November 13, 2013

2 South Side WeeklY

ÂŹ november 13, 2013

IN CHICAGO

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

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

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

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

Previously, the paper was known as the Chicago Weekly.

Editor-in-Chief Executive Editor Managing Editor

Harrison Smith Claire Withycombe Bea Malsky

Senior Editors John Gamino, Spencer Mcavoy Politics Editor Osita Nwanevu Stage & Screen Hannah Nyhart Editor Music and Zach Goldhammer Video Editor Visual Arts Editor Katryce Lassle Associate Online Sharon Lurye and Contributing Editor Contributing Editors Ari Feldman, Josh Kovensky, Meaghan Murphy Photo Editor Lydia Gorham Layout Editor Olivia Dorow Hovland Online Editor Gabi Bernard Senior Writer Stephen Urchick Staff Writers Dove Barbanel, Jake

Bittle, Bess Cohen,

Emma Collins, Emily

Holland, Jason Huang, Jack Nuelle Staff Photographer Camden Bauchner Staff Illustrators Hanna Petroski,

Isabel Ochoa Gold Business Manager

Harry Backlund

5706 S. University Ave. Reynolds Club 018 Chicago, IL 60637 SouthSideWeekly.com editor@southsideweekly.com stagescreen@southsideweekly.com music@southsideweekly.com visualarts@southsideweekly.com

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

Cover: Photo by Luke White.

Charlie Trotter, Chicago’s First Chef, was pronounced dead last Tuesday. He leaves behind him a profound impact not only on the city’s culinary world, but also on the many recipients of scholarships from the Charlie Trotter Education Foundation and on the many CPS students and homeless people who he let eat at his restaurant for free. Trotter opened his eponymous restaurant in 1987, and quickly raised the bar for high-end food in Chicago. It was called one of the world’s fifty greatest restaurants by many a food publication, and received two Michelin stars in 2010. Trotter closed the restaurant in August of 2012, citing an interest to pursue new projects. Though he had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain aneurysm a couple years ago, he was intent on spending the remainder of his life doing things that made him happy and not dwelling on death. He will be missed.

Harbinger of the Apocalypse

It is a sad day for print journalism. History’s greatest newspaper, The Onion, has announced it will stop publishing print editions for good on December 12. Started in Madison, WI, the paper could once be easily found on many college campuses and in the nation’s more hip cities. It put out a final Madison edition in July, and has been distributing its newspaper-cum-beacon-of-freedom-and-democracy in Chicago, Milwaukee and Providence, RI. All of us in the free print newspaper business will pour one out for our homie, lost to the cruel sands of time.

This City is Rated A for “Almost Untrustworthy”

Fitch Ratings, a national authority on rating the credit of companies and cities, has downgraded the bond rating of Chicago from AA- to A-, a three-notch drop just a couple away from a “non-investment” grade. The company is following suit with Moody’s, another investment ratings company that downgraded their ratings for Chicago in July. Fitch cited Chicago’s overwhelming lack of money committed to the pensions of policemen and firemen, for which the city has only allocated about thirty percent of the funds necessary to cover such obligations. The city’s total bonds weigh in at about $8.5 billion.

Southside Sinkhole

A sinkhole has opened up on Wentworth Avenue in West Pullman.

“I looked out my front door and it looked like Buckingham Fountain,” Christopher Carpenter said of his front lawn a few minutes before it caved in. As of Monday afternoon the hole, created by a water leak in a nearby home the night before, was about fourteen feet in diameter.

Water Management workers, however, are going to need to make the hole even larger to try and repair the water main that was crushed in the sinkhole’s formation. The State of Florida was quoted as saying, “Fourteen feet? Please.” ¬

In this issue cottage grove & 47th

budget unveiling

“The city does not seem to “Miniaturization was the respect Bronzeville’s history watchword of this entire or its residents.” budget.”

jon brozdowski......4

PATRICK LEOW.............5

mana contemporary

hector duarte

“One of our main overall goals is for Mana to be a multi-institutional pedagogical space.”

“I would like to paint all the city with murals.”

jason huang............8

michael scott carter

clara’s place

gay marriage

EMMA COLLINS.............7

olivia markbreiter..........7

“My family’s been Republi- “God is going to take care of us. We’re going to stay can since Emancipation.”

OSITA NWANEVU...........6 open.”

hoofprint workshop

“It’s like when you get a letter in the mail—you’re sharon lurye.........9 just like, ‘Holy shit. Someone actually took the time.’ ”

farm in the city

“If you have a whole system problem, only a whole system solution can transform it.”

“Their strategy really failed at the end of the day,” he says of the bill’s opponents.”

1893 world’s fair

“The Western world was unburdened, intact, and ready to show off.”

olivia dorow jamison pfeifer....10 jeanne hovland................15 lieberman.............14

county of kings

forms of fiction

“‘I’ll carjack a sonnet in 35 minutes, tops,’ he brags.”

“Ulysses matters because it makes everything matter.”

beer hoptacular

“The brew was dark brown, bold, and, yes, stephen urchick..16 jamison pfeifer....17 pretty badass.”

sharon lurye.......18 november 13, 2013 ¬ South Side Weekly 3

junctures

cottage grove avenue

47th street

BRONZEVILLE

At the Heart of the Metropolis by jon brozdowski

2010

1980

1950

GRAND BOULEVARD

114,557 $392 53,741 $501 21,929 $770*

residents

median monthly rent

residents

median monthly rent

residents

median monthly rent

Grand Boulevard Community Area contains the sourthern portion of Bronzeville, and is bounded

by Pershing and 51st to the north and south, and Cottage Grove and the Rock Island railroad tracks to the east and west. Median monthly rent numbers are given in 2012 dollars to adjust for inflation. *Final data not yet available. Based on 2007-11 estimates from the American Community Survey.

4 South Side WeeklY

¬ november 13, 2013

P

eople come and go, buildings rise and fall, and properties change hands, but a bank must always be present to bear witness. In 1922, the South Side Trust and Savings Bank was built on the corner of 47th and Cottage Grove in the classical style. For years people walked between the two-story-tall Indiana limestone pillars that framed the front entrance to conduct their business, helping to make 47th Street the black metropolis it became in the decades following the Great Migration. The building has since become the Urban Partnership Bank, and if current plans succeed, it may witness a rejuvenated Bronzeville of a different form.

Catty-corner to the bank will stand the Shops and Lofts at 47, a five-story, ninety-six-unit mixed-income housing and retail establishment. The cornerstone of this large city investment ($46 million in tax-increment financing assistance) is a 41,000-square-foot WalMart “Neighborhood Market.” Shovels hit the ground in April, in a ceremonial dig, to finally start the project after years of delay; construction is expected to wrap up in 2014.

The project is part of the city’s Cottage Grove Corridor Master Plan, which seeks to develop retail and residential nodes around 43rd, 45th, and 47th Streets. Such a “node-centric” approach to development hopes to consolidate dispersed establishments around major transportation intersections.

Other developments in Bronzeville include the Rosenwald Building, which received a $25 million TIF subsidy for restorations, and a return of the Gospel Music Festival in an effort to revitalize the 47th Street blues district.

Despite its central location, 47th and Cottage Grove has until recently only had the bank, a McDonalds, a Save-A-Lot discount grocery store, and an alcohol warehouse and liquor store at the demolished Booker Building. Designed by the prolific architect Horatio Wilson and completed in 1914, this fine brick and terra cotta mixed-use building served as a cornerstone of the commercial district in Bronzeville.

Harold L. Lucas, president of the nonprofit Black Metropolis Convention & Tourism Council, fought to keep the Booker Building standing. According

to him, developments could easily have renovated the space and built around it, but the city does not seem to respect Bronzeville’s history or its residents.

“Three out of four blacks,” he says, in a video for the Bronzeville Visitor Information Center on YouTube, “lower-income public-housing residents, have been discriminated against and systematically displaced by the city of Chicago, the State of Illinois, the civic community of the commercial club of Chicago, the University of Chicago, and any number of conspiring politicians and Black elites who would like to change the landscape of Bronzeville and make it an upscale development project.”

Instead of such a gentrification, Lucas would like to see a community-driven development that embraces Bronzeville’s local history, and perhaps even brings tourists interested in the black metropolis that it was earlier in the 20th century. But with the developments in Bronzeville moving forward as fast as they are, the tension between the old Chicago and the new is not likely to abate very soon. ¬

politics

What the 2014 Budget Means for the South Side Aldermen grapple with regressive taxes, hiring freezes in the latest city budget By patrick leow

“L

et us remember how far we’ve come,” Mayor Emanuel thundered during his unveiling of the 2014 budget on October 23. He beamed with obvious warmth at the aldermen collected beneath him as he informed them that he had once again managed to shrink a yawning budget deficit without raising property or income taxes.

Miniaturization was the watchword of this entire budget. Even though it has been half a decade since the Great Recession began, the holy grail of fiscal austerity and shrunken government as a means to stave off economic crises remains alive and kicking. Mayor Emanuel, decked out in a bright red tie, lavished praise on his administration’s ability to cut “the wasteful and duplicative practices of the past.” It was an obsession with size that permeated the entirety of his address.

His commitment to shrunken deficits is more than empty rhetoric, and his administration’s weight-loss regime has borne fruit for him and his budget director Alexandra Holt. The structural deficit is set to be slashed to $339 million for 2014, a drastic change from the $790 million that was projected three years ago. Underpinning this headline number is a coherent ideology, where his ideal government is, as he describes, “smaller, simpler, and stronger.”

