World hounds queen like Diana was hunted

Shrine to Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed, Harrod's, 2009

     When the subject turns to the death of Princess Diana, 20 years ago today, Aug. 31, 1997, two memories stand out.

     The first is the manner I learned of the accident: from the Sunday New York Times, which was delivered in our breezeway on Pine Grove Avenue. Old school, even back then. We had a newborn, two months old, our younger son, and didn't watch TV or listen to the radio that evening. We weren't as plugged in, could go hours if not days without dipping a toe in the sloshing oceans of news. 
     Nowadays, you can't have a moment downtime, waiting for the elevator doors to open, without whipping out your phone and dipping into the constantly running river of information.

     Back then, I clomped out the back door, scooped up the fat paper log of a newspaper, stripped off the plastic, and saw a short, early bulletin, squeezed into a column on the front page, that told only of the auto accident in Paris. I  went inside, clicked on the TV; the grim music and somber tones immediately told me she was dead, even before I heard words confirming it.

    The second was a few weeks later, during the paroxysm of scorn for the media that follows. A photographer pal of mine, Bob Davis, and I were returning from a story when we happened upon a bad car accident in the Loop, on Wabash Avenue. A woman pulling out of a parking lot had run down a group of pedestrians. As Bob raised his camera to record the carnage, one of the on-lookers, rubbernecking for a view, some businessman, held up his yellow legal pad, blocking the lens, snarling something critical of the jackal pack media. 

    The irony of that moment stung and lingered. Here was a guy trying to do what? See what had happened. And while in the very act of trying to do that, he instinctively lunged to stop everyone else from seeing what happened. 
     Donald Trump might skate along on hypocrisy but he sure didn't invent it. 

    My column was still weekly, so naturally, writing a week after the event, I sidestepped the death itself and focused on what was most recent, the queen's speech. I was genuinely revolted by the public reaction to Diana's death: the  wallowing in sentiment, the hyperventilating exaggeration, the overwhelming bathos, the bottomless hunger to pry into the inner lives of those we feel we own.

     With all the sympathy and tears—much of it, no doubt, genuine—expended over the tragic death of Princess Diana, I hope you'll forgive me if I whisper a kind word about the villains du jour, Prince Charles and his mother.
     Perhaps I am stone-hearted. But I was far more interested in what Queen Elizabeth, pushed by public pressure in front of the TV cameras months before her usual day, had to say Friday than I was in witnessing Diana's funeral, the four-hankie culmination of this week's extraordinary worldwide keening.
     Would the queen, bending to the public craving for self-exposure, stoked to a white hot flame by the cheerleading British media ("SHOW US YOU CARE!" a headline demanded) drop 50 years of carefully manicured public decorum and break down, cry, give us a show, sing the old Bill Clinton standard, "I-feel-your-pain; you-feel-my-pain; we-all-feel-each-other's pain"?
     That was what the mob seemed to be howling for.
     Or would she—as I so fervently prayed—be true to herself, maintain the reserve that was once the very definition of royalty, perhaps slipping in a bit of pique? Stare boldly into the camera and say, in a properly icy tone: "How can you bloody pack of bloody jackals condemn the paparazzi out of one corner of your mouths while yapping for my son to go on the BBC and read a love poem to his dead ex-wife out of the other? How dare you?"
     Well, one could hope.
     Or would she, unaccustomed except at Christmastide to talking to an audience larger than a brace of corgi dogs, sleepwalk through a pained yet Buckingham-Palace-polished chin-up attempt at damage control ("I believe there are lessons to be drawn . . ." she said), lobbing a few shovelfuls of beach against the rising tide of ever-cheapened sentiment?
      That was easy. Door No. 3. And of course CNN immediately cut to the throng outside the palace, to pull a few average citizens aside to give the thumbs down on the performance.
     "Not enough," one said.
     "Not enough?" Isn't Rule No. 1 of etiquette that the parties most affected get to act however they like? That it's cruel to judge Mr. Widower for not crying at his wife's funeral and rude to express that judgment?
     And the really galling thing is that we're using the same cudgel that killed Diana to pummel her survivors. The public has no more right to know how Queen Elizabeth felt about the death of her former daughter-in-law than it did to see how Diana looked working out in her leotards. Those two interests spring from the same desire. The same demand that public figures—movie stars, political leaders, royalty—not only perform their jobs, but act as a sort of surrogate pal and fetish object to the body politic.
     Why should Charles—a reticent, solemn man who can't state an opinion without being mocked as a twit— suddenly be expected to spout his deepest pains on command, like a trained seal? Why should the queen suddenly be requested to emote like a diva? It's bad enough that people started lining up along the funeral route three days early, as if they were camping out in front of Dorothy Chandler Pavilion before the Academy Awards.
     "Not enough"? It's already too much. Diana, in declining to act royal, in refusing to adopt the remoteness that the queen and Charles are unable to shed, might have built up a cult for herself, but she succeeded in pulling the royalty down to a state of low regard unequaled since the Roundheads were chasing the first Charles across the countryside.
     Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe royalty is bad, and the sooner it is retired, the sooner we can march off to whatever brave new world awaits us.
     We lie to ourselves that we loved Diana because she was so good, for her causes. But people didn't love Diana for her causes—we ignore causes. We scorn charity. Bor-ing. Except in the case of people like her, when causes are an excuse. How else to have parties? Unless it benefits AIDS or cancer or something, a masked ball is just decadence.
     People follow royalty for the same reason they play the lottery: wish fulfillment. Aren't we so interested in the royals for the very reason that the closest most of us will ever come to wearing a $ 200,000 ring or having tea and crumpets with the queen is to read about it, or to gape at it on TV?
     To suggest that people follow royalty for the good works they do is like saying that people play the lottery, not to spin dreams of wealth, but as a convenient way to contribute to the state's educational fund on an anonymous, weekly basis.
     So pity poor Charles and pity the queen. The reserve and decorum that seemed merely stiff before Diana will now appear inhuman.
     The only thing worse than remaining how they've always been would be to change—for Charles to start hanging out in nightclubs, joining conga lines with supermodels. For the queen to be photographed painting her toenails. Maybe that's next. God save the queen; God save us all.

