Tag, this is it.

     You find out about new products ... where?
     Well the newspaper, for us fuddy-duddies. Those big tech review round-ups in the Times. A constant stream of ballyhoo on Twitter and Facebook. What else? Billboards, I suppose. Television commercials, for those who watch television.
     Rarely...rare enough that I would remark upon it...do you learn about the latest technology by seeing it hanging on a hook in a store. Then again—and I don't think I'm alone here—COVID pretty much killed off the practice of aimlessly wandering around in stores, looking at stuff. You run in, grab what you need, run out. If that. Holding your breath, if possible. More and more, a brown box shows up on your doorstep.
     But my wife wanted to look at laptops. She wanted to lay her hands on the actual physical objects. And I go where she goes. So while she was poking around the dozens of possibilities at Best Buy, I sorta cruised around.
     Which is where I noticed the AirTag, Apple's gift for the forgetful. It's a small disc you slip into your wallet, or attach to your keys, or some other necessity you expect to lose at some point. The AirTag will then leave an invisible trail of electronic breadcrumbs so you can find it should mere memory fail. My first thought was that it could be used to track people too—just slip it in your pal's backpack—but the things are designed to thwart that, in theory. The discs will also let out a yelp on command. It's really worth glancing at the Apple page explaining it all.
     Not that I bought one. I wanted to. It seems a cool thing. But I couldn't think of what to do with it. Couldn't imagine having much hope of justifying the thirty bucks it costs by ever losing anything. I have a system of anxiety-fueled attentiveness far more advanced than mere Bluetooth technology. I've never lost my wallet in my life—I have a rule, for instance, when paying for something, never to set the wallet down. It's much harder to leave behind if it stays in your hand. That kind of thing.
     Yes, sometimes I'll tear my office apart looking for a certain book I know I have, or had, but can't lay my hands on at this particular moment, when I finally need it. But short of planning ahead and knowing I'll need that specific book and be unable to find it, and planting an AirTag inside the cover, I don't see how Apple can help me. Here persistence and patience—a shame Apple can't sell those for $29.99—usually win the day, eventually. There is a technique my wife taught me that I call, "The Thinking Trick," where you pause from frantically searching and try to recall the thing you are missing and when you last had it. If all else fails, there's strategic retreat—just waiting—the strategy my mother used to neatly summarize as, "You'll find it when you're not looking for it." 

Will Bears move ease suburban shame?

If this cute puppy can call Arlington Heights home, so can the Chicago Bears.

     Last week Ald. Harry Osterman said he wants the city to try to keep the Bears so he won’t have to drive to Arlington Heights to see them play.
     Mr. Alderman, you do know that Metra goes to Arlington Heights, right? Of course you don’t want to drive there to watch the Bears. Who wants to see the Bears? Or drive anywhere? Hop on the train, if you must. It makes life so easy.
     The other day I wanted to go to a reception at the Newberry Library. The event was an hour long, 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. and I paused, considering the “getting there” part. Leave home ... what? ... 2:30 p.m., to be on the safe side. Crawling down the Edens because everybody has to slow down and watch some idiot change a tire. Squeeze onto the Kennedy. Overland to Bughouse Square.
     Three hours of driving, round trip, for an hour’s mingling.
     Or ... I thought. There’s the Skokie Swift to the Red Line. Lets you off two blocks away, on Chicago Avenue. Also 90 minutes each way. But at least I’d be sitting down, reading.
     So that’s what I did. The reception was in the Newberry parking lot, and conversation was as interesting as I had hoped: about the history of handwriting (with the curator of a future exhibit), avant-garde women (with the curator of the current exhibit) and lots about Dante — OK, that was a logorrheic spiel I delivered to the head of adult classes, volunteering myself to give a talk on how the Divine Comedy is funny. I tried to stop, particularly when I noticed her shooting those little “Please somebody save me from this” glances in all directions. But once I get going, it’s hard for me to hit the brakes.

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‘Everything went wrong’ — the Great Chicago Fire at 150

     I volunteered for this one. Working on a book about Chicago history, of course I noticed the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire was looming, and poked my bosses, months ago. Not something a newspaper wants to forget. My approach was dictated by a single fascinating—to me anyway—fact, the one that begins the story. From there, the structure of passing the narrative from witness to witness presented itself. I knew that my piece would appear after the Tribune had been hammering on the fire for weeks, and hoped to provide something fresh and different. 

     The summer of 1871 was terrible for Mary Todd Lincoln. Her adored younger son, Tad, 18, died in July, a month when no rain fell in Chicago, the city where the slain president’s immediate family moved after leaving the White House in 1865. Mrs. Lincoln, a woman heavily veiled in black who “suffered periods of mild insanity,” lived with her only surviving son, Robert, a lawyer, on South Wabash Avenue. By autumn, she sank even deeper into anguish.
     “As grievous as other bereavements have been, not one great sorrow ever approached the agony of this,” she wrote to a friend on Oct. 4.
     And then the city burned down around her.
     One hundred and fifty years after the Great Chicago Fire, much about the epochal event that recast our city and its people is unfamiliar to current residents. Not one person in a hundred knows Abraham Lincoln’s widow lived here and endured the calamity, while the one thing many believe they do know about the fire, that it was started by Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicking over a lantern, is a baseless ethnic slur, a scrap of mocking calumny preserved in amber like an insect’s leg, surviving all efforts to dislodge it. Even though universally agreed to be untrue, or at least unsupported by any evidence, the lie endures.
     The most common causes of fires, the Chicago Fire Department had reported the previous March, were not cows or lanterns, but defective chimneys, carelessness with flame, and arson. There had been an average of four fires a day in Chicago the first week of October, started by tossed cigars, mischievous boys and oily rags bursting into flame.
     This was a city heated by coal, lit by gaslight, strewn with hay. The sidewalks and even some fire hydrants were wooden. Blistered by drought, “the dust was almost intolerable, the ground became parched,” wrote Chicago Theological Seminary student William Gallagher. “A furious wind from the southwest had been blowing steadily all day Sunday.”
     Whatever the cause, the fire certainly started in the barn behind the home of Patrick and Catherine O’Leary and their five children at what was then 137 DeKoven Street, on the city’s near Southwest Side. The hardworking O’Learys already had gone to bed. And they didn’t own a cow; they owned five, plus a horse and a calf. A drayman named Daniel Sullivan, out enjoying the evening, saw fire through the cracks between the boards of the O’Leary barn.
     “Fire! Fire! Fire!” he shouted.
     Sullivan went in the barn and untied the cows, thinking they would save themselves. They didn’t. He dragged the calf outside, badly singed.
     Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, a 20-year-old reporter on the Chicago Evening Post, arrived almost immediately, about 9:30 p.m., Sunday, Oct. 8, 1871, to find himself in a part of town he had never visited before.

     “I was at the scene in a few minutes,” he later recalled. “The land was thickly studded with one-story frame dwellings, cow stables, pigsties, corncribs, sheds innumerable; every wretched building within four feet of its neighbor, and everything of wood — not a brick or a stone in the whole area. The fire was under full headway in this combustible mass before the engines arrived, and what could be done?”
     The fire engines — steam pumpers, drawn by teams of brawny horses — were delayed because the alarm was slow being turned in. A pharmacist refused the alarm box key to a resident who’d seen the fire. Mathias Shafer, the night watchman in the Cook County Courthouse tower, saw the orange glow but thought it was light from the gas works. When he did send an alarm, he sent the firemen to an address a mile and a half from the fire.
     Later asked to describe what went wrong, one fireman would reply: “Everything went wrong.”

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Ravenswood Notes: Blessings

 

     There is something decidedly Jewish about Caren Jeskey. I mean that as a compliment. I shouldn't be surprised that she gets that a lot. Her Saturday report:

    Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech haolam. Funny earworm for an atheistic goy. Although I have almost no idea what those words mean, they have rolled off of my tongue since I was young. Growing up in West Rogers Park meant more menorahs in the picture windows of our Georgian homes in late November and early December, than Christmas trees later in the season. There was also the ranch style home on Birchwood near Sacramento with two picture windows, eight candles in one and a bedecked Fraser fir in the other.
     When my Grandma Marie came to visit us in Rogers Park, I’d drive her to St. Margaret Mary church on Jarvis near Western. If she was lucky, and I was being a good granddaughter, I’d attend a Saturday early evening service with her. More likely than not, though, I’d drop her off at the side door and leave her to kneel and genuflect, and I’d head back to whatever party was happening at my folks’ house down the street.
     There I’d stuff myself with delicious Polish sausages and other delicacies my foodie folks had laid out, and basked in the mutual admiration of family and friends. No piety for us. When it was time to get Grandma from church I was never late. I’d pull up along the side of the church, and she’d come out the side door like clockwork. Dependable, sturdy Marie. What I wouldn’t give to sit next to her at church again, inhaling her Emaurade perfume and hearing her sing the hymns loudly to demonstrate her fervor for the Lord.
     Rogers Park friends enveloped me into their culture growing up. I was the Hebrew school guest when a bestie and I could not pry our middle-school hips off of each other. I was a regular at seders, and hung on every word of the Haggadah even when my Jewish friends rolled their eyes and prayed for it to end. I even liked Gefilte fish, and I’d devour horseradish with wild abandon. These were my people.
     I have been called an “honorary Jew” more times than I can count. I realize that might offend some, so please read the sidebar of the blog. It happened. I’m simply reporting. Jewish families tried to “adopt” me, and told me that they were sure I had “Jewish blood” in me. Therefore, I was to propagate with a good Jewish man. They even had the Jewish husband picked out for me, and were sure we’d have many children. This never offended me. I was flattered.
     I remember once when I was working at the 2nd Street Bar & Grill in Santa Monica California— an Israeli couple at the bar became (albeit drunkenly) obsessed. They were SURE I was one of them (meaning Israeli, and Jewish), and they wanted to get me to Israel so I could see that I belonged there.
     My mother’s father Karol Krasnopolski was born in Budapest Hungary. With a name like that I’m pretty sure he was Polish. So why was he in Hungary? Did his family have to flee Poland for some reason? Were they Jewish? I don’t know, but it feels like a possibility. Just because my paternal grandfather may have been Jewish doesn’t mean I am, according to Jewish lineage rules; however, it might mean that the attraction I have to the Jewish world comes from an intuitive sense of belonging.
     Tonight, on this Friday, I am heading to a Shabbat dinner at a friend’s house. Or at least I thought I was. They invited me for “Shabbat dinner” but then today my friend sent a follow up email. Along with their address and the time I should arrive, they sent: “The only other thing is, I might have oversold the Sabbath. We don't actually do that.” I laughed. Perfect. Good thing.
     I am more than happy to gather around a loaf of challah, light candles, and listen to the incantations of my friends. Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech haolam. I’ve done it so much I’ve committed it to memory. I love the ritual of it all. It feels so safe, simple, comforting, pure.
     But for tonight I’ll bring my Jewish friends a loaf of challah and some matzo ball soup that they can eat this weekend, and the three of us will break bread and have a grand old time. No one will be more or less holy than the person next to them.

 

Talk about a barnburner of a concert...

Theodore Thomas in 1898
 Alfred Cox photo/Rosenthal Archives of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association

     Here’s a joke that Chicago residents told immediately after the Great Fire:
     Question: Why is Theodore Thomas different than Nero? Answer: Because one fiddled away while Rome burned, and the the other roamed away while his fiddles burned.
     Not a thigh-slapper, to be sure. And for the joke to make any sense today, you need to know that Thomas was a famous orchestra conductor. When Thomas played a program of Johann Strauss in New York, critics said he wielded the baton better than the composer himself.
     Tickets going on sale for his October 1871 Chicago performance created a furor. The Tribune predicted the concert would be “one of the most notable events in the history of music in Chicago.”
     It wasn’t. The performance was set for Crosby’s Opera House on Oct. 9, 1871 — 150 years ago Saturday. By curtain time, Crosby’s, and much of the city around it, would be ash and ruin.
     The date of the Great Chicago Fire is remembered as Oct. 8, 1871 because that’s when it began, about 9:30 p.m. in the barn behind Mrs. O’Leary’s home on the near southwest side. But by midnight it was no historic fire; just another blaze on par with a big fire the day before.
     The next day — Monday, Oct. 9 — was when it earned the word “great,” leaping across the river, twice, first ravaging downtown, then jumping to the North Side.

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Is THIS the column you are looking for?

     I'm no fan of cinder blocks, not on an aesthetic level. They're big, crude, grey. Nor on a practical level. Rough and heavy, tough to pick up.
     I'm a much bigger fan of bricks—deep red, smooth, they fit easily in the palm of the hand. Dense, yet portable. An old brick, worn by time, can be a beautiful thing.
     So bricks over cinder blocks, every time.
     Unless.
     Were I in a house on fire, and the only way out was a big plate glass window that wouldn't open, and there was a cinder block right there, I would happily alter my view of cinder blocks to adjust current conditions, and regard the cinder block gratefully, happy that it is there to be thrown through the window so I could escape. It would suffice.
     That's my view of Joe Biden. I was no fan of his before the 2020 election, as I've written. But since he became the nation's last, best hope, the free safety standing between Donald Trump and spiking the ball in the end zone for a second term, Biden became Abraham Lincoln and Solon the Lawgiver and Clark Gable, all in one. I wrote a column about this before the election, "Hand the baby to Fireman Joe."
     At one level. Am I happy that he, oh, lies about what military brass told him to do in Afghanistan? Or about his unleashing security forces on horseback to whip Haitian refugees? Or his inability, so far, to herd all the Democratic cats into one spot long enough to get this big multi-trillion dollar bill done? No, I am not. That's bad. But so long as Biden is going to face Donald Trump again in 2024, and he will, then he's my man, and I will support him. If he goes on national television and kills a wicker basket full of puppies, one by one, with a crochet hook, I will feel disgust and disappointment. And still support him, because animal cruelty just doesn't compare to undermining our democratic system and selling the country to the Russians. 
     Trump supporters, sitting cross legged in patient rows, fingertips pressed together, eyes narrowed, heads tilted back, scanning the skies for the arrival of their god from above, just don't get this. They see Biden's mistakes and apply the critical thinking they never, ever directed toward Trump. Suddenly, the measuring tape of good government has fallen into their laps, and they hop up to use it. And they want us to applaud.
     Consider this email from Brian S. of Oswego, regarding Wednesday's Facebook column:

     Neil, unfortunately there are some people who live on or for Facebook. I believe they are lonely or in search of some self worth by constantly posting their daily lives or thoughts. I rarely post anything to FB (maybe two times a year) but if it helps people cope or grieve I vote to not take that away from them.
       P.S. Perhaps you can write an objective column about the effect of all President Biden's policies have had on American life over the past 8 months.

     I saw through that postscript in a heartbeat. He tried to play it all cool and neutral, but "objective" was the tell. Usually I just leave these people to be judged by God at Doomsday and sent to the fiery perdition they deserve. But he backed into it so disingenuously, I couldn't resist serving him the lunch he had ordered. I replied:

     Of course. Some people live for Beanie Babies. It's a big world. I can write that column for you now: Biden has been a tremendous relief from the liar, bully, fraud and traitor of Donald Trump, and it is only sad that those duped by him continue to deceive themselves, and scan the skies, a pathetic cargo cult of delusion that runs contrary to every principle of intelligence, patriotism or human decency. Thanks for writing.

     No answer, of course.

How can we miss Facebook if it won’t go away?

Barbara Kruger installation, Art Institute of Chicago

     Facebook went bye-bye Monday afternoon. The most surprising thing is what I felt when I realized it was gone: absolutely nothing. Not relief, not panic — certainly not the help-me-I-can’t-breathe panic when, say, your computer won’t boot up. Honestly, I didn’t notice, at first.
     But Twitter started ululating about Facebook disappearing. I wondered if anybody tried pounding the top of Facebook with the flat of their hand; that worked for my Kaypro. Mostly I was busy napping, having gotten my third COVID booster Sunday night. Running a 99.8 fever, the afternoon had already taken on that dreamy, home-from-school-with-Gumby quality.
     Then again, I’m one of those rare people paid to use Facebook, sort of. It’s part of my job, anyway. I still remember the meeting — remember meetings? — where we were informed that we would join Facebook and we would like it. Building our brands. In keeping with my habit of missing the significance of every single important technological shift of my entire life, Facebook struck me as ludicrous.
     “We’re a mass market publication,” I objected. “Why not make us go down to the street and strike up conversations with passersby while you’re at it?”
     I soon discovered how wrong I was. Facebook is a resource, a tool. Forbes asked me to write a story about Barbie mutilation (it’s a thing; academic papers are written about it) and I faced the challenge of how to go about researching the story. Hanging around schoolyards, trying to talk to actual girls about cutting up their Barbie dolls seemed a Bad Idea.
     Or ... I posted my interest on the subject line of Facebook, and was thrilled as potential subjects lined up. “Ooo, Facebook,” I thought. “It’s like having a legman.” Later, I was with the boys in Salt Lake City. We toured the Mormon Temple, exhausting my store of ideas of what to do there. Now what? I posted this query and someone on Facebook suggested we go to Ruth’s Diner. We did. Twice. Red trout and eggs and chocolate malt pudding. Yay, Facebook!

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