1. You know where you are? You're in the Jungle, baby...
I've recently had a breakthrough when it comes to my navigational skills, passing through denial, anger, bargaining, anger, depression, and into acceptance of the fact that I don't have any. It shouldn't have taken this long, since an ex-girlfriend used to constantly remind me that I couldn't walk across a large room in a straight line, and during the bargaining phase I got a GPS to give me audible directions, so now I still miss all the turns, so it spends most of its time telling me “Please make a legal U-turn” in a pleasant female voice.
Unfortunately the most direct paths to Galena all involve plunging into the woods with a lantern and a bloodhound and hoping you come out the other side without being eaten by trolls, and the only way I've ever gotten there without getting lost was by insisting that any road I used had to be illustrated on the map with a red line as thick as Peter North, and as a result took a decidedly unscenic trip through several hours of Iowa cornfields. Wanting to cut a couple hours off the trip but not wanting to ask directions from a Wisconsin survivalist selling fireworks out of a camouflaged schoolbus (at least not again), I thought I'd try the wisdom of my Great Uncle Burr, who forsook the use of maps and street names and instead navigated entirely by the use of the stars and a photographic recollection of the terrain, yet knew the best route to get anywhere... a true Magellan of the Maid-rite. Since Burr's wisdom was accumulated and distilled through my father's recollections and tendency to include detours through every state park he could reach before anybody asked where he was going, and I was concerned that the inevitable “clump of trees” that forms a critical signpost in all of Burr's sui generis routes might have been cut down and made into somebody's deck, I thought I'd check this against a map and make my own decision, which turned out to be unwise.
The best route through the back roads of Iowa involves finding a way south to US-20, which is a nice wide, level road designed for high speeds with proper passing lanes, but it takes forever going straight south down I-35, plus there's always that risk I'd space out and end up asking directions at the Alamo. So you have to figure out a way to get east to US-218, which at least in Iowa, has been rebuilt into another modern 4-lane highway. I got really clever and decided to pick up 218 as early as possible back where it hits I-35 in Owatonna, home of the fighting Magic Pumpkins, and pass into Iowa through Austin, MN, which served as nursery to both spam and the Gear Daddies, given my extensive collection of Gear Daddies, Martin Zellar and the Hardaways, and Billy Dankert and the Real Austinaires albums. The classic route to Galena goes down highway 61 and has that whole Bob Dylan, God said to Abraham kill me a son, how many roads must be blocked with tipped over bales of hay sort of thing going, so I thought I might have better luck with 218 and the more upbeat tunes of the Gear Daddies, mainstay of the Mower County Fair. As it happens, parts of highway 218 are about a step above a dirt road, with years of patches of blacktop cobbled together into a narrow road swarming with junebugs, rhythmically pattering into my windshield, and then I remembered that track off of Can't Have Nothin' Nice that goes “218 is a lonely road for me”, and it certainly was. It is kind of nice to get out there into the countryside of scenic Mower County, teeth chattering as you you speed down the cratered road, up and down hills, until you slam on the brakes to avoid plowing into a dump truck going 25mph with no way to pass him for a half hour.
I figured it would open up past Austin, but then I discovered something that should have been obvious, when you consider the music of Billy Dankert, Austin resident and former Gear Daddies drummer, a generally talented guy who manages to combine this pleasant sound with a slightly disturbed romantic wit. He captured really beautifully this sense of growing up in a small town and feeling the steel jaws of a trap close over him as he got older in “Open Wide”, and especially “One Voice”, a pleasant yet haunting ditty that later turned into a cautionary tale about killer bees (seriously, don't let your children play around that apiary). What Billy Dankert was trying to warn me about is that as happens all too often on the back roads of the US highway system, once you get to Austin, the road signs all disappear, and US 218 seems to plunge into a residential neighborhood and disappear, with no hint of coming back out. Lost in the birthplace of spam, I feared I had wandered into some sort of Upton Sinclair inspired nightmare in which sausages rose up out of the asphalt to ensnare my tires, and I'd spend the rest of my life feeding pig snouts into a meat grinder while getting terrorized by a supervisor in an ugly striped sweater with knives on his fingers. And it's not like I wasn't warned: like the creepy gas station attendant in the first reel of every horror movie who warns our heroes to get out of town before sundown, my GPS spent all the time after I passed Owatonna telling me to turn around and periodically suggested an updated route back to the interstate.
