Icehendge? Chicago has a new Frank Gehry, and it's Like Nothing You've Seen

click images for larger view (recommended)

We got a tip from a reader to check out what was going in the lobby of the Inland Steel Building, the 1957 jewelbox skyscraper at Dearborn and Monroe designed (separately) by Walter Netsch and Bruce Graham of SOM.  She wasn't exactly thrilled, and was wondering if we should write a complaint to architect Frank Gehry, who admired the building so much he became part of a consortium of new owners in 2005, and retains a 5% ownership stake.

What was going on in the lobby was the installation, earlier this month, of a new security desk.   Not normally a subject for controversy, except that this was no catalog item from Office Depot, but a striking assemblage of elements of glass one Facebook observer has dubbed ‘Icehendge’.

And I don't think there'd be much point in complaining to Frank Gehry, because, I've been told, he designed it.  From what I've heard, it's intended as a visual a counterpoint to Richard Lippold's Radiant I, commissioned for the building in 1957 by Inland Steel VP and noted art collector Leigh Block.  

Radiant I's relationship with the building's lobby is original and integral.  According to a 1963 New Yorker profile by Calvin Thompkins, early in the design process, Block asked Lippold to tell him what he needed.

Lippold said he would like more space, and, to his amazement, the builders agreed on the spot to push the lobby wall back eight feet . . .‘Radiant I’ is a thirteen-by-fifteen-by-twenty-four foot construction of gold, stainless steel, and enameled copper set over a rectangular reflecting pool, and in the opinion of Lippold, Inland Steel, and nearly everyone else it is a complete success; it convinced him that he could do his best work in collaboration . . . 

Lippold wrote in a magazine article that to have that collaboration to be a success, the artist must “attach his work so tightly to the building, in similarity of proportion, material, and technique, that try as he might, the user cannot pry it loose [visually] and thus is forced to move though the sculpture or the painting, to the building, and, of course, back down through it again to himself . . . The architect's responsibility in this is simply to allow the artist to achieve this double rapport.”

Radiant I definitely meets this goal.  It both reflects and is reflected in the polished stone of the walls and floor.  A small drop ceiling hovers above it as if kept aloft by the sculpture's energy field, which seems to radiate out beyond the physical object to take in the farthest reaches of the lobby.

The Frank Gehry reception desk, on the other hand, is a study in contrast and assimilation.  It's placed at the far end away from the Lippold, along the south window wall and entrance doors.

seriously - click the images to see a larger view

It was lovingly fabricated by the craftsmen of the John Lewis Glass Studio of Oakland, California.  You can check out a fantastic gallery of photographs of the work being assembled, shipped, and placed on the John Lewis Facebook page.  (Their next Chicago job is renovating the brick at Crown Fountain in Millennium Park) The 14,000-pound work in the Inland Steel  lobby is made of emerald-colored glass, cut down from 6-foot-high blocks into Gehry's famously crumpled forms, arranged as a sculptural work area and enclosure for the security guard, whose video monitors look painfully, plainfully outshone.  Especially at night, the interior composition of the glass refracts color and light like a finely-cut gem.

I'm sure - Gehry or no Gehry - the installation will be controversial,  but because of the way the reception desk is set against the perimeter, you can still easily find views into the lobby that pretty much bypass Gehry's work and let you enjoy the original composition.  (And without that huge  purple metallic artwork that used to set the back wall of the elevator lobby aglow.)

The Inland Steel is in the midst of a major renovation to bring its functionality up to current standards, but as an officially designated Chicago Landmark, the original feel of the design, right down to the original single-pane windows, has had to be scrupulously maintained.  It's important to remember that the Inland Steel, one of the glories of Chicago Architecture, was in its day a gloriously radical statement, and that statement is being preserved and restored.

As an autonomous object, the Gehry reception desk is an intriguing work. Inserted into the relentlessly angular grid of the Inland Steel Building and its lobby, it's also a subtly subversive one, providing a small explosion of the 21st century into the late 1950's vision of Netsch, Graham and Lippold.  While not changing their vision in any way, it keeps it from being embalmed as a museum piece.  It's like the young cat introduced into a household dominated by a beloved aging feline - the relationship is often uneasy, but it invigorates both.  Even as we're left to admire how things once were at a snapshot point of architectural history, the Gehry reminds us how things have changed, as it places past and present in dialectic tension.

And, of course, it's reversible.  It's furniture, not structure, and if it ages badly, it can be carted off, respectfully, long after Frank's gone.  My sneaking suspicion, however, is that once we get used to it, it will become one of those funky objects beloved by the Chicago public.

What do you think?

Creation and the Politics of Gender: Modernism's Messengers - the Art of Alfonso and Margaret Iannelli

 Alfonso and Margaret Iannelli -click images for larger view

The new show at the Chicago Cultural Center, Modernism's Messengers: The Art of Alfonso and Margaret Iannelli, echoes two current controversies - immigration and gender in artistic partnerships - in telling a fascinating story with two compelling, parallel hooks: rediscovering the work of sculptor and artist Alfonso Iannelli, and uncovering the vital, often inseparable role that his wife, Margaret Iannelli, played in its creation.

To begin, the story of Alfonso Iannelli is a portrait of the American immigrant experience.  Late in the 19th century, his shoemaker father had left Andretta, Italy to seek his fortune in the United States, and a few years later was secure enough to bring over the rest of the family, including ten-year-old Alfonso.  Soon, Alfonso was studying art in New York, and in 1906 he became an apprentice to Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor who would later go on to create Mount Rushmore.

(click to watch on YouTube in a larger window)

According to the Tim Samuelson, Chicago's official Cultural Historian and the curator of the exhibition, young Alfonso was ripe for assimilating Borglum's philosophy, which was all “about the idea that America has to to find its own artistic voice.”

“Iannelli,” says Samuelson, “was very much an advocate of collaboration in all things, that society was full of strong individuals who work together to create a harmonious society.  He believed in the idea of democracy.  I think this all came out of his immigrant experience - the freedom of the individual to create out of himself, but then the ability of the individual to have interactions with like-minded individuals.”

By the time Iannelli decided his future lie in the Great American West and moved to Los Angeles, Margaret Spaulding was already there.  Another transplant from New York - she was born in Mount Vernon in 1893 - Margaret's family settled in L.A. in 1903.  “Even as a teenager,” says Samuelson, ”she was getting every foreign fashion and art magazine that she could. ”  By the time she was 16, she was teaching art, and shortly thereafter had carved out a career as an illustrator for fashion advertisements.  She continued her outside work even as she joined Alfonso's L.A.  studio in 1913.

“Margaret talked,” says Samuelson, “in a breathy voice and the men would be mesmerized by this beautiful blonde, dressed in these stylish clothes and talking about art in a whisper.”

The Iannelli Studios had gotten a commission to do posters - at $5.00 a piece - for the Orpheum vaudeville theater in downtown Los Angeles.

“The earliest posters,” says Samuelson, “were done on tinted cardboard, starting in 1912.  You see how they were made to read as a panel.  They had to crank these out, but they made these studies.  They knew what acts were coming and so they would try to plan to make sure that when they were placed in the cases the posters would relate to each other.”

It was a job ‘perfectly suited to Alfonso Iannelli's desire to put modern art in highly visible public places.  The posters conveyed the spirit and energy of the performers, instead of simple caricatures.’

The posters got the attention of Frank Lloyd Wright's son, John, and in 1914, Alfonso accepted an invitation to come to Chicago to work with Wright on Midway Gardens, at 60th and Cottage Grove.   During the five months he was away, Margaret continued work on the posters, and the designs began to show more of her artistic influence. “ She was looking at Art Nouveau,”, says Samuelson.  “She was looking at Secession.  Especially if you look at the Orpheum posters, there's nothing that's Wrightian in those at all.  If there was an article in The International Studio on Japanese art, she tore it out and she'd file it away.  The whole use of line and negative space, it's very much that.”

