wait… eye boogers.

King Lear on Michigan Avenue, Chicago

Courtyard of the Chicago art museum

For some reason, I have spent the last many years thinking up cool band names. So, I’m going to write some of them down, right here. If you name your band one of these completely awesome names, please give me credit in the liner notes of your albums. The names are listed by genre.

Alt/Indie
Everybody’s Amber¹
Alas, Earwax! (Come on, you know this is awesome)

Funk/R&B/Soul
Ill-Gotten Booty²

Metal/Industrial

1. this is my favorite, and the front-runner for many years, should I choose to make such a band [↩]
2. This is my personal choice for a funk outfit. Get it? ‘Booty’ is a double-entendre. [↩]

Looks like Kubrik’s monolith, don’t it?¹ And we are the monkeys dancing at its base :). It’s half of what I considered to be a wonderful — and even powerful — piece in the same park as the Chicago Mirror Bean. This was set at one end of a tiled plaza about fifty meters long, with a matching one facing it from the other end. I’m sure there’s an artist’s statement somewhere about what it’s supposed to represent, but I just enjoyed standing between two huge faces. I was surprised at how much of a visceral impact I felt when I stepped between them. The faces changed every few minutes, and each face shifted expressions every so often. After the jump, a few more pictures, including a close-up of the surface, which looks like bazillions of LEDs behind glass brick. Continue reading →

1. except the proportions aren’t 1 x 4 x 9 [↩]

That’s the Mirror Bean, a sculpture at the South end of the “Magnificent Mile” of Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Amanda says it’s a butt. I find it very cool¹. More pics after the cut.

Continue reading →

1. But I have also been known to have an aesthetic appreciation for the occasional butt, so there you go [↩]

 Mr. Irrigation Canal, direct light is not your friend.

Friday night, I saw the UTPA Dance Ensemble Fall Concert. Three pieces.

The first was just phenomenally awesome. The soundtrack was composed of old, misogynistic radio and TV ads, a Bing Crosby piece (maybe?), and something jazzy and awesome that sounded like Django Rinehart on guitar. The dancers (all female), using spinning stools as props and dressed in identical polka-dot short dresses, created a highly kinetic melange of war-era pinup poses, glamor-girl smiles, burlesque moves and what I thought were more abstracted references to female gender roles. As the piece progressed, there were increasingly visible indications of the shallowness of the facades, such as the dancers lifting and posing each other like dolls or mannequins. Oh, and there was lots and lots of sultry cigarette smoking, with some serious coughing at the end. Also they sometimes flew around, airplane style, on their stools :)

The second piece was set to the Titanic theme, and involved some fairly predictable and derivative–but sweet and romantic–choreography. There seems to be a gender-change operation in there somewhere, as well as a lesbian love affair, but I suspect (given the nature of the rest of the piece) that these are not what the choreographer was going for.

The third piece (the one of resistance, you know) was my friend Melinda Blomquist’s MFA choreography work. I saw it in an earlier form last Spring, and now it’s even more awesome. Traditional hymns with a lot of vocals, an a capella Lila Downs piece, and some other touching music with gorgeous allegorical dance involving women with a white sash. The white sash begins around their waists, and they all struggle (sometimes violently) to get it off. Lots of repeated themes: jerky struggling-type motions, progressions of one hand up the other arm (sort of reminiscent of David Byrne in his “Once in a Lifetime” period),  women lifting each other up and falling back down, and too many more to remember or mention. One by one, the dancers remove the sash, and the tone of the dancing shifts from tortured to jubilant. The themes of trials, mutual support, faith, and overcoming are powerful. I get all verklemt just thinking about it. Continue reading →

But first, a gratuitous picture of my sweetie at Garden of the Gods:

So Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams got together in a dark bar one night…

First Excellent Thing:BLDGBLOG has a wonderful, wonderful, delicious article about Michael Cook, a guy in Toronto who is an urban explorer, with an emphasis on subterranean exploring (especially Toronto and Hamilton). This means drains and sewers, largely. There are some sa-weet photos here, which you simply must see to appreciate. The article links to his blog (which has apparently crashed from the newfound publicity), and to sites of other underground urban explorers. Seriously, if I didn’t suddenly have a heightened sense of my own mortality (since, say, June 3 of last year), this is the kind of thing I’d be really, really tempted to do. It tickles my fancy in particular ways. Actually, I’m not saying I won’t do a little of it. The not-very-dangerous kind. Here’s a sample photo (click for larger size, as usual):

Second Excellent Thing: Berkeley Breathed, author of the original Bloom County strip, has continued (with much less fanfare) to create Opus. Recent strips about Lola Granola jumping on the “Radical Islamist” bandwagon in her peripatetic spiritual journeying were immediately pulled from many national newspapers for fear of offending people. Pfft. I love Berk Breathed. He’s been shooting sacred cows on a regular basis since I was too young to understand political sarcasm. And we need to people like him to continue to help us see the absurdity inherent in the world around us. [click for the full comic]

(note: I found out about this by way of boing boing, and also through Salon.com, who has not pulled the strip).

So, you know about light writing? Well, it has lots of names. You go to a dark place and you open your camera shutter for a few seconds (or a few minutes) and write things in the air with flashlights, candles, etc. Here are some examples of light writing that I had fun with a few years ago, after getting my Canon Rebel SLR (film version).

So, I have loved this kind of magical stuff for a while. And then I found this excellent project (link: blog - higher resolution) from some guy calling himself pikapika (hee hee). Thousands upon thousands of light-writing images, stitched together into a stop-motion movie. Joy! (the link below is the lower-resolution YouTube version).