November 19, 2014

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ✶

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TRACK MASTER SCOTT, OPT-OUT, FATHER NEVINS, PULSE OF THE NIGHT, WILLY CHYR

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NOVEMBER 19, 2014

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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 Music Editor Jake Bittle Stage & Screen Olivia Stovicek Editor Web Editor Sarah Claypoole Contributing Editors Maha Ahmed, Lucia

Ahrensdorf, Emma Collins, 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, Austin Brown,

Amelia Dmowska, Mark

Hassenfratz, Maira Khwaja,

Emily Lipstein, Jamison Pfeifer, Wednesday Quansah,

Kari Wei, Arman Sayani

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

Asleep at the Switch If you haven’t gotten your fill of the CTA after reading this week’s feature on the history of the Green Line, or if you like slipping into fifteen-minute fugue states while you should be doing something more productive, go on YouTube and check out the videos the CTA has been posting, which feature high-definition time-lapse videos recorded from the cockpit of trains shooting up and down the Red and Blue lines.

You’ll be able to watch stop after stop slip by and catch CTA workers loafing on the elevated tracks, all to the tune of vaguely unsettling electronic music. Especially recommended is the underground portion of the Red Line, which features trance-inducing lights and a haunting, Philip-Glass-esque piano. If only all commutes were this stimulating— and this fast.

Tributes Jerry Blumenthal

Longtime Chicago documentary filmmaker and founding partner of Kartemquin Films Jerry Blumenthal passed away on Thursday.

The producer of many documentaries and the director of Golub and Independent Lens, among other films, Blumenthal became seriously interested in film after attending film screenings at Doc Films while at

the UofC. Blumenthal aggressively documented social issues, including union organization and public housing, while also focusing on fine art later in his career. In addition to filmmaking and teaching college courses, he was a mentor to various aspiring filmmakers. With Blumenthal, Kartemquim has produced various social-issue documentaries about Chicago, including The Last Pullman Car and The Chicago Maternity Center Story, as well as films of a national scale, like Vietnam, Long Time Coming. Golub was his favorite. Though Blumenthal’s passing is a great loss of a brilliant visionary, we hope his legacy of curiosity and bravery in filmmaking will endure.

Jane Byrne

On Monday morning, Chicago paid tribute to former Mayor Jane Byrne, the first (and only) woman to lead from the helm of City Hall from 1979 to 1983. Among those who came to pay their respects were Mayor Emanuel, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, and mayoral candidates Alderman Bob Fioretti and Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia. Jane Byrne is remembered for her role in Chicago’s downtown revitalization, for the renovation of Navy Pier, and for her somewhat unusual campaign in 1979, when she ran on an aggressive snow-removal platform. She is remembered as an intrepid trailblazer who cared deeply for the city. Lisa Madigan, recounting Byrne’s dynamism to the Tribune, mused, "She took on the big boys and won.”

IN THIS ISSUE

Staff Photographers Camden Bauchner, Juliet

Eldred, Kiran Misra, Siddhesh Mukerji Staff Illustrators Lexi Drexelius, Wei Yi Ow,

Hanna Petroski, Amber Sollenberger Editorial Interns

Denise Parker, Clyde Schwab

the once and future green line

plans to expand

Business Manager

Harry Backlund

If Rahm cashed his fifty million in singles, and laid them in a stack, they would exceed the distance between Cermak Red and Cermak Green. andrew lovdahl...4

First rule: look up. Second rule: there is Preschool programs in the city of Chicago do not have the capacity to provide no objective up. services to every three and four-year-old stephen urchick...8 in the city. olivia myszkowski...7

opting out

don’t be misled

whpk veteran: track master scott

“Just how doctors have to sign an agreement to do no harm to their clients, teachers don’t want to harm to their students. These tests are causing harm.” hafsa razi...10

We looked at one of his sculpture installations, a sleek, copper water fountain labeled “Post Blacks Only.” lauren gurley...11

"If I’m spinning with these cats, I’m still gonna promote me." bryce peppers...12

father nevins of santa inés de bohemia

the camera man

growing up in englewood

“Jesus, you were one of the ones leading the protest against my coming, now you want to protest against my leaving.” lucia ahrensdorf...13

The atmosphere depicted and its attendant details—heavy eyelids, lazy smiles, girlfriends, boyfriends, drinking, dancing—are timeless. osita nwanevu...15

“There was nothing that you could want and couldn’t get on 63rd Street.” mari cohen...16

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 by Amber Sollenberger.

there is no down

The Once

The story of Chicago's oldest "L"

BY ANDREW LOVDAHL

“A

r oad,” the writer Isak Dinesen observed, “is the fixed materialization of human longing, and of the human notion that it is better to be in one place than another.” South Wentworth Road, then, is the fixed materialization of the notion that one should be able to mosey freely between the South Loop and Chinatown. The Red Line obligingly stops at Cermak and Wentworth every few minutes, doing a great service to several thousand longing, notion-ful commuters every day of the year.

Just one block over, construction is well underway on a new Cermak stop for the Green Line, which runs loosely parallel to the Red through the heart of the South Side. This station will be open by year’s end according to a mayoral press release, and will be almost entirely sheltered by a clearish tube. It is the fixed materialization of Mayor Emanuel’s notion that tourists who are going to conventions at McCormick Place, or staying in its hotel, should be spared that treacherous block’s walk to the Chinatown stop. Nor should they be left vulnerable to a chill while awaiting their train—not if Emanuel and fifty-million TIF dollars have anything to say about it.

One long block. Not quite a quarter-mile’s walk, and not a half-bad one, either. On one side, an innocuous teacher’s college; on the other, a solemn scrum of sturdy and modular senior housing high-rises. Fifty-million dollars for a quarter mile’s convenience works out to ten-thousand dollars per foot, or ten million for each minute of walking. If Rahm cashed his fifty million in singles, and laid them in a stack, they would exceed the distance between Cermak Red and Cermak Green. Why build a station when you could make a little sidewalk out of money 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

courtesy of chuckman chicago nostalgia

and have some left over to boot?

The city’s press release does little to mask that the station exists for the sake of the convenience of well-off: convention-goers and the patrons of the glamorous new hotels and venues that, according to Emanuel, will soon spring up to create the so-called Motor Row Entertainment District. There is talk of a brewery. Cheap Trick considered opening a theme restaurant.

No one has bothered to explain why this is the first “L” station to offer substantial protection from the elements in a city thrashed by winter five months out of the year (except transportation commissioner Gabe Klein, who inventively described the high-concept cocoon design as a “necessity” born of the limited space available).

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The only defense of the Cermak Green Line is that it splits the difference in the two-and-a-half mile gap between Roosevelt and 35th-Bronzeville-IIT. That’s the largest gap in the whole system except for one gap out in the western hinterlands of the Blue Line. Another argument holds that eliminating a five-minute walk is precisely the kind of baby step that will coax a few more car-reliant Chicagoans under the CTA’s raggedy umbrella, and so serve the greater good. Maybe—but one would be excused for wondering how many participants of, for example, the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncologists, will be eagerly loading up Ventra cards at Jewel-Osco, Cermak stop or no Cermak stop.

These days, municipal elitism and

warped priorities aren’t cover stories; they’re the mayor’s vital signs. But a little further reflection will show how a station like Cermak, on a line like the Green, in a neighborhood like the South Loop, all for people who don’t live here, adds up to something much more than a station. It is a richly symbolic project, a distillation of what Chicago was once struggling to be and what has now sprung up in its place.

O

ne hundred and twenty-two years ago this fall, a steam-powered wooden train full of inspectors and civic dignitaries plied its way along a four-mile track. This would not have been particularly scandalous but for the fact that the track was two stories off the ground, running over a back alley from downtown

& Future Green Line

CTA

courtesy of cdot

Congress Street to 39th. It stopped at such destinations as 33rd, 29th, and 22nd (today known as Cermak Road, after the Czechborn mayor). Such was the dawn of Chicago’s “L.” History is oddly silent as to how the train attained that height. Granted, at that time, the city would have been full of people who remembered the entire downtown being lifted up on jackscrews, pulling Chicago up out of the mud that threatened to swallow the young city.

After only a year, the train was ferrying thousands of sightseers to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Jackson Park.

Its route expanded on the original spur by continuing south to 63rd Street, above which it proceeded east to the door of the fairgrounds.

By its sixteenth birthday, in 1908, the

newly electrified route had sprouted a total of five branches, each curving gracefully away from its central trunk to serve a terminal region: Englewood, Normal Park, Oakland, and the Union Stockyards, in addition to Jackson Park. It was not a line but an entire system, spreading freely and busily throughout the South Side, several steps ahead of similar developments on the North and West.

For sixty years—through two World Wars, two World’s Fairs, a Great Migration, a Great Depression—the trains kept shuttling along these paths. Today we see service on a fraction of that trackage, at a fraction of the stations. One explanation for this startling decline is simply that population dropped off. Under-patronized routes were axed. Hence, the empty, raised

tracks that now snake through Oakland near 41st. Hence, the bridge which does not quite cross the Dan Ryan around 40th, falling short of the east bank like a cartoon cliff. Hence, the hulks of go-nowhere track that loomed over Woodlawn for decades before they were finally demolished. In the latter case, it can be convincingly argued that the change was actively pushed for by a few certain people (CTA scrooges, UofC administrators, an influential pastor), and did not reflect a lack of travelers who would have used the service had it been maintained.

