Small Biz in Big Town

Chicago West Town:
get milk, cigarettes, soda and much else
at the local Convenience Store.
Independent businesses, family operated.
No fruits or vegetables. Spoil too fast.
And not so easy to sell a beer. $2,200 a year
to get a license from the city - if neighbors agree.

- click to enlarge -

Books asleep

Some books interest me
because they really tell a story or change my view.
Many only seem to reproduce what was written
by anybody else in other words though. They might be read as an
act of duty and without much respect.
Some are hard to understand and I always blame the author for this.
Some books are a sign of their times.
This one was published in NYC in 1968, it sleeps in a Chicago library.
In east german libraries a few books from socialist times
survived the switch. Guess their librarian made a deal with them.
Keep quiet and you can sleep on the shelf.
But whatever the content,
these forgotten books have a new purpose.

Truth on Polaroids

(Click on the image to read the handwritings)

Street art on a Chicago wall.
Commercial free expression in public space.
Recognize hidden beauty.
A smile
A voice
Shyness and Sensitivity

Light and beauty

Some glass frames, hiding stairs of a Dresden concrete high rise
from East German socialist times (colors rearranged).
Whenever I travelled to the East in the 80's,
I was impressed about how ugly their architecture was.
Grey seemed to be their favorite color,
concrete their material of choice.
I couldn't believe that this design was the outcome
of a lack of resources.
I thought that maybe they wanted to redefine
what's beautiful.
But now I think, as soon as I was back in the West,
they put on some secret tiny glasses that altered
their perception of color into something shiny,
letting you enjoy the most beautiful colors you can imagine.
All the beauty was out there all the time.
I just couldn't see.

Echoes of the past

Travelled to Dresden recently.
A city of 800 years - and too many bombs in 1945.
Same streets, same sky some 60 years later.
A city like a sad, aching creature.
Grow, shrink, get burned, torn down.
Breathe and die.
May get some new life in the shadow of the past.
People long gone. Bricks still there.
Some new urban fabric coming up
between old houses and another generation.
Dresden's heart is still a strange place.

(Un)disciplined mind

Inside a cafe' in Chicago Wicker Park.
Silent people in their twenties, Latte and WLAN -
accurate execution of lifestyle under full control.
Proper behavior excludes creative expression
other than keyboard typing emotions.
Check the bathroom wall to discover
the undisciplined other.

Welfare theory

A few sentences from a book that I was just reading:

" It could be claimed that modern society exists somewhere
between two extremes, two dreams of perfection.
On the one hand there is an 'environmental' utopia where
social problems are explained in terms of social conditions;
on the other, there is a 'pathological' utopia where social
problems are attributed to the supposed failings and
immorality of individuals. At their most general level,
social policies are a means by which society moves itself
in one direction or the other: some policies address the
social injustice of underlying conditions, some are concerned
with improving the behaviour and habits of individuals.
Of course it might be claimed that we must always fall short
of either extreme [...], meaning that we should always factor both
the 'social' and the 'individual' into our decision-making."

Tony Fitzpatrick (2001): Welfare Theory: An introduction.
Referring to Thomas More's Utopia (1516): "If you allow young folk
to be abominably brought up and their characters corrupted,
little by little, from childhood; and if you then punish them as
grownups for committing the crimes to which their training
has inclined them, what else is this, I ask, but first making them
thieves and then punishing them for it?"

Bikes and guns

A police officer,
fixing a flat tire for a girl on Chicago Critical Mass.
Maybe unvoluntarily - she's armed as you can see.
I was really impressed.

The soul of liquids

This is about liquids.
Hard to catch, to keep, to control.
I'm not sure whether I'll ever understand water.
The way it feels when I'm in it. The way it sounds
at the coastline of the sea. Slow motion under water.
The different tastes.
We make sure it's around wherever we go.
Pipes and bottles.
At some places we honor its soul.
Japanese gardens come into my mind.

Never wanted to listen to gasoline.
All we do is blow it up in our engines.
Bills for gallons.
But I would like to listen to oil.
Liquid history.
Ancient stories from the early days of the earth.
Would like to know how it feels, how it smells.
Never did.
Wells are fenced.

Let the Clouds in

Sun lured me.
"Come on, get me if you can.
You're a bit slow, so I'll wait a while
at the end of the highway and play with the clouds.
If you don't make it, you might see me another evening,
somewhere else. But this won't be the same.
We won't be the same.
So try your best and race the car."
Tried hard but she was way too fast.
So I gave up and stopped by.
Opened the windows to let the clouds in.
Together we waited for the stars to come,
talking about those sunny days behind
and those still ahead.

The hidden city

I read a lot about cities these days
and just found some fascinating sentences
published by Ian Chambers 16 years ago -
not that I knew of this guy before:

"The city exists in a series of doubles, it is a real place
and a site of imagination. Its elaborate network of streets,
housing, public buildings, transport systems,
parks and shops is paralleled by a complex of attitudes,
habits, customs, expectancies and hopes
that reside in us as urban subjects.
We discover that urban "reality" is not single but multiple,
that inside the city there is always another city."

Tell me all your secrets

Had my secrets. They popped up somehow. Locked them up.
Was a kid then. Some heavy to carry around all the time,
some I forgot. Shared one once. Wasn't a good idea.
Number one rule in the secrecy business. Keep it.
But we want to know. There are so many around.
Curiosity drives us mad.
That's why we read the news, watch TV,
listen to strangers, feeding their tiny phones on the train.
Speak louder. Please. Can't leave till I heard it all.
Talking to a small box in your hand
Talking in a big one in church
Talking in a cop room, tape recorder running
Add the cameras for a daily show
Tell me all your secrets.
Once you did, you're broke, cut off the line.
Silence.
Dumped that girl when she ran out of secrets, what could I do.
Was dumped by that girl when I ran out of secrets,
what could she do.
Need some fresh secrecy supply.
Should read the old books. Sail to unknown lands.
Walk the darkest streets in another city.
Or ask the government to help me out. They got so many.
But they want to trade. Want their forms to be filled out first.
When did you spend your last one and why?
No no no, not a word.
This one is left.
Thanks for telling me.