WORDPAINTING A BEACHFRONT MURAL (9/12/2011, 3.31pm-4.05pm)

Concrete beachfront seating mural divided into visions and dreams and advertisements a few feet wide. These graykiller paintings have been done by local people and businesses. I saw them being prepared under the sweatsheen sun a few weeks ago; one is helpfully memory-jogger-dated 6/19/11. The beach and vision-attacked seating was a boiling contrary hive of laughing shouting jumping praising appraising paintsmear bodies creating their tribal community naïve artburns. The colors are vibrant and eyegrabbing; all-shade rainbow palettes construct an everchanging static vista of dream faces and ocean scenes and nonexistent eerie salamander-like animals and dogs and awestruck celebratory singing fish and horses and men and women and footprints and skylines and flowers and clenched solidarity-urging fists and pianoplaying and trees and islands and kiteflyers and Biblical scenes and windows to other mindworlds and insects and welcoming immigrant borders and footballsize globes and mushrooms and sleeping dreamers and aliens and sharks and octopi and lions and skyscrapers and snowcap mountains and skiers and rabbits and streams and stars and moons and books and cryptic dream transcriptions and handshadowpuppets and cloudsleeper babies and Mona Lisa and John Lennon and ice cream and feet and erupting volcanos and scissors and skeletons and dinosaurs and fairies and mermaids and Daliesque surrealist grindscapes and skullhead snakes and bees and houses and suns and sons and daughters and mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and hearts and minds laid bare on an endless imagestorm kaleidoscope groping for some sort of winning inner truth or thought-tide externalized and communicated. The previous panel about an artist creating their own truth, that Gene kicked in anger before falling over when I mischievously pointed it out to him in May, has been painted over. I don’t know who flowed these colorslick flickershows or if they were given an idea to create around, though I would assume they were (I could check but really don't want to know, preferring instead to impose my own subjective spinterpretation on the pictures) as dreams are a constant recurring theme-thread: dreams of a new better tomorrow, dreams of peace, dreams of world purity, dreams of sweet dreams, ugly and scary somnambulistic nightmare-dreaming dramas, silent primal screams of nightfight terrors. Spirituality is presented often too, looping artistic representations of New Age and religious tropes past and present, naïve atombased stabs at everlasting serenity and wisdom and salvation or maybe just unwitting dimly-remembered-echo paintings of the eternal rest in peace to be found on the other silent side of the forever-wailing wall of death, each oily snapshot numbered, 1-151 with some having won prizes in their teen or whatever class; win a prize for turning yourself inside out and upside down truth and guts and brains and heart laid out in a hundred-and-a-half internal romantic panoramic slices, everyone’s a winner but the dreams will only grow sadly thinner and more jaded and hazy with the unbeatable fading effect of the beating sun’s unstoppable scandalous ultraviolet vandalism as the end of the where-did-it-go year runs at us at full grinding-halt gallop.

FURBLUR

I can see a couple of wee squirrels from where I am sitting. Chicago is squirrel central. Seen them eat anything from old cold pizza to chicken Mcnuggets; they're not fussy or healthy eaters, hell no! I love that lolloping galloping archback run they have, the wee black eyes in the brown face, scamper, scuttle, white-and-brown tailflick, forage, sniff sniff sniff ground, stop, wait, alert, sense something in the air, look round, listen to the wind, hear a sound, fly off up a tree or into a garden never to be seen again.

WAITRESSES OF THE AREA

One is blonde, a totally gorgeous wee honey lighting the day up wherever she walks and whenever she talks, and is training to be a massage therapist. I told her she looks, to me, like a young Cybill Shepherd. She didn’t get the reference. Oh well.

One is from Louisiana, has tattoos, wears neon-red lipstick, loves Bukowski, and reeks of raw bad-girl-gone-mostly-good energy.

One is lovely, studies English at Loyola, loves JK Rowling and liked my stories about the Edinburgh café where she wrote the first Harry Potter book. Says I’m the first Scotsman she’s ever served. I believe her.

One is pretty and bespectacled and end seems endearingly kooky. Says she’d love to hear some of my work read out to music, picking up on its rhythmic intonations.

One just graduated Loyola as an actor. I haven’t seen her in anything yet, but confess I don’t get out to the theatre much at all.

One is inattentive and furtive-seeming for no clear reason; you know how you just feel that way about some people. She just seems like she can’t be bothered and should be doing another job.

One is black and very beautiful, another Loyola girl, works on Tuesdays and bears the name of a continent.

One is Hispanic and very attractive and drives a white car. Gave me a jump-start one time and saved me a lot of trouble by doing so. Said she feels like she’s been married twice with two deep relationships she’s been in.

One is attractive and wears glasses, studies Science at Loyola and has a super-intelligent gaze that looks like it could cut through steel or split the atom. I made her laugh and she told me I was an easy table.

SATURDAY BREAKBEAT (8/27/2011, 12.19PM - 1.06PM)

Slowglide lakefront wanderlust. Shorthair tattooed blackhair white woman and middle aged gray-goatee black man in Pakistan teeshirt heartbeat out a lazy tom-tom afternoon rhythm. Monochrome communication vibrations slip gently through the grateful displaced air. Strategically placed shadowsoaker tents and barbeques decorate the park grass. A black helicopter momentarily waspbuzz-disturbs an angry cloud-choked sky. A red birdlike kite flies further down the beach, static-anchored in the everblowing warm breeze. A man rows and flows effortlessly by in a rowboat. The mischievous wind laughingly ruffles the bookpages of a glasses-wearing lassie sunbathing and word-drinking. An unstoppable napkin blows by like manmade garbage tumbleweed. Far-off boatsails cut the horizon like sharkfins. Jaws associations grip my mind for a moment, evil unforgettable John Williams killerfish theme tune, Amity vile horror, Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw (huh three R first names) all at sea no-landshocked unsteady sealegs drunk and singing show me the way to go home, Quint-death, oxygen tank explosion, scattering splattering red chunkrain of dead great white shark. A small white Cessna-type plane chugs merrily by, and the bottle-green lake must be quite a heady skimmed liquid sight from that low almost-splashed height. Sometimes I think I glimpse a familiar Scottish face or hear a Scottish accent but of course I’m always wrong and don’t know why I even think it. Sudden brief nostalgia stab and grab at nothing but Chicago's warm thin air. A young couple in lockstep love walks happily by arms and charms and hearts wrapped round each other in perfect-partner-found pheromone bliss. Beardo riff from earlier sporadically licking and kicking the inside of my aurally assaulted skull, Fight a Revolution, sad song mad song but not bad song, nice one son, been freebassing on that album for a week now and loving it. Middle-aged woman eating nice ice cream, sunbathers lost in shut-eye UV dreams, gulls caw and glide and beachcomb in ever-shifting-pattern aerial wingpacks. Two young black kids, maybe three and five, furiously cycle by on training-wheel-stabilized bikes. The day when those wheels come off and they pedal by themselves will be a giddy ecstatic barely-believed moment of earthbound flight they will never forget. Gentle soothing Spanish guitar from behind me gives way to The Archies doing Sugar Sugar over a muffled-thump P.A. The sand bears the historic fossil footsteps of every race and nation on the planet. Two young helmet-clad women bike by, legs slowly pumping in clockwork tandem rhythm. A Hispanic church meeting broadcasts fictional ancient news from eternity. I trap a too-hard-thrown dirty tennis ball with my foot as it rips my way and throw it back to a thank-you boy of around seven. Spanish announcements occasionally change into English, strange bilingual life-meaning-searching pronouncements as the Henry Mancini Pink Panther theme plays slinky and raucous in the misunderstood religious air. Teeshirt slogan: 100 SEMBRADOR; who knows? The afternoon vision peters and fizzles out as human life remains as unsolved and unresolved as ever forever and never to part from the unexplained atom-body script with no words or meaning or tune. Then sit, sand from shoes as usual, and home again home again jiggedy jig.

A Falkirk Man In America Writes...

Hi there. I am a Scotsman born and bred now resident in Chicago. I moved to East Rogers Park in February 2011. I have been writing descriptions here and there of the place for my own amusement, and to stay wordsharp. I hope you like them. I may add more as I go along; always seeing new things and people and faces and places. The lake mentioned is Lake Michigan, for those from outside the area or city. I may add some other stuff here or there I have had published that is from different areas, we'll see. Nothing here is particularly graphic, so don't worry about that. And you can contact me at: protocore@hotmail.com if you want. Thanks.




