California Leftovers

I drove by Randy’s Donuts near LAX, but didn’t stop to buy any. The first place I did go in Los Angeles, practically right off the plane on February 21, was Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles on W. Manchester Blvd. Mm, good. Almost as good as Maxine’s in Indianapolis, which is high praise.

After I ate chicken and waffles there — a late lunch — I determined that I didn’t have time to go all the way to Venice and stroll around the canals before I had to be back in Ladera Heights to check into my short-term residence. So Venice, California, remains an unfulfilled ambition. Like Venice, Italy.

Instead I drove over to Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery, which is on the edge of Culver City. It has everything it needs to be an aesthetic cemetery — land contour, trees and other greenery — except upright stones or much funerary art.

Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery, California

Still, I found Jimmy Durante. That’s something. Inka Dinka Doo.

Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery, California - Jimmy Durante grave

I had lunch my first full day in Los Angeles at Grand Central Market downtown. Once a market, now it’s mostly a food hall. A popular place. The likes of which will be largely empty for a while now? This pic is status quo ante.

A large selection of eats. With some good neon.Overpriced, though. While I was eating, rain started to fall outside. Heavy for about half an hour. That was the only rain during my visit.

Saw all too many of these on the sidewalks of LA.
I even saw a man kick one hard in disgust.

I was within sight of the Santa Monica Pier when in Santa Monica, but I didn’t have the energy to actually visit the pier. Didn’t want to put up with the crowds, either.
Santa Monica Pier Feb 2020I did see this.
End of Route 66 Santa MonicaThat would be the opposite of the sign in downtown Chicago.

The East Garden at the Getty Villa includes this fountain.
East Garden Getty Villa“The enchanting central wall fountain represents a replica of a mosaic and shell fountain from the House of the Large Fountain in Pompeii,” Alice’s Garden Travel Buzz says. I’ll take Alice’s word for it.

On my return from Texas on March 1, I had a fine view of Chicago as we flew in. First to the south of O’Hare, which was visible as a whole, then across the city and over downtown — I didn’t know that was allowed — and out over Lake Michigan, where we turned. The flight back to O’Hare crossed over the North Side of Chicago, so I got a sky-high view of Wrigley Field, and then lower and lower over the suburbs near O’Hare. I recognized some of the larger roads. Some intersections. A building or two. Wait, what’s that pyramid-shaped building?

The guy next to me on my flight home from Texas rubbed his hands with sanitizer three or four times over two hours. After touching the seatback tray table, I think. If one impact of the novel coronavirus is to encourage people to wash (or clean) their hands more, that’s a good thing.

More Skulls and Bones and Things

Here’s one reason the Field Museum might have jacked up its admission in recent years: it spent $8.3 million in 1997 to acquire the fossilized remains of the T. rex nicknamed Sue. Or at least part of that hefty figure, since other organizations, corporations and HNWIs also chipped in, I understand.

From 2000 to 2018, Sue stood in Stanley Field Hall. Mostly bones, but also a number of replacement replicas for a few missing ones. Even so, the museum and other sources call Sue the most complete T. rex ever discovered, at about 90 percent.

These days, Sue has her — his — gender actually uncertain, so its — own room in the Griffin Halls of Evolving Planet, a multi-room exhibit about the evolution of life on Earth, complete with various fossils to illustrate various periods. Naturally, most of the crowds gravitate to the dinosaur bones, and not just Sue, but the creatures in the large Elizabeth Morse Genius Hall of Dinosaurs, which you reach before you get to the T. rex room.

Lots of impressive fossils there. Such as a triceratops. Can’t very well have a dinosaur collection without one of those.
Or an apatosaurus.
Or a stegosaurus.
Sue not only has its own room, there’s narration and a minor light show as the narrator describes different parts of the beast, the better for the audience to ooh and aah.
The head mounted on the rest of the skeleton is actually a replica. Sue’s head is kept in a separate box.
If I remember right, that’s the way it was when Sue was in Stanley Field Hall.

Sue isn’t the last of the fossil parade. Time marches on, a meteor kills the dinosaurs, and mammals increase in size. This fellow looks pretty large, even for a bear.
Known as Arctodus, or a short-face bear, it lived in Pleistocene North America but vanished about 11,600 years ago.

An Irish Elk.
How did they hold their heads up? Strong neck muscles, I guess. More subtle minds than mine have taken up that very question. Amusingly, Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “The Irish Elk, like the Holy Roman Empire, is misnamed in all its attributes: it is neither exclusively Irish nor an elk.”

A mastodon.
They are all examples of animals that didn’t survive the most recent Ice Age unless, as Gould mentions, Irish Elk survived into historic times. Just goes to show that no matter how tough you are, along comes a little climate change or hunters with pointy sticks and soon all that’s left is your bones, if that.

Field Museum ’20

Our main destination on Saturday was the Field Museum. Been awhile since we’ve been there. Looks as sturdy as ever.An important consideration was that the museum charges no admission for Illinois residents during the entire month of February, representing a $69 savings for us. A savings in theory, because it’s unlikely we would have ever paid full price. Maybe half that. I don’t have the numbers at handy, but I strongly suspect that ticket prices have significantly outpaced inflation over recent decades, and that sticks in my craw.
Not that you don’t get a high-quality natural history museum for that price.

Something I didn’t know before: the main hall, the grand, sweeping main hall of the Field Museum, which measures about 21,000 square feet, and whose ceiling reaches up 76 feet, actually has a formal name: Stanley Field Hall. He was Marshall Field’s nephew, but more than that, president of the museum for a long time, from 1908 to 1964.
T. rex Sue, the museum’s most famed — and marketed — artifact, isn’t in the hall any more. Those bones occupy their own room these days, more about which later.

Rather, an exhibit called Máximo now lords over the hall, at 122 feet across and 28 feet tall at the head. Not actual bones, but a model cast from a titanosaur discovered in Patagonia, and considered its own species, Patagotitan mayorum, only since 2018.

Still, it’s impressive.
After the main hall, we spent time at the Granger Hall of Gems, the Malott Hall of Jades and at a display of meteorites. Last time I visited the museum, we were promised that there would soon be a permanent exhibit of pieces of the Chelyabinsk Meteor, which fell to Earth in Russia in 2013.

Here they are.
Not that large, but I think every bit as interesting as the dinosaurs. I’ve always had more fondness for astronomy than paleontology.

Here’s something you don’t see every day, which is pretty much the reason you go to a place like the Field.
Sculptures of Malvina HoffmanWe’d happened onto an exhibit called Looking at Ourselves: Rethinking the Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman. It’s a remarkable group of sculptures.

“In the early 1930s, the Field Museum commissioned sculptor Malvina Hoffman to create bronze sculptures for an exhibition called The Races of Mankind,” the museum says. “Hoffman, who trained under Auguste Rodin, traveled to many parts of the world for an up-close look at the ‘racial types’ her sculptures were meant to portray.

“By the time the exhibition was deinstalled more than 30 years later, more than 10 million people had seen it — as well as its misguided message that human physical differences could be categorized into distinct ‘races.’

“Today, 50 of Hoffman’s sculptures are back on display — with a new narrative.”

Namely, that Hoffman did some remarkable sculptures of individuals, not illustrations of racial typologies. There’s some indication that Hoffman herself considered the whole typology idea as malarkey, even as she was creating the artwork.

“In her letters from the field, Hoffman told museum curators that she wanted to illustrate the dignity and individuality of each of her subjects,” the museum says.

“The Looking at Ourselves exhibition team believed that naming Hoffman’s previously unnamed subjects was an important way of illustrating that individuality. They spent months poring over Hoffman’s and her husband’s letters and journals, and consulting the work of others who have researched the Hoffman collection over the years, to find the subjects’ given names.

“For subjects whose specific identities remain unknown, the team worked with anthropologists to correctly pinpoint the names of their ethnic groups.”

The figure above, climbing a tree, is a Tamil man from southeast India, identity unknown. This is a Nuer man from Sudan, also unknown.
A group from various parts of Indonesia, put together by the artist. The two standing figures were modeled on Ni Polog and I Regog, a sister and brother from Bali. The others are a man from Madura and one from Borneo, identities unknown.
A Hawaiian: Sargent Kahanamoku, an aquatic athlete and member of a well-known Hawaiian family.
Glad we got to see Hoffman’s work. Ann and I spent a fair amount of time looking at them and discussing them. An idea for those who would destroy discredited statues: re-contexturalize instead.

Chicago Chinatown ’20

One of these days, I might pop into the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Museum on S. Wentworth Ave. in Chinatown. It has to count as one of the more obscure museums in metro Chicago, and that adds some interest right there.

But when we went to Chinatown on Saturday, we took a pass on Sun Yat-Sen and had lunch next door instead, at a newish-looking place called Slurp-Slurp. Had some tasty noodle soups there.
Chinatown wasn’t the main destination that day, but it was more-or-less on the way, and always a dependable place to find something good to eat, and things to see. Even if there isn’t a parade.

We arrived at the Cermak-Chinatown El Station and saw something fairly new, visible from the stairs leading to the ground.
Done in hand-made ceramic tile by Indira Freitas Johnson, installed in 2015.

“The centerpiece of the upper panel features Fook (Fú in Mandarin), the symbol of good fortune or happiness,” the CTA says. “According to custom, the symbol is placed upside down and against a diamond-shaped background. Within the context of the stairway Fook (Fú) may be translated as ‘good fortune arrives.’ ”

Not far from the station is a screen wall.

It looks like there had once been a small sign in front of the wall to explain it, but that’s now completely blank. Not to worry, a very short amount of Googling tells me that it’s a Nine-Dragon Wall, a miniature version of such a wall in Beihai Park, Beijing (the Winter Palace).

Wiki tells us that there are various other walls of this style, including one at the Forbidden City that I have no recollection of seeing. Then again, it’s a large place. There’s also one at the Mississauga Chinese Centre in the Toronto suburb of that name.

Besides lunch, we did a short walk on Wentworth Ave., since the weather wasn’t too bad for the pit of winter. Not pit of winter-ish at all, with temps above freezing, though sometimes winds would kick up. Wentworth is the original hub of Chicago’s Chinatown.

Chicago Chinatown Wentworth AveThere’s evidence of continuing cross-cultural pollination.

About a half block off Wentworth is St. Therese Chinese Catholic Church. Unfortunately, the sanctuary was closed.
St Therese Chinese Catholic Church ChicagoSome distinctive Chinese features are visible outside.
St Therese Chinese Catholic Church ChicagoLater I learned that the church had been built just after the turn of the 20th century as Santa Maria Incoronata, to serve an Italian congregation. By the 1960s, the demographics of the neighborhood had changed enough for it to become St. Therese, serving a Chinese congregation.

Richard III

In our lifetime, only five years ago, Richard III got a spiffy tomb at Leicester Cathedral, after centuries in an anonymous grave not far away. That came to mind when Ann and I went into the city on Saturday to see a reading of Richard III at the Newberry Library.

It was the same setup as last year, when we saw Titus Andronicus: actors reading their parts, holding scripts, while moving around one of the library’s large rooms, in front of and to the side of the audience. Outside wind blew and rain fell, just above freezing, so that might account for the slightly smaller crowd than last year, but even so a lot of people came out for the tale of murder, intrigue, more murder, double-dealing and a violent denouement. Everything you need in an Elizabethan history play.

Very talented actors, so the lack of any set or costumes didn’t matter. Christopher Prentice, who played Richard, did the demented villain to just the right pitch, and moved himself in ways that didn’t exactly suggest a hunchback, but weren’t quite normal either, and strangely menacing.

One more thing. Here’s the mission statement of the Richard III Society, which was instrumental in finding the king’s bones in our time: “In the belief that many features of the traditional accounts of the character and career of Richard III are neither supported by sufficient evidence nor reasonably tenable, the Society aims to promote, in every possible way, research into the life and times of Richard III, and to secure a reassessment of the material relating to this period, and of the role of this monarch in English history.”

I’m all for historical inquiry, but even so — Richard III gets to be a villain. The literary Richard III is more robust than any historic portrait of him is ever likely to be.

Twelve Pictures ’19

I always take many more pictures than I post in any given year. Here are some from this year to close out the decade. Back to posting around January 5, 2020. That year sounds so far in the future, at least for those of us who vaguely remember Sealab 2020 — and yet here it is.

