Where to go? Book bird-dogs intriguing Chicago places

Phil Sipka, at the Kusanya Cafe.

     Englewood is a long way to go for a cup of coffee. But I like coffee. So when I heard about Kusanya Cafe, a coffeehouse at 69th and Green, I decided to slide over for a cup. Most Chicagoans never go to Englewood for any reason. They associate it with murder, not coffee. But even the worst neighborhoods are also just that — neighborhoods — and I figured, if people can live there, I can visit.
     Inspiration came from a book called "111 Places in Chicago That You Must Not Miss," published by German publisher Emons Verlag. That aspect is what initially caught my attention; I hoped to smirk at some foreigner's wildly mistaken impressions of Chicago. The book arrived from Germany; alas, it was written by Amy Bizzarri, a Chicago Public Schools teacher who lives by Logan Square.
     "I have a severe case of wanderlust," she told me. "But I can't go to India, so I go to Devon Avenue. It's my way of traveling. I feel I know a lot of hidden corners of city.
     The Chicago volume is one of dozens of "111 Places" books Emons sells, featuring the hidden charms of cities from New Dehli to Berlin to Istanbul. 
     "I saw the New York edition and thought, 'I'm the perfect person to write this for Chicago,'" Bizzarri said.
     She's right; she is. It's hard to pull off a book like this. You don't want to be too familiar. No point alerting folks to Wrigley Field. But you don't want to be too esoteric either. 

      Bizzarri succeeds. She finds the sweet spot, visiting many worthwhile Chicago treasures, ranging across the city and the spectrum of culture: music, museums, shops, restaurants. She hits many of my favorite obscure places, including the Sky Chapel atop the First United Methodist Church, with its bas-relief of Jesus pondering the skyline of Chicago circa 1952, and Red Square Spa, the former Division Street Russian Baths. The book is illustrated by creative, colorful pictures snapped by Chicago photographer Susie Inverso.
     A few places struck me as too well-known: the Colleen Moore Fairy Castle in the Museum of Science and Industry, for instance. And a couple are too obscure: The School of Shoemaking and Leather Arts is whimsical, but it isn't somewhere you visit but somewhere you enroll. If anybody reads this book and decides to become a cobbler, I'd love to hear about it. 
     Quibbles aside, the book's main value, for me, will be as a tip sheet, bird-dogging intriguing places I've somehow never heard of and now can visit. Chicago Honey Co-op? Big Monster Toys on South Racine? I'm on my way.

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Bumped into Phil Corboy the other day...

  

    Attended the Chicago Bar Association Christmas show Thursday night. I almost passed on it; I'm a homebody. But I couldn't very well mock the mayor for not going and then skip out on it myself. There's enough hypocrisy going around without me adding a cupful to the ocean.
    I'm glad I went. The show was boisterous fun. My favorite song was an ode to personal injury litigation, "Duty and the Breach" sung to "Beauty and the Beast." 
     It seemed apt, since the reception beforehand was held on the second floor of the CBA headquarters , in Philip H. Corboy Hall, under the watchful gaze of a big oil painting of the great Chicago litigator. He passed away five years ago, and it was good to see him again. I went over to say hello.
     It's always a little odd to see guys I knew lionized in semi-permanent form: the bust of Jack Brickhouse in Pioneer Court, or Kup gesturing—with what I hope is contempt—at Trump Tower, squatting on his former home. 
     I got to know Corboy a little—he was a good man, proud of his family and his profession, helpful when I had a question about the law, even more helpful when I got in trouble with the law myself. Not every friend of mine stood up; he did. We first met when, researching something else, I noticed his first case, and wrote the column below:


     Two men, friends since childhood, got in a drunken fight, picked up pistols and killed each other. Their life insurance policies had clauses denying payment if death was caused while committing a felony.
     The widows turned to a young lawyer, Philip H. Corboy, for help. Corboy convinced a jury that the men were too drunk to have the intent needed to commit a felony.
     That was Nov. 11, 1950—50 years ago next Saturday—the first rung in what has been a climb to the legal summit: Corboy is the most visible lawyer in Chicago and among the most successful personal injury trial attorneys in the country.
     I sat down with Corboy last week in his 21st floor Dearborn Street office. I wanted a glimpse of what a man learns after 50 years of representing the most grievously injured people involved in the most heartbreaking cases, and extracting compensation out of corporate America.
     Sitting at his antique, four-sided English partner's desk, with a splendid panoramic skyline behind him, Corboy radiated success, confidence and energy. I couldn't help but be struck by how tremendously handsome he is; surprisingly so for a man in his mid-70s, with pale blue eyes and pure white hair. He looks like Kirk Douglas and has an actor's eloquence, honed by a half century of arguing before judges.
     "I have never calculated the number of cases I've tried to a jury," he said. "I've 'tried' thousands of cases where the case gets ready for trial, you have a jury in the box, you spend four days trying the case, it gets settled. Ninety percent of these cases get settled."
     In part, no doubt, out of respect for Corboy's track record. Many people are under the impression that Corboy has never lost a case. That is not true. He ended up losing that first case—the judge threw out the jury's verdict. And he lost a case in 1985, though it was reinstated on appeal and his client ended up with $1.35 million.
     But that's about it. This near-perfect track record has lent Corboy's 24-lawyer firm a certain air of invulnerability. The firm of Corboy & Demetrio turns away 19 out of 20 cases, so when he represents a client—such as the family of the woman who was killed when a pane of glass fell from the CNA Building—it is a sign of the unfairness of the tragedy and reliable foreshadowing that some deep pocket is going to be turned inside out.
     "There is no segment of the citizenry population I have not represented," Corboy said. "I've represented prostitutes. I've represented monsignors in the Catholic Church. I've represented ministers. I've represented rabbis. I've represented housewives. I've represented convicted felons."
     While certain professions scream at the cost of litigation—doctors, pundits, politicians— Corboy pointed out that when a tragedy happens to them, sudden changes of heart frequently occur.
     "We represent many, many doctors who sue other doctors," said Corboy. "When a newspaperman is hurt, he comes to us. We get politicians who have voted for tort reform who send us their children who have been hurt."
     Despite the speed at which people rush to law to address their problems—or perhaps because of it—lawyers are generally held in low regard, and personal injury lawyers receive particular scorn. It doesn't bother Corboy at all.
     "Lawyers in my type of work are quite secure they are doing the right thing," he said. "When you watch movies, with tension between the local police and the FBI, how does the FBI come off? Interferers? Dolts? Do you think the secure FBI man cares?"
     In his time he has seen law change, he says, for the worse, a "crankiness" born out of the practice of winning cases not in courtrooms, but by drowning your opponent in a roomful of documents.
     "Corporate America," Corboy said, "insurance America, medical America, are in the . . ."—here he chooses his words carefully— ". . . business of properly protecting their clients with devices that are meant to precipitate the generation of paper."
     He has been involved in many important cases; his firm represented the families of six of the seven victims of the Tylenol poisonings. Perhaps Corboy's most influential case came in 1965, when he represented the owner of a race horse killed in a freak accident at Arlington Park.
     Corboy won a $93,708.33 judgment for the worth of the horse, which was ironic because at the time in Illinois there was a cap on the wrongful death of human beings of $30,000.
     "If it was the jockey who was killed instead of the horse, his widow could have only collected $30,000," said Corboy, whose testimony in Springfield did much to remove such artificial caps.
     We spoke for two hours. The problem with a subject like Corboy is that one barely scratches the surface, and then it is time to stop.
            —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Nov. 5, 2000

     

Motherhood hasn't mellowed Amanda Palmer

     I don't watch TV much. But occasionally, when I want to unwind, I'll dip into YouTube and look around for something new.
     Last week, on a Sunday, I noticed a new Pink video. I like Pink, and admire her taut, well-produced videos, for first-rate songs such as the dark, decadent "Sober," with its establishing shots of an overcast Stockholm, or the heartbreaking journey through divorce's lasting impact in  "Family Portrait," maybe my favorite song of hers.
      This new one, however, "Beautiful Trauma," is just dreck, in my eyes. The same tired cotton candy 1950s imagery that was trite decades ago. A jarring literalness. At "the pill I keep taking" she gobbles some pills. The cross-dressing that Annie Lennox was doing in 1984. And the song itself? True, not many songs work the first time you hear them. But unpromising. I've listened to it twice and have no idea what she's singing about.
    No big deal. Performers peak and enter their downward limbo, a shadow of themselves. No matter how sharp and hungry—Ani DiFranco—they go flat and out-of-focus and whatever spark they have gutters. To be honest, I didn't think about it.
    The next day, however, the very next day, in one of those intriguing real-life juxtapositions, Twitter served up Amanda Palmer's cover of Pink Floyd's "Mother."
     I gave it a watch.
     First, what a great choice, for Palmer to reach into the nightmarish "Wall" double album and serve up this lament, so necessary in the hideous era we find ourselves in, as Donald Trump and his followers distort everything good and decent about America. A funhouse mirror reflecting our very worst selves.
     Savor the fierce scowl on Palmer's face when the video begins. I can't remember ever seeing a singer so pissed off in a music video, and rightly so. We all are, or should be. The elegant, unsettling imagery, the string ensemble, the piggish politicians, the Trump figure, the allegorical escape/rebellion, the children building their little wall—literal too, in its own way. But somehow it works here. It all works.
    I won't give away the surprise ending, beyond to say that it's there, and I think Palmer is about the only singer who would do that. People sometimes accuse her of being an exhibitionist. Maybe so. Or maybe just fearless. Either way, it jarred me. Now there's something you don't see in every music video...
     Very few music videos are artistic, or engaging, or worthy of thought or a second glance—Sia's "Chandelier" and the other way-creepy vignettes with pre-pubescent dancer Maddie Ziegler come to mind. I have no idea what Sia's trying to convey in these, but boring they are not.
     Maybe it's that I feel a bit of residual kinship of Palmer after meeting her a few years back, and reading her book. I assumed she had disappeared into motherhood, having had a baby a couple years ago (Duh, "Mother." I just thought of that connection. Making the song doubly apt).
     Not that creativity is always rewarded—the Pink video, released Nov. 21, had 16 million hits when I looked at it. The Palmer video, released five days earlier, had 20,000.  No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. (Although, to be fair, "Chandelier" has 1.7 billion views, so I suppose the message is, if you're a big enough star to begin with, you can take risks, which circles back to Pink and the surrender of "Beautiful Trauma.")
     Singly, I'd never murmur a word on either video. And I am no Lester Bangs, so I hope you'll forgive this foray into contemporary music criticism. But somehow, the interplay of the two videos made them worth mentioning, fodder for a Saturday, and since you'd probably otherwise never encounter the Palmer video, I thought I'd point it out. What do you think?


   

Bruce Springsteen's darkness not just on the edge of town

     Bruce Springsteen was our Elvis.
     When I became a teenager in the mid-1970s, the original King of Rock and Roll was an over-the-hill joke. But Bruce? On the cover of both Time and Newsweek, young, raw, supremely talented.
     His music ticked off the milestones of my life: howling along with "Rosalita" in a circle of beer-soaked freshmen. Screaming myself hoarse to the man himself live at McGaw Hall.
     The Boss had my back. When I was gathering my courage to get married, he offered up "Tunnel of Love," his crawl through the carnival of matrimony.
     His music was epic, inspirational, almost protective. I remember listening to his live album on a Walkman during two weeks wandering Port au Prince in 1987, a sonic talisman against the overwhelming reality of Haiti. I might be alone in the Cite de Soleil slum, but I was born in the USA. No retreat, no surrender.
     Springsteen even introduced me to the indignities of age, when I played his music for my own teenage sons. Without hesitation, proud, revealing a wonder. Give a listen to this, boys. I was genuinely flabbergasted when they greeted his music with a shrug. "The songs are all the same, dad," one said. I wilted, the magician with a stream of cards tumbling out of his sleeve. Oh right. I too will grow old and everything I care about will be mocked as a joke.
     Fanhood faded. Years passed. Then a few months ago I joined Audible, and one of its quirks is that it charges you for a book a month. You might as well pick something and listen. I chose "Born to Run," narrated by the Boss himself. A nostalgia trip.
     The first half is his laser-guided-missile climb from working class Freehold, New Jersey, his chain-smoking blue collar father's taunts burning in his ears. Once Springsteen becomes a rock star, however, the book really gets interesting. Turns out becoming rich and famous was the easy part.
     "At the end of the day, I was simply a guy rarely comfortable in his own skin," he writes.
     Panic attacks. Clinical depressions that lasted 18 months. Medication. He calls himself "broken," "damaged goods," adrift in "an ocean of despair," lashed by "torrents of self-loathing."
     Stability, marriage, a home, kids all elude him. It turns out that while I was dreaming of being Bruce Springsteen, Bruce Springsteen was dreaming of being me.
     His book, published last year, is a tremendous gift to those who struggle through this difficult life, a.k.a., just about everybody. Springsteen lays himself bare with rare candor. He recounts 30 years of therapy. Nobody looks cool weeping in his psychologist's office, but Bruce isn't trying to be cool. He's trying to do in a book what he does in his songs: tell the truth and maybe help people make sense of things.
     "Born to Run" really sings when when his three kids show up.
     "You're gonna miss it," his wife, Patty Scialfa, warns, of their children's early morning routine, leading to this:    

      The next morning, grumbling, stolid faced, I rolled out of bed at seven a.m. and found my way downstairs. "What do I do?"

