Newberry Library

The Chicago Reader at 50: A Half-Century of Revolutionary Storytelling – Newberry Library

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I’m the guy who made it through The Louvre in less than an hour, so it should come as no surprise that I finished my tour of Newberry Library’s Chicago Reader exhibit (on display through January 22, 2022) in under five minutes, or maybe it should, as the Reader had a much greater effect on my life than a bunch of old art work, although even I have to admit that the Winged Victory at the top of the Daru staircase is a sight one doesn’t easily forget.

I wish the Reader exhibit were larger. One small hallway, though nicely curated, really isn’t enough for a publication that helped shape a generation of Chicagoans, though kudos for mentioning the Missed Connections section that I once eagerly scoured in the hope that the young lady on the elevated platform really was checking me out.

And whose idea was it to have a constantly running broadcast of a couple of their podcasts interrupting your concentration while you’re trying to read the displays. It’s like studying with the television on. Oh, wait, that is how I studied. But I was younger then. It doesn’t count.

The Theory of Nothing

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Just because the world has ground to a halt doesn’t mean that I should stop writing, or does it? Have I misinterpreted the signs? Anyway, to help us all pass the time, here are some notes about some of the things I’m not doing.

Speaking of signs, and the stealing thereof, I’m not watching baseball games. I wouldn’t anyway, but my class on the Literature of Baseball at Northwestern’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute will be held online, instead of in person, which means I don’t get to indulge in the delicious home-made brownies that a member of the class, who is a baker, brings each week.

I’m not watching March Madness or running my pool, which is a shame because I concocted some bizarre rules this year in the hope that no one else would understand them. In that vein, in the absence of games, I have declared myself the winner of the pool.

Despite having been the Wizard of Oz in Wicked on Broadway, Joel Grey apparently does not have the power to make everything right and so is not going to the 25th Anniversary Porchlight Music Theatre Icons Gala honoring him and neither is anyone else, including me, at least until it gets rescheduled.

I’m not going to the postponed Newberry Library Associates Night, where I was hoping to cop some free wine and cheese and then sneak out before the staff droned on about research that would have bored me to tears.

I’m not going to the American Writers Museum to listen to Gene Luen Yang talk about his new graphic novel Dragon Hoops, as he cancelled his in-person book tour, and instead, according to his website, is touring as a cartoon.

I’m not going to the Civic Orchestra of Chicago’s 100th Anniversary Concert, which was to feature Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, which also was performed at the orchestra’s first-ever concert on March 29, 1920. I missed that one too.

Candlelight Concert (Klaudia Kudełko, piano) – Newberry Library – February 5, 2020

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It’s not a smudge on your screen. Klaudia Kudełko’s last name is spelled with a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative that adds a stroke to the L that makes it look like a T (and now I know how to make it magically appear).

The Candlelight Concert series produced by Fever (don’t worry, it’s not related to the coronavirus) presents its artists, as advertised, by candlelight, which meant that Kudełko had to know the music and where the keys were, just as if she were Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, or George Shearing.

Though Kudełko was great, I was disappointed by the fact that the candles spread throughout the room all burned (well shone, not burned, as they were battery-powered, because, after all, it was best that Kudełko’s flying fingers were the only thing on fire) yellow. In particular, I would have liked to have seen different colors of candles on top of the piano, changing in sync with the music as if part of some hallucinogenic dream (which led me to an article on “5 reasons to buy color-changing light bulbs”).

Though the colors were uniform, the candles on the piano were of different sizes, which made me hope that Kudełko also might entertain us with some variation of playing glasses of water with different levels, as in the video of the street musician playing Mozart I found. Maybe it doesn’t work with Chopin.

What does work with Chopin is the Tido Music app (which Kudełko promotes in an online video of her playing part of one of the selections she played at the concert), which hears what you’re playing and automatically turns to the next page of music on your tablet at the appropriate time! Most apps can’t hold a candle to that.

Chicago Map Society Annual Holiday Gala and Members’ Show and Tell – Newberry Library – December 19, 2019

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Ironically, I found the map society meeting without the help of a map.

While a meeting of a map society may seem somewhat anachronistic, I enjoyed it and am pretty sure it was more interesting than a meeting of computer-driven global positioning system advocates would have been.

Five people presented. The first showed us various inflatable and pop-up globes, including an inflatable one that might have been big enough to transport the stars of the movie The Aeronauts to new heights. The pop-up globes made me think of Sydney, Australia’s Shakespeare Pop-up Globe Theatre, though the closest I’ve come to it is an evening at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre.

