United Nations

I'm working at the archives Ford Foundation this week, and their building is just down the block from the United Nations headquarters in New York.

I liked this sculpture but I would want to point out to anyone thinking about firing this gun that it will blow up in your face. Which, I suppose, is exactly the point.

Mathiessen State Park

The worst thing about living in Chicago, which is otherwise pretty great, is that to get yourself to any sort of natural environment you have to go far. (There are of course many city parks, the lakefront, the forest preserves, the botanic garden, etc., all of which add immeasurably to one's quality of life around here. But it's not the same as being away from it all. Nor are the Indiana Dunes, with their nuclear-power-plant views. And, let's face it, farmland is as "unnatural" an environment as a city.) Most Chicagoans go to Starved Rock State Park, about 1.6 hours away in Utica, Illinois. And indeed, Starved Rock is a nice place to be. But it's too bad that people skip over Matthiessen State Park, just a couple of miles past the entrance to Starved Rock. For one thing, there are often fewer people at Matthiessen. At the Dells Area, there are waterfalls and you can go walking around in the river: it's arguably more pleasant than the sandstone bowls at Starved Rock. We recently went to the River Area for the first time, and found wild orchids. If you've already been to Starved Rock a couple of times, try Matthiessen the next time you go.

Gazing Globe - Spring

Got out today to do the final season of Chicago gazing globes - spring. This was the most spring-like and most appealing picture. But although it's more abstract, I also liked this one of the globe sitting on a log:

Kayaking on Lake Michigan

It seemed warm enough today to go kayaking, so we went out on Lake Michigan. For the first 3/4 of the trip, it was great - then the sun disappeared, the wind kicked up, and we got cold. Still, Chicago looked great.

See, it was fun!

Detroit Institute of Arts II

The other great exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts was a real surprise - a collection of chess boards from across the centuries and the regions of the earth. As Nicole pointed out, most often at art museums you see objects organized by era, region, and type: Victorian plates here, Dutch masters there, etc. Rarely does an exhibition feature a single object as interpreted by many different movements, as these extraordinary chess sets did. It struck me that it would be a great way to teach art history to introduce a new current or school by showing how it interpreted a chess set: whether Islamic non-figurative art or surrealism through Dali's finger-board. I'm showing at right one of the pawns from an 18th century Italian all-insect set. I highly recommended you look at the pictures here and here (the latter in pdf form). The capitalists vs. communists set from Leningrad in 1925 is extraordinary, though nothing if not unsubtle.

Detroit Institute of Arts

We've spent a few days in Ann Arbor, hosted by some generous friends, but we struck out one day for Detroit and its Institute of Arts. It's fascinating because the whole Institute would probably not have existed had Detroit not once been the fourth largest city in the U.S. 50-60 years ago. I thought it was a great museum -- large enough to hold many things of interest, but not so large that it couldn't be taken in within a single day. A couple of parts were worth the price of admission by themselves. The museum's most famous work are the Detroit Industry Murals, painted by Diego Rivera in 1932 and 1933. For a Communist (and Trotskyist, etc.), Rivera was orthodox enough to remember that it was the industrial proletariat that will bring about the socialist revolution, and so he celebrated the creation of industry and even of industrialists. There are, in his madman's mind, also currents of horror at the workings of technology, which he strongly associated with the United States (as against Mexico, which he associated with the workings of nature).

See also his occasional wife Frida Kahlo's not-unambiguous interpretation of the divide between "natural" Mexico and "industrial" America:

Spring Break!

In Michigan this year, where everyone is enjoying the balmy temperatures.

Inauguration - White House

After the end of the inauguration, I tried to get closer to the Capitol, where some friends were waiting. I tried for an hour and couldn't find any way to go in that direction. I suppose for security reasons, all of the crowds were being moved in the opposite direction. And so I passed by the White House.

It's ours now!

Inauguration - Monument

Inauguration - Monument

There I am! The temperature wasn't too low but it was below freezing and we all ended up standing out there for about six hours straight.

Inauguration - Crowd

Here's a little shot of the crowd, which of course was impossible to capture in a picture. In the center of the photo, you can make out a row of portable toilets that lots of folks decided represented their best hope of seeing something. They climbed on top to get a view, and, as far as I know, there were no disasters.

Inauguration - Capitol

This is as close as I got on the day of the event. Between me and the Capitol Building there was a solid mass of people. I'm standing very close to the Washington Monument.

Inauguration - Capitol

I was in Washington DC the last two weeks working at the archives -- which happened to coincide with the inauguration of a certain new president. Here's a picture of the capitol building on January 19th, the day before - that is far far closer than I would get on inauguration day itself.

Gazing globe 3 seasons

I've got three seasons of gazing globe pictures now from the same rotting log in Jackson Park. Out of context of the other pictures we took on those days fall and summer look pretty similar, but there's a kind of brightness and warmth in the summer photo that comes through nicely. (Particularly on a day like today, when we took the winter photo!) This project is basically turning into an ode to temperate climates. And Hyde Park.

Summer

Fall

Winter

November 4, continued

There were a quarter million people downtown celebrating on November 4, but I made it into the paper! Well, sort of: my friend Sarah found a picture of me in the user-submitted section of the Chicago Tribune's online coverage. Currently it's photo number 14 in the list that you can find by following the link here. Nicole is there, but only her forehead seems to have made the picture. The picture was submitted by a user named tonywint. Thanks tonywint, and thanks to Sarah for finding it.

November 4

So many things to say...it was simply the best day in American politics in my lifetime. We were fortune enough to get some of the free tickets to be there in Grant Park for the Obama victory celebration. However, as you can see from this picture, there were many many people there. We were in the large crowd off to the top right, and couldn't even see the stage. All we could see was the jumbotron broadcasting the results and the speeches.

When the West Coast polls closed CNN called the election for Obama and the place erupted. We were all cheering, hugging each other, crying...it was an incredible surge of emotion. I'm sure that with time we'll forget what this was like, and how momentous it seemed. Just for a moment, we could let go of our guilt. And in the days that have followed, I have felt that there is someone in charge who believes that it is important to take care of the future: my future, our future. Of course things like this can't be quantified, but I feel that maybe 15-20% of the unhappiness that I've felt over the last eight years can be attributed to the political direction that the country had taken and the lack of action on things that matter. Now I feel no bitterness towards Bush, just relief.

Just as it was hard to see, it was hard to get a picture of anything down there. There's a hat in the way here, but if you enlarge the picture you'll be able to see the crowd and get a sense of the scope of things. Obama has finished his speech here and you can see him with his family on the screen in the upper left.

Finally, you owe it to yourself to look at this sequence of photos, taken at a rally in Virginia. Hope indeed. Update: the original photographer has come forward: she's a 17-year-old named Nida Vidutis, and her site is here.

Gazing Globe I

I had an idea for what a younger kid might call an "art project" over the summer. Since we got a phenomenal camera as a wedding gift (thanks Auntie Di & Uncle Garth) and since Nicole decided my idea was worth pursuing and bought me the globe (thanks Nicole), this is the first of a series.

Amtrak

I spent last week in New York doing research, and I decided to take the train out from Chicago to get there. It was a 21 hour trip, which I decided to undergo to see our nation's rail network for myself. It was a worthwhile experience, involving some uncomfortable sleeping, an immigration raid that nabbed the woman sitting behind me, and some beautiful scenery (seen here) in upstate New York (Chicago to New York runs through Albany, and then south).

Here's what I liked: the cars were plenty modern, with lots more space than you would have on an airplane. They had footrests, you can obviously walk around the cars, and the seats recline well enough to sleep. If you were a couple and had seats next to each other, you could make a comfortable evening of it. There were two electrical outlets in each seat, so you could theoretically get some work done. Security was much less onerous than an airport, and it felt safe rather than threatening. It was cheaper than flying. The conductors were less stressed than flight attendants.

The problems are as follows: the train ride is not quite smooth enough to allow me to work efficiently, so I got to feeling a bit sick as I tried to write on my laptop. That's not good for a really long trip. There was far too much air conditioning, making it quite uncomfortable. When you can't quite stretch out to sleep, your feet fall asleep and wake you up. For too many long stretches, the train just sits there, not moving at all. It never seemed to go faster than 80 miles an hour.

Would I do it again? I've thought about it, and I'm still not sure. I felt that I could do it again right after I arrived, but I came down with cold symptoms for the two days that followed. I blame the frigid air I had blowing on me for 21 straight hours. If I could take away that problem, I'd think about it, but most people wouldn't and I wouldn't blame them either. To really begin to reduce flying and make it easier to reduce our impact on the environment, you need some functional long-haul service that's quite a bit faster. I used to think the United States was just to big to make that work, but I was convinced by this experience that that a really good rail network would work better than I had thought. Obviously there are some distances over which trains are faster than planes when you add in all of the time in airports. And train depots are generally more central to cities than airports, so that's another advantage. But even for long-haul, I think there's an opportunity that's being missed. Chicago to New York, for example, is about 800 miles, 1000 along the route through Albany that we took. If we had a serious rail network, you can easily have consistent speeds of 100 miles an hour. You could, like I did, begin at night, and go to sleep. I woke up in Buffalo and had to wait another 12 hours before hitting New York City. But if the trains had dedicated fast track, 100-120 miles isn't even particularly speedy by international standards. And you could put people to bed on long haul routes, and wake them up at their destination. Ten hours on a comfortable train designed for sleeping wouldn't be such a bad way to travel, and might not be such a bad trade with five hours of painful flying. Maybe someday.

On September 11, a picture of New York from the 10th story of the New York University main library, where I am doing some work right now.

Mantis

Noticed this mantis outside the other day. Kevin Drum blogs a picture of his cats every Friday...I'm thinking about starting Saturday mantisblogging. If I can find any more, that is. Which is unlikely.