Shiseido Gallery: RMB City

(Somewhere around here, I noticed that my camera battery level was dipping precipitously low. Since I forgot to bring my charger, dy/dx(pictures taken)<0.)

Shiseido is a major Japanese cosmetics and hair care corporation, but they also run an experimental art gallery in Ginza that features installation pieces. I popped in to take a look and ended up watching a video on RMB City, a virtual city created by Cao Fei in Second Life.

Judging from the anime I've watched, I'd say the Japanese are big on wrestling with the boundary between the virtual and physical worlds, so this film will probably go over well with Tokyo audiences. It featured a female avatar named China Tracy and her son, China Sun, who travel to RMB City, where they explore the virtual world in Second Life. They meet a host of people, like Mr. Reality and Feng Shui Master Q. It was entertaining and thought provoking in that almost-too-cheesy-to-be-deep kind of way. Or maybe the English subtitles could have been better.

Some of the more amusing quotes from the film:

Mayor: Like a five-star hotel, I am here to serve you, to meet any of your needs.

China Sun: Can you change my diaper, or nurse me?

Mayor: My little citizen, yes of course, but I must discuss this with the programmer first.

Man on street: I am writing a novel. Some people say that Second Life is a novel, or maybe a novel is writing me.

China Sun: What is life in here?

China Tracy: Life in here is a reflection of what you see and who you are.

China Sun: I have the urge to poop.

China Tracy: I hope that is not in your programming.

French Museums, or "We're Racking Up Life Points!"

Third entry in a series of posts about vacay in Europe

Continuing on from London, we took the Eurostar across the Channel to explore Paris. When we arrived, it was drizzling and gloomy, so we decided to make the best of the situation and headed to the Louvre.

The Louvre is an enormous building, and definitely the largest art museum I have ever stepped foot in. Here, you can see one side of the Louvre, photographed from the other side, with the landscaped glass atrium in the center.

We immediately set off for the Mona Lisa, but en route, a museum security guard suddenly waved us back. "S'il vous plaît, nous avons cherché un objet suspicieux." They had found a suspicious object and we weren't allowed to proceed any further. I checked to make sure that I hadn't dropped my bag somewhere unattended.

Foiled, we next set off to find the Venus de Milo. I am still unsure as to the artistic significance of this statue (she looks like pretty much any other classical Greek statue I've seen), but I'm not about to question.

The Code of Hammurabi is a large stone tablet inscribed with one of the world's first legal codes. One of the more frustrating aspects about the Louvre was that the majority of the information was given in French (naturally), which meant that non-speakers were out of luck if they wanted to know more about the work on display. The Code of Hammurabi was written out in French, and I did my best to translate its contents for Megan and Matt. Almost every rule went something along the lines of "If ____, then he shall be put to death."

A stained glass window in the medieval section, it is here that Megan and Matt said their wedding vows. Unfortunately, this "relationship" would end about 48 hours after that.

The throne of Napoleon III, I was surprised at how small it was, especially when paired with the showy carpet before it.

Another meta photo of us taking photos in front of a mirror

At the end of the afternoon, we went back to look for the Mona Lisa once more, et voilà. After fighting the crowd, I managed to reach the front and snapped a picture of my favorite eyebrow-less girl in the world.

The famed glass pyramid outside of the Louvre

The Place de la Concorde, a gold-capped obelisk gifted to France by the Egyptian government. Though the name suggests otherwise, this was actually the site of many executions, where the guillotine was located during the Reign of Terror.

Paris is filled with dozens of monuments, museums and palaces that are "must-sees," at least once in your life. With that in mind, I felt a keen pressure to check off all the major sights in Paris like some sort of scavenger hunt, as though my trip would be cheapened if I returned without seeing X. In an ambitious itinerary, we declared the next day to be "Monument Day," and traversed much of central Paris, trying to score as many Life Points as possible.

We started out at the Arc de Triomphe, located in the center of the craziest rotary I have ever seen (topping the 9-entrance rotary in E. Longmeadow). With several unmarked lanes of traffic zipping by at high speeds, I am not sure how accidents do not happen every hour here. To reach the center and view the underside of the Arc de Triomphe, there are tunnels underground that traverse the square. Unfortunately you have to pay €7 or so to surface, and we weren't in the mood for that. You can see the Eiffel Tower in the background on the right.

The Eiffel Tower is an elegant, iron structure constructed for Paris' 1889 World's Fair. It is repainted on average every 7 years to prevent rusting.

To reach the top, you could take the lift or the stairs. After pondering the relative lengths of the lines, we opted to take the significantly faster and cheaper stairs (a mere €3,50 for students). This allows you access to the first two étages of the tower, which was plenty high for me to view Paris. The stairs were also a much-needed chance to get some exercise. Though there were many of them, we all agreed that taking the stairs wasn't terribly draining, so I would definitely recommend it unless you're elderly. And, on the way down, the lift is free.

The Musée Rodin comprises a large collection of Rodin's works, including his infamous "Le Penseur," or the Thinker. For only €1, we were granted admission to the garden, which features a dozen or so of his sculptures on display amidst roses and fountains. The Thinker statue was teeming with tourists vying to take photos in the Thinker-pose; I was evidently not above this. Elsewhere in the garden is Rodin's "La Porte de l'Enfer," or the Gates of Hell.

A shot of a sculpture centered in a pond, with Megan taking a photo of the same. You can see the gold-capped dome of the Palace des Invalides in the background, where Napoleon's Tomb is located.

Outside of the Musée Rodin, we were greeted with our first French protest! Now, I know that I have truly experienced the cultural flavor of France. The police had blockaded the street, so we weren't able to approach the protestors to find out what they were fired up about. I did some googling afterwards, which revealed that they may have been upset about the price of milk.

We made our way to the Île de la Cité to view the Gothic splendor that is Notre Dame.

A closer look at the detailed masonry in the center. Here, as with all of Paris' other tourist attractions, we were accosted by people begging for money.

Afterward, we decided to take a break at Shakespeare & Co, a famous English-language bookstore in Paris. This was a very cute shop, the only store I've seen which tops Hyde Park's Seminary bookstore for books crammed/square foot. Their top floor features hundreds of old books available for browsing, not for sale, and seating for you to lounge and take in the musty scents as the sun sets outside over the Seine.

The sign outside of Shakespeare & Co. is appropriately poetic.

The Sacré-Cœur basilica, another area teeming with vendors selling chintzy items and panhandling beggars, juxtaposed with a beautiful building. The basilica is located at the summit of the butte of Montmartre, the highest point in the City (unless you count the top of the Eiffel Tower). To reach the top of the summit, you can take the funicular (free with our Mobilis train passes) or the stairs (according to Matt, who lost his train pass, this was no worse than hiking up Libe Slope). We were able to tour the inside of the basilica for free, and a service (in French!) was taking place simultaneously.

For dinner, we went to Le Refuge des Fondues (per Katherine's recommendation). This is admittedly a bit of a tourist trap (when we arrived, all the guests were speaking American English), but heck, we are tourists after all. The restaurant offers an €18 prix-fixe menu of apéritif, a cheese, salami & olive appetizer tray, cheese or meat fondue (Megan couldn't handle dealing with the bubbling oil to save her life), and wine served in a baby bottle. Yes, a baby bottle. Apparently, there is some sort of additional tax if you serve wine in glasses, so the owner has taken to serving it out of baby bottles instead. This is probably for the best anyway, because spacing in the restaurant is extremely tight (to be seated against the wall, you must step over the table), and the baby bottles are adept at preventing further spills. On the wall behind Matt, you can see a myriad of colorful currencies, signed by visitors all over the world.

Elsewhere in Montmartre, the area is known for being "bohemian" and also for its plethora of sex shops. Walking down the Boulevard de Clichy, we saw store after store with titillating offerings, something that would certainly offend American zoning proprieties. The famed Moulin Rouge cabaret is located here; unfortunately the entry prices are somewhere in the triple-digits, so we definitely passed.

Continuing down the street, we stumbled across the Musée de l'Érotisme. After Megan posed outside of the fat Bhudda statue, we decided to hop on the low-brow museum train and go inside.

This chair is prominently on display in the window, and does pretty much what you would expect it to. The rest of the museum's collection contains mostly artwork with accentuated body parts, from a variety of cultures and time periods. Not that I fancy myself a connoiseur of sex museums, but I would recommend NYC's Museum of Sex over this one.

