Odds and Ends

I think I was sitting about fifteen feet behind the person shooting this video. The man's technique is amazing.
Linsey Alexander at Kingston Mines


Here are some images that never made it to the blog in the past few weeks. I liked these, but I didn't have a good use for them.

Soldier Field in it's current incarnation. Someone said "remodel it," and someone else thought "land a spaceship in it."
The Library Center roof.
The city turns citrusy on overcast nights.
I'm the one in the middle.
This was one of my favorite pieces in Grant Park, some kind of ten foot wood sprite.
This is outside the Museum of Contemporary Art. I'm a little surprised it hasn't gotten a parking ticket, given the tenacity of the parking cops.
A wide shot of the Kingston Mines stage. It's one of the few great places in the city that can still be called a "joint."
I always make a point of seeing this painting when I'm in Chicago, as well as Nighthawks by Hopper and the giant painting of Mao by Warhol. All three were absent from the museum, on loan for the renovation. That's the official story, but I wonder if the curator has gambling debts to pay off.
Looking directly up at the bean.
The same shot with a flash- fun stuff.
A tiny hot dog. Three of these are almost a meal.

Taking a Personal Day

Today was my day. I meandered all over the city to revisit some of my favorite places, including Chicago Comics, Myopic Books, Penny's for lunch, and then eventually Cheesecake Factory for a dinner of toblerone cheesecake. I sat outside to avoid the wait for a table and the mob of tourists and suburbanites. The dug-in alcove in front of the Hancock building was shielded from the wind, so I sat on the steps and watched people walk by while I ate. Being on Michigan Avenue during the dinner hour on a Friday is a good indicator you're not from the city, as is the magnetic compulsion to look up at the buildings. I haven't looked up since my first week here, but I still check street signs and duck into building foyers to check my map to find the right el station now and again.

Electronic Arts has a Chicago office now on the near north side of downtown, so I walked by the entrance hoping to see, well, anything. The front windows look in on a reception area with giant overstuffed sofas and a game room. Employees were playing ping-pong, arcade games, and air hockey. It was probably lunch hour, but if they wonder why crunch time is so brutal when they hit the end of their deadline; there you go, fellas. Granted, all they have to do for next year's NBA Live is design a new free throw system, update a few names, and wait for the millions. But I look at this lax atmosphere and I see how their Batman games have all come out crappy while their chief competitor, Ubisoft, has written and re-written the book on effective stealth action. If this studio is their flagship in their effort to develop original content games for once, they'd best get to work. Midway is fighting their way away from bankruptcy in the same city, and The Adventure Company is almost single-handedly reviving the adventure game genre out of their Chicago office. How big do you suppose their air hockey tables are?

This was the last day of my immersion. I've enjoyed myself and learned a lot, and I imagine that much of what I've learned won't occur to me right away, but in the coming weeks as I go back to work and my normal life, and try to repair the massive dent in my wallet from this endeavor. I'll put up pictures from the past few weeks that never made it to the site when I get home tomorrow.

Oil Paint and Grease

After putting it off for no apparent reason, I paid a visit to the gallery district on Chicago a few blocks west of Michigan today. Some of the galleries are under new management since I was there last, and nearly all of the artwork was brand new, save for a few permanent NFS pieces. The area doesn't get a lot of foot traffic, as it's outside the big retail area. The only reason I know about it is because I'd been there during undergrad. Most of the galleries were open for browsing, with a few locked for private meetings with potential buyers. It looks to be a big year for landscape paintings, the sort of thing that looks good in an office. Trees and hills pay the bills, and that's been the rule for generations of American artists dating back before Thomas Cole.

I saw some great art, though. One extremely prolific painter had a large gallery full of a series of oils of trees that reminded me of Tim Burton or Dave McKean illustrations. Each one was coated with an extra thick layer of clear coat, so they glowed under the lights. The great thing about these galleries is that each one has art from professional artists who have honed their craft for years. I wish more people could see their work- it's a diverse collection with influences from all over the world.

As I was leaving the area to look for coffee, I saw a gallery across the street advertising a show of Bill Maudlin cartoons. I like his war cartoons, so I entered the gallery. There were more than thirty original ink drawings from his time at the Chicago Sun-Times during the 60's and 70's. I had never seen his later career work before. He had a few about middle east terrorism and the fuel crisis that could run again today.

