The Glow

It was announced this last week, to little fanfare, that the city of Chicago was to begin replacing its sodium-vapor streetlamps, which have since the mid-70s bathed the nighttime city in their distinctive pukey-orange glow, with a more-energy efficient (and much less orange) model. I rejoiced at the news--I've always found the city's Glow more or less nauseating, particularly on overcast nights when the reflective cloud-cover makes it especially pukey and unnatural. And I'm by no means alone; an architecture critic for the Tribune once described the lights as a "city-wide orange abomination." Of course when you live in the Glow night in and night out you don't really notice it any more--it's when I return home from time abroad that it's always hit me with a sinking ugh.

They've already replaced the lights all down the stretch of Western Avenue I ride almost daily, and the change is indeed striking. Might just take some getting used to, but y'know what?--I don't think I like it. The new metal-halide lamps certainly give off a cleaner, brighter, less queasy-making light, but they also feel somehow... clinical. The old Glow might have been downright ugly but it's been the Glow of my youth, steeping so many of the joys, pains and drunken episodes of my early life in its off-golden radiance. Chicago readers will know exactly what I'm talking about, but for you out-of-towners here are a few photographic examples, various friends of mine basking in the old Glow:

The new lights, 'much as I thought I'd appreciate them, make me feel like I'm in Toronto or something, and I think I might miss that awful old Glow after all, when it's gone--fortunately, this being Chicago, they'll be lucky to have the project completed within the decade. Tan while you can!

Haymarket Affairs

Happy May Day, dear readers! Not the most popular of holidays here in pragmatic Chicago, it's true, but for much of the rest of the world the 1st of May has long been a catchall occasion for gettin' out some ya-yas--be it a bustle in yer hedgerow, a gay swing around the maypole, or, in many locales, a big flip-off to Capitalism and all its attendant evils. The latter tradition, of course, was born here in Chicago, 125 years ago, when a motley gang of workers, reds and malcontents tangled with the police, some bombs were tossed and quartet of anarchist martyrs were given the rope: the Haymarket Riots (or 'Haymarket Affair,' if you're feeling prim), which remain emblematic of the elusive Struggle to this very day. 'Course, 'Haymarket' has lost some of its fangs over the years--Google will point you toward the Haymarket Brewpub, a stones-throw from the historic site; the only signifier at the site itself is a tacky sculpture on which well-meaning young rebels have been known to leave memorial bags of dumpstered bagels.

Not to say that May Day is dead in Chicago; there were, in fact, some large-scale events held over the weekend that I wasn't able to attend--a march for workers' and immigrants' rights that snaked through Pilsen this afternoon, and yesterdays Haymarket 're-enactment', promulgated by the artistes over at Lumpen, Inc. And then there was a curious event last night, which I did make it to--dubbed a Filibustacular (your guess is as good as mine), with the ominous tagline 'Post-Haymarket, Pre-Apocalypse,' the under-a-bridge-party-cum-ragtag-parade was perhaps not a rousing success, but it did have some compelling things to say about the state of youth politics and counterculture in Chicago c. 2011.

Which is to say that it was fun, unpredictable and totally incoherent. The plan in a nutshell: the freaks would gather at this tucked-away Union Pacific underpass at Noble and Hubbard to celebrate the holiday with a temporary autonomous zone, or whatever, w/ booze, noisemakers and other tokens of youth + freedom on hand for some anti-State revelry; and in the likely event of police interference it would go mobile, parading over to an uncertain fate over at (naturally) Haymarket Square. No leaders, no dogma, just some public ruckus for a warm spring night.

The mood under the bridge was festive and genial as some fifty or so people gathered around sundown--a couple of dudes from the IWW showed up, mercifully short on rhetoric but long on bucket drums; a generator arrived, and some lights, and a bunch of Art Institute refugees drinking hooch out of gallon jugs, and pretty soon the party was swinging, albeit in a self-conscious, drum-circley fashion--the event had been billed as a bastion for free speech, but the banging of bucket-drums drowned out even beer-fueled small-talk.

All of which might have progressed or devolved in any number of ways had the local cops not, predictably, routed us from our lair--commence phase two, marching in the streets. Dawdling eastward on Hubbard, drumming and yelling enthusiastically but never quite coagulating as a group, the 'march' perhaps exuded some disaffected charm but was painfully low on message, meaning or actual politics of any kind. Giving in to the general joke, I began chanting the first thing that came to mind. ANTI-EVERYTHING!, I bellowed, trying to poke some fun at the Hey-Hey-Ho-Ho insipidness of usual protest mantras; to my dismay, it was quickly picked up by the group and suddenly, surreally, we were parading through the West Loop, staring down motorists and shouting ANTI-EVERYTHING! ANTI-EVERYTHING! I couldn't tell if I'd tapped into some deep well of nihilism among my fellow marchers or if it was just fun to say; soon, however, it was eclipsed by an even more dubious chant, as some art-school kids started yelling, QUIT YOUR JOBS! QUIT YOUR JOBS!--hard to argue with, on a pure gut-level, but pretty f-ing puerile considering the historical context we were trying, however lamely, to conjure up.

But the high-absurdist sloganeering had yet to reach its apex; upon reaching the statue at Haymarket Square, the crowd, noticeably thinned-out, stood around rather cluelessly, drinking and banging on buckets, until the cops again arrived and ordered us to, y'know, tone it down. Flush with revolutionary zeal, a young woman named Stephanie refused to give up her perch atop the statue and was forcibly removed + thrown in a squad car. In other places, at other times, the arbitrary arrest of a comrade might induce a certain militancy, but our half-assed mob didn't know how to react. There was some grousing, some pleading, and finally an incredibly silly-sounding chant of LET STEPHANIE GO! LET STEPHANIE GO! that took hold for about a minute and a half; a perfectly reasonable sentiment, of course--we didn't want our buddy taken to lockup--but in the annals of political rallying-cries, LET STEPHANIE GO! has to rank among the most poignantly ridiculous. I didn't, admittedly, stick around long enough to find out whether the cops let Stephanie go; there was some talk of 'marching' down to 18th and State to do 'jail solidarity', but people were also saying that the cops would release her if we'd just quit hanging around on the corner making a nuisance of ourselves.

All told, it was an enjoyable, if not particularly threatening way of observing the holiday--for all it's silliness, I found the Filibustacular to at least be in the spirit of May Day. I couldn't, it's true, help but wish I was back in Berlin, where May Day has become cart-blanche for widespread rioting--despite claims that it's been watered down the last few years by slumming-it teenagers and so-called riot tourists, the arson, looting and gleeful window-smashing there is quite real. I missed it by a matter of weeks last year; this year's model was apparently gnarlier than ever. Here in Chicago, we take what we can get; at least we're trying, right?

August

Gone Country

If nothing else, the eerie quiet tells me that I'm back in Chicago--the gentle whirring of cicadas and occasional beeping from the freightyard. I'd never have thought of Chicago as an especially quiet place, but after three and a half months of Berlin's 24-hour boisterousness, where crowds of drunken boys paraded past dawn down Revaler Strasse, where tehcno music was always thumping at least off in the distance, Chicago sounds like farmland.

Berlin gave me something of a raucous farewell, a nearly sleep-free weekend that I am not yet recovered from. Trying to stuff as much adventure as we could into a few short days, Yony and I ran all over town--visiting B-list attractions like Pfaueninsel (Peacock Island), where the Kaiser built a bunch of tacky pleasure-palaces and assembled an exotic menagerie of animals which straggles on to this day; examining the elusive German shopping mall; going to lesbian bars and exploring post-war wreckage. I had what I felt to be an archetypal Berlin experience, which I'll relate if only because it makes a ripping good story: Yony took me out to a bombed-out building near Ostkreuz, a roofless labyrinth so littered with soiled mattresses, broken bottles and nasty detritus as to be authentically spooky. We poked around for a while, messing around and taking photographs--
--but left abruptly when we noticed a burning tea-candle sitting on the floor, where there had been no such thing mere minutes before--it was too witchy even for hardened urbanites like us. We ended up returning to the neighborhood that night, for a party in a factory-turned-dance-club, and, emboldened by drink, decided to wander back over to the labyrinth. As we entered the premises, we began to hear a terrible, horror-movie rumbling emanating from the cellar. It sounded like some infernal machine, the evil churning of some secret laboratory--and a tea candle was still burning at the top of the stairs. Feeling very brave, I tiptoed down the steps into the dreaded cellar, where I found--it should have been obvious--an electro-noise generator show in full swing, complete with cash bar. Everyone seemed deliriously happy. My friend Al Burian, who has lived in Berlin intermittently since the early 90s and came out to the labyrinth with us, seemed particularly pleased by the surprise, the hidden party a part of a grand Berlin tradition that has become harder to hunt down over the years. I imagined the illicit partying that must have been widepsread as early as the mid-1940s, when horny youngsters, bored with the War, must have swing-danced and tippled in cellars much like this one. Even the music was a cut above techno--techno rhythms and textures so blown-out and manipulated as to become a totally abstract rhythmic pallette.

Early Sunday morning found the party-life cast in a totally different light. I'd gone to bed early and woken up at 5:30 for a job way out in Brandenburg herding goats. Almost any other city in the world would be quiet and peaceful at 6:00 on a Sunday morning--it's a famously tranquil hour. But in Berlin, the streets and trains were packed with dawn-revelers seemingly unfazed by the growing brightness of day, unapologetically drunk. The goats in question resided in a small, medieval village called Glowen, a herd some 30-strong owned by a colorful Berliner named Barbara who splits her time between the city, where she runs a wine shop and sells pot on the side, and this small farm where she could breathe deeply and tend to her beloved animals. The morning of my visit, the local livestock vet was coming out to take blood samples, administer deworming medication and castrate six of the young kids. We herded them into the barn and then, goats being particularly skittish creatures, had to catch them one by one--devilishly quick little buggers, they were--and drag them by the horns out into the yard for their date with the doctor. The castration was, as one might imagine, a bit of a nasty business. There's no real polite way of castrating an animal; I held the poor fuckers down while the vet, with a nightmarish pair of oversized medical pliers known as Burdizzo, crushed the blood vessels leading to the testes, which would cause them to shrivel up and eventually die. The goats, needless to say, weren't especially keen on this--in fact, they screamed absolute bloody murder, their eyes rolled back in their heads and they thrashed about in violent spasms of pain and horror. The vet, a greying East German who spoke little English, managed to keep an impressive sense of humor about him throughout, as I suppose anyone who's been castrating large animals for half a century must. I was amused, as my plane approached Chicago the next day, to find an item on the customs-declaration form asking whether I had come into contact with any livestock in the course of my travels. If only they knew, that only hours ago I'd been castrating goats, that my clothes were still flecked with fresh goats-blood! No, I marked, opting to make my trip through customs + immigration as streamlined as possible--no livestock whatsoever...

Goat-herder that I am, I don't so much mind Chicago's rural vibe. Unlike Berlin, which has been cultivating urbanites for nearly a millenium, Chicago is quite new as a city, and many Chicagoans are only a generation or two removed from the farm. The Great Migration in the 1950s was largely of rural, southern blacks; in more recent decades, huge numbers of agrarian and small-town Mexicans have settled here; geographically sprawling and relatively low-density, Chicagoans have always had space to stretch their legs, an affinity for beer-n-barbecue and a certain all-around bumpkinishness. People have always told me that I have an inexplicable twang for someone who grew up in the big city, and I long chalked this up to my taste for country music; but more fundamentally, I think, Chicago is country, a heavily-populated blip surrounded by vast prairie. Anyway, I'm glad, in many ways, to be back in my hometown, at summer's end at with a gloriously blank slate. Wave if you see me in the street, and if you have any large animals you need fixed feel free to give me a call.