Marquee Monday

Posted on December 4, 2023 by admin

I went downtown for a meeting with colleagues today, and after that, took a stroll. Temps were fairly chilly, but still above freezing. I wandered over to State Street, near the storied Chicago Theatre.

“The Chicago Theatre was the first large, lavish movie palace in America and was the prototype for all others,” asserts the theater web site, though I know there are other claimants dating from the decade before. Still, there’s no doubt that the Chicago was a palace among palaces.

“This beautiful movie palace was constructed for $4 million by theatre owners Barney and Abe Balaban and Sam and Morris Katz and designed by Cornelius and George Rapp,” the site continues. “It was the flagship of the Balaban and Katz theatre chain.”

I’m assuming that means $4 million in hefty soon-to-be Coolidge dollars (Harding dollars?), since the palace was completed in 1921. I ran that through an inflation calculator and came up with the modern equivalent: $68.7 million.

After reading the following paragraph, I decided I need to take a closer look at the theater sometime, even though I’ve seen it many times. That’s because I never knew about the French connection and especially the stained glass.

“Built in French Baroque style, The Chicago Theatre’s exterior features a miniature replica of Paris’ Arc de Triomphe, sculpted above its State Street marquee. Faced in a glazed, off-white terra cotta, the triumphal arch is sixty feet wide and six stories high. Within the arch is a grand window in which is set a large circular stained-glass panel bearing the coat-of-arms of the Balaban and Katz chain — two horses holding ribbons of 35-mm film in their mouths.”

That’s not quite what photos of the stained glass depict, at least not “film in their mouths,” but never mind. Note also the Municipal Device — the Chicago Y — just over the marquee.

Boop!

Posted on November 28, 2023 by admin

Boop! = much fun. I know that because I remember enjoying myself during the new musical of that name, despite my uncomfortable seat there in the dress circle at the theater formerly known as the Sam Shubert, now named for a bank, in downtown Chicago. We popped in for the show on Friday evening.

Even now, only four days after the performance, whatever detail I took in about the jazzy score or entertaining lyrics or the vivacious dance moves or the intensely colorful costumes – which were sometimes monochromatic yet colorful somehow – or the peppy dialogue or the remarkable sets, is all a kinetic blur.

That’s the way it should be with a musical, I figure. A little razzle, a little dazzle, something to enjoy in the moment. Still, Boop! wasn’t just a musical, it was a staged musical cartoon with a star character nearly 100 years old, singing and dancing her way through an appropriately gossamer plot.

A young woman named Jasmine Amy Rogers brought Betty to life with astonishing vitality and, often enough, a hot red dress, once Betty leaves monochrome behind. The supporting cast, up to and including a marionette dog, likewise filled the stage with song, dance and antics. The cast was first rate in every way.

Pudgy, Betty’s dog, a more-or-less life-sized marionette, did some astonishing moves himself, as guided by Phillip Huber, who once upon a time did some puppet work in the extreme oddity that was Being John Malkovich.

I am, I confess, mostly indifferent about Betty Boop. Or was, until I married a fan. Capt. Gus on KENS-TV Channel 5 didn’t show her cartoons on weekday afternoons after school; his thing was Popeye, though maybe he screened the Betty Boop short in which Popeye made his cinematic debut. In those pre-Internet, pre-You Tube days, the cartoons simply weren’t available. Betty, for me, was stuck in the amber of the 1930s, and while pop culture of the time has considerable interest, somehow she didn’t resonate.

So I grew to adulthood without giving her much thought, though I did see her brief appearance in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

“Work’s been kinda slow since cartoons went to color, but I’ve still got it, Eddie!”

– Betty Boop, voiced by Mae Questel (d. 1998), who managed to live long enough to do so.

In Boop!, a monochromic-ish Betty, tired of being a cartoon celebrity, manages to transport herself to the “real world” via a machine concocted by Grampy, the inventor character from the shorts who is explicitly her grandfather in this show. She figures no one will know her in the real world, but she lands at New York Comic-Con in our time, in living color, and of course everyone knows her, especially the spunky little sister of her soon-to-be love interest, a modern jazzman. He provided the story’s shout-out to Cab Calloway, and I was glad to hear it.

Luckily, the story didn’t make too much out of Betty being a fish out of water, though that provided a little amusement. To her eventual dismay, she realizes she’s famous here, too.

Grampy, realizing that Betty needs to return to the cartoon world, comes to the real world to look for her, but also manages to spend the night with a real-world woman he had a dalliance with decades earlier. (The Hays Code doesn’t apply to this show, though it’s mostly wholesome.) There’s also a sleazeball running for mayor of real-world New York and it is he, in the fullness of time, who chases Betty around a desk, only to get clocked by her with a blunt object.

The sprinkling of serious elements – most musicals have a few – mostly involve female empowerment, though there was a dig at modern-day plutocrats. Betty is known for resisting sexual harassment and, after returning to the cartoon world, tells her director that she won’t be chased around desks by lecherous men any more in her cartoons.

I believe we saw the only the fourth performance of Boop! Not the fourth of this particular run, but the fourth ever in the history of the theater. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any big production that soon after its premiere. It was a fluke of marketing, and my experience with the character, that made that happen: a few weeks ago, a theater ticket website that sends me email once a week suggested Boop! I figured Yuriko, who has a longstanding fondness for Betty, would like it, so I got some tickets for something to do on the day after Thanksgiving. She did like it. Ann did too. We all did. Boop! is a crowd pleaser, and we were happy to be in the crowd.

Apparently the show has been in the works a long time and eventually was brought to fruition by director and choreographer Jerry Mitchell, who is very much a known quantity in the American theater. Its run at the Shubert serves essentially the same shakedown-cruise function as pre-Broadway runs in New England towns used to do – may still do, for all I know, but I expect Chicago offers a much larger pool of potential theatergoers.

Eventually, probably soon, Boop! will be on Broadway. As a crowd pleaser, I’ll bet it will do well there.

Millennium Park ’23

Posted on November 27, 2023 by admin

On the day after Thanksgiving, we went downtown for the afternoon and into the evening. Michigan Avenue is coloring up for the season, such as at the magnificent Railway Exchange Building (224 S. Michigan Ave.).

But no seasonal colors at 150 N. Michigan, which because of the rows of lights on its roof rim, is a glowing rhombus in the sky. Still all white lights as of Friday. Maybe management decided to ax the expense of changing the lights.

The city of Chicago’s Christmas tree rises over Millennium Park, as it does every year. Chicago hasn’t shied away from calling it a Christmas tree.

We thought it looked a little unfinished, at least in the daylight. Lights, but no ornaments.

Then again, in previous years the tree has looked about as spare. But I’ve only seen a few of them. Bet their décor has changed across the decades since 1913, when the city put up the first one. For all I know, spare might be the current trend among municipal Christmas trees.

When we returned after dark, it was a different story. Lights up dandily at night, it does.

We didn’t spend a lot of time in Millennium Park that afternoon, but we did walk around the site of the Bean, a.k.a. Cloud Gate, which is surrounded by a sizable temporary fence and closed to the public. The plaza is being renovated, and the Bean stands aloof over the construction site, unable to attract visitors – multitudes of them – to its mirrored fascinations.

This fellow was celebrating something. Some accomplishment of his. Or possibly mocking George W. Bush some 20 years after the fact. If so, what would be the point of that? If it had been a summer day, I might have paused to ask him about it.

But no. The chilly air drove us on, even as he did a few different poses with the banner.

A Few Japanese Woodblock Prints

Posted on November 12, 2023 by admin

About six years ago, when we went an exhibit of early Soviet art at the Art Institute, we also took a look at some Japanese woodblock prints, which were in one of the East Asian galleries. Not Edo-era prints, which I think are better known, but early Showa works.

Such as “Spring Night at Ginza” (1934) by Kasamatsu Shiro.

“Bell Tower in Okayama” (1947) by Kawase Hasui.

“Ginza at Night” (1945 reprint of 1929 design) by Kawakami Sumio.

“Bar Bacchus in Ginza” (1929) by Oda Kazuma, which is actually a color lithograph.

Those two especially would make good postcards.

Halloween Residue

Posted on November 2, 2023 by admin

Back to posting November 7. Got things to do.

One more pic from San Antonio for now. A Halloween inflatable I saw there last week. Much amused to see it.

Not bad staying power for a movie that came out nearly 40 years ago.

In Chicago, the week before, I saw this tableau, referencing lore older than a mere movie.

Three witches made partly from black paper. I assume they’re supposed to be witches. Why paper? The better to burn them, of course.

Some Oddities of Ravenswood Avenue

Posted on October 18, 2023 by admin

Fall break time. At least from posting. Back on October 29 or so.

On the North Side of Chicago, the north-south Ravenswood Avenue is a double street, divided by raised tracks of one of the Metra commuter rail lines. East of the tracks, the street is one way headed north; west of the tracks, one way headed south. Some of the streets still show their brick heritage. Mostly such streets in Chicago, as in most North American cities, has long since been paved over or replaced.

In the neighborhood known as Ravenswood, small industrial buildings line the avenue. Fewer than formerly, but still some.

That second image is of Gabel & Schubert Bronze Co. “Your source for donor recognition walls, trees, plaques, and more,” its web site says. Someone makes those trophies and plaques gathering dust in countless glass display cases in high schools nationwide.

New apartments have been developed on the avenue as well.

Just to the west of the Metra tracks are El tracks. The sort you can stand under.

Reminds me of a parody of “Under the Boardwalk” I heard years ago by Four Guys Standing Around Singing, an a capella group along the lines of The Bobs I saw in Chicago in the late ’80s. All I remember is a fragment of lyric: “Under the El tracks/Where the bums hang out…”

Remarkably, the four guys are still singing. At least, some guys using that name. But not The Bobs, who hung it up in 2017. Saw them in Nashville in ’86. My favorite of theirs was “Bus Plunge.”

At 4636 N. Ravenswood is the former Bull Dog Lock Co. building, now home to a number of small businesses, including Starshaped Press, which was a Chicago Open House site. It is a letter press specialist, with a number of cool vintage letter presses and other equipment in its small office, including racks and racks of metal type and many examples of its work.

Such as postcards.

And small wonderful posters.

I bought a few other postcards (the one above and the poster, as ads, were free). It’s good to support such remarkable little operations. If the place hadn’t been so crowded, we would have spent longer.

Also, we had somewhere else to go: 1807 W. Sunnyside, where that street crosses Ravenswood. Also known as the Airstream Building. It too was an Open House site.

Airstream? That’s because perched on its roof, three floors up, is an early ’60s Airstream.

“The former industrial structure was renovated in 1989 to house Chicago Associates Planners and Architects, a design cooperative led by architect Edward Noonan,” the Open House web site says.

“Looking to add a whimsical amenity for employees, Noonan asked city officials for permission to hoist the trailer onto the roof, but was not taken seriously. With a rented crane, the trailer was lifted onto the roof, drawing an emergency response when the CTA mistook it for a derailed Brown Line train. In the years since, the Airstream ‘Conference Center’ (complete with rooftop deck and skyline views) has hosted numerous events and parties.”

Nice views from the deck.

The airstream itself, as I saw it.

Inside.

If I had a party to throw, in Chicago, and wanted to spend a little money, it’s a place I’d consider.

Churches After Lunch

Posted on October 17, 2023 by admin

“Nothing matters but the weekend, from a Tuesday point of view.”

Lyrical wisdom from The Kings, a Canadian band who had only one hit in the United States that I know of (or two, depending on how you count the songs). I don’t think I’m going to look it up to confirm that notion. It’s been more than 40 years, after all, and that level of detail doesn’t matter much.

Lunch on Saturday was in Uptown, specifically near the Argyle El station, which is home to a sizable number of Vietnamese immigrants and their descendants. Once upon a time, at a small strip center in the neighborhood, there was a pho restaurant that had the distinction (for me) of being the first place I tried pho. It was the also first restaurant we ever took Lilly to, when she was exactly a month old in December 1997. I’m glad to say she slept through the entire experience in her detached car seat, next to our table. The other patrons were probably glad, too.

That restaurant is gone – or has moved, its space taken by the next-door Vietnamese grocery store – so we repaired to a North Broadway storefront pho spot. Actually much larger than a typical storefront, with room in back for a small stage for live music, colorfully decked out with a handful of small spotlights ready for action, as we saw at some of the larger restaurants in Saigon. Lunch was filling and as good as pho almost always is. Who can ask for more?

After lunch we walked the few blocks to Saint Thomas of Canterbury Catholic Church in Uptown. I lived not far away for a number of years, but had no idea it was there.

Another unusual church style, at least for Chicago. Colonial Meeting House, though looking a bit more Georgian than that, my sources tell me. An architect name Joseph W. McCarthy, not to be confused with the number-one proponent of McCarthyism from Wisconsin, did the design. He’s yet another noted designers of churches, back when that was a growth industry.

Many of the shrines in the church reflect the local population, as shrines tend to do.

In case you want to know who the 17 Martyrs of Laos are, a poster at the back of the nave tells you. Martyrs figure prominently at Saint Thomas, fitting right in for a church honoring a churchman murdered in a church.

Later in the day, in fact the last place we visited on Saturday, was St. Ita Catholic Church in Edgewater, at the edge of my old stomping grounds in Andersonville.

“St. Ita Parish was founded in Edgewater in 1900. On October 23, 1923, His Eminence George Cardinal Mundelein commissioned Architect Henry J. Schlacks to design and build a new church specifically in French Gothic design for St. Ita Parish,” the local parish web site says. I’ve seen a number of his churches.

“The current church, which opened in 1927, was the capstone of Henry Schlacks’ distinguished career as an ecclesiastical architect…. The open tower appears airy and delicate, yet it contains 1,800 tons of Bedford limestone and rises to 120 feet in height. Elaborate Gothic detailing marks the altar, but the medallion windows containing more than 200,000 pieces of stained glass, designed by Schlacks, are the real highlight of the interior.”

I have a vaguely remember visiting the church on a cool rainy Saturday – sometime in the late ’80s, maybe? — but not lingering for too long inside because a wedding was in progress. Last Saturday, cool and rainy, another wedding was in progress.Some other time I might see those many pieces of glass, artfully arrayed.

Churches Before Lunch

Posted on October 16, 2023 by admin

As we navigated the back streets of the North Side of Chicago late on Saturday morning, the rain kept on coming, leaving scatterings of yellow and brown leaves and sizable puddles.

Tucked away in the Lincoln Square neighborhood was our second site for the day, and first church: Luther Memorial Church.

As a congregation, Luther Memorial dates from the late 19th century, and was one of the first English-speaking Lutheran congregations in Chicago. Currently part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.

The present Indiana limestone church building rose on the site in the 1920s, designed by E.E. Roberts and his son E.C. Roberts, who were Oak Park architects. Not as well known these days as The Genius, apparently, but they did a lot of work in their day.

Behind the altar is the Christus Window, original to the church in 1926. Blue Christ, I’d call it.

The side and back windows were installed about 40 years later, and they look like it.

That isn’t a criticism. The 1960s are derided as a time of poor design, and it might be in some things – children’s animation comes to mind – but not in the stained glass I’ve seen. More abstract than in previous decades, often, but with their own elegance, though my images don’t quite capture it.

By the time we left Luther Memorial, the rain had slacked off. Our second church of the day is one we used to know, over in the Ravenwood neighborhood, since we attended it sometimes in the late ’90s: All Saints Episcopal. Rev. Bonnie Perry was there at the time, and I understand she was instrumental in keeping the church open. These days she’s bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan.

An example of stick style, rare in Chicago, designed by John Cochrane, who also did the Illinois State Capitol and the Iowa State Capitol, among many other projects. The church was built in 1883, when Ravenswood was still a suburb of Chicago.

By the time we got there, the church was closed to Open House visitors. Getting ready for a wedding, we realized, when we say people dressed for a wedding going in. An elegant interior, as I recall.

The National Cambodian Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial

Posted on October 15, 2023 by admin

It’s mid-October and in Chicago at least, that means Open House Chicago, which we’ve attended most years over the last decade. We’ve visited churches, synagogues, temples, office space, libraries, factories, theaters, museums and more as part of the event. Open House is a worldwide phenomenon.

Rain fell heavily Friday night, and was forecast to last into Saturday morning – which it did, also obscuring whatever partial eclipse was above the clouds. The weather didn’t stop us from going out, though it did slow us down some, since driving in the city is like driving through glue even in the best conditions. To make things easier, I decided to head into the neighborhoods east from O’Hare – relatively accessible from our suburb – and on to Lakeview near Lake Michigan, as familiar as a neighborhood can be in Chicago, since we used to live there.

Our first stop was west of Lakeview, however, in the much less familiar Lincoln Square. It was still rainy and quite windy when we arrived at the National Cambodian Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial, which I hadn’t known about till I saw it on the Open House List.

The weather discouraged outside photos, but I did manage to capture the mural on the side of the museum building, which faces west on Lawrence Ave.

“Cambodian Color” (2017) by Brandin Hurley and Shayne Renee Taylor.

A detail near the museum entrance, and out of the rain.

It’s a small museum, only a few rooms, but enough to provide some testimony and images about the Cambodian genocide – the evacuation of Phnom Penh, forced collectivization, blunt-instrument murders to save ammunition, Tuol Sleng and other death prisons, the Khmer Rouge turning on itself when an agrarian utopia mysteriously didn’t appear — the whole horrorshow of ideology gone barking mad. A somber place to visit, but that should be an element in one’s wanderings.

One of the docents, a young woman I took to be an American of Cambodian ancestry, asked me if I knew anything about the period. Unfortunately, I do. Not unfortunate that I know, but that there was anything to know. I remember reading reports of mass murders in “Democratic Kampuchea” while the Khmer Rouge was still in power and of course after its overthrow, when much more detail came out. I told her simply yes, that I’d heard of it.

