gnat enjoys free summer music

this morning i realized i hadn't yet posted about what is probably my favorite chicago summertime activity - evening concerts in millenium park.

regular attendees include cara,

myself,

eileen,

and sean,

with occasional guest appearances by aleck

and andrew

among others.

about once a week cara and i load up bags of snacks, wine, and blankets and head down to millenium park, where we all play card games and listen to free music all evening.

this summer we've heard everything from rachmaninoff to egyptian music to iron & wine, all from this patch of grass.

in other news, all of my pictures are going to be in hipstamatic for a while, both because i'm basically obsessed with it and because carmine II is in the hands of the geek squad after sustaining a fall. (yes, again. shut up.)

gnat and eileen's hipstamatic chicago afternoon

shortly after i posted today's blog entry, in which i complained about how miserable humidity is, my tutee cancelled our lesson for today leaving me with a free afternoon. i immediately enlisted eileen's aid in coming up with an exciting activity that was both free and air conditioned. without hesitation, she suggested the art institute. little did eileen know that i very recently (and by very recently i mean last night) finally jumped on the hipstamatic bandwagon and was itching to play with it, and a trip to the art institute was the perfect opportunity to do so.

(for those of you who, like me, are not well versed in the exciting world of iphone applications, hipstamatic is a program that takes vintage looking pictures with your phone's camera. it is shockingly addictive.)

what follows is a sample of the photographic results of our afternoon in the museum:

because we worked up quite an appetite at the museum we adjourned to devon seafood grill (also air conditioned) for happy hour. i have been obsessing about oysters since my visit to the publican last month (which i just realized i have yet to write about... this is awkward.) and have been intending to go to devon's happy hour for 75 cent oysters on the half shell for weeks.

eileen and i started with wine flights,

before receiving our oysters. (they were magnificent, and made even better by the fact that they are served with teeny tiny bottles of tabasco sauce that are now floating somewhere at the bottom of my purse.)

you can't have too much of a good thing, so we also tried their oyster shooters.

now, a dozen oysters is not actually that much food, so we supplemented them with an order of mussels. (i'm not kidding anyone. the real reason we got mussels is because we are a couple of fat kids. if you don't think so now, you will in a minute. i didn't even tell you about the smoked salmon flat bread, because i was so busy eating it that i forgot to take a picture.)

at the very last possible moment, five minutes before the end of happy hour, eileen and i decided that despite all the seafood we had already consumed, the deal on lobster (at cost) was just too damn good to pass up. so we did what any reasonable people in our situation would do - we ordered a lobster.

and it was the best idea ever. he was delicious. and cheap. but mostly delicious.

predictably, the meal ended in lobster carnage.

thoroughly stuffed with seafood, we braved the heat once more to return to our respective places of residence. as a result of our adventure i am feeling far less upset about the climate outside. if it means more air conditioned adventures, i say bring it on!

gnat discusses the pitfalls of craigslist furniture

longtime readers may remember my complicated relationship with the ugly chair, which was left behind by the previous tenants of my apartment and for several weeks was the only furniture i owned in chicago. once cara moved in and we assembled a respectable collection of real furniture, i gleefully relegated ugly chair to the trash room.

well today i finally had to do this:

see, it turns out "real" furniture purchased dirt cheap from craigslist isn't always of the highest quality. the chair pictured above is one of three (the other two are also of questionable structural integrity, though this one is the worst) which were generously included free of charge with our $30 dinner table.

this particular chair has collapsed under an unwitting diner not once but twice, and since my attempts to reassemble and secure it with packing tape have failed into the trash it goes. taco tuesday regulars will either be very excited about this or disappointed that they will no longer experience the brief, exhilarating moment upon sitting down when they wonder whether the chair beneath them will hold up or take them tumbling to the ground.

gnat revisits al's (and gets it right, this time)

it's the end of the month and as of yesterday i had only completed one item out of five on my january chicago wishlist. totally unacceptable! not wanting to close the month with a dismal 20% success rate i crammed two more items from the list in at the last possible moment.

first, my triumphant return to al's beef:

i first visited al's with jalees and nicole back in august. i didn't find out until months later (thanks, man vs. food!) that REAL chicagoans get their al's beef "dipped" - the sandwich gets dunked into the vat of juice the beef was cooked in, because it just isn't messy enough to be worth eating otherwise.

so of course, i went back. i asked the guy behind the counter twice to make sure he actually dunked my sandwich this time, because it didn't look quite mushy enough to my untrained eye.

it was dunked, all right. as soon as i picked the thing up to get a picture it unleashed a greasy stream of liquid and i narrowly avoided a lap full of beef juice. the following is an actual look of shock and dismay captured by cara:

if you should ever find yourself at al's #1 beef, do yourself a favor and get your sandwich dunked.

this morning i walked down to navy pier to check out the snow sculpture competition at "snow days chicago." (see? i DON'T just write about food.) because i was feeling exceptionally touristy, i walked the scenic route along the lake. last time i was at this "beach" it was 95 degrees out... not so much, right now.

the snow sculptures were, predictably, completely awesome. i took a moment to discuss the ones i liked best with comedian bob newhart, a chicago native.

(just did some research. evidently this is his character dr. bob hartley's psychoanalyst couch from the bob newhart show.. for the purposes of this discussion i would like to pretend instead that i am on some sort of bob newhart talk show discussing snow sculpture ratings and how painful sitting on frozen metal couches can be.)

this wasn't one of my favorites but the others weren't quite as imitable as cranky captain america.

except maybe the medusa, but nobody was standing around to get a picture of my interpretation. it won first place!

my favorite was the second place winner. it's called "hommage a duchamp no. 2" and it's based on a marcel duchamp painting called nude descending a staircase no2.

i also liked this one, "that's a moray." yeah, it's actually called that.

an exhibition piece done by the team that won last year's competition. zoom in and look at the wrinkles in his face... that's all made of snow.

i'm not even certain i'm capable of putting together a half decent snowman. i haven't tried yet, but we're supposed to get a blizzard this week so there should be some prime snow frolicking days coming up.

the last two items on my list were a visit to the field museum and to go to a blackhawks game. both have been postponed (one due to a total fail on my part, the other completely zain's fault, or really zain's knee's fault) but by no means forgotten!

gnat sees more free art and hears more free music

i know, i know, enough already.

the museum of contemporary art, which until about a week ago i had no idea even existed, is free on tuesdays so yesterday i paid (ha?) a visit. they have an awesome exhibition of alexander calder's mobiles which is mostly cool because, well, alexander calder invented the mobile. photography wasn't allowed in that particular exhibition, unfortunately, because they were really something else. (the photos in those links really don't do them justice)

post exhibit i settled on the lawn in the sculpture garden and listened to the jazz stylings of mwata bowden while reading my new book - alton brown's gear for your kitchen. there will most definitely be more on this later.