Ray Pride

The intermittent groaning and bleeping along the half city block of mud and dirt on Chicago Avenue from first light to dusk is no mystery--but the view is gone. The spread of land where the Edmar supermarket stood until summer is now hidden from eastern eyes: a greater-than-story-high pale retaining wall, drab, Soviet, up against the McDonald's on the corner, a gray cement barricade, like a barrier against slurry in mining operations. Kitty-corner there's a Subway, and despite the burst of independently owned businesses: restaurants, bars, bakeries, a comics store, a record store, an art-toy store, the neighborhood will immediately be marked by the market to come.

This block, in a few months, will be where you go, not to shop, but to go to Dominick's, a multi-story multi-brand mini-mall. The first thing that came to mind the morning the wall went up last week was Ronald Reagan's calculated shout to Mikhail Gorbachev about the Berlin Wall, "Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" This wall, for this first day at least, lacks the expressive graffiti and tribal markings of the long-gone German barrier. Birds circle overhead, pigeons, gulls, the shapes and shadows of birds. They gather in hope of a market. They remember the market that's gone; they can't know a new supermarket is being built to replace the old one, the 1950s supermarket founded as an A&P. (The "ghetto grocery" as neighbors affectionately dubbed its low-cost aisles.) Today there's only a wall, held up at streetside by an orange strut, a yellow strut, first markings of the edifice complex.

(2007-01-23)

Also by Ray Pride

Iraq 'n' Roll
So, a dozen people want to kill Jeremy Piven. That's in Joe Carnahan's "Smokin' Aces," where his character Buddy "Aces" Israel, a sleazy magician and leading luminary in Vegas' entertainment zirconium firmament who's made a compact with the feds after his long-gestating Vegas blood has gone wrong
(2007-01-16)

Tip of the Week
Most of the short films put out by SAIC grad, 36-year-old Apichatpong ("Call Me Joe") Weerasethakul, are on a shorts program at Chicago Filmmakers this weekend: many of his ideas about duration (with intermittent surprises) and binary narratives or bifurcation of storytelling are well in evidence, later refined in dazzling, dawdling movies like "Tropical Malady," (2004) "Blissfully Yours," (2002) and this year's "Syndromes and a Century"
(2007-01-16)

Teenage Wasteland
While promos for "Alpha Dog" may suggest a drive-by mashup of white gangsta wannabes and the seamier predilections of Larry Clark, it's actually pretty terrific: a loopy, loping Altmanesque picaresque about a terrible crime committed by clueless teenagers
(2007-01-09)

Tip of the Week
Spare, melancholy, steely, fearful, Clint Eastwood's "Letters from Iwo Jima" is the first great release of 2007
(2007-01-09)

Tip of the Week
(2007-01-02)

Potter's Field
(2007-01-02)

What Screams May Come
(2006-12-22)

Tip of the Week
(2006-12-22)

The Same Sidewalk Twice
(2006-12-22)

HOLIDAY MOVIE PREVIEW
(2006-12-19)

The Materiel World
(2006-12-19)

Tip of the Week
(2006-12-19)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment