It was hot on the day I made this photograph; I’d gone with Corey to attend to a boring bit of business and then spend the remainder of the day, nabbing shots of the city. I’d just returned to Chicago from Prague. I still heard Czech (at least in my mind) and felt a pervasive twinge of culture shock. Where were the cobblestones and the scent of hops in the air? Where were the belligerent ducks, the kind that act as if they have switch-blades tucked under their wings? Where were the things made to human scale, and the giant, faceless babies, crawling up a tv-tower? Where were the scruffy skateboard punks, making use of the ruins of Stalin’s pedestal? Prague is a Czech city, a central European city, a beer city. As such, she lives at a different, casual pace and at an intimate, human scale. Beer cities are slow: you get from one place to another at precisely the speed your body allows. There are tall things in Prague: Communist-era monstrosities, but in comparison to Chicago and other young cities, these tall things still bear some intimate relationship to human proportions. They were built to dominate humans, but to also allow humans inside, to marvel at their efficiency. Chicago is different. Everything is fast. Car horns blare incessantly. Chicago is a coffee city. Coffee is a stimulant—speed in a cup. Where Prague moves only as fast as a human might move (by foot power or tram power) Chicago spins its wheels, careens around corners, and plows hapless pedestrians into a chunky-salsa pulp. Things happen in Chicago. No one notices. Things happen in Prague, but no one is ever surprised. They’ve seen it all before. They’ve seen it coming and at a slow, human pace. On the day that I made this picture, I craved a beer in a cellar older than the entire span of US-American history. I wanted to hear accordion music, or Amy Winehouse blasting from ceiling-mounted speakers in a room full of smoke. I wanted to hear people singing along: zey try to make me go to rehab and I say no-no-no. I suppose I could have heard such things, but it’s the accent I wanted, the honest incongruity that can only come out of a situation dominated by humans. Chicago offers such situations. They go by quickly. Chicago is a city full of iPod people, zonked on caffeine. It’s easy to hear the high-frequency whine of overloaded synapses. Though it was loud on the day that I made this photograph, I’d settled into a different mental zone. I knew what noises surrounded me. I could hear their messages. As I’d only been in Chicago for a few, short months, big things surprised me. Straight-line streets were something of a novelty. But no one sang in the streets. I think that’s the thing I missed the most. I miss it now, and often wonder: What is a city without drunk people splattering song lyrics all over the place? Ah, but a city is many things. Prague is one. Chicago is another. There is no way to compare them. They’re different animals altogether. I’ve seen shadows in Chicago, the likes of which cannot exist in her smaller, Czech sister city, and perhaps it’s the shadows, and the strange orthography of light-splotches that make up for the absence of drunk people singing with gleeful, tuneless abandon. I like Chicago’s shadows and its rusting, graceless bridges. I know that—later—I’ll return to where drunken songs color the night. I know that when I return there, and to places a bit more Russian, I will miss Chicago’s massive display of Attention Deficit Disorder, and the shadows of the el—those strange, strange shadows, loud with the rattling-clatter of overhead trains. It isn’t music, not by a long shot, but it’s strangely pleasant. As always thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re in the midst of a pleasant and productive week.