January 22, 2014

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY JANUARY 22, 2014 ¬ STUDENT LED, NEIGHBORHOOD READ ¬ SINCE 2003 ¬ SOUTHSIDEWEEKLY.COM ¬ FREE

A Literary Picture Show Bridgeport author John Hospodka talks poetry, Hardscrabble, and Bernice’s

SAVE MONEY, NORA SCHULTZ, PURGING THE POOREST, SEVEN GUITARS, MLK DAY, ANTHONY PATERAS

&

MORE INSIDE

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¬ JANUARY 22, 2014

IN CHICAGO A week’s worth of developing stories, odd events, and signs of the times, culled from the desks, inboxes, and wandering eyes of the editors

The Gates to Fame

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is a newsprint magazine produced by students at the University of Chicago, for and about the South Side.

The Weekly is distributed across the South Side each Wednesday of the academic year.

In fall 2013, the Weekly reformed itself as an independent, student-directed organization.

Previously, the paper was known as the Chicago Weekly.

Editor-in-Chief Managing Editor

Harrison Smith Bea Malsky

Senior Editors John Gamino, Spencer Mcavoy Politics Editor Josh Kovensky, Osita Nwanevu Stage & Screen Hannah Nyhart Editor Music and Zach Goldhammer Video Editor Visual Arts Editor Katryce Lassle Education Editor Bess Cohen Online Editor Sharon Lurye Contributing Editors Jake Bittle, Meaghan Murphy Photo Editor Camden Bauchner Layout Editor Olivia Dorow Hovland Copyeditor Paige Pendarvis Senior Writers Emily Holland, Ari Feldman, Patrick Leow, Stephen Urchick Staff Writers Dove Barbanel, Christian Belanger, Jon Brozdowski, Emma Collins,

Isabel Ochoa Gold, Lauren Gurley, Jack Nuelle, Rob Snyder Staff Photographer Luke White Staff Illustrators Hanna Petroski,

Isabel Ochoa Gold Business Manager

Harry Backlund

5706 S. University Ave. Reynolds Club 018 Chicago, IL 60637 SouthSideWeekly.com Send tips, comments, or questions to: editor@southsideweekly.com

South Side luminary Theaster Gates has been getting a lot of press lately. A long feature in the New Yorker was released in last week’s issue, profiling Gates’s art, life, and the change he wants to see on the South Side; at the end of last year, the New York Times took a shot at profiling our elusive artiste; and last week the Sun-Times published a story detailing Gates and Mayor Emanuel’s partnership at the Stony Island Savings Bank, which Gates is in the process of turning into a community gathering space. Long story short, Gates is as active as ever, and has finally begun to receive the national recognition for which his fusion of public space and modern art howls.

Plumb Out of Luck

It might take six hours for food to pass through the human digestive tract, but in the Windy City, sewage can be a drawn-out business. To that end, Chicago’s Deep Tunnel sewage and water revitalization project found itself in deep doo-doo after the EPA filed a lawsuit over the city’s policy of dumping its scatological contents into Lake Michigan.

As per a court case resolved by the Fed last week, the city can continue digging its Deep Tunnel, so long as Chicago stops dumping its collective dumps into Lake Michigan. The Deep Tunnel is a multi-phase project that began in 1972 and is scheduled for completion in 2029.

So, digesting your dinner may be a six-hour process, Chicago politics turns out to be so full of it that digestion is a fifty-year event.

Give Rahm a Home

This past week, Mayor Emanuel released the latest iteration of Chicago’s five-year housing plan. Coming a week after our paper’s housing issue, the mayor is finally catching up to the standard that the South Side Weekly sets.

Two Wheels to Nowhere

The Montreal-based Public Bike System Company (aka Bixi), known to Chicagoans as the supplier of the bikes for Chicago’s Divvy bike-share program, has filed for bankruptcy. Despite the city’s plans to enlarge Divvy from 3,000 bikes and 300 stations to 4,000 bikes and 475 stations, as well as to expand into Evanston and Oak Park, there’re no indications that Bixi’s financial struggles will put Divvy in jeopardy. Even if it did, that would just mean less tourists riding bikes on Lakeshore Drive (seriously: look it up). Either way, it’s nothing to lose sleep over.

Güten Morgan from Alderwoman Hairston

Fifth Ward Alderwoman Leslie Hairston has proposed that the city stop doing business with JPMorgan Chase. She claims that the Wall Street wag has violated city code for “dishonesty and deceit,” leading her to agitate for the city to stop using JPMorgan as a municipal fiscal depository. Thanks to her efforts, a new ordinance will be on the docket to stop the fiscal giant from dragging its hands through Chicago’s treasury.

A Good Job Is Hard to Find

Teenage unemployment rates in Chicago have risen rapidly. According to a recent report by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, eighty-nine percent of black teens in Chicago are unemployed, and the rate is higher for those whose families make $20,000 or less. Lawmakers have promised to work to expand summer job opportunities, but in the mean time, teens better start sending out their resumes and pressing their suits now if they want to be employed come June. ¬

IN THIS ISSUE purging the poorest

high rise stories

seven guitars

southside trilogy

nora schultz

“These judgements are still—and in a peculiarly American way—blaming poor people for their poverty.”

“At some level this has to be about human beings.”

“Everyone is familiar with the Mississippi Delta blues that made its way up to Chicago, and found itself an amplifier on the way.”

“Chicago as a theme for me has more to offer than its reality.”

“Success is not necessarily a corollary to transgression.”

ari feldman...........4 mixed bag

rachel schastok...6

michaela cross......8

emma collins.......10

lillian selonick....7 anthony pateras

“Formalist work was oush- “The small, slightly stooped ing everything out of the figure of Pateras before he work—so I left a little jab.” started playing is gone.”

nico segal

mlk day

“This event is like one of those extreme bittersweet moments.”

“We are saying that something is wrong with capitalism.”

stephen urchick..11 jack nuelle...........12 jack nuelle...........13 olivia stovicek....14

For advertising inquiries, contact: (773)234-5388 advertising@southsideweekly.com

Cover photo by Stephanie Koch

JANUARY 22, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

High Rises on the Horizon An interview with Professor Lawrence J. Vale

BY ARI FELDMAN

T

he shadow of Cabrini-Green looms large over Lawrence J. Vale’s life and career. He grew up in a high-rise a few streets down from the infamous development, and has spent his life trying to understand and help others to understand how public housing has marginalized huge swaths of the American population. In his fourth book, “Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Housing,” he tackles the histories of Cabrini-Green in Chicago and the Techwood Homes in Atlanta. Vale is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is also the director of the Resilient Housing Initiative. We got the chance to speak with Professor Vale about what design politics are, the current problems of public housing, and the future of the American poor. hanna petroski

You grew up pretty close to the Cabrini-Green developments. What was your experience of the neighborhood?

And that curiosity developed into a career.

It was mostly an experience of avoidance, frankly. As a child I was aware of the Cabrini development, but had no reason to go there. When my parents were in the car with me we would give it a pretty wide berth. It was not a place that I ever explored on my own. I can’t say it was anything more than high-rises on the horizon to me. It was always a name I was very familiar with, and I remained highly curious about the place.

Well, I think that’s right. As an undergraduate at Amherst I wrote my honor’s thesis about public housing in Chicago. That was back in 1981, just after Jane Byrne had moved into the Cabrini high-rises while she was mayor. It was certainly a place that was on my mind. Even though I was in Massachusetts, leaving Chicago for the first time was when I really found myself reflecting on the place that I had grown up in in a more detached kind of way.

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How do you feel when you return to Chicago now, especially as an academic doing research?

As an adult, returning to Chicago on visits, I’ve seen many more neighborhoods than I ever did while growing up and I’ve become much more curious about the city, and much more aware of the profound inequalities that lurk proximately to one another in the city. Chicago also now has a much better reputation nationally than it did when I was in high school in the mid-seventies. I still on the whole feel very proud of being

from Chicago these days.

I learned from your book that in 1990, nine of the ten poorest census tracts were in Chicago’s public housing. How did this happen?

I think it’s a function of several different things. First of all, Chicago was building large enough housing projects to enable them to constitute their own census tracts, either individually or collectively. Secondly it seemed that some of the census districts may have corresponded with these projects, making it more possible to make that cal-

PUBLIC HOUSING culation. And third, at the time employment levels were so low and the welfare payments so meager that you could get the lowest kind of incomes by simply having a huge percentage of the entire tract be very poorly paid, or welfare-receiving residents in public housing. There were not other places that would have that many unemployed per acre, for lack of a better measurement. When I looked at the incomes in these areas as percentages of the rest of the incomes in the city, one of the most striking things to me was that when these places were built, through the fifties, the incomes were low but not extremely low, like fifty or sixty percent of the city median income. But by 1990 or so the national figure for public housing was something like seventeen percent of the area median income, so well into the extremely low-income category. If that’s who is in public housing nationally, and then you have that amount of contiguous public housing, it’s not surprising that you would get these dire figures.

It seems that the word choice in your book’s subtitle is very significant: “twicecleared communities,” not “developments” or “lots.” Was it purposeful?

At some level this has to be about human beings, and about the removal of one set of people and their replacement by a preferred set of people, and that is the dynamic. It’s cast as a real estate operation, but that’s not how its perceived on the ground, it’s not the way its thought of by the people who care about this, and it is often thought of as, “Well these are places where no one wanted to live,” whether we’re talking about the so-called slums, or the public housing development itself. Certainly the people in those places didn’t want to be removed, and didn’t see their community as lacking in worth. It is a decision by people making professional judgments that one community deserves to be wiped off the map and that another should be socially engineered to replace it.

When talking about the redevelopment of the Cabrini-Green site, you mention that one of the realtors involved, Peter Holsten, bristled at one website referring to the area as “Cabrini-Green.” For places like this and Techwood, in Atlanta, and in other failed public housing developments across the country, what’s in a name, for both former residents and outsiders?

So much of this is a kind of re-imaging of a place. Part of that is a salesmanship job that is about trying to reinvent a community with a different set of property values and a different set of expectations for residents, but it’s a branding exercise. When redevelopment started happening in the 1990s, you often got these appealing, kind of verdant, rural sounding names that have words like “village,” or “park,” or “orchard,” or “garden.” But conversely, it would get a reaction from former residents for whom its seen as not simply replacing a name, but eliminating a memory, who are not necessarily so happy to see the last vestiges of the place they knew completely forgotten.

You teach a class at MIT every year about the relationships between politics and the resultant shape and form of an urban structure. How might a political motive be visible in the very design of a building and its surroundings?

The class is called “Urban Design Politics,” and they didn’t let me put a hyphen in “Design Politics” in the title of the book because it sounded ungrammatical, but I think of the two terms as very much conjoined, and it comes out in a lot of different ways. Some of it is about the symbolism of naming and renaming and things like that, but some of it is inherent in the way a community is laid out on the site, and the choices about which kind of amenities to include, and which of the component groups in that community is being most targeted by investors. The initial plan for the northern part of Cabrini had plans for open space, for a “tot lot,” and the market-rate developer said, “No, we can’t have all of those people out there,” so they turned that area into a dog park, because the thinking was that that would be more appealing to some of the more upscale residents who didn’t have young children. So they made fewer outdoor spaces for residents, which kind of forced the social life indoors. I think design politics is there on a lot of scales, whether its visible as architecture on the outside, or basic decisions about things like the number of bedrooms, which is an architectural way of saying we don’t want families of this size.

Its evident in the act of building one thing as opposed to building something else, and you don’t have to actually say, “We don’t want our family here,” you simply don’t design for them. To me that’s design that encodes the politics.

You write that talking about the collapse of Cabrini-Green pushes us to grapple with “a long-standing cognitive dissonance between a territory of undeniable extreme violence and an impoverished community that also retained enormous social value to its residents.” How much of this cognitive dissonance do you think policymakers in the world of Chicago’s public housing understand?

where will the city find the resources and places to do something more for those who have the very lowest incomes. The temptation around the country has unfortunately been to try and make public housing serve the working poor, and yet if you look at the waiting list it is comprised overwhelmingly those below thirty percent of median though the eligibility is up to eighty percent.

It’s something that has been very difficult for officials in most cities to understand, and in some ways Chicago has been more understanding of the value of these communities than other places. I certainly think that developers like Peter Holsten were pretty knowledgeable and sensitive and genuinely wanting to help low-income households be able to thrive in redeveloped communities. If you asked the policy-making leadership in Atlanta, whether it was the mayor or housing authority, they really, genuinely believed that there was no value in the communities they were wishing to see torn down and replaced. And these were African-American women who were middle class and very much of the opinion that the public housing communities were a constraint on the upward mobility of lower-income African Americans in Atlanta, and they would go so far as to say, “Those people don’t want these communities, and anyone who says that they do are outside agitators who don’t really speak for the community.” They were pretty explicit in saying that there was not a redeeming social value to an economic wasteland. And yet when you talk to people who were residents, they’re able to see the social value of the networks that they have built up to survive, and sometimes thrive, on very low incomes. That’s a hard thing to see if you’re a policymaker.

In the book’s introduction you quote a 1971 National Affairs article by Roger Starr, in which he asks, “Which of the poor shall live in public housing?” You present a more honest variant of this question in your conclusion: “Which of the poor deserve the empathy of the state?” Why is there still an effective and moralizing distinction in this country between the deserving poor and the unworthy poor?

Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently outlined a housing plan that will put $1.3 billion into creating 41,000 new homes over five years. What is necessary for this money to create quality public housing?

What I’ve seen is this shift between an emphasis on the poorest to focusing on middle-income households. What’s happened, especially in cities that have had many struggles to house everyone, is that the lowest households are pitted against the slightly less poor households for a scarce supply of housing. Public housing was prepared to house people in the extremely-low-income category, and the question is

In the first book I wrote I kept trying to figure out, “Where did this come from?” since it wasn’t invented in the 1930s with the New Deal. I ended up trying to trace it all the way back to European inhabitation of the continent, and called the book “From the Puritans to the Projects.” I probably could have looked at the Spanish colonists and found something there, too. It seems to me that this is something really deeply rooted. It’s not something that starts with public housing, but it‘s a set of moral judgments tied to where you live and how you live that go all the way back to the poorest townspeople of the seventeenth century.

Starting with the Poor Laws in Elizabethan England, there was this assumption that there was some moral failing in you that made you poor. The argument that I have been making in all of my books is that these judgments are still—and in a peculiarly American way—blaming poor people for their poverty, rather than people being willing to look at the structural problems in the economy that might enable more people to work in an effective way that allows them to afford housing. If you look at the name of the public housing reform of the nineties, it was called the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998. You can’t get any closer to John Winthrop and Puritans than that language.

Do you consider the problems of American public housing to be quintessentially “American”?

That’s a really good question, and I puzzle

JANUARY 22, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

over that. I’m really only now starting to do more international comparisons, either with Europe or developing countries. The trick that has really made European-style “social housing” different from the American-style “public housing” is that they’ve never really targeted the tiny fraction of the lowest-income people in the same way that the United States did. They had a much broader range of incomes that were eligible for this housing, so it didn’t develop the same stigma. It is possible to say that other countries may be sharing more of the American style challenges than they used to, tied to immigration and growing racial minorities, and in that public housing is gaining in stigma worldwide. There’s definitely an American attitude that is still pretty distinctive, but it may be becoming a little less so.

San Francisco­— and, to some extent, Boston—have done that. I want to try and find some of the rays of hope that are in HOPE VI. In your chapter on the creation of Cabrini-Green, you quote a Chicago Sun article that compares the severely over-crowded “Black Belt” of the South Side to “a concentration camp or an Old World ghetto,” calling it “a disgrace to civilization, [and] a sad commentary on human greed and indifference.” Those words were written in 1945. Do you think these “disgraces” will inevitably cease to exist?

There have been a lot of successes in the last seventy-five years in removing substandard housing. The challenge now is not that we have substandard housing, but that we’re

There will always be people describing certain parts of cities as disgraceful, but that’s a relic of moral judgments that have persisted for hundreds of years.

You write in your conclusion that quite often “the urban design politics of public housing offers a promise of moral redemption.” Who is being redeemed: the poor or the politicians?

Well, it’s the delusion of the “tabula rasa” approach, that you can start over with a blank slate and invent an alternative that will leave the problems of the past behind, as in renaming a capital city or relocating a neighborhood. Sometimes a local government is trying really hard to make these investments on behalf of the least advantaged citizens; I just didn’t find any cases of this in Chicago or Atlanta. There have been cities in which public officials say, “You know, we’re going to bring back one hundred percent of the public housing on this site, and we’re going to create additional housing with tax credits to get a slightly larger income household into this neighborhood, but we’re going to say, ‘Sorry, market rate developers, there’s not room for you here.’ ” 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

left with housing that is simply not affordable to people with the incomes they have.

There will always be people describing certain parts of cities as disgraceful, but that’s a relic of moral judgments that have persisted for hundreds of years. I don’t know if that answers your question, but it certainly makes me think that we will continue to have battles over housing that are couched in extremely moralist language, and that we will continue to have an enormous shortage of affordable housing in American cities. The need is still framed in ways that blame the poor person, rather than the larger context in which they find their housing unaffordable. ¬

Lawrence Vale will be speaking on his book “Purging the Poorest” this Thursday, January 23, 6pm, at the Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State St. publichousingmuseum.org

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An Oral History of the Projects At a Bronzeville panel, author Audrey Petty keeps listening

BY RACHEL SCHASTOK

“I

come to you as a student, not as an expert or a scholar,” Audrey Petty declared, opening a panel discussion of her new book, “High Rise Stories.” The book tells the stories of several residents of Chicago’s now-demolished high-rise housing projects. In both her book and her talk, Petty, an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, sought to portray the impact the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan For Transformation has had on real people. For many of those gathered at the Bronzeville Visitor Information Center last Friday night, this immensely controversial program, which has brought about the demolition of high-rise projects and the relocation—or displacement—of thousands of residents, is a deeply personal source of anger and pain.

