November 12, 2014

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY NOVEMBER 12, 2014

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what must be done As its leader loses national relevance, the Nation of Islam struggles to stay visible on the South Side

LAKESIDE CBA, LORD THING, FLUFFY, LIMELIGHTRR, THE SCHOOL PROJECT

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IN CHICAGO

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 Editors

Luke White Ellie Mejia Adam Thorp. Baci Weiler

Senior Writers 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 Olivia Adams, Christian

Belanger, Austin Brown,

Amelia Dmowska, Mark

Hassenfratz, Maira Khwaja,

Emily Lipstein, Jamison Pfeifer, Wednesday Quansah,

Kari Wei, Arman Sayani Staff Illustrators Lexi Drexelius, Wei Yi Ow,

Hanna Petroski, Amber Sollenberger Editorial Interns

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 Luke White.

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

Take Back Illinois

bumps and smooth curves to a circular observation deck above, as “a land-eating colossus,” “straight out of the Republic of Alderaan,” and “Greco-Martian.” The museum, which will house pieces from film director George Lucas’s art collection in addition to Stars Wars memorabilia, is drawing ire not only for its unusual design, but also for its placement on the lakefront, which the Tribune referred to as an “attempted land grab.” In a terse, three-word statement sent to the Weekly via inter-galactic mail, noted architecture critic and lakefront conservationist Gial Ackbar registered his own disapproval of the project: “It’s a trap!”

This past election day saw a billionaire gubernatorial candidate who enriched himself on public pension funds “take back” Illinois. But in most black wards on the South Side, Republican Bruce Rauner won less than five percent of the vote. In the 20th Ward precinct that voted inside the church of Pastor Corey Brooks, one of the prominent Rauner supporters whom the Weekly featured two weeks ago, Pat Quinn beat Rauner 275 to eleven. In the 9th Ward, home to Pastor James Meeks and the Salem Baptist Church, which, with over 15,000 members, is the largest African-American church in Illinois, Rauner won just 3.08% of the vote. Both Brooks and Meeks have been named to Rauner’s twenty-six-member transition team, along with former Governor Jim Edgar, former White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley, and sixteen powerful businesspeople. On the night of the election, after it became clear Rauner would win, Brooks tweeted: “Now everyone will have to work for our vote no more taking advantage of us. That’s all I am going to say for a while.” A few days later Meeks told the SunTimes, “It’s not about me. It’s about failing schools.” Rauner, who spent $65 million on his campaign—$25 million of which was his own—also says that when he takes office it won’t all be about him.

We’re not crossing our fingers, though.

Rahm Still Not Cool

During a lunch break on a cool October day, Rahm Emanuel slipped in his headphones and started bumping Chance the Rapper’s acclaimed mixtape Acid Rap, which his aide downloaded for him from DatPiff. Leaning back in his chair, Rahm listened to the words of the second track, “Pusha Man/Paranoia”: They murkin’ kids; they murder kids here. / Why you think they don’t talk about it?

They deserted us here. He scratched his head for a moment, furrowed his brow, and then skipped to the next song, “Cocoa Butter Kisses,” which he enjoyed much more. So much more, in fact, that when he came off his break he decided he wanted to give this “Chance” fellow Chicago’s Outstanding Youth of the Year award for his “outstanding contributions to the youth of the State of Illinois.” So he did, and rightfully so. But here’s hoping this co-sign won’t bring the honoree’s fan base down to the size of the honorer’s.

This Isn’t the Museum You’re Looking For

Last week’s release of the renderings for the future Lucas Museum of Narrative Arts stirred up nearly enough attacks to take down an X-wing fighter. Critics quickly panned the 110-foot-tall mountain-like structure, whose shining white façade will rise in

IN THIS ISSUE what must be done

who is fluffy?

vice lords past

placing the chicago

blind but not unheard

According to Farrakhan, the Nation still represents the best and possibly the only antidote to the perils of black life on the South Side and in America.

“I wasn’t like, ‘Ooh I hate her,’ but I was definitely like, ‘Ooh, that girl, she’s doin’ it.’ “

“I know you’ve got plenty of prison stories, but do you have a successful re-entry story?”

imagists in chicago

“His mouth speaketh great swelling words. His hands bringeth forth great swelling sounds.”

jake bittle.....4

kari wei......8

michal kranz......10

The sixties! The Second City’s version of Pop Art! Colorful, lewd, full of insanity and grotesquerie and sexuality!

julia aizuss.......11

“the

limelightrr matches

south chicago seeks cba

regrading

artists to their fans

for lakeside development

in the nation”

Ever wanted to hang out with hip-hop producer Just Blaze?

“...we don’t want to be displaced or moved out or destroyed as a result.”

“Here in Chicago, perhaps nothing is as complex or troubling as our school system.”

kyle jablon.........13

christian belanger...14

worst

maha ahmed.......16

christian belanger......12

butter elbow, then and now

I walked out of the Experimental Station with that unpleasant feeling that meant I’d been shown something important.

emily lipstein..........17

NOVEMBER 12, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

What Must Be Done

As its leader loses national relevance, the Nation of Islam struggles to stay visible on the South Side 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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luke white

O

BY JAKE BITTLE

n the west side of 73rd and Stony Island, there is a plaza containing a chop suey joint, an H&R Block, a Subway, an insurance office, and a Harold’s Chicken Shack. On the east side, across the street, is Mosque Maryam, the largest mosque in Chicago and the national headquarters of the Nation of Islam, the syncretic African-American Muslim group led

by Louis Farrakhan. The mosque is separated from the street by a wrought-iron fence

and a wide parking lot. A star-and-crescent symbol stands on a pole atop its golden dome, overlooking the neighborhood.

On Sundays, the gates to the mosque are open, and the Nation of Islam’s Chicago congregation, which numbers in the thousands, flocks up the wide front steps to hear a sermon from Farrakhan or another high-ranking minister. During the rest of the week, the only traffic to Mosque Maryam comes from the operations of Muhammad University, a K-12 school run by the Nation of Islam, but at all times the

RELIGION premises are heavily guarded and monitored. All visitors to Muhammad University must submit to a bag check and a pat-down search.

Despite the flashing electronic sign advertising Farrakhan’s weekly sermon series, “The Time & What Must Be Done,” Mosque Maryam holds itself at a remove from its immediate surroundings, and for all its attempts at widespread proselytism, the Nation is still very wary of outsiders. As it attempts to remain relevant both on the South Side and in the national consciousness, the strict discipline and radical doctrine that distinguished it in the first place may now be what keeps it distant from the surrounding community.

On a recent morning, I visited Muhammad University with a photographer, having been given permission to take pictures by one of the school’s administrators.

While the photographer was taking a picture of the mosque, again with permission, two Nation members (apparently guards) came out of the mosque and asked us to come inside and explain our reason for being there. We were put on the phone with Minister Jeffrey Muhammad, a high-ranking official, who told us that despite what we had heard, we were not, in fact, permitted to take pictures even of the mosque’s exterior. He explained that my colleague and I should leave the grounds and return to take pictures at our next scheduled visit. We agreed to do so and left. At our next visit we were also not permitted to take pictures while on Mosque Maryam’s premises; the photos in this article were taken from the sidewalk and the surrounding area on Stony Island.

The Nation almost never speaks openly to the media; stories about them in the Tribune, the Sun-Times, and The New York Times rarely include original quotations. I made several visits to the Mosque Maryam campus and had numerous conversations with Nation officials of all ranks, but despite repeated requests for interviews with Nation ministers, a (later canceled) interview appointment with Minister Ishmael Muhammad, and subsequent agreements by the Nation to answer questions sent to them via email, at the time of writing the Nation has still declined to comment on its current state of affairs.

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n the 1960s and early 1970s, the Nation of Islam was one of the most important African-American organizations in the country, and its headquarters on the South Side (then known as Temple #2) was a constant hive of activity. Fronted by an enig-

matic man known as The Honorable Elijah Muhammad (whom members of the Nation believe to be a messenger of Allah) and his outspoken mouthpiece Malcolm X, the Nation promised to liberate the oppressed blacks in Harlem and beyond from the chains put upon them by the “white devils” in America. But by the time he was assassinated in 1965, Malcolm X had rejected the Nation as corrupt and condemned Elijah as a fraud. Ten years later, Elijah himself was dead and the Nation had begun to lose relevance.

Elijah’s son and successor, Warith Deen Muhammad, steered the Nation’s party line towards traditional Islam, but Warith’s tenure at the forefront of the Nation did not last long before Louis Farrakhan, a high-ranking minister within the Nation and a colleague of Malcolm X, rose independently to national prominence.

With his charismatic speaking style and radical adaptation of the Nation’s program, Farrakhan quickly became the central figure in the Nation and pushed the Nation’s party line back to the teachings of Elijah (see sidebar). For the rest of the twentieth century, Farrakhan kept the Nation relevant mostly through polemical public statements and national campaigns for the black male such as the Million Man March, a D.C. demonstration hundreds of thousands strong.

In the twenty-first century, Farrakhan has remained a household name for his extreme public statements, many of which have been called anti-white and anti-Semitic. But neither Farrakhan nor the Nation remains a major national force in the lives of African Americans. Indeed, other than occasional media attention on Farrakhan for his controversial remarks or involvement with controversial figures like former Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi, the Nation rarely makes headlines. Today the Nation’s membership, estimated at around 20,000 to 50,000, is well below the hundreds of thousands of members it had in the 1960s and 70s.

Despite this slide away from national relevance, the Nation retains a considerable local presence on the South Side and in the neighborhood of South Shore. The enormous Mosque Maryam building, converted from a Greek Orthodox church in the 1970s, occupies a wide berth on the otherwise unremarkable 7300 block of Stony Island. Much of the Nation’s on-theground social work involves outreach in the area immediately surrounding Mosque Maryam, including the South Shore and Auburn Gresham neighborhoods.

It is in these neighborhoods that members of the Fruit of Islam, the Nation’s order of protectors and guards, sell and distribute the Nation’s newspaper, The Final Call, on streets and on exits off the Dan Ryan. In addition to advertising upcoming Nation of Islam events, the Call acts primarily as a mouthpiece for Farrakhan’s commentary on world events. Many articles are write-ups of sermons by top Nation ministers that address national topics like Ebola, police brutality, and hip-hop music from the Nation’s perspective.

In the past few years, the Nation has also drawn citywide attention for its efforts to combat crime in the neighborhoods surrounding Mosque Maryam. One professor who researches the Nation of Islam and who chose to remain anonymous describes the Nation as a “unifying force fighting against drug and gang activity” on the South Side.

In 2012, on certain summer nights, Nation members walked the streets to guard against potential gun violence. Rahm Emanuel praised their attempt to “protect” and “clean up” Auburn Gresham and South Shore, a statement for which he received considerable backlash in light of Farrakhan’s history of controversial remarks.

