Ray Pride

A lifetime second-hand smoker bellies up to the bar of Rainbo Club. You're a smoker, the woman beside him reassures him, "You smoke as much as anyone in here including that beat-up leather jacket. The buzz won't be the same, I guarantee you."

The faded circa-1950s down-at-heel west side-Wicker Park-Ukrainian Village Bohemian vibe is nearly vanquished: no sawdust and dogs underfoot; the old man who hits on your sister is on oxygen; and now the end of the haze of gray-to-blue that's risen since 1936. Three hours before midnight a recently married couple hustle up: a last chance to share a smoke in their favorite tavern. A photographer shooting close-ups makes smokers aware of the rude detritus scattered about: no flash, only ash in trays and dusting fingertips. A veteran of gestures checks her iPhone while lighting someone else up. Singles and Abe Lincolns carpet the bar. The place hasn't had a cigarette sales license in weeks. Somebody's brought five Parliament hard packs across from D&D. Junk everywhere.

The stroke of midnight is anticlimactic, no one's quit yet, but then there's always today. Closing time and out into the air. The sidewalk at closing: a crumpled fold of a Red Eye: pretty cover girl sucks one down. Flag up, flag down: the slushed streets race with traceries of taxi tracks, pulled to corners, zooming southward and eastward, a crush of dozens of revelers, one hand up in hope of a cab, the other glowing with a last, unconfined drag.

(2008-01-08)

Also by Ray Pride

The Fugitive Kin
While film festivals make their own brave attempts at categorizing the dozens of hundreds of documentaries being made, each in its own fashion, the Siskel Film Center's annual January survey, "Stranger than Fiction," is a valuable taster, with ten titles, several with Chicago connections
(2007-12-31)

Tip of the Week
Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" opens with landscape and Man: a man named Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis). Man seeks Oil, or "Oil!," the title of the 1927 Upton Sinclair novel that Anderson drew from for bits of his story. There is sound, beautiful, terrible sound, not screaming, but keening, a physicalization of Plainview's inner state
(2007-12-31)

Tip of the Week
Obejas' first book of poetry, called "This Is What Happened in Our Other Life," is predictably lovely, if far too brief
(2007-12-31)

Eagle-Eyed
This slacker avant-le-lettre Austin fable was obscure then and would remain obscure now if not for the discovery of a mint print of the shot-on-16mm black-and-white, and the digital restoration of its gamy glories
(2007-12-26)

Tip of the Week
(2007-12-26)

Holiday Movie Preview
(2007-12-18)

Savage Grace
(2007-12-18)

Tip of the Week
(2007-12-18)

$128 Million Later
(2007-12-11)

Tip of the Week
(2007-12-11)

Stiff Upper Brit
(2007-12-04)

Tip of the Week
(2007-12-04)

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