Near North Side Chicago, January 2019

San Antonio, February 2019

Downtown Chicago, March 2019

Elmhurst, Illinois, April 2019

New Orleans, May 2019

Arcola, Illinois, June 2019

Pittsburgh, July 2019

Oak Park, Illinois, August 2019

Midland, Michigan, September 2019

Charlottesville, Virginia, October 2019

Schaumburg, Illinois, November 2019

Millennium Park, Chicago, December 2019Good Christmas and New Year to all.

Millennium Park Skating Rink ’19

Walkabouts in Chicago aren’t so bad in December as long as temps hover above freezing and the wind isn’t too strong. Those are the conditions we had over the weekend, so we spent a while downtown. Took a look at the Millennium Park Christmas tree.
Millennium Park ChicagoWe wandered past the skating rink, just below the Bean.
Millennium Park Chicago

The rink is also in shadow of much larger structures.
Millennium Park ChicagoEarlier, on a street a few blocks to the west, a family asked me directions to the Bean. I think I gave them good directions. I’m glad that even in the age of Google Maps — a really good urban navigation aid — people are still asking other people for directions.

The Hot Sardines

Usually one visit to the city per weekend is enough. On Saturday, the trip to see The Merchant of Venice involved a drive to a part of town where parking is easy and an El stop is nearby, so we could ride the rest of the way to a neighborhood with far more difficult parking.

Not long ago, I found out that the Hot Sardines were going to be in town the same weekend — but on Sunday — so I decided that I wanted to see them, too. At least driving all the way was an option, since the band was playing at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Lincoln Square. We parked a half a block away.

The only reason I know about the Hot Sardines is YouTube. To be more exact, YouTube algorithms that suggest one thing and another. When it comes to music, that’s almost always very little outside a narrow range, but occasionally something unusual gets through. Probably listening to electroswing a few years ago made the bots suggest the Hot Sardines’ to-the-ceiling-lively version of “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen.”

They’re just as lively in person. Hot is fitting. Hot jazz and lots of it, in a roughly two-hour show with no intermission and two encores, with frontwoman Elizabeth Bougerol and bandleader Evan Palazzo each hopping their jive — peppy vocals and animated piano, respectively. Other band members jammed on trombone, trumpet, bass, tenor saxophone, clarinet and drums, sometimes including conga. Often enough each of them had solos in which to shine, and shine they did, every jack jazzman of them.

There was also a fellow on stage with no instruments. Sitting in a chair in his fancy duds and fine hat. (Of course, they all wore fancy duds — Bougerol in gold lame and Palazzo in powder blue.) As soon as the first number started, his feet started tapping, and you noticed the taps on his shoes. He was the band tap dancer. Did he ever move, sometimes just sitting down, but often on his feet, moving all over the stage, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap with arms and legs moving every which way, adding his distinctive rhythm to the band. Who thought of adding him? (A.C. Lincoln by name.) What an inspiration.

Some tunes were more familiar, some less, all good. Among others, the Hot Sardines played “Some of These Days,” a Sophie Tucker number, “Bill Bailey Won’t You Please Come Home,” “Lulu’s Back in Town” and “Caravan” (take note of A.C. Lincoln doing his thing in that last video). “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” was the first encore.

As we entered the theater, I noticed a few small signs here and there explaining that the show was partly sponsored by the European Union. Odd, I thought, then forgot about it.

About mid-way through, Bougerol, who had a pretty good between-song patter, mentioned it. “Seems like one of our sponsors is the European Union,” she said, making a gesture that told us, How strange.

“Must be because I’m a French national,” she said.

Listening to her speak or sing in perfectly idiomatic and unaccented English, you’d have no clue. Apparently she was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris, but spent time in Ivory Coast and Canada while growing up — as well she might, since her grandfather was a Canadian jazzman named Bobby Gimby, who wrote a song I might have sung as a six-year-old had I lived in Ontario instead of Texas.

Bougerol did four or five of songs in French — just as jazzy as anything in English — but the only one whose title I know was “I Wanna Be Like You,” or whatever the French equivalent is. She said she knew it from watching the French version of Disney’s Jungle Book as a child.

The band lineup is a little different in this video, but the tune and lyrics are the same.

