Photos: Traveling IV

A final set of photos from this trip. One of my last planned visits was to see the famous Casa Batlló's, Antoni Gaudí's lavish house, designed for Josep Maria Jujol in 1877 and redesigned in 1904-6, that (in)famously appears to have no straight lines in its face. It spectacularly droops like candle wax, or creeps like the stone efflorescences in a Max Ernst painting, dominating the already grandiose architecture of the grand Passeig de Gràcia's most over-the-top block, the Illa de la Discòrdia (or "Block of Discord"), so labeled because the neighboring manses, by Barcelona's most famous Modernist architects Lluís Domènech i Montaner, Antoni Gaudí, Josep Puig i Cadafalch and Enric Sagnier), visually and visibly strive to outstrip each other, though Gaudí easily wins the prize. In local parlance, the house is known as the Casa dels ossos (House of Bones, in Castilian: Casa de los huesos), and if you stare at it long enough, it does start to appear to be growing new excrescences. (Like the Sagrada Familia, but in reduced form.) Just as with the Temple, so here, mobs of tourists, and a pricey entry fee, so I snapped (not so great) photos and got back on the Metro.

It was the highlight of a tour through L'Eixample, the neighborhood surrounding and north of the University of Barcelona; also in this area is Barcelona's main gay district, though I learned that to see it at full flower, it was probably best to visit after 6 pm. Many a shop, though none of the restaurants, shuttered for la siesta, which I'd completely forgotten about. Though thoroughly worn out, I definitely enjoyed seeing Barcelona again, and hope to get back soon. I was even able to have a complete conversation in Spanish, from pickup to drop off, with my cabbie, and on the first leg of my return flight read a couple of the books I bought, one by a young Spanish poet named Juan Vico, which received a prize in 2011, and one by the Argentinian author Carlos Skliar. I'll post translations of excerpts as soon as I can. My cabdriver--I am not becoming Tom Friedman!--stated what I'd observed, that the city had grown in infrastructure and racial and ethnic diversity, and Catalan cultural consciousness since 1990. The days of Franco's ban of this distinctive Romance language, or the absence of black and brown faces, was long gone. What the future promises, especially given the Eurozone crisis and Catalonia's own economic problems, remains to be seen, but the city is and will probably continue to be a jewel.

I concluded part of my return by staying in a relatively inexpensive, Japanese-style pod-hotel, Yotel, in Amsterdam's airport. It took a few minutes to figure out how to turn on the lights and connect to the Internet to Skype home, but I would recommend it for non-claustrophobics and non-acrophobics. It's like sleeping in a chamber of the spaceship in 2001, though without Hal threatening to wreak havoc. Reserve in advance though; I thankfully had so I wasn't denied a room but there was a line of people looking for an affordable option, their computer system was down, and the beleaguered young attendant seemed almost ready to bolt if he was asked another question.... On the second leg of the flight home, I finally read Julian Barnes's Man Booker Prize-winning novella The Sense of an Ending, after having recommended it, based on a number of strong reviews, to a student who enthusiastically polished it off and then came to my office hours to ask: "Professor, what happened at the end?" He wasn't testing me, I realized, but actually confused. I read the book and now what happened, so he'll receive an email, if he did not subsequently reckon it or consult Wikipedia. As tight as a Swiss watch's gears, that plot of Barnes's, yet also perhaps a bit melodramatic too.

OBAMA British Africa gin & rum, ales and stouts

PELIGRO

VOTA

Mary Astor Cafeteria, L'Eixample

FOCUS

Street scene, near Blanquerna

Carrer Moncada

Umbriacle, in the Parc de La Ciutadella

Door art

Casa Batlló

Casa Batlló

Casa Batlló

Museu Antoni Tàpies (with the wire cloud on its roof)

La Mulata, in L'Eixample

Street scene, L'Eixample

Galeria de arte, L'Eixample

Pub Fiction, L'Eixample

Yotel Hallway, pods on either side

The Yotel pod, straight on

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Photos: Traveling III

I had seen the Temple de la Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudí's unfinished, ongoing masterpiece, before, but it astonished me no less this second time, not least because a large portion of its façade and other sections of it are actually finished! The building's front and sides, every angle of it, pulsate with a strange, compelling magnetism; it is as if it were another life form, a stone creature to which you feel drawn, willing to surrender whatever good sense you have because you cannot say no. But I did say no to the tour, because of the long lines and exhaustion after several longish days, a lingering cold, and two hours whiled walking and looking in the Picasso Museum. I'd never been there. I highly recommend it. The collection is small; Picasso's friend and secretary Jaume Sabatiers donated most of what's in it, with the maestro himself and his former partner (wife?) chipping in some tidbits to fill things out, but it nevertheless gives a good sense of Picasso's trajectory, grounding his genius and work in his experiences in Barcelona, where he spent a good portion of his youth. There was also an excellent temporary exhibition called Archivo F. X.: On Zero Economy (or, as a large wall-sized display said, "Economy: Picasso"), that paired his work with that of admirers and critics, one of whom I recognized as soon as I rounded a corner and heard the beat and her voice: Adrian M. S. Piper, with her famous conceptual art project and video, "Funk Lessons"!  As part of this exhibit the group Archivo F. X. Commissioners Pedro G. Romero and Valentín Roma created a series of pieces, ranging from a dictionary of capital and economy, to large coloring charts, to vouchers for 1 peseta. I asked three different museum guards, who were swarming about, whether these materials really were free, because I did not want to be spend the rest of the month of June in jail for larceny, and each assured me that yes, the materials were free. (My bold action in rolling up one large print led a couple behind me to do so--how easily we follow others.) As I left I mentioned in Spanish that no one was taking the pictures (I couldn't think of the word for "poster"), and the guard I spoke to just shrugged. I wasn't going to pass up Picasso/FX Archive swag! At some point I wended my way to the Arc de Triomf. That is not a spelling error, but Catalan. It's a striking monument, with flourishes such as only Barcelona seems capable of. Behind it, the Passeig Lluis Companys stretches in the direction of the Parc de la Ciutadella, where the Zoological Museum and Zoo, as well as the Catalonian Parliament are located. You infer from that juxtaposition. A fitting end to the day came when I happened upon a street performance that involved those giant wearable puppets that are common during Carnaval in Recife, Brazil, and the young musicians switched, not on behalf of me, but because they knew the tune, from what sounded like a traditional Spanish song to r&b. Above them hung the two signs you'll see below in the final two images, calling for help for public schools, and for the preservation of public services. The Catalan in the last two sentences reads: "We believe in public schools" and "We defend public services." Lest we ever think we're (the 99%, that is) not all in this boat together....

Museu Barbier-Müller (Olmec head)

Arc de Triomf from the Passeig Lluis Companys

Arc de Triomf looking east, towards the Mediterranean Sea

Passatge (Passage) Sert

Scouring the limestone

CULOS (you know what that means, along with "BEERS"; but "DINMA"?)

Zoological Museum, Parc de La Citadella

A commercial being filmed at the edge of the Bari Gothic

Via Augusta, Gracià

The entrance to the Picasso Museum

The alcove of the Picasso Museum

An student-era drawing of an African, by Pablo P.

"In the year 2065"...

The Temple of the Sagrada Familia (the fruit-topped steeples are wrapped as of today)

Wider view of the Sagrada Familia

Mercat Santa Catarina (an amazing building)

The lagoon in the Plaza de Gaudí

The giant humanoid puppets (hmm...)

SOS Public education

More public pleas: "We defend public services!"

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Photos: Traveling II

It's mid-afternoon here, early morning on the US East Coast. Our panel, at 9 am today, went well, each of the papers harmonizing with each other in fruitful ways. I realized last night as I was making changes that I had written two papers instead of one. Separating and then developing and polishing both will be something to look forward to. Now, after a bit of Skyping with C, I hope to catch a few panels, and walk a bit more around the city.  One energizing mental exercise involves trying to make out as much Catalan as I can, and I can. Mash French and Spanish together it really makes sense; fortunately it doesn't impede my Spanish, which now arrives at my lips without even the slightest tinge of Portuguese. I cannot help but speak it slowly, though, and with a Caribbean accent. Eso sí que es. In a Catalan bookstore today I saw sections for every type of book except "literature." I didn't ask where they'd hidden it. On the other I think I did read on Twitter that Andrew Zawacki posted on Harriet that "grafitti" is the "secret language" of Paris. Not just Paris: there is so much inventive street literature and art here that it's clear it's one chief response, as it was once upon a time in the US, to the misrule of the overlords. Maybe that's where all the most vibrant poets and fiction writers here are publishing. On walls. ¡Siempre la lucha, pa'lante, arriba! (¿Escriba?)

Update: I did find some work by very interesting Spanish and Hispanophone English--in a bookstore that featured both the US and British English-language versions of Jonathan Franzen's new volume of essays. Why?

Facultat de Comunicació Blanquerna
Universitat Ramon Llull (HQ for the conference)



Where our panel was held this AM

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Photos: Traveling

I'm traveling for a conference, so blogging will be intermittent. In place of words, a few images. I hadn't been to Barcelona, Spain, in 22 years (1990), when C and I were fortuitously able to acquire courier flight-priced tickets to Europe, hop on a train, and travel from Paris to Lisbon for almost nothing. Back then France still had francs, which compared favorably to dollars (5/6=$1), Spain had pesetas (22=$1US), which compared even more favorably to dollars, and Portugal had escudos (33-35=$1US), which compared most favorably to the little bit of greenback we had in our pockets. Today, however, all three countries are on the euro, and Spain is very expensive. It also is teetering on the brink of a financial collapse, as is Catalonia, Barcelona's home province. Unemployment is 25% nationally, 50% among the young.  The little of Barcelona I've seen thus far, from the airport to the Sant Gervasi/Eixample neighborhoods I've passed through, still glitter despite the worry and wear, and much of the changes that came with the Olympic Games in 1992 have led to further sprucing up. The sleepy big town where people stared in fascination at us on the subway and which felt like a curious way-station between France's capital and Portugal's square-thronged biggest city has changed quite a bit. Here are just a few photos. I hope to post more soon.

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Congrats to Prize Winners + RIP Bradbury & Menil

Natasha Trethewey
(John Amis for
The New York Times)

Congratulations to our new Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant to the Library of Congress, Natasha Trethewey! She will assume the post beginning this fall. She's the first Southerner since the first Robert Penn Warren, the initial Poet Laureate, and the first African American since Rita Dove. How lucky the country is to have Natasha, as fine and generous a poet as there is writing today, at this helm!

Congratulations also to poet and translator Jen Hofer, whose translation of Negro Marfil/Ivory Black by Mexican poet Myriam Moscona (Les Figues 2011), poet, translator and critic Pierre Joris selected to receive this year's Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets! Jen is a superb poet and person, and one of the best impromptu letter writers (on a typewriter) and bookmakers as you'll ever find!

Congratulations to poet, translator and scholar Jennifer Scappettone, who received the 2012 Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Prize from the Academy of American Poets for her translation Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose, by Amelia Rosselli (University of Chicago Press, 2012). In addition to being an outstanding colleague, I shall forever be grateful to Jen for introducing me to her own work and projects, and to the work of so many outstanding living Italian poets.

Congratulations to poet and editor giovanni singleton, whose first collection, Ascension, received the Gold Medal in the poetry category for the 81st California Book Awards!  giovanni is the real deal, and I'm so very happy to see her début collection so honored.

Congratulations also to this year's winners of the Lambda Literary Awards! An especial shout out to Bil Wright, who received the award in LGBT Children's/Young Adult Literature for Putting Makeup on the Fat Boy (Simon & Schuster); to Rahul Mehta, who received the award in Gay Debut Fiction for Quarantine: Stories (Harper Perennial); to Michael Hames-García and Ernesto Javier Martínez, editors, who received the award in LGBT Anthology, for Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader (Duke University Press); and to my old Boston compatriot Michael Bronski, who received the award LGBT Nonfiction for A Queer History of the United States (Beacon Press)!

UPDATE: Congratulations to Seamus Heaney on receiving the Griffin Trust Prize Lifetime Achievement Award!  Tomorrow the winners of the international and Canadian Griffin Prizes for poetry will be announced.

***

On a different note, farewells to Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), the leading speculative fiction and fantasy writer of his generation, the author of 20+ novels and many hundreds of stories, a visionary whose sense of what deeply imaginative and non-realist writing might conjure ranks among the most important in the American or any global literary tradition. Bradbury was a native of Waukegan, Illinois, and a lifelong resident of Southern California. A few years ago, when I taught his novel Fahrenheit 451 (Ballantine, 1953) in a huge survey course on 20th Century American literature, it easily ranked among the most popular texts on the syllabus, and rereading it then brought my childhood admiration for his skillfulness as a stylist and futurist. We are not burning books, thankfully, but we destroying libraries, watching bookstores vanish into thin air, flooding online sites with word-filled, content-less commodities that strip the very word "book" of meaning; and as in his novel, we are entranced by the sorts of screens he depicts, enthralled with the staged dramas, combats, fake political dramas, performed to lull us, as the 1% rob us blind and the government engages in endless wars it will not explain because it cannot. Too many of us still dismiss at our peril what the sharpest minds of our era put in the pages or touch-screens of texts, preferring to flow with the crowd, accept the widespread surveillance and remain silent, speak out only when we are directly touched by circumstance or tragedy. There is no site of refuge or resistance, except within us; that is one of the lesson I take from Bradbury's book, and from his work in general. He became a conservative crank in his later years, a technophobe, dismisser of the net and web, but it is on such systems that others and I can honor his larger vision tonight, and perhaps help others return to his work soon. RIP, Ray Bradbury.

Also RIP Alain Ménil, a Martinican philosopher and critic, only 54 years old, utterly unknown on these shores but an important figure in Caribbean and Francophone letters, who had published his most recent book Les voies de la créolisation. Essai sur Edouard Glissant (De l’Incidence éditeur, 2011), on the late, great Martinican poet, novelist and theorist last fall. The book was a finalist for the 2011 Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde. At the time of his death Ménil was teaching at the Lycée Condorcet, and also had published a study of cinema's relationship to time, L'ecran du temps (Regards et ecoutes) (1992); a text on the Enlightenment and drama, Diderot et le drame: Theatre et politique (Philosophies) (1995); and a book on AIDS, Saints et saufs: Sida, une epidemie de l'interpretation (Visages du mouvement) (1997).  The Glissant book, which has received considerable praise, is 658 pages, so I hope an intrepid translator steps forward soon so that it'll be available to English readers too.

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11+ Things I'll Miss About Chicago

22 boxes and counting

When I first sojourned in Chicago for the spring 2001 quarter, and then returned again to teach and live in fall 2002, people would ask me, Do you like it t/here?  Even before I ever lived here I visited many times, and believe without hesitation that Chicago is a great city, one of the grandest, most exciting and livable big cities in the US. But I would often find myself giving a mixed answer, because there were and are many things I like about it, but there are things I have not liked so much.

A few years in, Chicagoans no longer asked me the question, assuming I suppose that I was still here I must like it as much as they did, but people who came to visit or people I met in other cities who found out that I spent part of each year here would ask me about the city, and almost always whether I liked it. Again my usual response usually proceeded with praise for the city's many amenities, which I would then counter with a statement about the winter. This sufficed, because almost everyone I've come across has an image of Chicago's glamorous downtown skyline (which has grown only more impressive in the years since I've been here), yet shudders with fear over having to spend a winter alongside this side of Lake Michigan, especially after the Snowpocalypse (which really did blow snow through my locked window sashes up onto the inner panes of my apartment's double-paned windows), though as a colleague reminded me yesterday, this was a very mild winter.

Over the last few months I have been thinking of what things I really have enjoyed about Chicago and what I'll miss, and what I have enjoyed less so. Here then are two lists, which do not include my family, friends, students and colleagues (who'd appear in the first).

TEN THINGS I'LL MISS ABOUT CHICAGO

1. My neighborhood, Rogers Park. It's one of the most diverse and affordable neighborhoods on Chicago's north side, quite safe (even though one of the main strips was for years an open-air, 24/7/365 illicit drug mart that cops drove past without batting an eye), full of artists and immigrants and queer folks and people of all ages, colors and religions (I used to live near an Episcopalian Church, Ethiopian church, a Korean Christian church, and a mysterious African-derived church that held ceremonies all weekend long, it seemed, and now live right across the street from a Christian Science outpost), with an accessible beach, lots of cut-rate but tasty restaurants, and proximity to Evanston, which has meant a fairly easy commute to work. The El's and Metra's trains both stopped in the neighborhood. Getting downtown is always a hike, and necessitated my getting a car when I had to teach on the Chicago campus, but there's also a lot to be said for not being in the midst of everything, or being in the midst of other sorts of things that are amenable and livable. That Rogers Park is.

2. The various literary and artistic communities of Chicago. Rarely do they meet, but I have tremendously enjoyed interacting with and in some cases participating in many of them. Alongside my university creative writing, Poetry and Poetics Colloquium, and literary studies colleagues and students, I've had the invaluable benefit of linking up to a range of smart and energizing wordsmiths, artists and performers. From the Reconstructon Room and Second Sun and the Silver Room, who brought visual art, poetry and performance together, to the Red Rover Series, which never failed to bring something innovative and unexpected to its events, to the Human Micropoem, which put the "p" in "people," "poetry," "politics," and "possibility," to the Homolatte series at Big Chicks, which paired queer performers and music in exciting ways, to the Myopic Reading Series at that incomparable bookstore (cf. below), to the Danny's Reading Series, which brought so many friends to town and gave a whole new meaning to reading in bar full of enthusiastic patrons, to the Poetry Foundation and its multiple, enlightening programs, to the Gwendolyn Brooks Conferences at Chicago State University, which I had the good fortunate to be able to speak at and attend, meeting Dr. Haki Madhubuti, James Alan McPherson, Edward P. Jones, and the late Octavia Butler, among many others, to all the projects that Krista, Toni, Nathanaël, Abegunde, Jen, Erin, Amy, Joshua, John, Jennifer, Quraysh, Kelly, and Reg, and a vast extended crew of other writers and artists and programs have gotten going, I never lacked for language and art.

3. WBEZ, Chicago's main public radio station. Though it relies perhaps far too heavily on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for programming--on any given day, if I switch on WBEZ, half the time, it seems, I hear Canadian accents talking about Canadian topics, which is okay in small doses, fond as I am of our neighbor to the north--WBEZ is far superior to WNYC in New York. Unlike the latter station, it has a more racially and ethnically diversified local lineup of reporters and hosts, and far more diversified programming. It also featured one of the smartest, most informative programs I've ever heard, Odyssey, hosted by Gretchen Helfrich. That show has gone and Helfrich is in (or has finished) graduate school, but it alone made WBEZ worth listening to every weekday. Also, it broadcasts weekly speeches from the Commonwealth Club of California; features a show called Vocalo that plays house music for hours on end; and yet also features all the NPR staples, including Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk with Tom and Ray Magliozzi. Fortunately I can stream it online, so I won't have to forgo it, but I'd much rather be able to tune all my radios to it rather than the New York metro-area dominant WNYC.

4. Metropolis Café, Charmers Café, Caribou Coffee's branches along Clark Street, The Common Cup, Chava Café, and all the great cafés from Rogers Park to Boystown to Wicker Park. I am a coffee person and a café person, and Chicago has many of the latter serving very good cups of the former. Metropolis has excellent coffee, and I've enjoyed sometimes running into favorite colleagues hard at work there, and even met a talented Afro-Colombian artist who'd exhibited his work there.  Charmers is very neighborhoody, and I once stumbled upon a film being shot there. At the various branches of Caribou I have graded many a paper or reread a short story or novella revision; unfortunately I've also always managed to miss Rod 2.0! When we're both in town we seem to operate like two subatomic particles that settle at the exact other Caribou at the same time.

5. Landmark Century Cinema, the Music Box, Gene Siskel Film Center, and all the other venues for seeing new and unusual films, and alongside the theaters, all of Chicago's vaunted film festivals, which are the real thing. The city has tons, you can see films you'd only see on the coasts, and most of them are affordable. There's even a mainstream theater in walking distance from me, right near the Loyola University of Chicago campus, that features very cheap matinees.

6. Lots of cheap, affordable, delicious restaurants. I have mostly cooked since living here, but I can vouch for the fact that Chicago has some of the best food in the US, high, middle and low end, and if you are looking to economize, it also has a number of excellent fairly affordable restaurants, with almost every cuisine you could think of available.  A few years ago one of my students visited the famed Alinea, a temple of molecular gastronomy, and I have said I'd love to try it, but it remains out of my price range. One restaurant I don't hit anymore but which is a must for meat lovers is Hot Doug's, about which I'll say only: bring cash, be ready to stand on line, and don't eat before because you will certainly feel full. There are variations on Mexican cuisine that boggle the mind. Then there's my favorite restaurant, Sticky Rice, a joint serving Northern Thai cuisine that has "worms" on its menu. Chicago does roll like that!

7. More theaters and plays staged than you can possibly ever visit. I'm not a big theater person, but I think Chicagoland has got New York and LA beat by many miles in this regard, Broadway notwithstanding. This is a theater town. On any given night, there are plays underway somewhere in Chicagoland. Or on the verge of being staged. I have caught some great plays and performances, and some awful ones, but without fail I've at least left the theater musing about what I saw.  Within walking distance of my apartment there are, right now, a staging of works by Samuel Beckett and A Light in the Piazza, just to name two of the offerings.

8. The El. Once I was able to avoid having to rely on it all the time, I could appreciate it.  Some of the stations, like nearby Jarvis, look so decrepit it's miracle they're still standing, the cost of a one-way ride just keeps rising, and the hub-and-spoke format means that getting west requires you to travel towards the Loop to connect to lines radiating away from the Lake, but it runs 24 hours, and mostly goes where I need to if I don't want to drive. Getting to Cablevision, the office of the Secretary of State (for car stickers, etc.), requires another mode of transportation, however. I.e., a car.  (I'll put in a plug for the No. 22 bus, which runs up Clark Street. It's reliable and clean and carries all manner of humanity up and down this major east-lying Chicago artery.

9. Chicago is one of the more queer-friendly cities in the US. I have had many criticisms of former mayor Richard Daley, but being homophobic was never one of them. Between the city's government and its general ethos, it is pretty lgbtq-friendly, and although there are racial, ethnic, class, and gender divisions among lgbtq people, the main gay neighborhoods of Boystown and Andersonville (there are others, including Rogers Park) are increasingly gentrified and unaffordable to many non-wealthy queer people, and there is anti-gay violence like anywhere else, Chicago has maintained a vibrant queer ecology in a way that other cities, either through hypergentrification or decline, have not. Outside the northside it's less gay-friendly, but there are gay bars and events on the South Side and West Side, and the general atmosphere places it in the upper ranks of major US cities.

10. Bookstores like Unabridged Books, Myopic Books, Women and Children First, Powell's, and many others. I am packing up books, so many books, so many boxes of books, which is a tiny nightmare, but Chicago still has some fine independent and used bookstores, some offering treasures that astonished me. Like the time, early on in my process of working on this 19th century novel, of coming across a book, in a bookstore, and not a library, on African-American probate records in Boston. Seriously. There it was, right there in the used bookstore. Or going to another bookstore not far from Wrigley Field and seeing first editions for sale for less than $50.  Or finding the Encyclopedia Africana for $20 years ago, a price so low I decide to buy two, and, at the urging of an acquaintance, shipped one to a Brazilian writer who would have had to pay through the pores to get a copy. I have tried to the best of my ability to visit these dens of text-lust infrequently as my departure date has neared, but I know I will miss all of them.

11. Chicago's architecture. I don't just mean the famous architectural treasures, of which there are many, but the Prairie and Arts and Craft-style homes, the solidity of the brick architecture, the human scale of so much of the northside's neighborhoods. Then there are the numerous remarkable exemplars by some of America's greatest architects (H.H. Richardson, Holabird and Roche, Burnham and Root, William LeBaron Jenney, Sullivan and Adler, Walter Burley Griffin, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Helmut Jahn, Stanley Tigerman, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, etc.) dotting Chicagoland , and singular jewels like the Marina Tower (the Honeycomb Building), which never fails to fill me with awe and delight. I've never understood why I enjoy looking at and exploring buildings so much, but Chicago has presented more than enough.

Also, all the museums; the parks and conservancies, with their incredible floral displays; the fact that I was able to be here on the very day in November 2008 when Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, four years after I'd met and spoken with him in Evanston; the affordable rents, even in Rogers Park; my local health food coop, which is excellent; the easy drive to O'Hare International Airport; the beach in spring and fall; and driving toward downtown on Lake Shore Drive in the evening during the fall and winter, when the Loop's skyline gleams in front of you, and off to the left you can see the glittering bracelet of Navy Pier's Ferris Wheel turning, the shimmering moonlit lake churning in the background. It evokes a feeling that isn't exactly romantic but approximates it. If nothing else, it underlines Chicago's distinctive beauty and  I always expect to see this in a film, but never have. Directors, please take note.

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