Northshore Notes: Star Stuff

By Crisóstomo Alejandrino José Martínez y Sorli (Metropolitan Museum)

     We live on in the memories of others, and it was good to see the name of my late friend Jeff Zaslow in today's essay by EGD's Northshore bureau chief.

By Caren Jeskey 

“I quote my father to people almost every day. Part of that is because if you dispense your own wisdom, others often dismiss it; if you offer wisdom from a third party, it seems less arrogant and more acceptable.”
              ― Jeffrey Zaslow, The Last Lecture

     Like Jeff Zaslow did, I quote my father often. “Don’t let the turkeys get you down” is a favorite. Particularly in this season, when turkey and its related holiday has a way of getting even folks with the most copper-bottomed psyches down.
     There was an enormous emptiness inside of me this week — I was gutted like the birds we consumed last Thursday. In yoga speak, the solar plexus is a chakra that rests between the chest and the abdomen. It is said to be the center of confidence and also holds one’s sense of personal power, or lack thereof. When I’m feeling nervous, restless, or scared, I often notice a hollowness emanating from that area.

     This time, the existential crisis was Thanksgiving’s fault. The disruption of the holiday unbalanced my precarious apple cart. I’ve noticed others in my life feeling similarly. There have been a lot of tears for lost loved ones, and regrets, mixed in with memories worth keeping. Regrets that nothing is perfect.
     I’m not where I want to be in life, even though I know I have a lot to appreciate and enjoy. If I allow myself to admit it, I want to be footloose and fancy free again. I miss gallivanting off to islands and rainforests. (Though even a crowded movie theater and restaurant would be daring these days). I want to be more successful. I want all of my teeth back. Reuniting with family members is an opportunity to admit what's really going on, or to put on an act and pretend that things are great even if they're not. I wish I’d been more prepared to host my brother and his girlfriend in a grander manner. Instead I was embarrassed by my own life. I wish I wasn't too scared to join them at Rosa's and Buddy Guy's and Thalia Hall in Pilsen. I wish I was the young confident person I used to be. And the regrets just kept coming. I don’t have the children I’d wanted to have. I’m single and renting living amongst families who most certainly own. “Pass the tea and crumpets!” Though I don’t want to be single, my last date (last weekend — a walk through a forest trail on sunny warm day) was so awkward I never want to try it again. At least this one wasn't still married and "in the process" of divorce.
     Sometimes I have what those in traditional twelve-step recovery programs call a God-shaped hole, what Buddhists understand as a Hungry Ghost, and what I call a feeling that something is missing. There’s not enough food, drink, smoke, “love”, blissful meditation retreats, Netflix or AppleTV to fill it up. (I cancelled Amazon Prime and Netflix last month and can report that life is better).
     The longing to be satisfied has roots in our physical bodies, not just in our minds. The solar plexus is a real thing also known as the celiac plexus. In 1914, Julia Seton, MD (a native of Decatur IL) authored The Psychology of the Solar Plexus and Subconscious Mind. 

     “The solar plexus is a large collection of nerve cells and it forms the great center nerve generating energy for the sympathetic nervous system … The solar plexus is the home of the ego or spirit of men … From our solar plexus we receive our visions called faith, and when we register them in the field of consciousness of our physical brain, and work them out through scientific human reasoning into tangible expression, then they become facts.”
     Stale Edwardian wisdom perhaps. But I'm inclined to learn more about whether there is science behind any of this. Here I was thinking that chakras were too woo-hoo for me anymore, but maybe I'm not done with them yet.
     In the still formative years of my teens and twenties, All that Zazz — the advice column Jeff Zaslow took over from Ann Landers in the Sun Times in 1987 — was a voice of reason for me. I wouldn’t listen to my folks, even though they were full of wisdom, but I’d listen to Jeff as I had listened to his predecessor. There was a comfort in knowing that there were simple answers to life’s big problems.
     I still believe that’s true.
     I have to give Neil a shout out before I go. Just as I relied on Zazz, I turn to EGD for comfort, wisdom, and laughs. Thanks NS.*
  

          "We are star stuff harvesting sunlight."
                                   — Carl Sagan

* Editor's note: De nada.

