The Secret Ward of Chicago Newsletter - October 18, 2024
In Which We Tour a Museum, and Celebrate A Year
The Musée du Flux is big.
That’s one of the first things visitors remark on when walking the halls of the cosmically refurbished edifice formerly known as The Shifting Museum. Not that the Shifting Museum itself wasn’t large. It was, and impressively so, it’s just that in it’s new form, with it’s new name, it just seems to keep going. Look off in any direction, and you will be confronted by enormity. It is, in all senses, big.
By comparison, the man who runs it is very small.
He won’t let you say he runs it. Never that he runs it.
"I manage,” he’ll concede. “I guide, cajole, needle, hell sometimes get dragged along by, but never ‘run’. To believe the arrogance of such a claim would get me shattered to atoms.”
Immediately in the running for the sharpest dressed person in the Ward, his gray jacket, white dress shirt, vest to match the jacket and burgundy slacks are tied together with elegant black flats. This crisp outfit is adorned with various bits of jewelry and timepieces, and completed with a black cane of ornamental purpose and unknown origin. He certainly cuts the image of someone who runs the place.
The most he does, he insists, is described in his job title: he Curates.
At the time of this writing, he is curating a live tiger away from a mural.
“Miss Nayak, no!” The Curator says playfully, batting at the tail of the full grown Bengal. “That is not dinner, that is a mid-stage Keith Haring!”
The tiger gives him the merest glance over her shoulder before turning back again to sniff the mural. His response to this is only minimally sterner.
“Do not side-eye me, young lady! I know when you’re looking at someone else’s work and when you’re looking for dinner.”
I watch as the Curator takes a tiny bell from his pocket and rings it. From a place where there was no door a staff member emerges.
“Take Miss Nayak to the museum cafe, please,” The Curator says to his staff member, another person unconcerned by their proximity to a 400-pound cat. “I’ve called ahead to make sure her favorite is there and in great heaping quantities.”
The staff member nods, then steps to the side to await Miss Nayak’s attention. It’s paid to them at last in response to a clearing of the Curator’s throat, followed by a raising of his eyebrows that clearly communicates the question “…well?”. Turning from the mural Miss Nayak follows the staff member, and The Curator replaces the bell in the inside pocket of his jacket.
I watch him do this only to lose the museum employee and tiger in my periphery. I look to where they should be and there is no one. The Curator mutters behind me.
“Artists. Tsk tsk. Sometimes.”
It’s a Season unlike any other here in the Ward; a late-arriving Autumn has waded through Summer’s residual heat to weave itself into the fabric of our days, and The Season of Magpies and Blue Bells has been revealed to the Faeries, mystical visitors that remain even now in the Ward, helping to repair damage done by necromantic incursion and also to just hang. I think that, besides genuinely helping, they understand how truly excellent Chicago is in Autumn, and are trying to take advantage of the fact that they’re still here.
Amidst all this sits Musée du Flux, vibrating with the energy of renewal, heightening the Ward’s buzzing, ephemeral feel. It’s an ambiance that suits our newest arrival to a tea.
“Tea?” the Curator asks, offering me a cup while blatantly reading my notes. As with most things he can offer or allude to I have no idea where he’s gotten it or how he knew other than spying and my god this is good. Are you kidding? This tea is spectacular.
“I made my personal collection the standard for the museum,” the Curator responds, again to my written passage, a hurdling of boundaries that seems to delight him. “I have no desire for our museum refreshments to join the ranks of other institutions that barely punch above the weight of far-station vending machines. No offense meant to the poor contraptions, of course, they do their best, but some experiences should only be administered at highest quality.
He puts the teapot down on something I can’t perceive. It goes somewhere, I assume, because it’s no longer there.
“Not fear though! This institution will not be one of snobbery. High culture, lowbrow, and everything in between is welcome here.”
The Musée du Flux will engage with everything!”
He punctuates this last point by striking his cane against the marble flooring. The impact echoes in the hall we stand in, but it’s not enough to distract me from this tea my god.
“Think nothing of it,” the Curator reads again before stopping after I give him a look, and then gestures further on.
“Shall we?”
I nod and we turn to walk.
Before us is void.
It’s startling. The utter blackness of it. The depth to which the darkness yawns and sinks. There is no mistaking it. Beyond where we stand exists truly, expansively, nothing. Behind us everyone else in the museum goes about museum business. I wonder if they can see this too. My eyes lock forward. My tea becomes ignored.
