Aesthetics of the Invisible World

The Underground Online pt 3/3 - Engineering Authenticity

This is part two of a three part series.  Part one can be found here, part two can be found here.

When people join the underground, they latch onto some sense of authenticity.  It’s authentic because it’s intimate and often impoverished.  When it becomes mainstream, the facets of legitimacy are inevitably auctioned off.  The early adopters are usurped by the late-comers.

This is life in the underground.  Always becoming something else.  Too often, it is in response to popular culture.  Chicago is like this.  This city reacts to what is happening in Los Angeles or New York.  The second city.  The third coast.  In a sense, the whole city is underground, or flown over.  Chicago is the capital of Flyover Country and its residents act like it.  Fiercely defensive.  Overcompensating pride.  Reactionary rather than trail-blazing. 

What is invented here is hardly visible until it leaves.

Karl Scheffler’s Berlin: a city condemned always to become, never to be.  When you are not defined by your context to something else, you are simply being.  It is who we strive to become.  Independent.  Wholly unique but humble enough to understand our place in the universe. 

On the intersection of Clark and Belmont in Chicago, you’ll see many people becoming.  They define their lives by the subculture they share.  They are restless and afraid of death - attached to the definition of what an authentic life is, of who they are.  Reaching, destroying, loving and losing endlessly.  This is the ethos of the underground: tragedy. 

~ü