Book Sales, Hipsters and Bells - oh my!

Last weekend, the Newberry Library was having a used book sale. Since I have fond memories of the Ithaca Book Sale (walking out with a dozen books after paying $3), I dragged Katherine along with me to do some perusing.

The Newberry Library is apparently a private library, with circulation and membership cards separate from the Chicago Public Library system. I was suitably impressed that someone was rich enough to cobble together a library of this size, but I can't imagine how they'd compete effectively against the vast CPL system. At any rate, the sale was decently large, scattered through a series of rooms on the first floor. Of course, the pickings weren't nearly as plentiful (or cheap) (or well-organized) as the Ithaca book sale. Mad props to Ith for hosting the 3rd largest book sale in the country, twice a year. I walked away with a few books (Flatland and Pride & Prejudice among them) and Katherine bought a charming (?) book on "Oriental Cooking" from the 60s, where msg is listed as "1 tsp Ac'cent" and there are chapters on cuisines from non-existent countries like Indochina and Burma.

The same weekend, Katherine's friend Warren decided to come visit because it is painful to exist in Iowa. Let's review Warren: he plays WoW, loves all things internet meme-related, watches Naruto, has a great falsetto and insanely good memory for pop music lyrics, and probably writes fanfic. That's right, I have found my substitute Whaley. This is fantastic, since I've already found my replacement Scott.

We spent some time bumming around Ukrainian Village at a hipster bar and hipster club. Chicago neighborhoods tend to range on a sliding hipness scale which I will define as follows:

Ethnic (predominantly Mexican, Chinese, etc) ---> Hipster (damn pretentious white people start to gentrify the neighborhod and raise rents) ---> Yuppie (fratty, makes you want to cut yourself)

Ukie Village definitely falls in the hipster category, with a nice juxtaposition of Eastern European folks with no teeth and guys wearing tight jeans and shirts smaller than the one I'm wearing. (Actually, that last bit was rather disturbing.) Walking into the Rainbo Club, I was a little concerned about my collared shirt. It was about as egregious a mistake as the time I accidentally wore orange to the Princeton hockey game.

Why has no one told me about the cinematic wonder that is Wayne's World, especially since it is based in Chicago?

On Sun night, I ventured to U of Chicago campus for the first time. They are doing a major renovation of their carillon, much like the "silent year" Cornell's tower had in 98-99, so I wanted to catch the last concert of their summer concert series. Wylie was playing, and I'm always impressed at how down to earth he is, given that he's kind of a big deal, president of the World Carillon Federation and all. I toured Rockefeller Chapel, watched the concert from the playing cabin, and then grabbed dinner (free beer & pizza on Chicago's dime!) with the U of C contingent. It was nice to see familiar faces from GCNA, and Lieve's husband is hilarious and quite Belgian. I think I need to drag them out of Hyde Park for dinner at some point. If only I could remember his name. Also, I have a crazy urge to practice right now.

(Some technical drivel that no one else is probably interested in:) There is a bit of a debate over whether the Rockefeller bells should be retuned during the renovation. Currently, the plans are to move their small, high bells further up so that they have a line of sight to the ground, install a new electronic practice stand, upgrade and standardize the current (rather unwieldy) playing console, install larger clappers, etc. After consulting with Verdin, Watson and other experts, it seems that many of the bells have a unique fourth partial that would be destroyed after retuning, and furthermore, although you can adjust the prime tone, apparently you can't tweak the quint, which would make for strange sounding bells indeed. Thus, it looks like Wylie's leaning towards simply not retuning the bells, or if worst comes to worst, recasting replicas of the current bells.