Dear Everyone,
A week ago Tuesday, we went out for lunch with Vivian and
Jasper to Manny’s. This is a Chicago
institution, yet I had never been before - - it’s surprisingly easy to get to
from Hinsdale. We had pastrami
sandwiches or variants thereof, latkes, a knish, matzoh ball soup, Dr Brown's Cel-Ray. I also bought some chopped liver from their deli to take home. The sandwiches were great but I would rate
the chopped liver as average. It’s made
with beef liver instead of chicken liver.
Several days later, Cindy went to Albany for her twin aunts’,
Jane and June, 80th birthday party.
There were two other sets of twins at the party: her siblings John and
Joanne, and her great nieces (Cheryl’s granddaughters) Ariella and Isabella. There were other Scalzos and Libertuccis
(Cindy’s paternal grandmother), along with friends of the birthday girls
present. She came home with an airline
sized bottle of peanut butter whiskey. I
did not like it.
I was busy enough while she was gone. I played some pickleball at NetGame, (and got
yelled at a bit because I was pickling some of the less proficient players, but
my last group of games was with some competitive players). I made a stir-fry of eggplant and tofu in a
gochujang-based sauce. On Saturday, instead of our usual basement cardio and
weightlifting regime at Jami’s, we did a bike ride up and down the Cal-Sag bike trail. Jami lives quite close to the western trail
head, and we road about 7 miles to near 86th street and back. The plan, someday, is for this trail to
extend all the way to Indiana. It was a beautiful morning - - not too hot
(although a lot of the trail is shaded) with a bit of a breeze, and not a lot
of Canadian wildfire smoke, which has been troubling us these past few weeks. We saw several ospreys.
This past Thursday we went Andy and Gail’s to celebrate
Rafaela’s first birthday. We arrive a
bit late, because there already was a ton of traffic on Lake-Cook Road for an
Earth, Wind and Fire concert at Ravinia (that was scheduled to start 3 hours
later). There were plenty of relatives at the party, including Rob and Alison
Feiger, Ariana’s family, and Jasper and Vivian (conveniently, Jasper had been
at a surface materials conference at Lake Forest college). There were Aperol spritzes, many pizzas, and
a large cake that Bluma had picked out.
Bluma was very helpful in aiding Rafael in opening her presents.
On Friday Cindy and I went the College of DuPage to see an
exhibit they are calling Hokusai and the Floating
World. The first half of the exhibit
is an informational about Hokusai,
his life, old Edo’s (Tokyo) ‘Floating World’, woodblock print making, Hokusai’s
influence on Europe (and vice-versa).
Then there are around 60 works of art (mostly woodblock prints, but also
scrolls, game sets, instruments), sourced from the Italian Chiossone
collection. Chiossone was an engraver
and currency maker who was hired by the Japanese to print currency in the
1870s. He like the life there so much he
pretty much stayed in Japan until his death, and amassed a large collection of
antique and current (i.e. late 1800s) Japanese art, now housed in Genoa. After the artwork, the museum has some
interactive areas, one about Manga, another centered on children, with an
amusing 7-minute animated loop about Hokusai’s life. They also have an “Edo Eats” concession, that
unfortunately only serves Asian food on the weekend; we had hot dogs. On the weekend they also have a variety of
demos. This weekend they were to have
sumo, kyudo, and some musical demos. It’s
been in the low 90s, so I don’t imagine the sumo was much fun for the
wrestlers.
For our Galapagos book club, we read a book about J S G
Boggs. Boggs became quite
famous for painting images of currency and exchanging them for actual
objects. He was arrested as a forger
several times, (his art was clearly not actual currency) and was always
acquitted. In some ways he illustrates the
philosophical underpinning for the concept of NFTs. The book was fun, but stylistically quite
late 1980’s, with a David Foster Wallace vibe.
I also enjoyed Ordinary Wolves
by Seth Kantner, a bildungsroman about growing up in the Alaskan
wilderness.
In fiction I enjoyed Sister
Snake, sort of a mash-up of Crazy Rich Asians plus demon/vampire/immortals,
pretty funny. Mechanize
My Hands to War, a near future dystopia/preapocalyptic book about our
present have/have-not society, artificial intelligence, etc. It’s a somber, well thought out book. Presently, I’m halfway through House of Open
Wounds, a darkly comic grim-dark fantasy mash up with MASH.
Love, H.
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