In July 2012, an article in the SunTimes describes community members awestruck at the sight of an “army” of Nation of Islam members deployed in their neighborhoods. Male members of the Nation, all of whom are technically members of the Fruit of Islam, still dress in full suits and bow ties; in its activities and practices, the Nation emphasizes discipline above all things.

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n the 1960s, even critical writings about the Nation (including C. Eric Lincoln’s seminal 1961 book The Black Muslims in America and James Baldwin’s 1963 essay “Down on the Cross”) cited the success with which it was able to turn around the lives of black drug addicts and prisoners by encouraging them to forswear sex, drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, and pork. Malcolm X himself was one such convert. Their grandiose claims about salvation through Elijah’s teachings, Baldwin notes, appeared to be supported by evidence: conversion to the Nation of Islam entailed a complete transformation of character, and even secular programs like Alcoholics Anonymous were taking cues from the Nation’s addiction recovery program.

According to Farrakhan (and, thus, according to the entire Nation of Islam), the Nation’s religious doctrine and focus on self-discipline still represent the best and the only antidote to the perils of black

life on the South Side and in America. He and his ministers continue to appeal to Chicago’s impoverished African-Americans through sermons at Mosque Maryam and outreach to the community.

The Nation’s message and its social work target the predominately black community of the South Side in much the same way Elijah did in the 1960s across the country, specifically in Harlem. The cultural items on the agenda have changed with the times—gang and gun violence are now the most talked about moral evil—but in many ways, Farrakhan’s sermons chart the same course Elijah Muhammad charted fifty years ago when he advised black men to give up alcohol, prostitutes, and other sinful temptations he contends are pushed upon them by white society.

Farrakhan frequently rails against gun violence, drill music, and white control of the mainstream media. In a sermon this past summer he outlined a utopian plan for black nationalism in which he proposed reaching out to gang members to convert them into “protectors” of a new, collectively owned African-American state. At various points during Farrakhan’s speech, Nation members and ex-gang members in the audience stood up, many of them crying, to voice their agreement.

The Nation needs such soldiers to defend it, insisted Farrakhan, because the government is trying its best to dismantle his campaign for “black consciousness” in America. “Really, they want to kill Farrakhan,” he said while discussing police brutality during the Ferguson riots. “But I say to the United States government: I’m not running from you! I am backed by a power that can destroy you!” The audience erupted with screams and applause.

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hat made Farrakhan so relevant in the beginning, says Vibert White, a professor of history at the University of Central Florida and a self-described “fringe” member of the Nation of Islam, was his ability to “tap into and provide an uncompromised viewpoint about current issues.” Farrakhan made it a practice to say controversial things that got picked up by the mass media in the 1970s and 1980s, when he spoke out against Ronald Reagan and America’s involvement in foreign scandals like Iran-Contra. In his sermons today, he continues to offer his perspective on global phenomena such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, modern drug culture (“What is it called again, Molly?”), and the Ebola outbreak. But in the twenty-first century, noted White, his visibility

NOVEMBER 12, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

The Theology of the Nation of Islam Since its foundation, the Nation of Islam has attracted attention and criticism for its unconventional beliefs. A grasp of the institution’s theological teachings is important to understanding its attempts to position itself in relation to more mainstream movements.. Below are a few fundamental tenets of the Nation of Islam, as preached by Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan.

•

The Nation of Islam believes that Allah is the one true God and reveres the word of the Qur’an as absolute truth, and also accepts Elijah Muhammad as a messenger of God.

•

According to the Nation, a man named Wallace Fard Muhammad (b.

1893?), about whom little is known, was the incarnation of God in person. Elijah Muhammad, who met Fard in Detroit in the 1930s, became Fard’s divine messenger and founded the Nation of Islam under him until Fard disappeared in 1934.

•

In his book Message to the Blackman in America, Elijah Muhammad outlines the cosmology of the Nation of Islam. This cosmology claims that our universe was created by divine black scientists and is seventy-six trillion years old. The teaching goes on to say that 6,600 years ago an evil scientist named Yakub used a form of selective breeding to create a deviant race of “blue-eyed devils,” now known as white people. Yakub exiled these devils from his private island to West Asia, where they used “tricknology” to usurp the dominant black tribe of Shabazz and establish tenuous supremacy over the world.

•

This white supremacy, according to Elijah Muhammad, began to end in 1914 with the coming of Wallace Fard Muhammad. The rise of the Nation heralds the coming apocalyptic judgment against white people, which will happen in America. “Mother” Tynnetta Muhammad, a woman with whom Elijah Muhammad allegedly had four children in secret, wrote for multiple decades that this apocalypse would happen in 2001. When this apocalypse does happen, it will take the form of the arrival of a gigantic “Mother Plane” whose spinning “Wheel” lies dormant in Japan.

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Divine authority was transferred from Elijah Muhammad to Louis Farrakhan 1985 when this same “Wheel” appeared to Farrakhan and showed him a vision of a scroll saying that then-President Ronald Reagan was planning a war against Libya (a vision that was later “proven true” by a headline in the Atlanta Constitution saying the same thing).

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Farrakhan has at points in his career referred to Hitler as a “very great man” and to Judaism as a “dirty religion.” In 2011, when President Obama launched an attack on al-Qaddafi (who was one of the Nation’s greatest benefactors), Farrakhan called Obama the country’s “first Jewish president.”

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The Nation’s demands, as established by Elijah Muhammad, are for an independent black state to be established on American soil. Their theological program claims that “if the white people are truthful about their professed friendship toward the so-called Negro, they can prove it by dividing up America with their slaves.” They also ask that this separatist African-American state will be supported in full by the United States government for twenty-five years until it can support itself.

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has diminished.

“In the 1980s and even the 1990s, Farrakhan was everywhere, with the Million Man March and campaigns like that,” said White. “But although the media are familiar with his views today, especially the more controversial ones, he doesn’t get as much attention as he used to.”

White is the author of the book Inside the Nation of Islam, which describes and at many points criticizes the Nation’s policies from the 1970s to the end of the century.

White admits that his writings against Farrakhan and the Nation have drawn the ire of some of his fellow brothers and sisters, but he insists that he has not burned all his bridges with the Nation; that is to say, he still identifies as being as “inside the fold.”

However, even though White spoke of Farrakhan as a “natural leader” for the Nation, a “central figure” without whom the group would have by now disappeared into irrelevance, his analysis of Farrakhan’s campaign in Chicago was not entirely charitable. He went on to explain that a key motivation behind Farrakhan’s proclamations about gang members being soldiers—and by extension, perhaps, the Nation’s attempts to convert these gang members—is his desire to maintain this visibility in the media.

In the 1960s and 1970s the Nation was a widespread national force whose power was largely based in Chicago, but now, as Farrakhan loses influence in the mainstream media, the organization’s strongest influence is local: in addition to being home to all of the Nation’s leading ministers, Chicago is also home to the Nation’s largest congregation. Even this local following, however, is not immune to decay.

White noted that in the past two decades more and more members of the Nation have used their membership as a stepping stone to other religious organizations. These range from mainstream Islamic ministries (such as Warith Deen’s organization, The Mosque Cares, which did not respond to requests for comment) to other “nationalistic black churches in Chicago” and to South Side spiritual leaders like Jesse Jackson and Michael Pfleger, whom Farrakhan considers his peers.

As the time for a successor draws near (Farrakhan is eighty-one and has had documented health issues since the turn of the century) and as the Nation continues to lose relevance even under Farrakhan, it will need to extend its impact beyond its inward-facing foothold in South Shore.

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hough it receives considerably less press than Farrakhan’s pronouncements or the Fruit of Islam’s vigilante activities in Auburn Gresham, Muhammad University of Islam (MUI) is almost as old as the Nation itself, and it remains one of the Nation’s main avenues into the community. During the Nation’s heyday the K-12 school had almost a hundred campuses across the country, but that number has since shrunk significantly: now there are around a dozen functioning chapters in America, of which Chicago’s is the largest by far. In this way, MUI typifies the Nation’s current position as a whole: though its ethos is global and its internal culture is strong, its only impact beyond its own preservation is local and limited.

MUI has a small enrollment of two to three hundred students and a yearly tuition of $4,800, which is on the low end for Chicago private schools. Around three-quarters of its students are the children of members of the Nation, and the rest of the school’s students enter from other families on the South Side. With a program based on the Nation’s religious teachings and founded on a belief in physical and mental discipline, Muhammad University seeks both to maintain the culture of the existing Nation and to transform youth from the South Side into righteous and upstanding men and women by the Nation’s standards.

On school grounds, students are separated by gender, and for the most part their teachers are also of the same gender. All food is cooked on-site, and no lunches are brought to school. MUI teaches standard core subjects including math, science, English, history, and a foreign language (Arabic), but the first class of the day is a course in what White calls the “fundamentals of basic Islamic scholarship.”

MUI’s outgoing national director, Larry Muhammad, told me that in MUI, “Islamic scholarship” means the doctrine espoused first by Elijah Muhammad and then by Louis Farrakhan. This includes, then, not only the belief in Wallace Fard Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad as divine personages but also a belief in Farrakhan himself as divinely inspired and an acceptance of various theological developments under Farrakhan.

Both White and Larry Muhammad, however, are clear that the central feature of an education at MUI is not any sort of scholarship, even “Islamic scholarship,” but rather a practice of severe discipline that aims to transform boys and girls into upright, exact, self-restraining adults.

RELIGION “Yes, they strive for excellence in education,” said White, “but the strength of it, the real distinguishing element, is the discipline. Not in the books but how they teach them to act.”

“We have a certain discipline, certain military-academy type structure to the school, and that makes a big difference,” said Larry. “So therefore some of the challenges that you get at a public school, a secular school, you’re just not going to get at our school. We don’t have a dropout problem. We do have children whose parents can’t afford it, but we don’t have a dropout rate, we don’t have violence, we don’t have any of that.”

Students at MUI begin the day with military-style marching drills in the school’s gymnasium. Boys and girls line up rankand-file in separate groups and perform about-faces and salutes to the tune of what sounds like triumphant horn music. These drills, Larry says, are critical to instilling a culture of discipline in the student body. He also mentioned the almost total separation of sexes and the all-student uniform policy. All boys wear full suits with blazers and bow ties, while all girls wear identical blue robes and garments that cover their hair.

The uniforms, Larry added, are integral in teaching students how to follow orders and adhere to systems of discipline. He claimed that Muhammad University was part of the reason why many CPS middle schools now have uniform codes, though they are not nearly as strict as MUI’s.

In teaching them how to exercise self-restraint and self-mastery, the school hopes to secure boys and girls against the various dangers—gang life foremost among them—that exist on the South Side and in similar communities. It is with this program of discipline that MUI seeks to reach and change the community that surrounds it, and it is this element in the Nation’s teaching that Farrakhan claims makes it the best and only place for African-American people to turn.

“That’s what separates man from animals, actually, is civilization and discipline,” said Larry. “When the minister [Farrakhan] says that these [gang members] are soldiers, the media paints it a certain way, but then we stop and think and we say, ‘Hey, that makes sense.’ These are people who kill for a living. But as opposed to them fighting for what they’re fighting for, imagine if they were fighting for business, or for the clean, organized community we’re fighting for?”

