Travelogue: Chicago

Broad shoulders. Butchered hogs. It’s all there. Three days of French hospitality in the second city, and I’m fascinated by the possibilities. Cars AND subways; Apartments WITH back yards; Chicago remains a city of strange contradictions. A city where you can fairly easily find a taxi but still live in a quaint three-story neighborhood without shelling out the GDP of Bolivia has a lot going for it. I remain amazed that there is a well-populated beach within a short ride of the commercial center, even walkable from a place you can live sans voiture. It’s like Barcelona with really, really cold winters. (and no mountains.) The people still seem a bizarre combination of friendly but not polite; something of a cultural adjustment coming from a culture where one assumes that everyone is armed. Things to suggest: Trap Door Theatre in Bucktown (or the rest of Bucktown, for that matter,) The Bourgeois Pig Café in Lincoln Park (not in any way associated, except in a weird kind of spiritual way, with the Bourgeois Pig in Hollywood,) apartment life at the East end of Hyde Park, Cloud Gate (the jellybean) in Grant/ Millennium Park, and everyone’s perennial favorite Luciano’s. This is a town to make you both reconsider and totally give up on urban theory at the same time. It’s a place where the Nineteenth Century stubbornly refuses to die, and doesn’t care what anyone thinks about it. One has to wonder about the thought process of a place that shells out millions of dollars for a titanium bandshell, yet refuses to update the godawful cast-iron monstrosity of a transit system in the next block. Does cold weather addle the brain? Maybe it’s a machine-politics thing.