First draft of American Writers Museum is highly promising

Canadian architect Dennis Rovere and his daughter Adrienne, 19, came from Calgary to visit the American Writers Museum.

     No man was ever as ready to dislike a place as I was primed to loathe the new American Writers Museum. As I strolled toward Michigan Avenue Tuesday morning for the museum’s grand opening, I was practically stropping the blade of scorn, eager to put it to use.
     I had studiously avoided all previous AWM publicity, my opinion of such places set years ago after visiting Cleveland’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, a mausoleum that reduces the vibrant disruptive force of my generation into dead glass cases of fringed jackets and sequined shoes. Just last month I had plunked down four euros to enter Casa di Dante in Florence, the slapped together tourist trap the city established to prove Florentines are the same frauds that Dante sunk into Hell 700 years ago.
     How could so vast a subject as American writing be condensed into an 11,000 foot space? It would be reductive, like the Illinois Holocaust Museum, turning the greatest atrocity of the 20th century into a school lesson about bullying.
     I was the third person in line, behind a father and daughter from Calgary who came here, specifically, they said, to see the only historical artifact on display: the 120-foot-long scroll of taped-together typewriter paper upon which Jack Kerouac batted out “On the Road.” (“They’re not writers,” Truman Capote quipped of Kerouac and the Beats. “They’re typists.”)
     That relic aside, the museum is all displays of the curator's art—timelines and interactive video screens, games and quizzes. I decided the standard for the AWM had to be the standard for any writing anywhere—is it interesting?—and I'm compelled to relate, it is interesting. The big guns were all there, of course, but also writers I had never heard of, such as Abraham Cahan, founder of the Jewish Daily Forward, a paper that, we are told, "mixed shund (sensationalism) and literatur (seriousness)." Some things never change.
     On video, scholars discoursed on subjects like "Promise" and "Edge" and "Identity." I chose Edge, and NPR book critic Maureen Corrigan nudged me toward something that I've never considered doing—reading Nathaniel West's "Day of the Locust," which she painted as a relevant look at what watching screens does to culture. She mentioned how 300 readers of the New Yorker canceled their subscriptions after Shirley Jackson published "The Lottery," a fact I might find useful when the readers are in full cry.
     Physical spaces are good, even important in our increasingly online world. So I'm glad the American Writers Museum is here, though it would benefit from more real objects. "On the Road" will be swapped out in October for something as yet undermined. But consider the room on Children's Literature. Big graphics, interesting displays on "Charlotte's Web" and "Little Women" and "Where the Wild Things Are." The room really cried out for a framed Dr. Seuss sketch, or some such thing, and I'd point out that bringing a child younger than 10 could be considered abuse.
     A few other flaws: the touch screens did not always leap to work. Some text, printed on glass, is rendered nearly illegible by shadow. And all of the authors featured in permanent displays are dead. I asked an administrator about this and he said contemporary writers will be represented in their programming and special exhibits, which is fine, though good writing is disruptive and by drawing the veil—one timeline stops in 1970—dynamism is lost.
     Though the museum is flexible enough that it can get it back. The central area is a changing exhibit space, now devoted to W.S. Merwin, who is alive. Though it focuses on Merwin's palm tree plantation in Hawaii. Visitors are invited to write thoughts on paper, which will be used to mulch the trees—itself a mystic, creepy, almost wrong misreading of the use of words.
     One hall focuses on the mechanics of good writing in an engaging and useful fashion. And since editors are taught to stress the positive with beginners, I would scrawl "highly promising" across this first draft of the American Writers Museum.

On the block

  

     Hmmm...this is a toughie.
    The prudent thing would be to stay silent. Say nothing about tronc, the parent company of the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, et al., entering into a deal to buy the Chicago Sun-Times, which was made public Monday afternoon.

    Best be mum. Safer. Hard to get in trouble that way. 
    Because saying anything is a lose-lose proposition.  And I have a cute little piece about the high cost of printer ink all ready to go...

    Nah, that stinks of cowardice.
    Lose-lose. No question about it. And I have no secret insider information. I'm a bystander too. 
     Being positive looks like sucking up to the new boss. Even when the new boss is really my old boss, Michael Ferro, who shed the Sun-Times—giving it away to a charity—so he could buy the Trib, seeing value in it that others missed, apparently. Remember how Gannett kept offering him more money, crying about his irresponsible stewardship all the while, even as they upped their offers, bidding against themselves while he waved them away?
    Kinda cool really. Maybe he'll buy Gannett next.

    But being negative also has risks. It's almost impossible to mention "tronc" and not observe it sounds like the name of a robot Muppet in a 1970s Sesame Street episode. I'm not sure that matters much in the upper echelons of finance. Most Sun-Times employees can spool out a variety of gripes about Ferro, though that does not make him unique in the pantheon of owners.  
     Not much of a risk to candor though. I can't honestly imagine he'd care. You need a pretty thick skin to own a newspaper. If the sale goes through—if the Justice Department allows it, and they blocked a past Trib deal— those cobbling together the transaction won't add a line to the complex contract purchasing, "All dunnage, office equipment, warrants and deeds belong to the Sun-Times ... except for Neil Steinberg. He gets the boot because he smirked at the corporate name on his hobby blog." 
     These big money guys, they're not china dolls.
     So fuck prudence, as I can say here, but not in the newspaper. Not yet anyway. I sometimes politely suggest we break that barrier because, well, it's coming, and we might as well be the first through the door. Imagine the attention. I've already crafted the lede to the column introducing obscenity. "Fuck this." Maybe I'll mention that to Michael next time I see him, assuming I ever do. 
    Would I prefer the paper not be bought? Sure. Change frightens me. Because I know how good I have it, how blessed I am. It's easy for me to me smug, now, because I'm not paddling around the frozen slurry with all the other folk—good, bad or indifferent—who got pitched over the side. I know it can make you bitter, like those former newsmen who gather every day at the end of Rob Feder's column, sticking up their thoughts about journalism, like dried boogers over a men's room urinal. One of my primary ambitions is to never be one of those guys.
     But change comes whether we want it or not. It's like Hemingway's line about how bankruptcy happens: "Two ways: Gradually and then suddenly."

    The Trib buying the Sun-Times is gradual and sudden. So. Enough throat clearing. To the heart of the matter. The Tribune and the Sun-Times joining together, the lion and the lamb, the suburban burgermeister and the scrappy city kid getting hitched.
    It isn't as if they're going to mash them both together and sell the thing as the Tribune-Sun-Times.  The two papers appeal to different demographics, and I imagine they'll be maintained as separate entities for the same reason Nabisco sells both Oreos and Fig Newtons. A blend would be gross. Killing one paper doesn't drive its readers to the other. There's no point in buying the thing if it won't remain a separate title. As it is, the Tribune already prints and delivers the Sun-Times. It won't rock your world if the Sun-Times marketing department cooks up Tribune promotions.
    That said, there will certainly be individual peril. Less job security, which is really sayin' something, and then there's the question of the union, on life support since 2009 but still there. Journalism has been on a race to the bottom, trying to find something hard to bounce up from in an attempt to regain the surface. The Tribune and the Sun-Times wrap their arms around each other, figuring they'll both float better that way.
    I'm ... what? Guardedly optimistic, a reaction that has to be a little colored by how I perceived the news. When I saw the publisher's email Monday I was momentarily confused. It began:

I wanted to update everyone on some developments in regard to the Sun-Times and other assets owned by Wrapports, LLC. We just issued a press release (attached) announcing that in tomorrow’s edition of the Sun-Times the newspaper will run an ad (also attached) that it is seeking a buyer that will continue to publish the newspaper.   

