History – Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

The Wrecking Ball Comes For The Theatre Building

End of an era

A friend and fellow theatre professional, Walter Stearns, took this sad photo today. It marks the end of an era, the end of a theatre (multiple ones under one roof), and the closing of a chapter in my life.

The Theatre Building, later Stage 773, and even later WHIM, has finally come under the wrecking ball.

If you were a theatre practitioner in any of its disciplines, I’m betting you worked on one of its three stages. Big name stars worked there before they were big names, just like many others less famous doing their thing.

If you think of what has become known as Chicago theatre, The Theatre Building was one of the venues that made theatre in Chicago, Chicago Theatre. I was privileged to produce and direct shows on each of those three stages, was a tenant, worked on staff for a period of time, and helped manage a major renovation in the 90’s.

We’ve known this has been coming for a while now, but seeing this photo of the demolition sharply marks the end. The site of so much theatre magic and home to so many Chicago theatre companies will now be developed into residential units.

Here’s a link to a Chicago Tribune article from last summer announcing the impending final curtain.

I’d take a drive by today, but feel I would be too emotional. Instead I’ll commiserate with some theatre friends tonight when we see Walter’s latest show in another part of town.

Sad day for many.

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

Sunday Morning Reading

A basket of good writing to share

For those who celebrate Easter and Passover, and all who do not celebrate either, may you find some bit of peace on this Sunday morning, however you see yourself and the world. I’d like to say this week’s edition of Sunday Morning Reading is filled with Easter eggs, but instead it’s just the usual basket stuffed with links to interesting topics and stories that I like to share. Enjoy.

It’s good to be seen, certainly the way you see yourself. When seen by someone who doesn’t know you, that’s eye-opening. Check out Natasha MH’s The Taxi Driver Knew.

The war that isn’t a war in Iran continues. Whatever that story is, it is still being written. Given that this might be heading to the culmination of a conflict that has simmered, and occasionally boiled over, for decades if not longer, there are a few stories out there that offer preface. He Helped Stop Iran From Getting The Bomb by David D. Kirkpatrick is one worth reading.

JA Westenberg’s The “Passive Income” Trap Ate A Generation of Entrepreneurs is also one heckuva a read. There’s nothing passive about this take.

Seva Gunitsky takes on The Incel Global Order. Somebody needs to.

As the technology we use advances, in some spheres some are stepping back. Joshua Cohen takes a look in Sweden Goes Back To Basics, Swapping Screens For Books In The Classroom.

Social Media is under the microscope again after two recent court verdicts against Meta. Chris Castle takes a look with The Social Media Verdicts Are In. Now Ask The Hard Question: Where Was The Board? Counting the money, I imagine. Hat tip to Stan Stewart for this one.

In the category of no easy answers, Mathew Ingram also examines what’s going on in social media with Social Media May Be Bad For You But The Remedy Could Be Worse.

On the Artificial Intelligence front there are always interesting topics cooking as the AI purveyors cook the planet. I wrote about two fascinating pieces yesterday, and today I’m highlighting Angela Fu’s An AI Company Set Out To Fix News Deserts. Instead, It Copied Local Journalists Work. Something tells me we’re going to be seeing more of this going forward.

Apple is, I assume, winding up its week celebrating its 50th Anniversary. So much has been written on that topic because there is indeed much to celebrate and much history to contemplate while looking ahead. Here are four pieces that caught my eye, the first three primarily because they are more personal than historical, the fourth is a look ahead.

John Moltz gives us Missed Connections: Me and Apple.

James Thomson is one of my favorite Apple developers. His Apple At 50: Gonna Be, Gonna Be Golden is indeed a personal journey.

Adam and Tonya Engst have been writing Tidbits since 1990. I started reading it shortly thereafter. What Apple’s 50th Anniversary Misses is certainly different than most, but one that mirrors the thoughts of many on this anniversary.

And Marco Arment, looking ahead, has penned A Letter To John Ternus, the guy everyone assumes will don the CEO mantle in the future.

