October 29, 2014

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY OCTOBER 29, 2014

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A R T S , C U LT U R E , A N D P O L I T I C S

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S O U T H S I D E W E E K LY. C O M

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Voting to Be Heard

BLACK EUTOPIA, DEAR WHITE PEOPLE, LIT & LUZ FEST, FIERCE WOMEN OF FAITH

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MORE INSIDE

As Republicans court the black vote, South Side pastors endorse to send a message

arts

DOVA Faculty Lecture

Theaster Gates

PLAT|FORMS Conversations in Place 10.24 2014 to 1.2 2015

Mon, Nov 3, 6 pm / Free Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates is a visual arts professor and director of Arts + Public Life at UChicago.

Gates has developed an expanded practice that includes space development, object making, performance, and critical engagement with many publics.

DOVA-OPC Lecture

Liam Gillick

A conversation-focused exhibition invested in new thinking around design, community development, and artistic agency in cities. With the future of the Washington Park neighborhood as its principle concern, this exhibition acts as a laboratory for reimagining place.

Arts Incubator 301 E Garfield Blvd Chicago, IL 60637

GROWING PAINS

Artists

As part of the exhibition, Place Lab hosts GROWING PAINS, a three-part conversation series examining contested space and design through the lenses of public housing, public art, and public schools.

Conversations moderated by Lee Bey.

David Adjaye Stephen Burks + Master Class participants Tadd Cowen Felicia Ferrone Eric Mirabito Jonathan Muecke Miguel Perez Sara Pooley Kevin Reiswig Norman Teague

Through Jan 2, 2015 Admission Free

Mon, Nov 10, 6 pm / Free Acclaimed artist Liam Gillick is based in New York. His wide ranging practice involves writing, sculpture, film, wall texts, and furntiture. Gillick has been exhibited at major venues around the world. This lecture is presented in connection with Logan Center Exhibitions’ Szalon, on view through Nov 23, 2014 at the Logan Center Gallery.

Public Housing + Design Wed, Nov 19, 6–8 pm Public Art + Design Wed, Dec 3, 6–8 pm

Logan Center Performance Hall 915 E 60th St, The University of Chicago arts.uchicago.edu 773 702 2787

Public Schools + Design Tue, Dec 9, 6–8 pm

arts.uchicago.edu/apl artsandpubliclife PLAT|FORMS is supported by generous contributions from the Knight Foundation, Knoll Inc., Roche Bobois, Dedon, Parachilna, Volume Gallery, Michael Jefferson, and Missoni. Photo by Sara Pooley.

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¬ OCTOBER 29, 2014

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is a nonprofit newsprint magazine written for and about neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. We publish in-depth coverage of the arts and issues of public interest alongside oral histories, poetry, fiction, interviews, and artwork from local photographers and illustrators. Started as a student paper at the University of Chicago, the South Side Weekly is now an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side, and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists.

Editor-in-Chief Bea Malsky Managing Editor Hannah Nyhart Deputy Editors John Gamino, Meaghan Murphy Politics Editors Osita Nwanevu, Rachel Schastok Education Editor Bess Cohen Visual Arts Editor Emma Collins Music Editor Jake Bittle Stage & Screen Olivia Stovicek Editor Web Editor Sarah Claypoole Contributing Editors Maha Ahmed, Lucia

Ahrensdorf, Lauren Gurley Photo Editor Illustration Editor Layout Editor

Luke White Ellie Mejia Adam Thorp

Senior Writers Patrick Leow, Jack Nuelle, Stephen Urchick Staff Writers Olivia Adams, Christian

Belanger, Emily Lipstein,

Noah Kahrs, Maira Khwaja,

Olivia Markbreiter, Jamison Pfeifer, Wednesday Quansah, Arman Sayani Staff Photographers Camden Bauchner, Juliet

Eldred, Kiran Misra, Siddhesh Mukerji Staff Illustrators Wei Yi Ow, Hanna Petroski, Amber Sollenberger Editorial Interns

Zavier Celimene, Denise Parker, Clyde Schwab

Business Manager

Harry Backlund

The paper is produced by an all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, spring, and winter, with breaks during April and December. Over the summer we publish monthly. Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 1212 E. 59th Street Ida Noyes Hall #030 Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773)234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly Read our stories online at southsideweekly.com

Cover photo by Rick Majewski.

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

Tony Hu is Fine After a series of FBI raids on his chain of Lao restaurants (Yunnan, Sze Chuan, Shanghai, etc.) wherein federal agents searched computers and seized paperwork, shutting down the restaurants in the middle of the lunch rush, big-shot Chinatown chef and mogul Tony Hu has reassured his hordes of loyal customers with a profound statement of positivity. “I am fine,” said Hu in a recent email to DNAinfo. Now we can all rest peacefully knowing that the namesake of that delicious Chef Tony’s Chicken wasn’t harmed by those pesky government officers who went snooping into his totally legitimate restaurant operation.

No word on the future of said operation, but Hu did indicate that he would be hiring an attorney.

Non-endorsement of the Sun-Times Longtime Sun-Times political reporter David McKinney has resigned, and the Sun-Times has endorsed Bruce Rauner for governor, as if things could get any worse. The endorsement, which broke SunTimes’s own three-year no-endorsement policy, came after a borderline-defamatory attack on McKinney by the campaign, which alleged that McKinney’s wife, Ann Liston, was working with a PAC to defeat Rauner. In his resignation letter, McKinney traced the issue to his work on a piece “focused on litigation involving the former executive, who alleged Bruce Rauner, while a director of the company, threatened her, her family and her future job prospects.” He was attacked by the Rauner campaign and, for some reason, placed on leave. We have to tell it straight: it is a great lapse of integrity in Chicago journalism.

Dyett Lives CPS announced Friday that it would initiate a formal request for proposals for an open-enrollment high school to replace Dyett High School, on the northern edge of Washington Park. Slated for closure in 2012, Dyett now serves only thirteen seniors who take a number of classes online. The Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO) has been fighting to keep the school open since the closure decision. According to KOCO organizer Jitu Brown, the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett High School has presented a proposal for the Dyett Global Leadership and Green Technology High School—which includes a “full academic plan”—both to Alderman Will Burns and CPS officials, but none were willing to commit to it. The announcement of the RFP comes weeks after eleven KOCO activists were arrested during a sit-in at City Hall, but also, interestingly, during the heat of election season.

Capone Lives Too? People are always trying to get a peek inside Barbara Hogsette’s house in Greater Grand Crossing, and she just can’t take it anymore—even if Al Capone did once live there. The six-bedroom house is far too expensive for the retired CPS teacher to maintain, but she’s had a hard time trying to sell it. Capone bought the home for only $5,500 in 1923 and lived in it for eight years before being sent to prison for tax evasion, and a petition has been started to preserve the building and turn it into a museum.

IN THIS ISSUE voting to be heard

bronzeville artist

spotlight on

picking up peace

“We want to send a message, to the African-American community and to Dick Durbin, to let him know we are not a novelty.”

lofts offer a new

afterschool

live-work space

“More and more people are finally realizing that afterschool is not a luxury. It is a necessity.”

“I don’t know if I should say this, but it’s true. Ladies get the job done.”

john gamino...4 victor storino, steelworker, 73

“Unless you work in the steel industry, you would not understand what goes on in the steel industry.”

harrison smith...14

BAL received over 200 applications for its sixteen spaces.

olivia adams...8

emeline posner, mari cohen, olivia myskowski, and chloe hadavas...10

bess cohen...12

barbershop talk

a conversation with

lit & luz at co-pro

Most attendees were there for a haircut and had no idea that they were walking into an art show.

justin simien

“There is no place I hate more than Mexico City, and there is no place I love more than Mexico City.”

zoe makoul...16

I was concerned about the kind of crowd Dear White People would attract.

ellie mejia...17

lauren gurley...18

Voting to Be Heard As Republicans court the black vote, South Side pastors endorse to send a message

BY JOHN GAMINO

O

n August 8, as the Republican National Committee concluded its three-day summer meeting in Chicago, Paul Ryan sounded the new message of the Republican Party. “We have to go to corners of the country that are not used to seeing us,” he told his fellow party leaders.

But with less than three months until the November elections, Ryan and the Republicans were surely hoping that people had begun to get used to seeing them already. The plans for their change of strategy had been laid much earlier.

In December 2012, after a historic election season in which, for the second time, African American voters turned out at a higher rate than white voters, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus commissioned the “Growth and Opportunity Project.”

Intended to “grow the party and improve Republican campaigns,” the report found that public perception of the party was at “record lows,” that Republicans were seen as “scary,” “narrow-minded,” and “out of touch,” and that things would only get worse, when, “in 2050, whites will be 47 percent of the country” (they were sixty-three percent of the population at the time of the report).

The report determined that Republicans desperately had to find new voters among minority communities. “This priority needs to be a continual effort that affects every facet of our Party’s activities,” it said.

Last October, a memo went out from the RNC’s director of communications, updating the party on the “new approach.”

Whereas, in the past, Republicans had spent most of their time hording cash to use 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

in last-minute, pre-election, three-month binge-sessions, the new plan would be to establish a permanent ground game. “This work isn’t about one campaign or one election year.”

Finally, on May 7 of this year, the RNC formally announced Victory 365, “a new permanent grassroots field operation,” focused heavily on engagement with minority communities, that would be “unlike anything the RNC has done in past election cycles.” It was the official theme of the Chicago meeting in August.

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n the last day of September, Jim Oberweis, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Illinois, opened a campaign office at 6607 S. King Drive. He stood in a room with bare white walls and polished wood floors, flanked by several African-American community leaders, in what used to be a soul food restaurant.

