CHICAGO
Chicago holds a very special, weird, desolate corner of my heart. There’s quite a few reasons I could rattle off as to why, but the core of that reason is the general aura of its many neighborhoods. Each one is insane in its own special way, and I mean that so lovingly.
Quick chaotic anecdote, I spent one accidental afternoon in Ukrainian Village a few years back and went on the wildest day drink ride of my life.
Chaos ensued shortly after popping into a bar to have one drink and an excuse to use a restroom. While there early, we learned of another neighborhood living icon just up the street, Stella’s, that opened up at 2pm. We were promised the presence of Stella herself, a take-no-shit, old school Polish woman and bar overlord who had recently put a local homeless man to work and partially paid him in beer.
What we didn’t get as we stumbled into Stella’s shortly after they opened was Stella. Stella doesn’t work Saturdays because, well, she doesn’t have to. Instead, we were greeted by an actual punk rock straight outta the glory days bartender who also felt the need to educate us on the neighborhood, but in a (much) less coherent way. The Polish beers we had eventually escalated into shots of Polish honey flavored liqueur called Krupnik.
Overall, the experience at Stella’s went from weird to oh…I think I just lived out a hallucination. The visit was comprised of honey shots, Old Style beers, free thumb rings, The Ramones blasting from an iPhone speaker, and a leather sex slave mask. It was nothing short of bizarre. The Yelp reviews we read later are pretty scathing, so I guess the trick is to this is you’ve gotta buckle in and expect that there is going to be an out of context dildo appearance. Which typically, no, you should never expect that this is how your day is gonna go, but in this case...know that it’s happening.
Unfortunately since my time spent in Chicago was in art school where my quirky ass was exlusively shooting on film, or more recently where I slammed too many Polish beers to remember what photography even was, I don’t have a ton of photos worth sharing. But these few photos make me irrationally happy to stare at for this highly specific Chicago mood board.
