I got to try out a few organic restaurants — like Crust and The Chicago Diner — but couldn’t make it to most of them.

Thus a list of places I hope to visit next time — which’ll hopefully be helpful to any green LA girl readers planning to travel to Chicago — Feel free to add your eco-recommendation in the comments.

Butterfly Social Club. 726 W. Grand Ave. 312.666.1695. Organic cocktails, from Goji Kombucha Cider to Funky Budda’s Margarita.

Green Zebra. 1460 W. Chicago Ave. 312.243.7100. A higher-end, well-known vegetarian restaurant in Chicago.

Hopleaf Bar. 5148 N. Clark St. 773.334.9851. Lotsa beer, organic wine, and organic meat options — plus a nice array of vegetarian dishes to choose from.

Lula Cafe 2537 N. Kedzie Blvd. 773.489.9554. Seasonal, organic, local produce at a cafe in Logan Square.

Unrelated to food and drinks: The Working Bikes Co-Op sounds like the best place to buy a bike. The kids here fix up donated bikes, donating some to countries where bikes’re scarce and selling others cheaply in its Chicago store. 1125 S. Western Ave. 312.421.5048.

Tags: chicago, restaurant, bar, bike, bicycle, workingbikes

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Blogs’re about interactivity, so the closing keynote by Elizabeth Edwards — 58-year-old attorney, blogger and wife of presidential candidate John Edwards — was not a speech but a chat.

Which meant bloggers got to ask a lot of questions — and got what seemed like very frank answers from Elizabeth.

For ex: One woman — who rambled a bit about how she writes about reclaiming the F word (faith) asked Elizabeth about how her faith impacts her political views.

Elizabeth said that she’s a methodist, but that she doesn’t believe in an intervening god — as in she doesn’t believe in praying to make shit happen (though she didn’t say shit, and she did say she’s appreciative for the people who pray for her). Instead, she believes in a set of general guidelines for living one’s life.

But Elizabeth emphasized that she believes in living according to those guidelines NOT because of the promise of “eternal life” but because “that’s what’s right.”

If Elizabeth’s answer was the answer most religious people gave, I wouldn’t think of religion as such a dogmatic, painful, and generally harmful blight on society.

Elizabeth was careful to separate her own views from her husband’s views — saying that she’d support gay marriage, even while John Edwards only supports civil unions.

And Elizabeth elaborated on her widely-reported comment that John Edwards would do more for women’s issues than Hillary Clinton would. “I just think that we need someone to lead in an aggressive way,” she said, and quickly pointed to “truly universal healthcare.” Saying that Hillary is “not in the right place on this issue,” because “the position she takes is we have cost saving programs” which would reduce cost of insurance and make it more widely available but not actually provide insurance for all. “The national will is here — what we need is leadership,” Elizabeth said, and specifically pointed to the fact that John Edwards has been honest about the fact that there are “sacrifices were going to have to make to get there” — namely raising taxes on those making more than 200K. “I’ve been disappointed that she’s been unwilling to say that,” Elizabeth said about Hillary.

Many of the questions from the general crowd had to do with healthcare and education — from the availability of childcare and elder care to getting young people involved politically. To the former, Elizabeth pointed to importance to making these occupations more attractive via financial incentives; to the latter, she spoke to the importance to making young people feel they aren’t in a vacuum, that they can hear an echo from the work they do.

On media consolidation, Elizabeth said she doesn’t want the Rupert Murdoch “to be the gatekeeper of the information that comes to the American people.” She elaborated later to say that she wasn’t speaking about Murdoch specifically — though she finds him “problematic” — but to the fact that any one person’s voice should be heard so loudly. “I agree with me all the time,” she said jokingly, “and I still don’t think I should be the sieve through which all the information should come to you.”

Then she came and partied with us at the Chicago Children’s Museum, and I got to ask her about her and John’s eco-activism –

Tags: elizabethedwards, blogher07, chicago, god, religion

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So at the Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, I got a free phone card.

It wasn’t a traditional phone card, though it was wallet sized. There were actually a bunch of them, next to a sign encouraging you to take one, with this inscription: “A found photograph opened a new lead. The latest details were left on a voice message at 312.397.3856.”

So take one I did. This card, titled An Expiring ending II, is part of Mario Garcia Torres’s (with Murtaza Roashan) multi-part, multi-medium piece — all based on trying to find a mysterious One Hotel depicted in a photo taken by an artist called Alighiero Boetti back in the 70s.

