mojosmom | Entries tagged with iacdl

The Humanities Festival ended (for me) with an interview with Umberto Eco, whose The Prague Cemetery I recently finished, as well as a talk by Ian Lindsay, a professor of anthropology, about technology in the archaeological record. Both very interesting.

I saw a marvelous play at Court Theatre, An Iliad, a one-man show, that one man being "The Poet" (played by Timothy Edward Kane), and he is with us to recite his poem, as he has been doing for audiences for 3200 years. It was quite wonderful, gripping and timely. It's mostly, though not entirely, Homer (in the Robert Fagles translation, with a few lines in the original Greek). When The Poet rattles off a long list of wars since Troy, well, it was stunning. More here

Also saw a not-so-great play at a small theatre, The Beauty of the Father, by Nilo Cruz (whose Anna of the Tropics I liked very much). It's a bit of a tangle, there's a bit where one character explodes (figuratively, not literally!) that came out of nowhere, and the end is confused. The acoustics at the venue were not great, so some of it (including that explosion) was hard to understand.

I've done a couple of literary events - the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame Induction ceremony and an opening at the Poetry Foundation, and I did a great Chicago Architecture Foundation tour of "(Mostly) Indoor Art". That last one on a chilly day that came hard on the heels of one so lovely that I had lunch outdoors. Chicago is like that in the fall!

Last Friday was the Illinois Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers annual dinner. Because it's our 25th year, we honored the founders and past presidents, nearly all of whom showed up. It was a splendid evening, seeing old friends and meeting some new people. We have filled a number of board vacancies, and I think the new blood will be of great benefit to the organization.

It is such a dreary day today. Gray and rainy and cold. I was going to go out and do a couple of errands, but I'd rather stay inside. So I'm getting started on cleaning and straightening up the apartment ahead of my annual after-Thanksgiving open house next Sunday. I got quite a bit of the necessary shopping done yesterday; another advantage of retirement is that I can shop during the quiet time of day - a particular bonus before the holidays! I just have to pick up the wine, and the produce of course I won't get until Friday or Saturday. But anything that can be stashed in the freezer or pantry has been bought.

Stacey will be arriving late Thursday afternoon, so I will fix us a vegetarian lasagna for Thanksgiving dinner.

You may remember that I wrote a while back that I had attended a poetry workshop at my local library. While there, I recommended to the group Stephen Fry's book, The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within. Yesterday when I was there returning books, she came over and said, "I ordered that book you recommended!" Maybe I should make a list . . .

( Cultural stuff )

( shopping )

The board meeting itself was good. We're in the black, having made actual profits at seminars and the annual dinner, and membership is way up. We're planning a party, an "Irish wake for Clarence Darrow", which should be tremendous fun. We'd just co-sponsored a two-day forensics seminar, which I attended, and which was really an excellent program. So we are quite happy, and voted a raise for our executive director (not that she's making much - it's a very part-time gig - but she deserves every penny).

CHF:

Saturday:
Wayne Koestenbaum: The Anatomy of Harpo Marx:
Koestenbaum is a poet and cultural critic, and, in addition to his well-known, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire, has written books about Andy Warhol and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. He's interested in celebrity. Now he's taken on Harpo Marx. This was an odd lecture. He began by saying he was going to "over-analyze" moments from Harpo's work. And he sure did. The thing is, though, that it was hard to tell if he was kidding or not! I and a couple of people near me were in stitches the whole time. It reminded me rather of the book, "Why Paint Cats", that send-up of art criticism that so many people took seriously.

Ars Antigua: Musical Jokes of the Baroque
This was fun! Drunken night watchmen, cuckoos and frogs and such, all set to lovely baroque music.

In between these two events, I had a bit of time, so I went over to the Art Institute to see the Caravaggio, "The Supper at Emmaus", which is there on loan from the National Gallery in London. It's displayed along with a number of the AIOCs own “Caravaggesque” paintings. (Thank you, London! We're sending you "The Crucifixion" by Francisco de Zurbarán in return. Enjoy!) I also saw the exhibit of Victorian photocollage, which was very interesting, indeed.

Sunday:
Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South Tell Their Stories
E. Patrick Johnson, professor, chair, and director of graduate studies in the department of performance studies and professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University, presented through performance bits of the interviews he conducted for the book of that name, and talked about the process of writing it (finding informants, etc.). A southerner himself, Johnson shows that what you think you know about the south isn't necessarily accurate. He notes that certain behaviors that in the the north would be considered markers of homosexuality (for instance, a man calling other men "darlin'") are just the way things are in the south. He made a similar observation to what Florence King said in her essay, "The Gay Confederation", that gay men "often maintain surprisingly high profiles in our allegedly homophobic region". Not to say all is peaches and cream, though.

