south of the loop

One of my creative nonfiction peers writes a lot about her family. I really admire that–I can't imagine writing about people who will almost certainly read what you've said about them. Can you even imagine David Sedaris' family, wondering and worrying that that one embarrassing thing they said at Thanksgiving dinner will find its way to the best seller list? My writing has so far been exclusively about my own experiences, so if any other characters figure in, it's only for narrative purposes. Only as needed to tell the story.

I shared an essay from my thesis (part of which is excerpted in Part I of this post) with two former co-workers today. One of them had condition-reported with me: she was one of the people I switched places with over and over, sharing the duties of measuring paint loss and recording the locations. She reminded me of the stories we found on the backs of the paintings. Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz's signatures. Bits and pieces of paper with records of who had purchased the painting. Nearly a century of history scrawled in black crayon on the reverse side of red poppies and white jimson weed.

The other co-worker couldn't believe I had lived through this experience and not shared it. It's a good question: Why didn't I drag everybody I knew into the gallery and say, "Look! That's where the hair from Georgia O'Keeffe's siamese cat is! That's where black paint is splattered over bright yellow petals!"? How could I have kept these secrets until now?

I think part of the answer lies in the process of writing. Capturing something on paper changes it: now it has to be deliberate and meaningful. It has to tell a story. When I started writing this essay for my thesis, I had to recall those details of condition-reporting, mull them over, run my fingers over them, pick them up and roll them around in my palms, smell them, re-live them in every way. And then I had to make a story out of them.

Part of the magic of condition-reporting hit me seven months after the fact, when I came across one of those closely-examined paintings in the form of a wall calendar. That's when I realized just how powerful the condition-reporting had been. That's when the details came rushing back, when my palms sweated and my fingers quivered with the memories of those paintings.

Something we've been talking about in my Time & Narrative class is the difference between lived time and recorded time, and I think that distinction is pertinent here. It's almost too obvious: when we record an event, it is no longer the lived moment. It's why we write. It's why we make films. It's why we make art. Narrating the event lets us roll those ideas and memories around in our brains. It lets us find beauty in the mundane, and a story in the everyday.

But I'm fascinated with how both co-workers inserted themselves into my story. I wonder if I somehow wrote them in by omission, that by focusing on how the events affected me, I also indirectly asked how the events affected them, since we all worked together while the condition-reporting was taking place. I wonder if David Sedaris' family does something similar. I wonder if his essays make his family find stories in the everyday. I wonder if they think, "Why didn't he tell me that then?" But maybe it's just this writing thing that gives the mundane a story to tell.

* * *

current book: May 2006 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Finally! A (brief) break from Ricoeur!
current music: Dengue Fever, Escape from Dragon House
current socks: purple and polka-dotted

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Condition-reporting is the task that must happen before a museum exhibit gets installed. It involves checking every object for tears, rips, paint chips, cracks, etc., and recording their location with a painstaking exactness. A tiny excerpt from my thesis:

Not many people enjoy condition-reporting, especially after the first few hours. It is painful. It makes your eyes cross, your back sore, your brain numb. Combing every centimeter of every surface of an incoming exhibition takes days. Your hand cramps from holding the light loupe for too long, but you can’t loosen your grip; you might drop the heavy metal tool on the painting. Your palms sweat inside the cotton gloves. You arch your back, squeeze your eyes shut, and stretch your neck upward to counteract the constant stooping and squinting. You switch places with your colleague over and over; you measure the exact location of a tiny chip of lost paint or unknown detritus, visible only under the light loupe, while your colleague records it. A day of condition-reporting starts early and ends late. This other world, a world where time slows to a crawl, is immersive. This other world, a world where you are locked in the gallery for hours at a time, is imprisoning.

But I loved it. I loved breathing the same air as the painting, running my gloved hands over the frame to check for dust, calling out, “white accretion, two inches from the right, sixteen inches from the top.” I loved being so close to the paint that my eyelashes were in danger of brushing it. I loved the thrill of finding something that nobody else had ever noted before, of finding that miniscule scratch in the paint that had gone unnoticed by dozens of condition-reporters. I loved poring over every painting’s surface with my eyes inches above the canvas, gripping the sides of the table to prevent me from literally falling into the wideness and wonder of the piece.

The locked, hushed gallery contained only a few people and several dozen crates. I belonged to an underground society whose sole purpose was to uncover the secrets of paintings. And such secrets! Only we knew exactly where the thin strokes of black and gray swirled together on the gnarled tree trunk in a knotty seam. Only we could see where the canvas buckled under bulky layers of paint. Only we knew where the artist had splattered paint across a corner of her canvas in microscopic dewdrops. We stood on hardwood floors underneath bright lights and interrogated each painting: we asked what it knew, who had touched it, whose cat hair was forever embedded in its thick paint. The interrogations took place on old morgue tables covered with archival foam. It was strange to place something so rich with history, something so alive, on something that was built to hold the dead. The paintings changed from one exhibit to the next in ways obvious to our secret loupe-wielding society; minute damage was the inevitable trade-off for thousands of museum-goers having access to the works. But they changed more subtly when we carefully lifted them off the morgue tables and placed them on brightly colored walls next to each another, when we put a red-and-brown West Texas tree next to blue Taos skies. We could unlock an infinite number of melodies; we could play the paintings off of one another and watch the song change. I loved this part of the installation process, of entwining ourselves into the paintings’ histories, of adding ourselves into their complex equations.

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I watched Mean Girls last night. One of “The Plastics” looked really familiar, but I couldn’t place her. It was bothering me enough that I got on IMDB after the movie ended. I skimmed over her filmography… she’s mostly had parts in a bunch of TV shows I’ve never watched. Hmmm. I clicked on the link to her bio. Amanda Seyfried has “appeared on the cover of three Francine Pascal books.”

AHA!

Five years of shelving young adult books, and I can now recognize teen actresses. Awesome.

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This post has to be prefaced with the following threat: DO NOT TELL MY MOTHER ANY OF THIS. Or else.

Last night I celebrated a friend's birthday with tapas, multiple pitchers of sangria, and strategically concocted banana-and-ice-cream desserts. Fortunately for the birthday girl, I didn't have my camera with me. You'll have to use your imagination.

At 11:30, I left the restaurant, thinking it would be an easy El/bus ride home. Normally I take the Red Line to 63rd Street, where I hop on the 63 bus, which takes me two short blocks from my door. 63rd and the Red Line is in one of Chicago's grittiest neighborhoods, and really isn't the best place for a white girl to be hanging around at any time of day or night. But I always wait for the bus by the well-lit Mobil station; I try to be extra-aware of what's going on around me; I try to be as invisible as a white girl can in a neigborhood that's 99% African-American.

The El was running behind–there was construction going on on the South Side tracks, and the El runs less frequently at that time of night anyway. By that point, I was already on the train and didn't have any other viable options for getting home. Cabbies don't exactly hang around the South Side, and certainly not in Englewood, the blown-out neighborhood where I was spending my little layover. It was nearly 1am by the time I was standing under the well-lit Mobil station, waiting for the 63 bus.

A guy came up to me. I'd seen him on my train talking on his cell phone. He said, "Um, excuse me? I don't mean to be rude… but you know this isn't really the best place for a woman to be hanging around?"

Right. Much less a white woman.

The guy–whose name is Will–told me a few Englewood horror stories. I believe them. Englewood's been in the news recently for stray bullets murdering two young girls (the bullets were traced to guns purchased in Indianapolis, but not at Don's Guns). Will told me he worked at the Palmer House downtown (a Hilton hotel), and he said that he always replaces his suit and tie with a 'do rag and baggy jeans before getting on the El. You gotta be careful, man. You just never know who's watching you, but people are, man, people are always watching you around here, you gotta blend in, y'know? It went unspoken that even a 'do rag and baggy jeans wouldn't make me blend in.

Will said he was going to wait around with me until the bus came. I was pretty skeptical–you have to be on your guard, even under the bright red and blue Mobil sign–and I wasn't sure that his chit-chat wasn't just some elaborate scam. But he chased away a drunk who came up asking for money. He never got too close to me. He never asked me too personal a question. He told me I had to be careful, had to be on the lookout, this was Englewood, man. He kept up small talk and would walk out into the middle of the street to see if the 63 bus was coming. He finally walked into the Mobil station to get a drink when he saw the bus.

There really are some good people out there.

* * *

current book: Ricoeur's Time and Narrative. Volume fucking two.
current music: Royksopp's remix of the Kings of Convenience's "I Don't Know What I Can Save You From."
current socks: light blue with tropical birds

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Shockingly, this isn't a post about Monte, even though today alone he has displayed animal force equivalent to a herd of hyenas. I think he's doing speed when I'm in class.

One of my professors is visiting from a university in Germany. This has prompted the following, mostly delightful, results:

• he began the first class by saying "My English, it is not so good." It's not so bad either; he's mostly just not confident in his speaking abilities yet. But he pointed out that this will work to our advantage when he grades our papers. Hell, yeah!
• when he boots up his laptop, it says "Wilkommen" instead of "Welcome." It reminds me of how the British version of AOL says "You've got post!" Yes, I am this easily amused.
• throughout today's entire three hour seminar, he kept using a term that I heard as "animal forces." I knew I was mishearing him, but what do you say? "Excuse me, professor, but what's that word you keep saying that sounds to me like 'animal forces'?" Yeah. So it was in the last twenty minutes of class that I realized he was saying anamorphosis. Which is simply the distortion of an image and has nothing to do with my crackwhore kitty.

* * *

current book: Gerard Genette's Narrative Discourse. It just arrived at the bookstore and I have to read 135 pages of it by tomorrow at 1:30pm. No fudging for this course: The professor started off the last class by asking us to write out a few sentences about why Ricoeur uses historiography in his study of time and narrative. He claimed it was simply to gauge how difficult the text was. Couldn't we have determined that by simple vote? "Raise your hand if you didn't have a damned clue what Ricoeur was talking about."
current music: still completely fixated on Canasta's cover of "Major Tom."
current socks: black with little gray cats all over them. the cats are all wearing different polka-dotted and stripey dresses. my mom got them for me, okay? and anyways, they're cute.

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Breaking news: I have now left Hyde Park two times in two days.

I just got back from the Canasta show at Schuba's in Lakeview, which was good, especially for a Monday night. Smoking is now banned in the music room at Schuba's, and they sell ear plugs at the door. I am officially old enough to greet both of these things with wild, unadulterated enthusiasm. I believe I said to the bouncer, "You sell earplugs?!?!? I'll take two packs!!!!" Emphasis on the exclamation points.

Canasta debuted two new songs, both ballads, one of which ended with a fun upbeat. They also did a beautiful and haunting cover of Peter Schilling's "Major Tom" (in English), and then maybe another six songs off their full-length album We Were Set Up, including "Slow Down Chicago:" "I'd like to ask this town to slow down / selfish I know / but I think it's come to this / I'm losing my breath and I'd take a break / If I thought I could."

* * *

On the thesis front: Advisor and I spent over two hours going over my thesis page by page, sentence by sentence, word by word. He found some funny quirks in my writing, such as a tendency to use "where" instead of "when" or "in which." Such as:

I finally visited the Hyde Park murals on one of those cold mornings where the stinging wind reminds you that Chicago is on a lake, the kind of morning where the precipitation is neither snow nor rain nor sleet, but some vicious, frozen mixture that bites mercilessly at your face.

Strange, no? I do this repeatedly throughout my thesis, and I'm not sure I would have caught it if he hadn't pointed it out to me. My work this week will focus on concluding this behemoth. That means tracking all of the unanswered questions throughout the existing thirty-three pages and figuring out where and how to answer them. Can art hurt you? Stay tuned to find out. And wish me luck.

* * *

current book: Foucault's reading of the painting Las Meninas from The Order of Things.
current music: Canasta! check out www.canastamusic.com and do yourself the favor of listening to "Major Tom." Seriously.
current socks: my concert-going socks: green with little records all over them.

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The guy who lives in the apartment above us–we'll just call him Clompy McClomperton–was stomping around yesterday morning with all his usual intensity. Monte was snuggling with me with all his usual intensity, until Clompy McClomperton startled him with his elephant footsteps. Monte looked at the ceiling, clearly alarmed. The look on his face said something along the lines of: "Squirrel? Squirrel? Squirrel? Squirrel?"

If you're reading this, Mr. McClomperton, watch out. My cat thinks you're a giant squirrel and he wants a piece of you.

© 2005 carol street photography

* * *

In other news, I… wait for it… wait for it… left Hyde Park today. My roommate and I went to a hipster coffee house in Wicker Park called Filter, where we drank lattes out of proper mugs, hipster-watched, listened to a very shrill and melodramatic woman talk to a very bored-looking man, and, oh yeah, studied. We then went record shopping at Reckless Records. Is this what it's like to be normal? I'd forgotten.

* * *

current book: um, yeah. still fucking Ricoeur. but I also read a chapter today from a book by WJT Mitchell, the title of which I can't remember and which I'm too lazy to look up. the chapter is called "Metapictures," and is about self-referential art, or pictures that are about pictures. The most common ones are the duck-rabbit and the old woman/young woman, both of which you probably saw in your high school psychology textbook. art? I'm not so sure.
current music: at Reckless Records today, I purchased two Arto Lindsay albums (Salt and Hyper Civilizado) and Versus, the Kings of Convenience's remix album. I want to listen to everything all at once! I just discovered Arto Lindsay thanks to one of my awesome managers at McBookstore, but it seems that Lindsay, based on his album art, is strangely penis-obsessed.
current socks: bright purple with green frogs.

Filed under: chicago, monte by admin2
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