Robert Hayden captures to totality of snow:

Snow

Smooths and burdens,
endangers, hardens.

Erases, revises.
Extemporizes

Vistas of lunar solitude.
Builds, embellishes a mood.

[Photo: Merg Ross Steps in Snow, New York City, 1964]

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]

This curve could continue forever.  Telephone pole after telephone pole.  She passes by, mimicking their outstretched arms.  Evenly spaced points along the path.  An infinite loop.  Recursion here.

I spent most of the day getting used to the understated elements of the footage for The Assassination of Chicago’s Mayor.   I’m looking for the natural cadence of the film.  I like to rough out the edit while I outline the music in an attempt to find the movie’s idiosyncratic pacing.  The tone and tempo of the performances captured to screen should fully inform the natural flow of the experience. 

The image above is the basic musical gesture I settled on.

~ü

Midwest Revolution

In a previous post I quoted an author who thought that there are quintessentially Midwestern tropes of “growth, decay and rebirth through cyclical nature.”  Midwesterners, more than other United States citizens, live in cyclical, not linear time.  This is mostly due to our unrelenting seasons. 

Cyclical living might seem redundant, but it actually leaves more opportunity for revolution.  The very word revolution alludes to the necessity of repetition to lay the ground work for true change.  Revolution quite literally means to both repeat (the a wheel’s revolutions per minute) and change (the French Revolution). 

In the midwest, we are getting close to another revolution.  Fall.

~Schmüdde

[Image: Nikolinerlr]