Though the election was just a month away, with early voting to begin on October 20, Oberweis’s message was humble and nonspecific. “I don’t have the answer to every problem,” he admitted. “I’m pretty knowledgeable about the economy. I’m less knowledgeable about how to solve the gun violence. But I will listen.”

The community leaders who spoke were more assertive. “The reason we put this office here,” Pastor Corey Brooks announced, “is because we want to send a message, to the African-American community and to Dick Durbin, to let him know we are not a novelty.” At that, there was a decisive round of applause. “We don’t stand alone.”

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Over the past year, a number of South and West Side pastors, either independents or former Democrats, have publicly endorsed Republicans. Brooks, of New Beginnings Church, just across the street from the Oberweis campaign office, is one of them. Pastor Ira Acree, of Greater St. John Bible Church in Austin, who was also in attendance at the opening of the Oberweis office, is another. Still others include Pastor James Meeks, a Democratic state senator until he retired last year, Marshall Hatch, who has served as Rainbow PUSH’s national director of religious affairs, and Bishop Larry Trotter, who has been active in civil rights causes and wants a south suburban trauma center.

They are too few to be called a movement, and too individually distinct to be called a collective. Brooks has endorsed both Oberweis and Bruce Rauner, the Republican candidate for governor. Meeks, Hatch, and Thurston have endorsed Rauner but have not said anything publicly about the Senate race. Trotter has endorsed Oberweis but hasn’t said anything about Rauner. Acree will vote for Oberweis but also Democratic Governor Pat Quinn (though Brooks, in one media appearance, included him in a list of pastors supporting Rauner).

What they have in common is their dissatisfaction with the say African Americans have, or don’t have, in state politics.

They think that Democrats have taken the African-American vote for granted, and that African Americans have been disenfranchised as an assumed constituency: not every politician has to listen to them, and those that do don’t have to listen very hard.

The pastors who have endorsed Oberweis

cite a “lack of access” to Durbin (Trotter), a failure to address “the critical needs of our community” (Acree), and not enough “concern about African Americans” (Brooks).

All three voted for Durbin when he was last up for reelection, in 2008.

“I’m not a new Republican, that’s not the message I wanted to give,” Acree told me.

“I look around and see so many people struggling, getting gunned down, because people are desperate and resorting to these desperate measures, because of the economy, they can’t get jobs,” he said. “And when I see politicians playing games it frustrates the living hell out of me.”

“Does all this mean we should support Republicans whose policies are against the interests of our communities?” Hatch asked in an editorial he wrote for the Austin Weekly News, in which he endorsed Rauner. “Of course not. But all this does mean that we will have to learn how to play two-party politics in order to win in every election.” Hatch called the relationship of African-Americans and Democrats “dysfunctional,” and said that Quinn only had to appoint an African-American as his running mate to have gained more credibility.

“If [Rauner] pulls this off with African-American support, there’s going to be a different relationship with African-Americans and the Democratic Party,” Hatch told CBS in September.

Both Oberweis and Rauner have made headlines for their efforts to court the African-American vote: Oberweis for the office at 66th and King, and Rauner for putting $1 million of his own money in the South Side Community Federal Credit Union

POLITICS

over the summer. (The credit union’s president, Gregg Brown, had never met Rauner prior to the deposit and has not endorsed him.) And they have been especially vocal about the pastors’ endorsements, appropriating their rhetoric of dissatisfaction.

“I think he’s never listened to the needs of these communities,” Oberweis told me, referring to Durbin and the South Side.

In the second gubernatorial debate, held at the DuSable Museum in Hyde Park and dedicated to African-American issues, Rauner proudly stumbled through the names of his endorsers: “I’ve been very honored in this election to be endorsed and supported by many prominent African-American leaders here. Rev. James Meeks, Rev. Corey Brooks, (um) Rev. (uh) Marshall Hatch, (uh) Commissioner Lou Laford, (uh) Dr. Willie Wilson, Dr. (uh), Rev. Thurston, many others, dozens of others.”

Though the pastors, like Brooks and Acree, have been vocal about their decisions, they’ve also been careful to frame them as a matter of personal choice, a sign that African-Americans are not beholden to any particular party or candidate. They have put their faith in the individual candidates’ abilities to create jobs, but they have not done the same for all Republicans, and they remain cynical of both parties. Ultimately, they reserve their right to cynicism, and they are most concerned with shaking up the current system and empowering African-Americans.

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n April 2013, Pastor Ira Acree went to Springfield to lobby for sensible gun control legislation, along with Pastor Marshall Hatch and other members of the Chicago Clergy Coalition, an interfaith group. There, the coalition delivered petitions containing 50,000 signatures for “common sense gun legislation,” calling for criminal background checks on all gun purchases, registering all guns, reporting all stolen guns, and an outright ban on assault weapons. “Something radical needs to be done to stop the unchecked flow of guns,” Acree said at the time.

The experience destroyed what confidence he had in state politics. “They made all these speeches, ‘We’re for background checks, banning assault rifles,’ all that,” he recalled, “and then they can’t pass the legislation. That does not pass the smell test.”

At the time, Democrats controlled, and still do, the House, the Senate, and

the Governor’s office. “These people are in control and they don’t do anything,” Acree said. “When we stood out in the cold, collecting signatures, and the Democrats couldn’t find the courage—who cares about speeches about gun legislation if you’re not going to implement the laws?”

Jim Oberweis has an endorsement and an eighty-three percent favorability rating from the NRA, thinks that gun control does not reduce gun violence, and says on his campaign website that gun laws only make those who think otherwise—people like Acree, who endorsed him— “feel good.”

But it would be tough to call Acree’s endorsement of Oberweis naive, or even a compromise. “In the last election cycle,” he

activist, also from Austin, argued that Acree had “leveraged for a lot less than what the Democratic Party has actually done for the black community.” Still, Acree’s position is deliberate and takes this criticism into account.

He cites Oberweis’s record on jobs and “vision for economic growth” as affirmative reasons for his endorsement, and hopes that Oberweis could help solve “the number one issue in my community right now,” which is the economy. He voted for Jim Edgar, the Republican governor, in the 1990s. But he was still a Democrat then, and he doesn’t see himself as suddenly becoming conservative now.

“I’m a Democrat, and I’ve been a Democrat since the first time I voted for

“In the last election cycle, I would have chopped Oberweis up like chopped liver. I would have said, ‘If you’re not for gun control, I’m not for you.’ ” Pastor Ira Acree told me, “I would have chopped Oberweis up like chopped liver. I would have said, ‘If you’re not for gun control, I’m not for you.’ ” To the Democrats and Republicans who play “political games,” Acree has responded with his own political long game.

“It’s about making a statement,” he emphasized. It’s not about this election cycle so much as bringing African-Americans “back in the conversation in the two-party system.” It’s about turning to African-Americans for policy rather than turnout, about making African-Americans a true constituency where they currently are not. “If we push back and show that we could possibly vote for the Republican Party one cycle,” he says, “maybe we could get some respect.”

Acree’s position has come under fire, from both within the community and without. In an editorial in the Austin Weekly News, Dwayne Truss, a public education

[Harold] Washington in 1983. I’ve been a Democrat my whole life, but when I see the mean-spirited, blatant disrespect that this party dares to give black men who think independently, it really leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.”

But, “I’m not going to shut up, I’m going to continue to try and speak truth to power, and elevate our people, because they’re getting screwed.”

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he winter before Acree and the Chicago Clergy Coalition faced the Chicago cold to collect signatures, Pastor Corey Brooks spent ninety-four days atop the roof of a motel. He wanted to use the attention to raise the money needed to buy the motel, and later, to build a community center on the site, across the street from his church. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton came to visit him.

He told the New York Times that, while he would never run for office, he would “always fight against the social ills of our society.”

The motel has since been purchased and torn down. The now-deserted lot runs right up against the small building at 6607 S. King, the one with the Oberweis campaign office, which Brooks’s church also owns. After the election, Brooks plans to tear it down as well, to make more room for his community center.

Before endorsing Oberweis, in May, Brooks had never voted for anyone running against Durbin. (In 2010, he also voted for Pat Quinn.) Since May, he has led Oberweis on trips around the South Side, including five visits this summer to the corner of 79th and Cottage Grove, as part of Brooks’s anti-violence “Brothers on the Block Program.” (“I have been amazed by how friendly the people are in that neighborhood,” Oberweis told the Sun-Times.)

Both say that Oberweis has contributed just a one-time $1,000 donation to his community center program, Project HOOD (“Helping Others Obtain Destiny”).

Like the other pastors, Brooks came around to the idea of endorsing Republicans because he thought the Democrats were taking the African-American vote for granted, at the expense of neighborhoods like Woodlawn. “When you look at the landscape of our community, everything seems to be in disarray. Our schools are the worst, our unemployment is the highest, and our crime is ridiculous,” he says. “All of this has taken place under what he calls a “Democratic system.”

“So for the people who’ve been so loyal to [the Democrats], to have all these issues in their communities, speaks volumes for how they’re taking advantage of our vote.

Because if these were problems in other voting areas that belonged to other constituencies you can believe they would have done something about it.”

He now considers himself an independent.

“I’m gonna support the best candidate I feel for the position. Sometimes that’s gonna be a Democrat, sometimes that’s gonna be a Republican. But I’m no longer going to be voting for a person just because they belong to a certain party. That is never going to happen again. Ever.”

