El Centro, Northeastern Illinois University

Posted on April 20, 2015 by admin

I came across this sign on Saturday afternoon. That’s the first usage of “gender neutral” I’ve ever seen at a restroom. (There ought to be a hyphen, but never mind.) I wondered whether it’s an up-and-coming usage to replace “unisex” or merely is supplementing it.

The gender-neutral restrooms — one of three options, along with standard gendered rooms — were at El Centro, a satellite campus of Northeastern Illinois University that was completed only last year. It was one of the schools we visited as participants on the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s Schools by Bus tour. Unlike the Churches by Bus tour last fall, only one bus was enough for everyone. As the docents explained, this was the first tour of its kind by the CAF, compared with the churches tour, which has been going on for 20 years.

The schools were interesting, but the churches were more beautiful. There’s no escaping the utilitarian nature of a school, even if the overall design is good. Still, El Centro was well worth a look. The glass structure’s covered with fins: blue on one side, yellow on the other. Stand at one spot and it’s yellow.

Move, and it starts a transition to blue.

Then it’s blue. Or move the opposite way, and it goes from blue to yellow.

Just as remarkably, the building manages to work well despite standing hard by the always-busy Kennedy Expressway.

Last fall, Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin wrote that, “Chicago architect Juan Moreno, a Colombian native who in 2011 won attention for a striking charter school built for the United Neighborhood Organization in Chicago’s Gage Park neighborhood, wisely saw the Kennedy as an opportunity, not a monster.

“Instead of setting his three-story, steel-framed building far back from the highway and sticking a parking lot in between, Moreno slid El Centro almost alongside the road. Rather than turning out an ordinary box, he bent his long, linear structure like a boomerang to turn its southern end toward drop-dead views of the downtown skyline. Then he sculpted its exterior for reasons both formal and functional…

“In the crucial move, 20-inch-wide fins — their faces blue to the south, yellow to the north — are layered atop El Centro’s glass skin, ostensibly to shield the building from the sun’s glare. But there’s no denying that the fins endow the building with visual rhythms that express the highway’s rushing motion and reveal the influence of the Pritzker Prize-winning London architect Zaha Hadid.”

Black Hawk & John Deere 2003

Posted on April 19, 2015 by admin

In April 2003, we took a short trip to north-central Illinois. We made a stop at the Black Hawk statue, whose formal name is “The Eternal Indian,” by Lorado Taft in Lowden State Park in Ogle County.

As I wrote then, “the statue, made of concrete, is about 50 feet high and stands on a bluff overlooking the Rock River and some of the town of Oregon. The head and neck represent an Indian, looking pensively off into the distance. His arms are folded in front of his chest, and from there on down the statue is less representational, but is clearly a human form.”

We also took a look at the John Deere Historic Site in Grand Detour, featuring a blacksmith demonstration.

“The re-created smithy was… the exact size of John Deere’s original Grand Detour shop, not including a latter addition, and presumably the original didn’t devote about a fifth of its space to a railed-in section where tourists stood. Otherwise, it was an evocative re-creation. A lot of iron & steel tools and implements on shelves, hanging on pegs, scattered around on various tables and benches. A bellows and a coal-burning furnace, which was glowing. A real anvil and some mean-looking, anvil-beating tools at hand.”

Thursday Misc.

Posted on April 16, 2015 by admin

More spring on the way: a baseball game in the field visible from our back yard; budding bushes; woodpeckers; almost warm days, though I hear that next week won’t be so warm. Such is the seesaw of spring.

Ad leaflets are appearing at my door, promising yard service. One recent one was a large Post-It-like notice, stuck to my door, offering to keep my lawn to bourgeois standards for only $25 a week. That wasn’t quite the wording, but never mind. I suspect unkempt lawns are going to be the fashion in a few decades anyway. Either because a new-found appreciation for the aesthetics of long grass, or maybe because in a hotter and drier climate, long grass will be harder to grow, and therefore more prized.

I found out today that the Colorado House Speaker is named Dickey Lee Hullinghort. Say what you want about Colorado pols, they’ve got some interesting names, including Gov. John Hickenlooper as well. (The President of the state Senate is a more prosaic Bill Cadman, though).