Commedia dell'arte: Managing Chaos
A marvelous discourse about, and performance of, commedia dell'arte. The performers showed how, with very little in the way of script, stock characters and stock jokes can be transformed through improvisation into wildly funny comedy.

Other stuff:

Friday was the annual dinner of the Illinois Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. We honored Randy Stone, former Cook County Public Defender (and the guy who really raised the bar at that office, turned into a truly professional law office instead of a home for political hacks) and former head of the University of Chicago Law School's clinical program (where he still teaches). A good time was had by all, and the speakers were uniformly funny, and, more important, brief! I saw lots of folks I hadn't seen in a while, so there was a lot of indiscriminate hugging.

Sunday, after the CHF stuff, I went to the Court Theatre's production of Charles Ludlam's The Mystery of Irma Vep which was great fun. Five roles played by two actors, with incredibly quick costume changes (the backstage folks got huge applause at the end). I'd seen the play a few years ago, but I sure didn't mind seeing it again.

On Monday, instead of our regular Italian class, most of us went to hear Italian author and activist Clara Sereni reading from her book, Casalinghitudine, which has recently been translated into English as Keeping House. She read in Italian and her translator then read the passages in English, followed by a Q&A and then some food and wine.

Yesterday, I went over to campus for the first Artspeaks program of the season. Dawn Upshaw, with members of eighth blackbird and some other musicians, performed Osvaldo Golijov's song cycle, "Ayre", which was inspired by Luciano Berio's "Folk Songs". The piece draws largely on Al-Andalus, that period of time in southern Spain when the three Abrahamic religions coexisted in relative harmony. The texts were in Spanish, Ladino, Arabic, Hebrew, some traditional music and texts reworked, some contemporary music and poetry. It was gorgeous. Following the performance, Golijov and the musicians were interviewed by Shulamit Ran, who, like Golijov, has been a composer-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony.

Tonight I didn't go anywhere except grocery shopping.

I've been catching up on back issues of The New Yorker, and found a little something for the bookstore and library employees among you.

Thursday evening was the first in what will (I hope) become a regular series at the Chicago Cultural Center: Chicago under the Dome. Preston Bradley Hall is often used for concerts, but these events have some cabaret seating in addition to the regular rows of chairs, and beer and wine! This concert was Jim Gailloreto's Jazz String Quintet, with Patricia Barber sitting in on a few numbers. She was the big draw, of course, and the room was full.

Also full, on Friday night, was Millennium Park's Pritzker Pavilion, for the Stars of Lyric Opera concert, which has become a yearly event and is always packed. I got there around two hours before the concert began, and got a decent enough spot on the lawn. There is a seating area, which opened right about the time I got there, and people were already lined up all around the lawn to get seats. The first half featured singers from the Ryan Opera Center, the artist development program run by Lyric. The big guns (Deborah Voight, Vladimir Galouzine and James Morris) were in the second half. Morris had my favorite piece of the night: a very shiver-making "Credo" from Verdi's Otello.

There was at least one diehard Wagnerite in the crowd:

Today I had a couple of meetings. An Illinois Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers board meeting in the morning, followed by a member tea of a new chapter of the AAUW (American Association of University Women) that I have been sucked into. That was at a very hotsy-totsy place, the Women's Athletic Association, which is situated in a landmark building on Michigan Avenue that may have the last elevators in Chicago that actually have elevator operators!

( This has been a movie-watching weekend. )

( other things )

Current Music: WWOZ

I went to a dinner tonight of a professional association of which I am a board member. We were giving a "lifetime achievement" award to a hotsy-totsy big firm white-collar criminal defense lawyer and former U.S. attorney who makes more in a week than I do in a year. Speakers included an ex-governor (one of the few unindicted ones). It was actually a rather pleasant evening.

And this made me laugh! I ran into a woman I know who is the colleague of another woman who applied for the job that I had applied for (neither of us got it). And she told me that I'd been Googled! Apparently my "competitor" had googled me and was all worried about me as competition. "Oh, she went there to college! [like anyone cares 35 years later]." "Oh! she's published!" It was pretty funny, and flattering in an odd sort of way.

The guy from my office who was a finalist for the job didn't get it either. I had mixed feelings about that. I think he would have been excellent, but I would have missed him! He's a good guy.