Today’s photo essay was not exactly planned.
If you’ve been reading PopCult, you know that your humble blogger and his lovely wife just got back from our annual trip to Chicago a week and a day ago. My plan, something I’ve been attempting to do recently, was to just go and enjoy the trip and not try to turn it into content for the blog. However, I also take my camera with me everywhere out of habit, and part of our trip involved going to The Art Institute of Chicago, so it’d be criminal not to take a few photos.
Our main reason for making our first visit to The Art Institute since 2018 was so Mel could see one of their prints of Katsushika Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa. They have four copies of this piece, but due to their fragility, they only display them every few years, and then only for a few months at a time. This is a big deal and there were ads for the event all over Chicago. Light and the elements can damage the prints, so they are displayed in a dimly-lit area.
Mindful of this, I did not use a flash for any of the photos I took the entire time we were at the Art Institute. But we were also there on a very cold day in December, and extreme weather exacerbates my Myasthenia Gravis, so most of the pictures I took, both with my camera and with my now-retired phone, came out at least a little blurry, and in some cases as accurate depictions of my double-vision.
So while comments are always welcome, please don’t be a jerk and point out the obvious. Also, if I appear to be bright red in the photos, it’s because we got there twenty minutes before they opened to the general public, and had to wait outside in sixteen-degrees weather. By the time we left four hours later we had almost returned to normal.
And a few words of advice if you wish to go to the Art Institute: Periodically, the Art Institute opens their doors and lets any Illinois resident in for free. Do not go on those days; Go when the weather is really nice; Try going on a weekday; Go with the intention of spending the entire day there: Pace yourself because they have tens of thousands of amazing pieces of artwork to see, and you want to spend enough time with each piece that you enjoy.
Oh, and be sure to stop on the way in for the free map to where the galleries are.
I had only intended to run a dozen or so photos, but when I started going through them, I came up with more than twice that. Let’s look at ’em…

Mel and The Great Wave, out of focus (it was very dim and I didn’t want to use the flash).

The Great Wave, almost in focus.

Better luck with the focus with the phone set to selfie mode
This is our final STUFF TO DO before Christmas lands next week, and we have a lot to tell you about.







The PopCulteer









Above you see a not-safe-for-work video travelogue, wherein you humble blogger wanders through the Spirit Christmas Store in Erie, Pennsylvania for about fifteen minutes, making snarky comments (many of them off-color) while shakily shooting video of the massive holiday retail overload.
This year they’re taking baby steps toward bringing the concept of seasonal retail to Christmas. They only opened ten stores, nationwide, and the closest one to us is in Erie, Pennsylvania, a six-hour drive.
You probably saw the
In all fairness, we were pretty much caught up in the irreverent spirit of the store, which had more cynical, goofy, alcohol-fueled and profane celebrations of the holiday than wholesome or religious ones.







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