Recently I did a short squib about a drive-in movie theater that managed to raise the money necessary to re-fit with digital projection equipment, and so will be able to stay open (that’s a blow for Americana, or something). Then I thought, we should go to a drive-in. The family’s never been to one. There’s a functioning drive-in in the suburb of West Chicago, which isn’t the one I wrote about, and which already has digital projection.

Trouble is, I don’t want to see Home, which is one of the features, and I really don’t want to see Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, which is the other. Previews for that movie have been showing up on YouTube recently, and as far as I can tell, its formula is Kevin James Falling Down = Funny. I’ll go along with that, except substitute “≠” in that formula. (Also, what kind of name is Blart? Did they pick it because it rhymes with “fart”?) Maybe something better will come along.

Consider the Fish

Posted on April 15, 2015 by admin

Take raw fish.
Apply heat. Turn over a few times. Wait.
That was the protein part of dinner. The second picture might not look that appetizing, but the fish were tasty. The exact chemistry of how that happens, I couldn’t say. Just another one of those daily details that usually passes unrecorded.

Tom Dewey at the Resale Shop

Posted on April 14, 2015 by admin

A curious thing: I’ve been self-employed for 10 years as of today. When I got to my office on the morning of April 14, 2005, I found that the company’s HR woman had come in from New York — and so had the publisher. I didn’t appreciate it at that moment, but I’m glad they had the good graces to fire me in person.

Here’s something I found in a resale shop the other day. Odd what you can get for $1.

Published by Doubleday & Co. in 1952, Journey to the Far Pacific is a forgotten tome by Republican politico Thomas E. Dewey, who (considering the country’s disregard of its own history) is at some risk of being forgotten himself. Then again, he’s probably one of the better-known presidential election losers. If you’re going to lose, do it in a surprising, spectacular way.

The book’s blurb notes: “A few months ago New York’s Governor Thomas E. Dewey set out on an extensive tour of the Orient to view conditions at first hand and to form for himself impressions of the peoples and nations who stand between Communism and the California coast. During his trip he traveled forty-one thousand miles, visiting seventeen republics, kingdoms, territories, and colonies.”

The book’s maps are interesting. Of course they are. Note that on the cover, communist-controlled territory is red-orange, including half of the Korean peninsula but not Taiwan, which naturally is called Formosa.

The map that illustrates the main title page shows the “Chinese Republic” as including all of the modern PRC except Manchuria — which is separated as if it were independent — as well as Mongolia, which is merged into China as if it weren’t independent (it was a Soviet satellite, but still technically independent in the early 1950s). Ulaanbaatar is called “Urga.” It’s easier to spell, anyway.

Unfortunately, there’s no index to look things up conveniently. Not sure when I’ll get around to actually reading the thing, but for now owning it’s enough.

Dewey’s on the back cover. I never appreciated how oval his head was. There’s a monograph in that somewhere: head shapes of the men who ran for president. Maybe one shape or another tends to win.

That’s a Yousuf Karsh photograph of Dewey. Not one of his better-known images. Not bad, but it doesn’t have the luster of some of his more famed shots. Then again, maybe it was hard to make Dewey look like he had even an ounce of charisma.

Opening Notes of Spring

Posted on April 13, 2015 by admin

The opening strains of the northern Illinois spring symphony have begun. The grass greened up almost overnight last Thursday after a sizable amount of rain. Large puddles were left over, too, though that’s not necessarily a harbinger of spring.

After a few days, it was merely a soggy, muddy patch. The dog enjoys the mud. She’s been with us two years now.

We took a walk with the dog at the Poplar Creek Forest Preserve on Saturday, and I heard throaty frogs awake and (presumably) singing for a mate. On Sunday, I heard the faint strains of “Turkey in the Straw” from my office, and went to the front door to take a look. Sure enough, it was an ice cream truck.

Speaking of spring: A note to Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Hillary Clinton, and Marco Rubio (so far): I don’t want to hear about your efforts to become president. It’s the spring of 2015. I don’t even want to hear about it in the spring of 2016. It can wait till the fall of that year. Except maybe the candidacy of Vermin Supreme.

