|
ONE MIGHT THINK THAT HAVING GROWN UP in Milwaukee, only 100 miles north, that I would know much more about the city of Chicago. But that would be wrong. Here I am—30 years old, married for nearly five years, a citizen through the years in Milwaukee, both Twin Cities, St. Louis, Boston, and Brooklyn. Up until this past spring, when my wife Hannah and I crash-landed in Chicago, if you would have asked me about this town, I would have said, "you know, I don't know much…” and trailed off into smoky visions of so-called grander illusioned towns like New York City and San Francisco.
The entire reason we moved to Chicago was a particularly ridiculous affair. Officially, we left Brooklyn one year ago. More accurately, we ran for our lives. Brooklyn was a bona-fide riot, no doubt about that. We lived in an inhumanely-small apartment with rent that was neither worth the money nor within our realistic budget, given that I was awash in the kosmic polyphony of full-time music school. You know what was really tough? Embodied human-to-human connections. The pace of the city, we realized, makes that very difficult. People don’t have the time to be people. So many events in New York City are a high-speed headache, skirting in every direction imaginable. And the city, folklore aside, seemed antithetical to the pursuit of creative art on our terms, which says more about us than the city, probably. We did love the restaurants, the SoHo district, the Long Island vineyards, the great art at BAM, the geographic proximity to friends and family in Boston and Philly, and of course the pizza (for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert). But the fact is that we wanted to leave New York City from the very first day we arrived. Our first week, stillborn, we burned in naked high-noon shadows in a radical internal flame that ripped us apart several times over. No joke: it was ugly.
After a brief three month Milwaukee stint, filled with analysis paralysis and a carousel ride from hell—making a decision—we choose……Chicago! Like I said, I didn’t know anything about Chicago, and though it makes me sound like a wild-eyed kid, everyday is a crazy new experience, and I’m loving it. My lord, the things in Chicago. Like Milwaukee in extreme macrokosm. Milwaukee times 5000. Minus the bowling alleys, and the bar to people ratio.
The Model of the Outdoor Music Pavilion in Chicago's Millennium Park.
THE “IT(S)” OF CHICAGO
Our apartment is two blocks from Lake Michigan. What is this—we are living in the cheap-rent part of Chicago, and we have the lake—the lake?—within casual eyeshot! Only rich people get to be near the lake, or so I thought. Two blocks south is the Chicago Shambhala Center, next to a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Four blocks west is one of the two dozen or so “little Mexico” districts of Chicago. Two blocks north are public basketball courts, home to some serious ball in the summer months. Five blocks south is Chicago's oldest coffeehouse, the Heartland Café. From the appearances of the sentient and insentient decor, there is a distinct "reformed hippie" vibe that brings forth a state of subtle memory of our beloved Twin Cities, where everyone is a hippie of the mind. We live in the "High Fidelity" neighborhood of Chicago, where in the movie John Cusack lived and ranted. You can see his filmic apartment from the Red Line train. Every once in a while, I wonder if I'll see Jack Black, or even Dick, bopping along to the headphones in their head. Maybe all of masculine Chicago is one part Jack Black. Maybe the other is Dick. Maybe not. The feminine has definitely got an Oprah thing going on. One of the many feminine fires, of course.
We live off of Sheridan Road, which runs north/south along the lake. Take it north, and we are at Northwestern University, and downtown Evanston in five minutes. There are plenty of the corporate creature comforts in Evanston—such as Whole Foods grocery stores and the like. Taking Sheridan Road south, and you eventually join up with Lake Shore Drive. The long scenic stretch, which is called "LSD", even by the local newscasters, hugs the lake all the way into the downtown area, called The Loop. What a drive! There are plenty of green grass parks, walkways, bike paths. Plenty of turns on LSD, and a lot of friggin’ bumps. The city must not have a lot of coin earmarked for street repair. But it keeps you awake on the road. There is no sleeping in Chicago.
Bumpin’ up and down, you see the Hancock Building and the Sears Tower come into focus, and the entire skyline of Chicago emerges. Snaking through it all is the Chicago River, the direction of which was actually reversed in the early twentieth century. Can you imagine it? Weird, but true. To me, there is a bit of a parable in that; Chicagoans work hard, take on impossible challenges, succeed against the odds, but the success goes unnoticed unless you really look closely. If you do, you are blown away, but if you don't, you miss it, because… damn, it is just a river.
Anyways, when the downtown area burned to the ground in the early 20th century, the city brought in architects from around the world to rebuild the city. The competition amongst architects yielded many of the great buildings in the Loop. Win, win, win all around. I do love the architecture here. Saying so is a broken record, but records get broken for a reason. Usually it is because they are good.
Frank Gehry is building a music pavilion on the north end of Grant Park, the downtown public recreation area, in the newly created Millennium Park. Gehry is my favorite architect. His work embodies for me Goethe's comment that "architecture is frozen music." This new music pavilion is another of his multi-perspectival shimmery-steel curvy structures, like Bilbao Guggenheim in Spain, and the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, to name a few.
The music pavilion is a large, ready-to-surf wave cryogenically frozen in just before it could land on the city and wash it forever away to the bottom of the lake, like some sort of Vienna Hot Dog Atlantis. The pavilion has this wild horizontal lattice system of large pipes that hang over the seating area which reminds me of one of Alex Grey's “lattice, causal body, vision” paintings. Whatever is said about Gehry's work and the culture around it [Let’s just say that Gehry has a slightly less than world-centric ethical line when it comes to labor practices; see The Baffler #15 for more. –ed.], it is difficult, in my view, not to think his manifest vision pushes the avant-garde of architecture, and art, to open up human body-minds to radically new large-scale forms and depicted perspectives.
Of course there are all the museums, the Art Institute, the Shedd Aquarium, and much more. There are the universities, schools, and seedy record shops. I have no problem finding an Irish bar in pretty much any part of town. There is the film culture: must be the long shadows of Siskel and Ebert. Surprising to some, Columbia College is the largest film school in the world. There are the dramatic theatres everywhere, large and small. There are the music clubs, and all the coffeeshops. Plenty of pubs and galleries. The Magnificent Mile....and let's not forget the Chicago-style stuffed pizza.
I like to get a slice or two from Giordano's, and sit and stare for hours at the Gehry music pavilion, as a flower zero wave in-progress. I've often wondered what would happen if Gehry's work melted, and started to flow in all directions. What would the music sound like? If architecture is frozen music, then music is liquid (or even boiling) architecture, and all that can sound like...what? Sometimes, I hear it somewhere deep inside, like a stranger in a strangely familiar melody.
Blues legend Lonnie Brooks (right) administers cunninglingus to his
guitar at Buddy Guy Legends, August 2003 (photo by Coolmel)
“WE” CHICAGO
It has been said about Chicago's culture that Chicagoans have a healthy skepticism for imported spirituality. Allaudin Mathieu, a composer who lived in Chicago for 14 years and was the founding musical director of Second City Theatre, offers that very assessment. I lightheartedly interpret that to mean that Chicagoans, stereotypically, don't go hog-wild for the Buddha, gonzo for Shiva and Shakti, insane for Allah, nor do they do prostrations for trees, prayers for the earth, nor tantric high-fives for the sensuous body electric. Or maybe they do, and I just haven't met those folks yet. Feel free to drop me a line.
So what does that leave? Many things, but for one that leaves the Blues. Oh, the Blues: the suffering of regular folks, and the soulful twelve bars of manifest rejuvenation. The minor blues talk about getting beat down by life, love, and booze, but getting back up and livin' — l-i-v-i-n — knowing that it ain't always a bag of stink-pretty roses. The Blues are about realism, about communal confirmation that suffering and sorrow ain't confined to you and yours. The blues are a support system, to acknowledge the crap and crud of your illusions, your loves lost, your own damn idiocy, and the weird shit all around — to acknowledge all that and then to give you those last bars on the V7 chord, to reassure that you and your kin-tribe-folk that you are gonna get on with your life, that there's gonna still be a sunset tomorrow evening, that the morning will come, that the storms will die out and pass, that life needs the water, and that songs are always worth singing, even if only to get tangled up in the silly mess-games of manifest existence on the third planet house of rock from the sun. And when it's really groovin', really smokin', and really kickin', those blues wolves come out from the alleys and dark rooms to start howling down the lovely moon.
O, the lovely moon.
Did you know that Chicago was the third choice to be the railroad hub of Middle America? Cincinnati was first, St. Louis second. Both turned the offer down. Chicago accepted, and it all changed. Chicago became the junction between East and West, between opportunism and classicism, between the earth’s core and the fertile top soil.
But rooted in the Midwest, Chicagoans know all that is crap. Some say that Chicagoans never miss an opportunity to point out how the city is "1st" in so many areas of civic life in America. But Chicagoans also know that the city will never have the same level of fame, mystery, intrigue, and infamy as the big cities on the coasts. LA, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, D.C.: Chicago has the tag "the Second City" for a reason. And besides, "First City" is a bunch of bullshit anyway. And, oh yeah, this is "the Windy City." The Cubs, the Bulls, the Sox, the Hawks, the Bears, and all those wacko fans.
Go Pack go.
There are plenty of tension hotspots in the culture of Chicago. Racial tension is at or near the top of the list. Chicago, for better or worse, is a main home of the slavery reparations movement. We will see how that all turns out. Many folks I've spoken to talk about the racial segregation in and around the city. Perhaps we can all agree that much cultural healing is hopefully to come, through love and heartache. We all already share a deep humanity. Now, it is a matter of widespread realization of that deep essence and spirit, and to live from that, outwards.
I imagine I will learn more about the Chicago culture the longer I live here. Culture seeps in over time, through ebbs and flows, in the nooks and crannies of emerging spirit. As with any city, there are the sunny sides, as well as the unfortunate underbellies. I'm sure there's still cultural residue from the 1968 Democratic convention. I don't have to mention Al Capone and all that. Just last week there were charges of corruption splashed on the newspaper front pages. And the wheel continues to turn in the Windy City.
CHICAGO THE “I”
So am I happy to live here? As much as I believe I can be. Hannah and I want to start to buy some real estate to financially support our "art addictions." We can make our own private NEA Idaho. She'll likely be in her Masters program for several more years, and as a rule I have to live in a city for at least two years before the musicians and artists, like Kosmic cockroaches, come out of the cultural wood work. I’m meeting more every week, fortunately, and have helped organize a Chicago Salon of Integral Art. I dream of a Kosmic Trainwreck Circus, a traveling troupe of integral artists. I dream of an Integral Cabaret in Chicago. What a laugh riot at even the thought.
Given that we've traversed the upper right quadrant of the United States, to me this feels just the right distance from all of our family, in Wisconsin, Michigan, our beloved Minnesota, and the East Coast. We still have our Brooklyn area code on our cell phones. Brooklyn is like Hotel California: you can check out, but you can never really leave.
And that's can be how it goes, everywhere you live, does it not seem? The energies of people, cultures, and things exchange subtly between the bodies, leaving indelible grooves, impressions, and gifts that, in actuality, never stop opening as spirit, and never stop exploding anew. We wake up everyday to hopefully live our illusions in a healthy way, and lean on those around us when those illusions go awry. Everywhere I've been, it's been all about some sensuously raw adventures, and some seriously ordinary days.
Within those times when the vibe
is a love wave to ride, a deep hum emerges
when open and full, to sing
a multiphonic world as a fabric
of concentric Original existence.
Like silent birds that sacrifice their wings
to wind. We live, and we die:
And we sing again.
Like wolves that howl at the ambulance
of life. An open throat, up and down in love:
a full-tenored embrace, until there is nothing left
to howl within. And we re-coil, relax, and expand,
in an open wonder of what
in the world
we are
not.
|
|
|
