Essay on Essay on the Emil Bach House
Last weekend I went to see a piece of site-specific performance by an artist named Corey Smith. Titled “Essay on the Emil Bach House,” it was achingly beautiful.
It’s a rare thing when you show up to a piece of performance art you know little about, and have your (low, sure) expectations handily demolished. “Essay on the Emil Bach House” is set in and around Frank Lloyd Wright’s Emil Bach House on Chicago’s North Sheridan Road, in Rogers Park. Built in 1915, one year after Wright’s lover Mamah Borthwick and six others were murdered at Taliesen, and the first iteration of that house was set ablaze, the Bach House has been described as a house of grief, built by a man devastated by loss. The small house sits at the corner of the lot, a fortress atop an embankment, removed from the street. Its lines are heavy and the windows are small. Inside, the living space spirals tightly in on itself around a central hearth. The overall effect, as Smith discusses near the beginning of the piece, is one of safety -- of wrapping the home’s inhabitants in a tight embrace, never to let them go.
But the genius of “Essay on the Emil Bach House” (which I found out about from this preview in Architectural Digest) is that it doesn’t dwell on this narrative. Rather, it uses the story as a trampoline from which to fly with both skill and abandon, bouncing around big ideas about love and loss, time, aging, death, our fragile, mutable connection to our bodies, and, of course, the trope of the architectural house tour itself. It’s also, at times, very funny.
Smith is trained as a composer and afterward my friend Sharon and I decided that that must have something to do with the precision with which the piece is built. Every movement, every breath has intention, and yet this is not stifling. Rather, I was left suffused with a feeling of release and joy.
I had a very emotional response to this piece, obviously. At one point, sitting in an upstairs bedroom, listening to a performer play a saxophone in a bedroom, I watched the traffic go by in the twilight on Sheridan and had to stop myself from lying down on the bed and sobbing with the wordless power of that moment. Watching the world go by, protected by the thick walls of a house bricked up by loss, but maybe also a testament to the resilience of the impulse to love? I can’t stop thinking about it.
For the past few months I’ve been doing some freelance contract work that involves interviewing folks working with various Chicago-area social service agencies. It’s a good gig, and each time I meet someone new, my expectations are upended yet again. I’ve talked with Central African refugees in the western suburbs, food pantry volunteers on the North Side, folks building a center for homeless teens in Grand Crossing, and -- this week -- teens and young adults with serious motor disorders (cerebral palsy, mostly) seeking to enter the workforce which, damn. The amount of grit and determination required to get up and going, let alone look for a job, when the muscles of your body do not respond to neural firing as one might expect is, yes, profound. The stories that come out of this don’t bear a byline, but that’s OK. The important part is, as one of the service providers told me, is that people get to tell their stories, and that someone is actively listening.
All of this was rattling around in my own body when I went to class last night. I was a little cranky, and fatigued from running around all day. All I really wanted to do was sit and have a TGIF beer with the friends I had to ditch to go work out. Why did I sign away my Friday nights again?
As we were waiting for class to start, a refrain I’m familiar with fired up, in which a person in their 40s tells a person in their 20s their age, and the younger person reacts by exclaiming, “But you look so young!” I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of these in past years, but lately I sit these exchanges out. It’s one thing to tell a 23 year old you’re 42 -- a number still within the realm of the conceivable? -- but 51 is something else entirely. Last night though I chimed in and was only half-surprised to not receive that dopamine hit of reassurance in return.
I tried to blow it off but throughout the class I felt like I was having a hard time making myself heard. Was anyone listening? When, ⅔ of the way through class, I was coming down from the lyra and whammed my left foot hard into the floor (the crash mat being … not where I thought it was), I yelped in pain, but was a litlte relieved to spend the rest of the night on the ground with an ice pack. It hurt, yes (it’s fine now). But my pride was also dinged, and the mutable fragility of my own aging body, my own unmanageable emotions, laid bare.
That’s what we want in art right? But it’s still so hard to deal with when it reaches up to swat you in the day to day.
If you’ve read this far you deserve a reward. Here’s a recipe for some excellent gumbo, from the February 6 Soup & Bread. I would guess it makes a few gallons:
Louisiana Chicken and Andouille Sausage Gumbo
From Will Goodwin/Spoken Cafe
Ingredients
5 bell peppers (3 green, 2 red)
2.5 large yellow onions
5 stalks celery
8-10 cloves garlic
2 12 oz bags chopped frozen okra (fresh works but is hard to find)
3 bundles green onion
2 cans Rotel tomatoes
5.5-6 lb whole chicken
3 lbs andouille sausage
4 bay leaf
1 cup vegetable oil
1 cup AP flour
3 TBSP dry Italian seasoning
2 TSP garlic powder
2 TSP onion powder
1 TBSP fresh ground black pepper
1 TBSP kosher salt +/- to taste
Preparation
Chop all peppers, yellow onions and celery. Run garlic through garlic press or fine mince if no garlic press present. Set these veggies aside in a large bowl with the two bags of okra. Okra does not need to be thawed. This step must come first. These chopped veggies will stop the cooking of the roux.
Time to make a roux. This along with the okra will become the thickening agent in all of this. This roux is one cup vegetable oil and one cup flour in a med high heat pot with a thick bottom. You will need a pot big enough for the entire gumbo as this is a one pot meal. All cooking happens inside this pot. An 8-10 quart pot should suffice. I suggest magnalite or LeCreuset. Do not use a black iron pot. Stir the roux continuously ( it will burn almost immediately if you stop at any point) until it is nearly the color of milk chocolate and add the veggies all at once. The green onions are for later in the process.
Sweat the veggies down for 15-20 minutes stirring every couple of minutes to prevent the roux from scorching and sticking. Once the veggies have sweated out and are beginning to soften you may add the cans of Rotel tomato, the whole chicken and all dry spices and bay leaf. Cover with water till water just tops the whole chicken in the pot and set for covered a med high heat boil till chicken is cooked through. Usually about 1-1.5 hours or so. You can test the doneness by seeing how easy it is to twist away a leg from the chicken. While this is going you should cut lengthwise your andouille sausage links and chop into ¼”- 3/8” slices. You may also chop into very thin rings two bundles of green onions. Set both of these items aside.
Once chicken is done, carefully remove it from the pot and set aside on large rimmed baking sheet to cool. Add andouille sausage and green onions and lower pot temp to med heat. Break whole chicken down to cool quicker and once cooled enough to handle begin thoroughly deboning chicken removing all meat and setting aside bones and skin. (these may be kept to freeze for making a stock at a later date). Once all chicken meat has been pulled, add it back into the pot for a medium to low heat simmer for about 15 minutes.
Serve gumbo over rice with fresh chopped green onions on top, a dash of Tabasco and a sprinkle of Gumbo File’, a dry spice of ground sassafras.