Columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
The jewel heist at the Louvre proves what I’ve long felt, that going to an art museum induces stupor and you don’t notice what’s right in front of you clearer than day. Two men going to work on a Sunday in Paris, cutting a hole in a glass case, escaping out a second-story window on a hoist, as museumgoers strolled by — I’ve felt this same stupor looking at Degas. Two masked men in tutus could’ve tippy-toed past carrying a guard in handcuffs and I wouldn’t have noticed. Apparently, looking at jewels produces an even greater stupor. The burglars could’ve taken their time and made off with a wheelbarrow of crowns and gone out the front door.
One more reason for you and me to not invest in emeralds and to keep a hand on our wallet when in a museum.
Read MoreI flew to St. Paul last week as it took a turn toward winter with a cold rain and me without a warm coat but then thought better of it and the sun came out and the fall colors brightened. My sweetie was starting rehearsal for Mozart’s Così fan tutte, playing viola, a good enough excuse to come back to my old hometown. The Mississippi still flows by, magnificent as ever, and the downtown sits on a high bluff and the trains still run through Union Depot, one to Chicago, one to Seattle, each daily.
I have a soft spot for St. Paul, having found a career there when I was thirty. I loved radio, having grown up in an evangelical family that refused to get a TV, and a started a live variety show on Saturday nights, a chance for me, a writer, to be friends with musicians, a low-income aristocracy of warmhearted people. The show started in a storefront and went to a theater and toured the country and other people ran the business and I had the fun.
Read MoreWherever you go in the world, if people ask you where you’re from and you say Minnesota, they say, “It gets cold there, doesn’t it.” When New Yorkers travel to Minneapolis, we don’t say, “That’s a really big city, isn’t it.” That would be dumb. But somehow we haven’t created a brand personality for ourselves other than weather. We wanted to be an arts mecca and a tech center and we had our chances but didn’t make it. What we’re left with is our status as America’s Number One producer of turkeys, which doesn’t have the same allure.
With global warming, Minnesota’s status as the Boy It Gets Cold There State is not even accurate, and what’s worse, it’s taken away we Minnesota males’ chance to demonstrate competence. After fourteen inches of snow, you go out the door and hear tires screaming and smell burning rubber and see Nadine the neighbor lady at the wheel of her Buick stuck in a snowbank and you walk over and tap on her window. She opens it. She looks crazed, in a rage, foaming at the mouth, and you say, calmly, “Let me help you.” And she gets out and you get in and you rock the car gently back and forth, and expertly rock it over the hump and out of the snowbank. She offers you money. You say, “No no no no. My pleasure.” You walk away.
Read MoreIt’s good to see Zohran Mamdani meeting with New Yorkers who opposed him in his run for mayor, including a closed-door meeting with a bunch of rank-and-file cops. Earlier in his career Mr. Mamdani uttered the words “defund” and “police” close together in one sentence, which is dumb, and he’s not saying it anymore. It’s what you’re supposed to do after you win a primary and become the Democratic candidate, meet with people who disagree and say fewer dumb things.
There are dedicated cops and some not so much but when you need the police you need the police, you don’t need a pollster, a nail polisher, or a politician. My lasting memory of New York cops goes back to when I landed at JFK and headed for the cabstand, heard shouting, saw people waving their hands and a young woman lying on the sidewalk apparently unconscious. A guy in an orange jacket got on his walkie-talkie, and two cops came running, one of them got on the phone and the other one lay down beside the woman and talked to her and put an arm around her.
Read MoreI am a hard worker and last week I put in a string of 12-hour shifts bent over a laptop and found it exhilarating even though it’s hard on your legs. You get up and walk into the next room and feel off-balance, so you do a few squats but come right back to your work. Two surgeons repaired my defective heart and gave me a couple bonus decades and I don’t wish to spend this astonishing gift recumbent in Boca Raton sipping rum fizzes. I intend to finish this book and then hike up Columbus Avenue to morning Mass at St. Michael’s.
I was brought up Brethren but I escaped into Episcopalian. Brethren believe that if you study Scripture you will find the truth and graduate into redemption but your grammar needs to be correct and punctuation proper. Anglicans believe it’s a miracle. The candles, the smoke, the Black lady deacon who reads the Gospel in a powerful voice.