I headed east on the last cross street, figuring it was at least the right direction, and hoping to find a southbound road that didn't have a stop sign every two blocks, and of course, that road came to an abrupt end at the beginning of a large wooded area, where a wolf in a dress and bifocals wiping his mouth with a red hood beckoned from behind a tree. Fortunately, figuring I was good and screwed, my GPS relented and smugly gave me the way out of Austin heading south into Iowa. To any tempted to take this route, around Osage or Charles City or somewhere 218 does turn into a decent highway all the way to US 20, and from there it's open freeway and smooth sailing all the way to Dubuque, but for god's sake just don't stop at the gingerbread house. Okay, I made that part up, but I did stop off for something sweet at a DQ in Cedar Falls, only to have the girl at the counter go back and fetch this old hag out of the back who insisted on feeling my arm before making my Misty Freeze. Make of that what you will, and pack plenty of breadcrumbs. I eventually did make it to Galena, and due to the hospitality of dear friends, spent a couple of enjoyable days in idyllic surroundings in a hotel on a hill overlooking rolling green countryside, enjoying the fresh air and sounds of nature, and sleeping on the nastiest urine stained hide-a-bed I've ever seen.
2. Bitch slap rapping but nothing done (and no cocaine tongue)
I was in Galena for a triathlon, or more accurately to watch a triathlon, since I wouldn't run five miles if Big Foot was chasing me (a situation I occasionally thought I might encounter driving to Galena through the morass of unmarked trails that is southwestern Wisconsin). The Galena triathlon is a tough one, starting in a chilly lake and winding over rolling hills into a town clinging to the side of the Mississippi River valley, but it's through verdant, fresh countryside, which may or may not be better appreciated with tears in your eyes from the pain and adrenaline high. For my part, I quickly discovered that the triathlon is really not a great spectator sport, since 1400 people on a beach in matching black wetsuits all kind of look the same so I had no idea where my friends were, and a couple hours of watching heats of people dive into an icy lake seemed like a pretty stupid way to spend the morning. Eager to avoid getting trapped when the roads were closed for the bikers, I started the trek back to the field where my car was parked, with the help of a kindly man on a golf cart with a thick German accent. He drove me part of the way, but then I don't know if he was Adolf Eichmann or something, but when I asked what part of Germany he was from and how he came to be in Galena he threw me out of the cart and drove away. I did get out scant minutes before they closed the lot and the entrance to the road, and I tried to race back to town before the entire road was closed, passing what I figured had to be most of the local law enforcement establishment at road blocks, including one guy, I swear to god, in a leather vest with a cowboy hat and a tin star like he thought he was Wyatt Earp. Since I thought Marshall Earp couldn't catch me on horseback and I had a wide-open Stagecoach Trail in front of me I figured I'd open it up as much as I could to get back before spectators gathered at the finish line only to have me come crashing through, horn honking. It's a nice drive, up and down those hills at 80 mph, when you know you won't come over a hill blind and crash right into a combine going 20mph down the road (or at least I hoped not).
Unfortunately the Jo Davies Sheriff's Department had other ideas, and I was diverted down a series of gravel roads back to town, where I hit on an idea to entertain myself while waiting for my friends to finish the race. Since the entire Sheriff's Dept. seemed to be out on Stagecoach directing traffic, I figured Galena would be wide open for an epic crime spree, like a full-on Batman villain, purple suit and white clown make-up orgy of mayhem leaving a smoke and graffiti scar down main street. Any supervillain will tell you that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, so I sat down for a waffle first, and discovered the fatal flaw in my plan when the Sheriff sat down opposite me at the counter. Talk about intelligence-led policing, that guy was on me like white on rice before I even designed a supervillain costume. So instead I hit a couple art galleries and a frame shop, and broke something which I then had to purchase and hang on my wall. Bumbling around I managed to miss the whole race except for the big barbecue at the end, where the stragglers were tossed on the fire to feed the winners, who then received their “I am a Triathlete – Biker – Swimmer – Cannibal” tattoos. Seriously, when they say the Galena triathlon is tough, they aren't just talking about the rolling hills. Okay, that didn't happen, but nobody's reading this anyways so I can tell it any way I want. And this part is true, Amstelboy got spanked by his woman in that race, and he wasn't happy about it... like the poet says, sometimes he gets so tense but he can't speed up the time.
