the surveilled city & the googled chicago

Dan Egan’s The Death and Life of the Great Lakes invites the reader to reimagine the Lakes as substance and space in some distinct and disturbing ways. As watershed and geography, the Lakes have undergone a profound shift over the last half century-plus. Here, Egan offers a clear eco-history of those shifts and prompts a means of reimagining the Lakes’ next century of human use.

Egan underlines that, through their history, the Lakes have been relatively isolated—at the head of the St. Lawrence River, protected by Niagara Falls. This position leaves them ecologically fragile, susceptible to relatively sudden shifts in fish and plant populations. Trawling surveys measured Lake Michigan’s biomass in the late 1980’s at around 350 kilotons; by the end of 2015, that same measure did not even reach a single kiloton (124-6). An invading species’ undetected presence can lead to volatile results in the Lakes’ food chain and ecological balance—shifts that are even more pronounced as human geographies evolve and regulatory agencies seek responses to manage the Lakes into the 21st century.

Much like the prairied “river of grass” to the Lakes’ west, Egan encourages the reader to rethink these bodies of sweetwater not as undisturbed ponds, but as a river—one that tips slowly from Superior down through Huron, along the St. Clair River, into Erie, and over the falls into Ontario. Human movement against that long, slow pull of waters is Egan’s story—human activity in the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway and human inactivity in face of those oft unrecognized ecological shifts posed by invasive species and agricultural run-off. To the east, Lake Erie remains vulnerable to the development of toxic algae blooms, spiked by the presence of fertilizers carried by the Maumee River (with concentrations of phosphorous 30 times higher than the larger Detroit River [235]). Globalized trade has brought invading species that have no known predator in the Lakes; Egan writes, “Call it the Caspianization of the Great Lakes” (127). The western Lakes’ underwater geographies have been remapped by the quagga muscles that have proliferated well into the Lakes’ depths, invaders that have sapped the plankton that rest at the base of the Great Lakes’ food chain.

Meanwhile, attempts to manage the Lakes’ problems have been stalled by boundaries between nations and governmental agencies. Costs of ecological changes mount; cities and power companies have poured $1.5 billion over the past 25 years to keep muscles from clogging pipes from the Lakes (147). And as the demands for sweetwater build, the United States drains its aquifers and waits out historic droughts. Even more recent attempts to clarify the geographical relationships here (i.e., the Great Lakes Compact) have prompted legal and legislative quandaries that are in the slow process of being resolved as the next invasive species might be waiting in the bilge tanks of a ship making its way through the Seaway locks.

With the moving waters, is it a question of will? Egan argues, “Like generations of the past, we know the damage we are doing to the lakes, and we know how to begin to stop it; unlike generations of the past, we aren’t doing it” (xviii).

It was great to hear Robbie Fulks’ closing of his seven-year, Monday night stint at Chicago’s Hideaway back on February 27. For me, Fulks’ songs recollected other musics down south in grade school gyms and VFW halls, my ass precariously balanced over a funeral home folding chair, as musicians plucked their mythologies of escape and flight. Voice working against other voice and fiddle; guitars strummed against a land where love is mischief and a relentless here.

 

Fulks’ voice changes from song to song. It moves from front porch recollection to woodsy howl, from highway song to backscreen intimation. As it shifts, his voice recognizes the America of perpetual reinvention. In “Fare Thee Well, Carolina Gals,” the singer laments, “Some shrink from a shameful deed; me, I do it gladly.” It’s a marvelous lyric where the speaker moves in and out of building memory and self-knowing; seducer and scamp, he recognizes himself in time with his hearers—an American confidence man in love with the idea of heading west, but who recognizes that his escape won’t be financed by odd jobs and selling the kudzu-strung family place. Eventually stung by the locusts’ song, he reflects on wry self-invention: “I made a medium to poor boyfriend, and a pretty good house painter.” We all should have been listening from the outset where he announced, “There ain’t but two stories told, and this one’s about leaving.”

 

Rethinking my own attachment to bluegrass and hill musics—what kinds of stories are planted in those tunes that reflect a world that I observed but never fully inhabited as a child? In an interview with “The Bluegrass Situation,” Fulks situated his own music: “I just call myself country. It’s a big country.” Myself, I can’t make head or ass out of most of what comes out of Nashville these days—“country” in the sense that it sounds like someone listened to a couple of Eagles’ albums over the weekend and then wrote a handful of lyrics. Fulks’ “upland elegy” has more at stake in these days though. Its voice recalls that edge from the summer of 1967, noted by Greil Marcus on hearing and rehearing Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe”: “driving with the song on the radio, trying to follow its sliding phrases, drifting into miasmic trance, and plowing straight into the car in front of me.”

