Thursday Debris

Posted on September 11, 2014 by admin

Distinctly cool today. We’re in for a run of cool days — enough to use the heater. A bit of fall too soon, but there will be some more warm days before there aren’t any more until next year.

The local skunk population seems to be way up. I smell them often when driving along. At night, I’ve seen a few live skunks scurrying down the street – the first time that’s ever happened since I moved to the northwest suburbs over a decade ago. By day, I see dead skunks on the road.

Not long ago, early one evening, I went out the front door and there on the driveway was the distinct black-and-white of a skunk. I stopped instantly. It stopped too. I figured it would do what most animals do in the face of a larger animal – get away. Advance on the animal, get sprayed. Otherwise, not. I was right, it hurried away.

A headline spotted today, via Google News: “Islamists Are Not Our Friends.” An Op-Ed in the NYT. Glad you cleared that up, headline writer. I would drag out Captain Obvious, but that seems a little adolescent, as many Internet memes are. Why is he a captain, anyway? Patterned after Captain America and the even greater Captain Canuck, I suppose, but isn’t –man the common suffix for a superhero, even a satirical one? Greater minds than mine will have to sort these questions out.

Another head: “DC teacher has sixth-graders compare George Bush to Adolf Hitler.” That from Fox, which is probably trying to highlight the shocking things that public school teachers do, especially if they have the temerity to belong to a union. But then again, you can compare the two (and I’m assuming they mean the younger Bush, but it doesn’t matter). Conclusion of such a comparison: Bush wasn’t much like Hitler. No major American politician has been, is, or can be. Well, maybe Huey Long had a bit of der Führer in him, but we’ll never know for sure.

From Newser, which seems to be a Weird News site: “Waitress Hits Lottery, Won’t Quit Job.” Why is that news? Is that supposed to be salt-of-the-earth admirable in some way? Or just the mark of a shriveled imagination? It just begs for an Onion satire. They’ve probably already done it: “Waitress Hits Lottery, Says Take This Job and Shove It.”

Product Thursday, example 1: Vigo Black Beans & Rice. In the convenient 8 oz. package, “completely seasoned & easy to prepare,” as the package says. Also: an Authentic Cuban Recipe. For a thing you cook in boiling water for a while – and that’s pretty much all there is to it – Vigo Black Beans & Rice is pretty tasty. Everyone liked it. Now if I could only remember where I bought it.

Example 2: Pirate’s Booty. Yuriko, impressed by a sample being given away, bought a bag of the white cheddar snacks. Shrug. Coincidentally, Lileks had a comment about the bag this week: “I have always hated this guy. Partly for the way he’s drawn. Partly for the fact that the food within is overpriced and insubstantial. But mostly for THAR BE GOOD, which he says on the larger packages. It just bothers me.”

The cartoon pirate on the bag does look like a Hanna-Barbera reject, but the stereotypical pirate verbiage doesn’t bother me particularly. After all, Talk Like a Pirate Day is coming up soon (next Friday). Like National Gorilla Suit Day, it comes but once a year.

Speaking of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon factory, I saw the introduction to the original Space Ghost the other day, probably for the first time in well over 40 years. Why? One of those things that happens when you’ve got a lot of other, more important things to do. One thing struck me about it. Space Ghost sure seemed to fight a lot of man-sized insectoid creatures.

The Illinois Centennial Monument

Posted on September 10, 2014 by admin

Rain in the morning, sun in the afternoon, drizzle in the evening. At least that’s variety. And it isn’t cold yet.

Henry Bacon’s well known for the Lincoln Memorial, as well he should be. He isn’t very known for the Illinois Centennial Memorial Column, a.k.a., the Illinois Centennial Monument, in Logan Square in Chicago, which is on the Northwest Side. I’d never taken a look at it up close until recently.

It’s a little forlorn. One of those monuments with passed by thousands daily, noticed by few if any, and marked with a little graffiti just to drive home the point. Then again, it’s been quite a while since the 100th anniversary of Illinois’ statehood, which was in 1918.

It’s a Doric column, and according to one source at least, made up of 13 solid marble segments based on the same proportions and scale as the columns of the Parthenon colonnade in Athens (or Nashville, come to think of it). The eagle on top, done by sculptor Evelyn Beatrice Longman, evokes the one on the Illinois state flag.

