"I have a voice!"

     Do you prefer to watch new movies or movies you've already seen?
     It might seem an odd question. Who doesn't want to see a new movie? But given how many films are garbage, the question can be seen as: is it better to take a risk, or go for the sure thing?
     Sometimes I prefer the safety of the familiar. I know I'm going to enjoy "Master and Commander" for the characters, the dialogue, the action. Some other film? Who knows, except it probably won't be as good.
      Or "The King's Speech." I can't tell you how many times I've watched the 2010 film about Lionel Logue, the speech therapist who helped King George VI overcome his stutter in the years before World War II.
     Why that movie? A trio of fabulous actors. Colin Firth plays the stuttering monarch. Firth has a presence that somehow far surpasses his bland handsomeness. Viewers have to like him, even when he is playing an aloof king, or, in "Bridget Jones Diary," a jerk barrister. He's also the cuckold Lord Wessex in "Shakespeare in Love," which put him in the same movie with his star here, Geoffrey Rush, who plays Logue with an unshakable dignity, going toe-to-toe with royalty. "My castle, my rules."
     The third is Helen Bonham Carter, as Queen Elizabeth, who is something of an emissary between the royal world and the grungy environs of an Australian self-taught audiologist. Her face is an essay of pained concern as her husband blubbers that he's a naval officer, not a king. The pivotal moment of the movie is hers as she pops up unexpectedly in the Logue apartment and encounters his wife Myrtle, who learns what her husband's been up to by finding the Queen sitting at her dining room table.

      "It's "Your Majesty" the first time," the royal consort explains, a bit wearily. "After that, it's 'ma'am.' As in 'ham.' Not 'mum' as in 'palm.'"

    The writing is just top notch — the royal couple, his brother, the short-reigning King Edward VIII and the woman he loves, Wallis Simpson, plus the Logues at home, the way their children gather around the radio as war is declared, stand-ins for all those young people about to be swept up and perhaps killed.
    What I didn't know was the story of the film, laid out in the obituary of screenwriter David Seidler, who died last week while fly-fishing in New Zealand at age 86. A thoroughly unexceptional Hollywood journeyman, "The King's Speech" reflected his own experience with stuttering, and shows how important first-hand knowledge is to creativity. His other films — "Tucker" and "Come On, Get Happy: The Partridge Family Story" are uniformly ordinary. Only "The Kings Speech," labored on over decades, stands out as extraordinary. He won the Academy Award for best original screenplay.

    If you haven't seen it, well, you know what to do — you can watch the trailer here. Honestly, I'd rather watch one great movie a dozen times than a dozen so-so movies one time each.

Cook County state's attorney race down to the wire

Clayton Harris III

     Election night tests a news organization. Lots of races, lots of information pouring in on deadline. The paper asked me to write about the state's attorney match-up, probably the most significant race decided Tuesday night. 

     Polls closed at 7 pm. My deadline was 7:45 pm. For 15 long minutes, there were no results at all. Then they began to trickle in. I told my editor the column was finished at 7:43 pm.

     How did I do it? Of course, as with any magic act, preparation is key. I'd already written what I call "A-matter." A background story that could run as-is if — say through a computer glitch —we never got any results at all. The trick was to quickly update the existing story with the best information we had on hand. Which was frustrating, because while we could see Burke was ahead, a winner still hasn't been officially declared. So we did the best we could with the information at hand, which might be the definition of a newspaper.

     There are two speeds in the American criminal justice system: too fast and too slow, and society lurches from one to another.
     Too-fast justice fills the jails and wastes law enforcement resources pursuing petty criminals. Too slow lets the small fish escape to become big fish and leaves law-abiding citizens feeling unprotected against the lash of crime.
     The public doesn't like either for very long. Which puts the Cook County state's attorney — the elected official responsible for 700 lawyers prosecuting crimes among a population greater than Ireland's — in a bind.
     The public — the estimated 20% who voted anyway — made their choice in the Democratic primary Tuesday, leaning toward tough-talking former Judge Eileen O'Neill Burke, playing for Team Too Fast, over Clayton Harris III, representing the too-slow faction, with half the votes counted.
     If elected, Burke would be a pivot away from current two-term State's Attorney Kim Foxx, protege of Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who put the brakes on prosecutions, tossing out thousands of cases, declaring the system "inequitable, unfair and totally unjust” and pushing to be more fair ... to accused criminals.
     Theft of items worth more than $300 could be handled as a felony, but she more than tripled that threshold to $1,000 which, combined with the post-COVID-19 hollowing out of downtown, and the George Floyd riots, created a sense of a Loop awash in unchecked crime.

