The New Yorker cartoon of the day:

High school basketball is over.

Is it too early to be thinking about football? My friend from Naperville sent me this recently:

Got Neuqua Valley’s 2015 football schedule today... one tough road, especially the first four games. I won’t venture a guess on their prospects for ’15 until I know more about the team and this year's opponents. Certainly a lot of these teams are strong, but several like Naperville North, Wheaton North and even Glenbard North have been up and down the last few years. Could come down to just how you catch teams this year and that could account for maybe two wins or losses on either side of the ledger. Will be interesting to watch...

Aug. 28 @ Metea Valley

Sept. 4 @ Naperville Central
Sept. 11 Waubonsie Valley (North Central College)
Sept. 18 @ Wheaton Warrenville South
Sept. 25 @ Bartlett

Oct. 2 Naperville North
Oct. 9 @ Wheaton North
Oct. 16 @ Lake Park
Oct. 23 Glenbard North

Yes, it will be interesting to watch. I know the DVC is in flux, but why only two true home games? (The Waubonsie Valley date is also considered a home game.) 

I don't care what anybody...

...says, I really like Tudor Revival architecture.

I happened upon this building on 111th Street, just east of Western Avenue, as I was driving through the Morgan Park neighborhood on the Far Southwest Side of Chicago yesterday.

The current home of Little Hands Learning Center was probably built in the 1920s, before the Great Depression, when the style was popular.

From A Chicago Sojourn, my new favorite blog, Robert Powers writes:

Castellated architecture has its roots in the Gothic Revival and its Romantic views of the middle ages. In the eclectic 1920s, when a tidal wave of revival styles swept across America, a variety of castellated styles were used on large apartment buildings around Chicagoland. The implications of luxurious living – worthy of a monarch – would make a powerful advertising statement for the developers trying to fill their newly constructed buildings, as well as pleasing neighbors concerned about the aesthetics of a large new building in their neighborhood.

Is there a bowman up in that tower?

The most common castle architectural elements include massive turrets with small “arrow slit” windows, rough limestone bases, and crenelated rooflines. Of course, the need to supply the basics of a modern home, such as windows, mean that the castle motif can only run so far. On most examples, it is combined with a Tudor Revival style, which uses faux half-timbering for some surfaces for a more domestic effect which also happens to be more amenable to larger windows.
The castle craze was part of the period revival craze of the 1920s, when practically every style associated with pre-industrial society came into vogue.

The Great Depression, of course, put the kibosh on any further such flights of fancy. By the time construction resumed in the 1950s, both style and economics demanded the simplicity of Modernism. Castle apartments were a quaint curiosity – a last hoorah for historicist revivalism. 

My guess is that any true "student" of architecture would turn up his nose at this style. But I agree with the American architect Robert Venturi, who, in response to Mies van der Rohe's famous modernist dictum, "Less is more," said, "Less is a bore."

Bad week for pop music!

First, Andy Fraser, who helped write the rock anthem “All Right Now” as a teenager when he was the bassist for the British rock band Free, died on Monday at age 62.

And then, Michael Brown, a keyboardist and songwriter who at 16 was a writer of the 1966 hit “Walk Away Renee” for his band the Left Banke, died on Thursday at age 65.

It's the first day of spring...

...in Chicago and as good a time as any to walk over to Garibaldi Park on Polk Street, between Laflin and Ashland.

The plaque in front of the statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi describes him as an "Italian patriot, soldier and leading figure of the 'Risorgimento,' the 19th century movement for the liberation and unification of Italy.

"With his band of 'red shirts,' Garibaldi fought armies of the French, Austrians, Spanish, creating, for the first time, a united and independent Kingdom of Italy."

The statue was dedicated in Lincoln Park in 1934 and relocated to its current location in Little Italy fifty years later, in 1984.

On my way out of the park, I could see the dome from nearby St. Basil Greek Orthodox Church on Ashland.

Completed in 1910 in the Greek Revival style, the building was originally designed as a synagogue. In 1927, it was transformed into a Greek Orthodox Church.

Samuel Charters, music...

...scholar, died at age 85. From his obit in the Times:

Mr. Charters was also drawn to the psychedelic music emerging in the San Francisco area in the mid-’60s. He produced the first four albums by Country Joe & the Fish, including the satirical “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” one of the best-known protest songs of the Vietnam War era.

And which contains the chilling line:

Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box.*

The obit also mentions Mr. Charters's wife, Ann, and I wondered, Where have I heard that name? Oh, yeah (my emphasis):

In addition, Mr. Charters wrote two books with his wife, an expert on the literature of the Beat Generation as well as a pianist and photographer: a biography of the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and “Brother Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation.”

* McDonald, by the way, wasn't just some long-haired hippie. At the age of 17, he enlisted in the United States Navy for three years and was stationed in Japan.

Daevid Allen, a member...

...of the rock groups the Soft Machine and Gong, died at age 77.

Now, not only is that first name problematic (you don't suppose anyone ever misspelled it, do you?), but it appears to have been a self-inflicted wound. From his obit in the Times:

Christopher David Allen (he stopped using his first name and added the “e” himself) was born on Jan. 13, 1938, and grew up in Melbourne, Australia. 

It doesn't say, but I'm sure he had a good reason.