Pasta in comforting shapes

     History will note that when the Steinberg household finally decided to act decisively to face the growing global coronavirus pandemic, and stood together in their kitchen Tuesday evening, and examined their larder, my wife's first dynamic step in our Total Safety Plan was to command: "Get some Cream of Wheat."
     I wrote it down, in pencil on an index card: "Cream of Wheat." Not to put the blame on her. In truth, I too had been thinking of Cream of Wheat lately—we have been out for a while, as I manfully consumed bowl after bowl of the Maypo I badgered Sunset Foods into stocking and now feel personally responsible for consuming. Guilt was one thing, survival another. I heartily agreed. It goes without saying it was the red box, the long cook, two-and-a-half minute variety. When society is tottering on the abyss, it becomes all the more important to maintain standards.
     We had just gotten off the phone with our older son, who said that NYU Law would be offering classes remotely for the time being. He could just as easily take them at home, and I urged him to do so, to get out of New York City and back to Chicago before they blow the bridges into Manhattan, like that scene in "I Am Legend."
      "Are you making preparations for a quarantine?" he countered.
     Good question, lad! Honest answer: no, not in the slightest. I had just turned in a column that treated the whole matter in a somewhat light fashion, certainly not the society shattering disaster that it seemed to lurch toward in the six hours since I had filed.
     So I was open to the idea that I had underplayed the situation. Quarantined? Yes, that was happening. If one of us became sick, and we were homebound, with only GrubHub, DoorDash, and 20 or 30 nearby restaurants that deliver, what would we do? How would we survive? We needed to stock up.
     "Soup" my wife said, suggesting Campbell's condensed—save space!  And Wednesday, my work done, I headed over to Sunset, and did get a can of Campbell's Chicken Noodle and a can of Tomato Bisque. Just the thing for riding out martial law. I also went for Progresso Italian Wedding Soup—not condensed, but we'd need something festive in the gloomy days of disease.
     Then "pasta." Doesn't go bad, always welcome. Sensing a trap, I had tried to find out what kind of pasta by replying, "Fettuccini okay?" I like fettuccini. It's flat and chewy.
     No, fettuccini is not okay, she said. I was to find "pasta in comforting shapes." That's one of the 27 top reasons I love my wife so. You could lock Beatrix Potter, Johnny Gruelle and Mary Engelbreit in a room for a year and force them write down cute concepts, one after the other, and they still would never come up with anything close to "pasta in comforting shapes."
    To me, that meant one thing: wheel-shaped pasta. "Choo Choo Wheels" was the brand my mother bought when I was a child. There was a locomotive on the box which, if you cut out the wheels, turned into a toy engine. And while there were indeed wheel-shaped pasta at the Sunset, that seemed a tad desperate, a frantic, crisis-induced regression toward childhood. They had four boxes of Barilla for $5, catering to the world-is-ending market. I went for rotini, rigatoni, medium shells and elbows, for that ultimate comfort food, mac and cheese.
     Five pounds of Jasmine Rice, in case society actually does come to a skiddering halt, not that we need it (I told the boy that I had prudently stored up enough excess energy, in the form of body fat, to get by for a few months, maybe two, without any additional nutrition necessary). Napkins and toilet paper—in our defense, we were getting low on both, though TP seems to be the de rigueur panic purchase, for reasons I can't fathom. Isn't societal collapse the very time when you least need toilet paper?
     There was one thing that Sunset did not have, or at least I couldn't find. Zippo lighter fluid. I'd been out of fluid for a while—actually lit my last few cigars with a match, talk about tossing civilized standards to the wind—and I stopped by Ace Hardware for a bottle.
     Getting home, I filled my brass Zippo and produced flame. Fire good! Now, with that and my Gerber LST knife in my pocket, I was ready to flee from the coronavirus-maddened neighbors storming my house to get at my toilet paper to stem their COVID-19 sniffles. My wife and I could escape to the Somme Woods to begin civilization anew.
     Wednesday night President Donald Trump spoke to the nation, cancelling most flights from Europe excluding, inexplicably, Great Britain, no doubt for some jaw-dropping Trump business-related purpose that will come out later. Then the NBA cancelled its season. And Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson announced they have the coronavirus, which is sorta like Raggedy Andy and Raggedy Ann getting sick. Suddenly, that long-forgotten, pit-of-the-stomach, post-9/11, nothing-is-funny-anymore tickle of dread began stirring.  The Washington Post quoted the projection from a former CDC director estimating that a million Americans could die before this is over. Maybe more. Maybe less. Nobody knows.

