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Intriguing and Inspiring Fashion

Past the velvet ropes and the purple walls, it’s possible to catch a glimpse of high-fashion stylish mannequins at the Chicago History Museum. Text and image are on the walls, but reading the title – Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair – makes little sense to the uninformed. Wandering in, fancy dresses are next to outlandish costumes are next to beautiful gowns. It is more than the eye can take in. The clothes radiate expense and seem more like works of art than items for sale.

The outfits are meant to be worn. Through video and photography, is possible to see the artifacts on models and as clothes. Read more wall texts and start to imagine the fashion fair, and the clothing and the show take on different meanings. Issues of gender, body image, class, globalism, race and racism reverberate. The exhibit looks at the introduction of high-end fashion to the African-American community from 1958 to 2009 through a traveling road show sponsored by the community’s leading magazine. It is fascinating, educational and not didactic. It makes clear that fashion can be much more than clothing and the Ebony Fashion Fair had significance well beyond consumption. For a unique twist on fashion accessories, check out this article about tentacle earring plugs at https://www.gearfuse.com/tentacle-earring-plug-um-do-you-know-theres-a-sea-monster-in-your-ear/. Also, consider this sites at 레플리카 for more latest fashion trends.

The Fashion Fair was the creation of Eunice W. Johnson, who along with her husband John H. Johnson, created a very successful publishing company aimed at the African-American market. Benefiting from the rising circulation of Ebony, their most popular magazine, Eunice Johnson started the fashion fair to raise money for charities. She visited Paris fashion shows and designer houses across Europe and the US, developing a network of contacts and relationships. Back in the US, the fair was booked throughout the country and often required specialized services, such as audio visual hire for corporate meetings, to enhance its presentations. It featured African-American models, bringing high-end fashion to African-Americans in an entertaining and accessible way. Attending the Fashion Fair was a major event. Videos and recollections of Johnson make clear that she was an extraordinary woman.

The show contains dozens exotic dresses and ensembles, ranging from the demure to the outrageous. It explains the context of the fair and gives a good sense of what it would have been like to attended. They were lively, theatrical events that spoke to the growing economic power of African-American women. The exhibit explains, postulates, and makes visible – and is grounded in the real. The clothing can engage without explanation or tags. It is that interesting and the explanations of the fair highlight a community that was little known by white America. For events like these, https://soundsystemrental.co.uk/sound-system-rental-for-fashion-shows/ is essential to create the right atmosphere, making the experience even more immersive. These events were also among the first to use led screen trailers, adding an innovative touch to the presentations.

Collectively, Inspiring Beauty shows that clothing, above and beyond something interesting to look at, can have surprising social power. The right fashion can, indeed, inspire.

David Potash

January 20, 2014 Reviews

Chicago Pulp – Look But Not Too Closely

Stories of true crime have lurid appeal. We stop, we gawk, rubberneck, and then move on, usually feeling a little cheaper for doing it. It’s a guilty pleasure best enjoyed quickly. We can laugh about New York Post headlines without ever reading the articles.

Occasionally a crime story – like the play/musical/movie Chicago – resonates. A perverse curiosity pulls us in and something special in the telling and tone and the telling keeps us engaged and coming back. Exploring that tension is the critical thread that makes Douglas Perry’s The Girls of Murder City an interesting read. Subtitled “Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers who Inspired Chicago,” it recounts the real-life murders and trials of the women in the play Chicago. Perry gives the histories of Belva Gaertner and Beulah Annan, who murdered and walked away free thanks to their beauty and all male juries. We learn of Kitty Malm and Sabella Nitti, who were less attractive and less fortunate. The distinction continues to this day. The prettier women rate a Wikipedia page while their less attractive Cook County jail fellows do not.

