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.

48 Hours and 4 Book Stores

That's the theme of the past two days. I've been all over the city looking at bookstores of all sorts. Yesterday morning on the way to find Intelligentsia Coffee I stopped by a used bookstore for a moment, and happened upon a first-edition copy of Dirk Gentley's Holistic Detective Agency for only eight dollars. I expressed my excitement to the owner, the sort of sagely fellow who spends his days tending to the store collection as the store's sole employee. He's the first bit of familiarity I've seen here outside the apartment where I'm staying. Every city has at least one of these guys.

I hit a couple of comic shops after that; Chicago Comics up toward Wrigley and Graham Cracker's downtown. Two shops in one day and it wasn't even Wednesday. My goal was to find locally produced comics, which I did. Some are cheaply produced photocopy and construction paper jobs with high school level characters and simplistic, often gonzo stories for the author to demonstrate an inflated sense of originality. Many seem to want to be the next Harvey Pekar or R. Crumb, but lack the patience to learn the art craft or stop to appreciate the mundane aspects of the real life humor they attempt. That's my read, anyway. A more well-informed opinion would require slogging through some truly horrendous bargain-bin dreck, so for the sake of time and standards, I choose to remain willfully uneducated. However, I did pick up some locally crafted gems. One, a hand bound history of the inventor of the word "robot" narrated by a small toy robot, is downright charming. I also picked up two issues of "Deterrent Comics," a series modeled loosely after the old golden age comics. Along the way, I bought a few other comics that aren't available outside of major cities.

Friday night I went down to Wrigleyville to the Cubby Bear, a bar and venue hosting a trio of tribute bands with a dead rock star theme. The three bands were versions of Nirvana, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and The Doors. It seemed odd to be seeing this show in a Cubs themed bar, but it occurred to me that the three bands represented hadn't had a hit in over a decade and were all dead before October, so perhaps the venue was fitting. I got there in time to See most of "Nirvana," and I was impressed at the level of authenticity, right down to "Krist Novaselic's" vintage L7 shirt. The lead, "Kurt," had an exuberance that came through between songs, whereas the original was a rather unlikely frontman. Also, to his credit, the drummer had the look and the style of drummer Dave Grohl extremely well. For the next two groups, all that really mattered was that the frontmen got it right. The "Hendrix" was a great guitar player, even in the afro wig and velvet pants. The third act's "Jim Morrison" sort of looked the part, had Morrison been one to get regular healthy meals not consisting of heavy narcotics. He sounded the part, though, as did the band. My only expectation for each band was that they play my favorite works by each respective band, one song each. For the record, they did: Territorial Pissings (Nirvana); The Star-Spangled Banner followed by Purple Haze (Hendrix); and LA Woman (Doors), respectively. The thing about a tribute show like this is that it invites the crowd to sing along. At most concerts this is a faux-pas, as you are there to hear the original auteur. This show was all about the collective appreciation of the bands impersonated. A more pretentious and less tired blogger might even make a comparison to Greek theatre with actors play gods by donning masks and acting in a recognizably deitific manner. "Hendrix" played a solo with his teeth.

Today we all took a walk down to the neighborhood Tower Records to peruse the store-closing sale, part of the wider chain shutdown. I don't mind seeing another overpriced corporate music store close, but I'm not above buying discounted merchandise. I picked up Chulahoma, a short album of blues covers by the Black Keys. Elsewhere, at a local music store I found a few singles by the Black Keys and Pearl Jam, and the UK import Disarm single by the Smashing Pumpkins, the one with a ton of live and rare material- most of which I'd never seen on even the old music pirate networks. This was one of the singles my old roommates used to mention almost reverentially, as if it only existed in rumor.

I ate dinner at a pizza-by-the-slice place and set out to take the el to a stop by Quimby's Bookstore. The bus system is often a better way to travel the city, but I've been operating under the notion that the el is both transportation and a landmark. In the days before pdf maps of the city transit system, during the Roman empire, an easy way to find a city was to find the gigantic aqueduct system and follow it by the downward slope. Here in modern times, all tracks lead to the Loop, so I use the el for nearly everything. Tonight that backfired. There were no southbound trains stopping at my station or the one immediately north. The trains could go by, sure, but not stop on the track near the platform due to some construction. I ended up taking the scenic route to a red line stop that would take me to a blue stop where I could switch to go in the right direction. My goal was to make it to a reading by an author I don't even remember anymore at Quimby's at 7:00. After numerous stops, transfers, and waits, I was on the red line at 8:00 when the train stopped dead in an underground section downtown.

