Stuff I enjoyed in Chicago!
I was in Chicago for a week! Here's what I did!
Museums and Stuff
I checked out the Shedd Aquarium for the first time in, like, 20+ years, and it's crazy how much of it I remembered. The "Oceanarium" absolutely walloped me - I very suddenly and clearly remembered a dolphin and sea lion show I'd seen there as a child. It felt even weirder to go see all that stuff than it does for me to return to, say, a Disney park, and see all the stuff there just as it was in my childhood - mostly because I didn't even know that this was stuff I'd remembered.
The Shedd does have a Disneylike feel to it - many of the aquarium's wings are heavily set-decked with elaborate, dense sculptures on the walls and ceiling. A lot of aquariums look alike to me, and my memories of them tend to mix and combine, but this one stands out. I'm sure not all this stuff dates back to my own childhood, but I found myself remembering enough of it that I was really surprised and impressed.
We also visited the Museum of Contemporary Art, mostly because it was the latest-open museum we could find near us, and we had an evening time slot free. We saw an Arthur Jafa exhibit with a bunch of his video installations, a collection of work from Virginia Jaramillo, and a bunch of smaller exhibits with works by a variety of artists. I think I was most impressed by Arthur Jafa's work - I want to hunt around to see if I can find any interviews on his process for collecting, filtering, and assembling his video works. Every one we saw was was this truly monumental juxtaposition of sometimes hundreds of different stills or video clips edited together in the most relentless way.
We later visited the Art Institute. We spent much of our time there attempting to find the architecture and design exhibit - once we found it, we had a good time, but we spent a good 45 minutes wandering around like idiots trying to understand the museum's topographical complexity, haha. We also really liked an exhibit about early-1900s artist Paula Modersohn-Becker which had a lot of super intense (nude, pregnant - highly unusual for the time) self-portraits in it. Highly recommend that one!
The last two museums we visited really struggled with their material in super interesting ways which I hope to write up later this month. The Museum of Science and Industry, predictably, struggles with the intersection between science and industry - it expresses a kind of fawning-yet-insecure relationship with industry which affects almost every exhibit in the museum. (It did have a very fun exhibit about the history of the bicycle, though!!) We also visited the American Writers' Museum, which contains a truly odd exhibit about games writing. I photographed every single display in the at exhibit because I have some big brain thoughts about it that I need to express (very carefully, so that I do not end up on a Chicago-area TTRPG writer shitlist) or I will explode, haha.
I leave you with this message from the exhibit:
Games
The Writers' Museum wasn't the only games-related thing we attended! We also stopped by the Chicago Indie Games Showcase, an event organized by Indie City Games. They had a bunch of games available to play in an art gallery. The event was packed!!
I played a bunch of games there, but the project which most knocked my socks off was Crockpot by Emily Koonce and Blake Andrews. It's a really, really cool little experience, and it demoed in the space in a very awesome way - it's 25 mins long and I think it was looping? I saw a lot of people duck in and out of it over the course of its running time and get a little taste of some of its (extremely good) dialogue.
CIGS was super well-run and I was really surprised to learn that this was ICG's first time throwing the event. If you are in the Chicago area I recommend checking their stuff out!
Music
We attended an experimental music performance at a space called Tritriangle, where Brendon's cousin Mabel Kwan was one of the performers. This was probably my first time since college attending an explicitly "experimental" show, and it was extremely cool; both sets involved modular synths and long, expansive compositions where a sound changed slowly over the course of minutes. I really liked it! It was super relaxing!!
This happens to me occasionally with orchestra music as well, but it was the kind of performance that got me thinking about visuals I'd previously toyed with and discarded for personal games projects. I don't know if working musicians think this is a laudatory outcome for a live performance, haha, but I enjoyed myself a lot.
Other Stuff
We took the Chicago river architecture tour - there are several of these by different companies. Everyone we know who regularly visits Chicago had been recommending that we go on one of these, and they were all correct!!
Chicago is a Real Fucking City and is VERY vertical, and these boat companies take you on a breakneck tour of all the tallest buildings along the river. The guy doing the commentary on our boat felt an awful lot like a comedian doing a side gig. I photographed a lot of buildings and rusty industrial infrastructure from ages past. It was great.
Foodwise, we didn't visit too many famous spots... but we did hit up Pizzeria Uno, the apparent original home of the deep dish pizza, as well as Ann Sather's, a well-known brunch spot with extremely good cinnamon rolls. I had a Swedish breakfast combo and dunked a lot of different things into lingonberry jam. A+.
An aside: I wrote here about the Chinese "designer vinyl toy" market. Well, one of the manufacturers I mentioned, Pop Mart, has a store in downtown Chicago near the river. One day, we saw a line outside... people waiting to buy a Molly of some variety, perhaps. Truly wild to encounter this phenomenon in the real world here in the US after trying so hard to find anything useful about it online in English, haha.
Public Transit
I really adored riding the train and bus in Chicago. It was comparatively low-stress compared to LA - mostly because service was so much more frequent. The longer I wait for a train or a bus, the more annoyed I get, and the more negative experiences I accrue. But when service comes sometimes every 5 minutes on some of these train lines in Chicago, I am serene. The rides were chill as hell, too - almost nothing surprising or alarming happened to us.
I cannot wait until LA gets the same level of ridership as Chicago has. You can really feel a difference when a train is not a mode-of-last-resort for most of its riders. People here were clearly using the train because they found it convenient, not only because they felt like they had no other choice. Being on a lot of these lines was downright pleasant. The trains were all clean as hell, too.
I also really liked the CTA system wayfinding. My friends and I are constantly complaining about how horrible the signage in LA Metro system stations is - it's so hard to see the signs at night, and it's pretty easy to end up in a spot within the train where seeing a station sign out the window of the train is actually very difficult. Sometimes, the digital signage in the trains is extremely wrong, too - I should never miss a stop because I can't see a correct sign, but this has happened to me multiple times on the Metro system.
In Chicago, it's fucking impossible to miss the signs. They're like, 15 feet long. They are everywhere, and they are huge. Just make the signs really fucking big, Metro!! Even bigger than you think!! Size 20,000 font!!!!!
Go to Chicago
I really enjoyed our trip here. It's an S tier tourism city in America, I think - tons of museums, loads of things happening, great public spaces. Millennium Park was cool - we saw that gigantic fucking bean. The river walk was cool. I cannot wait to come back, maybe during the spring or summer, and rent a bike to ride down the lakeshore.
I've spent a lot of time in NYC over the last 15 years, and I am now kicking myself for not spending more time in Chicago. If you're in North America and haven't yet been yet, it's chill as hell. I kept telling my friends in Chicago, "This city figured out how to have all the same stuff as the other big cities, but with 90% more chill," and they kept saying: yes!! That is why we live here!!