blog.jasonconny.com

Rode my bike up there the other day. Found it to be a lot better than the locations in Wicker Park and the Loop. Maybe it has something to do with the lower concentration of hipsters up there? Anyway, I wasn’t looking for anything in particular like I was when I visited the Wicker Park store. Maybe that’s why I walked out with so much? Hell, I even put a few things back.

• Cedar Walton: The Electric Boogaloo -Luckily this has nothing to do with bad movies about breakdancing from the 80s.
• Herbie Nichols: The Third World - From Blue Note’s mid 70’s re-issue series.
• Spirit: The Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus
• Lynyrd Skynyrd: Street Survivors - With the original cover of the band standing in front of some burning buildings that was pulled from stores after the plane crash.
• Emerson, Lake and Palmer: Pictures at an Exhibition
• Jethro Tull: Benefit
• The Doobie Brothers: What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits - Purchased solely because of the title in the hopes it would live up to it. It doesn’t.
• Sir Victor Uwaifo: Guitar-Boy Superstar 1970-76 - Another great comp from Soundway.

Icee concession at the Erie County Fair 2008

Pictures I took of this year’s Erie County Fair. I hadn’t been since I was a kid. It hasn’t changed much from what I remember. This is the first time I ever went to the midway at night, which is much different than being there in the middle of the afternoon. I intentionally tried to keep fair-goers out of a lot of these, so it didn’t seem this deserted despite the fact my dad kept commenting on how there were less people than the year before.

This photo is the one flickr ‘chose’ as the lead image when it scrambled the order when I uploaded them. It’s as good as any I suppose. The rest of the set on flickr.

While visiting friends in Pittsburgh over the weekend, I went the The Andy Warhol Museum for the first time. In addition to a lot of the expected “hits” (Campbell’s soup can paintings, celebrity portraiture, cow wallpaper, etc) that I expected to see, was a curious display on the museum’s second floor.

Both the gallery guide and the signage at the entrance declared the second floor to be “Closed For Installation”, yet the contents of the that gallery were clearly visible beyond roped off area:

There were a few pieces on display, but the room was mostly filled with crates which preumably contained more work. Additional signage said something to the effect that the crates in that room were soon to be shipped to various museums around the world for Warhol related shows, or had recently arrived back at the museum.

Was this the Warhol Foundation touting it’s importance as the repository for one of the 20th century’s most important visual artists? Institutional process laid bare for public consumption? A clever negotiation of the tropes of exhibition design? Probably it was all of that.

But what I liked most was that all of the crates were emblazoned with a stencil based on Warhol’s Self-Portrait in Fright Wig:

It reminds me of the way bands stencil their logo on their gear so they can tell what’s theirs backstage.

Saw this hanging in Perry’s Deli on Franklin Street the other day.