Chicago Daily Observer

If you are not a lover of that most American of art forms, jazz, then kindly skip to the next article.

If you are, then stop reading and walk over to your radio. Turn it to 90.9 on the FM dial and chances are that you’ll hear something wonderful that will help you forget about things like high gas prices and your cholesterol count.

Like television, radio is a vast wasteland unless you know just where to look. Skim the radio dial and you’ll likely encounter the kind of vapidity that now characterizes much of American popular culture.

Fortunately, there’s a fresh wind blowing from the direction of DuPage County. It’s actually been blowing for decades but isn’t well known because, like many things of quality, it’s been overshadowed by louder and more strident voices—or stronger radio signals.

In a City of Big Shoulders known for muscular jazz, it’s the ... Read More...

Forget Sex and the City and its extravagant women. Haven’t you heard? Thrift is in vogue.

Every cloud has a silver lining, they say, and if there’s a silver lining to problems like the subprime mortgage crisis and escalating gas and food prices, it’s that some Americans are waking up to the old-fashioned idea of thrift.

Out of the blue, and out of Washington D.C. (not a place known for controlled spending) comes a multi-year, national campaign to confront the debt culture. It’s called “Confronting the Debt Culture” and a report, released in May, called “For a New Thrift: Confronting the Debt Culture,” outlines ways in which to confront the debt culture.

I know all about thrift. I was a music student, after all, and lived on Ramen noodles (10 for $1 at Jewel) throughout my early years in Chicago while my MBA friends dined at Charlie Trotter’s. I ... Read More...

The story of David and Goliath is playing at a theater near you. Only David doesn’t wear Biblical-style sandals. He wear sneakers, and a business suit.

David is played by actor-turned-activist Ben Stein. The part of Goliath is played by the scientific establishment of the United States. The movie, an excellent and entertaining documentary, is Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

The film takes a serious topic—the debate between Darwinists and those who subscribe to the idea of intelligent design—and treats it with wonderfully satirical humor. But the film is also deadly serious. Why? Because the suppression of honest inquiry and the twisting of ideas can lead to dangerous places, such as Dachau.

Let me explain.

The word “expelled” in the film’s title refers to accomplished scientists who have either been terminated or denied tenure for alluding to the possibility that the universe may have originated through the work of a designer. ... Read More...

If you have two eyes with which to read this text, then you possess a human body and can relate to the exhibits on display at a quietly wonderful museum on Chicago’s Gold Coast.

Located in a Lake Shore Drive mansion that is itself worthy of a visit, the International Museum of Surgical Science offers a series of exhibits on medical history that are meaty but small, a welcome aspect in an era of Too Much Information.

Democrat or Republican, peasant or aristocrat, God-fearing or pagan, we all have bodies and the problems that come with them.

Pain, for example. The Jewish proverb “Not to have felt pain is not to have been human” greets us as we enter a one-room exhibit called “The Universal Condition: Enduring and Alleviating Pain.” What do belladonna, mandrake and henbane have in common? All are effective pain relievers AND deadly poisons. Very important ... Read More...

Following the 1997 re-make of the movie Titanic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, an amusing T-shirt began showing up about town. “THE SHIP SANK,” it read. “GET OVER IT.”

One could say the same for the feminist movement.

This thought came to mind as I attended a recent talk at DePaul University by Phyllis Schlafly, the Alton, Illinois housewife-turned-attorney, a visit organized by the DePaul Conservative Alliance.

Having attended college in the ‘seventies, I knew a thing or two about Phyllis Schlafly, all right. She was the annoying blue-haired lady who led the fight to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, and who wanted to keep women down. Never mind that I hadn’t ever read a scrap of her writing or heard her speak.

As a music student, I wasn’t interested in the grown-up working world anyway, and I’ve always liked men. But I was surrounded by ... Read More...

“Everything I ever really needed to know I learned in kindergarten,” a popular writer once claimed.

Not me.

Oh, I certainly learned some hard lessons back then, playing in the sandbox. But for me, slow learner that I am, the most important lessons came much later in life. In high school.

Most of these came from my high school English teacher, Rose Barth. Mrs. Barth (wasn’t it wonderful when married women were called “Mrs.?” So much more respect they had then) was not only a brilliant teacher of literature, she was tough. “Break it up,” she snapped one day to me and my high school sweetheart, Scott, as we stood by our lockers entwined in teenaged embrace. We obeyed. No one dared disobey Mrs. Barth.

Among other virtues, Rose Barth and her colleagues in the English Department made us, even the most sullen and resistant, read great books—scads of them. ... Read More...

Just when you think the world’s going to hell in a handbasket, along comes Buddy Charles.

In the unlikely setting of Niles, Illinois, just northwest of Chicago, in the comfortable sort of place that might once have been called a supper club, the singer/pianist Buddy Charles performs each Tuesday and Wednesday nights in an open run. The place is called The Chambers and it’s on the east side of Milwaukee Avenue, about a half mile south of that god-awful fake stone fountain at the intersection of Touhy and Milwaukee.

Why is Niles an unlikely setting? Well, you’d think that a place where you could cuddle up with a brandy to hear Noel Coward and George Gershwin sung and played with the rarest of wit and pianistic skill would be in downtown Chicago, right? But no. The elegant cognac-and-piano bars—Toulouse and the Gold Star Sardine Bar, for example—are gone for now, ... Read More...

A fifteenth-century Florentine is speaking to Chicago.

His name is Lorenzo Ghiberti and he is remarkably well preserved, as you would be if your image was cast in bronze and burnished in gold.

Forget King Tut. Forget the museum blockbusters. Right now, at the Art of Institute of Chicago in a single small gallery, you can see a small piece of one man’s magnificent life work, absent of hype, speaking for itself.

It’s a set of doors, or, to be more accurate, a few panels. A miniature exhibit of a monumental work.

Fly to Florence and go to the Cathedral. Stand outside its main entrance. Look west, and you’ll see a green-and-white marble building. It’s the Baptistery, a place not only for baptisms but for other religious and civic activities. There you’ll see two enormous bronze doors (they’re seventeen feet high and weigh three tons) with ten relief panels telling ... Read More...

Or “Culture Matters”

Once upon a time there was a gracious avenue in America that resembled the great boulevards of major European centers such as Paris and Barcelona. Well-dressed men and women strolled its length, admiring the fares on display in the windows of the elegant shops that bordered it. Some of them even wore hats.

Twenty-five years ago when I moved to Chicago, Michigan Avenue fit this description. Last week I decided to spend a Saturday afternoon shopping on the Avenue, something I hadn’t done for years.

The change appalled me.

Hordes of shoppers crowded the sidewalk, chewing gum while gaping at the Victoria’s Secret windows, electronic devices protruding from every other ear. Forty percent were talking on cell phones. The best-dressed among them wore Spandex, typically on figures that did not well tolerate the wearing of Spandex. Others displayed bare midriffs, with spaghetti strips hanging loose over visible ... Read More...