Thou Shalt Not Covet

I finally made it into Pistachios tonight. I stopped in on the way to the train to go home. I don't usually take the train home but I had to put $$ on my transit card and you can't do that on the bus. I noticed this morning as I walked to the office, that the bowl I was gazing at longingly thru the right storefront window for months was now placed on the back wall of the shop on a shelf.

I walked in and walked straight over to it, with a maniacal look on my face I'm sure. :D I looked at the teeny price on the card next to it. Teeny as in the print, not the actual price itself. $175 for a glass bowl? The saleslady saw my reaction to seeing and holding my precious bowl, but evidently not my reaction to the price. She asked if it would be going home with me. I don't know if I said, "You must be high!" to her in reply or not. I'm gonna guess it was only in my head that I said it. But, I actually wondered for awhile as I was walking from the shop to the train if I really said it out loud...

She really tried to work me. "You know, if you don't take it someone else will and it will be gone." All I could think was, 'It was in the window for 3 damn months! Who's gonna come and take it now?' And if someone else got it, bully for them. If I had $175 in disposable income, I wouldn't be driving illegally with an unregistered vehicle. I'd have cable. I'd buy a new coat for the hellacious winter I know is coming. I'd buy a gang of long underwear to save me from the piercing winds off Lake Michigan. I would not buy a bowl I can't put in the dishwasher. Ms. Tenacious Saleslady said the bowl was "made to be functional" and to be "art you can utilize." I guess, if your idea of functional was to put fake floral arrangements or marbles in it or something. I can't cook oatmeal in it. I wouldn't eat my Cocoa Pebbles in it.

And then, there were the other expensive lovelies in the shop. Jewelry, gorgeous scarves, and beautiful, beautiful glass art pieces. Nothing less than $50 in there. Vases, more bowls, shaped things (I forgot to ask what the things were in the front window). I have very little highbrow tastes but glass art is a weakness of mine. I don't own any but they sure are purty. I like strange, fascinating things in gorgeous or odd colors. But, it has to DO something. "What does it DO?" is a question I always ask at art fairs. Some people get pissed at me for asking such a thing. Others seem to make up an answer. Some people will actually tell the truth and say it doesn't do anything but look pretty. Which is really my favorite answer because I wish I could do the same thing. Not have to do anything, just sit there and look pretty. And get paid a lot of money for my trouble.

I'll take the items on the top shelf, and send my driver to pick it up later.

Right next to the fancy electronics store is a fancy things store. Pistachios is an arty shop with glass things, jewelry and other things I can only aspire to afford. A shop for those of top-tier Republican, off-shore bank accounts socio-economic status who buy things without asking what it costs or bothering to look at the price tag just because they can. For months, walking from the train station to work, there was this red glass bowl on display in the right storefront window. I don't know how functional it was, if it was dishwasher or microwafe safe (which is a MUST for me). I don't know what it cost because the price tag was so teeny, I could not make it out. It was so beautiful and then it was...gone... Replaced by an enormous glass apple.

It is a lovely red apple but I wanted the bowl. The red apple has been moved recently and now where it originally sat, there are other...um...things. I have no idea what they are supposed to be. On the other side of the door, in the left storefront window, there are massive glass ornaments - the size of which would go on Godzilla's Christmas Tree. I've never actually made it into the store when it was open to see what other lovely things they have that I can't afford. Why spend $2,000 on a piece of art when you could feed so many people at a shelter with that, or buy clothes for residents in an emergency home for battered women? If I had the disposable income, I probably could not in good conscience spend that kind of $$ on a bowl I can't eat out of (or even if I could eat out of it). I could not pay more than $50 for art of that sort. Any more than that seems wasteful.

Heck, when you're broke, spending more than $5 for anything you don't need seems a waste. That $5 can be the difference between eating something and not eating for a day. Stores on (and just off) the Magnificent Mile could feed the entire City of Chicago with what they make in a day. Stores like Pistachios, Cartier, Tiffany, Gucci, etc. just seem so unnecessary.

But, I would not turn down a lovely bauble from such unnecessary stores if ever presented with such a thing. Because I secretly wish to be that which I hate. Paris Hilton. With more money than sense and nothing to do with my time but embarrass myself and every woman on the planet. And spend gobs of money I didn't earn.

Chicago from a different set of eyes.

[This view of Chicago comes by way of brilliant, perfect, single, studly DanH. He gives a postcard picture of the Chicago he saw in a summer visit this past August. -CS]

I once read a novel in which one of the principal characters, a university lecturer from Kansas, reflected that the main reason he was un-American was that he loved trains. He had chosen to live in India, that most journeying of nations, and loved the fluidity, the mobile camaraderie and temporary society, of a string of carriages pulled by a groaning engine. He mused that his native land, with its emphasis upon individual choice and freedom, was both more suited to the dynamism of the car and more static as a result. There is something liberating about the automobile, but there is something more romantic and enduring about the step-on step-off bustle of the train. America, the lecturer concluded, had chosen the guarded privacy, the obsessive freedom, of the sealed and controlled car and had thus consigned itself to an insular, impersonal, and altogether grayer existence.

Well, Chicago was built on the tracks.

Like all tracks, the ones on which Chicago grew had two sides: the Working City's stolid, bluecollar tradition and the swirling, neon-lit decadence of its Capones and Giancanas. That tension still exists today. The visitor to Chicago, the green tourist of Americana in its urban incarnation, will be attracted - will be directed - towards Michigan Avenue and the Hancock Building, towards Saks or Sears. They will be encouraged to take a ride in a horse-drawn carriage and listen to narration about the city's glorious past, its famous and, more interestingly, its infamous sons and daughters. There will be cafes and clubs and there will be arty kids playing trendy rock in tastefully furnished, and exclusively patroned, bars. There will be an artificial beach.

But a ride on the CTA takes them to the grit of Chicago, to its cogs and neo-Victorian brick. The forbidding quasi-Gothic architecture of the Tribune building is here replaced by the communal practicality of the front stoop. Bloomingdale's is replaced by Target, the Apple Store by Best Buy. Subway stays. Here, people stand still more often. They smile more often, too. Things feel at once more comfortable and less predictable out here, as if real life only begins somewhere eastsouthwest of the Magnificent Mile. Here is where the bluecollar tradition comes alive - here is where the city is born. In the suburbs live the people who drive into downtown to buy a throw for their leather sofa. That is Sinatra's Chicago. Eastsouthwest of the
Esplanade lives the City of Big Shoulders. These people are connected to Michigan Avenue by the train.

I was fortunate enough to see both of these Chicagos - unlike many a tourist, I lived in Rogers Park for a week and explored the city's headier attractions from that base. I like to think that this gave me a different perspective to the average international visitor, and to some extent I have evidence for this minor conceit: I have travelled the States, mainly the south, as a harried tourist many times, and visited any number of smaller American cities ... and do not feel I have the same grasp of them that I do of the Windy. Which is not to say I *understood* Chicago in its entirety. Not at all.

I am English. It is a peculiarity of English society that a new accent and dialect crops up at intervals roughly equivalent to every city block. It may have something to do with our Germanic need to classify, but more crucially this separation of people translates into the urban geography of our cities. The only megalopolis we have to compare to Chicago is, of course, London - our other cities are provincial towns by comparison. But London, it is often said, is not so much a city as it is a collection of villages - of a Camden here and a Bayswater there, then a Covent Garden over in that corner and a Kensington in this. Each of these 'villages' has its own distinctive feel, even its own special architecture. It is not just evident when emerging, blind, from the subterannean public transport hamster tunnel that is the Tube - it's possible to walk between one village and the next and observe the sudden but undeniable shift.

Despite Chicago's special reputation as a city of two particular sides, this was a phenonemon I failed to observe whilst there.

