When Chicago Was More Than the Second City

I've long wanted to visit more of America, and the last few years living in the US have given me the chance to see parts that I wouldn't get to when I was flying over from London. Some of it, like Portland or the more mountainy bits of California, have been for pleasure, but work trips have let me get acquainted with the likes of Las Vegas (where I went for CES for four years), Fort Worth and now Chicago.

My company is based in Bloomington, Illinois, and I got the word two weeks ago that they wanted me out there for a meeting. I weighed up my options and quickly decided that I wanted to add a couple of days in Chicago, which is about 140 miles away. I got a rental car, and the company was happy that it would cost them less to send me home on Sunday (i.e. yesterday) rather than the Thursday after the meeting ended, so I was set.

And things improved when my girlfriend agreed to fly out to meet me the day I drove up from Bloomington, marking our first long weekend away together (cue "Awwwws"). She managed to get on the same flight as me, and even booked herself into the seat beside mine, which made the whole trip even nicer.

As for the city itself: I planned on one major sight per day, and while we missed the Field Museum, Wrigley Field and Shedd Aquarium, we did get to tour the river on a cruise that focused specifically on the architecture, plus we hit the American Writers' Museum and the Art Institute, so I think it's fair to say we caught a bunch of things that are relevant to my interests. We even went to the viewing deck at Hancock Tower, overlooking Lake Michigan and downtown, where we spent a romantic evening watching the sun go down and the city lights come on.

Top of the World, Ma

My girlfriend laughed at me the first morning on the bus up to the Architecture Center, when I said I was already feeling good about the place, and could kind of see myself living there. I've since moderated that since a friend who lives there explained how brutal the winters have been, but even she agrees that it's a great city, if only they would put it somewhere more temperate.

Mostly I was just excited to be in a big city again, especially one with so much history. Between paintings, music and architecture, as well as politics and business, so much of what we associate with the idea of America comes from Chicago, more so than from New York or Los Angeles. I've heard more than one person (on and off TV) poke fun at the regard Chicagoans have for their city, and the self-regard on the gift shop shelves can be a little overblown, but it is nice to think of a third pole to the US, separate from the two giant cities on either coast.

More than that, being in Chicago reminds you of a time, not even that long ago, when the US considered a lot of cities important: Detroit, St. Louis and so forth. And of a time when New York was just this scruffy, dirty, dangerous city over on the East Coast, rather than the gilded playland that shows like Sex and the City are at pains to present.

View from the start of the river tour

On the drive back to O'Hare yesterday I kept thinking about Sufjan Stevens's Illinois album, which at its best talks about the human stories dotted around the entire state, referencing cultural signifiers like Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln and even Superman and John Wayne Gacy. It's not the best album, because it was his attempt to keep up with his (quickly abandoned) idea of doing an album for all 50 states, but in its best moments I do recognize what I've seen of the city.

I guess I'm affected by the city because it hearkens back to times when America was still confident and good at making things, and when you could make it big in pretty much any big city. This is a feeling I also get when I read Bill Bryson's books about America, for instance his memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, which talks about growing up in Iowa in the 1950s. Now Iowa is kind of the butt of jokes, but here on the coasts we forget at our peril that people do live there - maybe if we hadn't bypassed the middle of America by flying over it and shifting our manufacturing out of cities like Detroit, we wouldn't be in the mess we're currently in.

The Seer's Tower and modernist architecture in front

I think the city's tallest tower is a good example. When it was the Sears Tower, and the world's tallest office building, it represented a strain of American business that employed a good chunk of the workforce. Now it's the Willis Tower, and Sears-Roebuck has pretty much torn itself apart through dire mismanagement. But the tower itself is still the daily destination for around 12,000 workers every day - representing how just because a place is no longer the center of the business world people still live and work there.

Illinois is obviously not as down-at-heel as cities like Ohio and Michigan (or at least parts thereof), which were more reliant on heavy industry. It's been helped along by its more service-oriented economy, I suppose, and its continuing cultural capital comes from being the first stepping stone for a lot of Saturday Night Live comedians... as well as housing works like Edward Hopper's Nighthawks.