Perry takes a clever approach to his real-life history of 1920s alcohol, guns, and violence, by focusing on focuses on Maurine Watkins, a young female reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Watkins was a budding actress and playwright who took the newspaper job to learn more about life. Her articles on the crimes were well-written and well-received. Her sojourn in Chicago was short, however, ending as the Leopold and Loeb trial dominated the headlines. This cold-blooded kidnapping and murder of a teenager marked a different kind of crime and a different kind of zeitgeist. Watkins returned to the east coast, contacted her old Harvard theater professor, and began crafting a play about the women murderers. The Brave Little Woman in early versions, the play became Chicago. Watkins’ satirical take on violence and celebrity was an instant hit. Realizing that the underlying story of the women was depressing, Watkins found the right tone to give an audience sufficient distance to enjoy themselves. Satire is an effective tool to deal with the dreadful. Done well, we can even laugh at horror. Later reworked into a musical and more recently a film, Chicago is a mainstream cultural artifact.

Alike but different in important ways, Rose Laws’ Gold Coast Madam is a first-person account of a life of Chicago crime. Born to poverty in rural Tennessee, Laws recounts her rise to becoming a very profitable agent for prostitutes in Chicago (she does not consider herself a madam – even with the book title). Laws is unapologetic about her choices. She tells her tale in a straightforward manner, from early childhood abuse to a young marriage marked by violence and cruelty. Laws lost custody of her five children to an orphanage for several years and struggled to earn enough money to keep her family together. She eventually found her niche selling sex. Laws accepts the world as it is. Her candor is appealing. Her autobiography is absent moral or critical reflection, save for a deep wish that she had continued her education and had insisted on more education for her children. Without narrative distance or a different perspective, Laws’s history is sad.

How a story is framed and told can matter more than the story itself – and it is particularly true when it comes to stories of violence and crime.

David Potash

January 4, 2014 Things someone who grew up in NJ might write

Authentic Artifice

Sometime in my late-20s, I noticed that the conventions of theater were no longer working for me. It was a gradual change, akin to failing eyesight. Others simply were able to see things on stage that I could not. Perhaps I needed glasses? Optometry has offered no relief.

I used to enjoy drama, musicals, and other kinds of theater. Now I find myself unable to engage “normally” with whatever is happening on stage. It is a strange phenomenon and I do blame Brecht. My mind wanders, raising questions of the structure, support, and the great collective effort that leads this person and that person performing in front of me to do whatever they are doing. I think about about the proscenium and the staging. I wonder if how this line was re-written or that line looks on the page. I evaluate lighting and sound. I restage blocking and the movement of the cast. It takes great concentration for me to engage with what is happening as an audience member, and when I can, it is fleeting. I sneak looks to the left and right of me – others in the audience, invariably, are engaged. The productions are not at fault. The problem is mine.

Theater still beckons and I still attend, but things are different. Enjoyment comes in other guises.

Bear this lengthy caveat in mind as I enthuse about The Hypocrite’s production of The Mikado. Currently showing at the Steppenwolf Theater Company, this is a fresh take on a somewhat ridiculous and lovely Gilbert and Sullivan classic. The Mikado is a comic opera set in a topsy-turvy Japan, replete with highly stylized characters and many jokes. Performed “traditionally” the Mikado can easily lapse into a stilted, dated racism that is more often than not meliorated with camp.

In this production, boundaries between performers and audience are erased. The performance takes place in an open room with areas defined by low-benches, platforms, rings and lighting. All of the actors play instruments, so the stage orchestra is also on stage. The audience is allowed – encouraged – to move around the space to engage as they see fit. The rules of the performance are simple: the actors and the audience should not pretend that they do not see each other. If an actor needs to get to a spot and an audience member is in the way, they will point or tap to clear a space. And the bar remained open through the show.

The Hypocrites are an interesting theater company with a mission to make “a Theater of Honesty” and a manifesto to “create theater as an artistic expression.” The company identifies the audience as part of that process. The Hypocrite’s Mikado was a delight to attend. The talent level was very good, but more importantly, it was what it was – and it did not pretend to be anything else. It was great fun. For this all too artificial opera, written in England 140 years ago about a love story in a fictionalized and absurd Japan, the Hypocrites found authenticity. I am impressed.

