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| "The Hand & The Eye," $50 million worth of high end magic palace located in the old McCormick Mansion on East Ontario. It opens Saturday. |
A lot of old people on Facebook wax nostalgic about drinking out of garden hoses, riding in the beds of pickup trucks without seat belts and the freedom of no cellphones.
Count me out. I was there and recall a lot of boredom. Much thumb-twiddling, whistling and staring out of windows. As for seat belts — I was riding with Phil Flanigan in his mother's 1966 Ford Falcon when she hit the brakes and I went over the front seat and knocked out my front teeth on the dashboard — baby teeth, thank goodness. Still, I'm a big fan of seat belts. They save lives.
As for iPhones, one question: Have you gotten lost lately? Me neither. Getting lost sucked.
Not to be confused with wandering. Wandering is great, I went Downtown twice this week, researching columns. Marching up the wide, sunny arc of Wacker Drive, marveling at the passersby, but also thinking how soon the striding pedestrians and zipping electric scooters (c'mon guys, pretend you have brains to protect and wear a helmet) will be forever joined by squads of little rolling robots, like the pair that took out a couple bus shelters in West Town and Old Town last month. These are the last days we can pad around without flocks of drones buzzing over our heads.
Sorry, I know, lots of delivery workers out of jobs. And cabdrivers, by self-driving cars. And journalists.
But not yet. Feeling lousy about it doesn't help. Every technological advance in history was greeted with howls of ambivalence. When Gutenberg created movable type, some worried that the personal connection of reading an author's own handwriting would be lost. The first programmable machine was not a computer, but a Jacquard loom, whose designs could be changed by switching punched cards. Outraged English textile workers attacked the looms. Got them nowhere. Robert Louis Stevenson complained in vain when gaslight was replaced by electric light, "a lamp for a nightmare," producing "ugly blinding glare." No matter. Technology always wins.
I say this, despite AI coming for my job. But not yet. It can form words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs. But can AI do the footwork? How is AI at rambling? At wandering in a random fashion across an urban environment and stumbling upon interesting stuff?
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Too rich for my blood. But yes, some are always against innovation. However, if that had been a cult place, stay out of it.
ReplyDeleteAs my gramma Roseanna rosanadana always said only boring people get bored.
ReplyDeleteAs a matter of fact that is exactly what AI does . It wanders all of the available information on earth and boils it down to pablum.
Congrats on scooping the Times
You wrote, " Count me out. I was there and recall a lot of boredom. Much thumb-twiddling, whistling, and staring out of windows."
ReplyDeleteI write, What? You don't want to make America great again? (insert rolleye emoji here) Although I think that it's perfectly natural to be wistful from time to time, however, when someone becomes melancholy, I bring up the field of medicine.
Remember people with a "weak heart," or vision problems, prior to walk-in, walk-out cataract surgery? People used to die of old age at your age. Cherish the past, but embrace new ideas. I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
Oh, Penn & Terller should love that place.
I'm pretty sure they gutted the entire building, and they put another floor on it. Not sure that price tag should be considered "renovation" so much as saving the outside but rebuilding the rest.
ReplyDeleteRegardless, a fun and thought provoking piece to start off my Friday.
I would suggest everyone read about the Luddite movement. It has been presented to us as a group of people who were against technological advancement and used as a label for the old, out of touch, and anti-tech fools of our society. In actuality the movement tried to raise awareness and warnings about what was going to happen to the people who would be replaced by machines. Families who had relied on specific trades for multiple generations were to overnight lose all means of supporting their families. In turn, this would decimate towns and areas where these people lived. They didn't want to end modernization, they wanted to make sure the people were protected and trained for new jobs when the industry changed. As is the case with most doomers, they turned out to be right; towns died fast, many families lost everything.
I think we face a similar thing in today's world. Of course, there are differences, nuances, but again, we aren't ready to support all the people whose jobs will go away over night, or how the physical world will change.
I hate the delivery bots for many reasons; but existence helps point out how our cities have screwed us, the people, over.
The smashing of bus stop glass on Grand by the birdlike comprehension of Coco the delivery bot exemplifies the un-huminization of our streets. I know both the building and bus stop have been there for decades, but having walked down that stretch of road for nearly half a century, I've always cursed the narrow pathway. Between the building being built to the edge of allowance, the buss stop taking up 2/3 of the sidewalk, and the signs and street lights taking over almost all of the rest, where are people supposed to go? Now these robots are going to get stuck in the small areas we have left. I hate it.
Cars took over the streets. The streets got wider to make room for them. The sidewalks got smaller to accommodate. The streets aren't safe for bikes and scooters so they take over the sidewalks. Busses replaced trains and trolleys because they are "cheaper" but the only make the congestion worse, and my god they spew such caustic smog.
The capitalistic aspects of our society love to destroy the parts of our world that are already being used by other things because it "saves them money." Its the same reason I despise the rich and their calls for lower taxes on them. They make their billions by using and abusing the very institutions and infrastructure our tax dollars paid for. They don't want to pay for the roads that are built to take people to their stores, the government subsidies that allow them to pay their employees appallingly low wages, city services that clean up rat infestations their back alley box bales breed.
I hate the idea that a company can save a few dollars by having a robot deliver food that clogs the sidewalks, makes me do more work to get the food, and still manages to cost more than it did when people were delivering it. And then they have the gall to ask for a tip.
Invest in vassaline; 'cause there's no way they're going to make our lives any more comfortable.
