My mom is visiting us for our birthdays, and she took it into her head that she wanted to go look at the beautiful Tiffany glass domes in the Chicago Cultural Center.

Which, as it turned out, is hosting a Louis Sullivan exhibit -- Louis Sullivan's Idea -- designed by the one and only Chris Ware. Which, as a moment's thought will indicate, turns ( Read more... )

Back from London, jet lag slept off, and only needing to bring everyone up to speed on the last day or so of the trip. (Strangely, jet lag the other way -- from US to UK -- apparently turns me into a real boy. On this trip, at least, I was up with the larks' immediate associates and nodding off at midnight or one every night ( Read more... )

This is just too freaking cool to sit on until I can work it into a column in four months to a year.

But first, some prefatory ramble. We're on the penultimate adventure of the current game1 and I'm beginning to think about what we might run next. One contender2 (bred of seeing There Will Be Blood and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward ( Read more... )

So tonight on a lark I hooked up with gnosticpi, voxel, and heathey (to the latter two of whom great thanks for saving us seats) for a free Decemberists concert, backed by the Grant Park Orchestra, at the Pritzker Bandshell in the lovely (and only a wee bit over budget) Millennium Park here in the greatest city in the world ( Read more... )

"The Call of Cthulhu" deserves more time than I had yesterday, and I'm not likely to have more today ( Read more... )

Arrived at London (well, at Stansted) yesterday, and thence to the stately flat of Mr. James Wallis, good friend of this blog.

As always, we went in search of Hawksmoor churches, this time hitting both the extremely effective St. George-in-the-East and the not quite as overwhelming St. Anne's, Limehouse. On a thorough circumnavigation, we did ( Read more... )

There are so many things I should be writing reviews of right now, not least for a much-belated "Out of the Box," that instead I'm writing a Suppressed Transmission about the King of the Cats. (Don't go blaming me, it was Nancy's idea.) While delighting me to no end, it does leave you, my gentle LJ readership, somewhat bereft-ish. "What did Ken ( Read more... )

Between February 16 and March 18, I have spent three days in Chicago.

I'm back from Vegas, having shattered my personal record for consecutive nights out past 2:30 a.m. in a state unfit to operate heavy machinery. Eight straight nights of Something Going On (And On), to the point where, on the eighth night, I was so wrecked that I was actually ( Read more... )

Today, luagha and I did a big buncha low-key stuff, but the two highlights were lunch at the Fairmont Hotel to soak up a gift certificate, and the final phase of our multi-year assault on the Winchester Mystery House, as we finally hit the magic window for the "Behind the Scenes Tour" which takes you down into the basements ( Read more... )

Whenever the Tribune runs their "beautiful home" articles, I am always amazed at the paucity of bookshelves depicted. Didn't owning a whole fat lot of books used to be a status symbol, even if you never cracked their covers? When do you suppose that stopped being the case? And why? Is this one more sin we can lay at the feet of Le Corbusier and the ( Read more... )