F

arrakhan considers the work of Muhammad University integral to the future of the Nation. As Larry explains it, it was actually teaching and education that first made Farrakhan a wellknown public figure.

“The reason why the Minister is so effective dealing with our problems here is because he has a mind and approach like a Steve Jobs, someone who can take ideas, and grow, and expand,” said Larry. “Most people can’t do that, you know? The Minister has managed to stay relevant in 2014, and we’re talking about someone who was with Malcolm in the 1950s and 1960s. There’s something to that. CPS is struggling, and Muhammad University is going slowly, but we have a culture, we have a leader. [Farrakhan] is a teacher, his whole focus is educa-

that their ultimate ambition is to convert the country’s entire African-American population into the citizens of a new separatist state.

“It needs to be prevalent and widespread,” said Larry. “If Muhammad University was used as a model and was helped— and when you’re talking about help, you’re talking about resources—and we got the opportunity to affect more kids and build more schools, you would see a big change.”

He suggested that the school might develop programs for adults, such as GED courses or classes taught in prisons. “Muhammad University is a huge deal, but it’s almost like Starbucks,” he said, gesturing to the Starbucks in which we were sitting. “Imagine having Starbucks with the popularity you have now, but you only have five. It wouldn’t

Muhammad University of Islam typifies the Nation’s current position as a whole: though its ethos is global and its internal culture is strong, its only impact beyond its own preservation is local, and limited. tion, learning, and that’s why he’s relevant.”

But MUI, like the rest of the Nation’s institutions, has had to change with the times, tailoring its disciplinary approach to the most visible problems of the day.

The Nation’s drug recovery programs in the 1960s reached prisons and cities across America, and a substantial part of the Nation’s twenty-first century following consists of prison inmates. But gang and gun violence are systemic issues, and the school only reaches a few hundred kids, many of whom have already been raised within the Nation. For MUI and for Farrakhan, a local influence—even a powerful local influence—is not enough.

“They can’t operate on a small scale,” said White. “The essence of the organization is global.” He spoke of Chicago’s South Side as a kind of testing ground for the Nation’s programs and activities, but stressed

be ideal for Starbucks or for the people. But yeah, it would make a big difference if we could affect more children, if we could have an impact on the prisons.”

But MUI is not Starbucks, and before it can reach millions of followers, it will have to convert them. Though the school may represent the Nation’s most significant effort to reach Chicago’s African-American communities, its impact in these communities remains limited. Unlike the Nation’s ministry, it has no Farrakhan to draw the country’s attention to its actions.

B

ut the Nation’s ministry, too, may soon lack its last avenue into the mainstream media. As its charismatic leader grows older and more ill, it becomes ever more important for the Nation to preserve and pass down Farrakhan’s radical presentations of the word of Elijah

Muhammad. Even now, at the Final Call, Nation members are working to catalog and synthesize all the talks given by Farrakhan and his disciples in the forty years Farrakhan has been at the Nation’s helm.

Larry, who joined the Nation of Islam in St. Louis at the age of nineteen and has been an administrator and teacher at the Chicago campus of Muhammad University since 1994, says MUI and the Nation could not exist as they are without Farrakhan as a central anchor and arbiter.

“The Minister’s not just a leader for the Nation, he’s a leader for the world, black, Hispanic, white, Asian,” Larry said. “I mean, he has people all over the world who follow him. What he’s doing and teaching, like anything, it has to be codified, it has to be institutionalized...Minister Farrakhan’s done thousands of lectures. When he’s gone, that’ll be the beginning of the work.

All of that will have to be formalized and put into practice.”

At the time of writing, Farrakhan has just returned (along with the rest of the Nation’s top-level ministers and a significant portion of its members) from a ceremony in Jamaica commemorating the anniversary of the 1995 Million Man March, but in the past few years he has fallen seriously ill and become much less visible at the Nation’s events and ceremonies. The Nation is now at least nominally controlled by an executive committee of ministers, and at Mosque Maryam, Farrakhan has largely handed the weekly sermons off to Ishmael Muhammad, his student minister and second-in-command. Ishmael is generally acknowledged as Farrakhan’s most likely successor, but White noted that despite being a son of Elijah Muhammad, Ishmael has none of Farrakhan’s fiery charisma. Ishmael also has no claim to divine inspiration, whereas Farrakhan’s authority was legitimized in the 1980s when he allegedly received a spiritual vision from the late Elijah Muhammad.

As successor to Farrakhan, Ishmael will face the same challenges Farrakhan has faced so far in the twenty-first century: he will have to figure out how to keep the Nation visible in the communities where it is based and how to bring its doctrines and practices to the wider African-American population. If Ishmael cannot bolster the Nation’s already diminished relevance in both local and national spheres, Mosque Maryam will risk completely withdrawing into itself, maintaining a loyal group of followers but closing its gates on the South Side and the world.

NOVEMBER 12, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

Who Is Fluffy?

“W

ho Is Fluffy?” It’s the question that’s been on everyone’s lips—as well as the title of her first EP—but no one can answer it better than Fluffy herself. The Weekly met Fluffy last spring during an interview with her close friend and associate, Psalm One/Hologram Kizzie. Though at the time Fluffy introduced herself as Kizzie’s manager, she has since become a breakout MC in her own right, releasing a number of tracks in her signature conversational style and touring throughout Europe. She is currently performing across the Midwest on the Chicago Takeover tour with Psalm One, The Hood Internet, and My Gold Mask. The Weekly met her in between tours to talk about her childhood on the South Side, her experiences in education and the corporate world, and the beginnings of her career as both a solo artist and a member of the female hip-hop collective Rapper Chicks.

BY KARI WEI

What prompted you to go into the entertainment industry?

I used to dance when I was younger. I went to Whitney Young [High School], and they have a great dance program. I also did other things like ROTC and Future Business Leaders of America. I tried rapping, and someone in my crew was like, “Don’t rap anymore!” [laughs]. So then I was like, well, I don’t need to rap, everybody’s not a rapper. But I’ve always been a writer. Actually, my first degree was in journalism—from the University of North Florida.

the community and my friends. We were throwing parties, kind of living through both worlds.

Meanwhile, I was editing music for Open Mike Eagle. So I came up with this business plan of incorporating the artist into the party scene. We got to do that a couple times, and I worked with a couple other artists—like Kid Static, which was super cool. Then I started working with Kizzie.

How did you meet Kizzie?

It does, because it makes me want to report on what’s happening. It makes me want to tell stories. Some of my musical mentors get on me about that. They’re like, you gotta make songs! Why are you reporting? But then I tell them, this is a part of me too.

At one point in my life I drove a cab, and I did that because I wanted to talk to people! And then I found out that people don’t wanna talk to you [laughs]. But I just really wanted to have conversations about all these things that no one was talking about.

She and I went to high school together! We didn’t get to hang out very often, because the hip-hop crew that I really loved...back in those days you could only have one girl in the crew, so they picked her. And then she stole my boyfriend! She didn’t even know it. This was junior year, and there was this boy who had been pursuing me for a year, but I had kind of been curving him....Then we went out on a really cool date on Saturday, and then on Monday at sixth period, I saw him and I was like, we should totally go out! I had such a great time this weekend— and then he was like, I started dating Cristalle in fifth period. So, you know, I wasn’t like, “Ooh I hate her,” but I was definitely like, “Ooh, that girl, she’s doin’ it” [laughs].

What happened after you graduated from Whitney Young and went to UNF?

That’s crazy! What prompted you to reunite with her after high school?

I was a journalism major, I pledged AKA [Alpha Kappa Alpha] while I was down there...but my mom got diagnosed with breast cancer, so I got an A.A. and came home. I finished school here at U of I, studying business. I worked as a manager for the zoo, I worked for Bacardi for a little bit...and the entire time, I kept my hand on

She was playing a show with Kid Static at the Hideout, and I went, and her show was just really good. I was really impressed, so I told her, “If you need any help, just let me know,” and she did. It was really her who pulled me into writing music again. It was inspiring to be around a woman who is very much part of the boys’ club, but is still...

As an artist, do you think that still influences you now—having studied journalism, and always having been a writer?

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...a woman.

So what’s next for you, as an artist?

Yeah! She’s really been able to blaze some trails, and if I didn’t take advantage of these situations, it would be insane. Like when it comes to Rhymeschool. I’ve been teaching kids how to rap for so long that it’s kind of crazy that I don’t rap myself [laughs].

I’m really enjoying this Rapper Chicks work. We’ve been called the Slaughterhouse of women [laughs]. And there’s nobody who’s really doing this. Number one, there’s not a lot of women. Number two, getting those people to band together—all these female MC’s—is a whole other thing, so just the fact that the five of us have been able to come together...

I feel like writing is really good for everybody. It’s therapeutic. I feel like everybody should rap, even if they don’t do it in public, because you can. You could rap right now if you wanted to. And I know that I have a perspective that’s very different from other people. And if I don’t share that, then...the world won’t have it.

When did you decide that you were going to start writing music again? Was it a conscious decision?

It was the same dude again, Open Mike Eagle. At that point I was managing him, and I would be like, “Let’s do this with the performance, let’s do this with the video,” and he’d be like, “I can’t do that” and I’d say, “Yes you can!” And then we’d have the “you don’t understand ‘cause you don’t rap’” conversation. One day we were having an argument and he said, “You know what?

You should just rap.”

And I was like, “You know what? I will.

You got it.” Cut out the middleman. Why do I need to fight with this person? We have the same goals! So it’s like, yeah. I can do my own crazy ideas. And I can argue with myself if it comes down to it! But I don’t think I will. I think I’ll be like, “Great idea, let’s do it.”

That’s so amazing! As a girl growing up listening to hip-hop, you struggle to find one female MC to look up to, let alone a group of them. Wow. Exactly! So I’m pretty inspired, and I really like hanging out with these girls. We finally have a team, and everybody serves a purpose, you know? I don’t mind putting my own personal endeavors on the back burner while we figure it out, while we enjoy this camaraderie. I just can’t wait to bring more women to the table. It’s really interesting— if you look at the female archetype, there are very few of them that actually get any type of equitable treatment. It would be really great if we could work together.

I wanted to talk to you about the race relations that you rap about in tracks like “The Baby Song” and “It’s 1973.” I know you went to Whitney Young—did you grow up on the South Side? How does that perspective play into what you’re trying to say as an artist?

I grew up in Englewood, and it used to be a really dope neighborhood when my grandparents moved there. They were the first black people who moved in to their block,

MUSIC

cam bauchner

and that kind of started white flight. When my mom and my aunts and uncles were young, they had a really strong, wholesome black community, and I think it went on like that until my childhood. By the time I was a kid, I couldn’t play outside, really.

