Old (Town) Style...

As you may have noticed from last night's date night, I'm slowly motivating myself to get out of the apartment more. Today, I even managed to drag myself (and my mom) up to the neighborhood of Old Town to take advantage of one of my favorite summer happenings in the city -- the Old Town Art Festival. As I've mentioned in the past, the Old Town Art Festival is one of the few remaining independently-produced art fairs in the Chicagoland area, and the panel in charge of curating it has impeccable taste, or at the very least, we seem to share a similar aesthetic. Given my recent attempts to scale back my spending and monitor my finances more carefully, it probably wasn't a good idea to go to this today, but I just couldn't resist.

Predictably, I ended up dropping some money I didn't really have on a set of three photographs from an artist that I encountered at the festival for the first time -- Xavier Nuez. His work really blew me away; he uses a vintage film camera and very long exposure times (up to a half hour), to capture images of urban ruins and other dilapidated, forgotten elements of our decaying infrastructure. During his long exposures, he changes the lighting set-up to create other-worldly colors in his photographs. The resulting pictures are hauntingly beautiful, despite their unconventional subject matter. Check out the gallery on his website here; it will be time well-spent.

While we were in the neighborhood, we also decided to check out the Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder Company, a restaurant that's been featured on several television shows concerning Chicago travel and tourism. The restaurant is notable for its unique gimmick: the pizza pot pie. In a city where deep dish is king, the Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder Company literally turns the tradition upside down, by placing all their cheese, toppings, and sauce in bowl, topping it with pizza dough, and un-molding the creation tableside. I've been meaning to try it myself for years, and have actually recommended the place to out-of-towners looking for something a little different.

Pizza pot pie -- looks kind of like a stuffed portabello mushroom cap in my opinion.

Now that I've actually been there and sampled the pizza pot pie for myself, I would like to apologize to anyone that I ever recommended this place to. It's fame is solely based on the novelty of its featured menu item, not due to the quality of the pizza in question. The cheese was passable, but not outstanding; the sausage, which comes standard and cannot be left out because it is part of the sauce, was flavorless and lacking in fennel -- it easily could have been mistaken for ground beef; the tomato sauce tasted like it came from a jar; the crust was soft and chewy, but due to the cooking method, lacked any of the exterior crispness that makes a good pizza crust worth eating. Truly, it was a disappointing experience, though I'm glad I tried it once, for the novelty, and at least I can say that I scratched another Chicago experience off my list...

One Of A Kind...

Tonight I met Lauren after work to check out the One of a Kind Show at the Merchandise Mart, a vast indoor art festival held yearly near the holidays as an opportunity for attendees to purchase unique, handmade gifts for their friends and family. Like the Merchandise Mart itself, the show is overwhelming in its scope, and Lauren and I lacked the energy to see the entire thing this year, much as Mom and I had thrown in the towel without finishing it last year. Truly, one can only see so much art and handicrafts before reaching visual saturation.

One artist with whom I was particularly impressed was, of all things, a photographer. Most of the time, at art shows, whenever I see photography I think to myself, "I could do that, why spend my money on it?" It has been ages since I have seen some work with a truly unique concept, which is why I'm sharing this link to the work of Audrey Heller. You must click on it and go check it out. Out of respect for the fact that she makes her livelihood from selling her photographic works, I'm not going to steal any images from her site and reproduce them here. Just go check it out, trust me, it's pretty fantastic.

I was taken with several of her photos, but the price of her prints was a little outside of my budget, even with the early Christmas money I had burning a hole in my pocket. I was about to walk away with just a fond memory of her whimsical, slightly surrealist works, when Lauren suggested I pick up a copy of the artist's book, Overlooked Undertakings. I had originally passed over the book since real estate is at a premium on my bookshelves here in the city, and I thought I would be better able to enjoy Ms. Heller's art if it were hanging on my walls in plain sight. Lauren skillfully pointed out that as I had flipped through the loose prints for sale in bins, nearly each one had given me a laugh, or at least brought a smile to my face, so it would make sense to buy the book and have all of her photos at my fingertips. Her logic was hard to ignore.

When I got home, I googled Ms. Heller, and discovered that she also has an Etsy shop where she sells much smaller prints at a more economical rate. I couldn't resist, so I snapped up three of her culinary-themed prints: "Challenging Conditions," "Fish Out Of Water," and "Cloven." I might not have anywhere to hang them in my kitchen now, but they'll be ready and waiting for the day that I can afford my own place. I might have blown through my Christmas money in the first week of December, but it was well-worth every penny!

Running on Empty...

In case you haven't noticed, I've been busy lately. I haven't had a free day on a weekend since mid-May, and the way my schedule looks now, I won't have another one until mid-July. Generally, I would consider that a good thing -- I'm out taking advantage of what the city has to offer, I'm spending time with friends, and I have plenty of fodder to write about here.

Last weekend, for instance, I had dinner with Dad's cousins Jeff and Candy, who were in from out of town, and I spent two days at the Old Town Art Festival; I went on Saturday with Lauren, and was so impressed with the quality of the show that I dragged Mom back for a rather expensive outing on Sunday. I picked up two great prints, and Mom got a highly detailed little bronze sculpture now gracing my mantelpiece, and a piece of fiber art that is just the right size for the little niche next to the doorway.

Images of the sculpture Mom picked up this weekend.

It's been a long time since I was so impressed with a local art show. Most of the shows in the suburbs that I once frequented have been taken over by Amy Amdur, a woman who came up with the idea of creating an art festival production company, so that local art fair organizers could outsource to her at a savings. Unfortunately, she puts the same artists in nearly all of her shows, and she and I do not have similar taste. See one of her shows a year, and there's no need to see another one. The Old Town Art Festival, however, has remained independent for all of its sixty years of existence, and that is most definitely in its favor.

However, even though I enjoy getting out and exploring the city, my body doesn't know how to cope with all this running around. I started feeling run down over the weekend, with the slightest of sore throats. It really didn't hurt unless I was swallowing, and I could tell that my tonsils must have been swollen because it was also more difficult to swallow. I was much more tired than normal (and I'm normally pretty tired, as an evening person who is forced to work a job with a normal schedule), and despite getting more sleep than normal on Monday and Tuesday nights, I was still so exhausted on Wednesday that I took a sick day. I spent most of the day sleeping, and didn't really suspect there was anything wrong with me besides a virus, so I ignored my parents' suggestions that I go see the doctor.

Late in the afternoon, on a whim, I decided to take a look at my throat in the mirror to see what was going on in there. Lo and behold, it was a fearsome sight indeed. I'll spare you the details, but I knew it wasn't normal, so I decided I ought to have it checked out after all. I made a journey to the nearest urgent care center (Which, if you ask me, is a total racket: there was a $100 co-pay just to see the doctor and get a rapid strep test, and they didn't warn me how much it was going to cost until I'd already seen the doctor. If something is going to cost $100, they should tell you before you incur the charges; I bet some people would walk away upon hearing that.), where they ascertained that I didn't have strep throat. Having had strep more times than I can remember growing up, I really didn't think that was what was wrong with me, as my throat didn't hurt in remotely the same way. Instead, the doctor suggested that I might have mono. In fact, I believe her exact words were, "Say ahh. Yeah, that looks like it could be mono."

For the time being, it could still be a virus. The doctor did not want to do a blood test, because she thought I was too early in the course of experiencing symptoms to have produced enough antibodies for an accurate test. Instead, I'm supposed to wait a week and go back for the test if I'm not feeling any better. So keep your collective fingers crossed that I'm feeling better by next week, because I really don't want to have mono. There's just too much on my agenda for 2009 to spend the next several months battling with debilitating exhaustion. Not to mention, I don't think a chronicle of "I'm tired, I slept all day, I'm going back to bed," would be much of a good read...