'Museum Hack' tour reveals Art Institute many miss

Ali Kemp, Museum Hack guide

     "Make no mistake, this is pornography," said Ali Kemp, pausing Monday in front of Titian's painting "Danae and the Shower of Gold" at The Art Institute of Chicago. "If you were a rich dude in renaissance Italy, and you wanted porn, you just commissioned someone to paint your own. But if you wanted people not to know what it was, you'd come up with some vaguely mythological story that could somehow involve a naked lady and that's what you'd portray."
     She was — the woman in the painting, not Kemp — one of thousands of naked ladies sprawled on chaises I've tramped past in a lifetime of vigorous museum going. But I can't remember ever pausing to look closely and think about what I was seeing, such as the dog in the corner of the painting.
     "Now there's this little dog, which seems innocent enough," she said. "But in renaissance Italy, nothing is as it seems, and that dog symbolizes that she is ... loose, basically."
     I knew there is an Art Institute — I've been a member for years. And I knew there are tours — groups of foreigners trekking after someone holding a small flag. But it never occurred to me that there are also organized gonzo tours, not until Museum Hack invited me to tag along and I thought, "Why not?"
     "We lead sassy and subversive tours at The Art Institute," explained Cody Nailor, a publicist for the tours. "These aren’t your grandma’s tours."
     Indeed not. Museum Hack offers "Drag Tours"— art tours led by cross-dressing men —"Badass Bitches" tours, focusing on feminism and the one I was on, the "Un-Highlights Tour." In addition to Chicago, it operates in New York, San Francisco, Washington and Los Angeles.
     The Art Institute allows this?
     "We do allow Museum Hack and other various groups to conduct their programs at the museum so long as they follow our security and visitor protocols," said Anna E.. Miller, a museum public affairs coordinator.
     The group gathered in the lobby.
     "We're going to see a sampling of the things I find in this museum the weirdest, the sexiest, the most disgusting. and just have a really good time," said Kemp, a mother of three who lives in Downers Grove. "It's just going to be the cool stuff that you wouldn't get to see if you came here yourself."
     Our first stop was a two-foot tall Aztec figurine, labeled: "Ritual Impersonator of the Deity Xipe Totec.".
     "Do you guys have an outfit in your closet, you know you could put on if you got a call from your boss, or a Tinder date, something that made you feel sexy and powerful?" Kemp asked. "The Aztecs had an outfit like that too."
     She explained that during a certain festival, Aztecs wore the flayed skins of ritual victims. She pointed to the corset lacing at the back of the ceramic figure, where the skin was held in place.
     "You might feel best in a little black dress, and they would feel best wearing you," she said. "They're wearing people."
     Speaking of people, our tour had five: Kemp, myself, Larry Snider, a new retiree to Melbourne Florida, plus Vivian Lee and Faith Magtulis, an engaged couple from Toronto, here on business.
     We pulled up in front of Giovanni Baglione's "The Ecstacy of St. Francis." .
     "Do any of you guys have a favorite celebrity feud?" said Kemp. "First is Baglione; he's the Taylor Swift of this scenario. He sweet, nice , easy to work with, easy to like his artwork. He probably has cats. The second is Caravaggio. He's a real jerk, but he makes great art."
     Two hours passed quickly. Yes, sometimes we descended into parlor games—pick a place we'd hide in a miniature Thorne Room. Part of the pleasure of tours is finding the guide's mistakes, and I noticed just one: Kemp presented Louis XIV and Honore Daumier as contemporaries, even though the Sun King died nearly a century before the great caricaturist was born.
     A visitor to Chicago could find worse ways to spend $59. A reminder that merely checking out the latest show—the John Singer Sargent exhibit opened this week—and pausing before old favorites doesn't come close to taking full advantage of The Art Institute. There's a lot there, if you take the time to seek it out.

