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The Lucerne Project opening tonight

If you're reading this and you're in Chicago, and you have a spare hour tonight, consider joining me for the official artist's preview of my exhibition "The Lucerne Project: People I've Never Met, in a Place I've Never Been." It's from 5pm till 9 pm at Finestra Art Space, on the 5th floor of the Fine Arts Building, 410 S Michigan Avenue. Get a ride in the gilded brass and glass, polished wood, human-tended art deco elevators. Drink some free wine. Get a close look at the 100-page accordion book:


Read excerpts from the imaginary Lucerne travel diary (or listen to me reading them via your smartphone):

from an imaginary Lucerne travel diary
We were halfway up the mountain, hanging almost vertically off its side in the old cog railway, when the person sitting next to me in the train said: “I’m going to be sick.”
I wasn’t feeling too well either. The ascent had been fun at first, with a great wide view of the town below the mountain gradually emerging through the clouds, as the carriage pulled up and away from the boarding station. The train inched upwards at a steep angle, but it was no worse than other funicular railways I had travelled on in other parts of the world. The chain car that takes you up to Pest, as in ‘Budapest’, is pretty steep, too, and that didn’t give me the vertigo that everyone had warned me about.  Like the other twenty or so people in the carriage, I was enjoying the sights, snapping the occasional picture, listening to the murmur of the engine and the ‘tock’ of the gears as they moved the car closer to the mountain top.

And maybe shake hands with the Swiss Consul General (well, I did send him an invitation).

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