LOYOLA PARK AND RIDE THE FUTURE (2/29/2011, 1.57-2.21PM)

Sand is defrosted soft underfoot for the first time this year. Slight nippy wind. Artery-flowing tidewasher lake is light khaki moving in gradients to jade on the crisp in-focus horizon. Sand soft and pliable, unlike earlier this year with ice visible under slowly blowing-away grains, landtrapped iceberg in a fake cold winter desert. Random crisscross of meaningless telltale tracks, dog and gull and human. Looking left along the beach or lakebank it could be anywhere, Tangier to Marbella to undercover Chicago faroff slow suburb storm. The constant wavewash slaplap is relaxing white H2O noise. White plastic product bucket of some kind on stones near water's choppy uneven edge. Coldish wind whistling on half-covered ears. Sky subdued but growing in heat-strength after a long bad dark blizzard-scarred winter. Pastel shadings of cloud fur the aerial view. Fingers grow slightly numb and moan of cold recording overwork. Harsh discordant windswept gullcries. Sand progressively less dark backing away from urgent insistent water and all the way back into Rogers Park infinity. You can almost hear tattered intermittent acoustic-strummed lovesongs round a beach bonfire borne on the historic wind, young laughter, passed hand-to-mouth winejugs and joints, melting stickjammed marshmallows, writhing furtive lovemaking just out of emberglow-illuminated crowd kiss-and-tell view, barking dogs, youthful heat and quiet lifeburn fury, legends of nothing but dark-obscured summer fun, drunken freezecry skinnydipping, horseplay, sandkicks, firepokes, feverstorms of urgent Midwestern passion, firefly-eyes glinting reflecting it all and nothing, sandswarms, brainstorms, painstops.

Here comes the longed-for summer sing the romantic growing new-seasonal undertones.




IN THE MIDSTS OF THE MISTS OF THE MIDWESTERN LAKE (3/19/2011, 8.15-8.36PM)

Walking down W Morse to the gray hidden lake, choked by an airborne sea of mist. Toiling streetlamps barely illuminate with fuzzy orange halogen halos. The cold pleasant damp sits unconquerable in the sodden air. Random confused lost birdcries cut the atmosphere with a tiny avian vocals knife. PARK CLOSES 11PM, park closed for visibility early tonight. Spectral gray hovering threatening everywhere. Sights unseen blurred into indistinct deceptive changed-perspective two-dimensional ghosts. Fake raindrops drip and drizzle from condensation-sodden trees. Far off or nearby dog yelps, windworked sand far back on suffocating grass verges. Crisscross of tiretracks and footprints and pawprints fading into seagullcry-marked lakeside. Ahead, spring wanderers long gone. Green and blue garbage cans glimpsed here and there like grayblack tombstones on a suddenly-could-be-graveyard deathplain. Down towards the lake and the halos behind grow weary and small and impotent warning of impending graysmear nightfall blackout. Chill air still air thrill air, no buildings to either side visible not even the pier mere yards or miles away, the somewhere impossible sky slowly crashes and colorburns in gray gradients until suddenly becoming earthbound, fluid, liquid, laketrapped, wavelapped, washing right back up onto the eternally unconquered mystery-shorn sandshore to wonder forever how it slid and fell to earth returning to nothing but its natural sensational self time after time after time after tide waiting for no man to answer the riddle of the clockwork creation mythology and night screams silently down heavy and pure and in control of itself once again never to be outdone by a mere graysplash freak climactic
imposter competitor
Because the air and earth
will always and never
win against
her powerful
unstoppable
self.



(This following piece was a wee experiment. I saw a young woman whose face I recognized from the area, and asked her if I could do a wordsketch of her, take a wordsnapshot. It didn't quite turn out as planned, but she was a good sport about it and she liked it, so it turned out okay. It's something I'd actually like to do more of, having learned a lot from that initial encounter, but anybody having it done would have to volunteer - it's way too embarrassing to ask somebody to do, especially when you're not quite sure what you're trying to do yourself! I'd definitely be open to that, so if you're interested, drop me an email.

Thanks again, Ella.)



