Chicago duo revives the gramophone

The challenge of this story was not buying one on the spot, not jumping on Kickstarter, putting down the $250, then circling May on my calendar and waiting. But that's a lot of money for an impulsive purchase. Still, I want to have that horn on my desk. want to listen to music coming out of it. So I'll hold off, for now, just to give myself something to look forward to. 

     Early last January, college friends Pavan Bapu and Jeff Parrish were walking through Wicker Park when they passed an antique store and saw a 1920s Magnavox R3 gramophone in the window.

     "We both did a double take," said Parrish. "We ended up tracking them down on eBay and bought one to play around with it."



     The graceful curving horn was originally made to amplify thick 78 rpm discs. The two, who met at UIC, decided they could do better.



     "We figured out a way to modernize it, to make it suitable for people now," Parrish said. By February they had a prototype: a Bluetooth receiver within a sleek wooden base, attached to the gramophone horn.



     "It was pretty big," said Parrish.


    
Bapu put some images and a description on a website and 500 people liked it. That got them thinking.



     "What if we scaled this thing down, made it less intimidating, less filling somebody's space?" Parrish said. "We tried out a number of different sizes, and settled on three-quarters [of the original] - big enough to have amplification and presence, and small enough to fit on somebody's table."



     They decided they had something to sell.



     Pavan handled the "nitty-gritty electronic stuff" using knowledge he picked up clerking at Best Buy.


    
"We created our own proprietary audio driver and printed circuit board inside, acoustically optimized for this product," said Bapu, 27. "So we didn't just do a hack job. We put in something that resonates with the harmonics of this horn."



    Parrish's background is engineering and industrial design; Bapu's is communications. "Between the stuff I know and the stuff Pavan knows, we've got our bases covered," Parrish said. "We both have a good bunch of contacts that we've got from our time in school and from various employment opportunities since then."



     They started out putting drawings online, searching for manufacturers.



     "We got quotes from people around the world. It's pretty cool," Parrish said. "Pavan found people by Googling what we need."



     They need people to give money, for instance. Pavan went on Kickstarter, saw a video he liked and contacted its creator, who produced a video for them. Their Kickstarter campaign went up Nov. 26. In fewer than three weeks, they've raised $120,000; more than their goal. The Gramovox devices cost $299, or $250 for those who contribute on Kickstarter, and they plan to start shipping in the spring.



     As much as I like the design, which I noticed on my Facebook stream, I love that these two guys, who have never started a business before, quickly went from seeing an obscure antique in a window, to manufacturing and selling their own version. "In less than a year we went from concept to prototype to production," Bapu said. That's what our country is about, or should be.



     I wanted to hear it, so I biked over to Pavan's apartment at 11th and State. Pavan played Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine." There was a resonance to it. Then Nancy Sinatra singing, "Bang, Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)." I'm used to an iPod, which has the acoustics of mud, but you could hear Sinatra forming the consonants - the Bs, the Ds - as if she had her lips against your ear. Then Louis Armstrong, "When You're Smiling." What more perfect way to hear a master's horn than out of the bell of a metal horn?



     I took my iPhone out to see how the Bluetooth aspect works, and within seconds was playing George Gershwin's "Tip-Toes." It filled the room.



     Lest audiophiles descend on me, I should point out it's still a unidirectional 1920s horn. I'm sure any Polk Audio speaker has better acoustics. My perception was no doubt skewed by how much I admire the thing. There's a wonderful aesthetic to the horn, and I'm the son of a radio operator, who has, displayed in my office, his Turner X-22 crystal microphone and his chrome-plated Vibroplex telegraph key, because they're lovely, to me.



     Whether the world will find the Gramovox Bluetooth Gramophone lovely too, well, we'll find out in a few months. They ship in May. I can see it as the big audio gift of Christmas 2014 because it looks so good, sounds crisp, doesn't cost all that much and points society back to a place it used to be: where you listened to music with other people, together, out of a curving horn.


     They've raised more than $130,000 on Kickstarter, well more their goal. You can see their complete fundraising presentation and excellent video by clicking here.

