walking home and the light won't leave you alone

zoopolis

Maybe you are at the zoo. Maybe it is the Lincoln Park Zoo and you are with a class and you are breaking up into teams to watch, listen, and consider the why-how-what of zoos as institutions and the metaphorical or literal Arks they claim to be.

There are jaguars six feet from you and you smell them, but something about their spots defy your best attempts to take them completely in. A gorilla disdainful. Sad colorful birds. Thoughtful children. Screeching children. The pigeons seem non-plussed by the condors.

If you squint your eyes you might think one of your students is in fact a giraffe. At this point you look for a water fountain and sit down on a bench shaped like a giant yellow rainforest frog. No doubt that will make you feel more clear-headed in a minute.

i heart Sonnenzimmer!

Nick and Nadine make things more beautiful than you could imagine (and I know your imagination is particularly fecund)

visit Sonnenzimmer! and buy a poster for someone you love.

Sonnenzimmer: the shoestring portrait from dsinker on Vimeo.

sound lives on

((((*))))

in memorium

the continued search for Andrew Yang

Of course you might imagine my surprise when I read this headline in the the Chicago RedEye the other day. I had only just eaten at "Yang Restaurant" an hour before in the South Loop at now I was considering if they or I had been arrested, and were just slow on the uptake.

It turns out Marni Yang was the criminal in question - and what a crime it was:

"Yang plotted the killing, driving a rental car with stolen plates and buying dark makeup and a cornrow wig to disguise herself, prosecutors said."

The various press coverage does its best to be equally creepy - from web videos sifting through her online personals to bikini photos.

Two days later my phone rang. This is how it went:

"Hi, is this Andrew Yang?"

"Yes, it is"

"I know this might be a strange question, but I'm a reporter with CBS and I am wondering if you are you the Andrew Yang who is son of Marni Yang?"

"No, I am definitely not that Andrew Yang"

"Ok, sorry, thanks! "

Wow. And so what was she going to ask me - how I'm doing? Who knew journalists actually still called people randomly up by names and numbers listed in the phone book. These reporters need to be issued computers, yo.

Regardless, the episode fits in to the Who is Andrew Yang? files, and its updates.

As for the Andrew Yang that I was mistaken for this time, I can only say sorry and good luck with things....

dibs

If there is any really good reason to look forward to the end of Chicago winter besides the obvious ones, I would offer relief from the tyranny of "dibs."

Of course digging out a car is no small or happy thing. I saw one of many empty spots in my street and parked it. A couple days later this note showed up on my windshield. Ah, communality.

I don't know who to feel sorrier for, me as a victim of a needless and random hate crime, or the poor sod who in an apparent gesture of so-so samaritanism didn't manage to keep a spot free for himself. I also wonder where his chair went, since I never saw it. The magnanimous restraint of his neighbor in not keying my already pocked-marked car seems a little dramatique, but threatening missives need that kind of punch.

Gaper's Block has a thread on dibbing for our enjoyment.
_____

Synchronschwimmen

One of my students showed this video in class the other day. We were all pretty floored.

icykills

Today was balmy in that eerie "climatic instability" way, but boy, it felt nice on the skin.

The icicles from the other week are a memory, but one worth keeping in mind - who knows that next week will be like.

modern art/modern fashion

Old abandoned factories in the northeast = great showcases for art. Who would have thought? My museum-going collaborator CMD always manages to dress appropriately somehow - I guess she has a contemporary sensibility at heart?

Or at least one that jives with Sol LeWitt at Mass MoCA (left) or indeed those minimalists at DIA Beacon (below). I didn't know blue, orange, and black created a nice color groove together as an ensemble as much as on a canvas. What kind of stuff are we channeling, I wonder. The collective unconsciousness? the derivative nature of fashion? the fact that museums are an infinitesimal sampling-slice of what everyone else is doing some other way?

Makes we want to get my kaleidoscope glasses out, just to bump it all up a notch.

Former classmate update #3456

People love Facebook for catching you up on folks from your long past days - kindergarten to boot camp. But the internet also does a fine job for some of your more high-profile connections, no matter how tenuous they may be.

Jay and I were always the two fastest sprinters up through 4th grade. In high school he was bigger, but not nearly this big. I guess this nice guy did actually end up finishing first.

puppet party

It's cold, it's Sunday: buy some socks at Walgreens and go crazy with some thread! Dog + Space Princess.











