Jean Albano Gallery Closing, Povos Expanding | David Bordwell Remembered

Film scholar David Bordwell, who looks like he could talk and listen at the same time, EbertFest 2012/Photo: Ray Pride

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ART

Jean Albano Gallery Closing

After over thirty-five years in the gallery business, Jean Albano is closing her gallery at the end of May. “It’s been a great run and wonderful experience—lucky to have worked with amazing artists—but it’s time to go private and do consulting,” she writes. More on the gallery is here.

Povos Gallery Opens Downtown Outpost Next Month

On Instagram, Povos Gallery posts news of upgrades to their flagship location on Chicago Avenue and announces an additional exhibition space, Povos Downtown at 600 West Van Buren, replacing the W. Gallery, with which it is joining forces. Both locations are set to reopen in April.

Artist And Trail Marker Tree Expert Dennis Downes Was Seventy-Two

Much of Dennis Downes’ art, “often completed at his studio in Antioch, was inspired by trips to ancient and natural sites in the United States and Canada,” reports the Sun-Times. When he was twelve, he was “inspired by the sight of a ‘trail marker tree,’ which Native Americans are believed to have used to designate trails and other points of interest. That led to his lifelong pastimes as a national expert on trail marker trees, as an author and as an artist whose work included the George Wellington ‘Cap’n’ Streeter sculpture in Streeterville.”

DESIGN

JPMorgan Chase Revamp Goes To Gensler

“Of JPMorgan & Chase’s 14,500 employees in Chicago, 7,200 work out of Chase Tower,” reports the Architect’s Newspaper. “The sixty-story building by C.F. Murphy Associates and Perkins&Will, completed in 1969, has a ceramic wall mural by Marc Chagall. It was built to host the First National Bank of Chicago, but was renamed Chase Tower in 2005 after JPMorgan & Chase moved in… Gensler, a firm with a long history focused on workplace design, has been tasked with upgrading the twentieth-century building into a workplace with flexible, collaborative spaces that are adaptable and withstand the test of time.”

Lee Bey On The Chicago Spire Site

“A pair of tapering, faceted towers designed by architecture firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill hold the promise of finally delivering the come-up the historic three-acre parcel has always deserved,” writes Lee Bey in his architecture column at the Sun-Times. “The end is here for the infamous man-made crater at Lake Shore Drive and Grand Avenue. The twisting, 2,000-foot tall Chicago Spire was supposed to grow from this seventy-five-foot deep hole. But the project fell through fifteen years ago, and that sunken place has just sat there ever since, attracting rainwater and curiosity seekers. But no more. Teams of cement trucks last week swarmed the site as workers poured a new mat foundation inside the hole—formally called a cofferdam—for what will be the first of two towers planned for the location.”

Robert M. Lamp Wright House In Madison For Rent

“Madison, Wisconsin is not a serious city: I just found out Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robert M. Lamp House is for rent as student housing,” relays urban observer BoHo Chicagoan on X/Twitter. “Large three-story Frank Lloyd Wright house just one block from the Capitol and two blocks from James Madison Park. Includes four bedrooms plus basement level office & top floor room. Includes three bathrooms, large porch, parking for two cares [sic] and free onsite laundry,” lists Apex Rents, renting from August 15 for $2,750.

Offer Upped For Macy’s

“Arkhouse and Brigade up Macy’s takeover offer to $6.6 billion following rejection of a previous deal,” reports AP. “The investment firms announced that they had submitted an all-cash proposal of $24 for each of the remaining shares in Macy’s they don’t already own, up from an earlier offer of $21 per share.”

DINING & DRINKING

Survive With “Dune: Part Two” Water Of Life At Music Box

During the limited 70mm run of “Dune: Part Two,” the Music Box Lounge is confecting The Spice Melange for $12: Captain Morgan spiced rum, mango liqueur, orange juice, agave nectar, club soda, topped with Tajin; the nonalcoholic version substitutes Speedlip Spice and mango syrup for $11.