The second person displayed a map of Chicago from the 1933 World’s Fair showing Chicago as it was in 1833, although apparently not really, as it was just something to sell at the fair (printed t-shirts didn’t become popular until the 1960s), without the need for, or regard to, accuracy.

The meeting started to hit its stride with a European map from 1914 that featured dogs, that is, the dogs of war, which should have, again, made me think of Shakespeare (Marc Antony in Julius Caesar), but instead reminded me of Christopher Plummer’s scenery-chewing turn in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

As proof that maps, computers, and people under the age of 30 can coexist, a student from Jones College Prep then gave the crowd an introduction to Minecraft, the best-selling video computer game of all time(?), and a mapping project he worked on with it, which led to him showing us a prize-winning map of a Canadian province created by one of his Minecraft buddies.

The last map we saw was the most timely, showing receding ice caps, world heat and humidity levels, and annual storm concentrations, a veritable Tempest.

Two Tales of a City – Northwestern University and Newberry Library – December 4 and 11, 2019

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Northwestern’s Chicago in the Roaring Twenties was the best of lectures, Newberry Library’s misnamed Books That Built Chicago was the worst of lectures.

Kathleen Skolnik, who teaches art and architectural history at Roosevelt University, had the Northwestern audience in the palm of her hand as she led them on a photograph-aided journey through design elements of the 1920’s.

On the other hand, or palm, the Newberry Library didn’t even get the name of their program right. There’s a reason why Chicago by the Book: 101 Publications That Shaped the City and Its Image is so named, as evidenced by architect and IIT professor John Ronan’s task to convince us that the original brochure (a publication, not a book) for the 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Mies van der Rohe buildings was worthy of being included.

He failed. Just because the buildings themselves may have been groundbreaking, doesn’t mean that the brochure was significant, its inclusion apparently resting on its attempts to glorify a plain, rectangular, interior living space.

And yet, Ronan held our attention better than David Van Zanten, Professor Emeritus in Art and Art History at Northwestern University, who discussed Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe, 1910-11 (Executed Buildings and Designs for those of you who don’t read German).

Van Zanten spent most of his interminable bombination, not on the substance of the book, but rather on the way in which the pages opened and folded over one another, and then posited that, perhaps, he should have showed us this origami-related manipulation on the screen instead of through third-rate, mime-like, hand gestures.

There were two other speakers at the Newberry, who informed us about the arguments the chapter selection committee had over whether or not menus should be included in the book.

Sparing you this discussion may be a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.

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.”

 

Moby-Dick Read-a-Thon – Newberry Library – January 19-20, 2019

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The closest I had ever come before to reading past the first three words of Moby-Dick was to see the Gregory Peck movie and the Star Trek movie First Contact, wherein Captain Picard is accused of being like Captain Ahab.

In case you were wondering, Moby-Dick, the novel, is 206,052 words long. It took over 150 of us a little over 24 hours, taking turns, to read the whole thing aloud. I was assigned the last 1158 words of Chapter 134.

In case you were further wondering, the Smithsonian tells us there appears to be absolutely no good reason why the title is hyphenated (the name of the whale is not hyphenated inside the book, except, mysteriously, in one place), it possibly being a typographical error or the result of a long-obsolete custom. Melville originally titled the book simply, The Whale, but then apparently changed it for marketing purposes, which didn’t really work as it had “tepid reviews and miserable initial sales.”

Nathaniel Philbrick, author of Why Read Moby-Dick and the introductory speaker leading into the read-a-thon (or as the lead staff person for the occasion called it, the Moby-Dickapalooza), advised us that, back in the day, “if you liked Moby-Dick you had literary cred”, that Faulkner said it was the one book by another author he wish he had written, and that Hemingway, in writing The Old Man and the Sea, admitted that he was trying to best Moby-Dick.

Along with the unwashed masses, such as myself, reading from the book, there were quite a few ringers – Sara Paretsky, for one, and Dave Catlin, who directed Moby-Dick at Lookingglass Theater, for another. I mention him because he introduced himself to me in the ready room after I impressed him by knowing my left from my right.

Upon conclusion of the event, it was determined that three people (plus the staff person in charge) had stayed for the whole thing (giving more meaning to the unwashed masses). Their presence throughout made moot my intellectual curiosity as to whether, like that tree in the forest, if no one had been there to listen to the readers in the middle of the night, they would have made a sound.

Christmas at the Fair: The Joffrey’s New Nutcracker – Newberry Library – December 4, 2018

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The Newberry Library currently has on display Pictures from an Exposition: Visualizing the 1893 World’s Fair, which is why it hosted an event about The Joffrey Ballet’s reimagined Nutcracker, which opened in 2016 and which uses the exposition as its background.

The Newberry also houses Ruth Page’s papers, which include choreography notes from that company’s Arie Crown production of The Nutcracker, which opened in 1965. Page’s notes include pictures, which Newberry curator Alison Hinderliter showed, of nails, staples, pins, and other such items that had to be cleaned from the stage each night after falling with the snow from the rafters.

Joffrey Artistic Director Ashley Wheater said his company has the same problem and uses a sieve when cleaning the snow off the stage to filter out such junk.

Speaking of snow, Wheater added that choreographer Christopher Wheeldon had assured him, in noting concerns about the acceptance of changes made to the classic, that the tree still will grow and the snow still will fall.

And, all this happens as a result of over 2000 production cues in the show, which is a lot of opportunities for something to go wrong, which could drive a person to drink. But if it did, not to worry. Wheater said they spray vodka on the costumes (including perhaps the rat king’s head, which is made up of two IKEA wastebaskets) to keep them fresh (a trick also used by figure skaters), so, “if you need vodka, come to the Joffrey”, they have a lot on hand.

Considering all of the above and more, WTTW critic Hedy Weiss quoted her own review of the production in saying that “[t]he whole event brought to mind Tom Stoppard’s observation from “Shakespeare in Love”: “The natural condition [of the theater business] is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster … but strangely enough it all turns out well.” I hope for the same miracle each time I write my blog.

Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson – Gordon S. Wood – Newberry Library – October 11, 2018

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I knew I was listening to a Pulitzer Prize-winning author because Wood’s talk was littered with a wide range of words like apoplectic, turgid, egalitarian, dissimulation, and implacable, though, when he threw in tumult, I felt like I was back home in the kitchen of my childhood.

According to historian Wood, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had very disparate personalities and held differing opinions on almost everything, but one thing they could agree upon was a hatred of Alexander Hamilton, and that was long before it cost $500 a seat to get to know him.

One of the many things that differentiated Adams and Jefferson was that, whereas Jefferson was reserved, Adams “lacked the gift of silence.” Now I know what to give my friends for the holidays.

In discussing the letters between Adams and Jefferson, Wood deterred from his historical accounts by suggesting that future generations wouldn’t even be able to read their correspondence because cursive writing is no longer taught. I’m not sure that follows. I know the converse isn’t accurate, as I learned cursive in school, but can’t read a lot of people’s handwriting, including my own. In any event, cursive, at least as of a couple years ago, wasn’t dead yet, just as if it were a Monty Python character,

Jefferson also corresponded, and, according to Wood, flirted with Adam’s wife Abigail. In a 1785 letter to her, Jefferson wrote, in reference to some items he was purchasing for her in Paris: “They offered me a fine Venus; but I thought it out of taste to have two at table at the same time.”  Quite the charmer.  If only he’d lose the wig.

Finally, in case you were wondering, Wood, when asked by an audience member, said, given their personalities, he would rather have a drink with John Adams than Thomas Jefferson. Surprisingly, he offered no opinion about Samuel Adams.

Adult Seminars (Classics of Comedy and Wonderful Town II) – Newberry Library

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As Justice Potter Stewart might have said, I may not be able to define comedy, but I know it when I see it (or hear it, or read it). And I’m quite certain I know what is meant by a classic. So I was somewhat taken aback when the instructor for the Newberry winter seminar on Classics of Comedy picked as our first reading a short story no one in the class had heard of, by an author none of us (or the internet based on my search) had heard of, and that wasn’t funny, except to the instructor.

So it didn’t come as a shock when the instructor informed us that the author was a friend of his who, the instructor (and presumably the friend/author) believed, hadn’t received the recognition he deserved. Now that’s classic, but not why I enrolled in the seminar. So I left during the break of the first class to claim a refund of the registration fee. I imagine the instructor didn’t think that was funny, but I did.

I also enrolled in a Newberry winter seminar called Wonderful Town II, about music from New York in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. What a difference. The instructor, Guy Marco, has an encyclopedic knowledge of the music of those years (which he experienced first hand, as he is 90 years old), from Broadway to classical to pop to opera. When I asked him how many rooms his music took up at home, he answered “all of them.”

He even made the mercifully short operatic selections tolerable (which is saying a lot coming from me) with his detailed and humorous analyses, such as his observation in one instance that there was no way to determine from the story line why a particular character had died. And he signed off the last class doing his best Benny Hill impression. His dry wit led me to think that he also should have taught the Classics of Comedy seminar.