Winter Storm Brewing

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The latest from the National Weather Service, early Sunday evening (November 25), for my location:

A powerful winter storm will bring blizzard conditions and very heavy snow to portions of the area. Accumulations will exceed a foot in some areas, including across the northwest suburbs and portions of north central Illinois. Most importantly, conditions will deteriorate rapidly this evening from northwest to southeast. Snowfall rates will exceed 2 inches per hour tonight which will allow for quick accumulation on roadways.

Or to put it in less official terms: Winter says he’s back, and he’ll not be trifled with.

I made a point of getting home in the late afternoon today after taking Lilly back to UIUC, before dark and before the rain turned into snow. Reports on the radio told me that the storm was then slamming into Missouri and was headed east, more or less. It all gave some urgency to the drive.

Still, I took time to take Lilly to a Chinese restaurant in Champaign for lunch before I left. Across the street from the place I noticed what you might call a hyperlocal billboard. It says The Chief. Yesterday, Today, Forever. (Punctuation added, but not all caps, because I’m that kind of guy.)

The Chief isn’t mentioned by name, but I know the sign wants passersby to be nostalgic for Chief Illiniwek, mascot of UIUC from 1926 to 2007. Currently the school has no mascot, or symbol, not officially anyway.

Lilly at 21

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Good Thanksgiving to all. Back to posting on Sunday the 25th, probably.

Lilly has turned 21. To mark the occasion, recently we went to the same restaurant as last year at her request, and by chance sat at the very same table.

No pics of the food this year. A similar array of sushi. The place, called Sushi Para, does wonderful sushi. One difference this year was that Lilly ordered hot sake to go with the meal, expressing surprise that there was such a thing. Heated in winter, chilled in summer, I told her.

At home we had a cake made by Yuriko. A big chocolate torte actually. Rich chocolate with a dash of edible gold leaf and chestnuts.

Lilly had a good time with it.

At one point, before she blew the candles out, the 2 fell over still lit, releasing rivulets of wax onto the chocolate. Ann sneezed at about the same time.

Once the wax had hardened, however, it was easy to remove.

A Pair of Chicago Cathedrals: Holy Name and St. James

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Spent a little while in the city this weekend and had time to visit two major churches. Cathedrals, in fact. Holy Name Cathedral, which is the seat of the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, and St. James Cathedral, which is the seat of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago. They are a block apart and both only a few blocks west of Michigan Ave. on the near North Side.

The Gothic Revival style Holy Name rises over State St.
“After the Great Chicago Fire destroyed both the Cathedral of St. Mary (Madison and Wabash streets) and the Church of the Holy Name (site of the present Cathedral), a new cathedral was needed,” the Chicago Architecture Center says…. “the new Holy Name Cathedral was dedicated in 1875.”

More recently, the roof was restored after a 2009 fire did serious damage to the cathedral.
St. James Cathedral is another Gothic Revival structure, rising above Wabash St. It too is the result of rebuilding.
“A few weeks after the splendidly redesigned church was formally rededicated in 1871, the Great Chicago Fire erupted, leaving nothing but the stone walls, the Civil War Memorial, and the bell tower, whose bells gave warning to the neighborhood of the fire,” the church’s web site says.

Wiki says that the upper reaches of the bell tower are still stained with soot from the Fire, but I didn’t really see it.
Maybe the soot was obscured by trees from my vantage. Anyway, here are some interior shots of St. James.

More Than I Need to Know About UK Advent Calendars

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November has been much like December so far this year, and occasionally too much like January. On Saturday morning, the view of the back yard was like so.

That’s not even the first snow that stuck. That happened more than a week ago. It melted, but even so, no snow at all till December would be better.

The dog doesn’t care.

Sometimes I get a press release so completely out of left field that I have to wonder about how I got on the list. Here’s a sample of one that arrived recently:

“55.6% of UK consumers surveyed stated that they intend to purchase at least one advent calendar this year, up from 53.4% last year, says GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

“While chocolate advent calendars remain the most popular type purchased, with 73.6% of advent calendar shoppers stating their intent to purchase this product, this is down on last year as consumers purchase more extravagant advent calendars as a way to treat themselves or others ahead of the Christmas festivities…

“For retailers considering launching an advent calendar, more focus should be placed on non-chocolate advent calendars, with both beauty and alcoholic advent calendars increasing in popularity this year particularly as more brands and celebrities introduce their own advent calendars. The average spend on advent calendars is also up year-on-year highlighting the boost in sales that advent calendars can provide.”

I assume that advent calendars are a more important holiday sales item for British retailers than U.S. retailers, though of course they’re a known quantity here.

Am I also to understand that British retailers are trying to up their game when it comes to advent calendars? Apparently so. A quick search for “celebrity advent calendars” turns up the likes of this. Naturally, the likes of The Guardian carped about luxe calendars.

