ML - Michigan Avenue

2014 - Issue 6 - October

Michigan Avenue - Niche Media - Michigan Avenue magazine is a luxury lifestyle magazine centered around Chicago’s finest people, events, fashion, health & beauty, fine dining & more!

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illustration by Daniel o'leary Dona ld Tr ump, wor r ied t hat his glea m ing 1,362-foot-tall building on the Chicago River is too subtle, has plastered his name on it in 20 -foot-high letters. "As time passes, it'll be like the Hollywood sign," Trump told us. With a straight face. Now comes news that George Lucas is planning to build the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art here, promising that it will be much more than a Star Wars memorial. There will be art by Norman Rockwell, a 1963 cover of Mad magazine, a vintage pinup of Kim Novak, a still from the movie Rango…. In other words, it will be a museum of Stuff George Lucas Likes. It's not surprising that these men are paying trib- ute to themselves. What's the alternative—waiting until you die? That leaves an awful lot to chance. How confident are you that your drug-addled grand-heirs will follow through by commissioning a mammoth bronze statue based on your death mask? Not bloody likely. One thing is a safe bet, though. If self-aggran- dizement is your goal, it is inevitable that you will find your way to Chicago. We are the City of Broad Shoulders and Enormous Egos, where "WGN" stands for World's Greatest Newspaper. This is Chicago, where the brief ly senatorial Roland Burris has preemptively honored himself with a mausoleum in a cemetery on the South Side. The tombstone, Whose Is the BIggest? Two high-profile ouTsiders are building monumenTs To Themselves in ChiCago. Join The Club. by paige wiser headlined trail blazer, is engraved with his many accomplishments to date, with room for more. There is a stone bench to collapse on should you be over- come with emotion. And if the crypt doesn't do the trick, Burris has ensured that the legend will live on through his children (Roland W. Burris and Rolanda S. Burris) and grandson (Roland T. Burris). Like the tombstone, there's still room for more. Burris's crony, former governor (and current jail- bird) Rod Blagojevich, erected $15,000 signs above I-PASS lanes that said open road tolling rod r. blagojevich, gover nor. It was really just a stop- gap measure until Chicago could rename the Kennedy Expressway after him. We've become numb to vanity naming. Stroger Hospital. The James R. Thompson Center. In Chicago things are named, things are renamed, and we roll with it. You want to celebrate your status as a lothario with nine-foot-high glowing letters on the Palmolive building spelling out playboy? Fair enough. Oh, you're taking them down? All righty. What, it's Willis Tower now? Seriously? Fine. Really, we've learned not to complain about labels from the very beginning, when the city itself was named. "Chicago," as you know, is the Frenchified version of the Native American word shikaakwah, which translates to "stinky onion." We had nowhere to go but up. Literally. In 1884, Chicago instead became known for the ultimate feat of testosterone: We built the first skyscraper. This, of course, paved the way for men to build soaring, phallic shrines to themselves in perpetuity. Which brings us back to Donald Trump and George Lucas. Stop pushing, boys! There's plenty of room for more. MA 144  michiganavemag.com Gold coastinG october 2014

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