Escaped Notice

Stephen Rynkiewicz, man of letters

2008-08-12T20:27:00.014-05:00

I wanted the letter-perfect career. So how did I end up making alphabet soup?

It all started with my first creative writing assignment: drafting my resume. All those years of making up exam answers were preparation for this task. My other college accomplishments were unexceptional, except for building my dorm-room sound system. Yet now was the time to turn my odd assortment of summer jobs and after-class hobbies into signs of upward mobility, at least on paper.

By the end of the page, I was reaching the limits of my BS degree, and the best chance of making my resume look good was finding handsome paper stock. Among the loose ends that filled out that page was a Radiotelephone Operator License, now known in the halls of government as the General Radiotelephone Operator License or GROL. It was proof to the FCC of my minimal competence in Ohm's Law as a college DJ. I set about turning this into proof of my ability to overcome resistance.

Such dizzying spin may have qualified me for only one job: public relations. Luckily, this resume caught the attention of Harold Bergen, Chicago PR executive and recovering engineer, whose daughter is now covering the Olympics for the Trib. Hal wasn't quite sure what a Radiotelephone Operator did, but he liked the sound of it. I am forever grateful that Bergen hired me as a writer in the Midwest office of the Ruder-Finn agency. My job: to represent professional societies for the near-professions.

By this I mean organizations like the International Fabricare Institute, for which I wrote pages of bullet points on laundry and drycleaning, tailor-made for lifestyle magazines. The best tip, of course: Save the tough stuff for a professional drycleaner. Maybe you've never thought of drycleaning as a profession. Think again. The IFI, now the Drycleaning & Laundry Institute, runs a laboratory that tests "Dry Clean Only" instructions. This is a true vocation, to make a sweatshop come clean.

Not only do they dress your family in rayon and linen, your fabric-care professional also drapes his or her name with initials. The institute bestows the credentials CPD (for Certified Professional Dryleaner) and CPW (Certified Professional Wetcleaner, a starchy way of saying launderer). In the garment trade, ED is not erectile dysfunction, and certainly no call for a Viagra prescription. It's the designation for a Certified Environmental Dry Cleaner. Nothing dirty about it.

So you see, the lowly GROL really was a roaring start to my new world of employment. Clients also included the National Board of Boiler and Pressure Vessel Inspectors, which provided engineers with critical knowledge to keep their projects from blowing up. The National Board (I couldn't quite come to use its initials) provided certification in EB (Electric Boilers), CIB (Cast Iron Heating Boilers) and UM (a particularly sought-after designation these days, Unfired Media).

After representing professional drycleaners and professional boiler inspectors, I was nearly ready to become a professional reporter. What sealed the deal was that I could set type too, thanks to jobs as a Compugraphic and MTSC operator. MTSC is Magnetic Tape Selectric Composer, an early desktop publishing system that if memory serves involved stone knives and animal pelts. This high-tech experience served me well at the Chicago Sun-Times' suburban bureau, where "computer storage" was a pegboard where we rolled up and hung tape from the Teletype machines.

By that point, my resume was beginning to look like Mark Twain's. Young Sam Clemens also started out as a typesetter, and in his 20s he joined a militia, piloted a riverboat and searched for gold. None of those jobs panned out. "By trying, we can easily learn to endure adversity," Twain said. "Another man's, I mean." Certainly at this point I had retained the two characteristics that Twain's guarantee of success: ignorance and confidence.

After gathering credits like GROL and MTSC, reporting solidified my true vocation: collecting acronyms. Journalism's professional society started as a Depauw University fraternity, and when I joined its legacy pledges had managed to keep the greek letters alive. The group was known as the Society of Professional Journalists, Sigma Delta Chi or SPJ,SDX. If you know anything about editors, you know one of them insisted on the comma.

SPJ-comma-SDX was just the umbrella organization for journalism. I also became involved in specialty groups — IRE, NAREE, SABEW, ONA and since I was briefly a college instructor, AEJMC. Plus a few joint broadcast projects with INBA and RTNDA, and awards from the publishers' groups (IPA, NAA, E&P). Trust me, they all stand for something.

My portfolio had expanded far beyond reporting by the time I was assigned a boss who was a PMP. Not that she was pimping for me, although I did need a good word with the general manager. My boss was a Project Management Professional. This was not just a new acronym to conquer, it was a revelation: I could get certified in getting things done!

Newspapers value this skill highly -- notably the new owners of the Tribune, who try to keep projects from being talked to a slow death. They have an acronym for their philosophy, AFDI, which means to actually do it. The F is just for emphasis. With this incentive, and with coaching from the PMO (the Project Management Office), I joined the PMA (Project Management Association) and started networking with software developers, commercial real-estate developers and a few engineers like my sister at Kodak, the film developer.

Finally, to help navigate all these new relationships and new acronyms I initialized one more project: I rejoined Toastmasters International, a group for professionals sharpening their persuasive skills. TM also has its own series of certications in speaking and leadership. Now I can address you now as Stephen Rynkiewicz ACB/CL, member PMA, SPJ....

Hope there's enough space on the business card.

Free jazz! Free Mandela! Chicago Jazz Philharmonic at Millennium Park

2008-07-21T21:35:00.007-05:00

"Is it an orchestra?" Orbert Davis asked from the bandstand. "Or is it jazz?"

The leader of the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic posed the question tonight at a Millennium Park concert dedicated to Nelson Mandela. The unasked question: How does mixing European symphony and American swing produce a tribute to South Africa?

With a gospel choir, it turns out. With orations that recall Copland's "Lincoln Portrait, performed with fervor by actress T'Keyah Crystal Keymah. (An windbag introduction by cable documentarian Bill Kurtis underscored what fortunate casting that was.) And in a nod to a Grant Park perennial, Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture," with extended quotes from a national anthem that brought the pavilion audience to its feet, some listeners with fist raised.

