I’m three times as excited about this blizzard as my seven-year-old daughter. Dumb kid.
More to come—if we don’t succumb.
Chicago: Can we be elegant, simple and dumb all at the same time?
Fancy New York developer named Ian Schrager buys the Ambassador East hotel in Chicago, and sez he's gonna restore the hotel's legendary Pump Room restaurant.
So far so good. Then the guy opens his yap, calls Chicago a "very elegant city."
We don't think of ourselves as elegant, but if he insists, we'll get out the cigarette holders.
Then he goes on.
"I think [Chicago] has probably the most beautiful architecture in all of America, and I just love the people, the simplicity, the basic honesty."
I think I know how the great Chicago columnist Mike Royko felt when novelist Nelson Algren referred to his writing as "visceral."
"He thinks I'm dumb," Royko concluded.
The general lesson here is, don't go into somebody else's city—or their house or their company, for that matter—and start making lots of authoritative editorial comments, even in praise.
Say you dig the joint, and leave it at that.
VIDEO: How to go from jamoke to Chicagoan in under 40 minutes
The lead from my latest on Huffington Post:
I've
got this intern working for me, he's a nice smart kid. (That's how bad
things are for college grads these days. They intern for freelance
writers.)Anyway, the kid grew up in San Francisco. He moved here a few years
ago to go to college at DePaul. The other day I asked him, "What did
you think of Chicago after growing up in such a cosmopolitan city?"He said he was shocked by the racism here, which his San Francisco
upbringing had allowed him to assume was a relic of the urban past. And
he said he missed the hills. Otherwise, he liked Chicago fine."There certainly is a lot to do here," he said with a shrug.
A lot to do here?
I'm thinking to myself, What kind of jamoke am I dealing with here?
How'm I ever gonna explain to this kid what makes Chicago different
from San Francisco, different from anywhere else? How'm I gonna
introduce him to Chicago's heroes, living and dead? How'm I gonna show
him how to get a laugh in a Chicago tavern — or at least help him
understand what he's supposed to think is funny.