Megan and Matt plop down for a break in a pair of leopard print heel chairs.

The next day, we decided to trek to Versailles, an over-the-top, extravagantly ostentatious homage to the power of Louis XIV. To get here, you must take a commuter train on line C about 20 minutes outside of Paris. Simple enough, non? It turns out that the C train has a number of branches, and after querying some other passengers, we realized that we were on a train headed somewhere other than Versailles. After we noticed our mistake, several other passengers who had overheard the conversation leapt up to ask, "Wait, did you say this was not the train to Versailles? Can we follow you?" All of the sudden, we were responsible for leading an Indonesian family and some other passengers to Versailles.

Once we boarded another train, the Indonesian family proceeded to plop down next to us, and strike up a conversation. Correction: it was mostly the dad who was interested in talking to us, with Mom making occasional comments and Angsty Teen Daughter sullenly sitting in a corner with her iPod on, hating life and making no effort to engage with us. After we said that we were recent college graduates, Dad whispered to his daughter, "These kids graduated from college, you should talk to them!" Daughter's response was to blatantly ignore him and turn up her music. Afterward, we discussed how all of us would have killed to have parents who took us on paid international vacations, and how the daughter would later regret how unappreciative she was as a youth. Though, Megan admitted that when she was 15 her parents took her to see the Grand Canyon, and all she wanted to do was go home and hang out with her friends. Ah well, c'est la vie.

After successfully arriving in Versailles, we approached the palace. Though it was an overcast day, the golden gates still shimmered in the distance. Engraved above the columns is the message: "À toutes les gloires de la France."

The Château de Versailles is filled with hundreds of paintings, mostly commemorating royal family members and other nobles. I didn't take a single picture of a monarch, but I did snap this all-important photo of Blaise Pascal. I also made sure to photograph the statue of L'Hôpital. Go mathematicians!

This painting covers the entirety of the ceiling in the Hercules Drawing Room, a work of breathtaking proportions.

This is the king's bedchamber, where King Louis XIV died in 1715. Each day, elaborate ceremonies would accompany his waking ("Lever du Roi") and going to bed ("Coucher du Roi"), with a formal procedure and order outlined for the people designated to see him.

Here we are inside the famed Hall of Mirrors, a long passageway outfitted with arched mirrors and chandeliers.

A formal garden viewed from the inside of Versailles. We didn't have the time or energy to explore beyond the palace, but the grounds cover an additional 800 hectacres, much of it perfectly landscaped in French Garden style.

Money, Porn and Other Sordid Tales

As befits its audience, Wrigleyville tends to be filled with generic, fratty faux-Irish pubs and sports bars, where the name of the game is cheap booze and raucous behavior. This certainly has its place, but I have discovered a far more interesting option in the seemingly mislocated Risque Cafe. I first heard about this bar through Rob, who described it as antithetical to the goal of meeting women, since it is filled with posters of pin-up girls and specializes in beer, neither of which are strong attractors for females. Sure enough, upon walking inside, I was greeted with the flashing lights of a Playboy pinball machine and large portraits of scantily clad women.

Onto the beer list. Risque features a gargantuan list of over 200 American craft beers, sorted by state of origin. Skimming through, I saw some familiar regional names, like 3 Floyds (IN) and Great Lakes (OH) breweries, along with more far-flung names like Southern Tier (NY) and Rogue Ales (OR). Though some of these beers can set you back $20, each night features a $3 beer on tap. They also have an impressive offering of whiskeys, with three types of whiskey even on tap. I ordered Jack Daniels from tap simply because I'd never seen that before. In case you're curious, it doesn't taste markedly different from a regular pour.

