January 29, 2014

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY JANUARY 29, 2014 ¬ STUDENT LED, NEIGHBORHOOD READ ¬ SINCE 2003 ¬ SOUTHSIDEWEEKLY.COM ¬ FREE

Grass Roots A community mobilizes to keep a Bronzeville high school open

ART SPIEGELMAN, THE HOMELESS COUNT, KAHIL EL’ZABAR, PICASSO, ANNA DEAVERE SMITH

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MORE INSIDE

2 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JANUARY 29, 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

Coked Up

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is a newsprint magazine based out of 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 Editors Josh Kovensky, Osita Nwanevu Stage & Screen Hannah Nyhart Editor Music Editor Zach Goldhammer 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 Ari Feldman, Emily Holland, Patrick Leow, Stephen Urchick Staff Writers Dove Barbanel, Christian Belanger, Jon Brozdowski, Emma Collins,

Isabel Ochoa Gold, Lauren Gurley, Jack Nuelle, Paige Pendarvis, Rob Snyder Senior Photographer Luke White Staff Illustrators Isabel Ochoa Gold, Hanna Petroski, Maggie Sivit Editorial Intern

Zavier Celimene

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

Cover photo by Luke White

Last week, the Illinois Pollution Board ruled that the piles of petroleum coke (petcoke) scattered around the Southeast Side did not pose an imminent threat to the health of local residents. They cited a lack of EPA proof that the petcoke piles are dangerous, despite evidence that exposure to petcoke dust can cause heart attacks, lung failure, and death. They also appear to have disregarded the fact that on windy days the wind blows noxious dust from the petcoke piles across the sky and into the lungs of Chicago residents. Whatever, Illinois.

A Whole in Hyde Park

It’s cold out there, but Hyde Park and Kenwood can be warmed by the fact that the days of schlepping to Lincoln Park for organic kale and overpriced figs are over. After six years of deliberation, Whole Foods will be coming to Lake Park Avenue and Hyde Park Boulevard. The development, designed by Jeanne Gang (of Aqua Tower fame), will also place 182 apartments atop the high-end grocer. Last week, the City Council approved $11.8 million in TIF funds for the project, which is set to open in 2015. Much love to Hyde Park Produce and Treasure Island.

The Grammys Are Racist (And Kanye Knows It)

With Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’s “Rap Album of the Year” victory at the Grammy’s, many hip-hop fans have claimed that the Grammy committees are either flat-out racist or entirely ignorant about the art that they have been appointed to appraise. One particularly Delphic Chicagoan foresaw Sunday night’s results, however. Last December, upon learning that he had been nominated

for only two awards (a third of the number racked up by Macklemore & Lewis) an outraged Yeezy told an audience that he had never once won an award when he was put up against a white artist. Kanye’s boisterous critiques of award shows have often been mocked, and there is no doubt that this latest statement was motivated by a heavy dose of ego, but his remark about white favoritism at the Grammys now seems almost oracular.

Hitting the Books

Although some conservatives love to accuse Obama of being a gay Muslim Marxist, one of the most dangerous things about him is that he likes to read. Mayor Emanuel, perhaps reliving his glory days as White House Chief of Staff, is planning on Rahming it down Obama’s throat that Chicago is the best choice for his presidential library. “I will remind him about his roots in Chicago,” Rahm said over the weekend. He also made it clear that the city will launch a unified bid for the library. A couple weeks earlier, a proposal for the library was leaked to Curbed Chicago, detailing plans for a Woodlawn location at 63rd and Woodlawn Avenue.

Out to Roost

Congress has reached a compromise on the farm bill. Over the next decade, $9 billion will be cut from the food stamps program, affecting two million people. A story that we ran last fall detailed the “ ‘depressed, displaced trauma’ of people who have to choose between paying rent and eating.” Now, thanks to the well-fed politicians in Washington, those same people’s choices will be even harder. ¬

IN THIS ISSUE @

dyett high

homeless count

anna deavre

art spiegelman

batman

“Dyett is the poster child of CPS sabotage.”

“Homelessness is pervasive in a way that’s very invisible.”

smith

“If comics were going to stay alive for another century, they had to become art or disappear.”

“He’s a rich philanthropist who runs around Gotham City in a cape.” olivia dorow hovland.......12

bess cohen.....4

jake bittle.............6

kahil el’zabar

“After years of work, he is ready to be forthright and say he wants the attention he feels he deserves.”

julian nebreda.......14

“She is at once the stage’s most compelling presence and its most phantomlike.”

hannah nyhart...........8

bindu

“Why Bollywood, why bleach, blue contact lenses, white skin?”

amelia dmowska......15

bea malsky..........10

concealed carry

jewish diaspora

“Legislation is irrelevant to people intent on committing violent crimes.” emma collins.........16

“The two exhibits can both be seen as explorations of the idea of double consciousness.”

sharon lurye............17

doc

picasso & the mayor

“A huge blue tarp is torn away from the great beast, and the citizens noticeably decline to clap.”

linus recht...........13

public school advantage

“Outrage is a reasonable response.”

olivia dorow hovland.......18

JANUARY 29, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

Grass Roots A community mobilizes to keep a Bronzeville high school open

BY BESS COHEN

“P

eople need to know the history of where you stand and where you are.” With those words, Jeanette Taylor set the tone of the Bronzeville Education Summit, a gathering of neighborhood students, parents, and teachers held at Mollison Elementary on January 20. Taylor has a son at Mollison and serves on the Local School Council; she also works with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO), which organized the summit. “We have not overcome,” said Taylor, acknowledging the event’s timing on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. “But we’re coming.”

One of KOCO’s major initiatives— and the heart of its Education Summit event—is the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett High School, which aims to keep Walter H. Dyett High, at 51st and St. Lawrence, open after a closure currently slated for 2015. Citing poor performance, the Board of Education voted to close Dyett in 2012; if the closure goes through, the seventy-eight juniors and seniors who are currently enrolled will be the last students to graduate. Once that happens, one elementary school parent said, “There will not be a neighborhood high school that I have the right to send my child to.”

Instead, students will attend Wendell Phillips Academy, two miles north of Dyett. According to CPS’s annual school progress reports, Phillips has been on probation for eighteen years, and its students’ test scores and graduation rates are only marginally higher than Dyett’s. Moreover, parents say they feel no connection to Phillips: “It feels like it’s in another world,” the elementary school parent said. Aside from Phillips, other high school options for local residents include King College Prep, where students must apply for enrollment, and Kenwood Academy, which automatically admits students living in the neighborhood and accepts applications from students around the city. (Kenwood is already at 111-percent capacity.)

Working with community members and other local organizations, KOCO hopes to convince CPS to reopen Dyett 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

under a new name: Walter H. Dyett Global Leadership and Green Technology High School. This new incarnation of Dyett would emphasize global studies and agricultural science, and incorporate the adjacent Washington Park Green Youth Farm directly into its curriculum. A collaboration between Dyett and the Chicago Botanic Garden, the farm already offers programming and summer employment opportunities to Dyett students.

pals, the report points out, have led Dyett in that time. Both the report and members of the coalition conclude that these changes in leadership and enrollment population have prevented the school from adequately serving its students.

A constant issue in the school’s tumultuous past, the report maintains, has been the lack of needed resources. Dyett did not receive additional resources from the district when it was converted from a middle school to a high school in 1999, nor when

“Whatever type of peaceful direct action we have to do to stop the closing of Dyett, that’s what we plan to do. We are not prepared for that school to close.”

“D

y ett,” says Jitu Brown, KOCO’s education organizer, “is the poster child of CPS sabotage.” A hearty man with the presence and oratorical skill of an experienced organizer, Brown is the professional, neatly-bearded face of the Coalition.

At the crux of his argument is a 2012 study of CPS school actions from the Collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education, a program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The report highlights Dyett as an example of the “Three Ds of Chicago School Reform: Destabilization, Disinvestment, and Disenfranchisement,” and argues that recent CPS decisions set the school up to underperform.

Since 2001, the report says, “CPS has closed, turned around, or converted to charter or selective enrollment twenty area schools near Dyett.” Four different princi-

¬ JANUARY 29, 2014

it was designated to receive students from Englewood High School when it closed in 2006. Unable to afford honors, Advanced Placement, and art classes, Dyett currently offers these courses online only.

Rico Gutstein, one of the authors of the report, is working with the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett to propose a new curriculum for the school. Gutstein is a co-founder of Teachers for Social Justice, a Chicago organization that promotes social justice in education and opposes the privatization of schools; he’s also worked with the Little Village Lawndale High School Campus, a cluster of four CPS schools on the Lower West Side that pools resources and facilities. Gutstein’s work at the Campus mirrors the work Jitu Brown did at South Shore High School, where a similar network of schools pooled resources for local students (South Shore High School is slat-

ed for closure in May).

The South Shore and Lower West Side networks are the model for what the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett is calling the “Bronzeville Global Achiever’s Network.”

“So imagine Dyett High School having a TV studio, and Mollison having a recording studio, and Reavis [Elementary School, at Cottage Grove and 50th Street] having a dance studio, and all the students in this network have access to these between the hours of 3pm and 7pm,” Brown explained.

This is KOCO’s long-term vision, but the first step in its realization is keeping Dyett open.

“W

e met with parents and teachers, and we did sort of an asset assessment,” Brown explained. “When we met with students and asked them what they liked the most about school, a lot of them said it was the farm.”

The Green Youth Farm was built in Washington Park in 2009, right next door to Dyett. Seventeen Dyett students worked the farm its first summer. When current principal Charles Campbell took the job in 2012, he strengthened the relationship between the garden and the school, introducing a “Topics in Plants” class.

Campbell says that Dyett students and staff get first pick of the produce harvested from the garden’s forty raised beds.

The rest is sold at local farmers’ markets.

