the world has turned and left me here

run from fear, fun from rear

We get up & take the Metra from west Chicago into downtown. Buildings begin to crumble, people become beater, trash blows through streets, skyscrapers loom. I have this thought about really big cities: you pass this certain blast radius and it's like everything has been flattened, destroyed by a blast of some sort. Detritus. Trash. How can you help but be excited as you zoom through this blastscape to the very source? It's like going back in time, to the Origin of the Blast.

Yun & I get excited and wander around happily for a while before we get our bearings. Everything is frantic & alive. Eventually, we take a bus to the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. There's a special exhibit of Lee Bontecou's stuff. He made this whole series of 3d pictures consisting of canvas stretched over wire frames, with various protrusions and black holes that seem to extend much farther back into the wall than is possible. Sometimes these holes are equipped with razor sharp teeth. They end up looking like the foreboding underbelly of some giant organic spaceship.

There's also a Surrealist exhibit upstairs ("Strange Days," after the Doors song). A series of paintings that appear solid blood red until you realize they are photographs of WWII soldiers, tinted so red you can barely make anything out. A neon sign: "Run from fear, Fun from rear." An 8-minute video clip of a condor trapped in an office room, trashing it. Various pictures of a sculptor's apartment containing 8 foot hight unnavigable balls of trash--"Excuse the mess," I try to imagine someone saying about this, impossible.

Although most of the stuff is pretty strange and or inane, I leave with this sense of clarity that was well worth the price of admission. Here, at least, were examples of people focusing all their intent upon something--everything was deliberate--there were no accidents--truth & beauty unfolded and you could pause, unhurried, to contemplate them.