The Abbott Oceanarium

Posted on August 17, 2016 by admin

Years ago I attended the “groundbreaking” for the Shedd Aquarium’s Oceanarium, officially the Abbott Oceanarium these days, as an editor of a real estate magazine. Usually groundbreaking ceremonies involve guys in suits and hardhats moving a little dirt with gold-colored shovels. It’s an established ritual in the development business.

Occasionally developers take a different approach. One time in Nashville, a developer planned to raze an older building on West End Ave. — a fairly large commercial street — and so painted one of the large wooden doors on the old structure bright red, and then knocked it in with a wrecking ball. The really odd thing about that was that actual demolition didn’t start for a few more days, and in the interim the red door was put back together haphazardly. Maybe the owners didn’t want bums looking for shelter there.

At the Shedd, we stood outside — it was cold, so it must have been late 1989 or early 1990 — as a crane hoisted a square-cut boulder into the air at the edge of Lake Michigan. It was a big thing, the sort of rock used to build breakwaters. The ceremony consisted of dropping the rock into the lake, right where the Shedd planned its expansion.

This is what that the exterior of the Oceanarium looks like now, jutting into Lake Michigan.
The facility’s upper level includes a sizable amphitheater that looks over a large pond and then through the windows out into the lake (with the Adler Planetarium visible not far away). During a show, the window are shuttered.

We saw a show. The Shedd staff didn’t say so openly, of course, but the subtext of the event was, “We’re not like Seaworld. Not at all. Don’t even think it.” The dolphins and beluga whales thus interacted with their trainers, and the animals seemed glad to be there. It wasn’t a particularly exciting show, though.

There’s also a tank for otters and another one for penguins.
We also spent a while watch the belugas in their tank, who were joined by Shedd staff. A lot of other people watched, too.
More fun to watch that the organized show, I think.

The Shedd Aquarium

Posted on August 16, 2016 by admin

The Shedd Aquarium, I’ve read, houses 32,000 animals — 1500 species including fish, marine mammals, birds, snakes, amphibians, and insects — and contains 5 million gallons of water. A “water zoo,” as Ann put it as we waited to get in last Friday. A lot of people were waiting to get in. A lot of people were already in.
That made the exhibits a little difficult to see sometimes. On the other hand, sometimes spectators added charm to the scene.
If you were patient enough, you could eventually see the tanks and tanks full of fish and other sea- and riverlife, small —
— and larger —
And some colorful static sealife scenes.
On the whole, the glass tanks and lighting and crowds made it hard to take pictures, but that’s just as well. The first thing to do somewhere interesting is to see it with your own eyes.

Saw lots of interesting creatures. That accounts for the Shedd’s popularity. It’s a water zoo of strange and sometimes bizarre things, even in our jaded age.

Sometimes the creatures were easy to identify, such as the octopi and the piranhas and the blue lobster — intense Prussian blue, as the Shedd notes. “The brilliant blue color is the result of a genetic mutation that causes the lobster to produce an overabundance of a large, complex protein called crustacyanin (‘cyan’ derives from the Greek word for dark blue) that binds the protein for the normal brownish coloration, canceling it out. Even the lobster’s antennae are blue.”

Another star attraction is Granddad, an Australian lungfish that’s been living at the Shedd since 1933. “Weighing in at 20 pounds and measuring four feet long, Granddad is believed to be the oldest fish in captivity at any public aquarium or zoo in the world,” asserts Chicago Tonight. He’s not much to look at, though (and I think his previous name, Methuselah, was better).

Speaking of the piranhas, we got a good look at them. According to a sign next to their tank, “their teeth are razor-sharp. Even so, piranhas usually just nip the tail and scales of other fishes to fill up on protein. Piranhas don’t hunt for people, cattle or other mammals. Many don’t even eat whole fish.”

What? I refuse to believe it. I saw the Saturday afternoon movies. I know that when luckless explorers in the Amazon basin put as much as a toe in the water, piranhas attack instantly and en masse.

Sometimes the creatures weren’t so easy to identify. The Shedd helpfully includes a digital kiosk next to most of the tanks, and you can scroll through pictures with common and scientific names to ID them. Trouble was, I’d look at some odd thing in the tank, and then scroll through looking for some picture like it, and find nothing. That happened more than once. Ah, well.

The crowds were a little tiring, but we enjoyed the place enough to stay most of the afternoon, to near closing. Part of the time we were in the Shedd’s new — new to us, since we hadn’t seen it, but it was completed in 1991 — Oceanarium. More about which tomorrow.

Olmec Head & Man-Sized Fish in Chicago

Posted on August 15, 2016 by admin

Where in the Chicago area is this fellow?

Between the Field Museum and the Shedd Aquarium in downtown Chicago, that’s where, with the Field Museum in the background of the picture. It’s a replica by Ignacio Perez Solano of Olmec Head 8, and a gift of the state of Veracruz to Chicago, dedicated in 2003. So while near the Field Museum, it’s actually part of the city’s collection of outdoor art. It might not be as imposing as the original, but it’s no small thing at seven feet high and a weight of seven tons.

Later it occurred to me that I didn’t know much about the original Olmec heads, beyond their great antiquity in pre-Columbian Mexico, so I read a bit. “Seventeen heads have been discovered to date, 10 of which are from San Lorenzo and 4 from La Venta, two of the most important Olmec centres,” the Ancient History Encyclopedia tells me. “The heads were each carved from a single basalt boulder which in some cases were transported 100 km or more to their final destination, presumably using huge balsa river rafts wherever possible and log rollers on land….

“The heads were sculpted using hard hand-held stones and it is likely that they were originally painted using bright colours. The fact that these giant sculptures depict only the head may be explained by the widely held belief in Mesoamerican culture that it was the head alone which contained the emotions, experience, and soul of an individual.”

Apparently the state of Veracruz, especially when Miguel Alemán Velasco was governor (1998-2004), decided that norteamericanos would benefit from replica Olmec heads, so there are now eight such heads in the U.S., according to Wiki: Austin, Chicago, Covina, Calif., McAllen, Tex., New York, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and West Valley City, Utah.

Closer to the Shedd is a very different sort of sculpture, the aptly named “Man With Fish.”

According to the Chicago Park District, the work is “a gift to the Shedd Aquarium from William N. Sick in honor of his wife, Stephanie… The painted bronze sculpture portrays a man with his arms wrapped around an enormous fish. Water sprays from the fish’s mouth, dripping into a reflecting pool below.”

William Sick is a prominent local businessman, and also happens to be a trustee and former chairman of the Shedd Aquarium, and a director of Millennium Park. He must have decided at some point that a sculpture by Stephan Balkenhol was just the thing for the Shedd. It was the artist’s first work in the U.S., installed in 2001.

“Stephan Balkenhol (b. 1957), a German sculptor who studied at the Hamburg School of Fine Arts, created “Man with Fish,” the park district continues. “Several of Balkenhol’s works feature human figures relating to an animal or several animals in an unexpected way. ‘Man with Fish’ conveys this playful approach as does ‘Small Man with Giraffe’ which stands in front of the Hamburg Zoo.”

We didn’t go all the way downtown just to look at statues, as interesting as they were. Lilly goes to university this week, so we all wanted to do something together before that. Ultimately we picked the Shedd Aquarium. We figured it wouldn’t be quite so crowded on Friday as it would be on Saturday, so we went on Friday.
Wrong.

Yogyakarta

Posted on August 14, 2016 by admin

Yogyakarta is a city on Java than few North Americans ever seem to have heard of. But I won’t use that as evidence of any egregious geographic ignorance on the part of Americans, though in fact we aren’t known for that kind of knowledge. After all, how many Javanese, do you suppose, have heard of Memphis, Indianapolis or Kansas City?

We went there in August 1994. One important reason for going to Yogyakarta was that Borobudur and Prambanan were located nearby; in fact, they were reason enough to go. But the town itself also featured some other sites of interest, such as the Kraton of Yogyakarta, a palace complex that also featured a museum, as well as some interesting ruins whose name escapes me, and a few other places in town.

One day we witnessed a large parade through the heart of town, or would have, had the authorities had any notion of keeping the street clear. As it was, the street filled completely with people, and the parade — a lot of men on horseback, as I recall — had to push its way through the throng. This got tiresome pretty fast, so we didn’t stay long.

Then there was the time we were walking down the curiously named Malioboro Street (Jalan Malioboro), which is a major shopping street, past a lot of shop stalls and booths. As I walked past one vendor, a man perhaps about my age at the time, said, “Keep smiling, friend. I kill you.” Maybe he was just tired of tourists, who so obviously could afford his wares, wandering by without buying anything. Or maybe his psychosis was deeper. We didn’t go that way again.

He was the only bit of hostility that we encountered, however fleeting. On the other end of the spectrum, a couple of teenaged Javanese girls buttonholed me on the street one afternoon, and wanted me to pose with them for a picture. Maybe I had novelty value. So I posed.

Another fragment of memory from Yogyakarta: sometime before dawn one morning, a rooster woke me up, because, cartoons notwithstanding, roosters crow whenever they feel like it. I lay awake for a while, and then off in the distance, I heard what must have been the pre-dawn call to prayers. Unfamiliar, mesmerizing, reminding me that I was somewhere else.

One evening, we had got a wonderful chance to enjoy Ramayana ballet at the Ramayana Open Theatre Prambanan.

It’s something tourists do. Some people might sneer at that reflexively, but they’d be thoughtless. I’m glad that Ramayana ballet has some audience. I don’t, however, remember much about it now, except for a notion of colorful costumes and stylized movement.

A Fashion Wagon Party Card

Posted on August 11, 2016 by admin

One more recently acquired postcard for the week. This one’s in James Lileks territory, I think, not only because of the mid-century commercial artwork, but also because the entity behind it was from Minnesota.
If that card doesn’t scream late ’60s, I don’t know what does. Indeed, it’s postmarked February 16, 1968. It’s an invitation for a neighbor to a “Fashion Wagon Style Show” at a house in Hoffman Estates, Ill., scheduled for February 23.
An event to brighten up what must have been a dreary February in metro Chicago (they’re all dreary). And to sell a few dresses. Interesting detail: the RSVP phone number uses two letters to begin with. That pretty much disappeared in the ’70s, but I remember learning the telephone exchange letters for our home phone number as a child. It began with TA (Taylor).

Apparently TW was “Twinbrook.” That took a little digging to find, but strangely enough I found it referenced in Jack Hoffman’s obit in the Chicago Tribune in 2008. Hoffman was the homebuilder who developed Hoffman Estates.

“Eventually, Mr. Hoffman’s company would build some 5,000 homes in the town incorporated in 1959 as Hoffman Estates. Residents that year voted to name the new city Twinbrook, after the local telephone exchange,” the paper noted. “But Mr. Hoffman’s influence led the homeowners association’s board of directors to dismiss the popular vote.”

So much for the vox populi, but there’s still a Twinbrook Elementary School in the village. Note that the editor didn’t see fit to explain the term “telephone exchange” in 2008. Few readers younger than me would understand the reference, but then again, how many people younger than me read newspapers?

Back to the card: it was produced by the Minnesota Woolen Co. to promote its fashion parties. A little digging and you find information from the University of Minnesota Duluth that tells you that “the Minnesota Woolen Company was founded in Duluth in 1916 by Nat G. and Abraham B. Polinsky. The company sold clothing throughout the United States through door-to-door sales. The company was the largest in the nation in sales of clothing on a direct to consumer basis…

“The Mendenhall, Graham Company was purchased in 1946 by Minnesota Woolen Company, which operated it as Minnesota Manufacturing Company with a plant at 514 West 1st Street. The company distributed clothing designed and manufactured in part at 131 West 1st Street through the national Fashion Wagon Party Plan introduced in 1962….

The last major expansion occurred in 1972 when the company moved the Fashion Wagon sample warehouse and shipping facility into a new building at 42nd Avenue West and Superior Street. The retail store closed in 1976, the manufacturing outlet in 1977.”

By the time alphanumeric telephone exchanges were gone, so were Fashion Wagon Parties.

(Speaking of telephones, out of idle curiosity I looked up those two dates in 1968, and found, according to Wiki anyway, that “…on February 16, 1968, the first-ever 9-1-1 call was placed by Alabama Speaker of the House Rankin Fite, from Haleyville City Hall, to U.S. Rep. Tom Bevill, at the city’s police station.”)

A McGovern Postcard

Posted on August 10, 2016 by admin

Here’s another recently acquired postcard, one from a very specific moment in U.S. history, a good many elections ago.

It was never used for its intended purpose, namely being put in the mail in the service of the McGovern campaign. Not that it would have made any difference to the outcome; not that a million such cards, all mailed, would have made any difference.

I don’t think I’ve seen any presidential campaign cards in recent years, or ever, come to think of it, but more local races still use them. I’m already getting postcard-based claims and counterclaims from candidates for the Illinois State House. I expect more in the coming months.

A particularly memorable example of postcard campaigning was in 2004. As I wrote then, “[Phil Crane] was also the subject of one of the most brilliant direct-mail campaigns I’ve ever seen in politics. Almost every day for about 10 days before the election, we received a large postcard, paid for by the state Democratic Party, all featuring the same picture of Rep. Crane photoshopped onto a variety of backgrounds.

“Each card had a different headline, and backgrounds to match, along with Phil in the foreground in a different outfit: GREETINGS FROM COSTA RICA (tropics, him in a floral t-shirt)… SCOTLAND (golf course, him with clubs)… ROME (Coliseum, him with a camera around his neck)… etc. The point being that Rep. Crane was fond of junkets at lobbyists’ expense. ‘Junket King’ was on several of the cards, too.”

Former Rep. Crane died in 2014. One thing I didn’t know about him was his role in Singapore easing its ban on chewing gum, which was in effect when we were there.

Adieu, Victoria Station

Posted on August 9, 2016 by admin

Late last week, despite the fact that I recently inherited a good many hundred postcards, I bought a some more. I couldn’t resist. I found a box of old cards at a resale shop that, in my experience, seldom offers any for sale. A dime each. Looks like someone was cleaning house after an elderly relative died. Or maybe the box represented a number of households with caches of cards, all stripped of their small-value debris at about the same time.

A few of them are used, but most are blank. Such as this one, which made me wonder, Whatever happened to Victoria Station?

Turns out there’s an entire book devoted to that question. (A song advertising Victoria Station starts playing when you open that page, which would normally be annoying, but the singer is Johnny Cash.) Anyway, the short answer is, as a darling brand of the ’70s, the chain’s time passed in a big way in later decades. Apparently the 99 locations at its peak shrunk to exactly one in our time, located in Salem, Mass.

Its web site says, “We are proud to continue the Victoria Station name and continue to pay close attention to the historic and nostalgic atmosphere with a new approach and even higher standards than today’s customers demand. We specialize in classic New England cuisine with a fusion of the once great Steakhouse and still offer Victoria Station’s signature slow roasted Angus Prime Rib and ‘All you can eat’ Salad Bar.” Well, good for them.

I can’t remember whether I ever ate at a Victoria Station. At first I thought yes, but then realized I was confusing it with Spaghetti Warehouse, so maybe not. Could be the confusion was because that chain always featured a trolley car in its restaurants.

For its part, Spaghetti Warehouse was an early adaptive reuser of old space that might have otherwise been destroyed. Say, whatever happened to Spaghetti Warehouse? Its contraction wasn’t as thorough as Victoria Station. Reportedly 14 are still in operation.

One more thing about Victoria Station. A chain of that name still exists in Japan, operated by Zensho. More specifically, there are 45 locations, most in Hokkaido, as this site makes clear (provided someone in your house can interpret the page).

Togo, Lesotho, Tuvalu and Other Olympic Teams

Posted on August 8, 2016 by admin

Spent some time on Friday watching the Parade of Nations. This time around, NBC didn’t seem to cut anybody out, so it was quite long, and I didn’t sit through it all. Even so, it’s the part of the Olympics I usually get around to watching. Everything else, not so much.

As usual, I’m pulling for Togo in the Games. Along with Lesotho, with their wonderful hats, and other small teams, such as Tuvalu, Bhutan, Chad, Dominica, and Equatorial Guinea, just to name a few. I’m sure the U.S. athletes will do well, and I wish them well, but any fool can get behind a large delegation.

But what about Tuvalu? Good old Tuvalu, which has sent exactly one athlete to the Games this time around, former footballer Etimoni (Reme) Timuani, who will be in the 100 m sprint. This is the third Olympics for the Pacific nation, which as yet has won no medals. Hope they win something while their country is still above sea level.

As for Togo, it’s sent five athletes to seek Olympic glory and swat mosquitoes in Rio: a couple of sprinters, a couple of swimmers, and a competitor in women’s single sculls. Does NBC pay any attention to single sculls? I suspect not so much. Why bother with someone like Gevvie Stone (who’s on Team USA just as much as a swimmer or gymnast) when you can spend hours talking about Michael Phelps?

At least NBC’s coverage of the Parade of Nations seemed to a little less annoying this year than before. The announcers’ subtext wasn’t quite so, “Golly, I don’t know where that country is! Do you? It’s so little, it’s hard to believe it’s a country. Go Team USA!”

Naturally, unheralded writers at NBC did their research, so that the announcers could tell heartwarming stores about some of the athletes. “That’s right, his family was so poor they couldn’t afford oxygen when he was growing up in such-and-such TPLAC. But he had a dream, and he began training by running up and down burning trash dumps without shoes.”

No doubt they told true stories, and I’m glad that some of the participants in the Games were able to overcome awful conditions to get there, especially the Refugee Olympic Team, which is a new thing this Olympiad. I don’t mock them. NBC, on the other hand, deserves to be mocked for the dumbed down coverage the network is sure to provide to American audiences. Am I merely being nostalgic in remember that ABC knew better how to cover the Olympics? I don’t think so. The network had better ideas about international sports coverage.

Notes From the Silly Season ’97

Posted on August 7, 2016 by admin

August 8, 1997

Summer is dwindling… & the days float by like so many logs on a river, on their way to the sawmill of mind, to be made into the planks of memory… hm, don’t know that I would show that metaphor in public. Or is it a simile? What was the difference, anyway? So much for my liberal education.

Had a light brush with celebrity last Friday. A movie crew spent the whole day out in front of my office building, shooting something. It’s a good, very urban sort of location, and features a conveniently large traffic island to boot, so they weren’t the first ones I’ve seen there.

But it was no small effort, unlike a TV commercial or some music video. On hand were two huge cameras, a couple of cherry pickers outfitted with artificial shade that they could adjust as the sun crossed the sky, dozens of extras and a lot of technicians and crew waiting around for something to do. As I left for the day, I could see some active filming going on, and the star (as I’d heard) was indeed Bruce Willis, whom I got a short look at. Not my first choice among movie stars, but he was good in 12 Monkeys, anyway.

E-mail has proven itself quite interesting in the month or so I’ve had it. I’ve heard from people I almost never — in a couple of cases, flat-out never — get real mail from. I’ve also found out a number of things I might not have otherwise, not at least for months or years. Just this week an old VU friend e-mailed me to say he was moving to San Francisco after living 14 years on the East Coast. Not long before that, I found out that a Scotsman I knew in Japan had become a father this year.

Then there was the running series of E-Postcards (the sender’s phrase). One fellow I know took a laptop on vacation and has sent a daily report on his movements (mostly on the West Coast) to a large number of e-addresses, mine included.That’s something you won’t catch me doing, taking a laptop on vacation.

2016 Postscript: Since then, a child of mine then in utero has grown up, I often take laptops on the road, but not on vacations per se, and the most recent Bruce Willis movie I’ve seen is The Sixth Sense. I think Mercury Rising was the movie being made that day. It was one of the turkeys that earned Mr. Willis a Golden Raspberry that year.

As for email, I don’t use the hyphen any more, and the in pre-social media days, the regularity with which people corresponded on paper was a pretty good predictor of how much they used email. After the novelty was over, people who were lousy paper correspondents proved to be the same electronically.

Thursday Trifles

Posted on August 4, 2016 by admin

One more picture from Navy Pier.
Saw about a half-dozen ASK ME sign holders on Saturday, and I did ask one which way it was to the tall ships entrance. He told me.

Occasionally I still flip through TV channels, just to see what I can see. A few weeks ago I was doing so, and happened to have my camera handy. Here’s something I found.

By gum, it was original cast Three’s Company. Accept no substitutes. I spent all of about a minute watching it. Enough to get the gist of that week’s comedy of errors: a holiday show that saw Jack and the girls wanting to get away from the Ropers to attend a more interesting Christmas party, while the Ropers were doing their best to bore their young guests, so they could attend a more interesting Christmas party. The same one. Har-dee-har-har.

Then I became curious about Man About the House. It occurred to me that I’d never seen it. In the age of YouTube, there’s no reason not to, so I watched Series 1, Episode 1 (since removed, but it’ll probably be back). It was no Fawlty Towers, or even Steptoe and Son, but it wasn’t that bad. It had a couple of advantages over its American counterpart, such as better comic acting, especially the part of the landlord, and no Suzanne Somers. Remarkable how much of a difference that makes. Well, not that remarkable.

Some of the Man About the House lines were so very completely, breathtakingly British. The last line of the episode, for instance. Off camera, the brunette roommate persuaded the landlord to let the male character move in, as he was on camera in the kitchen with the blonde roommate. When the male character asked her how she did that — the landlord was gone by this time — she said, “I told him you were a poof.”

An announcement on Wednesday from the IOC: “The… IOC today agreed to add baseball/softball, karate, skateboard, sports climbing and surfing to the sports programme for the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020.”

What, no tug-of-war? Skateboarding, but not tug-of-war, a sport that’s easy to understand, telegenic and opens up the possibility of beach tug-of-war?

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Monthly Archives: August 2016