Probably the advent calendar cartel — it has to be a cartel — wants more Americans to buy them, too. Aldi, which is owned by shadowy German billionaires, is rolling out wine advent calendars for the U.S. market for the first time this year. A thing that makes you go hmm.

Hull-House

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Besides trees and a little public art and some brutalist buildings, here’s something else I saw at the University of Illinois at Chicago on Sunday, the likes of which I’d never seen before.
It’s a knife-sharpening cart, complete with cobble stones, on display on the second floor of Hull-House, with a sign that says: “Julio Fabrizio, an immigrant from Castelvino, Italy, to Chicago in 1919, built this knife-sharpening cart in the 1930s for his peddling services. Pushing it through the streets of his Near West Side neighborhood, Fabrizio used it to repair umbrellas and sharpen scissors, saws, and knives.”

Since I was already at UIC on Sunday afternoon, I decided to drop by for a look at Hull-House, which is more formally called the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. All the years I’ve been in Chicago area, I’d never gotten around to it.

The current structure is a fragment of the 13-building complex in its heyday 100 years ago, but at least it’s a restored version of the original building, which dates back to 1856. By the time it became a settlement house in 1889, the house was fully part of the surrounding immigrant slum and so exactly where Addams and Hull-House cofounder Ellen Gates Starr wanted to be. The organization’s physical structure grew from there. The later buildings, just like much of the neighborhood, were destroyed in the 1960s to make way for the UIC campus.

“In the 1890s, Hull-House was located in the midst of a densely populated urban neighborhood peopled by Italian, Irish, German, Greek, Bohemian, and Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants,” the museum says.

“Jane Addams and the Hull-House residents provided kindergarten and day care facilities for the children of working mothers; an employment bureau; an art gallery; libraries; English and citizenship classes; and theater, music and art classes. As the complex expanded to include thirteen buildings, Hull-House supported more clubs and activities such as a Labor Museum, the Jane Club for single working girls, meeting places for trade union groups, and a wide array of cultural events.”

The museum is small but well designed to convey how the organization furthered the goals of the Progressive movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, besides providing numerous social services in the immediate neighborhood.

“Among the projects that they helped launch were the Immigrants’ Protective League, the Juvenile Protective Association, the first juvenile court in the nation, and a Juvenile Psychopathic Clinic (later called the Institute for Juvenile Research),” the museum notes.

“Through their efforts, the Illinois Legislature enacted protective legislation for women and children in 1893. With the creation of the Federal Children’s Bureau in 1912 and the passage of a federal child labor law in 1916, the Hull-House reformers saw their efforts expanded to the national level.”

Addams’ bedroom is part of the exhibit.
Fairly spare, though there’s a portrait of Tolstoy on the wall (no artist named that I could see, but it looks like a part copy of a 1901 portrait by Ilya Repin).
Apparently the Russian was an inspiration to Addams, though when they met in 1896 the event was less than comfortable for the American reformer.

The museum isn’t all about Addams or even the other settlement workers. Other people associated with the organization are given their due. One in particular caught my eye: Morris Topchevsky (1899-1947), immigrant from Poland when it was still part of the Russian Empire, painter, etcher, lecturer, writer and red.

Some of his works are on display.

Topchevsky took classes at Hull-House and later taught there. Seems that he also spent time in Mexico in the 1920s, becoming friends with Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco, though too early to have hung out with Trotsky.

Artists Monument, UIC

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My walkabout through the University of Illinois at Chicago campus on Sunday wasn’t exhaustive, so I can’t say for sure, but I got the impression that UIC could use a few more works of public art or fountains or memorials. That was one reason I was glad to see the Armistice memorial unveiled that day.

Just as I was about to leave — I’d arrived by taking the Blue Line to the UIC-Halsted station and so headed back toward the station — I noticed some public art on campus. A fairly large piece, too. Multicolored.

And long.

Eighty feet long, as it happens, and eight feet on each of the other two dimensions. It reminded me at once of a high cube shipping container, though with more color. The work is called “Artists Monument” (2014), by retired University of Illinois at Chicago art professor Tony Tasset. Acrylic panels on steel and wood.

The work was installed at this location only last year, after spending time at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and Grant Park in Chicago. According to the university, the work isn’t going anywhere else.

Up close, it’s easy to see the many names on the work.
All together the names of 392,485 artists. How the artist came up with that number, and how long it took to compile them, I couldn’t say. Best not to inquire too closely.

I picked one at random to look up: Atilla Atar, a living Turkish artist, it seems.

(Formerly) Like Going to School in Brasilia

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Back in the late 1980s, I knew a fellow who was pursuing an MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Academically, the place was strong, he told me. “But it’s also like going to school in Brasilia,” he said.

The last time I spent much time on the UIC campus was at roughly the same time, though I’ve visited places on the edges since then. So both before and after the Armistice Day event, I took a stroll through campus to revise my mental image of the place.

Turns out that UIC isn’t quite the brutalist wonder that it was 30 years ago or, presumably, in the mid-60s heyday of brutalism when Walter Netsch designed the school. In recent years the campus has been softened somewhat, especially with the addition of green space and trees.

But the campus still has its brutalist bones. Such as the vaulting University Hall, one of the original buildings and apparently home to some peregrine falcons since the late ’90s. As brutalism goes, not bad.

The Student Residences & Commons South, while also considered brutalist, has some style to it as well.

So does the campus’ latest structure, a residential hall that’s still under construction overlooking the Eisenhower Expressway on the north end of the east campus. More of an homage to brutalism than the thing itself, I’d say.
It’s a 550-bed project, designed by SCB, that will be completed next summer. The university is eager to have more students live on campus, it seems. Back in the days of a hardcore brutalist campus, I doubt that was a priority, but it is now.

The Dedication of the Armistice Centenary Memorial at UIC

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On Sunday morning I went downtown to the University of Illinois at Chicago campus and attended a short ceremony to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armistice, held by the university’s Honors College as the end of a series of events marking the occasion.

My old friend Neal mentioned it last summer and as it happened, Michele, his wife, organized the November 11 event. She did a good job.

The event included the posting and retrieval of the colors, some short remarks, poetry from the period, and of course at 11:00 a moment of silence, followed by the playing of Taps.

Michele read the two poems. This is her preparing to read.
One was “Grass” by Carl Sandburg, dating from 1918.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work —
I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.

Also, verse by Dame Mary Gilmore, lesser known in this country, but renowned in Australia. Also 1918.

They are not dead; not even broken;
Only their dust has gone back home to the earth:
For they — the essential they — shall have rebirth
Whenever a word of them is spoken.

About 30 people attended the event, which was held at the campus’ Memorial Grove, a renovated green space. A small tent had been erected in case of rain, but Armistice Day this year in Chicago was sunny, though fairly cold, just above freezing. So I parked myself just outside the tent, where I could sit in the sun.

Guillaume Lacroix, Consul General of France in Chicago, said a few words, echoing those of President Marcon during Armistice Day ceremonies at the Arc de Triomphe only a few hours earlier. Words about the dangers of nationalism, which doubled as a pointed rebuke against you-know-who, a subtext that was lost on no one.

Also speaking were a representative of the Italian consulate and the dean of the Honors College, Ralph Keen.

A Peking lilac (Syringa pekinensis) tree had been planted near the sidewalk a few days earlier, next to the new memorial. During the event, the memorial was covered with black cloth topped by poppies.

The Morton Arboretum says that “The Peking lilac is a dependable urban tree and a great choice even for parking lot, boulevard, and parkway plantings. Native to Asia, it is both hardy and beautiful, with attractive, amber-colored, peeling bark. In early summer, when many shrubs and trees are done blooming, it has large, creamy-white, honey-scented flower clusters.”

Toward the end of the event, the French Consul General, the dean of the college, and the Italian representative lifted the black cloth from the memorial.

A granite block with a burnished aluminum plaque.
According to Neal, the block had once been part of the former skywalk system around campus. When the skywalk was dismantled in the early 1990s, the removed materials were stored. They are still being recycled for newer structures, such as the memorial stone but also some nearby benches installed when the Memorial Grove was renovated a few years ago.

Armistice Day 2018

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Has it been 100 years? That milestone might merely be a quirk of the fact that we use base 10, but I still think it’s worth an extra measure of reflection on the man-made cataclysm that came to a halt on Armistice Day.

But the Great War wasn’t that long ago. Not really. All of my grandparents were alive for it — were grown men and women, and in one case, my mother’s father, in France when it ended.

I took this picture a few years ago at Cantigny Park, former estate of Robert McCormick, who was so deeply affected by his experience in the Great War that he preferred to be known as Col. McCormick even in civilian life, and named his property after the Battle of Cantigny, in which he participated.

I probably didn’t mean to capture Ann in that picture, but I did. A child amusing herself within sight of a memorial to bravery in the face of a bloodletting she could not imagine, and that her father can only dimly imagine, as informed by books and movies.

Somehow, though, I know November 11, 1918, is a special moment in the history of mankind, and we would do well to remember it. In Breakfast of Champions (1973), Kurt Vonnegut wrote a remarkable passage about Armistice Day:

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Big Lou’s Really Big Pizza

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The evening after the funeral all of the family members in town got together for dinner at a place in east San Antonio, way down on W. W. White Road, Big Lou’s Pizza. My nephew Sam had heard about it and took care of the logistics.

The logistics involved ordering a 42-inch pizza ahead of time. Here is everyone at the table posing with a 42-inch pizza.

I’d never seen a pizza that large with my own eyes. I’m certain that went for everyone else at the table. According to one source anyway, it’s the second-largest restaurant pizza in Texas: bested only by a larger one that Big Lou’s makes.

I’m glad to report that it was a good New York-style thin pie. For my part, I ate about a piece and a half. I don’t think anyone else at the table ate any more than that, so there was pizza enough for two boxes of leftovers.