More Hidden Beauty on Lake Street

Vampire Remembers 1,000 Year Old Law to Take Down Wells Fargo

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More Urban Detritus on Lake Street

This street is just horrible. Like I was saying before, there are bums on every corner. Including this one: at Lake and LaSalle. A mean looking bum sits here all day and shakes a McDonalds coffee cup at passersby. I see him every time I go to Starbucks or the other office or any location west of LaSalle.

Anyway, I walked to Lake and Wells the other day and passed this guy in his usual spot with his usual cup. He was swaddled in dirty bum blankets with an assortment of bum equipment scattered around his spot on the pavement. After a short visit with Accounting, I started on my way back east. I had a red light at LaSalle and glanced back to see my man's spot vacant. Upon closer inspection, I found all his stuff gone. The only remnants were pennies scattered on the sidewalk by his spot. I thought "Are you shitting me? Who throws away pennies?" I was so angry at his wasteful ways that I went to reach for the lone dime next to the puddles he left. As I bent towards the filthy concrete, I thought better of scavenging this dude's dime and held out hope that maybe he'd been forcibly removed from his corner. Nothing worse than a choosy beggar, ya know?

A Couple People Have Been Asking...

I basically need to upload this video monthly because I'm so bad at explaining where my dog's name came from and this video is the perfect summary.

Challenger was Crazy

 

I Love These Real Simple Graphics

Lake street has got to be the worst street in Chicago. Aside from the trains roaring across the loop a few feet above, the sun never shines below the trestles so snow turns to icey slush and stays that way. There is an aggressive bum on every corner and government issued vehicles illegally and/or doubled park in every spot. Traversing the street between offices everyday is enough to make you agoraphobic.
However, I found this little glimmer of light at trestle number 420 and it brightened up my afternoon. Dig:

Albums I Just Bought

Due to a visit from the facist dictator of China, it has taken cousin Michael and I an hour and a half and counting to get downtown today. I don't know why he chose Chicago, but he is here messing shit up. Maureen lost an hour of her life to his motorcade last night and now he is rampaging me and Mike this morning. Bastard. Anyway, this time killing gave me time to listen to a sampling of my new albums. You see I was killing time in Wicker Park the other day and found some treasures in the dollar bins at Reckless Records. I buy a lot of alt rock from the Half Price Books dollar bins and Reckless has a lot of the same stuff. However, they also have some real gems that might not make it all the way to a suburban HPB.
I bought the first two Bjork albums for 99cents apiece because I don't think I ever owned a tangible copy of either one. It's been years since I heard Post all the way through and I don't think I ever heard Debut all the way through. Nothing too exciting here: I could've certainly copped either one at any HPB around. However, not for under a buck.
Let's see...what else...I got the Italians Do It Better compilation for a buck and even though I have most of the full-lengths advertised on this album, there's still a couple unknown tracks on there and I'll pay a dollar for 7 tracks from a label I trust. Plus cd audio sounds a lot better in the car.
I shelled out $1.99 each for the 3 disc Matador anniversary set and Health::Disco2. I got the Matador comp mainly just to have (ya know?) but also to throw on when I'm not in the mood to make decisions. And since I've been hanging with the two most indecisive people in the world lately (Michael and Maureen), I have less and less capacity for weighing options these days. Ordering dinner is a nightly battle that wastes way too much of my precious time.
Decisively, I love Health. I love everything they've ever done and I loved Disco::2 before I was halfway through the tracklist. I somehow slept on it when it came out ( I think I read about it, got a few songs from blogs and then stopped thinking about it before I actually acquired it) even though I loved Disco::1 so much. And after listening to most of it while waiting for Supreme Chancellor Jintao to finish mentally molesting the students at Walter Payton middle school and clear the roads, I like it at least as much as I liked the previous disco album. While the Salem remix is fire and so is the Tobacco one, the best song on the album is probably "USA Boys" by Health themselves. I'll post it eventually.
But the best score had to be King Kong's first album for 99 cents. Obviously, some foolish clerk at Reckless didn't realize what she was doing when she slapped that ".99" sticker on a totally cristine copy of the self-titled banger. I think I may have to post the intro track at least when I get home tonight. For those of you unfamiliar with King Kong, the dude from Slint is the frontman and I guess you could say they sound like a more showgazey(?) version of Pylon. I guess.

I Wanna Go Tanning to Cure My S.A.D.

I finally got around to seeing Black Swan the other night. It was just about superb, as expected. Portman was a freakshow waiting to explode and I kept feeling the tension build and build as she turned the most mundane activities into psychotic episodes. Ballet may be stressful and all but then why was Mila Kunis so normal? I guess it was supposed to be Black Swan and White Swan but it was more like a regular swan (kunis) and Portman's tiger-giraffe possessed swan. I kept wanting to like smash a thick 40 bottle over her face. But the plodding psychosis made the movie: she eventually figures out that she literally has to kill her self and/or others in order to dance with a little swagger?

I guess my main (only?) complaint is that the movie was not long enough and her descent should have been more brutal and much darker. It could have been infinitely meaner and creepier and even more salacious if they had just let the characters keep doing what they were doing. Maybe a few more dark sex scenes or awkward Portman social situations, you know? Like maybe her imagining a dragon or something at the Doctor's office while she is getting her mutated foot checked out. Or maybe she rapes a subway monster or something, ya know? Yes, the film gave me the creeps a couple times (the lovely feathers), created a few visually compelling circumstances (monsters in the darkened theater), and eventually blew me away when she died for perfection. However, it should have been much darker, erotic and thrilling because when you think about it, the stakes aren't high enough when the only lives hanging in the balance are indifferent to death anyway. Was anyone actually really saddened by the ending? Does it matter what happens to anyone after the last frame? Whatever.


My roommates and I (Maureen and cousin Michael) had been trying to see Black Swan for weeks but uncompromising show times (not to mention the wicked case of S.A.D. I contracted since moving to Chicago) conspired against us ever getting to the theater. Instead of seeing the darkly erotic freak-fest everyone promised, we had been staying home in the snow and working our way through the Wire Box set. While I can quote the dialogue from every episode by heart, I still manage to notice a couple new dynamics every time I re-watch a season. For instance, Sobotka telling Carver his boss (Valcheck) is a "gaping asshole" while Carver just smokes without using any hands opened up rounds of new speculation for Michael and me this time through season 2. Is Sobotka's response believable? Is Carver a gaper too for dumbly following orders like that? Why is Carver smoking like that anyway? How come the stevedores don't put up more of a fight? I envy my brother because he is still watching the original seasons for the first time.


I hate to keep harping on the weather, but I'm really not trying to go linger and waste time at nightlife spots for no particular reason. I've had it with the whole going out just to go out mentality and unless you're as good as me at convincing people to do things they don't want to do, there is slim to no chance of getting me off my love-seat. So we watch Wire episodes. If we're lucky, the Redbox round the way will have something decent and I'll find a way to convince everyone to watch The Expendables or some crap like that while we eat takeout. And you know what? I can't figure out what's wrong, let alone how to fix it.

But there are a few bright spots. Last week, a couple movies I've been aching to see came to the Walgreens on Montrose. I rented The Town, the Social Network, and the Owl Movie I've been trying to see since it was in the theaters. (Quick side-note: I tried to take a bunch of neighborhood kids to the movies so I wouldn't feel like a freak when I went to see the Owl Movie myself. It kinda backfired though because I'm pretty sure the dads all think I'm a pedder-ass and the kids think I'm lame for wanting to see the Owl Movie).

So I paid for the Town with the Ipad app and ran up there to retrieve it, encountering the Social Network (also freshly released) while at the store in a box. I'd forgotten about it since I'd scornfully dismissed it during the round of theater previews over the summer. But I figured I'd grab it anyway so I could be the first person to rent/watch that particular copy, ya know?





I forget what we had for take-out, but I remember how horrible The Town managed to make itself after the excitement of the opening scene bank robbery quickly faded. Literally, the movie is like a TV crime drama mixed with Point Break. But instead of surf culture, they just have d-bag Boston meat-head culture to invade and latch onto. Ohh watch out, the dude from Hurt Locker is a loose cannon. And Ben Affleck is different: he's a sensitive felon...but you already knew that right? And because they had to out-Boston the Departed, the final shootout is deep in the guts of Fenway Park. Which reminds me of the very first thing I thought about this movie: if this "town" is so famous for all its bank robbers, how come I never heard of the town or a single bank robber from said town. Did they make it up? Uhh, I gotta stop thinking about it because I'm boring myself with my memories.

On the other hand, The Social Network was a lot better than I had first thought. Initially, I had no desire to go anywhere near the movie. Not only did I not ever want to see it, I decided I didn't like Jesse Eisenberg because he annoyed me in the previews. Plus I had hated the whole college aspect of Facebook since I was in college (where are the grown-ups?). But David Fincher's film was actually incredibly entertaining. It was exciting, informative, dramatic, well-structured, appropriately sinister and just glamorous enough for my tastes. Timberlake was great as the fella from Napster and he earned his 7%, unlike the rich kid who felt entitled to ride Eisenberg's coattails because he had a checking account. Seriously, he couldn't even hang out with his buddy while he was working. I mean, you at least have to stick around while others work if you yourself aren't going to work, right? Like when I made the LA STAYBAD mix-tape a few years ago, that kid Brent at least made an effort to be in the same room as me while I worked on Ableton. I didn't really notice the Reznor soundtrack so I'll have to give it another go, as I didn't notice Johnny Greenwood's superb There Will Be Blood score until the third or fourth viewing.

And I fell asleep during the Owl Movie because it was too hard to follow...I think. No wait, I remember a battle and a giant tree. I knew I couldn't get behind Owls; totally overrated woodland creatures anyway.