Chapter Three: Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty
We celebrated the race in style, gathering for what strikes me as the antithesis of the Independence Day bash with Toby Keith and exploding bombshells, as the more progressive end of town gathered for dinner on a sheltered porch watching woodland creatures rummaging through the creek bed, and discussing the usual liberal topics: the way our hands our tied while the billions shift from side to side and the wars go on with brainwashed pride for the love of God and our human rights are swept aside, things of this nature. After heading into town for a knees-up with some local bands and a 12 year old kid doing the time warp, our footsteps were drawn as they always are to the Paradise, which I always remember fondly for being there in years past watching the 4th of July parade with Butch, the Earl of Jo Davies County... I can't help a little smile stepping into the Paradise. It was in full swing on a Saturday night, with cash trading hands around the pool table and batting eyelashes everywhere asking oh won't you please take me home. Some of my friends got snookered into a high stakes pool game with the local gentry, and upon losing were sent scurrying to the bar to refresh the victors' throats with the most expensive sipping whiskey in the house ($5), while I had a fascinating time with a Gaelic scholar and a sapphist and sometime cougar (she insists it's just a phase), until a Guns & Roses song came on. Then I got the first clue to a mystery that has plagued me since 1993... is Axl Rose is still out there somewhere? Because I tell you, I met somebody in the Paradise whose intimate familiarity with all things Axl went beyond what a fan gleans from wikipedia and years of Rolling Stone interviews, going back to Axl's childhood, and I think she was trying to tell me something. I didn't assign much significance to it until I mentioned his dancing style and she insisted she could recreate it, to my amusement, since I love impressions. Then as I was preparing to leave, “Sweet Child of Mine” came on, and out of the corner of my eye I saw her start to dance... I turned to say goodnight to the dancing girl but she was gone and in her place the specter of Axl Rose, wistfully swaying to his own twenty year old tune, in that eclectic, willowy dancing style, and the way she captured that vision of Axl was beyond eerie and into something else. Stepping back out into the night, I planted a kiss on the window in one of those “I hope that was funny and not creepy” sort of gestures to get a laugh out of Axl and the Cougar, and wandered back down Main Street.
I've seen some of the world's greatest works of art, creations that have stood the test of time for hundreds and thousands of years, and many more beautiful things that have not, and as a certain Redwood Rapunzel used to point out to me, the ones that bring me to tears more likely than not capture a moment in time that ties together long threads into an inseparable knot on which for that instant the entire world turns. That gigantic statue of Laocöon being tormented by the serpents, or Canova's statue of Cupid and Psyche at the moment of embrace, or the last touch of the blood-stained shirt at the end of Brokeback Mountain, when the tragic enormity of a lifetime's worth of decisions is contained in that gesture and a deeply stifled sob (make fun of me all you want, Amstelboy, it's still a good movie). And in that moment, it was if Axl had stepped into the smoky shadows of the 1980's LA clubs (where he rose to prominence and will live on in perpetual youth in the memories of aging clubbers) and emerged into the Paradise to enjoy his legacy in permanent rotation on the jukebox. And Axl was looking good that night.
Chapter Four: As years all went by, with all the voices I've heard, something has died
After that night in the Paradise I started reviewing what I knew about the disappearance from the world of the wit and majesty of Axl Rose. It's been twenty years since Appetite for Destruction, and it's been over a decade since The Spaghetti Incident? with Axl gone quiet all that time. The claim is that he's been holed up in a recording studio working on an album called Chinese Democracy, but consider that Fleetwood Mac's one-time eight-month recording session is commonly cited by musicians as maddeningly excessive... perhaps literally since one of them took a shot at the mailman bringing him his royalty checks. Axl was pretty nuts before he started Chinese Democracy, occasionally checking in to hospitals and being discharged two days later without shoelaces, and apparently scheduling shows on his own secret inner clock, while the band showed up at 7pm but hedged their bets and printed “Around 7pm” as the start time on the tickets. He also famously threw his mike down and stormed off stage when the teleprompters didn't work, claiming he knew his songs but got so lost in the incessant, insistent running dialogue in his head that he needed an occasional reminder of where he was supposed to be.
So maybe his reported bipolar disorder is what keeps him persistently motivated to keep working on his new album yet unable to complete it. However, no songs have been released in any form, theoretically because Axl is endlessly reworking and rerecording all the songs, and he has also replaced all the people around him in the band numerous times, so nobody knows exactly what has been recorded and how much progress Axl is making on the album every time he makes a fresh start and re-starts the recording process. Here's the curious thing: several album covers have been leaked and the name of the album, “Chinese Democracy”, is something the mercurial Axl has never changed, and the overall style remains the same. The name of the band has remained “Guns & Roses”, despite a conflict with the former members of L.A. Guns and Hollywood Rose who formed GNR in it's heyday and resent Axl using the name. Now assume for a moment though that there is no new album, but Axl wanted to convince the world there was. His phantom project attains a certain permanence in the minds of the public through years of murmurs and promises about a release date, and keeping the Guns name on it insures there will be animated discussion of the upcoming album for years from anyone with an interest in or Guns or Rose. There are witnesses to his work on the project from the steady churn of the band and other staff, but if he only worked on the same song with each new group, recording it several times to “get it just right” and then fired them all in a manic episode, Axl would only have to appear back in L.A. Periodically to keep this going for years. Keeping the same name for his album makes it easier to keep his story straight, and shuffling the people around him means nobody digs too deep. Everybody who would speculate on Axl's whereabouts thinks they know exactly where he is: in a studio re-recording tracks for “Chinese Democracy”, but it's possible for him to be leading a completely different life for most of the year.
Even if you accept my theory as possible, I admit so far it's highly implausible because I have yet to offer any explanation of the flip side of Mr. Rose's double life. My claim as to his how he could disappear so fully from the world while still occasionally popping back to L.A. to stoke rumors about “Chinese Democracy” is this: after living the wild life as a stadium attraction, he's hiding out as a female graduate student, immersing himself in the quiet world of academia and studying Welsh. And I know this because I've met him (back in chapter three). The flexible scheduling of academia allows an assistant professor or student who can live off his (or her) GNR royalties plenty of opportunities for an annual trip back to SoCal to work on “Chinese Democracy” and storm out in protest after leaking a new sketch for the album cover. In addition, people who liked GRN back in the 80's and early 90's never socialized with the people who make up the more esoteric disciplines of academia, like any language not used as a langue vehiculaire somewhere (English, French, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, etc) leaving Axl free to speak Welsh in anonymous bliss in some tiny office full of wild-eyed arm-chair revolutionaries. And he had to create a new persona, MTV wouldn't have just let him go: Izzy Stradlin left the band and released an album and they wouldn't shut up about it for months before the market ruled that “former GNR rythym guitarist” doesn't guarantee a platinum album and a prominent place in pop culture.
I have to consider the clues Axl left us before he left: he was always strutting up and down the stage in a kilt and a catcher's mask, which gave him great practice walking and sitting in a skirt, a skill that I learned (under the sharp mockery of a couple of women) does not come naturally. It's a long story involving a crazy camp counselor who lives in Antarctica because he says ice can really add a lot to a drink, convincing a buxom lady to run naked in the snow with me through the grounds of the archdiocese, and trying to prove something to incredulous, buttoned-down New England Catholics, but really I'm sure it would just bore you all. Anyways, for a grown man it does involve un-learning a lot about movement and posture to move through society in something frilly and pleated that blows in the wind, and given Axl's obvious affection for Gaelic culture, I'm sure he followed tradition and went with an unfurnished basement. I'm sure a stadium full of groupies and the paparazzi lurking around every corner gave Axl the crucible he needed for a crash course in keeping the package in the mailbox, so to speak. As far as my claims to his love of Gaelic culture, he does speak Welsh, and if you'll recall, the big concert performance from which GNR drew a lot of their later videos was at Wembley Stadium, where the proximity to his beloved Cymru brought out the best in the mercurial Rose. And there was that time he played November Rain on dueling pianos with Sir Elton John, UK resident and friend to alternative lifestyles.
In a world where everybody wonders what ever became of Axl Rose, nobody suspects him in his current female guise, and that's the real genius. In the film The Prestige Christian Bale's character makes the observation that the real magic trick is in making an illusion of your whole life, so that nobody can ever detect the misdirection and transformation... consider some of Mr. Rose's iconic behavior: his screeching, wavering singing voice was so obviously mannered as to be unmistakably identifiable as Axl Rose and no one else. He lived his public life as a bipolar dynamo doing crazy stunts, with a mannered dancing style some say he borrowed from Davey Jones, with long hair streaming out from under gypsy bandannas (which indicates it may not have been real either) and especially crazy outfits that drew attention to his wardrobe, and away from his face, making me wonder if anybody really ever looked him in the eye before he scuttled away frantically. If he were to stop (as Axl might say) “using his illusion”, move and speak normally and put on a tasteful wool skirt and sweater, would he really look anything like his stage persona? Let me put it this way, for a new persona, he didn't need to invent Alice, he just had to stop playing Axl.
Some might say it's still a stretch to think he's reinvented himself as a woman, but I say he had to be trying to tell us something with that catcher's mask he used to wear. And given all this circumstancial evidence, Axl Rose of Indiana disappears, and I meet Alice Rose of Indiana (not her real name... or his) who shares all his interests in Gaelic culture and whose childhood in the Hoosier state tracks Axl's up until his rise to stardom? I don't believe in that kind of coincidence, and as I said, Alice just had to choose to stop being Axl. But in the dark corners of the Paradise to the nostalgic tones of “Sweet Child of Mine”, Axl/Alice dared for a few moments to drift back into character, and the game was up. Confirming my suspicions, the always on-the-run Rose kept me from asking questions about her current life and whereabouts by claiming to be uprooting and leaving the country soon... for England, where presumably Sir Elton's old futon is available for her to crash. Oh, and for any groupies and curious boys who missed their shot at pre-Spaghetti Incident Axl and want to try again, unfortunately Axl/Alice is married, but my good friend Screwdriver assures me she's waiting for something better to come along, so hope springs eternal.
The alternate explanation for Axl Rose's disappearance and Alice Rose's re-appearance include several factors. GNR rode the wave of 80's music culture and MTV, and the rise of alternative music as a response to the excess of the 80's pushed them aside, as it did Def Leppard and numerous imitators, much like reactionary rise of punk to kill off the 70's. At the precipice, GNR released their worst album ever (according to people who actually listened to it) and Kurt Cobain committed suicide, devastating legions of teenagers and further making Axl Rose, Eddie Vedder, Morissey, and all the other suicidal lead singers no damned fun anymore. Add to that Axl's famously difficult temperament and Slash's inability to see out from under that top hat, and it's possible the two could just never get together to work on a new album for a few years. Personally I think the vanished pop icon + woman I met for like four hours = mystery I should investigate theory is much more fun, but probably also explains why so many people I talk to smile nervously and back away slowly. And it may have taken a couple months to get around to publishing my theory, but I still got it out ahead of Chinese Democracy.
Chapter 5: Oh my god it's full of stars
In 1999 Liam Neeson apparently considered quitting film acting to be exclusively a stage actor, and credited that decision in large part to his experience playing Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menace. He refused to reprise that role in any part, otherwise he would have plugged a couple holes appearing briefly in episodes II and III and VI. Since Neeson took over Alec Guiness's “I'm an artist, damnit” rejection of Star Wars fandom, the true heir to the bitter legacy of Obi Wan Kenobi, Ewan MacGregor, confined himself to appearing on a magazine cover in a shirt reading “I did Star Wars and all I got was this lousy t-shirt”.
Given all that, I was a bit surprised to hear Liam Neeson narrating a film about black holes at the planetarium. The whole experience, an omnitheater with psychedelic images of spinning galaxies and the unraveling tendrils of gas giants spiraling into the turbulent vortex of a black hole, with Mr. Qui-Gon Jinn himself narrating the throbbing rainbow plunge into the maw of the singularity was certainly trippy, and exactly the sort of hipster nonsense I'd expect the man who didn't want to be a Jedi to turn up his nose at. And yet it was a lot of fun, and it's great Liam Neeson leveraged his lightsabre skills to do something educational.
The Adler Planetarium is a decent addition to Chicago's museum campus, and I love planetariums (planetaria to you Anglophiles who use Latin plurals) and omnitheaters, and I was saddened by the demise of the Minneapolis Planetarium, so when I went in I was an easy mark for a student membership. Now I have to go back at least once this year to justify my membership, and use my 10% discount at Galileo's Cafe. The solarium that houses the cafe has this United Federation of Planets vibe and a great panoramic view of waves breaking out on Lake Michigan that I'm sure is a nice way to ward off stress and sunlight deficiency in the winter for Chicagoans who aren't afraid of science or the #12 bus, but on a hot, still July day, I had to exit quickly because the last thing I wanted was more warm sunbeams. I'll return to the solarium for a drink this winter, just as soon as the Witte Maus and the Dragon Lady are shipped off to the Orient and I break into their vacant apartment for the winter.
Chapter 6: Episode #71: The Enemy Within, or The Diet Coke of Art (just one calorie)*
I've discovered that there are only so many times I can go to the Art Institute or the Field Museum before the spectacle of seeing the same broken jade hairbrush behind three inches of armored glass loses its sense of wonder, as does the collection of “Paintings the Europeans Didn't Want” in every American museum that has to be stacked floor to ceiling with the remnants of Gustave Courbet's work that wasn't urinated on by 19th century French art critics, and mile after mile of boring haystacks and water lilies. The obvious alternative is the Museum of Contemporary Art which in my experience always has some gigantic set of installations that make for a brief, puzzling trek through the first floor galleries looking at a wall of carpet with scratches in it facing a wall of styrofoam with gouges in it, both labeled something like “The Despondence of Joy in the Hindu Morning #19”, or room after room of video screens of charcoal drawings of burning buildings. The upper gallery of the MCA has had an interesting photography exhibit, but after a few months I've seen enough of it... other than the cartoon mural with the Medusa vomiting music and the Chinese food delivery girl upended on her bicycle with a bowl of noodles on her head, that was worth another trip. The room with a video of a girl swimming split by a mirror while Chris Isaak's “Wicked Game” plays over the PA with a kid hoarsely screaming the vocal track, now that I only needed to see once.
The International Museum of Surgical Science
In my search for something new I found a couple museums in Chicago that are always good for a reaction of “You went where?” when I describe them to friends and acquaintances, and occasionally a follow-up of “For god's sake why?” The International Museum of Surgical Science definitely elicits the latter question, but when I went there on a lark (it was Tuesday and I'm a complete whore for free museum admission) it was more memorable than I expected. The museum is located in an old lake front mansion on North Lake Shore Drive modeled after Marie Antoinette's “cottage” at Versailles, with tiled staircases and fireplaces in every room, donated by its owner on her death to a surgical college in order to continue her work promoting the advancement of medical science. The walls feature murals of doctors throughout history performing radical medical procedures, with busts and portraits in the stairwells of the noteworthy contributors to medicine from outside Europe and America. There's a drawing room with huge grand windows lined with huge imposing statues of doctors and scientists from Hippocrates to Marie Curie, and the overwhelming sense of obeisance to those insightful and sometimes daring enough to create new techniques for the practice of medicine was surprisingly moving. There's a certain whimsy to the art gallery on the top floor that offers artwork based on anatomy, like blood vessels in petri dishes and the gift shop has a nice range of plush microbes and red blood cells with cute googly eyes for sale. Granted I felt like the biggest dork in the world entering the museum since everybody else there was part of a college class filling out work sheets, but I resisted the urge to join in on a tour with an instructor giving me quizzical “Where did you come from?” looks. I'm certainly not going to steer anybody there, but that was certainly an interesting diversion.
The Museum of Contemporary Photography
My favorite spot I've discovered in my recent trips to Chicago is the MoCP, described by a guide book as “a light snack for your brain”, given that it's only about two rooms, a classroom with art on the walls, an entryway to somebody's office, and a hallway in a stairwell, but it's a tasty snack. Generally the museum is divided into three galleries with the work of 3-4 artists between them, and every time I've been, there has been at least one captivating, often provocative collection adorning some wall. Some of the work I've seen there has occasionally been provocative enough to require being very secure in one's appreciation of art to linger in front of it without feeling the eyes of strangers boring a hole into one's back. Here's some of what I can recall that I found stimulating, with only the dimmest recollection of the artist's names, and as I said, the aim of a lot of it is provocative:
A frothy exhibition of Robert Heinecken's work using a lot of existing images of women from magazines and other media. A whole wall was dedicated to the art of catalog photography with instructions and illustrative polaroids on how to achieve the “natural” pose that best showcases the product without making anyone uncomfortable, and facing it was a collection of what looked like catalog pictures of women in lingerie, with the nude bodies of other women drawn from erotica superimposed over their lingerie replacing what was covered, so in effect, the model in a photo would be covering her own breasts with somebody else's chosen to match hers. It's a disconcerting effect, separating some of the layers of exposure and stimulus that surround the eroticism and exposure of these women, who are in coy, sexy poses, and displaying all manner of breasts and vaginas with roaming hands, but not actually exposing themselves.
The last time I went a couple of large landscapes turned out to be fake, composed of elements from disparate landscapes to create new locations. A Saudi Arabian desert combined with an American suburb, unclear which is encroaching on the other, or a bright, red-roofed town and marina added to a barren industrial lake shore full of debris. There was another enormous composite landscape there the first time I went, composed different exposures of the reclining profile of a woman's body, hips flowing into the curve of her neck and onto her calf, all under a rising full moon to make it seem like some undiscovered country.
In the stairwell I've seen an exhibition of beautiful images taken in Japanese love hotels, themed rooms for couples looking for a romantic getaway. In true Japanese style, every variety was on display from the jail cell with the naughty warden to the circus to the doctor's office, and finally to a Hello Kitty themed room with a giant mural of the eponymous feline mutely peering down at her amorous guests like Big Brother (having sex under that thing would haunt my dreams). The empty rooms are so charged with naughtiness but so devoid of life in their clinical condition, they imply the acts that will take place there but not the people, and that's what makes it so unsettling.
The current exhibition in that hallway is of places in America where injustice has occurred, again charged spaces like a scar devoid of the people who gave them their significance, like the stretch of highway where Karen Silkwood was (allegedly) run off the road, or the toxic residences of Love Canal. On the top floor is an exhibition of photographs of divided communities, featuring Northern Ireland and the West Bank, two areas philosophically linked in Northern Ireland's murals that share the same walls and atmosphere of violence.
One of the most beautiful exhibitions I've seen there came from something mired in such a languid, mucous vulgarity that I would never have thought to see anything like this come out of it. Larry Sultan collection “The Valley” took him into the mansions that bizarrely serve as backdrop for much the porn mill that permeates the San Fernando Valley, where an endless stream of plastic women and servile girls submit to grimacing parolees on the same ugly red couch. Sultan's pictures focus on the surroundings, capturing the houses and furnishings, a stone fireplace chimney climbing to the ceiling while a tangle of legs peers over a couch out of frame, or the artifacts of the ordinary daily presence of the tenants: the tipped over box of cornflakes in the kitchen, or a girl's bedroom full of dolls, with a woman's clothes neatly piled on the bed next to her bag of vibrators and lube. Other shots detail the activity surrounding the shoots, capturing the same matter of fact nudity and casual sexuality as Timothy Greenfield-Sanders' “XXX: 30 Porn Star Portraits”, the odd quality that lingers over porn stars when they act like real people, only with a frank nakedness... one description of Sultan's work is that it's as if a dozen naked and horny people just invaded a suburban home for a couple hours. Both projects sound like a horrible idea, but they both produced beautiful photographs.
One of my other favorite projects was collection that featured sets of images blown up to all different sizes taken from different cameras, but all taken of the same person at the same instant, from different angles. What can be seen is different in each image, sometimes because we don't know what we're really looking at until we see it from the right angle, and sometimes just because the aspect that is captured from different views can be so different.
