Photo by Simon Koy  

Justin Torres, when he first arrived on the scene a mere two years ago, proved every bit the sensation we were promised. He’s the rare writer who is equally beloved by critics (e.g. Festival favorite Donna Seaman), writers (e.g. Dorothy Allison, who graced the CHF stage in 2012), and readers (e.g. me).

In one of the most resonant moments of the 2012 Festival, Allison equated the power of Torres' language to a tsunami (starting at 2:47 in the video below):

When we determined our theme for the 2013 Festival, I knew we had to bring him. Not only does his debut novel We the Animals fit perfectly with the conversations we hope to engage in this year, but his writing makes him a shoo-in: powerful, sharp, and eminently readable. And sure, it’s my job to create a little buzz around this year’s Festival presenters, but in this case I say: see for yourself. Check out his work in The New Yorker and Granta. 

I see superheroes flying to the rescue . . .

I worry if I'm good enough for this world . . .

On Wednesday, May 8 at 5 pm in the afternoon, I had the privilege of accompanying Paige Hernandez to the Better Boys Foundation in North Lawndale for a performance workshop. Paige was in the middle of her run of performances of Paige in Full at the Museum of Contemporary Art, one of six programs CHF presented this year in our Stages, Sights & Sounds festival. Paige led 20 kids through an inspiring 90 minute creative process.

First, the kids made a graffiti banner that would later serve as a backdrop for their spoken word performances.

 
All photos are by Aubrey Boonstra.

Then Paige gave the kids a series of movement challenges that required them to work together without speaking. This was a hard one for many of the middle and high schoolers. Remember how hard it was not to talk at that age!

After working in their bodies for a while, the group moved to tables where Paige led them through a self-reflecting and writing process—the “I am . . .” poem. Paige walked the students through a prescribed structure that helped the kids give voice to their pride, their dreams, and their fears.

In several instances, Paige encouraged them to use their imaginations, to not be hindered by the realities they knew. But she wasn’t asking them to deny those realities, and she worked closely with many of the kids to find an honest way of articulating their thoughts.

When they were finished, several of the kids read their poems (or traded them and read one written by a friend) in front of the graffiti banner they’d created earlier.

Five of the finished poems are posted below. 

CHF has been building a strong relationship with the Better Boys Foundation (BBF) over the last year, since their Director of Program Development and Evaluation Wayne Stiles joined our Education Ambassadors advisory group. BBF offers early childhood programs as well as fully and powerfully realized afterschool and summer enrichment programs for elementary and high school students and maintains relationships with students into their post-secondary years. In the last year, BBF students have attended Stages, Sights & Sounds performances and CHF’s program with artist Kara Walker at the Art Institute in February and Wayne was part of our 2012 Summer Institute for Teachers. (SIT 2013 is coming up in July. Registration opened yesterday!)

And just to be clear, BBF is non-discriminatory—there are lots of girls involved in their programs, too. The name is a holdover from when the organization was founded in 1961 as a boxing gym for youth (which back then meant boys).

*************

I am . . . poems by the boys AND girls of the LitLAB at the Better Boys Foundation

I am T. Little
(age 17)

I am black and proud.
I wonder will I graduate out of college.
I see many different potential faces.
I am black, intelligent and proud. 

I pretend I’m the President.
I feel like a boss.
I worry many African Americans won’t make it out of high school.
I don’t cry!
I am black and proud.

I understand this world comes with many trials and tribulations.
I dream of never dying and never aging.
I try to stay positive and focused on my goals.
I hope I get rich, and prosper a lot.
I am black and proud.

I am . . .
(by Michael Koleosho, age 13)

I am intelligent and shy.
I wonder if there is life anywhere else than Earth.
I see superheroes flying to the rescue.
I am intelligent and shy.

I pretend that I am the only person in the world.
I feel happy when I am playing football.
I worry if I will make it to school and back.
I cry when I am sad.
I am intelligent and shy.

I understand that money does not grow on trees.
I dream of going off to college to attend the University of Alabama.
I try to stay focused.
I hope I accomplish all my dreams.
I am intelligent and shy.

I am Valerie
(by Valerie Gipson, age 14)

I am ambitious and intelligent.
I wonder what the doctor’s name is.
I see the Gallifreyan sky.
I am ambitious and intelligent.

I pretend I am a companion.
I feel everything.
I worry about my algebra exit exam.
I cry every time I hear Nicki Minaj’s voice.
I am ambitious and intelligent.

I understand actions are only repeated.
I dream of strange things.
I try to be empathetic.
I hope to become a radiologist.

I am Simone
(by Simone Gipson, age 17)

I am compassionate and understanding.
I wonder if I’ll see tomorrow.
I see nothing but violence and hungry faces.
I am compassionate and understanding.

I pretend everyday isn’t the struggle it really is.
I feel that children have no one to look up to.
I worry if I’m good enough for this world.
I cry when I hear the name Ed Sheeran.
I am compassionate and understanding.

I understand that everyone isn’t as privileged as me.
I dream of a world where we support one another.
I try to do my best.
I hope those lonely children with starving bellies will one day be filled.
I am compassionate and understanding.

I am Victoria
(by Victoria Gipson, age 16)

I am hopeful and strong.
I wonder if people think I’m a success.
I see unhappy kids.
I am pretty and tall.

I pretend to do well.
I feel sick and tired.
I worry about my self-image.
I cry when I can’t say what I want.
I am hopeful and strong.

I understand the ununderstandable.
I dream that things will go wrong.
I try to be honest.
I hope for good things to come even to bad people.
I am hopeful and strong.

These are the questions that keep Grant Achatz—the visionary chef behind Alinea, Next, and the Aviary—up at night. His restless deconstruction and reformation of the dining experience has made him the toast of the culinary world (as evidenced by the numerous awards bestowed upon him and his restaurants). From the reservation system to the music and decor, from interplay of flavors to the number of people at a table—no detail escapes Achatz's discerning palate.

"If it's not going to be something that's going to add to the experience, then it shouldn't be there."

Achatz might have more in common with an artistic director of a theater company than he does with most chefs. That's why, at the 2012 Chicago Humanities Festival, he was interviewed not by a food critic but by Madeleine Grynsztejn, Pritzker Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The resulting conversation is a thought-provoking look at the future of the restaurant.

Highlights include:

• 1:34 - they discuss the 21st Century Limited, in which Chicago's Alinea and New York City's Eleven Madison Park swapped locations for a few days
• 11:59 - the importance of scent and aroma in cuisine
• 17:42 - on the tension sucessful artists feel between innovating vs. pulling from their repertoire
• 21:24 - on cooking as an art form (as opposed to a craft)
• 29:05 - why selling tickets for a restaurant is preferable to taking reservations
• 38:17 - Achatz's creative process in a nutshell
• 43:27 - on using music as a seasoning (or palate cleanser)
• 59:42 - if food trucks were truly viable in Chicago, this is Achatz's vision for a Next food truck 

Watch just the highlights:

Of course, cross-pollination is never one-way. Just as Achatz has borrowed ideas from the world of theater, there is a rich history of performing artists borrowing from the world of hospitality. Last year's exhibit at the Smart Museum, Feast: Radical Hosptiality in Contemporary Art, was a shining example of this. Regular readers of this blog may remember Feast curator Stephanie Smith's explication of how Marina Abramović and Ulay played with their guests' expectations at the dinner-party-turned-performance-work Communist Body / Fascist Body. To a lesser extent, even the "menu" of plays presented in Chicago's long-running Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind is an example of this interplay.

It almost makes one reconsider the oft-maligned genre of dinner theater.

Foodies may also enjoy our video The Perfect Meal with Paul Kahan, the executive chef behind Blackbird, avec, Publican, and Big Star; Mindy Segal, owner and pastry chef at Wicker Park's HotChocolate; and Alpana Singh, sommelier and host of WTTW's Check, Please!

What was your most eye-opening (or mouth-watering, as the case may be) dining experience? Tell us in the comments!

Ludacris’s “Area Code” which has nothing to do with being connected with a global network of professionals, came out on the tail end of the 90’s Gangsta Rap wave, appearing on his 2001 album Word of Mouf. Even knowing that Ludacris demands a grain of salt from listeners, the lyrics seem far from the musical poetry of the broader culture of hip-hop. 
 


Hip-hop, at its very best, has given a voice to the oppressed, has served as a creative, uplifting escape from poverty, and has emerged as an international youth culture with the unique power of crossing racial and social divides. This is palpable beyond the veil of materialism, misogyny, and violence that has in many ways tainted hip-hop’s original intent. Beyond the vulgar lyrics and the didactic clash with the folk music of my childhood, there was something profound about that first encounter with hip-hop—a felt, standing practice; a tradition oral, written, and complicated.

At this year’s Stages, Sights & Sounds we’re presenting a piece of hip-hop theater. Paige in Full tells the life story of creator Paige Hernandez—her experience growing up in Baltimore in a multicultural family (Black, Cuban, Chinese) and facing the growing pains of bullying, racial adversity, and heartbreak. The story is told through the lens of hip-hop—a form that uplifts, empowers, and gives a voice to her trials. The title is a play on the hip-hop classic Paid in Full, the debut album of American hip-hop duo Eric B. & Rakim, released in 1987. The album went on to influence the next generation of rappers through their unique use of internal rhyme schemes and lyricism.
  
    Search for a nine to five, if I strive
    Then maybe I’ll stay alive
    So I walk down the street whislin’ this
    Feelin’ out of place ‘cuz, man, do I miss

    A pen and a paper, a stereo, a tape of 
    Me and Eric B, and a nice big plate of
    Fish, which is my favorite dish
    But without no money it's still a wish

These lyrics are at once incredibly personal and deeply universal. He’s talking about struggling to find a job, but beyond that is the pursuit of a dream, and the material realities that defer, and transform dreams into flimsy wishes. With a degree in the humanities these lyrics hit home hard. I understand all too well that daunting chasm between what we must do, and what we dream of doing. 
 

Hip-hop can in many ways be defined as a response to the itinerant longing that Rakim raps about in “Paid in Full.” Tricia Rose, author of Black Noise, and 2012 Chicago Humanities Festival presenter, explains that the hip-hop movement was a response to the economic limitations of post-industrial New York. This was a place of forgotten youth a landscape void of jobs, of education, of art. Hip-hop was an explosive cultural response, where body, space, and community were used to create a new art form.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., in his foreword to The Anthology of Rap describes hip-hop as, “an art form born of young black and brown men and women who found their voices in rhyme, and chanted a poetic discourse to the rhythm of the beat.” Hip-hop is rooted in the most basic human desire—survival—a universal theme that pervades even through the movement’s commercialization and a reason for its broad appeal and subsequent globalization. 

It’s interesting what a global phenomenon hip-hop has become considering the specificity of its origins. It began in New York City, in the 1970’s, in the Bronx, in Morris Heights. In fact, hip-hop culture—rapping, DJing, break dancing, and graffiti—can trace its origin to one address: 1520 Sedgwick. There, Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc, referred to in The Anthology of Rap as hip-hop’s “sonic originator” threw his legendary block parties. On two turntables, Herc would mix existing popular records, creating an avant-garde sound. His rhythmic beats and pronounced instrumental breaks simultaneously borrowed and diverged from a distinctly American musical landscape of Blues, Jazz, and Rock and Roll. This modest, experimental space had a huge influence on other foundational DJs, most notably Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash. 
 

The term “hip-hop” was originally coined in 1978 by Keith “Cowboy” Wiggins—a member of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five—whose friend had just joined the army. Mimicking the cadence of a marching solider, he scatted the lines: “Hip/hop, hip/hop.” The phrase was later popularized by the song “Rapper’s Delight” by The Sugar Hill Gang: “I said a hip, hop, the hippie, the hippest, the hip hop, a you don’t stop.” And it was first referred to in print as a movement in the September 1981 Village Voice in a profile of Afrika Bambaataa. Bambaataa, the “Godfather” of break-beat DJing, was a foundational figure for the emerging hip-hop culture—one of its first and most fervent ambassadors. 
 

Hip-hop etymology is exceedingly mixed, defined by its refusal to conform, to be one thing, from one place. Breaking, b-boying or b-girling, is perhaps the best example of this. Breaking emerged as a distinct art form at Herc’s block parties, as a response to the new music being produced. It mixed Afro-Brazilian dancing similar to capoeira), Asian martial arts, and Russian folk dance. By the late 1970’s breaking would incorporate the distinct style of Michael Jackson, James Brown, and other Funk artists. 

Paige in Full is a “B-girl’s Visual Mixtape,” a life story told through the expressive medium of break dancing, in a mixed narrative form. Hernandez’s hip-hop discourse provides a complex perspective and subjectivity. Her story is a living, changing narrative that uses all of the elements of hip-hop, and does not shy away from complex issues like bullying, domestic violence, family support and structure, death, and true love. Common, in his afterword to The Anthology of Rap, asserts that hip-hop is a “living language…[with] lyrics about love and comic books and bicycles, about God, and nature and fatherhood.” This sense of being alive, of organic change and moving facets, is boldly reflected in Paige in Full. 

 

Like Ludacris’s expansive collection of “pros” across the world’s area codes, I continued to listen to hip-hop: from the Beastie Boys to A Tribe Called Quest; from Run-DMC to Salt N Pepa; from Lauryn Hill to E-40; from Devin the Dude to Zion I. My personal experience with hip-hop has always oddly—but perhaps appropriately—been associated with nature. There is an amazing place near Berkeley, CA called the Albany Bulb. It is a rounded spit of land that dilates into the San Francisco Bay, swelling towards the Pacific Ocean. Here, graffiti spackles the landscape, creating bright, Technicolor art on rocks and old cement structures.

There is a sculpture of a woman on the water’s edge made from wood and rebar, sprayed with now bleached graffiti paint. She reaches out with both hands up towards skies of cool fog and blinding sun. Her expression is one of dalliance and reverence, equal parts joy and veneration. Thinking and writing about Paige in Full, my mind has been returning home to that place, making parallels between Paige, and this coastal hip-hop Madonna. This show is wide open, arms spread. Powerful, playful, respectful, and direct, Paige looks at herself—in moments of despair and triumph—then turns to you, and doesn’t look away.

Works Cited:

Ludacris, “Area Codes” on Word of Mouf.
Clive Campbell, Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation.
Steve Hager, Hip-Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music and Graffiti.
Eric B. & Rakim, “Paid in Full” on Paid in Full.
Trisha Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America.
Adam Bradley, Andrew Dubois, The Anthology of Rap.

Are humans animals? The answer to this question is a perfectly confounding Yes and No.

From a biological perspective, things couldn't be any clearer. Like all living creatures, we evolved over millions of years. We look like most other species (two eyes over a nose over a mouth), share large parts of our genes with all other mammals (and over 98% with chimpanzees, our closest relatives), and do all the things that characterize earth's fauna (from breathing to eating to sexual procreation). Of course humans are animals!

Not so when seen from another set of traditions. In much of philosophy, religion, and aesthetics, humans appear as the very antithesis of the animal kingdom. They are the ones confined to the realm of nature; we are the ones who have ascended to the dominion of culture. Language, in all its creative potential, is the big separator. After all, what other creature has produced a Dante, Shakespeare, or Mary Shelley? To boot, what species even thinks (?) about other beasts, let alone uses them to define their own place in the world (Dante, Shakespeare, and Shelley being three of the writers whose depictions of the animalistic have done most to codify our understanding of ourselves).

This is rather familiar science-vs.-humanities territory. And it continues to have a hold on the popular imagination.

But it's not the whole story. Far from it. Over the last 10 years or so, a veritable revolution has been taking place in the academy. Spurred by developments in genetics and cognitive science, on the one hand, and new approaches to animals in the humanistic disciplines, on the other, we are witnessing an unprecedented convergence in once-distant fields of inquiry. Nowadays, evolutionary biologists speculate about art as an adaptation, while literary scholars challenge the species divide and theorize about animal communication. And interdisciplinary initiatives are sprouting all over America's campuses.

Are humans animals? Not long ago, the question produced a predictable standoff. Now it is quickly becoming the start of a fascinating conversation.

The 24th Chicago Humanities Festival will take this new conversation out of the academy and into the public at large. We will explore what it means to think about culture biologically, about biology culturally, and about the human-animal relationship beyond the science/humanities divide. In presenting the most cutting-edge work, Animal will give us a whole new perspective on our world. Most importantly, though, it will give us new answers to the oldest and most fundamental question in the humanities: What makes us human?

Sunday, October 13: Morry and Dolores Kohl Kaplan Northwestern Day
Sunday, October 20: 7th Annual Hyde Park Day
Friday, November 1 - Sunday, November 10: Downtown

Joining us this fall will be:

Photo by Rosalie Winard
Temple Grandin, animal scientist, autism activist, and bestselling author of Animals Make Us Human and Thinking in Pictures

Photo by Fred Field
Atul Gawande, leading medical thinker, surgeon, and author of award-winning books Complications, Better, and The Checklist Manifesto

Sherman Alexie, beloved novelist and filmmaker, best known for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Smoke Signals

Frans de Waal, primatologist and author of Our Inner Ape, Primates and Philosophers, and The Bonobo and the Atheist

Susan Orlean, New Yorker staff writer and author of Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend

Julia Kristeva, leading psychoanalytic theorist

Photo by Simon Koy
Justin Torres, literary sensation and author of We the Animals

Maria Tatar, Harvard professor and leading scholar of fairy tales

...among many, many more.

Sign up for our weekly e-mail blasts to receive information on other exciting presenters as they are announced!

Tickets will go on sale to CHF members on Tuesday, September 3 and to the general public on Monday, September 16.

Note on the Animal artwork: it's by designer Jason Pickleman, of JNL graphic design. Jason is the artist responsible for 2011's neon tech·knowledgē and 2012's multicolored America. We're pleased to be working with him again.

The origin story of the co-commissioning of Sleeping Beauty Dreams goes back to 2005, when playwright Amaranta Leyva came to the Kennedy Center as part of a group of Mexican arts professionals doing some training with Michael Kaiser and the DeVos Institute for Arts Management.  We had an instant rapport, since we both were passionately dedicated to performances for young audiences, and we’ve been fast friends since.  A couple of years after that, we saw their show Emilio and the Enchanted Cow at a showcase in New York and the Center gave them their first American booking.  I encouraged them to come to the IPAY (International Performing Arts for Youth) Showcase and find a US agent, which they did, and I’ve always been a resource for them, offering gentle guidance and mentoring as appropriate.

Doing a liberal adaptation of Sleeping Beauty came out of a conversation Amaranta and I had about how she was feeling pressure to write a piece that would have popular appeal, but at the same time allow her to exercise her desire to write from her heart.  I suggested she read some fairy tales to find one that spoke to her.  Little did I realize she would read 150 or more – most of Grimm and Andersen, some Perrault, and others.  Sleeping Beauty was the one that seemed to offer the most prospects for combining sales with telling the story in a new and interesting way.

At the same time, we at Kennedy Center Theater for Young Audiences were eager to try out the idea of co-commissioning a new work with a company that we would then present.  Since we had a long-standing artistic relationship with the Marionetas de la Esquina and Amaranta, the partnership seemed perfect.  We agreed to provide some funds toward the commission, artistic and dramaturgical support, and fly me to Mexico City to see an early preview.

It was a bit of a high-wire act toward the end. Amaranta and I had a far-ranging conversation about the dramaturgy of the piece over dinner with her parents and cousin (it’s the family business) while I was in Mexico City.  As a result, a lot of changes were made in the framing and design and interactions of the actors and puppets over the three months prior to their presentation at the Kennedy Center. 

We think it’s a terrific piece and are proud to be associated with it, and what’s great is that it really showcases what’s best about the company – we were an artistic partner, to be sure, but it showcases the best of their aesthetic and storytelling.  I’m sure that family audiences in Chicago will love this piece as much as the audiences in Washington did.  With almost thirty years of producing work for young audiences, I’ve never seen a Sleeping Beauty like
this one.

Related Program 

 

Sleeping Beauty Dreams

May 15 - 19. Program times vary.

This year’s Stages, Sights & Sounds festival loosely follows the broad and encompassing theme of the fairy tale. Grounded in the oral tradition, fairy tales have been endlessly transformed, reinvented, and transcribed on pages and stages, and embedded in our cultural subconscious. With the strange magic of recognition, they invoke the universal. Dark woods, breadcrumbs, a house made of sugar—a few details are all that is necessary to recall the tale of Hansel and Gretel. Fairy tales are stories we know, and wish to know again.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimms’ “Nursery and Household Tales,” now widely known as The Grimms’ Fairytales, are dark stories. Simple and violent, their brevity offers up a shadowy, dim nature—the world’s awful realities. The original tales, that often included murder, cannibalism, infanticide, and mutilation, were edited in the second edition for a children’s audience. However, the stories were revised only in small ways. For example, in the original Hansel and Gretel it is the children’s mother and not the stepmother who abandons them in the woods —a perverse and inconceivable fate. Despite these small adjustments, the fairy tales remain both grotesque and heavy-hearted with the common themes of poverty, abandonment, disloyalty, and loss pervading.  Stages, Sights & Sounds includes a small dose of the Grimms’ gloom. From Switzerland’s Trickster-p comes .h.g., an interactive installation that melds memory and image to re-envision Grimms’ Hansel and Gretel. This show doesn’t come close to matching the macabre fairy tale classics, but it does make allowances for certain realities. There is a clear sense that children can understand the true nature of things, even at their darkest.

Cristina Galbiati, one of .h.g.’s creators, attempts to explain: “Hansel and Gretel could be a real story. We thought about it as if the fairy tale were real. Taking out the important elements, we worked from our memories of the story and asked ourselves: what is the atmosphere? What does it mean to be lost in the woods at night? How can that feeling be transposed?” Trickster-p somehow transforms the story by creating a three-dimensional experience. .h.g. is an installation made up of nine rooms that spectators wander through guided only by earphones. It creates spaces in which visual experience is aided and manipulated by personal association and recollection.

During production, Cristina explains, they decided not to read any version of Hansel and Gretel, instead focusing on key personal memories. For one of the creators it was the image of the witch burning, for Cristina it was the chicken bones that the children use to escape their fiery fate. Although these aesthetic choices were tied to very personal memories, they have the uncanny capacity of resonating with each individual who experiences the installation. The story is perennial, timeless.  Even for those who don’t know the tale, there is a sense of tangible tradition that is easily felt.

In this production the audience plays a very unique role. Theater, usually a solo experience in the presence of many, is turned on its head. This was very important for .h.g.’s creators who wanted to take performance out of the mix both in terms of theatricality- action produced by actors—but also in terms of the inclination of an audience to react performatively, and interact with those around them. Cristina explains that the solo experience allows each person to confront the innate, human fear of being in the dark, of being alone. It becomes a space in which we can return to ourselves. She says, “When we are alone we are always trying to feel our time, to fill it, so that we are no longer alone.” .h.g. is an experience in which you can be alone without doing anything, where there is no inclination to relate or perform.

Using elements of traditional theater and visual art, .h.g. suspends reality, mixing it with dreams, memory, and imagination. At once personal and collective, the audience becomes an integral part of the story; you could be the two children lost in the woods, a parent telling a bedside fairy tale, or a child listening wide-eyed in bed. .h.g.  is a journey taken alone, but in a place recognizable, understood, and even known. .h.g. is not to be missed!

Fairy tales are importantly about the bare bones- details and feelings that we remember and carry with us from our warm childhood beds through life. These tales, culturally malleable structures that can be shaded in, and layered with innumerable disguises, remain recognizable, innate—as instinctual as breathing. At this year’s Stages, Sights & Sounds form and formula are exposed; our beloved fairy tales are changed, and even distorted to make them resonant again.

Related Program 

.h.g.

114: Fri, May. 10 6:00 - 9:00 PM

200: Sat, May. 11 10:00 - 1:00 PM

204: Sat, May. 11 3:00 - 6:00 PM

300: Sun, May. 12 12:00 - 3:00 PM

400: Mon, May. 13 10:00 - 1:00 PM

Access. That word has been a part of Better Boys Foundation since a boxing gym was converted into a community center over 50 years ago on Chicago's West Side. Whether it was through the generosity of borsch belt comedians, NFL linebackers, or heavyweight champions of the world, our founder Joe Kellman found a way to give the students of North Lawndale access to a brighter future. Many things have changed at BBF, we are now certainly not just for boys, we have a dance studio for our tap and ballet programs, and we have a blue screen for our FilmLAB apprentices. What hasn't changed is the belief that students in neighborhoods like North Lawndale deserve access to the same opportunities and experiences as their more affluent counterparts. Chicago Humanities Festival continues to be one of our most viable partners in this vision, providing BBF with relevant and vibrant programming, behind the scenes contact with artists, and curriculum connections that help bridge the classroom with the performance space.

BBF Scholars at the CHF Kara Walker event at
the Art Institute in March 2013.

As we work with our elementary and high school age students that come to us for services they are struggling harder and harder to find during their school hours, we reinforce in them the idea of cultural and social capital. Through the vision of our CEO Mary Visconti, we have established a diverse array of programs that provide opportunities for our young people to explore cultural, artistic, and intellectual pursuits they might not have access to without the finances to gain entry to them. We partner with Chicago Humanities Festival to put these potential thoughts into kinetic practice. CHF helps us put these goals into motion and demonstrates their commitment to the humanities and the arts, and their need for accessibility.

One such demonstration of access provided by CHF that we at Better Boys Foundation will soon take part in is the Stages, Sights & Sounds presentation of Paige in Full. When we wanted a program that would match up with our BeatLAB, TapLAB, and LitLAB apprenticeships, we didn’t have to look any further than this dynamic performance by an artist our students will easily identify with. Not only will our apprentices attend the public performance, but they will also have access to a workshop put on by Paige Hernandez herself, at our North Lawndale center. Time and time again, our teaching artists at BBF seek to provide our students a holistic learning experience, demonstrating not only the finished product of their art or media, but allowing them to view the process, effort, and preparation that results in a completed piece. Chicago Humanities Festival’s programming is an amazing fit for the shared goals that we strive to accomplish at BBF.

BBF student artwork inspired by Kara Walker's work.

While the Arts are a component essential to a student’s learning and development, their existence is dwindling in Chicago Public Schools. We also recognize that Academics are a cornerstone that needs to be strengthened among the children and teens in our neighborhoods. At Better Boys Foundation, we provide a structured program of academic support for all of our students. Whether it be through our daily tutoring, our ACT test prep, academic progress monitoring, or the services we provide in our BBF Scholars program for our high school graduates who have moved on to higher learning, the well-being of our students in the academic realm is a strong priority at BBF. Through my participation in the CHF Education Ambassadors program, I take part in discussions with Chicago Humanities Festival staff and educators from throughout the area to find the educational connections for specific CHF programs, especially Stages, Sights & Sounds. CHF staff does an amazing service to educators through the creation of teachers’ guides that outline a specific performance, give background on the performers, and supply questions and activities that connect with the presentation. This strong academic tool allows us to connect our goal of providing our students with cultural capital with their ongoing mastery of the traditional educational tools they will need to gain access to higher education.

More student artwork inspired by Kara Walker's CHF program.

When I speak with my CEO Mary Visconti, or my fellow director Billy Brooks, I see more and more that Chicago Humanities Festival has the ability to provide a very helpful and powerful tool to what we try to accomplish daily at BBF. When CHF grants us access, we are able to grow that into more opportunities for our young people. Thank you CHF for giving our kids the open doors to move toward a bright future.

Related Program 

 

Paige in Full

102: Tue, May. 7 10:30 - 11:30 AM

105: Wed, May. 8 10:30 - 11:30 AM

108: Thu, May. 9 10:30 - 11:30 AM

112: Fri, May. 10 10:30 - 11:30 AM

115: Fri, May. 10 7:00 - 8:00 PM

203: Sat, May. 11 2:00 - 3:00 PM

206: Sat, May. 11 5:00 - 6:00 PM

Waiting backstage at last year’s Stages, Sights & Sounds Festival, I felt like the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. The emcee announced our piece, Superman 2050, the lights went out and busloads of school kids began cheering wildly. The screams reached a full pitch and the Festival’s stage manager could barely see us reaching our opening positions and waiting for the lights to appear.

Two weeks later, the big wave came crashing down on the sand. We premiered our new and more fragile show, Murder on the Midwest Express, in front of a small, quiet audience full of adults. As an ensemble, we understood the unproven play would probably need several months of work before acquiring its own magic. But at that moment, it was hard to face the long road ahead with the earlier buzz of the Festival quickly fading to black.

Superman 2050 in New York in 2012.

In some ways, last spring illustrated the ups and downs of running a devised theater company. By May of 2012, we had performed Superman 2050 more than 20 times in various venues across the country over a period of nearly two years. That same month, Murder on the Midwest Express received only its second public appearance after less than nine months of creation. Compared to Superman, Midwest Express felt underdeveloped.

The actors and I reconvened rehearsals in late July and the sunny weather brought some good news. The Piccolo Theater in Evanston had invited us to perform Superman in the fall and we added Midwest Express to make it a double bill. Then, the Humanities Festival called us up and asked if they could see what we were working on. The prospect of eventually performing the new show at the 2013 Stages, Sights & Sounds Festival reignited our engine.

Even so, there were challenges ahead. Following the October shows in Evanston, five out of the original seven cast members left the project. By January of 2013, our seven-person show had shrunk to just three actors: two originals and one newbie. We met with the Humanities Festival folks to see if they would still be interested in producing the show in its new state. Fortunately, we again received their support.

The cast of Murder takes a break from rehearsal.

Energized, the small cast re-imagined the show in a whirlwind three weeks of rehearsal. In February, the pared-down version of Midwest Express finally found its form during a month-long run at Donny’s Skybox Theatre at The Second City. The reduction of the cast became a blessing in disguise for this “quick-change” style piece.

Between now and May, the company will continue to refine and solidify the material generated from the Second City showing. If this journey has taught us one thing, it is to simply keep working. We are getting ready for this spring; for the moment when we are standing backstage at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater and the emcee announces our name. We want to once again feel that we have earned those cheers emanating from all those students. And this time, we will make our first cue a visual one.

Related Program 

Murder on the Midwest Express

401: Tue, May. 14 10:00 - 11:00 AM

402: Tue, May. 14 12:30 - 1:30 PM

409: Thu, May. 16 7:00 - 8:00 PM

411: Fri, May. 17 12:30 - 1:30 PM

504: Sat, May. 18 7:00 - 8:00 PM

602: Sun, May. 19 5:00 - 6:00 PM

There are any number of themes that pervade this set of texts. But what unites them all is their target audience. Fairy tales are for children. They edify and entertain and, in the process, impart valuable lessons to the next generation. Yes, very much like the next Pixar movie…

Enter an anthropological perspective. From that vantage point, fairy tales are anything but child’s play. Sure, they are part of the social world children are exposed to in the process of enculturation. But they are ultimately understood as part of a much larger formation of cultural texts that we, as a species, have devised to make sense of the world.

That’s right – for an anthropologist, fairy tales are essentially indistinguishable from myths. And it’s mainly the legacy of ethnocentric thinking that locates the former among the children of the West while reserving the latter for the “primitives” of the Rest.

 
Lucian Lévy-Bruhl

To be sure, anthropologists shoulder some of the blame for this situation. Early generations of scholars were all too quick to speculate about foundational mental differences between human groups of the kind proposed by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl in his 1910 treatise How Natives Think (answer: with much less sophistication).

But ever since the towering interventions of Claude Lévi-Strauss in the middle of the twentieth century, we have come to see the relevant texts in universal terms. For the anthropological titan, all of the world’s myths were fundamentally alike. They were all based on a finite set of conceptual units and their recurrent permutations. And they ultimately revealed nothing so much as the basic workings of the human mind. Specific motives might differ. But, in the end, the tales of Native North America were homologous with the stories of Ancient Greece and the fables of the European Middle Ages. They were all products of collective consciousness, and even the modern fairy tales by authors like Andersen or Carroll could be shown to be built on their enduring principles.

 
Claude Lévi-Strauss

It was a radical shift in perspective, releasing fairy tales from the nimbus of childhood and anchoring them at the heart of humanity’s cultural achievements.

It was a move that also brought fairy tales closer to the meanings originally ascribed to them by such pioneers as the Brothers Grimm. Jacob and Wilhelm had famously collected and published their set of tales in the early nineteenth century. But they had not done so with the intention of creating a book of childhood diversions. Instead, they had set out to collect what they regarded as the most important emanation of Germans’ collective genius. This Volksgeist was expressed most fully in the tales transmitted orally from generation to generation, representing a pure form of national literature. It was a project spurred equally by Romanticism and burgeoning nationalism.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

And it only became linked to childhood secondarily. Childhood, after all, was just in the process of being invented – the notion of a distinct moment in the life cycle reserved for education and play didn’t really take hold until the late eighteenth century. The Grimms’ famous publication of 1812 came at this very moment – and its title still betrays the shifting ground. Their collection was called Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Fairy Tales for Children and the House), identifying children as a principal market while suggesting that this wasn’t necessarily so. In the course of the nineteenth century, it did become so, however, and by the time the modern masters of the fairy tale wrote their stories, they were quite self-evidently for kids.

 
Under the Stars, a retelling of Hansel & Gretel by L’Illusion, Théâtre de marionettes

All this brings me to Stages, Sights & Sounds. This year, our performance festival has the theme of fairy tales. But don’t think Disney or Pixar. What we’re really doing is harkening back to an older tradition. Just like the Brothers Grimm, we don’t think of fairy tales as “just” kids fare. On the contrary, we see them as repositories for enduring reflections on the human condition – reflections that are as relevant to adults as they are to children.

Join us as we take this journey via the early nineteenth century and right back to the twenty-first!

Related Program 

 

Stages, Sights & Sounds

May 7 - 19. Program times vary.

In May of 2012 a colleague and I had the good fortune to travel to Edinburgh for the Imaginate Festival, one of the largest and most ground-breaking festivals in Europe featuring performances for young audiences. After flying all night we stepped off the plane into the murky, drenched Scottish landscape. Unsurprisingly, the rain was falling down in sheets.

Mary Kate braves the Scottish weather.

I was aching for a cup of coffee, knowing that I had a full day ahead of seeing the latest and most innovative theater from around the globe. Alas, said our host, there wasn’t time, and he whisked us away to the Church Hill Studio Theatre where our first performance of the day was Cloud Man. I purposely had not acquainted myself with the details of each production, so I was completely surprised to be led into a dark, tiny space with two rows of benches and a swath of cloud-shaped pillows on the floor.

After I sat, I looked up to see more clouds, fluffy and white, hanging from the ceiling. Underneath the clouds was a wooden shack, and through its glass windows I could see numerous bits of ephemera. A group of small children were ushered in, tidy in their rain boots and coats, and set down on the cloud pillows.

Shortly thereafter the audience was introduced to Cloudia, a “cloud expert,” who had been searching for Cloud Man her entire life. Dressed in her own rain gear, and carrying mobile scientific equipment including a magnifying glass, Cloudia took us on her search up to the top of Cloud Mountain. When the show finished, I wondered if I had been dreaming, having not slept a wink on the plane.  How was it possible that Cloud Man was the very first show I saw on my very first morning in rainy Edinburgh?

Cloud Man is a production from Ailie Cohen Puppet Maker, co-created by Lewis Hetherington and Ailie Cohen. Ailie is an associate artist of Puppet State Theatre Company, with whom she co-directed and designed The Man Who Planted Trees, a Stages Festival favorite from 2011.

Cloud Man is a unique blend of puppetry, storytelling, and delightful visuals, I knew that it had to be seen by Chicago audiences. I’m delighted to present it as part of the 2013 Stages, Sights & Sounds festival, thanks in part to support from the MacArthur Foundation’s International Connections Fund.

CHF's Web Content Manager Carol Kang at Lorna's

Did I ever get my coffee, you may ask? I got something better: tea from Loopy Lorna's, a café housed within the theatre and one that we would visit several times during our stay.

Related Program 

 

Cloud Man

May 7 - 18. Program times vary.

I have intentionally not gone back to reacquaint myself with the Grimm Brothers' version of the famous tale nor with those more Disneyfied versions that, like the witch’s house, are excessively sugar-coated. I was too enchanted by the world that Illusion Puppet Theater has created. Whether theirs is true to the tales as we’ve heard and seen them in the past doesn’t matter. In Illusion’s remarkable (and wholly unique) version, the emphasis is less on hapless Hansel’s ill-fated breadcrumb scheme or the scary forest or the kooky witch (although when she shows up, she is delightfully kooky). It focuses, instead, on the very loving, playful, sometimes feisty relationship between sister and brother.  

The masterful puppeteers of Illusion make everyday things seem like magic: a white balloon transforms into the moon; human hands become birds (first greedy crows, later an ethereal white swan who delivers the children home). Simple but eloquent sleights of hand.

The show’s single set piece has a life of its own. It serves first as a path from home to forest, then a bridge, a river, the oven of the evil witch, and finally the pathway back home—all the while emitting the soft, earthy sounds of a wooden xylophone.

Illusion’s version is frolicking and sweet, but it doesn’t shy away from life’s harder moments: poverty, despair, death. These moments are handled with a deft hand.  

Illusion Puppet Theater hails from Montréal. Stages, Sights & Sounds has presented many artists from Québec over the years. We are pleased to have a strong relationship with agents and theater artists across Canada that fit so wonderfully into our Festival and for the second year in a row, we are delighted that the Québec Government Office in Chicago is helping to sponsor this series of programs. We hope to see you at Under the Stars and the rest of the amazing programs that make up Stages 2013. I can’t wait!

Related Program 

 

Under the Stars

May 7 - 12. Program times vary.

Even though many of the fairy tales we hear again and again are hundreds of years old, they still feel fresh—perhaps not to exhausted parents who dread the umpteenth telling of “The Three Billy Goats Gruff” in the hopes that their child will finally drift off to sleep. To artists, fairy tales are rich material for both storytelling and visual exploration. For audiences, fairy tales can bring a new perspective to the familiar or bring back warm memories of mom and dad telling bedtime stories.

Fairy tales cross cultural boundaries and can create a shared experience in a way that many other mediums do not. When I am telling a fairy tale to my son, I like to imagine what versions parents in other countries are telling their children. I also wonder, do other parents tell the full, often scary versions, or do they modify them, like I find myself doing on occasion?

At Stages, Sights & Sounds 2013, you can compare for yourself. You will see vastly different versions of “Hansel and Gretel” from Canada and Switzerland, “Sleeping Beauty” from Mexico, and original fairy tales from Scotland and the U.S.

Paige in Full, Paige Hernandez’s unique coming of age story, is a 21st-century not-so-fairy-tale about Everygirl’s search for acceptance, meaning, and her one true love.

Under the Stars is a puppet theater retelling of Hansel and Gretel, where the brother-sister relationship takes center stage.

Sleeping Beauty Dreams uses humorous storytelling and whimsical puppetry to recast the famous princess as an overprotected daughter looking to break free of her castle walls.

.h.g. is part installation, part interactive theater, and pure adrenaline. In this extraordinary re-imagining of “Hansel and Gretel,” each audience member travels through the installation alone to experience his or her own version of the tale.

Murder on the Midwest Express, Chicago company Theatre Un•Speak•Able’s latest physical comedy gem, draws from another well-loved literary genre, the whodunit, to tell a high-stakes tale on the high-speed rails.

The original fairy tale Cloudman from Scotland’s Ailie Cohen Productions, follows Cloudia, a cloud expert in search of the elusive Cloud Man, whose home is high in the sky.

Like the fairy tales themselves, Stages, Sights & Sounds has a different meaning no matter who you are. Teachers will find myriad ways to connect these performances to the classroom; the curious theatre lover will get to see the latest work from abroad; and families can share in an experience that will resonate for the adults as much as it will for the kids.

Related Program 

 

Stages, Sights & Sounds

May 7 - 19. Program dates, times, and venues vary. Click link to individual programs for more details.

The Seldoms, photo by Brian Kuhlmann

First up, at 12 noon at Francis Parker School, are Carrie Hanson and the Seldoms. The Seldoms is steadily gaining a national profile for their awesome dancing as well as their sophisticated treatment of complex subject matter. Artistic Director Carrie Hanson is quite masterful at calling forth dance’s strengths—abstraction, eliciting kinesthetic and emotional responses—to powerful effect. And she’s able to do it without stumbling into the trap that much overtly political performance does, namely being overly literal, trite or preachy. The Seldoms will perform excerpts from two works: Stupormarket (which tackles the economic crisis and was on both the Tribune’s and TimeOut Chicago’s Best of 2011 lists) and Exit Disclaimer: Science and Fiction Ahead, a new work on clean energy technologies that premiered last weekend at the Dance Center of Columbia College. Hanson will be joined by Zachary Whittenburg, former dancer/choreographer and current dance and culture writer, to discuss the development of these works and, more broadly, how dance can uniquely address political and social issues.

And at 7:30 pm that night, America Dances, takes the stage at Parker. Tracing the connections between African dance styles and so many social and performance styles that originated in the US in the 20th century (Tap, Lindy Hop, Charleston, Swing, Hip Hop, Stepping, Footworking), program curator Lane Alexander has amassed an amazing array of local performance companies.

+ BAM! is Chicago Human Rhythm Project's resident performing and
teaching ensemble with an extensive repertory including the classics,
contemporary jazz tap and experimental rhythmic expression like
body drumming.

+ Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre is a veteran Chicago company that blends
contemporary dance, live music and visual art onstage, creating a unique
multi-sensory experience.

+ FootworKINGz are at the forefront of this uniquely 21^st century Chicago
dance form. (Take a look at the first video on their home page and
you’ll be hooked.)

+ M.A.D.D. Rhythms is celebrating their 10 year anniversary this year.
Artistic Director Bril Barrett has built a company, school and satellite
programs throughout the South Side.

+ Najwa Dance Corps is 45 years’ strong in Chicago and specializes
in traditional African music and dances and African American
dances of the early 20th century.

+ Stick & Move is a younger company that has had a lot of international
exposure including travels in 2010 to China, Uganda, and Morocco

+ The Crucial Step Clique from Wheeling High School is the next generation
of dancers, combining step and hip-hop. They are three-time winners of the
Illinois Drill Team Association Championship.

Alexander, Chicago Human Rhythm Project founder and artistic director, will be our M.C. and tour guide through this rich, rowdy program. I wonder if we’ll be dancing in the aisles by the end . . . ?

Related Program

Dancing With--not Around--the Issues

703: Sat., Nov. 10, 12:00 - 1:00 PM

Related Program

Walden, A Video Game

716: Sat., Nov. 10, 7:30 PM

 
King’s Quest  

Desolate townscapes of Level 1 toggled between two kinds of scenes: those of barrenness in which you could fully explore recently vacated homes, shops, and the like, and those of terror in which monstrous zombies would pop out of closets and from behind trees. You could traverse the ghost town of Daventry, collecting abandoned objects and intuiting the tragic narratives of families gone missing, but you also had to wage battle against the very things that drove its inhabitants to extinction. I just barely squeaked by to Level Two, The Dimension of Death, when Microsoft Windows crashed for the zillionth time, prompting my father (the owner of the computer upon which I played) to ban the game from our household. I was devastated.

The Dimension of Death (if memory serves)

The solitude of the game intensified its dramatic mystery.  Sure, every now and then you met a being who offered sage advice, or forecasted doom, but on the whole, it was just you, your computer, and a grieving world emptied of its human life. I can only imagine that the Dimension of Death would offer more of the same.

When I heard that Tracy Fullerton’s upcoming video game was modeled on Hendry David Thoreau’s Walden, I didn’t know what to think. Here was a kind of solitude that wasn’t predicated on the horror genre (“NO! Don’t go in THAT room by yourself!”), or the fantasy genre (where are the ogres, the ghosts, the basilisks, that you, the lone species of human, must destroy?). Fullerton’s game rests on a different kind of aloneness that’s been carved out by one of the great American Transcendentalists; a solitude that comes from living simply in nature rather than complexly in society, freighted with the commercial economies of civilization. Thoreau built a cabin on Walden Pond near the edge of Concord, Massachusetts, and for two years he lived in relative solitude, not in the “wilderness” per se, but also not in the town proper.  “I had three chairs in my house,” he tells us in almost excruciating detail, “One for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” Like my hapless King’s Quest character, Thoreau wasn’t totally isolated, but he was, fundamentally, alone. Apparently he preferred it that way, for he “never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

Walking through the woods…

 
you pick some fruit…

 
and you eat it in your cabin as winter approaches.

(These stills from Tracy Fullerton’s Walden, a video game.)

We can experience some version of Thoreau’s Walden-solitude by removing ourselves to a patch of green somewhere: a backyard, a state park, a nature preserve, a remote piece of Lake Michigan’s shore.  I’ve certainly had my share of solitary nature moments; my most recent one occurred during a gentle hike up Colorado’s modest Mt. Sanitas. But what do we gain by reproducing digitally the experience of a physical exodus into the “wilderness”? What might it mean to be “alone” in nature via the largely (though not always) solitary act of video-gaming? A sneak peek at the game’s trailer suggests a new kind of emotional and experiential remove that merges the awe and hugeness of nature-at-large with the single-minded focus of, in my case, a 13-inch computer screen.  I’m not sure whether what I felt while watching the screen was aloneness or loneliness. But I’m pretty sure that interacting with the game will feel markedly different from passively watching its intriguing preview.

CHF favorite Tracy Fullerton returns to the Festival this fall to discuss the research, development, and paradigmatic shift that lead to the creation of Walden, a video game.

Related Program 

 

Walden, A Video Game

808: Sun., Nov. 11, 2:00 - 3:00 PM

The program team knew early on that a Festival themed “America” had to feature baseball.  Of all the professional sports, baseball is second closest to my heart, after hockey (that is a story for another blog). At five, with my dad, I attended my first professional sports event featuring the Detroit Tigers. It made such an impression that shortly thereafter I named my new pet cat “Jason Thompson” after their first baseman at the time. At age six the first team sport I played was baseball and was the only girl on the team. I loved the dusty outfield, where, at the time, a girl who wanted to play baseball was relegated. I didn’t care. I just wanted to play.

My dad and I watched with glee in 1984 when Kirk Gibson hit a three run homer off Goose Gossage in the 8^th inning of Game 5 of the World Series, thereby sealing the championship for the Tigers. That was their last World Series win. I’m hoping for another this year against the Giants.

All these years later I was delighted to discover that Kim Ng is the highest ranking woman in baseball management, and the one that most insiders think is going to break through to be the first female general manager of a Major League team. She is also a University of Chicago alumna, her first baseball job was with the White Sox, and she became the youngest assistant general manager ever in baseball at age 29 with the Yankees.

Ng’s strengths lie in her ability to understand and chart the quantitative analysis (as told in Moneyball) part of the game, and to recognize the importance of its international operations.  She spends a lot of time in Latin America and will tell us what’s trending for the sport internationally. After all, it’s not just an American pastime. That’s one of the reasons it’s such a rich topic for our “America” themed festival that looks not only inward, but outward as well.

Even if you are not a baseball fan or even a sports fan, Ng’s story is compelling. It’s a version of the American dream, if you will.

Related Program 

 

Kim Ng: On Deck

802: Sun, Nov. 11, 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

So the Prince of Denmark chastises his mother in Shakespeare’s early 17^th-century play. She remarried too quickly and too rashly – to a man who quite possibly murdered her first husband and usurped his crown. Hamlet was perhaps justifiably enraged, but he abstracts his anger against woman, at large. Nothing screams misogyny louder than a fear of women, at large. 

Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet; Julie Christie as Gertrude 

“Frailty, thy name is Man!”

First-wave feminist Margaret Fuller gave us this remarkable experiment in role reversal in 1845. If Hamlet could declare a deficit in womanhood, Fuller would unpack an equal lacking in manhood. Men were power-hungry, selfish, narrow-minded, and prejudiced. Women were dependent, undereducated, and disempowered. Only when the path was laid bare for women to achieve spiritual and intellectual equality with men could the sexes effect true harmony with each other. Fuller’s polemic is tinged with the ideal of romantic love: men and women complementing each other in a “ravishing harmony of the spheres.” She proclaimed brazenly in the nineteenth century what Foucault and the poststructuralists would affirm for the twentieth century: that categories, gendered and otherwise, were unstable, fluid, constructed. According to Fuller, “there is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.”

Margaret Fuller

If only the men in Queen Gertrude’s life had more of the “divine energy” about them (had, in effect, been more enlightened about relations of the sexes), perhaps Gertrude would not have found herself so entangled in, dependent upon, and frail in the face of, a romance with the sociopath, Claudius.

Claudius, Gertrude, and at center, a glowering Hamlet

Or so suggests Fuller’s revolutionary tract, Woman in the Nineteenth-Century. It was published originally in that famous transcendentalist magazine, The Dial, under the following prescient title that smacks of today’s litigious culture: The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men. Woman versus Women.  The trial-hungry feminist lawyers of Lifetime’s Drop Dead Diva would be proud.

 
The Dial, July, 1843 

Drop Dead Diva's cast of feminist (for the most part) lawyers

 Fast forward to the 1960s, The Feminine Mystique, and second-wave feminism. Women have the right to vote, to own property, to not be involuntarily committed to insane asylums without a trial, but they’re still largely stuck in the home as housewife goddesses and sexual idols. What Betty Friedan called “the problem that has no name” manifested as frustrated domestics and stifled secretaries anxious to make their way in an unwelcoming world dominated by womanizing male executives (think of Mad Men’s Betty Draper and Peggy Olsen). To support the career ambitions of women meant sidelining their sexuality, precisely because it was their reproductive qualities that rendered them, in the eyes of men, useless outside of the home and bedroom. It was a critical time in the growth of feminism, and one that continued to complicate the sexual status and freedom of femininity.

Mad Men's Betty Draper, Peggy Olson, and Joan Holloway

And then the Age of Madonna arrived, as I have been inspired to call it by scholar, critic, and professor, Camille Paglia. Her controversial op-ed piece in the New York Times, entitled, “Madonna: Finally, a Real Feminist,” was my first introduction to Paglia’s radical and highly-charged feminism. A feminism that glorifies rather than moderates feminine sexuality. She called Madonna’s video, “Justify My Love,” pornographic, decadent, fabulous, and avant-garde. Paglia’s is a feminism that smacks of sex, curves, and sauciness.  Madonna’s garter stockings, sensual caresses, and submissive positioning at the man’s feet add up, in Paglia’s ledger, to a woman who “teaches young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising total control over their lives.” Madonna’s music video revels in the shifting tides of male and female sexual power. Sometimes the men seem sexually dangerous, casting sidelong, half-sinister glances and clawing at their writhing female partners. But Madonna also exercises tremendous sexual power, ending those encounters on her clock rather than his. She leaves a wistful-looking man in her wake as she runs down the corridor, laughing and mirthful. Female desire, rather than masculine satisfaction, turns the gears of sensuality in Madonna’s film.

