Paul Potts

Watch this if you want your heart to be warmed. See how a shy cell phone salesman makes all of Britain cry when he sings opera. You'll love it.

Being back in Chicago is interesting. From the get-go, with Americans resurfacing around me, it was all very uncanny, from my neighbor on the plane telling me how he had recently visited Barandov studios, to the until now entirely forgotten feel of ice underfoot and the familiar echo of fellow men, cursing with mincing step down the sidewalk, remembering that sometimes its no cakewalk nipping out to the shops. Of course ice is not an American phenomenon, but it feels like the Chicago winter I know. On all kinds of surfaces, mostly on pavement and blasted on the glass of bus shelters and windshields, glazing the grass on winter walks to the Point, giving those blades a backbone for a few moments. When the plane was coming in for a landing and we ascended through a level of clouds, I mistook a lower cloud bank for a set of frozen waves on the lake, so perfectly frozen did they appear. I was wrong about the lake- it hasn't been swallowed whole by the cold- just around the fringe- but it seems to stand alone in that.

I went to the MCA the other day, and they were changing the exhibition, so only the permanent collection on the 4th floor was open. There was a modern take on the Allegory of the Four Seasons motif- the same vantage point photographed on Lake Michigan shot during all four seasons, which showed the change in the color palette and the opacity of the water through the course of the year. They also had a few Thomas Struth photographs that were incredible. This one was my favorite, to be sure. There was also a really terrible small exhibit on the same floor, Mapping the Self, which was really unpleasant, badly curated, low quality, and in my friend Emma's estimation, altogether too schmaltzy.

A Cameron McGill show was also in order, so I linked up with my friend David for that true fan experience, complete with absolute zeal and heartbreak, some hand-holding. Noah Harris, who makes part of What Army, played an opening set on piano that was perfect for the space, and goofily loungey due to the tea lights flanking him on the piano. Cameron's set was awesome, albeit somewhat less structured than normal, given the workshop format he's adopted for this Wednesday residency at the new Uncommon Ground. It's really more upmarket than the other Uncommon Ground, but very fun.

I got to get a tour of my friend's work in the Field Museum, in the venerable Department of Fishes, deep in the yawning depths of the building. Making our way to the exciting room where the live fishes swim, we passed shelves of less lucky fish, their bodies tipped into jars of formaldehyde, exciting terror and curiosity. Megsie then took us to her lab, where she does all sorts of exciting things involving DNA sequencing, which until this point I had assumed was a much more difficult process than it seemed to be, after seeing all the machines that shake the genes apart and take their picture. It was also a pleasant surprise to go to the Friday happy hour and see all the jovial scientists drinking unseasonal coronas with lime in a back room, paying on the honor system in the hallowed community of friend and colleague.

Before taking this tour, Mariya and I took free advantage of our free visitor passes and toured the Maps exhibit which was really exhaustive, and kind of counter-intuitively laid out. I think it lent something to the exhibit, that there was no overt and systematized ordering, except for occasional pockets of maps related by theme. This was actually somewhat reassuring since it would've been easier to skip through whole portions of a room if it has been organized chronologically. Instead, you always felt you were happening every once in a while upon a little revelation of a thing (the Babylonian clay map from circa 3500 BC, was it?, that shows the grid of a city map, with one block denoted as the Gardens... Are these THE Gardens? The Hanging Gardens? Is this a Wonder of the World as depicted on a clay map?) You see what I mean. The exhibit closes in a week of so, so you should see it if you can.

I was taken out to the best meal ever (of 2007?) at North Pond, which is in the old warming hut for ice skaters on an old skating pond in the center of Lincoln Park. We had the tasting menu, although it was a bit different than what you see on the link. There were a few sort of little courses skirting the ones listed- more substantial than the occasional amuse-bouche. For example, before the shrimp tartare and tuna crudo, we had two kinds of oyster and crème fraiche with caviar on a blini. I don't know that I've ever had oysters before, but they were incredible. Before dessert, we also had this amazing ricotta cheesecake (I use the term cake lightly- it was more of a slice) that tasted like burfi, topped with pomegranate gelée on this inimitable crust. The wine we had was a reaaaally nice Malbec that had no edge at all, which was pretty strange for me, since I always expect to be puckering. Really earthy, as they say. Of course, I know precious little about wines, and you would do well to be suspicious of my recommendations.

I also went on Saturday morning to a wedding- my friend Dana married his beautiful girlfriend Johana in the Chicago Cultural Center, and although I was embarrassingly the last to arrive for the short ceremony, I was thankfully not too late to see the knot tied. It's actually quite a beautiful place to get married, I think. And the judge who married them was goofy and charismatic.

Well, that's all from Chicago for now. I'm here in limbo for maybe a couple days yet. There's news of a Turkish invasion on the front, so I might hold out here for a bit longer, and take that long train ride back home mid-week.

Dictionary Squared is the creation of an old friend of mine, and it's a pretty interesting simple algorithm for displaying word usage by employing (I've been told) Google's search function, delivering usage examples much to the same effect as does the OED. In this case, the rub is that the answers are arbitrary in their selection, or at least follow internet search parameters, in stark opposition to the process the OED uses to supply its usage examples (at times, the origin of the word itself). This idea is something that critic John Simon would shake his fist at-- a neat if not aggressive tool based in the association of words with their colloquial usage, if it works as I imagine it will. Even if priority is given to academic resources online to supply the examples, the responses will still be inclusive in scope. It may be a very neat little idea to thwart the likes of Simon, since his stalwart defense against "misuse" of usage leaves little room for this kind of bottom-up, mechanized democratization in language. Anyway, it's cool.

Obama's caucus speech after his Iowa victory made me burst into tears when I read it this morning. Yes, I am a bit behind in the news. If you want, you can take a look at the video itself, which has been posted online. There were also a bunch of fantastic little local tv news clips that held interviews in Hyde Park establishments of note, namely Mellow Yellow and Valois.

Rocky Raccoon is amazing. For the Beatles, that kind of honky tonk piano is entirely unexpected and absolutely stunning every time you know they're about to go there. I don't know how I feel about the spoken part, but spoken parts don't have the best track record beyond Love Me Tender, so you gotta give a man some credit for trying. The end of the track has the same bittersweet appeal as Butch and Sundance getting gunned down. In league with Tumbleweed Connection in this sense, it is strange how Brits- or non-Americans - can reproduce such a staunchly American timbre. But maybe I'm forgetting too quickly that it was Ennio Morricone who penned the score for a generation of spaghetti westerns, and then there's always Wim Wenders.

After reading about Radiohead's pay-what-you-want scheme for their new album In Rainbows, I was excitedly trolling around for it, mistakenly thinking it would be found on iTunes instead of on their official site. By happenstance, while bumbling about I found this really wonderful lullaby series in the iTunes store: Rockabye Baby, which does lullaby renditions of different rock bands. The Radiohead one was pretty fantastic, but the Lullaby Renditions of the Smashing Pumpkins blew my socks off. You should have a listen- they have free snippets.

Flickeur, and CSI: LGA - MDW ?

Flickeur is all at once unsettling and silly (it uses flash, after all). The explanation for how the program functions is at the bottom, but once you start watching it, you get to wondering what it is, exactly, that makes it work so well. It probably feels most like a documentary about a serial killer, with its typed log of events and eldritch soundtrack. It is at its most interesting when there are series that really work when overlaid or juxtaposed. Taking from the entire pool of inane DSC_10012, etc. easyclick shots and the more professional alike proves effective, and I'm also pleased that the log that is incorporated is that of the miscellaneous descriptions of all the images on flickr. It seems incredible to me that code can be written for this kind of improvisation, however simple it might be to generate.

These are a couple minutes that I saw:
Two ugly pug dogs gussied up in red bows
A smiling cover girl
January 30, 2007. Something tells me her modeling days are over
bleached out photo, a boy in a field, only half of his head in the picture
Thursday, October 6, 2007. How many times have I told you I hate you?
A palm with a baby rabbit in its center
a huge glistening eye, and then an overexposed blue sky with blood red foliage
the baby rabbit, again and again
Monday, May 8, 2006 - 04:06. Shock and Awwwwwwwwww
the dome of the Seville Cathedral

Yea, it's better to see it for yourself. check it out, fool.

In other news, CSI: NY was amazing and I hope the current (I use this term loosely, since "current" over here means "episode I currently have my hands on") crossover episode in the Second City spawns CSI: Chicago. Chicago has been left wanting as a setting for a decent television show since Family Matters went off the air. CSI: NY gets top marks- not only have they already done an episode this season where Gary Sinise chases a murderer through Second Life, but now Sinise finds himself at the Tribune building, after following the clues (a bit of the Alamo, the Hagia Sophia, and the California redwood forest) to their embedment in the skyscrapers' walls. Some may argue that CSI: NY has really been jumping the shark recently, but who are they kidding: that's what makes it so fantastic.

As for realism in television, the writers strike is ushering in a new batch of really terrible reality shows. How about this show Mark Wahlberg is going to be hosting called A Moment of Truth, where contestants are strapped into a polygraph and asked the most intimate questions about their personal lives? The polygraph machine seems almost extraneous, since it seems pretty impossible to imagine that anyone would be able to lie to Mark Walhberg.