Some words in support of Bruce Rauner

 

 

     Now, now, let's be fair to Bruce Rauner.
     Given the consistent, utter indifference that the governor has shown to Illinois children, the disabled, the elderly, and anybody in the state who depends upon the government for any kind of assistance whatsoever, except of course for rich businessmen like himself, how much would we really expect him to show sympathy toward a bunch of refugees fleeing the slaughterhouse of Syria? 
     Not a lot, right?
     So we can't be too shocked to see him demanding that Syrian refugees be turned away from Illinois. 
     Yes, he does not actually have that power—none of the Republican governors across the country trying to use the Paris attacks as a pretext to slam their doors to the refugees does, on the flimsy pretext that a Syrian passport used by a refugee was found near the attack site; nobody even knows if a terrorist used it to sneak in, or seized it later. Besides, French-born citizens were also involved, yet we don't seem to be barring the French.
     A trifle, I'm sure, in Bruce Rauner's, I'm-the-boss-so-you-have-to-do-what I say world.
     "Our nation and our state have a shared history of providing safe haven for those displaced by conflict, but the news surrounding the Paris terror attacks reminds us of the all-too-real security threats facing America," someone in Rauner's office speaking for the governor said, in a statement.
     Yeah, a lousy history. American's have always heaped contempt upon immigrants in general and refugees in particular, and in this regard Rauner is only aping the public will. We hate refugees. Always have. 
     We should remember that no refugee group was enthusiastically welcomed in this country. From the Irish in the 1850s onward, they were all diseased sub-humans bringing crime and ways that could never fit into the American spirit. Ditto for the Chinese. And the Italians. And the Eastern Europeans. In the late 1930s, 83 percent of Americans -- almost as close to everybody as you could imagine -- were against changing America's draconian immigration laws to admit the Jews frantic to get out of Germany that was very public about its preparations to kill them. A bill that would have waved in 20,000 German children died in Congress.
     Why? Well, c'mon, they were Jews. Nobody wanted Jews around, and for reasons just as specious as the reasons the governor wants to slam the door on Syrians. The Jews were also seen as dangerous, not to mention oily and crafty and unattractive, with big noses and long beards and a tendency to take jobs that belonged to Americans, scarce with the Depression still winding down. In 1939, the Illinois chapter of the American Medical Association, aided by the patriots at the American Legion, pushed a bill in Springfield that would have banned immigrant doctors from practicing here until they became naturalized citizens, a process that took seven years at the time.
    We are a fearful, selfish, ungenerous people, flattering ourselves on a bigheartedness that was never true and is certainly not true now—ask the 11 million Hispanic immigrants living in permanent rightless limbo.  Or the 100 or so Syrian refugees who have been settled in Chicago the past year, a laughably small number, as is the 10,000 refugees that the United States of Flippin' America is trying to take if they can find states whose governors aren't wetting themselves in fear, which is not a certain proposition.
     And we elected Bruce Rauner, a plutocrat with nine homes and a heart the size of a gumball. Let's not get all weepy now that he acts completely true to form. Besides, one of those Syrians might end up living next to you. And you wouldn't like that. Would you?
     