                        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 7, 1997

   

Can't we pretend Hurricane Harvey didn't happen?

  
    What storm? You mean Hurricane Harvey? Or rather, so-called Hurricane Harvey?
     Never happened. An obvious fraud cooked up by Democrats trying to push their “climate change” agenda. The images on TV of waterlogged Houston residents being led to safety through flooded streets? Actors on Hollywood sound stages. More fake news by CNN trying to goose ratings with inspiring tales of rescue and . . ..
     Nah, it’s no good. Can’t do it. See, that’s why we liberals are at such a disadvantage. We have one hand tied behind our backs in the street brawl for America’s soul, denied the full range of fabrication easily employed by the Right, from simple bald lies (Ted Cruz first claiming he supported relief for Hurricane Sandy, then, fibbing again, insisting the bill was laden with pork. Which it wasn’t.) to the most elaborate fantasies (Alex Jones suggesting that Nazi protesters at Charlottesville were Jewish actors).
     Meanwhile, we’re mired in the troublesome realm of the real. Democrats just can’t contort our minds the way they can. We’re like rheumatic middle-aged men trying to compete on the pommel horse against Olympic gymnasts.
     I can’t even in good conscience hold up Hurricane Harvey — the worst rainstorm in United States history — as an example of climate change. While it is certainly the sort of meteorological disaster we are going to see more and more of as the Earth heats up, you can’t point to any one particular storm and lay it at the feet of our warming world. That’s why even though the evidence of climate change is as clear and undeniable as evidence that something wet and windy hit Houston this past week, that doesn’t stop Republicans from denying the former as they shed crocodile tears over the latter.
     Honestly, I’m not even comfortable using Hurricane Harvey as column fodder, because there are people involved. People suffering. Their homes destroyed, their lives upended. You don’t turn that into a joke.
    Either you sympathize with people or you do not. That is the essential gulf we see in America today.

