a rule. Not a very good rule, mind you — it seems it would, if anything, encourage murder-suicides. Yet a rule nevertheless.
     We have a Virginia Tech worth of gun deaths every morning in this country, on average, and then again every afternoon. I don't think it makes one a tyrant to wonder if perhaps there isn't something that can be done about that. Maxon might be onto something with their idea of using certain restrictive rules in an attempt, even a vain one, to prevent these tragedies. It's worth a shot.

Today's chuckle
You have to wait 10 days to buy a gun in L.A. I can't stay mad that long.
                                                              --Emo Philips

                                           

                                                     — Published in the Sun-Times, April 7, 2007

Chicago Shapes #3: Squares

    Third in a series of riffs on geometric Chicago. For circles and parabolas, see the two days previous. We'll take a breather after today—there's only so much geometry a body can stand—then come back next week refreshed for triangles, hexagons and ... believe it or not ... octagons. 

     Tiresome as the Chicagoans-don't-put-ketchup-on-hotdogs debate has become, it is not the only squabble regarding consumption of classic foodstuffs where local custom squares off, for want of a better word, against national habit.
     There is the matter of how to properly slice pizza.
     The debate pits the "pie slice" versus the — I kid you not — "Chicago square," which places like Home Run Inn Pizza endorse because that's the way they originally cut their pizza, handing squares out to bar patrons when the place first started in 1947,
     "It’s a Chicago thing: the flat, crunchy crust cut into squares," the web site Thrillist maintains, "for people who don’t want to be stuck eating a whole slice for five minutes when there’s important drinking to be done. No question that square is better."
     "Chicago has been a neighborhood based thin-crust-square-cut-pizza city since I can remember," Tom Schraeder wrote on HuffPost Taste in 2013.

     Neighborhoods and squares certainly go together. In pre-industrial times a center square of pasture was left so cows could graze, and it was natural for people to congregate in markets and fairs there. Cities kept that tradition, with communities built around park squares, and reflected today in places such as the Square Bar and Grill, which does indeed have a square bar, but was so named, I am told, because owner Nick Daud used to live in Logan Square, and the bar itself, 2849 W. Belmont, at one time would have been considered to be located in Logan, before that area morphed into Avondale.
     "More a neighborhood thing," said the employee who explained the derivation of the name to me.
     While town squares hold a mythic place in American lore, prairie Chicago was broken up in to rectangular lots, the better to eat up our endless plats of land.  The only truly square-shaped square I can think of is the park immediately south of the Newberry Library, aptly named Washington Square Park, also referred to as "Bughouse Square" for the radical speeches often given there. 
     Otherwise, Chicago city blocks are varieties of rectangles (a square, almost needless to say, is a specialized rectangle, with four equal sides and four 90 degree angles) and none of Chicago's 77 neighborhoods are actually square, including the three with "Square" in their names:  Armour Square, Lincoln Square and Logan Square.

     There was once a neighborhood in Chicago that wasn't itself square either, but covered a much-ballyhooed square mile on the South Side where the city's meatpacking took place.
"In the 'Square Mile' at its prime stood numerous packinghouses, ringed by railroad lines adjacent to the tens of thousands of animals pens of the Union Stock Yard," Dominic Pacyga writes in his stockyard history Slaughterhouse. Pacyga took liberties by casting it as an upper case name; more common was the treatment Upton Sinclair gave in The Jungle, where he called the stockyards "a square mile of abominations."
    While not common from a bird's eye level, if you walk around, Chicago architecture is studded with squares, particularly as windows and tiles. That said, squares here are more useful as concept than as geometry. The term is dated, now, but for a while, a true Chicagoan would recognize and steer clear of the squares.
     "On hot and magic afternoons," Nelson Algren wrote, in Chicago: City on the Make, "when only the press box, high overhead, divides the hustler and the square."
     "Square" as a term of condemnation was fairly new then; it was first used in 1944, as jazz slang, for a straight arrow who couldn't grasp the new music. By the 1950s, "square" was so overused, particularly by teenagers, that it led to "cube," which was a person who was really, really square, who might even live in "Cubesville."
     "Work was for the cubes," John D. MacDonald wrote in 1957. "The quintessence of a square." 
     While for the past half century a "square," according to Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang, has been "an old-fashioned person, esp. about dancing and music; later concerning customs and culture in general" that was just taking what had previously been a value and flipping it around. Before the 1940s squareness was something to be valued, a sign that you were on the up and up.  "Square" meant honest, as opposed to cross, which is why we have "fair and square" on one hand, and "double cross" on the other.
     "If elected," Theodore Roosevelt promised in 1904, "I will see to it that every man has a square deal, no less and no more."
     And how did "square" come to mean honest and true? Anyone who does carpentry knows that. You wanted your work, particularly your corners, to be square, though you can see this gravitating into general praise for behavior going back 400 years, such as in Act 2, Scene 3 of Shakespeare's "Anthony and Cleopatra."

ANTHONY: Read not my blemishes in the world's report.
                        I have not kept my square, but that to come
                       Shall all be done by the rule.

     Not that there wasn't wiggle room — a person could be square among thieves, for instance, such as the character running a warren of subterranean brothel rooms, also in The Jungle:  

    Here at 'Papa' Hanson's (so they called the old man who kept the dive) he might rest at ease, for "Papa" Hanson was "square" — would stand by him so long as he paid, and gave him an hour's notice if there were to be a police raid.

      Nowadays, "square" is mostly a shape. While in 1986 Huey Lewis could sing that it was "Hip to be Square," that was so true that the very concept of squareness, for a person, fell out of favor, consigned to the attic of the arcane along with stacks of 45s and poodle skirts. The only sort of person who would use the word sincerely would be ... all together now ... a square, though anyone aspiring not to be would just call that person "clueless."

Chicago Shapes #2: The circle

Thompson Center floor

     After yesterday's riff on parabolic curves, I'd be a fool not to keep going. The circle seemed the obvious next candidate.

     Chicago is not a round city. Just the opposite. It is a linear city, a grid, starting at 0/0 at State and Madison and marching out in a series of orderly lines, all perpendicular, with the occasional diagonal slash of an Ogden or an Elston vectoring off at an angle to make things a little interesting.

Worse than Indianapolis

     But no circles. Not like Washington D.C., with its DuPont Circle, or New York, with Columbus Circle, or Paris with its Place Charles de Gaulle encircling the Arch de Triumph.  Circles and cities quickly go downhill from there, from Cleveland, with its Euclid Circle, to Indianapolis, known as "Circle City."
      No more need be said, though Indianapolis is not quite the bottom rung; Hell, remember, is a city too, and it has nine circles.
     Chicago does have a Circle Avenue, but it is a small, obscure, egg-shaped oval in Norwood Park. Other than that, nothing. There is another Circle Avenue in Forest Park, though that is mostly straight, north and south, but describes a quick quarter circle before turning east and dead-ending into Harlem Avenue.
     We used to have a Circle Interchange, the confluence of the Dan Ryan, Kennedy and Eisenhower Expressways. But that was renamed the Jane Byrne Interchange last year, a dubious honor for a dubious mayor. 

Covers are round so they don't fall in.

    The University of Illinois does have a Chicago Circle Campus, that opened in 1965. But it has no circles in it; it was named for the interchange, due east. The UIC Circle Campus is distinguished, or more accurately, marred, by its brutalist Walter Netsch-designed buildings, so ugly that a university study of prospective freshmen found that a significant number were discouraged from attending because of them.
     So circles of any sort are not big in Chicago. I imagine Chicagoans would be hard pressed to name a prominent circle-shaped object in their town. The floor of the much ridiculed Thompson Center, above, comes to mind. There was the Ferris Wheel at Navy Pier, now between wheels as its new one is constructed.  There was a circle prominent in the stained glass of the old Granada Theater; 900 N. Michigan has an impressive circle window. But that's gone.

We've got the hole, now we just need a spire to go in it

     Just as prominent are circles that never came to full fruition -- the hole where the Chicago Spire was supposed to go, near Navy Pier. The "Circle Line," an outer loop connecting the 'L' to the Metra, which petered out after its first phase was completed in 2005.
     Though a hole cannot technically be a circle; a circle only exists on a two-dimensional plane, as the collection of all points equidistant from a center point. 
     Forest Park's Circle Theater, though not located on the town's main drag, took its name from the street and, according to its web site, "from the concept of infinity," which might not be that alluring for time-strapped playgoers. 
     But the duality of shape and symbolism has to be kept in mind with the circle.  It represents unity, wholeness, both life and infinity, which isn't as contradictory as it might appear—life, not as in your or my definitely not infinite lives, but as in life in general, which does endure even as we individuals come and go. Hence the hopeful title of Studs Terkel's book on aging, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," a reference to the 1907 Christian hymn:

                       Will the circle be unbroken
                       By and by, by and by?
                       Is a better home awaiting
                       In the sky, in the sky?

  
    A circle is also a group of associates—Gmail encourages you to identify people in your circle. Free Burning, Nigerian-born Chicago writer Bayo Ojikutu's novel, describes people who go to 12-step support groups as "circle fiends."  

    No matter, she isn't tricking off these days, not now—the old girl hasn't been to an Uptown circle fiend meeting since I finished high school.

     That seems to be a new locution — I could not find "fiend circle," obviously a play on "friend circle," used similarly in the sweep of literature, so hats off to Bayo Ojikutu.
     Fittingly, circles are a subject that can go on and on. The more you look for circles, the more you'll find. They hide in plain sight. If I asked you to name the most famous circle in the greater Chicago area, you might guess at the Ferris Wheel. If I added that it is one of the largest machines ever constructed, perhaps the largest machine ever constructed, you might be tempted to hold wavering to your choice, even knowing that can't be. It isn't even the biggest Ferris Wheel around. A final clue— you know of it, it just isn't in mind right now— won't help at all. 
     The Tevatron Superconducting Super Collider, a pair of rings, the Main Ring, with a circumference of four miles, and the Injector Ring, at Fermilab in Batavia. Mothballed now after being rendered superfluous by CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.  Still, a very, very big circle, though not enough to change the inherent uncircularity of Chicago.

  

Chicago Shapes #1: The parabola

    
     Plunging into all things parabolic for today's column proved too much fun to let the matter drop, so I'm using it to kick off an occasional series I'm calling "Chicago Shapes" that will continue, now and then, until I run out of shapes to write about. Tomorrow: The Circle.
  
    "Cool parabola," I thought, when I first noticed this arch traced across the front of River Point, the new 52-story tower going up at 444 W. Lake.
     A very 1950s, Jet Age shape, the parabola, defining the curve of a rocket in flight, "Gravity's Rainbow," to use Thomas Pynchon's wonderful phrase, the title of his dense, 1973 masterpiece that uses the parabola as a metaphor for fate, for the arc of life's, the upward spring of youth, the downward pull of age:
     "But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola," Pynchon writes. "They must have guessed, once or twice — guessed and refused to believe — that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow, and they its children...."
     "No surprise, no second chance" — that sounds about right, to a guy in his mid-50s, about 2/3 the way across his own life's parabola, in the descending part of the curve, hurtling toward the Big Splat.

Parabola formed on an x/y axis.

     Not that you need gravity to make a parabola. There are other ways. Math will do. A parabola also represents an algebraic equation, plotted out on an x/y axis.
     For instance, here is a graph of the equation y=6x²+4x-8, a curve very much like the arch at 444 W. Lake, only flipped upside down: You can also slice a curved 3-dimensional geometric figure, such as a cylinder or a cone, like this:

        

         

      

     That's how they came up with the parabola at 444 W. Lake, as I discovered after I phoned the building's designer, Connecticut architectural firm Pickard Chitlon and spoke with Anthony Markese, one of the firm's principals, who was happy to hear from his hometown. "I'm actually a suburban Chicago boy," said Markese, who grew up in Schaumburg "pre-mall."

     How did you decide to stick that parabola there?
     "The parabola form at the base of the tower and the top of the tower come from the building's response to the site," he said. "If you look at the building through Google Earth, one of the really interesting things about the site is a major portion of the Metra tracks run right through the site. The piece left to build on is a funny wedge shape left between Lake, Canal and the tracks."
     Not only did the site pose a significant engineering challenge — the building had to be constructed over operating train tracks — but it also suggested the shape of the building.
     "What fit well in there in terms of the tower plan was the kind of curved cut football shape, the elliptical shape the body of the tower is," Markese said. "We started looking at how to make it more elegant, how to make it meet the ground plane. One way we came up with is to cut it, If you take an extended ellipse, and make a cut, you are left with that parabolic form."
     That seemed right, aesthetically.
     "The idea of this grand arch that looked out to the river seemed really compelling to us," he said. "Sort of a ceremonial archway one could look through the lobby plaza out onto the river."
     You can't see it yet, but the shape will be echoed at the summit.
     "The top of the building has a series of cuts as well, lower parabola, dips downward to create another ellipse shape at the top of the building." he said. "The whole language of the building comes from cutting the building's surface for a variety of parabolic forms."
     Markese said parabolic shapes will also run through the pathways in the green space, and elsewhere.

Illustration of River Point when finished.

     
     "Once you start with an idea you try to run that idea through the building, to knit it all together," Markese said. "It seemed to fit the flowing nature of the river as well, a confluence of the three branches, curves against curves, a nice open sunlit area of the city."
     In that sense, it sort of mirrors the iconic green curved 333 W. Wacker building cross the river.
     "That building does a beautiful job bending around from one branch to another," he said. "We were very conscious of that, to have two curved buildings create this sort of flowing gateway to the south, quite beautiful and elegant. We very much had 333 on our minds when looking at this building."
     Making a large steel parabolic span like that and having it mesh seamlessly into the building took some computing power."Most of the parabolic shapes are framed with large curved bent steel beams, and we were pushing the envelope of a steel a bit," Markese said. "Marrying the steel, concrete and glass in a smooth way took a lot of computer time."
     That, he said, represented the most advanced aspect of the building.
     "The real change in technology was in computer software," he said. "We and the rest of the design team used to plot out those complex curves. All the surfaces come together in smooth, uninterrupted curves. All those surfaces have to have gutters to drain water, heat tracing to melt ice, and we had the ability to think about all that with advanced computer technology...10 years ago that would have been much more difficult."
     Do you worry, I wondered, that all these design nuances will fly past Chicagoans who will just see the parabola and think, "O00, 1950s retro."
     "I never thought of it as retro," Markese said. "Some people will look at the arch and not know any better. But it still looks fresh and modern. It's really more a geometric exercise."
     As is life. Geometry and math and physics. Writing about the design of the building as it goes up, I couldn't help but imagine some journalist in 22nd century Chicago digging the column up to celebrate the building as it goes down.
     "Because the given must be taken," the poet Philip Levine writes. "Because each small spark/must turn to darkness."
     Or, like the old saying relates, less poetically: What goes up must come down.