She did the reliefs along the base of the column as well, depicting Indians, explorers, farmers and laborers.

Plus a few figures from Antiquity. I’m pretty sure that’s Hermes holding a train and a steamship, maybe offering them to the laborer holding the hammer, and it looks like Ceres is to the workingman’s left. On Hermes’ right – is that Eratosthenes? He looks Greek enough, and he’s got a globe, fitting for the father of geography and the first person to more-or-less figure out the circumference of the Earth.

It’s too much to expect an Illinois Bicentennial Memorial in a few years, but may this one can be cleaned and restored for the occasion.

Ukrainian Village Exteriors

Posted on September 9, 2014 by admin

Cool in the evenings, warm during the day. Cicadas by day, crickets by night. We’re on the September slide. But the weather won’t be bad for two months or so, unless the Yellowstone Caldera blows or something like that.

As I mentioned yesterday, St. Stanislaus Kostka on West Side of Chicago is open all the time. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for a lot of other churches in the city. I understand the reason, of course: thieves and vandals and other miscreants. So sometimes all that’s visible to the casual visitor is an exterior, and that by itself can be a fine thing. Still, you want to go inside.

Earlier this summer we went to Ukrainian Village, a neighborhood in Chicago still populated by many Ukrainians, but arrived too late in the day to take a look inside St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral. Now 100 years old, I’ve read that it was modeled after St. Sophia in Kiev, with magnificent icons, mosaics and stained glass windows inside.

It has 13 domes surmounted by crosses – one for Jesus, 12 more for the Apostles, most not visible at this angle. Only a short walk from St. Nicholas is SS Volodymyr & Olha Church, a Byzantine-looking sort of place, which only dates from the early 1970s, but which harkens back a good many centuries.

It too was closed that afternoon.

But the sun was shining bright on the mosaic above the entrance, which depicts the Christianization of Ukraine. I hope it was in the summertime when that happened.

St. Stanislaus Kostka

Posted on September 8, 2014 by admin

One reason I wanted to peek inside St. Stanislaus Kostka Catholic Church not long ago when I was in Chicago – it’s not far east of Humboldt Park – was that I knew it would be open. I knew that it would be open because the iconic monstrance inside is the focus of 24-hour Eucharistic adoration. Here it is.

I found a press release, of all things, that describes the monstrance on the occasion of its unveiling in 2008: “The gilded receptacle has taken sculptor Stefan Niedorezo two years to carve from linden wood using Renaissance methods. The iconic monstrance is nine feet tall and weighs 700 pounds. Malgorzata Sawczuk applied the gilding and serves as project conservator.

“The monstrance depicts the Blessed Mother as the link between the old and new covenants. She stands over the Ark of the Covenant, a sacred container that held the stone tablets inscribed with the 10 Commandments. Mary is ‘clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars,’ as depicted in the Book of Revelation (Rev 11:19 and 12:1-2).”

St. Stanislaus Kostka is largely a Polish parish (masses in Polish, English and Spanish these days), and the 1870s structure is near the Kennedy Expressway. So near, in fact, that it was slated for demolition to build the highway back in the 1950s, when the Robert Moses school of road building was still in style (whatever’s in the way, knock it down). Ultimately the road was shifted to avoid the church, in a feature known as the Rostenkowski Curve, though apparently that politico (U.S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, who died a few years ago) wasn’t instrumental in saving the church. A lesser-known local politician, Bernard Prusinski, was.

Whoever kept it from being bulldozed, I’m glad. Your don’t have to be Polish or Catholic to appreciate such a handsome brick church, which I understand recalls major Polish churches of earlier centuries, though in fact designed by an Irish architect, Patrick Charles Keely. He also did Holy Name Cathedral on the near North Side, as well as a lot of other Catholic churches in a lot of places. The man was riding the wave of Catholic immigration to the U.S. in the latter decades of the 19th century, which spurred the demand for more churches.

Note that it only has one belfry. Lightning took another one down 50 or so years ago, but I like the asymmetry.

The church also has some superb glass in its ornate interior.

