chicago ups and downs

By Robbie on June 7, 2011

I live in what I think must be the best city in all of America (OK, a couple miles outside it), and yet I am continually reminded of Saul Bellow's definition of Chicago as that place where they love you right after you've made it in New York. "You" of course means creative types, and "New York" means "...or L.A." And if you include country music as a realm of creativity (arguable), then include Nashville too. Here are a couple things that recently happened:

- An actor friend tells me that when he auditioned at a big union theater in town, he was automatically weeded out along with anyone else without "New York City" on his or her resume.

- I do a variety-show podcast hosted by a personality from L.A. on location in Chicago. Making small talk with me beforehand, the host remarks on the difficulty in casting talent for his show, because, as he puts it, "famous people don't really live in Chicago."

- A drummer friend moves to Nashville to play with a touring band. How's it going, what's it like? "Boy, do they ever not care what you did in Chicago!" is the instant reply.

- Kind of a vague impression, but when I temporarily located to NYC last year it seemed to me that I became a mite more interesting to Chicagoans, or to the people who write about arts in the Chicago newspapers anyway. During those months there was a mite more press about me than usual, it seemed, and it conveyed a mite more appreciation for my music. And it would note, "the former Chicagoan, now living in Brooklyn," where before it would note nothing. Move back -- interest level reverts to normal.

If you live and work in Chicago and Chicagoans hear talk of you from people who live in other places, they sometimes react with honest puzzlement, as if the city is understood to be encased in a Kryptonite bubble. If you're a creativo in Chicago and appear on a local arts-focused radio or TV show, you are often asked about the benefits of working here, as though a certain city is a little insecure about itself. If you leave Chicago and achieve success elsewhere, you become that person "whose heart will always be in Chicago," in a tone of sinister quasi-religious absolutism. And if you leave Chicago and fail elsewhere and return...do you remember Nurse Ratched's countenance upon Randle MacMurphy's return from electro-shock?

Since there's no entertainment business to speak of in Chicago, and since excepting the blues the city isn't identified beyond its borders with an artistic style (a literary mode like the South, a popular music approach like Austin or New England) it's hard to answer that question about the benefit of working as an entertainer here. There is a very big benefit in living like a higher mammal, with space around oneself, a place to put your car when not in motion, a house or apartment with separate sleeping and eating areas, and non-entertainment-industry workers to socialize with. Getting to live like a normal person in a normal place is a wonderful privilege for a creative type, no doubt about it; but that just speaks to the difficulty of trying to live off your beauty-begetting impulses and the extreme difficulty of living in New York. It doesn't make a strongly positive statement about Chicago. "I paint pictures while not getting peed on by bums and vandalized and called fuckface by others on their way home from the second grade."

The one clear and real benefit of working creatively in Chicago is that you actually do get to work, where in the other two-and-a-quarter cities you can easily end up in the majority of creators who don't. The corresponding disadvantage, though, is that, as my drummer friend said, your work doesn't matter much on the outside. It's out-and-out unfair -- as unfair as being dropped from consideration for a job on the basis of the residence listed on your resume -- but that's how it is: we're apart from the conversation. There are, I wouldn't deny it, more good actors and musicians and dancers and litterateurs on the coasts, since there are more opportunities there; but the best of them there are no better than the best of them here.

Thus the whine about no famous people living here is hard to take sitting down. The only sense in which it's true is the sense in which it's boringly self-evident: Chicago doesn't do fame; just as well comment on the lack of snowmen in Biloxi. And the underlying implication that Chicago isn't teeming with talent is just stupid. I imagine every city in America that has a million or more people in it (hello Boston, San Antonio, Atlanta) is in the same boat, full of talented creators who are living well enough and working consistently enough, yet frustrated by the ceiling height. A windfall of the allegedly flattening world is the freedom to live where you'd like to even if that's not exactly where your industry is centered, but in the entertainment industry, that's not the case.