Pavan Bapu, with the Gramovox. 

Lights on but nobody home

There are very few blogs that I make a point to look at on a regular basis, and one of my favorites is Messy Nessy Chic. Written by Vanessa Grail, a young Briton living in Paris, it has a wonderful aesthetic, looking at the obscure, the decaying, the forgotten and submerged. I wrote a column about her last spring and she was kind enough, when she went overseas for Christmas, to allow me to write a post for her blog. This is the beginning of the post I wrote, which went up on her site Friday. If you click the link at the end, you'll be taken to Messy Nessy Chic, and can see how she does it, plus find a lot more pictures.

     Chicago is justly famous for its architecture. Birthplace of the skyscraper, home to the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere (still, the emotion-driven claim by New York’s One World Trade Center, based on the dodge of calling an antenna a spire, is easily dismissed) Chicago offers a panorama of architectural marvels. So many icons that you usually have to live here before you start noticing structures that are not famous and important, but merely intriguing and fun. Such as the charming little fake buildings that electrical company Commonwealth Edison puts up to camouflage its  substations.

     It can take a while, walking past, until you realize that the front doors don’t open. Or what look like windows are actually louvers. What is that? you wonder. And what is it doing there?

     The most noteworthy, a faux Georgian mansion in the River North area of downtown, was designed by perhaps the city’s most famous living architect, Stanley Tigerman, former director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

     “The building is somewhat tongue-in-cheek , a bit of a joke,” said Tigerman, who had first designed a restaurant just west of the site. “The Hard Rock Cafe: fake stucco, fake Georgian, nothing real about it. Then they came to me and wanted me to do the ComEd substation next door, but to be contextual, to relate it to this ersatz piece of junk.”

     So rather than construct a bogus building based on a fake, albeit one he designed, Tigerman cut the other direction....

To continue reading on "Messy Nessy Chic," click here.

Accurate statistics for gays still hiding in the closet

     People like things simple, but life is not simple. Even a basic factual, mathematical question—"How many people are gay?"—runs into all sorts of complications: what's a gay person? People having sex with their own gender, of course. But what about attraction? What about bi-sexuality? Do they have to act on that attraction, or is the desire itself enough? I looked at the stats, as best I could in the space of Friday's column:

     Assumptions are tricky. They trip you.

     How things seem and how they really are can be two different matters.

     Ask an American what percentage of their fellow citizens are gay, and they often wildly exaggerate, guessing as much as 25 to 30 percent. The actual number—hard, maybe impossible, to pin down—is from 2 to 5 percent.

    Why? That’s easy: Gays are much in the news, much on people’s minds; it’s the same for Jews or illegal immigrants. We think there are a lot more than there really are.

    Demography is always a hot issue, because numbers drive politics and, in turn, are driven by politics.         

