Tuesday, January 14, 2020

Strange interlude 2008: The house without bling

     This post-surgery recuperation is taking longer than I expected. Two full weeks now. Apologies. It's frustrating for me too. But I have to kinda take my body's lead on this thing, and the body says, "chill." Some stretching exercises, some physical therapy, and I'm done for the day. Even posting this seems almost a bridge too far, but I think I can manage. It's hard to read much, never mind write anything. Maybe next week.
     Thank goodness there is royal scandal, although honestly, it quickly morphed, in my eyes, from some nutty British crown-watching kerfuffle, to Something Significant About Race, influenced by this revealing Afua Hirsh piece in the Sunday New York Times, and BuzzFeed's jaw-dropping comparison of press coverage of Kate Middleton v. Meghan Markle. 
     I'm tempted to just leave it at that. But this is my blog, and I should join the party. So I wondered what, if anything, I wrote about Prince Harry over the years, and found this, when the Drudge Report outed him during his military service. Frankly, the fact he served in a combat zone should buy him significant goodwill, and my prediction is that Harry & Meghan's recent pushback against the racist British press will someday be seen as among their finest hours. I left in the breakfast table conversation about bling because, well, I had to. For the record, the younger boy is the least ostentatious 22-year-old I ever met. So I guess my anti-bling pushback worked.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     See? Journalists aren't quite the scum you think we are. For 10 weeks, Britain's Prince Harry had been fighting with his unit in Afghanistan, and the normally rapacious and cut-throat British media kept the whole thing in a cone of silence, until his cover was blown by the Drudge Report (is Matt Drudge having a good week, or what? First the American media swallows his Obama-in-a-turban photo, hook, line and sinker, then he eats the British press' lunch and leaves them muttering about bad form).
     In return for not turning a blaze of publicity that might get the 23-year-old royal killed, the British media was granted access to take photos and conduct interviews with him. It seemed a win-win situation all around. Perhaps their role in hounding Harry's mother -- Princess Diana -- to her grave gave the Brits a rare sense of duty.
     Is it bad that Drudge blew his cover? Well, somebody had to feed the news to him, so if Drudge knew, it was hours away from hitting other Web sites anyway. Still, the whole episode shows that restraint is possible, even in this day and age.

STUDS TERKEL IS NOT BLING

     "Dad, can we get Bling Water?" asks the 12-year-old, the Sun-Times spread on the kitchen counter before him, open to news that the Trump Hotel is selling water for $25 in crystal-encrusted bottles.
     "No," I say. "We are not a household that embraces bling."
     He keeps talking, but I am lost in reverie. My boy, 15 years hence, 350 pounds, wearing a sequin baseball cap turned sideways. Bedecked in gold pendants and chains, he sits on a folding chair in a circle of large, similarly-appointed men.
     "Sure we had love, a roof over our head, food on the table," I say, out-loud to the kitchen, approximating his voice, channeling the future scene, where he brushes away a tear as sympathetic, bejeweled hands are placed on his shoulder. "But we had no bling. My father never valued bling. I hated him for that."
     My wife, the cheerleader of the status quo, jumps in.
     "We went to the opera last night," she says. True—'The Barber of Seville.' Lovely. "The opera is bling."
     "The opera is not bling," I insist.
     "We sat in Studs Terkel's seats," she continues—the guy next to us told us that Studs once sat where we were sitting. "That's bling."
     "Studs Terkel is not bling!" I spit, fiercely. "He's a literary icon but not bling. He's 95. He has red socks."
     "Studs is a fan of the Red Sox?" says my wife, puzzled.
     "No he WEARS red socks!" I retort. "Red socks are not bling."
     "I think red socks are kinda bling," she says, deflating.
     "Why can't we get the water?" my son persists. I expect the Marx Brothers to burst in at this point. Somebody has to lay down the law.
     "I am de faddah," I say, in my best Laurence Olivier in "The Jazz Singer" voice, "and I say, we hef no bling in zis household."
     I glance from boy to boy.
     "You kids . . ." I begin, my voice dripping contempt. "With your bling, and your hip, and your hop. I forbid it! I will not hef der hip und der hop."
     And I storm off to work.
                                        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 2, 2008