To achieve this slimmer budget deficit, his government will institute a series of relatively minor tax hikes in 2014. Notably, Chicago’s smokers will be placed under greater strain, with a ten percent increase in the city tax levied per pack of cigarettes, garnering the city $1.43 per pack of twenty.

The Emanuel administration projects that this increase will raise $10 million, the majority of which would be funneled towards providing Medicaid coverage for the more than fifty-thousand CPS students who rely upon it for their healthcare.

While aldermen were quick to paint this as a positive step for both public health and public coffers, some of those who represent South Side constituencies worried that this tax increase would have the unintended consequence of sparking more violence on their streets. Alderman Leslie Hairston of the 5th Ward was especially vehement in her denunciation of the “disproportionate impact” that an increased cigarette tax would have in communities

of color.

“This will have the impact of creating a very large black market in a lot of minority neighborhoods,” she said. “The loose sale of single cigarettes increases loitering, and people involved in illegal activities will loiter more on the streets. That’s a gang problem that arises from that increased visibility.”

Alderman Roderick Sawyer of the 6th Ward echoed Alderman Hairston’s caution over the cigarette tax, but took pains to not inject race into the debate. “I’m not talking about race, I’m talking about lower-income people in general. This is hitting the poorest, the hardest,” he said.

Instead, he called upon the mayor to find a more equitable way to raise revenues. “I want to make sure that the burden is spread across all income tax levels,” he said, decrying the cigarette tax as a way to plug the city’s deficit. “This is a regressive tax.”

Still, racial inequalities came to the forefront during debate over the mayor’s push to reduce personnel numbers in numerous city departments, with 1,500 city positions having already been eliminated in his first two years in office.

The 34th Ward’s Alderman Carrie Austin, chairman of the Budget Committee, is a prominent critic of removing well-paying middle-class jobs from low-income neighborhoods like hers, noting in a recent interview that deficit reduction cannot be built upon “the backs of people who are adding to our economy.”

Stagnant or even declining numbers of city jobs exacerbate existing problems in unequal hiring practices in many public departments. During a hearing on November 7, Thomas Powers, head of the city’s Water Management Department, came under particular scrutiny from members of the council’s Black Caucus for the department’s stark racial imbalance. Only six percent of its 1,511 salaried employees

are black, well shy of the 32.9 percent black share of the entire city’s population.

However, Powers declined to commit to any concrete steps to make his department more representative. He directed the debate toward purely procedural grounds, insisting that all employment decisions made by the department were constrained by a definite, but unexplained, hiring process.

The department is no stranger to suspicion from black aldermen. Late in 2012, Mayor Emanuel decided to lay off thirty-four Water Management workers and outsource their jobs to call center contractors employed by Japanese firm NTT Data.

Most of the thirty-four happened to be black Chicagoans hailing from the South and West sides, a fact that raised the ire of Alderman Sawyer, who complained last year isabel that laying off ochoa gold city workers from neighborhoods that were especially reliant upon government jobs had a huge negative effect. “If you fire [city workers], there’s a ripple effect,” he told an audience at a South Shore budget meeting. “Businesses get hurt. Families get hurt.”

Given that the water department is the third-largest department in the entire city, the vagueness surrounding its racial inequities worries many. And there’s no upcoming sign of a great change: the mayor’s budget will have the water department slash seven positions in 2014, a downsizing that is replicated in almost every citywide department. This will likely have the effect of locking in the existing racial proportion of city workers in departments like Water Management, maintaining the imbalance until city coffers recover their vitality once again.

Such a prospect seems extremely remote. On some days during these two weeks of budget debates, it felt as if lawmakers could speak of nothing but the

statewide pension crisis that will descend upon the city in 2015. Then, Chicago will be required by state statute to pay $600 million to fill police and fire pension coffers that are currently teetering on the edge of insolvency.

Mayor Emanuel described the effect this expenditure would have in apocalyptic terms. “Without balanced reform, meeting our current pension obligations would require us to nearly double the city’s property tax, a move that would send residents and businesses streaming out of Chicago,” he said.

If things remain as they currently are, the pension crisis will have the effect of increasing the city’s deficit beyond $1 billion in 2016, potentially undercutting the significance of the cuts Emanuel has made during his time in office.

However, it is a situation that the mayor has very little control over. He is reliant upon both houses of the state to pass a bill that frees the city from its pension obligations, and there is no sign that any such legislation will gain enough support from statewide lawmakers any time soon.

The first week of November marked the very last legislative session of the year, and legislators in both houses decided to defer the passage of a bill until 2014, ostensibly for the gathering of additional expert input. Democratic representatives are under pressure from union leaders who seek to preserve the pension liabilities of their own, and neither Speaker Michael Madigan nor Senate President John Cullerton is able to find the votes necessary to pass a bill that defies a simple party-line vote.

Chicago’s 2014 budget is a transitory one, and the city is collectively holding its breath to see if Mayor Emanuel’s dire promise of a Chicago that is drained of its middle-class residents will materialize if Springfield fails to reform an underfunded pension system.

All the same, the minor tweaks to both spending and taxation that Mayor Emanuel has put in place for this year do not encourage optimism that this budget is one that will benefit residents of the South Side. The debate, as argued, is now about how cuts should happen, rather than whether a smaller city government is justified in the first place—comfortable ground for Mayor Emmanuel. ¬

november 2013 ¬Side South Side Weekly 5 november 13, 2013 13, ¬ South Weekly 5

A South Side Conservative Illinois Treasurer candidate Michael Scott Carter

By osita nwanevu

I

t can be awfully hard to tell at times if Illinois Treasurer candidate Michael Scott Carter is giving you a TED talk or a stump speech.

“We’re in the process of building a website that’ll be a clearinghouse for innovation,” he says earnestly about his work with the United Nations’ Leading Group on Innovative Financing for Development.

“I believe that if we’re able to turn our hat to making money solving people’s problems, I think the world will change instantly,” he continues.

This kind of optimism is a common feature of coffee shop conversations with the young and idealistic, and mine with Carter was no different. Carter, in fact, has been shaped by his own optimism, which sustained him through half a lifetime of adversity. He was raised in Roseland by a single mother, who was diagnosed with cancer when he was thirteen. She passed after he left for college, and the resulting financial strain forced him to drop out and join the Navy, where he trained to be a SEAL. He then suffered a serious knee injury, forcing the Navy to discharge him.

Eventually he wound up studying at the University of Buckingham in England— paying his way by founding startups—and traveled Europe while working in the finance industry. He later returned to America to become the chief economist of the Chicago Urban League’s Entrepreneurship Center. Most recently, he’s been involved with an ambitious music education project, the Chicago Academy of Music, that aims to bring free music classes to Chicago children from the ages of three to eleven through the establishment of twenty conservatories across the South and West sides of the city. With this resume, Carter hopes to carve out a place in the Republican Party as an ambitious problem-solver—and, in turn, carve out a place for the Republican Party in places like the South Side and among African-Americans.

“Well, my family’s been Republican since Emancipation,” he says with a laugh.

“One of the things I say to people all the time is: There is no natural Republican. But there are natural tenets to the Republican Party.”

Those tenets, accessible, in theory, to

everyone regardless of race, can be broadly defined as conservative—a word that, for Carter, is less a rhetorical flag to be planted than a deeply meaningful descriptor of the principles that protect the core institutions of American society: family, community, small businesses, and large businesses.

Creating an accessible party message focused on those institutions would involve a turning away from the kind of divisive social issues that have come to define the party in the eyes of many and that Carter, who is personally pro-life but supportive of choice as well as gay marriage, can’t seem to offer an opinion on without grimacing.

“I think it’d be slightly unfair for me to start pontificating about whether people should or should not do anything,” he says slowly. “I think the breakdown of communities is the root cause of most of our problems.”

“When we’re not looking at people being able to have jobs,” he continues, “at how in whole swaths of Chicago there are no real jobs—no good food outlets, no good schools, the roads are terrible, it’s dangerous, and all of these things, and we [instead] want to focus on whether a person wants to be with another person…to me, that’s very random when there are a lot of things to fix.”

There’s a technocratic matter-of-factness to the way Carter talks about, and perhaps, would deal with these problems— he is, after all, an economist. This comes through most clearly when he talks about the inefficiencies of status-quo policies, like property taxes.

“This is one of the reasons why we have so many people renting,” he tells me.

“Hyde Park is a prime example: property costs are massive, but if you live in a flat, it’s cheaper. So you could have technically the same amount of space in a condo as you do in a house but your property taxes are going to be more [in a house] because your physical space is not bordered on all parts by the outside. Really?” he says, incredulously. “I personally believe we need a form of consumption tax that takes into account people’s economic status.”

Conservatives and economists tend to like consumption taxes because they incentivize saving money and are notionally

6 South6 Side South WeeklY Side WeeklY november ¬ november 13, 2013 13, 2013

fair—the amounts paid are based purely on the goods and services consumers choose to buy. But many argue that pure consumption taxes unfairly burden the poor in practice, because those in poverty tend to spend more of their income than wealthier people. Carter’s preferred system would be a compromise in which the rate would be staggered by income. The issue is still hotly debated by economists and implementing such a system even on the state level would be well outside the bounds of Carter’s role as treasurer, if elected. But his stance is reflective of the kind of brand he’s working to create for himself: advocacy for conservative principles tempered by an awareness of complex social realities, like the dynamics of poverty—realities familiar to him as a born and bred South Sider, of which he warns those who downplay societal inequality should quickly take notice.