 

Fulks’ musics recognizes that force of displacement—songs sung in a strange land, much like the migrants who came to Chicago from West Virginia and eastern Kentucky to escape mid-century poverty, but were unwilling to depart a culture championing self-reliance and confrontation. In his recent work, Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance reflects on the mid-South’s “two separate sets of mores and social pressures…self-reliant…[but] increasingly…isolated, angry.” In that geography between self-defined “I” and isolation, Fulks has claimed a lyric voice. His work recognizes and probes that chasm in-between—with humor and legend, but also a sober recognition of the residue of disillusionment in what remains. Against an insistent banjo, he wails, “Freedom, come it may, to this child instead; Freedom comes, freedom goes, father is surely dead.   America’s a hard religion, not just anyone may enter.”

 

The difference is in telling a faith from a religion—the holler between singing belief in an America that never existed and ideologies that work a human being to a songless death. Fulks never forgets that divide.

 

Lately, I’ve been working on translations of poems from Efrain Huerta (1914-1982), all from his collection, Circuito Interior.  Here’s a sample.

WHO IS IT THAT DOESN’T LOVE VIRGINIA WOOLF?

 

My lady, your lips are perfect

and your gaze is so deep that I tremble inside;

your orange velvet skirt endless to me

—and your walk, as you bathe and talk alone, is

a sharp swan commanding words, as the saying goes

rightly kneading the dough for

baking our daily bread.

 

Were you, Virginia, the one who said

one foggy Sunday in March:

I go down with my flags flying.

 

Now, though I always knew

the one who’d been in the sea with her dog in her arms?

 

This October morning, very clear and very Sunday,

Louie your maid, sobbing like a wounded gull,

I realized that it was in a river of lilies

and doves and waves, ripples that devoured

your skirt, smooth hair and those eyes

that will not stop looking through me

never, our Lady,

because I read and reread Orlando and To the Lighthouse

and Three Guineas and I sink into the gentle waters

of your Diary—and now I am

the one who slips, Virginia-light, stung ray,

and is lost and reported drowned

because suicide—as you say—

is a stream of well-chosen words

and the ripples devour us again

to the bone and I die happily

because I loved you to the point of

never tiring of loving you

so much.

 

 

 

21 October 1974

Franz Schulze argues, “Chicago art is not naive, but it is fiercely, resolutely hermetic.” The play and meaning of this “hermetic” work is currently on exhibit at Hyde Park’s Smart Museum in the Schulze-dubbed “Monster Roster” (curated by John Corbett, Jim Dempsey, and Jessica Moss; running through June 12). These artists, at work in Chicago in the 1950’s and beyond, offer an interesting alternative current, one that reflects the city’s own social and mythic worlds at mid-century. The painters and sculptors were resolutely “here”—a test of place and moment. As Thomas Dyja notes in his history, The Third Coast, “According to [Leon] Golub, no one in Chicago had ever seen a painting by Jackson Pollock before 1947, and when they did, they weren’t impressed.”

Like the documentary photographers then at work in the city’s Institute of Design, the artists of Monster Roster seemed to feel that “something was up” was up in the provincial city; as a postwar American outpost, Chicago here distinctly reflected the Cold War’s pressures and the tensions of race, class, and gender in the United States. Golub himself underlined, “I am a reporter…a witness to chaos.” Golub and others depicted this chaos in art objects that seem more like artifacts of a fogotten culture. As students, they’d been encouraged to visit the Field Museum to examine ancient artifacts. In Chicago, they gathered and developed similar artifacts. George Cohen collected pieces of broken dolls and constructed collages out of them. Golub layered paint on canvases, then scraped those canvases with a meat cleaver until he was happy with the resulting textures and colors. In “The Tribe,” Fred Berger paints a line of gathered skulls, reflecting death at work in the city and culture that surrounded them.

In this show, some of the most interesting images come from work by June Leaf and Nancy Spero. Spero’s “Nightmare Figure” is the result of an alternating process of paint (particularly black paint) and rubbed turpentine. The result is an occluded, distorted figure—although to my eye, it’s difficult to tell whether it is a human or animal figure. It left me wondering how proximate Spero’s studio was to the stockyards. A similar disfigurement is at play in Leaf’s “Vermeer Box.” A television console, including a wrapped and frayed cord, contains sculpted images from a Vermeer canvas. However, the foil and shadows within “the box” refigure those images—reflecting Leaf’s artistic play of light and cultural memory.

Within these paintings and assemblages, the Monster Roster artists explore what Jean Dubuffet called “the unsuspected aspects of things” in a city in economic and cultural change. Richard J. Daley became Chicago’s mayor in 1955. Emmett Till was last seen in the city on the 63rd Street Illinois Central train platform in the summer of that year. The disassembly line of Chicago’s slaughterhouses was shifting to an economy of steel, while the city’s new expressways were beginning to sever the city’s known, walked geographies. The images and broken objects gathered by the Monster Roster artists are the detritus of these shifts—vinyl, pebbles, and plastic pressed onto canvas and into shapes of a “witnessed urban chaos.”

How do you walk out on the avant garde? Ken Burns’ jazz series followed a number of trajectories that the music took in the 1960’s and 1970’s—including the explorations of musicians from the AACM. The documentary’s implication was that jazz had turned inward on a set of private monologues, distancing itself from its hearers. Jazz’s focus, according to the documentary, appealed more to the European intelligentsia than its American base. The jazz musician’s world bent in on itself, playing only for itself in a jargoned, self-appreciative statement.

Last Sunday, Roscoe Mitchell again overturned that argument in a pair of sessions at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In the afternoon set, Mitchell’s ensemble played a handful of pieces that represented the breadth and sonic depth of Mitchell’s career, an exploration of not merely the music’s potential but also the audience’s expectations for jazz. These expectations were raised from the first glimpse of the space—a stage spread with three trap sets, hammers and sticks, tables of bells, and a pile of horns.

The ensemble’s program dissembled rhythm and our expectations of it. In the second piece, rhythm melted into four percussionists—Kikanju Baku, Tyshawn Sorey, Tani Tabbal, and William Winant—madly hammering on snares, cymbals, rims, blocks, and bells. My expectation was that the sound would become detached from its players—the banging and ringing cut loose from the bodies who produced it. But the sound stayed tethered to the musicians, a wider, shared sound, over which Mitchell presided, a steady beat in the seeming chaos.

Chaos? The result wasn’t bent-inward confusion, but sharp sound cut from the percussionists’ sharp movement. Not melody, but sound. A redefined lyric. This synced experience was further explored in the set’s third piece—a conversation of horns. The players—Hugh Ragin, Sorey, and Mitchell himself—traded phrases, notes seemingly cut from a ballad’s opening, and movements from what could have been anything from “On a Clear Day” to “Sing, Sing, Sing!” They played sustained tones as well as percussive scraps and stops. The sound building its own sense of common song in traded breaths.

That experience was echoed in the fourth piece—a collection of percussive effects—bells, filters, piano wire plucked, hammered, and strummed—until an ensemble member emerged from offstage with a handful of bells and bright yellow sneakers on his feet. Shaking the bells against the staccato effects of the resident sounds, he moved through center stage. As he danced, the bells reassembled the bits of sound. As sound, his breath was as substantial as the bells themselves.

Melody shook loose and, again, embodied. Mitchell’s ensemble was about dialogue in sound. The set pushed me to reconsider how Mitchell’s work reinforces both the ensemble’s unity and the common city of jazz. The musicians here were not bent in on a world known only to themselves, but were convened in the best sense of the “lyric”—voices speaking in place. Here, breath opened in commonplace. The respiration of pianists and percussionists, and the buzz of hornplayers. Not melody strung along a single voice, but sound itself in a shared space. In all, a reminder that the root of the lyric is breath.

Douglas Ewart offers a welcomed center in contemporary jazz. His ensemble’s performance last weekend at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art was an appreciation of the place of Malachi Maghostut Favors in Chicago music. In the words of the program, “Malachi was crucial.” Here, crucial to any understanding of race, song, and journey.

Ewart is also crucial—as one who makes instruments and draws the most out of the artists around him. He invents restlessly. One could say that he follows in the trail of free jazz, but Ewart pushes that trail in the direction that Ornette Coleman seemed to favor—the development of collaboration and good listeners. Onstage, Ewart pushes musicians to hear each other as well as to risk invention, as they engage not only the artistic currents in the room, but also the social and cultural seas that surround them.

Last Saturday, this was particularly apparent in the collaboration of voices in this project—Rita Warford, Maggie Brown, Duriel E. Harris, and Sterling Plumpp. It was the first time that I heard Warford, a vocalist of stunning range, invention, and talent. Brown answered every call throughout the piece—bringing us back to the world, her voice the summons to reality offered in a heart-to-heart across the back fence. Harris offered her regular stunning insight in: “the manifest of bodies / daily wasted.” At the foundation was Plumpp, also a restless inventor of poetic form through a blues narrative told in a distinctly American landscape between Chicago and Mississippi. Is there anything more fundamental to the geography of American poetry than Plumpp encouraging, “One more mile. One more mile…?”

A nice addition to the ensemble was Ni’Ja Whitson’s dance. She moved across and through the musicians’ own shifts and movements. Her breath and body joined the breath and anticipation of the players as the night unwound. In the center, Ewart pushing us also “one more mile.”

Occasional notes on Chicago by Garin Cycholl…