Monday, January 13, 2020

Chicagopedia: ketchup


Memphis, by William Eggleston (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
     A newspaper is a universe, or should be. A sky filled with all sorts of stars and planets, comets and asteroids, moons and meteors. Thus, despite being the most rational of men, or trying to be, I don't mind the horoscope, or the comics. I understand that not everything is for me: it's one of my superpowers. 
     Thus I was happy to see the new sports wrapper, even though I don't follow sports, and happier to contribute to it at the end of November.  I love our ongoing series on wall murals—interesting of themselves and a great way to get to know hidden corners of the city. I was happy to contribute to that too, and meet the great Jeff Zimmerman. I'm also glad they're bringing back Chicagopedia, our hand guide to Chicago ways and means through its distinctive use of language. The powers behind it asked if I wanted to contribute anything, and I've done several. This is my favorite so far:

ketchup /ˈkeCHəp/ n.  1. A sauce made primarily of tomatoes, vinegar and corn syrup. 2. A condiment which, when deployed on hot dogs, is considered by some to exclude the user from being a "true Chicagoan," whatever that is, when, in fact it is the concern, and not the usage itself , that is distinguishing as, 3. A code word for Chicago authenticity, visa a vis its non-use on hot dogs, by writers of advertising residing in other cities, recent transplants and others who for reasons unfathomable pay attention to the condiment choices of strangers.



Sunday, January 12, 2020

The I'm from Chicago Polka (for piano)


     Maybe Al Capone did us a favor. 
     Chicagoans wince at having their international reputation tied to a 1920s gangster, still, after all these years. Or Michael Jordan. Or whatever shard of Chicago urban culture washes up on a distant shore (if that metaphor can even be used in the digital age. Though it sounds so much better than "flashes on a distant screen.")
     But this? Regular readers know that I routinely make use of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's vast online collection of free, downloadable images to illustrate my efforts here. The Met is useful but, I've found, has limits. It doesn't have everything, and sometimes the site is a dry well. So when I saw that a consortium of 14 Paris museums had opened up their own image portal, I had to take a look.
     What to search for? I could have plugged in "Renoir" or "automobiles" or "Notre Dame." But being provincial myself, I plugged in "Chicago"—let's see what images of us they harbor—and was rewarded for my local pride with this sheet music.
     The "I am from Chicago Polka." For piano. With the image of one of the more ridiculous one-man-band rustics ever engraved That's when I sudden felt a flash of gratitude to Scarface. Is this how the French saw us? Is it how they see us now? Is it who we are?
   
Charles Lecocq
 Plenty of information on the artifact to unpack. "Ch. Lecocq" is Charles Lecocq, a French composer of light and comic operas in the latter half of the 19th century, little remembered today.
     "La Vie Mondaine"—"Social Life" or maybe "Worldly Life"—was an three act opera of Lecocq's, first performed at Paris' Théâtre des Novelties on Feb. 13, 1885.
     The large "Arban" at the bottom refers to Jean-Baptiste Arban, a big-deal composer and conductor at the time.
    That'll do. I probably shouldn't go too far into the weeds in dredging up the history of 1880s French musical comedy, except to note that the polka had indeed been a craze in France—in the 1840s. Lecocq evoking it in the mid-1880s reflected his slide into irrelevance that began decades before his death in 1918.

     But what is the explanation of the yokel illustrating the song? Chicago's reputation as an ethnic enclave? Perhaps it reflects French hostility toward America in general and our cities in particular. 
     "The city was pitiable, ugly and boring," Philippe Roger writes, in "The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism," referring not specifically to Chicago, but to the French 19th century view of American cities. "It was banality incarnate, quintessentially parochial."
     Chicago certainly was a cow town, a hardship post.
     "Bread is almost unknown in Chicago," French diplomat Francois Bruwaert wrote, recounting the joy of discovering a French bakery at the 1893 Columbian Exposition.  Lacking proper bakeries, Chicagoans attempt to produce bread at home and do so "badly."
      Bruwaert's visit, reproduced in the classic "As Others See Chicago: Impressions of Visitors 1673-1933" (edited by  Bessie Louise Pierce) is a delight of contempt and self-reference. The World's Fair is worthy only to the degree it celebrates France. Bruwaert tries "toasted corn," aka popcorn, and finds it "detestable," while allowing "it suffices to occupy the youngsters." In his defense, he does eventually suggest something that will "most surprise the foreigner who is enterprising enough to come as far as Chicago" is that the city is "beautiful," and he marvels that it could rise from a swamp in the span of 50 years.
     I had hoped that the lyrics to the song would offer fresh wonders. But when I finally found the entire 11-page score online I discovered that, alas, it is an instrumental. Probably just as well. If there were lyrics, my hunch is they would not be an ode to Chicago's splendor.
     No need. We supply that ourselves. Continually.

Saturday, January 11, 2020

Nature red (and pink and blue) in tooth and claw

Casper

    We have three houseguests over winter break. Two East Coast law students, in deep rest mode, at least when not reading submissions to the various law and tax review journals where they are on staff. And a black kitten named Casper, acquired this fall by the younger boy because, well, I suppose his life wasn't complicated enough.
     "He must need a cat," I said to my wife, offering as good an explanation as any.
     We certainly didn't need another one, or so we thought, prior to Casper's arrival. Our loyalties were fully invested in the aged Gizmo and Natasha, resting regally 23 and a half hours a day at the foot of the bed. Plus our old house itself: how would it fare under the kitten onslaught?
     It took about 15 minutes after the arrival of Casper—flown in at great expense—for me to shift from wondering how we are going to adjust to this third cat, to scheming how to convince our boy to leave him behind. This, despite a certain genius Casper had for running directly across my post-surgical thigh, with such consistency that I took to placing a pillow over it, protectively, just in case. This, uncharacteristically, did not seem to cool my feelings for the kitty.
     "Just look at how happy he is!" I'd marvel, as Casper cavorted with, aka chased, our two old cats. And Kitty, our dog, was practically vibrating with enthusiasm, as if Casper were a personal present and plaything. "Having an entire house to roam in....not confined to a small apartment. It would be cruel, don't you think, to take him away from all this?"
      Nice try, he said, in words and expressions.
      Part of the smooth adjustment of all concerned must be credited to my wife. Unlike our cats, acquired in the early years of the 21st century, Casper is not declawed. Apparently, in recent years declawing—the medical term is "onychectomy"—the once standard procedure is now a holocaust, and the Humane Society of the United States, and other pro-pet groups have come out against it. Last year, New York became the first state to ban it, and a variety of cities, mostly in California, have done the same. A pet owner declawing a cat couldn't be held in lower regard if he ate the beast instead.
     I couldn't find any recent statistics, but in 2011, 60 percent of cat owners said declawing was okay, and a quarter of U.S. cats were declawed, though those figures might have shifted to reflect a near decade of bad publicity regarding what one vet called "de-toeing"—the procedure removes not only the claw, but the nail bed and last digit of a cat's toes.
    "If performed on a human being, it would be like cutting off each finger at the last knuckle," the Humane Society notes.
     Not being a fan of projecting human neuroses onto the animal kingdom, I don't really get worked up about such fine points: I'm not about to apologize to Gizmo and Natasha for having them declawed (and cats, if you're reading this: it was the woman who did it.)       
   Me, I have an inherent ability to dismiss such matters. We rescued our dog, Kitty, from a breeder; you can judge us lightly, harshly, or anywhere in between, as you see fit. It's all the same to me. I was concerned, not how our pets would fare in intra-kitten skirmishes, but about the future of what few sticks of furniture we possess that are not already battered into ruin. 
      My wife, who knows about such things, urged the boy to deploy claw covers, which I had never heard of or imagined. To our mutual amazement, he did. If you are unfamiliar with the things, claw covers are basically glue-on fingernails for cats, keeping their sharp claws from inflicting damage.
     Commonly referred to as "nail caps," they are inexpensive, available everywhere and—most unexpectedly—come in a variety of neon colors.  Yes, I notice online that some folks are aghast at claw covers too, for a variety of increasingly implausible and esoteric reasons, the bottom line being they hate people and want humanity to die off so as not to inconvenience microbes. 
     Nature is cruel; claw covers are not. Having gone to Animal Care and Control to watch them gas cats, I can't get too worked up over any minor infringement on the dignity of animals. I suppose I draw the line at costumes, but it's a free world, and I wouldn't try to stop you. To me, claw covers seem a practical, easy solution—putting them on and periodically replacing them is no big deal, the boy says. They are festive, and God knows we'll need a little festivity in the long, cold, grey slog between now and Valentine's Day.  Or, I keep having to remind myself, between now and when Casper and his current owner leave next week. 
   

Friday, January 10, 2020

Strange Interlude, 2008: Return to sender



     Well, I did something Thursday that I have not yet done in 2020: put on pants. Which is my subtle way of saying the recuperation proceeds apace: slowly but surely. I also began reaching out to sources for what I hope to be my first column when I return. Small steps. 
     I stumbled upon this looking for something else, and liked it for two reasons: one, a reminder that a dozen years ago email used to be far more significant than it is today. And for my visit to the Rotary which, needless to say, never asked me back. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I including the godawful joke I coined about Barack Obama at the end because it seems cowardice to delete it. What is the old saying? Dying is easy; comedy is hard.

OPENING SHOT ...

     Every few seconds, the computer on my desk emits a pleasant three-note glissando chime — do-do-dooo — telling me another e-mail has arrived.
     Well, it was pleasant 20 minutes ago. Now, it's getting annoying, as dozens, then scores, then hundreds of messages arrive, all announcing that my e-mail has failed to reach its destination and is being returned.
     Not that I'm sending them—I'm writing a column, or was trying to. Now, I'm deleting e-mails by the hundred. A bank of computers somewhere — some musty basement in the Ukraine, or a stifling, windowless warehouse in Nigeria — is "spoofing" me, using my e-mail address to send out thousands of scam e-mails touting an online casino. "Are you our next massive jackpot winner?" it asks. 

      No, I'm not. Not me. This is nothing personal — they have digital spiders crawling over the Web, grabbing e-mail addresses and using them to try to fool computer filters into thinking an actual person is writing to them.
     And even though my involvement is accidental, there's something disquieting about having the fallout from this attempted ripoff collecting in my inbox. I don't know why I feel moved to delete it immediately — but I do. I want it out, as if it were diseased, or might drown me.
     I wish some of those sociologists studying Yanomamo Indians in the Brazilian rain forest and nomads in the Punjab would instead cast their attention to what being connected 24 hours a day into this enormous, often-enigmatic grid does to people, to all my plugged-in friends, frantically thumbing their BlackBerries as they walk down the street. I'm all for the Internet, but, like The Phone Company, it has its dark corners. From the froth-flecked lunatics who, unlike objects in the rear view mirror, appear much closer than they actually are, to the vile extremes of humanity only a few keystrokes away, to being bothered in your office by electronic scamsters a dozen time zones removed.
     So I delete and delete and delete and delete. It isn't terribly difficult, and there is a sense of sweeping away the bad. It's almost like weeding. At first.

LIFE AMONG THE ROTARIANS

     With phantom rejected e-mail messages clogging my in-box, I hopped a cab to the Union League Club for a Rotary Club of Chicago luncheon.
     If Facebook is new networking, then this is old networking — flesh-and-blood people with their names on big round badges, gathering at round tables to exchange business cards and chat before listening to whatever speaker was snared into accepting the job — in today's case, me.
     My hunch is that many people cling to a Sinclair Lewis view of groups such as the Rotary, the Elks and the Lions. A half-censorious, half-sneering sentiment left over from after World War I, when fraternal groups were the hidebound sentinels of Main Street status quo. With perhaps a bit of lingering 1960s scorn tossed in, a relic from when change was in the air, and anything that smacked of business was bad. The Rotary was The Man.
     But young people are entrepreneurs now, or want to be, and it's easier to name billionaires under 30 than it is to name rock stars. After exchanging banalities with your "friends" — Facebook code for people you've never met and most likely never will — a Rotary Club meeting feels positively revolutionary: real people in a real room, talking about their common bonds.
     George J. Kondik, a visiting Rotarian from Weirton, W.Va., seemed genuinely pleased that I know Weirton is the home of National Steel, though he probably wouldn't have minded being spared the reason why — that I took a bus there, with my high school girlfriend, to celebrate New Year's Eve 1979 at her sister's house.
     "That's where I first saw cable television," I said, with a bore's attention to detail. "Because of the mountains."
     Brian Sabina, just 24 and seemingly interested in helping people, despite having graduated from Northwestern, explained his new philanthropic group, "Reach the World." Jean-Hui Yao was the first college student I met who has a business card announcing the fact that she'll receive her master of science from Medill in December.
     Yes, none of us is a titan of industry — I'm not George Will, and none of the people digging into their beef stew were Warren Buffett. There was more than one toupee in evidence, and the general tone among the younger people was one of utter earnestness.
     But you have to grow where you're planted, and we can't all be Bill Gates and George Soros huddling in our Gulfstream Jetstars. There was a brief ceremony where visiting Rotarians — from Switzerland, from Taiwan, from Salinas, Calif. — presented little silk banners from their home Rotaries, and in turn received a banner from the Chicago Rotary, which is where the whole thing began in 1905.
     I like that. Any organization that exchanges little silk flags is all right by me. You can't do that online.
     Yes, there is a fleetingness to the social contact — the business cards inevitably go into a drawer, and are swept away at some future date. But when you are being inundated by a droid e-mail army of gibberish messages churned out by robot spiders, there's nothing like black coffee and sincere conversation to give you the strength you need to get back to the office and start deleting.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE . . .

     The media has been noting that there are few Barack Obama jokes and no funny ones. The reasons range from the high hopes he inspires in his serious supporters, the frothing hatred in his detractors (it's hard to make a funny joke when you're foaming) to the additional level of complexity brought in by racial considerations.
     Does anyone out there have a good Obama joke? I tried to cobble one together and couldn't do any better than:
     If Barack Obama is such a big fan of change, then why is he always wearing the same suit?
             —Originally published in the Sun-Times July 23, 2008

Thursday, January 9, 2020

Two royals decline to obstinately infest the stage



     "Even the most pleasurable of imaginable occupations," the great James Thurber once wrote, "that of batting baseballs through the windows of the R.C.A. Building, would pall a little as the days ran on."
      A truth worth bearing in mind whenever someone steps down from what seems, at a distance, an enviable job, whether a professional athlete retiring early, a movie star giving up career for home life or, as happened midweek, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry announcing they will "step back" from their duties as key members of the British Royal Family, and begin spending part of the year in North America, probably Canada.
     In case, like me, you don't follow the royals assiduously, Harry is Prince William's younger brother, the two making up the sons of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Queen Elizabeth II is Harry's grandmother.
      The 18 months since Harry's much ballyhooed marriage to NU grad Markle, apparently, have not been pleasant ones, the happy couple squirming under the microscopic gaze of the racist British tabloid media which, remember, is blamed for hounding Harry's mother to her death in Paris.
     It makes sense. There is something of the superfluous to their position already: Harry probably will never end up with his face on currency; he's just hanging around, in case he is ever needed.
     I can't gauge the reaction in England. But here the immediate social media reaction seemed to be general sympathy that each of us has only the one life, and spending it cutting ribbons and sitting on daises might become unbearable, no matter how fancy the car you drove up in. 
    There must be some pushback, from disappointed Brits who expect the royal family to be a perpetual circus conducted for their amusement, and it will not do for the acrobatic dogs and performing ponies to complain, never mind shirk their duties.  
     And I suppose there will be smirking that this is perhaps the ultimate example of Gen Y—Prince Harry was born in 1984—recoiling from the world of work, no matter how plush. Though the couple insist they are going to use their time to become "financially independent." The plan seems to be they will be working in some fashion, except for themselves rather than for the House of Windsor.
     A promising sign, perhaps. The entire democratic push against royalty over the past 300 years was predicated on the notion that we are not trapped by the conditions of our birth, but can build independent lives of our own choosing and, should we please, even change those lives at any point.  The implication was always that the pre0rdained roles being escaped were humble ones, but I suppose it should work similarly for the high born. The bottom line is, we can forge our own selves.
      Some of us can, or hope we can. It's difficult. We all have complicated relationships with work. Work is something we have to do, most of us, for the money. But it's also something we love, often, if we're lucky. For a lot of people, it's clock punching and grinding routine. Hard for me to imagine; since I'm blessed with a job I really love, while being at an age where the snug harbor is, if not looming before me, at least is a spot on the horizon. While I'm in no rush to get there, I do not dread it either. These past 10 days, recovering from surgery, have been useful in that regard. To my surprise, I haven't felt that desperate, if-you're-not-in-the-paper-you-might-as-well-be-dead feeling I typically get when stepping back from the column. Maybe because I'm too worked over, too tired, too focused on healing, on walking properly, and don't have have the energy or focus to write a decent column, this present bit of piffle notwithstanding.
     So when should I make the deep bow and exit? I figure I'll know the time when it comes; maybe a decade away, I hope. When I find myself facing fatigue that  a few weeks at home won't fix. Then a graceful exit will be something of a duty.
     As always, the Great Cham of Literature, Samuel Johnson, put it best.
     "He that is himself weary will soon weary the public," he wrote , when he brought his twice-weekly series of essays, The Rambler, to a close after two exhausting years.  "Let him therefore lay down his employment, whatever it be, who can no longer exert his former activity or attention. Let him not endeavor to struggle with censure, or obstinately infest the stage till a general hiss commands him to depart."
     That sounds like a plan, fit for commoners and royals alike.

       

Wednesday, January 8, 2020

Strange Interlude, 2003: The Art Institute of Chicago, Undocumented Industrial Polluter

     
     I haven't been on the editorial board for 14 years. And while I generally don't miss it—too many meeting about some monorail to DuPage County that's never going to be built—the duty was a source of occasional columns, such as this one about how The Art Institute of Chicago got itself on a list of industrial polluters operating without permit.
     I sometimes tell PR sorts that opening tale of trying to track down payment of the $1 yearly rental for the Chicago Water Tower. Except after the official finally blurts out that it's a line item, that an actual dollar bill never actually changes hands, I add my unvarnished thought at that moment, along the lines of: "I'd hate to tell a media professional her JOB... But if I had a representative of a major newspaper pestering me to see a dollar handed over so he could put run a story in the newspaper about all the worthwhile programs that I conduct there, I would reach in my purse, pull out a friggin' dollar, put in an envelope, and arrange a goddamn ceremony that he could see. But maybe that's Old School of me...."
     Anyway, the leg heals, slowly. Hope this is as fun to read as it was to write.
    
