Watching Ye crash and burn

     Hey Diddy! Rabbi Neil here. I know you’re in the studio, laying down your next megahit. A thought: People are soooo tired of hearing songs about chillin’ in the VIP room with a bottle of Cristal. Why not make that table bottle Manischewitz instead? They really have some very drinkable vintages nowadays. Or, better, a nice Dr. Brown’s cream soda. Show the home team a little love. I know that the Sanhedrin would be grateful, and you’d find a little something extra in next month’s envelope ...

     Two things about bigotry that don’t get said nearly often enough:
     First, it’s a kind of stupidity. A low, dank and nauseating sub-cellar of ignorance. The world just doesn’t work the way haters seem to think it does. Assuming their bile is sincere, and not just empty words that bad people throw at others, lashing out instinctively.
     The kerfuffle over Kanye West — whoops, “Ye,” he changed his name and might want to consider doing so again — quickly devolved into an exercise in accounting, keeping track of how badly his antisemitic spew hurt his sprawling business empire. Which meant that not enough consideration was given to his original offending remarks, such as the suggestion that rival singer, producer and lifestyle tycoon Sean “Diddy” Combs is somehow “controlled” by the Jews, followed by Ye’s threat to go “DEATHCON 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.”
     What does that second part even mean? The funny thing — funny sad, not funny funny — is that Ye probably meant “DEFCON,” a state of military readiness, and it was just an illiterate gaffe. An unfortunate slip, since wishing death on people, particularly Jews, tends to catch attention in our mass shooting age. The worst antisemitic massacre in American history, 11 worshippers slaughtered in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, happened in 2018.

     We need to notice, because our political climate, at home and globally, increasingly takes its cue from antisemitism’s embrace of utter lies, from the blood libel to the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” to this, which showed up in my email inbox Monday:
     “All INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES in America and Europe, now know that the disastrous [WTC 911] attack was planned and realized by the American CIA and Mossad with the help of the Zionist world, to place the blame on Arab countries and to persuade the Western powers to intervene in Iraq and Afghanistan ...”
     That reasoning is the exact same logic that Alex Jones used to declare Sandy Hook was fake — you don’t like the result, in Sandy Hook’s case another stark example of the need for America to do better dealing with guns. So you pretend that result was someone’s intentional goal all along, as part of a plot. It’s like blaming ice cream for causing hot summer days.

To continue reading, click here.

Exploding Kittens

 

     Here's a conundrum: I love playing games, but hate learning how to play new ones. Why is that? Set in my ways maybe. Affection for the games I already know. It's almost unfaithful, to turn my back on the stack of old, beloved friends downstairs and commit myself to something new. 

     In early October, my oldest boy and his girlfriend — who met at NYU's game club — came to town. I hoped maybe we would play Settlers of Catan, my current go-to game of choice. You gather resources, build settlements, work your way up to cities, which is a lot more fun than it sounds.      

     To limber up, my son and I played a few rounds of Cathedral; we have a gorgeous wooden set permanently stationed on our coffee table (a set that my Ohio friends, Jim and Laura, gave us for our wedding. I don't know which is more extraordinary. That a wedding gift should remain on our coffee table for 32 years. Or that friend would know us well enough to give us a game as a wedding present).

      Cathedral is simplicity itself — you surround space with a variety of wooden wall pieces. Then it's yours. The person who claims the most space wins. A game doesn't take five minutes. Quickness is a real value in games. Nobody has time to sprawl on the floor for four hours playing Risk anymore.

    I suggested Settlers, but going for the board, the kids stumbled upon Citadels, a game that a young cousin had given us as a thank-you present when she stayed over the summer. I hadn't opened the box. Because it's a new game. That I don't know how to play.
     "This is fun," my son's girlfriend announced, tearing off the cellophane. Citadels involves eight characters and a variety of realms and gold coins. As she explained the rules, my eyes glazed over, and I looked imploringly at my wife, who stared beseechingly back. None of this was making sense. Had we so entered the vale of years that now we couldn't learn a new game? Baffled the words washed over it. I felt terrible. The directions flowed around me like strangers brushing by in a crowd. This must be how stupid people feel all the time.

     Luckily, we decided to just play it, always the best way to learn a game. Slowly understanding dawned, and by the end of the first try, the strategy of what we were doing — using the variety of qualities the characters had to thwart your opponents, round by round, while gathering seven realms — began to seem comprehensible, then doable, then fun.

