Mucca Pazza at Tour de Fat

One of Chicago's great cultural treasures, in my irreverent opinion at least, is the band Mucca Pazza. Billing themselves as a "circus-punk marching band", this group of 30 musicians and performers employs all the trappings of a high school marching band, including their own mini-squad of cheerleaders, but with a wild abandon that represents what high school band might have looked like if the teacher had left and never come back, and the most energetic students took over running the show.





Mucca Pazza does indeed march during their shows, and dance, and spin, and run about through the crowd in every direction. At any moment you might get a cheerleader waving pom-pons in your face or a 5-second guitar solo played almost for your exclusive benefit. Some of the musicians wear amplifiers, with helmet-mounted megaphones on their heads, broadcasting their sound in one particular direction, and perhaps sending it to different areas of the crowd like a rotating tornado siren as they turn about. Groups of horn players might position themselves in different areas and play back and forth across the crowd. A trombone player might need the space between you and your neighbor for his instrument's slide. The show you get depends on where you are, and will be different for every member of the audience.





The band's energy is frenetic, and improvisation is everywhere. It's enough to make any standard rock band look dusty and tired.



I happily bought their album, but listening to a recording on speakers cannot remotely compare to the experience of being surrounded by musicians playing their hearts out and having a blast doing it. And there's no cheerleaders, either.

Rogers Park's Metra Murals

Every time the UP North Metra line embankment crosses a street, there are two ready-made mural canvases in the form of the retaining walls under the bridges. And one of the more delightful outcomes of Rogers Park's recent participatory budgeting has been the addition of some amazing and wonderful murals to the underpasses (though honestly, I might have given higher priority to a weekly power washing of the sidewalks, which are covered in pigeon droppings.)

I made a quick survey this evening of the murals in my neighborhood, most of which are less than two years old.

At Pratt, this work has just appeared within the last month, and is still in progress. The first photo shows it a week ago:


Now its color palette has grown:






Is it going to be 3D? I don't know, but as a child of the 80s, I am pre-programmed to like this particular color palette.

The Pratt bridge itself bears some note. It is the only Metra bridge I know of that retains turn-of-the-century ornamentation:




At Farwell, the northern underpass wall has a two-part mural by two different artists. West of the tracks, a surreal motor encounter, by Dan Bellini:



On the east side, a similarly surreal scene by Jennifer Cronin:


The two scenes are united as the road curves off onto a cliff overlooking the forest.



Next up is my absolute favorite, at Morse, a colorful composition by Molly Zakrajsek and Ann Van Devender:


Each of the large, simple figures is colored not by solid fields but by a delightful profusion of tiny colored figures:





At Lunt, the Rogers Park Metra Station underpass is adorned with a themed pair of murals titled "Diverse Earth".







As underpass murals go, the Lunt Avenue one is getting on in age, and parts have been lost to recent concrete spalling.


At the other end of the Rogers Park station, a series of colored panels with cartoon Cubist faces, by Christopher Royal, decorates the Greenleaf underpass:





On the other side of the same bridge, a stylized street scene by Zsofia Otvos:





Last stop: the Rogers Avenue underpass. On the south side, an older and more traditional painting, without the strong-concept artistic styles of the more recent murals, seemingly done by school kids:







On the north side,another strong-concept work - a series of colored panels, each with a slight pointer allowing the panel to be seen as a speech balloon spoken by a figure in the adjacent panel.



At present, there are only three characters, so I improvised a couple more of my own.



Is it incomplete? Are more figures coming? Or is it simply meant to evoke precisely this sort of interaction with the work?

All these works are somewhat ephemeral and transient. With luck, they may last five or ten years; however, they are doomed to a finite lifespan by both their medium and their setting. Paint fades and peels - but more than that, the concrete on which it sits spalls and crumbles.





The bridges themselves won't last forever, either - they're a hundred years old, and their condition reflects that. These bridges are not part of Metra's current bridge replacement plans (that project stops at Balmoral in Andersonville), but it's a fair bet that once the current project is done (in 2018, according to plans), this batch will be on the table for replacement.

Songs about the death and life of the American city

A loose list, a set of vague connections, but all powerful in their condemnation of what's happening to our cities. Songs about urban decay, suburban development, architecture, demolition, buildings and food:

* The Pretenders: "My City Was Gone" - the death of Akron, Ohio chronicled in a bitterly angry rock song
* Marvin Gaye: "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)"
* Bruce Springsteen: "My City of Ruins" (about his home town of Asbury Park. Later repurposed as a post-9/11 reflection.)
* Stevie Wonder: "Village Ghetto Land"
* Jay Farrar: "Outside the Door", a lament for the lost places and times of St. Louis
* Son Volt: "Way Down Watson" - Farrar & company mourn the death of St. Louis's old Coral Court Motel
* Marah: "This Town" - (semi)closing track from their amazing Kids in Philly disk. Every track evokes the life and times of Philadelphia, none more poignantly than this short reflection. See also "History of Where Someone Has Been Killed", "The Catfisherman", "Christian Street".
* Neko Case: "Thrice All American" - an almost apologetic song about Tacoma, WA
* B.J. Thomas: "Everybody's Out of Town" - recently suggested by a friend. A sardonic take on the abandonment of the inner city.
* Talking Heads: "The Big Country" - David Byrne looks down on the suburbs from an airplane and dryly declares that "I wouldn't live there if you paid me." I hear ya, bro.
* Rush: "Subdivisions" - those long, drawn-out synth notes capture the essential emptiness of growing up in the 'burbs

People might also suggest "Big Yellow Taxi", but it's a bit too chipper for the moods I'm circling around with this set.

Lane Technical High School

Lane Technical College Prep High School (architect John C. Christensen) is a Gothic icon on Western Avenue, a break from the relentlessly dense and unplanned commercial onslaught that lines Chicago's longest street. Lane Tech occupies a full city block (or more); the building is beautifully and artfully planned, with enormous spacious grounds surrounding an equally enormous building complex. Founded as Albert G. Lane Technical School in 1908, it is the city's largest high school, housing over 4,000 students.



You would never guess at a glance that this building was finished in 1934. The red brick Gothic style was highly out of favor by that point, both from an artistic and economic standpoint, but apparently it was decided to press onwards rather than redo drawings that had been completed several years prior. The result was a building that was out of style before it was even built - but still remains highly impressive today.







You could be forgiven for thinking that the prominent clock tower on the Western Avenue side marks the front of the school, but it doesn't - a look at the building's floor plan shows that the school is actually oriented to the north. Inside the tower is one of the school's many stairwells. The clock itself no longer functions.



On the north side, facing Addison Street, twin towers demarcate the school's primary facade. Between them is nestled the library, a beautiful double-height space with vast north-facing windows that bathe the space in indirect light.



The school's corridors are overwhelmingly long and monotonous, begging the question of how students manage to get from one class to another in the paltry 4 minutes they are alloted.




Though monotonous and monochrome, the hallways are enlivened in a most unusual way. A series of 40 murals, created for the 1933 Century of Progress world's fair, commemorating the contributions of every state in the union to modern technology.



The attitude toward industry and manufacturing in these paintings is startlingly divorced from that of today. Whereas we see factories and refineries as eyesores to be minimized and avoided, these paintings celebrate them as welcome additions to even the most bucolic of landscapes. A steel mill alongside a lake is a thing to be celebrated, not mourned. It's a fitting attitude for a building whose scale is that of a factory, an industrial-sized seat of learning.





Lane's early history is literally written on its walls. In the cafeteria, a small metal plaque notes that the sound system was the gift of the class of '59. Art projects dating back to the 1930s are scattered around the building, including murals in the cafeteria and library, and bas reliefs carved in wood in the library.







The wood reliefs were carefully restored just a few years ago. One, entitled Evolution of the Book, is in a WPA-influenced style similar to the Century of Progress murals. The other, Control of the Elements by Peterpaul Ott, is pure Art Deco - stylized, geometric, streamlined, and utterly amazing. Both were designed by teachers and executed with the help of students.





One of the nearby murals was done by members of the 1942 Mural Club.



Even the utilitarian courtyards are artfully decorated, and used to engender school spirit.



Both the librarian and a security worker I spoke to had glowing praise for the student body - hard workers, disciplined, well behaved, smart. Many are the children of immigrants. A handful were in the library studying on a beautiful Saturday morning.

History of Lane Tech at the school's website

The Murals at the school website

Lane Tech at Wikipedia