It took us a while to notice the TV screens behind the bar, but we soon caught on to the titillating material being presented. In order of weirdness, on the right-most screen, Mondo Topless was playing, which involved a lot of bouncing cleavage. Oddly enough, the Chinese subtitles were showing underneath, though I was too far away/couldn't read quickly enough to catch them. (One line said something like "I love running through the woods au naturel!") The center screen was showing Teeth, whose plot centers on the vagina dentata myth, and thus, resulted in many disturbing scenes of dismembered members. I should mention that Ryan's friend was playing at Risque that night, so in the middle of his acoustic guitar set, he glanced up to see a dog chomping down and screamed "Oh my god!" in horrified distraction. Shockingly, this movie won a lot of acclaim at the Sundance Festival and has a fairly impressive 82% from Rotten Tomatoes. (Forgive me for my skepticism; since we were watching with the volume turned down, I was joking but didn't actually think the movie was about women's empowerment.) Finally, on the left-most screen, there was fat chick morbidly obese chick porn. Also, some shots of naked children. I didn't catch the credits on this one, but trust me, it was quite bizarre.

Afterwards, Katherine had mentioned that James was housesitting for the guy that runs his law firm for the week, and ergo, he was throwing a party. I was told to bring "as many people as possible." I started to question whether this was a good idea, but upon second thought, remembered that the time Jie and I housesat for her boss, we drove the car and left the headlights on, resulting in a dead battery. Twice. Thus, I dutifully hauled the entire gang with me to my friend's roommate's classmate's boss' mansion on the Gold Coast.

Chicago's "Gold Coast" neighborhood is so named because it is the highest concentration of luxury retail stores and wealthy homes in the city. The house in question was located on Astor, which is renowned for its magnificent mansions, originally designed and owned by all the major luminaries from the 19th century. Hugh Hefner's first Playboy mansion is also located on this stretch.

Needless to say, the home was stunning, straight out of a magazine photoshoot. There was an original Miró hanging on the wall. A jersey signed by Michael Jordan. Flat screen TVs in every room. Two decks offered views of the downtown skyline. A pool table. Fireplaces. The master bathroom toilet was in a room that was completely mirrored on all sides. (Call me crazy, but why on earth would you want to watch yourself?) Two ornate, handpainted and limited edition (by default, because the artist has died) chess sets. Leather-bound books with gilt edges lined the study. And finally, Yale paraphernalia subtly popped up wherever you looked, from the coffee table reading selections to the pennants in the background of photos. Factoring for location, this was definitely the most expensive house I've ever partied in. What a shame that much of the alcohol was locked up, not because the owners were worried about us drinking, but to "keep it away from the son."

As we toured the house, I thought of the tour buses going past the ostentatious homes of AIG executives. Does this empty-nest family need all this space? Does anyone need all this space? The answer is undoubtedly no. I could feel some tremors of populist rage welling up inside me. At the same time, it would be wicked cool to be able to afford all that. Think of the ball pit room I could design! I grew up in a comfortably middle-class family, but for the first time, I felt like a grubby street urchin illicitly peeking into the lifestyles of the Rich and Powerful. This is where cognac is sipped in the cigar smoke-filled room, where admissions decisions are smoothed with the donation of buildings, where legislation is sealed with a handshake. And the Evil part of me wants to be in that upper echelon.

Anyway, we snapped pictures of the Miró (and had Adrian stand in the picture to prove that this wasn't from a museum):

Creativity

When's the last time you made a paper snowflake? Drew a cartoon? Decorated a vase?

Melissa invited a few of us over to make valentines yesterday afternoon, and I was struck by the way I froze, blanking out on what to do, stymied for ideas. It's been a long time since I've had to do something visually artistic, and as I looked at the pile of stickers, stamps, ribbon and brightly colored construction paper in front of me, I felt completely lost. Where were all my kindergarten-era arts and crafts skills?

Don't get me wrong, it's not as though having a full-time job has turned me into a soulless automaton. I take time out to be creative in other forms: through writing, in music, and in mathematics. (Yes, math does require creative juices.) However, I can't remember the last time I had to create a piece of visual art. I hesitantly grabbed a pair of scissors and began cutting out a heart. Meanwhile, Katherine was cutting out an elaborate silhouette with two people kissing and holding hands. It was practically on the order of a traditional Chinese paper cut. After surveying her work, I decided I should focus on jazzing up my cards via dinosaur stickers and glitter glue.

Eventually, my creative juices kicked in and I managed to assemble a few Valentines of debatable artistic vision. They are currently in the mail, so they should definitely be in mailboxes by the 14th. If you're reading this and didn't get a valentine, please don't take it personally; it probably just means you were less important than my mom. :p