Escaped Notice

The future of news: Tough it out

2009-06-11T21:01:00.006-05:00

Have newspapers forgotten how to sell themselves?

A century ago, newspapers were literally beating competitors. The Chicago Tribune and Chicago Examiner hired thugs to rough up their rivals, giving gangsters Dion O'Banion and Bugs Moran their felonious start. Fourteen news dealers were murdered in Chicago's circulation wars.

These days newspapers are only being studied to death. (Some of these studies are produced at USC and Penn colleges funded by heirs of Moses Annnberg, who hired O'Banion's sluggers.)

This weekend in Chicago there's a conference at Columbia College on the future of news (not the first in Chicago). On Wednesday came a report on what Chicago nonprofit agencies think of online news. The Tribune's media critic read the study and concluded they wanted something like mainstream media.

And Northwestern University the same day launched a website for collaborations between students in journalism and engineering, not the kind of collusion that was O'Banion's specialty. Broadly stated, all this effort starts from a single premise: The daily newspaper's profits are eroding, and new business models are slow to take hold. People in the media business can fill their schedule with many earnest panel discussions of the grave effect this will have on society.

Outside observers might conclude this is another example of media bias. Bigger companies than the Tribune and Sun-Times are failing, and there are few signs of a compulsion to examine whether the automobile is obsolete or if there's any future in banking. Perhaps this is a shared preoccupation of the media and the foundations that study civic progress. Their endowments are under the same pressures as are newsroom budgets.

The days of a dozen Chicago dailies are ancient history, and now companies that held a comfortable local monopoly have a worldwide web of competitors at their door. Welcome to my world. For a dozen years now I've worked in online media, and for more than a dozen years before that at one of the nation's few underdog print dailies.

Employing street gangs to gain market share is no longer an option. Marketers now try to understand their customers' problems and how they can be part of the solution. Newspapers of course have studied this too, and have identified a half-dozen needs that newspapers meet:

Enlighten the audience on issues they find important.

Educate consumers to make better decisions.

Enrich them with time-saving or money-making ideas.

Entertain them or ward off boredom.

Engage people who share interests or views.

Empower them to act on things that matter.

None of these are exclusive properties of newspapers but they're all powerful motivations. If news enterprises have to work harder these days to justify their worth, they're in good company. They can start by convincing themselves of their staying power.

6 steps to street-smart projects

2009-05-17T22:20:00.008-05:00

Consultant John Connellan tells of a client who was teaching his 4-year-old son Anthony how to ride a bicycle. Anthony was riding in the street for the first time and he kept drifting to the middle of the street.

"Stay close to the curb", the father warned. But Anthony kept weaving away from the sidewalk. Finally Dad lost patience and said, "if you don't stay close to the curb, I can't let you ride in the street anymore."

Anthony stopped his bike, turned around and looked straight at Dad. He said "What's a curb?"

There are all sorts of stories about children learning their boundaries. I like this one because it deals with our role in making the ground rules clear. I don't have kids but I face this all the time managing work projects. We all play roles in our company's success. But it can be hard to curb your enthusiasm and follow the game plan. If there is one.

In business, project management itself is misunderstood. People charged with keeping a project on track likely don't have final say in how much money it gets, or even who gets to work on it. Here I'm taking a few minutes to lay some ground rules for putting down ground rules.

Everyone needs goals but not everyone thinks about the role of spelling them out. Four years ago I became a student of this process when my boss put me on project work and gave me a copy of "Project Management for Dummies." Don't be offended, he said, it's actually one of the better books on the subject.

A few more projects and a few more bosses later I was getting coaching from the head of the Project Management Office. He had me go out and get "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Project Management." So you see how I've progressed. (Don't be offended, he said, it's an easier reference than the PMBOK Guide. Those are the certification documents, and the Celebrex fine print is easier reading.)

Now, complete idiots may not know a what makes a good set of project goals, but the developer building Trump Tower and the developer building your accounting software will tell you the same three things about goals:

Goals must be specific. Any idiot should be able to understand them. That's important because in this climate, the project could be out of your hands and left for some other idiot to figure out. Till then, you need to be able to explain the task to managers without them getting antsy and checking their messages.

Goals must be realistic. You don't need a work example here. Go to Borders and look at the magazine racks. There are dozens of titles about building the perfect kitchen. I'm never going to be able to afford the perfect kitchen. When I remodel I'll be lucky if the electrical system is capable of running the perfect 5-quart mixer. Either way, the dough does not just make itself.