“A lot of people don’t understand that problems with social inequality will be coming to your neighborhood soon,” he says. “It’s not locked anywhere. And I believe that there are members of the Republican Party that realize this.”

Right now, the state’s Republicans are more fixated on Illinois’ $100 billion public pension shortfall than anything else. But Carter isn’t fretting about it.

“It’s more literarily a problem than actual,” he says, arguing that the threat is mainly rhetorical.

“The pensions as they stand—they pay for themselves. The trouble is the debt that’s been accrued because we were able to sort of borrow against it.”

In his view, there aren’t potential solutions out there much better than cuts and boosting tax revenue through growth, an indication that the state’s inability to solve the crisis has more to do with an unwillingness to act than genuine uncertainty

maggie sivit

about how to address it. Carter thinks this kind of political immobility is symptomatic of the feeble state of American politics.

“Good people aren’t running anymore,” he tells me simply. “We don’t have any debate. That’s all it is. I know that’s a horribly immodest thing to say. And it’s uncharitable. But it’s the truth.”

So is Carter a good person? Naturally, it’s hard to say based on a single encounter. It is clear though, that Carter wants to make the case that he’s a sensible one, willing and able to help take the party in a new direction. If he gets the five to ten thousand petition signatures needed to appear on the ballot by November 25, the state’s Republican voters will decide in mid-March if they want to come along. ¬

POLITICS

Out in the Cold

Though its struggle for donations continues, Clara’s Place marches on By emma collins

D

uring the penultimate week of October, temperatures in Chicago fell to unseasonable lows, sending many of the city’s residents into the heated refuge of their homes. Nineteen women and twenty-three children in Englewood, however, were afforded no such luxury. Save for a few spare blankets and space heaters, the residents of Clara’s Place, a thirteen-unit housing complex for homeless women and children, endured the week without heat.

The gas service at Clara’s Place was discontinued on October 16 due to an unpaid gas bill in excess of $20,000. Fortunately, eight days after the heat was shut off, an anonymous donor paid both the gas bill for Clara’s Place and another $11,000 gas bill for Clara’s House, its short-term housing counterpart. Their heat was re-

stored, and with it, their confidence.

“God is going to take care of us. We’re going to stay open,” Clara Kirk, the seventy-two-year-old founder and head of both shelters, assured me, briefly turning her attention away from the months-old child she cradled in her arms.

The donation, however, while generous, is akin to giving a cancer patient a dose of morphine. Because the shelter relies solely on donations to cover its every expense, long-term funding depends wholly upon the whims of the general public. No single injection of funds will remedy the organization’s long-term solvency issues.

The shelters were not always in such dire straits. Both Clara’s Place and Clara’s House were funded by state and federal grants—via the department of Housing

and Urban Development—for a number of years, after opening in the late eighties. However, in 2007, the West Englewood United Organization, the organization through which Kirk runs both Clara’s House and Place, was unable to raise the almost $500,000 in matching funds necessary to receive grant money, rendering the shelters ineligible for government funds.

Ever since, the shelters have depended on donations.

This means that funding for the shelters—which Kirk says together cost around $650,000 per year to run—is unreliable at best. While Kirk remains confident that her shelter will survive, plans to secure further funds are nebulous.

“We’re going to apply for grants from the city and the state. We’re going to get

donations; God is going to give us donors,” Kirk said. “People are going to hear about us far and near. People have been great about donating to us, and I believe that they are going to continue donating to us.”

While few specific strategies for garnering greater financial support have materialized, Kirk noted that the shelter’s board members have planned a telethon for December 19 to raise funds for the shelters.

Beyond this effort, however, there exist no concrete plans to acquire more funding.

In spite of the obstacles, Kirk is determined to stay open. “We’re going to work hard to establish ourselves again,” she says.

“We’ll be just as good as we were twenty years ago, and better.” ¬

Illinois House Passes Gay Marriage Bill The Black Caucus backed equality activists, despite South Side activism by opponents

By olivia markbreiter

T

his week, after nine months of uncertain deliberations, legislators in Springfield narrowly passed a bill that made Illinois the fifteenth state to allow gay marriage. The Illinois Senate had passed the measure this past February, but the House, worried about a lack of support, had postponed a vote until now. It was a heavily-lobbied and heavily-publicized process, intensified by the emphasis placed on gay marriage by both advocates and opponents this legislative session. However, the fight was fought beyond both the halls of the Illinois legislature and the liberal urban and conservative rural populations most associated with the debate. It also played out on the South Side of Chicago, demonstrating a split in African-American politics over social issues.

Equality Illinois, a prominent LGBTQ lobbying organization, is one of the primary groups responsible for pushing this bill through the House. On June 17, after the failure of the Illinois House

to bring the bill to a vote, Equality Illinois announced its intention to fundraise and spend $500,000, half of which would be used for an “educational campaign” in areas including Chicago. Equality Illinois Public Policy Director Randy Hannig says the group has “spent a lot of time and effort” on outreach to the city’s African-American community in response to the work of one the nation’s leading anti-gay marriage organizations, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM). Their tactic, Hanning says, was to “cause a rift between the gay community and the African-American community” in Chicago by funneling money to prominent South Side pastors and encouraging them to speak against gay marriage.

During a 2012 investigation into NOM’s finances, a Maine court seized and unsealed a confidential 2009 document entitled “National Strategy for Winning the Marriage Battle,” that offered an explicit description of methods for preventing the

legalization of gay marriage “We aim, “it said, “to find, equip, energize and connect African-American spokespeople for marriage; to develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right.” A section of this document titled “Not a Civil Right” Project, focuses on the importance of deliberately targeting black communities around the country, because “the majority of African-Americans… oppose gay marriage.” (At the time this article went to press, NOM could not be reached for comment.)

Many religious leaders on the South Side have been outspoken in the fight against gay marriage. In March, Rev. James T. Meeks, Pastor of the Salem Baptist Church in Pullman and a former Illinois state Senator, released a “robo-call” warning of the dangers of same-sex marriage and encouraging the community to contact their state representative that reached 200,000 households. The funding for the robo-calls, made on behalf of the

Chicago-based African-American Clergy Coalition (AACC), has been linked by the Chicago Sun-Times back to NOM. Despite the outspokenness of religious leaders like Meeks and the efforts of national anti-gay marriage organizations, fourteen of the twenty members of the Black Caucus in the House supported the measure, potentially reflecting sentiments about gay marriage on the South Side and in other predominantly black communities more accurately. This could be made more clear in the upcoming 2014 election cycle, during which members of the AACC plan to mobilize their communities to vote out representatives who supported the bill. For now though, gay marriage supporters like Hannig are confident about the progress the marriage equality movement is making on the South Side. Their strategy really failed at the end of the day; “he says of the bill’s opponents. “The vast majority of the House Black Caucus voted in favor. They wanted to be on the right side of history.” ¬

november november 13, 2013 13, ¬ South 2013 ¬Side South Weekly Side Weekly 7 7

courtesy of mana contemporary

An Artistic Hive Mana Contemporary opens in Pilsen

N

By jason huang

estled in a nine-story warehouse in Pilsen is one of the newest and largest spaces for Chicago artists.

Mana Contemporary, an arts organization headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey, recently opened a location on the South Side, turning an ambitious eye toward the future of Chicago art.

The art center resides in a defunct, monolithic document distribution center topped with a precarious radio tower. A 6000-square foot space offers a traditional contemporary white-walled gallery, but maintains visible remnants of its industrial past.

The Mana Contemporary operation stems from the innovations of Moishe Mana, an Israeli entrepreneur who started a moving company to work around the clock instead of on the usual nine-to-five schedule. Moishe’s Moving and Storage eventually expanded across the country, and he started Mana Contemporary with business partner Eugene Lemay in 2011. It turns a profit as a studio supplier and art storage business, but also seeks to build connections between artists at similar cen-

ters around the globe; they’ve already got locations in Miami, San Francisco, and London in their sights. The ideal scenario is one that connects local art scenes and artists to a broader community of creators.

The Chicago center should fill a number of artists’ needs, including exhibition spaces and studio spaces for rent. Some other features include a café with free Wi-Fi and coffee, a technology lab outfitted with three-dimensional printing machines, and educational spaces. Currently, rented studio rooms range from 250 to 900 square feet.

A number of the rooms have already been claimed. “We have a pretty diverse range of artists, [in terms of] where they are in their practice and where they’re coming from and what kind of work they’re making,” one of the center’s directors, Nicholas Wylie, said. “We have people from Pilsen who’ve grown up here and people from Germany, Japan, and London.” Mana is still outfitting studios for use, but with all nine floors available for residence, the building’s capacity seems boundless.

However, Mana does not just want to

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be a studio space for artists. “The Chicago art world is driven less by the market and gallery system than the New York art world is,” Wylie explains. There are also a lot of graduates from BFA and MFA programs, which Mana plans to take advantage of by providing educational opportunities. Already, the University of Illinois-Chicago School of Art and Art History will begin holding courses there, including a bilingual lecture series. Late contemporary art dealer Donald Young’s library of art criticism and rare art books has also found a place. “One of our main overall goals is for Mana to be a multi-institutional pedagogical space,” says Wylie.

As the building fills, Mana’s biggest strength may be the artistic hive. With artists from various backgrounds and disciplines practicing so close to one another, the potential for collaboration and discussion is inherent. As Wylie puts it, “Everybody within this building…will be able to lend something to each other’s conversation.”

Mana’s efforts stretch beyond the bounds of visual art to other disciplines, es-

pecially those involving community actors, such as eighth blackbird and Lucky Plush, a Chicago-based dance group. Mana also hopes to bring in Café Jumping Bean, a locally-owned café that’s been in the neighborhood for over twenty years. The café is also a gallery, and Wylie hopes that this combination will increase community engagement. “One of the things we’re hoping to do is dedicate [a space] to host a rotating exhibition that highlights the work of [other local galleries] that they wouldn’t have the space for,” says Wylie.

At this point in time, though, Mana Contemporary’s impact on the rest of the Chicago arts community remains to be seen. The heating has not yet been officially approved, and many of the services they have planned are just coming together. However, Wylie has hope that Mana will be an attractive, community-serving project for artists in Pilsen and the rest of the South Side. “For major art events and lectures, people are traveling outside of Pilsen.” Mana wants to help make that change. ¬

visual arts

Somos Esto The murals of Hector Duarte

By sharon lurye

H

ector Duarte’s studio is full of butterflies and barbed wire. If you counted up every orange monarch butterfly that flits by in the paintings and murals that line the walls of his workspace, there would be dozens, perhaps hundreds, in the front room alone. But for every butterfly he paints, there’s usually a wicked strand of barbed wire right next to it.

For Duarte, who hails from Michoacán, Mexico, the barbed wire represents the border between Mexico and the United States, while the butterflies represent the possibility of erasing that border.

“I relate everything with this theme to immigration,” he says. “The butterfly flies from Canada to Mexico. The butterflies fly freely, and the human being does not— they go and come back.”

Duarte opened his Pilsen studio to the public for the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s annual Open House tours.

His house is difficult to miss, as it displays one of the most notable murals in a neighborhood noted for its murals: “Gulliver en el pais de las maravillas,” or Gulliver in Wonderland. The entire building is covered with a mural of Duarte as the giant Gulliver, tied down with barbed wire in a strange new land.

Upbeat traditional Mexican music played on Duarte’s iPod for visitors to enjoy as they mulled around his studio and checked out his works-in-progress. One of his big projects right now is a 30-by-10-foot mural that shows barbed wire turning into a cocoon for a human butterfly. The mural radiates with bright shades of orange, red, and black, a vivid palette characteristic of much of his work.

On the other wall is a mural of Duarte himself and his late father, the only other person in his family to migrate to America.

Rafael Duarte came to the United States during the Second World War as part of the brasero migrant worker program, working in the fields of California, Oregon, and Washington. Rafael is nineteen in the mural, while his son is represented at his current age.

The mural is painted in shades of red and orange, highlighted in green with an intensity matched by the expression on the

sharon lurye

father’s face. Every brushstroke is thick and angular, creating motion lines all over the two men’s faces. A strand of DNA weaves them together.

Duarte says that big pieces like this take him around three months to finish. At the same time, he’s often busy working on commissions from schools, libraries, and other public spaces. The artist has been working in Chicago since 1985, and over fifty of his murals can be seen around the region.

The main appeal of murals, for him, is that “nobody need pay nothing and everyone can enjoy it. You need to pay in the museum, and not all people can go to the museum.”

Duarte began studying mural art in 1977 in a workshop set up by the widow of the legendary Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. Siqueiros was one of the

founders of Mexican muralism, along with Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco.

Duarte explained that the main idea behind the Siqueiros method is the technique of “polyangularity,” where many different angles on the painting create different points of view for the spectator.

“He codified something about how you can integrate the mural paint in the architecture,” said Duarte. “That’s why I continue with this tradition. I integrate every corner, every space. I would like to paint all the city with murals.” He now teaches other artists the Siqueiros method, having set up artist collectives in Zacatecas, Zamora, and Chicago.

Duarte first visited Chicago in 1978, and decided that it would be a great place for his art. “I found this barrio, Pilsen, and I saw the murals in the streets, and I said, okay, this is good for me.” Seven years lat-

er he migrated, leaving almost his entire family behind in Mexico. But once Duarte moved to America, his artwork changed significantly from the style he had learned in Mexico.

“The artists here in Chicago paint in Mexican symbols,” he said. “Zapata, pyramids…why? When I came here, yo comprendi, I realized—” (here, he switched to Spanish) “—that they needed those symbols, because here they need to say somos esto, we are this. We have a culture.”

That’s when Duarte began using symbols like corn and hearts in his work, because of their importance in Mexican culture. He says he has a “corn heart,” and he takes that phrase seriously. One of his paintings is called “La Virgen de Maiz”.

The corn-cob Virgin Mary watched over the crowd in Duarte’s studio that day with as much compassion and tranquility as her human-shaped counterpart.

Close-by is a painting of a heart made of the Mexican and American flags, the two halves wounded and sewn together with barbed wire. “One heart in two countries and two cultures; one heart suffers on both sides,” Duarte explains. The culture shock forces him to hold on to symbols of his own identity.

“We suffer when we migrate to some place. We suffer in different ways. Different cultures, different everything. [Different] architecture, different food, different language, everything. And different people, from all parts of the world.”

Even his color palette changed after coming to America—an unexpected consequence of Chicago’s uninspiring weather, according to him. “I understand why the Chicano movement uses bright colors.

Here, it’s gray, gray. Everything is gray,” he says. “They need to see the papaya color, orange, mangoes, and flowers everywhere, and green. I don’t know; they need it. I don’t know if it’s true, but I think so.”

Go to Mexico, Duarte says, and you would see that the very air and sky look different. “I understand why the Anglo people paint in soft tones,” he says. “They have those tones in the weather. They have the blue sky, it’s a baby blue. But we need a strong cerulean, or cobalt!” ¬

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luke white

Printed Matters

printing

A printmaking studio takes over a funeral home By jamison pfiefer

J

ust north of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal is an ashen, defunct funeral parlor. At Oakley and 24th, the nineteenth-century, two-story building— still marked by a sign for “West Town Funeral Home”—is simple but striking, its stone exterior split by skinny lancet windows.

Inside are not crematoria and empty caskets, but a fully-working press. The building is now home to Hoofprint Workshop, a collaborative printmaking studio that can claim the title of southernmost printshop in Chicago.

The two twentysomethings who recently founded Hoofprint, and also live in the building, are Liz Born and Gabe Hoare. Born specializes in relief and screen-printing techniques; Hoare focuses more on lithography and intaglio. Together, they’re combining their printmaking expertise to repurpose the old building into a studio, workshop, and teaching and collaborative space.

Inside is a spacious workroom, its walls hung with artwork that surround the room’s centerpiece, a Dickerson Combination Press that can be used for intaglio, relief, and lithography. In the unfurnished backroom is a large assortment of prints, woodcuts, lithographs, and raw materials; during a tour of the building in late October, there’s also a conspicuous, nearly-completed chupacabra piñata.

“We’ve had a number of piñatas at the shows that we’ve curated,” says Born, smiling. The papier-mâché veneer is yet to be applied to the figure, making it look like an avant-garde sculpture.

“This,” Born says, “is for our Halloween party tonight.”

The building wasn’t always this colorful.

“When we moved in,” Born wrote in a note, “the place was in full mourning-mode. Dim, rose-colored lamps illuminated a patchwork of shag carpeting, smelling of stale flowers and dust.”

As anachronistic as it might be, a sense of old-world glory is still preserved in the building. The notion that a one-time

funeral parlor has been tactfully repurposed for the sake of printmaking—an art form that so readily lends itself to re-creation and preservation—seems fitting. “It’s such a specific place,” Born says about the building. “We can’t help but let it guide our direction.”

H

oofprint is, at its core, a collaborative space: the pair publishes prints in tandem with artists who may not necessarily share the same artistic backgrounds.

The workshop’s mid-October grand opening, a celebration entitled “Snap Roll,” featured a bluegrass trio and an exhibition of some of Hoofprint’s more recent collaborative work.

Some of those collaborative prints, including two recent works with artists Polly Yates and Sandra Perlow, still line the walls of the shop’s central room. “We like to work with artists whose backgrounds may not be in printmaking, because it lets them explore a completely different medium,” Born says.

“When we choose to work with an artist,” she continues, “it’s because we’ve crossed paths with them and we really respect what they’re doing. But we feel like we could help them branch out and expand their studio to the printmaking aspect.”

Typically, the artist covers the basic costs of supplies while Born and Hoare handle the actual printing process. In the end, the total number of prints produced is split between the artist and Hoofprint.

If publishing prints with outside artists is the duo’s primary goal, they also foresee other avenues of possibility—teaching private classes, working with youth arts programs, and expanding the space as a gallery. Currently, the press is open only by appointment, but beginning in December, Hoofprint will be open to the public on Fridays from noon to six.

The applicability of the printmaking technique means there’s always room to expand to mediums like comics and book arts. Born mentions Chicago’s lively underground comic scene as a way of poten-

tially working with other media, and hopes that the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo, held every June, will allow them to collaborate with creators who are interested in the printmaking arts.