     I stopped there, confused. An ad seeking a buyer? That had a whiff of doomed desperation, like old Aunt Sadie putting her profile on Match.com. That'll never work. And the "that will continue to publish the newspaper" seemed to suggest there are buyers who won't. Why buy the thing if not to run it? It isn't as if we own land anymore.

     But I kept reading—always smart when you're in the understanding-stuff business.  It turns out there was more. The ad is just a bit of pro-forma legalistic throat clearing so tronc—which also sounds like the place in his little automobile where Inspector Clouseau stashes his luggage—can buy the Sun-Times. We are told there are no other suitors.

     So a specific purchaser, even the Tribune, came as a relief, compared to just angling around for anybody flipping through the paper to buy the place. There are worse people than the Tribune to buy you. Last I checked, Rupert Murdoch still owned newspapers. WGN was just purchased by Sinclair Broadcast Group, a low rent right wing broadcast group, kind of Hunts ketchup to Fox's Heinz. There are hells below this one. 

     Those still using old dance cards will decry the sale. What of the storied Trib v. Sun-Times rivalry? The Front Page. Rival reporters racing to be the first to a pay phone? They were like Field's and Carsons.

     Field's is gone, I should point out. I hate to be the one to tell you. The Daily News is gone. City News too. And Napoleon escaped from Elba.

     Nostalgia only gets you so far. The first obligation of a newspaper, the trick question in J-school went, is to stay in business. The past decade of newspapering have been a struggle to do that, a constant game of staffer musical chairs. The music stops and they yank a chair away. Fewer folks putting out a leaner product. Am I happy about it? No. I'd prefer we hire the photo staff back ... and a jazz critic and a medical reporter and a few kids to run get coffee. And Italian cookies. I love those. 

     I do not dread going back to work for Ferro. That will seem like toadyism, but screw it. He was always fair to me, and I can't resist the impulse to try to be fair to him in return. He seems to have a plan. Ferro obviously has something going on. In 2015 IBM paid a billion dollars for Merge Healthcare, that he rescued in 2008, netting him a cool $200 million. I can't even tell you what Merge Healthcare is—something about merging health and care. He seems to have mastered the hoover-up-money part of the online world, and never pushed me to write anything I found odious. If he wants to spend more of those millions being fire hosed at him on the Sun-Times, well, that's just fine. Somebody should. 
    The great Irish playwright Brendan Behan once said, "A change is as good as a rest." There really is no rest in daily journalism. But there certainly is change, whether we like it or not. What will it be like? We don't have to guess. All we have to do is wait and find out.

  

How can Americans support Trump? How can they smoke?

Femme a l'orchidee, by Edgard Maxence

     Smoking is wonderful. That’s why people do it. It’s one of life’s joys. You pause from grinding routine, slip away to some quiet spot, tuck your favorite brand between your lips, spark fire, and inhale a big soothing lungful of your friend, nicotine. Ahhhh. Relaxation. The tightened bolt in your head loosens, anxiety ratchets down, and your brain squeezes out a single drop of pleasure.
     Smoking is vile. An addiction that will kill you. Cancer, emphysema, heart disease. Awful deaths. Half a million Americans a year die from smoking. Smoking is expensive. It makes you stink.
     Smokers, it is safe to say, endorse the first paragraph; non-smokers, the second.
     A phenomenon I call “framing” — you portion off the reality you prefer, the one that resonates with your life, and gaze fixedly at that.

     I mention framing a lot to my aghast friends, who can’t understand how anyone can support Donald Trump. They considered him a liar, bully and charlatan the day he was elected, and it’s only gotten worse. Trump fired FBI director James Comey last week, at first claiming it was because he bungled the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails then admitting he didn’t like Comey investigating how the Russians influenced the campaign.

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Happy Mother's Day

     Whistler's mother was aware of her son's love of art. But she still wanted the young man to go to military school, so as to have a career, and not shame the family name. 
    He forgave her, as sons invariably do.
    James McNeill Whistler's "Arrangement in Gray & Black No. 1 (Portrait of the Artist's Mother)" is on display at the Art Institute of Chicago for another month—the 1871 painting goes back to the Musee d'Orsay on June 11.

