Something Which Shouldn't Bother Me but Does

[mrdankelly]

When actors who have done well talk about how fucked up it was to live in Chicago. Their apartments were always horrible, their landlord and neighbors were weird foreigners, everything smelled, etc.* Maybe I'm just sensitive, but there's this undercurrent of, "Thank God I don't live in that hellhole anymore." Right, because LA and New York are

Comments

[semibold]

I don't know that it's necessarily a Chicago-specific trait. Don't a lot of people talk about how fucked up and poor their lives were when they were young, especially if they have some success in later life? I think there's a tendency to "romanticize" the past in that sense, "Oh, we lived in the sub-basement of an old mental institution and I woke up one night with cockroaches crawling on my face! It was awful!" Perhaps it's an attempt to re-claim some kind of street cred. "I wasn't always a pampered movie star complaining about the insufficient foaminess of my latte! I swear!"

[ayun]

This is a good point - people in general love to talk like that. ("Oh my god, my college apartment was SO GHETTO!")

[txtriffidranch]

I agree with you for the most part. The sane ones are the ones who relate that they had it that bad, and that they were smart enough to get out. As I noted a long while back, from personal experience, nearly starving to death in an underheated apartment in Portland sounds incredibly romantic when you're 18. It's really goddamn old when you're thirty, and only idiots think that it's a good idea when you're fifty.

[ayun]

I honestly haven't ever noticed this phenomenon (who's been mouthing off?), but if you think Chicago's ethnic neighborhoods are insular and off-putting and Scary For White People, you've got a really limited set of experiences with large American cities.

New York sucked a lot in the 70s, too - most big cities were in a bad way back then. So was most of, you know, America.

[mrdankelly]

Maybe I dreamed it. Nah, I was watching that 30 Rock episode, however, and it brought back a memory of a couple of Second City alumni babbling on a talk show about the old days in Chicago with the requisite stories of weird foreign landlords, etc. I think semibold is right though. It's nostalgie de la boue. I'm just sensitive about the concept of Chicago as a stepping stone.

[eatsoylentgreen]

There's places in Chicago where if you go there you will get robbed. But it's still a great city, much better than my safe and cultural Minneapolis/St. Paul.

[semibold]

There are places pretty much anywhere, where if you go, you will get robbed. Chicago doesn't have a monopoly on that.

[eatsoylentgreen]

I suppose, though I imagine my city is safer. Though I don't know that.

[seriesfinale]

I think this is partially inspired by the resentful Chicago backlash I'm picking up in the media.

I'm a little curious what you mean by this, since I haven't picked up on it at all.

I do agree with semibold that this is definitely not Chicago-specific.

[mrdankelly]

Oh, the usual rigmarole about how thoroughly corrupt the city is, whether Blago's sins will "taint" Obama (even though Obama has kept him at arm's length for years), and so on. With Obama's election we're no longer the flyover zone. Now we're fucking Mordor. If it wasn't for Blago's responsibility for picking Obama's successor, his arrest never would have received this degree of coverage, nor would the Right be pouncing on it. As well they should, though that doesn't mean I won't call bullshit on it.

[txtriffidranch]

I get the same thing in Dallas. Invariably, the people whining the most about how "Dallas is the bottom of the pile" are the whimpering little suburban junkies up from Plano or Richardson who discovered that whispering "I'm an artist!" doesn't make people open their wallets and tell them "Go fishing". In many ways, Dallas is a terrible place to be an artist, musician, or writer, but that's because it's so tough to get noticed here that only the good ones remain. As with Chicago, only the weak leave Dallas, and that's in the fervent hope that they'll somehow make it big in New York or Los Angeles and come back to rub everyone's noses in it.

For the record, I've had a lot of friends who decided to bail because Dallas is so presumably art-unfriendly, and with two exceptions, all came back within six months because they weren't ready for the move. One actually did make it big in New York as a painter, and one killed himself in Seattle two months after he moved there. The really deluded all move to Portland, where they surround

[little_octagon]

This reminds me of a trend among many Chicago-area creative types. These individuals will move to NYC or Los Angeles because "they've outgrown Chicago" or "this city doesn't show enough respect for its artists". Then after about five or seven years, THEY MOVE BACK. When I ask what happened, they say it's because NYC was too expensive/stressful/dirty/dangerous/rude or LA was too expensive/stressful/dirty/fake/competitive.

What I want to know: was this new information, or a misprint in their copy of the "Little Black Book" guide?

[txtriffidranch]

I noticed that in both Chicago and Dallas. In a lot of cases, it was with artists or musicians who managed to snag what they thought was a really good contract, found that what was a really good deal in Dallas was a pittance for New York or Los Angeles, and stayed until they were finally out of their golden handcuffs. The bitching about the excessive crime or filth of both cities is just a face-saving screen to conceal the fact that they got taken, they got taken for five years or three albums, whichever comes first, and that they didn't have anything as a followup to keep them there once the original contract was over

[little_octagon]

Way back in the d-iz-ay, I fancied myself a filmmaker, only I refused to move to LA. Unless I wanted sporadic PA gigs -- for which I'd need a car, for which sporadic PA gigs didn't pay enough -- my paid options in Chicago were mostly limited to painting animation cells or post-production editing. I lasted maybe about a year trying to do the latter. It was awful. The higher-ups and clients were monsters to work under, and if you didn't bring in enough bidnness, you got canned. (Why would I want to work for a production house if I had to get my own damn clients? If that's the case, why not just be an independent contractor?)

Now, if I couldn't stay afloat in Chicago's film industry, what the sweet fancy hell would make me think I could handle LA? Not moving to pursue a film career was one of my better choices.

I just wanna make stuff, and draw and write, is all.