some things

When I looked out the window this morning, snow was blowing horizontally at about 20 mph down Cleaver Street. It was so cold and so windy that nothing stuck to the street until about noon; it just kept blowing away. Sideways snow is not so weird. It consistently snows up on State Street between Adams and Jackson, what my office looks out on. Canyonland weather patterns, I guess.

So I stayed in the whole day, spending 4.5 hours making the "meat pie" (is there no better name for this?!) recipe from last week's Times magazine. I left the house today only to buy more meat for the "meat pie." I broke my own rule and trusted the Times and ended up with THREE POUNDS OF BEEF to "serve six." WTF New York Times are we cooking for GIANTS?!?!! One serving of meat is a deck of playing cards, not a car-washing sponge!! There is an entire lasagna tray of leftover meat pie. I am hoping Olympia, my new roommate, will eat all of the leftovers because if somebody's colon must be blocked, better hers than mine.

Despite the beefsplosion, I had a pretty good weekend. Friday I went down to 79th and Ashland for a musical put on by a consortium of black churches. It was called "Unconditional Yes," and it was about godly people (with nice clothes) vs. evil people (who wore gangsta clothes). There was lots and lots of excellent singing, and some very rousing gospel numbers.  It tells you more about me than about the event that my closest point of reference for this is its parody in The Blues Brothers. There were maybe 700 people in attendance and exactly two Asian people, me and Olympia, and maybe a handful of non-black people, including Bridget, my community organizer friend who heard about the play through one of her community contacts, and her fiance Raul.  It was a world - South Side, black community churches, evangelical fervor - I don't know if I'll ever see again. Except in skin tone it was not too different from the Billy Graham revival I had gone to in New Orleans; it was a spectacle of music and histrionics, it was entertaining, and it made me uncomfortable in the same ways, with the moral absolutism of good Christians against caricatured forces of evil.  And at the same time one thinks, Oh, but it is the second Great Depression, and things are falling apart, and what is given the uncomfortable name "evil" is genuinely destructive violence and criminality in the black community, so it makes a lot of sense that people find guidance and redemption in organized religion. And you can't really begrudge that. And then this line of condescending, judgmental by way of saying "let's not be judgmental" kind of thinking carries you to what Barack Obama said about bitter people clinging to guns and religion, and then you are in hot water.

Yesterday I did yet another lonesome self-guided tour of Chicago's free art, first stopping in the photo and design galleries at Columbia College, taking a break to eat an avocado with a dagger just outside the Columbia College computer lab, and then going to the Art Institute, which is free for all of February, so it's totally okay to go just for twenty minutes and run directly to that weird 16th c. front-on portrait of a woman by some Flemish painter that the curation says is supposed to be "arrestingly erotic" or something but just looks kind of weird. When art is cheap you don't feel obliged to stand in front of the Renoirs nodding knowingly (while secretly suppressing the urge to vomit...why did I pay for this...splotchy paint...motion sickness...). At night Bridget and Raul and I reunited for a show at the Hideout that the Chicago Reader billed as awesome dance music + political dub/punk but was actually none of those things, and instead just drums and bass playing in synch and then one crazy man shouting nonsensically and arrhythmically and atonally over it, and sometimes singing in an operatic baritone. The opening act was electronic music. Who thought it would be interesting to watch a person on stage click a mouse once per song?? I will be so happy when this dark stage of music the 2000s is as historic as the rap breakdown in the middle of the pop song by vaguely ethnic singer that was so popular in the early 1990s.  (Thanks to Raj for completing the second half of that sentence. He goes on: "like in bobby brown songs or 'mc scat cat' or whatever in the paula abdul song. it was like an effort to lend cred to the pop star, and that part of the music video would inevitably involve footage of said star folding arms in MC fashion and nodding. i think michael jackson did this in at least one song, too.").

Anyway, I saw some lovely things this weekend I would like to share with you. 

Bettina Hoffman at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. This is such a simple but fascinating idea. I am not good at describing art so let me just quote the pamphlet accompanying the piece: "Bettina Hoffman uses a slowly panning video camera to present multiple points of view on human subjects who are absolutely still.  As the camera circles the periphery of the people, the effect is one of traveling through the space of a two-dimensional photograph. It is as if the space of a still photograph has opened up for the viewer to navigate from multiple points of view, while the subject themselves remain frozen in time." (Kudos to curator Karen Irvine for writing such simple, unnauseating prose about art!) It really is mesmerizing and cool! Click the link above to see some samples.