Goals must be measurable. Part of keeping it real is putting down goals you can track. My bosses may expect perfection from me if I haven't sold them on the previous point. But at least my projects have to define what's good enough. Otherwise contractors don't know what to bid, and when they're finished you can't say whether they earned it.

To stick to these goals, three other things must be clear at the outset:

Goals must have deadlines. The more deadlines, the better to move things along one step at a time. I ran status meetings for a boss that liked a one-line summary of each project, with just an end date for each. It wasn't too surprising when those ending dates kept getting revised later and later.

Goals must have consensus. Sometimes it seems my main role running a project is just setting up meetings and taking notes. That would frustrate me till I realized that if you don't get everyone on the same page, things quickly get creepy, as in "scope creep." There's power in spelling out how far a group will take a . The first step in setting the agenda turns out to be sending out the agenda.
Goals must have owners. If you've seen an e-mail from me you know what I mean. I get so many emails "FYI" that it's hard to know I'm actually being asked to do something. Almost every sentence in my emails starts with someone's name -- Joe, can you do this task? Chris, can you automate it? To get a job done it's not enough to just ask. I have to ask someone.

These half-dozen rules can help keep any project from sliding off the rails. Take a blank sheet of paper and devote it to any project that's giving you fits, at home or at work. Write down what you're trying to do, why you're trying to do it, and how you'll know when it's done. You'll end up with a much better grasp on the situation.

There are so many things we have to deal with in a day that it's hard to make much progress on any of them. But it's like riding a bicycle: Once you've learned how, you can pick it up at any time. If you know where to point yourself, it's easier to move straight ahead.

25 edited things about me

2009-03-17T19:43:00.013-05:00

Brenda is God's most marvelous creation. Not that you aren't awesome too.

My mom studied communications. My dad studied logic. I'm studying them.

My bookshelves are flouting Zero Book Growth policy.

Newspapers will die when laptops are cheap enough to leave on the L.

Ed il mio bacio scioglierà il silenzio che ti fa mia.

Playing softball on asphalt, I couldn't understand why anyone would slide into home.

My 7th-grade chemistry class at St. Mary's: Watching the teacher handle test tubes.

I shot news stories on a Bell & Howell Filmo.

I wrote Fortran for a Univac 1110.

I played in a band with Clark Terry.

Why did I have to learn penmanship from Ditto but slide rule from Mimeograph?

Time to break for coffee.

If I don't cry at the opera, it's bad opera.

Brenda calls me a raisinholic, but I can stop eating anytime I want.

Dominus vobiscum. Et cum spirito tuo.

How did Tall become the small size? In clothing, I mean.

Best part of my desk set: My grandfather's pica pole.

I sang at Cardinal Cody's funeral.

I set type on a Compugraphic.

My studies changed from art to journalism because my paintings all had text.

My favorite color is gray.

Games are meant to be played, not watched. Except playing baseball is mostly watching.

Marvel Comics taught me Yiddish. That's meshuga.

Less Facebook time means more face time and more book time.

Sto lat, sto lat. Niech zyje, zyje nam.

The best part about the web is that it will count to 25 for you.

Prairie style: White Sox at home on the Phoenix range

2009-03-09T21:38:00.009-05:00

Chicago red hots are a tasty mystery in Phoenix. As our kosher dogs were groomed at the White Sox' new spring training home, the vendors asked if they were doing it right. And except for the celery salt covering more pickle than wiener it was picture perfect, right down to the kelly green relish. An empty container was labeled "TIPS" in Magic Marker so we primed the pump. That's the Chicago way.

The White Sox are working to get it right at Camelback Ranch Glendale, the new park the team shares with the Los Angeles Dodgers on the northwest edge of Phoenix. Vienna Beef dogs and Connie's Pizza lend Chicago flair to an otherwise indifferent menu, but pub brews from Gordon Biersch and Deschutes Brewery are a heady reminder that you'd really rather be spending March in the Western sun. I'll pass on the Lemon Chill, thank you.

We saw the Sox as nominal visitors in a split-squad game with the Dodgers March 5. The A-team was squared off against the Cubs in Las Vegas, which gave us a good look at non-roster players, some of whom like lefty slugger Miguel Negron were playing without names on their jerseys. Jack Egbert struck out 4 in three innings as a starter before Adam Russell (wearing #46) came in and gave up two runs to make things too interesting. Kelvin Jimenez lost the game 5-4 in the ninth.

