Race to the bottom: voters puzzled by primary slugfest

     "Who should I vote for? JB, Kennedy, Biss? No one impressed me at the WBEZ debate."
     I blinked at the question. Messages firehose at me all the time—on Facebook, Twitter and email, now a distant third, nearly occupying the tenuous position that letters written in blunt pencil on blue lined notebook paper once held.
     But this was coming in over iPhone Messenger, from somebody with my phone number. In the next line, he ID'ed himself. My old college roommate. Ah. 
     As a professional journalist, I couldn't summarize the 2018 primary election more eloquently than he did in 16 words. Then again, he was a political science major. Months of increasingly wild accusations, millions and millions spent on grim, black-and-white TV commercials and what are we left with? A sulfurous smell hanging in the air and three not-so-appealing choices. I'm not certain which of these guys to vote for and I've had long conversations with each. 
     The opening question is telling. It assumes, as I do above, that the only election of interest is the Democratic primary. That's true. (I was tempted to tease my friend with, "Aren't you a Republican by now?" But that seemed cruel). Compared to the Democratic slugfest, the Republican primary has been a muted sideshow. Or make that, freak show, starring Jeanne Ives in a tent off the midway, a lady tattooed head-to-toe with vile and shameful appeals to the bottom rung of the Republican Party, using every racist code in the book short of semaphore flag: Immigrants are murderers. Transgender people are predators.
     Who can blame anybody for tuning out this Punch and Judy show? I prefer to experience the election as a civilian, primarily through the relentless TV and radio commercials. Pritzker scored points early by swinging hard for Obamacare enrollment, his money stepping in for the delinquent Trump administration firing back at Trump's immigration slanders.The idea of a rebel stronghold in Illinois, based on emergent state power and the bottomless Pritzker fortune, is something I could get behind.

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Own the sin

     All of life, never mind human existence, is a patchwork fuzz on a single rock twirling through a cosmos of such cold immensity that we can't even conceive of it. 
     Nor do we really want to. Just the opposite. Each individual tends to puff himself up as much as possible, to the limits of plausibility and beyond. We are living in the Golden Age of Grandiosity, with a rich, famous president who obviously isn't satisfied by what he has attained, preferring—no, compelled—to live in eternal yearning, fantasizing ever greater accolades for himself. 
     While Donald Trump is an extreme, we all imagine ourselves more splendid than we actually are, or ever could be. I know I do. And I hope I'm not alone. Though I believe I've gotten better in my later years. Less self-absorbed. I think giving up drinking helped. You get in the habit of seeing things clearly, or trying to.
     Yet sometimes the two systems, the old grandeur and the new realism, do clash. Such as a couple weeks ago. I popped into Target for some Skull Candy earbuds. I had lost mine—a lapse that once would have bothered me more than it does now. I'm not perfect, I'm allowed to lose stuff. 
     Trucking through the aisles, I noticed this dog food—the same dog food we haul to Petsmart on Skokie Boulevard to buy for $11.49, here for $8.99.
     My heart swelled. Wow, what a bargain! I grabbed the bag thinking, What a coup! This really makes my day!
     Then some part of me stood back, aghast, arms folded, shaking his head. Really? Finding cheaper dog food. That's your gold standard of excitement nowadays? 
     Deflating, I tossed the bag in my giant red plastic cart and pushed it guiltily away. Immediately thinking: okay, what's the point of that? Both being a petty, small change kind of guy, excited to save a couple bucks on a bag of puppy chow and being so pompous that I can't even enjoy the pleasure of doing so? Stuck between two worlds.
     Yup, that sounds about right. Own the sin, as the colonial moralists used to say. And to be honest, the reproach faded, and I was left with satisfaction, and a new place to shop for dog food. 

The Era of Contempt, Redux

     Never underestimate the key role that sexual panic plays in both American history and, alas, current events.  

     Whether it is a cause or an effect of our nation's endemic racism—probably both—I cannot say. But the reason races couldn't go to school together, or, even worse, share that swimming pool, was the unbearable prospect that your kids might fall in love with someone of a different race, do the nasty, causing ... oh, I don't know ... the universe to collapse upon itself, I suppose. And the reason those gays can't get married is, never forget, that their doing so just kicks the supports right out from under your own marriage. Bake a wedding cake for Brad and Steve one day, find yourself cruising the Halsted leather bars, entirely against your will, the next.