Still from Madonna's "Justify My Love" 

Camille Paglia 

Paglia takes a pretty prickly view of American feminism. It has a “man problem,” she writes. “The beaming Betty Crockers, hangdog dowdies and parochial prudes who call themselves feminists want men to be like women. They fear and despise the masculine. The academic feminists think their nerdy bookworm husbands are the ideal model of human manhood.” I’ll never look at a Betty Crocker box o’ cake mix the same way again. Nor, for that matter, will I see in quite the same way my potential mates of the “nerdy bookworm” variety.  I have to say, you do meet a lot of them in academia, and we do often think about feminism in its many iterations – political, theoretical, personal.

In fact, just recently, I thought of Paglia’s radically “feminine” feminism when I felt myself caught in a minor fashion dilemma. In preparation for my first go-around on the academic job market, my mother, an academic herself, went shopping with me for an interview outfit (a painfully optimistic endeavor, because one has to make a lot of cuts and beat a lot of odds to get that coveted interview). As Dr. Karen Kelsky counseled in her blog, “The Six Ways You’re Acting Like a Grad Student (and how that’s killing you on the job market),” your clothes should be new, and they should fit properly. So I tried on a couple of suits, but my mother and I couldn’t agree on the fit of the skirt. She favored the larger size that hung straight down, masking any hint of curve or hip. I favored the smaller size that complemented rather than disguised my figure, making me feel a tad more stylish in the process.

So what does it mean to look “professional” as a woman? How much curve can you show? Or how “dowdy,” to borrow Paglia’s cutting critique, must you be? What parts must be, not just covered, but downright disappeared, when dressing a female body? And what exactly are we trying to hide? Our anatomy? Our sensuality? An inherent unprofessionalism?

Paglia urges us to navigate the sensual contours of gender difference in a way that relishes and controls our sexual stereotypes, rather than succumbs to our fear of their political incorrectness. “The sexes which used to occupy intriguingly separate worlds,” declares Paglia in “No Sex Please, We’re Middle Class,”  “are suffering from over-familiarity, a curse of the mundane. There’s no mystery left.” There was certainly plenty of mystery in the misogynist world of Mad Men, and look where that got everybody. But Paglia’s point is well-taken. If we all adopt what she calls an “androgynous” approach to styling our sensual selves, we just might find our desperate-to-be-employed bodies stuck in oversized skirts that have about as much drape as a paper bag.

Paglia’s provocative and against-the-grain cultural critiques continue to make the news. Just the other day I came across this wonderful piece in the New York Times on Paglia and her newest project, “Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars.” As you might imagine, she has some pretty choice things to say about the Egyptian galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Join me on November 4^th, as she continues to inspire, intrigue, and provoke us with her expansive and barbed analyses of our professional and personal, political and artistic selves.

Related Program 

 

Camille Paglia: Culture Critic, Provocateur

509: Sun., Nov. 4, 2:30 - 3:30 PM

I am sitting reading at Myopic Books in that great back room of hardwood floors, of chairs nestled in the crocked, outstretched arms of bookshelves, of muddled windows that temporarily frame fleeting Blue-Line trains.

A guy is rummaging through the “Fem Lit” section and I don’t wonder why he’s reading Irigaray or even think it’s refreshing to see a guy interested in Irigaray. His pants are tight, my size I think, and they’re paired with a blue flannel shirt that would perfectly match my eyes and all I can think is, “Dude, lemme borrow that outfit.”

 This bookstore is in the heart of Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood. Here, ‘80s punk rock meets lumberjack; a mid-western mimicry of the Mission, the Castro with no hills.

North Milwaukee Ave, Wicker Park

So, I’m sitting there reading and a girl in her early twenties runs up to me frantically. She rushes at me with one of those cameras so ubiquitous that even the guy at the bookstore counter is wearing one like a heavy necklace—not a Polaroid—but a film camera with one of those woven, brightly colored straps that your dad was wearing in the late 60’s—shirtless, probably in tiny, tiny shorts.

THIS guy.

She hands me this camera and asks:

“Do you know how to take a picture with this thing?”

I thought it was broken. I thought she needed me to fix it. I pulled back the small lever that advances the film and it loaded. There was a satisfying click of the shutter when I pressed a large black button. A picture of the floor

She said, “Thanks!” enthusiastically and ran…actually ran…off. I’m sitting there, post hipster hit-and-run, and a flood of questions run though my head:

Where was that girl going?

Had she never used a film camera before?

Why didn’t she know how to work her own camera?

Art?

I imagined a scenario. She was on a date at a tea bar across the street when her date, noticing the Vivitar V3800-50 SLR 35mm peeking out of her canvas backpack, asked if she was a photographer. He showed her a few dozen fisheye photos and she freaked out, realizing she was on a date with an ARTIST! And she had no idea how to take pictures with the camera that was now casually hanging around her neck. Her Facebook, inundated with sepia-induced photos, collected under cryptic album titles like "Hiding Out in the Big City Blinking" usually involved a small, light pink digital camera and a vintage effect setting. A photographer who does not know how to use a film camera--I wish it was poetic.

I’m looking at you, but really I’m looking at myself, looking at you.

This is all creative speculation, but I think that beyond my initial fantastical renderings of this bizarre, funny moment are greater implications, greater generational questions. The Millennial Generation (born after 1980) is in many ways defined by a strong sense of performance—selfhood translated through social media. Born on the tail-end of 1987, I am one of them. We are documenters, self-promoters, creators of fleeting realities. But we are also open-minded, diverse, passionate seekers. And on the eve of this coming election, we are worried.

Heather McGhee, vice president of the public policy center Demos and a frequent guest on MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN, is joining us at the Festival this fall to discuss the Millennial Generation. Demos recently published a report entitled The State of Young America, which chronicles the Millennial Generation’s coming of age in relation to other generations. The report came to numerous disheartening conclusions, including the harrowing projection that we may be the first generation in the history of America to end up worse off economically than our parents. We’ve also collectively acquired a staggering student loan debt of over 1 trillion dollars, which has recently surpassed the national credit card debt.

Beyond all of these detailed tribulations, McGhee asserts that the singular crisis of our generation is a blinding, autonomous focus on individuality that has shifted policy away from the public interest. Community, civic responsibility and the conception of a social contract are hopelessly lost in the deep pockets of corporate lobbyists. Wal-Mart, and conglomerates like it, has replaced unions, just as loans have replaced grants. Millennials are coming of age in the tail-spin of Reagan’s failed experiment, and the trickle has slowed to a menial drip. The new students, graduates, parents, home owners, dog owners, questionable camera owners—those of us just making our way into this messy world—are waiting eagerly at the bottom, mouths gapping.

In November 2008 the Millennials were perhaps the most significant voting demographic for the Obama campaign, with a thirty-four point margin, a sharp increase over Kerry’s eight point margin four years earlier. McGhee asserts that we need to engage in a “robust democracy.” The election in 2008 is proof of a Millennial desire for reconnection, for civil engagement, for public solutions. Despite our seemingly self-indulgent, individualistically driven ways of interacting with the world, we are intensely interested in the time in which we live and in the people here and now. I think that Millennials want to rally, to rebuild, and to invest once again in a civic community.

I worry hypothetically about the girl with the camera. Are we a generation so obsessed with how we look to others, about how we are distinct and unique and sovereign unto ourselves, that we cannot conceive of the collective? I worry, but at the very least, she did come running—chin held high—to unabashedly ask for help.

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Millennials and the American Dream

710: Sat., Nov. 10, 2:00 - 3:00 PM

Lisa Lucero

At the crack of dawn, eleven groggy students untangle themselves from mosquito netting and pull on thick pants and long-sleeved shirts. We douse ourselves with sunscreen and bug spray, lace up mud-caked hiking boots, pop mildly hallucinogenic malaria pills, and stumble out into the sticky Belizean dawn.

Lisa Lucero waits impatiently at the door of her beloved pickup truck, her dark eyes sharp and her tongue sharper. We’re not supposed to talk to her before she has had her coffee.

We clamber into the truck-bed and Lisa takes off down the dirt road. Burnt milpa (traditional slash-and-burn agriculture) fields stretch on either side of the road towards the jungle, still smoldering with the acrid scent of a fresh burn. Puffy clouds, hot pink and gold in the dawn, cruise across the sky on their way to becoming thunderheads later in the afternoon. We cling to the sides of the truck bed, gasping in humid air, as Lucero veers the truck around deep potholes.

At Valley of Peace Village, a cluster of cinder-block and clapboard houses sprawled along the road to the jungle, we eat a delicious home-cooked breakfast with the Chocs, a Belizean Maya family. Mrs. Choc’s sweet Central-American-style bean sauce, handmade tortillas, eggs laid yesterday, chicken and rice fit for gods wake us up a bit. Now that Lisa has her coffee (and a five-cup thermos to last her the rest of the day) we zoom in the pickup into the jungle, with six field assistants from Valley of Peace close behind.

The field assistants built garages from saplings and palm branches to shelter the parked trucks while we worked.

We enter the ancient Maya site of Yalbac on foot, carrying equipment into a cluster of mounds that at first glance look like small abrupt hills covered with jungle vegetation. The mounds, Lisa tells us, showing us the survey map of the site, are actually temples. The jungles of Central America are full of unexcavated ancient Maya sites, marked by mounds like these. And then we begin work.

The Temple of the Sun at Tikal, Guatemala

Archaeology isn’t simply digging in the dirt, and it isn’t simply swashbuckling. You’re rarely searching for mummies and gold. And you’re definitely not racing neck-and-neck against Nazis to find an artifact that will save (or end) the world. Although, with Lisa around, there is plenty of metaphorical whip-cracking.

For this summer’s field school project, we undergraduates work on several “test pits.” Test pits are small 2x2 or 2x1 meter units sunk at key locations around a site in order to determine where the best data lies before undertaking a larger excavation. Sounds simple, right?

 The field school students removing dirt.

Wrong. On our first day of excavation, all eleven of us get down on the ground with compasses, neon orange twine, rulers, and nails to stake down the outline of a test pit. The angles have to be perfectly ninety degrees, the sides perfectly symmetrical, the string border perfectly level, everything aligned with the cardinal directions. It takes us four hours to outline one single test pit.

To make life a little more interesting, we students invent intriguing names for the test pits, including: “The Freddy Mercury Memorial Test Pit” and “Ye Olde Test Pit of Many Cobbles.” Lisa promptly rejects both.

My test pit, outlined in orange string. If I stand inside, I can't see out of the top.  The contraption behind the pit is a sifting screen, to find small artifacts in the dirt we scoop out.

In addition to imparting technical and theoretical knowledge, Lisa impresses upon us the human dimensions of archaeological work. She underscores the importance of the field assistants, without whom we North Americans are quite lost. The field assistants, and the entire Valley of Peace Village for that matter, are actually refugees who fled from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras during the brutal civil wars and genocides that took place in the 1980s. Despite tragic losses, these men are jolly, good-natured, helpful, and working far more quickly and efficiently than we hapless undergraduates. They can build anything out of the jungle in a matter of minutes, the more wondrous works including several shelters to keep the rain off test pits and a two-story ladder to allow aerial photos of larger test pits. Lisa has relied on Mr. Choc’s ancestral and experiential Maya knowledge of the jungle for twenty-some years, and Mrs. Choc’s Central American food for much-needed salt and calories in the heat. Stan always hears rain coming ten minutes before anyone else; José is a dedicated birdwatcher; and the beloved elderly (now late) Salvadoran, Don Luna, made a point of convincing the single young women to go to El Salvador to “find a good husband.”

On weekends, Lisa makes sure we are busy and well-versed in all things Ancient Maya. She arranges trips to the most important Maya sites, including the world-famous and monolithic Tikal, the expansive and gorgeous Caracol, and a spelunking expedition into the mysterious ritual cave of Actún Tunichil Muknal. She even takes us to the Cara Blanca pools, the site of her newer project involving scuba diving. (Watch the National Geographic video and the longer version on YouTube.)

The Crystal Maiden, the highlight of the cave Actún Tunichil Muknal.  This skeleton of a 19-year-old female is covered in glittering calcite crystal from hundreds of years of mineral-rich water flowing over her bones.  

While we manage to improve our efficiency in staking out the other test pits, it is the first taste of the meticulousness, tedium, and frustration that all too often characterize archaeological fieldwork. Meticulousness comes first. Before you even start digging, you have to sketch the surface of the test pit. And by “sketch” I don’t mean whimsically interpret the appearance of the dirt and shapeless rocks. By “sketch” I mean whip out the tape measure and painstakingly note the exact coordinates of every corner of every rock, like plotting a shape on a graph. With every stinking rock! And there are a lot of rocks (“cobbles,” technically). Finally, when you break the soil and remove the top layer of rocks, you get to measure and sketch the next layer (or “stratum”) of rocks. And so on, and so on. For someone with a lack of spatial reasoning skills and a bit of numerical dyslexia (me), it can get frustrating.

The frustration really hits hard, though, when it rains. Rain is a huge problem for archaeologists. A light drizzle can wash away your careful stratigraphy in a matter of minutes. If we suspect rain is coming—and it comes almost every day, this being the rainy season after all—we hurry to cover the bone-dry test pits with tarps and sheets of plastic and huddle under ponchos to wait it out. For almost two weeks—a significant chunk of the six-week field school—we are rained out practically every day.

The road to Yalbac, with thunderheads already forming.

Lisa contrasts her work with desert archaeology, like some sites in Peru and the American Southwest, where all sorts of organics (such as textiles and human remains) survive indefinitely in luxurious dryness. The jungle, on the other hand, not only gobbles up organics faster than you can say “mummy,” but also wears down architecture and inscriptions with its relentless rain and ravenous flora. The result is that every Maya site looks like a bunch of mounds, covered with gnarled roots and poisonous trees, nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the jungle.

Things get more interesting as we dig deeper into each test pit. We start to find more artifacts—sherds of damp red pottery and shiny smooth flints in startling blue, pink, and green shades. Lisa identifies these artifacts as “ritual trash” which nonetheless provides important clues into the ritual practices of the ancient Maya. We spend the end of the field school scrubbing each one of the hundreds of flint (or “chert”) and sherds with toothbrushes. Then, they are labeled with an artifact number and shipped off to the Belize Institute of Archaeology.

Lisa’s charisma is part sweet charm, part strategic snark. She owns three machetes and knows how to use them. She tells us how she used to drive herself down to Belize through México, all alone, in her trusty red pickup truck. She takes a morbid delight in showing us photos of the terrifying insects she has encountered in the jungle—hives of African killer bees and bot-flies that drop down from canopy to burrow into your scalp. Early on, she establishes a rule about critter photos: in order to obtain bragging rights for spotting an exceptionally large insect/arachnid/reptile/amphibian, you have to snap a photo of it with a standard-sized object (a pen, a playing card, etc.) to indicate actual size. To prove her point, Lisa has a photo of a large hairy nightmare with a yellow pencil next to it. “Here’s that tarantula—with a pencil. For scale.”

A critter, probably deadly, indicated by its bright orange color.

But if you really want to incur the fearsome wrath of Lisa, loot an archaeological site. Looters, an all-too-common occupation ironically glorified by Indiana Jones, are non-academic treasure hunters who rip apart archaeological sites in search of gold and to sell on the black market. They destroy everything that is precious to archaeologists in their path, tossing about the cobbles, sherds and chert we work so hard to record in perfect detail. If they happen upon a precious burial, they usually destroy the body and take the jewels. Yalbac is scarred by looters’ trenches, both ancient and recent. Looters dig straight into the centers of temples, looking for the most magnificent (read: bejeweled) burials. Once a stratigraphy is disrupted, you can never get it back, and all the information is lost forever. Even if artifacts survive, they are virtually useless outside of their original context. It’s an archaeologists’ nightmare.

An old looter's tunnel, penetrating deep into Yalbac's main temple.

I myself experience the rage and disappointment of a corrupted stratigraphy as I am finishing work on my test pit. Now, at the end of the field season, it is six feet deep, with eight strata carefully mapped and accurately noted – and plenty of interesting artifacts. As I dust off one of the final potsherds, I see in horror that the sherd has the English letters “WEST” carved deep into the ceramic surface, as though a colonial Englishman a hundred years ago thought it would make a jolly good trail marker. Since it is found at the bottom of the test pit, it means the entire stratigraphy is meaningless. All six feet of dirt, cobbles, and artifacts above the sherd clearly sifted into place very recently, and nothing found there could have anything to do with the Maya. Yes, it’s a tad frustrating. But what’s a lost field season in the larger scheme of things…       

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Lessons from the Ancient Maya

809: Sun, Nov. 111 3:00 - 4:0PM

Soaring. Ecstatic.Transformative. These are word-sensations that came to me as I listened. Hersch creates an amazingly textured musical and lyrical world. Of course, the “lyrics” are Walt Whitman’s, but the care and courage with which Hersch surrounds the words and lets them take flight are, well – I've already said it – extraordinary.

In his liner notes, Hersch humbly describes his process: “In setting out to compose the music, I had no idea where these words would take me.  But I followed my instincts and, away from the piano, simply started to sing the poems.”

Got that? He sang the poems. He lets the poem’s inherent music come to him over time. 

     “Over time, musical themes emerged – and I began to find internal
     rhythms as I lived with the subtleties of the words.  Like Whitman,
     I tried not to limit myself, and, when the words wanted to take me
     somewhere – stylistically, melodically, rhythmically, and harmonically –
     did my best to just get out of the way. The result is that the music,
     like Whitman's ‘Song of Myself’, ‘encompasses worlds and volumes
     of worlds’.” 

In that same poem-song are the words:

     A child says, “What is the grass?”, fetching it to me with full hands. 
     How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

The wonder of Hersch’s setting of Leaves of Grass is that it illuminates and celebrates that very unknowability—of nature, of human nature, of God, of love.

Fred Hersch and vocalist Kate McGarry

Hersch is known primarily as a jazz pianist, composer, and leader of his own trio. I had the pleasure of hearing him play with his trio at the Jazz Showcase last month. He is a master of styles—as handy with hard-bop as with latin swing. He played obscure Miles, paired Jerome Kern with Thelonious Monk, and included an excerpt of Leaves of Grass. At one point, I heard the repetitive two-note drone (ostinato) in the right hand that I equate with Brad Mehldau and thought first that Hersch was sampling a bit from Brad. Then I remembered that Mehldau studied with Hersch and that what I was likely hearing was the source of what Mehldau has turned into his signature sound. Hersch is too restless and curious to stay in that, or any, one place. And for that we are lucky.

When he addresses the structure of Leaves of Grass, Hersch notes that, “formally, the closest comparison of this piece to a classical musical form would be a small-scale oratorio:  not a song cycle, but an entire piece with a narrative sweep.”

And sweep it does. Sure, the music is available on CD and online. But I wouldn’t miss the chance to hear this unusual, stunning work live—in the new state-of-the-art Performance Hall at the Logan Center at the University of Chicago. Hersch is gathering musicians from New York, Boston, and Chicago for this one-night-only performance. Here’s the line-up:

     Tommy Boynton and Kate McGarry, vocalists
     Jim Gailloreto, clarinet, alto sax, bass clarinet
     Geof Bradfield, tenor sax
     Victor Garica, trumpet/flugelhorn
     Andy Baker, trombone
     Jill Kaeding, cello
     Jeremy Allen, bass
     Bryson Kern, drums
     Fred Hersch, piano

Don’t you miss it, either!!

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Leaves of Grass

210: Sun, Oct. 21 6:00 - 7:30 PM

Sometimes, though, cable news can be extraordinarily edifying. I remember one such moment. It was in the fall of 2006, and I was watching this show or another, when a guest was announced. It was Rajiv Chandrasekaran. And while the name sounded vaguely familiar from my too-infrequent perusings of The Washington Post, I knew little about the man and his work. Turns out, he was the Post’s bureau chief in Baghdad and had just written an account of life in the city’s Green Zone, the walled-off compound from where Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority set out to fashion a democratic Iraq in the months and years after the U.S. invasion.


Rajiv Chandrasekaran

There were tons of Iraq books on the market at the time – urgent critiques of the war and angry defenses, studies of military minutiae and geopolitical analyses. But this was clearly different. Imperial Life in the Emerald City – the humanist in me immediately perked up at the poetic title alone – was neither polemic nor rant. Instead, it was something approaching an ethnographic account of the daily complexities and contradictions of the U.S. administration in and of Iraq.

The interview barely over, I raced to Unabridged Bookstore – the fabulous shop in Lakeview that happens to be right around the corner from where I live. I picked up Chandrasekaran’s book and started reading then and there. And I couldn’t put it down. Here was the rare combination of international policy expert and truly gifted writer. Packed with revelatory information, it was first and foremost an engrossing read – a book that informs you with the seeming effortlessness that only few writers can actually  achieve.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City

I wasn’t alone in my assessment. Imperial Life in the Emerald City became a publishing sensation, garnering some of the best reviews of the years and accolades ranging from the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and the Oversees Press Club of America Award. It was even made into a movie, Green Zone, a 2010 vehicle starring Matt Damon.

With all this in mind, I was thrilled to learn, sometime in early 2012, that Chandrasekaran was coming out with a new book, this one based on his reporting from Afghanistan. And when we had the chance to invite him to the CHF, we jumped on it!

Little America

It’s clear that we made a great choice. Published in the summer of this year, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan was instantly hailed as required reading for anyone interested in American foreign policy, in our war zones and beyond. Much like in Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Chandrasekaran – now the National Editor of The Washington Post – brings an anthropologist’s eye for the telling detail to bear on his topic. And once more, he focuses on the quagmires faced (and produced) by a U.S. administration seeking to establish control over a faraway land. It’s riveting reporting, prescient analysis, and captivating narrative all at once. I can’t wait to hear his presentation at the CHF!

Helen Levitt

Louis Faurer

Morris Engel

Weegee

Paul Strand

Robert Frank

Zoe Strauss

Paul D'Amato

Louis Faurer

Paul Strand

Weegee

Zoe Strauss

Paul D'Amato

Helen Levitt

Morris Engel

Robert Frank

Zoe Strauss

Paul D'Amato

Helen Levitt

Zoe Strauss

Paul D'Amato

Zoe Strauss

Morris Engel

Louis Faurer

Paul D'Amato

Zoe Strauss

Paul D'Amato

Paul Strand

Weegee

Zoe Strauss

Paul D'Amato

Robert Frank

Paul D'Amato

Zoe Strauss

Paul Strand

Louis Faurer

Robert Frank

Morris Engel

Weegee

Helen Levitt

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The Iconic American City
Richard Gray Visual Art Series

701: Sat, Nov. 10 11:00 - 12:00 PM

Hi again – Ian Belknap, Founder and Overlord of WRITE CLUB here. As you may have heard, very shortly CHF will be taking your submissions for bout topics for our fast-approaching shows at the Poetry Foundation. In order for you to make the best and most mighty suggestions, which will ensure the most maximally awesome show possible, here’s a couple things to keep in mind:

·It’s gotta be conceptually meaty. We’re not looking for a chicken wing of an idea – we’re looking for a leg of mutton. There should be an audible Fwomp! when it hits the table. For instance, Fire vs. Ice—even though these are each literal, also have considerable associative depth—they serve as potent symbols with great meaning that transcends their literal reality, in a way that Staple vs. Paper Clip, for instance, cannot hope to.

·They need to be equally matched. If one of an opposing pair is meaty and has heft, but the other does not, there’s no way for it to be a fair fight.

·They cannot violate the (just-now-made-up) Principle of No Forgone Conclusions—if a bout is between an idea that, on the face of it, is awesome, and an idea that is bogus, which do you think is more likely to prevail? A writer/performer of great craft can overcome this, obviously, but we believe all combatants deserve a fair shake. So Comedy vs. Tragedy, for example, would constitute a more fair bout than Love vs. Hate. Make sense?

·It should ring familiar—there should be precedent in the general-knowledge mind of the reasonably well-educated person. Made-up malarkey has no place, but just because a phrase is well-known does not render it a good bout. So Klingons vs. Romulans, for example, would not meet the general familiarity standard, nor does Hell vs. High Water constitute a satisfying opposition.

·They do NOT have to constitute a diametric opposition—polar opposites are swell, but two contrasting ideas that have sufficient weight, that ring familiar, and that are equally matched work perfectly well. Rock vs. Roll is not an opposition, Lock vs. Key is not an opposition, but both examples can constitute a fully satisfying bout.

·It cannot violate the (again, just-now-made-up) Law of Granularity. Too much specificity can render a topic difficult to write upon well, so Roots vs. Branches offers both sufficient clarity AND sufficient openness to render it an excellent bout, whereas Birch vs. Elm would not.

·Lastly, it must adhere to the (last time, just-now-made-up) Principle of No Borderless Expanses. As noted above, a degree of openness is critical. However, too much openness leads to a writer driven mad by limitless possibility. As such, Land vs. Sea would represent a more robust bout than would say Here vs. There.

We, the combatants set to square off during WRITE CLUB’s CHF shows, thank you in advance for your worthy suggestions, and vow to fight like banshees for your entertainment and edification.

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Write Club

517: Sun, Nov. 4 6:00 - 7:30 PM 602: Wed, Nov. 7 7:30 - 9:00 PM

The F.B.I. has had Barney Rosset’s Francis W. Parker School file for over seventy years. In class a teacher had asked him: “Who is the most important person in the world?” He had been reading Sawdust Caesar by George Seldes, an anti-Mussolini novel. Already a radical contrarian, he answered with conviction, “Benito Mussolini,” but would ironically go on later that same year to publish a mimeographed, socialist/communist newsletter dramatically named Anti-Everything. In an interview for the Paris Review he commented, “[The F.B.I.] thought I was a pro-fascist.” He was, in fact, a twelve-year-old.

Barney Rosset, the legendary owner of Grove Press, editor of the Evergreen Review, champion of obscenity, gin, and the avant-garde was interviewed extensively throughout his lifetime. His collective profiles meld into a hagiographic portrait in which the life of Rosset and the life of his publishing company Grove Press confusingly collide. Rosset passed away earlier this year at the age of eighty-nine. It is fitting that a man who devoted his life to the unbridled telling of stories would himself become a tall tale. His memory, dictated now by the written record—the delusional factuality of interview—seems to have transcended naturally into the realm of storytelling. The fact is his life’s work changed the American canon: what we read, what we consider to be literature, what we consider to be beautiful, what we consider to be art, what we teach in college lecture halls. Henry Miller. Samuel Beckett. William S. Burroughs. Jack Kerouac. Antonin Artaud. Regis Debray. Jean Genet. The Marquis de Sade. J.P. Donleavy. Che Guevara. Malcolm X. Blacklisted and banned, these were the authors he fought for; the books that would never have otherwise been published in the U.S. were instead rolled up in the back pockets of a generations’ Levis jeans, on the shelves of student unions.

Loren Glass

CHF presenter Loren Glass was one of the last to interview Rosset, writing Counter-Culture Colophon, a three piece story that appeared in the Los Angles Review of Books. He has recently extended it into a book on the history of Grove Press entitled Counter-Culture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde. Glass chronicles Rosset's life from his early leftist musings in Chicago at the progressive Francis W. Parker School, to the acquisition of Grove Press and the controversial publication of countless novels and Grove’s own Evergreen Review. Glass explains that with “New York as his home base, and the booming American university population as his audience, Rosset’s signal achievement with Grove Press and the Evergreen Review would be to take the avant-garde into the mainstream, helping to usher in a cultural revolution whose consequences are with us still.” Like black ink spilled on white paper, Rosset’s own story is an opaque, messy blurring of beauty and obscenity—a distinction that would become his greatest fight.

 
Evergreen Review No. 14

There was something both exceedingly complicated and perfectly simple about what Grove Press was doing.  Rosset was making literature more accessible to the masses, taking part in what Glass refers to as the “paperback revolution that was democratizing reading in the United States.” But Grove was also re-defining what the public considered to be art. This was the ‘50s and ‘60s; a new generation was coming of age, heading to college in droves. They would become Grove’s greatest supporters, waiting outside bookshops for the new delivery of dollar paperbacks, that they nicknamed “Grovers.” Grove published books that other companies wouldn’t touch, like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and the uncensored version of D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  In doing so, Rosset was essentially re-defining First Amendment rights; he fought countless obscenity charges and instances of extrajudicial suppression. These legal battles made certain condemned and elicit subjects—literature that was often erotic and even pornographic—not only legal, but acceptable. And the public ate it up.

Originally published by Obelisk Press in Paris, Miller’s Tropic of Cancer was purchased under the counter by a young Rosset at the Gotham Book Mart in New York City. He was deeply affected and intrigued by Miller’s great sense of individualism, as someone separate: an expatriate and maverick. However, he deviated with a key exception: “we must participate in action with our neighbors if we ever wish to achieve any of the freedom which Miller so covets… perhaps our salvation lies in all of us becoming artists.”  

Glass writes: “Grove worked not only to associate their imprint with the latest in experimental literature, but also to establish themselves as a force in the communities which produced and consumed this literature, communities which would soon become epicenters of student revolt.” The young readership committed to these publications provided the support Grove needed for the battles against censorship lawsuits. Interestingly, mainstreaming avant-garde literature was what gave Rosset the mass support necessary to legalize banned texts that had previously been ruled by the Supreme Court as “material lacking redeeming social importance.” Grove fast became the center of the counterculture movement, a vanguard of the radical. But to do this successfully, the underground ironically had to step into the light—essentially making the new, the forbidden, the untouched, a norm.

In an effort to gain public support for these obscenity battles, Grove launched an anti-censorship campaign called “Join the Underground” that appeared in full-page ads in Esquire, Ramparts, The New Republic, Playboy, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The Village Voice, and on posters throughout the New York City subway system. It was a counterculture call to arms: “If you’re over 21; if you’ve grown up with the underground writers of the fifties and sixties who’ve reshaped the literary landscape; if you want to share in the new freedoms that book and magazine publishers are winning in the courts, then keep reading. You’re one of us.”

 
Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Barney Rosset  

By the time William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch was published in the Chicago Review and censured by the University of Chicago administration, Grove had acquired a large following. Allan Ginsburg famously testified using his poem “On Burroughs’s Work” that he had written years earlier: “A naked lunch is natural to us, / we eat reality sandwiches.” This was a club, with recognizable members, and Rosset had become a defacto leader of sorts, a charismatic avenger of sex, free love, and gritty reality. If you were between the ages of 16 and 35, you wanted to be in it.

 
The first edition of the Evergreen Review, 1957

 In a broader scope, Grove was instrumental in creating the identity of what has become widely known as the “Beat Generation.” What was produced was a cult of the counterculture consumed by college students who could only really experience it through the safe black and white pages of “Grovers” or the Evergreen Review. Rosset explained in the Paris Review: “Certainly the Beats, the pop artists, and the abstract expressionists did complement each other when they were brought together inside Evergreen Review. But that wasn’t them. That was us. We saw the connections that they didn’t see.”

Evergreen Review No. 47, 1967

Glass, who also interviewed Fred Jordan, Barney Rosset’s right hand man and managing editor of the Evergreen Review, and his son Ken, referred to Grove and the individuals who ran it as a business. Ken immediately corrected him: “We just called it Grove. Because it was just its own thing.” Glass asked: What about a rock band? “It’s more like a band than anything else,” Ken agreed. And then he added, “The relationship was not so much from one person to another. It was one person to Barney, and then Barney to everybody else.” It was this legendary charisma that made Grove run, that made the whole thing work. It is how so many of Grove’s greatest moments are told—impossibility transformed by Rosset. He was both the alchemist and the crucible.

Barney Rosset and Norman Mailer

Rosset is considered by many to be the 20^th century’s most important publisher. His story is a Chicago story, it is a New York story, it is an American story, but more importantly it is a story about storytelling itself. At the Chicago Humanities Festival we cannot wait to hear Loren Glass tell it.

Quotes used for this piece came from Glass’s three part series in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Counter-Culture Colophon , and from an interview from the Paris Review: Barney Rosset, The Art of Publishing No. 2 by Ken Jordan

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The Case for Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer

806: Sun, Nov. 11 2:00 - 3:00 PM

When I first arrived in Boulder it was snowing. I’d taken a Greyhound halfway across the country and was dropped in the middle of the night at a gas station whose most striking feature was a payphone. I was there to start school as an undergrad at Naropa University and with orientation still a week away, I spent the first few days walking around town. I can’t quite recall how it happened, but one night during those first few days I found myself sitting next to Anne Waldman in the café of the Hotel Boulderado. She was drinking tea and I had coffee and was the only one near my age at a table full of poets and writers. I expected my night to be one of sitting quietly, slightly away from everyone, but to my surprise, Anne started a conversation with me. We talked about writing, traveling, and how to organize a large poem – she had just returned from Thailand and was working on the book that was later to become Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble.  It was an exciting evening for a young writer and an apt introduction to Anne Waldman, her generosity and commitment to poetry; she may just be the hardest working woman in poetry. She is a world traveler, a speaker, an activist, performer, teacher, and editor and it is more than likely you will run into her in places you least expect, and because of this I feel it important to provide a short introduction:

1. It is hard to locate Anne Waldman. She grew up in Greenwich Village, surrounded by the unique artistic and musical vibrancy of New York. After graduating Bennington, where she was a student of Howard Nemerov among others, she joined John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Barbara Guest, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Bernadette Mayer, and Lewis Warsh, with whom she co-founded Angel Hair Books in 1967. Later she came to be associated with the Beat writers such as Gregory Corso, Ed Sanders, Diane di Prima, and especially Allen Ginsberg. Still, this doesn’t encompass Anne Waldman. Perhaps it is her Buddhist practice that informs this dislocation, and it is not a school of poetry that can find Anne Waldman but an ethos, that of the outrider. In Outrider she explains that the Outrider is one who, “rides the edge – parallel to the mainstream, is the shadow to the mainstream, is the consciousness or soul of the mainstream whether it recognizes its existence or not.” To discuss Anne Waldman is to discuss 20^th Century American Poetry.

Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and Robert Creeley

2. In 1968 she became director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in the Bowery, and less than a decade later, in 1974, she co-founded with Allen Ginsberg the writing program at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado where she is still artistic director of its renowned Summer Writing Program, a yearly convocation of poets, writers, performers, and print artists who are on the leading edge of contemporary experimental poetics.

3. A year later, she was poet-in-residence along with Allen Ginsberg on the Rolling Thunder Review, Bob Dylan’s famous 1975-76 tour and was featured in the tour’s film, Renaldo and Clara, as “the Sister of Mercy.” In the film, which I’ve only seen online, Waldman is standing on the street reading from her poem “Fast Speaking Woman” as a seemingly lost Dylan shambles by and, although the camera follows him, so does Waldman’s poem.

4. Fast Speaking Woman showcased Waldman’s mature work, a strongly performative and feminist voice that carries through her more than 40 books of poetry, most recently, The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press), a collection that spans 30 years and contains some of her most innovative and ambitious work and for which she was awarded the 2012 Pen Center Poetry Award.

5. A friend and I will often quote from Waldman’s poetry, in particular, “Stereo,” from Marriage A Sentence:

     Marriage marriage is like you say everything everything in stereo stereo
     fall fall on the bed bed at dawn dawn because you work awoke all night.

Why I think this is impressive is that we first heard these poems performed and have quoted them from memory ever since.

6. I sometimes think it is only in performance that Waldman’s poetry is best experienced. On stage she offers her poetry with strength and energy. When reading she reveals the musicality of her work: the falling octave of “Skin Meat Bones,” the marching quatrains of, “Rogue State,” or the insistence of, “Makeup on Empty Space.” Waldman will often move through her poems as if they are a single work, using one as a refrain, giving new significance and meaning to pieces that were separate before, isolated in the pages of her many books, but find new relationships and harmonies in her reading. This makes her live performances unique and at the conclusion there is the urge to yell “encore.”

7. But then there is the Waldman of the page. Removed from the force of Waldman’s performance, the same poems reveal themselves to be erudite, compassionate, and at times vulnerable; they are well crafted, intrinsically playful, and highly structured. Waldman’s works integrate and work through a history of poetics – from Sappho’s fragments and William Carlos William’s delicate stanzas, to the historical expansiveness of Whitman and then extend these forms into something uniquely hers, an unmistakable energy and rhythm, a Waldman poetic.

8. One summer, when I was a student at the Summer Writing Program, I was walking to class and saw another student leaning against a tree some ways up ahead and as I approached I realized that she was crying. Admittedly I was nervous about the awkwardness, not knowing if I should attempt to console her or give her privacy, so I slowed my steps and looked around for an alternate route. Moments later, Anne rounded the corner, no doubt on her way to teach a class, but when she saw the student, stopped and started talking to her. The two eventually walked over to the green and sat in the grass. Soon the student had stopped crying and was instead laughing, and Anne, by then late for her class, was smiling too.

9. Perhaps the secret to Anne Waldman (and the best introduction) is that no matter how busy she is writing, performing, practicing, traveling, or teaching, she still has time for what is important, for what is human. She reminds us that, in poetry and life, we should maintain, “the awareness of our mission/ which is of love made/ parallel lines of Bodhisattva attention & concentration/ ‘enforced’ to focus on the/ inexhaustible task always at hand” (Troubairitz).

Related Program 

 

Poetic Outrider: A Performance with Anne Waldman

206: Sun, Oct. 21, 3:30 - 4:30 PM

The University of Chicago

Clarity came in a long conversation with my undergraduate mentor Arthur Wolf. The anthro bug had bitten me for real in a seminar he had taught on the history of 19^th century anthropology, which brought to life the sheer intellectual hubris of the discipline’s founding generations – the notion that scholars could somehow master the totality of human experience. Their encyclopedic, multi-volume tractates, which I gobbled up at the Stanford Library, were strange fun (as well as endlessly problematic). But what really hit home was the work of George Stocking. I devoured his books Victorian Anthropology  and Race, Culture and Evolution, brilliant historical treatises that situated the origins of anthropology in the political, cultural, and intellectual currents of its time. To me, they read like thrillers. Franz Boas and E. B. Tylor – the founders of American and British anthropology – were its compelling, yet flawed heroes as we joined them on their battles against racial prejudice and enduring superstition. This, all hubris myself, was the kind of writing I wanted to do, too.

“Why don’t you go study with George himself,” Arthur Wolf said to me in that long conversation in 1992, “after all, he created the history of anthropology.”

I knew that already. Arthur, in fact, had dropped a hint along those lines a few months ago, sending me scurrying to the library (this was so pre-Google…). There, I discovered that George Stocking had transformed the inquiry into anthropology’s past from self-serving histories of triumphalism (the kind that always ends with the work of the writer) into a systematic field of study. He had published the first books that brought true historiographical rigor to the subject and founded the defining periodical, a book series with a bland title –  “History of Anthropology” – whose content was anything but.

Knowing all this, Arthur’s suggestion struck me as entirely preposterous. Who was I to study with the great George Stocking, professor of Anthropology and History at the University of Chicago? It was as if Arthur had told me – upon learning I wanted to go into painting – that I should call up Jasper Johns to tutor me…

Victorian Anthropology

I didn’t understand it at the time. But one of the wonderful things about the Academy is that Arthur’s advice was entirely plausible. And once he talked me down from my awed intimidation, I contacted George, met him at a conference, applied to UofC, and became his student. Over the next years, I had the extraordinary privilege to learn from this great man and to see up-close what it means to be an intellectual trailblazer. I even lost my intimidation (George is too nice and easy-going for that); but what steadily increased was my awe for his ability to create and shape an entire scholarly field.

Cut to this year’s Chicago Humanities Festival and a scholar who – in so different a field, it seems – accomplished something very similar. To put it simply, Tricia Rose is the George Stocking of Hip Hop Studies.

Tricia grew up in 1970s New York City, witnessing the emergence of Hip Hop firsthand. And while she was not the first person to comment on the new cultural form in print (it preoccupied commentators and critics from its inception), she was the first to write a truly scholarly account of the phenomenon. And what an account it was!

Black Noise

Black Noise started out as Tricia’s dissertation. She had studied sociology in college at Yale and gone on to Brown to get a Ph.D. in American Studies. Today, that’s one of the most vibrant, interdisciplinary fields around. But in the late 1980s, it still harkened back to its post-World War II creation, when it originated as the academic pursuit of American exceptionalism. Brown’s department, for one, was still called “American Civilization,” suggesting just how radical Tricia’s dissertation project truly was.

Indeed, Black Noise turned on a number of daring propositions. For one, it announced Hip Hop as a meaningful topic for scholarly inquiry, on par with other quintessentially American political and cultural formations like the Constitution or Jazz. Nowadays, with Hip Hop’s mainstreaming (to say nothing of its global dissemination), that hardly seems controversial. But at the time, public discourse was dominated by tropes of urban violence and criminality, hardly the context inviting literary analysis of the art form’s aesthetics. But that’s exactly what Tricia did, proposing and executing the kind of interpretive approach that illuminates America’s other cultural traditions. Hip Hop, she argued persuasively, is a “contemporary amalgam of key stylistic elements in several earlier black musics,” citing the improvisational elements in Jazz, the narrative sense of place in the Blues, the oratory power of black preaching, and the emotional vulnerability of Southern Soul music.

Black Noise would have been a landmark if it had restricted itself to aesthetics. But it was just as concerned with politics, both internal to Hip Hop and vis-à-vis American culture at large. When the book was published in 1994, it had the subtitle “Rap Music and Black Culture in America.” Even clearer, though, was the original version of the 1993 dissertation which was “Rap Music and Black Cultural Resistance in Contemporary American Popular Culture.” To read Hip Hop in such political terms – against the backdrop of the Los Angeles riots in the wake of the Rodney King verdict for example – was intellectually galvanizing. So was Tricia’s highly differentiated stance on the question of Hip Hop’s sexism, which she neither defended nor dismissed as a pathology intrinsic to the art form. Instead, she developed a nuanced analysis that read Hip Hop’s aesthetics politically, its politics aesthetically, and the entire phenomenon as what we now realize it to be: the most important American cultural innovation since the creation of Jazz.

Tricia’s stature has only grown since the publication of Black Noise. As the doyenne of Hip Hop Studies, she now presides over a growing field that includes such entries as CHF fave Adam Bradley’s Anthology of Rap, which treats the art form in the manner of the Norton Anthology of Literature.

Even more importantly, she herself remains a key voice in the debates on Hip Hop. Her 2008 book The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop and Why It Matters was a seminal reflection on Rap’s mainstreaming and argued that Hip Hop has, in fact, become the primary way in which Americans talk about questions of race.

German Rapper Bushido

More recently still, Tricia has turned to the transnational dynamics of Hip Hop. Now back at Brown University as Professor of Africana Studies – following stints at Rutgers, NYU, and the University of California-Santa Cruz – she has become fascinated by Rap’s global reach and its ability to address issues of justice and power across political and national boundaries. Having created Hip Hop Studies, Tricia continues to push its boundaries, in other words, and I, for one, can’t wait for the opportunity to hear this path-breaking scholar at the Chicago Humanities Festival!

Palenstinian Hip Hop Group DAM 

At the University of Chicago, I had the enormous privilege to study with one academic pioneer. Now, all of us in Chicago have the chance to learn from another one. Don’t miss the opportunity to hear Tricia Rose at the CHF!

Related Program 

 

The Hip Hop Pioneer

408: Sat, Nov. 3 12:30 - 1:30 PM

At the CHF, we are lucky to have patrons who are as excited about such work as we are. Cody and Deborah Engle are among them. Long-time supporters of the organization (Cody is a former board member, Deb a current one), they have underwritten a series of lectures that has brought some of the country’s most influential scholars to the festival.

Just consider the last two years: In 2010 for our festival on “The Body,” they sponsored Martha Nussbaum, the University of Chicago’s brilliant philosopher and classicist – and one of the leading intellectuals of our time. Not just that. They were keen to have hear speak on a truly pressing issue – to intervene, in other words, in one of the debates that truly matter. Nussbaum did not disappoint. In a tour de force that was as much philosophy as it was public policy, she addressed the crucial concept of “disgust.” It was the question of lesbian/gay equality that was foremost in Nussbaum’s mind – and she stunned her audience with her critique of sexual Otherness and her call to substitute in its place a sense of common humanity. The intellectual ambition was palpable, not least because it changed the very foundations of debates on questions like gay marriage. (You can listen to Nussbaum’s talk here.)

The Engle Lecture of 2011 was no less far-reaching. That year, we presented Columbia University journalism professor Sylvia Nasar. World-renown for A Beautiful Mind – her book on John Nash that was the basis for the film with Russell Crowe – she had just published a seminal history of economic thought. But Grand Pursuits was so much more. It doubled as an account of the modern condition, particularly in light of the fact that economics is the tool that has allowed our species to understand and change social conditions on a large scale. It’s exactly the kind of work Cody and Deb like to champion – scholarship that at once reflects on the human condition and explores our ability to transform it for the good. (Check out the event here.)

This year, we are continuing the Engles’ great tradition with a lecture by one of America’s leading sociologists, who also happens to be a native of Chicago. Eric Klinenberg, professor at New York University, came to national prominence in 2002 with the publication of Heat Wave. In the book, he homed in on the devastating week in July 1995 when over 700 Chicagoans succumbed to record temperatures. In doing so, Klinenberg developed a new form of analysis – a “social autopsy” of all the demographic, institutional and political factors that led to the catastrophe. In the first instance, then, Heat Wave was a study of tragedy and urban failure in Chicago. But the book had ramifications far beyond the city. Heat waves kill more Americans in a typical year than all other natural disasters combined. And Klinenberg’s analysis revealed that changes in residential patterns are a crucial factor – people living (and dying) at home alone.

It was the first inkling of what became Klinenberg’s bestselling book of 2012, the fascinating and widely discussed Going Solo. The study reflects on some extraordinary demographic shifts: In 1950, only 22 percent of American adults were single. Today, more than 50 percent are, and roughly one in every seven adults lives alone. Adults living alone, in fact, make up a larger percentage of U.S. households than the nuclear family. These massive sociological transformations are the jumping-off point for a truly ambitious analysis. For one, Klinenberg explores the immediate effects and benefits of this shift for our country. Even more far-reaching, though, he contextualizes the new demographic realities in the past, present, and future – both of America and the world at large. Humans, after all, have lived in groups from the moment of evolution of Homo sapiens. And with the rise of living alone, we might be witnessing a world historical transformation.

Eric Klinenberg will return to Chicago to discuss Going Solo at the festival. And I know that Cody and Deb Engle will be in the front row debating the implications of another piece of scholarship that truly matters.

Related Program 

 

Going Solo: Eric Klinenberg on the State of American Society
Deborah and S. Cody Engle Program

605: Fri, Nov. 9 6:00 - 7:00 PM

The premise is tantalizing – a bank robbery gone wrong in a small Midwestern town. I’d already read an excerpt in Harper’s Magazine and there was a gentle, understated matter-of-factness that stood in stark contrast to the sensational plot line.

“Conceivably many of us think of robbing a bank the same way we lie in bed at night and delicately plot to murder our lifelong enemy…. After which we conclude that though it’s satisfying to think we could murder our enemy in ambush…only a deranged person would carry out such a plan.  That is because the world is set against such acts…At which point we forget about our plan and go to sleep….  But for my parents this kind of thinking didn’t occur.”

By the time Ford’s publicist got around to sending the book, I was giddy with anticipation.

photo: Robert Jordan

I’ve always thought of Richard Ford as manly-man fiction – the stuff that middle-aged men, not thirty-something women, read.  Although the novel is narrated from the point-of-view of an adult Dell Parsons, our mild and contemplative hero, the story’s action is a long time gone; taking place during Dell’s fifteenth year, Great Falls, Montana, circa 1960. His family is a peculiar lot. From Dell’s broadly cheerful and charismatic Southern pop, Bev; his “ethnic” Jewish mother, Neeva, a dark-haired, serious-minded school teacher; to Dell’s tough and rangy twin sister, Berner, the Parsons are a nomadic Air Force family. Even before the unexpected crime torpedoes the family apart, this odd foursome is estranged from one another – coexisting, rather than truly living with one another. And yet. Life during that hot, dry, dusty summer long ago has the simple innocence of board games, and a swinging screen door, and holds the promise of a visit to the county fair.

And then, with just a few moves, the kind of missteps that any one of us might make, the family unravels.  First there is a petty crime – illegal beef sales made to the passenger train line that makes its way through the lonely Montana prairie. Some spoiled meat and debts unpaid, and Dell’s father’s Native American business partners are riled and turn surprisingly sinister, threatening violence. A bank robbery to settle the balance becomes the seeming, sole solution.

It would have been easy for Ford to use Dell’s parents’ crime and subsequent arrest as the catalyst for his sudden maturity. But Ford isn’t that kind of writer. Even through the second half of the book in rural Saskatchewan, where Dell goes to avoid a life in Montana’s social services system, Ford’s and our hero is still, at times, a young boy.  There is a meditative quality to this novel; a mesmerizing, lilting quality that goes, it would seem, at the pace of real life; a quiet thoughtfulness, relentless in the least urgent, but wholly essential, of ways. It isn’t until the book’s final pages, where we learn what’s ultimately become of Dell, that we can begin to fully comprehend the reverberations of these familial tragedies. I started Richard Ford’s Canada on a sunny, July Saturday and emerged a day later in a wintry, windblown prairie a changed reader.       

Related Program 

 

Richard Ford: Printers Row, Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize

814: Sun, Nov. 11 6:00 - 7:00 PM

So when I sat down in Grant Achatz’s avant-garde Alinea restaurant (decked out in my floor-length dress and special-occasion heels), I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the first item on the menu was, quite simply, a PB & J.

1. PB+J grape, peanut, bread
2. SOUR CREAM smoked salmon, sorrel, star anise
3. DUNGENESS CRAB raw parsnip, young coconut, cashews
4. HEART OF PALM in five sections
5. ASPARAGUS caramelized dairy, egg, bonito
6. TURBOT shellfish, waterchestnuts, hyacinth vapor
7. EGGPLANT cobia, crystaline florettes, radish pods
8. FRIED BREAD chocolate, adjukura, oregano
9. FROG LEGS spring lettuces, paprika, morels
10. BEEF flavors of A-1
11. HAZELNUT PUREE capsule of savory granola, curry
12. PROSCIUTTO passionfruit, zuta levana
13. FINGER LIMES olive oil, dissolving eucalyptus
14. MELON gelled rose water, horseradish
15. ENGLISH PEAS frozen lemon, yogurt, shiso
16. FOIE GRAS rhubarb, sweet onion, walnut
17. BURNT ORANGE avocado, picholine olives
18. BROCCOLI STEM grapefruit, wild steelhead roe
19. SNAPPER yuba, heavily toasted sesame, cucumber
20. LAMB NECK sunflower seeds, kola nu, porcinis
21. ARTICHOKE fonds d'artichauts cussy #3970
22. BISON beets, blueberries, smoking cinnamon
23. BACON butterscotch, apple, thyme
24. PINEAPPLE angelica branch, iranian pistachios
25. SASSAFRAS CREAM encapsulated in mandarin ice
26. STRAWBERRIES argan, lemon verbenna
27. LIQUID CHOCOLATE milk, black licorice, banana
28. SPONGE CAKE tonka bean, vanilla fragrance  

I knew very little about the restaurant when I showed up. Only that it consistently ranks near the top of “World’s Best Restaurants” lists and pioneers exciting dishes in the style of molecular gastronomy. I knew it was famous, unusual, inventive, and on the cutting edge of food conception, preparation, presentation, and consumption. I probably imagined that the dining experience would resemble the 2011 satirical portrait of organic eating that the TV show “Portlandia” is now famous for. Wanting to order the chicken but hesitant to break eco-friendly code, a well-intentioned Portland couple requests the chicken’s credentials. Is it local? Organic? With a hilariously dead-pan delivery, the server responds to their concerns:

“The chicken is a heritage breed, woodland raised chicken that has been fed a diet of sheep’s milk, soy, and hazelnuts.”

Not quite satisfied, the customers press for more information, prompting the unflappable server to produce a more complete dossier of the chicken’s life:

“The chicken you’ll be enjoying tonight…his name is Collin, here are his papers.” (Check out the sketch here).

Amidst the rising trend of organic, locally-farmed food and the ever-more specific provenance of the ingredients we eat, I think I anticipated a painfully detailed and serious menu that tracked the history of each item right down to its wild-caught roots. Certainly “Portlandia’s” chicken had a more elaborate birth record than my parents could ever produce for me.  

Quite the contrary! Alinea’s menu was minimalist, humorous, and full of intrigue.  Achatz’s signature bubble design (it’s the organizing graphic principle of both his website and menu) suggests playfulness, and the size of the bubble telegraphs the size and substantiality of a course. This can be a helpful guide when you’re navigating a 23-course “tour.” PB & J is bite-sized – it gets a small bubble. Beef with flavors of A1 is, as you would imagine, a more substantial course, and so boasts a larger-sized bubble on the menu. 23 discreet courses at a single dinner have the potential to overwhelm, to become a muddled mess. But Achatz presents the courses like a musical line, the size and density of the bubble-symbols corresponding loosely to the texture of the dish. The meal crescendos and decrescendos, guiding you towards meaty climaxes and then easing you back from the precipice with a bite-sized bit of something fresh. His menu is a new kind of culinary notation, reliant not just on the words that describe the food, but on an innovative system of symbols that conduct the eating experience. And you are presented with the menu at the meal’s conclusion as a memento of the experience, a culinary-score that memorializes the evening’s performance. 

And what a performance it is. I suppose you could call Achatz’s PB & J a deconstructed sandwich. Instead of jelly, you get a grape, dipped in peanut purée and cloaked in brioche. But what really fascinated me was that this single grape was still attached to the stem. Plucking that lone grape off an otherwise empty branch, I was thinking as much about the missing grapes as I was about the one I popped into my mouth. Where had they gone? Would the chef use them in other dishes? We usually save the grapes and discard the stem. Alinea’s kitchen was doing it the other way around. I couldn’t help but think of the “Addams Family” episode wherein Morticia Addams nonchalantly clips the roses into the garbage and plops their thorny stems into a vase. Achatz infuses the mundane and automatic act of stripping the stem to eat the grapes with new life. His dish urges you to think about that moment of separation, the divorce of the turgid, juicy fruit from its cellulose stalk. And you can’t help but wonder what happened to its friends.

PB & J: grape, peanut, bread - all attached to the stem (top view) 

So unusual is this PB & J, that it requires its own kind of serviceware. Designed by Martin Kastner, this particular piece is a stainless-steel contraption called the “Squid,” and it holds the peanut-coated grape perfectly.  You can get a better look at it in this side-view photograph (and see Kastner’s other designs at Crucial Detail): 

PB & J (side view)

You may not get the whole cluster of grapes, but this airy piece of servingware supports the grape and creates the illusion of that fruity bulk. It elevates the grape, offering it up to you as though you are Cleopatra herself, being fed fruit by this Mark Antony of dishes. I must confess, never in my life had the PB & J been such a fascinating and cerebral experience.

Cerebral, but also delicious. One of my favorite dishes features a single piece of candied bacon swinging like a pendulum from a device that Kasten calls the “Bow.” The interplay of food and servingware is ingenious. This strip of meat which I ordinarily think of as heavy, greasy, and opaque, seems light, airy, and translucent as it swings from Kasten’s design.

Bacon with butterscotch, apple, and thyme

Or, consider the Rhubarb with goat milk, onion, and lavender air. (Yes, air.) How does one eat air, you might ask? Why, by serving the plate atop a pillow – filled with lavender scented air! 

Rhubard with goat milk, onion, and lavendar air 

The weight of the plate slowly presses out puffs of floral air, adding olfactory notes to the rest of the edibles.   

Alinea raises food artistry and design to new heights. It had me thinking about form and function, style and taste in ways I never had. It’s an intellectual endeavor, but it’s also filled with whimsy and humor. It’s hard, for instance, not to chuckle just a little bit over a dish that’s titled simply, “Ginger and Five other Flavors.” (Deliciously vague.) Or “Squab: Inspired by Miró” (what does food that’s been inspired by Miró look like? Taste like?). Or, my personal favorite on Alinea’s current menu (which you can find on this website): “Lamb:…….?????........!!!!!!!!” Now that’s a dish I want to taste.

What new boundaries will Achatz push with his food? He’s inspired by Miró, to be sure. Who are his other muses? I can’t wait to find out more when he discusses his culinary and aesthetic vision with Madeleine Grynsztejn, Pritzker Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Related Program 

 

Grant Achatz and the Culinary Cutting Edge

500: Sun, Nov. 4 10:00 - 11:00 AM

Billy Budd at the Metropolitan Opera

But Gunn is also a consummate performer, a singing actor as much as an acting singer. He’s been clowning to great acclaim in San Francisco (Papageno in The Magic Flute) and scheming his way to raves in Los Angeles (Figaro in’ Barber of Seville). He’s created countless new parts (like Alec Harvery in Houston Grand Opera’s world premiere of André Previn’s A Brief Encounter) and found new depth in many of the classics (none more so, perhaps, than Britten’s Billy Budd, which has become a kind of signature role, most recently performed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera).

The Magic Flute at San Francisco Opera

And, lest we forget, Gunn is a local favorite. Born in South Bend, he has lived in Champaign for the last twenty years. It’s at the University of Illinois where he received his training, met his future wife, pianist Julie Jordan, and now serves on the faculty. The Lyric Opera of Chicago is his homestead, in other words, and over the years, he has thrilled us with amazing performances in such pieces as Così Fan Tutte, The Pearl Fishers, and, most recently, the revival of Showboat.

And yes – he’s famously a hunk. A martial artist, he has the kind of physique opera directors just love to show off. Type “Nathan Gunn” into the Google search engine, and the first suggestion that comes your way is “Nathan Gunn Shirtless” (really – just try it!).

With Nicole Cabell in The Pearl Fishers at Lyric Opera

Other artists might be annoyed. But Gunn takes it all in stride. In fact, he can laugh about it and turn it into an advertisement for all of opera. He did so most famously in an appearance on The Colbert Report in which the brilliant satirist “worried” about opera’s “bad moral messages” and asked Gunn if he ever performed with his shirt on. Colbert’s opening line for the segment: “My guest tonight is an opera singer. He’s a baritone. When I’m done with him, he’s going to be a soprano.”

Gunn is utterly at home on the opera stage. But his artistry extends beyond the genre. Over the last years, in fact, he has come into ever greater renown as an interpreter of songs, particularly those in the great American tradition. His marvelous 1999 disc American Anthem was a step in that direction, featuring extraordinary interpretations of such pieces as “Brother Can You Spare a Dime” and “Early in the Morning.” More recently, he collaborated with Julie Jordan Gunn on Just Before Sunrise, a beautiful set of contemporary songs by the likes of Tom Waits and Billy Joel, among others.

Nathan and Julie Jordan Gunn

We are utterly thrilled that Nathan and Julie Jordan Gunn will bring this body of work to the CHF stage. Their recital – featuring American songs from Charles Ives and Cole Porter to Richard Rodgers and Tom Waits – will be a truly outstanding event!

But it’s not just the music that will be extraordinary. Those of us who have had the pleasure of seeing Nathan and Julie Jordan Gunn perform together know that they’re not just a great musical act. There’s also a good amount of talking – and it’s a big part of what makes them so wonderful. Educators at heart (Julie, like Nathan, is a professor at the University of Illinois), they have much to say about the music they perform, both in terms of its place in American culture and its personal meaning.

With Juan Diego Florez in The Barber of Seville at Los Angeles Opera

What’s more, the Gunns could easily make a living in the world of Stephen Colbert. Yes, that’s right – they are funny, funny, funny! Don’t miss what promises to be one of the all-time great CHF evenings!

Related Program 

 

Nathan and Julie Jordan Gunn in Concert
Helen B. and Ira E. Graham Family ASCAP Cabaret

419: Sat, Nov. 3 7:30 - 9:00 PM

How to explain the genius of Yo-Yo Ma? The basic facts are easy: he is, quite simply, one of the most famous musicians of all time, a global figure whose list of accolades – the National Medal of Arts, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, honorary doctorates, and countless Grammys – puts him in a league of his own. And while his accomplishments could fill all kinds of blogs, a mere enumeration could never get to the heart of the matter. That lies, at least as I see it, in a unique approach to music-making as communal aesthetic and social project.

Yo-Yo Ma receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom 

Let me try to unpack that by going back to Sunday, March 18. I was, as is often the case, at Symphony Center. The afternoon program was billed, quite simply, as Yo-Yo Ma and CSO Musicians. That was an entirely accurate description for an event that featured work by Johannes Brahms and Bohuslav Martinů in addition to some contemporary composers.

But it doesn’t capture what actually happened on stage. There was Yo-Yo Ma, serving as MC and ambassador, chatting with the audience and bringing everyone into the experience. And there was Yo-Yo Ma, the musician, performing a breath-taking composition for two cellos with John Sharp, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s principal cellist. A treat to see two of the instrument’s greatest living masters performing together. A master class in technique and beauty of sound; but what I remember most vividly from Mexican composer Samuel Zyman’s piece is the communication between the musicians, a constant exchange of facial expressions, gestures, and musical lines. It was the same in the Brahms Quintet, which was anchored by Robert Chen, our orchestra’s supremely gifted concertmaster. The two instrumentalists were practically screaming the phrases at one another, producing a reading so intense I was literally at the edge of my seat.

I have heard my fair share of chamber music, both performed by long-standing formations like the Beaux Arts Trio or the Pacifica Quartet and such ad-hoc groupings as were playing that day. But there was something different about these performances, something I attributed to Yo-Yo Ma’s unique gift for talking with and through music. His music-making has an urgent, dialogical quality that draws you in. “This matters,” it says, not just in terms of the music itself, but as a collective act, a form of community formation.

Robert Chen (far left), Yo-Yo Ma, and other citizen musicians

It’s this commitment, I think, that has turned Yo-Yo Ma into an activist. His concept of the citizen musician expresses it perfectly. It takes music beyond a trivial sense of mere entertainment, treats it instead as a constitutive act of the social. Community, it says, starts by joining together in a common conversation – and music, both played and experienced, is the ideal-typical form of that conversation.

It makes me tremendously proud that our city is the hub for this far-reaching project, which Yo-Yo Ma is spearheading in his role as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant. If you haven’t done so already, please, check out the CSO’s Citizen Musician website!

Damian Woetzel

All of us at the CHF are thrilled that Yo-Yo Ma will grace our stage in an event organized and presented in partnership with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. I can’t wait to hear the extraordinary musician perform with his colleagues. But I am most excited that he will share his vision of citizen musicianship with the CHF audience. He will do so in conversation with Damian Woetzel, former ballet star, Director of the Aspen Institute Arts Program, and a fellow member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. It is a powerful message, one that needs to be heard by as many people as possible!

Damian Woetzel and Yo-Yo Ma

Related Program

 

Yo-Yo Ma and Damian Woetzel: A Conversation About the Arts and Citizenship

108: Sun, Oct. 14 7:30 - 8:30 PM

Karen Ho

Daphne didn’t think about it in terms of Karen’s age (although she was the youngest anthropologist on the Minnesota faculty at the time). What she really meant was that Karen was doing a truly new kind of anthropological research. For her 2003 dissertation at Princeton, she had studied Wall Street. Yes, Wall Street! Just about as far as you can get from anthropology’s “traditional” subject matter. I knew exactly why Daphne was so delighted. Her entire career was about forging new territory for the discipline.

She, herself, had been a trail-blazer. When she started graduate school in 1988, she made the then rather controversial decision to become an anthropologist of Europe. In particular, she wanted to work in Germany, hardly the kind of place considered “proper” by her august faculty at the University of Chicago. True, a number of anthropologists had been moving into Europe or North America for their research. But it tended to happen later in a scholar’s career, after having cut one’s anthropological teeth in a non-Western setting – places some folks still called “primitive.”

Daphne, though, was keen to broaden the anthropological scope. She was convinced that the method of the discipline – the near-mythical practice of ethnography – had much to reveal about the societies of the “West.” But she did need to make concessions. Ethnography was codified by such anthropological titans as Bronislaw Malinowski and E.E. Evans-Pritchard as a form of participant observation undertaken in face-to-face communities. The researcher would spend a significant amount of time in one place – Malinowski among the Trobriand Islanders; Evans-Pritchard among the Nuer and Azande – experiencing the totality of social life across the yearly cycle. In the process, the anthropologist would get to know a population in its entirety, charting interconnections through kinship diagrams and life histories. Eventually, the research would be written up in a way that revealed a culture’s enduring social structures – the kula system of exchange among the Trobrianders, the age sets among the Nuer, the conception of witchcraft among the Azande.

Daphne’s advisors were prepared to sign off on her research in Germany provided that she could replicate such an approach. Daphne, in other words, needed to find a village.

She did. A fascinating one.

Fall of the Berlin Wall

Geopolitical change was in the air in the late 1980s. And Daphne would go to village right at the inner-German border. Kella was located in the GDR, but so close to the Iron Curtain that a good part of the village had been declared a no-go zone. She arrived just after the Berlin Wall fell. And she lived there for nearly two years. During that time, she did all the traditional work that would satisfy her advisors, preparing kinship charts and recording oral histories. But she did so against a backdrop of massive political and social upheaval. And it was that transformation – the rapid shift from socialism to capitalism – that became the topic of her dissertation.

In the early 1990s, many scholars worked on the end of the Soviet bloc. But what made Daphne’s research so unique was her ability to tell the story from the perspective of people’s everyday experience. She had been hanging out with her interlocutors while they were learning their way around the new system. She would accompany them on first trips to West Germany, noting, for example, that they always asked the wrong questions in grocery stores: “Do you have bread?” instead of “Where is the bread?” They didn’t know about brand names either, looking for glass cleaner instead of Windex.

When Daphne published a book based on her dissertation – Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland – it was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. Widely considered to be the finest study of the socialist transition, it has become a staple of the anthropological curriculum. 

I had the incredibly good fortune of seeing all this up-close. When I arrived at the University of Chicago in 1993, Daphne had just returned from Germany and was in the process of writing her dissertation. She became a close friend and mentor. And she was instrumental in my decision to undertake research in Central Europe as well.

We constantly talked about what might be possible in anthropology, and standing on her shoulders, I ventured into the urban territory of Vienna (although I was always quick to tell people that the two groups I was studying – Jews and gays – were small and closely nit together, almost like a village).

At the same time, Daphne began to conceptualize a follow-up project to her dissertation. She, too, would move into the city – Leipzig, to be specific, where she would study the relationship between consumptions and new forms of citizenship in the unified Germany. And she received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship to make that possible.

So I knew exactly why Daphne was so excited about the hire of Karen Ho. Not only was she a superb scholar with a PhD from a terrific institution, but she had pushed the anthropological project even further. In her research, Karen had found a way to deploy the ethnographic method in an unprecedented manner, exploring the local site of Wall Street in an effort to reinterpret the global dynamics of finance. This was an ambitious anthropology, unencumbered by traditional strictures and fully able to address some of the most pressing political and economic questions of our time.

It was a brilliant hire. The buzz in the discipline about Karen’s work was huge, and when she published her book Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street in 2009, she became a bona fide star. Her study was hailed as a “landmark in the burgeoning anthropology of money,” the book “many of us have been waiting for.” By “blending into the background, listening intently, in a non-judgmental way,” Karen had produced a “must-read for anyone contemplating joining one of the major global banks.” And the culture at large took notice, too. Karen even found herself on the pages of Time Magazine.

Tragically, Daphne was not able to cheer on her colleague. In late 2007, she lost her battle with cancer. Her death left a terrible void in anthropology. But her legacy lives on. Her work continues to inspire us – and so does her belief that anthropology needs to continue pushing against its boundaries.

Daphne Berdahl (1964-2007)

Because of that belief, Karen Ho is now a tenured anthropologist at the University of Minnesota and one of the most influential voices in the discipline. I am delighted that she will join us at the CHF to present her extraordinary research on Wall Street. Her presentation will be gripping. But Daphne will be on my mind as well.

Related Program 

 

Gentlemen Prefer Bonds

510: Sun, Nov. 4 2:30 - 3:30 PM

Greetings, CHF loyalist! My name is Ian Belknap, and I’m the Founder and Overlord of WRITE CLUB. Which is likely a thing you’ve not heard of and do not know. I’m here to change that. First the basics:

WRITE CLUB is quite simply a literary event that takes the form of a battle. The format is this:

Three Bouts of

Two Opposing Writers/Two Opposing Ideas (assigned in advance – Fire vs. Ice, for example, or Fate vs. Free Will)

They get seven minutes each to read their original piece on their theme

Audience selects a winner in each bout

Cut of proceeds get donated to charities of the victors’ choosing 

The tagline for WRITE CLUB:

Literature as blood sport. Prize money to charity.

Find out more here: writeclubrules.com

The show’s been running on a monthly basis in Chicago since 2010, and has since spread to four other U.S. cities (Atlanta, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Athens, GA) and we launch in Toronto in October. We have interest in many other cities, as well.

Here’s how WRITE CLUB is a Trojan horse: the façade – the planking that makes the mane and flanks and so forth – is the rhetoric of combat; the structure of competition; the brash and belligerent style of it; and the gladiatorial who-lives-who-dies power wielded by its audience. It is also high-velocity, whip-smart entertainment with a wide appeal. This is its trick – this is how it’s spreading so fast despite its lack of any kind of marketing except for word of mouth and free social media.

But underlying this readily visible skin – the soldiers crouched in the belly of this horse, if you will, and the reason I believe that WRITE CLUB has been invited to perform as part of CHF – lies the real cunning of its design, the awesome and improbable-looking Leonardo gears that make it run. What WRITE CLUB really is: a battle between ideas; a forum in which we all get reminded that ideas are worth fighting for; and that conviction is something you build through effort and thought; and an arena in which to grapple with belief.

Likewise, the charitable donations that WRITE CLUB makes (a few thousand bucks so far – a drop in bucket, maybe, but for an all-volunteer army, it’s pretty great) embed the proceedings in a climate more meaningful than a mere popularity contest. To belabor the metaphor – this spirit of giving that underlies WRITE CLUB, this is our secret weapon – we are each of us fighting in a heightened and even ridiculous arena, but we do so for a cause.

We’re pleased to be included in the Chicago Humanities Festival this year, and hope to see you at the show.

Related Program 

 

Write Club

602: Wed, Nov. 7 7:30 - 9:00 PM

Opera is a total form of art, what Richard Wagner called a Gesamtkunstwerk. It combines music, theater, visual art, even dance, in ways its aficionados – and I’m certainly one of them – experience as the pinnacle of human creativity. When it all comes together, when it really, really works, it’s simply magic.

Un Ballo in Maschera

And yet, there is something worrisome about the genre. Sometimes, it can feel a bit static and worn, as if it’s reproducing rather than advancing the cause. “Opera is like a museum,” is the recurring charge – silly, since museums are among the most adventurous cultural institutions around. But the basic sentiment has something to it. After all, the core of the opera canon spans a pretty short period of time (the late 18th to the early 20th century) and includes only around 100 works. Where, in this constellation, can innovation come from?

The Abduction from the Seraglio

In Europe, the dominant trend has been a radicalization of staging. If someone’s going to do La Boheme again, the reasoning goes, it can’t be yet another realist staging that charmingly evokes mid-19th-century Paris. Instead, it might be set in Nazi Germany or a dystopian military state where a deadly illness rules as the result of chemical warfare. The German opera scene, perhaps the most committed opera community in the world, calls this Regieoper. It’s best translated as director’s opera, not least because it puts the director, rather than the singers, center-stage.

Wozzeck

Regieoper can be quite thrilling, especially when it’s practiced by some of the genre’s masters. Chicago was just treated to a spectacular production by one of the greats: Spanish director Calixto Bieito. But we didn’t get to see his work in opera. His Camino Real at the Goodman was "straight" theater, even thought the piece had memorable musical elements. In Europe, though, he has been pushing the operatic envelope with radical stagings of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera (with an opening scene involving toilets and their use), Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio (set in a brothel rather than a harem), or Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (featuring necrophilia along with an Elton John impersonator).

Nothing but “Eurotrash,” is how many critics see this kind of work. And indeed, we are not likely to encounter it in America any time soon. The cultural conventions are too different, to say nothing about the economics of it all (in Europe, Bieito directs at state-supported houses that can afford to challenge, even offend, their audiences).

The Fall of the House of Usher

No, America’s contribution to opera’s progress lies elsewhere: in the expansion of the canon through the creation of new work. And there, our opera scene is at the global forefront. Not only are the two greatest living opera composers American – John Adams and Philip Glass – but much of their work has come into existence through American commissions. Doctor Atomic, Adams’s extraordinary piece on the first test of a nuclear bomb, is a good example. It premiered at the San Francisco Opera in 2005 before taking the rest of the world, including Chicago, by storm (the Lyric co-commissioned the piece). So is The Fall of the House of Usher, one of Glass’s many gems. Based on Edgar Allen Poe’s story, it came into existence as a 1988 co-commission by the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge and the Kentucky Opera – and we will get to rave about it in February 2013 when Chicago Opera Theater brings it to town.

McTeague

And speaking of Chicago. Our own Lyric Opera has played a central role in championing new opera, particularly through its unique relationship with Pulitzer Prize winning composer (and University of Michigan professor) William Bolcom. In 1992, the company premiered his McTeague, co-written and directed by Robert Altman, followed in 1999 by A View from a Bridge. A third commission brought Bolcom together with Robert Altman again, resulting in A Wedding for which the late, great director adapted his film into a libretto and supervised the staging.

A View from the Bridge

I was at the premiere of A Wedding in December of 2004 – and I don’t remember an evening at the Lyric quite like it. The anticipation was tremendous. No guarantees, of course – the new piece could be awful. But to be present at a work heard for the very first time was truly special. And I wasn’t alone – every critic of note was there from our local stalwarts to Alex Ross and Anthony Tommasini (the chief music critics at The New Yorker and The New York Times respectively). This is an event that matters, their presence and subsequent articles declared (and they mostly liked it, too). But what a thrill to see our hometown company take command of the art form’s future! And I'm not even talking about the nine-part New York Times series on the creation of A View from a Bridge in 1999...

Ann Patchett

That’s what I thought again when the Lyric announced its new commission in early 2012. Bel Canto will be based on Ann Patchett’s award-winning novel fictionalizing a hostage crisis in Lima, Peru. At its heart is the character of Roxane Coss, an American opera singer who is caught up in the events and emerges as a symbol for the power of music in the forging of emotional bonds.

Renee Fleming

The project is the brainchild of Renée Fleming, one of the great singers of our era and the Lyric’s first Creative Consultant. And she found extraordinary talents to accomplish its realization. The libretto will be written by Pulitzer Prize-winning Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz, whose Anna in the Tropics was a sensation at Victory Gardens in 2003. The music will come from acclaimed Peruvian-born composer Jimmy López.

Anna in the Tropics

Opera is a big undertaking – every aspect of it. Its creation, for one, takes a good amount of time. Bel Canto is scheduled to receive its world premiere in the 2015-16 season. At that moment, our city will become the focal point of the opera world. Alex Ross and Anthony Tommasini will be back at the Civic Opera House, assessing Chicago’s latest contribution to the future of the genre.

Jimmy Lopez and Nilo Cruz, with Lyric Opera Director Anthony Freud to their left

Bel Canto is a major cultural event, and we at the CHF are keen to accompany the process of its creation. We are thrilled to start with an event that brings together Jimmy López and Nilo Cruz in a conversation moderated by opera dramaturge Colin Ure. We will hear about their respective work and peek behind the curtain of their ongoing collaboration. I, for one, can’t wait to find out how one actually goes about writing an opera. Can you do it over e-mail (López is based in San Francisco, Cruz in Miami)? And how do you know how to do it in the first place (both artists are neophytes to the genre)?

A Wedding

When I attended the premiere of A Wedding, I came to it "cold." I was only glancingly familiar with Bolcom’s music and had not even seen Altman’s film. Even still, I came away from the performance with awe for the piece’s sheer ambition. But I can only imagine how much richer my experience will be at Bel Canto after following its creation on the CHF stage. What a tremendous opportunity to get to the heart of opera’s future – right in our city!

Upcoming Event: CUBE's 25th Anniversary Celebration featuring the music of Jimmy López

Related Program

Creating an American Opera from Scratch
502: Sun, Nov. 4 11:30 - 12:30 PM

I celebrate myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I always get a thrill and a chill when I read those opening lines of Leaves of Grass. On the one hand, I crave that feeling of spiritual unity; on the other, who does he think he is, assuming that I will assume what he assumes? That’s a little presumptuous!

Piqued or not by his tremendous poetic ego, scholars have long agreed that Whitman revolutionized American poetry. Until the mid-nineteenth century, U.S. verse was rhymed and metered.  Whitman introduced the long, sprawling line and free verse. It was a radical new look for the page (lines crawling dangerously near the margin’s edge) and a new music for the nation.

 
Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

So it’s truly exciting that pianist and composer Fred Hersch has written a jazz arrangement of Whitman’s epic collection.  An American musical form meets American poetry.

Fred Hersch 

Hersch’s voluptuous melodies pair with Whitman’s lush poetry-turned-lyrics to create an aural sensuality that Whitman surely would have celebrated. His poetry was, in fact, risqué for its time. He loved the body in all of its tactile, germy, and erotic glory.  

I mind how we once lay a transparent summer morning,

How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me,

And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,

And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.

Whitman sings the body in “Song of Myself” – the mainstay poem of Leaves of Grass – from head to toe, hair to skin, clothed and nude.  And now Hersch and his musicians sing Whitman. (For a terrific sample, see NPR’s recording of Hersch’s New York premiere.)  

Ralph Waldo Emerson (Whitman’s famous transcendental contemporary who both lauded and challenged him) would likely have disapproved. Like Whitman, Emerson sought transcendence, but certainly not by singing the body erotic. In fact, his notion of the “transparent eyeball” makes quite clear that sensuality has no place in American philosophy and music. Renowned cartoonist Christopher Cranch brought Emerson’s prudishness to life with this famous cartoon:

 
Transparent Eyeball, Christopher Cranch

As you can see, there will be no tongues plunging to bare-stript hearts in Emerson’s vision of the human body. In fact, if Cranch is right, Emerson’s humanity looks something like a Teletubby crossed with a Toy Story alien that’s been incubated on Mars.

But Whitman’s transcendentalism celebrates the tactile body, and Hersch’s jazz arrangement revivifies it in the no-less-sensual dimension of aurality. In some ways, Hersch’s re-working of Whitman’s poetry follows in a long train of Whitman’s own revisions to his work. He published at least six distinct editions of Leaves of Grass starting in 1855 and going all the way through 1892. Poems changed, appeared, disappeared – his book was as alive and mutable as the human body itself. Literary critics have long debated alterations as minute as a change in punctuation. The 1856 “Song of Myself,” for example, ended, as we might expect, with the finality of a period:

Failing to fetch me a first, keep encouraged,

Missing me one place, search another,

I stop some where waiting for you.

But this was distinctly different from the 1855 edition which conspicuously lacks that final period:

Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

Was this a typographical error? The poet’s statement of unfinished action? Something else? We don’t know for certain, and maybe it’s time for a new kind of scholar to answer this question – a musician and composer whose crescendos and tempos offer a musical interpretation of Whitman’s literary line. 

So for now, instead of searching for the infinitude of that final punctuation mark (or lack thereof), let’s listen to the beautiful ebb and flow of Hersch’s Whitmanian music.

Related Program 

 

Fred Hersch: Leaves of Grass

210: Sun, Oct. 21 6:00 - 7:00 PM

Joan Didion is a prolific writer of so many genres – novel, essay, autobiography – and it is my belief that she revolutionized the latter. Her autobiographical trilogy, Where I was From (2003), The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), and Blue Nights (2011) moves from her ancestor’s pioneering histories in California to her own experience of family, love, loss, and aging.

But these are not autobiographies in the expected sense. The vignettes are not chronological, nor are they even strictly prose. The story they tell is not the life of Didion (and her family), but her memory of that life, in all of its hiccoughs, cloudiness (punctuated by moments of sublime or painful clarity), and song-like mantra for recalling the precious details that encapsulate whole memories of herself, her husband, her daughter.

Joan Didion

The white stephanotis woven into her thick braid. These perfumed flowers stand in for the joys, sorrows, simplicities, and complications of Quintana’s wedding ceremony, five years before her death. The white stephanotis in her hair. We don’t hear much about the marriage, or Gerry (her husband), or the in-law relationship that can be so fraught, so interesting, so crucial. The white stephanotis. That is Didion’s lyric mantra, her memory of her daughter’s wedding, marriage, and the legal (and emotional) incorporation of a new family member. The stephanotis.

If I could coin a genre for Didion’s life-writing, it would be lyric memoir. Her books are a poetry of her memories. Slightly impenetrable and enigmatic. Lyrical rather than explicative. Teaching us the nature of memory more so than the nature of her life. Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I’m working. Ultimately her meditation on motherhood and daughterhood, while provocative, is brief and little bit hazy. Maybe this is a testament to how critical, how rooted, how fraught that relationship can be. And how compressed mantras become substitutes in our memories for whole narratives, feelings, relationships, and lives. Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I’m working. We as readers can only begin to guess at the care, the worry, the regret, but also the happiness that lurks behind some of Didion’s refrains. She does not always contextualize them, rendering the refrain as the sole testament to the memory’s complicated delicacy and incomprehensibility. Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I’m working. 

This is American autobiography in its most revolutionary form. Not how a life should be lived (ahem, Ben Franklin), or how it was lived, but how it is remembered by us as we pass through it. How we live our lives is achingly bound up in how we remember its parts. That, I think, is Didion’s magical thinking.

Julie and Roger Baskes 

Roger and Julie Baskes, two of Chicago’s great philanthropists, are members of this group. For the past decade, they have underwritten the annual Baskes Lecture in History, an event that has become a fixture and highlight of the CHF. The list of past Baskes lecturers reads like a who’s who of the American historical profession, including such luminaries as David Blight, Robert Darnton, David Hackett Fischer, Anthony Grafton, Jill Lepore, and William McNeill. All of these scholars share a fundamental attribute: they are leading academic figures who speak with equal ease and verve to a general audience. The group thus encapsulates what the CHF is all about – the dismantling of the Ivory Tower separating so much of what’s going on in the academy from the population at large.

This year’s Baskes lecturer fully embodies this principle. Kevin Boyle, professor of history at The Ohio State University, is one of the most widely respected historians of 20^th-century America as well as a supreme story-teller – a scholar with the proverbial novelist’s eye. It was in full force in his celebrated 2004 book Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age. Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction (as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award), it tells the story of Dr. Ossian Sweet, an African-American physician in Detroit. After his 1925 purchase of a home in a previously all-white neighborhood, a mob gathered outside his house; all of a sudden, shots rang out, leading to the death of one of the white assailants. The resulting trials were landmark events, nationally followed and involving the participation of America’s leading lawyer, Clarence Darrow, who had defended John T. Scopes in the Scopes “Monkey” Trial (and had served as counsel to Leopold & Loeb). In Boyle’s masterful telling, we are not only treated to the gripping story itself, but to a rich analysis of its many ramifications – political, social, and legal. It’s an absolute model for the writing of history and an instant classic, both in the graduate seminar room and on the shelves of America’s history buffs.


Arc of Justice

So what does Boyle have up his sleeve for this fall’s festival? Something totally new – and I, for one, can’t wait to hear it! Here’s the short version: after Arc of Justice, Boyle moved from the Roaring ‘20s to the Swinging ‘60s. But just like in his previous research, the story he tells is far from a conventional tale. While the 1960s tend to conjure up strong images of love-ins, flower power, anti-war demonstrations, and civil rights marches, Boyle focuses on the many Americans who regarded the progressive vanguard with considerable suspicion. The result was a political and cultural retrenchment; a phenomenon Boyle calls “the Other ‘60s.” Especially when viewed from a Midwestern perspective, those other ‘60s, he argues, hold the key to understanding the current trajectory of our country.

Boyle’s new book on the 1960s, scheduled to be published by Norton, is highly anticipated among American historians and the many fans of Arc of Justice. And I am delighted that, thanks to the generosity of Roger and Julie Baskes, we are able to present a sneak peek at the CHF. Our partner in this wonderful event is the Humanities Institute at The Ohio State University. We commenced our association last year with a widely hailed talk on “Tomorrow’s History” by Boyle’s colleague David Staley. And we greatly look forward to continuing it with many more presenters drawn from the Big 10 powerhouse.

Related Program 

 

The Other 1960s
Baskes Lecture in History

813: Sun, Nov. 11 4:00 - 5:00 PM

How do you write a history of humankind? That’s hardly an obvious question. After all, no individual text can possibly encompass the entirety of the human experience – it can’t even come close. Sure, there were any number of 19^th-century scholars who were undeterred by such verities, leading to some massive multi-volume tomes. James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, for example, clocked in at an impressive (or daunting) twelve volumes. But that hardly made it comprehensive, no matter how many cultural traits it managed to catalogue in its thousands of pages.

Moche Warrior Pot 

More recently, the basic problems in writing a truly global history have been recognized. And the solution has been a self-conscious form of editing. Rather than describing it all, authors focus on particular facets of the human experience. Economic approaches have been particularly powerful, whether they have come from the left – like Immanuel Wallerstein’s magisterial The Modern World-System, whose fourth volume, published in 2011, takes the story up to 1914 – or the right, where Harvard star prof Niall Ferguson finds ever new ways to chart capitalism’s global triumphs.

Less fashionable of late have been global cultural histories. It’s not surprising, really. While an economic approach allows scholars to gloss over the multitude of particularities, cultural history demands attention to exactly those. In an age of ever-increasing specialization, however, that really isn’t possible. Who, after all, can be a true expert on both ancient Egypt and medieval Russia, the Mughal Empire and West Africa’s kingdoms?

Enter Neil MacGregor.

In 2010, the British art historian unveiled the most ambitious and inspired approach to global cultural history in, perhaps, ever. His A History of the World in 100 Objects is exactly that – an attempt to tell the human story using our physical creations. Drawing a material arc of human experience, MacGregor’s pieces range from the most basic stone tools to solar-powered lamps and include such objects as Egyptian mummies and Russian icons, Mughal miniatures and Benin plaques. It’s a brilliantly novel approach that allows MacGregor to chart ruptures and continuities in an unprecedented manner. Even more importantly, it locates our common humanity in a universally shared trait of object making. Not Homo philosophicus, but Homo materialis.

Neil MacGregor

Where does this plenty come from? Well, it helps that MacGregor is the director of the British Museum, that unparalleled institution holding some eight million works. It also employs some of the world’s finest scholars – and along with the inexhaustible pool of iconic objects, that curatorial expertise allowed MacGregor to venture his grand project.

Aztec Goddess Figure

The result was originally broadcast on the BBC. That’s right A History of the World in 100 Objects started out as a 100-part (!) radio series – a tremendously successful one that was recognized immediately as a landmark achievement and quickly became a global phenomenon (you can join the millions who have downloaded the episodes as podcasts here). Shortly after the broadcasts concluded, an accompanying book – a gorgeous atlas of human creativity – was published. It was an instant and international bestseller.

Every year, one of the highlights of the CHF is the Art Institute of Chicago President’s Lecture. And I couldn’t be more thrilled that Neil MacGregor accepted Douglas Druick’s invitation to deliver this year’s speech. Even if he were not the originator of A History of the World in 100 Objects, we would be thrilled to hear from Europe’s most influential museum administrator.

Maya Maize God Statue

But with A History of the World in 100 Objects as his topic, MacGregor’s lecture promises to be a true milestone. I, for one, cannot wait to hear about the project’s genealogy and execution. How did MacGregor conceive of his path-breaking approach to global cultural history? How did he and his team decide which objects to include? How did he deal with specialized versus generalized knowledge? etc. etc.

Clovis Spear Point

And if that weren’t exciting enough, MacGregor will do all this with an eye toward America – this year’s CHF theme. As it turns out, about 20 of the objects among his 100 are from the New World, from a Clovis spear point (found in Arizona and about 13,000 years old) to a buckskin map of the late 18^th century. Other objects hail from Central and South America, including a Maya maize god statute, an Olmec mask, a Moche warrior pot, an Aztec goddess figure, and a golden Inca Ilama, among several others.

North American Buckskin Map

What is their place – and the place of our continent – in the human story? I can’t wait for Neil MacGregor to tell us!

Related Program 

 

Songs without Words: Tales from America's Past
Art Institute of Chicago President's Lecture

603: Thu, Nov. 8 6:00 - 7:00 PM

I still remember my first encounter with the art of Liza Lou as if it was yesterday. It was at a show at the Krannert Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the winter of 2005. I was taking in one of the more intriguing art offerings I had seen in a while, a show called Over + Over: Passion for Process. It brought together about a dozen artists whose practice is grounded in painfully slow modes of assemblage. The curators linked the resulting objects to the Arts and Crafts movement of a hundred years ago, not least because of the artists’ use of ordinary materials. But there was a strong whiff of obsession in the air as well, a single-mindedness of purpose that markedly separated the work on display from some of the more dominant trends in the art world.

Wade Guyton, Painting (2006)

 
Josh Smith, Untitled (2006)

This, after all, was the moment when trendy figures like Wade Guyton, Josh Smith, and Kelley Walker were bursting onto the scene – producers of variously aleatoric compositions that flooded the art market based on their readily accomplished mechanical and digital production.

Kelley Walker, Black Star Press (2004)

Over + Over was as far from this trend as it gets. I was particularly struck by an assemblage piece by New York artist Tom Fruin. On first glance, it presented a straightforward grid of playing cards. Closer inspection made it clear, however, that the cards stemmed from different decks and were all worn and weathered. All the cards, moreover, appeared multiple times – all, except the Six of Hearts. That one was there only once.

Tom Fruin, Discard (2005)

It’s the title, “Discard,” the finally gave it away. Evidently, the artist rummaged through the streets of New York City in search of playing cards until the moment when had found every card in a full deck. The Six of Hearts was the last – after days, weeks, months, years? – and then he stopped.

The other piece that has stayed with me for all these years was by Liza Lou. It, too, seemed quite ordinary when first glimpsed: a six-pack of Budweiser presented on an unassuming pedestal that gave it the look of a readymade. Only once I came closer did I realize that this was about as far from a Duchampian gesture as you could get. What had looked like the glint of glass from only a few steps away, was actually the reflection of thousands of tiny beads. As I examined the object, I became more and more stupefied by its radical proposition: the transmogrification of an everyday item through an abiding act of labor. From that vantage point, the piece became a startling commentary on American consumer culture, suspending a reflex that takes commodities for granted by confronting them with their true price.

Liza Lou, Windex (1995)

Beading over everyday objects is, in fact, the dominant artistic mode of Liza Lou. And in the context of her oeuvre, “Budweiser” is actually a ‘minor’ piece, something she threw together in mere weeks as opposed to the years she has spent working on her most celebrated pieces. First and foremost, this includes “Kitchen,” a full-scale replica of a functioning kitchen that took four years to complete.

Other projects have taken similar amounts of time – such as her series of presidential portraits, which were completed between 1995 and 2000 – rendering Lou’s work almost mythical, not just for its startling visual effect but in terms of its sheer means of production.

Liza Lou, American Presidents 1-43 (2000)

Someone else who has been struck by Lou’s work for a long time is the CHF’s Artistic Director Emeritus Lawrence Weschler. One of the most trenchant commentators on the contemporary art scene, he has long identified Lou as a key artist of our era. He also sees her as an artist with a unique perspective on America, which is why I am so thrilled that he will be in conversation with her during our fall festival. The event, which will be part of the annual Richard Gray Visual Art Series, promises to be a highlight of this year’s CHF.

No doubt, Ren will ask Lou some of the questions that are on all of our minds: how does she manage to create her extraordinary beaded tableaux? And how long does it really take?

Even more, though, I look forward to hearing her thoughts on the larger meanings of her art. Does she see it as an explicit critique of American culture (the way I took “Budweiser” when I first saw it in Champaign)? And what would that signify in respect to her chosen medium, the bead, with its contradictory overtones of decoration and exertion. Not all that glitters, after all, is…

Related Program 

 

A Conversation with Artist Liza Lou
Richard Gray Visual Art Series

801: Sun, Nov. 11 11:30 - 12:30 PM

George Stocking

I was completely taken with Victorian Anthropology, his definitive account of the history of British anthropology. And in my initial hubris, I imagined that my dissertation would be a German counterpart. That proved illusory for a number of reasons, including the fact that such a thesis would have put me squarely between the disciplines of History and Anthropology, not a good place for getting an academic job.

George Chauncey was the mentor who stood at the heart of my next venture. I have written about him before, in a blog celebrating Gay Pride Month. There, I briefly mentioned his book Gay New York along with the importance of having him, an openly gay faculty member who was doing pioneering work in queer studies, as a role model. Now, with another Gay Pride Season just behind us, I have the pleasure of going into a little more detail – and for a wonderful reason: George will join us as one of the stars of the fall festival!

George Chauncey

But back to my grad school days. So there I was in my first year at the U of C, casting about for possible dissertation topics. And there was George, frantically finishing his book manuscript. It was the winter and spring of 1994, and the 25^th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion was to be commemorated in June of that year. George’s publisher Basic Books wanted Gay New York out for the occasion, forcing him to squeeze what is typically a rather leisurely process – we’re talking about revisions, indexing, proofreading, cover design, etc. – into a few months.

Gay New York

But it was all worth it. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 was immediately recognized as a landmark. Within a few months, it had won every major award in the field of American history. And I was reading it again and again to figure out how George had done it – how he managed what had previously been thought impossible: to restore the complexity of gay lives to full historical view. This is hardly a trivial matter. After all, we’re not talking about political or diplomatic history here, where well-organized archives readily aid the scholar in his or her tasks. On the very contrary, until very recently, lesbian and gay lives tended to leave few records, a function of various forms of repression and self-censorship. Against that backdrop, George had accomplished an extraordinary feat of archival sleuthing. Starting in the 1970s, he had made ingenious use of such sources as police and court records and the papers of “social hygiene societies.” In addition, he had uncovered numerous individual diaries and conducted countless interviews (when he began, some living memory still reached to the beginning of the 20^th century). What this allowed him to do was to paint a portrait, not just of an individual or two (not that that’s so easy either), but of an entire subculture.

Sigmund Freud

It was a tremendous inspiration, both intellectual and political – and it got my hubris going again. This time, my dissertation was going to be the Viennese counterpart of Gay New York. Not only would it restore a lost gay world to historical view, but it would present the lived realities reflected in the most influential modern theorizations of sexuality – those of Sigmund Freud and Richard Krafft-Ebing.

Richard Krafft-Ebing

It wasn’t to be. A quick summer jaunt to Vienna made it clear that police and court records were spotty (a function, in part, of the destruction during World War II) and that the Austrian counterparts of New York’s social hygiene societies lacked American fervor and left few records. By the mid-1990s, moreover, living memory barely reached into the interwar period, several decades after Vienna had ceased to be the world’s center of sexology. But maybe, I was just too intimidated by George’s daunting example. In any case, I eventually retreated into the (archivally) safer territory of the post-World War II era, writing a comparative study of Jews and gays that also become my first book, Symptoms of Modernity.

George, for his part, also moved into the latter half of the 20^th century, in his case to write the sequel of Gay New York. And the scholarly community has been waiting with bated breath to see how he continues the story up to and beyond the Stonewall Rebellion. But there have been other demands on George’s time. In the wake of Gay New York, he has become one of the most prominent voices in the struggle for lesbian/gay equality, serving as an expert witness in such major gay rights cases as Lawrence v. Texas and Perry v. Schwarzenegger (the case involving California’s Proposition 8). Related to these efforts, he also wrote the widely-praised book Why Marriage: The History Shaping Today’s Debate Over Gay Equality.

Why Marriage?

But it’s the “big book” we are all waiting for. And George – who left the University of Chicago for Yale in 2006 and now serves as the Chair of the History Department, arguably the best in the country – hopes to finish it by 2013.

Leonard Bernstein

In the fall of 2012, we will get a sneak peek, when he returns to Chicago to take part in the CHF. His lecture will focus on the 1940s and 50s, the heyday of Leonard Bernstein, Tennessee Williams, and the Bloomingdale’s sales clerk (you’ll have to come to find out about that last one). Their world was culturally rich and sexually confusing, populated by “homophiles” and “beards” and marked by a distinctive and, by now, bygone aesthetic.

Tennessee Williams

It promises to be a major scholarly event – and a true personal highlight!

Related Program 

 

A Sneak Peek at Gay History

505: Sun, Nov. 4 12:30 - 1:30 PM

As Chicagoans, we are fortunate to live in one of the great architectural cities in the world. Not only that. It is a city defined, like few others, by one overarching aesthetic and functional principle: modernism. True, there are considerable differences between such masters as Daniel Burnham and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. But like the other architects who have made Chicago what it is (from Frank Lloyd Wright to Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and from Bertrand Goldberg to Stanley Tigerman), they were wedded to the modernist ideal of finding an architectural language that could at once respond to and lead technological and urban development. The result was not only the subordination of form to function, but the conception of architecture as a social intervention – an optimistic vision that sees the built environment as an agent of progress. 

Bertrand Goldberg, Prentice Women's Hospital

We don’t think of them this way. But Chicago’s grand public housing projects – like the now demolished Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green – stemmed from this very impulse. They certainly betrayed their modernist roots aesthetically, with clean lines and efficient design. But more than anything, they were modernist in their social vision. Conceived and built in the 1950s and 1960s, the very heyday of the movement, they were an integrated solution to a whole host of urban problems: rapid population growth, urban sprawl, social inequality. And they had their counterparts all across the Midwest and the country at large.

We know how the experiment ended. Instead of models for modern, urban living, Chicago’s housing projects became notorious incubators for narcotics, gangs, and violence. And by the 21^st century, they were gone – bulldozed to make way for mixed-income housing in low-rise buildings. That, at least, is the conventional story. And it has a good amount of truth to it.

Thomas Struth, South Lake Apartments II

But there are counter-narratives as well – representations that seek to redeem aspects of the housing projects’ progressive styling along with the optimism inherent in their original design. At the forefront of this recuperation is an extraordinary group of visual artists.

Thomas Struth, South Dearborn Street 

Thomas Struth, the great German photographer and one of the world’s most widely exhibited artists, is easily the most prominent among them. In 1990, in conjunction with his first major U.S. show held at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, the artist spent several weeks photographing Chicago. Most of the images in the series are of downtown, capturing the city’s modernist ethos in its most iconic form. But he was also drawn to Chicago’s public housing projects, particularly the Robert Taylor Homes in Bronzeville. The result is a number of startlingly beautiful photographs that perfectly capture the housing projects’ precarious nature, balanced, as they were, between modernism’s visual elegance and the inhabitants’ wholly unanticipated alienation. In the wake of the demolition of the Robert Taylor Homes (completed by 2007), I see these photos as both a potent critique and wistful memento. At once populated and seemingly empty, they mark and lament a bygone moment in architecture and urban design.

Thomas Struth, South Lake Apartments III

Michael Rakowitz, Dull Roar

Another powerful representation along such lines comes from Chicago-based Michael Rakowitz, currently one of the stars of Documenta and a speaker in our upcoming fall festival. In 2005, he created Dull Roar, a remarkable installation that commemorates the modernist housing project, in this case St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe complex. Much like its Chicago analogues, the St. Louis structure hailed from the 1950s. But its demise happened much earlier, in 1972, amidst racially charged unrest. The widely-televised demolition marked the first major failure of a public housing project, a signal moment across the United States. In his piece, Rakowitz recreates the housing project in plastic tarp, inviting the public to come up-close on a viewing platform. From there, the spectator can witness the implosion, ingeniously orchestrated by deflating the building. So far, so historical. But the poetic intervention happens afterward, when Pruitt-Igoe is re-inflated to repeat the cycle. The building’s demise, in other words, is reversed on a cyclical basis, a gesture I read as a paean, no matter how ambivalent, to modernism’s ongoing promises.

Demolition of Pruitt-Igoe Housing Complex

Michael Rakowitz, Dull Roar

Chicago photographer Jason Lazarus sounds a similarly poetic note of resilience in his extraordinary piece Cabrini-Green housing project (before razing). Created in 2008 in the midst of the housing projects’ multi-year demolition, Lazarus gained entrance into one of the already-condemned buildings. There, he found and documented the following graffiti, written in two hands:

I was here. I was raised here and played here as a child and as a[n] adult. Now I’m leaving here after 30 years with a lot of love and memories. God bless a child with her new home and now I’m leaving my love here and taking it also to the new home. God bless you.

It’s a startling piece, both for its striking formal simplicity and the potency of its moving message. Even more importantly, it reminds us that Chicago’s housing projects were not just the product of a centralized vision of urban renewal, but the lived experience of thousands of people. And their stories, all too easily lost when buildings are torn down, are not just about drugs and violence but the whole panoply of life.

Jason Lazarus, Cabrini-Green Housing Project (before Razing)

Jan Tichy, Project Cabrini-Green

The stories of local residents were also at the center of Jan Tichy’s marvelous Cabrini-Green installation. Realized in 2011 and widely hailed, it coincided with the demolition of the housing project’s last building and took the form of a light installation (the preferred medium of the Chicago-based artist). Working with children from the area, Tichy placed light sources in individual apartments and used them, via poetic transliteration, to tell the residents’ stories. The play of lights was set in motion and continued unabated, albeit on an ever-diminishing scale as the building vanished over the course of several weeks. Thousands witnessed this extraordinary spectacle, which could be seen live, on-line, and at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In its original form, the piece is now gone, of course. But it lives on, in film and photo, and, perhaps most importantly, in the stories Tichy collected.

Jan Tichy, Project Cabrini-Green

Jan Tichy, Project Cabrini-Green

Art has taken us closer and closer to the experience of living in Chicago’s public housing projects. But it’s a writer, Audrey Petty, who has taken the definitive next step. A Chicago-based author of creative non-fiction, Petty has been undertaking an ambitious oral history of the city’s public housing communities. Working in the great tradition of Studs Terkel and Alex Kotlowitz (whose There Are No Children Here remains one of the towering accounts of life in Chicago), she learned firsthand what life in the projects was actually like. Her oral history – titled High Rise Stories and covering the Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green along with the Henry Horner Homes and Stateway Gardens – reveals a rich tapestry that translates into a collective story of community, displacement, removal, and relocation. The book will be published at the end of the year in McSweeney’s Voice of Witness series, created by yet another great Chicago writer: Dave Eggers.  

 
Audrey Petty

Audrey is a cherished colleague of mine at the University of Illinois, where she is on the faculty in Creative Writing. And I was absolutely thrilled when she agreed to give us a preview of High Rise Stories at the fall festival. Having been taken with the artistic representations of Chicago’s public housing projects for so long, I can’t wait to hear the perspectives Audrey’s oral history approach can reveal. Will it be more wistful memories of a once buoyant but ultimately failed modernism, a celebration of collective resilience in the face of urban plight, or something else entirely? Join me as I find out!

Related Program 

 

High Rise Stories

203: Sun, Oct. 21 2:00 - 3:00 PM

 
Award-Winning Author Charles C. Mann

And then I read Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. How wrong I had been. We often like to imagine the Americas pre-Christopher Columbus as an Edenic paradise, suspended in time and history, traversed lightly by Indians who were in total harmony with Nature. Which, as Mann teaches us, is a tremendously flawed and dangerous delusion. The rainforest is what he calls an “artificial wilderness.” Native peoples managed, cultivated, and controlled it every bit as much as any farm or urban center. The fact that you can, for example, stroll through the Amazon Rainforest and pick fruit from the trees is because, as botanist Charles R. Clement puts it, “people planted them. [You’re] walking through old orchards!”

Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

And that’s before Europeans touched ground in the New World, bringing horses, cows, bananas, sugarcane – not to mention smallpox and malaria. The list goes on. This so-called Columbian Exchange profoundly altered whole civilizations and landscapes. (And it was a two-way street. There would be no tomatoes in Italian cuisine if they hadn’t first been transported from the New World. No marinara sauce - think of it!) None of this means that 1492 wasn’t traumatic. As we see in Mann’s 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, whole civilizations collapsed when European explorers and conquistadors turned up with guns and diseases.

Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

Long before what researchers call “first contact” (Columbus sailing the ocean blue is a famous instance, but Mann delves deep into the history of Cortes, Pizarro, and others), Native American civilizations radically manipulated their landscapes. Every couple of years, for example, they set fire to the Great Plains and Midwest prairies, dramatically increasing their size. “In all probability,” Mann has declared, “a substantial portion of the giant grassland celebrated by cowboys was established and maintained by the people who arrived there first.” As ethologist Dale Lott has pointedly put it: Lewis and Clark weren’t exploring the wilderness; they were traipsing through pastures cultivated by Native Americans. Our romance with America the Beautiful (its “amber waves of grain,” “purple mountain majesties,” and of course, the “fruited plain”), is also a romance with its indigenous peoples.

Mann is the author of several wonderful histories of science, including his books on the pharmaceutical industry (The Aspirin Wars), 20^th century physics (The Second Creation), and endangered animals (Noah’s Choice). And, of course, he counters the romance of the edenic Americas with the sciences of anthropology, ethology, archaeology, and ethnography in 1491 and 1493. It was so tempting to let the illusion of raw wilderness sweep me away, but now Mann has swept me away with his global drama of whole civilizations, their rise, and their fall.

The next time I find myself in a beautiful piece of nature – on the shore of Lake Michigan, or the Painted Desert of Arizona, or, if I’m fortunate enough to make the trip, the Amazon rainforest – I’ll be hard-pressed to stifle that amazing, oh-so-rare feeling of inspired calm that I’m sure has something to do with my misplaced notion of a peaceful, untouched Nature-with-a-capital-N. But I believe Mann’s path breaking histories of the New World – before and after Columbus’ first contact – will also inspire. Because when we plant ourselves off the beaten path, far away from the sight or sound of buildings, highways, and farms, we won’t just be contemplating the modern civilization from which we’ve removed ourselves. We’ll be contemplating the much older civilizations that fashioned these landscapes. And our romance with Nature and the stories of American origins will also be a romance inflected by the history, science, and technology of Native American civilization.

 

Monteverde, Costa Rica 

I discovered late in my travels, while chatting with a family in San José, that the portions of Costa Rican wilderness I’d roamed were secondary forest, meaning it had been cleared (probably burned or logged), and probably several times over. The primary forest that once existed had been replaced by secondary growth – lush and beautiful, but most certainly touched by humans. As Mann points out, the past, present, and future of human civilizations is written in the land. Each stalk of maize carries the mark of indigenous ecology in its DNA. So too, it harbors the promise of “next season’s growth.” We are not the first people to shape the land, Mann shows us, and we won’t be the last.

Related Program 

 

1492: Before and After
Southwest Airlines Program

100: Sun, Oct. 14 12:00 - 1:00 PM

But Alexander Nemerov’s history is as playful and fun, as it is serious and groundbreaking. As Nemerov explains, his recent book, Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War (2010), attempts to find “a more elastic and more infinite form for talking about the past.” I believe his version of American history would grip even my antsy undergrads, anxious to start their weekend of fun (and studying, of course!).

Alexander Nemerov, Acting in the Night

Sometimes I think that what I wish for in historical writing – what I find most pleasurable – are answers to the nearly unanswerable mysteries about people’s thoughts, feelings, and motives. And sometimes, just sometimes, Nemerov responds to my wish, glancing the surface of a plausible hypothetical (“The Wright case [an 1863 murder with parallels to Macbeth]…might well have crossed Lincoln’s mind as he watched the play”), but never leaving the realm of academic history to enter the world of historical fiction. This is not a novel about what Lincoln’s interior world might have looked like (wouldn’t we love to know!). But Nemerov reminds us constantly that these thrillingly unanswerable and deeply personal questions (what was she thinking? What was he feeling?) drive scholarly and scientific progress.

So you can imagine the surprise and joy of reading Nemerov’s imaginative and somewhat experimental history of the American Civil War. Acting in the Night sounds to me more like the title of a crime thriller than an academic study of history. And in some ways, that’s precisely his point – you can’t study the Civil War without appreciating the culture (and the “fun”) that contextualized it. Surely Abraham Lincoln did something for fun when he wasn’t in the telegraph room of the War Department. What shows did he see, what art did he look at, what books might he have read? And why does it matter?

Abraham Lincoln

Nemerov reconstructs the events of one theatrical performance on October 17, 1863. The play was Macbeth and Lincoln was in the audience. (Talk about interdisciplinary – Nemerov merges two of the most popular fields of study, Shakespeare and the Civil War. In an abandoned field somewhere, Civil War buffs are reenacting the Battle of Bull Run in full-on Elizabethan costume.)

Two civil wars: one ignited in Scotland when Macduff brought Birnam Wood to Dunsinane. The other raged across U.S. towns and wilderness when seven slave states seceded from the Union. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is not an allegory for the American Civil War, but according to Nemerov, the play aligns provocatively with America’s famous war. In the 11^th Century, Macbeth ousts King Duncan quickly and bloodily to ascend the Scottish throne, sparking war with the former king’s son and the English army. In the 19^th Century, American citizens elect an anti-slavery Republican president, fomenting rebellion in the southern states. Scotland’s Macbeth relied on the fortune-telling of three witches (“All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter!”). America’s Abraham Lincoln embraced a moment of prescience when he predicted an assassination attempt, but from the wrong man (Nemerov quotes Lincoln, “So far as my personal safety is concerned, Gurowski is the only man who has given me a serious thought….[H]e might try to take my life”). The real murderer, of course, was John Wilkes Booth, not the radical Polish patriot Gurowski, but Nemerov’s point is that we all have our visions, our seers, our Sibyls, or three weird sisters prophesying our yet-unwritten future.

Macbeth's Witches painting by William Rimmer

Certainly the Macbeth-Lincoln comparison inspires Nemerov, but so does modernist poetry. The idea for his book came, he explains, from Wallace Stevens’ poem “Anecdote of the Jar”. Stevens’ narrator leaves a jar in the Tennessee wilderness, imprinting it forever with the mark of a human-made object. “The wilderness rose up to it, / and sprawled around, no longer wild.” For Nemerov (and Stevens) the smallest aesthetic intervention can forge a butterfly-effect of consequences, going so far as to domesticate the Southern wilderness. So too, this single performance of Macbeth on October 17^th reverberates in the cultural, political, personal, and military worlds of Civil War America.

Macbeth was, famously, Lincoln’s favorite play and in an evening foreshadowing his death at the Ford Theater (we cannot escape these moments of seer-like premonition, even if they are known to us only in hindsight), Lincoln attended this October 17^th staging of regicide at Grover’s National Theater in D.C..  Nemerov isn’t just interested in the famous presidential assassination – he unearths the art that augured it.

Nemerov upturns customary historical scholarship, suspending the Civil War narratives we’re most comfortable with over an eerie and provocative history of the artistic performances we haven’t yet recognized as part and parcel of the Civil War. I can’t wait to see Nemerov in person, to witness an academic (he’s a professor of Art History at Stanford) tell history the way I’ve always wanted to hear it. And I just might take my undergrads with me.

Related Program 

 

Walt Whitman's Moment: Poetry and Time in the Civil War

402: Sat, Nov. 3 10:30 - 11:30 AM

Chef Grant Achatz

But wait 'til you hear about some of our other presenters! The slate we are announcing today is pretty darn awesome. It includes Eric Klinenberg, who may just be the leading sociologist in the U.S. today. Eric, who is a native Chicagoan but has long been a professor at New York University, came to initial prominence with his important book on the 1995 heat wave. More recently, he has made a splash with Going Solo, his far-reaching study of the rise in single-person households. At the festival, he will give us a broad account of the current state of American society, affording us a real sense of where we are and where we're going as a country.

Sociologist Eric Klinenberg

He will be joined on the CHF stage by other exciting presenters, including Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock Nine, who will be in conversation with his son Adam, a prominent American historian at the University of Chicago. Another great historian who will be with us is Yale’s John Lewis Gaddis, one of the leading scholars of American politics – and yes, this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winner for his astonishing biography of George F. Kennan, the architect of the Cold War.

Historian John Lewis Gaddis

Photo by The Penguin Press, Michael Marsland

Little Rock Nine                                        

Historian Adam Green

And there’ll be amazing folks from the world of art, including the fabulous pair of Rob Lindley & Doug Peck, two of Chicago’s brightest young theater stars. In between raking in Jeff awards for such extraordinary work as Court Theatre’s Porgy & Bess and Carousel, the two have created a series of amazing shows for the CHF, including 2010’s Follies and 2011’s Academy Award extravaganza in which they did every Oscar-winning song in order (a production of Wagnerian proportions). For this year, they have come up with something truly special: Stephen Sondheim’s most controversial musical, the rarely-performed Assassins, a complicated and cautionary show that reveals the dark underbelly of American history like no other work in the canon. It will be extraordinary! And so will be the presentation by Joy Harjo, one of America’s most celebrated poets and a key figure in the world of American Indian letters.

I wish it were October already…

Director and Musician Doug Peck and Performer Rob Lindley

Poet Joy Harjo

In the beginning of June we revealed three new presenters:

Shelton Johnson is a park ranger with the National Park Service and was featured in Ken Burns's PBS series The National Parks: America's Best Idea.

Rolling Stone magazine has dubbed guitarist Marc Ribot the "go-to guitar guy for all kinds of roots-music adventurers," which seems an apt description given the versatility of his playing and the breadth of his collaborations.

Heather C. McGhee is the vice president of Demos, a New York-based public policy center. She is a frequent guest on MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN.

As groups we chose the Greek tale of Icarus, the myth of Prometheus and the fairy tale of the Little Mermaid. 

This first video had wonderful application of fabrics that added texture and shading.  It would have been quite difficult to attain this look if only hand cutting paper or cellophane.  We also see the inclusion of multiple moving joints and cut out frames that create positively beautiful shapes in their negative space. 

This video also utilized subtle fabrics, rich colors and has more of a playful interaction between the shadow puppet and live performer. 

This last piece demonstrates the use of clear strings taped to cellophane shapes and pulled across the projector screen to camouflage the origins of its movement. 

Here is a picture of our gracious workshop host, Nori, wearing the Prince of Fire’s crown of flames.

For a taste of Nori’s shadow puppet skills and general antics check out the video below.    

Some more pictures for your viewing pleasure! 

When I was in college, it was the local custom to assign all the undergraduates into one of two categories: techies and fuzzies. It will come as no surprise to those who know me that I was in the latter. Not only did I major in the ultimate humanistic discipline (what could be more pertinent, after all, than anthropology – literally the study of the human?), but I was supremely maladapted to handle any of the new electronic gizmos that were making the rounds in the early 1990s. I could barely handle my Macintosh Classic.

This is all to say that I’m as far from being an early adopter as it gets. I do have a cellphone, but it doesn’t get me on the web, my calendar is old-fashioned paper, and I still like my books between covers.

So until about three months ago, the furthest thing from my mind was Twitter. Sure, I had heard all about it. But to be honest, it didn’t make the slightest sense to me. Why, I thought, would anyone spend their time sending messages at the arbitrary length of 140 characters? Even more, why in the world would anyone read them?

This state of ignorant bliss lasted until the day our webmaster Matt Heinrich sat me down to explain what Twitter actually is: a supremely sophisticated and utterly novel communication tool – one, moreover, that can be adapted by all users to fit their specific needs.

And that’s when it hit me: here is a way to share what I am doing as Artistic Director of the Chicago Humanities Festival on a day-to-day basis with anyone who might be interested. What, after all, does it mean to curate a humanities festival? More than anything else, it means being in the know about what’s happening in the worlds of art and culture, both in Chicago and elsewhere. It means following the publishing industry as it releases what will become the next set of Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award contenders. It means keeping up with the reviews of these books and the flame-throwing debates that ensue when they are negative. It means staying on top of the latest developments in the world of scholarship, whether it’s that new interpretation of Picasso or the discovery of a previously unknown manuscript.

This is, in fact, what I do for a good part of my day. And the results used to end up in my computer, in complexly organized files designed to maximize later retrieval.

What Matt showed me is that Twitter has changed this. What it allows me to do is to share all this work with you – instantly!

This is what I’ve been doing for the last couple of months. Matt set up a program that all of us in the office can use to send CHF tweets to our quickly-growing list of followers. And I’ve been going just a little crazy with it, sometimes sending as many as two dozen a day.

But it’s hard not to. As I spend my time researching the world of art and culture, I come across fascinating and important things all the time. And now, whenever this happens, I write a tweet! This morning, this included a note about the facticity of David Foster Wallace’s depiction of the IRS in The Pale King, another one on the artistic influences on Damien Hirst, another one on Cythia Ozick’s prospects of winning the Orange literary award, another one on Italian curator Antonio Manfredi’s decision to burn a painting in protest against arts funding cuts by the Italian government, another one on… Well, just see for yourself.

I love to share my excitement for humanistic practice this way. But it really doesn’t end there. Because, as I’m learning more and more, Twitter is not a one-way communication platform. On the very contrary, it is intrinsically designed to facilitate dialogue, whether by way of re-tweeting another’s message to one’s own followers, or by use of the built-in public reply system. What this means for my practice is most exciting. As I’ve been tweeting away on the curatorial themes of the Festival, our audience is weighing in, offering their enthusiastic perspectives or urgently disagreeing with mine.

I can’t begin to express how amazing this dialogue is! In terms of putting together the CHF, it gives me an immediate sounding board on the pertinence of issues. Even more, it is beginning to have a real impact on our curatorial choices. This nascent dialogue gives the research I do as Artistic Director an instantaneously communal dimension, bringing our audience into the very heart of the CHF’s process.

With all this, let me close with an invitation to you:

Follow us on Twitter and join the dialogue!

What follows is a conversation between the curator of Stages, Sights & Sounds and CHF director of programming Mary Kate Barley-Jenkins and CHF artistic director Matti Bunzl. This conversation was transcribed and edited by Rachel Blumenthal.

MATTI: I’ve been reading about Susanna Hamnett’s upcoming performance, Nearly Lear, and what I’m really curious to start with is, how did you find it? Of course, you’re the President of the International Performing Arts for Youth (IPAY), so I know you see a lot of this kind of work. Where did you first see this piece, and what was it that made you say, “We have to bring this to Chicago!”

MARY KATE: Well, the piece has had an interesting progression. I first saw only a ten-minute excerpt about three years ago at the IPAY showcase “spotlight” where artists are chosen to give brief presentations. Susanna gave a ten-minute performance of Nearly Lear, and I saw it then. I was very intrigued by it, but felt like it was such a risky move to do a one-person adaptation of Shakespeare. I needed to see more, and I needed to see it in person before I could really consider booking it.

MATTI: …because we only bring four or five shows to Stages, Sights, & Sounds. It’s actually very different curatorially from what we do in the fall where we have about one hundred separate events. Here it’s only five, so the weight on those decisions is huge. I know that you think incredibly hard before you say, “Let’s do it.” So what brought you from intrigue to, “We have to have it?”

MARY KATE: Well, one of my colleagues from IPAY who actually programs the New Victory Theater in New York (one of the only theaters for young audiences in the Broadway District in Times Square) took a chance on it. It played in New York and received rave reviews from the New York Times, so we encouraged Susanna to submit again to IPAY for a full-length showcase. She did, and I just saw it a few months ago and couldn’t believe how amazing it was. I thought, “We need to get it here to Chicago as soon as possible!”

MATTI: Wow, so what is amazing about it? I mean, the conceit is incredible. Shakespeare adaptation has a long history and so many things have been done, but one-person adaptations are rare and not usually successful. Why and how does this work?

MARY KATE: It works because Susanna has distilled the story to the essence of the relationship between King Lear and his daughters. While some Shakespeare purists might be unhappy with the elimination of certain characters, what she’s done so brilliantly is make you see this key part of the story. The play is, after all, called King Lear, and its opening scene involves him and his three daughters.

Peter Brook's King Lear, 1971

MATTI: So Hamnett starts with that scene…and she eliminates most of the male characters and their murders?

MARY KATE: Yes, those don’t appear in her adaptation. Hamnett’s version actually opens with the character of a young woman who wants to be an actor, but in the time period of Lear…

MATTI: …when of course there were no women actors…

MARY KATE: …Exactly. This was not a possibility, so her father encourages her to dress like a boy and apply at the palace for a job as the king’s fool. So she does just that, and proceeds to tell the story as a woman disguised as a male fool telling the story of Lear.

MATTI: Wow…

MARY KATE: So this prologue to the show is her invention. Her work has multiple layers.

MATTI: But then she also breaks with the character of the girl/boy to inhabit Lear and the three daughters.

MARY KATE: Yes, and Gloucester…

MATTI: …Ah, she plays Gloucester. Oh, so the other men do appear!

MARY KATE: They appear briefly, but not as frequently as Lear and the daughters. And I think what really hooked me was that at a certain point in the show, I completely forgot that I was watching only one person because she has so compellingly inhabited the amazing characteristics of Reagan, of Cornelia. It’s as though she portrays the essence or core of these characters, and you forget that she’s actually alone on stage. She performs the conceit where she turns to the right and talks to the empty air as Reagan, and turns to the left and responds to the air as Lear, but you believe it entirely because she’s so completely inhabited their characters.

MATTI: What I find incredibly intriguing (in addition to the theatrical bravura of it) are the gender dynamics of this, in part because Lear is such a male role. Lear is one of those roles in the normative actor’s career. At some point you play Hamlet and then a few decades later you play Lear. Aren’t those the two roles that every great actor wants to play in his lifetime?

MARY KATE: Absolutely.

MATTI: So for this to be done by a young woman is so intriguing. How does she perform Lear?

MARY KATE: I’ll describe only a little of her technique because it’s so key to see the show in person.

MATTI: …Oh yes, we don’t want to give it away completely…

MARY KATE: She wears a crown…

MATTI: …ah, the cover image on our brochure…

MARY KATE: Right, and she adopts a swagger to indicate Lear’s initial self-confidence.

MATTI: Does she go for an old man’s voice? Or…?

MARY KATE: She talks a little more slowly and a little more deeply, yes. When the show starts, Lear is so sure of what Cordelia is going to tell him, but when she doesn’t tell him what he wants to hear, his confidence starts to unravel and you see him descend into madness. And so at first, Hamnett swaggers around the stage as Lear and then all of a sudden you see the switch. First he’s cocky, he’s confident, and suddenly, he’s not.

MATTI: She uses the original Shakespeare? Or does she make it up herself?

MARY KATE: She uses bits of the original text and also her own improvisation.

MATTI: Really! So every performance is slightly different.

MARY KATE: Absolutely. In fact, she has recently let us know that because of her improvisation, sometimes the show runs seventy minutes, sometimes it runs eighty minutes, and she wanted the teachers who come to the student matinees to be aware that there needs to be a little bit of flexibility in terms of departure time. When I saw it, she did a particularly funny improvisation. I was late to the show, as were a few others, and she incorporated an entire riff about lateness and late people into the prologue of the show. After it was over, she said she might stipulate that for every future performance there be latecomers!

Akira Kurosava's Ran, 1985

MATTI: So that she can do it in the prologue every time. That’s fantastic! Just to return to the adaptation issue for a moment: there’s so much interest in the scholarly world right now in Shakespeare adaptation. It’s like, a few years ago, the Shakespeareans seemed to say: “what new thing could we possibly say about the plays themselves?” And that’s when studies of adaptations became all the rage. Because there are so many texts and cultural artifacts – films, comics, and such – that riff on Shakespeare. I’ll be very curious to talk to Susanna about how important it was for her to familiarize herself with this scholarship and other adaptations of Lear in general. I think maybe the most famous one is Ran by Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa’s film is a loose adaptation of Lear, but it’s set in an all-male context. Kurosawa’s aging Lear is trying to divide his kingdom among his three sons. And of course, what Kurosawa does with color and image has been remarked on widely. I wonder if Susanna watched the film, for example, to get ideas. There are a couple of other films, as well: Peter Brook’s King Lear, Grigori Kozintsev’s Soviet version, Korol Lir. Nearly Lear is not just theater for the whole family, but very much in the long tradition of Shakespeare adaptation.

Grigori Kozintsev's Korol Lir, 1969

RELATED EVENT

Nearly Lear

Josephine Louis Theater at Northwestern University, May 3-12, daytime, evening, and weekend performances available.

I think that is why I fell in love with DynamO Théâtre's Mur-Mur (the wall) when I saw it. The piece is filled with outsized human interaction and physicality. The story takes place against the backdrop of a building where five young friends congregate every afternoon. Four of the characters are experiencing that first blush of attraction, and their blossoming feelings toward each other cause them to dance, dodge, and play. There is also a pesky younger brother who hangs around making mischief.

I was enthralled watching the company literally throw themselves at the wall in a Cirque du Soleil-style aerial ballet, their limitless energy making the theatre vibrate. The young audience with whom I watched the piece gasped in delight each time a character leapt on or somersaulted off the wall.  Their non-verbal interactions were just as engaging and thrilling as their physical play.

Many of us don’t want to be reminded of that time when our first crush awkwardly developed. But watching the characters play and enact those experiences reminded me of the  scholarly work of Paul Bloom. Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale, explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world through imagination, and asserts that our understanding and appreciation of art reflects universal aspects of human nature. Bloom discussed this premise, with a lot of rich, interesting visual examples, at our fall Festival in 2010.

So, go ahead, come watch DynamO’s Mur-Mur (the wall) and remember your first crush.

RELATED EVENT

Mur-Mur (the wall)

Museum of Contemporary Art, May 6 - 12, daytime and evening performances available.

“History Fair taught me how to think critically and how to turn a confused pile of evidence into a coherent, meaningful argument. I’ve seen how it’s empowered my peers; the pride they have in their work. And I think History Fair really does create more empathetic, engaged people.”  Olivia Daniels, History Fair Participant

For the past 35 years the Chicago Metro History Fair has given local students the opportunity to study history the way professional historians do—by identifying important historical questions and conducting research to answer them. The 2012 History Fair is currently under way, and students in grades six through twelve, representing about 120 schools from across the city and suburbs, are developing their projects. Unlike the traditional history class, in which students read the textbook and take a test, students who participate in History Fair select topics that are especially important to them. To complete these projects, students conduct research in local libraries, archives, and museums as well as on the internet and through oral history interviews. In so doing, they take their education beyond the classroom and into the community. When completed, students will present their projects to public audiences as research papers, exhibits, websites, dramatic performances, and video documentaries (like the projects highlighted below).

Studying history in this way provides many benefits to students. Guided by their teachers, students learn how to develop historical questions as well as how to create a research plan to find answers. Students learn to find, analyze, and critically evaluate primary and secondary sources. They learn how to use the evidence provided by their sources to craft a well-supported thesis. Finally, they learn how to present their findings in a logical and compelling way.

Students themselves recognize the value of History Fair. Surveys show that more than 95% of students find History Fair to be a valuable experience. They also report that they develop many important skills from their participation in History Fair. Chief among them are the ability to think critically, including developing a thesis and making an argument based on evidence. Many students find the work difficult but rewarding, and some students report deep personal growth. As one student recently said, “History Fair, compared to other projects, was a lot more work but also much more exciting.” Another added, “When you do a History Fair project, it is something deep and emotional. I don’t think this happens with any other project.” A third said, “It was an unforgettable experience. I loved it. I feel helpful now. I know more about my community’s history. I could apply so much of what I know now in other areas and help others.”

These videos provide excellent examples of high-quality student research projects. They are thoroughly researched, which is evident in the sources that the students present. They address historically significant events, such as religion and public education, free speech for unpopular groups, and sexism. Also, each presents a logical, well-organized argument. We expect to see equally impressive projects in this year’s Fair!

Below you can see three exemplary documentary projects from 2011.

“McCollum v. Board of Education: Debate and Diplomacy in the Argument
over Religion in Public Education” by Daniela Flax and Stella Mensah
of Lincoln Park High School

“Nazi March in Skokie: Freedom for the Speech We Hate”
by Marissa Howe of Quest Academy in Des Plaines

“The Playboy Effect” by Takahana Miller of Taft Academic Center
in Chicago

America.

It’s a loaded word. It’s geography as well as terra firma; it’s history, memory, aspirations, a destination—a physical place as well as a repository of dreams and beliefs that tug at people from all over the world.

But when we at CHF say America, what do we mean?

As you have probably noticed, we are approaching a presidential election. In fact, it will occur right during our festival. Early November, after all, is our time of the year. But it happens to include the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November, i.e. the date that, in 1845, became the official federal Election Day. Tuesday was chosen to give folks a workday to travel to the polls, Sunday being a day of worship after all. And now, like so many other aspects of our lives, it’s simply tradition.

The CHF has its traditions, too, of course, including the date of our fall festival. And we weren’t going to abandon ours either!

So there we were, beginning to contemplate a festival in the middle of a presidential election. Why pretend that what will be going on all around us isn’t happening? At the same time, we had no intention – none! – to contribute to the shrillness that passes for present-day political discourse. What was needed, in fact, was a counterweight.

So this is how we at CHF think of our role this fall: the presidential election is the time when we are enjoined to discuss the past, present, and future of our country. Sadly, the spectacle that passes for politics these days falls pretty short of that goal (this is not about blaming one party or the other – it’s simply a fact). And that gave us our mission: we would make this year’s CHF the forum for the kinds of sophisticated and respectful conversations about America that so many of us long to see in the public arena.

At the same time, we realized that there was no reason to limit the conversation to the United States. America, after all, is a global entity whose local concerns have transnational implications. In fact, we started thinking about America in hemispheric terms, counterposing various “new” worlds to their “old” correlates.

America, in this sense, is ideal and reality, a local brand with global meaning. Or, perhaps better, it is multiple ideals and different realities, admired and loved by some, feared and loathed by others.

The 2012 festival will explore the many meanings of America, both at home and abroad. We will debate the great American novel and celebrate jazz and the American song book, shine a spotlight on our country’s visual artists and honor the American philosophical tradition. And we will look at America from abroad, tracing the history of its meanings from Columbus to Kafka and locating its place in the world today. We will think about the Americas and the West. And we will contemplate our country’s ever-increasing diversity in the context of America’s history of immigration.

Our ultimate goal is to bring to Chicago the best that has been thought and said about our grand hemispheric experiment. We’ll do this, as we always do, through an array of talks, discussions, and performances, in October in Evanston and Hyde Park, and in November in and around Chicago’s downtown.

Sunday, October 14: Morry and Dolores Kohl Kaplan Northwestern Day
Sunday, October 21: 6th annual Hyde Park Day
Thursday, November 1-Sunday November 11: downtown

We wanted to share some early highlights with you as the festival comes together. Joining us this fall will be:

• Grant Achatz, award winning chef, owner of Alinea and Next restaurants

• David Brooks, New York Times op-ed columnist, in the annual Franke Lecture on Economics

• Harry J. Elam Jr., Stanford professor and foremost August Wilson scholar, on the playwright’s legacy and his contribution to American dramatic tradition

• Adam Gopnik, staff writer for The New Yorker, on French cuisine and what Americans can learn from it 

The Helen B. and Ira E. Graham Family ASCAP Cabaret with baritone Nathan Gunn, who recently starred in Lyric Opera’s Showboat, in a recital of selections from the Great American Songbook with wife Julie Jordan Gunn, piano 

• Author and historian Charles Mann, whose books include 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

• Brown University’s Tricia Rose, whose 1994 book Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America was a groundbreaking publication in the study of hip hop culture

• Gwendolyn Wright, Columbia University architectural historian and star of the PBS show History Detectives

…among many, many more.

We’ll share additional updates with you late this spring and over the summer. Please mark your calendars, as tickets go on sale to CHF members on Tuesday, September 4 and to the general public on Monday, September 17. We look forward to sharing dozens of programs with you this fall and taking you on this grand journey with us.

Note on the "America" artwork: it's by designer Jason Pickleman, of JNL graphic design. Jason is the artist responsible for last year's neon TECHknowledgE and we're pleased to be working with him again.

Reading Blair Kamin’s Monday post about the Bloomingdale Trail—in which he reflects on the city’s recent announcement about funding for the Trail—got me thinking about the many conversations I had about the Trail last year that culminated in Walter Hood’s amazing lecture “Industrial Past, Green Tomorrow” at last November’s Festival.

Meetings with the Friends of Bloomingdale Trail and the Trust for Public Land and everyone’s favorite green-space advocate, Helen Doria, led me to Hood, who offered a surprisingly poetic and expansive presentation on the reclamation of unused (or misused) industrial and urban spaces.

Walter Hood

On paper, Hood is a professor and former chair of landscape architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and principal of Hood Design in Oakland. In reality though, he is so much more: a magnificent storyteller, a philosopher, a challenger of overly-long-held ideas. Hood’s program is everything you want in a podcast—rich in imagery and provocative intellectually. He encourages us to consider the city—not just our city, but in this case, specifically our city—as a text, a story, whose narrative is well-known and whose landscape supports it. “Make no small plans,” he echoes Daniel Burnham.

But, unlike Burnham’s grand ambitions, Hood’s are more modest, if also more revolutionary. Let the past rest for a time, he admonishes, and in the meantime look at who you (Chicago) are—as a community, as a society. And where you are. And be there. If you do this, he asserts, resources present themselves. Then the work is to dust them off (the bricks, the infrastructure); dust it off (the city), but be careful not to bring back the wrong thing. And don’t be too quick to name what it is you’re doing, because if you do, institutions (civic, educational, philanthropic) will insist on limiting your vision to the name you have chosen.

Take a listen, and let Hood’s gentle force and vision carry you to Pittsburgh, to Wyoming, and to the near northwest side of Chicago, where the potential for something quite new out of something quite old is emerging.

What’s more—Hood’s pointed dissection of how our uniquely American ethos (“We are not a society that likes to collect our past.”) effects how we treat our ruins, is food for thought for my colleagues and I as we look forward to Fall 2012.

Photo credit: Rebecca Droke/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (of Walter Hood)

RELATED EVENT

Industrial Past, Green Tomorrow

 
Velo Theatre's The Postman

A fantastic aspect of object theatre productions is the creativity displayed by the artists and performers involved in its making.  Who would have thought to use a trombone as a communication devise?  Or the bottoms of lampshades as wheels for a baby carriage?  Or a bunch of rusty old magnets and gears that snap together to create a piece of art and an abstract representation of a machine? Tenacity, ingenuity and utilitarianism are the characteristics of this work.  Though it is fun to watch the spectacle in progress, the magic of object theatre also centers on the art form’s ability to encourage us as audience members to engage our creative mind and employ a sense of playfulness—two things that are infrequently done in today’s world where, more often than not, high-tech graphics are used to fill in the places where our imaginations used to run wild. 

 

Vélo Théâtre uses a wonderful blend of creatively applied objects, like rolls of blue cellophane that pull out of nowhere to create underwater scenes and cardboard boxes that unfold like Rube Goldberg devices to reveal rich landscapes.  Changing the context of these everyday items is not only charming but helps create comical and/or beautiful imagery.  Part of what makes these images fascinating is the kinship between object theatre and visual art.  While it is fun to see someone with their ear in the bell end of a trombone (the mouth piece going down to a small house for the little beings inside to talk back through), there is also an element of this aesthetic that is visually entertaining and intriguing.  For instance, in one of Vélo’s productions there is a dance between a woman and a small toy helicopter that artfully flies around her graceful movements and lands in the palm of her hand.   

 

Velo Theatre's There's a Rabbit on the Moon

 

Vélo Théâtre is considered to be one of the pioneers of object theatre and was founded in 1981 by Charlot Lemoine and Tania Castaing.  Their first show, The Postman, took place on an old bike as a deliveryman discovers a land of living postcards in the various packages he’s carrying.  This show uses objects and miniature marionettes and quickly became a point of reference that gave the company its name (“vélo” translates into English as “bicycle”).  The Chicago Humanities Fesitival is pleased to bring Velo to the United States for a third time in 2012.  Considering that they infrequently visit the U.S. from their native land of France, I strongly suggest you check into their poetic, fanciful universe.  Vélo Théâtre will be performing The Postman at the MCA Wednesday, May the 2^nd through May 9^th.   

Check out these videos to get more of an understanding of object theatre’s various incarnations.

Here is an underwater scene utilizing bubble blowing toys featuring a swimmer cleverly crafted from rope.

Here is a mesmerizing moving arm crafted out of old wire, scrap metal and spare gears. 

Another pioneer of object theatre Tadeusz Kantor. 

.

RELATED EVENT

The Postman

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; May 2 - 9, daytime and evening performances available.

The first thing you’ll notice about Nori Sawa is that he breaks the rules of traditional theater. In Fairy Tales, he breaks all of them, in 55 minutes.

Nori is a master of figural theater. Where a puppeteer operates characters from the shadows, Nori steps into the spotlight. He manipulates and is manipulated by his puppets, sometimes becoming a character in the story himself.

He also breaks the fourth wall, chatting amiably with the audience from the very beginning. His airy banter in between sketches is not memorized patter, it’s spontaneous story-telling. Nori’s fairy tales are performed without English dialogue. Instead, you’re likely to hear muffled Japanese, Czech, or fantastical made-up languages that help tell the story. He does costume changes on stage, gives thumbs-ups to the techs in the sound booth, and will not hesitate to tell the audience that the more they like the show the longer he’ll make it last.

It’s completely delightful. But more than that, by breaking the rules Nori Sawa creates a feeling of camaraderie with the audience that almost allows you to forget the darkness that fairy tales contain. In interviews, Nori often refers to the light and shadow—both literal and figural—to be found in theater.

In his work as an instructor in Theater Arts at DAMU, the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, Nori encourages his students to experiment with combining traditional elements of puppetry to break boundaries and explore new territories in theater. He frequently travels overseas to lead workshops on figural theater, shadow puppetry, Japanese Bunraku puppetry, and more.

While his repertoire of performances includes shows geared towards children, Nori has also developed solo interpretations of classic plays such as Macbeth and The Cherry Orchard. Within the framework of these tales familiar to Western audiences, Nori layers additional meanings drawn from his home in Sapporo, Japan. Playing the part of Macbeth, Nori manipulates and is manipulated by the puppet of Lady Macbeth, who wears a stunning kimono cut from fabric belonging to Nori’s mother. Using Japanese fabric and construction techniques, Nori creates a physical presence of Japan in his characters, bringing a unique blend of cultures to the stage.

The audience of Fairy Tales will get to experience the full range of Nori’s talents. They will enjoy themselves so much that they might not notice the subtlety that Nori weaves into his performances. Whether it’s a drunk old man sniffing out a baby rabbit or a tortoise who gets revenge on the hare, Nori’s fairy tales deftly weave their way through light and shadow, reminding us that illumination and darkness are always intertwined.

RELATED EVENT

Fairy Tales

Josephine Louis Theater, Northwestern University, May 9 - 12, daytime and evening performances available.

A classically trained actress walks into a theatre and decides to play all of the characters in King Lear herself. Impossible, you say? It is possible and we’re bringing it to Chicago’s audiences at this year’s Stages, Sights & Sounds festival in May. It’s a performance that will change the way you think about Shakespeare.

In this rendition by Susanna Hamnett, the story is not only poignant and tragic, but also gentle, mischievous, and funny. Yes, you read that correctly. A Shakespearean tragedy is funny. Nearly Lear upends expectations of what a Shakespeare play should be and uses exuberant storytelling to take its audience into the heart of this great tale.

Hamnett, who studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in England, has distilled the play into the main conflict between Lear and his daughters and spits it out in an astonishing 70 minutes.

Hamnett’s rendering of Regan is a breathy diva, obsessed with her looks. Goneril is a twitchy, nervous schemer. And Lear himself is blustery and cocksure, until he isn’t.

As you watch the story unfold you forget completely you are watching one person.

Nearly Lear played in New York to rave reviews from the New York Times and recently received the Victor Award (for best performance) at the IPAY Showcase in Austin, TX.

While this Lear may not be a purist’s rendering, it reminds us all of why this play has flourished for centuries.

RELATED EVENT

Nearly Lear

Josephine Louis Theater, Northwestern University, May 3 - 12, daytime and evening performances available.

Stepping into Times Square on a cold January evening felt close to otherworldly—especially knowing I was going to perform there later that night. I emerged from the subway to find myself in the bright hue of so many LCD screens I could have mistaken the night for day. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but Times Square merits a few million.

And there I was—nervous as you-know-what; it was the first time I was performing in New York City. I was concerned about how our show seemed anything but extravagant. Seven performers squeezed onto a tiny stage telling an entire Superman story with no props, no scenery, just their bodies. I could not help but think about Broadway’s Spiderman: Turn off the Dark, featuring actors on wires flying around the theater, and whose stage door I passed walking west on 43^rd St. A block later, I saw the modest blue awning: “Times Square Art Center.” There was no looking back.

Along with sixteen other companies, we were about to perform at the Times Square International Theater Festival. Our show, Superman 2050, had been created through a six-month residency at Links Hall in Chicago. We had opened there with three sweaty nights in their cozy Wrigleyville location, the Red Line trains trundling past the windows. Then, we had stretched our endurance levels to perform five midnight weekend shows at Second City’s Donny’s Skybox Theater. Finally, putting the icing on the (melting) cake, we dragged our little wooden stage across the Midwest for five days. During the hottest week of 2011, we performed at outdoor train stations and indoor theaters.

Why was I nervous? This ensemble had been to Milwaukee and back. Surely, this Chicago troupe could handle a little New York cold. But when the first performance began, I felt my fears coming true. From the moment we had walked into the building, I could tell we were not in Kansas anymore. The lobby was filled with glamorous-looking actors awaiting a TV audition. We got into costume and waited for our theater space to open up. In that cramped entrance hall, I do not know what glimmered more: the auditionees’ lipstick and hair gel or our shiny blue Nike running gear. My nails were all but bitten off.

Ten minutes before starting time, we were let into the theater. Fifteen minutes later, the lights went up—only 15 inches above our heads—and I realized that even in January, we were again destined to sweat. The audience sounded so quiet you could have heard a pin drop. Inside that long and narrow theater, the sounds of Times Square had been hewn to a hush.

We knew not to rush. We had performed the show enough times that we had learned to trust each other. Even the pressure of Broadway proximity had not broken this year-long bond. Instead of panic, the show went on. Clark Kent saw Lois Lane hanging off the side of a building. Suddenly, like the Man of Steel himself, the audience leapt into action. And little by little, with each piece of absurd virtuosity, they helped bring our small stage to life with their imaginations. The momentum continued until the end, when the lights snapped to black and, after a second, the once resolute crowd ripped into applause.

It was a milestone, we had gotten over the hump.  And I will never forget the feeling I had leaving our little theater with its non-electric blue awning looking up at the mass of lights above. Stepping into the cold, my breath was frozen in time—in Times Square.

RELATED EVENT

Superman 2050

Josephine Louis Theater, Northwestern University, Evanston; May 2 - 6, daytime and evening performances available.

It’s not often that I find myself sitting in church and loving every minute of it.

Actually, having grown up Jewish and secular at that, I don’t find myself in church much at all. Sure, there’s the occasional wedding, to say nothing of the conscientious traipsing through the various instantiations of Europe’s ecclesiastical culture. But the fact remains: church is not really me.

Well, that might change after the transcendent experience I had at First United Methodist Church at the Chicago Temple, when I had the chance to worship at the altar of performance art under the guidance of its high priestess, Marina Abramović.

But let me start at the beginning: who doesn’t love a church where the pastor cracks a truly funny joke to welcome the flock packed into his sanctuary? Reverend Phil Blackwell looked up at the nearly 1,000 folks in the standing room-only hall and said this: “When we have an event this big, it’s called Easter…”

Then, Marina took the stage. And it’s hard to describe this woman’s truly magical appeal. I don’t think I have ever been in the presence of someone so instantly charismatic. That would be quite enough for this diva-worshipper. But Marina is so much more – stern, tough, wise, and funny. Yes, FUN-NY!

How about this bit: “How many performance artists does it take to screw in a light bulb?... I don't know, I was only there for 6 hours.”

When Marina wasn’t cracking jokes, she laid out the most compelling raison d’être for art I have heard in – well, maybe – ever. It turns on the total commitment to a vision, even, and especially when, it involves the unthinkable. In a way, it seems that Marina is haunted by her imagination, compelled to enact the very fantasies that most haunt her. This, in any case, explains what seems to be the startling contradiction between Marina’s death-defying oeuvre and her near-paralyzing anxiety to bask in the reflective glow of hundreds of her most ardent fans (we practically had to talk her down from a panic attack before she took the stage). But it all makes sense. For art to be truly uncompromising, it has to entail real sacrifice. If it’s easy, it’s nothing at all.

What’s more, Marina has figured out a way to pare art down to its very core. I saw her defining show The Artist is Present  at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. But I only now realize that I didn’t get it – at all! Sure, I was intrigued by her feat of endurance, sitting motionless in MoMA’s atrium for three months, staring down whoever had the nerve to take the seat across from her. But it was during her talk at the church that I grasped the larger aesthetic project: how her work has gradually become less dependent on props (as in her legendary 1974 piece Rhythm 0, in which she allowed the audience to interact with her by using such objects as roses, scissors, whips, as well as a gun) to focus on what really matters in performance art: the intersection of time and presence. It was in that context that the endurance piece at MoMA, having started with two chairs and a table, ended up with just two chairs. Several weeks into the performance, Marina realized that “the table was not necessary.” I had heard the line. But it seemed a bit of an affectation. Table or no table – what’s the difference? Well, if you are striving to isolate the true essence of presence, then ANY prop is one too many. And it is in this context that Marina is currently looking for ways to pare down performance even further. I cannot wait to see what she comes up with.

But let me return to the magic for one last moment. After 20 minutes or so of equally insightful and witty explication of her career, Marina turned down the church lights. She was going to show clips of seminal performances by various artists. But as she stood at the bimah, framed by candles and the coruscating light streaming through the stained-glass windows, she became what she talked about: total presence.

When it was all over, nobody, it seemed, wanted to leave. For several minutes, people simply kept sitting in the pews, quietly reflecting on the power of the moment. And then, Marina was mobbed by her fans!

 If Marina is right, only those of us in church that day had the experience of true presence. But for everyone else, there is great consolation. We have it all on film, ready to share with anyone who wants to get a sense of that magical evening in Chicago.

Thank you, Marina!

Working in the region of the Former Yugoslavia for the past 15 years, I had heard of Marina Abramović, but never had the opportunity to see her work. But little could prepare me for the extent of both my pleasure and disappointment when I finally went to see the exhibition mounted by MoMA in spring of 2010. For many of us doing research in the region, in the wake of the violence and devastation of the 1990s, Abramović represented a different version of Yugoslavia: cosmopolitan, a place of artistic innovation and experimentation rather than extreme nationalism, civil war, and genocide. The country that produced Abramović was one of great complexity, a place which had long been seen as central to progressive global projects that imagined other ways of being in the world. And in that context, Abramović created new, if provisional, spaces that challenged taken-for-granted categories of human meaning and visual representation.

Yet in the wake of the violence of the 1990s, the narratives both in and about the former Yugoslavia had become claustrophobic, a story of essential ethnic hatreds that had bubbled up with the fall of European communism. The narrative when deployed by international media and policymakers masked a host of conditions and causes of violence in the region, as well as a long history of interethnic co-existence. But perhaps more importantly, the available narratives or frameworks for understanding the wars of the 1990s, especially in Serbia where I conducted my research, were also increasingly routinized and predictable. Reduced to either tropes of victimhood or rituals of forgetting, the available narratives for making sense of Yugoslavia’s dissolution became increasingly locked into place, rarely troubled by experiments in thinking otherwise about violence, responsibility, ethics of remembering pasts or imagining futures. It was in this context that I wondered whether Abramović, with her ability to sidestep the taken-for-granted in human communication and meaning-making, might open up some space that had seemed closed for too long.

The exhibit itself was divided up into several rooms, roughly chronologically ordered. Of course the centerpiece was a new piece, about which much has already been written: The Artist is Present, in which Abramović sat trancelike and unmoving for hours on end. A steady stream of supplicants had arranged themselves around her the morning that I was there. A handful of brave souls actually approached her, sitting for varying lengths at a chair placed opposite the artist. Some were quiet and contemplative, others anxious and squirming, but all of them seemed very small, and very human next to this monument of discipline and holy impassivity. I experienced The Artist is Present much like I experienced many of the works in the exhibit. The space between the artist and the viewer seemed vast and impossible to cross. Her concentration was unbreakable, she didn’t flinch or sweat, or remotely acknowledge the crowds that thronged her. And yet people kept coming, and sitting, seeking something. The space between her and her supplicants seemed charged with desire, a longing for connection, for human response, for acknowledgement that would never come.

I was deeply moved by that space of proximity and distance and the unrealizable longing for connection that it invited. That promise of connection that never comes struck me as both tragic and true. In piece after piece, Abramović seemed to invite intimacy while ultimately staying just out of reach. The price of engagement with her work was often witnessing her own suffering. For example in a video of her 1975 Freeing the Voice, Abramović screams until she passes out. As painful as it was to watch, it was also impossible to stop watching. Somewhere in that intense pain there just might be meaning. I wanted her to suffer, to see how far she could take it. But I also wanted her to communicate, to redeem that suffering. The twinned, or intertwined humanity and cruelty of those desires was shocking.

This interplay of complicity, desire, and the refusal of redemption appeared throughout many of the pieces in the exhibit. For example, one narrow passageway between two rooms in the exhibit was flanked by two naked bodies, one male, one female, through which attendees had to squeeze to pass to the next part of the exhibition. As I squeezed through the bodies I accidentally stepped on the bare toes of one of the artists. My body went warm, and I flooded with guilt. Had I hurt her? Did it matter? Was she not there to be stepped on, to be used, in some way, to provide passage? They were there for my consumption and observation, no doubt. And yet in confronting them, becoming part of the show, there was no way I wasn’t going to step on someone’s toes. Connectivity and objectification were inseparable. Under those conditions it became very hard to avoid the ethical dilemmas of being a spectator.

Given the deftness of these pieces, I was surprised that someone so attuned to the ethics of watching and the limits and utopias of communicative acts would fail so epically just when I expected (and needed) her to come through most. As I entered the final room of the exhibit, a series of later pieces from the 1990s, I was confronted with a large pile of bones. This was the remains of Abramovic’s famous piece, Balkan Baroque, from the 1997 Venice Biennale. Above the bones was a video of Abramović standing ramrod straight in a white labcoat that hung to her knees. To the sides were video recordings of interviews with her parents. As the piece unfolded Abramović shrugged out of the coat to reveal a slinky, sleazy shift. She proceeded to dance, erotic and obscene movements framing the pile of bones below.

The piece would be disturbing, if it were not all too familiar as a visual and discursive trope I encountered many times in Serbia over the last 15 years. The image of the Balkan carnivalesque, at once brutal and seductive, violent and pathetic, is a commonplace in films, literature and even everyday conversation. It is a narrative that invites fascination and repulsion, but allows no space for connection with an audience, even under the guise of complicity. The story goes something along the lines of (as directed to a foreigner): there is something wrong with us, something dark, and violent and backwards about our mentality. We are victims of our own selves, and a world that can’t ever understand us.  It says: we are fascinating surely, and you may even find it sparks desire. But don’t try to understand us (we barely understand ourselves). It implies: Simply watch our self-destruction and enjoy.  The myth of Balkan (and here particularly) Serbian backwardness and barbarism on the one hand and victimhood on the other is perfectly crystallized in Balkan Baroque.  It is a self-pitying narrative that somehow revels in degradation without ever really dealing with the violence to which it is putatively addressed. The grotesque becomes a kind of excuse-making, a pleasure in self-hatred that in the end only really focuses the viewer back on the subject without shedding any real light on the pile of bones that lies before it.

In the original piece Abramović sat in the Venice heat cleaning the bones, amid blood and stench. And yet with the video that framed it, the meaning of the impossible and bloody task seems to focus attention back on her suffering, the artist’s inability to express or comprehend the enormity of the crimes at hand. The piece stands in poignant contrast to Cleaning the Mirror, from 1995. Here Abramović gently, lovingly, and meticulously cleans a skeleton for hours on end. Only the hands are visible. The piece reveals an ethics of care that draws the viewer into the rhythms and intimacies of a nameless grief. The washing of the skeleton was performed in 1995, the same year the war in Bosnia ended, a war in which Serbian paramilitary groups committed grisly acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Bosnian Muslim population, leaving behind mass graves dotting the countryside. The anonymous skeleton, the rigorous cleaning and sterile white background call to mind the teams of forensic scientists who uncovered these mass graves of unidentified dead. To them fell the dirty work of sorting and cleaning bones, an army of scientists to take charge of acts of ritual morning, in the absence of family members dead or otherwise departed.

What is powerful about this piece, as opposed to Balkan Baroque, is that it resists an easy narrative in favor of an intimate action, one that unfolds over time, forging a connection between viewer, artist, and distant dead through unceasing, unsparing and unsentimental motion. It is not a false apology or a master narrative. It is an act of care (and an ethics of viewing, if not necessarily witnessing) that never ends. The piece holds out neither apology nor any real chance of redemption. Its subject is an impossible purification, rather than the elaborate victimhood of a guilty conscience. In refusing a narrative in this piece, unlike the easy tropes of Balkan barbarism, backwardness and obscenity, Abramović comes closest to something that few have achieved, a kind of ethical truth that might forge links rather than refuse responsibility. She offers the possibility for a space filled with some other kind of meaning, some other way of being, inconceivable perhaps in the present, but not impossible.

Jessica Greenberg is a cultural anthropologist who teaches in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. She is an expert on Serbia who has conducted extensive research on student activism in post-revolutionary Belgrade.

Then high-school was over, and the army service was over. This was the heyday of Israeli film-schools. Everyone wanted to be a filmmaker (and many of these dreamy-eyed filmmakers to be, ended up as studio directors for reality shows), and young filmmakers who needed screenplays turned to Etgar. Once again, simply Etgar. It may very well be an urban myth, but through the years I kept hearing that Keret had never turned down a film student who wanted to adapt a story of his into a short film. 

But these early brilliant short stories were only a part of Etgar Keret’s influence. Israeli culture underwent a tremendous change since the1990’s, and Etgar Keret was perhaps the first to deeply and genuinely understand this changing reality. Writers of older generations such as Amos Oz, A.B Yehushua and David Grossman reflected in their writing on the very apparent and immediate political changes: The Palestinian up-rise of the 1980’s and early 1990’s, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the painful failure of the Camp-David talks. For all these, it seems, the Israeli Canonic writers were ready and well trained for.  

It was, however, the younger generation of Israeli writers, and especially Etgar Keret, who understood that the change that Israeli society had gone through was too great for literature alone to reflect on: it was also time for advertising and comics to step in, along with commercial television that took its first steps in the 1990s. And it was Keret and the writers of his generation and milieu – among which Uzi Weill and Asaf Tzipor –to whom television barons turned to. They wrote TV series, TV commercials along with their short stories. It was a short-stories- generation. Keret once defined them as an “asthmatic” generation – a generation of writers who wrote as if they were short of breath.

Israel spoke the language of Etgar Keret. In many respects, it still does. I look forward to see how Chicago reads him and speaks this asthmatic language of his, which seems to shine in every language. 

Tamar Merin is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University’s Crown Center for Jewish Studies. Merin specializes in Hebrew and Israeli Literature, with a focus on Israeli women’s prose and its dialogic relations with the Canon of Hebrew literature.

Lecture

Etgar Keret: A Conversation and Reading

2012-Keret: Thu, Apr. 26 6:00 - 7:00 PM

Anyhow, here’s just one example of the big in the small, taken from a favorite of mine, "Hole in the Wall" [The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God]. In this story, Keret offers a world in which the impossible and supernatural coexist—a world which should give us pause in the context of Israeli fiction—only this combination ultimately leads to a lesser, darker reality. This is a powerful double move the irony involved is particularly unexpected in comparison even to most other ironic moves in fiction. In "Hole in the Wall," Keret opens with the following: there is a hole, and according to rumor, if you yell a wish into it, the hole will fulfill your wish. A skeptical guy named Udi yells into this hole asks for an angel friend, and soon a man with wings enters Udi's life. But the man isn't a good friend, and when Udi accidentally kills him in the end (violence is nearly everywhere in Keret's worlds, but that's for another time), he discovers that the man can't even fly: "He wasn't an angel, just a liar with wings." So the story ends, by which point we've learned, among other things, that (a) the wall has not fulfilled Udi's wish, or, at best, has sent him an alarmingly defective version of what he requested, (b) there are, regardless, beings with wings, (c) there are beings with wings who, for some reason, can't fly. What is a reader supposed to do with an impossible reality of this sort? And why does this absurd combination of the mundane and the supernatural strike us as anything but nonsensical? 

Readers less sympathetic to Keret's fiction, could, I suppose, dismiss the gestures at the center of "Hole in the Wall"—and he has many more stories in The Girl on the Fridge like this in some general way—as gimmicks or tricks. And, I imagine, one could think up similarly odd combinations of the magical and the mundane. Even though this is much harder than it looks. It must be. Because Keret's Hebrew is so astoundingly simple, on the level of diction, that if he weren't doing something profoundly inventive there would be 100 other writers doing the same thing by now. I'm sure many more than that has tried. 

Keret achieves something singular in his best stories. He strikes some strange, nearly beautiful note, or more accurately some similarly unforgettable chord, on this small and loud instrument he crafted—go figure—out of the same materials made famous by Amos Oz, S. Y. Agnon, H. N. Bialik, Ibn Gvirol, and whoever authored the Hebrew Bible. Keret's best pieces amaze us, but in such a way that the short, short story is over and its narrator gone away before it's occurred to us ask what would have happened if Mozart had only written pieces of twelve measures or less. Would we have learned to celebrate him, or would we have continued to demand a full-length symphony each and every time he came to play?

Todd Hasak-Lowy is a Chicago-based writer and scholar of Hebrew literature. His collection, The Task of This Translator (2005) received praise for its "explosive originality" from the New York Times, and his debut novel, Captives (2008), was hailed by Darrin Strauss as "brilliantly funny." In addition, he is the author of Here and Now: History, Nationalism, and Realism in Modern Hebrew Fiction  (2008), as well as the translator, most recently, of Asaf Schurr’s Motti , published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2011.

Lecture

Etgar Keret: A Conversation and Reading

2012-Keret: Thu, Apr. 26 6:00 - 7:00 PM

Because of their cultural and ethnic backgrounds, Chicago audiences are eager to welcome the artists that we bring to Stages, Sights & Sounds. Our festival showcases fresh, original work from Europe and Canada that you won’t see anywhere else. Parents come back year after year, as our offerings grow along with their children and provide a shared experience. Teachers look forward to introducing us to each new class and exploring connections between learning and play.

All of the productions from this year’s Stages, Sights & Sounds explore play, physically and philosophically:

~   ‘Tweens dance and dodge, physically expressing  blossoming feelings
     towards each other through play in DynamO Théâtre’s Mur-Mur (The Wall)

~   A postman unwraps packages, finding a play in each,
     in Vélo Théâtre’s The Postman

~   Actor Susanna Hamnett tells the entire story of King Lear by herself,
     with jokes, twisting our expectations of what a Shakespeare play is
     in Nearly Lear

~   Puppeteer Nori Sawa plays with scissors, paper, and our notions
     of some very familiar stories in Fairy Tales

~   Seven actors make a 3' x 7' platform their playground, bringing to life
     a futuristic battle between Superman and Lex Luthor
     in Theater Un•Speak•Able’s Superman 2050.

I enjoy working with my colleagues to bring these companies to Chicago’s smart and engaged audiences. I can’t wait to see you at the Festival!

Mary Kate Barley-Jenkins is CHF's Director of Programming and the Director of Stages, Sights & Sounds.

Marina Abramovic

In the Central Australian desert, Marina sat for very long periods of time in extreme heat, doing nothing 

Marina …

Lived in a car for five years

Designed menus for a French restaurant

Painted walls at technical fairs

Wore wooden shoes

Knitted all her pullovers herself

Milked goats in the mountains in exchange for food

Once a year, for five years, she let 5 snakes trace energy veins of her body. 

She makes her students:

Hold a tree and complain for fifteen minutes

Walk backwards using a mirror

Eat a ball made of almonds, white peppercorn, black peppercorn, coriander seeds, and honey wrapped in a thin 24-carat gold leaf, after fasting for 5 days.

Marina Abramovic and Students at Reed College

She would like to: die three times and explore each of these deaths individually.

Marina thinks it is important to: fast, to sometimes do things in extreme slow motion, to drink a lot of water, to clean the house.

Her private spaces: bus stop, the space under the pillow

Marina likes to: collect little coins and exchange them at the airport. 

Marina doesn’t like to: sit in front of a piece of paper and try to imagine what to do. Ideas come to her like apparitions, while in the kitchen, chopping garlic.

Marina is very much against: habit. 

No more than twice a year, Marina re-edits, humorously, her own work to date, on stage in a real theater with its gold and plush fittings. And if she cuts a star in her stomach, really, just as she did years ago in Belgrade, the audience in the front row starts fainting.

She does things that she’s really ashamed of. It’s a huge relief, she says. 

When she rents a DVD, she likes to see the deleted parts, the unused material, and the documentaries about how the movie was made before watching the actual movie. 

Some context 

In 2006, I taught a course on anthropology of art at Reed College in Portland, OR. “Why don’t you bring Marina Abramovic to your class?” my wife Gordana Živković, an artist from Belgrade, asked. Wasn’t there something very “ethnographic” about her work – with all these Australian Aborigines and Tibetan Lamas she learned from and performed with? True, Reed has a well-endowed Art program and regularly brings in such stars as Hans Haake, Ann Hamilton, or Mona Hatoum, but bringing Marina to Reed on short notice was still a fantasy until we learned that she was coming to Oregon anyway and we can snatch her for a day. I spent two months preparing this five minute introduction and decided to introduce Marina, arguably the most famous performance artist today, without once using the words “art” and “performance.” Why? It occurred to me that Marina is actually an “extra-dimensional being” passing through our Flatland universe. She only appears to us as a “performance artist” because we have no other categories to capture her.

Marina Abramovic and Gordana Živković

What happens when you encounter an “extra-dimensional being”? Abbott’s delightful 1884 Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions tells us that such a being would cause certain kinds of perturbations or ripples. And this is what Marina caused during her Reed sojourn.

This first happened in my anthropology of art class, where Marina talked about her experience with the Australian Aborigines. She told us how when she visited Australia in 1979 with her partner Ulay for the European Dialogue Biennale, they wanted to see the Aborigines. In Alice Springs, a lawyer who represented the Aborigines literally threw them out of his ramshackle office as yet another pair of “bloodsuckers out to exploit the Aborigines.” Later that day, in a bar, the lawyer tells them to come when they can do something for the Aborigines. Marina and Ulay come next year and spend three months drawing maps, making photos, and designing a book about Aboriginal land rights. They then joined the Aborigines deep in the desert for the rest of the year. Ulay goes through some of the male initiations Marina hangs out with women who seem to spend most of the day enacting each other’s dreams.

Now, several times during the class, Marina says that Aborigines have telepathy. “I found out,” she says at the outset, “that the Aborigines are one of the most developed human beings on this earth ... they use much more of their brain than we do. They have extra-sensory perception, they have extremely developed telepathy ... They start talking to you in your head ... It’s much cheaper to use telepathy than telephone.”

Anthropologists have long had these “extraordinary experiences” – visions and altered states of consciousness – related to their fieldwork, but would rarely dare to report them in official writing for fear of ostracism.

The fact that Marina lived with the Aborigines in the deepest desert, participated in dream enactments with the women, and even took meticulous notes makes her a kind of ethnographer. This is why she made the budding anthropologists in my class uncomfortable – she was acting as an ethnographer- then suddenly she made a leap into the territory where anthropologists fear to tread.

In the afternoon, Marina was to appear in an informal seminar aimed primarily at Reed art majors. My wife and I were two minutes late and when we cracked the door open we see Marina has made everyone in the room take off their shoes and lay down on their backs. She is in the middle of the circle leading the group through a Tibetan breathing exercise.

Here is a confusion of genres. Yes, we know that some artists have famously drawn on Buddhism, but in an academic setting do we really expect to do breathing or chanting exercises instead of discussing such things verbally?

Now these two situations give me a neat triangulation. If we take the morning class as an example of Anthropology World, then we can interpret the ripple Marina’s passage provoked there as coming from an intrusion of Artworld into Anthropology World. Anthropologists discover that Marina has at least one more additional “degree of freedom” just as extra-dimensional beings would, and this jolts them out of a simple identification with Marina as a fellow ethnographer.

But was Marina just showing herself as a Being of Artworld pure and simple? The slight shock might then come from realizing that although she seems to share a bit of territory (ethnographic experience) with our tribe, Marina actually belongs to another one. If this is the case, nothing terribly shocking really happened beyond us recalling that there is an Artworld out there that in some ways transcends our Academic World. For don’t we commonly allow artist types quite a bit of “latitude” even additional “degrees of freedom” that we deny ourselves as academics, scientists, or even ordinary people in our rational hard-headed commonsense mode?

The ripples that Marina caused in her passing through Reed, however, cannot be attributed to a simple jolt that an Artworld Being causes to us Academe types. None of the other stars of the Artworld whose passage through Reed College I witnessed caused these effects. Marina couldn’t have caused such ripples if she had been just an Artworld Being pure and simple. I think that in fact she isn’t, and that it is because she is a Being passing through Artworld without being of it, just as much as she is passing through Anthropology without being of it, that she has the effect that she does. Because she causes ripples or perturbation in both worlds, she probably belongs to neither.

I don’t think Marina fundamentally cares whether what she’s doing is labeled art or something else, as long as it does to her and her audiences what it should. It is only that she happens to find the Artworld the most generous and congenial home. It provides the spaces and opportunities, and calls forth a certain mindset that she could, sometimes with difficulty, exploit for her purposes. This mindset – that we are going to attend to something with quite an unusual degree of attention and openness, an expectation that our ordinary perception is going to be challenged, etc. – this whole attitudinal set developed by Artworld could be seized upon by Marina for her own ends. Such temporary curiosity could be used to trap Artworld audiences just as a clever monkey traps work by exploiting monkey curiosity.

Sure, Marina will explicitly say that art is a tool for her, but when she performs there is no sense that she is using Artworld as merely a ruse, a trap, or enticement. She is not ironic about being an artist at all. In fact she is fully, completely an artist and also fully, completely not an artist. In a word, she is shimmering.

Marina’s work probably couldn’t work without witnessing her in person. She is a flickering, shimmering being. She is a shy young girl AND an eternal mother, perhaps even grandmother, but all at once. There is power and assurance and there is fragility and shyness, and they are both there simultaneously, at the same time, but because our minds cannot process these qualities as being one and the same, they get processed as an oscillation between states, an eye blink of a girl, an eye blink of a wise mother, on and off, thus shimmer.

It was Marina who introduced me to Lawrence Weschler, the CHF Artistic Director Emeritus and my use of shimmering owes a lot to his use of this concept, especially in his Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder. That Marina Abramovic will appear at CHF is for me a sign that extra-dimensional forces have been at work.  

Marko Živković and Marina Abramovic

Marko Živković is a professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta and the author of Serbian Dreambook: National Imaginary in the Time of Milošević (Indiana University Press, 2011).

Event Info

Marina Abramovic: A Lecture on Performance and its Future

2012-Abramovic: Thu, Feb. 16 6:00 - 7:00 PM
First United Methodist Church, The Chicago Temple

 
Communist Body / Fascist Body is part of a rich body of collaborative work produced by Abramović and Ulay. They collaborated for over a decade, beginning in the mid-1970s when Abramović moved to Amsterdam from her native Serbia (then Yugoslavia). Partners in both art and love, they used their own bodies and psyches as primary material for their art.

Many of their works took the form of pared-down actions that extend to physical and mental extremes. In Breathing in, Breathing Out (1977), for instance, they locked lips, breathing in the stale air from each other's exhalation, pushing to the edge of physical collapse. Simple in structure, their performances were often meant to engage the audience's response on an emotional--even primal--level while also evoking heady topics like the boundaries of self, the limits of the body, and the power dynamics inherent to any interpersonal relationship. The pair famously ended their collaboration with the performance The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk (1988) in which they walked from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, meeting briefly in the middle as the final moment in their collaborative practice.

Abramović and Ulay's original performance of Communist Body / Fascist Body took place one evening in 1979, when the artists invited a small group of friends to come to at their Amsterdam apartment just before midnight on their shared birthday. The unsuspecting guests arrived to discover a tableau arranged by the artists -- two tables, one beautifully set with silver, crystal, German champagne, white bread, and caviar, the other set with cheap Russian versions of the same (e.g. toilet paper rather than damask napkin). Their birth certificates were displayed on a third table. In the back of the space, the Abramović and Ulay lay on a low mattress, under a red blanket, apparently asleep.

Communist Body / Fascist Body feels like one of the real finds of the exhibition. It's a rich and moving work and one that should be much better known than it is. I first came across references to the piece last year while researching Feast, and found descriptions of the performance fascinating especially in terms of the complex relationships that it established among the participants.

The tableau contrasted the fact of the quietly sleeping, united couple with a geopolitical opposition that foregrounded their roles as separate beings, whose selves were shaped by everything they ingested growing up in different nations, ideologies ,and economies. It also upended the usual kinds of interaction between host and guest. The hosts were present -- physically there -- but also absent -- asleep (or performing sleep) and so not attending to any of the host's usual duties of welcome or attention. The guests responded in different ways to this surreal repast -- some were disturbed, others relaxed and convivial -- but eventually they embraced the situation, popped the champagne, and enjoyed the party.

We know about the guests' richly varied reactions because Abramović and Ulay wove documentation into the fabric of the performance: a friend filmed the evening, and then edited that footage together with audio interviews that they conducted with their guests a few weeks later. They completed the loop by screening the resulting film to their guests in the same space in which the performance occurred, three months later.

So, although Abramović and Ulay established the original work as a closed circuit, they always meant for it to have a life for an audience beyond that initial circle of participants. Until now, the work has only been shown rarely, as a film. On the occasion of Feast, Abramović and Ulay have decided to embrace the issue of re-performance in a new way by creating a fresh version of this work: an installation that recreates the original setup (tables, bread, and champagne, bed) with the original video projected in the space as a way of anchoring and vivifying the video's evocation of that original meal.

The Smart is thrilled to be collaborating with the artists to produce this new version of the work. And it's personally deeply moving to me as a curator to see how much it means to the artists to be revisiting this work, after so many years, together.

Above: Marina Abramović and Ulay, Communist Body / Fascist Body, Performance, Zoutkeetsgracht 116 / 118, Amsterdam, November 30, 1979. Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives. © Marina Abramović.

RELATED EVENT

Marina Abramovic: A Lecture on Performance and its Future

First United Methodist Church at The Chicago Temple: Feb. 16, 2012 6:00 PM

While we saw many of you playing, only a handful of people submitted completed poems. Thanks to all that participated, at every level.

Winners are Linda and Steven Pedlow of Orland Park and Mary Jo Barton of Chicago. We’re delighted that we’ll be mailing them a letter-press copy of “This Poem is In Finish” designed and printed by our friends at Spudnik Press and a pair of tickets to one of our CHF Year-Round programs.

    “My husband and I had fun solving the poem. I was happy to see the poem
    as it was originally written. We were curious to see how many words we
    got right.”   --Linda Pedlow

We’re already busy thinking about how we can continue on this playful, interactive course with you, our audience, during our 2012 Festival.

Big thanks to everyone that played "A Secret Poem." It was wonderful to see so many of you with your game cards seeking out clues and sharing answers during the Festival.

Herewith the secret is revealed:

This Poem Is in Finish
toggle here for translation

While I remain in English, either stranded or
As one drunken and wheeled to a paddy
Wagon. There was a time I drank blueberry
Wine but that was long ago and my powers
Of recollection are still too strong to forget.
As one overcome by waves of wanton flashbacks,
Acid dreams of moments all too real, finds
Himself mirrored by the mind of a very little
Boy trapped in the body of an old man.

written especially for the 2011 Chicago Humanities Festival
by Charles Bernstein

(Bernstein's 2011 CHF program "Attack of the Difficult Poems" is already posted online. Listen here.)

RELATED EVENT

A Secret Poem

At all CHF venues and online: until 5:00 pm, Nov. 14

We know a lot of you love to do crossword puzzles. And we know that many of you were aware that during the Festival there was a CHF game afoot. Well, that game, "A Secret Poem," is very much like a crossword puzzle. During the course of the Festival, there were a lot of clues to hunt down and from the feedback you've given us, we think we might have made it a little too hard to find them all. So, we want to help. It was never our intent to make the game too hard to play. (Next time maybe we'll consult Will Shortz.) Now that the Festival is over, and we know you are missing us, playing the game will be another way to stay connected.

Below you will find a complete list of all the "sticker" (free) words and all the clues. Treat it like a crossword puzzle. Sit down right now and give it a try. (Download a game card here.) Call or text your friends and make it a collaborative effort. We'll be accepting submissions through 12 noon on Friday, Nov. 18. Submit your best attempt, even if you haven't filled in all the blanks. Prizes will be drawn randomly and include a signed, letter-press edition of the original poem by Charles Bernstein and tickets to some of our winter and spring programs.

Have fun!! (And, as always, if you need help, email us at secretpoem@chfestival.org.)

Sticker Words (Freebies)

A1: remain
A3: stranded  
B2: wheeled    
E1: recollection      
F3: wanton        
G2: moments           
H3: mind            

Clues:

A2:   To put a bit of _____ (spin) on a ball

B1:   Chan’s comedy The Legend of ___ Master

B3:   Nickname for your Irish cousin Patrick

C1:   Mode of transport on the Oregon Trail

C2:   Common reason (past tense) for a hangover

C3:   Muffin flavor, though often actually purple

D1:   Simone’s “Lilac _____”

D2:   A long time _____, in a galaxy far, far away . . .

D3:   Flight, invisibility, mind-reading, and X-ray vision

E2:    Lance’s Arm-band LIVE___ campaign.

E3:    Sorry, I can’t remember the clue

F1:    “Our obligation is to give meaning to life, and in doing so, 
         to ____ the passive, indifferent life.” – Elie Wiesel

F2:    Sound, ocean, heat, and greeting

F4:    In film, visits to the past

G1:    A trip with Ken Kesey

G3:    Successes at a flea market

H1:    Masculine reflexive pronoun

H2:    Reflected

H4:    Alcott’s women

I1:     Miners and vermin, on occasion

I2:     The theme of last year’s Chicago Humanities Festival, with “the”

I3:     A “dude,” “bro,” “homey,” or “sir”

RELATED EVENT

A Secret Poem

At all CHF venues and online: until 5:00 pm, Nov. 14

The one drawback to all of these lovely spaces is that they're not as close together as one might hope. When I was planning my theoretical event schedule, I didn't take venues into consideration, so in practice, my ambition has been thwarted by logistics; so much for making it to both
Taussig's lecture at the History Museum and Tomorrow's History at the Chicago Cultural Center immediately after, for instance. Making matters worse, Saturday was the most difficult day of the festival for me, choice-wise. Between 1 and 2:30, I wanted to see Lend Me Your (Bionic) Ears at the Parker School, Facing Up to the Uncanny Valley at the Harold Washington Library, Sylvia Nasar at the UIC Forum, and Taussig. I will always have to wonder what might have been, and what might have been, and what might have been. Oh, the humanities! (Look, you knew I had to say that once. Now it's over.)

Still, what I saw last week was pretty great. On Sunday, Virginia Eubanks's  talk, A Jane Addams for the Digital Age challenged assumptions about the "digital divide" and the role of technology in creating opportunities for poor women. During four years of "participatory research" with women who used the resources at a YMCA in New York's capitol region, Eubanks found that most already had access to computers and at least the basic skills taught in classes meant to bridge the divide; many were working in "low-wage, high-tech" jobs at call centers, or performing data entry. The problem is, these jobs tend to be temporary, unstable, and unsustainable--and just as troublingly, advances in technology have decreased workers' privacy and autonomy, created negative impacts on their health and quality of life. Eubanks argued that we need to look at technology as "another site of struggle" and build it around specific social justice goals, instead of assuming that access to computers and skills training will magically create a level playing field. I look forward to reading her book, Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age.

And then there was Laurie  Anderson. Holy cow! I took three pages of notes during her conversation with the Steppenwolf Theatre's Martha Lavey, but what kept going through my head was, "Wow, this woman is just frightfully smart." I don't mean to say she was intimidating or abstruse in fact, she was a wonderfully accessible and engaging speaker. What flabbered my gast so thoroughly was the way her mind connects disparate sensory elements to create art that operates on multiple levels, a sound leads to an image, which leads to a physical project, for instance. She spoke of using art to evoke desire, "the way perfume works," creating an image in the mind and an instant sense of longing. And in a move dear to my puppy-loving heart*, Anderson once staged a concert for dogs because she wanted an audience for her music that wasn't limited by weak human hearing. The axiom that we only use 10 percent of our brains may be false, but Anderson left me feeling as though I use only a small fraction of my senses.

This week, I'm especially excited about Mother Jones editor Clara Jeffery's interview with David  Carr, Rebecca Solnit's "Technological Wild West" lecture, and Shakespeare By the Numbers at the Poetry Foundation, among others. Plus: even more new (to me) auditoriums!
*Murray had surgery on a cherry eye this week, by the way; he's recovering nicely.

www.kateharding.info
Twitter: KateHarding

Chandler and Price platen press

Although Smith’s legacy is situated within the musical genre, he was also a visual artist and filmmaker and the print shop honors his artistic contributions to the 20^th century and his presence in Boulder. Inside the small shingled building was a collection of beautiful, but seemingly archaic equipment: a Chandler and Price platen press and a Vandercook SP-15 proof press. Against one wall was an immense wooden cabinet filled with metal and wood type – fonts big and small, symbols to be used in the letter press printing tradition. Each summer letter-press artists and writers would converge on the small studio and spend a week at a time designing, setting the type, inking the plate to make exquisite renditions of their poetry and prose – the letters making their indelible imprint on the paper. Letter press celebrates the word as object – from the design process through printing and in a technology festival it only seems right that we would find a way to honor that lineage as well.

It’s fitting, then, that Charles Bernstein, a 2011 CHF presenter (and longtime guest faculty at Naropa) has, not only written this year’s Secret Poem, but that the work will be reproduced in a limited run of letter press by Chicago’s own Spudnik Press which will be signed by Bernstein and awarded as prizes to a handful of lucky (and dedicated) Secret Poem participants.

If the Harry Smith Print Shop is quintessential Boulder, Spudnik is quintessential Chicago. A four- year-old artist-run community print shop, Spudnik is a hub for letter-press and silk-screen artists. Up until this spring it was run out of founder Angee Lennard’s apartment as a live-work space, but is now housed in the 1821 West Hubbard Studio Building just south of Grand in a loft space that recalls Chicago’s industrial past. Situated in a third floor corner, light from the west pouring in, the studio has a whole room devoted to the letter press with a Chandler & Price Pilot Press, a Golden & Co. Pearl Press (made in the late 19th century) and a Line-O-Scribe proofing press (cylinder press) available for artists who rent by the hour, month, or year. Local artists Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger print at Spudnik, along with Ray Noland (the artist responsible for many iconic prints including “Run, Blago, Run”), Lilli Carre, and Paul Nudd, whose work was just featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art this past summer.

Run, Blago, Run

Brandy Barker, the newly appointed Studio Assistant, sat with me and my colleague Julia, to discuss the design for Bernstein’s secret poem. Surprisingly, visiting the drawers of type was not the first step. Brandy explained that she is now able to do mock-up designs digitally. From there a photo-polymer plate will be made from the negative. In short form, the plate will be attached with an adhesive to a gridded, cast aluminum base. This base is locked in to the chase, which is a metal frame, placed in the press, then inked, registered and printed. As Julia, Brandy, and I went back and forth – tweaking fonts – a little narrower here, bolder there – the benefits of digital design became apparent, but knowing that ultimately Brandy will be hand-cranking the Chandler & Price to produce the special 25-print run of Charles’s poem is, like the Carolina Tar Heels through my ear buds, a harmonious blend of technology across the decades.

Spudnik Press is committed to providing accessibility to its facilities to the greater community. Visit them for Portfolio Day Sunday, November 20 at its 1821 West Hubbard Studio Building. Artists can sign up to have their work reviewed by three local artists and curators, including Dawn Hancock of Firebelly Press, Mark Pascale of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Columbia College’s Jessica Cochran or, catch them as a part of What’s Your Art , hosted by WBEZ at the Cultural Center this December.

RELATED EVENT

A Secret Poem

At all CHF venues and online: until 5:00 pm, Nov. 14

David Grossman

A message arrives only when someone receives it. Ora, terrified of the message that might come, flees her home setting out on a long hike across Israel. This is the premise behind David Grossman’s new novel To the End of the Land.

The protagonist and narrator of the novel, Ora, dreads the final month of her son Ofer’s army service; the Second Lebanon War has broken out and she fears hearing that he was killed in action. Staying away from home, but constantly thinking of him, Ora believes, might just save Ofer’s life. 

To the End of the Land is a haunting novel; an epic-journey of 650 pages.  Not a traditional voyage of discovery or a travelogue of the Israeli landscape, but rather the long tale of Israel’s wars of survival through the experiences of one woman. Her narrative, and that of her travelling companion Avram, reveal the enormous price such commitments cost.  

David Grossman is one of Israel’s finest and best known writers.  He has gained the statue of prophetic author since the publication of his remarkable non-fiction book The Yellow Wind (1987). A brave and controversial report on the dangerous situation in the West Bank and the impossibility of maintaining the status quo between Jews and Arabs, the book appeared less than a year before the first intifada. This grassroots uprising among Palestinians transformed the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Grossman himself began to argue for a two-State solution, an idea that met with reluctance in government circles at first, but has since become the dominant political policy for resolving the situation.

In a tragic irony, Grossman’s new novel also has the quality of prophecy. While working on the final stages of To the End of the Land, he received the message that Uri Grossman, his younger son, was killed in the Lebanon war. Uri was only two weeks away from his 21^st  birthday.  The nation was swept up in grief and affection for the bereaved author and his family. An outpouring of public grief was evident in the press, while the forthcoming novel became intertwined with the author’s personal tragedy, in the Israeli literary imagination.

The story of Uri Grossman shadows the book in the guise of Ofer. But there is also another story: the capture and torture of Ora’s companion Avraham, during the Yom Kippur War (1973). His story is a contrast that provides a possible source of hope. The terrible experience of violence and solitary confinement has rendered him physically and mentally damaged for the past thirty years, but walking through the land now redeems him. It provides him with the strength to finally tell his story and confront the parts of his life he had always avoided. Perhaps here too Grossman can be seen as a prophet!  In a country where every soldier killed or wounded in action is reported in the press, Gilad Shalit is the other soldier’s story most associated with the Lebanon War. Released earlier this month (18^th October 2011) he was kidnapped by Hamas in June 2006, and held captive in Gaza for five years. Avram’s experiences as a prisoner of war and his life as a damaged person after his release warn of the larger societal issues that war engenders. They also raise questions about the relationship between public and private grief.

To the End of the World is a novel of universal appeal that extends beyond the particular Israeli narrative. It presents larger questions about the cost of war on a nation’s psyche, any nation, anywhere. It is about more than the death of a single soldier, or even the anguish of a family fearing a message that their child had been lost for ever. Rather it speaks of the deep scars that battle leaves in the heart of the whole nation.

RELATED EVENT

Reading and Conversation: David Grossman

Northwestern University Law School Thorne Auditorium: Sunday, November 13 at 10 am

You probably know by now that the Chicago Humanities Festival is pretty darn great at delivering engaging, thought-provoking programs. But you might not know that we’re also extremely talented in another area – I’m talking about eating. Yes, we tend to demolish in short order any delicious food that makes its way into our office. Leftovers from a lunch meeting at La Madia won’t last more than a minute, and there are at least three people on staff whose baked goods rival any Parisian café.

All this is to say, we won’t blame you if you get hungry before, during, or after one of our upcoming Festival events. In fact, if you’re not drooling by the time you leave Deconstructing Dinner: Molecular Gastronomy, we’re doing something wrong. So while you’re picking out programs and planning your schedule, we hope you also get excited about grabbing a bite to eat and exploring a new neighborhood. To get you started, I’m happy to be your self-appointed guide to the hidden (and not-so-hidden) culinary gems near the UIC Forum (725 W. Roosevelt Road).

We have a full slate of distinguished guests presenting at the UIC Forum on Saturday, November 5th and Sunday, November 6th, from hip hop artist Common to prize-winning author Jonathan Franzen, not to mention an eclectic range of topics on the table, including dating in the digital age, social media and the Arab Spring, technology in both Hollywood and athletics, and amazing feats of memory. How will you get your fill of these enticing offerings and still leave room for lunch?

Hashbrowns

Lucky for you, options in University Village and nearby neighborhoods abound. If you’re fearful of braving autumn’s chill, take a brisk stroll south down Halsted to Maxwell Street, a cozy cobblestone fairway with informative historical plaques and bronze statues. Stop in at Hashbrowns (731 W. Maxwell Street) if you’re in the mood for all-day breakfast – go for one of the specialty omelets named after Chicago neighborhoods, and be sure to try the eponymous house specialty made with sweet potatoes. Just be aware that while Hashbrowns opens its doors at 6 am, they close at 3 pm.

If you’re heading out for some grub after one of the 3 pm programs, you can still enjoy a tasty meal on Maxwell Street. Stop in at Lalo’s Mexican Restaurant (733 W. Maxwell Street) to get your evening started with an Ultimate Margarita and one of their massive seafood entrees. Ole!

 
Maxwell Street

Feel like venturing a little farther afield? The UIC Forum is only a hop, skip, and a jump from the heart of Greektown – and my favorite place for brunch. Meli Café and Juice Bar (301 S. Halsted) is a bright and cheery corner spot with amazingly decadent daily specials and adorable little pots of marmalade. It’s admittedly difficult to narrow down my top recommendations, but you can’t go wrong with Caramel Banana pancakes, the fig and goat cheese omelet, or eggs benedict with honey smoked salmon.

Of course, you might be in the mood for ouzo and flaming cheese served family style. With a plethora of traditional Greek restaurants clustered around Halsted and Adams, the options are endless. Feel like part of the family at Pegasus Restaurant and Taverna, Greek Islands, or Athena Greek Restaurant.

Tuscany

We don’t want the Italians to feel left out! Rest assured, a leisurely meal at Tuscany (1014 W. Taylor Street) in Little Italy will make you feel like you’ve jetted off to the land of villas and Chianti. My colleague assures me that the clam linguini is exquisite – but I have my eye on the pear ravioli. Speaking of colleague recommendations, I’ve also been told that Jubilee Juice & Grill (140 N. Halsted) is the place to go for veggie burgers, fruit smoothies, and waffle fries. I don’t know about you, but I’m never one to turn down French fries.

Jubilee Juice

Just down the road from Tuscany, you can sample heaping portions of noodles and rice at Thai Bowl (1049 W. Taylor Street). Warm up with a steaming bowl of soup or try one of their fiery curries. They aren’t messing around with the chili pepper symbol on the menu.

If all that spicy indulging puts you in the mood for a tall glass of beer, head west to Three Aces (1321 W. Taylor Street). You can join the fun at Sockhop Saturdays, with DJs spinning rock ‘n roll hits from the ‘50s and the ‘60s starting at 10 pm. Yes, it’s a little different than Common, but with deliciously potent American beers on draft – like the 9.8% ABV Three Philosophers from Ommegang Brewery in Cooperstown, New York – you’re bound to have a good time. They describe their food as “Italian countryside meets the American farmhouse,” and with options from the mill, sea, barn, and farm (butternut squash soup with blackstrap molasses popcorn and maple-cider agrodolce!), you won’t run out of choices. Plus, I once saw my favorite local celebrity, Top Chef winner Stephanie Izard of Girl & the Goat, hanging out drinking a beer here.

A mural in Pilsen

Lastly, the UIC Forum is only a mile from Pilsen. Time for tacos! A local hotspot for nearly fifty years, the staff at Nuevo Leon  (1515 W. 18th Street) won’t let you leave hungry. Check out the whole red snapper cooked with fresh garlic and red pimiento sauce, served with rice and salad. Or try a corn tortilla taco with lettuce, cilantro, onions, tomatoes, and one of 9 different fillings.

Personally, I can’t wait to explore everything we’re offering at the Festival – and then discuss these amazing programs over a stupendous meal (or two… or six). Where do you plan to eat before or after catching a Festival program? Let us know your thoughts and please share your recommendations.

Kelsey Rotwein is the Education Fellow at the Chicago Humanities Festival and a graduate student in literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She believes chocolate chip cookies are a food group.

Since my husband had to take the puppy to obedience class in the car, I made my way to the University of Chicago via public transportation, which took about 90 minutes from my home in Rogers Park. Unfortunately, I had only budgeted slightly more than an hour for the trip, so I missed the presentation on the Mansueto Library, which I had been really excited about; future-of-the-book stuff is right up my alley.  On the bright side, it was a ridiculously gorgeous day, so I found myself a bench outside and read until it was time for the 1:30 tour of the new library.

A little background on me: I am 36 years old and reasonably well-adjusted, yet still enormously and (needless to say) irrationally bitter that my undergrad experiences failed to live up to the promise of the movies.  Once, a friend and I were watching a film set at a small, New England liberal arts college but filmed at my alma mater, the University of Toronto.  The friend, who had gone to a small, New England liberal arts college, looked at a breathtaking shot of an old building covered in multicolored ivy, and sighed, "I wish I'd gone to a school that looked like that."

"You did!" I yelled. "Whereas I actually went to that school, and it looks nothing like that in real life!"

I mean, of course parts of it, in isolation, look exactly like that, which is why so many movies are filmed on that campus every year. But mostly, it is sprawling and urban and tragically bereft of thoughtful, ruddy-cheeked young men in fisherman sweaters, who spend their days riding bicycles around duck-dotted ponds, occasionally stopping to rest under explosively colored old maples, where they all have the same daydream: about a shy, chubby girl with a kind heart and a terrible attitude showing up with a thermos of hot chocolate. Spiked with whiskey.

I enjoy real life quite a bit, most of the time, but I was deeply, deeply disappointed by it in my college years, is what I'm saying. So these last two gorgeous autumn Sundays, strolling through the Northwestern and University of Chicago campuses, I've been beset with that old, familiar, increasingly embarrassing longing for a do-over.

When the 1:30 tour of the Mansueto Library was too packed to accommodate me, I headed across the street to Mandel Hall to grab some lunch before the 2:30 tour. Looking for a place to park myself for a bit, I wandered into a dining room that could easily have been from a movie set: impossibly high ceilings, hand-carved woodwork, oil paintings of old white men along the walls, that sort of thing. And I did something I almost never do, something I haven't done regularly since I was an undergrad in the early 1990s: I took out a notebook and started writing longhand.

Unfortunately (again), I didn't stop in time for the 2:30 tour, or the 3:30, or for the Amitav Ghosh interview at 4. (I saw my friend Jill on the way out of that, though, and she said it was wonderful.) I kept writing for hours, finishing up with just enough time to have a cup of tea in the courtyard before The Encyclopedia Show. 

In other words, for one afternoon, at 36 years old, I essentially had the college experience I've always wanted. (Well, minus the guy in the fisherman sweater, but a big guy in a grey hoodie asking a tiny puppy for kisses is a pretty good alternative, and one of those was waiting for me at home.) I do feel bad about wasting the all-access pass for those few hours, but it was really rather glorious.

And then the Encyclopedia Show! So much fun! From Megan Mercier's piece about a suburban subdivision as literal uncanny valley to Jamila Wood's lovely poem about FRIEND, a robot built to assist people with disabilities, it was a fantastic evening. And for the rest of my life, I get to tell people I was once invited to speak on nanotechnology at the University of Chicago. Sort of.

Next up: Laurie Anderson! I will most definitely make sure I leave myself enough time to get to that. See you after the first full week of the festival.  

Kate Harding is the co-author of Lessons From the Fatosphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce With Your Body and has been a regular contributor to Salon's Broadsheet.

It’s been nine months to the day since a group of virtual activists made the final tweaks to a planned January 25 protest, a date that will be forever be etched in the memory of this nation.

We all know what happened next. Or do we?

As news emerges of the sudden return of another dictator not so far from here in Yemen, as a bloodbath continues in Syria and the megalomaniac in Libya wreaks havoc in the final throes of an ignominious defeat, one question lends itself: What have we Egyptians achieved since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak in February?

Here are the facts: The ex-president, his sons, his interior minister and their henchmen are on trial for ordering and/or inciting the killing of peaceful protesters; icons of the previous regime, including the all-powerful steel magnate Ahmed Ezz, are behind bars, some slapped with prison sentences and exorbitant fines while others are still locked up pending investigations.

No matter how cynical we are about the indications regarding the final outcome of these trials, we must admit that had it not been for the colossal events of the 18-day uprising, such a scenario would have continued being a figment of our wildest dreams.

But beyond the trials, has anything in Egypt really changed?

No.

The ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) continues the legacy of a 60-year military dictatorship wielding absolute power while claiming to represent the legitimate choice of the people based on the results of a botched referendum last March.

Despite promises to hand over authority to a civilian government after six months and to cancel the state of emergency, the SCAF has leaked a bizarre schedule for the legislative elections that would have us in a constant state of election fever from November till March 2012; as well as broadened the scope of emergency law, giving itself a pseudo-legal cover to continue trampling human rights until June 2012.

In the meantime, SCAF has issued election and parliament laws that were rejected by political parties of all stripes since they lend themselves to abuse by members of the disbanded National Democratic Party and hence open the doors to the recreation of former structures and pockets of power. Despite promises to review these laws, nothing has been done yet.

And while officials incessantly pay lip service to the issue of restoring law and order, the security vacuum today has only slightly improved since the police retreated on January 28. Why has the interior ministry done nothing other than accuse protesters exercising their legitimate right to express themselves of fueling chaos?

Horrifying crime rates including an estimated 10,000 car thefts, kidnappings, muggings and acts of thuggery, have turned many people against the revolution.

Just two days ago an encounter with a taxi driver left me pale-faced and terrified. Veins swelling from his neck, the angry man gushed vitriol against what he called “this failure of a revolution” postulating an elaborate theory about how the Egyptian people deserved what they got from the police and how he would rather go back to a time when a handful of people controlled all the wealth, than deal with the hundreds of thugs who now think they own the streets.

There was no point reasoning with him after he said that he didn’t mind being the victim of police brutality as long as the thugs were driven back into their holes.

It’s also no coincidence after months of incitement against youth groups who led the uprising that many people have turned against them, convinced that they were serving a foreign agenda having received “revolution training” abroad.

While the political scene remains polarized and the SCAF continues to employ its carrot and stick methods to divide and conquer and to buy time, the evolving social disintegration poses the biggest threat.

Strikes have erupted in unison over the past two weeks threatening the vital health, education and transport sectors with potential paralysis. While reason would challenge the validity of such strikes at this specific historical moment, reason also dictates that these strikes did not erupt without just cause.

If Egyptians had seen real change and purges government institutions; if they had seen the interim Cabinet taking sure steps towards dismantling and restructuring the old, collapsing structures with a clear vision of how to rebuild them on the basis of professional merit and financial parity, they would have been willing to withstand the material decrepitude.

But the situation now is far from any claims of incremental, let alone, fundamental change.

A transitional period is only transitional because it sets the stage for a new democratic scene governed by strong state institutions overseen by a free and independent media, not one subjected to intimidations and outright gags all in the name of national security.

In many ways, Egypt on September 24, 2011 is not much different from the Egypt of January 24, 2011, except that today we have a little more hope.

But the struggle to achieve the goals of this uprising must never cease. The only thing worse that no revolution, is an amputated revolution.

RELATED EVENT

Ourselves as Others See Us—Social Media and the Middle East

UIC Forum: Nov. 5, 3:00 PM

Dana Horst works for nonprofits, writes things, and turns the bass up.

“Even if it’s not laid out in perfect sentences – is any rap? – you’d have to be an idiot to not at least grasp a few things from these songs, or have had no interest in pulling anything from them in the first place.”
-Aesop Rock

Common

“One Day It’ll All Make Sense”, Common says, in his new autobiography,  and between that, the forthcoming album The Dreamer, The Believer, his afterword on The Anthology of Rap (edited, in part, by Adam Bradley), and his upcoming CHF lecture on the history of hip-hop on Nov. 4th, there’s a rich vein of material to discuss.

I just finished reading The Anthology of Rap, and I wonder: does hip-hop have a canonical text? Should it? Or would that reduce a living, vibrant art form (beats, rhymes, and life) to a series of arguments about whose work is included, whose is excluded, and create artificially limiting boundaries around an art that includes not only rap, but dj’ing, b-boying, and graffiti?

The Anthology of Rap does not claim to define the canon, but samples it (pun intended). Though you can read The Anthology of Rap cover to cover in an academic binge on hip-hop, I think it’s most useful as a point of reference.

It’s not written to be the all-time-forevermore definitive resource for all of hip-hop culture: the focus is lyrics and small bites of context for each featured artist. So, who is The Anthology of Rap written for: academia or the hip-hop head? (Oh, such discussions to be had about if and when and how those two simplistic categories intersect! Do I get to call myself an academic? Or a rabid rap fan? And if I get to be both, then I want a book that gives me the historical, cultural, and literary contexts as well as well-transcribed and well-diagrammed lyrics! Oh, and track samples. So I want an encyclopedia with music samples happening as I turn every page.)

For the academic, there are two portions that I think are exceptional: NWA’s one-page contextual introduction gives a remarkably thorough overview of that group’s importance in a few short paragraphs (pp.232-233); and the discussion in the introduction to “1993 – 1999: Rap Goes Mainstream” (pp. 325-332) includes a concise but multifaceted discussion of the mainstreaming of rap via visual media, and the sexual politics linked to those visuals.

Any academic discussion of the form and content of rap lyrics would be expected, following the discussion of Aristotle, Demetrius, Cicero, Wordsworth, T. S. Eliot, et al. (yes, really: p. 126), to include significant scanning of texts and diagramming of the complexities of the rhymes. For example, the Cold Crush Brothers’ “Fresh Wild Fly and Bold” gets a diagram of the internal rhymes, but there are still post-its stuck to my book with notes like “I WISH THIS HAD BEEN SCANNED OUT” (Eric B. & Rakim’s “Eric B. Is President” and “Check Out My Melody”; yes, really, I did scribble that note in all caps), and “I want to see the diagramming of these internal couplets!” (Kool G Rap’s “Road to the Riches”).

Anthology of Rap co-editor Adam Bradley

Then again, if you aren’t coming to The Anthology of Rap for scansion, you’re coming to it for the lyrical content. But I can’t imagine that too many hip-hop heads don’t want to hear the delivery of the rhymes. I can’t tell you how many times I paused my reading to bring up a track and to hear the lyrics in their natural habitat, over beats (“you’re bobbin’ your head so hard you’re left with a permanent injury to your neck”, from Eyedea & Abilities’ “Reintroducing” ).

Other notes:

It’s well worth reading more about Sylvia Robinson, the Sugarhill Gang, and the well-acknowledged theft of Grandmaster Caz’s lyrics for “Rapper’s Delight”. It’s especially interesting in light of these “Rapper’s Delight” lyrics: “But whatever you do in your lifetime/ you never let a MC steal your rhyme”.

Upon reading Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s entry, featuring “Tha Crossroads”, I wonder if there’s a chapter or a book yet to be written about the “dearly departed” memorial rap.

Two entries that surprised me: Canibus’ “Poet Laureate Infinity 3” reads like a Greek epic and sounds like a deranged verbal manifesto; Foxy Brown’s “My Life” shows a storytelling depth that I don’t associate with her. The mix of disappointment, anger, and heartbreak comes through in the text, and sent me back to this song for a fresh listen.

If you want to geek out and read more: Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang and The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop by Dan Charnas. 

RELATED EVENT

Common: History of Hip Hop

UIC Forum: Nov. 5, 6:00 PM

Murray

That is the kind of information you can't just will yourself to unknow. And so I am writing this blog post to the sounds of a 14-week-old pug/corgi puppy (Murray) chomping on a squeaky plush duck with murderous persistence. And I had to skip seeing William Gibson on Sunday, because our obedience class ran from 12-1, which was the whole point of that tangent, apart from indulging my current obsession with the wee beastie. 

Fortunately, Murray's class is in Evanston, so I was still able to make it to The Truth Machine: American Justice and Our Obsession with Lie Detection at 1:30.  (Al and Murray will have to go to class without me next week while I head down to Hyde Park.) As I said on Twitter immediately afterwards, I enjoyed Ken Alder's talk so much, I bought his book, The Lie Detectors, for my Kindle before I even left the auditorium.

Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with the Law & Order television franchise (and I have waaaaay more than that) has long been aware that lie detector technology is too unreliable to be admissible in court. Still, I didn't realize that, in the 100 years that we've been using some iteration of that technology, we've pretty much always known it was unreliable. The need for human interpretation of a polygraph's data creates acres of room for error, and psychologists have been pointing that out since the very beginning.

Why, then, do we remain so enamored of a piece of hardware that, as Alder put it, "promises objectivity but thrives on its opposite"? Essentially, because we want so badly to believe there could be such a thing as a machine that tells us, scientifically and conclusively, when someone is lying. That desire is then fueled by the use of polygraph evidence on TV and in crime novels, in comic books—"Dick Tracy" popularized it in the '30s—and films and the theater of politics: Alder notes that the 20^th century was full of "lie detector moments," from the Watergate scandal to the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. These entertainments and performances, he says, are the "natural habitat" of the lie detector—not science or justice.

Much as I wanted to go start reading Alder's book right after that, I stuck around for Noshir Contractor's Traces in a Tangled Web talk, and I am so glad I did. I wasn't entirely sure what the subject was from the description—I saw the phrase "digital traces," and my mind immediately leapt to worst-case privacy invasion scenarios, the kind of thing I simultaneously wish to learn about and never want to hear about, la la la la. So I was quite torn between that and Shedding Artificial Light on Art History but ultimately let laziness—I was already in the building where Contractor's talk would take place—decide for me.

Contractor acknowledged that the potential for baddies to exploit our online data footprints  (basically, everything we ever do on the web leaves a record) is "frankly, incredibly frightening," but he was primarily focused on how all that information is also "incredibly useful." Researchers like himself can now access enormous, previously unimaginable data sets that offer new insights into human social behavior—one of which is that technology may have changed how we communicate, but not so much with whom. The web was supposed to eliminate geographical barriers—and as someone who has "internet friends" (i.e., people I correspond with but have never met) in Europe and Australia, I can certainly attest that it's made a difference in my life—but the research shows that overall, 75 percent of online communications are between people who live in fairly close proximity. We apparently aren't looking to the internet to find new people nearly as much as we are to chat with our existing friends.

After that, my brain was too full of new thoughts for me to sit still any longer. I can't wait for the Hyde Park program next Sunday, though—especially since I'm now a part of it! After my last blog post, Encyclopedia Show co-founder Robbie Q. Telfer e-mailed to ask if I wanted to be among the "stellar hodgepodge of writers, artists, poets, and performers" assembled for this one. I said yes before I could talk myself out of it. Eep! Wish me luck.

You might be surprised to know that football and the humanities go together like coffee and cream.  The Big 10 Conference, formed more than 115 years ago, (now actually comprised of twelve teams) is known as much for its academic prowess as it is for its athletic accomplishments. It was with this in mind that Festival Artistic Director, Matti Bunzl, created the Big 10 initiative for techlknowledgē.

We’ve combed the Big 10 universities for the people you’ve never heard of who are doing the most innovate work on campus. This work ranges from dancers working with biologists to the latest studies on relationships in the age of social media.

When we mention the Big 10 initiative outside of the office, the first response almost always involves a comment about those universities being known more for football. Being a graduate of a Big 10 university myself, and a sports fan, it makes sense to me that the two go together. In fact, we decided that they should compete against one another. So, with tongue firmly in cheek, I will now rank the ticket sales of our Big 10 festival programs against their respective football team’s records, as of October 8.