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Dibs

     "Dibs" is an odd phenomenon, usually remarked upon during the long Chicago winters. Those parking spaces on residential streets dug out after snowstorms by neighborhood residents, then reserved for their exclusive use by setting out kitchen chairs and sawhorses and other handy objects to mark their claim.
     The logic, as much as there is logic, is they "earned" those spaces by digging out their own cars, through sweat equity. With a hint of threat—anyone who moves the boundary markers and parks in the cleared space does so at their own risk.
     Every heavy snow, TV stations like to show the various hodgepodge dibs markers, and take up the debate anew. A bit of Chicago color.
     Yet dibs are not confined to cold weather. In summer, there are parade route dibs, such as the ephemera set out on Cherry Street in advance of the July 4 parade in Northbrook. Here the claim is more tenuous. There is no work involved, no snow to shovel. This property is often not on a residential block, but, the case of these photos, the public parkway in front of Greenbriar School. Yet if I showed up a half hour before the parade, kicked these chairs aside and set up my own, those who had set them out, sometimes days in advance, would show up and obviously feel ill-used.
    Why?
   Because their claim was first, I suppose. They got there and mapped out the spot, sort of like getting in a line. You get in line, you can leave and return, provided a friend remains to back up your claim. These lawn chairs and caution tape are place holders. Their reward, not for street cleaning work, but for planning ahead and undergoing a minimum of effort.
     More importantly, society seems to recognize this claim. Dibs could just as easily be seen as selfish and futile—it's certainly the former—and youths would rush to see who could scatter the markers first. 
    But we don't. It is a claim of little consequence, so is respected, this temporary seizure of public space. I live a block from the route, show up as the parade is approaching, my folding chair slung over my arm, and never have trouble finding a clear spot to park myself. 
     But that is not the end of it. 
     For some reason, walking the dog past these markers earlier this week, I thought of the Israeli-Palestinian stand-off.   
     That too, is a matter of claim. The Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, and across the globe, insist they have a right to occupy Israel because they were once there or, rather, their ancestors were, a few generations back. 
     Because of that pre-1948 presence, they believe they have a right to return to land that many have never seen—even "return" is a misnomer, since you can't go back to a place you've never been. 
     That's the half of the puzzle that gets bruited about periodically usually when the Palestinians contrive a protest, or action of some sort that gets a sufficient number of them killed to draw fickle international attention. They fling themselves against the Israeli state, are killed, then the survivors wave the bloody shirt, insist they have been wronged. The world notices, clucks, then moves on with nothing changed.
     This has been going on for half a century.
     As with dibs, society somehow respects the Palestinian claim, to some degree, and the obvious question is "Why?" It can't be they were there "first"—Jews were certainly in the Holy Land too, thousands of years ago. The Palestinian claim isn't enjoyed by other groups. Native Americans controlled the entire continent of North America, 500 years ago, though neither they nor anybody else suggests that, because they were first, they have a right to get the whole thing back. They lost, history moved on. That is usually the case.
     But not with the Palestinians. Part of it has to be that, like parade dibs, it is a claim of little consequence to those giving it support. The far left liberals and college students who turn out passionately for the Palestinian cause have the benefit of something easily-understood to be indignant about, and are required to give up nothing. It isn't their land.
     If you grab those U.S. supporters and ask them what other displaced peoples they support—say, the Kurds—they will just look blankly at you. The Palestinian situation is the only injustice in the world. If you asked what about all the Jews who, for instance, were kicked out of Egypt, Iraq, Iran, etc., in the 1950s, as revenge after the formation of Israel, where Jews had lived for millennia, again the blank stare. When do they get to return to their homes? Who cares? Never. Those situations don't matter. 
    Again, "Why?"
    I think this is where anti-Semitism comes in.  Germany did not believe the Jews who had lived there for centuries belonged there either. Ditto for many other countries. The Jews' homes are always in doubt. The simple solution to any society's problems always seems for the Jews to go somewhere else. We see that today in the United States, with a small but real and growing anti-Semitic presence at the highest levels of government. It would look exaggerated in fiction, but there it is. The hidden solution that's discovered again and again by a certain type—anti-Semitism is philosophy for stupid people. Oh! Look! The answer!
    That's what made the founding of Israel in 1948 so important, such a miracle, a miracle that resonated around the world for a couple decades until, after 1967, the Israelis moved from being the underdog to being the top dog in the area, with the strongest military and the most vibrant country. The Palestinians began to look like victims, and there is a certain sort of squishy heart that automatically goes out to a victim without too much thought of extenuating circumstances. Who never worry that the Palestinians never seem to have a plan, either for thriving in what territory they have or interacting peaceably with the permanent reality of Israel. What they have are dibs on the land of Israel, because someone they knew lived there once. It's a stretch, and yet the Israelis are damned for not respecting it.
     This isn't to say that the 4 million Palestinians in the occupied territories aren't in an awful situation, nor that a solution can't be found, nor that Israel has not mismanaged its control of the territories and shrugged off its responsibility in recent years. All that is true. While most people approach this situation as a 0 or 1, this side or that, Palestinian or Israel, there is plenty of blame to go around. I see no reason to be hard-hearted toward Palestinian suffering. Jews, of all people, should recognize the wrongness of that. The question, "What happens now?" is met with equal silence by both sides (or, more accurately, each offers up its own brand of nonsense, the Palestinians saying "Now we march on Jerusalem," the Israelis saying, "Now we do nothing while nibbling away at Palestinian land.")
     The irony is, the best way for outsiders to help the Palestinians resolve their situation is to withhold the false sympathy they periodically show toward them after their ritual self-immolations make the news. The Palestinian plan—Israelis vanish offstage and the country falls open to them—would be a catastrophe if it actually happened, though that is moot, since it's never going to happen. What is happening is the Israelis are hardening into the same right wing nationalist disease that is afflicting half the world, our country included.
     I should wind this up—weighty musings for some plastic chairs on the side of the road. But claims to the property of others are social constructs, as rule bound and time specific as a minuet or Virginia Reel.  The 70-year claim that the Israeli people and government have on their own nation is only questioned by many because it is a Jewish nation, and denying Jews a place in the world is one of the oldest fall-back positions in history.

