Sign of the times: Danville company working hard to dazzle Las Vegas

Shannon Stine, an employee at Watchfire Signs in Danville, tests the LEDs in a new sign. 

    At first glance, there doesn't seem to be much in common between the glitz of Las Vegas and the grit of Danville.     

     Vegas is a thriving desert metropolis, world-famous as a gaudy adult oasis floating on a sea of gambling money. Danville, a small community of modest homes, is a once-thriving town that has never been the same since the GM plant shut down 30 years ago.
     Wealth is on flashing display everywhere in Las Vegas. Five years ago, the U.S. government called Danville the cheapest place to live in the United States.
     What could the connection be?
     The flashing signs are the giveaway.       

      Go to Danville, 120 miles south of Chicago. Turn down Maple Street, to where it dead-ends with the unfortunately-named Bahls Street, a source of never-ending guffaws from truckers making pickups and deliveries. There you will find Watchfire Signs, which right now is constructing the largest digital display in the world, a $30 million, four-block long, barrel-vaulted, 130,000 square foot video screen that, when complete, will form a canopy above Fremont Street in Las Vegas.

     Watchfire employs about 320 people manufacturing and selling LED signs. If you drive down the Kennedy, you've already seen their work: Watchfire manufactures video billboards for JCDecaux. The company began in 1945 as Time-O-Matic, producing grids of bulbs under bank signs telling the time and temperature. The company also created flashing signs for Vegas casinos.

     They've grown considerably over the past decade, discarding their mechanical-sounding name, and now tackling the biggest sign ever attempted, beating out 15 other companies worldwide that bid on the job.
     "For a company like ours, this is a huge project," said Steve Harriott, president and CEO. "For any company — it's is the biggest screen in the world."
     Manufacture began last month. To see it, you must put on an anti-static smock and booties before entering the state-of-the-art assembly room.

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Flashback 2011: Sons of Thorne Rooms artist still run dad’s studio

A Thorne Room in the modern style. 

     Hank Kupjack died Monday. My colleague Maureen O'Donnell did her usual excellent job ushering the miniaturist into the hereafter. I felt a connection, beyond that offered by Maureen, because I had visited Kupjack at his studio in 2011. I remember being pleased that I had stumbled upon a bit of controversy over a subject as blandly familiar as the Thorne Rooms.

     

     Imagine that you are in the Impressionist wing at The Art Institute of Chicago, admiring the masterpieces, and you notice a placard telling visitors that the sons of Vincent Van Gogh — Harold and Bob Van Gogh, say — still run their dad’s studio.
     That’s basically what you find if you go down to the beloved Thorne Miniature Rooms in the basement of The Art Institute.
     Over the holidays my wife dragged the family there. I’ve never been a particular fan of the Thorne Rooms — the 68 wee interiors always struck me as girly. But they are art, of a sort, with a certain serene quality, and I had no trouble peering into them for 20 minutes, reading the notations, including one crediting the work of local craftsman Eugene Kupjack, adding: “Today Kupjack Associates is operated by his two sons, Hank and Jay, in Park Ridge, Illinois.”
     A few days later, I was shaking hands with Hank Kupjack, 59, a singular figure — very thin, pants tucked into tall black leather boots, wearing glasses, a turtleneck and a mop of anachronistic ginger brown hair.
     We chatted briefly about Istanbul, where the rooms were on display last year, then sat down at his workbench — dozens of jars of paint and shellac, dozens of needle nose pliers. Kupjack lit a Marlboro cigarette and conversation immediately took an unexpected dive into controversy.
     “As you know, the Thorne Rooms are very popular,” he began. “The Institute has never liked the rooms, I’ll be honest with you. Now they do. But they hadn’t, for a very long time, because they are the most popular thing in the Art Institute. . . . But they’re not Impressionist paintings, and the Institute for a long time didn’t like that. They always rubbed them the wrong way — they only acquired them because Thorne gave them to the Institute, [which] only took them because [Mrs. Thorne] was a founding member of the Art Institute and the only donor during the Depression. Once they were installed they couldn’t do anything about it.”
     That’s the risk of all public art — once you put it in, you can never get rid of it — and why Chicago is stuck forever contemplating a rusty baboon, a fiberglass Snoopy in a blender, and other crude 1970s debris that aging masters fobbed off on the city.
     Not to lump the Thorne Rooms in with such monstrous modernist kitsch — at least they require skill to create and are pleasant to regard.
     To my surprise, the Art Institute cheerily acknowledged both the popularity of the rooms now and the undervaluing of the rooms, installed in the mid-1940s, in the past.
     “When people come here, they look for American Gothic, for Sunday on the Grande Jatte, and for the Thorne Rooms,” said Erin Hogan, director of communications. “They’re a hugely, hugely popular part of the museum.”
     “I think there’s always that problem with, not only miniatures, but decorative arts in particular,” said Lindsay Mican Morgan, curator of the rooms. “There’s a history where paintings became ‘art’ and anything else is simple and decorative.”
     The Kupjacks — Hank is the main artist, Jay assists and take photographs — make the miniatures on a scale of one inch to one foot, now primarily for collectors and rich folk who want to immortalize themselves. The studio that produced “The Drew Carey Show,” for instance, paid the Kupjacks $100,000 to create a diorama of the show’s set.
     “Right now I’m doing a classical Greek andron — an andron is a room specifically built in a Greek home for parties, for boys only,” said Kupjack. “You basically sat around, drank wine, told stories, read poetry and behaved badly. The donor wants to show the context this stuff was actually used in antiquity.”
     “And the donor?” I asked.
     “We’re having serious issues,” he said, of the museum, which he asked me not to name (Geez, I thought, I flee politics to seek refuge in quaintness, and controversy still nips at my heels like a dim pup). “It’s going to go to one of several institutions that have large collections of classical art.”
     The Thorne Rooms — I did not realize — were intended to replace full-scale interiors.
     “When Mrs. Thorne was on the board in the 1920s, it was all the rage for museums to have full-sized period rooms,” said Kupjack. “The Institute had, I think, five or six. And she realized that not only were they terribly expensive to recreate . . . they took vast amounts of space and ultimately, when the public walked through they didn’t give a damn. The purpose of the Thorne Rooms was so that the Institute did not have to have full-sized period rooms. She did not realize they were much more popular than full-sized rooms until she did it.”
     I found the Kupjacks candid and charming, filled with tales of P.K. Wrigley, Marshall Field V and Malcolm Forbes, and the museum has grown to value them.
     “I have to admit, when I got this position, it took many tries and a lot of bridge building to gain their trust,” said Morgan. “They definitely felt hurt from the past. To me, they had so much history — they’ve given me fabrics, they’ve been very generous — it seemed ridiculous not to associate with them.”

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 7, 2011

Jussie Smollett situation reminds us: An example is not proof

                                                                   Basilica di Santa Croce, Florence, Italy


     In an era when everyone’s talking, all the time, silence is a privilege.
     A radical thought from a person paid good money to blow off his big bazoo.
     But never on command. I’m fortunate in that I rarely must comment on any given situation. My boss never shifts the stump of a wet cigar in his mouth and barks, “Steinberg! Your take on the Kershpungen Kerfuffle! Online in 30 minutes!”
     Not yet anyway.
     I do believe in comment, but after reflection. Time is our friend. We are allowed to think about stuff, to see what develops. We don’t have to argue every murky, fluid situation. We can just wait and find out.
      I’d never heard of either Jussie Smollett or his TV show “Empire” before Jan. 29, when the young actor reported being attacked in Chicago. Such things happen — Wrigleyville is next to Boystown, and in the summer, carloads of suburban bully boys are known to assault pedestrians whose step isn’t as heavy as theirs.
     But that wasn’t the situation here. It wasn’t summer; it was 20 below. And he was walking in Streeterville, not on Halsted Street. There was preparation beyond drinking a case of Old Style: a rope, and bleach. And, most incredibly, claims that this is MAGA country, which it certainly is not. Donald Trump won’t show his face here.
     Nor was this any random young man on his way home from Sidetrack. This was a celebrity.

     I try not to engage in Facebook tug-o-wars. Better to read and not react. But I came upon a string of comments from people horrified at this attack. Doubts were being raised and the doubters reviled. They needed support. I thought carefully, then wrote:
     “This is a very strange set of facts. Not a typical Chicago crime.”
     I felt safe with that. A couple days later, I came upon another friend out on a limb:
     "I know many will call me an ass for not believing the victim but this story is BS," he wrote.
     To some, that was bigotry rampant.
     "It saddens me that it is easier for people to find this story made up (hospital pictures of injuries, document threats and all) than see this is plausible."
     It seemed cowardly to hurry past. I weighed in:
     "I have to admit, I had the exact same thought. It just seems implausible. Not impossible. But the odds of this celebrity hitting town and running into the cast of 'Deliverance' ... let's just say if I had to bet the ranch, it would be on Some Other Explanation."
     Since then, over the past two weeks, the story has assumed the usual pattern. Blue America waved the bloody shirt—see, this is the nest of haters we must deal with! Now that the blood appears to be ketchup, and perhaps—still perhaps, remember—Smollett cooked this up, hiring the men who supposedly assaulted him for reasons I won't guess at—Red America had a jubilee: see, all this racism and homophobia stuff is a lie. We live in Mayberry where everybody is happy.
     The core problem, ignored by both sides, has nothing to do with whatever happened to Smollett that night. The problem is that an example isn't proof.
     If I want to illustrate that America is a deeply racist country, whose economic success is built upon the dehumanization of black people, the slavers' poisonous worldview still with us to this day, I don't need a street incident to make my case. I can just flop open a history book to almost to any random page. Nor does the country's pervasive homophobia, despite real advances, need to be proven by a mugging.
     When the initial news was seized upon, as Exhibit No. 1 for these woes, those eagerly banging garbage can lids together were playing Trump's game: trot out a dramatic crime then demand a wall.
     When diligent police work cast the attack into question, the Revanchist Right picked up the stick the Left dropped, and made it Exhibit No. 1 for Fake News. More proof that the racism and homophobia we're never acknowledged in the first place does not exist.
     Why does everybody do it? Cherry pick newly-baked facts that we hope will support us? It must show lack of confidence in our view of the world, this constant junkie scramble for new validation.
     See why silence is so attractive? I've said it before: Shutting up is an art form.

"Will you be enjoying Nantucket Sea, Himalayan Pink, or, ahem, common table salt tonight?"

     Sunday night we met old friends at a restaurant in Glenview. Gusto, an Italian place with a nice atmosphere and hearty, homemade food. Their choice; I hadn't heard of Gusto, never mind been there. But they said it was a favorite, and our experience there proved their judgment sound, starting with the arrival of the bread: fresh, warm, braided, friendly little rolls. 
    Bread serves a time-honored function in the restaurant experience. It takes the edge off the hunger that sent you there in the first place. It is a small gift of welcome from the owners to their guests for the evening. It is the first indication diners have of the excellence going on back in the kitchen.

    I limited myself to one roll, by an act of will, saving myself for the dinner to come. Though not without casting a covetous look or two at the basket, fortunately out-of-reach across the table. I was glad for that when dinner arrived, a plate brimming with rigatoni, pomodoro sauce, meatballs. Pure and lovely. When I got down to the last tube, I looked around and said, "I think I'll take the rest home."
     Everyone laughed.
     Gusto wasn't the only restaurant I went to for the first time last week. The previous Tuesday, I met a friend for our monthly strategy lunch. We usually go to The Dearborn: convenient, new, excellent food and service. But we had had to reschedule several times—busy men!—and we couldn't get a reservation on short notice.
     So he suggested Steadfast, on West Monroe. I had never heard of it, and went with the excitement of trying someplace new. In many ways similar to The Dearborn. Hip, new, or at least opened in 2016, which is new to me, since I probably have cans in the back of my fridge opened in 2016. 