David Potash

November 29, 2013 Reviews

No Easy Job

More than a biography, Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs is a cultural phenomenon. It was the best-selling book on Amazon in 2011 and it has continued to sell. A movie will follow. It is a well-written and well-researched work. Steve Jobs has entered our collective consciousness, just like its founder and Apple. Understanding how that happened is a obvious pull. Who isn’t intrigued? Referencing the book, as I have learned, is a reliable way to generate conversation. Everyone has an opinion about Steve Jobs.

Unfortunately, for me and most of those that I have talked with, reading Steve Jobs was far from a pleasant experience. It can be downright grim. There is little joy amid Jobs’ many accomplishments. Granting Jobs his business genius, we are left with a thorough study of a manipulative, sometimes cruel, and driven man whose primary passion outside of his company was Bob Dylan and Zen philosophy. Jobs made an unlikely Buddhist.

Many biographies turn out to be studies of morality and character. Others biographies are windows into a life and lifestyle. Celebrity biographies often follow this format – we are curious about those that we idolize. Isaacson’s book satisfies on neither front. Jobs was not a particularly good or moral person. Further, his lifestyle was not that interesting. While he met many fascinating people, it is to tell if he had any significant interactions outside of business. In many ways, the primary legacy of his Zen pursuits was an indifference to how he lived. The result is a striking absence of vicarious happiness in reading about Jobs’ accomplishments.

What remains – and here is the value of Isaacson’s book – is a powerful examination of the intersection of information technology, consumerism, and popular culture, and the ability to generate your paystubs by the help of this software. The business genius of Jobs was the integration of these powerful arenas. It is a history that we are living every day. Isaacson offers a human but privileged perspective from which to make some sense of it all. Additionally, one can navigate their finances more effectively with the aid of a financial toolkit for paystubs.

Technological used to take time to reach the public. Decades elapsed before Bell’s telephone or Edison’s light bulb was in American homes. The marketing, communication, and distribution networks were not robust. During periods of discovery and development, technology could evolve along with public reaction and understanding of it. The speed of innovation, distribution, and adaptation today is tremendously shorter. It is extraordinary how quickly we discover, adapt, saturate, and discard. The closing of Blockbuster stands as a great example – from thousands of stores a few years ago to none in 2014. Such platforms play a crucial role in connecting sellers with buyers in an efficient and timely manner. An excellent example of this is a ticket sales platform, which instantly connects event organizers with potential customers, facilitating rapid dissemination of information and enabling swift ticket sales. Businesses today leverage various tools to stay competitive, including digital marketing strategies, social media platforms, and audio visual hire UK services. Also, video wall hire is a popular solution for enhancing audience engagement, providing high-quality, dynamic visual displays that captivate and inform attendees. Additionally, services like AV hire for corporate events ensure that businesses can efficiently manage their technological needs, enhancing the overall experience for attendees. For more specialized needs, businesses can also refer to this site at https://avequipmentrental.co.uk/led-video-wall-hire/.

Jobs’ successful products made technological innovation attractive to many. He had a talent for designing, packaging, branding, and rendering. Jobs’ ability was not something that he could explain in words. Isaacson, too, struggles to capture what it was about Apple designs that made them so special. It was Jobs’ good fortune to be in a location and at a time when that talent could take the engineering and computer science skills of others and marry them to popular consumption. It is a strange talent that has left a powerful – and problematic – legacy.

David Potash

November 10, 2013 Reviews

Place – Unique or Ubiquitous

Where do you like to go? And when you think of your town’s center, where is it? A recent visit to two downtowns – each successful in its own way – started me thinking about different ways and places that we come together.

