It’s a rare occasion that either of us finds a reason to cross the state line into Indiana, but the promise of good Italian cooking proved incentive enough. Luckily, the Hoosier State is closer to Chicago than we’d remembered. After a quick, cheap train ride on the South Shore Line (a 28-minute journey from Hyde Park to Hammond, Indiana, costs less than $5), we found ourselves in the hospitable hands of Karen, AM’83, MBA’89, and Mike Jesso, the husband-and-wife team behind Café Borgia.

The Jessos had originally intended to open their café down the street from the Medici on 57th, naming their restaurant after the Italian Borgia family, historical rivals of the Medicis. When their Hyde Park plan fell through, they settled on a Lansing, Illinois, location instead and moved to nearby Munster in August 2007. But they kept the name. Ever the Chicago scholar, Karen had done her research on the Borgias, discovering that the family was known for its love of fine dining. She says her executive-chef husband even incorporated some Borgia family favorites into the modern Italian menu.

That menu led to some moments of agonizing indecision, as we wavered between prosciutto-wrapped mozzarella or mozzarella en carozza (essentially fancy mozzarella sticks) to start. We got both, each served in a pool of Chef Jesso’s tomato sauce—what Karen calls “a modern version” of the traditional sauces cooked for hours. The pesto sauce, which we tasted in the roasted red pepper pesto spread appetizer, is made from the basil plants the Jessos grow in small garden plots outside the restaurant—enough for a year's worth of pesto. Before the frost hits, they make 100 pounds of pesto, freezing it for winter.

By the time we got to our entrees—shrimp and seashells in a tomato-vodka sauce and rigatoni with smoked chicken—we were nearly stuffed. And the tiramisu summoned us with its ladyfingers, so we decided to take most of our pasta dishes home to save room for dessert, which also included the restaurant’s signature zucotto (chocolate cake filled with white-chocolate mousse and pistachios) and rice pudding. No surprise that we left with two heavy doggie bags.

For one of us, the leftovers were sadly never to be enjoyed. The victims of a surprise office refrigerator cleaning, the leftover rigatoni and smidgen of remaining zucotto most likely ended up in the trash or—the better option—were enjoyed by the person cleaning out the fridge. Another reason to make our way back to Borgia.

Elizabeth Chan and Ruth E. Kott, AM'07

Unveiling their design for the Reva and David Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts before an SRO crowd last Tuesday night, architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien showed off a building that will act as both University anchor and portal. Located at 60th Street and Ingleside Avenue, the $114 million building has a planned May 2010 groundbreaking and 2012 opening.

Along with practice rooms, classrooms, studios, and a shop shared by set designers and artists, the Logan Center will have lots of public spaces: three theaters, a gallery, a glass-walled penthouse performance space, and a ground-level cafe. Designed to become a South campus landmark, the building "will let people know that the University of Chicago has a deep commitment to the arts of the present," said Dan Logan, whose family committed a $35 million gift to support the center.

Students, faculty, alumni, and friends who couldn't make it to the Law School auditorium for the unveiling could watch via live Webcast as the architects walked through slides of the building and answered questions about their design. Here are a few architectural details:

What the principals wore
Tod's loose gray shirt resembled an artist's smock; Billie's blouse was tailored and green. Within minutes, they'd both pushed up their sleeves.

Conversational style
She stayed seated, advanced the slides, and wielded the laser-pointer. He jumped up, walked around, built boxes with his hands. Both got their points across.

Their marching orders
As told to the audience by the evening's emcee, Deputy Provost for the Arts Larry Norman: "First and foremost, an integrative arts center.... It had to be a very porous building. They were told, 'It's OK if the building has a front but it can't have a back.' You're going to see a building with a lot of entryways."

Their inspirations (global)

• The skylit tower in New York City's Carnegie Hall where they had their home and studio (like the other artists who lived in the tower, they've been evicted to make room for programmatic space).
• The American Folk Art Museum, which they designed and which was named one of 2001's best buildings. Wedged into a narrow slice of Manhattan real estate, it's also a tower, "with openings looking down from one place to the next," they explained, "where you know where you are and are curious to where a friend might be."

Their inspirations (local)

• The Midwest. Tod: "We saw the project as a silo in a field."
• The campus. The Indiana limestone of Chicago's English Gothic quads meets Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House brickwork in the limestone bars (4 feet x 4 inches x 4 inches) that will form the building's facade.

LEEDing question: How green is the building?
The center will achieve a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating. Contributing to the green factor:

• Local materials
• North-facing skylights (of double-glazed glass) reduce electricity consumption
• Extensive green roofs
• Two elevators (instead of the standard three) in the 11-story tower require less electricity--and promote taking the stairs

And the night's towering question
Is the center's tower taller than Rockefeller Chapel?

• University Architect Steven Wisenthal gave the numbers: At its highest point, Rockefeller is 200 feet. The center's tower is 156 feet. Tod gave the reason: "I'd like to think we were respectful of Rockefeller Chapel, but if we had had the budget..."

After the slide show...
Architects and audience repaired to a lobby reception where renderings of the center were on display.

Mary Ruth Yoe

Architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien unveil the design for the Reva and David Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts.

That evening I entered the gymnastics room in Lab’s Kovler Gym. It’s a cozy space packed with 80s-era gymnastics equipment: wooden balance beams, stiff uneven bars, a vaulting horse instead of the modern vaulting table. Settling onto a blue mat, I watched the club president, College third-year Joe Cacioppo, lead 11 male and female members through a warm-up of tuck jumps, stretches, bridges, and splits. Then Cacioppo, a former competitive gymnast and coach, announced the start of tumbling practice. With Bon Jovi blaring in the background, the gymnasts performed handstands, walkovers, and front and back handsprings up and down the yellow tumbling strip.

After tumbling, participants split up to work on different pieces of apparatus. Brian Callender, AB’97, AM’98, MD’04, an assistant professor of medicine who was a gymnast in high school and joined the club last year, breezed through a killer pommel-horse sequence of circles and flares, while Cacioppo whirled around the high bar, bending his knees to avoid the low ceiling. “I did that last year," said Callender, "hit the ceiling and sliced my knee."

The industrious atmosphere inspired me, albeit just a little. As I swung on the bars, the muscles in my stomach ached. Walking across the beam, I completed some of the basic dance moves from my old high-school routine. I decided to call it a day and wondered: how did I ever do this? “You can get it back,” Callender told me. “It just takes time.” Hey, why not? Maybe I’ll pack my gym bag more often.

Katherine E. Muhlenkamp

“John Grunsfeld was being interviewed by a writer for the Chicago Maroon while [Assistant Athletic Director] Dave Hilbert, Steve Koppes [of the News Office], and I were cleaning up. Dave had his camera, so when the interview was finished, I asked John if I could have my picture taken with him. He said yes, and went to the display case, unlocked it, and took the ball out. Dave shot a couple of pictures, and then he said, ‘Let’s do a jump ball!’”

The picture speaks for itself. (Ebenhoeh is the one on the left, without the mustache.)

Benjamin Recchie, AB’03

From fence to reinforced fence to concrete, the wall grew by 1980 to two massive fortifications, with a swath of barren land (aka the Death Zone) in between. Walls, armed guards, dogs, watchtowers, beds of nails, and other deterrents worked. Between 1961 and November 9, 1989, when the wall fell, only 5,000 East Germans attempted to escape.

That’s the human perspective. But a 2009 German-Polish documentary film, shown at International House last week as part of a three-day series marking the 20th anniversary of events that led to the end of the cold war, takes a rabbit’s-eye view.

Rabbit à la Berlin (in Polish, Królik po berlinsku) begins in the burned-out aftermath of post-war Berlin, as rabbits flock to makeshift gardens sown near Potsdamer Platz. Times are hard, but the gardens and the rabbits take it day by day. Years go by, and the rabbits wake one morning to the fence, to the wall, and then to the realization that they can't get out. But the basic necessities of life remain, and so the rabbits multiply. They believe the guards are there to protect them, and they are content. Until some aren’t. When they begin to burrow their way out, they become the hunted.

Through newsreel clips, we watch as the rabbits watch builders, guards, escapees, statesmen, tourists—and the wall itself—come and go. The archival and contemporary footage of the rabbits is equally revealing. But if Rabbit à la Berlin (up for a 2010 Academy Award nomination in the documentary short-subject category) follows the conventions of a nature documentary, its subject is human nature.

On the surface, the commentary is serene; underneath, hardly safe: “…for rabbits, this was almost like a zoo...” or “there would be individuals that would go against the herd….” The rabbits are not the only species still struggling to adjust to life after the wall.

Mary Ruth Yoe

"With Immediate Effect" The Events of 1989 Revisited
A film and discussion series reflecting on the 20th anniversary of the transitions in Central and Eastern Europe that marked the end of the cold war and altered the balance of power in the world. The Center for International Studies series was cosponsored by the International House Global Voices Program, Doc Films, and the Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies.

If you haven't popped into Rockefeller since hearing the Aims of Education address as a first-year, here are some ways to make a virtual visit:

• AUDIO: "At Rockefeller Chapel," performances and interviews
  (American Public Media, Pipedreams, Sept. 14, 2009)
• VIDEO: "'Going Home'—Blues on the Pipe Organ," performance by Barbara Dennerlein
  (Peterson Electro-Musical Products Inc., Aug. 26, 2009)
• VIDEO: "Skinner Organ," interview with Davenport and organist Thomas Weisflog
  (Chicago Revealed, May 5, 2009)

In April, Lavi helped guide WIDEawake’s purchase of the infamous rap label Death Row Records and its back catalog, which includes recordings by Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Dogg. It’s hard to imagine anyone more different from Death Row’s enormous and terrifying founder, Suge Knight, who, according to legend, once dangled rapper Vanilla Ice off a hotel balcony to get him to sign over rights to the song “Ice Ice Baby.”

Lavi recently spoke to UChiBLOGo's Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93, by phone.

Did you like gangsta rap when it first came out?

No. But I’ve grown to appreciate it, I will say that. Sort of.

No, I’m kidding. I appreciate all well-done forms of music. Am I the kind of person, demographically, that would gravitate towards gangsta rap? Probably not. I don’t think I should fool anybody or myself on that point.

People ask me all the time, what were you thinking? This is music that relates to gang violence, mistrust of the police, and misogyny. I have had to give this tremendous thought.

On a business level, this is an asset that is continually generating significant income. And on a substantive level, I’ve come to realize that a lot of this music in many ways is protest music. You have to peel back the swearing and understand that these guys were trying to find a way to align. They were trying to express the fact that they do not feel part of mainstream society. This was alternative socioeconomic folk music in some degree.

How did your company end up acquiring Death Row?

I was recruited in 2005 to evaluate the viability of a new-breed entertainment company that cross-collateralized its divisions of music, film, production, and technology. About a year ago I got the green light to acquire a significant asset. And quite to my surprise, we publicly bid $18 million for Death Row and not a penny over that, and we were the winners.

Now in retrospect, I can see why people were reticent to acquire this asset. The books and records were in very poor order. But the biggest challenge has been trying to figure out a way to work with the artists, because they’re very hostile toward the brand at this point. They never got paid royalties under Suge Knight. He basically kept all the money, I guess. I still don’t really understand what he did.

Our practice is to pay royalties and have excellent relationships with artists. I could never live with myself if we were doing things that were disreputable. Amazingly, I thought the most difficult relationship was going to be with the Tupac Amaru Shakur estate, and as it turns out, it is our absolute best relationship. [Shakur, one of the best-selling hip-hop artists of all time, died in 1996 at age 25.] That’s 50 percent of our income.

Are there upcoming Tupac projects?

Yes. We’re entitled, as per the court documents, to 13 unreleased Tupac compositions. We’re going to put those out in June 2010. That’s the goal. And Afeni Shakur [Tupac’s mother] is trusting me with the creative control of it. I intend benchmark production value on All Eyez on Me, one of Tupac’s best-selling albums, which I think will make fans happy, because they’re looking for pure Tupac. We’re trying to honor Tupac and what he intended.

Tupac also wrote a screenplay for a film, Live 2 Tell, when he was in prison. I’m looking for ways that we can option that. The script is fabulous.

What was your time at the University of Chicago like?

I loved the academic experience, absolutely loved it. I have very fond memories of my Chicago days. I realize now I was very privileged to take economics classes, which have helped me greatly in my business.

I was getting good grades, fulfilling all the requirements, but for financial reasons I had to drop out. I started working as a waitress at the Kingston Mines Blues Bar. By the time I was done, I was singing with [Chicago blues legend] Jimmy Johnson, who’s 80 now. He used to drive me home to Hyde Park on his way back to Harvey, and sing me blues licks and teach me blues inflection.

How did you end up working for an Indian tribe?

With my science and environmental background, the obvious job if you want to stay pure—not end up on the polluters’ side—is to work for one of the tribes. So I ended up working for the Muckleshoot. I think I was making all of $18,000 a year.

Working for the tribe was a huge influence on me. I would periodically go to powwows, and spend time with elders. I ended up forming a group called the Songcatchers with a very dear friend of mine, Charles Neville, the saxophonist for the Neville Brothers. The group merged rock with full-on Indian powwow singing and drumming. That project toured all over the place, with Peter Gabriel and the Neville Brothers.

What kind of music do you like to listen to?

Anybody that knows me knows that I am a die-hard and absurdly neurotic Bruce Springsteen fan. I have no apologies. Bruce, if you’re out there, and you’re reading the University of Chicago alumni blog, I love you. I will always love you.

Philip Roth, AM'55, sits down with Tina Brown to talk about writing and his latest novel, The Humbling. Watch one of the six segments from their chat:

• "Writing and Rewriting"
• "Writing about Sex"
• "Will the Kindle Save the Novel? Not Really"
• "If You Think Turning 60 Was Fun..."
• "Is Barack Obama a Good Writer?"
• "Looking Back at Portnoy’s Complaint"

Okay, I’ll just come right out and admit it: I may have two degrees from the University of Chicago, but until Homecoming this past Saturday, I had never, ever been to a Maroons football game. But then again, I had never had six-year-old sons, who—in a triumph of nature over nurture—already know more about sports than I do.

“What’s the U of C, Division Six?” a friend of mine, a DePaul alumnus and former sports reporter, had asked when I told him about our weekend plans.

“Divison Three,” I corrected him snippily. “And founding members of the Big Ten.”

“Which actually has eleven teams,” he said. “And oddly, Chicago is still not one of them.”

Well, I didn’t know that either. I know what a touchdown is and what a first down is, and that’s about it. In fact, my ignorance of football was so deep and abiding that although I have lived in Hyde Park off and on since 1988, I could not even find the stadium entrance.

“Where are we going, Mommy?” one of the six-year-olds wanted to know.

“Why is this taking so long?” asked the other one.

“How are we supposed to get in?”

“Where’s the gate?”

“How did all those people get in?”

“Do we have to climb the fence?”

“We’re missing it! We’re missing it!”

“We’re never going to get in!”

For the record, fellow English majors, the entrance to the stadium is not on 55th Street. It is on 56th.

As usual, we were late in the first place, so by the time we arrived, it was the start of the second quarter. We walked along the bottom of the stands, looking for somewhere to sit, and—to my amazement—the stands were almost entirely full. True, they would hold perhaps 300 people, about as much seating as was provided for my high school's junior-varsity team, but still.

With just under 15 minutes to go in the first half, the Maroons were up 14-0. “The Maroons are good!” said six-year-old A. Later, apropos of nothing, he amended his opinion to “Whoever they’re playing must be really bad.” I explained that the opposing team was Denison (since I know as much about liberal-arts colleges as about Division III sports, I had to Google it to discover it was in Granville, Ohio). Six-year-old A, perhaps dreaming of Chicago’s storied Big Ten past, kept referring to them as Minnesota.

We ended up sitting crisscross applesauce at the bottom of the stands, just inside the fence. We could hardly see past the football players standing on the sidelines, so I watched the cheerleaders instead, which is what I mostly did at high-school football games anyway. I was hoping for some of the infamous University of Chicago cheers, which I had read about but never heard, such as:

Themistocles, Thucydides,
The Peloponnesian War,
X squared, Y squared,
H2SO4.
Who for? What for?
Who we gonna yell for?
Go, Maroons!

Or perhaps:

Gimme the speed of light.....C
Gimme Planck's constant.....H
Gimme root negative one.....I
Gimme carbon.....C
Gimme the Bohr radius.....A
Gimme the gravitational constant.....G
Gimme the additive identity of a non-trivial group.....O
What's that spell?.....Chicago!

Sadly, no. The cheerleaders did some cool lifts and round-offs, but the cheers were nothing more original than “Maroon and white, all right all right, let me see you win tonight” and “First and ten, do it again, go fight win.”

By halftime the score was 17-0, despite a dramatic interception by Denison that gained 54 yards but no touchdown, and the six-year-olds were ready to leave. I managed, by offering a bribe of popcorn, to persuade them to stay for the halftime show, when 13 members of the original 1969 varsity football squad—the first varsity team since Robert Maynard Hutchins famously abolished football in 1939—were recognized.

The final score, as I discovered later by checking the athletics department’s Web site, was 38-7. I cut and pasted the headline “Maroons Celebrate Homecoming with a 38-7 Victory!” into the subject line of an e-mail to my sarcastic DePaul friend. “Over Denison,” I wrote, thinking that, as a Chicago native, he would have to be more up on Midwest colleges.

But to no avail. “Congratulations on a resounding victory over a college that you clearly just made up,” he wrote back, “to hide the fact that U of C doesn’t actually have a football team.”

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

PBS Nightly Business Report's Susie Gharib interviews Chicago Booth professor Richard Thaler about behavioral finance and its practical implications.

Public television journalist Ray Suarez, AM'92, talks about immigration as it relates to business, politics, culture and demographic changes in our schools.

What is it about Philip Glass’s music that gives everything a hypnotic, monumental quality? With Glass, AB'56, on my iPod, even the morning commute feels epic. The rattle of the ‘L’ merges with the relentless, repetitive bass line; wires against the gray sky become a metaphor for human futility. Every person on the Red Line seems to brim with existential angst—especially me, with the soundtrack from The Hours blaring in my ears.

If you like Philip Glass, his music makes you want to throw yourself off a cliff—but in a good way. If you hate him, you want to throw him off the cliff. As a member of the former group, I was thrilled to nab a ticket to his sold-out performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art last week. And I had questions. What would he play during an evening of solo piano? Would he get jiggy with the artwork, like the Glass Ensemble used to do in the 1970s? Would the Chicago math and philosophy grad give a shout-out to his alma mater and former hometown?

Answers—like Glass’s thundering left hand—came fast and furious. Although last month he premiered an opera and released a new recording of his “Toltec” Symphony No. 7, the composer mined older material (the 1989 Metamorphoses and 1994–99 Etudes) for his one-hour MCA gig. Casually dressed in black pants and a gray button-down shirt, his demeanor was courteous and contained. He played with concentration but made no overt connection to the 300 people gathered in the small theater.

Which leads to another question: why, at 72, does Glass even bother to play live? Certainly not to showcase his virtuosity; introducing the second set, he joked, “I’ve composed 16 etudes, and I’ve learned ten of them.” Glass’s newer operas, film scores, symphonies, and chamber music are lush and lyrical, shattering early categorizations of his work as minimalist. The piano compositions, in contrast, seem spare and workmanlike.

Glass hinted at an explanation in a recent interview, arguing (like John Cage) that one of the principles of modernism is that “the audience completes the work of art, that a work of art has no independent existence; it’s a transaction.” For the performer, the encounter is necessary. And for the listener, there is something riveting about hearing a composer play his own work, regardless of the technique. When Glass trundles through Etude No. 2, we feel excitement and a sense of privilege, as when a master architect unrolls an old blueprint and guides us through the drawings, many years after the house is built.

Elizabeth Station

Photo courtesy Giorgio Constantine.

Listen to "Allegro inquieto" from music professor Easley Blackwood's Symphony no. 5, op. 34, as performed in 1992 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and conducted by James DePreist.

Neurology professor Steven Small kicked off the festival with fair warning that he aimed “not to make you laugh, but to inform you about how laughter is mediated in the human brain.” He explained that laughter, “an exquisitely human phenomenon,” was also an anatomical reflex. Down the street in Fulton Recital Hall, philosopher Jonathan Lear dissected irony with the help of funny folks like Kierkegaard and Socrates. His goal was to explain irony’s basic structure and isolate what happens to us psychologically in the “ironic moment.”

Were there chuckles and appreciative nods? Sure. But no one really laughed out loud until the noontime session, “Deconstructing the Latke-Hamantash Debate,” in Mandel Hall. Following a brief history of the annual tradition, philosophy professor Ted Cohen emceed a mock version of the debate for the CHF audience. In full academic regalia, two presenters made their pitch. Opera expert Philip Gossett theorized about Verdi’s love of fruit pastries and showed how key passages in a newly analyzed manuscript of Rigoletto revealed the composer’s long passion for hamantaschen. Biologist James Shapiro (who showed his sense of humor with a 2007 journal article entitled “Bacteria are Small But Not Stupid” (pdf)) did a genomic analysis that proved the latke’s inferiority. The hamantash’s morphology, cortical development, and tasty “poppy-seed endoplasm” proved its intelligent design, Shapiro argued. Belly laughs followed.

Later in the day, audiences heard scholarly presentations on Molière’s comedic mission and the role of laughter in opera. The Chicago Humanities Festival—and the fun—will continue November 2–15 around the city.

Elizabeth Station