We stood around the rippled slab of stone where all this history had taken place, looking at one another.
“This was the place?” Bjorn asked rhetorically.
Below us, a busy freeway rushed its commuters into the suburbs, none of them any wiser that just over their heads a small group of unconventional tourists was trying to figure out just what it was about its own history that still gave Chicago nightmares.
The Haymarket Riot was not entirely uncommemorated: a few blocks away, by an empty parking lot, a square bronze plaque about the size of a pizza carton was embedded in the sidewalk. Inscribed on it was a confusing story that would have seriously baffled anyone not already fully cognizant of the events.
We loitered around Unremarked Site Number Three for a while, not quite sure what to do. “I’m baffled,” I said.
“So are we all,” said Tom. “That’s why we call our magazine The Baffler.”
There was only one person in Chicago with the power to unbaffle us. This was a man who was a historical monument himself, the writer Studs Terkel. Born in 1912, Studs Terkel had interviewed thousands of ordinary folk and spokesmen for ordinary folk, and had warmly defended the waning light of American progressive thought for over half a century. His books include the celebrated Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, and Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day And How They Feel About It.
Studs’s office was in the building of the Chicago Historical Society, where he holds the title of senior researcher. We found the building but it turned out that Studs’s office, like all the other hidden history of Chicago, wasn’t so easy to find. We wandered around for a time with a baffled security guard, before we found the door. On the other side of it, an intelligent man with a wild shock of white hair and sparkling eyes full of wit bade us welcome.
The writer divined what I had come to ask him before I even opened my mouth. “You want to know about forgetting,” he said. “The children and grandchildren of the men and women who were saved by the New Deal are now voting to cut funding to schools and aid for the poor. How could they have forgotten? I’ll tell you. They forgot because it is America’s business to make them forget. The Cold War changed everything. The language changed. We are suffering from national Alzheimer’s disease. Trivia is news now. Everything’s been trivialized. Once upon a time Hannah Arendt said that the Nazis proved ‘the banality of evil.’ We are now living through the evil of banality.”
The old master of the word smiled ruefully as he reminisced about his friend Nelson Algren, about intellectual publications like The Anvil and The Spectator, and about tumultuous and challenging times when ideas were alive. He raged against corporate downsizing and the so-called prosperity.
Several times I tried to say something and Studs kindly put in his hearing aid to listen. But when it became obvious that all I wanted was to urge him to keep talking, he took it out and did just that, like a luminous fountain, still full of passion and guts. Ah, history! Here at last was a living monument of everything prosperous Chicago tried hard to forget. Studs Terkel knew about that, too.
“It’s funny. They used to blacklist me. Now I’m an icon. Live long enough and everything happens!”
I hope so. Chicago has done a pretty good job of forgetting, but then here is Studs Terkel. And Danny Postel of Lip. And Tom Frank of The Baffler. And four Danes. And, doubtlessly, many others, even as they keep migrating from their condo-fied apartments into cheaper places that aren’t even on the map.
Our last visit was to an artist named Marcos Raya, a muralist who lives in the Chicano barrio. His murals, depicting revolutionary scenes of Chicano life, adorn several walls. In his studio, there is the intense activity of a man always working. But his greatest pleasure, he said, “was to live among my people here in the barrio. I don’t want to be in a condo or loft in a hip part of town. All my life I lived and painted here with working people. This is a neighborhood.”
Marcos’s apartment and his murals are live monuments.14 Chicago may not note and mark its radical past, but it should pay close attention to the present.
Shell Games
I squeezed in next to a corporate fixer on a flight back to New Orleans. I tried to prop up my laptop on the food tray but the seat in front of me reclined and I was nearly killed by my laptop. The fixer said, “You need to get a smaller laptop,” and I said, “We need to have better airlines!” and therein lay a vast philosophical difference between us. There are those who’d defend corporations to the death, right down to their right to make dogfood out of us, and those, like myself, who think human beings come first, and corporations second. The fixer’s job was, as he put it, “information architecture,” which is to say, redesigning corporate structure to minimize inefficiency, maximize productivity, and squeeze out dead time. Worthy goals, so I asked him if our current prosperity was fueled by the efficiency of the new information technologies. Not at all, he said. Our current prosperity is due to speculation, inflated estimates, rosy forecasts, and manipulation of the financial markets. There isn’t a blessed thing being created, it’s all paper profits. Everyone is in debt, and the gap between rich and poor is growing. Well, those were my sentiments exactly, but it was strange to hear them come from the lips of a corporate savior. How is the illusion maintained? I wanted to know. Shell games, he said. Everybody is busy getting frequent flier miles, playing with credit cards, filling out coupons, hoping to be the first to reach Gold status in something or other. It’s one huge game of trying to find the pea under the walnut shell. Meanwhile, the big boys go on extorting time. For every corporate minute gained, there are a thousand human minutes lost. Do you think anyone works eight hours a day anymore? he asked. Not a chance. Everyone works from sunrise till well past midnight, if you count all the time spent on the computer or watching television, which is all work. Television isn’t entertainment, it’s advertising setting you up for the weekend shopping spree. So, I said, I’m right we need better airlines, not smaller computers and tinier bodies? Yeah, you’re right, he said, but so what? The airline’s come up with a new gambling gimmick—the whole country’s gambling-crazy-and you’ll never notice yourself shrinking. You’ll never even think of complaining. You might be losing frequent flier miles.
Prosperity and the Devil
I am writing this on October 16, 1998, and I cannot hear myself think. There are cranes, bulldozers, and maniacal contractors swarming all over America, making infernal noises. I haven’t had a quiet moment since the demon Prosperity landed in the USA. Even in New Orleans, the last place on earth you might think such a demon would inhabit! Of course, it being New Orleans, Prosperity takes on peculiar forms.
The maniac next door has been banging on my wall for six months now. He’s rebuilding a nineteenth-century house the nineteenth-century way, which is to say with little iron scrapers and chisels. If guys like this had their way, we’d do everything like we did in the nineteenth century. Wars with trenches and bayonets. Boiling laundry on the woodstove. Nice epidemics. Incurable TB. Nostalgia is masochism and masochism is something masochists love to share. It would be okay if all these lovers of the past kept their suffering to themselves. But their self-righteous banging makes the rest of us suffer. And that’s when we turn sadistic. The thing is, all the scraping and spooning of precious old dirt has been sending the French Quarter rats in search of quieter abodes. So they’re moving next door. That’s right. Into my house. Well, the plan is this: I have a powder that drives rats crazy: It makes them nostalgic for their home and they grow enraged at those who disturbed them. So they go back and eat the nostalgia guy down to his littlest bones. Ah!
But like I said, things could be worse. Chased out of my lair by the lovers of the past, I am penning these poison-pen tropes at the open window of Café Kaldi on a splendid blue day. The sounds of the swing band across the street at the French Market Café drift in. Three living tableaux, tattooed with the psychedelic minutiae of a strife-free world, just ambled by and dissol
ved in brightness. A skinny fellow with a small red Mohawk and Elton John sunglasses is pulling a stubborn bulldog puppy by a sequin-studded leash. A delivery man is pulling a handcart full of Turbodog beer into the delivery door of a restaurant on Calle San Felipe, as the elaborate faience plaque on the wall identifies St. Philip Street. There are no big trucks, because they aren’t allowed here. A mule-drawn carriage just went by slowly, the lone muleteer nearly asleep under his straw hat. The air is redolent of shrimp and sweet olive.
The thing is, I like the nineteenth century, and parts of the eighteenth. I’m even fond of small portions of the seventeenth. That’s why I live in New Orleans, in the French Quarter. It’s the only place in America I know of where you don’t need a car, where you can walk out any hour of the night and find natives at work in the ditches of bohemia. But the thing is, it’s easier to maintain the nineteenth century with twentieth-century tools. Easier and faster. You can have the pleasures of the past without vermin, scurvy, and rusted wall scrapers. Please say it’s so, and I’ll call back the rats.
