Michael Workman

Chicago artists Bonnie Fortune and Mike Wolf have organized a series of summer walking tours that, last weekend, included a two-mile hike of the Bloomingdale Trail located between Ashland and Ridgeway Avenues. At the moment, it's an unofficial trail mapped out along a freight line abandoned by Canadian Pacific Railways, overgrown with weeds and papered with litter, that runs a course parallel to Bloomingdale Avenue. The artists hope their tour would give the Friends of Bloomingdale Trail a boost in its effort to gather support from private businesses and city government to convert the neglected path into a recreational trail.

Such preservation efforts have a precedent in the effort to save the abandoned High Line elevated rail structure on Manhattan's West Side. There, a group similar to the Bloomingdale team--have gathered massive support from a host of elected officials, civic groups, architecture firms, actors like Kevin Spacey and Glenn Close, artists and their galleries in West Chelsea. There's a history of successful rail-line conversion that the Bloomingdale effort can cite in support of its efforts: in the mid-1980s, for instance, the city of Paris turned a rail in the vicinity of the Bastille into the now-popular Promenade Plantee. In the U.S., even the federal government's gotten into the act: the Department of Transportation oversees a rail-banking program called Rails-To-Trails, which has converted over 10,000 miles into recreational trails. Locally, the support continues to grow. Friends of Bloomingdale Trail have listed support from a few aldermen, neighborhood associations and art organizations such as the ACME Artist's Community.

A total of four walks in the Free Walking Tour project have been planned, with a visit this Saturday June 12 at 1pm to Chicago artist Joe Janka's "Lost Bike Installation" near the Nelson Algren Memorial Fountain. Janka has invited artists to make work to be installed on an antique bike he refinished and secured to a rack at the corner a year ago. He lost the key to the lock and it's been there ever since. On a third walk, the weekend of June 19, local artist Julia Marsh will oversee a search-and-retrieve assignment that culminates in a report on the journey and, for the group's final walking tour on June 26, Jennifer Bastian will conduct a tour of the Hyde Park site of the World's Columbian Exposition. At each walking tour, the artists will leave chalkboards with the route mapped out for latecomers to follow, as well as a number of sealed "cairns" along the trail--coffee cans, that is--with notebooks inside for patrons to record their thoughts on.

Flying blind

A few weeks ago WBEZ 89.1FM premiered its new Sunday arts magazine, "Hello Beautiful." Two years in the offing, the show replaces morning magazine 848's Sunday spot, gathering together a "best of" from that week's art and culture programming, presented by host Edward Lifson. Promising a more experimental approach, hosts Philip von Zweck and John Wanzel this past Sunday launched the hour-long art program "Blind Spot" on independent community radio station WLUW 88.3FM, which broadcasts live from Loyola University. Since the university stopped funding it, WBEZ rents the management license for WLUW and has been helping plan for the station's eventual fiscal self-sufficiency. Broadcasting from Rogers Park, according to Wanzel, the program can be heard about "as far north as Evanston" and as far south as the Wicker Park neighborhood.

Pioneered by Zweck and Wanzel, the program's inaugural show compressed the nineteen hours of the 1944 D-Day invasion of Omaha Beach into a single hour. A score for computer and cello was composed by Jacob Christopher and Peter Rosenblum at the ratio of three minutes for every hour of the invasion, interspersed with scripted voice-over narrative by Wanzel and Chicago artist Brian Taylor that imagines the point-of-view of soldiers in the attack. The recording starts with the parachute drop, moves through a midnight bombing raid, then to the first and second waves of the invasion. Originally, the D-Day show was supposed to broadcast live, but it ran into a few technical problems along the way. "I built boats with microphones in them," explains Wanzel, "but the anchors weren't working." Instead, a recorded version of Wanzel's boats will fill the space. This weekend, the show will host "radio bingo," a live on-air version of the game with prizes including bumper stickers and a gift certificate to Powell's Bookstore. Listeners can play by emailing the hosts at pvonzweck@yahoo.com or jwanzel@earthlink.net for cards, also available at the Art Institute's Gallery 2 and Reckless Records locations. The following Sunday, the program will air a "cell-phone soundscape," with seven or eight artists using cell phones as microphones and calling in from different locations throughout the city to create an audio landscape.

Free Walking Project: Joe Janka's Bike Convergence takes place Saturday June 12 at 1pm at the corner of Division and Milwaukee. For more information call (773)412-2501. "Blind Spot" airs Sundays from 10pm to 11pm on WLUW 88.7 FM.

(2004-06-09)

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