esprit de l'escalier

Birthday wishes and other hodgepodge

Happy (early) birthday Dad!

Saturday is my Dad's 60th birthday. My mom turns the same in August. It's mind boggling to me that they are 60. They make 60 youthful. I'm headed home for a big party at my grandparents with many of my extended family. I keep missing these and am looking forward to seeing how big my little cousins have gotten.

Plus it's supposed to be 76 degrees and I really want to go swimming. So much so that this song has been stuck in my head this week:

My roommate just heard that playing and said, "Oh honey, are you listening to REM? Is anything wrong?" While the song is sad, I find it more nostalgic than depressing. It makes me long for endless summers with not much to do, with just a bike and a pool pass.

I got tagged by Adorable Girlfriend over at the Republic of Dogs to share eight things about myself.

1. I have never broken a bone (knock on wood) but have gotten stitches twice on my face (one on my cheek: dog bite, entirely my fault; one on my hairline: knocked into a tall radiator when I was about 6 or 7 by my brother, entirely his fault).

2. I got him back, though, by throwing an etch-a-sketch at his head a couple of years later. Which occurred during our babysitter's first ever time babysitting, just as my parents were sitting down to an expensive meal out. Neither of those things occurred again for a very long time.

3. In high school I could eye a pica. I bragged about this once the first day of orientation at college and every time I see the person I did this to (which is now very rare), he brings it up. Now you can bring it up too.

4. The Fourth of July is one of my favorite holidays. I love a parade. And fireworks. The town I grew up in had the best parade in the city and one of the best community celebrations. It was always beastly hot, but fun.

5. I once held a(n elaborate) funeral for a dead beta fish to fulfill a class assignment. (We had to repent sins we committed — we had been reading The Scarlet Letter and I admitted to accidental, but chronic, fish killing.) It included the class making a processional to the girls restroom for the end of the eulogy and the flushing. Greatest waste of 15 minutes ever.

6. My cousin Hasia and I spent hours of our summers as teens playing Spite and Malice that we re-named after our sisters, Mimi and Alix. Because we were nice.

7. The most hungover I've ever been I blame on an Australian grandmother. The next day I spent 6 hours in a small windowless room overseeing the counting of hundreds of pencils by women who spoke no English, and me no Arabic. It was brutal and even now I don't like to joke about it.

8. I turn to baking and facial masks as stress relievers (not at the same time).

I'm not tagging anyone. I could barely get the brainpower to come up with this list and it's possible none of this is news. I may post something in the next week, but if I do it will be at newcritics, where I'm sorely overdue for something. I have two half written posts already. Besides that, I probably won't be posting 'til next weekend. Happy holiday!

A musical teaser

I'm off for the weekend, but will be back to regularly scheduled programming next week sometime.

Before I go, let me show you something that made my heart skip a beat this week... Wait for the music to kick in, rinse, repeat.

Josh Ritter rocks out (those horns tease me so!). New album out August 21. He's playing Ravinia August 3 with Hilary Hahn. A picnic and Josh, what could be better? (He's also playing with John Prine in Charlottesville, VA August 18. I would give an appendage to be there.)

Can you tell I'm excited?

Strawberry picking

Natasha and I are splitting a CSA (community supported agriculture) box with our dear friends Elaine and George. One of the farms was having a strawberry picking day, so Sunday we packed into our Hondas and caravaned north. We picked 30 lbs of berries, and 10 of which are sitting pretty in our fridge. (I'd love some recipe ideas, quickly before they go bad.) Natasha's little sis is visiting, so she got to come too. Below is a polaroid of the lovely sisters with our personal haul.

After a quick and lovely picnic, we headed to the terrace on UW's Union to enjoy some sun, beer and views of Lake Mendota.

Then we wandered up State Street, in search of ice cream and cheese curds. Both needs were met.

All in all, an excellent afternoon, though I do have a raging sunburned neck. More photos here, taken with one of my spectra and a borrowed OM-1 that I'm still figuring out. Go film!

Two years in!

Walking to work this morning I asked my roommate what day it was. June 13th. It's my friend's birthday today. It's also Frank's 8th month birthday. And it's my second blogoversary.

I had been planning to write something nice, perhaps pithy, but can't take the time at the moment. It's hard to believe it's been two years. The time has flown, partially because I've been up to my eyeballs in all sorts of stuff, school, work, mild artistic endeavors, blogging, travel. I'm glad to have started this thing, and am certainly glad to have met so many interesting and inspiring people through it. Thanks everyone for your support!

Preserving historical architecture

This city. Man. I love it like a dysfunctional best friend who's always making the wrong choices. For example, there are two lovely, historic athletic clubs in and around the loop that are endangered for demolition, to be replaced with god know's what, cheap ass condo building. I knew about the Lake Shore Athletic Club, and this morning I read about the Chicago Athletic Association on Michigan Ave. (See a great photo of the CAA here.)

One reason why I love Chicago is because of its buildings, especially its older buildings. I was taught to see them through my father's architect eyes and I love them. Just today I had lunch in the park next to the Art Institute, lying on my back, looking up at the beautiful facades on Michigan Ave. It angers me to know I'll never see Sullivan buildings that were razed in the 1960s by the first Mayor Daley. To still not understand how these buildings weave into the framework that make this city great boggles my mind.

Snipped from Blair Kamin's Sunday Trib article:

They are magnificent anachronisms, jock palaces with drop-dead dining rooms, grand marble staircases and swimming pools fit for a laurel-wreathed Olympic champion. And their allure extends from inside to outside, from private to public. For they are bricks in two of the great walls that define the face that Chicago shows the world, one directly across Michigan Avenue from Millennium Park, the other more than a mile to the northeast on Lake Shore Drive. Both face an uncertain future.

