Complete Writeup: Sea Kayak Georgia

Title: $25 for a Half-Day Coastal-Marsh Kayak Tour from Sea Kayak Georgia (Up to $55 Value)

Micro for email digest (140-character hard maximum):  6,000 acres of dunes, beaches, and subtropical forests accessible only by boat beckon kayakers across Georgia's shimmering coastal estuaries

The ancient Phoenicians invented boats so they could expand their lucrative jetpack trade into distant lands. Explore terra incognito with today’s Groupon: for $25, you get a half-day kayak tour from Sea Kayak Georgia in Tybee Island (up to a $55 value).

Helmed by long-time paddlers Marsha Henson and Ronnie Kemp, Sea Kayak Georgia’s staff equips seafaring adventure-seekers with kayak and paddleboard rentals and guides them on excursions through Georgia’s pristine coastal-marsh islandscape. The half-day trip begins with an orientation, where chaperones brief advanced and beginning kayakers alike on the basics of kayak navigation and how to ask the way to the library in colloquial egret before transporting them to the launch site. Groups then set out across the calm, shimmering waters of Georgia’s coastal estuaries toward Little Tybee Island, a protected, uninhabited preserve reachable only by boat. There, hiking legs take over for paddling arms, exploring Little Tybee’s more than 6,000 acres of dunes, beaches, and subtropical forests home to myriad long-legged waterfowl, including the endangered wood stork, as well as bald eagles, tree frogs, and alligators. Upon their return to Sea Kayak Georgia, explorers can take advantage of the facility’s showers to rinse salt from their feet and any naturally occurring saltwater taffy from their hair.

Sea Kayak Georgia advises adventurers to wear clothes and shoes they don’t mind getting wet, and to bring along sunscreen, drinking water, and snacks. Half-day tours convene at 8:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. daily March–October, and at 10:30 a.m. November–February. Reservations re required, and can be made via telegram, telephone, or singing telegram sung over the telephone.

Merchant Profile: Watermarc

Watermarc’s executive chef and owner Marc Cohen boasts quite the culinary trophy shelf, having been accumulating accolades since his days as a member of Johnson & Wales University’s gold-medal-winning Chine des Rotisseurs Culinary Olympic team. Since then, he has dazzled both East and West Coast diners with his distinctive “modern American cuisine where seafood rules.” At Watermarc, Cohen seamlessly blends the cutting edge with the classic, featuring innovative items such as the seafood sausage appetizer with cannellini beans and fluffy mustard alongside such classic fare as the filet three ways, which showcases traditional oscar, wellington, and diane preparations in a trio more powerful than the Three Tenors covering “We Will Rock You.”

With an open-air dining room, outdoor patio, and second-story terrace opening onto Peppertree Lane, Watermarc offers a mix of environments where diners can relax with one of the eatery’s original cocktails or upwards of 100 wines. The Hot Lips martini burns with Smirnoff Passion vodka and sliced jalapeño tempered by frosty mango puree and grenadine; in the classic Hemingway, sophisticated Bacardi light rum and maraschino liqueur look on coolly as grapefruit and lime juices grapple with one another amid the rocky terrain of an icy tumbler. Watermarc opens its doors and, weather permitting, front windows for lunch, dinner, and late-night noshing, as well as for private parties on the terrace.

Smells Like Paper Machete

I had a super fun time returning to the Paper Machete show this past Saturday to talk about Nirvana, 1991, and 2011's inevitable 20 year anniversary retrospectives in the media. Something happened where not all of the show ended up being recorded, so my piece won't get podcasted, and so I wanted to post it here:

Only a month into the new year, 2011 is already a significant one. It's the year of the most hyped and possibly also the actual worst snowstorm in Chicago history. It's the year that, along with the very last few days of 2010, people turn old enough to drink that have never lived in a world without continuous, uninterrupted new seasons of the Simpsons on TV. It's the last year before the end of the world, of course. And it's the year that, this coming September, will mark the 20th anniversary of the song that changed everything, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," by Nirvana, and their album, which also changed everything, "Nevermind," and so many others.

The year 1991 reads like a book of saints in the alternative canon. There's the two other wings of the late-'91 alternative rock power-triptych, Pearl Jam's "Ten" and Soundgarden's "Badmotorfinger;" there's REM's "Out of Time", Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Blood Sugar Sex Magik", the Pixies' "Trompe le Monde", to name just a few, which will make 2011, in addition to all those other things, a landmark banner year for documentaries and retrospectives.

By this fall, we can expect to see . . .

In 20 Words or Less

My friend Matt Higbee and I have a writing game we play at work sometimes where we use a random prompt (it's an improv theater, so there's a lot of those) to try and write a story in 20 words or less. It started because I wanted to put together a new piece to read at Two With Water's Rx Reading Series. I was going to be traveling most of the week leading up to the reading and I wanted to get something started before I left. The theme of the reading was "Orientation."

We didn't discuss what we were doing,

Cultural Center Exhibit Proposal for the Artist Matthew Woodward

In Spring 2010 I wrote this for my friend Matt Woodward. It was pieced together from earlier statements and proposals, new thoughts and notes from Matt, new research and thoughts of my own, and mostly-accurate intuition regarding how he thinks about his work. He'll be showing new work at the Chicago Cultural Center Michigan Avenue Galleries in April-May 2012.


"The city is made, forgotten, and made again, / trucks hauling it away haul it back"  -Carl Sandburg, The Windy City

"Over the last year I have been building a body of work around the moldings and wrought iron details of the American Renaissance and Beaux-Arts movements of the turn of the twentieth century, an era which employed the conventions of European classicism to glorify the advent of a new Golden Age of progress through industrialism while constantly and necessarily shedding the accoutrements of the past in order to advance and perpetuate its own motion. The White City of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago represented a crowning achievement of American Beaux-Arts at the same time it stood in stark contrast to...

Left of the Loop Part III: Where Have All the Pioneers Gone?

the West Loop, circa 198?

Tim W. Brown's Left of the Loop is in one sense a frontier story. If, as it is described in Frederick Jackson Turner's essay "The Frontier in American History," the frontier is a sparsely populated margin at the far edge of established settlement, then the West Loop in the Eighties fits the bill. Although the neighborhood bears no resemblance to the "meadows, timberland, mountain ranges, water systems and clean skies" traditionally associated with the frontier, Stark and Spungkdt are, by Spungkdt's own estimation, the only inhabitants for at least four square blocks or so; their Little House comes equipped with a huge industrial steel sliding gate, and their Prairie consists of weeds snaking up through cracks in the concrete.

Left of the Loop Part II: The Bone Chute

The most haunting image from the Post-Industrial Urban Apocalypse of Tim W. Brown's Left of the Loop is the bone chute located across the street from the loft. While some meat distributors and restaurant supply warehouses still remain in the neighborhood these days,  many of the large meat packing plants have now been converted into luxury lofts and tourist-destination restaurants. In the Eighties, however, the meat-packing industry was in full swing in the West Loop, making stray dismembered animal parts one of the notable features of Spungkdt & Stark's landscape.

"Perhaps the best reminder of the neighborhood's character and purpose was what Stark and I called the 'bone chute.' A fiberglass device sticking out of a wall of the packinghouse across the street, the bone chute's conveyor belt ferried the spinal columns, skulls, ribcages and pelvises of countless slaughtered cattle into the back of a dump truck parked underneath. All day long the bones, still red with flesh, would drop into the truck; with each thud, the truck bed echoed through Sangamon Street like an over-sized bass drum. Then, promptly at three, the truck would pull out, empty its bones somewhere, and return for the next day's load. Although curious, we never found out where the bones were shipped."

Sounds like something out of And the Ass Saw the Angel. Brown was even able to dig up and scan a picture for us, circa 1985. "Notice in the background," says Brown, "that the Bloomingdale's/900 N. Michigan building near the John Hancock Center has yet to be built."