Speakers

Chicago Humanities Festival – November 3 – 10, 2019

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The nominal theme of this year’s Chicago Humanities Festival was Power. Recent years’ have been Graphic, Belief, Stuff, Speed, Style, Citizens, Journey, Animal, America, Tech-Knowledge, The Body, Laughter, etc. If they insist upon continuing the naming pretense, I would like to suggest, for next year, Apathy. It’s my hope that this would, by power of suggestion, reduce tickets sales, thus making seats more available.

I often select sessions based on their comedic potential, so, not surprisingly, my most hopeful year, despite the frequent disconnect, was 2009’s Laughter. I particularly remember seeing former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who, in addition to being very smart, is downright funny, much funnier than any of the comedians I’ve seen at the Underground Comedy Club.

This year, Ren Weschler talked about his new biography of Oliver Sacks, who himself was a speaker at the 2002 festival. If I’d seen that, I wouldn’t have bothered with Weschler.

John Hodgman pushed his new book Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms. He told some good stories, but the audience’s questions were about his podcast Judge John Hodgman, which I’ve never heard. So I was surprised that many of the questions seemed serious, with people looking for actual advice from a comedian, and not one named Larry David.

Mo Rocca’s new book is Mobituaries, Great Lives Worth Reliving, but it was more interesting to hear him talk about his own career, which has included a job as an editor at a soft porn magazine.

Sarah Vowell, when asked why she became an historian, said that she doesn’t like to pry, which she acknowledged was a problem for her as a journalist, so she finds it easier to write about dead people, as she doesn’t have to talk to them, or, I suppose, see them.

The Peanuts Papers: Charlie Brown, Snoopy & The Gang, and the Meaning of Life – American Writers Museum – November 4, 2019

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Happiness is a warm puppy. It’s also listening to cartoonists Chris Ware and Ivan Brunetti, in a panel moderated by editor and literary agent Andrew Blauner, sing the praises of Charles Schulz and credit him with being the inspiration for their careers, although Brunetti admitted that part of the reason he became a cartoonist was because he couldn’t see himself as a more traditional artist wearing a beret and smock.

Schulz hated the name Peanuts, it having been forced upon him by the United Feature Syndicate, which the speakers referred to only as the syndicate, making me think that Charlie Brown was controlled by the mob.

Schulz based the strip generally on his own childhood experiences, though he favored hockey over football, and thus didn’t have the recurring placekicking issues Charlie had. While the speakers stated that Schulz never allowed Charlie to kick the ball, I’ve found possible evidence to the contrary, a cel showing a successful attempt with the help of Spiderman!

The panelists also mentioned Schulz having won the Reuben. A corned beef sandwich seemed like an odd prize until I discovered that it wasn’t food, but rather an award named after Reuben “Rube” Goldberg, presented to the Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year.

The same year he won the award, 1955, Schulz took the advice of a fan and cut the unpopular character Charlotte Braun from the strip. He then sent a letter, preserved in the Library of Congress, back to the fan with a drawing showing an ax in Braun’s head. Good Grief!

One final note. It has been announced that the upcoming 8th version of the Snoopy Thanksgiving parade balloon will be clad in astronaut gear to honor the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. Not so coincidentally, episode one of the new Apple TV show, Snoopy in Space, launched on November 1.

Margot Shetterly – One Book Keynote Address – Northwestern University – October 17, 2019

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Hampton, Virginia is the home of NASA Langley Research Center. According to Margot Shetterly, the author of Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, which is the second longest book title of which I’m aware, losing out to Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Human Intelligence but Were Too Dumb to Ask: A Humorous Look at What Intelligence Is, How It Works & Who’s Got It, many of the people who worked in the space program at Langley retired in the area, thus providing her with easy access to them in her home town for research into her best-selling book.

Shetterly provided a rich picture of her background as the daughter of a NASA scientist who grew up in a neighborhood surrounded by mathematicians, aeronautical engineers, and physics professors. Just your typical childhood.