Lorna Simpson. Again from the pamphlet: "Simpson used James Van Der Zee's photographs as her inspiration for 9 Props (1995).  Made while she was an artist-in-residence at Pilchuck, a glassblowing school in Seattle, Simpson had artisans re-create the elegant vases that appear in Van Der Zee's pictures. She then photographed the glass objects and printed them onto felt accompanied by simple texts" [and here the curation fails to describe that what makes it so great is that the "simple texts" are just her literal descriptions of the original photos. And that James Van Der Zee's subjects were affluent African-Americans on the bubble. The effect is that the vases come the represent the entire scene of rising prosperity. It's not just a simplistic critique of consumerism because the felt fabric and the directness of the texts makes you feel a little wistful, like this is something that was once good and has been lost. At least that's how I felt.]

The text: "A man stands on the far left of the room with a pipe in his mouth. He is dressed in a smoking jacket with a shirt and tie, with his right elbow resting on a dresser and ring on his finger. The bed has a satin cover with a small stuffed animal positioned on the center of the pillows. Behind the bed hangs a rug, off the backboard of a fringed lamp, and above hangs a chandelier.  In front of a curtained window, a standing lamp shines on the portrait of a full figured woman. On the right side of the room is a dresser with an ashtray, small boxes, a candle, and a vase."

John Coplans' photographs of his old naked body. Nothing too spectacular, but I liked the composition of this tiny little photo (maybe 3" square) and his grossness. It looks like a slug!

Graffiti in a bathroom at Columbia College. It is just standard bullshit: "Pooping in public bathrooms feels embarassing [SIC, stupid!] but eating in public feels normal. Why is the exit of waste less acceptable than the entrance??"

The question is funny to me because I have never heard anyone describe eating as "the entrance of waste." But what made this graffito so great is one of the many responses to the question:

If you can't see, let me transcribe.  First, the writer wrote: "A#2: because your butt is often a sex organ." And then perhaps thinking it through again, the writer underlines "sex organ" and writes in "connected to." As in, "your butt is connected to a sex organ," or "your butt is a sex organ connected to"...? Then there is a second revision, adding this final, most plaintive thought: "You uncover one you uncover the other." What??!

Here is a nice little sign that was funded by Chicago's public art coffers: "My love for you is a like a shiny heart-shaped metaphor about the sea."  Synesthesia and recursive metaphors, courtesy of the city of Chicago!

Here is a nice marquee for a dry cleaners just down the block from my house. It's not a clear shot because I was on the Milwaukee Avenue bus when I took it, but you can see how impressively well-maintained the lights are, and how interesting the typeface is. 

Here is a pregnancy test on the sidewalk outside my front door.  The garbage cans are on the backside of the apartment building, 200' away. So how does a pregnancy test find itself on the sidewalk? I imagine someone wanted to get it out of her hands in a hurry (an adulterous wife? an evangelical teen hiding her boyfriend from her parents?) and just chucked it out the window, which means I could've been struck in the head with this urine stick if I had been walking by. The label says "Clear Blue," but the indicator strip must've faded out because there were no blue lines or pink dots or anything else.

This is just an ad I ripped out of SkyMall.  I just don't get it at all. 

It's selling Yahoo Mail. The caption "Your inbox understand some of your friends only speak IM." The picture is of a pretty girl in glasses kneeling in front of a credenza. She is typing on a laptop and there is a cup of espresso nearby. In the background is a living room, possibly hers. She is a poor decorator, choosing mismatched dark floral patterns and antique radios, decanters, and a Rolleiflex camera for her space. There is an empty espresso cup and a tabloid newspaper on a coffee table behind her.  The bad floral print of the furniture is echoed in the girl's garish fist-sized flower pin and what appears to be a monarch butterfly or quail wing stuck behind her ear. The composition of the photo is imbalanced so your eye travels left to right, first panning the furniture and the espresso-drinker who is not there, before reaching the girl, who is looking down at a screen, with her hands (and your attention) converging at the lower righthand corner on a laptop that is not even in the frame of the photo. The brightest spot in the photo is the girl's right temple. The text above the photo is topheavy and hangs above the girl's head. All of it makes you feel like someone is behind her, and it makes you nervous that someone might pounce on her. The caption below (describing Yahoo features, such as "chat" and "email") is no help either. Designer friends, help me. What is this ad supposed to make me desire???

And that is all. I hope this post has made your Monday a little more bearable.