Art history never seemed so important before

     Some columnists hobbyhorse an issue, hitting it again and again and again. Me, I try to be a one-and-done kind of guy. Why? Because if I bump into Jesus Christ delivering the Sermon on the Mount in Grant Park, and decide to stretch that into a two-parter, with a third column for reader reaction, by that last day, I promise, you’ll be thinking, “What, again with Jesus?”
     But the Art Institute firing its white docents en masse deserves a second visit. It both speaks of our uneasy racial moment, and has the makings of being one of those evergreen PR disasters still talked about 25 years later, the way when I pass bottles of Perrier in a supermarket I shiver and think, “benzene.”
     The Perrier benzene contamination was in 1990. Maybe it’s me. But people generally have long memories for anything negative.
     The good news is that disasters do eventually fade. This isn’t the Art Institute’s first public blunder, you know. Who remembers that the museum once carelessly stashed three Cezanne paintings in a janitor supply closet? From where they were stolen, the theft going undetected because Art Institute procedures were so lax. That wasn’t sunk into the distant heroic past. It was 1978.
     And nobody at all remembers that students from the School of the Art Institute once gathered at the museum to hold a mock trial of an artist, whom they condemned for “artistic murder, pictorial arson, artistic rapine, total degeneracy of color,” among other crimes. They burned reproductions of his paintings and would have burned the artist too, in effigy, had the police not stepped in.
     The artist was Henri Matisse.
     All right, that was in 1913, and the School of the Art Institute was and is a separate place from the Art Institute. (The school is much older; the museum began as a gallery for student works.) But nuance doesn’t enter into these scandals. I personally think the museum acted in a defendable manner when birthing this fiasco. Every step a rational one, in the desired direction, right off the cliff.

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Flashback 2008: "Grandiose and Biedermeier and tragically defunct."

      I called my old friends at Atlas Stationers on Lake Street Wednesday to order my 2022 Brownline Daily Planner. Which led me to this, and I thought I'd share it with you. First, for the word jazz over office supplies. And second, well, I gotta say, I'm proud to have once called the National Weather Service to ask if the clouds are lovelier of late. It's from when the column ran nearly a thousand words and filled the page, so some patience might be required. I've left in the original headings.

OPENING SHOT ...

     JetBlue charging $7 for a pillow and a blanket reminds me of a business tip I've meant to give to struggling upscale restaurants for a while now. Two words:
     The napkin.
     Hear me out. Restaurants already plump their bottom line by gulling diners into splurging on luxury water instead of plain old tap. Like there's a difference. Why then should patrons settle for boring white linen napkins, when they could chose from a "Napkin Menu" offering rough silk, antique lace or fine Egyptian cotton? Think of the publicity value—far outstripping the $100 Kobi beef hamburgers that clever chefs have long used to gain a headline or two. If napkins are too over-the-top, think about the revenue stream possibilities of salt. Why sprinkle your $90 Tempura of Spot Prawn with Braised Kombu with the same sodium chloride the Morton Salt Girl has been flinging around for a century when you could savor imported hand-pestled French sea salt for an extra $9 and get to keep the little crystal shaker as a souvenir? I'm surprised nobody has thought of it before.

A CLOUDY DAY CAN BE A GOOD THING

     It is a mantra of mine that the world does not change; rather, we change, and then blame the world. Life does not start as an exciting, dynamic, possibility-laden enterprise—coincidentally when we are young —and then suddenly shift, deteriorating into a grim, dull, unappealing, entropic mess about the time we grow old.
     Thus I viewed with suspicion—at first—my growing conviction over the past few months that the clouds are lovelier and more numerous than usual this summer. I dismissed it as a trick of memory, a passion, an amour fou, the symptom of some overwrought emotional state.