Alfonso Iannelli, studies for Midway Garden sprites

Meanwhile, back in Chicago, Alfonso was working with Wright to create what the long-vanished Midway Gardens remains most famous for today - its striking ‘Sprite’ sculptures.  Several of the originals, plus a group of studies, are on display at Modernism's Messengers.  The Sprites are displayed on a raised platform that gives you a good idea of their original relationship to the viewer.

“They were never on the ground,” says Samuelson. They always looked down at you.”

“This one had a mast that came out of the concrete, and cubes of glass, kind of like those light fixtures at Fallingwater, and the light bulbs would stagger up.  They called this one the totem.  In an early description, it's also called the gift-giver, that it's greeting you and bringing you cascading flowers in a vase.  Midway Gardens was an experiment in merging art and culture.  Of course, it quickly went broke.”

The downturn at the start of World War I saw the gardens sold in 1916 to Edelweiss Brewing

Margaret Iannelli
click for larger view

Company, which converted Midway Gardens into a beer garden. “They painted the sculpture.  The gift-giver, instead of looking like she was bringing you flowers, was painted to look like she was bringing you foaming beer steins.”

The changes - and cheapening - gained only a temporary reprieve.  Not even an appearance by the legendary Pavlova could save Midway Gardens from the ravages of Prohibition.  It was demolished in 1929, bankrupting in the process two demolition companies who had underestimated the solidness of the construction, “Wright actually said he was happy to see it go.”

When the work at Midway Gardens was published, Iannelli was appalled to discover that Wright claimed all the credit for the sculptures himself.  A contentious correspondance ensued, resulting in a rupture that precluded any further collaboration.  When Alfonso returned to Los Angeles, however, the Orpheum posters ‘displayed a new aesthetic of geometric complexity deriving from Alfonso's experiences with Frank Lloyd Wright.  Flat geometric areas of solid color predominated the designs, often contrasting with areas of gold and jet black.’  While both Ianelli's embraced strong geometries in their work, that of Alfonso tends to be harder and more abstract.  Margaret's have more of a pulse of life.

On Valentine's Day, 1915, Margaret and Alfonso were married in Santa Ana.  Soon afterward, they moved to Chicago, setting up their studio at the top of Holabird and Roche's Monroe Building on Michigan Avenue.  By the time the Iannelli's, now with two children, moved the studio for a final time, to Park Ridge, Margaret was showing signs of mental illness. 

At times she would erupt into episodes of rage.  Periods of intense productivity alternated with times when she could make nothing at all.  On occasion she would disappear for days.

After a major breakdown in 1923, Margaret was institutionalized, first at a sanitarium in Wisconsin, then on farms in the northwest suburbs of Chicago.  She continued to take on projects, but she never fully recovered, finally being committed to Elgin State Hospital in 1929, where she would remain 38 years - more than half her life.  Her last works were a series of colorful illustrations for the hospital newsletter, painstakingly created by running the pages through the mimeograph once for each color.  The last known issue to include her work was in 1948.  “Details of Margaret's last nineteen years remain sealed in the medical records of the institution.”  She died, two months after breaking her hip, on November 29, 1967.  No one claimed her body.  She was given a pauper's burial in an unmarked grave.

It's uncertain if she even had known of Alfonso's death two years before.

After Margaret was institutionalized, Alfonso began to take on studio assistants, including Edgar Miller, Bruce Goff, and Ruth Blackwell, who would also become his new life companion.  His studio remained active during the 1930's, with a lot of work at the 1933/34 Century of Progress Exhibition. There were also the theaters - the Catlow in Barrington, and Pickwick in Park Ridge- but as the thirties came to a close, work dried up.  (Be sure not to miss the arrow pasted on one of the Cultural Center gallery's high windows, pointing to the view towards Iannelli's last major commission.)

