Second Life Redux: Day Two.

Greetings again from the "gameless" virtual world Second Life, where I have recently become an active player again for the first time since 2006. If you haven't seen it already, a few days ago I wrote a much longer post here about why I've decided to join again and what I'm hoping to get out of it this second time (in a nutshell, I'm there this time primarily to make money from prefabricated houses and furniture, because I have this new "mom laptop" that can just minimally now let me navigate that digital universe again, now that I can take it out to coffeehouses and leech off their fast broadband connections -- which is the big irony, of course, that my giant screaming-fast graphics-enhanced Mac at home could run Second Life in its most processor-heavy graphic settings without breaking a sweat, just that I don't have an internet connection at home that can handle all that data. My fucking life, man, I swear; it's so close to all coming together so profoundly, but there remains just one big thing missing from each and every element of my life these days.) If you haven't read that previous post yet, I encourage you to do so, because today's post is basically just a continuation of that -- a screenshot-heavy look at my first weekend back in the "Grid," and all the steps that come with setting up a premium account, getting your first starter home, and tricking out your avatar so that you're no longer an embarrassing newbie everywhere you go.

So just to remind you, here's how my new SL persona, "Zad Cornell," looked when first born and pushed into the Grid; this is essentially how nearly everyone looks when they first come to exist, in fact, which is why it's important to change this look as quickly as possible if you want to have an actual fun experience there, instead of being one of the X amount of people (and there's a lot of them) who try SL for one day, then quit in disgust because "my avatar looked like shit and there wasn't anything to do." Like I said last time, that's the big huge difference between SL and any other Massively Multiplayer Online environment (or MMO), like World of Warcraft or EVE or what have you; there's no actual "game" to play at Second Life, so it's up to the members to come up with ways to amuse each other, aided greatly by a much more robust system than any other MMO for users to create stuff, from avatar components to ownable goods like vehicles and houses, to the computer scripts that will animate it all in specific ways. And so that's why the Grid admittedly looks a lot crappier than other MMOs a lot of the time, because the entire thing except for the land is collectively created from scratch by three million users, and with changes appearing in real time, unlike something like World of Warcraft where a whole team of professional designers can work a year in advance on much more sophisticated backgrounds and avatars that will never change once the game goes live.

So first -- off to get some hair! Or actually, hair and skin are the two most important things to get, usually at the same time; but I find it easier to pick a hairstyle I like based on just its look alone, while to pick the right skin I usually need to see it actually paired with the hair I'm going to have. And to do this, one simply visits some of the "bedroom business" owners like the kind I'm hoping to be soon with prefab housing; this after all is one of the most remarkable things about Second Life, and why it got so much national attention in the mid-2000s when it first became big, is that there's literally millions of real, spendable American dollars exchanging hands between players there every year, from unemployed graphic designers and bored housewives and weekend hobbyists who are essentially running full small businesses there, most of the time concentrating on just one thing like fashion, home accessories, erotic aids, etc. So here I am at one of them, a store called Dura, just full of cool little emo hairstyles like what I'm looking for; and thankfully, a common practice at most SL stores is to offer "demo" versions of their merchandise, which you can wear like normal but which will often have a big "DEMO" warning somewhere on it (in this case, the back of the scalp), so that you can try it out and see how it's going to look on your avatar before purchasing. And so here's a crazy '80s-film montage above of me with all kinds of different possible hairstyles, some of which I ended up liking more than others.

Next -- some eyes! Why yes, this is yet another thing that can be created and then bought and sold within Second Life, which is really just one of the most brilliant things about that place that so many people overlook; that with something like 100 different changeable controls just for the avatars themselves (from big things like height to almost unnoticeable things like the amount your cheekbones protrude), and with every single inch of that avatar able to be swapped out for user-created content, it guarantees a world where you can literally have three million different avatars that all look slightly different from each other, something that no other MMO can come even close to. As you can imagine, with them being so small, eyes are a dime a dozen in SL -- and I mean literally, you can pick up a pack of a dozen different eye colors for one American dime -- so I just basically bought the very first ones I came across that I liked, because there are literally hundreds of thousands of them for sale in the Grid. Hey, don't laugh -- there are lots of people there paying their real-world rent each month from Second Life digital sales, one damn dime at a time.

And next, finally, some decent skin, which is one of the most important things you can do in Second Life; because not only is it a relatively hefty financial commitment, five to six American dollars for a good photorealistic one, thus marking you to other residents as someone serious about wanting to be a good, immersive player, but your avatar is without a doubt the one thing in the Grid you will spend the most time staring at, so it's crucial to get one that you like. And again, the process is the same with the hair -- you simply go around to some stores, download the demos to your inventory (a sort of bottomless invisible suitcase that you carry with you everywhere you go), then mix and match and try them out with the sample hairstyles you now have as well. For those who are confused, what you're actually looking at is nothing more than a Photoshop document that anyone can do,  based on a specific template that Linden Lab (owners of Second Life) gives out for free; then their computer coding magic basically takes that Photoshop document and wraps it around a 3D avatar, kind of like when you show a film of a person's face on a white 3D face sculpture. And their coding remembers in that template where all these highly specific marks of a human body are -- here's exactly where the nostrils end, there exactly is where the left eyelid starts -- which is why just one of these Photoshop images will work on all avatars, no matter how you've modified that avatar to be short or tall or fat or thin or whatever.

So that's why a good skin can command a high price like five or six American bucks; because what you're looking at there above is literally some graphic designer drawing this skin in Photoshop with a digital brush, and if you click through to the big version (and seriously, do so), you'll see that with good skins like these, the level of detail that goes into every single millimeter is just astounding, precisely so that you can blow up the image like this and still get such a dizzingly realistic effect. And so what a typical designer will do to maximize the revenue from such a huge amount of work will then offer such a skin in dark, tan and pale versions, and with many times up to six or seven different types of mascara and lipstick options; and then they might sell any one particular copy of these 18 versions for two bucks, an entire line of one shade for five bucks, or all 18 versions bundled together for ten bucks. And since these are as easy to swap out as simply clicking a mouse button, that lets you own a whole series of slightly different skins for different occasions, or even to change them to alien skin, animal skin, or pretty much anything else you can think of.

Oh, and a final thought before moving on -- note again how the only difference between these free demos and the versions you pay for is merely that there's a big "DEMO" tattoo across the faces, and how the only reason that people even bother buying the non-demo versions in the first place is because of the social stigma attached to having "I'M A CHEAP SON OF A BITCH" tattooed across one's forehead. As I've said many times, it's the sociological issues that come with Second Life that I find more fascinating than anything else, and this is a major one, of how so much that makes that universe reasonably ordered and not just some endlessly chaotic teenage anarchy playground is literally the social stigma that comes from not being a "good citizen" while there, which of course can be manifested in literally dozens of ways, from paying for your things to not trolling in chat environments (known as "griefing" within the Grid, and an endless subject of conversation to all avatars), to maintaining "100 percent avatar reality" while at sex clubs (versus constantly bugging other people about who they might be in the real world), etc etc etc.

So when all is said and done, here's the skin, hair and body type combination that I ended up deciding to go with, which cost me a total of seven dollars altogether, making my total commitment now to Second Life $17 since joining again on Friday. Yes, I know, jarring to see a naked avatar, isn't it? Because let's be clear, that this is one of the biggest reasons (if not the biggest reason of all) that a lot of people join Second Life -- because man, if you think that "cybersexing" with a complete stranger via audio and chat online is intense and erotic, just imagine having two photorealistic avatars added that have been scripted to literally fuck each other while you're dirty-talking, within a virtual sex club full of other naked avatars all fucking in front of each other, but with very real human beings guiding their actions and typing their text, making up stories that directly correspond to the action you're all seeing on the screen. And now imagine a million-dollar-a-year cottage industry devoted entirely and exclusively to making these interactions as realistic as possible, and to constantly improving these associated items (animated genitals, fetish gear, scripted sex furniture) so to retain a competitive edge. And that's why there's all kinds of social etiquette rules attached to sexuality in SL, because a lot of people take that shit very seriously in the Grid; and while it's cartoonish in nature, as you can see above it's just exactly realistic enough to make some people very uncomfortable with the mere subject.

And now that I have my finished hair and skin, a quick trip to the first clothing store I can find, so I can buy the first non-embarrassing outfit I can find, simply so I'll have something to wear while out shopping for clothes I like better. Okay -- we're finally approaching a look I'm starting to be happy with!

