The Swiss in Chicago

       People are an enigma. Even those you know well, you don't really know. A public face, a few private facets, but the rest is hidden, mysterious.
     Monday I had to be at Chicago Police Headquarters at 10 a.m. to pick up my press credentials, and later had lunch with a journalist new to the city from overseas. At Harry Caray's, of course, the first restaurant I always take newcomers to, to give them an idea of the richness and heritage of the city. He's going to a football game soon, and I found myself trying to explain the intricacies of American football, all the while having to keep from laughing and saying, "Boy, do you have the wrong guy for this." But I know about the four downs and the the 10 yards to make a first down, and passing and running, and made the best of it. 
    He had no idea about the Water Tower, and that seemed a lacuna that could cause trouble, so I walked him there, so he could clap eyes on the thing, trotting out Oscar Wilde's classic description of the structure as a crenelated fairy castle with pepperboxes stuck all over it.
     On the way back, we ran into these two inexplicable characters posing. I asked if I could take their picture—at first they were in profile, belly to belly and that would have been the better shot. But I wasn't quick enough about whipping out my phone, and they posed, which wasn't as good, and ignored my suggestion that they face each other again.
    Of course I asked them what they were doing, because I had no idea. With the masks, it seemed vaguely sexual, some kind of cosplay fantasy right there on Michigan Avenue. I got the sense they weren't promoting something. This wasn't commercial, it was personal.
     At first no reply. I asked again.
     "We're on holiday," said one, in some kind of accent I couldn't place. Which wasn't an explanation, but was a start.
     "Where from?" I asked.
     "Switzerland," one replied—I couldn't tell who was speaking, green or blue.
    Well, Switzerland. Say no more. I got the sense that I had overstayed my welcome, and moved on.
    Back at home, I started to dig. They are wearing what are called "Chub Suits"—$33 and you can buy your own on Amazon. A small battery-powered fan keeps them inflated.
     Maybe the hive can step in. I should have quizzed them further, but it's a free country, so far, and people should be able to caper about in large inflatable blob outfits without being badgered by the media. On that note, I bet no reader looked at that get-up and thought: we can't see their faces; that should be illegal. 
    Not like it was a face veil or anything. Covering your face for religion is bad. But for some freaky public thrill, well, who would even think to criticize? 
 

Look, there’s hypocrisy! Right there! And there! And there and there and …

The Hypocrites, by Paul Klee (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

 
     Oh my God!
     Earlier today, an enormous ball of flame crested the horizon in the east, casting heat and shadow as it rose, slowly, blindingly, majestically, marching toward some unimaginable zenith....
     The sun,.. came up ... this morning.
     Somehow, Chicagoans, going about their business managed to ignore this astronomical marvel, displaying itself in full rampant glory right above their heads. A blazing wonder whose tremendous scale can hardly be...
     What? What's that you say? Nothing to get excited about? Happens every day since the dawn of time, without fail, except when it's cloudy, and even then is still happening, only undetected, obscured by these giant masses of water vapor dangling ominously above....
     Sorry, but I was scrolling through Facebook, which I really must stop doing, seeing friends express continual shock and perpetual indignation at the hypocrisy they detect in public life.
     You've read the same memes.
     "Republicans refused to hold a hearing for Merrick Garland because he was nominated 237 days before the election. Now they're rushing to confirm a nominee 50 days before an election who's accused of sexual assault, lied under oath...."
     "I trust the GOP senators who insisted Al Franken step down will demand the same treatment for Judge Kavanaugh."
     ("You do?" I couldn't restrain myself from remarking. "Kinda naive, ain't it?")
     I could go on, but you get the point (or don't. Not getting the point has become an American folk illness). We react to each specific instance of hypocrisy like a person who has never seen the rising sun, with misplaced awe, as if it were something rare and unusual, when what we are really seeing is an ordinary phenomenon. Hypocrisy isn't an exception, it's the rule, the grease with which the whole political world goes clanking along.
     Almost ... as if ... people are not really assessing the world before them, not really gathering facts and then drawing conclusions, nor measuring situations against their long-held standards and principles, but cherry-picking information that suits their permanent inclinations, adopting and discarding values at will, to shore up their twisted, contradictory and mistaken beliefs.

