This is from Danielle Albert, sharing the Pedway secret:
“pedway secret…
I was a little reluctant to share this information with you…
but I decided to be kind to my saic neighbor and share the wealth…
I have recently discovered how to walk to Columbus Drive via the amazing Chicago Pedway…
Here is how you do it:
Enter either through Macy’s (which opens either at 9 am or 10 am), or enter through the Red line entrance right outside Macy’s…
Make your way east, until you run into the Millennium Park underground parking…
(follow the pedway compass if lost)
but instead of walking through that garage south (like you would to get to the Michigan building-for those who have never used the Pedway to this building, it will take you to the corner of Michigan and Monroe)…
You must walk east…
You’ll pass this hallway with like a huge gate on the south edge (I feel like a zoo animal when I walk it)…
You follow this past the millennium railroad and this is the part where you go outside for 40 feet (but you are underneath an overpass/completely sheltered)…
Then you’ll see a door on your right with the pedway compass, enter (you are now on floor 2.5 of the Grant Park north garage; you will see an entrance to the Harris theater)…
walk to floor three, and make your way through that garage…
you will end up on Monroe and Columbus!!
and voila!!
November 20, 2008. 7 pm. Posted on Facebook.
Thank you Danielle. I might try this with a camera and report back.
Besides my enthusiasm for candied nuts and Glühwein, the best thing about the Christkindlmarket in Chicago is WATCHING PEOPLE EAT. It is always hilarious. The desperate attempts to fit whole sausauges into mouths, to finish a gigantic stuffed pretzel in 1 minute flat, washing it down with lashings of German Beer or spicy mulled wine. There’s nothing like it.
Here are some photographs from last year’s Christkindlmarket:
I don’t know these people, but I thought they were kinda funny lookin’
This morning the staff at F Newsmagazine had a casual breakfast meeting with SAIC’s new(ish) President, Duke Rieter.
I don’t want to let all the secrets out of the bag, but here are a few details of the discussion (meh, what secrets? there are no secrets, we’re interested in what everyone thinks…)
The meeting was quite frank and open, and covered all sorts of student and school frustrations, including:
- The lack of a decent student space at SAIC (this is being worked on… )
- The lack of a decent newsroom / workspace for F Newsmagazine’s editors and designers
- Complaints about the First Year Program
- The lack of an illustration curriculum
- The fact that no one knows what F Newsmagazine means as a publication title and the name is confusing doesn’t have brand strength.
- The possibility of F Newsmagazine either having another name, or distributing differently (weekly, quarterly…?)
- The absolute CRAPNESS of the SAIC website. (How difficult it is to navigate, to find links, lack of student presence on the site…
- The disconnections and lack of communication between different sections of SAIC (between departments, between the faculty, admin and students, and between grads and undergrads)
- How the financial crisis impacts International students
- The invisibility of SAIC - lots of people not knowing about it who… perhaps… ought to know
- The difficulty of putting on student events at the school - booking spaces, security, bureaucratic red tape…
- The lack of artwork actually visible around SAIC… unless you know where to look
Basically, what we took away from the meeting is that there is no reason to be complacent or defeatist at SAIC. If we think something needs to be addressed, changed, fixed, instituted - then now is the time to bring up the issue, because we have a school President who, for the time being, is all ears. Whether or not that “listening” can actually correspond to actual changes will be a slow and complex process, but it’s certainly worth a try.
Now… I know post offices are BAD NEWS. In general, all around the world, they are havens of bureaucratic bungles and profoundly inefficient processes. They are, almost always THE PITS. And in Chicago, you get to multiply that by 10. THE PITS x 10. It’s actually pretty hilarious how bad they are. It’s like I’m watching a painful episode of Survivor, except all I’m doing is waiting in a post office line, listening to people get more and more confused about packages, forms and bills.
And then… just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse - you find THE WORST POST OFFICE IN THE WORLD. Wicker Park Post Office, on West Division, is apprently the worst EVER. This is not my assertion, it is the assertion of 35 reviewers on Yelp.com, who all gave this post office the lowest rating ever. Well worth checking out, I think people are using Yelp.com for therapy these days.
A friend of mine found this interesting blog on “architectural conjecture, urban speculation, landscape futures” with some very interesting posts about experimental building projects. The blog is authored by Geoff Manaugh, senior editor of Dwell magazine. He was recently in Chicago for the Chicago Humanities Festival where he spoke at “Offshoring Audacity,” and “Burnham 2.0“
A friend of mine tried to vote this morning. She had her registration card ready, and when she showed it to the officials, and they looked her up, they said,
“Well, you are registered, but you’re registered as someone who has to vote on our computers, you can’t vote by paper ballot. And our computer voting machine is broken right now, so you’re just going to have to come back later.”
I’ll keep you posted as to whether my friend succeeds in voting today, she’s going to give it another go this afternoon.
We pondered about whether the was black listed, because back when she was 16 she volunteered for the Green Party, and y’know, the govt. decided she was never going to use PAPER again. Or something like that.
Famous people are funny at election time. I just got this email from Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor. Since the last time I got genuinely excited about Nine Inch Nails I was a black-nail-polish donning teen, I’m not sure this will effect my (already cast) vote. But I’m sharing the love anyhow. The wording is very interesting.
Next Tuesday we will elect the next President of the United States. The result will have great consequences for the nation.
This election offers a choice is between two men with dramatically different visions of the future. We have strong feelings about this choice. But we feel even more strongly that all Americans, regardless of political preference, have a stake in the outcome and should vote in this critical election.
This is likely to be a close election. Your vote matters. Please use it and make a difference.
The work is being exhibited in a Logan Square shop window (formerly Grace’s Furniture) as part of a project by Lynn Stevens, The Milwaukee Avenue Art Walk. Stevens has arranged for work to appear in Logan Square shop windows (along Milwaukee, between Kimball and Kedzie) between October 17 and November 2. It’s all about Logan Square. Here is Lynn Stevens’ blog: Peopling Places about her curatorial endeavours, and other matters.
Just thought I’d share this link with the SAIC community - it’s a website memorial to Ben Schaafsma, who co-founded INCUBATE, and studied at SAIC in the Masters of Arts Administration and Policy program. He died on Thursday October 23, 2008. Last night a memorial gathering was held at INCUBATE to celebrate Ben’s life and honor his memory.
THE ECONOMIC CRISIS & YOU
Panel Discussion Tues Oct 28 6:30 pm
SAIC Columbus Bldg Auditorium
sponsored by the Student Activists and F Newsmagazine
Panelists Include:
Duke Reiter (SAIC President)
Sarah Peters (Prof. of Liberal Arts)
Robyn Coffey (BFA Student & Editor of F Newsmagazine)
Lia Rousset and Amber Ginsburg (MFA Students & collaborators in the
siteWARE project “Urbs in Horto”)
Nina Pagano, BFA Student
Join us for a lively discussion of the current economic crisis: how we
got here, where we might be going, and how it could affect YOU!
Black Walnut Gallery presents Slated for Demolition, a one night only event investigating Chicago’s forgotten structures and institutions and people - November 1, 2008, 7 to 11 p.m.
The lower level of 212 N. Aberdeen St exhibits a collection of black and white photos of Chicago’s homeless community (potentially problematic in its objectification, perhaps?) and the upper level records buildings and institutions of a “forgotten” Chicago.
I expect the night will be tinged with a decidedly earnest performative sense of nostalgia, and a bunch of upper-middle class white folks patting themselves on the back for being such socially conscious citizens … but it might provide some interesting snapshots of parts of Chicago previously unseen or long forgotten. Or you could just go for the free booze - the invite promises “free drinks all night.”
“Don’t let me drive home, I get intoxicated by my own words … I crack myself up. Stay tuned for my blog: ‘Odd Linguistic Formations.’ Ha … that’s another good band name.”
Professor David Getsy
“We all have a tendency to encrust our sentences with the barnacles of everything that we’ve read.”
But honestly, the evening was “Tom Wolfe-Lite.” Marin’s questions were, in the main, unpenetrating, trite and uninteresting, and Wolfe’s responses were almost as banal. At some point he went on a bit of a rant about how unaccomplished twentieth century modern painters were (Picasso didn’t know perspective, and couldn’t draw hands, so he was lazy enough to invent cubism). Granted, Wolfe was referring to his satirical commentary on modern art in The Painted Word …. but it is many years since 1975, and Wolfe’s comments yesterday on modern art sounded less like biting, clever satire, and more like a plain old fuddy-duddy misunderstanding of modern art history. Actually, in general, Wolfe came across as an aging, stubborn whiner, not the incisive, witty, sharp and bitchy writer I might have imagined him to be, from the many books of his that I have read. I know he’s always been a pompous prick, that’s what was appealing about his writing. But now…? The sharp critique has turned into narrow minded waffle. Or maybe Marin brought that out in him. Ask a silly question, get a silly answer.
Wolfe’s comments on blogging, too, betrayed a lack of a will to understand our present context, particularly in relation to new media and the attitudes of younger generations. Wolfe suggested that people who read blogs “don’t believe in anything,” and described a generation of young people who “only get their news from blogs” and supposedly don’t expose themselves to any other kind of media.
Albeit, Wolfe was exaggerating… but who is this generation? Who are these people? I’ve never met them. The people I know who read blogs, read them as an entertaining supplement to a myriad of other forms of media. The internet is, in a way, a channel for other media, rather than just being a form of media in itself: people watch TV on the internet, films, listen to radio… read the newspaper. In some ways, it means that younger generations are more likely to read newspaper articles now, than they would have been without the internet: less likely to actually buy a paper, but more likely to click on a link.
As a blogger and blog reader (and as an avid newspaper reader and radio listener), I took offense to Wolfe’s argument that people like me are somehow so apathetic and that our use of blogs mean that we are without beliefs or convictions. I suspect the blogging generations Wolfe speaks of are not quite that dumb, and I would venture that blogs are, in the main, not considered to be reporting by anyone. People understand the difference.
That said… I don’t want to wholeheartedly defend the masses… yet. Let’s wait until the results of this election before I carry on this argument … perhaps people only believe what they hear on talk-back radio…. perhaps a scarily large number of people think “Obama is a Muslim,” and “Obama supports terrorists” and perhaps this is a problem for this large group of people. Maybe then I will agree with Wolfe that people are stupid. I think, though, that it is not this mythical “younger generation of blog readers” who will be responsible if the worst really happens on November 4.
Last night David Sedaris spoke at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago, to a packed audience. He read recent stories, diary entries, unpublished work, and a little George Saunders. It goes without saying that the event was bittersweet and frankly, hilarious… and it would be a disservice to Sedaris to recount his wonderful anecdotes and tales here, but there is one little tid bit I wanted to share, for those who weren’t at the event.
Early in the evening, Sedaris had finished reading one story, and he started reading an essay drafted for the New Yorker, about the strange bunch of people who are “undecided voters.” I’m probably letting the cat out of the bag, here, publishing this, but Sedaris was letting the cat out of the bag too, by reading his unpublished story to 3500 people.
So… in this particular reading, Sedaris expressed his befuddlement at the existence of these odd creatures, “undecided voters” at this PARTICULAR TIME in U.S. political history. Do they really exist? How come they like being on television so much?
He described how undecided voters are rather like when you’re on an aeroplane, and the air hostess rolls up the food cart to you and says,
“Would you like the chicken, … or the human shit with broken glass in it?”
and the undecided voter says,
“How is the chicken cooked?”
David Sedaris, “No Photographs Please”
_____________________
A little later Sedaris mused that perhaps the pessimist might argue that opting for the human shit is just cutting to the chase, and to go for the chicken would be delaying the inevitable end product of the event.
Ah, said Sedaris, but that’s where the broken glass comes in.
Just watching the McCain-Obama Town Hall debate at this moment…
and it occurs to me… if McCain is so gung-ho about nuclear power (and he is, he’s so madly enthusiastic about it - build those plants, build heaps of ‘em, they’re safe!) … doesn’t that present a bit of a national security issue, because McCain is hell bent on offending and putting offside all these “enemy” countries who don’t agree with him? The more people you piss off, the more likely you are to generate people who might want to attack America’s vulnerabilities…. and I would think that large numbers of attackable nuclear plants, and nuclear waste storage areas would perhaps be a vulnerability?
Also, if we are going to be spending so much on investigating EVERY subcommittee of EVERY government department, to find wasted efforts and problems with efficiency - won’t such a mammoth set of investigations cost a LOT of money?
Two days ago, when getting out of the shower, I remembered how to make weird duck-quacking noises with the side of my mouth. This is pretty exciting because I haven’t been able to make these quacking sounds for about 20 years (and I’m 25) and suddenly I know how to do it again.
Does anyone have any small children that they’d like me to scare? Or, better still, a disgruntled pet goose that needs a bit of empathy? Let me know, I need to find a use for this rediscovered skill.
Today and tomorrow is the University of Chicago Press’ first public book sale in over twenty years.