The media returns fire

     As someone who wrote a book on college pranks, I know that even the most respected institutions are swept with various fads and manias. The media make note of them as curiosities, but it's a mistake to put too much significance on goldfish swallowing or phone booth packing or the latest squishy academic oversensitivity.
     Though that last realm does illustrate the schizophrenic quality of higher education. On one hand, they're preparing students — supposedly — for the rough-and-tumble workforce, where trigger alerts and safe spaces seem like so many teething rings and sippy cups.
     On the other, colleges have become carnivals of liberal ideology so rigid that it borders on a kind of oppression.
     While it was bracing to see the University of Missouri football team wake up from the general anesthesia of sports and drive the president out, the protesters subsequent turning with a snarl against the poor student journalists trying to document their own Mizzou Tahrir Square was chilling. You must see that video of a crazed professor calling for "muscle" to drive out the reporters, lest they . . . I'm not sure what the harm was supposed to be. Make the students protesting in broad daylight in the middle of campus feel observed, I suppose.       My wife called me over to watch the clip, and after I collected my jaw off the floor, I said, in a genuinely shocked little whisper: "Missouri used to be known for its great journalism school."
     Good luck washing that stain off, guys.
     To make things worse, undergraduate media hostility is now a trend. Late last week, Chicago's Loyola University was parroting the errors of Missouri, holding their own solidarity rally, complete with cordon of linked arms students keeping out the media. A stunning piece of hypocrisy since, a) they were exercising the same First Amendment rights they were denying others (for any freshmen reading this: The First Amendment, in the same breath, forbids "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press") and b) if nobody noticed or covered their protest, they'd feel they were victims of a media conspiracy.
     Since college students are free to vent what they feel about the media, it's only fair that the media return the favor.
     So allow me, based, not on biases absorbed from my parents along with my Maypo, but on actual experience, teaching college courses, including one at Loyola.
     College kids don't know shit. The average college student couldn't find his ass with both hands and a map. I once taught a journalism course for the State University of New York's Maritime College. At the end of the final exam, I prefaced the extra credit questions with, "A journalist should have a rough idea of what is going on in the world." One question was: "With the collapse of the Soviet Union, one Communist super power remains. What is it?" Some students guessed "Cuba." Others, "Iraq." Some didn't even hazard an attempt.
     Eight years ago I taught a journalism course at Loyola. The class was on feature writing, and since the most basic feature is a profile, I asked 20 friends to volunteer as subjects, then paired each with a student. The subjects were successful individuals with complex, interesting, colorful lives, from Justice Anne Burke to Phyllis Smith, bartender at the Billy Goat.
     So now I'm reading over my students' completed papers, and one profile, on auctioneer Leslie Hindman, suddenly changes in tone, an obvious, lurching shift. "This is boilerplate," I thought, "lifted from her auction house website." It took 30 seconds to confirm the truth.
     I called the student into the office, where I was joined by the dean, whom I had enlisted for guidance and moral support. School policy said the woman could be expelled. Yet she was indignant, as if she were the victim. "I'm a single mother!" she exclaimed. "I need this degree." I tried to explain that, yeah, the reason she needs the degree is because it means something, or did, and if we let students just turn in swiped material, what have we accomplished? Not that Loyola was ever going to actually expel her, and lose a customer. The dean suggested she just redo the paper, not stealing copy this time. But that deal wasn't sweet enough, apparently, and she dropped the class and flounced off to find a more lenient professor who didn't sweat trifles.
     So Loyola students, a reminder. The media is watching you, yes, but they're not the only ones. Putting your hand over a camera lens can actually bring you into sharp focus, and the picture it presents to the world isn't pretty. The Millennial Generation is famous for one thing: craving praise while shrinking from criticism, just or not. It causes you trouble in the workplace. You can blame the media for that, but you really should be blaming yourselves. Everyone else does.

