Mercato Centrale

     Chicago has much to recommend it. But one thing the city lacks is a thriving central market.
     Oh, they've tried,  ginning up that French Market next to Ogilvy Center. But the place seems tepid and marginal and unpopulated whenever I go there, which isn't often, as I can never think of a good reason to stop by. It suffers from ersatzness, a certain lack of distinctiveness.
     Which might be why my wife and I so enjoy visiting real markets in other cities. There's a great one in Los Angeles we've visited several times, called Central Market, and another in Philadelphia—the Reading Terminal Market.
     In Florence, it is called the Mercato Centrale, and even in our limited time, we found ourselves drawn back, to stock up on gifts and lunch for our train trip to Venice.
    Dried cherries and fresh bread, marzipan seashells and pork sandwiches, with a break for espresso at a stand-up bar. It was the place to buy gifts — small bottles of Limonchello and discs of panforte.
    I assumed the place had been there forever — the hulking iron building it is located in was built in 1874. But the truth is it opened three years ago. So not old, but certainly authentic. Maybe that's why people throng there — you get a sense of farmers and butchers stacking the food they've created. While at the French Market the vibe is of clerks heating up grub.
    I wish I could explain why theirs bustles while Chicago's languishes. Maybe readers have an idea.
       

Would this read better if Medill were accredited?

 

     Good for Medill.
     I admit, when I first heard that my alma mater, Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism (we'll get to its official name later) had let its academic accreditation lapse, my immediate instinct — call it "Columnist's Reflex" — was to draw back my foot and deliver a kick.
     What is college but reputation? And Medill Dean Bradley Hamm's assessment of the review process — "It's relatively superficial, extremely time consuming and doesn't lead us to a goal of significant improvement. It's sort of a low bar." — is true for college in general. And yet they still encourage young people to attend.
     Then I reconsidered. Why does a journalism school — excuse me, a journalism, integrated marketing, storytelling and whatever else they fancy themselves this week school — need official sanction? A merit badge, a Good Housekeeping seal, a kiss on the forehead from some pooh bah? Look around. The number of newsroom jobs is half what it was 20 years ago. Circulation and ad revenues hemorrhage. People get their news from three bullet points on their smartphones. While the president of the United States daily damns the entire profession to his millions of reality-challenged followers who lap it up, being the sort of people who believe the "Fast and Furious" films are documentaries.
     Do you really need to go to an accredited journalism school to slave for some obscure website? I don't think so. Fog a mirror, agree to grind out steaming piles of content for whatever Dickensian online workhouse they're running and you're in. Frankly, the higher quality school you went to, the more galling the penury that awaits. Five years after graduating from Medill, I was unemployed for the third time, telling myself that my patchwork of humiliating low-level jobs was a freelance career....

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But the clocks come with it, right?

     My grandmother was a proud employee of The May Company in Cleveland. Growing up, we bought my clothes there, at the employee discount or, if need be, at Higbee's or Halle's, the other two legs of of the triumvirate of department stores that made up respectable society.  
    To go elsewhere was to slum. I can still feel the cringing humiliation I felt when my mother, no doubt economizing, took me to J.C. Penney's to buy a loathsome polyester black suit suit at one point in the late-1970s. I couldn't have been more horrified had she given me a tambourine and told me to dance for coins in Public Square.
     As an adult, I clung to that mentality. I shopped at Marshall Field's, at Carson's if I were desperate. Toward my late 20s, I grew adventurous, and would buy clothing at Mark Shale. My wife's inclination toward discount stores I put off to a baffling cheapness.
    Then in May, 1999, I was about to leave on a six-week trip, needed certain necessities -- a lightweight tropic sports coat--and had no time, so popped into the Filene's Basement on Broadway. I still remember returning with an armful of purchases, babbling to my wife, "The prices are ... so low." 
    Ever since that epiphany, like many middle class shoppers, I haunt discount outlets like Nordstrom's Rack and T.J. Maxx, with occasional trips to Suits 20/20. Which is why the former Carson's downtown, with its ornate Louis Sullivan frou-frou, is now a Target. Or Macy's, which used to be good at running this sort of thing, announced they'll be selling off the top seven floors of its flagship downtown store to become condos or offices, or what have you.
    This, the latest step in the Great Department Store Die-Off, which will no doubt be melancholy to us folks of a certain age. 
    The spin was that the Walnut Room will remain, and that might provide cold comfort to some. But the Walnut Room never did much for me —a place where grandmothers rested their feet and ate pot pies.
     Looking to see if I ever wrote anything about it, I came upon this, about how Macy's got ripped going in the door a dozen years ago. Maybe not so savvy after all. 

  

"The Clock Mender" by Norman Rockwell

  Did you ever buy a house? What do you do if you really like the chandelier in the dining room and want to make sure the former owners don't take it with them? You write that into the contract. Because people are people, unfortunately, and left to their own devices, they'll pry off the 19-cent light plates on their way out the door. Maximizing their advantage.
     So no sympathy for Federated Department Stores, owner of Marshall Field's, which expressed "hope" that Target Corp. will give them the famous Norman Rockwell painting of a man setting the Great Clock in front of the State Street store.
     The store owned the painting for more than half a century, and Federated seems to have thought it was buying the artwork along with the 60-store chain and was surprised to find a copy hanging in the store's seventh-floor "museum."
     Out with the contracts! Either the painting was included or it wasn't. My understanding is that Target cannily made the swap—shipping the original back to its headquarters in Minneapolis—in spring of 2004, about the time it put Field's up for sale.
     In other words, the chandelier was gone long before Federated bought the place.
     Target does a brisk business in Chicago—my wife makes her second home there, and she offers Target this elegant solution: Donate the Rockwell to the Art Institute. Target gets a tax write-off and is spared any PR unpleasantness. The Art Institute will no doubt cringe away from displaying a painter as proletarian as Rockwell, and happily loan the painting, long-term, to Field's—er, Macy's. And the obscure seventh-floor museum, whose visitors seem to largely consist of Walnut Room patrons looking for the bathroom, will have its $5 million worth of original art back, and there will be joy in Chicago once more.
                        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 21, 2006

    Postscript: The Target Corporation, no doubt coincidentally, did indeed donate "The Clock Mender' to a museum: not to the Art Institute, but to the Chicago History Museum, which proudly has it on display, where I noticed it during a visit earlier this month.

Trump is indeed making America great again

     Remember the domino theory?
     It didn't have anything to do with the pleasant game of deploying spotted oblong tiles. Rather, it was a way to view the world that believed, once a nation became communist, its neighbors would also fall under the sway of Marx, Lenin, et al., working like an infection toward the good old U.S. of A.
     The theory didn't show much confidence in our own system. But it was enough to get 57,000 American soldiers killed in the 1960s and 1970s trying to stop one tiny Asian country, South Vietnam, from being absorbed by its communist neighbor, North Vietnam.
     In the daily anguish that is the Trump administration, I've been using the Vietnam War as a touchstone, a reminder of how bad things aren't, at least not yet. Because you might be forgiven, reading the analyses surrounding Trump's first 100 days in office, for assuming that his administration represents some historic nadir of disaster in the realm of American mis-governance. Vietnam reminds us there are hells below this one.
     Yes, it's difficult to identify disaster aborning. Vietnam simmered for years. But Trump's missteps tend to be utterly stillborn, and he has fallen into a regular pattern of initial zeal for the detestable — to ban Muslims, scrap health insurance for millions, build a nonsensical wall and, most recently, bankrupt the country giving tax breaks to the rich. Each folly in turn is thwarted by the heretofore lamented but now cherished diffusion of power and creaking inefficiency of American government: blocked by the courts, by rebellious fellow Republicans, by fierce local resistance.
     Then Trump shrugs and moves on....