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Reliable

     Riding a Divvy down lake street earlier this summer, I passed the Reliable Plating Corporation, 1538 W. Lake.  
     I paused, straddling the bike, and took this photo. Why? I thought the scene beautiful, the compressed, san-serif letters, the quiet insistence of the word, the interplay of faded red brick and beige concrete, the machine age entryway, with those metal doors and round windows, like a robot's face.
      Then there was the business itself. The metal plating industry just doesn't get into the paper much, so I phoned the company. Maybe I could come visit? Write a little story to go with my portrait of their business face.
     I called a few times. People don't call back anymore.
     Eventually I reached a person in authority. No, sorry. No interest. Couldn't get off the phone quick enough. 
     As the line went dead, I thought of saying: someday, your business will be gone, and you'll be gone, and I'll be gone. Only the story I would have written might remain. Don't you care about that?
     Only that probably wouldn't have helped, and I didn't say it.
     So no story. Only this, the shadow of a story never written.
     And a phantom ache. I suppose it stung, a little, to be scorned by an obscure metal plating company. Like what I'm doing is dirty. I'm sure they had their reasons. All those metal-plating chemicals, where do they go when they're done with them? Down some sewer perhaps? I shouldn't speculate. Sour grapes.
    But I will trot out the photo, and the concept of reliability, on this, the day after the last day of summer. I didn't want to write a post, frankly. But I squeezed one out, a dyspeptic, carping thing that I instantly knew was never going to see the light of day. 
     Being a professional means you know when your stuff isn't up to par. That's not a general indictment. Even noble Homer dozed. Sometimes I write a sentence, a column, and sit back and think: That doesn't work. 
     So we will try again, no inspiration needed — inspiration is for amateurs, I like to say, and though this blog isn't really a commercial affair, it is a commitment I made when I titled it. You expect me to be here, and here I am. Heneni, as Moses says to God. Reliable.
    There, that works. And if it doesn't, it will have to do for today. 
     

The Saturday Snapshot #7

     Today's snapshot comes from Bernard Linzmeier. It is of his mother, the smaller girl on the right, and her sister, three years older, on the left.
    He says the photos was taken in the late 1920s near Homan Avenue, looking west down 16th street. The sign behind them, he says—I can't read it—is for the Kosner Star Sausage Company.
     But none of that is why I decided to post the photo. There is something going on in this picture that was one of the more radical developments in feminism in the 1920s. I wonder if you'll notice it, unprompted.
    All five girls here reflect this change, whereas, a decade earlier, they would not.
    Look closely. Perhaps pause on the lone boy—it looks like he's holding a Brownie camera, which was popular at the time, and would be a sly wink at today's theme. Hard to tell. Could be just a box. Photos can be deceptive, the way if, you look to the far left, there is what, for a moment, struck me as a hand holding a cell phone, as if taking a photo of the girls. It's not, of course, just the deceptiveness of the shape. Funny to consider though.
     It's the hairdos—they all have bobbed hair, which represented rejection of previous norms of femininity. The fashion started around World War I with a few pioneers, French actresses and such, and by the early '20s young American women—"flappers"— were dressing in short skirts, flinging away their corsets, and sheering off their long hair, which had forever been the very definition of femininity. By the time this photo was taken, it had filtered down to the schoolyard, as fashions do.
    Girls had long had short hair before, of course—Pixie cuts, and such. But the frizzed out look was particular to the bob, three of the five girls have it, and if you want to get a grasp of just what a radical act bobbing your hair once was that had in a few years become tame enough for girls to convince their parents to allow, track down F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1920 story, "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," a "drama of the shifting, semi-cruel world of adolescence." Mean girl Marjorie feels oppressed by having her Wisconsin cousin, Bernice visit her, and, in pretending to befriend her, goads her into bobbing her hair, to the shock of all and, well, better just to read it. You see Fitzgerald delving into his favorite themes of flaming youth and the upper crust, with a surprise ending I wouldn't dream of hinting at. For a 98-year-old story, it holds up well.
     The big deal over how women styled their hair is a reminder that women have always struggled to crawl out of the box that society, aka men, have tried to keep them in. Even in the smallest detail of their lives—how long their hair should be—the choice was not so much their own as imposed upon them. A battle which, as we all know too well, continues today.

   

Nietzsche teaches: Don’t let Trump’s vileness make us vile too

"The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters," by Goya (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     “Beyond Good and Evil,” a cornerstone of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, contains one section that is a list of numbered maxims.
     They veer from true to false, profound to ridiculous, current to outdated. No. 144, for instance, begins, “When a woman has scholarly inclinations, there is usually something wrong with her sexuality,” which I guess passed for insight in 1886, when the book was published, but has not aged well, beyond offering a glimpse into how certain guys thought then and no doubt still do.

     Others are sharp and useful, such as No. 68, worth bearing in mind as Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh does or does not remember what he might or might not have done at a party in high school:

     “I did that,” says my memory. “I could not have done that,” says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually — the memory yields.”

