January 24, 2018 by South Side Weekly

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Logan Center Gallery • Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts • 915 E 60th St Chicago IL 60637

THE MYTH

January 26

Mike Cloud —

Blackstone Bicycle Works

Weekly Bike Sale Every Saturday at 12pm Wide selection of refurbished bikes! (most bikes are between $120 & $250)

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March 11

OF EDUCATION

Blackstone Bicycle Works is a bustling community bike shop that each year empowers over 200 boys and girls from Chicago’s south side—teaching them mechanical skills, job skills, business literacy and how to become responsible community members. In our year-round ‘earn and learn’ youth program, participants earn bicycles and accessories for their work in the shop. In addition, our youths receive after-school tutoring, mentoring, internships and externships, college and career advising, and scholarships. Hours Tuesday - Friday 1pm - 6pm 12pm - 5pm Saturday

773 241 5458 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637

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SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent nonprofit newsprint magazine written for and about neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. We publish in-depth coverage of the arts and issues of public interest alongside oral histories, poetry, fiction, interviews, and artwork from local photographers and illustrators. The South Side Weekly is dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists. Volume 5, Issue 14 Editor-in-Chief Hafsa Razi Managing Editors Julia Aizuss, Andrew Koski Directors of Staff Support Baci Weiler Community Outreach Jasmin Liang Senior Editors Christian Belanger, Mari Cohen, Olivia Stovicek Politics Editor Adia Robinson Education Editor Rachel Kim Stage & Screen Editor Nicole Bond Visual Arts Editor Rod Sawyer Food & Land Editor Emeline Posner Music Editor Christopher Good Contributing Editors Maddie Anderson, Elaine Chen, Mira Chauhan, Bridget Newsham, Adam Przybyl, Rachel Schastok, Sam Stecklow, Michael Wasney, Yunhan Wen Data Editor Jasmine Mithani Radio Editor Erisa Apantaku Radio Hosts Andrew Koski Olivia Obineme Sam Larsen Social Media Editors Bridget Newsham, Sam Stecklow Visuals Editor Ellen Hao Deputy Visuals Editor Lizzie Smith Photography Editor Jason Schumer Layout Editor Baci Weiler Staff Writers: Elaine Chen, Ashvini Kartik-Narayan, Michael Wasney Fact Checkers: Abigail Bazin, Sam Joyce, Bridget Newsham, Adam Przybyl, Hafsa Razi, Sam Stecklow, Rebecca Stoner, Tiffany Wang Staff Photographers: Denise Naim, Jason Schumer, Luke Sironski-White Staff Illustrators: Zelda Galewsky, Natalie Gonzalez, Courtney Kendrick, Turtel Onli, Raziel Puma Webmaster

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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 Land Versus the Library While there may be some who consider the Obama Presidential Center (OPC) a boon to the South Side, it’s more than clear by now that many Chicagoans have considered the OPC a source of ire since Jackson Park was selected to be its home. There are those who’ve been calling for a Community Benefits Agreement—a legally binding document that would ensure the economic benefits of the OPC’s construction and establishment really are funneled into the South Side—since the Obama Foundation first broke onto the scene. Others bemoan the blemish such a project would make on Frederick Law Olmsted’s (considered by some to be the father of American landscape architecture) greatest Chicago park. And still more worry about the ecological impacts brought by the OPC’s construction. Now the OPC, along with its public and private allies in the city of Chicago, faces a new obstacle: a lawsuit being brought against the Chicago Parks District by the Coalition to Save Jackson Park for withholding files they requested using the Freedom of Information Act. We’ll see if this latest development does anything to slow down the OPC’s planning and construction process—a process that, judging by the Foundation’s recent selection of a construction manager, has certainly not been delayed. Unjust Deserts We’ve heard about food deserts. But the South Side of Chicago also faces a scarcity issue of a different nature: “pharmacy deserts.” Although this issue gets less attention than its food-related cousin, pharmacy deserts are nonetheless common in communities of color around the country. Chicago’s own lack of drugstores—a lack found overwhelmingly on the South and West Sides—is only getting worse. CVS shuttered eleven of its locations in the last year; Walgreens has shuttered four. Their disappearance has an amplified effect in communities of color because they are also the areas most underserved by public transportation. More and more South and West Side residents are now located more than a mile away from the nearest pharmacy. That mile (or more)—when paired with scant CTA routes, no access to other means of transportation, and bitter winter temperatures— becomes an unbridgeable gap. But bridging is a matter of life and death for those who rely on their prescriptions. A story recently published in the Tribune is helpful for visualizing the problem: the digital version of their article includes two interactive maps, one identifying census tracts in 2015 where there wasn’t a pharmacy at least one mile away (newsflash: these were all on the South, Far South, Southwest, and Southeast Sides of Chicago), and another identifying where there were active pharmacies in 2017 (take a guess where these were concentrated). RIP Fredo For many, he’ll be remembered just as he looked on “Trappin’ Ain’t Dead”: leering at his audience, ink cross between his eyes, middle fingers raised high. He collaborated widely, stole Drake’s girl in a music video, and bludgeoned drill into the mainstream by sheer force of will. But above all, as he spit on “Been Savage,” Fredo Santana was the rare rapper that “don’t need a rap deal [to] show you how the trap feel.” His death only feels more tragic for the peace he finally seemed to be finding—he had started a family and been fighting his addiction to lean in 2017. But, an all-caps presence even in death, Fredo continues to cast a long shadow on the tracks he graced. (Chief Keef has three verses to Fredo’s one on “Beetle Juice,” but Keef ’s all open with “Fredo in the cut”). On “Ring Bells,” he told us his name would ring bells––and it was already clear he’d ring the bell of anyone who crossed him. It’s devastating to hear a funeral toll.

IN THIS ISSUE sensing the city

“Data is power. Who is going to take responsibility for what is there?” david unger.......................................4 city-run englewood clinic abruptly shuttered

“The city has this incessant reliance on private services to address public needs.” bea malsky.........................................8 who’s here and who’s not

“What does it mean to be owned?” erisa apantaku................................10 lorraine’s legacy

“It seems like she was a deeply feeling person even as a child. I feel like she was a trained activist.” dylan petiprin................................12 the staples letters

You can lend a student a pen joyfully, you know? staples.............................................13

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Cover illustration by Kahari Black

JANUARY 24, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

Sensing the City With the Array of Things program, environmental inequity meets urban technology BY DAVID UNGER

t’s called “the nursery.” A half-dozen white-domed machines lie on racks in a high-ceilinged room at Argonne National Laboratory, about half an hour west of the city. With the low, winter afternoon sun hitting them just right, it’s not a stretch to imagine them as eggs warming in an incubator. These little plastic nodes are packed with sensors and backed by millions in federal funding. Eventually, the microwave-sized devices will make their way out to lampposts in Chicago or Detroit or Denver or beyond to quietly measure the world around them. They’ll look for traffic patterns, and they’ll measure sound. They’ll count particles in the air and note the amount of carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and other pollutants present. They’ll measure vibration, magnetic fields, and light. And if all goes according to plan, they’ll send this information back to a database where scientists, city officials, hacktivists, and residents will be able to access and analyze the streams of hyperlocal data. This is the vision of the Array of Things (AoT), a joint initiative between Argonne, a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory operated by a subsidiary of the University of Chicago, the University of Chicago, the City of Chicago, and various technology firms. The project expects to start publishing data from its preliminary nodes to the city’s open-data portal earlier this year, at which point they hope to have a hundred of them up around the city quietly quantifying the traffic, noise, and emissions that make city living unpleasant at least, and environmentally unjust at worst.

