"Chicago is an October sort of city, even in spring." - Nelson Algren
Being away from Chicago during the winter has its advantages. It's not bitter cold and windy, and there isn't 12"-16" of snow in the ground, for sure. At the same time, the national perception of Our Fair City is that winter is so unbearably cold that living here is incomprehensible. As a long time proponent of the long view, (as well as a native Great Lakes Midwesterner), I know that this is not the case.
I landed at Midway on Friday, after being stranded at Dulles for several hours while a serious storm front dropped a snow bomb on the upper half of the nation. When you're driving north through the far South Side at 8P in the middle of December thinking "damn it's good to be back", you've been gone for far too long. Anyway, in spite of Daley's attempts to make us surround City Hall with pitchforks and torches by not plowing the streets, in spite of the horribly cold wind blowing off the lake, in spite of the questionable insulation on the windows of our cheap Bridgeport apartment, I've come to enjoy the really cold weather. (Watch and see what I'm saying in March when I've had enough of this nonsense.)
Although the perception that Chicago is filled with stoic types, who will put on a heavy coat and pull on a pair of boots in January to go about their business, the truth is that we all tell ourselves it'll all be better soon, that Spring is right around the corner, that winter only lasts three or four short months, and once the dial hits 50, we'll all be back out there again.
On those bitter cold days, the ones that happen between Early December and late April, when the weather forecast lines up single digits across the board and the sun brings light but not heat, I don't tell myself those lies. I tuck my head down, stuff my hands in my pockets, and walk faster, hoping that I don't have to wait too long for the bus.
Nonetheless, coming home, taking off the cold and wet boots, and settling down in a warm living room leaves me with a strange sense of satisfaction. There's something in this city that makes the people that live and work here tough. Like late season-baseball in Chicago, even when things look bleak and cold and dark, we just dig in and think about the sunrise that is surely around the corner.
Photo by TheeErin
Monday, December 22, 2008
An October Sort of City
Thursday, December 18, 2008
On a Journey
I keep seeing this commercial on TV:
Every time I see this ad, I think back five years, when I first came back to Chicago. Moving to a new city can be tricky; it takes a while to put down roots, to meet people, to feel established. For those first two years, when I was still broke, rootless and didn't have many friends, I would wonder sometimes why I didn't just cash out, pack it up and hit the road.
I've learned over the years that I'm the kind of person that needs to be part of some sort of community to feel connected, grounded and productive. Although the overarching use of this commercial is to sell Louis Vuitton bags, I'm not sure there's a traveler in this ad in the conventional sense. I'm not convinced that the people in this ad are are out of their elements, so much as just journeying through life.
What is it that we remember from our journeys? I'm sure I saw the Statue of Liberty in New York; I remember best the French-Soul Food Vegan dinner with the guy we stayed with. I know I went to Alcatraz in San Fransisco; I remember best getting drunk in a series of dive bars, or visiting the Lusty Lady and talking about the labor movement with the girl in the private peep show. I know we went to Chapultepec Park in Mexico City; I remember best sitting on the steps of a Catholic church at the top of a hill, listening to Indians pray and drinking coffee with Vero.I'll not be traveling with Louis Vuitton any time soon (not my style). But as I get ready to fly back to Chicago for the holidays, I'm left wondering about the journey that I'm on. Not just the life journey, but also the immediate journey, here in DC. Have I really come face to face with myself? Have I made this trip, or has this trip made something of me?
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Four Months of Solitude?
Not everyone can be settled in one city, or stay in one place for longer than a few years. Some of the people that I've met through work here, especially members of the active-duty military, have mentioned to me that they move around so much that they actually look forward to it. "I get nervous when I'm in a place more than a year and a half. I start looking for my next deployment," said an Air Force pilot I know. For me, I'd much rather live in one place and be a part of a stable community. I've lived in different places, and moved around a little bit, and while it's an exciting, interesting experience, ultimately it leaves me feeling unsatisfied and looking for relationships that are more profound.
I've been here for one week now, and I'm starting to get used to being in the District. I'm even trying to recreate some of the stability that I have back in Chicago: work friendships, regular places for services (groceries, haircuts, cigarettes). The people that know and see you everyday, who, by the very fact that you drop in to buy a cup of coffee most mornings, or you say hi to them at the bus stop when you're on time, or you drop by their desk once in a while to talk shop at work, know and care for you in a broader communal sense.
Call it the "unintentional community", a situation that looks like all the other lives you see in popular culture, except without the luxury of excising the rough edges that people can brush away in the intentional community. And, after only a week in the Capital City, I'm finding communities here nicely. Work is pleasant, and I've made friends with some of the people there, both among my peers an among some of the management. And, speaking of rough edges, I've been able to work around some of the more awkward and standoffish people in my office, by simply being professional and confident with them while making friends around them. (That's a little trick a learned a while back, and I've yet to not have it work!)
As for the social side of DC, well, I've found Yelp to be especially useful. I don't really like the notion of the online community. I have my own real-time community that I fit into and don't need to send out emails and write reviews as part of some "social networking" scheme to be a part of something. But. Knowing that there's a website written by lots of locals makes it really easy to find a decent coffee shop in a part of town you want to go check out, or a bar with outdoor seating. And, in spite of the East Coast reputation for being cool and detached, I've found it really easy to meet people to hang around with in most of the places I've gone to. That may have something to do with the fact that must of the professional class in this city is from somewhere else, but I think ultimately people are, deep down, genuinely interested in meeting others.
I don't really have a conclusion for this post, other than it's a lovely day in the District, and I've got a three-day weekend ahead of me. I suspect that I'll be meeting lots more Washingtonians soon.
Photo by NCinDC
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Debate Night in America and the Brand of the District
Tonight was Debate Night in America, CNN's attempt to make the presidential political process as appealing as Monday Night Football. And as much as I love the idea of fathers and sons sitting around watching the debates like they watch the Bears, I also have some reservations about commodifying American Democracy. For all of its faults, the notion that some 300 million heterogeneous people have a referendum every four years on the state of the republic is a pretty remarkable thing, even when it goes horribly, cynically awry.
But as I was watching one of George W. Bush's former speech writers analyze tonight's debate (sharply dressed like most of the career climbers I see walking around DuPont Circle before and after work most weekdays), I got to thinking about one of the differences I've noticed between DC and Chicago. It took me lots of visits to many other cities in North America before I discovered that you can't go downtown to find out what's going on in a city. (I think you can only get away with this in Chicago and New York.) The District is, by far, much smaller than Chicago, both in size and population. Population particularly is a significant difference between DC and Chicago; with only about a half million residents within the District compared to Chicago's nearly three million, you can feel the difference just walking around. According to the Lonely Planet that I checked out from the library, DC's population doubles every workday when professionals that work for, in and around the government come in from Maryland and Virginia.
As I was watching these two speechwriters from the Bush and Clinton administrations try to convince Jim Lehrer that their guy had won the debate, I got to thinking about the symbolism of campaigns, and of the modern political process. While the right-wing, especially the neoconservative movement, is on the retreat this election cycle, they're still using the old political short-hand for patriotism and identity politics of the past. And it occurred to me that the District itself is marked by symbolism much in the way that modern politics is marked by symbolism. DuPont Circle, Admas Morgan, The New U, Anacostia, Bethesda, Arlington, Crystal City, Franconia, Alexandria. Each of these places (along with the phrase The District) is short hand for what it says about you and your lifestyle. White, professional and government. Poor, black and violent. Middle class, on the GS and suburban. Military or intelligence.
As I was watching these former speechwriters argue over who could best the other with symbolism, I couldn't help but think about who I see walking around in front of my apartment when I go out to smoke. And while those symbols are different from the ones I see walk around my neighborhood in Chicago, I wonder if stereotypes here are really any different from stereotypes back in the City of Big Shoulders.
Monday, October 6, 2008
You Won't Find Homeland Security Like This in Chicago
Walking down Pennsylvania Ave is pretty anticlimactic. DC is pretty anticlimactic. You look out the window of the jet as you land at National, and you see the capital, the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial on the Potomac's Tidal Basin. You walk through the airport and catch a cab, which drives you to a quiet apartment in the Old City of the District. It all really feels very much like you're some hotshot diplomat coming to town to cut a deal. It's a neat feeling, and you expect to have that feeling all the way through.
So when I went to go check out the White House over the weekend, I was hit with the reality of one of our national monuments, something that at least most Americans think of as their own, is very much real. The White House, up close and sans zoom lens and dramatic lighting is pretty impressive. But it isn't ABC Nightly News impressive.
The White House is an impressive building, but it's still very much real. Aside from the random protesters parked in front of the presidential mansion, the gawking tourists and the uniformed Secret Service police, there's also a sizable contingent of service workers. Gardeners, custodial staff and building engineers walk the grounds, doing mundane daily maintenance tasks. And you get the sense that it's an incredibly secure building. Except. Except that you can see behind the curtain, so to speak. As we walked around the building, there were gates that police officers were walking through, building staff moved freely. And on the East side of the grounds, we came across a gate that was closed with a simple lock, held in place with a bike lock cable. Walking around DC, I see lots and lots of buildings with wrought iron bars on the windows. And in Chicago, I usually see buildings with wrought iron gates around them. The lock sets are surrounded with high-gauge steel mesh, so you can't just reach through the bars and open the lock. But here's the White House, locked up with cable, like a bicycle in some small town.
In Chicago, that bike would be gone in less than an hour.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
And we're back!
At least for a while. City of Progress has had a busy summer, and an exciting fall is off to a great start. I moved from Liquor Park to Bridgeport - mainly due to the negligence of my landlord. Long story short: $675 a month is a great deal on an apartment as long as nothing breaks.
In the meantime, I've put most of my stuff into storage and am living out of laundry baskets and a duffel bag at my girlfriend's place on the Southside.
In other news, I'm not in school this year! Huzzah! This has given me such a glorious sense of freedom and relaxation, I can't even begin to describe it. Also, I'm traveling to Washington, DC for four months for work, so I'm hoping that I'll be able to document some of the experiences I have living in another American urban city.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Monday, January 21, 2008
Martin Luther King, 2008
One of my favorite things to do for Chicagoist is post stuff that wouldn't normally fall into my beat. In the past that's included music reviews, running around Lollapalooza talking to people that aren't from Chicago, and attending a debate between Ron Jeremy and a Pastor committed to helping people leave the porn industry. It also includes writing the about religious holidays and traditions, and the occasional reflection on an historically significant figure.
Since today is Martin Luther King Day, I did a quick rundown of events in the city today, and posted a video of Dr. King's final speech. While I was looking for information about Dr. King earlier today, I came across a nice set of "rare and unpublished photographs of the civil rights movement from the Life Magazine archive". Life magazine is a little before my time, but I remember looking at it when I was younger and being stunned at the powerful photography it presented.
The great thing about these photos is that they aren't about Martin Luther King. The few times that you see Dr. King, he looks very human, a man and a preacher, nothing more. Yet so often, I think that people lift up the man forgetting his message. The real reason the Civil Rights Movement succeeded is because they didn't lift up a single man, but rather people took his message as their own and carried it forward as their own.
Every third Monday in January the government closes down, the preachers get dressed up, and, like clockwork, the "I Have a Dream" speech makes the rounds in the public consciousness. That speech was not his most important, most courageous, or his most politically advanced. But it's what he's remembered for. As I was reading the unsigned letters the Reader's Whet Moser culled from the Chicago Tribune back in 1966, when King paid our city a visit, I wasn't shocked. It didn't bother me, or cause me to stop, shake my head and think of how far we've come. Maybe I'm cynical. But after watching the immigration debate, and the fury of anger and hysteria that it whips up whenever we start talking about legitimizing the people who have come here to work, I wonder if we've forgotten the dream that so many want to remind up of each January.
Here's hoping the next election changes things.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Spring Cleaning
The recent cold snap has got me dreaming of Spring. There are always a few miserably cold weeks during any given Chicago winter, but they always seem to be so brutal that no matter how many times you've gone through it, you never really get used to it. I know that I'll hate March when it comes, because that month is an evil bitch. She teases you with promises of Summer, while holding cold, rainy days over your head, leaving you stranded for weeks at a time without sunlight.
Back when I was an undergrad, I was getting ready to actually finish my degree. (I say actually, because it took me like seven years to conclude what most people do in four.) One of the required courses was 201, Professional Writing. Luckily for me, I took it with an open minded professor, who taught classical literature and creative writing. So while the rest of the class was wrestling with clunky words like "stated", "provide", and "furthermore", I was writing poems and short stories. At the time I was unemployed, had just broken up with a girl I really liked, and was getting ready to move back in with my parents. Taking his class as a creative writing course was as much about earning credit to graduate as it was about writing as an expression.
One of the things that Dr. Hull would have us do at the beginning of class is spend 15 minutes "just writing". He didn't care what we wrote, if it made sense, was interesting or even if it was pretty prose. "Just write," he would tell the class. "That's the only way that you will get good at it." So the class would sit in concentrated silence, keyboards clicking, laboring to "just write" for those 15 minutes, three times a week. After our time was up, he would pass out a sheet of paper with "flourishes", clips of what we had written in the previous class that he liked.
I set up City of Progress as the next step for me when I was still thinking about what I would do post-Chicagoist. Obviously, this isn't my post-Chicagoist blog. In fact, aside from a few friends and my parents (hi Dad!), nobody really even reads this site. Which is fine with me. That's given me the freedom to write what I want to write. And it's given me an excuse to write a little bit, every day.
Those dreams of Spring have made me want to do the things people do in the early months. Namely, open up the house, step outside, and do some cleaning. While it's far too cold to even think about kicking the doors open and do real cleaning (although there is some light picking-up scheduled for later today), I thought I would do some verbal Spring cleaning. So, in the spirit of Dr. Rick Hull's Professional Writing 201, here's some clips from unpublished posts that I wrote just to write:
So we walked down Western looking for a different restaurant that someone told us about. Which we couldn't find. Seriously, we got to Ohio before I suggested we turn around. At this point the movie was starting in about 15 minutes, and we had pretty much decided that we just wanted to eat dinner and drink at a bar and be left alone.
Last winter when Margaret Lyons wrote a piece for TOC, I went with her and we took both a revolver and a semi-automatic handgun class. I grew up with guns: my father was a duck hunter and trap shooter, so I learned about guns, safety and sport early on, as did my sister (although she never went hunting with us, she did come out and learn to shoot). As I got older and my father got more involved in the union, there was less and less time for hunting and sport shooting. Consequently, it had been about 15 years since I picked up a gun. Regardless, I had no experience with handguns.
I'm certain that there was some B-School calculus in a marketing department somewhere at Walgreens Corporate HQ that put this product on-line. And I'm certain that running to Wags for a little lube and some rubbers is something that red-blooded Americans do all the time. But I'm also reasonably certain that if you're doing an internet search for a specially lined plush throw to protect your dry-clean only Italian leather duvet from lube, spooge and santorum, you aren't clicking through Walgreens website muttering to yourself "I know it's in here somewhere". But who am I to judge?
Image via Michael DaKidd
Monday, January 7, 2008
Winter in Babylon
So, I'm back. I pretty much took the month of December off from this, and writing for Chicagoist as well. It's funny, because whenever the semester ends, I always vow that I'm going to do all the fun things the I don't get to do when I'm in school. Taking pictures, reading, writing, digging through thrift stores. Those kinds of things.
And in the summer, I'm pretty good about doing those things. But over the holidays, not so good. I get all done with finals, then it's time to catch up on Christmas shopping, and visiting the family, and then it's all over. Whew!
Anyway, for the past few years, I've taken some sort of trip over the holiday. Mexico twice (Chiapas one year, Mexico City the next). Los Angeles. Puerto Rico. This year: Toronto. I know, I know. It's cold. But so what? I live in Chicago for crying out loud, so I think I can get down with a little cold. And Toronto is pretty rad.
Anyway, it was a pretty fun trip. We were supposed to meet up with the staff of Torontoist, and we almost did it. By almost, I mean that we made it to the same bar. But for whatever reason, in spite of me stalking through the bar asking everyone if they knew David Topping, we couldn't find them, and they didn't spot us. But oh well. We had a nice, quick dinner at Pizza Pizza, (you'd think Little Caesar's would sue), and then wandered into a nifty dive bar called The Tap. And let me tell you: Canadian beer? Stronger than American beer. I still can't figure out how many kilometers are in a pint, but the next morning, it sure seemed like a lot.
The United States is often called a melting pot; people immigrate here, and within a few generations they have assimilated. Lots of us have hyphenated heritage: Polish-American, Irish-American, Asian-American. For others, they belong to distinctly American ethnic groups: Jewish, Black, Hispanic. But ultimately everyone gets to be American, whether that means weaving their own history, culture and past into the larger American narrative of liberty, equality, freedom and opportunity, or just assuming an American identity.
On the other hand, Canada is often called a mosaic, and while four days in Toronto hardly makes me a scholar of American-Canadian relations, watching TV (in English and French)I got a sense that each group gets to come to Canada and make it their own. There is no grand notion of Canada that each immigrant group melts into, but rather a broad territory that everyone lives in. One group comes, and the others move over to make a little more room.
We spent most of the long weekend bumming around the neighborhoods on the west side of the city, eating Indian food and digging through junk shops. Except for the blizzard we drove through in Michigan, it wasn't a bad drive. And the All Days House 3 Hostel was clean, quiet and chill. And close to the subway. I forget, sometimes, how much fun it is to forget the day to day, pack some clothes, and get lost. If loving Chicago is like being in a relationship, then visiting Toronto is like having a crush. I'm ready to throw a bag out the window and hop the next freight train out to be with my love, damn the consequences.