     That might have been forgiven. But Foxx kneecapped herself in the case of Jussie Smollett, the obscure actor who, in an apparent bid for notoriety, beat himself up in 2019. Foxx botched the prosecution of the case, then botched her handling of the botch.

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River City Marina

 

    Several Chicago architects are remembered for their fondness for particular shapes. Harry Weese, for instance, loved triangles — the city's two triangular buildings, the Metropolitan Correctional Center and the Swiss Hotel, are his. 

    Bertrand Goldberg worked in curves. He's best known for Marina City, the twin corn cob towers between Dearborn and State, just north of the Chicago River. They were iconic symbols of the city, briefly, between their completion in 1967 and when the Picasso sculpture a few blocks south replaced them at the center of our civic imagination.
      Those aren't the only buildings — and I think I'm correct using the plural, since there are two — Goldberg designed downtown. Business Monday morning took me to two of them. First,  his lesser known River City Marina — sort of a squashed, serpentine, version of Marina Towers, with wide oval windows, also on the river, its southern branch,at Wells and Polk. 
     The ground floor is big, sprawling, spread out, mostly empty and poorly marked, and as I searched for the room I was looking for, I passed the study area above. 
    What caught my eye? The books of course. At first glance I thought they were a wall of decorative volumes, with color coded spines. But a second look revealed it to be something worse — a photo mural of books. The giveaway was how outsized the books are — too big to be real. Kinda nightmarish, really. From font of knowledge to exaggerated graphic device in one generation.

      Which raised the question: why? To create a scholarly atmosphere? Be artistic? Fill a blank wall? Then why not use a photo of actual books at ordinary scale? Or heck, install actual shelves and stock them with real books of some sort. A little more cost and effort, sure. But perhaps worth it. Books are cheap enough nowadays, you can buy them by the yard or the pound. As ersatz as that seems, this is worse.

      The book mural seems a triple whammy — books chosen for their dust jacket color. And then photographed. And then made huge. Is that where we are now? I suppose. It didn't help that I had been the only person in my Metra car consulting an actual physical newspaper. Nearly an affectation, like wearing spats.

     I've only stepped in Goldberg's Marina Towers once, years ago. We were looking for a place to live downtown, and my wife and I figured we'd check out the famous, pie-shaped apartments with their balconies overlooking downtown. Only I never made it past the lobby — too dreary. I didn't even like walking through once, and turned around before I got in the elevators, thinking, "I can't come home here." Maybe they've remodeled it since — I don't want to malign the place unfairly. But River City felt the same — we had been there years ago, my wife and I, scouting out places to live. River City seemed the sort of place you'd live on your way to Mars. An architectural misfire, a literal dead end. Do any readers live there? Am I missing something?

    Oh, and the third Goldberg buildings were the Hilliard Tower Apartments on Cermak, passed on the way from River City to McCormick Place. A pair of big round towers, Hillard seems like Marina City grown squat and fat. Much of that housing is for low income seniors. Perhaps I'll be visiting there next. 