DATA VISUALIZATION BY JASMINE MITHANI

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TECHNOLOGY

AoT is the brainchild of Charlie Catlett, the project lead and a senior computer scientist at Argonne. About six years ago, Catlett began exploring how computer science might help address the challenges of mass urbanization. He looked at geographic variation in life-expectancy data and other metrics, and became alarmed by how much a person’s address dictated their chances of suffering asthma or lead poisoning. “Depending on what neighborhood you’re in, your experience living in the city is dramatically different than a neighborhood that’s a mile away,” Catlett said. “This sort of bothered me.” He wanted to help “cities move in the direction of ‘better’—however you want to define ‘better’—that could mean less congestion, better air quality, equitable services and opportunities, etc.” In June 2012, Catlett began several years of conversations with scientists and city officials about what a functional citywide sensor network might look like— what it should measure, and how it might be deployed. In 2015, the National Science Foundation awarded the University of Chicago a $3.1 million grant to support AoT’s development. The effort adopted the name “Array of Things”—a sort of portmanteau of “array telescope” and the “internet of things”—to suggest a distributed but unified, discrete but interconnected, collection of measuring instruments aimed at understanding life in the city. AoT is an early foray into an urban design revolution based on the principle that massive amounts of new data can help identify and repair urban woes. It places Chicago at the epicenter of a global “SmartCity” revolution. Metropolises across the globe seek to adopt AoT or technology like it, hoping that a smarter, more connected, and more analyzed city means a cleaner, safer, and less-congested one. Cities are entering “a fourth stage of modern transformational change,” according to a February 2016 White House report on urban technology. The first came about with the steam engine, the second with the power grid, and the third was made possible by reliable mass transit. Now, the report says, “new physical and digital technologies” offer innovative solutions to twenty-first-century problems. “Information and communication technologies, the proliferation of sensors through the Internet of Things, and

converging data standards are...combining to provide new possibilities for the physical management and the socioeconomic development of cities,” the report reads. “Local governments are looking to data and analytics technologies for insight and are creating pilot projects to test ways to improve their services.” There’s a lot of chatter around the idea of the smart city, but it can sometimes feel reductive, as if to suggest that something as complex as urban poverty can be understood as a sequence of ones and zeroes. Chicago has a long history of failed utopian schemes, from the City Beautiful movement of the 1890s to 1920s to the high-rise publichousing projects of the mid-twentieth century. On its face, AoT stirs up some of the same old urban-design tensions––while introducing the uniquely twenty-firstcentury concerns of data security and digital privacy. It might explain why Catlett is a little wary of the “smart city” label. “Our idea of a ‘smart city’ was more: let’s see if we can equip people who are making decisions and operating the city to do it better,” Catlett said. “When I think about the Array of Things and ‘smart cities,’ I don’t think about the overall design of a smart city so much as: we can just pick off one problem at a time and, at the end, we’re going to be improving the city. If we never become ‘smart,’ at least we’ll be smarter than we are now.” In other words, the smart city is not a silver bullet, even if it’s sometimes billed as one. But if AoT works out as Catlett hopes it will, then it will open the door for other opportunities: a developer might use the data to build an app to warn asthma sufferers of nearby irritants; local activists might use air-particle levels to make the case for restrictions on diesel traffic. Or the city—armed with reams of new data— might better understand how a bus route change downtown affects traffic flow. “Once you have a number of these deployed across the city, you begin to measure it in a way it hasn’t been measured before,” Catlett said.

f you stand on the corner of Damen Avenue and Cermak Road and squint up at the lamppost above the gas station, you can make out one of the twelve AoT nodes already deployed across Chicago. The

Damen/Cermak node is part of a subset of nodes focused on “Urban Air Quality and Health Education,” and it’s pointed at an area that has a history of fighting for a cleaner environment. Pilsen and Little Village have long been undergoing the slow process of deindustrialization. With it come the pains of job loss and a long-overdue reckoning with industry’s toxic legacy. The blocks surrounding the Damen/Cermak node, in other words, are an excellent place to test one of AoT’s core theses—namely, that when citizens and officials better understand their environment, they are better able to improve it. In 2012, the nearby Fisk and Crawford coal power plants closed down after years of protests and community organizing by the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO), the Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization (PERRO), Pilsen Alliance, and others. The closings may have had as much to do with broader market forces and federal environmental regulations as they did with local activism, but they were considered an enormous environmental win nonetheless. Organizers leaned heavily on a 2002 Harvard School of Public Health study that literally put a number on how many deaths, emergency-room visits, and asthma attacks the two plants caused each year. “We inherently knew something was wrong... but we couldn’t prove anything,” said Kim Wasserman-Nieto, LVEJO’s executive director. “It was finally getting those numbers that we were able to tell the story of how we were being impacted, outside of: ‘My kid has asthma.’ And it was those numbers that moved people to want to take action. There’s nothing like having forty body bags in the hallway of City Hall to really accentuate how we were being impacted.” The AoT nodes themselves won’t go as far as to draw a link between poor air quality and asthma attacks or fatalities. In these early stages, the project-runners are mostly concerned with making sure the citywide sensor network—potentially the first of its kind—really works. But the data they produce could empower more scientists and activists to make those kinds of analyses. If successful, AoT might multiply exponentially that quantitative awareness,

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giving neighborhoods access to all kinds of data that could confirm or deny suspicions about the air they breathe. Instead of just a dozen or so air monitors scattered sporadically across the city, a projected 500 AoT nodes will be logging air-quality data in neighborhoods that have historically suffered from high levels of asthma but have lacked the mechanisms for connecting it to specific environmental factors. “Data is power,” Wasserman-Nieto said. “When you are putting out things like the Array of Things you are crossing into very unknown territory because what’s going to happen when those results come out? Who is going to take responsibility for what is there?” Wasserman-Nieto and LVEJO—along with other community groups on the South Side—have already taken the matter into their own hands. LVEJO is part of Shared Air, Shared Action, a 2016 grant from the Federal Environmental Protection Agency to explore how community groups and local residents might use increasingly affordable sensor technology to do their own air monitoring. For LVEJO, the current concern is diesel pollution, with high truck traffic in the area and proposals for new diesel-heavy industrial facilities. Shared Air, Shared Action volunteers walk predetermined routes in their neighborhoods with boxy plastic air monitors strapped to their chests. They look for and note anything that might add context to a sudden aberration in data—the passing of a smog-belching truck, say, or a particularly odorous barbecue nearby. They send their observations and the data back to a centralized database for scientists at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Kansas State University to analyze. It’s all a bit like traditional, shoe-leather neighborhood canvassing, except that instead of drumming up votes, these engaged pedestrians are painting a portrait of their neighborhood’s environmental health. For Wasserman-Nieto, getting community members directly involved like this creates a bottom-up approach to air monitoring in which those with the greatest human stake in the results are present in formulating and performing the experiment at hand. It’s also, Wasserman-Nieto notes, an opportunity to introduce questions of science, technology, and engineering to communities that have traditionally lacked access to STEM education. “A lot of times universities will make assumptions about the problem—and a 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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lot of times they’re right—but [they] will dictate how to solve that problem,” she said. “If you want true partnership with community, then the community leads the request. The community leads the process. The community is the principal investigator.”