Stay at home, just don’t get too used to it

Kitchen, by Liza Lou (Whitney Museum of American Art)

                                  “Stay home as much as possible”

                                                — Centers for Disease Control

     I’m embarrassed to admit, when first reading that CDC advice for “older adults,” my reaction was to spin a joke, adding, “... groan audibly when rising from chairs, and complain incessantly about how young people today don’t have a work ethic.”
     Because older people are already there. Staying home as much as possible is a marker of age as much as the calendar. That, and complaining.
     But it isn’t much of a joke if you have to explain. Yes, older adults have caution down cold, no urging from the federal government necessary. We old folks always act like airborne death is waiting right outside the front door. Mortality rears up when we contemplate almost any activity. I have not actually said to my boys, “For God’s sake, don’t go anywhere or do anything.” But I’ve thought it, and opened my mouth to say it, then held back.
     You could try spinning that into a virtue. Argue that excess of caution is how you live to be old in the first place. Though cautious myself, I retain just enough trace afterglow of youth to view that as a liability. All this fretting about the weather. My parents do it so much that I flinch at the idea of carrying an umbrella. It seems a defeat; leaving it behind strikes a blow against timidity.
     Notice I include myself as “old.” What is an “older adult” anyway? The CDC isn’t much help. A page called “Indicator definitions—older adults” includes both “persons aged ≥ 65 years” (not me) and “Older adults aged 50-64 years” (definitely me). I’m tempted to trot out the “you’re as old as you feel” chestnut. But I knew a man who was 102 and didn’t consider himself old. Spoiler alert: He was.
     Events seem to be hurtling past the “older adults” distinction anyway. Literally while I was writing the above, the Sun-Times told employees it is planning a one-day work-from-home test for most newsroom staff.
     Yes sir! As someone who has worked from home, to a greater or lesser degree, for decades, I welcome my brethren. Any advice to my newly homebound colleagues? Remember to shower once a day, whether you are going out or not, as an ablutionary gesture toward civilization.

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Whistling while the world crumbles

   The Dow plunges 2,000 points. The scary new plague spreads. The president is still an idiot.
   So why do I feel like grabbing a bamboo cane, leaping up so quick the office chair shoots out from under me, holding the cane horizontal in both hands, smiling broadly and breaking into a little soft-shoe, whistling?
    Doo, tah-doo, tah-doodily-doo, tah-doo....
    Maybe it is the nature of the comedian. What else am I supposed to do? Issue stock advice? Buy low sell high. List sensible health precautions? Wash your hands for two minutes in hot lye. Identify and condemn specific presidential lies? There's one and there's one and there's one. Bad! Bad! Bad!
     No, this is a time for pratfalls and pies in the puss. Which can be hard to achieve on the written page. One seltzer bottle is worth a thousand words. But serious times call for unserious measures. Always have. Inmates did joke in Auschwitz, you know (not that they were particularly funny jokes; I've tracked them down. At least not funny today. Much dark political humor that's hard to scan, what with translation and the passage of time. Then again, comedy is always situation specific).
     And I say that, knowing that people are suffering. Which is okay, because I'm not making fun of them—those losing big bucks on the stock swoon (and even if I were, heck, I'm among them, so I get the victim's Get-Out-Jail Free card). And while I am not dying of coronavirus, it could yet happen. That could  be me in a few months, and I hope if that is the case, I have the presence of mind to pull the oxygen mask slightly away from my face, and rasp at my wife, "You know ... if you'd let me drink myself to death ... I could have been spared this agony."
     As for Trump, ridicule is pointless: it bounces off him, and merely puzzles his followers. If you are so lost to reason as to think "Donald Trump" is the answer to, well, anything at all, then what good is satire, high or low, going to do? Not much. It's like shouting Latin insults at plants.
     Yes, there is privilege floating around somewhere here. I am not poor, or sick, or directly harmed by Donald Trump, beyond the harm of seeing a nation that I love laid low and shamed, and my fellow citizens, whom I really do try to understand and respect, establish themselves as credulous dupes and groveling lackeys who'll let themselves be defrauded, eyes open, and betray their country if some demagogue throws their particular fixation a biscuit? Or even if he promises to do so then doesn't.
    So sure, I can smile at the world falling apart in big pieces, since none of those chunks have hit me yet. One glancing blow and all amusement will drain away. Grim-jawed, I'll join the candlelight vigil in Daley Plaza, wearing a sandwich sign declaring whatever particular wrong lodged itself under my fingernail. I guess that's human nature. 
   
