So, my Chicago peoples in the place to be. I know it's cold outside and the amassed snow from this famed city's third largest (recorded) blizzard has made getting around the city a huge pain in the ass. Fret not, because there is an absolutely amazing photography exhibit going on at my favorite place in the whole wide world, that's right, you guessed, THE CHICAGO CULTURAL CENTER! Easily accessible by any means of Chicago Public Transportation or even the METRA, ensconced in other interesting cultural exposes, and best of all, FREE FREE FREE!
Long story short: this lady, Vivian Maier, took a ton of street photographs, hardly ever actually developing her negatives, and stored undeveloped and developed negatives along with a copious amount of other artifacts, she deemed worth of archiving in a storage unit, which went up for auction due to non-payment after her death in 2009. This guy, John Maloof, bought the contents of the storage unit, realized that the Photographs were actually amazing, and started developing, scanning, and printing from her negatives. So this exhibit is fascinating for many, many reasons: 1) Because she was not formally trained in the arts, we get to consider her an outsider artist (yeah an outsider street photographer!)-although blurbs about her suggest that she did avidly follow the artistic trends of her day. 2) What's more bonkers than a person spending all her free time (as a nanny, I imagine which was in scarce supply) taking pictures that she never developed? 3) Are there ethical issues with printing the artistic work of someone else and then exhibiting said work in a public forum? What happened when dude starts selling prints? Anyway, like I said major, major stuff, man. Check out more images at, dude's blog on Vivian Maier. It will make you wish women still wore fancy hats, more people hung out in the streets, and the poor could be as poor as the wanted to be with out worrying about car payments or high definition televisions.
MUSIC!!!
So here it is: Number 8 on the list of my top ten albums of 2010. Free Energy's Stuck on Nothing. Basically one of my favorite bands, Hockey Night decided to kick out 3/5s of their band (their drummers (yes they had two)and bassist) and upgrade their rhythm section with a new rhythm guitarist (their lead's big brother), bassist, and drummer. And thus transformed themselves from indie rock weirdos to indie stadium rock weirdos. Just imagine thin Lizzy guitars, nice disco bass lines, and break beat drum parts topped off with a poor man's Steve Malkmus vocals. Yep, happy, fun times!!! Check em out live if you get the chance, too, because they throw down, something nothing nice.
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