That and an African National Congress marching anthem, performers stomping in time, were the few obvious African references in the premiere of Davis' score, "Hope in Action," performed as a 90th-birthday salute to Mandela. Speaking from the conducting platform, Davis said he was inspired by Mandela's autobiography and from the PBS travelogue "Grannies on Safari." That alone should have told listeners they would not mistake the proceedings for a Mahotella Queens concert.

Davis' program notes suggests his inspiration was not literal. He offered the ensemble as a metaphor for the fight against apartheid: "When musicians are willing to create outside their personal and musical boundaries, they in essence produce a new genre and creative aesthetic."

Political themes in summer concerts tend to be flag-wavers, and the music that accompanied Mandela's quotations was, well, quotidian. But the rhythm section of Ryan Cohan on piano, Stewart Miller on bass and Ernie Adams on drums seemed particularly sharp in supporting the modal flights of Zim Ngqawana on alto and soprano sax and Ari Brown on tenor. They bespoke freedom in a way the recitations could not match.

The rest of the program struggled for its footing in this tug of war between classical and jazz idioms. But jazz arrangements with strings are so rare that it's always a pleasure to hear the Chicago Jazz Ensemble take them on. Dee Alexander reached for common ground in folk with two Miriam Makeba tunes, and got just comfortable enough with her lead sheets for a Dinah Washington flirtation in the Sid Wayne-Quincy Jones confection "Relax Max."

Davis' remaining charts were part Stravinsky, part Gil Evans. They included "100 Questions, One Answer," in which Brown and Ngqawana took freestyle solo turns with Nicole Mitchell on piccolo and Davis on a Leroy Anderson-style trumpet that reminded me of when I played "The Toy Trumpet" behind Clark Terry in a high-school clinic, and ended with a too-short quartet that held the potential for operatic drama.

Personal note: My time as a backup music critic in the provinces is long gone. Back then I enjoyed the luxury of writing the next day and did not have to sprint for the exit with the final note. Arriving just in time at the Pritzker Pavilion, I found a good seat next to Chicago Tribune colleague Howard Reich, with whom I have had occasional newsroom and lunchroom chats. We couldn't talk this time because he had to make himself scarce to write his review. I've never told him how highly I regard such deadline improvisation. It's a salute to his subjects, and this review is a salute to him.

Homes and arts in Beverly: Rodeo Drive it's not

2008-07-06T19:31:00.012-05:00

Kathy Halper, Walter Burley Griffin

In my twenties I would drive up and down Sheridan Road looking at untouchable homes, wondering how the other half lives. In the Beverly neighborhood, large homes from the same era take the high ground on Longwood Drive.

But part of the Southwest Side's charm is that the other half is close at hand. A brick two-story on a quarter-acre lists for $285,000, a block from a Colonial on a half-acre at $675,000.

Southwest Side city landmarks include Longwood Drive, a pre-Chicago Fire Italianate, a smattering of Frank Lloyd Wright homes and a street renamed for his Prairie School acolyte Walter Burley Griffin. Houses on this stretch of 104th Place can list for close to $1 million, or half that for the Griffin home pictured here. The carpenter vernacular homes that surround them are charming too, and current listings include foursquare on an oversized lot.

Unlike their haughty North Shore counterparts, it was easy to picture yourself in any of them. The Ridge Historical Society website notes that swanky Beverly Hills was not named for the Chicago neighborhood.

An equally diverse yet grounded grouping rings the atrium activity room at the Beverly Arts Center, where a Chicago Artists' Coalition group exhibition is in its final days. Gabriella Boros and Millie Marnin foreshadow lives of struggle for their young subjects, while Kathy Halper place children in domestic scenes on wallpaper-pattern backgrounds, offering the same latent fury but with more hope.

Unsettling subtext is totally lacking in the upstairs installation by Perry Pollack. Its announcement claims Perry's work "avoids the gravitas and clichés of the art world," but the cool minimalist constructions steer straightaway to those twin destinations.

It's the end of the boom as we know it, and I feel fine

2008-06-07T19:53:00.004-05:00

At the Happy Village tavern, a neighbor confessed he's watching the real estate market from the sidelines, waiting to buy at the market's low point. From that barstool perch, the parade may already be passing him by.

The sales pace in West Town is indeed off 30 percent from last year. Yet property values have risen 3 percent, according to the Chicago Tribune's Market Pulse analysis of property transfers.

West Town's median price of $400,000 is up 20 percent in five years. The sales numbers pace 2003 levels. Prices increased this year in 24 of the city's 77 census areas, including nearly all lakeshore communities.

The Illinois Association of Realtors' Chicago area statistics show values down 3 percent overall — hardly a free fall. Condo prices were up by a greater percentage. The typical sales commission wouldn't cover the difference between the median-priced condo and midpriced home.

The overall picture masks some sad individual cases, as this week's foreclosure report suggests. So-called sub-prime loans have fallen down the rabbit hole, and many families with them. In the first three months of the year, foreclosures started on 6.35 percent of adjustable loans in that higher-risk category, nearly triple the overall rate.

Foreclosures ran apace in only seven states, however, with the Great Lakes trouble spots (Michigan, Ohio and Indiana) starting to shore up. It could get worse. It could get better. Or, as the regional gaps suggest, it's all about location. Many neighborhoods will stubbornly hold their own as bystanders await their collapse.

My work for hire with the South Side Hitmen

2008-05-24T21:54:00.017-05:00

A long courtship need not start with fireworks. That was literally the case on my first visit to Comiskey Park. The exploding scoreboard fired only once before the Chicago White Sox lost to the Cleveland Indians on Aug. 10, 1977. Once was enough. I've been a Sox fan ever since.

