I’m enjoying a much-needed break from Oklahoma. I’d been planning to come to Chicago for awhile, and it seemed like Sydney’s birthday was as good a day as any to do it, especially since Mom was here as well.

We went to a Steppenwolf Theatre production of “The Dresser” which is about someone who dresses rather than a piece of furniture. It was well-produced, though the meta-play thing really seems overdone. It had what had to be one of the most elaborately constructed sets I’d ever seen. And Fraiser’s Dad.

I spent most of yesterday at the Art Institute of Chicago. After the Met, it’s probably the best survey museum in the country. And I’ve never been to the Met. The University of Chicago apparently has its own art collection, which I’d like to see, as well as the contemporary art museum which I haven’t seen since the first time I was in Chicago, in ’98.

The more exciting things at the institute included a Magritte quite different from any I recall seeing and two Magritte sculptures. He didn’t do much sculpture, so that made me happy.

There’s a traveling exhibit from U of Indiana of Art Sinsabaugh. 90 prints of the American landscape. He traveled around with a large format banquet camera and took landscapes with it. He’d take the negatives and crop them to 1″ x 20″, which is a very strange format so very well suited to the midwest. I liked it a lot.

There were three “Exquisite Corpse” drawings, which were combined efforts of the likes of Man Ray, Tanguy and others. Several of them were really good. “Exquisite Corpse” was a popular surrealist game, where the artists would get together and draw on a folder sheet of paper. Each artist would only see the fold he was working on, though he would extend the lines of his figure just barely over the fold for the next artist.

Museum shops annoy me. They never have posters of anything I want.

I saw Napoleon Dynamite tonight. I’m not sure if I can recommend it in a meaningful way. It’s not really offensive at all, I think it was made by Mormons. It’s basically a hilarious character portrayal of many seemingly impossible characters. I was amazed that it’s being so widely distributed. It needs to be appreciated from a standpoint which is so very different from most of cinema these days.