My Life in Three Songs

     Most days I get downtown through the miracle of Metra which, despite its bad press, is comfortable, generally, on-time, usually, and pleasant, almost always.
      But occasionally I drive, if I have an event at night and don't want to hang around afterward waiting for a milk train that stops at places like Grayland and Mayfair. Such a day was Tuesday, and traffic was slow enough that I had a protracted opportunity to listen to WBEZ. Tony Sarabia had put together  a particularly fascinating morning program, between Jonathan Sachs, the former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, talking about why religious violence is such a betrayal of faith, and my former Sun-Times colleague Jim DeRogatis, offering up his "My Life in Three Songs."
    It's an ongoing series lately on WBEZ where various Chicagoans are asked to summarize their existence in three tunes. At first I thought it an impossible task—lives are complicated, or should be, and not something that can be outlined in 10 minutes of music, or even 100.  The notion seemed to slight both life and music, which has too many great songs to pick just three of anything.  Picking three top Ani DiFranco songs would be an impoverishment of reality.
     But DeRogatis had some interesting selections, and I learned a lot hearing him talk about them, from the fact that he once played in a rock group, opening for the cult band Wire, to the words to Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," one of his picks.
     Maybe, I thought, the exercise is like Haiku — a limited form whose constraints forces you to focus in such a way that bends toward revelation. 
     Besides, I enjoy music too much not to try. It sounds like fun. Though actually trying is harder than it seems.
     DeRogatis said it took him 20 seconds to pick his three songs. My process took a couple of days. First, I had to form an idea what my life was about.  That wasn't too hard. Something about work, certainly. Something about love, and family, and probably sobriety too.  
      The first few songs I considered I almost immediately discarded. It turned out that the degree I liked a song or its quality weren't of primary importance, for this purpose. I don't think I ever loved another song with the immediate fervor that I felt for the Rolling Stones' "Miss You" when I first heard it in 1978 — I can still see my hand snaking out to turn it up on the radio in my parents' silver Dodge Dart 1975 Special Edition while driving down Front Street in Berea, Ohio. It certainly captures the sense of longing I had and have toward absent loved ones.
    But a 1970s Stones song just wasn't right. It turned out that none of the songs I loved the most were really that representative of my life. Some could capture a year — Bob Dylan's "If You See Her, Say Hello," was good for high school. But not much more. Warren Zevon has a dozen songs that are wonderful. But I couldn't describe a third of my life with "Studebaker" or "Genius" or "Disorder in the House." I thought of songs that literally described an aspect of my life's routine — like Elvis Costello's "Every Day I Write the Book." Not a very good song, and too specific. Cheap Trick performing "I Want You To Want Me" live at Budokan? Certainly a rocking song, and an anthem for a newspaper columnist ("I need you to need me") if ever there were.
     Yet...
     Then I thought of the Call's "I Still Believe." It's an anthem, with that sense of holding on to something with your fingertips that every professional journalist has to relate to. The generally sense of plugging away at a lost cause but not giving up. The opening stanza: 

                                         I've been in a cave,
                                         Forty days 

                                         With only a spark

                                         to light my way 

                                         I want to give out

                                         I want to give in 

                                        This is our crime 

                                        This is our sin 

                                        But I still believe....

     That sounds right. Song One down. What's next? I felt I needed something about my wife —  such a huge part of my life — and only two songs could be candidates there. The first was "Bela Lugosi's Dead," by Bauhaus. A clicking, dripping, sensuous early 1980s rock number, from "The Hunger," that became our song when we danced to it on our third date at 950 Lucky Number club in 1983. I tried to get a 12-piece swing band to play it at our wedding, to no avail. But it's a creepy song about vampires (refrain: "I'm dead, I'm dead, I'm dead.")
     Too creepy. No vampires.
     Better the other song, one that, one morning shortly after that third date, came on the radio of my Volvo P1800 early, as I drove ruminatively home: Tom Waits "Ole 55:"               

                                           Well my time went so quickly 

                                           I went lickety-splitly 

                                           down to my old '55. 

                                           As I pulled away slowly. 

                                           Feeling so holy. 

                                           God knows, I was feeling alive.

     Yeah. Maybe you had to be there. Tom Waits is an acquired taste. But he's one of my favorite performers, with poetic words and creative, bang-a-femur-on-a-garbage-can music (though, if you haven't noticed already, with pop songs, it's always words first, music second, though in opera it's the other way around). 
   "Ol' 55" it is, for Song Two. And while it isn't my favorite Tom Waits song — that would be "Hold On" or "Train Song" or "Mr. Siegel" — I think "Ol' 55" does it for its buoyant sense of the world being in my pocket. I feel that a lot, particular in regards to my wife, and so that's probably a better choice than, say, John Cale's version of "Hallelujah," which was also a contender. 
      And the third song? I'd be tempted to go with "Fallen" by Sarah McLachlan. No, too Lilith Fair. "Lust for Life" by Iggy Pop? More danceable, certainly apt. "I'm through with slipping on the sidewalk..."  But Iggy's, well, he's odd and scary and rolled around on broken glass onstage. I never liked him much. Lou Reed was more my style, his pinging "Satellite of Love."
     Then it came to me. Certainly not a great song, in the great song sense. But one that I always loved, on a WXRT live compilation (one of the many songs fantastic live and flat in the studio), one my older son loved, as a toddler. Barely old enough to walk, he would rush into my office and demand it, and I would scoop him up and we'd dance. So there was that, plus a lot of philosophy, an attitude that twines together all the important aspects of my life, family, work, sobriety. And you can dance to it. It's by a local group, Poi Dog Pondering, a big, sprawling, multi-racial funtime band. So "Complicated" is Song Three, for its lyrics by Frank Orrall,  who, as an added bonus, was kind enough to permit me to reprint these lines in my next book, where they fit perfectly:

                                            Sorrow is an angel

                                            That comes to you in blue light

                                            And shows you what is wrong

                                            Just to see if you'll set it right

                                            And I've fucked up so many times in my life

                                            That I want to get it right this time.

    So those are the three songs that limn my life, such as it is. What are yours, and why? 


    I will be on WBEZ, talking about this with Tony Sarabia, the day after Thanksgiving, Friday, Nov. 27, shortly after 9 a.m. 
       

ISIS and its handmaidens

     Why do these attacks occur?
     What is the point?
     To strike out at a society they hate, obviously. You have to hate a particular community a lot to randomly kill its members, innocent people out enjoying themselves on a mild Friday evening at a restaurant or a concert. 
     For revenge? Certainly. These groups, like bullies and aggressors everywhere, see their own suffering in crystal clarity, ignoring the suffering they inflicted on others that started the cycle in the first place. 
      But is that it? A stab at the West? Toward what end? What is supposed to happen? There is of course a larger purpose, and the purpose it to widen the rift between Western culture and the Muslim world. France is 10 percent Muslim, and those people, uncomfortable already, have to be less comfortable this morning. That is the whole idea.  The glittering attractions of Western culture, its freedoms and pleasures, spell the end for oppressive, fear-based medieval theologies. They know that and are locked in a desperate, losing battle, trying to forestall the inevitable. 
    But radical Muslims are not the only haters in the world. Americans who hate Muslims, of whom there are many, have been leaping to, for want of a better word, glory in this latest atrocity, the confirmation of all they already believe. 
     "Europe is reaping the stupidity of allowing the muslims to live in their country..." one of my readers emailed me almost immediately Friday night. "England has made the same mistake,; all of the country estates are being bought by arab money and being taken over by muslims. Germany just allowed half a million of these people into their country, and our secy of state kerry said we should take in a couple hundred thousand as well... It defies all reason, but this is what happens when the common man is kept out of the decision making in the world and its turned over to elitists politicians and far left liberal media conglomerates...."
     You get the point. It goes on, ending, "Annihilation of Isis and their cousins..."
     "And their cousins"? Who would that be? The rest of the 1.2 billion Muslims, perhaps?
     There is a symbiosis among haters, each helps the other in cooperative effort. They hold hands and a flash of recognition goes 'round the world. Heartless radical Islamic murderers commit these horrible acts and here, their servants around the world leap up and say, "Yes! Exactly! This is what I've been saying! This is what they're all about! All of them! Let's get them! Let's be just like them!"
     These attacks offer a kind of permission, a validation for the hate that is already in their hearts. They feel terror envy, and if the actual perpetrators of the evil are not available, well, here's somebody who looks quite like them, and of the same faith too. And isn't that the basic message of prejudice: These people are all the same; one is as good as another. The killers obviously believe that. And many among us, alas, believe it too.
     They're both wrong. And those who can see that have a duty. Most of us will never have the chance to strike at ISIS or defeat terrorism in a real and direct way, other than to be patriotic citizens of the United States, which is battling ISIS et al as best it can. But we will all encounter terror's cheerleaders, its handmaidens, the bigots and fearful hate mongers in our own country who leap to dance in the street over this, in their way, believing, mistakenly, that now is the time when their prejudice is back in fashion, and now is the time when they can lash out at the local mosque, and now is the time when they can condemn the refugees who are fleeing from this very terror. They think this is the moment to suspend America's liberties, to halt the inclusion that is the hallmark of Western culture—to stifle the very thing that ISIS wants stifled—when in reality it is at moments like this when we must cling to both even more tightly, because they got us this far against worse foes than this. The haters have always been with us, a fifth column behind our lines, collaborating with whomever our enemies happen to be, working in concert to undermine our precious freedoms.  Those people are everywhere, and we can and must resist the urge to join them, must hold firm and push back, as they try to carry out the wishes of the people who perpetrate the kind of madness we saw in Paris Friday night.

