William Horberg

Sweet Home Chicago

Friday the 13th today, but nothing unlucky about this classic Robert Johnson recording of Chicago's unofficial theme song.

Enjoy!

william

If You Really Want to Understand Chicago...

Check out this 10 minute short film from the early 1980's by Scott Jacobs of an interview with the legendary former Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko, in which he holds forth on one of his favorite subjects, Chicago softball and his national championship team The Strykers, while sitting in one of Chicago's most famous haunts and his frequent watering hole, the Billy Goat Tavern.

 Royko at The Goat

Royko was a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist who wrote for all of the major Chicago newspapers of his day, but mostly the Chicago Sun-Times and The Tribune. His only full-length book was "Boss", a study of long-time Chicago mayor and political machine boss Richard J. Daley, but it is one of the best books ever written about big city American politics.

Glad this short film has survived for future generations. What an evocation of a place and time and distinct culture of which Royko was the epitome. 

Enjoy!

william

The Chicago Sun

Here's another taste of ol' Chicago, a Sunday comic book insert from the now defunct Chicago Sun newspaper, the predecessor of the current and almost-defunct Chicago Sun-Times, which was created when the Sun merged with the Chicago Times back on February 2, 1948, sixty-one years ago.

The headline on the front page of that first Chicago Daily Sun and Times was the kind of Chicago story that could just as easily be written today: "MAJCZEK TELLS OF $5,000 'GIFT' TO ILL. LEGISLATOR."

It was the latest development in one of the most famous stories in newspaper history, the "Call Northside 777" murder case, in which Joe Majczek, a wrongly convicted man, was freed from a life sentence thanks to an intrepid reporter.

But two years earlier, in February of 1946, a kid could crack open the Sunday paper and pull out this comic book insert and discover the world of the great Will Eisner and his pen and ink creation The Spirit.

Magic.

william

The Lost World

I like to collect images from the Chicago of the near past, especially of commercial businesses that are no longer around. I guess like many people, this fascination with the landscape of our youth is a form of nostalgia, as well as a means of tracking time and change in our lives.

Here is a beautiful postcard I found at an antique market there depicting a view of Rush Street facing north. The card is from 1966 and was published by Cameo Greeting Cards who had their HQ back then at 3431 Irving Park Road.

Hotel Maryland. Casanova's. The Pussycat. Mammy's Pancake House. Tony's Cellar. Banquet On A Bun. Allied Hi-Fi.

Half a lifetime ago. 

Here's how they describe this part of "Chicago: The City Beautiful": Rush Street, the gay main artery of the Near North side, is a well-lit mile of fun and frolic offering every type of music for dancing and listening, and provides thrilling entertainment from twilight to dawn.

My kind of town!

william

Art Dogs

You've seen Hotel For Dogs. But how about Museum for Dogs?

The Art Institute of Chicago has opened a beautiful new wing designed by architect Renzo Piano to showcase their major collections of 20th and 21st century painting, sculpture, design and photography, including this 1953 work by Ellsworth Kelly titled (you guessed it!) Red Yellow Blue White and Black.

It is a gleaming temple of modernism and the new extension makes the museum one of the largest in America.

But buried in the museum's literature I found an interesting tidbit about one Utz von Storfels. 

Not a name that is familiar to you? 

Was he a contemporary of Otto Dix or George Grosz of the German Expressionist painters? Or was he inspired by the three famous artists associated with the New Objectivity - Albert Renger-Patzsch, August Sander and Werner Manz - to make a name for himself in post-war German photography?

Hardly. 

von Storfels was a German alright, but he was a German Shepherd, one of a pack of dogs that the Art Institute used to guard its collection from the late 1920's all the way into the early '60's!

While some Germans a world away were busy looting the major artworks of Europe and Russia, these dogs were roaming the galleries at night, keeping out wannabe crooks. 

Must have made for some interesting conversation among these cultured canines!

I didn't see any dogs on my recent brief tour of the premises, but I'm sure the spirit of Utz and his buddies were smiling down on their bright new home!

william

 

Can't Stop Smiling

Hugh Hefner, Mike Royko, William Friedkin, Roger Ebert, Studs Terkel, they are all there, within the pages of Stop Smiling's great Chicago Issue. 