So it came as no surprise that she went into business after college and lived in Mexico for 11 years. Huh?

Fortunately for the rest of us, she found her way back to Virginia and realized that she had a great story to tell. So great that she sold the movie rights before she even finished writing the book, which, along with the usual dramatic license, resulted in diversions from the book in the movie, though Shetterly made it clear that she loved the movie and found it to be faithful to the crux of the book’s stories and themes.

As a follow-up to her work on the book, Shetterly founded The Human Computer Project, which is aimed at “recovering the names and accomplishments of all of the women who worked as computers, mathematicians, scientists and engineers at the NACA and NASA from the 1930s through the 1980s.”

More generally, she made the audience aware of the NASA Technical Reports Server, which contains decades of aerospace-related documents, including, hypothetically, numerous ones authored by one’s uncle.

Upcoming Events

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Normally I don’t take up my extremely valuable time, which could be better spent working on my hip flexors, publishing information about upcoming events, but the website has been acting up lately, causing several problems, like no one receiving newly published posts.  So, after two days of chatting with my new best friends in two different tech departments in two different countries, I feel the need to test the system to see if it’s working properly again, and what better way than to annoy my subscribers with unnecessary, verbose emails.

So, without revealing too much information about my clandestine movements, here’s some things you might consider attending.

Arts in the Dark Parade at 6:00 pm on October 19 on State Street.  You can dress up like your favorite movie character or just watch from the sidelines and admire the total lack of shame of the participants.

Sunset Boulevard just opened at the Porchlight Music Theatre, featuring Chicago legend Hollis Resnik as Norma Desmond.   Having attended an invitational rehearsal, I can tell you that the cast is great and the music is wonderful, but I did catch Resnik smoking in the parking lot during a break, which calls for detention.

The Art Institute is opening its Andy Warhol exhibit for member previews this week, which makes me want to look for clues as to whether he was really an undercover agent spying on extraterrestrial aliens as depicted in Men in Black III.

The Chicago Humanities Festival presents dozens of programs the last week of October.  Just like your insurance company, the festival has been furtively raising prices the last few years, but, unlike your insurer, there’s no competition, so suck it up and treat yourself.

And though I receive no commission for my continuing promotion of her (but should I?), don’t miss Meghan Murphy in Spamalot at the Mercury Theater.

 

 

 

 

 

Literature’s Lineage: Descendants of Writers Share Family Stories – American Writers Museum – September 26, 2019

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I came for the daughter of the man who created Superman, that is Laura Siegel Larson, daughter of Jerry Siegel, not Friedrich Nietzsche or George Bernard Shaw, and stayed for Steve Soboroff, the man who lent more than a dozen typewriters for the American Writers Museum’s current exhibit, Tools of the Trade.

Soboroff, a Los Angeles Police commissioner, among a wide variety of other things, could have held the audience’s attention all night with his stories about how he acquired his collection and how he goes about verifying the authenticity of the typewriters, but he shared the stage with Larson, Gwendolyn Brooks’ daughter Nora Brooks Blakely, Hugh Hefner’s daughter Christie, and Maya Angelou’s grandson Colin Johnson, as they shared memories of typewriters as the focal point of their households.

While their stories were interesting, I have to believe that a tools of the trade exhibit at Amsterdam’s Museum of Prostitution would elicit tales about more stimulating, though possibly illicit, activities.

Nevertheless, writers’ quotes concerning typewriters abound. Graham Greene, for example, wasn’t a fan. “My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.” Perhaps he should have tried using more than two fingers, not that I do.

Elmore Leonard was a little less archaic. “It took me 20 years to buy an electric typewriter, because I was afraid it would be too sensitive. I like to bang the keys. I’m doing action stories, so that’s the way I like to do it.” Different typewriters for different kinds of writing? A novel thought.

And finally, more from Leonard, though not about typewriters. “I try to leave out the parts readers skip.” And so I end.