Spirit of '76, Pt. II: If you're lost, check the map

Independence Hall, Philadelphia

     This is the second of two parts of a July 4 look at the Declaration of Independence. Part I, "Despair is not a success strategy," can be found here.  

    It is essentially a memo drafted by a committee, albeit one that had the good sense to delegate the work to the best writer in the group, Thomas Jefferson.
     The 33-year-old Virginian required —anyone sweating a deadline please take note — 18 days to turn around his assignment, writing the first draft of the Declaration of Independence in quill and ink in his rented two-room suite at the home of Philadelphia bricklayer Jacob Gaff.
     I would imagine the average supposedly patriotic American ready to expound on how the intentions of the founders should guide our daily lives today has little idea of what the Declaration of Independence actually says.
     Such as our president, currently picking a new Supreme Court justice to serve for 20 or 30 years, eagerly embracing the supposed original intentions of the founders, when useful. But what were the intentions of our founders, originally? As outlined at the start, in our founding document, the first roadmap, a declaration so important we honor its final adoption on July 4, 1776 to this very day.
     The Declaration of Independence formally announces our break with Great Britain. But why? Does it give a hint of a reason, beyond the famous but vague phrases about self-evident truths and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
     Yes, it does. The bulk of 1337 words are a protracted list of grievances against one man, King George III, the “Author of our Miseries,” to use the words of Richard Henry Lee.

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A visit with Ann Landers

     The centennial of advice columnist Ann Landers' birth is Wednesday. I figured, if I'm ever going to share this story, now is the time to do it.

