As my company, EarthCircle Films, gears up to shoot its latest short, The Coldest Winter, I meditate on how priorities would change for those affected by an event so catastrophic that the United States’ power grid has been unable to provide electricity through the coldest months of winter.  This is the backdrop of the film.  The script is finished, I’m just thinking of the banal details that obsess artists.  The simple touches that separate good from great.

The film takes place in Chicago.  I’m a recent witness to the thunder-snow-blizzard snowmageddon in Chiberia, where the above photo was snapped.  The timing of our film is entirely coincidental. 

The details start at the feet.  Cold, wet feet.  Socks drying by the wood-burning fire.  They smell bad because hand washing my clothes is the only option.

The streets are buried under several feet of snow.  Gas and oil has been dedicated to generators providing power for only the most essential services.  Hospitals.  Shelters. 

So the snow outside is ubiquitous.  Small paths have been cleared but my shoes and pants will always have ice on them when I come back inside.  I scavenge for clean, dry clothes rather than wash my own.

There is nothing to hunt or naturally survive off of.  All that is left is frozen and canned food.  Spring is almost here.  I’m not worried about running out of food, as long as I ration intelligently.  If I go out, I don’t hunt for deer, I hunt for frozen dinners left inside of freezers in abandoned apartments. 

If I’m on my own, I look for clothes, food and things to burn.  I look for allies.  I watch for looters. 

My feet are wet.  If I shave, I shave every few weeks.  The layers of clothing press my body hair against my skin.  If feels unusual and liberating to take them off.  But it doesn’t last long.  It’s too cold to go around with bare skin.  So the layers go back on.  My hair is oily. 

The pipes have long since frozen.  The bathroom is outside.  If my feet are warm and my pants are dry, the last thing I want to do is go to the bathroom and face the snow.  Hold it for ten more minutes.

Finally, keep survival essentials in places that are easy to reach.  No need to use a closet or drawers.  They get more use now that there is no electricity.  A knife or two.  Rope.  A sled to haul plunder.  Hand-made snow shoes.  Gloves.  Lots of gloves.  A saw.  Even my toothbrush.  No need to venture far from the fire when it’s 40 degrees Fahrenheit indoors.  Keep those items nearby. 

Photo: [Kichiro Sato/AP]

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

The Underground Online pt 2/3 - Different Ways of Being

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

When you make something that no one sees, there is an implicit existential crisis.  If it is never seen, does it exist?  Certainly does.  Inside you.  Like so many important things in our lives, no one can see it happen.  We just feel it.  That’s the ultimate underground.

Then there is the next level.  The shared level.  Creative subcultures.  Film lovers.  Music lovers.  Theater lovers.  Geeks.  Fetishists.  Something outside of the mainstream moves them.  The only experience more exciting than being immersed is sharing that feeling with someone else.  That’s why the underground exists.  It is more special than popular art; it is more intimate by definition and it’s shared by a community.

Chicago represented that second level to me.  Wax Trax! records was a large part of that.  The music was unknown to most of my everyday acquaintances.  The music promotes non-mainstream values.  It is sexually obscure like the intersection of Belmont and Clark in Chicago.  The institutions that surround the intersection tell the tale.  It is equidistant to Wrigley Field and Boys Town.  Berlin is less than a block away - a 4 or 5 AM nightclub where the straight, bisexual, transgendered and outright gay have all come together for 20 years.  Straight-laced DePaul University sits just south with it’s college parties and suburban commuters.  And they all intersect at Clark and Belmont at some point. 

I’ve only ever found myself comfortable where everyone is welcome.  I never fully committed to any particular culture.  I identify with so many different ways of being.  I love to dance the waltz as much as I love to bachata.  I love the peace and quiet of meditation but I also engage in the onslaught of physical violence at an Enstrüzende Neubauten concert.  But it’s impossible to be in all these places at once.  So I’m only vaguely involved in any one culture, split by the possibility of being in love and totally committed - never truly being.

~ü

[Logo: Wax Trax! Records]

The Underground Online pt 1/3 - Condemned to Become, Never to Be.

The intersection of Clark and Belmont in Chicago is important to me.  Although its relevancy has faded, it is renowned enough to have an entry in the Urban Dictionary:

Clark and Belmont is the neighborhood of nearly every subculture Chicago has to offer, especially the Chicago Punk scene.

This was true throughout the 1980s and 90s.  I loved the mix of underground and mainstream.  Bandwagon baseball fans meet goths.  Transsexuals walk the streets at night.  Moms push strollers during the day.  Even in the rougher 1980s, long-time residents stayed unlike Wicker Park circa-2000.  Only fragments of that neighborhood’s colorful Polish past remain.

Clark and Belmont never developed the haute couture like the trendsetting streets of New York, London, Tokyo or Paris.  Hip-hop went mainstream.  Car commercials, high fashion and the like.  Ministry, a Chicago band, and Front 242, a Chicago import, remain obscure. That’s what happens in cities like Chicago.  What starts underground stays underground. 

Berlin shares this destiny.  Karl Scheffler summed up the condition in 1910 when talking about his city:

Berlin is a city condemned always to become, never to be.

Restless folks are like that.  I’m restless.  I can never simply be.  I’m a filmmaker.  In film, people move to Los Angeles in the hopes of being something someday.  That’s a terminal aspiration.  Like death.  People like me are in perpetual motion.  We’re always working and never becoming.  We remain underground.  Always digging.

[Photo: Belmont Graffiti]

I love great design.  It’s also good to see New York and Illinois tops on the list. 

If you were to sum up the cost of IQ losses from leaded gasoline (now gone, of course, but the effects live on), the asthma epidemic among today’s kids, military protection of the Middle East, global warming, garden variety smog, plus all the more prosaic things like traffic jams and so forth, I wouldn’t be surprised if the real cost of a gallon of gasoline would have to go up by three or four dollars to pay for it all.

My favorite recent Chicago Skyscraper: 300 North LaSalle