      She looked at me and said, "Make the pancakes."

     Make the pancakes? I'd never made anything but music my entire life. I...I...I...don't know how! 

      "Learn."

     He does. Springsteen also tries to shield his children from his fame. When people stop him for autographs, he tells his kids he is "Barney for adults." And he shares a sentence that every prospective parent should be made to memorize before being allowed to procreate: "At the end of the day, as parents, you are their audience. They are not meant to be yours."

     Much hard-won wisdom is here, the truest being that no success is huge enough to inoculate a person from the sting of living. There is great comfort here for we ordinary schlubs trying to get through the day. If Bruce Frickin' Springsteen has to fight to be happy— the struggle continues—has to work hard to attain the serenity we all seek, and can be this honest about it, how can any of us be ashamed of our struggles?
     "At the end of the day," Springsteen writes, "life trumps art, always." He says it twice.

"Tiny, fey, Irish, honest, quiet, otherworldly, and superb"

Gemze de Lappe, far left, leads "Oklahoma" dancers through rehearsal in 2013.

    The hardest part of my job is convincing organizations to go along with a novel idea for a story. I'll think of an angle—who tunes pianos at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra? how do they feed all those fish at the Shedd Aquarium?—and then spend YEARS trying to convince someone to let me in to report it. They resist, I believe, because it isn't the precise facet they want to ballyhoo at that particular moment. But it might also have something to do with my blunt, I-must-do-this-NOW manner. I hope not.

     My relationship with the Lyric Opera of Chicago is different, unique really. They will actually invite me drop by a rehearsal and look around for some aspect that I find interesting. This takes a bit of courage on their part, as they aren't always happy about what I ultimately fix on, or the approach I take. But they tolerate my attention, and I'm grateful for that.
     The moment that best illustrates this process is when, hanging out at the rehearsals for "Oklahoma" in 2013, I noticed a tiny, white-haired woman in her 90s going over choreography with the show's dancers.
     "Who's that?" I asked. It was Gemza de Lappe, who danced in the original touring production in 1943 and kept the flame of the show alive for the next 70 years. Obviously I had my subject.
     De Lappe died a few weeks ago, without any notice in Chicago, and I thought it apt to revisit my column on her life and work, and a few photos of her, snapped, alas, from a distance with a primitive iPhone 4S. 

     When Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers were writing their first musical together, "Oklahoma!," they wanted spunky farm girl Laurey Williams to dream "a big circus ballet" that would give the audience something gorgeous to see.
     That was the plan. Until they ran into the genius of Agnes de Mille, whom they had seen choreograph Aaron Copland's "Rodeo" and tapped to create the dances for "Oklahoma!" Though it was her first major Broadway show, she told the musical icons that a lighthearted ballet was a dreadful idea.
     "People don't have dreams like that," she said. "They have anxiety dreams. It should be a dream of Laurey's terrors. Also, you have no sex in this show. Nice girls dream rather dirty dreams. They do."
     That nightmare dance is the pivotal scene in this landmark musical, which opens May 4 at Lyric Opera of Chicago. After presenting the Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein musical "Show Boat" as part of its subscription season last year, Lyric launches its American Musical Theater Initiative, a five-year series devoted to the works of Rodgers & Hammerstein, with "Oklahoma!" Programmed outside of Lyric's regular subscription season, the American Musical Theatre works are part of the company's campaign to reach new audiences.
     In "Oklahoma!," de Mille's choreography made a dramatic break from the "one-two-three-kick" routines of earlier musicals, the first where dance and songs are not threaded together by a flimsy plot, but welded into one cohesive work of art. A masterpiece.
     "The show changed the course of musical theater, it was a watershed event," said "Oklahoma!" director Gary Griffin, who previously directed "The Merry Widow" and "The Mikado" for Lyric. "This is the first show where dance rose to the level of significant storytelling, particularly the dream ballet, an essential [element] to the story."
     And essential to dance is rehearsal. This morning, in Room 350 of the Civic Opera Building, two performers go through their paces: dancers Jenna McClintock and Stephen Hanna, the "Dream Laurey" and the "Dream Curly," under the gaze of associate choreographer Victor Wisehart and choreographer Gemze de Lappe, a wisp of an elderly woman, who leaps off a chair and hurries over to where McClintock has just curtseyed.
     "It's too ladylike!" she says, trying to import a bit of High Plains sass. "You say, 'Hey! Yeah! Mornin'!' You don't say, 'Goood mornnning.' You say ..." and she bites off the word and tosses her head: 'Mornin'!"  

  

With Jenna McClintock, left and Victor Wisehart, right.