In any case, I'd like to go back and see more of it - potentially arriving on Amtrak, the way people used to get there before flying was commonplace, and you had to stop there on trips between the coasts. My friend who lives there talked about how it's a city of neighborhoods, and I think it'd be fun to find out more about those places, too.

And maybe spend another romantic evening with my honey up at the top of the city? That sounds pretty good, too.

RIP the UK

The title might be a little dramatic, but this week's news that the supposed Prime Minister Boris Johnson has decided to send Parliament home for five weeks in a bid to stop them from stopping his no-deal Brexit agenda is also quite dramatic. It's also probably overkill, since Parliament had trouble agreeing on anything before he took power.

Because I read the Guardian, it's hard to escape the impression that things are going to hell in a hand basket, and that we'll be back to death by stoning by dinner-time (I never get tired of that Blackadder quote, in part because it remains so apposite with each new development in the Brexit saga). But in fairness, if I read the Times, the Telegraph (aka the Torygraph) or the Sun or the Daily Mail, I'd be just as het up but in the other direction: worried that my Brexit and taking-back of control could be stolen out from under my nose at any time by shifty foreigners and disloyal leftists.

Which is part of the problem: in normal circumstances it's a good thing that the papers in Britain have a viewpoint, but here it just means that people are unable to find any common ground, because they're being whipped into a frenzy by their respective sides.

My problem with the whole business is that I actually guess the UK's going to be okay. Not great, not as well off as it would be if they'd just voted in Ed Milliband in 2015, or more likely, had returned a majority or coalition for Gordon Brown's Labour in 2010. But the UK's economy is probably big and robust enough that it could do okay on its own - potentially even with a no-deal, though because it's so unprecedented it's impossible to tell.

But what's frustrating is the eternal deadlock that's been unleashed by 2016's Brexit vote. Labour and the Tories respectively are in disarray because being pro-Leave or pro-Remain doesn't cut neatly across party lines - Theresa May had a fifth column in the shape of Jacob Rees-Mogg's cronies in the European Research Group blocking everything she proposed, just because it suited them to do so, while Jeremy Corbyn's personal distaste for the EU is balanced by the strong Remain contingent in his party and counter-balanced by the knowledge that a great number of Labour strongholds voted heavily to leave.

And while it's comforting (and probably accurate) to point to the massive irregularities in the vote caused by dodgy funding and social media interference, the fact remains that the country voted and people have picked their sides. I won't claim I could foresee the result, but conversations I had as early as 2004 made me wary that a vote to leave would always be possible - for as long as I've lived in the UK there's been a steady drumbeat of negativity about the EU (in no small part because of Boris Johnson's agitating in his newspaper columns).

Add to that the fact that even then the north, or really anyplace that wasn't London, was being left behind. For all the vibrancy of Manchester, Liverpool or Edinburgh, the place to really do most anything is London, whether you want to get into politics, finance or the media - or simply find a job, given that so many former industrial communities in the North and Midlands still haven't recovered from the double blow of their massive inefficiencies and the Thatcher years.

I don't like to subscribe to notions that it's grim up north, especially because the farthest north I've ever been in England is Nottingham (I'm hedging a bit, because I have been to Edinburgh), but I knew enough people from those areas to know that coming down to London was their best bet to getting started in their early twenties.

The problem with Brexit generally, and my suspicion that Britain will be okay (though as stated, not great), is that it'll do nothing to address those structural issues. Power will still be concentrated in the southeast, and with it all the funding and attention; housing will remain impossible to find, at least at decent prices and at a sufficient level of quality that you'd like to see your children live there. And given that Brexit was revealed as a massive racist attempt to stop immigration, it's ironic that the folks driving up property prices in London - rich Chinese, Russians and Middle Easterners, among others - won't be affected by the end of EU freedom of movement.

Moreover, Scotland's going to make more noises about seceding from the UK, hoping in part to get back into the EU, while Northern Ireland could turn back into a powder keg - or at least a giant headache for Westminster, since it had already gotten so fractious that it wasn't being ruled from Belfast anymore.

But I think the best summation of the issue is my friend's comment that the instant rage directed at the idea of revisiting the vote is ridiculous. As he points out, if the arch-Brexiteers have their way, we'll never be able to vote on it again. It's like if we were to stop having elections in the US after we voted in Donald Trump, because we can't go back on that ever (though watch this space - in the unlikely event that he loses the 2020 election, who's to say he leaves the White House...?).

Still - there's probably enough there for the UK to muddle along once it crashes out of the EU without any trade deals. There probably won't be riots or fighting in the streets, and the march of business will set things back on course at some point. But it'll be a smaller, crappier and less pleasant place, losing many of the things that made it a nice place to live or visit. And that's the tragedy of this whole farce.

Big Cold War Love

Every once in a while you step back and notice a pattern in what you're watching, reading, listening, or whatever. I've recently noticed how many movies and TV shows I'm watching that are about the last few years of the Cold War.

The big one for me at the moment is FX's The Americans, which I'm getting on Netflix DVD because I'm stubborn like that. But before that it was Deutschland '83, then Atomic Blonde, and it feels like there are a few others. And it's not just me catching up on things - for some reason the Cold War and especially the way it played out in Germany seems to be a really popular theme with Hollywood these days.

It might be a tenuous link, but I think it's there. Atomic Blonde and Red Sparrow came out about the same time, and seem to be about roughly the same thing (though I haven't seen Red Sparrow, so I don't know if it's got the same twists and turns as Atomic Blonde). They're both also very similar to Deutschland '83, which has as its backdrop the Able Archer exercise, but what's funny to me is that more than one of the actors in that show has done other 80s period pieces - for example 2014's Dessau Dancers, about an East German breakdance troupe.

It's not hard to figure out why German media is interested in going over this ground, three decades after the Berlin Wall fell. On the one hand for a lot of Easterners (or Ossis) the certainties of the previous 40 years were replaced by the uncertainty of making your way in a society where you weren't being constantly surveilled and controlled - the best example from recent years is Goodbye Lenin, where a woman's family pretends that the DDR never fell, because they worry the shock of the truth would kill her.

On the other hand, movies like The Lives of Others (another which I haven't seen) talk about the actual mechanisms of coercion the state used, in this case snooping on citizens and encouraging them to rat one another out to the authorities for not expressing sufficient confidence in communism. Turning people on their friends and families as a way to control them creates a wound that's slow to heal, if ever, and the Germans are still working out what that meant, to the extent that authors like Christa Wolf have seen their reputations destroyed when hints emerge that they worked for the Stasi.

What's harder to guess is why American media is so fascinated by it at the moment. Deutschland '83 was a joint-production of Germany's RTL and the US's Sundance Channel, the first German-language TV show to air on an American network, and one of the creators, Anna Winger, is American by birth. Atomic Blonde and Red Sparrow are both American movies, and even X-Men Apocalypse, which was set in the 80s, chooses Berlin as one of its settings, suggesting to me that there's something in the air.

I can't think of a real political reason for this interest appearing in the last few years. It doesn't seem to fit with other media that's grappling with the current Trump situation, although shows like the Americans at least reference the West's relationship to Russia. And very few of these are particularly triumphant about America beating the Commies - the protagonists are frequently on the USSR's or the DDR's side, which makes it uncomfortable to consider whether we're rooting for the "bad guy" against our own side (a theme that the AV Club's coverage of the Americans took on frequently).

Part of it may also be that my generation has come of age, and one of the things we're mining for content is that first decade we remember, where nuclear war became a real possibility again. Deutschland '83 is full of cultural signifiers that would have been familiar to Americans in particular - Nena's 99 Luftballons, Peter Schilling's Major Tom (Coming Home), and so on.

In a lot of ways, the 80s were the last decade that America even paid attention to a lot of places like Germany. That, in particular, would have been because the presence of East and West Germany was likely to be the start of any conflagrations between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, but we also grew fascinated by places like Australia (see all those Paul Hogan and Yahoo Serious movies), in a way that we wouldn't be again.

I don't get a sense, looking back, that we were so outwardly focused in the 90s, possibly because America had retreated into self-satisfaction after seeing off the Soviet threat. And then in the 00s, of course, 9/11 meant we approached the world on a more adversarial and contemptuous basis, which has colored our relations with everyone else ever since.

Though the self-satisfaction may be present in these movies as well - Deutschland '83 has a scene where Jonas Nay's protagonist is struck dumb by the amount of choice in a West Berlin supermarket, which is already getting a bit cliche. Which I guess means there's some triumphalism remaining - a fiction that I've seen coming up more and more recently is that our "economic" ideals were part of what beat the Soviets. This is partly true, in that East German teens wanted to buy the same jeans and music that their Wessi cousins had, but as Goodbye Lenin pointed out, they didn't sign up for gross income inequality or the increasingly dog-eat-dog nature of capitalism.

Anyway, this all might be fantastical - some themes go in and out of fashion, and it's hard to point to any one reason for their popularity. I guess the test will be seeing how the third and final season, Deutschland '89, tackles the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Now That's What I Call All of British Music

My research through the twisting and turning corridors of British music continues. As promised when I wrote about listening to all of the Kinks' albums a few months ago, I went on to listen to the Rolling Stones' discography, then The Who, and on and on. I've explored how the blues and R&B fascination of the 60s turned into the hard rock of the 70s, and from there into the stadium rock of the 80s, a trajectory that encompassed all three bands, and might have included the Beatles, if they'd lasted that long.

I had a brief delve into folk, with the Small Faces (though not the Faces) and Fairport Convention, though there again I wasn't sure I wanted to continue through their discography which (impressively) continues to the present day. I might still be on Fairport Convention if I'd done that.

My other big takeaway so far from this whole business is that prog rock is not for me. I gave the albums of Jethro Tull a game stab, but didn't start very promisingly with This Was or Stand Up, and I gave up completely when I got to A Passion Play. Aqualung may be considered a high-water mark but with that in mind, why subject myself to the likes of 1999's J-Tull Dot Com?

The one exception to my "no-prog" rule is Pink Floyd, but I think they really only got good when they left behind the worst excesses of the genre with Dark Side of the Moon. And even they had a difficult decade in the 80s, when David Gilmour and Roger Waters decided they'd had enough of each other.

The Bee Gees are another band that I fail to see the charms of, now that I've listened to their whole oeuvre. They weren't very remarkable before they took up the whole disco thing, nor were they very remarkable after, when they opted for the same over-produced sounds that many a British rock band's career foundered on. Come to think of it, the disco years weren't particularly exciting either.

The most interesting thing about them, I'd say, is the late Robin Gibb's uncanny resemblance to former Tory leadership candidate Rory Stewart. The proof that we're in the darkest timeline is that a Google search for "Rory Stewart Robin Gibb" fails to throw up pictures of the two side by side for comparison (I'd do it myself, but I'm not that bothered, frankly, and I don't have loads of time for such bollocks tonight).

There are positives, of course. I really liked going through Elton John's back catalog. I loved his 70s albums when I was in middle school and high school, and revisiting them had the same effect as re-reading my old comics - being reminded of stuff I hadn't thought about in twenty years and revisiting what I liked about it then. Of course, he had a pretty difficult 80s too, a fact that comes to mind especially when I watch the video for Nikita and realize that Ethan Phillips based the character and look of Neelix in Star Trek: Voyager on Elton's get-up for that video, right down to the unfortunate mullet.

Slightly more seriously, it's interesting to see the similar trajectories, where these artists find out how the things that worked in the first decade of their career don't necessarily work in the second, only to find that a back-to-basics approach allows them to carve out a respectable third decade. It worked for the Kinks, the Rolling Stones and Elton John - the tragedy is that the Kinks broke up just as people started to recognize how good they'd been.

It's worth noting that there's a point to the whole enterprise, beyond muso credit. In a lot of cases, I knew about these less-heralded bits of favorite artists' careers, but only glancingly. It's been nice filling in the gaps in my knowledge, for instance by listening to Genesis and figuring out where both Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins came from.

There's loads more to go, of course. The 60s were easy because if you listen to The Beatles, the Kinks, The Who and the Rolling Stones, you've basically hit the high points (though I did go further and also listen to the Small Faces and the Zombies), but the 70s are when rock splintered into a number of sub-genres... and that's even before you get to punk.

Ironically I'm already a lot more conversant with the best bands of the 80s and 90s, but I'm sure both decades will throw up some interesting stuff. I'm also hoping that the 2000s will hold up as well, and that I'll be able to find some decent bands from the 2010s, though I may have to draw the line at Bastille...

Wondering About Amazon Prime's The Boys

I've been seeing ads for Amazon's new show The Boys, based on the Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson comic from Dynamite Studios (and previously Wildstorm, which I just learned about reading the Wikipedia page a moment ago). It looks fairly well done, but I'm not totally sure how I feel about it, especially given this review on the AV Club, which I also read just a few minutes ago.

I guess the issue I have is the source material - Garth Ennis has long reveled in nihilism, and while it was entertaining when I was reading Preacher or Hitman, I wonder if it's not gotten out of hand, even for him?

He's one of that cohort of British comics writers who came up in the 80s and 90s on stuff like 2000AD, and then made their way to the US via Vertigo, and from there ended up in superhero comics. But whereas someone like Grant Morrison loves superhero comics and has continued working in the genre, Ennis went on a similar route to Warren Ellis and turned his back on superheroes as soon as he could.

I don't entirely blame him, since I think that most superhero books are basically the same now as they were 20-30 years ago, if a little more gross and intense. But what I've seen of his work since Preacher has lacked heart, for lack of a better term.

It might have been the switch to Marvel in the early 2000s that precipitated it. Preacher was graphic, extreme and sometimes all you could do was laugh in horror (cf. the Meat Woman), but you could see he held affection for characters like Jesse, Tulip and Cassidy, or even Arseface. It was so thematically rich that it actually got me into Western movies, especially John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. Even now I don't think I can name a more perfect comics series, other than Ennis's run on Hellblazer or Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

And it seemed like he was onto something similar with War Stories, the one-shots he did for Vertigo after Preacher, about wars (mainly World War 2, one of his favorite themes). But then he went for Marvel's MAX line, and I think his worst instincts got the better of him. Mainly in the final issue of his Fury mini-series, where Nick Fury (pre Samuel L Jackson) strangles the main villain with his own intestines. Apparently George Clooney had been attached to play Fury, but was put off by that book.

From there Ennis went on to the Punisher, first under Marvel Knights and then MAX. His first storyline was fun, in a back-to-basics way, but the impression I get of some of the MAX issues is that he was just there to rack up as much of a body count as possible. This is notwithstanding my pleasure at seeing his fingerprints all over Punisher War Zone, of course, but I can't deny that those stories aren't really his absolute best.

Another one that I dip into from time to time is Crossed, which he did for Avatar. Crossed is basically just gross and disturbing, a version of zombies where instead of the mindless walking dead, the zombies are maniacal rapists and murderers acting out their civilized selves' worst impulses. There's room for thematically rich stuff there, which is why I have a look every once in a while, but for the most part it's unrelentingly brutal.

The Boys is kind of in this vein, from what I've seen. The first image of the series, essentially, is the crushed, armless corpse of the main character's girlfriend, a hapless victim of collateral damage during a superhero fight. I do think the story plays well with one of Ennis's best-loved themes, which is the ease with which the people in charge of society get subverted into immorality, but I guess my experience has been that he's more concerned with grossing out the reader than giving us characters to care about.

Maybe that's unfair - Wee Hughie is a pretty good character, but somehow I've never connected enough with the book to buy the trade paperbacks, even having skipped ahead a few collections to the end, where things go pretty crazy.

It might just be that, overall, I'm tired with all the relentless negativity and nihilism of media at the moment. I've talked about it on Star Trek Discovery (though my complaint there is more the writing than the tone), and it's present in a number of other shows and comics at the moment. The problem is that nihilism is also present in the real world, much more so than in 2006 when Ennis and Robertson started The Boys, and it gets a little tiring to see that kind of thing even in the places I go to escape from the real world.

