Festivals

Chicago Storytelling in Bughouse Square – The Newberry – July 15, 2023

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Last year, in regard to this annual event, I quoted Will Rogers about things not being what they used to be. This year, they were even less than that.

Last year, I visited the Society of Smallness table and exchanged small talk with them. But, after many years of underwhelming us with their underachievements, they didn’t make an appearance this year. Perhaps they had little left to say.

A few times, in past years, I’ve been entertained by the ragtag Environmental Encroachment Brass Band, and, last year, the Sheryl Youngblood Blues Band. This year, no offense, musically there only was a DJ whose job it was, I think, to help keep people awake between speakers in Ruggles Hall, which, as far as I know, despite being in a library, is not an eponym for the protagonist of the novel Ruggles of Red Gap, or the movie of the same name, wherein, interestingly, the actor Charles Ruggles plays, not the title character, but rather Egbert Floud.

Last year a couple of the scheduled speakers struck my fancy, including the one who talked about pigeons, a relevant topic when we were in the park as usual, but the threat of bad weather (even that’s not what it used to be – way more often now as Armageddon approaches), kept us inside, and the only orator I listened to was, coincidentally, Chad the Bird, who, in case you don’t know, is Chicago’s leading avian op ed columnist, who gave us the history of Malort, the iconic Chicago undrinkable drink.

Meghan “Big Red” Murphy – Wells Street Art Festival – June 10, 2023

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The Wells Street Art Festival should really be called the Wells Street Drinking and Eating Disgusting Fried Foods Festival, but there was art on display.

This was a different kind of Big Red performance than what I have seen in the past, and I’ve seen quite a few – a bawdy holiday show with her and The Boys at a couple different theaters, a tour de force performance as The Lady of the Lake in Spamalot, a solo cabaret show, a third of a We Three trio of ladies at Steppenwolf of all places, a musical guest at the Green Mill’s Paper Machete, a private birthday party performance in the courtyard of my building during the pandemic and, originally, a turn as the star of a production of Woman of the Year.

This time there were no risqué songs, no double entendres, no scatting, and no live music, as if she were David Byrne trying to break the Broadway rules requiring pit musicians. (He finally agreed a couple days ago to use 12, instead of the normal minimum of 19 the union wanted).

There was only great singing and engaging banter in an outdoor street fair setting that is less than perfect for performers, though Red managed to get members of the milling crowd to dance and sing along, all while drinking along (Red stuck to water, I think).

My only disappointment with Murphy was when she sang a disco version of “If You Could Read My Mind” and said how surprised she was to learn that it was originally a Gordon Lightfoot song. I was surprised that there was a disco version.

Totally unrelated, I feel required to mention that I saw former Bears and Illinois head coach Lovie Smith walking around at the festival, one of the few people there who was old enough to know Lightfoot had written the song.

Chicago Blues Festival – Millennium Park – June 9, 2023

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You don’t even have to enter the park to hear the music. It was so loud it made my throat hurt and my skin flake. But the couple acts I heard induced a lot of head bobbing in the audience and sounded great – Lightnin’ Malcolm, representing his birthplace on the Visit Mississippi Juke Joint Stage, and Stephen Hull, from that hotbed of blues, Racine.

Unsurprisingly, I have no interest in visiting Mississippi, but who doesn’t love a juke joint, which, in turns out, is a term derived from the Gullah word juke, which means bawdy or disorderly. What that has to do with a basketball player juking a defender, I’m not sure.

Besides the music and the everywhere-you-turned, blues-related merchandise, including items from the foundations of Muddy Waters, Eddie Taylor, Little Walter, and Willie Dixon, in case you need something from one of them to fill out your collection, the big draw at the festival is the smokehouse meat, which, I’ve found, has its own section concerning emission factors on the EPA website, which seemed like a good reason for taking a wide berth from where the cooking was taking place.

Access Contemporary Music – Thirsty Ears Festival – August 13, 2022

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Promoted as Chicago’s only classical music street festival, this annual two-day event, now in its seventh year, is not quite on the scale of Lollapalooza, but has two important things in common with that and every other outdoor music happening – you can buy a beer and a tee shirt.

