harry is not feeling well :(

Spotted this unhappy dinosaur/alligator in front of the Wilmington Harris Teeter grocery store.

the bat man

In Wilmington now, and we saw The Dark Knight last night. Why does everyone think that movie is so great? Writing was eh, plot was wanting. Even the action scenes were often too convoluted to follow.

Is it that I can't enjoy action films anymore, or are they getting progressively worse? Does T2 hold up over time (one of my favorites), or is it a genre that speaks only to adolescent adrenaline?

And what about this suggestion from Rush Limbaugh that Batman is representing an unfairly criticized GW Bush? No doubt it had a lot of themes taken from recent headlines, but a strict interpretation of Batman as Bush seems reaching. I thought if anything, the movie warned of becoming what you are apparently fighting against. And wow, I hardly ever listen to Rush Limbaugh, but I did once I landed in North Carolina and, OMG, what the heck, do people really take him seriously? He said so many things not based in reality that I lost count.

Christian Bales's recent personal drama peaks my interest, and made Batman a bit more enjoyable. His is a beleaguered persona. A bunch of tension and anger just beneath the surface makes him such an interesting actor, with a strange monotone voice. It seems like he has a tragedy lurking in his background, which this recent episode with his mother and sister appears to confirm, and this just interests me more. If you like Christian Bale, you may want to rent Harsh Times in which he plays an Iraq War vet. The movie is not so good and incredibly disturbing, but his performance will haunt you.

And Heath Ledger, no one can deny that we lost a great one there. I always thought his performance in Brokeback Mountain was one of the best ever. His performance as the Joker was also first rate, It's a shame that his last movie, The Dark Knight didn't turn out better.

adventure

We're going on an adventure tomorrow to North Carolina. That's all I can divulge for now.

Watch this Scott H. Biram video of Woody Guthries' "Pastures of Plenty" in honor of Scott playing at the Empty Bottle tonight.

composting toilet

This is a picture of the composting toilet at the farm, and the view through its window looking out on the cornfields. There is something about cornfields that is super creepy, I think I never shook off The Children of the Corn.

Now that the over-abundance of corn is wreaking havoc on our food system and our bodies there is a real-life reason to be afraid of corn. Even though most U.S. residents are mostly made of corn now (like this quote from a biologist to Michael Pollan: "When you look at the isotope ratios, [U.S. residents] are corn chips with legs" ), I just can't separate Stephen King from the corn.

I would never ever walk through a corn field or a corn maze which I imagine would become a nightmare scene like the ice maze in The Shining.

For more on the scariness of corn check out this Grist article about Michael Pollan.

what kind of state are you in?

Overheard today in the Chicago, Illinois DMV:

"The state is a pi–mp!"

fred hampton's bed

Today I found out that Fred Hampton's bed, the one he was murdered in, is in the basement of the building in which I work. This is why some people claim that he haunts this building. I maintain that if it is Fred Hampton's ghost it would definitely be more vocal because he was an amazing orator. Although I am inclined to think that that bed carries with it some strong energy. Imagine, this piece of history tucked away just a few floors below. It's not in a museum, it is not a shrine, it just waits below in an old building as state's evidence while life goes on up above.

lost dog dutches

I keep asking myself if this dog is actually named Dutchess. Because I've never heard of a dog named Dutches before, and like A. pointed out, people in Chicago do like to spell things phonetically.

I do hope Dutches finds his or her way home. Unfortunately, odds are that someone picked the little doggie up to be pitbull bait.

Geoghegan is my hero

There was a fantastic interview with Thomas Geoghegan, a Chicago-based lefty lawyer, on the local radio station WBEZ this morning. What was so great is that Geoghegan is able to boil down what is wrong with this country in a ten minute interview. I implore you to give it a listen: here

He talks about the deregulation of the credit card industry, and its effect on our debt-ridden society, linking it with increased litigation. He also breaks down how the U.S. is not a direct democracy, and hence we are very unlike other countries because we do not have one person, one vote. He actually puts current issues into context (!) and he's written several books: Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back, and his latest: See You in Court: How the Right Made America a Lawsuit Nation.

He's smart, well-spoken, and he connects today's problems with policy decisions made in the past and with weaknesses inherent in our government's structure, he helps to alleviate our collective amnesia, and for these reasons he makes me happy.

i love not having roommates

I was just thinking about how great it is to not have any roommates. I mean, I do live with my significant other, but he's kind of like an extension of myself so that doesn't really count.

Once I lived in this big yellow house in Oakland with three roommates and one bathroom. The kicker was that one roommate lived in a little sunroom on the other side of the bathroom. So, you had to walk through the bathroom to get to her room, and while you were in the bathroom, you hoped she wouldn't walk through.

That's what happens in a tight housing market, strange co-housing situations. One friend of mine lived under a staircase. I'm not exaggerating; she lived in a tiny closet under a staircase; quite happily I might add.

One guy I dated had a room barely wide enough for an old futon mattress to just fit. When we first started dating, he only had a foam mattress, the kind you take camping. Charming.

Though, I've had my share of grandiose bedrooms, like the room with 13 foot ceilings, parquet floors, a marble fireplace and bay windows from which you could see the San Francisco Bay. Rent control, sigh. I was always pretty lucky with my housing situations.

Chicago does have cheap rent going for it. After living in the Bay Area I couldn't believe the Chicago rents, it was like shopping in a dollar store. I never thought I'd live in a one-bedroom apartment as nice as the one I live in now–and honestly, this apartment doesn't compare to the beautiful vintage places most of my friends live in.

It's funny how you get accustomed to sharing living space in odd situations such as the sunroom/bathroom situation. In a city like San Francisco, some part of your brain registers scarcity of housing as "I'm so lucky to live here." And then you come to the inevitable question "Why the heck am I living here?"

intelligentsia tour

This weekend we went on a tour of the Intelligentsia coffee roasting facility. This was on the Chicago bucket list– a list that A. graciously made up of urban things to do before we say goodbye to Chicago. Because someday we may miss this urban decay of a city.

I have to admit, the tour was kind of cool. Intelligentsia is a local Chicago coffee roaster- they sell wholesale but they also have cafés (several in Chicago, and one in L.A.).

We arrived at the nondescript door of the facility and stepped inside to a lovely aroma-filled open warehouse. There are stacks of large bags full of coffeee, three huge coffee roasters, and nice natural light. Everyone got jacked up on the sample coffee available before the tour.

The coffee roasters are slick. The whole process is pretty much done by these large machines, which look like custom cars, or large versions of those beautifully colored vintage mixers/blenders that everyone has in their kitchens nowadays.

The humans are in charge of monitoring the temperature and rate of roast, and constantly checking the color of the beans - they start out green, turn yellow, orange, then dark brown (atleast the columbian roast did this.) The way the coffee roaster person handled the roaster reminded me of how a projectionist relates to his/her projector. The machine becomes your companion and you can identify every sound that comes from it as language that you've learned to interpret.

Everyone on the tour gets to take home a 1/2 pound of the coffee that was just roasted. Mmmmmmmm. Yum.

One thing A. and I discussed as we walked home, was how beneficial Intelligentsia's "direct trade" practices were as opposed to "fair trade." Apparently, by cutting out the middle man (in this case the fair trade coffee regulatory body) they are able to give farmers better prices. However there is no hard proof of this, because they are not part of the fair trade group, hence the problem. A. likened this to benefiting from a system that you're not supporting. I'm unclear on the workings of fair trade, so I'm abstaining from a position, but I'm a bit suspicious of the claims of direct trade, which must result in higher profits for the company.

Anyways, it was nice to see another part of the city and to explore a local business. As we walked back up Damen to catch the Blue Line, we marveled at all the ugly condos that are still waiting for some real estate boom to happen. When they demolished the Horner projects, developers must've thought the area would instantly become hip. For now, the area is a strange neighborhood made up of mostly cement block buildings in a "SoMa-esque" area of Chicago.

italian beef

sin in the second city

I just finished reading Sin in the Second City by Karen Abbott. The book is about two madams, Ada and Minna Everleigh who ran the famous Chicago brothel, the Everleigh Club. Abbott also details the religious reformers' fight to shut down the club and Chicago's "vice" district, then called the Levee. Besides enjoying a colorful depiction of early 1900s Chicago, I learned a few historical tidbits.

At the time, there was hysteria about "white slavery" which is what nowadays we would call sex trafficking. There were stories abounding of young girls kidnapped from Europe and brought to the U.S. to work in brothels. Also at risk were young women from rural U.S. towns who were duped by big city men promising marriage. From what I gather, these things did happen although they were often exaggerated by religous social reformers for various nefarious and not so nefarious reasons.

Just last month I noticed a news article about a huge prostitution bust. The last sentence of the article struck me because it uses the word slavery to describe the situation just like they did in the book: "These kids are victims. This is 21st century slavery," Allen said. "They lack the ability to walk away." (you can read the article Here)

Yes, technically, many underage boys and girls in the sex trade are pretty much slaves. But, I do find the usage of the term odd, especially back in the 1900s when the slavery of African American people was a very recent memory, and I believe calling it 'slavery,' especially qualifying it as "white slavery," inescapably has some racist undertones, especially back in the day. (This in no way means that I am belittling the horrendous global sex trade that boys and girls are victims of)

Another interesting thing I learned from the book is how prostitutes at the time where generally seen as victims in need of rescue. And how later, society began to blame them; as they began to be seen as dirty and immoral much like the present. Now prostitutes take the blame and are more likely to be arrested and charged than a john, a pimp, or a madam.

Another thing to consider was the passage of the Mann Act or the White Slave Trade Act which banned the interstate transport of females for “immoral purposes.” Check wikipedia for more here. Unsurprisingly, the Mann Act ended up being used disproportionately against African American men and it has often been used to prosecute men for having sex with underage women (taken from wikipedia.)

One thing I'm glad that Abbbott pointed out in her book was that as a result of the "white slavery era" the Illinois State Assembly in 1913 investigated the link between prostitution and wages; they actually put department stores like Sears on the stand which resulted in Illinois passing some of the first minimum wage laws. Let's here it for treating the cause of the problem, not the symptoms, if only that happened more often in the U.S.

yard sale find

It's our new old table. Our neighbor said 50, we said 35, he said 40, we said fine.