B

orn and Hoare emphasize that there is a fine distinction between a print and a copy—the former made by a series of complex processes, the latter merely a mechanical reproduction. “Even between prints [of the same image],” Born says, “there is some amount of variation.”

“Some people call them multiple originals.” The collection of these “multiple originals,” so to speak, is what forms the edition of a certain print.

Usually, once the pair have produced the desired amount of prints, they will mark or disfigure the original image. “It’s a way of protecting the artists’ interests if some of their prints or original artwork are ever exhibited,” Born explains. “It’s an issue of rarity.”

Nothing made at Hoofprint is a giclée, which Born explains is “a fancy word for an inkjet print.” The prints are handmade and therefore bound by the dimensions of the original image. There’s always an awkward exchange, she says, when a potential buyer points to a print and asks, “Can I get this in an eight-by-ten?”

“Images are so widely available— they’re everywhere and I think they begin to lose what makes them special...The Internet provides free content to our eyes.”

T

he old embalming room is located in the basement—what Born calls “The Lodge.” (“It’s like stepping into the basement of the fictional Great Northern Hotel from Twin Peaks.”)

Though funeral services were held in the building as recently as last year, the embalming room hasn’t been in use for over fifteen years. Born and Hoare plan to retrofit the space, which by design is amenable to working with toxic fumes, as a kind of working space and storeroom for the acid-dipping process required for intaglio.

In this technique, the intended image

is etched onto a copper plate that is treated with acid before being applied with ink.

“You put ink all over the plate and then you wipe it off, so ink stays only in the valleys. And then you apply it to the canvas,” Born says. The technique is the direct opposite of the relief process, where the actual incised image holds no ink, like a negative.

The Perlow pieces on display at Hoofprint—one called “Sitting Down,” another called “Strong Assumption”—are a good example of the physical dimensionality that mixed-medium prints can achieve.

Whereas most painting is conceived in gradients of color and shading, printmaking is based in the study of contrasts. Think, for instance, of the negative image of a photograph. The same concept applies to printmaking.

P

rintmaking, Born and Hoare both concede, is an art form that naturally lends itself to collaboration, both in terms of the physical process and the necessity for space and equipment. Take the lithography technique, for instance, in which ink is applied to an aluminum plate.

It’s a planographic process, meaning the surface remains flat throughout, unlike in other printmaking techniques. Instead, Born says, “It’s about hydrophobic and hydrophilic substances. The water is important to maintain the blank or non-printed parts of the plate.” So, often you need two people to print a lithograph: one person to apply the water with a sponge; the other to roll the paint on.

“It’s one thing to have your own press, but it’s another thing to share it,” Born says. “We’ll rent our press out to people who already know how to.” In the meantime, the duo will continue to grow the workshop into a space that involves classes and workshops.

“A lot of our mission is about educating people [about printmaking],” Born says.

An oft-impervious art form, printmaking is necessarily labor-intensive, requiring multiple processes that have to

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be repeated until the desired number of prints has been created. Similarly, many printmakers rely on communal or shared workspaces due to the expense and size of some of the equipment involved. The fact is that most artists and printmakers can’t afford to buy a press or have the space and the other materials required for their own workspaces.

D

avid Jones is the head of Anchor Graphics, which he founded in 1990 in Wicker Park with his wife and partner, Marilyn Propp. The press moved to Columbia College Chicago in 2006 and is now a nonprofit—“We were just priced out,” Jones says—and still functions as a publishing press, but also as a teaching and collaborative space.

“When Marilyn and I started our

printmaking workshop, there were only two other printmaking workshops that I knew of in the city,” Jones says. Landfall Press, founded in 1970, has since relocated to Santa Fe. Plucked Chicken Press was operated by its founder, Will Petersen, in Evanston until his death in 1994. But Jones insists that the community is a growing one.

In the nineteenth century, Chicago

was something of a publishing giant— hence, historic districts like Printer’s Row, which was a fulcrum of the industry in its heyday. Even until the late 1970s, Dearborn Street was home to many printing shops, though most of the buildings along this area have now been converted into residential spaces.

Farther south was the Goes Lithographing Company, which for just over a

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¬ november 13, 2013

printing century made its home in a 75,000-squarefoot building at 61st and Perry. Goes left for Delavan, Wisconsin in 2010 due to issues with the building: the owners realized that the vibrations from passing trains would disturb new electronic printing presses. Norfolk Southern bought the building, which was demolished in February, and plans to build a truck depot on the site.

With the rise and fall of the printing establishment in Chicago, printmaking today has become something of a niche art.

Hoare, for one, compares his art form to another, similarly archaic one: letter writing. “It’s like when you get a [hand-written] letter in the mail—you’re just like, ‘Holy shit. Someone actually took the time to write this by hand.’ ” “It becomes a lot more meaningful,” Born echoes—whether it be a hand-written letter or a handmade lithograph. Printmaking nowadays, she says, is not so different from what analog tape has come to mean with music recording.

Jones, too, thinks printmaking is something more and more people are finding themselves interested in. “There’s a real desire to get your hands dirty,” he says, and “a wonderful sharing of ideas.” Due to the fact that printmakers are so heavily reliant on communal workspaces, the result is “a community that revolves around the locus of the print shop.”

Today, most of Chicago’s presses are heavily concentrated on the North Side.

There is Spudnik Press, off Hubbard— where Born has worked and taught classes—and also the Chicago Printmakers Collaborative, in Ravenswood.

On the South Side, until recently, the Southside Hub of Production (SHoP) had a printmaking studio but lost its space.

SHoP head Laura Schaeffer says that the organization is looking into having one again. “If we had space,” she says, “we’d like to have a kind of DIY community print shop.”

Not far from SHoP’s former location, the Hyde Park Art Center offers printmaking classes and is currently showing an exhibition titled “Oli Watt: Here Comes a Regular” that spans the career of another Chicago printmaker.

B

ack in 1966, a series of exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center inspied a group of artists to call itself th Hairy Who. The group is considered a part of the larger Chicago Imagist movement, which developed in reaction to the New York art scene of the 1960s.

Born, who had a stint at Bard College

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in New York before transferring to SAIC, recalls attending a retrospective exhibition of one of the Hairy Who’s early members, Karl Wirsum, while in high school. Wirsum was known for his inventive, largescale prints.

“It blew me away, and that’s part of the reason I decided to study at the School of the Art Institute,” she says of the exhibit. “I took Karl’s drawing class for three consecutive semesters.”

“The Imagists were working at a time when it wasn’t necessarily in vogue to paint recognizable things,” Born says. “Abstract Expressionism in New York still dominated when the members of the Hairy Who were in school. It was rebellious to do what they did—and it’s still exciting, fifty years later.”

For Born though, the central draw of printmaking remains its revelatory experience. “I like the process of discovery involved in printmaking,” she says. “The moment that the print is revealed...it’s different from, say, painting, which is an additive process, so there’s not that same surprise.”

When Born and Hoare show me the original images—whether carved on wood or etched on metal—of some of the prints

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on display, this notion of transfiguration becomes a little clearer. You try to imagine the series of processes of woodcutting, image transferring, and ink layering that took place before the work is finally put through the press. The result is a singular image— often transfixing—formed by these multiple processes.

“Every single process involves some kind of transformation,” Born says. And then, there’s that final reveal of what she calls an epiphany.

“I’m addicted to that feeling,” she says. ¬

november 13, 2013 ¬ South Side Weekly 13

green

Farms in the City Remedies for Chicago eats and neighborhood streets By jeanne lieberman

“W

e believe that if you have a whole system problem, only a whole system solution can transform it,” announced Naomi Davis, founder and president of the grassroots community development organization Blacks in Green, to an auditorium full of Chicago Humanities Festival patrons on Sunday afternoon.

Davis’s co-panelists and fellow South Side community leaders, John Edel of The Plant and Harry Rhodes of Growing Home, presented a similarly passionate case about the “Farm in the City,” as the event was titled. They envision urban agriculture as a remedy not only for what Chicagoans eat, but also for what goes on on our streets.

Rhodes characterized Growing Home’s urban agriculture work as at the juncture between social enterprise, transitional employment, and community development. Between its four local farms, the organization generates 13,000 pounds of organic produce a year. But Rhodes believes an integral result of their urban farming operations is the job training they offer formerly incarcerated or homeless interns, ninety-five percent of whom never return to the prison system, as compared to the fifty percent average for released convicts in Illinois. Growing Home’s gardens and Englewood farmstand serve as safe havens in one of the city’s most violent communities. “When you bring people together in a garden, bad things don’t happen,” Rhodes assured the crowd.

When asked by moderator Lee Bey whether it was a coincidence that they all worked on the South Side, the three panelists quickly expressed a consensus answer: “No.” While the models are meant to be replicable in many Chicago communities, the legacy of deindustrialization and what Davis termed the “foreclosure tsunami” on the South Side have left acres of vacant land and a desire for community safe havens that make it a natural place to start.

Davis explained her motivation for working in urban farming as a desire to spear14 South Side WeeklY

plant chicago, nfp/rachel swenie

Mayor Rahm Emanuel tours the growing system at The Plant, an urban agriculture organization in Back of the Yards. head holistic community development.

There is, she commented, a “high cost of doing nothing in neighborhoods like mine, in West Woodlawn, where people die on the street, as surreal as that may seem,” she commented.