Savor The Luxury Cocktail (Like Queen Mary Tavern’s White Truffle Martini)

Punch purveys costly cocktails in a continent-wide survey, checking out “hyperexpensive Martinis… made with more expensive gins and other specialty ingredients. The Monkey Bar Martini at Monkey Bar in Manhattan… goes for $34, is made with Ki No Bi, which retails for about $73. The $40 Gibson at Bemelmans… uses Procera Blue Dot gin, which sells for $94… Some Martinis also jump in price depending on other, non-standard Martini ingredients. Dan Smith, the general manager at Queen Mary Tavern in Chicago, wanted to use Italian Alba white truffles in a drink. ‘The botanicals and the spices in gin turn out to be a very natural combo,’ he said.”

“The White Truffle Martini on the menu is made with Austrian eau de vie producer Hans Reisetbauer’s Blue Gin (retail: about $56) infused with shaved white truffles, a seasonal addition to the menu and at $40 over twice the price of most other offerings. ‘This is a drink that’s expensive, but in a way that is completely justified by the intrinsic cost of the ingredients that went into it… It’s not arbitrarily expensive because it’s in a fancy glass or something.’”

Calumet Fisheries Regular Recreating Familiar Signs

“Casey King, a Northwest Indiana-based artist, is using his graphic design skills to simulate the vacuum-formed menu boards and well-known exterior signs,” reports Block Club, after a fire swept the seafood shack.

Enzo’s In Chicago Heights Closes After Seventy-Five Years

Family-owned Enzo’s Beef & Sausage on Chicago Road had to close early on its final night after running out of food, reports WLS-TV. “Enzo opened the restaurant back in 1946 after serving in the military… Enzo himself returned to the restaurant Saturday after the final order was served, on what he said is a sad day… ‘I spent my life building Enzo’s. I’m old now, but I was young when we started across the street.’” Enzo’s grandson Kyle Hallberg has run the place for thirteen years, but says the restaurant “has just become too expensive to operate in Chicago Heights. ‘We’re being overtaxed, and not enough people are sticking around to foot that bill. And if we don’t see changes here in the south suburbs soon, there’s gonna be more of that coming.’” The restaurant site is here.

Slurp The PBR Spritz

“Enter the beer-based ‘spritz,’ which, in [Bed-Stuy Brooklyn], combines an ice-cold Miller High Life—the Champagne of beers—with strawberry-infused Campari,” relays Punch. “The built-in-a-bottle drink is known as the Camparty. ‘It’s simple, cheap, intriguing-looking and has complex flavors,’ a local bartender says. ‘People love it.’” Reddit is populated with plenty of nods to the casual beer cocktail, like the PBR Spritz (or Spritzer).

FILM & TELEVISION

Midwestern Titan Of Film Studies “Good Dr. Bordwell” Was Seventy-Six

One of the great academic figures of the Midwest, and a kind and brilliant man, David Bordwell was seventy-six. The modest author of a cascade of books of film studies, including the iconic textbook “Film Art,” in 2024 in its thirteenth edition, took to blogging with a fury after the turn of the century in collaboration with his wife and fellow University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Kristin Thompson. (Jeff Smith is a frequent collaborator, including on the textbook and the fifty marvelous “Observations On Film Art” video essays on the Criterion Channel.) Tweets film archivist and former Reader critic Dave Kehr: “Farewell to David Bordwell, friend and fellow traveler of fifty years. I’ll miss him; I’ll miss his prose; I’ll miss his sane, fact-based scholarship.”

Bordwell was the most affable man, modest, casually great and implausibly prolific in his seemingly infinite world of enthusiasm, online and at events like the Toronto International Film Festival and EbertFest. Whenever I posted links at the now-defunct website Movie City News to his blog and festival appearances, I dubbed him “Good Dr. Bordwell,” to evoke Boswell racing to take down the thoughts of eighteenth-century lexicographer Good Dr. Johnson. Which was akin to Ebert calling out to his youngers, like me, “Hello, old man!”; Ebert also approved of the “Good Dr. Bordwell” moniker. David was amused, and complimentary in turn, which I mention from an email exchange in part just to show his endearingly goofy side: “Dear Ray, Your expansive words linking to our new entry on Digital are much appreciated,” to which I replied, “It’s my pleasure. Wish I could write in that lucid, comprehensive way.”

And David, moments later, “You do write lucidly, dude! Or maybe you do write dudily, luce!” (He himself would alert colleagues he’d posted them with “You’ve been BLOGGED!”) The blog of his essential “Pandora’s Digital Box” from 2013, which I dramatically linked, to Bordwell’s approval, as “When Did Film End? Good Dr. Bordwell Details Celluloid’s End Times In A Comprehensive Must-Read,” is here. (Download the PDF of the complete book for free here.) A 2014 panel with Bordwell talking about master Hou Hsiao-hsien at the Toronto International Film Festival is here. (David posted about the onset of his illness in 2021.)

Film at Lincoln Center programmer Maddie Whittle gets Bordwell down in a few words, on X/Twitter: “Bordwell articulated the mechanics of film style & form with such piercing lucidity and disarming warmth that his writing elicits a kind of awestruck déjà vu a sense of encountering fundamental truths that I already knew on some level, but could never have formulated on my own.” Filmmaker James Benning: “He was a friend of mine, always in the front row…” and on Facebook: “David was six years younger than me. He arrived at UW in my second year of Graduate School in film & art (I already had a master’s degree in math), I was thirty-one and he was twenty-five. I called him the Boy Genius. He was a sweetheart. My heart goes out to Kristin Thompson.” The University of Wisconsin-Madison remembers Bordwell here. The repository of “Observations On Film Art” lies here.

Mark Harris Optimistic About Future Of Smaller Sorts Of Movies

Pre-Oscars, film historian Mark Harris has opinions at the New York Times (free link): “In light of this blockbuster shortage—and out of sheer panicked supply chain necessity—Hollywood is looking at and buying and even making plans to produce a bunch of scripts that can get off the ground fast and be cast, shot and edited reasonably quickly. They’re the kinds of films that don’t require a $250 million budget and a year of complicated postproduction work… These are self-contained films that don’t demand moviegoers have a Ph.D. in previous installments or extended universes. They’re the kinds of films you might sometimes wish Hollywood made more of. Maybe you remember them. They’re what used to be called movies.”

LIT

Chicago-Born Comics Pioneer Ramona Fradon Was Ninety-Seven

Ramona Fradon, who was born in Chicago, reports the Comics Journal, “led the way for female artists in the comic book field [in a] career of more than seventy-five years… Before Fradon (and Barbara Hall, who drew the Black Cat feature for Harvey), there were no women drawing superheroes in comic books. She was especially known for her work on the DC characters Aquaman and Metamorpho, the latter of which she co-created with writer Bob Haney.”

Oak Park Library Trustees Apologize Over “Harming” Palestinian Event

“The board of trustees for Oak Park’s library issued an apology to the community late amid the internal yet controversial actions the institution’s leadership took over the handling of a Palestinian cultural event and staffing changes,” reports Wednesday Journal. The apology comes after “a four-hour board meeting during which more than two dozen community members and former staff members pushed back against… management of the event, as well as… elimination of two positions, one of which involved diversity, equity and inclusion practices.” Community members “questioned whether the motivations of the actions were racist and reactionary as the Israel-Hamas war deepens.”

MEDIA

Remembering City Editor John Russell, Who Was Seventy-Two

John Russell, “the tough, dedicated former city editor of the Aurora Beacon-News,” died recently, writes editor Stephanie Lulay at Block Club. “Over thirty-eight years, John climbed the ranks from intern to city editor at the paper, becoming its heart and soul. He’s also the man who taught me. Everything I learned under him, every tough-love moment, every extra phone call he demanded I make to strengthen a story, every knock on a door he thought would make a difference, is infused into how I strive to make Block Club Chicago better as co-executive editor.”