Things in Chicago that are free

In no particular order, here are my ten favorite free things to enjoy in Chicago, which can be visited for the price of an "L" ticket.

The Museum of Contemporary Photography

I've raved about this museum at length elsewhere, many times I'm sure. There's always something worth seeing tucked into a corner of this museum, and given the small size of the gallery, it doesn't take long to find. And it's on Michigan Ave in the South Loop, making it easy to pop in.

The Baha'i House of Worship

While it takes a while to make the trip out past Evanston, the Baha'i temple is a tranquil oasis out at the end of the Purple Line. Go in, sit down, enjoy the way the light enters the building and chill out for a few minutes.

National Museum of Mexican Art

Half the fun is getting there, because of the murals at the 18th St Pink Line Station near the museum, which put to shame any other attempt at public art I've seen in the Chicago transit system. I'm not a huge fan of the museum, but the Chupacabra room was very stimulating, and I have to admit I like their gift shop for all my Doogie Howser weird mask needs. (Don't ask.)

Tuesdays at the MCA

The MCA is a very hit or miss kind of museum, with the risk you'll wander in to an video projection of a child swimming while a hoarse child screams the lyrics to Chris Isaak songs. That one was maybe not worth the price of admission, which is why I try to go on Tuesdays and buy something from the MCA's rather fantastic gift shop if I feel like I should chip in. And I have seen some spectacularly neat stuff at the MCA like the dinosaur-sized cat skeleton they had looming over the lobby for a while like an eerie, alien counterpoint to the Field Museum lobby.

Chinatown

There's something delightful about the insular nature of Chinatown, which really feels like another country has sprung up in the space between the Orange and Red Lines, and it's hard to shake the self-conscious feeling of appearing different and speaking a strange language while walking around Chinatown speaking English. Plus I still say sauteed baby octopus and squid with lemon grass at Penang makes for a nice meal.

Signature Lounge

I've never been up to the observation deck on the John Hancock tower, and the all-dancing all-singing all-crapping on your car pigeons that narrate your trip to the top of the Sears Tower really make me hesitant to go back. But the Signature Lounge at the Hancock Tower is a nice place to stop in for a drink with the whole city laid out around you. (Just stay away from the oily focaccia.)

Lincoln Park Zoo

I do like a nice zoo, even on a hot summer day when the animals all get that kind of stoned, weary look that says "You brought me all the way from Africa so I could sit around in the 80% humid, 90 degree Chicago summer? Thanks, it wasn't hot in the Serengetti or anything, this is really great. And don't over-season my gazelle this time."

Garfield Park Conservatory

I like this conservatory for the same reason I like the Baha'i House of Worship, it's very beautiful and calm, and right off the Green Line. The fern room which recreates Chicago in the Cretaceous Period in this lush, moss-covered greenery overgrowing its brick paths with only the waterfalls and fat koi to break the stillness is really an amazing retreat from all the chaos that surrounds the park. And there's a lot else to be said for the Conservatory as well.

Lake Michigan

I do enjoy the shoreline between North Ave and Navy Pier, and the unbroken, open quality of the Chicago shoreline, which will soon be completed by the Calatrava bridge over the river near that sky-scraping dildo he's building in Streeterville. It is a lovely place for a walk, but don't tell anybody I said that or Amstelbooij will be trying to get me to bike to his sailboat in Calumet City (the one his wife doesn't know about).

Kenny Chesney Wake-Up Call

When you least expect it, you too can be roused for a Kenny Chesney pop quiz. Startled and disoriented, you will have no idea what is going on or who you're talking to, only that Kenny Chesney is involved somehow. This is a free service provided to any number in the 312 area code, any time after our operator reaches the office at 2:30am. For those outside the Chicagoland area, also see our 4:52am "What time does Perkins open?" emergency phone call service.

Chicago Destinations

On my last trip to the City of Children dodging fish with Clive Owen, I hit some of my favorite locations and some new ones, and I've decided some things never get old when I go to Chicago. And some things get old awful fast.

Things That Never Get Old:

The Museum of Contemporary Photography always finds at least one nugget of provocative artsy goodness to make the small detour worthwhile. And even if they ever did put on a crappy exhibition, I could never stay angry at a free museum. This time the large picture of a South American shanty town made it all worth it, because of the amount of time it took me to realize that mixed in to all these corrugated tin and paper shacks that had never seen a level were these gleaming cedar homes designed to be off-axis and edgy, blending right into these scrap metal domiciles.

The solarium at the Adler Planetarium is always nice on a cold windy day in Chicago, sunlit and calm with this panoramic view of Lake Michigan. And I still like a nice planetarium show, so I can point up at the night sky and act smart until Amstelbooij cuts me off saying, "Thank you Galileo, now go to bed." (Eppur si muove!)

The best breakfast in the city is still Noogie's, whether it's the original, Too, or Tree. The strawberry and mascarpone napoleon that requires a steak knife to eat is still to die for, and come summer I'm camping out overnight for the first crack at the three berry brioche. The Breakfast Club is good, but three locations just off the red and brown lines is hard to beat.

I also never get tired of Chinatown, just even to walk around for a while, because it really is like another country nestled into a few blocks on the south side. And it's nice to be able to pop down and pick up a little giant clam and tiger balm (it was a wild weekend) and Chinatown's markets are certainly unique. Chinatowns in other cities have been difficult for gentrification to dislodge because many Asian property owners won't sell their Chinatown holdings and give up the character of the neighborhood, so hopefully Chicago's Chinatown is here to stay as well. And Argyle St, which I still think of as "Not-Chinatown" for its concentration of non-Chinese Asian businesses.

Joining that list may be the Baha'i House of Worship in Wilmette. Out at the end of the purple line, it's this beautiful bastion of tranquility, and I know very few people with too much openness and tranquility in their lives. I may add that to my list of places I keep returning to in Chicago, a place that asks nothing but that you be at peace when you enter, and keeps services blessedly short. Certainly shorter than the trip up there... next time I'll be smart enough to pick up a purple express at rush hour.

Things That Were Worth a Trip Once:

The National Museum of Mexican Art has some interesting elements in its collection, especially the political art in the Chupacabra-themed gallery. There's too much old pottery for my taste, so I probably won't make it a point of going out there too often, but I really can't stay away from a free museum for too long.

The L platform at 18th street is so extravagantly decorated by Latino artists that it adds another highlight to the museum. I wish more Chicago stations had their own style, and you can see bits of this at Chinatown, but it seems like a huge opportunity during the huge renovation that has to be done all over the L. Letting local artists painting the panels on some of the platforms is certainly cheap enough to be viable. Also adding to the style of the pink line, I like the ancient subway cars with batwing doors they have banging along that line.

Chinatown's own Chinese-American Museum is interesting for its reminder of how long there has been a largely independent, sometimes segregated Chinese-American community in Chicago, and I hope they are able to continue to develop their exhibits and keep that history alive. I don't know that I'll be buying a $1000 glass brick, but it's important.

The Leather Archives boasts the best collection of uniforms and hardcore gay S&M porn I think you're likely to see in a midwestern museum, and I enjoyed their big screen presentation of short films showing in the theater as well. I resisted the temptation to buy a t-shirt of a muscular, mustached man sodomizing a bound boytoy, even though I do need something to wear around the office, but I like their gift shop. And really what I like most of all is their attitude: friendly and relaxed, without a touch of either shame or defiance... "Hi, we're here, come on in and stay a while."

Things I May Give Another Shot:

The Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Museum in Chinatown is supposedly a one-room museum of Kuomintang memorabilia, which I wouldn't make a trip to see if it wasn't right on the main drag in Chinatown above a storefront. Dr. Sun Yat-Sen is referred to by some as the father of modern China and he's got a bigger museum somewhere in Hong Kong, so I figure it's worth a look if I'm ever back on a weekend... I can't say no to a free museum.

I'm all annoyed at the torrential rain that was pouring down on my last attempt to take in a Twins-Black Sox game at Comiskey, and then last night's game against the Black Sox had a lengthy rain delay as well. I seriously just want to get in some outdoor baseball before the new Twins stadium opens in 2010... I shall return.

