Category Archives: Uncategorized

A couple Mondays ago I got on the Blue Line to O’Hare and took a night flight to Florence. My parents have found a place in the hills above that city which they’ve returned to enough times that my father has taken to calling it their dacha.It’s a house down a dirt path, in the middleContinue reading “Against Travel”

Over the past month or so I’ve been working on an article about Roseland in 1970. It has caused me consider how I view my own past, to ask whether my younger days were formative or memorable the way Paul’s, John’s, and Bob’s obviously were to them.  A couple days before I had to turn a draftContinue reading “Old Fashioned Days”

I didn’t know about Francis Chapin (1899-1965) until a few years ago, but once I saw his pictures it was like I’d known them my whole life. He painted and drew Chicago cityscapes in a style somewhere between French Post-Impressionism and the Ashcan School. Those are two of the boxes often checked off when myContinue reading “Frank Chapin, my long-lost relation”