Ryan Adams - Easy Tiger - CD 21; Fun Fact 39

Do you like Neil Young? Lucinda Williams? Gillian Welch? If so, you're you'll probably like Ryan Adams' Easy Tiger. This 2007 alt-country release has all the trademark Adams features: great voice, excellent guitarwork, finely crafted songwriting. You may remember Adams from his earlier band Whiskeytown, or from his 2001 solo release Gold which received a fair amount of radio play, as did his song "New York" especially after 9/11. While Gold remains my favorite CD of his, Easy Tiger is a close second. Fun Fact: Before he became famous Adams played in a band called The Patty Duke Syndrome.

The Counterfeiters - Movie 28

This intriguing German-made film is about a world class counterfeiter who is arrested by the Nazis. He survives in the camps by heading up a unit of Jews who are charged with creating convincing copies of the British pound and the U.S. dollar, to support a Nazi plot to undermine their respective economies. This quiet but powerful film offers a facinating mediatation on the complexities of power and the difficulty of knowing what exactly is the right thing to do in difficult circumstances. One of the best films we've seen this year - we highly recommend it!

Girlyman / WAC at Bill's Blues - Performances 18 & 19

A couple of Sundays ago we went to see the band Girlyman at the Old Town School of Folk Music, with our friends Jude and Pam who were in visiting from Milwaukee. (Check out a sampling of their music here.) Girlyman is a trio of accomplished musicians who also happen to be hysterically funny. The OTS is a great venue for seeing live music. (For Athens friends: it's even more intimate than Stuart's Opera House!) And it was great to see our friends from our old neighborhood in Milwaukee. We plan to meet up with them for a Cubs game later this summer.

Speaking of musical performances, I forgot to blog the performance of my Women's Acoustic Group at Bill's Blues in Evanston (the home of Northwestern University, just north of the city proper). We all braved the weather one super cold Thursday in late February to play a 7 song set at this friendly club that stages primarily folk and blues performers. Not too many things are better than the thrill of being on stage and performing -- especially in front of such an enthusiastic audience. Hope we'll be able to get another performance in before the end of the summer! (I'm second from the left in the shot above.)

Artropolis - Performance 17

Yesterday we went down to the Merchandise Mart to check out Artropolis, Chicago's enormous annual festival of art, antiques and culture. This is a yearly festival of various shows, including juried and unjuried art, emerging art, outsider art, and independent art. We saw some great prints, but were most interested in Intuit, the folk and outsider part of the show. Maybe our favorite booth was a collection of quilts with humorous captions, such as "born with a big head" and so forth. This booth also included several pieces featuring blues artists. While it might be hard to capture here in the blog, it was a great show.

Hopper and Winslow at the Art Institute - Place 37

We recently went to the Art Institute to view the Edward Hopper and Winslow Homer exhibits and they did not disappoint! Perhaps the most interesting thing we discovered was that Hopper's work, for all its realism, has many interesting surreal aspects. For example, in his famous "Nighthawks" painting, shown at left, there are no entrances or exits to the diner -- it's basically a self-contained, hermetically sealed space. We both liked his oils much better than his watercolors -- even though the watercolors focussed largely on venues in Kate's native New England. Great show -- but it was huge and we were so wiped out by the end of it that we didn't even make it to the gift shop afterwards to look at the books!

First Cubs Game of the Season - Performance 16

Prior to heading out to Las Vegas (see posting below), Susan took in her first Cubs game of the season with several of the girls. Here's a picture of us enjoying the friendly confines of Wrigley Field on a day when the Cubs beat the Pirates, who they have now swept twice already this year! Although they lost a close one yesterday, they are still in first place and have been hitting a ton. It's too soon to say anything out loud yet, but you know everyone in the city is already dreaming about October!

Hold em in Vegas - Experience 35

There's been so much going on that we've hardly had a moment to talk about it here in the blog. We'll be remedying that in the next several days. Most recently, Susan took a trip to Las Vegas with several of the girls to test out her Texas Hold Em skills in a bigger venue. She played in three tournaments and was able to break into the money in one of them, placing third! In the tournaments she did not cash in she was competitive, but largely card dead. So, she came away feeling that she definitely could compete at this level. Anyone want to join her at the World Series of Poker's Women's Touranment in June?

Fixx Coffee house - Place 36; The Year My Parents Went on Vacation - Movie 27

Weekend before last ushered in some beautiful weather and we decided to spend all day Saturday outside our apartment. We started off by walking over the the Fixx Coffee House, a locally owned coffee shop in our neighborhood. There were few people there that early on Saturday morning, so it turned out to be a great space for some peaceful reading. At about 11:30 a lot more people started showing up so we headed off to Penny's Noodle Shop for lunch, probably our favorite Thai restaurant here in Chicago, just a few blocks further down on Diversey and Sheffield. From there we went shopping down on Clark Street, hanging out in various bookstores and picking up a new pair of gym shoes for the triathlon training. In the late afternoon we stopped in at the Landmark Theatres to see a very quiet but compelling movie, The Year My Parents Went on Vacation. This is a Brazilian film set in the dictatorship period in 1970, the year that Brazil also won the World Cup (in soccer) led by the great Pele. This film chronicles a boy's coming of age during that time when his secular leftist parents are forced underground ("on vacation") and he must find his place the jewish community of his grandfather, who passes away upon his arrival. After the movie, we walked up to Mama Desta's Red Sea Ethiopian Restaurant (blogged here earlier) for an excellent dinner, and then finally made our way home, exhausted but happy with our day trip around the neighborhood.