Schaumburg, Illinois is a large Chicago suburb with about 75,000 inhabitants and no traditional downtown. Joel Garreau examined it in Edge City, a thought-provoking book he wrote in the 1990s about suburban development. Schaumburg has attractive single family homes, pleasant parks, some mid and large businesses, and a several large roads with all the standard franchises and dealerships one sees dotted around the country. If you were to locate the heart of Schaumburg, at least in terms of crowds of people in a shared space, it would be Woodfield Mall, now part of the Simon’s Corporation.

Woodfield Mall is the largest mall in Illinois and the tenth largest nationally. Last year there were more than 27 million visits to the mall. In 2000, visitors to Chicago named it the best suburban attraction. It as a hub of economic activity and has served as a foundation for other real estate development. Hotels, shops, and businesses have all located close to the mall. When I visited, Woodfield Mall was bustling with people – a hive of activity.

As I toured the mall the shops seemed very familiar. In fact, everything seemed familiar. I reviewed the directory and every single store in the mall (save one devoted to Chicago sports teams – a version of which I’ve seen in other malls with their local sport team) was a national brand. The mall’s content was extraordinarily similar to another popular Simon’s Corporation mall I also know, South Shore Plaza in Quincy, Massachusetts. There is nothing – absent the prevalence of sports team memorabilia – to differentiate the two malls. The popular malls are completely without any reference to any particular geographic, regional, or particular place. Mall is mall is mall. I could have walked in to a Nordstrom in one state and walked out an Apple store in another.

Shortly after Woodfield I went on a Chicago Architectural Foundation boat tour (third time). A 90-minute hosted ride around the Chicago River, the tours always teaches me something new. Chicago’s architecture is among the best in the world and it is unique to the city. Buildings respond to each other, sometimes in complementary fashion and sometimes competitively. Collectively, they create a dense urban landscape that is fascinating, inspirational, challenging, and extremely popular. A tour helps to make sense of it, providing a larger context and a human history to the cityscape.

Chicago’s downtown population has grown in recent years, even as the city’s population as a whole has decreased. People want to visit and live in the heart of the city in an area that is, by its very history and development, unique. The streets and public spaces in downtown Chicago have shopping that is familiar, just like what is found in malls and the rest of the nation. However, downtown also has the unusual, the different, and the unique. More things take place in downtown, too. It is about many different kinds of activities in shared and contiguous spaces. The architecture of the city reflects this. It is a dynamic mixture of old and new that supports business, commerce, entertainment, industry, education, worship, services, home life, and more.

Imagining our future, I see more opportunities for urban downtowns than suburban malls. The experience is richer. That said, the popularity of the larger malls and the international retailers is undeniable. They know what consumers want and they deliver it.

One of the unexpected consequences of the internet may be a change in our understanding of space. We surf, click, and are able to see much of the world. In that mode, distance may not seem to matter. If I want to see what downtown Chicago is like, I have many options. The barriers of distance, time, and travel seem to be erased. At the same time, digital accessibility makes the particularity, the uniqueness, of particular places and spaces all the more valuable. The web version of a city can never be authentic. Being in the space, exploring the place, matters. With that in mind I doubt that future generations will take tour of shopping malls, no matter how popular today.

David Potash

November 3, 2013 American Culture Today

Baudelairian Commute

The clouds were beautiful Monday morning driving to work. Raking sunlight infused color into a sky that opened broadly. As I sat in traffic on the Kennedy Expressway, I took this photo and thought of Baudelaire’s poem The Stranger –

Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father, your mother, your sister, or your brother?

I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.

Your friends?

Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known.

Your country?

I do not know in what latitude it lies.

Beauty?

I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal

Gold?

I hate it as you hate God.

Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger?

I love the clouds… the clouds that pass… up there… up there… the wonderful clouds!

(Louise Varese translation)

My introduction to the poem came through Ulrich Baer’s Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan. More than a hundred and fifty years on, it’s a poem that can still seduce and shock. Baer, NYU professor and talented literary critic, uses it as a leaping off point to interrogate key issues of modernity. Questions of freedom and alienation may seem relevant when trapped in stop and go traffic. My thoughts, thought, were about attentiveness, our engagement and awareness of our surroundings. We live in distracting times and there is always another image, another experience, just a click away.