It’s difficult to pin down Brooks politically. He defends his endorsements on the grounds of jobs and school choice (“When

OCTOBER 29, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

Change in African-American voter distribution, 2010-2014 Governor’s races

Change in African-American voter distribution, 2010-2014 Senate races

isaac malsky

you limit me to go to an impoverished school that’s already underperforming and underfunded, that’s racism, that’s exploitation”). He’s in favor of raising the minimum wage nationally and wants an elected school board. He doesn’t trust corporations any more than the government, but he doesn’t really trust either (“I think we have to keep everyone accountable”). He says he would not have voted for Karen Lewis or Toni Preckwinkle for mayor—claiming that neither had a chance to win, despite their overwhelming leads in pre-election polls—but that, “as it relates to the African-American community, [Emanuel] has done a very poor job.”

“My point is, insanity is this: doing the same thing over and over, trying to get a different result,” he explains. “It is very insane for us, as a people, to keep going to the same well and it’s poison. We need to change wells. See what another well has to offer. We need to change systems, see what another system has to offer. You can’t keep going down the same road knowing what the end is going to be—a train.”

The pastor’s endorsements are a re6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

sponse to that disillusionment before they are an embrace of Jim Oberweis and Bruce Rauner. “For me, this is about job creation and the economy. That trumps everything for me, Brooks says. “I mean everything.

Because if African Americans don’t have jobs in these neighborhoods, there’s going to continue to be a lot of violence. And so, one of the things that has to happen is we have to get more jobs, the economy has to get better.”

“So the fact that both [Rauner and Oberweis] are businessmen to me is a big, big deal.”

Brooks has received death threats for taking his position. Last Friday, he received five phone calls, from an unknown source, in a harshly disguised male voice. In the one call Brooks made publicly available, he is called a “sell-out,” an “Uncle Tom,” and “a puppet for Bruce Rauner.” On Saturday, Brooks reported that $8,000 had been stolen from a donation box in his church— money that was intended for the community center.

The next day Brooks delivered a powerful sermon in which he alluded to, but

¬ OCTOBER 29, 2014

did not mention, what he had been trying to achieve with his endorsements. “People will try to label you, and when they label you they limit you,” he told the crowd that had come out in his support. He noted that the majority of the prison population in Illinois is black and that fewer than half of black adults old enough to work in Illinois were employed. “If you want to do anything in this world you cannot bow down to everything people tell you to bow down to.”

Though he invited Rauner to say what he usually has to say—”I’m here to go to work for you”—after the service, Brooks reiterated to the media what he’d told me before, that he did not want to ever be a member of either party.

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wo Saturdays ago, on the weekend before the start of early voting, I paid another visit to the Oberweis office at 66th and King and happened to find Jim Oberweis.

A single room, deep but not very wide, the office has the look of a just-constructed suburban home—one that someone filled with posters of Chicago wards and political

yard signs at the last minute. There are a few desks and chairs in the back, which is where Oberweis, Brooks, and a few others were sitting. Though Brooks and the political consultant who runs the office, James Jones, had been taking Oberweis around the South Side on a day-long campaign tour, one of their appointed stops had fallen through, and Oberweis was waiting for them to figure out the next move.

At the time, Oberweis was more than two-digits behind Durbin in the polls (he still is), and spending more time campaigning on the South Side than one might expect this close to the election. Unlike Rauner, he didn’t even have the votes down among his base, and those aren’t on the South Side.

Oberweis said he first met Brooks back in 2012, at a fundraiser for Project Hood.

He said he’d been introduced to Brooks by Joe Walsh, the former Tea Party congressman from the Chicago suburbs. In terms of policies that would benefit the South Side, Oberweis says he would create jobs, simplify “the so-called crony capitalism that has become a major part of our tax code,” and

POLITICS promote school choice.

Already, he said, “We’ve been providing a list of jobs available to Pastor Brooks, so he can pass it on to people looking for jobs. I just sent him an email list within the last week of several jobs that are available.

And on top of that we are working with Pastor Brooks to make an Oberweis Dairy franchise available to Project HOOD as a way for people to learn basic skills, and possibly make a training center here on the South Side.”

Oberweis has said on the campaign trail that “we as Republicans probably have the greatest outreach effort [on the South Side] that we’ve ever had,” and that “this is a new relationship with the African-American community.” But most of his engagement with the South Side seems to go through Brooks, and he invokes him repeatedly. Brooks has risked his reputation with his endorsement but has drawn increased attention to his already popular programs such as Brothers on the Block and Project HOOD. Oberweis has gotten good publicity but few to no immediate practical benefits in return.

Meanwhile, Oberweis, who has only raised a few hundred thousand dollars in non-personal contributions to his campaign, is expected to pay Jones $150,000 total as his coordinator for African-American outreach, according to Jones. (He said he’d been paid $40,000 thus far, which is borne out by campaign filings.) Jones is leasing the office from Brooks at a rate of $500 a month.

Until this year, Jones had mostly consulted for Democrats. He said he had worked for Durbin before, and campaign records show that, as late as 2011 and 2012, he had been paid by Democrats Napoleon Harris, Bernard L. Stone, and Bob Fioretti, the progressive challenger to Rahm Emanuel for mayor.

Oberweis “has hired a lot of African-Americans for his campaign,” Jones said. “I have a crew of guys that I work with year-round, and I try to keep them employed. Off-season, we’re doing real-estate, cleaning out houses, and election season comes around, they look forward to that money. They told us they weren’t going to put the money in the street because they already got the vote, they already got the African-American vote. And I thought that was an insult. Like, what the hell are you saying that you got the African-American vote already that you’re not going to put—man you’re crazy. So we changed and

went with Oberweis, because he offered us a contract, you know.”

Ron Holmes, a spokesman for Senator Durbin and himself an African-American from the South Side, stressed that a brickand-mortar office “matters a lot less to people than what you do when you’re elected.”

“We’re not taking anything for granted,” he said.

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epublicans have been mum about the details of their attempts at minority engagement. They have more visibly reached out to African-Americans in swing states like Michigan, North Carolina, and Georgia in this election cycle. But they are building roots across the country. On November 7 of last year, just over a week after the GOP memo, the Illinois Republican Party announced the

own on the South and West Sides: one in Chatham, and one in Ashburn, and one in Austin (Acree and Hatch’s neighborhood).

By coincidence or not, the Chatham office—at 511 E. 79th Street—is just a few blocks west of the corner where Oberweis has repeatedly campaigned, at 79th and Cottage Grove. In a DNAinfo article about the opening of the Chatham office, published September 5, Oberweis was quoted sounding the familiar refrain. “The Democrats have taken people for granted for many years,” he said.

The author of the DNAinfo article wondered “whether this was some kind of brilliant political strategy or an act of desperation.” It is a mix of both. These offices are some of the early underpinnings of the GOP’s national new direction—a direction it needs to take.

African Americans have been disenfranchised as an assumed constituency: not every politician has to listen to them, and those that do don’t have to listen very hard. hiring of a new state director, Anthony Esposito, who, “under the RNC’s new model,” would “implement a person-to-person grassroots organizing program.”

“Tony’s expertise and experience will be invaluable as we work toward victories in 2014 and beyond,” Jack Dorgan, the state party chairman, was quoted as saying.

“Democrats have taken Illinois voters for granted.”

Andrew Welhouse, the communications director for the Illinois GOP, said he couldn’t provide any details about the Republicans’ new ground game, but added that “the Illinois Republican Party and the RNC are working closely with the campaigns,” and that they were active on the South Side of Chicago.

Earlier in September, the Republican Party quietly opened three offices of its

Chris Cleveland, the vice chairman of the Chicago Republican Party, told me that “some” of the three South and West offices will be permanent, or at least long-term, outposts—although plans will depend on the outcome of the election. He confirmed that they were part of the national effort of inclusivity and engagement that began “after 2012,” when “the RNC stepped back and tried to figure out what went wrong.”

Cleveland stressed that bringing minorities into the party and speaking to urban concerns were high priorities, affecting “every level the party is involved in.”

“We’re obviously ground zero for the effort to reach out to urban areas and minorities,” he said.

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ut despite their efforts, neither Oberweis nor Rauner has had much success in courting the African-American vote so far. A Tribune poll in early September found that African-Americans were supporting Durbin by more than a ten-to-one ratio. Another Tribune poll, published October 23, found that only three-percent of African-Americans were supporting Rauner. Other polls have also found him in the single digits, the highest at ten, which would actually put him behind the 2010 Republican candidate, Bill Brady, who polled at thirteen-percent among African Americans in the final poll before he lost.

This doesn’t mean Republicans can’t or won’t find more African-American voters in the future. A poll conducted by the Wall Street Journal and NBC this summer found that, while likely voters who are black prefer a Congress led by Democrats by seventy-seven percent to ten, more blacks consider themselves “conservative” than “liberal”: thirty-seven percent to thirty-three.

But the partnerships Republicans have formed in this election cycle don’t yet look like lasting ones. At the most, they have won over some voters with conservative tendencies. At worst, they have been bested by community leaders who want their politicians to answer to them and adapt more aggressive and reform-minded policies, and who are getting more out of the relationship than the Republicans are. Either way, it’s tough to sell a message of individual opportunity to people committed to fighting continued discrimination and segregated neighborhoods.

The African-American leaders Republicans are pursuing on the South and West Sides feel left out of a party that has only begun to call for a $10 minimum wage ($10.10 if you’re Dick Durbin) because its white base of people who already make more than that has begun to embrace it as part of a vaguely progressive self-identity.

That doesn’t mean they’re about to start joining the party of voter ID laws and trickle-down economics in large numbers.

In Chicago 34.1 percent of African Americans live below the poverty line. Personal relationships are a start, but the Republicans will need more than that—as will the Democrats.

“I love Bruce, I really do,” Brooks joked on Sunday, after the sermon. “but I don’t love you that much.”

OCTOBER 29, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

Bronzeville Artist Lofts offer a new live-work space

BY OLIVIA ADAMS

A

s the sun sets on 47th Street and Vincennes Avenue in Bronzeville, small groups of people trickle into a commanding brick building that occupies the majority of the block. A grassy vacant lot to its right is illuminated by the soft lighting from an adjacent art gallery.

Inside the brick behemoth, a thin corridor lined with images of the building’s decline and rebirth leads into an open space. This, the ground floor incubator space of the Bronzeville Artist Lofts, currently houses an exhibition called The Doll Project, a series of photographs depicting roadside memorials from across the United States. The exhibit is a component of Chicago Artists Month, a five-week, city-wide celebration of local artists.

The BAL, a recently completed project of the Chicago Neighborhood Stabilization Program, is a new player in the neighborhood’s art scene. Since May, the loft has served as both home and workspace for nineteen Bronzeville- and Chicago-based artists. The building, originally erected in 1937, housed the first black-owned and operated department store in the country, the 5 & 10 Ben Franklin store. The building stood vacant and dilapidated for the last sixteen years, until 3rd Ward Alderman Pat Dowell targeted it for rehabilitation. The second and third floors consist of the apartment units, studio spaces, and a lounge space for the residents, while the 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

ground floor serves as the primary exhibition space for both local and national artists.

Universality, interconnectedness, and collaboration were common themes in the conception of the BAL. In early 2013,

take on the building, which was otherwise slated for demolition. Dowell approached the city with plans to convert the building into a live-work space for artists, and acted as a liaison between community, city, and private development companies to create

The building’s design and vision have resonated with the community; BAL received over 200 applications for its sixteen spaces.

Dowell campaigned for the rehabilitation of the former Ben Franklin building as part of the Neighborhood Stabilization Project. The city of Chicago then released a Request for Proposals (RFP) to solicit private contractors and architectural firms to

¬ OCTOBER 29, 2014

development plans.

Ravi Ricker and Cheryl Noel of Wrap Architecture, a Chicago-based company, were immediately drawn to the project.

As specialists in restoring older spaces, the Ben Franklin building was a unique op-

portunity to blend their skills as artists and business owners.

“We lived in Pilsen. We're drawn to live-work spaces. We both were creative people outside of architecture—I blow glass, and Ravi used to be a musician. It's a project that's really near and dear to our hearts, because we know that artists are always looking for big, open space, cheap space, and often compromise the quality of their living conditions to get that,” Noel explained.

Ricker and Noel were also drawn to the eccentric character of the building, which hid within its crumbling roof and water damage an internal structure that, while common today, is unusual for its period. The three-story building employs a truss structure, much like a bridge. Instead of traditional support beams, the second floor of the building is supported both by the truss structure of the third floor, as well as a series of thin metal rods that suspend the second floor from the third. As a result, the ground floor is completely open, as it is not supporting additional weight from the upper floors.

After a city inspector falsely described several interior clay walls as load-bearing, ignoring the building’s truss structure, several other architectural and construction teams submitted proposals that did not take full advantage of the building’s unique structure. Wrap’s proposal, in contrast, was

HOUSING

brad pogatetz

dynamic and expansive, and the resulting design features dramatic intrusions of the original beam structure into the second and third floor living spaces.

Much of the BAL project has been dependent upon both collaboration among the residents and approval from the community. Frances and Andre Guichard, the owners of Gallery Guichard, which is attached to the main loft building, were integral to allowing the voice of the community to be heard during construction and development phases of the project. The Guichards have used their position as a for-profit

gallery to help foster support for the project.

The addition of the BAL to the Bronzeville Artists Trolley Tour this year, an event developed by the Guichards as a way to expose Chicago residents to Bronzeville’s arts destinations, increased monthly average attendance of the tour from 150 to 400 passengers between August and September.

They have also used the space to feature art by their neighbors and hired their BAL neighbors to work at the gallery.

The building’s design and vision have resonated with the community; BAL received over 200 applications for its six-

teen spaces. Each applicant was required to outline his or her commitment to the Bronzeville community, as well as the level of professional work and training in their respective disciplines. As a result, the accepted residents are largely established professionals from diverse artistic backgrounds. The building was fully occupied

by May of this year, and the empty lot beside BAL and Gallery Guichard was used during the summer as a community space for film screenings.

Bronzeville has a rich artistic history, but BAL and its affiliates, including Gal-

lery Guichard, hope to renew awareness of Bronzeville’s treasures by invigorating the neighborhood with projects like the BAL. “BAL creates a sense of uniqueness about the neighborhood, and I think people are used to seeing that kind of stuff in New York, what you think about in the seventies and eighties when people were having the loft parties and loft events and loft exhibits, and it was so fresh,” Mr. Guichard said. “I think this whole urban freshness is part of what the BAL adds, not just to Bronzeville, but to the city as a whole.”

OCTOBER 29, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

Spotlight on Afterschool O

chloe hadavas

n October 23, the Empire State Building lit up the New York skyline as afterschool programs across the nation opened their doors for rallies, talent shows, open houses, and more. The Afterschool Alliance’s fifteenth annual LightsOn! Afterschool rally attempts to shine a metaphorical light on the work of afterschool programs in communities throughout the country and to demonstrate the pressing need for investment in afterschool programs.

The Afterschool Alliance’s expansive survey found that eighteen percent of Illinois kids are participating in an afterschool program this year, while forty-one percent of children in the state would like to participate in an afterschool program if it were available, and twenty percent have no supervision between 3 pm and 6 pm These are the hours when children are most likely to get into trouble, and yet they have huge potential as time for additional opportunities for learning and growth.

The Weekly checked out several LightsOn! events on the South Side to see what existing programs are already accomplishing and why afterschool matters in our communities. (Mari Cohen)

eighteen pass through ABC Polk Bros. every day., “They’ve really been exposed to a lot of stuff,” said George as she showed me crime statistics for the neighborhood. Between August 13 and September 12 of this year, ninety violent crimes took place in North Lawndale. Crime actually peaks between 4pm and 7pm, the hours during which most of children attend the Center.

The staff encourages students to establish goals and start thinking about future careers and academic opportunities.

The middle school program includes time to research potential universities, and over

sixty of ABC Polk Bros.’ previous members have sent word to Center staff that they are now in college, in fields including urban planning, political science, social work, and criminal justice.

Shortly after I arrived, one boy burst out the back door into the garden exclaiming, “I’m here!” George laughed and explained that members of the Center look forward to the LightsOn! event. But when a cheerful young girl named Malika proclaimed to me, “I praise the Lord every day for this day!” it was clear that the excitement wasn’t a one-time thing. (Chloe Havadas)

ABC Polk Bros. Youth Center

“A

lright, just one more right answer and you guys will be the winners of LightsOn! Afterschool Family Feud!” For the first time in the evening, the room is silent, but for the sound of a little girl’s feet as she shuffles anxiously. Two families and an audience await game show host Kimberly George’s next words. After a few more attempts by both teams to snag the title, one family sneaks up from behind and emerges as the victors. Cheers erupt.

In addition to this dramatic round of Family Feud, the ABC Polk Bros. Youth Center organized a workshop on diagnosing and treating asthma, a grill-out, a 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

karaoke room, and a volleyball tournament between the kids, staff, and parents. This was just a taste of the center’s usual offerings: tutoring and academic assistance, service opportunities, and sports, arts, and gardening activities.

As George, the Center’s College and Career Specialist, gave me a tour of the Center, she explained, “the whole idea of [the event] is to promote afterschool programming; to keep it going, keep it funded.” In North Lawndale, like other communities throughout Chicago and the country, afterschool programs are vital.

Over 100 kids between the ages of 3 and

¬ OCTOBER 29, 2014

EDUCATION

Elliott Donnelly Youth Center

“H

i! I’m so happy you could make it!” exclaims Director Yvette Goodrich, greeting parents with a tone as warm and vibrant as the colorfully painted walls at the Elliott Donnelly Youth Center. The Bronzeville hub for afterschool programming welcomed families to participate in pumpkin carving, arts and crafts, and poster making at an open house on a Thursday evening, highlighting the skills built and relationships formed by students who spend their weekday afternoons at this half-century old institution.

Elliott Donnelly, on S. 40th St. and Michigan Ave., offers various afterschool opportunities for about fifty school-age

students and teens, including arts and science instructional programs, museum field trips, and counseling on teen pregnancy prevention and college and career readiness.

Keveon Morrow, a gregarious seventh grader from Pershing East with an affinity for science, enjoys playing basketball at Elliott Donnelly.

“I like doing physical activity,” he says, intently scooping pulpy pumpkin flesh from the jack-o-lantern he and his father are preparing to carve. “Plus, I’m athletic,” he adds with a confident grin.

Keveon’s father, Kevin Morrow, is quick to praise the impact that Elliott Donnelly’s afterschool programs have

had on his son’s life. “Keveon has learned valuable lessons from all the trips and educational experiences he’s had in his five years here,” Morrow says. “We don’t ever worry, because we know he’s in good hands.”

As Goodrich and her team of instructors and assistants stroll through the activity stations, chatting with families and gently teasing the students they work with everyday, it is clear that the Youth Center is more than a location for activities; it is a deep-rooted community of support, where staff partner with parents to teach and raise their children.

With gusto and grit, Goodrich is committed to securing the resources nec-

essary to maintain and expand Elliott Donnelly’s program capacity. “We got van transportation this year, which is huge,” she says, beaming. Goodrich says she’s grateful for funding that allows students to be safely transported from their schools to Elliott Donnelly after school.

Goodrich is excited about new partnerships on the horizon as well, including the development of an arts curriculum with the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum and the Logan Arts Center.

“More and more people are finally realizing that afterschool is not a luxury,” she says. “It is a necessity.” (Olivia Mysokowski)

empty lot on the corner of Garfield and Calumet into a “pocket park,” a space for performance and leisure, in addition to smaller scale public arts projects.

The students also conceptualized and set up nearly every part of the Open Mic. (One mentioned to me that she had even helped with the design and assembly of the café earlier this year.) They performed dances and re-

cited excerpts of speeches, essays, and poems, some of them original, and all of them to a double round of applause. The MCs insisted that everyone, whether prepared or not, was welcome to get up behind the microphone.

Miguel Aguilar, Director of DAP, said that the evening marked the beginning of a concerted effort to transform Currency Exchange into a welcoming environment for

members of the Washington Park community. And by the end of the night, the transformation had already begun. The café filled with not only friends and family, but also passers-by who, having heard the applause and laughter within, decided to stop by.

(Emeline Posner)

The Design Apprenticeship Program

M

ulticolored sheets of paper hung on one wall of Currency Exchange Café, each displaying a single word: Community. Peace. Opinion. Family.

Throughout the evening, guests of the Design Apprenticeship Program’s first LightsOn! Open Mic covered the papers with words, stories, and pictures, offering their personal definitions of these words. Handmade wooden blocks with conversation-starting questions were spread out on tables, allowing several of us to discuss the questions posed by nearby blocks: “What does peace mean to you?” “Where do you get to express your opinions?”

Through the Design Apprenticeship Program (DAP)—part of the University of Chicago’s Arts + Public Life initiative—students spend ten hours each week working in the Arts Incubator workshop on Garfield Blvd. under the mentorship of design professionals. In its second year, DAP has doubled its capacity, thanks to funding from After School Matters.

Aside from honing their craft, design, and presentation skills, students develop a sense of their ability to enact change not only in their immediate surroundings, but within the larger community. With the support of the Sustainability Council, Chicago Park District, the University of Chicago Department of Visual Arts, and Alderman Pat Dowell, DAP students will transform the

emeline posner

OCTOBER 29, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

Picking Up Peace

Fierce Women of Faith advocate nonviolence

BY BESS COHEN

How did you become a peace advocate?

I think it was by default. About twenty years ago, I was about to graduate—I’ll never forget this. It was on the West Side, near the Henry Horner Projects, and there were some guys fighting. They had to be between the ages of seven and ten, about twenty of them. And they were fighting and so I took it upon myself to have a conversation with them. And from this conversation I learned that many of them were out of school.

So I started talking to these guys and I made an agreement with them. I said, “Whoever graduates, then we’ll go to Disney World and we’ll visit BET.” Now how was I going to do that? I don’t know.

But do you know, like ninety-seven percent of those guys graduated? So I had to find some sponsors and I had to do some training with them on nonviolence because a lot of them were being recruited for gangs and things of that nature.

We had to make another agreement that they were going to get a job, or go to college, or something like that. And so I got started. I did get them to Disney World, we did get to BET. We made tapes and everything.

Teddy Watler

R

everend Dr. Marcenia Richards is the founder and executive director of Fierce Women of Faith, an interfaith initiative of women promoting peace throughout Chicago. Wrapped in their signature pink pashminas, members of FWF gather on Tuesday mornings for prayer vigils around the city and advocate for peace.

Richards founded the coalition about a year ago, after serving as the director of Saint Sabina’s Peace Coalition Against Violence, where she found women had a limited presence in nonviolence organizing in Chicago. Richards says that about two-hundred Chicagoland women actively participate in FWF’s work. They categorize their work into five pillars: increasing public witness to prevent violence, training advocates for peace, pursuing legislation, driving the enforcement of nonviolence, and deepening partnerships with organizations engaged in this work. Dr. Marcenia Richards spoke with the Weekly on a recent Saturday morning shortly after her return from the World Alliance of Religions for Peace in Seoul, South Korea.

12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ OCTOBER 29, 2014

Amazingly, I saw one of the guys in Walgreens and he’s the manager. He came over to me and said “Do you remember?” and I go, “Oh. My. Word!” It’s the little things that make a difference.

What does Fierce Women of Faith do?

The Fierce Women of Faith have been active for just a little over a year, and I think we have done more work in a year than other organizations have done in many years and it’s because—I don’t know if I should say this, but it’s true. Ladies get the job done. Ladies are mothers, we’re nurturers, we’re sisters, we’re aunts, we’re

surrogate mothers, so we have a sense of camaraderie that says we have to do something about our youth and about our children.

We have had prayer vigils from Evanston to the South Suburbs, from Englewood to Auburn Gresham. We also walk children to school…we talk to parents in the communities, and sometimes we see children who have dropped out of school and we talk to them to see if there’s something we can do to get them back in schools.

But we also train advocates in mentoring and counseling and working with youth.

We have women who come to volunteer. Some volunteer an hour, some volunteer three hours…some can give you forty-five, fifty, sixty hours a week. It’s a very interesting group of women from Jewish to Muslim, Christian, Buddhist; we just have a lot of interfaith people.

Can you tell me about your trip to South Korea?

It was just amazing.

The speakers were from all over the world.

We had former presidents, former prime ministers, ambassadors, individuals who have been promoting peace around the world for years. There were counselors, educators, Buddhist monks. You name it.

Sometimes you get lost and you become inundated with your own perception that you are just striving alone, but we’re not alone. The entire world is seeking peace.

One thing that was very interesting, that really caught me off guard, was this. We had a group there from Chicago. They performed hip-hop… and the South Koreans just went crazy. I couldn’t believe it. I go, “Are you serious? Is hip-hop this famous?” I didn’t know. I go, “Am I so

PEACE

inundated with a peace movement that I missed that hip-hop is big?”

What’s the international perspective on violence in Chicago?

There is a sentimental tone when it comes to Chicago because individuals are thinking that we have access to so much, but at the same time, people realize that

really good things transpiring in Chicago with youth. I think we have to change the perception instead of allowing people to create the perception for us.

How can one advocate for peace?

This summer in Chicago there were a lot of TV channels and billboards saying, “Put the guns down,” but if I say to you,

“Sometimes you get lost and you become inundated with your own perception that you are just striving alone, but we’re not alone.

The entire world is seeking peace.”

Chicago is very segregated. I think it was Dr. King who said that Chicago was perhaps the most segregated place that he had visited in the nation. However, I think it’s an asset and an advantage that we’re segregated. It means that we have our own individuality and I think that’s okay. And I’ve learned to use that as an asset in Fierce Women of Faith. There’s so much individuality and you can use that to create a great movement.

In terms of how they see us, they call us “Chiraq.” They have all of these terms for us…but Fierce Women of Faith is out to change the perception of who we really are. I think the Jackie Robinson West team gave us an idea that there are some

“Put the guns down,” what am I asking you to pick up? If you put something down, you have to put something in your hand. So we started a campaign saying “Pick up Peace.” Pick up the pieces and pick up peace.

It can be anything. I’ve learned, having eulogized so many kids from gun violence, that you can be a peace advocate just by being in the presence of a mother who has lost her child. Sometimes you don’t have the words to say, you just don’t.

I could say a prayer but sometimes that person is so numb they don’t even hear it.

But you know what, they’ll come back six months later and say, “I remember your presence.”

OCTOBER 29, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

Victor Storino, Steelworker, 73

V

ictor Storino, who goes by “Vic,” was born in Calabria, the toe of Italy. Following his father and sister, he and his brother came to the United States in 1958 to find work on Chicago’s East Side. He moved in with his father, he says, and if he hadn’t, he “would have been deadbeat,” unable to make enough to support himself on the minimum wage. After a short stint at Wisconsin Steel, Vic joined Republic Steel in 1961, where he would work until the plant shut down in 2002. . In that time, he served three terms as president of Local 1033, a chapter of United Steelworkers of America, and learned English in night classes. Since then he’s been heavily involved with the South Chicago chapter of SOAR, the retirees’ branch of United Steelworkers. We speak after the chapter’s monthly meeting, in a back room at Memorial Hall, 117th Street and Avenue O. The hall, once the permanent home of Local 1033, is now a United Methodist Church; the lot across the street, once home to Republic Steel, is now an empty field.

AS TOLD TO HARRISON SMITH

We would like to see the world change more for the people. Justice, that’s what we’re for.

Justice. Not for the Koch brothers—they buy justice, and we cannot buy justice. But if the people wake up, you buy justice at the polling place. But people don’t vote. And people that you give a few dollars to, they might vote for you. That’s unfortunate, but that’s how it works.

I do believe that if the people really get involved, understand the government, they will make the legislature do things the right way—not for big business. But...many people, they don’t think about others. They say, “How well am I living? How will it benefit me?” But they don’t think about the guy who is on welfare, who is working for Burger King or McDonald’s, that they don’t get no insurance, that they don’t get no benefits, except the minimum wage. They don’t think about it. The only thing is how much money am I going to save, if I go eat over there. The same thing if they go shop in a store—they don’t care about if it’s American-made or not.

When I first got at the mill, at Wisconsin Steel, I got put into what they call “floating gang.” Floating gang means that you go at the clock house, and look at the schedule, and they tell you where you’re going to work every day. You don’t have a permanent department. You could work one day-turn, one three-to-eleven, one midnight, or you could work two day-turn, two three-to-eleven, or one midnight in a week. Seven to three is a day turn. Three to eleven is afternoon shift.

And midnight shift is from eleven to seven in the morning. So you could work all three shifts in one week—and I did that for about four months.

And then they put me in a department called “coke plant.” The coke plant was the worst job I had in my life. First you’re there as a laborer, and then they assign you to a job. And mostly, when you’re a newcomer, the jobs that opened 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

up nobody wanted. They assigned me to be a lidman, where you go and pop the battery— it’s like a sewer lid. Before they pushed the coke out you had to go there and crack them open, see; they have to open up so that the steam and all that dust and flame would go out. And I did that for about three and a half months, but I got sick. You know, I couldn’t

wire mill, producing wires and stuff like that.

I learned all the jobs but I didn’t like that. I wasn’t making any money. I got assigned to the most undesirable job: cleanup. Oh, man... your clothes sometimes were so greasy that you couldn’t take them home, you just throw them in a garbage can because of the grease.

But I always wanted to do better for myself.

“Your clothes sometimes were so greasy that you couldn’t take them home, you just throw them in a garbage can because of the grease. But I always wanted to do better for myself." eat or sleep.

So I went down to the manager’s office and I told him, “Look,” I said, “if you have something else for me to do,” I said, “otherwise I gotta quit this.” My system couldn’t take it.

And he said “Yeah, I’ll see what I can do for you.” So he called me into the office the next day and he said, “Well, I can’t give you the best job but I’ll put you in the yard department. Mostly it’s outside—like cutting the grass, cleaning up, stuff like that. But still, it’s not a good job.”

I worked until they laid me off, in March of 1960. Wisconsin Steel didn’t need that many people anymore, so they cut down on their workforce and I was let go. That’s when I got hired across the street, at Republic Steel.

I started as a laborer, in production. It was a

¬ OCTOBER 29, 2014

I went to another department, and I worked with them for about four years, where they treat the steel, the timber. You want it hard, soft. They put it in the furnace and they allow it to stay in there so long, so they can give it the strength that you want. But then I didn’t like that either, so I went to the mechanical department, and that’s what I stayed in most of the times. Then I got involved in the union.

A lot—a lot—of hard work.

The union negotiates a contract. And the company, the supervisors, just don’t want to abide by those rules. They’re the boss: “I call the shots.”. And in theory that’s true, because he tells you to do a job, and even if it’s not your job, you’ve got to do it and then protest later. Now, if I’m a supervisor and I want to make it harder on you, what am I gonna do?

I’ll assign you a job that’s not yours, and you

don’t even know how to do the work—but if you don’t wanna get sent home, you do it.

And a lot of people get hurt because of that.

That’s when the union comes in: they try to enforce the safety, so that you have to be trained on the job before you were even assigned to one. They can’t just plug you from here and put you over here—no, no, no. And then the boss, if he had to call you, he could say, “I called you, you were not home.” At the time there were no answering machines, see.

Or they’ll tell you your wife doesn’t speak English. That’s what my foreman said one time. I said, “What?” “Oh, your wife couldn’t speak English; I couldn’t leave you a message.” I say, “I’m surprised at you. You tell me that you’re a Christian man, right? And if you believe in Christianity you don’t believe in lying.”

Was working at the mill dangerous?

Unless you work in the steel industry, you would not understand what goes on in the steel industry. The rigger shop—the riggers is one of the most dangerous professions in the industry because we used to work with an overhead crane, and you go up there to change a motor but the steel goes underneath you and all the heat comes up. But it was interesting. Every day you do a different type of work, talk to different people. It was nice.

I liked it.

You were working at the mill, in the mechanical division, until you retired?

Until I was sixty-one and a half. When the mills started shutting down, departments like the melt shop, the blast furnace—where you put all the iron ore, and then the lava comes out when it’s cooked—they were no longer there, and we did not have the electric furnace anymore. We didn’t have the soaking pits where you make the steel and you put them in the forms, and that becomes the ingot, then you pull out from the ingot and you

STEEL

julie wu

put them in this pit, where there’s fire, and you cook them in a certain temperature then they go to the roll line and you make the size that you want, and it’s all heat and gas and dust; and at the end we just did one furnace and it wasn’t that much. So it was easier at the end. When I got hired I think there were about 4,000 employees, just union people. In total, between union people and supervisors and nonunion people, the height of employment was 7,700. And then it started going down and down. When we shut down we had 190 people.

When the plant closed, did most people move out of the neighborhood?

Some are still over here, in the neighborhood.

Some, they found work at the mill in Indiana.

Some are already dead. People move around,

they go where they can find a job. You have to make a living. I was at an age where I could take my Social Security. I was almost sixty-two then. My house was paid, and whatever few dollars I get I pay taxes, electricity... but I’ve been involved with activities like this, marches, stuff like that.

I was the last president of the Local 1033, which was organized right after the massacre. [The Memorial Day Massacre of 1937, in which ten Republic steelworkers, striking to protest the mill’s refusal to recognize the union, were shot and killed by police.] I was elected three terms. When they were having the big demonstration over in Wisconsin [in 2011, to protest legislation that would limit collective bargaining and cut funding to public employees], I was there a few times. When they were fighting about Right to Work at

the Indiana legislature, I was there about six times.

And you’ve met with legislators in Springfield as well, right?

I went to talk to one, they said, “You’re not my constituency.” “I know. But how do you get paid? My tax dollar, right? I pay tax dollars, so I’m paying you.” You should have seen that guy’s face. [Laughs.] He said directly, “Yeah... you pay me.” Now you listen.

What I’m doing right now I’m doing because I want to do. I was in this morning at eight o’clock. I put it together. I don’t get paid for that. But I do it because I feel like they gave me education, they paid for my education; because when I was working there every time I went out to school they paid me like I would

be working—I would get wages, plus they’d pay for my tuition, my transportation, my food. The money came from dues that people pay.

I feel that steelworkers should have somewhere they can go if there is anything that will help. There should be somebody there that helps them find some kind of answer.

One guy called me from Mexico. When the plant shut down he had many years before he retired—he was young—and he went back to Mexico. His friend told him, “Call Victor, if there’s something you can get he will find out for you,” and he called me. I asked the question that I need the information. I think he had twelve years’ service when he left; he was entitled to his pension. Now if I wasn’t here to call he probably would have—well, he would’ve lost out.

OCTOBER 29, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

VISUAL ARTS

Barbershop Talk "Black Eutopia" at Carter's

BY ZOE MAKOUL

I

t sounds like a bad joke à la Alice in Wonderland: “Why is a barbershop like an art gallery?” At Black Eutopia, the question is taken seriously. This past Friday, Carter’s Barbershop in North Lawndale briefly became an open forum for visual, performance, and auditory art.

Black Eutopia is the first in a series of pop-up events organized around the West Side by activist Rae Taylor and West Side Art Chicago’s Leah Gipson. The events are meant to explore the interplay between labor, art, and community. While Black Eutopia was advertised in the city and publicized by Chicago Artists Month, most attendees were there for a haircut and had no idea that they were walking into an art show.

At 1pm, when the event was supposed to be starting, three men were getting their hair cut by three barbers. Being a barber requires skill and artistic vision: the barber is a sculptor of hair, which is riskier than sculpting clay—clay can be remolded or thrown away.

Hair can also take on a life of its own.

The main visual art on display included selections from local artist Krista Franklin’s “2013 Narrative(s) of Naima Brown.” The multimedia pieces highlighted what has been nicknamed “tumbleweave,” or errant pieces of weaves found on the street.

Franklin incorporates this “tumbleweave” with other media: in one piece, a set of fake nails is glued to the center; another piece is flecked with the shiny gold of a gum wrapper. Because they are on thin sheets of paper, the weaves add texture and dimension. Grey-blue paint and cool-toned shredded paper give the works serenity: it’s 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

easy to forget what they are made of.

Organizer Leah Gipson also had a painting on display. Bright colors and bold lines depict a young black woman sitting and feeding her baby. On the top right corner, “Free Marissa Now” is confidently scrawled in blue paint. The painting is an ode to Marissa Alexander, a Florida woman who faces 60 years in prison after firing a warning shot to scare off her abusive and estranged husband. Gipson hopes that enough people passed through the event to see the painting and gain awareness of Alexander’s plight.

The barbershop’s permanent decorations stood alongside the exhibit’s artwork.

Posters of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali covered a corner wall. A Barack Obama poster triumphantly declared, “This is Our Moment.” Another poster, from the Smithsonian, had a picture of the “Afro-American Migration” with the words “Field to Factory” across the top. Rae Taylor noted that the barbershop was artistic in its own respect—she saw no need to change what was already on display.

But why put up art in a barbershop?

Taylor argued that a barbershop is the perfect setting for Black Eutopia, because “it is such a comfortable, communal space already, that it’s like, ‘we’ll bring the art to you.’” Gipson agreed: “We figured we’d try to get some of the locals and the people who were coming through to get their hair cut,” she explained.

But the barbershop is significant for other reasons as well. Taylor and Gipson wanted people to talk about how black labor and art interact. The show included a variety of music and audio of people talking

¬ OCTOBER 29, 2014

jean cochrane

about work experiences. Attendees were encouraged to stand up and share their stories about work and employment. Taylor pointed out that because a barbershop is both a business and a place to practice art, it provides a solid basis to explore the relationship between art and “how we work in our community and how we work outside of our community and how we see value in the two of those things.”

And as for the name, Taylor explained that the “e” in “eutopia” was heavy with meaning. “Oftentimes when you read the definition of utopia,” she said, “people are so against it, like it’s too perfect, to the

point where you won’t have any stories to tell about the utopic experience.” The added “e” makes the idea of utopia slightly more attainable.