The “global leadership” element of the proposed school, Brown says, comes from KOCO’s own “expertise in youth leadership development.” According to Brown, KOCO would continue to facilitate “the ongoing process of organizing the school with a cohort of different organizations” and managing the “different resources [it] can bring into the building,” if CPS approves its proposal.

The Coalition to Revitalize Dyett includes representatives from a number of community organizations—the Chicago Teachers Union, Blacks in Green, Washington Park Advisory Council, and the DuSable Museum among them—in ad-

EDUCATION dition to community members and Dyett High School parents and students.

The proposed curriculum emphasizes collaboration with the surrounding community, and plans for extensive support services for students and resources that the school doesn’t currently offer, such as a full-time case manager and social worker.

While the Coalition hopes that CPS will fund the school and its proposed programming, they are working to identify private foundations that might also provide support. “You know [this is] gonna take some funding,” Brown says, “but it’s not that heavy of a lift if it’s a priority.”

Those in attendance at the Education Summit were encouraged to join the Coalition formally, to attend its regular meetings and have a voice in the process.

All were asked to call CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett later in the week to request that she meet with the Coalition within two weeks’ time. If the mass-calling campaign didn’t work, Brown said that Karen Lewis, president of the CTU, had agreed to secure the meeting.

But the mass-calling campaign did work. Last week Byrd-Bennett’s office arranged a meeting with the coalition for January 28, with a goal of putting Dyett’s proposed curriculum on the agenda at the next Board of Education meeting, scheduled for February 26. (The Byrd-Bennett meeting occurred after the Weekly went to press.)

When asked what the next step would be if the curriculum presentation failed to sway the board, Brown said the Coalition has a strategy, though he declined to reveal it.

“Our members are committed,” he said. To illustrate his point, he referred to the Coalition’s meeting during the blizzard in early January. “The room was packed... seniors [walked] through the room with their canes…we had teenagers, seventeen-year-olds who everybody says don’t care about nothing, getting there early to help set up.”

“Whatever type of peaceful direct action we have to do to stop the closing of Dyett, that’s what we plan to do...We are not prepared for that school to close.”

I

n the midst of the mobilization around Dyett High School, Principal Campbell is operating business as usual.

Campbell was originally hired in 2012 to help phase the school out, and though he and the administration are not involved with the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett, he says he applauds KOCO’s efforts to have

a neighborhood high school. “It’s much needed.”

“Mr. Campbell’s taking lemons and making lemonade,” Brown said at the Education Summit, while introducing him to the audience.

Dyett’s massive school building has the capacity for 1,200 students, but with only seventy-eight students and twenty-five staff members, they only use half of the space. Campbell says the facility doesn’t have any serious problems and could continue to be used as a school, though he is not aware of any concrete plans that the district has made.

“We’re still a regular school,” Campbell says, with regular expectations for students’ achievement and consequences for their actions. He hopes to raise attendance rates to eighty-five percent by the end of this year, citing an initiative that incentivizes weekly attendance by allowing students off-campus lunch as a reward for perfect attendance.

“Numbers talk,” he says, citing a nine-percent rise in attendance so far this year. Ninety-four percent of the class graduated last year, the highest graduation rate in five years, and though all graduates had college acceptances, only forty-six percent went away to school.

T

he initiative to keep Dyett open addresses another part of KOCO’s mission, that of building “the next wave of leaders.”

“We don’t believe that young people become leaders when they’re grown, we believe they become leaders now,” Brown said, explaining that many of the high school students involved in the Dyett coalition have participated in KOCO’s afterschool and leadership programs since elementary school.

“For us, the youth programming is where you learn how to meet a need. Because the threat that exists towards our base regards our quality of life...we feel that we have to have a base that is more deeply invested in our work.”

Parrish Brown (no relation to Jitu Brown) has been involved with KOCO since he was in sixth grade at the nowclosed Price Elementary School, in Kenwood. He has worked previous KOCO campaigns, travelling to Washington, D.C. with Jitu as a freshman. Now in his senior year, he is ranked second in his class and is one of about twenty Dyett students involved with the Coalition.

Parrish’s little brother is one of a handful of Dyett students working to

luke white

The Kenwood Oakland Community Organization’s plan for its Bronzeville Education Summit. transfer out of the school now, to finish out his high school career on as strong a note as possible. He’s hoping to transfer to King College Prep.

“Young people have been pushing their own concerns, so they’ve been very engaged in this Dyett fight as well,” Jitu Brown says.

An emphasis on passing the torch to the next generation of leaders pervades the entire initiative around Dyett.

Jitu Brown is getting ready to move to a position with Journey for Justice, a

national coalition working against school closures in eighteen different cities, but he says KOCO will remain his home base.

At the end of the January 20 summit, he pointed out a young woman whom he has known since she was seventeen, and who is preparing to take over as education organizer. When she threatened to eat some of the pumpkin bread a summit attendee had baked for him, he snapped at her. “You better get it together girl. We’ve got nation-building work to do.” ¬

JANUARY 29, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

The Count

A community organization leads volunteers in an annual homeless census

BY JAKE BITTLE

J

anuary 22 was a bad night to be homeless. A thick snow had fallen the night before, and temperatures dropped into the negatives as the sun went down. No one was out on the streets except those who had to be.

That night, volunteers from across the city, partnering with various community organizations, took to the streets to attempt a census of Chicago’s homeless population.

From 9pm to 2am, armed with survey forms and spare hats and gloves to give away, they drove block-by-block searching for anyone who didn’t have a place to stay.

“The point of the count,” said Adriana Camarda, of the Department of Family and Support Services, “is to demonstrate to [the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development] what exactly Chicago’s need is for federal funding for homeless service programs and federal housing programs for homeless individuals.” In a webinar presented to volunteers in the count, Camarda said the city usually applies for about $40 million in funding from the government. “[The count is] essentially a snapshot of how many homeless individuals are being housed in shelters on a given night, and at the same time, how many individuals are sleeping on streets or in places that are not meant for human habitation,” said Camarda.

One participating group was Featherfist, a homeless empowerment organization located on 75th and Yates in South Shore.

Featherfist is one of only a few organizations on the South Side that participated in the count, along with Olive Branch, located in West Pullman. Under the direction of Stacy Anewishki, chief program officer of Featherfist, the group has served as a South Side leader in the count for ten years. Yearround, Featherfist case managers reach out to the homeless and attempt to help them find permanent housing and get back on their feet. Their website claims a seventy-five percent success rate. “[The homeless count]’s not a fun time for the volunteers, but we at Featherfist want it to be a learning experience,” 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

said Anewishki. “We want to find whoever doesn’t have a place to stay, the chronic homeless, the ones who aren’t going into the shelters.”

Before she sent volunteers out on their surveys of the city, Anewishki gathered them (about fifty, all told) in a Featherfist conference room and gave a brief overview of the history and rules of the count.

“It’s always the coldest day of the year,” said Anewishki. “I don’t care how many years we’ve been doing this, it’s always cold on the day that we do it. Since this time of year is usually when shelter use is at its highest, and since the end of the month is usually when public benefits run out, many people will be out roaming the streets. If they’re out there, they have nowhere else to go.”

Anewishki explained that teams were not allowed to wake sleeping people in the streets, or give money or food to any homeless people we surveyed. Surveys had to be completed in full.

“How do we know if someone is homeless? We don’t really ask,” she said.

“We never assume that someone is homeless. We just ask, ‘Do you know anyone who is homeless?’ And then they may say, ‘I’m homeless.’ But you never assume.”

As many teams as possible, Anewishki announced, would be led by a Featherfist team member who had experience with the homeless count.

“Where are the homeless people hanging out? Find out,” she said, before taking questions. “Get out of your cars. Don’t be afraid.” The room was silent. “Man, you all look scared. You’re all thinking, ‘What did I get myself into?’ ”

A

t around 9pm, Featherfist coordinators split the volunteers up into teams of four, most captained by an experienced employee.

“Homelessness is pervasive in a way that is very invisible,” said Steve, a longtime team-captain for the count. “I’ll give you an example. One day we were driving down the streets doing one of these counts,

¬ JANUARY 29, 2014

and there were about five guys standing beneath one of the bus shelters. And I looked at the bus shelter sign, and the buses had stopped running an hour ago. So I walked over there and I asked them if they knew anyone who was homeless, and they just started talking [to me].” It turned out that all of the men were currently homeless.

Steve’s son, David, a graduate of Columbia College, was in the same volunteer group. The final member was a woman named Cynthia, in whose BMW the team departed from the Featherfist building at around 9:30. The volunteers piled in, along with dozens of survey forms, a map of the assigned area, and bags full of supplies to give to any homeless people we might meet.

The team’s assigned area stretched from Cottage Grove to Lake Michigan, as far north as 39th Street and as far south as 59th Street, encompassing Oakland, Kenwood, and Hyde Park. We started in the north, coming off Lakeshore Drive at 39th Street and combing up and down Cottage Grove. The roads were already empty, and most of the stores were already closed.

On 45th and Cottage, we passed Golden Fish & Chicken, which was still open. Steve told Cynthia to park the car across the street. He got out and went into the restaurant, spoke with some people inside, and then came out. There was a man waiting for the bus. Steve spoke to him as well. His booming voice echoed across the empty intersection.

No one in the restaurant gave Steve anything concrete, so he suggested heading further south. We circled around Kenwood for a while longer before continuing south on Cottage Grove, until we reached a shopping plaza on 51st Street. Inside a Subway, a few men were sitting at the counter, not eating.

“You don’t sneak up and startle folks,” said Steve, on the way into the Subway, to explain why he had asked Cynthia and David to wait in the car. “If a guy looks up and sees four people all of a sudden, they’re subject to get scared. But if he sees one or two people, he’s more subject to engage in

conversation.”

Inside, he greeted one of the men sitting at the counter.

“Do you know where we might find anyone who is homeless?” said Steve.