Hope the kids in Indiana will like them.

meteoric

lost n found

I retrieved two video pieces from a dusty folder on my hard drive today. Enjoy the pixelated party of digi-fish schools or five observations wrapped together into a simultaneous view.

galling critters

I picked a leaves off a tree in front of the art institute and had students pick open the nodules on the leaf surface. A tiny surprise package of baby bug (Order: Hemiptera) living inside. It was a shame to disturb this one for the sake of "science," but it was extraordinary.

details on cloudness

I think only the flatness of the midwest allows for this particular sort of sky freakout/atmosphere singalong.
























As for clouds, this piece by Aspen Mays recently blew my mind. Just the idea a balloon could bring you to that edge of outer space & air....


The passenger jet is a mere mote racing to the the vertex. who knew the edge of space as so clean!

in the sky, out of the sky

Last night the air was funny. Moonlight and sodium-lamp light pollution mixed like some poorly considered cocktail and yet produced quite a sight in the sky - this sort of orange, billowly, clear, immanent-ness. I felt like I was certainly underwater. I made me think of this book I read as a kid that I've never found anyone else has read or even heard of called "Under Plum Lake." This felt like that.

Maybe this kind of light is too much for delicate things. Or maybe it is just the season and the actuary tables that dictate the lives of small creatures: downtown at the corner of State and Monroe was this little wren lying on the ground, still very soft.

Kobayashi Issa:

That wren--
looking here, looking there.
You lose something?

Dale M. Kushner:

.....Her small body is dense with a radiance
she doesn't have to earn.
All that's required
is to live the ancestral life
over again
without any urge to change it.

insects abound/around town

The inaugural insect trip of the fall insect course went well. Dragonflies were the welcoming committee, hundreds flying all over acres and acres of Montrose Beach Park and the bird sanctuary as well. What was with this swarming? Theories are out there and there as numerous as dragonflies themselves (and of course obligatory YouTube footage is as well) but the jury may still be out.

They were still hard to catch, but the sheer number made it more possible than usual - like the endless herds of bison out on the western range back in the late 1800's, getting one was simply a matter of time to bag one.













The weird caterpillars were out in force too - very well dressed (much like many of students, I might add). I think stripes are in, regardless if you are a vertebrate or invertebrate.

It should also be noted that the milkweed bugs were out in full force (you would have loved them, Yui), enjoying a Sunday with there comrades. The monarch butterflies were in lower numbers, but perhaps it was just the way the wind was blowing this Sunday?

contemporary architecture

Ah, milkweeds in the summertime & their white plant sap.

Yui and I found ample insects in the field the other day. The Oncopeltus love this plant as much as the Papilio. I'm taken with the filigree of the circulatory, trusses and braces. Buckminster ain't got nothing on that.

prevencion de accidentes (armas de fuego)

As an addendum to the last post involving firearms, I want to just add two cautionary images from a didactic sheet meant for children in Mexico called "Prevencion de Accidentes" that I picked up in a stationary store down in Guanajuato this summer.

There are many accidents given as examples in these sheets: skateboarding in the street, playing with gasoline, cutting towards rather than away from you, etc., but the gun ones seemed apropos to the moment in the Various Stream.

In the one, the mother looks concerned she might in fact be getting done in by her teenage son, who has a particularly unsettling look on his face. In the other,the father almost seems to be inviting a certain form of disaster - although maybe he always has his kid load in pistol before starting the work day?

The recent Supreme Court ruling overturning the historical ban on handguns in DC is worrying enough that perhaps we should be distributing similar accident prevention sheets around - plastering them everywhere next to ones that also read something like "shooting people is for sissies."

pull!

Summer + rural Illinois = a rare opportunity this last weekend. Visiting with friends downstate means new things, and the thing this time was skeet shooting. Walter was kind and generous enough to take me out. My feeling about firearms can be mixed, but I did enjoy shooting at the fluorescent "clay pigeons" as the flew about in the air - apparently these things are supposed to be "fragile as eggs" - I'd say they are even moreso.

Skeet, or "trap," is also a Olympic sport including at the current Beijing Games. Oh yes, and the newest event this time around? > here

The video below shows that my aim wasn't always spot on - I guess that is what makes it a sport, after all?