Shortie raincoats are the gong of doom

     "What do you see that I don't?" my wife asked, as we snaked forward in line Thursday morning, waiting to get out of the Stygian platform at Union Station. I had whipped out my cell phone and taken the photo above. She hates that. Her heart bleeds for whoever I take a picture of—even if they don't notice I'm taking a picture. Even though the odds of their seeing themselves on this blog are miniscule. What if they did? The horror.
     "The rain coat," I replied.  Even worse. I was suggesting something amiss about someone else. I can be a cruel bastard that way.
     "What about it?" she asked, bristling.
     "It's hideous. I hate them."
     "I think it's stylish," she countered, mounting a defense in her capacity as Counsel for Everyone Else.
    I sighed. "I wrote a column, years ago," I said. "That's explain better than I can." It's a bit sophomoric; I was young. But maybe it'll help convince her...no, that's impossible. At least then maybe it'll entertain you. 
   
     Never wear a short coat. 

     I'm sorry to jump into my subject like that, without the requisite string-plucking, throat-clearing and preliminary pontification we columnists like to indulge in before we get down to the matter at hand.
     But this is so important, and some harried people just read the first line and move on, that I want to at least plant the seed of reason if I possibly can.
     Short coats are hideous.
     You know the type of coat I mean. Not snazzy ski jackets that flare out below the waist. Not bomber jackets or Eisenhower jackets, or anything else that's vaguely outdoorsy or has elastic along the bottom.
     I mean those Navy pea coats. And dress cloth coats that just happen to peter out about a foot above where they're supposed to. Short coats, on men. The horror.
     STOP WEARING SHORT COATS NOW!
     I just came back from getting coffee. There was a guy at the elevator wearing a sort of blue double-breasted pea coat. It went down to his upper thigh, barely covering his pelvis. He looked like the mascot for a Dutch cocoa company who had misplaced his wooden shoes. He looked ridiculous. I almost told him so, just out of basic human sympathy. But he was about 6foot-2 (which made the coat look even worse).
     Short raincoats are the lowest rung of doom.
     You ever see a guy wearing one of those beige shortie trench coats? The kind without a belt? It breaks your heart. You know his whole life story, just from the coat. The entire sad, squeaked-through-high-school-only-to-crash-and-burn-in-junior-college- and-now-he 's-selling-industrial-glovewear-and-doesn't-date-much-so-no-one's-around-who-cares-enough-to-tell-him-about-how-bad-the-short-coat-looks saga.
     And lose the watch caps while you're at it.
     I will grant you that cold weather headgear is tough. Military caps look good, but how many police officers and Marine lieutenants are there? After that is a quick slide downhill. I myself wear a cloth cap that makes me look like I just passed the lice exam at Ellis Island and am waiting for a tug to the Lower East Side.
     But at least it isn't a knit watch cap. If you're unloading barrels of whale blubber from a tramp steamer on a cold night in Copenhagen, I suppose they're all right, but otherwise knit caps make you look like Rocky Balboa's dim older brother.
     The only thing watch caps have going for them is they're cheaper than the equally horrific massive fur hats with the flaps sticking straight out. Again, fine in context; fine if you're skinning a reindeer in Lapland. Bad if you're running into the White Hen on Diversey.
     Maybe these feelings about short coats betray me as an old person. I notice that the pre-real-job crowd seems to favor what was once considered dorky: thick Buddy Holly glasses, grotesque polyester fabrics and yes, shortie coats, particularly those Navy surplus jobs that cost about $20 on Belmont Avenue.
     But they should be careful. The all-forgiving perfume of youth fades in time, and you should have abandoned your fashion quirks by then or face a lifetime of ridicule. When I was young, we used to wear green Army surplus fatigue pants. I thought they looked fine. Now I know fatigues would make me look like a man who spent the night under a trestle, so I wouldn't wear them to paint the house.
        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 10, 1998

