Our Tale of Two Cities--Part V

Friday, July 29, 2005: Back to the Windy City

This was the day we had planned to see the city of Chicago!

The Crowded Metra

Ah, public transportation yet again. This time, we were with Tracy, who grew up in Chicago and knew how to navigate the system. It amazed me how mashed together people tend to be in larger urban areas and how they can stand it. People don’t make eye contact on the street, yet they have an amazing group cohesion and politeness face-to-face. I noted when our train arrived at the destination and we found a café to get some lunch, that the employees at that establishment were much more friendly and receptive than the average Kentucky server. On the Metra trip into town, some poor teenager was having trouble opening a bottle of frapuccino, and he felt perfectly comfortable asking his fellow passengers to help him out with it (I couldn’t do it, but Mighty Dr Paris could). The city hustles and bustles and they don’t like slow walkers, but I did not find it as hostile as the stereotypes always indicate.

The Chicago Institute--Breasts of Brass, Stone and Oil on Canvas

The high point of our trip to Chicago, the Chicago Institute, was truly a magnificent façade. Unfortunately, it was quite crowded, probably because of the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit on display at that time. It took about 20-25 minutes just to get in the door to pay our entrance fee. I was somewhat familiar with the 19th century post-impressionist painter from my art appreciation college course in Fall 1993, but was not necessarily overjoyed with his work. I have discovered that I’m just more a fan of the High Renaissance artwork of Raphael and the Baroque chiaroscuro of de Zurbaran. Nonetheless, we were there, and he was relatively well-known, so we thought the additional $4 wasn’t unreasonable to say we’d seen his exhibit. Of the entire museum, it was the only section where photographs were not allowed.

Overall, the Chicago Institute was much like the St. Louis art museum, except it was much larger and had more popular works from better known artists on display. For example, we have a picture of me standing in front of Picasso’s famous The Old Guitarist, a work from his “blue period,” as well as some of his Cubism pieces. There was a surrealistic painting by Salvador Dali, though it was Inventions of the Monsters and not the better known Persistence of Memory. I really enjoy sculpture, so Jennifer took several shots of me appreciating an elegant nude woman rendered in stone or brass. We didn’t have as much time to explore the museum as we would have wished, so we learned from our experience in St. Louis and streamlined our preferences. We avoided the ethnic, American and contemporary art altogether and pretty much stuck with European stuff from the High Renaissance to the 19th century. The one exception was our picture of American Gothic, which is so pervasive in pop-culture that we had to have a shot of the real thing.

The prize of this chapter was that Jennifer finally got to see Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, the Georges-Pierre Seurat pointillist painting she’d been hoping to experience from the very beginning of the trip. I am always amazed by how renderings of some things in textbooks just don’t do them justice. That painting is colossal! In books, it always looks like a conventional portrait size, but the reality is that it stands about 7 feet tall by 10 feet wide. The Institute had it in a white frame, to simulate what Seurat had intended for it. Since it had just been restored, there was a sizeable crowd gathered around it. I quickly gave up hope of getting a picture of it by itself. In fact, I eventually ended up using some of the other people as props to illustrate just how large the painting was. My only regret was that I didn’t have Jennifer step up to be in the picture.

Jennifer feels her commitment to yoga, as she stands before Shiva, the Hindu force of natural destruction.

Our biggest complaint about the Chicago Institute was that it was an architectural nightmare. To get to a particular set of exhibits, one had to constantly go downstairs to the main lobby and then back upstairs in some area that could only be reached by running in whirls through exhibits they didn’t want to see. We spent more time getting from branch to branch than we did actually looking at anything. It had the better exhibits, but we liked the St. Louis museum better for layout.

Jennifer and I both were glad we did art museums this trip instead of science or animal museums. One benefit is that art is boring for most people, especially children. They don’t have any exhibits with push buttons and special effects, so that weeded out many of the crying babies and whining toddlers that normally disrupt our immersion in those institutions of cultural enrichment.

Another benefit was that we both sort of awakened our quiescent interest in art and what art says. I’ve always had some small fascination with it, being untalented myself, but had never truly explored my aesthetic sense. Jennifer was totally new to it, having only had canvases crammed down her throat when she was a teenager. Actually choosing to view art as recreation was enjoyable for us both. I took several pictures of the nudes, to which one might just chuckle cynically at a man who just likes naked women (I did take a few of men too!). The fact is that I appreciate the human form, finding it very expressive and amazing in the versatility of ways it can be portrayed in artistic format. The very reason neither Jennifer nor I really liked the contemporary exhibits was precisely because they seemed intent on abstraction to the exclusion of recognizable human form or tribute to the human condition.

(ABOVE:) Thomas shows his metrosexuality by allowing himself to reluctantly be captured with a naked woman and a naked man. (BELOW:) Jennifer stares at a woman across the ages and commiserates with her about Thomas' preference for female nudes.

Pointillism and Other Goodies Come Home

Their gift shop was a good way to express that new artistic interest. Jennifer found a couple of small pictures, one of Seurat’s painting, and Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877) by Gustave Caillebotte, which she wanted to hang when we got home. I struck gold when, against all odds, I found a poster of Raphael’s School of Athens (1509), an inspirational piece that shows philosophers of all time periods together in a timeless place of learning. That will do great things for our office wall!

Big Spit at the Millennium Fountain

We toured around Chicago for some time, just looking at some of their strange sights. The Millenium Fountain is a good example. Basically, it’s composed of two 20-30 foot rectangular blocks, each about 100 feet apart from each other. On the inside wall of each is a gigantic movie screen that shows a huge human face that is actually in motion. You can see the images blink and smile. Think of a 2,000-inch television screen and you’ve got the idea. Every so often, the image will close its eyes, pucker its lips and blow out a stream of water that rains over anyone standing between the two blocks. In general, that was a bunch of children who were just out enjoying the cool water.

The Fountain Had Water in It

While we were viewing fountains, we finally got to see the famous Buckingham Fountain that was popularized by the opening scene of the old horrible sit-com, Married, With Children (1986). Jennifer and I first saw it back during our first Chicago trip in March 2003, but because the weather was so cold, the fountain was off. So it was very anticlimactic to climb all the way up there to see a big, rock-filled basin that was dry as a proverbial bone. This time, it was actually active, and periodically ejaculating a span of water three stories tall!

Still newlyweds, the Thornberries engage in a rare act of PDA.

Here, you can get an idea of what the quickened fountain actually looked like:


At one point, the spray caught the fading sunlight of the evening and formed a tremendous vertical rainbow that was magical in its ability to induce awe.


Another Mad Dash in Chicago

Leaving the rainbow behind, we had to beat feet back to the Metra station to catch our train. As they are wont to do, Paris and Tracy underestimated the time it would take us to walk back, and then they had some trouble determining which train we needed. But they did find it and we all climbed aboard, where we were taken back to a starving Dante and Starrie Barnes. We finished the evening out with a good dinner, watched a DVD I purchased back at Union Station in St. Louis, and went to bed.

Saturday, July 30, 2005: Elegant Legs Coming Together to Form an…End

In case you haven't figured it out, the "leg" metaphors culminated in the word "end" above, which means "ass." :) Be that as it may, our time in Chicago was rolling to a close.

Delays, Delays, Nothing But Delays

We left Chicago about 1½ hours behind schedule. Worse, it took about an hour just to get out of the Chicago area. Apparently, I-80 is the only road in the region that is worse than I-55. In about 7½ hours, we were home. We were tired, wrung out and exhilarated from our list of experiences. Our heads and hearts were stuffed to overflowing. Are you tired from reading about them? Imagine the direct experience of it!

And if you stayed with us throughout this entire essay, thanks so much! It was fun again! Thank you!

Ye Ende