Saturday, June 10, 2006
(8:17 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Surprisingly enough
Getting crapped on by a seagull isn't that big a deal. Of course, in my case, it was on the back of my shirt rather than on my head. Yet I imagine that even if it had been my head, it would have been a fixable problem -- my fellow citizens would surely rally to my aid, offering kleenex, handkerchiefs, etc., and everyone would feel really good about this Genuine Human Interaction Among Strangers In The Big City. (I suppose that in good blogger fashion, I should give a "hat tip" to David Foster Wallace for the Capitalizing Every Word Of An Entire Phrase Thing.)"That's why I love living in Chicago! People aren't really obtrusively friendly, but if a bird craps on your head, you know you're not alone." Of course, in this case I was sitting at a picnic table with Lauren and two of her friends from out of town, taking a lunch break at the Chicago Blues Festival, having just seen Big George Brock. (One of these friends had read that Big George spent some time as a bear wrestler; when asked about it after the show, he said, "I've wrestled a bear or two in my day.") No strangers needed to come to my aid; I was well-stocked with people I already knew.
Believe it or not, I was eating my very first Chicago-style hot dog at the time of this incident, or else I had recently finished it. We were sitting around enjoying ourselves, and this lady walked up to me and said a bird had pooped on me. She seemed very sorry to have to be the one to deliver this news.
We spent a lot of time in the Art Institute, too -- last night we took in one of the free lectures, then today we just wandered around, primarily in the medieval stuff, at Lauren's request. I knew of one particular painting that had multiple stories depicted on it, but it turns out that the Olivet professor who pointed it out on the Art Institute tour (as part of the retrospectively very worthwhile "Intro to Fine Arts" class) only pointed it out because it was such an extreme example. There was a depiction of the Fall, for instance, where the foreground was Adam and Eve eating the apple, and off in the distance they're being expelled from the Garden. In another one, the main image is the Last Supper, and in a corner -- as though you're seeing it through the window -- Jesus is washing the feet of the disciples. The other corner is a view of a city street.
I can't quite put my finger on why, but I normally avoid the Impressionists like the plague, even though they're the pride of the Art Institute. I prefer the later modern art, because it's more obvious on first glance that I don't understand it. Of course, this excludes the forms of modern art that seem to be created for the sake of their theoretical blurb.
We've had this discussion before. Looking back at the post, I recognize now that I would never walk all the way from the Art Institute to the Museum of Contemporary Art. Of course, back then I was a suburbanite who was intimidated by the bus -- now I'm putting my damn truck in storage and going carless, in complete contradiction to everything America stands for. I'm a veritable CTA evangelist. Last night I even convinced Lauren to get a Chicago Card Plus.
Ah, Chicago! The city of broad shoulders! All the amenities of a world-class urban center, with a Midwestern sensibility! Why would anyone ever want to live anywhere else? Why?!
