Today is the first of two North Halsted Street Market Days which is a street festival held in the neighborhood Chicago calls Boystown. This festival is oddly popular outside of Chicago...I was chatting up fellows in Toronto in advance of my trip later this month and some of them had attended, others just hoped to attend one day. Arent there any outdoor events with fried dough and sunglasses vendors in Canada?
I'm attending with a few guys from my book club and I'm hoping the rain holds off long enough so that we can see the band Super 8 Cumshot tonight at 9 p.m. They are loud, catchy and have a punk rock sensibility even though the lead singer is also the musical director for the Goodman Theater's annual A Christmas Carol.

As you might expect, the whole festival acts like one enormous, cruisy, outdoor bar. Which leads me, sort of, to The Pink Nun who was profiled on the cover of The Chicago Reader this week. Alas, the Reader doesn't post their stuff online except for a fee but the nun herself has an extensive site. She's a woman, trained as an artist who also describes herself as both a feminist and a Christian and she has a No Sex Outside Of Marriage position. It's oddly complex...I think of a no sex outside of marriage stance to be humorless and unpleasant and it's tough to reconcile that with a woman who has a pierced tongue, a pick up truck decorated with flames and who wears a pink habit while doing her pro-chastity raps she calls Hymen Rhymin'. The world seems more understandable when stereotypes remain stereotypical...a performance artist who sells Purity Panties and isn't being ironic takes some getting used to, I find.

Anyway, considering that this festival is largely about cruising and looking for sex, it was interesting to take a moment to think about the pink nun's belief that sex outside of marriage is demeaning and unhealthy. In The Reader piece, a young gay man points out that he can't get married so what is he to do? Her response was that, while she generally believes that God's plan is for men and women to be paired up in marriage, she wasn't sure about gay people and was not currently making any art to address that. Which I thought was a pretty decent, straightforward way to answer-she feels she can't offer an endorsement but she's not going to give someone a hard time. This shows a good sense of priorities...if you genuinely believe that heterosexual heavy petting is a real problem, as bad as, say, racism or global warming, then why waste your time pestering us sodomites?

The nun is friends with Jay Bakker, son of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. Jay runs a site called Revolution which features the world's smallest font but is otherwise devoted to applying a punk sensibility to a Christian ministry. Jesus was considered a drunkard who was friends with scum notes the site, adding that they want to emphasize the Jesus," that never gives up, the one that is always hopeful, the one that never demands his own way, the one that loves till the end." They never come right out and say "The Emo Jesus" but hey, if Jesus can't be emo, who can be?

I feel slightly ahead of the emo curve thanks to my brother. Josh has spent a good chunk of his life touring with his bands. They often don't play in bars but in people's houses at parties. I feel like talking about it with him is doing cultural anthropology, our worlds are so different. Deep down inside I don't think I'm well suited to riding in an old van for months at a time, hoping I have enough money to buy a can of beans but there is still a part of me that envies this about Josh. His bands and their scene seem very pure...not a purity of enforcement (here's a long list of what it means to sell out-don't violate anything) but a purity of wanting to make art because making art is satisfying in and of itself. No one yearns to get picked up by Interscope, no one dwells on their place in history, it's all about the present. In the present it's fun to make music together, in the present it's fun to zigzag the country in a van, it's the doing that counts.

Maybe I've got it wrong, like I say I'm observing from a long distance. But I did ask him to describe his genre for me several years ago..."punk" sounding under-nuanced. He told me they were emo. These days "emo" seems a little perjorative, at least from what I read in SPIN, emo is like the Hair Metal of hipsterdom. But my brother is old school emo, one of the original OEs so you better come correct.