Whatever the cause, it was only well after the rise and fall of this little empire that the first Mayor Daley inaugurated a new breed of Chicago transit: a train running in the median of an interstate express-

way, the newly built Dan Ryan. This was realized by poaching funds from one Lyndon B. Johnson, funds that had originally been earmarked for another politician’s similar Northwest Side project (today’s Blue Line). “Mr. President,” complained the man who had lost out, “what is the Dan Ryan?” “God damn you,” said the president, “I don’t know. I just got a call, and [that’s where] it’s going.”

“It” was, and remains, a strikingly different vision of the urban train, as impersonal and technocentric as the earlier model was intimate and homey. It’s all business, stopping infrequently and delivering you not to your home or a restaurant or nightlife, but to a crummy depot where you wait for a bus to take you the rest of the way. It has the ambiance of a carburetor.

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CTA

Sending out its tendrils right and left, tapping small pockets of life, plunging directly past houses and boulevards instead of concealing itself in heavy rail corridors and no-man’s-land, the Green Line extended a broad invitation to a minor miracle: riding a train to work, and riding it back home. courtesy of cdot

Of course, while the Dan Ryan line grew into a workhorse, the proud old “L” continued aging. The 1970s and 1980s brought further consolidation, including the closing of the Cermak station, deemed redundant. The 1990s brought a round of threats to raze the whole system to the ground and replace it with buses. Public outcry was sufficient to bring about overhaul repairs, which closed the line for years, culminating in an anticlimactic and diminished reopening in 1993, at which point CTA implemented a new color-coding policy. The joining of the Dan Ryan line to the State Street subway and the terminus at Howard made the new Red Line the artery it remains today. The term “Green Line” finally entered the lexicon, too, when the South Side “L” was matched to the Oak Park line running due west from the Loop.

With these changes in place, many an armchair city planner has glanced at the CTA map and uncovered the terrible secret of the Green Line’s supposed redundancy.

The Green Line is, or was, for the people. It was a fixed materialization of the belief that Chicago’s widespread masses had at least a measure of human dignity, and that this attribute ought to be reflected in the public works provided to them. To be quite clear, Chicago was never a workingman’s paradise. Indeed it is famed for 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

a unique brand of grisly industrial misery.

But the lesson of, say, Sandburg’s poem “Chicago” is not that we Chicagoans are a fortunate lot; it is that we are simply here, and legion, and awesome to the extent to which we are willing to be here, living in columns and rows.

Just a glance at an old map of the Green Line will tell you that it was not designed to provide the most lucrative, the most efficient, or the most utilitarian service. It was a business, certainly, but more than that it was an appropriate, even deferential response to Chicago’s people. Sending out its tendrils right and left, tapping small pockets of life, plunging directly past houses and boulevards instead of concealing itself in heavy rail corridors and no-man’s-land, it extended a broad invitation to a minor miracle: riding a train to work, and riding it back home.

Look also for this spirit in Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago, which explored the principles of built environment that could best support a graceful, wholesome, and mobile lifestyle for a population of millions. Look to the Lathrop Homes in Lincoln Park to see what was once considered appropriate for the city’s less fortunate.

Look to the concentric rings of parks and boulevards, miles afield, and the more you do, the less the city’s glitzy center seems to

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matter.

And so the decline of the Green Line followed the decline of this way of thinking. At some point public services became grudging favors. At some point it became absurd to suggest preserving an aging institution or making an effort to beautify its replacement. At some point the chief preoccupation of City Hall became non-Chicagoans, and what they read about us in the paper, and how they could be enticed to come visit for a week or two, thus providing the money so desperately needed to, well, build new enticements. Whisk Emanuel back a hundred years (an attractive but irresponsible proposition), show him that the greatest ambitions of the city once radiated outward to the edges, not inward to the core, and his first impression would be something in the spirit of “pearls before swine.”

Y

ou can still experience bits and pieces of the finery that used to be typical of Green Line stations. An old ticket booth has been preserved across the street from the Garfield stop. Waiting at Conservatory-Central Park feels like hanging out on somebody’s wraparound porch. Most of the Lake Street houses are still fancifully Victorian: folks really knew how to gable back then. The new Cermak

cocoon presents a stark contrast. Its only kin is the Morgan stop, which also opened on Emanuel’s watch, also serves a posh district, also cost a truckload, and is also very, very shiny. This technocentrism is yet another thumb of the nose to the friendly, domestic old Green, which spread so organically across the land.

The changes now in progress in the vicinity of the Cermak stop are shaping up as Emanuel’s architectural legacy. And what a legacy: a neighborhood fit for a NATO summit, engineered to house, court, and entertain exceptional people on whose trickling benevolence the city is presumably supposed to grind its way into the future. Being the grand plotter of streets and the layer of land should be a mythical job that we all envy. A little imagination in that position goes a long way. Emanuel’s imagination, meanwhile, was at one point occupied with how to bring the Super Bowl to a Chicago February. It’s at times like these you just want to give the guy a hug, tell him not to get his hopes up, and perhaps buy him a ticket to that World Cup in Qatar.

With mayoral elections fast approaching, one remembers the indisputable benefit of the Cermak stop: it’s a rotten feeling, wishing we could get off the train we’re on, and it’s nice to have plenty of chances.

EDUCATION

Plans to Expand What the mayor’s proposal for more pre-K means locally

BY OLIVIA MYSZKOWSKI

“I

f we want to continue making progress, we have to start in the earliest years of a child’s life,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel pronounced emphatically before a packed chamber on October 15, as part of the education component of his 2015 Budget Address to the City Council. “So we have to reach them early and make sure they arrive for kindergarten ready to learn.”

Since he took office in 2011, the expansion of access to early childhood education has been a recurring theme in Mayor Emanuel’s education agenda. Chicago is just one city across the country taking action in response to research that cites strong early learning opportunities as crucial indicators of success later in life. According to research led by University of Chicago professor and Nobel Laureate James Heckman, the years from birth to age five are most important for developing skills that are the foundation for success later in life.

Heckman points to a statistic from the Chicago Child-Parent Center that estimates $48,000 in long-term public benefits for every child who receives half-day preschool instruction.

Now, as part of a budget plan that will serve as the Mayor’s re-election platform if it passes through the City Council, the Emanuel administration is taking such research to heart and moving steadily towards institutionalized early learning opportunities with a push to level the playing field for children coming from low-income backgrounds.

For families living on the South and West sides of the city, this plan carries

particular significance—this is where the bulk of early childhood program development will take place. $9.4 million worth of capital investment is slated to expand opportunities at ten sites, selected to benefit neighborhoods where the need for more pre-K opportunities is most keenly felt. In 2015, this investment aims to provide halfday preschool opportunities for 1,500 fouryear-olds at no cost to families. A $17 million corporate Social Impact Bond over the next four years intends to raise that number to 2,620. According to 2013 census figures, there are approximately 71,500 students eligible for preschool in the City of Chicago, with only fifty-six percent enrolled in some kind of early childhood education program.

Gerardo Arriaga is the principal at Enrico Tonti Elementary School, one of the schools selected for Emanuel’s preschool program expansion. Arriaga hopes that the Mayor’s vocal commitment to early childhood education will translate into concrete benefits for four-year-olds living in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood.

“We always hope to provide for more students,” he says, “but space is always an issue in schools.” The school currently serves eighty students, but a proposed four-classroom module addition would allow them to expand enrollment in their half-day pre-kindergarten program. Arriaga isn’t sure if hiring more instructors will be possible, but is enthusiastic about the addition of any resources that will improve the classroom environment for both students and teachers.

“We teach these students the socio-

emotional skills, the motor skills, and the language and math basics that allow them to come to kindergarten more prepared,” Arriaga says. “pre-K is really having an impact on my students.”

While Arriaga has received preliminary site expansion plans from Chicago Public Schools, officials at another site selected for expansion, Mount Greenwood Elementary, had not been informed of plans for early childhood program implementation at the time they were called for comment. Mount Greenwood does not currently offer any preschool instruction.

Mount Greenwood and Tonti will be joined by Daniel Boone Elementary and a site to serve children in the Marquette Park and West Lawn neighborhoods that has yet to be selected. Six CPS Child-Parent Centers, sites designed to provide educational and family support to low-income communities, are also on the docket for expansion under the four-year plan, including Jose de Diego Community Academy in West Town, Velma Thomas Learning Center in McKinley Park, Melody Elementary School in Garfield-Humboldt Park, Hanson Park Elementary School in Belmont-Cragin, Peck Elementary School in West Eldon, and James Wadsworth Elementary School in Woodlawn.

