Art Shay

Matt Dillon And Art Shay Celebrate Algren

On April 6, there will be a special celebration of the 100th birthday of Nelson Algren, with Matt Dillon at the Steppenwolf Theater. The slides will be Art Shay photos. From the Tribune:

Matt Dillon is headed to Steppenwolf. He'll be part of a one-night event April 6 celebrating the 100th birthday of the late Nelson Algren. The evening is slated to include never-before-heard work by the famed Chicago writer.

Others performing include authors Russell Banks, Don DeLillo and Barry Gifford, Steppenwolf ensemble member Martha Lavey, Estelle Parsons (currently in "August: Osage County" on Broadway) and Dan Simon. Slide projections are by Art Shay; script is by Gifford and Simon.

It's being produced by a group called the Seven Stories Institute (Seven Stories Press is the publisher of Algren's work) in partnership with Steppenwolf and M30A Films.

Christopher Hiltz Shoots Art Shay

Christopher Hiltz has been posting photos on his blog, The Clementine Pile, and one recent collection shows some audience members from a Court Theater showing of Ibsen's The Wild Duck.

Click on this Clementine Pile link to see several of the images, including the fourth one, which shows Art Shay, in a knit hat.

What did Shay say to Hiltz?

From the blog:

I can't express enough how much I admire his work, and will follow his advice to 'just keep shooting' as if it were scripture.

Shay On The Recession -- And The Depression

Art Shay in Swans, an essay titled The Real World Of Deerfield And The Coming Depression, looks back to the 1930's and forward to what he says will be a long slowdown:

"Things fall apart," Yeats wrote in the Recession just a year before my birth in 1922, "the centre cannot hold." He rued that the falcon could no longer communicate with his falconer, that mere anarchy was loose in the world, that the best (like us) lack all conviction, while the worst (you know who They are) are full of passionate intensity. Yeats's immortal poem spoke enigmatically about a rough beast, its hour come round at last, that was slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. The Irish genius hopefully entitled his work, "The Second Coming."

Would that our world was more like the Super Bowl, where the center cannot hold either -- but the penalty is a mere 10-yard infraction and a do-over. Not like poor Obama's onrushing Depression, inherited from Bush, which is about to penalize us half a decade with no do-over of the down syndrome that got us here.