One, the Lake Shore Athletic Club at 850 N. Lake Shore Drive, the perfect Beaux-Arts foil for Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's exquisitely skeletal 860-880 Lake Shore Drive residential towers, would be demolished for an 18-story condo high-rise whose design is supposedly not yet cooked. The other, the Chicago Athletic Association at 12 S. Michigan Ave., would be transformed into an Omni hotel, its richly layered Venetian Gothic facade and extraordinary front rooms restored to their original splendor, but its back hacked off for a 19-story tower that could blight views from Millennium Park.

I have a (slight) personal connection to the Chicago Athletic Association, as my great grandfather lived there when he was a resident at Rush. I sent Kamin's article to my parents and my mother sent me a brief history of her grandparents:

My grandfather lived in the Chicago Athletic Club on Michigan Ave. for a number of years while practicing medicine in Chicago.

It was while he lived in Chicago that he became involved with boxing and he later wrote the medical rules for the sport that are still in use today, I believe. His mother became ill (breast cancer) and his father talked him into coming back to Litchfield to take over his practice, which he was loathe to do. Soon after that he met my grandmother (Claire Porterfield) who was singing in a Chautauqua traveling group. My Aunt Jean gave lectures about a variety of subjects and gave elocution lessons on the side.

They traveled by train and Litchfield has a train station. That is one way "nice young ladies" got around to see the country and meet guys. They would be invited to stay in homes of educated people who were interested in culture, etc. and those folks would have parties to introduce them to eligible men.

Everyone in Litchfield always thought he was the luckiest person to have married her as she was so much fun and always knew how to act properly but with flair and an astute knowledge of people. It was that which made her humor so delightful and why I have always missed her presence. Mother got her instinct about people from her mother; and just about everything else from her father. So I hope they don't tear down that lovely building. It would be so foolish in the long run.

I don't want to be a person that is mired in the past, but I think it is foolish to tear down historic buildings willy nilly for a buck, especially without thought to how the change would affect the tenor of the city and neighborhood.

Another old friend in the blogosphere

Literally a day or two after I posted about my friends starting/restarting/in general upping the quality of the blogosphere, I got an email about another friend who started a blogger account to keep track of his summer in Rome.

My friend Joe is in Italy for the summer, learning Latin with Father Reginald Foster, which is supposed to be the best and most intense Latin programs in the world. Joe took up the language as an undergrad and teaches some kids in Columbus. Joe's also a musician and a voracious reader, and his posts are clear and insightful and bring you right to Rome, as if you're having a quick caffe with him between his explorations. His photos are also wonderful. I'm such a travel nut, that I will take any sort of vicarious travel logs, and I'm unsurprised and completely pleased that his is wonderful. I've never been to Rome, but now I feel like I have. The last year or so he's been learning Italian via tapes that he listens to on long runs, muttering Italian under his breath, so it's a journal about language in many respects as well.

Here's his description of the Pantheon:

When I was preparing for this trip, I think the one building I was most looking forward to revisiting was the Pantheon. Built in 118, it has to be one of the best maintained and most magnificent buildings of its age in the world. It was originally built by Emperor Hadrian to replace a temple built by Marcus Agrippa (son in law of Augustus) and was later taken over by the Christians and turned into a Christian Basilica, which it still serves as. You probably will recognize the "oculus" or the eye, basically a giant open hole in the dome ceiling. Its layout is extremely simple but perfectly executed in its symettry. As I approached the building from behind, it looked almost horrifying in its ancient grandeur. At first glimpse of the Pantheon, I felt a real sense of what Ancient Rome must have felt like, more so even than the forum, its quite a rush actually, and as you make your way to the front from the back, you see the portico which is very familiar to us by now as it looks like a portico to a bank.

I've been overbooked since 15

I haven’t been able to put much thought towards posts lately, as evidenced by the fact that my most recent posts involve polaroids and brief weekend recaps (this will probably be much of the same). (The polaroid above is from Memorial Day weekend; it's the B'hai Temple in Wilmette.)

I just tuned into the second half of a very old Adam Dalgliesh mystery. I haven’t seen the first half but just read the book it was based on and thought I’d watch. According to the brief recap the characters are the same, but the events are entirely different. It sounds a lot more convoluted and ridiculous. Why anyone would monkey around with P.D. James is beyond me.

My weekend was packed full and I’m still exhausted. The Genius was in town, and Friday night Natasha and I took him and his friend Marty to Carol’s, our favorite honky-tonk within walking distance to our apartment. Cheap beer, live country, good company, it was great.

Saturday involved a hung-over scramble to complete a graduation gift and then my brother and I headed to the suburbs for a family party. There we had our first sight and sound of the cicadas, which are as bizarre, gross and fascinating as I expected. (I didn’t have my camera, but my brother did. Don’t hold your breath on him sending the pics anytime soon, though.) There was more family than I originally expected and we had a great time. I also went, dead tired, to an engagement party of a friend’s in a crazy huge house in Bucktown. The food and company were good, but I was asleep by eleven.

Sunday comprised of about six hours of reading articles about how fair use of copyrighted material is being degraded and ignored under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It’s a subject that is currently making me angry and I hope my paper on it isn’t too boring. Damn the man, and all of that. (I’m really going to miss my class on new media and the public sphere.) Chuckles and I also went to see Once, which was very sweet. It stars Glen Hansard of The Frames, a band I love.

Tonight I skipped kickball, ostensibly to work on my paper. In reality my brain needed some rest. Wish me luck finishing it and my portfolio project. I’ll need some. I should be back to the regularly scheduled programming soon.