Despite enthusiasm on the part of educators, officials have voiced mixed sentiments about borrowing money from investors to finance early childhood expansion. In essence, the Social Impact Bond that serves as the four-year plan’s financial cornerstone is a $17 million loan from corporate back-

ers with one big catch. The Goldman Sachs Social Impact Fund, Northern Trust, and the J.B. and M.K. Pritzker Family Foundation won’t be paid back on their investment unless the program makes measurable positive impacts on student achievement and kindergarten readiness. But while CPS Board of Education member Henry Bienen expressed uncertainty about the feasibility of basing repayment on these benchmarks, investors have praised the plan as an opportunity to invest meaningfully in the community. “We want to lead by example here in Chicago and encourage more investment nationally in high-quality early childhood education,” said J.B. Pritzker in an October 7 press release.

As it stands, preschool programs in the city of Chicago do not have the capacity to provide services to every three and four-year-old in the city—there are only three seats available for every five eligible students. City Council approval of Emanuel’s budget will increase that number by a small margin, with impacts concentrated in low-income communities—but nearly 25,000 students in the city of Chicago will remain unenrolled in early childhood learning opportunities even if Emanuel’s plan is fully implemented. Considering these limitations, Principal Arriaga is happy to see students from the Chicago Lawn neighborhood as initial beneficiaries. “When Tonti students go to preschool, they come into kindergarten more prepared,” he says. “My dream to provide that for more students is hopefully coming true.”

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There Is No Down

BY STEPHEN URCHICK

“T

his is what this café looks like, at this moment,” said Willy Chyr, a video game developer based out of Hyde Park. Chyr gestured to the windowpane across from us. “But what if we rotate it so that this is the f loor? What would happen then?”

The answer, unfortunately, is anticlimax, as Chyr quickly learned while developing spaces for his 3-D first-person game, “Relativity.” Our tables and chairs simply clumped up in the corner of the café the first time we decided to change gravity’s direction.

“Relativity” takes place across an amalgam of sparse chambers. Most are separated with locked doors, themselves linked to trigger plates that accept different color-coded boxes as power sources. Tremendous pane-glass windows pierce every room, letting in raking light from the outside world. Each space indexes M.C. Escher’s dizzying architecture, and each puzzle relies on the same bottomless visual rhetoric. The results literally drop the earth out from beneath you.

To introduce “Relativity’s” core mechanic, Chyr shepherds the player

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¬ NOVEMBER 19, 2014

into rooms with no apparent exit. Upon running into your first wall, “Relativity” prompts you to click once. You are now standing on the wall. The door had actually been nested in the ceiling, all along. First rule: look up. Second rule: there is no up, objectively speaking.

“In my game, height is meaningless,” insists Chyr. “It’s above you, but as soon as you rotate, it’s below you— so you don’t even see it!” In “Relativity,” the player moves within a total of six different spatial orientations, each of which is marked with a color. Clicking on a surface causes the player to stand on that surface. In an early puzzle, Chyr presents the player with two boxes: one blue, one purple. A purple trigger panel halfway up the “wall” powers a purple-banded door. Chyr encourages the player to lift the purple box up against the trigger panel. But as soon as you step away to enter the now-opened door, the purple box slips your grip and falls, shutting the door.

The solution? Switch gravities. The “wall” on which the purple trigger panel is placed now becomes the “f loor” of the blue orientation, and the player can

GAMES

Playing "Relativity" with developer Willy Chyr now manipulate the blue block. By placing the blue block just to the left of the panel, and switching back to the purple orientation, you create a “shelf ” on the “wall” where you can successfully stand the purple power block. This permanently fixes the door open, letting the player exit the level.

Chyr nodded along as I blundered through this particular riddle. “What you do in blue affects what happens in purple—that box takes on a different role based on where you place it!”

He admitted that in earlier iterations of “Relativity,” this kind of thinking didn’t quite come through. “The puzzles I made in that version were far less interesting, because all those ones were very execution-based. I had one where there’s a bridge, and the bridge was rotating, so when you stood on it, you constantly had to be rotating the room around its axis.

Otherwise you’d fall off!” He cleared away fiddly default physics, honing in on the player’s own planning and foresight. Stressing thought process, Chyr soon arrived at the kinds of problems playtesters and fellow developers at conventions like PAX or IndieCade could chew on rewardingly.

willy chyr

Chyr still hasn’t been satisfied with the challenges he’s produced. “Lately I’ve been rethinking what the role of the puzzles are in the game,” he said. For the first few tutorial puzzles, it proved important that the puzzle elements come first and architecture simply embellish the principle being demonstrated. “Architecture is there to serve the puzzles when I need the player to form the right mental model,” Chyr said. “I ultimately really wanted to be just about the exploration of space.”

Chyr’s urge for exploration became breathtakingly apparent as we dropped out of my first gauntlet of puzzles, which took place beneath a pale, creamwhite sky, onto a ledge levitating high above an invisible ground. I edged towards the vast, colorless expanse, calculating whether I could jump from my present platform and reach more distant surfaces.

I accidently whooshed downwards, having nudged my “W” key a tap too far.

I descended past other f loating structures, unopened doors—the starting points of new puzzles—one after the next.

“And that’s entirely intentional—”

I half-asked, thinking I’d unwittingly slipped through an invisible wall and broken Chyr’s demo build.

“Yes.” “—so jumping between platforms is totally okay?”

“And necessary,” offered Chyr.

“Whatever you see you should be able to get to.” Chyr wrestled the character back under control to guide me to a new puzzle. Before we could arrive at our new destination, however, Chyr himself slipped. We fell further, and further, Chyr nonchalantly holding his course, until he thunked suddenly onto the very point from which he had first slipped.

I ref lexively straightened my back.

“Oh—! There is no bottom!”

“There’s no bottom,” Chyr exclaimed with me. “Relativity’s” world had repeated itself as a closed loop through space.

“It’s a very logical consequence of the core mechanic,” he said. If there’s no objective up—because the player can cycle through different gravities—there ought not to be an objective down towards which the player can fall. So the ground wasn’t invisible: it simply didn’t exist in the first place. In earlier builds,

Chyr admitted that he had the screen fade to black whenever the player fell, restarting them at a checkpoint earlier in time. He smiled wryly: “Which is a lot less interesting than this current solution!”

You could fall forever—in any of six different directions—but you’d always know where you were, because you’d unerringly return from where you came.

Each mind-teasing puzzle now seemed to stand between me and more of these heightless vistas; the puzzles either lock you out from a new zone or slowly initiate you to different ways of appreciating the area in which you puzzled.

Chyr’s aspirations detach the challenges in “Relativity” from the actual trappings of each puzzle. The game cares less about the boxes and triggers and doors than it does about the puzzle of navigating an endlessly redoubling reality, where your comprehension shifts with every ceaseless stumble into alien space.

“I can create the illusion of infinity,” said Chyr, “without the player ever getting lost.”

NOVEMBER 19, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

EDUCATION

Opting Out CPS parents and teachers resist high-stakes standardized tests

BY HAFSA RAZI

T

wo years ago, Joy Clendenning, a Hyde Park mother of three CPS students, was walking her kids home after school when one of them broke down in tears.

“Mom,” the sixth grader said, “I don’t want to take that MAP test anymore.”

Clendenning’s children had never had problems with standardized tests before, but that year her twin sixth graders started hearing a lot about growth—about showing improvement from test to test, getting more points, fixing weaknesses. These assessments included the Northwest Evaluation Association Measures of Academic Progress (NWEA MAP), a district-wide assessment used to evaluate teachers and schools. That winter, one of her sixth graders didn’t improve from the fall test, and the other’s score fell by two points.

“There was then a class discussion with the teacher,” Clendenning said, “where the teacher congratulated the class and said, ‘This is really great, most of you really showed growth, terrific.’ And then she said, ‘A few of you stayed the same, and a couple of you went down, and we’re really going to have to figure out what to do about that.’”

After this experience, Clendenning started opting her children out of some of the standardized assessments. It’s a simple process: parents need only send a letter or email to the school principal. But as the opt-out movement has gained momentum over the past few years, it has come under fire from the Illinois State Board of Education, which, in an October 28 newsletter, told schools that that parents were not allowed to opt their students out of the controversial Common Core-based PARCC assessment, which is set for spring 2015.

According to Cassie Creswell, organizer of More Than a Score, a grassroots coalition of parent, teacher, and community groups opposed to high-stakes testing, the ISBE’s declaration is untrue. Provisions in the ISBE’s regulations for standardized 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

testing allow for children who refuse to take the test—or, Creswell said, allow for parents who refuse on their children’s behalf, since the students are legal minors.

“The language of the law is that the state must administer the test to all kids,” Creswell said, “which does not mean that all kids are compelled to take the test.”

Students have been opting out of standardized tests for years, she said, with no repercussions. Creswell cited thousands of CPS students who opted out of the Illinois Standard Achievement Test (ISAT) in at least ninety schools this past spring, and several teachers at Little Village’s Saucedo Academy and Drummond Montessori in Bucktown who boycotted the test. None were disciplined.

The ISBE statement also claimed that schools must test all students in order to receive funding from No Child Left Behind (NCLB). But it’s more complicated than that—NCLB requires schools to test ninety-five percent of their students, but even when they do so, most schools in CPS don’t score well enough to meet NCLB requirements.

The high stakes of test results come in other forms—NWEA MAP scores are used to promote students from third, sixth, and eighth grades and to determine placement in selective-enrollment high schools.

In these situations, many parents are hesitant to opt their students out of tests. But even when individual students opt out, the tests still loom large for teachers, principals, and schools, whose ratings depend directly on test results.

“Standardized testing is not supposed to be used for...these kind of decisions, and it’s really being misused,” Creswell said.

Refusing to take or administer the tests is a form of resistance, what Creswell calls “driving a wedge” into the system.

More Than a Score aims to educate parents about opting out and inform them about students’ testing experiences in general.

Clendenning got involved with the orga-

¬ NOVEMBER 19, 2014

nization through these outreach programs and believes the opt-out movement plays a major role in increasing parent awareness and involvement. “Opt-out is a strategy to empower individual parents and students and families, to help them understand what their rights are,” she said.

But it’s not just about the politics; for some students, Creswell said, opting out of standardized testing is a matter of urgency.

“There are individual students who are really horribly, negatively impacted by testing, like in the case of severe test anxiety,” she said. “If they just don’t test well, it’s not a good measure of what they know and what they’ve learned at all.”

Carolyn Brown, a teacher at Thomas Kelly High School in Brighton Park, said the testing process is frustrating for teachers, who can see students’ progress in their work but not in their test scores. It quickly becomes demoralizing, she said, for both teachers and students.

“Ultimately what we have, at least at the high school level, is an entire generation of kids that have been told yearly that they’re not smart enough, that they’re not up to standard, that they’re below average, that they’re unable to perform well in school,” Brown said. “And they believe it.

They internalize it.”

Many opponents of the tests also cite the cost of standardized tests—the state of Illinois will pay $160 million over four years for the PARCC test alone. Many of the tests also require additional technological resources; Clendenning said she was shocked to learn that the computer lab at her kids’ school was occupied by students taking tests for over a month.

Sarah Chambers, a teacher at Saucedo who participated in the ISAT boycott, believes that these circumstances provide teachers with a clear incentive to boycott.

“You don’t want to do harm to your students,” she said. “Just how doctors have to sign an agreement to do no harm to their clients, teachers don’t want to harm to their

students. These tests are causing harm.”

Brown said that until recently, she and other teachers and students who refuse to participate in testing have been able to do so quietly, without repercussions, because they were so few. The ISAT boycott was a different story, Chambers explained: teachers were threatened with firings and loss of teaching licenses, students were questioned

by CPS officials, and some students who opted out were left in crowded rooms or without breakfast.

While the extent of the boycott drew the ire of the CPS administration, Chamber believes the resulting media attention gave credence to the opt-out movement and ultimately protected teachers from disciplinary action.

“CPS had tons of bad publicity, and so did Rahm Emanuel,” she said. “So the more people who opt out, the more people who boycott, the more likely it is that they will drop some of these standardized tests.”

The upcoming PARCC test is under scrutiny after CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett announced at a board meeting in October that she has applied to the Illinois State Board of Education for a waiver, hoping to delay the test’s implementation another year. If the waiver fails, Chambers said, she believes there will be “massive” opt-outs and boycotts across Chicago.

This reflects a shift in attitude and awareness of high-stakes tests in the city, Brown said.

“The conversation around standardized testing has been so internal in the world of educators, kind of arguing back and forth and discussing about it,” Brown said. “I think for many years it’s been teachers complaining behind the scenes and frustrated, but not feeling like they could do anything about it....But I think when you have the support of parents and students it gives strength to the movement, and it forces it out into the open.”

VISUAL ARTS

Don’t Be Misled “Perception/Reality” at Blanc Gallery

lauren gurley

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BY LAUREN GURLEY

his fountain is a satirical look at the big myth of a post-racial America,” said Raymond Thomas as we looked at one of his sculpture installations, a sleek, copper water fountain labeled “Post Blacks Only.” This piece, along with thirteen other aesthetically beautiful but thematically horrific sculptures, paintings, and assemblages, is part of Thomas’s most recent multimedia exhibition, “PERCEPTION/REALITY (In the Age of Deception),” currently showing at the Blanc Gallery in Bronzeville.

I met a bundled-up Thomas on a Friday morning at the Blanc Gallery as the first snow of the year fell along King Drive. Dressed head-to-toe in black with a corduroy beret, Thomas gave me a tour of exhibition that has been several years in the making, his most recent inspiration the August shooting of eighteen year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

Thomas’s exhibition is alive with bright colors, sharp angles, and radical messages about contemporary race politics in America. A semi-abstract painting titled “Envy Not Thy Oppressor (proverbs 3:31),” shows a black figure holding a gun made of hundred-dollar bills to his head in front of a blood-red backdrop. Another image is of the late rapper Tupac Shakur as president of the United States with the caption “What our young prince could have been.” A movie poster advertising a film called “Obama,” shows a photoshopped image of President Obama with his hips cocked, dressed in a leather disco suit. The caption reads: “The Crackers wanted their country back, he gave them healthcare, hugs, and DRONE ATTACKS.” “People have adapted this label of ‘post-black,’ because we have a black president, but there’s no post-racial America,” Thomas said. “I see [racism] in institution-

alized ways: health, wealth, education, and the penal system. The penal system is one of the most heinous atrocities on earth, and everyone should be beyond outraged but we just don’t consider it. Some people try to say that institutional racism does not exist.

And so you’ve got this group of blacks who have adapted this idea of being ‘post-black’ meaning they have evolved, which I feel is a very dangerous thing to do.”

Most of the pieces incorporate some form of text challenging the belief that racism in America is over. Phrases like “Don’t Shoot,” “Free-Dumb,” “Neo-Negro,” “Underground Railroad,” and “It’s be PostBlack” are scribbled, stenciled, or painted on canvases, mirrors, mannequins, pieces of wood, and the American flag.

Thomas is exceptionally well rounded as an artist, skilled in everything from filmmaking to bronze cast etching. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1965, Thomas came to Chicago to study visual art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1984, but insisted on training in multimedia rather than focusing on a single form.

“I’m an interdisciplinary artist, as the label is now,” Thomas said. “But when I went to the Art Institute, the departments were like warring factions. Now the whole interdisciplinary mantra is this ‘high’ thing, you know? But I’ve always done everything.”

After graduating from the SAIC, Thomas served for several decades as art director for Ebony and Jet magazines, as well as for the South Side Community Art Center in Bronzeville. This year, Thomas received an IAP grant from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, which he used to fund “PERCEPTION/REALITY.” When asked about the current state of the art community on the South Side, Thomas was enthusiastic. “There is definitely a community of artists that I am comrades with, particularly here in Bronzeville,” he said. “There’s nowhere in this country that

you can go and find institutions that are exhibiting so many African-American artists within a mile radius. You can’t go to New York and find this. It’s a pulsating group of artists who are working hard to exclaim the humanity of the African-American experience and do work that touches the soul.”

If Thomas’s claim is that “racism in America is thriving more than ever before” through institutions like the education and prison systems, then it seems that his response is for the African-American community to band together though its music, art, and culture, instead of breaking through into factions based on wealth, education-level, and skin-color.

“Willie Lynch, in his [1712] letter to slave owners, talked about the indoctrination of a separatist kind of in-fighting that they could breed into African Americans, pitting the old against the young, the women against the men, the light-skinned against the dark-skinned,” Thomas said.

“So I think when you come up with things like ‘post-black’ and say that you have evolved from just being a regular black person, then you cause these schisms to arise again.”

I asked Thomas about the Curtis Mayfield lyric that he put on the top of his artist’s statement: “Why can't we brothers protect one another? No one's serious, and it makes me furious. Don't be misled.”

Thomas recited the lyric back to me, and said, “I mean, that’s really what this show is all about. As African-Americans... we have horrific things like the murder of Mike Brown, but within that murder, we have the galvanizing of a community that stands up to fight. I’ve tried to create something that by looking at it, it could frighten you, and you could see it as beautiful as well.”

Blanc Gallery, 4445 S. Martin Luther King Dr. Closing event December 12, Hours by appointment. (773)373-4320. blancchicago.com

NOVEMBER 19, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

WHPK Veteran: Track Master Scott

BY BRYCE PEPPERS

bryce peppers

12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ NOVEMBER 19, 2014

MUSIC PEACE

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rack Master Scott has been spinning house music at clubs, parties, and events since 1985. As the face of Park Avenue Promotions, an on-the-ground fliers distributor, Track Master toes the line between artist and promoter. For his own events, he often serves as both. His goal has always been the same: to get as many people as possible on the dance floor. Since December 2013, Track Master has hosted “The Track Master Scott Show" on WHPK, where he spins house mixes live on air. His trademark sound is a lion's roar. The show airs on WHPK 88.5 FM every Friday, from 4am to 6am.