So next -- some shopping! In fact, I used to talk about this all the time back in 2006, when I was first in Second Life; that for a straight middle-aged male, I find a surprisingly high amount of enjoyment in the Grid simply from the act of shopping for little girly outfits, which frankly is one of the top two or three things in the entirety of Second Life that people do for "fun," which is why Second Life has an insanely higher female customer base than any other MMO in existence. As you can see, most of the micro-entrepreneurs who take their businesses seriously have basically these big warehouse-type stores for people to visit, which gets into an important technical detail of Second Life that I haven't described yet; because just as one physical server at Linden Lab covers one square of the big map, or 32,000 square meters of virtual land, how they keep control over how loaded-down those servers get is by allowing only around 7,500 "prims" per region to be built (or more specifically 117 prims per 512 square meters, the smallest amount of land that one can buy and sell in the Grid). A prim, then, or "primitive shape," is the basic building block with Second Life from which everything else is based; so a wall might be one prim, and a window another prim, and the section of wall that goes between two windows yet another prim, while a fancy piece of furniture might run 20 or 30 prims just on its own.

So landowners are always looking for ways to save on prim count, which is why stores will often consist of just the most basic, minimal shapes one can get away with, so that more prims can be devoted to the actual merchandise, which is yet another way I find the Grid so fascinating, the manner in which these kinds of tech limits end up sorta self-regulating the way the entire universe looks and behaves. And the way you shop, then, is how you're seeing above -- there's basically a touchable prim for each and every item that store sells, and when you touch it a script activates that will let you pay it money, at which point it will automatically deliver a piece of merchandise straight to your inventory. And that's...well, that's frankly a backwards way of doing things, in a real world where brick-and-mortar stores are more and more losing out to giant online database businesses like Amazon, but backwards is sometimes the way that people exactly want things in Second Life, so to feel more like they're at an actual place with actual stores, that you actually have to walk through in order to actually stumble across accidental deals and the like. Which is why you have all these giant cavernous warehouses in order to show off several hundred items for sale, which you could've done a lot easier and with a lot less fuss on a single page at a single website. Like I said, the issue of "immersion" is a paramount one to all serious players of Second Life, manifested all the way from sex rules to social etiquette to this reliance on outdated brick-and-mortar paradigms for commerce there.

And so after a long weekend of hunting, shopping and modding, here finally is a look and feel for Zad that I think I will probably be sticking with; for while all of these things can be changed with a click of a button, including turning into an eight-foot-tall man in a few seconds right in front of other people's eyes, this is part of the "dedication to immersion" I was telling you about, that serious players tend to stick with the same body type, skin and hair from one day to the next, literally so that their friends can recognize them by sight whenever they walk into their favorite hangout. Oh, and if I haven't made it clear yet, after sex and shopping this is undoubtedly one of the other main three reasons that people enjoy Second Life, is to gather with their friends and have essentially group chat sessions via text and voice, only in environments that are designed to look like clubs and full of animation scripts that make clubgoers dance, often featuring an actual live DJ streaming in music from their home computer and taking requests, or sometimes even live musicians who are actually playing their instruments out there somewhere in the real world, and with an audience gathered from scattered locations globally who are all listening and responding in real time. And not by coincidence, this is what fuels a lot of the shopping going on there, so that people will always have new outrageous outfits to show off to their friends; and this in turn fuels a lot of the micro-entrepreneuralism that's going on there, a self-feeding cycle which is what keeps so many people coming back day after day after day, despite a total lack of "goals" and "adventures" and "leveling up" and the other elements of almost every other MMO in existence.

