Today In The Culture, March 30, 2023: Chicago’s James Beard Finalists | Booth’s First Goodman Season | Houdini Appears

Vincent Van Gogh, “The Novel Reader” (Liseuse de romans), November 1888/Image: Wikimedia Commons

Get daily culture news like this, sent to your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe to Newcity Today here.

ART

Van Gogh Painting Settlement Reached Over Painting At Detroit Institute Of Arts

“The dispute over Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Liseuse de romans’ (‘The Novel Reader,’ 1888) has been resolved out of court by the parties who had been claiming rightful ownership of the work,” reports The Art Newspaper. “The loser in the case may be the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), which an appeals court ordered in January to hold onto the painting pending the resolution of the ownership dispute—it had been loaned to the museum for its blockbuster ‘Van Gogh in America’ exhibition,” which closed in January. “Brokerarte Capital Partners, the Miami-based art brokerage of Brazilian collector Gustavo Soter, had purchased [the painting] in 2017 for $3.7m from Torrealba Holdings, a company owned by Brazilian thoroughbred horse collector Goncalo Borges Torrealba. Brokerarte then loaned the painting to an unnamed third party, who ‘absconded’ with it, as Soter’s original complaint stated… ‘Consistent with the confidential settlement, Brokerarte no longer seeks injunctive relief’ … lawyers for Soter wrote in a court filing.”

DESIGN

Clean Your Own Room, Do You Think This Hotel Is A Hotel?

“In the early days of the pandemic, the daily cleaning of hotel rooms was among the many routines disrupted. Even people who dared to travel blanched at the idea of a stranger entering their rooms. Many hotels started cleaning only after guests checked out, even letting some lodgings sit empty for a day,” reports the New York Times. “Guests staying at midlevel hotels run by Hilton, Marriott, Sheraton, Walt Disney World Resorts or other major brands are finding that if they want complimentary daily housekeeping, they need to request it—or clean their own room.”

The Siege Of The “Fifteen-Minute City” Man

“For most of his forty-year career, Carlos Moreno, a scientist and business professor at Sorbonne University in Paris, worked in relative peace,” reports the New York Times. “Many cities around the world embraced a concept he started to develop in 2010. Called the fifteen-minute city, the idea is that everyday destinations such as schools, stores and offices should be only a short walk or bike ride away from home. A group of nearly 100 mayors worldwide embraced it as a way to help recover from the pandemic… In recent weeks, a deluge of rumors and distortions have taken aim at Moreno’s proposal. Driven in part by climate change deniers and backers of the QAnon conspiracy theory, false claims have circulated online, at protests and even in government hearings that fifteen-minute cities were a precursor to ‘climate change lockdowns‘—urban ‘prison camps’ in which residents’ movements would be surveilled and heavily restricted.” Moreno “was accused without evidence of being an agent of an invisible totalitarian world government. He was likened to criminals and dictators. ‘I wasn’t a researcher anymore, I was Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler,’ Moreno said. ‘I have become, in one week, Public Enemy No. 1.'”

DINING & DRINKING

James Beard Finalists Announced

“The James Beard Award Foundation has narrowed the list of finalists for its 2023 awards,” reports Crain’s, “and five Chicago names have risen to the top. Obelix, a new French spot in River North, was nominated for Best New Restaurant; Damarr Brown, chef de cuisine at Virtue in Hyde Park, was nominated for Emerging Chef; and Sepia, a fine-dining spot in the West Loop neighborhood, was nominated for Outstanding Hospitality. Chicago has two nominees in the Best Chef in Great Lakes Region category: Tim Flores and Genie Kwon at Kasama, and Diana Dávila at Mi Tocaya Antojería.” Writes Nick Kindelsperger at the Trib: The list “comes with some pretty big surprises. Chicago chefs didn’t completely dominate the Best Chef: Great Lakes region category, as they largely have for the past decade… This means a chef from somewhere other than Chicago—the region includes Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio—has a real chance to win the award for the first time since 2015, when Jonathon Sawyer won at The Greenhouse Tavern in Cleveland.”

Daisies Gets Big

Pasta restaurant Daisies reopens today “in a much larger Logan Square location after months of renovations, a big expansion for the family-run eatery,” reports Block Club Chicago. The 5,500-square-foot restaurant with coffee bar, to-go area and thirty-seat dining room “found a new home in The Radler’s former spot at 2375 North Milwaukee, which is more than three times the size of its original location.” Reservations here.

Uncle Nearest’s Tennessee Distillery Has World’s Longest Bar

Any Chicago publicans care to compete? “Nearest Green Distillery, the Shelbyville, Tennessee, producer of award-hoarding Uncle Nearest bourbons and ryes, is opening an on-site restaurant and music venue dubbed Humble Baron,” reports Garden & Gun. “Inside that venue is a winding, 518-foot-long bar that surpasses the previous record holder by more than one hundred feet.” (That would be Beer Barrel Saloon of Put-in-Bay, Ohio.) “If you look at our operation, Uncle Nearest is the most-awarded bourbon the last four years running and the biggest-selling Black-owned spirits brand in history,” Nearest Green cofounder Keith Weaver tells the magazine. “As an extension of that, we’re wired to run fast and break records, to go bold or don’t go at all.”

Community Effort To End Cairo, Illinois Food Desert

“Rise Community Market in Cairo, Illinois, is expected to open before summer in this hard-hit river city, which has lost eighty-nine-percent of its 1920 population. Cairo fits the federal government’s definition of a food desert, [with] no grocery store since December 2015,” reports the Southeast Missourian.

FILM & TELEVISION

Billion-Dollar Bets On Theatrical Exhibition By Both Apple And Amazon

Prevailing sentiment is that streaming services need to create awareness for their individual attractions, not just for the service itself… just like the movie industry has sold its wares for a century. Amazon Studios releases its Ben Affleck-directed “Air” to theaters next week, for more than a cursory few days. Apple has announced that its first worldwide theatrical release, in partnership this fall with Paramount Pictures, will be Martin Scorsese’s quarter-billion-dollar-budgeted “Killers Of The Flower Moon,” after a likely debut at an autumn festival such as Venice or Toronto. “This is a big one in a loaded slate for Apple, which became the first streamer to win the Best Picture Oscar two years ago with ‘CODA,'” writes Deadline.

“Apple plans to release its biggest movies in theaters at least a month before they appear on its streaming service, Apple TV+,” reports Bloomberg. “Amazon released one of the biggest box office draws of the year in ‘Creed III’ and is about to put a Ben Affleck movie on more than 3,000 screens. Both Apple and Amazon are going to spend $1 billion a year on movies that get proper theatrical releases… The Scorsese movie was destined for theaters when it was at Paramount. But when that studio got cold feet, Apple was willing to step up and meet Scorsese’s desired budget.”

But there is also “a compelling business rationale as well: marketing. Apple TV+ has about one-eighth as many users as Netflix. Amazon’s video service accounts for less than half of the viewership of Netflix in the US. If you are going to spend nine figures on a single movie and you don’t have a large and engaged streaming audience, you need to find a way to make sure more people see the film. When studios release movies in theaters, they tend to spend millions of dollars to promote the title and drive people to leave their homes opening weekend. That generates awareness for the title, which often benefits the film when it appears on streaming service a month or two later.”

Disney CEO Dumps “Metaverse” Unit Championed By Predecessor

The Disney unit, seen by an earlier administration as developing a new form of storytelling, had about fifty employees, reports the Wall Street Journal. The division’s mission was to find “ways to tell interactive stories in new technological formats using Disney’s extensive library of intellectual property.”

A White Parent’s Complaint In Florida Banishes “Ruby Bridges” Movie

“The Disney movie ‘Ruby Bridges,’ which tells the tale of a six-year-old who integrated New Orleans schools in the 1960s, has been a staple of Pinellas County Black History Month lessons for years,” reports the Tampa Bay Times. “A North Shore Elementary parent who would not allow her child to watch the film when it was showing in early March later complained that it wasn’t appropriate for second graders.” The mother “wrote that the use of racial slurs and scenes of white people threatening Ruby as she entered a school might result in students learning that white people hate Black people.” Judd Legum of Popular Information learns about the process that led to this result.

The mother “also objects to the movie being ‘very aggressive’ about ‘the anger/racism of these white people.’ She also admits to only watching the first fifty minutes of the movie.” Despite standards that material under “review” remain available, in response to the mother’s “objection, North Shore Elementary banned the film from its school… This isn’t the first time that Pinellas schools have ignored procedures and banned material. Earlier this year, the district banned ‘The Bluest Eye’ by Toni Morrison based on an email from one parent who claimed it was pornography.”

LIT

“Best American Essays” Include Two From CQR

Chicago Quarterly Review relays that two of their nonfiction pieces—“Dreams Awaken” by Scott Spencer and “A Fist of Muscle” by Sam Meekings—have been chosen by guest editor Vivian Gornick for inclusion in “Best American Essays 2023.”

Latest Brand Management Recipient: Agatha Christie

“Several Agatha Christie novels have been edited to remove potentially offensive language, including insults and references to ethnicity,” reports the Guardian. “Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries written between 1920 and 1976 have had passages reworked or removed in new editions published by HarperCollins to strip them of language and descriptions that modern audiences find offensive, especially those involving the characters Christie’s protagonists encounter outside the UK.” According to the Telegraph: “The character of a British tourist venting her frustration at a group of children has been purged from a recent reissue, while a number of references to people smiling and comments on their teeth and physiques, have also been erased… Dialogue in Christie’s 1920 debut novel ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’ has been altered, so where Poirot once noted that another character is ‘a Jew, of course,’ he now makes no such comment… A young woman described as being ‘of gypsy type’ is now simply ‘a young woman,’ and other [such] references… have been removed.”

MEDIA

Open Letter: Pause Giant AI Experiments

Over a thousand signatories, including leading artificial intelligence researchers, are affixed to an open letter from The Future Of Life Institute that begins, “We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”

“AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research and acknowledged by top AI labs. As stated in the widely-endorsed Asilomar AI Principles, ‘Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources.’ Unfortunately, this level of planning and management is not happening, even though recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one–not even their creators–can understand, predict or reliably control… Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.”