Joining Petty was a panel of five men and women selected for their varying expertise and experience with Chicago’s public housing communities. This panel included Todd Palmer, curator and interim director of the National Public Housing Museum, and Rashayla Marie Brown, director of multicultural affairs at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Despite the panelists’ qualifications, the audience dominated the discussion.

After Petty read a selection from “High Rise Stories,” several of the audience members were quick to jump in with their own takes on the problems and solutions for African-Americans in Chicago’s public housing. A good-natured reminder from the moderator, long-time journalist Monroe Anderson, that,“we’ve got a panel that wants to speak,” was met with laughs, but was not able to shift focus back onto the five panelists.

The nature of the comments was varied, but participation came overwhelmingly from older men. These included former gang leaders, former employees of the Chi-

courtesy julien lallemand

cago Police Department, Chicago Public Schools, and CHA, and former residents of public housing communities. Each prefaced his comments by detailing his own expertise and experience, and each cited a deliberate effort on the part of police and politicians to dismantle the black community and the black man in particular. At one point, Brown cut in to remind everyone of the struggles of single mothers, and the problems involved with regarding men as the necessary “saviors of any community.” This was met with appreciative nods from some, but with dismissiveness from Anderson and others.

Each audience member who spoke presented a story that he or she felt was not being heard. It was clear that Petty was sympathetic to her audience’s unhealed wounds and long-stifled voices. She closed the discussion by affirming the need to remember public housing in all its complexity, for its networks of support and togetherness as well as its violence and its disillusionment.

Tying together all that had been said, she remarked that while one should not neglect to work for a better future for the community, one must also never lose “the history we can give our children.” ¬

THEATER

Sweet Home Pittsburgh August Wilson’s “Seven Guitars”

BY LILLIAN SELONICK michael brosilow

A

ugust Wilson’s “Seven Guitars,” now playing at Court Theatre, takes place during a crucial moment for the blues. The year is 1948, and Big Bill Broonzy and Tampa Red have been holding down the Chicago blues scene since the 1920s. Alan Lomax first recorded Muddy Waters in Stovall, Mississippi just seven years before. Waters’s hit “I Can’t Be Satisfied” has just been released.

As Muddy Waters’s ascent to mythic status begins, to the east another blues guitarist passes from this world.

In Pittsburgh, a backwater in the development of the blues, Floyd “Schoolboy” Barton (played at Court by Kelvin Roston, Jr.) was by all appearances on the eve of success. He was about to have something, for the first time in his life. He and his band—Canewell the harmonica player (Jerod Haynes) and Red the drummer (Ronald Conner)—have had one hit song from a single recording session in Chicago. Then, suddenly, Floyd dies. His friends gather in the Hill District backyard of the group’s unofficial matriarch, Louise, played by the lively and engaging Tony-nominated Felicia Fields.

The play, told mostly through flashback, is ostensibly about Floyd as he struggles to win back his woman, Vera (Ebony Wimbs), and makes plans to return to

Chicago to become a real star. It is a story that spans the intimate details of these people’s lives, equal parts tragedy and playful comedy. However, for a play about the blues, “Seven Guitars” has little on-stage blues music. Early in the play, Floyd pulls out his guitar and idly strums it, and the auditorium shivers in anticipation. But he puts it back in its case and heads to the pawnshop. Floyd’s one hit record, “That’s Alright,” can be heard on the record player periodically throughout the play, as well as on the characters’ lips. But only once do he and his band perform on stage. They play an impromptu version of “Hoochie Coochie Man”—an insertion by Director Ron OJ Parson—written by Willie Dixon and originally recorded by Muddy Waters. It is a rendition so full of contagious spirit that it becomes impossible to doubt that this man was a blues star on the rise.

Still, “Seven Guitars” is not lacking in the blues. The dialogue is lyrical and flows and stops and starts with the rhythm of Delta Blues in one scene, Piedmont Blues in another. The outline of the plot seems pulled straight from a blues song—he lost his woman, and now he’s longing to go to the center of the world, Chicago. But there is something more complex and intriguing happening in this Pittsburgh backyard.

The blues is not the only music with a stage

presence. Hedley (Allen Gilmore), who raises and processes chickens in his backyard, brings an older form with him. Gilmore’s strong, weary, mournful voice seems made for the wistful call and response that weaves in and out, throughout the show. It is a refrain that simultaneously hearkens back in tone to the oppressive horror of the Middle Passage while expressing a stubborn faith that he will be a “big man” some day, even in a white man’s country.

From the beginning, Floyd’s big personality dominates the stage, even in death.

The first scene shows the six people he was closest to gathered in Louise’s backyard, a heavy mood hanging over the dusty yard as they sit and reflect after Floyd’s funeral.

Most of the action takes place in the past, soon after Floyd’s return from cutting his first record in Chicago. His song has just been released and become a hit. All eyes, whether adoring or jealous, are on him for the first half of the play. But then, Hedley’s character gradually expands from comic relief into a deeply complex and tragic figure who contends with Floyd for the spotlight.

Much of the play, especially following the intermission, exhibits the form of a struggle between the new, fast, loud and exciting world personified by Floyd and Chicago electrified blues, and an older, prouder world—one with Toussaint L’Ouverture’s

slave revolt in Haiti still vividly present in ancestral memory. This struggle is shown symbolically when, as Floyd, Canewell, and Red start their Muddy Waters jam session, Hedley builds a one-string diddley bow, an instrument with its roots in traditional West African music. This tension is all the more unsettling because of the sense, articulated by Parson in a postshow discussion, that Floyd’s urban, post– WWII musical aspirations and Hedley’s diddley bow can all be ultimately traced back to the common cradle of Africa.

“Seven Guitars” earned August Wilson the 1996 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play. Under the direction of Ron OJ Parson, Court Theatre’s artist-in-residence, the three-hour play becomes an exquisitely raw and powerful experience. It is a story broad in scope, with intricately intertwining plot lines, and yet it maintains a clarity and coherence that is dazzling. Take a lesson from Louise— when the music stops, just keep singing the blues. Court Theatre, 5525 S. Ellis Ave. Through February 9. See website for show times and prices. (773)753-4472. courttheatre.org

JANUARY 22, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

Literary Picture Show An interview with Bridgeport writer John Hospodka

BY MICHAELA CROSS

A

story of stories, John Hospodka’s “South Side Trilogy” is the narrative of a neighborhood that is at once real and out of this world. Told through art, video, poetry, prose, voice recordings, and song, the multimedia work follows the lives of a few residents of Hardscrabble, Chicago, a fictional neighborhood based on Bridgeport.

Though it was begun in 1995, the three parts of the trilogy weren’t finished and collected until 2010; since 2013, it has been available for download as an e-book. Still, the work is less a book than what Hospodka calls a “ literary picture show.” At its opening, Hospodka monologues before breaking into a deep song, singing his fictionalized neighborhood’s bluesy theme.

Hospodka has a heavy beard, and the intensity of his eyes is magnified by his glasses. He looks like he’d be more at home on a bar stool than at the spindly-legged tables of Bridgeport Coffeehouse, where we meet. His voice in conversation is recognizable from the trilogy as he talks about M.F.A. programs, Hardscrabble, and Bernice’s.

What is your background? Where are you from?

I’m a Chicagoan. I went for four years to school at Ohio Wesleyan and came right back to Chicago. I’ve been an aspiring writer since as long as I can remember, and I’ve always based my life on that, meaning that I have stayed as far away from careers as possible. I’ve had a job right now for eight years or so working with a construction consultancy. It’s my livelihood but I don’t consider it my life; I don’t take it home with me, I don’t talk about it. I talk about writing. I’ve always considered myself a writer.

And that’s basically it. I’m a Chicagoan.

And you never got sidetracked into having a career?

No. Your story incorporates video, song, po8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

etry, and collaborations with local artists.

Had you done anything like that before?

No, I hadn’t. I think it all comes from having a theater background. All of my friends have been in theater in one way or another or have worked in film in one way or the other, and I’ve always longed for that collaborative community to work with. As a writer you get stuck in a basement sometimes by yourself when your only audience is your dog. It’s a lonely craft, writing. And so I always thought I’d like to make it a more communal experience for myself. It’s been kind of a selfish thing, wanting to project my writing onto others and to bring them into my little realm of loneliness.

But there’s also a reasoning behind it, and that’s because I was an aspiring poet—talk about lowest rung on the hierarchy as far as literature goes, as far as acknowledgement goes from a reading public. Essentially poetry is read by poets.

Being a poet and wanting poetry to be read, I was trying to come up with a new context for poetry where poetry wasn’t the main focus but was a main ingredient.

It’s like a mother slipping broccoli into a dish.

Exactly. I hope that it opens the eyes of poets and readers. It’s really hard to do when you’re self-publishing and you’ve got no one behind you. But I really think this whole South Side poetry isn’t about me. It’s more for the art of poetry. I think that the public is actually willing to read poetry if it’s given to them on their terms instead of being asked to come to poetry on poetry’s terms. I think a lot of poetry today is very academic, is very insular, so it doesn’t invite a public in. I think there’s a readership for poetry out there, it just needs to be finagled.

You wrote in “South Side Trilogy” that “Chicago’s written word turns its back on university towers.” I definitely got that sense that you’re fighting against writing

¬ JANUARY 22, 2014

that has been co-opted by the academy.

So how do you feel that should be subverted?

I think that what has happened today is because of M.F.A. programs. Writing has become looked at as a feasible career and—I’m speaking very romantically—I don’t think of art as being a career in any way. Art is too impractical to be put into a practical realm such as one where you’re trained for a career as a poet. I think that you can go through undergrad, be taught very well with workshops by very good instructors, be tossed out into the world, and if you got what it takes and if you’ve really got the passion for it you’re gonna stay with it. I kind of think M.F.A.s are a scam.

If you consider yourself a writer and you want to be published and recognized as a writer I think you should go for an M.F.A., because if you don’t you are an outsider and you better have patience, because it’s gonna take a long time to get recognized when you’re not in that group. But I think that that approach, coming from the outside in, it’s more fun. You have nothing to lose. You can be more daring, you can take risks. You can actually live life for six months without thinking about a poem and not feel like you’re wasting time.

But the tradeoff of course is that you’re losing a potentially much larger audience.

It’s a huge tradeoff. You’re sacrificing your dreams and are actually making it less feasible if you don’t play by the rules. I know many people who are in those programs and they swear by them, and swear they made the right decision. And if you look at their publishing credits, they probably did. I don’t want to come off like I’m anti-M.F.A.—I am anti-M.F.A., but I understand why they exist and I’m certainly not one to judge anybody. I can judge the programs but I don’t judge the people.

“South Side Trilogy” is very much about Chicago; there are times when you spe-

cifically choose metaphors that would only make sense to someone in Chicago, someone who knows these neighborhoods well. Do you feel you limit yourself that way or that you get extra power by sticking to these local voices?

That’s a good question. When I started writing “South Side Trilogy” it was going to be specifically about Bridgeport. Book One, which is called “Greetings from Hardscrabble, Chicago,” was going to be called “Greetings from Bridgeport, Chicago.” The whole book was going to be very specific to Bridgeport. And when I started writing, that absolutely limited me and also limited what I was really trying to get at. So I did start to make up the names of streets while keeping the names of bus routes accurate. I wanted the book to have its hand in both metaphor and reality.

I wanted to turn the neighborhood into not exactly a physical neighborhood but also a mental neighborhood, a sort of a purgatory, something otherworldly. Chicago as a theme for me has more to offer than its reality. I think there’s an otherworldliness to Chicago that I always want to bring out.

What’s otherworldly about Chicago?

When you see the characters in Hardscrabble they’re all kind of beaten. They’re drinkers, they’re drug users, they’re beaten by reality. And then there’s this other sense to them. There’s this longing to be cultured. They all read, they all dabble in music, they dabble in arts. They’re not exactly in the gutter but they’re in a tough neighborhood living in tough circumstances and they have that sort of tough background to them. There’s that longing for beauty, for culture, that they touch on and almost know they could accomplish but they never quite accomplish.

There’s something that hovers about Chicago that makes one want to appreciate beauty and culture and I think that you find that in a lot of folks. That’s one thing that I discovered moving down to Bridge-

BOOKS

stephanie koch

port and being an aspiring writer, moving into essentially the quintessential blue-collared neighborhood in Chicago. Everyone I’d meet in bars I always thought were these tough dudes, but then one fellow played piano for me once and it was like he was a classical pianist, but you never would have guessed it. He was just some guy from Bridgeport who had this desire to capture a little bit of beauty. It was like the quest for culture was automatic to these folks, they didn’t even question it.

This work includes many different voices.

Whose voices are these? Are these your friends, are these people you know at bars? Are these people you’ve watched, or just heard about?

There are no friends, no friends in there.

Mostly just people I’ve encountered hanging out in bars, hanging out in coffee houses just trying to capture the rhythm of how

people speak and how they think. Yeah, it’s a myriad of voices from the neighborhood and from the South Side.

So in the actual process of creating all these stories, did this end up being more about a communal effort with your friends, or was it you writing in a basement and then bringing pieces to them?

It was the latter. Once I brought them the monologues I let them record it on their own. And I’m really happy about that. Had I been hovering over them I might have been inclined to give them that Chicago voice. That’s where it’s not necessarily Chicago, that’s where it’s otherworldly; handing over trust to folks that I know and just telling them go for it. It was collaborative but the writing was all mine. But the final product we teamed up with that.

I noticed two themes: the reading and the

drinking. How much is that a part of your life, and how much is that a part of the “lost dream,” Bruce Springsteen kind of thing?

It’s definitely Bruce Springsteen. I don’t know if it’s so much lost dream. It’s just pure nature and habit. I’m a barfly. I’m married but I don’t have any kids and it’s the way of life that we’ve chosen to live by and that’s where we find our friends.

You gotta face it: me and a lot of my friends, we’re just old burnouts hanging out, trying to keep things real as far as our parts go, whether writer or actor. Trying to keep youthful. Maybe we all have drinking problems, but I don’t think that’s the case.

What’s your favorite bar?

The Skylark in Pilsen. I think they should put a plaque where I sit, because if anyone

working there has children I’m definitely putting them through college. It’s a great place; it’s where our friends hang out; it’s our gathering place. It’s at 22nd and Halsted. My favorite place in Bridgeport specifically is Bernice’s.

Are you an artist first, or are you a Chicagoan first?

Love that question. I think I’m a Chicagoan first because you can’t help but be influenced by your surroundings, especially if you’ve been in those surroundings your whole life. So I’m more of a White Sox fan than I am a Nelson Algren fan.

I don’t know if I’ll ever again specifically write a book about Chicago, but Chicago will always be present. It’s the place I know where people eat, where people sleep, where people drink, where people get into car accidents. It’s my reality. ¬

JANUARY 22, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

For the Birds Nora Schultz’s “Parrottree—Building for Bigger than Real” at the Renaissance Society

BY EMMA COLLINS

N

ora Schultz describes her exhibition “Parrottree—Building for Bigger than Real” as being about “superstructure,” the set of dominant principles, beliefs, or ideas that arise from more fundamental realities. As she said at a talk during the show’s opening reception, “Parrottree” is “struggling with being under pressure of any kind of superstructure. I am trying to deal with it, trying to hack the system.”

Schultz’s work invokes the physical notion of a superstructure: most of her pieces hang from the elaborate metal framework that spans the length of the Renaissance Society’s ceiling, and viewers must crane their necks to examine the suspended objects. Most of them are large pieces of cardboard, metal mesh, and weathered, paint-flecked wood. Some are blank, and others are inscribed with crudely hewn phrases such as “extend retract,” “parrot eye,” and “am I a machine dreaming I am a mind or am I a mind dreaming.”

Her work also heavily references avian life, particularly Hyde Park’s itinerant parrot colony and the peregrine falcon. Recorded parrot calls echo through the room, and in one corner a window—with glass panel intact—is propped up horizontally on four wooden stilts. The accompanying plaque denotes it as the former structure behind which a peregrine falcon made its nest.

Schultz brings these items out of their normal contexts in part to illuminate the artistry of creation. By displaying objects that are traditionally viewed as materials for creation—like planks of wood and sheets of metal mesh—as completed installations, Schultz exalts in the artistic process rather than the product.

She also uproots these objects in order to break own their superstructure—that is, the meaning they derive from their original, elemental functions. By removing the window from the context of the peregrine falcon’s home, she dissolves its invented significance as a place of refuge for a bird.

Schultz leaves it up to her viewers to create their own superstructure for this object as it exists within the context of the gallery.

10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

tom van eynde

The Hyde Park parrots embody such superstructural upheaval. The parrots, native to South America, mysteriously appeared in Hyde Park in the early 1970s and have since thrived despite the inclement weather. They reinvented Chicago’s unforgiving urban landscape by making it their home, imbuing windowsills, trees, and buildings with new and unexpected meaning.

Schultz’s work challenges traditional conceptions of superstructure by playing with the context of everyday objects; unfortunately, however, the works’ concepts also function as a crutch. Schultz’s most complex conceptual pieces are also her least interesting works of art. Perhaps Schultz believes that the intricate ideological framework underlying her efforts absolves

¬ JANUARY 22, 2014

her of any responsibility to create aesthetically interesting pieces.

Schultz’s work provides little physical evidence for the ideas it attempts to convey. One prominently featured piece is a newspaper clipping that describes the latest technological gadgets. Circled in black pen are pictures of an exercise-tracking smartphone app and a camera-carrying drone. This piece seems only tangentially connected to the larger theme of the show in that it details a camera capable of providing a “birds-eye view,” and relates to the show’s recurring avian imagery. Beyond this tenuous connection, however, the piece is neither conceptually relevant nor visually stimulating. The rest of the exhibit is similarly opaque. To a casual viewer, the sparse arrangement of industrial materials

and slabs of wood would surely be incomprehensible.

The exhibition, by presenting an unconventional collection of objects and labeling them as art, attempts to break free from the prevailing art-world superstructure, which sets the standard for what art is supposed to be. Schultz’s attempt, however, demonstrates that success does not necessarily result from transgression. The Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Ave., fourth floor. Through February 23. Tuesday-Friday, 10am-5pm; Saturday-Sunday, noon-5pm. Free. (773)702-8670. renaissancesociety.org

VISUAL ARTS

An Admirable Assault on Canvas Steve Sherrell’s “Mixed Bag” at 33 Contemporary

BY STEPHEN URCHICK

S

teve Sherrell’s “Mixed Bag” is less jumbled than the title lets on. The new exhibition, hosted by 33 Contemporary at the Zhou B Art Center in Bridgeport, puts bold outlining and a canvas’s meticulous, geometric subdivision into correspondence with canvases removed from their stretchers, literally slit apart and stitched together again. Insistently, distinct shapes and broad fields of color contrast with canvases that are dismounted and distressed, minimal and morbid. But Sherrell’s digitally rendered “Mashups” anchor the exhibition by proposing a compromise—looking less consciously contrived, but remaining unscarred, intensely intricate, and exuberantly colorful.

This colorful exuberance makes locating the titular bliss in “Where Bliss Grows” something of a riddle, although it still belongs among “Mixed Bag’s” more conventional pieces. Tall, varicolored, and roughly rectilinear forms rise toward the center of a pale, swirling rose and white background. Three scythe-like tendrils sprout out from between each form’s firm boundaries. Sherrell applies his colors thinly, leaving clear signs of his painterly hand in unsuppressed brushstrokes. He vigorously works the surface, developing abundant half-tones. The effect is dreamy.

Yet given the painting’s fleshy hues, sharp angles, and sinister, vine-like coils, the dream more properly becomes a lurid, candy-coated fever. The taut, fruiting bulb, the glistening, dangling blood-droplet, the pink pustules all suggest a suspiciously sinister brand of bliss inside. Sweet boils and anxious euphoria—the title is deceptively assertive.

“Bliss” more or less shares these well-defined and vibrant swathes, its deliberate but unfinished brushwork, with the other works of the exhibition: “Adventures in Bubble Land,” “Leela,” and “Gary in the Park,” among others. Sherrell forgoes preparatory sketches. “These are all done immediately,” he says. “I do all the drawing on the canvas.”

Sherrell’s more conventional canvases all seemingly preface “Ten Years Gone,” a wall-sized summation, or a proof of con-

cept. It draws on “Leela’s” stains, scratchings, and dune-like accumulations; one clef-like line echoes the tendrils from “Bliss” with smooth, curving gravity. As balanced, measured, studied, and purposefully abstract as the smaller pieces that precede it, “Ten Years Gone” reads like a symphony score in its huge, synthetic coordination.

Yet Sherrell appears to call out his own tidiness and clean draftsmanship by following up with a satire of compositional purity. Turning past “Ten Years’” corner reveals a canvas with a white circle on a cream background with a single vermillion gash. If “Ten Years” evokes the orchestra, “Formal Painting with Wound” is a pure harmony with a lone, vindictive “Hee!” shouted in. “Formalist work was pushing everything out of the work,” said Sherrell.

“So I left a little jab.” Works like “Bliss,” “Leela,” or “Ten Years” hardly demonstrate that same singular, neurotic attentiveness to the elements of art. A naval mine crafted from canvas and a painting hinting at an Iron Cross both accompany “Wound”— and come off as mildly belligerent. They inaugurate a series of works assembled in counterargument to the exhibition’s first half. Restricted to grays, reds, whites, weaker beiges and yellows, slight shades of similar colors, their sparser palettes rebuke the expansive range of pieces like “Bliss.”

One such piece, “Pin the Tail” assaults the canvas itself.

Sherrell cut away material from the left-hand side of what was initially an unstretched patch of fabric and transplanted it to the bottom and right-hand side. “Pin the Tail” thus acquired its titular appendage, dangling several inches down, and painted a sinister crimson. A donkey’s rear quarter is sketched onto a graphite grey field that darkens around the canvas’s edges. Parallel lines converge on a human gunnery target, evoking crosshairs and laser-lighting the piece’s irony. Sherrell remarks that slicing up his medium “makes it abnormal.” “It gets me away from the rectangle.”

Free-form canvases represent the next frontier for works like “Bliss,” for figures as tightly drawn upon a canvas as the canvas

“Mashups”

by Steve Sherrell stephen urchick

is across its stretcher. In “Icicle” a dripping mass denies pictorial representation.

Sherrell shapes the canvas after its subject by attaching tapering strips to the piece’s bottom, each plastered thickly down with dripping paint-rivulets. The medium no longer contains the form, but assumes it.

It chucks stiff, wooden support altogether, whether from 2B pencil or external carpentry.

Sherrell’s “Mashups” might nominally combine influences from late artists (Monet, Van Gogh, Hiroshige, et al.), yet they also effectively reconcile the exhibition’s subtle thesis and antithesis. Sherrell, himself a digital artist since 1991, manipulated low-quality images of canonized paintings to produce the “Mashups” in their names.

Sherrell credits a certain poetry to resurrecting digital garbage (“It’s not typical trash”). In one “Mashup,” a central “V” punctures two nested yellow and orange rectangles. From the “V,” waters issue upwards and out, with ascending clouds and spray. Drafting the work electronically and applying it to the canvas mechanically obliterates traces of the human hand.

While as visually complex as something like “Ten Years,” and configured around sharp and unforgettable lines, it elides conspicuously intensive brushwork and seemingly blasts through its geometry, even though Sherrell elects this time to keep his medium intact.

It’s ultimately fitting that Sherrell’s love of line would draw a divisive boundary through his exhibition. His works align along stylistic contentiousness. “Mixed Bag” might toss studied and adamantly drafted abstractions together with semi-satirical and frame-breaking innovations, yet it accommodates a brief rebellion within the space’s scarce square-footage. The exhibition directs us toward the appealing middle ground of the “Mashups”, resolving a pointed argument from amidst the mix. 33 Contemporary Gallery at Zhou B. Arts, 1029 W. 35th St. Through February 15.

Monday-Saturday, 10am-5pm; also by appointment. Free. (708)837-4534.

33collective.com

JANUARY 22, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

Textural Harmony Anthony Pateras’s experimental compositions

BY JACK NUELLE

T

he Performance Penthouse in the Logan Center is packed. Berlin-based experimental musician Anthony Pateras is in the wings, as part of a joint presentation through the Lampo Collective and the University of Chicago’s own Smart Museum, and the promise of his performance has drawn this crowd through the mire. Pateras himself is slight, with a sparse shock of black hair that has a tendency to stick straight up, almost comically. Standing half-shadowed against the soundboard while Andrew Fenchel from Lampo introduces him, he could be just another inquisitive concertgoer, at least until he steps onto the stage. Pateras remains unimposing until the very moment his fingers touch the keys of the grand piano, framed starkly against the rain streaming down the windows behind it.

What emerges is nothing short of spectacular—unique, jarring, and wholly original, not unlike Pateras himself. Born in Melbourne, Australia in 1979, Pateras was classically trained in piano until the age of seventeen. After “a complete detachment and disillusionment with playing other people’s music,” he explained in a post-show interview, he started writing and composing on his own, for himself. His signature repetitive and percussive style is heavily influenced by avant-garde composers like John Cage, Mortan Feldman, and Iannis Xenakis. For Pateras, the American Feldman and the Greek-French Xenakis seem to frame his cultural existence. He says that he likes “to think that’s kind of an Australian thing, ’cause we are pretty much in between Europe and America in cultur12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

al influence. I’ve got my guy in Europe and my guy in the States.”

The first piece Pateras performs begins quickly and continues at that breakneck pace for the entire, nearly forty-five-minute arrangement. The arrangement is, at its heart, simple: few notes, played close together, over and over without ceasing, wrist-numbingly fast. He starts low on the keyboard, and then suddenly switches high at several points, the chiming of the upper octaves producing a woodblock effect.

This result is extraordinary. As his fingers hit the keys over and over, the sounds of his fingers, and in turn, the sounds of the hammers hitting the strings of the piano slowly become audible over the course of the performance. Toward the end, the overtones produced by this pounding, like the wobbling of a great steel sheet, match almost perfectly with the whirring of the rotors of the medical helicopter landing on the hospital over his shoulder. He uses the entire piano as his instrument, something he discovered “quite by accident, through experimentation, and realizing one day that the hammers provide this complete other textural harmony.” The small, slightly stooped figure of Pateras before he started playing is gone. Now, as he whips off his spectacles and wipes his brow, he becomes magnified, quite like the increasingly eerie drone rising from the eighty-eight keys in front of him. When it finally comes to a close, he slumps momentarily, stunned, before rising to wearily bow to the audience.

His second piece, done as an encore of sorts, provides some relief from the avalanche of sound of the first piece. It is

¬ JANUARY 22, 2014

courtesy of the artist

almost a tone poem, sparse, flowing, and delicate. Neither of the pieces have names, intentionally so, but their anonymity works—it seems a shame to give name to something so elemental.

The son of two different continents, Pateras says he was driven to Berlin by “an impossibility of life” in Melbourne, where the cost of living is high, and because, as he concludes somewhat cryptically, “Melbourne doesn’t want me.” His shared homelands, as well as his involvement in both electric and acoustic projects, make him difficult to nail down, both in genre and location. This performance was his first

at the UofC, and only his second in the United States through the Chicago-based, electronic music collective Lampo. He operates on the fringe, which may be as he likes it.

Pateras plays for himself; his brand of music is not necessarily palatable. It is difficult, at points, to sit through. But it is, in the end, the summit of both his musical and artistic visions, and that passion comes across in his raging and powerful playing style. This dynamism carries the listener through, and, as shown by the countless audience members who congratulated him as they filed out, that was enough. ¬

MUSIC

Going to California At Riff, a tribute to departing Save Money member Nico Segal

BY JACK NUELLE

Segal’s 2013 EP, “Donnie Trumpet.”

O

nly open since Thanksgiving 2013, Riff seems a fitting place for a gathering of some of Chicago’s most up-and-coming young musicians. Owner Danny Bonilla is enthusiastic about the club’s future, and the place holds the same undercurrent of rampant young success that accompanies many of the young artists performing here. Situated on Michigan Avenue, twenty blocks south of the Loop, Riff still has that fresh new performance space/bar/recording studio smell—a mix of expensive furnishings, ambition, and a three dollar coat check.

Riff is on the rise, and has attracted national acts like Mariah Carey, Beyoncé, and Maroon 5. This past Friday, though, the club demonstrated its local roots. Past and present members of the Chicago-based Save Money hip-hop crew were on the three-act bill. The concert was meant as a farewell to one of their own, Nico Segal, before he heads west to find new opportunities in Los Angeles. Segal’s show, as part of the farewell, brought together many different participants of the Chicago hip-hop, poetry, art, and music scenes, and served as a testament to the interconnected nature of the Chicago music and arts movements.

The venue itself is the latest extension of an existing enterprise, Pressure Point Recording Studios, which has been active in Chicago since the mid-nineties. Riff forms the bottom of a three-story venue, with a converted speakeasy on the top floor and a studio on the second floor where live acts can be recorded as they perform.

That studio is equipped with an SSL K9000 console, one of only seven in the country. While the state-of-the-art equipment has appealed to big name acts like Mariah Carey and Beyoncé, Bonilla said, “We were built for live music first and foremost, and I want to keep it that way.”

“To be honest with you, I’d prefer to have local artists come through here, Chicago based artists,” he explained. “It’s always fun for the staff and everyone to get famous people in here, it raises the profile of the studio, but at the end of the day I’d prefer to have a local artist come in here, and jam out.”

The night’s headliner was the soon-departing Nico Segal, a.k.a. Donnie Trumpet, a utility player from many Save Money projects now embarking on his own career.

His final show was also the first in which he performed his own songs. The tone of departure was pervasive: all the acts were friends of Segal’s, and Segal’s departure was tinged with sadness for many of them.

Malcolm London, MC of the event, talked about how “this event is like one of those extreme bittersweet moments.”

Lane Beckstrom, bassist from the opening act who played with now defunct Chicago group Kids These Days, summed it up as “a double edged sword, because he’s leaving, but he’s also going to a place where there’s gonna be a lot of opportunity for him and it’s gonna be awesome. So we’re gonna miss him, but he’s going somewhere to do a lot of cool stuff.”

Beckstrom and Macie Stewart, also

formerly of Kids These Days, were the first musical performers of the night, and stayed true to the genre-bending nature of their shared musical background. Melding soul with funky walking bass lines and comped piano jazz riffs, layered with close vocal harmonies and Stewart’s soaring voice, they wove twee pop, a jazz combo, and the crooning of St. Vincent and Norah Jones into a soothing sonic garment.

Next came Chicago female rapper Noname Gypsy, who was featured on Chance the Rapper’s “Lost.” Armed with the signature Save Money surrealistic drone, biting lyrics and commentary, and a magnetic stage presence, Noname comes from the same mold as fellow South Side artists Chance the Rapper and Vic Mensa.

Despite a few flubbed lyrics, her magnetism put the entire audience on her side.

Segal capped off the show.

“It’s the culmination of a long process from going from a lot of different projects and things to really centralizing and becoming my own thing, and my own form of music,” he said.

Segal was a multifaceted dynamo.

Part bandleader, part multi-instrumentalist, Segal directed his tight five-piece backing band with professional aplomb as he alternatively spat out ringing accents on his trumpet and padded the bottom of his arrangements with close keyboard rhythms. He shared solos with fellow keyboardist Peter Cottontail who loomed over his synth console wearing two floppy rabbit ears, as well as his marimba player,

Thaddeus Tukes, whose mallets became a blur as he hammered out cascading runs on the keys. Segal’s ragged yet soulful croon, sometimes lifting into falsetto, lay over the top of everything.

Kevin Coval, creator of the Louder Than a Bomb poetry festival, introduced Segal with a poem that worked both as praise for Segal and a send-off to California. Segal himself brought on Jamila Woods and Owen Hill, both from the Chicago alt-soul/pop outfit Milo and Otis, to provide backing vocals and bass. Liam Cunningham, guitarist and vocalist for Kids These Days, as well as a new project with Mazie Stewart and Lane Beckstrom, wailed on a cover of “Something (In The Way She Moves)” by The Beatles. Maceo Haymes, from indie funk/soul group the O’Mys, turned the Riff into a Havana nightclub with his gritty Spanish guest vocals, and trombonist J.P. Floyd, who played with both Kids These Days and Frank Ocean, ended the show with a languid snippet of Chance the Rapper’s “Good Ass Intro.” The theme of the evening was collaboration even in the midst of departure.

Together the musicians and artists created a joyful shared stage.

Caught by his merch table after the show, Segal expressed his loyalty to Chicago. “Save Money, to me,” he said, “is my friends, a group of all my friends. I’m putting Chicago on my back wherever I go.” ¬

JANUARY 22, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

MLK DAY VISUAL ARTS Concealed Carry Look at the people sitting around you. What are the odds that one of them has a gun hidden inside their coat?

In Illinois, the odds might have just gotten higher. The Firearm Concealed Carry Act officially took effect on January 1, making Illinois the last state in the country to allow residents to carry concealed weapons in public.

The Experimental Station has jumped into the debate over this new legislation with a two-week art exhibit featuring over a dozen contributors, including E.C. Brown, Russ White, Jennifer Ray, and the Kite Collective.

Citizens who want to add their voices to the debate can attend two evenings of public conversation at the Station, hosted by Steve Edwards of Chicago Public Radio (January 14 and 22, both 7pm-9 pm). You won’t know if any of the viewers are armed, but the exhibit itself will definitely be packing heat. Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Through January 23. Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-6pm. Free. (773)241-6044. experimentalstation.org (Sharon Lurye)

WORDLESS!

Hope in an Age of Crisis Reclaiming King’s legacy of activism

BY OLIVIA STOVICEK

“W

e are saying that something is wrong with capitalism,” Reverend Dwight Gardner, president of the grassroots network IIRON, called out to a crowd of 2,000 people. “There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”

St. Michael the Archangel Church, at 83rd and South Shore, was bursting with people this past Sunday. But this was no Mass, and those words were not Gardner’s own. He was quoting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the keynote address for what has recently become an annual South Side tradition on the weekend of Dr. King’s birth. This year’s event, titled “Hope in an Age of Crisis: Reclaiming Dr. King’s Radical Vision for Economic Equality”—or simply “#RadicalMLK”—was the largest and most galvanizing yet.

The event was organized by IIRON and The People’s Lobby, a group that uses both community organizing and direct political action to advance progressive goals. They discussed issues of economic, environmental, and social justice, characterizing them as driven largely by corporate power. With similar passion to that of 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

Gardner, and invoking King just as often, they eloquently laid out the terms of today’s inequalities. Toby Chow, one of the leaders of IIRON, emphasized that two-thirds of corporations in Illinois pay no state income tax, while programs such as Medicaid face cuts. The Rev. Darice Wright talked about seeing residents of the homeless shelter at her church wake up in the morning to go to their full-time jobs, and urged those assembled to say “that ain’t right” to the fact that some companies that receive government subsidies do not pay their workers a living wage. Others explored the topics of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and mass incarceration.

The energy was palpable. Every so often a gospel choir would burst into an interlude of song, and the speakers’ points were punctuated by whoops and shouts of agreement from the audience. And it certainly didn’t hurt that, sitting in the church, one could look around and see all two thousand people sitting in one cavernous room. But what stood out most was the way this display was coupled with the idea of action with “the ninety-nine percent” at the helm. Workers’ justice activists and environmentalists alike described the day

¬ JANUARY 22, 2014

as a day to take back democracy and put people ahead of profit. Accordingly, most of the speeches were paired with calls for elected officials to come to the stage and publicly declare their support for particular steps to address the problems that had been outlined.

The commitments made by the officials were significant: State Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie, the House majority leader, said she would support a bill for corporate tax transparency. A representative of Governor Pat Quinn said he would commit to implementing a climate action plan and strengthening fracking regulations (his office had only come to a final decision earlier that day). State Reps. Christian Mitchell and Will Davis both made commitments to support a requirement for companies that receive state subsidies to pay their workers higher wages.

Just as important, though, were the calls on ordinary citizens to get involved in fighting for these causes. As everyone sang “We Shall Overcome” together at the meeting’s end, the collective fervor made it clear that many had been motivated by the event to take part in that liberation. ¬

Preceding the Chicago premiere of Art Spiegelman’s newest, coolest brain-child, “WORDLESS!,” an exchange between this acclaimed graphic novelist and UChicago Cinema and Media Studies and Art History Professor Tom Gunning will be getting plenty wordy. After winning the Pulitzer Prize for blurring the line between comics and literature in his graphic novel “Maus,” Spiegelman has called his new project a different sort of “strange creature.” If Friday’s conversation whets your appetite, be ready to return to Logan: the Saturday program combines slides of the earliest graphic stories, lecture, and musical performance into a harmonious yet heterogeneous display of media. Once, a reviewer said that Spiegelman’s work “brought comics out of the toy closet and onto the literature shelves;” but with the creation of “WORDLESS!” he brings the graphic novel into new dimensions, diving right into the cross-hairs of image, sound and word. The performance will feature acclaimed jazz composer Phillip Johnston and new content from Spiegelman titled “Shaping Thought!” Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Conversation Friday, January 24, 4pm-5:30pm; Free. Premiere Saturday, January 25, 3pm and 8pm. $20. (733)702-2787. arts.uchicago.edu (Kristin Zodrow)

Everything Will Be Okay Chicago artist Jerry Koepp’s paintings capture the essence of human experience. He forgoes traditional styles of painting in favor of pure abstraction. His subject matter is visceral, not material. He deals not in physical experiences, but in the emotional life that underlies them. Vast swaths of color, arranged in dramatic chiaroscuro, convey the quintessence of the feelings Koepp chooses to illustrate, untempered by the trappings of the physical world. His work transcends both language and physicality, yet remains fiercely emotionally evocative. In his upcoming exhibition at the Chicago Art Department, Koepp explores transformations spurred by failure. His paintings—through the interplay of color, light, and shadow—trace the deeply human, and deeply relatable, journey from failure to adaptation to growth.

Koepp’s works offer a rare glimpse into the shared inner life of humanity, in a style that is universally understood.

Chicago Art Department, 1932 S. Halsted #100. Hours by appointment. Free. (312)725-4223. chicagoartdepartment. org (Emma Collins)

Where the Wind Blows, Pt. 2 “Keep the art of sign painting alive!” wrote Chez Perry, one of Chicago’s longest working sign painters, on his 2012 Kickstarter campaign created to find work in a medium that technology has made more rare. The signature handcrafted folk artistry behind logos, wall menus and bar signs has gradually dissipated in Chicago. Luckily, in the second part of Ugly Stepsister Gallery’s ongoing exhibition “Where the Wind Blows, pt. 2,” attendees can appreciate the subtle, varied, and distinctly human quality of the work of many premier sign artists and collectives still making beautifully crafted, hand-painted signs in the city. The bold design and painterly expertise behind these works is on full show, demonstrating the unique qualities of individually crafted signs—qualities that, as “Where the Wind Blows” aims to prove, cannot be easily replaced. Ugly Stepsister Gallery, 1750 S. Union

ARTS CALENDAR Ave. Through February 9th. Saturday-Sunday, noon-6pm, or by appointment. (312)927-7546 (Julian Nebreda)

The Fifth Dimension The fabled “fifth dimension” has piqued the interest of artists since at least the early twentieth century. While there is no consensus about what the fifth dimension actually is, the Logan Center for the Arts has invited seven artists to install their works in the Logan Center Gallery gradually over the course of two months. The seven artists’ works appear sequentially, each a few days after the last. With pieces that promise to push past the gallery’s very walls, “The Fifth Dimension” claims not to be an exhibit about the fifth dimension, but the fifth dimension itself. Just like the differing conceptions of the fifth dimension, the exhibit space changes as each artist installs his or her work, offering up a constantly evolving interpretation of the fifth dimension as a concept. If nothing else, the exhibit will certainly travel through time and space, promising equal parts whimsy and perceptual shifts. Logan Center for the Arts, Logan Center Gallery, 915 E. 60th St. Through February 16.

Monday-Saturday, 8am-10pm; Sunday, 11am-8pm. Free.

(773)702-2787. arts.uchicago.edu (Paige Pendarvis)

Parrottree The Renaissance Society will soon be home to a new solo exhibition by Berlin-based artist Nora Schultz.

The first show curated at the Renaissance Society by new Executive Director and Chief Curator Solveig Øvstebø, “Parrottree—Building for Bigger Than Real” combines found material from Schultz’s studio and the exhibition space itself into sculptures and functional printing devices. The sculptures add depth to themselves by presenting the opportunity to make two-dimensional works out of the three-dimensional—Schultz uses her found-material presses and printers to churn out 2D art within the space, often in front of an audience. With related events including poetry readings, concerts, and guided walkthroughs led by curator Hamza Walker, Nora Schultz’s first American solo show is bound to leave its mark. The Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Ave., fourth floor. Through February 23. Tuesday-Friday, 10am5pm; Saturday-Sunday, noon-5pm. Free. (773)702-8670. renaissancesociety.org (Katryce Lassle)

Bindu A seemingly nondescript and simple dot, the “Bindu” is in fact a powerful Indian symbol that represents the point at which creation begins and may become unity. In a collaborative exhibition at the Bridgeport Art Center named after the bindu, three artists of both Indian and American descent explore the symbol’s deeper meaning in a collection of works that spans folk art, contemporary printmaking, sculpture, and photography. Through depictions of classic Indian iconography like the Kalighat Cat and Ganesh, the elephant god of wisdom, as well as more modern silk screen interpretations of these symbols, artists search for unity between a clash of cultures and customs—between India and America, past and future, tradition and modernity. Bridgeport Art Center, 1200 W. 35th Street. Through February 28th. Monday-Saturday, 8am-6pm; Sunday, 8am-12pm. Free. (773)2473000. bridgeportart.comi (Amelia Dmowska)

STAGE & SCREEN Picasso and the Mayor In celebration of the forty-seventh anniversary of the Chicago Picasso’s dedication, South Side Projections will be screening two films about public sculpture, as well as hosting a related discussion with local filmmaker Tom Palazzolo and Art Institute educator Annie Morse.

The films promise to be no less enthralling in their brevity: WNET’s “The Chicago Picasso” (1967, 60 min), and Palazzolo’s satirical “The Bride Stripped Bare” (1967, 12 min), each from 16mm film—the latter was shot at the dedication ceremony itself. Palazollo and Morse’s discussion is to concern the story of Richard J. Daley’s push for public art in Chicago; it promises to be richly factual, soberly edifying, and perhaps a laugh-riot. Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219-21 S. Morgan St. Thursday, January 23, 7pm. $5 suggested donation. coprosperitysphere.org (Linus Recht)

Mélange-1st Edition In 2011, Chicago-based performance group 3 Card Molly carried a giant ball of newspaper around Wicker Park in an attempt to “wrestle with the news of the day.”

Clad in bright red, Seuss-esque costumes and face-paint, the duo of Liz Winfield and Ania Greiner turned the stereotypically elite genre of performance art into an amusing interaction between artist and audience. On January 24, husband-wife duo, ROOMS will fuse 3 Card Molly with the genre-bending Chicago groups Customs and Posterchild to craft an evening of artistic alchemy and multi-media mayhem. Mélange- 1st Edition, is the beginning of a series by ROOMS combining many mediums and genres including dance, film, music, and spoken word. Your high school chemistry teacher would say the combination was unstable, but you’ll be safe behind a pair of beer-goggles. Just try to avoid the sparks. ROOMS Gallery, 1835 S. Halsted. Friday, January 24, 8pm. $10 suggested donation. roomsgallery.com (Rob Sorrell)

Batman @ Doc Films The Dark Knight trilogy is so passé. True Batman devotees know that it was Tim Burton’s 1989 film that first portrayed the caped crusader in all his sinister and mysterious glory. Gone were the days of spandex suits and campy jokes. Instead, Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson star in a darker take on one of the most beloved superhero stories. As part of their Tim Burton series, Doc Films, in partnership with First Aid Comics, will be hosting a special screening of Tim Burton’s Batman on January 24. Stick around afterwards for a Q & A with the original screenwriter, Sam Hamm, and a pop-up comic book shop, in case the movie alone wasn’t enough to satiate your comic cravings. Max Palevsky Cinema, 1212 E 59th St. Friday, January 24, 7 pm. $5. docfilms.uchicago.edu (Olivia Dorow Hovland)

Seven Guitars Following the lives of six friends gathered in Pittsburgh in 1948 for the funeral of a seventh, August Wilson’s “Seven Guitars” is being resurrected this month by Court Theatre’s artist in residence, Ron OJ Parson. (See full review on page 13) Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Through February 9. See website for showtimes. $15-45.

(773)753-4472. courttheatre.org (Lillian Selonick)

Beethoven, maybe Mozart, or Debussy. Have you ever wondered, though, if there are great composers living, breathing, and brushing their teeth in the mornings today? The answer is “yes, but…” there are few orchestral establishments willing to feature them. The Chicago Modern Orchestra Project takes that risk, and on Wednesday, January 22nd they are featuring some fresh compositions and artists to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Though the project is mainly committed to the modern classical tradition, the group will also be lead by Chicago jazz legends Ernest Dawkins and Mwata Bowden. These highly esteemed musicians will be performing specially commissioned works along with inspiring music by composers Jack Dubowsky and George Walker, and John E. Zammitpace. Community youth will be part of the celebration as well, with performances by the Kenwood Academy String Ensemble.

Renée Baker and Dr. Keith Hampton direct. South Shore Cultural Center, 7059 South Shore Drive. January 22, 7pm. Free. (773)256-0419. chicagoparkdistrict.com/parks/ South-Shore-Cultural-Center (Emily Holland)

com (Jake Bittle)

Jazz at the House of Bing

Young Dro

The self-proclaimed “rebirth of jazz in South Shore” happens every week at the House of Bing. House of Bing is a Chinese restaurant and lounge that hosts the Mo Better Jazz Chicago collective every Friday. Mo Better, established in 2012, attempts to “give back to the South Shore community through the gift of music.” The organization was founded by Joseph Stroter and Darius Lawrence, two longtime residents of South Shore and organizers of the Jazz Unites festival. With free parking, and a “wonderful diverse crowd,” and a vibrant atmosphere at the House of Bing—home to the “best Chinese Food in South Shore”—what’s not to like? House of Bing, 6930 South Shore Drive. Fridays, 7:30pm-10:30pm. $10 suggested donation. (773) 363-5400. http://hobsouthshore.

In what is sure to be a truly peerless musical experience, Young Dro, a trap-rap export from Atlanta, will be performing at Reggies in February. Dro, who sounds something like a far less intelligible 2 Chainz, is known for such songs as “FDB (Fuck Dat Bih)” and the ever-popular “Shoulder Lean,” featuring T.I. He’s released almost a dozen mixtapes and two full studio albums, the most recent of which was “High Times.” He is the mastermind behind lyrics like, “I’m in the hotel with two lesbians, where the fuck y’all at?” It’ll cost you only 18 dollars to get your lean on; these tickets are a steal. See you there. Reggies, 2105 S. State St. Sunday, February 5th, 7:30pm. 18+. $18, (312)949-0120. http:// www.reggieslive.com/venue/music-joint (Jake Bittle)

Strut Haiti CD Release Party with Joe Bryl and Hugh Mendez Chicago’s superhuman sound connoisseur, Joe Bryl, is back to his old tricks at Maria’s. This Thursday he will be hosting a CD release party for Hugo Mendez’s “Haiti Direct,” a compilation of Haitian dance music from the sixties and seventies. Mendez, head of the Sofrito Sound System record label, has put together an excellent collection of some extremely underexposed Carribean music. Haitian twoubadou music often gets overlooked in favor of Jamaican reggae and Trinidadian calypso; Mendez and Bryl hope to reassert the relevance of Haiti’s distinctive Caribbean sound. Come listen in and dance your ass off with two of the most erudite and funky DJs in the nation. Maria’s Packaged Goods and Community Bar, 960 W. 31st Street. Thursday, January 30th, January 30, 8 PM. 773.890.0588. www.community-bar.com (Zach Goldhammer)

The Weekly Show The Jazz Showcase plays host to a new weekly variety show aptly named The Weekly Show. With five artists performing each show, no two acts are the same. Creator and producer Monte LaMonte has assembled a vast range of poets, singers, comedians, musicians, storytellers, adventurers, and acts that are all of the above and then some. Each week brings a new host to produce a show with their choice of performers, making each show unique. All acts are Chicagoans hand-picked by the host, adding their own style to a rising South Side entertainment movement for the low-low admission price of free. The Jazz Showcase, 806 S Plymouth Ct. Through February 15. Saturday, 4pm. Free. (Mark Hassenfratz)

Out Loud The trope of the oddball pairing—two individuals with personalities so diametrically opposed as to appear unworkable—has long been used to challenge traditionally-held beliefs pertaining to notions of familiarity and companionship. Do it right and you get chicken and waffles. Force something that isn’t meant to be and, well, there was that one time Lou Reed did an album with Metallica. In OUT LOUD, writers Ray Proctor and Olivia Dawson attempt to tap into this idea of beauty in the midst of apparent discordance through a series of “vignettes of conversation” between a straight, socially-conservative woman and her friend, a gay, African-American man. The primary topic of conversation is political correctness; specifically what one ought and ought not say out loud in public, witty corollaries in the form of discussions about race, sex and identity.

Chock-full of verbal sparring, OUT LOUD promises a strong opening to the Eta Creative Arts Foundation’s schedule for the New Year. Eta Creative Arts Foundation, 7558 S. South Chicago Ave. Through March 3. Friday, 8pm; Saturday, 3pm. $30. Student, senior, and group discounts available. etacreativearts.org (Arman Sayani)

MUSIC Let The Thunder Roll!: Celebrating the Legacy of Martin Luther King When most people say they “went to the symphony,” they mean they went to hear the works of Ravel or

WHPK Rock Charts WHPK 88.5 FM is a nonprofit community radio station at the University of Chicago. Once a week the station’s music directors collect a book of playlist logs from their Rock-format DJs, tally up the plays of albums added within the last few months, and rank them according to popularity that week.

Compiled by Rachel Schastok and Charlie Rock Artist / Album / Record Label 1. CAVE / Threace / Drag City 2. Epicycle / You’re Not Gonna Get It [reissue] / HoZac 3. Sneaky Pinks / I’m Punk / Almost Ready 4. Wooden Shjips / Back to Land / Thrill Jockey 5. Cheap Time / Exit Smile / In the Red 6. The Julie Ruin / Run Fast / TJR/Dischord 7. Gas Rag / Human Rights EP / Beach Impediment 8. Slushy / Candy / Randy 9. Graham Lambkin & Jason Lescalleet / Photographs / Erstwhile 10. Fuzz / Live in San Francisco / Castle Face 11. Bil Vermette / Katha Visions [reissue] / Permanent 12. Today’s Hits / Sex Boys / Randy 13. Pampers / Pampers / In the Red 14. Screaming Females / Tenement and Screaming Females / Recess 15. Potty Mouth / Hell Bent / Old Flame

JANUARY 22, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

arts.uchicago.edu UChicagoArts

FIRST MONDAYS JAZZ Free, 7 pm, at the Arts Incubator 301 E Garfield Blvd at 55th + Prairie Feb 6: Yaw Agyeman Mar 6: Nicole Mitchell’s Ice Crystals Apr 7: Dana Hall’s Polyglot

SECOND TUESDAYS JAZZ Free, 7:30 pm, at the Logan Center 915 E 60th St at 60th + Drexel Feb 11: Justefan (vibraphone) Mar 11: Robert Irving III (piano) and guests

MORE JAZZ at UChicago

Jazz Workshop with composer Phillip Johnston Free, 1 pm, Jan 24 Logan Center

MLK Week 59th Street Jazz Concert

Art Spiegelman + Phillip Johnston’s WORDLESS!

Sat, Jan 25, 3pm and 8pm Logan Center, Performance Hallll

General $20 / Students $10 $10-20, 8 pm, Jan 24 International House

$10-20, 3+8 pm, Jan 25 Logan Center

ticketsweb.uchicago.edu | 773.702.ARTS

Media sponsor:

773 702 ARTS 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JANUARY 22, 2014

Presented by the Logan Center in partnership with Hillary Chute with the support of UChicago Arts, UChicago’s Humanities Division Visiting Committee, the Adelyn Russell Bogert Fund of the Franke Institute for the Humanities, Arts Council, the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture, Critical Inquiry, Chicago Center for Jewish Studies, and the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. Additional support from the Departments of Art History, Cinema & Media Studies, English Languages & Literature, Music, and Visual Arts.