I went out for a walk this morning, hoping to find the lily pond open for the first time this season.
Helen Olney pastel
When I was growing up as a teen in Milwaukee, my family knew an artist named Helen Olney. She was a wonderful woman of great beauty and dignity who
Wistful for Wolcott
I get wistful for Wolcott when it gets to be spring. When I was in grad school, my younger friend, Joan, lived in a two-flat in Roscoe Village. The flat, on Wolcott Avenue, was unusual because it had a big side yard. Joan basically had the whole place to herself, because the old woman who…
Taller than the Hancock
The former home of a toy company where a terrible multiple murder once occurred has finally been torn down, exposing the base of a remarkably gangly old water tank.
In the hollows
The woods appear dead without being so. The hollowed-out tree is somehow still alive, still standing, all the more impressive for being diseased.
On a quiet side street
When applied to Chicago, the phrase “quiet side street” has an unconvincing ring.
The new potholes command respect
Chicago’s new potholes are fascinatingly deep and dangerous. More like craters than potholes, they have suddenly appeared all over the city, like the pock marks of a virulent disease, democratically afflicting every neighborhood
The Bruckner Mass at Rockefeller
Last weekend, I went down to Hyde Park to hear the Bruckner mass that the Chicago Chorale was singing at Rockefeller Chapel. The mass was the main item on a program devoted to religious music by Bruckner and his contemporaries.
A beautiful snow
The aesthetics of snow in the city are pretty tricky, but Wednesday we woke up to a beautiful snow.
Smoque BBQ scene
From a block away, I could see the crowd stepping in to Smoque BBQ, like filings being drawn to a powerful magnet. Everyone, instead of passing, was stepping inside.
Over Adams one morning
Another dawn: joyous, painful, inconclusive. The streets of the Loop are beginning to jam. As the train flies south, each cross-street flies into view for a second, begging to be frozen in photographic time, a experience too fleeting to merit the name.
Renee Robbins
Renee Robbins‘ paintings, recently on display at the Union League Club, teem with rainbow colors and psychedelic beauty. Fantastical yet elemental forms splay across the canvas in a random fashion that recalls a microscopic slide. Bold, sinuous forms combine in complex ways, their tentacles and ganglia looking radiant and menacing at the same time.
