New Orleans Wins Super Bowl 37-17

The Super Bowl has ended, and the New Orleans Saints (at right, TED JACKSON / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE) won, defeating the much more heralded Indianapolis Colts 37-17. They ain't the Ain'ts (remember that era) any more. I watched bits and pieces of the game as I was reading school-related stories, and prepping for my new class, tomorrow (the novella-writing adventure!), so I missed nearly all the commercials that I didn't actively tune out, which I usually cannot do. These included the controversial Focus on the Family's Tim Tebow anti-abortion advocacy ad, which CBS chose to run while refusing (and lying about) gay dating company ManCrunch.com's site's ad. I did catch the wheezing, out of tune members of The Who (Roger Daltry, Pete Townshend), whom I thought weren't going to be performing because of Townshend's child-porn scandal, but for some reason or another, CBS and the NFL thought these folks, who were known back when I was a little kid for singing about drugs and the counterculture would be the best choice for 2010. What about the children, for real? After the orgy of consumerism and stereotyping the commercials projected, the anti-establishment message the Who geezed out was a bit refreshing, I think; did anyone else catch it?

Back to the game, New Orleans came through in the second quarter, controlling the ball for long stretches and racking up a near tie with two field goals, which turned the game around. That, followed by the daring offside kick to start the second half, and Drew Brees's 288 yards passing and 2 TDs, put the Saints in the lead, but the backbreaker was Tracy Porter's late 4th quarter inception of Peyton Manning (who was, as always, being proclaimed as the greatest ever before the game), who was leading a dramatic final drive to tie the score.  That gave New Orleans breathing room and the win. It was wonderful to see a team that has never won the Super Bowl, and which has had such a checkered history, finally walk away with the trophy. It helps too that the team comes from a city that was left to drown, before the country's and world's eyes, just five years ago, and which has been treated pretty shabbily since then.

I saw some folks posting on Twitter about how this victory might "help" New Orleans, but it realistically won't do squat for the many hundreds of thousands of people who're still feeling the aftereffects of Hurricane Katrina, half a decade on. But it may give them a temporary good feeling, and might spur on more interest in the city and its ongoing problems. Its people still need the country's help, and we still need to be listening, and working with them, wherever they are.

s(NO)w + Art (Free) + Rogers Park ≠ Hipsterville + Klein/Agbodji Rule NYC + Super Bowl Prediction

Chicago, I'm glad to say, did not suffer the Snowpocalypse. Or "Snowmageddon," I should say. It's cold, but it's always cold in the winter. The sidewalks are paved with ice, but people here frequently don't shovel or salt the walkways in front of their homes (as people in New Jersey do), perhaps in the belief that they will not be sued if someone took a violent spill on the glassy lake stretching the length of their easements (perhaps New Jerseyans are more litigious?). There's residual snow from earlier in the week, but there always appears to be residual snow, even when the sun finally appears and the temperatures rise above freezing. It's just the way things are. It also didn't snow in New York, which was supposed to be buried alive. Instead, I imagine, people went about their business, and laughed once again at the frenzied excitement of the local media. Washington, DC, and Philadelphia, and parts in between and south do appear to have received the snow gift, though. The photos of Washington in particular look really beautiful.

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Since it a snowless Saturday, and it's free admission all month to the Art Institute of Chicago, I hopped on the El (which is now $2.25) and traveled down there. I was very glad to see that many Chicagoans, including many brown and black ones, were also taking advantage of the free admission; it was packed. I hadn't seen the new Renzo Piano extension, which sits behind the famous Michigan Avenue Beaux Arts façade, but it really is impressive, airy, bursting with light, easy to navigate, and almost cinematographic in the dramatic views it offers of Daley Millennium Park. It also serves the art well, at least to my eye, an impression which the smaller crowds in the contemporary galleries only heightened.

Yves Tanguy's "Untitled"(screen), 1928

On this trip, I decided to drift forward through the museum to see what I might come across. My first stops were at the architectural artifacts from historic Chicago, which included various pediments, spandrels, caryatids, gratings, and so forth, from buildings by important Chicago architects like Dankmar Adler, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. I found myself repeatedly impressed by the workmanship and intricacy, the delicacy and beauty, of many of these pieces, especially those by Wright, who was, as I need not tell anyone, a visionary. From there, I kept walking forward, into what turned out to the 1800-1900 European art galleries, which included furniture and other material artifacts, as well as many of the Museum's best and widely known treasures. I must say, it's one thing to see reproductions of Gustave Caillebotte's iconic 1877 painting "Paris Street, Rainy Day," or Georges Seurat's giant masterwork, "A Sunday on la Grand Jatte - 1884" (1884-86), for example, or Monet's various later paintings, such as the ones in London, or the haystacks, or the water lilies at Giverny, but it's another thing altogether to be able to look closely and deeply at them, to engage them and truly take them in, at length. Time really does fall away, and some opens up in the encounter, the exchange.