I also didn't think the rain and overcast skies did much to heighten my appreciation for James Turrell's Skyspace installation thingy on the UIC campus at Roosevelt and Halsted. Also the screwed up #12 bus getting delayed and overloaded doesn't do much for anybody's appreciation of art. I would like to see Turrell's piece when there's actual light for it to work with, and the fountain that's supposed to deaden some of the street noise and make the place tranquil, rather than dull, windswept and dusty.

Things That Just Failed:

I'm done eating at any restaurant in the Loop. Or basically anywhere with a wait... you would think that would indicate a good restaurant, what it actually means is the people who eat there don't know anywhere else to go, so they just sit and wait for an hour and a half for an uninspiring dinner and a stomach-acid inspiring bill. It's never a great experience, and half the time the staff don't know what the hell they're doing, leaving a tray of half-eaten food next to the table for you to look at as your empty stomach rumbles, then arbitrarily taking the bread plates and utensils away (but leaving the bread)... there is good food in Chicago, but there isn't any place worth waiting an hour behind a line of ovine yuppies. Except Noogies. It's always worth the wait at Noogies.

Anatomy in the Gallery

In my recent trips to Chicago, I decided to get off the beaten path and try and make it to more places I've never been, which has led to some gems (the Bahá'í temple in Wilmette, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 18th St station) and some misfires. I wasn't sure how to classify the International Museum of Surgical Science, which does feature a beautiful building right on the lake (modeled on Marie Antoinette's summer cottage) to house its reverent artwork depicting great healers of the last 2000 years, and a really great gift shop with plush microbes (the red blood cell with googly eyes is cute as can be, and I'm kind of fond of the soft and squiggly syphilis bacterium as well). Sometimes you can like the idea behind something more than the actual implementation, like I have to love a medical museum with its own medical themed art gallery, no matter how strange that art may turn out to be, like an installation of what looks like pasta dried onto construction paper that's selling for $400.

And speaking of their gallery, the IMSS is hosting a gallery opening this Friday May 2 from 5pm-8pm for their newest exhibitions, ExtraSensory and Two Spaces, One Body, which both look extraordinarily weird and fascinating. For anyone living in the Near North area, this might be an interesting place to stop off on a Friday evening for a free drink. And given the general WTF quality of the place, I definitely recommend seeing the IMSS for free, which is why I went on a Tuesday, but the new exhibitions do look cool. The IMSS is between North and Schiller on Michigan Ave, facing the lake.

My Minor Museums of Michigan Ave Manual

In my opinion, there are three tragically underrated snacks for the human mind on Michigan Ave, should a frantic shopper need to take a break and decompress under the vast dome of human history, thought and expression. (And the Art Institute isn't one of them, I'm so bored to tears with megamall museums.) North to south, if I was cruising up and down Michigan Ave with a power shopper and I needed to exercise the little grey cells, here's where I'd seriously recommend popping into.

First, right by the river in one of Chicago's most striking buildings is the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum, which sounds insanely hokey, but isn't. I went in to check out a friend's work, absolutely expecting the fifth grade field trip experience, and while there were guys dressed as 18th century minutemen in the lobby, I was really pleasantly surprised by a serious attempt to engage with issues of freedom of expression in American history with a neutral perspective. The works of expression highlighted in this museum range from Thomas Jefferson's brief note on the right to self-determination of the American colonies the Continental Congress had messengered over to King George III appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the rectitude of their intentions, all the way to NWA's similarly insubordinate opus “Fuck da Police”. As you can imagine, the banned music kiosk is probably my favorite exhibit, with a collection of samples of songs spanning decades, with an explanation of how and why particular songs were kept out of the public ear, whether by government censorship, radio station boycotts, or the whim of retailers. This is actually kind of hard to miss, it's in the giant, beautiful building with rocks from famous sites around the world like the Taj Mahal and the Moon, and across the street is the entrance to Billy Goat's, which is stimulating to the liver and the pancreas if not the mind.

