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 King earlier today, I came across a nice set of "rare and unpublished photographs of the civil rights movement from the Life Magazine archive".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.

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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

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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.

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