Listing Through Life

My niece and nephew came to town for a 10-day visit. On the last Saturday in June, my daughter and I took them to Crystal Lake to see the 25th America's Cardboard Cup Regatta. Maybe 50 boats were entered in various design and racing categories — all constructed with cardboard and duct tape. The course ran along the shore from one end of the public beach to the other.

It was hot and muggy. We spent most of the time in a sliver of shade along a building where we had a pretty good view of the crowd and the races. When the shade disappeared, we left, even though the regatta wasn't over.

This "boat" was designed like the house in the Pixar movie, Up. It won second place for design and first place for "most spectacular sinking." We saw that moment. Seconds after the race began, the entire house blew off the base.

The most famous work of art in the world was painted in 1503 by Leonardo da Vinci, who was born in a Tuscan village, moved to Florence, Italy and developed into the quintessential Renaissance man. The painting wasn't called Mona (Madam) Lisa until the 1800s. The Italian title (La Gioconda) and French name (La Joconde) both mean "the playful one."

Lisa Gherardini married Francesco del Giocondo, a silk merchant in Florence when she was 16. When her portrait was done, she was 24 and had two sons.

The painting drew attention immediately, in part because de Vinci pioneered several techniques, including:

• contrapposto — positioning a figure so that the body above the waist is twisted on a different axis from the lower body.
• sfumato — applying several layers of translucent paint to create an appearance of depth
• chiaroscuro — contrasting light and dark in painting
• pyramidal composition — arranging the subject of a painting in a geometrical shape

It was also among the first portraits to be placed in front of an imaginary landscape.

Part of its fame also comes from its history.

• It was owned by Francois I, a French king.
• It hung in Napoleon's bedroom in the Tuileries.
• In 1911, it was stolen by an Italian carpenter named Vincenzo Peruggia who worked in the Louve. It was recovered two years later when the thief tried to sell it to an Italian antiques dealer. His motive, he claimed, was simply to return the painting to Italy.
• In 1956, a Bolivian named Ugo Ungaza Villegas threw a rock at it and made a small dent near Lisa's left elbow.
• The most famous work by Dadaist, Marcel Duchamp, is a cheap copy of the Mona Lisa with a beard and mustache.

I appreciate the painting (the original, not Duchamp's) more after having studied it, but I've never found it particularly moving. I always thought Lisa was a bit strange looking and I just reazed why — she has no eyebrows. It's not known whether she plucked them as a fashion statement, or if they were erased during an early restoration.

I wandered about the Cary Days carnival for an hour or so taking time-lapse photos of the rides. Here are the best.

Before you read this post, you need to read this post.

I returned to Cary Days and saw the same booth as last year. I was glad to see they still sell Cheesburgers, but the Sandwhiches are gone. Before I made my selection, I took this photo.

Just like last year, a woman in back of the booth saw me and, with a very stern look on her face, said, "What's the picture for?"

I smiled my very nicest smile and said, "Every year I come and try something new."

Her face lit up as she said, "You were here last year!"

"Yes I was," I replied.

She said, "I have the fried pickles I told you about. Do you want to try them."

I was amazed that she'd remembered our entire conversation. I told her I'd like to try the pickles. She said, "They're on me." She went into the cooking area and prepared them for me herself.

She handed them to me and said, "Here ya go, Sweetie. Let me know what you think."

They were very tangy but tasty, and the ranch dressing as a good addition. My daughter was at the carnival with friends, and I offered her some, but she declined. When I was done, I went back to the booth and thanked the woman again and told her the pickles were very good.

Stay tuned for next year. I still haven't tried their Oreos, Reeses, Milky Ways or "fun shaped" chicken tenders.

Got you wondering, don't I? Here's how it happened. To the left of the main jump there was a second, smaller jump with a wooden stairway along the edge. I spotted a couple people on the stairs taking photos, so I wandered over that way. There were no barriers and no signs. I walked right past a guy who was watering the main slope between rounds. He looked right at me and said nothing. So I started climbing.

The stairs ended about halfway up the slope below the big jump. From there I took this photo back down the hill. You can see how large the crowd was, and you can also see the plastic carpeting on the hill.

A couple other people came up the stairs behind me. They and the first two people started climbing higher along a narrow dirt path that ran along the smaller jump. There were still no signs or barriers and nobody seemed to be paying any attention, so I started climbing again too. When I got to the top of the hill, I saw that the others had actually climbed a ramp that reached right to the base of the jump itself. I followed. We were right at the point where the jumpers launched into the air! I think this is the 10-year-old kid.

OK, at this point I have to admit that I knew I wasn't supposed to be there. But nobody seemed to care! Two photographers were on the other side of the jump, but if their equipment was any indication, they had some official reason for being there. Here's a shot I took looking up the jump. The skiers were given a ride in a van to the base of the ramp I had climbed up, then had to hike up stairs to get to the very top.

When the round ended, the others headed back down the hill. I decided to stick around for a while. Six or eight minutes later, when they would have been hiking down the stairway, I heard the guy in the booth way down below make an announcement. "Would those of you on the stairway please head down. I know it's a great place to get photos, but our insurance doesn't cover you up there so you need to come back."

Now what? As I thought about it, I realized I had three choices.

1. I could head back down the hill, but I would have gotten to the stairs well after everybody else had gotten off and I would have been pretty obvious to the entire crowd.
2. I could skulk off down the back of the hill and out a gate, or
3. I could brazen it out and stay where I was for the final round and then skulk off down the back of the hill and out the gate.

I chose option three. After all, the announcer hadn't said I couldn't be on top of the hill — he'd just said I couldn't be on the stairs leading to the top of the hill.

I had about a half hour wait until the skiers were brought back up the hill and the final round began. I took this panorama looking out over the valley with the crowd way down below and the Fox River on the right. You can click twice on the image to make it a lot larger.

Here's the view in the other direction.

Imagine being 10 and launching yourself off of that … While waiting for the next round, I sat on a cement wall under the jump. The skiers, when they climbed up, walked right past me as did several of their coaches. A guy drove by in a truck belonging to the ski club. He looked at me, but he didn't say anything. Finally the round started. Unfortunately, my camera (or perhaps it's me) isn't up to shooting action shots in low light, so they came out grainy and blurry, but you can get a sense of what I was seeing.

The longest jumps were about 72 meters. I don't know how that compares to winter or Olympic competition.

When the last skier had jumped, I did, in fact, skulk down the back of the hill and out the gate. I had about a half mile walk to the front gate where I took one last photo, then headed for home, still not entirely believing where I'd gone. It's amazing what you can get away with if you carry a camera and look like you belong.

If anyone wants to go the the winter competition with me, let me know. But I think I'll probably stay at the bottom of the hill.

Almost everywhere I go in Cary and Fox River Grove I can see the ski jump at the Norge Ski Club rising above the landscape. And three or four times a year I see signs announcing a competition open to the public. I've wanted to go for some time, but I've always been busy — until this past June 13th.

In the summer, a carpet of plastic strips (think imitation hula skirt) is laid on the hill and drenched with water. It must work because shortly after I arrived and paid my $5 admission, people started jumping.

This was an unofficial "King of the Hill" competition. There were 13 jumpers, including:

• A 30-year-old guy from Norway who wore a pink suit with a hole in the behind and who wasn't good enough to make it out of the first round.
• Three girls in their teens.
• A 10-year-old boy who made the final five.
• A 17-year-old guy who is the only ski jumper in the world with a prosthetic leg and who came in third.

There were perhaps 300 people spread around the bottom of the hill, including some celebrities such as Erik the Viking (left) and a former Miss Illinois (right). I know who she was because they introduced her when she sang the National Anthem, but I won't tell you her name or the year she won because that would be mean.

I walked around to the west side to get the sun at my back. That's where I got this photo.

I'd been hoping for something a little better than that, so I walked around to the other side and took this video.

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And this photo.

From the end of the run, I got this shot.

I still wasn't satisfied, so I kept searching for a better angle to shoot from.

To be continued …

I'm beginning to think I should change my name to Joe Btfsplk, the character from Al Capp's L'il Abner comic strip who walked around with a rain cloud perpetually over his head.

Consider:

• In May, I went camping with my family and several friends at Starved Rock State Park. It rained.
• Also in May, I walked to Wisconsin. It rained.
• In June, I went to Milk Days in Harvard. It rained.
• Again in June, I spent the day in Chicago to look at art. It rained.
• And on June 13, I went to Wheaton to see the French Market my daughter manages. It rained.

My wife, younger daughter and I drove down on a Saturday morning to see my older daughter at the market. This is the second summer that she's managed this particular location. There are perhaps 60 vendors selling food, flowers, jewelry, crafts and clothing. My daughter is in charge of getting the booths set up each week, making sure the vendors have what they need, handling any problems that crop up and a variety of other tasks. We could tell as we walked around and met several of them, that they like her and think she's doing a good job. Not bad for a 22-year-old kid with two other jobs.

In this shot, she's dumping vast quantities of rain water off one of the tarps that cover the booths.

We wandered about for an hour and a half and bought several food items, including pretzel bread, raspberry bread, summer sausage, strawberries and rhubarb. On a normal Saturday, the place is so crowded it's almost impossible to move, but because of the steady rain, this day was less so.

We headed to a nearby Starbucks for a while, then took off for home. Of course, by the time we got there, the rain had stopped.

Four sculptures by Chinese artists are temporarily on display along the Boeing Gallery in Millennium Park. I didn't find any of them to be particularly moving. It is interesting, as I often discover, to try to make sense of sculptures in light of what the artists say about them. Interesting, but rarely successful … (The comments below the photos come from the brochure I picked up by the sculptures.)

Jia Shan Shi No 46 (2001) by Zhan Wang

Zhan Wang has become world famous for his stainless steel copies of "scholars' rocks" found in classical Chinese gardens. By hammering a pliable sheet of steel over a scholar's rock, he reproduces every minute undulation on the stone's surface. To him, both the original rock and his stainless copy are material forms created for people's spiritual needs, but their different materiality reflects the cultural transformations in changing times. With their glittering surface and illusory appearance, his stainless rocks symbolize the adaptation of Chinese cultural tradition to today's conditions and new aesthetics.

Good luck trying to satisfy your spiritual needs by staring at a silver rock.

Valiant Struggle No. 11 (2006) by Chen Wenlin

The youngest of the four artists, Chen Wenling most acutely responds to the heightened commercialism and materialism that has seized Chinese society in recent years. Made of stainless steel and painted red and gold, his sculptures frequently consist of blissful, self-indulgetn human and animal figures, who embrace one another in tight, three-dimensional clusters. Chen derives the pig motif — one of his signature images — from the folk art of his birthplace in Fujian, turning this local symbol of wealth into an icon of contemporary Chinese society. Displaying a highly organic style, these images are at once fantastic, ironic, satiric, and comical.

And goofy. Don't forget goofy.

Kowtow Pump (2007) by Shen Shaomin

Shen Shaomin has been pushing the boundaries of Chinese experimental art. Kowtow Pump is inspired by his childhood growing up near one of China's major oil fields. Locals called the numerous machines standing among their schools, hospitals and residences "Kowtow" for their fhythmic, up-and-down movements. By refitting the mechanical transmission, Shen changes the pumps' stable, uniform motions into twitching, convulsing gestures, struggling to complete the task. The work forges a contemporary allegory for the dangerous dependence of modern society on oil production.

I suspect that this work, wherever it was located (and particularly with the fence around it) conveys the meaning of "under construction." To be fair, it wasn't moving when I saw it.

Windy City Dinosaur (2009) by Sui Jianguo

Sui Jianguo's sculptures often respond to China's social and political transformation, and reflect on cultural clashes in the process of globalization. With "Made in China" engraved on their chests, his larger-than-life toy dinosaurs reference the cheap, mass-produced goods that have become a foundation of the booming Chinese export economy. Witty and incisive, such works question the source of China's economic prowess as well as a stereotypical image of China in the West.

I was in the area for several minutes, but I never saw the dinosaur respond to anything.

Of all the art I saw (sculptures and paintings) during my trip to Chicago on June 11, this was the one that impressed me the most.

The plaque beneath the drawing reads:

Have No Narrow Perspectives

Ryan Oakes & Trevor Oakes (2009)

Having embarked upon various visual experiments since the age of 3, twin artists Ryan and Trevor Oakes have developed a method to trace the world before them onto a curved surface, completely freehand and by eye alone. Described as one of the most original breakthroughs in the rendering of visual space since the Renaissance; Millennium Park and the Department of Cultural Affairs in association with the Chicago Humanities Festival proudly present their first public sculpture. For more information visit: www.OakesOakes.com.

I like it so much because ink sketching is the type of art I most wish I could do and this is the most amazing example of it that I've ever seen.