I definitely got bused to school. I was lucky because I had a really strong household— my grandparents lived upstairs. My grandmother worked with me on reading and writing every day before I went to school, so I tested out of the ’hood school, which had a horrible rate of graduation and success, no resources, all types of stuff.

space. But in Jacksonville—I never could’ve guessed this, but I became so militant when I was down there. Just because silly stuff would happen, like a group of kids tried to have the African-American Student Union disbanded because it was “unconstitutional.” In my sociology class, whenever we would talk about race, it would always break down to some girl being like, “I just don’t understand why black people are so mad!” and it would be me and one other black person in the class going, “Are you gonna answer? Because I’m pretty sure I answered last time.”

Going to Whitney Young was interesting, because it allowed us to interact with people from different cultures in a really safe

I don’t know, I’ve always had the ability to move between worlds because of my education, and there aren’t a lot of people who are

talking about this race thing. People like to say we’re in a post-racial time, which is... the dumbest thing ever. A lot of stupid race stuff happened to me, things where I had to think to myself, “Oh, this is because I’m black.”

When I was in Jacksonville, there were some jobs that I didn’t get that I knew were definitely because I was black. It’s the South. And in Chicago, there are housing things that happen...I would love if people could figure out how to get involved in the parts of Chicago that no one’s getting involved in, like Englewood. But everyone’s afraid.

What do you think makes your perspective so different?

Overcoming poverty [laughs]. That’s the realest answer I can give you. I feel like we were so poor growing up, and then working in the corporate world, making all that money, and knowing the cost of making that money. There is a toll that corporate America will take on you. You have to conform, you have to be mindful of the bottom line—any business is like that, but big corporations, it’s like...it’s very tough. And just figuring out that I don’t really need to have money.

NOVEMBER 12, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

Vice Lords Past

Lord Thing at Black Cinema House

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BY MICHAL KRANZ

he only existing tape of the 1970 documentary Lord Thing was forgotten for decades until a single damaged VHS was recovered and restored by the Chicago Film Archives, only to be shown at select screenings across Chicago, including the Black Cinema House viewing I attended. Once the curtain rises, however, the inescapable magic of this gem of a film is finally revealed, and one is immediately sucked into the world of the 1960s West Side. A must-watch for any Chicago history aficionado, Lord Thing depicts a part of this city’s turbulent past that is not often told but remains relevant in its content as well as its grounded style.

While another director might have chosen to take a more distant, objective take on Chicago’s Vice Lords, DeWitt Beall does away with the impartiality of the documentary medium. Casting former Blackstone Rangers spokesman Leonard Sengali as narrator (the Rangers were allies of the Vice Lords), Beall recreates the personal stories told by individuals through staged vignettes featuring actual gang members in a style echoing the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson. Sengali is brilliant, refusing to simply read his lines in the monotone of the traditional chronicler, instead infusing his speech with the slang and frankness of the streets.

The plot of the film follows the history of the Vice Lords through the lives of several of its most prominent members, beginning in the streets of 1950s Chicago before the proliferation of guns. As racial tensions 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

were clawing to the surface in Chicago, the young Vice Lords, then under the leadership of Eddy Perry, “got even” with the abusive Chicago police by warring with other black gangs on the West Side. According to Vice Lord Bobby Gore, this was part of a cycle of black-on-black violence perpetuated by powerlessness in the face of racist oppression, and deep down everyone knew it.

It was only after a series of riots in the mid-sixties that the Vice Lords and other Chicago gangs realized who their true enemies were and went through a radical shift in thinking about their rivalries. Black nationalism was on the rise in Chicago in the late 1960s, and the city’s gangs reimagined themselves as harbingers of this new urban consciousness, with the Vice Lords leading the charge. Within a few short years, the Vice Lords became the Conservative Vice Lords, who focused their efforts on community empowerment and self-reliance rather than petty gang enmities. In 1967, they became the Conservative Vice Lords, Incorporated, and they undertook an effort to create a strong, independent, socially conscious black community on the city’s West and South Sides and to defy the Chicago Police Department.

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These activist-gang members built African-themed clothing stores, community currency exchanges, and civic institutions exclusively for their black compatriots, and by 1969 successfully forged a historic gang alliance between themselves, the Blackstone Rangers, and the Gangster Disciples to create what came to be known as the “LSD.” These gangs put aside their differences in order to fight white supremacy together for the first time since their inception. However, the city could only tolerate defiance to the status quo for so long, and by 1970, even though gang-related crime was at an all-time low, Daley launched a war on gangs in retaliation, leading to a final, enormous, showdown between the powers that be and the movement that the Conservative Vice Lords had helped create.

At the conclusion of Lord Thing, the small, packed screening room of the Black Cinema House erupted into applause. Present at the subsequent discussion panel was former Vice Lord gang leader Benny Lee, the head of the National Alliance for the Empowerment of the Formerly Incarcerated, who vividly connected the dots between the legacy of the Vice Lords and the fractured gang scene of today. Lee, like a fiery

preacher, recounted the fate of the Vice Lords at the hands of the Daley machine and discussed his multiple stints in prison and the de facto enslavement of poor minorities through the leasing of convicts to multinational corporations as free labor, as well as the plight of disenfranchised ex-felons. He also challenged the crowd: “I know you’ve got plenty of prison stories, but do you have a successful re-entry story?”

The last scene of the film shows gang leader Bobby Gore returning to his neighborhood after being released from prison, where he encounters a young boy with a red beret on. The boy surprises Gore with his militancy, demanding a continuation to the fight to bring adequate housing, healthcare, food, education, and security to the underprivileged neighborhoods of Chicago. Forty-four years later, the plight of minorities in Chicago remains largely the same—the inequities articulated by the young radicals in Lord Thing still plague low-income communities across the West and South Sides.

While it is unlikely that a united, socially relevant, gang-led movement will ever arise again in the Second City, Lord Thing shows us a glimpse of what could have been.

Placing the Chicago Imagists in Chicago

courtesy pentimenti productions

BY JULIA AIZUSS

“T

urtle wax!” someone yells. A scraggly mustache twitches while reading aloud ads from Life Magazine. Snippets from a staticky radio intercut the hubbub. “You’re listening to Art and Artists with Harry Bouras—” begins the clipped voice, emanating in jagged lines from the radio.

“Harry who?” Karl Wirsum interrupts.

A sudden silence—a collective gasp from his fellow artists—and “HAIRY WHO,” drawn in a font that can only be described

as fuzzy, bursts from the Chicago apartment buildings in a triumphant boom.

This black-and-white animated sequence from the documentary “Hairy Who & the Chicago Imagists,” screened last Friday at the Logan Center for the Arts, answers the question of where the Hairy Who name came from, but the question in the name itself remains: who are they? Or, as narrator Cheryl Lynn Bruce asks when discussing the Chicago Imagist movement’s fall from fame and favor: “Hairy Who?” The question is valid. Sure, there are answers rife with word association: the sixties!

FILM The Second City’s version of Pop Art! Colorful, lewd, full of insanity and grotesquerie and sexuality! But beyond the confidence, simplification, and occasional falsity of these exclamations, no one seems able to truly answer the question, not even the artists. The documentary doesn’t even try. Bruce’s remark at the beginning—“a group of artists shared a moment in Chicago”—is as close as it gets, though, she adds, it’s “not a story about Chicago.” That nebulousness is part of what defines the Hairy Who and all the Chicago Imagists.

Appropriately, the documentary presents not one straightforward storyline but a web of influences, teachers, galleries, and people to explain these loosely affiliated, manifesto-less artists. We jump from the Maxwell Street flea market to cartoons, from gender to Surrealism. The viewer is invited to fill in the web’s latticework, but a solid web is ruined and stationary. The Imagists, if they were anything, were all about movement.

“Hairy Who & the Chicago Imagists” successfully captures that giddy energy. Archival footage abounds, old photographs and newspaper headlines vibrate, irrepressible animation creeps in at the frame. Even the art looks like it can’t stay still. “In those early cartoons, everything moved,” says Hairy Who artist Gladys Nilsson as the limbs of Popeye characters bounce, followed in the next shot by her paintings of intertwined limbs. She might as well be talking about herself and her compatriots.

Witness how another artist, Barbara Rossi, gives Olive Oyl a run for her money with the twists and turns she unleashes in just a few sentences: “I like the contradiction of using feathers and plexiglass...and hair. It was a new way of making line. I didn’t think it could only be defined as feminist art. I feel like I’ve gone through my life on my eyeballs. I just keep rolling along on my eyeballs, and I don’t know how else to do it.” She smiles, wide-eyed. She’s not sure where she’s going; she only cares that she goes.

Jim Falconer compliments the film’s constant motion at the post-screening panel discussion. He would know: he exhibited at the first Hairy Who show at the Hyde Park Art Center in 1966, as well as the third and last one in 1968.

“It has an energy of the time,” he says.

“It’s almost in the editing, you know, the nervous twisted connections and disassociations, and things associate and disassociate again.

There’s a kind of hesitancy to commit to what a thing is, what an Imagist is.”

Note the dropping of “Chicago” there: just Imagist. Hesitation to commit to the movement’s Chicago roots recurs throughout the film too, voiced by several interviewees and crystallized near the end by Art Institute Cu-

rator James Rondeau. “The Imagists should be and need to be contextualized within a much broader spectrum of Pop Art internationally,” he says. “The humor, the grotesque, the ribald, the caricature, the overt sexuality, the potency of that, transcends the limits of a Chicago story.”

But neither the panel nor the audience can stay away from Chicago. Moderator and University of Chicago professor Rebecca Zorach wonders what happens to the story of avant-garde art when Chicago is at the center instead of the periphery. Panelist Richard Born, the Smart Museum’s Chief Curator, remembers that when he moved to Hyde Park in the seventies, his landlord was Imagist Roger Brown. Falconer reminisces about the “great party house” in Kenwood that belonged to Don Baum, the Hyde Park Art Center curator who first brought together all the artists for those group exhibitions.

When a man in the front row with a bandage on his forehead turns out to be the printer of the Hairy Who comic books the artists made for their HPAC shows, it’s clear we’re stuck in this town. Falconer may have decamped to New York when he was twenty, but he’s the most excited he’s been yet. “People have been looking for you for years,” he interrupts. They try to figure out whether the printer—Tom Brand—sold several proofs to Falconer’s friends thirtyish years ago, and go backward from there. Was Falconer among the artists Brand trained in printing? Did they go to the same outsider art show on Clark Street—near the Century Theatre or the Ivanhoe? Once they begin haggling over the art’s pricing, Born switches the subject to rescue the discussion from hyper-locality.

You can’t escape Chicago that easily.

Falconer liked Hyde Park because the people he met there expanded his perceptions, he tells me at the reception after the panel, midbrownie-chew.

He’s just told me he moved to New York for the same reason, so he could learn even more instead of being defined by the Hairy Who and Chicago—“I had to make mistakes, make more mistakes, make bigger mistakes.

My life’s been a continual mistake”—when Brand returns. They slip easily into the sort of conversation that involves name-dropping street corners.