Baseball is back. And every team and their fans are dreaming of a championship. David Todd McCarty spins a bit of fiction that’s baseball adjacent, but rooted deep in dreams in The Taste Of A Dream.

To conclude this week, this story by Audrey Pachuta very much sums up the contradictions we’re living through at the moment. Check out A Student Set A Goal To Run Every Street In Chicago And Inspired A City. Now He Must Leave The Country.

May you find peace however you can.

(Photo from the author.)

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

Sunday Morning Reading

There be dragons, dogs, and humans. Trust the dogs.

Time for some Sunday Morning Reading.

There’s a great lyric and greater question in Lin-Manuel’s musical retelling of American history, “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” Control is a crazy concept. We strive to control what we can, while we’re around. Too often we delude ourselves into thinking we control more than we actually do. No one wants to define themselves or be defined as lacking control, much less under the control of others. We may think we’re masters and mistresses of our own universes and control our own narrative. Yet too often, when we do have control and things go askew, we foist the responsibility (blame) off on others. That may be essential to surviving on the paths we choose. But it’s not easy to control the reactions a dog may have to who’s good or who’s not, a dragon, or much less the demons of our own making.

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Kicking off this week is Natasha MH asking the question, What’s The Best Story You’ve Been Told About Yourself? There be dragons.

The Guardian published an editorial on the ‘unmasking’ of anonymous artists in the wake of the second unmasking of Bansky and the reveal of a hoax surrounding the death of Italian novelist writing under the nom-de-plume Elena Ferrante. Regarding Banksy, The Guardian opines that “his mask is his art — let’s not destroy it.”

I don’t often link to book reviews in this column, but this one struck my fancy. A.O. Scott’s A Treacherous Secret Agent, examines How Literature Spoke Truth To Power During The Red Scare. I’m looking forward to reading this.

Jason Perlow’s The Well We Never Tapped is a sequel to an earlier piece he wrote about the future of science fiction. He argues that in the runaway world of big sci-fi franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars the answer to controlling the future of these and other properties isn’t retooling or reimagining, but perhaps to stop for a while.

Speaking of science fiction and stopping, on the Artificial Intelligence front a number of things happening in that wannabe industry that can’t really find a purchase beyond the flimflammery of the financial markets and bean counting boardrooms, have been prompting some interesting writing of late. kstenerud on the yoloai blog writes Why Your AI Agents Will Turn Against You. There be lobsters and dragons.

Kevin Baker takes a look at how AI Got The Blame For The Iran School Bombing. Follow that up with Anna Moore’s piece Marriage Over, €100,000 Down The Drain: The AI Users Whose Lives Were Wrecked By Delusion. Makes one suspect that we’re not looking for ways to better exert control over our lives, but to more easily avoid taking the rap when things inevitably go wrong.

Big news last week got kind of mushed about in wish casting about Facebook killing off the Metaverse. That sort of did and didn’t happen. Regardless, Neil Stephenson’s My Prodigal Brainchild caught quite a bit of attention.

Apple is celebrating its 50 year anniversary and there’s lots being written about its history and it’s present. Everyone’s vying for control of that story. Harry McCracken’s How Apple Became Apple: The Definitive Oral History Of The Company’s Earliest Days is worth a read.

So too is David Sparks’ The MacBook Neo’s Unfair Advantage and the Stephen Sinofsky piece he links to, Mac Neo And My Afternoon Of Reflection and Melancholy. The damn thing hasn’t even been on sale for a month, yet we’re already trying to define its legacy.

Two political pieces to conclude with after all of the good feelings surrounding yesterday’s No Kings Rallies. (Watch for the comical battle to control the narrative over that moment this week.) Lydia Polgreen says what I’ve been saying for over a decade now. It’s Not Trump, It’s America. It’s hard to come out from under the burden of a myth.

Mike Lofgren’s How Trump Fits The “Great Man” Theory of History — Sort Of, taps into Hegel, Asimov, and the wisdom of dogs. He concludes his piece with:

History as we experience it at the sharp end is the aggregation of moral choices made by individual human beings. When those choices become corrupted by fear, resentment or inexcusable stupidity, and then amplified by mass suggestion, we get a creature like Trump, the reflection of a people’s image.

I’ll leave it at that this week.

(Image from Daniele Gay on Shutterstock

Bette Midler Updates Woody Guthrie’s ‘All You Fascists Bound To Lose’

Let’s turn the screws, you perverts bound to lose

Add Bette Midler to the growing ranks of musical artists offering up protest songs for our current crisis.

Midler has updated Woody Guthrie’s classic, All You Fascists Bound To Lose, with new lyrics hitting many of headlines and moments we’re all living through under the current administration. Here’s a sample:

We’ll battle ICE together until they cut and run
Just like in Minneapolis and when the midterms come
You’re bound to lose, you fascists bound to lose

All you fascists bound to lose
All you fascists bound to lose
I said all you fascists bound to lose
You’re bound to lose, you fascists bound to lose

To hell with all the cowards who hide behind their masks
We’re gonna win the midterms, we’re coming for his ass!
He knows it too, that bastard’s bound to lose

Trying to distract us from the Epstein files
You gas and beat and murder us, protectin’ pedophiles
Let’s turn the screws, you perverts bound to lose

Give it a listen. Share it around. The fascists may be bound to lose, but everyone has something to gain when they do

Sunday Morning Reading

Epidemics of reading, opinions, and the wild ways of artists

Spending a few days with the grandkids this weekend and into next week, yet still managed to find some time for a little Sunday Morning Reading. It’s a lesson in learning, watching as they begin to put it all together, compared to so many of the adults trying to own the world who seem stuck and unable to grow, or suffer some sort of reversion. With kids, it’s innocence. The rest of us have no excuses. Just stories. Makes you wonder what turns that on and off.

In the large discussion around screen time and attention spans, Carlo Iacono says What We Think Is A Decline In Literacy Is A Design Problem.The section looking back to “reading epidemics” in the 18th and 19th century are more illuminating than any screen.

The First Casualty of Trump’s War In Iran Was The Truth. So says David Remick. That’s always true in warm even before the first bullets fly. But it’s become the truth in all aspects of how we try to survive together. Funny how we revert back to our early childhood ways of dealing with the world before disgarding the truth was supposedly trained out of us.

Everybody has an opinion about this war that we can’t call a war. Here’s one that I found interesting from Frida Ghitis. Check out What Everyone Gets Wrong About Iran.

David Todd McCarty tells us How I Learned To Hate AI. The more you know…

Chris Castle takes a look at The Great White House AI Copyright Dodge: Managed Decline, Global Spillover, And The Rise Of The Chief Personhood Denier.Hat tip to Stan Stewart for this one.

With everyone focused on The Strait of Hormus, Richard Bookstabler takes a look at our financial straits in I Predicted The 2008 Financial Crisis. What Is Coming May Be Worse. For the record, I didn’t predict the last one, but anyone with two nickels to rub together can predict the outcome of the one we’re heading into.

I did any number of odd (in all senses of the word) jobs in my early life supporting myself as an artist. Emily Watlington takes a look at The Wild Ways Artists Have Made Their Livings, From The Renaissance To Today.

Notes From A Burmese Prison is a comic by Danny Fenster and Amy Kurzweil. More than worth your time. Extrapolate the specific location and situation to any troublesome moment and remember whoever the guards are, you can’t trust them.

(Photo by the author)

If Shoes Make The Man…?

The jokes write themselves

It was a big deal and a rite of passage for the males in my extended family when Uncle Robert gifted you a set of Florsheim shoes on your sixteenth birthday. He was a shoe salesman. He knew shoes. He knew feet.

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He always carried his Brannock device, the metal device that measured foot length, width, and arch length commonly found in shoe stores of old. He would measure you up before your birthday, so the gift was not a surprise but a statement.

He not only believed in the cliché that “shoes make the man” but that saying was embossed on his business card and also on your birthday card, tucked neatly in the tissue paper in the top of the shoebox. Like I said, he was a shoe salesman.

That aphorism not only signified that you were moving out of your boyhood to become a man, but it also announced your social standing to the world around you, and supposedly signified that you were of good character.

I guess that well worn cliché, like everything else in this world during the last decade or so, will need to be resoled now that the made-for-TV Pedophile-in-Chief is not only requiring the simpering slaves in his cabinet to wear his favorite Florsheim shoes, but gifting them those shoes to ensure their obeisance.

If shoes ever made the man and defined character, watching these men march in lockstep, wearing comically ill-fitting symbols of their subservience, it certainly reveals (again) just how character-less these bumbling bunions are as they trip over themselves to please their master.

My uncle tired to set us on a course for success. I’m sure he’s turning over in his grave at how these simpering sops fail to measure up.

No Kings Rally Returns March 28

We’re protesting against desperate foes. We need to become just as desperate.

The windup for another No Kings rally is heating up for March 28th. As I have been for the previous No Kings events, I’m of two minds.

First, it’s good to see this happening. I encourage and support the effort. Certainly since last fall’s event we’ve been through even more hell to have plenty to protest. Protests do make a statement.

Secondly, as I’ve repeatedly said about the previous protests, until they spill over into the work week I’m not sure what ultimate effect they have. Again, protests are statements. Statements are important. Statements some times lead to action. But as we’ve seen in other countries, it isn’t until large crowds gather in force for successive days and nights that anything beyond demonstrating solidarity actually happens.

Don’t get me wrong when I say that. I’m glad to see these events organized and happening. I hope they continue. I hope the crowds grow. I’d just like to see the effort continue with a greater sense of desperation.

My sense is that too many take too much comfort from feeling they are not alone and that it strengthens resolve as they gear up to vote in November. We probably will get that chance to vote. Although if you’ve been paying attention, that’s not guaranteed. I’m also not sure the results or the chaos around the results are going to provide the answers we need.

These are a desperate bunch of folks who can’t afford to lose. They know what they’ve done, and the only chance to save their skins is to stay in power. They continue to rig the game and the pace of those efforts is quickening.

I believe we have to become just as desperate.

You can check out the information on No Kings Rallies planned for your area at the No Kings website.

Farewell Country Joe McDonald

Gone, not forgotten. Perhaps rekindled.

Country Joe McDonald, née Joseph Allen McDonald, passed away last week at the age of 84, taking another page out of the songbook of my early life with him. The good thing about music is that the songs and the impressions they make never die.

My father used to hate that I played his music over and over. Which of course led me to play his music over and over even more during those years of America’s war in Vietnam.

And as we all know, or one day find out, what was will always be again.

In the wake of Country Joe’s passing another generation is discovering songs of his especially The Fish Cheer/I-Feel-Like-I’m Fixing- To-Die-Rag, which McDonald wrote in 20 minutes or so for an anti-Vietnam War play. About the song, he’s quoted as saying he “was inspired to write a song about how soldiers have no choice in the matter, but to follow orders, but with the irreverence of rock n’ roll. It was essentially punk rock before punk existed.”

It’s a damn shame we actually have to go through terrible times again to re-discover the music that helped us through them once before. But here we are.

Sunday Morning Reading

“The life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.” -David Hume

On the weekend when some parts of the world think they can alter time by simply changing the clocks, I’m reminded of the biggest lesson most learn in life: we’re each not the center of the universe. Most learn it. Some never do, or if they do, they continue to operate under that delusion. We pretty good at setting up systems and structures that reinforce and rely on that delusional thinking. Somehow that seems to be the theme running through the articles and writing I collected this week for this edition of Sunday Morning Reading.

Bronze statue of a child sitting on an outdoor stone bench with legs crossed, reading an open book that rests on their lap, a small bird perched on the top edge of the book, and a stack of books beside them, with a paved walkway, grass lawn, and buildings in the background. Kicking things off is the story of how Humanity Altered an Asteroid’s Orbit Around The Sun by Becky Ferreira. The article links to the ScienceAdvances abstract on the nudge that might be as good as a wink.

