As a follow-up to my St. Louis weekend, I finally watched The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, a documentary which Katie Schuering recommended to me a very long time ago and stuck around on the same “to do, eventually…” list which still includes (and I promise this is true) the vague one-word entry “Kierkegaard”.
Anyway. You should too. Pruitt-Igoe was a famous public housing project in St. Louis which followed a trajectory familiar outside America too: built in the 1950s as a shiny modernist answer to urban slums, it soon spiralled into neglect and decline, before being demolished in the 1970s and forever after held up as the kind of ‘big government’ failure on which the Reagan myth depended. But quite obviously – and this is the story which the documentary tells – this happened in the context of a mass exodus from the city to suburbia. And aside from everything else, mass suburbia was built on an astonishingly upfront and explicit racism. It was the ultimate segregation project, and it plundered everything from the urban civic core.
On a more positive note for the future of urban renewal: Chicago is buying new trains 🙂
Sceptical
And when the children of suburbanites rejoin the city, one of their many fun leisure options will be concerts like the Chvrches show I saw with Randi on Monday night. I’m a fickle music listener who mostly hops from one catchy song to the next without much allegiance to the artist, so it’s really rare that I see someone where I’ve actually listened to whole albums and have an above-average chance of recognising each song. Unsurprisingly, it’s much better this way too. Later in the week, I savoured Marco Rubio’s pleasingly humiliating primary exit on Super Tuesday II with Catherine, lost many rounds of Fibbage 2 at Toggolyn’s, and finally lured Josh onto Skype. (He treats the technology a bit like contemporaries tried to take in the moon landing.)
All credit to Anna
Apropos nothing, other than rummaging through some old files from long-dead computers, I present this memento from 2003 celebrating my achievement at catapulting my Geocities website (“Web Site”) to the top of Google’s search results for my own name:
Take that, Dominic Pettman and your self-replicators
Nothing nearly so momentous has occurred in the past few weeks. Following the primary voting schedule is a bit like peeling back the doors of a particularly slipshod advent calendar: some days nothing comes out at all (unless you count Marco Rubio’s “landslide victory in Puerto Rico” – kudos to Rubio for ensuring his official podcasting team don’t exceed the bounds of plausible upbeat narratives and end up just looking embarrassing now) and then on other days a whole Super Tuesday’s worth of states come tumbling out. To mix metaphors, it’s The Archers Omnibus Edition of primaries, and I watched the continuing rise of our new jackbooted overlord Trump in the fine company of Randi, AJ and some Mexican food. Think of it as a political statement.
No one was a great fan of Trump at Kevin’s (temporary) leaving party, either. Which is damned odd, because there were a bunch of people there. So since none of my twenty and thirtysomething urbanite friends have a good word to say about Donald Drumpf, I’ll conclude that it’s all a mirage and move on to my sedate theatre review section:
- Trip the Light Fantastic: The Making of SuperStrip – after winning free tickets to a show at the Harris Theater [sic] for Music and Dance, I scoured their programme to find the least dancey thing in the schedule… or at least, the least exclusively dancey thing. Trip the Light Fantastic, a light-hearted skewering of buzzword-soaked organisations through the ineffectual committee meetings of a group of (somewhat rubbish) aspiring superheroes, fit the bill nicely. One of the biggest laughs of the night came from a joke about the uselessness of a Masters in the arts: you know this sort of crowd.
- Interrogation – the first half of this play is an intense murder-mystery, building up the tension through a skilled cast of misfits and potential sociopaths. Unfortunately, I don’t know how any of this resolves in the second half, because it proved slightly too intense and I wasn’t confident of making it through without losing all vision (this happens to me…) and adding some unnecessary extra drama of my own. But it’s really annoying, because this is the first time that I’ve actually really liked what I was walking out of, and I want to know what happens next…
- Othello at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater [sic, again] – I fucking love Othello. Partly because I studied it enough that I don’t have to work to understand everything that’s being said, partly because Randi mistakenly prefers Hamlet and I don’t want to give ground, but mostly because Iago is the greatest villain ever created. My one complaint with the play is that he gets his comeuppance at the end, because I like to imagine that he spends his life drifting from place to place, worming his way into the lives of noble people and then blowing them apart just to sit back and watch the fire burn. Plus, whenever Roderigo appears, I hear Mr. Buchanan booming “THICK! THICK! THICK!” in my head. I realise that I’m reviewing Shakespeare here, which is not really necessary at this point, but it was a good adaptation (even Randi agreed with this) which did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for this eternally relevant play.
Flip-flopping
Even without Katie’s help we still managed to conjure up a decent batch of pancakes this year, before settling down with Catherine and AJ to watch the New Hampshire primary. This included the first of what looks likely to be a long-running tradition of Donald Trump victory speeches, notable for their free-wheeling lack of structure or syntax, spontaneous walk-on parts for audience members, and helpful choruses of “USA!” at random intervals which serve as a useful reminder of the country you’re in. I am seriously starting to weigh up, in the still-unlikely event of a Trump presidency, the wisdom of an early getaway versus the historical opportunity to witness such a thing first-hand.
One place where Trump is likely to do well is Byhalia, Mississippi – but true to my bourgeois roots, I’m linking to an excellent play of the same name which we saw that weekend instead. After a brief affair with an African-American man, a newly-married white woman gives birth to a mixed-race child, and her husband must come to terms with the fact that her son is ‘not his’. The couple’s relationship is at the core of the play, and the storytelling perfectly balances this focus with the other obvious issues raised. Everything just came together really well, and it’s now one of my favourite things I’ve seen in Chicago.
Note the appropriate t-shirt
Another of my favourite Chicago sights is the sun, which made a rare appearance last weekend to coincide with Randi’s mum visiting. We went to see Van Gogh’s Bedrooms at the Art Institute, which means I’ve finally spent a respectable amount of time there. Good old Vincent painted three versions of the same famous painting, y’see, and so the gallery has licence to gather them all together and put on a glorified game of spot-the-difference. (We also very neatly timed our Doctor Who watching so Randi finally saw ‘Vincent and the Doctor’ just beforehand.) That night Jason took us to eat very fulsomely at Avec – tapas for people with appetites – and we were suitably stuffed and happy.
I rounded off the weekend by going to Grace’s ATC Fundraiser in Andersonville. It’s the kind of ‘fundraiser’ where all you have to do is order drinks from a bar, but I turned up so late I was close to failing at even this, so I quickly bought a few raffle tickets to even things out. Lo and behold, I promptly won tickets worth much more than my solitary contributory cocktail. Everyone else left soon afterwards – either in protest at my Machiavellian tactics or because they’d been diligently drinking for hours – and I was left to celebrate my success with two affable drunk men at the bar. Sadly I can’t remember their names, or I’d be tempted to track them down to continue our increasingly surreal arguments about marriage, but maybe I should just hang out in more bars in Andersonville.
Tangent: last night I performed the deceptively-productive (but actually entirely time-wasting) task of cleaning out my blog subscriptions, and I was made quite nostalgic and sad by all the voices who have gone silent. Especially those whose last post, written sometime around the George W Bush era, was an earnest promise to blog more. I miss you all.
Explanation: today’s title is a tribute to the terrible headlines at Vox, an otherwise fine news source to which I have grown increasingly addicted. And don’t even get me started on their podcast, The Weeds… that moment when someone else at work starts quoting lines from a political policy podcast is confirmation, if more were needed, of the lovely bubble in which I live.
I’m a terrible European. Unlike my parents, I only speak English, and have never lived in any European country outside of the UK. The world around me is overwhelmingly British and American: friends, TV programmes, films, books, social networks, news, politics, all of it. Years ago, when I visited Robert in California, he said that living in the US had made him discover his hidden ‘European’ identity: the things we have in common as opposed to the Americans. I really wish I could say the same for me, but it’s just not true.
I can think of lots of nice things to say about ‘Europe’ – the place, its people – but they are vague generalisations, and I lack any confidence that they apply in Hamburg as in Bucharest as in Rhodes or wherever. Yes, all national myths are fantasies: but my British fantasies are instinctive. I ‘know’ that Britain is a country like this, with a people like that, even if these assertions break down under serious scrutiny. It doesn’t matter. It’s about the identity, and the sense of belonging, not the facts.
It’s not even my mug
I’m thinking about this, obviously, because the date of the UK’s referendum on its membership of the European Union has been announced. As it happens, I should be in London on 23 June, so I will be able to vote in person. And while I do plan to think about it, and listen to the arguments, it’s very hard to imagine I won’t vote to stay. But I am surprised at how sad I feel about it – how obvious the hole is where my heartfelt sense of European identity should be.
And I don’t think this is just a British problem. Yes, of course it is true that Britain – the island nation – is uniquely detached from its neighbours. Of course those European countries who speak each other’s languages, and share borders, and still remember how easily armies marched across them, are driven to shared institutions with greater inevitability and less fuss. But I have yet to meet a French person who didn’t feel French, or a German who didn’t feel German. Maybe I am imposing my categories onto them, but Europe’s failure to respond to the great moral test of our time – the migration crisis – in anything like a coordinated fashion suggests that at the end of the day, the nation state still rules everything.
The campaign to remain in the EU likes to describe leaving as a jump in the dark for the UK. It would be, and I think it is motivated largely (though not entirely) by bad instincts and silly conceits. But in truth, a vote to stay is also a leap in the dark. Because we can’t go on like this. For the European Union to avoid paralysis whenever anything difficult comes up, there has to be some meaningful sense of European identity, some patriotic glue which holds people together in something more than a trade pact. I don’t think this means a United States of Europe, or that national identities are about to disappear, and any bureaucratic attempt to engineer a common culture will surely fail. Honestly, I find it hard to even imagine what the EU should look like. But I hope that a vote to remain gives us longer to figure it out.
Would I Lie To You? Yes.
It didn’t feel right to leave without remembering the night Todd and Carolyn came round to play Would I Lie To You? against me and Randi. Because they are some of my favourite Americans, for sure. And now, it’s off to the airport for the longest plane journey of my life…
Beth on Bergen: “It’s always fun to see you two having such a great time exploring a new place!” Apr 7, 15:05
