Chicago is a wonderful and complex city.
A city of unrivalled public sculpture and gardens against a backdrop of the most stunning architecture, the former bequeathed and the latter commissioned, like latter day Medicis, by those made rich by railways, oil, steel and other spectacularly successful but not necessarily sustainable American industries.
The Chicago Institute of Art houses ‘A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte’ (Georges Seurat’s pointillist masterpiece and one of my favourite paintings), the mesmerising ‘American Gothic’, Hopper’s celebration of drab public spaces as places of refuge in ‘Nighthawks’, and ‘the Great Wave off Kanagowa’. It undoubtedly rivals the New York Metropolitan.
Directly across the road begins Route 66, and with a little imagination one can fantasise jumping into an old Ford with Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, driving West until they run out of land.
As I walked along Michigan Avenue one early morning there was a man perched on a box blowing a whistle, toot-toot, toot-toot - repeatedly, inappropriately, annoyingly - to draw attention from passers-by to a very extreme and poorly constructed poster depicting President Biden as a child-molesting Nazi.
The same afternoon at Grant Park a Christian Evangelist group dominated the space with microphones, telling us all that we were arrogant and evil, presumably because it was Sunday and rather than being in church we were out enjoying ourselves. “One day you will all die” …yes, no argument, but it’s a huge leap from there to prostrating oneself before an imaginary, psychopathic god with the morality of a toddler.
I mean this sympathetically. I think Americans feel more keenly than most cultures the alienation of their capitalism, of being invisible, and consequently they say and do dumb things to be noticed. In the US you are constantly mugged not for your money but your attention.
On the other hand, you walk into a neighbourhood sports bar and you meet great people.
So, anyway, I came here primarily to run the Chicago Marathon and I’m happy to say I completed it. That’s Chicago II and Marathon VIII.
