What's So Great about Google Art Project?

Google Art Project is one of my favorite things. You can virtually visit more than 150 museums around the world, although you are just looking at a subset of each museum's artworks. All together, though, there are more than 30,000 works of art to discover, and many of them are in super-high-def (gigapixel) format.  In other words, they are really beautiful. Also, via Google Street View technology, you can virtually "walk" through many of the galleries, so you can get a feeling for the setting of the artworks.  Of course some of the museums, like the Palace of Versailles, are arguably more interesting for their architecture and interior design than for the artworks they contain.

Endeavors like this put us on the path to an idealized future, where all the world's knowledge and cultural capital is freely available and accessible online.  We can't all travel everywhere we would like to visit. Google Art Project offers the opportunity for really rich encounters with art and the institutions that house it.

Jason Salavon, Computational Artist

At the University of Chicago yesterday, Victor and I attended an interview with Jason Salavon as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival day in Hyde Park. This artist's work is amazing. He transforms digital information into aesthetically pleasing and often fascinating works. One piece, Field Guide, is a copy of "the entire 2007 IKEA catalogue, leaving only color and structure." Another piece turns shoe manufacturing data into a hypnotic, psychedelic animation. Golem is a generator/printer of very convincing abstract paintings reminiscent of Hans Hoffman and Richard Diebenkorn.

This is art with brains and beauty, satisfying on multiple levels.

Adventures in Caffeine

I never liked coffee. It was my father's drink. My mother drank tea, so I thought coffee was for men, with that logic children are born with. The fact that my grandmother drank coffee was confusing, but like any good theoretician I didn't let the facts get in the way of my conclusions.

Because I never particularly noticed that tea had a taste (tea from teabags rarely does), I drank plain hot water for years. Then I somehow got introduced to real tea--from loose leaves. And learned that tea could be delicious.

Working at home, I had the flexibility to drink a pot of tea in the morning, but on days I went out without drinking the pot, I found I felt awful.: caffeine withdrawal.

So I started getting mochas-to-go, or cappuccinos. A far more efficient caffeine-delivery mechanism (one serving got me what I needed), and perfectly palatable as long as I added a packet of sugar.

For the past several months we have had an espresso machine at home, so the ritual has changed once more: the morning begins with a cup of cappuccino, whether I'm in or out. If I'm in, I follow this with a pot of tea; if not, not. Thus, the caffeine-urge is satisfied, the tastebuds are satisfied, and I go about my day (relatively) alert.

My child-self would be utterly confused at this union of (she believed) opposites. But she was wrong about an awful lot of things. 

Going Digital

I have never been as attracted to books as objects so much as for what they contain. Those who know me might raise their eyebrows at this--I have an awful lot of books. But I have rarely minded cheap editions or used ones; as long as a book was readable, I'd be happy enough to own it.

Of course, some books are attractive primarily because of their physical aspect: my Abrams art book on collage, with its tipped-in pictures and two-color letterpress printing; the book about the Peacock Room that I am reading now. And some books are really more convenient and useful in their analog state--like travel guidebooks and field guides, so you can flip through when you don't know what you're looking for.

Sitting in my living room lately, with its wall of books, I've been fantasizing about empty space. The advantage of books on the shelf is the visual sweep--there's a randomness factor: running your thumb along the spines you might choose to read a book you didn't intend to at first. There's a similar loss in the exchange (years ago accomplished) of digital music for CDs, but that loss is compensated somewhat by software "shuffle" features. Browsing is also still possible in digital book collections; it just becomes a conscious choice rather than a default activity. Web services like Library Thing can display book collections in multiple formats.

Slogans against digital books point out "books don't need batteries" but the physical space required by books is not trivial (says one who has lined the walls of two rooms with them). And this far-from-trivial space has very limited value beyond what it contains. It does provide a kind of eccentric eye candy and a visual reminder of what one has read and has yet to read. For the most part, though, the books are bound and printed cheaply, not made to last, and the spines fade on the shelf. The loyalty to what one has read and what one wants (or wanted at one time) to have read...sometimes it seems silly.

So find myself wishing that much of my library were digitized. As I read Wolf Hall on my Kindle last week, I had absolutely no nostalgia for turning paper pages, or lugging around a big fat tome. I was enthralled by the novel, and didn't need yellowing paper to enhance that enchantment.

It's quite impossible to contemplate buying digital copies of all my books. It would cost something around $30K (assuming ,$9.99 a book for 3,000 books). Of course, some I wouldn't want digitized, and some are not available.

It turns out that there are devices to transform real books to e-book files, and I even found a service. The devices are either really expensive or require you to turn the pages (and sometimes both)--imagine doing this for 3,000 books! Ugh. The service might be worthwhile, at least for some books not available on Kindle (they won't do a Kindle conversion for books already commercially available on ereaders, though you could get PDFs).