"Napoleon's Mother" by Antonio Canova

      Anna McNeill Whistler had moved to London in 1863, joining her son's household and forcing his mistress to find new lodging. He did not hold that against her either, however, painting this portrait: at first she was to be depicted standing, according to the placard. But the old woman grew tired and was allowed to sit and Whistler, sensing an opportunity, and influenced by Antonio Cadova's sculpture "Napoleon's Mother," went with it.
      Having just written about why the Mona Lisa is famous, it would be worthwhile to consider why Whistler's Mother, as it is commonly called, is also iconic.  It was immediately popular, which helps: Swinburne praised it. Thomas Carlyle commissioned Whistler to paint his own portrait after seeing it. 
Always a francophile, Whistler quipped, after the nation bought painting in 1891, that now he truly was a son of France now that the nation "owned his mother."
     In popular culture, she became motherhood personified. Or perhaps, rather, idealized. Maybe because the woman seems so placid, so pleasant, calm, silent, in repose, not glaring angrily at the viewer, but looking placidly away. Who we would all like our mothers to be, at least at times. The artist, who considered this one of his best paintings, agreed that his mother looks swell here. "Yes," he once said. "One does like to make one's mummy just as nice as possible." 

Colleges should supervise hazing instead of trying to ban it

  
     Last year, when my younger son told me he was joining a fraternity, I was pleased, but had one concern.
     "Good, I said. "I'm proud of you. Just don't let them kill you during the hazing," I said.
     "Dad," he replied. "Frats don't haze anymore. It's banned."
    "Of course it is," I said. "So when they're not hazing you, don't let them kill you. Just say, 'I'm sorry, but my father forbids me doing this.' You can blame me."
     That conversation came back last week, as charges were filed over a horrific incident at Penn State. Eighteen members of Beta Theta Pi were charged with manslaughter and other crimes for letting pledge Timothy J. Piazza, 19, die after drinking excessively, falling down stairs, and then being neglected for 12 hours.
     When I was his age, fraternities were a mystery. "You spend 18 years under the thumb of your parents," I'd say. "You finally get a taste of freedom and what's the first thing you do? Run to join an organization that demands you crawl across the quad at midnight, blindfolded, rolling an egg with your nose."
     Belonging to a frat wasn't a point of pride, it was an indictment. I felt this so strongly, I put a frat paddle in my freshman dorm window, bearing a decal showing a coat of arms— a knight holding his thumb to his nose and waggling his fingers, blowing a raspberry—and the letters GDI, meaning "God Damn Independent."

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Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Last week's return of the Saturday Fun Activity was supposed to be a one-time event. But so many readers were glad it was back, and since I have utterly nothing to say otherwise, I figure, well, why the hell not? 
     This is an architect's model that I noticed Friday. It struck me as the sort of thing that King Dale would immediately dredge out of the internet. But since he is sidelined this week, because he won last week, the challenge falls to you. Can you do it? It might be unfair to ask you to locate something that hasn't been built yet, but my gut tells me you're up for the task. 
      Still, I imagine some brainwork is in order, so a suitable gift is necessary. How about ... a signed, hardback copy of "You Were Never in Chicago," my memoir of the city. Place your guesses below. Good luck. 

