Iron gray.
Relentless.
Chicago.
My father tells me there is a depressive syndrome called seasonal affective disorder—SAD—which means the midwinter blues,
which means we are, like flowers, heliotropic, subject to solstice, attuned to equinox and perihelion,
which means we’re even weirder
than we think we are.
Cushion of snow on the window ledge, whistling teakettle, steam like the ghost of Hot Chocolate Past:
feels like a day off from school, license to curl up in blankets and watch The Price Is Right until Mom comes home.
•
Hey, I think I’ll enjoy this
tasty repast
in front of the tube!
Let’s see now: leftover
Chinese
or liverwurst and Swiss?
•
Look, that dog food’s packed
with real beef gravy!
Will the celebrity spokesperson eat it?
I’m still waiting for the advertising boys to break this taboo, leap this low hurdle, cross the frontier of bestiality
and compel Robert Urich or Lorne Greene or whichever down-on-his-luck former primetime star
to plunge a silver fork into those luscious nuggets and savor the rich, hearty flavor of all-beef goodness
just like Fido!
After all, if I won’t eat it, why should he?
If it’s good enough for my dog, it’s good enough for me.
Such a small, such a beautifully small,
such an infinitesimally
gorgeous
abyss.
•
Of course, meat was Chicago’s first great industry,
a virtual monopoly controlled by the South Side packinghouses, Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour and the rest of their cutthroat cartel,
their visionary manipulation of consumer psychology, the pickling vats and offal heaps laid bare by Upton Sinclair,
vast fleets of refrigerator cars at the Union Stock Yards manned by rock-bottom immigrant labor,
the strong-shouldered muscle the city was built upon,
the capital accumulation by which it was built,
a real killing,
any way you slice it.
If New York is an apple,
Chicago is pure sausage.
Chicago is liverwurst.
Chicago is lumber, sowbellies, soybeans, freight trains.
Chicago is the nexus where pigs and cows become puts and calls, where corn and copper become shorts and corners,
where wheat transforms into paper promises
premised on possible productivity,
which is to say, the future,
all by means of one simple equation.
Cattle drive, feedlot, slaughterhouse: Board of Trade.
Clearcut, logjam, lumberyard: Board of Trade.
Amber waves, gristmill, Wonder Bread: Board of Trade.
It’s a form of modern alchemy,
a public sacrament,
an open secret!
It’s a quick trip on the El to the ornate observation balconies above the primal trading pits in the Loop,
where you can witness the literal transmogrification of the fruits of earthly labor into abstract quanta
by gangs of men furiously signifying with frantic gestures the private glyphs of their transnumerative calculus,
a scene which never fails to remind me
of apes learning sign language
on the Discovery Channel,
their hierarchy and ritual deference,
slow mastery of sign and indicator,
the pathos of their struggle to articulate desire—
GIVE APPLE KOMBI
PLAY HIDE-AND-SEEK KOMBI
HUG KOMBI PLEASE
Chicago has an apple for Kombi,
if the price is right!
Chicago is ready to talk turkey.
Chicago is a Great Ape House gone bananas,
a Hanseatic citadel in hog heaven,
a mercantile carnation pinned to the lake’s lapel,
a magic hat from which the rabbit of capital is pulled,
a portal into the realm of money itself,
and as in all border towns the locals grow rich off the unwary travelers they smilingly fleece and service,
and woe unto he who suffers the perils of fortune unincorporated into the greater risk pool of the system.
•
In December 1836, an enterprising local miller bought up more than a thousand hogs from Sugar Creek farms and drove them down the road to American Bottom. Twenty miles south of the Creek a sudden drastic drop in temperature caught him and his men, threatening them with killing cold. As they raced in panic for the shelter of a nearby cabin, their hogs began desperately to pile up on each other for warmth. Those on the inside smothered, those on the outside froze, creating a monumental pyramid of ham, frozen on the hoof. The marketing experiment was a dead loss and the miller financially destroyed.
—John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek
•
So Chicago grew
and grew fat
off the fat of the heartland.
So it is still, more or less unchanged in its bluntly commercial convictions.
Rich men wear fur coats in the streets because the weather is cold and they are rich.
Factory workers drive Oldsmobiles because Oldsmobiles are better than Buicks and they don’t make Packards anymore.
Unemployed factory workers move out of the city because the only place hiring is Wal-Mart and it’s cheaper out there in the hinterlands of exurbia.
Chicago is your basic meat and potatoes.
Chicago is white bread.
Chicago is a monumental pyramid of ham.
•
When man Vanuatu brought the pig with him from New Guinea thousands of years ago, he probably brought also the concept of it as the most valuable currency. With pigs he could ascend in status, with pigs he could acquire wives, with pigs he could pay for the services of sorcerers and artisans. The pig may not have been the most portable currency ever devised, but in Western Melanesia it still remains the most highly prized.
—Norman and Ngaire Douglas, Vanuatu: A Guide
•
This train of thought
is spoiling
my lunch. That’s the problem
with liverwurst:
twenty minutes later you’re
hungry again.
•
Speaking of ham,
Bob Hope has always been big in Chicago.
Seven shows a day at the Stratford Theater, still glamorous
in 1946. Seven shows!
The man is nothing if not a fanatic,
an indomitable trooper in the old joke factory, a faded rose
of a star-spangled performaholic,
although, like so much that we consider American,
he’s an imported model, not a true domestic.
Son of a hard-drinking immigrant stonemason,
Bob passed through Ellis Island early,
en route from Bristol to his new home in Cleveland,
where he evinced a precocious talent for comedy,
a ready facility for cutting a rug,
changed his name from the original Leslie
and thus became Bob Hope the Buckeye street pug,
Bob Hope the shill at the Alhambra pool hall,
Bob Hope the wisecracking street-corner thug.
Quit school at sixteen to work in his uncle’s butcher stall,
hard-knuckled, hungry, lean and pale
from the long days of ox-blood and entrails,
sour odor of meat beneath his fingernails
during tap-dance lessons at Sojack’s Dance Academy
on Lake Erie evenings gray as a lunch pail,
a tenth-grade dropout with the gift of gab, an affinity
for hard work, and a dream
> to escape blue-collar Ohio, a trinity
familiar to every immigrant’s son, the dream
of New World wealth and glory,
the American Dream.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Which happens to be
our story.
•
Have you noticed there’s nothing on TV anymore?
Liposuction. Public prayer. Cajun food. Korean cartoons. Jane Goodall’s chimps. The Congress.
History repeats itself.
So, too, the History Channel.
Again Grant’s army encamped before Vicksburg.
Again the Gold Rush, again the Gilded Age.
Again the Wobblies, again Black Friday, again the New Deal, again Enola Gay.
On CNBC today, word that “gourmet pet food” is America’s newest multibillion-dollar industry.
On CNN, an increase in global malnutrition; 40,000 children die of hunger and its attendant diseases every day.
Which is not to say there is any particular correlation between these contemporaneous pronouncements,
not to say the good citizens of Chicago would rather their dogs eat Veal and Kidney Morsels than the children of Pakistan eat rice,
not to say we can even encompass the human implications of these binary blips aswim in the inundation of the great data flow,
the Sea of Information from which they have arisen like walruses heaved up on some high blue shelf of the Malthusian iceberg.
•
I thought squirrels were supposed to hibernate.
Isn’t that what they say on the Discovery Channel?
Isn’t that what “the industrious hoarding of acorns” is all about?
So what’s with this rigamarole in the branches?
Here’s one clambering up through six inches of snow, struggling to drag a frozen newspaper back to its nest,
a bedraggled sheath of ads for cars or maybe tires, steel-belted radials from Sears or Montgomery Ward.
Alas, poor Sears, the state’s largest employer, the world’s tallest building and the city’s most obvious landmark,
an unrentable white elephant boxing the Loop in sovereign shadow. Once upon a time they ruled the world!
Once upon a time Chicago was the general store for half the nation, not just day-trippers in from Wisconsin and Indiana but all those within reach of the mighty catalogs,
all those bicycles and reapers and Mason jars shipped out to pickle the beets and preserve the plums of Oklahoma, Kansas, Minnesota, and the Dakotas.
•
By the dawn of the new century, the Montgomery Ward catalog contained 1,200 pages and 17,000 illustrations, offering no fewer than 70,000 separate items for sale . . . . The firms’ yearly postal money order business was greater than that of entire cities like Cincinnati, New Orleans, or San Francisco . . . . By 1900, Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck were the two greatest merchandising organizations in the world.
—William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis
•
When I was a kid I’d walk up to Sears to buy just about anything—
ballpoint pens or school notebooks,
a new sled, leaf bags,
a lawn mower or Doobie Brothers album.
Today, I’d as soon shoot myself as shop at Sears!
Today one must navigate daunting loops of expressway misnomers out to some suburban circumlocution
in order to ransack the latest jumbo, discount, wholesale Wal-or K-or What-the-Hey-Mart,
which is not so much a store as a merchandising organization disguised as an aircraft hangar lumped full of bulk commodities.
•
Chicago is a merchandising organization
disguised as an aircraft hangar
lumped full of bulk commodities.
•
Yes, that’s true.
It is.
We are.
Materialism is our genius; must we bow down our heads in shame therefore?
Why apologize for seeking fulfillment in the satiation of our hungers?
What engine drives human history if not the elevation of physical comfort?
What other principle conforms to the contours of individual desires?
Is it not our Jeffersonian right and obligation to pursue the fleeting figure of happiness?
•
HAPPINESS
I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them.
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.
—Carl Sandburg
•
Yes, Carl, how beautiful
a poem,
how telling, how fine.
But can we subsist on a diet of accordion music and raw profusion?
Is the solace of the material enough to sustain us?
At what cost has it been purchased?
Don’t we crave a more elusive amplitude, a hunger no less intense for being nameless?
Is it possible to fix a common focus with such singularity of vision?
When I look out my window, when I look not to look but to see, even the most elemental forms and objects are shaded with hermeneutical nuance,
the unsaid, the understood, subtexts half buried by this blizzard of the incomprehensible,
a world of circumstance and utter contingency invested with a deep and apparent historical sheen.
In these arcane graffiti sprayed across the Baptist church are encoded the territorial markings of the local Chicano street gangs,
children of Oaxaca and Michoacán displaced to the frozen verge of Lake Michigan,
their scrawled logos imbued with intricacies of signification akin to Mayan sun stones or the birdman petroglyphs of Easter Island.
In these wooden houses and brick three-flats is depicted the evolution and degradation of the American city,
our hegemonic apogee and concomitant deliquescence, the wildfire of industrialization that fueled Chicago’s growth,
the development of the consumer economy and the invention of the balloon-frame building method,
a tradition of relentless reduction to cheaper and faster means through the turbo-engine of mass production.
In the Housing Authority high-rise perched anomalously on the corner of Clark Steet is written the victory of New Deal liberalism and the failure of its utopian social engineering,
not to mention the aesthetic capitulation to Bauhaus hideosity its yellow-brick conformity embodies,
and insofar as half of its inhabitants are retired black city workers, and the other half ancient Japanese widows,
it reifies simultaneously the memory of the Nisei internment camps and the postwar movement of African Americans to the manufacturing centers of the North,
which in turn encompasses a brief history of organized labor,
and how the blues came up the river from Mississippi,
and the relativity of our constitutional liberties,
and the dark imponderable of slavery,
and a deeper strata of humanistic yearning in the age-old migration of populations in search of material betterment.
Material betterment!
I guess you could say
the writing
is on the wall, hermano.
You could say the writing is the wall,
our homes are our castles,
our bodies our temples,
so what metaphor must the city we live in describe?
What girders underlie the construction of the dream?
What marvels of engineering, what existential architecture?
What wrecking ball or hidden rot even now betokens its deconstruction?
If what we build speaks for us, what does Chicago say?
What’s written in Louis Sullivan’s damascened grillwork, the Sears behemoth, the public housing battlements, the suburbs’ ever-increasing dominion?
What texts are affixed to the shingle roofs of the endless blocks of Back of the Yards bungalows?
What utilitarian tunes would the warped beams of this tired house hum?
What about what we haven’t built,
what’s been lost,
what we’ve built and then torn down,
the mile-high skyscraper of Frank Lloyd Wright, the bulldozed stockyards and Comiskey Park,
red wagons of waffle vendors at the Water Street Market and Delta bluesmen stomping around Maxwell Street trash fires
and the palisade of old Fort Dearborn where the Pottawatomie came to trade for blankets, hatchets, whiskey, and beads?
What about the White City,
the World’s Columbian Exposition master-planned by Daniel Burnham to serve as Chicago’s debutante cotillion,
a prolix effulgence of fin de siècle flotsam announcing the end of the nineteenth century seen as the Age of Progress through Industry?
If the 7-Eleven is a minnow, and Wal-Mart a bluefin tuna, the White City was Moby Dick.
If the 7-Eleven is a slot machine, and Wal-Mart a bingo parlor, the White City was Las Vegas.
If the 7-Eleven is a glittering chapel—like the beautiful Santuario at Chimayo—and Wal-Mart a sturdy cinder-block church of solid suburban parishioners,
then the White City was a metropolis of neoclassical cathedrals raised up to the Gods of Materialism themselves—
Manufactures, Machinery,
Electricity, Transportation, Agriculture,
Forestry, Fisheries, Mines.
Such were the pavilions wherein was gathered every conceivable artifact and innovation of national origin or adoptive ancestry,
every all-American doodad, gizmo, gimcrack, and curlicue,
and those of the various individual states,
and those of whichever nation or homeland cared to participate,
all and sundry jam-packed into some dozen
bulging Palladian pleasure domes,
an urban dreamscape of wings, naves, galleries, and transepts,
lagoons, ponds, basins, bridges,
wedding-cake fountains and Creamsicle statuary,
plus scores of lesser Beaux Arts repositories,
plus the carnival clutter and anthropological detritus of the Midway.
The murals in the Woman’s Building were painted by Mary Cassatt.
Louis Sullivan designed the Transportation Pavilion, and later denounced it as an exercise in sentimental retrospection.
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