Or, well, I actually put a second outfit together as well, with a second hairstyle I find gorgeous but I don't think I'd want to wear around all the time; although this outfit doesn't work as well, because it's what's known as a "mesh prim" (i.e. one that can be actually shaped into complex patterns via CAD/CAM software), which means that it actually hangs off an avatar itself instead of being a Photoshop texture that is merely wrapped around the surface of an avatar. And so that means that that designer has to design that prim to be one objective size instead of instantly adjustable; and so when you have an extra-small avatar like mine (who I designed deliberately to be 5'2", when most avatars are more like seven feet tall to help balance out the oversized nature of everything else), it means that a mesh outfit like this dress above is simply not going to fit exactly right, as you can see in the see-though sections by the neck and the weird-looking boobs. But in any case, it's good enough to at least go kicking around; and since my goal this time in Second Life is to get up and going as a revenue-generator as quickly as I can, versus last time when I was an arts-and-entertainment blogger who was constantly attending fashion shows and club openings, these are probably the only two outfits I'll have for quite some time, just enough to get around and do my business without embarrassing myself in front of other serious players. And so everything you're looking at in these photos -- the skins, the hairdos, the clothing, the tattoos -- all came out to around twelve dollars, which means that my "not a moron money" goal (or that is, the amount of money I need to make before I can prove that I wasn't a moron for joining Second Life again) is now officially at $22, which then automatically increases to $32 a month from now when my next bill for being a premium member comes due.

So that's it for now from my starter home in IKEAville here in the Grid, and I hope that you've found these two extra-long entries this weekend to be interesting. Coming next week -- shopping for a large parcel of land, so that I'll have the space to start construction work on my first prefab home, which I'll technically be able to sell at Second Life's online marketplace before having to construct my own retail space in-universe. As always, many more details and screenshots coming about all that very soon. End of line, users!

Oh fuck -- I've joined Second Life again.

You know that I used to be a heavy player of the "gameless" virtual world Second Life, right? What, you didn't know that? Well, that's a shame! Because for about a year there in the mid-2000s -- fall 2006 to fall 2007, specifically -- SL was one of the main things going on in my life, taken up literally days after The Great Fucking Startup Disaster of 2006 (in which I was going to use the profits from my new high-tech job to start up my arts center, CCLaP, then got screwed out of the thousands of dollars I was owed), done essentially as a mental diversion while I fumed and fumed over the dual massive failures I had just gone through. I played an "omnisexual" character named Miller Copeland, a shapeshifter who could morph between male and female forms at will; that's Miller in her female form you're seeing above, the gender I mostly played since being a cute pixie-like girl in SL is a lot more fun than being a male, in some of the many amazing outfits I ended up picking up for her over the months.

And that's really the first big thing to understand about SL, to understand both that environment and why I've recently chosen to go back to it; that since there's no proscribed "game play" there like you'd see in, say, World of Warcraft, people just make up their own things to do whenever they're in-game, and with Linden Labs (owners and puppetmasters of SL) providing an unusually robust system for creating your own clothing, buildings, vehicles and just about anything else you can mention, as well as an extremely simple-to-use virtual currency system that can be "cashed out" every so often for very real money that you can actually spend in the real world. So for example, single pieces you see above like t-shirts, jeans, arm tattoos and bracelets might cost an American quarter or so to purchase, from one of the thousands of digital entrepreneurs you'll find in SL, while something like that blue alien full-body skin might cost two dollars, while something like that elaborate black dress or the erotic elf costume might cost five bucks. And so that's how a lot of people in SL are making a surprisingly big chunk of spending change there per month, by constantly creating new content, amassing a catalog of hundreds of items, opening a retail store within this virtual city (for those who don't know, SL in 2012 is now roughly the size and population of Seattle), and doing all the normal things that a traditional small business would, like maintaining a mailing list, holding sales, sponsoring fashion shows, etc etc.

I just happened to join SL in 2006 right when the first big wave of national publicity hit it as well (it made the cover of Newsweek in the months I was playing it); and so the blog I was doing about all the interesting artistic, entrepreneurial and sexual things that were going on there, In The Grid, blew up at the same time, and at a certain point was within the top ten most popular Second Life blogs on the entire planet. But alas, at the same time Linden was constantly in the process of adding more and more code and more and more graphic details to this virtual world, which is what eventually both drove me away and stopped the national fawning; because by the time I left, it was nearly impossible for anyone besides 17-year-old boys with Alienware gamer setups to have a truly immersive, truly real-time experience in SL, which none of them wanted to do because of the correct perception that SL is a "videogame for your freaking mom," and which eventually pushed away all the middle-aged casual gamers like me with non-souped-up computers who were generating all the national publicity in the first place. And in fact this problem got so bad that even the founder of Second Life and CEO of Linden Labs, Philip Rosedale, left his own company soon after I quit myself, although to be fair that's probably more because he's a serial entrepreneur and always likes working on cutting-edge projects. (Before Second Life, he had been a senior executive at RealPlayer in the '90s, and was one of the people who helped stabilize the MP3 format; he's now the founder of Coffee And Power, a website/physical hybrid in which people advertise for small jobs with small pay like proofreading and light construction work, with regulars encouraged to hang out at a specific associated coffeehouse in their city to better be able to pounce on these micro-job offers when they come in.) And besides, this was now happening a full year after my failed attempt to open my arts center, and I was finally feeling emotionally recovered from that; so in fall 2007, I quit Second Life for good and started devoting all my spare time to the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, which has been growing by leaps and bounds ever since.