Philip Glass 1985

Posted on April 12, 2015 by admin

Thirty years ago this evening, I went with some friends to see Philip Glass conduct some of his music in Nashville. At least I think that’s what he did. I have an image in my head of him standing in front of musicians, waving his hands, and them playing. But maybe he sat down at a keyboard. It’s a been a long time.

I can’t remember why I went, but I’m sure it was worth $2. At some point, I owned Glassworks on CD, which is considered his most popular recording, but I don’t remember when I got it. Since I didn’t own a CD player until ca. 1988, I didn’t have it when I saw the concert. One of my housemates during my senior year in college might have had it on vinyl, or possibly even reel-to-reel. A lot of odd things were floating around that house.

Also, I saw Koyaanisqatsi sometime in the mid-80s. That might have been before this concert. Or after. Things get jumbled over the decades.

Oddly enough, I heard a little of a Philip Glass interview last week on the radio. He must be making the rounds to talk up his memoirs, which have just come out. The NYT reviewer of the book asserts that “enough time has passed for him to sell his own distinct musical language, developed through a blending of Western and Indian traditions, in which repeated musical cells form patterns to hypnotic effect. To many listeners it remains perplexing and even infuriating, but the influence of Mr. Glass’s music, called Minimalist despite his protests, is pervasive in all genres of music.”

Sure. If you say so. I like the idea of his music better than the music itself, though I haven’t spent much time with the likes of “Satyagraha” or “Einstein on the Beach” in the last 30 years. Philip Glass composes the kind of music that you start playing, listen to for a few minutes, and then realize 30 minutes later that it’s been in the background for nearly 30 minutes.

I didn’t fall asleep during the concert — like I dozed off at a Pat Metheny concert once — but I vaguely remember being tired. After the concert, it being a Friday night, we repaired to a nearby Italian restaurant. Who then showed up for dinner, a few tables away? Philip Glass and a small entourage. We noticed his presence, but didn’t approach him. Just as well not to pester publicly known people in public — can’t say he was exactly famous in this case, but still.

The Lincoln Park Conservatory

Posted on April 9, 2015 by admin

The Lincoln Park Conservatory dates from the 1890s, when Gilded Age Chicago wanted a splashy new Crystal Palace-like conservatory. Architect Joseph Lyman Silsbee designed the structure in collaboration with architect M.E. Bell, and their work still stands in the early 21st century.

It’s one of the city’s two great conservatories, with the other in Garfield Park. Somehow I feel that Garfield Park’s the greater of the two, though not by much. I can’t argue that position very thoroughly, since I’m no authority on plant diversity or glass-and-iron construction or conservatory aesthetics, but never mind. I’m always glad to stroll through the Lincoln Park Conservatory, as we did on Easter Saturday. It’s luxuriant.

It also sports some odd plants. How is it that I visit conservatories periodically and always manage to see plants I’m certain I’ve never seen nor even heard of? For instance, the aptly named Sausage Tree (Kigelia africana), native of tropical Africa. Granted, it’s been a few years since I was at the Lincoln Park Conservatory, but you’d think I’d remember the Sausage Tree. But no.

The plants have also made themselves at home even on the conservatory structure.

There’s also a fern room. Ever conservatory worth its salt has one of those.

And a place for orchids. A Vanda orchid (Vanda orchidaceae).

One more thing. We took a 151 Sheridan bus from Lincoln Park to Union Station for our return home, and at a Michigan Ave. bus shelter, I saw this from the bus window.
Anti-Rahm bills plastered on an ad. He won the runoff election on Tuesday, but at least the electorate made him work for it, by obliging him to win a runoff. No Daley ever had to do that.

The Lincoln Park Zoo

Posted on April 8, 2015 by admin

Easter Saturday was a pleasant day in Lincoln Park in Chicago. The view south from the Lincoln Park Conservatory at about 2:30 pm.

This is how old our children are. Us: Want to go to the Lincoln Park Zoo on Saturday? Them: Nah, we’d rather stay home.