ELLA (7/12/2011)

Tuesday late morning
Chicago Public Library at the
corner of Morse and Sunstroke
80 degree heat beating
boiling brains and blood in veins
Me just after
Fumbling mumbling grumbling
with their first-try bloody sci-fi wi-fi a
blonde beautyfuel young Midwestern girl
No type she could be but wellbred cornfed American
Exuding that USA today vibrancy and confidence and
urgent ill-concealed energy pointing towards
some unknowable but totally conquerable tomorrow
Chicago Public Library public garden 80 degree heat
in head and heart and hand stuck without pad and pen and
I can’t see my monitor for the glare to write
anything anybody anywhere anyhow anywhy
Tells me she’s from Montana and my ideas of her local genesis
go up in punctured-bubble smoke signals fade to nothing
Wild horses run Rocky in my mind as she speaks of mountains
and enjoying the slow snow show she and her contrary friends
rushing down to the lake to revel in its pure white revealing blankness
as the rest of the burning-weather-ruined city foolishly turns and runs
Bright silver slightly scratched shades she is wearing reflecting
concrete, bushes, sunscream, confusion at this literary experimentation
from left of known and acceptable field trips to weirdness
Humoring me out of vague curiosity impatient
to get down to the lake to fry in ultraviolet tanning fury
Multitechnicolor long skirt ready to swish and sway away
down the road to the end of land and surf the sand
Who am I to deny her that sweet sunsweat leisure pleasure treasure
So I show and throw and flow her a few air-pulled syllables and images
from the inexhaustible supply inside and she’s off once again
flying on her merry way to brighten up the light of the life of the day
with her sunbathing presence and East Rogers Park celebrates that spark
that’s just one of thousands of beautiful
touches and tastes sights and sounds and smells and smiles
gratefully and graciously at its luck to have been born in the middle of such a
whirlwind tornado nexus free of windblown destruction except for that
done and dusted by the eyeburning pretty young women of the city
And that’s no bad bargain at that for any area to labor under
we all know
that’s true
and that’s
all there
is to
it.




SURFING THE HEATWAVE (7/17/2011, AROUND 4.30PM)

90+ degree heat. A vital vibrant increasing-in-sound-and-fury walk down to the lakefront greasily clad in insect repellent and sunscream. Every nationality dots the sand dunes and grass and beach: black and white and Mexican and oriental and indeterminate origin, beautiful original genetic recombinations, the human race sprinting ever-nowhereward on its evolutionary trip. Young and old and sky and bold and kids laughing and screaming and sundreaming and sandpulling and windmilling and toing-and-froing and back-and-forthing and swimming splashing waterspurting divebombing brainstorming new ways to piss off their dunked half-drowned friends. A young fearful blonde boy of round four is led through aquatic etiquette by his concerned dad. A woman with a near-see-through top lets a blue swooping soaring kite control the burning sky, letting it out on a green further-and-further stringstorm to tangle with a far-up helicopter. A man clangclanging an ice-cream message cycles slowly by looking for wannabe-cool takers. Sand castles, land castles, grand castles, bland castles, manned castles. Two young Mexican boys have a third buried up to his neck and laugh at a dirt dick they have put on his body. Tanning sunbaking flesh boils and reflects everywhere, tanning lotions and potions and slow-motion stop the rot of ultraviolet damage bouncing back off the eyes gleaming from fine ripe young greasy tits and tummies. A new young mother smiles shyly as she walks past with offspring in buggy, baby’s first summer, memories pour from the humid air and swarm around me ready to come to life again in timeworn colored-muted form. Mother hasn’t lost the babyweight yet and anxiously gently hands her darling to glowing grandparents. Looks like their sweetheart has barely mastered holding her head up on a wobbly nodding-dog neck. Two beautiful bikini-clad women in their 30s lie on their stomachs and chat, oblivious to everything, including the shouting smoking mocking Mexican guys nearby. Some of these sunstunned dozing people look dead and it’s not morbid, just funny. A black man bathes his tiny daughter in a fountain; a young black couple wash their sandy feet using watercups from the same fountain later. Hotdogs and ice-cream and soda and picnics and iced tea from Styrofoam coolers and always an international battering chitter-chatter of happy voices, languages known and not, Spanish English Eastern European and who knows. The rise and fall of poorly sculpted sand empires. Sand in often-emptied shoes, careful of how I’m sitting with short sport kilt on. A young black girl of around six runs joyously yelping kicking up sand, voice a sonic palette of all the variant intangible joys of summer. Young guys dive around with sand stuck to them playing with a basketball. And finally sunbeaten and home again, a final knocking of sand from shoes, a final goodbye to the lakefront multicolor allsound carnival for today, but there’s always tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…