   

Goodbye to the Standard Club, and all that

View from the terrace of the Cliff Dwellers Club. 

 

     Ho, for the club life! The green leather wing chairs, the well-stocked bars, the well-heeled members, all those Buckys and Binkys and Bills. In another life, I might have been quite clubbable, in my bowtie and fez.
     But alas, in this life I lack certain necessities: connections, for starters, and wealth, or an employer willing to pony up steep membership fees. I am indeed a proud member of one club, Cliff Dwellers, but as a charity case, as will be explained if you somehow make it to the end of this column.
     But first I can’t let The Standard Club vanish — the 150-year-old institution is closing May 1 — without eulogizing it and that whole private club world teetering on the brink of extinction.
     The Standard Club was the Jewish club, formed in 1869 by Jews blackballed from Chicago’s gentile clubs. To prove that Jews could be as snobbish as anybody, it performed the neat trick of being the rare Jewish organization that discriminated against Jews. Founded by German Jews, so proud of that apex of refinement and civilization, Germany, The Standard Club initially barred their embarrassing, unwashed Eastern Europe brethren. Snickering fate would eventually punish them for that.
     To me, clubs mean lunches — dining at The Standard Club with federal judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, with Jeff Zaslow. I believe I’ve eaten in every club in the city, including the ultra-exclusive Casino club, twice. A lapse on somebody’s part, I’m sure. The Casino sits on what was to be the footprint of the John Hancock Building. But when developers tried to buy the land, Casino president Mrs. John Winterbotham gave them the frosty rebuff such impertinence deserves.
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Plums on plinths

     When a joke goes flat, or a story is met with a shrug, the struggling comic, or flailing storyteller, will sometimes try to bring the effort to a close while preserving a shred of dignity with, "Maybe you had to be there."
     Some experiences need to be, well, experienced. Photos and words just don't convey the thing.
     Which is quite the admission from someone in the word business.
     I wondered if this was the case when I first thought to share Darren Bader's art installation "fruit, vegetables; fruit and vegetable salad." Just writing the title, the whole thing seems impossibly arch and conceptual and twee and stupid.
     But that wasn't how it felt. Stepping off the elevator on the eighth floor at the Whitney Museum of American Art last month, confronted by these 40 austere wooden pedestals displaying produce, was cool. For all the conceptual art depredations that go on in contemporary museums, there is still a default expectation of gravitas, of significance, of vale, one that is punctured by the literal elevation of grapefruits and asparagus and leeks.
     What's he saying? Hell if I know. Maybe something about the worth of what too often we let go bad in the refrigerator. The artist nods at “nature’s impeccable sculpture,” which sounds about right, but then the artist's statement, besides offering general guidelines to presenting the exhibit (the number of pedestals, for example, being "any even number between twelve and infinity") emphasizes that the citrus and melons and carrots and such on display are to be rendered into salad every day, as if the whole point were reducing the burden on landfills. 

     “Before over-ripening, the produce is removed from the pedestals by museum staff," we are told. "It is then chopped, sliced, shaved, and diced into a salad, which is served to visitors.”

     Of course it is. The result has already—the show closed Feb. 17—been thoroughly mocked. "I ate the worst salad of my life in the name of art."

    Perhaps it helped that, the day we visited, salad preparation times were not convenient, and we skipped standing around 40 empty plinths, waiting for cup of fruit and vegetable slaw. 

