By Joel C. Boehm

As I think about where, perhaps, Lloyd falls short in his considerations, I turn to the patron saint of Wicker Park Writers, Nelson Algren, with whose writing I was casually obsessed with for a while as an undergraduate, and who lived for a time near the Artful Dodger’s location on Wabansia. I later learned about Saul Bellow living in the neighborhood, too, and while I read The Adventures of Augie March last winter, as far as literature influencing me along my own journey, it’s been Algren near the top. I read much of The Neon Wilderness on a cold few days at my grandparents farm in Wisconsin, as opposite from Algren’s urban decay as one could get. In that era I also read The Man with the Golden Arm, which hits one much the same way as the Velvet Underground’s first album: for all its merits and flaws, it’s fresh, it’s both unsettling and inspiring, and it’s authentic. As I said before, it’s on the elusive edge. It suggests to one the possibility of a new way of doing things. Like Wicker Park once did.

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Posted on October 6, 2006

By Cate Nolan

Like most Americans, I was taught the version of history that was edited to make white people feel okay and that history was simple.

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Posted on October 5, 2006

By Joel C. Boehm

So, where does rebellion end and exploitation begin in this new post-modern bohemian symbiosis? What do you do when trend-setting, tastemaking, and cultural arbitering becomes a commodity? What do you do when The Man you’ve been flipping off decides unexpectedly that you’re cool – which you’ve known all along, of course – and wants to capitalize on you, except on your terms, for things you’d be doing anyway?
Lloyd spends some time on Wesley Willis (although Willis is annoyingly absent from the index at the back), and his impossible ascension to notoriety from the neighborhood. Willis was a large, black, diagnosed schizophrenic known for his random headbutts – said to be given as a greeting – and for his raving conversations with the unseen as he is for his music. He went from being a homeless man wandering Wicker Park, selling his drawings and tapes of his lyrics delivered over a K-Mart casio keyboard, to a two-year deal on American Records and an appearance on MTV.

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Posted on October 5, 2006

By Joel C. Boehm

Of course, Wicker Park, the year I lived there, was hardly what it was a decade earlier when Dave arrived before the tide of gentrification rolled in. Or a decade before that, when the trailblazing artists arrived in the urban wilderness of prostitutes and hypos. It’s a fundamental truth of a cutting edge scene that it was better right before you got there – ask anyone – meaning that there’s always an ongoing debate about whether a scene is any good at all anymore as it supposedly declines.

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Posted on October 4, 2006

By Joel C. Boehm

My recollections of those early days in Wicker Park are at the heart of what is both a success and a flaw in Richard Lloyd’s treatment of the neighborhood in Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City. It’s a sociology book, written as a dissertation. As such, it cites lots of (presumably) well-known studies and conclusions by other sociologists. Some are more familiar to the general readership than others, like Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class and David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise.
Lloyd’s work compares dozens of these sociological theories and analyzes competing trends based on evidence collected in Wicker Park. But it’s no accident that Lloyd begins his book by recounting his first Wicker Park experience, one of Veruca Salt’s earliest shows at Phyllis’ Musical Inn, in 1993. Asserting something of one’s own personality onto the case is a very Wicker Park-ian thing to do. Lloyd’s account is something of a hybrid, then, telling the story of the forest of the post-industrial economy by giving the stories of some trees.

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Posted on October 3, 2006

By Joel C. Boehm

The first person I met by the time I arrived in Wicker Park in 2004 lived in the garden apartment of my building. Garden apartment being Realtor spin for the basement hovel in our three-flat, wood-frame house one address down from the intersection of Beach and Paulina in that Near West Side neighborhood of Chicago. Person being a polite term for wild-eyed, wild-haired beatnik Dave.

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Posted on October 2, 2006