Falconer may have moved to New York, but a few years ago he moved back to Chicago, and now here he was, anchored like the Imagists were years before by this city. In one of those Hairy Who comic books Brand printed, the final line of dialogue was, “I DON’T BELIEVE in Hairy Who! / Neither do I!” Believe in them: although the web has disintegrated, the artists are still here, and still moving.

NOVEMBER 12, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

BOOKS

Blind but Not Unheard

A review of Jeffery Renard Allen's "Song of the Shank"

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BY CHRISTIAN BELANGER

M

emory haunts the characters of Jeffery Renard Allen’s second novel, Song of the Shank. Initially set in the year 1866, in the near-immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the collective consciousness of the characters often seems to reside in events predating that four-year bloodbath, and the novel spends much of its time exploring the rapidly shifting relationships of blacks and whites after the dissolution of slavery in the South.

Allen was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, and his two previous works of fiction—a novel, Rails Under My Back (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), and a collection of short stories, Holding Pattern (2008)—were heavily influenced by his experiences here. “I wanted to write about subjects that people did not want to talk about,” Allen said in an interview in 2005. “I do think that it’s a writer’s job to put the dirty stuff in peoples’ faces to make sure they see it.” With Song of the Shank, Allen uncovers from the past a figure whom history has wanted to forget and whom he forces us to see.

That figure is Thomas Greene Wiggins, a famous, black piano-playing savant known simply as “Blind Tom,” unable to clothe or feed himself (other than by ardently and endlessly requesting lait), but capable of memorizing and playing, immaculately, over 5,000 pieces of music.

His quiet magnetic pull seems less related to his gnomic pronouncements—at one point, he tells a hapless interviewer, “I could be bounded in a nutshell and still consider myself king of infinite space”— than his mercurial ability to pound at the piano with the “spasmodic movements of the hands.” He presents a problem, however, for various groups of people.

The Bethune women of Hundred Gates, the farm where Tom was born, soon form an attachment to him, and the daughters begin distributing playbills to

local farms, proclaiming, in tones that foreshadow the later hyperbolizing of Blind Tom’s shows: “His mouth speaketh great swelling words. His hands bringeth forth great swelling sounds.” Allen’s writing is lilting and lyrical, with concise metaphors, and some of his strongest sentences come in this section, when he relates small snippets from Tom’s point of view of his childhood. One encounter in particular, where Tom drinks milk directly from a cow, could be clumsy in the wrong hands, but Allen makes it strangely beautiful with the simple desires Tom feels: “He gently probes her udders—this is a word he does not know—with his fingers.

Cows and trees have branches…He pulls and squeezes and sucks. In a low voice the cow encourages him. More.”

Meanwhile, Mrs. Bethune muses on the possibility that he is simply a master of mimesis, incapable of producing anything truly original because of the constraints of his birth race—a view obviously shared by the many mocking, racist attendees at his early concerts, who view Tom as a genetic aberration to be treated dismissively.

At this point, Allen could afford to vary his language to suit his different characters—whether a youngish white widow or an older black freedman, they all sound vaguely similar, and it works to the book’s detriment, removing the potential for more varied, unique voices.

Later, after the death of Mrs. Bethune, Tom is sold to Perry Oliver, who publicizes and celebrates his show across the United States and, eventually, the world. The book actually contains images of several of the posters from the historical Blind Tom’s original shows. Their bold, enthusiastic lettering seems more like quaint sensationalism than shrewd showmanship. Their presence—along with various quoted newspaper accounts of his performances—is a deft reminder of Tom’s historical existence (he died in 1908).

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omewhere in the middle of all of this, a Civil War unceremoniously ignites, flares up, and fizzles out; it is not Allen’s focus. The plot proceeds apace in a dizzying amalgamation of time periods and characters, and Tom is eventually passed back to the Bethunes and taken to New York, where he is met on the stoop one morning by a mysterious black stranger, Tabbs Gross, who explains that he has come to return Tom to his mother. This brings Tom to the fictional island of Edgemere, lying to the east of New York City in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Black families, brutally expelled from their homes during Civil War draft riots, have taken refuge on the island. Soldiers and freedmen travel home join them there, or are consigned to Central Park; both places are desolate, and Allen invokes as description a couplet echoing Eliot (echoing Dante): “I would never have believed / That Death could have undone so many.” Death, here, is not only the war, but also slavery and its vestiges. Allen is constantly prodding, reminding us of the underlying historical background to the novel: “Slavery is a puncture—have you ever picked cotton?—the hole (hold) that can never close.”

Allen isn’t interested in exploring the well-trodden ground of the horrors of slavery, but rather the aftermath, articulating how blacks attempted to heal its first lingering, festering wounds. In his description of these autonomous black societies—their religious, militant leadership, their harsh poverty—Allen illustrates the complexities of newly discovered independence, and lays to rest the idea that, even in the North, the end of slavery was the start of a utopia. Allen’s refusal to truly shift between voices again works to his detriment here, burdening sections that could be more telling, and his characters are sometimes hard to keep track of. Yet the novel is incisive in showing the impossibility, especially in a time and place like this, of escaping history.

Well, almost impossible—when Tom

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arrives at Edgemere, the island where his mother lives, newly burgeoning black leaders idealize him, and attempt to turn him into an instrument for their own highly political ends. As Wire, a powerful black preacher, tells his congregation, “The time has come for us to forget and cast behind us our hero worship and adoration of other races, and to start out immediately to create and emulate heroes of our own.” But Tom, more iconoclast than icon, manages something of an escape when he simply refuses to play the piano at Wire’s church meeting, because of how much he pines after Eliza Bethune, his white caretaker.

Hoping to spark resistance, the militant church leaders come to discover that Tom is not as easily manipulated as they had initially thought, and cannot simply be touted as a figurehead of his race.

Perhaps this is due to his impenetrability—he shows physical tenderness only towards Eliza, and shuns his own mother.

The curiously inexplicable nature of his actions allows characters such as Eliza, Tabbs, and Seven (Perry Oliver’s curiously named assistant) to identify themselves with him in whatever manner they want.

Seven, for example, builds up such affection for Tom—despite never receiving any in return—that giving Tom back to the Bethunes leaves him churning with grief, bitterly telling himself, “Never forgive.

Never forget.”

The novel, ostensibly about Tom, often has nothing to do with him. Instead, characters like Seven that revolve around Tom are explained through his association, and the genuine care and detail that Allen lavishes on the more compelling ones, the ways he carefully exposes and dissects them, is the best part of the book.

In the end, it may be most astute of Seven to remark, paradoxically: “Blind Tom is a name he can no longer claim, a name that perhaps no one can claim or that everyone can claim.”

Jeffrey Renard Allen, Song of the Shank.

Graywolf Press. 608 pages.

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BY KYLE JABLON

ver wanted to hang out with hiphop producer Just Blaze? What about musicians like Wiz Khalifa or Mac Miller? At the outset, the concept—paying to hang out with your favorite artists—might sound absurd. But this is the vision of tech startup Limelightrr, the brainchild of Chicagoan Jabari Evans and startup consultant Mahrinah von Schlegel. Limelightrr seeks to add another dimension to fans’ interactions with artists by selling chances to enter their idols’ worlds.

Evans is a rapper, one half of Kidz in the Hall. Von Schlegel handles the business side of the operation and owns Cibola, a start-up incubator in Pilsen. The two have known each other since their freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania, but it wasn’t until last year, when they were both on the advisory committee for Emanuel’s Chicago Music Summit, that they began working on Limelightrr.

After lunch one day, the two began discussing the lack of minority entrepreneurs in the tech industry, and Evans mentioned an entrepreneurial notion of his own. While touring, he occasionally met fans of his who didn’t know he was in town. What if there were an online marketplace to schedule these encounters?

Von Schlegel pushed him to pursue his idea, and Limelightrr was born.

Evans thinks it’s the right time to open a new kind of marketplace for experiences with musicians and producers, one that any artist can enter but where each artist is held to standards of accountability. He cites a 2013 Northwestern study

by Peter DiCola indicating that approximately five percent of a music artist’s revenue comes from record sales, while thirty percent comes from touring.

As Evans puts it, artists have to do a sound check whether or not they’re spending time with a fan. Especially in the case of mid-tier artists, who make little money from record sales, Limelightrr could be an opportunity to supplement income from touring. Evans is confident in the service’s results, likening Limelightrr to ordering an Uber—at the end of the day, both artist and fan want the transaction to happen, so

the likelihood of any misconduct is low.

It seems that others think it has potential, too: Evans and Von Schlegel recently entered Limelightrr into the University of Chicago’s South Side Pitch contest, a showcase of South-Side-based entrepreneurship, and won third place.

Evans is clear that being in the area is important for the startup. He was born and raised on the South Side and currently lives in Hyde Park. The area’s hip-hop scene has exploded recently with artists like Chance the Rapper, Vic Mensa, Chief Keef, and others. By starting Limelightrr in Chicago, Evans is able to put his many personal connections to use.

The service is currently in a very limited beta-testing phase, and Evans and Von Schlegel are beginning by experimenting with different business models, such as partnering with record companies.

They hope to have the service fully established by next spring.

seonhyung kim

NOVEMBER 12, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

South Chicago seeks CBA for Lakeside development

julie wu

BY CHRISTIAN BELANGER

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ast, empty plots of land overgrown by brush and grass flank the tranquil new section of Lake Shore Drive, now a year old, that runs through the Lakeside Development site located in the South Chicago neighborhood. Eastwest streets intersect with the new roads and move towards the lakefront, to a newly christened beach park, the development’s most tangible achievement thus far. The park is named after the steel workers who were at the South Works plant for most of

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the twentieth century, and the remnants of that association still linger in the neighborhood. U.S. Steel owns the land on which Lakeside will be built, and many residents have parents or grandparents who worked in the steel mill. The only significant physical remnants of the plant’s existence today, though, are the ore walls, painted with slogans: “Work safely always in all ways.”

Since U.S. Steel dismantled the site in 1992, it has stood mostly vacant, with the exception of a short-lived attempt to build a Solo Cup factory a decade ago and a concert by the Dave Matthews Band in

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2011. The disappearance of industry from the area has had a dire economic effect: South Chicago’s median household income of approximately $31,000 (according to U.S. Census Data) is well below the city’s median of nearly $47,000. As such, the Lakeside Development could be a boon to a community still struggling to find a viable replacement for the steel mills. With over six hundred acres of available space, the finished product will be a mixture of commercial and residential spaces constructed over the next twenty-five to forty-five years, ultimately designed to create

a district that, according to the project’s official website, will be “a global initiative for innovative living...a compelling model for a green, 21st century lifestyle.”

This is heady stuff, but there are a number of worries about whether a place will still exist for the current community. A Community Benefits Agreement (CBA), organized by the Alliance for the South East and put together by over thirty different community organizations from the area, attempts to articulate some of these concerns. Sent to McCaffery Interests—the main developer behind the site—in late September, the official document says that the CBA’s goal “is to maximize the Project’s benefits to the current residents of the project site, while offering McCaffery broad community support and decreased risk.”