I came for Crossing Borders Music, represented on this occasion by the talented duo of violinist Jennifer Leckie and pianist Marianne Parker. I wasn’t disappointed, as their engaging selections crossed numerous borders, including music by composers from Cuba, Uruguay, Armenia, Colombia, and Arkansas.

I also was pleased with the sound system, the ease of parking, and the availability of seating, though I chose to stand, which if I understand the research correctly, caused me to burn up an extra 75 calories.

It also enabled me to hang out in front of the Mathnasium, Math Learning Center, and try to respond to the half dozen, grades K-12 questions on their windows, while simultaneously listening to music and breathing. Since the answers were not shown, I’m going to assume I got them all right, except, okay, maybe one of them.

Chicago Storytelling in Bughouse Square – Washington Square Park – July 30, 2022

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“Things aren’t what they used to be and probably never were.” – Will Rogers

The ACLU was handing out flyers, but there were no soap boxes in the park. No anarchists in sight. No spectators shouting down speakers.

There were people hanging around, perhaps waiting for an argument to break out, but, times being what they are, the Newberry staff had to be happy to have a docile event, where the biggest controversy was the position taken by Northwestern professor Bill Savage that it was okay to put ketchup on hot dogs. Even I booed at that.

Savage had some interesting, less hot-button things to say about Edward Brennan and his years-long effort to successfully rename many streets and renumber addresses throughout the city, accomplishing things that many mistakenly credit as being part of Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago.

The only other speaker I heard any of was Katie Prout, a freelance-writer, who, amazingly, had a lot to say about pigeons, a fairly safe topic.

I then headed over to the Documents Bureau table where Society of Smallness clerks listened to a random complaint I came up with for the moment and issued me a certificate granting me the authority to do something about it. I was going to snap a photo to attach to this piece, but when I got home I discovered that they, ironically, had given me somebody else’s document. Next year’s complaint.

Back to the main stage for Sheryl Youngblood and her blues band, who did a sweet half hour before more talking heads appeared and I disappeared.

Bastille Day French Night Market – Summer Thursdays at Lincoln Common – July 14 2022

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As I circled around the bandstand, from which there was a notable absence of music emanating, I saw a woman on stilts, a man juggling while riding a unicycle, and an artist doing caricatures, a scene just as I have always imagined it when that angry mob attacked the French prison in 1789.

Also, I could not help but notice that a mime was following me, imitating my every movement.

But I ignored him. Sure there was the temptation to do something embarrassing, to see if he would follow suit, but there were numerous small children in attendance, so I grudgingly restrained myself.

Then I started to feel sorry for him. He had committed to making me his target, but I was disinterested and no one else was paying any attention to him either. And he couldn’t just give up. That would be antithetical to the unspoken mime code of conduct.

So I engaged. I started making revolutions around him, causing him to spin to maintain his relative position to me. I spoke. He didn’t. I told him I had gained the upper hand, as I was now following him.

He bowed and conceded, non verbally, smiling and silently applauding, before walking away, while the band continued not to play on.

American Writers Festival – Chicago Cultural Center and American Writers Museum – May 15, 2022

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I’ve delayed writing about the American Writers Festival because first I wanted to watch the animated Love, Death & Robots on Netflix. Huh?

I went to the festival primarily to see my favorite living science fiction author, John Scalzi (which reminds me, Willie Mays celebrated his 91st birthday earlier this month), whom I first discovered at an AWM program in October, 2018, at which time I had yet to read any of his books (Scalzi, that is – I don’t think Mays has written anything, but he sure could do everything else). Since then I’ve read all 16 of his novels and one of his short stories.

But I didn’t know, until I saw Scalzi at the festival, that five episodes of L, D & R were based on other stories of his. So, I now also can recommend those, with a special shout out for When the Yogurt Took Over.

