Northshore notes: Sunsets

Clasped Hands of Rob't and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, by Harriet Hosmer (Metropolitan Museum)

     "Connection." Caren sure nailed it today. As if reading my mind. Friday afternoon. I went straight from researching a story next to Midway Airport to a Wicker Park coffee shop, to meet an old friend I hadn't seen in years. In town, briefly. We both smiled at each other, and toed the corpse of our old friendship. But the thing never stirred. We didn't really have anything much to talk about, and then I stood up and went on my way. Maybe the problem, as Caren suggests below, is that we were never equals. That could be it. Anyway, this helped.

By Caren Jeskey    

     “so he said: you ain’t got no talent
      if you didn’t have a face
     you wouldn’t be nobody

     and she said: god created heaven and earth
    and all that’s Black within them

     so he said: you ain’t really no hot shit
     they tell me plenty sisters
     take care better business than you

     and she said: on the third day he made chitterlings
     and all good things to eat
     and said: that’s good

     so he said: if the white folks hadn’t been under
     yo skirt and been giving you the big play
     you’d a had to come on uptown like everybody else

     and she replied: then he took a big Black greasy rib
     from adam and said we will call this woeman and her
     name will be sapphire and she will divide into four parts

     that simone may sing a song

     and he said: you pretty full of yourself ain’t chu

     so she replied: show me someone not full of herself
     and i’ll show you a hungry person
                     "Poem For A Lady Whose Voice I Like," by Nikki Giovanni

     “There is only connection when there is equality,” observed my British pal Pat. Yesterday morning we engaged in an enjoyable video chat with a couple of other friends. Only one other person made it past the third hour.
     I finally cut myself off to write this so I can send it to Neil before too late. This way, he won’t have to pad to the computer in his socks at 3:45 a.m. — I think that’s the regular waking time for a newsman — to weed through my weekly (sometimes stream of consciousness) musings.    

     The Zoom hang satisfied the ennui I didn’t know I was experiencing. I thought I was just tired. The perk-up led me to do a bit of research about the dangers of isolation, which “causes a cease in brain activity, as the stimulation of thought and action leads to the firing of more neurons in the brain. Without that, we are left with nothing but a state of stress.”
     Living in solitude means one must actually leave the house to have human contact, unless you want to make your neighbors uncomfortable and overly chat to them over the fence. (Now that I’ve finally landed on my feet back home in Chicago, I’ve started dating again. I decided I want the company of a man to do the dishes with after coffee, croissants and crosswords on Sundays, before we head out to kayak and fossil hunt).
     Virtual connection, a la Pat and company, is the next best thing to flesh and blood. He sat cozily in a low-backed armchair, long legs crossed in that elegant European way. A knit cap warded the cold off of his balding dome. There was give and take in the conversation, but Pat really has a voice worth listening to, both for its content as well as lyrical timbre.
     He addressed a recent piece I offered here on EGD recently. On Camus, Pat said “he observed an absurdity in the human condition, but also wrote from a depressed state of mind as German tanks rolled into France.” Camus also posited that the myth of Sisyphus reveals that acceptance of the mundane nature of living "allows the sorrow and melancholy of life to become bearable," and perhaps even enjoyable. Finding intrinsic value in work itself. You probably know that this king of Greek mythology's fate, a punishment for cheating death, was to push a boulder up a mountain repeatedly, only for it to roll back down and need to be pushed up again and again, each time.
     Then we laughed at Samuel Beckett’s more playful idea that one can decide the purpose of their life, and it can be absolutely anything. Waiting for Godot, perhaps.
     The sun eventually set over Pat’s left shoulder through sheer lace curtains. “Is that the sun setting? Or a streetlight?” I asked. “It is the sun.” He sat up straighter and chuckled gleefully. “A reflection on the window across the street,” a phenomena of physics adding a bit of joy to his dusk.
     Another Zoom friend mostly listened but then piped up to offer up a song suggestion, Sunshine on Laith. I found the Scottish Proclaimer's song on Apple Music and offered it to them via nifty little vibrating oscillator circuits embedded my bluetooth speaker. We all swayed along, eyes closed, and took it in. A Standing Bear protest poster hanging on another friend’s wall prompted Pat to request Buffy Sainte-Marie. We all sat back and contemplated her deep voice singing "Now That The Buffalo Is Gone."
     I envisioned Pat in his UK town down the road from Roman ruins, and again realized how young we are in the U.S. An adolescent mess these days, it seems. Pat conjured up the image of a wagon wheel to remind us that all roads lead to Rome. This picture created an instant sense of connection with the rest of the world. Someone then chimed in that the Earth is not, in fact, round, but an oblate spheroid.
     It’s comforting to know how little I know. Sometimes I can be just one of the gang, keeping each other company. Equals sharing ideas.