There were no home runs to set off the the scoreboard's electronic pinwheels, only an RBI single. But if that night was not an auspicious start, at least I can document it. I was fresh out of college with a PR job, and had written a press release for Coca-Cola's role in Guinness Book of World Records night at Comiskey Park. Sweetheart Cup built a 5-foot-high waxy paper cup at its 75th and Kostner plant, and Coke's local fountain syrup distributor was going to fill it with enough carbonated water to wash down a 22-foot-long submarine sandwich.

This record-setting fast supper was one of the lesser milestones of legendary promoter Bill Veeck, who started his baseball career when his family worked for the Cubs. Forty years earlier Veeck had built the Wrigley Field center-field scoreboard and planted ivy on the walls. Now he was the lead owner of the White Sox and his son Mike was filling the home game schedule with circus acts and other pregame stunts. One went famously wrong two years later, when 24-year-old DJ Steve Dahl blew up a crate of disco records in center field between games of a doubleheader with Detroit. Or what would have been a doubleheader if the field were still playable after riot police cleared out rowdy fans.

My 1977 introduction to Comiskey Park was a much tamer affair. The night before, Steve Stone pitched a 13-3 win over Western Division rival Seattle before 12,294 fans. It was raining the afternoon the the Ruder & Finn publicity team set out for the South Side. Bob Verdi wrote in the Tribune the next day that the infield looked like the paddock at Arlington Park.

After assisting with the pregame festivities from the sidelines, we took box seats on a damp concrete deck. It felt like taking refuge from the summer heat in a cool basement rec room. At this point I had seen the Sox only in day games as a Brewers fan, including one near-disastrous field trip. We took a chartered bus from Madison with a keg of beer, which the bus driver nursed as we watched the game. Our trip home was delayed when the bus ran into a ditch near Delafield.

Some Sox stars were missing from manager Bob Lemon's lineup. Lamar Johnson was at 1st base instead of Jim Spencer and Jack Brohamer replaced Jorge Orta at 2nd. At least Cleveland, aligned then with the Eastern Division, had not played the Sox since May and was on a six-game losing streak.

The pitcher was Wilbur Wood, a 35-year-old knuckleballer. The knuckler is an unpredictable corkscrew pitch that confounds not only batters, but also catchers. Brian Downing took Jim Essian's place in the battery. Wood was in his 16th year in the major leagues and his 11th for the Sox. After years as a reliever, the Sox put him in the starting rotation in 1971. He pitched 20 or more complete nine-inning games in each of the next four years.

In 1977 Wood had a knee ailment and was a year away from retirement, but was the highest-paid Sox starter at $140,000. The two Sox stars of 1977 were just passing through. Veeck traded for right-fielder RIchie Zisk and designated hitter Oscar Gamble even though he could not afford to keep them more than a year, when they would become free agents. At the All-Star Game Zisk played alongside Reggie Jackson, whom the Yankees had hired for five years at $2.9 million.

Cleveland's leadoff man, Duane Kuiper, led off with a bunt single, got to second on a swinging bunt by Buddy Bell, and reached third on an infield out. With bases loaded, ex-Cub Andre Thorton tried a bunt as well. It dropped dead along the third-base line for a single that brought in Kuiper.

Wood never found his knuckleball and Cleveland scored two runs in the third and two in the fifth. Bill Melton, who had spent eight years with the Sox, got his 1,000th career hit in the ninth inning for the Indians, with Jack Kucek in relief.

This was the year of the South Side Hitmen, but not tonight. Pitching for Cleveland was Wayne Garland, a 20-game winner for Baltimore. He signed with the Indians for 10 years at $2.3 million and immediately developed arm problems. They were not in evidence. Garland had a three-hitter going into the ninth.

The Sox made it exciting with a late rally: Lamar Johnson singled, Gamble walked, and Eric Soderholm singled to load the bases with two outs. Orta came in as a pinch hitter and worked Garland to a full count, only to fly out and end the game. Garland pitched a complete game, which means I did not hear Nancy Faust's newest specialty. The organist would grab any song title that came close to fitting the action, and lately she had begun to play a late-1960s pop song when an opposing pitcher was replaced. It was "Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)."

Aug. 10 was a 6-1 loss, and likely the beginning of the end for the 1977 Sox. They led Minnesota by 1½ games but would start a slow fade to Kansas City and Texas. Still, this was fun. The Sox had come far with an all-hit, no-field squad of underdog rent-a-players.

Harry Caray was calling play by play on WMAQ — yes, Harry was working on the South Side, and had begun leading the crowd in "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" during the seventh-inning stretch. As a Chicago newcomer I was captivated by the city's street life after dusk, and especially a cool night under stadium lights. I became a Sox fan that night, and though I have never lived south of Madison Street I have looked to the South Side ever since. And Guinness Book of World Records night got mentioned in the newspaper game wrapup, which endeared me to the Tribune. But that's another story.

Moved by stationery

2008-05-10T20:50:00.007-05:00

Former coworker Frank Gruber was musing before Mother's Day on the superior alternatives to musical greeting cards. But Mom's not tweeting, you know. She still wants the phone call, but really appreciates writing.

There are alternatives to gimmick greetings. Hipster DIY craft shops have rediscovered the art of letterpress printing. Letterpress cards are not typical Hallmark fare but high-touch affairs with embossed images and restrained color on rag paper. Mother's Day was a good excused to take Shadow for a walk to visit Maude at Paper Doll on Damen.

Sonny has been known to abandon his roller-ball for a fountain pen on occasion and repress memories of his Catholic school penmanship lessons. He really has to pause and reflect on Mom while filling in the large blank spaces, and the scribbling itself is a lost tactile pleasure.

A dog and his bones

2008-03-27T18:34:00.009-05:00

I took my dog to the neurosurgeon the other day. Yes, dogs have docs who fix slipped discs, treat seizures and tend to wobbly walks, and I was in the market for such a specialist.

