Ray Pride

A reformed Rainbo Club regular visiting from out of town always calls this Ukrainian Village mainstay a "self-selecting slum-ocracy," but on his current visit he’s fixed on but one thing: "The ugly bus pulled up outside, and it’s got big wheels."

Yes: strangers. He’d expected the neighborhood to be like it was when he left five years ago: the same mix of laidback smile-to-smirk guys and stylish, slightly eccentric women with freshly minted art-school degrees. This night’s seventy-degrees outside. The bartender’s got arcane shred metal amped. Friend’s wide-eyed, though, at the completely half-dressed crew; his last image of Chicago taverns was in winter. Long johns give way to short cons in the dead of summer. His eyes flick. Flesh: men in shower slides displaying feet escaped from distant northwest Chinese work camps. Women in flip-flops, skin flushed and polished iridescent only hours since pedicure. This skimp-dressed banditry, the simple action of subtraction, outdoes what he sees in his SoCal haunts: you learn to dress down year-round there, but this is the dialectic between frost and Freon.

In winter? Timberland and mounds of down and wicked woolens awaiting strip. Summertime? And the looking is easy. The grief of dimples and calf, of sandal and ass in miniscule jersey dresses (sans VPL). Sneakers and calves and the backs of knees. Smiles and lemon-dropped laughter. One particular tremendous, tiny skirt. Men in sleeveless muscle Ts above khaki shorts held up with woven leather belts. A few time-honored New Traumatic fashion misstatements ornament the room. The crowd roils in abrupt shifts, packs of departure and arrival. The chatty, sometimes barking, unfamiliar stampede fills the room’s panopticon box: all convicts watch others’ cons unimpeded, an advance in the most sophisticated of mid-nineteenth century jailery. But if you look and do not listen, there is but the sweet contagion of freckle, dense afterglow of day’s vitamin D absorption, heart-race from common steed, bolt-tethered at curb alongside the herd of carbonized aluminum horses. Blood races and palls with two-dollar lager, G+Ts and the scent of other things served elsewhere under the dark of night.

Antic, frantic, distant and close. Do you hear them? The children of the summer night? There’s nowhere to sit or lean or not fidget in this savannah of the fumbling that insures the survival of the species, the jagged conversations just like the ones forgotten while mid-begetting, mere molecules of moisture in the close, dank, prurient fug. One angry voice rises above all, the all-purpose cry against this dive, warm weather or cold: "What do you mean, no Bud? Man!"

Rainbo Club, 1150 North Damen, (773)489-5999

(2007-07-24)

Also by Ray Pride

Space Odyssey
Scots-born director Danny Boyle’s protean imagination tends to the tactile, the immediate, the blood-rushing, the trippy: think "Trainspotting," "Miracles," "28 Days Later" and its sequel, "28 Weeks Later," which he supervised. His latest, "Sunshine," is no different, tending more toward the mind-expanding drift of "2001: A Space Odyssey" or the "Solaris" of Tarkovsky and of Soderbergh or the claustrophobia of "Das Boot" or "Wages of Fear" than to the pop-pow of "Armageddon."
(2007-07-17)

Tip of the Week
"Lights in the Dusk," the closing film of Aki Kaurismaki’s drolly dubbed "loser trilogy," follows Koistinen, a loner who’s been a night watchman for three years. He could go on this way forever, estranged from his equally glum co-workers. Janne Hyytiainen is dog perfect as the chain-smoking Koistinen, willing to drink alone. He's courtly but his cool knows its limits, as an ending as bracing as that of Kaurismaki’s brilliant "Match Factory Girl" rushes toward us
(2007-07-17)

Bombs Away
"Nice Bombs" is Chicago filmmaker Usama Alshaibi’s forceful diary-style documentary about the first visit he and his father and his American wife made a journey back to their native Iraq after the American occupation had begun
(2007-07-13)

iPhone Has a Home
Walking down Michigan Avenue, the crowd at Huron is motley, but up close to the Apple store, lines are roped off to east and south, security guards are parsing ten customers at a time: who gets to drop five, six hundred dollars in the pursuit of gadget-lust in the half hour to come?
(2007-07-10)

Tip of the Week
(2007-07-10)

Well Enough in the Margins
(2007-07-10)

Bay Watching
(2007-07-02)

Tip of the Week
(2007-07-02)

More Moore
(2007-06-26)

Tip of the Week
(2007-06-26)

The Show Must Go On
(2007-06-26)

Limpid Pools
(2007-06-26)

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