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Downtown Chicago, lighted for the holidays (I love lights in trees; I wish such festiveness were visible all over the city)
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Chicago's skyscrapers, looking towards Michigan Avenue
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On Chicago Street, right near Northwestern's Chicago campus
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The Luc Tillmans billboard in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art
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The extraordinary Roscoe Mitchell and his ensemble, at the AACM's 45th Anniversary Celebration at the Museum of Contemporary Art (flautist Nicole Mitchell is at the far right)
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Roscoe Mitchell, playing his alto sax, at the AACM 45th Anniversary Celebration at the MCA
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Members of Renee Baker's Brass Band Epiphany, letting loose (they were incredible)
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Fake movie set café in my neighborhood (it will appear, I imagine, in the movie Contagion
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The movie café's post-filming interior
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Fake movie snow
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My undergraduate honors advisee, Simon Han, who was awarded second prize in the Union League of Chicago's Civic & Arts Foundation's Creative Writing College Division competition, for his story "Bear Hands"
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Streetcorner puppet show, Andersonville neighborhood (I passed this on my way to see Rikki Beadle-Blair's new film Fit
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Zakes Mda, who was visiting writer in residence at the university's Center for the Writing Arts, delivered a smart and insightful lecture on the relationship between landscape and his writing (I have been a fan of his for years, so it was marvelous to meet him in person)
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On November 30 at the Silver Room, Artistically Linked was hosting a multi-artist-art show; each week leading up to that, you could see the artists working on the installation, so I caught painter/grafittist Rahmaan Statik at work
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Literary scholar Jahan Ramazani gave a terrific talk at the university on the relationship between postcolonial poetries and affiliated discourses (I am still studying my notes on this one; it opened a number of doors, so to speak; and he even played clips of poet Patience Agbabi reading/rapping!)
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Who says Chicago doesn't have its own flavor: Rogers Park's very own Prince
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Rogers Park Prince from a distance
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Melissa Harris-Perry spoke at the university on Michelle Obama, and was nothing less than incandescent
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Independent scholar Justin Spring gave a talk on his acclaimed study of queer scholar, tattoo artist, porn writer, and archivist Samuel Steward: Secret Historian: The Life of Times of Samuel Steward: Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2010).
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An artist working on a mural in Rogers Park
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