“The irony” says Samuelson, “is he was trying to be the voice of modernism, but to the new voices in modernism - the Institute of Design and Moholy and the movements of the 20th century -Iannelli's work was much too figurative.  They were taking modernism into an entirely another direction.”

“In the end,” Samuelson says, ”there weren't many people seeking him out in the studio, and then suddenly he becomes the spokesperson for the Prairie School.  Instead of people coming to discuss the new trends and the philosophies of modernism and life, almost everyone was coming to talk to him about Frank Lloyd Wright and 1914.”  His last known poster was for an exhibition of the work of Adler and Sullivan at the historic Pilgrim Baptist Church, the former K.A.M Synagogue that burned to the bare walls in a 2006 fire.

When he died in 1965, Iannelli's ashes were buried anonymously in a Park Ridge cemetery.  He became news again in 2011, when his former design studio was threatened with demolition.  It was saved at the last moment when it was purchased by the Kalo Foundation and has now been preserved as The Iannelli Studios Heritage Center.

2013 is a year of discovery for the Iannelli's.  In addition to the show at the Cultural Center, next month will see the publication of Alfonso Iannelli: Modern by Design, a lavishly illustrated monograph by David Jameson.

Samuelson is a master storyteller, and in the Iannelli's, he has a great story to tell.  First, the Americanization of Alfonso - how, even before he came here, he was shaped by American culture, and soaked up its values and reshaped them with his own work.  And then, Margaret's story, which the Pritzker Prize's announcement that it will not redress its slight of Denise Scott Brown makes especially timely.  Samuelson's wall text lays out the story of Alfonso and Margaret in compelling and illuminating detail.  Hints are placed as to who was the dominant designer in certain works, but the observer is also often left to decide for themselves.

There is no question that the backstory of the rediscovery of Margaret and her role in the work of the Iannelli Studio lends a special poignancy to the exhibition.  Ultimately, however, the art must stand for itself, and here, it does.  This would be a great show even if the walls were bare of text.

It's a very sweeping display of many types of work, from graphics to sculpture, architectural renderings and ornament, illustrations, advertisements, furniture and even Iannelli's industrial work, including a patented design for a blender's glass container.

Tim Samuelson and appliances designed by Alfonso Iannelli

I don't want to oversell it.  We're not rediscovering a lost Picasso or Rodin, but as they said of Dvorak, if  the Iannelli's aren't necessarily at the top of the food chain, they are still second-rate artists of the first order.  In itself, their work is pleasurable to encounter.  In fostering an understanding of the history of early 20th-century art and architecture in Chicago and America, Modernism's Messengers: The Art of Alfonso and Margaret Iannelli is deeply rewarding.

Modernism's Messengers: The Art of Alfonso and Margaret Iannelli, in the 2nd floor Chicago Rooms of the Chicago Cultural Center, continues through August 27.

Version Festival, Swiss Futures, Marshall Brown's Urban Imaginary, Armenta Davis, Evanston Places, White City Simulated and more - lots of new stuff for the June Calendar!

Yes, I know it's June 17th, and no, it's not too late to be adding another half dozen great items to the

June Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

This Wednesday, June 19th, Version Festival will be the focus of a gallery walk through the great Spontaneous Interventions exhibition at the Cultural Center, where on Saturday the 29th, there'll be a Scholarly Perspectives panel discussion moderated by Gordon Douglas, with Jeffrey Kidder, David Schalliol and others.

On Tuesday, the 25th, The Swiss-American Business Council will be sponsoring A Swiss View: Urban and the Future of Cities: 5, 10, and 50 years from Now, with Tom Jacobs, Hanno Weber and Susanne Cannon.

Thursday the 27th is bursting with newly added items, beginning with 's Marshall Brown discussion with Geof Oppenheimer on Architecture, Power, and the Urban Imaginary at the Western Exhibitions Gallery, which is currently hosting Brown's show, Center of the World, Chicago.  That same evening, there'll be a book launch at the First Bank and Trust for Evanston 150 Years, 150 Places; while at the Woodson Regional Library, architectural historian Carolyn Armenta Davis will discuss Today's African-American, Afro-European and Africa Architects.