     Both featured Cuban sandwiches, and I was about to order one, for comparison purposes, when I was seduced by an Asian salad with thick soba noodles, as well as shaved vegetables, salted peanuts and miso vinaigrette. I'm a sucker for soba noodles. Throw some herbed chicken on top and you're only out $18—well, my pal is out $18. He always pays, and when I tried to pay, he looked hurt—he's a few clicks up the food chain than I am— and wouldn't let me do it.
     Bread was on the menu, which is a thing nowadays, as restaurants try to find new ways to monetize the dining experience. For a while they weren't giving you bread. Some places asked, other places expected you to ask. It seemed fallout from so many people doing low carb diets, from restaurants tired of wasting bread. Now they've taken a new tack, and are trying to sell it back. Girl and the Goat does the same thing.
     "House baked artisan breads." I asked my pal if we should give it a go, and he was enthusiastic.
     The staff of life pictured above arrived. I selected the reddish bread—a roll, really. It was pleasant and slightly sweet. Beets were involved, I believe the server said. But not so good that I worried myself excessively about trying the others. One was plenty.
     Don't get me wrong. I liked Steadfast. The salad was excellent, and enough to drive me back. I wrinkled my nose a bit when I asked the waitress why the place was called "Steadfast" and she just shrugged, as if the explanation for the name of where she worked is unknowable. A mystery. If you're going to give your restaurant a quirky name, at least acquaint the waitstaff with why. If they can't do that, what else can't they bother to do? The full name is Steadfast at The Gray, by the way, named for the boutique hotel that you will explore, as I did, trying to find the bathroom. Fairly elegant, and you can get a bed for $180 a night (Not that I required one on the hike to the john; but the place is swank, and I wondered).
     I hope I'm not alone in flinching at pricy bread. Maybe that makes me Old School. I never got used to charging for water either. To me it seems another step toward the day when the napkin sommelier will glide over, snap open a case, and start brandishing swatches of cloth and raving about Egyptian cotton and thread counts and the Thai Black Silk Option and such while I hold up my palms and say, "Oh no no no, plain white napkins will do." His expression freezes, the smile dying, and he snaps the teak case shut with a dismissive clap. 

White whale and wide wall: American obsessives Ahab and Donald Trump

Ahab, illustrated by Rockwell Kent. "In the mid-20th century, he's an argument against totalitarianism," said Will Hansen, curator of the Herman Melville exhibit at The Newberry. "And now he's this demagogue leading us over the cliff."

     Even Ahab, the great figure of self-destructive obsession in American literature, gets pushback, immediately, while he’s still selling his quest to the doomed crew of the Pequod. He displays the ounce of Spanish gold belonging to whoever first sights the white whale and nails it to the mast. The crew cheers. But Starbuck, the young chief mate — and future eponym for a famous chain of coffee shops — isn’t huzzahing with the rest. He’s scowling.
     “What’s this long face about, Mr. Starbuck,” Ahab demands. “Wilt thou not chase the white whale? Art not game for Moby Dick?”
     “I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow,” replies Starbuck. “But I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance.”
     It might be a stretch to compare Ahab and Donald Trump. One man is sun-bronzed and lean, the other orange-dyed and stout. But the two men do share a leadership style — both issuing “orders so sudden and peremptory.”
     And Ahab’s white whale does resonate with Trump’s wide wall. When Starbuck elaborates his objection, “To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous,” he is referring to the unreasoning whale.
     Echoed by the dumb thing of Trump’s wall, which is stupid because it is racist, unnecessary and expensive. Most Americans, like Starbuck, are clear-eyed enough to oppose such vengeful folly.
     Moby Dick is on my mind, having walked through the excellent “Melville: Finding America at Sea” with organizer Will Hansen, The Newberry Library’s director of reader services and curator of Americana.
     “The great American secular Bible,” he said, pausing before, “the first editions of Moby Dick, first published in London.”
     London?
     “It was fairly common in the 19th century for American writers to first publish in England, probably because America had no copyright protections,” Hansen said. "England was starting to get more copyright protections, thanks to Dickens, if you first published in England it was thought you had a better case to sue if somebody pirated your work."

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"It is a grape."

