Is there any conceivable way that this house is not haunted? Is there a universe in which this house is not filled with moldering lace and wavering candle light and the sounds of things going bump in the night?

This house is on the extreme west side of Chicago on a side street just off of Austin. Dan and I discovered it in large part because we had also discovered a great ma&pa butchershop (though, truthfully, it's a bro&bro shop), called the Blue Ribbon Meat Market. The BRMM sells everything, makes their own sausage, will put turducken together for you, and its where I always buy my pork shoulder for pulled pork makin's. And an added benefit of the BRMM, is that there's this amazing street of old monster homes that's fun to take a little walk down as part of the trip.

But this house is the most unusual. . . and undeniably beautiful/really really creepy:



And I have to assume that the owners are okay with their house being super creepsville. . . or they probably wouldn't have bought two stone statues of actual sized people to flank the entryway to their home:

City buildings juxtaposed against one another, tell stories. . .




City buildings taken by themselves, speak in poetry.

Chicago, Harinezumi and Memory

I bought a little Harinezumi 2++ camera this past summer. I meant to shoot a film with it for work and didn't. I took a bunch of pictures on vacation--a number of which I posted here--and then the memory card hitched up and I couldn't get the images off the camera. And as those things go, I set it aside and forgot about it.


But this past weekend, I unearthed it, messed around with it, wouldn't take no for an answer and I got the images from the beach off the camera. And rather than dwelling too long on seeing pictures from the sunshine-y North Carolina September seaside on the coldest day of the year in Chicago, I pushed ahead.

And it's all worth it, because here's the thing. I think digital cameras are great for a million different reasons--primarily because you can shoot and shoot and shoot and you will instantly know if any of the images are any good before going through the expense of printing them. But truth be told, I think they're a little soulless. Their images are so crisp, so high-def, so crystal clear. The images they produce are like actually seeing, rather than like remembering. And I think I want photographs for remembering.

When I was a kid, all photography looked like memory--not the crystal clear clarity of the original day as you experienced it, but the way memory faded and played tricks on you and turned a pale hazy blue around the edges. No. Those pictures from the 70's weren't perfect records of the day, but they were kind to your nostalgic view, they didn't jar you with images that were clearer and more immediate and still trapped in that moment of time than your memory could be. . . they aged into the blue and lavendar and green/yellow of your faulty memory. And looking at those images feels right. They feel long ago and that makes me wistful, not sad. There's my dad with a full head of hair and me two feet tall. There's my brother with his big fluffy bowl cut and my mom all slender and grace and smiles. And I don't think, "where did the time go?" I think, "Awwww, look at us back then."

Digital images don't allow for or create that distance. . . except for Harinezumi photos. Digital, but meant to mimic a 110 camera (my childhood camera. anyone? the weird little flat placard at the bottom that you had to push in with your thumb to advance the film foward and the hazy window in the back that would tell you what number picture you were on, if it wasn't fogged up with humidity. And then trying to space the roll out and save shots to stretch the whole vacation because Mom and Dad had only bought you two rolls of film because they could only afford to print two rolls of film. And the oddly shaped pictures at the end, with white edges all around and the light leaks that created dreamy splashes of lavendar or yellow across the center or corner of the photo. anyone?). And so I'm back on board with the little H 2++, because I capture strange, lovely, atmospheric images like this:

This is my city in winter.
This is the city I want to remember in years to come.

Half Day Fridays

Columbia has a lovely habit of giving staff half-day fridays every other week in the summer. I've never taken much advantage of them because I run a big summer program for high schoolers that keeps me glued to my desk. . . happily glued. But I have, nevertheless, been wistfully jealous of my colleagues for years as they run off mid-day, starting their weekends early, hying off to do fun summer things on a stolen friday afternoon.

So, this year, I took one! And it was just as wonderful as I imagined--sneaking away with my buddy Tim to walk the whole length of Michigan Avenue, to see a movie (or two!), to walk through the fountain in Millennium Park and then eventually meet up with Dan for dinner at the Honky Tonk BBQ in Pilsen. It was a perfect day. A swirl of 5 hours of work to start the day and then come noon a lazy protracted afternoon.

By the end of the day, the afternoon felt like it had been 20 hours long and work was a distant memory.

And that's apparently how half-day Fridays feel. So lovely!

And here's what they look like:


Outside of the Chrysler Building in NYC, I think there no lovelier skyscraper than the Carbide and Carbon building on Michigan Ave. It would be the black sheep of the Chrysler Building Family. The wild card. The unpredictable one with its dark good looks and handsome bone structure. But come sunset when the copper at the top of the building lights up fiery orange? Watch out.

I heart Jeanne Gang. Her new Condo building is on the left. Maybe best structurally designed skyscraper ever. Not the most elegant facade, but smart smart smart (and green!) to its very core.

I can't get enough of this shot coming out of the AMC movie theater on the Chicago River. The Trump Tower is just so insanely overwhelming. It's Monolithic. It's sort of beautiful (though decidedly more so from a distance. . . from a vantage point where you don't feel like it might just reach out and smoosh you for being so puny), but it's mass looks so colossally out of scale with the Wrigley right next to it.

Gosh, I can't say enough good things about this place. Ask anyone. . . it's all I can talk about. Pulled pork sandwiches that will either make you cry or marry it.


Oh boy. Maple syrup candied bacon? And how!


Splendid bathroom art at the Honky Tonk BBQ. 3-D.

Both 623 S. Wabash and Not 623 S. Wabash

This building is not 623 S. Wabash. It's directly across the street from 623 S. Wabash. But the light show is being cast upon it by the late-day sun hitting the windows of 623 S. Wabash and reflecting back. I don't know what accounts for the extreme variation in shape, but it was lovely to see. . .

The building in this photo is not 623 S. Wabash, but surely the photo captures a record--removed as it may be--of 623 S. Wabash.

Today Looked Like Spring

It didn't really feel like it, because it's still chilly out, but skies were blue, the sun was shining, there are buds on the trees and spinach is growing in the cold frame in the backyard.

It's such great news. I need spring to get here as quickly as possible.

In the interest of speeding it along. I worked on spring projects and dreamed of the house I would want to live in if it was spring already (and if cost or heating and cooling and my own need for privacy were no object).

First the house. . .

Brought to you by Japanese architectural design company, Suppose Design Office. And my favorite, by far, is the house in Buzen, especially in spring when the light is so changeable at the end of the day. How great would it be to get to enjoy that light pouring in through your glass ceilings between your cozy boxed up vanilla ice cream lit rooms?

Check out the Suppose Design Office website and look at the rest of their homes. They're all Modern (with a capital M--and Minimalist with a capital as well) and filled with light. The SDO also features highchairs or rocking horses or children's toys somewhere within a shot in every home--despite almost all of the designs featuring odd bi-level builds with no railings or fall-prohibiting structures at the edge of one story tall precipices in, say, living rooms or bedrooms.

Besides this gorgeous one story Buzen house, the rest seem like resplendently gorgeous parental nightmares.

But even without a glass ceiling, the view from my front porch today was perfectly lovely:

And inside I was making delightful small and/or springy things.

Gigantor (by Trump)

I knew that the new Trump Tour in Chicago was meant to be massive. And looking at it down Wabash from a mile or two away, the scale is impressive. But I played hooky from work yesterday to see a move with chums downtown, and walking back from the theater towards Michigan Ave., this is what we saw.


I think it will grow on me eventually, but right now, it just feels so imposing. It feels like it wants to crush the Wrigley building, which has always been surrounded by air and space next to the old low Sun Times. The beautiful old building now seems bullied.

I love this building. I wish it were a public building and not a high rise condo, because that means the spectacular views from inside are available only to the exorbitantly wealthy. But the building itself is amazing. I stare at it every day and find new ways of loving it. This is the eastern tower of One Museum Park. The stubby unfinished building to it's west is the second tower of One Museum Park.

At first, it struck me as futuristic--but by a decidedly 1950's idea of the future. It looks like a painting of the future--the sweep up into the skyline, the shape of the top like the prow of a sleek silver ship cutting into the days of tomorrow--like maybe the illustration on the cover of a 50's sci-fi novel. It almost doesn't seem real.

But I also love the darker western side of the tower. One Museum Park is located at the southern end of Grant Park in Chicago. It's the tallest building at that end of the city. And the darker feature of the building seems to mirror and distort the shape of the Sears Tower as if reflecting back the geography and history of Chicago and carrying that into the future. It feels like a very smart building to me.