Chicago, Peanut Butter & Jelly, and Documentaries

MY TRIP TO CHICAGO
AND (IN THE SUBTEXT)
HOW IT CHANGED ME

For some of us accessibility is a serious obstacle. All considering on what exactly you're looking for, accessibility can always be an issue, but, for some people, it's that much more of a daunting task when attempting to see a particular movie. I live in Northwest Indiana, in a town called Valparaiso. I'm just about the poorest, sickest, and happiest person I know. On top of my poverty, I'm also jobless and without car - this is both a reflection and a cause of my aforementioned happy-poverty. All I mean to say is this: I'm in a small town with little cultural advantage, and I have no money to sustain a Netflix account or an obsessive DVD-purchasing habit. So, for me, accessibility is one of those obstacles which forever haunts me in my path towards filmic enlightenment.

Last week I had the privilege of receiving a vision: the city. Valparaiso is about an hour and a half from Chicago and taking the pilgrimage isn't exactly rare. However, what is rare, at least for myself, is spending anymore than a night in the city. As I have quite a number of friends living in the city, the opportunity is actually quite open to myself. Last week, the morning after the Perseid meteor shower, I finally took that opportunity. I stayed with my art studenty, furry friend Robbie D. in his sort of dirty, but very welcoming Logan Square apartment. The first night I was in we took a very long and aimless walk full of philosophically tangential conversation dotted with moments of ghostly inwardness. I knew that this trip was important, something big.

I was having just about the closest thing to a spiritual experience an atheist can have. I was in a new land, with a good person, and predisposed to a great deal of introspection. But, for some reason, everything just kept coming back to film - as if my states of contemplation all began with a title card and ended with rolling credits. As Robbie is a film enthusiast himself, we decided it would be appropriate if we spent a considerable amount of time watching movies together. Well, nothing was playing at the Gene Siskel, or the Music Box, or, really, anywhere for that matter. So, Robbie brought me to the John M. Flaxman Library at the Art Institute. This is where my envy, free in my excitement, began to claw at my insides; not until I began to flip through the video catalog did the monster bend my ribcage and tear itself from my flesh.

I knew then, in absolute certainty, that I needed to be somewhere that actually served to cultivate my enthusiasm. Netflix and other extra-medial services will always be dear and near to my heart, my head, and my cock, but the welcomeness and open exchanging quality of the art and cultures within the city is penetratingly intoxicating. There were so many things that I wanted to see, needed to see - and, it was all there, right in front of me. It all seemed so easy and so encouraging. This was the sort of accessibility I craved! Oh, rapture!

In the course of three days, I think we watched nine movies (mostly documentaries, mostly at the library itself, big screens are nice). It felt really good. And, I wouldn't call it dread, but there was a sinking feeling the entire time; I knew I was to return home Netflixless, Flaxmanless, and completely broke (Chicago, for all its accessibility, is fucking expensive). Now that I'm home, I'm actually stupid comfortable, but part of that may be because that sense - that I can just take the Blue Line to the Flaxman and watch whatever I like - hasn't exactly disappeared yet. In a somewhat related note, I'm really happy I don't sell Bibles for a living.


When I did get home (Friday afternoon), I immediately went to see Vicky Cristina Barcelona (playing at a theater nearly forty minutes from my home) and think I cared for it as much as I did merely because of the idea of anyone, ever, going to some foreign place (literally), but actually going somewhere much further (experientially, metaphorically), and then returning home a different person. Woody's dialogue was clichéd and rigid, Scarlette Johansson's "hotness" was talentless, and Javier Aquirresarobe's photography was uninspired, but I didn't care! The music was cool, and, and... Vicky and Cristina we're whispering things to me in their going-back-home-awkwardness. The next morning I shaved my mustache (of which I have great affection).


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This post has no finality and little contingency, in a sense, it's perfect in expressing, in form, the sort of feeling I have right now. I'm going to wake up in seven hours, take a shower, have two eggs, hashbrowns, and toast (with mixed fruit jelly and butter) for breakfast, watch "Conversations with Dead People" (Buffy the Vampire Slayer 7x07), and then leave for a meeting with my supervisor for undergraduate admissions and registration at PUC in Hammond. I'm excited. I want to watch a really good movie right now, any suggestions? Who wants to do some VHS trading? Oh, by the way, I got these two guys at this little-big cool pawn shop (the sort of place I think I might live at) somewhere in Chicago (I never caught the name, oops):