Unexpected visitors

 

     "Hey honey!" I said, looking up from a magazine. "I think the 'Northbrook Voice' is casting shade on our house."
     I was reading the January/February issue, a page two story headlined, "Visionary That Helped Make Our Village What It Is Today." That should be "Visionary Who Helped..." but no matter. The article was about Edward D. Landwehr, the postal carrier who was one of 35 men to sign the petition incorporating the village of Shermerville. When a contest was held to rename the town, his suggestion — Northbrook — got the most votes. The leafy suburban paradise I call home.
     My interest was personal — we live in Ed Landwehr's old house on Center Avenue, built in 1905. The Village Hall, public library and old water tower in my backyard are in his old cornfield. The article mentions the house.    

     "Ed and Annie lived on a large piece of property on Center Street," the unnamed author writes. "Although changed, their house still stands today."

     "Although changed...?" Ouch. 

     Tell me if I'm being overly sensitive.... 

     "Although changed..." 

     Yes, the house has faded piebald olive aluminum siding on it now, and a two-story addition on the west side added in the relative yesterday of 1959. A master bedroom above and a rec room below. The place would be quite small without them. I replaced the rough front porch made  of two-by-fours and crumbling brick steps with wooden steps and a nice railing made of lathework. And maybe I'm being touchy — not without reason. It IS my house, after all. But that "although changed..." Do I detect a note of asperity, of censure, in that? Is there a house that hasn't changed since 1905? At least it's still here. The place was sold to us "as is," practically a tear down. The kitchen was a ruin, floor sloping, counters pulled away from the walls. We didn't have a working stove for the first two years we lived there. But we decided to keep it because a) we liked it and b) we couldn't afford to build a new one.

    So yes, we bloody well changed the house, all we could. I plan to change it more.

    Though changed, it is not without interest. I was attuned to this topic because of something that happened in November. I looked out the front window and was surprised to find a half dozen people, gazing at the house, taking pictures. Hesitant to imagine that this might be about — are these the piqued readers that John Kass so worries about? Come to get me? Unlike John, I didn't bolt to Indiana like a terrified bunny and start digging a burrow. Instead I went outside and said hello. They were descendents of Ed and Annie Landwehr, in town for a civic event at the historical society, honoring their ancestor.

     Of course I invited them in — we try to keep a modestly neat abode for just such a contingency. They went from room to room, sharing memories. A grandfather had lain in state in our front parlor. We showed them that the pocket doors between the living and dining room still work. They were curious, friendly, polite and grateful.

      I have a letter I found at the historical society from Ed's son Martin, and sent it to his descendents. I hadn't read the letter in many years. The house was built without bathrooms — that was in the backyard, and Saturday night bathwater was heated on the stove in the kitchen. I was charmed that the same line of evergreens lining the driveway were planted when the house was built, as was the hedge of van houtte spirea that I have battled to keep alive.

     A sane man would have torn that spirea out years ago. That's what the neighbors across First Avenue did. But I am not a sane man, when it comes to spirea, and I estimate I've spent nearly a thousand dollars and planted 15 shrubs if I've planted one. It's worth it every spring when that thing turns into a bed of snowy white. Were Ed Landwehr to suddenly arise and walk among us next month, he would see the thing from a block away, and it would make him happy. Although I imagine heaven is just silly with vanhoutte spirea.

     I thought I should write my own letter someday, encapsulating the quarter century my family has spent in the house. We raised two boys here; I wrote five books in the upstairs library. I like to imagine it would be of interest to a future owner, though the sad reality is that anyone who buys the place will certainly tear it down to build one of those jumbo white faux farmhouses with black trim that are all the rage. Me, I prefer an actual farmhouse, that once was associated with an actual farm — complete with a horse, stabled in the garage in the living memory of our next door neighbors when we first moved in. There are two horseshoes nailed to a main beam in the basement — for good luck. The wood is cracked, but holding — one of the first things we did when we moved in was add a support brace, to keep the place together.

 

     

"Bésame, soy irlandés!"

 

     Some aspects of Chicago life are so scoured raw by excess attention — particularly from advertising copywriters trying to inject a bit of local color into their plugs — that mere mention of them is enough to draw a wince of pain. Deep-dish pizza and ketchup on hot dogs leap to mind. Please, no mas.
     The St. Patrick's Day version is dyeing the Chicago River green and chugging green beer in Irish pubs. You'd think these were Ireland's only contributions to the world.
     As St. Patrick's Day looms, I try to shine a light in the more neglected corners. In previous years I shared a bit of the work of the Irish writers whose grim black-and-white portraits stare mutely from pub walls, or celebrated Hazel Lavery, the Chicago beauty name-checked in a Yeats poem, whose face graced Irish banknotes for nearly half a century.
     This year I'd like to mention famous Irish revolutionaries Michael Collins, Daniel O'Connell and Che Guevara.
     Ireland's revolutionary spirit was born, never forget, from nearly a millennium of oppression, as the English invaded Ireland in 1169. In 1494 ...
     What's that? Still chewing on Che Guevara? What's he doing there? The Argentine revolutionary whose face stared down from countless 1960s college dorm rooms? Not aware, are you, of the Irish roots of the man who helped overthrow Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959?
     "The first thing to note is that in my son's veins flowed the blood of Irish rebels," said his father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, whose forebear Patrick Lynch left Galway in 1749, bound for Argentina.
     The connection isn't a big secret — Ireland put Guevara on a stamp in 2017 to mark the 50th anniversary of his death. Though I learned about the Irish/Argentine connection in a more direct fashion.

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'Working directly from Nature is the best way'

Deering Memorial Library, Northwestern University

     The Fine Arts Building has to be on anybody's short list of favorite downtown buildings, with its elevator operators — the last in the city, soon to be phased out — its sun-filled fourth floor atrium and general air of seedy artistic casualness, home to violin makers and  mouthpiece fitters, shoestring opera theaters and puppet troupes. 

     Yes, in recent years, there is a pang for the loss of the Artist's Cafe —I'm tempted to decry the singular possessive, but what artist worth his or her salt isn't pretty singular in nature? It was a splendid burger, pie and coffee diner that time forgot, with patrons including Johnny Carson and Mick Jagger, the perfect place to while away an hour waiting for a concert to start. Closed five years now.

     I was there recently visiting a brass instrument showroom on the second floor, and returned last Friday to kill  few minutes before the ACLU Luncheon at the Hilton down the block by browsing the lovely bookstore on the second floor.
    My attention was drawn by an exhibit of paintings there by Don Yang. The paintings were created en plein air, or "in the open air" meaning it wasn't done in a studio, but painted on an easel outside, in front of the scene being depicted. 

     I asked Yang about it — what does painting in the outdoors bring that can't be found painting, say, off a photograph? 

      "Nothing like painting and drawing the real thing on location seeing/feeling the true color and atmosphere," he replied. "What we see in photograph or screen shot is not ‘real’ in the sense of true color. Those images are heavily dependent upon the printer and paper (photo) or how computer/tablet screen is calibrated. Never same as what I ‘feel' with my eyes. Even the gloomiest day on location offers more vibrant colors and sense of presence than a photo reference.

     "Though I do enjoy my studio work, and often have to work off of photo references, working directly from Nature is the best way to learn and experience the true light and color.
Different season, different day, different weather, and my different mood of the day yields different paintings.
     "I didn’t understand how Monet felt he could ‘get away with’ painting the same haystack and consider them all different paintings until I started taking my own painting gears outdoors.
     "To me, plein air painting is just as much of an experience as it is a result."
     Born in South Korea, Yang came to the United States as a teenager. After a stint in the Army, he settled in Chicago, painting and teaching. He's chairperson of the fine arts department of the American Academy of Art College, a small, for-profit school teaching art and design.
     I like the dappled light in the paintings, the rich natural colors, and the way he frames his images. Yang often paints familiar Chicago landmarks, but from unexpected angles. Another thing that struck me about the painting was how affordable they are — $500, $800. Not cheap, but not an unimaginable fortune either. They struck me as a good special event gift for someone, and yes, he does commissions, if there is a certain home or part of the city that you or a loved one has particular appreciation for.
     You can see dozens more examples of his work on his website, or reach Don Yang at donyangart@gmail.com.

Fourth Presbyterian Church Courtyard

Give Scientology a break!

     Preconceptions can blind you, so you see what's festering in the back of your mind rather than what's shining right in front of your eyes.
     Take stories about the opening of a new Scientology center in the South Loop. The accounts focused on the accusations directed at the church, that it is a "criminal enterprise."
     Scientology stories always trot out the controversies.
     While downplaying what is, to me, the bigger news: somebody opened something in downtown Chicago. The corpse is twitching! The headline in the Sun-Times was "Church of Scientology expands in Chicago," which is like topping a story on the Resurrection with "Ex-carpenter goes for walk."
     I should show my hand here. All religions are scams, to one degree or another. Which is not to say they are without value. People can derive deep emotional moral satisfaction from being defrauded — the past decade of American history proves that. Life is squishy, painful and short, why not embroider existence with some mystic hoo-ha?
     Look at the charges outlined in the Sun-Times story: "The California lawsuit, filed by former Scientologists, accuses the group of, among other things: unpaid child labor, identity theft, covering up sexual assaults ..."
     Are there not well-established churches — no names, please! — also regularly rocked with at least a few of those accusations? I believe there are.
    That said, Scientology does have a way of standing out from the crowd.
     "An anti-democratic authoritarian personality cult that will not tolerate critical comments (however justified) about its policies or leaders," is how Stephen A. Kent, sociology professor emeritus at the University of Alberta, described Scientology.
     In Scientology's defense, there's a lot of that going around.
     Of course, opening a new business isn't the hard part. It's the staying open part that is the trick. And here, like any hopeful restaurant or internet startup, Scientology's new center faces challenges, as Kent explained when we spoke.

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Flashback 2012: Are Oscar winners cursed? Only to overly credulous media

     What goes around, comes around. As in 2012, we've been without snow so long that we've forgotten what it's like. And it's Oscar time, again. This column from a dozen years ago recently popped up in my Facebook feed, and I thought I'd run it today, to get you in the mood for the Academy Awards. 

     Thus Chicagoans awoke to the indignity of snow Friday morning. Snow in February! Imagine that! Two whole inches and we can’t hope to see the sun until Saturday, with balmier, mid-40s temperatures not returning until the next day. The indignity of it.
    Admit it — you were feeling sorry for yourself. I sure was. I was almost offended, as if this weren’t allowed anymore, and somebody slipped up. Half a warm winter and we fancy that winter has been outlawed.

Odd people II

     Strange indeed. People also automatically embrace the most extreme explanation, ignoring less flashy causes. A streak in the sky? Must be a mother ship from the space aliens who constantly hover around the periphery of our vision, keeping tabs on us.
     Some of this is biological. There was little downside to seeing a murky shape in the dark and thinking, "Bear!" It served us a whole lot better, in evolutionary terms than shrugging and thinking, "Oh well, must be a bush." Those folks tended not to survive.
     We are machines of innate exaggeration.
     Still — "The Oscar Curse" — really?
     "A mysterious jinx that has plagued past winners of the golden statuette," CNBC.com reported last week. "While logic would dictate that winning Hollywood’s most prestigious award should catapult its winner into the A-list, the sad fact is that many Oscar-winning performers have seen their career trajectories plummet."
     Mysterious? Sometimes I’m ashamed to be a journalist, they can be so credulous. The notion has been repeated again and again in the weeks leading up to Sunday’s Oscars.
     None of the stories I saw breathed a whisper of what is really happening, perhaps because that would take actual logical, or rather, statistical, thinking. Two concepts.
     First, "Regression to the Mean." If there is an average performance — say the typical baseball batting average is .261 — and you excel, say one season hitting .350, then your subsequent performance will tend to deteriorate toward the average, to preserve it.
     So if you flip a coin and it come up heads five times in a row, while the odds are always 50-50 on your next flip, at some point you’ll likely have a run of tails, since the odds of heads will gravitate toward 50 percent.
     Thus, if the vast majority of movies are garbage — and they sure are — and an actor appears in an exceptional movie (the kind that generate Academy Awards) then the odds are greater that the actor will return to trash as opposed to somehow magically being projected into another great movie.
     The second concept at work here is non-random sampling. A piece last week in RedEye singled out five actors who were supposedly "curse victims" — Halle Berry, Cuba Gooding Jr., Roberto Benigni, Reese Witherspoon and Mira Sorvino — and cited their Oscar-winning performances and their subsequent dogs.
     They seemed to think that proves their point: Look! Halle Berry was in "Gothika" after she won an Oscar for "Monster’s Ball."
       The story didn’t mention that Berry was in plenty of lousy movies before winning her Academy Award. How can "X-Men: The Last Stand" be offered up as evidence of the curse when Berry also appeared in the nearly-as-bad "X-Men" prior to winning?
     You could just as easily gather together five actors who won Oscars and didn’t immediately appear in lousy movies. Katharine Hepburn won an Oscar in 1967 for "Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner" and won again the next year for "The Lion in Winter." Meryl Streep was nominated for 17 Academy Awards and won twice, and while Margaret Thatcher fans might grumble about her latest, you can’t say she’s been in a bad film.
     The Oscar Curse is like the Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx or the sophomore slump, a fun fallacy reported as fact by those who should know better. If you excel now you’ll tend — on average — to slip later. Maybe that’s too sad a truth to report unvarnished.
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, February 24, 2012

Drink poison or eat Chex? The choice is yours.

