Election Day 2019, Part I

     Election Day in Chicago. Finally something on the political scene to be grateful for, to give thanks that the clown car that for months has been pulling up at various forums, disgorging candidates—14, count 'em, 14 on the ballot—will finally be sent to the junkyard.
     Not that it was always 14. It used to be more. In November, it was 21.  Easier to keep track of the Chicagoans who weren't running for mayor.
     Fourteen, until this evening. To be replaced by two, Godzilla and Rodan, who'll immediately set to wrestling each other, rolling around on a scale model Chicago, crushing it to flinders, metaphorically. That battle to be determined by another vote in April.
     Which two?
     While we ponder that, the New York Times had a tell-tale effort in its Monday paper. A full page, asking "a few questions" to nine of the 14 candidates.  The article was telling for a variety of reasons. First, being the Times, it never explained why these nine, and what about the other five made them not worthy of the cut.
     Second, each candidate was asked two semi-serious questions—to describe Rahm Emanuel's term in three words, and to name "Chicago's biggest challenge." Gentle pitches right down the middle. And two completely trivial questions: "Dibs or no dibs" and "Favorite Chicago skyscraper."
     Meaning that half of the questions the Times chose to present potential future mayors of Chicago the day before the election were fluff. Kinda tells you where the Gray Lady stands on Chicago. A far outer borough joke to amuse its readers on a slow news day, as comic relief from actual issues.
     For a moment I thought they also gave away the game by putting Bill Daley front and center, the favored candidate of Illinois billionaires and establishment publications in other cities. But a second look and I realized the Times lined up our would-be leader in alphabetical order, as if they were kindergartners, which does indeed make a certain sense.
     The skyscraper question—a single click removed from the classic "If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?"—was also telling. Garry McCarthy, Paul Vallas, and Willie Wilson picked the Hancock Building, which the Times took pains to explain was renamed "875 North Michigan" last year (who knew?)
   Amara Enyia and Susana Mendoza picked the Willis Tower, calling it the Sears Tower, of course.
   I didn't realize real people actually liked these examples of brutalist giganticism. It's like saying your favorite flavor of ice cream is "cold." But nothing should surprise in Chicago politics. Daley said the first thing I completely agree with him about, picking the charming spun sugar Venetian wedding cake of the Wrigley Building as his favorite. Hints at a soul, which is par for the course. Bill always seemed the most humanlike of the Daley clan, the Daley most likely to fog a mirror. Or maybe the Wrigley Building just tested well.
     Lori Lightfoot also picked a pair of buildings—the Wrigley Building is actually two buildings, with two different addresses, connected by a nickel sky bridge. She chose Marina Towers, which is defendable, in a retro 1960s way. Toni Preckwinkle, unable to color between the lines, picked the Cultural Center, noting its not a skyscraper. I suppose we should be glad she didn't pick pancakes, which are not a skyscraper either.
     And Gery Chico picked the Daniel Burnham's Reliance Building—to be honest, I believe he deserves to be mayor for that choice alone. Apt yet not playing to the crowds, exactly the sort of independent thinker Chicago needs as mayor.
      But I don't see Chico making today's cut. I'm normally not a fan of handicapping elections, but on my hobby blog, why not? All we can do now is wait, and the time must be passed somehow.
     One slot belongs to Bill Daley, because of the mesmeric powers that the Daley name has over Chicagoans to vote against all common sense and their best interests. That and the enormous bucket of money he collected from the billionaires whose interests he'll put above all else, while running an endless loop of TV commercials claiming what a salt-of-the-earth Chicago guy he is.
     The other ... I wish I could say Lori Lightfoot, based on the Sun-Times' powerful editorial lauding her lack of ties to the Old Guard.  But anyone young in her potential base in the African-American community would drift Enyia, thanks to the fluke of her Chance the Rapper endorsement or, if older, to Preckwinkle, whom I've said before I personally prefer, were the election up to me, which it's not.
    Mendoza has promise, and I wish I could say it would be her. But a sick feeling that just came over me now, at this second, my fingers tingling on the keyboard: it will be Gerry McCarthy, simply because a Daley-McCarthy race would be so horrible it makes sense. A cruel joke disenfranchising two-thirds of the city's population and revealing the whole system as the bald lie it certainly is.
     So that's my prediction—Daley v. McCarthy. Why? Because it's hard to go wrong in politics nowadays betting on the nightmare scenario.