I was planning on going too to two other programs at the festival, but a staff member at the museum wouldn’t let me go to the ready room to annoy, I mean say hello to, Jennifer Keishen Armstrong (it wan’t a cold call – she does know me, honest) before she came out to do her live Dead Writer Drama podcast, which then caused me to lose interest in staying to hear her and later Peter Sagal and several of his closest friends for them to tell me how to write comedy, as if they could. This was not unlike how the actions of a couple high school teachers caused me to lose interest in studying for years. Also, I was lazy.

Magnificent Mile Lights Festival – November 20, 2021

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The word “Petoskey” is a native word that translates to “rays of light.” So it’s only fitting that the Michigan city participates in a lights festival. At least 40 of Petoskey’s 1000 or so high school students, as part of a steel drum band, came to the big city and entertained the crowd from an open-air bus.

I don’t know how good their football team is – actually I do, they were 3-6 this year – but those kids sure love to bang their drums, and not slowly. I was mesmerized as they turned otherwise yawn-inducing holiday songs into a raucous rave, accentuated by tribal screams and a bouncing choreography that threatened to destroy the vehicle’s shock absorbers and flip it over like a bug (and it wasn’t even a Volkswagen).

Usually, the only holiday song I’ll listen to is Mariah Carey telling me that I’m all she wants for Christmas (though she never calls), but, just like all food tastes better with jalapeño peppers mixed into it, a bus full of steel drums goes a long way to improving otherwise undigestible music, although the after-taste, or rather after-sound, can linger on for hours and isn’t helped by drinking a glass of milk.

Scott Turow – Printers Row Lit Fest – September 12, 2021

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I once played golf with Scott Turow. He’s a better writer. He’s also an articulate speaker, so it was a shame that only 10 percent of the 345 seats in the tent were filled to see him. (I know – half a person.)

He was at the Lit Fest pushing his most recent book, The Last Trial. The plot is about a trial.

But, he noted, when asked, that plot is character, though he forgot to attribute that statement to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

He praised Saul Bellow for his characters, but characterized the plot of every one of Bellow’s novels as “a guy wanders around and thinks.” Sounds like my last 18 months.

After the talk I stopped by my favorite Lit Fest spot, the vintage graphic art posters and magazine covers (more crowded than the Turow program), and studied the Orgy of the Living Dead movie poster.

Then I debated waiting around to hear Jeffrey Brown discuss his book, A Total Waste of Space-Time, which sounded like it was right up my alley, until I discovered that it was targeted toward pre-teens. What a waste. Still . . . .

Southport Arts Festival – July 13, 2019

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The Southport Arts Festival is a modest gathering, where free street parking is not that far away, at least in the daytime, and one location offers free beer.

But my main reason for going was to see Bill Larkin and his Comic Songs at the Piano (and one with a ukulele) at the Venus Cabaret. Larkin acts, including some shouting, as much as sings his original songs. I see a sort of combination of Lewis Black and Tom Lehrer in him, as his dark humor highlights people’s foolishness and foibles (including his own). The size of the crowd was disappointing, but Larkin wasn’t.

Later in the day, Neal Tobin, Necromancer, took the same stage. Necromancy is a practice of magic involving communication with the dead. After only 15 minutes of his act, Tobin made me wish I were dead, so I got up and left, thinking that his act was not worth the free price of admission, and not worrying whether he could read my mind in that regard.

As with most street fairs, there were a variety of artists and artisans displaying their work. Three attracted my attention. Time After Time, it turned out, was not selling Cyndi Lauper CDs or DVDs of H.G. Wells chasing Jack the Ripper, but rather Historic American Rephotography, where Mark Hersch merges 100-year-old photographs with photographs he takes from the same vantage point to create a single image.

Robots in Rowboats also misled me, as most of the robots were not, in fact, in rowboats, but I guess you just can’t pass on a good alliteration.

Finally, By The Yard sells outdoor furniture recycled from plastic milk jugs. Really. Afterward, it occurred to me that I should have asked whether there was a quality difference between pieces constructed from skim, 2%, and whole milk containers.