Maxfield Parrish clouds

     And yet. Day after day, I'd look up, and stop. Enormous Maxfield Parrish billows piled up in a corner of the sky, churning, lit pink and yellow and gold by the setting sun. Sheets of wispy stratus clouds, whirls, fantastic displays that lacked only cherubs with harps.
     I placed a call. Are the clouds lovelier this year?
    "I noticed that," said Frank Wachowski, a National Weather Service meteorologist who has been closely watching the Chicago weather for the past 62 years -- since he was eight. "In the afternoons, lots of build-ups."
     More than usual?
     "We really don't keep records on clouds," he continued. "But there's been a lot of cumulus clouds, a lot of thunderstorms. Some tops of thunderheads go as high as 70,000 feet. In the last 60 days or so, lots of what we call cabbage-type clouds: cumulus-nimbus, and with the jet stream, lots of cirrus clouds—the middle-type, 12,000 to 15,000 feet. I'd say the last two months have been exceptionally different than most summers."
     Well, that's a relief.

PENCIL JOTTINGS

     "I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils," wrote poet Theodore Roethke. "Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight. All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage."
     I don't know about that. Myself, I've known the joy of pencils—tumbling out of the box with a clatter, fresh recruits, interchangeable soldiers in their identical orangish-yellow uniforms, eager to serve.
     But then, I'm a sucker for office supplies. This autumn—as every autumn—I'll feel a pang at not being able to go to Woolworth's to stock up on protractors and rulers, pencils and scissors, tape and ring binders.  
     Pencils have an aesthetic beauty and an technical purity—engineering historian Henry Petroski wrote an intriguing book about their development, The Pencil. There is a reason Claes Oldenburg made paper clips and wheel erasers into giant sculptures—they're pure forms, and beautiful, or else throwbacks to an earlier time. What is more nostalgic than a rubber stamp? Novelist Nicholson Baker referred to the "black, weighted Duesenberg" of an old tape dispenser as "grandiose and Biedermeier and tragically defunct." Mmmm....  
     Perhaps it can't be explained—you either get it or you don't. I'm looking at a round metal can of Premium Best-Test White Rubber Paper Cement. It sits, red and white, on my roll-top desk—too beautiful to hide in a drawer, a delight to unscrew its round metal cap with "BRUSH IN CAN" embossed upon it, to remove the aforementioned black brush, enrobed in a viscous cocoon of milky glue, dripping slowly, languid as honey.
     And while I patronize the Office Depots and OfficeMaxs that crowd the suburban moonscape, there is a special place in my heart for Atlas Stationers, in the Loop, in a small iron-columned storefront right under the L at 227 W. Lake Street. Business sends me there every week or two, to purchase copy paper or grab a bubble envelope ("Cushioned/Self-Sealing" it announces, traits we all can aspire to) or gaze longingly at the green-covered ledger books and blue-lined accounting books and wonder who in God's name still uses them.
     You worry about a place like Atlas Stationers. They've been there since 1939, but how much longer can they survive? How much longer can they peddle Chisel Point Staples and Dixon Ticonderoga pencils, competing against the bargain behemoths? In that struggle, Atlas is holding its 21st annual sidewalk sale today. "Discounts UP to 90%" cries the flier they tucked into the bag with my four Uniball Gel Impact RT pens, two black, two blue. "Bigger and Better Than Ever! Come Often! Selection Changes!"
     That sounds exciting, doesn't it?
            —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 15, 2008

Filling the void left by absent fathers

Alberto Garcia (left) helps boys think about what it means to be a man. They were gathered at the Union League Boys & Girls Clubs’ Barreto Club in Humboldt Park. The conversation sometimes involves his numerous tattoos. “I have a lot of friends on my body,” he says.

     “What’s a real man?”
     Alberto Garcia writes that question and two others on a whiteboard in a social room on the second floor of the Union League Boys & Girls Clubs’ Barreto Club in Humboldt Park. Facing him are a dozen boys — eight 8 to 11 years old; the other four are teenage mentors.
     “I want you guys to think really deep,” says Garcia, 27. “Three questions. No. 1, male stereotypes. No. 2 is, ‘What is a real man?’ Then a mural idea. If you had a blank wall, or could put up anything. That breakout session starts now.”
     They divide into two tables to discuss the topic. At one, Shacole, 13, and takes the lead. He quizzes each younger boy in turn.
     “What is your definition of a man?” he asks the kid next to him.
     “Somebody who pays the rent,” answers Malachi, 11. “Who has a good living and a job. Takes care of himself.”
     They bump fists. Shacole turns to the next boy.
     “What is your definition of a man?”
     “Working hard,” says Tawan, 11. “Helping others.”
     “What is your definition of a man, Avian?”
     “Someone who cares, first of all, about yourself,” says the boy, also 11. “Respect everyone. Caring. Not just a man’s job to make all the money.”
     Shacole adds his own perspective.
     “Caring, self-respect,” he says, ticking qualities off on his fingers. “They don’t beat on people. It’s not the man’s job to make ALL the money.”

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Hillary learned to be hit—and hit back—in Park Ridge

 

By Tony Puryear (National Portrait Gallery)

   Today is Hillary Clinton's 74th birthday, and to celebrate I thought I'd share with you a column that points to the path not taken. This was to have been my column on Nov. 9, 2016. Clinton won the popular vote, but lost in the electoral college, and the nation entered the dark wood that it is still struggling to escape. Some of us, at least, are struggling to escape.

     Hillary Clinton will be the first president of the United States born in Chicago.
     It says something about the conflicted, tentative view that people in her hometown have toward her that this will be news to many. The city has not exactly been welling with pride over the prospect of its daughter ascending to the White House. Maybe the Cubs' march to World Series victory has monopolized our sense of hopeful self-esteem.
      But Hillary Diane Rodham was born Oct. 26, 1947, at Edgewater Hospital, a blond brick building at the corner of Ashland and Hollywood. The building still stands, shuttered since the late 1990s.
     That makes her something of a double rarity: only four previous presidents have been born in hospitals: Jimmy Carter, the first, followed by George W. Bush, her husband Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, who also shares another exclusive club with Clinton — presidents born in cities.
      Through most of American history, our commanders-in-chief tended to come from farms and small towns. Only four hailed from cities: William Howard Taft, born in Cincinnati, Teddy Roosevelt, born in New York, Obama, born in Honolulu — deal with it — and now Clinton.
     Her father Hugh, a crusty-bordering-on-abusive man, manufactured drapes. Her mother Dorothy was the daughter of the broken home of a Chicago firefighter. For the first three years of Hillary's life, the new family — she was their first child — lived at a small apartment building at 5722 N. Winthrop (the building no longer stands). Then her father put down $35,000 in cash for 235 Wisner, a handsome faux Georgian brick home in Park Ridge, the town where she spent her youth until graduating from Maine Township High School South and going off to college at Wellesley.
     It's a quiet neighborhood a few blocks north of Touhy. At midday the streets are deserted, except for a few dog walkers such as Clay Baum, 44, a software account manager, who lives 10 houses north of Clinton's girlhood home. He was walking his poodle, Knight.
     "I support her," he said, a few days before the election. "It's great for the community of course."
     He said he didn't know who lived in the house, and that the rumor around the neighborhood is that no one does. Yet the neatly tended grounds are obviously being cared for by somebody.
There is no plaque, only an honorary street sign on a nearby light pole reading "Rodham Corner," located a hard-to-see 15 feet off the ground, the result of it being frequently stolen by souvenir hunters despite using special vandal-proof fasteners when it was first put up a decade ago.
     Efforts by Park Ridge to honor Clinton have been sidetracked by politics; in 1992, a proposal to hang her portrait at the local library proved so controversial the idea was scuttled.
     It is a coolness sometimes reflected when quizzing the locals about their most famous daughter, a popular media pastime for decades — in 1996, a reporter from the Los Angeles Times collared an area resident, a "patrician-looking woman in her 70s" who wouldn't give her name, but managed to damn Clinton both for keeping her last name and for changing it, in the same breath.
     "When she got married she wouldn't take his name. That was really a bit much for us," she sniffed. "And then, of course, when it came time for an election and her husband needed her to do it, she took his name. It's not something I really approved of."
     Clinton biographies are filled with stories of her toughening her persona in Park Ridge. The loss to the high school football captain when she ran for class president. Her shift away from Goldwater Republicanism.
     But the Park Ridge story that seems most apt to tell about the woman who endured a year of the worst that Donald Trump could dish out, with class and dignity, harkens back to when she was four years old.
     In the frequently told family story, it was in Park Ridge that newly arrived Hillary, 4, was beaten up by the neighborhood bully girl, Suzy. Running home in tears, the future first lady, senator, secretary of state and now president-elect was told by her mother, "There's no room in this house for cowards. You're going to have to stand up to her. The next time she hits you, I want you to hit her back."
     Which is exactly what happened.
     "I can play with the boys now!" Hillary said in triumph.

