Greetings from the windy city,

Just spent the most harrowing 12 hours chasing the New Order hype machine, yes, t.v. land, a sad and strange brush with what a post-interview bar patron said, 'must be really cool, like that...that....movie, i can't reme.." No. It's not like that, I explain. I'm a woman, they don't let girls on the Sweetwater bus for work purposes, I mean, writing work. "oh ya, you must get a whole lot of 'how bad do you want this story'" Ha ha ha, ya. No.

Then I got to have the guilt and anxiety of watching not one but two women get pickpocketed on the blue line train. Walking up the stairs on the transfer, just sort of thinking 'he's way too close to that woman, does he know her' and my eyes, which I normally think move quickly and catch the slightest thing, just bauble down to his hands, reaching into her bag. I stayed silent until the immediate danger of his presence cleared - excuse me miss, that man went through your bag.
The other woman felt the hand in her bag, like I sometimes feel when I'm at shows, only to realize I'm being bumped or having beer poured on me or something, and she shouted and chased him. No one on the platform did a thing. No one. There must have been fourty people there. I was so rattled I did the cell phone clutched in hand girlie girl thing the whole way home, then called excellent friend Caryn to be my virtual bodyguard on the walk back to the super secret new Stop Smiling offices.
And here I was thinking about the delicate balance between the obtuse and the vapid as relates to Sumner's lyrics, when some 'real shit' happened, some Concrete Jungle, some hip hop, political punk narrative shit - and had that flash of "first they came for the Jews". But we talk about this in this horrible abstract way sometimes in ethnoworld, that no fieldwork is worth your life, that some stories are too dangerous - likewise, the balance between self-preservation and moral obligation to help someone in need is one that seems obvious in the abstract, but so much different when you're standing alone in a strange city half-paralysed that all these BIG DUDES aren't doing a thing - like, do they know better? Anyway, my moment of weakness - causing even more introspection on human's need for false enticements to danger - the black hole of Joy Division rendered as caracature for mass spectacle, the hrm hrm dead end of some dark myth that serves a good number of people without having to know the real horror of that man's final hours. I read 200 pages of press on them before doing this interview, some really horrible stuff, and this was the worst. "Maybe he killed himself because there was nothing on the telly."
And maybe there was a reason he put on "The Idiot".