“Yeah,” said the man. “Me.” The man, whose name was Lloyd, agreed to participate in the survey. As Steve went down the list and asked Lloyd the assigned questions, a rough outline of Lloyd’s life began to take shape. He had lost two apartments after getting into fights with the landlords. He had been homeless in Michigan, in Rockford, and in Chicago.

He had been to prison twice. He had been homeless at least four times. His children lived with his ex-wife in Calumet City, Indiana. He had been homeless in Chicago for seven months. He had no place to stay that night.

We gave Lloyd a bag full of hats, gloves, and papers with information about shelters and places to stay. Then Steve spoke with him for a while longer, explaining to Lloyd what he could do to help him get back on his feet.

“If you could get an apartment tomorrow, would you go?” said Steve.

“I would,” said Lloyd.

Steve told Lloyd about what Featherfist could do for people in his situation, and offered to meet with him again.

“Call me,” said Steve.

“I don’t have a phone,” said Lloyd.

“Okay,” said Steve. “That’s fine. A lot of times I hang out in Valois after work.

Know where that is?”

“Yeah.”

“If you’re ever looking for me, come by there, ask for me. I wish I could buy you some food, man, but we aren’t allowed.”

When Steve and Lloyd were finished talking, we went back to the car and combed Kenwood for a while longer, without much success. Around 11:30, Steve decided to move on to Hyde Park.

On 55th and Woodlawn, Steve told Cynthia to pull over. There didn’t seem to be anyone out on the street. She parked the car, and this time Steve and David both got

CENSUS

jake bittle

“Altogether, how many times would you say you’ve experienced homelessness?” “About fifteen.” out, taking a survey and a bag filled with gloves and a hat. Steve led David alongside the Starbucks, and they stopped in the doorway of a neighboring restaurant and started talking to someone. There was a man standing in the doorway whom no one but Steve had even thought to look for.

“People don’t mind talking to you,” said Steve afterwards, as we drove through Hyde Park. “At first it was hard, because I felt that the surveys were too formal, but what I figured out is, you have to let the

survey be a tool to start that conversation.”

A few minutes later, as we parked in Kimbark Plaza, a man approached our car and offered to wash our windows. He was carrying a sponge and a bucket of water.

“Hey man,” said Steve. “No thanks, but do you know where we might find people who don’t have a place to stay?”

“I don’t have a place to stay,” said the man.

Cynthia and David went inside a nearby pizza shop with him. Five minutes later,

they all walked out together—he was wearing the hat and gloves they had given him.

Cynthia and David got back in the car.

“By the way,” said the man. “Y’all just missed a bunch. They just headed over to that Dunkin’ Donuts a couple blocks down.”

At Dunkin’ Donuts on 53rd and Dorchester there was a group of men and one woman, all sitting near each other, none of them saying anything. Steve approached them with the surveys. One by

one, they shook their heads: No, I don’t have a place to stay tonight. The team surveyed each of them in turn.

One man said that, during the warmer months, he sells miscellaneous scavenged goods from a blanket he sets up on 53rd and Dorchester. That night, however, he had no money, and nowhere to go.

“How long have you been experiencing homelessness?” Cynthia asked one of the women.

“About four months,” said the woman.

JANUARY 29, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

“Altogether, how many times would you say you’ve experienced homelessness?”

“About fifteen.”

We returned to Kenwood and Oakland, surveying the main restaurants and plazas along 39th, 43rd, and 47th Streets, but didn’t see anyone walking, waiting for the buses, or loitering inside. By this time it was 1am, and teams from other sides of the city had started to return to Featherfist.

Before heading back, however, Steve suggested we follow a tip from a man we had interviewed earlier and check the emergency room at the University of Chicago Medical Center to see if anyone was spending the night there.

The emergency room was full of men and women of all ages. Many were sleeping. Steve told the clerk at the front desk why we had come. She stood up.

“If anyone doesn’t have a place to stay tonight,” she shouted across the room, “these people have some questions they’d like to ask you.”

One by one, seven men and women, some of whom had been asleep, rose

8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

and walked over. The hospital employees opened a conference room so the interviews could be conducted in private. After each survey was finished, Steve took the man or woman aside to tell them what he could do for them.

One of the women we interviewed, Debbie, had lost her apartment a week before, after a disagreement with her landlord.

“I do have a job, I do have an income,” she said. “I can’t keep going from place to place like this. I need to find me a permanent place to live. Plus, I got a medical condition, high blood pressure. What do I need to do?”

“Call this number,” said Steve.

“Is this Featherfist?” said Debbie. “I did call you guys. I just called the lady yesterday, and she said they haven’t even gotten my name.”

“We’re doing everything we can,” said Steve. “But you understand, there’s only so many of us. Can you call me tomorrow?”

“Yeah, because I need a place. I told you, I need a place.” ¬

¬ JANUARY 29, 2014

Talk About a Question Chasing grace with Anna Deavere Smith

BY HANNAH NYHART

“W

hat is grace?,” asks Anna Deavere Smith, onstage in character as Reverend Peter Gomes. “What is grace? Well, that’s no small question.” This not-small question fueled a three-week artistic residency at the University of Chicago, culminating in the presentation of Smith’s ongoing work, “Conversations on Grace.”

Over three cold weeks, Smith gave two public performances of the show, one at the UofC’s Logan Center and another at the Harris Theater downtown. Smith plays real characters, their monologues formed from verbatim quotes culled from decades of interviews with figures famous and civilian: Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, inmate Paulette Jenkins. It is not quite a one-woman show; cellist Joshua Roman joins Smith onstage.

The piece is a proud work in progress; Smith does not know where it will go from Harris, only that it will go. In the week between the two Chicago performances, monologues grew and contracted or were swapped out entirely at the judgment of Smith and director Leonard Foglia. Some touch on grace explicitly. In others it is hard to see grace at all.

By design, the conversation isn’t limited to the stage. Audience discussions followed each performance, and Smith also appeared at Logan with Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle for a public discussion, “On Grace and Politics,” moderated by David Axelrod.

Call a show “conversations on grace” and the audience will look for it, asking where, if not what. Grace slips through most easily in the conversations with religious figures, perhaps because we expect to find it there. In a search for grace, it is simple to turn to the preacher, the imam, the monk, the rabbi. The religious connotations of the word are never fully shed.

The cellist’s renditions of “Amaz-

ing Grace” that loosely frame the show reinforce Christian underpinnings, but the word’s theological definition acts as a jumping off point more than anything else. “If you don’t have a word, you might not even see it,” Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf tells Smith. And so the word is grace, and though it cannot be cleaved fully from its religious roots, it stretches beyond the hymnal pages, naming moments aligned with everything from courage to beauty to mercy.

It’s hard not to look for something else in the show as well, and that’s Smith herself. Smith plays eleven different figures, but she too is a character. The artist refers to her portrayals as portraits; in reciting the words of her interviewee, she becomes her subject. On stage, she is speaking to us as someone who spoke to her. She is at once the stage’s most compelling presence and its most phantomlike. We are reminded only periodically that Smith was in the room. Boxer Michael Bentt punctuates his boisterous indictment of his father with “Anna, Anna, Anna,” and Justice O’Connor, suddenly old, shouts reproachfully into the phone, “I’m here with Anna Deavere Smith.” And so are we. There is a multitude of Annas, as the characters address the audience, or the cellist, or the empty space in which we imagine her. The only time we see Smith onstage as herself is after the ending chords of the final song have played, when she stands stoic alongside Roman to a standing ovation. She is gracious, but tight lipped.

Mute but for his cello, Roman is an elegant scene partner. At different points during the monologues he is pupil, audience, or accomplice. The compositions that punctuate the speeches and transitions are largely original, safe for a few well-known pieces the cellist plays when Smith’s characters mention them—“Amazing Grace,” “Rock of Ages,” “Is that All There Is?” The effect is that of a brilliant and affable con-

THEATER

versationalist with occasional well-timed quotations. At times, the cello provides a soundtrack to the speaker, underscoring the Imam’s dream or the Monk’s story, or leading us from one portrait to the next.

His interludes give grace when it is most needed.

Smith’s most wrenching character is clearly inmate Paulette Jenkins, whom she interviewed almost two decades ago. Jenkins stares at the audience, back straight, from center stage, as she details her family’s years of abuse at the hands of her boyfriend, who beat her daughter to death. The audience becomes one of clasped hands, their own and others. The woman in front of me cradles her young daughter’s head, covering her ears.

From prison, Jenkins tells us of their attempts to hide the crime, including a drive out to the interstate to dump the body. Smith doesn’t move as Roman begins to play, but stands, shaking with breath.

Without his chords, I don’t know whether anyone would have exhaled.

Jenkins is one of the best representations of the ways grace remains elusive in the piece. In an audience discussion after the performance at Logan, participants struggled with the monologue’s brutality.

Some called it graceless.

Days later, speaking for a few moments on the stairwell by the theater’s soundbooth, Smith reflects on the monologue. “Part of looking for something is looking for what it’s not,” she muses, “I think portraying its opposite creates a kind of call for it.” But she also finds grace in Jenkin’s testimony, in the courage required to give it.

On stage with President Preckwinkle and David Axelrod to discuss grace and politics, the conversation wandered across a swath of injustices. Time ran out as Smith made a point about racial segregation in prison, and Axelrod began to wrap up, pointing the two women’s work as evidence for optimism. Smith cut in: “I’m always in this argument with my director, Leonard Foglia, because he’s like you. He thinks my plays have to end with the good news. I’m really attracted to catastrophe. I think catastrophe is very mobilizing.”

courtesy of mary ellen mark

A week later, Smith ends her show as Rabbi David Wolpe, reminding us of the story of Noah. After the flood, God shows Noah a rainbow, and tells him he will never again destroy the world. “But there’s this

chilling omission,” says Wolpe, “He doesn’t say, ‘You won’t destroy the world,’ he just says, ‘I won’t.’” She walks out to the chords of “Amazing Grace,” and the show closes with the oldest catastrophe we know. There

is a standing ovation. If there is grace to be found, maybe it is in the moments when, one way or another, we step back from the work of destroying the world. ¬

JANUARY 29, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

enno kapitza

Our Horizontal Memory A few words with Art Spiegelman

A

BY BEA MALSKY

rt Spiegelman, author of the comics “Maus” and “In the Shadow of No Towers,” is a master of translating the library of small human behaviors into image and symbol. He freezes moments small and large: a subject caught in the frame before she steps on a banana peel; the cursive practice of a child devolving into idle doodles; a crumbling tower. Last week he came to Chicago for two performances of “Wordless!” at the Logan Center for the Arts. The show, a collaboration with composer Phillip Johnston, is part spoken word, part jazz orchestra performance, and part slideshow homage to early woodcut and picture-story greats.