     De Lappe is 91, and the last living link to the show's original choreography. The curtain rose on "Oklahoma!" on March 31, 1943; by that August, de Lappe was dancing in the national company of the smash hit.
     "It was wartime—it just rang a bell," she recalls. "Touched the whole populace of the United States."
     And not just the United States. She danced the Dream Laurey for 18 acclaimed months in London starting in 1947.
     "Tiny, fey, Irish, honest, quiet, otherworldly, and superb," one critic wrote of her dancing.
     Lyric's current cast is drawn not just from the world of opera but from musical theater: Laurey is Ashley Brown, who played Magnolia in Lyric's "Show Boat" and the title role in "Mary Poppins" on Broadway, and Curly is John Cudia, the only actor to play both the Phantom and Jean Valjean roles in the "Phantom of the Opera" and "Les Miserables" on Broadway.
     Cudia says that the musical's historical importance, evergreen popularity—thanks in part to beloved songs such as "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' "—and big, relevant themes make it perfect for the opera stage.
     "We all have things between us and what we really want," Cudia says. "Taking those journeys to get to a place of happiness and togetherness."
     While musicians can follow a score and actors a script, to make a dance really come alive requires a detail-obsessed choreographer. And de Lappe, who has been involved in so many productions of "Oklahoma!" over the years she has lost count, closely studies and then minutely adjusts every step, leap, turn, gesture, look, down to a flutter of fingertips.
     "I'm conscious of your thumb at your throat," she says after McClintock touches her larynx. "It's really just 'hauh!' That's better. Just two fingers."
     Often words fail her, and she sings, taps or shows the dancer what to do by doing it herself, imparting not only movement but attitude—a 19th century prairie shyness that 21st century dancers might not have encountered.
     "The other thing you got to work on is your hesitation," she tells McClintock. "It has to be much more big and decisive. 'Shall I? No, no. Yes!' It has to be clear as day, because otherwise ... this is not fast. This is yes, yes, yes, yes ..." De Lappe rises on her toes, a bit more with each "yes," then collapses and turns away at "no!"
     "You're a little bit undecided, so I think you should look down, and then change your mind. It's just a moment. And then go with that."
     While often emphatic, she is never harsh. There is no yelling.
     "Agnes never screamed," she says during a break. "She might be very forceful and very direct. But I never saw her get publicly angry."
     De Lappe's comments are peppered with dazzling smiles, ready praise and big hugs. She points out that David Adam Moore, who made his house debut at Lyric earlier this season as the brutish Stanley in "A Streetcar Named Desire," is even better in "Oklahoma!" than movie star Rod Steiger was as the menacing Jud Fry, because he has the handsomeness that would attract Laurey (he also has the physical prowess to dance Jud in the dream ballet, a part usually filled by another performer).
     This rehearsal goes on for three hours, with only the briefest of breaks. De Lappe's energy and focus never lag. Anyone who ever danced has to wonder how de Lappe has reached 91 uninjured, when many dancers a third her age find themselves hobbled.
     "They didn't force extensions and splits," she explains. "They didn't overstretch the body, like they do now."

   That's why her body is agile—that and her daily exercises—to the astonishment of dancers in the troupe, who have come into the rehearsal room to find her stretching on the barre.
     But how does she keep a fresh view of material she has worked with for nearly 70 years?
     "Well, first of all, it's very good material," she says.
     While de Lappe is trying to keep faithful to the original intent, she also understands that it must bear the imprint of whoever is performing.
     "As close to the same as possible within the freedom of the actor or dancer," she says. "You can't get a cookie-cutter copy. That has no life. You have to find the inner life of the performer and use that."
     Toward the end of the rehearsal, McClintock and Hanna run through the part they've been working on for hours, until suddenly it clicks: a smooth, frantic, graceful, hauntingly beautiful, complex yet seamless dance that brings to mind something Walter Kerr wrote after seeing de Lappe's choreography of a 1969 revival of "Oklahoma!"
     "Miss de Mille has been fortunate in having Gemze de Lappe to remember for her on this occasion. Miss de Lappe was one of the loveliest lead dancers Miss de Mille ever gave us, and the loveliness lingers in the sweetness and the shining respect with which she has restaged the numbers here."
     Yes, precisely, a fidelity to the past that nevertheless lives in the present. "Oklahoma!" has a triple history— a Prairie period piece created in the 1940s and staged in 2013, a large landscape populated with larger loves, sweetness with an undercurrent of eroticism and evil. Among the greatest American musicals, rarely performed on a stage dominated by European opera, it's the first musical where dance truly leapt into the spotlight.

                   —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 28, 2013

Donald Trump brings shame upon himself and the nation

      When you have a president who is a bully, fraud and liar, and who manifests those dismal qualities every day, if not every hour, there can be a tendency to eventually let things slide. You can't react to every new insult, to each new deception, to every lie. It's hard enough to count them. Why not save your silver bullets? Focus on the truly important stuff—like the obscene and costly giveaway that the Senate is at this moment crafting, using the tax code to funnel money away from the poor and middle class and toward the already wealthy.
      But on Wednesday morning Donald Trump set an astonishing new low, even for him, retweeting to his 43.6 million Twitter followers a trio of odious anti-Muslim videos produced by a British hate group, British First, that has a record of misleading and vile anti-Muslim propaganda.
     The three Trump shared were titled “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!” “Muslim destroys a statue of Virgin Mary!” and “Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death!”
     Whether they actually show what they purport to show is not the point—a standard technique of haters is to take one jarring crime, one reprehensible person, and use it to slur an entire community.  The Klan did it. The Nazis did it. And now the president of the United States does it. It happens to be against Muslims, but in the past it was against Mexicans, women, Jews. Any group he feels he can get away with mocking for the benefit of his followers, who thrive on this kind of thing.
    Again, nothing new. More of the thoughtless hate that got him elected, that excites the third of this country who are angry, fearful, and looking for someone to blame. Who need a bogeyman to justify their fear, like the 5-year-old who asks, "If there's no monster under the bed, then why I am afraid?"
     But because we have seen it before doesn't mean we shouldn't cry out in horror now.  Trump's actions this morning are a gross betrayal of what it means to be a patriotic American, or a person of faith, or a decent human being. It makes our country more imperiled, and provides succor and encouragement to every zealot, extremist and terrorist in the world. It is unethical and dishonest, both bad policy and bad strategy. It is Trump's three major deficiencies rolled into one: a bullying fraudulent lie.
     Reaction has been swift—British Prime Minister Theresa May denounced Trump's reckless calumny as "wrong."
     “British people overwhelmingly reject the prejudiced rhetoric of the far-right which is the antithesis of the values that this country represents: decency tolerance and respect,” she said in a statement.    
    That is leadership. The British leader should be joined by anyone with a voice. No decent American can let it go unchallenged. Because if we do, it'll only get worse and worse. It already has gotten worse. Today's obscenity is worse than what came before, and if we don't want worse to follow, we need to make a stand. This is intolerable.  
     Donald Trump reveals, once again, the small, twisted bigot at the bottom of what he calls a soul. America is humiliated that we set such a petty, vain, cruel, brainless, hateful individual as our leader. We didn't all vote for him. But we all have him now. Denunciation is ineffectual and cold comfort, but must be done. This isn't who we are, but it's what we are becoming, unless we find a way to stop it. It is a fight every American should—no, must—commit ourselves to waging right now. Loud, strong and clear. 

Rahm stays out of the heat of CBA show kitchen

Larry Aaronson makes a point of personally inviting Rahm Emanuel. 