The memorial is in the back room of the museum.

Not really visible unless you look very closely is Khmer script up and down the glass panels. A lot of it, in other words. Names.

“Designed within an environment for quiet contemplation utilizing glass, stone, water, and light effects, the memorial includes the individual names of thousands of relatives lost by Cambodians all over the United States,” the museum web site says.

Along North Avenue, Chicago (Murals &c.)

Posted on August 30, 2023 by admin

My stroll along North Avenue on Saturday gave me an opportunity to look more closely at murals I’d seen before, but only from the vantage of a moving bus window, which isn’t optimal. Murals have always been around – one I looked at is over 50 years old – but I can’t help feeling that now is pretty much a golden age of murals, at least as far as North American cities are concerned: commercial, polemic, vernacular, idiosyncratic, ghost, ars gratia artis and uncategorizable.

To start: not actually on North Avenue, but steps away, a new-looking advert on a wall under the Damen El station.

An eatery about as Chicago as can be, but I wonder. What are the odds the restaurant will outlast the mural? It’s a tough game, doubly so considering how many other joints in the city offer dogs and burgers. Chicago’s a city of dogs and burgers, you could say.

Equally new, equally commercial, on the opposite wall (a detail).

Not a painted mural, but built-in concrete relief mural and adjacent art on North Ave., making a wholly nondescript brick building into something notable.

“Life-Tree” or “Arbol de Vida” (1989), according to writing on the wall. No random reference, that.

The building traded for $2.9 million in 2017, according to the now defunct DNAinfo Chicago, closed in a fit of anti-union pique (and whose workers later formed the nonprofit Block Club Chicago, which is still around).

The work was created “by artists John Pitman Weber and Catherine Cajandig,” the DNAinfo Chicago archive says. “They were helped by nine community-based youth artists, who contributed other works along the same wall.”

As pretty much all Chicago streets do, North Avenue also features works by those who don’t sign them, unless I’m missing their code (and I probably am). Such as this entire graffiti’d wooden fence.

Encouraging one and all to – bake?

There’s something vaguely unsettling about this rendition of a famous cartoon rodent. The more I look at it — an unholy melding of Mickey and Goofy?

A graffito, see the bottom, that encourages warm interpersonal relations.

As this mural seems to do as well.

Not a mural or graffiti, but advertising posters tell a story as well, such as the rise of Korean chicken in North America (and corn dogs, too).

And the persistence of tobacco, in spite of everything arrayed against its use.

I don’t think I’ll take up premium cigars, or any cigars, but I have to like an outfit whose web site quotes in large script: “If a man says he is not afraid of dying, he is either lying, or he is a Gurkha,” which is attributed to Indian Army Chief of Staff Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw (d. 2008).

Soon I came to North Avenue’s most intriguing mural, and certainly the most polemic of the ones I saw. One not to be appreciated from a bus, whose title I had to look up later: “La Crucifixion de Don Pedro” (1971). It’s a little hard to get an unobstructed view, unless you’re up close.

Left.

Center.

Right.

“ ‘La Crucifixion de Don Pedro’ was painted in 1971 by three community artists: Mario Galan, Jose Bermudez, Hector Rosario, and was commissioned by the Puerto Rican Arts Association,” notes Clio. “It is the oldest Puerto Rican mural in the city. The mural shows Don Pedro Albizu Campos being crucified between Lolita Lebron and Rafael Miranda. Campos was the Vice President [sic] of the Puerto Rican nationalist party, which fought for Puerto Rican Independence. Lebron and Miranda were also members of that party.”

The backdrop is a Puerto Rican revolutionary flag raised against the Spanish in the 19th century.

My sources don’t say who’s depicted as the figure stabbing Campos, paralleling the soldier stabbing Christ, but my guess would be Luis Muñoz Marín, first elected governor of Puerto Rico and generally considered the architect of the Estado Libre Asociado status of the island that the nationalists so bitterly opposed. Enough to organize violent uprisings in the 1950s, which landed Campos in prison most of the rest of his life. In the case of Lebron and Miranda, they wounded a number of Congressman by opening fire in the U.S. Capitol in the pre-metal detector days of 1954, which earned them about a quarter century each of hard time in the federal prison system.

Another polemic on North Avenue.

Not polemic.

Unless you count the comment about ICE that Homer wouldn’t be able to see, even if he weren’t sloshed.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Chicago