How did you start off as a DJ? In my household, house music was not “house” music. It was just parents’ music, and that was something I was trying to get away from. My mother played Aretha Franklin, James Brown…she played it, and when she had her girlfriends come over, I played the music. It was like, “Hey, come here, play the music!”

The thing is, we had a tip jar, or something we could put money in. By me playing music, every time I heard a drop in the glass, I thought, “That’s more money.” So I just kept playing more music until everybody was like, “We give up. He played all our records.” The music I played was jazz and blues—one of my mom’s girlfriends liked blues, and one of her other friends liked jazz. And if they danced, it was cool. She was dancing, and her friends were dancing, and it was basically like she was teaching me how to get the women on the dance floor—for some money! So, that’s what I’ve been doing.

About how many hours per day do you spend DJing?

president and Keef Edwards was the president, and I was one of the guys that was coming in and passing out fliers and hanging up posters.

How that came about was I had just come out of Chicago Vocational, and I had nametags—my major was Plastics—so I used to make nametags and buttons. As you can see [points to button], Cavaliers for life, you know. We used to make those back in the day. I had a long trench coat,

“Well, I’m back in the reality-world, so I gotta get ready to go to work.”

Tell me about Park Avenue Promotions.

and I had nametags on it with a lot of sayings on them, and when [Steve Door] saw that, he was like, “Wow.” He gave me a flier and said, “You’re like a walking promotion!

How’d you like to be a part of Park Avenue Promotions?” I was excited. And then I thought about it and was like, “Well what do y’all do?” He said, “We are the number one promoter company from the South to the West Side.”

Sure. So Park Avenue Promotions was founded in 1983 by three cats. I can only name two because I forgot the first one, but Steve Door and Keef Edwards were the original promoters. Steve Door was the vice

We would hang from the South to the West Side, then come back south, and hand out posters at whatever high school was open. It was Thanksgiving night just a year out of high school, and I was on my way

Not much. That’s the weird part, isn’t it?

Once I leave WHPK, it’s like, “Well, what do you do now? Well, I’m back in the reality-world, so I gotta get ready to go to work.”

to a Lil Louis party when I bumped into Steve Door. And after that, the party started going—I was just a promoter then. As time went by, they had a battle of the DJs come up, and I promoted that. My group didn’t know I spun, so I, uh, tricked them [laughs]. I took them over to my grandma’s house and they saw I had turntables and all that, and they wanted to enter me in the battle of the DJs. So I took first place as a graduate of CVS, but I had to disqualify myself because it was only for the high

school students.

The next thing you know, that’s how we started throwing parties. From there, I just took on that job, and some years later, I became a DJ through Park Avenue. And then I started my own group. They [Steve Door and Keef Edwards] retired, and I just kept the name going.

So it’s your group?

So now it’s my group. Shouts out to Steve Door and Keef Edwards, though. Those cats were on the ball.

Do you promote yourself?

Yes I do, most definitely. I am overrated when it comes to promoting myself [laughs]. Listen, I promote me before I promote anybody else, that’s mandatory. If I’m spinning with these cats, I’m still gonna promote me. I do Facebook, Myspace, then I like to interact with the people as well.

You know, I’m a public person as well. I like to hand them a flier.

What made you pick Track Master Scott as your name?

Oh, wow. Now that’s the question you want to ask me. Another person I gotta give shouts out to: my teacher, Terrence “Treacherous” Witter. He was a freshman at the time I was in my senior year. He taught me how to pitch bend, or find the beat, and keep it purposely on beat. Now the record that he made me use, and I don’t play this record no more, goes back to Jesse Saunders. He made this record called “Funk You Up.” He made me practice this record every time I went by his house. So what we would do, every day we listened to this record “Funk You Up.” I started doing remixes, so I took “Funk You Up” and started playing it with other records. And Treacherous looked at me, and he was like, “Track. Your name is gonna be Track.” And I was like, “Nah, my name is gonna be Track Master Scott.”

Because Track Master Scott is almost close to my government name, Tremel Mauricia Scott. And so Track Master Scott sorta fits my initials, TMS. So that’s how I became Track Master Scott.

NOVEMBER 19, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

FAITH

Father Nevins of Santa Inés de Bohemia The Little Village pastor recounts his experiences with the Latino community AS TOLD TO LUCIA AHRENSDORF

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he identity of Little Village has undergone periods of subtle transformation, as the neighborhood has shifted from being defined by Irish, Eastern-European, Polish, to Mexican immigrants. The richness of the history is not obvious, as with each wave of immigrants the facade of the area has evolved to accommodate a new culture. It is for this reason that the European-style church on Central Avenue—a side street off of hectic 26th Street—is so magnificent and unexpected. With an ornate bell tower and luminous stained glass windows, the church evokes another era entirely. St. Agnes of Bohemia, now more commonly called Santa Inés de Bohemia, was built in 1904 by Czech immigrants. Lined with pews, the inside of the church is richly decorated with various statues and gold detailing. As Catholicism is such a vital part of Latin American culture, the church has become a center of the community, and its priests, community leaders. The pastor of St. Inés de Bohemia is Father Don Nevins, an Irish American and Chicagoan with perfect Spanish. Sitting in a bare conference room with images of saints and other religious symbols hung neatly on the walls, Father Don Nevins tells me about his experiences as a priest and as a leader within the Little Village and Pilsen communities.

I grew up in Des Plaines, so I’m a Chicagoan basically. Went straight from high school to seminary. What made me want to become a priest? It was the example of some of the priests I knew growing up.

I kind of had an inkling about it. When I was in sixth grade I had rheumatic fever and in those days, the only cure was complete bed rest. It’s basically a heart murmur, and so I was in bed for about five months. I wasn’t even able to sit up in bed, just <i>be</i> in bed, and the idea was your heart would cure itself. So, my pastor, who was kind of a gruff old guy, he would come every week and bring me communion and talk to me and talk to my mother and I got to see a whole other side of him that just made me know that that’s what I wanted to do.

It was three or four of us that got involved in studying some Spanish and then one summer we talked the rector into sending us down to Mexico to one of those language programs. We went there for a summer and when I came back I got involved in working in some Hispanic parishes.

One of my first big challenges as a priest was in St. Francis over in Pilsen. St. Francis at Roosevelt and Halsted is completely surrounded by UIC, but it’s a parish that’s been there for 160 years now or so, and it was one of the very first parishes to reach out and administer to the Hispanic community. In the nineties though, St. Francis closed. It just caused all sorts 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

of problems and people were protesting all the time. The cardinal realized that that just wasn’t going to work. He asked me to do a study because the diocese was going to knock down the church of St. Francis and sell the land to UIC. I made a recommendation at the end of the study that there were a lot of problems with this closing, and if there was a way to reopen it, I thought that would be the best.

So, he agreed and told me I would be the pastor there. I kind of thought it would all be great, that people would be happy. Well, most of the people were very happy, but some were just—they kind of figured that they should be the ones that should direct where the church was going. So my beginning there was very, very difficult. They had protests, they went to the cardinal’s house. The church had been closed up for a year and a half and nobody had checked on it. It was basically a big vacant building. I was in charge and we eventually got the church restored, got the cardinal to come out for the dedication mass, and I invited the former pastor, the guy who had been very angry and said a lot of bad things about me. As we were walking out at the end, he tapped me on the shoulder and says, “You must be a genius, how could you do this? How did you manage to get this all restored?” And you know, that’s kind of nice.

I had been there for twelve years, you know, that’s a normal term, and the bishop decided to move me somewhere else. And

¬ NOVEMBER 19, 2014

then one of the guys who was very vociferous against my coming, he said to me, “I don’t think this is a good idea, I think we need to form some kind of protest to keep you here.”

I said, “Jesus, you were one of the ones leading the protest against my coming, now you want to protest against my leaving.” And he just kind of laughed and said, “Yeah.” So that felt good. That kind of said, okay, some of the wounds have healed. Things are moving forward.

I’ve been in Little Village for six years. I think that one of the things that is key with our parish is, how do you keep yourself going, and how do you raise the money? How do you keep the school going? And so it becomes kind of an issue, because people are not used to, in Mexico, having to support the church. There’s no goose with one leg that’s going to drop it someplace and take care of all of our money problems. We have to do it ourselves.

There are people here who have lived here for a long time, but the nature of the community has changed... A lot of the times the parents want to keep the traditions and for the kids, if it’s to their advantage, they do it, and if it’s not, they don’t do it. We have a lot of girls here who were born and raised here who want to have a quinceañera. There are others though, whose families realize that they can’t afford this.

A lot of the adults want to be a part of that Mexican tradition because it ties them

back to their parents and their grandparents. The kids are more disconnected from that. The parents don’t know English and work all day, which puts a strain on family life. In some ways I think that the church, because it ties many of the traditions that people are maybe looking for, or they bring, is a part of the life here that gives people a sense of belonging. Maybe a little bit more than the community does sometimes.

In Little Village, we’ve had some sad events that have turned things around. A few years ago we had a couple people who were deported, picked up on minor traffic violations. Turn signal doesn’t work, police stop you, you don’t have a driver’s license, they check you out, they find out you’re not here legally and you get deported.

