In Which We Aim for New York and Land in Chicago

Chicago

by NICHOLAS FREILICH

Chicago is known by many names: The Windy City; The Second City; The Third Coast; The Homeless Man’s New York; etc. It’s the place I aspired to build when I played Sim City in junior high school. It’s where actors go to star in a few regional commercials and get an agent before moving to Los Angeles. It’s filed with people who eat and drink and root for sports teams named after large animals. It was Frank’s kind of town, and — for the next two years or so — it’ll be my kind of town, too.

I’ve lived in Chicago for a month, haven’t been to a single museum, and still can’t figure out where to put my recyclables. In other words: don’t try this at home. With that out of the way, some advice and observations.

Transportation

The Red Line is the key to Chicago’s train system. Without it, the CTA’s rail system becomes DC’s or — even worse — Boston’s, two plans based on the premise that people only travel from their homes to downtown and back. With the the Red Line, however, CTA offers a direct path south from the Evanston-Chicago border to end of the Dan Ryan Expressway, a near-perfect Y-axis from which riders can transfer to any number of buses running parallel to Chicago’s X-axis.

The grid makes it easy for people like me to feign knowledge of how to get around. While the numbered streets don’t start until south of the Downtown Loop area, all the street signs indicate how far they stand from the intersection of State and Madison, the grid’s origin. It gets tricky when the diagonal streets come into play, but those are mainly useful for cyclists and delivery truck drivers.

Residents polled for advice recommend buying a bike, as Chicago is a "bike-friendly" city. This is half-true. Yes, Mayor Daley declared that he wanted to make Chicago the "most bicycle-friendly city in the United States," and the expansion of bikeways — from 50 to 350 miles in the past 10 years -- as well as the introduction of Bike Chicago — a 3-month series of organized rides — indicate a clear commitment to that goal, as does the McDonald’s Cycle Center in Millennium Park. Unfortunately, motorists hate cyclists here as much as they do in any other big city, and if one is foolish enough to ride on the sidewalk to avoid traffic-related death, fines and imprisonment await.

The drivers aren’t the only crazies here, though. The folks on public transportation put Boston’s Green Line passengers to shame. In the last week I’ve watched a quartet of Crips down a handle of off-brand Vodka at two in the afternoon, a Nigerian woman put a curse on an entire train before an angry guy with a unibrow told her to “shut up,” and a small group of teens simulating a snowstorm by breaking up pieces of styrofoam and tossing them into the air. Hey, at least the Red Line runs all night.

The Soul of the City

A friend recently remarked that she found New York overwhelming in large doses, the idea being that once the initial enthusiasm of moving there wears off, you lose the motivation to attend art openings, free concerts and weekly group Spanish lessons. Chicago doesn’t seem to have such a brutal personality, at least not yet.

The “tall city” feel is concentrated in the Loop area where tourist necks snap up at sights like the Hancock Center and the Willis nee Sears Tower. The rest of the city rolls out like an endless urban rug, akin to Queens, or Brooklyn, or Omaha.

This sort of urban sprawl is less oppressive and indomitable than the up-up-up of Manhattan. It’s also much cleaner here than in New York, perhaps because there are fewer skyscrapers.

That’s not to say Chicago is without its stunning edifices. The architecture here is richer than that in any other American City. It buries New York’s. For proof, watch Batman Begins or The Blues Brothers. If you’re tired of those classic films, try Adventures in Babysitting — it shows off what may or may not be a Chicago bus terminal.

For the best view up close of Chicago’s towering skyline, there are a few boat-based architectural tours, all of which are priced for tourists from countries where the Euro is king. If you don’t mind making up the facts as you go along, take a Chicago Water Taxi from Michigan Avenue to Chinatown. An all-day pass is only six bucks and it includes all the best views as well as complimentary lifejacket use.

Chicago is also highly walkable, but I’ve found that walking around here reminds me of the 30 Rock episode where Liz Lemon realizes that if she moved to Cleveland, she could be a model. It’s not that people are unattractive in Chicago — they’re just closer to the mean than folks in Manhattan and Paris are. If Fox were to cast a reality show called “Real People of America,” they could just grab a handful of Red Line riders and call it a day.

Dining and Entertainment

For people who can afford to dine out with impunity, Chicago’s restaurants are truly what make it The City Second Only to New York. In my sole break-the-bank eating experience, I ate at Prosecco, a high-end Italian kitchen that includes among its repeat clientele Bon Jovi, Vince Vaughn, and Jakob Dylan. If you have the means, you must drop in; the risotto alone is worth the visit.

Of course, there are those of us in Chicago who would prefer to get our food free, in the form of hot-wings if at all possible. Thankfully there is BrokeHipster.com, a site dedicated to Chicago’s free and cheap dining. You don’t have to sport an ironic mustache or ride a fixed-gear bike to use the site.

Fun and laughs are plentiful here. Chicago is the core of the improv universe. Every night of the week offers a free or cheap show of mid- to high-level entertainment value. Some of the best include TJ and Dave at iO, Messing with a Friend at The Annoyance Theater, and the independently owned and operated Dirty Water, a 5-man show about “the fun-loving wise-cracking regulars” of the fictitious Boston bar bearing the show’s name (the first Friday of every month at Town Hall Pub, 3340 N. Halsted, 8:00pm).

Chicago is also great for fans of Public Radio. Both Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! and This American Life are co-produced by Chicago Public Radio. Wait Wait… is even recorded weekly in front of a live Chicago audience. Anyone with $21.99 and directions to The Chase Auditorium can join in the fun.

Lastly, a note on working out: Gym use is down in middle-America, so most gyms are eager to let you sample their facilities, some even for weeks at a time. Most of the people who purchase memberships are coastal transplants, young professionals, and law students who are too good for university-level athletic centers. If you are stealth enough, you can sneak into the Crunch at Grand and Wabash for months without being asked to show proof of membership. (This Recording does not endorse gym membership theft).

And Then…

I could go on… I’ll go on: Al Capone. David Mamet. The Cubs. SCTV. The Green Mill. University of Chicago Physics Grad Students. Ferris Bueller. Pitchfork, the Festival and the Music Hype Machine. Chicago, the Band. Wrigley. Obama. Kanye. Common. Uncommon. Deep Dish Pizza. Michigan Avenue. Lake Michigan. The Goat. Art Institute of Chicago. Navy Pier. Lakeshore Drive. Oprah. Ozzie Guillen. MJ. Da Bears. And don’t forget House Music.

Nicholas Freilich is a writer living in Chicago. He maintains The Poetry Project, which you can find here.

"Numero" - Chewy Chocolate Cookies (mp3)

"Apocalypse" - Chewy Chocolate Cookies (mp3)

"It Was Only A Kiss" - Chewy Chocolate Cookies (mp3)

In Which We Are The Huston of Our Dreams

The Girl Who Would Be Queen

Anjelica is the fiercest, baddest, Jack Nicholson-beatingest, betch ever. And like Tess Lynch, she is Irish as fuck.

For Saint Patrick’s Day, Joan Juliet Buck interviews her childhood friend Anjelica Huston about her Irish roots, branches and leaves.

JJB: Let’s talk about Ireland.

AH: Remember that Irish is a slow language; all vocal exchange is introduced by at least 7 minute’s opening dialogue about the weather. No conversation is complete without this introduction. It’s like looking at a horse’s teeth. From this initial exchange one can deduce age, demeanor and provenance.

JJB: So how is the weather by the beach in Venice California?

AH: It’s as cold as a witch’s tit, the wind is whipping up the palm trees, the seagulls are slapping against my windows, there are whitecaps way out to sea. Lots of teenagers on roof tops, on cell-phones, with their hair flying.

JJB: Can we start now? Have we done the weather?

AH: Sure.

taken by Bob Richardson (father of Terry), Anjelica's then BF

JJB: Do you cook Irish food?

AH: Yes I make Soda Bread! I make Irish Stew!

JJB: What Irish qualities do you wish you had?

AH: Extraordinary resilience when it comes to suffering. Musicianship. Patience.

JJB: What Irish qualities are you glad to have?

AH: I’m up for a good time. I make friends easily. I like to dance. I feel good around the color green.

JJB: So just how Irish are you? You grew up there, starred as Gretta in your father’s The Dead from the James Joyce story, directed the Irish movie Agnes Browne What did Ireland give you?

AH: Without my Irish childhood I would —— not know the names of the plants and flowers in my mother’s garden, would not know how to ride a horse, walk in the rain, sing plaintive songs about the country I miss and love the most. I would not know you. I would not understand the vagaries and the delights of nature, the clouds racing overhead, the smell of turf and sheep’s wool, the cold, the black bogs, growing up with dogs, The Sisters Of Mercy, fairies, and the best Christmases in the world.

JJB: I remember your nanny, who looked just like Katharine Hepburn.

AH: That was Nurse— a firm calm presence, dedicated to my Mother, whom she called ‘Madam’. There was Molly, who was exceptionally fun when she dropped her false teeth, and held a flashlight under her chin, and chased us up and down a dark hall near the back stairs . There was Josie, who always brought Dad his breakfast. He said she was like watching the sun come up in the morning. There was Paddy Lynch, our Groom, who taught me how to ride like an Irishwoman. I still ride. I have nine horses at my ranch up north.

JJB: You were terrifyingly good on horseback. The Pony Club , and you hunted with The Galway Blazers …

AH: Who had the reputation of being hell for leather. Big stonewall country…I was blooded on my first outing—they smeared fox guts on my face. I hunted side-saddle from the age of 12 to please my Father.

Anjelica and her father John Huston

JJB: It seemed so out of time, so far from everywhere

AH: The West of Ireland! The Big house, as we called it , was at one end of a fork in the avenue, across a waterfall, surrounded by meadows and a ha-ha, a sort of hidden ditch, which allowed an uncluttered view of grazing horses. It was Georgian, built of limestone, it was a good size, three storied, not huge.

JJB: And you and your mother and Tony lived in The Little House.

AH: The Little House was at the other end of the fork, across the river. It was sweet, cozy, like a limestone cottage. The walled garden behind The Little House was hundreds of years old, and at one time the explorer Burke had brought back many plant specimens from his travels abroad, and planted them in this garden. There were wonderful, mysterious trees there, some very rare. The woman who owned the property, Mrs. Burke-Cole, was concerned that Dad would tear down a Norman Castle –-the tower that stood behind the stable yard — and so it remained in her possession surrounded by a tall fence. Remember? We used to sneak in and play there, and on one occasion, we found a primitive cannon ball, wooden, with lead sheeting nailed to its surface. And of course it was a great place for fairies.

JJB: You didn’t really like performing then.

AH: My first acting experience was the part of the Third witch in the Shakespeare play. You were the director, and you, as First witch, had the most lines. It was decided that for safety’s sake, I, being 6 at the time , should have the least. The small, glamorous 7-year-old daughter of one of my father’s visiting ex-girlfriends, Marina Habe, filled out as the Second witch. She and you had wisely chosen nightshirts of my father’s and not the Aran fisherman’s blanket I had greedily claimed as my costume. Tony was in charge of special effects, such as blinking the light switches on and off to simulate lightning, and an ample ewer of tomato juice to double as ‘Baboon’s Blood’. Our audience—remember— was comprised of my parents and yours: The Hustons, Ricki and John, The Bucks, Joyce and Jules, and glowing in the front row seats of honor, the glorious, golden pre-‘Lawrence Of Arabia’ Peter O’Toole and his beautiful Welsh wife, Sian Phillips. There were some additional well-wishers, such as Eric Sevareid and his wife Belen, and a smattering of kitchen help.

JJB: Anjelica -

AH: Needless to say, tension ran high. You delivered your lines with calm authority, as did Marina, but when it came time for Third witch to deliver, a weedy voice quavered to a halt on the line ‘Toad under Cold Stone….’ A clamorous silence ensued, and finally I muttered, “This is silly,” and ran from the scene in blind hysteria. This is still one of the reasons I find stage acting so hard. The constant possibility of that. I spent the rest of the night hiding behind the curtains in the study as Tony set up a hunting party to find and then flay me, and then eventually found my way to my mother’s lap where I sobbed piteously till I was put to bed.

JJB: Um… Anjelica, you were the First witch. I was the Third witch, with all my great lines at the end. That’s why I was so angry. We couldn’t do the scene until you’d been found.

AH: I’m sorry.

JJB: I’ve gotten over it. But by the next year, you’d pulled it together and were very good reciting Edward Gorey’s poem “The suicide as she is falling, illuminated by the moon”…

AH: I’d dress up in my mother’s old tutus with some tulle on my head and wait for a bridegroom to pass by. I longed for Barbie dolls, but Mum thought they were vulgar. I longed to be a princess and to have a prince of my own, with whom I would live happily ever after. We listened to Edith Piaf, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra. Tony and I favored Burl Ives, Harry Belafonte was maybe the most played down at the Little House…’Angelico’ being a favorite of mine. We also had spoken-word albums: Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Marlon Brando in Julius Caesar, Yeats reading his own poetry. And Leadbelly, Billie Holiday , Count Basie , and then the Irish music, John Mc Cormack. Jim Reeves was hugely popular. Then you introduced Chubby Checker’s ‘Let’s Twist Again’, and we were never the same.

JJB: What Irish songs stir you?

AH: ‘Galway Bay’ really gets me because I was raised in County Galway. When I was doing Lonesome Dove, Bobby Duvall had a Mariachi Band record that song to use whenever he needed to make me cry. It would be the end of a long working day, and we’d have done seven scenes, and I’d think I didn’t have a grain of emotion left in me. Bobby would play ‘Galway Bay’ on his tape recorder, and I’d be gone on a wave of tears.

JJB: What was Ireland to your parents, to John and Ricki ?

AH: For Dad, Ireland was the place he came to lick his wounds. He was happier there than anywhere else in life. For Mum? She said it was beautiful, romantic, wild, exasperating, lonely…

JJB: Was it lonely for you?

AH: Loneliness is not necessarily considered a bad thing in Ireland. Every story, every song is nostalgic, even the place itself is soft and wet…There are signs of the past everywhere, they are part of everyday life. I was very lonely when Dad would leave to go to America to work. It seemed so terribly far away. I remember holding on to his legs with Tony when he would walk out the front door to the car. I was lonely when Mum would go away on trips without us . I remember being very lonely when you would leave to go back to London in the early days. I remember hiding your passport and you getting mad at me.

Anjelica with longtime former boyfriend Jack Nicholson

JJB: Don’t you want to go back?

AH: I would like to time travel. But to go back there now? Everything has changed. The adults are no longer … my father and mother are gone. The last time I went back to St Clerans was with Bob (Robert Graham, Anjelica’s husband), before we became engaged. In fact , he proposed to me at Dromoland Castle on that visit. It was unutterably painful to go back. There is not a nook or cranny of that place that I had not committed to memory, yet everything was altered. The people who owned The Little House had bought it with winnings from a horse they owned that won at the Galway Races.

AH: I had hoped that they would be at Mass when we dropped in unannounced on the property. At the front gates of The Little House, we were spotted by a young man of about 17. He stared at me from a distance, and then approached me, looked into my eyes, and said: ‘I’ve always dreamed of the day Anjelica Huston would come back to St. Clerans’. That just about put me away. I did not have the courage to go up to the Big House. We walked in the garden..…It was almost unbearably sad. Although the idea of living at St.Clerans again is alluring, I fear it’s true that—- at least in this instance— I can never go home again. Soon after, Merv Griffin bought it, gave it a facelift, and transformed it into a boutique hotel with a sushi restaurant.

Thanks to Anjelic, the Anjelica Huston fansite.

"Return to Me" - Sparklehorse (mp3)

"Dreamt for Light Years In the Belly of the Mountain" - Sparklehorse (mp3) highly recommended

"Don't Take My Sunshine Away" - Sparklehorse (mp3)

In Which We Put You On The Right Literary Track

Summer Reading

by ANDREW ZORNOZA

I'm a habitual self-interlocutor.

Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has been photographing seemingly random swaths of oceanscape since 1972.

In the summer we think more about the sea. What else is there to say? Sugimoto divides the landscape right at the vertical midpoint of his photographs, he provides no focal point—these are compositionally crude, a child's drawing without a boat. The photographs are titled simply: Ligurian Sea. Boden Sea, Ionian Sea, North Atlantic Ocean, etc. . . .

Naming things has something to do with human awareness, with the separation of the entire world from you. So with the Seascapes I was thinking about the most ancient of human impressions. The time when man first named the world around him, the Sea…[the Seascapes] all look alike, but they are located at different places in different countries, and the oceans have different names.

But the seas do not all look alike. There is no need for a focal point because none exists. Any part of the sea is as good another to lose yourself in. All that remains the same is Sugimoto's perspective, the viewing angle, the perceived height of the vantage point.

Sugimoto uses an 19^th century large-format cabinet camera. The 8 x 10 negatives are easily scarred by static electricity; the ASA speed of the film is tortuously slow.

...but personally I was also concerned with the quality of the photography, traditional professional photography. I didn't want to be criticized for taking low-quality photographs, so I tried to reach the best, highest quality of photography and then to combine this with a conceptual art practice. But thinking back, that was the wrong decision [laughs]. Developing a low-quality aesthetic is a sign of serious fine art - I still see this.

The shutter opens, the sea enters: despite their detail, each image has compressed time, each incorporates a spool of motion into its present tense. Buy it here.

If you are not indoors for the summer, here are some more seas in motion—appropriately pondered from a beach towel:

Self-Portrait with Beach, Frederic Tuten

The beach, the sea, the blue umbrellas. A sail. Then another, like a long arm climbing the horizon. She stretched out on a blanket beside me in the dreadful hot sand.

Tuten, a generous boulevardier and elder statesman of the avant-garde has quietly been assembling a series of self-portraits. Tuten's stories are tender, with an oddly refreshing touch of narcissism thrown in. And always beautifully written. The author's Self-Portrait with Icebergs also makes excellent summer reading, despite the title.

Goodbye My Brother, John Cheever

A must read for anyone trapped on a family vacation — especially those take the extra minute to make sure they have Vampire Weekend on their iPod before they leave for the Cape. First time readers generally sympathize with the narrator and loathe the dour brother, Lawrence. Those who re-read start to see holes in the narrator's story and begin to loathe the unnamed narrator. Those who reread over and over say fuck it and hate Lawrence anyway. Similar to Sam Shepard's True West, and arguably like any brother narrative, this one flirts with schizophrenia. Neither character is real, only Cheever says Thallasa, thallasa and gets away with it. When the women walk naked and unshy out of the sea — all this is playing out inside one bifurcated mind.

The Man Who Lost the Sea, Theodore Sturgeon

The sick man is buried in the cold sand with only his head and his left arm showing. He is dressed in a pressure suit and looks like a man from Mars. Built into his left sleeve is a combination time-piece and pressure gauge, the gauge with a luminous blue indicator which makes no sense, the clock hands luminous red. He can hear the pounding of surf and the soft swift pulse of his pumps. One time long ago when he was swimming he went too deep and stayed down too long and came up too fast, and when he came to it was like this: they said, 'Don't move, boy. You've got the bends. Don't even try to move.' He had tried anyway.

Thomas Sturgeon is undoubtedly an acquired taste, but so is life. Too pulpy for the literati, too silly for those who thought they knew better (with titles like The [Widget] The [Wadget] and Boff; and "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" who can blame them), Sturgeon is perfect for the beach. If you like the above which you can read here , find “Slow Sculpture.” The latter story contains one of the most imaginative most heartbreaking leaps in all literature with the words: "Come up to the house and I'll fix it."

The Terminal Beach, JG Ballard

Above him, along the crests of the dunes, the tall palms leaned into the dim air like the symbols of a cryptic alphabet. The landscape of the island was covered by strange ciphers.

It is sad that so many young experimentalists of today have fallen under the spell of Barthelme. Ten years ago, it seemed there were many other paths to follow. Calvino, Acker, Ballard.... Now that he is dead, people will miss him.

Some Clouds, Paco Ignacio Taibo II

He was sitting in the last chair under the last lonely palm tree, drinking beer out of a bottle and cleaning the sand off a pile of small shells..."

So opens this Taibo novel, with one-eyed Hector Belascoaran Shayne downing Coronas and waiting for his sister to arrive and shake him out of his torpor.

Belascoaran is one of the great characters in all modern fiction. Too bad, the author, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, is woefully unappreciated here in the United States. Taibo's Belascoaran novels have the proper blend of sex, drama and hijinks to make the hours disappear and spin the mind into a blissfully woozy state of vicarious carpet riding. The gimpy, one-eyed Belascoaran is an aficianodo of carbonated beverages, has an urban geographer's love for "The Monster" (Mexico City) and — pre-craigslist — practically lives in his "office": a rented desk in a room shared with a plumber, an upholster and a sewage engineer. Highly recommended.

Also:

To The Lighthouse, Virgina Woolf

The Tempest, William Shakespeare

The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares

Andrew Zornoza is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find his website here. You can purchase his new book, Where I Stay, here.

"Stopover Bombay" - Alice Coltrane (mp3)

"Shiva-Loka" - Alice Coltrane (mp3)

"Journey in Satchidanada" - Alice Coltrane (mp3) highly recommended