For now I am lightly thinning the shelves by replacing hard copies with digital versions of free or cheaply available classics by the likes of Dickens and Wharton. I have established a moratorium on buying new paper books unless they are unavailable for Kindle, or they really are better in paper (cookbooks are another example).

My library's digital conversion will happen in fits and starts, and will not be complete, but it is happening.

The British Library's Virtual Books

Victor and I have been to London a number of times, and one of our favorite places to visit is the British Library. Like our Library of Congress, it is a national library; unlike the Library of Congress, it sees its mission as global rather than national (its slogan: Explore the world's knowledge). A personal visit to either can be a little disappointing for a lay book lover--the shelves are typically not open to just anyone; you have to present yourself as a researcher of some kind, fill out a request slip, and wait for the librarian to deliver what you desire.

Even so, our first visit to the British Library took hours. Open to the public is a large exhibit room containing a varying assortment of remarkable documents under glass: a Gutenberg Bible, a copy of the Magna Carta, a handwritten draft of a Beatles lyric by Paul, pages from Jane Austen's first novel. In an alcove, you can sit at a terminal and virtually turn the pages of (for example) an early illuminated Hebrew bible.

It is really the coolest thing ever.

And I just learned you don't have to go to London to use it. The British Library's website provides access to "virtual books." You can download a Shockwave plugin and leaf through one of William Blake's notebooks or Mercator's first atlas of Europe.

Unbelievably awesome. Just when you're thinking that all the Internet has to offer is faster, grimmer news and LOLcats, something like this makes you remember that technology can still do amazing things.

Sunday in the Park with George

Yesterday afternoon, we went to see the Porchlight Music Theatre's production of Sunday in the Park with George, the Stephen Sondheim musical about Georges Seurat and the making of his masterpiece A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. 

It's a beautifully done show, extremely moving, with some sharp insights about artists and the art-making process and business. The whole cast does justice to the remarkable score, and the simple set is lovely.

Recommended.

Thieves Like Us

We started subscribing to the House Theatre of Chicago last year, with some trepidation.  There is so much great theater around town that it seems limiting to commit to a particular troupe, and we travel so much that there is a real concern about whether we can make every show.  On the other hand, House subscriptions are about as cheap as they could be, and go to support some of our favorite Chicago artists and performers.

This season's inaugural show is Thieves Like Us, based on a 1930s-era novel by Richard Anderson and adapted by local playwright Damon Kiely. Like most House Theatre shows, it features creative scene-setting and staging; for example, when main characters hop into their (invisible) getaway car, other cast members parade along the stage holding up newsprint drawings of the scenery the automobile passes on its journey.

Imaginative touches like these, and an enigmatic (and magnetic) torch singer who appears and disappears, like a phantom of protagonist Bowie Bowers' mind, elevate the show beyond its pulpy, noir material (nice guy falls in with the wrong crowd, gets in trouble, lands in jail, gets in more trouble, falls in love with nice girl, tries to get out of trouble, fails).  So do an array of fine performances from the cast who are--as typical at the House--terrifically energetic.

In spite of a sad ending, it's an invigorating show.

Another Day, Another Gadget

Our new flat-screen TV is Internet-enabled, which means we can stream Netflix movies, and access Amazon Video on Demand, which is almost embarrassingly exciting.  But yesterday I realized we can't easily access video content from iTunes (which was embarrassingly disappointing).  Our Blu-Ray player has an iPod dock, but that only facilitates music play; it doesn't transmit video.  We have a cable to connect my iPhone directly to the TV, but that transmits only visuals without sound.

So after scouring the Web for hours, looking at cables, docks, and other devices, I've concluded that the easiest and most cost-effective option is an Apple TV.  It offers some redundant services (for example, Netflix streaming), but also offers the prospect of a better remote interface (using my iPhone via the Remote app), access to iTunes content, and ultimately (in November or so), the ability to wirelessly stream content from any of my devices to my TV.

So is the PC-user becoming Apple-fied?   Somewhat.  But after I had to replace my Airport Extreme because it couldn't sustain a VPN connection, I'm inclined to persist with a mixed environment.

Origin

Did not want to put down this mystery. The protagonist, Lena, is a fingerprint expert confronted with a crime that might just be a statistical blip--a surprising number of crib deaths (SIDS) within a couple of months.  Because of her unexpected success resolving a previous child murder, Lena, almost pathologically private, is the target of enormous attention and expectation from the public as well as her colleagues.

While Lena is not at all sure there is a crime, to start, something about the case troubles her, and leads her to explore her own past more persistently (she was raised by foster parents).  As the investigation progresses, certain details and even pieces of evidence seem to point back to the mystery of her own origin. 

Beautifully written with a compellingly diverse cast of characters; convincingly set in depressed Syracuse, New York; a really terrific read.

