Goodbye to the Rookery

The Rookery in summer

     Hiding in plain sight amongst the profusion of the bountiful life and colorful beauty of nature is a message about death. Flowers bloom in soil made from last year's blossoms. They fade as the seasons cycle round, one after another. The fallen trees rot and provides mulch for a new crop of mushrooms. Each individual begins and ends, but life goes on unbroken. We are not forever, but we are part of something that is.
     This is seen most clearly in a national park, an expanse of forest the same now as it was a thousand years ago or, one hopes, a thousand years from now. Our petty squabbles and concerns dim, then vanish.
     But even a well-curated expanse like the Chicago Botanic Garden states this truth clearly, if you pay attention. My wife and I visit year round, enjoying the budding flowers in spring, the brilliant displays in summer, the muted browns in fall, the evergreen boughs heavy with snow in winter.
     In summer 2022, for the "Flourish: The Garden at 50" celebration, large artworks were installed all over. Most were clever and creative and enhanced the splendor around them. One clunked. "HEAR NATURE CLEANSING," barked big white block letters at the entrance, as if nature were having a high colonic. "It would be better if you snipped off that last word," I said, editing.
     And one installation was simply outstanding, Patrick Dougherty's "The Rookery," a six tower fairy castle made of willow boughs, some of them living. Kids loved to explore its little rooms, gaze out the windows. It was a surprise and delight when, at the end of last summer, when all the other anniversary artworks were removed, the Rookery stayed put. Long enough for us to get used to it, though we'd still drift in its direction, to see if from new angles and perspectives.

     Alas, even an artwork grounded in nature must take nature's cue, and this week a reader informed me that the Rookery will be taken down soon.
      "I just learned the Chicago Botanic Garden plans to remove The Rookery in early December," she wrote. "As you’ve written about it I thought you might want to know it will soon be gone. What a shame. It seems like it’s still in great shape and not a danger to visitors."

     Then she urged me to action. 

     "My daughter-in-law said I should handcuff myself to the sculpture. That seems a bit drastic, especially if they aren’t taking it down for a couple of weeks," she wrote. "Maybe you can use your voice, which is much more powerful than mine, to ask the Garden management to reconsider—maybe leave it up for another year."
     That sounds possible. But first I had to find out if her report was true. I inquired.
     "You are correct, we plan to take down the installation in early December," wrote Erin Benassi, director of public relations at the Chicago Botanic Garden. "The Rookery, which is created entirely out of willow saplings, was always meant to be a temporary installation, and the artist, Patrick Dougherty, said we’d get one great year and one pretty good year before it would reach the end of its natural life. Unfortunately, we’ve noticed this fall that it’s coming apart as it dries out with individual sticks poking out and falling to the ground. We feel now is the right time for it to be taken down before the blustery weather of winter hits."

     Even though the installation won't be there much longer, I can't see rallying to keep it, and for a reason that might surprise you. I've been going to the Garden so often for so long, I've come to admire the intelligence and stewardship behind it. Even when it means doing something unpopular, like cutting down mature black alders which were also invasive species.
     Not every change has to be battled. Isn't that the lesson of nature? Embrace and celebrate change. Good things sprout, wax then inevitably wane. Which is not something to be mourned, because new life is on the way, waiting, gathering energy, under the snow. Who knows what fresh delight could someday occupy the clearing where the Rookery once stood? The same organization that brought us the Rookery is now taking it away. I'm going to assume they know what they're doing. Sometimes you have to trust people, and trust is meaningless if it's only extended in situations where you agree with what's going on. It's when something happens that rubs you the wrong way that you have to sometimes take a step back and defer.
      Besides, honestly, when we were there a week or so ago, we paused in front of the Rookery. "Does that left tower seem like it's leaning a bit?" I asked. Hard to tell. Maybe a tiny bit. They can't afford to wait until the thing topples over and crushes a child.
     I'll certainly miss The Rookery when it's gone,the way I miss the huge sugar maple in my front yard. But I planted a tulip tree nearby, and it's going gangbusters. The world isn't ours; we're just borrowing it for a little. A brief span — in this case, a few weeks, before the Rookery is gone. If you haven't been to the Chicago Botanic Garden, this is a perfect excuse to go — the sprout of possibility unfurling from the mulch of loss. That seems fitting.

Where is your cheesecake?