     "Most politicians like to be skewered at some point," said attorney Jeffrey M. Marks, producer of the Chicago Bar Association annual satiric review, which opens Thursday. "They may not be happy how we skewer them."
     Marks said that most people figure they've made it if they're being made fun of. We get senators, representatives, judges..."
     "U.S. Attorneys..." added show co-writer Cliff Berman, sitting beside Marks in Philip H. Corboy Hall on the second floor of CBA's South Loop headquarters before rehearsals Monday for "Much to Sue About Nothing!" the 94th annual bar show.
     "Governors..." added Marks.
     "Quinn came, often" said Berman.
     "Everybody wants to come," said Marks, referring to the show, now in its 94th year.
     Well, not everybody. 
     Rahm Emanuel won't be attending the show this year because he never comes. Despite being personally invited, despite the lawyer playing him, Larry Aaronson, being his third cousin, and despite the mayor being a traditional source of fodder. The first line the chorus sings is, "Another year we'll make fun of Rahm."
     The lawyerly lampoon goes back almost a century, to 1924, when the smattering of songs for the CBA's Christmas party expanded into "Christmas Spirits,' a full-length revue.
     Rahm's predecessors had it worse and took it better. Mayor William Hale Thompson became Nero in the climactic song of the 1927 show, "The Burning of Rome"

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Tony Calzaretta, playing a frustrated Prince Charles, rehearses Monday for "Much to Sue About Nothing!" the Chicago Bar Association satirical music review, which opens Thursday

Give to The Night Ministry

Jeff Ayoub, of The Night Ministry, talks to a man sleeping on Lower Wacker Drive last Christmas.

     Ideally, you wouldn't be giving money to The Night Ministry today.
     Even though today is "Giving Tuesday," a day designated by those who care about such things full time to encourage we who rarely give these life-and-death matters a second thought to pause from our lavish and blessed lives, pause between the Feast Extravaganza and the Carnival of Gifts and remember those with nearly nothing. To extend a hand to people facing problems that on their best day dwarf ours on our worst.
     You wouldn't be giving today because, again ideally, you wouldn't have to. You'd already be giving throughout the year, either to The Night Ministry, and organizations like it, whether through money or, more valuably, through your time and efforts.
     Though really, there are no other organizations like The Night Ministry, the last threadbare safety net between thousands of Chicagoans and the abyss of homelessness, addiction, mental illness, despair and death. 
    There are other things besides money. You could, for instance, prepare a few score meals to be handed out at one of the stops of the Night Ministry's health care bus during its nightly rounds, and then show up at the appointed hour and distribute them. You could help pull off their big annual fundraising dinner or hit up prominent individuals to lend a hand. I've done all that—on certain sporadic occasions, I don't want to give the impression I'm a less selfish person than I actually am—and it feels great.
     But in a pinch, digging into your pocket will do. I''ve done that too, mostly recently on Monday, just to show how easily and painlessly it can be done. You go to the web site here.  I timed it—four minutes flat, from start to finish. Nobody is too busy to spare four minutes. The Night Ministry gives you a receipt for your records. 
     Plus a certain charitable Chicago supporter has pledged $25,000 in matching donations for Giving Tuesday—meaning every dollar you give will be doubled. So dig deep. 
     Or not so deep. Whatever you are comfortable with giving. I'll never miss the money I gave to The Night Ministry. But the person who gets my $50, maybe in the form of a care package of life's essentials, or a visit from the bus, or an asthma inhaler, or a sandwich handed over by a wide-eyed suburban volunteer  they corralled to help out, someone like my son below, will benefit enormously.

 

He's baaaaaaaack!!!

By Damien Hi

     Watching one zeppelin-sized media career after another go up in flames, like so many Hindenburgs exploding — fwump! fwump! fwump!— as their revolting sexual excesses are disclosed, I nevertheless felt secure. Think of it as the shy guy dividend.
     Alas, being a predatory creep isn't the only way the past can rear out of the dust and bite you.
     I was shocked last week to see someone completely unexpected back in the headlines, back on television, an accusation in human form aimed in my direction.
     No press conference, yet. No hazy, half-remembered charges. That's coming, no doubt.
The only thing to do is to be proactive, try to get ahead of the scandal.
     Sigh.
    Todd Stroger.
     I'm innocent. I swear. Stroger is not my fault, though people at the time blamed me.
     "Even Stroger's supporters were worried in the final three weeks of the campaign as to whether African Americans were going to turn out heavily for Stroger," the Chicago Defender wrote in July 2006. "Were it not for the controversy created by Neil Steinberg's column in the Chicago Sun-Times blasting his health status, which invigorated the Black community and drove many of them to the polls, President Stroger likely would have lost."
     That was referring to Todd's father, John, and if you're wondering how boosting the chances of dad meant helping junior, well, how quickly you forget.

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Piercing info; You never know what you'll find on Facebook

      I spent the long weekend getting ready for Thanksgiving, cleaning up from Thanksgiving, then puttering around the house, trying not to do or write anything. I generally kept off Facebook because when I dipped into the thing it seemed, not so much a dynamic gathering of friends and associates, but as an electronic backwater, a new way to be lonely. 
     Looking for a post for today, I jumped into the archives and put my name and "Facebook" into the search and came up with this chestnut from almost a decade ago. So long ago that I felt the need to explain what Facebook is on the first reference to it: "the social networking site." How quaint is that? Akin to saying, "I looked for a telephone, that popular communications device..."
      Well, I suppose Facebook still has its uses—Scrabble comes to mind—though it hasn't served up a topic like this one in many a year. 