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Mona Lisa selfie

     

      To my credit, I did not plan to visit the Louvre during our recent trip to Paris. For several reasons. First, I saw it during my last trip, 24 years ago. Been there, done that. Second, and more importantly, my wife didn't have fond memories of what she recalled as hulking time-darkened medieval works plastering across endless, packed galleries. And third, both of us much preferred the Impressionist art at the Musee d'Orsay, which we went to immediately.
      But we were in Paris nearly a full week, and the expected exerts a gravitational pull. Something we had already noticed in Florence, when a friend of our son's insisted we visit a certain sandwich shop. The line in front of the shop was long, we waited a half hour, while other shops were empty. When we got our coveted sandwiches they were ... just okay. A reminder that the wildly popular is sometimes better, sometimes not.
    So the tractor beam of the Louvre eventually pulled us in. And once there, we shuffled, zombie-like, toward the Mona Lisa, another pair of lemmings, hurrying cliffward. You have to. There are mute signs, with just her black and white image and an arrow, to both satisfy the common urge and to reduce wear and tear on the guards. Plus, the idea of going to the Louvre and not seeing the painting, it feels almost perverse, like going to Fort Lauderdale and not seeing the ocean. 
     On the way to see the star, we enjoyed the Louvre more than we thought. It was brighter, the pictures, fresher. Maybe a quarter century of general cleaning and restoration. Maybe our tastes are more refined now.
    And it was worth it just for the shock of arriving at the large room containing the Mona Lisa. It's a madhouse, jammed with visitors, all trying to get pictures of themselves with the Mona Lisa in the frame.
    Even before you glimpse the painting, a wave of humidity, sickly sweet, slightly perfumed, hits you in the face. The moisture from all those bodies. It's like being in a crowded locker room with art.

"Portrait of a Woman"

    And why? Because the Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world. And why is this particular painting is the most famous of all paintings? Because ... any idea? No, not the smile. She was just another one of Da Vinci's works, no different than this "Portrait of a Woman" which museum-goers flock by with nary a glance on their way to the Mona Lisa. 
     But in 1911, a worker named Vincenzo Peruggia, hired to cut a pane of glass for the painting, instead walked out of the museum with it. The Mona Lisa was so obscure that it took a full day for anyone to notice it was missing. And it stayed missing for two years, the Da Vinci tucked in Peruggia's trunk while the theft made more and more headlines—at one point Picasso was a suspect, and the chief of the Paris police resigned out of embarrassment. It was only returned after Peruggia, who like most criminals was no Lex Luthor, tried to sell it to the Uffizi Gallery. 
    So that's what you're crowding to see--the after-echo of a true crime mystery. That's why the crowds are there. But why all the photos? Hard to take in a throng, the image muddied by the protective glass. You could buy a perfect postcard in the gift shop for 1.2 euros. But that wouldn't satisfy the "Kilroy was here!" impulse that has us in its thrall, the Facebook urge to document our precious selves. A manifestation of the brainless egotism that has so thoroughly gripped our times.  I'm not excluding myself, though I generally resist the urge to include myself in photos. I know what I look like.
    The Mona Lisa is so popular it almost can't be perceived. Like Grant Wood's "American Gothic." You see it and think of the parodies. To be honest, I enjoyed Da Vinci's "Portrait de la Femme" in the next room far more than the Mona Lisa. I can't tell if the painting is substantively finer, or just less familiar, which are pretty much the same thing in the art world. Nothing kills a work more than over-exposure, and attention has in essence ruined the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa's smile is famously enigmatic, but this unknown woman seemed, to me, downright chilly, even hostile. As if she's saying, "Go ahead, fawn over the bitch in the next room." I looked for a postcard in the gift shop of her, but of course there were none to be had, among the hundreds and hundreds of duplicates of M.L.
       This has to be a transitional phase, all this picture taking. A little gap between the time when we used film, which cost money, and limited our number of shots, and the time when we wear some device that constantly films our surroundings, as a matter of security. No wonder we revere the past, or at least our ragged perceptions of what it might have been  like.

"Another voice, then"

     It is surprisingly easy to overlook the Baptistery of San Giovanni, a plain—well, plain relative to its surroundings — octagonal building sitting in the courtyard of the vastly larger, vastly more stunning, ornate and magnificent Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, commonly called the Duomo.
     The first time I went to Florence, in 1999, I didn't even go inside the baptistery. 
     But that was before I caught what my wife recently called "your Dante thing," and on my recent trip I made a point of ponying up the 12 euro entrance fee and going inside to take a peek, even as my loved ones took a pass. 
     This is, after all, the place where Dante was baptized on March 26, 1266. It is not often you get to sit in a room 750 years old. There is a wonderful, spare beauty to the altar, which looks like this.


   
     I spent a long time looking straight up, at the mosaic ceiling. It looks like this:
    

     As I did, a thought came to me. The thought went something like this:
     You know... that ceiling. It sorta echoes the entire structure of The Divine Comedy. You've got Satan below. You've got the mortal world above, then the angels above. Here Dante gets all this credit for imagining the nine rings of hell, and the complex design of his masterpiece. Maybe he got the idea for the whole thing merely by looking up.
    Nah, I thought. That can't be. If it were possible, I'd have heard of it. Seven hundred years is a long time. Who knows when the ceiling was even decorated? 
     In 1225, it turns out. Forty years before Dante's birth.
     Okay, I would have read about it. I've certainly read enough Dante commentary. My idea of fun, embarrassing as it is to admit. This isn't some Dan Brown novel where important clues sit out in plain sight waiting centuries to be noticed. Amateurs do not discover important aspects of literature heretofore ignored. If it were at all a valid thought, somebody would have had it and mentioned it. 
    Turns out, somebody did. When I got home, I immediately pulled down my go-to guide for all things Dante, Barbara Reynolds' masterful, Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man. The world's foremost Dante scholar doesn't mince words while describing Dante's upbringing:

     Images of evil were depicted everywhere. In particular, the cupola of the Baptistery was decorated with mosaics arranged in rectangles, placed symmetrically, representing Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, the Last Judgment and, of special importance for the Commedia, a grotesque figure of Satan, with three mouths, two protruding snake-like from the sides of his head, each devouring a sinner, an image with which Dante was familiar from earliest childhood. His presentation of Lucifer in Inferno resembles it closely, even to the sinners being crunched in his three mouths.

   Ah good, not original to me, but at least I'm not off-base either. The detail she's referring to is this.
     What I think this little episode illustrates the value of seeing something for yourself, versus reading about it in a book. I'm all for books. Still, I had certainly read the lines in Reynolds' book, then promptly forgot them. 
     But seeing the mosaic on the ceiling of the Baptistery—that isn't going to slip out of mind anytime soon.
      My wife and son had bowed out—save 24 euros, gone to get some cappuccino, leave dad to his madness. I didn't blame them. And honestly, I was glad for the time alone, to sit not only where Dante squalled as a baby, but where he yearned all his life to return.
     In Canto 25 of Paradiso, he pines for the place:

Should it ever come to pass that this sacred poem
to which both Heaven and earth have set their hand
so that it has made me lean for many years, 

should overcome the cruelty that locks me out
of the fair sheepfold where I slept as a lamb
foe of the wolves at war with it, 

with another voice then, with another fleece,
shall I return a poet and, at the font,
where I was baptized, take the laurel crown.

     I like the "made me lean for many years." Just another frustrated writer bitching about the paltriness of his reward. Which is no doubt why I like Dante so much. Not for Beatrice, not for all the Florentine politics or Catholic cosmology. But for the swollen, aching ego, so real across the centuries. Something I relate to.
     Also the "with another voice then, with another fleece..." What exactly does that mean? There's a lot of obscure stuff in the Commedia -- to this day nobody can figure out what "between Feltro and Feltro" means. Maybe he meant that he's hoping to come back, perhaps disguised. "Vello" means fleece, but it also means "veil." Or... not to put on airs ... but maybe he was referring, not to himself returning at all—hope of that was fading as he wrote Paradiso, which was not discovered until as his death. But maybe he was thinking of other people, of strangers, speaking in other voices, wearing other garb. Of, just maybe, guys like me. Who, if the poem was as popular as Dante seemed convinced it would be, might shamble by, centuries and centuries later, to sit for 20 minutes on a bench, and think about him, and grant him the honor he so hungered to receive at that spot.