Or should I say, Shadow was in need of one. We found this Belgian shepherd mix at The Anti-Cruelty Society five years ago, and he may have been age 3 at the time. Strays don't come with pedigrees. Now at age 8 he was having problems with the winding stairs in our house. He would approach them as I addressed a home improvement project, staring at the woodwork, frozen in place, trying to figure out what to do next. It took my considerable coaching skills to get him to put one leg in front of another.

Dogs usually walk on their paws, which would be like walking on tiptoes. When he walked up steps, Shadow's shinbone almost touched the tread. Walking down was worse. He would circle the head of the staircase, look down the stairs, then circle again, as if he had to keep hitting the reset button to get himself moving. Sometimes I just have to pull his immobile legs out from under him and carry his 50 pounds down the steps. This winter, I put Shadow on a low-fat diet.

Things got progressively worse. My neighborhood has various types of of 3-flat condo buildings, but one common trait is that none of the owners care to shovel snow. So taking the dog for a walk is like taking him through an agility course, jumping hurdles and maneuvering obstacles. Shadow was not the star pupil in agility school. Worse, he started adopting a strange stance, walking with both his hind legs thrust forward. I'd feel a tug on the leash and look behind me to see Shadow splayed on the ice, looking around like his buddy the schnauzer had snuck up and greased his path as a practical joke.

By this time I was suspecting his hind legs were not quite right, and a couple days of long walks in last month's warm stretch confirmed it. A trip to the park usually set Shadow running after every squirrel he saw. This time, he just barked. He was moving slowly, then hardly at all. Aspirin helped, till the vomiting started. I booked an appointment with the chiropractor at the local veterinary clinic. Yes, there are canine chiropractors too.

But the chiropractor checked back with Shadow's usual vet, and in turn Dr. Jane called Shadow in for a closer look. Already I'm probably looking at a couple hundred of bucks on visits to the clinic, X-rays, the whole bit. Our vet is a real sweetheart though. Dr. Jane's exam room has a photo on the wall of a dog who's the spitting image of Shadow. It's her dog, who died a few years ago, and she always greets Shadow like a long-lost relative.

She and a lab technician prodded Shadow, flipped him on one side, then the other, and tested his reflexes with a rubber mallet. One side, he's all twitches. The other, tap tap, nothing happening. Numb. Doggie sciatica. This is when Dr. Jane starts talking about the dog neurologist. There used to be one in the whole state, who would drive up from Champaign once a month like a circuit rider.

Now there's a veterinary neurologist up in Northbrook, board certified in internal medicine, with all the diagnostic equipment, the surgical setup, everything. You can make an appointment in the morning and if Shadow needs an operation, you're in the right place. Just one thing, Jane said. You're not talking about hundreds of dollars, but thousands.

Well, what could I do but make the appointment? Shadow was happy. He was in no obvious pain. There was no reason not to treat him. And he's my best friend! Really, five years ago I was having a rough patch at work, and I took a cue from Harry S Truman. "If you want a friend in Washington," he said, "get a dog." Shadow taught me a lot. He got me out in the sunshine every day, got my mind off my problems, and made me leader of the pack. There's a responsibility that comes with that.

So I told my co-workers I was taking the day off and I gave Shadow a push into the back seat for a trip up the Edens. Shadow loved the excursion, and the clinic's waiting room was a social occasion for him. The neurologist followed us out to the parking lot so Shadow could stretch his sometimes wobbly legs. Then it was back inside for more prodding and more rubber mallets.

That was all the neurosurgeon needed. Nothing really unusual here. Shadow might be a bit older than Anti-Cruelty's best guess, he said, and getting a bit arthritic in the legs, maybe the spine or neck. Time for to trade in Shadow's collar for a harness. And time for a return to see Jane for X-rays, doggie dentistry, and the same kind of treatment many older humans need: anti-inflammatory pills, glucosamine for the joints, some regular but not super-strenuous workouts.

Dogs are stoic about old age. They don't complain or expect too much from old bones. They seem happy with their lot. Whatever lies ahead, Shadow has more to teach me about life.

The tippling point

2008-03-19T21:44:00.007-05:00

A reporter in a bar would be the definition of an unreliable source. Same with Malcolm Gladwell at a storytelling performance. In Slate, Jack Shafer calls out the author of "The Tipping Point" for a performance at the NYC story event The Moth. Bunk, the subhead claims. Well, yeah....

Gladwell's tall tale of journalist apprenticeship reminded me of the after-hours yarns told at Chicago newspaper hangouts, as well as Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's insider scenes in "The Front Page" and satirical novels from Evelyn Waugh's "Scoop" to Charles Dickinson's "Rumor Has It" and Calvin Trillin's "Floater." Like most fiction, all germinate from a seed of truth. Nelson Algren's short stories from "The Neon Wilderness" is my current occupation on the 66 Chicago bus. Algren wrote fiction and nonfiction set on the West Town streets where this bus now trolls, and often it's hard to tell which is which.

One of Gladwell's conceits was a variation on the "Order of the Occult Hand." Old-school reporters were initiated into this virtual society by getting an article published using the phrase "It was as if an occult hand..." Fans of The Onion would appreciate this sendup of journalistic convention, documented by (among others) editorialist Paul Greenberg of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and reporter James Janega of the Chicago Tribune. Gladwell looks to be an Occult Hand apprentice.

Postum-part depression

2008-03-02T19:58:00.006-06:00

An NPR report started a rush of demands on the Kraft message board to bring back Postum. Too late. Kraft stopped making the hot beverage mix last year.

The archetypal health beverage, a 19th-century wheat-and-molasses concoction of C.W. Post, is no longer found alongside instant coffee at Jewel and Dominick's, although chicory is still hiding on high shelves. Coffee-flavor Postum was an abomination of course, but Postum had the same mellow feel as New Orleans' gift to coffee.

