Mark saw the Roy Lichtenstein retrospective at the Art Institute when he was there for Lollapalooza, and thought it was so good that I should see it too – seriously enough that he took me there for a belated birthday present. I handed in the first of the syllabi for the three courses I am teaching this fall on Thursday and took the day off on Friday. We took the Metra Train into the city – drove to Harvard IL; train to Ogilvie Transporation center – it’s always been the Metra terminus, under the blue waterfall building, across the street from the ugly side of the formerly mighty Union Station.
We had a really nice room at the Hotel Monaco. I wanted to take the EL up to a park on the Northwest side, and see a free reduced Shakespeare Taming of the Shrew – but Mark didn’t really want to sit on the grass, plus, as he rightly pointed out, we did not have the equipment for it – no blankies or lawn chairs. So we had an early-ish dinner at the Browntrout, and then went to see a late show of Dark Knight Rises. I spent a lot of the time in the movie not knowing what the hell was going on, but it was still fun to watch, and filmed in Pittsburgh. In fact, they used the City County Building, where my mom used to work, when she was a librarian for the Allegheny County Planning Dept., for a lot of scenes, as well as the yellow Fort Pitt bridge. And a lot of the chase scenes were in small crooked streets in downtown Pittsburgh, like Smithfield Street and Cherry Way. Looks like somebody mapped it. I think they altered the skyline so it wasn’t quite so recognizably Pittsburgh, but to a Pittsburghers eyes, like mine, it was still Pittsburgh.
Since we stayed up till almost 2:00, I was even able to stay in bed past 6:30 the next morning. We got coffee at Intelligensia, the anti-Starbucks, each cup of coffee brewed painstakingly – and very lengthily – by hand. I had what they called their V6 brew- they had three ceramic Melita filter holders going into 3 quart-size glass pots – yielding 2 16 oz. cups of coffee. The barristas were boiling the water in these little metal teapots and pouring it in.
I liked the Lichtenstein – the painting were grouped thematically rather than simply by date. My favorite was in the room devoted to Lichtenstein’s deconstructions of art history – his gridded Monets, and dotty Picassos – called Woman III, 1982.
Then we walked south to have breakfast at the new near south Bongo Room, an old friend from Wicker Park. It took us a little finagling to find it, it’s kind of tiny, on a corner, but we had a good breakfast – perfect over medium eggs, good potatoes with lots of dill, one slice of multigrain toast, and decent jam. The place was so small that they had to keep all the people on the dining room side – the most direct path to the bathroom went right past the main serving hatch, as I realized when I got shooed over to the civilian side.
So two good meals, a movie, lots of walking and a deluxe hotel stay, not to mention going everywhere by public transportation = a really good trip. About the only thing that would have made it better is if we had biked.
