Smells Like Paper Machete

I had a super fun time returning to the Paper Machete show this past Saturday to talk about Nirvana, 1991, and 2011's inevitable 20 year anniversary retrospectives in the media. Something happened where not all of the show ended up being recorded, so my piece won't get podcasted, and so I wanted to post it here:

Only a month into the new year, 2011 is already a significant one. It's the year of the most hyped and possibly also the actual worst snowstorm in Chicago history. It's the year that, along with the very last few days of 2010, people turn old enough to drink that have never lived in a world without continuous, uninterrupted new seasons of the Simpsons on TV. It's the last year before the end of the world, of course. And it's the year that, this coming September, will mark the 20th anniversary of the song that changed everything, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," by Nirvana, and their album, which also changed everything, "Nevermind," and so many others.

The year 1991 reads like a book of saints in the alternative canon. There's the two other wings of the late-'91 alternative rock power-triptych, Pearl Jam's "Ten" and Soundgarden's "Badmotorfinger;" there's REM's "Out of Time", Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Blood Sugar Sex Magik", the Pixies' "Trompe le Monde", to name just a few, which will make 2011, in addition to all those other things, a landmark banner year for documentaries and retrospectives.

By this fall, we can expect to see . . .

In 20 Words or Less

My friend Matt Higbee and I have a writing game we play at work sometimes where we use a random prompt (it's an improv theater, so there's a lot of those) to try and write a story in 20 words or less. It started because I wanted to put together a new piece to read at Two With Water's Rx Reading Series. I was going to be traveling most of the week leading up to the reading and I wanted to get something started before I left. The theme of the reading was "Orientation."

We didn't discuss what we were doing,

Cultural Center Exhibit Proposal for the Artist Matthew Woodward

In Spring 2010 I wrote this for my friend Matt Woodward. It was pieced together from earlier statements and proposals, new thoughts and notes from Matt, new research and thoughts of my own, and mostly-accurate intuition regarding how he thinks about his work. He'll be showing new work at the Chicago Cultural Center Michigan Avenue Galleries in April-May 2012.


"The city is made, forgotten, and made again, / trucks hauling it away haul it back"  -Carl Sandburg, The Windy City

"Over the last year I have been building a body of work around the moldings and wrought iron details of the American Renaissance and Beaux-Arts movements of the turn of the twentieth century, an era which employed the conventions of European classicism to glorify the advent of a new Golden Age of progress through industrialism while constantly and necessarily shedding the accoutrements of the past in order to advance and perpetuate its own motion. The White City of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago represented a crowning achievement of American Beaux-Arts at the same time it stood in stark contrast to...

Left of the Loop Part III: Where Have All the Pioneers Gone?

the West Loop, circa 198?

Tim W. Brown's Left of the Loop is in one sense a frontier story. If, as it is described in Frederick Jackson Turner's essay "The Frontier in American History," the frontier is a sparsely populated margin at the far edge of established settlement, then the West Loop in the Eighties fits the bill. Although the neighborhood bears no resemblance to the "meadows, timberland, mountain ranges, water systems and clean skies" traditionally associated with the frontier, Stark and Spungkdt are, by Spungkdt's own estimation, the only inhabitants for at least four square blocks or so; their Little House comes equipped with a huge industrial steel sliding gate, and their Prairie consists of weeds snaking up through cracks in the concrete.

Left of the Loop Part II: The Bone Chute

The most haunting image from the Post-Industrial Urban Apocalypse of Tim W. Brown's Left of the Loop is the bone chute located across the street from the loft. While some meat distributors and restaurant supply warehouses still remain in the neighborhood these days,  many of the large meat packing plants have now been converted into luxury lofts and tourist-destination restaurants. In the Eighties, however, the meat-packing industry was in full swing in the West Loop, making stray dismembered animal parts one of the notable features of Spungkdt & Stark's landscape.

"Perhaps the best reminder of the neighborhood's character and purpose was what Stark and I called the 'bone chute.' A fiberglass device sticking out of a wall of the packinghouse across the street, the bone chute's conveyor belt ferried the spinal columns, skulls, ribcages and pelvises of countless slaughtered cattle into the back of a dump truck parked underneath. All day long the bones, still red with flesh, would drop into the truck; with each thud, the truck bed echoed through Sangamon Street like an over-sized bass drum. Then, promptly at three, the truck would pull out, empty its bones somewhere, and return for the next day's load. Although curious, we never found out where the bones were shipped."

Sounds like something out of And the Ass Saw the Angel. Brown was even able to dig up and scan a picture for us, circa 1985. "Notice in the background," says Brown, "that the Bloomingdale's/900 N. Michigan building near the John Hancock Center has yet to be built."

Left of the Loop Part 1: Ish Spungdkt, Kill Your Pets, & The Strangers

210 N. Sangamon Avenue is a parking lot. The address of Ishmael Spungkdt and Stark's (no first or last name, just Stark) loft in Tim W. Brown's 2001 novel Left of the Loop is a dramatically different place for visitors today than it was in the Eighties when it was Spungkdt and Stark's  post-apocalyptic urban playground. If you walk down Sangamon to Randolph, you'll see a few holdouts from the old neighborhood -- meat packers, restaurant supply warehouses, and Adults-Only shops -- still there in between the Starbuckses and trendy restaurants . But SUVs and young adolescent trees line the 200 block of Sangamon now, and the parking lot at 210--walled-in, gated tight, and completely empty -- is surrounded by galleries, swanky architects' offices, and lofts. "Historic Loft Living, Great Views, 15 Floor Plans, Rooftop Sundeck, Vintage Architecture," reads the big yellow banner hanging on the Lake Street Loft building, clean and ivy-covered on the northeast corner of Lake and Sangamon.

Historic indeed.

If there's anyone that can tell you about Historic Loft Living in Chicago's West Loop, it's Tim W. Brown. Left of the Loop is the fictionalized account of Brown's years spent living in a barely-habitable artists' loft in the bombed-out wasteland that was the West Loop in the Eighties, the only permanent residents for several square city blocks of broken-down industrial scrabble peopled by hobos,  smacked-out ragtag punk outfits, sometimes-identifiable animal parts that found their way out of trucks and dumpsters behind meat packing plants (see: bone chute), and lots and lots and lots of broken glass.

"Chairs Are Architecture; Sofas Are Bourgeois": A Study of Eurocentrism, Modernism, and IKEA

It falls apart before you get done putting it together. It’s so crappy that some moving companies refuse to touch it. And according to Ed Norton in that movie I hate, a house full of it is a sure sign that you’ve sold your soul to corporate Satan. But we’ve all got our IKEA furniture; we’re attracted to its clean modern lines the way little kids with Cheeto fingers are attracted to your new white shirt. I go to that joint and I buy the HELL out of that crap. Every time I do, though, I think about how the popularization of mass produced, inexpensive Modern design via IKEA involves phenomena that extend beyond any discussion of quality or taste.

Early 20th century Modern design, like its late 20th century IKEA revival, begins as a European export. And like a ship full of plague rats or a pile of blankets festering with smallpox, it arrives on distant shores with something nasty crawling unseen just below its smooth faux-teak surface.