Recently, though, I purchased a new bottom-of-the-line laptop so I could finally start going to neighborhood cafes and getting a good internet signal (my one at home is through Virgin Mobile and doesn't work for shit); and while Second Life still remains as processor-heavy as it always has, the processors themselves have gotten remarkably more powerful since 2006 when I was last logged in, with even my cheap little $300 "mom laptop" still having four times the data-crunching power as the Mac Mini I was originally using for SL back in 2006. And so spurred by my Chicago friend Jim, who is still to this day making several hundred dollars a month in SL (yes, real spendable American dollars) on flyable steampunk spaceships he designs, I've joined up again! Although let's make no mistake -- I'm not there anymore to socialize or sightsee or write a blog or attend sex-club parties, all of which are still as laggy to do as they were when I first quit in 2007; I'm there very specifically to make another go at Fabb, the prefabricated housing company I first tried opening back when I was first there, which I was just never able to make a go of because I literally didn't have the computing power even to finish the houses themselves. But I got close, though, which is why I've still been thinking about it ever since; for example, above see the screenshots of "Asimov," the very first house I designed there, which back in 2006 would sell for around ten to fifteen American dollars. (I'm going to have to shop around soon and see what the going rates are anymore for such prefab housing. And by the way, note that this doesn't include the furniture you're seeing in these photos; in fact, that's a big part of the "fun" for a lot of SLers, is simply the shopping and interior decorating of their home. For those who are confused, you can think of a person's home in SL as kind of like their profile in Facebook; it's where you start every time you log in, a place you can customize to show off your unique personality, where you can invite friends to gather when you want to have a chat session with them, and where you can have information from all your other friends flowing in if you want.)

Or for another example, check out "Ion," the second house I designed, about half the size of "Asimov" and that would sell for no more than five bucks, perfect for a "starter plot" of 512 square meters. (For those who don't know, one physical server in the Second Life system covers what's called an "island" of 32,000 square meters, or one square on the SL big map; you can own one yourself for a one-time fee of a thousand dollars, plus another $4,000 per year in server maintenance fees. This large standard unit, then, keeps getting split into smaller and smaller parcels depending on what an individual person wants; the smallest unit available is 512 square meters, exactly 1/64th of an island, which is given to a person for free as a perk for becoming a premium member, and with the maintenance fee waived if all you own is this starter plot. [If you later choose to purchase a plot somewhere else in the universe that's twice the size, for example, you start paying $8 per month in "land fees;" add together 64 of these $8 monthly payments, and that equals the $4,000 per year a person would pay to own an entire 64-plot island unto themselves...which, by the way, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people do.]) There is a very real market within Second Life for stuff like this -- they have something like three million members now, after all, who spend on average something like a hundred bucks a year just on in-game content like houses, vehicles and clothing -- and given that it only takes me about a week to kick out a new house like the ones you're seeing above, which can then be easily converted into five or six different actual things for sale once you change up the colors and textures of the walls and floors, it simply makes sense to have another go at the whole Fabb business, now that I have the means again to do so. Like I said, my friend Jim makes a couple of hundred dollars a month while now spending only maybe five to ten hours a week in-game, so there isn't a single reason why I couldn't be making the same amount with my prefab housing, if I would simply get my shit together and get serious about all the crappy little summing-up details of such a business, not just making the houses but bundling them up, getting a merchant system in place, adding the right animation scripts for opening and closing doors, etc etc etc.

