FYC Zine - February 2015

For our second-ever issue of FYC Zine: For Your Consideration, we are beyond excited to be featuring the first-ever Frontwoman Fest, which began with Elaine Davis of Spaces of Disappearance. With the help of Adele Nicholas (of Axons and the tape label, Impossible Colors) and Midwest Action, she’s put together an impressive lineup of 12 hot bands and she’s been kind enough to let us release our February issue along with it!

You’ll also find interviews with Chicago Zine Fest featured artist Corinne Mucha, the band Strawberry Jacuzzi, and an actual pot dealer. Enjoy, my little muffins.

Rae Bees & Piya Willwerth February 2015

© 2015 FYCzine

ElaInE DavIS oF SPaCES oF DISaPPEaRanCE. PhoTo CREDIT: CB lInDSEY

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ou probably got this at The Burlington. You’re probably here right now, or you were, anyway, for Frontwoman Fest, sipping your whiskey and bobbing along to Strawberry Jacuzzi while your friend gets another PBR. Frontwoman Fest is the brainchild of Elaine Davis of Spaces of Disappearance, and it started with a song.

“I had written a song called ‘Frontwoman,’” Davis says, “and part of the song came out of certain frustrations I felt about getting credit for my work sometimes, as a female. I was thinking about doing an EP release, and then I was thinking about doing a single release, and then I thought it’d be fun to do something with some bands that a strong female component to them.

And then all of a sudden I’m like, what if there was a little festival? And I went to Adele [Nicholas], who runs a cassette label called Impossible

Colors.”

“Elaine Davis from Spaces of Disappearance approached me with the idea and got me involved,” Nicholas says. “I helped pick the lineup, did a bunch of media outreach, and most importantly, put together our rad mixtape, which I’ve released on my tape label.”

“We both decided to go to Midwest Action,” Davis says, “because they sponsor a lot of shows. So that’s Dan [Jarvis] and alyssa [Welch]. It just exploded.”

There are twelve bands in the lineup, but they’re not all necessarily female fronted, Davis says. “[They’re] just bands that in some way showcase gender equality, or a strong female component, or, you know, social activeness, being active in the music community.

“We tried to be relatively diverse in genre,” Davis continues, “so there’s some electronic, and some ambient, and some punk, and some garage, so all kinds of things.”

Frontwoman Fest is also, strictly speaking, a benefit. “[I’m] super psyched that proceeds from the fest and tape sales are going to benefit Girls Rock!

Chicago, which is an organization I love,” Nicholas says. Girls Rock! is a weeklong summer camp that fosters musicianship in girls ages 8-16.

“All of the bands volunteered their time,” Davis says, “they’re not gonna get a penny of any money that comes. It’s all going to go to charity. It’s fantastic.

We’re really excited.”

- Piya Willwerth Visit Girls Rock! Chicago: girlsrockchicago.org/ Buy the mix tape to benefit Girls Rock!: impossiblecolors.org/releases/ Visit Midwest Action: midwestaxn.com/

Corinne Mucha is a Chicago based cartoonist, illustrator, and teaching artist. She grew up in southern New Jersey and studied illustration at RISD. She’s a fan of terrible puns and hypothetical questions.

Where does your love for comics and illustrations come from?

I grew up with a love for storytelling. My dad is a writer and he would read me children’s books or tell me stories. He introduced me to children’s books from illustrators he admired like the cartoony works of James Marshall. Oral storytelling like what you hear on the The Moth, or audiobooks read by the author are another source of inspiration. listening to writers read their own stories in their voices is powerful.

What attracted you to DIY publication?

A friend at RISD pushed me to create my first minicomic at the end of my senior year. I printed 200 12 page minicomics called Graduation Plans, about my plans to become a superhero after graduation. I wrote about how my superpowers would help me get health insurance, a job...you know grown up things. What attracted me to self-publishing was the immediacy of making something. You decide on the story, you draw it, head to a copy store, make a few copy, and then, bam! You have something to put into the hands of readers.

What work have you done that you’re most excited about?

Right now, I’m most proud of Get Over it! my autobiographical graphic novel that came out from Secret Acres in spring of 2014.

Your work is sometimes personal and yet still covers struggles that readers can relate to. Do you find creating comics therapeutic in a way?

It can be. We all have stories about ourselves and our experiences that we tell over and over again, in a particular way. I like to use comics to take that narrative and turn it into something new. In real life, I have a tendency towards sarcasm and exaggeration. In comics, I can push this to a whole different level, by introducing talking inanimate objects to tell part of the story for me, or draw real life events in an exaggerated way. In this way, a story

’ve told many times can become something new, perhaps even helping to resolve my feelings around it.