I'd guess RL Stevenson was complaining about electric arc lighting. High voltage "arched" across a gap between two carbon rods emitting harsh, intense light. They crackled and needed constant maintenance to replace the burned up rods. Then someone invented incandescent bulbs.
ReplyDeleteNow nostalgic types complain about the harshness of LED bulbs. And Big Brother mandating their use. LED bulbs use less than one fourth the electricity and last about 10 to 15 times longer.
And they don't throw off wasted heat. So I guess you can't use them in Easy Bake ovens or chicken egg incubators.
And those darn LED bulbs won't work in my lava lamp, either! ;-) Tony
Delete“three-hour journey” Well, I'm familiar with the famous tale of a "three-hour tour, a 3-hour tour," but this sounds much different. Alas, there aren't a lot of “seated encounters, shared spaces and unexpected interactions” for which I'd shell out $239, and these aren't among them. Then again, I don't imagine they're counting on cheap schlubs like me to be among the patrons.
ReplyDeleteReally, I just wanted to say that I'm glad that this fine building has received such an expensive and tasteful remodeling, whatever its purpose, and even if it was gutted in the process. I loved Lawry's, though we only went there a few times (see "cheap schlub," above). This seems like a swell utilization of that location.
I had kinda the same reaction when we toured Teatro ZinZanni during Open House Chicago -- cool, but not for me. Of course, that seems to be closed, at least for the time being...
Really don't get that fixation about the garden hoses. Like it was some risky and forbidden thing to have done. What's the BFD? A hose is a hose and water is water. Did a hose contaminate the flow? All it did was make the water taste a little funny.
ReplyDeleteRiding in the back of a pickup is dangerous but fun. While hitching out to California, a guy let me ride that way. From west of Salt Lake City, all the way to Oakland...about 600 miles. He had twin gas tanks, and only had to stop for whiz breaks. One of the wildest and greatest and most memorable rides of my life.
Phones? Don't get me started. You've heard that rant before...more than once. Somehow, I've managed not to get lost without one. Still use maps and atlases and just have a good sense of direction. Not all who wander are lost. Gave my wife a pillow that says that. Thought she'd hate it. She loved it.
Seatbelts? They save lives...and faces...and teeth. My mother lost all her front teeth in a wreck at 19. Between the world wars, and right on into the Forties and Fifties, beltless cars and trucks were death traps. The worst of the classic driver's ed horror films were made right in my own backyard, by the Ohio Highway Patrol.
A lot of old geezers on Fakebook who wax nostalgic over hoses, seatbelts and no phones? They aren't even geezers, Mister S. Too many of them are overseas data-miners, spammers, scammers, and charlatans, who think that Americans, and especially Midwesterners, are rich gullible chumps. Easy pickings...because they were brought up to be polite and be "nice" to random strangers. More and more pages and groups are being infiltrated and decimated by these dirtbags who never lived in Zion. More like Zamboanga.
Zipping electric scooters don't bother me. Until I get clocked by one. Ride one? If I fell, I'd shatter like a flowerpot. Can't even risk riding a bicycle anymore. Little rolling robots? I'm not touchy or violated by the idea of them. More like annoyed. People can't even be bothered to get their own take-out anymore. Lazier and lazier. Do feel lousy about all the jobs that will be lost. I may never see them. Cleveland will probably be one of the last places to have them.
Will robots replace journalists? Can't see a robot snooping around and sniffing out stories and stumbling upon cool stuff to write about. Humans will still have to do that. Robots will do the rewrite. They already write a lot of the AI crap online. It forms long strings of sentences--when a few words would suffice. It turns a couple of sentences into a couple of paragraphs...of lame, trite, wordy, repetitive sludge. Whole paragraphs repeat the same idea or message as earlier paragraphs. And no editor is around to cut the length or remove the slop. AI prose in instantly recognizable to anyone who writes much. AI can write garbage for sheeple to digest. But it can't do the legwork...or ramble...or wander. The real question is whether there will eventually be anything resembling journalism at all.
An upscale magic bar? Now the patrons can get fleeced as well as fooled. Magic bars aren't new. There was the New York Lounge, at Lincoln and Foster. A dive bar with magicians tending bar and two-way microphones in the rest rooms. And I lived close to Schulien's, near Irving and Damen... a classic old joint where the bartenders also performed card tricks and other magical feats. Once saw them pour Jack Brickhouse into a waiting cab. Didn't have to pay three Benjamins for the privilege, either.
Those are the 2 places I thought of with regard to the topic of this post -- the New York Lounge and Schulien's. About all I recall from the former were the microphones in the restrooms that you mentioned, Grizz. Schulien's was very nice, though.
DeleteNow, between Damen and St. Ben's on Irving, the draws for us are competing German bar / restaurants on opposite sides of the street: Resi's Bierstube and Laschet's Inn. We've come to prefer Laschet's, but Resi's has a nice, small beer garden. German restaurants have gradually disappeared, one after another and, of course, our genial host has an ongoing disdain for the oldest, The Berghoff, so it's good that those 2 spots seem to be doing pretty well.
Lived at Irving and Oakley from '88 to '90. LONG time ago. Nice to see those old German places are still alive and well. Was sad to see Chicago Joe's go poof, and become history. All that Chicago memorabilia...sold and auctioned off to wealthy collectors. I'm so old that I remember when it was Grover's Oyster Bar.
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