Welcome back, Donald Trump!

      Carlisle (Pa.) Indian School, Classroom debating society, 1901 (Library of Congress)

     “Social media is rooted in the belief that open debate and the free flow of ideas are important values,” begins Nicholas Clegg, president of global affairs for Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, in a post announcing the return of former president Donald J. Trump to both those wildly popular services after two years of exile.
     How to characterize that statement? “A lie segueing into a mischaracterization” sounds about right.
     First the lie. Think about your interaction with social media. How much would you characterize as “open debate”? Pretty much zero, right? Actual debate requires the notion of impartial assessment of verifiable reality. Each side offers arguments backed by facts — ”evidence,” we called it in middle school debate club. A judge would decide whose case is best and thus carries the day. You had to prepare a strong case because you knew your opponent would have a logical argument and solid evidence supporting their side.
     Nobody is debating on social media because nobody is open to the possibility that the other side might have a point, never mind be right. And nobody is judging because everybody has already made up their minds, which perceive the living world in a state that too often borders on pure hallucination laced with bottomless malice. Opposing arguments are dismissed immediately in a blast of contempt.
     Which leads us to Clegg’s mischaracterization, “the free flow of ideas.” Sure, ideas are free-flowing on social media. (And here I’m struggling to find a metaphor that doesn’t involve diarrhea.) Unimpeded flow isn’t the problem, it’s what is flowing that’s the trouble: an endlessly gushing firehose discharging every possible unfiltered thought, notion, lie and fantasy.
     Example? This week MAGA-world decided that ... well, let them explain:
     “I believe that Damar Hamlin is dead unfortunately. We have yet to see his actual face there appears to be a clone,” announced one seer.
     Or a robot. Or a body double. Died on the field. Of the COVID vaccine. Aggregate lifetimes were spent arguing about it online this past week. Right wing twitiot Stew Peters demanded Hamlin provide evidence of his continued existence, much like Trump crying for Obama’s birth certificate: “I want to see video of Damar Hamlin holding today’s newspaper with the date visible.” When Hamlin blocked him, Peters mocked the recuperating football star. “I used to think football players were tough” Peters pouted.
     “Open debate” my foot.

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Flashback 1996: Culture is lovely, but bring on the fat lady

 

"The French Comedians" by Antoine Watteau (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     For a decade, I'd take a group of 100 Sun-Times readers to the Lyric Opera. Then the Lyric got their nose out of joint over something I wrote, and told me to scram. That was five years ago. But the Lyric Opera is performing "Carmen" in a few months, and I thought it a good time to venture back. In rooting around the column closet, checking out matters operatic, I found this, and was surprised to discover where my opera predilection originally came from. I had forgotten.

     A sure sign of autumn, as definite as the Canadian freezer air whooshing over the city: my wife searching for the big pasteboard sheet of Lyric Opera tickets, which arrived in the balmy days of summer and was squirreled safely away.

     She found the tickets, alas. I wasn't exactly rooting for them to be lost, but I wouldn't have been heartbroken, either. Six operas between now and Valentine's Day. 
     And mountaineers think their sport is a test of endurance. Hah! What can climbing the Matterhorn demand compared with sitting through five hours of "Gotterdammerung"? I did that last season, and should have gotten my picture taken afterward, thumb in the air, a look of giddy victory on my face.
     Granted, the music isn't bad. I even like certain operas. But nothing is so good that it doesn't start to grind you down after a while. If the Lyric offered an evening of naked supermodels performing the opera "Neil Steinberg Is Swell" I still would be fidgeting and glancing at my watch toward the end of the third hour.
     Of course I could have resisted subscribing. I always consider objecting, consider waving the "Money's tight!" flag that my wife so happily hoists whenever I propose an entertainment more costly than tossing cards into a hat.
     Marriage is a give-and-take, however, and I know that resisting opera would only come back to haunt me. I will be struck by some terrible disease, and want to go to the Mayo Clinic to see an expert, and my wife will give me that look and say, "Who's throwing money around now, Mister Fancy Clinic?"
     So I didn't say anything. Besides, she didn't ask me. She got tired of all my throat-clearing and eye-rolling, and just went ahead and got them, without consultation.
     So now opera is officially routine. An established part of our lives now includes plump middle-aged Italian ladies pretending to be German milkmaids at the top of their lungs in a language we don't understand. I'll just have to live with it.
     I know what my wife will say when she reads this. "But you like opera," she'll say, which only shows how successfully I've been fooling her all these years. I see too many of those grumbly, scowling hubbies harrumphing after their terrified wives.
     Can't be like that. Better to go and enjoy what I can and pretend to enjoy when I can't. Being Jewish helps. Like many Jews, I grew up attending services I only dimly understood, and years of neglecting my faith, such as it is, haven't made Hebrew any more comprehensible.
     Growing up, I was trained to sit through it, nodding along and waiting for the parts I could appreciate.
     Rather like opera. I'm surprised the two institutions, opera and Judaism, don't learn from each other. Oh, some synagogues have opera-singing cantors. But why not borrow more? Supertitles, for instance, those translations projected above the stage at operas. They might help enhance prayer services, too.
     Or not. Perhaps too much is lost in translation. While the singer is reeling off a mouthful of Italian — "Il mio sposo! Oh Dei! Son morta. Voi qui senza mantello! In questo stato . . . un ricevuto foglio, la sua gran gelosia"*— the supertitle is always something like: "My husband! We're in trouble."
     Congregations might not be too happy to see some cherished prayer — "Here O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is One" — projected in front of them as: "Hey Israel! The Lord's one."
     Opera definitely could benefit from a synagogue tradition called "staying until the end." There is a final blessing and everybody kisses one another and shakes hands and goes home and gets something to eat.
     At the opera, about three minutes before the end, a shocking percentage of the audience leaps to their feet and bolts for the exits as if the place were on fire.
     Any subtle sense of pleasure the music may have instilled is wiped away by the shock of watching these people. If your time is so precious, if you can't wait 10 minutes for your coat or a cab, then why are you sitting through five hours of Wagner? Why go out at all? Stay home and work.
     My only hope is that these fleeing people, at some moment in their hectic lives, will realize they have lost their souls. I hope that, kneeling down beside Fluffy after she has been run over by a car, or watching their home burn, or whatever, they will look up and have a flash of insight: "This is because I left early at the opera. This is because we couldn't even stay and applaud for the 50 people who had just spent three hours singing their throats to a pulp. We have earned every bad thing that can ever befall us."
     Me, I clap heartily, big, potching claps, drawing my hands about three feet apart and slamming them together, cheering. This is the best part of the opera. It gets the blood, which tends to settle during hours of inaction, going. And I am genuinely delighted and enthusiastic— I mean, the thing is over and we get to home.

                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 15, 1996

* Translation: "My husband! Oh God, I'm dead! You here, without a cloak! In this state . . . a note give him his great jealousy."

What does an abortion look like?

