Review: Ray Yoshida’s Museum Of Extraordinary Values

Ray Yoshida’s Museum Of Extraordinary Values by Karen Patterson My rating: 5 of 5 stars I’ve had the privilege of seeing Ray Yoshida’s art collection only twice, the first time in 1994 when I was co-curating a show of bottle-cap art for Chicago’s Intuit. Ray was gracious and loaned some pieces. His collection was spectacular, but tellingly, it did not seem out of the ordinary. If it was finer than many I had seen (my own included), it was not fundamentally different in style and approach. The mix of Maxwell Street flea-market finds with masterpieces is a hallmark of the

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Family Circus book cover

Review: The Family Circus: Daily and Sunday Comics, 1962-63

The Family Circus: Daily and Sunday Comics, 1962-63 by Bil Keane My rating: 5 of 5 stars I liked Peanuts as a kid but I loved Family Circus. Where Charles Schulz used his kids to make universal points, Bil Keane tried to be about real kids and real parents. It was a chronicle of post-war suburban life, and I could relate. It also was probably the greatest source of insight I had into the parental point of view (well, along with Dave Berg’s The Lighter Side comics in Mad Magazine, with had some similarities to Circus in style and point

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Spam {comment|message|kudos} of the {day|week|month|year}

Every once in a while I take a look in my spam folder and find something really {awesome|amazing|very good|superb|fantastic|excellent|great}. This is one of the better examples — kind of a how-to for composing a spam comment. Really, it’s a template you could apply to writing almost any kind of message. I’m sure “samanthablanchette@—.com” would be happy for {other folks|folks|other people|people} to make use of it. {I have|I’ve} been {surfing|browsing} online more than {three|3|2|4} hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours. {It’s|It is} pretty worth enough for me. {In my opinion|Personally|In my view}, if all {webmasters|site owners|website

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One-of-the-best-restaurant-paintings-Ive-seen.-Up-In-Smoke-Rib-Shack-U.S.-12-Michigan-City-Indiana

Roadside Indiana

A roadside art trip on the gyros trail through northwest Indiana ended in Michigan City. Not so much gyros there, but some fine paintings, including one of the best wall signs I’ve seen, at Up-In-Smoke Rib Shack. Also some lovely constructions by Tim Bruce along the way.

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Review: Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.

Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. by Viv Albertine My rating: 5 of 5 stars I came of age around the same time as Viv Albertine and I was drawn to punk, so this memoir was bound to resonate for me. Much as I appreciated punk’s exasperation with the state of both society and popular music, though, I was far too inhibited, and more to the point way too square, to be part of the scene. Albertine was very much in the thick of it, however — friend and bandmate of Sid Vicious pre-Sex Pistols, close to

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Gyros icon The Gyros Project Gyros icon

Rebuilt and Expanded More gyros signs, hundreds of them! Each a bit of vernacular art genius The Gyros Project started as a way of collecting fine examples of Chicago-school hand-painted business advertising. The gyros was a graphically strong object, with lots of sellers all over the city, and typically promoted via one-off signs. Hot dogs, the most commonly advertised product on Chicago streets, were less interesting since they tended to be merchandised via Vienna Beef-supplied printed materials (not that there’s anything wrong with that, it just wasn’t my primary interest). I also had a particular affection for the gyros in

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