no clarity

Chicago. I came here for the annual O'Banion's reunion, and arrived a couple of days earlier than I really needed to, courtesy of frequent flier mile blackout dates.

So much of Wednesday was spent in transit, a relatively uneventful day. Thursday was primarily a work day, although I did manage to meet artist Laura Myntti for lunch, and then had a succession of early evening meetings folowed by dinner with my friend Natalya. There were a couple of unusual and interesting conversations... but I'm choosing not to go into great detail right now.

Friday was a vacation day, and it's unusual to do that here. The only real daytime event scheduled was an afternoon photo shoot, with a dancer in the far NW suburbs. She had responded to a casting call which clearly specified nudity and shooting out in nature, with a distinct possibility of encountering mud and water... especially after all the recent rain here. She had called a couple of days before the shoot to express new-found reservations about the nudity part, but I decided to go ahead and shoot anyway. At least she was communicating and being honest. And in the end that turned out to be a non-issue; she tried to do some implied poses, decided it was too much effort to strategically arrange arms and legs to hide, and quickly gave up trying.

But in mid-shoot, she finally told me that she's a clean freak. This as she's standing in an inch of water and mud, surrounded by prairie and marsh. It was making her uncomfortable, and finally I understood why. I couldn't help but wonder why she'd offered to do this, the conditions had been clearly stated.

We finished the set, and I took her back out on the pavement for what proved to be essentially a fashion shoot from that point on. In a short white dress and heels, she moved much more happily among the painted white lines in the parking lot. Not the most enticing background, at first thought... but it's amazing what selective cropping, the right angles, and shallow depth of field can do. My inspiration was those fashion shoots in tacky ghost towns, the ones that could have been disastrous with the wrong composition but somehow are made to seem exotic and edgy.

I'm not worried about the composition part. But I haven't really reviewed the whole shoot yet, it's sitting on a stack of CF cards, and I haven't looked at the "in nature" series at all. I'm sure there are some keepers in there, but I expected a little more from this model than she delivered.

Friday night, another dinner, another long conversation. Saturday, I sleep late; Saturday night, I head over to Holiday Club for the O'Banion's reunion. It's not that crowded yet when I arrive, and I have a succession of conversations with a variety of geezerpunks; some are old friends, some I've just met. Roseann is there, not working for a change, and it's good to talk to her. I have a long talk with a guy named Dan. Suzanne Shelton is spinning, and when she's done she says hi, and we both realize we knew each other somehow, more than 25 years ago, but neither of us is really sure where or exactly when or how well. She spun at Neo then, distinctly on my second tier of hangouts, so it was probably somewhere else. It's lost in the haze of the past, so we just start over.

It's crowded by now. It gets a little cross generational, as Colleen arrives with a slightly jealous boyfriend in tow, then Chryssy and Rae and two goth boys from LA come in sometime after midnight. Some vanilla girl wanders in from the other side of the club, around 40, attractive but conservatively dressed. She asks a few questions, then asks me to dance.

I don't think she's prepared for the very physical intensity of a punk dancefloor. She hangs in there for four songs... there was a Bowie number, and the last one was Siouxsie's "entertainment" which resonated because it was brand new the night I photographed Siouxsie, way back in 1981. But by this time, the girl... it never occurred to me to ask her name... was clearly shaken. The dance floor energy had completely overwhelmed her, she'd gotten in way beyond her experience. I gavc her a graceful opportunity to escape, and didn't see her again.

The end of the event was a chaotic series of conversations, with John Kezdy of The Effigies, and with many of the people mentioned above. At 3 am, as the club closed, a few of us headed over to Exit, where we were entertained by an expressive bartender until 5 am, then we all went to Hollywood Grill for breakfast. It was fully light when we came out, and each went our own way.

I had time to wander the lakefront for an hour and take pictures before meeting Salome for coffee at 8 am... yes, I'd strongly suspected it was going to be an all-nighter. It had been so common once, all those years ago.

While we were at coffee an intense storm front moved through, with high winds and heavy rain. It was over an hour later as we left, but by then it had wreaked havoc with any thoughts I'd had of catching an early flight. I checked at the airport just in case, but it was all long lines and cancelled flights. That Bay Area client, the scheduling impaired one, is just going to have to wait one more day. I'll fly Monday as originally planned.

The punk reunions are always a trigger for introspection, and somewhere during this one I'd begun to hope for some new clarity. Although there are some new questions, I don't think many answers have followed yet. The diverse thing now lumped into "punk" was a key part of my younger life, something that shaped and forged new directions. It's always there, inside, all these years later. I see the same angst in others, the ones who lived through it and are now successful, whatever that means.

All I'm sure of is that even as we formulated complex philosophies in those days, it wasn't complexity we wanted. Maybe that's the core contradiction that must be addressed, or at least one of them.

I also see that as much fun as it was to see all the friends, old and new, older and younger, to have all those conversations so far beyond what most would understand, about subjects that would bring fear to some; the city remains shallow and superficial outside of the stolen and all too brief moments of intellectual intensity. Outside of the passion of ideas, there remains the urban emptiness.