Caitlyn Jenner: "We can talk about this"

 

Caitlyn Jenner (photo courtesy of Kat Fitzgerald)

      Caitlyn Jenner, former Olympic champion, current reality TV star and symbol of America's shifting sense of gender, spoke Thursday at the Hilton Chicago.
     "What I have learned in the past six months," said Jenner, referring to the time since Diane Sawyer's profile of her on ABC in April and her debut on the cover of Vanity Fair in July, "is how many good people are in this community ... it's really been overwhelming."
     Jenner's appearance was her first since receiving the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the ESPYs in July. The luncheon was to benefit Chicago House, a residence for transgender people in Edgewater, and the TransLife Center, its program offering social services and job placement.
     Some 700,000 Americans are thought to be transgender, or about 0.2 percent of the U.S. population. Though they face intense discrimination and violence and their unemployment rate is double the national average, public attention in recent months has focused not on their struggles but on debates within school districts about where transgender teens should change for gym and which restrooms they should use — issues Jenner avoided.
     Instead, she insisted she is not a spokesperson for the community. "No. I'm a spokesperson for my story. It's the only thing I can tell. It's the only thing I know." That said, she hopes others will follow her example. "Open up this conversation. We can talk about this. It's part of society. It's part of humanity."
     Jenner has dealt with this since she was a young boy in Tarrytown, New York.
     "I want people to know this story didn't just happen," she said. "For me, it's been a lifetime. When I was a child, 8 or 9 years old, I used to sneak into my mom's closet, cross-dress when they weren't around."
     Sports, to that boy, "was my place to hide."
     After winning the decathlon in the 1976 Montreal Olympics, Jenner plunged into a job as a TV announcer, embraced his celebrity lifestyle, all the while keeping "this woman living inside" of him hidden from a public that idolized him as a hero. She said that in the mid-1980s the New York Times was preparing a story about Jenner being a cross-dresser, but that her PR team managed to pressure the newspaper to abandon it.
     She was received with a standing ovation by the audience of 1,000, although some transgender women in attendance grumbled that Jenner, for all her talk of giving back, took an honorarium, which Chicago House confirmed. It would not verify the amount, said on good authority to be $150,000. The event raised $250,000.
     "I have never had one negative comment in six months," she said. "As long as I don't go online. What a mess."
     Indeed, tweeting Jenner's remarks drew a howling chorus either insisting she is still a man (like most transgender women, Jenner has not had gender reassignment surgery) or bringing up a fatal traffic accident she was involved in earlier this year. Although I couldn't help but notice that the most vigorous tweeter, whose Twitter ID is "His Names Bruce" has sent out 27,700 tweets passionately condemning Jenner, including thousands of clonic repetitions of "His name is Bruce and he's a man" and gained just 29 followers for his troubles. That's scary, sad and reassuring in equal measure.
     Listening to Jenner speak, I tried to gauge my own reaction. She did not seem as aware as she should be that she is the beneficiary much more than the instigator of these changes in society. She fought the truth leaking out, tooth and nail, until TMZ dragged her out of the closet. Plus, well, it wasn't so much that Bruce Jenner is now a woman, but a woman with lots of plastic surgery, with that pinched, vulpine, Joan Rivers face. One of the cultural conundrums of this transgender moment is that they're embracing a vision of femininity that could be viewed as outmoded, as a man's view of what being a woman means, one that many other women reject as superficial. Is a small nose and big breasts really necessary to be a woman? Many don't think so, but Jenner obviously does, and given her role in "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" that can't come as a shock.
     Or is that carping? Contempt for the media peppered Jenner's talk, and considering her past experience with paparazzi, who made her life "hell," perhaps she earned that right.
     For those confused by all this — sometimes me, sometimes even Jenner, who, listing her privileges, began a sentence, "I am a white guy ..." then caught herself, adding, "was" then admitting "I can even mess up." — what's happening here should be laid out. The realm of people who get to play on the playground, unharassed, is expanding. Women got onto the playground, then blacks, then gays, and now transgender students can swing on the swings without fear of being beaten up, at least in theory. The rest, as Hillel said, is commentary.
     For anyone still under the illusion that this is still a marginal group, the event was sponsored by BMO-Harris Bank, Walgreens, Pepsico, Aon, the Chicago Community Trust, the Chicago Sun-Times Trust, among other gilt-edged organizations.

Wozzeck: The shock of the (90-year-old) new

 David Portillo as Andres,
 Photo courtesy of the Lyric Opera. 

I realize that today's discussion about Alban Berg's Wozzeck, currently on stage at the Lyric Opera, will not be everyone's cup of tea.  But the opera puzzled and irked me and, trying to make sense of the thing, I turned to the Lyric's General Director, Anthony Freud, for help. He was such a sport, that while we sail off into deep waters, I hope you will either tag along with us or, if you do not care to, forgive me and show up tomorrow, when we'll be hearing what Caitlyn Jenner has to say on her visit to Chicago. 

     The Magic Flute is beautiful and happy. Madame Butterfly is beautiful but not happy. And Alban Berg's Wozzeck is neither beautiful nor happy, though others disagree, at least about the "beautiful" part. The critics at both Chicago papers raved about it. 
    What did they hear that I didn't?
    I last experienced—I almost said "endured"—Wozzeck when the Lyric performed it 23 years ago and,  not to mince words, hated it. It struck me as shrill and ugly, an ordeal imposed upon the audience for reasons mysterious.
     It would be exaggerating to say I enjoyed it more on my second viewing, but I disliked it less, and  found myself plunged into thought, even as it was unfolding, asking questions like, "Why are they doing this?" then "Why am I seeing it?" and "How can people like this?"
    The plot, thin as it is, matters more than the plots of most operas. It is about a common soldier, Wozzeck, living a life of regimented brutality as the servant of the swinish Captain. His love, Marie, the mother of his child, is canoodling a vile Drum Major. A team of grim doctors gleefully anticipates the fame that will be theirs when Wozzeck's condition, whatever it is, is fully dissected. Spoiler alert: it does not end well.
     The music is atonal, meaning that there are not lush harmonies that swell and follow rhythmic patters we associate with songs. There is nothing to hum. I could easily have shrugged it off as the kind of eat-you-peas homework plucked out of the long history of opera that the Lyric feels compelled to inflict upon its audience, out of a strange compulsion to shine its light into the darkest corner of the canon, the way art museums intersperse their Monet and Van Gogh and Renoir shows with the occasional rude black and white slashing shock of Franz Kline. 

