Friday, January 15, 2016

Lois Weisberg: "A flair for life"

Life magazine, Aug. 6, 1956
     

     I was just finishing up my column Thursday morning when my boss stuck his head in my office and told me that Lois Weisberg had died, and could I write her obit? I said sorry, I've got this column to finish, but knew that I was just ducking trying to grasp her long, complicated career. I had read Malcolm Gladwell's "Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg" in the New Yorker years earlier and had no desire to compete with him. But 15 minutes later I finished up the column, guilt set in, and I went after him and told him I'd do it. It made for a full day, but Fran Spielman did yeoman's work helping out, which is why she has a joint byline. The column also ran, but I'll post that here tomorrow.

By Neil Steinberg and Fran Spielman

     She had the respect of both Harold Washington and Richard M. Daley and was friends with both Lenny Bruce and Maggie Daley. She was comfortable hitting up John D. MacArthur personally for money. She was lauded in the New Yorker and has a credit on the liner notes of Allen Ginsberg's 1959 recording of "Howl."
     Oh, and Lois Weisberg had a hand in creating many of the cultural institutions that make the city of Chicago such a vibrant place.
     Ms. Weisberg, 90, who died Wednesday at her home in Florida, was the tireless, idea-spouting, chain-smoking (before she gave it up) commissioner of cultural affairs through most of Daley's administration.
     From 1989 to 2011, she had a hand in almost everything that lent sparkle to the city, from helping create Millennium Park to re-opening Navy Pier as a tourist mecca to suggesting to Maggie Daley that the city turn a white elephant Loop embarrassment, the grassy field of Block 37, into Gallery 37, an artistic mecca for school kids. She turned the abandoned Chicago Public Library main building into the event-packed Chicago Cultural Center, made "Taste of Chicago" a success, and oversaw creation of the Blues Festival and the Gospel Festival.
     "Most of us make an effort to think outside the box now and then," said Kimberly Costello Keefe, who served under her in the Department of Cultural Affairs. "It was no effort at all for Lois, who never really saw or understood the box to begin with. Nothing was off limits, unthinkable, impossible and that’s why her legacy is so broad and diverse."
     In the mid-1970s, aghast at Chicago's neglected public parks, then "considered rubble-filled, dangerous political fiefdoms," Ms. Weisberg formed Friends of the Parks. She single-handedly saved the South Shore Line from Chicago to South Bend by pressuring Rep. Sidney Yates and organizing school trips to the Dunes to show the line's value.
     "Lois has this thing — whatever it is — that brings people together," wrote Malcolm Gladwell, in a worshipful profile, "Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg," in the New Yorker in 1999, the year she brought an obscure Swiss event, "Cows on Parade" to Chicago.
     Not everything she touched worked, of course. The follow up to the cows, bringing ping-pong tables to city streets the next year, failed to come near its success. She was also behind the "complete chaos" of the Bears 1985 Super Bowl victory parade, though — Rahm Emanuel take note — she admitted she made a mistake, by locating the parade on LaSalle Street and preparing for 150,000 spectators. Half a million showed up.
     
"I should have figured out what would happen.," she said.
     Bestowed with awards and tributes, she had the rare honor, in 2006, of being declared the first "Legendary Landmark" by the Landscape Preservation Council of Illinois.
     "Since she wasn't a building, they honored her body," Mary Cameron Fry wrote in the Sun-Times.
     Lois Porges was born on the West Side of Chicago, daughter of Mortimer and Jessie Porges. Her father was an assistant attorney general for Illinois, her mother was a housewife. She grew up in Austin and went to Austin High School. She took elocution lessons and at 16 was the only teen in a local theater group.
     "She was always, always interested in the theater, always," said her sister, June Rosner.
     Ms. Weisberg first attended University of Illinois, then transferred to Northwestern University, graduating in 1946. There she met Leonard Solomon, a pharmacy student, and they married shortly after graduation, making newspaper columnist Irv Kupcinet, who was married to Solomon's sister, Essee, her brother-in-law, and Kup offered entry into the world of Chicago celebrity and theater.
    She was doing radio plays with her childhood friend, Sondra Gair, and became interested in George Bernard Shaw. She then noticed his centennial, July 26, 1956, was nearing, and would be uncelebrated in Chicago. So she waylaid John D. MacArthur at the Pump Room and squeezed $10,000 from him, persuaded the city's adult education council to let her throw a Shaw birthday party for 800 at the Hotel Sherman, complete with Shavian vegetarian lunch. Norman Thomas and William Saroyan spoke, and the event drew notice in Life magazine.
     "That's how it started," she once said.
     Her home on Scott Street turned into a salon for writers and musicians and artists. Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane would show up. Her parties might have Dizzy Gillespie and Ralph Ellison. William Friedkin, who would go on to direct "The Exorcist" and "The French Connection" stopped by often. Arthur C. Clarke, whom she met at a science fiction convention, was in town once, and she paired him up with another writer who happened to be here, Isaac Asimov. In 1959, she sponsored beat poet Allen Ginsberg to visit the city, and recorded him reading "Howl" — "Lois Solomon" is credited on the album's liner notes. Off-color comic Lenny Bruce was a houseguest, to the consternation of her mother, who came to call.
     "Bruce had been in the shower and opened the door wearing only a towel," Ms. Weisberg later recalled.
     She and Solomon divorced, and in 1962 she married Bernard Weisberg, a well known civil liberties lawyer who became a federal magistrate.
     In 1975, Ms. Weisberg was director of development for Business and Professional People for the Public Interest. She read a magazine article about the decline of Chicago's park system and snapped into action, creating Friends of the Parks, leading a volunteer cleanup of Jackson Park.
     "People need the parks as much as they need bread," Ms. Weisberg said, when honored in 1995 for the group's creation. "They are probably the most important recreational part of life of any city."
     She was also executive director for the Chicago Council of Lawyers.
     She joined Mayor Harold Washington's staff in 1983 as executive director of special events, though one of her first events — Washington's birthday party at McCormick Place — did not go smoothly. Wheeling out a giant birthday cake, Ms. Weisberg realized they didn't have a knife to cut it. Grabbing a convenient hammer, she extended it, smiling, toward the mayor, and was wrestled away by his security detail, who had no idea who she was.
     She "figured out every detail" of his second inauguration in 1987, including handing out packets of seeds to honor Chicago's "city in a garden" slogan.
     "We want them to be a symbol of the birth of a new Chicago," she said at the time.
     In July, 1987 she quit, saying she was "completely drained after four years in a pressure cooker" and wanted to spend more time with her family. But in 1989 Daley appointed her head of his new Cultural Affairs Department.
     "What an odd pairing. They worked very fruitfully together for a very long time," said her son, Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of Slate. "Their partnership was a marriage of strange bedfellows. Daley saw the good she did for the city and realized those weren't results he could get any other way. She found him open in ways she didn't expect to her unconventional approach to government."
     In 1991, Ms. Weisberg oversaw the transition of the city's 1897 landmark central library on Michigan Avenue to the Chicago Cultural Center.
     "It must be a place where families and people of all ages can have the opportunity to partake in free cultural programs in the visual arts, dance, music and theater," she said.
     In 1999, her "Cows on Parade" brought an estimated $200 million in commerce to the city. She created local art fairs and street festivals, and brought public dancing to summer evenings.
     "If you're talking city arts festivals, exhibits, concerts, grass-roots arts funding, you're talking Lois Weisberg," M.W. Newman wrote in the Sun-Times in 1991 calling her "the den mother of the arts."
     In January, 2011, when Daley was merging the Department of Cultural Affairs with the Department of Special Events, Ms. Weisberg quit.
     "One of the main reasons I am leaving is that I am angry about the way the mayor has treated me," Weisberg told the Tribune. "Not to ask me about [the merger], not to get any input from me about something like this merger, and about privatizing the festivals, strikes me as just wrong."
     She had also been under pressure for her way of connecting people and making hires, which was not in keeping with Shakman restrictions.
     In addition to Jacob Weisberg, survivors include Joseph, her other son from her marriage to Bernard Weisberg, as well a daughter from her marriage to Leonard Solomon, Kiki Ellenby, eight grandchildren and three great grandchildren, as well as her sister, June Rosner. Her daughter Jerilyn Fyffe died in 2011.
     What was Lois Weisberg's secret that allowed her to live such a full life?
     "She just had a flair, a flair for life," said Rosner. "She always had these wonderful ideas."
     "She didn't understand the obstacles and difficulties," said Jacob Weisberg. " "She had a one of a kind talent for making things happen. She thought a good idea was a powerful force in the world."
     Funeral services will be Monday 1:30 p.m. at Anshe Emet Synagogue in Chicago.

Thursday, January 14, 2016

Powerball isn't trying to make you happy


     Sometimes, the simplest question will help bring clarity. I wrote a column Monday celebrating the simply joy of blowing two bucks on Powerball. Then Rosemarie, a regular reader, asked this:
I enjoyed your "Surrendering to Powerball" column and will put to you a question that has long baffled me: Instead of making it more difficult to win — as they have recently done — by giving only one person (or two) a $5 million or $18 million Powerball (or Lotto or ...) prize, why not give $1 million or $6 million to 100 or 500 individuals? It would seem to invite more participants and therefore more revenue from the multiplied interested by doing this. 
A fair question. I thought about it, and answered:
The reason, I imagine, is that bigger pots draw in more players, which draws in more money. The purpose of these lotteries is not to benefit the winners — were that the case, you're right, it would make more sense to give away a thousand million dollar prizes. The purpose is to squeeze more money out of the public. Hence the one billion dollar prize.
     Evidence of the utter irrationality of humans. Because winning $1.6 billion, while no doubt an occasion for joy for the several people who won it Wednesday night, would no doubt have tremendous stresses as well, as a few regular schlebs sudden find themselves in charge of vast fortunes. It could be argued that winning a much smaller sum — say $200,000 — would provide all the bill-killing benefits, with none of the who-should-run-my-foundation? headaches, and do for hundreds if not thousands of people.
     Which means, were people thinking clearly, they'd flock to put their money down trying to win something like the Lucky Day Lotto run by the Illinois lottery, whose odds of winning a $200,000 payout are one in 1.2 million, and avoid Powerball with its 1 in 292 million odds that 44 states working in concert can't seem to win more than once every few months.
     But they're not thinking clearly, are they? They're dreaming. And while I stand by my earlier epiphany that it can be fun to snap up a ticket now and then, that doesn't change the greater truth: the purpose of Powerball is to take your money, not give money to you.

     

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Fear and Loathing and Sean Penn


     A few days before Sean Penn's interview with drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo, hit the Internet, I was talking with my younger son about gonzo journalism.
     He had asked if "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" is worth reading, and I said yes, it is: very funny, assuming you can get past all the drinking and drug use. Hunter S. Thompson's personality and style was so strong people tended to overlook the fact that he was a drug addict and alcoholic.
     Of course gonzo journalism is dated, a relic of the days when writers were the oracles, the gatekeepers. A little injecting yourself into a story can go a long way. While it can work when the subject matter is inconsequential, like the motorcycle race and district attorney's convention at the heart of "Fear and Loathing," when you have a truly important topic, gonzo journalism reveals its flaws. Nobody cares that your luggage got lost on the way to interview Vladimir Putin. I had just read "The Fight" by Norman Mailer, who goes to Zaire for the 1974 Muhammad Ali/George Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle." Mailer's ego blocks out the sun; he refers to himself in third person:

     Before the drive, they stopped, however, at Kin's Casino, and there each man lost a little at Black Jack. That was about the way Norman wanted it. He was feeling empty — the hour in the Press Room of the Memling had been no good for n'golo. To lose therefore, was a confirmation of his views on the relation of vital force to gambling. Feeling low in luck, he would just as soon squander this bad luck at the Casino...
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Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Not so good a time after all

Ivan Albright painted a series of self-portraits at the end of his life.
 
     To write is to err, as I say when a reader points out one of my blunders with an excess of glee. Mistakes inevitably happen when you put words together and hastily poke them in the public eye, and the writer who takes too much pleasure in another writer's gaffe is mocking someone today for something he may very well do tomorrow.
     That said, an innocent whopper showed up deep in the New York Times Monday that merits sharing. In the Arts section, page three, the "Arts, Briefly" column. Compiled by Andrew R. Chow, which means maybe he wrote it, maybe he didn't. Under the headline "Saluting David Bowie At Carnegie Hall."
     The badly-timed, unfortunately-worded opening sentence reads:
     "It's a good time to be David Bowie, below. He just celebrated his 69th birthday, released an album, "Blackstar," and has a show, "Lazarus," running off Broadway."
     Ouch. Bowie was also dead, or nearly, when the above was written, though of course the author, like the rest of us, had no idea.
     Which is worth relating, both for the rueful chuckle it might draw, and to show how little we really know of celebrities, though we pretend otherwise. We imagine them living large when, quite often, they're not. In this case, Bowie wasn't living at all. 
    My immediate thoughts on David Bowie's passing were posted here yesterday morning. But in the afternoon, polishing them for Tuesday's newspaper, I started this way:
     Of course the public never knew David Bowie was sick. A man who controlled his image so artfully, so thoroughly, who moved from one personage to another and was famous and adored for nearly half a century, well, naturally, he'd slip away without fanfare, leaving us to burst into applause to an empty stage.
     Which was the tack my colleague Rick Morrissey took, praising his silence in the face of illness, as opposed to "the compulsion to make one's cancer fight  a tent revival."  
     A sharp line. And the sort of thing that doesn't get said much, because being sick grants people license to share away, and they do, with varying degrees of tact and skill. 
     Though sharp lines also prick. Even as I was applauding Rick, I had to pause, first thinking of when my alcoholism memoir came out, and some idiot at the Tribune wrote a column saying, in essence, "Gee, where's my addiction, so I can get a book contract?" Making writing such a book seem boorish. A tarter version of the sentiment lauding Bowie for keeping mum (I responded to him with something along the lines of, "You know, Anne Frank did very well with her book, too, though I would hesitate, if I were you, from envying her publishing success too much, because there are other factors you are not considering.")
     The idea that too many are too public about being sick ignores the value of writing about illness. And it lumps together all the sick individuals posting graphic updates from their hospital rooms on Facebook with creative works like Evan Handler's novel of surviving cancer despite the ham-handed care he gets at Sloan-Kettering, "Time on Fire." I give it to every friend who gets cancer, because it's both funny and useful.
     Yes, there's a lot of that going around. But there are a lot of babies being born, yet reacting to your neighbor's infant with, "What? Another?!" is both rude and short-sighted. The world need babies, news, memoirs. First, those might be of interest to people who are not yourself, other people, with other needs and interests — bulletin: you are not the only person in the world. And second, they're obviously of value to the person writing them. And how much should a healthy person really complain about something bringing comfort to the sick? Nobody forces you to read it.
    Third, there is a general value to publicizing illness, in that it takes away stigma. People didn't talk of having cancer, not because they were being discreet, but out of shame. It was a seen as a death sentence and a personal failing. Just as gay people stepped out of the closet to demand funding for HIV research and civil rights for themselves, so people who talk about their illnesses normalize them, and remind us that sickness is part of the life, and deserves attention.
    Bowie's secrecy regarding his illness was characteristic — his art was public, his private life was, well, very private. And in this era, it was an amazing feat, one few celebrities could pull off. But like orange hair, just because it looked good on Bowie doesn't mean everyone should do the same. For instance, Roger Ebert's public battle with cancer was also characteristic, for him, perfectly in keeping with his life of elegant introspection and bracing candor, and it provided a moving denouement that in some ways was as culturally significant as his film criticism. Should he have kept it to himself, just to spare us a jarring picture in Esquire? The brutal full-face portrait was important, thought it wasn't everyone's idea of a magazine photo. 
     A writer is allowed his subject, her field of interest. For me, when I get sick, my guess is that I will try to keep it to myself, not out of reluctance to join the packed tent revival, but out of the feeling that Roger Ebert has already covered this ground, and far better than I ever could.  Of course, you never can tell what you'll do until you're there. Chicago artist Ivan Albright painted self-portraits right up to the time he died. They're hanging in the Art Institute.



Monday, January 11, 2016

David Bowie: Bottomless cool you could dance to.



     David Bowie's son confirmed that the rock star died Jan. 10 after an 18-month battle with cancer.

     David Bowie helped shape my world.
     When I was 16, I was a junior counselor at a summer camp in Ohio. We had a small turntable and just a couple records, if I recall correctly: one was Bowie's "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars." We played it continually, all summer. 
      By fall I was a Bowie fan, for his flair, the drama of his music—"Ziggy Stardust" is a dark tale of apocalypse and murder, a theme continued on "Diamond Dogs." His bleak worldview helped me navigate the self-generated crisis of adolescence. I remember coming home from high school, putting on the "David Live at Tower Philadelphia" album to the "Diamond Dogs" track, clapping on a pair of headphones and crawling under the desk to listen at full volume. 
     "This ain't rock and roll," he cried. "This is genocide!" 
     I have no idea what that meant, but it sounded good. Plus Bowie was cool, so fabulously hip that just listening to him imparted a bit of contact coolness, even to a chubby Ohio teen with a bowl haircut. 
     The album that came out when I was a senior, "Low," is not his most famous — half the songs are instrumentals, winding, jazzy Brian Eno-influenced numbers. But his "Always Crashing in the Same Car" certainly spoke to me—I wrecked both my parents' cars—and "Be My Wife" certainly did. "Sometimes I get so lonely," he sang. "Sometimes I get nowhere."
     I only saw him sing once, in 1980. He was touring for his "Berlin" album. In my recollection, he stood motionless behind a synthesizer and never so much as said, "Hello Cleveland!" True to form—he actually disliked having to perform—but also disappointing, as a fan, because Bowie was one of those rare stars, like Bruce Springsteen, who you wanted to look back at you. He never did, an artist lost in his art or, maybe, just too aloof. 
     Bowie kept putting out hit albums. "Heroes" was another one of those songs that was a soundtrack to my life. "You, you can be queen. And I, I'll drink all the time..."
    His star kept getting bigger. "Let's Dance" was elegant and sinuous, showing a song could be a hit and have a beat while avoiding the idiocy of disco. And then he just went away, living on some island, it was said, with his wife, the Somali fashion model  Iman.
    Bowie acted in movies—"The Man Who Fell to Earth"—that were strange and wonderful. 
    In recent years, he returned. New music. A retrospective of his life that toured world museums, a living scrapbook, tribute and not coincidentally, record promotion. He always was the consummate businessman. People lined up for hours to see it at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
    I did too, not so much in tribute to Bowie or my teenage self, but because my oldest son, Ross, loves him.  The boys grew up watching "Labyrinth," a kid's movie that had Bowie playing a goblin king to a teenage Jennifer Connelly and the Muppets.  He did that sort of off-beat thing—he was cool enough to pull it off, whether singing "Little Drummer Boy" as a duet with Bing Crosby, of all people, or recording  Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. 
     I remember Ross at 16, playing "Ziggy Stardust" and giving me one of those "What is dad making of this?" looks. I said, "Given that I had that album memorized, word for word, when I was 16, and can sing it for you now, if you're looking for me to be shocked, I'm not."  And then I began the album's first song,  "Five Years." 
     "Pushing through the marketplace...so many mothers sighing," I warbled, before he begged me to stop.
     Just Friday we were in Vintage Vinyl in Evanston—records are back; my kids buy 'em. They had the brand new Bowie album, "Blackstar," which came out Jan. 8, his 69th birthday. I held it up for him to admire,  though, at $38, that's all he did. 
    "I can get it online," he said. 
    So Bowie, the man, ended his story Jan. 10, to the sorrow of his friends and family. But the musician, artist and cultural figure will continue, so long as there are teenagers looking to see their turmoil reflected somewhere, and adults hoping to borrow a bit of bottomless cool and something good to dance to.

Surrendering to Powerball




     I didn't win the Powerball lottery Saturday night.
     Neither did you. Nobody did.
     Shocking, I know, because, well, we had our hopes, didn't we?
     I'm still surprised that I played, twice. So $4 of that a $1.3 billion being given away, maybe, Wednesday is mine.
     Or was.
     I'm a little embarrassed to admit I played. Mr. Logic. Mr. Rationality. Voluntarily paying the Stupid Tax. It's almost as bad as visiting a palmist.
     Well, like any sinner, I have my excuses.
     The first time was a few weeks ago, and a machine made me do it. I popped into the 7-Eleven on Shermer Road to buy a Sun-Times — my wife had taken ours to work. There was a new machine set up by the doughnut case. Designed, no doubt, to relieve the endless pressure on the clerk who has to sell both tickets and Slurpees. I had $2; why not try out the machine? It worked.


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Sunday, January 10, 2016

"They have no problem talking to a robot." Meet Paro


     I am not what is called an "early adopter." I have not summoned an Uber car, though I've ridden in one conjured up by colleagues, and I've downloaded the Uber app on my iPhone, inching toward the big moment when I shift from licensed cabbies to piecework drivers.
     And I didn't pet a Paro until Friday, a dozen years after the robotic baby harp seal was created and started showing up at nursing homes and hospitals, and long after it became something of a cultural touchstone, parodied on "The Simpsons" and well-covered in the media.
     Still, it was news to me—I had stopped by the Japanese External Trade Organization's Chicago office, to pick up some background information for a trip to Japan in March for Mosaic, the London web site of medicine and science. Since I'm writing about kawaii, or cuteness,  my contact at JETRO,  Robert Corder, thought I might enjoy meeting Paro.
     And I did, if "enjoy" is the word you can use to describe the slightly vertiginous feeling you get when you glimpse the unfamiliar future hurtling toward us.
     Paro is not a toy. It is a $6,000 robotic baby harp seal that has audio, light, touch and temperature sensors, microprocessors. It bobs its head, looks at you like an inquisitive pup, practically begging to be stroked. It can bat its long eyelashes, and coo and trill in an appealing, lifelike way. 
       "They actually recorded baby harp seals, in Canada, to get the sounds just right," said Corder. "The shape itself, you have to hold it." 
     I admit that it is something easier to pick up than put down, and we ended up passing it to each other as we talked. The robots are made in Japan, but the company selling them, PARO Robotics, is based right here in Itasca. 
     Paro was designed by Takanori Shibata, a Japanese engineer who wanted to develop a robot that would be useful to people.  At first he considered making a robotic cat or dog, but people tend to prefer one or the other, and had pre-set expectations about how cats and dogs should look and behave.  On the other hand, not many people have held a baby harp seal.  Paro was approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a Class 2 medical device in 2009, and is found in hospitals and treatment centers around the world. The seals are useful motivators when dealing with autistic children, for instance.
    "They use it for kids who have ADHD, Asperger's and autism," Corder said. "Those kids can have a hard time connecting, so they teach them to talk to Paro. They have no problem talking to a robot. The teachers will use him as a teaching tool. They use him for breaks. 'Let's take a break and you can have some Paro time.'" 
     In retirement homes, Corder said, Paro not only comforts lonely seniors, but lures them into social interaction. 
    "The people come out of their apartments, come out of their rooms, down to the common area," he said. " They don't bring it to your room. So if you want to have time with him, you have to come out of your apartment. It's a whole strategic use." 
     I felt like a farmer gawping at a Model T, and what made me believe this sort of thing is going to grow bigger and bigger, and not just be a passing fad, is that I kept looking at Paro, which was batting his eyes and cooing and almost demanding attention, instead of looking at Corder, who is just another human being. 
    That no doubt troubles some, and I admit I had qualms floating around myself. Should not every dementia patient and troubled child have human caregivers and live comfort animals? Sure, in an ideal world. And a pony for the children. But in our real world, with an exploding population of elderly with dementia, caregivers will be a scarce commodity, and if comfort is found in robots such as Paro—and it is, studies around the world show—where is the harm?
    Paro made me think of our small dog, Kitty, and another initial, half-hearted mental reservation was, naturally, this robotic seal would not really love its owner the way a dog does. But that love is also a projection. I just think Kitty loves me, because I want her to and she seems to. Just like Paro does.