      So while I wouldn't directly credit recent advances in gay rights—particularly the unexpected, almost incredible advance of transgender Americans from shunned freaks to semi-accepted participants in the national story—with the staggering national embrace of the bolus of fraud, bullying and deceit that goes by the name Donald Trump, there must be a connection, as eloquently, if unintentionally conveyed by my new favorite reader, Alan P. Leonard of Tinley Park. 

     You might remember Mr. Leonard from last Saturday. His letter last week drew more than twice as many readers as anything else I've written over the past month. I share it now in the sincere hope that there are more to come. Frankly, I'd be a fool to offer up anything else, and if Mr. Leonard wants to continue to write to me, I will happily post his letters and split the profit I make from the blog on the days that he appears.

     This is even better than the Saturday Fun Activity, because I don't have to send out a prize to the lucky winner. Today, we all win. Enjoy.

International Home + Housewares show: ‘You put it online; if it sells, it sells’

Andy Berger

     The show is so vast, it can go so many ways. For a while, walking around, I thought I had nothing, just a bunch of random images and interviews. Then I decided to focus on dog devices. I only decided to bookend two interviews with 67-year-olds with very different views of the market after I sat down and started working. One funny aspect that I couldn't fit into the story had to do with Andy Berger's company, which I first heard, understandably enough, as "Max's International." After he corrected my error, I asked him if it was named for the Axis powers the United States fought in World War II. No, he said, he never thought of that—he thought his products were the hub the world turned on. He didn't consider the Germany, Japan, Italy definition until after the company was up and running and a lawyer pointed it out to him.

     The baby lay motionless on a green mat. I paused.
     "Brand new," said Andy Berger, owner of Axis International in Des Plaines, hurrying over. "It's remote control."
     The baby was a doll; the mat, designed to soothe fussy infants to sleep, though when Berger tried to demonstrate how it works, it didn't.
     "Might be out of batteries," he said. "A heartbeat sound, and it whooshes."
     Graco this was not. The International Home + Housewares Show at McCormick Place offers everything from huge corporations displaying products known the world over, to plucky entrepreneurs ballyhooing items that might not even be on the market yet.

    While I too scope out the latest — KitchenAid's "Color of the Year" is "Bird of Paradise," the love child of coral and peach — I prefer to excavate the deeper substrata of commerce.
     "I've been doing this 35 years," said Berger, 67. "My biggest hit is that tank-top hanger. Sell 'em by the thousands every week."
     The show, which ended Tuesday, lacked a certain hum.
     "The older I get the slower it seems to get," Berger agreed. "The whole market changed. There's less and less brick and mortars. It's all internet. We do so much business with companies like Amazon, Zulu. You don't even have to talk to them. You put it online; if it sells, it sells. If it doesn't, they don't care. I hardly have to travel anymore."
     That isn't good?
     "You lose that interpersonal touch," he said. "It's all automated. You try to deal with Amazon, they don't talk to anybody."

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Good news: Lucas museum breaks ground somewhere other than Chicago

     Those who hooted down the white carbuncle that movie mogul George Lucas wanted to erupt next to Soldier Field can take a measure of vindication from the architectural illustrations released ahead of Wednesday's groundbreaking for the Star Wars creator's new Museum of Narrative Art.
     Gone is what Chicago wits dubbed "Jabba the Hutt's Palace" or "Space Mountain" when they were sending the project packing two years ago, replaced by a pair of joined ovals that looks very much like a star cruiser designed to dock at Spaceport Soldier Field. An homage perhaps.
     So maybe the old design wasn't so avant-garde after all.   

 

Architect's rendering of Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles

    Not that the new design, also by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, is much better—a bacterium caught in mid-mitosis. Inside, some vaguely familiar curving ceilings that, naturally, were praised to the skies by beneficiaries of the estimated $1 billion project.
     “The building itself will certainly be an icon of 21st century design,” said museum president Don Bacigalupi, perhaps before he got a good look at the interior, which looks more like an icon of Space Age design circa 1962, specifically, the TWA Terminal at JFK.
     This doesn't even touch upon the supposed purpose of the museum itself, the "narrative arts" an omnium gatherum category designed to enfold Lucas' vast holdings of "Star Wars" memorabilia, his Normal Rockwell and American illustration collections, and give the endeavor a sense of significance that just off-loading his keepsakes into a permanent home obviously lacked.
     And we can savor that the ground-breaking is being held in Los Angeles, in Exposition Park and not the $10, 99-year lease on Chicago's lakefront that the Park District and the City Council happily handed Lucas. The museum is a better fit for L.A., with its movie industry, and other vanity museums, like The Broad collection of contemporary art, and the Getty Museum and Villa.
  

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Many schools support Student Walkout. And then there's Northbrook...

Snap the Whip, by Winslow Homer (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully,” Dr. Johnson once quipped.
     This can happen even when the person is not quite a man, or woman, but a teenager. A high school student, say, and the threat isn't the certainty of being strung up in two weeks but the possibility of being gunned down in the indeterminate future.
     Never underestimate the motivational power of the prospect of being killed. Or of having your friends killed.
     We saw it in the Vietnam era, when college students set down their bongo drums and picked up protest signs.
     We saw it this past month — in just 30 days — as students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School did not merely mourn 17 slain classmates, nor limit themselves to piling teddy bears. Instead they pushed past their inert elders and took on our country's insane gun culture and the National Rifle Association.
     And we'll see it Wednesday, with the National Student Walkout, when students at thousands of schools leave class for 17 minutes, one minute for every murdered Parkland student. It a litmus test of the mental agility of school administrators whether they embraced this rare moment of youthful solidarity or fought it.
     As my colleague Lauren FitzPatrick reported, Chicago Public Schools gave tacit approval. “I want to make sure our students have an opportunity to express themselves and engage thoughtfully in this national dialogue," CPS CEO Janice Jackson said.
     Hundreds of area Catholic schools are holding prayer sessions, discussions and protest activities. Romeoville High School, not content with a single protest, scheduled a week's worth of activities under the rubric, "It's Not a Moment, It's a Movement."
     "As educators, one of our most important tasks is providing students with the guidance of learning advocacy skills for developing policy when they become adults," wrote James Mitchem, superintendent of Valley View School District 365U.
     And then there's my leafy suburban paradise.
     I learned of Northbrook's cower-in-place reaction when a childhood friend of my son bolted out his house like it was on fire and buttonholed me. Had I seen the letter District 225 sent out? I had not. He sent it.
     After a few paragraphs of throat-clearing, it gets down to business:
     "Students who elect to participate in the demonstration will be subject to school rules and attendance procedures as outlined in the Student-Parent Handbook. Walking out of a classroom will be considered an unexcused absence for the period of time that the student is out of the classroom."
     Parents howled. My neighbor, Carla Slawson wrote a letter to Glenbrook North principal John Finan:
     "We all want our students to know that there is more to AP Government than getting a "5" on the AP exam ... that what they study can and should have relevance in their lives. This is a unique moment to experience student civic engagement in action. Let's not deny them this, and at the very least, let's not punish them for it."
     My attitude: what's wrong with these people? Shame the protest wasn't a pep rally, because then you could pull everyone of class to have them cheer for Spartan pride. This isn't about education; it's about control.
     Sunday evening, school administrators met with students who, in keeping with the entire movement, helped the grown-ups grope into the murky abyss of their souls and brush their fingers against their missing sense of moral purpose.
     A second letter went out Monday that ... again working through the legalese ... says, in essence: OK, OK, we aren't going to punish you for participating in the walkout, much. The gist:
     "Public schools must remain politically neutral, and it is through Board policies and school rules that we are able to ensure that the rights of all students are recognized and protected."
     Viewing a desire not to be murdered at your desk as a controversial political stand is political - the politics of the NRA. Compare District 225's duck-and-cover with the warm, human letter from Loyola Academy principal Kathryn M. Baal, carefully explaining why some students are taking part, exactly what they would be doing, and why the school supports them:
     "As a gesture of Ignatian solidarity with the Parkland victims, their families, classmates and friends - and a unified call for change in the way our country addresses school safety, gun violence and adolescent mental health - some Loyola Academy students are planning to participate in the National School Walkout on Wednesday, March 14. ... The faculty and staff of Loyola Academy stand behind our students as they grow in their advocacy of peacebuilding and social justice."
     It is hard to run a school. An enormous bell curve of students must be accommodated. It takes rules. I get that. But if administrators aren't careful, they can get trapped within those rules and forget that rules are not an end in themselves..
     Think of it this way:
     You're allowed to run out of the school when a fellow student starts shooting, right? No disciplinary action there. So why not permit students to also leave (for 17 flippin' minutes!) to join a national effort to kick start the change their parents have failed so woefully to even contemplate? Once again, guns seem to be the default value. You can leave class to flee being shot. But to prevent the next shooting? That's a problem. To some.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 13, 2018

Toast Bags and Garbage Pantz

2018 Home + Housewares Show

     This year I almost skipped the Home + Housewares Show, despairing at ever topping last year's riff off Pablo Neruda's "Ode to Common Things." But that seemed the coward's way. So I spent a long, footsore day there Monday, and came home too pooped to do anything other than cast around into the past and dredge up this look at the 2012 show, published six years ago today. Not my most compelling work, I know, but not without interest—particularly since every trend I noticed has sputtered out, as far as I can tell. Seeing the flatness of this fires me up to try to come up with something better for Wednesday.