     The limousine she sent to collect me had custom license license plates: "AL 1955."
     The "AL" was for Ann Landers, obviously, the owner of the limo. What writer owned a private limo? She did.
    And "1955" was the year she stepped out of obscurity and started her column at the Chicago Sun-Times and, shortly thereafter, 1200 other papers. I knew that too, because I had written her obit. I knew everything about her. Or so I felt.
      In 1955, she had been a 37-year-old well-to-do housewife and mother who had never held a job or published a word when, new to the city, she walked into editor Larry Fanning's office, looking for work. Her timing was good. Nurse Ruth Crowley, who originated the "Your Problems'' advice column under the pseudonym Ann Landers in the Chicago Times in the 1940s, had just died. The paper was looking for a replacement.
     Fanning gave her a series of questions to answer.  One of the questions she answered involved walnuts dropping onto a lawn from a neighbor's tree, and in her reply she quoted Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, commenting on the walnut issue. 
     See here, Fanning said, you can't just make a thing like that up. She told him she hadn't. She knew Douglas, a personal friend, and phoned him. She got the job, and had to go out and apply for a Social Security number, because she had never received a paycheck before.
    I don't remember why I wrote her obit. It seemed something worth doing. She was, after all, among the most significant journalists of the 20th century, whose compassion and humanity helped nudge America toward being a more tolerant place. She left the paper just after I arrived. Her office was still painted the same Pepto Bismol pink she must have preferred.
     But after you gather that much information about a person, it's hard to keep it contained. Bits of information kept leaking out into my own column.
     In 1998, the newspaper asked me to write the story marking the Sun-Times' 50th anniversary, and I tucked in a few sentences about Ann. How she won the job by doing research, consulting experts and writing well. How she didn't always run columns of Q and A, advising husbands whose wives can't cook and wives whose husbands can't be faithful. When Robert Kennedy was shot, she began her column, "Bobby Kennedy is dead. I still can't believe it'' and called for gun control and reduced violence in TV and movies. She marked her 1975 divorce by leaving half the column blank.
     So I occasionally let loose a fact or two about her, where appropriate, and she noticed. Which is kinda incredible, because she was famous, her column syndicated to around the country, the world. She started sending me little notes. I remember looking at one, her head floating on the stationery, disembodied like the Wizard of Oz, and thinking, "This is an opportunity."
    I didn't realize she wrote those little notes to everybody.
    So I wrote her back, thanking her for her kind words, suggesting we have dinner.
    A few days later the phone rang. Her secretary.
    "Ann doesn't go on dates with strange men," the woman said—she really got her back into that word, "dates," the way a pitcher puts a spin on a ball. "But you may come over for tea."
     The Sun-Times was still in the grey trapezoidal barge at 401 N. Wabash. The limo ride to her apartment, immediately east of the Drake Hotel, was a brief one. The doorman waved me in, and I took an elevator to her apartment. I was shown in by a maid, and found myself alone.
      The decor was high fashion circa 1964. There was a bronze Dali bust of John F. Kennedy on a plinth. A grand piano in the French Revival style—I had never seen one before, nor have since. A framed front page of the Sioux City Journal from July 4, 1918, the day Esther Paula Friedman—her birth name—was born and, 17 1/2 minutes later, her twin sister. Pauline, who would follow her sisters footsteps and start her own hugely successful advice column under the pen name "Dear Abby."
     Eventually Ann showed up, a tiny woman with the best plastic surgery I have ever seen in my life. She was in her 80s, and her cheeks looked like a baby's ass.
     We sat on the sofa. I said something, and she replied, in a slightly dentured lisp, "Speak more slowly and come sit by me." She wanted every shred of newspaper gossip I could offer. The tea arrived, with a slice of chocolate cake so fantastic it seared in my memory. It was so moist, it was if it had pudding in it. "This," I thought, "is the cake rich people eat." I asked her about it, and she praised her private chef.
     At one point she looked at me closely.
     "Why are you here?" she said. Candor seemed the best option.
     "I wrote your obit, Ann," I said, explaining that I was interested in the truth of her rocky relationship with her sister, which some portrayed as close, some distant. She told me.
     Before I left, she gave me a tour of the place. There were photos of her and Father Theodore Hesburgh, president emeritus of Notre Dame and her particular friend. And lots of owls—she was a fan of owls. That week, I would buy a copy of the marvelous children's book, "Owl Babies," and send it to her by way of thanks for her time, and for the cake.
    After a couple hours it was time for me to leave, and she walked me to the door, and we had an exchange I always treasured.
     "Are you friends with Richard Roeper?" she asked.
     I admitted that I was.
     "We're drinking buddies," I said.
     "Why isn't he married?" she asked, then adding, in a rushed semi-whisper. "Is he gay?"
     "I don't think so, Ann," I said, grinning.
     "You tell him this," she said. "You tell him Ann Landers has this advice for him..."
    I stood up a little straighter. It felt like I was getting wisdom straight from the Delphic Oracle.
     "...you tell him to figure out his life before it's over." 
    Very good advice, for him, me and just about anyone.
     I promised her I would. And did, rushing to his office, closing the door, and passing along Ann Lander's remarks with the maximum of emphasis and drama. I never saw her again. She passed away in 2003, and the obit I had written was manhandled so much by a colleague that I took no pride in it, which is why it isn't being reprinted here.
     But once was enough to make me very glad to have met her.

Spirit of '76, Pt. I: Despair is not a success strategy

Inscription outside the National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.

