TODDLIN' TOWN

We're back from Chicago, the most underrated city in the country. One of the things we noticed on a cool, sunny day: Michigan Avenue, brimming with tourists and shoppers from the Old Water Tower south to the Tribune Tower, made New York's Fifth Avenue look like a cheap alleyway.

We also visited the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections at Northwestern University Library (just north of the city in Evanston). The library is famous for its archive of radical literature and materials (including the best documentation of the Siege and Commune of Paris, 1870-1871). It also has probably the world's most complete collection of books and materials on the 20th-century art movements of Art Nouveau, Dadaism, Expressionism, Futurism, Surrealism, Constructivism and Fluxus.

The day we visited Russell Maylone, the curator of special collections, his office was a jungle of newly acquired documents and materials from the Fluxus artist Charlotte Moorman, who died in 1991. Moorman was notable for, among other things, her topless avant-garde cello performances in collaborations with video artist Nam June Paik. She also created works with Joseph Beuys, John Cage, and Yoko Ono. Composer Edgar Varese called her "the Jeanne d'Arc of new music."

Meantime, the library is deep into cataloguing the huge archive of Dick Higgins, another major Fluxus artist, prolific writer, and founder of Something Else Press. (Full disclosure: Higgins was a friend of the Tireless Staff of Thousands's boss, who was the last editor of the press, following Emmett Williams; and the library houses the TSoT boss's own collection of letters, manuscripts, artworks and other documents largely from the late-'60s.)

Not incidentally, the library also holds the personal papers of John Cage, including the Notations collection, an archive of arts performance music manuscripts that Cage compiled. And, oh yeah, anyone interested in feminism, take note: The library has a major archive, the Women's Collection, focusing on the women's liberation movement from the late 1960s to the present. It comprises 4,000 periodical titles, thousands of ephemera files, and several thousand monographs.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: Speaking of Chicago, this week the U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to consider H.R. 3667, which designates a facility of the United States Postal Service (at 200 South Barrington St.) in Los Angeles as the "Karl Malden Station." It's about time! Malden was a Chicago native, after all, and one of Hollywood's great actors.