The generic city is a city without names. The great city, on the other hand, is a collections of names. London is not just “London.” It is also Big Ben and Trafalgar Square and the Shard.
Many of Chicago’s names are buildings named for corporations: The Sears Tower, the Wrigley Building, the Tribune Tower, the John Hancock Center. Many of these names are being replaced or they are being removed from their original position in the production of meaning. In the middle of the 2008-09 real estate crisis the Sears Tower became the Willis Tower. Soon the Tribune Tower will no longer contain the Chicago Tribune newsroom. Even though no newspapers will be produced there, the building will still be called the Tribune Tower because brand names have become commodities in their own right.
Now the John Hancock Center will lose its name. The John Hancock company, no longer an independent entity, has asked that its name be removed from the tower, years after vacating it. The tower’s identity will revert to its position on the grid and assume the name 875 North Michigan Avenue. You will look at the building but you are prohibited from saying its original name. This may seem odd considering how much effort corporations give to insert their brands into our speech. Yet the prohibition against its proper name is really another example of how corporations try to own language.
The tower’s anonymity may be temporary. The Hearn Company, which owns the office and parking parts of the building—the visual unity of the building as a single property is an illusion—is actively seeking an “important identity” for the tower, as if it were a newly divorced woman. The new identity may come from a local corporation. More likely, it will come from nowhere, like the Willis company.
After the tower receives its new name, no doubt many people will continue to use the old John Hancock name, partly out of habit, partly from reluctance to give up a piece of Chicago history, and partly from resistance to becoming a shill for a brand.
After dinner we drove the short distance from Urban Belly to the United Center for the Arcade Fire concert.
First I should say that my wife and I are not regular concert attendees. We had conceded that form of entertainment to the young. We didn’t want to appear to be middle-aged adults trying to be cool by attending a concert by a band that had performed at Lollapalooza last summer. History works one way in popular music. Vinyl records may be cool to the young, but that doesn't mean that cool extends to people who grew up with vinyl. Past musical styles regularly serve as source material for new music, but audiences are not expected to be so free-ranging in their tastes. More freedom is given to objects than to subjects—a cultural condition of our time.
As it turned out, however, we were far from the oldest people in attendance that night. Some people even brought their children, opening up the horizon of age. Why not teach children how to listen to music? If you don’t, the culture industry will do it for you.
The opening act that night was The Breeders, a band from Dayton, Ohio, my wife’s home town. The band had its creative and popular peak in the 1990’s when they were known for their restless approach to the pop-inflected music of the time. They performed perched on the very edge of the stage, crowded out by the headliner’s equipment. The space was so crowded that when Sarah Nuefeld, Arcade Fire’s violinist, joined them onstage for one song, Kelley Deal had to play her guitar crouched miserably against an amplifier.
The Breeders seemed anxious and overwhelmed by the space. Either self-consciousness at being literally and figuratively on the fringes of rock stardom or simply because she had a cold, Kim Deal, the lead singer, made several awkward attempts to connect to the crowd. “Are you doing okay?” She asked after every song, as if she expected them to wander off at any minute to the vendors selling Arcade Fire tee shirts in the concourses. They played a forty-five minute set before announcing, with evident relief, that this was their last show with Arcade Fire.
Black-clad stage hands moved in sweep away the Breeders' equipment and to construct the spell that would be Arcade Fire's Everything Now live show. As they worked images from the album's controlling metaphor flashed on the screens. The United Center is a hockey and basketball arena, so it offers a lot of pixels for information and promotion. The arena's monitors were busy with phony commercials, currency symbols and other images from an imaginary consumer culture--perhaps North Korea's a few years after the fall of the Kim regime. The question, of course, arose: Where to place Arcade Fire in this image flow? Inside it? Beside it? Trying to escape from it?