     Instead, what I took away from it was that you could walk among the pedestals. That was dynamic and engaging, to be inside the display, since I was taking photographs, which became an exercise in parallax, as I alternated between trying to frame people out, so I got an empty shot of just produce on plinths, to then including the visitors, as dark figures off in a corner of the frame.

Publishing news

University of Chicago Press warehouse

     I have an interest in the publishing industry and like to keep current, the way a denizen of the old Maywood Park with $2 on Whirligig in the 3rd would study the Thoroughbred Gazette he's found on a seat, to see how next season's crop of Kentucky 2-year-olds is coming up.
     So my eyes fell with interest upon the March 4 New York Times story, "Simon & Schuster, A Top 5 Publisher, Is Offered for Sale." The opening sentence caught me up short: "Simon & Schuster, the publishing powerhouse behind best-selling authors like Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin and Judy Blume, is up for sale."
     Now let's play, "See if you can guess what puzzled Neil."
    Read that opening sentence again.
     Any ideas? I read three newspapers a day, The New Yorker, The Economist, paw through the New York Times Sunday Book Review.  I know that Beowulf's dad is Ecgtheow.  I like to think I'm aware of stuff.
    But Ursula K. Le Guin? That was an entirely new one for me. If I had to guess, I would assume she's a more recent version of Barbara Cartland, one of those mega-selling authors of bodice-ripping romances that a certain stratum of American society seem to have an endless hunger for. No shame in being unaware of that.
     Wrong. Let's end the suspense with a quick check of Le Guin's Wikipedia page.
     Well, she's dead, for starters, in 2018, at age 88, having written 20 novels—science fiction. A realm I'm not entirely unfamiliar with, having gobbled Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov novels as a lad (and once, believe it or not, having gotten a phone call from Harlan Ellison; he liked one of my books. I should have thought to get a blurb).  Michael Chabon called Le Guin the "greatest American writer of her generation." All told, quite the career.
     Well that's a comfort. A reminder that all success is relative, and someday Mick Jagger will find himself on the phone, trying and failing to get a reservation at a hot new restaurant. ("Mick ... Jagger... The singer...From the Rolling Stones...It was a band. Very big in our day...Oh. Yes. I see. Maybe something at 4:30 then?")
    The story relates how ViacomCBS is selling off S&S because it can't be bothered with a shriveling segment of the entertainment world.
    "It hasn't been a strong growth industry in a long time and what little growth there has been recently seems to be arrested," Thad McIlroy, a publishing industry analyst, tells the Times.
    And here I thought it was just me.
    Actually—and talk about burying the lede, but I'm trying to find a gentler pace as I shamble into the vale—I seem to be back in the game, book-wise. Think of it as a $2 trifecta ticket on three longshots in a race taking place in 2022. Or 2023. 2024 at the very latest. The University of Chicago Press on Friday asked me to write a book—another book, my third for them, ninth overall, if you're keeping score at home. They suggested this new book be called "Every goddamn day." Good title. I said yes.

YWCA and StreetWise to join forces

World War I poster (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

    Businesses gobble up each other every day.
     But only rarely do charities, and then usually because one is in crisis. Which is why my curiosity was piqued hearing that YWCA Metropolitan Chicago is absorbing StreetWise.
     Every Chicagoan who strolls downtown knows the latter—the weekly magazine that homeless folks buy for 90 cents then hawk on street corners for two bucks a copy, as pedestrians drop their heads and hurry by or occasionally—as I sometimes do, out of solidarity for fellow journalists—buy a copy. It’s a surprisingly lively publication.
     I’d always assumed the YWCA is the distaff version of YMCA, maybe with special lady gyms I’ve never had reason to encounter or imagine. Wrong.
     ”Our mission we’re focused on is eliminating racism and empowering women,” said Dorri McWhorter, CEO of YWCA Metro Chicago. “And promoting peace, justice, freedom and dignity for all.”
     I bit back the question, “And how is that eliminating racism thing going?” and instead asked what they do, specifically, to advance those ends. The YWCA has dozens of programs, promoting child care, fighting child abuse, encouraging more inclusive, less biased workplaces, and working with CHA residents.
     ”Providing high quality support for training and education,” she said. “As well as sexual violence support services.”
     Such as the Chicago Area Rape Crisis Hotline—1-888-293-2080.

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