Late August #2: Medici, OutFoxed, Millennium Park

DIARY

Within a couple days of getting back, I had a day with Jessica and Elisabeth.
We met at the Medici at... eleven? Noon? Sometime like that.
We were seated by Michael Kennedy, and we sat on the patio.

It's a gorgeous space... one of my favorite places in Hyde Park. Partly because the Medici itself, with patrons crowded between the kitchen and walls and among dark brick columns and vaguely tasteful art pieces, is so cavelike. You enter. You climb a flight of stairs. Wend your way among tables. And then you're there. It's like emerging from a cave into sunlight in an almost inaccessible space. The floor itself is red brick tile, and a wooden fence reaches around an area dotted with white plastic tables and chairs and umbrellas. Through the slats in the fence you're looking at other peoples' gardens and back porches. Above, the sky is partly obscured by green leaves from black oak leaves.

And they never open the place unless there's a throng waiting for seats, so the place is always chattering with noise and conversation. We heard coffee cups break. I drank a bunch of coffee. We talks about NaNoWriMo and other things.

I will talk more about NaNoWriMo and my plans for it soon...

After that we walked to the #6 which we took to the river, then walked another mile to the Esquire theater where we saw Outfoxed. I'll say what I thought a little later... but that's a political post, and this post is a diary entry. I'll give you a short version now, though: As so happens with me and these left-leaning documentaries, I agreed entirely with the point, but thought that the presentation was flawed. It would be easy to accuse the film of hypocracy, which is disappointing, giving the obvious care in selecting sources and developing a well-rounded, reasonable argument.

After that, we walked back south through the new Millennium Park.

I don't have pictures now, but I've taken plenty, and plan to upload them very soon.

I love the park.

The project had gone way over budget and way behind schedule. Originally, the park had been the site of a largely defunct rail yard, and the park was to be funded through converting the yard into a parking lot. But given the effort to pave over and redesign the land, then shell out for flawlessly engineered sculptures of stanless steel as designed by world famous architects, things got a little out of hand.

Millennium park is not remotely emulative of the flagship parks of other major cities. It has a sheen and glow, a polish, that is a stark contrast to the formality and age of say, Central Park or Detroit's Grand Circus. The effect is somewhat like walking through an early computer animated landscape. Things are almost a little too polished. You don't know how anything early could be so clear and clean.

But the park isn't soulless. As we walked through the Great Lawn, we found it filled to the head with concertgoers listening to a classical performance. On other days, the space will fill with blues and jazz. An of course, there's the romance of the Cultural Center, the Santa Fe building, the Aon Center and Prudential, and behind these, the Sears and John Hancock tower, as well as the epic gray of Lake Michigan off to the left. The park isn't soulless, because its intended design was to be an empty vessal filled with the soul of the city outside.

The place was thronged with people. First we saw the Wrigley Square and Millennium Monument, which was the site of an exhibit entitled Family Album, featuring life-sized captioned photos of families from all over the world. The exhibit was sprawling and seemed continentally to reflect population, although I wish more countries had been represented, and I wish more information had been provided on each family than the pithy, sometimes trite little anecdotes. It was still fascinating.

From there we went along Michigan to the Crown Fountain, which I also find visually striking, although the images actually projected onto the fountains were a little silly. The most exciting thing about this all, of course, were the numbers of people milling about. The fountains rained out all this water and there were dozens of kids running back and forth through it, while music trickled in from an opera and jazz groups playing on the street.

From there, we walked along Monroe and entered the Lurie Garden. Which I also went in for. Other people would probably find this to be the least interesting part of the park, but the design, binding back thick groves of conifers with metal bands, and a fountain running a long line that resembles the curve of sandstone... it was peaceful to me. I would like to read a book there. And also, I think it's wonderful that the flagship park of Chicago would make an honest exhibition of Chicago's scenic environment, even something considered generally unexciting like open prairie. It was neat to look out over scrub grass at the Sears tower. I was reminded of pictures of Brazilia and New Delhi.

From there we went to look at the BP bridge, which is also gorgeous, but doesn't really lead anywhere, and has a dumb name.

And then, the Great Lawn and Pritzker Auditorium. We couldn't get inside, because of the opera. But earlier on, when I had been here alone, I had loved this space most of all, because of its openess and because it creates an impression of being simultaneously inside and out.

Finally, the also dumbly named SBC Plaza, and partly because SBC is such a buccaneering enterprize. In the middle stood Anish Kapoor, and all I can say is that it's much cooler than it sounds. From far away, it resembles a silver lima bean, and from closer, a sort of silver donut. The whole thing is grafted of stainless steel welded together along curves, and while it is easily forty or fifty feet from tip to tip, only touches the ground at two points, probably sever square feet. So you can get very far under in the middle, and look up at a sort of dome above you, where you look back at yourself, reflected in several places. From outside, the curvature in the middle is such that the reflection takes in almost a fulled 180 degrees. So standing several feet away, you're looking from Navy Pier to Adler Planetarium. And then you realize you've been straining and your eyes are a little sore.

We walked south, and took the bus back home.