We returned with my parents the next day for a non-Cactus League exhibition vs. Australian minor-leaguers warming up for the World Baseball Classic. Neither game made the Phoenix papers, but the lopsided 10-3 WBC warmup put more prospects in play. Gordon Beckham got cooking in a potential bake-off at second base, as the hinge in a 6-4-3 double play, and Brian Anderson stroked a solid opposite-field homer to improve his odds in the center-field derby.

Despite the comfy scenery, the Sox risk being visitors in their new ranch home: L.A. fans show up in quantity no matter who's playing, and although the teams share a Playbill-size gate handout I was toning up my flabby scorekeeping in a Dodgers program, the only scorecard available. But home-plate seats were available and affordable, and the outfield lawn's up-close bullpen view was an $8 bargain. And while the Herbie Hancock sample from US3's "Cantaloop" became an earbug between innings, it could not beat hearing again the Sox' opening "Pirates of the Caribbean/Thunderstruck" medley.

Another day of third-base wind and sun would have been perfect, along with a chance to stroll the practice fields beyond the outfield wall, which include park-dimension facsimiles of both Dodger Stadium and the Cell. Sadly, that was not to be. One consolation: Sox season tickets were awaiting the return to Chicago. Spring, bring it on.

25 songs on my iPod (Randomly chosen)

2009-02-02T21:26:00.002-06:00

Gideon Kremer/Keith Jarrett: Part, Fratres

Thelonious Monk: Monk's Mood

Kronos Quartet: The Cusp of Magic

Maurizio Pollini: Chopin Nocturne #15

John Moulder: Freedom

Martha Wainwright: So Many Friends

Rufus Wainwright: Release the Stars

Joan Baez: Oh Happy Day

Frank Kimbrough: Wig Wise

LaVerne Baker: Without a God

Michael Bates' Outside Sources: Prodigal

Ron Sexsmith: Brandy Alexander

Belle & Sebastian: Sukie in the Graveyard

Ahn Trio: Oblivion

Vic Chesnutt: Virginia

Bob Mintzer Big Band: Swangalang

Cedar Walton: Clockwise

Cynthia Felton: Long as You're Living

Dropkick Murphys: Rude Awakenings

Boston Pops: Gaite Parisienne

Jimmy Cobb Quartet: Never Let Me Go

Duke Robillard: When Your Lover Has Gone

Dandy Warhols: Bohemian Like You

Calexico: Inspiracion

R.E.M.: Gardening at Night

Another Frank Lloyd Wright affair

2008-11-29T19:21:00.021-06:00

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright was once the proverbial prophet without honor in Oak Park. Early in his career, Wright showed bad form in skipping town with a client's wife. Last year a writer from Oak Park, Nancy Horan, found the story intriguing enough to imagine it from the woman's perspective. I read her book Loving Frank as my wife and I planned our own intimate association with Wright. We would live in one of his houses, if only for a day or two.

When I first came to Oak Park 30 years ago, Wright was re-emerging from obscurity nearly 20 years after his death. His turn-of-the-century early work were known mostly as the inspiration for the ranch house, and neighbors told me that for a long time his sprawling single-story commissions were viewed as no different from any other home in the comfortable Chicago suburb. Except that local roofers kept patching their leaks.
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But in 1978 the village had seen enough tourism potential in Wright to publish a guidebook to his homes, and a housewalk was organized to show Wright buildings that were on their way to becoming museum pieces. In the local weekly newspaper, the Oak Leaves, I reported with some fascination that "they have color TVs and children and dogs, like other homes." In Oak Park it was easy to buy into the Wright mystique.

In the '70s Wright's architectural office was being restored and opened for tours. That's where volunteer docents told me of the Cheney scandal, which did not involve Haliburton, an energy task force or a quail hunt. Wright built a low-slung rambler of a single-story home on East Avenue for Edwin and Mamah Cheney. Then he left his wife and split with Mamah for Europe, where he would publish a portfolio that influenced the emerging Bauhaus designers. Horan paints the couple as hounded by scandal-mongering press, which struck me as 21st-century embellishment until I read the actual news coverage. In 1909 the Chicago Tribune called the affair "an affinity tangle of character unparalleled even in the checkered history of soul mating."

Oak Park is home to 34 Wright structures, according to the most recent catalog of his homes, plus another 11 in neighboring River Forest. Wright designs had a name, the Prairie School, with carpenter-Gothic examples scattered throughout the Midwest. Wright moved his architectural practice to Wisconsin so I saw a lot of Prairie homes growing up. The Prairie School had a required reading list of Emerson and Thoreau, the better to recognize patterns from nature in his art-glass windows. There was even a typography based on his drawings, which influenced the Oak Park map I drafted for my wedding invitations.

