Poker with the Girls - Experience 26; Fun Fact 24

This is also a catch-up post. I've played poker with a group of friendly south-side girls a couple of times now and it has been great fun! These girls are good poker players! In the first tournament I took 3rd place and in the second I had high hand. Can't wait for the next game which will probably be sometime after Christmas.

Fun Fact: It's not legal to play poker for money in Illinois, even in home games (so it goes without saying that these games were all on the up and up, purely for entertainment.) Illinois is perhaps the strictest state in the country when it comes to poker. I was surprised to read in the paper the other day that the police busted a cash game in a private home and that bars with separate rooms for playing were also being threatened with losing their license. An attempt to eradicate the Capone legacy? Strong lobby by the neighboring casinos? Either way, the casinos seem to have the market cornered when it comes to cash games. No such restrictions exist where we live in Ohio, where you can get a legal cash game pretty much any day of the week (as long as no liquor is being sold and the pot isn't being raked for private profit.)

Karyn's Cooked - Restaurant 28; Beer 24

This is a catch-up post: About a week before Thanksgiving, our friend Kathleen came to Chicago from Athens for a conference and we were lucky enough to be able to arrange a dinner with her on the one (chilly!) night she was in town. Kathleen's a vegetarian, so we thought we'd try Karyn's Cooked, Conscious Comfort Foods, located two blocks away from the Chicago stop on the Brown line. This is a place that makes traditional comfort foods, with only vegan ingredients. (There is also a Karyn's Raw which serves only uncooked foods, located on Clybourn and pictured here).

We decided to share three dishes. Kathleen ordered the ribs, Kate ordered a Buddha bowl (mixed vegtables and rice), and I had polenta with mushrooms. They were all very good, but I think that anyone of them on their own might have been a bit much for us. Combining the entrees seemed to really add to their flavor. We also each had a Scarecrow organic beer, a flavorful light amber. We then decided to split a piece of coconut cake which was the largest piece of cake I have ever received in a restaurant! Despite it being very tasty, even the three of us together could not finish it off.

Karen's Cooked was a nice treat, but an even greater treat was having dinner with Kathleen and catching up on all the comings and goings in Athens!

Ras Dashen - Restaurant 27; Beers 22 & 23

On Saturday we went to Ras Dashen an Ethiopian restaurant on Broadway north of Hollywood to celebrate our friend Aileen's birthday. Although we were still feeling the effects of several days of big eating, we thoroughly enjoyed the food here. We had excellent appetizers - a much lighter version of something like a vegtable pakora. This was followed by a platter that included a wide variety of tasty vegetarian treats served on top of the traditional spongy Ethiopian bread. Our favorites were the specials --a mushroom based and a pumpkin based dish, as well as a lentil based dish off the regular menu. We also had a Windhoek beer (a tasty lager) and a Harar (which was also very good - it had a little more bite too it.) For dessert, we had a really good coconut creme brulee -- very light and flavorful. Some friends had coffee too, but that stuff was so strong I wouldn't have been able to sleep a wink! Great meal! We plan to return soon.

Pre-publicity for Who's Your Daddy - Book 17

Here's some ad copy from my forthcoming book, which will be out in
March. (I snatched it off the Ashgate website). I guess this counts as
as a book that I've read ;^)

The Founding Fathers, Pop Culture, and Constitutional Law:
Who's Your Daddy

Susan Burgess

Series: Law, Justice and Power

Applying innovative interpretive strategies drawn from cultural studies, this book considers the perennial question of law and politics: what role do the founding fathers play in legitimizing contemporary judicial review? Rather than promulgating further theories that attempt to legitimize either judicial activism or restraint, this work uses narrative analysis, popular culture, parody, and queer theory to better understand and to reconstitute the traditional relationship between fatherhood and judicial review. Unlike traditional, top-down public law analyses that focus on elite decision making by courts, legislatures, or executives, this volume explores the representation of law and legitimacy in various sites of popular culture. To this end, soap operas, romance novels, tabloid newspapers, reality television, and coming out narratives provide alternative ways to understand the relationship between paternal power and law from the bottom upIn this manner, constitutional discourse can begin to be transformed from a dreary parsing of scholarly and juristic argot into a vibrant discussion with points of access and understanding for all.

Contents
Preface; Introduction; A fine romance: judicial restraint as a romance novel; Who's your Daddy? Judicial activism as a soap opera; Space aliens save country from ruin? Critical race theory as tabloid science fiction; Did the Supreme Court come out in Bush v. Gore? The instability of judicial identity; The drama of contemporary constitutional discourse: Lawrence v. Texas as a makeover of Bowers v. Hardwick; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Reviews
'Top, bottom, homosexuality, illegitimacy and more. Here all the stimulating issues surrounding queer theory enliven the traditional debates over authority for constitutional interpretation. This book is Susan Burgess at her path-breaking best. Like her earlier work and her professional contributions Who’s Your Daddy? is both fun and very important.'
John Brigham, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA

'For nearly a decade, Susan Burgess has been producing some of the most provocative scholarship at the intersection of cultural studies, law, and politics. This book draws together and significantly extends her previous work. Interesting, insightful, and laugh-out-loud funny, Who's Your Daddy?: The Founding Fathers, Pop Culture, and Constitutional Law will change the way people think about old questions of legal power and judicial legitimacy.'
Keith J. Bybee, Syracuse University, USA

Defining Moments in Music - Book 16

Defining Moments in Music is a (small and paperbound) coffee table book, but before you write it off let me say that it is packed with interesting information about key songs, events, inventions, performances, albums etc that pertain to the development of pop music in the 20th century. I started casually flipping through it for ideas for my women, gender and rock course and soon found that I couldn't put it down, despite the fact that it's more encyclopedic than narrative in form. It would make a great gift for any music lover that you may have on your holiday list.

First Friday at Old Town - Experience 25; Fun Fact 23

One of the most purely enjoyable things that I've done since I've been here is playing in First Friday at the Old Town School of Folk Music with my friends in the women's acoustic ensemble. On the first friday of each month students at the School offer performances ranging from folk to rock to dance. It was great to be a part of an event where adults were all doing something that they love with pure abandon (rather than perfection).

The Women's Acoustic Ensemble (WAC?!?) is a great group of women who meet every Monday morning, led by the friendly and talented Andrea and Aerin who teach us a wide variety of songs. At First Friday, we played a song by Feist called "I Feel it All" and then we joined another ensemble to play "The Chain" by Fleetwood Mac. Both songs have various levels of harmonies, making them especially fun to sing as a group. I had such a good time that night! I hope we're able to do it again soon! Thanks to Nancy (the bass player in the group) for sending the fun pictures.

Fun Fact: The building that currently houses the Old Town School used to house the Hild Public Library, a place where I spent many happy hours as a kid hanging out in the towered stacks of books (which seemed enormous to me then, but were probably pretty modest in size). It is really fun to be back in the same building as an adult, again doing something that is bringing me a lot of joy.

"Pre": A Thanksgiving Event - Experience 24

Here's a picture of us taken by our friend Marissa (and then another of us with Marissa) at "Pre," a fantastic pre-thanksgiving dinner put together by our friends Cyndy, Terri, and Julie 2 weekends back. The food was fabulous, as was the company. After stuffing ourselves on a variety of traditional thansgiving food and drink we had fun with a rousing game of Master Clue. (How do kids manage to follow the complex rules in these games? I promptly messed up about 5 minutes in.)

A sit down dinner for 20 of the girls is no small feat, but it went so well that the organizing trio is considering staging "Pre 2" - a Christmas event. Stay tuned for details.

Gay and Lesbian Film Fest - Movies 14, 15 & 16

We've been absent from the blog for a while, but now we're back again. It's a hard to maintain the balance between doing 10 x 40 and documenting 10 x 40. I'm afraid we're better at doing than documenting ;^)

The GLBT film fest was running over the last couple of weeks. It is a huge film fest featuring over 70 films across 11 days. We saw three films, Vivere, a German film about unlikely relationships across generations. It was pretty pretententious and slim on plot. We also saw a film called The Gendercator, a science fiction dystopia that sends a 70's lesbian 40 years into the future where those outside traditional gender roles are compelled to have sex change operations. This film has engendered (pun intended) a good deal of controversy due to its alleged treatment of transgender folks as (however inadvertantly) aligned with the religious right to reestablish firmer gender lines through surgery. Rather than avoiding the controversy as some other cities have, it was screened in Chicago at the LGBT Center on Halsted and was followed by a panel discussion. The film was not very good and the discussion quickly slid into identity politics of various sorts. The last film we saw was the best of the lot, it was called Between the Lines and it focused on hjira, the so-called third gender in India. The picture above is a still from this film. It consisted almost entirely of interviews with various hjira which was quite interesting, but there was almost no critical commentary outside of the personal experience presented.

Traveling Mercies - Book 15

Anne Lamott is a person who has lived a lot of life and managed to come through the other side. Thanks to her good sense (and good sense of humor) this book is not so much a victim-y detailing of her descent and recovery, as much as it is a compelling story of how she began to catch glimpses of grace in everyday living. To this end, she offers a series of short vignettes on various topics including hair, beauty, illness, kids, family relationships, politics, music, drugs, eating, sex, etc. All are informed by her trademark self-depricating humor. This is a good book to read when you feel like you'd like to see the world differently from the way it usually presents. I bought a copy of it about 7 years ago shortly after a dear Aunt of mine died, but never quite got around to reading it until last week.

I had been thinking my Aunt quite a bit in the last week or so, missing her more intensely than I normally do in the normal course of life. One day I was waiting for the red line train at Belmont, heading south towards downtown. As is pretty common these days, it was slow and running on the wrong side of the track due to construction on the line. When it finally came, I boarded hastily looking for an empty seat and as I sat down I looked up to find a woman who looked remarkably like my Aunt. Same age, hair-do, style of scarf, lipstick type. Then she started to talk to me, just as my Aunt would have talked to a total stranger, about what she was doing that day, where she was going, her kids, her earlier life, crocheting caps for cancer patients and so forth. It could have been my Aunt. Really. Even though I knew better, it felt like it WAS my Aunt, so much so that I felt a real pang of loss, again, and had to choke down a few tears as I climbed up the subway stairs and hurried down the street to my appointment.

I thought about it all week. At the end of the week I learned that in the christian church All Saints Day (November 1) is supposed to signify a time when the boundary between this world and the next, the material and the spiritual is said to be very thin. I don't think I ever heard that in all the years I spent in Catholic Church as a kid. It's a good spin. I wonder if it holds in the subway too. Anyway, I lit a candle on Sunday in memory of my Aunt, feeling more at peace about her than I had for quite some time.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows - Book 14; Fun Fact 22

Don't want to give anything away to the one or two people on the planet who still haven't read this book, so I'll just say it's a worthy ending to J.K. Rowling's fantastic Potter epic . . . minus the epilogue which was rather uninteresting and flat. Kate finished this book when it first came out and I finally finished it during the move. Our Athens friend Miriam sent us a review of Harry VII from the National Catholic Reporter that does a great job of capturing the excitement surrounding the emergence of each new book in the series . . . and how that can never be fully regenerated for future readers of the series who can just burn through all 7 volumes at once. Fun Fact: Dumbledore is gay . . . but perhaps you already knew that ;^)