Aftermath

Just a few random shots, post Taken by Storm...the Storm started the afternoon of Tuesday, February 1, and ended the afternoon of Wednesday, February 2. The first three photos were taken the morning of Thursday, February 3, when the city started to come back to life. The fourth pic was from that evening; the storm had scrubbed the sky clean. The last photo is from today, Saturday February 5. There are massive piles of snow everywhere the plows have been, causing especially large vehicles like city buses untold misery coming around corners and the like. 

Digging out, the morning after it was all over

A little pathway

Stuck in a berm (two more days before that car in the middle of the road got out)

Gorgeous evening...snow on top of the ice, Lake Michigan (and still no traffic on Lake Shore Drive)

After the snow plows...those two cars are lucky, with a little digging they might actually get out of their spaces.

Taken by storm

There are only two things being reported on the Chicago area news: the revolution in Egypt, and the Storm of The Century in Chicago.
It was not a tempest in a teacup. It was a TEMPEST. Was? Is. It's still carrying on outside, though from my 11th floor condo perspective, things have settled down extraordinarily since last night, when it peaked. Well, I'm not sure I would say it peaked, in the usual sense of a point on a line graph at the top between steep upward and downward slopes. It plateaued, raging unchanged for hours and hours and hours.

We can't say we weren't warned. For the last 48 hours all radio and TV channels trumpeted warnings: The Storm of the Century is coming! The sky is falling! Sixteen to 24 inches of snow! Dangerous gale-force winds! How often this kind of anticipatory hyperbole is deflated when in actuality we manage to pile up 4 or 5 inches of snow. This time, they were right, and the prediction has so far been phenomenally accurate. The winter storm warning went into effect at 3:00 p.m. yesterday, just about the time I arrived home. The president of the organization I work for had sent around an email with subject, "Winter storm event" (so that's it's called!) suggesting people leave while the going was good, and announcing that we are to work from home today, so here I am, signing off the blog momentarily to carry on the good fight.

But before I go, I have to say, I've never experienced anything like last night's storm. The wind coming unimpeded off of Lake Michigan seemed to blast right through my (modern, industrial-strength, double-paned, heavy aluminum-framed) windows at high velocity, making it uncomfortably cold and creepily noisy to sit anywhere near them. Somewhere deep inside my building, a 15-story mid-century mid-rise, something set to vibrating at about the same frequency of a jet flying within hearing range overhead, the oddest, steadiest background hum I've ever heard in the the 23 years I've lived here. The view outside was so whited-out that it wasn't possible to see snow, only occasional long cloud-like streams of scintillating moisture shooting past horizontally against the background glowing gray from the city lights.  I kept thinking of the early Arctic explorers, imagining homesteaders in their sod houses on the Dakota plains, stray kittens huddling in alleyways, and above all, Chicago's homeless unwilling to go to shelters. Soon we'll know how many did not survive Chicago's Storm of the Century.

I'm sorry, but I really don't find it charming or funny

Yesterday afternoon I attended Lyric Opera of Chicago’s La Fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West), Puccini’s classical opera, his only (among Madama Butterfly, La Boehme, Tosca, and others) with a physically and morally strong female lead, many amusing touches, and with a happy ending.  Like that of many operas, the plot is light duty: it takes place during the gold rush of California’s Sierra Nevada, and, to make a long story short, involves the sole woman at the mining camp, the good-hearted Minnie, finding true love with a bandit that her golden devotion is sure to reform. As a fellow audience member quipped about this light drama, sung in Italian and written from the remove of early 20^th century Europe, “It’s the original spaghetti western!”

The lively production was directed by the renowned Harold Prince, with stage direction by Vincent Liotta; the evocative sets were designed by Eugene Lee, and the exquisite and convincing costumes were by Franne Lee. The vocal star was Deborah Voight, beautiful and believable in spite of her real-life maturity, among other well and lesser known performers, nearly all male. I also enjoyed the music–not just Puccini’s yummy score, but Lyric Opera orchestra’s performance, reliably and beautifully directed by Sir Andrew Davis.

