February 08, 2005
foxes tour diary pt 3
2/4/2005—old friends are coming back to you
chicago's marina towers are a wilco fan's mecca. i walked around it seven times before i built up the chutzpah to photograph it. jeff tweedy ended up showing remarkable prescience by singing, "i've been hiding out in the big city blinking / what was i thinking when i let go of you."
the night before, i ate a fortune cookie that read, "old friends are coming back to you." now, who am i to argue with the chinese and their thousand year history of prognostication? i smiled and braced myself for the worst.
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apparently, the university of chicago's law building was designed specifically with function in mind (at the expense of aesthetics). one building houses the entirety of the law school including all classrooms, the library, professors' offices, etc. unique among law schools i have visited, professors' offices are actually inside of the stacks. i imagine the arrangement is something akin to eating a sandwich while on the pot.
coincidentally, in the green lounge—the hub of activity, the facilitator of collaboration—i bumped into a girl i haven't spoken with since junior high. now a law student, she couldn't stop espousing the virtues of chicago law. she brought me to her property class presided over by professor r.h. helmholz—aka chicago's kingsfield, aka the hammer. unfortunately, he didn't reduce anyone to tears, but, quite clearly, chicago is the place for me.
afterwards, i sat and waited for an old friend to come back to me.
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in the evening, i watched the university of chicago basketball team destroy brandeis. i spent most of the game staring blankly ahead of me, but at times i wanted to cry and crawl into a corner, which i actually did at one point. maybe it's the difference between chicago and northwestern. maybe i shouldn't have... but whatever. could the chinese possibly be both right and wrong? is such the nature of truth/fortune/life? in this situation, i imagine milan kundera, jumping at the chance to point out the effortlessness of cialis and its contemporaries. while i've never maintained a 36-hour erection, i can appreciate that such an experience could drastically change my worldview.
i'm reminded of the protagonist in chungking express who, when faced with heartbreak, goes out and runs to the point of exhaustion so he has no tears left with which to cry. well i paced the staircase of my mind without breaking a sweat only to find that it was shaped like a mobius strip.
geez, i just got my second wind. maybe the next time around will be different.
Posted by foxes in chicago tour diary at 09:01 AM | riffraff (135) | trackback (1254)
February 07, 2005
foxes tour diary pt 2
2/3/2005—l'esprit d'escalier
my visit to northwestern was fortunate enough to coincide with a talk given by randy barnett of boston university school of law who happened to be discussing a recent case he had argued in front of the supreme court. he told the crowd that, after making his oral arguments, he thought for weeks about what he should have said but didn't. the french have a word for it, he said—l'esprit d'escalier. the regret of afterthought and the consequent unending staircase tread.
while i understand that most of foxes' visitors keep coming back for his erudite prose, i realize that there is a select portion of my fans who mainly value the straight dish. in respect of those yahoos, i'll say this: my interviewer was not a beautiful woman, in fact she—was a man. we exchanged niceties. he asked me, "why northwestern?" and the ubiquitous, "why law?" unfortunately, i didn't prepare an answer to either question so he pulled down my pants and spanked me with a plastic toy shovel.
other questions were, "described a time you failed" and "how's my tie?" but then, out of nowhere, i ripped the interview from out of his clutches by describing my concussion in excruciatingly gory detail, after which i began asking myself questions that i then answered with questions.
somewhere near the end, i spaced out completely—mostly to think about the likelihood of a law school romance with an eight year age differential. in this sense, i appreciate experience in the same way as northwestern law. i like a girl that's been around the block.
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that evening i placed 5th in a chess tournament and didn't think about my interview at all. after all, there's no mental recursion when you don't really care. it's not so much about "getting it right" as it is "the epic, untenable, irrepairable consequences of wrong action" that usually stabs me in the gut. and when northwestern is somewhere around 65th on my list, it resides some place down after the spaghetti sauce and the artichoke dip. no, this time around, the only pangs in my gut resulted from the lack of foodstuffs.
i ate some deep dish and kept on whistling.
(photo credit: j. becker)
Posted by foxes in chicago tour diary at 05:15 PM | riffraff (165) | trackback (2902)
February 06, 2005
foxes tour diary pt 1
2/2/2005—putting my best foot forward
heraclitus observed that you can never put your foot in the same river twice. it's the same pheonomena that led siddhartha to point out that time is an illusion. because, while the river moves, it's also still. well, chicago is in the same place that i left it, but it definitely flowed by fast, leaving behind dead mussels and rotten jellyfish in the glistening white foam of its wake. i tried to scrape the brown crud off of the bottom of my feet before i double dipped—fresh like a newborn babe.
i typically read tour diaries of rock stars—such as myself—looking for more than they are willing to offer. after all, a diary is personal but an idol is an idol and surely untouchable. foxes asks you to worship him not for his pristine hands and dainty feet, but for his dirty fingernails and mud up to his elbows. if you're willing, i welcome you to the infinite regress of my inner soul.
i determined to keep a journal of my activities after i veered off of that fateful jump flush onto my rugged cheekbones and woke up remembering nothing. it's the black black blackness that scares me, and i'm not talking about the red line past cermak-chinatown.
anyway, how can we determine the nature of change if our memories aren't persistent? i'd like to cry myself to sleep if i can only remember why. fortunately, arriving in chicago, i did notice all of the ceiling fixtures, the light they cast, and the shadows standing plaintively in the corners.
i slept soundly and woke up with a crick in my neck. i decided then to eschew documentation for interpretation, physical evidence for impressionistic nonsense. are you embarassed? if so, then just think about me—choosing between chicago and northwestern. oops, i wet myself.
(photo credit: m. escalon)
Posted by foxes in chicago tour diary at 11:09 PM | riffraff (241) | trackback (963)