July 21, 2004

Brief note: Millennium Park, Books

I leave Chicago for the foreseeable future (modulo some half-planned visits) tomorrow, so I'm busy finishing work and rushing about town seeing things and people. After this I'll be in Rocky Mountain National Park for about a week, on a hiking trip with my parents. (And also hopefully plowing through a large pile of novels during the car rides and at night.) I might be without Internet access the whole time! It's a scary thought.

So, a few brief thoughts:

- The Millennium Park music shell (designed by Frank Gehry) isn't as bad as I had thought. My thought before going to a concert there was that it's ugly. After going to Sunday's concert: the metal cage-like structure over the field is a nicer way to have speakers everywhere than erecting large poles that block people's view. The stage itself looks good. It's elevated enough, and the wood paneling gives the stage a pleasant warm look. As for all the other steel around the stage, I still don't like it so much. For some reason I just feel like a music shell needs more symmetry. Maybe it's that it shouldn't distract from the concert. (For some reason I had a better reaction to the Experience Music Project than other Gehry buildings I've seen, most of which I don't like so much.)

- The Millennium Park reflective bean sculpture by Anish Kapoor is really awesome. The fountain with the videos of people is pretty cool, except that having them spit the water seems a bit weird.

- I got the Belle & Sebastian Books EP. The 6-minute version of "Your Cover's Blown" is really good. The shorter one is good too, but I don't care for it as much. It's a long song that changes styles and moods a few times. For Belle & Sebastian it's really different (Stuart Murdoch does funk!?), but I like it. "Wrapped Up in Books" was one of my favorite tracks on Dear Catastrophe Waitress originally, though others have grown on me more, but I still think it's very good. It has some characteristics of older B&S, but it's very upbeat. On the other hand, "Your Secrets" is pretty bland, at least on the first couple of listens. This one is a huge step up from the I'm a Cuckoo single, in my opinion.

Posted by Matt at July 21, 2004 11:35 AM
Comments

The Financial Times has a nifty little article about the Bean:

http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1087373834699&p=1016625900929

Here's how the article begins:

"Chicago has something new and unexpected in the heart of downtown: the Bean. Only a few days into the opening of Millennium Park, a mere four and a half years late, locals have taken their newest piece of public sculpture into their affections. The legume-shaped sculpture, a 110-ton hunk of highly polished steel, has been designed by Anish Kapoor, the Anglo-Indian sculptor. It is his first piece of public art in America, but remains unfinished. 'My contract says the work is supposed to last for 1,000 years. It is wonderfully daft. In that context, what difference does it make being three months late?' he asks.

"He has named the piece, 'Cloud Gate' (you can walk under it) but the nickname 'The Bean' is already locked in the local idiom: on Saturday, a five-year-old tugged at her parent's sleeves, pleading, 'please can we go back in the Bean again?' Nearby, a man in his 20s limbo-danced as close as he could to the sculpture's spherical contours. 'Wow! It's like liquid mercury,' he observed. His girlfriend looked on, embarrassed.

" 'Probably it will be 'The Bean' forever,' acknowledges Kapoor with a sigh, as he takes in the inevitable compromise of public art works: the public's reaction to it. 'I hope what I have done is make a serious work, which deals with serious questions about form, public space and an object in space. You can capture the popular imagination and hold other points of interest, but that is not what I set out to do, although there is inevitably a certain spectacular in an object like this.' "

I don't know how the Bean "deals with serious questions about form, public space and an object in space," but it sounds kind of neat and now I want to go see it.

Posted by: Ed at July 21, 2004 04:23 PM

I still maintain the point that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is a
fundamental error. Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a
high grade for such a design :-)
(Andrew Tanenbaum to Linus Torvalds)
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Bart Simpson on chalkboard in episode 9F12
generic viagra cheap viagra onlineI still maintain the point that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is a
fundamental error. Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a
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(Andrew Tanenbaum to Linus Torvalds)

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