Crescent

This is a beautiful, moving novel. The book is ostensibly a romance--a love affair between an Iraqi-American chef and an Iraqi emigre academic--but it is also about loss, and the power of rituals, like cooking, eating, and storytelling, to heal.

Someone I Used to Know

I am reading a novel by someone I used to know.  Not very well; Diana was a grad student when I was an undergrad: I admired her from afar.  She was tall, blond, slim, and (to me) grownup and glamorous.  Her boyfriend--just as tall, slim, and handsome--was he a grad student in a different department?--added to the glamor.

She was the first person I ever saw wear black stirrup pants.  I remember asking her where she got them, and her bemusement at my admiration. Black stirrup pants became my uniform (under a white dress shirt) for at least a handful of years. (My husband periodically evinces nostalgia for them: "You used to always wear stirrup pants. What happened?") I remember mean-spirited voices criticizing her work as beautiful, but too opaque, difficult.  She is probably the person I most wanted to be when I was 19 or 20.

I never did become her, though. Never that slim, nor that alluring, and nobody ever accused me of opacity (quite the opposite).

But I became her reader, and happily find her work engaging, actually wholly delightful.

Out Stealing Horses

This book was recommended by my friend Stephanie recently; she even offered me a money-back guarantee.  No refund was needed, however: Out Stealing Horses is one of the best novels I've read this year.

Per Petterson's novel demonstrates Hemingway's famous maxim, "The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water," as perfectly as anything I've ever read.  As I read I kept thinking the novel was about one thing, and it kept turning out to be about something else, also. This happened repeatedly. So a coming of age story about a teenage boy is also a story about an an almost-old man preparing for being old and alone, and it is also a story about the limits of human relationships, and it is also a story about how we cope with disaster, and it is also a story about resistance to Nazi occupation, and it is also a story about adultery.

Oh yes, and it is also a story about stealing horses.


I have read some online reviews of this book that complain the novel has no plot.  On the contrary, there is an astounding abundance of plot.  You just have to read almost as quietly and attentively as the author writes, or you could miss it all.

Despicable Me

This movie was not despicable enough.

Nathalie

I probably picked this movie because I'm nuts about Fanny Ardant. Plus, Gerard Depardieu is in it. Another movie about infidelity; in this one, a jealous wife hires a prostitute to seduce her unfaithful husband.  Her motivations are obscure: is she seeking to entrap him, to put his infidelities under her control, or does she simply get off on the prostitute's graphic descriptions of their time together?

It's not a fun movie to watch, but well done, with an unexpected conclusion.

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

No, not the great Warren Zevon song, but the Clive Owen movie.  Sadly.  Because it's not a very good movie, even though it contains Clive Owen, and Charlotte Rampling, and even Malcolm McDowell.  But cast isn't everything.  It's a grim story, about a retired gangster who believes he's wasted his life; and through the course of the movie nothing really changes. You meet grim or feckless characters, you wait for bad things to happen, they do, and the movie just goes on.When the movie ends, it's not clear why it ended then as opposed to any other time.

Probably if it had starred almost anyone aside from Clive Owen, I wouldn't have had the patience to sit through it.  That, and hoping something more would come of Charlotte Rampling's presence in it.

I guess no one is immune to being wasted.

Being My Own IT Department

Sometimes, being my own IT Department gets old. No one can solve my technical problems but me, which can be rewarding, but also dismaying.  Dread of long stays in hold limbo with electronics manufacturers can keep me from resolving some issues for a ridiculously long time--like how my laptop stopped starting in its docking station.  I'm not even sure where the problem is--with the laptop, or the docking station? 

But in the five-plus years we've lived in this apartment, I've endured a worse problem (after all, the laptop starts perfectly outside the docking station, and then I can just dock it), which is that our wi-fi network just barely extends into my home office.  It is not a matter of distance--our apartment isn't so terribly large--but rather, interference.  Something in the kitchen--maybe the microwave, or pipes in the wall--doesn't like the wi-fi signal and degrades it to nearly nothing between one end of the room and the other (and my office is just past the other end of the kitchen).  For a while I tried a wi-fi extender, which helped, but was prone to signal drops and also interfered with Victor's VPN access.  Then we got a new router, at the recommendation of a guy from Best Buy who said we should have better equipment if we were going to stream video to our new Blu-Ray player, and it wasn't compatible with the wi-fi extender.  Then we found that it also wasn't compatible with Victor's VPN, and also was prone to signal drops, so we got yet another router.

This router has worked well so far, but the wi-fi still barely extends into my home office.  So I tried a new solution I just learned about: ethernet through electrical lines.  You plug this adapter into the wall outlet, and connect an Ethernet cable from your router to the adapter.  You plug its partner adapter into a wall outlet in another room (for example, the room in which you have a Blu-Ray player to which you want to stream video) and connect another Ethernet cable from that adapter to the Blu-Ray player.  And then get another adapter, and plug it into the wall in your home office, and connect yet another Ethernet cable, this time to your docking station.  And it works!  Best Internet connection I've had in here!

