#Chicago bars

[bruce-adams]

Right back at you, Chicago.

The good people at G-Man Tavern will be hosting a Q&A on Wed. April 12. I've done events in Wicker Park, Hyde Park, and now it's time for Lincoln Park (okay, maybe Wrigleyville is more accurate...) Formerly known as the Gingerman, this particular tavern was the site of much kranky aktion in the day, and next-door to Metro which was/is central to the Chicago music scene. Register below or drop in unannounced! Doors open at 7pm, the gabbing starts at 7:30.

[birdhand-art]

My first submission to Xerox Candy Bar has officially been published!! I'm so excited to share the Monsters & Cryptids edition with everyone on distribution day :]

Thank you so much to everyone at XCB! Y'all are amazing and i'm so interested to see what comes next 👀

[notbecauseofvictories]

My best friend and I had a call recently---she’s back with her family for a bit helping out with some hometown stuff. As part of the stuff, she’s been going through a (deceased) relative’s scrapbook, compiled in the American Midwest circa 1870-1900 and featuring mostly cut-out figures from the ads of the day.

She talked about how painstaking this relative’s work was. (Apparently the relative was careful to cut out every finger, every cowlick; this was by no means carelessly or hastily assembled.) But she also she talked about how---the baby on the baking soda ad is ugly, it is so ugly, why anyone would clip this heinously ugly illustrated baby and paste it into a scrapbook? Why would you save the (terribly told, boring) ghost story that came with your box of soap?

(Why include these things in the first place? we asked each other. ”There’s a kind of anti-capitalism to it,” she mused.)

And we discussed that for a bit---how most of the images, stories, artists, and ads were local, not national; they’re pulled from [Midwestern state] companies’ advertisements in [Midwestern state] papers, magazines, and products. As a consequence, you’re not looking at Leyendecker or Norman Rockwell illustrations, but Johann Spatz-Smith from down the road, who took a drawing class at college.

(College is the state college, and he came home on weekends and in the summer to help with the farm or earn some money at the plant.)

But it also inspired a really interesting conversation about how---we have access to so much more art, better and more professional art, than any time in history. As my bff said, all you have to do to find a great, technically proficient and lovely representational image of a baby, is to google the right keywords. But for a girl living in rural [Midwestern state] of the late 1800s, it was the baking soda ad, or literal actual babies. There was no in-between, no heading out to the nearby art museum to study oil paintings of mother and child, no studying photographs and film---such new technologies hadn’t diffused to local newspapers and circulars yet, and were far beyond the average person’s means. But cheap, semi-amateur artists? Those were definitely around, scattered between towns and nearby smallish cities.

It was a good conversation, and made me think about a couple things---the weird entitlement that “professional” and expensive art instills in viewers, how it artificially depresses the appetite for messy unprofessional art, including your own; the way that this makes your tastes narrower, less interesting, less open.

By that I mean---maybe the baby isn’t ugly! Maybe you’ve just seen too many photorealistic babies. Maybe you haven’t really stopped to contemplate that your drawing of a baby (however crude, ugly, or limited) is the best drawing of a baby you can make, and the act of drawing that lumpen, ugly baby is more sacred and profoundly human than even looking at a Mary Cassatt painting.

And even if that isn’t the case....there was this girl in [American Midwestern state] for whom it was very, very important that she capture every finger, curl, and bit of shading for that ugly soap ad baby. And some one hundred years later, her great-something-or-other took pains to preserve her work---because how terribly human it is, to seek out all the art we can find that resonates with us, preserve it, adore it.

It might be the most human impulse we have.

[williammarksommer]

The Berghoff

66 series 

Hasselblad 500c/m

Kodak Ektar 100iso

[tierras]

cdmx recs?

[mickeym4ndy]

I need a million more AU’s where Ian and mickey meet again in their mid thirties when Yevgeny’s a teenager

[urbestnightmares]

BATHROOM CONFESSIONS

[coolthingsguyslike]

[copperbadge]

I wish like hell I had gotten a look at the front of this guy's shirt, but the back is so good I almost don't want to know.

[ID: A photograph of a man wearing a long-sleeved shirt, really just his torso; the back of the shirt reads, in plain lettering, "North of Detroit, Way South of Heaven." I could google its meaning but I simply refuse.]

[jackspanto]

The Allis at Soho House _North Green St Chicago, IL

[alicesbread]

Good luck, babe! Is the most Velma x Roxie coded song there is out there

[mileenaxyz]

😁😁😁😁

[appreshaeation]

Kiss the fish

[traderrock]

[quinnmil]

[papas-majadas]

Spotted on the window at Tradition Gastro Pub in the West Loop, Chicago.

Someone out there loves 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'.