 
     Perhaps you have been vexed by slices of bread leaving crumbs in your toaster and frustrated by the appliance's inability to make toasted cheese sandwiches.
     Or, more likely, you haven't.
     Either way, those days are over, thanks to the boldly named "Toast Bag," an envelope that encases bread before it is inserted into a slot in a toaster, one of tens of thousands of products both ordinary and exceptional showcased this weekend at the enormous 2012 International Home + Housewares Show at McCormick Place.
     "Your toaster remains clean," the package trumpets.
     "These are 100 percent Teflon," said Tom Geyskens, an account manager at ICB, the Belgium company selling Toast Bags. "This is our design. We invented this."
     Which was news, and not welcome news, three booths over, at Planit Products, which offered "toastabags" ("American Style Grilled Cheese in Your Toaster").
     "They copied ours," said Caroline Kavanagh, director of Planit, located in Malvern, England, "the bastards."
     Spend five hours marching through the Housewares show—not nearly enough time to begin to cover its vastness—and you will notice how ideas echo through the industry.
     A dozen different collapsible water bottles, such as Vapur, "the original foldable water bottle." Most are flattish, but the Viv, from France's Charles Viancin, is an attractive soft round bottle whose band fastener holds the rolled-up bottle in a tight bundle.
     Meanwhile, other manufacturers tack in the opposite direction - Copco offers a sturdier, hard-plastic version of brand-name water bottles, and Japan's Takeya is selling the Classic Glass Water Bottle "inspired by the iconic American milk bottle" though no dairy would have dreamed it might someday retail empty milk bottles for $24.99.
     Several manufacturers are rolling out segmented bowls designed to separate cereal from milk. "Never eat soggy cereal again," promises the Obol, sold at Brookstone.
     While most products are familiar—booth after booth of fine knives, regular bowls, plates and pitchers—the new always stand out. A pet bowl with three squat round posts, designed to make dogs eat slower. Perhaps the boldest new product in the show, which you may file under Solutions to Problems You Never Knew You Had: "Garbage Pantz"—bright fabric sleeves designed to wrap around outdoor trash cans.
     "Where do you keep your garbage cans?" challenged Ana Meyer, president of the New Jersey company, who demonstrated her commitment to her product by wearing it as a dress. Garbage Pantz designs range from blue jeans to team logos to a scratching dog saying, "I'm itching to recycle."
     Not knocking things over seems important. "Never spill again," the Mighty Mug promises. Bibo is "a wide-based universal stabilizer" designed to keep you from crying over spilled milk. Colleen Costello invented "Flippt," a collapsible rubber ziggurat that holds shampoo or condiment bottles upside down so the product will collect by the spout. Is she worried about ketchup bottles already being designed to stand top down?
     "Not everyone's going in that direction," said Costello, of Dayton, Ohio, tying herself with other hometown inventors such as the Wright Brothers and Charles Kettering, who invented the electric car starter. "In Dayton, Ohio, inventing is in our DNA."
     "Can I be honored to show you my product?" said Lisa Blackburn, a Dallas attorney who invented the bagFormR, an oval container with a notched lip designed to hold plastic bags open, so they can be filled or serve as a "disposable kitchen bowl."
     Now "bagFormR" is not the most elegant name. More established companies try to inject pizzazz into their products by borrowing pizzazz's plentiful z's: Homz (ironing supplies); Blitz (cleaning supplies); Zing (colorful kitchen utensils) and Twiztt, a line of cookware with distinctive features, like measurements printed inside a pot.
     Some names clunked. "My Drap" is a line of fancy cotton napkins that come serrated on rolls. "It's Catalonian," said Allen Uhler, My Drap's American importer. "We thought about changing the name."
     When I came across "ToastaBags" at a booth run by Boska of Holland, I knew it was time to leave the show, which runs through Tuesday but is open only to its 60,000 registered attendees and not the public. To its credit, press material for the Dutch company—which is licensing the product—reads, "ToastaBags zijn in 2008 in Engeland uitgevonden" which, translated, is: "ToastaBags were invented in England in 2008."

                   —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 12, 2012