Chicago Review;

four out of five

Stamped corroded metal and the metal SCREAMS

“You stop hearing it after a while.”

Streets cracked with frost, covered with salt or snow, steps crunch, nothing perfectly flat, everything gnawed by freeze-thaw and three million people on six million feet. Its a literate city, explicitly and implicitly labelled and always in rivers of text; US policy One; never use an image when a string of words will do - so looping lines of long official words to back up explanations on the street signs; a reading city, subtext and overtext, signs and where there is no sign; graffiti, graffiti everywhere, graffiti on the pizza boxes left as trash below the huge trash bins.

Chicago Lex Logos; you can graffiti anything if you can reach it, and they can reach anything, they climb buildings and rappel down like Nolanverse incursors or Bond in teasers, and like Batman, who also lives here really, they can get in anywhere. But Graffitisomo won’t obscure another’s tag AND, what’s this? Smears of blank brown paint? “The city will cover some graffiti,” maybe if its racist or political, or gangs dividing boundaries - So; there is “legal” graffiti, (lame), illegal graffiti (raw city flesh - its Jungian unconscious, basement level mind, (the Academic says; “two Jungians lived over here, the husband killed the wife”), and there is really (actually, we mean it this time), illegal graffiti, that has this special quality, and the city will know, like Koschei the Deathless hearing some steppe-herder whisper his name a dozen rivers distant, and will come, and hence the wide brown smears, on a bridge, behind a Jewish (likely) shop; the true un-speech, and later, atop the rectangles of brown, the logo’s back, creeping in, the city-mind reclaiming the edited space, in acknowledgment, perhaps submission, and this, personal-impersonal, reactive, truculent, eternally sustained rebellion of text, is legitimate, and none will write over it, because don’t you know there are laws?

Sweltering - huge, black winter coat from cab to train to plane; “Chicago is really cold, you will need to wrap up.”

It aint. I look and feel ridiculous. The old black drunk three feet across the L-Train thinks so too. He is the only republican; “I approve of I.C.E.; we gotta take back what they took from us.” Every other sign and shop and symbol (where they have them), screams its hatred for the Orange Man. The race line here is vivid, violent, strange, intense, the only shared spaces are municipal services, the trains, the busses, “Hey I’m your bus driver, hey! HEY! I’M YOUR BUS DRIVER, thank you, and the cable is broke so you gotta tell me when you want to get off ok?”, the low-key hipster spaces are a little beige but the city isn’t, its black, or its white, one or the other.

But Batman fights here, clearly, these gifts to the city, all aging, all from another time, kinda high-anglo, but the names aren’t; german, jewish, north European maybe, scribed on columns, laid in rows and, shock, this would never happen over here; stacked by value; so-and-so gave fifty grand, the mid-range giver, such-and-such is much higher up, up in the 250, 5000, million dollar giver range. Everyone will know how much you gave. The little public jewels; the Zoo, the Conservatory, the Cultural Centre empty but for the names of Philosophers, the battles of the Civil War and one small lonely woke exhibit saying U.S. might be bad somehow - they were all made like this, by wealthy men and fine families and then hurled randomly at the city to stick like shrapnel, wherever. You want to see Cacti in the Ghetto? Dealer cars with plates removed one-handing it down a street of philosophy professors; Chicago U, home to one by Frank-Lloyd Wright, a hunk of bronze from Arnoldo Pomodoro, mad fake Oxford on a massive scale, (U.S. in its post-Mao phase), all hurled at black Chicago like a spear; you think Mayor Dailey gave a shit? Take it and like it! Frank Lloyd-Wright built a mildly-cursed home here for the Robies; a dense, layered, exquisite hyperdwarf experience they managed for 18 months; he built the tables into the chairs so they couldn’t be moved and the lights into the tables so they couldn’t be moved. He made a whole wardrobe of clothes for Mrs Robie to wear in his (still Lloyd-Wrights) exquisite home; nothing must fuck the aesthetic. Its a gem, the Artist hates it; oppressive dwarven madness. Just across the street New Modernists have abominated in steel; Frank made this for the Open Plain, now it faces directly its own horrific spawn - a gargled chrome instantiation of everything Lloyd-Wright fought so hard to contain and control; face pressed to the glass as his retarded child gulps down the world, if he was resurrected here he would kill himself. (Perhaps deserved.)

But Batman could fight here as well; all these stage sets. Why? The scale, the grime, the gloom, the layered singularity of each space; its not like here; no jumble, little history, a place is a place is a place in the United States; shops too; three million people means a store front needs to be about One Thing; Ribs (honey flavour), pulled-pork burger (only), hot Yoga, huge revolving hotdog and hadean pizza, whats your thing?

And in the Loop, Batman could fight well. Skyscrapers in parallax, a brief beautiful flower of 19th and early 20th century design, fragments of Art Deco and weaves of ironwork by Louis Sullivan; mad magic from the old world studding the Tribune building; a shard of Westminster Cathedral, the Louvre? Many more jammed in the walls like a spell. The old ways are best, before the sacrificed God we put souls in the foundations of important things, even till late 19C Cornwall, John Masefield describes the sacrifice of a mouse beneath the door-stone of a farmers house. Any built thing is a threat against the gods, and they must be appeased. What threat then, Chicago? Perhaps ‘tis cursed. Trump Tower pierces the Loop, a shard of alien ego; the Artists eyes glide over; American Spellcraft, they have learned how not to see false gods.

The artist doesn’t like it here; “There’s nowhere to eat downtown.” How about the Russian Tea rooms, Starbucks, this Cafe? They meant; not too expensive, not touristy, but not common. Naturally a Chigagoan (or this one) would think this way; the field is infinite but everything on it is specific to itself. Only fools and tourists treat the city as a whole, as what they see, for everyone who lives here it is a network of known acceptable places, particular, specific. If not this, then what? Infinity each day? Too much.

And violently, aggressively insane; “The SPICS and NI**ERS are RAPING WHITE girls at the MARRIOT hotel!” he’s a rare full-spectrum racist, has it in for us all; “fuckin’ WHITES, you like that you WHIT SLUT” even the Asians, triggered by the sight of helpless women queuing under heat lamps for a train, (I mean he runs out of material for the Asians quite quickly, but clearly they are bad). The women shuffle, freeze, American Spellcraft again, he will become real if he actually stabs someone, or if someone intervenes, (is this the kind of thing I should have done? maybe ended up a headline, I could have at least asked the girls to shuffle down and stood between him and them, rigid with fear and rage, fantasising about hurling him off the L down to the street, or onto the tracks, bashing his brains out, I lack the Spell, the U.S. magic, I have not learned to never see the city, which all who see the city every day know well not to do), he disappears into the distance. The Artist says it was worse over Covid; no-one moved them off the trains, (all-day ride for $2.50, (incredibly affordable compared to here, America is rich), and the trains were heated), anyway the Artist cycles everywhere now, (Zeus rots metal left outside, another God-curse, bike maintenance is schmuck-faith - use ‘em up) I don’t ask if the crazies pushed the Artist off the buses and trains, the spell has been cast so how would they know?

Its not a Sea-City, nor an Inland City, like Toronto, its a Lake City, and that’s a slightly different thing. Maybe every Port City everywhere feels like it has one window open to the world, or inland, that its all about the Nation, but with these Lake-Towns, who knows? (Smaug approves this message. He nearly got Chicago once, but they came back.) Few things face the Lake and people don’t seem to think about it. Its flat, fine, abnormally normal for a mass of prime element. Always just the colour of the sky and always fading perfectly and naturally into that sky, so its more like being open to the void than the wild sea and whale-road. Chunks of petty ice float in the perfect azure hollow of the lake.

The cold returns and all those hours sweating in tubes are justified as I finally do up every button on my jacket (Britain has never required this); there are nerds on Michigan Avenue so my explorations are essentially; a line; Americas Oldest Occult Shop looks spooky from outside, but inside is crystals, frankincense incense and a desperately kind lady who looks shocked to see a customer. In Chicago they bolt the signs on then chain them down, everything is bolted to iron which is bolted to concrete which is torn, crumbled, abraded, replaced; nothing lasts - the freeze-thaw every year; two cities, one tropical, one cold. But really everything in Chicago is a line. It’s made of lines, of grids, a diagonal is an event, and here the wilderness is in the diagonals; like the axis of a grid all journeys are an ‘L’; latitude, and once you have that, and are exactly parallel to your destination, another trip for longitude. Far isn’t hard to find, diagonal is, the home-places, the hidden spots, are deep in the diagonals, not crow-flies far, but far-by-street, buried in corners of the chocolate box.

And the city is a Chocolate box. Maybe its been stamped on, sure, but the logics in the lots, and none of the Americans I ask can tell me how that works; why would you even ask? Row upon row of exactly parallel exactly similar sized lots, but what you build in them is different every time and the fates and fortunes of the families and owners is different too; some crumble, some are never built, some are made and re-made, different styles each time, brick, plastic slats, a mania for balcony-fire-escapes to each rear, (popular in summer when the city breathes out after the long cold), modernist, traditional, grimy, polished, bare; ‘FUCK ICE’, “Love has no Boundaries”, a fucking biography of your dog attached to your front fence? Are you threatening postmen or making an introduction? (but this is very Chicago; “Are you local?” people say, and when I ask the Artist about this they say this is the Lib-City equivalent to the blank-faced “WHUT?” or “Where are you from?” I got in Indiana back in twenty-seventeen; it means ‘Identify yourself’; they know I’m strange. How finely passive, the fatherland is proud of you, our brave retarded son) even fake brickwork painted over plastic and steel.

the triangle revolves

On this, my personal, diagonal, I wander. They have bookshops and I irritate the Artist by seeking out pulp and Chicago history; shameful behaviour for a native. The only approval I get is a guy next to me on the plane as I settle in for 20 hours in nowhere - flying forwards into time, losing hours, dumped back into my future; “Boss?” he says. I’m confused. “Sorry?”

It’s the title of the book I’m reading; “Boss: Richard J Daley of Chicago, by Mike Royko” (we saw Royko’s portrait in the Gotham-Hamburger joint beneath the city); “Stunning, astonishing, myth-shattering - Studs Terkel”. (And Batman could fight Daley too; he’s big and rough enough, though only half a villain, more of a Spider-Man foe.) Did you know all those Dick-Tracy-faced guys from the movies were just real guys but with a coat of paint? Myth shattered indeed.

“That’s a good book.” The guy says, and that’s all he says; spends the next eight hours underneath his hoodie, face covered like a corpse. This guy knows how to fly.