“Don’t worry if you get a little lost while you’re watching,” Spiegelman says on stage. “I’m hoping you will careen between my words and these picture stories until you’re left as breathlessly unbalanced as I am.” It’s a reassuring yet unnecessary introduction. Before the final Chicago performance, as his orchestra warmed up beside us, I had the chance to talk to Spiegelman about serious comics, vomit, and his deal with the devil.

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You’re a man who’s worked to bring comics into the literary world and also into the world of academia. So I’m wondering—who is “Wordless!” for?

At this point, I think it’s a done deal.

Comics, image studies, word and image studies: they’re all part of academia now.

So on the one hand it’s for academics, on the other hand it’s just for people who like jazz or pictures, and are willing to have an entertainment that isn’t too heavy on the sex and violence but is kind of entertaining and sometimes sad and sometimes sexy. So I really think of it as for a general audience but a relatively bright one.

But not too heavy on the sex and violence?

Well, you know—there’s violence, there’s

sex in it, but it’s sort of like...I wouldn’t do this if I were trying to go out and get really drunk and go to something. This wouldn’t be the place to end up. My son was trying to explain it to his girlfriend, because he wanted her to come. She said, “But what is it?” He said, “it’s a lot easier to describe it after you’ve heard it.” And then she was pressing, so he gave a description of it that really made me laugh at least, which is “PowerPoint with orchestra.”

Is that accurate?

No. But it’s amusing. It’s an odd combination of a lecture and an introduction to a whole small continent of stuff that most people aren’t aware of. But also it’s genuinely entertaining, because it moves from some ideas I have of that continent to ex-

COMICS

periencing it with very lush pictures and a really great score.

The promo advertises that you’re demanding a paternity test for your role as father of the graphic novel.

Yeah, that’s one of my one-liners. It has to do with the fact that there’s always a first before the first before the first—it goes way back in one way or another. But this stuff, the stuff that makes up the heart of “Wordless!,” really is a genre that got invented around 1918. It was really alive and happening and fully being realized in the twenties and thirties, when there had never previously been a serious comic. There’d been melodramatic comics, but there hadn’t been a comic that just had the seriousness of purpose to deal with the existential issues of being alive, or the inequality of the economic situation in the thirties, for example, unless it was really just overt political propaganda. These were more heartfelt and nuanced than that, although almost all of them were made by men on the left.

In the introduction of “In the Shadow of No Towers,” you write about treading “the fault line where world history and personal history collide.” Do you find comics a particularly good way to deal with that collision?

They can be. The thing about comics, which is finally being recognized, is that it’s a medium. So is literature a good way to deal with the fault line of history and trauma?

Yeah, it can do that. It can also just tell the dopiest zombie story you’ve ever thought up, and that’s a novel too. It’s a medium.

Film has the same range of possibilities.

There are certain things comics can do especially well, and I think that’s dealing with memory, because their very nature asks for things to get frozen so that we can look at them, and that’s what remembering consists of.

Comics allow you to see a past, a present, and a future literally in the course of three panels, depending on which way you start trying to look at them and take them in.

So that’s something specific to comics, or that’s easier. I still think in terms of horizontal and vertical information. Comics are made for horizontal information; Hulk picks up truck, throws it across room, it hits

the thing.

The experience of sitting and watching a show, then, is very different from holding a book and opening it in front of you. Do you think you’ve transferred that intimate experience to the stage?

To a degree. The idea here was not to make an animatic. The idea was to make you aware of what the source is, and to show you something that can only be shown this way if you want to talk about it, because otherwise it’d be, “Okay class, come back and have read at least these seven graphic works, and we’ll talk about them next week.” This show is a much kinder way of doing that, but it’s still a way of pulling you through something.

The goal was to not cut and overwhelm with the narrative content of the music, but leave it like real music; feeling the intensities that music brings and allowing the pictures to have their own autonomy while guiding you through. So it’s a balancing act to make this happen, and I think it works.

I think it’s a way of getting these stories a very efficient first read, and it’s beckoning you in to find them again.

skills and they don’t step on each other— it’s much harder to collaborate when I’m working with another cartoonist, but this is really just a game. It also has a certain kind of challenge for me, which is that I work in space, not in time, even though I’m sculpting the spatial to become temporal. This show is happening in time, and if I don’t do it right I’m going to get run over by six musicians who are following their beats, you know? So that keeps me alert. This show is all temporal, so it’s a whole other animal.

You say that comics are very much in academia already. The high culture-low culture divide: do you see it sustained, broken, or just irrelevant?

Oh, it’s a mudslide now. When I was here a couple years ago with Tom Mitchell, we were on stage and I specifically talked

about the Faustian deal. It was consciously made; if comics were going to stay alive for another century, they had to become art or disappear. Because they were no longer the mass culture they’d been. And what was conscious in first Arcade and then Raw— and in my own work—was that if we could find our way into getting grants like poets, then comics didn’t have to appeal to the billions in order to have a place to work from.

And if we made the deal, then they’d be a medium in which you can still have the cartoonist who believes that something’s only funny if it’s about farting and menstrual blood. But in order to have that part of the comics spectrum you’ve got to have the medium still around. That was the deal that was being made. And I’m amazed at how successfully realized it’s come to be. ¬

So why Phillip Johnston? Why an orchestra?

Because I’ve worked with him once before, and I loved working with Phillip. We’re on the same frequency in a lot of different ways, and he’s one of the more narratively engaged musicians that I know. The way I first heard his music was when I went to a live performance of Lon Chaney and Tod Browning’s “The Unknown.” He’d made a new score for it, and he’s made about eight movie scores since, of silent films. So he seemed a natural fit. He has a jazz orchestra. He has a range. He’s really very very good.

Yesterday, in a talk with Tom Gunning, you told an anecdote about being on the Today Show and unwittingly saying that therapy is like vomit and drawing cartoons is like eating your own vomit. So how does this work in a collaborative project?

Oh, I guess we eat each other’s vomit. Sorry, that’s disgusting. This collaboration has a lot more play in it. We each have a set of JANUARY 29, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

Batman Unmasked

At Doc Films, screenwriter of the 1989 “Batman” discusses the history of the Dark Knight

BY OLIVIA DOROW HOVLAND

O

n Friday night, Doc Films, in collaboration with First Aid Comics, celebrated the evolution of one of our most beloved comic book heroes with a special screening of Tim Burton’s 1989 “Batman.” A pop-up comic shop before the movie, and a Q&A with the original screenwriter afterwards, drew many eager fans to Ida Noyes.

Almost everyone in the UofC’s Max Palevsky Cinema had seen “Batman” before. The crowd was enthusiastic and loud, letting out a round of applause when the Batmobile first appeared on screen. Michael Keaton, originally a comic actor, elicited quite a few laughs with his exaggerated and dramatic portrayal of the costumed crusader, while Jack Nicholson’s plastic Joker grin was more sinister than many expected. By today’s standards, the film would be classified as campy, but when it was originally released, it actually pioneered the portrayal of a more sinister Batman.

12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

In the Q&A session, screenwriter Sam Hamm said, “The public image of Batman at that point was still colored by the [Adam West] television show. It was a camp phenomenon.” But because of this, “the TV show was rejected by Batman purists.” They demanded a more serious treatment. The comics themselves show a reaction to the aesthetic of the television show, growing darker and more serious during the sixties and seventies, as a way to protest the show’s treatment of the character.

“Batman” breaks out of the mold of many superhero movies by not starting with the story of his origin. For Hamm, the question should not be how Batman started dressing up as a bat and saving people, but rather, “What does he want to accomplish by doing what he does?” Indeed, the story of Batman’s origins would be rather hard to explain. After all, he’s a rich philanthropist who runs around Gotham City in a cape, armed with unique gadgets and piloting

¬ JANUARY 29, 2014

high-tech machines. “If you don’t show the stuff as already existing, you raise a lot of questions,” said Hamm. Instead, his transformation into this hooded vigilante can be explained by the fact that “he has a wound he cannot heal.” For Hamm, Batman’s rationale is focused on an inner struggle rather than a materialistic evolution.

Hamm wrote the original screenplay for the movie but was not able to take part in the writing process during filming because of the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike. Rewrites thus had to be done by a slew of uncredited writers. Hamm spoke of some of his disappointments in the movie as a result of this disjointed treatment of the screenplay. For instance, the character of Robin was initially written into the story but was cut at the last minute due to budget concerns. Hamm’s biggest qualm, however, was the fact that Albert, Batman’s butler and confidant, let leading lady Vicky Vale into the Batcave, an action that Hamm says would have most certainly led

to Albert’s firing, as Bruce Wayne would have seen it as a fundamental betrayal of secrecy and trust.