This bench is sooo deep there are even reviews of the re-release of two classic Chicago publications, "Big Bill of Chicago" and "Lords of the Levee: The Story of Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink" by Lloyd Wendt and my friend Rick Kogan's father Herman Kogan.

One of my favorite articles was on the Birth of Chicago Comedy by Jeff Griggs, who wrote a book about one of the funniest and least known (except within the comedy world where he is a revered figure) comedians, Second City's in-house master of improvisation, Del Close. 

Griggs gives us brief biographical sketches of Mort Sahl, Shelly Berman, Nichols and May, and even Dick Gregory, who was influenced by his predecessors Nipsey Russell, Godfrey Cambridge and Redd Foxx, and became the first black comedian to perform at the then prestigious Playboy Club in Chicago.

And what tour of Chicago cultural icons would be complete without at least a mention of the great Curtis Mayfield, who came from a musical family on the West Side, started The Impressions when he was 13 years old, famously wrote the songs for the blaxploitation classic "Superfly" and even had his own record label, Curtom. 

He was paralyzed from the neck down in a tragic accident in 1990, but before his untimely death in 1999, he recorded a final album, one breath at a time, called New World Order. 

So in honor of Curtis and all of the artists who came from the streets of Chicago and made it into the pages of Stop Smiling magazine, take your own deep breath, and keep on smiling!

:)

william

Keep Smiling

Here is an iconic photograph of the Ramsey Lewis Trio on Michigan Avenue in Chicago in the 1960's from the great magazine STOP SMILING. I love this shot and the energy and optimism is conveys.

STOP SMILING has a theme for each issue. The first one I cracked open was the Jazz issue, with my all-time hero flute player and multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy on the cover and interviews inside with the likes of vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson (pictured below) and photos from the great William Claxton and others. 

If that wasn't enough to keep the drool flowing, then there was a deep dish Chicago issue covering politics and sports and local cultural icons old and new, with old school characters like the radio host Dick Buckley (pictured above with Joe Williams and Count Basie) or comedian Mort Sahl or published Hugh Hefner inside.

If that's not a reason to smile, what is?

william

Start Smiling

I left Chicago in 1986, and even though I have been back many many times since then, in some way the city still remains in my mind the way it was then, and the myriad changes since then, of gentrification and development, shifting demographics, disappearing landmarks and cultural artifacts, are all details that have mostly escaped my attention as the beat goes on and on.

   

Therefore, one of the things that never made it on to my radar out here on the West Coast was the publication of one of the best magazines I have ever stumbled across, the Chicago-based STOP SMILING.

My sister brought me out two back-issue copies for my birthday this year, and if someone had sat down to design a collection of words and images that, story by story and topic by topic and shot by shot, hit the very center of the sweet spot of my eclectic range of interests, STOP SMILING would be it.

It is described as a magazine for "high-minded lowlifes", and I don't know if this fits me or not, but you can check out their website here. I almost feel like I should just link my blog to their content, since almost all of my own subjects of passion are covered so beautifully within their pages. Or maybe they will just make me an honorary member?

In any event, I will feature some of my favorite STOP SMILING excerpts here, and urge you to check them out on your own, as I have just begun to scratch the surface of their backlist issues.

Thanks, sis!

william

Letting Go

Breaking up is hard to do. 

Here is a final portrait of the red Mercian ten-speed bicycle with Campagnolo brakes and gears and Phil Woods hubs and Cinelli bars and Fiammi rims that I sold to a loving collector of vintage bikes this week.

As any occasional reader of my blog might intuit, I am a collector, and tend to hang on to stuff that I have picked up over the years. 

Books, comic books, photos, letters, art, artifacts, music, vinyl, 78's, toys, posters, sheet music, musical instruments, it all tends to clutter up our house, but I enjoy my collections, I dip into them for inspiration, and I enjoy sharing them with you here.

So it was a hard day for me this week when I finally had to acknowledge that the 

10 speed racing bicycle I bought back in 1973 and have hung on to for these past 36 years had to go. As my oldest son is soon turning seventeen himself, I finally had to look in the mirror and admit that I Am Not A Teenager Anymore. Whether I have actually succeeded in that quest or not remains to be seen, but selling the red Mercian and getting a more practical middle-aged comfort bike was definitely a first step.

