Way the El out there.

A little after noon, after slumber that would make rocks envious due to a debaucherous night and a $7.00 beer called Goose Island "Destroyer", I accompanied Gerry to O'Hare International, all the way at the end of the blue line. The trans-Siberian railroad takes only slightly longer from end to end than this ride. After the same ride back to the city, I wandered around trying to find a sandwich shop that was open on a Saturday afternoon. Apparently if the block isn't absolutely full to bursting with hungry office drones, most restaurants can't be bothered to stay open. The only franchise that hadn't gotten the memo was a Subway staffed by two ESL guys.

I was able to catch one of the Resfest presentations, Cinema Electronica, a collection of electronic music videos. This included a South Korean rapper, the guys in Gnarls Barkley comped into musical history footage, a slow-motion video shot at 1000 fps, a procedural animation of single-celled life forming, a whimsical story about a wolf that raises an abandoned mermaid, and a few that I can't really describe. I came away from it with several new ideas about CGI technique. On my way out, I bought a ticket for tomorrow's Radiohead video screening.

After the show, I took a detour through millennium park to see the city at night reflected in the could gate sculpture. Sure enough, there were kids under it dancing around and trying to figure out the shape of the underside. I've never seen a piece of art capture public interest like this.

Friday

I saw one sculpture yesterday, Harry Carey outside Wrigley field. The rest of the day was spent wandering around the city with Gerry, who is in town briefly for a conference. Nothing of note to report, but I found a couple of places in the Wrigleyville area to revisit in the next week or so. I also saw the Cabaret Metro, where it turns out I just missed seeing the Bouncing Souls, but there are other acts coming up that look interesting.

This is what my afternoon looked like. A gallery talk about some of the sculpture pieces at the Art Institute, followed by a quick snack of hazelnut mousse in the cafe while I reviewed my hastily-scrawled notes. There are quite a few public sculptures in Chicago, and I'm interested in what makes these stand out in a city that sometimes overwhelms my senses. Sculpture is a bit foreign to me, as I haven't really thought about it since I was a sophomore at USF, and even then it wasn't my main focus. The gallery talk was great. I came away with the idea that public sculpture was and still is a prestigious symbol for a successful city.

One block north of the city is a good example of this:

The official name is "Cloud Gate," more commonly known as "the bean." When it was first unveiled, photography was prohibited due to copyright (allegedly). I was a little disappointed to find this rule had been lifted, as I was keen to fight the power, as photography actually adds a fantastic level of interactivity.

People can take mirror self-portraits with the city in the background, little kids can run underneath it, and everyone can actually get close to the art and see how it works. It's participatory now, and I think that's great. Elsewhere in the park, there are large LED grid video installations with giant faces on them.




A face.

Another face.


Detail view.

See the RGB LEDs? The painting that inspired that method is in the Art Institute- "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat.

I plan to relax a little this weekend. On Saturday and Sunday there is a big digital video festival at the museum of contemporary art. One event that stands out to me is a Radiohead video retrospective. I picked a good time to come to the city, that's for sure.

I went back to Columbia University today to see a faculty creative nonfiction reading. All of the readings were good, naturally. One man had a detective story based somewhat on reality in which he described his protagonist as "Tony Soprano meets Jack Black." His second reading was a first-hand account of witnessing an execution by lethal injection as a member of the press. He didn't go for any sort of cheap drama, but instead let the story stand on its own merits. The last reader was an older fellow with a story about a Vietnam war protest a block from where we were during the 1968 Democratic convention. He recounted how the crowd had transistor radios, and upon hearing that a plan for peace had been voted down, tried to lower a flag to half-mast. The police moved in with tear gas and clubs, and people watching couldn't believe that it was happening. He made a point at the end that the millions of people watching the chaos on TV marked a new sort of political participation, no matter how they felt about what they saw. I'd never thought of it like that.


After the show I took the red line to a transfer stop and decided to take a quick look at things on street level between trains. I came upon the studio for the ABC affiliate here, set up fishbowl style like Good Morning America. The giant glowing thing was a huge LED screen display. Somebody paid a lot of money for that thing. It was kind of like a jumbo-tron, but with a warped surface.