Hilliard Tower Apartments

“History repeats itself” — Hellenic Museum to consider voter suppression

Pericles

    The Illinois primary election is Tuesday. With November's pivotal moment in American history looming beyond that. So now might be an apt time to pause and ask ourselves: this whole voting business, where did it come from?
     Partial credit for citing the American Revolution, 1776 and all that. A major step away from being ruled by kings.
     But where did American revolutionaries get the idea? Voting initially sprang from a very specific time and place — Greece 2500 years ago — and like any new tool, it had a specific purpose: to create a new form of power.
     Elections in ancient Greece represented "the new weapon of the popular vote against the old power of family politics" according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Being in charge because you were the son of the ruler was fine, if you were the son of the ruler. But those non-relatives had begun to chafe. Shouldn't their views count? An idea sprang up — ask people to give or withhold their consent, aka democracy.
     Then the question became: who votes? Could foreigners earn the right? About 451 BC, Greek general Pericles changed the Athenian constitution to require that to be a citizen, you had to have Athenian parentage on both sides.
     In April, Chicago's National Hellenic Museum is putting Pericles on trial for fiddling with the constitution.
     "Hero or tyrant?" is how the museum presents the issue. "Audience members will cast their votes to decide the final verdict."
     Raising the subject of voter suppression and xenophobia can't have been an accident.
     "No accident," confessed retired Circuit Court Judge Anna Demacopoulos, a trustee of the museum and co-chair of the event. "This year's presentation is so relevant. You can actually see the first time somebody was accused of voter suppression. Do you protect your citizens or do you do what it takes to retain your power? Which is exactly what leaders might be grappling with right now."
     As if voting rights and treatment of foreigners were not relevance aplenty, there is also the matter of the status of women.

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Flowers. Folks. Forever.

     Sometimes I wonder whether media professionals really think about their audience. The other day on the morning news, WBBM AM 780 ran a notice that the orchid show at the New York Botanical Garden had opened. Why would that go out over the air in Chicago? Without any hint of an extenuating detail that might be of interest to a listenership who were, one and all, not hurrying to the Bronx to see it. What purpose does that serve other than to fill dead air? The item seemed doubly strange, since they'd never mentioned the one at the Chicago Botanic Garden, at least not in my hearing.
    Then again, neither had I, even though my wife and I went a few weeks ago. Maybe because I had nothing particularly noteworthy to say about it. "The flowers are pretty?" Stop the presses. The only mildly substantive observation would be a criticism — last year's orchid show, built around the idea of lens magnifying the unearthly blooms, was packed with information about orchids. While this one, maintaining a circus theme, was mere fun. Not a fact in sight. 

     I just didn't feel like carping about a flower show. (Last year, circumstances dictated that I attend the show three times — squiring people through — and my post, "Orchids — Like sex dolls for bees," was built around a visceral disgust for orchids).   For me — and this might be telling — the prettiest sight wasn't the flowers at all, but a plate in a book on orchids on display in the library. The Chicago Botanic Garden has a considerable library, even though not one visitor in a hundred steps in. I am that one visitor.  

     The Orchid Show of Wonders opened Feb. 10, and runs until March 24. Tickets are $21, but that includes admission to the garden, which has changed its logo — this weekend, in fact. Inspired by the center of a coneflower, it is a colorful seal that well encapsulates the beauty of the place. As for the tagline "Plants. People. Planet." Hmmm.... Again, I wonder whether the audience was considered. "Plants." Not a very enticing word, is it? With that adenoidal "a" sound. Plaaaaaaaants. How long would you drive to see "plants"? And "people." Even worse. Generally considered a negative, particularly among earth-hugging sorts. People are what's causing the problem. Nobody says, "There's a crowd, let's go!" And "planet," well, huff some patchouli oil, transport me to the 1970s and let's all start saving the planet. 

     Since I never criticize another writer's word choice without coming up with an alternate myself, I'd prefer ... oh ... "Flowers. Folks. Forever." An improvement, right? That'll be $10,000 please.

A circus theme throughout.

COVID + 4

     Wednesday was the fourth anniversary of Presidential Proclamation #9994, declaring COVID to be a national emergency. "A moment that changed the world," is the way one story put it.

     I'm not so sure of that. Not that COVID didn't change the world; we still live in the fall-out of its isolation, division, private death and public disorder. I mean whether the proclamation was the decisive moment when the world shifted. In my own memories of the advent of COVID, that day, March 11, doesn't particularly stand out. I did watch Trump's announcement that evening, and snapped a photo of the television. Americans are used to travelling about freely, and the notion that now we no longer could, well, it was frightening. Then again, much of COVID was frightening, except for those who couldn't grasp the situation, which was also scary.
     Still, emotionally, March 11 didn't touch the surprise in mid-February, having lunch in an utterly deserted Chinatown restaurant in New York City, or March 13, seeing the shelves at Target stripped of bread, or March 16, the day before Gov. Pritzker closed the restaurants in the state. Sitting alone in an empty Kamehachi in downtown Northbrook, watching the sushi chef work, thinking, with true dread, "I'm killing myself for a negi hamachi roll."

