GQ sells its birthright for a mess of ice cream

     How magazines stay in business nowadays is a mystery. Some manage it by sheer excellence. I subscribe to three: The New Yorker, The Economist, and Consumer Reports. 
     The rest must resort to other stratagems....
     I was in the barber shop on Schermer Road a week ago Saturday, waiting for Leo to finish up with a customer. I turned my attention to a pile of magazines—are there enough barber shops and doctor's waiting rooms to keep the profession afloat?— and fished the July Gentleman's Quarterly out of the pile on a low table. Not my usual fare, but I figured, why not? See what the hip metrosexuals are up to. Nothing really registered until I got to this advertisement for Klondike ice cream bars.

     It seemed very familiar, even though I was sure I'd never seen the ad before. Nor have I ever eaten a Klondike bar, to my memory. Nor would I want to, even after seeing this ad. Especially not after seeing this ad. I paused, and began flipping backward through the magazine, until I came to this:

     
     The same stack of Klondike bars—the photo from the ad, under the serious sounding heading, "@GQREPORTS," which suggested information dug up by the hardworking hipsters on the GQ staff. I squinted hard and saw the word "promotions." Ah, paid content. 
    Here is how they described the wonders of the aforementioned Klondike bars:
    

  
     Is that not the lamest block of copy you've ever read in your life? It's one thing to sell out and pretend that the average reading of GQ is having trouble deciding what kind of frozen comestible to ask his mom to pick up at Jewel. But "a little spice to their lives" doesn't even mesh with the idea of ice cream. Nobody wants spicy ice cream. It's repulsive.
     I don't want to make too much of this.  The actual, non-paid, produced-by-journalists-of- some-sort editorial content of GQ was never exactly hard-hitting reportage: more how to wax your pubes and an interview with whatever passing 20ish celebrity was enjoying his spasm of fame at the moment. The cover story of the July issue, "The Most Stylish Men Alive" is not only banal, but uses the cliched, tired, unfortunate "Blah Blah Blabbity Blah Alive!" structure pioneered by People magazine that leads one to suspect, grotesquely, that a future GQ might turn its attention to nattily-dressed corpses.
     So hardly better than a stack of Klondike bars.        And if you pressed a gun to my temple and demanded I declare the name of an endeavor that Ryan Gosling was involved with, I'd be a dead man. Movies, based on his looks.
     But still. All a magazine, all any publication has, is its credibility, its voice. And while that voice will be stilled if it goes out of business, it can also be so strangled by commercial considerations that it loses all meaning.
    Yes, there's a lot of that going around lately. Sponsored content is not the Kiss of Death. The Tribune has its Blue Sky Innovation and, from what I've seen of it, manages to pull the somersault off. The Sun-Times has a fat wad of USA Today living inside it, which I comfort myself by observing, "It's better than nothing." The key is to have stories that are actually interesting, in themselves, despite being sponsored or appropriated from elsewhere.  It can be done.
     I haven't tried it yet, but I've considered nodding at my advertiser. Like a diver bouncing at the end of a high dive, summoning his courage, trying not to look down. This blog is just ending its third season being sponsored by Eli's Cheesecake, a financial arrangement that gives me a sense of validation, plus spending money. And though I am vastly grateful to Marc Schulman for buying ads on my blog, and though I have Eli's cheesecake right now in my freezer, there by demand of my oldest boy, who loves the stuff, I have yet to figure out how to create some editorial content here without seeming like a complete sell-out and a fraud, or even if I should make the attempt. I mean, what about those readers who don't notice that nice new Valentine ad in the upper right hand corner, who are wondering, "If only there was some rich and satisfying desert substance I could send to the significant person in my life at Valentine's Day to show just how much I care?"
     Not that Eli's has ever requested it. But I do want to encourage them to return next year. And it seems almost a creative challenge, to put my head in the lion's mouth and pull it out. Why not write about cheesecake? I write about every other flippin' thing, every goddamn day. Cheesecake can be interesting too. 
     Is avoiding that topic courage or cowardice? The Tribune seems able to manage it., and they're a respected mainstream publication. Plugging "GQ sells out to Klondike bars" into Google reveals no outrage on the Internet, which can build up a mob of criticism over a 6-year-old's drawing for his mother. Maybe this is how we do it nowadays. Maybe caring at all about this kind of thing is an antique concern, like worrying about accuracy on Facebook. Thoughts? 

Preparing for President Trump

     President Trump. President Donald Trump. "... and in international news, President Trump arrived in Berlin today for the start of the NATO summit ...." The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Museum.
    Sorry. Just practicing. Newspapers are nothing if not cheerleaders for the status quo. We howl, for a while, then we fall in line. This was driven home to me a couple Decembers ago when I was in Boulder as Colorado welcomed legal marijuana. The Sunday Denver Post suddenly read like High Times, with recipes for pot brownies in the lifestyle pages, tips for raising your own weed, and such a general sense of ballyhoo you had to smile.
     If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
     I've observed a lot of presidential elections — 14, by my count, from the day in 1968 when I pressed my parents to take me to the Hubert Humphrey headquarters in Berea, Ohio, and scoot me in to receive a "Humphrey/ Muskie" button, which I still have, to the current free-for-all contest of extra odd characters, like a brawl in the Mos Eisley cantina in "Star Wars."
     One thing I noticed, long ago, is there is a presidentification process, as various wannabes stride toward the White House, where the media starts slapping layers of varnish on the deeply flawed individuals who want to be president, just in case we have to keep looking at them.

To continue reading, click here. 

  

The Droste Effect

     I am an impulsive shopper.
     For instance, when I saw these boxes of cocoa from Droste, the venerable Dutch chocolate company, I didn't not wonder if we needed cocoa, or check to see that other cocoas cost a third as much. I bought one, at the usurious price of $10.49 because ... well, any guesses? ... yes, of course, because the box looks so cool, with its 19th century nurse wielding her tray of the hot cocoa you need for whatever ails you.  Plus that rich red background. Isn't that the best red you've ever seen? 

     To be honest, I didn't intend to open and use the cocoa at all; I knew that just seeing it on the shelf, among the teas and spices and such in our kitchen, would give me an added boost. The fact that there was something inside the box was just a lagniappe, an added bonus. 
      My wife, who scans the newspaper for sales, creates shopping lists and goes from store to store, stalking bargains like a lepidopterist netting rare butterflies,, eventually quizzed me about the luxurious cocoa that showed up in our kitchen cabinet. Though to her credit, she did so gently, with genuine puzzlement and none of the cold outrage I'm sure was simmering in her gut. She probably assumed I had lost my mind, and was both trying to be kind, and a little frightened.
     "Cocoa is all the same," she said, calmly and evenly, resisting the urge to add, "You crazy person you." 
     I had to admit there was more to it than a pretty box. When my father was a young man, he went to sea, and his ship stopped at the Netherlands, where he rode a motorbike—shooting a movie using his wind-up Bolex camera—and developed a taste for Droste, which he brought home with him. 
     So trying to add a little cachet to our white bread and Cheez Whiz suburban Ohio upbringing, he made a habit of purchasing Droste products, wherever in God's name you got such things in Ohio in the 1960s and 1970s. The black market, I suppose. We ate creamy Droste milk chocolate bars and tapped Droste orange-flavored chocolate oranges on the table to watch them shatter into sections and popped bittersweet Droste pastilles in our eager yaps. Droste chocolate made Hershey's taste like plastic and Nestles' Crunch taste like gravel. 
     Though I doubt that was the deciding factor in my father's buying habits; to him, Droste's was high class, international, Euopean and a tribute to his seafaring years, and I guess I view it the exact same way, with the added bonus of nostalgic mixed in.
     The box looked different then, with a little Dutch boy and girl. An old-fashioned look that for some reason I was able to utterly ignore for decades in my adulthood; if I ever saw it, it never registered.
    The new box is a vast improvement, even though it isn't new at all; just a re-issue of a design from 100 years ago. 
    Before we let go of this subject, no doubt with a sigh of relief on your part ("Really, was there no news at all?!") I would draw your attention to the tray the nurse is holding. It is an example of what, believe it or not, is called "The Droste Effect," a picture that contains a smaller image, which holds an image that is smaller still, an infinite recursive dwindling, vanishing beyond the limits of reproduction.  
     Just so I don't seem a total spendthrift I did, to justify my purchase, whip up a batch of homemade pudding, using this recipe off the Internet. Edie was then horrified, not that I was wasting my pricy cocoa by putting it into food, but that I would use a recipe requiring heavy cream to  make such rich, fattening pudding and not the sensible low-cal puddings we who are watching our weight should eat if we must consume pudding at all. To show me how it was done, she made the proper, sensible pudding that, I couldn't bear to tell her, until now, tasted like congealed water. I ate it with husbandly duty.
     Sometimes a fellow has to sin boldly, within his narrow limits, and if I'm going to have a cocoa orgy and go off the rails, puddingwise, full strength, sinfully rich chocolate pudding made with cream and genuine imported Dutch Droste cocoa seems the way to go.  After all, as I'm always saying when called out on an extravagance, they sell the stuff, right there in Sunset Foods in Northbrook. It can't just be me.

