1,001 Chicago Afternoons

By an abandoned train track in West Englewood, there is a half-block of land filled half with smatters of dying grass, half with crackling concrete, but Kristin Miodonski doesn’t see that. She sees what it could be. 

As a child, Janna Sobel wanted to find the moment the light shut down and you became an adult. “I felt like my friends were more playful, goofy, spontaneous, like whole, emotional, funny, alive,” she said as we sat in the grass by the Lincoln Park Children’s Fountain, the coincidence not occurring to me until [...]

Above, there are chandeliers and rooms made of walnut. Above, there are floors and floors of shopping for brand-name luxury. Above, there are perfume counters and ornate stone and bronze fountains. Below the downtown Macy’s (but the locals call it Marshall Field’s) glass meant for light sits in darkness.

“In the six months since the aliens landed, demands for goods and services has dropped sharply,” said the video of a man whose eyes move along with the cue card. Around me, children ran and squealed. “Most consumers are either hiding at home or toiling beneath the cruel yoke of their new alien overlords,” the [...]

Through a door past the elevators of a luxury suburban hotel, there are bone-white, bone-shaped drywall sculptures that run the length from floor to ceiling. There’s a foyer dangling with massive paper airplanes. There’s the “Artist Coat Room” through that door. Walking through that door, you’re crossing from hotel to art gallery meeting space, from [...]

Overhead, Michael Jackson is starting with the man in the mirror. It’s a Saturday morning in April. The day’s starting slow in the windowless warehouse on a frontage road alongside the highway. Only a few of the shoppers have ambled into the store. The homeless who gather to solicit loose change haven’t yet arrived, taking [...]

Every so often, when the wind blows oblique angles and I decide I should actually spend a night in rather than tracking down the last artisanal radish farmer in Schorsch Village, I run draft sections of a book I’m working on (and still looking for a publisher for… hint hint).  The book will be a companion [...]

He’s building a slave ship in the basement. He wants noises and lights outside the faux portholes to create the sensation of a sea at motion. He wants creaks of timber and he wants the wax replicas of chained slaves to feel like human skin to the touch. He wants a fog machine to perfume [...]

She was waiting for someone else to care. That never goes well.

Chicago’s last war dance started by the Wrigley Building, then headed west along the riverbank past Trump Tower, Marina City, and The 3D Printer Experience.