     The neat thing about this job is that you never know where it will lead you.
     For instance. The Sun-Times asked us to join Facebook, the social networking site. Sure, it seemed a little one-on-one for a supposedly mass communication business. It was as if they started encouraging us to run up to anyone we saw on the street holding a copy of the Sun-Times, drape our arm around their shoulders and gush, "Hiya pal! Enjoying your newspaper?"
     But heck, if giving hundreds of strangers a little electronic hug makes them feel loved, then why not?
     Besides, it's fun. I get a few new "friends" every day, tell them it's nice to meet them, glance at their bios, and perhaps ask a question based on who they are. What's an 85-year-old man doing on Facebook? What's a mechanic do at a soda can factory? What's new at Loyola University Medical Center?
     The senior citizen didn't reply. The mechanic maintains the die punch presses. And Anne M. Dillon, as befits a media director, rattled off what's happening at the hospital: there's the study of high-fructose corn syrup in sodas and its effect upon the kidneys; the OB/GYNs are "up in arms about the prevalence of labia and clitoral piercing among young women . . . "
     Stop right there, I said. Tell me more about that high-fructose corn syrup study . . .
     Kidding. Of course I wanted to know more about labial and clitoral piercing -- because really, if I don't ask, then how are you ever going to know?
     "The concern we have is mainly trauma during the actual birth," said Sarah Wagner, a doctor of obstetrics and gynecology at Loyola. "The piercing can get in the way of the delivery of the infant, and can be traumatic to both the infant and the mother."
     She said that while patients invariably agree to remove them prior to childbirth, that with the profusion of piercings, not every prospective mother might know to do so.
     "We've definitely noticed an increase in genital piercing," she said, estimating that she has perhaps half a dozen patients in her practice who have the jewelry in their nether regions.
     "It's less than 1 percent, but it's there," she said.
     She said the biggest risk right now is getting the piercings in the first place.
     "People can have some pretty awful infections to the surrounding tissue," she said. "Infections that get deep as the bone."
     So given the risk, why do women do this? Is it a tribal sisterhood type of thing?
     "To my knowledge, they're doing it for sexual pleasure," she replied.
     Clearly, more research was called for. Experts only take you so far. I turned to help from Facebook, which did not let me down.
     "I was a freshman in college," recalled Eileen McCarthy, 23, when she and a group of her friends decided to embellish themselves.
     "Since I had my nose and tongue [pierced], they suggested to get my [genitals] pierced," she said. "I think they were joking, but I agreed to go through with it."
     She had it done at a place called Hobo's in Portsmouth, N.H.
     "It was a little painful, but not too bad," she recalled. "It was more like a little pinch. It was my least painful body piercing. I did not have any complications."
     She never told her family about the piercing --which she says she did not find particularly stimulating -- and removed it when a guy she was dating felt it was "trashy."
     McCarthy was 18 when she had the procedure done, but those in the piercing world say this is in no way limited to young women.
     "It is common for a woman who has no other body art to get a genital piercing," said Elayne Angel, a piercing pioneer who has performed the procedure 40,000 times. "I get a lot of empty-nesters, retirees, soccer moms, sorority gals."
     "Retirees?" I whispered.
     "Certainly," she answered. "I have pierced quite a few in the category of older women. They're celebrating a renewal of their sexuality."
     The author of the forthcoming book, The Piercing Bible, which Ten Speed Press is publishing next month, Angel said that piercing is a way for women to sanctify their lives.
      "There are very few rites of passage left in modern society, so people use piercings to mark passages: clean and sober times, births, deaths, marriages, all kinds of milestones," she said.
     "There are probably about as many reasons as there are piercings."
     Angel, who now lives in the Yucatan in Mexico but for years ran a piercing parlor in New Orleans, stresses the need for customers to scope out where they are having their piercings done.
     "Piercing is under-regulated, and many people piercing have little or no skill," she said. "There is no such thing as certification."
     She said that several chapters in her new book are devoted to how to select a safe piercer.
     "There are many things to check for," she said. Do they have an autoclave to sterilize their tools? Do they know how to use it? Do they perform spore tests to ensure the autoclave is at sufficient heat to kill micro-organisms?
     "It's dangerous out there," she said. "It is a break in the skin and there are risks."

         —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 25, 2009

A legacy that still shines

    I never laid eyes on Harold Washington. When he died, I had been on staff at the paper eight months, but had spent that time putting out The Adviser, a weekly publication that told readers how to clean their garages and get Japanese beetles off their lawn. Nevertheless, 25 years later, I was asked to assess his legacy.

     Chicago wanted Harold, and Chicago got him, though nobody realized for how brief a time.
     Harold Washington, the beloved, the first and only, larger than life, abruptly entered death on Nov. 25, 1987—exactly 25 years ago Sunday, a span that will catch many Chicagoans by surprise, and perhaps remind them of their own uncertain date with mortality, and of course bring back a dynamic chapter in Chicago political history remembered by all, cherished by many.
     "I miss him terribly, and I think about him every day in one way or another," said Timothy Evans, now chief judge of the Cook County Circuit Court, but alderman for the 4th Ward during Washington's administration and his floor leader in the council. "There was certainly a huge sense of loss. The possibility of someone that brilliant and that committed to fairness, and that committed to all communities — who seemed to be the right job for the right man for the right time — and to have that taken away when the city seemed to need him most, was something I think affected people greatly."
      Even 25 years after his death, Washington still inspires a fervent reverence.
     "Harold Washington will go down in history as one of the most, if not the most, impactful mayor in the history of Chicago," said Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Chicago), an alderman when Washington was in office. "Because Harold was a visionary. He understood not only the problems that the city was confronted with, but the potential of everyday, ordinary Chicagoans that was not remotely achieved by other mayors. Harold built a coalition that completely exploded the opinion that Chicago ain't ready for reform, and built a coalition that did in fact reform Chicago. He made patronage a bygone word in this city."
     For a city that had elected 40 white men and one white woman mayor over the previous 146 years to finally put a black man in City Hall was an occasion for joy for many.
     "With blacks it was a question of group esteem," said Paul Green, professor of political science at Roosevelt University. "When Harold Washington became the first black mayor, that created an enormous sense of pride, among black people and also Hispanics, and also among good-thinking white people. He had a real deep-seated visceral impact."
     Those who had been frozen out of power delighted in having a mayor who spoke for them.
     "We are a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-language city," Washington said in his first inaugural address. "Neighborhood involvement has to take the place of the ancient, decrepit and creaking machine. City government for once in our lifetime must be made equitable and fair."
     It was not a vision that the old white machine, that still held a majority in the City Council, was eager to hear.
     "That speech that day created the 29-21 [split in the council]," said Dorothy Tillman, then alderman of the 3rd Ward, on the 10th anniversary of Washington's death. "A lot of [the white aldermen] were scrambling and running and saying, 'Uh-oh. Fairness is coming. We've got to mobilize.' "
     'Power-based' opposition
     Mobilize they did. The "Vrdolyak 29" coalesced against Washington; some of his appointees could not be seated for months, even years.
     "I think much of the opposition was power-based and not racially based," said Evans. "Maybe some people mentioned race as a way of marginalizing Harold. But I think the real issue was power, not race."
     Either way, Washington had difficulty matching his success at winning office with success at running the city.
     "Harold Washington, in my opinion, has to be divided into two parts," said Green. "Harold Washington the politician was absolutely brilliant, with the ability to win what I have called the mother of all primaries in 1983 against Richard Daley and Jane Byrne. We'll never have another cast like that, with a supporting cast like Ed Vrdolyak and Ed Burke, it was a rendezvous of sluggers."
     But as mayor, despite the praise of admirers, Washington was often thwarted, not only by local enemies, but by national trends.
     "He was mayor of a big city during the Reagan administration," Green said. "Anyone would have had problems. There was so little he could do, even if he had control of the council. Money was tight. The Republicans also controlled Springfield. And even when he got control, the legacy of Council Wars was there."
     After succeeding in breaking the deadlock in 1987, Washington's death seven months later left a void that the African-American community clutched at for years, assuming that a replacement would be found, that fairness demanded a return to the mayor's office they had won. Instead they were left with enticing might-have-beens.
     "He didn't live long enough as mayor, he didn't have enough time, for his vision to take root in its totality," said Rush. "Had Harold lived, you would have seen more stable communities throughout the city, rather than just having central pockets of affluence."
     "He had a style all his own," said Green. "There has never been an African-American politician in the city, including Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson Jr., to capture a moment in a phrase or feeling the way Washington could. He invented words—"hocus pocus dominocus"—but he said them so well. He had that personality, bigger than life. The man was brilliant."
     "His legacy is alive today," said Rush, "because it's the only legacy that makes sense. Richard Michael Daley borrowed immensely from the Harold playbook. Rahm Emanuel is today using Harold Washington's playbook in terms of trying to rekindle and reconnect that coalition that really represents that city as its best. President Obama right now is trying to govern using the Harold Washington playbook."
     "He was a forerunner of what would happen," said Green. "Illinois gets a lot of heat for its corruption, and Chicago's racism, but in reality, if you look at African-American leadership over the past 25 years, it's all come from Chicago. That is his greatest legacy. He begot Carol Moseley Braun for Senate. He helped create the image of Barack Obama. People forget that Cecil Partee was head of the Illinois Senate in the 1970s. The party was always crucial, and Harold Washington bled Democratic blue. He and people like Emil Jones, John Stroger, Wilson Frost - they assumed real power, and Washington was the personification of that. That's his legacy. He was the first. That to me is tremendous. A lot of people followed him, but there is only one Harold Washington."
     Evans, who was with Washington the day he died, dedicating new housing in Evans' ward, remembers traveling to China with the mayor, on their way to establish a sister city.
     "We got to Beijing, we saw how they had entombed Mao," Evans said. "We were on the square, and he said, 'We see how China's leader was remembered — I wonder how I will be remembered?' I think he'd be thrilled to know that people remember him in commitments to education — Harold Washington College; he was always committed to education as being the path to improvement in every community. The world-class library named after Harold Washington. He knew a new library was coming. He just didn't know it was going to be named after him. I think he'd like to be remembered that way."