Right on the south side of the bridge is another recent McCormick Tribune foundation creation, the Bridgehouse & Chicago River Museum, worth a look and easy to see in under half an hour. The whole five story bridge tower is opened up to the public with an equal mix of Chicago history and modern environmentalism explained along a series of stairs and landings, starting with a view of the gigantic works that open the bridge to passing ships. The whole exhibit combines smoothly a history of the grand metropolis rising from the swampy river delta (and explains why the river defies the Tao and flows the wrong way) with a more natural view of the river. The man-made marvel of the bridgeworks that convert land to open sky and water is set against the small scale fish hotels bound to the side of the embankment, providing safe haven and breeding ground for the fish who claimed the river long before Chicago. Going up the tower, mixed into the history of the canal and lock system, the technological terror that imposed Chicago's will on several million years of erosion and drainage in North America and sends Lake Michigan water pouring into the Mississippi, is a whole explanation of how sewers and storm drains work, and what hopefully should and should not go into them to keep the river healthy. Usually that kind of pride in the ability of man to conquer nature doesn't mix with the kind of awe and respect for the natural world that drives environmentalism, so I have to admire the creators of this exhibit for finding a common voice for it. So while I wouldn't pop in here every weekend, it's worth checking out, and I can't think of a more convenient way to take in a bit of Chicago history and get a little cardio in climbing up and down all those stairs.

The last spot I've certainly raved about at length elsewhere, like in chapter six of my travelogue From Chicago to Chisago and Back Again, but I still believe the Museum of Contemporary Photography is always worth a brief detour to Michigan & Harrison. There has always been at least one image in that museum that lingered in my thoughts for days and days, for it's sheer provocative beauty, and since the first time I entered it back in March it's been an essential stop on any Chicago trip. Plus it's free, and the suggested donation box is way over on the wall so I can get by with tossing in whatever might be in my pocket, and some of the books for sale (like Larry Sultan's “The Valley”) are well worth it. Inside the Columbia College building at Michigan and Harrison, there's a whole huge park across the street, buses going by, easy access to brown and red line trains at Adams and Harrison respectively, and the Metra Electric and South Shore lines at Van Buren station for anyone needing to get back to Indiana to feed their moaning cat, so there's really no excuse not to check it out.

And if you find yourself doing some hardcore retail therapy on Wells Ave, there's no better place to fuel up before hand than Nookie's (tell 'em Crockett and Tubbs sent you) and working your way south, Amstelboy assures me there's no better place to put your feet up, wash down a couple poppers, and take in a little culture and good company than the Bijou Theatre, but you may find it hard to get up and walk back up Wells afterwards. (I have no idea what he means by that.)

Capra Chameleon

What the hell is going on with goat culture in Chicago? To be sure, a population of nearly 10 million people in the Chicagoland area (most of them women) and two baseball teams creates a sizable demand for goats and goat products, particularly unusual cheeses. But there is something odd about the number of goat related events I find in that city, some of which I captured in my travelogue "Of Green Goats and Blackberry Bankers", which I'm told is a smashing good read (okay no, nobody really told me that). Bars and baseball teams live and die on the whims of stray goats, people are serving goat at parties, and trying to kick a hangover at a Chicago movie theater, I swear I saw a goat playing some sort of woodwind instrument, but that may have been the green dye and sambuca talking.

I thought maybe it was just one wild, braying weekend, but then I poke around Nobo's blog and it turns out she's listening to the Mountain Goats and making her own goat cheese. Not that I can object to either, because of all the fine times I had eating the feta cheese laden greek pizza at Luce... although I think the first time I heard of the Mountain Goats, somebody was telling me "International Small Arms Traffic Blues" was very reminiscent of dating me, and I don't think that was supposed to be nice.

My goat related love and libation experiences aside, why is Chicago the epicenter of all these capric goings-on? Is this some sort of back-up plan if Chicago doesn't get the 2016 Olympics, to become the goat capital of North America and use all those green spaces and unneeded Olympic venues over to bedouin goatherders? I don't now, but I assure you, I intend to find out.