There’s someone who lived right down the block here who had three small children and his wife here, and he got deported. It was really tragic. The wife didn’t have a job. And her story spurred some people to get a little more involved and minister to immigrants.

Eventually, we worked with a parish here to establish an immigrant center. It’s still going on, and it’s really responding to the needs and hurts of people. And the people themselves are keeping it going.

You know, one of the greatest things is the people here. They don’t need to have a diocesan person to bring them together; they do it themselves.

The Camera Man Michael Abramson's photos capture the nightlife of a bygone era

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BY OSITA NWANEVU

efore his death, one might have reasonably referred to Michael Abramson as a “celebrity portrait photographer,” although this wouldn’t have been strictly true. While he spent most of his career jetting around the world as a photographer to the stars, it seems likely that, in the current moment, Abramson will not be remembered for his shots of Oprah Winfrey or Steve Jobs or Steven Spielberg or Ron Howard or Michael Jordan. His legacy now resides in a series of photographs submitted as his graduate thesis before his professional career began in earnest. Unlike those of his later work, the subjects of these portraits are anonymous, defined only by the period and places in which they met Abramson and his camera—the nightclubs of the South Side in the mid-1970s.

These are the people and photographs featured in “Michael L. Abramson: Pulse of the Night,” an exhibition that Columbia College Chicago has elected to call Abramson’s “first large-scale show since 1977.” The venue for this “large-scale” show isn’t a gallery or museum, but the second floor of Columbia College’s library, where visitors can see the greatest works of Abramson’s life relegated to the back walls adjacent to the floor’s main bathrooms and water fountains, behind a cluster of printers.

Bored students staring idly into space might set their eyes on the booze, and cigarettes,

michael l. abramson

and nipple tassels featured in Abramson’s shots and daydream, for better or worse, about the weekend to come. Or weekends past. Whether this amounts to generosity or cruelty on the part of the exhibition’s organizers is up for the visitor to decide.

“I had a young man come up to me and say, ‘This seems just this far off from what we do today,’ ” says Tom Lunt, a friend of Abramson’s and the editor of Light: On the South Side, the 2009 book where the “Pulse of the Night” photos originally appeared.

“And I said, ‘Yeah. It is.’ You could capture the same photographs almost anywhere.”

Though the photographs were taken in the 1970s, their age is not always obvious. The era is nearly always rendered in the popular consciousness in rich, often garish color. But in black and white, Abramson’s scenes seem as though they could have been shot decades earlier. Only a few tell-tale signs—broad sideburns and wide collars on the men, the sheen of certain fabrics, fringe bangs here and there—allow the viewer to date the photographs more precisely. The atmosphere depicted and its attendant details—heavy eyelids, lazy smiles, girlfriends, boyfriends, drinking, dancing—are, as Lunt says, timeless.

Abramson’s shots were directly influenced by the Hungarian photographer Brassaï, who achieved international fame in the 1930s and 1940s for capturing Pa-

risian nightlife on film. His transposition of Brassaï’s compositional techniques from the favorite haunts of Parisian high society to South Side clubs with names like Perv’s House and Pepper’s Hideout amounted to more than just a change in scenery. Through his photographs, Abramson audaciously suggested that the gaiety of everyday African-American men and women in blues clubs was as worth capturing as the gaiety of anyone else, and at a time when camera film itself suggested otherwise.

“Not only did he have a great eye for composition and great understanding of the history of photography, he also had the understanding that film was not designed to capture African-American skin tones,” Lunt says. “For many years, it just wasn’t. If you were shooting African-American people, you were using film that was racist. It was white film.”

The most compositionally impressive photograph in the series is perhaps a profile shot taken of an African-American woman at Pepper’s Hideout in 1975. She looks downward, her face and skin’s subtle texture enveloped in shadow and by the smoke of her cigarette, while a light above illuminates her hair and the opulent fur collar of her coat.

It’s a shot that easily could have been a still from a film noir and one that calls attention to Abramson’s apparent interest—perhaps conscious, perhaps not—in documenting how women navigated and carried themselves within his most frequented spaces.

In many of the series’ photographs, men are almost literally pushed aside. They are left slouching or slumping at the edge of frame while their female companions are centered, allowing the viewer to examine their expressions: an annoyed glance upwards on one as an overeager boyfriend tries to cajole her into dancing, suggestive and drunkenly suspicious gazes at the camera on others.

The most poised figure in the series is another woman Abramson photographed in

VISUAL ARTS

Perv’s House. She sits elegantly in a highbacked wicker chair looking directly at the camera with a fan in hand. A man remarkably permed and coiffed with a silk scarf around his neck, perhaps a date, seems on the verge of inebriated collapse on the right.

It occurs to one viewing photos like this one that it would have been reasonable for Abramson’s subjects to be wary of his and his camera’s presence. But Lunt says that for the most part, Abramson was welcomed and sought after.

“When Michael would walk into these clubs, he’d get a ‘who’s the crazy white guy who walked in here and is taking our pictures?’ sort of thing,” he says. “But at the end of a half hour, he was completely accepted.

And they called him the camera man.”

“There used to be a guy going around taking pictures and he’d sell you a Polaroid if you were out that night and looked good,” Lunt continues. “But they used to ask Michael. Michael was the camera man. That other guy that was trying to make money off of them? They didn’t care about him.”

It would have been easy for his project not to transcend simple voyeurism. But Abramson was invested enough in his subjects to return to the clubs after the photographs were developed to show them the finished work.

Anyone hoping to find the clubs Abramson shot today will likely be disappointed. Most have long since been shuttered. The space Pepper’s Hideout used to occupy is now a section of McCormick Place’s parking lot. As such, the photos in the exhibition are among the last extant artifacts of a bygone era in the history of the South Side. Abramson would go on to a career crafting timeless images of the rich and powerful. He got his start, though, suspending in time the revels of those who were not.

NOVEMBER 19, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

Growing Up in Englewood Elaine Hegwood Bowen reflects on Englewood in the fifties, sixties, and seventies

BY MARI COHEN

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laine Hegwood Bowen will never forget the race riots that she witnessed almost every day as she made her way to Gage Park High School near 59th and Maplewood. It was 1969.

Bowen remembers white protestors shouting at her from their doorsteps, a friend who broke an arm after someone threw a tin trash can lid at her, and the gym teacher at Gage Park who never really cared if the black girls learned how to swim. The atmosphere was so toxic that Bowen gladly took the opportunity to transfer to Jones Commercial High School (now Jones College Prep) for her last two years of high school.

In a recent interview to promote her 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

new book on WBEZ’s The Barber Shop Show, Bowen described the stress of attending Gage Park so vividly that a white listener named Cindy later called into the show and sounded close to tears as she apologized and apologized again for participating in the riots. When she was nine, Cindy’s family made her carry signs with messages like “No Blacks Wanted.” Bowen was so moved by this “powerful testimony against a racist environment” that it was the first thing she wanted to tell me when we sat down to talk at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore.

“A young person’s high school experience in Chicago in the late sixties, early seventies, should not be the same as down in Alabama, down in Arkansas,” Bowen said emphatically. “It just shouldn’t have been the same. And yet, quiet as it’s kept, it was the same.”

Yet, as much as Bowen, a journalist and PR professional, wants people to know what really happened in Chicago, the Gage Park race riots are far from the spotlight in Old School Adventures from Englewood—South Side of Chicago, the collection of essays that she self-published in August.

Bowen doesn’t shy away from writing about the racism she faced growing up in Chicago, but she also doesn’t let it take over her story. She narrates important moments in the civil rights movement and calls out discrimination when she sees it, but the history lessons are sandwiched between fond personal memories. She describes quitting a job in the city when she wouldn’t get promotions because she wasn’t white, but it’s just two paragraphs in an essay about

¬ NOVEMBER 19, 2014

buying her own red Pontiac Firebird that impressed the “bruthas in their cars” on the North Side. In Chapter Eight, she discusses the racial bias in the media when she was growing up, but Chapter Nine is about the smell of her mother’s peach and pear preserves and the taste of her father’s homemade vanilla ice cream.

“I just wanted to account my contribution to history of Englewood, because we’re getting such a bad rap,” says Bowen, who no longer lives in the neighborhood.

Today, when Englewood appears in the media, the story usually has something to do with violence, crime, gangs, or drugs.

But Bowen was determined to show another side of the neighborhood: her essays vividly illustrate moments with family and friends when 63rd between Ashland and Halsted was like another Michigan Avenue.

“There was nothing that you could want and couldn’t get on 63rd Street,” she said.

Bowen wrote the essay about her father’s 1964 Red Buick, excerpted here, while getting her master’s in journalism at Roosevelt University in the 1990s. Her father died in 1986 of lung cancer, and the bill of sale for the Red Buick inspired her to write the vignette. It wasn’t until two or three years ago, however, that she got to work on the rest of the book.

“I just felt, ‘Okay, it’s time to buckle down and finish this one’ so kids could read an account of Englewood that is vastly different from what they know,” she said.