You had me at chia pudding

     At the end of October, I found myself zipping down to Dallas for a story. A quick 24-hour jaunt. Arriving the evening before, I met my sister for dinner at a fabulous restaurant called Roots Southern Table, gorged on collard greens and cast iron cornbread served with sweet potato butter, then jerk lamb chops and orange juice cake.
     The next morning, with that huge Southern dinner still under my belt, breakfast was a Clif bar eaten on the run. Lunch was spent talking to people in the rain. Then boom, back to Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, trucking through Terminal E about 3 p.m., heading toward a 5 p.m. flight home. It dawned on me that if I didn’t want to subsist on a foil bag of pretzels tossed at me by an unhappy flight attendant, now was the moment to root out something to eat.
     What were my options? A big soft salt-crusted dough twist drenched in hot cheese-like product from Auntie Anne’s Pretzels? A Chick-fil-A sandwich which, setting aside the moral qualms of supporting haters, raises gustatory objections that my wife succinctly summarizes whenever we pass one, in a tone of mingled wonder and disgust: “Breaded chicken ... served on bread?!”
     Hurrying along, I was just thinking that the path of prudence would be to eat at home when I approached a wood-tone vending machine. A Farmer’s Fridge, stocked with large jars of salad.
     I love salad and eat one almost every day for lunch. Finding salad on this soul-dead airport causeway was like encountering a real twice-boiled bagel in Indiana.
     I selected the Harvest salad — lettuce, dried cranberries, pecan couscous — for only $9.49. I poured in the balsamic vinaigrette dressing and gave the thing a shake, and ate in silent joy. For dessert, chocolate raspberry chia pudding.

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Hello DALL-E, well hello, DALL-E...

"A sad Al Capone sitting on a park bench 
all alone" suffers from not resembling the 
mobster. The park bench is fine.

     The press prides itself as watchdogs, investigators, the people who dig up the bad news and shine the light of day on it.
     But there's also a pervasive cheerleader aspect to the media that doesn't get acknowledged often enough. At least not publically. Privately, we've all had the experience where some trusted writer or critic or news source raves about something — a new restaurant, movie, even a computer program — so much that we try it out ourselves, and what was presented as a fragrant ladle of savory wonder turns out, in real life, to be an unappealing spoonful of mediocre meh.
      In late September, the Washington Post went wild for DALL-E — yes, the name is a mashup pun of "Dali" and the movie "Wall-E"— an artificial intelligence image generator, in "AI can now create any image in seconds, bringing wonder and danger," by Nitasha Tiku.
     "Wonder and danger." That seemed something to try out myself. Particularly as someone who needs fresh images on a daily basis, for my blog, and sometimes for special projects — for my new book, I had to hire an artist and pay her slightly more than I received for writing the book itself.
     Wouldn't it be easier to just plug my needs into a free program that "has dazzled the public, attracting digital artists, graphic designers, early adopters, and anyone in search of online distraction"?
     I went to the site and signed up and found WaPost-level enthusiasm.
     "DALL·E 2 can create original, realistic images and art from a text description," it promised. "It can combine concepts, attributes, and styles."

     Let's go! I pursed my lips, thought hard, then typed, "Dante Alighieri smoking a cigarette on the moon."

     "Something went wrong," a message told me, vaguely. "Please try again in a few minutes." I did. Something was still wrong. A couple more attempts, then I deployed my "wait a while" strategy and came back the next day.
      In the fresh dawn of a new day, an image of the dour Florentine was now doable. DALL-E tossed off four drawings. Only in the first did the man look vaguely like Dante. In one he was in inexplicable whiteface. None were on the moon — the moon was behind him. They did get the cigarette right. But at least it was working.

     Okay, try something else. A Beatles lyric came to me. I typed: "Rocking horse people eating marshmallow pie." DALL-E understood "rocking horse" and "people" but couldn't combine them. It could do "marshmallow" but not in a pie.

     Again again, as the Teletubbies used to cry.
     "A train station filled with birds reading newspapers"

     The first image was quite pleasant, though missed the "birds reading newspapers" aspect. None were up to the level of a skilled high school art student working on an assignment.

    I tried to think of an image I might actually need: guns. I write about guns from time to time, so asked. "Many handguns all pointed at the viewer." Here DALL-E balked.

    "It looks like this request may not follow our design policy" pouted a dog and cat — I bet they hired a. artist to render them — looking at me reproachfully. A reminder that the online world, when it isn't busily vile, is reflexively timid. 

     When I wanted to see "Criminals on a street corner in Chicago" all the images where of men in hoodies with their backs to the viewer — earlier DALL-E versions were criticized for the race bias the creators had initially hardwired into the system. Obviously nobody wants to be accused of that.  Their idea of a Chicago cop was closer to a mall security guard. They did create images of a beautiful sunflower.

     I'd say 90 percent of my requests generated unusable garbage. "Humpty Dumpty juggling maraschino cherries" showed AI has yet to grasp the concept of the famous eggman — they seemed to think he was a clown, with the same splayed, clawlike hands DALL-E likes to render; AI, like all novice artists, seems to do a particularly bad job of hands. 

     "A beautiful woman playing Scrabble with martians" contained women who weren't beautiful, games that weren't Scrabble, and no denizens of the red planet. (Beauty of course is subjective, but DALL-E faces, composites of many photos, have a blurred stitched-together quality more scary than appealing)

     I thought I'd try out a real life example. In my book, for the day the Cubs finally won the World Series, I thought of the Hindu god, ganesh, "the remover of obstacles" and asked artist Lauren Nassef to draw it with arms holding various Cubs tokens. I asked DALL-E: "The elephant-headed god ganesh wearing a Cubs cap and holding a pennant." I got this:

     It couldn't do a Cubs cap — trademark infringement? — but it got ganesh down fairly well and we executed enough to give me pause. Was DALL-E getting better? Or perhaps my standards were just lowering.
     Are artists endangered? We have to remember that the human default is to fear doom at every new development. A century and a half after Edison offered recorded music, there are still jobs for violinists and violin-makers.
     But art, well, while I'd encourage you to go online and give it a spin — it's free — there are still more than a few bugs in the system. For the moment. One thing about technology is, it gets better. I scoffed when my wife bought a robot vacuum. Now I love it; no cleaning lady ever vacuumed downstairs with the singular focus of our Eufy.
     I went back to the Post story, to see if maybe I missed some faint whiff of disappointment. I found a little:

     "The ability to create original, sometimes accurate, and occasionally inspired images from any spur-of-the-moment phrase, like a conversational Photoshop, has startled even jaded internet users with how quickly AI has progressed."

     "Sometimes accurate, and occasionally inspired..." So there was a wink there. The Post hedged its bets, went for subtle. It takes a certain confidence to declare something not up to its advertising. I don't know why they didn't want to come out and say it flat out: WALL-E, not so hot. Maybe Jeff Bezos is an investor.

     I was about to splash the above in the newspaper, maybe on a Monday across two pages, tisk-tisking the entire operation, when I had breakfast with my younger son, and he raved about DALL-E, and whipped out his phone, and showed me images that were much more arresting than mine. That gave me pause. I realized I was trying for broad esoterica when what was needed was narrow, concrete  and specific. I held this, for over a month, and figured I was safe to let it rip here in the less rigorous world of online punditry. 

     Since then, using DALL-E (an apt name, given that Dali too was given to excessive hype and fraudulence) I've dialed back my scope and increased my success rate. "An angry man in profile vomiting a stream of fire" for a Caren Jeskey post gave me exactly that (actually three: the program gives you four different options for every request). I couldn't find an apt photo for Wednesday's column on anti-semitism, and asked WAll-E for a picture crowded with hooked noses. The automaton delivered, again nothing great, but good enough. The future isn't here, AI artwise, but we sure can hear its approaching footsteps.

