!Chicago, City of the Damned

Well, I got a request today for more ranting (go figure) and who am I to disappoint? However, I am down in the book-writing hole so deep that I simply haven't much to opine about. National Lampoon? Done it. SNL? Check. The state of American comedy? Christ, there aren't enough electrons in the world.



This evening, I did watch an interesting documentary on the early history of Chicago--"Chicago: City of the Century." (I am still wondering which century they are talking about. Nineteenth? Twentieth? Anyway...) Topics may come and go, but there's one thing that you can count on from PBS' American Experience series: they make you goddamn glad you live in the present! I wonder if future Americans with view our current trials with similar distaste: "They subjected themselves to cable news programming 24 hours a day. In such a harsh environment, most didn't survive."



Cholera epidemics, the 1871 fire, the practice of capitalism-as-a-deadly-weapon: There's a word for the early history of Chicago, and that word is "hair-raising." I thought maybe I'd come in at the wrong time, but apparently this has always been the anti-Paris, a city where the mechanism of modern life was left showing, and it takes a certain kind of callousness not to mind the eerie squeal of the pigs as they are slaughtered. I am looking forward--between splayed fingers--to tomorrow's segment. This is a brutal city, where the prices paid are clearly marked; that's perhaps why comedy thrives so well. It's New York without the softening of age or culture or interchange with Europe; Los Angeles seems to be another planet entirely. And I live here. Do I like it? I don't know if I'll ever find out for sure.