Stello's Choice

Printers's Ball @ the MCA

The 4th Annual Printers' ball, held by the Poetry Foundation at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, served free hot dogs.

Walking through the crowd I could feel eyes violently digesting my attire, my gait, and the state of my facial hair. As I lined up to scan and gank the magazines, journals and books stacked on the floor against the walls, I heard Cyndi Lauper and Tupac blasting over the heads of deliberately greasy hair.

On the tables in the basement were cardboard mini-polemics on the state of poetics, advertisements for journals and calls for submissions to Make. There were stickers and pens, all manner of shwag, a long yellow sheet of paper (PDF), and a workshop on silk screening. Nobody was speaking to strangers. Everybody stared. A band entered wearing neon spandex, clown faces, and glitter.

Holst @ the Pritzker

Not that it was a bad thing, or unexpected. But I left, to see a performance of Holst's Planets at the Pritzker with a compilation of some NASA video. The performance was packed, and the couple sitting in front of me were having an episode. The guy must have thought that this concert was a great opportunity to assault his date's face with his lips, and she was trying to use the semi-captivating performance as an excuse to dodge the attacks. I imagined that each of their skulls were planets, stuck in an erratic orbit with one another but never colliding.