Some of these projects could be observed for hours, while sometimes a lot of the museum can be absorbed in just a few minutes, like a visit I made earlier this year where most of the exhibitions seemed to be stills of early 20th century barn door hinges and the like, and yet a collection of one artist's work, about ten images on a lonely wall, sharp as broken glass. The exhibition was a series of twelve year old girls acting like adults, the most striking being this girl posed in a cocktail dress looking back towards the camera in the classic 20-something club kitten pose, arms crossed with an ashen cigarette as accessory, lips slightly parted in that bored expression that is used to imply sophistication without the threat of intelligence. It's so iconic, and so wrong when this girl hits it so squarely that she illustrates what an adult woman looks like by contrasting her own childish body against it.
It's worth a trip if I ever get anywhere near Michigan Ave is all I'm saying. Southwest corner of Michigan & Harrison, take the red line to Harrison and head towards the lake, or Loop trains to Adams or the Library, pop over to Michigan and head south. Or just follow the crowd of people of unusual intelligence and sophistication who will eventually lead you to the MoCP, presumably on their way to
*-I only find this funny because of a particular set of circumstances involving Austin Powers, a seminar on genocide and fascism, an anatidaean brunette, and the plot of every Star Trek episode ever.
Chapter 7: Of Hipster Hideaways and Sinister Stockings
While in CHI after the triathlon (not even with Big Foot chasing me) Amstelboy and I took in one of Chicago's more obscure bars, tucked away behind a warehouse next to the municipal fleet's garage and gas pumps, where somebody threw up some Christmas lights and neon signs informing passers-by it was “Miller Time” in the windows of his house and started serving beer on the patio. Not a bad spot for a drink on a Tuesday night, with a cop rolling by the neighborhood every sixty seconds for a fill-up and a screwdriver. Like the bird watcher that he is, Amstelboy noted the plumage of the clientèle, the “hipster uniform” as he calls it that requires a certain amount of silver chain on one's pants or skirt, denim or plaid with pleats, and some circa 1980's video game t-shirt. The reference to the 1980's is important, because it's what marks the wearer as being under 25: for the Children of the 80's (this was apparently our attempt at re-branding ourselves when “Generation X” became such a pedestrian sneer) Pac-Man, The Thundercats, Sesame Street and the Muppet Show in their glory days, the Dukes of Hazzard, and the other things printed on these shirts are childhood icons. For the Millennials (their attempt at re-branding themselves when “Generation Y” became such a pedestrian sneer) they're “retro” and actually move in the opposite direction through time, older vs younger. And this is why I have that Sesame Street t-shirt: you may not be a hipster, but you can embarrass them (and yourself) by wearing their uniform, which is so commercialized it's sold by Target... are off the rack “pre-ripped” pants any dumber than acid wash jeans? (At least with Carhartt's, the Widji camper hipster uniform, you had to get that worn look by wearing them.)
So it was in a silly Sesame Street gangsta t-shirt that I took the red line down to Comiskey the next day. This is a mixed experience for a Twins fan, because on the one hand, outdoor baseball in a proper stadium is a rare treat, plus there's the legendary Comiskey Park food court, but on the other hand, I was nervous I'd accidentally say “Black Sox” in the bleachers, and eight guys would throw down their churros (bought at the best food court in the majors) and beat the crap out of me. Chicago baseball is curious in that it's the market least concerned with baseball: you go to Wrigley for the beer and Comiskey for the food. The atmosphere at Wrigley keeps it full, but in a city that loves the Cubs Comiskey famously needs a winner to keep the turnstiles going. I have to say I enjoyed seeing a game out in the fresh air, and nibbling on a kosher hot dog, while the A's thumped the stuffing out the Black Sox. I still don't know what made them collapse so quickly... for a few years the Sox were all about power hitters, and their porous defense and the mercurial nature of power hitters meant they kept losing to the small ball Twins, so they put together a much better roster with table-setters and better defenders, and they won the whole thing. It really surprises me Jerry Reinsdorf couldn't scare up enough to keep some of their players, but then again he and Jerry Krause kept raving about how they were making moves to insure the post-Jordan Bulls didn't collapse like the post-Bird Celtics, and that sure worked out great.
Based on that experience though, I have to offer a few words of advice to the financial professionals of the world. Learn the words to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” because people really do sing it and for mercy's sake at least get up out of your seat, when your team is losing in late innings your cap goes on upside down, don't get up for churros during an at-bat, throw the other team's home run ball back, and don't ever reach over the fence for a ball when your team is fielding... the last guy to do that in Chicago had to be taken out in a police riot van to protect him from the angry crowd. At least one of the bankers I was with that night understood these critical concepts: I honestly just told him to put his cap on upside down as a joke, I had to admit I underestimated the stuffy world of finance when he faithfully his hat in the “rally cap” position.