Conscious of this, I clicked a photo myself, wondering if others were looking and considering the wonderful clouds.

David Potash

October 16, 2013 American Culture Today, Curiouser and Curiouser

Brooklyn Waterfront Impressions

Earlier this week I jogged from the north end of Brooklyn Bridge Park in DUMBO down the Brooklyn side of the East River to the Fairway Market, deep in Red Hook. You may remember the devastation Hurricane Sandy had on this part of Brooklyn. While there wasn’t the dramatic fires of Breezy Point or the loss of life in Staten Island, Brooklyn’s waterfront was hit hard. My run was more exploration than exercise.

According to Playground Painting Companies, the Brooklyn Bridge Park construction is progressing nicely, with playgrounds, fields, and manicured bits of nature among the walks. For further information about playgrounds for Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), you can click here. It’s heavily used, well-planned, and everything that a public park space should be. With strong public and private support, the park was as attractive as billed. What interested me was the industrial, residential, and commercial section south of the park in Red Hook.

Red Hook has long been a neglected area in Brooklyn. Isolated from the rest of the borough by the Gowanus Expressway after WWII, and from much of the economic development during the past few decades, Red Hook has faced serious drug problems and only spotty investment and attention from the city. The situation started changing about ten years ago with many trumpeting the possibilities of the neighborhood. Since, Fairway Market and Ikea have been big box additions with many of smaller businesses and shops providing a stronger sense of neighborhood. A business development corporation has been encouraging investment and relocation. Through it all, the underlying vision has not been of condos, but of light manufacturing and commerce among updated residential housing stock. Unfortunately, much of that nascent possibility of economic growth was imperiled by the hurricane. In April, six months after the storm, residents gathered to take stock. Three months later I was cheered to see the neighborhood starting to look like the Red Hook I knew a few years earlier – dynamic, gritty, and keen to make money.

Running down Van Brunt Street I saw new restaurants and shops, tractor trailers and smaller trucks hauling, and construction sites, big and small. The Queen Mary 2 loomed along the river in the newly constructed cruise terminal. Steve is still making key lime pies on Van Dyke Street. More than a few distillers are making high-end alcohol in the neighborhood. A high-end hardware manufacturer is in Red Hook. And wandering through the streets of Red Hook, I saw work, jobs, innovation, and above all, opportunity.

There are few sights more encouraging that witnessing an urban neighborhood growing and prospering.

David Potash

July 5, 2013 American Culture Today

Accelerating Democracy – From a Governing Perspective

John O. McGinnis, professor law at Northwestern University, has faith in democracy, empiricism, and technology to improve governance. His latest work, Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance Through Technology, provides an overview of the ways in which democratic government can use and respond to technology. He is mot concerned with claims about how democracies should use and respond to new technology.

Driving the work is a serious question: how do democracies make and evaluate decisions? How can they do so more effectively? McGinnis identifies the ever-increasing importance of the social sciences and new technologies to answering that query. For us to live in a rationally governed world, it is essential that we have an understanding of the consequences of policies and choices. New technologies permit more sophisticated questions and answers. We can now do this quickly and efficiently.

McGinnis calls for more experimentation. He wants a revival of federalism with multiple pilots. He identifies great value in more information, more readily shared and assessed. In addition, McGinnis emphasizes the values of predictive markets. Technology can make all of this possible. However, McGinnis does not advocate for a technocratic élite. His aim is about harnessing the social values inherent in new technology.

New technology, particularly analysis of big data, can lead to smarter decisions. Businesses use it well. However, I am not confident that public policy preference is grounded in efficiency. We often make decisions reasons that are less effective and less rational. There is also great potential within dispersed communication (social media) to disrupt government and rational decision-making. Democracies do not always move toward greater democracy. McGinnis, acknowledges bias but believes that technology and greater information can be a corrective.