f the implicit benefit of cheap sensors and big data is greater knowledge, then the new technology’s inherent risk is to information security and personal privacy. Every day reams of information about our lives are beamed across networks in exchange for access or convenience. Not a month goes by without some new security breach or hack that briefly makes us reconsider our faith in the gospel of the Cloud. It’s no wonder, then, that AoT has raised the eyebrows of privacy critics. After all, its aim, in the superficial sense, is to install hundreds of artificial ears, eyes and noses throughout public spaces. Initially, AoT had planned to include in the node a mechanism for counting nearby Bluetooth devices as a way to track pedestrian flow. When the Tribune published an article on it in 2014, it prompted concern over exactly what data was being collected and who would control it. The feature was ultimately dropped, and AoT eventually published an Operating Policies document outlining their approach to privacy, but the genie was already out of the bottle. Chicagoans had gotten a whiff of Big Brother, and it amplified a skepticism many already hold toward city government. The final node design moved forward instead with a camera to count pedestrians and cars, and to detect street flooding. To guard against privacy intrusions, AoT relies on edge computing, in which images are processed and analyzed right at the point of collection. In other words, according to AoT, the node extracts whatever quantitative information it needs, destroys the image, and just sends the information (e.g. number of cars) back to Argonne’s database. For calibration purposes, less than one percent of images will randomly be stored. AoT insists they will not contain personally identifiable information, but they will be controlled and protected as if they do. It begs a uniquely digital thought experiment: if a camera records a person in the city, but only a computer sees the image, is it a violation of personal privacy? Should Chicagoans have the ability to opt out of such collection, even if it is ultimately anonymous and limited to public spaces? The scrutiny over AoT’s camera is perhaps ironic given that there are already

literally thousands of public and private cameras throughout Chicago recording and storing our everyday acts—and doing so with far less oversight or scrutiny than is afforded AoT. In the early Internet, programmers were almost fanatically devoted to transparency, decentralized power, and informationsharing. Much of that original culture has been lost in today’s increasingly monopolized and centralized web. But Catlett enjoyed a front-row seat to the Internet’s halcyon days, serving as chief technology officer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in the years following the release of Mosaic, the World Wide Web’s first major graphical browser. Catlett stresses that the nodes are built and run on open-source hardware and software. The algorithm that decides what goes in your Facebook feed is a black box to which you will never have access. In contrast, the algorithm that determines how the Damen/Cermak node measures carbonmonoxide levels is freely available online for anyone to inspect. Of course, for most of us, this will still be an indecipherable morass of computer code, but Catlett says there’s an active community of programmer activists who would be eager to inspect it and flag anything of concern.

n a 2013 pamphlet called “Against the Smart City,” urbanist Adam Greenfield makes a philosophical case against the digitization of our urban environments: “[T]he wholesale surrender of municipal management to an algorithmic toolset... would seem to repose an undue amount of trust in the party responsible for authoring the algorithm...Inconvenient results may be suppressed, arbitrarily overridden by more heavily-weighted decision factors or simply ignored.” In other words, writing algorithms for civic technology is a political act. What do we lose when we outsource quality-of-life assessments to machines and the people who program them? All the more reason, then, for smart-city proponents to embrace the limited scope and open-source ethos that AoT purports to embrace. A good technologist is the first to admit that technology can only do so much. “There’s no substitute for individuals and people coming together and advocating for things,” says Derek Eder, founder of Chi Hack Night, a popular forum for hacktivists and concerned citizens. “Anybody who is trying to sell you the idea that civic

TECHNOLOGY

technology is the big thing that will save the world...don’t listen to that person. That person is just trying to hype something or sell something.” AoT’s success or failure, then, relies on the degree to which it harnesses (or fails to harness) the messy human factor behind the computer’s clean logic. To what degree does it get not just the tacit approval of everyday denizens, but also their active participation and engagement? To that end, AoT has partnered with the Smart Chicago Collaborative to do public outreach. To date, they have hosted three public meetings, all of which have been thoroughly documented online. An educational component dubbed the ‘“Lane of Things’” has given students at Lane Tech High School a chance to try their hand in developing their own sensor packages. An engagement report posted online details the rest of AoT’s outreach efforts. More connections to communities and the public may pop up once AoT begins actually publishing data, but, for now, meaningful, direct contributions to the core design of the system appear largely limited to scientists and city officials. The public meeting I attended in Humboldt Park in October was well-organized and informative, but didn’t seem reflective of the kind of deep, sustained community connection one might hope to see in an initiative of this scale. Many of the attendees appeared to be somehow affiliated with AoT, the city, or the Smart Chicago Collaborative. After a series of presentations, the first question out of the gate was from Daniel Kaberon, an interested Evanstonian who works in the IT sector, who asked why the AoT website wasn’t being updated more frequently and why various goalposts set by the project had seemingly been delayed or abandoned. “Is there a pulse? Is this dead?” Kaberon wondered aloud to me after the meeting. “I really want this thing to roll out—I really want this all to happen. I’m not negative about it, but, c’mon, tell us what’s going on!” At the time of writing, the Array of Things blog consists of just one entry, dated July 19. In Catlett’s defense, he and his team are computer scientists, not community organizers. When I asked him about these criticisms he acknowledged their validity, chalked them up to a lack of resources, and genuinely seemed to wish he could hire staff to directly work with community groups. It made me wonder why he even decided to stick his neck out and put AoT in the

Charlie Catlett, Array of Things project lead and a senior computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory.

public spotlight in the way that he, Argonne, and the city have. After all, he likely could have approached this urban sensing project quietly, making it strictly an experiment by and for the scientific community alone. “I don’t want people to ever feel like we’re sneaking up on them,” he told me. “I would rather that people say to me, ‘I don’t like what you’re doing’ than say, ‘I don’t like what you did, and I don’t like that you hid it from me.’”

how cities are built, but in coming years, interconnected technology will quantify and digitize urban life in ways that feel strange and opaque to lay city-dwellers. In the end, the fundamental tension of AoT is the same. Byron Sigcho, director of the Pilsen Alliance, put it to me like this: “Research is only as good as it addresses the needs of the community. If it doesn’t, we have to ask, well, whom is that research for?” ¬

ow Chicagoans respond to AoT when it finally launches will have wide implications for the future of technology––not just in Pilsen or Little Village, or even the Chicagoland area, but at large. Over a hundred cities across the globe have inquired about adopting AoT, hoping, as Catlett hopes, that sexy sensing technology can help the powers that be better address the very unsexy problems that have long plagued urban life. Algorithms and data are playing a larger and larger role in all aspects of our lives— how we work, whom we love, and for whom we vote. Technology has always informed

Reporting for this story was made possible by a fellowship from Northwestern University’s Social Justice News Nexus.

DAVID UNGER

JANUARY 24, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

City-Run Englewood Clinic Abruptly Shuttered

Federal funding gets cut, yet HIV rates remain high in vulnerable communities BY BEA MALSKY JASON SCHUMER

n early December, the Teamwork Englewood office received an anonymous call from an affiliate of the Chicago Department of Public Health alerting them that the Englewood STI Specialty Clinic—one of four city-run clinics offering free testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections—would be shutting down. On December 11, Nicole Johnson sent out an email to the neighborhood’s Health & Wellness Task Force, of which she is a member, outlining her concerns: that Englewood residents without health insurance would be left without reproductive healthcare; that walk-in treatment and testing for HIV and other STIs would cease to be available in the neighborhood; and that this marks a continuing trend of public disinvestment from Englewood. “The city has this incessant reliance on private services to address public needs,” she 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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wrote. The city clinic, housed in the basement of 641 West 63rd Street in the same building as a University of Illinois-Chicago Mile Square Health Center and a Howard Brown Health Clinic, ceased operations on January 12. According to a CDPH spokesperson, federal funding cuts prompted the clinic’s closure. These cuts, paradoxically, resulted from Chicago’s recent success in HIV prevention and treatment. “This past year, the number of new HIV infections hit an all-time low for Chicago and we remain committed to completely eliminating HIV infections within the next ten years. [...] Because of the progress we have made in achieving historic lows in new HIV infections, Chicago will receive less federal grant money in 2018,” the CDPH said in a statement. It’s true that new HIV diagnoses are at

a record low in Chicago—just last month, Rahm Emanuel’s office announced that diagnoses are down fifty-five percent from 2001, and that eighty percent of those newly diagnosed are linked to medical care within a month. As the city released this data, Emanuel also announced Chicago’s participation in the international Fast-Track Cities initiative, becoming the fifteenth city in the United States working to hit the United Nations’ HIV eradication targets by 2020. However, these encouraging numbers are not distributed evenly throughout Chicago, which the city’s 2017 HIV/STI Surveillance Report notes. “There are health disparities when it comes to STI infections. Specifically, infections are concentrated in high hardship, low childhood opportunity community areas and among specific populations,” CDPH Commissioner Julie Morita wrote in the report’s introduction.

“Black women accounted for nearly 27 percent of all chlamydia cases in 2016, and Black men nearly 22 percent of all gonorrhea cases in 2016, while they only account for 17 and 14 percent of Chicago’s adult population respectively.” The mayor’s press release around the report acknowledges and addresses this disparity specifically regarding HIV: “While Chicago has seen declines across all ethnic groups over the past several years, African American men between 20-29 years of age continue to face disproportionately high rates of infection. As such, CDPH and its partners will continue to focus resources specifically toward closing this disparity.” Englewood would be an ideal locale for the mayor to bring his commitment to young Black men into practice. “We have high numbers of HIV incidence,” said Michelle Rashad, a chair of the Englewood Health & Wellness Task

HEALTH

Force. She cites numbers from the Chicago Health Atlas: Englewood’s rate of HIV incidence (that is, the number of new cases identified in a year) is 50.7 per 100,000 in comparison to the Chicago average of 34.2 per 100,000. “So we know HIV is an issue. The fact that funding is being cut from it is shocking. It’s shocking especially because there’s always a need, but someone makes the decision that that need isn’t a priority and cuts the funding. That’s just very disheartening,” said Rashad. “This follows a larger trend of CDPH putting off direct provision of care into the hands of not-for-profit providers,” said MJ Johnson, a community health worker from Englewood and Community Engagement Specialist at the University of Chicago’s Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry & Innovation in Sexual & Reproductive Health (Ci3). “This is the continuation of that trend, even given the funding concerns and the oddity of the timing. It is part of a pattern that’s been established.” HIV—human immunodeficiency virus—has always been a disease of the marginalized in this country, a slow-building illness stigmatized and rendered invisible by interlocking prejudices surrounding queerness, poverty, and Blackness. Left untreated, HIV develops into AIDS: acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. AIDS prompts a failure of the human immune system, and, until recently, was a death sentence. With recent advancements in antiretroviral therapy and preventative care, AIDS is now a condition many people live with. The Center for Disease Control estimates that there are roughly 1.2 million people in the United States living with HIV. However, testing is critical: it must be treated early in order to be managed, and the CDC estimates that one-eighth of those 1.2 million are not aware that they are infected. To have HIV/AIDS is to become individually vulnerable to opportunistic infections, and to live in a community without adequate healthcare resources is to become collectively vulnerable. Two driving forces behind the dropping HIV rates in Chicago are both under threat by the current federal administration: the availability of a preventative pill called PrEP, which must be taken daily to maintain its effectiveness, and the Affordable Care Act. Since being signed into law in 2010, the ACA has allowed an estimated 12,000 Illinois residents living with HIV to access

AIDSVU (WWW.AIDSVU.ORG). EMORY UNIVERSITY, ROLLINS SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH. [JANUARY 18TH, 2018.]

regular and affordable care. Without insurance, typical medical costs for yearly treatment range from $20,000 to $30,000. “Life happens, and people say, do I pay the rent, or do I pick up my medications? People start making choices,” David Ernesto Munar, president and CEO of Howard Brown, told the Chicago Tribune late last year. The Chicago Health Atlas estimates that twenty-two percent of Englewood residents are uninsured.

here are two clinics remaining in the building on 63rd Street: Howard Brown and UIC Mile Square. The city says that these two will pick up the slack left by the closure of the city clinic, and Maya Green, site medical director of Howard Brown’s 63rd Street location, reports that they started providing walk-in

services this month. “Approximately twenty to twenty-five walk-in patients a day were estimated by the city and we expect that we will absorb those in collaboration with our other partners in the building,” she said. “We anticipate being able to serve Englewood’s sexual health needs through our walk-in clinic, as we have an excellent history in Chicago of providing these services at our other North Side locations.” Both remaining clinics provide treatment on a sliding payment scale for uninsured visitors. With the threat of dwindling public resources, the Englewood Health & Wellness Task Force is working on next steps, including a Health Navigators program that would help residents locate and use existing resources in the neighborhood. They continue to advocate for ample, affordable,

Though Chicago HIV rates are at an all-time low, geographic disparities persist. and accessible care. “How are we actually improving people’s livelihoods so that they can be healthy and have consistent access to healthcare outside of a crisis?” Johnson asked. “I’m thinking about communities like Englewood or Austin or Roseland, which are sitting at intersections that are hypervulnerable to infectious diseases. More than just increasing funding for HIV care, we need social services in the area, and a commitment from public institutions. And that’s not happening.” ¬ Bea Malsky works at Ci3, a public health research and policy lab with a focus on adolescent sexual and reproductive health.

JANUARY 24, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

altered what I think about—well, what does it mean to be owned? And what does it mean that there’s no grocery store. And there’s only corner stores around the corner. How does that play [a] part? Those things were a very huge inspiration. I also think [about] gentrification and gentrification through art, and certain people renovating parts of Chicago, and it becoming a site of tourism. A site of the white consciousness and unconsciousness consolidating with each other under the disguise of Black liberation. In a similar vein, what sort of influences were in this album? I know one of the tracks “Sims” has Philip Glass in it, as a sample. Another track, “Magic Isn’t Real,” has the dialogue sample at the end. I’m wondering if you could share some of those influences and other things that maybe listeners wouldn’t hear automatically that are in this.

ELLIE MEJÍA

Who’s Here and Who’s Not Sol Patches unpacks their new album “Garden City” BY ERISA APANTAKU

ol Patches is a gender abolitionist artist from the South and North Sides who makes music influenced by poetry, theater, and black and brown queer and femme. Their new album Garden City includes a host of local collaborators including Hora English, Plus Sign, and Mykele Deville. The Weekly spoke with Sol Patches and Chaski, one of their collaborators, about the album. Listen to the full interview at southsideweekly.com/category/radio and watch Sol Patches perform some verses from Garden City at southsideweekly.com/ssw-video-sol-patches. So where did the album title come from? What inspirations did you draw from? 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

Sol Patches: Hora made the title of the album. We were working on a song one night in Chicago at my friend’s, Alé, who’s also on this project. I made this instrumental composed of rain and certain keys. And Hora was just slowly writing and then was finally like “Okay, I got something.” I was just like “That’s it. That’s it.” When I heard the words “garden city,” I thought a lot about growing up with my auntie and my momma and seeing how they were to each other, taking care of each other. Like us kids, we would go off into the neighborhood, into the hood. We would just play with anything

¬ JANUARY 24, 2018

that we could, play hide and seek [in] these abandoned buildings. We would see old records in these old houses. We would try and play those records. We would break those records. When I think about garden city, I think about: “Wow, there’s so much potential here.” There’s so much potential in my family, and there’s so much potential in what this neighborhood could do to us and what this neighborhood could grow out of us. And also seeing all these signs in the city—all these signs on these abandoned buildings, saying “state property” or “property of,” something relating to the state government. Seeing things like that really

Chaski: The research that goes into this piece is very inspired by a lot of the work that we’re doing also at school, at NYU, and different readings we’re interacting with. And realizing how those can be transformed into a piece like this. That’s been amazing. ‘Cause it’s like, you can’t really do that in high school. What sorts of encountered?

readings

have

you

Chaski: Well, Patches was in a class called Reinventions of Love and reading a lot of song lyrics, a lot of plays... Sol Patches: ...A lot of James Baldwin, Federico Lorca, Frida Kahlo’s diary, and this is a bit more––but you specifically brought in a lot of Fred Moten. Chaski: He’s an Afro-pessimist, but not in the same rigorous way as people like [Frank B.] Wilderson [III]. He believes a lot of things, but one thing he believes in this piece called “The Undercommons” is that the only relationship a student can have with a university space is criminal. Like, that realization, and then just realizing, whoa, there’s a lot to exploit here...because you know, this place is exploiting us and so many other people in so many ways. Who was sampled in “Magic Isn’t Real,” at the end? Sol Patches: Nina Simone is sampled at the end of “Magic Isn’t Real.” My advisor, Karen, took me to this panel with this person

MUSIC

named Malik Gaines, and they were hosting this thing about this book that they made, and it was all about Black performance. And I was asking him, “What is the future of Black performance?” I was unsatisfied with my answer, but that’s because there wasn’t enough time and space to really talk. But he had this brilliant section on Nina Simone—how when Nina Simone covered songs, [there were] dynamic shifts that happened—and the power of reclaiming. So being able to experience that and then the next day looking at songs that my mom would play by her, and just really listening, just listening as much as I could. I feel that what Nina Simone has always been alluding to and speaking about is something that is so needed, even today. I think that New York is very influential on this project. New York has been an experience where it feels like there are three or four different Chicagos in boroughs, and they all make up a city. It’s humongous. And a lot of times, I think that I had to do some reinventions of how I love, how I interpret my love for art and “Why am I doing this?” Because the city moves so fast and I realized that if I really want to create music, I really have to not get caught up in how fast a city moves, how fast it is to yearn for procrastination. And I think that’s very relevant to this album. Being able to be outside of Chicago opened my mind to so many more possibilities––how I can distort my art, how I can subvert, and reverse power dynamics around the topics that I’m talking about, and it being a constructive matter that will help offer questions to the future generation of folks that listen to music, folks who want to know about trans musicians, Black trans musicians specifically. I really wanted to honor that tradition, or that notion that’s been coming about in the conversation with people who’ve come before me. I feel like one thing that is really haunting me about this project in terms of what New York has done—I think about who’s here and who’s not. My advisor Karen Finley has had such an impact on this project, and I think about her generation of friends who aren’t here. I think about the AIDS epidemic, how that specifically affected queer folks in New York. I definitely feel that through these rhythmic structures and me, in a lot of ways, being inspired by Sylvester, who is an amazing singer of their time and disco-oriented trans person who is Black, plays a part into how this album is supposed to be experienced.

Talk to me about some of the collaborators on this album.

Sol Patches: It’s like mob, but it’s not like mob at all.

Sol Patches: Some of the collaborators?

Chaski: It’s like vagabond, kinda, it kinda has like similar connotations. Just like mischief, but what against, you know, like that’s the question. So “Yob Culture” talks about that.

Chaski: Those are amazing...I’m just like... all of them are amazing people. Sol Patches: So, one of the first tracks, “Yob Culture,” there’s Mykele [Deville], there’s Eiigo Groove, Sasha NoDisco, + [Plus Sign], and that’s one track that is instrumentally built to change drastically. So I always find that song to be very nice. On the production side for one of these songs, the sixth song called “Morph+,” we got this person named Eve Calstrom. And we have this person named Little Bear, who’s an amazing jazz instrumentalist and plays a mad trombone. But uh, [laughs] I don’t think they play the trombone on this album. Chaski: I don’t think so. Sol Patches: Yeah, we have this amazing artist named Andre, who changed our lives. I was like wow, I was like wow. In what way? Sol Patches: They were the first other GNC [gender nonconforming] rapper that we had met specifically in New York, but more than that, they were also really about cultivating spaces of accessibility, of critical theory and bringing their family together. Andre is very inspiring, especially on the song called “Last Soil.” They taught me so much about my own music, and I think for that I’m forever grateful. We also got EMEKA on that song, “Last Soil.” EMEKA is hella talented. We met EMEKA with Andre. And like, it was amazing to collaborate with other queer Black and brown folks and [have it] not be such a tokenizing thing. Let’s go back to “Yob Culture,” real quick, for our listeners who don’t know, what does yob mean? Chaski: Well, yob actually has multiple definitions. Sol Patches: Yobbery! Chaski: There’s many forms of the word yob. Can you be a yob? I think you can. Sol Patches: Yeah, you can be a part of a yob. Chaski: Yeah, so yobs are people, it’s a British word, it’s kind of like...what’s that word?

Sol Patches: It takes a lot of different meanings. I think there’s something interesting about how queerness affects certain words like boy or violence. And I’m also reminded when I think of yobbing. In the contexts that I’ve heard of it, I think that it’s always important to draw parallels between certain forms of English to demystify this American notion of speaking properly and how destructive that is to a lot of communities. So I think that there’s power in us choosing that particular word in describing a certain happening in the Midwest, Chicago, [and] America, in seeing how those politics play out. There are at least four people on that track, and it takes you through sonically very different scenes. I remember during the listening party a lot of people said that it felt like the song of the summer. It’s almost like you’re hopping from party to party on a nice summer night’s evening. I was wondering what was the process of putting together that track. Chaski: It just kept on growing—that’s one thing that happened. First we put Eiigo on it, and Eiigo didn’t know that Mykele was gonna be on it, and Mykele didn’t know that Eiigo was gonna be on it. So at first it was like, people were just doing what they want with this, independently of each other in completely different cities. So that was amazing to see when people were finished with their verses, to see that come together. And it was astounding how the different parts spoke to each other. And then when Sasha added their part it became something entirely different. And really set up the feeling of, you were saying, like a theatrical type of narrative. Sol Patches: ’Cause I was working on an instrumental, and it was not happening. For some reason I was missing the drums aspect of it, so I was bothering my little brother. ’Cause Eiigo— it’s always been like second nature to make a beat or to orchestrate music. It was crazy because he came over and visited us in New York...

Sol Patches: ...[laughs] For the whole summer, yeah, and was like, “We gotta do something about these drums,” so he helped me completely reorganize the sounds, also helped to make the drums sound a certain way in the air. And it really changed the project for all the better, because I went back to all the other songs and really investigated pocket of the drum sounds with the melody. Chaski: Yeah, inspired by Eiigo’s intuition with drums. “Basketball” has a really driving, urgent beat to it. Likewise, I was wondering if you could explain the creation of that track. Sol Patches: It emerged out of growing up with my auntie and my mom, specifically when I stayed over at my auntie’s in Englewood. It also is about these basketball stories. How so much of my life was centered around being a basketball star, when we talk about Blackness and masculinity. This kindship, this feeling of expression—like, wow, is this that potential for expression only allowed to happen on the basketball court? And just dwindling in that bitter tone really inspired this song. But also thinking of cookouts, thinking about barbecues with my family, thinking about the songs that were played—the house songs specifically. And thinking about this boy who was about four or five years older than me and being able to play a basketball game with him on the court, with so many other people. And just witnessing his speed, how much power, how much compassion was there and is there. I think that moment really changed me. And coming back a couple of years later and playing another game with him and just realizing like—this person actually did get shot, and how does that feed into the context of this basketball game that we’re playing with each other. I also really think about the song “Cha Cha,” and how the person was from Chicago and grew up in the same neighborhoods as my family did. And so those steps all play into part with that song. ¬ Follow Sol Patches on Twitter @SolPatches and on Facebook at Sol Patches.

Chaski: ...For like the whole summer... JANUARY 24, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

STAGE & SCREEN

Lorraine’s Legacy How “Sighted Eyes / Feeling Heart” goes beyond “A Raisin in the Sun” BY DYLAN PETIPRIN

n May of 1937, eight-year-old Lorraine Hansberry moved with her family to a home in the all-white neighborhood of what is now West Woodlawn, in an act that helped fight a racially segregated housing system in Chicago. Two weeks ago, a crowd of over one hundred convened just a twentyminute walk away from that same childhood home to watch Sighted Eyes / Feeling Heart, a new documentary honoring Hansberry’s life as both a playwright and activist. The film’s writer and director, Tracy Heather Strain, described the importance of telling Hansberry’s story to the audience at the DuSable Museum of African American History: “I was really conscious of the fact that people only know A Raisin in the Sun, and I thought her whole life was interesting and of value. You think of someone at the age of twenty-eight who wrote this play that is adored and you think, ‘How did that happen? Who was this person?’” Sighted Eyes answers these questions by beginning with Hansberry’s South Side roots. Born at Provident Hospital in Washington Park in 1930, Lorraine Hansberry grew up in a middle-class family. The film explains that despite the professional success of her father, Hansberry’s family was relegated to living in the less affluent “Black Belt” of Chicago due to racially restrictive housing covenants, formal deals in which real estate agents agreed not to sell property in white neighborhoods to African Americans. When the Hansberry family managed to purchase a Woodlawn home in 1937, they

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were met with hostility. Sighted Eyes recounts how young Hansberry was “spat at, cursed, and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school.” The film also features an interview with her sister Mamie, who describes when a piece of mortar was thrown through the Hansberrys’ front window and nearly hit Hansberry’s head. According to Strain, the Hansberry family had known that they risked facing this type of racial violence in their efforts to defy the housing covenant system. “The fact that they moved their family to the house where Lorraine was attacked was part of a test,” she said. Thankfully, it was a test that paid off. In the Hansberry v. Lee case of 1940, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Hansberrys, which allowed them to remain in their Woodlawn home. While the case won on a technicality, it opened up thirty blocks of South Side property to African Americans, making it a milestone in the efforts towards ending legally-enforced housing segregation. Strain surmised that the success of this case was instrumental in shaping Hansberry’s life trajectory. “It seems like she was a deeply feeling person even as a child. I feel like she was a trained activist,” she said. Sighted Eyes / Feeling Heart showcases the ways Hansberry used that training in activism to enact change up until her death in 1965. From creating plays that brought authentic Black narratives to Broadway, to writing for the first national lesbian magazine The Ladder, to speaking at rallies and delivering keynote addresses for the civil

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MILO BOSH

rights movement, the film documents how Hansberry used her skillful control over the English language to fight the many forms of oppression she observed in American society. Describing her experience seeing Hansberry’s play To Be Young, Gifted, and Black at the age of seventeen, Strain reminisced about how impactful Hansberry’s passion for social justice was. “I was thunderstruck,” she said. “I had never heard someone represent experiences that I had had. She talked about race, class, gender, and I had never known a young person that was speaking in those ways that I just thought in my head.” With the making of Sighted Eyes, Strain set out with the goal of producing a film that similarly moved people. “When making media about things, you want to do something with it, don’t you?” So far, Strain seems to have been successful in that goal. As Willa Taylor, Director of Education and Engagement at the Goodman Theatre, personally thanked Strain from the stage after the screening was finished, the crowd at DuSable gave a standing ovation for the film. For Strain, seeing such reactions to her work has been validating. “I’ve had the good fortune of talking to audiences after films

screenings and I have been really pleased because in the same way To Be Young, Gifted, and Black hit me and introduced me to Lorraine Hansberry, I was really pleased that for some people our documentary has had that same kind of effect, and that they feel inspired by the story”. Though the Sighted Eyes serves as the culmination of over fourteen years of work for Strain, she hopes that it is only a starting point for what is to come. “I’ve always thought of this as a transmedia project,” she said. “One of the things we’d like to do is create a graphic novel for kids to learn about Lorraine Hansberry’s life. We want to do an exhibit about Black theater before A Raisin in the Sun because we also did a lot of Black theater history research.” “Everybody we interviewed shared something that I think the world should hear, especially some of the African American interviewees who were telling some of their own stories along with their remembrances of Lorraine Hansberry,” she added. While the world only had Lorraine Hansberry for thirty-four years, Tracy Heather Strain’s Sighted Eyes / Feeling Heart serves as a testament to the inspirational quality of Hansberry’s life and work, showing the importance of appreciating her for more than just A Raisin in the Sun. ¬

LIT

EVENTS

BULLETIN

The Staples Letters

nspired by C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, the Staples Letters are a new series of essays in the South Side Weekly written in the form of letters from a veteran teacher, Staples, giving advice to a young teacher, Ms. T. All events in the Staples Letters are drawn directly from real-life experiences in Chicago Public Schools, and names and identifying details have been removed in the interest of privacy. Though fictional in form, the letters are used to address a variety of issues in education, from quotidian classroom considerations to national policy. Hey Ms. T! I completely understand why you’d feel the need to start off the year as tough as possible—you know, give millions of detentions, scowl, that whole routine. That was certainly the plan for my first year. I thought it’d get the students to respect me and impress the principal. What’s the cliche—don’t smile till Christmas? Ugh. Who came up with that horrible advice? Someone who hated kids, probably. There’s a surprising number of adults like that running around schools. No, the main thing to remember is you’re allowed to have fun in class. Or maybe fun isn’t quite the right word. Fun is too limiting. Fun ends. Joy, on the other hand, is the sort of background hum that sustains a classroom. You can lend a student a pen joyfully, you know? I would say if at the end of your first year, you can at least say your room is a joyful place, it’s a success. The problem is your department chair isn’t going to mandate joy. There aren’t any Common Core standards that deal with joy. There aren’t any metrics that measure it. And your principal is going to be actively hostile to the idea, though of course they’ll never say it out loud. They will express this preference by requiring any good idea—any idea that encourages community, happiness, relaxation, or joy—to have all sorts of paperwork, endless meetings, permission slips. Whereas any idea that will increase the amount of student discomfort, pain, or suffering will be fast-tracked and incorporated by end of day. Suffering reads to them as rigor, like if the students are really unhappy it must mean they’re learning a lot. It’s nuts. The admins at your school, I’m sure, are mostly interested in order and control. They distrust noise, fun, desks arranged into a circle. They’re a little like the Grinch in that respect. The Grinch didn’t really hate Christmas, right? He just thought the Whos were too annoying about it. Which, I mean... fair enough. Anyway, nobody ever felt any joy doing the same seven worksheets over and over again. Nobody ever felt anything but drudgery doing that, especially when it’s eight degrees outside. I sometimes think that’s what’s meant by students being “careerready.” It means to prepare them to obey orders even when they’re really bored, really beaten down, really tired, depressed. Those are

twenty-first century job skills, right? For most of us? Well, what do you expect when the bosses get control of the schools? What does Bill Gates know, or care, about teaching joy? So you don’t have to do that. I really hope you won’t. It’ll feel right to do it their way ‘cause that’s what your principal will praise you for doing. But just because it feels right doesn’t mean it is right. In my school now, there aren’t any music classes or art classes or gym classes or photography classes—except in horrible online versions. That’s right, they literally take P.E. online and answer multiple choice questions about tennis and yoga. One kid, an English Language Learner who was working quietly at his computer the other day, asked me what a “cleat” is. I had the hardest time answering him! “It’s like a shoe...with, uh, nails in the bottom...that helps you grip the ground…” Seriously, is there any way to learn what cleats are except by putting them on and running around? But if you check his transcript, it will say he passed P.E. even though he never once left the computer lab. A woman from the charter came to my room earlier this year. She patiently explained to me that our kids are just too far behind, that we just don’t have the time to do things any other way. Welcome to “skills-based” education. Forget assemblies, Christmas parties, dances, student newspaper, yearbooks. Hello, online P.E. So you will have to provide these things, because in all likelihood they have been taken. Do not ask for permission. Do not see it as extra or as part of a standalone “fun” day. Embed joy into the DNA of your class. Play music constantly—and let students make the playlist. Decorate your room with art and posters, not test score data and rules. Ditch the phony competitiveness that infects every inch of childhood. Death to worksheets, death to test prep, death to Scantrons. You must instead focus your students and inspire in them a feeling of solidarity with one another and with you. It’s impossible to achieve this by teaching in the manner your administration will be comfortable with because the isolating nature of worksheets and standardized tests is completely antithetical to the joyful community of learners a true educator strives to create. Your own classroom should exist as a microcosm of the world you’d like to live in; by creating this, you and your students are, each day, bringing one infinitesimally small piece of that world into being. The fact is, everything that might happen in your classroom will be useless, boring, ridiculous if it is not obvious at every moment you’re all working cooperatively in the service of justice. So for goodness’ sake—smile! Your Affectionate Cousin, Staples

Now What Professional Workshop Dyett High School for the Arts, 555 E. 51st St. January 24, 5:30pm–7pm. Free. RSVP at bit.ly/ProfeshBioWorkshop Donda’s House is hosting a professional workshop series for those who want to learn specific skills in marketing, branding, and artistic expression. Workshop presenter Adrienne Samuels Gibbs is a Pulitzernominated arts and culture journalist. Listen to stories from her and other professionals to learn about best practices, receive feedback on how to write a professional bio, and walk away with a new skill set. (Maple Joy)

UMEDICS 2018 Winter Orientation South Shore Library, 2505 E. 73rd St. Saturday, January 27, 2pm-4pm. Register at bit.ly/umedics2018. Free. umedics.org In Swahili, ujimaa means collective work and responsibility. With this principle guiding them, Ujimaa Medics welcomes you to their Winter 2018 orientation, where you can learn about their Black health collective and learn the basics of medical care for gunshot wounds and asthma attacks. All ages are welcome and childcare is provided, with priority given to Black participants. (Adia Robinson)

Come and Create Your Financial Vision Board BopBiz Center, 644 E. 79th St. Saturday, January 27, 3pm–5pm. $15. 17+. bit.ly/CWEGVisionBoard Do you have financial goals? What does your financial future look like? If you’ve been asking yourself these questions, the Chicago Women Empowerment Group has a Financial Vision Board Workshop for you. Turn your dreams into a reality and learn the necessary techniques to have successful financial goals. Materials and lunch will be provided. (Maple Joy)

JANUARY 24, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

Fun Filled Parent and Tot Demo Classes Comprehensive Learning Services, 1642 E. 56th St. Ste. 110. Wednesday, January 31, 9am–11am. Ages 18 months–4 years. Free. bit.ly/TotDemoClass Enjoy a fun and free morning with two demonstration classes designed to help your child play and grow. Buddha Belly Yoga explores yoga through movement, stretching, singing and more, while Learning Out Loud helps develop toddlers’ early language skills. (Adia Robinson)

Ben Austen “High-Risers” Book Release Party The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. Tuesday, February 6, 7pm. Free. (312) 8012100. promontorychicago.com Celebrate the release of Ben Austen’s new book, High-Risers, which explores the history of Cabrini-Green and its significance to housing practices in Chicago and nationwide. Remembrance of the now-defunct housing complex will be a multimedia affair: Sugar Ray Dinke will perform his eighties classic, “Cabrini Green Rap.” (Michael Wasney)

VISUAL ARTS The Stoop Pilsen—Inaugural Show! Casa Calle 20, 1538 W. Cullerton St. Friday, January 26, 7pm–9:30pm. $5 donation. thestoop.us Tribble Tribble and Pipcraz will host The Stoop’s first live lit event in Pilsen featuring Yvette Marie, Luz Damian and Ipninder Singh, and the musical guest MARKBOMBS. Pipcraz also will do a DJ set while featured storytellers and open mic volunteers riff on the theme “Passing You By” without the aid of notes. Lily Be and Clarence Browley originally founded the five-year-old reading series at Rosa’s Lounge in Humboldt Park. ( Joseph S. Pete)

Eclipsing: Politics of Night Arts Incubator, 301 E. Garfield Blvd. Friday, January 26, 7pm–11pm. Free. npatin@ uchicago.edu In honor of the first lunar eclipse of 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

January 2018, join curators Amina Ross and Justin Chance for the “Eclipsing” of this new group exibition that explores conversations of power, landscape, language, space, and visibility. The opening night will feature work from artists Shala Miller, Terrell Davis, Carris Adams, Bethany Collins, Cream Co., Angela Davis Fegan, and more. Check in afterward at the Currency Exchange Café and BING for the Eclipsing Afterparty at 9pm. (Roderick Sawyer)

Mike Cloud: The Myth of Education Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Friday, January 26, 6pm–8pm. Free. (773)702-2787. Chicago-born and Brooklyn-based artist Mike Cloud will be presenting new work for his first solo exhibition in the city. Including handmade collage quilts, largescale three-dimensional paintings, and paper vessels, his work explores various cultural meanings embedded in signs and symbols. Come early—after audience members have some time to settle in, Cloud will give a tour of the exhibit around 6:30pm. (Roderick Sawyer)

The Artist’s Artist: Bill Walker Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Wednesday, January 31, 6pm–8pm.(773) 324-5520. hydeparkart.org In conjunction with the HPAC’s ongoing exhibition on Bill Walker, “one of the forefathers of Chicago’s mural movement,” friends and artists of Walker—including artist and activist Arlene Turner-Crawford and Weekly staff artist Turtel Onli—will discuss Walker’s impact on today’s activist artists in Chicago and beyond. ( Julia Aizuss)

MUSIC Dogs at Large with Sonny Falls, Gazebo Effect, Bandy Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S. Morgan St. Friday, January 26, 7pm. $10. 18+. (773) 837-0145. coprosperity.org Dogs at Large bring an easygoing charm to the indie rock template; their lounge psychadelica is leavened by saxophone, pedal steel, and a heaping spoonful of reverb. To celebrate the release of their second cassette, they’ll gig with some

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like-minded rock revivalists. (Christopher Good)

Fire-Toolz with Sea Tone, Spa Moans, Hen of the Woods Archer Ballroom, 3012 S. Archer Ave. #3. Saturday, January 27, doors 8pm, show 9pm. $5–$10. (312) 972-5691. bit.ly/fire-toolz If you’ve ever had a nostalgia trip for Geocities, then you’re the target audience for Fire-Toolz, Angel Marcloid’s feverish post-vaporwave recording project. Her set will follow Spa Moans’ experimental pop, Sea Tone’s granular noise, and Hen of the Woods’ sonic tweaking. (Christopher Good)

ShotsFired!ShotsFired! With Eske, Jules&Beans, Wvrshp Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S. Morgan St. Saturday, January 27, 9pm. $7. 18+. (773) 837-0145. coprosperity.org Spanglish thrash group ShotsFired!ShotsFired! has all the rage you’d expect from post-Trump hardcore plus the energy the exclamation marks suggest. Don’t miss kindred spirits Eske (as in eskeletos). (Christopher Good)

“Winter Journey”––A Choral Concert Celebrating Winter Hyde Park Union Church, 5600 S. Woodlawn Ave. Sunday, January 28, 5pm. lecantani.org The snowfall might be thawing, but Le Cantani di Chicago––that is, “the singing women of Chicago”––are celebrating the season with their annual winter concert. This time around, it’s a particularly special occasion: the choir is releasing its first CD, Imbiana! Come Sing Together. (Christopher Good)

George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St. Wednesday, January 31, doors 7pm, show 8pm. $38–$58. 17+. (312) 526-3851. thaliahallchicago.com The Mothership will be touching down in Pilsen, and you know what that means—an unforgettable night with funk legend George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic. With over forty R&B hit singles, three platinum albums, and decades of legendary performances, this isn’t a show to be missed, so get your tickets soon. (Andrew Koski)

STAGE & SCREEN The Frunchroom Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th St.. Thursday, January 25, 7:30pm. $5 donation to benefit the Beverly Area Arts Alliance is requested. (773) 445-3838. thefrunchroom.com The Frunchroom returns bigger and better to its new home at the Beverly Arts Center. The live storytelling series features a mix of Chicago storytelling royalty and newbies. Author/essayist Ronnie Hartfield, poet/ author/director Nate Marshall, and others will be reading. (Nicole Bond)

Neighbors Night Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Friday, January 26, 6pm–9pm. Free. bit.ly/HPNeighborsNight Mingle with your Hyde Park neighbors for a fun-filled evening. Join in on the art-making activities, have a beverage while listening to some great music, or enjoy watching one of the presented films. (Maple Joy)

Last Days of Revolution featuring Kirill Medvedev and Cauleen Smith Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. Friday, January 26, 6pm. Free. (773) 702-0200. smartmuseum.uchicago.edu This closing event for the Smart’s “Revolution Every Day” exhibition, which featured a collection of short films exploring women’s experiences before and after the Russian Revolution, will begin with Russian poet Kirill Medvedev reading some of his work. His performance will be followed by a discussion between exhibition artist Cauleen Smith and guest curators Robert Bird, Zachary Cahill, and Christina Kaier. (Nicole Bond)

The Learning Tree Black Cinema House, 1456 E. 70th St.. Friday, January 26, 7pm–9:30pm. Free. (312) 857-5561. rebuild-foundation.org Iconic photographer/filmmaker Gordon Parks wrote and directed the The Learning Tree, a 1969 film about two Black teens in 1920s Kansas who must navigate the racism they experience all around them.

EVENTS Come to watch the film, stay for the discussion scheduled for after the screening. (Nicole Bond)

Charlamagne tha God—“Black Privilege” Harold Washington Cultural Center, 4701 S. King Dr. Sunday, January 28, 1pm–3pm. $30–$75. (312) 747-4300. chipublib.org Charlamagne tha God, co-host of the nationally syndicated radio show The Breakfast Club, will sign copies of his New York Times bestseller Black Privilege: Opportunity Comes to Those Who Create It. After, he’ll discuss his book with moderator Jimalita Tillman. VIP meet and greet begins at 1pm. Doors open for general admission at 2pm. (Nicole Bond)

Relationships 101 with The Extraordinary Everyday Marriage Duo: Sean and Dorian H. Nash Sunday, January 28, 7pm. bit.ly/DoUStillLoveMe The Extraordinary Everyday Marriage Duo Sean and Dorian H. Nash, authors of the book Do You Love Me Still?— How We Made It Through Our First Seven Years of Marriage and Beyond, host another Facebook Live segment of their Relationship 101 series. The duo will share some of the practical lessons they have learned in keeping their marriage solid for eighteen years. (Nicole Bond)

All My Sons Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Through Sunday, February 11. Tickets $20– $68. (773) 753-4472. courttheatre.org Charles Newell directs Arthur Miller’s 1947 Drama Critics’ Award-winning play All My Sons. Featuring Timothy Edward Kane, John Judd, and Kate Collins, this dramatic tale, based on true events, weaves business, love, and tragedy and established Miller as an American theater icon. (Nicole Bond)

FOOD & LAND Green Power for Green Spaces Online application form for solar panel system: bit.ly/GreenPowerGreenSpaces. Applications due Monday, January 22.

Do you belong to a community garden that has a use for a solar panel system? El Paseo Community Garden has partnered with a teacher from McKinley Park’s Horizon Science Academy to produce five solar panel systems, for installation in early spring 2018. One will go to the Paseo Community Garden, but the remaining four are up for grabs. The one requirement: gardens must have a “secure, dry shed or enclosure to store the equipment and a south-facing, sunny mountable area.” (Emeline Posner)

Windy City Harvest Corps Info Session Arturo Velasquez Institute, 2800 S. Western Ave., Rm. 1102. Monday, January 22, 9am– 11am, and Monday, February 5, 9am–11am. Free. bit.ly/HarvestCorps Every year, Windy City Harvest runs a 14-week-long Harvest Corps training program designed to open a door into urban agriculture for those with (nonviolent) criminal backgrounds. Come by on one of the listed mornings for more information on how the multifaceted training program could suit your interests, and where it might lead you. (Emeline Posner)

Rashid, founder of Grand Boulevard-based organization Your Bountiful Harvest, and you’ll be ready to cultivate your own bountiful harvest come springtime. (Michael Wasney)

Urban Livestock Expo! Southside Occupational Academy, 7342 S. Hoyne Ave. Saturday, February 3, 11am– 2pm. Free. (773) 850-0428. bit.ly/SSUrbanLivestockExpo Advocates for Urban Agriculture, a sustainable agriculture nonprofit in Chicago, teams up with Southside Occupational Academy to showcase the high school’s urban agriculture program and give workshops on raising urban livestock. Tips on how to raise bees, goats, chickens, ducks, and other animals in the city will be available for all experience levels. (Tammy Xu)

51st Street Community Farmers Market Internship Applications Send applications, questions, to Stephanie Dunn, Sdunn1342@gmail.com. Applications accepted through February 15th. bit.ly/51stInternshipApps

United Human Services, a food pantry that operates twelve community gardens and farms in Back of the Yards, is looking for three farmers market interns and three farming interns for the coming season. The marketing internship will offer a $500 stipend for ten hours a week from May to October, and the farm internship is unpaid, with a free produce share and money-making opportunities at weekly farmers markets, for sixteen hours a week. Candidates will be interviewed and selected by March 15. (Emeline Posner)

Chicago Food Policy Summit South Shore Cultural Center, 7059 S. South Shore Dr. Friday, February 23, summit 9am–5pm, reception 5:30pm–7:30pm. Reception $10, summit and reception $20. chicagofoodpolicy.com Registration is now open for the thirteenth annual Chicago Food Policy Summit, organized around this year’s theme “From Survive to Thrive.” The event is hosted by the Chicago Food Policy Action Council, a volunteer organization advocating for equal access to healthy food options in the city. Details about summit workshops, speakers, and vendors to be announced. (Tammy Xu)

Museum Week After Hours: Water, Earth, and Sky Adler Planetarium, Shedd Aquarium, and Field Museum, 1200–1400 S. Lake Shore Dr. Wednesday, January 24, 5pm–9pm. Free for Illinois residents, $25 for non-residents. sheddaquarium.org Experience the museum, aquarium, and planetarium after hours from the perspective of the experts behind the scenes. Try scanning the stars and skies, tending to the Shedd’s animals, or maintaining the Field’s historical relics. Hot chocolate, cocktails, and comfort food will be available as well. (Connor Rudynski)

Your Bountiful Harvest’s Gardening Class BOP Biz Center, 644 E. 79th St. Saturday, January 27, 3pm–6pm. $50 per class. RSVP to yourbountifulharvest@gmail.com. yourbountifulharvest.com 2018 is the year you can finally cultivate a green thumb of your own. Attend the first of three farm classes led by Safia JANUARY 24, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

THE H OUS ING IS S UE 2018 U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES

South Side Weekly is seeking pitches, stories, essays, poems, fiction, nonfiction, lists, photos, illustrations, and more for our annual Housing Issue. With the Housing Issue, the Weekly aims to explore the places that people call home on the South Side, but we also want to complicate this picture, examining places that, through decay, development or disinvestment, are no longer homes, or perhaps have become new homes. In past years, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve written about treasured neighborhoods and favorite intersections, but weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve also taken a hard look at homelessness and unaffordability, as well as their possible solutions. In that spirit, we welcome submissions or pitches across a wide variety of topics: a photo essay about a tight-knit Beverly block, an illustration of your childhood home, an interview with somebody displaced by gentrification in Pilsen, a deep dive into affordable housing development in Woodlawn, and anything in between. Apart from the theme of the issue, the only requirement is that pieces be about, or relevant to, life on the South Side. Submissions or pitches can be sent to submissions@southsideweekly.com by January 31, 2018.