     Never underestimate the role of imagery in Christianity’s march toward world domination. Christ crucified on the cross. The Virgin and Child. The Last Supper. The faith would circle the globe and centuries pass before anyone wondered how it was exactly that Jesus ended up a pale white northern European.
     I don’t want to credit good graphics for the religion’s entire success; violence was also key, along with a doctrine that sounds good on paper. But compelling visuals, executed by craftsmen like Michelangelo, Raphael and El Greco, were in the top five.
     So it was surprising Monday to turn to the New York Times editorial page and see images of early abortions that did not resemble diced up Gerber babies. The gore that for years volunteers from Joe Scheidler’s Pro-Life Action League displayed along Madison Street in color photographs five feet high.
     These were not the babies conjured up and branded into the public mind for years, but splotches of tissue an inch or two wide. Illustrations from a guest essay, “Early Abortion Looks Nothing Like You’ve Been Told,” by a trio of doctors, Erika Bliss, Joan Fleischman and Michele Gomez.
     ”Primary care clinicians like us who provide early abortions in their practices have long known that the pregnancy tissue we remove does not look like what most people expect,” they write. “It’s important to us to counter medical misinformation related to early pregnancy because about 80 percentcq as published of abortions in the United States occur at nine weeks or earlier. So much of the imagery that people see about abortion comes from abortion opponents who have spent decades spreading misleading fetal imagery to further their cause.”
     “Important”? How about “kinda late”? “Important” would have been decades ago. Now, the damage is done, the zombie baby army that anti-choice fanatics conjured up and relentlessly flaunt as if real has already conquered the country. The right to an abortion, assumed in most of the civilized world, already has been yanked away from half the women in the United States. The debate not focused on whether women should be in charge of their own reproductive care or whether men should make those choices for them. But on saving babies.

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Taste and decency

     Whenever I write on a topic that crosses the border into disgusting, I hear an echo of Australian press lord Nigel Wade's voice ringing across the newsroom on the fourth floor of 401 N. Wabash. "STEINBERG!" he'd bellow. "I was eating my POACHED EGG when I read that!!!" So a warning to those who might be enjoying their breakfast, or just unwilling to read an essay that includes reference to Amy Schumer's husband's anal orifice. You might want to set this aside to read later, or not at all.

 

     "Taste and decency." Now there's a concept that doesn't get floated much nowadays. Yet there it is, twice in one brief Daily Herald article by Jake Griffin on vanity license plates. Honestly, I find even unobjectionable vanity plates — "MOMS VAN" or "LAWYER" or whatever — somewhat suspect. A little blurt of "look-at-me!" that most of us manage to do without. Though I suppose if you're popping $100,000 for a car, what's another $94 to put your own individual spin on it?
     To be honest, I'm reluctant to present myself as the champion of taste and decency in any particular situation. First, it's the oldest gripe in the book. There are cuneiform cylinders sitting unread in drawers in the Oriental Institute (speaking of objection, weren't they going to change their name in January? I see by their website they're still using the language of hate) complaining that these kids nowadays don't give proper reverence to the gods.
     Besides being an antique qualm, taste and decency are both relative. I've heard from enough people to whom just the name of this blog is an objectionable slur on the deity, far outside the bounds of propriety. I once wrote three out of four columns about picking up after my dog. I've written about being flogged by a dominatrix and the people who open the jars of shit at Cologuard. Still, I'd never consider myself "tasteless," though I do like to dance along the boundary, convinced that is often where interest lives.
     Unless it doesn't. Pop icon Madonna recently announced her first tour in years. I was never a particular Madonna fan, from the very start. I happen to remember the first time I saw her first video, "Like a virgin," on that modern marvel, MTV. It was about 1983. She was in her waif-in-lingerie get up, shimmying on a gondola in Venice, if I recall properly. I leaned in, fixed my gaze at her bare midriff, and thought: I'd better get a good look at this bimbo because I'm NEVER seeing her again.
     Predicting the future, not my forte. And apologies for the "bimbo" which indeed was the word that formed in my head nearly 40 years ago. I was 23. I hope we aren't at the point where certain people aren't allowed to express a risque thought.
     That sure doesn't hold for Madonna. "Madonna’s upcoming tour will defy society’s limits on female pop stars" is the headline on the Post critique, by Robin Givhan, which lionizes the singer for "40 years worth of club dancing, provocative shape-shifting and sex-positive proselytizing."
     All true. Back in the Reagan era, when anyone who wasn't Ward and June Cleaver was encouraged to keep out of sight, Madonna put what then were the fringes of human society into her songs, music videos and at least one coffee table book. (I'm old enough to recall when you could reasonably expect her 1992 metal-covered $50 coffee table book, "Sex," to be on a hip Chicago coffee table. I still remember certain shots — the baby powder — so it must have pushed some buttons). That was real society approval, and it's worthwhile to remember that, beside all the commercialism and camp and self-regard, she did do real good. Not to forget the music, which was okay.
     The Washington Post story on her return linked to the video where she announced her "Celebration" tour. She's sitting at some Mad Hatter dinner — an homage to her 1991 "Truth or Dare" movie, apparently — with Jack Black and a few guffawing confederates, playing the adolescent challenge game. At first I focused on Madonna's face, which has that unmistakable immobile plastic surgery mask-like look that makes me think of a line from Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast" about the bedribboned World War I vets he'd see drinking in the 1920s in almost every cafe in Paris. “I watched… the quality of their artificial eyes and the degree of skill with which their faces had been reconstructed. There was always an almost iridescent shiny cast about the considerably reconstructed face, rather like that of a well packed ski run.”
     Madonna takes up a basket of bread rings.
     "I want you to show me, with this bread," she says to Amy Schumer, "how you lick your husband's asshole."
     Ewww. Maybe I'm outing myself as 62, or a prude, but that wasn't something I wanted to know.
     "This is kinda like sad and gross," observes tablemate Eric André, immediately reading my mind. Which is as far as curiosity would take me. Maybe they brilliantly turned the conversation around to why anyone would pop $250 or $500 or $1,000 or whatever tickets cost. But I didn't stick around to find out.

    If Madonna really wanted to transgress societal norms, she should have let herself grow old. I believe women should be allowed to grow old, to age and sag and get wrinkles, just like men do. Judge me harshly if you must.

     Honestly, my self-protective instinct urges me to walk away at this point. With the Washington Post casting every Madonna's excess as the triumph of a female pioneer, any objection becomes by definition the bile of sexists and haters and male pigs, none of which I consider myself to be. To me, based on the brief clip I saw, Madonna is not in the vanguard, but like a dotty old aunt well into the prosecco prattling on about the guys she balled at Woodstock while her younger female relatives exchange worried looks. If Madonna is so freeing, then I'm free to disapprove, yes? Maybe not. 

     Anyway, no hard feelings. I saw Madonna perform once — the paper sent me to a show for her "Blond Ambition Tour" at the Rosemont Horizon in 1990. It was memorable, in that I still remember aspects of it: skillful theatrics at the Rosemont Horizon, with lit candles rising out of the stage, vigorous male dancers, the song "Like A Prayer" and an audience that included 6- and 7-year-old girls in lace bustiers and gloves. But that's about it.

     

Making beautiful music together

Greg Sapp in his workshop.