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 23, 2012

"A black day it will be for somebody"

 

     "Black Friday" is an odd term. The day after Thanksgiving, of course, when shoppers descend upon stores to snag discounted items and, increasingly, buy stuff on sale on-line. 
     A carnival of cut-rate consumerism then. And bargains are a good thing. So why the "black"? Historically, a black day was something bad. 
      "A black day it will be for somebody," Richard III says, waking from bad dreams to find gloom over Bosworth Field.
     Sept. 24, 1869 was called Black Friday after Jay Gould and James Fisk's attempt to corner the gold market. After hoarding gold for months, the two started dumped their gold supplies, made their profits and crashed the economy. The price of gold dropped 15 percent in minutes, the stock market crashed 20 percent in the next week, and panic ensued.
     (The Steely Dan song, "When Black Friday Comes" is roughly based on the panic, which makes sense, given the lyrics. "When Black Friday comes/I'll collect everything I'm owed/And before my friends find out/I'll be on the road.")
     In general "black" get attached to financial collapses, massacres, deadly storms—so how did it get attached to what is traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year, the kick-off to the Christmas buying season?
     The generally-accepted explanation is the term was applied to post-Thanksgiving shopping in the 1950s by the Philadelphia police, who used the term to describe the angry mobs and traffic snarls created by department store sales. This situation was worse in the City of Brotherly Love, supposedly, because it also hosted the Army-Navy Football game on Thanksgiving, which in the pre-Super Bowl era was a huge event and also stretched cops thin trying to maintain order.
     The newspapers borrowed it from the police,, with the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin putting it in a headline in 1961.
    "We used it year after year," wrote Joseph P. Barrett, a police reporter for the Bulletin at the time. "Then television picked it up."
    I have no direct personal experience with Black Friday shopping. I like a sale as much as anybody, but can't see facing the crowds. My younger son needed a new coat, and we slid by Macy's Wednesday. The store was empty. "Department stores are going away next," I said to him, as we made our selection and headed to the clerk, who assured us that it had been crowded that morning. The coat was 60 percent off, savings enough for my needs.
     Usually the shopping struggles, the mobs crushing against doors, the tug-of-wars over cheap goods, is portrayed as some kind of indictment of the materialism of our society. The public, safe at home with their purchases, watches the news and tut-tuts. But with the plutocrats in control in Washington, running riot, unchecked, the way Jay Gould and James Fisk did in the Grant administration, my gut tells me that this year any Black Friday disturbances will be seen more sympathetically. Or should be viewed that way at least. With the neck of the middle class stretched, turkey-like, across a tree stump, and the Republican Congress whetting the axe, saving money and stocking up on hard goods suddenly seems blameless, even prudent. It's going to be a long winter.



 

Turkey day

The Kauffman family

    Unlike you, I've actually been to a turkey farm. Exactly 20 years ago, visiting the Ho-Ka Turkey Farm. 

     It was not, as you might guess, a stomach-churning experience. Just the opposite. I have a memory of the turkeys wandering about a vast, feed-speckled outdoor area. It was pleasant, or pleasant enough for turkeys anyway. 

      Ho-Ka is still in business—Robert is still there. I just missed him, when I phoned, but spoke to the third generation, Nicole. 

     Wherever you get your turkey, however you prepare it—we roast one, fry the other—hope you and yours have a Happy Thanksgiving.

