News You Can Bruise for 2020 January 11 (entry 1)

Sat Jan 11 2020 13:41 Leonard's Excursions 2019: Just a memorandum of some of the unusual travel and fun things I did in 2019.

Early in the year I took my first trip to Chicago, for DPLAFest. I stayed with Beth and we did some fun tourist things, like the Chicago Architecture Center boat tour! Accept no substitutes! Or do, it's probably okay. But the CAC tour was great.

We also hit the Chicago Art Institute, which was a real highlight, since Beth is a fine artist who went there all the time as a kid and talked about her favorite pieces. A few of my favorites which I'll share with you, via the medium of website links rather than my own awkward photos.

• The Artist Looks at Nature by Charles Sheeler. This is the piece hung directly to the right of American Gothic. Beat the lines!
• Cow Relieving Itself by Nicolaes Berchem the Elder. Nuff said.
• Robot by Alexandra Exter. Absolutely incredible, especially considering it's from 1926!
• i\Ω.. by Jacqueline Humphries. The Smooth Unicode of fine art!
• Eviscerated Corpse by Mike Kelley, the work that made my 14-year-old mind stop in its tracks at LACMA and understand contemporary art.

They've also got the old floor of the Chicago Stock Exchange off in a corner! A corner I guess they use for events, since I don't think the Chicago Stock Exchange originally had a grand piano on the floor. Some live music would have really classed up the joint, though, I tell you what.

In May, my sisters came to New York and surprised me with a weekend of tourist activities and a fancy dinner!

For my birthday we planned a getaway in upstate New York at a rented house with a few friends. Allison and I did some stargazing and saw a little bit of a meteor shower. Shout out to Rodgers Book Barn, the perfect mix of "peaceful rural atmosphere" and "huge used bookstore". Thanks to Zack and Pam for driving.

Allison and I went to a Manfred Mohr retrospective at a gallery. Never heard of him before but it was definitely art the two of us can agree on. I really liked his plotter-esque pictures from the 70s and 80s, such as P2400-297d_5225__black. The names of the artworks feel like program filenames; I was expecting a bunch of _final_FINAL.

PS: in June, Sumana and I randomly ate dinner at Copinette, a French restaurant on the former site of Copain, the much fancier French restaurant that Gene Hackman stakes out in The French Connection. You live in New York for a while and these odd coincidences become smaller and less common, but they still happen!