Blog2L2
- Baldessari May 18, 2012 Derek Bridges
- Rewind May 11, 2012 Derek Bridges
- Going in the Opposite Direction May 8, 2012 Derek Bridges
- Rope Man with Cigarette April 25, 2012 Derek Bridges
Stronger Than Dirt Pete Moss
Democracy in Chicago: Medium Rare
I went to bed last Thursday night a citizen of Chicago’s 46th Ward. I rose the next morning a citizen of the 47th. Without moving an inch. I don’t really mind; I’m not upset. For sentimental reasons, I’ll kind of miss having been part of the “Fighting 46th” for all these years – there goes another piece of my misspent youth, etc. But the 47th seems like a perfectly good ward for me. Despite the fact that I don’t have a personal nickname for it yet. I know it will start with the letter “F.” But the rest is undetermined. I’ve already rejected purely laudatory adjectives. No “Fantastic” or “Fabulous.” The “F” word presents itself for consideration, but I think not.
I’d open it up for public suggestions, although that would lack a certain symmetry. Considering that the City Council didn’t ask for any suggestions from members of the public as to which ward they’d like to be in, or how they’d feel about being cartographically uprooted.
If anyone cares about the fact that the… Continue reading
Colicky Baby Records and Tapes: Introduction Part Two: Gonzo DIY: The Amateurs Turn Weird
(Note: The first part of the introduction to this series of posts is located here. Maybe with the next installment, the actual series will begin. Or maybe the whole thing will be all “Introduction.”—STDPM)
In 1989, Mike Gunderloy, about whom I’ll have more to say a little later, published a booklet collecting the answers given by dozens of small-press magazine (or “zine”) publishers to the question, “Why publish?” (That booklet is available online, with Gunderloy’s permission, in PDF format.) It covers just about every imaginable reason why someone would want to go to through the toil, expense, and emotional turmoil of creating and distributing a small print publication.
“Why publish?” It’s a good question, because one thing that most publishers discover, when they publish something, is that a large portion of the world’s population would prefer that they didn’t. And the vast majority of the remaining people don’t care one way or another.
I was involved in small-press publishing, in one form or another, on and off, from roughly 1988 to 2000. I’ve… Continue reading
Colicky Baby Records and Tapes: Introduction
I was an impressionable kid. For instance, I was very moved by the “let’s put on a show!” ethos of “The Little Rascals” (aka “Our Gang”) shorts – which were broadcast every afternoon on Chicago UHF TV. Thanks to Spanky, Alfalfa, and company, I was forever trying to put on a show in my own backyard, always unsuccessfully, due to the fact that there were not enough fellow rascals in my neighborhood to stage a full-blown vaudeville extravaganza, or even to serve as a suitable audience, notwithstanding the tireless efforts of my long-suffering (and sole) sidekick, Jeffie.
I can’t remember if it was “Our Gang” or some other bane of Newton Minow that provoked me to try to start up my own neighborhood “newspaper.” Like my attempts at theater, my paper never got off the ground, even though I had found a really kick-ass place in the woods for a secret hideout, er, editorial headquarters.
Failures are learning experiences, and should be appreciated, as such.
I stayed interested in the newspaper business. After a semester of gonzo sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll-soaked fun as the news editor of my community college weekly (the day we learned we were being evicted from our little hash-smoke-redolent trailer on the edge of campus, and were to be moved into a glass-walled fishbowl in the midst of the lair of our nemesis, the faculty director of the student government – dude was Dean Wormer with a cheesy mustache and smarmy grin – the editorial board got together, got wasted, and trashed the bejesus out of our beloved offices and spray painted obscene cartoons all over the hammer-and-boot-pocked wood-esque-paneled walls – good times) I transferred to one of my home state’s top-four “directional” universities and immediately joined the staff of the student newspaper.
I think I lasted two days. Maybe three. Details are unusually fuzzy in my memory, but something about my first assignment pissed me off, and I said some things to a couple of editors that made me unwelcome in their very stuffy and Omega-Theta-Pi-House-like home. Which was actually a house. A house full of very dull people.
Continue readingGripe/Countergripe
August 2011. Hoffman Estates, Illinois. I’m waiting for my annual checkup at the glaucoma doctor’s office, reading a back issue of Chicago magazine. The small waiting room is about three-quarters full. As usual, I’m the youngest patient in there, by a couple of decades.
An old man enters, signs in, and sits down next to me. He says, to nobody in particular, “She sure likes to pack ’em in.” He pauses for a beat. “Well, I guess if you don’t like it, you can get a different doctor.” Another beat. “If you can find one.”
I think to myself, he’s a whiner, but I’ve got to appreciate a whiner who can cover all the bases like that, single-handed.
The day the Chicago Police Department put a barrier between us and the snakes
It was August 1998. I’d been living in my “garden”-level apartment on the Far North Side of Chicago for only a few months, and I still wasn’t sure that random individuals wouldn’t be trying to climb in through the windows on a regular basis. I had lived within a few hours of Chicago for my entire life, but I was 30 before I moved to the city itself, and my expectations about city life were derived from hearsay and news stories, most of which leaned toward the sensational, or at least the dramatic.
A lot of Chicagoans like to embrace the stereotypes about the city – even the negative ones. Especially the negative ones. They like to play up the rough edges. Nelson Algren famously said about Chicago, “Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”
I guess I assumed that “real” meant, in large part, “dangerous.” So during that first summer in the urban jungle, I had made it a habit to… Continue reading
Brief Dispatch from “The Big Uneasy,” Chicago Music Box Theatre Screening
This may or may not be news to anyone here, but it was news to me. At last night’s Chicago screening of his documentary film, “The Big Uneasy,” during the Q&A after the movie, Harry Shearer provided more detail regarding something he’s been tweeting about recently.
He said that reaction from the Obama administration to Army Corps of Engineers whistleblower Maria Garzino’s exposure of faulty levee pumps has been nonexistent – with one exception.
According to Shearer, the only word from the administration has come from former deputy press secretary Bill Burton, who said about Garzino, “What do we have to do to make her shut up and go away?”
On a lighter note, when Shearer was asked whether he feared repercussions similar to those suffered by the whistleblowers covered by the film, he said, “I thought about it. And I figured, what can they do, tell me I can’t be Mr. Burns anymore?”
Thoughts During Intermission
I know I’m one of the only Chicagoans paying attention to the Stanley Cup finals this year – and maybe one of the few Americans outside of Boston – but I can’t help it. Hockey is the only sport that grabs my full attention anymore. When there’s a game on, I sit still and watch it. No other sport makes me do that.
I still love baseball, but I don’t think of it as a sport as much as a languid, friendly, leisurely radio talk show that I tune into on summer evenings while making dinner and washing up afterwards. I rarely sit down and rivet myself to the TV screen when a baseball game’s on. Instead, I drift in and out of awareness of the game’s progress, while I do whatever else is distracting me at the moment, and it doesn’t seem to detract from the general enjoyment of baseball, as I know it.
Hockey requires attentiveness. The broadcasters don’t have time to yak about that day’s lunch or yesterday’s golf game, or their… Continue reading
Blizzard ’11: Hot Stove Report
Barely underway for four hours now, the Insert-Hyperbolic-Name-Here Blizzard of 2011 is already having deleterious effects on both of Chicago's baseball teams.
On the north side, the Tribune's "Chicago Weather Center" page reports early damage to the Home of the Cubs:
Continue readingA section Wrigley Field's roof was blown off shortly after 6PM. Some of the debris landed in the intersection of Addison and Clark. Police are attempting to clean up the debris.
Residentially Rahm’s Chi-Town
(To the tune of John Cooper Clarke's classic, "Evidently Chickentown."
Warning: Foul Language Ahead.)
Continue readingTell it like it is, brother
It is a scientific fact that every other person under the age of 30 in Chicago (and every server at every restaurant) is a member of an improvisational comedy troupe. Comedy is one of Chicago’s top industries; besides the big dog in town, Second City, there are approximately 10,000 improv troupes and an unknown (large) number of storefront and basement theaters.
Young people come to Chicago from all over the Midwest and elsewhere with dreams of breaking into showbiz and becoming the next Stephen Colbert or Tina Fey. The vast majority fail, of course, which is the nature of dreams. If success were likely, you wouldn’t call it a dream, you’d just call it an item on a to-do list.
Native Chicagoans—of all ages and backgrounds—tend to be natural comedians. They have no professional theatrical ambitions, but they appear to see themselves as direct descendants of Belushi and Murray. They’re always playing to the gallery, performing for strangers. At least that’s the best explanation I can come up with for why they talk so bloody… Continue reading
Call me “Esquire”
This is the traditional season for everyone to spend money on things nobody really needs or wants. And I am no exception.
Last Friday I electronically transferred $289 from my bank account to that of the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission of the State of Illinois, to maintain my license to practice law for the year 2011, although I have not practiced law in over 15 years and have no intention of doing so in the future. Some people remember Black Friday, to keep it holy; this is my own annual ritual.
It’s two annual rituals, really: paying the registration fee, and re-resolving never to again accept employment as an attorney, not that anyone’s offering.
I don’t know why I keep paying the fee, except that it was really hard to get the license the first time around. Getting a law degree was easy. Passing the bar exam wasn’t all that difficult. Filling out the attorney registration paperwork, though, was murder.
They wanted to know about everything that had ever happened to me. They stopped… Continue reading
Rahm’s New Job?
Charlie Chaplin made just one motion picture in Chicago, but that was enough to get an auditorium named after him in the main campus building of the small college that occupies the building in which it was produced. That’s where I go to vote, the Charlie Chaplin Auditorium at St. Augustine College, on West Argyle Street.
The room sounds more interesting than it is; it looks pretty much like a small gymnasium in any working-class community center. As a polling place, it’s fully low-tech. No touch screens; you use a magic marker to fill in a blank space in a black arrow to cast your vote. It’s always uncomfortably warm, and by the time I’m done voting, my back always hurts from hunching over the rickety plastic voting “booth,” which could never support my weight if I leaned on it.
You don’t get a sticker to prove you’ve done your civic duty, you get a photocopied piece of paper. (This is at least symmetric with the fact that about a million city vehicle stickers distributed… Continue reading
Happiness is knowing it could always be worse: On politics, government, and what they have to do with one another
Estragon: I can’t go on like this.
Vladimir: That’s what you think.
As a professional editor and writer working in an unspecified niche market (to narrow it down a little, I’ll call it “law” and leave it at that), I spend a lot of time staring straight into the heart of the sausage factory that is government—analyzing court decisions, tracking bills through the legislative process, untangling the machinations of various administrative agencies.
I find the subject of government fascinating. It’s just too bad there’s so much politics wrapped up in it.
It seems to me that “government” and “politics” are synonymous to most people, but I don’t see it that way. I know there’s considerable overlap, but I don’t think they’re the same. “Government” is about doing things, taking care of business. “Politics” is about the eternal junior-high-school struggle for dominance over one’s peers.
In college, I majored in Political Science, but it always seemed like a misnomer. I never studied elections or the art of jawboning (aka, “moral suasion”); I studied foreign policy, which… Continue reading
The real Chicago Blackhawks
"Them is Chicago hawks! OK? Them the Blackhawks!"
Peregrine falcons nesting on the (grand old, shuttered, sleeping) Uptown Theatre, plus commentary.
Continue readingStill Love This Bar – Field Report from Carol’s Pub
Patrick and I had barely settled in at a table on the far left of the room, with a good view of the stage and a clear path to the john, when the waitress stepped over from the bar.
“Hi, guys! What can I get y’all?”
“Uh … whaddaya got on tap?” Pat asked.
“Well, we’ve got Miller Lite, Old Style, and PBR. It’s $2.50 a mug, $15 for a pitcher.”
Carol’s Pub hadn’t changed at all.
“Y’all like some nuts?” Sure, why not. “OK, I’ll bring you some pistachios.” Seconds later she was back with the pitcher, two plastic cups, and a paper napkin full of nuts.
It was early in the evening – for Carol’s, on a Saturday – not quite 10 o’clock. The place looked exactly the same as I’d remembered it, except nobody was smoking. The last time I’d been there, you could still smoke in bars in Chicago. And I did, frequently and enthusiastically.
So no smoking at Carol’s … in that respect, we’d changed together with the times. As… Continue reading
Oh, Carol’s …
I haven’t been to Carol’s Pub for a decade, but it will always be the emotional naval in my personal version of Chicago’s heaving swollen abdomen. So to speak.
Carol’s Pub is what snobs would call a “dive bar,” but what I would call a “neighborhood tavern.” It’s a humble watering hole on a busy street corner in a residential neighborhood. The décor hasn’t changed since about 1985, and the taps probably haven’t been cleaned many times since then, but nobody at Carol’s is going to sneer at you for wearing off-label sneakers or an insufficiently ironic t-shirt.
Carol’s is more than a standard Chicago working-class saloon (an endangered species in general) – it’s a full-blown honky tonk, with a live country-western band that plays on weekend nights until 4 or 5 a.m., week in, week out.
I haven’t been there in a long time, but during my first year in Chicago, I was at Carol’s three or four nights a week. Weekends were the best, because Diamondback would play, but weeknights were the best,… Continue reading
Furdermore … dis, dat, and da udder t’ing
CHICAGO – One of the funniest things I’ve heard in many years was said to me by a co-worker, a lifelong Chicagoan.
“There’s no such thing as a Chicago accent,” he said.
I laugh every time I think of it.
Of course, like everyone else who grew up here, he pronounced “Chicago” as “Shuh-CAW-go,” and, as well-educated as he is, I bet that after a beer or two, he would have said “dere” and “t’ing.”
He said it with a straight face, and he meant it. (Not like the Facebook group, “There is no such thing as a Chicago accent!,” which appears to have been started by individuals who, in fact, believe the opposite.)
“Dis’s hayer sapose ta tawk. Dis’s narmal. Ever’wun eltz tawks funny.”
All right, now I’m exaggerating. And I’d agree that there is no such thing as the Chicago accent. There are, of course, several. It’s a very diverse city. Ukrainians and African-Americans and Vietnamese and Assyrians and Bosnians all have their own accents. As do Uptown Kentuckians and the few remaining… Continue reading