Bruce McCall's enormous world

  

     "It's like working in a Bruce McCall illustration," thought the master of the obscure reference, waiting for a tour of the new Sun-Times space at the Old Post Office to begin last October.         
     For those who weren't raised on the National Lampoon in the 1970s, McCall, a Canadian-born artist who died Friday, built his oeuvre upon the inherent humor of the enormous — vast interior spaces, stupidly huge 1950s cars, Brobdingnagian ocean liners. He created "The Battling Buses of World War II," a parody of the bomber adventure worship popular at the time. 

     McCall moved up from the Lampoon to the empyrean of The New Yorker, where his covers are masterpieces of the marriage of the monstrous and the detailed.  

     They reward careful examination. As does the Old Post Office. The lobby is gigantic, the hallways disappearing to the horizon. But upstairs, you look at your feet and the little square tiles are perfect. The walls are regularly graced with either historic mail photographs, or animal shots, all artful black and white. Nothing is slipshod. Someone spent a fortune. I was utterly charmed with the lux renovation of what once seemed a permanent white elephant. A corporate Xanadu, with countless grottos, niches, pool tables, bars, coffee shops, a health club, a rooftop deck. EGD glimpsed it when I visited Ferrara candy in April, but the tour was a closer look. Or maybe I just realized I get to come here whenever I like.

     "Will I?" I wondered. It seems a bit ass-backward for there to be this place where there's a great health club and rooftop chaise lounges and bars with pool tables and bocce ball and, oh yes, a fairly spartan room filled with computers where you can also go and work. Last time I visited, a few weeks back, I stayed for an hour, and was utterly alone. I can't imagine this arrangement lasting very long.

     There were upsides. As much as I think synergy is a myth made up by real estate folks trying to sell radioactive downtown office space, the fact remains that, on my tour, I got to talking to a new WBEZ colleague I'd never met, and within five minutes we were planning newspaper events and brainstorming possible ideas.

     Which came to absolutely nothing, as such bursts tend to do. But for a moment it seemed like progress was being made.

     Speaking of which. After I conjured up McCall, I tried to interview him. I'd read his memoir, "Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Canada," and found it both well-done and disappointing. Well-done in that it had moments that resonated — he finds a crumple package of American cigarettes on the side of the road, and picks it up, yearning toward the boundless, appealing, frenetic country that seems just down the road.  

McCall's 83rd New Yorker cover

     And disappointing in that he never got to the National Lampoon part of his life, never mind The New Yorker part. It was like reading a book about Michelangelo as a child, before he picked up a chisel. Only after I reached out to McCall, last October, did I realize he had written a second memoir, "How Did I Get Here?" Didn't do my due diligence. So I read that while going back and forth with his people. He had people, which struck me as unusual for an elderly artist, and I sent them questions. 

     Reading the second memoir took the air out of my desire to talk to McCall. He'd worked on "Saturday Night Live" at its heyday. He drew more than 80 New Yorker covers. And yet ... it did not make him happy. Pretty miserable in fact. Bruce McCall reminded me that success can be overrated. Excellence and achievement can be no more sources of satisfaction than mediocrity and oblivion are. It's all in the interpretation. Or rather, to flip open "Paradise Lost" and quote John Milton: “The mind is its own place and, in itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven.”

     These are the questions I sent to Bruce McCall last fall and he never answered. Looking at them now, and given his death, half a year away, I'm not surprised he didn't bother. Still, I think they're good questions, and I would have liked to hear his replies:

1. Throughout history, enormous buildings and interior spaces were associated with grandeur, or the divine. You discovered big also can be funny. How did that come about? Why are huge things funny? It seems to me you are mocking the unrestrained ambitions of the past, the desire to have too much of everything. Are you?

2. It's been years since I read "Thin Ice," but the image of you gazing in longing at that American cigarette pack at the side of the road has stayed with me. To what degree is your artistic perspective influenced by being Canadian?

3. I noticed that even though you said that Parkinson's has "ruined" your ability to draw and paint two years ago, you have had several covers printed — are these covers that were already in the New Yorker's pipeline, or do you manage to continue despite the disease? Is this a struggle you'd feel comfortable describing? Are there more on their way? Steig's style changed markedly as he aged. Have you considered factoring the deprecations of Parkinson's into future art, the way some artists have?

