Notes on watching "Treme" and "When the Levees Broke" with my baby

Karolyn and I seldom catch TV shows when they first go out, preferring to go at our own pace and in our own time.  We catch up eventually, though.  Watching the series "Treme" was a special viewing experience for us.  We will miss following our New Orleans friends (LaDonna and Delmond and Toni, Albert and Antoine and Annie, etc.,) around as they rebuild and heal and begin again in the years following Katrina.  There is a palpable sense that these lives go on even now that the cameras are off.  Only today, I thought of Terry (David Morse), an honest cop, a good man.  Important to remember a good man too, in these times when we rail, and quite rightly, against police brutality.  And to remember how Terry was hounded out for challenging the department's culture of brutality and corruption.

The show deserves a salute for being itself an act of preservation and curatorship of New Orleans heritage. It's a show about rebirth, created, written and produced by people rooting that rebirth on: David Simon and Eric Overmyer.

"Treme" beamed New Orleans culture all over the country (the music, the food), so we could learn about it in Chicago. That's how we learned about Kermit Ruffins and his code of partyin', about Mardi Gras Indians and Big Chief, and so much more. When we started visiting New Orleans together, the show enriched our visits; in turn, our visits enriched our experience of the show. We'd be sitting there on the couch watching the show after returning from New Orleans and a scene would appear set at Lil' Dizzy's or Vaughan's or Cafe Du Monde or the Praline Connection and we'd exclaim, Hey! we were just there!

We went to the gigs and started meeting musicians who'd played themselves on the show, like Kermit and Glen David Andrews.

The show's heart and soul was in the "Treme" neighborhood, the country's oldest African-American neighborhood, where those hit hardest by Katrina lived. It celebrated Treme's street culture.

The show deserves a salute as well for keeping its characters complex and human.  Its people are sometimes weak but never really "bad," not even the councilman who finds himself wordlessly accepting bribes. As was true in Simon's and Overmyer's "The Wire," no one is ever merely an instance of a type. The excellent casting deserves a nod. Each character found his or her double in just the right actor.

The show's realism meant there were no false plot machinations (though plot was not the point, it's worth stating that the show's handling of multiple plotlines was deft).  To critics who didn't love lingering on the music and moments, as we did, I suppose they would say there was no powerful story engine.  For us, the story engine was all there in the rich Altmanesque tapestry, interwoven with real people and places, chefs and musicians, restaurants and clubs (Dr. John, John Boutte, Irma Thomas, Trombone Shorty, etc., etc.).

Every character gets a rich characterization.

Just one example sticks in my memory. I think of the encounter between Davis (Steve Zahn) and Nelson (Jon Seda). Davis is the groovy, slightly dysfunctional, stick-it-to-the-Man activist. He's a DJ, A walking encyclopedia of music, steeped in NOLA history, albeit a slightly fanciful version. He wants to preserve and protect NOLA's culture.

Nelson is the slick real-estate developer, a go-getter with an unsinkable personality. A carpetbagger, he comes into town from Texas after Katrina to siphon up some of the pork from all those rebuilding contracts flying around. Opportunistic, but likable for all that. His thing is get-'er-done efficiency. That said, he genuinely digs the local music, is genuinely interested in the people, curious about what makes them tick. He enjoys hanging out in the community, wants to learn. In final scenes he worries that he's never really made anything, anything except money. Both Nelson and Davis are are doing what they feel is right by their lights.

They first encounter each other as onlookers at a community hearing around plans for a new jazz center. Davis is there to support the community, Nelson as the "eyes-and-ears" for his developer boss. They strike up a chat; each is startled to find himself speaking with someone who sees the world so differently. The chat carries on over beers at local bars as Davis takes Nelson on a tour of the real New Orleans. It is fascinating to see the two of them kick around ideas and actually listen to each other. Each gives the other something to consider that maybe he hadn't thought of.

Not to belabor the point too much because the show doesn't, but it struck me that while the show's heart is with Davis, it does not dehumanize Nelson, the "suit." It seems to say that, going forward, NOLA is going to need the spirit of both of these guys. It is going to need all of the characters in this rich tapestry.

Then there is that final shot of the entire series. I won't give away it away; I will say that I think it finds the perfect image for funky, one-of-a-kind New Orleans. It's an image that says, here in this town we may not fix what's broken, not exactly. But we will make it into something beautiful, in its own strange way.