Bowen believes that Englewood has lost some of the community values that it once

had. Somewhere along the line, she said, one generation “dropped the ball” on the community traditions that blacks brought with them to Chicago from the south.

“If Obama opened up a youth center in every neighborhood and cloned himself, he still wouldn’t have all the kids going to it,” she said. “There’s got to be something inside of you that makes you want to change and get better for yourself.”

Bowen grew up with two working parents, and made sacrifices to be an involved parent for her daughter, rapper Psalm One. She believes her book can teach parents and kids not only about the history of Englewood, but also about the importance of community, hard work, education, and spirituality. “If a parent is on the bus reading the book and saying ‘Oh, well I’ll do that with my kid, see how that works,’ then it’s a job well done,” she said.

To this end, Bowen hands out fliers about the book on the bus on the way to work, emails school principals urging them to have students read the book, and carries copies with her wherever she goes—she once sold one on the way out of a movie theater. The book is now on the library shelves at the Latin School of Chicago and a high school in New Jersey. Bowen is hopeful that her words will provoke reflection and even change in communities like Englewood throughout the country, like it did for Cindy.

“If that lady after forty years is able to release and to even say she wanted to meet me because of what she heard on the radio,” she said, “then that’s like a little United Nations session right there.”

BOOKS

1964 Red Buick

BY ELAINE HEGWOOD BOWEN

I

t’s 1965, and it’s time again for my father to purchase an almost-new car. My father walks less than a mile from our home to Crown Buick Co. at 63rd Street and Throop and buys a fire engine red Buick Riviera. He had previously marveled at this beauty in the showroom. As he negotiates a price, my sister Audrey and I take advantage of a warm October day to walk to Coney Island at 63rd Street and Ada, just west of Crown. Coney Island is the neighborhood fast food joint (I guess it was named after the famous New York attraction).

Well, let me correct that: Coney Island is the place where the youngsters hang out.

Nan’s on 63rd Street and Loomis, and later Red Apple on 63rd Street and Ashland, which was owned by a former Sixteenth Ward Committeeman Jim “Bulljive” Taylor, and the Walgreens restaurant on the other corner catered to the mature crowd of this Englewood neighborhood. You see, during that time, as is now, the political machine in Chicago was in full throttle. Years earlier, Chicago was one of the first cities where blacks attained great political influence. Oscar DePriest became Chicago’s first black councilman in 1915 and in 1928; he became the first black elected to the United States House of Representatives in the twentieth century. As a matter of fact, blacks had won the official right to vote in 1965 with the Voting Rights Act, and local politicians and their cohorts were taking full advantage of this. It was common to have folks canvass in the community for whatever election was coming up, and my folks were active citizens in the process. It was a big thing to go up to the polling place with them, which was then located at the local elementary school.

People would mill around, talking about one candidate or the other. So Taylor’s restaurant was always crowded, with folks ordering fried chicken, chitlins, and whatever was the featured “bean” of the day, along with cornbread muffins, while discussing current political issues. After the grown folks ate at the restaurant they could walk a couple of blocks and further enjoy themselves with liquor and other “packaged

goods” from the Rothschild’s, which was located on the southeast corner of 63rd Street and Loomis. There was always some brutha in front of Rothschild’s, who seemed to be drunker than the customers going in, who served as the doorman—in hopes of getting tips to buy more liquor. One such doorman was a man whose brother had recently been killed. When asked one day about his brother’s murder, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “He’s gone, but I’m still here.”

My usual order at Coney Island is a

a life’s savings of change for our food. As he drives past the Del Farm grocery store, also at 63rd Street and Loomis, reality hits him.

He has to give my mother money for food.

That’s alright. We may have to eat beans and cornbread for a couple of days, but we are sure gonna look good in that red Riviera.

That intersection is busy at this time of day.

The rush hour buses running up and down the two streets take passengers either south on Loomis or west on 63rd Street from the final stop on the “L” line. 63rd Street is the

People would mill around, talking about one candidate or the other.

So Taylor’s restaurant was always crowded, with folks ordering fried chicken, chitlins, and whatever was the featured “bean” of the day, along with cornbread muffins, while discussing current political issues. burger and fries and, of course, a “suicide.” A suicide is a soft drink made from a variety of the fountain flavors. My preference is more coke and orange flavors; something that I still order at the movie theaters even to this day. “May I help you?” the clerk asked from behind the counter. “Give us two cheeseburgers, please,” my sister and I both answered in unison. You see, we weren’t twins, but we often behaved as such. The burgers came with fries at no extra charge. Most of the beef to feed the free world was being slaughtered right here in Chicago, so it was easy to come by.

As my father proudly deposits $400 on a nearly $3,163 debt—leaving him with a thirty-six-month, $77.60 note give or take— we reluctantly clunk down what seems to be

business district of this neighborhood. (Yes, this is the same 63rd Street that the late Marvin Gaye sings about in Hitchhike).

Between Halsted to the east and Ashland to the west are a myriad of shops and restaurants that blacks are welcome to patronize. Throughout the years, Thompson’s Barber Shop has also served as the local polling place at election time. A Mandl and Sons Cleaners advertises a “plant on premises.” One of their specialties is blocking hats, and my father uses this service to clean his Dobbs hats that he most likely purchased at Howard Style Shops, down on Maxwell Street near Halsted—or what at that time was called Jew Town (to recognize the many shop owners who were Jewish). The shirts, suits, and dresses would always be so nicely

cleaned and pressed. If you peered past the front counter, you could see the guy operating the pressing machine. This glimpse into the dry cleaning business would further manifest itself a few years later, as one of my father’s brothers would open his own dry cleaning business over in the Gresham neighborhood. As teens we would hang out on a Saturday placing garments on hangers and pulling the plastic over each order to keep the clothes fresh and crisp. When you drive down 87th Street near Halsted you can still see the sign “Hegwood Cleaners” in the window.

Then there is Sarah’s Beauty Salon, which is always filled with women vying to look beautiful, especially on the weekends.

There are even two banks within this short area—Chicago City Bank and Trust Company and the Ashland and 63rd State Bank, as well as a hospital named Englewood Hospital. The neighborhood to the west of Ashland is entirely white and even though our money is green, we are not welcome to shop there.

On our way back from Coney Island, with small, greasy brown paper bags and overfilled, brimming paper cups, we would spend the rest of our pennies on candy at Big Mama’s grocery store. It takes us a while to arrive home, but it takes my father even longer. Although we live only moments from the car dealership, my father takes a leisurely drive home, beaming with pride every block of the way. This fond memory of the Englewood community will always remain in my heart, just as memories of my father and his new Buick always bring a smile to my face—a smile as wide as the grill on that bright, red Buick Riviera.

Elaine Hegwood Bowen, Old School Adventures from Englewood—South Side of Chicago. Lulu Publishing Services. 130 pages.

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CALENDAR

BULLETIN The Weekly will now use this space to highlight political and civic events happening across the South Side.

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)

Visions Blu Youth Town Hall Meeting

Bad Grammar Theater

How is media changing and how can young people alter it? Vision Blu, a nonprofit that works to develop news literacy, technological skill, and general artistic expression among adolescents in the Chicago area, seeks to answer this question and others at its inaugural Youth Town Hall Meeting, The Power of Media, Becoming a Decision Maker. The conference features speakers involved in all aspects of the media, including journalists, television producers, and researchers. They’ll present on topics ranging from current social media platforms and the future of the press to the role in media that youth themselves can play. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Saturday, November 22, 10am-1pm. Free. (773)7022787. visionsblu.com (Sonia Schlesinger)

This Thanksgiving season, satisfy your literary cravings with Bad Grammar Theater. Quirk, performance, good writing, and plain old weirdness merge as Chicago authors join together to showcase their work in this monthly series. A monthly tradition that takes place at Powell’s Books at Roosevelt and Halsted, Bad Grammar Theater welcomes Chicago’s best science fiction, pulp fiction, horror, and fantasy writers to the stage. The event takes place in a very casual setting: a mélange of authors perform sections of their work from 6pm to 9pm, and audience members are welcome to arrive and depart as they please. A perfect combination of literature and performance, Bad Grammar Theater provides a great assortment of performances sure to appease the most diverse tastes. Powell’s Bookstore, 1218 S. Halsted St..

Friday, November 21, 6pm–9pm. Free. (312)243-9070. badgrammartheater.com (Itzel Blancas)

Chicago’s Case for Reparations During the middle of the last century, Clyde Ross moved from Mississippi to Chicago, where, like many other African Americans, he was pushed into an exploitative home loan. In his much-discussed article “The Case for Reparations,” senior editor for The Atlantic and social commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates led with Ross’s story in order to argue that injustices extending through and beyond slavery and the Jim Crow era oblige America to consider reparations for African Americans. In the course of his argument, Coates returns to Chicago’s fraught history of race and real estate several times. Now Coates has come to Chicago to make his case in person.

Institute of Politics, 5707 S. Woodlawn Ave. Thursday, November 20, 7:30pm. politics.uchicago.edu (Adam Thorp)

“Know You’re Right” From the events surrounding the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson to Chicago’s own police shootings, the issue of police brutality has been foregrounded in public dialogue locally and nationwide as of late. On Friday, First Defense Legal-Aid, an organization that provides twenty-four-hour emergency legal representation to those taken custody by the CPD, and L.Y.R.I.C., a performance-centered youth organizing program, will present a know-your-rights workshop and an open mic. The event will focus on encounters with the police, highlighting the work of organizations in combating police brutality, including We Charge Genocide, which recently sent a delegation to the UN charging the CPD with torture of black youth. Kusanya Café, 825 W. 69th St. Friday, November 21, 6pm. (312)404-0314 (Kathryn Seidewitz)

STAGE & SCREEN 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

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Manakamana Developed in the confines of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab but shot above the Nepalese jungle, recent documentary Manakamana represents numerous physical and emotional journeys to the ancient Hindu temple of the title in 118 minutes of 16mm film. At just eleven takes, the entire film is shot within the cable car that carries these travelers, and some goats, up the mountain to the goddess’s sacred site. Directors Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez create intimate portraits of the passengers amidst the jarring contrast between a sprawling jungle and urban technology. The UofC Film Studies Center will host a screening and discussion with the directors of the documentary, which the New York Film Festival called “an airborne version of an Andy Warhol screen test...an endlessly suggestive film that both describes and transcends the bounds of time and space.” Intriguing in its simplicity, Manakamana creates a window into its subjects’ lives, providing a brief, inconclusive glimpse into who they are. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Friday, November 21. 7pm. Free. (773)702-8596. filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu (Sammie Spector)

Missing Pages Lecture Series Over the course of our lives, we have often been under the impression that we were presented with the whole story—after all, our high-school history textbooks must have covered everything we needed to know, right? the DuSable Museum doesn’t think so. Aimed to reveal the people, places, and events that haven’t gotten proper credit for shaping history, the lecture series Missing Pages, starting November 20 and running through March, is designed to address larger themes of politics, culture, race relations, and personal identity. The largely unknown figures and topics will be presented and discussed by nationally known speakers, and while their subjects never received much recognition in common memory or the media, now they take center stage. All this series asks of its audience members is that they remain open to what they might not have known and be willing to pick up a pencil and fill in history’s forgotten pages. DuSable Museum, 740 E. 56th Pl. Various Thursdays, through March, 6:30pm. $5. dusablemuseum.org (Emiliano Burr di Mauro)

André Bazin’s Dark Passage In his upcoming lecture, Yale professor and film scholar Dudley Andrew takes on film critic and theorist André Bazin’s take on director Delmer Daves’s 1947 film Dark Passage. Bazin was a mid-twentieth century film critic and theorist with a love of gritty Italian films and

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existentialist philosophy whose outspoken critique of montages was swiftly ignored by every 1980s movie ever.

Dark Passage follows an escaped criminal’s attempt to clear his name in the classic film-noir style Bazin helped to define. This Thursday, Andrew uses the film as a lens with which to explore Bazin’s cinematic and real-life philosophies. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Thursday, November 20, 5pm. (773)702-8596. filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu (Kathryn Seidewitz)

VISUAL ARTS 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 years’ 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, 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. Through November 22. (312)725-4223. chicagoartdepartment.org (Sammie Spector)

The Material That Went to Make Me 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. Through December 6. Monday-Friday, 12pm-5pm; Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, 1pm-5pm.

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

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 UriEichen at the Al DiFranco Studio. In accordance with the exhibit’s theme, the music of Joe Hill, an early twentieth 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)

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 instructor 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. Free. 4wps.org (Julie Wu)

Mana Miami When you go big, why not go colossal? That much seems to be the goal of Mana Contemporary with its most recent endeavor for Miami’s Art Basel gallery. During this special time of year for visual arts, Mana Contemporary will host three exhibitions: “Mana Monumental,” “Dirty Geometry,” and “GLE,” all in the Wynwood arts neighborhood of Miami. “Mana Monumental” focuses on the sheer size and spectacle of the work of twenty-one different artists. The large-scale art is an effort to relate to viewers in a quick yet truly impactful way, rather than through sheer shock value.. Meanwhile, “Dirty Geometry” focuses on contrasting unkempt abstract art with the rigidity conveyed in theoretical geometry. If you’re unable to hitch a ride to the sultry and sandy Miami Arts Week this December, then just visit your local Mana Contemporary arts center in Pilsen, which will feature locally known artists in residency and public education activities. Mana Chicago, 2233 S. Throop St. Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm. (310)850-0555. manacontemporarychicago. com. See also Mana Miami, 318 NW 23rd St. Miami, FL. December 2-7. (305)305-5474 (Sammie Spector)

MUSIC 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)

Dads at Reggies When November winds start whipping and just stepping outside chills you to the bone, there’s nothing quite like sensitive lyrics backed by angsty guitar riffs to keep you warm. New Jerseyites-turned-Michiganders John Bradley and Scott Scharinger started indie-rock band Dads as a side project, but years of dedication and nonstop touring have produced a loyal following. Fresh off the release of their sophomore LP I’ll Be the Tornado, the earnest auburn-haired duo will grace the stage at Reggies to moan sincerely into the microphone and remind you that adulthood can be filled with just as much soul-searching emotionality as adolescence. Though neither Bradley nor Scharinger have actually fathered any children, lyrics like “A permanent bee sting in my throat / I can’t ever catch my breath / It’s not fair to tell me to cheer up” leave no doubt that if they ever do, they’ll have plenty of wisdom to impart.

Reggies, 2105 S. State St. November 21, 2pm. Free, all ages.

(312)949-0120. reggieslive.com (Olivia Myszkowski)

A Roaring 1920s Costume Concert When the cold snap hits, there are only two kinds of people: those who only want to curl up somewhere warm with a hot drink and wait the winter out, and those who would rather forget the present altogether and travel far away to a glitzier era such as the Roaring Twenties. Or at least, that’s what “Charles Heath Presents” is banking on with its upcoming 1920s gala at the Promontory. This will be no mere Gatsby throwback: jazz singer Dee Alexander will provide vocals, and the proceeds will go to the Ken Chaney Scholarship Fund, which supports young musicians. If you’re not done dancing the jitterbug after

the gala and would like to keep going with some Chicago-based swing-inspired dance, stay for the Stepper’s Set afterward. Twenties attire is encouraged, hors d’ouevres will be served: general elegance should be the result. The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. West. Friday, November 21, 7pm. $50/$65. (312)801-2100. promontorychicago. com (Julia Aizuss)

Jason Marsalis Vibes Quartet It’s sometimes hard to evaluate the children of famous musicians, given that a life of music-making has been presented to them like a silver spoon. But Jason Marsalis, of the infamous New Orleans jazz family that produced Wynston, does no dishonor to the family name. Having played professionally as a sideman since the age of twelve and trained in classical percussion in the Big Easy’s Loyola University, Marsalis has made the transition to bandleader with the grace one might expect from a musician of his pedigree. His Vibes Quartet (he is on the vibes, in this case) has recently followed up their critically acclaimed 2013 release In A World of Mallets with an effort entitled The 21st Century Trad Band. Backed by Will Goble on bass, Austin Johnson on piano, and David Potter on drums, the group grounds itself in more traditional, swinging bop and takes hints from Dixieland but isn’t afraid to dig into complex polyrhythmic ideas and forge ahead into the more melodically nebulous elements of post-bop. Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth Ct. November 21, 8pm-10pm. $25, $35 VIP. (312)360-0234. Jazzshowcase.com (James Kogan)

VixenFridays at The Shrine Hit the Shrine on Friday for #VixenFridays “to experience the evolution of nightlife.” For a $20 cover you can #groove to the very best in hip-hop, trap, and top-forty sounds, including a set from Chicago’s own #DJWildboy. The #party starts early at 10pm, but it’ll keep on #keepingon ‘til 2am. If you miss this one, #don’t #worry: Vixen Fridays isn’t a one-time event, but a weekly staple at #TheShrine. Word to the wise: don’t Google “Vixen Chicago” unless you’re looking for something altogether different from details on this event. The Shrine, 2109 S. Wabash Ave. November 21, 10pm-2am. $20. 21+. 312-7535700. theshrinechicago.com (Elizabeth Bynum)

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

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October 31 / Bury The Hatchet / Hells Headbangers Nader Sadek / The Malefic: Chapter III / Self-Released Oozing Wound / Earth Suck / Thrill Jockey The Yolks / Kings of Awesome! / Randy Unwound / No Energy / Numero Nots / We Are Nots / Goner Iceage / Plowing Through the Field of Love / Matador Dean Blunt / Black Metal / Rough Trade Grouper / Ruins / Kranky Bob Mould / Beauty and Ruin / Merge Gel Set/Stacian / Voorhees / Moniker Botanist / VI: Flora / The Flenser Various Artists / My House Is Not Your House / Acido Toupee / Yeehaw Grandma / Lake Paradise Wrekmeister Harmonies / Then It All Came Down / Thrill Jockey

NOVEMBER 19, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

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