the City and the Arts

If I had any guilt about my NAP record, it’s that I haven’t been a very good advocate for my city’s cultural offerings –especially musical of course. This year, with my son being born at the beginning of the “festival season,” I was completely absent. For the first time, I did not attend the Pitchfork Festival, nor did I attend the Jazz Fest, Blues Fest, Lallapalooza, the Gospel Fest, Taste of Chicago, Kuma’s Metal Fest or any of the block parties that do such a good job of bringing in many of my favorite bands of years past (I’ve seen Camper Van Beethoven, the Meat Puppets and the Mekons at block parties past). I’ve grown to love Chicago even though my time here got off to a rough start; and though I live in a barrio where dollar stores are far more abundant than coffee shops.

This is a city where the arts are for the most part allowed to flourish from bottom up. The up part especially has been well supported by the looooong tenure of our almost King-like Mayor who yesterday announced that he won’t run for re-election.

Richard M. Daley has been mayor of Chicago going into three decades. If he keeps his word and retires after this term he will have surpassed his father’s time as mayor by a few months.

There is reason for a guy like me to be concerned. Not only is Daley a terrific supporter of the arts –someone who truly believes in the necessity of a healthy and vibrant urban culture– he is also a bicycle enthusiast who has done wonders for biking in this city (check out this facility at Millennium Park).

Sure Daley has his critics. But to a guy like me it doesn’t mean much that most of them are sequestered at the Republican Chicago Tribune. A paper that found it ethical to own the city’s North side baseball team and whose biggest editorial Daley critic is himself a beefy tool in whose hands I would really hate to see this great city.

Becoming a mayor who can have such a powerful influence on the cultural aspects of a huge city like Chicago is something I would imagine you can only earn with a legacy like that of the Daleys. It’s hard to picture a new mayor having ambitions in this arena just out the gate. Given the quote unquote hard times we are in right now it seems especially hard to imagine that we will see as much done in the name of arts as we have seen just in the nine years that I have lived here.

When I was a kid growing up in Queens in the early 70′s, the country was in recession and NYC was a filthy city (just watch Midnight Cowboy for reference). It didn’t take decades for that town to become a filthy wreck but it did take decades to clean it up.

I recycle Ghost’s Post’s song of choice. We may not know what we’ve got until it is gone.