Comings & Goings - Chicago

Downtown Chicago, lighted for the holidays (I love lights in trees; I wish such festiveness were visible all over the city)

Chicago's skyscrapers, looking towards Michigan Avenue

On Chicago Street, right near Northwestern's Chicago campus

The Luc Tillmans billboard in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art

The extraordinary Roscoe Mitchell and his ensemble, at the AACM's 45th Anniversary Celebration at the Museum of Contemporary Art (flautist Nicole Mitchell is at the far right)

Roscoe Mitchell, playing his alto sax, at the AACM 45th Anniversary Celebration at the MCA

Members of Renee Baker's Brass Band Epiphany, letting loose (they were incredible)

Fake movie set café in my neighborhood (it will appear, I imagine, in the movie Contagion

The movie café's post-filming interior

Fake movie snow

My undergraduate honors advisee, Simon Han, who was awarded second prize in the Union League of Chicago's Civic & Arts Foundation's Creative Writing College Division competition, for his story "Bear Hands"

Streetcorner puppet show, Andersonville neighborhood (I passed this on my way to see Rikki Beadle-Blair's new film Fit

Zakes Mda, who was visiting writer in residence at the university's Center for the Writing Arts, delivered a smart and insightful lecture on the relationship between landscape and his writing (I have been a fan of his for years, so it was marvelous to meet him in person)

On November 30 at the Silver Room, Artistically Linked was hosting a multi-artist-art show; each week leading up to that, you could see the artists working on the installation, so I caught painter/grafittist Rahmaan Statik at work

Literary scholar Jahan Ramazani gave a terrific talk at the university on the relationship between postcolonial poetries and affiliated discourses (I am still studying my notes on this one; it opened a number of doors, so to speak; and he even played clips of poet Patience Agbabi reading/rapping!)

Who says Chicago doesn't have its own flavor: Rogers Park's very own Prince

Rogers Park Prince from a distance

Melissa Harris-Perry spoke at the university on Michelle Obama, and was nothing less than incandescent

Independent scholar Justin Spring gave a talk on his acclaimed study of queer scholar, tattoo artist, porn writer, and archivist Samuel Steward: Secret Historian: The Life of Times of Samuel Steward: Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2010).

An artist working on a mural in Rogers Park

Recent Comings & Goings - NYC

A few photos of recent events or shows I've attended, street scenes, and all that good stuff.


A pop-up designer store in Chelsea

Alexander Bonin Gallery in Chelsea

Look west in Chelsea, towards the Hudson River (that's the IAC building on the left, and the High Line Park horizontally splitting the frame)

Lanterns strung outside the New York Film Academy Café, near Astor Place (I can remember when this spot was a Starbucks, and a Fuqua's, and even part of the Cooper Union)

Outside Thé Adoré

At Thé Adoré, a great spot near NYU (that's my old friend Jerry W., on the left)

Inside the Limelight Mall (I actually partied at the Limelight, both in my 20s and again in my 30s, so it remains a bit of a shock for me to step inside this space and see what it's become, but it's a metaphor for New York: a mismatched mall!)

Angels posing (I have no idea what this was about...but in the old days, half would have been male and all would have been wearing less clothing with those wings.)

Exterior of the Limelight (Mall)

Interior of St. Francis Xavier Church, West Village (I've passed this church many a time, known graduates of its famous high school, and decided finally to peek my head in. The woman at right urged me to "come in," but having devoted a good portion of my youth to the Roman Catholic Church, I decide a snapshot would suffice.)

Pop-up Gallery, in Chelsea; I believe this is the same spot that not even a week later was the jewelry store pictured above. Also interesting how some icons, like Twiggy, remain in circulation, while others vanish without a trace

Gallerists at work

Décollage (so common all across Manhattan, and here it adorns a building site)

Rainwater mirror (this is photography 101, but I am endlessly delighted by the mirrors that rainwater or thawing ice make. My new novel even opens with an image of this sort.)