Last week the war in the Middle East had just kicked off as I was publishing this column. This week it continues. And, yes, it’s a war, regardless of the stupid debate. Jonathan Taplin looks at The Terrifying New Era of American Imperialism, and Jay Caspian Kang examines The No-Explanation War.

“Society grows great when old men plant trees who shade they’ll never sit under” and the opposite of that wisdom is how Scott Galloway kicks off his piece on Role Models.

Ali Breland takes a looks at those yearning for a return to McCarthyism in ‘We Need To Do McCarthyism to the Tenth Power.’ Turning back time only works as a song lyric.

JA Westenberg offers up a A Soft-Landing Manual For The Return To The Second Gilded Age. It’s tough to avoid the usual hard crashes.

The Dodgy Code examines The Great AI Arbitrage: Making A Killing Before Your Client Wises Up. The inevitable turnaround on this is going to be something to see.

Before we get to that turnaround, Mathew Ingram says The Danger Posed By AI Just Got A Lot More Real All Of A Sudden. Going to be interesting to watch AI bots fighting each other to be the center of the universe. If we’re around to see it.

David Todd McCarty is Searching For Originality In A Sea of Slop. Even on dry land that’s tough.

I’ve been revisiting a lot of Shakespeare of late, so this piece by Alice Cunningham caught my eye. Check out Author To Revive Shakespeare Club After 300 Years. We could all do with revisiting the his works.

And to conclude this week, James Verini brings us the wild tale of The Man Who Broke Into Jail.

(Photo taken by the author.)

Sunday Morning Reading

Slicing life close to the bone

It could be said that the world is off its axis. Or it could be said that we’re just slicing the meat closer and closer to the bone. Because we don’t know what we don’t know about the war the U.S and Israel launched against Iran I’ll leave off any direct links on that topic for this week’s Sunday Morning Reading. Be warned though, some might be peripherally related. Things happen that way. I’m sure there will be plenty to share in the weeks to come. Meanwhile, here is the usual serving of links on a variety of topics that caught my eye this week. You’re on your own for the tzatziki.

Parthenon 14.

David Todd McCarty is bringing his writings from other platforms to his own site, and some of his earlier writings often strike with new currency. This piece, Defiantly Daft, Duplicity Delicious is certainly one that does.

What is journalism for? Good question these days, but it’s actually been an important one for quite awhile. Take a look at this piece from 1989 from Janet Malcolm called The Journalist And The Murder-I.

Journalism, like everything else, might be under fire at the moment, some of it friendly, some of it not so. Check out Zack Whittaker’s adventure in FBI Agents Visited My Home About An Article I Wrote, And Now I Can’t Go To Mexico.

Tom Nichols says The Republican Party Has A Nazi Problem. Well, duh.

One of the many charges against Artificial Intelligence is what it will do to the cost of the energy needed to power it. Chris Castle takes a look in Update: Trump’s “Ratepayer Protection” Pitch Becomes A Private Power Plan for AI — But Grassroots Revolt Won’t Fade. Hat tip to Stan Stewart for this one.

Apple is about to release a number of products this week at a time that it is under increased criticism on a number of fronts. Recently, Jason Snell of Six Colors released The Six Colors Report Card, in which he surveys a number of the Apple faithful on how things went in the last year and compares that to year’s previous. The scores are always interesting, but the commentary is even more so, which you can read here. Also of interest is Kieran Healy’s charting out the bad vibes based on that commentary.

Speaking of Apple, Wesley Hilliard takes a look at some of those bad vibes in Apple’s Week February 27: Chasing The Puck.

On a local Chicago front and also on the tech beat, The Chicago Tribune’s Editorial Board takes on a local (yet owned by Albertsons) grocery store’s shopping app in Fix Your Lousy Shopping App, Jewel-Osco! Having suffered through using this app, and watching store personnel and other customers show their distaste for it, I can agree. Fix the lousy app.

Libraries, like so much else, are under attack these days. So this piece from 2017 from Eliza McGraw reminds us of a bit of history. Check out Horse-Riding Librarians Were The Great Depression’s Bookmobiles. Knowledge, like life, finds a way.