Wright originals were not particularly lucrative for the architect. A running theme of Horan's book was Wright's continuous borrowing to finance a globe-trotting lifestyle and high-profile divorce. The architect made ends meet selling art prints he picked up cheap in Japan. Wright also designed massive wood furniture in the Arts & Crafts style, which in the 1970s was eagerly being bought up by Domino's Pizza baron Thomas Monaghan. Craftsman sofas built like workbenches were an acquired taste, though, and I had found one of its mass-market descendants for my college apartment at the Goodwill shop off campus.

The townhouse Brenda and I bought in Oak Park was across from the Unitarian church Wright designed, and we considered selling postcards to tourists scaling our front porch for a better camera angle. We could imagine living in a Wright house — the oak benches actually were pretty comfortable — but not paying for one. Wright homes now all have million-dollar price tags, even the so-called bootleg houses Wright designed while moonlighting from the Louis Sullivan firm. A Phoenix house he designed for his son is listed for $4 million.

This past March, Brenda spotted a New York Times article about Wright homes available for overnight rental, and was taken with the idea of living in a Wright house, if only for a couple of days.

So we planned a road trip through Pittsburgh to visit Fallingwater, Wright's best known house — a river runs through it. We booked a tour of another Wright curiosity: Kentuck Knob is maintained by the British lord who once owned Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House south of Plano. He lives there only a few weeks a year but keeps Claes Oldenburg sculpture and a piece of the Berlin Wall on the premises.

And we'd stay in a Wright home somewhere off the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Acme, PA. Mapquest could get us to the Dairy Queen in Donegal, where we could call for directions: turn right at Brady's Restaurant, when you see a fork in the road bear right, open the gate yourself and don't kick up too much gravel.

At the end of the rocky road was a ranch house on steroids, very long and low. We parked under the carport and let ourselves in. It was a time trip to the 1950s: a red Formica kitchen with built-in oven; a greatroom with stone fireplace and shag carpeting, and not Wright built-is but House of Teak knockoffs. This wasn't a museum piece, it was Graceland. What had we gotten ourselves into?

Owner Tom Papinchak arrived and filled us in. We had just taken a coals-to-Newcastle trip: Duncan House was built outside Lisle in DuPage County.

Wright's engineer in the 1950s, Marshall Erdman, was one of the early manufacturers of prefabricated homes. Duncan House was a 1957 attempt at a Wright prefab, a ranch house on steroids but modest by Wright standards. The Wright prefabs were a failure: Multiple changes to the stock plans ate up Erdman's profits. Only 11 were built.

Elizabeth Duncan saw the prefabs in a magazine and convinced husband Donald, an electrical engineer, that they could afford a stripped-down version in cinderblock instead of limestone. After Don Duncan died the 2-acre lot was subdivided, and four years ago the house became another DuPage County teardown. It escaped demolition, though. Crews dismantled the house, labeled the parts and packed them on semitrailers for a 500-mile trip East.

There the pieces sat for two years. An attempt to reconstruct the house as a museum ran out of money. (See a pattern emerging?) Papinchak, a contractor in the rebuilding effort, finally bought the warehoused house and spent a year piecing it back together, upgrading to a stone facade in the process.

He rebuilt Duncan House on the grounds of yet another failed Wright project, a subdivision of Wright homes that stalled after the architect's death. This would be the third house, joining two designed by a Wright apprentice. A year after the home was completed, Papinchak's plan to turn the grounds into a conference center appeared to be faltering as well. Catering supplies and gift-shop goodies were packed in the basement.

Secluded it was, but not exactly a resort. We could use the microwave and toaster oven but not the wall oven or range. The mattresses were hard. The wireless connection worked if the computer was docked against the wall. Cabinets were bare but for odd pieces of trimwork, its location labeled in Magic Marker.

Yet, spending time there, it was obvious the architect knew how his homes would be lived in. Thirty years ago, the owner of one of those Oak Park Wrights told me about "a constant play of light through the windows." It kept changing day and night. Learning firsthand what she meant made this an affair to remember.

"Am I Here," He Asks, as City Goes Wild with Frenzy of Joy

2008-11-17T05:32:00.012-06:00

Watching Barack and Michelle Obama tonight on "60 Minutes," I'm struck by the pace of events. This spring I could walk past the Obama household on the way to the 57th Street Art Fair. Now in mid-November, the Obamas are laying claim to a much bigger house, with what Michelle slyly calls a really big home office. And after a walk-through with the current occupant, the next tenant is reviewing his closing-day list with Steve Kroft. Obama seems relaxed. Inauguration is two months away, but he's ready to seal the deal now.