A simpler and easier to read metaphor was taking shape on the arena floor. The stage hands were setting up a boxing ring in the center. The stagecraft was a conceit to transport the band members through the crowd to the stage. The band was introduced like boxers (“Weighing in collectively at two thousand one hundred pounds.”) and once on stage, they pulled off their robes. (A few songs into the set, the stage hands discreetly ripped the ropes away, dematerializing the boxing ring metaphor.) The band opened with the title song and thematic centerpiece of their new album. Before settling into the music, I wanted to capture the freshness of the spectacle with a video.
The Breeders had constructed an audience in their own anxious image ("Are you doing okay?"), and so Arcade Fire constructed their audience as a collective that gazed upon itself as much as the band.
The Breeders dressed like the audience in the United Center--blue jeans and ugly sweaters. Unlike rappers, who generally embrace theatricality, alternative rock band members prefer illegible styles, rarely straying far from the stylistic template of the record store clerk. Rock bands don’t have foundational myths any more (“four lads from Liverpool”). Instead, they have genealogies of working relationships. The Breeders started as a side project for Kim Deal, who played for the Pixies. Rock musicians choose anonymity because they may find themselves in another band at any time.
Arcade Fire has had some lineup changes, but they present themselves as a collective. Their sound is de-centered, with no instrument dominating over the others. They avoid solos. For the Everything Now tour the stage was designed so that the musicians were distributed evenly around the stage so that each band member staged their own more or less self-contained performance.
Like any collective, Arcade Fire has a lot of resources, but in the vastness of the arena there was a disconnect between sound and presence. Arcade Fire is known for their diverse instrumentation, but, in the United Center at least, the band’s music came across as an undifferentiated wall of sound. Sounds from individual instruments—a short melodic line here, an exotic instrument there—burbled up from the mix, then disappeared back into it. The band’s presentation strategy meant that Win Butler didn’t function as a normal front man, as the visual and sonic focal points of the band. He can be an expressive singer in the studio, but on stage his vocals were another element in the band’s wall of sound. He played mostly to a quarter of the audience, stepping onto a pair of amplifiers on the southwest side of the stage, rooted in place by the prolixity of the lyrics and the fragility of the stage conception. From where we were sitting his presence had to be tracked by his wide-brimmed hat and orange boots.
In their best songs Arcade Fire have found room in their big sound for intimacy. “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels),” from Funeral, their first album, evokes a shared experience that’s clearly adolescent while trying to imagine the forms of adult experience. It begins with a lovers’ escape fantasy.
You climb out the chimney, And meet me in the middle, the middle of the town. And since there's no one else around, We let our hair grow long, And forget all we used to know.
Then the song worms its way back to home and an unexpected (for a rock song) place.
But sometimes, we remember our bedrooms, And our parents' bedrooms, And the bedrooms of our friends. Then we think of our parents, Well what ever happened to them?!
By their most recent album, however, the singer, now an isolated"I," restages a return home. What had been an imaginative space in their first album is now filled with commodities. Instead of an escape into (and from) possibility, "Everything Now" is empty repetition.
Every inch of road's got a sign And every boy uses the same line I pledge allegiance to everything now Every song that I've ever heard Is playing at the same time, it's absurd
A few verses later we find out what happened to the parents in “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)."
Every ancient road's got a town Daddy, how come you're never around? I miss you, like everything now Mama, leave the food on the stove Leave your car in the middle of the road This happy family with everything now
This constricted, despairing vision rests within a studio production drawing extensively from disco and new wave--musical forms dedicated to the pleasures of repetition. Those forms are logical choices for the band's big sounds, but they're an uneasy fit with the band's thematic obsessions. Every time they performed a song from their latest album the disco balls would drop from the ceiling, visually reducing the size of the United Center while referencing the dance hall experience of being a single body in a crowd.
Arcade Fire has been roundly criticized for Everything Now album and tour, suggesting that the band embraces the cynicism of the larger culture. It doesn't help that arcadefire.com now redirects to everythingnow.com.
But for me and my wife, the Arcade Fire concert in the United Center was both pleasurable and familiar. In other words, it was rock and roll. We had seen this show many times before: a rock band with a deep emotional connection to its audience daring to venture into new artistic territory only to find themselves in a land of dead signifiers. Win Butler's curled-lip delivery of the lyrics in the "Everything Now" video enacts the semiological dead end not just of the band's music, but rock in general.