Will your new kidney come from a pig?

 

     Kidney from a case of dropsy (Courtesy of St. Bartholomew's Hospital Archives & Museum).

     As someone who recently tried to persuade Massachusetts General Hospital to take one of my kidneys — we’ll get to that — I noted with interest reports last week that a pig kidney has been successfully transplanted into a human.
     The pig-to-human factor isn’t even the most eye-opening aspect of this operation. Since people and pigs were not designed — by nature, by God, your pick — to swap organs, the donor pig was genetically engineered to make its kidney a better fit. The experiment worked. The transplanted kidney functioned for 54 hours.
     And because this cutting-edge procedure couldn’t be tried with one of the 90,000 people currently awaiting a kidney on the transplant list — including my Boston cousin, who was hoping for mine — the kidney was transplanted into a brain-dead patient, which I didn’t even know was a thing.
     The deceased person’s family gave consent, an act of astounding generosity that shouldn’t be overlooked in our what-about-MY-rights? age. Picture it: Your relative dies and is being kept alive on a ventilator.
     A gaggle of scientists rushes over and asks, “Umm, would you mind if we stick a pig kidney into your loved one to see what happens?” And you say “Go ahead.” That family deserves a medal.
     I’m jumping on this story, hoping to get ahead of the chorus of complaint. This medical triumph pokes several hot-buttons for outrage: 1) genetic modification 2) experimentation on animals 3) cross-species medical procedures 4) use of dead people to advance science.
     I’d better leap in with the decent, humane perspective before all the vegans, misanthropes and ministers get into the game.
     While practical application is still long off, this is a marvelous development. There were some 40,000 kidney transplants in the United States last year, but there could have been many more if only more kidneys were available. Half a million Americans, including my cousin, must undergo dialysis to stay alive, a time-consuming, unpleasant procedure. And dangerous: A dozen such patients die every day.

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The grasshopper is no burden, yet.

 

     The summer is over, gone, the cold gathering, settling in. Leaves are already dead, falling, and yet I haven't mentioned one of the most notable events of the whole season, now past. I saw this grasshopper, hidden among the leaves of my Persian Spear. I don't remember ever seeing a grasshopper in years and years. Crickets, yes, cicadas, God knows. But this fellow, straight out of Aesop. I had just enough time to frame a photo and he was gone.
     I believe it is a differential grasshopper (Melanoplus differentialis) based on the distinctive "inverted chevrons along the hind femur." But there are 11,000 varieties of grasshoppers, at least, so I am open to the idea that I might be mistaken.       
     Had I been thinking quickly, I might have reached out and crushed it.  Grasshoppers are notorious pests, going back to the Bible. "The grasshopper shall be a burden." (Not to confuse them with locusts, which are similar, physically, but have even worst culinary habits. Think of locusts as grasshoppers gone bad).
     But no, upon reflection, I probably would not have done that, even had it crossed my mind. Too beautiful. Besides, they gobble ragweed too.
     That quote from the Bible is deceptive, as quoting out of context so often is. That line, in the Book of Ecclesiastes, part of a memorable passage about advancing age. Here is the entire thing, taken from the New King James version, 12:1, with a few, ahem, alterations of my own, done to enhance comprehension 

Remember now your Creator in the days of your youth,
Before the difficult days come,
And the years draw near when you say,
“I have no pleasure in them.”
While the sun and the light,
The moon and the stars,
Are not darkened,
And the clouds do not return after the rain;
In the day when the keepers of the house tremble,
And the strong men bow down;
When the grain grinders cease because they are few,
And those that look through the windows grow dim;
When the doors are shut in the streets,
And the sound of work is low;
When one startles at the cry of a bird,
And all the daughters of music are brought low.
Also they are afraid of heights,
And of terrors in the way;
When the almond tree blossoms,
The grasshopper is a burden,
And desire fails.
For man goes to his eternal home,
And the mourners go about the streets.

