I wound up taking a trip out to South Bend, Indiana this weekend to visit Ian at Notre Dame. We had some free tickets and he’d invited me out when he was home over Christmas break so I though, why not? Now you’re all caught up and hunky-dorrie, right? Good. So I flew in to Chicago Midway and took two trains (three hours or so) out to South Bend from Chicago. All by myself! I’m pretty darn pleased if I do say so. Anyway I got into South Bend at 7:30 on Wednesday and flew out at 3 on Sunday (after taking two trains BACK to Chicago). We had some fun times, mostly involving alcohol… for better or worse. I did get to see Chip Kidd give a little talk which was an AMAZING coincidence! I got into the car on the way to his place from the train station and Ian says something like “Oh, so my roommate is going to see this guy talk tomorrow night… I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him. Chip Kidd? Anyway, you might like it.” At which point I flipped out and said YES YES YES! I want to go! For those of you not in the know Chip Kidd has designed just about every awesomely wonderfully beautiful book cover you’ve ever seen… it’s like asking a British person if perhaps they’d like to go see the Queen give a little talk, I mean, only if they’d heard of her or something. Amazing. That made the whole trip worth it. Period. It’s still a good thing that everything was still fun too because it would have been a long four days.
Anyway, on Thursday Ian had class so I walked around the campus for seven hours or so. It was pretty brisk outside and windy, but the sun was out so if balanced out. More or less. I took a bunch of pictures while I walked around and I just realized that, as I’m uploading them that about 90% are of tree bark, 7% are of squirrels/swans, 2% are statues/buildings and 1% are miscellaneous plant bits. Sigh… there IS something about tree bark textures that hits a happy note in my brain and I have a feeling they’re going to play a role in some project down the line but those were seriously ALL the pictures I took! No pictures of people, us doing things, the apartment. NOTHING. I guess it’s just another window into whatever the hell goes on my head most days. Tree bark. Super exciting Hannah. Sheesh.
Statues of the religious types I saw hovering around campus standing in front of Touchdown Jesus on the library. Jesus found his way onto most buildings around ND. Surprise surprise.
Disco Devil Moses nearish the library. And yes, he is standing on a bull’s head.
The Golden Dome thingy.
And again, goldenish and domish.
Hot bark action… and this is just the beginning.
One of my squirrely friends just before he stuffed a fist sized wad of trash into his mouth and ran away. The size of my fist, not his.
EXTREME bark action…
And a pair of swans I found cruising on the campus lake. A.) Yes the campus has it’s own damn lake and B.) these swans were having none of this “jogging” around the lake. I saw one go for a girl’s ankles just before it made a pretty impressive go for the other swan and some type of tiny duck.
Ok, this is the last bark picture. I really do think these have some potential. Quilt? No… something though. We just don’t have those kinds of trees out here in abundance.
This is a shot of Chicago from the South Sound commuter train station at Museum Campus/11th if you’d like to geek out over it or something.
And this is a REALLY neat piece at the Midway airport. It is a cluster of red paper aircraft in the shape of a bird. Each little aircraft has a lead weight hanging below it also in the shape of a bird. It looks like a completely random cluster until you start to descend on the escalator and it morphs into this amazing, giant bird.
That’s the end of my story.