    Groups like to exaggerate their own numbers, trying to boost their significance. For years, gay advocates seized on a 10 percent figure from the 1948 Kinsey report even though it only dealt with men and seemed to include every man who ever thought Clark Gable was handsome.
     With society galloping toward recognizing gays (the preferred term is LGBT, "lesbian gay bisexual transgender," but LGBT doesn't strike me as an acronym Joe Sixpack is going to know), now might seem a time when we can finally get a fix on how much of the population is gay. But it's a complex question.
     "I'm a demographer," said Gary J. Gates, of the UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute, which tracks the nation's gay population, or tries to. "I'm talking to people who self-identify. I'm measuring visibility."
     In other words, people who admit to a pollster that they're gay. Even that is tricky.
     "In Gallup polls, among people under the age 30, more than 6 percent of adults tell pollsters they're gay," Gates said. Above 30, the number abruptly drops in half.
     "Is that really because young people are gayer?" Gates said. "I think a large piece of that is younger people are growing up in an environment where this is acceptable, so they're willing to identify themselves as gay."
     As attitudes change, once-invisible communities rise from the mist. The census doesn't ask about sexuality but does ID same-sex couples. Gates found that between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, "conservative states show the biggest amount of change." Which either means that toleration causes gays to flock to red states—doubtful—or that when it's safe to come out, gays do.
     We were talking in the wake of an intriguing article in The New York Times on Sunday by economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, "How Many American Men are Gay?"
     He used social media stats—Facebook status choices, Web searches for gay porn—to determine "at least 5 percent of American men ... are predominantly attracted to men."
     That 5 percent—or 3, or 7—is distributed around the country. The most interesting point of the Times piece is that, while we might think a place like Chicago, with its Boystown, has a much higher proportion of gay residents than, say, Phoenix, actually what they are is more visible, since gay people, like straight people, tend to stay put.
     "There's no evidence gay or lesbian people are substantially more mobile than any other group in the population," Gates said. "You don't get dramatic differences."
     The Williams Institute statistic for gay men is astonishingly low: 1.8 percent, which doubles if you include lesbians and bisexual men, though that throws the issue back into politics, since some insist that bisexuals are merely men who haven't accepted their gayness yet, while others see them as a distinct category, and experts consider sexuality more a spectrum, or continuum, than a grid of neat cubbyholes people can be tossed into.
     The whole exercise of counting gays could be seen as an echo of their repression, and just as scientists don't stay up nights categorizing straights by whether they prefer blondes or brunettes, so the acceptance of homosexuals into ordinary mainstream American life will nudge keeping track of them into less controversial scorekeeping, like how pollsters keep track of Lutherans.
     The numbers also show the stigma of being gay, while abating, is still strong. A recent Pew Research poll said that half of LGBT people with a living father aren't out to him.
     "That's still an awful lot of people," said Gates, who told me a story more evocative than a ream of numbers. He was at a wedding recently in Washington state—he lives in Seattle. The happy couple, two men "had lived their entire lives together." The vows exchanged, it came time to kiss. But they couldn't kiss, not in front of all those people.
     "They were very nervous," Gates said. "They had lived their entire lives together, cautiously." The attendees urged them that "this is OK, it's what you do at weddings."
     "An awful lot of gay people are like that," Gates said. "Even when you can get married, it doesn't undo everything you've been told."

"Drink! Drink! Drink drink drink!!!"

       Jeff Woodman, a fine actor who has read such best-selling works as "Life of Pi" and "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" for Audible.com, recorded my 2008 memoir, "Drunkard" in New York City last week.  
     Beforehand, he phoned to go over some details. I was impressed with how conscientious he was about getting the pronunciations right. We talked for a long time about the book, and when I told him how I always felt bad that the original ending was shaved off, over my objections, by my cleaver-wielding editor—the editor found the ending funny, and funny is somehow bad in a recovery memoir, I guess because it undermines the expected air of penance—Jeff graciously allowed me to return the original ending to the audio version, plus add a few other jokes that got chopped, even though it made more work for him. I was glad to get that ending back on, and I think adds an attractive bonus to the audio edition. So thanks Jeff.

      Audible.com releases the audio book of "Drunkard" next month—they work quick—but a faithful reader asked if, before then, I could share the salvaged ending. Happily—it's extra apt right now, because the scene occurred at a 2006 Lyric Opera production, "Fledermaus" which, coincidentally, debuted this week in a production new to the Lyric.  I'll certainly see it with an easier mind now than I did seven years ago. 
      As a set up to this passage,  you should bear in mind you've just read this excruciating crawl through rehab and reached what was at the time a tentative, hard-fought sobriety:

     A year after all this transpired, a friend from Gene & Georgetti invited Edie and me to the Lyric Opera, to join him and his date in fifth row center seats. The opera was Strauss’s “Die Fledermaus,” a good part of which, we discovered as we watched, is a celebration of champagne. The elegantly-attired singers, ladies in ball gowns, men in white tie and tails, gaily twirled around a sumptuous Viennese ballroom, raising glasses and enormous bottles of champagne high in the air while belting out, in German, “Drink! Drink! Drink drink drink drink!!!”
     As they did, Edie tapped me on the arm. I looked at her. She leaned in toward me.
     “You just can’t catch a break, can you?” she whispered, smiling gleefully.

                                                                                #

Photo courtesy of Lyric Opera of Chicago by Dan Rest

Divvy Diary: If you think it's cold outside, try riding a bike.

     We are chaff, blown by society’s breezes. We don’t think so; proud, we flatter ourselves that we are independent mariners, captains of our destiny, raising our sails of free will to tack in whichever direction we please. It only seems that way. Truth is, a few puffs from culture and we toss our hats in the air, quit our homes and go die in trenches at the Somme.

     Or jump onto bikes when it’s 20 degrees outside, as I did Monday. It occurred to me, striding toward the Divvy stand at the Merchandise Mart, that I have never before been tempted to ride a bike in winter, never mind done it. What changed? The job demanded I go to 11th and State, a perfect distance to try a Divvy in snowtime. The city gives us permission, making these bikes available all winter, ergo, I must go try it. That logic gets you tangled in barbed wire.

     The rack at Orleans offered, at first glance, a row of snowed-in bikes. But closer examination revealed the first truth about winter biking: As long as you aren’t biking immediately after a snowfall, someone else will have already brushed off a bike for you.      

    So I sidestepped the five snow-crusted bikes and picked a clean one, wordlessly thanking the previous cyclist. I hopped on and crossed east between the Mart and the river (going the wrong way, yes, but it isn’t technically a street and besides, it was convenient. I’ve decided not to be the only cyclist in Chicago who strictly obeys traffic laws).

     The Wells Street bridge has that new, green bike lane, and again, it helps to have societal approval, for the city to say, in essence, “You belong here, this is your path.” A kind of benediction, really, and not only did it instill confidence as I rode, but it seemed to affect the midmorning traffic flowing around me with what I perceived as a certain, “let’s not kill him” respect. Or hoped.

     The only problem was my hands ...

     Though an expert had, in this very column, urged the wearing of mittens when winter biking, and though I had read it — heck, I had written it — and found the advice sound, the drawback was it required one to actually go buy mittens, which I neglected to do. What I was wearing was a pair of thin, Under Armour-like gloves beneath ragwool fingerless gloves I had in my pockets, and though technically “layers,” they were completely inadequate.

     By Madison, the pinkies on both hands had gone numb, and I retracted them from the gloves, curling the frosty digits against my palm, a process I repeated for each finger — ring, middle, index — in turn, until I was basically riding with my balled-up fists pressed against the handlebars. Not the safest practice, but it worked. A reminder that newspaper advice is one thing, real-world experience something else entirely.

     Nothing tempers the shame of folly like seeing your madness shared, and I am not the only idiot riding Divvy bikes in the winter. Fred Wu, of Roscoe Village, owns six bikes and races on the SpiderMonkey team, but he also is a Divvy member who on Sunday rode his cyclo-cross bike to Montrose, where he left it by the team tent, checked out a Divvy and rode it in the Montrose Harbor leg of the Chicago Cyclocross Cup state championship.

     “I did it for fun,” said Wu, enthusiastically cheered by the tough cup crowd. “I thought it would be amusing.” He came in last.

     Wu was inspired by cyclists teasing each other about racing a Divvy. The blue bikes (the hue of the stripes on the Chicago flag) have become a de facto symbol of the city. Wedding parties pose with them, as they do with royal blue Citi bikes in New York, a new Gotham tradition (a shame we can’t as easily adopt New York’s custom of making serious money off the bikes; it got $43 million from CitiBank for the branding, while cash-strapped Chicago got zip — another local tradition. The city says it’s working on it).

     It took 25 minutes to bike from the Mart to Roosevelt, pausing at Polk to click my bike into a dock, thaw my hands then jump back on. There was a buffeting icy gale as I crossed Congress, but I dropped my head, stood on the pedals and persevered.

     Docking at Roosevelt and Wabash, I couldn’t help but notice the Red Line station, welcoming and warm. I did my interview and after, heading back to the office, didn’t think twice about taking the L north and grabbing a Divvy at the Thompson Center, for the much shorter, much warmer return jaunt. Blame that free will I keep hearing about — it’s smart to limit your madness — though you could argue that it is just 100,000 years of survival instinct kicking in. And the next time I rode the Divvy — on Tuesday, when it was even colder — I was wearing mittens. They help a lot.

The amazingness of life

     We read for many reasons. To be taken to different times and places, to go on adventures with unusual characters. To learn practical information and find useless pleasure. Me, I read for all those purposes, while always hoping to find what I consider "the telling detail," a little fact that stands out and conveys more than its share of emotion, reality, truth. You rarely come across a really good one. But when you do, it sticks with you.
     The telling detail I'm thinking about when the topic of telling details comes up -- or, rather, when I bring it up, since people aren't always broaching the subject — is from my pal Adam Gopnik's excellent memoir, Paris to the Moon. He writes:
    "That first year we went to a lot of circuses; in Paris there are usually six or seven in residence. We saw the Moreno-Bormann family circus,which is a true family circus. When any performer does anything slightly dangerous, the rest of the family stand around the ring calling out 'Careful!" under their breaths and averting their eyes."
     There is nothing wild or extraordinary about that moment. In fact, just the opposite, it is small, and human, and sweet, and I love it. You can see the family—in my mind's eye they are holding hands, looking alternating up at, and away from, a young man in tights, perhaps walking with a pole across a stretched wire, 10 feet off the ground. whispering, "fais attention, fais attention." "Careful, careful." 
     Another such telling moment popped out of Jack London's drinking memoir, John Barleycorn, while I was reading on the train Monday. The author of The Call of the Wild, turned to non-fiction trying to take advantage of a contract loophole (he had already sold his future fictional output; by writing a memoir, he could get paid again). London is recounting his childhood in 1880s along the coast of San Mateo County, south of San Francisco, a rough and tumble place. At age 7, he tags along with some older neighbors to a dance with immigrant workers. 
     "The young fellows drank and danced with the girls to the strains of an accordion," he writes. "To me that music was divine. The young Italian who furnished it would even get up and dance, his arms around his girl, playing the accordion behind her back. All of which was very wonderful for me, who did not dance, but who sat at a table and gazed wide-eyed at the amazingness of life." 
    Great line, "the amazingness of life." And great detail, the musician reaching around the girl, working the keys of the accordion behind her back. You can almost sense the dilemma of the accordion player — how to provide music and dance with his date at the same time? And the impromptu yet elegant solution. Reach around your date, playing and dancing. You know that Jack London saw the scene because you can't make a thing like that up. It impressed him, and he put it in his book, published exactly 100 years ago, where it delights us a full century later: the ingenious musician, his accommodating girl, faint whiffs of the smoke and the cheap wine, the echoes of their stamping feet and the wheezing accordion, reaching us today, continuing to amaze. 

Oh good, more public art...

     I've blasted public art in Chicago several times, but don't think I've ever explained what first sensitized me to it—when my wife was in law school, she wrote a paper on Irene Siegel's mural in Ravenswood's Sulzer Regional Library, a stark black fresco based on The Aeneid. Local residents and library patrons immediately hated the crude and graffiti-like artwork, protesting the work and suing to try to get rid of it. To no avail; it's still there. A reminder that you need to careful putting this stuff up because, once it's on our city streets, it can be very hard to take down. Not that art should be done by committee or put to a vote, but it was sad to have this brand new, classical and beautiful library open with one room turned over, with very little input from the people who would live with it, to this crude defacement with literary aspirations. I've searched the web for a picture of it; nothing. I'll have to head over this week and take some pictures. It's strange to have an image so controversial not be online -- none of the news articles include photos. Maybe a reader has one...

     Most art is garbage. I think we can all agree on that. You could take 99 percent of the paintings ever painted and burn them, using 99 percent of the poems ever written as kindling, and the world would be no poorer for it.

     It’s determining what constitutes the 1 percent worth keeping that sparks debate.
     I can’t decide if outdoor art is particularly bad because it’s not hidden away in museums and galleries, where at least you don’t have to look at it. Or because Chicago is uniquely cursed with particularly godawful public art, starting with Picasso’s rusty steel baboon (OK, he meant it to be a lady) in Daley Plaza, to Miro’s imbecilic brush-head doll across the street, to Dubuffet’s horrendous dirty white “Snoopy in a Blender” in front of the Thompson Center (because, you know, Helmut Jahn’s salmon and blue mounded monstrosity just isn’t ugly enough, not without a fiberglass whatsit jammed into the too-small plaza in front of it).

     Although, in defense of even the worst public art—that would be the stuff scattered around Oakton Community College, which makes my fingers itch for a blowtorch and a jackhammer—it could be argued that it is better than nothing, which must be the rationale behind the Langham Hotel's push to install Chinese artist Ju Ming's bronze tableau of 11 businessmen carrying umbrellas. A Crain's post by Abraham Tekippe reports that the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, which balked at allowing the scrum near the former IBM Building, the last American office building designed by modernist icon Mies van der Rohe, now says it'll be OK if moved by the river where, one assumes, the statue won't be so noticeable.
     The Sun-Times building used to be across the street from that plaza, so I am particularly familiar with it, and had to smile, in an ironic, rueful kind of way, to read the remarks made before the landmark committee. The plaza should "remain open," said an activist who himself lives safely across town.
     "Open." This being the same plaza where they installed posts crisscrossed with ropes in the winter, so that what few pedestrians dare navigate it have something to cling to against the canyon-fed gusts that, at times, blew out revolving doors on the building.
     The statue "does compromise the overall purity" of the plaza, another expert said.
     Well yeah, in the same way that building a house compromises the overall purity of a vacant lot. Mies' brutalist internationalism is a dead end; they were already slipping settees and coffee shops into the bare stone and glass box Mies inflicted upon Wabash Avenue. I have to see this new sculpture before judging, but if it injects a human scale into the severe, the Fueher-Will-Be-Pleased massivity of Mies' handiwork, I'm all for it.
     Art is too important to be left to artists, or their advocates. For instance, public statues should never be commissioned by grieving relatives. That's how you get ­­— sorry Pat — such oddities as the Jack Brickhouse sculpture in front of Tribune Tower, its pedestal crowded with carved achievements that would look excessive under a bust of Nebuchadnezar. As for the aborning Roger Ebert sculpture — sorry Chaz — well, let's just ask: What would Roger say about it?
     The good news is that we aren't actually stuck with public art forever; it just feels that way. Remember Jane Byrne's "Children's Fountain" in the middle of Wacker Drive? The one that Rich Daley had cut up and carted off, either as a necessary component of traffic improvement or as a big Screw-You-Jane - it isn't as if Daley will ever tell, about that or anything else.
     Art should affect people. As much as I personally dislike the Picasso, give it credit: Kids like to slide on the thing. Chicago is blessed with the most successful public sculpture since the Statue of Liberty: Anish Kapoor's 100-ton Bean (or, if you must, "Cloud Gate"). All you need do is watch how people react to the piece, how happy it makes them, the amazement it confers. That's why I liked that giant Marilyn Monroe installed, alas temporarily, next to Tribune Tower. Tourists loved it, loved posing next to it, loved looking up for a peek at Gigantic Marilyn's Gigantic Panties. It was fun, and took the edge off the Gothic horror show of Trib Tower, all flying buttresses and chunks of rubble that Col. McCormick pried out of actual landmarks across the globe.
     So welcome, bronze businessmen to the former IBM Plaza. At least soon there will be a reason to go there, once, to eyeball them. And good that the expanse of barren void will no longer be generally vacant, but always occupied by these 11 bronze guys, who can keep an eye on the cyclone-swirled trash. That's something to celebrate, maybe.

A reader notes that my mention, later in the column, of Rich Daley cutting up and carting off Jane Byrne's Children's Fountain suggests it's gone — which I thought it was. It was actually re-located to Lincoln Park in 2005.