NPR interviewed an fan who made a watery cup of Postum via satellite for Scott Simon. Some people make coffee taste like tea too. One possibly ironic message on the Kraft board suggested ground cardboard as a substitute. Bah. As my wife ruefully recalls, Postum was never strong enough for me till you could smell the blackstrap. Herb tea is just not going to cut it.

Extreme times call for extreme measures

2008-01-27T19:26:00.001-06:00

Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth till he sprouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave.
Herman Melville, "Moby Dick, or the Whale"

Captain Ahab had a boatload of earnest accomplices on his quest for the Leviathan. Thus it ever was with change we can believe in. The presidential campaign has taken on rising stakes and a meaner tone. Any sign of nuance, from Mitt Romney's benchmarks for Iraq to Barack Obama's thoughts on Ronald Reagan, are taken for signs of weakness. Extreme values are the measure of unlikely behavior.

When Barry Goldwater said, "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," his words to the 1964 Republican Convention were a strange echo of Dr. Martin Luther King's "Letter From Birmingham Jail" a year earlier: "So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?" Whatever your concept of liberty, it's bound to be something worth fighting for.

Tribune Company's liberty was at stake whenSam Zell took over at yearend, and the company's core values changed nearly overnight. At least the 1991 corporate mission statement got a grand rewrite. It's hard to pledge yourself to "Create premier branded content." I'd rather "Play to win," particularly when the Sun-Times is spelling out the price of failure.

In catching up with the Sun-Times buyouts, I missed the news that the Sun-TImes is abandoning its Booster weekly newspapers. Oak Park's Wednesday Journal will extend its city footprint by taking over over the former Lerner imprint, along with the Booster and News-Star. East Village/Wicker Park is one of the few neighborhoods in which the two chains currently compete. Likely that will not continue. Update: The Booster's new owner confirmed that its coverage area was retreating to Lake View. )

One rogue trader may have lost the Societe Generale bank $7.14 billion, spooked futures exchanges worldwide and escalated the Fed's extreme makeover of the U.S. economy. Playing to win is sometimes literally going for broke. Said Mr. Starbuck: "God keep me!—keep us all!"

Marsalis' slow turn on Ellington

2008-01-19T10:09:00.000-06:00

Wynton Marsalis gives "Cabin in the Sky" his thumbs-down. Still, his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, in Chicago on Friday, couldn't resist dusting off "Going Up," Duke Ellingon's contribution to the thinly plotted 1943 race movie. "He must have thought, something better come of this mess," Marsalis said.

Rookie director Vincente Minnelli seems to do more than go through the motions (note the nice dance-hall tracking shot). But it's good to have even a cheesy M-G-M document of Ellington's heyday, just as putting slapstick standards to celluloid elevated the Three Stooges to historians of burlesque. (Watching my dog launch himself at parkway squirrels still triggers my recall of "Slowly I Turn").

Maybe Marsalis came to Symphony Center via ... Niagara Falls! The Jazz at Lincoln Center band was dressed in gray suits matching the Ellington clip, ready for fun with standards and obscurities on an assortment of instruments. Elliot Mason took an uptempo turn on bass trumpet; "The Single Petal of a Rose" featured Joe Temperley on bass clarinet alongside a dukish Dan Nimmer. Ali Jackson's brushwork on "Solitude" was a simple display of skill. Marsalis not only channeled Leonard Slatkin in a music appreciation lecture but flirted with audience members seated onstage. A swinging time was had by all.

Doctor Atomic: It's the Bomb

2008-01-05T21:01:00.000-06:00

It's a gray sun brooding over the proceedings, a diving bell to hell, a sacred-heart monstrance in a monstrous benediction. The atom bomb hanging over the New Mexico desert cyclorama in Lyric Opera's "Doctor Atomic" looks like it came at once from government-archive photo and stage director Peter Sellars' dark fantasies. Act One of this San Francisco Opera co-production has dancing electrons and an Anvil Chorus of physicists, but "The Gadget" steals the show.

Sellars' libretto for the John Adams opera is a pastiche, but with a striking range. J. Robert Oppenheimer speaks in his own words and in the poetry of Baudelaire and John Donne, whose poem Batter my heart, three person'd God becomes a Faustian killer aria for Gerald Finley. His wife's dialog is elegaic poet Murial Rukeyser, who apparently is not represented in the Chicago Public Library collection. A Greek chorus quotes The Bhagavad-Gita in their fear of what Man hath wrought.

This has been a fine season for Lyric Opera, perhaps because we've cut our subscription back to four operas to avoid yet another "Boheme" or "Traviata." (OK, we don't mind another "Barber of Seville.") Handel's "Julius Caesar" cornered the market on countertenors, trumped by Danielle de Niese's Cleopatra as a Bollywood ingenue. And Christine Brewer dueled diva Deborah Voigt to a draw in "Die Frau ohne Schatten."

But the Lyric's late first attempt at a John Adams opera matched these considerable feats. As a dramatic slice of recent history it resembled "Amistad", which debuted at Lyric a decade ago and only now is being revived for Spoleto. But while Anthony Davis' high-atonal score did the impossible, creating an opera on slavery that could not bring you to tears, "Doctor Atomic" used a similar musical language to speak the unspeakable with both force and intimacy. Bring your hankies.

Facebook vs. face time

2007-12-30T19:54:00.000-06:00

After visiting family, I'm spending a little time with Facebook. If it didn't seem so creepy, I could have asked my niece and nephew to friend me and saved the trip. But that would not have led to curious after-dinner conversations about vector graphics, teaching and 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Facebook friends seem to spend more time on trivia quizzes, which is why I'd rather befriend than be friended. My friends lead more interesting lives outside Facebook. But you gotta start somewhere, and it might as well be in learning the music tastes of the IBM help desk at work. (Metal. Who knew?)

So after changing copyright dates on my websites I broke down and started accepting Facebook friends tonight, since we all seem to be killing time right now. Not as much fun as a spy novel (this weekend, Richard Clarke's "Breakpoint") but still liable to keep me up past my bedtime. Let's watch what happens.

The wild colonial blog

2007-12-02T12:31:00.001-06:00

Return with us now to colonial Boston, a half-century before the Tea Party. The Puritans were in charge — the Salem witch trials were as recent a memory as the Iran hostage crisis is now — and Increase Mather had still to hand the North Church keys to his son Cotton.

One of the parishioners was candlemaker Josiah Franklin. He dreamed of a better life for his sons, perhaps their entry to Boston's first estate as clergymen. But making soap and candles did not make Josiah a man of means. Harvard was not in his sons' future.

So son James went back to England to apprentice as a printer and returned by 1718 with his own shop, printing Boston's second newspaper, the Gazette. When his youngest brother was 12, James took him on as an apprentice.

The publisher was the local postmaster, which was a convenient arrangement. When the postmaster received newspapers from England he could repurpose that content. Unfortunately the next postmaster sent the work elsewhere and James was running a job shop. But James admired the essays and pamphlets circulating in London during his apprenticeship. One familiar byline from those days, Daniel Defoe, had just published a novel, "Robinson Crusoe."

James Franklin's young friends had literary and political pretensions as well. Today they'd start a blog. Instead, James Franklin launched his own newspaper, the Courant, and took on the issues of the day. Smallpox was epidemic in Boston, for instance, and Cotton Mather, who once had studied medicine, had learned from his slaves about inoculation. Mather promoted the practice, and editorially the Courant found nearly any civic benefit proposed by the clergy suspect.

The teen apprentice also had writing aspirations, despite a mere two years at Boston Latin School. He was a voracious reader and had learned much about the language as a typesetter, but James was not going to let him write. What was 15-year-old Benjamin Franklin to do?

Poor Richard might have had coined an answer years later, or maybe Ben cribbed the idea reading Plato by candlelight: Necessity was the mother of invention. He disguised his handwriting and slipped a letter to the editor under the printing-house door.

"It was found in the morning, and communicated to his writing friends when they call’d in as usual," Franklin wrote in his Autobiography. "They read it, commented on it in my hearing, and I had the exquisite pleasure of finding it met with their approbation, and that, in their different guesses at the author, none were named but men of some character among us for learning and ingenuity."

Thus it was that Ben Franklin started his career as an essayist by making things up. The teen author wrote as a preacher's widow, Silence Dogood. The pen name was ironic: Silence was a scold, who announced herself as an enemy of both vice and power who would enlighten the Courant's readers with a short epistle every two weeks.

The ruse was not only successful in fooling his brother's literary circle, but young Franklin would keep it up over the better part of a year. Silence Dogood's letters were front-page material for the Courant. For one thing, they were entertaining. One of the widow Dogood's proposals would give spinsters a cash award. They could even keep the money if they later married, as long as they did not consort with their husband for more than an hour at a time.

The publisher also might have found a plainspoken preacher's wife a convenient foil for the highfalutin Puritan establishment. In one early letter widow Dogood instructs readers how to write their own epitaph with all the appropriate cliches: "cold, cruel death, unhappy fate, weeping eyes etc." Another letter relates a dream in which Harvard scholars copy the archbishop of Canterbury's sermons, presumably for their own use on graduation from divinity school.

This was cheeky but by no means out of the ordinary for the Courant, which was risky business with the clergy so close to the courts. When the Courant that summer suggested that the government was inept in dealing with piracy, James Franklin was thrown in jail. Young Ben was left to run the paper, but couldn't resist getting in a few digs himself. Ms. Dogood submitted an essay critical of preachers turned politicians, a group that would have included the governor.

By fall Silence fell silent in the Courant's pages. By then Benjamin Franklin's name was on the masthead as publisher. This was another ruse. James had been freed from jail on orders that he stop producing the Courant, but was still running the newspaper under his brother's name.

But within another year James would be running a help-wanted ad for a new apprentice.
Ben was looking for true journeyman work, with less political heat. Poor Richard would coin a phrase years later, "He makes a foe who makes a jest." Like W.C. Fields' vaudeville epitaph, he would rather be in Philadelphia. And writers from Fields to Mike Royko to the anonymous bloggers of Daily Kos can trace a strand of their DNA to Ben Franklin and his first alter ego, the good widow Silence Dogood.

They've given you a number, and taken away your name

2007-12-02T12:31:00.000-06:00

The picture of health

2007-11-10T13:10:00.000-06:00

I did not recognize my mother. In a hospital room she was tiny, propped up at an odd angle in a tall bed. And the lines on her face did not match the contours of my memory. Mom is always the same age in my mind, a time when I'd be playing on the beach and she was soaking up sun. Not at 76, paying for her luminous tan.

Dad gave us the green light for our weekend visit, but we were her first new visitors. She was finishing her lunch, or trying to. Her chicken soup was tasty days ago but a salty, unappealing broth now. Of course the menu had changed after surgery, but we needed a fixer. Mom called a nurse.

Nurses' watchful eyes and comforting words were much appreciated in her first unsteady attempts out of bed. One nurse lowered her guard with Mom as well. She had a 90-minute commute home when she finished her double shift and was trying to figure out what food she was going to get on the table when she got there. "I just want things to be perfect," she told Mom, crying.

"I don't know why she was telling me all this," Mom told us, choking up herself at the recollection. I changed the subject: A nurse at Rush had a similar long commute and crummy hours. She cared for my mothe-in-law when we had to add an emergency-room visit to her vacation itinerary.

