Breezing around the Windy City

In between the Wild Reef and the Magnificent Mile, Chicagoraises entertainmentto an art form.
By TOM UHLENBROCK
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
NEARLY 18 TONS OF SAND was shipped from the Philippines to Chicago to make the residents of Wild Reef feel right at home.
Visitors to Wild Reef, the new exhibit at the Shedd Aquarium, take an elevator 25 feet below street level to get to the underground wing that contains the 10-room, $45-million addition. They are greeted by crashing waves and the smell of seawater -- 750,000 gallons of it -- in a re-creation of Apo Island in the Philippines.
Most of that water is held behind 5-inch-thick, curved acrylic walls in the heart of the exhibit, a floor-to-ceiling view of some 25 sharks and other large fish circling a reef of fabricated coral. A standout among the residents is a big blue Napoleon wrasse.
"That's a real cool creature," Shedd spokeswoman Tracy Boutelle said. "They have bright blue blood because it's copper-rich. They can grow to 300 pounds and about 6 feet. We've nicknamed him Baby Huey."
The best thing about making annual pilgrimages to Chicago is the chance to visit old friends, and meet new ones. At the Shedd, we visited the creamy white beluga whales and the seahorses that look like floating lettuce leaves, and met Baby Huey.
Other attractions
On a four-day trip to Chicago this spring, we found the Himalayas at the Art Institute, Egypt at The Field Museum and painter John Currin and his humorous, often unflattering portrayals of women at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
And we learned new facts. Mrs. O'Leary's cow has been cleared by bureaucratic fiat of starting the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The fire, by the way, did the town a favor. It wiped out a three-square-mile area of the old downtown, cleaning the slate for the country's great architects to show off their creations.
"Make no little plans, for they have no magic to stir men's blood," urged Daniel H. Burnham, who led the rebuilding of the city. "Aim high in hope and work."
His followers did just that, building the world's first skyscraper and the Sears Tower, which Chicagoans still view as the tallest building on Earth despite some upstart towers in Malaysia.
Chicago was rebuilt with a grand plan that saved the area along Lake Michigan as green space, with the cultural institutions and awesome architecture sprinkled around. A visitor staying in a downtown hotel can walk, or take a short cab ride, across Grant Park to the Shedd, Field and Adler Planetarium.
Milt Levin was another new acquaintance made on the trip. Levin is a docent at the Field. "They call us facilitators now," he said with a smile.
A rex named Sue
One of Levin's duties is to stand in the main hall in front of Sue, the world's most complete fossilized skeleton of Tyrannosaurus rex, and answer questions from those staring at the fearsome figure. If they have none, Levin pulls out a prop or two from his pocket and asks his own.
"You know what this is?" he said to one group of youngsters. "It's a dinosaur tooth. Not a real one. A mold. A real one would be too fragile and too expensive."
Next, Levin produced a mound of what looked like brown rock. "This is copralite," he said. "Fossilized dinosaur poop." He offered it around but had no takers.
Apo Island was chosen as the focus of the Shedd's Wild Reef because the Philippines has the world's greatest diversity of underwater life -- more creatures than Australia's Great Barrier Reef or the Hawaiian Islands.
When poor fishing practices, including the use of dynamite and cyanide, threatened to destroy the coral beds around Apo some 20 years ago, the islanders formed a marine reserve and today jealously guard their reefs, allowing only eight tourist divers at a time. As a result, the recovered reefs are the most pristine in the Philippines.
During eight years of planning, Shedd staff members made five trips to the Philippines and worked with an advisory group of Filipino people living in Chicago. The exhibit gives visitors not only a diver's-eye view of the reefs around Apo but also explains how the community has learned to live in harmony with the underwater life.
Exiting the elevator and entering the Shedd's rendition of Apo, visitors are greeted by waves crashing into tidal pools teeming with a rainbow of fish. Nearby, four species of mottled moray eels poke their heads out of tunnels in the reef as if waiting for unsuspecting prey.
In the next room, visitors are surrounded by fish. "The designer tried to capture the exuberance of the first dive," said Boutelle, the Shedd spokeswoman. "The water is literally around you and above you. The more you look, the more you see."
Most of the Shedd's sharks are youngsters that will nearly double in size, with a single 6-footer prowling the habitat. "That's a zebra shark," Boutelle said. "He'll grow to be around 12 feet. We call him Andre the Giant."
Smaller displays hold celebrities such as poison lionfish, flashlight fish, warty frogfish and a boxer crab, which snips off bits of anemones and carries them around in its claws as protection. "The anemone's stinging tentacles put a little extra zing in his punch," Boutelle said. "See, he's holding them like pompons."
Other museums
Two other Chicago museums also are featuring glimpses of exotic locations.
"Himalayas: An Aesthetic Adventure," at the Art Institute through Aug. 17, presents art from the mountainous region of Nepal, India, Tibet and Bhutan known as "the rooftop of the world." The works are up to 1,500 years old.
The Buddhist and Hindu art includes temple sculptures of stone and wood, cast bronzes embellished with inlaid gemstones and vividly colored paintings so detailed and intertwined that it makes you dizzy trying to untangle the figures.
But looking closely can be educational: The depictions include amorous couples used to instruct newlyweds on the art of lovemaking.
The standouts among the 190 pieces include a painted terra-cotta sculpture of a lama meditating and a copper figure bedecked with semiprecious stones of the androgynous form of Shiva and Parvati. One side contains the hairstyle, bosom, waist and hips of a woman; the other the body of a man.
Among the buddhas represented is the god Ganesha, who has an elephant head, ample belly, chubby legs and trunk dipping into a bowl of sweets. Others are more frightening. The goddess Vajravarahi is portrayed with a garland of skulls and a sow's head protruding from her neck, while she dances on the chest of a corpse.
Before we left the Art Institute, a whirlwind tour led to brief encounters with familiar masterpieces: Monet's "Water Lilies," Renoir's "Two Sisters," Seurat's "A Sunday on La Grande," Grant Wood's "American Gothic" and Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks."
Too much art, too little time.
"Eternal Egypt: Masterworks of Ancient Art From the British Museum" is at The Field Museum through Aug. 10. If you didn't catch this display when it stopped last year at the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City, this is your second chance.
The British Museum has some of the most important and beautiful works of Egyptian art outside of Cairo, and many of them are in this show. The 144 objects range from a 3,000-year-old ivory statuette of an aging king to a carved stone funeral stela of a high priest who served under Cleopatra.
The exhibition's centerpiece is the enormous quartzite head of Amenhotep III, all that remains of a statue more than 26 feet tall. He is guarded by a life-size red granite lion, although the figure looks more like Oz's Cowardly Lion with crossed paws, curled tail and the hint of a feline smile.
A mummy mask on display was said to have been made for a royal attendant. She was given godlike golden flesh and hair the blue color of lapis lazuli.
The jewelry in the show includes a stunning pair of gold cuff bracelets decorated with the figure of a child god sitting on a lotus surrounded by cobras and sun discs.
After touring the visiting exhibition, stroll across the hall to the Field's permanent Egyptian collection, which includes 23 mummies, a 4,000-year-old royal boat and two original chambers of a tomb excavated two centuries ago in Saqqara, Egypt.
Surprises
Wandering around the Field always produces surprises. On the second floor, I found the Grainger Hall of Gems, a darkened room full of glass cases holding sparkling stones. Among them was the 5,890-carat Chalmers topaz and perfect emeralds with a sign that said: "Carat for carat, a good-quality emerald is worth more than a good-quality diamond." Emeralds over five carats, however, are usually flawed and cloudy.
The hall has replicas of famous diamonds, including the 45-carat Blue Hope diamond. The real thing is in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington.
Currin exhibition
On my ride up to Chicago, I thumbed through a slick travel magazine and read a feature on painter John Currin. Walking into the Museum of Contemporary Art, I found Currin, and his dog, Chewy, supervising the installation of an exhibition of his works.
Tall and 41, Currin seemed perplexed when asked to explain his feelings about women, which make up much of his subject matter. Although occasionally voluptuous, many of Currin's ladies are painted with cartoonish qualities -- knobby knees, balloon-like bosoms, billowing butts. The figures softened a bit in favor of Botticelli-esque sirens after Currin married sculptor Rachel Feinstein in 1994.
"People sort of focus on this misogyny -- I don't deny it's there," said Currin. "For me, a big part of painting is thinking about women, and fantasizing about women. Not sexually, but just thinking about women. My favorite works of art are about women."
Currin has not entirely shed his weird outlook on women. "Stamford After-Brunch," painted in 2000, depicts three seated women laughing as they share cigars and martinis. They look happily disheveled.
"It came from an ad I saw," Currin said. "They're really sort of the '90s women that you see on 'Oprah' or something like that. The subtext is the men are away and the women have some sort of empowered freedom."
If the goal of art is to provoke emotion, even controversy, then Currin succeeds. My chortling at one of Currin's balloon-breasted women earned a venomous glare from my female companion.
Shopping
The women in my party -- one mother, a teen-age daughter and her friend -- waged an assault on Chicago's Magnificent Mile of shopping along Michigan Avenue.
In one morning, they bought a fleece jacket, two pairs of shorts and two shirts at North Face, a sweat shirt at the Loyola University bookstore and three CDs at Virgin Records. They visited Disney, Guess and Gap but came away empty-handed. The teens decided they had outgrown American Girl Place.
Oh yeah, they paid $4.95 for a white sweatband with a swoosh at Niketown.
Now, here I fear a conspiracy arises, although I have no proof.
I had the afternoon shopping shift with the teens, and they quickly reminded me that the following day was my wedding anniversary. "Mom really liked a windbreaker at North Face -- the red one," said the daughter.
We hurried over and paid $89 for the windbreaker.
The next day, my wife got the windbreaker; I got the sweatband.