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As a follow-up we also re-watched Spike Lee's heartbreaking, transcendent documentary on New Orleans and Katrina, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts."  It's no less a rich mosaic of humans. Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, a real New Orleans resident caught up in Katrina, is so vivid and funny and outraged that you can see why Simon thought she'd be great in "Treme" and would go on to cast her as Desiree.  Sometimes Spike Lee cuts between her and the great Wendell Pierce, who would go on to play her rascally, good-hearted, 'bone-playing husband on "Treme," and it's fun because we know that they will go on to play the tempestuous but loving couple, Antoine and Desiree.

"When the Levees Broke" can make you angry to see how carelessly a corporate-run society treats its people. What happens to a society when you have oil industry people running this show? How little regard we have for the poor who pay the price for decisions made in high places to cut corners for private gain.  How coarse is our ignorance of our country's true wealth: its music, its culture, its people. And yet we see good people too, people who behaved bravely in crisis and helped others. And we see resilience.

There are times when "When the Levees Broke" can restore your faith in humanity. Yet I think finally what it asks of us is just that we watch.  Watch, in the sense of bearing witness.  The tone finally is more elegiac, haunted, than angry. Not least because of Terrence Blanchard's haunting music.

Jazz, Blues and Beyond: A Chicago Music Tour

On a recent Saturday morning Karolyn and I hopped aboard the Chicago Detours “Jazz, Blues & Beyond Bus Tour,” a birthday present from her to me.  I’ve found on my trips to Europe that walking in the footsteps of the artists somehow enhances how you experience the art.  Wandering through the pubs and lanes of London where Shakespeare trod, say, you get a sense of his stomping grounds, of space and distances.  What was abstract becomes physical.  So to do this in my own town, Chicago, with, say, Muddy Waters instead of Bill Shakespeare, was a kick.        

We’d gathered on a Saturday morning at the great downtown record shop, the Jazz Record Mart.  As we pulled away from the curb our tour guide, Amanda Scotese, posited Chicago as a place of (productive) tension, a place where people came together (and not) over music.  In that sense, an alternate title for her tour could have been the “Jazz versus Blues tour.”  She set up a dialectic that was really just a fun framework for thinking about jazz and blues in terms of oppositions: north versus south, head versus heart, mood versus story, etc. 

Our bus featured video screens like on an airplane, so she could play us footage of the jazz and blues musicians she was setting in opposition.  What contrasts could we hear in, say, Mahalia Jackson versus Scott Joplin, spirituals versus ragtime? People volunteered some good stuff: soulful versus jaunty, rural versus urban, on the beat versus syncopated.  She gave us Charlie Parker versus Muddy Waters, leading to Tortoise and the White Stripes, respectively.  

All the while we were shooting up north, bound for Uptown, a neighborhood I pass through twice a day on the “El”.  On our way Amanda pointed out the building on Argyle that once housed Essanay Studios, where Charlie Chaplin made films. 

As we headed Uptown, Amanda explained that Chicago kept expanding:  you had to drive or take the streetcar to get to Uptown.  It was the “end of the line.”  The Green Mill, which once took up a whole Uptown block, was a roadhouse; “roadhouse” meant you had to drive to get there. 

She showed us a great clip of Gene Krupa with trumpeter Roy Eldridge and singer Anita O’Day doing “Let Me Off Uptown,” a very early integrated duet (circa 1941), playful with sexual innuendo. 

As an aside, we learned that “juke joints” were places that had jukeboxes, and jukeboxes played videos like this one.

We alighted the bus and stood studying the Aragon.  I admire it from my levitating El car every day (and in fact I saw one of Nirvana’s last-ever shows there almost 20 years ago).  Now we gave it a Rick Steves-like going over, admiring its Spanish façade with its swirling columns, the faces peering out of its crisscrossing brickwork, its shields and scalloped shells.  This was an exotic place for rural and working people who traveled great distances to come dancing in the big city.  (Bands were told to play faster so boys and girls wouldn’t dance too close.)   

We strolled over to the corner of Broadway, from which vantage point we had before us the Riviera, the Green Mill and the Uptown Theater.  Amanda asked us to imagine the scene as it would have been at the height of the Jazz Age, say 1926: this was Chicago’s Times Square, a neighborhood of glittering ballrooms and movie palaces.  It was the place to be.  Squinting, you could almost see gangsters stepping out of gleaming cars. 