     Quite grim, I know, particularly when the faith in God isn't on the table as balm and narcotic. "When the almond tree blossoms" is an allusion to white hair. And the grasshopper reference isn't because of their crop-devouring, or incessant chirping. It's their lightness. Older people are plagued by grasshoppers means eventually even your light burdens are difficult.
      Hmm, how do I pull out of this one? Maybe by quoting scripture of a different sort. When Warren Zevon was dying, he said a variety of very smart things. He talked up poetry, carrying a copy of Rilke's "Duino Elegies" with him. He kept working. "Work is the most effective drug there can possibly be," he said. True dat. And when David Letterman asked him what he had learned from the cancer that would kill him at age 56, he replied, 'How much you're supposed to enjoy every sandwich." Do that, or try to.   

Ravenswood Notes: Senses

   The whole point of these little italic intros is to alert the inattentive reader that they are not reading something by me, but the Saturday report of our esteemed Ravenswood correspondent, Caren Jeskey. Because occasionally readers, particularly new ones, will miss that. However, with today's  post, and its plunge into the world of Jeff Yang and his art, I don't think there's much risk of confusion. I try to get about, but usually end up on the sofa with a book, while Caren, indefatigably buzzes from flower to flower, gathering her sweetness and light. 

  

   Graffiti artists sprayed paint on large canvases on either side of the stage during a DJ set at the last Sundays on State for the season back in September. I had just marched with Clamor and Lace Noise Brigade playing my flute (well, mostly pretending to play since I could not really see the sheet music affixed to my arm on a bracelet of sorts—my first attempt at a marching band), and dancing along as the crowd lit up. It was so much fun! Shortly thereafter I pulled out of the band since I do not have the time or dedication to give them their due rewards for being so awesome.
     The spray paint art brought me back to the days at The Hot House when it was on South Wabash. An artist would paint while a band played. I’d become transfixed, watching the strokes of paint on canvas in time to the music, or to the rhythm in the artist’s head.

Jeff Yang, in his shop.

     I recently reconnected with an acquaintance from the past. We had brunch at Five and Dime and then I walked with him back to his violin shop in Evanston. Jeff Yang played with Mannheim Steamroller for many years, before leaving that world in 2015 to pursue another path.
     “My ultimate goal is to change the way arts and music are being viewed and consumed right now," said Jeff, who brings all of the senses into his creations. Music, olfactory stimulation, visual stimulation, color, and even gastronomy.
     As Jeff talked about his passion for awakening all of the senses simultaneously, I flashed back to my one and only visit to Alinea. Discreet round speakers were placed in the ceiling above each chair, and sounds played to coincide with the dining experience. For example, when one was eating a crisp caramel glaze, the speaker would emit a tinkling sound as the caramel cracked .
     Jeff is intrigued by the power of sound. He has learned that sound frequencies create varying patterns. “Circles, triangles, snow flakes. There is an order that sound is incorporated into.”

   Jeff partnered with a perfume blogger Victoria Frolova, as well as perfumeries in New York and Tokyo, and launched his first event in 2018. A representative of Pod Majersky's group—of Pilsen art district fame—provided ample space on the Halsted art corridor where Jeff showcased his first event, Elements. The focus was on the five elements of Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Metal.

     The exhibits blended food, perfume, music and art including film. He hired a well known chef from Arun’s Thai, and presented Dining in the Dark with various textures to stimulate the taste buds and overall experience. Jeff encourages the chefs and other artists to go with what they feel, and contribute in a way that makes the experience more fluid between various artists and mediums.
     The Violet Hour sponsored Elements as well, and developed the Juliet & Romeo cocktail in homage.
    Jeff's next performance, In The Realm Of The Senses, (click here for tickets) is coming up next Friday night, 10/29, in Evanston. It was delayed due to COVID, and will celebrate Beethoven’s 250th birthday. A string quartet will play Op. 59 No. 2 and Sergio Gomez will create real time art inspired by improvised music. An ornate floral creation by Stacey Bal will drop down and shower beauty on the crowd while aromas will be diffused throughout the air in a subtle yet awakening manner.

     I will be there for an evening of forgetting about everything else.