But despite the tweaks that were made to his screenplay, Hamm remained positive about the movie. DC Comics was supportive of “Batman’s” new take on the franchise: “They wanted to go beyond the original fan base of the comics,” said Hamm. And not only does the film still have a huge cult fan base, it also marks a turning point for the Batman franchise. For the first time on screen, the superhero moved from a campy to a more nuanced, troubled figure, mimicing the new, darker Batman of the comics. “When I was a kid I loved the TV series,” said Hamm. But the television show had run its course, with “Batman” paving the way for a new era in the portrayal of the beloved superhero. Finally, the caped crusader received a much-needed, darker makeover on the silver screen. ¬

The Chicago Picasso

SCREEN

Public art on 16mm at the Co-Prosperity Sphere

BY LINUS RECHT

T

he Co-Prosperity Sphere is pretty bare. About thirty attendees sit on benches and chairs before the screen. The topic is public art in Chicago in general, and the Chicago Picasso in particular: a fifty-foot untitled sculpture in the Loop, dedicated to the city in 1967.

Some say it looks like a bird, a bug, a baboon; others see a woman. At any rate, this debate will not be settled by tonight’s features: WNET’s “The Chicago Picasso” (1967, 60min), and Tom Palazzolo’s “The Bride Stripped Bare” (1967, 12min). Picasso himself, but for his photo, appears in neither film. A quick opening speech establishes that Palazzolo, present tonight, has brought along a short third film to close the evening.

Without further ado, “The Chicago Picasso” begins. A rather serious-sounding voice is the first thing we hear: “This is a film about the difficult birth of a great work of art.” This more or less sets the tone. A few doughy talking heads cycle through, telling us that Picasso is very good at art and that his sculpture is very good. The narrative is sparse. First, Picasso made a maquette; people from the Chicago side came to him to pick it up. Then, as practice, a ten-and-a-half-foot model was constructed here in the States. Eighteen months later, work began on the big one.

Interesting, sure, but not exactly high drama. Not sixty minutes worth of high drama, at any rate—and so we see much of vehicles transporting bits of the statue, and steelworkers working on it. But this latter footage is more than mere padding: as we learn at the very end of the credits, the film is sponsored by U.S. Steel. So the documentary’s industrial feel was less than accidental.

Perhaps the most vibrant scenes come at the actual unveiling: a huge blue tarp is torn away from the great beast and the gathered citizens noticeably decline to clap.

Mayor Daley looks up, confused. We will see this scene revisited in the next film.

Intermission. Palazzolo stands up to introduce his films. He’s funny, his hair is sticking up, and he seems happy to be here.

mike warhot

He tells us that around the time he shot “The Bride Stripped Bare,” Roger Ebert often came to see his films. The raciness of the film itself was calculated: Palazzolo shot it the year before censorship was struck down, and he knew Ebert liked to see some skin.

Palazzolo seems determined to heckle his own film, and essentially provides a

live commentary. The meat of the film was shot at the unveiling, but without the privileged position enjoyed by the first film. In other words, we see a lot of the crowd. We also see the cameraman himself climbing a tree—the police quickly come to relieve him of his perch.

Intercut with all this is a bevy of eclectic footage: other art, televisions, strip

clubs, and, most centrally, a young nearly-nude woman wrapped in a blue tarp. She sheds it in time with the unveiling of the Picasso. As Palazzolo says with pride, he found a living Picasso for this film who can move her eyes independently of one another. They’re now married, he adds. Wedding music blares triumphantly in the background. The camera lingers.

Palazzolo’s third film, “Pets on Parade,” does not appear to relate to the first two directly, as he himself sheepishly admits afterwards. But it is probably the most arresting: a series of interviews of the happy participants in a small-town children’s parade. The characters are weird and frequently very funny. A young girl tells us about her guinea pigs; a local activist explains his organization’s turtle mascot.

And despite Palazzolo’s protestations, it’s hard not to draw a certain parallel to the Picasso films. The grim, alienating phoniness of a grand public spectacle—the self-serious attitude Palazzolo mocked in his first film—juxtaposes nicely with this smaller, more intimate version of what is essentially the same thing: citizens coming together for the sake of creativity in the name of civic pride.

In the first film, the creativity has been outsourced to the masters and the industrialists; here the people express themselves in crude and colorful floats. In the first we find stony-faced reassurances of grandeur and the stamp of corporate sponsorship; here we find, to all appearances, real joy.

After the film there is a short talk between Palazzolo and Art Institute educator Annie Morse. We get some more of Palazzolo’s personal history as a ne’er-dowell and frequent arrestee (tear-gassed and beaten by cops, on many occasions), as well as an amusing digression in which Palazzolo complains that the Harold Washington Library displaced some particularly stimulating strip clubs. At this, the distinguished crowd lets out some nervous, baffled laughter. The organizers move in to end the Q&A. Unpretentious crudeness, sanitized in the name of order. Palazzolo seems amused; he’s seen it all before. ¬

JANUARY 29, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

Let It Be Known An unadulterated look at the life of a jazz legend

BY JULIAN NEBREDA

A

t sixty years old, Kahil El’Zabar is one of Chicago’s most decorated jazz percussionists and composers.

He’s also one of the most underexposed.

Throughout his career he’s had many struggles, both professionally and in his personal life, that have kept him on the fringe of achieving widespread recognition. He doesn’t shy away from this reality. Kahil’s first line in “Be Known,” a new documentary by fellow South Sider and filmmaker Dwayne Johnson-Cochran—which is now playing in preview screenings at the Gene Siskel Center—reveals both the purpose of the film and its central question. Kahil, half-lit, with a two-day stubble, explains with a subtle pride: “I have chosen to be in an area of art and entertainment that is not popular to the masses.”

Coupled with the film’s title, Kahil’s words are a direct and transparent demand on the world at large. After years of work, he is ready to be forthright and say he wants the attention he feels he deserves. However, following Kahil through all the ups and downs of a six-week U.S. tour, the filmmaker Dwayne Johnson-Cochran uses the 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

film for more than just profiling his talented friend. Considering Kahil’s thirty-plus years of experience touring around the world, countless albums, and his collaboration with some of jazz’s finest musicians, Dwayne also explores the question of why Kahil hasn’t enjoyed the popularity he deserves, all the while attempting to create an accurate portrait of the musician’s enigmatic personality.

Kahil was raised on Chicago’s South Side and has been working as a percussionist since he was sixteen. In addition to collaborating with artists such as Dizzy Gillespie, Nina Simone and Stevie Wonder, among others, he is also part of two groups of his own making: The Ritual Trio and The Ethnic Heritage Ensemble. He has recorded and released over fifty albums and was recognized as “Chicagoan of the Year” in 2004 by the Chicago Tribune.

His style and presence are unique. As he is portrayed in the film, Kahil avoids all traditional percussionist personas. His shows involve intricate improvisation that moves somewhere between poetry, African and Caribbean heritage beats, and sometimes

¬ JANUARY 29, 2014

even electronic influences.

In one particularly memorable scene in the film, Kahil closes his eyes during a long drum solo on the large African Earth drum, with which he is uniquely talented.

Entranced and shaking his head, surrounded by a rapt audience, he yells out intermittently in a shrill and violent pitch unlike any noise one’s accustomed to hearing from a musician, a scream that seems more akin to an exorcism than a musical performance.

Seeing Kahil live on stage through the documentary has an intoxicating effect that invites you into the soulful and impassioned world in which he seems to lose himself with every performance. Early on in the film Kahil says that he’s never used alcohol, drugs or marijuana in his life—and it isn’t hard to believe him. His performances are so involved and entrancing, any other intoxication would be pointless.

The real achievement of Dwayne Johnson-Cochran’s film is the raw portrait that it offers of Kahil, which serves to illuminate the importance of his performances and his music. “Be Known” is not afraid to reveal Kahil in a way that shows him almost un-

comfortably uncut. We see a dark side to Kahil, whose constant womanizing and seduction is juxtaposed with the central bout he faces in the film. During the shooting of the documentary, Kahil was involved in a child custody feud that eventually, if briefly, sent him to jail. Though we see the love and appreciation he has for his six other children, there’s something uncomfortable about listening to Kahil and people who are close to him describe the situation from their perspectives, undermining and patronizing the unnamed woman who is pressing charges against him, without getting the other side of the story.

An undeniable flaw of the film is the fact that we are never offered an opposing voice to counter Kahil. On top of these struggles are the standard highs and lows of constant touring, with frustrations and friendships between members, and gigs that range from depressingly empty to sold-out events with captivated audiences.

Dwayne’s camera captures all. The “fly-onthe-wall” aesthetic allows the audience to appreciate Kahil for the complex character he is and understand his music beyond these issues. His performances take on a new light as we see his struggles and understand his frustrations.

Even considering all the flaws and frustrations in the tour and in Kahil’s life, by the end of the film his artistic power is understood beyond (or in spite of) them.

Despite pursuing a difficult career path— establishing himself as a front-man jazz percussionist in a world that favors horn players, singers, or guitarists as band leaders—despite the troubles he has faced in his personal life, and despite the fact that, even with years of well received work, he still doesn’t own a house and is unable to purchase a car, he perseveres with his artwork. He says in the film, “Did I succeed or did I fail? I got an ‘S…’ an ‘S’ for survival.”

In the second-to-last scene of “Be Known,” Kahil shows some of his paintings and talks about the respite they offer him. “Thank God for art,” he says finally, before the film cuts to a final performance.

Watching him behind the drum, at the peak of his artistic maturity, it’s easy to forget about all of Kahil’s problems and be left with only one thought: Kahil El’Zabar is an artist that deserves recognition. ¬

Expat Unity “Bindu” at the Bridgeport Art Center

BY AMELIA DMOWSKA

A

seemingly 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, artists Paula Garrett-Ellis, Mareev Vaid, and Stacey Sirow explore the symbol’s deeper meaning in a collection of works that spans folk art, contemporary printmaking, sculpture, and photography. Within these pieces, the artists search for unity in a clash of cultures and customs—between India and America, past and future, tradition and modernity.

The gallery itself serves as a space for this cross-cultural unity, sheltering visitors from snow outside with sweet, samosa-scented warmth and the soft strumming of traditional Indian music. At the opening reception, gallery-goers in brightly colored saris and shawls mingled with others bundled up in black sweaters and scarves. After lighting an oil lamp in a traditional Hindu ritual, the spectators dispersed to inspect the work on the walls, which ranged from depictions of classic Indian iconography— like the Kalighat Cat and Ganesh, the elephant god of wisdom—to more modern silkscreen interpretations of these symbols.

