Why Lynn Becker is about to disappear

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This week marks the 12th anniversary of my first article being published in Chicago Reader.  What better time to call a time out?

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money," Dr. Johnson famously observed.  I have become that blockhead.

So I'm taking a hiatus to vegetate and experiment - fiction, poetry, screenplays, prescription drug disclaimers - so many choices, so little time between naps.

At least until March 1st, I'm also engaging in the radical experiment of swearing off social media.

No Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Instagram.

No posts.

No reading of posts. 

Is this even possible, in a time when seemingly every last one of us has been sucked like Alice through the Looking Glass down into our smartphone screens?

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.

When I look at my life, all my misfortunes are pretty much self-made; the wonderful things the gift of others.  I'm going to do a Trumbo and not name names, but you know who you are.  Except for you, I would have been a irredeemably dull boy, making his home in a box on Lower Wacker.

And thanks to you, my readers and followers, for your patience, generous if misguided attention, and eloquent engagement.

If you should need to reach me, I'll still be checking e-mail.  I'm not a total idiot.

Street Smarts: Chicago Street Art, at the Cultural Center only through Sunday - Plus our Photogallery on Art on the Street (and Viaduct)

Okay, so people liked our Monday story about the doomed Phillips House in Sheridan house a lot more than they liked Tuesday's post on pitching 150 North Riverside, so we're taking a break before part 2 to remind you of a great show at the Chicago Cultural Center's 4th floor exhibit hall, Paint Paste Sticker: Chicago Street Art. You have only through Sunday, January 12th to see it.  My apologies.

Painted, wheatpasted or stickered, made for a hard life on the streets or to enliven a domestic setting, the art flowing from the Chicago Street Art community is among the most intense and vibrant in the city today. The exhibit features work from over two dozen artists including Slang, Zore, Ish Muhammad, Hebru Brantley, Uneek, Statik, Brooks Golden, Chris Silva, You Are Beautiful, Oscar Arriola and an overview of projects by Chicago Urban Art Society & Pawn Works and Galerie F.

Jyoti Srivastava has a great post on the exhibition with photos of over a dozen works and curator Nathan Mason.   An article by the Reader's Deanna Isaac's profiles Statik, a/k/a, Rahmaan Barnes, who created his “remix” of Caravaggio's The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, seen at the top of this post, entirely in spray paint.

Many of the artworks come from organized - and authorized - projects.   Others came from the more renegade forms of graffiti and tagging. I don't think I want to go back to days in 1980's when a deeply troubled New York City had its subway cars overrun with graffiti, nor am I comfortable with buildings and L stations being tagged by street gangs marking their territory, but you can't help to be impressed by the creativity street artists bring to some of the city's drab and unwelcoming infrastructure.  There's even a bus shelter, by Mario "Zore" Gonzalez. . .

. . . that would be a welcome relief from Bob Stern's joyless, thick-limbed constructions.

It's a great show, and this Saturday, January 11th, there's a closing weekend program, Chicago Street Art Stories:  1:00 p.m. in the Claudia Cassidy Theater on the Cultural Center's on the 2nd floor off the Cultural Center's north stairway. An open mic where you'll be able to hear many of Paint Paste Sticker's artists talk about their art and careers.  “The Exhibition catalog will be available and free for the taking.”

Here's our own gallery of some of Chicago's street art.  Some were temporary, others disappeared behind new buildings, many still endure for your enjoyment.

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continue the survey, after the break

Wolf Point Update: Reilly yanks proposal from December Plan Commission agenda; schedules Third Public Meeting

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 In an email to his constituents, 42nd ward alderman Brendan Reilly announced he has requested the Chicago Plan Commission defer consideration of proposals for the development of Wolf Point from its December agenda.  Instead, he will be calling a third public meeting on the evening of December 20th to review the revised plan.

Since deferring this item from the November Plan Commission Agenda, I have spent the past week meeting with the City of Chicago's planning and infrastructure departments as well as representatives from the River North and Fulton River District neighborhood associations to evaluate the new details recently released by the Developer that call for a hotel use and the potential for additional residential units on the site.

Although Hines/Kennedy have been aggressively lobbying for a process that would allow them to secure all necessary city approvals by the end of 2012, in light of the recent events, I have informed the development team that their preferred timeline is simply no longer feasible. As a result, I have again requested that the Chicago Plan Commission defer this item from its December 20th Agenda, for the purpose of vetting new information related to the Bulk Table for the site and to allow for a much-needed sixth revision to KLOA's traffic study.

Reilly yanked consideration of the three-building project from the November Plan Commission agenda after, as reported by the Chicago Reader's Ben Joravsky, documents obtained by Friends of Wolf Point uncovered a request for up to 1,800 hotel rooms on the site that had never before been part of the developer's documents or discussions.

Reilly, whose ward includes most of downtown, including Wolf Point, invoked his aldermanic prerogative to request the delay in consideration.  In his Thursday email, Reilly said that in the latest "Bulk Table" defining the developer's request,  the maximum hotel "keys" requested is now down to 450. The maximum allowed construction is now listed at slightly over 4,000,000 square feet, with a maximum of 1,410 residential units and 1,285 new parking spaces.

Reilly said the revised plan submitted by Wolf Point Owners LLC, representing the Hine Interests and the Kennedy family, which owns the land, not only included the previously unmentioned 1,800 hotel rooms, but "did not include the long list of previously negotiated changes and improvements to the proposal" originally submitted in May.

You can read Reilly's complete statement after the break.

The Death of the Newspaper: Here, Let me Help

 click images for larger view (and apologies to Stanley Tigerman)

I knew it was coming.  The announcement was made last fall.

Still, it was with a bit of rue that I opened my home delivery bill from the Chicago Tribune to find that charges have more than doubled - up 122%, the latest brainstorm from company management, and proof that gross stupidity didn't leave the building with Sam Zell.  No explanation on the bill, just a message about how much I must be enjoying the "additional 40 pages of weekly coverage,"  every one of those pages costing me more than a nickle each.  What a bargain.  Somehow I don't recall the Trib dropping the rates when they shrank the physical size of the paper several times over the last decade or so.

If any more proof were needed of the complete contempt in which the Tribune holds its subscribers, consider this:

• You can't cancel your subscription via mail.
• You can't cancel your subscription via email.
• You can't cancel your subscription on the Tribune website.

When I tried to log on the website, I was told that my email - the same email at which the Tribune has been sending me bills the last eight years - was "not found.  Please try again.  Your frustration amuses us no end."

When you call the 800 number printed on the bill, you go into automated response hell.  "Let me look up your account.  Is your address .................  three.....zero......zero?" What? That's not my address.  It's the street number.  Should I just press "1" for yes and take my chances?

OK, I guess that's what they wanted. The automated voice instructs "If you wish to discontinue you service, Press 4." With a complete lack of confidence that anything good will come out of it, I press 4,  only to find that at the Tribune, not even being an automaton exposes you to working overtime.  A different automated voice scurries on to say, "Please call back during normal working hours." 

Which apparently will be another grim experience I'm not looking forward to.  On a website called Customer Service Scoreboard, Chicago Tribune customer service is ranked 425 out of 525 companies, qualifying it for the official designation "Terrible".  Comments posted:147 negative, 1 positive.

The negative replies get a canned response titled "Official company reply".  Which doesn't exactly raise your expectations, for good reason . . . 

Good afternoon, my name is Autumn Smith, and I am an employee in the Client Services dept at the Chicago Tribune.

Although our main call center is in the Phillippines . . .

What follows is a series of a graphic customer descriptions of what you have in store for you when you talk to one of those hapless folk at outsource central in Manila, whose English is reportedly somewhat tentative and who will apparently try to bargain with you if you say you want to cancel, and commit only to "taking your request", which may or may not actually be honored without a second or third follow-up, and possibly the sacrifice of your first born male child.

I was brought up at the end of the golden age of newspapers.  As a kid, I read all three of Chicago's dailies (somehow, Chicago Today, the aereated aftertaste of Hearst's old Herald American, never struck me as a real newspaper.) I couldn't even wait til the day of publication. Late every afternoon, I would walk to the corner newsstand to pick up the "Bulldog" edition of the Trib and Sun-Times, already carrying the next day's date.

Even today, I don't subscribe to the Sunday Trib.  I don't buy the Sun-Times on Sunday.  I can't wait.  I buy them as soon as they hit the newsstands Saturday morning, the same way that even though I
I've read every edition in the history of Crain's Chicago Business, I've never subscribed, because I can't wait until Monday or Tuesday for a paper I can buy Saturday afternoon. Which I do, along with the Sunday New York Times, pretty much every week, at one of Chicago's last surviving newsstands, at Chicago and Michigan.  Call me sentimental.