This starting point for the urban farms—abandoned lots, unsafe neighborhoods, and resource scarcity—was geographically far removed from Sunday’s discussion, in the high-tech auditorium of the Lincoln Park charter school that hosted the event. While the setting signaled the newfound trendiness of urban farming on the municipal level, the audience was keen to interrogate the larger institutional road-

¬ november 13, 2013

blocks that still limit this all-encompassing solution. One astute and wary audience member asked Davis whether the UofC is “just keeping quiet about this or are they hatching anything behind closed doors?”

In response she described the vacant lots in West Woodlawn that are not yet in community land trusts as “perched precariously within the talons of the University, which quite clearly has a plan for developing” the neighborhood. “The University of Chicago is six of one and half a dozen of the other,” she said, as Blacks in Green has also received support from the UofC and has many university allies in pushing forward their initiatives that don’t concern

real estate development, such as backyard gardens.

Edel eloquently characterized the city’s equally ambivalent initial attitude towards urban agriculture: “We were being told ‘No. Absolutely not’...in writing.

There were several signatures on that.

But being told privately, ‘Do it, do it. We want you to do it.’ Well we did it.” And, seemingly due to all this grassroots work, zoning laws have changed. The mayor’s office now encourages urban agriculture—at least in writing. ¬

Come One, Come All

hanna petroski

“Wonders of the 1893 World’s Fair” at the Field Museum By olivia dorow hovland

T

he 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition was a product of giddy enthusiasm. Charles Darwin had recently released “On the Origin of Species,” a groundbreaking book prompting its readers to reexamine the natural world around them. Electricity lit up the dark night like never before, and the telephone was newly facilitating quick and personal communication. Archaeologists, botanists, and sociologists were almost tripping over new findings, many of them in far-flung countries. The passenger pigeon still flitted from building to building in America’s growing metropolises. The Western world was unburdened, intact, and ready to show off, an enthusiasm that manifested itself in the fair erected in Jackson Park and along the Hyde Park Midway.

The Field Museum has opened its vaults for its most recent exhibition, “Wonders of the 1893 World’s Fair.” The museum was originally established in order to be the final home for many of the World’s Fair exhibitions after the fair itself end-

ed. Many of the items currently on view have not been put on display since the fair, which makes walking through the exhibit feel like something akin to time travel. It is apparent that many of the displays are from a bygone era. Objects such as a piece of wood from a Japanese tree, simplistic in our age of global travel, were likely incredibly fascinating to the fair’s attendees, many of whom were just then learning of the particularities of countries and cultures outside of their own. Lions, leopards, and seals were stuffed for exhibition as evidence of the inconceivable fauna that existed beyond American borders. The fair was lit entirely with electrical light bulbs powered by alternating electrical current, pioneering technology and a source of pride for the fair’s organizers. The clunky metal switch that powered that maze of electrical lights is now in a glass case at the Field Museum.

In 1893 the Chicago Tribune wrote, “It is a World’s Fair as far as its…exhibits are concerned. It is a Chicago Fair as far as energy…and determination are

concerned…Chicago deserves the credit.” Beating out New York, St. Louis, and Washington D.C. for the opportunity to host the exhibition, Chicago threw everything it had into the production of the fair.

Its organizers and department heads became so renowned for their work that they worked as the Field Museum’s first curators in the years after the fair. Twenty-five million people visited the fair between May 1 and October 30, 1893, almost forty percent of the country’s population at the time.

Organizers recommended allotting two weeks to go to the fair because of the extent of the exhibitions on view. And literally everything was for sale; fossils that the Field Museum now has in their collections were priced between $2 and $5. Artifacts seemed so abundant at the time that the whole fair was set up as a trade show from which the exhibition items themselves were purchased as souvenirs.

In addition, many exhibition items were judged and awarded prizes accordingly, one of the most famous winners be-

ing Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. It was within this framework that fairgoers felt comfortable walking through the “villages” of the Japanese, Javanese, Dahomey, and Inuit that were set up along the Midway and evaluating the level of their civility.

Anthropologists today are still working to mend relationships between America and the cultures and peoples that were put on display at the fair.

The 1893 World’s Fair, as reanimated in the Field Museum’s present-day exhibition, was Chicago’s initiation into the national and global scene. The endless white buildings, the rare and fascinating global artifacts, and the cutting edge technology that held it all together made the fair into something extraordinary and worthy of revisiting. As the Field Museum puts it, “the fair brought the world to one place and showed that America—and Chicago—was open for business.” ¬

november 13, 2013 ¬ South Side Weekly 15

screen & stage

Goddamn Lemonade

“County of Kings” at the Beverly Arts Center By stephen urchick

A

young Lemon Andersen walks into a poetry reading. He’s just triumphantly concluded his jail sentence. He’s heady with freedom, so ready for change he’s followed a hipster’s invitation to the open mic. “I’m greeted with love,” Andersen says. “And a quick pat down.” He mimes the motions of a frisk with an edge of cool comedy. The intrusion hardly breaks his stride, shimmying down his back like a dance move. The action of his one-man theatrical autobiography “County of Kings” has admittedly whisked us to worse places this evening. We’ve watched his mother Mili die from HIV, we’ve seen his family variably incarcerated, and we’re wondering what happened to his fifteen-year-old fiancée, conspicuously absent since Andersen’s trial for coke dealing.

Andersen now vacates the narrator’s perspective as he glides between the voices of each successive slam poet, fading one’s twanging vowels into another’s explosive bilabials into a third’s vigorous, hand-swinging style. He returns to himself with aching indecision over signing up to speak. We listen as he hurriedly forces his thoughts out onto appropriated printer paper, feeling credibly closeted with him backstage though he’s presently front and center. “I don’t have a poem,” he says. “But I have an experience.”

“County of Kings,” performed at the Beverly Arts Center in Morgan Park, is itself a two-hour slam that vigorously articulates this experience at its every joint—stretching from Andersen’s earliest 16 South Side WeeklY

childhood to his earliest career. Andersen—now a Broadway performer, renowned spoken-word artist, and actor—frames his narrative with the night of his ultimate triumph, his acceptance of a tremendous and televised Tony. Yet the play doesn’t support reading as a reductionistic success story.

“Kings” isn’t Andersen’s linear rocketing out of his brain-breaking home to fame, recognition, and an ambiguous ‘better life.’

The play’s one-man structure obligates Andersen to embody his tale’s interlocutors and to suggest his growth and gradual education through the evolution of his narrative voice. Both of these theatric demands intersect in a rich, messy, and humanistic day-in-the-life story. “Kings” accepts Andersen’s childhood for what it was, not as a launching pad for what will be, graffitied with messages of his prewritten and assured success. Each vignette he sketches isn’t code for social mobility or a clue to his future. They’re unique and validly meaningful moments all on their own—messed up or hilarious or both.

Andersen is quite literally an image of his mother; the first half of the play is dominated by his favorite fast-talking, no-nonsense, disco-loving Puerto Rican girl. This leads him to spend much time arms akimbo, making ample use of his hips, throwing his voice as believably as only one regularly chastised by it ever could. Her proud, beautiful cries of “That’s my boy!” are rendered by the boy himself, exquisitely genuine. We find Mili funny, and appreciate her presence. But scratch at the humor and you’ll

¬ november 13, 2013

find sad irony. Andersen’s absurdity rests on the knowledge that he was once—by grim necessity—a tough customer with serious street cred, for whom crossing genders and impersonating an unrelenting Latina would be impossible. An exasperated tirade over her son’s request to day trip to Coney Island jokes about food stamps and is peppered with urgent poverty. Its comedic value isn’t necessarily blackened by that aspect, however. The scenario remains nuanced. A mother tries to make the best from the worst, though the worst still looms, must be accepted, and moved beyond.

This river of hard-up exigencies murmurs throughout the play. Never far beneath any light moment is some reminder of reality’s hardships. Crawling on the bathroom floor, young Andersen finds a used heroin plunger and naively pockets it as a sweet gadget for an action figure. He looks up to the men in his life with cute, wide-eyed appreciation of their ability to hotwire a car in thirty-five seconds, asking them—in passing—where all the spots and scars on their arms came from. As he participates in a special ballet program, we laugh at his interpretation of the instructor who demands complete commitment. “He looked full in our eyes knowing that if he steps onto my block, his wallet would be going towards somebody’s takeout.” Andersen impersonates each figure he introduces; the story pulses with weirdly and unpredictably funny characters. He accepts and independently values the different as-

pects of each encounter. The fact that the teenaged Andersen finished a three-hundred page book is “revelatory” and, for the audience, gratifying. The fact that he and the barber subsequently celebrated with acid stamps is as equally worthy and tremendously hilarious. Encountering unfortunate and unfair truths, Andersen introduces no condemnation or bitterness.