There was, however, a blot on the afternoon’s fantasy, and one that might have been avoided. A minor character (though he stuck out for me like a sore thumb), Billy Jackrabbit, is described by Puccini as “a red Indian,” meaning, of course, a Native American. The first act takes place in the Polka, the bar and, and, as it were, community center of the mining camp. There, Billy’s role is to behave like a stereotypical drunken Indian, trying endlessly to swipe some whiskey, by the glass or by the bottle, for a little comic action; in a later setting, he has one more opportunity to celebrate alcohol, when he gives in to Minnie’s plea that he marry the Indian woman with whom he has a baby, and announces loudly, “After marrying, we get beads and whiskey!” He’s presented as a morally deficient drunk with laughably (literally) simplistic values.

The plot requires the miners to regularly voice their appreciation for whiskey as well, but alcohol addiction was not quite the problem for the miners of European heritage (“Anglos”) and their descendants, that it was, and still is, for those of American Indian ethnicity. Of all the stereotypes required to successfully mount an opera (or any stage drama for that matter), I wish the producers had had a bit more sensitivity to this particularly painful and destructive one. Alcohol use and abuse has devastated more than one Indian family, sometimes taking whole communities with it, and is a plague that was intentionally wreaked by the Anglos from the earliest colonial times to control the troublesome “redskins”who, it seems, may have widespread genetic susceptibility to alcohol addiction.

The producers of this opera could easily have played down the buffoonish portrayal of what is truly a sad, sick and unfunny stereotype without betraying Puccini’s plot or libretto. I rather wish they hadn’t missed the chance.

Full disclosure: One very old friend, of pure American Indian heritage, died in 2005 after a long, wasted life addicted to alcohol. And he is not the only one among friends I held dear who has died from drinking. Maybe my sensitivity is tuned too high. But it’s also the reason I understand how hellish an affliction alcoholism is.

I love coffee

And so did Johan Sebastian Bach, listen to his charming rendition of the last chorus of his Kaffee Kantata:

Bach's lyrics are so silly as to be nearly incomprehensible (especially when translated into English), but for the intrepid, here they are, in part.  

And if you like your coffee wonderfully sweetened, just listen to Natalie Cole singing a little bit of Coffee Time:

Free music - Coffee Time

Here are the lyrics:

Coffee time
My dreamy friend
It's coffee time
Let's sing
This silly
Little rhyme
And have
A cup of coffee

Java time
My happy chum
Let's have a time
We'll celebrate
For just a dime
And have
A cup of coffee

Greetin' time
The music box
Is beatin' time
It's good
Old-fashioned
Meetin' time
We're in the pink
So come and clink
And let's drink
A cup of coffee

Coffee time
My dreamy friend
It's coffee time
Let's sing
This silly
Little rhyme
And have
A cup of coffee

Coffee time
My dreamy friend
It's coffee time
Let's sing
This silly
Little rhyme
And have
A cup of coffee
And have
A cup of coffee
And have
A cup of coffee

All of this makes me thirsty for my ritual morning brew: Starbucks Espresso Roast, made in my ancient-falling-apart-dearly-treasured macchinetta, poured into a cuppa hot milk for a real Puerto Rican-style café con leche. Not just a great way to start the day: it's the only way!

Sea life meets human life

As much as I love beautiful scenery, mountains and water, geological wonders and amazing plant life (think minuscule flowering flora clinging for dear life flat to the ground at 10,000 feet and their distant cousins, the grandest sequoias) for me, nothing rewards the spirit  like watching "charismatic megafauna" (as referred to by those charged with managing both the wildlife and the humanlife that comes in droves to view, and sometimes get in trouble with it). At the top my list are the grizzly and black bears, wolves, and cats when I'm in the mountain west. At the top when I'm in Sanibel, Florida, are the Atlantic bottlenose dolphins. Like many other top-of-the-list, top-of-the-food-chain predators, they can be very difficult to view, because their element is not our element. Fortunately, though, like just a few other predators (e.g., bears and our garbage, wolves and our livestock) they are attracted by certain human activities. But unlike other wildlife, dolphins exhibit apparent curiosity about us and our water-going contraptions. In Sanibel this December, we took the best dolphin-viewing boat tour ever. Not that it's necessary to be out in a boat to view them--they're not hard to spot from shore for those who watch. A fellow beach-comber told me she was once very startled to see one slide up on the sand and then back into the water. This one was only, who knows, maybe 50 yards from the beach at lighthouse. 

 

This one was a bit farther out. I hope all those people on the beach below the lighthouse were enjoying the show!

As the tour operators know, there are certain speeds at which the churning propellers attract the dolphins if they're not busy feeding (though that is also very fun to watch as they splash and roil around in a school of confused and terrified mullet, sometimes tossing a fish into the air before consuming it). As frequently depicted through history, dolphins around the world have always been interested in the disturbance humans and their vessels make in their watery world:

Depiction of Dionysus among the dolphins by Exekias, c. 530 B.C.

How could we believe otherwise than that this one was checking us out?

Why, exactly, they engage in such entertaining acrobatics in the presence of a foaming wake is not clear, even to experts.  It seems possible these intelligent mammals do it for joy. Note the one on the left is completely upside down:

If you're built to withstand enormous belly flops, then this is for you:

They even teach their children what do when the tour boats come through:

May its passing be not unremarked

Fish market Hong Kong 1980

Guangondese (Cantonese) folk dance demonstration 1983

Wisconsin 1982

Wisconsin 1982

Kinkaku Temple Kyoto 1983

Tourism at the Grand Canyon 1985

The waters of Puerto Rico 1979

I used to go through it like candy: Kodachrome 64, best slide film ever made. Now that it's no longer possible to get it developed anywhere on earth, many are sadly bemoaning its passing. And many would agree with me, that the colors and vibrancy of the images it captured were unparalleled: accurate skin tones, reds and blues, such sharpness and liveliness. Above are just a few scanned slides, muddied a little by age and repeated showings in front of a hot projector lamp, tweaked a smidgen with PhotoShop to bring back some of their original vigor. Click to enlarge and fully enjoy them. The camera  was a (very rare) split-focal screen Nikormat FTN, with 50 mm f2, 28 mm f2.8, and most wonderful of all, 135 mm f 2.8 Nikkor lenses (long before you could do all that with a single zoom).

Oh yes, I do love digital photography. If nothing else, it's surely easier to organize my photos, and God willing, the images will falter less with time. The image below is among the very first I ever took with my digital camera, a Nikon D70, in 2004.

 

Why I love Florida

Ring-billed gull with shrimp

Regular Amusing Musings readers know how much I love and treasure the greater Yellowstone area. But for a change of pace we sometimes spend a week on Sanibel Island, just off the coast of Fort Myers, Gulf of Mexico side. Sanibel is two-thirds nature preserve, what more could I want? Well, it helps to have birds that are big enough to see without my glasses. Yes, yes, there are little warblers and hummingbirds, but it's the big guys that are abundantly present at this time of year. Here's just a sample of what we saw two weeks ago (click on the photos to see the details). Enjoy, and merry Christmas!

Double-crested cormorant, juvenile plumage, at Ding Darling National Wildlife
Refuge. Note the striking eye color!

Great egret on Sanibel's fishing pier

Snowy egret, at Sanibel Marina

Boat-tailed grackle

Great blue heron, Captiva Island

Pair of nesting ospreys, under the Sanibel Lighthouse

White ibis, with pretty blues

Wood stork, Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge

Brown pelicans, Ding Darling

White pelican (and great white egret), Ding Darling

Roseate spoonbill, a standout even at this distance (and ibises and a gull)

What is so marvelous about photography

We've just returned from a week in Sanibel, Florida. Sanibel, an island off the coast of Fort Myers, is two-thirds nature preserve. Need I say more?

(please click photo to enlarge for full effect)

I took hundreds, maybe a thousand, photos. As I go through them (fully intending to post some here and more on my Flickr site) I finally understand what a miracle nature photography is. Something catches the eye, the camera goes up, focuses, and the shutter clicks. But during that micro-second between when something is envisioned and when it is recorded on the sensor (or film) anything can happen. There's literally a blind moment, and the outcome isn't fully known until displayed on a computer monitor or printed. The miracle is that time after time, the result is spectacular. What a joy of a hobby photography is!

This time the good kharma is mine

In the last two days I have lost and found: one earring...which I eventually found with the pin-like post pointed down into the car seat where KLK had been sitting for about an hour...the earring would have been found a lot faster if the pin had been pointed up; one pair of fancy (and pricey) prescription sunglasses, on a shell- and detritus-strewn post-storm beach (photos to follow in a few days), thanks to KLK's ability to pick them out from among the tens of thousands of shells and squishier things of all shapes, sizes and colors along the wave-line; one lens cap, face down in the sand. Its perfect black roundness made it easy for me to locate, although it had been sitting in the sand, slightly embedded, for a good 15 minutes before I noticed its absence and retraced my steps.

One can always use a little good kharma!

An island in time. In Chicago.

Scenic Starnberger See from the "unterhaus" (lower house), Landheim von Specht, 1963

The summer I turned 13, my parents parked me at a summer language camp, Landheim von Specht- in Ambach am Starnberger See (Ambach on Starnberger Lake), Bavaria. The kids in the camp hailed from all over--Germany, England, Africa, Greece, and me, the sole representative of the U.S.. We had individual tutoring and classroom instruction in German, and field trips to places like the puppet opera theater of Munich, where I saw my first, if watered down, Magic Flute. That being dairy country, we were given milk to drink that came (and smelled like it) straight from the cows. Yogurt was entirely new to me. It also had a bit of arome d'grange, and required spoonsful of sugar to be edible, even with sweet zweiback dipped into it. 

Photo labeled "Chapel of Ludwig" Starnberg, Germany 1963

At the end of the summer my father returned to the U.S. and my mother and I moved into a little apartment in a modern high-rise on Calle Enrique Larreta in Madrid, where we spent the 1963-64 school year. I was enrolled at the American School of Madrid, where there were interesting friendships to be had, including with my 8th grade classmate, Rafael Diaz-Balart (on whom I had an unrequited crush), grandson of the famous anti-Castro leader of the same name, and brother of Lincoln and Jose Diaz-Balart, both well known in American public life today. The administrators, teachers, and students were ex-pats and Spaniards with connections to America, and Cuban refugees and Americans accompanying their parents on business in Spain, such as me. Mother had a Fulbright grant to train teachers in teaching English (TEFL). For my part, as usual, I had my friends, my horseback riding lessons, and my adventuresome spirit in that country still very much under the reign of Generalissimo Franco. We had a car, and explored the Iberian peninsula widely and deliciously--Santiago de la Compostela, Salamanca, Sevilla, Segovia, Cordoba, Cuenca, Toleldo, Barcelona, Avila, Malaga, Torre Molinos, and Algarve and Lisbon in Portugal, were on our itineraries. It was an exotic place, like an island not yet caught up with the rest of post-war Europe: there were castles in ruins, wonderful, amazing food, and throwback rituals like bullfights and medieval Semana Santa processions. Acquisitive by nature, I enjoyed shopping for Toledo-ware, iron- and ceramic work, textiles, Spanish leather goods, and, with my own precious Agfa Optima II camera, took lots of pictures I considered interesting (and some, though now fading ever faster, are indeed so). 

The walled city of Avila, Spain, 1963 or '64

But among the things I enjoyed most above all, both in Germany and in Spain, were simply visits to any kind of commercial venture, including cafes and restaurants, delicatessens and groceries, drug stores, perfumeries, department stores, shoe stores, stationers, book stores, souvenir stalls, you name it, the goods were magnetically intriguing, so different from what I'd experienced stateside, new items to look at, or entirely new forms of things I was well-familiar with back home. At that time, Spain especially had one foot firmly in the prior half of the 20th century, but Germany also had not developed to anything remotely like the cosmopolitan place it is today.

Christmas display table, Merz Apothecary, Lincoln Avenue, Chicago, 2010

So much cool stuff at Merz

Yesterday, some 47 years after my initial European immersion, I took a stroll through Chicago's charming Lincoln Square area, and in particular spent a long time browsing in Merz Apothecary, established in Chicago by a Swiss immigrant in 1875. In 2010 it still flourishes, with a small storefront in the Chicago Loop and a robust internet trade. But nothing beats its original location at 4716 N. Lincoln. Because of conscientious efforts to retain the original look and feel of an old-style European apothecary, I was whisked feet first back to Madrid and Munich, 1963. What a sensation, what a pleasure to know all that has not been lost! Even many of the product lines (along with their many modern counterparts) --Fa, Badedas, Nivea, 4711, Roger & Gallet, Maja -- new to me in 1963-64, are still available on their shelves, some even in packaging hearkening right back to those halcyon days.

Sieben und vierzig elf, my fave!

Roger & Gallet, another old, old favorite

I don't know what this is, but it's awfully appealing arrayed on display.

Addendum: For updates on this post, see http://veronicawaldsamusingmusings.blogspot.com/2011/02/musings-on-bloggings.html

How deep is the trouble we're in?