Anyway, I've decided to make a completely clean break from my time there before; so say hello to Zad Cornell, my new in-game avatar who I just created yesterday, and whose look will be getting profoundly changed over the next several weeks. (Once again, Zad will be a dual-gender shapeshifter, although I imagine once again that I will spend a good 90 percent of my time there in the guise of a cute little punk-rock girl.) I literally joined only yesterday, so the only things I've been able to do so far is get my premium membership set up ($6 a month, for those who are curious) and to stake out my starter plot of land. But, I've already noticed, there's a big change between 2006 and now on how this actually works; because now when you get your starter plot, you're only allowed to pick between five different types of terrain (flat, woods, mountains, etc) and something like three or four types of houses for each terrain, and once that's established you're no longer allowed to change the terraforming, or erase or modify your house, Linden now basically maintaining an entire "suburban continent" (see the screenshot of the big map above) that might be called "The Land That IKEA Built." And I have to say, as bland as that might seem, this is a huge improvement over how it used to work before; because I will take IKEAland any day over an entire landscape of casinos and 50-foot-high neon-green penises, which is what these vast fields of starter plots used to look like back when I was originally there in 2006. You're still allowed to add things to your starter plot like furniture and wall hangings, which is all that most beginning players want to do anyway; but if you want to demolish your house and build another, you now have to go and actually buy a plot on the mainland, away from "Newbieville" or whatever you want to call this suburban continent, which I think was really smart of Linden to do. (Also smart -- as you can see in the above photos, these starter plots are no longer stacked up directly against each other like a grid, but instead have these little irregularly shaped triangles of blank land that allow "breathing space" between each plot, owned by Linden and not individual players so that no development can take place on them. As you can see, my starter home basically fills up my entire rectangular 512 square meters of land; so when these were being originally laid out in a grid fashion like when I was there before, often you would get these "suburban ghettos" where one building would literally bump up against its neighbor, and the neighbor after that, and the neighbor after that.)

Anyway, the goal for now is to get up and running on a minimal professional basis as quickly as I can; so I'm basically dedicating my evenings for the next week or so simply to doing some shopping, getting myself some decent skin and hair, a few outfits that won't embarrass me, and a decently sized piece of land so I can start building. Oh, and that's another big difference I've already noticed between SL 2006 and 2012, is that the land boom that was taking place when SL first got massively popular has now completely crashed and burned; even just looking around a little yesterday, I saw that plots that would've usually gone for a hundred dollars back then are now going for only ten, although of course don't forget that your real expense is that land-usage fee you're paying Linden every month, which hasn't changed since 2006. So if I get a plot of around 2,000 square feet to serve as my workshop and retail space, that'll be a monthly "property tax" of $15, which combined with my $6 per month to be a premium member will be basically $21 a month I'll be shelling out to Linden simply to exist; and so that's a minimum of $21 per month I need to be making from Fabb sales, in order to not be a big fucking moron who didn't learn his lesson the first time he was here. How long before I'm making "Not A Moron Money?" We'll see, I guess!

Dance review: Esoteric Dance Project, "Craft"

As part of my challenge this summer to get out more, I've decided to start attending dance recitals on a regular basis again; I used to do so regularly back in college 25 years ago, back when I would occasionally date dancers here and there, and especially now with my hearing problems is usually a much more pleasant way for me to spend an evening than at a movie or play. And I thought since I was doing so, I would do write-ups here of all the shows I'm seeing too, not only to keep me more motivated for going out but also as an interesting intellectual exercise, in that I don't know the first thing about the formalities or history of dance, so cannot write essays based on any learned or traditional standpoint.

The first event of the year was last night, at Links Hall just down the street from my apartment, picked totally at random simply because I didn't feel like traveling far; it was the show "Craft" by the Esoteric Dance Project, a fairly new company founded by husband and wife Brenna Pierson-Tucker and Christopher Tucker, and now in just the second year of performances. It was an interesting line-up of five pieces, including three premieres, plus a piece that intriguingly combined classical ballet moves with modern steps; but overall you could say that most of the show was dedicated to a sort of fascinating obsession with rhythm, order, geometry, and the way all these things could be played with within the square confines of the beautifully unique Links Hall performance space you're seeing in these photos. (And note that these shots are actually from a previous performance by the group last year.) It was a kind of hypnotizing experience of simply done but complexly rigid group movements, sometimes traveling large distances quickly and sometimes concentrating on just one specific spot, and I found the complicated ins-and-outs between the players to be really mesmerizing at times.

Plus I have to admit, although this might sound a little weird, I found it really joyful that many of EDP's dancers are…well, not 'overweight,' that's not the right word, because all of them are definitely at the top peak of conditioning, but certainly many are larger or stouter in general than the typical waif stereotype we think of when thinking of ballet, for example. Maybe it's because I'm middle-aged, and now have this ten-inch steel rod in my hip that puts permanent limits on some of the things I can do in my life; but I found something really celebratory about EDP featuring the kinds of dancers who would normally get pushed to the fringe in a more traditional company.

And this show also gave me a chance to contemplate something again that I always find really fascinating about the arts, of why certain artists make certain choices at certain points in their careers concerning what they're going to do with their lives. Because the fact is that everyone involved with this show was roughly the same age; but while some of them were dancers and choreographers, and had bios that reflected this kind of concentration, some were simply dancers, and their bios more emphasized starring roles in famous productions, while of course the twentysomething husband-and-wife founders (pictured above) thought it important enough to actually go to all the trouble of starting and running their own company. Why each of these artists picked those particular things to do within the dance world is something I find endlessly interesting to contemplate; and Chicago is full of these kinds of places, not just in dance but literature, theater, music and more, where a group of equally young people will come together with their different concentrations and pull a whole show together by the end.

And next? Well, most likely "Return," by what's being billed as "Rachel Thorne Germond and Friends" (formerly RTG Dance, but who are going through a re-branding process right now), again at Links Hall next weekend, which at a typical $10 to $15 admission at these "storefront theatre" shows is really hard to beat. (And a little trivia, by the way; back when this neighborhood was the epicenter of Chicago's punk scene in the '80s, there used to be a basement "black box" performance space in this building called "Club Lower Links," which was the first Chicago home for such touring performance artists as Karen Finley, Henry Rollins, and Eric Bogosian.) As always, I'll let you know about that one next week.

Everyday Sightseeing: Senn Park and the "Seven Mile House"

Now that the weather's starting to turn warm again in Chicago, I thought I'd start getting back into the habit of going to the gym and/or taking a bike ride almost every day, as well as starting to update this "I Am A Camera" blog more, which after all exists mostly just to post photo reports from various things I'm doing while out and about. So I thought I'd combine the two and start up my "Everyday Sightseeing" series again for 2012, in which I blog not necessarily about big tourist things here in the city but rather the small yet fascinating little things that I always seem to be coming across in various neighborhoods while on my bike rides. Today, Senn Park in the far north central area of the city (Clark and Thorndale, to be specific), which used to be famous for being the location of the so-called "Seven Mile House" of Nicholas Kransz and his family, called that because of being exactly seven miles from the Chicago Loop via the old Green Bay Road. Legend has it that Abraham Lincoln made a stop at this location during his 1860 Presidential campaign to talk to a gathering of neighborhood farmers, which is why Charles Keck's "Young Lincoln" statue is now located here. I find it hilarious that the teens from the massive Senn High School next door keep Lincoln's toes painted in elaborate colors all year round.



View "Everyday Sightseeing" Chicago 2012 in a larger map


And hey, since I've enjoyed doing this so much in the past, I decided to start up a "place-blog" version of this year's Everyday Sightseeing series, in reality a customized Google Map; that basically lets a person navigate all these blog entries in the future not by date but by location, which always ends up fascinating once you get to the end of a year and have several dozen placemarkers scattered around the city. I'll make sure to embed the latest version of the map in these blog entries all this year, like you're seeing above, so that you'll be able to explore the archives that way as well.

Everyday Sightseeing: Montrose Dog Beach at sunset

(This is part of a new series I'm doing here, mostly to get back into the habit of blogging, in which I post photos and short write-ups of various interesting things here in Chicago that I see on a regular basis during my ho-hum neighborhood errands.)


The dog-friendly area of Montrose Beach, the area of Lincoln Park closest to my apartment, spied at sunset one evening as I was biking home from Rogers Park. There are miles and miles and miles of views like these along the lakefront path here in Chicago.