Ah, the red line. I shared my tale of misfortune with Michelle, who then informed me that the red line breaks down all the time and it has the most crazy people. One such nut was sitting near me on the red tonight. When I sat down, she was furiously scribbling in a notebook with about eight lines of letters titled, I believe, "Work (world?) Poems." She muttered to herself and anyone within earshot trying to find the right word, settling on "top-flight." So pleased with this word choice was she, that she began jabbering into a dead cellphone held upside down to the side of her head. She then tired of writing, stuffed her spiral bound notebook into a purse, and began singing the chorus of Michael Jackson's "You are Not Alone," from one of the Free Willy movies. The first line was from the song, the second was probably her own, as Jackson has proven capable of fitting lyrics to music. It was about then that the train slowed and halted in the tunnel. Nothing out of the ordinary- trains pause to wait for the next train to clear the station all the time. Then the train started rolling backwards as if the brakes hadn't engaged. Then the lights went out, save for the lights above the doors. The lady started repeating the song over and over, louder each time, until she stopped and started calling for single men. By either the Grace of God or the collective will of the other passengers, the lights came on and the train moved forward.

By this time, I was irritated at missing the author and determined to find Quimby's, closed or not, even just to touch the door and say I had been there. It was still open, so I went in and bought a few local comics. The store had an assortment of odd books and art on the walls, all the sort of things other stores don't carry. A city this size can support this sort of niche, and while not everything in the store is top-quality merchandise, the city is a better place for having a store like this.

In spite of my ordeal, I managed to drag my weary bones into a coffee shop for a huge slice of dense-as-lead chocolate spice cake. The ride home was pleasant and direct.

Rain and Train Delays

Today was a bit of a wash, all things considered. I traveled a couple miles south to see the area between Depaul and the city, and ended up walking around an area full of homogeneous retail stores in hopes of finding something interesting. The most I found was Peets Coffee, a national chain with far better coffee than Starbucks(better, as in they don't roast it until the acid could melt the brake pads off a Buick). Today's Red Eye poll had the local Intelligentsia Coffee ranked above Peets, and everybody says it's great, so Tomorrow I may have to seek one out. I also plan to get down to the University of Chicago to see an art gallery I read about somewhere, but that may be next week.

The trains have been delayed due to construction on the tracks I use to get to the loop, and there was a fire on Tuesday in a building next to the tracks that's choked up one of the busiest areas in the system. I carry a book in my jacket to read during the delays now- score one for dead tree media.

I've been thinking about Fort Wayne as I walk around this city and explore the kinds of establishments so many in my hometown yearn for. Fort Wayne has two great used bookstores, this city has dozens. Fort Wayne has a handful of great little bars and venues, this city has scores. I spent my whole undergrad with small town expatriates who spent much time comparing Fort Wayne with larger cities, and most of them had been to Chicago at some point, so it became the gold standard to a whole crowd of corn-fed hipsters. Now that I'm here, I'm starting to see how one city can have so much happening. The rich culture and thriving independent businesses cater to a population so densely packed around them that the population has taken to high-rises out of necessity. Outward expansion lead to slums, and the whole eastern edge is Lake Michigan, so the past twenty years have seen a return to the city with massive renovations to old buildings to make more housing. There are at least two properties being remodeled between where I am and the El stop down the street, thus the process is ongoing. Vibrant neighborhood culture is the one positive aspect that I can see to overcrowding.

But wait! As I'm typing this, the local TV news is reporting a new outdoor sculpture in Grant Park. Something with giant iron torsos with legs, and lots of 'em. There's my Friday so far, then. To the Bat-poles!

So Many Books

I spent a bit of time online today trying to plan a trip to a used bookstore in Wicker Park, a neighborhood I plan to explore more this week. The RTA website wanted me to take a bus, as this is the quickest way. I've been in the habit of taking the El, though, so I have to explore the neighborhood a bit to find what I want. It's a great way to discover things.

Myopic Books is a great used bookstore, one of the best I've ever seen. Right when I walked in, two large dogs came bounding up to me to say hello, followed by their owner. I handed my bag over to the front desk, and recieved a large laminated ticket labeled "hell weapon," instead of the usual boring numbered chip. To my immediate right, a section of shelves labeled "Geek" caught my attention, a selection of graphic novels, sci-fi, and cultural ephemera books. The general fiction section took up the back of the first floor with much of the second on the second floor landing, and then a third floor had essay anthologies and other smaller categories. The basement was stocked with biographies, humor, and sci-fi. Unfortunately, there were no copies of Douglas Adams's Dirk Gentley's Holistic Detective Agency, an out of print semi-rarity I always look for in used bookstores.