Now, I should point out one other, slightly contradictory thing, which is that I'm pleased for him and Darick Robertson that they've had the show optioned, and are getting paid well for it (I presume). I think he's one of those writers whose work deserves more recognition - I just wish it was for some of his better work. I know Preacher's on AMC, but I also don't get the sense it's taken off the way other AMC shows have... and that's a real shame.

At Last

Just felt like an appropriate thing to post, given how stuff at home is going:

Thoughts on the Women's World Cup

So another Women's World Cup ends with the US taking the trophy home. With my limited knowledge of the women's game, I guess I'm not surprised, since all I really knew about women's football before this tournament started was the 1999 tournament, with the now-iconic team that won their second trophy on penalties and, properly, for the first time, put soccer front and center here in the US in ways that the men's team hasn't been able to.

It may sound bad but I wasn't really planning on paying much attention when it all started last month. It was a little more top of mind for me than it might have been if I didn't religiously read the Guardian's football coverage every day, and their Football Weekly podcast has done a decent job in the regular season of mentioning the doings in women's football. I'd been sort of looking forward to a break, but then it all started and I found myself swept along in the excitement.

I remember listening to the Football Weekly that went out the day before it started, and getting a sense of excitement from the correspondents, and I think that's what made me want to keep up. But the thing that really got my attention was seeing Italy unexpectedly beat Australia.

As an Italy fan, I think it's fair to call myself "long-suffering". I still have fond memories of Italy's 2006 triumph (in the men's tournament), but since then the World Cup has been one disaster after another, and the European Championships have been only a bit better. To be honest I didn't even know the women hadn't qualified for the last couple of tournaments, so seeing this unfancied team come out of the blocks was impressive. Even more impressive was the 5-0 against Jamaica that essentially guaranteed progression to the round of 16. And if Italy went out in the quarterfinal to eventual finalists the Netherlands, well, it was at least a good run, which was needed after so many years of the men doing so badly.

The other thing I enjoyed about the tournament was the mirror-universe quality to it all. Some teams that are nowhere in the men's game qualified for this tournament (like Thailand), or were even considered strong contenders (like Canada). Even China and Japan got to the knockout rounds, which is a big feat for Asian teams on the men's side.

Probably the biggest example of this quality, though, is the position of the US. By winning today the US takes home its fourth trophy, making it the most successful women's team on this stage, whereas the men didn't qualify for Russia 2018 either. I was struck by the narrative surrounding their progress as the team everybody loved to hate, especially given how they kicked off their tournament with that 13-0 demolition of Thailand.

But I also got into the narratives around Megan Rapinoe and her ongoing spat with both Donald Trump and with the US Soccer Federation, as well as how the women's team overall has taken the federation to court to achieve parity with the men in terms of pay. Given their success internationally, it's hard to argue, especially when you read the analysis of how little they earn compared to the men.

All of a sudden, not only could I not avoid profiles of Rapinoe or Everybody's Favorite, Alex Morgan, but I couldn't get enough of them myself, especially given how outspoken Morgan is on this pay gap question. The profiles on her talk about how marketable she is (which I take as a euphemism for "attractive"), so it's more notable how willing she is to speak bluntly about pay, her goal celebrations or even backing up Rapinoe on not visiting the White House.

I also can't help contrasting Morgan with Neymar Jr. on the subject of diving and drawing fouls. Both are key players who score a lot of goals and therefore get the stuffing knocked out of them regularly. And if Morgan has started to incorporate diving into her own repertoire, it's still a far cry from the theatrics that Neymar engages in when he gets fouled - to the point that he's probably damaged his own reputation every time he pounds the turf while rolling about.

Morgan gets bowled over, makes maybe some kind of meal of it, but then she's back on her feet and drawing more fouls, with a lot less complaining than him.

Or another example that I loved: in the Sweden-Netherlands semi-final Kosovare Asllani took a ball to the face that left her getting stretchered off at the end of the match, and going to the hospital for scans. Yet she recovered fast enough to play again in the third-place playoff a few days later, and even scored the first goal. 

I'd say it's those kinds of stories that made me glad I've watched a fair chunk of this tournament. I just hope I'll be able to keep up with this side of the game as it develops, though with luck a true female equivalent to Neymar's playacting is still a few years off.