After I left, I walked south and east to a place I would love to avoid if not for my assumed duty as a web culture connoisseur: the Rock and Roll McDonald's. Were it not for Wesley Willis, famed Chicago troubadour and pop culture reactionist, I could have gone my whole life without ingesting their food ever again. If you don't know who or what I'm talking about, Willis wrote a web-famous song called "Rock and Roll McDonald's," where he shouts the name of the establishment a few times for the chorus, then proclaims "McDonald's hamburgers will make you fat." (Incidentally, the song is the first Google result, well before the restaurant.) How could I resist?

It's pretty hard to miss, so I didn't have to search for long before I saw the giant two-story neon monstrosity blotting out the Hard Rock guitar sign. The arches stretch over full-length glass walls and neon lights, like something out of Frtiz Lang's Metropolis. Full size bronze statues of people in various jubilant poses stand near the entrance, presided over by a Pieta-sized Ronald McDonald with a look of fanatical glee on his too-real face. Inside, the counter is wider than any other fast food place in the world. I ordered fries, a couple apple pies, and a small coke from a standard non-rocking employee, then rode up the escalator(!) to the second floor. The standard plastic fixtures are there, along with black leather and chrome lounge chairs and sofas around glass tables in open air booths. One area looks like a conference room. None of this changes the fact that you're eating some of the worst food in the developed world. There are TVs on one wall above the escalators, six of them, alternating three with MSNBC and three with a continuous stream of vintage McDonalds commercials from all over the world. Maybe it was the acoustics in the place, but I could swear I heard Neil Postman saying "I told you so." Elsewhere, there are sections devoted to decades with music from each period. The 90's section had Pearl Jam's song Evenflow playing, and for a moment the novelty of the place felt kind of good. Then the more appropriately commercial Whoomp There It Is came on, and I remembered that I was in a shrine to the death of locally-owned culture.

North of Wrigley

Local bookstores mean local culture- that's my justification and I'm sticking to it. When I was at the cartoonist signing in Evanston last night, I overheard someone mention a bookstore called Women and Children First. Naturally, my curiosity was piqued- bookstores with interesting names probably have interesting books for sale. This logic was good enough for me today, so I got on a northbound bus up Clark, past Wrigley Field, darn near to Canada, until I came to the block with the bookstore. I'd never been to a feminist bookstore, and I couldn't name another, but this was a nice store in general. They've judiciously collected a selection of books ranging from a little bit if general interest to the sort of women's studies books that remind me how very little I know about how the other half lives, so to speak. To their credit, they have a small comics section with titles like Wonder Woman, She-Hulk, and Alias. And, of course, a couple selections by Art Spiegelman- you can't have an independent bookstore without at least one copy of Maus.

Here's what I did after the bookstore. Moroccan eggplant with couscous from Andie's Restaurant, a Mediterranean place on the same block. I've eaten at the Vatican City snack bar, and this beats the hell out of that. The neighborhood is full of people from all different parts of the world, and the food reflects that.

I took the bus back to the Wrigley area to walk down to Chicago Comics to buy a few of my weekly titles and peruse a few of the local retailers. I don't shop, I peruse. The difference lies in my ability to view cool local merchandise from an academic perspective, like how I could carry books about interactivity in the cool messenger bag I saw.

At 7:00 I went to Sheffield's, a bar on N. Sheffield, for Reading Under the Influence; a monthly gathering of local authors and bookworms. Anyone can sign up to read original or published work, and must do a shot before and after reading. After someone reads a well-known work, they ask the crowd trivia questions and award the person with the most correct answers with some kind of prize, usually a book. It was a fun time.

Giant Legs, Small Print

I mentioned the giant legs last week, that I'd be walking through Grant Park looking for giant leg and torso sculptures. That was the first and last mention of this, as I did not want to admit that I went traipsing all over the park looking for a giant herd of dozen-odd foot amputees and completely missed them.