Here's what I did find:

Fun With Milk and Cheese vol. I, by Evan Dorkin: An old indie comic that's supposed to be really funny. I missed it the first time around.

Darwin, Marx, Wagner, by Jaques Barzun: I picked this one up on a whim. It's about how these three were all alive and working at the same time, and how they all redefined their respective fields. If it doesn't grab me, I'm sure Hyde Brothers or White Rabbit will take it.

The Civil War, by Lucan: An epic poem about the Roman civil war, recommended by my brother as a companion to the Rome TV series. I'm picky about translations of old texts, and I like what I read of the Loeb collection version of this, but $5.00 is hard to pass up for this one.

Peace Kills, by P.J. O'Rourke: I saw him speak a few years ago, and he remains the only political writer of any stripe I can tolerate for more than ten pages. The man is funny and, again, the price was right.

So, that's what I ended up with for that trip. The shop seems to have the right idea of how to stay organized, too. A sign above the basement staircase forbids any upstairs books from going downstairs. Several signs on shelves inform patrons that any book found out of order will be priced one dollar higher to be re-shelved. As a former book shelver myself, I appreciate both the store's system of organization and the store's assumption that I can properly re-shelve a book myself. If anyone reading this far into the post ever wants to find this store, just take the blue line from the loop towards O'Hare and get off at Damen, then walk a little way SE down Milwaukee. It's next to the Double Door, yet another famous club here that I was happy to find.

I found a good blues bar within walking distance tonight, Kingston Mines. Sunday-Wednesday, college students can get in free, but the show I saw would have been worth the full $12. The flavor of blues favored here is a bit brighter and faster than the music often associated with the Mississippi Delta area, and both bands could solo like crazy. The venue is split into two rooms, each with a full stage setup, so two bands can set up and be ready to play and the crowd moves from one room to the other as the two bands alternate sets. I look forward to seeing more music here, as there is always something going on at night.

I really don't have a good reason as to why I had never been to the Museum of Contemporary Art before this trip, save for I didn't know where it was. Today was my first visit to the museum itself, where they have a large multi-leveled exhibit about the future of global design. Sustainable design and recyclable materials were the main focus, showing how to ease our energy needs and how to make earth-friendly materials cost-effective. In most cases, this all looks possible. Combinations of wheat, corn, and other organic materials are being formed into plastic-like material that can serve a purpose and then compost easily. This is all well and good, but some of the items on display probably won't fly. Case in point:


There is probably another great leap forward in single-person transportation since the bicycle, but we haven't hit it yet. So far, we have a three-wheeled squash with room for one person under five foot six and a small suitcase. I saw one of these parked in Rome a few years ago, the only one I'm aware of in the wild. The driver presumably isn't too hopeful on finding a breeding partner either.


In the plus column, though, is the $100 laptop. The little yellow bit on the right side is a hand crank to power the battery. It can serve as a wifi relay to other models in the area, and I believe it runs a light-footprint version of Linux. The developers are considering selling a $200 commercial model to people in developed nations, and I'd love to try one out. The idea behind the project is to provide computers, and thus the resources of the internet, to developing countries for a price that can be covered through charity.


Some of the items had this transparent voting box system, like this one next to the genetically modified food example. Five reasons are offered for and against, and each person casts a yellow vote paper in the box they agree with. Given the current trend in organic food, this one isn't really a surprise, but other issues were more evenly split, such as breeding a featherless chicken, or more robust fish stock.

The big question at the end was "Now that we can do anything, what do we want to do?" More accurately; assume we can do anything, and tackle problems from that vantage point. This is the sort of techno-progressive attitude that I reserve all my optimism for, that given proper guidance, our rapidly advancing technology can be used to better the world. Failing that, maybe we'll just use Myspace to spark the first online political coup in North Korea.

Later on, after a cherry smoothie with some sort of performance-enhancing protein add-in, I wandered to the four-story Borders on Michigan. Large bookstores draw me like like a Catholic to mass, and this store is like Saint Mark's. The overhead speakers announced a book signing with R.A. Salvatore, a sci-fi/fantasy author I've read in the past. I knew he sounded familiar, and not just for the two Star Wars books he's written. It only dawned on me after he mentioned the company, that he's one third of the top of Green Monster Games, a MMORPG start-up in Boston with Todd McFarlane and Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling. Salvatore is the creative director for their forthcoming product, which is currently in the early stages of development. He described his job as writing a template instead of a story for the game, as it is up to the player to assemble the story. This seems to be in line with his writing process, as he explained later that he writes a continuous story through his books, with no idea where the story will lead to next save for his desire to explore different ideas, characters, and locations. All he does is give enough bits of information so the reader can piece together the story based on their notions of the character. He also had an anecdote about having to incorporate a character from another author's book series, a character with several gadgets that had been added over the course of a dozen or so books. Instead of slogging through all the backstory when he needed to be writing, he anonymously posted on a message board asking for an inventory of the gadgets he'd have to know about. In two days time, he had a complete descriptive list with book and page citations compiled from internet fans.

Off topic, but funny- I was walking home last night after a quick trip to get something to drink at the drugstore on the corner, and there was a young woman walking in front of me. Nothing out of the ordinary in this neighborhood, until a guy came around a corner, recognized her, and approached her to initiate conversation. She kept walking, giving him the finger for ten seconds solid without saying anything. He seemed to know full well why he deserved this, and walked sheepishly beside her for at least another block before I turned and crossed the street. I don't know what he did, but it didn't warrant a mention in this morning's Tribune, so it can't have been that bad.

Dork: noun, Loyal: adjective

Normally the adjective describes the noun, but here it could go either way. Let me explain:

Monday is the universal day of blah in any city, so my search for creative novelty in Chicago online and in the papers was turning up nada last night. On a whim, I checked the Northwestern University site calendar, and found a guest lecture posted for today at 4:30- "The Network is the Actor on the Stage of History." I'm pretty sure that this is the lecture I saw, as it sort of fits the title, but more on that in a moment. I took the purple express train north to the edge of the Northwestern campus, and from there relied on dead reckoning to find the right building on the right street. The campus is nice- not Kenyon nice, but pretty good. The front door of the humanities lecture hall had a stern warning to trespassers, and while this may not have applied to me entirely, I couldn't help but feel that I was crashing the lecture. Hence the title of this post.

The lecture was about social networks of geniuses in history and the following generations. The lecturer, Dr. Randall Collins, used ancient Greek philosophers and German philosophers as his examples, and while I know nearly nothing about either, I got the gist of it. Essentially, a great mind like Socrates is remembered as being in the center of a great movement, when in reality he was one of many intellectuals working on developing what came to be the foundation of modern philosophy. He then gained importance in philosophy as an individual when future generations singled him out as being most important, as they measured ideas against his. This phenomena is visible in other creative networks in history as well.

He also talked about strong ties and weak ties in social networks. Creative intellectual networks are often, in Dr. Collins's words, "hermetically cultish." Strongly tied individuals work well together, but the network can get rather redundant. Weak ties to acquaintances offer access to other networks. I've seen this at Ball State, with some departments opening up to the idea of interdisciplinary learning while others think the idea is absurd.

I'm starting to look for good blues bars now. The conveniently named House of Blues downtown might have something, but I wonder if it might be a little too commercial for what I'm looking for. Any venue not located in a historic neighborhood may not be what I'm looking for. I'm also waiting for an excuse to go back to the Hothouse- it seems like it would get good unique music.

One week in

Resfest was great. Today they showed a ten year retrospective of the festival's best videos since the beginning, and a collection of Radiohead videos directed by past festival-featured directors. The very first video was one of my longtime favorites, Street Spirit. There were several I had never seen, including one from Thom Yorke's solo album. I think I've seen at least twenty videos altogether today, so I'm fairly overloaded.

There was an after party at a club a couple of miles away, so I took a couple trains to get down the street and walked a block, nearly missing the Lilliputian club sign above Sonotheque, a video/tecno club that by all rights, I had no business being in. As I presented my festival ticket stub to the doorman, I felt like George Costanza using a picture of his pretend model girlfriend to gain access to an exclusive hangout for beautiful people. Picture the inside of a pencil sharpener designed by a Swedish hipster, and add thumping techno music and a bar. A bearded fellow at the bar beckoned to me by way of the person next to him after he noticed me standing there admiring the video projector. I introduced myself, he gave the customary double-check that I actually said my name was "Loyal," and that was most of the exchange. He introduced me to the co-founders of Resfest, a 16mm enthusiast and a graphic designer, and I explained who I am and what I study. They seemed to get it pretty well, and the subject turned to hypertext narrative and video. They seemed to agree that interactive narrative didn't really work as advertised. I'm not the strongest advocate for nonlinear story (I'm dubious of it at best), so I offered no rebuttal. I left after about thirty minutes in order to catch the brown line in time.

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.