Medill Money Mavens » Arts

Five Ways to Save at Ravinia

Daniel Hom — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 19:44:42 +0000

The Ravinia Pavilion (photo courtesy Ravinia.org)

What can be better than spending a summer night outdoors, away from Chicago with your favorite friends and enjoying the live music of your favorite bands?

How about doing all that and saving money? Ravinia’s summer concert series in Highland Park begins tomorrow with a line-up of artists all summer long. Since there’s surely something for everyone. Here are a few simple ways to save money while still getting value for your travels.

1. Take the Metra

Highland Park might be in the suburbs, but that doesn’t mean you have to drive to get there. As if they knew you wanted to save money, Metra’s Union Pacific / North Line makes a special stop at Ravinia Park just for concert goers, which is just a hop skip and a jump away from the concert venue. A one-way ticket from Ogilvie Transportation Center in the Loop will cost you $4.50 and 45 minutes. Driving will cost you gas, up to another $20 for parking and who knows how long with traffic.

2. Buy tickets in advance

This is especially true if you want lawn seats (which you should, as per tip No. 4), because buying lawn seats on concert day will cost you an additional $5.

You should also buy tickets with friends. For all orders made not in-person (online, phone, mail etc.), a $7 charge will be added per order. But that’s per order, not per ticket, which means you can buy one ticket, or 20, and there’s still only one $7 charge levied. So buy tickets together with others, which leads us to…

3. Go in groups

Because music is better enjoyed with friends—or strangers trying to save money—plan to go to Ravinia in a group of 20 or more people. You can get a 20 percent discount on tickets with a group that size, and if you’re a business planning a party, they also help with corporate events or private dining and catering.

You can find a group ticket request form here and more information about group events here.

4. Buy lawn tickets (or if you’re in college, get them free for some shows)

It’s understandable to want to see you most favorite musical artist up close and personal. For all other interests, don’t buy reserved seats. For example, reserved seats for the Backstreet Boys will cost you $50. A lawn seat is just $27. For other concerts, the difference is even wider.

The pavilion, where most concerts are held, is split between reserved seating and a lawn right behind it with a walking path separating the two. If you go early enough, you can snag a spot at the front of the lawn, which is plenty close enough. Even if you don’t, there are projection screens as well.

Sitting on the lawn also allow you to…

5. Bring your own food

Everybody loves picnics with friends on a grassy lawn. So do the people at Ravinia, who will let you bring your own food, chairs, candles, the works. Even alcohol, though kegs aren’t allowed. It’s also a great way to pass the extra time you took to get a good spot on the lawn.

You could buy a garden vegetable basket at Ravinia for $10. You can also prepare one yourself for far less.

Remember, you can’t bring food into reserved seating areas, which is another benefit to tip No. 4.

And as a side note: If you buy a ticket but can’t attend the concert for some reason, you can donate it back to the festival for a tax-deductable donation. Just be sure to call the box office before the performance begins. It’s better than letting the ticket go to waste, since there are no refunds.

Are ‘Three Trillion Dollar War’ estimates still on target?

Nicole V. Rohr — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 15:48:42 +0000

It’s amazing that a book detailing the costs of the Iraq war could even come close to being accurate two years later. My recent read, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, was both upsetting and enlightening (and at times a little dry). Even after reading, I still cannot wrap my mind around $3.5 trillion.

Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner and chair of Columbia University’s Committee of Global Thought, and Bilmes, a Harvard faculty member and recognized expert on the U.S. budget and public finance, assisted me in my mission to understand where the money is going by breaking down the costs of the Iraq war into six sections:

actual budgetary costs
veterans’ benefits and extended care
costs that the government doesn’t pay (i.e. a soldier with traumatic brain injury, or TBI, which affects a person’s ability to work, only gets maximum benefits of less than $60,000 per year in combined veterans’ and Social Security payouts)
macroeconomic effects (lost economic contributions due to killed or wounded soldiers)
global consequences (i.e. a cost of $1.1 trillion to the world economy due to higher oil prices resulting from the conflict)
exit strategy (estimated by 2015).

The first section is rather dense, as it regurgitates figures in the most artistic way possible. If the reader can push through the textbook style of this valuable start to the book, he/she will find that Stiglitz and Bilmes put more of a face to the war in the following chapters. For example, a pleading letter written to Bilmes by the aunt of a wounded soldier in Iraq. “President Bush can use any numbers describing the wounded or the cost, but nothing is going to solve this problem, if no one is paying attention. Or cares,” she writes.

The authors use these clips and stories to transition to numerical data. As this book would be extremely enlightening to every American taxpayer, it would help if these sort of transitions were included in the opening chapter, as well, in order to aid readability.

The book’s estimates are also divided into two types: conservative or best-case and “realistic-moderate.” Stiglitz and Bilmes suggest that the best case for both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars totals $2.3 trillion, while the realistic-moderate figure is a staggering $3.5 trillion.

“There is a simple message of this book,” the authors write, “one that needs to be repeated over and over again: there is no free lunch, and there are no free wars. In one way or another, we will pay these bills.”

The message may be simple, but the figures are not. I was curious whether or not the 2008 estimates listed in the book still rang true today. Antiwar.com analyst David Henderson said in an e-mail interview that $3 trillion should turn out to be “roughly correct.”

The official blog for the book recently posted this USA Today article which cites the Pentagon spending more in Afghanistan ($6.7 billion) than in Iraq ($5.5 billion) in February 2010 alone.

Kindle 2 could capitalize on environmental concerns

Joseph Freeman — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:32:42 +0000

(www.blog.pricegrabber.co.uk)

BY JOSEPH FREEMAN-MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

On Monday night before falling asleep I was about 200 pages into Ron Chernow’s 818-page wonderfully written biography of Alexander Hamilton (the revolution had ended and the future Treasury secretary was humiliating other lawyers in court with his oratory while somehow finding time to scribble ideas down about inflation and consumer confidence), when I realized that Earth Day was on the horizon.

The book felt heavier in my hands, and along with the dozens of other weighty tomes (“War and Peace,” Shelby Foote’s Civil War trilogy, the usual fare) sitting nobly on my bookshelf, I wondered about the bibliophile’s carbon footprint and the economic impact electronic books like Amazon.com Inc’s Kindle 2 could have in the age of environmentalism.

Sure, any respectable reader would and should disapprove of the philistines at Amazon.com and their uninspiring device that can, at the touch of a finger, bring up encyclopedias, op-eds and obscure Norwegian poetry. Indeed, these distractive capacities simply aren’t conducive to long stretches of reading Proust and contemplating lost eras of one’s childhood.

It pains me to admit that getting off books might help the environment. According to a collaborative study between The Green Press Initiative and the U.S. Book Industry, the production and distribution for one paper book account for 8.5 pounds of carbon emissions.

Flagging publishing houses can’t afford to ignore the Kindle and digital publishing revolution either. According to the International Digital Publishing Forum, sales of e-books in the U.S. market totaled $16.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2008, up from $8.2 million in the year earlier period, an increase of 105 percent.

To take a global example, The Digital Content Association of Japan announced last year that sales of electronic books over mobile phones and the internet had increased 331 percent, from 1.6 billion yen ($14 million USD) to 6.9 billion yen ($58 million USD) as of 2006, the last year for which data was available.

Ardent bibliophiles guarding first editions of “A Farewell to Arms” like a grizzly bear protecting a cub will find some consolation in the Kindle’s exorbitant price tag. At $359 (I could buy two iPod shuffles and have a chunk of change left over to download a few albums) amid a recession, even the most zealous eco-terrorists will most likely remain loyal to their local book emporiums.

And if all else fails, book lovers can indulge in a measure of schandefreude at this clip of Daily Show host Jon Stewart taking Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his revolutionary Kindle 2 down a few notches.

‘Atlas Shrugged’ and the first derivatives in literature

Joseph Freeman — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:31:43 +0000

BY J.H. FREEMAN- MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

In times of crisis, we look for lessons from history, or on the rare occasion, in literature. Published in 1957, Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” a novel about industries and businesses boycotting a fiscally manipulating government, has been seized upon mostly by free market trumpeters as the encapsulation of the crisis and the loss of liberal economic ideals.

In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece published in January, Stephen Moore wrote the following paean to the novel.

Some years ago when I worked at the libertarian Cato Institute, we used to label any new hire who had not yet read ‘Atlas Shrugged’ a ‘virgin.’ Being conversant in Ayn Rand’s classic novel about the economic carnage caused by big government run amok was practically a job requirement. If only ‘Atlas’ were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I’m confident that we’d get out of the current financial mess a lot faster.

The Guardian books blog posted a review of the novel last week, which began with “If recent reports are to be believed, people have started seeing parallels between our current economic meltdown and the world collapse outlined in the 1200 pages of Ayn Rand’s libertarian classic Atlas Shrugged.”

And today, Don Watkins, a writer for the The Ayn Rand Institute posted a column entitled, you guessed it, “The Resurgence of Central Planning.”

Whether or not it speaks to the lack of literary pedigree in our journalists and commentators of the free market disposition is impossible to know, but ask any expert or graduate student in Russian literature and you will quickly find there is already a more prescient novel about the causes of the economic crisis, and it was written almost 170 years ago in the land of central planning itself.

Nikolai Gogol’s “Dead Souls”, published in post-Napoleanic Russia in 1842, is the first novel in the history of literature that concerns itself almost entirely with derivatives. The protagonist, Chichikov, arrives in a small Russian town and begins buying from landowners the certificates of serfs (“souls”) who have died but remain registered “living” with the government because the census is slow to record the changes. The landowners are forced to pay taxes on serfs that are dead, and Chichikov offers to relieve them of this economic burden.

Chichikov’s end-game is to acquire enough dead souls and put them up as collateral, secure a large loan, and set himself up in the style of a gentleman landowner. This all sounds dreadfully familiar, as Wall Street brokers as well as Main Street homeowners refinanced and leveraged against a mortgage market in which prices were believed to keep rising.

But like the dead souls in Gogol’s novel, the prices didn’t rise and the schemes backfired, leaving those involved, like Chichikov at the end of the book, to leave town in disgrace. It’s not a coincidence that the term “mortgage” derives from an old French phrase meaning “dead pledge,” referring to the reversion of ownership to the lender if the homeowner dies.

If Stephen Moore gets his way and the Obama administration is compelled to read “Atlas Shrugged,” I submit that Stephen Moore and the outfits who peddled the dead souls of credit default swaps should have some required reading of their own.

Marketing is key for upcoming Chicago fashion designer Anna Fong

Tian Huang — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 19:27:28 +0000

Chicago fashion designer Anna Fong said marketing is crucial to succeed in the current economic climate. Tian Huang/Medill

BY TIAN HUANG - MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

Sketch, sew, sell. That formula may have been enough for fashion designers in the past, but now, with even established fashion labels feeling the brunt of the recession, younger designers, including those in Chicago, are using marketing as a key tool to stay afloat.

Anna Fong, a budding Chicago designer, officially launched her line a year ago. Fong, educated at Columbia College, headed to New York after graduation but decided to start her company in Chicago. Fong had little experience with marketing and no publicist, so when she first started, Fong said she mostly relied on other people’s referrals to gain customers and had media coverage that was more about her and less about her designs.

“I’m learning as I go,” Fong said. “People would hear about me from someone else, and [articles] were about me, the designer, but now, I go and it’s, let’s talk about the clothes, talk about the collection, talk about where people can buy it and how much it is.”

Since then, Fong has had her clothing sold in the Macy’s on State Street, featured in Lucky Magazine and worn by celebrities like Kimora Lee Simmons. She attributes her growing success to marketing.

Click here and listen to Anna Fong talk more in depth about how she’s used marketing in her business.

For Chicago Flower Show, an unexpected jolt of flower power

hollistempleton — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 19:20:36 +0000

BY KAREN LEIGH AND HOLLIS TEMPLETON – MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

The Chicago Flower and Garden Show is in full bloom at Navy Pier, and vendors said the recession, though impacting sales of luxury flowers, has actually triggered a boom in sales of cheaper stems – an unexpected surprise in a time of consumer cutbacks.

Though they said the flower industry as a whole is wilting, attendance at the show has not disappointed. At just $12-$14 for adult admission, it’s become less of a sales pitch and more of a beautiful (think waterfalls, hedge animals, bonsai trees and mini man-made lakes) and inexpensive place to take the kids.

Though it recently laid off more than 50 reporters, the Chicago Tribune was impressed enough to become a sponsor, as were the Chicago Botanic Garden, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Science and Industry, and the Lincoln Park Zoo.

To hear Creative Director Daniel Stober talk about how the recession unexpectedly helped his show flourish, and to get a behind-the-scenes peek at this urban garden of Eden, watch our video.

Ordinance could hurt Chicago promoters, music venues

hollistempleton — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:25:04 +0000

Sarah Marie Young performs at the Morse Theatre, a jazz venue in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood. (Photo: Hollis Templeton/Medill)

BY HOLLIS TEMPLETON – MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

An ordinance that would limit music venues from hosting events by independent promoters is making the rounds again at Chicago’s City Hall.

The so-called promoters ordinance was introduced to the Council’s License and Consumer Protection Committee in June 2007 by the Department of Business Affairs and Licensing at the request of Mayor Richard Daley.

The ordinance comes as a delayed reaction to a February 2003 disaster that killed 21 people at E2 nightclub on Chicago’s South Side.

The promoters ordinance would require independent promoters to pay licensing fees ranging from $500 to $2,000 and obtain $3,000 in liability insurance, even if they are working in conjunction with venues that have been licensed by the city and have their own liability insurance.

While City Council’s license committee approved the ordinance, it was tabled before a full council vote due to an outcry from the music community. A revised version of the ordinance is expected to be brought up for a vote in committee again soon.

The Chicago Music Commission, a nonprofit music advocacy organization issued a statement on March 3 in objection to the latest draft of the ordinance.

“The ordinance creates an unnecessary and overly burdensome layer of new regulation that will increase costs for the smallest and most fragile of Chicago’s small music businesses while failing to add viable safety and transparency measures,” wrote members of the CMC.

The Commission argues that there are less-burdensome means available to address public safety and accountability concerns—like existing insurance coverage and the control of venues during events—and that those means should be better enforced before an ordinance takes effect.

“I just hope that something like this would never come to fruition, because it would definitely hurt the little guy, said Reggies manager Robby Glick. “That’s what the arts are all about—giving indie artists a break and a platform.”

Listen to Tim Tuten, co-owner of the Hideout and a member of the Chicago Music Commission, talk about the importance of music, the music “business” and promotion of artists in Chicago.

Photo project: Slate wants you to shoot the recession

ihwang — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:29:07 +0000

This photograph of a shop window in San Francisco was submitted into Slate's Flickr photo pool. (Source: balmes on Flickr)

BY: INYOUNG HWANG – MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

Slate is turning to its readers for photographs that capture the current recession.

The online magazine has created a picture group called “Slate’s Shoot the Recession Project” on Flickr, where participants can submit images that they believe are emblematic of the ongoing economic crisis:

Grim economic times produce indelible images. The Great Depression calls to mind grainy news photos of bank runs and soup kitchens, and the harrowing portraits taken by Walker Evans. The downturn of the 1970s evokes images of yacht-size cars idling in line at the gas station. But what does the current economic crisis look like?

Of course, the first images that pop into mind of the current downturn are of shops going out of business and empty, foreclosed homes that are by-products of the housing crisis. But Slate says it hopes participants will use their imaginations to take photographs that illustrate the crisis without stating the obvious. I’m really curious to see what the images of Chicago and the Midwest in a recession will look like – perhaps shut down factories, crowded ‘L’ trains and abandoned spaces in the Loop?

Slate refers readers to a recent Boston Globle essay that posed the question “Depression 2009: What would it look like?” in which the writer Drake Bennett observed that “instead of dusty farm families, the icon of a modern-day depression might be something as subtle as the flickering glow of millions of televisions glimpsed through living room windows, as the nation’s unemployed sit at home filling their days with the cheapest form of distraction available.”

Slate points out that “you can’t take a photograph of a collateralized debt obligation.” But so far, there are 118 images in the Flickr photo pool and some of them are quite good – much more moving than a CDO could ever be.

So bring out your camera and snap some photos. As Walker Evans demonstrated, great art and creativity can develop from especially hard times.

This photograph in Slate's Flickr pool shows a father and son in Los Angeles discussing college tuition costs. (Source: SeeingBeing on Flickr)

Chicago’s Havana Gallery hopes to support Cuban artists in recession

hollistempleton — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 00:27:04 +0000

"Dirijir las nubes" by Luis Saldaña, 2008.

BY HOLLIS TEMPLETON – MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

While many Chicago art galleries are exercising caution during the recession, Lincoln Park’s Havana Gallery (1139 W. Webster Ave.) is taking a different tack that it hopes will help the Cuban artists whose works grace the gallery.

“Most of the artists we represent live in Cuba,” explained Gallery Director Allison Hill. “Whatever economic problems we’re having here, the effect is magnified there, so we are more committed than ever to promoting them and helping them succeed.”

Hill is hard at work promoting her artists, all of whom she visited during a two-week trip to Cuba in January. “We planned an ambitious schedule of exhibitions for the year,” said Hill, whose gallery displays contemporary work by 35 artists who work in styles varying from portraiture to landscape to Surrealism.

This year’s exhibitions will include solo shows by Alicia de la Campa, Orestes Gaulhiac, and Isolina Limonta.

Despite ambitious plans for 2009, Havana Gallery is also finding ways to cut back. It’s spending less on advertising, mailing invitations via e-mail instead of postal mail, and cutting back the days the gallery is open from five days a week to only four–Thursday through Sunday.

The gallery is also adjusting to wallet-conscious art buyers. “We want to make it easier for our clients to buy art, so we are offering them flexible payment plans and letting them take pieces home for a week-long trial period,” Hill said.

Havana Gallery has been in business since July 1999 and Hill says this is by far the most serious downturn the gallery has been through.

But the director is hopeful. “I really think that when spring is here people will start to feel optimistic again,” she said. “We’re expecting a great year.”

And a great year for Chicago’s Havana Gallery could become one piece of a broad movement in cultural diplomacy with the island nation. Many artists, gallery owners, art educators and scholars are working to improve cultural relations between the United States and Cuba in hopes that with President Obama in office, an artistic exchange will improve U.S.-Cuba political relations as well.

Here’s a look at some of the artwork on display at Havana Gallery. Images courtesy of Allison Hill.

"Paz" (Peace) by Sandra Dooley, 2008.

"La virgen de las estrellas" by Juan Moreira, 2006.

"Mesa de Familia" (Family Table) by Pablo Perea, 2004.

Enjoy Chicago, for free

Tian Huang — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:19:05 +0000

Free February at the Art Institute. Tian Huang/Medill

BY TIAN HUANG - MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

February has been a particularly busy month for me, so it only was this week that I was able to take advantage of the Art Institute’s Free February. I’ve been to the Art Institute quite a few times, and I have to say, this was the first time I have seen this many people there.

I saw people who looked like they had sneaked out of work to take a break at the Michigan Ave. gallery, as well as teachers bringing in their classes for tours. I polled around 30 people there, and all of them said that Free February was one of the main reasons why they came.

One of the visitors was Jordan Falduto, 19, from Kenosha, Wisc. It was Falduto’s first time in the Art Institute, and part of the reason why was because it was free.

“I probably would not have come if it wasn’t,” Falduto said. “I’m not a big fan of art, but these events are great, especially at a time like this because it can spark interest in someone who would not otherwise come here.”

Ashley Stephens, 25, of Bucktown, said she came because she had an off day at work, and the free admission was a draw as well.

“I think it’s great,” Stephens said. “It gives people something to do.”

With free entertainment such a big draw for people, I decided to compile a list of free things to do around town. Enjoy and save your money!

Visitors of the Art Institute enjoy a free tour. Tian Huang/Medill

Entertainment that is always free:

Entertainment that is sometimes free:

Museum of Science and Industry: Click here for calendar of free days.
Chicago Children’s Museum: Free on Mondays
Field Museum: Free the second Monday of every month and click here to see additional free days.
Museum of Contemporary Art: Free on Tuesdays.
Art Institute: Free February, but schedule for the rest of the year has not been released.
Adler Planetarium: Click here for a calendar of free days.