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Fight night

     How big was the Mayweather-McGregor fight Saturday night?
     Even I watched it, and I had never seen a professional boxing match before in my entire life. The closest I came previously was a smoker at the Union League Club, and then we didn't pay as much attention to whatever was going on in the ring as much as we did our scotches and cigars.
     It was an accident of course. Friday was, well, one of those days, and when I saw my younger kid in his work-out gear heading for the Y, I said, "Wait five minutes and I'll go with you," and he graciously paused while I got dressed, grabbed a bottle of water and we went to work out.
    Exercise helps.
    While I was in the weight room, doing sit-ups, I heard an insistent, leathery, flapping noise, and realized it was the boy hitting the speed bag. I drifted over to watch, a blur of hands, the bag snapping back and forth faster than I thought possible. He invited me to try, and I did, getting up what I thought was a respectable rhythm.
    "You're doing it wrong," he said, and showed me his technique: hit with the knuckles of the fist then the heel of the hand, a double-tap with each hand that worked the bag much faster, so that even I could manage halfway respectable results.
    "How did you learn that?" I asked.
    "YouTube," he replied.
    Of course.
    I thanked him and, as we departed, we talked about how much fun the speed bag was—I usually end my work-outs with it, as a kind of reward. I mentioned the fight the next day, perhaps we could head somewhere and see it. He'd said he'd like that. A bit of online sleuthing told us: go to Buffalo Wild Wings.
    But they wanted $20 a head cover charge. And my other son wanted to join in. And my wife, who wouldn't actually watch a fight, but would go along with her men. Suddenly we were looking at $80 just to get in the door, never mind what we'd spend on wings, wild or otherwise. A hundred bucks to stream the thing at home suddenly seemed a bargain.
     It seemed a wasted opportunity, almost selfish, to just watch it by ourselves. Texts were sent, doors down the street knocked on, pizza ordered, and a party sprang up around the slugfest.
     The event started at 6 p.m. Having never watched a fight before, I ignorantly assumed that meant there would be an hour or two or preliminaries, then the Main Event. I stupidly began watching at 6 p.m., what turned out to be an hour lionizing the UFC fighter Conor McGregor, an Irish martial arts expert who despairing of worlds to conquer, like Alexander the Great, had challenged undefeated boxer Floyd Mayweather to come out of retirement to face him. Then we got an hour of hosannas to Mayweather, including visits to his boxing center and strip club.
     Two hours of proof that, black or white, American or Irish, flaunted wealth ends up ridiculous and puerile.
     It wasn't boring exactly, with plenty of shots of exotic cars and a kind of pumped up self-assigned significance—not only would boxing be changed forever, but all sport, if not the universe nudged off its axis by this match. I smiling, remembering that a few days earlier I had never heard of either man. Their general tone of unashamed, counter-factual exaggeration made me think, more than once, of the current occupant of the Oval Office. The fact that he too isn't trailed by goons holding enormous championship belts above their heads seems almost a kind of restraint. Maybe that's coming.
     The truly boring part happened in the three undercards, as non-entity boxers poked at each other. The sport is condemned as violent, but these matches weren't violent. The contestants poked at each other in near-stupor. I knew I was in trouble about 8 p.m. when the talking heads introducing the matches did so from a largely empty arena in Las Vegas. The crowd wasn't even there yet.
     Fortunately I had the good sense to light the Tiki torches—will we ever look at them and not think of Nazis?—and build a fire out back in the fire pit, so we could repair there and take a break from the action, or lack of which.
     The main event began at about 11 p.m. Common wisdom was that McGregor, who had never fought a professional boxing match before, would have to overcome Mayweather, 49 and 0, early on in order to win. Mayweather, for his part, was content to keep his hands in front of his face, elbows close together and ward off blows for about the first eight rounds. As fit as McGregor is, he couldn't do that forever, and when he tired, in round 9, Mayweather began to pummel him and by the 10th round he was hitting him at will and the referee stopped the right to keep McGregor from being maimed.
    It was more complicated than that, but that was the essence.
    We all agreed that McGregor had not embarrassed himself, marveled at the sums taken in by the fighters—Mayweather earned a reported $300 million, McGregor a third or so—and declared the whole thing a success.
     Final thoughts? McGregor was undone by his personality, not his skill—as the bold newcomer, he couldn't have adopted the conservative strategy that won for Mayweather, even though that would have been his only hope, though not that doing so would have worked; then they'd both be hanging back, neither would win, and the audience would feel robbed. So everyone was forced to behave the way he did; McGregor's loss was almost foreordained by Fate. Hubris.
    What else? I was surprised at how poorly produced the opening segments were.  At one point they spent several minutes showing a poster of the fight, certainly a lost opportunity, considering that millions were watching. They were advising something we had all already bought.
    Given that the evening was bringing in the take of a Hollywood blockbuster, and that many people new to the sport were viewing, I would have imagined they'd have explained the terrain a bit more than reprise a few of McGregor's fights and show Mayweather getting on and off jets and talking about how much money he makes in a tone that, again, struck me as sadly presidential.
     On Facebook, friends wrung their hands over the violence of boxing. They should save it for the victims of actual violence. These guys are laughing all the way to the bank, and while I'm sorry it had to be done on this pretext, the fight led to a house full of my kids, their pals and our friends, so I can't complain either.

Wall of Respect less remembered but more significant

Photo courtesy of Northwestern University Press

     Gwendolyn Brooks read a poem at two dedications of public Chicago artworks in August of 1967.
     The first everyone knows about. Big, front page news, then and now: the unveiling of the Picasso sculpture at Daley Plaza—you couldn't miss its anniversary earlier this month.
     That dedication 50 years ago was attended by Mayor Richard J. Daley and tens of thousands of onlookers. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed.
     The poem Brooks read at the dedication radiated unease.
     "Man visits art, but squirms," she read.
     The second dedication, Aug. 27, 1967, is far less known, then and now. Daley stayed home, and its anniversary passed without hoopla Sunday. 
     That dedication was of a mural known as the "Wall of Respect," while less famous, has more to say to our present political moment, with Confederate monuments to white supremacy being debated and a president mouthing racist codes.
     The Wall was a series of portraits of black heroes, painted on an abandoned building at 43rd and Langley.
     Brooks was more comfortable at that dedication. She knew exactly where she was.
     "South of success and east of gloss and glass," she read.
     The wall depicted Muhammed Ali, arms raised in triumph, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Bill Russell, Billie Holiday, and others—though not, significantly, Martin Luther King, who had been deftly played by Daley earlier that summer when he tried to bring his open occupancy movement to Chicago.

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Photo courtesy of Northwestern University Press

Seen on the boulevard

     Not everything is for everybody. I know that. 
     So when confronted with something new and, to my perspective, horrific, I try to pause and wonder if the new thing being considered is indeed unacceptable, or merely new. Maybe it is just ridiculous to me, but others think it is swell. 
     Particularly with fashion. The way fashion works is that designers toss all manner of novel weirdness out at the public, and sees what sticks. It is a mistake to take something seriously that isn't intended to be taken seriously at all.
     So it might have been a lapse in me, a man in his later 50s, an old standard that stopped me dead in my tracks, gaping in horror at this ensemble of men's clothing spied in the window of the Paul Stuart shop on LaSalle Street in downtown Chicago recent. 
    It looked ... so ... clownish. I thought immediately of Ed Wynn, a largely forgotten comic, half a century dead.  The high narrow waist, the thick blue fabric, the red pants, the big white buttons, whatever is going on with the collar and perhaps a tie, I can't quite tell.
    Would someone see that, think, "Cool!" and run in and buy it? Someone must. They sell the thing. Paul Stuart is, I believe, a mainstream clothier, not some hip trendy place catering to the fringes.

Ed Wynn

      Still. Even the idea of suits, regular boxy suits, with two or three buttons, feels almost arcane. Suits themselves have slid from favor. I used to wear them almost daily to the paper, so as to be ready for any occasion. But such occasions became increasingly rare, and lately I've been eyeing the row of jackets in my closet, wondering whether I should bag them up and relocate them to the guest room closet. I think I've worn one jacket, once, since Memorial Day—meeting Chris Kennedy for breakfast a few weeks back for breakfast at Chicago Cut, a high end, see-and-be-seen kind of place. But then it was the standard blue blazer. 
    I used to loan my neckties grudgingly to my boys, for interviews and such, with stern admonitions. "This is my favorite tie; try to bring it back." Now I don't bother: they can take what they want, return it, not return it. It isn't as if I'm wearing neckties anymore.
    So given that suits themselves are becoming an oddity, who would wear this particularly odd rig? A young man, I imagine, with more money than taste, to pass judgment, someone hoping to look ... not clownish, certainly, but well-tailored. I was hurrying to a train, or I would have stopped in and seen what the outfit cost. A grand, I imagine, or more. High fashion is not only quixotic but pricy. That's the point. To tell people you laid out for this look.
     Perhaps it is something that a young man in his 20s might pull off, at the opera or among circles I just don't travel in. And if you have it hanging in your closet, forgive me, the fault is mine, no doubt. And in truth I don't feel burdened and out-of-sorts so much as liberated. I would hate to be burdened with a perspective that would put me in such a get-up. Or am I missing something? Maybe someone can explain it to me. I just don't understand. I once went to work in a kilt and jacket, so am not completely averse to standing out. But this? To me, I would die a thousand deaths if I had to wear it to the most formal occasion. But others must feel differently. 

Are you cute or severe?

     "Batman" with Adam West debuted on television in 1965. I was in kindergarten and just learning to read. In the show, his youthful ward Dick Grayson, in the role of sidekick, Robin, would frequently utter some kind of faux oath beginning with "Holy..." Someone online has of course tallied them all, counting 367.
    Sometimes the sanctified nouns were common words, "Holy Fog!" But often obscure, "Holy Tintinnabulation!" What I remember is trotting off to the dictionary to look up these words, a practice I've done all my life ("Tintinnabulation" = ringing in your ears, and no, I didn't have to look it up).
      I can't tell you whether other people do the same. My hunch is they shrug the recondite words off and live with the mystery or, more precisely, forget all about it.

Chex box

Microsoft logo

    Not me. When my cousin Harry, a tech guy in Boston, remarked upon my post on the new Chex box, he pointed out its similarity to the Microsoft logo, adding, "I'm overall not a fan of overly-flat design—skeuomorphism is charming in moderation." 
    Before I even responded, I was on Wikipedia, learning about skeumorphism. New to me.
    The term refers to when physical objects mirror design characteristics of the originals they are based on. A rubber baseball that retains stitching sprang immediately to my mind. The stitches serve no function beyond enhancing the baseball effect (sticklers will argue they facilitate grip, and they do, but toymakers could add plain lines for that. These look like lacing). 
     We see this in computer interface design.  The email button on your cell phone looks like an envelope, even though not requiring an envelope is one of the numerous advantages of email. The stopwatch function has a little watch, complete with push buttons upon it. The pictures are tip-offs to what the buttons do.
     Harry contrasted this with "flat design." Digging into that, I find that the icons I consider skeuomorphs—the little phone on my iPhone—are actually considered instances of flat design, because they are so simplified, though there is some overlap. The blue oblong with an "f" on it that calls up Facebook is flat design.
     I'd say its the difference between cute and severe: a little camera with a flash cube is cute, and thus skeumorphic; a more stylized camera is severe, thus flat design.
     Why so many symbols on computers? The big advantage of symbols is obvious if you consider the issue of restrooms. Once upon a time they were labeled "Men" and "Women" which only helps if you speak English. In the 1960s, we started to get those generic "Man" and "Woman" stick figurines, a descendent of the Isotypes first created in Vienna in the 1920s (a selection of Isotypes is pictured atop the blog). 
    I am just old enough to think of these generic figures as being vaguely futuristic.
    I suppose context is important. The flat design man is what we are used to; it would be off-putting to have an actual person represented in faux three-dimensions on restroom doors. I was in a restaurant recently where the restrooms were identified by photographs—James Dean for "Men," Marilyn Monroe for "Women." It was not clever, not a visually pleasing look, but had an improvised, ad hoc quality to it. It looked cheap.
     Where am I going with this? Hell if I know. I just thought it was interesting, at least did when I started out. But now I feel like someone who balled up paper under a camp fire, then watched the paper blaze away and then die down to a smoldering ruin and the fire never caught. Ah well, better than nothing, which might make for a good slogan for the blog. "EGD: Better than Nothing." I don't have a slogan, or didn't up to now. The next step is a logo or symbol for everygoddamnday—something I've never considered before. What might that look like?

         

Driverless cars are coming while Balbo Drive is going

     “It’s like shooting a duck in a bucket,” I told my wife, making a pistol with my thumb and forefinger and taking bead on the imaginary fowl placidly paddling at my feet, looking up at me with anatine puzzlement.
     I was referring to commenting on the stupidities of the Chicago City Council. Their various edicts and pronouncements hardly matter. Besides, I have my professional pride to think about. We do not traffic in the obvious.
    No need to highlight the City Council’s follies for readers. They know.
     But there is futurity to think about. And someday, maybe even someday soon, when the bean-shaped, electric, self-driving cars that we summon with our iPhones, if not simply by tugging an earlobe and wishing it, are gliding silently to our doors, some grinning wit will disinter thecomments made this week by Finance Committee Chairman Edward Burke(14th):

“Let’s say a child is playing soccer or basketball in a park and then loses control of the ball and it rolls out into the street,” Burke fretted. “Would the [driverless] vehicle recognize the presence of the ball or toy and promptly brake?”

     No Ed, the car would just run over the ball and the child chasing it; that’s what makes this new technology so exciting.

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