June Festivals

Every time I think about California, I miss it. But summer has come to Chicago, and I am loving being here. We've had a great weekend; yesterday, we hit up a bunch of Hyde Park yard sales (didn't buy anything) and the 57th Street Art Fair. The fair was expensive, but we got some really good corn on the cob and saw some cool stuff. My favorite booth was "kinetic sculpture" by Jeffrey Zachmann, which provides us with the image below. Basically, he makes beautiful whirring Rube-Goldberg machines.

His website is pretty cool. You can see more of his machines, including some gigantic ones that seem to fill up entire rooms. There are links to movies of them working, but I couldn't get any of the movies to play. Maybe you'll have better luck. You can also commission a piece from the website--but I wouldn't suggest it. The small ones we saw in his book at the fair were thousands of dollars already!

I liked some of the photography, too. A San Francisco photographer was there with serious and beautiful shots of Gui Lin. There was a also a fun series of miniature people-figures doing funny things, by Audrey Heller.

If you look closely, you can see the tiny broom that the tiny woman is using to sweep up the crumbs.

So that was yesterday. Today, we went to the Printer's Row Book Fair, which was awesome. We met up with Isabel and spent all afternoon wandering around the three or four blocks of booths. We got an armful of books and visited Printer's Row Fine and Rare Books, a small but absolutely beautiful bookshop with books that are indeed fine and rare (autographed copies of books by Kerouac, Hemingway, Melville, etc.). I picked up some supercheap art books. There were some neat posters, too. We bought an 1863 map of South America, showing Bolivia back when it still had access to the Pacific (before Chile took that part of it, along with part of Paraguay). We avoided buying a poster that I was immediately drawn to, in a love-hate way; it was probably about fifty years old and very big, and it advertised the glory of the Cultural Revolution with bold colors and the smiling faces of our comrades. It cost $40 and was gone by the time we went around its booth again at the end of the day. I didn't want it, really, but it made me feel horrible to think about some college student tacking it to their dorm room wall as a monument to kitsch. Communism, as it has existed on this earth, terrifies me.

Anyway, I had a wonderful weekend. Now it's time to get back to writing my end-of-trimester narratives! Oh but before I go, one last treat: hands on stanzas, a poetry center where one of Isabel's friends works (until next fall, anyway, when she will begin the MFA Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa). Their latest project has been to get the poems of some of their elementary school students printed big in bus stops. The project is called "elevated verse," since the CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) is famous for its El (short for "elevated") trains. The poems are side-splitting and heartbreaking. More so than Dave Eggers, I would dare to venture. One thing that makes me mad, even furious about it though is that CTA put all the posters in nice neighborhoods (thinking I guess that the program would be more interested in advertising itself there?). The kids whose poems they are won't even see them unless they venture out of their neighborhoods. And the whole spirit of the project, to bring poetry to people who don't have much of it, is lost.

Anyway here is a sample.

Homework

My work has been done
to experience the city.
The big city sits in
land. Far away from Chicago
sits Texas. To day
dream far away in a
land of big. Bigger than an
ocean. My eyes fold to
see a surprise so big.
I start to think I own
that place. I feel like I've
even been there.

by Jonathan R.
Bernhard Moos Elementary School


Dear Tree,
Tree! Where were you
yesterday? I miss you.

My friend Book, he told
me all about you.

I hope you come back
soon so we could have

a big party today at 5:45
Your friend, Air

by Loc N.
Helen C. Peirce School of International Studies

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival

It doesn't feel like mid-autumn (more like mid-summer to me), but that's what it's called. Anyway, I was browsing the internet and found that Chicago's moon festival/mid-autumn festival was happening, so Patrick and I took the commuter rail up north to check it out. Here are the notable bits, in the order that I observed them:

A) The web advertised the festival's features as "supercool mooncake" and "one frickin' giant moon."

1) Almost no one there was Chinese, apart from some of the performers and booth-workers. I guess the festival wasn't in Chinatown.

2) On stage, there were two girls engaged in a sword fight set to a loud, traditional Chinese song--techno remix.

3) The spring rolls and potstickers were kinda mushy.

4) We were only around for the last half hour, but we caught the grand finale: teenage lion-dancers, doing their thing first to a brief burst of cymbals and drums, then to the stereo accompaniment of "Lose Control" by Missy Elliot and Ciara. They ended with Mariah Carey's "Shake It Off" (though they didn't dance to that last song quite as vigorously).

5) There was no mooncake. Supercool or not. None, period.

If you could make your expectations of this event as low as possible, then add in a few random quirks, you would probably have a pretty good idea of what it was like. We only caught the last half hour, so maybe it was partly our fault. Anyway, we had a good time people-watching and walking by the lake by the light of the full harvest moon.

I didn't get any good moon festival pictures, so I did a web search for some. Couldn't find any. This led me to a Google Image Search for "san francisco," which turned up this awesome photograph from the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition, which took place in SF. It struck me that although I know all this stuff about Chicago's Columbian Exposition, I've never even heard of the Panama Pacific International, and I have no idea where this "Tower of Jewels," as it was called, stood in its day. The only structure that survives is the dome-thing at the Palace of Fine Arts. (Is the dome itself the Palace? If not, what is? See, this is the extent of my ignorance.) Pretty amazing.

About Town

We've been taking weekends to wander around Chicago some more. Here you see the Water Tower, one of the few buildings to survive the Great Fire of 1871. We spent the evening on the Hancock Building's 94th-floor observation deck, then got ice cream at the Ghiradelli on the corner. I'm renewing my love of opulent window-shopping on the Magnificent Mile. I actually had a dream about going to the mall with Patrick and looking at iridescent dresses with huge skirts.




Buckingham Fountain
at night. The largest illuminated fountain in the world, supposedly. The lights change colors quite spectacularly, but this picture came out
the best.




Patrick's dad was here last weekend. We wandered around Evanston (visiting Patrick's great-grandfather's house), Millenium Park (free concert by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra), and the Chicago Cultural Center, which used to house Chicago's main public library. It features two magnificent glass domes, one by Tiffany and this one by Millet. The light on the floor is not sunlight shining through the windows, but artificial light shining through tiles in the floor. The overall effect is quite beautiful.




We went on one of those architectural boat tours of the Chicago River, too. Then we wandered around downtown, past the most beautiful Bloomingdale's in the world. It was built in 1912 in Islamic Revival style for the Ancient Arabic Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. Now it's Bloomies Furnishings and Housewares or something. Anyway, we found this LEGO man in another mall nearby. He has a chicken (LEGO also, of course) on his head and a busted Lego egg on his shoulder. But look at his face! Have you ever seen such humanity!?!

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