     Does it ever. People whitewash their pasts trying to fit their own pristine estimations of themselves. Which is stupid, given the universality of sin, and the freeing effect of simply admitting the wrongs you’ve done. Honesty can be hard, which is why people lie and distort. But it rewards us in the long run.
     No. 146 is my favorite, useful in all sorts of situations — really, it’s like a cordless electric drill — and came fluttering to mind earlier this week, as Twitter lit up with anatomical details from the new memoir by Stormy Daniels, the porn star who had sex with Donald Trump, who botched the payoff meant to silence her.
      If you've been in a cave and missed it, sorry, I'm not going into detail. Google "Trump" and "mushroom," but not while eating.
      Done? Good. Back to Nietzsche. Since quotes get twisted, let's begin with the original German: "Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird."
      The non-German speaker trying to make sense of that might recognize the word "kämpft"—struggle, or fight—from Hitler's memoir, "Mein Kampf." But the key word is "Ungeheuer,"—pronounced "un-gahoya," with that kind of strangled Teutonic swallow between the N and the G—or "monster."
     Or in English:
     "Anyone who fights with monsters, should be careful that he does not become a monster."
     Amen. At every point in American history, we see this tendency. To fight Hitler, putting his people in concentration camps, we put our own people—of Japanese descent—into concentration camps. We didn't kill them, hearty pat on the back. But we put them there.
     In the early 1950s, when we faced a grim and repressive Soviet Union, we became grim and repressive ourselves, with loyalty oaths and purges.
     Ever since Donald Trump thrust himself into our national political life, there has been a tendency of those opposed to him to nevertheless mimic the man. To distract themselves from his key failings by dabbling in his brand of pettiness, venality and obsession with looks.
    I understand why. You can only focus so long on his contempt for truth, his scorn for minorities, his disrespect for women, his disdain for American traditions, his clonic lying, bullying, love of tyrants—the list goes on, but you get the idea.
     The temptation is to take a breather, to delve into side issues, into lighter, more amusing matters: his horrendous hairdo, orange skin, pear shape, loathsome sons Eric and Donald Jr., robotic wife, lurid affairs.
      The above paragraph notwithstanding, I try to avoid all those off-point critiques of the president. Reading Stormy Daniels microscopic—a tool apparently necessary for the task at hand—assessment of the presidential assets can make you almost feel sorry for the man.
     He might deserve impeachment, but he doesn't deserve that.
     Or maybe he does. After I thought of Nietzsche's wise words, I remembered this bit of advice a sage editor once told me over a few beers: "Be careful where you put it." How much privacy can a man expect from a porn star?
     Still, we need to keep our focus. There are so many important, legitimate reasons to condemn Trump. Why get down into his cesspool and, in splashing him, spatter ourselves in the bargain? It's such a simple task to be a better person than he is — such a low bar, it would be a shame to stumble over it. Just because the man's a pig doesn't mean we should all become pigs while opposing him.

Flashback 2009: Lezza spumoni: Bellwood ice cream legend started in Little Italy

   

Gelateria, Rome, 2017

   I'm meeting a friend in Elmhurst for lunch on Friday. Mention of this to my wife drew a series of specific instructions: I was to go to Victor Lezza's new retail store. I was to buy cookies—don't skimp on the lemon ricotta—cannoli, the shells separate from the filling, thank you, to preserve crispness. 
    And finally, don't forget the spumoni.  Which made me think of this story. I can't believe I haven't shared it with you up to now. One of my favorite opening ledes.

     I've spoken with Louie Lezza, and at some point—next week, surely, assuming the steady drumbeat of real news takes a rest, and Chief Keefe doesn't throw his hat into the ring for the mayor's race—I'll find a way to offer an update. Spumoni has been sufficiently covered, below. Time to blow the lid off the Italian cookie situation.

     In Italy, they know not of spumoni.
     "Spumoni? What is this? I have never heard of this," says Marianka Campisi, of Bologna, a 25-year-old intern at the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago. "I don't think we have this in Italy."
     Rather, the distinctive type of ice cream was invented in America by newly arrived Italian immigrants.
     But we are getting ahead of the story, which begins not long ago in the frozen food aisle at Sunset Foods.
     "I'm getting spumoni," I told my wife, in that way husbands have of automatically narrating their actions, so as not to risk doing anything unapproved.
     I love spumoni and didn't expect resistance. But my wife regarded the container of Edy's spumoni in my hand as if it were a dead kitten.
     "Not that spumoni," she said. "I grew up in Bellwood. If you grew up in Bellwood, there is only Victor Lezza's."
     I returned the Edy's, and reached for a container of Lezza's which, I saw from the label, indeed comes from the west suburb. Which piqued my interest. They're making ice cream in Bellwood?
     Out front, Lezza Spumoni & Desserts looks like any small Italian bakery. A sign offers cakes for weddings and baptisms. Inside, glass cases display distinctive Italian cookies—amaretti, regina, quasimale—in the shapes of leaves, shells, hearts.
     I sit down with Ed Lezza, the third generation Lezza to make spumoni in Chicago. His grandfather, Salvatore Lezza, left his hometown outside Naples and came to the West Side in 1905, where he formed a partnership with the man who created Ferrara Pan candy, to this day a big local candy company, maker of Lemonheads.
     "They were in business, Ferrara and Lezza," says Lezza. "My grandfather was the baker, and Ferrara was the candy maker."
     Soon the partnership extended beyond business.
     "My grandmother's a Ferrara, Lucia Ferrara," he says.
     Despite my wife's belief that the company has been in Bellwood "forever," its first 60 years were in Little Italy. Then Lezza's got in the way of the University of Illinois.
     "We probably still would have been down at Halsted and Taylor streets, but Circle Campus came down there and condemned the property," say Ed Lezza. "We wanted to stay there and we were forced to move."
     Salvatore Lezza passed the company on to his two sons, Jack and Victor—Ed's father.
     "I pulled this out of the safe," says Ed Lezza. "It's something precious to us. I wanted to share it with you."
     Lezza displays a small notebook, filled with scrawled 75-year-old recipes, some jotted on the backs of Banco di Napoli Trust Company Bank deposit slips.
     "We keep exactly as my grandfather had written it," he says. "Everything the same."
     The bakery kitchen is charmingly old school—marble tabletops, a cedar-lined cooler. "You don't see them too much no more," says Louie Lezza, Ed's nephew and a fourth generation Lezza to make spumoni.
     Lezza spumoni is made up of five distinct "components." Four flavors of ice cream— chocolate, strawberry, rum and pistachio—with a whipped cream center studded with candied fruit and wheat germ bits (taking the place of chopped cashews, the rare change in deference to nut allergies)
     The spumoni production area seems impossibly small for a facility meeting the spumoni needs of 700 local restaurants and 24 states.
     "We're pretty close to outgrowing this plant," says Ed Lezza. "It's just a matter of time until we move into a large facility."
     Strawberry and pistachio are being mixed in two huge stainless steel vats. The flavors are complex—the strawberry has pineapple in it, seven different types of chocolate go into their chocolate.
     "We use the European-style blending," says Ed Lezza. "The pistachio isn't just pistachio."
     The completed, complex flavors are chilled to 21 degrees. At that temperature, they flow smoothly into containers, but don't bleed into each other. The flavors don't freeze because of the butterfat.
     "It's like anti-freeze," says Louie Lezza.
     The four ice cream flavors go in first, and then the burst of whipped cream at the center, which demands a special serving style for spumoni.
     "Spumoni must be sliced," says Ed Lezza. "You slice it, you have all five characteristics in every slice."
     Feeding four cups at a time under a filling machine is a bearded worker wearing purple latex gloves. I'm surprised to find he's Ed's son, Ed Lezza Jr., 38.
     I suggest that it's unusual for an owner of a business to work the packing line.
     "It's in my heart," he says. "I want to make sure it's right. It's my baby."
     He is also national sales manager. Customers are sometimes surprised when he delivers shipments of spumoni.
     "We do everything," Ed Lezza Jr. says. "It's a service-oriented business."
     Speaking of service, he is also a Bellwood village trustee. I ask: how's Bellwood doing?
     "We're holding our own," he says. "We're having our own new Metra station coming to Bellwood with 900 parking spots."
     And indeed, the neighborhood around Lezza's, including my wife's old house at Park and Frederick, looks well-tended and inviting. Driving north on Mannheim Road, snaking my hand into the big white cardboard box of Lezza's cookies sitting on the seat next to me, the future brightens. Things change and institutions crumble, so we need to pause, now and then, to appreciate what has not changed, the good things that are still with us.
      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 7, 2009

Just exactly what, or make that 'who,' is Bill Daley hoping to make great again?

"Portrait of Two Young Men," by Giovanni Cariani, Louvre Museum, Paris

     When Bill Daley told my colleague Mark Brown, "but to be mayor, that would be the greatest," what exactly did he mean? The greatest for whom?
     For the city of Chicago? Did Daley mean that once he is sworn in as mayor, Chicago will begin enjoying a period of greatness: more jobs, less crime, better race relations?
     Make Chicago Great Again.
     And if he meant that, what is he, Bill Daley, bringing to the table that will usher in this new epoch of greatness?
     "Daley offered no specific solutions to the city's most vexing problems," Brown wrote. "Saying he plans to spend much of his campaign listening to voters for their ideas."
     Ah. I see. Chicagoans are supposed to tell Daley what he should do, how he should solve Chicago's laundry list of city-killing woes. And then, stout-hearted fellow that he is, Bill Daley will do those things, and greatness will ensue.
     Or gee, could it possibly be that when Daley said "to be mayor, that would be the greatest," he meant it would be the greatest for him? That it would great for Bill Daley, and other folks named Daley, to have another Daley in the office that two Daleys have already held for, umm, 43 of the past 63 years?
     Could he really mean that?
     He could.
     Sigh.
     The thing is, I like Bill Daley, and I'll tell you why...

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