Kamera

Aughts Philly was long on glamour, indeed. Was the city glamour market necessarily cornered for that time period? Not from what I saw. Part of the attraction of Chicago in the Aughts was that you could see from a distance, right there online, all kinds of glamour bleeding out in different directions. So many presses, journals, reading series, so much dynamism, and the online presence was, indeed, immense. Once I got a taste of Aughts Chicago, I went slightly crazy with it. First, I was going to be there, then I was there. The second of four visits, in the summer of 2007, when I was still hitched to Mary H, was well documented. Mary H and Abby, as they had been in the early Aughts, had glamour-puss rivals in Simone and Kristy, as is seen here. The fact that Simone and Kristy were also powerful heads-of-state made it so that I could not not feel, that second visit, that I had securely arrived, even as I had done Myopic the first visit, met other heads-of-state. What do Philadelphia and Chicago have in common? They both happen to be big, real cities. That's a deceptively simple thing to say, but seasoned city-watchers will know what I mean. Through Wilco, Chi-Town also had an Aughts rock record of note, which Philly did not. I like to hear Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as Tweedy & Co's answer to Third/Sister Lovers. Decomposition and decay. Even as a walk down North Milwaukee Avenue in Wicker Park does something so Main Street Manayunk, and Bucktown does something so Roxborough, that people watching closely, about Philly-Chi-Town, would not be surprised that something had to give, and it did. Against decay.