Taman Negara 1994

Posted on September 7, 2014 by admin

Taman Negara is a large national park — more than 1,675 square miles — slap in the middle of the Malay Peninsula. I understand the name means “national park” in Bahasa Malaysia. As a park, it’s older than the independent nation of Malaysia, starting as a smaller game reserve in the 1920s and taking its present size in 1938 as King George V National Park. That gives you an idea of who persuaded the sultans of Kelantan, Pahang, and Terengganu to designate parts of their realm as parts of the park. Even now, the park is technically in all three of those Malaysian states.

Reaching Taman Negara from Kuala Lumpur involved a bus, and then a boat trip upriver to park lodging, about three hours each. We stayed at the cheapest part of the lodging — a small row of bunkhouses sleeping four each along the river — a few days in late August/early September 1994.

You might think it’s a jungly place. It is.

There wasn’t much else to do at Taman Negara besides walk through the rainforest, some of it on steep ground, since the park is in the Titiwangsa Mountains. We enjoyed the walks, and then idled back at the lodge’s common building, where we took out meals and read.

Various sources tell me that rare mammals live in the park, such as the Malayan tiger, crab-eating macaques, and Sumatran rhinos, but we didn’t see anything so remarkable. Rare mammals with any sense stay away from people tramping through the jungle. Bugs, on the other hand, seek you out in the rainforest.

Our bunkmates for a couple of days were a young Australian man and woman, a couple. For some reason, she was at pains to stress the independence and fortitude of Australian women, which I don’t doubt at all. Maybe she was trying to impress the point on Yuriko, who doesn’t doubt it either.

So I found it a little funny when she make a loud fuss about an insect that had gotten into the cabin: a gorgeous green-and-brown (I think) walking stick-like thing, maybe six or eight inches long, with large insect eyes. She insisted that we, the Australian fellow and I, kill it. We didn’t want to do that, so if I remember right, we shooed the creature onto a piece of newspaper and tossed it out the door.

One day we did the canopy walk. The park bills it as the longest one in the world. Maybe it is. It is way up in the trees, maybe 60 or 80 feet.

Of course it wobbled. Yuriko says she’s not sorry she did it, but doesn’t want to do another one.

Humboldt Park Bronzes

Posted on September 4, 2014 by admin

As you’d expect, there’s a statue of Baron von Humboldt in Humboldt Park in Chicago, and it’s a good one, a ten-foot bronze by Felix Gorling. He’s standing next to a globe and an iguana. I like those details. But by the time I got there, my camera’s battery was exhausted – the modern equivalent of running out of film. Public Art in Chicago always features better pictures anyway, so here’s Humboldt.

The baron and I go back a ways. I did a report on him in the fifth or sixth grade. His science is impressive, but what I think really impressed me at the time, and still does, was how he successfully explored parts of South America without much in the way of modern equipment (though I guess what he had was state-of-the-art).

Also in Humboldt Park – another legacy statue of the long-gone German population in the area – is a bronze of Fritz Reuter by one Franz Engelsman. My knowledge of Fritz Reuter is meager, and at first I confused him with the fellow who started the news agency (Paul Reuter, as it happens).

The park district tells us that “Reuter is best known for Otto Kanellen, a volume of prose stories. But he is also remembered for writing against political oppression, a subject he understood first-hand. The Prussian government sentenced Reuter to death for high treason because he had participated in a student-run club promoting political activism. This was commuted to imprisonment, and despite poor health, Reuter continued to write throughout his years in prison. Reuter’s work included several comic novels that were popular with many of Chicago’s German immigrants.

“On May 14, 1893, more than 50,000 Chicagoans of German descent attended the dedication ceremonies. While Reuter is less well-known to the wider community than Goethe or Schiller—for whom monuments were also dedicated in Chicago parks—the impressive attendance at this dedication shows the great enthusiasm for Fritz Reuter within the city’s German community. Four bronze relief plaques of scenes from Reuter’s best known works originally ornamented the granite base of the monument; however, they were all stolen in the sometime in the 1930s and have never been recovered.”

Germans weren’t the only ones living near Humboldt Park more than 100 years ago. More from the park district: “On October 12, 1901, tens of thousands of flag-waving Scandinavian-Americans participated in events to celebrate the monument’s unveiling. Despite heavy rain that day, the festivities included a parade and a two-hour ceremony in Humboldt Park.”