We clambered back aboard the bus.  It was time to head down to the South Side to Bronzeville, that historic African-American neighborhood. 

As we rounded corners Amanda pointed to the site of Lincoln Gardens on 31st Street, one of the great “Black and Tan Clubs,” which welcomed blacks and whites to mingle, dance and hear music together.  Joe "King" Oliver's Creole Jazz Band kept ‘em dancing here in the early 20’s.  Those were the days when cats like Bix Biederbicke, a young white fella, would take the train to Chicago to sneak into speakeasies to hear some “hot jazz,” jamming with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. 

As an aside, I hadn’t realized how important New Orleans musicians were to jazz innovation in Chicago, all those greats like Mahalia Jackson coming up with the Great Migration.

We passed Olivet Baptist Church, the oldest African-American Baptist church in Chicago and itself a great catalyst of the Great Migration.  Amanda called it a “key to the neighborhood.”

As the bus rumbled down State Street between 31^st and 35^th, Amanda pointed out that this particular strip was once known as “The Stroll,” the vice district.  These were the days when jazz was associated with sleaze.  Today “the Stroll” is the notably unsleazy campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology. 

We came to a stop at an ACE Meyer Hardware Store.  What!? you exclaim.  Had this suddenly become “the Chicago Hardware Shop tour?”  Allow me to explain.  This hardware store was once the Sunset Café, a.k.a. the Grand Terrace Cafe, a very important "Black and Tan club” featuring Louis Armstrong’s big band (another son of New Orleans, of course).  Cab Calloway and Earl "Fatha" Hines came up here under Armstrong before becoming the bandleaders themselves.  In fact Hines would go on to lead the band there for twelve years.  On the way there Amanda had shown us a photograph of the Earl Hines band during this residency, featuring a young Sun Ra, no less! 

 

We went in and headed for the back.  A few at a time we climbed a few wooden steps.  We stepped into a narrow, cluttered office.  Lo!  We were onstage at the Sunset Café!  The original murals are still there, visible around the duct and piles of boxes.  A topless demon lady clawed the skin of a great drum.  Climbing back down to the floor, we stood amidst aisles of hardware supplies imagining the floor filled with tables draped in elegant white tablecloth.     

 

 

Back aboard the bus we passed Pilgrim Baptist Church, designed as a synagogue by no less than Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, built in 1890-1891.  It was the “heart of Bronzeville,” one of the birthplaces of gospel music in the 1930s.  Thomas A. Dorsey, the "Father of Gospel Music", was its music director. 

Next up for our merry bus: the “blues” part of the tour.  That meant we had to talk about the Chicago Defender, the country’s most important black newspaper.  It was the catalyst for the black exodus, the Great Migration, which hit its peak in the 40s and 50s.  It wrote about Chicago as a place of hope for African-Americans, a place where housing and jobs could be had.  “Blues is hopeful music,” as Studs Terkel put it from our screens.  “I may be down now, but I won’t be down forever.”      

We rumbled up South Michigan Avenue, up historic “Motor Row,” past the great display windows which once showed off their proud auto showrooms.  We trundled up Record Row, grinding to a stop at 2120 S. Michigan, that address that rings out in music history.  This was Chess Records (today renamed the Willie Dixon Blues Heaven Foundation).  To some, this is the “birthplace of rock & roll,” Amanda told us, and quite right she was.  Interesting to think about which has the stronger claim as birthplace of rock & roll, Chess or Sun Records in Memphis (which I've also visited).  Hometown pride compels me to proclaim that Chess has as strong a claim as any. 

We didn’t go in.  Amanda offered that there’s nothing much to see inside, which is kinda true.  Still, as someone who’s been inside twice, it’s still pretty cool to stand on the same floorboards as Muddy and Jimmy Rogers, Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.     

We had to finish up by taking a trip to Maxwell Street, ground zero for the Chicago Blues, once a teeming, communal place where people gathered around music (not unlike Grant Park today, Amanda offered).  Every musician had his or her corner, such as Blind Arvella Gray, who now appeared on our video screens.  Like the Stroll, the old Maxwell Street Market flea market is gone today, of course.  However, we stopped next to a statue commemorating the days when the blues rang out: a bluesman sitting on a box, with his harp by his side. 