 

    "Do you have cheesecake?"
    Asked my older boy, over the telephone from New York.
    Thanksgiving approaches. The nuclear family, scattered across the continent, is primed for their transit back home, like comets, trailing stardust, sweeping back toward their ancestral planet. A son working in Phoenix. Another in Washington, D.C. Bolstered by a fiancé in New York. A second fiancé in Hyde Park (for the younger boy; can't have you thinking the older boy has two). Packing bags, calling taxis, boarding airplanes. While my wife and I scrub and fret and fill the freezer with hors d'oeuvres. Their last Thanksgiving as single men. 

     "Do you have cheesecake?"

     Starting at ... 12 midnight Tuesday, when a certain individual, aka me, will be at O'Hare International Airport for the final leg of the ferrying home process. Sure, I could ask him to take an Uber. Just as we could serve frozen turkey TV dinners on Thursday. ("The frozen is just as g-g-good as good as the real" stutters one of Woody Allen's guests at the mournful end of "Broadway Danny Rose." "And the frozens are much cheaper than the real ones," he agrees.)

     "Do you have cheesecake?" 

     Asked only once. But a question that resonated, being posed, not by a child, any longer. Not by the radiant boy curled up in my lap, being read Harry Potter. But by an adult, a professional, a lawyer, who might appear in court someday, an assistant U.S. attorney, zeroing in for the kill, leaning over the mahogany rail, staring intently at the cringing witness, another malefactor. "Please answer the question with a simple 'yes' or 'no.' Do you ... have ... cheesecake?"

     We will not be serving frozen turkey dinners. There will be a fresh roasted turkey and a deep fried turkey. Mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes, challah stuffing and green bean casserole. Homemade cranberry relish and canned jellied relish, because some people prefer the canned, like the little rounded rings the can leaves on the relish. Countless cookies and pies and flans and brownies and what have you. Sweets galore.

     You would think, with all that high quality homemade grub barrelling down the pike, that store-bought cheesecake would be the last thing on his mind. 

     "Do you have cheesecake?"   

     A question demands an answer. 

     "Umm...no," I muttered, guiltily reflecting on the fate of the once considerable amount of cheesecake in the freezer. The boys ... they weren't there. But rather, far away, out in the real world. Making their own lives, separate and apart from us. Gone gone gone. "Gone like yesterday." But the cheesecake ... it was there. Not gone. Here. Available. Delicious Eli's cheesecake. Right here. What would you do?

     "Umm, no," I said quietly. "I ate it." Not all at once. Not even a slice at a time, necessarily. A half here. A big forkful there. The whirligig of time takes its revenges.

     My son did not growl, "Then you better frickin' get some, huh?" He did not say, "Then what the hell am I coming home for? You? Bah!" 

     We raised them to be better than that, kinder than that. He did not say it, aloud. Only thought it. Of that I am certain. I could almost feel the thoughts, fluttering around his head like luna moths. You mean I have to put up with days of you, you stupid old coot and your endless self-agrandizing stories and your off-point garbled quotations and your decaying, cluttered, dusty old house and I don't even get a slice of CHEESECAKE out of the deal? Fuck you, I wish you were dead!

     No, he didn't say that. What he did do — his beloved was also on the line; they often call together, which is so sweet — was reflect on a visit to Eli's Cheesecake World about a dozen years ago. He and his brother toured the plant, met the great Marc Schulman, who showed them the gold wristwatch that Frank Sinatra gave his father, Eli, the man whose trademark "The Place for Steaks" (on the site of what is now the Lurie Children's Hospital on Chicago Avenue) lives on in the cheesecake company his son created. (And, I should point out, has advertised on EGD since its inception, not that my impartial high calibre journalism would ever be affected by something so trivial as a boatload of money, and cheesecake, passing from one party to another).

     My boy explained how he and his brother donned white coats and hairnets, like scientists, and were permitted to decorate their own cheesecakes.

     It was immediately decided that, during their Thanksgiving visit, a trip to Eli's Cheesecake World is in order. Nor do you have to be related to a plugged-in, big-ass newspaper columnist to get a look behind the scenes. Anyone can arrange a tour. Or just stop by — Eli's Super Sweet Thanksgiving Sale, the biggest of the year, ends today, if you're reading this on the 18th.