     But did mastering Citadels mean that we would then be playing Citadels? It did not. No sooner had we played a game or two, then the young couple came back from Walgreens with another new game, Exploding Kittens.
    I have to pause to marvel at that. I would never, ever buy a new game — it's hard enough to play the old ones. We've got stacks downstairs, plus more in big plastic tubs in the basement. Later, when I quizzed them about what had drawn them to Exploding Kittens— buzz from friends? Online reviews? — they said they hadn't heard of it. It just seemed fun.
     I credit the great name. Who isn't intrigued by that? A little digging showed that Exploding Kittens is actually quite famous as the most popular start-up, ever, on Kickstarter, the crowd-sourcing website, when it debuted. When the game was first presented in 2015, by co-creator Elan Lee, Shane Small, and Matthew Inman, creator of the comic website The Oatmeal, it blew past its $10,000 fundraising goal in its first eight minutes, and $100,000 in an hour. In 30 days raised over $8.7 million from more than 200,000 followers.  And the success rolls on. Netflix is planning an animated Exploding Kittens cartoon show next year.
     The creators explained the game this way:
     "Exploding Kittens is a highly strategic kitty-powered version of Russian Roulette. Players take turns drawing cards until someone draws an exploding kitten and loses the game. The deck is made up of cards that let you avoid exploding by peeking at cards before you draw, forcing your opponent to draw multiple cards, or shuffling the deck."
     Exploding Kittens is one of those new breed of games that overcomes new game reluctance with humor — exploding kittens — and simplicity. The deck has 56 cards. The exploding kitten cards are moved, as are the defuse cards that spare you from exploding. The cards are shuffled and dealt out, eight to a player. Each player gets also gets a defuse card, and then the kittens and the rest of the defuse cards are returned to the deck and it gets reshuffled.
     I'm confusing you already. The other cards give certain useful powers (I liked the "Nope" card, which stops the action dictates by whatever cards someone else plays). Not only did I get it immediately, but it was instantly addictive. We played at least half a dozen games.
     On Wednesday I drove the couple to the airport.
     "So..." I said, disingenuously. "Did you remember to take Exploding Kittens with you?"
     "No," my son's girlfriend said. "We left that behind as a gift, for hosting us."
     I glowed. Now all we have to do is find somebody to play with. It's more fun with a crowd. Now that I think of it, a few neighbors are coming over for dinner Sunday. I wonder how they'll react when I tell them we're having Exploding Kittens for dessert. 

    

Decades later, she meets the rescuer she never knew she had

     Three ordinary people, connected by two moments almost 30 years apart, one terrifying, one sweet. Plus a yellowed 2015 news clipping. And a story with an unexpected moral.
     The first person is Tony Namrod, owner of a Subway restaurant. The second is Suzanne Stone, Amway representative. And the third, the connection bringing them together, is Tom Mahoney, American Legion Post 791 Commander, who missed the first, awful moment, that very cold early January morning in 1993.
     Stone had dropped off Amway associates in Elgin, and was driving home.
    “During the day, you work,” she explained last week. “So when you’re building an Amway business, it’s at night.”
     But she never made it home, not that night, or for many days to come. Her car skidded on black ice and slammed into a building at Devon and Nagle.
     It was 4 a.m.
     She doesn’t remember anything after that. The story will have to be picked up by Namrod, then 22, coming home after the late shift at IBC Bakers in Schiller Park.
     “I stopped for a light at Devon and Nagle,” he said. That’s when he noticed the car smashed against the building. He remembers thinking: “Something’s wrong. It looks like a fresh accident.”

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 1994: Catalog a Big Order At Oriental Institute

Not a closet at the OI, but "Untitled,"
by Jannis Kounellis, at the Hirshhorn.  

     I talked to the interim curator of OI—as the erstwhile Oriental Institute styles itself now that its original name is considered to contain a slur—on Monday, arranging a visit next month when I'm in the neighborhood for a book publishing luncheon.

     I tried to cast my mind back to when I last was there. Turns out it was before I was a columnist, though this brief article has a column-like feel to it.