The monument this time: a bronze of Leif Ericson on a granite bolder, the work of a Norwegian come to Chicago around the time of the world’s fair, Sigvald Asbjørnsen.

A determined “We’re off to Vinland, men!” look on his face? Maybe. Sure, among Europeans, he got to America first, not counting nameless Vikings who may or may not have been shipwrecked there. If I’m ever out that way, I’ll definitely take a look at L’Anse Aux Meadows. But it’s a historical curiosity more than anything else, and this kind of memorial speaks more of modern ethnic pride than anything else. Even if the Vikings had told anyone else, which they didn’t, what could have 11th-century Europe done with that information?

Humboldt Park

Posted on September 3, 2014 by admin

The day before we went to Millennium Park, which was full of people, I went by myself to Humboldt Park, which is also in Chicago, for about an hour’s walkabout. Few people were there, even though it was the Friday before a holiday weekend, but maybe the population picks up on Saturdays and Sundays. Even so, the place seemed underused, considering how gorgeous parts of it are. Especially along the banks of the “prairie river” that runs through part of it – a landscape element by Jens Jensen, whom I’ve run across before.

“In 1869, shortly after the creation of the West Park System, neighborhood residents requested that the northernmost park be named in honor of Baron Freidrich Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (1759-1859), the famous German scientist and explorer,” the Chicago Park District says. “Two years later, completed plans for the entire ensemble of Humboldt, Garfield, and Douglas parks and connecting boulevards were completed by William Le Baron Jenney, who is best known today as the father of the skyscraper. Having studied engineering in Paris during the construction of that city’s grand park and boulevard system in the 1850s, Jenney was influenced by French design.

“The construction of Humboldt Park was slow, however, and the original plan was followed only for the park’s northeastern section. Jens Jensen, a Danish immigrant who had begun as a laborer, worked his way up to Superintendent of Humboldt Park in the mid-1890s… [Eventually], deteriorating and unfinished areas of Humboldt Park allowed Jensen to experiment with his evolving Prairie style. For instance, Jensen extended the park’s existing lagoon into a long meandering ‘prairie river.’

“He commissioned Prairie School architects Schmidt, Garden, and Martin to design an impressive boat house and refectory building which still stands at one end of the historic music court.”

The boat house is a fine structure.

The view of the lagoon from the boat house is nice as well.

A few people were fishing from the edge of the lagoon. I was looking at it. That was the entirety of the human presence there at that mid-afternoon moment. It was a little hard to believe that 9 million or so people live within 30 or 40 miles of this body of water except, of course, for the ambient traffic noise from nearby Humboldt Blvd. and Division St.

Jazz Fest and Big New Head ’14

Posted on September 2, 2014 by admin

While I was eating lunch on my deck today — the opportunities for that will be rarer as the weeks ahead pass — the dog took a sudden interest in one of my lower pant legs, sniffing and snorting with gusto. I noticed a small black ant crawling on it. The dog had too. In a moment, she’d eaten the ant.

I’ve seen her chase flies and bees (and lucky for her, never catch any), but this was a first. It didn’t seem to be a biting kind of ant. Ants on the hoof, snack food for dogs.

Did some gadding about in Chicago over Labor Day weekend. On Saturday, Yuriko and Ann and I went to the city and met my nephew Dees, his girlfriend Eden, and an old friend of theirs, and eventually ended up at Millennium Park. Dees and Eden were visiting from Texas, staying with friends here. That reminded me a bit of the Labor Day weekends of my youth, when I usually went out of town — to Chicago (before I lived there), New York, Boston, and Washington DC — though one year (’85) my old friends came to me, and we gadded around Nashville.

There’s a new face near Michigan Ave.

It’s called “Looking Into My Dreams, Awilda,” by Jaume Plensa, the Spaniard who did Crown Fountain, the twin towers of alternating faces that spit water in the warm months, which isn’t far from the new sculpture. The Tribune says that “Awilda is 39 feet tall, made of marble and resin; the internal frame is fiberglass. She arrived from Spain in 15 pieces, then was bolted together.” It’ll be there until the end of 2015.

The Bean was as popular as ever.

We spent a while at the Chicago Jazz Festival at Pritzker Pavilion. The last time I went to the Chicago Jazz Festival was – 1996? Maybe. This time we left fairly early, but were around long enough to hear Ari Brown, Chicago sax man of long standing. At 70, the man can blow.