Sunday Near Millennium Park Without Anyone Named George – July 21, 2019

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Interestingly, both Doctors Without Borders and Borders book stores, which no one was able to save (thereby making the doctors’ organizational name prescient), were founded in 1971. On the other hand, Crossing Borders Music, which put on the concert by my piano teacher, Marianne Parker, that I attended at the Chicago Cultural Center, across Michigan Avenue from Millennium Park, originated in 2011.

The wonderful solo concert featured music from Marianne’s new album of Haitian music, entitled Pages intimes. As I told her afterward, she obviously has been holding out on me, not teaching me everything she knows, because, shockingly, I can’t play like she can. What other reason could there be?

I then rushed over to the Art Institute, across Monroe Street from Millennium Park, to attend its annual Block Party. On my way to the Impressionism room containing Van Gogh’s The Drinkers, for a program put on by the Brewseum, I passed by Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, thereby completing my park-adjacent trilogy.

Pub historian, and Brewseum founder and executive director, Liz Garibay presented a delightful lecture to the crowd on both the Van Gogh painting and the history and culture of drinking and drinking establishments in Chicago, including the 1855 Lager Beer Riot. After this educational tasting, I now thirst for more information, which I attend to drink in at the Brewseum’s exhibition currently on tap at the Field Museum.

I ended my near-the-park Sunday by watching Mucca Pazza (which translates as mad cow) end the party with one of their unique musical performances. P.T. Barnum would have been proud of the way they closed by marching through the Monroe Street exit, helping to clear the building by leading out hundreds of visitors, who then realized that the show was over.  This way to the egress.

Printers Row Lit Fest & Chicago Blues Festival- June 8-9, 2019

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In case you were wondering, the Lit in Printers Row Lit Fest refers to literature, not to the new Illinois law permitting recreational marijuana starting January 1, 2020. But maybe next year it will be both.

One of the attractions of the Lit Fest for me in the past has been the Flash Fiction writing contest held by the Mystery Writers of America. Again, in case you were wondering, the Flash in Flash Fiction refers to fiction written quickly, not fiction written about Barry Allen of DC Comics fame.

There was no contest this year. The Mystery Writers didn’t even have a tent. Or perhaps they did and it was flapping so quickly in the breeze that no one could see it.

And this year there was only one program each day that interested me. On Saturday, it was James Geary amusing the audience with a discussion of his book Wit’s End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It.

As part of his presentation, he held a pun contest, with the winner receiving a copy of the book, and the losers presumably being sent to the witless protection program.

On Sunday I heard WTTW critic Hedy Weiss interview music director Jermaine Hill, and stars Monica West (Marian the librarian), and Geoff Packard (Professor Harold Hill) about the Goodman Theater’s upcoming production of The Music Man. I introduced myself to Hedy and spoke with her for about 15 minutes before the program, which I’m sure she also will mention in her next blog.

On the way to the Lit Fest Sunday, I stopped by the Chicago Blues Festival to listen to Erwin Helfer do his wonderful thing on the piano. Heller plays on Tuesday nights at the Hungry Brain, which seems like a good name for a place to go after a Lit Fest.

MSI After Hours – Wired to Wear – Museum of Science and Industry – May 31, 2019

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I was hoping to see the museum’s exhibits come alive as in one of the Night at the Museum movies, but, upon second thought, the simulated tornado in the Science Storms exhibit, for example, might have brought the party to a crashing halt, and the adventure just wouldn’t be the same without Robin Williams.

The museum’s new Wired to Wear exhibit is fascinating. It’s described as “smart clothing and devices designed to extend the human body’s capabilities and make us healthier, stronger and safer.” Although I have my doubts that the dress that barks like a dog when someone gets too close to the wearer will catch on, there are a lot of interesting innovations that are likely to result in useful options for the disabled, the professional athlete, and the idle rich searching for a Halloween costume.

In addition to the new exhibit and access to all the others at the museum without having to fight off busloads of school children, this adults-only party offered microscopic veggie sliders, generous-pour bartenders, and access to a live podcast of WBEZ’s Nerdette, featuring two of the Wired to Wear inventors.

If you listen to the podcast once they post it, you’ll likely get a digitally-cleansed version, so you won’t be able to appreciate the fact that the guest tech nerds couldn’t figure out that you have to hold the microphone near your mouth when you’re talking so that the audience can hear you, and you probably won’t hear me yelling from the audience “can’t hear you”, an act that didn’t get me kicked out, brought a murmur of appreciation from a part of the audience, and caused one of the guests to use the microphone properly for two seconds, before once again holding it as far away from his mouth as humanly possible.

Perhaps clothing with a built-in amplifier would be more useful than clothing that barks like a dog.

Chicago Humanities Festival – David Brooks, David Wooten, and Maude Maggart – May 4, 2019

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Commentator David Brooks was very funny for the first part of his appearance at the packed Harris Theater. Then he got to the topic of his new book The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life and receded into preachiness reminiscent of a Sunday morning TV sermon, citing examples of others’, but not his own, humane behavior, discussing how his discovery of the moral life had led him out of a dark place, while failing to mention  that during that time period he got divorced from his wife of 27 years and married his former research assistant, 23 years his junior, and without making a case for there being anything in his book that hasn’t been said before in a basic psychology class in regard to character development.

Professor David Wooten, speaking on virtue at the SAIC Ballroom of the School of the Art Institute, was even more disappointing to his much more meager audience, because he wasn’t even funny, just droningly pompous, as evidenced by the sleep-inducing effect he had on several audience members. He basically gave a short shrift overview of philosophies of Aristotle, Hume, Hobbes, Machiavelli and a few others, all as background leading up to his criticism of a modern day philosopher, whose name, unfortunately, escapes me (as I’d like to create my own objective view of her thoughts), who wrote about the fragility of courage.

Fortunately the day was saved by Maude Maggart, a wonderful cabaret singer from New York who presented material from the Great American Songbook, demonstrating a silvery voice with an engaging personality to a full house at Venue Six10. At the end of the hour, the crowd applauded on and on, hoping to encourage her to come back for an encore, but, alas, the Humanities Festival runs on a tight schedule and she did not reappear, the only disappointing part of her performance.

Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures – Adina Hoffman – Newberry Library – February 19, 2019

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Though I’d like to compare this blog, somewhat conceptually, although certainly not artistically, to Ben Hecht’s 1001 Afternoons in Chicago (a book that interestingly contains only 65 of his newspaper columns), for me, the single most identifying thing about Hecht has always been his co-authorship, with Charles MacArthur, of the play The Front Page, and his co-authorship of the movie His Girl Friday, based upon that play.

Adina Hoffman, whose rapid-fire speech pattern at the program drew a page from the style of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday (it has been said that gangsters learned how to talk from seeing gangster movies, such as Scarface, written by Hecht) painted a much broader picture of Hecht for the audience, most of which, as usual, I will ignore for my purposes.

But, for example, according to Hoffman, Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, called the final scene of the Alfred Hitchcock movie Foreign Correspondent, uncredited screenplay by Ben Hecht, the greatest piece of propaganda ever written.

One thing to take from that is that Hecht not only wrote many classic Hollywood scripts, but also was the uncredited script doctor for many more, including, who knew, Gone with the Wind. According to Hoffman, film critic Pauline Kael called Hecht the greatest American screenwriter and famed director Jean-Luc Godard called Hecht a genius who invented 80% of what is used in Hollywood movies (at a time when movies were more than just a bunch of computer generated comic book stories).

On a less consequential, but, if you stretch it, coincidental note, Quentin Tarantino’s movie Inglourious Basterds includes Goebbels as a character, and MacArthur, Hecht’s frequent writing partner, was the target of a Dorothy Parker quip after her relationship with MacArthur resulted in her pregnancy, when she allegedly said “how like me, to put all my eggs into one bastard.”