It could be that, as a visitor with no clue as to what precisely delineates American neighbourhoods, I simply missed the signs. But, it seemed to me, the closest Chicago gets to this stark villagisation is the complexion of a neighbourhood's residents - Jewish in Skokie, Asian in Naperville. There is something of the American in this - English cities have grown over centuries, and reflect this organic expansion in their haphazard and disconnected topology. American cities were erected quickly and seamlessly, and each time a neighbourhood was added to them it was added so as to fit that first initial spurt of frenzied construction. They are as a result more architecturally unified, if often socially more stratified. Chicago, I think, is no exception.

At the same time, however, the city is far different to any other American experience I have had. Much is made of the concept of the Independent Republic of New York City, but Chicago felt in many ways as separate as the Big Apple is reputed to be. Travelling the south, you don't hear on the radio what you hear in Chicago. Travelling almost anywhere else in the US, you simply do not get a public transport system as coherent as the CTA - for an Englishman bred on the idea that nowhere is too far away as long as you can find a train station or a bus-stop, I was in public transport heaven. Chicago felt airier and less oppressive than many cities I've visited - its wide boulevards are almost Parisian and even the tallest of its skyscrapers do not seem to close in on your personal space as they do in Dallas or
Jacksonville. There is nothing of the claustrophobic asthma of London in Chicago. It is liberating. It is liberal.

There is also something defiantly midwestern and down-to-earth about the city - even the Magnificent Mile is clandestinely hectoring, "Hey, you - yeah, you - shouldn't you be watching the Bears? Put that diamond watch down." I appreciate this. Pretension is not an attractive feature for a city, and Chicago is mostly without it. But seven days is not enough to know a city the size of this one.

I did not understand whether or not the river cleaves Chicago in two as it does London.

I didn't understand which parts of Chicago were the nice parts and which the seedy, as I did instinctively in El Paso.

I could not discern what made a Chicagoan a Chicagoan - what part of the city's many unique features conjured allegiance from ether ... and decided that it must therefore be birth. This makes Chicago an exclusionary city in that most defiant and protective of bluecollar ways.

I'm not sure I got a feel for Chicago's people. Perhaps this was because I didn't meet enough of them. In fact, no, it *was* because I didn't meet enough of them. This is the nature of the beast - it is the anonymity of the modern city at work, and Chicago is many things but not, perhaps, the most communal of settlements.

And I couldn't tell you what number bus to get for North Sheridan.

But I kept a journal whilst in the city, and one day I wrote this: "I understand Chicago. I think it understands me." I meant this in the most vague, esoteric of ways. It is beyond the seven days of my visit to truly come to grips with a city the size of Chicago, but I felt something in this conurbation of obscene spread with which I immediately connected. I am a city boy. I had spent more than three weeks travelling largely rural areas. When I arrived in Chicago, I had experienced a couple of pretty bad days. This city was, to me, like balm.

Chicago is a city with the potential to be as brutishly lonely as any other, but I thought I felt something in its bars and stores and streets. I thought I felt a kind of workaday welcome, the kind that behooves a city built to the tune of migration. It is big, it is loud, and it is imposing. But, at root, Chicago is perhaps that rarest of cities: one that actually *likes* people, rather than just entertains them.

And you can see it all by train.

CARRIE!

I was walking after midnight, out in the moonlight...

Sorry.

I was walking down Grand from the CTA Red Line station to the office today, passing the fancy electronics store as I do every morning, when I was halted in my tracks by the sight of Luke Skywalker hopping into his X-Wing. They had EPISODE IV playing on the fancy flat screen plasma TV in the window, DVD case prominently displayed and I had to fight off the urge to call in ill until it was over. First of all, it's TOO DAMN COLD AND WINDY to be standing outside watching a movie I've seen at least twice a year since the VHS copies of STAR WARS came out. Second of all, I have to work and can't afford time off without pay (which is what I'd be facing if I skipped out right now). I'm sure it was on all night, because I didn't see anyone in the store yet. Had I known they'd be playing it, I would have gotten up early and packed a thermos of hot chocolate so I could see the whole thing before I went to work. I would feel better today.

Christmas in Warsaw

The day of the 'election,' I saw a postcard on the train. It was discarded in a seat across the aisle from me so I didn't get THAT close a look but I did see Jesse Jackson insisting that whomever got it VOTE NOV. 2. For some reason that made me laugh. I imagined that the text said something like, "You and your baby mama better vote or all black people are gonna be slaves come Nov. 3rd." Which is no less ridiculous than the fliers that were distributed in some black neighborhoods in Detroit and elsewhere that said if you have ever been arrested and you try to vote you will go to jail for 30 years. I'm not exaggerating...

Also seen that day on the train, some grown @ss man coloring in The Big Brain Coloring Book. I can only hope he is a medical student.

I noticed last week that the Christmas lights are going up all over Chicago. I dread The Holiday Season because it is nothing but a hassle. Holiday music you can't escape, and it's EVERYWHERE. Nothing about the gift of life thru God's only begotten son. Jesus didn't have a Christmas tree or chimney. My best friend's husband (who is JEWISH) slipped a disc in his back last year when he tried to take the tree down into their basement for storage. He hasn't worked since. I thought this meant we wouldn't have to decorate the damn thing ever again but since it didn't make it into the basement...it's sitting in the dining room just waiting for us... *SIGH*

I love giving presents, but I give presents all year whenever I can. I am big on 'just 'cause' presents. There is nothing nicer than to give a present that is unexpected and PERFECT. Christmas is such a pressure cooker of commerce. It will be interesting to see this all take place in Chicago, where shopping is at a whole 'nother level. There are miles of stores I cannot afford to set foot in. I dare not even look longingly at Cartier, Chanel, Gucci, Bvlgari, Escada, etc. This is Oprah, the Hilton sisters, the Olsen/Bush twins and Ivanka Trump shopping. I am banished to the suburbs for Wal-Mart and Target. The only other stores I can afford are Walgreen's and Family Dollar. To be one of those ladies with a limo and driver and AmEx Black Card with days filled with nothing but shopping The Magnificent Mile until my fingers get numb from taking my card out of and putting it into my Ferragamo wallet.

I wonder if I should get presents for the people I see frequently and know by name? Mr. Otis, who sells the paper in the morning outside the Walgreen's across from work. Ms. Betty, who owns that antique shop around the corner from me, between Estes and Touhy on the west side of Sheridan. In a town this massive, it's always nice to hear that someone is glad to see you even if you don't know them very well...you've touched them somehow, even tangentially. What would you get someone like that? A coffee mug? A winter scarf? Chicago can be so cold and intimidating. To be singled out as someone, whatever that means, is very sweet. I go into work by a different route so I don't see Mr. Otis as much as I did but anytime I go into Walgreen's on the way to work he always says he needs to see me more. He sees hundreds of people every morning. It's just sweet to be noticed. I haven't gotten in to see Ms. Betty in awhile because now that it's getting cold...the hours for the shop are a lot shorter and she's not there as late it is when I get home from work. She never cared that I didn't buy anything. She liked to sit and chat with me. We've talked about her life, why she's running her antique shop at a loss most months (because she likes pretty things and likes the people who comes in to visit more), Chicago's past. She was a school teacher and when she retired, she invested her savings into an antique store just because it's what she always wanted to do. Her husband is doing very well and she can afford to have the hobby. She's just glad to be doing something she's ALWAYS WANTED to do. She may have to close one day but, she's grateful that for awhile at least...she gets to live her dream. "I don't want to get rich. I just want to be happy and this makes me SO happy." I'd like to be rich and happy, but if I have to pick ONE...I'd pick happy.

Unless I was old. Then I'd pick rich...