Retrospective

“Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained,” Vladimir Nabokov

Corey Hagelberg was asked to hang a retrospective of Denny Davis’s work at Miller’s Gardner Center of the Arts.  The March 15 event coincided with a twentieth anniversary celebration of Lake Street Gallery.  We took Wing Wah to Hagelbergs and arrived at the former Miller Drug Store around 7 p.m.  On the way Dick recalled helping Professor Leslie Singer pick up paintings in Chicago for a spectacular 1969 art show at IU Northwest.  Most of Denny Davis’s art pieces were brightly colored acrylic abstracts that didn’t make my toe tap, but I enjoyed numerous wooden cut-outs that Davis did early in his art fair circuit days. 

Denny and then-wife Sheila Hamanaka moved to Gary around 1970.  A Maoist, he worked as a steelworker, hoping to foment a workers revolution, before turning to art.  Denny loved playing video games on his large-screen television.  We were friends until he broke up with Sheila and then regarded us as enemies for siding with her in a custody dispute involving their two children.  For a time he was married to Joyce of Lake Street Gallery.

Running into Steve Spicer, who put his hand out, I embraced him and said I was a hugger.  I inquired how he was dealing with the death of wife Cara.  He thanked me for asking and told me he’d become close to her mother, who once offered Cara a thousand dollars if she wouldn’t marry him.  The wedding took place Auguet 9, 1974, the day Nixon resigned in the wake of Watergate.    Spicer put together a book about Cara and then a video compilation of photos and home movies, including trips they’d taken together - a very healthy way of dealing with loss.  He told me that after Herman Wouk’s wife died when he was 95, the author of “The Caine Mutiny” and “The Winds of War” thought he’d never write again.  Then he placed her photo on his desk and knocked out “The Lawgiver” at age 97.  That year he gave the Library of Congress a hundred volumes of a diary started in 1937.

Al Sterkin was at Lake Street Gallery looking fit and trim thanks to a diet.  I told Bud Rosen that the two of us played many softball games at Thirty-fifth and Virginia next to Franklin School in Glen Park, including one day when Mike Schmidt hit four home runs against the Cubs.  We had the radio on and watched the final HR at Al’s place across the street, which he shared with several other friends, including Tom Pancini.  I told Al and Bud that there was a photo of Joyce’s assistant Sue and I in the bathroom, then took them and several other curious folks in to view the shot of me signing copies of “Gary’s First Hundred Years” seven years ago as Sue looked on.

Lake Street Gallery was the second oldest business in Miller, Gene Ayers told me.  Still it was a half-century or so younger than Ayers Realty.  Somebody brought up the subject of tattoos, and Gene said, “I have one.”  He grew up in Gary’s Emerson district and had his blood type tattooed on his side.  He told me that kids who went to Wirt School in Miller didn’t get branded, probably since so many were Jewish and it reminded their parents of German death camp tattoos.

Aaron “Beamer” Pickert thinks the cartoon character Tycho resembles him.  The invention of Jerry Hopkins, he is in the comic strip Penny Arcade and, like Beamer, is fond of long words and fantasy literature.  The original Tycho Brahe was a sixteenth century Danish astronomer who lost the bridge of his nose in a duel and thereafter wore a brass prosthetic in public.  Meanwhile Darcey posted a cartoon on National Pi Day.

Discovery Carter School’s sixth grade band, with James on percussions, won gold at a competition in LaPorte.  Somebody mentioned to Dave that he might some day play drums for Blues Cruise.

WXRT’s 1970 playlist included “One Toke over the Line” by one-hit wonders Brewer and Shipley. A stoned hippie returns home after many adventures.  Because of references to “Sweet Jesus,” Lawrence Welk embraced it as a modern spiritual and had Gail and Dale sing it on his TV show.  Pigstink Spiro Agnew, on the other hand, condemned it for allegedly corrupting young people. Lin Brehmer did a feature on 1970 outdoor concerts, including a five-day spectacular on England’s Isle of Wight featuring The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Donovan, Jethro Tull, The Doors, Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Richie Havens, and many more.  Due to bad publicity from Woodstock and Altamont, many American localities were banning the holding of such events.

I picked up “Look at the Birdie,” a collection of unpublished Kurt Vonnegut short stories, including “Confido,” a device invented to help lonely people converse with their inner conscience that had unintended consequences.  “Confido” planted seeds of envy and resentment in the person hooked in to it.  “FUNAR,” meaning “Fouled Up Beyond All recognition,” is about a white-collar worker who has nothing meaningful to do.  Vonnegut wrote these spoofs of shrinks and corporate culture shortly after leaving his job at General Electric.  His work appeared in such magazines as Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, and Argosy in order to keep the wolf from the door.  He was in good company since contemporary novelists Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck all wrote for commercial publications.

Angie helped me set up captions on my TV screen.  I don’t use it for sports, but it helped when I watched last year’s final “Game of Thrones” episode after sitting through IU’s disappointing defeat to Wisconsin.  The Blackhawks games was more fun, an 8-1 rout of Dallas.  Many Chicago fans had on green jerseys for St. Patrick’s Day.  Toni made a delicious corned beef dinner.

Sunday after fixing eggs, kaibasa, toast, and fried onions and portabellas, I bought Polish ham and rolls for lunch during gaming.  My one victory was in St. Petersburg due to having melded 13 different orange cards, which has to be some sort of record.  Getting the Observatory early, I kept drawing orange upgraders.

Rolling Stone raved about the FX series “The Americans,” so I checked it out.  Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, living in the Washington, D.C., area, are spies working for the KGB in the early Eighties. Like in Miami Vice, contemporary music sets the mood in various scenes.  After Elizabeth and Philip kill a Russian traitor and dump his body in the river, they have rough sex in their car to Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.”  In two suspenseful scenes we hear Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk.”  The captions reveal the song’s lyrics.  The villains are Reagan-era FBI creeps, while the viewer roots for the Russian-born couple.

On the tenth anniversary of Operation Shock and Awe a Huffington Post article called “Iraq Retrospective” was subtitled “Read the Quotes that Sent Us to War.”  Pentagon official Kenneth Adelman claimed that liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein “would be a cakewalk, a walk in the park.”  President Bush told a skeptical Pat Robertson, “We’re not going to have any casualties.”  Vice President Dick Cheney predicted, “It will go relatively quickly, weeks rather than months.”  Out of that Vietnam-like disaster a new generation of skeptics was born. 

Scott Fulk still had the poster advertising Bill Pelke’s Soup ‘N’ Substance talk, so I brought it to the Archives.  Student Haley Kittle, whose dad was baseball player Ron Kittle, designed it.  Steve McShane will hang it in the workroom.  He wants me to give my Vivian Carter talk to his students and burned a DVD of jpegs to go with it.

A few months ago, Bob Mucci, who runs the Anthropology Dollar Sale, told me that someone had donated some old Shavings issues, so I was anxious to see whether they included any out-of-print volumes.  Mucci ended up offering them on Amazon: one, he said, sold for 20 dollars.  My Seventies issue he is offering for $30, based on what others are selling for.  Checking Amazon, I found used Thirties and Fifties issues on sale for $45.  “Tales of Lake Michigan” was going for $40.  Mucci makes more money selling books on line, despite the monthly charge and mailing costs, than at his dollar sales.

I talked to Corey Hagelberg about Frederic and Blandine staying at his and Kate’s place for seven weeks starting August 29.  They are planning to move into their larger house and are willing to rent the house where they currently live to them.  I told Frederic it’s about six blocks from Lake Michigan and just a few blocks from the cabin where Simone de Beauvoir and Nelson Algren spent two summers.  The only potential drawback is that to get to the top of the dune where it sits requires going up 90 steps.  Frederic said no problem, they live on a fifth floor apartment without an elevator.

I checked out a Senior Thesis Exhibition at Savannah Gallery for Jeremy Boyer, Jeffrey Brink, and Veronica Napoli.  Napoli’s work was of a female model; Brink did very angry, political pieces, while Boyer’s was mainly minimalist stuff such as a seemingly blank canvas except for a dot and a similar one with a square in the center.  A can just hear my dad saying, “I could have drawn that.”  But would Vic have thought to do it?  I think both Brink and Boyer were trying to shatter the complacency they feel folks have about the postmodern world.

Val called from Home Mountain to report that the proofs for volume 42 were ready for me to approve.  I only found one small thing that needed changing and loved the color, a brilliant yellow background and featuring Corey Hagelberg’s drawing “In the Garden.”  It should be ready for delivery, Val predicted, soon after I return from California.  Toni made ribs, rice, and asparagus for dinner.  I’ll miss her home-cooked meals.