“Instrumental in traveling is the participation in it, the belief in progress, the witnessing of passage.” – Dave Eggers Dave Eggers’ first novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, is a travel journal with a lot of internal gyrations, a.k.a. dialogue from the narrator, whose mind “hovers and churns.” I just finished reading the 400-page book […]
Chicago
This Weatherman Knows Which Way The Wind Blows
The New York Times Sunday Magazine today features Chicagoan Bill Ayers, college professor, author and former member of Weatherman Underground. He provides some great answers. How do you define yourself politically? I think I am a radical. I have never deviated from that. By radical, I mean someone trying to go to the root of […]
The Oregon Trail, Circa 2008
We just completed a nine day journey cross country by car from coastal South Carolina to Portland, Oregon. On day one, we stopped for lunch in Asheville, NC to say “hi” to Gary and Katie. We then pushed on to Lexington, KY for the night. From the hotel we walked first to Mexican food and […]
Standing in the Twilight of Open Outcry
The Chicago Tribune looks at James Allen Smith’s documentary film, Floored, about open-outcry traders at the Mercantile Exchange. Here’s how the paper describes their lot: Open-outcry traders always stood apart from the rest of the financial crowd, or maybe their rough-and-tumble grab for megabucks just made it seem that way. With their colorful jackets and […]
Power To The People
Chicago-based In These Times offers a look at a political struggle taking place in Chicago’s city government. Chicago’s labor unions decided to send Mayor Richard M. Daley a message: The “city that works†doesn’t work for working families. In the February and April elections, the labor movement broke with the city’s fabled but feeble Democratic […]
Savannah To Chicago And Back
I returned to Chicago this week for the first time since I moved from the city 16 months ago. It was a good trip. I stayed at Kimpton’s Hotel Monaco on Wacker and Wabash. I enjoyed some salmon downstairs at South Water Kitchen before venturing out to The Map Room, “A Traveller’s Tavern” on the […]