For all its promise of escape and rebellion, rock music has long been about regression and return. Arcade Fire has understood this from the beginning. Their debut album was called Funeral and it featured not one but three songs called "Neighborhood." Despite the motor revving of "Born to Run," Bruce Springsteen has never left New Jersey. Tom Petty's whole career was a shuttle between LA and Gainesville, FL. Bob Dylan moved on stylistically a few times in his career, but the transitions weren't always smooth, and for a long time he was just as prickly and remote as Win Butler is now. The only rock star who ever successfully dropped one style for another was David Bowie. He pulled off multiple changes because he was a solo act and therefore more in control of himself as a brand. He also dared to fully embrace even the silliest of his personas, i.e., Ziggy Stardust. But his real secret was that he never wore blue jeans, never anchoring himself even for a moment in rock authenticity.
When the ringside handlers reappeared to escort Arcade Fire from their stage at the end of the show, my wife and I, clad in blue jeans, left the arena before the encore. We had enjoyed every moment of the show and we had had exactly enough. We found our car and drove home.
One night not long ago my wife and I attended an Arcade Fire concert at the United Center in the West Loop neighborhood of Chicago. I will have more on the concert itself in a separate post. Today I want to take a look around the restaurant at which my wife and I met for dinner before the concert.
We chose a restaurant near the United Center in a former warehouse district on Randolph Street in the West Loop. The bars and restaurants along this street are mostly large establishments, many of them located in converted warehouses and factories. Urban Belly, the place at which we agreed to meet for dinner, was the quick service side of a restaurant with the rather inscrutable name of BellyQ, as if there is a species of hunger native to the city.
Urban Belly offers a “tour of the world” consisting of “the radically delicious and the curiously familiar.” The “delicious” part of the equation rests in the Asian dishes on the menu, centered around dumplings and bowls, while “familiar” refers to the borrowing of service concepts of casual fast food chains like Chipotle. To avoid Chipotle’s mass-market cultural appropriation, Urban Belly’s website features a narrative of its chef, Bill Kim.
Kim’s story is a quintessentially American one that dives into the melting pot of cultures and experiences to create an identity that is uniquely his own. He started urbanbelly in 2008 to bring together his wide-ranging passions. Asian + American. Fine-dining techniques + neighborhood comfort. Classic dishes + joyous creativity.
The sudden hastening of language toward the end of the narrative, with text-like plus signs reconciling opposites, hints at a structure of feeling experienced by young urbanites. It is globalist, hybrid, and aspirational, but also anxious to move on to the next experience. The general vibe is cool and a little harassed.
The structure of feeling hinted at on the website is expressed most fully in the dining area of Urban Belly. The quick-service Urban Belly space is differentiated by a transparent partition from the full-service BellyQ, which has conventional booths and four-place tables. The Urban Belly space was dimly-lit, with exposed brick and concrete floors. You sat at long, shared tables fashioned from massive pieces of wood-like material. You sat on heavy wooden blocks of similarly indeterminate manufacture. They weren’t chairs. They weren’t stools. The dining area was arranged like a grade-school cafeteria situated in a gymnasium—exertion and replenishment in the same place. Like a cafeteria, the Urban Belly space is convivial but the clock is ticking. There’s no escape from the schedule.
It was a chilly night, the first truly cold night of the season. We ate pork and cilantro dumplings, ramen and pho using disposable wooden chopsticks. The soups were warming and the dim lights soothing. Still, the experience didn’t feel very intimate, and not just because two men were sitting on the not-quite stools next to us. The open spaces, high ceilings and concrete floors made it seem like customers were being warehoused themselves. Just like a grade school cafeteria will revert back to a gymnasium after lunch, after dinner Urban Belly looks like it’s designed to be an easy-to-clean industrial space. I don't think they actually do this, but the space could have been hosed down every night after closing.