Deploy the big chicken

     The restaurant business is tough. You need good food. A good space. Good service. Good publicity. And a big heaping serving of good luck. Over and over and over. It's a wonder any of them ever work, and most don't. The pudding never sets, the miracle never arrives.  It's unfair to go to a place too soon, before they've worked out the kinks. But wait too long and it may be gone. 
     Who doesn't want a good restaurant a few steps from home? So I've been following with more than passing interest developments at the corner of Shermer and Walters in Northbrook, ground floor of a rounded brick office building just around the corner from where we live. Hope mingled with disappointment, rooting for something to work, invariably let down. 
     My Pie, a branch of venerable Chicago pizzeria, opened in 2009. The place had fans, though we were not one of them. We went twice. It wasn't bad, but Lou Malnatti's is practically across the street. I just wasn't willing to forgo a single Lou Malnatti's pizza in order to support this new place. Do that, and I'd always be short one Lou's pizza. I would never catch up. It lasted a little more than two years.
     In 2015, Agave, a generic Mexican restaurant opened. I knew it was doomed right away before stepping foot inside, because the sign was mounted crooked. They didn't even bother taking down the Mi Pie sign brackets. Really. If you can't get your damn sign straight, what can you do? 
    Charitable soul that I am, I went anyway. Ate some expensive, utterly unremarkable Mexican chow, set down by an indifferent waitress, in a room that was nearly unadorned.  
    Kind soul that I am, I held my tongue, until after it failed. Which took about a year.
     The spot is not even a block from my house. You have to have pity on your neighbors. Pity on restaurants. They're hanging off a cliff; don't jump on their fingers.
     Then, six months ago, Drumstix. I immediately went with my younger son and we happily fed. Moist chicken. Homemade baked beans. Mmm. We were satisfied but then, we are boys and boys tend to like food that can be chewed and swallowed. I hurried back with my wife, a far more discerning eater than I. She pointed out that the friend chicken breast that I celebrated for being juicy was in fact soggy. 
    "Fried chicken is supposed to be crispy," she said.  That wasn't a factor for me, because I scraped off the skin off before eating it.  But I saw her point.
     I was tempted to give the place another try -- sometimes restaurants take time to find their groove, and you need to give them a chance. Support the home team. But my wife was underwhelmed, end of story. There are many other places to eat. I almost pressed. But their signs are paper, tucked inside the windows. Really? Is that the best you can do? The My Pie lighting bracket is still up, illuminating nothing. I know I shouldn't, but I put an almost talismanic importance onto restaurant signs. They reveal the soul within. Months passed.
     And that might have been it. But a couple days ago, this 7-foot-tall chicken arrived out front, set off by his own little wrought iron fence.  "Did you see the chicken?" my wife said. Of course I did. Nothing more really needed to be said between us. We knew what we had to do immediately. You must respect effort like that. Particularly in Northbrook. I wish I had been at the zoning meeting where they finessed the chicken past the board. (Actually, it is on private land, the owner tells me, so zoning approval was not necessary. That explains its presence). 
      We saw the chicken Tuesday. On Thursday night we were at Drumstix for dinner. My wife liked her fish and chips far more than she had liked the chicken. I tried a half slab of ribs. And while it is no Green Street Smoked Meats, no Smoque, Not sweet, as I like ribs, but peppery, I also had no trouble polishing them off, sucking the bones. The place was sunlit and populated with diners, with families. The guy bussing our table was a kid we've known since kindergarten, and we caught up happily. The music was lively, trains passed by outside. We both felt pushed over the hump. We weren't smitten with the food, not yet anyway, but we'd give it another try. You sort of have to -- I mean, look at that chicken. It's a very big chicken.
     Or is it a rooster? The saying "If it crows, it's a rooster, if it lays an egg, it's a hen" is not enormously helpful in this situation. I'm sticking with a chicken because, frankly, a chicken is funnier. 
     Either way, exactly the sort of thing Northbrook so desperately needs.
    "Maybe I'll really like the chicken pot pie..." I said, hopefully. They also have red velvet cake on the menu. It is very hard to wreck red velvet cake. 
     Most people push at their dreams but feebly. A first draft, shopped around a few publishers and then consigned to a drawer forever. A half-assed effort, success fails to arrive immediately, then straight to collapse, surrender and bitterness. But some people roll up their sleeves, cock their heads, squint one eye, and deploy the big chicken. You have to respect that.