No municipal wireless internet for Chicago

Chicago has canceled plans to roll out a municipal wireless internet network. The final nail in the coffin was the sharp drop in 1.5Mb DSL pricing in Chicago, which is ironically probably a response to the threat of competition from the city. On the other hand, new wireless networks may come up from private sector initiatives, as Sprint rolls out a WiMax network and analog TV spectrum opens up for other projects. I read about this when slashdot picked up an article from the Tribune, who should really sell the Cubs to Mark Cuban. On the plus side, Google has convinced the US government to hold the spectrum auction their way, with Google's bid of $4.6 billion and the collection of services they promised to roll out serving as a minimum bid, insuring nobody can buy up all the spectrum and keep it dark to lock out competitors.

There has generally been slow uptake on municipal wireless networks so far with several on the way, with many people apparently a bit suspicious it might be vulnerable to identity thieves and the like, in this glorious age where the FT tells us anybody can print a fake utility bill and open a bank account in England. (Actually I didn't quite get why that was so heinous, since a bank account is a place where you deposit money, so my nefarious scheme to deposit 1000 pounds under a fake name leaves me like $50 poorer or something.) The great thing about a wireless network is supposed to be the ease with which the infrastructure can be rolled out, unlike British universities where the internet apparently runs through the lead pipes the Romans put down for plumbing and sewage. And there's a decreased risk of some excessively tall green and yellow parade float snipping your overhead wires careening down Michigan Ave.

From Chicago to Chisago and Back Again, a travelogue in eight glorious chapters

At long last, here is the complete text of my travelogue "From Chicago to Chisago and Back Again", including chapters 4-8 in which I present my opinions on the present whereabouts of Axl Rose, several Chicago attractions, and kickball. (Blessedly I ran out of Guns & Roses lyrics to reference sometime in Chapter 3.)

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 the theatah...Rule Britannia, and all that, I say.

*-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.)

Your Blog Request Fulfilled

By Amstelboy's request, I did some due diligence* on the following topics. As always, my judgment is absolute, and final.

1. Freddy Adu joins Benfica

Freddy Adu, the overhyped teenage soccer phenom is on his way to Portugal to play for Benfica. This is a good opportunity for him, playing in a second tier European league but for a team that will play in European competition. Actually it's more like tier 2A for Portugal and the Netherlands, with a Tier 1B above them that has the French Ligue Un and everybody in the German Bundesliga besides Bayern Munich in it. Tier 1A is Spain, Italy, and everybody from England except Spurs, who mathematically can't win anything until 2011 (do the math). I'll put Russia, Greece, Scotland, and Belgium in Tier 2B at present, and maybe a 2C with Turkey, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic, regular contributors to the CL who would be upwardly mobile in good years. But anyways, Benfica is a good spot to find out if he's any good, because he'll get playing time, and if he's any good he'll play some European games in the CL or UEFA Cup, and won't get buried on the bench like Landon Donovan and Claudio Reyna did in Germany.

An American player in a comparable situation was DaMarcus Beasley who played in the Champions League semi-finals for PSV Eindhoven, who has since moved on to Rangers, another tiny league superclub like Benfica or PSV. When Rangers got Reyna from Wolfsburg, my impression is he was like they stereotypical American soccer jock, a big fish in a small pond who pictures himself as a playmaker through which the chi of his team flows. Talented, but not aggressive, always in midfield because he has to touch the ball but isn't a finisher. There's a breed of world class midfielder who stamps his mark on a game: a fantasista like Zidane from the middle, a striker like Henry or a mezzapunta like Francesco Totti from up top, or wingers like Beckham with his crosses or a Franck Ribery with his long runs last summer for France... lots of ways to do it, if you're that kind of chi-focal player, and that's how the coddled soccer jock imagines himself. Then there's a different breed of world class midfielder, including linchpin players like Clarence Seedorf and Andrea Pirlo who switch the whole team from defense to attack, and versatile defensive midfielders like Patrick Vieira, Edgar Davids, and Roy Keane who were tough as nails but could roam both ends of the field.

While Reyna was not in the class of the players I've mentioned as archetypal, it seemed that he went to Rangers as a soft soccer jock imagining himself as a Zidane-style fantasista, and they made him into a holding midfielder, a supporting role that required him to be tougher and play off of other people. When he was fit enough to play in the 2002 World Cup, the US team had the middle of the field locked up with Pablo Mastroeni as ballwinner and John O'Brien as distributor, both playing supremely well, so there was some expectation that Reyna as the Captain and darling of US Soccer would screw that up. came in to play on the right side of midfield, and immediately made an impact as an aggressive presence on the wing. My opinion is he became a much better player for getting an opportunity that made him stretch himself at Rangers, as did arguably John O'Brien when he got playing time as a defender at Ajax. The two bad situations are the two Landon Donovan has found himself in: too good to need to push himself in California, and not needed enough to get playing time in Germany.

So hopefully Freddy Adu gets slapped around in Portugal where nobody cares if he's Freddy Adu, but gets an opportunity that challenges him. But all in all, youth phenoms have a poor track record at the top level... if you look at some of the teenage phenoms who've blossomed, like Cristiano Ronaldo, or Cesc Fabregas, or Nicholas Anelka back in the day, they weren't making their bones in U-17 World Cups and playing for youth teams, they were signed with big clubs (Manchester United, Arsenal, and Arsenal, respectively) and playing for their countries' senior national teams (Portugal, Spain, and France, respectively) by the time they warranted so much hype. So let's see what he does outside of second flight football when nobody gives a shit about his marketing deal.

2. Kevin Garnett Trade Rumors

There are no Garnett Trade Rumors, he's gone. Speculation is Kevin McHale still loves the Celtics, because in two trades, he did more to help them rebuild than anybody in the last 15 years. They have a core of veteran all-stars, the Timberwolves now have some young talented players, some expiring contracts, and a couple draft picks back to replace the various ones McHale gave away (including the Celtics giving back the one they got in our last trade). The most important part of the deal for cynics is the Wolves get under the luxury tax threshold and save Taylor some money, and for the optimists, that while we'll suck next year, we get to rebuild a team with a new identity not based around jump shots, and one more good trade could pretty much clear out the rest of the garbage.

3. All Things Cub

Is 99 the Cubs lucky number, is the Hope Train leaving the station for Clark and Addison or are they the ninja loan of Midwestern baseball, due to shinobi their way out of the playoff race in September? They may make the play-offs, provided no naive bankers with too many stamps in their passport don't pay attention to the game, pull a Bartman, and haul in a critical foul-out as a souvenir. However, while they may lead the NL Central (the subprime mortgage market of Major League Baseball) the Brewers just had a rough patch and are 0 games back, and the wild card race is distinctly unfriendly, with the Cubs and like 3 others tied for second. Are they clutch? Are they a team of destiny? Their Pythagorean win total at this point in the season is 61, while their actual win total is 57. For those of you whose statistical training didn't include the Pythagorean theorem (no, not the one with the triangles from 8th grade) that's a sophisticated system somebody drew up on a cocktail napkin to predict a team's record based on their offensive and defensive productivity. Even after the walk-off wild pitch in their last game, the Cubs are under-performing slightly, which means they lose close games... not good for a tight play-off run. Then again, maybe it means they're due to pick up four more wins and pull ahead in the NL Central.

The long-awaited sale of the Cubs by the Tribune did have some interesting fall-out. One of the Cubs suitors is Mark Cuban, and White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf is expected to oppose his purchase of the team, despite an OBVIOUS conflict of interest. Cuban is the guy most likely to "get" the appeal of the Cubs, which ironically makes him the perfect guy to own the White Sox. Cuban bought the hapless Dallas Mavericks and turned them into a major success as both a contender and a profitable contributor to the NBA, and stated that his philosophy in doing so was that the Maverick's product was not basketball, it was "sore throats". Unable to insure victory, Cuban tried to make sure the experience of a Mavericks game was a good one for paying customers regardless of the outcome of the game, with a competitive team and energetic atmosphere, so everybody left with a sore throat from cheering. This is how the Saint Paul Saints came close to outdrawing the Minnesota Twins in the mid-90s, by making a day at a Class C game more fun than the MLB game at the other end of the #3 bus line. The experience of a day at Wrigley is an American legend, and my Dad still has the scorecard from his first Major League game at Wrigley Field back in the 50's. The Cubs stink because they can... nobody cares and they won't go out of business, because it's still fun to be a Cubs fan. The Black Sox have traditionally only had two real lures: winning teams, and the best food court in the majors (allegedly). My cousin (a Cubs fan) tells me Black Sox fans describe themselves as political, staying away to protest managerial decisions and make their displeasure known, which is kind of a sophisticated way of saying they're fair weather fans who don't really even want to watch their own team half the time. Frankly, the experience of being a Black Sox fan doesn't sound all that much fun, eating churros while the Piranhas from Minnesota nip away bases and having to listen to endless Shoeless Joe jokes (like me continuing to call them the Black Sox after 88 years).