Tonight I went to the Green Mill to see Mortified, a sort of confessional show where locals read their most embarrassing adolescent diaries with special emphasis placed on the melodrama that comes with the age. One girl, after smoking marijuana, declared (circa 1990) that she thinks she's the only person in the world who really "gets" Pink Floyd, and ends every entry with a comment about wanting "coke." Another recounted her dreams of traveling to England with nothing but her art supplies and a list of things she could do, like eventually be a tour guide when she knows the area. One man read his diary from his freshman year at a Lutheran college where he considered entering the seminary, if not for his guilt over meeting a slew of passionate young women and "reaching new lows" every time. A footnote at the end of the show said that he is married with one daughter now. The whole thing was really funny, taking really bad writing and presenting it as the perverse gold that it is.

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Columbia College and Creative Nonfiction Week

I got a later start today, as I was exhausted from all the walking yesterday. Getting used to being in a big city also took a toll on me, but today was better. I took the red line to Roosevelt and walked around the Columbia College Chicago area on the south end of the loop. The neighborhood is full of urban college campuses built in to office areas, so it's not uncommon to see a college freshman with harshly dyed black hair standing next to a business man with his own grey hair dyed out.

I missed the first panel discussion after I couldn't find the building, so I went to the Art Institute. It is still one of my favorite places in the world to see art. European museums are nice for their depth, but they naturally tend to focus on their respective country. The Louvre is amazing, but there were great artists in other countries too. The Chicago Art Institute has paintings from all over the world grouped into galleries by time period and subject matter. As I followed my usual route through the European wing past several depressing crucifixion depictions (think CSI: Golgotha), I paid attention to each painting's nation of origin and overall feel. The Italian paintings throughout had more allegory (less literal, I mean), more emotion, and more romanticised flesh tones. The French were more experimental, especially during the absinthe days of the mid to late 1800's. The British aren't as well represented in this wing, but what I saw was very formal and detailed and less emotive (hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way, after all). The Spanish were pretty much rock stars- all strong emotion and muscle. See Francisco Goya's work and you'll know what I'm talking about. As I kept walking, I began to consider how the narratives in these old paintings manage to carry through to today. Some of the symbolism is lost on the average viewer, such as the meaning of certain flowers or the stature and clothing color of certain politicians, but the gestalt comes through clear as day in most cases. If these themes and narratives are that durable from an old culture to a contemporary one, that says a lot about the power of art as a visual history and shared world culture.

After I collected my coat from the coat check I set out to find some food. I happened upon the Blick art store, a huge two level toy store for creative people, where I bought a pack of three small brown notebooks. I'm too afraid to take my normal moleskine out with me for fear of losing it, or running out of pages at an inopportune moment. The new thinner notebook is easier to carry, and if I lose it I haven't lost three years worth of brickabrack dating back to my unemployment days.

A little before 6:30 I found my way to 31 E. Balbo and an unassuming entrance to the Hot House, an amazing little club/venue for progressive arts on the Columbia campus. The interior is decorated with subdued red walls and minimal lighting from electric candelabra wall lights and Fresnel lamps pointed at an elevated stage in the center of the room on the back wall, with a large mural of jazz musicians behind it. I was there to see Lorraine Ali, a senior writer at Newsweek who covers music, pop culture, and Arab-American issues. Her pedigree for these fields is equally impressive- she's written for the LA Times and Rolling Stone, interviewed the Rolling Stones (in her words, "totally terrifying"), and even voted in the 2005 Iraqi election, as her father is a citizen. She spoke about her career, trying to balance the alternative music culture in the early 90's with mainstream appeal in order to get published while not selling out. Professional integrity was definitely a theme. She read her profile on Ali G, and I had to quickly explain to the middle aged women sitting at my table who he was. A guy from the audience came up onstage to read the Sacha Baron Cohen parts in character, and everybody laughed. Then she read a profile on the subculture of stalwart Michael Jackson fans during the singer's trial. She had found people with fanatical loyalty to him to the point some acted like they knew him. The next piece was even heavier, about her remembering a Baghdad family reunion in 1976, and how she still thought about her family being caught in the chaos and economic ruin of the past decade. She has a book in the works about this and other issues, and I'll definitely look for it when it comes out. One of the best things she said all night was "if you aren't interested in things outside your beat, you aren't gong to be that interesting."

