Monday, February 26, 2007

Daley wins reelection

I hope no one minds my declaring the projected winner of the Chicago mayoral race 36 hours before the polls close.

As I've written before, I'm not that enthusiastic about the incumbent mayor. But Mayor Daley's opponents (Walls and Brown) have been struggling to get even a little visibility. I just don't see either of them overcoming Daley's organization.

The Chicago Federation of Labor has declined to endorse Daley, partly in reaction to Daley's veto of the Big Box living wage ordinance, but they don't seem to be taking on the mayor head on. Instead they are opting to back opponents of the aldermen who helped Daley's veto stick, in hopes of strengthening opposition in the City Council.

In my own ward, the 48th, this election provides voters discouragingly few choices. Not only does Daley seems certain to win the mayoral race, but all three opponents of the incumbent alderman have been knocked off the ballot. Last week I was listening to British P.M. Tony Blair being interviewed on the BBC News' radio show, and the interviewer asked why Blair doesn't consider Iran's government a legitimate democracy, since they have an elected president and a parliament and so on. Blair's response was that two thirds of the people who would run for office are disqualified; therefore the people are not given a real choice. In Chicago's 48th Ward, three of four aldermanic candidates were disqualified for minor errors in their paperwork. By Tony Blair's standards, this puts Chicago's version of democracy about on a par with Iran's.

Saturday, February 17, 2007

The mean streets of suburbia

It's conventional wisdom that you're more likely to come to a violent end in a dense, urban place than out in the suburbs. I haven't seen any statistics, but I've come to question that idea. In the past year, a 21-year-old woman met her demise on the street right outside the window of my suburban office. Two months later, two teenagers were killed a few miles down the road.

None of this had anything to do with shootings or gang violence or anything like that. These three fatalities were all due to automobile accidents. All the news media in Chicago have been reporting this week on a particularly horrific accident in Oswego in which four of nine occupants of a single vehicle were killed, and this comes after the Chicago Tribune has spent the last several months editorializing on fatal car accidents involving teenagers. While the driver in the Oswego incident was 23, the victims were all teenagers, and so the story has been made to fit the narrative that teenage drivers are dangerous.

It is true that teenagers, more so than people well into adulthood, are inexperienced drivers and may be prone to lapses in judgment. But how do we explain why a large majority of fatal accidents involving teenagers in the Chicago area occur in the suburbs rather than in the city proper? I suspect that the differential owes much to the design of the streets; suburban roadways are designed to be dangerous. In some cases they might be built to allow for traffic moving at sixty miles an hour, and then we wonder why people won't limit their speed to the posted thirty-five. On these streets, it is much more possible to drive at high speed.

In the city, on the other hand, narrow streets, frequent intersections, cars parked along the curb, the occasional double-parked car, as well as a number of traffic-calming devices (speed humps and traffic circles) all make it harder to drive fast. The city still has its drivers who exhibit poor judgment, but they don't attain lethal speeds as often as they do in the suburbs.

Hot Ducks

I thought it was interesting that Doug Sohn made the front page of the Chicago Tribune today. His brother Andy, a real estate agent, helped me find my current home (and he still owes me a bottle of wine). The Tribune article is about Hot Doug's, Doug Sohn's high-end hot dog restaurant. It seems that Sohn is sort of blatantly disregarding the City's new foie gras ban, and the City isn't too pleased about that.

The last time I wrote about foie gras was almost two years ago, when I praised Charlie Trotter for taking it off his menu. I still believe that foie gras is produced through inhumane means. I wouldn't order it myself, and I'd like to see Mr. Sohn comply with the ordinance. That said, I wouldn't go so far as to boycott Hot Doug's... Their hot dogs are too good.

Friday, February 09, 2007

Sweet Occasions on Bryn Mawr

Last month I wrote about the slow progress being made on Bryn Mawr. I've since learned that another good place to eat will be opening up there: Sweet Occasions. I actually wrote a few words about their Andersonville location in an October, 2005, posting. The new one will only be about a mile northeast of the one in Andersonville, but I'm sure there will be enough business for them both.

Saturday, February 03, 2007

The Trout

I just found this good YouTube on CrooksandLiars:



The film is broken up into 9-minute segments. The full set of links:

Part 1 :: Part 2 :: Part 3 :: Part 4 :: Part 5 :: Part 6

It's a film from 1969 of Daniel Barenboim (piano), Itzhak Perlman (violin), Pinchas Zuckerman (viola), Jacqueline Du Pre (cello), and Zubin Mehta (bass) performing the Schubert Piano Quintet ("The Trout"). The first thing that struck me was how young they all looked. Barenboim, who recently left the Chicago Symphony after a 15-year stint as artistic director, still acts the same way today as he did nearly 40 years ago. The performance might be a bit long for casual viewing, but I love the clowning around backstage in Part 2. Did Perlman call Pinchas Zuckerman "Pinky?" It's like Spinal Tap with classical musicians.

Aside from Daniel Barenboim, there are some other Chicago connections... Zubin has a brother named Zarin who was once the executive director of the Ravinia Festival, where the Chicago Symphony performs during the summer. Both Perlman and Zuckerman have performed regularly at Ravinia, and I've seen the now white-haired Zuckerman conduct there. Alas, I was too young to ever see Du Pre perform before multiple sclerosis ended her career, but the cello she plays in the 1969 film now belongs to Yo-Yo Ma, founder of the Silk Road Project, which is in the middle of the yearlong Silk Road Chicago program, a collaboration with various cultural institutions in Chicago.