Mambo Taxi

melted_snowball, on reporting that Tampa is under windchill warning because it will feel like 35ºF, says he thinks this is cute.

I say, what is *really* cute, is all the workers I imagine out there rushing to put Snuggies™ on the fruit trees.

On reflection, wouldn't that make an amazing Christo-like art piece? A field of trees, each with a leopard- or zebra-patterned Snuggie™ flapping in the breeze?

Googling the subject tells me of course the Japanese already thought of it, at least with straw wraps and windblocks.

One of the photos on that page, the entirely wrapped trees, look suspiciously like some of the Chihuly sculptures that dan, Tom, and I saw this afternoon in St. Pete.

After my first 24 hours in Chicago...

Friday night, we were off to Steppenwolf Theatre to see American Buffalo, by David Mamet. I hadn't known anything about it, other than it being a classic, and it turned out to be a real treat. The seats were excellent (even though they were in the back row; it was a small theatre), and the play itself was disturbing and well done. "Disturbing" because it said much about friendship and "business" (read, shady dealings). The set made me smile- the stage was made to be a junk shop in a basement, with much of a real junk shop's worth of stuff cluttering the stage, with amazing lighting coming from "upstairs" or from florescent bulbs. Very intricate, as also were the story and the dialogue.

Saturday, we went for deep dish pizza at a nearby bar and didn't pay much attention to the (American) football on the tube, except when the guy next to us at the bar made a comment in our direction about a play. I burned my tongue on some marinara sauce.

We walked around Old Town, and we saw A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant. It was very merry, indeed. Fairly self-referentially funny (it started with a disclaimer about Scientology and Dianetics being copyright, etc etc.) The players were all kids, the set was very simple, and it was a 60-minute show. We agreed 60 minutes was a good length.

Then, to a Mexican restaurant, where our dinner was overshadowed by the blind-date a table over, where the guy really needed a hearing-aid, because we didn't need to hear him strike out.

Sunday: more touring around, including The Art Institute of Chicago, which has added a large wing since I was last there in 2006. High points for me: a temporary exhibit called "Light Me Black" - the floor was drywall punched with a lot of craters, and some hundred florescent tube lights were suspended in the middle of the room. Entering, we were told, "please watch your step and don't make more holes." It was remarkably stark, and I liked that. There was also a wonderful exhibit on Arts and Crafts in Britain and Chicago; not only Frank Lloyd Wright, but Stickley furniture, Tiffany glass, and photos by Alfred Stieglitz and others. I was amazed by two finds: a self-portrait by Edward Steichen, a bichromate gum photograph which appears as a painting- Steichen manipulated the print with brush-strokes to add both white and black shades. I stood there studying it for quite a while. ...And there was a neat piece by Marion Mahony Griffin, a line drawing of a Frank Lloyd Wright house which used space and light/dark in a stylistically Japanese way. I appreciated how the exhibit called out a number of associations between Arts and Crafts and design elements taken from Japanese forms in the mid-1800s- lots of connections I hadn't known of.

In the evening, we popped off to Alinea for the most decadent dinner I've ever had. ( Twelve courses )

So that's how I ended my Chicago trip; with a hangover, pulling my bags through a new layer of snow, back through the Red Line, Orange Line L, to Midway (a bit concerned about time; the train was slow; but then my plane was late arriving), back to Toronto Island, back to Royal York Hotel, where I sat and read for an hour because my late plane meant I missed the earlier bus back, then dragged myself up to the Greyhound station to catch the 3pm bus home, which got me in the door at 5:30.

Which, I'll note, was just exactly 24 hours after the caviar, champagne, and quail eggs.

This life, it is a good one.

Oh, finally: I think Porter was a good choice, but not a great choice. I didn't pay more for the plane ticket, the departures lounge in Toronto was wonderful; but on the way back, missing that bus meant I got home two hours after I'd hoped I would, turning a 7-hour travel day into 9-hour travel. *shrug* It was a good experiment, at least.

melted_snowball and I just took a fairly long Sunday Constitutional. We passed by the regional children's museum, which just opened an exhibit on Andy Warhol. So, it's interesting that Warhol has now become acceptable to teach to kids, which I suppose means they've built up enough socially-acceptable history or pseudo-history to paper over any hint of dangerous unacceptability? Or maybe that's just the cynic in me. We'll probably go see this some time soon to give us a better idea. As d. pointed out, the exhibit we saw with metalana in '06 did have a bit of the scary, but was fairly tame and "family friendly" (for certain values of family).

It's also interesting that they've programmed quite the speaker-series for Sunday afternoons through April, (jumping out for me: "Feb 1st – Kathy Battista, Director of Sotheby’s Insistute of Art, New York with Marie Burns and Amanda Kesner on Warhol, Wigs and Women: Identity Politics in Warhol’s Practice"). No mention of when on Sunday these talks are, though.

But I think the most interesting part of this was, one evening last week, Dave FM had a very long (3 minute?) discussion of why you should go to this exhibit and what Warhol is most famous for (Campbell's soup can, product design, "many films", no mention of sex). On the pop radio station. Which feels surprisingly subversive to me, pop radio talking about pop art.

As mentioned, our dining-room is haunted by the world's most trivial poltergeist. Only, now maybe I pissed it off by soldering the clock?

melted_snowball returned home to discover the clock face-down on the dining-room floor, shards of pottery scattered around.

True, this morning, I tweaked the clock's batteries because it had stopped overnight. (This time, the pendulum was running, and the clock had stopped. Why? No idea. Electrically, they are on the same circuit and every other time it's stopped, the hands kept going and the pendulum stopped.)

True, every time the Via Rail train comes through, the whole house shakes. And true, the nail on the wall is loose in the nail-hole, because it's plaster and I've re-hung the clock more times than I could count. But- I hung it on the nail, and it stayed there, like every other time I've hung it up. And then, some time in the day, it leaped to the floor, in the process landing on a single ceramic bowl on the shelves underneath, but not hitting anything else on the way, and remarkably not smashing into a pile of wooden and glass shards. Even though the d-cell batteries were flying around inside the case.

And dan came home to a clock in a pile of ceramic shards. And I came home to survey the damage (the poor bowl!), and the clock is fine, in fact it was still ticking. Even though the two D-cell batteries were sitting in the bottom of the case (*boggle*)

...And then I remembered the 3rd battery, a rechargeable, which I had stuck into the mechanism as a shim, but had stuck tape on the contacts so it wouldn't mess things up electrically. And the tape had worn through.

And now the clock is rehung, and I'm slightly on edge waiting for it to leap from the wall again.

Perhaps we should take the_infamous_j's advice and permanently attach it to the wall. Perhaps I should just countersink a sturdy screw into the wall. [Stop looking at me like that, dawn_guy...]

Perhaps we should declare the house haunted and move to Tahiti.