Dad too has had enough hospital moments in the past year. He has spent most of this spring being probed in various places as a cancer patient. Most of the family visited soon after they got the news. I put off my visit till he was rested enough to travel the grocery, hear my Chicagoan's view on Barack Obama, and generally allow my distractions.

These visits have been full of the chatter we use to process big events. Mom got to hear about my birthday plans to see Bruce Springsteen in concert. She got to recall her 1970s trip to see Elvis in Las Vegas, and how the King had wandered offstage mid-performance. Preparing to take on Halloween alone, Dad got to review his trick-or-treat game plan before, with Mom growing tired, it was time for hugs and good-byes.

My parents now visit me at work, from a framed photo at my desk. I now recognize myself in the their portrait, much like used to see myself in their wedding picture. They're familiar in sickness and in health.

I'll see my parents again in person over Thanksgiving, no nearer perfection but making due with the small talk that nurses us to health.

That's life. This is Walgreens.

2007-11-09T22:35:00.000-06:00

It seems like a man-bites-dog situation. The neighborhood tells a developer to go big or go home.

The East Village Association has been lobbying for a building at Ashland and Division that would be more of a neighborhood anchor than the chain restaurant it would replace on the southwest corner.

This week the developer presented his concession to the community: a chain drugstore.

Residents were upset. But should it surprise anyone when a large retailer and busy developer make decisions based on short-term profit? And can we blame them for not taking risks when we make it so easy to go for the quick money?

That's how Polish Broadway got paved for a Pizza Hut. And that's how the new gateway to my community is going to be a big red W under glass.

Ald. Manny Flores seemed to have a golden opportunity in reviewing the project. Here was a chance to replace a single-story billboard — a building that couldn't even be vacated till its trademark red mansard roof was papered over. As it turned out, he might as well have told the developer, "No, that's just not good enough. My constituents really want a two-story billboard."

Here was a chance to stiffen the developer's spine, to show how there were smart, profitable ways to fill a community need other than (1) drive-in retail or (2) drive-in retail plus condos, and that the perfect complement to a bank building is not precast concrete.

Instead, the Polish Triangle, one of the few public spaces on Division that hasn't been converted to a sidewalk cafe, most likely will become an arrow pointing to the snack-food aisle.

Still, I can't blame politicians when they build playlots instead of parks, or extract taller store windows as a development concession. After all, this month Flores held hearings in the ward to ask what a new library was worth to us. And we responded: Cash in at the casino. Don't raise taxes. Our kids can find books somewhere else.

Of course, the commercials are right. We don't live anywhere near Perfect. So there's Walgreens.

Commissions of omission

2007-11-03T11:54:00.000-05:00

Journalists only write 10 percent of what they know, said my college reporting instructor. Now it must be only 5 percent.

A reporter called me and we must have talked 20 minutes. In his story, I was represented by a one-sentence quote. What surprised me was the sentence he quoted, which displayed neither a central point nor any particular wit.

No wonder politicians place such a premium at staying "on message." Certainly I was getting through to the reporter, but I couldn't predict just what would get through to print.

Alan K.O. Tan spent considerable time in his Journalism 204 lecture at Wisconsin suggesting what reporters can get wrong in an interview, but less on how much to leave out. Since then I am constantly humbled by learning how much of what I say is lost because I'm still warming to a topic when the listener has already moved on.

Tan also introduced his students to the regional synonyms for political patron when he told us reporters should not use the word "Chinaman." But that's another story.

Outsourced context

2007-10-14T16:14:00.001-05:00

It's a marvel how the New York Times can produce historical perspective through automation. Click on a word and Answers.com searches a reference library. Sometimes I just stumble on this feature through errant keystroke and learn that the tuna is a fast swimmer.

This ready-reference search came in handy when the Times reprinted a 15-year-old essay by novelist and now Nobel laureate Doris Lessing. She had made a point about political correctness that Harold ("Closing of the American Mind") Bloom now might appreciate, even as he grouses that in Lessing's case the Nobel committee could be its standard bearer. ( Bloom says since age 73 it's been all downhill for Lessing.)

Lessing saw Marxist roots in fuzzy political and academic speech, and took pains to separate it from literary speech: "Literature, in particular, has always inspired the House committees, the Zhdanovs, the fits of moralizing, but, at worst, persecution."

That's a sentence fraught with context, and while Answers.com did a fair job at a capsule bio of Andrei Zhdanov, Wikipedia gets right to the point on his role as impresario of Socialist Realism. As for the veiled reference to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, nytimes.com cannot read between the lines.

White Sox cheer now a September song

2007-09-30T19:39:00.000-05:00

Late September brings the merger of nature and man — the evening breeze under the street lamp — in its most focused form, the major-league ballpark. It's a bittersweet merger for Chicago White Sox fans.

Fall came too quickly this year, the ballpark lighting up before the first pitch. We covered our team jerseys with nondescript windbreakers and ordered hot coffee instead of cold beer. No wonder the singing Miller man from first base had replaced the gravel-voiced beer dude that had made third base his territory.

Jon Garland pitched a three-hitter, a reminder of another cold evening when Mark Buehrle pitched a no-hitter. New seatmates were there to follow the pitcher's cat-and-mouse games, some only for an inning as they left for vacant seats nearer home plate. Sometimes I was left with my own thoughts.

This weekend my fellow season ticket holders came for the last game under the lights before our wait till next year. Cubs fans now will have their day under the lights. We know how fleeting it can be.

A penguin's tale

2007-09-03T13:57:00.000-05:00

It seemed like love at first sight, but was it really? Antarctica can be pitch-black for months at a time.

His crisp prom-tuxedo look could not have been what attracted her. The lady-bird pretty much dressed the same way. All penguins do.

It could have been prom king's cute Andy Rooney eyebrows. Or maybe it was his lapel. He matched the feather behind his ear with a bright-orange crustacean.