And that addresses your last Cubs question, about rebuilding the stadium. For the Cubs, Wrigley Field is their product. It's the CDO^2 of baseball tickets, all risk has been heavily diversified out of the product. They can renovate a bit, open up new revenue streams with a club and luxury boxes, a discrete new stand, but some places are special. The Knicks survived leaving the Mecca of Basketball (the old Madison Square Garden) but it helped being the crown jewel of the city that has an unbelievable cradle of basketball legends across the East River, but the Celtics never recovered from leaving the Boston Garden. If they did something truly tragic, like moving the Cubs to a soulless, gargantuan new facility in Evanston or Skokie where they had a development deal, they'd quickly become a curiosity, lose mindshare to the Black Sox, and the mystique would continue to surround the field and the history of the club, but the ability to step back in time to a pre-Vietnam, or even a pre-WWII America would be lost, and that's what they're packaging and selling at 1060 W Addison.

4. Skol! Let us drink from the skulls of our enemies!

Ever since the debacles of 1998 and 2000 I've been unable to commit to being wildly optimistic about the Vikings season, because I know my emotional state is too fragile to leave it in Ragnar's hands. They may be better than last season, and they could hardly be less watchable, but the major flaws may still remain: no passing game, and no pass rush, leading to horrors like the Patriots game last year. I'm still irritated with my ex-girlfriend from Connecticut over that game, and we broke up 12 years ago... it produces that level of irrational bitterness, which is why I have to manage it carefully. With our weak implementation of the Tampa-2 defense exposed and not a single reliable receiver to revive our weak implementation of the West Coast Offense, we're screwed, that's your Vikings outlook, so you can go ahead and hop on the Bears bandwagon early, Amstelboy.

5. Triathlons and Tattoos

The Singapurrr triathlon is an experience I can only imagine. What is it, running, running while being caned, and swimming in salt water with sharks circling your raw, bleeding fresh caning wounds? How does it compare with the Chicago triathlon, where take your bike on the red line to 95th street, ride it north until it gets stolen, then run like hell until you get stabbed and thrown into the river, with a finish line in Indiana where your body washes up on the shore? I'll stick to the Minnesota triathlon: 30 miles by dog sled, 5 miles on foot chased by wolves, and eating deep fried candy bars at the state fair until you throw up, and then we all celebrate with a glass of root beer milk from Senator Boschwitz's milk stand. In the relay my team's a dead lock for the gold... I marked every tree in northern Minnesota until I'd established my alpha status amongst the native wolf population, and the Captain is like the Eddie Merckx of eating deep fried candy bars.

*-By due diligence, I mean I thought about each topic for upwards of a minute before forming my opinion, and made occasional trips to wikipedia to verify small details I couldn't bluster over.

From Chicago to Chisago and back again

I started a brief description of my trip to the Galena Triathlon back in May, then I started getting carried away and never finished it, so I'm breaking it into excessively long, self-indulgent chapters. The sad thing is I only started writing it so I could set up this elaborate strained joke about Guns & Roses and this woman I met for like five hours (which will appear in chapter four). But nevertheless, with apologies to Messrs. Bailey, Isbell, and Hudson, here's chapter one.

Chapter One: 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.

Chapter Two: 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.

Next: Now he's a court jester with a broken heart