What not, local edition
1—I'll probably want to write about this at greater length once I've read the whole issue, but check out the difference between the Reader's new package on my neighborhood and the one Time Out ran a few weeks ago, which kind of sums up the difference between two ways of looking at the world.
Reader tease: 'The Hyde Park & Kenwood Issue. Independent politics. Aggressive urban renewal. Ambitious architecture. More bookstores than bars. And the 800-pound gargoyle: the University of Chicago.'
Time Out tease: 'What's wrong with Hyde Park? Equal parts brain and beauty—so why is it a retail and entertainment wasteland?'
Just want to point out that to take today at random, Kenzaburo Oe is giving a free lecture on former U of C prof Tetsuo Najita's 'approach to intellectual history, including Najita’s Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan: The KaitokudÅ Merchant Academy of Osaka (1997), a landmark study of the rise of an independent school of economic and moral philosophy in 18th–century Japan' and then Doc Films is playing 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' for $5 later. Not sure 'wasteland' is quite the word I'd use.
2—The New Yorker's new many thousand word profile of Richard Daley (not available online) is well turned and gives as much insight into him as a man as anything I can remember reading. Still, it's a shame that so many crushing problems are so lightly brushed off. The South and West Sides are hardly the monoliths of crime they're sometimes thought to be, but it's absolutely true that the civic revival has not touched enormous swathes of the city, in some of which people live a nearly Third World life of grim brutality that is not much relieved by knowing that Chicago is a world center for 'molecular gastronomy.' Sparing a few more words to discuss the morality of saving the city by essentially sealing large parts of it off might have been worth the while. Similarly, readers might have done with a bit less about the Richie-Obama relationship and a bit more about the fact that the Illinois deficit now accounts for half the budget, a sum so large that if you laid off every state employee two-thirds the gap would remain.
3—As I've never cared for the Pixies a bit I was enormously entertained to read what Steve Albini had to say about them in this excerpt from an oral history of the band:
I respect them and I certainly have high regard for Kim as a singer and I think Charles is a good guy. I never really liked their music in the way that I liked my favorite bands' music - like the Jesus Lizard, Television, Public Image, the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, Suicide, Kraftwerk, unique and brilliant bands that I loved, I never really got that level of interest with the Pixies. It's awkward for me to say because I feel like in some way I'm peeing on their birthday cake here. I do geniuinely like and respect the people in that band. I think David Lovering is a great drummer. I think Joey is an innovative guitar player. I think Kim is probably the best singer ever, and I think Charlie is a talented and unique guy. But the things that I like about that band, it's not really the music.
I've always thought it must be hard to be Albini in that you're serving as an engineer to so many bands vastly worse than your own. How do you stop yourself from just rolling your eyes?
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Reader Comments (3)
I've only been to Chicago once and spent that entire day driving through some seriously blighted neighborhoods half lost and half looking for the nice area(s?) and half just taking it in before I headed to St Louis to catch a Cardinals game. I didn't really learn anything enduring then, so my vision of Chicago remains unchanged since I was 14 and read Carl Sandburg . He wrote an entire book on the topic.
I think Albini is being a bit of a hater, but I get his point. The Pixies were very good but never a great band. I'm a little bit baffled by his qualifiers: Kim Deal a great singer? I had no idea - and I actually saw the Breeders a couple times before they became bloated junkies.
I think peeing on someone's birthday cake is a lot worse than what he said about the Pixies here.