“Without a CBA there’s no guarantee to prevent folks from being pushed out of the neighborhood,” says Amalia NietoGomez, executive director of the ASE. In the big scheme of the development, it’s not a big deal, but it is a very big deal for the community.” The document was put together by a process that began with a survey of local residents, passed out at local events like church gatherings and school board meetings. The concerns listed on the resulting document—foremost among them jobs, housing, education, and community improvement—were then delegated to a number of committees put together of local community leaders, who helped finalize the language of the CBA. The proposed agreement is hardly radical. It calls for targeted hiring practices of what it names “Priority Applicants,” among them former convicts, veterans, and women, as well as the allocation of a “signifiant portion” of the affordable housing units, which it wants to be about one third, to those who are at thirty to fifty percent of the average median income, which would be between $10,000 and $15,000.

There are also a number of suggested environmental practices, such as the regular

DEVELOPMENT

testing of local waters and a notification to residents when pesticides will be used.

Coalition members are quick to emphasize that this document is primarily supposed to foster responsible development, not completely curtail it. “We don’t want to stop development,” said Arnold Bradford, Executive Director at Crossroads Collaborative and a resident of the area whose family has lived there since the 1980s. “We want to encourage it, but we don’t want to be displaced or moved out or destroyed as a result.”

Coalition members, however, feel that Dan McCaffery, CEO of McCaffery Interests, hasn’t always engaged with them in good faith. NietoGomez recounted that at their last meeting with McCaffery, in October of 2013, he assured them that he was supportive of a CBA. They have not yet heard back from him concerning their proposal. Bradford describes him as “friendly, but arrogant,” and worries that his focus on profit will ultimately doom the activists’ goals for the community.

For his part, McCaffery says that he greatly respects everyone that’s participated in the CBA so far, but that he simply does not have enough information currently to sanction a CBA, seeing as he does not yet know what retail or residential spaces there will be, with the exception of a Mariano’s grocery store on 87th Street. “A CBA is more meaningful when it’s constructed so all parties know they can live up to it,” he says. He also pointed to a track record of progressive engagement with the community, such as the fact that in 1984 he was the first builder to accept the use of affirmative action when hiring for the construction of the Quaker Tower in the Loop, or his cooperation with local community groups in creating a CBA for his redevelopment of the old Children’s Memorial Hospital site in Lincoln Park.

Tellingly, however, McCaffery also spoke about his desire to emulate similar projects to his around the country.

He named one development, East Lake

in Atlanta, as a particular success story.

In the first half of the 20th century, the area’s East Lake Golf Club was home to legendary golfer Bobby Jones, but over the decades the neighborhood fell into economic decline, and soon became known as “Little Vietnam” for its high rates of crime and poverty. The Atlantic Journal-Constitution called it “a shooting gallery, a poverty trap, and worse.” As McCaffery tells it, Tom Cousins, a real estate developer, was so upset when he heard that Bobby Jones’

was all accomplished, McCaffery claims, without significant disruptive changes to the neighborhood’s core identity. In citing this particular success story, he seems to at least want others to think he believes in the potential for gentrification to both improve a neighborhood and keep the local community, for the most part, intact.

“Within gentrification, there have been people left out, but it’s never undertaken with the hope of leaving people out.

That’s a byproduct. To the extent we can

Holmes wrote that the coalition CBA provided a “good framework for what the community wants…however a final agreement would have to be a compromise between all stakeholders—the developers, elected officials, and community.” home golf course was about to be turned into a dump that he stepped in to save it, embarking on an ambitious redevelopment project that eventually blossomed into the Villages of East Lake.

To many, elements of this story might seem comically stereotypical—elderly white man steps in to save beloved golf course, rescues neighborhood in the process—but East Lake today is a thriving community, widely held forward as a model for other underserved areas across the United States, including Chicago. And it

minimize it, we’ll do it – to the extent we can. But we can’t let fear of gentrification stop progress.”

And while McCaffery does support a CBA, he would prefer if Natashia Holmes (7th Ward) and John Pope (10th Ward), the two aldermen whose wards are encompassed by the development, played a more central role in crafting it. Holmes, who earlier this year sponsored a town hall meeting with the ASE, wrote in an email that the coalition CBA provided a “good framework for what the community

wants,” but that “a final agreement would have to be a compromise between all stakeholders—the developers, elected officials, and community.” She went on to outline her ideal process for creating a CBA, which first involves creating an “Advisory Group that will be made up of community members, experts in certain fields (technology, building trades, housing, environment, etc.), [and] the developer and elected officials, to forge an agreement that will work for all stakeholders involved.” Public meetings would also be held throughout the process in the interest of ensuring “accountability and transparency” towards the community. Alderman Pope could not be reached for comment, but he has, according to NietoGomez, expressed support for a CBA in the past.

While an alderman-endorsed CBA would ostensibly be an ideal compromise for both activists and developer—an open process mediated and sanctified by a local official—coalition members still have some reservations. Bradford, for example, expressed a worry that the developer would simply “put together his own blue-ribbon committee and completely shut the community out of the process.” NietoGomez has also called for more urgency in the process, exhorting McCaffery to help create an official CBA before construction begins on the first businesses in the area.

Nevertheless, it seems there is little the community coalition can do if McCaffery prefers, as it seems he does, to engage with the community through the aldermen. Even if this does happen, however, their actions will still have acted as a catalyst, sparking and accelerating the process of the CBA in the first place. For now, though, almost a year after the Lake Shore Drive extension opened through the future site of the development, the community remains waiting. Questions about McCaffery’s authenticity and willingness to engage in the community will only be answered, at this point, by him.

NOVEMBER 12, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

EDUCATION

Regrading “The Worst in the Nation”

A collaborative series looks at CPS past and present

“Typically, when you look back, you see that these things happen in cycles.”

BY MAHA AHMED

T

wenty-seven years ago this past Saturday, major newspapers across the country quoted then-Secretary of Education William Bennett as calling the Chicago schools the worst in the nation. Two months before Bennett’s comment hit the headlines, in September of 1987, CPS teachers had taken to the streets in a strike that lasted nineteen school days, the ninth in nineteen years and the last until 2012, when the Chicago Teachers Union went on strike again. Later that year, thousands of children—largely on the South and West sides—learned that their neighborhood schools would close, yet another in a list of controversies that CPS has been the center of in the last quarter century.

16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

“Chicago Schools - Worst in the Nation?”—the first in a series of collaborative documentary shorts called The School Project—aims to place Bennett’s misnomer in the context of Chicago’s education reform history. At the premiere screening of the short film two weeks ago, Chief Historian of the Chicago History Museum Russell Lewis stood in front of teachers, parents, and students in the museum and summed up the story succinctly: “Here in Chicago, perhaps nothing is as complex or troubling as our school system.”

Twenty seconds into the short, the narrator notes that the label “may have been the invention of an overzealous headline writer.” Long-time Sun-Times reporter Linda Lenz later says that reform “did not start with Bill Bennett, but he certainly put an exclamation point on it.”

¬ NOVEMBER 12, 2014

Regardless, what follows in the grainy archival news footage and suspenseful music is an exploration of why the label stuck and how it influenced the way Chicagoans view CPS. A different Chicago production company created each of the six segments of The School Project, and the next five will be released each month, starting in January.

Greg Jacobs and Rachel Pikelny of Siskel/Jacobs Productions directed “Worst In The Nation?” and subsequent segments involve work from, among others, Kartemquin Films, Free Spirit Media, and Kindling Group.

The series was inspired by last year’s CPS closures, but each segment tackles distinct hot-button issues in Chicago public education, from charter schools and privatization to discipline policies and

standardized testing. “Our goal is humanizing certain aspects of education and its context,” said the project’s Supervising Producer, Rachel Dickson of Kartemquin.

The anger, excitement, and energy in the footage was mirrored in the audience, who, during a panel following the screening, applauded every statement that condemned Rahm Emanuel and supported CPS teachers. If this first segment is hinting at anything, it is that the narrative surrounding education in Chicago today is not new.

“There’s a tendency sometimes for people, at a given moment, to think ‘now is the only time in history when this has ever happened, and if things are going badly it’s because no one’s ever experienced this before,’” Jacobs explained. “And then typically, when you look back, you see that these things happen in cycles...[you see] the roots that got you to this particular point.”

Victor Montañez, an activist, artist, and educator from the Southwest Side who is featured in the segment, feels that conversation is the first step to ending the cycle. “I hope that [the documentary series] will open up dialogue, and allow people to actually talk about these issues… not simply listen to what the pundits say, or repeat the sound bytes that they hear,” Montañez said in an interview. Accordingly, the film ends with a call for viewers to join the conversation on a website created for the project.

“I don’t think Chicago is that unique,” says Pikelny. “We have a unique history of reform around education, but we’re just one example of a large urban school district with a high proportion of low-income families. Even though in theory, The School Project is about Chicago, we hope it can serve as kind of a case study that could apply to other cities in the country.”

The creators of “Worst In The Nation?” focused on the moments before and after Bill Bennett’s visit to Chicago because they saw the time as a model for re-igniting the collective dialogue and action that characterized it. “[Everyone] brought something to the table and had a real conversation with each other about the best way forward,” says Pikelny. “We want to pinpoint what was happening then that isn’t happening now, and think about how that can change.”

Additional reporting by Olivia Adams

Butter Elbow, W Then and Now Hyde Park’s strangest (and only) animation festival returns

Stills from "San Laszlo Contro Santa Maria Egiziaca" by Magda Guidi.

ANIMATION

BY EMILY LIPSTEIN

e sit in semi-circles of folding chairs around the projector, snacks and lemonade in hand, waiting for the lights to dim. This is the third Butter Elbow Animation Festival in Hyde Park since 2010. “Our mission is the same,” says coordinator Vicky Yen. “To show young animator's work! Bring good work to public! Celebrate the art of animation!”

Butter Elbow began four years ago as the brainchild of coordinators Laura Shaeffer and Vicky Yen, along with a cohort of their friends. Yen and three other animators, known collectively as the Mobile Animation Station, made a stop-motion film in Hyde Park that they planned to show at the closing event of “Shaeffer and friends’” Op Shop. The team collected films created by students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to show alongside it, inviting friends of all ages to join their one-night festival.

The second Butter Elbow took on a new size, showing the films of almost thirty animators from five countries in a three-program bloc. Two years later, this year’s incarnation of Butter Elbow paid homage to its roots by returning to a onenight event with seventeen short films.

Animators from the previous years were invited to submit their work, resulting in an eclectic mix of films made by artists from all over the world, SAIC students, and the event coordinators themselves.

The films shown utilized a variety of different animation methods and mediums.

Magda Guidi used brightly colored markers and colored pencils in her film “San Laszlo contro Santa Maria Egiziaca” to express the excitement and loudness of the action. In the short, Saint Laszlo does a funny dance to some music before being eaten by a bluehaired, green-skinned demon woman. He is saved when Joey Ramone comes back from the dead and plays music that makes the woman spit him out. A fight ensues between the woman, her demon friends, and the combined team of Joey Ramone, Saint Laszlo, Jesus, and a collective of shocked individuals. Despite the film’s peculiarity, it was one of the most popular among the festival’s younger crowd.