There is something romantic about Emperor penguins. When they're featured on television shows, my wife starts cooing. "They mate for life," she says. She looks me in the eye when she says this. Maybe this is why I thought of penguins to tell a story with a moral.

Or perhaps everyone seems to be drawing lessons from penguins. The movies find them inspiring -- who knew they could tap-dance! And the Chicago Tribune's lobby display uses penguins' response to climate change as symbol of transformative workplace change.

A newspaper cohort called me breathless awhile back. "There are penguins in the Baltimore Sun's lobby!" she said. It sounded like a bit far to range in a flight from global warming. But the Tribune sibling was just relating a
common business fable on seeing adversity as opportunity. And what captain of industry wouldn't want to face change by striking out in a bold new direction? If he could only chart a course.

Our prom-king penguin was a goal setter. He wanted to escape the stifling quiet, where he could hear the permafrost crunch under his well-insulated feet. And it was time to make a break from his parents. At this time of year penguins would be flocking to the colony, and these love-birds couldn't imagine living at home till they were 6!

So they struck out for a new, independent life. But by the time King got to that young-adult hangout, the historic Rookery, it was dawning on him (and dawning can take quite a while in Antarctica) that starting a family was more than just hatching an egg.

For one, the open sea was another 50 miles away, and with a hatchling on the way the love-birds couldn't just order takeout squid every night. One of them had to go on the hunt, and if lady-bird was to raise her chick she needed to make the deep dive now. That left the prom king to babysit her egg for two months, while fending off wild winds.

So King huddled with his buddies, not to talk about hunting but as an avian windbreak. They'd take turns standing in the center of the huddle for warmth. This is where baby fat comes in handy: They were balancing eggs on their feet to heat them, and no one was going to be going out any time soon for a cold one.

One of them in fact was woozy and did not look like he would last the winter -- could it have been the bird flu? -- and this cold made it no time to be unsteady on one's feet. When his buddy swooned, King scooped up the egg and kept it warm as one of his own offspring.

By the time lady-bird returned with a bellyful of food, she would have two young mouths to feed, and King would have the sure knowledge that life was not about striking out on your own as he had thought, but relying on and being reliable for others. It's a lesson those who flock to the city often fail to recognize, but these are the cold facts.

Workin' and steamin' at the Chicago Jazz Festival

2007-09-02T19:09:00.001-05:00

Jazz musicians have been working up a sweat at the Chicago Jazz Festival this weekend. This is physical labor, with rhythm sections banging away at their instruments in 80-degree heat.

Clark Sommers, playing upright bass in he Dan Cray Trio, arrived with a sunburn, attacked his instrument like a demon, then went tourist and darted about Grant Park catching the remaining acts. Just watching was fatiguing.

Charlie Haden stopped to hear the cicadas leading a pickup band from the far end of the Jackson Boulevard stage. Paul Wertico was physically the frontman, sun shining on his drum set just beyond the stage monitors. The laid-back set was a marked contrast with New Orleans' high-energy Astral Project.

It was hard not to enjoy the small stage, where you could sit close enough to hear the instruments over the public-address speakers. But no one seemed to be enjoying himself more than Ted Hogarth, a baritone sax sideman getting to step out with friends and a stack of Gerry Mulligan big band charts, a Labor Day labor of love.

80 percent of success

2007-07-07T21:13:00.000-05:00

Business has spent months reflecting on how to move quickly. A few books like "Our Iceberg Is Melting" have started thousands of executives thinking about doing something unique.

So I took a perverse interest in taking a break from such business reading for "Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up." Maybe I'm not so clever after all. Why not look for advice on transformative change from an improv coach?

Stanford drama prof Patricia Ryan Madson in fact shares some ideas with the "Getting Things Done" brand of productivity advisers. For instance, begin with what seems obvious and once it is under way any task seems smaller.

By "don't prepare," Madson actually is saying to pay attention to the issue at hand rather than plotting your response. Which, if reports on global warming are correct, is what the penguins would do.

All the children are above average

2007-07-05T21:46:00.000-05:00

The first look at standardized test results are out, and 64.8 percent of Illinois Scholastic Aptitude Tests at Andersen School this year had passing grades, vs. 64.1 percent citywide.

That was 269th out of the 527 schools for which the city posted composite scores. Not high enough to rate boasts in the real estate ads, but much better than the 31.2 percent just four years ago.

Like many schools, science grades slipped while math improved strongly (70.8 percent passed).

Composite scores nearby include 67.0 percent at Peabody, 71.5 percent at Sabin, 72.7 percent at Burr and 78.7 percent at Pritzker.

Wisdom of the market

2007-05-29T21:53:00.000-05:00

There's a message for all corporate managers in the Chicago Tribune report "Keeping the Oil Flowing". BP paid a high price for deferred maintenance, according to author David Greising, in the 2005 explosion of a Texas refinery, the 2006 spill at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and extended repairs to its Thunder Horse platform on the Gulf of Mexico.

But striking a balance between fiscal and quality priorities is not unique to Big Oil, and the balance is difficult even for a company chastened by experience. "The day someone says budget doesn't matter," said BP's top North American official, "well, then I'm working at the wrong company."

No one ever claimed money was no object in the news business. A sign of that industry's troubles came in the Chicago Tribune own lower circulation and flat readership in its most recent circulation audit. Top executive Scott Smith still could accurately characterize as "among the best in the industry."

This writer does not tell tales out of school, so here is not the place to find news of the Tribune Co's impending sale or who is being severed from the company. That only partly explains the lack of posts in this space of late.

Late hours at work also leave little time for establishing the East Village Association website, much less contributing to this one. This year's spring distractions include gardening (no soreness this weekend) and the White Sox (still smarting from Tampa Bay home stand).