The Museum of Science and Industry marks its 80th birthday with a double-header from Chicago cultural historian Tim Samuelson on Sunday the 23rd.  In the morning, he partners with Lisa M. Snyder of the Urban Simulation Team at UCLA for Exploring the White City, the latest iteration of the UCLA's evolving computer simulation of the 1893 World's Columbia Exposition, this time with an emphasis on Louis Sullivan's polychrome Transportation Building.  

Then in the afternoon, Samuelson teams up with University of Arizona architectural historian Lisa Schrenk for a look at Building a Century of Progress, exploring the often strikingly modernist pavilion and exhibit designs for the 1933-34 Chicago's World Fair.

The MSI events are incredibly pricey - $20-$25.00 atop the museum's minimum $27.00 entry fee - but the White City simulation, especially, is a fascinating project, and these events usually sell out quickly, so be warned.

Already on the schedule is Martin Adolfsson on Suburbia Gone Wild this Tuesday the 19th, and then on to Creating the Pullman Cultural Renaissance, Channel Glass Wall Systems, the Wells Street Bridge Rehabilitation,  the Common Cause of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Frank Lloyd Wright, the new growth industry of Urban Farming in Chicago, the Original Sears Tower, the Illinois Statewide Preservation Conference, and a lot more.

How much more?  Well, check it out for yourself - two dozen great items still to come on the June Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Some Say the World Will End in Fire . . .

click image for larger view (recommended)

How to Build a Flying Staircase

More from the Loews Hotel construction site at 435 North Park Drive. (watch on YouTube for highest res.)

click images for larger view

When they're all done, it will look something like this . . .

rendering courtesy Solomon Cordwell Buenz

More:
435, Cool Even in Daylight

Coolest Construction Site in the City?

Am I Boring You?

Saturday News: What Would You put under Block 37? Crain's opens up the Hole, and Wants to Know

photograph courtesy Crain's Chicago Business

          My money lies under pedway

       My money lies under the mall

      My money lies under the pedway

     Please bring back my money to me

The bad news: the millions the city dumped into a hole below Block 37 isn't coming back.  That's how much was spent on a "superstation" for a $1 billion express service to O'Hare that didn't exist and had no plan for existing, and a crossover to a Red Line that doesn't serve any airport, in probably the most expensive place in Chicago to do it.   After dumping $218 million into the project, the city decided cost overruns were so out of control the only thing to do was just abandon construction and seal up the whole thing. 

The good news:  thanks to Crain's Chicago Business, we now know what our money pit monument looks like.  On Wednesday, Greg Hinz and photographer Stephen Serio (no just handing the reporter an iPhone here) were given the first public access to Mayor Daley's batcave - 472 feet long, 68 feet wide, and an average of 28 feet high.  See all the photo's here.

Block 37 groundbreaking ceremony, 2005

The fun news: as Mel Brooks will tell you, ridicule is often the best revenge for pain, and Crain's is now offering you the chance to put your best sarcasm to good use  . . . 

Calling all architects, designers, urban planners, visionaries! What do you see in that space? Tell us in a paragraph or two, and, because we all know a picture is worth a thousand words, send a rendering, too. 

Best of all, there are no prizes and no money, just a promise that the best ideas will be featured in a subsequent article.   Of course, you could play it straight and come up with useful concepts, but why limit yourself?  Submit your most warped concepts to Crain's via email by next Friday, June 21.

Let me get you started . . .

click image for larger view
photo courtesy Crain's Chicago Business; sheep, not

Block 37 Sheep Monument to Chicago Taxpayers and Voters:  The space will be fitted out to house a large herd of sheep that will save money by replacing the current expense of mowing with grazing at Millennium and other nearby parks.  The sheep's passivity will commemorate the passivity of Chicago voters in electing and re-electing hacks, autocrats and actual criminals.  Waste from the animals, to be sent to the city's urban farms, will represent the oratory of elected officials, while ceremonial shearings will symbolize what gets done to taxpayers.  The resulting wool will be pulled over our eyes.