Chapter 8: I play kickball with my cousins and discover I am a bad, bad man
After one of my trips to Chicago I went directly to Chisago City to spend some time with my cousins at their cabin. This is a very competitive branch of the family, who can make any game into the Superbowl, and it's very easy to get drawn in just even watching them as the tension mounts and the psychological games begin. However I figured I was safe when I joined a three person team composed of myself, my seven year old cousin, and her uncle the gentle giant who safeguards our prisons like that guy from The Green Mile (I never saw that movie so I may be confused) against his wife and a couple of enthusiastic kids in their early teens who implored us to come play kickball in the backyard at their cabin. Usually it's their uncle who crushes aluminum beer cans in his haste to vacuum the beer out of them, his big brother who sublimated his desire to throw a beating to one of his in-laws into some very passionate games of bocce ball, and a couple of their more boisterous sisters who get the trouble started, but this game got out of hand quickly, and I hate to say it was my team doing most of the trash talking... okay all of it.
In my reluctance to let children half my age win, I found myself hitting bunt singles, aggressively running the bases and making headfirst slides to avoid being picked off at first. One of my teammates kicked the ball into a tree which should have ended or at least paused the game, but instead he announced he'd hit a home run, and then did a slow trot around the bases to taunt his wife, niece, and nephew. That's right, the 8 year old girl was the mature one on our team who was just there to have fun. When her grandmother came out to act as umpire and keep things under control, she was told "If you had one more eye you'd be a cyclops, ump." I also recently discovered this isn't a woman you talk back to, because she might throw a meat fork at you. (If I'd known that at the time, when somebody started singing "Three blind mice" after all her decisions, I might have asked her to step away from the grill full of barbecue tools and hot coals.)
Sadly this isn't the only kickball game my cousins have drawn me into where I've walked away slightly ashamed of myself. There was a time where after a cousin made his confirmation all the little kids got together after the church service to play kickball. In a game full of children ranging from ages 5-15, I wasted no time getting to taunting my teenage cousin K___ by calling the infield in during all his at-bats because of his weak leg. And then I kept the taunting going every time he made it to first base. He's a pretty charitable kid and I'm a bad, bad man because he let this go on for hours without objecting, however I noticed when we played Mortal Kombat later he took particular relish in killing my characters before I could figure out how to use the controls. (They changed all of Scorpion's moves around, wtf!) When we really started falling behind, one of my younger cousins, A____, who shares a frighteningly similar temperament to mine tried to advance from first to second, circled the area a couple of times, and finally looked up to see me in shallow center field dragging second base away with my foot. I hate to report that the example of sportsmanship was set by my cousin D____, a tremendous athlete and competitor in his early teens who took over pitching duties and rolled soft balls to the other team out of a sense of competitive fair play (arguing over pitches and whether your eight year old niece got the ball over the plate is a hot topic in these games) and also answered all questions about who was winning by giving a tied score and adding a couple runs for each team as time went on. I should have learned something from his example, but instead after losing terribly at Mortal Kombat, I went right back to taunting my cousin (who I have to admit is way better at MKIII than Amstelboy was at MKII on his best day).
Epilogue: Of Chow Mein and Chopping Men
One other thing came up in my travels I thought I'd share, what with the Big Damn Wedding coming up. Up in Chisago, the party continues until dawn, and I learned from many a sleepless night in Boston life gets awfully silly around 4am. After traveling all day from Chicago and finding a cool, empty bunkhouse (usually packed to the rafters and hot as an oven) waiting for me in Chisago I elected to turn in early and get a good night's sleep, but it came as no surprise to find that my silliest cousin (ironically for this story, her name is Lee Ann) got into a raging argument with her husband around 4am as to whether or not he liked chow mein. He insisted he did not in fact care for chow mein, and she was infuriated because she thought he was lying. After a few hours of sleep, it was kind of hilarious to her that she was so emotionally invested in chow mein, and that she would actually believe her husband would invent antipathy towards the dish. However, I mentioned this story to my parents, and within moments, my mother was angrily shouting at my father for making false claims that he liked chow mein, when she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he did not. I had no idea chow mein was such a difficult subject for couples both young and old, but I did find that I preferred it when I slept right through the inevitable chow mein argument.
The other thing I discovered is when I'm at a cabin I know is frequented by hockey players of all ages and genders, but I unwisely choose to sleep alone in the bunkhouse, it's that much harder to shake that image of Jason looming over my bunk in a hockey mask as I drift off to sleep. If any of the girls ever becomes goalie, I swear to god I'm outta there before she scares the hell out of me popping out from behind a tree in that mask as I'm tiptoeing to the outhouse at 3am.
(By the way, all my cousins' names are blanked out because they're minors and god help them if their social circle googles them and come across my observations about subprime lending, porn, and their kickball skills. Although googling them was in cases amusing... one of them has a friend who apparently has very strong feelings about the quantity of moaning in porn movies, and also probably should have made his Myspace page private before Google's spider crawled it and added it to their cache.)