     Two-hundred and forty-two years ago this Wednesday, American revolutionaries formally broke away from their mother country, England. They issued a Declaration of Independence, boldly stating: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."
     By "all Men" they really meant "white men" — not women, naturally, certainly not black men, who would later in the Constitution be established as 3/5 of a person, when enslaved, to increase the power of their drivers in Congress.
     In a sense, the founders were unintentionally signing a check they had no intention of cashing. They were like a man at a bar offering to buy everybody a drink, not realizing just how many people were crowded into the shadows.
     But they were there, and then began to come out of the shadows and claim their due — our nation's domestic history over the past 242 years in a nutshell: bloody Civil War followed by 150 years of struggle nudging up the personhood of blacks in the eyes of the state to somewhere above 60 percent but still somehow lagging beneath the full 1.0 status that whites automatically enjoy. Meanwhile, women rose up, first battling slavery, as leading abolitionists, as if practicing to win their own freedom. Then, a half century after Emancipation, casting off their own chains, earning the right to vote.
     At no point in the past was this struggle not being fought, by one group or another, but always returning to the central question: who is this Declaration of Independence for? Who belongs in this country?
     Those who believe that the United States of America was, is, and should always be a white Christian native-born clique, saw where our country is going, uttered a cry of alarm, and in 2016 elected the most unfit, dishonest, petty, vindictive, vain, ignorant man ever to call 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue home. After 18 months of spinning his wheels, more or less, issuing hourly Twitter rants, last week his tires caught and we were all projected forward toward the nation he wishes to see. A nation that bars immigrants because of their religion. That abuses children. That starves unions. And with the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, that lurches jurisprudence rightward for the next generation.
     On Facebook, my Democratic brethren are liquid with terror. This is the worst thing ever! They repeat their empty promises to flee abroad, the same bleat of preemptive surrender heard two years ago.

     Please. Fifth-seven thousand Americans died in the Vietnam War. That was worse. As for threats to leave: how can we miss you if you don’t go away?
     If you stay, stop whining and get serious.
     In their defense, we are leaderless. What is needed is a Democratic Winston Churchill, to eloquently muster courage, to light these dark hours. Yes, there is a steady flow of defiance and reason from some, like our own Sen. Dick Durbin. But these are times that call for supreme eloquence. In The New Yorker, George Packer suggested the cool reserve that ushered Barack Obama into office failed him as he left. “Obama was always better at explaining the meaning of democracy than at fighting its opponents.”
     That difficult task falls to us. A fight for democracy. Will voting rights and the concept of truth be further eroded? Both must continue for a right-wing minority to exert its will over our more liberal nation, over a reality that exists whether they recognize it or not. Will the media holding a mirror to the administration’s ugliness and lies continue being denounced as “fake,” the precursor, make no mistake, to suppressing it, the way other totalitarian states do?
     The Fourth of July is Wednesday. With that in mind, I’ve been reading the Declaration of Independence adopted that day. Useful stuff. Reminders that this is not a time to feel bad about the United States of America, nor to abandon her, nor reject patriotism, nor forget hope. This is a time to gather up all those precious things that made this country great, to protect them so they can continue to protect us. Just because millions of Americans have lost sight of what this nation is about doesn’t mean everybody else must follow suit. Despair is not a success strategy.

You need a little poetic license to beat the heat

   

Center Avenue, Northbrook, June 29, 2018

  
   
     Ninety-six degrees? Two days in a row? Pshaw! I remember when it got HOT in Chicago. Such as on July 13, 1995, when the temperature reached 106 degrees, and I wrote the following, no doubt assigned to come up with something diverting about the heat wave.
     That day I walked a block outside, to our dry cleaners in East Lake View. I can still remember trudging back, toting a plastic bag of clothing, feeling as if the weight of the sun were pressing down upon my head. I returned to the apartment and had to lie down, for all the good it did: no air conditioning. The heat was deadly.
    Literally. I was wiped out and I was 35 and in good health. (Poor Edie was five months pregnant). For many older people, it proved fatal, and the hot spell that I had such fun with below was, even as I was flipping through quote books, was killing Chicagoans one-by-one, elderly and alone barricaded in their overheated apartments; 739 heat-related deaths by the time it was over. 
     And yes, I was part of the media, along with the city government and everyone else, who were slow to realize what was happening. Hindsight is 20-20. Even after the scope of the disaster started to come out. I remember wondering if it could simply be the medical examiner's office grandstanding—calling every death in the city a heat-related death, since it was so hot.  A blunder, or a bid for attention made sense. The truth just seemed incredible.