     Three factors determine the price of a violin, Mel Sapp explained, just as I was leaving the bright, airy shop she and her husband Greg run in Batavia: one is workmanship. Two, materials. And three, the name of the luthier who built it.
     “You notice I didn’t say, ‘sound,’” she added. “Sound is subjective. You can change it.”
     Indeed, most masterpiece instruments of old —by Amati, Guernari, Stradivari — have been modernized over the years, their necks and fingerboards lengthened, to bring them into line with current musical tastes.
     I am not in the market for a violin, alas. But I visited Sapp Violins earlier this month because of a quip. When the shaky future of journalism is being discussed, with what colleagues I yet retain in a rapidly contracting profession, I’ll sometimes attempt to both sound a positive note and move the conversation along by observing, “They still make violins.”
     Meaning, even antique trades thrive, for some.
     Though it got me wondering: How is the violin business doing? Chicago, being home to one of the world’s great orchestras, is unsurprisingly also a center of violin craftsmanship. After I visited Sapp, the January Chicago magazine took an in-depth look at John Becker, the Fine Arts Building luthier to the multi-million dollar instruments of musical stars such as Joshua Bell, the article by Elly Fishman itself a finely constructed marvel.
     So how does one get into the violin making biz?
     Greg Sapp was a music education major at Duquesne University in the mid-1970s when he had a realization that often comes to those whose ambitions lie in the arts:
     “This isn’t going to work.”
     Luckily, senior year, he had a class with the very 1970s name, “Creative Personality.” His final project was constructing an Eastern European folk instrument called a “prim.”
     “It’s kind of like a mandolin,” Greg said, pointing to the ur-instrument, displayed on the wall. “I was the only one in my class that made something so functional.”
     That wasn’t a complete accident — his father was a woodworker and singer.
     Greg moved to Chicago in 1978 to attend the Kenneth Warren & Son School of Violin Making (now the Chicago School of Violin Making). He also bumped into Mel, whose car had broken down and needed a lift to the train station. When Greg told her he was going to violin school, Mel, who’d known her share of prevaricating creeps, assumed he was lying.
     “How do I find these guys?” she asked herself.

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EGD Orphan #1: Alexander Woollcott

Alexander Woollcott (Bettmann Archive)

     The book inspired by this blog, "Every Goddamn Day," has been out for more than three months.  I'm assuming you've all bought a copy by now and if you haven't, well shame on y... whoops, I mean, your admirable restraint has been rewarded, as the University of Chicago Press is now offering it among their bestsellers at 30 percent off in their Great Chicago Book Sale. You can access their catalogue here.  

    "Every Goddamn Day" is a daily history of Chicago, with 366 compact essays keyed to the date. When writing the book, occasionally I'd find a new story for a particular date that would efface something I'd already done. That is, I'd prepare a vignette for a day, then research would cough up another for the same day that I liked more, either because it was inherently more interesting, or better added to the mix of themes in the book. So the original tale got bumped. But I kept the banished stories in a file called "Orphans" thinking I might serve them up here when their dates came around. 

     The tale below, while interesting — how often do radio commentators die on the air? — was only loosely tied to Chicago, and didn't reach the level of Clint Youle, "Mr. Weatherman," perhaps the first television meteorologist, predicting a chance of snow in a windowless WMAQ studio in 1951 while a blizzard howled outside, the episode included in the book for Jan. 23. 

     Looking over the vignette below now, after not reading it for a year or so, I think I would have added an explanation of how the Tribune, at least among those conversing on the program in 1943, was seen as a moral stain and journalistic embarrassment, sort of the way Fox News is viewed by liberals today.

Jan. 23, 1943: Alexander Woollcott said a lot of witty things. It is he, in 1921, who coined the term "ink-stained wretches" to describe "those who turn out books and plays." It is Woollcott, one of the founders of the Algonquin Round Table group of clever inebriates, who launched a million refrigerator magnets when he quipped "all the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening." 

     His final remarks are not so much sharp as knotty, a moral question to be untangled. On the CBS "People's Platform" coast-to-coast radio program, Woollcott responds to one of his fellow panelists trying to put some daylight between Hitler and the German people by saying, "Germany was the cause of Hitler just as much as Chicago is responsible for the Chicago Tribune." 
     This is less a defense of Germany and more an indictment of both. The suggestion is made that this is perhaps unfair: there is a chance that Germany at least, may someday return to the realm of decent places. 
     "I think time may do it," allows Woollcott, his last public utterance. Time does indeed do it, to him anyway, and has its revenge. Woollcott suffers a stroke, on air, is hustled out of the studio and dead by midnight, at age 56. The hazards of live broadcast.