MW: I understand that last week, in all seriousness, you said: “If I had another 15 years to work, I could rebuild this entire country. I could change the nation.”
FLW: I did say it and it’s true. Having had now the experience building (going on) 769 buildings, it’s quite easy for me to shake them out of my sleeve. It’s amazing what I could do for this country.
–from the Mike Wallace interviews, care of PBS
We spent some time today in Frank Lloyd Wright’s “great space.” Unity Temple, home to a Unitarian Universalist congregation still active in Oak Park today, allows for self-guided tours of their world famous modernist gem on weekdays and guided/narrated tours on Saturday and Sunday.
Wright lived and worked only blocks from this location, a corner lot on Lake Street in downtown Oak Park. At the time, 1905 when construction began to 1908 when the church was finished, very few reinforced concrete buildings had ever been built, and none built as an artistic masterpiece in service to an active public use.
Wright was shockingly bold/great in his time and place. Post-Victorian Oak Park was a proper and conventional place at the turn of the century while Wright’s work, though grounded in nature, was provoking, new, and scandalous–an interesting parallel to developments about to erupt in the architect’s personal life, events which eventually led him to Europe and the construction of Taliesen in south central Wisconsin.
Darby gave me a stunning coffee table book on Frank Lloyd Wright for Christmas. It’s from German publisher, Taschen , and features trilingual text–English, French, and German–from Brooks Pfieffer along with amazing photographs and reproductions of Wright’s original sketches and architectural drawings.
Chicago Bloggers is a marvelous Web site. The site charts bloggers based on each blogger’s specific location in the public transportation grid of greater Chicagoland. Bloggers list their blog not by content type, but by CTA stop or Metra stop. Thus, one can hear what the neighbors are blogging on about. Or one might make an inquiry into the “blog tones” of a certain neighborhood, and see how they differ from one another.
I’m fascinated by Frank Lloyd Wright. He was a radical artist who dared to be great at all times. But like any genius, he was also but a man, sometimes susceptible to the lower impulses. After attaining much success in his architecture practice, marrying well, and raising six children, Wright grew restless. He looked to a client’s wife and neighbor in Oak Park, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Mamah held a Masters degree from Ann Arbor and was an outspoken suffragist, feminist, and free-love advocate. She also translated foreign texts on these subjects. Mamah was also said to be quite beautiful. For certain, she deeply enchanted Wright, as he dropped everything–family, reputation, and career–to flee to Europe with her.
Upon returning to the states, Wright built Taliesin on his maternal ancestor’s land in south central Wisconsin. In part, as a defense against Chicago and the conventional values held universally therein. Taliesen also was a natural refuge, a place in the sun where Wright and Mamah could live life their way, masters of their rural, but progressive kingdom. All was well until one day in 1914 when Wright was away in Chicago working on Midway Gardens, a household servant went mad and burned the place down, waiting at the one available door with an axe, where he murdered each escaping person, including Mamah and her two children, plus four others.
As Truman Capote knows, this kind of stuff really happens. Here again we see, no inventor of fiction can easily compete with sad reality.
I thought the phone might ring and it did ring. Milt, on his way to the airport in Denver, called to say he and Bonesy were on their way to Chicago to catch Phil for two nights at The Riv in Uptown. Redman had also flown in from Seattle and left a message on my cellee. Time to step up. Time to like Phil again. Milt left a ticket for me at the door–since I had class downtown until 9:30 p.m.–and it was hard to turn away from that type of gracious invite. Plus, I wanted to see my friends, more than Phil’s friends, per se. I saw the second set and the entire show Friday night and was satisfied. On Friday we ate lunch downtown at a Thai place and this little old lady sitting next to us tried hard to figure us out and eventually asked us what our deal was. When she learned that 3 of the 4 of us had flown in to see Phil, she like most “civilians” was incredulous over things the Milts never think twice about.
Steffan Postaer’s apocalyptic novel, The Last Generation is out. I have yet to order it from Amazon, but I soon will, as I look forward to learning more about the writer and the stories he tells. Mr. Postaer is a copywriter, like me, but unlike me he is Executive Creative Director at LB Works in Chicago and famous within the industry for his Altoids work.
Making ads is not all that different from making books. And knowing how to do both is a good thing, since making ads fails to satisfy the soul and making books rarely pays the bills.
My peer-to-peer file sharing experience has been pretty limited. I do acquire and share various sound files, mostly all legal (since the bands I enjoy promote live concert taping and file sharing among fans), and I have had friends rip and burn expensive software for me, but yesterday I took the next step and downloaded Macromedia’s Dreamweaver, complete with license number, via Lime Wire’s peer-to-peer software and file sharing community.
If I’m a Macromedia employee or shareholder I’m pissed. Unless I can adjust to a new way of thinking about transactions in this shifty hypertext environment. If I can see file-sharers as early adopters of my product and key to creating buzz and value-added technical troubleshooting to boot. Then, I might be okay with these “free” transactions.
Coming off the heels of Friday’s Jerry Joseph show at Schuba’s, it was a pleasure to find yet another outstanding Chicago venue–and one of my favorite artists therein. The Abbey Pub on the corner of Elston and Grace hosted Tony and his new band for an evening of stringed instrument nirvana, care of Tony’s blistering action on banjo, acoustic and electric guitar. There were too few in attendance, and those who did attend mostly sat for the show, but this impacted Tony not at all. He stood and delivered like the musical hero he is. After the show we purchased a disc and asked Tony to sign it. Once again my belief that the truly great artists are also the nicest people was proven correct. Thanks Tony!
My buddy in Salt Lake, Steve Jerman brought this scholarly article to my attention. Its concern is discrimination against Deadheads. Of course, we’ve all experienced it, which makes this study ring especially true. Many thanks to Rebecca G. Adams, Ph.D., sociology professor at UNC Greensboro, for making this information available.
One night after an Oakland Coliseum show in 1991, I returned to the Hampton Inn where I was staying, only to find a blockade set up at the door, barring me from taking more than one person with me to my room. A huge argument ensued between me and the rent-a-cops, resulting in me basically saying, “Stop me if you can.” It wasn’t pretty, and I have not stayed with said hotel chain since.