The Wicker Park Urban Belly is actually in a residential neighborhood, but on Randolph Street you don’t disappear into the fabric of a neighborhood. It’s a warehouse district, close to highways and rail lines. The few residences in the area are also carved out of industrial spaces. After dinner in the West Loop you get into your car or an Uber and head someplace else. Despite its urban trappings, the West Loop is a transactional space like any commercial strip in the suburbs.
We walked around the corner in the biting wind to our car to hurry to the United Center for the concert. More on that here.
Filmmaker and art historian Judith Wechsler has made a beautiful film about Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, entitled, appropriately enough, The Passages of Walter Benjamin. The film was completed in 2014, but it's still making the rounds, which is good to know.
It situates the Arcades Project in the political and artistic context of the 1920's and 1930's, when Benjamin was actively working on the project. In this trailer, for example, you can see segments from Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927). The story Wechsler tells will be familiar to Benjamin scholars, but the presentation is evocative and the experts interviewed in the film--Howard Eiland, Susan Buck-Morss, Sigrid Weigel and others--are top-notch.
The Passages of Walter Benjamin isn't in general release, but it pops up here and there, most recently at Duke University. You can get the exhibition schedule and the DVD by contacting Wechsler directly.
From Michael Chabon's open letter to "our fellow Jews, in the United States, in Israel, and around the world."
The President has no filter, no self-control, you have told yourself. If he were an anti-Semite — a Nazi sympathizer, a friend of the Jew-hating Klan — we would know about it, by now. By now, he would surely have told us.
Yesterday, in a long and ragged off-the-cuff address to the press corps, President Trump told us.
Chabon lists a number of alibis Jews have created for Donald Trump--in effect, speaking for Trump, or rather around him, in order to create their own president. Every Trump supported I've ever talked to has done something very similar to what Chabon describes. It has seemed to me that support for Donald Trump necessitates some form of magical thinking that some sort of different Trump will emerge when he's placed in the context of government. "He's not really X; he is really (or will become) Y." Charlottesville revealed the possibility that only one group will ever see their magical thinking become real: the alt-right, the rag-tag, inchoate band of outsiders who seem to reflect Trump inner core of Id-fueled resentments.
Chabon urges his fellow Jews to realize the magical thinking about Trump wasn't limited to the public/real self dichotomy people have assigned to Trump. An even more dangerous part of the magical thinking is the dynamic Martin Niemöller first pointed out in regard to Hitler. The malevolence can't be contained. Chabon writes,
First he went after immigrants, the poor, Muslims, trans people and people of color, and you did nothing. You contributed to his campaign, you voted for him. You accepted positions on his staff and his councils. You entered into negotiations, cut deals, made contracts with him and his government.
Now he’s coming after you.
At this moment Chabon is speaking specifically to Steven Mnuchin, Gary Cohn, Sheldon Adelson and others who have offered material support to Trump. One could add, of course, a long list of Republicans of all stripes to this list. Despite the "open" letter, Chabon is using insider language to appeal to insiders. Toward the end of his letter Chabon switches from address a public who speaks to a demand to a small group of people who can act. Mnuchin and Cohn should resign. Adelson should stop donating money. The rest of us trapped in language, excluded from the sphere of political action, must be content with the same magical thinking that got Trump elected in the first place. Responsible men and women will enforce democratic norms to forge a reasonable Trump and contain the malevolence.
The scariest thing is this may be our best chance.
I got a chance to attend the preview of the Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats Its Own Legexhibit at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. All I had known about him was that he collaborated with Kanye West and Louis Vuitton to create high-concept branding. It turns out that these branding projects were only a relatively brief phase in his career, albeit one in which his talents coalesced in perhaps their most perfect form. I was prepared to see him as a sort of Japanese version of Jeff Koons, but to my eye, Murakami's "And Then, And Then And Then And Then And Then (Red)," (1996–97, below), created during the peak of his branding phase, is his most perfectly realized work of art.
Murakami started his career painting gloomy meditations on ecological disaster. He was headed to a career as a minor artist, a Japanese version of Anselm Kiefer but without the grandeur. Then, in the story told in the MCA exhibit, one day Murakami decided he wanted to be an anime artist, so he created a character called Mr. Dob. To clear a space for the character Murakami swept away his landscapes of doom and painted a pure blue field onto which Mr. Dob appears in a off center, a tiny fraction of the frame, smiling timidly. There's a whole gallery in the MCA exhibit devoted to these transitional paintings. They're completely unlike anything that came before them. Compare an early painting at left with one of Mr. Dob's first appearances on the right.
A lot of retrospectives in art museums try to document transitional moments in artists' careers. I don't recall ever seeing such direct evidence of a painter morphing into an entirely different artist. I'm not exaggerating when I say it's exciting to watch.
Once he discovered anime and Louis Vuitton, his paintings and sculptures became eye-catching without necessarily being accessible. We see Mr. Dob evolve from a tiny, fragile figure in a vast background into a landscape himself, a framework onto which Murakami maps out the imagery he had developed during his mid-career branding phase. In "Tan Tan Bo Puking--a.k.a. Gero Tan" (2002) branding reaches its logical end as grotesque myth-making. Nevertheless, the painting has a kind of beauty. Murakami's best work creates a tension between the beauty of its colors and the ugliness of its images.
That tension, however, dissipates in Murakami's twenty-first century work. His canvases have grown ever larger, some taking up an entire gallery wall. I found it hard to see these larger canvases as a sign of artistic growth. It's almost as if Murakami is looking for something new to paint and if he expands his canvases he may find it someplace. While there's a lot to look at in these late Murakami canvases, like smiling daisies sprouting from the bottom of the frame, the wall-eyed monsters command one's attention the most. We're told these figures represent spiritual enlightenment, but how? Without access to the texts Murakami is working with, it's hard to tell, and the MCA provides only cursory information. The viewer is left to contemplate a disconcerting aesthetic--part Hieronymus Bosch, part Hello Kitty, part mad doodler.
Even the title of the exhibition, The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg, suggests there's an artistic crisis just around the corner, if Murakami hasn't already fallen into one. The most recent work in the exhibit, some of it created especially for it, seems unfocused, although that's most likely because the earlier work was more selectively curated. But even the images in this gallery demand your attention. Some retrospectives allow you to gloss over some artworks to get to the next development. Not Takashi Murakami--every image is arresting.
One can disapprove of Murakami's dalliance with corporate branding. The cover he designed for Kanye West's Graduation album is cool, but West is an ambiguous figure in popular culture. Lots of contemporary artists mix high and low cultures, East and West--in this sense Murakami isn't that special. Some of his daisy paintings look like they belong more on an iPhone case than a museum wall. Yet one comes away seeing Murakami's art as more than the sum of its parts. You should go to the MCA retrospective to see an artist evolve at a time when art has become a big business and not just simply the tool of it.
Parallax Sounds, a film I wrote about in this space in 2011, is now available for streaming. The film is a documentary about the post-rock movement in Chicago during the 1990s. Director Augusto Contento has a unique visual style, heavy on tracking shots. Parallax Sounds is as much about Chicago as it is about the musical movement. Although post-rock petered out around the turn of the century, but looking at the current state of rock music--stuck in place, ceding all creative energies to rap--it's a movement worth looking at again.
New World Design Ltd., a Chicago design company, has hatched a plan to have giant inflatable pigs hover beside Trump Tower in Chicago, hitting Trump right where it hurts the most--his brand. A couple of summers ago Trump plastered his name on the façade of his namesake tower, defacing a handsome building and irritating nearly every citizen of the city. In retrospect, it was a harbinger of things to come.
Anyway, the design firm is still working out the details of the installation, which is planned to be only for one day. It would be brilliant if the pigs could be permanent, but the Chicago River is busy at that point, so it's unlikely the city, despite its animus toward the president, will permit a barge to disrupt boat traffic for very long. The design inspiration comes from the concert props for Pink Floyd's Animals tour, which came to Chicago in 1977.