We had one more treat in store: a harp lesson from Fruteland Jackson, a veteran bluesman who hopped aboard at Maxwell Street.  Each of us was issued a harmonica, and, wielding an acoustic axe and a harmonica rack, Jackson taught us to play a basic 12-bar pattern.  The trick: for the first bars you suck, and then you blow.  As we rolled back to our starting point, the bus resounded with the sounds of blowing, sucking, “dumping” (exhaling) and flourishing big finishes.  We got to keep the harmonica! 

Did I say one last treat?  There was one more.  When we got back to Jazz Record Mark, its legendary owner Bob Koester, happened to be there.  Mr. Koester was the founder of Delmark records in 1953, the oldest jazz and blues independent record label in America.  The great man stood listening as Amanda summed up. 

I’ve said it before: as long as I’ve lived in Chicago—20 years now--there’re always something new to discover around every corner.  Turns out there’s always something “past” to discover as well. 

Now when I’m on the commute home, I can pretend like I’m on that streetcar up to Uptown.  

Roger Ebert's voice: companion, pointer to vistas on my own journey

Roger Ebert was my teacher. That is, his voice was, and by his voice I mean his writing (and TV as well). When I was a kid, that voice pointed me to what felt like a secret door opening onto whole new continents of film. Sometimes after we watched a film on home video I’d reemerge with one of his books and read aloud his review to my family and we’d consider the picture in that light. Not that I always agreed. But he did that uncanny thing that our favorite critics are somehow able to do: somehow he put into words something I felt but couldn't express.

That voice never really left me. Years and years later, his journal ("The London Perambulator" article, one of my favorites) guided me on my very first walk around London. Funny, his voice almost came to mean more to me after he lost the use of it in the literal sense. On my first first visit to Venice, I kept in the back of my mind the name of his favorite trattoria. One morning I was out exploring and I suddenly looked up and there it was. What’s more, through the window I saw who I thought must surely be the character he’d described so vividly in his journal: Lino, the lively proprietor, busily preparing for the day. Though graying now, I recognized him from Ebert’s description.

I took the liberty of taking a picture. When I returned home I e-mailed Roger the photo, letting him know that I’d stumbled across his favorite trattoria, though I didn’t get to eat there because it was too early. I told him I hoped that this was his old friend Lino, still at it. I didn’t really think I’d hear back. He must get massive amounts of e-mail every day, I thought. Then the response came. He couldn't open the picture and asked me to re-send to his personal e-mail address. I did so, and shortly thereafter came the reply: “Ah, yes! The very place! The beloved man! Now you must go back someday.” There followed an extremely enjoyable e-mail exchange that still feels a bit surreal. Amongst other things, he told me about how beautiful Venice is in the winter, how that was his favorite time to be there.

This only begins to say how much I’ll miss his voice. On Thursday when I first heard the news I sat at my desk and wept.

Jon Langford rocks the Art Institute

  

Karolyn and I burrowed deep into the bowels of the Art Institute to attend a lecture by one of Chicago's great rockers and all-around creative guys, Jon Langford.  He appeared in a subterranean auditorium as part of the Institute's “Artists Connect” series, billed as “where local artists talk about how their work connects with artists of the past.”  Langford’s connection is with Goya, whose devilish eye held a twisted mirror to society that showed its true soul.  In a society still run by fear, Langford noted, Goya couldn’t be more relevant.   

I have a personal experience with Goya myself.  In 2012 I explored the Prado, something I've wanted to do for 20 years, and saw three flights of his stuff, from the pastel cartoons of leaping lords and ladies that he made as a young court painter, to his “black paintings,” when he had a freak-out and smeared the walls of his house with his nightmares.  (He "had a freak-out."  Way to put it in social and historical context, Pfeiffer!) 

Of course, since it was Langford, he appeared with guitar in hand.  He turned the talk into a concert, jamming out on songs like “The Country is Young,” “Sputnik 57” and “To The Last Dead Cowboy.”  The music passed my litmus test for proper music, by which I mean to say it could have been played by the guys sitting around that circle in the Elvis Presley ’68 comeback.  (Okay, that’s one of my litmus tests for proper music.)  His lyrics, of course, are quite another matter indeed.  Those could have only come from the surrealistic imagination of Jon Langford.  Langford always plays with a fiery rock ‘n’ roll attack, even if he’s playing acoustic, even if he’s singing country or folk songs.  