So I called the number, and got this message:

As you might have imagined, or already know, the film was never shot. Today, the One Hotel building has still not been found. Maybe it was indeed destroyed around 1981, but the story does not end here. The disappearance of the hotel building now has become less important, as the actual existence of it now becomes blurry. The image you are now holding became incredibly important. According to the photographer journalist M… (can’t make out), this image, which was recently seen in his deteriorating archive, was taken sometime between 1973 and 1975, when the One Hotel was supposedly in operation. The hotel was located in a depicted building. If you look closely, you can see the Aziz Supermarket, then the space where the hotel was, and next the pharmacy, both places present in Alighiero’s photo of the hotel. I now wonder if Alighiero went to Kabul later than 1971, as it has been written. Or perhaps it was all a construction of the artist, or maybe the sign on the hotel building was installed later. I’m now as confused as I was when I started looking for the building. In any case, if not photographic documentation, I did talk to someone in the neighborhood who remembered there was some twins that managed the One Hotel. Presently, I still refuse to believe that Alighiero’s story in Kabul never happened.

Then I got back to the net and found this artblog post by libby, who uncannily covered the exact pieces I planned to write about. I mean, the exhibit was a decent size, yet we both took pics and notes on the exact same pieces. Odd –

Thus some of my pics are below, but I encourage you to visit libby’s post for commentary –

Front: Ganz Grosse Geister (Big Spirits XL), Thomas Schutte; back: Short Cut, Michael Elmgreen and Ingmar Dragset.

Front: Abraham Cruz-Villegas, Rond Point; Back: Stefan Bruggemann, Explanations

Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Until September 2, 2007.

Tags: mca, chicago, museumofcontemporaryart, art, museum,

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I was going to get one of the organic vodka cocktails at Crust, but it was like noon, and I’ve really overdone it on the drinks this weekend, even for me.

So I settled for the organic pinot blanc to go with my “Shrooms” organic pizza — served on a flatbread, which is basically a yum pizza base except, you know, it’s flatbread — with yummy fresh mushrooms, goat cheese, and seasoned spinach.

“Eat Real” is the motto of this certified organic pizzeria — which means 95% of the ingredients used at this eatery are organic. No, it’s not a vegetarian restaurant — but its meats — down to the pork — are organic.

The service was awesome, except when I asked ’bout the desserts, the waiter listed — albeit enthusiastically — only an organic carrot cake and chocolate cake. Um, do you have ice cream? I asked — and he said they did, choco and vanilla.

I said vanilla, but now I’m reading Time Out Chicago and apparently they also have a simple bowl of raspberries for dessert! Crust’s waiters need to not shortchange the dessert menu!

But if I lived in Chicago, I could seriously eat here every day — dessert or no dessert –

Crust. 2056 W. Division St. 773.235.5511.

Tags: crust, pizza, pizzeria, organic, chicago

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Elizabeth Edwards was the keynote speaker for BlogHer — She’s a blogger! And Elizabeth graciously came to the cocktail party at the Chicago Children’s Museum after the talk to hang out, meet people, and answer questions.

I don’t know who I’m voting for yet — I have been pretty impressed with John Edwards’ plan re: the environment, but I’ve yet to really compare it to others….

More about Elizabeth’s talk later. I did get to shake her hand, thank her and John for making the environment one of the key issues in the campaign, and asked if the two’d been long-time environmentalists, or newbies to the green movement.

Elizabeth said they hadn’t seen the urgency of the issue until more recently, but that since a few years ago, she and John have been more actively involved. Here’s a recent post she wrote on how her household’s trying to go green.

Tags: elizabethedwards, blogher07, chicago, chicagochildrensmuseum

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The Chicago Diner.’s v. chilled out — popular, but not frenetically busy on a Friday night — with a really well-stocked bar for a diner.

This all vegetarian, vegan and raw-friendly diner serves fair trade coffee — as well as organic vodka cocktails.

Anne and Kelly aren’t vegan but they really liked their Radical Reuben and Red Pepper Ravioli. My Wilted Spinach Salad was super fresh and yum too –

The vegan chocolate chip cookie ice cream sandwich was a bit hard, making it really difficult to split 3 ways, though it was yum once we divided and conquered it.

I took some pics of the food, but those taken without flash’re reddish and dark, and those with are orangey and washed out. I shoulda gone to the Food photography panel at the BlogHer conference –

But to the right’s a pic of the Reuben from The Chicago Diner’s website –

The Chicago Diner. 3411 N. Halsted. 773.935.6696. M - Th 11 am - 10 pm, Fr 11 am - 11 pm, Sa 10 am - 11 am, Su 10 am - 10 pm.

Tags: chicagodiner, chicago, vegetarian, diner, restaurant

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The most confusing mishmash of info collected into one panel at the BlogHer conference was prolly the one I was on.

