I have been chastised by a few individuals about my negligence toward this site. I’ll admit, things have been a bit slack since, oh, June ‘06. Maria and I moved to Colorado Springs and the move took a lot out of us. Once we arrived in “The Springs” (as they call it), I had to hit the ground running with my job as Director of the Gallery of Contemporary Art. I’ve been in the position for just over six months and have managed to come up with a new exhibition schedule, generate some new event series, start work on an online coloring book for the Gallery, and redesign our painfully outdated website. If you would like to take a look, you can find it at:

www.galleryuccs.org.

Most of my writing takes place over there now.

Once I get some time (ha!) this site will be morphing into something else. In the meanwhile, I’ll throw a little something at the Movable Walls every now and again to see what sticks.

When I was at the Ohio State University as a graduate student, I taught a few art classes ranging from basic drawing to a course that dealt with real and recorded time in art forms. I had both bright students, and some dim bulbs. The inconsistency in student quality made it hard to tell if my students were being straight with me, or if I was just involved in a strange performance art project that they schemed up.

A young woman in on of my classes was a good artist, but a mediocre student. She had a tendency toward sporadic attendance and had missed one Friday morning class, returning to school on Monday with apologies for her absence. She began, “I’m sorry I missed class on Friday. I had Anthrax.”

I began to think, “Where would she get Anthrax?,” “When is she going to tell me the punchline?,” and “Is this that 24 hour Anthrax bug that can be remedied with some Nyquil® and good night’s rest?”

She then followed that up with a tale of working her waitressing job that Friday night (obviously a quick recovery) where she was picked up by Jim Jarmusch and whisked away to a strip club, where Jim spent the night sucking on cigarettes and contemptuously exhaling streams of smoke while seething, “Corporate strippers.”

It’s too bad she didn’t try to pass that off as a performance. She may have received a better grade in the class.

Alright, I had my skeptical moments. Time after time I used Blingo to search and never did I feel a sliver of luck. But today I won! Yesseree, I won a $10 iTunes gift certificate.

I would like to thank Josh for introducing me to Blingo (but since he won an accompanying iTunes certificate, that should be thanks enough). If you haven’t signed up for Blingo yet, search results and prizes await. If you sign up as my friend and win something, then I win something too. It’s symbiotic.

Two weeks ago, Maria and I hired and excavation crew to come in and inspect our exterior sewer line. We had been told by our plumbers that our sewer line had three distinct breaks in the pipe and we would have to have it replaced. The excavators told us that for a nominal fee they could bring in a camera and send it down our pipes to find the specific areas of damage. How could we say no to a more thorough assessment?

After the excavation crew cleared a small blockage of tree roots, we discovered that our entire sewer line was brand-spankin’ new. Not a crack, not a root, not a single problem. We just saved ourselves thousands of dollars and a lot of hassle.

Last Thursday I was putting the finishing touches on some exhibitions in our new museum before the big dedication. As I retired for the evening the stomach cramps that has plagued me all day suddenly worsened. Maria entered panic mode after finding me in the fetal position on the futon under a blanket, and she demanded that I go to the emergency room. A visit to the emergency room goes against all the cheap instincts I have. I would rather gnaw my own leg off and drag myself to my primary care physician at opening the next morning rather than incur the cost of an ambulance and the emergency room. After constant prodding and elevating pain levels I acquiesced.

The initial x-rays and CT scans revealed nothing out of the ordinary (but the crazy attendant who careened my bed around the hospital like a NASCAR junkie did get me to puke a couple of times). So after 20 hours in the hospital the doctors had no good idea what the problem was. Their best assessment was that I had some extreme gas. Finally a surgeon with a little sense noticed that the initial CT scan only covered the upper part of my abdomen and not the lower section that houses the appendix. So after a second scan and a swift diagnosis, I was spirited away to surgery.

Three small incisions and some deft laparoscopic camera work removed my enflamed appendix and alleviated the chronic cramping. I’m now on the road to recovery. And the money we saved from our first incident with a camera inspecting our plumbing will pay for the second instance of a camera inspecting my plumbing.

It all started with “the Perfect In-Law Storm.” My wife’s family came to visit us a couple of weeks ago. I love my in-laws. Let there be no insinuation that I perceive their presence in our house as just the first in a series of debacles. We have a house that is just the right size for our needs, and fine for a temporary occupation of nine people. We were a cozy little family sprawled out on the bed, futon and floor. At least until the weather turned from comfortably autumnal back to a sweltering summer. We have no AC, so we had nine sweaty bodies in the house trying to stay cool by moving as little as possible.