So now we get to watch the death throes of the very idea of a vibrant city newspaper, as the last survivors flail on their way to the graveyard.

Like pretty much every daily, the Trib killed off their book section years ago, shifting it to an anemic handful of pages in its Saturday edition, when a lower readership means not having to print quite as many copies of pages hardly anyone reads.  Now, the Trib's killing off even that, creating a Printers Row book section to be sold as a separate publication at $99.00 a year, about what I pay per year for the New Yorker and New York Review of Books combined.  The Reader's Michael Miner had a great piece on Thursday on a single Tribune article all but completey devoid of any curiousity as to the basic facts of the story being reported.

Removing content and doubling prices.  Making customer service an obstacle course. It's as if the sales staff at the Trib are all graduates of the class, "Marketing for the Suicidal."

It wasn't that long ago that publishing a city's dominant newspaper was thought of as a license to print money.  Now it's the way to burn through it.  It's the classic tale of challenges ignored as engorged margins became an addiction, of cluelessness, arrogance and desperation racing each other down a quickening whirlpool of dissolution.

You could get angry, but it doesn't seem worth the bother.  There's nothing you can do about death. It's just sad.

Time to move on.

 Why does the above shot remind me of the chamber pot scene in Visconti's The Leopard?

The Vultures Claim Latest Victim: Alison True gone as Chicago Reader Editor

Crain's Chicago Business and The Chicago Reader's Mike Miner reports that Alison True, The Reader's long-time editor who had been with the paper since 1984, was summarily dismissed Friday morning by the latest revolving-door full of executives put in place by Atalaya Capital Management, the current owners trying to salvage some of the $30 million it loaned Creative Loafing, the parent company that bought The Reader in 2007 and spun it into bankruptcy less than two years later.

As I said in a comment I posted on Mike Miner's story, The Reader is now at the mercy of a Florida CEO who did such a good job at her last job they let he go, and an "acting" publisher du jour from Texas whose last great accomplishment was cutting the frequency of the publication she managed from daily to weekly.

Without Alison True, I would never have become a writer on architecture, but not even that can tarnish Alison's reputation as an exemplary editor who cared about developing writers and nurturing the kind of offbeat outlooks that made for compelling stories.

My own story, I'm sure, was shared by many other aspiring writers. Back in 2002, I was looking out my Marina City window and getting increasingly angry about the often hideous condo towers rising all around me. I put my feelings into an article that my former boss, Wendy Lapidus-Saltz, helped me punch into shape, and I mailed it to The Reader. When I heard nothing after several weeks, I said to myself that it was par for the course for a first effort and I needed to start thinking about what I would do next. Then, I came home to find a message on my answering machine, "This is Kiki Yablon of The Reader. We liked your piece and we're thinking about putting it on the cover."

Kiki and Alison gingerly guided their novice contributor through the editing process and the piece, titled, Stop the Blandness! ran on The Reader's front page on January 16, 2003. It was a long piece. but it got a great response from Chicago's architectural community. And for me, it was an amazing thrill.

Dozen's of other articles followed. I got to meet and write about Chicago's amazingly talented architects - from Helmut Jahn, to Stanley Tigerman, Ralph Johnson, Carol Ross Barney, Jeanne Gang, John Ronan, and so many more, including a side trip to Seattle for Rem Koolhaas's new public library, and concluding with a different take on Daniel Burnham for the Burnham Plan Centennial last year.

It was a great trip. I may have tortured an entire succession of talented Reader editors with my contentious bad humour, but I could still depend on finding a receptive ear in Alison whenever I had an idea for a new piece. And I think I can say, objectively, that a lot of interesting stuff resulted.

Week after week, Alison created a product whose quality frequently put Chicago's two dailies to shame. My suspicion is that Alison's unforgivable crime was that her commitment to that quality made her an obstacle to those absentee landlords who seek a cheaper, more blandly marketable, more generically modular Reader whose content can be created largely on autopilot from the home office in Florida.

For management to dismiss Alison is a huge misfortune for The Reader and an outrage to its most dedicated readers. What would be a tragedy, however, would be for Chicago to lose her entirely. We can only hope that a major publication that still retains some capacity for judging talent will snap her up - and quickly.

Alison, I would follow you anywhere. You're my hero.