Wall-E had the Ford Mustang down fairly well, but failed at the "made of red brick" part.

 

Hatred is their secret sauce

Generated by Dall-E.

     So it’s left to me to tell the secret?
     Sigh.
     OK.
     If I must.
     The current tizzy over this kid, Nick Fuentes, a vile antisemite — is there any other kind? — dining with two other vile antisemites, Kanye West and Donald Trump, is ...
     What? Oh. Don’t slide into the ditch on me here regarding that last one. Doesn’t matter that his son-in-law is Jewish. Trump could be a Jew himself and that wouldn’t change anything. Stephen Miller is Jewish, in theory. Moving on ...
     ... having dinner with two other big-mouth bigots, Kanye West and Donald Trump ...
     Better? I aim to please. Though after 40 years in this business, I’m convinced that the object of bigotry hardly matters. Haters are cowards — they’re searching for anyone safe to attack and thereby feel ... I don’t know, powerful and manly, I suppose. Their victims are fungible; anyone will do, provided they are vulnerable enough. Trans kids, Muslims, Blacks, Jews, what’s the difference? Remember Trump’s escalator descent at Trump Tower, deus ex machina, to announce his candidacy? All that poison about Mexico sending us drug dealers and rapists? You elected him president anyway. To make a fuss now, over this, is just daft. Rolling around in bigotry like a dog in ordure doesn’t hurt Trump; it’s what made him. Half of America loves this.
     Which brings us back to Fuentes and the secret. Have you asked yourself how, at 24, in a media landscape that is a 24/7 howling hurricane, a billion voices screaming at once, does this knucklehead get to be a national figure in the first place? What’s his secret sauce?
     Right. Hate sells. Vile sells. Antisemitism sells. It cuts through the clutter. People who have nothing else to say say that, and everybody perks right up.
     Look at our own homegrown hater, the Right Honorable Louis Farrakhan. Smart. Ambitious. With valid points: self-reliance; avoid drugs and alcohol; respect women; shop in the community.
     But he can give a two-hour Founders Day speech and what gets reported? The three minutes he fulminates against the Jews. Which isn’t wrong. You can’t expect the papers to focus instead on his bean cake project. Farrakhan learned the lesson and the vicious circle turned for years: He condemns the Jews for plotting against him. Jewish groups issue their pro forma complaints. Which Farrakhan points to as proof of animosity against him. He just couldn’t stop.

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Flashback 1999: Jews' history as victims doomed to repeat itself

 

    Anti-semitism. In the news. Again. God, do I have to pinch my nose with one hand, reach WAY down into the gutter with the other, and drag that wriggling thing up and look at it? Again? Do you know how many years I've been dissecting this thing? Cutting it up into little chunks, bottling those bits in formaldehyde. Affixing educational labels. Only to wake up the next day and find it intact and squirming on the tray, ready to be vivesected again.  I'm going to pass, this time, and dig up a chestnut on this topic which, unsurprisingly, is as relevant now as it was 23 years ago.

 

     "What we have heard about the suspect and his motives is deeply disturbing." 
                 — President Bill Clinton

     The moment I heard the TV people speculating on the reason for Buford O'Neal Furrow Jr.'s gunning down a bunch of kids and an elderly lady in a Jewish community center in Los Angeles, I asked myself, "Who cares?"
     What would be the non-disturbing motive for bursting into a community center and spraying it with machine gun fire? Altruism? Concern for the whales?
     What does it matter if he did it out of hatred for Jews — the old standby — or voices in his head or because his dog told him to?
     Chicago Jews interviewed before Furrow turned himself in expressed the pathetic hope that anti-semitism wouldn't be the motive. As if everything would be all right then.
     As if, so long as the crazed assault came from nondenominational madness, we could all wipe our brows and relax.
     Naive. And deserving to be rewarded with Furrow's comment that his act was "a wake-up call to America to kill Jews."
     Now, there's a sentiment that kicks you in the gut. And you know what? He didn't invent it. It's out there. If Furrow had told the FBI that the aliens made him do it, that wouldn't change a thing. Anti-semitism would still be out there, under the surface. The Holocaust only made expressing one's disdain for Jews impolite, made it hidden, except in cases such as this. It didn't root out the disdain itself.
     This isn't going to change. Know why?

     The Egyptians hated the Jews. The Babylonians hated the Jews. The Turks, Greeks and Romans hated the Jews. As soon as they shed their own Judaism and evolved from a fringe cult to a powerful religion, the Christians hated the Jews, as policy, for about 1800 years. Every nation from Iran to England had all sorts of laws, expelling or restricting or somehow dampening down Jews. Some still do.
     Notice a pattern here?
     Sometimes I wonder, to quote the classic question: Why the Jews? I have a theory. The reason isn't the old Christ-killers chestnut. A guy isn't motivated to gun down random children because he's upset about the passion of the savior.
     Rather, my theory — and I'm sure this is glommed from some college textbook I can't recall — is that Jews are hated because we are both successful as a group and something different. Difference alone can be shrugged off, as long as it keeps its place among the downtrodden and the underclass. But do well, and do well generally, and suddenly somebody whiffs a conspiracy, and the difference becomes intolerable. To be different, in the eyes of certain, insecure people means criticism.
     If I could ask Buford O'Neal Furrow Jr. a question, I'd want to know what sort of world he thinks he'd get without the Jews. Would that suddenly make him king? Fix Social Security? End the nation's problems? Apparently he thinks so.
     Wouldn't happen. Look at Poland. People there used to think the Jews were causing all their problems. Then they got rid of their Jews. And guess what? Poland still has problems, and many there still blame the mostly absent Jews. Not all. The really odd thing is, among a certain segment of Poles, being Jewish is sort of hip. The tiny shred they have left has developed a certain fashionability. Which would be funny if it weren't so sad.
     The TV mentality likes to learn little lessons from tragedies. So here's one I don't think you'll get from TV: Hate is eternal. If you're different and you're successful, people will hate you. Whether Jewish, black, Hispanic, Asian, gay or, in about 40 years the way demographics are going, white Anglo-Saxon, there will be people who loathe you sight unseen because, in their poisoned little minds, everything is your fault.

     Better to be aware of this. To foster a healthy pessimism, an attitude I have long thought as "Keeping a bag packed." You fall into a false sense of security, you tell yourself that because you don't wear a beard and a long black coat that you're just like everybody else, and the next thing you know you end up face down in a slit trench.
     That might seem negative, a downer on a Sunday. But I believe it; it's in my blood. My grandfather was a pessimist, or at least dissatisfied with his future prospects on the farm in Poland. So he quit, gave up, blew town. He headed for the paradise of Cleveland, Ohio, America. His entire family — and it was a big family — was more complacent and stayed put in Poland. They were optimists. They hoped for a brighter future. They're all still in Poland, somewhere, in the form of white ash. That's the ugly lesson behind Buford O'Neal Furrow Jr.'s timeless message.

       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 15, 1999

Fight mass shootings with education

     How to get unstuck? Say an impasse at work, where two people go head-to-head over opposing views of what to do.
     You don’t last 35 years at a company without strategies for this, and a favorite is what I call “The Third Way.” A shot of interpersonal WD-40 to get the frozen gears moving again. You want Plan A. Your boss comes along and touts Plan B.
     “That’s a stupid idea,” sticks in your throat. What to do? Insisting on your own way, telling them they’re wrong gets nowhere. But meekly submitting to the bad idea feels like surrender, and the wrong strategy wins.
     Enter The Third Way. Not your idea, not theirs. But a different approach, not as good as yours or as bad as theirs. A compromise that gets you moving again. Both sides save face.
     I thought of the Third Way after our most recent spate of mass shootings: University of Virginia, Colorado Springs, Chesapeake. Keeping track hardly seems worth the effort. The Republican solution to America’s gun nightmare is ever more guns. Arm everybody, everywhere, all the time, and let them shoot it out. We’re seeing how well that works.
     The Democratic solution — shore up the tattered framework of laws into something a bit stronger — seldom goes very far. That isn’t to say it can’t help. Our nation banned assault weapons, whatever they are, for a decade. We could again. I don’t want to underplay the value of restrictions entirely, as states with more sensible gun laws have lower rates of gun crimes. A car loving nation, we still manage to demand driver’s licenses and speed limits.
     But there is a third way that gets ignored. Not arming teachers or crafting laws but education, in the form of advertising. We gained all sorts of social goods through advertising. The public didn’t just naturally stop tossing their trash out their car windows. They had to be taught. Guns are an area where people flail in the dark. Why not teach them? Most handgun deaths aren’t murders; they’re suicides.

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Telling you nothing is certain

   

     Lies are often irrational, but seldom purposeless. They have a point, a function, as little squirts of oil intended to lubricate the path forward for those to whom the truth is rocky and an impediment. 

     They are grease, camouflage, an octopus's inky cloud, disguising the continual getaway that is life for the dishonest. 

     But lies also aggregate, accumulate, take on weight and substance. Grain by grain, the mountain is constructed. Taken together, they form a terrain, a landscape where anything is open to doubt, to questioning. Where the simplest fact becomes an arduous climb up a steep slope of argument. Where nothing is certain. And in that topsy turvy world, embracing the lie becomes the sign of an open mind, while pointing to the truth is seen as self-deception. 

     Lies corrupt. What began with a septic stream of confabulation coming from the mouth of Donald Trump has animated his growing army of imitators. Deceit rolls likes gas across the countryside, until we catch whiffs of it in the most unexpected places.

     Tuesday I was driving in the car, and a CBS radio feature on the 59th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy came on the air. It was standard stuff, neutral, historical — Dallas, the news breaking, a stunned nation. But one phrase leapt out. The crime was "blamed on Lee Harvey Oswald." Not "committed by..." I heard that and felt a chill. The "unfairly" was unvoiced, but present. Why say it that way otherwise? Who was to say Kennedy died that day at all? Another CBS report called Oswald the "accused" gunman. 

     No, no, no. Oswald shot Kennedy, acting alone. There was no trial, true, but an enormous investigation, the Warren Commission, whose report concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin. And to see how far we've slipped into the ditch of conspiracy theories, even typing "Oswald shot Kennedy, alone," felt somehow daring. Which I suppose is true, when the world becomes a forest of fabrication. As far as anything can be true. As has been observed many times, the function of lies is not to get the public to believe that any particular fib is true, but that nothing is true. 
     Sure, lots of people get lots of mileage arguing the blizzard of conspiracy theories that have grown up in the past 59 years. Anything that generates the mass of data that the Kennedy assassination — or Pearl Harbor, or Sept. 11 — produces will churn out enough "evidence" to support an array of alternate imaginings and hypotheses. So many variants that they inadvertently undermine their initial premise. Just as UFOs can't really be cylinders and saucers and cubes and orbs, glowing or dark, silent and shrieking, the vast armada reported by the credulous and the deceived, so JFK couldn't have been killed by the mafia and the Russians, the CIA and LBJ and Jimmy Hoffa. First you realize that all of it can't be true, then, duh, that none of it is.

    Denial is not fact-based — the Holocaust, Sandy Hook, Lee Harvey Oswald. Rather it is malice-based, bald attempts to carve reality into a shape more pleasing to the carvers. That is why it has to be so actively resisted. Not just because lies are bad on their face — they are. But because these particular lies are so particularly bad. 

    This is so disappointing. I expect CBS to have a little more integrity than that. Obviously they do not.