cowperthwait | lies, evasion, spin, circumspection and cleverly veiled hype

P1xel and the Chronic Network were an effing awesome band.

Gee willikers!


I ... don't know, either.

The 13th floor is in a similar state of disrepair, according to Cassel. He said he did not know what the space was last used for, but [it] consists of a series of small velvet-covered rooms with a washbasin in each.

"I don't know what people do in small velvet-covered rooms," Cassel said.

—Zoning change sought for Del Prado owners, Hyde Park Herald

Today, I was feeling acutely sentimental for Hyde Park. In an attempt to overcome this, I fell back upon the nuclear option of comparison-shopping our respective climates.

 
hmm

It backfired: now, I'm still toothgnashingly angstipated, and don't have any better idea of where to go.

Screw you, world.

If you visit a big city in Europe, you notice two things right away: you walk to most of your destinations, and there are storefront shops everywhere. For instance, within a stone's throw from an apartment my family and I rented in Rome, we were able to shop at a cheese and milk shop, two bakeries, a butcher, and a produce store.... Open Produce, 1635 East 55th Street, seems to follow that European model.

...

There's a good variety of items in the store, with most of the standard fruits and vegetables you'd want (I missed seeing a few green veggies that are staples for my family: broccoli, snap peas, and green beans), and most are in respectable shape. There's an interesting selection of South Asian and East Asian dry goods, some canned goods, spices, and a refrigerator and freezer case with milk, juices, yogurts, and pre-prepared vegan and vegetarian foods. If you're like me and you eat tons of produce -- and frequently run out of tons of produce -- and if you live nearby, you could easily pop in on the way home from work or school....

—Hyde Park Progress notices Open Produce


Previously:
Go Get 'Em!: Entrepreneurial Produce Edition

Today is launch day for Open Produce, a local-source produce startup in my erstwhile hometown, Chicago's Hyde Park.

I can't imagine offhand when commentators last would've declared it a particularly auspicious time to start a small retail business. 1965? Clearly, undertaking it all — the tight credit, the rising food prices, the potential lead poisoning — takes cojones grande. Fortunately, these, joined with above-average intellect and a noble commitment to sustainability, are amply extant.

It couldn't have happened to neater guys, either: Steven Lucy was a fixture chez 5237 and notably once saved Crime Fiction's ass in the Doc projection booth; I met Andrew Cone on the set of a (fake) porn, in which he played the pool repairman opposite David Bashwiner's greased-up lifeguard.

Opinionated as I am about Hyde Park grocery options, and having had my own brushes with launching a company, I have all the pride and respect in the world for these guys.

Knockemdead.

Oh, you people have got to be kidding me:


our very own swimming-pool light

Roughly 3.5 million volumes will be stored on racks in a climate-controlled underground facility that digs down about 50 feet. The glass dome above it will reach 36 feet high, supported on a curving grid of steel. Ceramic patterns on the glass will block the sun, reducing heat gain.

“At least that’s what the engineers tell me,” Jahn said Friday, when I asked if the dome would turn into a sauna, as the Thompson Center infamously did....

—Jahn's library dome at the U. of C.: Elegant minimalism or self-indulgent object?, Chicago Tribune

Our boy SRD gleefully forwards the following, to test whether I indeed still miss Hyde Park:

CELEBRATE RADICALISM! CELEBRATE THE EARTH!

You are invited to join ECO (the environmental concerns organization) and others in the closing event of this year's Earth Week, the March of Industrial Progress! We, the participants--hopefully also you--will dress in various and hopefully extravagant ways as industry/capitalism/progress (though theme dress is not necessary--anything at all will do) and parade from the quads to the point, where we will burn the Earth in effigy in protest to the diverse and extensive destructions of capitalism. Afterward, however, we plan to remove our industry costumes and, producing a new, unscorched Earth, reveal ourselves as proponents of any of the various ways forward. Finally, hippies, communists, anarchists, and all others will toast smores (including vegan smores) around the bonfire. Bring yourself, a noisemaker, and a marshmallow skewer.

Friday, April 25th
7:00 PM
The Circle on the Quads

Answer: surprisingly, still, yes.


Previously
hooray college!: The Great Mustache Race Is Back

My first Hyde Park rental was a "four bedroom" unit carved out of a fantastically decrepit Columbian Exposition house, which had passed down through something like a decade of successive generations of Fire Escapers without any inspections or repairs. I managed to overlook the five-degree cant of the kitchen floor and the bathroom's sinking into the unit below us, because I felt so cool having a chandelier and built-in mahogany buffet in my dining-room-qua-master-bedroom, and smoking on the orange loveseat on the rear fire escape. La Vie de Bohème!

Real estate hijinks ensued, the building got sold to a microcephalic absentee unclear on the concepts of "lease" and "collecting rent", and I shortly ended up with the place all to myself. This was fun for a while: I used part of it as a set for a rambling digital video epic about incest and angels, and rode a mini BMX up and down the long halls. There then followed a sitcom-montage-worthy parade of mostly foreign subletters, including one — Kristen or Kirstie or something — who never left, until Jesse convinced me to move into more sanitary quarters across the street. On moving day, we couldn't track down anyone to whom to return the keys, so we threw a kick-ass Welcome Freshmen party, then abandoned the place with an unlocked door.


Looking back, I have little good to say about that time of my life. When I could be bothered to get out of bed at all — I spent a staggering percentage of that spring and summer under the covers — I stoked bitter bureaucratic infighting among fellow ersatz filmmakers, half-assed an IT job at a lethargic nonprofit, and not once did a single load of dishes or laundry. I was a world-class fuckup.

I suppose it would be hubris to describe my fuckup days as completely in the past, but when I'm feeling self-loathing, I look back upon that spring and summer in that apartment. At least I'm not still there. At least my fuckupness has taken on more diverse, less antisocial forms. Rumor has it I may even have tricked the University of Chicago into conferring a degree upon me; I'm increasingly optimistic that I may be free of my Hyde Park curse for once and all.

Still, I've several times had a nightmare that it's 2003 again: I'm still an unhygienic, underemployed college dropout, I still live in that dreadful apartment, and anything in the way of recovery and progress I've experienced since then is actually hard work yet to come. When I awaken after one of these, I punch the pillow and vow: to eliminate for once and all the risk of ever accidentally ending up back there, I'll someday buy that goddamn building and gut it or tear it down.


During my walk to campus today, a discovery. MAC — you know MAC: basically K&G with nicer letterhead and aspirations of River North... — just may have beaten me to the punch:


The other night I dreamt of knives, continental
drift divide. Mountains sit in a line, Leonard
Bernstein. Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester
Bangs. Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom! You
symbiotic, patriotic, slam bug net, right? Right.

It's all over. It's time to leave Hyde Park now, isn't it? It is. My work here is done.

I'm only attracted to guys with facial hair. How Freudian is that?

—M.L.


There are some times in which I lapse into preëmptive nostalgia for Hyde Park — I may never again have the privilege of living and working among such a high concentration of smart people, etc. etc. While it's true that Hyde Park has (more than once!) finished me, I'll never feel like I've really finished Hyde Park, etc. etc.

Other times…


finally, the UC's women's rugby team wins something…

Reminds me to talk to my landlord about transferring my lease — April 1, I'm gone.

I contemplated asking the fashionista from my Pragmatism seminar to join me at last weekend's Kolak Family Whole Pig Roast, but worried that "Hi; now that we've sat through a whole three hours of class together, I was wondering if you were single, and happened to like pork a whole, whole lot" would prove inauspicious.

…

Jazz funeral for a grocery store: the perfect storm of liberal guilt and hipster irony. News photographers nearly outnumbered actual participants, which isn't surprising when you consider the photogenic quality of parading through aisles of empty shelves led by a tuba, a trombone, a trumpet, and the two locals with bass & violin who joined halfway in. Oh when the saints / Go marching in, from the produce department to the meat counter, after which we all awkwardly dispersed into the parking lot and tried our hand at getting interviewed by someone, even if this meant settling for CLTV or that lady from Gapers' Block.

…

My textbook orders have begun arriving at the UPS Store, each separately packaged, one or two a day. "What did your mom send this time?", they asked today. "You get a lot of packages."

JON           I don't know that I've ever gone to           a funeral for a grocery store           before.                       JOE           I think we have to go.

blimpjihad blimpjihad blimpjihad


My father's colleagues Google me on an alarmingly regular basis. One, whose sloth and graft oughtn't be rewarded with a shoutout, notes that, between when Google caches it, and when Google caches this note, my meta-discussion of the Paultardbot feedback to a tossoff in my anti-Co-Op screed may well constitute the Googlewhack of the compound term blimpjihad.

Relatedly, someone got offended.

Hyde Park Co-op board votes to shut grocery

After nearly three hours of heated discussion, the Hyde Park Co-op's board of directors decided Monday night to close the venerable South Side grocery store.

The board voted 7-1 to shut the store, which was founded in the Depression, and accept a proposal by the University of Chicago to replace it with another grocery tenant that officials have refused to identify. The co-op is slated to close in January.…

—Trib

Members of the Hyde Park Co-op have come one step closer to removing the venerable South Side grocery from life support, after most who voted in a non-binding referendum this weekend said no heroic efforts should be made to seek a new financial structure.

The co-op's board of directors met in closed executive session Saturday, during which they decided to postpone a final decision until a public meeting Monday.

"Because of the members' emotional attachment to the organization, we have to be sensitive about how we do this," said Jim Poueymirou, president of the co-op board since June....

—Co-op's demise is likely after vote, Chicago Tribune


Okay, no.

Attn. Chicago Tribune: the Co-Op is only "venerable" and deserving of "heroic efforts" to end its "life support" in the eyes of someone who hasn't actually shopped there in the last, oh, thirty years.

At first I was genuinely torn by the Save The Co-Op hysterics. It's clear that our pinch resulted from bad fortune cascading from the well-intentioned if extremely poorly handled expansion push of the 1990s. How tragic! If only we could turn back the clock!

But all of the available forms of heroism were outlandish:

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