Fall arts are back
It’s returning for the first time in a long time. But given this particular season, should we care?
Going on two years since we had a fall arts season. A real fall arts season.
A fall arts season that looks like a fall arts season. On the other hand, who cares anymore? I’m not certain I do. The Earth did not stop rotating, the sun did not stop rising, seasons still change as anticipated and summer gives way to autumn on schedule — we had an autumn last year, we’ll have an autumn this year. That’s something. Yet the old wash of relief as weather turns cool, that familiar promise of a fresh beginning — that feels tentative. The climate is changing, and only half the country is vaccinated against a virus the other half is not vaccinated against mostly because of age or ignorance. It sounds like satire then to point out that movies have not entirely rebounded, or that live music — and theater, museums, dance — is back but unsettled.
Is it indecent to wonder about the future of sweater season when the world burns?
A lifetime ago, in another job, the fall arts season was very, very, very ridiculously vital. One of my duties was to compile an encyclopedic annual preview of every movie opening between Labor Day and New Year’s. And now I wonder if there will be movie theaters come January. Once upon a different world, I awaited eagerly the arrival of TV Guide’s fall preview — that always Sears Christmas Catalog-sized issue, arranged around the pitiless timetabling of weekly network television programing — and now how many anachronisms can you spot in that sentence? Autumn, we hear often, is change, decline. But there’s usually an assurance of renewal, return. The book business is doing nicely — autumn is the season of knowledge — and TV remains our cultural water cooler.
Still, am I alone in not being able to focus on much else?
And what’s a water cooler again?
The Art Institute of Chicago and the Hyde Park Art Center have large installations this fall constructed of the everyday flotsam recycled from our lives. Yet Steppenwolf doesn’t quite return until November, and only then with a recycling of “Bug,” last seen in early 2020. The movies get an epic new adaptation of “Dune” — and so does HBO Max, same day.
The Spring Awakening electronic music bacchanal returns ... in October. C2E2, that usual harbinger of Hot Geek Spring, returns to McCormick Place ... this December. The Chicago Humanities Festival also returns, as does the Chicago Architecture Biennial, and Chicago filmmaker Lana Wachowski is back, with the first “Matrix” film in 18 years.
But why pretend this feels normal?
We’re not back to normal, no matter the messaging or marketing. So why not embrace uncertainty — at least for the moment? Eventually, one day, after the last of our lockdown art is presented, the last unvaccinated American receives a jab, vaccine cards are no longer required at the doors of theaters and the diversity pledges of civic institutions have seeped deeply enough into the ground water to bear perennial fruit, when the world returns to life again but looks invariably different — ironically, only then will we get a fall that feels like fall. Which, again, is all about loss and reflection anyway.
Fall is the best season. No one needs me to quote poets or writers as proof, but to paraphrase “Anne of Green Gables”: Who isn’t happy to live in a world with an October? The universe resembles baked goods in the fall. And Halloween, the best holiday, still doesn’t require gifts. Don’t take it from me. Trees know how to handle the stress of an unsettled life. They drop their clothing. They go commando. Their nutrients sink into their roots, to be used later, when the world is back and the worst has passed. The green of summer retreats from the leaves, revealing a vibrancy there all along.