     The only difficulty was finding a free morning, which in our case was the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Which led to a problem — what to do about any cheesecake needs that should arise among our houseguests beforehand? Luckily, Eli's delivers, and an Original Favorites Sampler — four slices each of plain, chocolate chip, strawberry and Heath Bar — arrived last Thursday, packed in dry ice. I thought I should take the plastic off, to make a better picture, and then realized if I tore open the plastic, purely for aesthetic reasons, in the service of professional photojournalism, the cheesecake within might not make it to midweek, certainly not in its pristine, complete condition ("Hey kids, welcome home! Who feels like sharing a slice and a half of strawberry cheesecake? Wait, where are you going?")
     I carefully slid the cheesecake, unopened, into the freezer to await their arrival. Our home is now ready for guests. Is yours?

The teachers who started a museum

 

   Oh, you’ve got to tell the story.
     Not to take anything away from my colleague Ambarcq Colón, whose excellent article in Wednesday’s paper shared the news that Carlos Tortolero, founder of the National Museum of Mexican Art, is retiring. There was a lot of real estate to cover — quotes from the ever-effusive Tortolero, the search for a new museum president, the honors and accolades rightly laden on the Pilsen landmark.
     But three simple words, “opened in 1987,” just don’t do justice to the reality, and spur me to blow the dust of decades off them. Opened why? Opened how? How did a history teacher at Bowen High School — as Tortolero was — start what became the preeminent institution in the country showcasing Mexican, Latino and Chicano art?
     It should be part of Chicago lore, alongside Uno’s inventing deep dish pizza in 1943. But it isn’t. The only reason I know is from interviewing Tortolero for my recent book, “Every Goddamn Day.” But since every Sun-Times reader hasn’t read that book, alas, I should lay the tale out here, briefly.
     Wander back in time, not to 1987, but to September 1982. Tortolero was disgusted with a Chicago Public Schools system that would treat Spanish-speaking students as if they were learning-disabled. Where Mexican culture was pretty much limited to the bad guys at the Alamo. Inclusivity is such a mantra today, we forget the headlock that white culture had on education not so long ago, and what did show up in classrooms about Mexican history echoed the joke about food at a Catskills resort: lousy, and in such small portions.
     “Beyond bad,” Tortolero said. “The misinformation was unbelievable. No one knew about Mexican culture. The students, young people, don’t know the impact of Mexico. These kids were not getting any of their history, all the great things. They knew nothing about it.”
     So he met with five other CPS staffers on Sept. 15, 1982, at Benito Juarez High School. That date was picked deliberately: the evening before Mexican Independence Day. “El Grito” the anniversary of Father Miguel Hidalgo ringing his church bell and calling for the Spanish oppressors to be driven out. “The Cry of Dolores” — a perfect day to start a revolution.

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Crimo father’s T-shirt stunt a thumb in the eye of real victims

Museum of Contemporary Art

      Regular readers might know that I don't usually have a column in the newspaper on Thursdays. But my editors asked if I would weigh in on Crimo's surrender to jail on Wednesday, and I was happy to comply.

     Robert Crimo Jr. got off light.
     He was sentenced to 60 days in jail, two years of probation and 100 hours of community service for signing the gun ownership application that allowed his disturbed teenage son to purchase an assault rifle — the gun the younger man is accused of using to slaughter seven people and wound 48 others at the Highland Park Fourth of July parade massacre in 2022.
     That’s about one day for every casualty.
     A decent person would be grateful, humbled, remorseful at that sentence. But then a decent person wouldn’t help his clearly troubled son buy an assault rifle.
     The sort of person the elder Crimo is was on full display Wednesday when he showed up for his jail time wearing a T-shirt with the words “I’m a political pawn” printed on the front and “LAWS, FACTS, REALITY” on the back.
     Let’s talk about laws. The law would allow Lake County Judge George Strickland to declare Crimo in contempt of court, void his plea agreement, haul him back into court and send him to trial. There’s plenty of precedent for that, such as when a federal judge — irked by a photo of Ed Vrdolyak on the front page of the Sun-Times, smirking after receiving probation in 2010 for a real estate kickback scheme — dismissed his probation as “a slap on the wrist” and re-sentenced him to 10 months in federal prison.

