TIFF doodle roundup
How I spent the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival:
September 18, 2006
June 02, 2006
Big Shoulders
In the thirteen years since my life in Chicago—a life of highways, record stores, rock shows, fried food and other teenage kicks—my sense memories of the city I grew up in have become a little blurry. I used to think that home would always stay a baseline, and it is strange to grow up, however slowly, and realize the baseline is yourself.
Aurally and aromatically, the city is a constant shock to me. Where did all these wayward vowels come from? How is it that everyone is allowed to smoke? How is it that smoking once represented the atmosphere of something so vital and amazing to me—a world of going to concerts, often ones I wasn't legally allowed to be at, a world of spending long afternoons watching TV or otherwise pretending to be adult with a boy who had to work hard not to knock over his million messy ashtrays.
Now, of course, that smoke bears a mixture of nostalgia and repulsion—strong stuff indeed, and often accompanied by the quintessential Chicago look. Sweatshirt, chain wallet, thick glasses—you know him, I'm sure. He's still here, on a Salvation Army couch, listening to Wilco. I am entirely of this world, and yet I feel like I've somehow moved on.
And many years ago, my visions of Chicago began to blend chromatically with the city seen through the maudlin, loving eyes of a newcomer. Distilled into crisp lines and melancholic mythologies, it became harder and harder to tell the Chicago I visualized in my mind's eye from a Chris Ware drawing: I can't think of downtown without my own memories washed over in a mix of imagined and real nostalgia. El tracks, pavilions, rooftop water towers and department store clocks—my own childhood recollections grow murky in pastel beaux arts recastings. And yet I think I prefer it this way: to see the city, or imagine it, through the eyes of someone who came to it instead of left it is in some ways redemptive of the loss I feel of all the beauty and memory and too-big-to-comprehendness of the landscape that shaped me.
There are times when I stay away for too long and when I come home I am flooded and confused, in part because the city is so beautiful, and so no longer mine. But this week, under familiar streetlights, beer signs, and the gazes of old friends, I was not an outsider. As I swam the Chicago heat away on a downtown rooftop, an oasis all but for the wafting chocolate to remind me just how close I was to the Kennedy, I could not have been happier to blink up at the skyscrapers and sunshine of my long-ago surroundings. And as I straggled in just a little bit before the newspaper last night, a too-thick spinach pizza clutched desperately under my arm, I could not have possibly felt any more at home.