I must admit that I didn’t expect these results to match up at all. However, both Illinois and Wisconsin, both still unbeaten on the field, have the two top-selling Festival programs. One of two Illinois programs features University President Michael Hogan and Catherine Davidson of Duke University in a conversation about the future of the Humanities leads the pack, second only to Wisconsin’s Digital Shakespeare program by Professor Michael Witmore (who was recently named director of the Folger Shakespeare Library). Professor Witmore’s program sold out in the first week of ticket sales and we were able to call an audible and ask him to do the program a second time.  Witmore is looking as good as Wisconsin’s new quarterback.  In Illinois's second program, Professor Rayon Fouché will touch on the technological developments that are everywhere in sports, and they continually change the games we love.

Closely following Illinois and Wisconsin is The Ohio State’s program Tomorrow’s History.  In his Festival program, David Staley provides us with a front row view of history’s digital revolution.  The Ohio State’s football team, however, is 3-3. 

In the middle of the pack both on the field and in the Festival, and running neck and neck, are Purdue, with Can You Dig It—Technology in the Archeological Record, Michigan State with Good Food? A Philosophical Stance on Today’s Agriculture, Indiana with The Breakup 2.0, and Northwestern’s S. Hollis Clayson with Shedding Light on Art History. Northwestern actually has its own day as part of the Festival, coming up on Saturday, October 16.  If you added all of their programs together they would be at the top of the standings, not a place they usually occupy on the field. (As a Northwestern grad, it pains me to write that sentence.)

Closing in on those four are Penn State with Boundaries of Life in a Biomedical Age and the University of Michigan. Michigan’s football team is still unbeaten. Their Festival program can come from behind with a Hail Mary Pass. It features U of M physicist Gordon Kane in conversation with choreographer Liz Lerman about their collaboration on her latest dance work, The Matter of Origins. (CHF is co-presenting The Matter of Origins at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Nov. 10-13.)

At the bottom in both in football results and Festival ticket sales are Minnesota with When Dancers and Biologists Collide, and Iowa, with Kate Gfeller’s Lend Me Your (Bionic) Ears. On October 29^th these two teams face off in football and at the Festival on Saturday, November 5, their last two chances to come out on top of the other.

Come on Golden Gopher and Hawkeye fans! Purchase your tickets now and boost your team’s standings!

And, where, might you ask, is Nebraska is all this?

Since they didn’t officially join the Big 10 until this fall, after our tickets were already on sale, we didn’t include them. Just wait until next year Cornhuskers!

Computers are dumb.  Though they have the ability to store, process and export massive amounts of data, they are fundamentally incapable of distilling meaning from this material.  A computer can pretend to offer insight, but one must never forget that this synthesis is illusory, an echo of the human who taught the device how to operate.

Here’s the secret to understanding computing:  at the most fundamental level, digital devices can only differentiate between true and false.  That’s it!  This binary system seems impossibly limiting, yet computers are capable of enormously complex behavior. 

We crossed an important conceptual boundary when computing components  shrank to a size that cannot be perceived by the naked eye.  Although this shift has made powerful technological devices more accessible to individuals of all economic strata, it did so at the cost of another kind of access. For example, before the engineering of an automobile became computer-mediated, any high school kid could learn to fix up and maintain a car.  We had a more physical relationship to technology, or at least the potential for one.

Modern computers, on the other hand, are akin to mystical objects.  We depend on these devices, yet our relationship to them is wholly abstract.   What’s more, the actual components of a computer are useless without software, another complexity that has no tangible state.  Is this phenomenon really any different from Animism, where we worship those objects and events on which we rely and that we do not understand?

Great thinkers have always expressed great concern whenever society develops a new technological dependency. Plato worried that writing would supplant memory[i]. John Phillip Sousa feared that “infernal machines” would replace the human vocal chord[ii]. Leonard E. Read warned that industrialization would create a nation of human cogs that lacked the ability to complete complex tasks individually[iii].  However, in every case, the technologies in question proved too great a temptation and were ultimately adopted.

Contemporary philosophers such as William Gibson and Jason Salavon provide us with the modern equivalent of Plato’s technological musings.  Both men regard digital systems as reflections of essential human traits – most interesting when used (or misused) to address some personal desire.  Gibson, whose medium is fiction, uses the flexibility of print to discuss technology that does not yet exist.  Salavon, a visual artist, composes custom software to produce artwork that employs technology as both material and subject.

Consider, for example, Salavon’s Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades (normalized) [iv].  Here the artist produced four prints, each representing the software amalgamation of a full decade of centerfold photography.  Only the title hints at prurient content; all that remains are the ghostly hints of a single figure in each image.

From a technological perspective, centerfolds provide Salavon with a perfect leaping-off point.  The basic proportions of the vertical format are instantly identifiable with the help of the title.  One can also depend upon the regularity of the composition, given the documentary purpose of the original material.  Indeed, Salavon has explored many photographic themes that return near-identical results.  From this perspective, the work is a meta-commentary on the way that familiar image groupings (including graduations, pornography, and snaps with Santa) lose all individual meaning when repeated over and over.

The heavy technological component to Salavon’s work can mask the presence of more traditional conceptual content.  Again, consider the visual progression of Centerfold across the decades.  The lack of identifying characteristics forces a viewer to rely on the broad strokes; namely, the fact that Playboy centerfolds appear to grow thinner and less diverse (read: whiter) over time. 

Similar critique of the objectification of women is often stated in a much more strident fashion.  Salavon, however, is careful to separate himself from the direct invocation of these ideas.  Here he lets software do the heavy lifting, producing work that is simultaneously celebratory and critical.  Much like the Surrealist practice of automatic drawing, Salavon’s algorithmic approach allows him (and us) to discover the hidden content of the popular subconscious.

The Computational Artist: Jason Salavon in Conversation with Hamza Walker

University of Chicago - Kent Chemical Laboratory: Oct. 23, 2:30 PM

In recent decades age-old questions such as the origin of our universe, and of the matter from which we are made, have become research areas for physicists rather than speculative discussion topics.  There has been great progress in learning about the stages of development of our universe out to the edges of the observable universe and back to its beginning, and scientific theories about the beginning are being formulated.

Many people, perhaps most, want to gain insights into questions about the meaning of life and our place in the universe. As we have understood our universe better we have seen it apparently does not provide a base for meaning for our lives.  It is not that physics does not tell us anything about meaning, but that the answer is not what we thought we wanted to hear.  What we learn is that the meaning should arise from our relations to other people, rather than outside.

Once scientists understand something they can explain it in words pretty well to some people, but many more people think and interpret the world differently from the standard scientific approach.  Many people could learn more about what we have understood about our world if communication could be via forms of art and dance that convey the questions scientists have asked and the understandings gained, in a rigorous way.  Science and art are similar in that they strive for understanding the world, and require creative thinking.  Their criteria for success are not the same, since science has to describe the actual natural world, while successful art and dance have to communicate to people.  If art and dance want to communicate about implications of our understanding of our natural world they have a constraint that not all forms of art have, to represent the science correctly.

For me, that people can understand the origins and workings of the universe even though it does not have intrinsic meaning provides an immense source of dignity and delight.  I hope that can be communicated to many people.   When a mutual friend brought Liz Lerman and me together, knowing of our interests in communicating science, we quickly felt it might be worth it to try, and I think it was – the outcome is the Dance Exchange program The Matter of Origins.  Liz and I admitted to each other at the end of the first day that each of us had thought it probably would not be fruitful to meet, but the time lost would be small.  I’m happy our initial doubts were wrong.

RELATED EVENT

Dance Exchange: Liz Lerman's The Matter of Origins

Museum of Contemporary Art: Nov. 10-13, 7:30 PM

"I like your ambition, Kate!"

That was a Chicago Humanities Festival employee's response after seeing a homemade calendar of events I plan to attend: 29 of them, in all, bookended (ha!) by William Gibson in Evanston on October 16 and Umberto Eco downtown on November 13. The fantastic perk of being a guest blogger is an all-access pass to the festival, and I intend to make the most of it—even if I did clearly hear a quiet "Good luck with that, sport" underlying the comment about my ambition. (And it was in an e-mail.)

Every autumn since 2005, when I moved to Rogers Park, I've had the same conversation with myself.  It goes like this:

"Hey, Kate, you should go to something at the Humanities Fest this year."

"Great idea, Kate.  Let's look at the website and choose a couple of things."

[looks at website]

"I want to go to everything! And I can only afford, like, two things! WHICH TWO THINGS?"

[brain short circuits]

Then I get distracted and forget about it until two or three days after the festival ends, at which point I kick myself.

This year, though, I can "afford" all the things! The only hard part is choosing between events scheduled at the same time, or back to back and a mile apart from each other.  Do I really want to see Umberto Eco (whom I love, but perhaps my schedule is too author-heavy) or attend the City of the Future panel? How do I decide between the sold-out Wikileaks and the First Amendment discussion and Todd Kuiken's fascinating-sounding lecture on advances in prosthetic technology?

And will I have the energy for either after I've already seen two Can't Misses that morning: Rebecca Solnit (whom I have admired ever since I read her glorious essay "Men Who Explain Things") and Anthony Grafton on the future of the book? As a writer, a former publishing professional, and an avid reader of both paper and e-books, I'm really excited to hear his ideas.

I know it's almost certainly unrealistic to believe I will make it to all 29 of the events I put into that calendar, but I swear, I will die—by which I mean "get really tired"—trying. I mean, look at these offerings! The Truth Machine: American Justice and Our Obsession with Lie Detection! Trains of Thought: Lessons from Tokyo! Facing Up to the Uncanny Valley! Mother Jones: New Frontiers in Journalism! It's like the programming folks read my diary when deciding what topics to include. (Except there's nothing called "Pile of Corgi Puppies: An Interactive Presentation.") How could I skip any of them?

In fact, the festival hasn't even started, and I'm already down to 28 events; I remembered I'm teaching a class at StoryStudio Chicago on the night Jared Diamond is speaking. Stupid employment! But I shall do my very best to milk my golden ticket for all it's worth.  At the very least, I need to make up for the last six years.

Kate Harding is the co-author of Lessons From the Fatosphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce With Your Body and has been a regular contributor to Salon's Broadsheet.

Flashback, mid ’90s, perhaps a week after I first met David Carr. The occasion was David giving reporters and editors at Washington City Paper, the alt weekly where I worked and where he’d just become the boss, a little speech. My memory of it is vague: part introduction, part pep talk, part acknowledgement that he had a steep learning curve to grok a city where most of us had grown up and all of us had put in some serious time (serious to a bunch of twentysomethings, anyway) learning the unwritten rules of the city—to say nothing of the quixotic ways of the Marion Barry administration. David was an odd mix of humble and feisty; there was something about us needing to hold staff meetings in Anacostia. What I do remember is as we shuffled out of his office, one of my coworkers turned to me and muttered, "Jesus, can you translate? You lived in Minnesota for a while, right?”

Almost 20 years later, David’s Fargo-worthy accent has not been tamed. But then, that was never what made his commentary so captivating. It was the high-low mix, the gift for remixing colloquialisms he grew up with and absorbed along the way with at least a dash or two of self-deprecation and a little combativeness stirred in as well. But maybe, most importantly, what made him so good was the willingness to throw himself into a new arena with reckless abandon. After five years at City Paper, he departed for the brave new world of online journalism at Inside.com, a news site focusing on the business of entertainment and publishing, and parlayed that into a gig at the New York Times.          

Today, there is perhaps no more engaging expert on the ways that technology is transforming—for good and for ill—journalism than Carr. His Monday Times columns challenge both the Web 2.0 and old media elite while making sense of their foibles for the average reader. But Carr is perhaps best known as the unlikely hero of Andrew Rossi’s acclaimed new documentary, Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times.  

The film tracks Carr and other media reporters during an era where their paper is roiled by layoffs, Wikileaks, paywalls, and social media. Today, newspapers’ revenue streams have been wiped out.  Reporters find their hard-won stories repackaged by bloggers and aggregators like the Huffington Post—entities that the Times’ editor, Bill Keller, has famously called “oxpeckers who ride the backs of [old media] pachyderms, feeding on ticks.”

But while Carr frets aplenty about how news organizations are going to pay for original reporting, he also believes that the digital tools of the 2.0 era have ushered in a journalistic Golden Age, allowing reporters to contextualize stories with video, analysis, and original documents at a speed unheard of a decade ago. Carr used these tools when he built the website for his best-selling memoir, The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own. In the book and on the site, rich with video interviews and interactive timelines, Carr essentially subjected his own ur narrative—how the love of his twin daughters prompted him to quit abusing and dealing coke, get off welfare, and eventually become a successful journalist—to his own fact-checking.

But to this Chicagoland audience, Carr may be best known for his blowout investigative piece into the frat boy corporate culture of the Tribune Company. 

I feel a bit of sympathy for those Tribune executives and staffers. One journalist has likened Carr to Mark Twain, and while David would swat that comparison away immediately, like Twain he tends to lull fools by his down-homery, only to eviscerate them. In our conversation at the Chicago Humanities Festival, we can be sure to see his charm on display—and, if we’re in luck, a touch of the devil-may-care bomb thrower as well.

RELATED EVENT

Mother Jones: New Frontiers in Journalism

Francis W. Parker School - Diane and David B Heller Auditorium: Nov. 9, 6:00 PM

Claudia Rankine’s is an expansive and open-hearted poetics in which the heart belongs to all of us; her “I” as flexible as her form. From project to project she carries the or of possibility and the fragment, placing them among and within our modern society. As her format expands from the word into multiple mediums and now into the city itself, so does her “I” expand along with it. Owning us, our society belongs to her, is optioned out among her works for our review.

     You explain to the ambulance attendant that you had 
     a momentary lapse of happily. The noun, happiness,
     is a static state of some Platonic ideal you know better
     than to pursue. Your modifying process had happily 
     or unhappily experienced a momentary pause.
     (from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely)

Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely was published in 2004, the first time visuals entered into her text. Swallowing our society and reordering it within the text, the poet embeds collective trauma and gives it back in images. From static televisions with George W. Bush silhouetted in the background, to a prescription bottle of pills, to an image of James Byrd Jr.—a black man brutally killed in a hate crime by three white men in Jasper, Texas, 1998. George Bush, then governor of Texas, could not remember certain basic facts about the case, so Rankine has given us his image. Here is James Byrd Jr, back from the dead: look at him.

     I think sometimes I am too private, too lonely in my heart,
     but my mind rows constantly as if involved in a public disturbance.
     (from Rankine's contributor note in
     Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature)

Since Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Rankine’s work has continued its social and open trajectory while expanding further into other mediums. In “Situation #1” (the first in a series of collaborative video essays with John Lucas) we watch in slow motion the famous headbutt delivered by Zinedine Zidane to Marco Materazzi in the final moments of the 2006 World Cup.

Zidane and Materazzi immediately after their altercation

Rankine’s audio weaves a text upon the image including Ralph Ellison, Shakespeare, herself, and Zidane among others. Repeatedly throughout the audio we hear Materazzi’s comment to Zidane leading up to the headbutt: Big Algerian shit. It echoes through, puncturing the collaged text. Big Algerian shit. She asks us to review, to listen again. 2009 debuted The Provenance of Beauty, a play for which the audience boards a bus and takes a guided tour of the South Bronx. Rankine complicates the space with its own history. The city is now her text, and ours to live again.  In each, Rankine plays out our world before us, hands it to us and expands it, asking us to look. Here. I am here.

Throughout each of these projects and extending out of her earlier works is the fragment and the or of possibility:

     Still, it seems he needs me,
     and as my face turns away, my hand
     reaches out. It can.
     Why doesn't it?
     (from Nothing in Nature is Private)

Taking the obsessive, fractured thinking of our modern world, Rankine worries it into every conceivable outcome. In Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, she has a sister whose entire family has died in a tragic accident. Or, she doesn’t. By moving the fragment into multiple potentialities of action (each thought built out into a possible reality) she creates a poetics of multiple options. A paratactic and hanging poetics presenting the reader with all possible universes.

There is a generosity and a direct challenge in Rankine’s ever-expanding universe. Her destabilized “I” accommodates and engages our modern American world. Here. I am here. Never answering, never explaining away the trauma, Rankine interrogates and circles, asks us to look again.

Elizabeth Metzger Sampson is a writer and artist currently living between Cairo and Chicago. She is the editor of Dear Navigator magazine. 

RELATED EVENT

Don't Let Me Be Lonely: A Reading with Claudia Rankine

Northwestern University, Harris Hall, Room 107: Oct. 16, 1:30 PM

Elation, followed by panic: that about sums up my reaction when I was asked to interview Amitav Ghosh about his latest novel, River of Smoke. Unfortunately I’m easily intimidated by nearly every author I encounter, but Ghosh? He’s brilliant, complex, prolific, a veritable trifecta of admirable literary qualities, and so transcends being merely a smarty-pants author. His best-selling 2008 Sea of Poppies was so multifaceted and imaginative it was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, the first of three promised tomes in Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy. Reading that book was to be catapulted headfirst into, among other topics, the early 19^th-century opium industry, seafaring, the start of the Indian Diaspora, botany, and the politics of British colonialism, with an attendant vocabulary quirky enough it required a lengthy glossary. (What to make, for instance, of “Damned luckerbaugs and wanderoos! . . . where’s my dumbpoke and pollock-saug . . .”?) Ghosh’s characters – among them an impoverished maharaja, a French orphan, a widowed Indian farmer, an American slave’s son – were palpably believable, as were the unorthodox situations that united them all. I found it difficult to break away from the 1830’s and return to the 21^st century, so caught up did I become each time I read a few pages. I bitterly lamented the book’s end, and installment #2, River of Smoke, was eagerly anticipated.

Now here I am, Ghosh fangirl, about to interview the author. Yikes.

Amitav Ghosh

A cursory Google search yields over 1.5 million results for Amitav Ghosh: reviews, interviews, and essays devoted to him, plus radio, TV, and internet appearances, not to mention the novels, collections, and non-fiction works he’s produced. And by October 23^rd, I’ll have examined every single one of them.

OK, that’s a lie. But my preparation (goaded by neurotic anxiety and old-fashioned curiosity) means gorging on as much of this seemingly-endless datastream as possible. Luckily, he is as fascinating as his writing, having been raised in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, with chunks of time spent in Egypt, Burma, and many other locales. In fact, Ghosh’s life seems to reflect a restless quest for profound understanding of people and places, and the research for his novels parallels that intensity. Ships’ logs, judicial records, travel journals, ancient broadsides, Parliamentary papers, treatises, diaries, letters – there seems to be no end to the arcane material Ghosh excavates, and he’s stated many times that he revels in this aspect of his work.

But it’s his obsessive attention to detail, whether in sights, sounds, and smells, or to the social structures, racist viewpoints, and intricate politics of the day that also make these books so satisfying. River of Smoke, which picks up in the 1830’s where S.O.P. left off, focuses on the old Chinese port of Canton (now Guangzhou) as its atmospheric stage, with dynamic new characters supplementing earlier ones. I was so taken by the descriptions of the city’s multi-national “hongs”, or business centers, that I searched out early drawings of this foreign quarter.

In Poppies, Ghosh detailed the devastating effects of England’s forced opium production on Indian farmers. Now we see the next stage, as the drug arrives and is traded in China, despite that country’s increasingly forceful and ultimately failed attempts to stop the illicit trafficking that addicted its population. But considering that the lucrative opium trade provided 20% of the British Empire’s entire revenue at the time, the idea of walking away was out of the question. Here’s one fact that illuminates the situation: in 1820, there were 9,708 fifty-pound chests of opium imported to China. Just fifteen years later in 1835, around the time River of Smoke is set, that number had multiplied to 35, 445 chests!

Ghosh, in his two volumes, has rocketed readers to the brink of the Opium Wars that violently altered China’s history, and will surely (I hope…) be the central narrative of his third novel. I found this period in history in that part of the world to be particularly compelling, so ignorant was I – along with most of us in the USA or, for that matter, India and England – about this shameful moment, not to mention the role Americans played in the opium trade and subsequent conflict. We were far from guilt-free, unfortunately.

Ghosh deftly interweaves his fictional and historical figures – Napoleon even makes an appearance at one point – nudging the story to a calamitous conclusion, while his characters and readers alike are forced to constantly adjust their moral compasses. By the end, we might not agree with the choices made by our favorite denizens of his story, but we have a much better understanding of how they made those decisions.

Since it will, sadly, be years before Ghosh gets his next installment to the printer (he says he’s in no hurry, and could keep writing this series for the rest of his life), we can at least content ourselves with his eclectic backlist. Ghosh’s first foray into epic historical fiction, The Glass Palace (2000), tackles a century of Indo-Burmese relations and is an incomparable book in its own right, targeting plenty of the issues that crop up in the Ibis books: race, identity, class, Colonialism, and what ultimately constitutes “home.” Or if it’s futuristic/sci-fi you’re after, pick up The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), a complex sort of mystical-medical-thriller that won the Arthur C. Clarke award. Or ramble through his collections of essays. Or the non-fiction travel/anthropology discourse, In an Antique Land (1992), centered in Egypt while he was still pursuing social anthropology. Whatever direction you choose, Amitav Ghosh has his bases covered, and disappointment is not an option.

Now, back to the research . . .

RELATED EVENT

Amitav Ghosh: River of Smoke

Mandel Hall, University of Chicago: Oct. 23, 4:00 PM

This weekend, we partner with the Museum of Contemporary Art to present the Dance Exchange performing Liz Lerman’s latest work The Matter of Origins. This is rich, fully-realized work that Lerman developed from a residency with the dance company at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland, and in consultation with University of Michigan physicist Gordon Kane. (In addition to the Dance Exchange’s four performances, CHF will also present a conversation between Kane and Lerman in which they will discuss their collaboration and the potential for the intersections of art and science.)

Dance Exchange in rehearsal for The Matter of Origins
photo by John Borstel

I saw The Matter of Origins when the Dance Exchange performed it at Montclair State University in New Jersey last March. The program has two distinct, but dependent, sections. The first half of the evening is an exquisite performance. Lerman’s choreography deftly shifts back and forth between the narrative and the abstract. The real-life musings of Edith Warner, who kept a tea house near Los Alamos while Oppenheimer, et al were cooking up the bomb; an appearance by Marie Curie; and a rumination on the story of Genesis and the Big Bang are interspersed with beautifully crafted, highly physical sequences in which dancers aged 25 to 75 collide randomly and rebound, like so many subatomic particles. The set and projections are gorgeous and the sound design is rich and textured, throughout, though the textures, tonalities, and aural references keep changing. Best of all, there is lots of luscious, juicy dancing. While Lerman is contemplating the origins of the universe as well as man’s capability for ultimate destruction, the piece is highly accessible. It never gets weighed down by its weighty subject matter.

The second half of the evening is one of the most unique interactive performance experiences I’ve ever taken part in. The audience is invited to sit and take tea (à la Warner’s evenings with Oppenheimer) and contribute their thoughts and experiences to an ever-widening discussion about the issues raised in the first half of the program. What personal associations do people have with the history, the morality, the metaphors presented in Act 1? Does the impressionistic and poetic exploration of these issues—the ethics and the mystery of what scientists work with everyday—achieve something that language cannot? Conversations are facilitated by “provocateurs”: local performers, scientists, and interested lay people who are trained by the company to keep audience members interacting and engaged.** Some of the dancers from the first half dance in the second as well. It is an interesting blend of performance, consciousness-raising, and peer-learning, as tablemates are encouraged to reflect together and debate. When I was in New Jersey, I grew giddy as I thought how much our CHF audience would love this format: a richly layered performance and the opportunity to unpack the content immediately afterward. For those of you who are scared off by the idea of “interactive performance,” rest assured, you will not be asked to perform—only to drink tea, eat cake, and participate in a lively conversation.

** We are currently recruiting provocateurs. The time commitment is not insignificant: 3-5 evenings between November 8 and November 13. If you are interested in learning more, please contact me at juliam@chfestival.org.

RELATED EVENT

Dance Exchange: Liz Lerman's The Matter of Origins

Museum of Contemporary Art: Nov. 10-13, 7:30 PM

Streisand with Marilyn and Alan Bergman

Barbra Streisand didn’t like “The Way We Were” when composer Marvin Hamlisch first played it for her. She thought it was “too simple.” She asked the Hamlisch-Bergmans songwriting team to write another song, and so they did. Barbra preferred the second version. A tape was made of each of the two songs and played during a private screening of the film’s opening credits to determine which version worked better. Barbra got outvoted. The original song made it into the movie. The rejected version, nicknamed “The Way We Weren’t,” can be heard on her Just for the Record album, recorded during an ACLU concert honoring lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman in 1980.

The Bergmans have received 16 Academy Award nominations for Best Song, and have won two Oscars in addition to the one for “TWWW.” for “The Windmills of Your Mind” in 1968, and for the score of Yentl. Hamlisch, an EGOT winner (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) along with Barbra, was the rehearsal pianist for Funny Girl before it opened on Broadway.   

The song so recognizable to so many underwent several variations before completion. A Streisand fan site provides an opportunity to listen to a rare demo of an early, longer version of the song (they ask that we not hot-link to their content). The melody is not entirely familiar and even includes lyrics not in the final version: 

     “Rain falls on a Christmas afternoon/Misty water-colored mem’ries of the way we were…”

And this, where we expect to hear “Can it be that it was all so simple then?”:

     “Every day was like a gift of flowers/Ribbon-wrapped and waiting to be seen/Eagerly we opened all the hours/Then what happened, happened…”

For a time, the lyric’s first word was not “Memories,” but “Daydreams.” I’ve read it was Barbra who suggested the change, but I can’t recall where I read that or be assured that this is true.

Also for a time, sought-after actors to play Hubbell Gardiner were Warren Beatty and Ryan O’Neal, not Robert Redford. The original script by Arthur Laurents focused on Katie. It was re-written to beef up Redford’s role. But I digress.

Barbra’s singing of the song on the single, at the time her biggest hit since “People” ten years prior, is different from how she handles the song on the film’s soundtrack. It won the Grammy for Song of the Year in 1974. “The Way We Were,” like others discussed on this blog, is included in the American Film Institute’s list of the Top 100 Songs. It is number eight. Incidentally, “People” is yet another example of one of those songs that nearly got cut. Makes you wonder if there is a parallel universe where marvelous songs that got cut from shows and movies live on to become standards. But again, I digress.  

According to her website, Barbra’s 51 gold and 30 platinum albums have helped make her second in the all-time charts, topped by Elvis, but ahead of The Beatles. She’s had number one albums in each decade from the 1960s to now. No other female recording artist has equaled her musical achievements with 71 million albums sold, quite a remarkable feat for someone not part of the rock & roll pantheon. These numbers don’t include statistics from her latest album, What Matters Most, released the last week of this past August. It celebrates the work of the Bergmans, which brings us back to “The Way We Were.”   

A look at the other songs nominated at the Academy Awards that year, and the performers who sang them, is a sure eyebrow-raiser for those of us from a certain generation:

     Dyan Cannon, "All the Love That Went to Waste" from A Touch of Class
     Telly Savalas, "You're So Nice to Be Around" from Cinderella Liberty
     Connie Stevens, "Live and Let Die" from Live and Let Die
     Jodie Foster (!) and Johnny Whitaker (!!), "Love" from Robin Hood

Jodie Foster and Johnny Whitaker

I remember seeing “The Way We Were” for the first time. I didn’t think the song was up to Barbra’s standards (!). When the movie ended and the lights came up in the theater, I couldn’t understand why so many women were wiping away tears. I was an idiot teenager then. Ten years later, as an idiot adult, I made the idiotic choice to watch the film after a particularly bad break-up. OY.

RELATED EVENT

A Night at the Oscars: The William and Greta Wiley Flory Concert

Francis W. Parker School - Diane and David B Heller Auditorium: Nov. 7, 6:00 PM

Jerry Herman is the reason I got into this Business. I don’t know whether to hug him or to hit him. I will NEVER forget the first time I heard “Some Enchanted Evening” and my life was changed. Oh wait – that was Rodgers and Hammerstein! I knew that. I have always loved Jerry’s scores, and come on – WHO DOESN’T?

I started piano lessons when I was 9 – my piano bench was filled with Grieg, Beethoven, Mozar t, “Claire de Lune” and the vocal selections from Mame. Guess which one I practiced the most? “It’s Today,” “Open a New Window,” “You’re My Best Girl” were my hymns. I grew up in the Bible Belt so that was… interesting. I was definitely different than most of the other children. I’ve been so lucky to have worked closely with Jerry over the last 10 years. When you’re with him it’s so easy to forget that he’s Broadway royalty – he’s quite unassuming, has twinkling eyes and a smile like the Cheshire Cat, and he’s just plain fun to be around. He is also unbelievably generous, has an INCREDIBLE sense of humor, and has impeccable taste in just about ever ything. And to top it all off, he is so supportive of singers performing his material – as long as it still SOUNDS like his material!  

And Jerry Herman said: 
"Jason instinctively knows how to find the smile or the tug at the heart behind my music and lyrics. . . .  How I love Jason Graae singing my songs!" 

RELATED EVENT

Perfect Hermany: The Songs of Jerry Herman

Cahn Auditorium, Evanston: Oct. 16, 7:00 PM

Well, that’s about to change.  And for any of you with an inclination toward crossword puzzles, word play, poetry, friendly competition, trafficking in valuable information, and/or chatting with your seatmates before the next CHF program begins, our first-ever Festival game—this year called “A Secret Poem”—is for you!

Game cards can be found on pp. 92-93 in your Festival program guide or here online. They will also be available at the ticket tables at all our Fall events.

Pages 92 and 93 of the CHF 2011 Program Guide 

“A Secret Poem” was developed in collaboration with Chicago-based game designer Erin Robinson from an original poem written expressly for this purpose by Festival poet Charles Bernstein.  Robinson created a grid that would fit in our program guide and provided the specs to Bernstein. (Limit the poem to 8-9 lines, only 9-12 words per line.) We were honored that Bernstein quickly embraced the idea of this game and within days sent us “This Poem is in Finish: toggle here for translation.” Now the ball was back in Erin’s court: she took the poem and fit it into her grid, deciding which words would be revealed and which would be held back, to be discovered through the course of the Festival. Then Eric Ruelle, our summer programming and production intern, and I created the clues.

There are five ways to uncover the missing words and “solve” the game:

First, SOME, but not all of the missing words, are printed on stickers that will be distributed at will call at select Festival events. Since there is a limited number of words on the stickers, there is a good chance you might find yourself with duplicates. This is where the sharing of information and chatting with your seatmate comes in. Trade stickers. Exchange answers. At some point we may run out of stickers. It is equally valid to write in a “sticker” answer as to have the bright-colored, shiny sticker affixed to your game card. “Cheating” is encouraged! Stickers will start circulating on the first day of the Festival, Sunday, October 16 in Evanston.

Also, crossword puzzle-like clues will be posted in three places: live, in pre-program slide shows; and online, on our Facebook page, and on our Twitter feed.

We know that not all of our audience participates in social media. If you are one of those people, your best bet for finding clues is in the slide shows (the more programs you see, the more clues you’re likely to encounter) and chatting up your digitally-inclined seatmates. We will start dropping clues in early October on Facebook and Twitter. Tell your friends. Remember, “cheating” is encouraged.

Finally, if you are really desperate and can’t find a clue you really need, email us at secretpoem@chfestival.org and we’ll try to help you out. But try to uncover the answers by talking to real humans first, before you resort to emailing us. (Think of this as being analogous to calling your sister-in-law for the answer to a clue in the Sunday Times crossword puzzle, rather than calling the 800 number.)

When you think you have decoded the puzzle, send it to secretpoem@chfestival.org. You can type the poem right into an email or send us a scan of your game card. There are no bonus points for finishing early, so hold onto your puzzle until you’re completely certain you have the answers or until you’ve used your game card as a ploy to introduce yourself to that handsome man you keep running into at CHF events.

You can start playing at any point during the Festival, but all completed poems must be submitted by 5 pm on Monday, Nov. 14, the day after the Festival ends. (Revision: Deadline for submission has been extended to 12 noon on Friday, Nov. 18.) We will pick random winners for an array of prizes we are still collecting. Prizes will include free tickets to our Spring 2012 Stages, Sights and Sounds Festival; free tickets to our year-round events; and a limited number of signed, letterpress copies of Bernstein’s poem.

I’ve had the great fun and privilege of helping develop “A Secret Poem.”  If you have any questions or suggestions in the next few weeks before we go live, feel free to contact me, juliam@chfestival.org. Have a ball!

RELATED EVENT

A Secret Poem

At all CHF venues and online: until 5:00 pm, Nov. 14

So where do we begin in the process? Our starting point is a desire to present as all-compassing a Festival as we can imagine. To that end, we extend the notion of Humanities beyond the narrow academic definition. Yes, we do present literary scholars, art historians, and other academics who seek to elucidate the history of culture. But we never leave it at that. We also feature practitioners of the various creative disciplines – writers, artists, dancers, particularly if their works resonate beyond their immediate field.

At the same time, we are conscious in our desire not to duplicate the fabulous work that is already being done by Chicago’s other cultural institutions. Particularly in the field of classical music, of course, we are blessed with some of the country’s foremost organizations. And there would be little point to add yet another straight-up performance to what is already a wonderfully full calendar.

So this is how we go about it: we ask ourselves what a classical music event might look like in a distinct humanities setting. What would make it unique?

Ars Antigua

There is not just one answer, of course. But our basic proposition is to find ways to imbue performance with some form of humanistic reflection. Let me give an example from last year’s Festival on The Body. There, we created a program that we called, somewhat sheepishly, A Camerata on the Body. A scholarly event staged in 18th-century style, it featured University of Chicago historian of science Robert Richards and Ars Antigua, the early music ensemble led by Jerry Fuller. Together, they conceived a program that revealed connections among three towering figures of that century’s turn: Goethe, Mozart, and Schubert. Combining brief lectures with musical selections (just as it was done during the high enlightenment), Richards and Ars Antigua were able to excavate these masters’ shared interests in concepts of the body and science.

Rachel Barton-Pine

We are pairing up with Ars Antigua again for this year’s Festival tech•knowledgē. This time around, Jerry Fuller’s band is backing Rachel Barton Pine, in a program we are calling "The Adventurous Violinist." And again, there will be something different about the event. Barton Pine is a celebrated violinist, of course. Much less known, though, is her strong interest in the history of her instrument. As it happens, Barton Pine not only collects ancient string instruments but has spent considerable time mastering them. One of those instruments is the viola d’amore, the “viola of love” – a 14-stringed hybrid of the violin and viola da gamba that set 17th-century hearts aflutter.

The viola d'amore

We can’t wait for Barton Pine to perform the viola d’amore on the CHF stage. The music, a romp through the instrument’s repertoire which includes works by Telemann and Vivaldi, promises to be spectacular. But I’m just as excited about Barton Pine’s comments on the viola d’amore, both in terms of its technological particulars and its relation to subsequent string instruments. Those comments will make up a significant portion of the event, giving it the very flavor we look for when programming classical music at the CHF. I can’t wait!

RELATED EVENT

The Adventurous Violist: Rachel Barton Pine and Ars Antigua

Francis W. Parker School - Diane and David B Heller Auditorium: Nov. 12, 8:00 PM

Growing up in Vienna, classical music was always in my life. It was on the radio and television as well as at school, where I had music instruction from grade one (all of us could choose between lessons in piano or violin – free of charge). Most importantly, though, I had my grandparents, who had fled Vienna for London in 1938, but returned in 1946, mainly because they missed Austrian culture, which is to say classical music.

Grosser Sall at the Musikverein

Every year, they went to the Salzburg Festival and they were big supporters of the Vienna Philharmonic, frequently accompanying them on tour. And once in a while, they brought me along, either to a concert in the Musikverein or a performance at the Staatsoper (two of my strongest memories from those days in the early ‘80s: shaking hands with Leonard Bernstein and seeing Edita Gruberova and José Carreras in La Traviata.)

Gruberova and Carreras in La Traviata

I loved it! From the pomp and circumstance to the incredible music! But once in a while, there was a damper on it all – all of a sudden, there might be some tension, rustling in the audience, or applause that would go from frenetic to merely polite. Even an occasional boo was possible. It typically occurred in the middle of a concert, and as my grandfather explained it happened whenever there was “difficult” music on the program. I’m not sure I readily heard the difference. But to the audience, it was clear.

Viktor Bunzl with Matti (ca. 1974)

As I understand now, Vienna was hardly a hotbed of the avant-garde in those days. Darmstadt, it decidedly was not. Instead, it still wallowed in the Vienna School, the first that is, of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. My grandparents were themselves socialized into that aesthetic. They considered Brahms to be highly progressive, Mahler difficult, and Schoenberg and Berg more or less intolerable.

And yet, I remember my grandfather always clapping with particular enthusiasm after one of the “difficult” pieces. Typically, he would say that he didn’t understand it,  but it was interesting and he was glad that he heard it.

Especially in hindsight, his attitude strikes me as pretty remarkable. True, his own tastes might have been conventional, but he saw the value, even the necessity, in challenging traditions. And even though he, himself, might not like the innovations, he was there to support them.

I, myself, have a less gallant approach. I actually like “difficult” music – not always and every piece – but I think of it as a thrill to hear sonic formations that have never, or only rarely, been heard before.

Katinka Kleijn in Oil-Free Blush

And I am thrilled that, at the CHF, we have been able to champion contemporary music. Among recent events, this centrally includes last year’s world premiere of Oil-Free Blush, a remarkable piece for solo cello, co-commissioned by the CHF and the CSO’s Katinka Kleijn. The work, inspired by last year’s Festival on The Body, addressed the carcinogenic properties of makeup in a suite of movements composed by Marcos Balter, Megan Beugger, Phyllis Chen, Pablo Chin, Nomi Epstein, Sebastian Huydts, and Du Yun. (To watch the performance, which also included a Q&A with WFMT’s Andrew Patner, click here.)

Anna Clyne

We are continuing our engagement with contemporary music in this year’s Festival on tech•knowledgē. This time around, we are teaming up with the CSO to present a performance and conversation with Anna Clyne, one of the orchestra’s two composers-in-residence. Under the title “Composing Music in the Digital Age,” Clyne will reflect on her use of technology in the creation of her acoustic and electro-acoustic music (which has earned the admiration of such diverse artists and writers as Björk, Alex Ross, and Esa-Pekka Salonen). In particular, Clyne will discuss her seminal composition Choke, a piece for baritone saxophone and tape she developed with saxophonist Argeo Ascani. The two will perform the work, recall its creation, and reflect on the opportunities and challenges presented by the latest technologies.

Argeo Anscani

I know that there will be plenty of new music aficionados in the audience when Clyne and Ascani present their work, just as there were last year for Kleijn’s remarkable performance. What I truly hope, though, is that there will also be some folks like my grandfather, who may not necessarily like the music they will hear but believe in its importance – the importance to continued creation, not in spite of all the great music we already have, but because of it.

RELATED EVENT

Composing Music in the Digital Age

Chicago Cultural Center - Claudia Cassidy Theater: Nov. 12, 3:00 PM

Katie Salen is a game designer, executive director of the Institute of Play and recently appointed professor in the College of Computing and Digital Media at DePaul University. Several years ago, while teaching at Parsons The New School for Design, Salen and her collaborators began more closely observing how kids learned and played videogames. Kids spent hours unpacking the rules and learning the idiosyncrasies of each gaming environment; they developed creative “work-arounds” when they discovered better ways of playing or advancing in a particular game; they shared their knowledge with each other; and, perhaps most basically and most importantly, they went back again and again and again in order to master the game. What would it be like, they wondered, if kids gobbled up school like they gobbled up these games? What would school be like if—instead of demonizing the very activities that got kids concentrating, thinking critically, and collaborating—educators embraced gaming as an innovative platform for education?  And they weren’t just thinking about video games, but games in general. What is it about games that hook kids, be it Monopoly or Skip-Bo or chess? After years of research and experimentation to harness the best games have to offer and rethink education in the process, Salen helped open Quest to Learn, a public middle school in New York City, in 2009 . Now, this new model of education is going national and the first stop is Chicago, where ChicagoQuest opened to sixth and seventh graders last week.

My son is one of those 6th graders. As the mother of a kid who is smart and curious and imaginative and has never even remotely liked school, much less felt engaged by it, I can say that ChicagoQuest and the methodology that Salen developed at Quest to Learn is, as the Quest team likes to say, a revolutionary movement in education.

It’s been difficult describing to friends and family what the Quest model would “look” like in a school setting. And it’s been difficult to know how to answer well-meaning questions of concern, like this one from my father: “I read recently that 40% of today’s high school students don’t know which century the Civil War occurred in. Please tell me that at this new school he’ll learn when the Civil War took place.” Friends and the parents of my son’s friends were curious. But quite often, the moment I mentioned that game designers were among the developers of the model for the school, the parent I was talking to would get distracted, trying very hard not to roll their eyes or to mask their concern for my sanity. I found that it was never a good thing to start a conversation by trying to convince someone that the kids weren’t going to be playing video games all day.

After week 1, I can say that my son did not for one moment have a videogame controller in his hand at school. He spent much of the week working in small groups; the uniformly enthusiastic team of teachers worked closely with the kids to develop the foundation for collaboration and cross-functional teamwork that are among the core values of the school. Interdisciplinary classes that integrate math and language, math and science, English and social studies (ah, an integrated humanities class!), and basic design and critical thinking are the building blocks of the curriculum.

I recently read a New York Times op-ed piece on Cathy Davidson, another digital learning expert that CHF is pleased to be presenting this fall. Davidson asserts that 65% of the jobs that will be available to our kids 20 years from now have not even been invented yet. Schools like ChicagoQuest are taking the realities of 21st century educational theory, globalism, and the economy and revolutionizing how kids are learning. I know I’ll be in the audience on Saturday, Nov. 12 to hear Katie Salen discuss the origins, successes, and aspirations of the Quest schools. Whether you are parent or not, if you are someone interested in how education must adapt and innovate for our wired world, I encourage you to be there, too.

RELATED EVENT

Quest to Learn

Harold Washington Library: Nov. 12, 12:30 - 1:30 PM

Fred Astaire with George and Ira Gershwin

THE GERSHWINS
Gershwin’s 1937 entry into the Oscars was "They Can't Take That Away From Me," which was sung by Fred Astaire to Ginger Rogers in Shall We Dance. The nomination was a posthumous one, as the 38-year old Gershwin died of a brain tumor in July of 1937, after the film’s release the previous May.

This classic lost to "Sweet Leilani," sung by Bing Crosby in Waikiki Wedding. 

WHAT were they thinking?

Ira Gerswhin was later nominated for "Long Ago And Far Away" and "The Man That Got Away." Alas, neither were Oscar picks. Something about the use of the word “Away” in the title, perhaps?

Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields

COLE PORTER and JEROME KERN
In 1936, Porter’s "I've Got You Under My Skin" lost to a song that has since likewise become a classic, The Way You Look Tonight, with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Dorothy Fields. Fields was the first woman to win a Best Original Song Oscar. She would remain the only one until 1968, when Marilyn Bergman (with husband Alan) won for The Windmills of Your Mind (music by Michel Legrand).

Kern bested Porter again in 1941 when The Last Time I Saw Paris won over Porter’s "Since I Kissed My Baby Goodbye" (a song I must confess I don’t remember from the Fred Astaire-Rita Hayworth movie musical, You'll Never Get Rich).  

Hammerstein wrote the lyric to "The Last Time I Saw Paris" in 1940. Paris was then occupied by the Nazis and nostalgia for the City of Lights was rife. Kern wrote the music, the only time he followed a lyric to the song sheet. The hit song was later used in Lady Be Good and was declared the 1941 Best Original Song. The good folks at the library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences confirmed for me that up to 1941, songs that were used in a motion picture “for the first time” were eligible. Beginning in 1942, the rules were changed to restrict nominations to songs that were “written for” the motion picture.

The battle of the destined-to-be-classics continued in 1943 when "You’ll Never Know" (music and lyrics by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon) was the winner over Porter’s "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To." In 1956, Porter lost his last chance to win an Oscar when his True Love lost to "Whatever Will Be, Will Be/Qué Será, Será" (music and lyrics by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans). By the way, Doris Day didn’t like Qué Será, Será when she first heard the song that would be such a big hit for her. It would be the only Oscar-worthy song associated with a Hitchcock film, in this case, The Man Who Knew Too Much.  

Rodgers & Hammerstein

RODGERS & HAMMERSTEIN
What about Rodgers & Hammerstein, you ask?

Oscar Hammerstein was nominated 5 times and won twice, for the aforementioned Paris and once with Richard Rodgers for State Fair’s "It Might as Well Be Spring" in 1945. This was Rodgers’ single opportunity to nab an Oscar with Hammerstein, since State Fair was the only musical the celebrated duo wrote especially for the screen. All their stage musicals, from Oklahoma! to Flower Drum Song, were made into movies with no additional songs added to their scores. With The Sound of Music, Rodgers wrote music and lyrics for a couple of new songs that the Academy chose to overlook.

Cole Porter

INCIDENTALLY…
…Cole Porter was born in tiny Peru, Indiana. A school mate and neighbor, Emil Schram, was my partner’s grandfather. Emil later went on to become the head of the New York Stock Exchange and visited the Porters at their place at the Waldorf-Astoria (I frantically counted the degrees of separation the first time I heard tales about Cole: four). Cole Porter and his wife are buried in Peru, not on their Eastern estate as falsely depicted in that film of many falsehoods about the life of Cole Porter, De-Lovely.    

But I digress.

RELATED EVENT

A Night at the Oscars: The William and Greta Wiley Flory Concert

Francis W. Parker School - Diane and David B Heller Auditorium: Nov. 7, 6:00 PM

Ten years ago when I was in the midst of my graduate studies in English at Harvard, reading four-inch-thick Victorian novels and taking my oral exams with professors whose names appear on the spine of the Norton Anthology of English Literature you couldn’t have convinced me that one day I’d be sharing the stage with my favorite MCs. My fate was Tolstoy, not Tupac; Dorothy West, not Kanye West.

But there I was late last year at the historic Lincoln Theatre in Washington, D.C. in front of a thousand fans, celebrating the publication of The Anthology of Rap—a kind of new school Norton with my own name on the spine. Walking onto the stage, I basked in the ovation. Never mind that the cheers were meant for the men flanking me, the old school legend Kurtis Blow and the new school rapper and actor Common. As James Brown once said, it was Star Time. For me, it was Almost Famous.

In the months that followed, I had the privilege of working with Common on another project, his memoir, published this fall and entitled One Day It’ll All Make Sense. After hours of conversations in LA and Chicago, in the car and at the recording studio, at restaurants and even at the grocery store, Common and I went about telling his life story on the page. For me the book also marked the fusion of two worlds—literature and hip hop.

Living on the edge of hip hop celebrity, however, can make for an uneasy—if invigorating—relationship with a tenured professorship. Last fall and into the spring, as Common and I were working on the book, I was also teaching a full schedule of courses at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Try grading a freshman essay at two in the morning in the back of a black Escalade with Biggie bumping from the speakers. Trust me, it can be done.

Here was my weekly schedule: teach Thursday afternoon, catch a late flight from Denver to wherever on Thursday night, hang with Common until Monday night, catch a flight back at the crack of dawn on Tuesday morning and arrive on campus just in time to teach my midday class. On top of that, my wife was pregnant with our first child, so we were going to birthing classes, decorating the baby’s room, and scouting out the shortest route between our house and the hospital.

Somehow it all worked out just fine. My wife and I welcomed our daughter into the world one afternoon this January. My classes got taught; my grades went in on time. And Common and I produced a book that we’re happy to present now to you.

Thanks to the Chicago Humanities Festival, Common and I will be sharing the stage again this fall. We’ll be talking about music, but we’ll also be talking about books—his memoir and The Anthology of Rap. For me, it will mark the celebration of an unlikely career as a hip hop academic. And even though I know you’ll be cheering for Common, save a couple claps for me!

RELATED EVENT

Common: History of Hip Hop

UIC Forum - Main Hall AB: Nov. 5, 6:00 PM

James Gee

Gee, who recently spoke at YouMedia as part of the CHF Summer Institute for Teachers, has studied how players’ interactions with video games can help explain the process of learning, a topic he explores in detail in his seminal 2003 book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.

Exceprt from Super Mario Bros. Manual

In his book, Gee explains the reason why so many players begin playing without bothering with the instruction manual. “When I give talks on video games to teachers,” he writes, “I often show them a manual or strategy guide and ask them how much they understand.  Very often they are frustrated.”  The problem, Gee argues, is that individuals who have no experience with video games have no context in which to situate the information presented in the manual.  All of the information contained in the instruction manual relates directly to objects and actions that exist in the world of the video game, and without some knowledge or experience of that game world they lack what Gee calls “situated meaning”.  They may understand the individual words on the page, but without the experience to contextualize the words within the larger structure of the game world, the information presented in the instruction manual is “just words”.  Experienced video game players understand that it is better to dive into a new game head first, begin exploring the game world, and then return to the instruction manual as a reference as needed.

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy

What does all this mean for education?  Well, Gee suggests that when we hand students textbooks on science, math, or history and ask them to read and memorize information without allowing them to develop experience in the field, we are, in effect, giving students the instruction manual without ever letting them play the game.  While the “good” students will be able to regurgitate the information and pass the test, the information will really be “just words”.  If teachers and parents want students to learn subjects in a deep and meaningful way, they need to be able to relate the information back to the “game worlds” of scientists, mathematicians and historians.  We must give students more than what the texts alone can provide; we must give them opportunities for the development of situated meaning. 

Put simply, video games encourage players to learn by doing, through exploration and discovery; school should do the same for students.

RELATED EVENT

The Next Level—Gaming, Testing, and Education’s Future The Spencer Foundation Lecture on Education and Learning

Francis W. Parker School - Diane and David B Heller Auditorium: Nov. 5, 10:00 AM

As a teenager, I harbored unremarkable ambitions. Like you, probably, I thought of writing fiction, until a year—just a year!—of writer's block ended any hope I might have had that I could ever make a living stringing words together. But it never stopped me from reading. Surrounded as I was by books, I had a growing sense that the world obviously must have a place for someone of my uninspiration and limited abilities, a place for people who loved and understood books, but didn't or couldn't write them. A critic? A scholar? No, they write too much, and far too often alone.

Umberto Eco

But it was the critic and scholar Umberto Eco and his 1989 novel Foucault's Pendulum that changed everything for me. Writing had seemed to be a solitary thing, but people like Belbo, Casubon, and Diotallevi, Eco's alternately snide and earnest heroes, didn't work in a vacuum. Suddenly they meant a lot to me. They suggested by their mere fictive presence, just when I was ready to hear it, that there was a whole industry that would not only embrace people like me, but was composed of people like me.

Foucault's Pendulum

And even if Eco wasn't entirely in earnest, even if he was jousting at some of the worst kind of bookmaking, he had turned me on to the secret of academic and small press publishing: there are hidden, out-of-the-way places in this industry where the out-of-sync congregate to cast a curious and diabolical eye on the rest of the culture. On the rest of every culture. That that curiosity can support an interesting and not-entirely-derivative culture of its own is truly a wonderful and mysterious thing. And if these same characters and their too-smart games with words and meaning and with cause and effect turn readers off from time to time, there's always another book, even another book of Eco's, to get lost in.

The Prague Cemetery

Umberto Eco is the author of novels we know to be full-to-the-brim with truths bordering on lies. The author's gift for words is prodigious, but secondary—even in his fiction—to his stunning facility with ideas, his ability to synthesize and remix history, myth, and aimless supposition. The effect of any of his writing, or all of it, is the establishment of a deep, winking sympathy for every lucky reader who believes a word of it. I'm happy and proud to have been one of them.

RELATED EVENT

Umberto Eco on The Prague Cemetery

Northwestern University School of Law, Thorne Auditorium: Nov. 13, 3:00 PM

At some time, in some place, I read an interview with William Gibson in which he said that he stopped writing about human alienation in a dystopian future when the world around him caught up to his visions.

William Gibson

It's basically true: his books since Neuromancer have become less about the future and more reflective of the present. His writing is notable now less for the forward thinking fever dream of the Sprawl, and more genuinely interesting because of what he tells us about the world we're living in and about the people who live on the fringe. What's most interesting about the evolution of his work, though, is that his books created massive communities of the disenfranchised. They lent identity to sprawling virtual populations that are joined together by their affinities and by a depth of feeling for literature about loners in league against the establishment.

 
Neuromancer

Will Gibson be remembered as the man who coined the word “cyberspace?” Maybe only by the people who know that Orwell invented the term “Cold War” or that Mark Twain is responsible for the phrase "Gilded Age” or that Henry Fairlie was the man who finally called “The Establishment” what it is.  But we don't continue to read him merely because of the way he shaped tech culture. We still read Gibson with enthusiasm not just because of what he's written, but because there are few people who can write the way he does, few people who can write with a polished appeal to the intellectual and still unabashedly entertain the fans of genre writing.

Zero History

Gibson's books are thriller and sometimes mystery, they're social and creative. And his blend of technology and literature, of age-old story arc and archetypal characters within the dramatically different, wired world we live in makes him one of the most necessary recorders of the moment, one of those crucial writers who will help us to bridge the gap between fiction as we've known it and life as we live it.

RELATED EVENT

Technology’s Tomorrow: Sci-Fi with William Gibson

Ethel M Barber Theater: Oct. 16, 12:00 PM

Tom Sachs

Born in 1966 and raised in Westport, Connecticut, he must have been one of those kids completely entrameled in the world of model kits, remote-controlled racers, and out-back garage workshops: he still is.  After a stint at Bennington College, architectural studies in London, and then a couple years out west in Frank Gehry’s furniture shop, in 1990 he transplanted himself into the very heart of the fast disappearing machinery district of downtown Manhattan, where he launched into his career as a self-styled “bricoleur,” which is to say one who, in his own words,

hobbles together functional contraptions out of already given or collected materials which he retools and resignifies into new objects with novel uses, but more importantly, which he regenerates into a new oscillating syntax: one of loss, gain, and more than anything, play.

Oh dear: we will have to forgive Mr Sachs the French-flecked academic jargon, an occupational hazard which appears to have blighted his entire generation of artists and critics—though this should be relatively easy to do in Sachs’s case since, apart from anything else, his work is so damn fun to engage (albeit not entirely without the occasional whiff of menace).

Chanel Guillotine

Early on he conflated the worlds of fashion and violence with such inspired confections as the HG (Hermes Hand Grenade), a Tiffany Glock, and the Chanel Guillotine.  From there he went on to commemorate a whole other slew of modernist icons—rendering scale models of Mies van Der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion out of foamcore and plywood; Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation out of cardboard and thermal adhesive; and perhaps most inspired of all, a complete functioning McDonald’s mobile cart (fashioned out of standard hardware store paraphernalia) capable of exuding a first-rate order of fries.

Nutsy's McDonald's

With the passing years, his New York City studio, off Centre Street, has become ever more semi-mock fanatically regimented, a process documented across a series of antic short films generated by his celebrated protégés (and onetime employees) the Neitstadt Brothers, most notably in the “Ten Bullets” (as in bullet points) training film, compulsory viewing for any would-be assistants (“The studio is a complex and enigmatic working environment full of precise rules and principles; we call these rules and principles The Code: as an employee you must familiarize yourself with these rules and principles in order to advance within the studio hierarchy”), and available to the rest of us by way of the Sachs website.

From out of this roiling hive of activity have emerged such other urgently necessary inventions as the Incinilot (a toilet that—well, you get the idea) and the Wafflebike (“a fully weaponized mobile waffle-making machine complete with a call-to-prayer public address system and two live caged hens laying eggs.”)  Along with all sorts of other cool stuff.

Nothing as cool, to my mind, however, as Sachs’s Space Program, a 1:1 scale model recreation (meticulously fashioned out of his standard hardware store lexicon) of NASA’s Apollo lunar landing module, guided by a mission control station with 29 closed circuit video monitors and manned by two female astronauts outfitted in handmade Tyvek space suits, which alighted in October 2007 at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills.  Following the landing, the astronauts presently opened their capsule’s portholes, gingerly emerged and carefully made their way down ladders to the surface of Richard Meier’s hyperelegantly designed high-gloss gallery cement floor, which they then proceeded to bore into with high power pneumatic drills, returning at length back up the ladders into the capsule, bearing a trove of recovered “moonrocks.”  (You can see a video documenting the whole momentous achievement on the Sachs website.)  Back on earth (or rather at the Center Street studio), Sachs’s team meticulously documented each cement shard, dubbing each with its own distinctive name- “Flagstaff,” “Oscar,” “Florida,” “Gibraltar,” “Turtle,” “Bruno,” and the like and characterizing it as exactingly as possible (“Sample includes bottom slab and small portion of top slab; top slab area bears close resemblance to the state of Florida.  This powerful rock is ovoid in elevation and has a wedge shape from above”).  Click for the full, detailed, 105-page report.

1:1 Apollo Lunar Landing Module

Whereupon the entire set was sent over to Brooklyn College for further advanced petrographic analysis, after which the trove was disbanded, entering “a variety of distribution channels,” as Sachs parses matters delicately, not excluding “the commercial.”  One private collector, for example, owns a specially mounted set entitled The Twelve, currently valued at $250,000.  (Admittedly less expensive than a similar number of moon rocks from the actual Apollo program which, according to Wikipedia, “are currently considered priceless” and at any rate have never been put up for sale.)

Sachs’s team retained a clatch of their own moonrocks for further study as part of their latest endeavor—their most ambitious yet.  Next year, in collaboration with scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Sachs team will pivot from commemoration of past icons to anticipation of future ones, staging a full scale Mars landing in the bowels of New York City’s capacious Park Avenue Armory.  Which is what Tom and I will be talking about at this year’s Festival, flanked by two of his JPL collaborators.  It should be a hoot, though, as with most of Sachs’s work, considerably more than that as well.

RELATED EVENT

Art on Mars - Richard Gray Visual Art Series

Francis W. Parker School - Diane and David B Heller Auditorium: Nov. 6, 4:00 PM

“Walter Murch is the smartest person in America,” I’m likely summarily to declare, “and that will be on the test.  The question will be, ‘Who is the smartest person in America?’ and the expected answer is ‘Walter Murch.’  Ten points.”

Walter Murch 

And every few months in the interim there comes another email or blog post or letter or translation or film release to confirm me in my conviction.  Film release: because that’s how most people know about Walter Murch, as arguably the greatest living film (and especially sound) editor working in cinema today, a veritable god among his colleagues—editor or sound designer, among others, of THX-1138 and The Conversation (both of which he co-wrote), American Graffiti, Apocalypse Now, large swaths of the Godfather movies, Julia, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The English Patient, Jarhead, and the forthcoming Philip Kaufman HBO feature, Hemingway and Gellhorn.  (His collaboration with Michael Ondaatje on The English Patient led to their booklength collaboration on The Conversations.)  Translation: for years now, in his spare time, he has been embarked on a magesterial project channeling previously unavailable reportage by the mad mythic fascist/communist World War II era Curzio Malaparte from Italian prose into exquisitely moving English poetry (for an example of which, see his latest such effort in the London Review of Books).

Apocalypse Now

And beyond that, just all those everyday revelations.  His contributions, for example, to my ongoing Convergence Contest on the McSweeneys website, including a marvelous riff on Maxim Gorky’s uncannily prescient immediate response (in 1896!) at witnessing an early Lumiere Brothers version of the coming medium of cinema and a one-shot leap-frog over the contest’s usual requirement that entries contrast at least two improbably matched images.

Smartest?  Well, okay, maybe not the smartest (I suppose there must be some Nobel Prize winning biophysicist/concert pianist somewhere with an equally plausible claim to that title.)  But surely among the most various and polymath and confoundingly protean.  One recent afternoon, for example, he sat down to puzzle out the answer to a question he’d posed himself: on a per-watt basis, which emits the most energy for its size, the sun or a brain?  (His answer: on a per-cubic centimeter basis, the brain emits 56,000 times more energy than the sun.)  The point being, who else but him would have even thought to ask the question?

The English Patient

Veterans of the Festival, meanwhile, may recall his star turn a few seasons back when he fearlessly ventured into the field of gravitational astro-acoustics with his resurrection of the previously (though, to hear him tell it, prematurely and unfairly) repudiated Bodes Law about the sequential placement of the orbits of planets and moons and electrons relative to their various gravitational centers:  indeed, once Bode’s formula had been properly recalibrated, as he demonstrated across one of the most elegant powerpoint presentations ever, the orbits of a good 75% of such bodies in the actual universe turned out to jibe with Bode’s formula, which itself turned out to rhyme precisely with the Pythagorean octave.  Music of the Spheres, indeed.

Speaking of which, the other day, typically, Murch was regaling me by phone  from his home in Bolinas, north of San Francisco, with one of his latest discoveries, the fact that for a few days in June of 1600, two 28-year-olds (born within a few months of each other) found themselves jostling along together, sharing a coach on the post road between Prague and Vienna: Johannes Kepler, soon to achieve fame as the greatest astronomer of his time, and Frederik Rosenkranz, a ne’er-do-well cypher who would even sooner achieve fame, of a sort, as the basis for one half of that pair of bit players in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (the pair reprised, yes, a few centuries later as the central protagonists in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencranz & Guildenstern are Dead).

The Talented Mr. Ripley

In keeping with the theme of this year’s festival, I expect my conversation with Walter Murch this time out will hew somewhat more closely to themes principally technological. The sorts of things he addressed in his seminal In the Blink of an Eye, the bible for generations of editing students (and especially that slim volume’s afterword, on the differences between analog and digital editing, which turn out to ramify in all sorts of directions, in fact just about everywhere). We’ll likely dip into his hugely influential theory of two-and-a-half (how in any given scene, the audience can keep track of two and a half conversations or plot developments or sonic interruptions at a time, anything more invariably leading to the experience of perceptual chaos—and the possible neurological explanations for same); his recent polemics on why 3-D filmmaking can never truly satisfy; and then maybe, for a truly satisfying conclusion, his account of what it’s been like for this world class film editor to have spent a good part of the last year directing an episode of the cult-hit Saturday morning TV cartoon series, The Clone Wars (we might even get a sneak peek at the episode in question!).

RELATED EVENT

Behind the Scenes: Hollywood Sound Design with Walter Murch

Northwestern University School of Law, Thorne Auditorium: Nov. 13, 12:30 PM

Really.  And I am.

My academic specialties are U.S. History and Public Policy, but, over the last several years, I've taken to studying the social and psychological aspects of video game play.  When I first took an academic interest in video games a few years ago, there wasn't too much information out there; only a handful of academics, like Professor James Gee, were taking a serious look at the medium. Today, there is a substantial and expanding body of literature on the subject covering everything from the history of video games to the promise that the medium might hold for the future. Researchers are looking at the potential impact of games on our health and on our happiness and asking big questions about the medium.  Do violent games impact players' perception of violence?  Can fitness games really improve fitness?  Are online video games bringing us together or isolating us further?  It's a broad field that keeps getting broader.

Nintendo Entertainment System

So how did I end up studying video games and public policy?  Well, part of this expanding body of literature is focused on the ways that new media, including video games and the Internet, are changing the way we understand learning and literacy. While studying U.S. education policy and school reform movements, I started to run across some of the literature on New Literacy Studies and digital learning. My interest was piqued. Could video games actually offer us new ways of understanding learning? Could all the time kids spend playing video games actually have a positive effect? Could video games and other new media be powerful new educational tools if used correctly? 

Nintendo's "Super Mario Bros."

Now, I'll be the first to admit that I may be biased. I've been playing and enjoying video games for a long time, and some of my earliest (and happiest) memories involve playing Super Mario Bros. and Tetris on my family's Nintendo Entertainment System.  Video games have always been a big part of my life, and I was immediately drawn to the idea that video games could actually be making us smarter.  Fortunately, there's a good deal of solid research backing up these claims. 

"Tetris" NES Cartridge

Researchers like James Gee (What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy) and David Williamson Shaffer (How Computer Games Help Children Learn) have written about how video games may revolutionize the way we approach education, and they have done so in a way that is both convincing and thoughtful.  By understanding video games as complex systems that people (including children) learn voluntarily, these scholars, and many more like them, have suggested that good video games are built around good principles of learning.  Good games encourage players to be open to new experiences, leading them to wonder what's around the next corner.  Good games supply necessary information just in time, so that players have what they need, when they need it.  Good games make learning exciting by encouraging discovery and exploration; so should school.

Do video games alone hold the key to reforming education?  No.  But it's a start.

For more information about the potential lessons video games hold for education, see:

Gee, J. P. (2007). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy: Revised and updated edition. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gee, J. P. (2007) Good video games + good learning: Collected essays on video games, learning and literacy. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.

Gee, J. P., and Hayes, E. R. (2010). Women and gaming: The Sims and 21^st century learning. New York, NY: Palgrame Macmillan.

Shaffer, W. D. (2006). How computer games help children learn. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

RELATED EVENTS

The Next Level: Gaming, Testing, and Education’s Future - The Spencer Foundation Lecture on Education and Learning

Francis W. Parker School - Diane and David B Heller Auditorium: Nov. 5, 10:00 AM

 

 

 

 

Quest to Learn

Harold Washington Library Center - Cindy Pritzker Auditorium: Nov. 12, 1:30 PM

Broadcast networks, most notably Al Jazeera, picked up impromptu feeds that flowed from the Arab streets and helped spread them to nearby neighborhoods and far countries, cementing the role of social media as a force in news reporting and civic engagement alike. Months later, with the region’s course still unclear, an ever-shifting community of bloggers, tweeters and masters of new media is trying to find its place.

Three specialists will bring their stories and their perspective to the festival on Saturday Nov. 5.

Abderrahim Foukara (right)

Abderrahim Foukara, the Washington bureau chief of Al Jazeera, contributed significantly to the network’s groundbreaking coverage during the Arab Spring and serves as an important interpreter of events in the Middle East and a valued voice in the United States for the work of the five-year-old Al Jazeera English network.

Rania Al Malky

Rania Al Malky, editor of Daily News Egypt, an English-language news operation, is flying in from Cairo where she witnessed the Tahrir Square drama and the work of a new generation of tech-savvy bloggers. Not only was she on the scene, she was prescient, writing a research paper in London in 2007 that asked whether citizen journalists and their blogs could challenge the repressive narratives of state-run media and become important players in an Arab reform movement.

Ahmed Al Omran

Ahmed Al Omran is a young Saudi blogger currently working in Washington as an intern for NPR. Indeed, he was barely 20 when he started the English blog that is now www.saudijeans.org,  quickly focusing on human rights, freedom of expression and women’s rights. “I want to be a part of the change that is going on in Saudi Arabia,” he writes. “I want to participate in the effort to push for more reforms, and I want to see this country become a better place.” Ahmed also writes an Arabic blog.

Learn More:

Ahmed Al Omran on Social media and Saudi Arabia for NPR

Abderrahim Foukara on The Daily Show

PBS News Hour on Social Media and Al Jazeera featuring Abderrahim Foukara

"Revolution Not Chaos" by Rania Al Malky, Jan. 30, 2011

RELATED EVENT

Ourselves as Others See Us: Social Media and the Middle East - Bill and Penny Obenshain Global Affairs Program

UIC Forum - Main Hall AB: Nov. 5, 3:00 PM

It was not until the late 19^th century that the study of Africa started to be undertaken with anything approximating scholarly rigor. And even then, the first anthropologists turning their attention to the continent relied on highly questionable “data,” culled from travel accounts and missionary sources. That’s right. This first generation of scholars, folks like Edward Burnett Tylor and James Frazer, wrote about Africa without ever setting foot there. They were “armchair anthropologists,” contemplating the place of the continent’s peoples in a putative chain of evolutionary development – from “savage” and “primitive” to “civilized” – in their distant studies at Oxford and Cambridge.

E.E. Evans-Pritchard with Zande Boys in Southern Sudan

It took until the early 20^th century for anthropologists to actually study Africans “in the field.” The pioneers were A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and E.E. Evans-Pritchard, who made a crucial break with the evolutionary tradition that came before them. Rather than seeing Africa as a kind of stepping stone toward European rationality, they stressed the intellectual and social coherence of the tribes they visited. Their paradigm was called structural functionalism, emphasizing the systematicity of native social organization and the fact that each component (the political system, religion, etc.) fulfilled its part in sustaining the collective organism’s existence. It was a radical move that questioned ethnocentric ideas about such things as “African witchcraft,” suggesting that it was not evidence of lesser intelligence, but a perfectly adequate explanation given the empirical facts at hand. But it did have a major flaw. The structural functionalists represented African societies as existing out of time, as if the integration of their social systems held them in perpetual and unchanging balance. Scholars like Evans-Pritchard knew that that wasn’t the case. After all, they undertook their research in the middle of what was an ongoing colonial onslaught. And yet, their depictions and theories of African life betrayed none of the cataclysmic shifts underway in the early 20^th century.

The reaction to this ahistoricity came in the 1960s and was centrally inspired by the revival of Marxist theories. It was scholars like Eric Wolf and Sidney Mintz who were at the forefront of the new approach to Africa. To them, it was a crucial node in a global capitalist order that had been developing ever since the age of explorations. Wolf titled his magnum opus Europe and the People Without History to suggest that the very opposite was true. Rather than peoples living out of time, Sub-Saharan Africans were part of the emerging world system. Mintz made an analogous point in his masterful book Sweetness and Power, which investigated transnational capitalism by focusing on a single commodity: sugar – a staple whose cultivation in the Caribbean had catastrophic consequences for the hundreds of thousands of Africans who were abducted and forced to labor on the New World’s plantations.

            This so-called world systems paradigm continues to produce important research. But starting in the 1980s, it came under attack for its inability to take account of the agency of the native populations whose colonial histories it charted. True, Wolf and Mintz had returned sub-Saharan Africans to history; but they only appeared as victims, the essentially passive objects of European aggression. What was missing, a number of scholars began to argue, was a real understanding of how Africans actually responded to and even resisted the European incursion. In the context of South America, a crucial comparative case, it was 2011 CHF star Michael Taussig who led the charge, famously feuding with Wolf and Mintz about the question of indigenous agency. In the African context, the most influential critics were the University of Chicago’s Jean and John Comaroff. In response to the world systems approach, they produced a remarkable two-volume study, Of Revelation and Revolution, that charted the complex dialectics set in motion by the attempt to “civilize” Africa. In their paradigm-setting account, the Tswana people of South Africa are active participants in a shared, albeit no less conflicted and brutal, history, thereby restoring to view not only their historicity, but their often subversive cultural creativity.

John and Jean Comaroff

As a graduate student, I was fortunate to study with this amazing power couple. And I saw first-hand how they were building what was quickly becoming a University of Chicago School of African Studies. In many ways, Emily Osborn is part of that School. Trained as a historian of Africa, she works in a Comaroffian tradition that seeks to understand the continent as shaped both by global forces (capitalism, neoliberalism, etc.) and local responses. In the case of her particular research, the focus is on the stuff of everyday life in West Africa, particularly Côte d'Ivoire, Gambia, Mali, Sénégal, and Sierra Leone. There, she hones in on a specific commodity within the global economy: aluminum. Tracing a widespread technique of aluminum casting that allows the continual repurposing of the metal, she reveals the West African engagement with the commodity (and the world system more generally) to be a highly creative process. Like Christianity in South Africa, aluminum in West Africa is not just dropped down from the sky. Instead, its introduction enmeshes it in complex local networks that at once appropriate and re-appropriate it, part of life’s ongoing struggles and an ever-present contest of meaning-making.

 
Emily Osborn

I am thrilled that Emily will share this cutting-edge research with our festival audience. In her work, we will be able to glimpse not just the long history of African scholarship, but its exciting future. With more and more native Africans joining the academy, moreover, new perspectives are already on the horizon. Stay tuned as we bring those to you over the next couple of years.

RELATED EVENT

Melting Pot: African Recycling

The Law School, Glen A. Lloyd Auditorium: Oct. 23, 12:30 PM

When I announced to an office colleague that "Over the Rainbow" would be the next song for the Academy Award-winning Best Song blog, she cheerfully replied, “Oh! You have to do "Over the Rainbow". You’re gay. You can do a whole lot of things with that.”

Well, let’s see.  

1.

In 1961, after a number of troubled years, Judy Garland played Carnegie Hall in a concert that would become legendary. Its album topped the Billboard chart for months, became the first to receive Grammy’s Album of the Year by a female artist, and is included in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry (as are "When You Wish Upon A Star" and "White Christmas"). The online reference to the album on the National Recording Registry describes the “moving performance” of "Over the Rainbow." Descriptions about the concert were hyperbolic.  Judy begged musician Mel Tormé not to follow through on his intention to see the concert more than once. He did though, swept away as he was by the electricity of his concert-going experience. Alas, he lost a bit of the concert’s magic when he realized that Judy, while singing "Over the Rainbow", began crying at the exact same point in the song as she had the night before. It was Mel Tormé who devised the "Get Happy/Happy Days Are Here Again" duet (both Arlen songs) for Judy and Barbra Streisand.   

2.

This song, like "Secret Love" and "Moon River", is most associated with the performer who first sang it on film. Like "Moon River", audiences almost didn’t get to hear it. MGM’s head honcho Louis B. Mayer (as in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) thought the song slowed down the film and had it deleted after a preview. It was restored before its general release thanks to the efforts of Arthur Freed and Roger Edens, both who would go on to helm the golden age of Hollywood musicals under what came to be called The Freed Unit at MGM. One could even say that the golden age began in 1939 with The Wizard of Oz (consider the films that followed: Meet Me In St. Louis, An American in Paris, Gigi, and Singin’ in the Rain). This was also the year that the following movie classics were nominated for Best Picture: Gone With the Wind, Stagecoach, Wuthering Heights, Dark Victory, Of Mice and Men, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Love Affair, Good-bye, Mr.Chips, and Ninotchka, in addition to Oz.    

3.

The song’s composer was Harold Arlen, who also gave us "Get Happy", "Stormy Weather", "That Old Black Magic", "One for My Baby", and "The Man That Got Away"; and whose songs were favorites in the early recording career of the aforementioned Streisand. Its equally famous lyricist, E.Y. “Yip” Harburg, was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, but was commemorated in 2005 by the U.S. Post Office with a stamp for his accomplishments (insert a sidebar discussion about irony and the effects of time here). With "The Man That Got Away", Arlen would provide Judy Garland with her other signature song, a song written for what would be her last major film musical, "A Star Is Born." Arlen and Harburg are vibrant testimony to the contributions made to American music by Jewish songwriters. 

4.

The American Film Institute listed "Over the Rainbow" as the top movie song of all time in its list of 100 Years...100 Songs. 

Note: others among its Top Ten category that also won Oscars for Best Song were "White Christmas", "The Way We Were", "When You Wish Upon A Star", and "Moon River."

The song includes an introductory verse not used in the film:

When all the world is a hopeless jumble
and the raindrops tumble all around,
Heaven opens a magic lane.
When all the clouds darken up the skyway,
there’s a rainbow highway to be found,
Leading from your window pane to a place behind the sun,
just a step beyond the rain.

5.

According to the National Geographic Society’s website, there are “three species of colorful North American birds called bluebirds. Eastern and western bluebirds have a reddish brown breast, which contrasts with their predominately blue plumage. Their relative, the (male) mountain bluebird is entirely blue. Eastern bluebirds are primarily found east of the Rockies, and range from Canada to Mexico and Honduras…The eastern bluebird is the state bird of both New York and Missouri…Bluebirds are considered fairly common, but their numbers have declined substantially during the last century. Populations have been given a boost by the birdhouse boxes that have become popular in many parks and backyards.”

6.

How to make your own lemon drops: Pour just enough freshly squeezed lemon juice into a mixing bowl to dissolve one cup of fine sugar. Mix until the sugar is dissolved in the juice.  Pour into a heavy saucepan and bring to a boil.  Boil until the mixture has the consistency of a thick syrup (drop a bit into a glass of cold water---it should be brittle).  Remove from heat and drop small dollops onto a non-stick cookie sheet.  Allow to harden.  

7.

Why is Dorothy’s song considered one of the gay community’s anthems? Consider the elements and surmise an answer. There’s the singer with the tortured heart who gave her all and was abused by the system. There are the lyrics about yearning to escape to a trouble-free, happy place where dreams come true. And then there’s the movie about a dreary sepia-toned life replaced by a fantastical one in super-charged color. An analysis of Oz could easily be the subject of a blog in and of itself. Recall Tony Kushner’s use of the movie’s ending in Angels in America: “I’ve had the most remarkable dream. And you were there, and you…And some of it was terrible, and some of it was wonderful, but all the same I kept saying I want to go home. And they sent me home.”

8.  

Legend and myth and rumor have it that Judy’s passing on June 22, 1969 attributed to the powder-keg mood that set off the pivotal Stonewall riots of June 28, 1969. While unsubstantiated, the legend/myth/rumor lives on. Similarly unsubstantiated is the belief that there is a connection between "Over the Rainbow" and the design of the Rainbow Flag.    

9.

In his book, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays & Lesbians in the U.S. Military, Randy Shilts wrote about “friends of Dorothy,” the code phrase used by gay men in closeted times to identify fellow gays. It seems that in the 1980s, the Navy investigated gays in Chicago. The Navy, ignorant of the long-term use of this phrase, suspected that it referred to a secret group of gay service members, and worked to break the code in order to expose them.

10.

An office colleague wondered aloud if Judy had been known for being a good actress. A movie critic once wrote that Judy Garland never once uttered an insincere line on film. In early 2000, I oversaw a workshop for playwrights I had created in Miami with Edward Albee as one of the visiting master playwrights. He spoke during the course of the weekend about attending a 1950 screening in New York City of Summer Stock, Judy’s last film for MGM. When Judy finished singing the melancholic "Friendly Star", the audience was so taken by the genuine feeling behind the performance that it burst into spontaneous applause, as if the singing had been live and not on celluloid.

There, Office Colleague.  How’s that?

RELATED EVENT

A Night at the Oscars: The William and Greta Wiley Flory Concert

Francis W. Parker School - Diane and David B Heller Auditorium: Nov. 7, 6:00 PM

With trance-inducing “ah-ah-ahs” and cushy layers of synth, Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” aurally transports its listener to a dreamy-digital state that might feel something like sleeping in a robotic womb. Turns out - this is a rather pleasant place to be. Upon its release in 1981, Laurie Anderson’s techno-filial anthem hit number two on British pop charts. Laurie Anderson was rocketed to international fame, where she has stayed ever since, constantly experimenting with our perceptions of society, technology, and art itself.

Anderson's radio play preceded my existence by almost a decade, so there was little chance that she would appear on my pop culture radar. I would’ve missed her completely if my roommate hadn’t said to me in passing: “Hey, I saw this performance artist from the ‘80s onstage last week. My mom used to be into her… Yeah, it was cool, my mom laughed when I told her I went.” I ambled curiously on over to Youtube, watched “O Superman,” and spent a good twenty minutes transfixed, hitting replay, replay.

The central image of “O Superman” is Anderson's suited arm, illuminated and enlarged as if by an overhead projector. The intended gender of this arm is unclear. Given the title of the song, the obvious assumption is that the arm belongs to Superman. After all, it is an arm with a clenched fist and curled bicep – the very symbols of masculine force and productivity (a nod to Rosy the Riveter, perhaps?). Yet, while the first lyric of “O Superman” is its namesake, the closing refrain is “So hold me, Mom, in your long arms.” Well... whose arm is it? Superman or Mom? Anderson keeps us guessing.

The '80s came and went, and while contemporaries David Bowie and Annie Lennox left behind the androgyny of the day, Laurie Anderson still actively engages it. Her use of a voice filter to lower her voice to a masculine register, previously dubbed “The Voice of Authority”, has recently evolved into an entire male alter-ego: Fenway Bergamot, historian. The name comes compliments of husband Lou Reed, but the personality is quintessential Laurie Anderson. And there are certainly perks to having an alter-ego. Anderson has mentioned that "any kind of stupid thing that I wouldn't do in front of people, I can have Fenway do."

Fenway Bergamot, featured on the cover of Anderson's latest album, Homeland

I’ll admit it: part of my fascination with Laurie Anderson is precisely this playful attitude toward gender. Yes, my intrinsic aversion to the mass consumption of female sexuality that influences, if not rules, the rise and fall of women celebrities certainly has some hand in all of this. Laurie Anderson breaks up this algorithm. I recently watched a performance by The Neo-Futurists (an experimental Chicago based Theater troupe) in which three actors held up Tina Fey’s Bossypants and repeatedly yelled “TINA FEY! A WOMAN! THE WOMAN’S WOMAN! TINA FEY!” The point was well taken: being a brilliant and successful woman that does not rely on the laurels of her sex still comes as a shock to our collective consciousness. Laurie Anderson is all of these things, so why aren't we running around yelling WOMAN at her?

Anderson's relationship with gender, like much of her work, is puzzling. In 1985, Laurie Anderson discussed her performative choices with Mother Jones Magazine (whose current Co-editor Clara Jeffrey will be discussing journalism at CHF's fall festival):

“I have always thought of myself as a narrator, first of all. I wear audio masks in my work – meaning, electronically, I can be this shoe salesman, or this demented cop, or some other character. And I do that to avoid the expectations of what it means to be a woman on a stage.”

But gender considerations are not at the core of Anderson's work. Before she was masquerading as Mr. Bergamot, inventing the talking stick, and organizing symphonies of car horns, Laurie Anderson told stories. She told stories at dinner when she was a child – one of eight in her family – and quickly realized that simply recounting experiences was not very exciting.[1] She told stories when she taught Art History at New York colleges, filling in forgotten details with her own and projecting images into the dark. She told Salon magazine last year that “it's not about gender. It's about telling stories. […] What I do is tell stories.”

And when Laurie Anderson tells stories, we are left with questions. I suspect Anderson wouldn't want it any other way: “It's always good to end with a question.”[2]

It will be good to hear some answers, too, at her Festival program this fall.

______________________

Non-digital Sources:
[1] Gordon, Mel. “Laurie Anderson: Performance Artist.” The Drama Review: TDR. June 1980. MIT Press.

RELATED EVENT

Laurie Anderson, O Superwoman

Francis W. Parker School - Diane and David B Heller Auditorium: Nov.7, 7:30 PM

Warner Brothers was a cheap studio in the Forties and Fifties. Ruled back then by Jack Warner, it wasn’t above producing inexpensive copies of others’ successes, particularly when it came to MGM’s lavish musicals. On Moonlight Bay and By the Light of the Silvery Moon borrowed heavily from Meet Me In St. Louis; Calamity Jane was its answer to Irving Berlin’s big western Broadway-to-Hollywood musical, Annie Get Your Gun.  Even some of Calamity’s songs echoed others, as any musical diva will tell you. You can’t listen to Calam’s I Can Do Without You, without being reminded of Anything You Can Do; and her I Just Got Back from the Windy City shares more than an idea or two with Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City, from that “other” big western musical, Oklahoma!

What all these Warner movies had in common was Doris Day, a movie star who first made a name for herself as a big band singer with a string of hit singles in the Forties, and whose Sentimental Journey was especially favored by G.I. Joes during WW II. By 1953, she was one of the studio’s biggest, if vastly underpaid, stars and just a few years away from becoming Hollywood’s number one star for several years running. What may come as a surprise to most is that, after fifty years of movies, she remains to this day---no pun intended---the number one female star of all time.

The movie was based on episodes from the life of a sharpshooter named Martha Jane Canary who rescued a U.S. Army captain from an Indian uprising in South Dakota and got the name “Calamity” for her trouble. A large, homely brunette with a propensity for drink, she was everything Day wasn’t. Calamity Jane co-starred Howard Keel, on loan from MGM (you see?), and followed something of a Cinderella line, with a scruffy, rough-and-tumble, gun-toting girl in fringed rawhide stumbling into love and blossoming, discovering make-up and the wonders of the hairbrush along the way. (Hollywood censors had a bit of a snit over the film’s scenes that played with gender- identity confusion, particularly when a girl winks at a boyish-looking Calamity Jane during her visit to “Chicagee,” and a saloon patron flirts with Francis Fryer hiding in drag). 

Sammy Fain, of I’ll Be Seeing You fame, wrote the song with frequent collaborator, Paul Francis Webster (I Got It Bad And That Ain’t Good, The Shadow Of Your Smile). Fain was nominated for Oscar’s Best Original Song nine times and won twice: in 1953 for Secret Love and in 1955 Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.  He was also the composer of Tender is the Night from the movie of the same name. These last two songs were collected into the aforementioned Andy Williams album on the Moon River blog---can there be a six degrees of Andy Williams in the works? Or for Audrey Hepburn, who won the Oscar for Best Actress in her film debut with Roman Holiday the same year that Secret Love got its Oscar? But I digress.

Doris’ recording of Secret Love became her fourth U.S. Number 1 recording. Like It’s Magic and that other Oscar-winning song, Que Sera, Sera, it became one of her signature tunes. In 1995, the song was resurrected on the big screen via a recording by k.d. lang for the closing credits of The Celluloid Closet, a documentary about the mostly awful historical portrayals of gay characters in Hollywood films. It was heard again in 2003 in Mona Lisa Smile.

I watched Calamity Jane on TV many times as a kid and recalled it with an 8-year old’s fervor. In the mid-Nineties, I made the mistake of showing the film to two of my best friends, a couple who were big fans of movie classics that had never seen it. They thought the movie was a scream, much to my dismay, particularly the opening number, Deadwood Stage (Whip Crack-Away).  Shortly thereafter, the husband was hired by Tracey Ullman to be one of her writers for her TV series, Tracey Takes On…and they moved to L.A.

For Christmas of 1996, their present to me was an advance video of the series’ first episode of its second season, slated to air in early 1997. The episode co-starred Chicago favorite, John Mahoney, and featured Tracey’s character, Trevor, the gay flight attendant. The episode related a traumatic experience in Trevor’s childhood when, in an attempt to grab the attention of his sports-loving father and older brothers, young Trevor stages a show in their living room, lip-synching and gaily prancing to Doris Day’s recording of Whip Crack-Away, complete with toy whip. The father, played by Mahoney, is mortified; Trevor’s attempt to impress his father ends in tears. I was amused and bemused to see a movie I was fond of made fodder for a televised joke. I’m not sure I’ve seen the movie since.       

RELATED EVENT

A Night at the Oscars: The William and Greta Wiley Flory Concert

Francis W. Parker School - Diane and David B Heller Auditorium: Nov. 7, 6:00 PM

Michael Bérubé

Across the country, these institutions responded to the fascinating transformations in humanistic practice that had characterized the 1980s and 1990s. What had been a highly specialized pursuit strongly demarcated by traditional disciplinary boundaries had rapidly become a much broader conversation. Historians wanted to talk to anthropologists about culture; anthropologists wanted to hear everything about the close readings of texts from the literary folks; and everyone wanted to learn about “theory” – an amorphous term that designated the mostly French thinkers (Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu, Baudrillard) who galvanized the late 20th-century academy.

Michael had been trained as a literary scholar with a specialization on 20th-century American literature. And he had published a widely acclaimed book, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers, that investigated the process of canon formation through a comparison of Thomas Pynchon with African-American modernist poet Melvin Tolson. But what had really put him on the map of the interdisciplinary academy was his second monograph, Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child. It chronicled his family’s response to the birth of his son Jamie who was born with Down syndrome and interspersed that account with a cogent critique of America’s (mental) health care system and society’s construction of disability more generally. The book was instantly hailed as a touchstone in the then emerging field of disability studies – the kind of interdisciplinary field that had become plausible in the course of the 1980s and 1990s.       

At Illinois, Michael became an instant model as well as a friend and mentor. What I loved about his approach to scholarship was his emphasis on intellectual camaraderie, the notion that, in addition to quiet time at the library or in front of the computer, humanists needed a space to exchange ideas and learn from one another. The IPRH was that space – and I spent many afternoons and evenings at the building, hearing lectures by visiting scholars or taking part in various interdisciplinary seminars. Michael presided over all of this, creating a wonderful vibe of intellectual curiosity and open exchange. It’s what I sought to continue when, in 2003, I became director of the IPRH. In that role, I also came to know its local peers – and I was delighted to realize that the same spirit of shared inquiry and vibrant debate also characterized the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago, the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern, and the Institute for the Humanities at UIC.

Meanwhile, Michael was becoming a prominent public intellectual. In addition to his work in disability studies, he became an important commentator on the state of the humanities and the status of academic labor more generally. He published such books as Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies, Rhetorical Occasions: On Humans and the Humanities, and What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education. And he began to write frequently for The New York Times among other national publications. At the same time, his blog became an academic sensation – and his fans are fervently hoping for a fast-approaching end to the current hiatus.

And then, Michael left Illinois. He was lured away by a fellow Big 10 institution – Pennsylvania State University. But it wasn’t just the beautiful campus at University Park. Michael was offered to be the inaugural holder of the Paterno Family Professorship. Yes, that’s right! The legendary coach of the Nittany Lions is an ardent supporter of the humanities – and when he endowed a professorship in the English department, Penn State had the extraordinary luck of snagging Michael. And yes – I do think that Paterno’s invitation to spend home games on the sidelines had something to do with Michael’s decision to accept the offer. It was just too perfect for the biggest sports nut I know in the academy (if you want to see true passion, start talking hockey with Michael…).

One of my goals for the CHF is to make the festival a showcase for the great work being done in the humanities in our part of the country – and the Big 10 has a big role in that. With this in mind, I was delighted to be able to reach out to my old friend and mentor. And I was thrilled when Michael, who now heads the Institute for the Arts and Humanities (the Penn State counterpart of the IPRH), not only came up with a wonderful program to be co-presented by the university but agreed to take part himself.

Susan Squier

“Boundaries of Life in a Biomedical Age” will pair Michael with Susan Squier, another stand-out member of Penn State’s English Department and the author of such widely acclaimed books in science and technology studies as Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology, Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine, and Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet. Together, they will explore the philosophical and literary ramifications of recent advances in biomedical technology, including embryo adoption, stem cell research, and intra- and inter-species organ transplants. It will be a fascinating conversation!

And while he’s in Chicago, we will make sure to ask Michael about the future of the humanities. He was just elected President of the Modern Language Association (MLA), the professional organization of America’s literary scholars and one of the most influential academic organizations in the world. Stay tuned for the great things he is certain to come up with in that role!

RELATED EVENT

Boundaries of Life in a Biomedical Age

Chicago Cultural Center - Claudia Cassidy Theater: Nov. 6, 3:00 PM

This fall, we will welcome Michael Witmore to discuss his work on digital Shakespeare. Now what does that mean? Mike, as he is known, is at the forefront of a group of humanists who are pioneering electronic approaches to the study of the great texts. He uses things like bioinformatics, corpus linguistics, and probability clouds to do so – strange new technologies that are completely changing the way we think about the canon.

Michael Witmore

As an expert in early modern English literature, Mike is particularly keen to apply the new devices to Shakespeare – and he uses them to spot previously unrecognized patterns in his words. It’s a fascinating marriage of the humanities and technology and the subject of a book Mike is writing under the title “Shakespeare by the Numbers.”  Mike’s research has propelled him to the forefront of international scholarship and into one of the most influential positions in the global world of Shakespeare.

A former member of the faculty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (which is our partner in the presentation), he was recently appointed Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. It is the world’s largest repository of Shakespeare materials and holds major collections of other rare Renaissance books, manuscripts, and works of art.

The Folger Shakespeare Library

I am thrilled that this year’s Festival will feature this pioneering scholar. Just like last year, when we had the chance to hear from Ania Loomba about her path-breaking work on postcolonial Shakespeare, this year’s program on digital Shakespeare will take us right to the cutting-edge of the humanities. Only at the CHF!

RELATED EVENT

Shakespeare by the Numbers

Poetry Foundation: Nov. 13, 11:00 AM

But it’s not just the creative types who populate the CHF stage. We regularly hear from key figures in the world of politics and higher education – the folks who set the larger parameters for the humanities in our country.

Jim Leach

 
Morton Schapiro

Last year, we formalized these conversations into an annual series on the state of the humanities. The first event was as high-powered as can be, featuring National Endowment for the Humanities chairman Jim Leach in conversation with Northwestern University president Morton Shapiro. (To see the video, just click here).

Top-level engagement with a local angle continues this year in a discussion between Cathy Davidson and Michael Hogan.

Davidson was recently nominated by President Obama as a member of the National Council on the Humanities. A prominent Duke University professor of literature and interdisciplinary studies, she is a national leader in the field of digital humanities and the founder of HASTAK, the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaborative. The author of such acclaimed books as Reading in America: Literature and Social History, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, and The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, she will also be discussing her brand-new book, New You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.

Cathy Davidson

Michael Hogan is the recently appointment President of the University of Illinois, a university that has long been at the forefront of technological innovation, including in the humanities. Hogan’s scholarship is in the field of American diplomatic history, where his widely respected publications include such titles as The Marshall Plan: America, Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-1952, America in the World: The Historiography of US Foreign Relations since 1941, The Ambiguous Legacy: U.S. Foreign Relations in the American Century, and Hiroshima in History and Memory.

Michael Hogan

The conversation between Davidson and Hogan promises to be an extraordinary occasion, bringing together two of the most influential people in the humanities today. Their free-wheeling dialogue will be the kind of event that can only happen at the CHF.

RELATED EVENT

The State of the Humanities

UIC Forum - Main Hall AB: Nov. 5, 11:00 AM 

And whether you’re new to the Festival or a long-time veteran, we want you to know her story. That woman with the clipboard is none other than Peggy Hall-Heineman, who for years created a Festival class assignment for her students at Frederick Von Steuben Metropolitan Science Center. Each year, she would select between eight and ten Festival programs for her students to attend. They would then write responses to the programs for credit and discuss the content of the programs in class.

About Peggy’s teaching style, Paul Duda, a fellow teacher at Von Steuben, writes, "Peggy has worked at Von Steuben since 1998 and during that time she has taught both World and US History, but has found a particular passion in creating her Chicago History elective. Whether it’s taking kids to Humanities festival events or dressing up like Richard Nixon in class, Peggy has continually gone above and beyond to reach her students."

Going above and beyond to bring students to Festival events is an understatement. It’s one thing to organize a field trip during school hours. It’s quite another to get high schools students to come to programs outside of the school day and a good distance from where they live. Peggy did all this and more, without asking the CHF for help or looking for any kind of recognition. The programs Peggy chose to have her students attend extended well beyond traditional history programs. She wanted to inspire her students with the breadth of human experience, therefore they attended performances by writer and performer Sarah Jones and the GIMP dance project as well as programs featuring sex columnist Dan Savage and NBA great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

I have been fortunate to be able to spend time with Peggy, asking for her advice on how to encourage other teachers to bring students to Festival events. Last year, we spent one Saturday morning talking with teachers at the Chicago Foundation for Education conference. She also volunteered her time to accompany program staff to the City of Chicago’s Spotlight on Chicago, where she worked the room in her inimitable way, handing out flyers to bring attention to the Festival.

This is no surprise to Duda, who also notes that, “In addition to her responsibilities in the classroom, Peggy has volunteered large amounts of her personal time to various activities including: National Honors Society, Scholastic Bowl and the Chicago History Fair. Her work with the Chicago History Fair was nothing short of heroic. Peggy was honored for her hard work this year by being recognized as National History Day Teacher of the Year. Von Steuben shared in her honor by being recognized as Illinois’ National History Day School of the Year.

Each year the program staff would look forward to the day that Peggy would drop off her student’s responses to the programs they attended. Young people’s insights are refreshing and, in many cases, without filter. If we blew it, they let us know. If they loved something, they raved, and once the web site launched, they raved on-line. Here are some of her students’ responses to the 2010 Festival The Body:

• Ananya Dance Theater
• BAM: Body Percussion Dance 
• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
• No Caption Needed 
• Sarah Jones 
• The Body Spoken
  

We owe Peggy a debt for her enormous efforts to bring the next generation of big thinkers to our Festival.

Peggy Hall-Heineman made a commitment to Chicago Humanities Festival and to her students, enriching both our organization and her classroom by attending our events and discussing CHF ideas. Peggy retired this summer from Frederick Von Steuben Metropolitan Science Center. In recognition of her inspiration and hard work, we have named the program ”A Jane Addams for the Digital Age” in her honor.

Watch Some Events Peggy's Students Attended:

Kareem Abdul Jabbar: The Body at Its Finest

Sarah Jones: One Woman, Many People

Kuumba Lynx's Half-Pint Poets: The Body Spoken

No contemporary anthropologist practices this maxim with greater verve than Michael Taussig. In a career spanning 40 years, the Columbia University Professor has produced some of the most startling and influential writings to ever come out of the discipline.

Michael Taussig, One of Anthropology's Great Lecturers

In The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, the book that made him a star in 1980, he explored the contradictions of capitalism from the vantage point of its indigenous response, a radical intervention that upended more conventional approaches to globalization and started a prolonged debate about the intersection of anthropology and Marxist analysis.

He followed this up with another classic, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (1987), in which he postulated South America’s colonial history as an ongoing form of terror and shamanism as a resistive form of healing. Taussig did so with what has become his trademark, an unmatched literary style that freely mixes personal experience with critical analysis and ethnographic observation with philosophical reflection.

 
Michael Taussig with Don Pedro in his Garden, Columbia 1977

It’s a style whose mesmerizing effects are hard to describe. Fortunately, I don’t have to attempt it, since I can just invite the CHF audience to what promises to be one of the true highlights of the 2011 Festival on tech·knowledgē: a lecture by Michael Taussig with a typically provocative title: “Beauty and the Beast: The Monstrous Side of Plastic Surgery.”

The talk is drawn from a book he is currently writing on one of the more puzzling phenomena in contemporary South America, the morbid fascination with, even delight in, plastic surgeries that end up disfiguring or killing the patient. Rather than chalking it up to the sadism of a perverted culture, Taussig proposes to see it as a complex response to larger geopolitical constellations – a notion he approaches through his term “cosmic surgery.” I can’t wait to hear his elucidation of this tantalizing idea.

But I am delighted about Taussig’s appearance for yet another reason. It is the first in a new collaboration with the University of Chicago Press. Taussig is one of the star authors of the publishing house, which has issued Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man along with such other provocations (in the best sense) as My Cocaine Museum, Law in a Lawless Land, Walter Benjamin's Grave, What Color Is the Sacred?, and the forthcoming I Swear I Saw This.

 
Charles Bernstein

There is no finer academic publishing house in the country than the University of Chicago Press. A local gem, it is also a national and international powerhouse – something that will also be in evidence in a second program the press is co-presenting: the appearance of poet Charles Bernstein, another star author. (Check out his just-released Attack of the Difficult Poems.)

It’s a fabulous lineup – and the first in what I hope will be a long-standing collaboration!

RELATED EVENT

Lecture

Beauty and the Beast: The Monstrous Side of Plastic Surgery

409: Sat, Nov. 5 1:30 - 2:30 PM

University of Chicago

Enter Chicago, where I arrived in the fall of 1993 to attend graduate school at the U of C. Very quickly I felt that this is where I belonged. Here was an intellectually intense place that couldn’t be more casual interpersonally. There were no barriers, no airs, and somehow it felt that everyone was in it together. I even got a little misery when my first winter turned out to be one of the worst on record…

I came to think of all this as a very Midwestern quality of academic life – a sense that was confirmed as I started to visit other campuses to present my work. And as my graduate career progressed, all I was hoping for was to land a job at one of the great Midwestern campuses. Those, of course, would be the schools of the Big 10 – the envy of public education across the country.

 
The Ohio State University                                   

Think about it – where else are the big public institutions the finest universities of any given state? Not in Massachusetts, not in Connecticut, not in New York or New Jersey – not even in California (but maybe that’s the little bit of Stanford pride I do have left in me speaking). But certainly in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

 
University of Minnesota                                

When I went on the job market in 1998, I landed one of those dream jobs. I was hired at the University of Illinois, and I have never applied for another university position. When I got the offer to come to Champaign, I felt like I had won the lottery – and I still feel that way. Teaching and researching at a Big 10 powerhouse is a huge privilege. But it’s also sheer fun. Nothing beats the exhilaration of working with some of the country’s brightest students; nothing compares to the intellectual camaraderie we share among the faculty.

University of Illinois

I know from colleagues and friends that this is the feeling all across the Big 10. Simply put, the legacy of the land grant institution is alive and well; and while budget cuts and reduced public funding are presenting challenges all across the Midwest, I know that this is a tradition that will endure. As I see it, it is simply woven into the cultural fabric of our region.

When I came to the CHF, it was one of my goals to celebrate the greatness of the Big 10. This was not a wholly new project. The University of Michigan has been a long-standing partner of the festival; and while I directed the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, the interdisciplinary humanities center at Illinois, we, too, were able to partner with the CHF.

University of Michigan

But I had a more ambitious fantasy. I was imagining a CHF in which EACH of the Big 10 campuses would be represented EVERY year. What better way to showcase the intellectual prowess of our region and to bring the Midwest’s leading thinkers into public conversation with writers and artists from elsewhere. We are, after all, the biggest humanities festival in the country (and maybe even the world) and hence the perfect node for an exchange of regional, national, and global perspectives.

Purdue University

To cut a long story short, our Executive Director Stuart Flack and I approached the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), the academic arm of the Big 10, which also includes the University of Chicago. In the fall of 2010, we had a chance to address a meeting of all the deans of the liberal arts. And their response could not have been more enthusiastic. Since then, we have been working with the humanities institutes of each campus to curate their CHF events. And I am absolutely delighted to report that, indeed, every Big 10 university will be at this year’s CHF!

Here is the list of events. It’s an amazing slate, and we couldn’t be more proud to present it!

Illinois

Game-Changer: Technology in Sports  

How many football games have been decided through instant replay? How many world records were smashed when swimmers started wearing full-body suits? How much faster is tennis today than in the glory days of Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe? We don’t always see them, but technological developments are everywhere in sports, and they continually change the games we love. University of Illinois historian of technology Rayvon Fouché discusses his research on technology and athletics, and technology’s influence on the past, present, and future of sports.

Presented in partnership with the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.