4. If you can't create artwork yourself, have you considered sharing ideas with other artists and having them render your concept?

5. How many covers have you done? Were you serious about being disappointed about not reaching William Steig's record. Many New York cartoonists can't manage a single cover — you've had about 80. That must be very satisfying. What makes a great cover? Any suggestions for those trying to sell their first?

6. We are in something of a golden age of appreciating illustration. Who were your heroes growing up? Who do you most admire now?

7. Have you made provisions for your work? Do you see it being donated to a museum, or is it all sold?

8. Are you familiar with AI image generators like DALL-E? They're garbage now, but hold out the potential to cut into the already shrinking market for illustration. Is that a cause of concern?

Works in progress: Monica Eng

      Writing with a co-author is an entirely new gear for a writer. At least it was for me — whereas I usually write based on my own gut, now there was a second, exterior voice, one I was obligated to listen to, understand, respect. 

     Which wasn't a problem when I was writing "Out of the Wreck I Rise" with Sara Bader, who inevitably was right, or at least had a point, particularly when dialing back my more flowery prose. I remember her saying, "You're competing with the poetry."

     It was fun, educational, productive.

      So when I approached my former Sun-Times colleague, Monica Eng about her writing something here about her new book, "Made in Chicago: Stories Behind 30 Great Hometown Bites," I asked her to address how she came to collaborate with her co-author.

    The only thing better than eating great local food is reading about it, and this book seems a natural summer read for those of us bouncing around the suddenly-warm city, eating stuff. Monica and her co-author will be at the Highland Park Public Library Monday, talking about their book. Take it away, Monica:

     After years of reporting on Chicago-invented dishes, I was having lunch with a food historian friend who suggested I collect a bunch of their origin stories in a book. The University of Illinois Press was launching a 3 Fields imprint on Midwest culture and he thought it would be natural fit.
     I was barely keeping up as a mom, radio journalist and podcaster — much less a person who regularly washes her hair. So it seemed nuts to add a book deadline to the chaos. But at a book party in late 2018, I was talking to my pal and fellow food writer, David Hammond, about the difficulty of the project and he agreed to take on half the writing. We cooked up a book proposal and finally signed a contract right before the pandemic hit. I don’t think we saw each other’s faces in person for four years after that party.

     When it came to figuring out the 30 foods to feature we used these rules: All the dishes (or twists on them) had to be invented in Chicago, served in more than one place and tell an interesting story. To meet our 18 month deadline, I worked during vacations, on weekends and at night, mostly wishing I’d never agreed to do it. But like most of my big babies, this one has left me with nothing but pride as the memories of labor pain fade away. The book designers did a nice job of making this perfect for the your bike basket and glove compartment, so you can whip it out anywhere in the city to learn that a tasty bite and story are right around the corner.
      But more than just making an eating guide, I wanted to highlight these inventors, almost all of who were recent arrivals from other countries or the South. Our hot dog toppings tell the story of early 20th Century migration to Maxwell Street. The Pizza Puff comes from Assyrian immigrants from Iran crafted hot dog carts from baby buggies and manufactured corn roll tamales. Rib tips hit menus because Chicago barbecue masters from Mississippi didn’t want to waste a gnarly bit of the rib that many threw away. And the Akutagawa omelet represents Japanese-Americans in Wrigleyville who held onto small part of their culture even after the U.S. government told them to leave it behind.
    Beyond the happy stories, though, I found a bigger depressing story of persistent cultural segregation. Few South Siders have ever eaten the Akutagawa or gam pong gi, and fewer North Siders have tried Sweet Steaks, Jim Shoes or Pizza Puffs covered in mild sauce. My naïve hope, though, is that this book might change that a little — that these stories might intrigue readers to the point where they bust out of their own neighborhoods to try something new across town that gives them a little better understanding of the people who share their city.

Don’t tread on my gas stove!

