Chicago's a hot and cold city. And we're not just talking about the weather, though the constant stream of invective recently does reflect how much we love to bitch. There's nothing more Chicagoan than bitching about local celebrities. First we build them up--we boast of their success even--then we tear them down when we're tired of them, or when we feel they've gotten too big for their britches. We've been paying extra-close attention to water-cooler slayings and barroom gripes lately, in order to come up with this list of the ten Chicagoans who most consistently get into Chicago's collective craw.

Mike Ditka
The guy who marshaled what was arguably the greatest team in NFL history? The guy who helped the Bears to their only ounce of glory since the days of Sid Luckman? Face it, the man hasn't really done the city many favors since that lone season--and let's not forget to stress the word "lone" here. To every Chicagoan with a Second City-sized chip on the shoulder, to every Chicagoan who despises New York's claim as America's only haven of culture, Ditka stands as the epitome of everything we fight against. Because of him, we're characterized as bulky, brutish, blue-collar jokes with slicked-back hair and overgrown mustaches. Of course, "Saturday Night Live" didn't help much when it made "Da Bears" and "cheese fries" part of American vernacular. "The people here in Chicago really went off the deep end at times, because they did put the Bears and myself on a pedestal," Ditka told ESPN. Maybe that's the real problem: with every forward stride Chicago makes on the cultural map of America, all it takes is one good football team to set it all spinning backwards, and one blunt-tongued coach as their mouthpiece. Where's Phil Jackson when you need him?

Conrad Black
Rupert Murdoch hasn't owned the Sun-Times since the eighties, yet his name remains stuck to the scrappy tabloid. Even less comprehensible are the dealings of current owner, Hollinger International, until recently headed by right-wing plutocrat-social striver-citizenship-shedding Baron Black of Crossharbour, who remains its controlling stockholder. A fiduciary rat's nest of overlapping and interlocking holding companies are under investigation by the SEC and others. While Murdoch shed his Australian citizenship for American in order to build the Fox network, Black, the publisher of London's conservative Telegraph and The Jerusalem Post, cast off his Canadian patrimony in a foamy snit when told that he could not accept a seat in Britain's House of Lords. After collaborating in the years-long atrophy of Canadian journalism, and while touting a 1,000-plus page doorstop bio of FDR, Black now stands accused of extensive perk-pocketing and self-dealing. In effect, picking up a Sun-Times means a sliver of your 35 cents has gone to recompense Black for all manner of dodgy dealings, as well as a multi-estate private-jet lifestyle and a hoard of artifacts, including historical documents and relics, including, it's been reported, perhaps more out of malice than fact, the pickled penis of the small man Lord Black admires most: Napoleon. Soon: the demolition of the homely Sun-Times offices along the Chicago River for a towering collaboration with Donald Trump. Turn to page 147 of February's Vanity Fair for a full-page glimpse of the blazer-and-chinos clad carpetbagger at his Palm Beach Estate.

R. Kelly
It wasn't long ago this golden-throated crooner of love songs sexy enough to juice the libido of a 95-year-old nun was the toast of the town. He was, and remains, Chicago's only certifiable pop star, boasting a wall of records with more gold than the Federal Reserve. Chicago loved its native son, Chicago felt him. Then it happened: June 5, 2002, Kelly was indicted on charges of child pornography, stemming from a videotape received anonymously by the Chicago Sun-Times. Oh yeah, and it showed him peeing on a young girl, too. "Never!" cried the fans and the young lady in question denied everything. But the tape existed, nonetheless, spurring authorities to charge Kelly with twenty-one counts of child pornography. Then, less than six months later, with Kelly in retreat at his Florida home, authorities there arrested him on more charges of child pornography after they allegedly found twelve images of underage girls on Kelly's camera. Now Chicagoans may be tough, and we may have seen it all, but dammit man, child porn charges in two states? And Kelly's response to it all? "Osama bin Laden is the only one who knows exactly what I'm going through," he told Blender magazine, eloquently making himself into the victim. Poor guy. His "Chocolate Factory" album only sold a couple million copies--after he was charged.

Bob Sirott
We loved Sirott when he was the host of "Fox Thing in the Morning." The acerbic wit. The wink-and-a-nudge delivery. The nostalgic reverie for his own Chicago childhood. It was a refreshing alternative to all the party-on-the-plaza going down every morning on the networks. But then Fox jettisoned Bob (along with his perky co-host/spouse, Marianne Murciano) to head in a bewilderingly blasé direction. In June of 2002, Sirott reemerged as the new host and managing editor of WTTW's local news program, "Chicago Tonight." But in doing so, he bumped one of this town's smartest newsmen, Phil Ponce, who had been handling the hosting duties with intellectual aplomb since '99, into the co-pilot's seat. "C.T." staffers whispered concern that Sirott would turn the in-depth news, arts and culture show into "Fox Thing at Night." Well, guess what? They were right. Now we have Sirott's golden-era buddies, like John "Records" Landecker, a dusties DJ, reviewing films. Sirott and Murciano do embarrassing tours of their friend's houses, gushing over Mike North's autographed balls, and ogling Alderman Burke's piano. The humor, delivery, and nostalgia that worked at Fox now only makes us yearn for our own past, when "Chicago Tonight" was actually good.

Ira Glass
As producer and host of Chicago Public Radio's "This American Life," Glass has become a spokesperson for Generation Slack, helped launch the careers of "It" quipsters like Sarah Vowell and David Sedaris, and invented a type of radio narrative that has become a brand in itself. Maybe then it's pure unfettered jealousy that explains our newly found ambivalence towards Glass, or the fact that the show's themes sometimes seem like self-parody, although it was kind of cool when they rounded up that band through the classifieds to play Elton John's "Rocket Man." But, really it's the voice. That nasally, whiney, apathetic drone affected by legions of Ira Glass wannabes clearing their throat, adjusting their horn-rims, with their microphone in the other hand. When Glass counts off the chapters in the beginning of every show, it's starting to sound like nails on a chalkboard.

Winston Mardis
The average drinker of 35 or 65 who must flash identification at the door of the corner tavern, or who's kept waiting in the cold at a hot nightclub, doesn't know the name of Mayor Richard M. Daley's field general in his war on fun, but saloonkeeper and restaurateurs whisper the name Winston Mardis with universal off-the-record venom. That's because they must struggle upstream through the murky Byzantine bureaucratic waters of the Liquor License Control Commission and live in fear of the seemingly capricious and often-crippling enforcement of his special set of rules. In July, Chicago magazine presented a telling stat: ten years ago, there were 2,728 taverns in the city; 1,479 remain today. Daley's said he believes that "a bad liquor establishment can tear the fabric of a neighborhood and send it into a decline," and the little-known Hyde Park-bred Mardis is Daley's tailor stitching up his polyester vision of the city. Or perhaps his fall guy. Either way, he's not saying.

Mary Schmich
The columnist smiling like the Mona Lisa from the front page of the Tribune's Metro section continually rubs us the wrong way. Not only does Schmich, who also pens the Brenda Starr comic strip, epitomize the classic lost-in-suburbia Trib lifer, but her attempts to be with it usually miss, like the soccer mom slinging outdated slang. No surprise then that Schmich's one claim to fame parodied her basic schtick of shaking her head over a generation that she's desperately out of touch with. In 1997 one of her columns, a fake speech to the then-graduating college class, was attributed to writer Kurt Vonnegut in a widely circulated Internet hoax that then got turned into a song by Baz Luhrmann. The oh-so-wacky advice Schmich chose to lead with in "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young?" Hey kids, remember to wear sunscreen. This is classic Schmich snark, like the column she penned bemoaning the loss of young newspaper readers along with her skin's elasticity, "If you're 18-34, you're truly old enough to read." And add to this, the cutesy "he said/she said" columns that she alternates with fellow Metro columnist Eric Zorn bewilder us as much as the Q section. And no, we don't care about their latest sing-along.

Richard Roeper
He's like Ryan Seacrest spliced with Bill Zehme, our city's trademark metrosexual. As the manicured thumb next to the practiced digit of Roger Ebert in their nationally syndicated Saturday night movie party, he's bland, bland, bland. It's pure schadenfreude to watch the eager puppy Roeper attempt to form his usually superlative opinion about a film Rog has just weighed in on, like a student squirming before a college instructor in "Film 101," and then watch the Pulitzer Prize winner dismiss him quickly and coolly. Maybe not the sharpest critic in the drawer (he enthused that the ill-received Elvis impersonator flick "3,000 Miles to Graceland" was a "rockin' good time") he often surprises us with his acerbic quips and pop-cult savoir-faire in his Sun-Times column. Roeper's rising profile will escalate once again when he begins contributing monthly essays on film for boys' club Esquire, which has promises of being as much of a must-read on the subject as Stephen King's head-scratching meanderings in Entertainment Weekly. But, then again, we're always tickled when Richie surprises us.

Bill Ayers & Bernardine Dohrn
"We took ourselves so seriously--okay, a little too seriously," writes Bill Ayers in "Fugitive Days," his memoir of life as an active member of radical seventies group the Weather Underground. You think? Never jailed, Ayers made the FBI's ten-most-wanted list and, with partner Bernardine Dohrn, led the 1969 Chicago random street assaults dubbed "The Days of Rage." Most notable, however, was the Underground's bombing of the Pentagon and Capitol building. Throw in a little self-congratulatory group sex and it certainly sounds like they were taking themselves way too seriously. Either way, along with Dohrn, to whom he's now married, Ayers made a reputation for directing havoc against the Vietnam-era U.S. government and managing to successfully evade capture for nearly a decade. These days, retired from crime, Ayers works as a professor of education at UIC and Dohrn--irony of ironies--teaches law at Northwestern. Of his contentious past, Ayers drew fire for stating in an interview with the New York Times that "I don't regret setting bombs. In fact, I don't think we did enough." This verbal bomb came at an unfortunate time, published the day the Twin Towers fell. That didn't help.

Joan Cusack
Oh no, you say, not Joannie, not Chicago's sweetheart. Maybe we're just sick of seeing her scrunched-up face everywhere. Yes, she rocked as the principal in "School of Rock," but we stopped connecting with Cusack when she zeta-jonesed on us, and by that we mean started pimping for a cell-phone provider, one step lower on the Hollywood evolutionary chain than those 10-10-220 commercials. If playing second fiddle to Hollywood's leading ladies wasn't bad enough, as U.S. Cellular's ubiquitous spokesperson, we now have to watch Cusack degrade herself in what are some of the most inane commercials ever seen. Carrier pigeons, Bob? Wow, your calling plan must really suck. It's great she insisted on shooting "What About Joan" in Chicago, but as both the commercials and the short-lived sitcom show, Cusack's manic energy can't be captured on the small screen.

Written by Dave Chamberlain, Tom Lynch, Ray Pride, Sam Weller, Michael Workman and Kate Zambreno
(2004-01-13)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment