I tried the picture of Chicago in monochrome and the town suddenly sprung to life. Chicago has a certain boldness in style that evokes contrasts and heavy shadows.
I like to imagine my heydays around 1955-69, when the future looked promising and the past was still available. I would work hard and smoke a pipe and read newspapers that were worth reading. If I was American I would drive around in a car that nowadays belongs to the streets of Cuba.
It's a strange longing between vintage cars and certain buildings. Being a melancholic means, among other things, that people like me get dragged towards this nostalgia, this unfulfilled longing. Surely the cars are less out of time in black-and-white.
The American cars in Cuba pinpointed Chicago, maybe with a whiff of San Francisco, especially in the hilly streets of Santiago de Cuba, and there really were nothing here that reminded us of, say, Miami. But a nation is never the entity it sets out to be.