     Will the Russians nuke us? Or high-tension power lines fry our brains? Could we be poisoned by the water? By fluoride, or lead? Are we being gulled by subliminal advertising? Blinded by sitting too close to color television? Or by computer screens? Cooked by microwave ovens? Will cellphones give us brain cancer? Are we being crushed by overpopulation — too many kids. No, bankrupted by aging demographics — not enough kids. A new ice age, no, global warming. Africanized killer bees, on the move north. Would the airbag in my Honda slit my carotid artery instead of saving me? Will AI — Artificial Intelligence — start churning out content in one corner of the internet while consuming it in another, shutting humans out of the loop entirely and somehow destroying the world?
     Honestly, by the time gas stoves were raised as a peril, I’d had a lifetime of ooo-scary threats that proved illusionary, an endless car alarm blare of empty warnings, so many that I’ve become immune. News of any danger without the immediacy of “you’re bleeding” is safely ignored.
     Seriously. Last summer, a colleague phoned to say his Chicago cop friend was concerned about people on Twitter threatening to kill me. I chewed on this a moment, then replied, “Are they on their way here, now, to get me?” They weren’t. So I went back to gardening.
     So naturally, the alarm about gas stoves left me unmoved. This week, when the state of New York banned gas stoves in new construction, I didn’t feel either the planet nor Empire State children are being saved. I grew up with an electric stove, burning myself more than once on coils that were off but still raise-a-blister hot. Supposedly the new electric stoves are better, but gas stoves are what pros cook on — you’d no sooner go into the kitchen in a fine restaurant and find an electric stove than you’d expect to see them emptying cans of Progresso into a big pot for the soup d’jour.

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Flashback 2010: Overshadowed by his skyscrapers

Willis Tower (Photo by: Mike Innocenzi, aka @pantagapher. Used with permission)

     Here's a koan for you:

     Q: How can a man be busy writing, yet have nothing written?

     A: When he's busy writing something else, and has nothing for his daily blog.

     That's okay. Because I noticed that Wednesday was the 50th anniversary of the topping off of the Sears, of late Willis, Tower. That sent me wandering back, looking at my various takes on what for years was the world's tallest building. I like the one below, because it's a relic from slough after the 2008 recession, when half-built buildings dotted downtown and it seemed that the city had gone to hell. A reminder, as we struggle through our current civic woes: we've been through this before. Notice my use of "Trumpish" as a pejorative in 2010 — ahead of the curve.

     Shouldn't architects be better known, considering what they do? I'm not talking about Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Sure, they're famous and probably always will be.
     I'm talking about subsequent architects. When Bruce Graham died last week, and I read in his obituary that he had designed both the Willis (nee Sears) Tower AND the John Hancock Center, my first thought — and perhaps yours, too — was: "Never heard of the guy."
     Of course, 1973 — when the Willis Tower opened — was a long time ago, and the Hancock was completed even earlier, when I was in third grade. Graham could have been borne in triumph down State Street on a sedan chair over scatterings of rose petals and given the key to the city.
     But I doubt it.
     How is it that any promising Cubs rookie receives more enduring fame than someone who created not one, but two, Chicago landmarks? We have a better chance of being aware of a French artist like Jean Dubuffet, because of his god-awful Snoopy-in-a-blender sculpture jammed into the too-small plaza of the Thompson Center, than we are of the guy who designed the center itself, Helmut Jahn (of course, that might be a favor to him, depending on your opinion of the Thompson Center — post-modern masterpiece or horrific white elephant, take your pick).
     Perhaps the obscurity of architects is their own fault — they're always winging off to Bahrain to design something new. Were I Bruce Graham, I'd have spent at least one day a year hanging around on the sidewalk in front of the Sears Tower with a big "Ask Me About My Building" button, cadging conversations with passersby. But I am not an architect.

