By the time you read this, "Black Friday" aka "The Biggest Shopping Day Of The Year" will have been and gone. And this year, I bought absolutely jack shit — not because of any anti-consumerist bias, but simply 'cuz I had to work most of today (the bastards!) and then I had to run around tying up some loose ends related to my impending full-time move to the desert. But hell, between new tires and some stylin' new Chelsea boots, I think I did my part in propping up the economy last weekend...
Anyway, I have some very positive associations with the day after Thanksgiving, and they're only tangentially related to buying shit. On the gray and nippy day after T-Day in 1980, I set out to explore Chicago by myself for the first time. I'd been living there nearly a year, and had certainly gotten an eyeful of the city while traipsing about with my family. But there were parts of the Loop that I'd never been to or seen up close; and having already developed myself at the age of 14 into something of an junior/amateur architectural and urban historian, I was determined — on this magical day where I had neither school nor any other obligations — to finally go and check these places out on my own.
Wrapped up in my down coat and scarf, I headed out from our apartment at 910 N. Lakeshore Dr., which was one of four of Mies Van Der Rohe's famous glass-and-steel apartment buildings which stood side by side on Chicago's "Gold Coast". (For the record, though I loved the idea of living in an architecturally significant building, the reality sucked — during the winter, we'd get ice nearly two inches thick on the inside of the windows!) I walked past the Playboy Building — which still had a working Playboy Club at the time, which of course intrigued my adolescent friends and myself no end — over to Michigan Avenue and headed south.
It was cold out, but not too cold — when I lived there, the brutal Chicago winters never really seemed to kick in until closer to Christmas — and by maintaining a brisk stride, I managed to keep myself pretty warm. I did stop at the Tribune Tower in order to take a closer look at its walls; in an odd display of cultural/architectural imperialism, they were dotted by chunks of other famous buildings from around the world (including the Taj Mahal), which had been hacked off, transported to Chicago, and then cemented into the side of the newspaper's headquarters as some kind of trophies. Across Michigan Avenue was the far more attractive white terracotta ornamentation of the Wrigley Building; and across the river from there, I could get a good look at the Stone Container Building, which was trimmed (as many buildings were before the Nazis rose to power) with backwards swastikas and had a classical temple up on top of it. Behind that was the appropriately black-and-gold art deco edifice of the Carbide & Carbon Building; and to the west along E. Wacker Drive was the Jeweler's Building, a pink terracotta high-rise that had once owned the title of "Chicago's tallest building," though for only about a year.
These were all buildings that I'd read about, or seen briefly in passing, but now I had all the time in the world to scope them out. It would be years before I actually started taking photos of buildings; but on this day, I just photographed them (and dozens of others) with my eyes, drinking them in from every angle and trying to imagine what it would be like to have worked in them forty years earlier, when they were still the latest and greatest buildings Chicagoans had ever laid eyes on. I also wondered what it would be like to be a grownup who had an office in them now, who rode their old elevators and used their already antiquated mail drops.
I spent the entire day going around the Loop in this fashion, occasionally getting bumped by the teeming crowds who were streaming in and out of Marshall Field's, Carson Pirie Scott and other downtown department stores. It was Christmastime in the city, just like Bing Crosby sang. In fact, I knew my Mom wanted Bing's Merry Christmas LP, so I ducked out of the cold and into Rose Records on Wabash to buy it for her. That same day, I also discovered Rolling Stone Records (later Rock Records), which in years to come would be my regular go-to destination for musical edification. And at a bookstore along Wabash, I picked up a copy of C.W. Ceram's Gods, Graves and Scholars, which was a history of great archaeologists and their most celebrated digs. I had been into ancient history and intrigued by archaeology before, but this book really sent me down that rabbit hole; within just a few months, I'd be reading everything about ancient excavations I could get my hands on, mentally preparing for my future career as an Egyptologist. (Well, we all know how that turned out. But really, I was dead serious about it at the time...)
Back in my room, my nose still red from the day on the windswept Windy City streets, I cracked open Ceram's book and began reading about the Mayan civilization. As I always did in those days, I read with my radio on and tuned to WLUP — "Where Chicago Rocks!" — a station which, for a couple of years there, proved at least as important to my musical education as Ceram's book did to my knowledge of archaeological history. That night, as I thumbed through illustrations of ancient Mayan pyramids like the one above, the station played a song I'd never heard before — "Children of the Sun" by Billy Thorpe.
The song's "for headphones only" production values where completely lost on me at the time, as I did all my radio listening in those days through a General Electric clock radio with a single speaker that couldn't have been more than two inches across. And I had absolutely no idea who Billy Thorpe was; even now, I can tell you that he was something of an Australian rock legend, though I'd have to defer to my friend David at Lorraine Crescent for any more info on the man. But the song's crunchy, insistent guitar riff and (literally) spacy lyrics about inter-planetary travel — which somehow fused in my mind with what I knew of Erich Von Daniken's theories about ancient civilizations and their dealings with extraterrestrial visitors — fascinated the hell out of me. I remember thinking that night that there was a whole world of things out there that I didn't yet know about, and a whole list of things that I could be or become. Archaeologist? Architect? Historian? Rocker? I wanted it all, or at least I wanted to know about it all. The possibilities, at that moment, seemed absolutely endless.