The Chicago Loop offices of the nonprofit where I work, NORC (an independent social science research organization that provides data and analysis to people and institutions that make decisions about key social issues) has become the home of some extraordinary photographs around which the field of "visual social science” crystallized. While still vigorous, but aware that she would likely suffer a fatal recurrence of breast cancer, Rachel Tanur launched a series of photographic sojourns through Africa, Europe, and North, Central, and South America, bringing back hundreds of iconic (and some aesthetically remarkable) images documenting what she observed. The photographs, taken between about 1999 and 2002, were initially part of the National Science Foundation’s Art of Science Project, but have now found their permanent place along the NORC's corporate halls. Rachel’s mother Judith M. Tanur, Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita of Sociology, Stony Brook University (New York), is a valued member of NORC's board of trustees. 

Of the many thought-provoking images on the walls of our downtown offices, this is the one* that struck me most forcefully:

While it is not a given that the statement is unalloyed truth, it clearly deserves thoughtful consideration.  Below is a small selection of screen shots from cable TV this morning, amply illustrating why the avowal on the marquee must be taken seriously. If it is so, the United States is in very deep trouble.

* Because Rachel was not able to catalog her photos before she died in 2002, I believe where exactly this photo was taken is not known. Please learn more about Rachel's legacy and see a gallery of her wonderful photographs here  and for more about her story click here.

Perchance to dream

(This is a not-great trailer of the same production 

I saw, but at a different company and with a different cast. At least it gives a little taste of the magicality and musicality of the piece.)

Yesterday afternoon I supremely enjoyed the first opera I’m attending in Lyric Opera of Chicago’s 2010-2011 season, Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Benjamin Britten is one of my favorite 20th century opera composers, and I’d never seen his brilliant translation from Shakespeare’s stage play to musical opera. Those who recall the story from their school days or favorite repertory theater know that it is all about a prolonged dream involving fairies (both royal and Puckish), a band of well-meaning actors (as the troupe says, anticipating Yogi Berra but most definitely in Shakespeare’s words:  “If we offend, it is with our good will.”), and lovers-gone-awry galore. All is happily resolved at the end of their long, intertwined, disorienting dream, but it’s also clear that no one got a restful, restorative night’s sleep.

By happy coincidence, earlier last week my friend and colleague at the University of Chicago's Division of Biological Sciences, Professor Eve Van Cauter, gave a presentation to my alumni club. The topic was her recent research on sleep and biorhythms providing experimental evidence in healthy human subjects of the epidemiologically-observed associations between chronic reductions in sleep duration and quality with the development of obesity and obesity-associated type II diabetes (“diabesity”).  

Here is how I introduced her:

I have known Eve Van Cauter since the late 1980s, when she first brought her extraordinary human subjects experiments to the NIH-grant funded Clinical Research Center at the University of Chicago, where I was administrator at the time.

One of the joys of grant administration is grant renewal, and part of grant renewal is the tribulation of a site visit, which goes on for a day-and-a-half and involves the descent of a group of 10 experts and peers, and a few government officers, to whom we had to present our best projects to convince the funding agency to continue their largesse for another five years.

Naturally, there is a great deal of art (and maybe science) to how the projects are presented. Whoever goes first gets to start the day off with a bang. Whoever goes right after lunch is doomed unless they’re a pretty lively speaker. However, you always reserve your strongest presenter for last, so after a long, exhausting day the reviewers will leave inspired, energized, and deeply impressed by the quality and creativity, importance, and soundness of your center’s science and productivity.  Eve Van Cauter was always designated to go last.

Although her doctorate, earned at the Free University of Brussels, is in biophysics, her contributions are to the disciplines of human physiology and the unraveling of the mysteries of sleep and circadian rhythmicity, the daily biological clock if you will. As summarized on her 37-page curriculum vitae, her interests include, among other things:

The role of sleep and circadian rhythmicity in endocrine regulation, metabolism, cardiovascular function, mood, and cognitive performance;

The interactive effects of sleep loss and reduced sleep quality in aging and the associated impacts on health and cognition;

The control of circadian rhythmicity in health and disease, including how we adapt to time shifts like jet lag.

Which among those is not of direct relevance to all of us? I present to you my friend and colleague, Eve Van Cauter who is going to tell you about heretofore unrecognized relationships between the body and the “brain” phenomenon of sleep.