Kristóf Deák’s Singwon the 2017 Academy Award for a live-action short film--remember? Ivan Krastev, a New York Times reporter covering central Europe, remembers it, and suggests if you want to understand the protests in the streets of central Europe, you should watch the film. It tells the story of an elaborate ruse in the guise of a children's choir. To win a chance to travel to Sweden, the choir director only allows a chosen few choir members to sing; the rest simply mouth along with the lyrics. The plot, Krastev says, is an allegory for how Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban contrives to erode democratic norms in his country. Orban doesn't bother punishing his media opponents. Instead, he directs government funds to media outlets who support him; leaving any media outlet that doesn't completely subscribe to the government's line to fend for itself in an uncertain media marketplace. Krastev quotes a Hungarian who neatly sums up the modern despot's strategy for expanding power in a democratic society: "As one Hungarian recently told David Frum of The Atlantic, 'The benefit of controlling a modern state is less the power to persecute the innocent, more the power to protect the guilty.'”
This is my response to the first assignment in the Architectural Imagination course I'm taking online from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The assignment is to compare and contrast two buildings, which are unnamed in the assignment but will be recognizable as Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye and Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House.
Pay attention to features such as: how the buildings meet the ground and sky; the nature of the "wrapper" or enclosing envelope (does it seem thick or thin, heavy or light, porous or solid?); how light and shade are used; and how openings, such as windows and doors, are organized. Discuss how masses and volumes are composed.
Here is my response:
The most striking point of comparison between the two buildings is their relationship to the ground. The second image, Wright's Robie house, rests on a stone base which levels out the uneven ground below it. The strong horizontal orientation of the stone base is repeated in the stone trim demarcating the first three levels of the house before giving way to shingled roofs. The land and the sky meet in the structure of the house itself. The massive chimney in the center of the Robie house further anchors the house to the land, forming a core around which the domestic life of the house is organized. The heavy brick and stone wrapping envelopes the house, protecting its inhabitants from the elements.
The horizontal quality of the Robie house invokes the wide-open prairies of the Midwest, yet the site itself is constricted by urban space closer to the spectacle of the 1892 Columbian Exposition than the open plains of Illinois. The contextual space is purely imaginary.
Similarly, the Corbusier house is also located in an imaginary contextual space within a very real urban setting. However, the space itself is imagined very differently. Wright used stone and brick to insulate his home from its urban setting. Le Corbusier extends the geometry of the Villa Savoye to the edges of the visible landscape. The white structure rests on thin steel columns on a wide plain of grass. The house doesn't rest on the land so much as it exists in a purely mathematical space. It is a classicism of Pythagorean geometry.
The Robe house is balanced, but the Villa Savoye is almost perfectly symmetrical. Both houses have long expanses of narrow windows. Le Corbusier places his windows on the surface of the wrapper itself. He also uses Wright's technique of using mass to center his structure. However, like most everything else about the Villa Savoye, the circular tower is so abstracted it's hard discern its exact function. The interior space seems partitioned yet lacking the traditional divisions between intimate and public space in a house--between the bedrooms and the dining room, for example.
The final point of comparison between the two structures is an odd one: neither house has a visible door. The most social element of domestic architecture is invisible. From where does a family greet visitors? I’ve entered the Robie house, so I know it has a door. When approaching a stranger’s house, the door is the first visual feature upon which you focus. Wright makes you search for the door. Le Corbusier doesn’t even provide a walkway from the street. From the image provided, the home’s owners must somehow materialize inside the house, emerging only to mow the lawn.
Both houses are autonomous structures. They pay minimal attention to the social worlds of their environments. The landscape has only three parts: land, sky, and flat plain. With its regular column widths, long expanses of glass, and flat white wrapping, the Villa Savoye is the product of a machine age. The Robie house is artisanal, all brick, stone and shingle. Despite the differences in building materials, both houses are abstractions of a particular mode of making things.
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