She also told the amusing story of how the band formed. Namely, the beginning of the musical collaboration between her and Palazzo, who met by answering the same Craigslist ad for a jazz jam. They discovered they both knew a relatively obscure Fats Waller song, “Feet’s Too Big,” and played it at the jam.

Then they played it for us in the audience.

Now that’s a fun song. Fats Waller’s recording of it is here.

The Merchant of Venice

On Saturday Ann and I went to the North Side of Chicago to the Pride Arts Center to see The Merchant of Venice as performed on a small stage by Invictus Theatre Co., which did a first-rate job.

Besides enjoying the steady stream Shakespearean turns of phrase — as with any of his works — by seeing that play, we were also dipping our toes into the unending argument about how to interpret the play and especially Shylock.

The modern urge is to want Shylock to be sympathetic, and he is sometimes, such as in his righteous anger. Yet sometimes he’s not, as when he bemoans not his lost daughter, but the money she took with her. I doubt that Elizabethan audiences concerned themselves much with understanding Shylock, however nuanced Shakespeare made him. They just were looking to be entertained, and probably booing and hissing at Shylock was fully part of that.

But we bring centuries of further history with us when we see the play. Invictus referenced this explicitly by setting the action in Fascist Italy, with costumes specific to that period — including the stylish dresses of upper-class women of the time, but also blackshirts. The setting added an extra layer of menace to the situation Shylock found himself in, making him easier to sympathize with.

Also emphasized: Shylock as an outsider. Joseph Beal, who did a fine turn with the part, played it with a Yiddish accent, which might not have meant anything to Venetians of 1600 or even 1938, but which marks him apart from the rest of the cast to our ears.

There are comic elements in the play, of course, some of which actually were funny, especially when Portia’s suitors mulled which box to pick to win her hand. A young actor named Jack Morsovillo briefly stole the show as the comic Arragon in that scene. Though it wasn’t all that funny, the play also featured the comic conceit of two men unable to recognize their wives simply because they were pretending to be men.

In this production, a silent addition marked the end of the play. Jessica, the daughter who abandoned Shylock, emerges on one side of the stage, looking miserably torn about the decision she’s made. Shylock emerges on the other side of the stage, looking at her. Are they going to reconcile? Quarrel? Before anything is said, two blackshirts come from behind Shylock, grab him and take him away.

Quite an ending, even if appended for a modern audience, for a play that’s technically a comedy. So the production was squarely in this new(ish) tradition — since the 19th century, I believe — of making Shylock more victim than monster, but hardly all victim. Well done, Invictus.

Recent Eats

During Open House Chicago last month, we saw this.
Taste of Thai Town ChicagoNothing to do with the event. It’s a Thai shrine of some kind. Not sure whether it counts as a spirit house, but the building behind it (from this angle) is a Thai restaurant — Taste of Thai Town at 4461 N. Pulaski. Previously, the building housed a Chicago PD station. We ate lunch there and were well satisfied with the meal.

In Virginia last month, Ann and I ate at Moose’s by the Creek in Charlottesville. It’s a large diner, decorated with a couple of enormous moose heads, many antlers and other reminders of sizable members of the deer family. Had some good sandwiches there, and when I paid, the woman at the register — it might have been co-owner Melinda “Moose” Stargell herself — said she wanted to take our picture under a major pair of antlers.

For Moose’s by the Creek’s Facebook page. Lots of customers have their pictures there. She said we were free to download it for ourselves, so here it is.

Moose by the CreekI had to be careful not to bump up against any of those points. Moose’s by the Creek also gave us some stickers.

We had dinner the first evening in Richmond at Belmont Pizzeria in the Museum District, a pleasant old neighborhood not too far from VCU, so maybe students eat its pizza too. Mostly it was takeout, with the large kitchen completely visible from the ordering counter, but there were a few tables, so we sat down to eat as a parade of people came in to get their orders. It was a popular joint, full of wonderful smells, and when we got our pizza — which had shrimp on it — we found it to be wonderful too.

Belmont Pizzeria has a curious bit of wall art on the outside.

Belmont Pizzeria Richmond

Even without the art, it was the best meal I had in Virginia, though the hipster waffles were a close second and, as I said, Moose’s was good too.