“Western ‘modernity’ and non-Western cultures are in constant conflict on how to maintain an indigenous tradition and how to incorporate the new world,” said Lelde Kalmite, the exhibition’s curator.

“In ‘Bindu,’ we have an unusual combination of art from two expatriate Indian and American women artists who explore the pressure from Western culture to remake the world in the Western mold.”

The first of these expats, Paula Garrett-Ellis, was born in America but moved to India after her husband relocated to New Delhi for work. Even after moving to a new country, Garrett-Ellis wished to create opportunities to continue making and

paula garrett-ellis

displaying her art. She organized a project called NOWARTINDIA, a group made up of international and national women artists living in New Delhi. Together, these women collaborate to organize studio exhibitions and shows in order to continue sharing their search for self amid new environments and cultures.

While in India, Garrett-Ellis was struck by the cultural sacrifices that accompany modernization and the evolution of symbols within an urban way of life. In particular, she felt that the prevalence of plaster mannequins of women and children in marketplaces and malls typical of the thirties, forties, and fifties encapsulated these trends. While adorned in traditional Indian garb, these gaudy mannequins exhibit the faces of a Westerner: fair skin, blue and green eyes, blond hair. Many modern Indian women aspire to these Western ideals of beauty and strive to alter their natural appearance by using bleach to lighten their skin and blue contacts to change their eyes.

“Why?” asks the artist. “Why Bollywood, why bleach, blue contact lenses, white skin? In becoming globalized, so much is lost, so much natural beauty and priceless tradition.”

In “The Why Project,” Garrett-Ellis probes these questions by creating a series of silk-screen prints of women’s faces. In one of these pieces, she paints the jagged features of a woman’s visage in an unnatural, garish yellow hue. Her bright orange hair juts in spikes from her scalp while her smeared red lips scowl. Along with bright blue eyes that unabashedly glare outwards, her demeanor captures a seemingly universal discontentment with appearance that leads to the desire to fit a certain “ideal” mold.

While Mavee Vaid, an Indian woman working in America, is also concerned that her heritage is losing out to modernity, she chose to explore this topic by showcasing traditional Indian folk art from a variety of artists who capture the narratives of Indian mythologies. The collection, entitled “Deccan Footprints,” explores the tension between humans and nature in India of the past and present. She hopes that these pieces remind people all over the world of the beauty of India and open their eyes, hearts, and minds to the Bindu in order to bridge cultural differences.

In a piece called “Kundalini,” Indian artist S.H. Raza paints a series of repeat-

ing concentric blue and black circles that are reminiscent both of a dormant, coiled snake and the shape of the Bindu. The third artist featured in the exhibition, Stacy Shirow, also aimed to portray the energy and spirit of India by designing interactive water pots which try to reproduce the sounds she associates with her native country.

By weaving circular motifs within her works, Garrett-Ellis ultimately unifies the exhibition through the subtle interplay of traditional cow symbols along with modern art-making techniques. In one image, a pulsing ring of circles emanates from the middle of a cow’s forehead, epitomizing the relentless beat of the Bindu—a rhythm that will continue to unify humans even amid the inevitable trends of modernization and globalization. ¬

“Bindu,” Bridgeport Art Center, 1200 W. 35th Street. Through February 28th.

Monday-Saturday, 8am-6pm; Sunday, 8am-12pm. Free. (773)247-3000. bridgeportart.com

JANUARY 29, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

Embodying Fear “Concealed Carry” at Experimental Station

BY EMMA COLLINS

I

nside the Experimental Station, silence is punctuated by the piercing sound of gunshots. As part of its exhibit “Concealed Carry,” the Station has installed a mechanically operated shotgun that fires blanks every time a housefly crosses its path. The exhibit consists of a variety of artistic reactions to the recently passed Illinois state law that allows private citizens to carry concealed firearms, provided they obtain a permit to do so.

Much of the room resembles a sort of Technicolor armory. A giant peace sign constructed of neon-hued rifles and handguns hangs from the ceiling, questioning how Illinois will keep crime down despite the potential increase in gun-wielding residents. In one corner, a shelf showcases a series of grenades tucked into ostentatious, crocheted pouches. These “grenade cozies” represent one artist’s fear that the concealed carry legislation will lead people to glorify their weapons, carrying them around as casually as bedazzled smartphones.

Some of the featured art is decidedly darker. A series of pop-art style portraits depict everyday people cowering in fear, with circular targets superimposed over their images. Most disturbing is a portrait of a young boy with his back turned, a target lingering portentously beside one of his temples.

Haunting photographs of gunshot-riddled objects adorn another wall.

Among them, a cracked cantaloupe leaks viscera, and a ravaged animal carcass gapes.

While the gallery doesn’t officially take a stance on the concealed-carry legislation, it’s clear that the installations are curated with a strong anti-firearm sentiment in mind. One featured piece, a gun icon emblazoned on a flag and encircled 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

by a red prohibition sign, makes this slant heavily apparent.

This image—which mimics the “noguns” sign that private businesses can opt to display under concealed carry—was the subject of much debate during the group discussion hosted within the exhibit.

Rick Valicenti, a graphic designer, noted its pitfalls. “This whole act of communication is sort of trivializing the issue, the way we’ve gone about communicating the yes-or-no aspect,” he said.

Other members of the conversation felt similarly ambivalent about the flag.

Steve Wiesenthal, the university architect at the University of Chicago, suggested that the icon might alienate some Chicagoans by drawing lines between public and private space.

“We pride ourselves on being an open campus,” he said. “Anybody can come on the campus and enjoy and appreciate the architecture and the landscape…and this logo was maybe designed with individual buildings in mind, thinking that the public and private separation is building by building, but when you come to a university campus, you don’t want to think that way at all.”

Some found questions of the flag’s image to be irrelevant to the debate about concealed carry’s impact on Illinois.

“Criminals could care less about signage… the only people who follow the law are law-abiding citizens, okay?” noted one contributor to the conversation, a retired twenty-six-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department and a former homicide detective. He believes that legislation is irrelevant to people intent on committing violent crimes. “You’ve got to get that in you.

The people who cross their t’s and dot their

¬ JANUARY 29, 2014

audrey green

Audrey Green, “American Stand-Off.” i’s and go through what you have to do, the hoops that have been created, to even get a concealed carry permit, trust me, those are not the ones who are going to be inclined to go into someone’s place of business and shoot it up.”

However, many expressed concerns that the concealed-carry legislation might engender a personal arms race among Chicagoans. Others challenged the notion that violence is an essential fact of human existence, calling for the total elimination of all weapons in lieu of mediatory efforts like concealed carry.

Another contributor to the conversation asserted that the public uproar over the concealed carry legislation should be used to highlight the larger social issues at play in Chicago, especially on the South Side.

“The concealed carry legislation has allowed us to divorce our conversation about guns from concerns of race and resources,” she said. “In Chicago, guns disproportionately affect people of color, and so this legislation disproportionately affects people of color. So we need to consider concealed carry in the context of these communities and its relationship to poverty, to lack of resources, to lack of education, and that it’s one circumstance in a wider whole.”

The discussion reached no definite conclusions, but that wasn’t the point. In the words of Steve Edwards, the discussion leader, “concealment has created forms of visibility.” ¬

Strangers in Strange Lands DuSable and Museum of Mexican Art explore Jewish diaspora in America

BY SHARON LURYE

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s the horrors of the Holocaust loomed over Europe, thousands of Jews fled the continent and a new diaspora began in North America. Two museums on the South Side are now exploring the historical moment when European Jews reached Mexico and the United States and had to redefine their identities in relation to their new neighbors. At the DuSable Museum, “Beyond Swastika and Jim Crow” tours the all-black colleges of the American South, where Jewish professors struggled with the irony of finding themselves part of the oppressive majority in the land of legalized segregation. At the National Museum of Mexican Art, “As Cosmopolitans and Strangers” explores the work of Jewish-Mexican artists in the twentieth century.

The exhibits cover two very different subjects using very different approaches: “Beyond Swastika and Jim Crow” presents a historical exhibit with a clear narrative arc about the struggles of segregation; “As Cosmopolitans,” an art exhibit, is more abstract and leaves the viewer to mull over ideas of identity and heritage. Still, they can both be seen as explorations of the idea of double consciousness. Members of the diaspora felt a tension between their old sense of self and their new cultural surroundings, and these exhibits suggest that such tension was often channeled into a heightened commitment to social justice.

The DuSable exhibit contains items that highlight the history of a few Jewish professors and the influence they had on their students in the midst of the Jim Crow era. In 1933, all non-”Aryans” were banned from civil service jobs in Germany and Austria, including teaching in universities; as a result, two thousand academics lost their jobs. Some intellectuals migrated to the United States, where they struggled to find new jobs and often ended up working as butlers or busboys. The collection includes a letter from Bertrand Russell’s wife, informing Professor Walter Fales and his wife that an opening in her household for two housekeepers was already taken.

“It would have given us both great pleasure if we had been able to employ you and Mrs. Fales,” she wrote, “though it would also sadden me constantly to see intellectual people compelled by painful circumstances to do work unworthy of their talents.”

Fales and some other refugee professors were eventually able to find academic work in the all-black colleges of the American South, and there they were thrown into an unfamiliar position. Before, they were Jewish; only when they got to the South did they suddenly become “White.” As one professor put it: “[In Germany] we were victims and now...I belonged not to the oppressed, but to the oppressor. And that was very, very uncomfortable for me.” Perhaps the situation reminded some Jews of the exhortation in Exodus, given after the Hebrews escaped slavery in Egypt, to “not oppress a stranger: for ye…were strangers in the land of Egypt.” In this case, they had escaped the tyranny of Hitler only to find themselves living with Pharaoh Jim Crow.

The exhibit features a few items that illustrate the well-known indignities of the Jim Crow era, including a 1952 travel guide for African Americans that promised “vacation and recreation without humiliation.” More than anything else, though, the exhibit is a testament to the impact of a caring teacher. The professors featured in the exhibit did not march in Selma or Washington, but their students did. The exhibit includes numerous quotes from African Americans who went on to become successful artists, scientists, civil rights activists, and teachers themselves, about how the professors they had in college inspired them, pushed them, and believed in them.

Take as one example Ernst Borinski, a professor at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi. A secret report written by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission accused him of being a “race agitator,” who “fostered racial equality and integration of the races” by giving lectures for “mixed” groups of students. Donald Cunnigen, now a professor of sociology at the University of

Rhode Island, wrote of his teacher, “One of the things I got from Borinski was that I could do anything I wanted to do, that I was a student comparable to any other student anyway.”

“A

s Cosmopolitans and Strangers” focuses even more on the ideas of “strangers” and “strangeness.” The title of the exhibit comes from the work of scholar Adina Cimet, who studied how members of the Jewish diaspora in Mexico responded to their new surroundings: with a feeling of being both assimilated “cosmopolitans” and unassimilated “strangers.”

None of the artwork in the exhibit deals obviously with Jewish themes or features explicit Jewish symbols; without an explanatory introduction, I would not have guessed that the art was “Jewish” at all.

The art on display is highly varied, ranging from abstract paintings to woodcut prints that are almost like documentaries in their realism. As a viewer, knowing that nothing necessarily linked the artists besides their shared Mexican-Jewish heritage, it was interesting to see how a few recurring devices and themes could appear in otherwise unrelated art.

One of these devices is a detailed, observational gaze, where daily life in Mexico is portrayed with dignified realism in prints or photographs. Take, for example, the linocut “Laundress” by Mariana Yampolsky.

This thick-lined black portrait on a sepia background shows a young girl working over a tub.Her face is impassive and turned away from the viewer; her shoulders are stooped over with quiet exhaustion. Yampolsky, the daughter of Jewish refugees from Europe, was deeply involved in the movement for social justice for Mexican laborers. Her view is clearly sympathetic, but is it the gaze of an outsider?

The techniques of Mexican social realism—an art form that takes the lower classes as its main subject, valorizes their struggle, and often criticizes the forces that led to their poverty—is most commonly

seen in the monumental murals of the early twentieth century; several of the artists in the exhibit trained under the influential muralist David Siquieros or worked with Diego Rivera, himself a descendent of Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, many of the works are abstract or lack human representation, like the bold “Birth of Lightning” by Leonardo Nierman, an intense bolt of color that somehow retains the dramatic energy of a mural. Several of the artists take their inspiration from the Nahua codices of pre-Columbian people, pictographic writing systems that served as inspiration for a form of communication that could cross boundaries of language and culture.

The exhibits at the DuSable Museum and the National Museum of Mexican Art let the visitor view history through the eyes of people who are simultaneously outsiders and insiders. It is impossible to say with certainty how the Jewish artists or Jewish professors ultimately came to view their identities in a new culture, but the power in both exhibits lies in the fact that they let the viewer see North America as the refugee might have: as a strange, challenging, fascinating new land. ¬

“Beyond Swastika and Jim Crow: Jewish Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges,” The DuSable, 740 E. 56th Place.

Through April 6. Tuesday-Saturday, 1 0am-5pm; Sunday, noon-5pm. Free.

(773)947-0600. dusablemuseum.org & “As Cosmopolitans & Strangers,” National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th Street. Through August 3.

Tuesday-Sunday, 10am-5pm.

Free. (312)738-1503. nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org

JANUARY 29, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

BOOKS

A Case for Public Schools Christopher and Sarah Lubienski’s “The Public School Advantage”

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18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

cess that the Lubienskis seek to explain in their book.

Public schools actually benefit from governmental ties, they claim. Their teachers must be licensed and must go through more professional development than their private school counterparts. The Lubienskis point out that such professional training has prompted public school teachers to adopt more global teaching perspectives. Private school teachers, on the other hand, have not been required to update their teaching styles or make their classroom approach more effective. And the teachers hired by new charter and private schools, like those opening in Chicago, are often much younger and even less trained.

Beyond that, because public schools serve the government, they have little need to cater to anyone but their students. They are not as beholden to parents or alumni, or to the pressures of the market; and they don’t have to spend large amounts of money on their image. “It appears that more autonomous schools—the private and charter schools so often credited with innovation—are doing a poor job of choosing effective educational strategies, of working on behalf of students, rather than parents,” the Lubienskis write. Being independent of the market helps make public schools as effective as they are.

“The Public School Advantage” is a slim but dense book, one that systematically breaks down prevailing misconceptions about the educational system. Knowing why people think what they think about schools, and how those opinions influence their choices, makes the Lubienskis’ conclusion sounder and more sensible.

But while the concepts of the book are clear and the evidence is almost indisput-

¬ JANUARY 29, 2014

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

Performing Images From the late fourteenth to the early twentieth centuries, opera and theater were central to Chinese cultural life at the Imperial Court and in rural villages alike. This flowering of theater produced an inevitable ripple effect felt far beyond the stage. Operatic motifs are found on ceramics, scroll paintings, books, fans, and textiles.

“Performing Images,” a new exhibit at the Smart Museum of Art, compiles a stunning array of such objects from the Ming and Qing dynasties. The show is being launched in concert with a five-month-long festival, “Envisioning China: A Festival of Arts and Culture,” that celebrates Chinese art, history, and culture with over forty events. “Performing Images” runs alongside another exhibit at the Smart, “Inspired by the Opera: Contemporary Chinese Photography and Video.” Together, these two collections form an unbroken narrative of an important field of Chinese visual art from its origins in medieval opera through its present incarnation.

Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. Februrary 13-June 15. Tuesday-Wednesday, 10am-5pm; Thursday, 10am-8pm; Friday-Sunday, 10am-5pm. Free. (773)7020200. smartmuseum.uchicago.edu (Lillian Selonick)

BY OLIVIA DOROW HOVLAND s schools have closed and teachers have gone on strike, the Chicago Public Schools seems to trend ever faster toward privatization. In December, after closing fifty “underutilized” public schools, CPS announced a proposal to open twenty-one new charter schools— publically funded but privately run—over the next few years.

Christopher and Sarah Lubienski, authors of “The Public School Advantage,” argue that public schools provide a better education than private and charter schools, an assertion that is certainly significant to the parents and teachers of Chicago’s students, who are still grappling with the recent round of mass closures of public schools. And the Lubienskis, both professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, say they have the numbers to back their claims up.

They first normalized test score data, accounting for the socioeconomic differences between public and private school students. Once the scores had been adjusted, they found that public school students were outperforming private school students by a wide margin; public school students have an edge that equates to anything from a few weeks to an entire school year, depending on the type of private school used for comparison.

The only reason that private school students outscore their public peers in gross test scores, the Lubienskis argue, is the difference in students’ backgrounds. Coming from a more affluent, educated background helps a whole lot—probably more than we thought we knew. But the flipside is that the public schooling system is doing a phenomenal job of helping underprivileged kids make up for those differences, a suc-

VISUAL ARTS

Regret

able, the rhetoric is a bit overwhelming. I often found myself getting lost in the middle of the page, bogged down by overly pedantic vocabulary. While the Lubienskis are career academics, and are likely catering to an audience of peers, there’s still something to be said for clarity.

Yet the pitfalls of the book itself are overshadowed by the significance of its conclusion: education is a public service that should not be beholden to markets.

And as the Board of Education continues to close large numbers of public schools in favor of constructing new, privately-run charter schools, outrage is a reasonable response. When students of equal socioeconomic backgrounds are performing better at public schools than charters and private schools, Chicagoans should be asking Mayor Emanuel why CPS is going in the opposite direction. “The Public School Advantage,”

by Christopher A. Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski. University of Chicago Press. 304 pages.

How a person handles the mistakes they’ve made and the regrets they carry can say a lot about them.

Repressing or dwelling; shame or blame; unless you’ve made all the right decisions in life (and you haven’t) you have had to grapple with—maybe even master—a way of coming to terms with your regrets. As Chicago Art Department puts it, “the best way to start a new year is to dwell on the mistakes you made in the last.” Whether you’re looking to satisfy your schadenfreude or find comfort in your own regrets, an exhibition dedicated to exploring the sentiment is sure to make for some interesting conversations with fellow gallery-goers. Chicago Art Department, 1932 S. Halsted #101. Opening reception Friday, February 14, 6pm-10pm. Free. (312)725-4223. chicagoartdepartment.org (Katryce Lassle)

Photorealism in the Digital Age For New York-based artist Yigal Ozeri and other photorealistic painters, there is much to be gained by rendering a photograph with paint on canvas. The works they produce capture all of the detail and depth of a photograph, and simultaneously seem to project the image into an ethereal, dreamy world beyond our own. With the quality of digital photography constantly improving, photorealistic painters can capture and magnify intricate details more vividly (and realistically) than ever. Mana Contemporary Chicago explores some of Israeli-born Ozeri’s most recent work in their upcoming exhibition “Photorealism in the Digital Age,” shedding light on an ever-changing form of painting that has fascinated for decades. Mana Contemporary Chicago, 2233 S. Throop St. Opening reception Saturday, February 15, 5pm-8pm. February 15-April 15. Call for gallery hours. Free. (312)8508301. manafinearts.com (Katryce Lassle)

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

ARTS CALENDAR 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, 915 E. 60th St. Through February 16. Monday-Saturday, 8am-10pm; Sunday, 11am-8pm. Free. (773)702-2787. arts.uchicago. edu (Paige Pendarvis)

Miami Dutch They preview us to curiosity with the strangeness of their release. I try to parse their gnomish subtext but lose myself as I take up this tongue-tripping, blurb-breaking, press-punching tone. “Miami Dutch,” a new exhibition going up at Queer Thoughts, insists on becoming the Last Time You Did Something for the First Time.

Coupling an unhinged and gestural short story with an exuberantly bright and sharp-edged painting, they argue on their website that the intersection might just “break the adverbial body and her discreet geometries,” “the inaccessible plan of the surface.” The prose resists a simple gloss, the composition seemingly shivers itself into shapes, and you, gallery-goer, will remake reality.

Can you feel it? Queer Thoughts Gallery, 1640 W. 18th St. #3. Through February 23. Hours by appointment. qtgallery. net (Stephen Urchick)

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)

Fragmentos It’s how most of us remember our childhoods: in fragments, abstract bits of memories that we are sometimes surprised we’ve kept with us. We all carry mental maps of our youth; Mexican-American artist Pilar Acevedo lays hers out in full color. She works through poetry, painting, sound, sculpture, and found materials to reimagine not only her childhood, but also the aspects of childhood that many women share. Surreal, uncanny, and even a bit frightening, “Fragmentos” places girlhood in a dream space that might turn into a nightmare at any moment. You survived childhood; “Fragmentos” is a wonderful opportunity to reflect on those years you thought you’d forgotten. National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th St. Through July 13. Tuesday-Sunday, 10am-5pm. Free. (312)738-1503. nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org (Katryce Lassle)

STAGE & SCREEN Alissa Nutting Reads from “Tampa” It seems like every critic that talks about Alissa Nutting’s first novel “Tampa” compares the debut to “Lolita,” or talks about how everybody’s comparing the book to “Lolita.” To be fair, our literary vocabulary has little to draw on when it comes to discussing first person, fictional, semi-erotic accounts of pedophilia.

Nutting’s Humbert, schoolteacher Celeste Price, is young, beautiful, and consumed by her desire for her pre-pubescent students. To read the first fifteen pages is to feel guilty by association. Nutting herself eschews the comparison with literary predecessors, offering up the book to be maligned or heralded on its own merits. Nutting will read and discuss the novel Thursday. Midway

Studios, 929 E. 60th St. Thursday, January 30, 6pm. Free.

(773)834-8524. arts.uchicago.edu (Hannah Nyhart)

Always for Pleasure & Dry Wood In celebration of Carnival season and all its festivities, Black Cinema House is rolling out a double feature. Two films by renowned director Les Blank peer into the music, culture, and passion of people living on the margins of American society. In the tradition of documentarian-folklorist Alan Lomax, Blank’s films bring the viewer straight into the enclaved worlds of Louisiana Zydeco, New Orleans “ jazz funerals,” and the Mardi Gras crawfish boil. “Always for Pleasure,” the first film of the evening, explores multiple traditions of the New Orleans Mardi Gras season. The film showcases scenes that range from the brass-band funeral procession, the city’s traditional Creole cuisine, the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade, and the heritage of the “Mardi Gras Indians,” a group of African-American Carnival revelers known for their distinctive Native American ceremonial apparel.

The film offers a more nuanced than usual view of a history-steeped party like none other. Black Cinema House, 6901 S. Dorchester Ave. Sunday, February 2, 4pm. Free.

RSVP online. blackcinemahouse.org (Meaghan Murphy)

The Trials of Muhammad Ali Director Bill Siegel brings to life the story of the man who handcuffed lightning and threw thunder, in his new documentary “The Trials of Muhammad Ali.” Cassius Clay, who later changed his name to Muhammad Ali, became arguably the greatest boxer of all time, and found himself on the ropes facing conflicts over religion, war, and race. The film concentrates on a burgeoning legend’s turn away from fame and fortune, towards his personal beliefs. Ali’s struggles are not as well known today, yet his spiritual journey through Islam is what made him who he is. Siegel, who will be on hand for a Q&A, is an Academy Award-nominated director with twenty years of experience. Combining the world of professional boxing and the tumultuous days of the 1960s, Siegel has brought a fantastic history to the screen. South Side Weekly is a sponsor of this event. Logan Center, 915 E. 60th St. Friday, February 7, 7pm. Free. (773)702-8596. filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu (Mark Hassenfratz)

Taming of the Shrew The English literary tradition owes Shakespeare big time. Pretty much anyone who has ever scribbled in English post-Bard, from storied critic Harold Bloom to storied critic Kanye West, has, at some point, invoked the man’s authority. The Greeks have Plato, the Germans Goethe, and we have the Swan of Avon.

For the longest time, I was under the impression that “The Taming of the Shrew” involved some combination of old English and anthropomorphism. As a firm believer in my pet turtle Julius’ right to conversation, I was disappointed to find my convictions only partially founded. Nonetheless, the Provision Theater’s offering of this classic—a patchwork quilt of sexism, misogyny, and societal discomfort—is required viewing. Whether you’re looking to carry out a feminist takedown or you simply want to check out Heath Ledger’s source material, swing by, throwing-fruit in hand. Provision Theater, 1001 W. Roosevelt Rd. February 12-March 30. See website for showtimes and pricing. (312)455-0065. provisiontheater.org (Arman Sayani)

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

30th, 8 PM. 773.890.0588. community-bar.com (Zach Goldhammer)

Young Dro

Annual BluJazz Festival Three Davids team up to slay the hulking Goliath

that is smooth elevator jazz. BluJazz Productions, an “independent artist managed label and promotion service,” is hosting its annual jazz festival at the Jazz Showcase, “where jazz lives in Chicago,” and local public radio station 90.9fm WDCB is sponsoring the event.

The Jazz Showcase was founded by Joe Segal in 1947, making it the oldest jazz club in Chicago. This month, BluJazz’s artists join the long list of legends that have played this historic venue. Featuring five days and nights of local, independent musicians from the BluJazz label, the festival promises to deliver what’s hot in the Chicago jazz scene. The Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth Ct. January 29-February 2. See venue website for performance times. $10-$15. (312)360-0234. jazzshowcase.com (Lillian Selonick)

Grateful Dead & Phish Cover Bands Phishing for a cure for your beleaguered, psychedelia-starved soul? Looking to fill the void in your life that was left when Jerry Garcia escaped this life some eighteen years ago? But why seek ye the living among the grateful dead? Should you call yourself a Dead Head, Phish Head, reefer head, or just another head interested in joining the special ranks of rock ‘n’ roll’s most cultish and unswerving fan base—well then seek no farther!

On Thursday, January 30 become privy to the sacrament of the jam band set, and pay your respects to two of the greats—Grateful Dead and Phish—in this double album cover band show. On this singular night, Paradise Waits will be covering the Dead’s 1990 “Without a Net” and Helping Phriendly Orchestra will be covering Phish’s sophomore album “Lawn Boy” at Reggies music joint on State Street. Come if only to keep “the Vibe” alive.

Reggies Music Joint, 2105 South State Street. Thursday, January 30, 7:30pm. $10. 21+. (312)949-0120. reggieslive. com (Jamison Pfeifer)

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

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. reggieslive.com (Jake Bittle)

Juelz Santana Last January, Juelz Santana of The Diplomats (“It’s Dipset, b$%!h”) went solo for the first time since 2005 with his mixtape, “God Will’n.” Positively dripping with superstar features, the long-awaited project revealed that Santana’s Uptown, NY wit is just as sharp (and his entourage just as fly) as it was when he dropped the perpetually addictive “There It Go (The Whistle Song)” nearly a decade ago. Now, one year since his last mixtape release, Santana is poised to make the jump from “Whassup? I’m Back” status to “No Seriously, I’m BACK” by releasing his third studio album, “Born to Lose, Built to Win,” an album which he has been working on since before Obama was elected. Pop over to The Shrine on February 13th and catch the fabled Harlem rhymester reclaim his throne in the Midwest.

The Shrine, 2109 S. Wabash Ave. Thursday, February 13.

Doors open at 10pm. $20. (312)753-5700. theshrinechicago. com (Kari Wei)

Hyde Park Folk Festival Walk right in, sit right down for the fifty-fourth annual

Hyde Park Folk Festival. The festival, which since 1961 has brought artists like the New Lost City Ramblers, the Staple Singers, and Muddy Waters to the Mandel Hall stage, is back with a lineup ranging from veteran artists Bobby Hicks and Calvin Bridges to two promising new acts, Bigfoot and the Yanks. As always, performers will encompass a range of styles from Appalachian to Irish, gospel, and more. Head to campus early over the weekend for free dances, jam sessions, and other workshops to be held in Ida Noyes Hall, 1212 E. 59th St. If you’re craving a behind-the-scenes look at the world of contemporary folk, The Folklore Society is still accepting volunteers to staff the festival.

Mandel Hall, 1131 E. 57th St. February 14-16. See website for times. $10-25, weekend pass and student/senior discounts available. Tickets online, by phone, or at Mandel Hall Box Office. (773)702-7300. uofcfolk.org (Rachel Schastok)

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.The Yolks / Two Dollars Out the Door / Randy 2. Rollin Hunt / The Phony / Moniker 3. Potty Mouth / Hell Bent / Old Flame 4. Bil Vermette / Katha Visions [reissue] / Permanent 5. Wooden Shjips / Back to Land / Thrill Jockey 6. Basic Cable / I’m Good to Drive / Permanent 7. Running / Vaguely Ethnic / Castle Face 8. Slushy / Candy / Randy 9. Ezra Furman / Day of the Dog / Bar/None 10. Wax Museums / Zoo Full of Ramones / Tic Tac Totally 11. The Julie Ruin / Run Fast / TJR/Dischord 12. Night Beats / Sonic Bloom / Reverberation Appreciation Society 13. White Fence / Live in San Francisco / Castle Face 14. Myrian Mekenwa / La Extraordinaria / Kindred Spirits 15. Scott & Charlene’s Wedding / Any Port in a Storm / Fire

JANUARY 29, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JANUARY 29, 2014