     Karen Wilson's basement is in chaos. Open boxes everywhere. Pots and jars lying around, some of them shattered in fragments. People scurry here and there, and then, of course, there are all those mummified bodies and human bones.
     Wilson, needless to say, is not your average harried homeowner, but curator of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, that world-famous repository of ancient Middle Eastern relics, now in the midst of a yearlong house cleaning in advance of a $10.1 million overhaul of its Hyde Park museum headquarters.
     The task is enormous — about 80,000 cataloged objects are stored in the basement, with thousands more not yet entered into the institute's computerized system. All of them have to be packed up and moved so workers can begin construction of a new storage wing, including installation of state-of-the-art climate control to keep Chicago's mercurial weather from inflicting further harm on the priceless artifacts.
     "A lot of objects suffered more since they came to Chicago than during the thousands of years they were buried in the sand in the Middle East," said Wilson. "Inside any building in Chicago there can be dramatic changes in relative humidity — from 100 percent in the summer to 5 percent in the winter. The objects absorb moisture, then give it off."
     Moisture migration breaks down the artifacts, as evidenced by the white rime of salt drawn to the surface on unwrapped mummies, of which there are several. To slow the process, the mummies are kept in a refrigerated room, along with other organic materials. The plan is to keep the room cooled during reconstruction, but if that proves impossible, a creative solution will have to be found.
     "We've thought of using fur vaults," said Wilson.
     Registrar Ray Tindel is in charge of keeping track of the artifacts, which range in size from the tiniest shards to a column base that weighs five tons. He says relics being dropped is not a problem — staffers handle them with scrupulous care. But sometimes they fall apart on their own.
     "Suddenly, a pot goes kaflump," said Tindel. "That is one of the things that causes the greatest heartbreak."
     Despite the value of the treasures, theft is not a problem.
     "You have to have a trusted staff," Wilson said.
     One of those staff members is rewrapping pots. Third-year archeology student Robyn Casson, 20, takes object number 36.1.27, a red clay jar from Hierakonpolis in southern Egypt, matches it with a pair of computerized labels. One label goes on the little plastic bag the object goes in, the other on the outside of the bubble wrap that she pulls from a wide roll and swaddles the artifact in to protect it on its journey around the building.
     Despite the repetitious nature of the work, Oriental Institute staffers say it does not get tiresome. Assistant curator Emily Teeter displays a narrow bottomed flared beaker, burnished red with black glaze.
     "The collection is absolutely incredible," she says, gingerly holding the 6,000-year-old ceramic. "We handle this stuff every day, but still, several times a day, you come across an object and you have to say: `Look at this!' "
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, September 27, 1994

Do you know who James Corden is?

Balthazar. 

     Maybe I’m just nearing my snug harbor and rationalizing a lifetime of obscurity. But despite being inclined to view fame favorably, to wistfully suspect that a little larger portion of attention would have been nice, when I see what kind of jerk those served a few portions of smoking hot success tend to become, I realize that I’m better off having nursed my little cup of tepid local awareness and been fairly satisfied.
     I’ve known men — no names, please! — who no sooner got that Pulitzer Prize, or National Magazine Award, or whatever, than they became world-class assholes, unfit to be around. Not that they have much interest in hanging with a nobody like myself, not after the spotlight touches them. And the ironic thing is, while notoriety hurries off, the prickishness it brings seems to stick around.
     I was reminded of this watching James Corden, comic actor and TV host, bathed in public purgatory last week over his don’t-you-know-who-I-am? arrogance at Balthazar, a French bistro in New York City.
     The public relations fiasco proceeded in orderly stages. Last Monday, restaurateur Keith McNally went on Instagram to dub Corden “the most abusive customer to my Balthazar servers since the restaurant opened 25 years ago.” He cited two incidents where Corden berated staff over supposed lapses. McNally banned “this tiny Cretin of a man” from his restaurant.
     Next, the star “apologized profusely” and was duly forgiven. Then over the weekend, the third act: Corden, in a tone-deaf interview with The New York Times, firmly reestablished that he is, was, and no doubt always will be, an entitled bully, so insulated by fame and wealth that he just doesn’t realize he’s running the risk of being forever known as That Brit Who’s Mean to Waiters.
     “I haven’t done anything wrong on any level,” Corden whined, clawing back his apology, before lecturing to the Times about what is and isn’t worthy of its attention. “It’s beneath you,” he said of what has been dubbed “the messiest feud of the year” by BuzzFeed. “It’s certainly beneath your publication.”

To continue reading, click here.

The Medill School of ...

 

     Saturday was a rare gorgeous, summery day toward the end of October. We headed to Evanston to take our out-of-town guests to Blind Faith Cafe for lunch, then a walk up the lakefront, watching the boaters drag their catamarans onto land. Approaching the campus of Northwestern University up Sheridan Road from the south, we came to a solid and familiar red  brick building.
     "That's Fisk Hall, or was, when I went to school," I began, correcting myself, an essential quality in journalism. Looked closer at the building. Now named for a McCormick, in deference to the waves of Trib money crashing over the school. "The Medill School of Journalism," I continued, then realized that too had been changed. Now the "Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications," a name instantly despised and ridiculed by alumni, and not just for the missing ampersand before the final buzz phrase that must have had currency at one point, "Integrated Marketing Communications." What even is that? A racially mixed group of marketing communicators? A well-coordinated PR campaign, so some other noble idea rendered in an awkward phrase, a bad idea come to life, maintained for the very Tribunish notion that bad ideas are to be neither admitted nor corrected.
     Not that the current name came to me — who could easily remember that mouthful? And the sign was no help. I looked, but a solid hedge neatly obscured the offending language from passersby. I laughed out loud to see it. You'd like to think it was intentional, but that would have shown far more dash and creativity than a stodgy old shop like NU would be capable of. Just another inadvertent error easier to ignore than remedy. 

Northshore Notes: Ending on a Koan

"Freedom of Speech" by Norman Rockwell.

     Myself, I have no trouble sleeping. It's staying awake that's the challenge. Still, listening to the rolling syllables of the good-night voice that our Northshore bureau chief Caren Jeskey links to today, I almost wished I had difficulty, just so I would have a reason to try drifting off listening to his rich brogue.  One of the joys of Caren's work is that she cracks open a door on a heretofore unconsidered realm of life, and I'm a little embarrassed to admit, in 40 years of column-writing, I don't think I've for one moment ever considered people's voices.

By Caren Jeskey

   “He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself…”
                                                              — James Joyce, Dubliners

     “There are only two cities in Ireland. Cork and Dublin. Corkonians dislike Dubliners, and vice versa. Cork is better, of course. It’s like Texas and Florida in the States.” 

     A benefit of internet life has been finding friends from across the pond (also the name of a music show I discovered on Sun Radio in Austin). This week it was hours with Irelanders and others with enchanting accents, one of whom made the declaration above. Give me the Scottish brogue of this kind person, who puts me to sleep each night, an accent that also still exists in North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

     Could be dangerous, falling in love with a voice— (I know that from experience). I can sit back and just listen to their anecdotes and have had the best laugh of the year in one of these gatherings. A self-conscious verbose member ended his musings with utter confusion, so declared that he'd end on a koan and muted himself.
    A friend in Reykjavik (who was excited that "Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga" is one of my favorite recent movies) has a voice in the íslensku máli. I'd listen to her read a phone book (a compliment I borrowed from an audience member after the compelling conversation between Neil and Dilla recently. No surprise that others find “listening to Icelandic is a form of time travel," and I'm looking forward to my friend speaking to me in her native tongue so I can sit back and feel the brain changes that come with soothing, novel sounds.

     This group and I have a good craic a few times a week, swapping our recovering Catholic stories and such. A retired gentleman flashed back to his laddie days in a small UK town. “There was food on the table when the nun came that was not there when she wasn’t coming. She’d only come every four years.” There was tension in the house before and during her visit, as his mother flew into a cleaning frenzy to make it presentable enough. He felt relieved that the nun only made it (as a missionary) quadrennially and no more. He recalls the towering figure in a crisp white habit casting a shadow over his sinful self. 

     During her last visit he hid between his bed and the wall to avoid her, since he had not been keeping up with his confessional obligations. She died three days later. His eyes teared up as he shared this. “She was trying to say goodbye to me.” Attachment to others— even those we fear— is a funny thing, often with subconscious roots.
     I am out of practice with real people. I saw my first client in two and half years in person, and now I'm scared to do it again (with record flu numbers predicted this season, compounded by the expected COVID winter surge coming up). That's why I was excited to get all dressed up for a benefit on Saturday for the Firehouse Art Center. Safe outings before it’s time to hibernate. When my brother offered to buy me two tickets my first reaction was panic. I have nothing to wear to a gala. Luckily, my Godmother (from my childhood Catholic days) Vilma and her kind daughter Linette became my fairies. They lent me the bedazzled evening dress Vilma wore to her 80th birthday celebration in her country of origin, before the pandemic stole our freedom. Back then, we all flew to Panama City, Panama, and celebrated with her for days. It was a privilege and honor to wear the dress I remember from a special time. I felt she was with me. She also lent me a white-hooded fur jacket. I hoped PETA would not spot me, and lavished in the warmth of this regal frock during the chilly Chicago gala night.
     As if to say "it's time," I had another occasion to mingle with a crowd at an exciting event this past Monday.Hair still blown out (professionally) from Saturday's party, (a style I cannot duplicate on my own), I adorned a pair of leggings and a sweater with Vilma's white jacket, happily getting a little more wear out of it before returning it. Who knew getting dressed up, after years in comfy clothes, could be such fun? I parked on Lincoln Park West and Fullerton, and made the windy walk to none other than RJ Grunts for Neil Steinberg's book party. (You can catch him in Evanston coming up in November). The scene was as much Park Avenue as you can imagine- with the down home vibe of Sweet Home Chicago.

     “When the short days of winter came, dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street.”
               ― James Joyce, Dubliners