“We’re prepping this space for a new exhibit,” The Curator says. He fiddles with a pocket watch in a way that communicates how utterly at ease he is beside profound absence, the placid thumbing of the timepiece making his behavior around a live tiger seem closer to screaming hysteria. The watch emits a tick, as clocks do, and a low hum, as clocks do not. When I don’t respond he looks up and smiles.
“Hoping it will stare back?” The Curator says, amused. “Nietzsche would have a few things to say about that, in so many words.” He joins me now in looking out, although for him it’s by choice.
“Anything could arrive. Isn’t that grand? Anything from anywhere in any state unfinished. And we have so much already. A Van Gogh canvas with one brushstroke. The sound of soon-to-be-scratched-out measures of The Nutcracker. The Taj Mahal’s first steps! All swirling around behind us like so many leaves in the breeze.”
I hear him. I really do. It’s just I’m having a harder and harder time doing so as the hum and tick of his pocket watch begins to swell out into the formlessness before us. Or maybe the hum and tick reach out from the void to join the watch? He continues.
“My favorites as of late, mind you, are the pieces from within Chicago. The local work here is always so exciting! Just yesterday we received an entire stack of notations made by Mike Royko! Most of them are threats toward his editor!”
His voice is further away now. The hum and tick take over more as something small becomes apparent within the void, invalidating it’s status as such. The something small gets bigger and bigger as he goes on.
“Thought I should mention that we include the written word here so you weren’t surprised when you saw this.”
The something small is clearly now a room. Not just a room but a gallery space. In the center of that space is a pedestal. The more the room advances and expands, the clearer it becomes that the pedestal supports a laptop, open, with a document open as well. Text crawls across it from left to right, then occasionally retreats, only to return in difference configurations. The humming and ticking is now almost all I hear, joined by the last of the Curator’s explanation.
“When this came across my desk at the same time your office set up this little walk-through, I simply had to have it.”
The gray of the rooms walls and high ceilings meet with the blackness of the gallery-to-be and fill in the corners until all that was nothing is gone. The hum and tick vanish, replaced by the background murmur commonplace to museums. The pedestal is now directly in front of us. The Curator’s voice is next to me again.
“Tell me what you think.”
My eyes focus.
The laptop is mine.
The Curator leans forward to take a look at the document, but the voice I hear naming the piece is my own.
“It’s this week’s newsletter.”
The Curator nods.
“So it is, dear boy,” he affirms, pleased. “Seems by the date attached to the file name this is intended to be released tomorrow, the 19th.” He turns to me, puzzled.
“Bit odd to publish on a Saturday.”
My voice answers again.
“The 19th is the one year anniversary of the newsletter escaping the Ward.”
This satisfies the Curator greatly.
“Congratulations! 365 calendar days of almost anything is to be celebrated.”
I’m answering again.
“Thank you. It’s not daily.” I look back to the document and it’s dance of letters. “Not even weekly, sometimes.” The Curator is unswayed.
“Still, an anniversary is an anniversary.”
We watch as the cursor halts mid-page, advances at a halting pace, then backtracks again, taking what was there with it. I agree with myself, wherever I am, on the edit. The sentence that vanished had been garbage.
The Curator take note.
“Battling with whatever that passage is, I see.”
I nod then speak.
“Looks like I’m trying to figure out what to say to commemorate the year.”
The cursor nests in one spot and remains. I’m now sitting in front of a much shortened pedestal, a table beside it with a teacup and pot.
The Curator speaks from behind me.
“Say what everyone should say on such an occasion.”
I nod, and my hands take to the keyboard to continue.
Hello again, Secret Chicagoans.
This has been your Secret Ward of Chicago Newsletter for one full calendar year. We’d like to, most sincerely, thank everyone in the Ward, of the Ward, about the Ward, and outside of the Ward for your attention. It’s been our pleasure keeping you up to date on what’s happening, even theoretically, in the Zero Ward. Without you we’d be sending this newsletter to literally no one. For a while I think we were. Just giving updates to…the void! Huh, how about that.
We’d like to thank our Alderman Cosgrove Garibaldi, Advocate of Authentic News Conveyance, Physical and Spiritual Protector of the Ward and First Son of the Noble House Garibaldi, for the continued support we receive every day from him and the House Garibaldi writ large. May your Manor stand strong, your saber be ever sharp in defense of the place in which you alder, and your eye for budgetary expenditure remain just and equitable.
We’d like to thank the Right Hand of the Alderman and Dreaming Eyes of the House Garibaldi Nocturne Raven for everything. Between the Christmas Cataclysm, The Duel of Ultimate Death and the Necrofication, he’s had a heck of a year, and it can’t have helped that it ended with turning his former best friend into stone. To truly show our gratitude, I think it’s best if everyone just let him sit in the quiet for a bit.
We’d like to thank the Ward Staff! We are the Ward Staff, but we’d also like to thank the Ward Staff. It’s fine.
Thanks to our witch-adept, Garibaldi niece and Mystical Authorizer Constantina, who’s done wonderful magical and clerical work this whole year. We’re all proud of you and will do you the courtesy of not telling you directly, because you are young, and would hate that.
Thanks to our office manager Debra REDACTED for precise management of all things office and arcane.
Thanks to Shannon Goswhite (Hi Shannon!) for nailing her first few months as official Ward linguist.
Thanks to the Ward Office Phantom. Please stop pinning my favorite mug to the ceiling.
Thanks to unofficial Ward employee, the ever-mysterious Ranger of the Ward! You appear semi-dramatically and always when we need, and we appreciate how you non-creepily watch over everyone.
Big thanks to everyone in the Thaumaturgical Engineers Union Local 988 for all your miraculous work building and rebuilding the Ward when need be. Similar big thanks to everyone in Streets and Sanitation and Sorcery for keeping the Ward intact, uncluttered and in general tethered to this plane of existence.
Our volunteers! Can’t forget about them! Thanks to everyone who volunteers their time, talent and expertise whenever it’s needed here in the Ward. There are always so many of you! And all of you will not speak!
Thanks to all our artists and event-makers for filling our calendars with Events and Activities! I’m sure places like Musée du Flux (formerly the Shifting Museum) and the Coriander Garibaldi Performing Arts Center (formerly a pit full of giant snakes a fact that doesn’t come up a lot) will keep us even busier this year.
Thanks to all our local business owners for their continued support. Everyone from PlantDance to The O’Keefe Family Wine Company to Stan Billchevski’s Wintersport Palace have been a constant presence in our newsletters, and for that we’re grateful. Your services are always welcome, and your marketing is only semi-invasive. Most we can ask for!
Thanks to WZER Radio for the entertainment and constant emergency broadcasts!
Thanks to Branham Tower and it’s ownership group for looming over us menacingly.
Big thanks to the Magenta Line for getting us where we need to go in this it’s 100th year! Hope the rest of 2024 is just as celebratory, no matter where you decide to let commuters out.
Thanks also to the Tunnel That Was The Kennedy Expressway. Word is you’re doing your best and hey, most days, that has to be enough.
The Office of the Shadow Mayor will deny any direct involvement in any Ward affairs. Were they to aid or monitor us in any way, like in a thought exercise or an immediately discredited academic study, we’d certainly say thank you, and not in any way that would compromise your increasing aversion to acknowledgement.
Most of all, thanks again to you, reader.
It was a big surprise when this newsletter somehow achieved escape velocity and got out into the wider world as we currently know it. As terrifying as it has been to be perceived, we thank you for your interest, at times your concern, and as always your ability to tell no one.
This is a draft of the edition I was going to send out tomorrow on the 19th, but looks like I’m done now, so what the heck, it goes out today.
Thanks for reading and if you didn’t know who any of these people or entities mentioned were, fear not. They’re in a year’s worth of editions, cataloged on this site.
This was the first I’ve ever been a museum piece. I liked it! It’s peaceful, at least in this part of the museum. Once I hit send on this though the post will no longer be in flux, so the exhibit will cease to be. And that’s OK. Something else from time and imagination will fill the void, and we’ll be the better for it.
The words coming through my hands onto this page are telling me I’m about to get up from this desk and walk to the Museum Cafe. There I’ll have a glass of Thieves Wine, The O’Keefe Family Wine Company’s most beloved and disavowed wine, and raise that glass in toast to what we’ve done, and things to come. I hope you join me, and probably Miss Nayak, wherever in Existence you are.
Oh and of course, once read, the suggested method of disposal for this newsletter is, as always, Time. The great devourer. Let it do the work for you. Chomp chomp.
Thanks for this year, everyone.
Long Live Secrecy, Long Live the Magenta Line, and Long Live the Secret Ward.
Numquam Aeternus
The Secret Ward Staff
(Thank you, Kevin, for bringing something else into the world that makes Chicago feel like home. Community is the best part of living in the Ward. Sorry to disrupt the narrative here.)
Mike Royko!