     That seemed simplistic. I beseeched the Lyric's general

Anthony Freud

director, Anthony Freud, asking him to help me. 
      "Why are we doing it?" Freud mused. "I think it is, in common with all great art, about the human condition,  about post-traumatic stress disorder, about poverty, about the relationship between an oppressive society and and oppressive system, and about people making moral judgements. In my mind, it's an incredibly topical story."
     "So it's about modernity?" I blubbered. The romantic age could be expressed with murmuring Bach harmonies but once you started gassing people in trenches you required something that sounds as awful as the reality it represents?
     "If you are talking about music, that's completely subjective," Freud replied. "You are entitled to find it ugly. I find it incredibly expressive, moment by moment, describing the characters' thoughts, feelings, relationships. I think there is a lot of really beautiful music."
     Freud's reference to the characters' thoughts "moment by moment," made me think of James Joyce, and I received a whiff of the philistinism that might be underlying my complaint with Wozzeck. If somebody told me that, heck, why chew on Ulysses, where you have to consult Cliff's Notes just to realize somebody is taking a piss, when you can slurp down a dozen Agatha Christie mysteries, one after another, like milkshakes?  And the answer is that Joyce is trying to replicate the sweat and funk of granular reality in words, which is not always pretty but ultimately worth the heavy lifting. Not everything in life is fun and beautiful. Why should art be?
     But Freud said there is beauty aplenty in Wozzeck,  if you know where to find it.
    "All of Marie's music is really lyrical, " he said. "The third scene of Act 1, the opening of act 3, very beautiful; a kind of aria in the 3rd scene — the way Berg writes for Wozzeck is totally different, music capturing the jagged, angular moment." 
    That's it, isn't it? If reality were one long carnival, we could move happily from Puccini to Mozart and back. But the reality of war and death jars, and so does Wozzeck. My go-to-man on these issues, Henry W. Simon, says it quite well.

    Berg and his operas Wozzeck and Lulu epitomizes one aspect of a certain time and place. Wozzeck was conceived during World War I; its composition was completed immediately after that war; and it received its first stage performance, in Berlin, in 1925. It deeply stirred all of Middle Europe of that period. And that period was the period of Dr. Sigmund Freud, the period of Franz Kafka, the period of the rise of National Socialism. In music it was the period that saw the most violent breakdown of old ideas of melody—and, even more, of harmony.  It was revolutionary, it was intellectually curious, it was unstable, and it reflected the sickness of the German soul. 

    But Freud—the director, not the doctor—would not yield the field on the loveliness of the piece.

"The orchestral interlude, the passacaglia  between the penultimate scene and the final scene, Wozzeck has just been drowned and we're about to be confronted with the horror of the ending: all we can hope for in the future is more of the same," said Freud. "It is a catharsis,  in an orchestral interlude, up to that point are incredibly short, 20 and 30 seconds, here we have an emotional climax of the piece that is extraordinarily expressive, to my ears, an intensely emotional passage, lasting three or four minutes, an eternity in the context of Wozzeck. In it, I hear Puccini, I hear Mahler, I hear a music founded in Romanticism. I think Berg constantly shifts, the whole idea of atonality means no more music anchored in predictable keys or series of patterns. It's completely free to respond moment by moment to characters ' thoughts, actions, it's full of tune but the tunes last three seconds rather than 30 seconds. 
     If you consider it was created in 1925, it was a time of shock in art, and Wozzeck stands out because, while we came to embrace certain radical works, lessening their impact, it still has a sting. 
    "Picasso's portraits, when they were created regarded as utterly radical and offensive," said Freud. "Now they possess a classicism of their own ,compared to what has happened to visual arts since. One of extraordinary things about Wozzeck, a piece 90 years old next month,, is this: in which other art form would a 90 year piece be regarded as modern? Yet it is radical. It is revolutionary. Berg forged ahead in way he composed, in way he structured , but it is anchored in tradition. He is not rejecting tradition. He values his inheritance, but sees himself as a champion of moving that inheritance in new directions....It is now nearly 100 years old, yet it speaks to us as if it were written today. Our our ears are more accustomed to more comfortable sounds, but actually I think Beethoven,  in his day, was as radical as Berg."
    Beethoven died nearly a century before the premiere of Wozzeck. Maybe that's the problem. At 90 years old, Wozzeck is too new to be comfortable, not yet. But that's coming. Maybe in 2115, a dilettante-yet-unborn will emerge from the Civic Opera House, blinking into the day after seeing Pffft! an opera composed in 2020 using chainsaws and chickens in vises, and think. "Heck, what was that? Why can't they put on something fun, a good old classic opera, like Wozzeck?" Something to look forward to.

To be honest, after talking to Anthony Freud, I'm tempted to see it again, just to see if I can draw more out of it. Third time's the charm. For those similarly inclined, "Wozzeck," three shows remain: Nov. 12, 16 and 21.