Art in Chicago: "You're surrounded by it everywhere"

"Balloon Dog (Blue)" Jeff Koons (Broad Museum, Los Angeles) 

     If you put a gun to my head and demanded that I name three living Chicago artists I’d be a dead man. Oh, I’d reel off Tony Fitzpatrick and Hebru Brantley easily enough. Then “boom!” because I couldn’t think of a third to save my life.
     Which I’d be too embarrassed to admit if I didn’t suspect that this is two contemporary artists more than most readers could manage.
     Chicago is not really an art town. Yes, Expo Chicago, the International Exposition of Contemporary & Modern Art, kicks off Wednesday at Navy Pier. And yes, we have wonderful public art, highlighted last month with the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the unveiling of the Picasso sculpture. A Miro and a Calder, that Oldenburg bat column and Dubuffet’s “Snoopy in a Blender,” which really isn’t its name, but neither is “The Bean” the real name of Anish Kapoor’s mirrored legume.
     Except for the Bean, which I love, I used to think dimly of Chicago’s public art, particularly the Picasso. But I try to actually listen to the people I talk with, and Michael Darling, the curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, convinced me that this stuff is actually important.

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From Katrina emerged a hero

     I'm afraid to even whisper this. But here goes: do you think the American public was, oh I don't know, let down by Hurricane Irma? Felt, in its secret heart, that they were promised this epic storm, this unparalleled disaster, and the severe weather that gripped Florida, damaging though it was, fell far short? As if the whole thing were an entertainment, a show, an extravaganza, that never quite pulled together.
     Not the people living it, of course. They were relieved, somewhat, although the power outages and flooding and such were no doubt trial enough for them.  

     No one would admit saying this—I'm certainly not. Saying it, I mean. But my gut tells me the feeling is there, just below the surface. 

     Without the promised once-in-a-millennia storm, cable news had to time-fill and tap-dance, sharing what tales it could find, spinning each person being evacuated from their home as a moment of high drama and heroism. 
     We will, perhaps, eventually learn of true tales of heroism, though they will be hard pressed to top "Zeitoun," the excellent book that Dave Eggers wrote after Hurricane Katrina.  

     I wrote this when the book came out, but before the Zeitouns divorced, after the hero was shown to be not so heroic after all.  It detracted from the story, quite a bit, an unhappy ending to an inspiring saga. I don't think it undermines the book, however. Every tale has to end somewhere, and Eggers could not predict the future.  

  
     Out of the fetid floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina, where most public figures associated with the 2005 disaster drowned in their own incompetence and failure—a negligent president, an overwhelmed FEMA director, a bumbling mayor—paddles a true American hero, Abdulrahman Zeitoun.
     If "American hero" and "Abdulrahman Zeitoun" do not fit together easily in your mind, then you must read Zeitoun, the new book by Dave Eggers, a Chicago native and University of Illinois graduate. Eggers examines the hurricane that inundated New Orleans four years ago through the eyes of one man and his family. As the storm gathers, we meet Zeitoun, a Syrian-born immigrant who runs a successful remodeling business; his wife, Kathy, a convert to Islam, and their four children.
     Given that too many Americans either know nothing about their fellow citizens who follow Islam, or else clutch at crude stereotypes, this book would be fascinating even without Hurricane Katrina, just for the intimate portrait Eggers paints of the family's life, of the frequent unease of being Muslim in post-9/11 America, the challenges of raising kids and running a business.
     Zeitoun is a man who fits no cliche. The logo of Zeitoun A. Painting Contractor LLC is a paint roller ending in a rainbow. Zeitoun picked the rainbow because his painters offer many colors. After his signs and stationery are printed, however, he learns a rainbow also has another meaning. Some customers turn Zeitoun's vans away, assuming it is some kind of gay painting company. New workers see the vans and quit, afraid people will make assumptions about them. After some soul-searching, Zeitoun decides to keep the rainbow, realizing that those who reject one minority tend to reject them all: "Anyone who had trouble with rainbows," he says, "would surely have trouble with Islam."
     Kathy Zeitoun is an equally strong figure, deflecting the constant muttered tweaks of her family. If you've ever wondered why a Christian woman would abandon her faith, adopt Islam and wear a headscarf, after reading about the process that led to her conversion, you'll wonder that more don't.
     As the hurricane looms, Kathy and her children flee the city, to her family in Baton Rouge who can barely tolerate their presence. ("Take that thing off your head," her mother is still telling her, 15 years after she converted.)
     Zeitoun stays in New Orleans, to look after his house, to help, and because he is curious. Katrina hits, but the damage is not bad. Then the levees break, the city floods.
     Zeitoun has a used canoe, bought on a whim, and he takes to gliding through the abandoned, almost serene streets, the antennae from submerged cars scraping his canoe. He evacuates trapped senior citizens and feeds hungry dogs left by their fleeing masters, occasionally attempting to enlist the help of the growing military presence.
     Eggers' writing is pitch perfect, without flourish or excess.
     "He paddled up Claiborne, the wind and rain fighting him, to the Memorial Medical Center, where he knew there were police and National Guard soldiers stationed. As he approached, he saw soldiers in the alleyway, on the roof, on the ramps and balconies. It looked like a heavily fortified military base. When he got close enough to see the faces of the soldiers, two of them raised their guns."
     The official relief efforts are an invading force, blasting around in their helicopters and fan boats, too loud to hear the soft cries that send Zeitoun on another mission of mercy. They remain in the background until—not to give away the plot, which snaps forward like a novel—they suddenly aren't in the background anymore, and Zeitoun is sucked into a nightmare of George Bush's vision of an American security state.
     How he responds, the sustaining power of his faith, how his wife and his extended family around the world react, make Zeitoun required reading, a truly significant book, a guidepost to what America has gone through and where it might yet return unless we hold fast to the principles we claim to revere.
     Zeitoun idolizes his older brother, Mohammed, a famous champion long-distance swimmer in Syria who died in a traffic accident at 24. But judging by the effect that Abdulrahman Zeitoun could have on the world, if this book gets the audience it deserves—it is already a best-seller—his solitary heroism will prove vastly more important. As pious as a Pilgrim father, paddling his canoe with the silent watchfulness of a Cherokee chief, Zeitoun fills an inexcusable void in our culture—the Islamic-American hero: strong, resourceful, loving, patriotic, a man who puts himself in a difficult situation by deciding to stay and face indifferent nature, only to be plunged into a far worse ordeal by the government, as represented by a gang of equally indifferent official goons, stupid with authority, many of whom could have been saved from becoming police state cogs had they the benefit of having read this book.
     Zeitoun offers a transformative experience to anyone open to it, for the simple reasons that it is not heavy-handed propaganda, not eat-your-peas social analysis, but an adventure story, a tale of suffering and redemption, almost biblical in its simplicity, the trials of a good man who believes in God and happens to have a canoe. Anyone who cares about America, where it is going and where it almost went, before it caught itself, will want to read this thrilling, heartbreaking, wonderful book.
               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 2, 2009

Memo to Jeff Bezos: We're not all like Rahm Emanuel

City Hall bas relief

Dear Jeff Bezos:
     Before we begin, I have to thank you for two things. First, for all the books. Volumes I could comb 100 used book shops — back when there were used book shops — and never find.
     And second, thanks for the Washington Post. I subscribe online, visit several times a day. With Donald Trump president, I would go insane if not for the Post letting loose a fact-based broadside in his direction every day.
     Enough dilly-dallying — I know you billionaires hate to dilly-dally. The country is abuzz about Amazon's competition for your new second headquarters — dubbed mellifluously "HQ2," a reminder of just how wrong "Tronc" really is. Some 50,000 jobs and $5 billion in investment go with it. Quite the prize.
     My inclination would be to not interfere. But this paper reported Friday that our mayor has been courting you, directly, and I thought I had better step up quickly and say something before he completely wrecks our chances. Let me assure you; Chicagoans are not all like Rahm Emanuel — in fact, it's just him. I've seen our mayor turn on what he considers charm: a high-pressure, in-your-face rattling off of statistics that prove, prove, by scientific method that the only rational decision you could make is to cave in to whatever he wants. I can just see you pressed back in your chair, eyes widening, brushing Rahm's spittle from your cheek with one hand while the other reaches for the buzzer under your desk, thinking, "We gotta pick whichever city in the continental United States is furthest away from this guy."
     Don't do that. Most Chicagoans are much more, ah, human. Rahm notwithstanding, Chicago certainly meets all your criteria regarding size and public transportation and universities and such.

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Preparing for the storm

John Rogers Cox "Grey and Gold" (Cleveland Museum of Art)

    

     There seemed little to do Saturday but wait and watch Hurricane Irma as it neared the Florida coast. Hundreds of thousands fled, while the rest stayed glued to reports. I found myself sifting through the many, many stories I've written about hurricanes and tornados over the years, and paused at this one, worth sharing for its look into the mechanics of how wind damage, expected to be widespread, occurs.

     Tornadoes get into a home through the garage.  
     I did not know that. I always assumed that . . . well, frankly, I never really thought about how tornadoes blow houses over. I thought they just knocked them down like a kid kicking over a block castle.
     It doesn't work like that, according to Kim Fuller of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which called again recently to push its Project Impact, an effort to get communities to protect themselves against tornadoes before the twisters strike.
     I got the impression that the federal government is tired of always going in to clean up the mess afterward and finally figured out that if they got everybody to dig into their pockets to shore up their homes ahead of the fact, the damage next time might not be so great or expensive.
     "Prevention' is a new word for us," said Fuller.
     The idea makes a certain rough sense. The flimsier the home, the easier it blows away (that's why trailer parks always get pulverized). FEMA is trying to get owners of today's spit-and-bailing-wire houses to anchor their roofs down and, particularly, bulk up that garage door.
     I always think of garage doors as heavy, particularly those big two-car models. But when you compare it with the construction of a house, a garage door is a relatively fragile construct: a thin, flexible wall of wood that slides, attached to the house itself by a flimsy track or connected by a pair of pivots (assuming your garage is attached to the house; if not, hey, let the tornadoes come!). If high winds blow out the door, what do you have left, particularly with a two-car garage?
     Right. A big, gaping hole in the house, 20 feet wide, a delicious handhold for a tornado to grab the structure and tear it open.
     "That wind's going through there will take the door right off," said Fuller. "Then it just pushes the roof off."
     Ouch. Can't have that. FEMA suggests that homeowners spend a grand or two to shore up their garage doors and other vulnerable areas.
     "We're trying to tell people that preventative measures do work," Fuller said.  
     That strikes me as a hard sell. How many people don't wear their seat belts, which come with the car? Now imagine you had to pay a dollar to buckle up. Nobody would do it.
     Still, FEMA is hopeful.
     "I'm seeing a change in mind-set," said Fuller. "Last year, since Hurricane Floyd, people are saying, 'Enough is enough.' After the tornadoes in Texas, for the first time, we have community officials saying, 'We didn't know there was something we could do.' It's our responsibility to the public to get the information out. There are very simple things people can do to increase their chance of surviving."
     Tornados are not unknown in this area -- the 10th anniversary of the Plainfield twister is coming up this August. But I just can't imagine there are people cautious enough, or with time and money enough on their hands, to shore up their garage doors against the possible advent of tornadoes. But maybe I'm wrong. You can call the FEMA Hotline at (800) 480-2520 and get more information (and it is an interesting call: "If you are calling in response to a disaster, press 1 now. . . .").
     If you end up reinforcing your garage, call me, too. I think the readers would love to meet somebody who's trying to cover all their bases so completely. Stay safe.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 2, 2000
     

Going (Russian) postal

     Ohhh, I'm a bad person. I am going to hell.  
     Not really. I'm not saying that in a sincere, "my soul is consigned to flames!" sense. I not only never believed in such rococo nonsense, but have trouble believing anyone in the world can believe such a thing, though obviously they do.
    If you read the "ohhh" as more of a groan, you'll get a sense of my sincere, sinking feeling when I realized what I had done, entirely by accident.
     Readers of this blog know that I have a fidelity for truth, for directness, for candor.
     And now I have gone and contributed to the smokescreen of deceit and obfuscation that is the web.
     Quite unintentionally, I hasten to say. Hell, if there were one, is paved with good intentions. 
     And the timing is awkward; just as the truth about Russians posing as Americans and creating anti-Hillary lies during the election is dribbling out ...  well, maybe I had better just tell the story.
     So I'm clicking over the Washington Post, and for some reason I'm told that the cookies on my computer are keeping me from seeing a certain story, and I might want to clean my cookies off my computer. So I figure out how to do that, and wipe out all cookies—bits of information that web sites place on your computer to recognize you and smooth surfing— from the computer. Boxes and boxes of cookies are trashed.
    Of course then I have to sign back in, into Blogger, into Facebook.    
     Into Twitter. Twitter asks me to log onto, not my standard @NeilSteinberg but @RussianPostal, the fake site I set up in March to create an air of reality around the non-launch of my parody Russian postage stamp honoring Donald Trump, created by a New York illustrator and actual postage stamp designer who agreed to help me with the ruse.
    I would never do such a thing in the newspaper, where satire is too often taken seriously accustomed to believing what they're told. But on the freewheeling web, it seemed a good idea. During the last week in March, I started tweeting anodyne announcements about new Russian postal stamps. I figured that would enhance the effect when my Trump stamp was announced.
    Reaction to the Twitter feed was tepid, but it perhaps helped, a little, I think, though the prank was quite successful—my most popular post ever, in fact. April 2 came around. I went about my business, forgetting about Russian Postal.
    Until, prodding by my cookie cleanse, I signed back on. And found that dozens of people had been sending tweets to Russian Postal. Russian people. Sharing their various real-life gripes with the actual Russian post office.
    They complained about lost packages:
   

    They complained about long lines, and send documentary photos:

 

   And bad conditions:

   My site became included in the loop from what looked like actual Russian Post Office trying to help people.

Some defied belief, like the driver who used a package to brace his truck:

     To be honest, if it weren't for the existence of that actual Russian postal service assistance feed, I might leave this up, to give these disappointed Slavic postal customers somewhere to complain, to let them vent off steam, and create the illusion of concern. But such a place actually exists, and might even do some good, and so I've merely created a place where feedback is misdirected. So, not wanting to gum up the system more than it already is, I'll leave Russian Postal up on Twitter for the weekend, in case you can take a look, then pull the thing off-line.  There's enough falsity on the web without my adding to it. Because people are credulous and will believe what they read, as our country is discovering, to our continuing misfortune. 


 

Can Samoas-flavored pina colada mix be far behind?

     Boys Scouts have an oath. Girl Scouts have a promise. As both organizations were forged more than a century ago—Boy Scouts in 1910, Girl Scouts, two years later—it is not surprising that a fine mist of Victorian notions about youth clings to both groups, despite their sometimes frantic efforts to stay current. 
     The Boy Scouts, for instance, vow to stay "morally straight" and obey a law demanding they remain "clean."  The girls' morality, meanwhile, is assumed, as is their cleanliness. No vows necessary. The boys are, in a subtle way, being warned away from traps that boys are expected to be tempted by, if not fall into.  The girls, well, not so much an issue. Rude to even mention, really. They're girls. The "good" is implied.
     That's why the Boy Scouts' gradual transformation into a hate group was so jarring. They were supposed to be moral, while being blinded to what morality now meant, thanks to the shrinking in significance of what you do with other people and an increase in what you do to them. 
     Girl Scouts, well, they sold cookies. Who doesn't love cookies?
    Yet, despite this chasm in pretensions to morality, one still has high moral expectations for Girl Scouts, perhaps even more than the Boy Scouts, since they didn't have to struggle for decades deciding which kind of kid to bar at the door. Girls who liked girls, well ... let's just say, years before the military initiated "Don't Ask/ Don't Tell" the Girl Scouts were already there. You're a girl? Great, start making potholders.
     So I was a little disappointed to see this box of Girl Scouts Thin Mints breakfast cereal at the Evanston Jewel Thursday night. Really? Everyone has a bottom line, and brand extension is all the thing, but cookies for breakfast?  The Girl Scouts of America is not only endorsing cookies for breakfast, but making a buck in the process? Does that "make the world a better place," to quote one of the imperatives from the Girl Scout Law. Does that help the girls who snarf it back be "strong"? Is the girl who breakfasts on Thin Mints really, truly, "Doing her best?" 
     I imagine General Mills didn't steal the Thin Mints brand, but are sharing their cut with the Girl Scouts. So the organization gets paid something. But what are the Girl Scouts giving up in return? I have to wonder whether they thought this through. I'm all for marijuana legalization, but somehow, when the Girl Scouts offer a merit badge in cannabis cultivation, it will still be a sad day. If the Girl Scouts don't take their own program seriously, who will? 

Saving birds from the wilds of the city

  

   Facebook has this feature where it tosses up what you were doing on this date in the past, and I noticed this story from five years ago today. I love birds though, like opera, birds are a subject I have more enthusiasm for than knowledge about. My fondness for them  manifests itself mostly in going through 20-pound bag after 20-pound bag of birdseed at my backyard bird feeder, usually thick with half a dozen birds at a time, or more. 

   For this story, I found myself on the 6:01 a.m. Metra downtown, to rendezvous with folks whose love is even stronger, who get up even earlier, and who manifest their passion for birds in a surprising and selfless way.

     The early bird catches the worm, but how early must you wake to catch the early bird? In Annette Prince's case, it's 4:30 a.m. Thursday to head downtown to collect birds, both living and dead, whose journey from the wilds of Canada to the rainforests of South America have been interrupted by the brightly lit trap of Chicago.
     "We have about 10 people out today," says Prince, director of the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, a group of volunteers who fan out over downtown every day during migration season—mid-August to early November, and again in the spring—to gather birds that collide with buildings during the night.
     Small birds generally fly at night to avoid predators. "They're going all night down the lakefront, they're looking for a place to stop, they unfortunately stop here," says Prince. "They're looking for green areas, or are confused, and come down to these buildings. They don't see there's glass."
     The birds stun themselves against windows, trying to get to trees and fountains inside lobbies, or are fooled by reflections of nearby trees and fall to the sidewalk, where the birds are either rescued or trod upon.
     Down an alley, Prince finds a Swaison's thrush, stunned, eyes squeezed shut, wings drooping, and transfers it to a paper bag.
     She's found everything from owls to hawks in the eight years she's been doing this; the group has collected 150 species, mostly songbirds, warblers, hummingbirds, tanagers. As with people, it is usually out-of-towners unfamiliar with the territory who get into trouble. "City birds like sparrows, pigeons and starlings never hit windows," Prince says.
     Prince, 54, moves fast, eyes scanning the sidewalk along the building, a jittery alertness that itself is almost birdlike. She cuts a singular figure, in bright green Chicago Bird Collision Monitors T-shirt and gym shoes, carrying a green net on a pole and a black bag. She stops to scrutinize an alley with her binoculars and a FedEx delivery man notices her and breaks into a benevolent smile.
     Prince picks up a small piece of wood and puts it in a nearby trash can. More out of regard for her fellow monitors than environmentalism. "Every time you see a piece of debris, you think, 'Is that a bird?'" she says. "I'm not trying to be Streets and San."
     When she sees an actual bird, such as the one in front of a revolving door on North LaSalle, she breaks into a run to get to it.
     She has a job, as a speech therapist. Why bother doing this in her spare time?
     "These birds have been migrating for thousands and thousands of years," she says. "It's just in the past hundred that these barriers, these skyscrapers, have been in the way. . . . Birds incur a huge amount of death in migration, it's the leading cause of death; storms, running out of food, dying of exhaustion, they're pushed to their physical limits. All those things are natural things. This is something added on top of it. An added hazard. A billion birds a year are killed by collisions in North America alone."
     Prince rendezvouses with two other volunteers, John Kaiser and his wife, Suzanne Checchia, who has a Whole Foods shopping bag holding two dozen dead birds. "A lot of ovenbirds," she says, handing over a baggie containing a colorful Magnolia Warbler.
     "Oh man," says Prince, examining the half-ounce bird. "Look at this guy, just gorgeous."
     By days' end they'll find 75 birds, 35 alive. There's a forensic birding quality to the effort; they always try to identify dead ones.
     Checchia opens the door to her red Jetta and there, in a box, are 14 living birds, each in its own brown lunch bag, some bags rattling slightly. They'll be rushed to the Willowbrook Wildlife Center in Glen Ellyn where 80 percent will survive to be banded and released into the wild. The dead birds go to the Field Museum, which keeps them for study.
     The group started in 2003. In addition to collecting birds, they work with building owners to encourage them to dim lighting at night and treat windows to reduce their allure to birds. They have 100 volunteers, but are always looking for more, who must take a two-hour training session to learn how to spot and handle birds. The next one is Sept. 10 at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. There's more info at birdmonitors.net.
     "It can be hard getting up in the morning," Prince says. "But it's very rewarding. Our volunteers are not only there to save the individual birds, but to raise awareness."
     Prince is on the way back to her car when she spies a warbler on the ground by the small park at Franklin Street. In a flash she's beside it, on her knees, carefully placing her net over it. "I want to call this a Northern Parula," she says, delicately holding the bird. "He's tangled," she says. "His wings are bound to his body by spider webbing, which is really very strong." With tremendous care, she unwraps the bird, then gently sets it in a paper bag for a brief detour to Glen Ellyn on its way to South America for the winter.

          —Originally published in the Sun-Times Sept. 7, 2012