     The turkeys are taller.
     Cowering together — about 1,000 hens in this particular shed, pecking at feeders, clouds of dust and dander puffing off their backs like smoke — members of the Thanksgiving 1997 graduating class at the Ho-Ka Turkey Farm, a rustic spread of 500 acres, are simply bigger birds.
     "Turkeys are taller than 10 years ago," said Robert Kauffman, owner of Ho-Ka, located near Waterman in DeKalb County, 70 miles west of Chicago.
     Consumers prefer huge turkeys, he said, and the turkey industry has been happy to oblige them. But the birds were getting so big that their legs were giving out; and a lame bird doesn't last long in the frenzy of the turkey pen.
     The solution: sturdier turkey bone structure.
     But contrary to popular opinion, no growth hormones are used to alter turkey size.
     "It's never, ever been legal to feed hormones to turkeys," said Kauffman, 38, a second-generation turkey farmer with a degree in agriculture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "The size of turkeys entirely depends on genetic selection."
     Thanksgiving is, of course, the high season for turkey producers—about 15 percent of the 300 million pounds of turkey raised nationwide each year are eaten for Thanksgiving dinner. Only 9 percent of the nation won't eat turkey this Thursday, according to the National Turkey Federation.
     Ho-Ka is named for Robert's father, Howard Kauffman, who started the farm in 1933. Ho-Ka is the largest turkey farm in Illinois, raising about 80,000 turkeys a year, from day-old chicks to full-grown birds weighing about 20 pounds at slaughter.
     Still, Ho-Ka is dwarfed by the huge turkey factories in states such as Texas, Minnesota and North Carolina.
     And unlike the giant turkey plants, Ho-Ka lets the turkeys roam outdoors, hunting grasshoppers, fighting with each other, and whiling away the 18 weeks of life they are permitted before they go under the knife.
     Turning gobbling turkeys into plucked birds ready to be sold is a lengthy process that could take the edge off your holiday appetite.
     First the birds are hung on metal racks and their throats are cut. After they bleed to death, the carcasses are scalded, the feathers removed. The windpipe and oil glands go. Then the viscera -- the heart, liver, gizzard and such -- are removed, the head and feet cut off, and the turkey is washed and packaged.
     A man in his position might not be blamed for passing up turkey tomorrow. Certainly anyone who watched the birds having their throats slit might have a qualm or two. But Kauffman's business doesn't diminish his appetite.
     "I always have turkey," he said, expressing a preference for white meat. "Thanksgiving. Christmas, Easter. . . ."

                     —Originally published in the Sun-Times Nov. 26, 1997

Letters to Santa

      So I was careless when grabbing a letter from the Letters to Santa bin this year, and only when I got home did I look at it and see neat printing on Citadel stationery.
     “Santa I have been very good,” it read. “Please give me the following: one Polo Bear Ralph Lauren Tuxedo Bear Wool Sweater ($395); one Burberry Bandana in Vintage Check Cashmere ($595); one pair Lacroix LXR HD skis ($2,700), one . . . .” My gaze leapt to the bottom of the letter.
     “Oh great, I got Ken Griffin,” I groaned to my wife, referring to the richest man in Illinois.
     I liked the annual Letters to Santa program a lot more before, in the spirit of the new Congressional tax plan, it shifted from providing presents to under-privileged children to buying holiday fripperies for the wealthiest of the wealthy.
     “We better head to Neiman Marcus,” she began. “I’ll grab the credit cards . . . .”
     OK, none of the above is true. Well, except for the cruel, rob-the-humble-to-benefit-millionaires tax plan — that is all too true, unfortunately. And my being careless about selecting this year’s letters to Santa is certainly true. I took two letters, thinking that would make shopping easier: kids have a way of asking for some unobtainable thing, “The Danger Ranger Master Blaster” that sold out in September. With two letters I could fill the easier one, return the other, duty done.

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Discards

     Not everything is online.

     Over the weekend I was writing about moving into our new offices at 30 N. Racine.

     And I thought that I should give a quick run-down of where the Chicago Sun-Times has been located during its 76 year history, starting with the creation of the Chicago Sun in 1941. 

      Which raised the question of where the original Chicago Sun offices where.

      Nothing in Wikipedia. Nothing that popped out of Google Books. Nothing anywhere. I wasn't that worried because I happened to have a copy of Volume 1, No. 1 of the Sun, bought on eBay for $5. Surely, that would say. Down in the basement to retrieve it—it was in the box I thought it would be in. So far, so good.

      But the address wasn't in the paper. Not in the little box of legalese on page five, where I thought it would be. Not in the big story ballyhooing the start of publication, going over again and again about the three newsreel cameras and the radio microphones relaying the news to a grateful world, presided over by Mayor Kelly and Governor Green and not once saying where the heck this entire circus was taking place. 

     Maddening. You wanted to reach across the decades and shake them. Where is it?!?!

     Not that pawing through the Dec. 4, 1941 Sun wasn't interesting. There, on the front page of the third section: "County Pushes Plans for Its First Super Highway," news of the "first super-speed, no-intersection express highway similar to those in New York and Pennsylvania. The new road, to be known as Edens Parkway, will start at Peterson and Caldwell avenues and run north to join the Skokie road five miles south of the Lake county line."

    The new road would have two lanes in each direction.

    Interesting. But not what I was after. I must have looked online for 20 minutes and finally I thought. "Back to the paper. You must have missed it."  Indeed I did. There, in the little box on page 5 I had started at and somehow overlooked: "Published daily and Sunday at 400 West Madison Street, Chicago, Il."

     A fact which, before my story Monday, had never appeared online before, that I can tell. Not once. Nothing in Nexis. Nothing anywhere. Why would it? 

    You never know what odd question you are going to have, and where that information might hide. I did brusquely throw those card catalogue cards away, and it was honestly liberating. But it was also done by force of will, by straight-arming thought, never mind regret, the way you would drown a litter of kittens if you had to. Close your eyes and do it. 

     I'm the guy who read Nicholson Baker's book about preserving old newspaper archives, "Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper," and was outraged, and grieved along with him, cheering Baker on as he races to save the last complete bound run of the Times of London. Most to the point, I read "Discards," his 1994 (!!!!) piece in The New Yorker about the tactile and informational value of card catalogues, a plea for their preservation. Sign me up!

     When possible. The good news is we are in an age of conservation that dwarfs any in the past. The internet is the greatest library in the history of the world, bar none, and also the most permanent, or so one hopes. Preserving the past used to be an issue—it still is, but not the primary one. There is also cutting through the enormous mass of stuff we now have at our fingertips. You can't care about everything—that's a recipe for caring about nothing. You can't preserve everything. You have to pick your battles. But I am glad I held onto that first copy of the Sun.