Flint water reflects Illinois woes

     In enormous disasters, there is often one small detail — I almost called it a "grace note" — that clicks a huge, blurred tragedy into focus. That drives the horror home.
     The atomic bombing of Hiroshima, for instance. It's difficult, maybe impossible, to conceive of a nuclear firestorm that kills 100,000 people at a stroke.
     But the shadows of victims vaporized in the blast, ghostly outlines left on sidewalks and against walls. Those you can see. The faint shadows somehow they symbolize the entire unfathomable, humanity-annihilating power of the explosion.
     Perhaps you're not paying attention to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. And I can't really blame you; Chicago is a city where children are gunned down in the street while they play, so it's hard to get too worked up over some folks in Michigan failing a blood test. Besides, we have all the good clean fresh Lake Michigan water we need.
     But there are aspects of the crisis that directly apply here. So a quick refresher.

To continue reading, click here. 

The future is here, maybe

     The future is always over the hill. That's what makes it the future. Tomorrow never comes. Change happens so slowly that its forward creep isn't detectable to the casual observer. Life rolls along pretty much the same way it always has.

 

      But occasionally, society takes a lurch, so abruptly that you can almost feel it move. You pause and think "Something just happened."
      I had such a moment Saturday.
      There was a bit of foreshadowing, an initial shock: the stark black two page advertisement in the New York Times by Mercedes Benz announcing that its 2017 sedan will be the first car licensed for self-driving.  I knew it was coming, fast, knew Google was testing it's little bean cars. But next year Mercedes will be selling them—not to me, God knows, but to somebody. The cars will drive themselves—just in Nevada, for now—I'd make some joke about taking a gamble, but self-driving cars make too much sense to not become the norm. Tens of thousands of deaths each year are caused by humans driving their cars erratically. 
    We all like to be captains of our destiny on the open road, "Born to Be Wild" and all, but to save 90 percent on our car insurance most of us will happily let a bundle of sensors and micro-chips drive while we sit back and stare at our phones and send text messages to our friends. (Heck, half the drivers seem to be doing that already, half the time. It's only sensible that the cars should pay attention to driving—somebody ought to.

   If that weren't enough to chew on, just this Saturday, running into Northbrook Court to

stop at the eyeglass store, I saw this: a pair of free Volta charging stations, with two Tesla Model S sedans cheek-by-jowl at the trough, slurping up electricity.
     I'm familiar with the Tesla — I've driven one. Quite a lot of giddy-up for a car running on batteries. Maybe not the vehicle I'd purchase if I had $85,000 burning a hole in my wallet. But a wide, low slung car with those way-cool door stainless steel handles that retract flush with the doors. I notice them everywhere. I used to say, "There's a Tesla," but now I don't bother. There are too many of them.

     The stations are newly installed by Volta, a San Francisco start-up that, according to a Fortune article in June, had installed 100 stations at shopping centers around the country and hoped, by now, to install 300 more.  They give the electricity away free and pay for themselves with advertising on their kiosks. There's another pair at Oakbrook Terrace.
      Someday, I imagine, most parking spaces, or at least many more, will have these, a little inducement to do your shopping at a bricks and mortar store. Amazon can do a lot of things, but it can't charge your car while you shop, at least not yet.

    We came out of Northbrook Court, oh, a half hour later, and one of the Teslas was gone, and there was an unusual silver sports car, a Fisker Karma.  I had never seen one before: Fisker was a short-lived Finnish hybrid, sort of the Bricklin of the second decade of the 21st century. They only made a few thousand of them before the company went belly up. A reminder that the future isn't always what it seems at the moment, and guesses about what's is to come are just that, guesses, reflecting more on the anxieties of any given moment than offering an actual roadmap of what's ahead.
     So yes, maybe self-driving cars and mall charging stations. Or maybe not.  I also paid $1.75 a gallon to fill up the day before, as oil companies pump out petrol and gas prices tumble. Which hurts the market for electric cars. So instead of being the future, electric cars could be an aberration, a blip, someday seen as amusing relics of once upon a time, back when we were still trying to stop climate change, before Donald Trump got elected and we all gave up, all decided 'Ah, what the hell, have a good time" while doom crept up on us.  I suppose they can make those Hummers self-driving too.  