He'd made a slide show to go with his talk, toggling back and forth between Goya’s images and his. Many of his works are illustrations of song lyrics.  Motifs include skulls, cowboys, cowgirls, and country music greats, sometimes blindfolded or X-ed out as though in a Stalinist wipe-out.  There were slides from his life as well, and the lecture became a personal story about the rather twisty road that brought Jon to country music. 

He was a boy from Wales born in the late 50s.  In the 70s he was excited about punk rock and art school.  During his art school days in Leeds, he co-founded the Mekons, the seminal second-wave punk band.  They dealt in small ‘p’ politics, he said: the everyday things that were around them.  He brought up a slide of the Three Johns, one of his innumerable side projects, looking like art-school pranksters togged out in djellabas, or like the jawas from "Star Wars" (an admitted big influence). 

He told the story of how the Mekons got into country music back when no one in their circle was into it.  (It'd be interesting to know if Elvis Costello's "Almost Blue" was an influence.  I think that record was way ahead of its time in turning people on to the beauty and strength of country songs). 

He talked about moving to Chicago and hanging with the Sundowners, the legendary Chicago honky-tonkers.  Later he went looking for the roots of American music, a pilgrimage many of us take.  (Karolyn and I are about to take a similar journey into the roots (routes?) of American music, to Memphis, Nashville and New Orleans.)  He talked about discovering Tootsies Orchid Lounge in Nashville, a “beautiful graveyard” with walls covered in amber, shellacked playbills of C&W stars.    

He pasted the people who run the American country music business as “Stalinists,” and he meant something quite specific: the way they consigned the country greats he loves to non-person status and shot them down the memory hole.  He pointed out that Nashville radio isn’t playing much Hank Williams or Bob Wills and Texas swing these days.  He is fascinated by the moment when an artist becomes an employee: that is, the moment when the pen hovers about the contract.  In the music business, people are food for machine. 

(Much to his bemusement, some industry people came to one of his shows and liked the images enough to commission him to do a record cover.  Everyone has his price, Langford admitted to audience laughter, and that day mine was $6,000.)

He performed “Hank Williams Must Die”:  It seems Hank Williams actually mentioned Stalin by name in a song and Stalin heard the song, apparently enraging the dictator.  The song is Stalin's imagined response.

Even though he made no mention of it, all of this put me in mind of the Mekons' urgent song “Amnesia,” which fascinates me.  History and memory is what it’s all about.  (“I forgot to forget to remember.”)  As the song begins, “it was a dark and stormy night" and we’re on a storm-tossed slave ship “taking rock & roll to America,” that is, bringing Africans to America, where they invent the music that then goes back across the Atlantic to turn on English kids.  It’s about two different British Invasions: the musical one in the 1960s that brought the Beatles, the Stones, the Animals to these shores, and which reawakened America to its own musical roots.  Also the one in 1812 where the Brits burned down the White House. 

It all swirls around until it finally explodes, riding in on a strumming dulcimer straight out of “Battle of Evermore,” a hurricane that is the harvest of all the forces the song’s unleashed so far.  There’s a rousing battle cry of “truth, justice, and Led Zeppelin!” but you don’t know whether it’s rallying you to join the rock & roll battle or the political battle, or both, or to what end.

There's a lot more in it (Mardi Gras Indians, segregation, the Shining Path, the drug trade), but that’s a few things I hear in this roiling maelstrom of race and  America and England, and cross-Atlantic trade and cultural give-and-take. 

So.  Back to the talk.  It was dense with references, musical and artistic.  He mentioned Otto Dix, the German painter and printmaker, and how Goya influenced his own ruthless depictions of war.

Langford was particularly shaken by Goya’s “Caprices” (Los Caprichos), the sheave of etchings that lacerated 18^th-century Spain.  Goya published it in 1799 but withdrew it due to fears of the Spanish Inquisition.  Likewise, Langford was hard hit by the "Disasters of War," Goya's etchings about the Peninsular War (1808-1814) that found Spain at war with France, pulled into the maelstrom of Napolean’s post-French Revolution conquests.  He showed us “This is what you were born for,” plate twelve from Disasters of War, showing a man puking over a pile of bodies.  (Goya kept it real.)   

Langford was knocked out by “The Dummy,” which he called one of the great images of humanity being tossed about.  