    Anyway, my purpose isn't to replay that disaster. Eric Klinenberg wrote an essential book, "Heat Wave" if you are interested. I was groping for ornate ways to describe the heat, and realized I had already found them. 

     The bad thing about "Hot, isn't it?" and "Hot enough for you?" and all the other variants people feel compelled to say is that everybody already knows it's hot, doesn't need to be told and is sick of hearing it over and over.
     Since poets and wits have been commenting on this for centuries, the following is provided, as a public service, as a guide to more dramatic phrases that can be used in this "fantastic summer's heat."
     A stranger observes that it is really very hot, and waits for your reply. Quote Coleridge: "Summer has set in with its usual severity."
     The person next to you on the bus comments that, as far as warm weather goes, this is unusual. Quote Lowell: "I had not felt the heat before, save as a beautiful exaggeration of sunshine."
     A guy on the elevator expresses displeasure at the heat. Quote Shakespeare: "I 'gin to be aweary of the sun / And wish the estate o' the world were now undone."
     Your hair stylist points out that it's hard to know what to wear in this weather. Quote Jane Austen: "What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance."
     A woman asks "How's about this heat, huh?" Quote Sydney Smith: "Heat, madam! It was so dreadful that I found there was nothing for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones."
     Your officemate expresses optimism that the heat won't last long. Quote Skelton: "After a hete oft cometh a stormy colde."
     The grocer observes that it is "hot as hell" outside. Point out that the phrase actually is from Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord's 18th century poem, "Recipe for Coffee" -- "Black as the devil / Hot as hell / Pure as an angel / Sweet as love." Or toss back the phrase in its original French, "Chaud comme l'enfer."
     You're walking along, perspiring heavily, and you catch the eye of someone else, also perspiring heavily. Back to Shakespeare: "Falstaff sweats to death / And lards the lean earth as he walks along."
     Someone bad-mouths the city for being so hot in the summer. Quote Harry Truman: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen."
            —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, July 14, 1995

State of the Blog, Year Five

American Helmet No. 5 (Metropolitan Museum)

     Five years? That's a David Bowie song, opening his "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" album:

   Five years, what a surprise
   Five years, stuck on my eyes
   Five years, my brain hurts a lot
   Five years, that's all we've got

     Fairly apt, or could be, if I quit right now, impulsively—today marks the end of the fifth year of the blog—just to give that last line a little extra relevance and zing.
     But my brain doesn't hurt a lot. It doesn't hurt at all. If anything, it perhaps feels a little lighter, a little less ... intricate the past year. Not that the old gourd is exactly drying out. But maybe a twist of the knob less crackle and pop. Not necessarily a bad thing either. It can give the routine a kind of spareness, an austerity. The extraneous crap falls away and life is reduced to essentials. Which is good. Not that the blog is essential. I do like it. I think of it as one piece, my writing and life, this hillock built a handful at a time in cyberspace. People read it. The numbers are up. I shouldn't lay them out—my wife insists nobody cares about the numbers, and she's right. But I care. It seems a kind of significance. And I'm the boss here, if nowhere else.

No. 5 of Collars (Metropolitan Museum)

      In fact, caring is the central guiding principle of the blog. Caring about this or that wisp of triviality that catches my eye any given day—why maraschino cherries are placed in the center of grapefruits?—to the deepest problems facing our country and world, the hourly assault against the United States of America by its president and his quislings. Monitoring the continual drip drip drip erosion of everything good and decent about our country. Then—squirrel!—veering away to tiny distractions, letting everybody enjoy the flea circus, catch our breath before rejoining the battle, hopefully refreshed. 
     So, five years, caring about the various columns, posts and essays. I write the stuff and correct the typos, even years in the past. I always tell young writers, if you don't care about your work, then nobody cares.
     Not every writer cares. Once, when Nigel Wade was editor of the Sun-Times, he became concerned that the obituary of a certain fiery local religious leader had been written by a Jewish person, aka me. "No problem" that Jewish person said, in a rare moment of self-effacement, asking a colleague, the actual religion reporter, if he wouldn't mind putting his name on the obituary. He didn't care. So  I put his byline on, in amazement. I didn't care that I would take my name off something—what's one less byline, even 20 years ago? The important part, the writing, is the same. And I liked the unusual show of ego negation. Though I was agog that this guy would put his name on a story that he had, first, not written, but also never even read, that he would allow it to be done. I didn't feel contempt, but a species of wonder, as if I had walked in the office and found him licking the floor clean.
     His name stayed on the obit for ... a while ... then Nigel left, and the reporter went off to Colorado, and I slipped my name back on, where it remains, waiting.
   But I digress into old tales, a tendency of aging journalists to be guarded against. On to the numbers:  

             Year One: 385,679 hits.
             Year Two: 499,423.
             Year Three: 577,617.
             Year Four: 730,955.