The sale will run from 9 to 5 at the International House’s Assembly Hall on the University of Chicago
campus (1414 E. 59th St)
Over 10,000 bookswill be available … priced at only five dollars each…
A work colleague sent me this Chicago Tribune link, an old one, from 2006, it’s a Getty picture of a giant rabbit and its breeder. I love this picture so much, I’ve now made it my mission to copy and paste it everywhere. Since I’m probably facing copyright issues, I’ve uploaded the image IN CONTEXT on the Chicago Tribune website. I think it’s fantastic how much the breeder and the rabbit look alike. Also - I wonder, 2 years on, how successful the North Korean rabbit breeding program (for food) has been….
Also, here is what the Chicago Tribune had to say about big bunny bun buns.
Karl Szmolinsky, who raises a breed of rabbits called giant grays, shows Robert, an 8.5kg giant gray who is 74cm long and has ears 25.5cm long, in the backyard of his house in Eberswalde, Germany in 2006. Szmolinsky sold eight giant grays to a delegation from North Korea that wanted to raise the breed as a source of meat for the North Korean population. Szmolinsky said his rabbits reach a maximum weight of 10.5 kg (23.1lbs.).
If library-related anythings make your eyes close, click away, far away. Otherwise, if databases and inter-library loans get you all excited, here is my gripe for the day: Why is the Flaxman Library’s iShare server lways interminably slow, to the point of “timing-out” every 3rd time I try to order a book or renew my books? Does this happen to everyone else too? If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, iShare is an inter-library loan service, so not run by Flaxman or SAIC. I know, once upon a time, an independent book seller taught me “zen and the art of book selling: if you want to go fast…. go slow…” but this isn’t book selling, it’s an online library catalogue, so it needs to lose the zen and catch up a bit. gripe over. over and out
Owner of the Chicago Reader, Tampa-based Creative Loafing, filed for bankruptcy recently, but says don’t worry, the Reader will be on the stands, as usual, on Thursday. According to Creative Loafing CEO (as quoted on Chicago Public Radio), Ben Eason, no one should be troubled: “All the sort of business pieces of this are all pretty sound. It’s just that there’s not as much revenue this year as there was six months ago or a year ago as we’ve been dealing with the economic issues.”
After all, everyone is going bankrupt lately, it’s the new trend, why not join in the fun? I look at my own bank balance, and although there’s not much “revenue” in it, I can feel good because my “pieces” and pretty “sound” (and also feel mildly relieved because I don’t own a newspaper.)
There have been little paper flyers stuck up around Logan Square lately - a method of neighborhood activism that is quite interesting in it’s low-tech nature and subtlety (and probable lack of impact). I’m interested in these little covert neighborhood actions. This one is sponsored by Neighbors for Responsible Development, a group that is behind enough in the times to think that pasting small messages on houses is enough to get peoples’ attention. Their tone is self righteous and a little batty, and there is more than the hint of NIMBYism going on, but their desire to create more stringent development controls and to think responsibly about Chicago’s glut of over-priced condos is worthy of serious consideration.
I won’t relay the entire content of this rather lengthy “note” pasted around the place, but here is an excerpt.
Greed in Logan Square
“Alderman Colon has up zoned the property at 1818 N. California for a large condominium building. These up zonings are bad for everyone. … Everyone, except the Alderman, knows that there is a glut of condos in Chicago. The more that are built, the lower the value of their property for cuttent owners. These up zonings are bad for long term residents. Up zonings raise land values and therefore raise your property taxes. … These up zonings are bad for democracy and community involvement. 3 large meetings have been held on this development. In all these meetings, the Alderman was asked to zone the property for 3 storey low density buildings that fit into the neighborhood. The Alderman didn’t listen to his community, he listened to the developer. These up zonings are bad for the long term future of this neighborhood. Condo sales have crashed. Developers and banks are desparate. They are renting units to anyone they can, they don’t care what kind of tenants they are. Units are being foreclosed on, abandoned, and even bordered up. Some of these buildings will be the slums of tomorrow.”
The sentences are short and to the point. Intensely argumentative. They show the perspective of home owners fearing they’ll lose money, and the fear of a neighborhood that is somehow going to slide into a slum. Just who are these tenants that the association is afraid of? People who don’t live in old-fashioned “family” (Ma and Pa + kids) units? People who happen to be poor? In view of the gentrification of Logan Square, this stance is pretty interesting — on the one hand, it presents a fear of gentrification caused by large condo building, on the pther hand, because of the financial climate it fears these fancy new condos won’t be inhabited by the “right sort of people.”
This is a bit cheeky, but I’m going to give it a go to see what happens.
When I was in a park yesterday, having lunch in the Loop, I overheard a conversation between a group of young women (who may or may not have been SAIC students), and one girl was complaining quite audibly about how her mother tricked her into enrolling to vote, by saying, “Oh, can you sign this?” The girl’s friends listened in sympathy - fancy being forced to enroll to vote, that’s just totally unfair and unreasonable! What a mean and tricky mom!
Their attitude - from the part I could hear of it - was that it was not their role to vote, and, moreover, that anyone suggesting that voting might be their business, was wrongheaded, and being pushy. Political involvement, from their perspective, was something to be ACTIVELY avoided, at all costs (though it’s a pretty easy argument to make to say that the adamant choice NOT to vote is a highly political decision). In any case, the tone was of outrage and annoyance.
Incidentally, this same girl also said that she HATES HALLOWEEN but likes Fall because the leaves change color.
I may have blown my cover here. If she reads this, I’d be very happy to hear her thoughts on voting, Halloween and Fall.
Since I come from a crazy place where voting is mandatory (see this article for an explanation) and if you don’t do it, politicians get to tie you to poles and throw pies at you, I thought I’d provide an alternative list of
“Things my own mother tricked me into doing:”
- Being honest with her about getting a tattoo
- Bringing a jacket, ‘cos I’ll get cold
- Eating my broccoli (using the threat that I didn’t want to be like George Bush Senior)
- Coming with her to dress shops full of beige things
The upcoming October issue of F Newsmagazine will have a more substantial article about the upcoming Rat City Parade, so i won’t give away too much now, but I know that SAIC alum Ben Fain is looking for participants, so if you’re stumped for a Halloween costume, and you like crazy rat suits (who doesn’t?) then I suggest you follow this up.
Here is some info from Ben Fain:
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
The North Halsted Halloween Parade:
Call for performers to be involved in a custom choreography for the Halloween Parade.
Artist Ben Fain, an SAIC faculty member and alumnus, will present a major large-scale performance and sculptural project as part of the 12th Annual North Halsted Halloween Parade, a parade that annually draws over 25,000 spectators. Fain’s project will include a massive parade float, live musical performances by Chicago’s own Bucket Boys, and a choreography designed for seventy dancers dressed in identical full-body rat costumes.
The thirty-five foot long parade float, a fully-furnished bedroom scene with a large rotating pizza pyramid, will serve as the center piece of this years rat themed parade, and will be accompanied by a choreography, designed by Canadian born artist Sarah Febbraro, that will completely envelop large areas of the parade route and the float.
We are searching for volunteers to don rat suits, perform the night of the parade and be a part of this totally over-the-top nightmarish tableau, which will hopefully bewilder and spook anyone watching.
If anyone is interested in participating please contact Sarah Febbraro at: ratcityparade@gmail.com.
I don’t make it a habit of posting press releases on this blog, but this sound entertaining - a film screening on Friday, presenting Lee Kazimir’s documentary about his journey - by foot - across Europe. Blisters in sympathy, anyone?
Chicago-based filmmaker Lee Kazimir will present his first documentary feature locally for the first time this Friday at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art.
The film, entitled More Shoes, is an autobiographical travelogue, and tells the story of Kazimir’s six-month walk across continental Europe, entirely on foot.
More Shoes shows how an epic, snail-paced journey can change one man’s outlook on the world. The film features a colorful cast of characters that Kazimir meets as he passes through the towns and villages of seven different European countries.
The film has played at over 20 film festivals worldwide this year, and recently won “Best Documentary” at the Atlanta Documentary Festival. This is the first Chicago screening for More Shoes, and serves as a preview for next year’s theatrical run and DVD release through Bend Sinister Pictures.
“We’ve had great responses from audiences at festivals this year, everywhere from China to Russia to Detroit,” says Kazimir, “and it’s meaningful for me to bring it here to Chicago for its first screening among friends and supporters.”
More Shoes was largely funded by individual donations from readers of the blog he kept during the walk and production of the film.
Friday’s screening is at 7.30pm at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, located at 2320 W. Chicago Avenue in Chicago, Illinois.
More information is available from the film’s website, or by contacting Lee Kazimir directly, by email at leekazimir@gmail.com or by phone at 708.280.9781.
I don’t know these people, but I thought they were kinda funny lookin’