So here they are. It'll be interesting to hear the public's reaction when they can get closer. The area is fenced off during the placement of the statues, but there's a decent view from a nearby bridge. One onlooker commented how they look like an elephant's rear end. Another, walking a dog, said that he'd been up close and the legs have a tree trunk texture. From what I could see, it will probably be an interesting installation up close. If nothing else, it lets people see what courtside Bulls tickets would be like. In my opinion, it doesn't fit the aesthetic of the park. The original plan for the park was more of a 20's modern style, more of a unified concrete and bronze deco design. The new additions in the northern Millennium Park area are chrome and streamlined, even functional in the case of the amphitheater. It's too early to say if this new addition to the park will be worth the money (reportedly a lot), as people haven't had a chance to walk among the enormous limbs, but I wonder what is accomplished with one hundred that couldn't be achieved with twenty, especially if each is an identical casting. Rodin didn't copy his work that much.
After that I caught the purple line rush hour express north to Evanston again, this time to a comic shop called Comix Revolution to see Gahan Wilson, an illustrator and frequent contributor to The New Yorker. His cartoons often have a maccabre tone that sets them apart from the other content in the typically uptight magazine. Early in the interview (lead by a lit professor from Northwestern), he related a story about one of his favorite influences, Chester Gould. Gould created the Dick Tracy comic strip, which was also rather dark, though few remember it that way. Aparently, Gould kept a miniature graveyard for the characters he killed off. Wilson also listed Francisco Goya as an influence, which makes sense if you've seen Goya. Later, he mentioned a fondness for H.P. Lovecraft and the utter futility his characters faced with the monsters against them. In an old game based on Lovecraft's "Call of Cthulhu," players gain knowledge points as they move closer to the monster at the end, but lose sanity points, hence they are destroyed by the end. That was decades ago, and Wilson is still laughing as he tells the crowd about it.
The interview turned to the subject of narrative and cartooning. Wilson likened the narrative in one image to a frame in a movie. "It's easy to speculate what lead up to it and what happened after it... most of it is suggesting it." The New Yorker has been doing a caption contest in the back of the magazine for a little ver a year now, where a cartoon is run with no caption and readers send in their own. The top three are selected by the magazine, then the winner is voted on and announced in the next issue. Wilson suggested that they let readers write the article conclusions, too, and see how the writers like that. The drawings for the contests already have a visual gag, so "you're already halfway there," said Wilson. The interviewer asked where his ideas came from, whether the image or the text came first, and the crowd all nodded in anticipation. "I haven't the vaguest idea where it comes from." He got back to signing books then, and I left to get dinner.

After a slower non-express train home, I headed up the street opposite my normal direction to Delilah's, one of the famous hole-in-the-wall bars here. Local legend has it this is the bar where Billy Corgan introduced Courtney Love to Kurt Cobain. Tonight they were showing the movie "KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park." I couldn't pass this up, as I love schlock cinema and alcohol. They had a beer called "Dead Man" on special for Halloween, which was odd, as it's actually a pretty good beer. The movie asserts that the band actually has super powers like telekinesis and fire breath, that one of them is a genius in neuroscience, and that Peter Kriss actually wants to be Peter Kriss (with the lamest makeup in the band). It also claims that Gene Simmons can actually walk -nay- kung-fu fight in his giant metal getup, but just watching the poor clod flail around is proof that he's just lucky he didn't break his ankles. The crowd seemed to enjoy the movie, played on three TVs around the bar, but most people only paid attention at particularly cheesy parts. No ammount of beer can make the concert in the end compelling.

I didn't really do anything notable today. The el was supposed to be back to normal after the fire last week, but there must have been other problems, as the loop was backed up all over the place. I had contemplated going to the University of Chicago, but then I looked at the route to the nearest stop to campus. It goes through some rough territory. The Red Eye has a blurb about a double homicide in a giant knife fight involving a gang of women a couple blocks from the stop. I envision an el stop with boiling pits and spinning fire things like the last level of Super Mario Brothers, and a swarm of those bug things from Halo. Weak video game nonsequiturs are pretty much the only way I'm comfortable talking about social inequity.

Here's hoping I find something better to do tomorrow.

I've Been Here Even Longer in Dog Years

And so, I enter week three of this endeavor. After staying up writing last night's post I had a headache this morning and ended up sleeping in. I've found at least one event to attend this week pertaining to my study, as well as a couple more bookstores to visit down by the University of Chicago. I thought about going to see Frank Black at the Metro, but the tickets are a little more than I want to pay.

I went to Kingston Mines again tonight. My camera batteries are dead, so I can't post any pictures. It was a good show.