     The Chicago Water Tower—the limestone structure in the middle of Michigan Avenue, not the shopping mall—is actually still owned by the Chicago Water Department. That makes sense. The quaint structure was originally part of a pumping station, and the fact that it is really old, that it survived the Great Chicago Fire, or that Oscar Wilde took one look and called it a "fairy castle with pepper boxes stuck all over it" does not take the Water Tower away from the Water Department, which leases it to the Tourism Department for $1 a year.
     This odd tidbit of hidden Chicagoana haunted me, particularly that dollar fee. There was something wonderfully antique about the payment, like a jeweled falcon given in yearly tribute to the king. I wasted more time than I care to recall trying to track down exactly when and how that dollar changes hands. I pictured it as a matter of great pomp, like the appearance of Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog Day: the various assembled honchos from Water and Tourism in their top hats and sashes, the ceremonial dollar mounted in a frame, with lots of hands shook and photos snapped.
     That I had to see. (Despite the fad of making stuff up, I'm a big fan of factuality. The damning thing about the fabulists isn't just that they're lazy, but that their fictions are so dull.) For a while I had hope, since I was taking a two-track approach: through both the Water and Tourism departments. But neither bore fruit and finally, an exasperated official snapped, "It's a line item. They do it through bookkeeping. They don't hand over an actual dollar bill."
     The missing dollar came to mind when a young lawyer from the Sierra Club, during one of the deadly dull meetings that have come to fill my days like kudzu, handed over a list titled, "Major Sources of Air Pollution Without Operating Permits."
     The list had 194 companies with names like Bunge Grain Milling and Sterling Steel. I'd like to claim that my sharp eye caught this—that darn factuality again!—but it was my boss who, scanning the list, picked out from among the various soap manufacturers, zinc replaters, tool works and wet corn milling facilities, one polluter who, well, was kind of unexpected: The Art Institute of Chicago. Its purpose, "museum," listed among "soap mfg." and "steel tubing" and "boilers."

Reporters can be sadists

     There is a certain amount of sublimated sadism in professional journalism, and I must admit savoring the moment I placed the call to my old friend, Eileen Harakal, whose enviable job it is to promote the greatest museum in the Western hemisphere.
     She said she had no idea why the museum would be on the list but was appealingly defensive. "We have state-of-the-art solar panels on the roof," she snapped. "Why don't you write about that?"
     Exuding charm, or an obvious oiliness I consider charm, I promised her that, if she found out why the Sierra Club was lumping the home of "Nighthawks" with the Danville Metal Stamping Co., that I would give her solar panels their due.
     To her credit, rather than dodge me for the next week, as I expected, within 24 hours Harakal spilled the beans: A dozen years ago, the Art Institute installed a pair of 725-kilowatt co-generation engines designed to supply about a third of the museum's peak period electricity, plus steam for heating and cooling.
     This wasn't an emergency back-up kind of affair—the things ran 13 hours a day when the museum was open. Because the pair squeaked under the 1,500-kilowatt limit, no permit was required.
     But rules change. In December 1995, the museum was required to file an application with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Air Act permit program. Not precisely one to flout the dictates of civilized society, the Art Institute did so.
     Those readers who are of foreign nations waiting for the Immigration and Naturalization Service to process their citizenship papers might have a hint of what is coming.


Eco do-gooders smear city icon

     The passage of nearly eight years is not sufficient, apparently, for approval of the Art Institute's permit to be acted upon.
     "The IEPA has a large backlog of applications to review," said Harakal, taking a far more benign view than I would if failure of some IEPA bureaucrat to stamp my form was prompting the Sierra Club to travel from one Chicago media outlet to the other, tarring me as an undocumented polluter.
     Not that the museum runs the generators like it used to. In late 1997, Commonwealth Edison changed its billing formula, and now the generators are in use about 30 hours a year.
     On to those solar panels. The museum installed a 102.96-kilowatt photovoltaic solar panel system, making it the largest such installation in the state. Who says French Impressionism and ecological responsibility don't mix?
     Touching base with ComEd, I had to ask: Since the Art Institute generates electricity, does Com-Ed have any artworks it is proud of?
      "The headquarters of ComEd, Exelon, is in the Bank One Building," spokesman Tim Lindberg said. "That Chagall mosaic is outside." Turnabout is fair play.
                             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 23, 2003