When Andersen is finally called forward to the open slam poetry mic—fortunately scribbling down his last lines as his name goes out—the stage lights drop and his precise, crisp, and itchingly bug-eyed narration melts. “I cop a rookie artist’s plea,” he says before believably shedding years in the single remaining slightly-red spotlamp. He’s a husky-throated hard-ass who’s seen it all, but he must now shake off this brand new terror. As his first ever slam swells, Andersen grades back into his polished narrative tone. But the tenor of the words remains unchanged—the story since told continues to inform them. He doesn’t transcend his history with poetic talent; he steals poetics to provide an expressive vehicle for his past. “I’ll carjack a sonnet in thirty-five minutes, tops,” he brags. As an autobiography, “County of Kings” champions the best in a bad situation. Though we never see his ascent to national notoriety, we leave comfortable in the fact that he will carry Brooklyn with him along the way. “Kings” makes spectacularly good on its prologue’s punning commandment: “Watch me take my lemons and make the best goddamn lemonade!” ¬

books

A Matter of Meaning It “Forms of Fiction” at Logan

By Jamison pfeifer

“I

’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant,” James Joyce once said of his oeuvre, “and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” It wasn’t only professors, however, arguing about Joyce— along with George Eliot, Henry James, and Jane Austen—at this past week’s “Forms of Fiction: The Novel in English” conference at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center, spanning three days of lectures, discussions, and book readings, all hosted by UofC faculty.

The four novels the series focused on were Joyce’s “Ulysses,” Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” James’ “The Golden Bowl,” and Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” English novelists A. S. Byatt and Tom McCarthy both made the transatlantic trek to lecture—McCarthy on the materiality of “Ulysses,” Byatt on Eliot’s modes of allegoric expression in “Middlemarch”—in addition to giving readings from their own

novels.

For all of his fast-talking glibness, McCarthy succeeded in approaching a level of interpretive richness—focused not on Joyce’s narrative structures but on his language—which advanced a particular reading of the book while resisting reductionism. His answer to the slightly obnoxious titular question of his talk, “Why Ulysses Matters,” was that “‘Ulysses’ matters most because it makes everything matter.” McCarthy’s notion of the necessity and materiality of language in Joyce affirms the innovation of Joyce’s masterwork, and its nearly limitless capacity for meaning.

Later, McCarthy and Byatt shared their personal thoughts on the novel as a genre, and hearing them occasionally diverge from each other—in what seemed to emphasize their generational differences— was a reassuring proof of the robust nature of the form. “The point of the novel isn’t communicating: it’s being there,” Byatt said. “Or elsewhere,” said McCarthy. ¬

november 13, 2013 ¬ South Side Weekly 17

beer VISUAL ARTS Resisterectomy Artist Chase Joynt, currently working and teaching at the UofC as a visiting artist and scholar, takes on the dynamic narratives of mastectomy and hysterectomy patients with the aptly titled exhibition “Resisterectomy.” Juxtaposing the stories of cancer patients and trans men, Joynt brings up questions about embodiment, gender identities and boundaries, and the implications of these surgeries for each patient.

By undergoing these procedures both cancer patients and trans men must confront and relate to their gender identities in vastly different ways, and “Resisterectomy” explores these personal narratives in a surprising and thought-provoking exhibition. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, Midway Studios, 929 E. 60th St., Ste. 112. Opening reception Monday, November 11, 5pm-7pm. Artist talk Wednesday, November 13, 3pm. By appointment only. Free. (773)834-1936. graycenter.uchicago.edu (Katryce Lassle)

11th Annual Cardboard Show

sharon lurye

Beer Memories Beer Hoptacular comes to Pilsen By sharon lurye

“T

his one is badass,” said the man behind the counter of the Goose Island station, slapping down the handle of a beer that had been infused in a barrel of Dark Matter coffee beans. The brew was dark brown, bold, and, yes, pretty badass. But it was just one of the many standout craft beers available at the multiday Beer Hoptacular festival this weekend, which made its home in Pilsen for the first time at the Lacuna Artist Loft.

The event, now in its fourth year, has previously been held in Uptown and the West Loop, and has featured over 150 craft beers from sixty-plus breweries, including nineteen in Chicago. Alcohol aside, the selection was enough to make your head spin.

For forty-five dollars, attendees were given a punch-card for thirty samples—which, on the last night, every brew station happily ignored—and a generously-sized sample glass.

Varied and sundry sculptures, installations, and paintings by modern artists overlooked the jam-packed crowd of brewers and tasters, lending a slightly surreal air to the night’s events. Local restaurants like Honky Tonk BBQ set up stations as well, sometimes leading to a beautiful synergy between food and drink; when I ordered a Pumpkin Spice Latte Tamale at the Dia de Los Tamales station, the server told me to hurry over to Destihl’s table and grab their 18 South Side WeeklY

pumpkin beer. “It’s a porter, too!” he noted approvingly, a nod to what was perhaps an overabundance of IPAs at the festival.

Jim Powers, the event’s co-founder, observed that most of the patrons hopping—or, later in the night, stumbling— from station to station hailed from the North Side. Powers, a record-store owner and amateur brewer, said he was glad to introduce them to Pilsen. “I’ve been coming down here for years. It’s an interesting mix of families and interesting people and music and culture.” He thinks that the craft beer movement embraces a certain DIY entrepreneurial attitude that’s well in keeping with the spirit of a neighborhood full of artists and small businesses.

Still, Powers admitted that “a lot of people have never even been to Pilsen,” and that it took some work to convince people to come down south.

In one of the rooms, a six-foot-tall map of Chicago invited drinkers to write their favorite “Beer Memories” on a PostIt note and stick it on the location of that memorable bar. The map ended abruptly at Pilsen, but bar-hopping South Siders nevertheless crowded the bottom with shoutouts to the likes of Maria’s and Horse Thief Hollow. South Side snubs aside, it’s appropriate that a neighborhood founded by beer-loving Bohemians was on the map that night. ¬

¬ november 13, 2013

Most of us interact with cardboard only so far as to break down and recycle the boxes that bring our online shopping hauls safely to our doorsteps. But Birdhouse Museum is taking advantage of this underappreciated material for the 11th Annual Cardboard Show. Project Onward—an organization that provides financial, material, and educational support for physically and mentally disabled adult artists in Chicago—has recently found a new home at the Bridgeport Arts Center and will be offering up its gallery space for the event. Over one hundred artists from all over Chicago will be displaying their talents on cardboard in the uniquely medium-centered cash and carry event. Show up, get inspired, and maybe you’ll never discard your cardboard again. Bridgeport Art Center, 1200 W. 35th Street. November 15-November 27. Opening reception Friday, November 15, 6pm-10pm. Mostly Cardboard Portrait Slam Saturday, November 16, 11am-5pm.

Office hours Monday-Saturday, 8am-6pm; Sunday 8am-12pm.

Free. (773)247-3000. bridgeportart.com (Katryce Lassle)

Killers. What’s Jason Benson trying to say? There’s only one way to find out. Queer Thoughts Gallery, 1640 W. 18th Street #3. Through December 8. By appointment only. qtgallery.net (Katryce Lassle)

STAGE & SCREEN An Iliad Too often we misconceive the idea of the unfathomable—we believe it is generated by multitudes, sheer symphonies of sounds. Yet in “An Iliad,” we find that a single voice is all that is necessary—one man’s voice can give rise to the unfathomable and overwhelm us. Timothy Edward Kane will present Homer’s classic in Court Theatre from November 13 to December 8, calling the audience back to a time when poets would recite these epic stories from memory. Hear the glory of Achilles and Hector, experience the full gamut of human emotion and suffering, and understand the animalistic depths of man. Court Theatre, 5525 S. Ellis Ave. November 13-December 8. See site for showtimes and prices. (773)7534472. courttheatre.org (William Rhee)

Traviata Famed Italian dance company Artemis Danza lends gesture to Giuseppe Verdi’s swelling opera “La Traviata,” “The Fallen Woman.” The company brings Verdi’s narrative of love and the forces that thwart it to explosion as dancers form throngs at turns ecstatic and strangled. “Traviata” is one installment of Artemis Danza’s series of Verdi adaptations, and tells the tale of the enamored young elite Alfredo and the tragically ill Violetta. The company offers what one Italian paper names a “feminist and feminine” portrayal, including a heroine who doesn’t share her name with a pasta dish. The Chicago rendition is one of just two U.S. performances before the venerated company returns to its small, boot-shaped land of high art, and leaves us our reality TV. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Thursday, November 14, 8pm. See site for prices. (773)702-2787. arts.uchicago.edu (Hannah Nyhart)

A Sherman Beck Retrospective

Hoodwinked

The South Side Community Art Center will be honoring renowned South Side artist Sherman Beck in an upcoming retrospective, presenting a collection representative of Beck’s career from 1955 to the present. Starting in the late sixties, Beck was part of the radical AFRICOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), a group of artists whose mission was to join the black cultural movement through visual arts. Beck has been a working artist for most of his life—he still frequently exhibits his work—and the South Side is vastly better for knowing him. Join the SSCAC in paying tribute to one of the South Side’s most influential artists, and maybe even have a conversation with the man himself.

South Side Community Art Center, 3831 S. Michigan Avenue.

