42 posts tagged “uptown”
Anyway, just wanted to let everyone know that I got a new photoset up at my Flickr account recently, a collection of random shots during a winter walk this week through the Uptown neighborhood here in Chicago where I live; they came out really nice, I thought, so wanted to let you know about them. Here's what I have to say about the set over at Flickr...
"Can I just mention again how flabbergasted I am by the richness of this camera's black-and-white mode? Maybe it's because I shot almost exclusively in black and white in college (for financial reasons, natch), which is why I think about it a lot more often than others; but the fact is that my little Coolpix just on any given day can naturally capture the kind of super-rich range of graytones I would've killed for most of the time in my old film-and-paper days in the '80s. The fact is that almost no 'digital darkroom' work was done at all on these images; that's a far cry from my old physical darkroom days, when extensive work would have to be done nearly every freaking time I walked in there."
Anyway, hopefully more personal updates coming here more regularly this winter; but for now, at least lots of new photo updates regularly. I hope you enjoy.
Egads! The police aren't releasing any details, aren't saying whether they died of an OD or if this was a crime gone bad; still, strange to know that you were literally sitting across the street from three loser junkies while they died in a transient hotel room, at the same exact moment they were actually dying. It somehow fits the rather apocalyptic mood that's descended over our entire country this week.
I've talked about the following online several times before (including here at VOX just a little further below, or perhaps on the next page depending on when you're reading), of how I believe in this new mental condition that's recently come about because of the Web 2.0, which in an attempt to coin a phrase I call "Global Displacement Syndrome" or GDS; it basically can only come about in people who consume a massive amount of amateur creative content from around the world at once, usually through online means, just hundreds of photos at Flickr and hundreds of videos at YouTube every month, just like I've been doing more and more in my own life over the last several years. Because when you do something like this, you end up getting not only the cool high-end artsy stuff like usual, but also just a ton of casual and informal media from around the planet too, photos from birthday parties and school events, cellphone images of a neighborhood statue posted a hundred times a year to some moblog or Photobucket account, showing that statue in a hundred different states of weather and daylight. And I've said before, getting that kind of regular multimedia input into a neighborhood halfway around the planet from you makes you...well, not exactly a local, you can't exactly call it that, but no longer a stranger or simply a tourist to that city either, with you now knowing a lot more about that city each day than a simple tourist would know.
When you get too much input in your life like this, when you spend too much time thinking about it all like I have, then your brain can get into certain strange mindsets at certain times, which for me always seems triggered by things like warm summer afternoons, pot, laid-back European dance musicians, and a host of other things. And that's a mindset where it suddenly becomes difficult to determine rationally just what city you're in at that exact moment in your life -- whether it's Chicago or London or Frankfurt, Sydney or Seoul or Ljubljana, Rio or Toronto or Cape Town. In fact, it's like you're not in any of those particular cities at all, but rather a strange and mystical world where all these cities have combined into a tenth, entirely fictional one, one where you and all your online friends from these other nine cities are all living at once, a place just as real and concrete in your head as the actual physical city you're currently located in. And when I'm under the spell of GDS, like I've said before, I sometimes have these really strange experiences here in Chicago where I physically live; for example, when I look out the window next to my computer here at home (the image seen in this entry, taken just a few minutes ago), it's hard for me to tell whether I'm still in Chicago or maybe suddenly in another one of these cities just mentioned, that if I were to actually go downstairs and open the front door of my building, hell, who knows, maybe I just will find Barcelona or Oslo or Saint Petersburg right beyond.
I find myself getting into this mindset more and more with the passing years, the longer I'm exposed regularly to all these hundreds of casual photos and videos online from around the world, all the underground bands and artists I follow around the world all at once. The Social Singularity? The Coming One World Culture? Or just the sad result of too much Flickr, 420, and time alone? Hmm.
In general it's a noble thing the owners of the real estate in this two-block area are doing; they're doing a lot of new development, a lot of new construction, trying to jump-start a new interest in the neighborhood, more money, more safety, more options, more jobs, etc. But for those who don't know, this is a neighborhood that's been infamously shitty for decades now, and still is in certain quarters; and for those who have never spent time regularly in such a neighborhood, among lots of other long-term effects it means that the locals mark very little difference between "public" space (sidewalks, parks) and "private" (your yard, your building's lawn, your cafe's outdoor seating).
In effect it creates this real schism in such "redevelopment zones," a monkeywrench in the plans to get the middle-class to feel safe enough to move in; because this is one of the very premises of the middle-class itself, this distinction between public and private space, this idea that your middle-class hard work is what gives you the privilege of the manicured lawns and outdoor cafe tables. If some crazy smelly homeless curse-word-swearing nutjob can sit down right next to you, can ruin your middle-class privilege that easily, what's the point of putting in all the hard work to become middle-class in the first place?
As a result, then, smart redevelopment land owners are constantly having to think up smart new ideas for placing physical barriers up on their properties, literal fences that separate this privileged middle-class private outdoor space from the public space like sidewalks where the usual crazy homeless junkies go wandering around muttering to themselves and peeing in their pants. In the '50s and '60s, of course, the way to do this was very obvious and not that intelligent at all; literally put up walls, fences and the like, making such inner-city erections feel more like fortresses than pleasant middle-class habitations. That was the lesson learned, in fact, from those redevelopment projects in that period that all failed; that you can't slap up literal fences and walls to create this space, because you then drive away the very middle-class urban adventurers you need to transform the neighborhood.
Take the building shown here, for example, within this redevelopment ghetto on Sheridan I mentioned. Ultimately it's presenting a cool private outdoor space for all the middle-class condo owners who move in; those nifty patios you're seeing, all slanty and glass just like the middle-class urban adventurers love. And then on the first two floors there's an ingenious semi-public space as well, for social interaction with your fellow middle-class adventurers; a mini-mall, that is, completely enclosed, with the natural intimidation of a consumerist space (and paid security guards) to naturally keep out the dirty homeless muttering junkies. And thus do you build that wall you need between the middle-class and the rest of that neighborhood, that makes the middle-class feel safe and thus populate the neighborhood more and more; but you don't literally build a wall anymore, but merely place your outdoor space up in the air, and a virtual wall that blocks out the poor in shifty but legal ways. The reason I call this space between Wilson and Lawrence a redevelopment "ghetto," then, is because there's literally something like six such projects found there, all of them built in the last decade, creating this great little two-block area for the middle-class that doesn't hold a damn thing of interest for the poor, addicted and crazy who have lived in the neighborhood for the past several decades.
I'm not saying any of this is ethically right or ethically wrong; I think there are arguments to be made for both conclusions, in fact. I'm just saying that it's happening in this particular part of the city, as well as others, and that these projects are apparently popular because more and more of them keep getting built. It's changing the very nature of this neighborhood, in fact, literally one block at a time.
Just got finished editing up episode 3 of the CCLaP Podcast, which will be getting posted to the official site tomorrow morning; so like always, I thought I'd post a sneak preview of it here as well, for any VOX readers who are checking in over the weekend. This episode is four minutes long and is a video report from the latest Dollar Store Show at Chicago nightclub The Hideout; run by "Time Out: Chicago" Books editor Jonathan Messinger (who is also one of the founders of Featherproof Books), each month Jonathan asks a couple of people from the city's small-press community to write and perform a brand-new story, based on a piece of merchandise from a dollar store that Jonathan had given to them a month previous. Enjoy!
Links to the projects and people mentioned in this episode:
Jonathan Messinger
The Dollar Store Show
The Hideout
Featherproof Books
Time Out: Chicago | Books
The Printers Ball
THE2NDHAND
Uptown Writers Space
Just posted a lengthy review of the novel "Little Children" to the website for the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (cclapcenter.com -- you're now reading every day, right? You've mentioned it at your own blog by now, right?). I ended up really loving the novel, actually, and a big part of that was because of the ways that author Tom Perrotta shows the silly elaborate rituals that many people in their early and mid-thirties will engage in, that they think is 'grown-up' behavior but is actually as immature as their teen years (hence the title of the novel) -- such as how many of the men in their community participate in this evening "Fight Club" style intramural football league, where teams will meet at the expensively Astroturfed high-school field once a week, a group of accountants versus a group of cops for example, and spend a night illegally pounding each other with no refs, the only rule being "the first one to quit is a faggot pussy," and with the hordes of former frat dudes spending the entire evening calling each other bitches and slamming each other's chests together in torso high-fives.
And sitting here finishing my time at Holiday tonight, I realize -- dude, that's just like the fucking trackball bowling videogame found in bars like these! How many times have we who are secure in our masculinity and adult choices we're making in our lives sat in bars with such machines, and watched a group of drunk, insecure, date-rape assholes spend the night getting ALL GEARED UP BEHIND THAT TRACKBALL, DUDE, and put up a leg and get all behind that push, and WHIZZ THAT LITTLE COCKSUCKING WHORE round and round until getting a strike, YELLIN' AND SCREAMIN' AND HOOTIN' AND HOLLERIN' AND HIGH-FIVIN', all their terrified little girlfriends in the corner and sucking down Sex on Beaches and trying to blot out as quickly as possible what horrific unsalvagable situations they've gotten themselves into.
Seriously, a pretty great book. I encourage you to stop by the site and see what I have to say about it. Man, for the rest of my life these bowling videogames are now going to creep me the fuck out.
Hey, I'm out again, at Holiday again, having Guinness and a grilled-cheese sandwich and mashed potatoes. It's Saturday night, give me a freakin' break, I want to be out! Damnit, I may even get on my bike later and pedal down to Lakeview, and maybe get in a little trouble old-skool Belmont and Clark style. We'll see!
Earlier this week I read the first half of this slim new-age self-help guide called "Happy," by this guy who apparently teaches a class at Harvard on "how to be happy," which apparently is the most popular class currently available at Harvard (yeah, roll eyes here, I know). And that's why I stopped reading halfway through, frankly, is that the book's mostly a bunch of obvious new-age claptrap about positivity and empowering visions and the like. One of the things the author suggests you ask yourself, though, is what exactly the definition of 'happiness' is anyway, which I've been doing this week and have realized is much harder than it sounds. The best I can do, in fact, is come up with things that can lead to happiness, while also acknowledging that I don't know what combination one needs to truly be 'happy...'
--The absence of pain.
--A sense of accomplishment.
--A sense of inner peace, of acceptance of oneself and one's surroundings.
--The sensation of pleasure.
--The sense that one is contributing to the world, instead of simply consuming its resources.
Here I am right now, for example, at Holiday Uptown in my neighborhood, currently pretty happy, but only because of a combo of little things -- because it's warm, because I'm outside, because I'm having a beer and am a little buzzed, because I've gotten a lot accomplished today, because half-dressed hot nerdy girls keep walking by me, because I just got done with a good mid-distance bicycle ride, because I've eaten, because I have a satchel full of just-published edgy small-press books, that I got for free because of living in a city with such a large and well-funded library system. And this doesn't even count the more existential reasons I'm happy -- because I live in a city I love instead of hate, because I'm starting my own business and am my own boss, even if that means barely any money right now, because I'm doing something with my time that I feel is adding something constructive and meaningful to the world, versus (for example) using my creative talents to be selling fucking hamburgers for some soulless multinational corporation. Sound haughty? Well, that as well is part of what makes me happy.
So what's the magic combination? Well, that's the fun part of life, isn't it, of discovering just what that combination is. I can tell you this, though, that the older I get, the more sure I am that is has almost nothing to do with the things preached to us in a consumerist capitalist society -- the accumulation of wealth, the accumulation of possessions, the getting ahead of your fellow humans, the long hours and little rewards and endless frustrations of most white-collar jobs. It's not just a thing for hippie undergraduates to believe in, I keep realizing more and more -- that the quest to simplify one's life, the effort to enjoy the current moment instead of deferring your entire personal life to the twenty years before you die, is of paramount importance to having true happiness in your life.
Er, that's all. End of line.
I don't reallly hide the fact that I did LSD roughly a dozen times as an undergraduate, back in the 1980s and '90s; in fact, I was one of those annoying little art-major shits who always had to take acid under "controlled environments," and pay all this attention to what was going on, unlike my friends who wouldn't think twice about dropping a tab or two before a rave and then either dancing and/or fucking for the next ten hours or so. (Well, okay, I did that once or twice too. Vive la Universite!)
Anyway, they say that everyone who does acid has a certain "thing" they most associate with the experience, a certain aspect of reality that suddenly seems really heightened or distorted or whatnot, which is what lets that person know they actually are on acid. Mine, for example, was for some reason the ways that artificial lights look when reflected off trees in the middle of the night; whenever I was on acid, the subject would endlessly fascinate me, of the million different subtle little hues such a situation actually produces, that you just never bother noticing when you're NOT on acid, and how you can double that number when God forbid there's streetlights of two different colors hitting it. It's a product I'm sure of my environment at the time; the middle of Missouri in the middle of the summer, that is, where nature can't help but to encroach around every single corner, no matter what you tried to do to stop it (and as big-city wannabes in that environment in those years, believe me, we tried everything we could to stop it).
So now, a decade and a half since the last time I did acid, I still have those sense memories associated with the experience; balmy summer nights, quiet back streets, the dramatic shadows of a streetlight beaming down on an otherwise dark tree, the feeling of being SURROUNDED by color on all sides, so many subtle shades of the same few colors that while on acid were suddenly as different as night and day. And even now sometimes, on warm evenings when I'm on a quiet side street in Chicago and feeling contemplative, and come across some trees being dramatically lit by two differently-colored streetlights at once, my mind can kick back into the memories of being on acid so dramatically to almost be scary; the jaw-grinding, the unnatural sweating, the heightened paranoia and all the rest. There's a reason I stopped doing acid 15 years ago, after all; it's not exactly a party drug, although I did attend some excellent parties back then while on it. It's not the same as a true flashback, I know, with the tracers and all that, which I never experience because I didn't do enough of it in school; but still.
I was a good boy tonight; got every single thing with the new CCLaP website (cclapcenter.com) working except the commenting feature, and got tomorrow's Obsession of the Moment and book review written in advance, so am now rewarding myself with a Pabst Blue Ribbon and grilled cheese sandwich at Holiday Uptown in my neighborhood, a rare nighttime trip out for me because in general I can't afford it, in the company of a bunch of hot, drunk hipster females, which of course is always a pleasure. I don't necessarily have to be directly interacting with my fellow humans to be happy -- in fact, I've discovered that it can often make me annoyed rather than happy -- but that I do at least need regular time around other humans, periods where I feel like part of a society and not so cut off in an online netherworld like most of my day is spent. Always good to get out occasionally and have a beer among the hoo-mons.
Enjoying CCLaP yet? Book reviews bitchy enough for ya?
