Much unlike many a magazine editor who recommends you buy all sorts of crap that they most likely got for free, your Jezebel staff doesn’t get jack shit (other than books, unsolicited). And that’s how it should be. But on our own time, in our personal lives, we still buy stuff. So this is Worth It, our daily recommendation of random things that we’ve actually spent our own money on. These are the things we buy regularly or really like, things we’d actually tell our friends about. And now we’re telling you.
I moved to Chicago in 2005 after graduating from college, and after a couple years of eating tubed meats, drinking a lot of beer, and spending my evenings shouting conversations at people in bro bars, I’d had about enough of that scene and the noise it insists upon. Parks were full of children and dogs, neither of which are quiet. The train to and from work every morning was a sardine can of parkas and smells of other people. The three small boys that ran around in my neighbors yard were cute, but noisy. I needed to find some silence, some space. And then, two years later than I should have, I finally discovered the Art Institute of Chicago— huge, open, silent, clean, and beautiful. After visiting a few times, I finally buckled down and bought myself a membership. It’s one of my favorite things that I’ve ever bought.
The Art Institute of Chicago is one of the largest art museums in the world, but most non-Chicagoans know it from the scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when Ferris and his cronies stare at Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Art aficionados may know it for its extensive collection of impressionist paintings or it’s gigantic new Modern Wing that once featured an installation called “Clown Torture.” Former little kids who took field trips to the Windy City for school may remember the Miniature Rooms exhibit in the lower level or the two giant lion sculptures that guard the front stairs. I love spending time around the museum’s Edward Hopper paintings. You can get right up close to a Jackson Pollack painting. On weekdays, it’s never crowded.