Some of the films had a more obvious storyline to them, including “Il Bruco e la Gallina (Caterpillar and Hen)” by Michela Donini and Katya Rinaldi. “Il Bruco” follows the friendship between a hen and a caterpillar. When the caterpillar goes into a chrysalis, the hen moves her entire house—

including her two chicks—to watch the caterpillar and make sure it is okay until it turns into a butterfly. The use of yarn in the stop-motion animation of this film benefits the aesthetic as a whole: the softness of the medium allows for a tangibly warm mood without the presence of dialogue.

Yen thinks that this year’s festival differs from the two past, in that most of the collaborators and supporters who made the newest Butter Elbow possible weren’t in Hyde Park, let alone in the United States.

She also explains that this year’s festival shows “some weird, eerie films that will be like the tale of Halloween, talking about death, about love, about life.”

The weird, eerie theme was definitely present in many of the films during the second half of the festival. “Nice Guy” by Nick Tuinstra started off this half with a frightening recount by so-called “nice guys” of experiences they’d had with women. Tuinstra used dark colors and ominous music to set a mood that the redaction of certain lines from his stories completed.

“Aurora” by Anne Savitie and “La Testa tra le Nuvole” by Roberto Catani focused on young children, with the first showing the slow death of Aurora’s two parents and her eventual elopement with a bear, and the second describing a situation where a teacher threatens to cut off a young child’s ear.

The last two films focused on the relationships between mothers and their babies in two similar but very distinct ways. “Jessica,” by Amy Lockhart, is shot in very vibrant colors, using paper puppets and stop-motion animation to show a girl named Jessica dance, talk on the phone, and drop and step on her baby and not really care much about it. “Changeling”

by Leena Jääskeläinen spliced traditional animation with real footage in order to better express the dissociation expressed in the film between how the woman wants to view her child and how she actually does.

The film focuses on the Finnish myth of the changeling and how it intertwines with the reality of post-partum depression.

Both films were terrifying in their own right, with “Jessica” eliciting disbelieving laughs from the audience and “Changeling” bringing pained breathing from everyone sitting around me. Maybe the reality of the last half of the festival made it as weird and eerie as it seemed. The first films were more whimsical, but I walked out of the Experimental Station with the unpleasant feeling that I’d been shown something important.

NOVEMBER 12, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

BULLETIN

Flood Tide

Starting with this issue, the Weekly will use this space to highlight political and civic events happening across the South Side.

City on the Make Professor of American History and Culture at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, Andrew Diamond tours the South Side with a series of lectures and panel discussions at the UofC and UIC on questions of race, class, and ethnicity in Chicago. Diamond has authored multiple books and articles on the subject of race and politics in the American cities, including Mean Streets: Chicago Youths and the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment in the Multiracial City, 1908-1969 and the forthcoming City on the Make: Race and Inequality in Chicago. He appears at the UIC Great Cities Institute on a panel discussion moderated by Teresa Córdova with Cook County Commissioner and mayoral candidate Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, political consultant Don Rose, UIC Professor of Educational Policy Studies Pauline Lipman, and Victor B. Dickson of the Safer Foundation. Student Center, East Illinois Room, 750 S. Halsted St. Thursday, November 13, 9am. Free. (312)996870. greatcities.uic.edu. Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, 5733 S. University Ave. Thursday, November 13, 4:30pm. Free. csrpc.uchicago.edu (Meaghan Murphy)

Reclaim Chicago Launch Accusing Republican Governor-to-be Rauner and Democrat Mayor-already Emanuel of allegiance to corporate interests, the People’s Lobby and National Nurses United have launched Reclaim Chicago, a fundraising and organizing effort to support candidates who align with their progressive platform. That platform is equal parts affirmation and opposition—for living-wage jobs, against charter schools, for public financing, pro-regulation, anti-privatization. The platform also touches on incarceration reform and economic justice. The coalition’s website refers to a candidate-focused strategy to reform city council, but has yet to name candidates; it promises more information on the endorsed, and actions in their name, at Saturday’s launch. National Association of Letter Carriers Hall, 3850 S. Wabash Ave. November 15, 9:30am-11am. reclaimchicago.org (Hannah Nyhart)

Whither the Movement? The Future of American Labor Unions Just over a week after the Democratic Party’s largest electoral drumming in recent memory and just months after a summer that saw newly energized campaigns to raise the minimum wage bring thousands of activists to the streets in Chicago and across the country, three of the nation’s most prominent labor leaders—AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard, and former SEIU Secretary Treasurer Eliseo Medina—­come to the UofC’s Institute of Politics to discuss the future of unions and labor activism. The discussion is moderated by The New York Times’s Steven Greenhouse. The Institute of Politics, 5707 S. Woodlawn Ave. Thursday, November 13, 6:00pm-7:15pm. Free. politics. uchicago.edu (Osita Nwanevu)

STAGE & SCREEN @HOME Seventeen years ago, Mark Horvath, a previously successful actor, found himself homeless and addicted on Hollywood Boulevard. Since then, armed with a camera and a microphone, he has made a career out of bringing the voice of the homeless to the public eye. His new documentary, @HOME, takes him across the country, from LA to Arkansas to Pittsburgh, documenting the emotional and physical trauma of homelessness. Invisible People, Horvath’s nonprofit, interviews homeless people who, according to Horvath, come to feel invisible due to society’s unwillingness to acknowledge them. He brings a powerful and invigorating message of recognizing the nationwide homelessness problem. Screening the film is the Renaissance Collaborative, a nonprofit centered in Bronzeville that provides safe and affordable housing in addition to workforce development programs. The Renaissance Collaborative, 346 E. 53rd St. November 13, 6pm-7:30pm. Free. (773)924-9270. (Clyde Schwab)

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“The dead don't linger because we have nowhere to go.

We stay because we're not ready. It's hard to let go on both sides,” says Maya, the deceased protagonist of Flood Tide. The film follows a group of artists as they accompany her body down a river on seven scrap-wood boats.

What they don't know is that Maya's ghost is following them. Director Todd Chandler filmed Flood Tide while living on “Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea,” a floating art exhibit and collaborative space, as it traversed the Hudson River. As a result, the film draws heavily from these experiences; the scrap-wood boats were integral to the “Swimming Cities” project, and the narrative was partly inspired by real-life interactions between the artists. Before Saturday night’s screening of the film, there will be shorts with live accompaniment by Chandler, Jim Becker, Mark Trecka, and Marshall LaCount, some of whom created the film’s score with the band Dark Dark Dark. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Saturday, November 15, 7pm. Free. (773)702-8596. filmstudiescenter. uchicago.edu (Julie Wu)

Der Vorführeffekt Theatre: Three Kinds of Wildness The play Three Kinds of Wildness seems to be the result of a dare to run with the pitch, “An ice baron, a telegraph inventor, and a doctor walk into a bar.” Directed by Sarah Lowry, the show boasts a production as idiosyncratic as its plot; it is the first play of Der Worführeffekt Theatre’s to have been “100% handmade and homemade” in its new location at the Sherwood Oak in West Philly. Before landing in Chicago, the Philadelphia-based theater company will perform this play all over the country, from the Northeast to Minneapolis to New Orleans, using only repurposed materials from their home neighborhood to "offer the opportunity to take a breath, to be together, and to participate in an evening of warm, ridiculous, unpredictable theatre that is unabashed in its humanity.”

Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3221 S. Morgan St. Wednesday, November 12. 8pm. $7-$10, no one turned away for lack of funds. (773)837-0145. coprosperity.org (Lois Chen)

KINOSONIK #1 Joseph Clayton Mills, the musician, artist, and writer who turned white noise and Franz Kafka’s deathbed notes into sound art, and Marvin Tate, snow-globe artist, performance poet, and former front man of the critically acclaimed funk band D-Settlement, are teaming up to present the first installment of Black Cinema House’s pilot project KINOSONIK. The two artist-musicians take short films pulled from the Chicago Film Archives as varied as a slow-motion shot of popcorn dancing in oil to a direct animation using paints and scratches (lauded by Canadian animator Norman McLaren as “the best film I’ve seen drawn on 16mm”) and pair it with their own improvised live-sound performance. This Sunday, join them for a night of musical collaboration and exploratory cinema performance. Black Cinema House, 7200 S. Kimbark Ave. Sunday, November 16, 4pm. RSVP recommended. blackcinemahouse.org (Kathryn Seidewitz)

Pockets, a self-proclaimed “funny film about depression” that examines the intricate lives of five different women as they navigate the ups and downs of life. Baumane’s tale takes inspiration from her family and Latvian heritage, and the characters are based on her own personal experiences. She creates a film that explores the mysterious machinations of the brain quite fantastically, using both stop-motion and hand-drawn animation. At next Wednesday’s screening at the Beverly Arts Center, viewers can follow the narrator on her fascinating quest for sanity as she tries to escape and survive a family history rooted in mental illness and a world plagued by the horrors of marriage, divorce, and violence. Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th St. Wednesday, November 12, 7:30pm. $7.50. (773)445-3838. beverlyartcenter.org (Michelle Gan)

at the Chicago Art Department’s newest exhibition, “Technologic.” Curator Chuck Przybyl’s goal is to showcase technology that has aided artists in avant-garde and creative work. “Technologic” features robotic drawings, prosthetics, 3D printing, laser cutting, image slicing, circuit bending, plus textile circuitry and algorithmic art. While it does not exhibit the artwork itself, the show represents the behind-the-scenes tools that can help artists produce work at the height of the DIY era—an ethos becoming known as the Maker Movement. With all of this (laser) slicing and dicing, “Technologic” is by nature participatory; workshops and discussions will be held throughout the two weeks of exhibition time. Chicago Art Department, 1932 S. Halsted St., Ste. 100. November 1422. See website for event dates and times. (312)725-4223. chicagoartdepartment.org (Sammie Spector)

Coates at the DuSable

The Material That Went to Make Me

It’s been a big year for writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. A senior editor at The Atlantic and regular blogger on the magazine’s website, Coates captured popular attention with his June 2014 Atlantic cover story, “The Case for Reparations.” The piece, a year and a half in the making, examined the historical and institutional subjugation of African Americans, with a focus on public housing policy on Chicago’s South and West Sides. Coates will bring his perspective as a journalist and educator to a Public Programs Lecture at the DuSable Museum of African American History in conjunction with the museum’s present exhibition, “Spirits of the Passage: Transatlantic Slave Trade in the 17th Century.” Don’t miss this leading public voice in American discussions of race, politics, and culture— it’s not often that you get to engage with someone who turned down a regular columnist position at The New York Times. DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Pl. November 13, 6:30pm8:30pm. $10. (877)387-2251. dusablemuseum.org (Olivia Myszkowski)

This month at the South Side Community Art Center, the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project presents a collection of artwork created in classes at the Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois. In both visual and text-based works, inmates use art to talk about their daily experiences behind bars and their movement within the prison system. The exhibit calls to attention the many issues prisoners face, including illiteracy, gangs, and violence within prison walls. Pieces such as timelines and schedules of how prisoners spend every hour of their day within the system are also on display. The exhibit strives to offer a humanizing look at prisoners, one rarely seen in popular media. South Side Community Art Center, 3831 S. Michigan Ave. November 15-December 6. Monday-Friday, 12pm-5pm; Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, 1pm-5pm.

(773)373-1026. sscartcenter.org (Michelle Gan)

An Evening with Filmmaker Akosua Adoma Owusu Akosua Adoma Owusu is one of those extremely young people who seems to have already lived a whole life, fulfilled an entire career, and achieved a grand level of success, all faster than you can click “Play Next Episode” on Netflix. On November 14, this talented experimental filmmaker will be appearing at Black Cinema House, where she will screen a wide range of her work and speak with Professor Terri Francis of Indiana University. Using a variety of avant-garde techniques, as well as inspiration from her Ghanian ancestry, Owusu explores the concepts of African identity and race through the traditional storytelling of her childhood. Her work brings a fresh perspective to the stage by offering its audience a continued dialogue concerning the connection between Africa and the United States that transcends its preconceived notions and stereotypes. Owusu is shaking up the world of cinema, and the electric narrative she’s giving us is certainly worth paying attention to. Black Cinema House, 7200 S. Kimbark Ave. Friday, November 14, 7pm. RSVP in advance, seating is limited. blackcinemahouse.org (Emiliano Burr di Mauro)

VISUAL ARTS

Story Club South Side: My Other Talent Why read nonfiction narratives when you can watch them live? Story Club South Side is ready to deliver all the amusement of open mic combined with the thrill of live theater at this month’s show, “My Other Talent” at the Co-Prosperity Sphere. Unlike most of Story Club’s shows, participants will not only tell you a story, but they’ll enhance it with other types of performance, too.

Featured performers such as playwright Kendra Stevens and activist Kim Morris may sing, recite poetry, or even bring puppets into the mix in a rare, enriched Story Club experience. Come perform as well: sign-up for open mic starts at 7:30pm, slots are eight minutes long, and the audience will vote on their favorite performance at the end. Whether you’re hoping to win over the crowd or be part of the audience yourself, it’s sure to be a good time.

(But also, keep reading.) Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3221 S. Morgan St. Tuesday, November 18. 8pm. Free, $10 suggested donation. (773)837-0145. storyclubchicago.com (Sonia Schlesinger)

Rocks in My Pockets In a society where mental illness carries social stigmas, Signe Baumane presents the animated piece Rocks in My

¬ NOVEMBER 12, 2014

Road Trip Have you ever wanted to drop all your responsibilities, gather your best friends, load them up in a VW bus, and take a road trip across the Great American Landscape? If you’re like me, just the thought makes you faint because you know the price of gas these days. Have no fear: Dennis Kowalski’s retrospective, “Road Map,” is coming to Chicago. Originally interested in architecture, the artist quickly turned to sculpture. In the exhibit, ten year’s worth of work will be on display, exploring the impact of humans on the environment and our neglect of the upkeep of civilization. Kowalski’s work spans across media, including installation and photography, as well as across the geography of the United States. Bridgeport Art Gallery, 1200 W. 35th St. November 21-December 31.

Opening Friday, November 21, 6-9pm. Free. (773)2473000. bridgeportart.com (Mark Hassenfratz)

Technologic Are we a part of modernity? Does technology play a role in today’s art? Did video kill the radio star? All of these questions will be explored, and perhaps even answered,

For the Brown Kids For the month of November, a poem addressing “those who learned to live the blues before they could tie their shoes” is being reimagined as a visual art exhibit at the Beverly Arts Center. The EXPO collective has gathered Chicago artists and had them illustrate their take on “For Brown Boys,” Rodrigo Sanchez-Chavarria’s direct, emotional exploration of the experience of growing up brown. EXPO calls the event a celebration of “diversity in art and in society,” highlighting the fact that the show bridges mediums while wrestling with the same theme of race. The show ran for the first time in June, but if you missed it, this is your second chance to see nineteen artists do their best to transfer a powerful poem onto canvas. Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th St. Through November 30. Monday-Friday, 9am-9pm; Saturday, 9am5pm; Sunday, 1pm-4pm. Free. (773)445-3838. beverlyartcenter.org (Mari Cohen)

Labor Migrant Gulf The boteh is the droplet-like shape at the heart of the paisley pattern. It is also a symbol of religion, culture, and appropriation for many in Asia. Fittingly, this symbol serves as the centerpiece of the “Labor/Migrant/ Gulf ” installation at Pilsen’s Uri-Eichen. The installation was developed in part as a response to the unsafe working conditions of migrant laborers in the Arabian/Persian Gulf. Additionally, the exhibit gives due attention to laborers around the Mexican-American border and the history of migrants in California. This second half of the installation can be found one door down from Uri-Eichen at the Al DiFranco Studio. In accordance with the exhibit’s theme, the music of Joe Hill, an early 20th century Swedish-American labor activist, will be played around 8pm at this neighboring venue. Uri-Eichen Gallery, 2101 S. Halsted St. and Al DiFranco Studio, 2107 S. Halsted St. Through December 3, by appointment. Free.

(312)852-7717. uri-eichen.com (Emeline Posner)

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 makes one-hundred 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

CALENDAR 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. Through December 21. Saturday and Sunday, 1pm-5pm. Opening reception November 9, 3pm-6pm. Free. 4wps.org (Julie Wu)

MUSIC Alfredo Rodriguez Trio at Logan Don’t look now, but the Logan Arts Center is becoming a hub for modern jazz. It has hosted trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, pianist Vijay Iyer, violinist and MacArthur Genius Regina Carter, and this Friday, Cuban jazz pianist Alfredo Rodriguez visits to kick off the five-country tour behind his Quincy Jones-produced The Invasion Parade. A famously intense performer, Rodriguez mixes bop and Afro-Cuban folk to create strange, ecstatic soundscapes that drip with nostalgia. Rodriguez, who’s been compared to Thelonious Monk for his off-center riffs, starts from jazz standards for what seems like the sole purpose of subverting them. Bulgaria’s Peter Slavov and Puerto Rico’s Henry Cole join Rodriguez on bass and drums. The whole trio is classically trained, too, so be prepared to come away feeling cultured. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. November 14, 7:30pm. $35, $5 students. arts.uchicago.edu (Derek Tsang)

Brother Ali at Reggies “Terrorism is the war of the poor / Hold up a mirror so the script get flipped / ‘Cause when it’s in reverse it ain’t wrong no more / Warfare’s the terrorism of the rich,” spits seasoned rapper and activist Brother Ali on his 2012 album, Mourning In America And Dreaming In Color. The Minnesota native and longtime linchpin of the Midwest hip-hop scene has made a career out of sharp tracks that earnestly address issues of class, race, poverty, and protest. Brother Ali will bring his biting lyrical style to Reggie’s, accompanied by a set of lesser-known hip hop acts known for their honest narrative approach. Performances

by Bambu, Mally, and DJ Last Word solidify this lineup as Friday’s best opportunity to see nimble musicality and political passion collide on the South Side. Reggies, 2105

S. State St. November 14, 9pm. $17-$20. 17+. (312)9490120. reggieslive.com (Olivia Myszkowski)

Willy Porter at Promontory Hailing from Wisconsin, Willy Porter released his first album, The Trees Have Soul, in 1990. He has been strumming steadily since, sometimes with other musicians, but often riding stag as his own accompanist on the guitar and mandolin. Porter gained recognition as an independent singer with his lyrically driven acoustic solo act, and his most recent album, Cheeseburgers and Gasoline, feels like listening to America, Unplugged. His folksy style is nostalgic for a time that is not yet past, and the bittersweet-ness of his melodies tugs firmly on heartstrings. It’s not hard to imagine listening to him on your couch, sipping herbal tea, wrapped snugly in a heavy winter blanket. Alternatively, his sound would be just as smooth from behind a heavy whiskey cocktail this Thursday at The Promontory, where he’ll be playing with Will Phalen, creator of rock music from the American Midwest. The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. West.

November 13, doors at 6:30pm. $15-$22. (312)801-2100. promontorychicago.com.(Elizabeth Bynum)

Respect the Mic at the Shrine Come say goodbye to Chicago hip-hop series Respect the Mic at its final show next Friday at the Shrine. One of Chicago’s longest-running event series, Respect the Mic is dedicated to showcasing both new and old hip-hop talent. This final installment will feature local up-and-coming talents including RnR, Prafase, Beware, and Hanibl Phee, and is also on the lookout for more performers. According to the description on the Facebook event, the organization is “dedicated to the advancement of local artistry and Respect in the Hip hop culture” and is also the only concert series where artists and producers keep the profits of the show. The Shrine, 2109 S. Wabash Ave. Friday, November 21, doors open at 9pm. $25, advance tickets available online. 21+. (312)753-5681. theshrinechicago.com (Clyde Schwab)

The Jungle Brothers at the Shrine A fusion of jazz, hip-hop, and house, the Jungle Brothers are making a return next Tuesday at the Shrine. Though they’ve never reached the critical magnitude of colleagues such as a Tribe Called Quest or De La Soul, the Jungle Brothers are known for their Afrocentric lyrics and for jazz sampling that actually predates both groups. The group, composed of Mike Gee, Afrika Baby Bam, and Sammy B, have recorded hits such as “What U Waitin 4” and “Straight Out the Jungle.” Using groovy lyrics and masterful sampling to create exciting dance beats, the Jungle Brothers’ smooth rhythms should offer an interesting contrast to the current drill-rap movement in Chicago. The Shrine, 2109 S. Wabash Ave. Tuesday, November 11, doors open at 9pm. $17.50. Tickets available online. 21+.

(312)753-5681. theshrinechicago.com (Clyde Schwab)

WHPK Rock Charts

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

Compiled by Dylan West and Andrew Fialkowski

Artist / Album / Label 1. The Yolks / Kings of Awesome! / Randy 2. Botanist / VI: Flora / The Flenser 3. Oozing Wound / Earth Suck / Thrill Jockey 4. Iceage / Plowing Through the Field of Love / Matador 5, Grouper / Ruins / Kranky 6. Twin Peaks / Wild Onion / Grand Jury 7. Bob Mould / Beauty and Ruin / Merge 8. Gel Set/Stacian / Voorhees / Moniker 9. Animal Lover / Guilt / Learning Curve 10. J. Rider / No Longer Anonymous [Reissue] / Machu Picchu 11. Fern Jones / The Glory Road [Reissue] / Numero 12. Steve Gunn / Way Out Weather / Paradise of Bachelors 13. Alright / Sleep Study / Self Aware 14. Spider Bags / Frozen Letter / Merge 15. Meatbodies / Meatbodies / In the Red

NOVEMBER 12, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ NOVEMBER 12, 2014