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.