Being an art instructor what have you learned from your students?

Well, today I learned that according to 7 year olds, I have an annoying laugh?! But really, you learn something new every day. I have to remind myself to stay open-minded, listen to my students ideas, and compromise.

I sometimes struggle with getting my younger students to make comics without blood and violence. I try to encourage them to have storylines that don’t end with all the characters dying, but that doesn’t always work. So, compromise! I suggest new plotlines, they occasionally still make comics full of death. We’re all learning.

Can you suggest 3 artists we should check out?

Eleanor Davis, Hallie Bateman, and Liz Prince.

Do you have any quick advice for aspiring illustrators out there?

Don’t be afraid to grow in front of people. You’re never going feel like you’re “ready” to show your artwork or share your story. You have to take risks. Your readers will enjoy being in that creative process with you.

-Rae Bees

Visit Corinne Mucha at her website: http://maidenhousefly.com Take a class with Corinne Mucha at Old Town School of Folk Music: Intro to Comics: Starting March 2, 2015 http://www.oldtownschool.org/

S

ince moving from Mexico City five years ago, CHema found himself embraced by well-known local artists Brooks Golden and Oscar Arriola, who first introduced CHema to the collaborative street art scene in Chicago.

Art wasn’t the only passion CHema brought to Chicago: his record label Colibrí Recordings also followed. With a longtime love of classic funk, Jamaican oldies, reaggae, rock steady, and ska , it’s no surprise to see those influences in his work.

“Mexico is so close to America, yet we are so apart in so many ways. I mean [the phrase] ‘people of color’ is very American. I collect ska, rock steady, funk, reggae. It’s all afro-influenced. It ‘s been a big influence on my artwork and in my life. I see a lot of strength in black culture. The way black culture has shaped Mexico even. It’s in our blood and history. This is something that is not very well known outside of Mexico.”

UNMASKED!, opening June 12th at Rational Park Gallery, is CHema Skandal’s first solo show in Chicago. The show questions the socio-political purposes of masks and our desire for anonymity. Some of the representations involved in Skandal’s show range from Mexican lucha libre masks, police in riot gear, terrorists, street artists, and indigenous native masks. These varieties of “masks” tell stories of our experiences and mixtures of cultures. “We all wear masks. Even if we don’t realize it – I as a Mexican, living here as a migrant, see how the culture mixes here in America. I use distorted pop references that people are familiar with, like Speedy Gonzalez, to question the stereotypes people may hold around them.”

- Rae Bees Be sure to check out CHema Skandal’s show: UnMaSKED! June 12, 2015 at Rational Park Gallery chemaskandal.com

FRoM lEFT: RoSS TaSCh, Shannon CanDY, nIKITa WoRD, anD DEvon PRESS

FYC got to talk to Shannon Candy and Nikita Word of Strawberry Jacuzzi about influences, image, and being a chick musician in Chicago.

SC: We started about a year ago and I had known Nikita from the band she was in, Summer Girlfriends. And then we kind of just started talking on Facebook, just to pass time at work, and that turned into us sending each other demos.

SC: The other band I’m in is called the Peekaboos, and I feel like, when Strawberry Jacuzzi started, it was — you know, the Peekaboos were taking themselves very seriously, and I kind of wanted a band that I didn’t have to really

take as seriously. Just kind of have fun with. We weren’t trying to make it or anything. We were just trying to have a good time together, as friends.

NW: I’d say the exact same thing. Summer Girlfriends had just ended, and we were getting a lot of press. We were a little more serious and I wanted something just fun to do to get my emotions about certain situations out.

SC: I think the cool thing about Chicago is that there’s not one or two bands that have women in them. There’s a ton of them. And you can look at something like Frontwoman Fest and notice that there are bands that aren’t on there that maybe you would expect to be on there. And in a way it’s a good thing that we can’t just have one show and encompass all the bands that have women in them in Chicago. You know, there’s so many that it exceeds the amount of room on one bill.

For example I went on a tour with my other band in October, and in most of the shows played, I was the only woman there. And that’s normally not the case in Chicago.

NW: Yeah, I just want to second what Shannon said. We’re really lucky to be in such an inclusive community where there’s tons of women, but the second you get outside of the musical community in Chicago, for example if you meet somebody through a work party or something, and somebody says “Oh! So and so’s in a band, Nikita’s in a band,” they almost always say, “Are you the singer?” Like 99% of the time. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being the singer, it’s just like, I think people who aren’t informed, always think that women aren’t as involved in music as they really are. Because like Shannon said, there are so many women in bands in Chicago. We’re really lucky.

SC: In the other band that I’m in I’m the only woman, and my bandmate and I kind of share songwriting duties. We split it pretty fifty-fifty, and I’ve had people ask me which parts I wrote. They go “Did he write this part?” or “Did you write this part?” Assuming that because a song is good, there must have been another hand in that. Maybe people don’t even realize when they’re asking those questions. It’s this very subtle form of sexism. People don’t think they’re asking you something offensive. I highly doubt that my bandmate gets asked if I wrote his parts or whatever.

NW: I’ve been fortunate (or unfortunate) that the only other band I’ve been in was all women. So they had no choice but to realize that we wrote all the

parts!

SC: People feel that they’re somehow owed your image or your sexuality.

NW: It’s due to this whole idea now that it’s not just music. It’s the whole package. You have to be able to do marketing and sell your brand and people forget about just the music.

NW: People care less about music. Music isn’t what makes money anymore.

That’s the whole point, right? It’s the package, it’s the prettiness that can be sold.

SC: I don’t think we’re trying to have an image, necessarily, I think we’re just trying to express ourselves as we are.

NW: Yeah, I’d have to agree.

SC: A lot of our songs — there are some that are a lot more poppy, and there are some that are almost post-punk, and some that, you know, are more mellow, and I feel like it’s not so much about appealing to various types of listeners so much as it is like, these are aspects of our personalities. And like, these are things that influence us and we just happen to grab from a lot of different things.

SC: I like all kinds of things. I am just as influenced by ultra-poppy kind of stuff like Blondie, like The Monkees, as I am Bikini Kill or Fugazi. I feel like in a lot of music I make I try to represent all sides of my multiple personalities and just, you know, just try to represent all the things that make me me, instead of just picking one.

NW: I like tons of different types of music and the majority of the records I own are like weird, old, Memphis blues kind of stuff, but like, in reality, every time I sit down at the guitar to write something, it always ends up sounding kind of like 90’s post-pop, post-punk kind of stuff. Whatever combination of stuff we listen to, somehow me and Shannon’s writing styles tend to be very similar in that way. Different influences, but kind of the same end result.

- Piya Willwerth Visit Strawberry Jacuzzi at their websites: facebook.com/StrawberryJacuzziBand strawberryjacuzzi.bandcamp.com

THIS IS AN ACTUAL PURPLE WEED PLANT GROWN BY STARDUST.

Stardust (which is totally his real and legal name) has been growing and selling weed for 10 years. He’d like to be legit. We talked to him about the ins and outs of the legalization of pot in Illinois.

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ou chop ‘em wet, you can either dry them with all the leaves on or you can trim the leaves off. I trim the leaves off while they’re fresh, and then freeze those leaves, and then I make hash out of them. I can make a solventless hash. So you just mix it with ice water, since it’s frozen, and it knocks all those trichomes off and then you get hash. And the best type of hash. Non-

solvent, petroleum, by-product free, only using filtered water and filtered water ice cubes.

Across the state, they legalized it for medical purposes and a number of conditions that people are allowed to use for licensing, in order to get it as a consumer. To be a distributor there are a lot more hoops that you have to jump through. It’s already like the most restrictive program in the country.

Least amount of patients are able to get on, like chronic pain’s not an allowable condition … if you pull out your shoulder or something, and ten years down the road you’re still having terrible pain, you can’t get weed for that.

You have to resort to Vicodin, or their pills … unless you move to a different state.

In California you just pay fifty bucks, a hundred bucks for the doctor and then there you go.

Even in California, to be a patient, it’s really easy, but like, technically, you’re still only allowed to grow like six plants, six mature plants, at a time, unless your county says otherwise, but most counties don’t. And then you have to register through your county and get a county registration card, and who wants to do that? People out in Cali don’t want to be putting their name on the weed list.

But I mean, it’s even worse in Illinois now. Or better depending on who you are.

It’s still illegal to grow weed. And your limits — if you do manage to get yourself a patient card — you’re allowed to get two and a half ounces from a dispensary every two weeks. So five ounces a month total. And that’s weed, I think, two and a half ounces of extracts, if the dispensary’s offering that.

There’s a limited number of cultivation centers that were finally awarded permits a couple weeks ago. It took about two months for the state to sort out who was getting all these permits. all the dispensaries — there’s gonna be sixty dispensaries across the state, so one per state representative district, and then only twenty grow facilities, one per state police district. and then so they all had to pony up I think $5,000 for every dispensary application and $25,000 for every cultivation center application, non-refundable, so the state made $5 million dollars, just on applications alone. And then once you get a permit, you have to pay $200,000 to get your permit. That’s for the grow facility. And then I forget

the permit fee for the dispensary. But you gotta pony that up, and then you gotta be in constant contact with the police, closed-circuit television … all the plants are tagged with an RFID, and they track, you know, everything.

So if you’re trying to get into the industry, you have to know somebody, have a solid resume to be able to show people. Hopefully some cannabis staffing agencies will pop up to help facilitate that. I’m guessing a lot of people are gonna just be shipped in from California and Colorado too. ‘Cause you know, finding employees around here might prove difficult, unless you have people willing to reach out, like me. Like I’ve sent out six resumes to different firms that have multiple dispensaries — hopefully I’ll get a call back from one of them.

In Illinois there’s already been a full legalization measure introduced. They see the potential. ‘Cause Chicago alone has, I don’t know the population Colorado has, but I know it’s less than the Chicago market itself. Colorado’s probably what, got a population of over a million, maybe? I don’t know exactly. But the market in Chicago alone dwarfs that, let alone the entire state.

So it’s a huge market in Illinois. People around here know we’re going to have to catch up.

- as told to Piya Willwerth

Visit the official Illinois Medical Cannabis Pilot Program website: http://www2.illinois.gov/gov/mcpp/

EVENTS Feb 24th 9PM A Benefit for the Carrefour Collaborative featuring KSRA @ Empty Bottle 1035 N Western Ave, Chicago, IL 60622 Through individual grants and curated artist exchanges, we aim to offset the marginalization of Haiti’s artistic community on an international and national level. $8 Feb 26th 8PM FREE! Deep Fayed / Native Sun / Adam Ness @ Wicker Park Emporium 1366 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL 60622 Feb 28th 1-4PM Caged Streets: An Exploration of the School-to-Prison Pipeline @ Loyola University Chicago 6430 N. Kenmore Avenue, Chicago IL Cuneo Hall RM 218 This workshop is being hosted by the InTransit Empowerment Project (ITEP) in collaboration with the Women’s Studies Gender Studies program at Loyola University Chicago. Free Art workshop & lunch provided.

Youth Ages 14-24 // RSVP at intransitempowers.org Feb 28th 9-3AM Q4 Presents: CHI-CULTURE UNITES - ART-MEETS-MUSIC Vol 1 @ Multi Kulti 1000 N Milwaukee Ave 4th Floor Join Chi-Town culture as we unite styles, crews, and forces from across the city map. Musicians: Denmark Vessey, Animalia, Los Vicios de Papa, Adam Ness, Chicago Drum Battery, Olmeca, & Motorcycle. $10 Mar 6th 7-12AM Swop Chicago’s Sex Worker Art Show @ Church of Templehead 1901 S Allport St, Chicago, IL 60608 This year’s exhibit will focus on portraits of sex workers in a variety of forms: literal and abstract, performance, film, sculpture, music, & more, displayed in a cozy, homey, gallery setting. All work is done by current & former sex workers.

FREE Mar 7th 6-11PM Voces de Mujeres | International Womens Day Celebration @ Carlos & Dominguez Fine Arts Gallery 1538 W Cullerton St, Chicago, IL 60608 Each of the female artists in this exhibition represent the innumerable variances in feminine expression and provides insight into the minds of modern female creatives who occupy spaces in the visual arts, cultural, musical, activist and educational fields here in Chicago.

FREE Mar 13th 7-10PM ~WEIRDO~ Brett Manning solo art show PLUS MUSIC by Maren Celeste, BANAL ANML, and King Tut’s Tomb @ Pinky Swear in Humboldt Park FREE

WHAT’S NEXT! March 28, 2015 7pm-12 mdnight @ Echoes of Chicago: Happy Birthday Chicago Block 37 108 N State St 100% of this event’s profits go to local nonprofit organizations.

LIVE MUSIC, LIVE ARTISTS, PHOTOBOOTH, BURLESQUE, LOCAL VENDORS, ART WORKSHOP, LOCAL BREWS & MUCH MORE! VISIT US AT FACEBOOK.COM/FYCZINE EMAIL US AT FYCZINE@GMAIL.COM WE WANT YOUR BLOOD