Read MoreIt’s a sunny day in old New York and I’m a happy man even though I’m at an age when friends are falling left and right but what troubles me right now is the death of newspapers and that means the eventual death of the Republic because people are slippery where power is involved and lying is a natural talent. In 1971, an employee of the RAND Corporation, Daniel Ellsberg, gave the Pentagon Papers to the Washington Post where Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein published it, showing that every president from Truman on had lied to the public about what was happening in Vietnam and Richard Nixon got nailed for it and had to resign.
If Whatsisface got nailed for lying, he wouldn’t even change his tie. He has turned it into an art form. Every morning we read the Times and ask ourselves, “How can the man not be amazed at his own naked bravado? Does the man not have a pair of pants?” He once built ugly apartment buildings and hotels and now he is a world leader who stands for an hour in New York, a city that despises him, and stands naked in the U.N. for twice his allotted time and they sit quietly and applaud at the end. Does no one possess a gavel? Is this just one big practical joke by the Queens Deutscher Bund trying to trick us dummkopfs into wearing lederhosen?
Read MoreIt is a beautiful October in Manhattan thanks to global warming and I understand it’s a balmy fall in Minnesota too, though Minnesota needs a good freeze to tell the farmers it’s time to harvest. There are few farmers left still farming in Minnesota, thanks to robotic harvesters — old Zeke looks up from his computer screen and says, “Alexa, pick the pumpkins,” and it’s done.
There are twice as many professional humorists as farmers these days as well I know. And now everybody’s son and stepdaughter are lining up to get a degree in Stand-Up. Yes, you’re right, it’s a B.S. and that’s all you need nowadays, and so I’ve had to take up teaching. And I do stand-up at nursing homes where all the jokes are fresh, even the one about the old man who came into a bar and sat next to a young woman and said, “Do I come in here often?”
Read MoreThe temperature dropped a little this week, from the 80s into the 70s, a relief for us elderly who go back before global warming. I like winter and we used to get a touch of it in late September, a few snowflakes, a little frost on the windows. Winter is a beautiful time of quietude and reflection. Weathermen talk about Minnesota being “hit” by a snowstorm but snow doesn’t hit, it falls gently to the ground and lies there until plowed or shoveled.
I was around before lightweight thermal wear was developed and I walked to school through waist-high drifts knowing that if coyotes caught me and took me to their den and devoured me, the world would get along just fine in my absence, and so I was alert to coyote sounds and didn’t dally and felt great relief when I walked into Benson School.
Read MoreThe priest at church Sunday morning said, clear as a bell, “Do not be afraid. Receive the news with joy.” He was not referring to the Sunday Times, I believe, though I hadn’t read it and was feeling pretty good on a summery Sunday in September having been to hear a Schumann piano quintet the night before played by the Callisto Quartet and Philip Edward Fisher that really rocked out, it was what “Great Balls of Fire” could’ve been if Jerry Lee Lewis had been to Juilliard and studied composition.
I didn’t want to go to the concert but my wife said, “Great music is good for the soul,” so I went and she is right. Schumann suffered terribly back in the early 19th with seven kids to support and Brahms to compete with and he went mad and died young, but here is this great work that, played by brilliant young talents, can shake your nerves and rattle your brain in good ways, even if you’re old like me.
Read MoreI got a call Thursday from a Lutheran pastor in Iowa saying she was running for Congress and would I contribute money to her campaign and we talked for a little while. I was busy working on a book and could’ve said so but there was something unusual about her — her voice wasn’t loud, it didn’t grind, she didn’t talk in paragraphs, she talked in sentences and then she stopped and let me talk.
I told her that the news has been making me dizzy for months and now the lucrative deals between the Arab emirates and the Witkoff and Trump families and the FCC threat to cancel the licenses of networks that broadcast criticism of the Administration is taking us into a shadowy land of unreality that should arouse outrage but has become commonplace. But I was impressed that this soft-spoken woman was entering the fray. I’ve poked fun at Lutherans for years and they enjoyed it. They are hopeful people who look around and see the goodness of life.
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