After it was over, I waited in line to ask her a question. A journalism undergrad asked me a few questions about how I liked the presentation for his assignment, and of course I answered all of his questions, as I have many friends in the fourth estate. (I neglected to ask if he was Jewish.) When it was my turn, I asked the author what she thought of music promotion through Myspace and did she think it would be possible for a band to break out this way. She said it was still early yet, but she would want to see if it happened organically or if a record label did some of the pushing. She also mentioned her feelings on blogs, saying that the mainstream press had this coming, that a group of writers would start reporting on their world and asking hard questions without fear of losing their access to celebrities.

I'm starting to get more of a handle on my immersion topic. In a city of aggressively persistent stimuli from trains, traffic, people, and signs, some narratives are able to come through clearer than others. It is my belief that the more successful narratives resonate with people, so they are not forgotten along with the pervasive storefront ads and billboards. Some narratives are even powerful enough to draw crowds in for their own sake, in the case of the Art Institute. I'll try to flesh this idea out over the course of this project.

One last thing worth mentioning- the woman who sat to the left of me at the Hot House is an art critic for Chicago Magazine. I just figured that out looking at the Columbia College website. She would have been good to talk to. D'oh.

Brown line to Van Buren today, then ambled around to find the Library Center, a beautiful nine-story public library in the Loop area. Huge libraries are always a draw for me, for the purpose of wandering up and down aisles looking for anything that might grab my attention. This building and the nice new-looking library I saw in Oak Park both indicate a well funded and well used library system.

Oak Park is a nice neighborhood. Not in a tourist-y sort of way, though it does have little shops here and there, but in a "rich enough to live there for the sake of history" sort of way. Part of the neighborhood is historic, with old Victorian homes and ornate churches. My reason for being there was the Ernest Hemingway museum, located a block from the house he spent the first two decades of his life.

The museum focuses on the author's work in WWII as a war correspondent more than WWI, where much of his writing is based. There is also an exhibit about the movie adaptations of his work, complete with original posters. The back wall of the one room collection is draped with Hemingway themed banners from a museum in Spain. But the most in-depth area is the corner devoted to his primary education at Oak Park High School. He was, according to a cheerfully narrated looping DVD, good at darn near everything. He ran track, took advanced courses in "The Oxford Room," a posh English classroom in the school, acted in school plays, and played the cello. Most American lit classes will mention the author's later proclivity for self-destruction, which plays well to a college audience. The museum treats him as the local boy done good, only mentioning his darker tendencies in point of fact as part of other anecdotes. I found this to be a welcome change from the norm.

The park across from the museum has a memorial to the neighborhood residents who served in WWI, again signifying the importance of history to the neighborhood. A block north of there is much more modern with the sprawling campus of Oak Park High School, which looks more like Stanford than the yuppie school I went to. According to the aforementioned video, the Oxford room is now rechristened the Hemingway room.

I should mention that I spend a good ammount of time walking today, as I got off at the wrong stop and had to walk a few extra blocks. The value of planning in the morning is reinforced by my sore feet. On the plus side, I found a music store that sells Smashing Pumpkins concert soundboard bootlegs. They're a bit pricey at thirty bucks each, but I just may have to go back before I leave.

City Limits

I chugged into town sitting backwards on the South Shore Line train today, after a two hour ride spent watching the landscape degrade from healthy farmland to the urban decay of Gary and then to the subterranean terminal at Randolph. The city of Chicago is familiar to me in parts, mostly from undergrad day trips to the Art Institute, but this time I'm here with two bags and a wider focus on the city at large. I'm staying with fellow/former digital storytelling student Michelle on the north side of the city and taking public transportation to everywhere I need to go. I've spent some time going over local papers to find the sorts of things I'm here for, and my week is shaping up nicely.