The Death of Imagination

I'm glad I put off coming downtown for a day, since it was infinitely nicer to be in Millennium Park this afternoon than it would've been in the cold and wet. While it wasn't exactly balmy, it was quite nice in sun, and there was plenty of that. So much that I suggested to Nuphy that we move to the shade of the Lurie Garden before we ended up lobsters. Speaking of which, there was a dancing lobster at the Next Generation tent. (At first I thought it was a dancing shrimp and got excited for reasons that not more than a half dozen people on my flist could possibly understand.)

As for the Fest itself, meh. I'm agnostic about whether it works in the space. Before, everything was arranged along Columbus Avenue, which made it easy to get an overview of events and tents. Now it's all spread over three levels, so when you're at the Next Generation tent (just off Michigan), you haven't the foggiest what is happening on the main stage at Pritzker, and vice versa. I overheard some of the concessions operators complaining about being stuck on the far side of the pavilion grounds and I don't blame them; their share of the foot traffic was minimal.

Concessions have always been the weakest point of Celtic Fest, and now they're only weaker. We may have joked every year about the presence of a Thai place, but at least it was another option. This year there were all of three vendors who weren't affiliated with the Park Grille (which is three more than I expected to see, frankly). But the most galling affront was the beer. Fucking Budweiser, are you kidding me? I did not come all the way up here from St Louis to have that swill at my city festivals.

Fortunately, anticipating the poor pours of Guinness that are part of Celtic Fest tradition, Nuphy and I met up first at the Gage. (I'm sure no one wants to hear me go on again about how this is the one bar in Chicago which maintains a standard of pouring Guinness that isn't an embarrassment to all that's Irish, so I won't.) That is the sole clear advantage to the new location: Finding food fit to eat is as simple as crossing the street. We ate at Cafe Baci--a half hour in the shade, and I was more than ready for a macchiato.

In the past, if you needed a hot beverage and a place to sip it, there was always a stand with tepid brew and expensive shortbread. I'm not sure if that, like the Heavy Athletics, is a casualty of the smaller space or a change in sponsors. I seem to recall that the Highland Dance tent was underwritten by some Scottish tourist agency; now that it's all under the aegis of Fly Nova Scotia, the various promotional booths have all vanished. I counted a grand total of eight society stands (the Cornish didn't make it back this year, though the Manx did) and a roughly equal number of vendors; that seems half what it was only a year ago. Hard times or a hard time from the organisers?

Bitch whine moan kvetch--what about the music? Even that was more disappointing than in years past, but it still deserves better treatment than I can offer it in a codicil to this post.

The plan was simple enough: Meet at the Chicago Children's Museum at Navy Pier at opening time on Saturday. M³ suggested that, as long as we were going to be down there, we might want to take the nephews out to see the river get dyed green. That's right, I suddenly remembered, it's the St Patrick's Day Parade this weekend. So Friday night I warned my sister of what that would mean for a visit to the Loop and she wisely postponed the trip a day.

Of course, this now put the visit (a) immediately after the switch to DST and (b) on the same morning they were checking out of the hotel. So I guess it's not at all surprising that by the time they made it to the museum, it had already been open for an hour-and-a-half. Having slept badly the night before, I was too tired to be annoyed. Besides, the sun had come out and turned waiting in the near-empty atrium into a remarkably pleasant experience. M³ and bunj were there for company and bunj's attempts to guide his brother-in-law to Navy Pier by means of frequent calls with his Blackberry provided amusement.

We'd actually turned up a bit late ourselves and so had rushed right to the museum and paid admission. When the woman at the desk found that we didn't have any children with us, she said we'd have to "check in" at Customer Services. This consisted of signing a log and exchanging our photo IDs for bright pink tags reading "UNACCOMPANIED ADULT" that we were required to wear at all times within the museum. I immediately started referring to these as our "perv tags". At one point, after IMI had run off again and I'd had to haul him back screaming for the second time in a row, my sister said to me, "I hope no one sees you wearing that tag and thinks you're trying to kidnap my son." It turns out she needn't have worried: I was joking again about the tags as we were gathering up to leave when a museum employee overheard us and said, "Oh, so that's what those are for!"

But before any of the nephews even set foot in the museum, my sister took me aside and said, "AWI and ECI have something to tell you." My heart sank; I'd been worrying for weeks about some disaster occurring during their visit to my house on Saturday and felt tremendously relieved to find everything intact after they'd left. What had I missed? A bottle of coke poured into the carpet? A smashed vase somewhere? A hanging scroll with pudding handprints?

Next thing I knew, my sister was presenting me with a plastic bag full of change. Quarters, dimes, nickles, and pennies; my mind was racing trying to figure out what this had to do with me. Then she began telling the story of how the two older boys had discovered the tray in the bathroom where monshu deposits all his pocket change until he needs "mad money" for an upcoming trip. They'd filled their pockets to bulging--and might've gotten away with it, too, if she hadn't heard the "ka-CHING" when AWI dropped trou that night to change into jammies.

I knew that the situation required me to play the role of the stern disciplinarian--if only for half a minute--but I wasn't up to it. All I could do was laugh; blame the tiredness. If only monshu had been there; one frown from him would've put the fear of God, Skeletor, and ebola into those boys. But as it was, I can't imagine what they thought as they were offering up their abject apologies.

BTW, the Children's Museum is, in a word, AWESOME. Totally worth having to wear a perv tag for if you want to play hooky one day and check it out for yourself.

Possibly the most surprising thing at the Polish Museum of America Library was finding that even after neglecting it for half I year, I still speak more Polish than the weekend attendant. She mentioned that she was just learning the language, so once we had wrestled with the microfilm long enough to score an article worth printing, I offered her the challenge of deciphering the headline. She recognised one word of it.

More troublesome for me than any Slavic language was the visual language of early-20th-century Polish community newspapers. It took basically the first hour just to determine where we needed to be looking (turns out the crime news is all under notatki reporterskie "reporter's notes"), after which we had to go back scan all the earlier issues over again. Before then, I wasted much of my time in the "local news" section, which eventually revealed itself to be ordinary community events: dances, confirmations, church bazaars, etc.

Complicating things even more, this section was arranged chiefly by parish. Fortunately, my previous reading about the Polish community of Chicago had led me to anticipate this, so when I saw "Z Annowa", I knew immediately that this indicated news from the parish of St Ann(e). But which St Ann(e)'s, and was it was in any way connected with our persons of interest? (As it turns out, no: St Ann's is on the South Side, and still has one Sunday mass in Polish despite being located just off La Dieciocho.) Before yesterday I had heard of Jackowo (St Hyacinth's), Trójcowo (Holy Trinity), and Stanisławowo (St Stan's) and it was easy enough to identify Josafatowo with St Josaphat's, Wacławowo with St Wenceslaus and Kantowo with St John Cantius. But Marjanowo had me bamboozled until I caught a reference to "anieli" and realised it must be St Mary of the Angels. Even more confusing were repeated references to the "Town of Lake". None of us recognised this as the name for what would later become Milwaukee's South Side.

Speaking of these and other monuments to the piety of Chicago's Polonia, I had the good fortune to spend a few moments admiring the interior of Holy Trinity. (Normally I'm too self-conscious to go into Catholic churches looking like a bum, but luckily I was turned out for a dinner engagement later in the day.) I would've loved to have done the same at St John Cantius, but I found the doors locked. Maybe next time I'll be able to take a gander at St Hyacinth's, which from the photos looks more spectacular even than St Mary's.

http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_4_california.html

I find the analysis in the article particularly interesting because I see Chicago heading toward the same "big-spending, high-taxing, lousy-services" model as California. For the past year and a half, we've had the highest sales tax in the nation, yet they still can't fix the potholes or make the the trains run on time. At least Left Coast progressives can console themselves with the fact that the major beneficiaries are those on the dole and public sector employees (and, by extension, their unions, which should warm the heart of the pro-labour contingent). By contrast, here the money seems to end up in the pockets of private developers, which is not an outcome favoured by any principled political philosophy.

Coming back on the drive last night, we saw a lighted display announcing the closure of the Bryn Mawr exit. Only on the sign the name of the street was spelled "BRYN MARW". Now some of you (i.e. anyone unfortunate enough to be within earshot of me when the subject's come up before) know that "Bryn Mawr" is a Welsh name meaning "big" (mawr) "hill" (bryn). As it turns out, marw is a Welsh word as well, one meaning "dead".

It's two hours since Chicago got eliminated from the running for the 2016 Olympic® Games[*] and I'm still giddy. Literally, there was a spring in my step all the way to J.K. Sweets for lunch. Oh, I'll admit that I felt a twinge of disappointment when I heard we got eliminated in the first round, but it was drowned in the ensuing surge of relief like a spider in a waterspout. I really don't care why we didn't tapped to host their gargantuan corporate party. All I know is that the feelings of the average Chicago citizen had nothing at all to do with it.

I feel a bit sorry for St Barack o' Bama, but only a bit since no one asked him to squander precious political capital on something so inconsequential. (And by "no one" I mean "the vast majority of those who elected him" since obviously someone asked him to do that. I just hope that, whoever it was, the big O got his back-scratching off them in advance.) When it comes to Da Mare, on the other hand, my feelings can best be summed up by this snide entry from fengi. At least he can console himself with whatever share of the profits he's entitled to from his developer buddies for a sweetheart deal involving the Michael Reese property, though he may have to conduct it with slightly more scrutiny than he's generally accustomed to in such matters.

For years, alumni of princeofcairo's RPGs have been joking about the Unknown Armies-inspired conceit of an occult poker game at an annual secret conclave of the US' big city mayors. I'm wondering how badly Daley was losing this last time that he had to toss in "Chicago's Olympic® bid" and how the winner is going to make use of it.


[*] Da hast du es, itchwoot; how's that for an informative opening sentence?

Recently I wrote a post in another forum listing all the languages which I had personal overheard spoken in Chicago. I thought I'd reproduce that here, but with the added value of trying to rank the languages roughly according to frequency.

Daily

English (American, AAVE)
Russian
Spanish (Latin American)


Over the Course of a Week

Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian
Chinese (Putonghua)
French
German
Hebrew
Korean


Over the Course of a Month

Amharic
ASL
Chinese (Cantonese)
Hindi/Urdu
Japanese
Polish
Thai
Vietnamese


Over the Course of a Year

Arabic
Aramaic
Bengali
Dutch
Greek
Gujarati
Haitian Creole
Igbo
Italian
Khmer
Lao
Latvian
Panjabi
Persian
Portuguese
Rumanian
Somali
Tagalog
Turkish
Ukrainian
Wolof


A Least Once in a Decade

Belizean Kriol
Catalan
Hungarian
Irish
Malayalam
Mayan
Swedish
Schwyzertüütsch
Teochiu
Welsh