Then my sister-in-law fell ill. Another sister-in-law offered to help us paint a few rooms in our house. Reason stated that trying to disassemble the kitchen, tape the edges, and paint it might cause some troubles with nine people in the house, but who am I to turn down free help? So what was once organized became disheveled as tarps were laid out and four sweaty people tried to cram themselves in our kitchen to turn it from heinous yellow to a nice avocado green.

And then the plumbing stopped working. We could get water, but the water wouldn’t go anywhere. Everything started backing-up and a foreboding gurgling noise started emanating from the first floor pipes. Next one of the cats decided to poop on the floor, which another sister-in-law stepped in. I suggested we use the litter boxes since the cats weren’t, but that idea didn’t fly. So all of us had to walk over to the public library to use the restroom and brush our teeth. The plumbing problem miraculously cleared itself after a couple of days.

After the family left (or, rather happily left our sewage house), things seemed to calm down a bit. Two rooms remained half-painted and I was in the throes of installing two exhibitions as work and working 13 hour days, so I was in no position to finish painting. So we tip-toed around to kitchen and dug around in boxes to find the utensils we needed.

Then the plumbing backed-up again and filled our tub with, um, nastiness. This time it did not clear itself and the nastiness just stewed and fermented in our tub. We called our home warranty company who spent the next three days trying to find a plumber for our area who would work with them, to no avail. So for three days we were using various public facilities to shower, brush our teeth, and use the restroom. Eventually, we took matters in our own hands and had a plumber come over.

I always thought of plumbing as a mildly dirty job of getting underneath kitchen sinks and fixing leaks behind tubs, but nothing too gross. This experience helped me appreciate why plumbers cost $170 for the first hour. After releasing the contents of our pipes on our basement floor (and some on the plumbers themselves), the plumber informed us that the blockage was out in our yard, so the home warranty company wouldn’t cover it. Plus we had numerous fractures in our main pipe and we would have to dig up our front yard and have it replaced. This will cost thousands of dollars.

At this point our basement floor was covered in sewage that had been steeping in the pipes for days like “Lipton Tea” as one of the plumbers put it. It was a ripe scent that permeated the entire house. I sent some copper sulphate and muriatic acid down the pipe to clear any additional blockages while Maria lit every scented candle at our disposal to dampen the smell of poo. I then proceeded to dump buckets of heavily chlorinated water on the basement floor and scrub away with a broom. My eyes and lungs were burning from the chlorine. Maria came downstairs to deliver another bucket of chlorine water and commented that our basement now smelled like a public pool.

I replied that when you mix poo, pee, and chlorine, it’s bound to smell like a public pool.

I apologize for my absence these last few days. Maria and I have been moving into our new/used home. We lugged the last of our boxes across the threshold Saturday afternoon and have since been wandering around the house yelling, “Where did you pack my shoes,” or “Where’s the toothpaste, for Pete’s sake,” or “Where are all these ants coming from?”

So please be patient while we make some minor repairs, get ourselves organized, battle it out with the phone company, and kill some ants. In the meanwhile you can visit some of the fine sites listed in the links section to the left.

Maria and I have been looking to buy a house, despite the fact that purchasing a home embodies all the fears I have of commerce: debt, huge debt, technical jargon, tricky financing, gargantuan debt, and peripherals. To avoid incurring too much debt, we weren’t looking at anything built after 1970. We also prefer older things because we like to have objects with histories. However, we opted not to tour a house where a murder took place. We didn’t want that much history (plus we had just seen The Grudge and we knew that a pale, gasping Japanese woman would surely come crawling down the stairs). After scouring the town, we found a nice bungalow from the early 1900s that we really like. Yesterday, after the home inspection, we walked next door and introduced ourselves to the neighbor lady. She immediately launched into her stories of the home’s history.

Apparently, a family who once owned the home were cantankerous weasels. We will call them “the Cantankerous Weasels.” There was a property line dispute, so the Cantankerous Weasels put up a fence right down the middle of the neighbor’s driveway. The fence was erected to create more parking for the Church of the Cantankerous Weasels they founded that supposedly met in their home. After a court ordered the Cantankerous Weasels to remove the fence, they took down the fence, but left the posts. Later, they rented the house to a young woman and her daughter. When the young woman found a house to buy, she told her landlords that she would be moving out, and since she already paid first and last month’s rent, she would leave her belongings in the apartment until her lease was up. The Cantankerous Weasels were OK with this arrangement. Then the Cantankerous Weasels arrived unannounced with the police and accused their tenant of stealing and selling their property. So they locked up all of her belongings for months in a storage unit. Once the Cantankerous Weasels lost the house in foreclosure they stripped the house of the french doors in the dining room, the beveled glass bookcase doors, and anything else that was or was not nailed down.

Not to be outdone, some of our friends were telling us about the woman from whom they bought their house. She had been injured in a car accident, and spent the rest of her time in fear that the insurance agency was stalking her. She was convinced that her house was bugged. She installed dead bolts on her bedroom door. She told our friends not to put any children in a particular upstairs bedroom, because she had seen an insurance agent sitting in a hidden room behind the closet taking notes. Even though they knew the woman was hallucinating, they are still a bit wary of that upstairs room.

This is why I like to buy used/old things. You can’t find stories like that in tract housing.

After unearthing our future home’s history from the neighbor, I was helping a friend erase her hard drive so she could donate it to charity. She was worried that some unscrupulous person could glean her personal information from the computer. I knew that I could strip the hard drive of most of the information, but I was also aware that the stories of it owner would always remain.

I have lived in a number of places and moved more times than I care to remember. The irony is that I have usually ended up moving to locations where I would never have pictured myself. Take for example my current stomping grounds: Indiana.

I was lured to Indiana as most people are — by the promise of a steady paycheck and a hearty dental plan. I know of very few people who say to themselves, “When I graduate from college and get a real job, I would like to live out the rest of my days as a Hoosier,” or, “Honey, let’s pack the kids into a hot car and drive for hours to spend some quality time in Terre Haute.” Indiana is just not much of a vacation destination let alone a living destination. This is not to say that there is something inherently wrong with Indiana, but Indiana’s PR people should probably rethink their tactics.

The state motto of Indiana is “The Crossroads of America.” When I picture a crossroads I imagine a lonely intersection in a desolate part of the country, or scenes from a coming-of-age movie with spurious ties to the music world. Neither version of “crossroads” is a tempting destination, but a place to leave and forget… fast. The rare instances that people stay at a crossroads is when they have given up all hope at deciding where to go and sit despondently cross-legged in the dust. That is how I perceive Indiana: populated by those who are momentarily pausing here to assess their lives before hastily moving on, and those who have no idea where to go and have set up camp. So the state motto may be accurate, but not hopeful.

Utah’s slogan during the 80’s was “Utah: a Pretty, Great State.” The idea was that Utah is both pretty and great instead of borderline mediocre. However, the slogan has the feeling of dating the acne encrusted FFA president until the prom queen gets dumped by the quarterback — slumming, not taking life by the throat.

Merely changing a state motto to something more snappy like “Utah: the Greatest Snow on Earth” or “Indiana: 2 Billion Years Tidal Wave Free” isn’t going to turn the tide (ahem) right away. There needs to be more.

It’s the self-perpetuating problem of places like Indiana: the place isn’t interesting enough to hold people who could set down roots and make it interesting. And the people who do set down roots, by the simple fact that they are setting down roots there, are depressing not interesting. Most movers and shakers flee to New York or L.A. where “interesting” things are already happening. Why is it so hard to make something interesting happen wherever you are? How do you work through a problem like this? Honestly, I have no good solutions. It’s not much of an ending to this discourse, but it’s honest.

As an undergraduate painting student in Utah, I had an instructor (we’ll call him Duane) who operated a small side-business renting artworks as set decoration to film/television companies shooting in the area. They told him what their tastes were, and he got it for them. Duane tapped on his colleagues, friends, and occasionally his students. Business was brisk. A few TV series and, because of the influence of Sundance, a number of independent films would use Utah as their backdrop.

The most notable of all of these television programs or films was Touched by an Angel. It shot primarily in Salt Lake City and its crew worked closely with Duane to make sure that each set in the show was adorned with artworks appropriate to the character who lived/worked there.

Duane casually approached me one day and said that he like the way my work looked. He asked if he could take some pictures of my paintings to show some people. I was uncomfortable with the prospect, but being young, poor, and eager to please, I agreed to the photo shoot. Throughout the process I was assured that it would all be very tasteful and I would be paid a small rental fee. This was my introduction to the world of art porn.

After Duane pimped my work to the Touched by an Angel team, they wanted two of my paintings to appear in the office of a soulless lawyer who would come to have a crisis of conscience through Roma Downey and Della Reese’s gentle, yet persistent, persuasion. Part of me was flattered that they wanted to use my paintings, but part of me was offended that my work was “soulless lawyer’s office” material. I didn’t feel too bad once I discovered that my friend Ai’s prints hung in Satan’s office.

Touched by an Angel had my paintings for two weeks after which they returned them with a check for my troubles. It seemed like such easy money. I loan them a painting and I get it back with a check attached. The only cost was the shame of the act that followed. I didn’t want to tell my art friends who would surely look down on my for selling myself so easily. I had to keep it to myself and hope that the footage would never surface.

I was never told what episode my work was featured in, nor was I told when it would air. I’ve never had the stamina to sit in front of Touched by an Angel longer than it takes to change the channel, so I’ve never seen my paintings on TV.

I imagine some day I will receive a late-night knock on my door. I will find no one there, but an an anonymous manilla envelope will be sitting on my front stoop. The envelope will contain an unmarked video tape and a note threatening a wide release of the video footage unless I leave a black gym bag of unmarked bills in the trash can at the northwest corner of the park. I will kneel in front of my television, tentatively take the tape out of its case, slide it into my VCR, press play, and watch in anxious horror as scenes from my sordid past glow in front of me: my paintings, a paper-thin plot, swelling awful music, and Della Reese’s wrinkled, smiling face. I was too young.

Things that have happened to me in the last month:

1. I chaperoned a girls camp from Hell and all I got were these lousy chigger bites. Incidentally, according to the University of Missouri website, this is what a chigger bite is:

Chiggers do not burrow into the skin or suck blood. Instead they pierce the skin with their mouthparts and inject a digestive enzyme. This fluid dissolves the tissues of the host, which are then sucked up by the chigger as food. Within a few hours, tissue around the feeding area solidifies into a hardened tube, called a stylostome. The chigger remains attached to the stylostome and sucks up liquefied tissue - like a person drinking through a straw. Feeding will continue for three or four days if left undisturbed.

Mmmmm… dissolving tissue… What’s even better is that it isn’t the adult chigger that does all this, it’s the larvae.

2. I lost my job while at girls camp (I was notified on my voice mail).
3. I interviewed for a job in Indiana.
4. Maria and I went to Utah for “vacation.”
5. I ate way too much food during a two week period.
6. I was crowned “Shuffleboard Master” (Maria is “The Iron Shuff”).
7. I was offered the job in Indiana and I accepted.
8. I was the best man in at my friend’s wedding and had no idea what I was doing. I’ve never given a toast in my life. I received counsel to act drunk, say a couple of inappropriate things about the bride, and rub my booty into the wedding cake. It went well, but I just can’t get the frosting out of my pants.

Now I just have to finish out my obligation to my current job, pack up our lives in a week and a half (in the middle of horrible head colds, completing two paintings, selling a car, and apartment hunting), shove Fran into the car, ignore her yowling for three and a half hours, bid Chicago aieu and drive south as part of our annual move. Piece-o-cake.

Maria and I decided to try out Los Chilaquiles, a little Mexican restaurant today. It’s only a few blocks from our apartment and one of the few places around here that advertises a vegetarian menu. The prices were decent and the food looked good. However, we were a little worried by this particular item on the menu:

Now, I’m no culinary expert, but $3.75 seems a bit steep for chicken poop, even if it is considered a delicacy in some corners of the world.

The following are photos from yesterday’s annual dyeing of the Chicago River. Every year, around St. Patrick’s Day, the city of Chicago injects a “harmless” dye into the Chicago River, rendering it a shocking shade of flourescent green. Kim, Maria, and I traipsed from bridge to bridge to get a better view of the creeping green cloud that lolled through the river.

Afterwards, we got some hot cocoa, did some shop-hopping, and then Maria and I went to Bella Bacino’s for lunch. I had eaten there years ago and really enjoyed it - good pizza, nice atmosphere, friendly staff. Now they have good pizza. Period. While we were wandering around trying to find Bacino’s, using only three year old memories as a road map, we saw a legion of fire trucks rush to the river to rescue four people who lept into the dyed green depths. I still don’t know if they got out OK. Crazy kids.

We just returned from Stacza’s and Luke’s Academy Awards party. The theme was Best Supporting Side Dish. Some highlights from the dinner table were:

• Lord of the Onion Rings
• The Last Ham on Rye
• Children of the Corned Beef
• Reese’s Pieces of April
• The Casserole with the Pearl Onions
• Jack Lemmon Chiffon Cake
• The Right Stuffed Mushrooms
• Cheesea Biscuits
• Nuts!

And congratulations to Paul for an amazing amount of correct Oscar picks culled from his mastery of Oscar strategy and trivia.

I recently received an email carrying a suspicious exe file with only one line in the message body:

You are a bad writer

I’m now getting criticism from virus spam. This is a low point.

Every morning I get off the train at the Roosevelt stop to get to work. This happens to be the same stop as the Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum, The Field Museum, and the John G. Shedd Aquarium. The Museum Campus took over the walkway that leads from the Red line to Roosevelt Ave., creating a permanent installation to educate the commuters and museum visitors about the evolution of the world. As I exit the train stop, I climb a set of stairs and enter the Museum Campus display.

I begin with a metal panel on the wall describing the Precambrian Era (4.6 billion years ago-543 million years ago) - single celled bacteria such as blue-green algae populated the earth. I walk past wall tiles illustrated with the Big Bang, jellyfish, and volcanic eruptions.

The next metal panel tells me about the Paleozoic Era (543 million years ago-248 million years ago) - it all ended with the earth’s worst extinction event. It is at about this point that I hear Neil Armstrong’s “One small step for man…” blurb mixed into the ambient, New Age music being played through the overhead speakers. The walls are decorated with depictions of trilobites, a dimetrodon, and Pangaea.

Next is the Mesozoic Era (248 million years ago-65 million years ago) - meaning “middle animals” and ending with a large object smashing into the earth. The wall tiles represent a Tyrannosaurus Rex, belemnite, and comets (presumably of the cataclysmic variety).

Lastly is the Cenozoic Era (65 million years ago-present) with human life, space travel, and the beluga whale. The walls along the stairs leading to the exit are bedecked with tiles created by museum visitors representing their hopes and dreams. Apparently, most museum visitors’ aspire to be misshapen lumps of ceramic.

As I exit the station, I look up to my right to see a panel hanging above the stairs leading to the next platform. Elementary school students have painted the panel with a crudely rendered Michael Jordan silhouette in his famous spread-legged leap. Surrounding Mr. Jordan are quotes from the students. “I like Michael Jordan because he is rich and famous.” “I like Michael Jordan because he is a basketball player.” “I like M.J. because he is tall and rich.”

I traversed universal history from a nebulous nothing, to single-celled organisms, through two major extinction events, to human life and it’s aspirations, culminating in a strange hybrid of physical and economic Darwinism - basketball. I wonder how much longer we’re going to last.

After I was done frenetically installing the new show at work I decided to take some time off from the rat-race and go on a trip. Maria and I decided that we didn’t have the time or money to cruise the sun drenched seas of the Caribbean, so, instead, we opted for Milwaukee. Suffice it to say that I was a bit delirious from work and Maria was suffering from cabin fever. These two factors combined with poverty drove us toward the frozen North.

As with most of our trips, we had a thin skeleton of a plan before we set out. We figured we’d hit the art museum, do some clearance rack and thrift store shopping, and stay at a bed and breakfast (in the middle of nowhere - to keep costs down). The rest was left to whismy and the proximity of Cheese outlets to the freeway.

Abu’s Jerusalem of the Gold
Milwaukee, WI

We first lunched at Abu’s Jerusalem of the Gold because we couldn’t pass up a tiny, corner restaurant with a name like that. Good falafel, nice hostess, tiny bathroom.

Next we hit the Milwaukee Art Museum. After foolishly following the parking signs to the public parking and a horrible lack of a “free day,” our trip to the museum cost more than I spent on museum attendence in the last five years. The museum had a surprisingly good collection, but we just missed the Laura Owens’s show by a couple of days. We watched the preparators pack away her paintings which was almost just as fun as seeing the show itself (I’m such an mseum/gallery nerd). We found out that Laura paints/stencils little monkeys on the sides of all her crates. I think I like her more knowing that. The museum also had a very impressive collection of beer steins, but I guess that is only expected in Milwaukee.

Quadracci Pavilion
Milwaukee Art Museum
designed by Santiago Calatrava

The new Quadracci Pavilion, added to the existing museum in 2001, is something to behold. The old museum looks a bit like a frumpy office building from the early 70’s, whereas the Quadracci Pavilion looks like the ribs of the Sydney Opera House if it appeared in Logan’s Run. Once inside, the view across frozen Lake Michigan was very impressive.

Looking down the hallways was like a look down a scene from THX 1138. I half expected to see chrome faced cops patrolling the galleries, especially with Andrea Zittel’s pod-like A-Z Wagon Station lining the west hall.

Quadracci Pavilion, Hallway
Milwaukee Art Museum
designed by Santiago Calatrava

After some bookstore and clearance rack shopping, we spent the evening at The Elliott House - a very pleasant little bed and breakfast in East Troy, WI. We especially enjoyed it since we were the lone occupants that evening (fancy that, we were the only people vacationing in East Troy on the coldest day of the year).

After maneuvering the maze of back, country roads we picked up some cheese curds on the way home at a roadside cheese outlet and I returned home relaxed and cheese-fed ready to start the rat-race all over again.

I remember one summer I spent on my parent’s back porch underneath the hummingbird feeder. I sat in the shade thumbing through my summer reading of Carry On Mr. Bowditch and Dove while hummingbirds buzzed nervously over my head. Over the course of a few months I became a regular fixture on the porch. The hummingbirds got so accustomed to my presence that I could hold my finger up to the feeder where they would light to get a drink. Their tiny, almost weightless, claws would wrap around my knuckle and their thread-like tongues would dart in and out of the nozzle.

I can’t recall another time since when I had so little responsibility and worry that I could just spend months lollygagging in the back yard befriending the local fauna. Vacations aren’t what they used to be.

Maria and I recently returned from a “vacation” to Utah for the holidays. There were short spans of time that weren’t planned and thus spent in front of the TV or inducing muscle fatigue playing the PlayStation’s Eye Toy (OK, that was just me with sore muscles the next day). The rest of the time was enjoyed with friends and family at get-togethers and Maria’s sister’s wedding. However, despite the two and a half weeks we had, we still did not get to see everyone we wanted, nor did we get to do everything we wanted. We left Utah wanting more.

It’s hard living away from family. It’s difficult to celebrate with them from a 1411.15 mile distance, and it’s impossible to be any support or help when times are tough. I almost feel selfish or reclusive living in Chicago, doing my own thing, while some of the best people I know live half-way across the United States. So, leaving kith and kin to fly back to a sub-zero climate and a chaotic exhibition installation waiting for me at my job was not an enticing prospect. At least Fran was waiting for us.

Some highlights of the Utah visit were:

• Having my wife cut my hair into a mini-mullet.
• Making some last-minute art at the No Hope Gallery in Provo.
• Maria’s sister’s wedding day
• Maria’s sister’s wedding being over
• Watching the Child Who Was a Keyhole raise their goblet of rock at a house concert.
• Spending two and a half weeks with my wife.

This morning I received a phone call from my wife. She informed me that Fran found the string and was playing with it in the hallway. Initailly, Maria thought that I had played a cruel joke on her - giving Fran the string to initiate a day full of torturous meows. But then she realized that Fran had found the stash on her own.

The string stash was located in a small purse hung high atop a nail in our bedroom closet. Fran seemingly lept five feet into the air, swatted the purse off the hook, and dragged the string out into the hallway where she waited for Maria to come home and play. She needs help.

Our cat, Fran, needs to go to rehab. She doesn’t have an any of the normal cat vices. She’s opposed to catnip like a Quaker’s opposed to war. Tuna to her is like a smelling salt. She prefers dish or toilet water to milk. Instead she is held in the crafty clutches of seemingly benign objects. She cries day and night if we do not provide her with these “drugs.” She will follow us around the house meowing until we relent and give her a fix. The items are as follows:

Thing #1: String. This is her first and worst problem. Not just any string will do. She prefers the draw string that came out of my hoodie during the wash. She will pick it up, come into the room, drop it at my feet, and then meow until I pick up the string and play with her. If I hide it she will wander the house for days yowling until I pull the string out again and satiate her.

Thing #2: Is just, that - Thing #2. It came in a box of sugary breakfast cereal (the only kind I eat) as a Cat in the Hat tie in. Thing #2 is a small stuffed doll with wispy blue hair like a troll doll’s and velcro hands that seemingly only stick to its own buttocks. Fran will carry this around like her own personal doll. She’ll take Thing #2 into the bathtub and curl up with it nuzzled in the crook of her arm while lovingly licking its hair. Removing Thing #2 has the same effect as removing the string.

Thing #3: Maria’s hair. Fran will pounce on the bed at ungodly hours, prowl over to Maria’s hair, bury her head in it and purr maniacally. Fran’s positioning results in her booty plopping directly on my face as I sleep (this can be a very fragrant awakening). Fran then begins to knead Maria’s hair into an intricate system of knots while purring and drooling all over the pillow. This addiction extends to any of Maria’s hair related tools - Maria’s elastic hair holders (Fran will play fetch with these) and Maria’s hair brush.

At times we worry about Fran, but we are grateful that she’s low maintenance. She requires no store-bought trinkets, only our normal household items, and a lot of patience.

view Post Script (12.17.03)

I used to teach a class at Ohio State University entitled “Real and Recorded Time.” When I was told that I would be teaching the class, that was all the information I was given: the name. I tried to figure out how to structure the class and determine what on earth the curriculum would contain. Eventually I molded the course into a theory and practicum class that explored various modes of perceiving, measuring, and portraying time.

This lead me to research a broad spectrum of subjects such as the slow food movement, quantum physics, dance theory, the Three Amigos, James Burke’s Connections series, electronic music, and microwave ice cream sundaes. During the course of my research, I came across the idea of empty time vs. cyclical time.

As I understand it, empty time, also called progressive time, is the idea that each moment we encounter is brand new and unencumbered by the past. This is taken to mean that with each moment, we are not chasing the tail of history but progressing through time. This view is a favorite of capitalism where everything must be newer and better than what was made two minutes ago.

Cyclical time is a bit older. It is the theory that time is never new, but just rehashed history. Cyclical time is favored by religions. The Mormons and Holocaust Jews both liken their trials to the hardships encountered by Moses and the children of Israel in the desert as if they were living the. Cyclical time was also the prevalent in ancient farming communities that relied on the yearly cycle of seasons for their crops. They just thought that they were coming across the same time that they experienced last year.

I was raised on empty time. Each moment was fresh out of the package and untouched by human hands. I could make the future because no one could get there before me. I was always going somewhere different.

Since graduating school and moving to Chicago, I have started to feel the pull of cyclical time. Every morning, I hop on the train for my daily commute and find that the subway musicians have the same schedule that I do. The Jackson Blue Line train stop has an old Chinese woman playing traditional Chinese music on a high-pitched stringed instrument every day at 4:30pm except for Fridays which features an R&B and hip-hop act. Fridays also feature a middle-age man and his guitar in the tunnel between the Red and Blue Line Jackson stops. In the park on Palmer and Sacramento, an old man plays an improvised “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on the saxophone on Wednesdays after dark.

Since I have no plans to go further in school, and I don’t have a corporate ladder to climb, I don’t have anywhere new to go. This stagnancy combined with the subway song cycle makes me feel like I’m trapped in the same week. It’s easy to see how people end up in employment ruts. They lose track of the time spent at a job because of the routine.

I bet if Moses and the children of Israel could have had cinnamon rolls or pancakes every now and again instead of manna every single morning, they could have been out of the desert in forty days instead of forty years.

After a mere three weeks of botched attempts to provide us with a phone line, AT&T has finally connected us to the outside world and left us with the sour taste of poor customer service. I even had one conversation with one of AT&T’s representatives where he suggested that I just go with another provider because AT&T couldn’t cut the mustard. I would have if they hadn’t promised us a phone number that was then plastered on my resumes and scattered to the wind. I needed that phone number so I could get myself a job.

However, along those lines, I accepted a position today as the Gallery Coordinator for the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College. I basically take down and set up shows as well as work on the website and create promotional materials. The Center for Book and Paper Arts is one of the best in the country when it comes to paper making, book making, and typesetting. I’m really excited to have a job in my field and at a school where I can take advantage of the facilities that only higher education can provide.

And since I’m in such a good mood, here is an added bonus:

Some pictures of our new apartment

Once my wife and I arrived in Chicago, we began frantically searching for an apartment. We cruised through low-rent neighborhoods scribbling down phone numbers from For Rent signs, pouring over classified ads, and we even went to an apartment finding service.

This free service is provided by the Apartment People. We stopped by their downtown office, filled out a form indicating where we wanted to live, that we wanted a three-bedroom apartment, the amenities we had to have, and the rent we wanted to pay. We were assigned to a squirelly looking middle-aged agent with a curious moustache, glasses, and the voice of a radio DJ. This was Bruno.

Bruno decided to completely disregard where we had indicated that we wanted to live. Instead he opted to look about ten miles north-east where the rents tripled and the apartment space shrunk proportionately. He tried to impress upon us that he had lived in Chicago for thirty some-odd years and he had been with the Apartment People for quite a while and he knew where the good places to live were.

After a grueling amount of time searching the computer database, we got into Bruno’s car for a ride I can only equate to a New York City cab ride. I’m not sure I could even tally all the traffic rules broken. We saw a number of miniscule apartments that Bruno would laud as “true gems” despite the lumpy, stained, blue, commercial berber carpet, and ceilings that did not permit an upright posture. He broke into a property because the key wasn’t working (because he had the wrong address) and had us chased off the property by mad dogs and screaming homosexuals.

These were very disheartening experiences, but the worst was seeing Chicago’s segregation and racist attitudes first hand. Neighborhoods are primarily singular in ethnicity. The white people live in one area, the blacks in another, the hispanics in yet another, etc.

Bruno, being a real estate agent of sorts, was not allowed by law to tell us about the safety of an area. But, as you can tell, Bruno held little regard for the law. He wouldn’t show us properties in Logan Square or Humbolt Park as we had requested because, according to him, it wasn’t safe, it was “gritty.”

We had been staying in Logan Square for the last week and it was perfectly safe. The only thing that would make it “not safe” to Bruno is the fact that the population is primarily hispanic and black. He would only show us properties where “[we] were the population.” We have been wrestling with that phrase trying to decipher it. Is everyone in the area unemployed and white? Does everyone in the area have an art degree? We decided that it really means that the area is populated by well-off, yuppy, white folk.

Once we abandoned Bruno and began searching on our own, landlords have been happy to wheel and deal with me on the phone because I annunciate. They are willing to drop our rent because we’re white. This same racism is so bad, we even visited an apartment where the Indian landlord told us that the apartment building was great because it was “98% caucasian.” I guess we could have brought it up to 100% whiteness.

We found our apartment on our own. It’s the size we wanted, for the price we wanted, in the area we wanted. We’re probably the only white people on the block. But we’re happy to not be the population.

About three weeks ago, I redesigned this website. It was once a grey, clunky Dreamweaver mess, and now it is a bright, white Movable Type mess. I anticipated that when the website’s content was actually updated more frequently than once every two years, I could generate more traffic. Boy, was I wrong. Since the redesign, the traffic to my site has been cut to a third of what it used to be. Change is not always good.

Over the last few weeks, my wife and I have packed up our lives and moved from South Florida to Chicago. We did not do this for a job, we did not do this for family, we did not do this for many of the reasons that anyone would uproot themselves, throw everything they own into a rickety truck and plow across the country with a cat yowling in the back seat. We did it because we were restless.

Florida has been great to us in many ways. In other ways it has been nearly intolerable. We decided that it is a fabulous place to vacation. But to live a low-income life, Florida just taunts you with its possibilities: “Would you like to visit the beach that is only minutes away? Oh, you can’t because you have to do your laundry and grocery shopping.” “Would you like to go on a cruise? Oh, you can’t because you have no time or money because of your piddly full-time job.”

Opportunities for us within our fields were non-existant, so we would both be required to work low-paying jobs to which we didn’t feel we could really contribute. So, if this were going to be the case, we figured that we could do this just as easily in Chicago around friends and a more active art community.

It’s a change - a violent change. We have yet to see if it is a productive change.

When I began college nearly ten years ago, I started working for a small, single-screen movie theater known as the Academy. The Academy Theater was located in the sleepy downtown of Provo, Utah. My co-workers were other college students or high school students all biding time for minimum wage. The work was simple - we worked for a half hour schlepping tickets, popcorn, candy, and overpriced soda, then we played cards, did homework, or chatted for an hour and a half while the movie played.

We often commented how we could write a sit-com set in the theater. Each of the employees was a character in their own right. We had the managers - a divorcee with a child and a high school senior who would make out in the dry storage room; the gay Hispanic; the gay, deaf kid; the large and loveable drunk; the womanizer; the long-haired death metal enthusiast; the high school cheerleader; and myself, the straight-man. John Hughes could not ask for a better cast.

Besides the cast of employees, the patrons would provide a sufficient amount of comedy. However, from the hundreds of bizarre and hilarious encounters with moviegoers, the most memorable was Mar-Tie Productions. Mar-Tie was an elderly gentleman, approximately 85, in sandals, a poorly knotted tie, full suit, and a Casio SK-1 keyboard tucked under his arm. His eyes were a crazy, clear blue, his hair was always disheveled, and he always seemed to have some half-chewed nuts sitting in the corner of his mouth.

He introduced himself as Mar-Tie Productions when he tripped into the theater in the summer of 1993 just to see a movie, any movie. He just wanted to get out of the oppressive desert heat. The movie happened to be Sliver starring Sharon Stone and Billy Baldwin. Our box-office worker took pity on him since he was apparently homeless and a little mentally ill. She did not want anyone to have to pay unnecessarily for such an atrocious piece of cinema. She let him in for free, he went inside, and fell asleep for two showings.

Since then, he would come back frequently for free movies/naps in our air-conditioned and near empty house. But each time he came, he insisted on singing for his supper. He would set his toy keyboard on the counter, look into my eyes and say, “What’s your name?” “Chris,” I would reply. “What do you like to do?” “Draw and paint,” I would say. “And your eyes are… brown!” Then he would turn the keyboard on, start up a pre-programmed beat, and begin crooning a sloppy, improvised song all about me. He would hunt-and-peck for notes on the keyboard, the time signatures would change often and erratically, and it was clear that he had little to no musical talent.

He would also regale us with songs about Navajo ladies and their long skirts, what he did when he woke up in the morning, or his fantasies about our manager upstairs brushing her red hair.

He became a mascot of sorts - a slightly off-kilter, tuneless mascot. I don’t say that to belittle him. We loved Mar-Tie. We loved his ridiculous, clumsy songs. We loved his strange fixations with Native Americans and our manager. We loved when customers informed us of the old man on the back row that they were afraid was dead. He embodied all of the quirkiness of our theater and then some. He even seemed to usurp our roles as main characters in our own theater sit-com.

Mar-Tie would disappear every winter and reappear every summer. Each winter we assumed he died, but he would return a few months later insisting that he was only hibernating. But one year he didn’t return. We never took a picture of Mar-Tie Productions. We never knew his real name. All that I have left to prove that he existed are three audiotapes he recorded of his improvised songs and gave to us. I still listen to them. Mar-Tie is still my mascot.

Navajo Lady, 1994 audio tape Mar-Tie Productions

Postscript
07.09.03
The mystery of Mar-Tie has been revealed. On the 365 Days Project, Otis included the article written by Mar-Tie’s grandson, Phil Jacobsen, for the Salt Lake City Weekly shortly after Mar-Tie’s death. Maybe he’s just hibernating.

Mar-Tie Bibliography

• A message group commenting on Mar-Tie’s “performance” with Rainer Maria at Kilby Court in Utah.