November 15-December 12. Opening reception Friday, November 15, 6pm-9pm. Artist talk Saturday, November 23, 2pm-5pm. Wednesday-Friday, noon-5pm; Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, 1pm-5pm. (773)373-1026. southsidecommunityartcenter.com (Katryce Lassle)

“Are there more black men in jail or in College?” The question at the core of filmmaker Janks Morton’s 2007 documentary, “What Black Men Think,” returns in the film’s sequel, “Hoodwinked.” The false claim that there are more imprisoned black men than black male students has been repeated by a wide range of prominent public voices; from news networks, to a convocation speaker at Howard University to President Obama himself. Morton places the misrepresentative statistic alongside a slew of misconceptions about black men and women that have emerged from centuries of codifying black inferiority. “Hoodwinked” is the filmmaker’s attempt to offer a counter narrative, examining recent census data that sheds light on the progress and potential of the black community. Friday’s screening at the DuSable will include a Q&A with Morton. DuSable Museum, 740 E. 56th place. Friday, November 15, 6:30pm. $10. dusablemuseum.org (Hannah Nyhart)

Your Implications Have Implications The new exhibition at Slow gallery confronts human interaction at its very core, via our most common mode of building relationships with one another: storytelling. Four working artists who have previously exhibited everywhere from Chicago and New York to Germany and Beijing come together to present a thoughtful collection of mixed-media works that confront various facets of storytelling—from personal bias and the balance of fact vs. fiction, to the creeping influence of the past and the difficulties one faces when re-forming an existing narrative. We take for granted that our lives are defined by the stories we tell and the stories we’re told; “Your Implications Have Implications” asks viewers to, for once, stop and reflect on what this means. Slow Gallery, 2153 W. 21st Street. November 16-December 14. Opening reception Saturday, November 16, 6pm-11pm. Saturdays noon-5pm. Free.

(773)645-8803. paul-is-slow.info (Katryce Lassle)

Bad Grammar Theater This Friday, Bad Grammar Theater continues to settle into their location at the University Village Powell’s for a collection of readings from Chicagoans who write. One can expect a variety of fiction work with potential interludes of memoir or poetry. The prose pros will be out in full force, including the reading series’ veterans Lawrence Santoro and Wayne Allen Sallee. Both of these scribblers have been nominated for the Dracula-inspired Bram Stoker award, a testament to the fact that they’re both scary-good. If you don’t like what you hear, the store is well stocked with books you can read for yourself, and you’re welcome to stay as long as you like. Head to 12th Street for a chance to hear authors’ words in their own voices, and see if you can catch the Bad Grammarist dangling a modifier or two Powell’s Books, 1208 S. Halsted Ave. Friday, November 15, 6pm. Free. (312)2439070 (Hannah Nyhart)

Jason Benson

Since Last Time at Story Club South Side

Jason Benson, a young California multi-media artist and SAIC alumnus, has a solo show up at Queer Thoughts. A helpful list of themes explored in the show is posted on the Queer Thoughts website: “a. Clone (We, I) / b. Rat (I, You) / c. Snail (I, We) / d. Wine (We, You, I) / e. Digestion (I) / f. Incarceration (I, We, You) / g. Infatuation (You, I) / h. Skin (I, You, We, We).” There is a supplemental PDF on the Queer Thoughts website featuring experimental poetry by Benson, along with graffiti fonts and graphics and a number of links to torrents of the movie Natural Born

Time to step up your anecdote game by learning from the professionals. Story Club hosts a South Side show the third Tuesday of every month, and November’s theme is “Since Last Time.” This cryptic title means that the city’s bravest raconteurs will be telling their best nonfiction stories detailing moments of separation and reunion. The Club hosts three scheduled readers and guarantees at least three additional open slots for the ballsiest audience members to have their eight minutes of glory onstage. “Story Club is like Fight Club,” quips their website. “Except everyone tells sto-

arts calendar ries instead of punching each other in the face.” This month’s featured performers are Eileen Dougharty, Kristin Clifford, and Byron Roussin. Listen closely enough and maybe people will start liking you at parties. Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S. Morgan St. Tuesday, November 19, sign up 7:30pm; show 8pm.

Free. BYOB & BOYPie. (773)837-0145. storyclubchicago.com (Bea Malsky)

A Christmas Memory and the Thanksgiving Visitor Strict seasonalists—those sticks in the mud who insist on celebrating popular holidays in order—will have a new thorn in their side this winter, as Provision Theater presents its adaptation of Truman Capote’s short stories “A Christmas Memory,” and “The Thanksgiving Visitor” at the same time.

The charming tales are loosely autobiographical, and detail the close friendship between a young boy and his elderlybut-young-at-heart cousin. The show opens November 20, but those who like to gripe about the modern elongation of the “Christmas Season” can hold off until they deem Christmas cheer appropriate: the run will continue through December 29, when every mall in America will be well on their way to hawking Valentines merch. Provision Theater, 1001 W. Roosevelt Rd. November 20-December 29. See site for showtimes. $10-32. (312)455-0066. provisiontheater.org (Hannah Nyhart)

Consuming Spirits Animated frame by frame in 16mm, twenty-four framesper-second, it’s no wonder that Chris Sullivan’s “Consuming Spirits” took fifteen years to complete. Most of the film is done using paper, ink, and a camera; its style shifts between stop-motion cutout puppets and more traditional animation, with other sections filmed on tiny model sets. Described as “rust-belt gothic,” the film tells the story of three run-down individuals in a run-down Appalachian town and their loneliness, secrets, and a local gardening radio show that errs on the side of metaphor. Sullivan’s mostly self-composed soundtrack further adds to the hypnotic atmosphere of story, adding tension to the most mundane moments. The green, yellow, and white-tinged faces of the puppets are almost grotesque, and their voices echo as from within a dream. The dark and inescapable realism of forgotten small-town America gets mixed with the surreal, hinting at something sinister beneath the surface. As it turns out, the mundane might be the most sinister thing of all. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Friday, November 22, 7pm. Free. (773)702-8596. filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu (Bailey Zweifel)

MUSIC K. Michelle The R&B singer best known for “Fakin’ It”—a 2009, Missy Elliott–assisted lament for false climaxes—is playing at the Shrine next month. Though Michelle hasn’t quite been able to top the success of her (anti)-climactic hit, she has nonetheless been seen as an important advocate for underrepresented feminist issues in mainstream pop

music. The Crunk Feminist Collective highlighted her, along with Kelly and Janelle Monae, as an important voice for “sex-positive, pro-pleasure” black women. The article cites her 2013 single, “I Just Wanna Fuck” as an example of an R&B artist “flipping the script” on traditional gender roles in an industry dominated by chauvinism and female objectification. The question remains, though: is K. Michelle a real deal, sex-positive feminist superstar in the making, or is she just faking? The Shrine, 2109 S. Wabash Ave. Friday, November 15, 9pm. 21+. (312)753-5700. theshrinechicago.com (Zach Goldhammer)

Joey DeFrancesco Trio Joey DeFrancesco’s official website modestly declares him to be “The Finest Jazz Organist on the Planet.” While one might be tempted to view this title as a product of hubris, the claim is hard dismiss. DeFrancesco won the Down Beat poll for best jazz organist six years in a row, from 2003-2009 and has remained an indomitable force on the Hammond organ for over two decades. DeFrancesco first proved his jazz chops by playing with the late, great Miles Davis when the keyboardist was just seventeen-years-old. Since then, DeFrancesco has played with a wide variety of music legends, including John Mclaughlin, Carlos Santana and DeFrancesco’s own organ idol, Jimmy Smith. The B3 master will be playing with his trio will be coming during a fournight stand at the Jazz Showcase. Don’t miss your chance to see the best living organist on earth work his magic. The Jazz Showcase, 806 S Plymouth Court, November 28-December 1, 8pm-10pm. $25-40. (312)350-0234. jazzshowcase.com (Zach Goldhammer)

Syleena Johnson In the mid-nineties, the perpetually almost-famous Chicago soul singer Syl Johnson was seeking a renaissance of recognition. After having his songs sampled in countless numbers of hip-hop tracks, sixty-year-old Syl wanted the rap generation to know who he was. In order to win over the younger audience, Johnson pulled his then 18-year old daughter, Syleena, into the recording studio for his 1994 comeback album, “Back In The Game” and for the duet follow-up, “This Time Together For Father and Daughter.” Nearly two decades later, Syleena seems to have inherited her father’s knack for bittersweet success. Despite six well-received solo albums, she is best known for the hook on Kanye West’s 2004 hit, “All Falls Down.” The chorus was originally intended to be a sample of Lauryn Hill’s “Mystery of Iniquity”; Syleena was just hired to re-record Hill’s part after West was unable to clear the sample. Johnson’s latest album, “Chapter V: Underrated” underscores the singer’s bitter feelings about her tepid success. Will Syleena now have the chance to find her own fame, or will she continue to perform in the shadow of others? The Shrine, 2109 S. Wabash Ave. Friday, December 6, 9pm. $15. (312)753-5700. theshrinechicago.com (Zach Goldhammer)

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

Compiled by Rachel Schastok and Charlie Rock Artist / Album / Label 1. LAZY / Obsession / Moniker 2. Perfect Pussy / I Have Lost All Desire for Feeling / s/r 3. Heavy Times / Fix It Alone / HoZac 4. Wooden Shjips / Back to Land / Thrill Jockey 5. Castevet / Obsidian / Profound Core 6. Move D / The KM20 Tapes (1992 - 1996) / Off Minor 7. The Joy of Painting / Tender Age / South Division 8. CAVE / Threace / Drag City 9. Marcel Fengler / Fokus / Ostgut Ton 10. Laurel Halo / Chance of Rain / Hyperdub 11. Good Throb / Culture Vulture / Muscle Horse 12. Skeletonwitch / Serpents Unleashed / Prosthetic 13. Deafheaven / Sunbather / Deathwish 14. The Afflicted Man / I’m Off Me ‘ead [Reissue} / Permanent 15. Burnt Ones / You’ll Never Walk Alone / Burger

november 13, 2013 ¬ South Side Weekly 19