Granted, I haven’t attended enough panels to know for sure this one was the most confusing — It’s 2 pm on the 2nd day of the conference, and I’ve only been to 2 panels total — including my own.

But seriously, I was confused by my own panel. Titled “Getting it On(line) for a Cause: Part 2 — Raising Consciousness,” I was asked on the panel to talk about the Starbucks Challenge and the bloggy techniques and apps used for the challenge — del.icio.us, google maps, etc.

So I — and the moderator Rochelle Robinson — thought the panel was about how we can use blog-related technology to promote social change and gave lil presentations to the effect.

Then the panel totally morphed. We did know that at this point, a couple panelists would present the topic for BlogHers Act, a new initiative to to harness the power of women bloggers to make a difference on a single global cause.

But I’d mistakenly thought that this single cause would already be specific and action-oriented, and that the discussion would then turn to specific ways we could use the blog and related apps as a tool to make this Act happen –

Instead, the Act announced was super broad: Global health. And then the two panelists basically turned the convo out to the crowd by throwing out an extremely broad question: What should the cause be?

At this point the panel turned into a bit of a free for all — much like the comment stream on the initial BlogHers Act posts — with one person after another taking the mic to talk passionately — and at length — about their pet cause, including long anecdotes from their childhood or from social work they were involved in. All this was peppered with long and repeated urgings from different people to not get partisan or political or religious or patronizing. The vast majority of the women in the room didn’t get a chance to speak, while a few more assertive women repeatedly gave lecture-length talks about both broad and specific issues that came to their mind.

The panel became a sort of “We women have the power” rally slash “share your feelings” circle….

Certainly, some of the stories were interesting, and all the issues brought up were very important. But I still have no idea WTF BlogHers Act is gonna do, much less how we’re going to accomplish it — and the whole experience was confusing and, in my opinion, not v. productive.

And I’m guessing some of the attendees expected and wanted a panel that actually was about “getting it on(line) for a cause,” not a serious of appeals for one social cause after another with little relation to blogging at all –

So I was a bit peeved.

But then the panel ended and it was cocktail party time on the rooftop of Navy Pier and after free wine and sushi rolls, all was okay again –

Left, me and Britt Bravo. More pics from the BlogHer conference here –

Tags: blogher07, chicago, navypier

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The trouble with not having to pay a conference fee’s that you don’t feel compelled to be at the whole thing — to get your money’s worth out of it, or whatever. Actually, it may be that even if I did pay, I’d miss stuff –

So I missed the BlogHer conference breakfast this morning because that started at a ridic time: 8:30 am — then I missed the welcome, and a get-to-know-each-other type session.

But I slept pretty well and took the 66 bus to Navy Pier, and caught a glimpse of Cool Globes before walking all the way down to the end of the pier to check in around 11 –

Unfortunately the first panels started at 10:45, and I couldn’t sneak in late because the one I wanted to go to was totally full and already had people standing at the doors peeking in –

So I went to the Yahoo! Internet Cafe (left) and checked email and explained to a new friend, Valencia, what an RSS feed is.

Then we had lunch in this huge room. Around 800 people’re at the conference!

And afterwards I took a lil nap at the Cafe — I was tired –

Finally it’s 2:45 and I’m finally attending a panel — Yay! Elise Bauer and Vanessa Fox‘re talking about blog traffic.

It’s a full house. To the right, the crowd to my right, to the left, the crowd to my left.

Tags: blogher07, navypier, chicago

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So far I haven’t done much at the BlogHer conference, except go to a cocktail party last night — (Oops) wine and yummy stuffed mushrooms and crabcakes, courtesy of Yahoo.

But after a brief interlude of eating and drinking I left and met my friend Anne, and after appetizers and more wine at Quartino, we hit The Peninsula.

Some people were having some sort of cocktail event at this hotel. Anne and I saw an open bar, and made ourselves at home.

We were there with an imaginary friend called Jerry.

The party seemed to be something related to an insurance company — I couldn’t figure out what the cardboard cutouts of Oscar statuette were about though.

Tags: chicago, peninsula, thepeninsula, blogher

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Trader Joes in Chicago are just like the ones in LA — except the aisles are like twice as wide.

And Two Buck Chuck costs 3 bucks –

One of the best reasons for staying in California is for the Californian wines — though I wonder why Cali wines aren’t as cheap in Cali as French wines are in France –

It’s balmy and beautiful here right now.

My friend Anne, whose apt I’m crashing at, seems to love it here.

And this time around, Chicago seems to have more Asian peeps on the street than I saw last time –

But if I moved outta LA, I’d still move to NYC, hands down –

If you had to move out of LA, where’d you go?

Tags: chicago, traderjoes

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