Obama's every day seems groundbreaking. As he reviews his agenda for Day 1, Brenda is choking up. "Look," she said, pointing to the screen. "He's the president."

History is usually coming at me from my blind spot. Ten years ago, as database whiz pressed into service as election-night reporter, I had to divide my time among three contenders in a state senate primary race. I spent probably more than I could afford with one of the Bronzeville challengers. I was curious whether he viewed the University of Chicago incumbent as a dilletante. Finally the assignment editor called and said the 13th District was looking like a lock. So I rushed toward Hyde Park, where Jesse Jackson is holding court before a perfunctory acceptance speech from the victor, Barack Obama.

I missed my chance to go one-on-one with the future president. But I'm more in my element as a concerned citizen than a political reporter. And my job makes it easier to take sides in preservation than in politics. When a historic district was proposed for East Village three years ago, I testified in its support. When the city's landmark commission recommended the proposal, I stayed to thank the alderman and a group of commission members. Later I find that table of Daley appointees included the wife of the junior senator from Illinois, Michelle Obama.

So I've covered him, lobbied her. But I keep missing the mano a mano moment. So much for my eye for up-and-comers.

Brenda too had seen Obama only from a crowd. Still, on election night we want to be close to the event. As do a million other people. The scant information available on the Grant Park rally is front-page news. The party seems like an invitation for supporters to spend time camping in line rather than escorting voters to the polls. When Brenda is offered tickets, she put me on notice that I'd be holding her place.

In fact she wraps up canvassing and is queued on Balbo before 3 p.m. on Nov. 4. I stop to bring for sandwiches and Starbucks when Brenda phones. The line is moving! I grab a cab and soon am introducing myself to her new friends, a police lieutenant improvising a series of entry lines, and a pair of student photographers, shooting for publication in Facebook. Brenda makes a break for the bathroom at the Hilton and the line starts moving again. I go through the checkpoint without her, surrendering the sandwiches and Starbucks, and by phone talk her back to my new location, the closed-off intersection of Congress and Columbus.

One of the Facebook photographers asks me, OK, is the press really in the tank for Obama? Well, it's like the pressbox at a ballgame. Of course you have favorites. But, no cheering. This is more like the crowd in the box seats, and everyone is in high spirits showing off their Obama paraphernalia. We wonder how the women with the long jacket covered in campaign buttons is going to get through the metal detectors. And I'm concerned about getting even that far: Beyond the barricades, the police are huddling. Do they know how they'll keep the penned-up crowd from turning into a stampede? One of them peels off and talks us down with a bullhorn. When we move the sawhorses, stay cool and wait for our signal.

Sure enough, there's no mad rush when we're let loose, just a brisk walk to another holding area. Here we get two choices: Turn toward the lake and the concession stands, or toward the stage and get searched. It's dusk and we've only eaten the crackers I managed to get past the first checkpoint, but we're all in. A mass of Secret Service screeners is lined up under a canopy west of Hutchinson Field, and in no time at all we're through their metal detectors.

We're close to the stage, but no closer than I can afford seated at Lyric Opera, and not as close as Oprah will get tonight: a half-dozen rows beyond bunting that marks off the VIP area, behind three press photographers who thought they too should be much closer. A man from the campaign comes through every so often as a courier for their memory cards.

The VIP area extends the width of a football field, marked off by network reviewing stands, rows of press tables under bright lights, and to our left the stage, with a big-screen TV airing scant but encouraging CNN returns. The drama builds despite the network's odd serenade from Hank Williams Jr. and an even more head-scratching in-studio projection of Will.i.am.

CNN teases a big projection at 10. The sound system is cranked up and the network's election theme blares. Then then we see Obama's photo onscreen, and the announcement is drowned in cheers. A couple hugs beside me and my wife covers her mouth and cries. We keep reliving this moment, partly because we're still in the photographers' sights and Brenda's 10:01 p.m. gasp goes out on the Reuters wire.

The crowd's roar seems to continue for hours, quieting only for the victory speech. It's simple, it's commanding, it's everything I missed hearing at close range 10 years ago. Thanks to the TV coverage, you can picture the scene. Bright lights in a dark night, the Chicago skyline framing waves of people, happy to be in Grant Park just then.

The headline is authentic history, borrowed from the Chicago Tribune report of Charles Lindberg's 1927 transcontinental flight. Does election night in Grant Park measure up? I'm no judge of the historic moment. But it was a grand night in Chicago. That's big enough.

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.