    Work in progress

     

     Spring peeked over the fence Thursday afternoon, and I celebrated by walking a cigar along Wacker Drive, admiring the Chicago River.
     At Clark, I paused to study the stalled construction across the street. "Waterview Tower — A 90-story elite residence," the battered signboard proclaimed.
     "No," I corrected, "Waterview Tower — a 26-story unsightly concrete shell."
     It isn't nice to smirk at somebody else's financial ruin — this forlorn, decaying edifice blew through someone's millions.
     The truth is, we're all cooking in the same pot. But they put it up, and now we have to watch it crumble. And there's something about that sign that invites contempt, something about its exultant, Trumpish phrases of enticement — "World-class lifestyle." What was that exactly? Gold-plated faucets?
     Bristles of rusty rebar poke up where construction left off, like shoots from a dying plant. I crossed the street and gazed through the fence. An overturned safety barrel. A port-o-john. "No HIRING ON JOB SITE" read a blue sign. No kidding; no hiring anywhere. Construction on Waterview stopped almost two years ago, and nobody expects it to start up again.
     We're not used to this. If you go to a Third World country, residents start building structures as soon as they scrape together a truckload of cinder blocks, halt while they earn capital for another truckload, then continue. The streets are dotted with buildings in every stage of completion, many going straight from new construction to abandoned ruin without ever being a finished building.
     Something for us to look forward to.
     The Waterview condos are advertised as ranging from "$562,000 to $2,316,000." You have to marvel at the specificity of that second sum -- not $2 million, not $2.3 million, but $2,316,000. That's so exact, as if it represented actual worth, the result of complex calculations. When it was just a guess, and a wrong one. The people doing this kind of thing — those who plunged the world into its current financial crisis — loved to pretend they knew precisely what they were doing. But they didn't.
     I was at the corner of Franklin and Lake when I noticed a man — 60ish, holding a scrap of paper and looking puzzled. I sensed that if I looked him in the eye, he would ask directions. I did, and he did.
     "Where is Wacker Drive?" he asked.
     Savoring the moment, I slowly raised both arms, straight out and perpendicular to each other, the right pointing north up Franklin Street, the left pointing west down Lake.
     "It's right there," I said, and let him gaze at me in bewilderment for a moment before explaining
     "Wacker Drive curves," I said. "There's a North, South, East and West Wacker. Where on Wacker are you looking for?"
     "Three Three Three West Wacker," he said. "A green, granite building."
     Now, it was my turn to be bewildered — 333 W. Wacker was directly in front of us. We were practically standing on its steps.
     "It's right there," I said, pointing to the number of the door. To my surprise, he argued.
     "No," he said. "That's 633 W. Wacker." Sure enough, there was some kind of scuffed area by that first "3" which, from where we were standing, made it look like a "6." We went closer and peered at the numerals while I pointed out that it was really a "3." He thanked me and went into the building.
     I walked away thinking, "Just goes to show the importance of details." Here you have one of the most attractive, beloved iconic, buildings in the city -- designed by Kohn Pederson Fox Associates, by the way — and one little flaw, some corrosion around a numeral, is enough to render the building practically invisible to someone standing in front of it. Architects matter, but so do maintenance men, and one of them needs to get out there with a rag and some solvent.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 14, 2010

Editor's note: In 2011, the owners conducted a study of the shell of Waterview Tower, at 111 W. Wacker, and decided it was salvageable. The project was scaled back from 92 to 59 stories, and completed in 2016. It's now dubbed OneEleven.

Sorry, Charlie! Kings aren’t Chicago’s thing

King Charles III

     In 2009, I had to go to London to give a speech, and wondered what else I should do while in town. Tea with the Queen of England sounded fun. So I phoned her press office at Buckingham Palace — nothing ventured, nothing gained! Not that I really expected to sit down with her, serf à la reine, and sip Earl Grey, I explained, in my brazen American way. But maybe she’d be cutting a ribbon somewhere and I could join the crowd.
     “The queen,” the press person explained, “will be at her castle in Balmoral.”
     Just as well....
     However, the press person continued, seizing the opportunity to bring up Prince Charles. He had a project. Something about architecture. I don’t think she wanted me to go over rolls of drawings with him. But he had some royal initiative she dangled before me. No matter, because at the mention of “Charles” my cognitive functions shut off. Sorry, Charlie.
     Charles never counted. Maybe it was the ears. Remarking upon people’s physical attributes has gone out of style, and I would apologize, but I am not expressing my own bias, but merely reporting the world’s. There is something squinty and inbred about the man — his parents were third cousins, remember.
     Charles was awkward and unpleasant, even before he cuckolded the world’s favorite princess and sent her hurtling toward her rendezvous with death on a Paris street (actually, “cuckold” applies only to men; a woman whose husband betrays her is a “ cuckquean” which is not a word even I would spring on you, unexplained, except to observe it was the only kind of queen Diana got the chance to be).

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'Stand up to bullies'

John Hewko, left, CEO of Rotary International, Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and Steve Edwards, right.

     The first 89 minutes of the dialogue Monday night about the situation in Ukraine was compelling. Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, who has just returned from that war-torn country, talking for an hour and a half with John Hewko, CEO of Rotary International, at Rotary's headquarters in Evanston, moderated by former WBEZ host, Steve Edwards.

      The general tone was optimistic, despite 432 days having passed since Russia invaded Ukraine, with no end in sight.

      "Vladimir Putin has already lost the war," Daalder said. "He never had a chance because the Ukrainian people never gave him a chance."

     With a big assist from the United States, both in intelligence and some $40 billion in weaponry. Sometimes we get things right.

      Interesting, but not something I'd rush to share here. Then, with a minute left, Hewko — who I wrote about a year ago — asked the key question. Americans often tune this sort of thing out, particularly as it drags. We get bored. So, he wondered, what's the "elevator pitch" — the brief argument for why we're persisting, why we're continuing to invest our time and money and reputation in this war. Why we need to stick with this.

     Daalder's response is worth sharing:

     "We have a tendency in the United States to listen to the loudest voices, who usually are wrong," he began."But in this case the majority of Americans are right. Why do they believe that? The argument is twofold: one, it's a principle. Understanding that if you start to live in a world in which bullies can get away with bullying, in this case using military force to change borders, and to say 'What's mine is mine and what's yours is mine.' We understand that's not a good world for us to live in. 

     "And then secondly when people decide to stand up to bullies, we should be with those people. People understand that at a very core level. That when missiles are raining down and destroying apartment buildings, that cities are being bombed, that 13 million people out of 40 million are on the move because of a war, we should be with them. We can do that in little ways, by financial support, by providing other humanitarian ways, and Rotary is based on the concept that a lot of little things come out to a very big thing. Or make sure your representative votes the right way in Congress on these issues. At its core, you don't want to live in a world in which  the bullies get their way. You don't want to live in a world where guy just because he has the capacity decides to take what's not his want to live in a world where people stand up against that. You can talk about larger issues, security of Ukraine, security of Europe, but at its core, it's about how we should behave in the world."

    That makes a lot of sense to me. And to most Americans. Something we should be proud of, in an era when Americans could use something to feel good about. We've done the right thing, so far. Now all we have to do is keep on doing it.

Books that pop out at you

     We didn’t have kids, yet. So with plenty of time to burn, my wife and I sat on the sofa and worked through Nick Bantock’s “Griffin & Sabine,” the 1991 illustrated novel whose love story unfolds, quite literally, in a series of postcards and letters.
     I admit that “Griffin & Sabine” has not come to mind much in the third of a century since. Not until recently, when I found myself strolling with the curator of rare books and manuscripts at the Newberry Library, Suzanne Karr Schmidt, through the exhibit she created, “Pop-Up Books through the Ages.”
     With the exception of freakish epistolary adult best-sellers — “Griffin & Sabine” and its sequels sold millions of copies — pop-up books today are considered primarily a niche entertainment for children, where colorful three-dimensional contrivances rear out of pages as they’re opened.
     But the Newberry’s books, some nearly a millennium old — the oldest dates to 1121 — have dials and flaps showing calendars and cosmos, anatomical studies, and a town before and after a landslide. (Though several reveal a discreetly hidden naked lady).
     “The interactiveness of it makes the show fun,” Karr Schmidt said.
     I was surprised, looking at these amazing volumes, how often the technological wonder in my back pocket came to mind. We often sneer at our phones, for good reason. But when you see the lengths scholars and clerics went to in the past, trying to visualize information, it makes you appreciate what we have. We’re living their unattainable dream.
     “A lot of these books do many of the things that a screen does now,” Karr Schmidt said.
     “Pop-Up Books through the Ages” is particularly kid-friendly, with large pages of cut out dolls and offers a souvenir pop-up Newberry Library, created for the exhibit by Chicago illustrator Hannah Batsel and paper engineer Shawn Sheehy.

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