     Other moments stand out. Wiping our groceries off with disinfectant. Putting on a mask for the first time before going into a store. "I feel like we're going to rob the place," I said to my son. Walking the dog at night, passing knots of neighbors, gathered in folding chairs in their driveway, having a party of sorts, social distancing in the darkness.

     Now COVID is gone, mostly, but not forgotten. Not by me anyway. Others, not so much. 
     "I still can't believe that happened," I sometimes say to my wife, perhaps an indication that it is still happening — almost the dazed remark of a survivor hauled into the lifeboat and wrapped in a wool blanket. I finally came down with COVID last July, and sometimes wonder if it isn't lingering in some ineffable way. 
     Have you noticed how little we think about COVID now? There is no memorial or even talk of a memorial. They're building a monument to fallen journalists in Washington, D.C., while the 1.1 million Americans dead of COVID, and counting, are forgotten, not that we ever considered them much in the first place. I can hardly accept it myself.

     Very little souvenir crap that events invariably produce, if you discount all the little bottles of hand sanitizer that still pop out of junk drawers. The only tangible relic is my vaccine card, which I'm holding onto for future reference. 

     That's another moment I'll never forget — March 15, 2021. My older son, at home with his girlfriend because their school had shut down ("Maybe you should get out before they blow the bridges," I told him on the phone. "Dad," he reminded me. "We live in New Jersey....") had gotten a hard-to-snag vaccine appointment at a Walgreen's two-and-a-half hours away, in Springfield. All the appointments in blue state, rational Chicago were taken. At the time I felt flattered, that he was looking out for me. Only later did it dawn on me that he wanted somebody to drive them there.

     Either way, I assumed that when I got to the Walgreen's in Springfield it would be jammed, like that last scene at the Jakarta airport in "The Year of Living Dangerously," with Mel Gibson waving his passport over his head and pushing through the crowd. 

     Instead the place was empty. Not even any customers, never mind downstaters queuing up for the vaccine they decided they didn't really need. I walked up the empty aisle toward the pharmacy in the back with a sense of wonder. I was excited to get the shot, and later regarded with mingled scorn and bogglement all those who spurned it. Rejecting this one aspect of a modernity they otherwise embrace, drinking purified tap water, speaking into cell phones and enjoying all the other benefits of technology, while scorning this one just because some talk show host told them to. I'll never understand it.

When it comes to Social Security, don't let a scammer sign up first

Pension certificate, 1873 (National Postal Museum)

     When I joined the Chicago Sun-Times — 37 years ago this month — my job was to be half the writing staff of The Adviser, a weekly publication giving readers practical advice: how to raise a dog in the city, fight a traffic ticket, pick a health club (I cooked up that last one because I wanted to find a health club myself, and figured why not combine business and pleasure? Bottom line: avoid scams that present membership as an appreciating investment and pick something close to you, so you might actually go).
     I wasn't with the features department long — on my second day at work, the city editor stopped by to say he wanted to lure me to the news side. But The Adviser gave me an affinity for those practical, how-to-get-a-stain-out-of-a-broadloom-rug type of story. A good news article makes readers think about something, a great one makes them do something.
     In that light, "How Fraudsters Break Into Social Security Accounts and Steal Benefits," by Tara Siegel Bernard, which ran Sunday on the front page of the New York Times, must be a great article, because I don't believe I've ever snapped into action the way I did after reading it.
     The story begins with an 88-year-old woman who had her Social Security benefits redirected by a criminal, who changed the bank account her check was sent to.
     "This particular fraud — where criminals use stolen personal information to break into online Social Security accounts or create new ones, and divert benefits elsewhere — has plagued people for more than a decade," Bernard writes.
     And I realized: I'd never signed up online with Social Security to create an account, at myaccount.ssa.gov. So anybody who got my Social Security number — from a data breach, say — could go online, sign up for me, apply for my benefits which, being 63, I'm eligible to start receiving, then direct the money wherever they pleased. And I'd never know it happened, maybe not for years, until I go to retire and discover that someone is already receiving my benefits.
     I leaped up from the breakfast table, bolted upstairs and immediately signed up.

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