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Indiana University

Indiana

The Breakup 2.0

“Breaking up is hard to do,” the old song goes, but is that still the case in a world of text messaging and Facebook? Of course new technologies are changing our behaviors, but how exactly, and with what consequences? Indiana University anthropologist and communications professor Ilana Gershon researches how new media affect our intimate relationships. Join her as she discusses the findings of her new book, The Breakup 2.0, the first academic study of heartbreak in the digital age, with Madeline Nusser of TimeOut Chicago.

Presented in partnership with the College Arts & Humanities Institute.

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Iowa

Lend Me Your (Bionic) Ears  

“Lend me your ears, and I’ll sing you a song.” Paul McCartney’s beautiful sentiment seems to exclude those who can’t hear, but new technologies are rapidly changing the reality of hearing loss. Cochlear implants, often referred to as bionic ears, are devices designed to enhance speech perception for people with severe hearing loss. Can this technology restore musical enjoyment as well? Is music heard through cochlear devices still the same music, or music at all? The nature and meaning of this auditory experience form the basis of innovative research combining otolaryngology, communications, and music. In this program, University of Iowa professor Kate Gfeller reports on her pioneering research, including how people who use bionic ears to perceive and respond to music.

Presented in partnership with the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa.

University of Iowa

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Michigan

Seeking the Source of The Matter of Origins  

“Sometimes you stumble into a way of describing, modeling, or actually understanding yourself better,” choreographer Liz Lerman explains in describing her ongoing conversations with physicist Gordon Kane. Lerman and Kane have both found benefits to exploration of each other’s fields. Kane, director of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics, encouraged Lerman to visit CERN and the scientists at the Large Hadron Collider. These visits provided inspiration for Lerman’s new work, “The Matter of Origins.” Kane and Lerman share insights from their ever-evolving explorations.

Presented in partnership with the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. The Institute is also underwriting the production of The Matter of Origins.

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Michigan State

Good Food? A Philosophical Stance on Today’s Agriculture  

We all know the saying: you are what you eat. How does that meaning change, though, as biotechnology exerts ever-greater influence on farming and the food chain? What are the ethics of genetically engineering food, of creating seeds unable to reproduce, or using hormones in livestock feed? Michigan State University’s Paul Thompson, whose work focuses on the philosophy of ecology and technology, discusses the promises and dangers of biotechnological agriculture.

Presented in partnership with the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University.

Michigan State University

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Minnesota

When Dancers and Biologists Collide  

When scientists and dancers collaborate, they usually produce an impressionistic interpretation of science, not science itself. University of Minnesota biomedical engineer David Odde, choreographer Carl Flink, and their ongoing Moving Cell Project prove what’s possible when their respective disciplines really combine forces. Odde contends that substantive changes constantly occur at the body’s subcellular level—in the form of collisions—and that these collisions are essential to healthy cells. This cellular process is, in turn, a starting point for Flink’s choreography, which examines the real physical impact between human bodies. In this program, Odde, Flink, and members of Flink’s dance company, Black Label Movement, share recent outcomes and video excerpts from their ongoing research.

Presented in partnership with the University of Minnesota Institute for Advanced Study.

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Ohio State

Tomorrow’s History  

I say “historian,” You see: a scholar knee-deep in the dust of obscure archives, or lecturing earnestly, perhaps in monotone, always in a tweed jacket, to a room of (occasionally) riveted undergraduates. But things are changing fast, even in the historian’s estimable profession. New digital technologies have shifted original research from remote sources to online archives, and computerized tools have created immersive classroom presentations. The Harvey Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching at The Ohio State University is at the cutting edge of this transformation. Its director, David Staley, provides a front-row view of history’s digital revolution, showing you how history will be researched, written, and taught in the future.

Presented in partnership with the Humanities Institute at the Ohio State University.

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Pennsylvania State University

Penn State

Boundaries of Life in a Biomedical Age  

Recent advances in biomedical technology, including embryo adoption, stem cell research, and intra- and inter-species organ transplants, are rapidly changing concepts of life. How are these developments playing out in the humanities? Literary scholars and Penn State professors Michael Bérubé and Susan Squier discuss the cultural, ethical, and philosophical challenges of the biomedical age and touch on such issues as engineered fetuses, the aesthetics of prosthetics, and the boundaries of the human.

Presented in partnership with the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University.

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Purdue

Can You Dig It? Technology in the Archaeological Record

Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age—human history is forever entwined with the history of technological progress. Nowhere is this more evident than in the archaeological record, where we can trace the rise and fall of entire civilizations based on the remarkable technical and scientific innovations they left behind. Purdue University archaeologist Ian Lindsay discusses the role of technology in early civilizations, including the cutting-edge approaches and the latest discoveries. Hear from Lindsay about his research on fortresses of the Bronze Age, and the ways pottery shards, crucibles, pyramids, and ancient writing systems speak to us across the ages.

Presented in partnership with the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University.

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Wisconsin

Shakespeare by the Numbers  

What happens when computers join the ranks of scholars who have plumbed the depths of Shakespeare’s incomparable imagination? For more than 400 years, the Bard’s works have been subjected to scrutiny from countless angles. The latest angle is digital: a group of literary scholars is pioneering electronic approaches to study of the great texts.  A longtime University of Wisconsin professor and the newly-appointed director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Michael Witmore is an expert on the literature of early modern England. He uses bioinformatics, corpus linguistics, and probability clouds to spot patterns in the Bard’s words. If you, like us, are not sure what any of that means, join Witmore for an unprecedented experience with Shakespeare. 

Presented in partnership with the Center for the Humanities and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

 
Ah, but what about Northwestern, you say, or Chicago for that matter (let’s call them an honorary Big 10 school on account of their membership in the CIC)?

Northwestern University

For the two home teams, we have something special – an entire day each on the campuses of Northwestern (Oct. 16) and the University of Chicago (Oct. 23). And events with some of their finest professors, including Ken Alder, Hollis Clayson, and Noshir Contractor (Northwestern) and Michael Fisch, Adrian Johns, Rocky Kolb, Emily Osborne, and Jason Salavon (University of Chicago).

Now, it’s up to our audience – and the many Big 10 alums among them – to come out and support the initiative. See you all in the fall!

It’s the equivalent of spinning a globe, and with a blindfold on, letting your pointer finger glide along the globe until it can spin no further, then removing the blindfold, and booking a vacation to wherever your finger has just landed- completely surprising, definitely wild, and infinitely entertaining. I was exposed to The Encyclopedia Show by a friend; because, well, that’s what friends do, they bring you to incredible shows that change your perspective on performance art, from the weird and very abstract to seeing it as a smart and quirky perspective on life. Now, as a friend, I’m telling you that you should go see The Encyclopedia Show October 23rd at 6:00pm in Mandel Hall 1131 East 57th Street.

Since that fateful September eve when I saw a variety of performances centered on the theme of the periodic table of elements, including poets, singers, actors, and actual scholars, I have been exposed to a few other episodes of the show, including Civil Wars, Wyoming, and Brains. What The Encyclopedia Show does so well, month after month, is make a fun game guessing which theme will be picked at random next. During the Chicago Humanities Festival sponsored event, the theme, in conjunction with the Festival, will be ROBOTS. In complying with The Encyclopedia Show’s rules, each invited performer that is asked to participate will be given a month to riff on their given topic such as “Helium,” or “Table,” that has to do with the theme, “Periodic Table of Elements.” It’s amazing to see what the artists can accomplish artistically in a month.

What can you expect from seeing this show? Well, the show brings a plethora of characters. Robbie Q Telfer, the curator and co-host of the show, is among the more balanced in the bunch. With Patrick the Intern, a shy kid who gets picked on by all the adults (in which I can relate (just kidding)), Dr. Armando Thomas-Chihuahua, a fast talking un-social savant, and the Jilted Emily Rose, a haiku spitting weeping woman, this show has a lot of vibrancy to it. And then there’s, “the Fact Checker,” played by Ian Belknap, one of Chicago’s great writers and solo-performance artists. The Fact Checker plays on the idea that you can’t exactly take what everyone’s saying on stage to the bank, including The Fact Checker. While each performer has written from their own experience on each topic, they also bring with it their own spin, an addition that makes the audience member get a peek into the head of the performer.

In the end, you would be doing yourself a disservice to not see this show. After I spent this whole time writing about the show and the whole time you’ve dedicated to reading this, we’ve already invested in it so much. Time to see your investment returns cash in. See The Encyclopedia Show: October 23rd, 2011 at 6:00pm in Mandel Hall, a part of Hyde Park Day during the Fall Festival.

Editor's Note: Stay tuned. In the coming weeks, we will reveal which CHF-affiliated artists and scholars will take the stage with Encyclopedia Show regulars on Oct. 23.

RELATED EVENT

The Encyclopedia Show: ROBOTS

Mandel Hall: Oct. 23, 6:00 PM

Certainly from the time I knew her, Sylvia had the “A” game: she was a great writer, with a great sense for a story, and most importantly, she had the intelligence and analytic ability to understand what was actually going on. As an editor of mine used to say, “If sports reporters had the knowledge of, say baseball, that business reporters have of business, we would open the back of the New York Post and read ‘Jones swung an object which is shaped much like an elongated wine bottle and appeared to be made of wood, at a taut leather sack, hurled by a man on small hill . . .’.”

Although Sylvia specialized in serious economics reporting, she did other things too. Here’s a fun profile of and up-and-coming playwright (me) written by her for The New York Times in 1993. You will notice that I’d now left the world of business journalism for a more lucrative day job. Did I mention that ALL playwrights need day jobs?

During much of the 1990’s Sylvia and I talked regularly because I was part of some pretty heavy-duty economics research efforts at consulting behemoth McKinsey and Company  and Sylvia was the best economics reporter pretty much anywhere. We always thought she was the best person to write about our work.  Here’s a great example of what she was writing back then.

Then John Forbes Nash won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994 and everything changed. It winds up that not long after Nash devised game theory, he suffered a severe psychotic breakdown, and then roamed the Princeton campus wraithlike for decades, a creepy legend among students. Sylvia wrote an unusually wonderful story about Nash for the Times.

For Sylvia, the fun was just beginning.  Most wonderful stories are not optioned as books. This one was. Most books based on wonderful stories are not themselves wonderful. This one was. Most wonderful books are not optioned as films. This one was. Most wonderful books optioned as films are not actually made into films. This one was. Most films, even those (especially those?) made from wonderful books aren’t themselves wonderful. This one was. Most wonderful films, once made, languish unappreciated. This one didn’t.  And so on. You get the point. With A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia scored big. As big as you can score.  Hooray!

She is now a journalism professor at Columbia University, teaching a new generation of writers how to write about business and economics with the skill, smarts, and panache that she has always brought to the task.

Her new book and wonderful book, Grand Pursuit, is a sort economic intellectual history of the last two centuries told through the personal stories of its major figures: Marx, Schumpeter, Keynes, Friedman, etc. Sylvia argues that the whole field of economics is animated by the revolutionary idea that “humanity could turn tables on economic necessity—mastering rather than being enslaved by material circumstances."

I’m seeing James Franco playing the role of all the economists! 

He wears a beard for Marx,

a skinhead for Schumpeter and Friedman,

and lifts in his shoes and a mustache for Keynes (that’s him on the right).

I think I read somewhere that Franco was going to get a PhD in Economics after he finished his MFA, his English PhD, and his monograph on wound care during the Franco-Prussian war.  I think he’d be great.

Casting issues aside, Grand Pursuit is an elegant and unique book: economics seen as part of the humanities. It’s a perfect fit for the Festival. And it’s an honor to host Sylvia in Chicago. 

RELATED EVENT

Grand Pursuit—A Conversation with Sylvia Nasar

408: Sat, Nov. 5 1:00-2:00 PM

For as long as people have been making music, those people have been trying to make the music they make louder. A longer stick. A bigger rock. Hollow out that log. Yodel in a fjord. Steel strings on violins instead of gut. Church organ pipes the size of a redwood. Mr. Jolson, sing into this megaphone. All are technologies of loudness. As with so many technologies, the 20th century saw technologies of loudness, as it were, boom. Just as the A-bomb was the mid 20th century techno-game changer, the perfect embodiment of our urge to destroy ourselves and each other, the electric guitar, is the mid 20th Century techno-game changer in the never ending urge to turn it up. Listen to this Count Basie-led group from 1938; perhaps the earliest recording of an electric guitar solo anywhere. This solo, with its twangy tone and cool arpeggios, is played by the great arranger, trombonist, and guitarist Eddie Durham.

Guitars, which before played background chords or single note lines over minimal accompaniment—you can hear the master of acoustic rhythm Freddie Green behind the solos on this cut—could now hold their own against trumpets and saxophones as instruments soloing over the whole band: a huge innovation.

Now, electrifying a guitar by putting a magnet wrapped in wire under the metal strings—thank you William Clerk Maxwell—and then running the current produced into another gadget that uses the current to move a column of air electric doesn’t just make the sound louder. The pure waves of the vibrating strings are really, really hard to accurately reproduce. So the bad news is that all kinds of wild imperfections—aka noise, aka distortion—creep in to “spoil” the accuracy of the reproduction. You can hear them in Durham’s solo. The good news—which took until about 1950 to discover—is that some of those wild imperfections actually sound great, often better than the pure, but naked, sound a of string vibrating in the first place. A loud guitar is nice, but a distorted loud guitar, distorted the right way….ahhhh.

Many guitarists since Durham have made distortion and noise part of their signature sounds, but only a few have explored distortion itself as a medium of expression. Jimi Hendrix was the master. Jeff Beck, Neil Young, Frank Zappa, Derek Bailey, Eddie Van Halen, Glenn Branca, Fred Frith, Thurston Moore and Nels Cline have done great stuff. But the history of making a guitar sound like it’s never sounded before, and inserting that sound into the popular lexicon, simply cannot be written about without one of our featured artists: Adrian Belew.

Discovered in a bar band by Frank Zappa, front man for King Crimson, sideman for David Bowie, Talking Heads, Paul Simon, fellow CHF 2011 presenter Laurie Anderson, Nine Inch Nails and countless others, Belew has been pulling an astonishing palette of sounds from his instrument for nearly 40 years and, as you’ll see in the clips below, bringing an unsurpassed ebullience, intelligence and musicianship to everything he does. 

Here he is on tour with Bowie back in 1978; one of the great bands of the era. This is “Jean Genie,” with Belew taking a great solo around 2:20. But I could have also chosen the great version of “Heroes” with Belew doing the Robert Fripp parts, “Beauty and the Beast”, and a bunch of other great stuff from this tour or other efforts with Bowie that continued through the 1990’s.

Here he is on the1980 Remain in Light tour with Talking Heads—absolutely at their peak—on “The Great Curve.” Who could not enjoy the solo which begins at 2:05?

(Notice how in these last two clips he is clearly upstaging Bowie and David Byrne—the late 70’s /early 80’s rock equivalent of dunking over last year’s festival headliner Kareem Adul Jabbar.)

Or here he is hand-picked by Robert Fripp to front the mighty reformation of King Crimson in 1982, doing his song “Elephant Talk”. The solo at 3:20 is pure Belew.

Or earlier this year in a more meditative mode in a live solo performance

We can’t wait to hear him talk about and make guitar noise on Nov 13th.

RELATED EVENT

Adrian Belew: A Personal History (and Future) of the Electric Guitar

811: Sun, Nov. 13 5:00 - 6:00 PM

Being an historian today is not like it was 20 years ago when I earned my PhD. 

How we research

 How historians access and use documents has been irrevocably altered. More and more documents (but far from every one) are being digitized every day, which is changing the way we engage in research. Historians have built up a heroic myth of the scholar who, like Indiana Jones, travels the world to sift out documents from dusty archives, unseen by human eyes in hundreds of years…There is certainly less romanticism in sitting in your living room with a laptop searching a database. “The search” as a way to conduct research clearly means greater convenience and less travel, but searching databases is leading to a new way to examine old documents. As more documents are digitized and stored in ever growing databases, those data can be analyzed and interpreted in new ways. In his article for our Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective e-magazine, historian David Steigerwald argued that in the 1950s and 60s sociologists and other social scientists used the concept of “alienation” to describe the root cause of a broad range of social problems. Steigerwald argued that we no longer use the term “alienation” to describe social ills as we once did. Steigerwald’s thesis was based upon extensive reading of a sizable literature, but not nearly as sizable as all of the books digitized on Google Books. We can now query that large list of books for the term “alienation.” And it turns out that the “Steigerwald thesis” is born out: when we search for the word “alienation” using Google’s n-gram viewer, we discovered that the use of the word “alienation” did seem to grow in the 50s and 60s and spiked sometime in the 1980s, and has been declining since.

Google Books Ngram Viewer

This simple example demonstrates that such “data mining” explorations of enormous amounts of texts facilitates new interpretations and  new insights, allowing historians to ask and answer questions that would have required an army of research assistants years of combing through innumerable libraries and archives.

How We Represent the Past

The Virtual Wunderkammer on Second Life

When I first started teaching, my students would ask me, rather than reading the book, “Can we watch the movie?”  I instruct graduate students today who are entering the teaching profession “Prepare yourself for students asking you ‘Can we play the video game?’” 3-D modeling, virtual reality, simulations, other kinds of visualizations offer a new canvas upon which we can represent the past. At the Goldberg Center, we have been experimenting with such 3-D environments by using Second Life. Within this space, we have created the Virtual Wunderkammer, an analogical collection of objects that one can move through like a museum exhibition.  Like its 18th century precursors, our digital “cabinet of curiosities” collects found objects and arranges them in a themed space; the objects here are seemingly unrelated to each other but are associatively joined by the common theme of “embodiment,” that is, each object shows the human body representing abstract ideas and concepts (everything from “Mother Russia” to “Blind Justice” to personifications of ideas.) Virtual worlds allow us display possibilities different from that offered to viewers in physical exhibition spaces: our next plan is to “layer” more objects on top of these, at higher and higher levels. A viewer could then “fly” up into the space to view these objects as well. 

RELATED EVENT

Tomorrow's History

Chicago Cultural Center - Claudia Cassidy Theater: Nov. 5, 2:30 PM

No matter your reading taste, it isn’t often that you encounter a writer who’s a living legend.  Jonathan Franzen is one of those writers – his reputation as a novelist and a thinker loom impressively in our literary landscape. His own relationship to his place in contemporary literature has at times seemed uneasy. Despite authoring two novels and a handful of essays, it wasn’t until The Corrections came out in 2001, just days after September 11, that he was catapulted to writerly superstardom; a seemingly dream-come-true distinction. That book, the story of the unraveling Lambert family, was a Midwestern epic and a reaffirmation of realistic fiction emerging from a more experimental, postmodern age.

And if people weren’t talking about Franzen’s masterpiece, they were certainly talking about him. Months after The Corrections appeared it was lauded with the selection into Oprah’s book club. When he expressed uneasiness with the recognition, admitting that he was concerned that his desired audience might shun the book, Oprah disinvited him to the show.

Franzen’s admittance of where he saw his work situated contributed to the ongoing ruminations on the sometimes blurry line between high art and populist (read: popular) work. It’s a line he’s continued to walk, whether he likes it or not. Freedom, another doorstopper of a book, is an incredibly smart and addictive page turner. Franzen returns to the Midwest, chronicling the tremendously dysfunctional Berglund family. Love – obsessive, rapturous, pragmatic, and uninspired – is in these pages as is the tension between our public and private selves, dreams imagined and often unrealized. Walter and Patty, the couple at the center of this novel, are at times infinitely relatable and cringingly, well, awful and it’s to Franzen’s credit and immense talent that we stay so transfixed, keen to experience every moment of their story as he’s written it, through 550 plus pages. Freedom also gave Franzen and Oprah an opportunity to patch up their relationship; she selected the new book for the last season of her book club and he appeared on her show last December.

As for that bit about a living legend. The chance to see Jonathan Franzen live feels a little like getting a ticket to Bob Dylan. Or Leonard Cohen. Or, to pick on another one of CHF’s stellar 2011 presenters, Laurie Anderson. Like these other masters, Franzen is a superstar. His perspective on literature, his intensity and commitment to big, moving, albeit emotionally exhausting novels, has earned him a well-deserved place in all of our important conversations on writing and reading. Listening to his interview last September (days after Freedom hit the shelves) with Guy Raz on “All Things Considered,” he reveals his psychology, both personally and writerly, that informs his work. He discusses the role both of his parents played in his maturation as a writer, mental illness and creativity, and  his relationship with his good friend, the late writer David Foster Wallace. I can’t wait until he takes the stage on November 6, since undoubtedly there will be a few other revelations that will make my experience of his work just that much richer.

RELATED EVENT

2011 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize Winners

UIC Forum - Main Hall AB: Nov. 6, 2:00 PM

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917)

As is sometimes the case when we talk about the cultural creations of our species –  i.e. when we practice the humanities – they all have some truth to them.

Conceptual art was named into being as a discrete art movement in the late 1960s. In many ways, it was a response against the dominant artistic traditions of the day. Abstract expressionism, which had reigned in the 1950s under the leadership of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, had fetishized the individual act of art making as a form of psychological exteriorization.

Jackson Pollock, Grayed Rainbow (1953)

Willem de Kooning, Excavation (1950)

Artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns reacted against the self’s apotheosis by incorporating lowly, everyday objects into their work – a gesture that was further heightened by pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, who, by the early 1960s, based their work on soup cans, celebrity photos, and comics.

Jasper Johns, Map (1961)

  
Robert Rauschenberg, Bed (1955) and Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Can (1964)

Minimalism was even more radical, removing the artist’s hand from the creation of objects, whether in the case of Donald Judd’s objects (which were fabricated to his specifications) or Dan Flavin’s sculptures (which were formed using industrial neon light bulbs).

  
Donald Judd, Untitled (1968) and Dan Flavin, Monument for V. Tatlin (1967)

 The trend in the course of the 1960s, in other words, was to move away from the author as artistic genius. And yet, all of the artistic movements from abstract expressionism to minimalism still resulted in the production of physical object – objects, moreover, that were imbued with a heightened sense of aesthetic value.

This is where conceptual art came in. Its most radical proposition was to emphasize the idea of the art work over its physical creation. Sol LeWitt came up with the iconic formulation in a 1967 article: “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” But in many ways, the radicalism of conceptual art was captured even better by Douglas Huebler: “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”

 
Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing 273 (1975)

The results of these pronouncements were varied. Joseph Kosuth turned his art into games of language philosophy; Mel Bochner played with numbers; Hanne Darboven executed endless, non-sensical inventories; Lawrence Weiner abandoned objects for text-based works affixed directly to walls; and LeWitt created instructions for elaborate drawings that others executed.

Joseph Kosuth, Box, Cube, Empty, Clear, Glass--a Description (1965)

 
Mel Bochner, Milan Number Block (1970) and Hanne Darboven, 19 Short Transversals of the Century (1968)

Lawrence Weiner, A 36 x 36 Removal to the Lathing or Support Wall of Plaster or Wallboard From a Wall (1968)

As a more or less cohesive movement, conceptual art had its heyday in the late 1960s and 1970s. But its most basic proposition – that ideas matter in art at least as much as, if not more, than objects – has become axiomatic in the art world. That is one of the reasons why, at this point in time, more or less all advanced art is conceptual in nature. Even work that seems naïve is self-consciously so, like the paintings of Elizabeth Peyton or Karen Kilimnik, playing with ideas of artlessness as a form of aesthetic intervention. At the same time, the triumph of conceptualism has led to a search for its historical forbears. This is where we find Duchamp, whose Fountain – his shocking 1917 presentation of a urinal as art object – is often identified as the first piece of purely conceptual art.

 
Elizabeth Peyton, Paradis (Kirsty) (2001) and Karen Kilimnik, Prince Charming (1998)

 But back to conceptualism’s heyday. In 1969, Chicago’s then brand-new Museum of Contemporary Art presented Art by Telephone, one of the defining exhibits of the conceptual art movement. The show was literally what the title suggested: a set of pieces phoned in by artists and created on-site to their specifications. It featured everyone who was anyone in conceptual art – and it helped put the MCA on the map of the international art world.

One of the contributors to Art by Telephone was Iain Baxter. A founding figure of conceptualism, Baxter worked under the moniker of N. E. Thing Company, which was registered as a business and operated like one, albeit in parodic fashion. Using such new technologies as fax machines (then called “telecopiers”), Baxter sent out advertisements that doubled as art pieces. For Art by Telephone, he faxed the MCA a list of objects that had N. E. Thing Company’s “seal of approval.”

IAIN BAXTER&

In the four decades since Art by Telephone, Baxter has continued to work on the forefront of avant-garde art, reinventing himself and his practice on numerous occasions, including his recent addition of “&” to his name. Yes, Baxter is now officially IAIN BAXTER& – in recognition, as he notes, that “life is simply all about ‘ands’ and the mystery of what comes next.”

 
Victor Romão & IAIN BAXTER&, thE eyes and hands of the raisonnE (2010)

On Saturday, November 5, the MCA will unveil an ambitious retrospective of BAXTER&’s influential oeuvre. Curated by Michael Darling, it will cover his entire career from N. E. Thing Company and Art by Telephone to recent sculptural work that presents stuffed animals in pickling jars. It will show one of the most resourceful, inventive, and adventurous artists of our time.

 
Michael Darling and Hannah Feldman

We partner with the MCA on many exciting ventures. And this one is no exception. On the very day of the opening, Iain Baxter& will take to the CHF stage to talk about this career in conceptual art. He will be joined by Hannah Feldman, professor at Northwestern University and one of the country’s outstanding, young art historians. Hannah specializes in the art of the 1960s and its many echoes to the present day. It promises to be a spectacular event!

RELATED EVENT

Art by Telephone and Other Adventures in Conceptualism - Richard Gray Visual Art Series

Museum of Contemporary Art - Theater: Nov. 5, 1:00 PM

Like the camera sweeping over the Austrian countryside at the beginning of The Sound of Music, the opening scene to Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a celebrated blend of image and sound. There’s that lone yellow New York cab coming up lonely-looking Fifth Avenue in the post-dawn.  There’s no other car in sight.  The music is wistful, a little sad, in keeping with the scene’s “quelle night” mood.  The cab rolls to a stop where Fifth meets East 57th Street.

A lone occupant, a woman with upswept dark hair, emerges from the cab.  The camera angle rises sharply and we see that she’s standing before the closed metal doors of Tiffany & Co.  She wears large black sunglasses that cover half her face, and extravagant ropes of pearls around her neck.  She carries a paper bag.  Her long black satin dress is distinctive (and well it should be, given that it was designed by the French courtier, Givenchy, and sold at Christie’s in 2006 for not a penny less than $923,187).  (Wasn’t every party girl in New York City in 1961 wearing a Givenchy original for a night on the town?)  Presumably, she’s just returning from a full night of partying.  From her little paper bag, she removes a paper cup of coffee and a Danish, which she consumes while window shopping.  The window display is set with miniature crystal chandeliers.

Okay, a show of hands, please: how many of you have sipped from a cup of coffee and snacked on a Danish at the windows of Tiffany & Co in New York?

At the time that the film’s director, Blake Edwards, approached Mancini to do the music for the film, Mancini was mostly known as a writer of themes for TV shows (a Henry Mancini theme song would accompany two future Hepburn projects: Charade and Two for the Road).  For the Tiffany project, he teamed up for lyrics with Johnny Mercer, of Blues in the Night/Anyplace I Hang My Hat is Home/Come Rain or Come Shine/One for the Road/Skylark/That Old Black Magic/P.S. I Love You fame.  In Mercer’s honor, an inlet near Savannah, his boyhood home, was named Moon River.

Holly Golightly sings Moon River

Mancini was quoted as saying that this “was one of the hardest melodies I ever had to write because I couldn’t figure out what this lady (editor’s note: meaning Hepburn’s character, Holly Golightly) would sing. Would it be a pop tune, a folk song, a blues?  It took me almost a month to get it.”  He recalled her rendition of How Long Has This Been Going On? in Funny Face, and set out to write a tune with a similar range and pitch to match the star’s voice.  And while he declared that “no one ever performed it with more honesty, feeling or understanding than Audrey did in the movie,” the album of music from the movie doesn’t include Hepburn’s vocals.

Mancini claims that after a preview of the film in San Francisco, the new president of Paramount Studios suggested that the song be cut.  Hepburn objected.  She had sung Gershwin in Funny Face and would soon receive the disappointment of being dubbed by Marni Nixon for My Fair Lady, but for this, she put her foot down.

For the 34th annual Academy Awards, Moon River was in competition for Best Original Song with Pocketful of Miracles, from the movie of the same name; the Love Theme from El Cid; Town Without Pity from Town Without Pity; and Bachelor in Paradise also written by Mancini and also for a movie with the same name…which starred the incongruous pairing of Lana Turner and Bob Hope, who was billed on the movie poster as “the world's greatest authority on love.” Who knew? But I digress. 

Andy Williams sang the song at the Oscars. Hepburn, nominated for Best Actress, was confined to her room at the Beverly Hills Hotel with the flu and didn’t attend.  The year’s Best Film was West Side Story. Breakfast at Tiffany’s wasn’t nominated.

Incidentally, the song also won two 1962 Grammy Awards for Record and Song of the Year. It’s been recorded by Sara Vaughn, Lena Horne, Barbra Streisand, Louis Armstrong, Bobby Darrin, and Johnny Mathis. Yours Truly sang it at his very first recital after a year of voice lessons in college.

Okay, a show of hands, please: how many of you grew up listening to their parents’ playing the Andy Williams Moon River record?

RELATED EVENT

A Night at the Oscars: The William and Greta Wiley Flory Concert

Francis W. Parker School - Diane and David B Heller Auditorium: Nov. 7, 6:00 PM

Really?

You have a Facebook, Gmail, and Twitter tab open in Google Chrome on your MacBook, and you’ve stumbled upon this blog through a series of links—which links they were, you can only remember vaguely—but, that’s not important. Either way, what is important is that, as college students, we recognize that technology plays a massive role in our lives. I mean, c’mon, when was the last time you cranked out a handwritten letter and sent it via post? (July 18^th, 1882 to a pen pal named Frederick Lichtenstein in Brockton, MA).

Currently, I am the Programming & Production intern at the Chicago Humanities Festival, as well as a college student at DePaul, so I understand the reservation that comes along with choosing to attend a multi-day festival that doesn’t start with “Lolla” or rhymes with “Hitch-Stork.” However, CHF is an annual festival that organizes multiple events across the city dedicated to the humanities, a large blanket which covers literature, performance, history, philosophy, art; and yet, over the past few years, our generation has been severely underrepresented at these events. Unacceptable.

This year, CHF has chosen the theme tech·knowledgē, basically spoon feeding college aged adults with a gigantic pool of programming orbiting around the thing we rely on the most (icanhascheezburger?). I am confident that if there were someone to guide you through CHF’s most exciting events, there will be an upswing in our attendance. And sure, I’ll definitely volunteer to be the one to do it.

Let’s make this year an outlier (in so far as comparing it to other years (we want to start a new trend here)).

But where do we start?

I’ve built up this expectation that these events are boss-awesome, now how am I going to deliver? Well, two words: Human Beatbox.

Wait. No, I take that back. Take that (Human Beatbox) and add harmonica.

Human Beatbox + Harmonica = Yuri Lane.

Does this even make sense? See this link to have your mind blown if you haven’t seen it already…

I found out about Yuri Lane way back in middle school through Ebaumsworld (does anyone else remember this website?). Anyway, this guy is dope, and he’s coming back to the Chicago Humanities Festival, bringing his new show, MeTube to the stage. From the description of the program, it boasts that, “The video projections of multimedia artist Sharif Ezzat accompany Yuri Lane’s live, explosive beatbox. Audience members are invited to film, text, tweet, and remix parts of the show.” How much more “our generation” can you get?

Having seen Yuri’s From Tell Aviv to Ramallah, during the 2009 festival called “Laughter,” I can say for sure that this will be an amazing live performance. The visuals and beatbox were insane, and it was a unique guide through his experiences travelling along the Gaza Strip. In MeTube, Yuri tells the tale of his own rise in popularity due to YouTube and other social media, and I can only imagine what he’ll bring to the table in this performance- a lot of beatboxing, probably.

Now that you’ve seen him online, don’t miss the chance to see him live and up close during the Chicago Humanities Festival. This is one experience you don’t want to miss.

RELATED EVENT

MeTube

Francis W. Parker School - Diane and David B Heller Auditorium: Nov. 4, 7:30 PM

Mr. M explained that he wanted the students to create an interactive, multimedia collage representing one of four specific scenes from their current text: The Ramayana, an epic Hindu poem dating from the 5^th or 4^th century B.C. The computer lab buzzed with conversation as the class started brainstorming elements to incorporate into their collages. Before long, several students were searching adeptly for images on the Internet, accurately citing websites within their PowerPoint document, and adding relevant video clips. I couldn’t help but reflect on PowerPoint presentations I had created at my former job, which were boring, stale things in comparison to the work these students were producing in a matter of minutes.

It turns out I wasn’t the only one behind the times. “Hey Kelsey, can you show me how to make this picture slide into the next one?” As I turned to help one exasperated student, his neighbor chimed in. “When you’re done helping him, can you tell me how to make this image explode?” Embarrassed by my lack of technical know-how, I asked one of their particularly computer-savvy classmates to show us the ropes. Soon, a small crowd had gathered to admire her multimedia collage, which featured bursts of color, twirling stars, and realistically crackling fire. She described some of PowerPoint’s functions and demonstrated the more advanced options while explaining the reasoning behind each feature. “I wanted the snow to start trickling into the autumn scene,” she offered, “so I just animated this image and layered it over the first one.”

All of this came back to me recently when my colleague at the Chicago Humanities Festival shared information about the 2011 Summer Institute for Teachers (SIT). This year’s SIT features digital learning experts James Gee and Nichole Pinkard on the topic of New Media Literacy. With Gee and Pinkard guiding the way, participants will discuss the changing nature of writing in the 21^st century and explore digital media narration. Educators will learn strategies for bringing new media literacy into the classroom, as well as view digital artifacts made by local high school students. With an emphasis on visual, interactive, textual, and musical elements, the two-day seminar promises to be lively, engaging, hands-on – and given my experiences with the sophomores last fall, highly relevant.

Other than a nominal $5 processing fee, SIT is free. What a great opportunity for teachers to join together with their colleagues and enjoy being students themselves. Ten CPDUs are available for this session, which takes place on Wednesday, July 13^th and Thursday, July 14^th from 9 am – 3 pm at YOUmedia at Harold Washington Library Center. Lunch will be provided. Learn more about the program and sign up here.

Chicago Gay Pride

The festivities commemorate the anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion of June 1969, when a bunch of courageous drag queens, immensely saddened by Judy Garland’s untimely death, decided to no longer take the harassment that was part and parcel of queer life. Rounded up in a raid at the Stonewall Inn, they famously resisted, inaugurating the modern lesbian/gay liberation movement.

Stonewall Riots

The event has been recalled ever since, first in the US and gradually around the world. And as we have been moving closer and closer to real equality, gay pride celebrations have grown. Our own, here in Chicago, is one of the great events of the summer season, featuring hundreds of amazing floats parading down “Boy’s Town” to the cheers of thousands and thousands of spectators.

Gay Pride 1994

Chicago’s Gay Pride Parade was actually the first I ever attended. The year was 1994 – and it was a special occasion: the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. It was the end of my first year as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, and I was there with my partner Billy (we had met during the first week of classes). But we were not alone. We were part of a small group of UofC faculty and students who would march in the parade. At the time, it was still not considered self-evident to be “out” at the traditionally conservative institution; but things were changing quickly, with folks like historian George Chauncey blazing a trail for the rest of us. George had just published Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, one of the definitive books in the then-emerging field of queer studies and a tremendous inspiration for many, including myself.

Gay New York

What I remember about that day in 1994 is the sweltering heat and the hours we waited for the caravan to get going – we were all the way in the back, and I swear that the Dykes on Bikes were done with their trek before we even started moving. But no matter. The atmosphere was incredible, with cheers coming from all around us. It got even better once we were on our way, with people throwing us candy and kisses. We didn’t even mind that we had to run most of the time to keep up with the procession – far from being natural partiers, it had not occurred to any of the UofC folks that it would be far more convenient to experience the parade on a float…

The Dykes on Bikes Getting Ready to Lead the Parade

But speaking of convenience. At the CHF, we have a long history of celebrating Gay Pride, and our archives are full of amazing LGBT programs. Just check them out! You will find talks by some of America’s most fabulous queer writers, including Tony Kushner, Jennifer Boylan, Wayne Koestenbaum, E. Patrick Johnson, and Mark Doty & Achy Obejas. Over the years, we have also featured scholarly presentations on lesbian/gay issues by such folks as Martha Nussbaum, Dwight McBride, and Paula Treichler.

Tony Kushner

Achy Obejas

Wayne Koestenbaum

Paula Treichler

Dwight McBride

And let’s not forget America’s favorite sex advice columnist – Chicago’s native son Dan Savage. At the 2010 CHF, he took the stage with his brother Bill for 90 minutes of insight and hilarity. It was amazing – kind of like a Gay Pride Parade…

Matti Bunzl, Dan Savage, and Billy Vaughn at the 2010 CHF

Please note: each week we reveal new fall Festival presenters and programs in our weekly update email. To stay in the know, email update@chicagohumanities.org to be added to our mailing list or check back every week for new blog posts.

Last winter, an email arrived from the Seminary Co-op Bookstore with a suggestion for an event featuring the rap artist Common and Professor Adam Bradley, the co-editor of The Anthology of Rap. Published by Yale University Press in October of 2010, The Anthology of Rap is the first book to bring together the greatest rap lyrics of all time, giving them the respect they deserve as poetry.  In the afterword to the book, Common writes, “What you hold in your hands is more than a book. This is a culture. This is a testament to the fact that rap is a tradition told in many voices. We have created a living language through rap... For anyone with the curiosity to see beyond the stereotype, this book offers a view of rap in full, from the root to the fruit.”

Common

A rap artist at the CHF, you say? Believe it or not, it won’t be the first time we’ve hosted a rap musician. Chuck D, who pioneered the development and popularization of rap through his work with Public Enemy, graced our stages in 2004 to talk about the inequity of access in communications technology.

Music has been a big part of our planning for the tech•knowledgē festival; so far our music programming touches the 20th century, with a program about amplification and singing styles, and the 17th century, with a program on the viola d’amore—a 14-stringed hybrid of the violin and viola da gamba. From here we find ourselves at rap.  With its beginnings in the sound system mixing of the 1970s to its cultural dominance via hip hop culture in the last three decades, rap music evolved from a specific technology and was deeply influenced by the communities in which it was first embraced.

Who better to explore this culture at the CHF than Common? Born Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr. in Chicago, Common is a gifted lyricist who approaches his work from a positive angle, despite what you may have heard regarding his recent invitation to appear at a White House poetry event. The author of three books, The MIRROR and ME, I Like You But I Love Me, and M.E. (Mixed Emotions), and an upcoming autobiography One Day It’ll All Make Sense, Common is a distinctive voice in a genre that has exploded in a relatively short amount of time. He is the recipient of a Grammy Award, is a successful actor (American Gangster, Date Night), and has started a foundation called Common Ground, an organization dedicated to the empowerment and development of urban youth in the United States.

Many of his lyrics express this theme.  From Be (Intro): “I look into my daughter’s eyes, and realize that I’m gonna learn through her/The Messiah, might even return through her/If I'm gonna do it, I gotta change the world through her.”

Talking with Adam Bradley, an associate professor of literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Common will touch on these and other influences and the technological milestones that marked rap’s rapid rise.

The Anthology Of Rap Yale University Press, 2010.

Edited by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois; Foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; Afterwords by Chuck D and Common

RELATED EVENT

Common: History of Hip Hop

UIC Forum - Main Hall AB: Nov. 5, 6:00 PM

Dan Sinker

Chicago is known as a political city, a place where the gusts of aldermanic promises almost blow the red stars off our honorable flag. One would assume holding an election without a Daley on the ballot for the first time in 22 years would provide enough drama for the evening news. But in true Chicago form, we were treated to an election cycle filled with courtroom drama, disgruntled renters, ill-advised photo-ops, personal tirades, and perhaps the first ever Twitter-style epic novel.

Columbia College assistant professor Dan Sinker did not intend to create an internet phenomenon. Yet the founder of the legendary zine Punk Planet singlehandedly made the five months of election slog a little more bearable when on September 27, 2010 he anonymously created @MayorEmanuel. A fictional Twitter account, @MayorEmanuel chronicled the profanity-laced adventures of former White House Chief-of-Staff and then Chicago mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel.

What started as a way to amuse a small circle of Sinker’s friends, quickly racked up more than 40,000 Twitter followers. From his mobile phone, Sinker lampooned the cutthroat reputation of Emanuel, elevating 140-characters to edgy, hysterical jabs at countless Chicago figures from Ernie Banks and Penny Pritzker to the real Rahm’s fellow mayoral candidates, Carol Moseley Braun, Gery Chico, and Miguel del Valle. Not content with keeping his story-arc confined to reality, he threw in a motley crew of recurring characters including David Axelrod (based on the real Obama advisor), Carl the Intern, Quaxelrod (a duck), and Hambone (Axelrod’s puppy).

Praise for @MayorEmanuel poured out from news outlets across Chicago and the country. But the fun came to a close sooner than expected. @MayorEmanuel posted his last tweet after being sucked into a vortex on the evening of Chicago’s real mayoral election. While the tweets died down, speculation as to the author’s identity persisted. Sinker finally unmasked himself to The Atlantic after the elected Mayor Emanuel offered to donate $5,000 to the author’s favorite charity. In “Revealing the Man Behind @MayorEmanuel” writer Alexis Madrigal waxed poetically about Sinker’s work:

The profane, brilliant stream of tweets not only may be the most entertaining feed ever created, but it pushed the boundaries of the medium, making Twitter feel less like a humble platform for updating your status and more like a place where literature could happen. Never deviating too far from the reality of the race itself, @MayorEmanuel wove deep, hilarious stories. It was next-level digital political satire and caricature, but over the months the account ran, it became much more. By the end, the stream resembled an epic, allusive ode to the city of Chicago itself, yearning and lyrical.

From The Atlantic (2/28/11)

We are thrilled to have Dan Sinker join us this fall for the 22nd Annual Chicago Humanities Festival. Not only has he created one of the most memorable internet memes, but he’s at the forefront of using new media as a literary art form. He’s currently devoting his creative energies to CellStories.com, a free service that broadcasts short stories straight to your mobile device. In a year celebrating tech•knowledgē, including Sinker was, in the words of @MayorEmanuel , “*#@+&#$^!”

Check out Dan Sinker on The Colbert Report:

Here are a few of my favorite excerpts from @MayorEmanuel:

RELATED EVENT

Twitterature & @MayorEmanuel

Harold Washington Library Center - Cindy Pritzker Auditorium : Nov.13, 3:30 PM

Claud Monet, Iris

 
Renoir, Two Sisters

 
Tuymans, Soldier

Then, we sat down to talk ideas. Stu and I had come to the Art Institute to explore the possibility of organizing a CHF lecture on some of the amazing work being done in the area of conservation science. We had seen some of the results of the department’s research in such shows as Seurat and the Making of “La Grande Jatte” (2004) and Mattise: Radical Invention, 1913-1917 (2010). And we had a hunch that there might be other incredible stories lurking among the x-ray photographs and old color palates. That’s when Frank introduced us to Francesca Casadio.

Francesca Casadio

Francesca is a chemist who serves as the senior conservation scientist at the Art Institute. But as I was listening to her astonishing tales of chasing ancient pigments across the globe and running microscopic residues through the latest material science machinery, it became clear that I was in the presence of a veritable art detective. Just like Steppenwolf’s William Peterson on CSI, Francesca was in the business of high-end forensics. The only difference was her starting point: a great painting rather than a corpse.

William Peterson on CSI

Francesca’s latest victim (ahem, research object) is one of the Art Institute’s great treasures, Picasso’s Red Armchair. Turns out, the 1931 painting of his mistress and muse Marie-Thérèse Walter is something of an enigma, especially in regard to the paint Picasso used to create the image. That purple background in particular has given scholars fits, suggesting to some that Picasso might have been the artist who first introduced house paint into the rarified world of fine arts. For art historians, it’s a crucial question, both for the interpretation of Picasso’s work itself and in regard to his place in the development of the later 20th-century’s radical art approaches.

The Red Armchair

Enter the intrepid Francesca and her amazing art machines. In a mind-bending feat of global sleuthing, she tracked down Picasso’s paints, chasing them from the south of France to eBay and back to her lab. The spoils were right there for us to see, from early 20th-century advertising brochures to 1930s paint samples. But the real delight was to hear Francesca tell it all. Having tackled one of art history’s great questions, she related the thrill of the hunt and the triumph of discovery in the most vivid terms.

Pablo Picasso

Stu and I asked Francesca on the spot to bring her story to the CHF, and she agreed immediately. We couldn’t be more thrilled that our audience will get to share in the amazing experience we had at the Art Institute and hear from one of the true stars of Chicago’s cultural scene.       

RELATED EVENT

CSI: Picasso

Chicago Cultural Center - Claudia Cassidy Theater: Nov. 6, 12:00 PM

We are in the midst of organizing a Humanities Festival on “Technology” – and there will be much discussion about the latest gadgets, from Kindles to iPads. Princeton’s Anthony Grafton, one of the world’s leading scholars on the history of the book, will even pose the question of their possible obsolescence. Who knows? In ten years, we may have nothing but electronic books. Until that happens, though, I, myself, will remain a traditionalist. I just love the real thing – the typeface under my fingers, the smell when leafing through the pages, and the sheer tactile sensation of holding the object of my affection.

So no electronic device on my nightstand (save for the TV’s remote control). Instead, there are piles of books that I just read, am in the middle of reading, or have every intention of reading soon. Yes, I’m one of those people who reads too many books at a single time. So here it goes:

Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century & Listen to This

I am a huge fan of Alex Ross, the classical music critic of The New Yorker. Writing about music is famously like dancing about architecture. But somehow, Ross pulls off the John Hancock Waltz. In The Rest is Noise, he takes his reader on an amazing journey across the musical revolutions of the last century, taking the non-specialist right into the heart of musicological debate. Listen to This is a great companion volume, a compilation of pieces from The New Yorker that range from the enduring fascination of Verdi’s operas to the allure of Radiohead. I’m savoring these books – every chapter is a treat, and I don’t want them to run out too fast.

Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ‘70s

I’m rather fond of a well-written memoir, especially if I have a thing for the particular period. The 1960s and 70s have long fascinated me, in part, I suppose, because I have some faint memories (I was born in 1971), but ultimately experience it as history rather than memory. Some of the books I have read recently on the period are Patti Smith’s magical Just Kids which recounts her life with Robert Mapplethorpe and Anne Roiphe’s Art and Madness. Edmund White has been a favorite of mine ever since States of Desire: Travels in Gay America awakened me to the world when I was in college.

Terry Castle, The Professor: A Sentimental Education

Also a memoir of sorts, but of a decidedly different kind, is Terry Castle’s The Professor. Castle, who is a professor of English at Stanford, is a literary critic by training. But the verve of her prose is that of a creative writer, astonishingly innovative and formally playful all at the same time. Several of the pieces recall Castle’s life in academia (another favorite topic of mine – surprise, surprise), pouring acerbic wit on the strange rituals of scholarship and exploring what they do to our inner lives. But the absolute highlight is “Desperately Seeking Susan,” a stunning piece on Susan Sontag.

Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

Staying with the academic world, I am currently reading Sam Lipsyte’s novel The Ask, a relentlessly unsentimental story of a development officer at a college in New York (Lipsyte just calls it “Mediocre University”). Much like Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, another unsentimental look at academic life, Lipsyte says a lot that hits close to home.  But the discomfort of recognition is part of the appeal.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

A few weeks ago, we were talking at the CHF office about what we are currently reading. When I mentioned The Ask and my general interest in novels set in the academic world, my colleague Corrina Lesser said that I absolutely had to read Nabokov’s Pnin about a professor of Russian at an American college. I went out and bought it that day – but I have yet to get to it. I can’t wait, though.

Grant Achatz, Life, on the Line: A Chef’s Story of Chasing Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat

Another book that is as yet untouched is Grant Achatz’s memoir. This purchase was inspired by a truly memorable birthday dinner at Alinea, which culminated in a dessert the chef himself orchestrated on our table and involving about 25 different things we were supposed to scoop up right from the table cloth. It was surreal, but much in the way a lot of contemporary art is surreal, pushing boundaries and risking presciousness and absurdity. I love that kind of stuff. And when I saw Achatz’s book at Unabridged, the fabulous independent bookstore right around my corner, I couldn’t resist – much like Achatz’s desserts.

To answer in order – a flintknapper is a person who makes tools through the process of lithic reduction, with is a fancy way of saying that they use stones to chip away on other stones in order to create flat surfaces and sharp edges.

Yes, that’s right. We are talking about the archaic tools built by our ancestors thousands of years ago – and that answers the second question. In a festival devoted to the place of technology in the human experience, we decided to start at the very beginning, with the most basic technology humans invented to gain dominion over the world around them.

But we didn’t just go out and get any flintknapper. We got John Shea, one of the world’s leading paleoanthropologists and a regular talking head on such programs as Nova and Alan Alda’s Human Spark. John, a professor at Stony Brook University, is among the world’s foremost experts on the evolution of human behavior, with a particular interest in the interplay of early technology and human development.

Making stone tools is thus part of his scholarly practice and something he started while still a graduate student at Harvard when, the lore goes, he used them to hunt for Cambridge wildlife. More generally, he uses the insights he gains from the experimental manufacture of stone tools to make inferences about their use during the Pleistocene area. His work, in others words, offers us a window into the very beginnings of technology.

We really wanted John to take part in the CHF; and we were delighted when he accepted our invitation. At the Festival, John will give a lecture/demonstration on flintknapping and what it can tell us about the essence of the human experience. It’s the kind of event we love to do at the CHF – and who knows, maybe some of our audience will be inspired to take up flintknapping themselves.

John, for his part, is really looking forward to his big Chicago debut. When I mentioned that the Festival pays its presenters a small honorarium, he just e-mailed back, “Getting paid to make stone tools...in ‘Caveman Heaven’ our Paleolithic ancestors are laughing.”

RELATED EVENT

Flint: Sharpening Stones at the Dawn of Technology

Chicago Cultural Center - Claudia Cassidy Theater: Nov. 13, 11:00 AM

Week 1

—Monday, May 2: Hanging lights for Baobab from the catwalk above the stage at the Barber Theater. So great to get out from behind my desk and wield a socket wrench with the techies!

—Tuesday morning, May 3: Being part of the full house as Baobab opens the Festival! We're off and running!

—Tuesday evening, May 3: Watching a group of about 20 kids take to the stage for our invited dress rehearsal of Kindur. None of us quite knew how the sheep-herding was going to work until we saw it. And it was truly delightful.

—Wednesday, May 4: Doing jumping jacks with the fifth graders from Crown School as they waited outside the MCA in the cold to see the first school-show of Kindur. After that, I had them in the palm of my hand!