“Becoming” elevates Michelle Obama to the pantheon of great American women

     News is supposed to be new; the expectation is even hidden in the word: new-s.
     So yes, I’m three months late.
     But anything can be news if you don’t know it.
    And back in November when Michelle Obama’s autobiography, “Becoming,” was published I didn’t know what I know now.
     To be honest, I barely paid attention to the book. I didn’t think much of Michelle Obama. Not that I held her in low regard, per se. Certainly nowhere near as low as the contempt expressed by right wing haters who decried every aspect of the First Lady, from her politics to her arms.
    I just didn’t think much about her. Not while her husband was a senator, when she was an offstage presence, grumbling about his political career, nagging him about smoking. Not while he was president, when she created scandals by wearing sleeveless dresses and urging kids to exercise. Not when her book came out. I clicked my tongue at her book launch for 14,000 people at the United Center, hosted by Oprah. Must be nice.  
     But it wasn’t as if I were going to read her book. Michelle Obama was not the sort of person I wanted to cozy up with. She seemed, as she herself put it in her book, a “pissed-off harpy.”
     How do I know she wrote that? Because I read the book, of course. How did that happen? I had to catch a plane. The cab was coming in 15 minutes. I needed a new audio book. Onto Audible to find something. "Becoming" was right there, a best-seller. My wife had already read the book, and while she didn't really remark upon it, that fact alone suggested it could be done. The cab was coming. I shrugged and bought it.

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Flashback 1998: R. Kelly arrested for a different reason

     Last week was a good time to be a news reporter in Chicago. It was fun just to follow my young colleagues via Twitter as they raced around the city, covering the unfolding Jussie Smollett and R. Kelly cases. You could feel the excitement. I noticed some pushback from the calliope of negativity that is Twitter, as if their enthusiasm were somehow unseemly, given the cause. But if you've spent any time with ER doctors, as I have, you know that there is both an adrenalin rush when the doors burst open and patients start being rushed in, and pride afterward for doing their jobs under trying conditions. That's natural. It doesn't mean they're glad a train hit a bus.
     Watching Jim DeRogatis and Abdon Pallasch, on this story years before anybody cared, in the spotlight again, made me wonder what, if anything, I wrote about R. Kelly at the time. The sex charges get glancing reference—someone else was covering it—but I did find some interesting relics, such as this story from 1998, the year the first case R. Kelly was charged with this week took place. It was nostalgic to see myself in the herd, digging for the story, and I was proud that I talked my way onto that cop bus 
    Though to be honest, adrenalin be damned, I never liked being in those scrums of reporters, and dreamed of being where I am now, pursuing my own solitary interests at my own pace. To me, if there's another reporter where I'm working, I'm probably in the wrong place. That isn't a criticism of ferreting out news—I'm glad someone is doing it, and glad the Sun-Times does it better than anyone else. I'm also glad not to have to be the person to do it, to be free to chase the will-o-wisp of my shifting interests. I like to think when readers get exhausted with the relentless drumbeat of the news of the day, that my column drapes a chummy arm over their shoulders, draws them off to the side, offering a cup of strong coffee and a biscuit and a chance to gather their thoughts.

  

1972 Pontiac Grand Prix

     The power of prayer must be exaggerated. 
     I know angels and divine intervention are a hot topic now. But if prayer really worked, then a shoulder-fired, heat-seeking missile launcher would have materialized in my bedroom a long time ago, so I could blast one of those blaring boom-box cars as they pass under my window at night.
     I've certainly spent enough hours in bed, staring into the darkness, listening to the throbbing music, if that is the word, pulsing from some idiot's car as it rolls slowly down the quiet North Side street where I live, usually about 2 o'clock in the morning, and wishing for that missile launcher.
     Praying for the launcher, trying to conjure it up, willing for it to appear. Imagining the joy of removing it from its military green case (I picture it packed in that fake grass they fill Easter baskets with). Throwing open the window, centering the car -- which I imagine as a low slung, 1972 Pontiac with neon light piping around the sides -- in the cross hairs as it cruises down the street, the music slamming away, "WHUMPA-WHUMPA-WHUMPA-BE-MY-LOVE-DOLL-BAY-BEE-T000-NIIIIIIIIIYIIIIIGHT!!!!-WHUMPA-WHUMPA-WHUMPA."
     I squeeze the trigger. The missile streaks from the launcher, a fiery shaft of vengeance, to the car, which explodes in a huge, slow-motion fireball, KA-BLOOOEY!; this sound, though loud, is somehow pleasant and unobjectionable. The street littered with debris. Then silence, sweet silence except for—signaling the fantasy's end—the muted sound of a few neighbors cheering.
     Or maybe I'm assuming too much, prayer-wise. Maybe God hears the missile prayer clear enough, and—for reasons neither cosmic nor mysterious—decides to let it go unanswered. Maybe he really is looking out for me.
     Either way, I unspooled the entire fantasy again last week, reading, with a good deal of deep visceral satisfaction, of the arrest of R. Kelly—a music star of some sort, apparently—for allegedly refusing a police request to turn down the volume blasting out of his car at a Clark Street night spot this week.
     Now everyone knows the proper response to a police officer asking you just about anything is "Yes, sir" (or "Yes, ma'am," as the case may be). If a cop stopped me on the street and asked me to climb a tree I'd probably be somewhere in the high branches before it occurred to me that I might want to question his (or, again, her) authority.
     This isn't because I'm a big police fan, as much as I'd like to be. After a dozen years of dealing with Chicago police on a periodic, professional level, I have a healthy respect (or is the word "fear"?) for their ability to turn nasty at a moment's notice and I wouldn't want to draw that quality down upon myself without a good reason. It isn't so much that I don't like them as they really don't seem to like me, no matter how I try to please them.
     I could cite many instances, but the one that comes to mind is the time that another singing star, Ice-T, was appearing at the Vic Theater. He had just released a song, "Cop Killer," that had inflamed the sensibilities of police officers everywhere, and our local Fraternal Order of Police decided to go down to the Vic and protest Ice-T's performance.
     This of course made perfect sense. If somebody puts a song on an album saying, basically, that an entire group of people, particularly one as generally laudable as the police, should be shot, then that group certainly can be expected to protest.
     The officers, who were off-duty, hired a few buses to ferry them from their gathering spot, the station at Belmont and Western, to the Vic.
     Being an intrepid reporter, I talked my way onto one of the buses, thinking I'd have a chance to chat with the protesting police officers on the way over.
     Big mistake. The cops were hopped up, mad, boisterous. Some were drinking, which didn't help. Ice-T wasn't on the bus, but I was, so they were mad at me, even though, to my knowledge, I'd never written a song about anyone. It was scary; I didn't get much interviewing done on the bus, but I did a lot of cringing down into my seat, trying to shrink into a small and unnoticed person.
     Things weren't much easier in front of the Vic. The TV stations were there, and one of them got some footage of an officer screaming in the face of some doughy, round guy, jamming his finger hard against that guy's forehead, saying something like: "How'd you like it if I said, 'Let's shoot you, bang, bang!' "
     I was that guy. I had just asked the officer some bland, meat-and-potatoes question about the protest, and the cop went off on a tirade. Which leads us back to R. Kelly. Maybe he was playing his music and being "loud and abusive" as the police say. He doesn't have the best track record when it comes to brushes with the law.
     But track records are a funny thing. They build up and people judge you by them, no matter the facts of a particular case. Maybe R. Kelly was guilty. Or maybe he was just a young black man sitting in an expensive car who got rousted for no other reason. Those things happen, and while they still surprise me -- I am the kind of person who clings to a shred of trust in the system -- it wouldn't surprise me as much now as in previous years.

                         –Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 12, 1998

The Saturday Snapshot #28

    
     At home, I was never much for going to synagogue. Oh, I'd go, if my wife wanted to. Though really I was more performing my husbandly duty of keeping her company than fulfilling any personal desire to visit a place of worship related to my religion.  And lately, not even that.
     Out of town, however, is an entirely different matter. A sailor-finds-religion-in-port type of thing, where synagogues become a little bit of home turf in a foreign land. I have visited temples from Bridgetown to Vilnius to Jerusalem, gone to Sabbath services from London to Taipei, seen the historic buildings in Newport (the Touro Synagogue, built in 1761) and Charleston (blundering into Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, its congregation founded in 1749, stupidly never imagining it would still be in use, clomping inside in my big cargo shorts and short-sleeved sports shirt, crashing some poor kid's bar mitzvah, finding myself, trapped and aghast, amidst hatted ladies and men in linen suits). 
     Punishment perhaps. 
     My first thought, receiving this charmingly off-kilter photo of the Magen David Synagogue in Mumbai, sent by my friend Michael Cooke, who is on a speaking tour of India, was, "So it's not just me."
     His accompanying note was concise:
    "With a sand-bagged guard hut in Mumbai. Beautiful building inside and out."
     There are 4,500 Jews in India, a nation of a billion people, and the Magen David Synagogue, built in 1861, has a school that accepts non-Jews; indeed, it has to be the only synagogue school where 98 percent of the students are Muslim. Jews have been in India nearly 2,000 years; in Kerala there are two "Jew Streets."
     There are actually eight synagogues in Mumbai; most modest, but grander than the Mogen David is the newer, larger,  but also blue Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue, built in 1884. 
     As well as a Chabad house that was occupied during the 2008 terrorist attacks across the city. Which explains the sandbagged security post. Synagogues abroad tend to be fortified, out of necessity. I remember visiting the Grand Synagogue in Rome. To get into its lovely Babylonian-style sanctuary, visitors must pass through one of those tight, 90-degree turn, bullet-proof security chambers, where one door clicks before the other opens. The grim result of an 1982 PLO attack where terrorists rushed in, firing machine guns and hurling grenades, wounding 37 people and killed a toddler. 
     It seemed poignant, in the sprawling Eternal City, where you can freely wander in and out of half the churches in Christendom, including the St. Peter's. But the Jews need police with machine guns in front of theirs. Maybe that's also a reason I visit; to show support for the beleaguered community that I belong to, a tiny and dwindling tribe, hated and attacked in all places and at all times, yet accused of secretly running the world.

Sign of the times: Danville company working hard to dazzle Las Vegas

Shannon Stine, an employee at Watchfire Signs in Danville, tests the LEDs in a new sign. 

    At first glance, there doesn't seem to be much in common between the glitz of Las Vegas and the grit of Danville.     

     Vegas is a thriving desert metropolis, world-famous as a gaudy adult oasis floating on a sea of gambling money. Danville, a small community of modest homes, is a once-thriving town that has never been the same since the GM plant shut down 30 years ago.
     Wealth is on flashing display everywhere in Las Vegas. Five years ago, the U.S. government called Danville the cheapest place to live in the United States.
     What could the connection be?
     The flashing signs are the giveaway.       

      Go to Danville, 120 miles south of Chicago. Turn down Maple Street, to where it dead-ends with the unfortunately-named Bahls Street, a source of never-ending guffaws from truckers making pickups and deliveries. There you will find Watchfire Signs, which right now is constructing the largest digital display in the world, a $30 million, four-block long, barrel-vaulted, 130,000 square foot video screen that, when complete, will form a canopy above Fremont Street in Las Vegas.

     Watchfire employs about 320 people manufacturing and selling LED signs. If you drive down the Kennedy, you've already seen their work: Watchfire manufactures video billboards for JCDecaux. The company began in 1945 as Time-O-Matic, producing grids of bulbs under bank signs telling the time and temperature. The company also created flashing signs for Vegas casinos.

     They've grown considerably over the past decade, discarding their mechanical-sounding name, and now tackling the biggest sign ever attempted, beating out 15 other companies worldwide that bid on the job.
     "For a company like ours, this is a huge project," said Steve Harriott, president and CEO. "For any company — it's is the biggest screen in the world."
     Manufacture began last month. To see it, you must put on an anti-static smock and booties before entering the state-of-the-art assembly room.

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Flashback 2011: Sons of Thorne Rooms artist still run dad’s studio

A Thorne Room in the modern style. 

     Hank Kupjack died Monday. My colleague Maureen O'Donnell did her usual excellent job ushering the miniaturist into the hereafter. I felt a connection, beyond that offered by Maureen, because I had visited Kupjack at his studio in 2011. I remember being pleased that I had stumbled upon a bit of controversy over a subject as blandly familiar as the Thorne Rooms.

     

     Imagine that you are in the Impressionist wing at The Art Institute of Chicago, admiring the masterpieces, and you notice a placard telling visitors that the sons of Vincent Van Gogh — Harold and Bob Van Gogh, say — still run their dad’s studio.
     That’s basically what you find if you go down to the beloved Thorne Miniature Rooms in the basement of The Art Institute.
     Over the holidays my wife dragged the family there. I’ve never been a particular fan of the Thorne Rooms — the 68 wee interiors always struck me as girly. But they are art, of a sort, with a certain serene quality, and I had no trouble peering into them for 20 minutes, reading the notations, including one crediting the work of local craftsman Eugene Kupjack, adding: “Today Kupjack Associates is operated by his two sons, Hank and Jay, in Park Ridge, Illinois.”
     A few days later, I was shaking hands with Hank Kupjack, 59, a singular figure — very thin, pants tucked into tall black leather boots, wearing glasses, a turtleneck and a mop of anachronistic ginger brown hair.
     We chatted briefly about Istanbul, where the rooms were on display last year, then sat down at his workbench — dozens of jars of paint and shellac, dozens of needle nose pliers. Kupjack lit a Marlboro cigarette and conversation immediately took an unexpected dive into controversy.
     “As you know, the Thorne Rooms are very popular,” he began. “The Institute has never liked the rooms, I’ll be honest with you. Now they do. But they hadn’t, for a very long time, because they are the most popular thing in the Art Institute. . . . But they’re not Impressionist paintings, and the Institute for a long time didn’t like that. They always rubbed them the wrong way — they only acquired them because Thorne gave them to the Institute, [which] only took them because [Mrs. Thorne] was a founding member of the Art Institute and the only donor during the Depression. Once they were installed they couldn’t do anything about it.”
     That’s the risk of all public art — once you put it in, you can never get rid of it — and why Chicago is stuck forever contemplating a rusty baboon, a fiberglass Snoopy in a blender, and other crude 1970s debris that aging masters fobbed off on the city.
     Not to lump the Thorne Rooms in with such monstrous modernist kitsch — at least they require skill to create and are pleasant to regard.
     To my surprise, the Art Institute cheerily acknowledged both the popularity of the rooms now and the undervaluing of the rooms, installed in the mid-1940s, in the past.
     “When people come here, they look for American Gothic, for Sunday on the Grande Jatte, and for the Thorne Rooms,” said Erin Hogan, director of communications. “They’re a hugely, hugely popular part of the museum.”
     “I think there’s always that problem with, not only miniatures, but decorative arts in particular,” said Lindsay Mican Morgan, curator of the rooms. “There’s a history where paintings became ‘art’ and anything else is simple and decorative.”
     The Kupjacks — Hank is the main artist, Jay assists and take photographs — make the miniatures on a scale of one inch to one foot, now primarily for collectors and rich folk who want to immortalize themselves. The studio that produced “The Drew Carey Show,” for instance, paid the Kupjacks $100,000 to create a diorama of the show’s set.
     “Right now I’m doing a classical Greek andron — an andron is a room specifically built in a Greek home for parties, for boys only,” said Kupjack. “You basically sat around, drank wine, told stories, read poetry and behaved badly. The donor wants to show the context this stuff was actually used in antiquity.”
     “And the donor?” I asked.
     “We’re having serious issues,” he said, of the museum, which he asked me not to name (Geez, I thought, I flee politics to seek refuge in quaintness, and controversy still nips at my heels like a dim pup). “It’s going to go to one of several institutions that have large collections of classical art.”
     The Thorne Rooms — I did not realize — were intended to replace full-scale interiors.
     “When Mrs. Thorne was on the board in the 1920s, it was all the rage for museums to have full-sized period rooms,” said Kupjack. “The Institute had, I think, five or six. And she realized that not only were they terribly expensive to recreate . . . they took vast amounts of space and ultimately, when the public walked through they didn’t give a damn. The purpose of the Thorne Rooms was so that the Institute did not have to have full-sized period rooms. She did not realize they were much more popular than full-sized rooms until she did it.”
     I found the Kupjacks candid and charming, filled with tales of P.K. Wrigley, Marshall Field V and Malcolm Forbes, and the museum has grown to value them.
     “I have to admit, when I got this position, it took many tries and a lot of bridge building to gain their trust,” said Morgan. “They definitely felt hurt from the past. To me, they had so much history — they’ve given me fabrics, they’ve been very generous — it seemed ridiculous not to associate with them.”

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 7, 2011

Jussie Smollett situation reminds us: An example is not proof

                                                                   Basilica di Santa Croce, Florence, Italy


     In an era when everyone’s talking, all the time, silence is a privilege.
     A radical thought from a person paid good money to blow off his big bazoo.
     But never on command. I’m fortunate in that I rarely must comment on any given situation. My boss never shifts the stump of a wet cigar in his mouth and barks, “Steinberg! Your take on the Kershpungen Kerfuffle! Online in 30 minutes!”
     Not yet anyway.
     I do believe in comment, but after reflection. Time is our friend. We are allowed to think about stuff, to see what develops. We don’t have to argue every murky, fluid situation. We can just wait and find out.
      I’d never heard of either Jussie Smollett or his TV show “Empire” before Jan. 29, when the young actor reported being attacked in Chicago. Such things happen — Wrigleyville is next to Boystown, and in the summer, carloads of suburban bully boys are known to assault pedestrians whose step isn’t as heavy as theirs.
     But that wasn’t the situation here. It wasn’t summer; it was 20 below. And he was walking in Streeterville, not on Halsted Street. There was preparation beyond drinking a case of Old Style: a rope, and bleach. And, most incredibly, claims that this is MAGA country, which it certainly is not. Donald Trump won’t show his face here.
     Nor was this any random young man on his way home from Sidetrack. This was a celebrity.

     I try not to engage in Facebook tug-o-wars. Better to read and not react. But I came upon a string of comments from people horrified at this attack. Doubts were being raised and the doubters reviled. They needed support. I thought carefully, then wrote:
     “This is a very strange set of facts. Not a typical Chicago crime.”
     I felt safe with that. A couple days later, I came upon another friend out on a limb:
     "I know many will call me an ass for not believing the victim but this story is BS," he wrote.
     To some, that was bigotry rampant.
     "It saddens me that it is easier for people to find this story made up (hospital pictures of injuries, document threats and all) than see this is plausible."
     It seemed cowardly to hurry past. I weighed in:
     "I have to admit, I had the exact same thought. It just seems implausible. Not impossible. But the odds of this celebrity hitting town and running into the cast of 'Deliverance' ... let's just say if I had to bet the ranch, it would be on Some Other Explanation."
     Since then, over the past two weeks, the story has assumed the usual pattern. Blue America waved the bloody shirt—see, this is the nest of haters we must deal with! Now that the blood appears to be ketchup, and perhaps—still perhaps, remember—Smollett cooked this up, hiring the men who supposedly assaulted him for reasons I won't guess at—Red America had a jubilee: see, all this racism and homophobia stuff is a lie. We live in Mayberry where everybody is happy.
     The core problem, ignored by both sides, has nothing to do with whatever happened to Smollett that night. The problem is that an example isn't proof.
     If I want to illustrate that America is a deeply racist country, whose economic success is built upon the dehumanization of black people, the slavers' poisonous worldview still with us to this day, I don't need a street incident to make my case. I can just flop open a history book to almost to any random page. Nor does the country's pervasive homophobia, despite real advances, need to be proven by a mugging.
     When the initial news was seized upon, as Exhibit No. 1 for these woes, those eagerly banging garbage can lids together were playing Trump's game: trot out a dramatic crime then demand a wall.
     When diligent police work cast the attack into question, the Revanchist Right picked up the stick the Left dropped, and made it Exhibit No. 1 for Fake News. More proof that the racism and homophobia we're never acknowledged in the first place does not exist.
     Why does everybody do it? Cherry pick newly-baked facts that we hope will support us? It must show lack of confidence in our view of the world, this constant junkie scramble for new validation.
     See why silence is so attractive? I've said it before: Shutting up is an art form.