“The event is called Black Eutopia, so it’s really about place, but it’s not just physical place,” said Gibson. “It’s emotional place, mental place, it’s all the things that make up community.” Carter’s Barbershop is unassuming—folding chairs, a fridge resting precariously on two milk crates, and an old-fashioned Pac Man arcade machine clutter the small room—but on Friday it felt like a eutopia.

A Conversation with Justin Simien

BYSOUTH ELLIESIDE MEJIA OCTOBER 29, 2014 WEEKLY 17

LIT

Lit & Luz Fest at Co-Pro

“T

BY LAUREN GURLEY

here is no place I hate more than Mexico City, and there is no place I love more than Mexico City. But writing away from Mexico City lets me love her more,” said Mexico City resident and writer Álvaro Enrigue to an audience of hip, bookish Chicagoans at the Co-Prosperity Sphere in Bridgeport. It was Saturday night, and two-dozen writers, poets, and visual artists from Chicago and Mexico City had gathered to celebrate the end of the inaugural Lit & Luz Fest with live performances, an artist’s talk, red wine, and churros.

The four-day event, sponsored by local nonprofit MAKE magazine, hosted conversations about translation, literature in the two cities, and the documentation of life in the digital age. It was held at venues on all sides of the city, including Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, the School of the Art Institute, and the Poetry Foundation.

Lit & Luz, several years in the making, was the brainchild of MAKE editors.

After producing an issue of their magazine featuring first-time translations of contemporary Spanish and English work, they came across a flaw in the contemporary American literary conversation: major Latin-American writers aren’t being translated into English.

“We became aware of how little work is translated into either language, but in particular from Spanish to English, and how unfamiliar we were with contemporary writing specifically in Mexico City, and so we decided to investigate that,” said Sarah Dodson, Director of MAKE. With the help of the Spanish Language Editor Brenda Lozano and a MacArthur Foundation International Connections Fund grant, MAKE was able to recruit a number of prominent Mexico City writers who are not widely read in the U.S. and were willing to contribute to the festival despite the relatively small circulation of MAKE magazine. Award-winning novelist Álvaro Enrigue, poet Luis Felipe Fabre, and novelist Valeria Luiselli were among eight Mexico City writers and artists that participated in the festival. In Chicago, the event leaders enlisted editors 18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

and former contributors to MAKE magazine, including Trainspotting writer Irvine Welsh, who coincidentally has attracted a cult following in Mexico in recent years.

The Lit & Luz finale event ARCHIVE took as its subject matter the documentation of Mexico City and Chicago. The performances featured an array of different media, much of which was performed in two languages. The most poignant and relevant pieces took to heart the project of combining and blending the languages. One particularly striking poem was performed with alternating stanzas read in English and Spanish, while a woman held posters with text commenting ironically on the poem. At other times, the collaboration between the Chicago and Mexico City writers felt tenuous. Certain acts that were advertised as collaborative felt heavily centered on the English-speaking Chicago artists’ creative input. However, despite some minor kinks in the program, the audience responded enthusiastically throughout the evening.

For the final act, Enrigue, Welsh, and Columbia College Fiction Professor Don Degrazia sat down to discuss the difficulties and joys of writing about their cities.

“The moments when I am self-conscious as a writer come not when I question whether I’m representing Chicago accurately enough, but whether I’m being too self-indulgent as a Chicagoan,” said Degrazia. Each of the writers acknowledged that the majority of their fiction ends up being set in the city they’re from, not intentionally but “organically.”

The directors of the Lit & Luz Fest are already planning their second event for February of next year. Most of the writers and performers from Chicago have already signed up to travel to Mexico City, where they will adapt this October’s live magazine show for a Spanish-speaking audience. The hope is that the event will take place once a year in each city.

“We are hoping to continue the Lit & Luz Fest as an annual thing,” said Dodson. “We think it’s really good for Chicago and writing in general.”

¬ OCTOBER 29, 2014

VISUAL ARTS

Science / Fiction Chicagoans have pioneered in the fields of science and fiction, so it only makes sense that the two would eventually merge in the form of an art exhibition featuring the new work of Ryan Thompson, Kimberly Kim, Noa Dolberg, and Reuven Israel. Their pieces play with humor, forms of observation, and the natural world. The show also offers a look into studio-dwelling relics of the artists’ works and research and production materials.

Watch the space come to life with “Plant on Premises,” a collage scrutinizing the clothes-cleaning industry and its relationship to indoor plants, or experience “Bad Luck, Hot Rocks,” which tells the story of wood stolen from the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. ACRE Projects, 1913 W. 17th St. Through November 10. Sundays and Mondays, noon-4pm. Free. www.acreresidency.org (Mark Hassenfratz)

10 X 10: Chicago Heroes What do Chicago heroes look like? According to Bridgeport art gallery Project Onward, the answer depends on whom you ask. Picture ten of the most remarkable figures in Chicago’s cultural history. Now picture ten different versions of each of them, created by ten different artists. That makes100 iterations of these ten heroes, all of which are on display at Project Onward.

Each artist’s portrait reflects a unique perspective and artistic style, in a gallery that celebrates and examines what it means to be a hero. Project Onward is a nonprofit organization that provides resources and exposure for local artists with disabilities, so it’s not just a celebration of heroes past, but also heroes present—people who create extraordinary work, despite adversity. Bridgeport Art Center, 1200 W. 35th St. Through November 14.

Tuesday-Saturday,11am-5pm. Free. (773)940-2992. projectonward.org (Hafsa Razi)

Affects Illustrated The press picture shows dismembered, vaguely architectural pieces of pink metal standing in a field. It's actually a digitally cut-up photograph of artist and UofC Visual Arts teacher Hannah Givler's sculpture “Avatar.” The sculpture is one of several pieces that comprise “Affects Illustrated,” a site-specific installation that plays with the dynamics of interiors and exteriors and examines spatial relationships. The show also addresses themes like materialism, fictional utopias, and city planning, which feature heavily in Givler’s research. 4th Ward Project Space, 5338 S. Kimbark Ave. November 9-December 21. Saturday and Sunday, 1pm-5pm. Opening reception November 9, 3pm-6pm. Free. 4wps.org (Julie Wu)

Paul Germanos IRL Paul Germanos counts among his achievements a graduate degree in political philosophy, a number of years as a taxi driver, a motorcycle odyssey across the United States, and an Illinois peace officer’s license—but online you’d never know it. On the Internet, Germanos is strictly a humble chronicler of the art world. He tweets straightforward news about art show openings in Chicago and posts photos of galleries on his Flickr photostream and blog as part of a decade-long effort to document Chicago’s contemporary artists and exhibitions. Now these photos are taking on a life outside the computer screen in a photographic installation at the antena project space in Pilsen. The opening night will also feature a presentation of Germanos’s portraits of forty artists, art administrators, and critics, as well as some of these artists’ own work. Antena, 1755 S. Laflin St. Opening reception Friday, October 24. Through November 22. 6pm-10 pm. Free. (773)340-3516. antenapilsen. blogspot.com (Julia Aizuss)

MUSIC Nannette Frank Looking to jazz up your Halloween? Look no further than South Shore’s Mo Better Jazz, formerly housed in South Shore’s House of Bing. This October 31, Mo Better will play host to jazzy R&B singer Nanette Frank.

Frank’s powerful five-octave voice has earned her great acclaim, both in her hometown of Chicago and inter-

nationally; Singapore’s press once deemed her “one of the greatest jazz singers in the world.” She’s no stranger to fame, either. Nanette has taken the stage with artists including Stanley Clarke, Miki Howard, Herbie Hancock, Donald Byrd, and Stevie Wonder. She’s performed at Taste of Chicago and the African Arts Festival, and her performance at Mo Better Jazz promises to be an intimate and power-charged evening—one that only Nanette could deliver. Mo Better Jazz Chicago, 2423 E. 75th St. Friday, October 31, 8pm. (773)741.6254. mobetterjazzchicago2@gmail.com (Teddy Watler)

Dance Apocalypse The Golden Horse Ranch Band and veteran square dance caller Annie Coleman will put dancers through their paces at Thalia Hall’s Barn Dance Apocalypse on November 8. Coleman, who also sings and plays guitar and bassoon in the band, has been square dance calling since she was thirteen. She spent her childhood summers working at her family’s Golden Horse Ranch, the band’s namesake. Hundreds of flannel-clad dancers are expected to descend on Thalia Hall, which will host the group’s first public barn dance—previous shindigs have been held at secret locations around the city. Described by band member Jeanine O’Toole as “loud, wild, and loaded with love,” the Barn Dance Apocalypse promises to bring the Wild West to Chicago for its tenth consecutive year. Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St. Saturday, November 8, 8pm. $15. (312)526-3851 thaliahallchicago.com

Cocoa Tea at the Shrine Although reggae virtuoso Cocoa Tea will be performing on Halloween, the socially conscious dancehall star is sure to be more smooth than spooky. One of reggae’s most illustrious and consistent artists, Cocoa Tea is well known for his outspoken style and piercing cultural messages. The concert is part of his “Sunset in Negril” tour, which kicks off on October 22 in the United States and moves to Nigeria and Europe in December. The tour will showcase plenty of new material from Cocoa Tea and the Step by Step Band, including the title track “Sunset In Negril” and a cover of Bob Marley’s “War.” Reggae star Louie Culture and DJs Ringo and Papa G. will also be in attendance, so throw away that costume, grab your dancing shoes, and head on over to the Shrine. The Shrine, 2109 S. Wabash Ave. October 31. Doors open at 9pm. $35.