Please give me back the peace and quiet of a mild recession. I want to hear things rust! Demons do not hatch in silence. They hatch in the optimistic din of well-being.
Houses and Shops
The French Quarter of New Orleans is the most mysterious neighborhood in America. The seveteenth- and eighteenth-century Spanish houses hide behind their high walls, impenetrable to the casual onlooker. A rich and secret life takes place behind them, in patio gardens, along second- and third-story galleries, and in tall, fan-cooled rooms. Slavery, murder, abjection, romance, and the discussion of the opera is what used to take place. Nowadays, those horrors have transmuted into other, less spectacular activities, such as lawyer orgies. Many is an attorney who sheds his and her strict redingote for the orchid silk of the afterhour bathrobe in the Vieux Carré. Real estate is so pricey in this unique corner of America that lawyers are being followed by Hollywood moneybags in search of fantasy and escape. For the newcomers, the Quarter must adhere strictly to the Church of Restoration, which is the new high religion of the South, from Savannah to New Orleans. Alas, many of the local Realtors, out for a buck, are turning the insides of historic buildings into Highway 66 motel rooms, complete with shag, Formica, and bathrooms from Home Depot. The reason for this evil work is that apartments thus appointed rent for considerable prices to yet another class of newcomers, the suburban escapees. These creatures like their façades historic but their insides square.
It’s so hot these days, the sweat runs down the windows of antique shops and down the backs and fronts of New Orleanians, some of whom are secretly happy because, eyes half-closed, they are guiding the path of a sweat drop to rich and giddy places. It’s all in the management of sweat, trust me. At any given time, a drop is heading somewhere. Which explains the utter lack of thought as I stroll through the French Quarter noting that houses are old shops and shops are new houses. This is a universal rule: Everything that used to be in shops is now inside people’s houses. You can find all the old shops in people’s houses here. But in most of America, the river of household items has been swelling decade after decade through mass-production, and it’s only obsolescence that keeps it moving. The old shops are still intact in the old Quarter houses, many of which have been antique shops several times already. The point of this is that everyone lives in a shop. In the old days people lived in small shops and there were fewer of them. The new people live at Wal-Mart and there are millions of them. Houses used to turn into shops but no longer: now houses just fall apart and the shops are all new. Only shops turn into houses now, a one-way flow with no end in sight. Except in the Vieux Carré, where the nude lawyers roam, and Realtors smoke cigars.
From American Life
Two new establishments have opened in the neighborhood, both of them emblematic of a new status quo in America. The first is a cigar café, with a few tables and a number of humidors where for a few hundred dollars a year you can keep your cigars moist. The humidors are like safety-deposit boxes, with your name on them. Whenever you’re ready to entertain, you bring your client or your pal here, pull out your smokes and puff away. The other day, two young urban types of the late nineties, wearing East Coast collegiate garb ca. 1956, were obscuring each other with smokescreen while a black jazz trio was entertaining them at a discreet distance, which in New Orleans is about twenty inches. The doors of the cigar café were open, letting in the ninety-five-degree heat and hair-curling humidity, but the cool inherent in the whole mode was such that the smokers remained glacial while the performers sweated rivers in strict compliance with cliché. Cigars have been around for a while, representing the new Republican ethos, which is to say a nostalgia for a time of no taxes, no labor unions, silk-lined overcoats, top hats, and the pursuit of actresses. In New Orleans, one sees the longest cigars protruding out of the well-rounded lips of short, fat guys accompanied by tall leggy girls whose profession was once described as “out-of-work actress.”
The other establishment, which is no less pertinent, is a dog bakery situated in splendidly lit rooms filled with barrels of dog treats, spotless vitrines full of dog pastries, and displays of pies and cakes for special doggy anniversaries. The counter sports a few stools to one side where the dog owners, who come in ultrachic fashions, can sip a glass of Merlot while choosing among the pricey treats. Dog pastries are not cheap, mind you. They cost about the same as human pastries, but they are made without the salt and sugars that, the sales girl explained, are detrimental to canine health. The clientele at the dog bakery—and the place is mobbed!—consists of young and not-so-young women who squire a bewildering variety of pooches to the joint. The other day, a near-riot occurred when a dogcatcher van stopped and scooped up a pricey barkum from the rich crop in front of the store. Incensed owners poured out from inside, surrounded the van, and threatened to overturn it and to set the dogcatcher on fire. Sensibly, the man surrendered the coiffed lifeform and was able to drive away.
The dog-ladies are, it seems to me, the natural mates of the cigar-chompers across the street. Their belief is that their dogs defend them from crime, but stylishly, because the dogs, in addition to eating pastries, are pedigreed and come, formally, in every shape from accordion pleats to taut mauves. The cigar smokers dream of an economy where such luxuries are affordable, and safety does indeed come in many shapes. Meanwhile, the band plays on, the dogcatcher is on the run, the market is on the rise, and the heat means nada to the cool.
Fried Rice
New Orleans is an operetta-type town, and we’ve had one of the best lately. Anne Rice, the vampire queen, publicly attacked Al Copeland, the fried chicken king, over a matter of taste. Ms. Rice took out a full-page ad in the New Orleans Times-Picayune complaining about the garish architecture of Copeland’s new Streja restaurant on St. Charles Avenue. Copeland, the creator of the Popeye Chicken franchise, has transformed a used-car dealership into a pastel pastry that sits smack in the middle of a nearly abandoned section of the famous Avenue. Ms. Rice, who owns several houses around a much ritzier section of the Avenue, felt the calling of something civic and something aesthetic in her blood. She has expressed herself in paid ads before, most recently in order to tell us who to vote for in the presidential election, but this time she hit hot grease. Al Copeland slammed right back with a paid ad in which he extolled the architectural virtues of his “California-Creole” restaurant and threatened to sue the irate inkster. The newspaper first headlined the fight COPELAND FRIES RICE, then conducted a public survey whereby three thousand New Orleanians faxed, e-mailed, and wrote in their opinions; 75 percent of them favored Al Copeland for bringing economic improvment to the area, while a considerably more subdued 25 percent defended Ms. Rice’s cri de sang. At Mardi Gras, a whole brigade of revelers appeared wearing plates of rice and beans around their waists, promoting a dish they called Red Beans Anne Rice, though it was somewhat unclear whose side they were on. The people of New Orleans take both fried food and gothic w
riting seriously, but this time architecture was involved and the feeling was almost French. The fight between the Queen of Vampires and the King of Kitsch is already drawing promoters and bookies, and there is speculation that the citizens intend to see this resolved in the traditional Creole manner, mano a mano in a mudwrestling pit. The New Orleans courts, while often resembling mud-fighting pits, are too dry a venue for the roused appetites of this city. The rumor mill claims that Anne Rice is on the verge of opening a vampire restaurant called Café Lestat right in the neighborhood of Streja, in which case there will be street battles between fanged fanciers of blood puddings and Shirley Temples and Americans going for chicken and Cokes. If any blood is spilled there will be no shortage of vampires to lap it up. Culture moves forward, and the cause of silliness is greatly advanced.
Marcel Duchamp Would’ve Loved Wal-Mart
Marcel Duchamp, who turned a toilet bowl and the art world upside down, would have loved Wal-Mart. What this French artist, who saw deeper and more ironically than a thousand art critics with pigeons on their shoulders, called “ready-mades” in 1913 is off the charts aesthetics-wise in 1999. The toilet bowl is a mud hut compared to the skyscraping barbecue moon-units on sale now. The lines, the curves, the gleam, the aerodynamics, the embarrassment of rich formal play—who designs these things anyway? Duchamp would’ve taken a huge nap in this suburban cathedral: Art has become both automatic and inevitable. Turn up the gleaming fan, draw the miniblinds!
The Devil Never Sleeps Page 19