             Drumroll please ...

             Year five: 886,385

Colt Percussion Revolver No. 5 (Metropolitan Museum)

     Hey! Not bad. A 21 percent jump from the year before. A drop of drool off Milo Yiannopoulos' slavering lips, no doubt. But then we are playing different games. You can draw a crowd pouring gasoline over your head and then setting yourself on fire, too, but what do you do for an encore? I think of this as both small ball and long game. The first, summed up in a sentence I like from last year: "My vegetable garden is not Con-Agra either, and I still plant it every spring." And the second, well, maybe five years from now I'll feel compelled to add a footnote, explaining who Milo Yiannopoulos is (I should probably do that now: some kind of flaming rhetorical freak show, saying vastly heartless and stupid things which people nevertheless feel compelled to pay attention to, right now).

     What I'm trying to say is, I'm not doing this for the notoriety, obviously.
     Now, were I looking for negatives, I could note that the growth rate has slipped from the year before, when it was 26 percent. But I think that's taking the jacket of good news and checking the pockets for bad news. (I suppose I could also observe that I don't know how many hits are actual people, as opposed to spiders from China, or Mars, speaking of Ziggy Stardust, And the numbers were goosed in December by a post that got 50,000 hits thanks to a retweet by Neil Gaiman).

Fish Series No. 5 by Charles Demuth (Metropolitan)

    Although being retweeted by Neil Gaiman is a good thing, right? So I should just accept it as more good news and move on.
    The average works out to 75,147 readers a month, compared to 60,812 a month last year. Which also feels like robust growth.
    This past year was marked by several notables—my first six-digit month, December, at 124,061 hits. My first significant press attention, "Neil Steinberg never falls short on his daily blog," written by the dean of Chicago media journalism Robert Feder. I should probably just refer you to his column rather than nattering on here myself. 
     The point of it all, if you read the very first post, five years ago tomorrow (and if you haven't, you should) is to mine hidden wonder, and I think we've continued doing that this year. We savored a chunk of Chicago artwork copied by the Louvre last July and went up Mayan ruins in Belize in March. We learned about skeumorphism, the Dempsey-Tunney fight and Martin Luther's Reformation. We baked English muffins, buried Hugh Hefner and read "Don Quixote," wherein Cervantes writes "self-praise is self-debasement."
    Ouch. True enough. Better wrap this up. 
    Thanks are in order. 

Five gold earrings (Metropolitan Museum)

      First, to my advertiser, Marc Schulman of Eli's Cheesecake. He has supported this blog from the start, and his holiday ads give a festive air to this effort, plus add sweetness the year around. I always have a cheesecake in the freezer, and encourage you to do the same. It's like having a fire extinguisher--you never know when you're going to need it.
    Thanks to the Chicago Sun-Times, for giving me a home for the past 31 years, and for tolerating the blog with a splendid leonine indifference, the old king gazing across the savannah while the cub scampers and rolls and gums his tail.
    Thanks to all my colleagues, at the paper and across the city, country and world, who have read this, enjoyed it, remarked upon it, retweeted it, criticized it, pointed out typos, and in general treated the blog as a legitimate center of interest and not, as the buzzing cloud of obsessives that gather around any journalistic endeavor insist, on a daily basis, the vacuous yet somehow still noxious effluvia of an imbecile.
    Thanks to my loyal readers, Coey and Nikki and Tony and Thomas and Jakash (and here I better cut off, before I start feeling like Miss Barbara looking through her magic mirror in"Romper Room.") Though not without a shout-out to John O'Rourke, who gives a careful read to the thing every morning and invariably offers up a typo or two. Thanks to my biggest fan, my mother, reading every day in Boulder, Colorado. 
   And of course to my wife, who musters a convincing show of enthusiasm for this, and has stopped suggesting I miss a day out of general principles. You're right of course. Maybe after a decade....