Update [6/28/13]: Here's Greg Hinz's follow-up with the proposals he got from local architects, including shown below, Grant Gibson's Embrance the Hubris, keeping the space useless but giving it patterned gilded interior . . .

More here.

. . . and talking about big abandoned holes and ideas about what to do with them  . . .

click image for larger view

Mine the Gap at the Chicago Spire Hole

More reading on Block 37:

Tales from the Crypt: City to Bury $300 Million Mistake under Block 37
Can Signage Save Block 37?
Block 37 - The Curse Lives!
The Entombment of the Plug Bug
Planning and its Disconnects: The Cautionary Tale of Block 37

Friday News: Brickworld, Activate Union Station, Ragdale's Ring, Saving Hull House Theater, more

News Briefs from All Over:

Brickworld Chicago - our indefatigable correspondent Bob Johnson reminds us that this annual event will take place this Saturday (10 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.) and Sunday (10:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m.) at the Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center.  Pony up $10 ($8.00 for kids over 3) for models, vendors and all things AFOL (Adult Fans of LEGO)

Activate Union Station: 2013 Placemaking Chicago Contest.  The Metropolitan Planning Council is again holding a competition for the right to place its own version of Spontaneous Interventions into

Union Station for nine days from August 24 to September 2, plus $5,000 to help carry it out.  The MPH has staked out ”three prime locations”, including:

• The 110-foot-tall Great Hall
• The east-facing arcade on Canal Street
• The Fifth Third Center plaza along the river between Adams and Jackson.

Two of the three sites will be selected for implementation; winners will receive $5,000 per site to implement their ideas at Union Station over nine days this summer, from August 24 through September 2.

Deadline for submissions is 5:00 p.m., July 24th.  Details here.

Richard Smith joins Cannon Design - as Principal for the company's Science and Technology practice, from HOK.

Ragdale selects architect Stephen Dietrich Lee - as the winner in a design competition for an outdoor installation and performance space at the 1897 former Howard van Doren Shaw house in Lake Forest that became home to the Ragdale foundation and its artist residency program in 1976.  The competition sought ideas for a contemporary re-imagining of The Ring, an outdoor theater Shaw created for the performance, typically by friends and neighborhood children, of plays by Shaw's wife Frances. 

 “I was intrigued,” says Lee,  “by the simplicity of manipulating a single, repetitive module to create a temporary Ragdale Ring that is both dramatic and functional.”  “The organic, geometric structure is composed of stitched wood pallets of the same shape, height, and weight that are then daisy-chained to one another, creating a zigzag pattern. Developing a repeatable pallet was economical and provided valuable volume with very little material. The pallet jointing permits a great deal of flexibility, creating a curved, porous structure that marks the performance space.”

The Consortium to Save Hull House Theater - Currently home to the Pegasus Players, and previously to the Organic Theater and Jackie Taylor's Black Ensemble Theater, the Hull House is threatened with conversion into residential use.  Supporters of The Consortium, including Joe Mantegna, Jim Belushi, Robert Falls, Jackie Taylor, Stuart Gordon, members of Preservation Chicago and local business leaders, have started a petition drive and have begun to lobby aldermen to save the 1966 venue, designed by Crombie Taylor. Pegasus Players and The Consortium are working on an alternative plan to purchase, renovate and expand the theater with an additional auditorium.

Update: the vote on zoning was postponed.  Update from DNAInfo.Chicago here.

In the Age of the Supply Chain, is there any room for Gratitude? John H. White at Chicago Sun-Times Rally

Pulitzer-Prize winning photographer John H. White usually achieves eloquence, not through words, but through the images he captures through the lens of his camera.   Unlike most of us, he pauses to think before he speaks, and chooses his words with deliberation.  Still, White has become the rallying point in the outrage over the decision of the Chicago Sun-Times to fire its staff of professional photographers in favor of iPhone pictures taken by reporters or sent in by the general public.