    I love, love, love going to the supermarket. Always have, back to the day when my mother and I would visit the two groceries that existed in our world, Pick & Pay or A & P. I was almost an adult before I discovered that you could buy food from a place that didn't have an ampersand in its name.
     Back then, the joy was just to hang with my mom and maybe score a black and white cookie at the Hough Bakery at the back of the supermarket. Now I like to study the products. Because you never know what you might find, like the orange box of Zante Currants on the right above. 
     If you grew up on the things, forgive me. But I had never heard of them, the unfamiliar product made even stranger by the oh-so-familiar Sun-Maid logo. It's like you saw an orange bottle of Heinz Mooshpa. A sauce of some kind,  apparently. 
     Of course I bought a box. "Tiny, tart and dark to taste," according to the Sun-Maid web page, which says they are made from the Corinth grape. I had heard the term "currant" before, usually describing something found in bakery items, a perception Sun-Maid validates, noting, "For many, they’ve become the preferred delicacy in healthy baked good recipes, like scones, cookies, breads, muffins and rolls."  
     But "Zante"? That is the true thrill: "A name of one of the Ionian islands, anciently Zacynthus," according to my Oxford English Dictionary. Used in the names of certain products. "Zante wine, wood, etc."
     The OED's first citation is from some business publication from 1615, but I knew I could do better, quickly stumbling upon a 1913 publication, compiled by Michael F. Tarpey, called "Levantine Grapes Commercially Known As Currents."      

    It quotes one Dr. Gustav Eisen, curator of the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, and an expert on horticulture, who testified that he had "made the Zante current one of the objects of his researches and studies" and that the fruit can be found mentioned in English documents dating back to 1333, as there was "considerable trade carried on between the Venetians and the English in Northern Europe generally in a fruit that was known as the 'raisin of Corinth.'" 

     A modest publication of only 40 pages, "Levantine Grapes" nevertheless begins more boldly than many novels: 

     Every discussion of tariff brings up the "Zante currant" question.     The "Zante current," miscalled, is not a currant.     It is a grape. Currants grow on a bush. Grapes grow on vines. The misnamed "Zante currant" is in no sense analogous to the American currant. The misunderstanding arises from a corruption of its French name "Raisin de Corinthe," or Corinthian grape.

      The book was directed at Congress, its purpose, it stated ,was "convincing legislators and the people that this question should be understood and finally settled." Of course money was involved. "Levantine Grapes" worries that reduction in tariffs on Zante currents would pose "a severe, if not mortal, blow to an industry which, as yet wobbly upon its feet, promises to become a prime industry."

      They must have won their case: the flood of cheap Greek dried fruit must have been effectively deflected, as the Sun-Maid Zante currants were grown, not in Greece, but California. Honestly, I could plunge deeper into pre-World War I grape tariffs, but I have a sense it's time to wrap up.
      Before we leave our topic, I have to point out that the island has a cameo in The Iliad, no less, in Book 2, translated by Robert Fagles: 

Next Odysseus led his Cephallenian companies, gallant-hearted fighters, the island men of Ithaca, of Mount Neriton's leafy ridges shimmering in the wind, and men who lived in Corcylia and rugged Aegilips, men who held Zacynthus and men who dwelled near Samos...

     See why I love shopping? One second you are weighing grapefruit in your hand to see if it's juicy enough to merit buying. The next you catch the faintest echo of an early 20th century trade tussle then, better, a clank of bronze, a whiff of sea salt, carried across the globe and the ages by tiny grapes that might not have dried in the Ionian sun, but are the descendent of fruit that once did.   

The Saturday Snapshot #27

      I could go all Benjamin Franklin on you and ask whether you think the sun above is rising or setting, and then use that as a measure of optimism. (Franklin famously mused whether the sun on the back of George Washington's chair at the Constitutional convention was rising or setting; he thought it ascendant).  

     But Tom Peters sent this, calling it "Frigid Sunset." The sun can be mocking, when its so cold, though this photo doesn't really convey "cold" to me. I asked Tom to elaborate on it, and this is what he said:

It's a wetland just south of Deer Creek Golf Course in University Park on Old Monee Road just east of Western Ave. I have driven by it over the decades on my way to and from work at the post office and now the flower shop down in Beecher. It is a favorite stopping spot for migrating water fowl in the Spring & Fall and home to many geese, egrets and blue herons. I was fortunate enough to see an immature bald eagle fly over on one of my trips home from work, that made my day.

     Tom's right about eagles making your day. I haven't seen many—usually in the UP. 
     Franklin's bit about rising or falling, by the way, is a little trite. A person who sees a sunset is not, by definition, less optimistic than a person who sees a sun rise. He, or she, might be just looking farther ahead, to the challenges and rewards of the next day. Might be wishing an end to a particularly taxing day that has gone by. I know many an American is eager for our current historic period to wind up as soon as possible and bring something better to come. That is surely optimism.