McGinnis’s vision rings true within the world of public policy and administration. Data and empirical information has the nagging habit of getting in the way of suppositions, biases, and predetermined plans. Officials and leaders who use new technologies can and will be more effective because they will notice this. Happily, these are also the people most likely to read Accelerating Democracy.

David Potash

June 15, 2013 American Culture Today, Reviews

Measuring Manhattan

John Randel was a brilliant crank, an idiosyncratic and irascible character who mapped Manhattan in the early 1800s. Randel made the world-famous grid of avenues and streets a reality through extraordinarily detailed maps. His obsession for accuracy was matched only by his commitment to his reputation. Marguerite Holloway’s The Measure of Manhattan is a generous and thoughtfully crafted biography of Randel. Holloway champions Randel, admits but tolerates his weaknesses, and lobbies mightily to raise his star.

The challenge facing Holloway is that Randel was not a visionary, a planner, or a theorist. He was not even a particularly nice or interesting person. Randel played a very important role in the mapping of Manhattan, but that role could have been shouldered by another. He was an outstanding surveyor.Randal’s role in history is notable because he possessed the right skills in the right place at the right time.

The true subject of the book is not Randal, but the processes involved in mapping the island of Manhattan. Surveyors imposed order on chaos and structure on the organic. If we equate happiness with property – and many Americans do – than happiness is only possible with a reliable map. It’s a good thing that Manhattan has so many happy people, and if only for that, I give thanks to John Randel.

David Potash

June 14, 2013 Reviews, Things someone who grew up in NJ might write

Fame in Familiar Flavors

Bat Masterson used to be famous. A gunfighter, lawman, buffalo hunter, pugilist, gambler, boxing promoter, and newspaper columnist, Masterson was a man’s man from the Wild West who lived the latter half of his life on Broadway in New York City. He killed several men, was involved in countless brawls and lawsuits, and lived a life worthy of fiction. One of his younger New York friends, Damon Runyan, thought so – he created the character “Sky Masterson” thinking of Bat. Sky would later achieve a different kind of fame as the lead in the musical Guys and Dolls. Theodore Roosevelt was equally enchanted. When President, Roosevelt arranged for a federal sinecure for Masterson.

Robert K. DeArment is probably the world’s expert on Bat Masterson. His latest work, Gunfighter in Gotham: Bat Masteron’s New York City Years, chronicles Masterson’s life but focuses on his time on the Great White Way. Masterson’s New York City was very much Runyon’s: a small district around Times Square filled with types. Masterson did have exploits, but were they worthy of our collective attention? His prose was nothing special; nor were his opinions, causes, or arguments. He was not a leader and he left no exceptional mark on his environs. He was a friend and a colleague to many and a dangerous enemy to a few.

Thinking of Bat Masterson brings to mind other celebrities famous for being famous, a category now enshrined in popular culture. We often think that the rise of the fake celebrity is a recent phenomena driven by the internet and social media. In reality, it is a part of modern life and has been for decades. We regularly think about, read about, and write about popular figures whose actual claim to fame is, at best, tenuous. Our fascination with fame is as much about us, the public, as it is about the object of our attention, the celebrity.

Those famous for being famous often share similar traits. They actively seek to maintain their celebrity. That kind of fame does not just happen – it requires ongoing work. And if you doubt me, consult with Kathy Griffin. Also, these kinds of celebrities tend to embody characteristics that are taken to an extreme. Masterson’s hyper-masculinity stands as a provocative counterpoint to the hyper-femininity of the Spice Girls or the Kardashians.

As for Masterson, DeArment’s volume provides more than I would ever care to know about the man in print. I will hold judgement about meeting Masterson in person – I think that he would have been a heck of an interesting fellow to meet at the bar.

David Potash

June 3, 2013 Curiouser and Curiouser, Things someone who grew up in NJ might write

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