So they did, while Yuriko and I went to the city, enjoying lunch at the always delicious Ann Sather Swedish restaurant on Belmont (serving cinnamon buns imbued with ambrosia), a short visit at the DePaul Art Museum — only open since 2011, so we’d never seen it — a walk to Lincoln Park, a stop at its conservatory, and then some time at the zoo. Except for the restaurant, all free attractions.

At the other end of the lawn pictured above is a statue. Of course I had to take a picture of that.

It’s Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller. Why is he here? Y asked. There used to be a lot of Germans here. After World War II? No, after 1848. Also a bad time in Germany. They wanted out — and came to places like Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and… central Texas. The statue is a copy of one near Schiller’s birthplace in Marbach, Germany, by Ernst Bilhauer Rau. It’s been in this spot in Chicago for nearly 130 years.

I’ve been visiting the Lincoln Park Zoo occasionally since 1984, when my friend Rich took me there during my Labor Day weekend flyup to Chicago from Nashville. This time around, many of the animals weren’t outside — still too cool for them, or maybe it was their day off — but we saw some of the primates, the sea lions, and a few felines.

I was astonished then, and I am now, that there’s no admission. That probably adds to the crowds, especially on a pleasant weekend in spring, but the zoo holds its crowds well. It isn’t like Disneyland — you don’t have to wait an hour in line to see a lion.

Leo here would periodically park himself on top of this rock. He had an audience.

Mostly he would lie there (being a cat, after all), but sometimes he’d open his mouth, and he also roared a bit. It didn’t quite sound like the roars you hear in movies.

The Rock Island National Cemetery & Confederate Cemetery

Posted on April 7, 2015 by admin

These days, visiting the Rock Island National Cemetery means crossing over to Arsenal Island (formerly Rock Island) in the Mississippi River, which is located smack in between all four of the Quad Cities. The island is occupied by a U.S. Army facility, and has been the site of one kind of military installation or another for about two centuries. You pass through a checkpoint where a soldier looks at your driver’s license and asks your business, and then it’s a short drive the cemetery.

It was a quiet place on the morning of March 28, a Saturday. It’s probably quiet most of the time.

The entrance to the Rock Island National Cemetery used to be marked by this piece of ironwork.

These days, the historic gate marks the entrance to the cemetery’s Memorial Walkway, which features about 30 memorials to various branches of the armed forces, or groups related to them, such as Pearl Harbor survivors, Mexican War veterans, female veterans, Gold Star Mothers, and local veterans organizations. I was glad to see that the Seabees have a stone there.

Not that I have a special connection to the Seabees, though I used to work with a fellow who said that his brother, who had died in Vietnam, had been a Seabee. It’s nice to see lesser-known battalions get their due.

The walkway leads to the grave of Thomas J. Rodman and his wife, Martha Ann. The NPS says that “Brigadier General Rodman, the ‘Father of Rock Island Arsenal,’ was an officer during the Civil War and was the arsenal’s commanding officer from 1865 to 1871…

“Rodman invented the construction method used in producing [Rodman guns], which involved casting the cannon barrels around an air- or water-cooled core, ensuring that the barrel cooled and hardened first. This allowed the cannon to withstand higher pressures, making them stronger, safer, and more reliable, while also greatly increasing the lifespan of the cannon.”

Not far from the Rock Island National Cemetery is the Rock Island Confederate Cemetery, “final resting place for nearly 2,000 prisoners of war who died in captivity from disease and the poor living conditions of the camp,” the NPS says.

It’s a much simpler cemetery, with only one memorial besides the gravestones, a six-foot obelisk erected only in 2003. (Some work around it seems to be under way now.) It says:

In memory of the Confederate veterans who died at the Rock Island Confederate Prison Camp. May they never be forgotten. Let no man asperse the memory of our sacred dead. They were men who died for a cause they believed was worth fighting for, and made the ultimate sacrifice.

Erected by the Seven Confederate Knights Chapter #2625 and the Daughters of the Confederacy.

The Rock Island prison camp, incidentally, is where Margaret Mitchell put character Ashley Wilkes after his capture in the service of the CSA. So by a peculiar circumstance, he’s better known for being there than any of the actual prisoners.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling