Pizza and Pissarro

I spent today in Chicago, once again visiting the Art Institute and Giordano's. Once again, I had an excellent time. There was no special exhibit this time, Seurat was done and Toulouse-Lautrec hasn't yet begun. I did take enjoy Japanese Art from the Alsdorf Collection, which was small but appealing. One piece included a poem in beautiful Japanese calligraphy:

If you want to live
Until your beard becomes long
And your back is bent,
You must not eat too much food,
And you'd better sleep alone.

Professor Buenger showed us a half dozen pieces that fall into our domain of Twentieth Century Italian. A half dozen pieces was really all they had. America seems to have thoroughly ignored all Italian art produced in the past three hundred years.

I walked with Nat, who sits next to me in lecture, in search of Giordano's. The one closest to the Institute was closed, so we went to the one I visited last spring. The pleasant surprise was that the area was much nicer with constriction on Millennium Park completed. We even went for a stroll over to Cloud Gate while our pizza was baking to utilize our time effectively. It was a very cool piece, even unfinished.

On the way back, Nat and I edited some short stories written by his classmates in Creative Writing. Neither story was good, but one was so unbelievably terrible that we were in tears. I'll try to get the exact text, but for now I'll reproduce the first two lines as best I can from memory:

Once upon a time there was a beautiful kingdom that was always sunny, with the sky a perfect shade of blue, never any clouds, and the grass was always green. Unfortunately, because it was always sunny, the plants withered and died, the grass turned a lovely brown, then fell to dust and blew away, and all the flowers bloomed no more.

¡Ay, ay, ay!