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How to always win at a casino

     People love gambling but hate taxes. Which is odd, because both do exactly the same thing: take your money.
    Frankly, I prefer taxes. At least with taxes, your lost lucre often goes to good use: building roads, funding schools, and such, rather than gilding a toilet in some casino owner’s yacht.
     Then again, I am not a gambler, and nothing is more ridiculous than passion you don’t share.
     Despite lack of interest in gambling, personally, I closely followed the opening of Bally’s temporary casino at the Medinah Temple, having tracked the decades-long chase after the will-o-the-wisp of a Chicago gambling den. Now that one’s actually open, a visit seemed in order.
     Stepping into the Medinah Temple had none of the existential sorrow of Vegas casinos. I’d pondered how much to gamble and, more importantly, whether I could expense my losses. While I have in the past stuck the newspaper with a variety of vices in the name of research, from a $200 bottle of champagne at the Ritz-Carlton bar, to table dances and tips to strippers at Thee Doll House on Kingsbury, something told me that Chicago Public Media might look askance at financing my casino spree. So I figured: eat my losses. Besides, a gambler should never bet anything he isn’t prepared to lose. I initially thought: $100 but then dialed it back to $50. Frugal.
     That plan lasted until I walked in the door. When I told the security guard this was my first visit, he directed me to a desk where I was issued a card — a Bally’s Rewards card, with “Pro” emblazoned in the corner. “Pro?” That made me smile. If I’m a pro, I’d hate to see what an amateur looks like.
     A quick glance at the cover of the brochure I was given revealed the truth. Pro is the lowest rung. The others: Star, Superstar and Legend. “LEVEL UP YOUR LOYALTY” it declares. Perks include free check cashing to cover your losses. I’m surprised there isn’t access to a VIP pawn shop.
     The card also came with a $10 credit. I headed to the slot machines. This $10 grubstake was unexpected. I’d point out the echo of drug dealers — your first hit is free — but don’t traffic in the obvious.

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Simple point

    I wonder how many of those Americans who are going on about the supposed colonial nature of the founding of the State of Israel realize that every square inch of the United States was formerly owned by indigenous peoples, before it was stolen or swindled away from them. 
    If not, it was owned by Mexicans. The entire state of Texas, for starters. 
    And I further wonder if they realize, despite the popular expressions of chin music recognizing that fact, such as the plaque at right, at the entrance to the Field Museum, how they would react if the descendants of those cheated Native-American tribes, or else the heirs of those defeated Mexicans, decided they wanted their forebears' land back, and toward that end started randomly slaughtering people, the better to drive their point home.
      How well would that work?  How persuasive would that be? My guess is: not very. A reminder: it's always easy to give somebody else's land away. 

Art Institute hopes to broaden its scope

     This has been a good year for me and major museums.
     One glorious day at the Prado in Madrid, including half an hour gazing at Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” which I’d previously only seen as a square inch detail in textbooks. In reality, it’s 12 feet across and almost seven feet high. Then in September, a day at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Four, count ’em, four Vermeers.
     Despite inhaling all this high-octane artwork, it’s always good to come back to Chicago to the Art Institute, a world class institution by any measure. My wife and I are members, which means we can stroll in anytime we like and wander around. And I do, literally if I have an hour to kill and am in the vicinity.
     So I’m trucking into the American wing not long ago, and I notice this little niche, with room for five paintings. Something new.
     “Folk Art and Belonging” announces a sign. The text explains that folk art — also called “vernacular art” — is a wide range of creative endeavors, from handmade jugs to embroidered samplers to amateur portraiture.
     “Museums often present vernacular traditions as separate from the larger histories of art,” it says. “Embracing a more expansive vision of the arts, we are rethinking this approach. ... We likewise plan to reintegrate such artwork throughout the galleries downstairs as part of a major reinstallation in the coming years.”
     Golly. What does THAT mean? “Let’s put a potholder next to this Rembrandt”? Seeking clarity, I emailed the Art Institute and, since they can ... um, how to say this nicely? ... take a while to find their ass with both hands, I also reached out to the Cleveland Museum of Art, as a control.
     Cleveland leapt from the blocks.
     “In the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Strategic Plan, we prioritized diversifying the collection to include more important works by historically underrepresented artists including BIPOC and women artists,” said deputy director and chief curator Heather Lemonedes Brown. “By expanding the scope of our world-class collection, we help all audiences see themselves, as well as discover the culture of others in our galleries.”

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