Chicago

Chicago was so lovely. I arrived there on Monday morning, dropped my stuff off at the hostel where I stayed and then zipped downtown. I spent the rest of the day traipsing about downtown. I first ate lunch by Lake Michigan. The lake is so blue. (The Chicago River, by contrast, bears an uncanny resemblance to the Hudson in color, albeit not in size.) Then I walked back towards the city and wandered down the Magnificent Mile, a mile or so of stores and hotels. At this point, I was exhausted from having gotten up so early, so I zipped back to the hostel and conked out almost immediately.

I got up bright and early Tuesday morning and went down to The Art Institute of Chicago. This museum alone is worth the trip to Chicago. It is full of beautiful paintings, jade and porcelain from bygone days. I sought to acquire prints of a number of works, chief among them Dali's Visions of Eternity but apparently none of the works I liked were popular enough to warrant sale in poster form to the unwashed masses.

I generally go to art museums to feel cultured, not because I especially get anything out of them. At first, The Art Institute of Chicago was no different. As I approached the modern art section, I very nearly skipped it since I never find such work accessible in the least. However, a voice rose up in my head from the professors who taught and invited me to take a modern chamber performance music class, telling me that part of understanding art is opening up one's mind to it. It was the best class of my undergraduacy. As such, I entered those wings and was pleasantly surprised to discover the art of Mel Bochner. It's the work of a mathematician bored with empty abstraction of it all. I climbed the stairs at the end of the wing. The next level was 'modern' but much darker, peculiarly evocative of death. As I turned another corner, there was a lovely explanatory museum paragraph about the popular surrealist game "The Exquisite Corpse".

Tuesday night I heard Mahler's 7th Symphony played by the CSO. There is something about listening to excellent concerts that makes me wonder what life would be like if I had pursued music performance as a career.

Wednesday I went to the Museum of Science and Industry. I went there once at the age of 10 or so, and my memory definitely exceeded the experience. It was a bit young for me, and heavily populated by small children. The exhibits didn't provoke much thinking on my part, but the information contained in them was mostly accurate. (There were some that were outdated.) The more adult exhibits were quite good. There was a series of photographs/posters about how and how much people around the world eat. It had pictures of families with all the food they would eat in one week. The Western families looked so gluttonous. I had root beer, carrots, and chocolate chip granola bars for lunch. Also of note, the U-505 exhibit was quite well put together. (The U-505 was a German U-boat that the US captured in 1944, providing valuable intelligence to the Allies.) It struck me that there is no moral high ground any more. World War II was the last great moral stand. We were a country of heroes, and a world of heroes. Do we have heroes now?

I wanted to go to a restaurant on Wednesday night for dinner. I found one. I was determined. However, when I got off the train it was dark and rainy and some hard-wired evolutionary rule stating that not wandering about in the dark in an unfamiliar section of an unfamiliar city is more important than determination or a desire for meat. Chicago needs a kosher restaurant downtown. A cheap one. Like Mama's Vegetarian in Philly.

The EL is an amazing feat of engineering.

I left at the crack of dawn this morning and am home now.