It was White's words of gratitude that brought a respectful silence to a Thursday, June 13th rally at the plaza of the James R. Thomson Center, and put the situation into sharp perspective.

Gratitude is a concept that's largely disappeared from today's commerce.  A company, to be sure, is in business to make money.  When we pick up a newspaper, or read it on-line, we've executed a commercial transaction. We've paid our money and expect value for it.  We don't say “Thank you” to the people who created it, any more than when we put on a shirt, or eat a plum, we thank the seamstress or the farmer.  As if we even know where we could  find them.

click images for larger view

At the deep end of the Age of the Supply Chain, gratitude, or even respect, has become a sentimental artifact, as has, seemingly, the very idea of an individual worker having value.  Every point of the process of production is standardized, consolidated, and abstracted.  Efficiency, not man, is now the measure of all things.  When price is driven down towards zero, the margin for excellence disappears.  The quest for the ‘insanely great’ becomes a spreadsheet pursuit of ‘what's the least we can do and still survive?’ It is not a coincidence that announcements of layoffs usually spike stock prices.  At every point of exchange, at every level of production, the primary dynamic of the Supply Chain is to eliminate human labor to the greatest extent possible, and commoditize and drive down wages of that which remains.

Hence we have Chicago newspaper reports on community sports events being created by people in the Philippines being paid pennies an hour.  We have a major daily - the Chicago Sun-Times - that hollows itself out as it struggles to survive, becoming less a newspaper than a collection of financial stratagems.  Business content created by a separate subsidiary, centered on a Sunday magazine consisting primarily of fawning portraits of corporate executives.  Arts and dining content taken from the Chicago Reader.  The entire ‘Nation and World’ confined to a single page or less, much of it devoted to a bizarre map flagging the origin of individual stories.  Ironically enough, the most consistently professional part of the paper may well be its Splash society section, printed on thick paper, the better to reproduce color photographs of the beautiful people, no small number of whom are probably part of the consortium that bought the paper to keep it from going down the tubes. 

But, in the end, what remains of the Sun-Times?  A thinning veneer of star columnists, reviewers, and reporters wrapped around a collapsing center.

Apologists, experts and realists all agree:  It must be so.  In their Panglossian haze, nothing that's happening, no matter how troubling, can be anything other than the best that can be expected.  Resistance is futile.

And it is true, we cannot go back to where we were.  We will never again have four competing dailies.  The strangely reassuring sound of a thick brick of newsprint hitting our doorstep each morning is not coming back. The trees thank you.

But there is not, as the corporate feudalists would tell you, only one path - their path- to the future.  And when the supply chain that once made life better for everyone now seems only to add to America's 60,000,000 low wage workers, when it stops building us up and instead eats away at muscle and bone in the pursuit of better margins, when it transforms the pursuit of excellence to a lowest-common-denominator ‘good enough’, then passive acceptance is no longer an option, lest we descend to the beggar's world described by Bertolt Brecht (via Marc Blitzstein) . . .

What keeps a man alive?
He lives on others.
He likes to taste them first,
then eat them whole if he can.
Forgets that they're supposed to be
his brothers.
That he himself 
was ever called a man.

The Sun-Times decided John J. White was unnecessary.  If that's what happens to the best of us, what kind of future awaits the rest of us?  Yet at Thursday's rally, White found room for hope, even after having taken a major blow, in people coming together in common cause.  “I never knew until today,” he said, “that you could fly with broken wings . . . your kind words gives fresh wind to our wings.”

Blackhawk Lions target Bruins

All good wishes from the lions at the Peninsula Hotel to the Chicago Blackhawks as, at 8:00 p.m. tonight, they take on the Boston Bruins in game one of the Stanley Cup Final. 

The Art Institute lions have already donned their Blackhawk-inspired riot gear, in anticipation of being a kind of honorary traffic cop overlooking the same sea of red jerseys last seen in 2010.

Read:
The Red and the Black: Hey, Mies - Here come the Hawks!