This is a painting by Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell ( 1926-1992). Joan Mitchell was the age of my parents and like them emerged from the crucible that is the 20th Century. Her work above is called City Landscape.
I see it in much the same manner, as when I look north from the roof of Leo High School and a pretty cool view it is -gliding the eyes over Hamilton and Ogden Parks and catching the slice of Englewood wedged between Wentworth and Vincennes Avenues ignoring, as Chicago does, the stockyard neighborhoods and sighting the twin pagodas of Chinatown to scope in the glass and steel of Rahm Oz.
Art can give one perspective beyond the gallery or coffee table. I don't have two nickels to rub together; therefore I use everything.
Take time and vote tomorrow. I expect a low turn-out and the news media has done its level best to unsure that fact. They want every person to believe that elections, like David Axelrod and Hillary Clinton, are inevitable.
I caught Comb Over Dave after Mass yesterday on CBS and I remembered him as the scruffy hippie tag-along reporter of Richie Daley in exile. Dave smelled a gold mine and struck it rich with Richie. He used the very same drop poison breadcrumbs techniques* that made a Believer out of him and took credit from the real political architects who made not only Richie Daley, but also Barack Obama.
Richie drank the Progressive Soup offered to him by Esau Axelrod. Daley needed Progressive cache and Axlerod gave Richie the Mikva Challengers and the gold that goes with them - PR maven Marilyn Katz, the Universities of Chicago and Northwestern, Peoples Law Office, Miner/Davis Real Estate and the editorial boards of both papers.
Rahm Emanuel was appointed to the Richie Daley Campaign for States Attorney by the Daley bundlers of Stepan Chemical. He too served early and often.
Daley was no longer the leader of Wards Organizations** in exile, he was Mao on the long march, because of David Axelrod.
That said. We have had enough of the chains forged in Hyde Park. Let's have a Selma moment tomorrow and break them chains. Vote so Rahm does not get one vote over 50%. It would be a 'thing of beautry,' as former Mayor Daley might say, when you really get down and scrutin everything. Of couse one should have someone from University of Chicago to parse the context for you.
The City Landscape deserves a good dusting off.
** Daley signalled the world that he had turned his back on neighborhoods forever, when he abandoned life-long friend Alderman Patrick Huels. The old ethnic Catholic neighborhood types would become fodder for investigative -nitwits like Andy Shaw, Carol Marin, Chuck Goudie and others -anyone who helped Daley rise and was from the Old Wards was now a Dave Axelrod Poison Breadcrumb. Richie was and shall remain off limits to scrutiny.