Tickets available online or at the door. 21+. (312)753-5681. theshrinechicago.com (Zoe Makoul)

Bonnie “Prince” Billy Best known for his 1999 song “I See a Darkness” and its subsequent Johnny Cash cover, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, or Will Oldham, makes folk music that’s thematically more appropriate for the nihilism-tinged post-punk of the twenty-first century than the idealistic values and up-tempo atmosphere of the 1960s. Relying in his best moments on both his fragile, world-wearied voice and a spare instrumental backing, Oldham’s oeuvre exposes a long-neglected avenue for a traditionally masculine figure in the world of indie rock, engaging in the genre’s trademark self-examination without being overly introverted. Most publications will steer new listeners towards I See a Darkness for an introduction to Bonnie “Prince” Billy, but Oldham’s former work under the alias Palace Music holds up just as well, especially the Steve Albini-produced Viva Last Blues. Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St. October 31, 8:30pm. $25-35 advance, $32-42 at door. (312)526-3851. thaliahallchicago.com (Austin Brown)

STAGE AND SCREEN Iphigenia in Aulis It’s a classic story: king sacrifices daughter in the name of easy travels to battlegrounds. Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, one of several surviving Greek tragedies that recall the story of Agamemnon, his daughter Iphigenia, and the cursed House of Atreus, will be performed at Court Theatre this November. Iphigenia in Aulis will be the first in a series of three tragedies at Court, followed by Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Sophocles’ Electra, both of which recount parts of the same narrative from different angles. The series is part celebration of ancient Greek literature and part psychological experiment—will viewers react differently to Agamemnon having first seen Iphigenia in Aulis? Directed by Court Theatre’s Artistic Director Charles Newell and based on Founding Artistic Director Nicholas Rudall’s own translations, Iphigenia in Aulis promises a talented cast and, as the theatre says, “a chance to explore the deep and complex questions that

ARTS CALENDAR bind us all together.” Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. November 6 through December 7. $35–$65. Discounts available for seniors and students. (773)753-4472. courttheatre.org (Emeline Posner)

Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists The Chicago Imagists blazed brightly for a few wild years in the sixties, making surreal, comics-inspired art that gave the Second City a spunky art movement of its very own. Nevertheless, as Andy Warhol supposedly said, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes: the Imagist fire burnt out too soon, leaving only the Warhol set’s Pop Art to reign supreme in memories of the sixties.

Leslie Buchbinder’s documentary <i>Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists</i> came out last spring to show what art history’s dominant narrative left out, and now it’s being screened for the first time in Hyde Park, where the Imagists got their start. After the film there will be a panel exploring Hyde Park’s role in the Imagists’ legacy; the panel will include Buchbinder, U of C art history and literature professor Rebecca Zorach, and Jim Falconer, a member of the first Hairy Who group that showed at the Hyde Park Art Center in 1966. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Friday, November 7.

Doors open at 6pm. Free. (773)702-8596. filmstudiescenter. uchicago.edu(Julia Aizuss)

South Side Pie Challenge Channel your inner Martha Stewart at this weekend’s third annual South Side Pie Challenge, where a panel of judges will select the tastiest pies from entries submitted by bakers from across the city. Leftover pies from the competition’s four categories (fruit, nut, sweet potato/ pumpkin, and crème) will be sold to the public for three dollars a slice; all proceeds will be donated to the Hyde Park and Kenwood Hunger Programs, which run a soup kitchen and food pantry in their respective neighborhoods. Register your own culinary creation by filling out the online form and bringing your pie to the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club between 11am and 12pm on November 8. A selection of bakers’ recipes will be collected in the South Side Pie Challenge Cookbook, which will be published online after the event. In the last two years, the event raised almost $3000 to fight hunger in the community, so come hungry and buy lots of pie to help raise that total this year. Hyde Park Neighborhood Club, 5480 S. Kenwood Ave. November 8, 2pm. Free. southsidepie.wordpress.com (Emily Harwell)

Lord Thing Lord Thing was almost lost to the world before the last fuzzy VHS copy was found and restored last year, and now this winner of a silver medal at 1970 Venice Film Festival will make its South Side debut this Sunday, presented by Black Cinema House and the Chicago Film Archives. DeWitt Beall’s classic film chronicles the rise of the Conservative Vice Lords, a West Side gang, at the height of the Black Power movement. Influenced by raw stories from CVL members, it shows how the gang tried

to transform themselves into viable agents of political change in their community. After the screening, there will be a post-film discussion with Rebecca Zorach, a University of Chicago professor of art history and literature, and Benneth Lee, the founder and director of the National Alliance for the Empowerment of the Formerly Incarcerated.

Black Cinema House, 7200 S. Kimbark Ave. Sunday, November 2. 4pm. RSVP recommended. blackcinemahouse. org (Adia Robinson)

every fear and internal disturbance. Using a variety of surrealist and experimental techniques, Fatal Frame guides us through the twisted realm of the supernatural, which inevitably overlaps with our world every now and then. Exploring themes of destruction, insanity, and the unknown, these movies will expose their brave viewers to a provoking dose of the violence of our everyday lives and of the lives that await us beyond mortality. Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3221 S. Morgan Ave. October 30, 7pm. $7. southsideprojections.org (Emiliano Burr di Mauro)

Danny Bhoy

La Casa de Satanas: True Terror

For once, yelling “Danny Boy” won’t be something you do drunk as all hell with your closest lads. Beloved comedian Danny Bhoy, quite the opposite of a tear-jerking ballad, beloved is crossing the pond to Chicago. The young Scot has earned himself a spot on the world stage with his enthralling stories and brogue,coupled with his signature whip-crack smarts. After performing to sold-out venues all over the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, Bhoy brings his show to the intimate setting of the Beverly Arts Center Main Stage. Give the Scotsman a warm Chicago welcome in his debut US tour, where he will be performing his well-received, gut-busting show, “Dear Epson.” Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th St. November 2, 8pm, doors open at 7pm.

Ticket prices vary. (773)445-3838. beverlyartcenter.org (Mark Hassenfratz)

Why simply see a spine-chilling performance when you can be part of one? That is, provided you’re not paralyzed with stage fright. La Casa de Satanas melds the concept of the haunted house with performance art, the immersive experience adding to both the artistic inquiry

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Step aside, Orson Welles—spoken-word performer Andrew Gregory Krzak of the hard-to-pronounce Odditorium is here and ready to rumble. If you thought War of the Worlds was the only radio show that induced widespread terror in the populace during the Golden Age of radio, you thought wrong—late-night horror series abounded for listeners in need of a good shiver.

Now, just in time for Halloween, they’re coming back from the dead for three nights, thanks to the necromantic powers of BEWARE or Be Square! Under Krzak’s direction, he and a bevy of actors will reenact three hair-raising episodes from The Hermit’s Cave, Lights Out, and Suspense using only their voices. Sure, the front page of the newspaper can raise your hair plenty these days, but if supernatural spookiness is more your speed, oldtime radio’s got you covered. Bring a folding chair and get ready for goose bumps. Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3221 S. Morgan St. October 27-29. 8pm. Free. (773)837-0145. coprosperity.org (Julia Aizuss)

and the scare factor. The show is the brainchild of a collective of Pilsen artists, all of whom have collaborated for over three years to create a vast range of experiences for audiences using sound, mixed media, and visual art events. This performance explores the terrifying truths of our world within a hauntingly beautiful aesthetic born from the space between the otherworldly and the tangible. Plus, it takes the form of a haunted house, and who doesn’t love those? Cowards, that’s who. Don’t be a coward. Slumber Room Gallery, 1654 S. Allport St. October 27-November 1, 9pm. $13-$25. Advance ticket purchase recommended. 18+. (872)216-1009. la-casa-de-satanas. ticketleap.com/la-casa-de-satanas (Mark Hassenfratz)

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Fatal Frame The scary movies playing on October 30 at Fatal Frame are not the ones that kept you lying awake late at night when you were a kid. There won’t be serial killers intruding homes, puddles of blood, or ghosts and vampires jumping out from every corner. No, this program of five short avant-garde films by five different artists is not going to let you get away that easy. These films, ranging from the early 1920s to the late 1990s, materialize our

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.

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Logan Center Family Saturday Festival SAT, NOV 1 / 12–5 pm $5 single tickets, $20 families of 5+

Discover your child’s artistic passion with performances and hands-on art workshops!

The first Logan Center Family Saturday Festival includes special special guest performers, film screenings, drop-in activities, art workshops, and more!

Purchase festival passes at ticketsweb.uchicago.edu.

FAMILY AND FRIENDS Chicago International Children’s Film Festival: Best Buddies Join Best Buddies as they meet new friends and share adventures in these short films about friendship.

Storyteller Carmen Deedy This Havana, Cuba-born storyteller and author captures audiences with larger-than-life body language, wit, and humorous stories

+ Day of the Dead art workshops by the National Museum of Mexican Art and more!

Come back every month! Families can sample a range of activities for ages 2–10 through hourlong sessions led by local artists. This season features monthly Family Saturday workshop days and full-day Family Saturday Festivals in Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer. Teens interested in spoken word are invited to join The New Speak open mic following Family Saturdays and Family Saturday Festivals.

Family Saturdays 2–4:30 pm / FREE

OCT 11, 2014 DEC 6, 2014 FEB 7, 2015 MAR 21, 2015 MAY 16, 2015 JUN 20, 2015 JUL 11, 2015

Family Saturday Festivals 12–5 pm / $5 single tickets, $20 families of 5+

NOV 1, 2014 JAN 24, 2015 APR 18, 2015 AUG 22, 2015

LOGAN CENTER 915 E 60th St at Drexel Ave 773.702.ARTS

20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ OCTOBER 29, 2014

logan.uchicago.edu