Still hot in the late afternoon, and a bit humid, but it was a good place to sit and listen. It helped not to get rained on, which was a distinct risk over the weekend.

Behind the stage rise the skyscrapers of the East Loop. I’ve always liked the view.

The Bluff Spring Fen

Posted on August 28, 2014 by admin

Back again on September 2. Labor Day weekend is no time to do work, if you can avoid it.

When in doubt, go to a dictionary. If one isn’t enough, go to two or more. First, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, New College Edition, print version. Fen: “Low, flat, swampy land; a bog; marsh.” Next, Merriam-Webster, online version. Fen: “Low land that is covered wholly or partly with water unless artificially drained and that usually has peaty alkaline soil and characteristic flora (as of sedges and reeds).”

I found myself wondering about the exact definition of a fen when walking through a fen the other day. The Bluff Spring Fen. It was clearly a low wetland, and I’ll say this about a fen in August, especially in a rainy year — there’s a lot of characteristic flora.

The only visible work of man is the footpath through the fen, which isn’t very visible, except in those few spots where wooden planks cross extra-low, extra-damp terrain.

The fen is next to the Bluff City Cemetery, described yesterday. Toward the bottom of the bluff, in fact, and accessible through the cemetery grounds. The web site of Friends of the Bluff Spring Fen gives a more complicated definition of this particular fen: “Bluff Spring Fen is a 100-acre Illinois Nature Preserve in Elgin, Illinois, named for its rich, calcareous fens. These rare wetlands are fed by springs coming up through the ground bringing mineral-rich water. This alkaline water comes out of the ground at about 50 degrees, keeping the springs and streams flowing year round, and supporting animals and specialized plants that are adapted to these conditions.

“The Fen is not just the wetlands. It is a myriad of habitats including prairies, savannas, wetlands, and woodlands. Each one of these groups can be broken down further into subcategories… Rare and endangered species can be found here, such as the Small White Lady’s Slipper Orchids, the Baltimore Checkerspot Butterflies, and the Elfin Skimmer Dragonflies. To date, over 450 plant species, 57 butterfly species, more than 20 dragonfly species, and almost 100 bird species, including 33 nesting, have been recorded at the Fen.”

I don’t know if I saw any Elfin Skimmer Dragonflies, but I did see a lot of dragonflies. Squadrons of dragonflies. All beating their wings, causing typhoons in the South China Sea. Or was that butterflies? Saw a fair number of them, too. But not as many mosquitoes as I expected, fortunately. Always a good thing when you’re out in the middle of a fen.

The Bluff City Cemetery, Elgin

Posted on August 27, 2014 by admin

At Costco the other day, I was waiting in line at the keep-’em-in-the-store food service window, which is across from the row of check-out stands. The line was about eight people deep, and had started to snake toward the check-out stands, partially blocking the flow of people and shopping carts as they headed for the exit.

“Please move the line against the wall,” a Costco employee told everyone in line. It was a reasonable request, and we all moved away from the check-out row. A few seconds later, a man wheeled his cart past us in the line, and said, “Thanks. There’s no more Thermopylae.”

Did he actually say that? I wondered. I decided he had. I didn’t particularly feel like we were holding off a host of Persians, but I chuckled anyway. That’s someone who’s read his Herodotus. Or more likely, watched 300.

I spent some time one warm day recently at the Bluff City Cemetery in Elgin, Illinois, which has been a municipal burying ground since 1889. It’s a large place, 108 acres, and unusually uneven for Illinois terrain. My guess is that as a rolling bluff, the site wasn’t good for much else, so it became the cemetery.

A lot of mature trees, a lot of stones. Not a lot of funerary art, but I did see some examples, such as this figure, atop a monument to people named Hanson, and holding what looks like a chain attached to an anchor. I’ve read that anchors were early Christian symbols of hope, and are sometimes found on funerary art, though I can’t say I’ve ever seen one before.

The cemetery also sports a few burial vaults built into the hillside.

There are some small mausoleums as well. I liked the Snow mausoleum, with its ivy.

The Snows are under a large oak tree, and the entire time I was there it spat acorns at the ground near me.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling