7.28.2023

A little ode to Chicago…

…plucked from a TV-show review in the New York Times this morning. 

It is a metropolis big enough to accommodate any type of person or story, big enough that viewers do not expect to be offered quaint local color, and yet not culturally defined in the American mind in the ways New York City and Los Angeles are. Chicago is in the sweet spot, asking for no explanation, happy to serve as a kind of median city. Insofar as it does have a national reputation, it is as an unpretentious workhorse of a place: the “City of the Big Shoulders,” the city Nelson Algren compared to loving a woman with a broken nose. (“You may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”)

[The review, concerning a TV show set in Chicago and named The Bear, is here.) 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You are right. Even there I have visited Chicago I cannot picture it except for the park on the lake with a zoo. I appreciate this photograph made with words

Ted Compton said...

Lincoln Park. Love it.