The bike was actually the legacy of another of my early industrious collections, as I sold off the rather impressive trove of 1960's silver age comic books which I had cadged and bartered and paid my hard-earned allowance and summer job money for, in order to pay what was then the completely outrageous sum of $300 or $400 for this high-end bike. For me at that time it was like buying a million dollar vehicle.

Given the subsequent explosion of the comic book collector marketplace, it is almost unimaginable what the value of those mint books would fetch today, and even then I probably cashed out too soon. But it was a time to put away childish things, as the story goes, and getting that bike was just about the coolest status symbol possible among my teenage peers at that time. I think the fact that it cost so much, and was something I held so dear, is what compelled me to hang on to it for so long, even though it has only occasionally been ridden this past decade. 

Maybe too I always dreamt of it as a hand-me-down, but my teenager never caught the bug that I had back in the '70's, when almost every night of the week my friends and I would light out for an urban adventure, usually taking the path along Lake Michigan up north to Evanston, past the Bahai Temple in Wilmette, and sometimes if we were really cruising, all the way up past Kenilworth to Highland Park or Lake Forest.

Lots of memories tied up in this old object, but it is time to let go and Clear The Path for new adventures to come.

So long, Mercian, my beautiful red bicycle from Derby, England.

william

P.S. Off to Sundance today for the annual film festival in Park City, Utah. Lots to share with you from the top of the mountain!!

My Own Frost/Nixon

Elsa and I took my mother to the premiere of Ron Howard's entertaining new movie "Frost/Nixon" the other night at the Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theatre.

It was a great movie to see with my Mom, as I vividly recall those Nixon years in the White House mirroring some dramatic years in My House growing up. 

In those days we were all consumed with the unfolding spectacle of the Senate Watergate hearings on television leading up to Nixon's resignation and that final unforgettable helicopter flight from the White House.

What drama!

What a cast of characters. John Dean. E. Howard Hunt. G. Gordon Liddy. Jeb Magruder. 

Watching the movie also brought back another, earlier Nixonian memory. 

My parents were divorced in 1967, the year that Nixon was launching his second campaign for president and the winter of the biggest snowstorm in Chicago history.

I was too young to really know or understand much about the reasons for their separation, but one thing that made a strong impression on me even at that tender age was the political conversion my father underwent at the time, going from a fairly liberal democrat, (who as a maritime attorney, worked mostly with poor, black longshoremen and dock workers from Calumet City and Paducah, Kentucky representing them in personal injury cases against shipping companies) to a conservative Republican and, horrors, a Richard Nixon supporter!

 

While my sister and I and our friends on the block innocently saw the Big Snow as an opportunity to ditch school and build elaborate forts and tunnels outside our house and bombard people and the few passing motorists still able to move with snowballs, the severe weather seems to have induced some sort of political brain freeze in my old man.

Culminating in the day that we came home to find that he had defaced with a magic marker that famous "Would you buy a Used Car From This Man?" political poster of Nixon that my Mom had hung up on the wall in our apartment, in what I look back on now as a brave flag or statement of her newfound independence as a single mother with two young children. She later worked for the ACLU, and became an active worker for the failed campaign of liberal presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. I vaguely remember her even wearing a pair of earrings that spelled out the name e-u-g-e-n-e m-c-c-a-r-t-h-y in hanging small wooden Scrabble tiles!

Of course, coinciding with these huge dislocations in our family life, the political season famously came to a boil right in our backyard the next year as the Democrat's convention was held in Chicago and the Yippies came to town and the riots broke out in Grant Park and around the Gold Coast. I was 9 years old and used to ride my bike down to the lakefront, as each day the park got more and more crowded with young kids and cops and the Summer of Love metastasized into the Days of Rage.

There is a fascinating documentary by Brett Morgen with lots of great archival footage of Chicago in those days that came out this year called Chicago Ten. Here is the trailer:

CHICAGO 10 - OFFICIAL TRAILER

Watching Ron Howard's movie Frost/Nixon sure brought back a lot of dramatic memories for me, as my own young life was shaped so profoundly by the big "Frost" of 1967, and by the candidacy and presidency of Richard Millhouse Nixon!

william