Twenty years a columnist

Enhanced image courtesy of Philip Wizenick

       Twenty years ago today, on Jan. 23, 1996, the Sun-Times' new editor-in-chief, Nigel Wade, whom I had met once, maybe twice, phoned me at home on Pine Grove Avenue, where I was in the third month of a year's paternity leave. In my memory, I have a baby balanced on a cloth diaper on my shoulder, spewing down my back as I juggle the phone. But that is perhaps a faulty recollection.      Nigel asked if I'd like to write a column for the newspaper. I said yes, and got busy.      While I try to avoid attaching any particular significance to my column—I've known too many self-important journalists, puffing themselves up like frogs—20 years as a newspaper columnist in Chicago strikes me as significant. Almost a miracle, really, given how many ways there are to blow up, burn out, give up, go away, slide into the ditch and stay there. Each new day, each next sentence, is an invitation to hang yourself, the entire endeavor a kind of public Russian roulette, for 20 years, and here I am still spinning the cylinder and clicking away, somehow unscathed.       A milestone worth noting, and since nobody is leaping up to celebrate the event, I'll have to do it myself, which is fitting, because while I do value my helpful colleagues, being a columnist is mainly a DIY affair. That's my picture on top of the column, nobody else's.        Yes, there are better ways to spend one's life. I was named a columnist along with Leslie Baldacci, a kind of his-and-hers matched set. She gave up journalism in 1999 to become a teacher, and while you'd have to ask her, I'd bet money she never regretted it for a second. And if you ask me who made more of a difference in life, who was more important, I'd put my chips on Leslie, no question. She's still a teacher, teaching other teachers to teach, and I'd say that injects more real good into the world than spooling sarcastic about the crisis of the moment.      Then again, injecting good in the world was never my goal. I do not regret two decades spent doing this.  Not at all. It is a peculiar task, filling that space, and I like to think it is suited to my personality and I do it with skill.  Unlike Phil Kadner, who just retired after a long tenure at the Southtown Economist, I cannot point to a list of changes fomented and wrongs exposed. In fact, I can't think of one. But it has been, I believe, an interesting column to read, and that really is my only ambition.  That, and to have fun, which I do. I'm the rare writer who likes to write, who sits happily pounding away at the keyboard, laughing at my own stuff. I know that isn't the cliche of the tortured perfectionist,  and suspect that self-satisfaction is the mark of the hack. So be it. You gotta dance with who brung ya.      Do I sound grateful? I am. I'm glad I have colleagues whose work I respect and am inspired by, a few who have become friends and whose insight I value: Eric Zorn comes to mind, Rick Kogan, Rick Telander, Mark Konkol, Esther J. Cepeda.  I'm proud to be among a stable of talent at the Sun-Times. Mary Mitchell, Mark Brown, Fran Spielman, Richard Roeper, Chris Fusco, Tim Novak, Frank Main, Maureen O'Donnell, Scott Fornek.  When I started this, I wasn't a kid—I was 35—but knew a few giants of the business. Some were extraordinarily kind to me—Roger Ebert, Jeffrey Zaslow, Andrew Patner, Michael Cooke, Steve Neal—and some weren't kind to me at all. To this day, I go out of my way to make new reporters feel welcome, and I suppose I have Mike Royko to thank for that, because I remember how it stung to get the back of his hand, every single time. Not that it's difficult. I'm genuinely excited that the paper is once again hiring new talent, like Andy Grimm. I like reading stuff that's good, and know that success is not a pie, and somebody cutting himself a bigger slice doesn't diminish my share.      Having been through many editorial incarnations and permutations over the years, I'm happy to say that the professionals I work most closely with now work very well together as a team: copy editor Bill Ruminiski, assistant metro editor John O'Neill, Steve Warmbir (who is called the "Assistant Managing Editor for News" but in my mind is just the "City Editor," a far more august and apt title) and publisher Jim Kirk. I don't want to speak for them, but from my perspective, we respect each other and get the job done.      Five years ago, someone asked me what I learned, doing this:
     "Good column today," Neil Liptak, a reader in the far southwest suburban town of Elwood writes. "Made me want to ask you: What have you learned after writing your column all these years?"
     The prudent route would be to thank him and go on. "The first thing that came to mind was, 'People are crazy,'" I replied. "But that's extreme. Maybe Hemingway's, 'The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for.'"
     Still glib. And the question lingered. Nobody ever asked me that before, and I began to suspect it deserved a sincere answer.
     Where to begin? Thousands of columns . . . geez, what haven't I learned? There is a Chicagoland Puppetry Guild. The United States and China are almost exactly the same size, in area. The pleats in a kilt go in the back. Some survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima fled to Nagasaki, where they also survived the second atomic bomb. The only elective office Jane Byrne ever held was mayor of Chicago. The Cook County medical examiner performs autopsies with a 10-inch kitchen knife. The 14th floor sky bridge on the Wrigley Building was built to skirt banking regulations. There is an S/M dungeon on Lake Street, two blocks from the Thompson Center.*
     I could go on and fill the column with trivia — the first cell phone call placed by a member of the general public was to Jack Brickhouse; the globed streetlights on Wacker Drive have the lovely name "boulevard electroliers" — but my sense is that the reader was aiming for something more, something akin to wisdom.
     I'm uncomfortable with the notion of dispensing wisdom. First because it means I consider myself to be wise, which is both untrue and an invitation to ridicule. ("I'll tell ya what ya learned, Steinfart, ya learned that a no-talent HACK can make a living spewing his psycho liberal bull..."), and second because wisdom tends to be both contradictory and situation specific. "A penny saved is a penny earned" is good advice, unless you're hiring a band to play at your wedding, when you should spend every cent you can scrape together or borrow, because otherwise you'll have a lousy band and what's the point of that? (Instead of wisdom, I'd rather dispense wedding advice: Skip the rental napkins. Jews, don't ceremonially step on a wrapped light bulb instead of a wine glass; light bulbs pop. Splurge the two dollars for a real glass).
     But general, one-size-fits-all wisdom?
     There must be something.
     How about "Doubt is good"?
     Doubt gets bad press, because it's seen as lack of self-confidence. But in the sense of questioning your assumptions, doubt is wonderful, the difference between being a thinking person and being a zealot. The world is full of zealots, glittery-eyed and certain. Better to be characteristically uncertain, skeptical and demanding proof.
     "Am I wrong here?" is always a good question to ask yourself. In the column, it isn't the things I'm unsure of that come back to haunt me — I check those. It's the parts that I am convinced are correct that can cause trouble.
     So, re-evaluate now and then. Do a spring cleaning of your biases as well as your garage.
     What else? Memory is faulty. People lie, all the time; they lie to others and to themselves. One example or two isn't proof of anything.
     Persistence is important. More people quit than fail. They want the big "I Tried Once" trophy and the idea of dropping their head down and working hard is repellent to them. I don't know if I got this from writing the column or from being half-Polish — I think of we Poles as grab-the-traces-and-drag-the-plow-through-the-hard-earth kind of people.
     Or at least we were; my branch of the family hasn't been there for almost 70 years. Which brings up another bit of wisdom: Times change, and you need to keep up with them.
     The beauty of a column is it forces you to stay current. I'll be on the cusp of opining what Tokyo is like then realize, whoops, I was last there in 1989. Keep on top of stuff. Don't be naive. Don't believe things credulously.
    Brevity is good. Nothing helps a 1,200 word column like cutting it to 800 words.
    Nostalgia is a lie. If someone suggests the past was better, make them name a year, then dredge up the forgotten horrors of that year.
     There is more world than we have time to grasp, and people too often wall themselves off and dismiss anything they're unfamiliar with out of fear — fear of the unknown being a major motivator in people who'll jump through hoops rather than admit they are wrong about anything, out of vanity, another universal. Everybody makes mistakes, but not everybody can admit it. Recognizing that you are capable of error is the path to wisdom.
     There's never enough space. Maybe that's what I've learned: Columns are short, life is short. Try your best to make it interesting.
                 —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 22, 2011

* No longer true; they tore the building down this month.

Bruce Rauner accomplishes the impossible

     Let's be fair to the governor.
     Sure, anyone paying attention to Illinois is compelled to believe that Bruce Rauner has accomplished nothing in his first year in office except shred programs for children, the disabled and the poor.
     Not only did Rauner fail to make tangible progress, but he didn't even tread water properly. The normal operation of the state, such as passing an annual budget, failed to occur, sacrificed on the altar of the governor's hunger for term limits, union enfeeblement and other unrelated pet causes. He's like an office manager geting himself hired by promising to expand a business who then promptly fails to pay the electric bill, as a point of principle against the electric company monopoly, so they turn the lights off.  Now we're sitting in the dark, listening to him explain.
     The temptation is to conclude Illinois would do better with no governor at all, than this one who can't seem to manage basic human interactions. On Thursday, Rauner announced his support for Illinois Senate President John Cullerton's pension reform plan, only to have Cullerton immediately cringe away, shivering, from the governor's embrace. "It's not my plan," Cullerton said, explaining that Rauner had twisted his idea.
     But give credit where credit is due: Rauner has accomplished something real,  something that I would have thought impossible:
     He makes Rod Blagojevich look good.

To continue reading, click here.

The Romans managed it

     That was fast.
     It's been, what, a month since the bright red "Loop Link" lanes opened on Madison and Washington, special bus-only routes designed to more than double the speeds that Chicago Transit Authority buses transverse the Loop, from an average of 3 mph, which is slower than briskly walking,  to a giddy 7.5.

     But just look at at them. A month of being pounded by traffic and what was described as "red pavement" in the city's grandiose plans of last year has revealed itself in the harsh light of January to be more like red tar paper, and is already coming up in big chunks. You can't very well expect drivers to avoid the red lanes if the "BUS ONLY" designation has peeled up and blown away. 
    Already plagued by delays over the past six months and greeted with a chorus of complaints from drivers who suddenly find Loop streets a lot narrower, the $32 million project might not have increased bus speeds, but it's given the downtown a shabby, am-in-Detroit-or-what? feel. 
      If this were in the newspaper, I'd feel obligated to call the city department of transportation  four or five times to squeeze out whatever half-hearted and feeble explanation they'd offer to illuminate What Went Wrong, and what Might Happen Next and why pave-the-road-so-it-doesn't-come-up-immediately technology, which was mastered in Roman times, seems to have eluded the City of Chicago, the City That Works Except When It Doesn't. But if I hear from the city, I'll rush to append it below.  
     In the meantime, the in-depth investigative work that led to these photos delayed my walk to the train a full 10 or 20 seconds one day last week. Additional investigation, which entailed walking down Washington Street on my way into work Thursday morning, showed that the red bus lane there is fine, so perhaps this is a localized screw-up limited to Madison Street's unique ecology, whatever that might be. Perhaps you, in your leisurely strolling, can find further examples of this latest embarrassment. Still, I suppose we should count our blessings, and not complain too much about a screw-up like this. At least no one was killed.

      

Abner Mikva laughs at 90

     Abner Mikva turns 90 Thursday. To mark the milestone I took the revered Chicago icon, who made his mark on all three branches of government—former congressman, retired federal judge and White House counsel—to lunch last week.
     How does it feel to be 90?
     "It's going to be kind of a shock," he said, using the future tense with a lawyerly precision. "I keep thinking of all the good reasons why I should be happy about it... I've already given up all the things I really enjoy: golf, tennis, sex, poker. There's nothing left to give up in the 90s."
     I get the golf, tennis and sex part. "But why poker?"
     "I have macular degeneration," he said. "I can't see the cards. I love the game."
      Mikva used to fly in just for the Washington Post's poker game. He said his favorite Washington figure to work with was Bill Clinton.

To continue reading, click here.

"What matters infamy if the cash be kept?"

     I had lunch with former congressman, former federal judge, former White House counsel, current Chicago icon Abner Mikva last week—my Wednesday column will be about our conversation. He mentioned a column I wrote about him 10 years ago. I couldn't find it, but I found this, from the long-ago era when Rod Blagojevich was our governor, and it was so much fun I thought you might enjoy.
     This was back when I had a full page, with a brief "Opening shot," several small segments, and a joke at the end.

OPENING SHOT
     Obscurity pressed hard upon Juvenal, the Roman satirist who spent
his career crouched miserably in the antechambers of rich patrons, waiting for a half-gnawed chicken leg to be tossed his way. 
     That's why his satires remain so fresh today — you see this poor mope, thwarted at every turn, overlooked, underfed, trying to make his way through the crowded Roman streets, enviously eyeing the rich in their curtained sedan chairs, not noticing the burly centurion about to plant a hobnail boot on his toe. 
     So it would do the old Roman's heart good, I believe, to know that in 2008, in a nation he never heard of in a world he could not imagine, one of his pithier lines spontaneously popped into the head of a Chicagoan when he heard that his old boss, David Radler, had been released from a Canadian prison after less than a year in jail. 
     "What matters infamy if the cash be kept?" I thought, quoting Juvenal, figuring that, for the money Radler got from his crimes, minus penalties and legal fees, I'd gladly make birdhouses in the federal penitentiary for a year, and so would you. 

IS IT SHOWING OFF OR SHARING? 
     Am I bragging by mentioning a classical writer? Maybe so. But why is it viewed that way? Nobody says, "How can you guys pay attention to these football games, week after week, month after month, year after year. It's the same thing happening over and over. Doesn't it get boring? Why insist on talking about it?" 
     No, I accept that football is a passion that many love, one that adds richness and texture to their lives. Who am I to judge their fancies? Yet do they return the favor? Nooooooo. I was listening to the radio the other day — WGN — and this jamoke starts mocking people who talk about reading War and Peace. "Oh, I'm reading War and Peace," he gushes, in a smug, Homer-Simpson-imitating-a-fairy voice, as if the only reason to read War and Peace is to impress strangers. 
     I was truly offended, and I don't offend easily, and for the very reason most people get offended — because my ox was gored. I am currently reading War and Peace, out loud to my older son, and we're both loving it, not because it gives us something to brag about, but because it's great. When Tolstoy describes a horse, it's like an actual horse canters into the room, twitching and snorting. When Natasha jumps into her mother's bed to tell the old countess about Prince Andrei, it could be any 16-year-old girl gushing about her dreamboat.
     It's real. I know the common wisdom is that classics are these horrendous blocks of stone written by dead white males and forced upon the unwilling through some malign conspiracy. And I can see how people feel that way. Classics have their drawbacks. War and Peace is 1,200 pages long, and every character has four names. It gets confusing. I'm sure climbing Mt. Everest has drawbacks, too. But must I suppress enthusiasm, keep quiet, just because you can't imagine any reason to read it other than braggadocio? Every Monday we all have to hear about what the flippin' Bears did, yet let slip something about a book you love and you're a bigmouth blowhard preening your feathers. It's not fair. 

THE LEGAL DEPARTMENT 
     Usually experts have to be hunted, cornered, flushed out. So it was a pleasant turnabout to have one of the foremost legal authorities in Chicago phone me up out of the blue Tuesday. 
     "I want to talk about the attorney general's lawsuit," said Abner Mikva, former federal judge and adviser to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, referring to Lisa Madigan asking the Illinois Supreme Court to freeze embattled Gov. Rod Blagojevich's powers. "I know you're questioning it, but we thought long and hard and looked at it carefully before we filed." 
     The Illinois Constitution clearly sets out reasons a governor can be relieved of power: death, impeachment, failure to meet qualifications of office, "or other disability," the loophole that Mikva believes the court can use to spike Blagojevich. "It doesn't say 'mental' or 'physical'," said Mikva. "It would cover just about anything the court wants to prevent the governor from carrying out his duties." 
     Isn't that the problem? If this is a disability, it is a political disability, and is not the governorship by nature a position given to controversy? True, the governor is not typically caught scheming to sell a seat in the Senate, but the particulars are not the crucial aspect. Do we really want this precedent, that our courts can strip our governor of power for being accused of doing something bad? Could not an attorney general with fewer scruples than Madigan—who I believe is a straight arrow—abuse such a system? 
      "We thought it made more sense for the attorney general, the highest law enforcement official in the state, to make the case to the highest court in the state," said Mikva. "I don't think it is asking the court for an outlandish interference. It is the least invasive thing anyone could do. . . . Well, the least invasive thing he could do is resign." 
     Amen. Not that anyone expects Blagojevich to do the noble thing.
     "Had he been thinking about what's best for the state, he wouldn't have gotten himself into this mess in the first place," I said. 
     "Of course not," said Mikva. "But that's not his bag, I'm afraid."

TODAY'S CHUCKLE 
     I bumped into George Lemperis, owner of the Palace Grill, the famed diner and Blackhawks hangout on West Madison Street. He told me the following: Two inmates go through the lunch line with their tin trays, then find a spot in the crowded prison lunchroom.
     "This slop tastes awful," says the first, grimacing over his spoonful of gruel.
     "You think this is bad," says the second. "You should have tasted the food here when you were still governor."
               —Originallly published Dec. 17, 2008

"Possible criminals on the loose"

   

     Martin Luther King Day is upon us, again, and me without a card or anything...
     See, that's the problem. There's no upside for a white guy to talk about race. It's all risk and no reward. At worst, you end up making some inadvertent slip and lose your job.
     At best? You're still a white guy commenting on race. What could you say that would possibly matter? Why bother? "Sorry, not my table. Mary will be serving you today..."
     So ... nothing about race here. Just another regular, not-about-race column. The 1958 UN Law of the Sea conference; how many Chicagoans understand its implications....?
     Oh, hell, in a for a dime, in for dollar.
     I was walking my cute little dog through the lily-white suburb of Northbrook (black population, 0.6 percent) thinking about race Friday morning. What to say? There are more black people on the Metra Milwaukee North line in recent years? A good sign! There used to be none, and now there are some. And in the street -- a black kid on his bicycle. A black guy living on the next block. We've stopped together on the corner of Shermer and Walters, across from the train station, and I've looked at him, expectantly, but he never looks at me. So whatever hale, awkward white guy greeting I would blurt out just curdles in my mouth. "Welcome to suburbia, black person! Allow me to vent my innocent white guy goodwill upon you!"

To continue reading, click here. 

 

Johnny Chung scores again

    College pranks don't get much attention. Which is why it was surprising on Saturday to pick up the New York Times and not only see a story about a prank in the paper, but on the front page, under the headline, "Forget the Quarterback Sneak: A Deception Play for the Ages."
    In it, writer Bill Christine describes the 1941 Plainfield Teachers College prank, which he calls "one of the greatest hoaxes in sports history." It wasn't. It was a slight, charming deception that took place in the agate football scores at the back of the sports pages of a couple East Coast papers. Though Christine tells the story in great detail and at length—a full inside page—he never explains why he's telling us now about this 74 year old prank, and I can't explain why he would. It's a curious lapse. You can read it here. 
     Or you can refer to my 1992 book on college pranks, "If At All Possible, Involve a Cow," where I relate the incident with the concision it deserves:

     There is no rule that a college prank has to be pulled by a college student. Morris Newburger certainly wasn't in college: he was a stockbroker with the firm Newburger, Loeb & Company. He was also fascinated with the obscure schools that were listed in the college football roundup in the New York Herald Tribune.
     In the fall of 1941, he amused himself during America's last moment of global innocence by creating his own school—Plainfield Teachers College—and phoning the scores in every week to the Herald Tribune. 
     Newburger did his homework. When asked, he was ready with 22 names for the lineup roster—names of his friends, neighbors, business partners. There was also a certain Morris Newburger starting at right tackle.
     Every team should have a star, and Plainfield's was Johnny Chung, the half-Chinese, half-Hawaiian tailback known as the Celestial Comet. Under his leadership, Plainfield went 6-0, and seemed a shoe-in for the prestigious Blackboard Bowl.
     As can happen with these things, matters got a little out of control. Newburger found himself printing up letterheads for the Plainfield Teachers Athletic Association and took a post office box in Newark. Jerry Croyden, the imaginary director of sports information, sent out news releases and phoned tidbits to the papers. The Celestial Comet was tearing up the field.
     Sadly, the Plainfield Teachers never made it to the Blackboard Bowl. Enjoying himself immensely, Newburger bragged to one pal too many, and word leaked into journalism circles. With Time magazine preparing to expose the hoax in their next edition, Newburger rushed out a release having the Celestial Comet flunk his exams, and so many players became ineligible that the rest of the season was cancelled.
     The Herald Tribune finally smelled something fishy and checked with the Plainfield Chamber of Commerce, discovering the utter nonexistence of a Plainfield Teachers College about the same time the November 17, 1941 issue of Time hit the stands.

Rahm flaps his broken wings

      Remember Chris Christie? Big guy, governor of New Jersey, once thought he could be president? That was before the incident two years ago that knocked him from Republican party darling to mortally wounded also-ran: the closing of the George Washington Bridge as payback to the mayor of Fort Lee for not supporting him.
     Christie's defense was that his top aides did it, while he knew nothing.
     Which he seemed to think let him off the hook. But it didn't. What it did was create two equally unpalatable choices: either he really did know and is lying — the answer that makes the most sense, given his bullying, hands-on-everything personality.
     Or he didn't know, but placed his trust in chuckleheads who could engage in jaw-dropping political pranks, undermining the well-being of the public, right under Christie's nose while he remained in the dark.
     Really, which is worse?
     Now turn our gaze to Rahm Emanuel, our diminished mayor and the Laquan McDonald video. Having committed to his "I didn't know" defense, Emanuel is confronted with the paper trail of his top aides huddling constantly with officials from the law department and the police, discussing the McDonald case. For eight months. These same aides and officials also met with the mayor. But, Emanuel insists, they never brought up this matter. Because, like Christie, he seems to think ignorance is preferable to knowledge, and once you've lied about knowing, that might seem the only route left.
     What's Garrison Keillor's classic line about slipping in the shower? "It's isn't the fall that hurts you; but what you do trying not to fall."
     The not-knowing defense, when it comes to Rahm, is ludicrous, and he should abandon it while he can. Rahm is knowledge incarnate. He can spout forth the most stupefying gush of facts and figures and self-justifying statistics. To see him go mute and mournful and out-of-the-loop on this, holding up his broken-wing, all saucer-eyed and sad, like one of those waifs in an alley in a black velvet painting, well, it's an insult to us but, remember, (all together now) "Rahm thinks we're stupid."
     So where from here?
     Calling for him to quit is like begging God to send a fiery angel. Sure, it might help, but it ain't happening. If anything, this whole episode will prompt Emanuel, not to go away, but to stay even longer. My sense was he wasn't going to run for a third term before this happened, but between wanting to bully the City Council into approving his budget in October, and trying to maintain his ebbing sense of authority, he now say's he is going to, and he probably will. Because quitting = failure, and Rahm Emanuel can't fail, at least in his own estimation.
     Three years is a long time. Public attitudes can shift in a heartbeat. Let's say, as they fear, a cop gets shot while squinting at a suspect, asking himself whether that's a gun or a cellphone. Whoops, turns out to be a gun. Let's say by some miracle that gets on video. Suddenly the police view isn't quite so hypothetical.
     For the record, I still don't think Chuy Garcia should have won. The deer-in-the-headlights look that Rahm is slipping into now, in the depths of crisis, is how Garcia greets every morning on a good day. I hear every kind of credulous nonsense shouted from the streets. But I have yet to see a sign reading "WHERE IS BOB FIORETTI WHEN WE NEED HIM?!?"
     Rahm's an abrasive, charmless man. That said, the problems he faces are not ones solved easily. The schools can't get fixed because they're never fixed. The pension time bomb is protected by a force field of law that would thwart James Bond. And while it would have been great if, the moment Emanuel learned of the McDonald shooting he was on TV, denouncing it, how would that have played with the 11,000 members of the Chicago Police Department, who throw a sulk if treated with anything short of worship?
     Let's pretend for a moment that Rahm Emanuel is toast. So who's gonna run the city next? Nobody seems to be volunteering. Not yet anyway.

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.

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.

     

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...

To continue reading, click here.