Headlines from a lost newspaper

Bald Men Beware – Horseflies Drawn To Your Skull!

I was walking down Michigan Avenue this morning and fell in step behind a man roughly my age with a shaved head, a somewhat too-large suit (looks like he’s lost some weight, I thought), and a briefcase.  Apparently there’s a machine tools convention in town, the barman last night told me it was a big one, about 100,000 people, and this guy had the look of someone in the machine tool sales way.  There was a pretty substantial fly sitting at the very top of his head, enjoying the sun beaming down and since we were walking with the wind, probably appreciating the relative stillness on top of his host as well.  I’ve been that guy before and I was wondering whether I should warn him; by the time one becomes aware of a horsefly on one’s pate, it’s far too late, and the bite will be great.  I just chuckled as I came up with the rhyme and let the bug be.  On the next corner, we stopped for the crossing light, and the bug stayed, calm, satisfied I expect.  I zipped by him when the light turned.

Family Sues US Border Control After Man Plunges Car Off Blue Water Bridge

As I’ve written before, I have a strange and increasing fear of crossing bridges.  It started when I was a child and I’d be in the front seat with my father on long road trips; here and there we’d cross some monumental bridge – the Verrazano Narrows, or the Delaware River Crossing at the end of the New Jersey Turnpike, or the worst in my memory, the mid-border bridge over the Niagara River as you wound from Buffalo to the Canadian side – and I’d start imagining the bridge dissolving in front of us, eventually sending us to our death in our 1976 wood-paneled Oldsmobile 88 station wagon, the dense heavy metal of its V-8 engine anchoring our descent into the waters below.  It’s gotten worse, though – now I don’t imagine the bridge dissolving, but instead, I have this sense that the car is being magnetically guided through the barriers on the side of the bridge, or that my arms are drawn to throwing the steering wheel to the right and sending the car over the edge.  The Blue Water Bridge from Sarnia, Ontario, to a lousy town in Michigan whose name escapes me, has just open fence barriers on the sides of the roadway, with no shoulder, and cars are directed to use the far right lane.  I could feel my heart not just racing but skipping, losing its rhythm, my vision closing in a bit, my breathing getting shallow and my arms, my traitorous arms, getting loose and ready to bolt, as I drove slowly (speed limit 50 km/h OR 30 mph, each alternative sign reminded the Canadian and US sides of my brain) towards America.

I kept telling myself to be strong, to just focus on the Subaru in front of me.  The fence looked pretty flimsy, though.  And it was right there.

The bridge is huge and long and high, and when you get to the crest you look down towards the Michigan side and the first thing you realize is that the bridge connects to the road at a cliff face – you’re even higher than you imagine.  I didn’t look left, towards the industrial landscape of the borderlands, and I definitely didn’t look right, towards the vertigo inducing endlessness of Lake Huron.  I looked down, and held my breath, and listened to the static build on CBC Radio 1, and gripped the steering wheel.  When I got to solid land, I found my place in the US border control line, put the car in park, and tried to breathe.  I didn’t think it would look good with Border Control to be in a state of panic when asked about my reasons for returning to the US.

World-Renowned Artist Finds Success – Without Selling Out to Rich Philistines!

I had my day at the Art Institute of Chicago today, and saw the John Singer Sargent exhibition that I had been excited about.  It will be the subject of its own essay, but I was looking forward to the exhibit partly because of the location.  The AIC has probably the best Impressionist collection in the US, which means a Sargent exhibition can be held in a place where you can actively compare his work and his style and his painterlyness (bad word but work with me) to that of his European and American contemporaries who were experimenting in different but similar ways at the same time, in multiple media and with a huge range of subjects.  Each of the US universalist, academic museums seems to have a different focus – the Met has medieval and ancient art, presumably because the New Yorkers were trying to compete with Londoners in their rape of the old worlds; Boston focuses on Americans and, interestingly, on Chinese art; Chicago seems to have a thing for the French and the Italians, and really loaded up on early and mid period modernism; while California museums either got dumped with mediocre medievalism or were way ahead of the curve on the modernists and post-modernists.  Everyone has shitty statuary, a fact I only realised when someone with an eye for sculpture took me to museums in Paris.

In any event, I spent a good five hours at the museum, wandering in a mindful way – first through the European impressionist galleries, then to the Sargent exhibit itself, and then back through the American galleries first and then back again through the earlier European collections, and finally spent a good half hour with the Qing dynasty porcelain.

No work of art in the museum was created by someone who had lived a pure artistic experience.

Now, partially this is because of the way in which the Chicago collection was assembled – almost entirely by gifts from rich collectors, with very little active purchasing through its own endowment.  But seriously, the works were all (I think I’m being fair in saying all, and not toning it down to “almost all” or “the vast majority”) either commissioned by a rich person, or done while on holiday provided by a rich person, or painted with an eye to having a rich person buy it because the artist had a pretty good idea of what they’d buy.  I almost had a sense that they’d consciously wiped the walls clean of the Whistlers, and the Thomas Eakin works which never sold, in order to present a more complete and uniform slate of “works of art for the wealthy, attuned to their eyes and designed for their digestion.”

There was one room of exception to this: an explosion of color and raw primitive form in the room just as one exited the Sargent rooms, filled with middle aged Georgia O’Keefe paintings – the ones she painted to express her love-hate of Steiglitz, the ones that never made it out of New Mexico until she was dying – and Marsden Hartley’s male nudes and rough Maine landscapes, all in browns and greens (maybe some red, I don’t know and wouldn’t).  These were paintings made out of a kind of artistic necessity – not Whistler’s art for art’s sake, but art because the image can’t bear not being created, and screw the viewer, the image needs to live.  There was a power there that couldn’t be found in the dully tuned colors and uplifted faces of medieval religious imagery, or, frankly, even in Sargent’s work – so much painting for hire, and even his not-for-hire works showing a kind of fawning devotion to wealth that some of the best images – he did a series while staying at his friend’s house in Miami, the heir to and president of International Harvester, of watercolors with goache washes and pastel highlights, which are extraordinary as paintings – but as images, they are just paeans to the obscene wealth which buys paradise on Key Biscayne.  Screw it.  I don’t think Hartley is nearly as good a painter, but it was almost a relief to see his Middle Weight – Acadian, which is an homage to a boxer in Madawaska who, apparently, Hartley rather “admired”.  

I’ll leave the art, though, to a longer discussion.

Chicago Murders Way Up, but Mayor Makes Sure You Don’t Care

In the lounge yesterday afternoon, enjoying a cocktail and some sushi after driving seven and a half hours without food, the group next to me was talking about the murder wave in Chicago, which admittedly makes even the crack wars of the 90’s look sort of tame.  Famously, 67 people were killed in random (well, unconnected) violence over a single weekend earlier in the summer, and the people at the bar were talking about how nervous they were about being in the city.

They were, it should be pointed out, talking from a seventh floor outdoor balcony bar in a five star hotel on the Near North side, while drinking $15 cocktails out of impeccably sharp crystal.

I walked to the Art Institute from my hotel, about a two mile walk along Michigan Avenue.  I passed plenty of beggars, some of the original kind – one had a sign saying “Bet You One Dollar You’ll Read This Sign”; I didn’t give him the dollar because you can’t be coerced into a bet – and some of the just worrisome kind.  One man had the swollen calves and ankles and scars of chronic, untreated diabetes combined with some kind of injection drug addiction; he cried into his forearm as people passed by.  An older white man was lain out in the park, naked above his waist and just a sleeping bag wrapped around his torso below several times, gesturing to a pigeon and seemingly talking about God’s redemption.  Looking south down Michigan Avenue you saw lots of cranes building another generation of high-rise luxury; looking west you saw that strange Chicago street scape, where you can see the canyons of steel for about a half mile, maybe a mile on some east-west streets, and then it dies into the low rise of the prairie, and when it dies you know that’s where the gunshots start, where you lock your car doors and gun it past the yellow lights when they appear.  It’s the land my parents white-flighted away from in the late sixties, it’s where human beings live today and where we should live with them but we generally don’t.

So I looked at real estate – well, rentals and cheap freeholds – in San Antonio tonight, and I changed my strategy a bit.  I want a place with air conditioning, obviously – I’m from Maine and I’m not living in Texas without air conditioning – and I want a place which is walkable to a bar, to a restaurant, and to a grocery store and a park.  But I’ll take a place which has those things and in which I’ll still be at risk of being shot while I have a cigarette after dinner in the evening.  I’ll take a place – I want a place – where I’ll be out of place.  I hadn’t thought about this before, but moving to San Antonio gives me more space to be out of place than anywhere I’ve been in a long time.  In London I was a finance guy, and American finance guys are pretty bog standard there.  In Edmonton, I was a Mainer, and that meant everyone thought I was Canadian, and frankly I was probably even more Canadian than that.  In Seattle I wasn’t anything but I worked for the Local Bank, and that made me okay.  And before that was New York, and San Francisco – cities built for anyone except the natives, cities the natives escaped from long ago.

I’m moving to a place which isn’t for me and which doesn’t need me.  Perfect.  Chicago, on the other hand, is screwed.  Come and visit, come for the conventions and the art and the lakeshore and the food.  You’ll be happily shepherded away from the places where the destitute kill one another without mercy or concern from others.  Keep your eyes on your smartphone as you take a taxi or Uber or train to O’Hare, and you’ll be fine.  You don’t need to worry about the people here – just keep moving.

Conventioneers Welcome!  If You’re Not A Conventioneer, Please Fill Out This Survey Because We Have No Idea Why You’re Here

Of course they are welcomed.  They spend a lot of money, they ensure that mediocre but well-publicized restaurants stay in business, they don’t clog the streets with cars, they more excited to be here than the citizens are.

This week is the machine tools conference; in prior years, I’ve been here for the box convention – apparently a big event every fall; 150,000 box and packaging professionals all trying to convince Amazon to use their latest cardboard innovation – and once during the financial crisis, during a convention for homebuilders, which had to have been the most depressing conference ever.  Chicago is built for conventions and has been since the railroads all deadheaded here from every direction.  O’Hare serves the same purpose now, with Midway serving the cheaper destinations via Southwest Airlines.

I’ve never come for a conference, oddly – I’ve come to visit the exchanges, back when I was a trader and at one point controlled 10% of the short interest in the S&P 500 futures contract, and multiple times simply to look at the art.  I don’t know that the conferences have anything to do with the art, which is, I think, a good thing.  Chicago exists on two levels – one as a transportation hub, which has a steady hum of people coming and going and staying just for a few days because it’s so damn convenient, in the middle of a big and bustling continent that seems incapable of stemming humanity’s desire to do something, anything, to stay busy; and another as a home to people who live here and stay busy, building machines and processing food in the outer suburbs and contracting and advertising and banking with one another inside the Loop.  My parents came from the people who lived here to be busy; they left for Maine a long time ago.  I come here for the art, and thus have nothing to do with either of the organic layers here except insofar as the people who work here like the art too, and the wealthy ones buy it.

I’m more a tourist in Chicago than I am in Tirana, or Paris, or London, or San Antonio.  I’m not a conventioneer or a native.  I’m a ghost here as a result, except in the museum.  There, the room wardens look at me and know me – you’re here for the art, and you’re not a local, and that’s okay.  Take a look, and if you liked Moroni’s Gian Lodovico Madruzzo, move next door to Room 207.  You’ll enjoy it there too.

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