Option A: "The Death of Socrates," by Jacques Louis David (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Should I drink a cup of poison for breakfast or eat a bowl of Wheat Chex instead?
     Let's consider my options.
     Taking poison is problematic. First, because I don't have any poison. But let's say I did. Let's say I have some, ah, hemlock ... a musty greenish liquid. Let's pour it into a lovely kylix — good Scrabble word — like the one Socrates is handed in the painting of his suicide in ancient Athens.
     Why not take a sip? Well, poison is bad for you. Drawbacks begin with dilation of the pupils and dizziness, followed by depressed heartbeat, paralysis of the central nervous system and death.
     Death is bad — as difficult as the world can be, particularly of late, we need to remember the sun rises every morning. The weather isn't always clear. You can't always see the sun. Clouds can block it out. But the sun is still there, somewhere, with its promise of a new day. Remember that.
     Speaking of optimism, on the upside, poison can release you from the burden of existence. It isn't as messy as jumping in front of a train. Quieter than a gun.
     Chex is not without drawbacks. All those carbohydrates. Not much protein, so breakfast can run out midday and leave you hungry. Plus I've gotten into the habit of eating my morning bowl with blueberries. Blueberries are expensive. They can be sour, turn moldy. Yet without them the cereal seems dry, plain, unadorned.
     On the upside, Chex is delicious and easy to serve. No peeling or baking. And it won't kill you the way hemlock can — that's important. Plus there's a box in my pantry.
     Poison or Chex? Honestly, it isn't a difficult choice. For me anyway. As for you, well, I'm sorry, but you're on your own. The media does not presume to make this kind of decision for our audience anymore.
     Nor is breakfast the only choice you face. With Super Tuesday behind us, and Donald Trump and Joe Biden winning big, the November election suddenly looms, hurtling up at us like a canyon floor in a Road Runner cartoon.
     Trump or Biden? Both have disadvantages and advantages, and I would never suggest one over the other. I literally can't, given the newspaper's 501(c)3 charity status. But that doesn't mean important issues cannot be raised in a fair, balanced way.
     As with hemlock versus Chex, there are many factors to consider.
     Donald Trump is a liar, bully fraud and traitor. Those aren't insults, but dry journalistic descriptions of past practices. He's a liar because he continuously tells lies, a stream of clear, unambiguous, well-documented prevarications. The Washington Post counted 30,573 false or misleading claims during Trump's presidency.
     A bully, in that he habitually picks on people weaker than himself — those two Georgia poll workers come to mind. They had done nothing wrong, yet Trump upended their lives. Ditto for clerks in various courtrooms where he is being tried on 91 criminal offenses. Or the women he groped.
     A fraud, since he's been found guilty of various scams.
     And traitor because he fomented an insurrection on the Capitol trying to derail the democratic process on Jan. 6, 2021. Lest you forget, which many already have. Plus his bottomless affection for America's enemies, like Vladimir Putin.
     On to Trump's advantages. He gives Americans the key to his magic kingdom, a topsy-turvy fantasy world where words mean their opposites, facts flutter around like butterflies, and you can hate whomever you like. Looking for personal redemption? Trump offers himself as a Jesus-like figure. He packed the Supreme Court with religious zealots who banned abortion in half the country. .
     Then there's Joe Biden. An inside-the-beltway political hack since dinosaurs roamed the earth. He's old — 81 — stiff, and tottering.
     Since Biden is president of the United States, you can blame him for anything the country does or does not do: the pro-Israel policy that the United States has followed since Biden was in 1st grade. The border crisis. Inflation.
     Or credit him. Biden too has advantages — I would start with him not being a liar, bully, fraud and traitor. Plus infrastructure. Mobilizing Europe after Russia invaded Ukraine. He isn't planning to kneecap Social Security. Did I mention his not being a traitor? That's kinda key for me.
     But then, I'd never put my thumb on the scale. It's your choice. Maybe you like traitors. A lot of people do, apparently. I almost said, "You're in good company." But you're really not.

Option B: Wheat Chex with blueberries.

  

  

Establishing a perimeter

 

     Business took me by City Hall just after 12 noon Thursday. Prompt fellow that I am, I got there a few minutes before my appointment, so killed time by wandering around the ground floor. Sometimes there are interesting displays, for a holiday or civic organization. 
     Nothing in the display department. But there were a number of police officers, milling about, conferring. Six, eight, maybe 10. "Establishing a perimeter" is the phrase that came to mind. There were several cops on the street, standing watch,and inside the doors, creating space, directing people in that space to step away. Waiting expectantly. Obviously something was about to happen. I took up position on a step and waited too.
     In hurried Mayor Brandon Johnson. At first I felt disappointment — I had planned to never set eyes on  him in the four years he'll be in office until he is replaced by literally whoever wants the job. My personal protest to his contempt for the press, so vital in a free society. And now that plan had been scuttled. Too late now; there he was, right in front of me. A dapper man rushing by.

     For one second I considered shouting a greeting. "Hey Mayor Johnson!" But didn't want to startle him — or all those police officers. I'd end up wrestled to the ground. And what would be the effect on the mayor? If half of what one hears is true, he's a man under pressure, someone to be pitied, not confronted. Besides, the cops made sure I was far enough away that I couldn't casually extend my hand and say a few words. He'd glance in my direction and keep going. At least I can say I've never spoken to him; a consolation prize. I remained mum.
     A few seconds, he was in the elevator and gone. Later, a person in-the-know told me — off the record, alas, — how he is the worst Chicago mayor in city history, and the civic helm is spinning while downtown crumbles and money flees as if Chicago were on fire. I like to think the situation isn't as bad as that, and considered bringing up Levi Boone, who sparked the Beer Riot. But that was in 1855, rather a reach back in history. I hope things aren't that bad. Then again, hope is not a strategy.