So today I'm my own genius IT Department. Tomorrow, of course, I'll be an idiot again...

My New Favorite Tree

At the very end of May--actually, while participating in Bike the Drive--I began to notice a really intriguing, almost tropical smell outside. I thought I might have smelled something like it in Hawaii, or at least Southern California.

After a week's investigation, I traced the smell to a particular, large old tree with yellowish flowers. Something tickled my memory. When we first moved into our house in Columbus, we asked a landscaper for advice about shade trees. He suggested the linden--he said the flowers had a nice mild scent. As it turned out, there were no lindens at the local nursery. We were told they were not often available--sort of out of style, though they had been very popular at one time.

Hmm...nice-smelling, big old shade tree. Looked up the linden on Wikipedia, and my mystery was solved. Of course, once I identified it, I saw and smelled the trees everywhere. When we visited our friends in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan last weekend, there was one in their yard, just beginning to bloom, not yet releasing its scent (the season starts later that far north).

Here, though, the tantalizing aroma is about gone (Wikipedia notes June as the month for smelling lindens, and that's certainly true in Chicago), but the trees are still laden with bees.

Collecting nectar for linden-blossom honey, no doubt.

No Exit, by The Hypocrites

Although The Hypocrites are among my favorite Chicago theater companies, I went to this performance of Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit with some trepidation. It's a play I read and loved in high school as the profoundest thing ever; and like many things I found profound in high school, its profundity has worn off. 

("Hell is other people" no longer feels like a dagger in the heart.)

But The Hypocrites have done a splendid job with this staging, which leverages a hot-pink set, a room with walls angled so that you feel claustrophobic on the actors' behalf before the play even begins. The production toys beautifully with preconceptions of hell; even as the valet assures the room's first inmate, Garcin, that there are no torture chambers, both their faces are drenched with sweat from what we can only imagine are hellfires.

This is not a play with a happy ending, but the performers attack their roles with such energy and humor that you walk out grinning. 

An excellent show.

Baal, by TUTA Chicago

TUTA Chicago has been devoted to Bertolt Brecht this year, with an excellent production of The Wedding a few months ago, and, now playing, Baal.  TUTA is one of my favorite Chicago companies for its exuberant, inventive stagings of classic and sometimes difficult plays (from Romeo and Juliet to Uncle Vanya) as well as its spirited approach to contemporary material (such as Huddersfield).  TUTA's production of Baal incorporates music by Josh Schmidt, whose score for the Writer's Theatre's  A Minister's Wife we loved so much.

The production is everything I expect from TUTA: ambitious, creative, musically surprising, and full of committed performances.  But I'm afraid I did not enjoy Baal that much--a difficult play--Brecht's first--centered on a supremely unlikeable character. Knowing it was a parody of German Expressionism--from reading the dramaturge's precis--was helpful; the actors don't play it like parody, though.  Doubtless quite right, but it makes the evening hard to bear.

Northerly Island, Rediscovered

The first time I was on Northerly Island, it was 2004 and I was lost. Victor and I were trying to take the lakefront bike path south, and somehow got sidetracked onto this narrow peninsula. We didn't know that it used to be an airport. We just knew we couldn't get where we wanted to go from there, and it was a windy day and we were tired. We ended up surrendering the attempt to bike south of the Museum Campus that day; we didn't try again for a few years. (Now we have a hard time imagining how we could have lost our way.)

On foot, I have returned to the mainland edge of Northerly Island a couple of times in the past few years to eavesdrop on concerts, but only ventured there by bike for the first time (since that 2004 confusion) as part of a Chicago Architecture Foundation tour. The tour had its drawbacks (rather long and slow and continuing right through lunchtime--enough to make anybody cranky), but I am grateful for the re-introduction to Northerly Island, which has become a stunning natural area with well-paved bike/walking paths and amazing views.

I went back to Northerly Island on my own yesterday morning and was thrilled to glimpse my first Dickcissel--a beautiful and persistent singer. I would have loved to linger and confirm the sighting, but the skies were dark and thunder rumbled; I headed home to avoid the storm.

This morning, with hardly a cloud in sight, I rode my bike there again, and this time looped the "island" three times, in my delight at being in such a gorgeous environment, full of wildflowers, bunnies, and birdsong. I easily confirmed the Dickcissel and added my first really positive identification of the Savannah Sparrow--I may well have seen one before, but now I'm sure I have. They were all over the peninsula, trilling from perches on bare branches, tall grasses, and even from mowed ground.

It was hard to make myself leave. Northerly Island has become one of my favorite places in Chicago, offering beauty, nature, tranquility, and views.