The relevant lines quoted above from Paradiso Canto 25 are carved in marble, generally unnoticed, outside the Baptistery. 

     

"This is as actual a part of living as being born"

     Concrete sounded terrible.
     "You don't sound so good," I told him.
     "I'm very weak," he replied. "I don't think I will be able to call you. I have edema all over my body. My nephew is a doctor and he says I have maybe weeks. I think that might be optimistic. I think more likely days."
     He would die the next day, April 5
     Concrete had been phoning me at the newspaper for 15 years. Once a week, once a month — it's not like I kept track. To comment on columns. To talk about stuff. He had a blunt, rounded Chicago voice, massaging his "t's" into "d's.
     "Hi, it's Concrede..." he'd say.
     He was pleasant and informed and often complimentary. But still, for years I viewed him as something of a nuisance. I had things to do. I'd surf the web while we talked. It's not something I thought much about. I had no idea, for instance, why I called him "Concrete" — his business, maybe.
     But over the past few months, he got sick — heart failure — and started to die. I began paying closer attention. A heart transplant was not an option.
     "I can't see taking a heart from someone younger," he said. "I'm not Dick Cheney."
     He could have fought harder but, at 69, he didn't see the point.
     "It's not like I'm jumping at death, but you gotta be realistic," he said. "Seventeen years ago I had a triple bypass, so I've actually outlived most people with the condition I had. Things are coming to the conclusion. This is as actual a part of living as being born. I know it's a cliche but it's true."
     I was concerned he was alone, but, the oldest of seven children, six boys and a girl, he had relatives around.
     "I feel terrible being a burden to them," he said. "My nephew carrying me down the stairs. I liked it better when I carried him."
     What's it like, knowing that you are going to die soon?
     "In a way it's almost a gift," he said. "I get to say thank you to people, to try to make amends to people I've offended by commission or omission. To forgive those who've done things to me."
     Was he worried about what might come after death?
     "Reason only carries you so far," he said. "That's where things like faith come in. I hope for some survival of awareness. I can't be sure there is. I've fallen back on Christian tradition. There are things beyond what our brains can comprehend."
     He had a lot of good memories.
     "My niece Dana on my shoulders, leaving the Auto Show, the kids waving bye-bye to everyone as they were going out of a the Auto Show. It's a nice memory. My God, I've been thinking of so many good memories, things when I was a kid, my dad, funny things. Seven kids, one bathroom, I once tried to see if the toilet would swallow a potato."
     Any regrets, besides that?
     "Oh God," he said. "I wish I had years and years, I had plans with my brothers, stuff like that. You have to let all that go. People are saying goodbye to me. I'm saying goodbye to everybody. There's a sadness to it, an anger phase, I've come to acceptance ... though I'm also still angry about it. I'll probably die that way."
     Toward the end, I thought to ask something I had never asked before
     "Concrete, what's your name?"
     "My name is Michael Rosewell," he said. "It's an English name. My great-grandfather was a remittance man. The family was paid to leave England and never come back."
     Why did I call him "Concrete"? I had written something about touring the engine room of a ship in the mid-Atlantic.
     "I told you that in Vietnam we experimented with concrete hulls for ships, and you started to call me 'Concrete,'" he said. "When it's over I'll have someone call you..."
     True to his word, the day before I left on vacation, I got a phone message from his brother.
     "He never married, never had any children," said Joseph Rosewell. "He always felt like the nieces and nephews were the children he never had."
     Rosewell died in Garfield Ridge, in the house his parents bought 66 years ago. His brother said he was greatly missed.
     "He was the leader, he was highly intelligent, you could see that, could sense that right away," said Rosewell. "He was always ready to share things. He loved to talk, loved to have us sit around and chat, hey, have a cup of coffee with me, one thing turn to another and we were having a great conversation."
     I can vouch for that. I never met the man, but felt bad, missing his funeral. The day I arrived in Rome, the first church I came upon was a lovely 16th century cathedral, the Trinità dei Monti. at the top of the Spanish Steps. I put a coin in the box and lit one of the short round votive candles and said a prayer for Michael Rosewell.