There’s something very moving, very hopeful and unbowed, about Jon Langford.  For one thing, he's still a believer in the socialist project, and though it wasn't a topic of his talk, he's as acidic about those who betrayed true socialism as he is about those who betrayed "true" country music.  (I think of "This Funeral is For The Wrong Corpse," the Mekons song about how the reports of socialism's death were wildly exaggerated: "How can something be dead when it hasn't really happened?") 

And he loves his adopted home, the United States of America, with a fierce, embattled love.  He ended with “Lost in America,” a song that always moved me.  We can still turn things around.  Let's keep the flame burning, and let's fight those who would snuff it out.  Langford made it sound as if the project of keeping America's flame burning and keeping our music's flame burning is one and the same.  Which of course it is.  As Goya showed him, the best art is about what’s going on immediately around you.

A Sunday afternoon with Roy Lichtenstein and Karolyn

 

Last Sunday, Karolyn and I popped down to check out the special Roy Lichtenstein exhibit at the Art Institute.  It’s been getting written up all over the country.  

I think it would please Lichtenstein to know that was this was the only art exhibit I’ve ever seen where the children dragged in weren’t screaming to go home.  In fact, the kids' imaginations seemed captured by the show.  Making up stories and asking questions about the pictures, the kids seemed to "get" instinctually how he played with painting and its language, codes, rules.

I confess that all I knew of his work were the iconic comic book panels, the ones about "loud sounds, energy, action, release," as the print on the wall commented.  POP! WHAMMO!!  I kept thinking of that Pop Art landmark, the Batman TV show of the 1960s.   

   

The cry for the show, though, had been that it would explode your preconceptions of what Lichtenstein did. 

We ducked in through the Modern Wing to get out of the rain.  I’m glad we did, because we stumbled across a permanent installation of the only film Lichtenstein ever made.  I didn't take any photos at the dark end of the hall, so I'll try to describe the film: a triptych of screens showed images that gently bobbed and rolled upon them, making us feel like we were on the deck of a ship.  Half of each screen was a window on nature (rippling water, fish swimming in a tank, a seabird pasted to the sky), the other half filled with striking diagonals or his trademark dots.  We sat and watched for awhile.  Karolyn remarked that she didn't think much of the plot. 

Trying to find our sea legs, we emerged blinking from the darkened space and headed for the special exhibit.  The film made a good intro; it created a harmony with concerns we'd see in some of the paintings: the flux of waves against geometric, man-made shapes, dots and diagonals.     

  

  

The most startling and hypnotic moiré "paintings" we saw looked like they were shaped out of shiny, bulbous plastic.  They seemed to swirl and undulate before your eyes.  

Here's Lichtenstein's comic take on the famous Laocoon sculpture.  I saw the sculpture last year in the Vatican Museums in Rome.  It tells a little story from Homer: Laocoon thought the idea of the Trojan horse was a crap idea and dug in his heels firmly against the whole project.  But since this was the plan which would enable the escape of Aeneas--crucial to the founding of Rome--the Gods couldn't allow Laocoon's "nolle prosequi" to muck up the plot.  So they sent two serpents to strangle him and his unfortunate sons. 

   

Postmodern art is always about the history of art on some level, but it was starting to look like Lichtenstein's project was nothing less than to reimagine that history completely, remake it in his own image. 

   

This one looked to me like his take on something Gaugin might do.

Something tells me my insight about this sculpture wasn’t too original: I proclaimed, “It’s very Art Deco.”  A moment or two later, a couple women stopped behind me to have a look.  “Very Art Deco, isn’t it?” one said to the other.  A had a little look at the wall description.  It said: here we have Lichtenstein's take on Art Deco. 

I like the velvet movie theater rope.

The drawings and sketches on this wall were actually I think my favorites.

 

Here's his take on Japanese landscape painting.

 

  On the spur of the moment Karolyn made up narratives for the women in "the naked pictures" room.  Her stories gave me in-depth character studies in just a few strokes, complete with psycho-sexual profiles of each woman.  Her stories pulled together all the pictures in the room.  I proclaimed that the Art Institute should take her on as a docent so she could pass these stories along. 

 

The Lichtenstein retrospective was an invigorating afternoon of boldness and ideas, an overview of a working life of prodigious creative work.  It was fun seeing it with Karolyn, who, woman of the world though she is, has never lost her ability to see with the wonder of a child.