December 3, 2014 | The Music Issue

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Welcome to the music issue, a celebration of the best tracks, venues,

and artists on the South Side. Inside you’ll find our picks for the year’s best music, coupled with in-depth profiles of South Side musicians whose styles range from the elemental to the experimental to the utterly esoteric. Our side of the city has always been a hub for songs and singers of all kinds—what other place could produce both the dusties-digging record geeks at Numero, the soulful samples of Jean Deaux, and the high school brotherhood that went on to become the innovative rap collective SAVEMONEY? Join us as we celebrate all these euphonies and many more—and while you’re at it, support the artists and labels featured here by giving their music as a gift this holiday season.

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 indepth 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 Luke White Illustration Editor Ellie Mejia Layout Editors Adam Thorp, Baci Weiler

The South Side Weekly will resume its regular weekly publishing schedule on January 7, 2015.

IN THIS ISSUE jean deaux makes a year in review

name for herself

We highlight the best releases to come out of the South Side this year.

“This isn’t a love song, because in the end I love myself more than any strange company I keep around.”

jake bittle...4

Senior Writers Jack Nuelle, Stephen Urchick Staff Writers Olivia Adams,

Christian Belanger,

Austin Brown, Amelia Dmowska, Mark savemoney:

Hassenfratz, Maira Khwaja, Emily a family tree

Lipstein, Jamison Pfeifer, Wednesday “ You just kind of meet

Quansah, Kari Wei, and click up with people.

Arman Sayani Staff Photographers Camden Bauchner, Eventually we put a

Juliet Eldred, Kiran name to our situation.”

Misra, Siddhesh Mukerji jack nuelle...10 Staff Illustrators Lexi Drexelius, Wei Yi

Ow, Hanna Petroski, Amber Sollenberger Editorial Interns Denise Parker, Clyde Schwab Business Manager Harry Backlund The paper is produced by an all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, spring, and winter, with breaks during April and December. Over the summer we publish monthly.

Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 1212 E. 59th Street Ida Noyes Hall #030 Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773)234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly Read our stories online at southsideweekly.com

Cover by Teddy Watler.

improvised interruption

Haptic is the sound of interrupted quiet. ryn seidewitz...16

austin brown...6

“It’s coming completely out of left field, there’s no context, nobody’s ever heard this music.” jake bittle...7

art rock rising

at the gates of a

fly on the wall

plant-based, gluten-

“It is sometimes strongest to include my interactions with the person on camera.”

jola idowu...13

free, soy-free universe

For a cookbook, YumUniverse reads a lot like a lifestyle thesis. zoe makoul...18

“A lot of it’s decorative, but everything has a point to it.” michal kranz...14

emiliano burr di mauro...19

playing at power breaking the chain

ward

“I’m not looking to win a lottery. I’m a rich man already.” clyde schwab...24

playing to win

“The premise is to build up a place in this community where the environment encourages excellence.” olivia myszkowski...9 futbol punks

“It’s hard, because there was always an arts school on the South Side for kids to have an outlet.”

for the post-industrial

max bloom...23

numero

chiarts migrates north

the union candidate

“This is a ward that needs to be run by the people here.”

checking in with

It’s a live-action “Monopoly” overlaid with some hometown social philosophy. stephen urchick...26

Every so often, children’s birthday parties and punk shows are scheduled for the same night. rachel schastok...15

at home in the house of atreus

“The Greek audience would have known instinctively that the main characters on stage are all going to die.” olivia stovicek...20 there are more than just children here

“I’m not Mother Teresa after all.” meaghan murphy...29

DECEMBER 3, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

The Year in Review We highlight the best releases out of the South Side this year

King Louie, Tony

Alex Wiley, Village Party

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Who even knows (read: cares) what Chief Keef is up to anymore? After 2012’s Finally Rich, the former drill icon fled to Los Angeles and gave up his spot on hip-hop’s cutting edge in favor of (as far as one can tell from his Instagram) gold-flecked bathtubs and chrome-plated cars, or whatever. In the power vacuum created by his absence in Chicago, Hyde Park Academy alum King Louie has become Chicago drill’s undisputed figurehead and FRONTRUNNER—and Louie knows it, too. His second release of the year, Tony, is littered with claims to kingpinship, kingship, god-kingship, and godship, as well as at least six dozen references to or samples from Louie’s favorite movie, Scarface.

Can you blame him for being so unapologetically triumphant? When he yells “oh my god oh my god / squad” like twenty times on “G.O.D.” it doesn’t sound indulgent, it sounds correct. Louie isn’t just stepping into Keef’s shoes here, he’s pushing the drill sound forward, honing its standards of momentum and repetition: the hilarious “Till I Met Selena” and the unprintably-titled “F— N—” are great moments wherein Louie sounds specifically, inimitably himself. A lot of this innovation has to do with the way Louie’s shouting appears to be abusing or escaping the beats over which he’s rapping (“MF,” “God King”). He also sounds better (read: almost beautiful) using the classic warbly drill auto-tune than Chief Keef ever did, as on the tremendous “Michael Jackson Money.”

Required reading from this mixtape, too, are the literate “Ambitions as a Rider” (c.f. Tupac) and Louie’s impeccable manifesto, “Live & Die in Chicago.” Here Louie announces himself, rightly, as the finest remaining flower of Chicago drill, and snubs Keef by declaring his unfailing loyalty to the city that made him. I’m-on-top albums are a definite staple of any hip-hop career (see recently Mastermind, O.N.I.F.C.), but they usually come out sounding boring, senseless, or indulgent. <i>Tony</i>, however, sounds abrasive, committed, and cantankerous, even in the moments when Louie is resting on his laurels. The new triumph is a post-tenth-round triumph, a come-try-me triumph. (Jake Bittle) The album cover of Village Party, Alex Wiley’s latest album, is telling: Wiley looks out, stylized as if in a mural or piece of graffiti, his face tired and vaguely addled. Caricatured yet not completely removed from reality, the picture creates an excellent parallel to the real-life career path of Alex Wiley. Having debuted with a style that lacked any cohesion whatsoever (he sampled “R U Mine?” and “Throw Some D’s” not just on the same album but on the same song), Wiley has gradually constructed a persona that is all his own, allowing his real face to emerge from a murk of color.

While other South Siders like Mick Jenkins and Chance the Rapper are unabashedly lyrical, Wiley opts for a more even-keeled approach: Village Party is notable not just for Wiley’s tense and high-pitched vocal style, but also for its expansive approach to production, incorporating martial rhythms and Hendrix-lite guitars along with the usual snare-heavy beats and synthesizers. This inclusivity, along with the loose approach that Wiley takes in structuring his songs, places Village Party in the tradition of Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys, artists who recast “rock” rhythms and heavy guitars against hip-hop songwriting. Wiley himself has expressed his debt towards the rock records of his childhood and their impact on his oeuvre.

This probably isn’t all an aesthetic choice: Wiley’s most obvious flaw is his rapping. Lyrics like “Cryptic on the phone keep it cautious / Cause I don’t trust that bitch” usually fail to impress, and his echo effects and ad-libs only go so far. Guests like Kembe X and Mick Jenkins, both fellow Chicago up-and-comers, stand out in their ability to take hold of a track and dominate it, something that Wiley doesn’t always do. Wiley seems aware of this: he’s attributed his songwriting struggles to his ADD in both interviews and songs. One such song is “Ideas (Adderall),” a rarity in which Wiley’s nervousness coalesces around a concrete image, that of a drugged-out one-night stand, backed by a stuttering trap beat. “I’m high / and you’re hot / and I’m cool” are hollow and meaningless lines on their own, but in Wiley’s voice they might hold enough desperation and insecurity to carry a career. (Austin Brown)

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MUSIC

Katie Got Bandz, Drillary Clinton 2

Tink, Winter’s Diary 2: Forever Yours

Mick Jenkins, the Water[s]

This newest release from drilless-in-chief Katie Got Bandz opens and closes with martial chants and speeches, and Katie’s insistence on the nickname Drillary Clinton seems to suggest that Katie has some interest in politics—or, more likely, rule—but the nine tracks in between the intro and outro are never anything but personal. Sometimes, in the midst of a thirty-twobar stream of brags and disses, Katie even gets private, which you hardly ever see in drill.

Essentially, what I’m trying to suggest here is that this newest tape from Katie crystallizes the unhesitating narcissism which attracts so much ire from devotees of “deeper” music; but the dozens and dozens of ways in which Katie self-affirms here are pretty damn deep when seen from a birds-eye view. This is music made in the heat of a teeth-grinding, selfaggrandizing moment, music (“Who Da F—, “Soldier”) that doesn’t seem written so much as secreted by a woman in the throes of a life-or-death battle with, apparently, the entire planet.

This battle, it seems, can only be won by vigorous and extensive self-affirmation: a fun game you can play while listening to this album is to count the number of times Katie yells “Katie!” at herself from the background of the song.

Still, narcissism—which we might more charitably refer to as “self-construction”—is in right now, and when it’s done as artfully as it is on “Nothing” or as intensely as it’s done on “Lil B—” (which makes me genuinely afraid) we need not hesitate before praising it as, yes, innovative. Katie’s lo-fi inaudibility, her snarling refusal to compromise or hold back (see, appropriately, “I Can’t Lie”), is all the emotional complexity this tape needs to earn a place among 2014’s best efforts. That is to say, beating a dead horse may only be bad if you don’t beat it well. (Jake Bittle)

Eight or nine months before the music world went gaga over FKA twigs’s LP1, Chicago’s risingest female star Tink had already released Winter’s Diary 2, a compendium of half-haunting, half-sultry songs that together are far less convoluted and far more compelling than twigs’s debut. While Katie Got Bandz and Sasha Go Hard shine more often than not when they’re revitalizing or reacting to the male-dominated drill scene, Tink flits in directions entirely her own. She dwells alternately in spaces reminiscent of Beyoncé’s diffuse 2013 sex/love tunes (“Freak Like Me,” “Fight It”) and in cloud-filled acoustic soundscapes more sensitive than most 2014 music outside of, like, Sharon Van Etten.

Just listen to the crawl of “Treat Me Like Somebody,” “Lullaby,” and the phenomenal “Your Secrets”: it’s not just that Tink has pipes, which isn’t enough in the twenty-first century, but that she knows how to sink into, sing into, the usual assortment of distortions and effects and percussions without leaving the pathos of the words as they are sung. The undisputed standout here is “Count On You,” where her voice splits and reunites almost line by line over rattling drums. Whether Tink will be joined in 2015 and beyond by imitators and derivatives is hard to say: on the one hand, it’s hard to imagine not wanting to capitalize on this stylistic redefinition (yes, really) of romance and lustful meditation, but on the other hand, it’d be hard to do it anywhere near as well as she’s done it on this inexhaustible volume, which even ten months out still sounds new and dense. This is languishing music, waking-up-at-1pmwhen-it’s-snowing music, music for long nights and the longer days after. This is proof, ladies and gentlemen, that R&B has room to stretch and grow. This is a return to the dominance of mood. (Jake Bittle)

STAND-ALONES Exemplary singles and influential one-offs 1. Enyce, “Life Good (Soda Pop)” for the best twelveyear-old world-affirming vibes.

2. Noname Gypsy, “Dizzy” for wordplay and narrative previously reserved for the slam poetry stage; for being comforting and devastating in the same bar.

3. Hard Femme, “What is Hard Femme” for the best genderqueer anthem of the year, possibly of all of the years.

4. Michael Anthony ft. Via Rosa and the Mind, “Rest in Power, Mike Brown” for the best (and most needed) catharsis.

5. Sasha Go Hard, “My Story” for repping her city and making pregnancy cool again.

6. Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment, “Sunday Candy” for the best grandmapraising gospel.

7. Young Chop ft. Lil Durk, “Murder Team” for a lifetime’s worth of aggression.

8. Rita J ft. Mr. Greenweedz, ADaD, Wes Restless, “Good Morning Strange” for best use of an alarm clock sample.

9. Melkbelly, “Doomspringa” for bucolic thrash noise.

10. Vic Mensa, “Down On My Luck” for eliding, moonwalking reflections on ups and downs.

11. Dreezy, “Chiraq” for the best Nicki Minaj remix.

12. Haki, “Weigh Me Down” for the catchiest, throatiest, doomiest cowbells.

13. Marquis Hill, “White Shadows” for best integration of an old-school jazz tune and timely rap outro.

14. ONO, “Spare” for sounding like the inside of the coolest and darkest factory ever.

When Mick Jenkins dropped his sophomore mixtape the Water[s] in August, no one was ready for hard-hitting, thought-provoking tracks from the virtually unknown artist. Now the Water[s] is one of the most talked about mixtapes of the year and has given the Chicagobased rapper national attention.

On every track, smooth underwater-like beats sit underneath Jenkins’s gritty lyrics, creating a drive-thru carwash effect: it’s relaxing and overwhelming at the same time. This contrast between harsh lyrics and smooth beats is most evident in the title track, where Jenkins raps, “Water more important than the gold / People for the gold / Everybody do it for the gold / People save your souls,” over a slow, almost otherworldly and dreamlike beat.

He calls out the way that so many people value money over other, life-sustaining things.

The track that really shows off Jenkins’s serious poeticism is “Martyrs,” first released at the end of last year in a music video. Jenkins rips raw lyric after lyric as the chorus from Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” echoes in the background. He turns the second half of the hook, “I’m just wit my n–ggas hanging,” on its head by pairing it the with the “Strange Fruit” sample, effectively changing an image of a group of guys just “hanging” into one that recalls, startlingly, Jim Crow lynchings. (Adia Robinson) DECEMBER 3, 2014

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Jean Deaux Makes a Name for Herself

The young artist cultivates a private sound

BY AUSTIN BROWN

J

ean Deaux, now nineteen years old, began recording music when she was sixteen. After school, she would leave home to “work on a group project,” so she could go record tracks with her friends. These early recordings were low-fidelity and casual—and according to Deaux in our interview, “kind of horrible.” However, upon gaining access to a real studio, one owned by her cousin Saba, her then-hobby of songwriting began to develop into a potentially sustainable career.

A self-proclaimed misfit in her youth, Deaux feels a kinship with the recent group of alternative R&B artists, people who try to explore a unique sound and aesthetic while remaining

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committed to honest emotion. But she also feels separate from them in the way her music reflects her subdued and introverted personality. While Janelle Monae commits to Afrofuturist concept albums and FKA twigs and Autre Ne Veut use trip-hop and trap elements to make their music more subtly aggressive, much of the material Deaux puts out feels private, more like music made both in and for the bedroom, even with its often distinctly clean studio sound.

Deaux’s music conveys volumes about her personality—she’s introspective, but not antisocial; she just seems most comfortable on her own. Indeed, the latest track on her SoundCloud, “Into the Water,” abandons an explicit

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kiran misra

romantic narrative. It acknowledges the pursuit of some personal connection (“So love me slow and don’t let go / in case that we might drown”), but never seems overly attached (“If you ain’t tryna take the leap / go ahead leave me now”). Deaux herself says, in a RapGenius description for “Into the Water,” that “this isn’t a love song, because in the end I love myself more than any strange company I keep around.”

“Grape Soda,” one of Deaux’s 2013 tracks, is a reference to Vic Mensa’s “Orange Soda,” but the only direct links to the fellow Chicagoan’s song are the lines “I make you want it baby / I make you love it baby,” which mirror Mensa’s own “Make you love it / make you want it.” Elsewhere in the song, Deaux pushes heavily against Mensa’s extroverted style, abandoning pure rapping for melodies more fitting a slow jam.

“Look at you / watching me,” she says, exposing the moment a shared glance reveals mutual understanding and momentary tranquility. The instrumentals of the song help to underscore Deaux’s emotional claustrophobia as well; synthesizers both carry the melody and weave an ambient soundscape beneath Deaux’s vocals, simultaneously disorienting and relaxing the listener.

There’s little actual melodic development to the track—it mostly consists of Deaux singing over the same melody— but rather than making the track less

potent, this serves to further the feeling that this is one moment, frozen in time and stretched out.

Songs like these are currently available on Deaux’s SoundCloud, unattached to any larger work, but Deaux does have plans for an album, Soular System, to be released in the next few months. Once a mixtape, the album took on a life of its own as Deaux realized that Soular System had the potential to make a coherent artistic statement.

She plans to release the album for free, an increasingly popular road, though one usually taken by more established artists and riskier for a developing musician like Deaux.

While Deaux recognizes that she’s taking a longer road towards popularity than a major-label deal (which she’s been offered in the past) would give her, she also feels that that searching for honesty in the hip-hop business world is both worthwhile and necessary for her art. Deaux concedes the superficial benefits that the major-label domain offers, but she also believes that, by choosing to surround herself with people who seem genuinely interested in her music and personality, she helps to create a more honest environment in which to create her art. Deaux seems most interested in cultivating a long-lasting relationship with her listeners, something that, for her, starts at the business end of releasing and promoting her music.

MUSIC

Checking in with Numero A founder of the archival record label on the music that was here

BY JAKE BITTLE

O

ne of the country’s most influential publishers of rare and passed-over music is based out of an innocuous, unmarked house on 24th Street and Marshall Boulevard, toeing the line between Little Village and Lawndale. Inside this house—and it is a house, albeit a house whose walls are lined with shelves holding thousands of records and master tapes— anywhere from three to six people sit tapping away on computers, reviewing promotional material, or sorting through boxes of 7” vinyl. It is these men and women who fulfill Numero’s self-described “dogged [and] obsessive” mission to “shed light on men and women who sang, played, recorded, and peddled—largely to shallow rewards, if any.” The hundred-plus numbered vinyl that Numero has released since its inception in the early 2000s all attempt to re-introduce these underheard recordings to the general public.

The Weekly had the opportunity to sit down with Rob Sevier, cofounder of Numero, to hear about the most exciting projects they’ve undertaken in the past year and to chat about the present state of the music industry both locally and nationally.

Rob Sevier On Ned Doheny (Numero 052): The first of this year’s releases that Sevier highlighted was a compilation of overlooked or unseen tracks from the singer and guitarist Ned Doheny, who played with Jackson Browne and Don Henley of The Eagles and wrote songs for the likes of Chaka Khan, in addition to releasing a half-dozen studio albums of his own. Sevier explained the genesis of the Doheny release, shedding some light on how many Numero releases

come to be—that is, by accident. Numero tapped Doheny for a song to be included on a compilation and found enough unreleased material in the singer’s catalog to warrant a full release that Sevier says has “a lot of hype” surrounding it. Per Sevier, Doheny is “one of those guys from that era who almost made it, but not quite”; Sevier says he values the chance to bring Ned back into the spotlight.

On the Universal Togetherness Band (Numero 057): Numero’s most exciting forthcoming release will delve into the buried tapes of an unknown Chicago group called the Universal Togetherness Band. Working on archival and legal proceedings for this project has taken Sevier and his crew most of 2014, and this project has a special place in their hearts.

UTB, Sevier says, is “a local band that we’ve really fallen in love with that never had a record of any kind.”

Numero found the group while working on another 2015 project, a digthrough of old episodes of the locally produced television show The Chicago Party. “It’s coming completely out of left field, there’s no context, nobody’s ever heard this music,” said Sevier. In attempting to describe the record, he called it, “disco but more in an Arthur Russell, sort of ESG, slightly post-punky disco sort of bag, more than the normal sound that came out of Chicago, which was more straight soul music.” Okay, sure. Other adjectives include, in order “unique,” “fun,” “noisy,” and “really fun.” Stay tuned.

On Darkscorch Canticles (Numero 048): This compilation of late-twentieth-century metal cuts—specifically

of metal with occult and mythological themes—was intended to demonstrate something that “most people already know,” which is that “there were a lot of stoned American teenagers who were influenced by Black Sabbath.” Sevier says the licensing on all the different bands took over three years to secure, but says the final product was a “really special” group of songs, packaged in Dungeons & Dragons-esque artwork.

On Kanye West: A song from Numero’s 2013 Norman Whiteside release was recently sampled by Kanye on the song “Bound 2.” Sevier confirmed that he does, indeed, get royalties from every sale of Yeezus, but he didn’t exactly have the kindest of words for Yeezy himself. “Man, that guy doesn’t write rhymes,” he said. “He writes checks.”

On the so-called “vinyl renaissance”: Sevier confirms that the record player has indeed come back into cultural currency. Even “dilettantes and casual listeners,” he said, now purchase vinyl editions of new releases. “Is it good that everyone owns a record player now? Yeah, it’s good, I mean, it’s good for us, at least.” But it’s not that simple, and there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes. “Independent labels, specifically those that put out dance music,” he says, “are the ones that kept vinyl valid the whole time,” even in the 1990s when highprofile releases stopped being issued on vinyl almost entirely. “It’s that industry that kept it alive,” says Sevier, “and it’s that industry that gets to reap some benefit now.” He denies, however, that at any point it ever seemed like vinyl was truly disappearing.

On local music: About twenty-five percent of Numero’s releases thus far, says Sevier, are local bands and artists from in and around Chicago. “A lot of it has to do with geographical proximity,” he says. “I mean, we’re here, we pick this stuff up, but there also happens to be a lot of stuff around here.

Lots of music came out of Chicago.

We’re not interested in what’s here now, either, we’re interested in what was here.”

DECEMBER 3, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

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MUSIC

Playing to Win The Musical Arts Institute brings rigorous music education to the Far South Side

BY OLIVIA MYSZKOWSKI

N

ear the corner of 93rd Street and Lafayette Avenue, nestled between St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church and a row of houses, sits an unremarkable tan brick building. Indistinguishable from its neighbors save for a modest banner hung between the front windows, the exterior of the Musical Arts Institute (MAI) does little to suggest the impressive work taking place inside.

When I stepped into MAI on the Tuesday afternoon before Thanksgiving, I was met with strains of classical viola, drifting into the living room from an upstairs studio. Despite the looming holiday weekend, the place was humming with activity—students practicing, teachers instructing, folks chatting in the kitchen. Executive Director Michael Manson seemed pleased with the action. “We’re not on break just yet,” he laughed.

For 163 students from Princeton Park, Chatham, and surrounding South Side neighborhoods, MAI, with its highly trained professional musicians and teachers, is an invaluable resource for private music instruction.

MAI employs fourteen instructors, and offers lessons in flute, clarinet, soprano, tenor, alto saxophone, trumpet, trombone, tuba, violin, viola, cello, bass, guitar, piano, voice, and percussion. The institute is also home to two string ensembles, and a children’s chorus is in the works. College preparatory music theory courses are also available, as well as twice-weekly piano classes offered free of charge for neighborhood students between ages seven and seventeen.

“By and large, kids in this area don’t have access to high-caliber music instruction,” said Manson, a long-time music educator and Grammy-nominated R&B bassist. “The premise of the Musical Arts Institute is to build up a place in this community where the environment encourages excellence.”

Manson and his partner, Lana Manson, who founded the MAI together in 2010, have several decades of music education experience. Both graduates of Northwestern’s Bienen School of Music, the Mansons understand, firsthand, the disparities in music instruction between the North and South Sides of the city.

“I started my teaching career in Evanston, and I worked there until 1998,” Manson said. “When I started working in CPS schools on the South Side, I had to recognize an extreme divide in the arts between the northern suburbs and the sites where I worked. We want to bridge that gap.”

Bolstered by a generous donation from St. James Church, which previously owned the house on Lafayette and offered the site to MAI for free, the non-profit Institute has been open to young performers on the South Side for four years. Their operation is sustained by independent donations and funding from the UPS Foundation, Springboard for the Arts, the Bank of America Foundation, a City of Chicago Artistry Grant, and a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. Manson emphasized that maintaining this funding is a challenging but necessary task, as about sixty percent of MAI’s students rely on scholarships.

“Those who can pay, do pay,” Manson said. “But we never want cost to prevent talented kids from getting a rigorous music education.”

Expectations are high for all students receiving instruction at MAI. With consistent encouragement and occasional tough love, instructors push students to realize an impressive standard of performance. Studiowide quarterly recitals held at Chicago State University mean that students are always preparing to perform for an audience.

“Ultimately, our goal is college prep,” said Manson. “We figure if these kids are having lessons with professional musicians and teachers, their chances of being competitive for college music scholarships are going way up.”

When MAI students embark on the college application process, their instructors are heavily involved.

Teachers work with students to prepare audition pieces, and Manson is quick to reach out to his contacts at music programs around the country to advocate for MAI applicants. In four years, this significant level of support has helped twenty-two graduating seniors obtain music scholarships at colleges including Fisk University, Central State University in Ohio, and Seton Hall.

Manson is adamant that parents be present for this application process, and stresses that MAI requires a substantial level of involvement from parents in their child’s music education.

“Parents are essential partners in monitoring practice, sitting through lessons, and making sure their kid

gets here,” he said. “They have to reinforce [to their child] that if MAI is going to pay for lessons, they have to perform at proficiency level.”

In addition to providing on-site instruction, the Mansons have expanded MAI’s work to reach CPS elementary schools with scant music programs. Pirie Elementary, Lenart Regional Gifted Center, and Bennett Elementary benefit from afterschool guitar, piano, voice, drumline, and choir programs taught by MAI instructors. Manson hopes this programming is just the beginning.

“When I taught in CPS, I ran into so many kids who were talented in music, but weren’t into academics.

They needed motivation to keep working, to graduate from high school, and music has the power to push them to do that,” he said.

Back at the tan brick house, nestled in the heart of the Far South Side, Manson took me upstairs to peek into the well-equipped studios.

In one, R&B music industry veteran and MAI piano instructor Tim Gant was teaching a lesson. In another, Manson’s high school-age daughter was practicing viola for a Midwest Young Artists program. In the basement, stacks of marching snares, tenor drums, and rows of thigh-height keyboards were evidence of local kids filtering into MAI to learn their craft.

“The only time I try not to come down here is when they’re all practicing the percussion,” Manson said, smiling. “It gets pretty unbelievably loud.”

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SAVEMONEY: A genealogy of Chicago’s youngest, most relentless rap collective ILLUSTRATIONS BY ELLIE MEJIA

A

s the 6 bus rolls off Lake Shore Drive into the Loop, the kid who got on at 51st and Lake Park lifts his saxophone case and prepares to exit.

He hoists his backpack up to his shoulder and pulls the bulky case from under his seat. When he hefts it under his arm, a slapped on red sticker peeks out.

As the teenager steps off into the swirl of workday pedestrians at Michigan and Balbo, the sticker is still visible as he moves down the block.

Its white block letters read “SAVEMONEY,” and the collective it signifies has blossomed from a group of friends into an artistic juggernaut that has taken the city—and the country—by storm.

SAVEMONEY is a Chicago rap crew, made most famous by such prominent members as Chance the Rapper and Vic Mensa. Their monikers include, to name but a few, the SAVEMONEY Family, the SAVEMONEY Army, and the Save Peso crew. Their interests range from video production to graphic design, artwork, and poetry—but music takes precedence above all, hip-hop specifically.

From rhymes spat in today’s street-corner cyphers to tributes to Chicago’s jazzblues-and-soul past, SAVEMONEY collectively produces a brand of hip-hop that, unlike some of its contemporaries in Chicago, is more than content to melt genres and to take big risks with production.

But this hip-hop collective is one that focuses as much on repping and looking out for its own as it does on racking up SoundCloud plays. When they were all kids, spitting verses after school and at poetry slams across the city, the members of SAVEMONEY were united more by friendship than music. Vic Mensa described the crew to the Weekly as starting off “as not a rap group at all. We all just used to go out and save money. Literally. On ‘five fingered discounts’ and ‘skipped’ purchases.”

For members of this nascent crew, messing around in thrift stores as kids and making music were linked, and always would be. In their interviews and lyrics, SAVEMONEY members are all about hoisting each other up. As Nico Segal said once, caught after a show, “SAVEMONEY, to me, is my friends, a group of all my friends.” In a moment from a 2012 Fake Shore Drive group interview, one that saw many of the core members gathered together, the discussion centered briefly on Chance and Kami de Chukwu. As the conversation spun, for a second, to the origins of the group, Chance leaned forward for emphasis and spoke into the camera: “We didn’t start off on some music shit.” Kami nodded approvingly and added, “It was just the natural selection.”

In short, if you insisted on stressing dichotomy to the group, insisted on tracing the group back to a shared musical epiphany, you’d be doing it all wrong. You’d be trying to pin down something intangible.

Despite how personal the group’s origins are, they’ve made their music accessible to the public. The trademark logo has popped up on bus stops, been splattered on lampposts, and gotten tucked into the corners of windows around the city. They have, at least here in Chicago, become a household name. Yet, aside from the notable faces like Chance and Vic, the ones featured in Complex and on Sway in the Morning, the minor players remain relatively unknown.

Here we’ve outlined the core musicians of SAVEMONEY, but with a special focus on the up-and-comers, those on the periphery of fame, who have been working steadily for years but are just beginning to break out.

If you asked members of SAVEMONEY what came first, friendship or music, they’d probably shake their head and laugh at how much you don’t understand, how much you can’t understand, because you’re not SAVEMONEY. (Jack Nuelle)

MAJOR PLAYERS Chance the Rapper @chancetherapper

Vic Mensa @VicMensa

Arguably the best and most celebrated Chicago rapper to break into the national scene since Kanye West himself, Chance became the object of worldwide adoration with 2013’s Acid Rap mixtape, which reached #63 on the Billboard Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, despite being released for free. With a deep and fittingly Kanye-esque appreciation for samples, often from dusty Chicago soul and jazz records, Chance channels an originality that doesn’t cater to the norms of the rest of his genre. Now based in Los Angeles, where he lives with 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

James Blake, Chance was the first to take SAVEMONEY national. His as-of-yet unnamed debut solo album will supposedly be released for free by the end of the year. Standout singles include “Wonderful Everyday,” his take on the theme song from children’s TV classic Arthur, and “No Better Blues,” a slow-burning, satirical list of everything he hates.

(Jack Nuelle)

¬ DECEMBER 3, 2014

The Hyde Park native honed his chops with local genre-benders Kids These Days before embarking on a solo career. He was catapulted into the spotlight by the solo mixtape INNANETAPE, which dropped in the summer of 2013, and this year’s much-acclaimed standout track “Down On My Luck.” While he sports a furious flow, lately Vic seems more preoccupied with exploring new styles of production and testing the waters as a suave dance floor crooner. He also snagged a gig in May of this year as the opening set at the UofC’s Summer Breeze concert. (Jack Nuelle)

Vic Mensa

A Family Tree

MUSIC

BREAKOUT STARS Nico Segal @DonnieTrumpet

Caleb James @calebjamesFBSM

True to his nom de guerre Donnie Trumpet, Segal provided much of the brass power behind both Vic Mensa’s Kids These Days and many other projects in which SAVEMONEY has been involved. Under the Donnie moniker, Segal released a self-titled EP last year that sees contributions from other SAVEMONEY ensemble players, including multi-instrumentalists and producers Peter Cottontale (also a SAVEMONEY loyalist) and Thaddeus Tukes. After a raucous farewell show in Chicago last January, Segal moved to Los Angeles, where he makes up part of Chance’s Social Experiment and is working on dropping his own album. He and Chance recently collaborated for the phenomenal feel-good single “Sunday Candy.”

(Jack Nuelle)

James has been rapping since his early teens but has been around music his whole life. The son of former Chicago musician and current Evanston pastor Steve Huff, James hung around his dad’s studio as a boy, and, according to a recent profile in the Reader, even had a cameo on the 2003 track “Flickin’ ” by R&B artist Avante.

His affiliation with SAVEMONEY began several years later, when he began work on his 2013 debut mixtape The Jones. The album features a solid mix of throwback beats inspired by nineties R&B, with James switching between exuberant raps and crooned interludes. SAVEMONEY receives copious verbal shout-outs throughout, and longtime collaborative producers and SAVEMONEY associates ThemPeople had a hand in most of the mixtape’s production. James’s followup mixtape, The Jones 2.0, was released this past summer. His latest track is a remix of “Pathetic” featuring Swedish producer Erik Hassle. (Jack Nuelle)

@DallyAuston

One of the only members of SAVEMONEY hailing from the West Side, Auston broke onto the Chicago hiphop scene in 2012 with his first single “Bliss,” which clocks in at a mere two minutes and sees him rapping solo over soft strings and a tinkling beat.

Auston carried this subdued production into his debut EP, The Wood, which dropped in March of 2013.

Auston also maintains a singular visual aesthetic in his videos and performance. The video for “99Cent,” the single off his 2014 EP Westside, features trademark visuals, including a neo-Disney slew of hand-drawn additions to the live action footage. Auston has a surreal flow in the tradition of Chance, but is less high-fire and more slow-burning. Westside showcases this best: in a flurry of languid, sparsely produced tracks, Auston drones and rambles about sex, drugs, his city, and everything in between. (Jack Nuelle)

Nico Segal

Dally Auston

UP-AND-COMERS Leather Corduroys @leatherchords

Kami de Chukwu

Both members of the duo Leather Corduroys, Joey Purp and Kami de Chukwu, were part of the original group of friends at Whitney Young High School that would eventually coalesce into SAVEMONEY. As Kami remembers it, “The group formed freshman year of high school. You just kind of meet and click up with people.

Eventually we put a name to our situation, and it evolved into a platform that we could use to do whatever we felt like doing, which included a lot of art-based things. I think Vic was the first one to start making music as any type of professional.”

Kami also says that he didn’t try rapping until he was around sev-

enteen, when he went to the studio a couple of times, and that he only began to take it seriously after he recorded a song called “Scrapemoney” with Preston San. The song eventually appeared on his debut mixtape, Light—and Kami found out that “a lot of people fucked with it.”

While Kami and Joey had always known they had similar influences, the duo really clicked after the two budding rappers recorded a track— “a practical joke”—called “Illuminati Slumber Party.” Ad-libbing at the end of that song, one of them hit upon the phrase “leather chords,” which eventually became the group’s official name (ambiguously, though: on Twitter the name seems to waver between Chords/Corduroys).

As Kami explains it: “We thought it was a really punk perspective, the imagery of someone on stage in leather corduroys. Why not take that shit and make it into a group?”

In April of this year, the act released a six-song mixtape titled Porno Music Volume II. One highlight is “Nightmare on Chicago Ave,” where, over a sinister, bleak beat, the two skip adeptly over a couple of verses, referencing everything from Harry Potter to Christopher Wallace. (Christian Belanger)

DECEMBER 3, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

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¬ DECEMBER 3, 2014

Brian Fresco @BrianFresco

Sterling Hayes @SterlingHayes

“Don’t put me in a box,” demands Brian Fresco. The SAVEMONEY crewmember’s trap music is what defines the rapper’s presence online and throughout the city, especially his party-oriented hits like “I Meant It” and “On My Soul,” expert companions to any sort of turning-up.

However, Fresco is right to claim he is far more than that; his songs “She’s the Type” off his mixtape Mafioso and his newest song and music video “Bae” prove that his slow, easy flow has versatility beyond trap, extending to more soul-influenced sounds. Fresco claims this variety of styles is the product of him being real; the different styles reflect how he feels in a current moment.

“Real life, never fraudulent,” says Fresco of SAVEMONEY’s essence.

“It’s our own personal experiences. I feel that’s what makes our music so good. It is all organic and real.”

“The strongest piece,” he adds, “is that there is not a strongest piece.

Everyone is still growing and maturing.” However, he doesn’t hold back about admitting that the collective is making serious moves. “We are taking over shit. We are like Voltron.

There are too many pieces that are so strong. Not one is better than the others or leads the other. We are all friends in the process. It is not a gimmick.”

Fresco says there is only one common thread: having fun. “I make you listen,” he says. “I make you vibe.

Then I turn you up.” (Jola Idowu)

A first glance at Sterling Hayes’s SoundCloud profile shows that he has a talented group of friends— Brian Fresco, Taylor Bennett, Joey Purp, Via Rosa. For Hayes, collaborating with other artists is not just another way to work or write; it is the way in which his own music thrives. He uses the SAVEMONEY collective as a rich support system, both playing his part on the team and taking advantage of the opportunity to learn from and create with his fellow players.

While his collaborations are often contingent upon his loyalty to the SAVEMONEY alliance, Hayes’s own style is what really commands attention. His work is as poised and confident as it is raw and relentless, constantly drawing upon Hayes’s own sensitivities and personal experiences for insight.

On one track off his debut EP BIGShorty, “Father’s Son,” which features Joey Purp, Hayes catalogues the personal tragedies he, his family, and his friends have faced, while also addressing violence, criminality, and excess.

Hayes explores these themes with a harsh tone appropriate for his subject, but he separates himself time and time again by maintaining control of raw aggression and turning it into a well-channeled power.

He identifies closely with the individual ailments of his life and uses his lyrics to cleverly envision himself subscribing to the same criminality and violence he denounces. Awareness of Hayes’s personal conditions and those of society is a common theme in the music. His unsparing attitude toward these conditions, however, carries with it an enduring hope for change. (Emiliano Burr di Mauro)

Brian Fresco

MUSIC

ChiArts Migrates North

A

BY JOLA IDOWU

prestigious arts high school where students endure four years of intensive training and teenage angst—where the trials of adolescence may just be punctuated with song and dance numbers—may seem a little fantastical. But for the nearly 570 students at Chicago High School for the Arts (ChiArts), performing arts high school is a reality. And for younger students who aspire to a career in the arts, admission to ChiArts’ toptier programs in writing, dance, music, theater, or visual arts is the first step to achieving their dreams.

The school, Chicago’s sole artsfocused public high school, has moved through multiple spaces in Bronzeville since its opening in 2009, but this summer ChiArts acquired a permanent location, not on the South Side, but in Ukrainian Village on the North Side. The move marks the loss of an artistic resource on the South Side, an area already hit hard by last year’s CPS closures.

“It’s hard, because there was always an arts school on the South Side for kids to have an outlet and now they have to go to North Side to get that,” said Lamar Gayles, a senior art major from Hyde Park.

The northward migration of ChiArts was a decision made by CPS.

emily st. marie

Mayor Emanuel’s office announced the news last February. Chris Smith, manager of external partnerships and communications at the school, explained that the move offers ChiArts a large permanent space for its programs, space that is vital for any strong arts program. “Arts high schools require thirty-three to fifty percent more space in facilities than the average high school. The new space in Ukrainian Village offers visual arts studios and music practice rooms for the students,” he said in a phone interview.

Gayles has seen the change. “Our arts program has expanded to a whole new conservatory area, and we have more space for our artwork and studio space to practice work in.”

Chris Molina, a student at ChiArts from Marquette Park, believes the move creates a transportation problem for students. “The building is now more north, so it has made transportation difficult for kids from the South Side, like me, to get to school,” he said, noting that this challenge did not exist when current students applied to ChiArts.

According to Smith, families are organizing to solve the new issue of transportation. “Our parents are incredible and have organized two shuttles for the South Side students,” he said. These shuttles provide an alternative to the CTA for students commuting to and from school, but parents are currently asking $100-$150 per month for the service.

Smith says that the school’s administration has yet to see how the move affects admissions statistics.

Chris Molina believes that the move has already started to impact the demographics at ChiArts, with some South Side students—many of whom are African-American or Latino—transferring out of ChiArts, though Smith was unable to confirm this. Gayles believes the move won’t deter students from auditioning for the school. “If kids are passionate about what they want to do, they will still apply.”

DECEMBER 3, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

Art Rock Rising

Tim Young and Passerines float toward a niche

BY MICHAL KRANZ

T

jason culver

im Young, lead guitarist and vocalist of the band Passerines, does not give off the air of a bandleader. Dressed in Vans, tight pants, and a gray hoodie, Young was shorter than many of his fellow performers during his show at Bucket O’ Blood Books and Records in Logan Square, and his humble demeanor suggested a desire to stay out of the spotlight. But once Young and drummer Robert Fletcher took the stage in the intimate, dimly lit venue, Young’s gentle and intricate guitar work demanded the listener’s attention, his tight vocal melodies adding to the drama of the performance.

Young’s current style is miles away from his beginnings as a punk rock guitarist at Lincoln Park High School, where he says he gained much of his initial experience by playing in a series of bands. “When I was in high school I would perform in pop punk bands, so I had a lot of experience with being on stage through that, and I got to play around Chicago at the Metro, the Subterranean, and whatnot,” he says.

It was only later that he began playing solo, usually at open mic shows in Chicago, while studying art and design at Columbia College.

14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

Young says he spent a lot of his time at Columbia learning about the engineering aspect of studio production and how to most effectively record his music, while beginning to write his own material on the side. The stage was set for his next major musical project, Passerines.

“I started performing under the moniker Passerines in early 2013, late 2012,” he says. “Over the past year I’ve worked with ten-plus musicians or so, and the band has at this point solidified to a five-piece which includes cello, viola, myself on guitar and singing, keys, and then drums.”

Listening to their recordings on Bandcamp, Passerines sound more like an art-rock orchestra of musicians, perhaps a testament to Young’s skillful production. Soft, crisp, vocals float above a sea of arpeggiated guitar chords, brass harmonies, and keyboard lines, giving the music a dream-like quality. At the Bucket O’ Blood show, this symphony was reduced to Young on vocals and guitar and Fletcher on drums, yet the same magic was present.

Young was quick to point out that many of the jazzier elements of the performance came from Fletcher’s drum work. A fan of contemporary

¬ DECEMBER 3, 2014

jazz, Young says his influences are broad: “Lately classical music has influenced me, like early 20th-century composers, mainly being Maurice Ravel and Paul Debussy, as well as some contemporary rock outfits like Dirty Projectors. Bjork is a huge influence for me personally, Joanna Newsom, stuff like that.”

Lyrically, Young’s technique relies on dressing up everyday experiences and feelings in allegory and metaphor. Love, growing up, and friendship are his primary sources of inspiration.

“It definitely is a skill to put something down and be straightforward about it. Some people really enjoy that,” he says. “But a lot of my music is a lot about color and a lot about ornamentation, and so I tend to do that when it comes to my lyrics too.

A lot of it’s decorative, but everything has a point to it.”

Though Passerines seem to know what they’re doing, they’re a young band—they’ve played fewer than twenty shows in two years, including a few at North Side Venue Constellation and the Southside Hub of Production in Hyde Park. Young says that the band has yet to figure out where they fit in relation to the larger

Chicago music scene.

“There’s a lot going on in this city, and it’s easy to get along with people, so I have a lot of friends who are in different music scenes across the city,” Young says. “But for the type of music that we make, I don’t know if it’s clicked with any certain niche or collective of people yet.” In the long term, Young envisions Passerines growing into something greater than a music group, perhaps incorporating film, theater, and dance into their repertoire. “We do what we do, and I write what I write, in order to communicate with other people,” he says.

In the immediate future, however, the Bucket O’ Blood show was Passerines’ last gig until February, when they plan to finish recording an EP to be released in early 2016. While fans await its release, they can bear the quickly approaching winter with a warm fire, some hot chocolate, and a few Passerines recordings to pass the time.

Upcoming performance dates and past recordings by Passerines can be found at passerines.bandcamp.com or at passerineschicago.com.

MUSIC

Futbol Punks ChiTown Futbol does it all

BY RACHEL SCHASTOK

O

n Saturday night, there’s a ten-foot Christmas tree lighting up the lobby of ChiTown Futbol. Packs of teenagers carrying soccer gear pour out of cars and into the stadium, a repurposed industrial building at the end of a quiet block off Cermak Avenue. The street dead-ends just past the parking area, giving way to beached shipping containers and one of the Chicago River’s freightloading channels.

There’s a league game tonight, as well as “a small birthday party, maybe fifty people,” says Noel Perez, the marketing and special events manager.

About three years ago, Benny Hernandez, a cousin of Perez and a member of several crucial Chicago punk bands including No Slogan and Population, began taking advantage of a space opposite the indoor soccer field to hold punk shows. The acoustics aren’t ideal in the large hall, but that didn’t (and still doesn’t) stop Hernandez from booking both local bands and groups on tour from Europe and Latin America.

Pilsen-based hardcore band Los

Crudos, who carved out a space for Latinos in the predominantly white world of nineties hardcore, chose ChiTown Futbol for a set of reunion shows in March and September of 2013.

Some saw it as an odd choice. They’re a household name in punk in Chicago and beyond, and fans feared the venue would fill up and they would miss their chance to see the band, which has only reunited sporadically for one-off shows since their heyday two decades ago.

Martin Sorrondeguy, lead singer of Los Crudos, gave several reasons why the band selected ChiTown Futbol for their Chicago reunion shows.

“Its size and location were two of the main reasons we chose it, also because they rented it to us at a great price,” he said. “It was also really left in our hands how we wanted to run our shows, and that was important to us,” he said over email. Sorrondeguy grew up in Pilsen, and made clear in a 2013 interview with WBEZ that ties to the neighborhood and to community-oriented DIY spaces have always determined where the band performs.

Every so often, children’s birthday

parties and punk shows are scheduled at ChiTown Futbol on the same night.

It’s easy to imagine some tension arising as the music hits ear-splitting levels, but the influx of punks from across the city into the mostly neighborhoodoriented facility seems to cause more curiosity than anything else. Parents and small children sometimes wander into the show space during a set, but they show no negative response to the deafening volume.

Indeed, there is some crossover between soccer-players and show-goers, one activity often leading to the other. “Sometimes people have never heard of our facility and come for a show, and they’re like, ‘Oh, you have soccer?’ ” Perez says.

At the ticket table, in the offices, and in the large spectating area where food is served and eaten at big cafeteria-style tables, just about every conversation takes place in Spanish.

Perez is the son of the stadium’s owner and has worked at ChiTown Futbol for about seven years, though he also spent time there before going away to college.

“At first it was strictly Spanish, but the community is changing. With second-generation people, everybody’s more bilingual now,” he explains.

“When I came back from [the University of Illinois], my Spanish was a little rough, but it came right back once I got here.”

The fluid transitions between Spanish and English speak to the complex identity of ChiTown Futbol. It’s not easy to classify it as a stadium, a venue, a stadium-venue, or anything else. “We don’t just have punk shows,” Perez says. “We’ve had EDM shows, rock shows, quinceañeras, baptisms, birthdays...” It’s a unique approach to using space. There’s something to be said for a family-operated space that brings in just as many neighborhood kids as it does internationally famous punks.

DECEMBER 3, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

MUSIC

Improvised Interruption

Joseph Clayton Mills’s experimental sound

BY RYN SEIDEWITZ

T

en years ago, Joseph Clayton Mills sat on a squeaky chair in his apartment, fresh off a leave of absence from his PhD program in English at Northwestern University. Mills was preparing to play a duet—he on the hurdy gurdy, a medieval French instrument, and his friend Jonathan Chen on the violin.

But the squeaks on his chair kept on interrupting their music. Instead of ditching the chair, though, they decided to ditch the hurdy gurdy. The result was a short improvisation with Mills playing the chair and Chen the violin.

“The thing about it was that it was stupid,” Mills recalled in our conversation at Simone’s in Pilsen, “But it was also immediately engaging for me to sit on this chair to think about the way it sounded and the sounds I was making and to not necessarily feel the same kind of pressure and judgment I had been feeling in graduate school.”

After that first improvisation, Chen invited Mills to play with a group at the Asian-American Jazz Festival. Mills immediately hit it off with the group’s drummer, Steven Hess, who subsequently invited Mills to play with his friend, Adam Sonderberg. Eventually Mills, Hess, and Sonderberg formed Haptic, a threeperson group with a rotating fourth member, from backgrounds as varied as classically trained musicians to “a power-electronics noise guy.”

Haptic is the sound of interrupted quiet. They produce textured white noise that rises and falls with each song, interrupted with fragments of percussion, melodies, and otherworldly sounds. Their music often evokes the moment of suspense before the scare in a horror movie. One track opens with a bleak, pulsating sound that is interrupted after several seconds by a loud metal screech, 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

and then trails off into silence before slowly picking back up again.

Mills describes his music as a way to focus on “that tension between communicating something clearly and the interference that occurs as a result of the material forms in which communication is embodied.” This idea shows up in The Patient, an original musical score and book based on Franz Kafka’s last writings. In his final days, Kafka was bedridden with tuberculosis and under strict orders from his doctors not to speak. He communicated by passing notes on slips of paper, which were then published in his collected letters. Mills published these final notes in a book with a musical score that largely included suggestions for improvisation.

“It was very interesting to me because it dealt already with issues of silence, issues of context, and lack of context,” Mills said. “A lot of times in classical style of performance the goal is to efface as much as possible, the idea being that the performer should attempt to convey without any mistakes or errors or introduction of the personal—it should reflect the mind of the composer. I’m interested in the things that sort of interrupt that.”

Each recording of The Patient sounds different. One is a haunting and enticing noise, interrupted at times by distorted tones and the suggestion of a low baritone voice attempting to be heard; it ends with several jarring and unexpected whizzes. Another begins in silence, with fragments of someone speaking in German, and contains groans vaguely reminiscent of a squeaking hospital bed. Mills performed the score for The Patient at the Experimental Sound Studio in Edgewater.

This November, Mills collaborated with poet and singer Marvin Tate in the first installation of KINO-

¬ DECEMBER 3, 2014

courtesy of the artist

SONIK, a project organized by the Experimental Sound Studio that pairs musicians with films from the Chicago Film Archive. Mills and Tate set out to create soundtracks for the films that would be largely, but not entirely, improvised. Tate provided a recorder with conversations and pieces of songs and poems. Mills used this as raw material with which he could layer over Tate’s live performance.

From Tate’s own voice recordings to a pair of his grandmother’s hearing aids, Mills attempts to create unconventional instruments. “I think there is also sort of a political resonance to that sort of thing,” Mills said.

It is another way he aims to foreground the things that most music typically attempts to mask—recordings of his work often include the tapping of a foot or subtle breathing. Kafka’s writings functioned as a record of his days much in the same way that Mills hopes his own music

does. His music attempts to leave a record or communicate some sort of meaning—a meaning that can be interrupted by its context and the way it is communicated.

“For example,” he said, motioning to the TV playing a Bears game in the bar we were sitting in. “The thing is that we’re here having this conversation and the TV is playing and we didn’t really choose to have the TV playing but we have to deal with that. The reason the TV is playing the football game has to do with all sorts of vast historical forces that we do not necessarily have access to but we can register the way in which they are impinging on our attempt to communicate. That is what I try and focus on in my music.” He pauses. “By foregrounding that kind of interference and the frustration of that—” A girl at another table laughs loudly and his last word is inaudible.

DECEMBER 3, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

BOOKS

At the Gates of a Plant-Based, Gluten-Free, Soy-Free Universe Heather Crosby’s cookbook caters to a select few

H

BY ZOE MAKOUL

eather Crosby’s new cookbook, YumUniverse, is visually delicious. Almost every page features pictures of well-dressed, skinny people laughing in the woods while snacking on vibrant and meticulously arranged raw fruits and vegetables. It was only after flipping through just over three hundred pages of bright photography that I began to notice the accompanying recipes and short essays.

For a cookbook, YumUniverse reads a lot like a lifestyle thesis. The first 160 pages are dedicated to the “why” and the “how” of eating plantbased, gluten-free, soy-free, and animal-product free.

“The heart of the journey is what people need to make a sustainable lifestyle change,” Crosby said. “How to shop, how to plan, how to prep the kitchen, how to deal with social situations, how to sprout, how to bake, etc.—the list goes on.”

After reading about the personal renaissance Crosby experienced following her conversion to a plant-powerful diet—she credits the diet with her recovery from a variety of chronic ailments—I found myself wanting to explore all her recipes. Imagine how much energy I would have! I’d be so fit!

And it seems like Crosby has done her research. She examines the relation of food to the human body in great detail, from the intricacies of 18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

the immune system to pH balance. It’s convincing, to say the least.

But, flipping through the recipes, I became discouraged. Even in an age where vegan restaurants are commonplace and it’s no longer shocking for someone to proclaim that they eat only caveman-fare, Crosby’s meals are dauntingly complex and restrictive.

Where would I even begin to look for nori, chickpea miso, buckwheat groats, psyllium husk powder, and hemp seeds?

Apparently, people worldwide know the answer. When I asked Crosby to describe her audience, she cited inspiration from a far-reaching online community in Canada, South Africa, Sweden, Asia, and Germany.

She says she’d like to reach “folks of all kinds—the BBQ-lovers, the veteran vegans, the new moms and dads, the single men and women, farmers— anyone who wants to eat good food and take care of themselves (and the people they love).” But she’s missing some groups—like overworked, underpaid college students and people in low-income areas. It seems like “wants to eat good food and take care of themselves” really means “has the resources to eat good food and take care of themselves.”

I started to wonder about the other groups Crosby could be overlooking. She’s a Pilsen native, so I asked her how the culture and community of Pilsen have affected her. She cited

¬ DECEMBER 3, 2014

some of her Mexican-influenced recipes, like Lentil & Quinoa Blue Corn Tacos, Creamy Chipotle Sauce, and Homemade Taco Seasoning.

However, she didn’t mention the working-class families who make up the majority of Pilsen’s population. It seems unlikely that families with kids and two working parents would have the chance to trek to from specialty stores to specialty store in search of certain ingredients, or set aside an entire day of the week for “self-care.”

Many people can’t forgo their microwaves for a high-powered blender, a cast iron skillet, stainless-steel pots and pans, and glass bakeware, cookware, and food storage, to name just a few of Crosby’s kitchen “necessities.”

YumUniverse may be a symptom of the changing face of Pilsen. The neighborhood has seen an influx of hipsters, students, and artists in the last few decades. The white population increased by about twenty per-

cent between 2000 and 2010, according to the US Census Bureau, and this change hasn’t gone unmarked. Crosby’s way of healthy eating may be a growing part of Pilsen’s culture, with markets like Belli’s Juice Bar gaining popularity, but it’s not necessarily accessible to everyone.

YumUniverse is filled with great tips, tasty recipes, and beautiful photographs, but it targets a specific type of person—young people with time to spare, who can afford to buy into an expensive and arduous lifestyle. For that purpose, the cookbook is perfect. It’s easy to read, engaging, and persuasive. But for people without the time and means to completely change their lifestyles, it’s nothing more than a vibrant collection of photographs.

Heather Crosby, YumUniverse: Infinite Possibilities for a Gluten-Free, PlantPowerful, Whole-Food Lifestyle.

BenBella Books. 320 pages.

SCREEN

Fly on the Wall

Cyrus Dowlatshahi takes his place in Chicago filmmaking

I

n a world often made too public, every door and window hides people who guard their stories from often-unforgiving society. Cyrus Dowlatshahi is one artist who has made it his priority to observe, document, and reveal the stories he thinks should be heard. A native Chicagoan hailing from Hyde Park, he captures otherwise unknown subjects on their everyday stages and presents them in film.

For the past four years, Dowlatshahi has been working on an observational documentary of the South Side entitled Takin’ Place, and last week he screened a rough cut of the film to a small audience at the Logan Center for the Arts. Given the nature of observational filmmaking, one might assume Dowlatshahi simply aims to capture people’s stories. But his work has further motivations: he attempts to comment on what a person considers “normal” and to capitalize on the assumption that one’s normality in the South Side is someone else’s strange or unfamiliar. Yet it remains uncertain how Dowlatshahi can expose these lives through observational means while maintaining the capacity to steer his audience towards the issues and questions he intends to

BY EMILIANO BURR DI MAURO

illuminate.

The documentary genre invites inquiries and criticisms of the methods of the director. One oft-debated question—and one Dowlatshahi addresses in his own work—is whether a filmmaker who desires to observe and record must also strive to remain absent from the process and end result. Dowlatshahi cites Frederick Wiseman, an acclaimed American filmmaker who adopted the “fly on the wall” approach in his career, as one of his role models in the medium. “[Wiseman] is the master of observational documentary — he’s completely separate from the lives he depicts in his work,” he says.

But despite his appreciation for Wiseman’s methods, Dowlatshahi has no reservations about interacting with his subjects, commenting on camera about the things he wants made apparent and steering conversations towards the topics he wants discussed.

“When I assemble footage in the editing process, it is sometimes strongest and most effective to include my interactions with the person on camera,” he says. He even claims that the purity many seek in observational films—the very purity he praises in the work of his role models—might not exist. “I don’t really believe there

is such a thing as just hitting record and presenting pure reality,” he says.

“An objective reality simply isn’t possible in the realm of film.”

Despite his emphasis on certain subjects in the film (gang violence, education, and family dynamics are a few of the themes discussed), Dowlatshahi does not believe his work offers concrete objectives and denies the existence of particular ambitions on his part.

“People can think I’m painting a picture with my comments or that I’m trying to color their emotions, but that doesn’t matter. It’s ultimately up to the viewer and what they want to think is relevant,” he says. This nonchalant attitude toward his own work can easily be mistaken as passivity or indifference about the objectives of the project, or lack thereof. Either way, it comes as no surprise that Dowlatshahi has some reservations about labeling himself a director.

“Real life evidently does not have a script...and in the field I don’t try to create some sort of reality when shooting,” he says. Rather, he asserts that the real decision-making in the process comes during editing. “Every editing decision is shaping the overall film, tainting it...I’m not really

orchestrating the process, just selecting things. It’s really for the viewer.

They’re giving me an hour and a half of their time, and it’s my job to captivate them.”

Dowlatshahi’s project can only find relevance if the audience sees significance in the subjects they are watching. “I work alone, and sometimes I get so into the footage and adjusting edits and swapping and reordering shots that I’ll lose that bigger-picture sense of how it will all play to an audience in the end,” he says. Yet this bigger picture, whether it is the one he hopes to convey or the one that the audience comes up with on their own, is what the film’s success will rely upon—giving the audience perhaps more responsibility than they bargained for.

In the coming months, Dowlatshahi will surely tinker away, analyzing, selecting, and perhaps somewhat directing every minute of what will culminate in a finished film. His subject of choice at the moment—the South Side of Chicago—is close to home, and the people he stares at on his computer screen are familiar faces by now. If his project succeeds, the viewers of the finished Takin’ Place might be able to say the same.

DECEMBER 3, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

At Home in the House of Atreus “Iphigenia in Aulis” at Court Theatre

BY OLIVIA STOVICEK

sonia chou

“I

am a sacker of cities, destroyer of Troy,” proclaims Iphigenia toward the end of Court Theatre’s Iphigenia in Aulis. Only sacrificing Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis will raise the winds the Greeks need to sail to Troy; to that end, her father, the Greek commander Agamemnon, has resolved to kill her. Anguished but out of options, Iphigenia (Stephanie Andrea Barron) finally and fervently accepts her fate.

The veneer of glamorous martyrdom in her words belies her death’s horror, and its futility: her murder will pave the way for the ten years of slaughter and atrocities to come. The fluidity and power with which Barron delivers the line similarly conceal the care and challenge involved in translating Euripides’ 2,400-year-old tragedy for today’s stage. In this production, what is just below the surface often has the strongest effect.

“There’s always been this interest,” says Nicholas Rudall, founding artistic director of Court Theatre 20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

and the play’s translator, “in tackling Greek tragedy not as a museum piece but as something that is entirely relevant (that awful word) and still has ways of speaking to a contemporary audience.” Enabling theatergoers to hear what Iphigenia has to say, however, is hard. The show throws up myriad hurdles to a successful performance, compounded by the fact that Court is putting on Iphigenia as the first in a three-year cycle of Greek tragedies, all by different playwrights, that tells the story of the House of Atreus, Agamemnon’s family.

“The Greek audience would have known instinctively that the main characters on stage are all going to die,” explains Rudall. “So [at the end] there’s all this great hope of we’ll sail off, and we’ll conquer Troy, but Agamemnon will die, Clytemnestra will die—she will die by the hands of the baby she is holding in her arms at the end, Orestes—and Iphigenia will die in vain.” Context makes up a significant part of Iphigenia’s potency;

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dramatic irony lends force to many of the most painful lines.

“Euripides wrote [Iphigenia] at the very end of the Peloponnesian War,” says Rudall, “that is, after thirty years of civil war. Athens is dying.

Not only is Athens dying, but people are dying, needlessly as they do in civil wars.” 406 B.C. Greeks would consider literal human sacrifice no less shocking than we do: Euripedes uses the intensely personal pain of a single family as a manifestation of the greater societal problems that the play asks us to confront: war and killing, and the heedlessness of their proponents in their lust for glory and revenge.

As the archetypal family, the actors must make the audience feel these questions’ power, and the superb cast rises to the challenge. Mark L. Montgomery is a beautifully tense Agamemnon, and Sandra Marquez transforms Clytemnestra’s motherly excitement for her daughter’s marriage to hatred for her husband such that she maintains her humanity and

ultimate relatability, effectively drawing out Euripides’ commentary on the consequences of violence.

But it is Barron, more than anyone else, who drives home the play’s indictment of gung-ho aggression and militarism. She emphasizes her youth and innocence, and her prodigious faith in her father, without rendering herself infantile. Her poise and courage as she strides to her death come across as the result of an idealism misguided and exploited, a heroism she ultimately finds false. As Rudall describes it, “At the end, Iphigenia says, ‘Yeah! Let’s go,’ and she is drawn into the irony of ‘Greeks must be free’ at a time when the opposite was happening. It’s as if this play were written in the middle of the Vietnam War—that is, this is slaughter, everywhere, sacrifice everywhere, and no one is getting it.”

Clytemnestra and Iphigenia are not the only women in the play, even if the original Greek cast would have been all-male: the female cho-

STAGE

rus stands out as one of the most intriguing parts of the production, and one of the most delicate; it’s easy to imagine how a director might stumble over how to incorporate an element so foreign to contemporary theater.

Impressively, the director, Charles Newell (also Court’s artistic director), manages to make the chorus feel like a natural, integral part of the play. Their commentary on the action draws out the pathos of each scene, and the interludes they have to themselves are captivating spectacles, adorned with ritualistic movements and sung phrases.

Part of what makes this chorus so effective is Scott Davis’s set. Split into two levels of worn-looking wooden beams, brick walls, and industrial accents, it evokes the deck of a ship, or a dingy dockyard, complete with ropes and cleats. But the division, mimicking somewhat the orchestra of the Athenian theater, also provides the chorus with the perfect place to stay throughout the show, letting them take on more or less prominence as needed. And it provides plenty of corners for lighting designer John Culbert to take advantage of: his tenebrous lighting hems the viewer in, trapping them just as the characters are.

C

redit for the vivid effect of Iphigenia must also be given to Rudall himself, and his modern translation. To be performed effectively, a translation for performance must be profoundly different from the sort of literal text useful in the classroom, while still carrying the original meanings. “It’s always the same aesthetic,” Rudall says of his work. “Don’t sound like a translation: allow contemporary American actors to speak the language onstage.” His fluid, modern-sounding translation (“It was contemporary Greek—it’s ridiculous to translate it as though it were ancient,” he says) forms the foundation for the production.

Rudall has been translating for decades; the first translations he did, he says, were to avoid royalties in Court Theatre’s early years, but now he has published over twenty translations of plays in languages including not just Ancient Greek but also

French, German, and Norwegian.

Still, that does not mean his task is easy. “I pride myself on never omitting anything,” Rudall explains, “but when a Greek paragraph gives you eighteen different ideas in adjectives, adverbs, verbs, I try to make sure that all of them are there intact, but not necessarily literally; you wouldn’t understand it. So I might make this adjective into a sentence, because my job is to make the language not sound like a translation.”

As if it weren’t enough to bring together all these details to make

prominence after the Athenian tradition had withered away. The endings of plays were often changed, just as those of Shakespeare were years later, and Iphigenia was no exception: in the suspect version we have, a messenger comes in to crow to Clytemnestra that Iphigenia didn’t really die but that the gods took her to live among them and replaced her with a deer. It’s dissonant, frustrating as a reader or viewer.

Rudall goes so far as to call it ridiculous, noting that it leaves Agamemnon and Clytemnestra’s relationship in limbo, and the pair thrilled about

Athens is dying. Not only is Athens dying, but people are dying, needlessly as they do in civil wars.

Iphigenia in Aulis speak to us the way it can and should, Court’s project raises the bar even higher by uniting it with Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Sophocles’ Electra. The choice to turn these plays into a novel trilogy is a daring, perhaps unprecedented one, and it amplifies the difficulties of putting on a Greek tragedy—presenting a particularly thorny problem in translation.

“Translating Aeschylus in a way that the Agamemnon is a follow-on from this play [Iphigenia in Aulis] is in fact a fascinating challenge, because they don’t write in the same style,” Rudall observes. “Your question is, do you adapt the translation so that they follow in some kind of aesthetic continuum, or are you true to a style which is, in Aeschylus’s case, quite obscure, very often, in the poetry. I don’t know yet—I’m in the middle of it!”

But the needs of the trilogy manifest themselves in other ways, too—in fact, they even changed Iphigenia’s ending. The play’s text has been significantly distorted in places in the 2,400-odd years since its original performance, bowdlerized by Greek actors working in the entirely different theatrical tradition that gained

the coming war. Though his original translation years ago left the text as it stood, the production stirred up old questions. “For us to do a trilogy,” he said, “it had to be absolutely clear that he killed his daughter. It has to end with the death.”

The spurious portion had to go, but how to authentically conclude?

The part of the play before the inter-

polated section had its own problems; Iphigenia delivers her “I am a sacker of cities” line only to have her speech repeated almost word-for-word by the chorus lines later. Typically, one of these speeches is considered a later addition, but an article in the journal Classical Philology gave Rudall the idea that both speeches were part of the original ending of the play, together forming an antiphonal exchange, a ritualistic back-and-forth between the chorus and Iphigenia.

Working from there, he found a new conclusion. “All the words are still there,” Rudall said. “I haven’t cheated at all. I’ve just rearranged them for a theatrical ending, which is that she has decided to die, and she goes to her death singing and with antiphonal singing by the chorus, and the only thing I’ve added comes directly out of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, where the chorus describes her death...So now we have an ending that allows us to do the Agamemnon.”

The new text, and the production it forms the foundation for, creates a gripping theatrical experience, evocative in ways that many stagings of Greek tragedies fail to be.

“It’s always a challenge to do these plays,” Rudall says, “because their format is seemingly alien, with choruses and long speeches and all that. But the beautiful thing is that they leap off the stage as being contemporary once you see them; the people are infinitely recognizable.”

DECEMBER 3, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

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¬ DECEMBER 3, 2014

POLITICS

The Union Candidate for the Post-Industrial Ward School counselor Susan Garza runs for Alderman in the 10th Ward

O

n February 24, Susan Garza hopes to replace John Pope as the Alderman of the 10th Ward on the Far Southeast Side of Chicago. The vocal and animated fifty-four-year-old calls to mind a progressive from a different era; she talks of how her father, a labor leader born in South Chicago who is “still fighting the good fight,” would “wake us up in the mornings and take us to the mill gates” to teach his children the significance of the local industry.

The steel mills are no longer around, a devastating reality in the former manufacturing neighborhood, but organized labor remains.

Garza is a counselor at Jane Addams Elementary School and was an outspoken advocate of bargaining rights during the 2011 teachers strike; as the South Side area vice president of the Chicago Teachers’ Union, she is in charge of sixtynine schools. She has been endorsed by the CTU, by mayoral candidate Jesús “Chuy” Garcia, and by United Steelworkers. Her tone toward Rahm Emanuel verges on outright hostility and her proposed policies are sharply at odds with those of City Hall.

“With the exception of maybe ten, maybe a handful,” said Garza, “the Aldermen are all rubber stamps and they do what Rahm Emanuel says.” Garza staunchly opposes the cuts Emanuel has made to Chicago’s public schools and public pensions, arguing that billions could be generated through a “LaSalle Street Tax”—a tax on futures and derivative transactions conducted in Chicago financial markets. Emanuel has called such a tax illegal and warned that it would be counterproductive for the

BY MAX BLOOM local economy, discouraging financial firms from operating in the city.

Another point of contention centers on the Board of Education: Garza supports transforming the school board to an elected body, rather than one appointed by the mayor as it is now. Emanuel believes such a transformation would politicize the school board.

But Garza’s platform is also a local one. She knows the 10th Ward well—she lives in Hegewisch and works on the East Side, where she grew up; her father grew up in South Chicago, her husband in South Deering. She readily admits that there are problems on the Far Southeast Side of Chicago. “We’ve always been known as an industrial zone,” said Garza, “but you can’t even buy a book in our neighborhood. We don’t have a coffee shop.”

There’s a strong sense in neighborhoods like East Side and South Chicago that the residents have been cut off from the economic and political workings of the larger city. “A lot of people have never been to this part of Chicago—it’s a great neighborhood,” Garza said. But, then, like other residents interviewed, she qualified this statement. “When the mill closed down, it kind of became a different neighborhood.”

The 10th Ward lies on the very edge of Chicago. From the taquerías and dollar stores at 106th Street and Ewing Avenue on the East Side, a ten-block walk brings you to State Line Avenue. Here, as the city gives way to broad trash-strewn fields of vacant land and rail tracks, Illinois becomes Indiana.

To the north, past the wan shops

and narrow frame houses of the East Side, Ewing crosses the Calumet River at the border of South Chicago.

Wires and cables crisscross the skyline ten stories high, cranes dangle immobile over half-covered pyramids of salt, metal tanks, and squat factory buildings at whose facades laps the toxic Calumet River. To the south, Ewing leads past blocks of identical postwar ranch houses, garden ornaments (behold the wire reindeer, surveying with insentient eyes its lifeless domain), and waving American flags.

It’s a panorama of middle-class life that is surreal both for its perfect facsimile of middle-class Midwestern suburbia and its near-total emptiness. No matter the cardinal direction chosen, the traces of human life are subtle: occasional cars rush down Ewing, a few scattered pedestrians duck into businesses or wait silently at bus stops.

The 10th Ward is a diverse collection of neighborhoods—Hegewisch is largely white, the East Side is primarily Latino, South Chicago and South Deering are predominately African American. Garza’s son, Ryan, drove me through the neighborhoods, describing them as segregated both physically—the Calumet River and a network of rail tracks partition this corner of the city—and economically.

“In Hegewisch, on the South Side, you’ll find million-dollar mansions,” said Ryan. “But by here, it’s all free and reduced lunch.” He gestured at a strip of shuttered storefronts, vacant lots, and fast-food outlets on Commercial Avenue in South Chicago.

Both of Ryan’s grandparents grew up here, and he has memories of a time when the shops were open and

the street was vibrant. But the steel mills closed (the blast furnaces are still visible as crumbling brick ramparts in a weedy wasteland alongside Harbor Avenue) and the area lost its raison d’être. It’s the same story in neighborhood after neighborhood: in Jeffrey Manor, a gaseous chemical smell wafted above the overgrown vacant lots and housing projects from nearby factories; in South Deering, Ryan pointed out deposits of petroleum coke, a byproduct of the refining process that regularly blows in toxic dust clouds over the southern parts of the 10th Ward.

Susan Garza speaks of transforming these neighborhoods. She argues that she can “use tax increments to give people incentive to bring their business here—businesses that can thrive and do well.” She intends to push for a Community Benefits Agreement with the proposed Lakeside Development that would ensure that local labor is employed and that the development contains affordable housing. She intends to ban the production and storage of petcoke altogether—her son argues that Alderman John Pope’s talk of cracking down on petcoke is mere lip service, given that Pope receives campaign donations totaling at least $9,900 from KCBX Terminals and Beemsterboer Slag, the two major firms responsible for petcoke storage.

Garza also wants to transform the political atmosphere. Her platform would include local involvement in the budgetary process and the return of precinct captains who had served as a go-between for local interests and the Board of Aldermen.

The political history of the 10th Ward is notorious for its power-grabbing aldermen: Edward “Fast Eddie” Vrdolyak represented this neighborhood from 1971 to 1987, when he led the opposition to Mayor Harold Washington. In 2007 he was indicted on eight charges including bribery, mail fraud, and wire fraud. Garza, on the other hand, believes in decentralization: “This is a ward that needs to be run by the people here,” she said.

“Some of the best people I’ve ever met in my life have come out of the 10th Ward.”

DECEMBER 3, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 23

Breaking the Chain Chatham minister Terry Shanks recalls his past AS TOLD TO CLYDE SCHWAB

T

erry Shanks leaned back in his chair and chuckled while swarms of shrieking children ran past his office to gym class. As we returned to his story, told in his firm but earnest voice, Shanks beamed with a cheerful smile. Currently in his role as a part-time locker room attendant for the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, Shanks also works as a minister with the United Praise Ministry, a church in Chatham. Shanks was born in 1957 and lived between 47th and 43rd in what he calls “a rough little area.” He now lives with his wife Mable Shanks—his four grown children have moved out.

I am from the South Side of Chicago and I have always lived here. I had two brothers and three sisters but I was the oldest, so I always was the one to take care of them and make sure they were okay. If there was a problem with somebody in a neighborhood like that you had to be tough, because if somebody bothered your family, or bothered you, you had to address the issue.

When I was younger, my dad used to take us to a regular church, but I started going off into my own understanding of religion. It started off with a Muslim understanding, because back in the day, it was Elijah Muhammad and Farrakhan, that taught you selfdiscipline, how to eat, how to dress, how to take care of yourself. I would see these guys with suits on, bow ties on and stuff like that, so I felt that hey, religion may not be that bad. But as time went on, I started drifting away.

I really wasn’t into religion because I had the street life consume me. After the Million Man March [in 1995], which I was a part of, my thinking started changing, and I started thinking that it wasn’t for me.

My job as a minister started when I got what you call “sober,” because once I did, I got my thinking pattern back, where I started to realize and started to understand what the reality of the world is. I started to think 24 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

about different ways of contributing.

For a long time I was a barber, which is when I started getting crazy. I left the barbershop and got another job, because at the barbershop all we did was cut hair, drink, and party and I had got caught up in a lot of that stuff.

I was drinking every day, using substances. After you get so old, where you start taking a look at life, I realized I had to go. I spent a good amount of time wasting time, doing stuff that young guys do. Now I’m getting close to twenty-three years of what they call “uninterrupted clean time.”

A lot of guys I started out with went to drinking, went to hanging out, and went to craziness, and a lot of them are dead. We still get together, we still laugh and enjoy ourselves, but that’s what brought me to the ministry. Now I want to contribute and now I want to do something to help somebody else.

Did you ever have any gang affiliations?

I kind of ducked it, but I still had to go through the neighborhoods that were gang affiliated. Back then, there were the Blackstone Rangers and the Disciples. I had my group of guys that I was with, and we didn’t take no stuff.

My dad was strict, and he wouldn’t let us affiliate with gang members, but

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we couldn’t help it because we went to school with them; they were in our neighborhood.

It’s changed a whole lot because right now you have more innocent people getting hurt because of the stupidity of people—of kids having access to guns. When I was growing up, you had to be good with your hands. I had fights with some tough guys, but I knew how to use my hands. Once you fought a tough guy, the rest of them gave you respect. Every day on the news now, you hear about shootings.

What was your family like growing up?

My father was something else. He liked to drink too, and I think I learned a bunch of bad habits from him. We were pretty close, and I think the devastation probably started when him and my mother separated.

I think that’s what really started me into a lot of different behaviors. When he left, it was a big responsibility on me as an older brother. It was an overwhelming feeling when you know that you’ve got to protect people instead of people protecting you. My mother had to teach me how to make bills, and lots of different things, but I really wasn’t into it because I wanted to do my thing.

lexi drexelius

We had a serious confrontation one time, but after that I think he stopped drinking. I said some things because I was under the influence, and a lot of things that I was holding in as a young man came out in one day. This had to have happened probably around the eighties, when I really started to take a look at my life. We still had a good relationship. At one point he started trying to see my mom again. At that point he found out he made a big mistake when he left my mom, and we talked about it and we started working a lot of things out.

One day he didn’t show up for work and I hadn’t seen him in a couple days, because he usually came by and I would cut his hair. My little brother called me and told me that he wasn’t at work. So I go over and see what’s going on. I kept saying, “This guy don’t miss no work, this guy don’t sleep late like this, something’s wrong.” They called the janitor in his building and we knocked but we didn’t get a response, When we got in he was laying back in a recliner, relaxed. But I knew he wasn’t sleeping and I could really feel the vibe. He was deceased. It was devastating for me, the oldest son, to go in and find him in that state. It was something I thought I would never experience, and if anything was an excuse for me to go back and get a drink, that would have been it.

INTERVIEW He used to talk like, “I could have got a house for you guys, or we could have had a beautiful family.” He talked about that after everything was over, but he never got a chance to do some of the things he thought about.

It’s like breaking a chain. My wife came from a big family too, and most of her family had different problems in their background, but me and my wife are trying to break a chain, so we don’t always have that stereotype of going to jail, selling drugs. That type of behavior should be broke going down the line.

What about your wife? When did you meet her?

I met my wife back in 1976 when she was on her way to a prom. I think I might have been like between nineteen and twenty years old. We had grown up around each other. She was pretty, and I saw her so we started

talking. I would have never thought we would be together this long but my wife has stuck in there with me through some bad times.

She supported me when I was confused and when I didn’t have no direction and I would take it out on her, I would act a certain way toward her, and she still hung in there. I was following the same pattern my dad followed, but she hung in there with me, and she always wanted the best for me and my family, and I’m proud to have her as my wife.

What are your plans for the future?

I want to keep working for the Lord Jesus Christ, saving souls, and spend the rest of my life with my family and wife, till death do us part. I’m not looking to win a lottery, I’m a rich man already. Since my life changed, I’ve been a millionaire in spirit and in truth. I’m just enjoying that God gave me a second chance to live.

DECEMBER 3, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 25

Playing at Power

Carlos Matallana gamifies Chicago in “The Anger Games”

northside college prep students

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¬ DECEMBER 3, 2014

BY STEPHEN URCHICK

o how does that feel, to be in a position of power like that?”

The young woman in the frame tossed her head at the invisible interviewer.

Artist Carlos Matallana and I were sifting through raw, man-on-thestreet footage from the first beta run of his large-scale roleplaying simulation, “The Anger Games.” (“This is an interesting interview,” Matallana confided with a grin.)

“It feels very good,” the woman on-screen said. “I’m not drunk on power, but I’m not not drunk on power.” She bolted from the shot, detaining a passing player. “Oh—! Hi, you’re in my territory—!”

Matallana laughed. “I really like that phrase, I think.” He wound back the scene. In the same breath, the power-drunk high schooler equivocated about her newfound influence while hitting up a wayward player for additional rent revenues.

“They held most of the properties,” Matallana elaborated. “Between the three of them. So, they basically

started running the city!”

“The Anger Games” belongs to Matallana’s ongoing “Manual of Violence” project—a comic book on youth violence, due out next spring. A teacher and artist who recently moved from Pilsen to Roscoe Village, Matallana seeks to identify and discuss the root causes of urban conflict. Toward that end, he developed the “The Anger Games” as a model of power relations in Chicago at the scale of a CPS gymnasium. It’s a twenty-four to thirtytwo-player game, a live-action Monopoly blended with Diplomacy-esque backstabbery and overlaid with some hometown social philosophy.

The “Games” were set on a largescale hexagonal grid laid out on the floor, divided into roughly eleven districts of three to four tiles each, with a central island for an elected mayor and his or her entourage. Players start with just a little cash, venturing onto the board with the personal incentive to avoid bankruptcy at the hands of social services and other players—and to eventually make others work for them.

GAMES First conducted over a four-hour playtest at Northside College Prep, “The Anger Games” was a culminating feature of Matallana’s research phase for the “Manual of Violence.” It was a chance for him to try out what he had gleaned from an eclectic reading list of everything from mass-market anger-management paperbacks to scholarly research on the pathology of aggression to the personal statements of community peace-builders and local teachers.

“I’m trying to put together different disciplines,” said Matallana, “that are maybe touching the same ground, but are not talking to each other.” It proved important to him that people— especially young people—attempt to explore the fundamental forces that shape their lives as citizens. “They need to understand what are the different phenomena that happen in the city,” he said.

Matallana initially distilled his groundwork into a conceptual diagram, trying to lay out the core components of any society. It looks a lot like a compass. Thinking about basic needs and the systems of control that have evolved to make gains in those needs, Matallana identifies, from north clockwise, four cardinal directions: government, culture, family, and social structures. He then introduces four ordinal directions, from north clockwise: education, housing, health, and finance. An elastic “spirituality”—the productive and emotional energy communities invest in these areas—hangs like Silly String on the points of the compass. Different societies map onto these directions with unique, spiderweb patterns, distending or shrinking each element. Social democracies are long, east-west pancakes; autocracies bunch towards the north.

An anthropologist, probably, would gripe at the ambiguity of Matallana’s terms (“social structures”), but the diagrams at which he gestured— tacked up on his walls—signaled that the work of gamifying a place like Chicago had already begun. Folks who’ve assigned skill points to a tabletop player-character or invested time in unlocking paths down a strategy game’s technology tree might warm up to his thinking pretty quickly.

“N

ow, going back to the game,” urged Matallana.

“How can we explain that to teens? And, in a more—I don’t know if ‘joyful,’ but—sophisticated way.”

He initially lamented the fact that it’s sometimes hard to hold onto young people’s attention, but found a solution in interactivity. “Thanks to my kids, I learned that the best way is in a game form,” he said.

A board game, however, wouldn’t have done the trick. Matallana wanted to engage more than six or eight people with every play-through. Furthermore, he had problems with perception.

“On a board—on a table—you can see the other players’ movements!”

By scaling up, he achieved the opaque bustle of a true-to-life city.

“You can see people moving, but you can’t see what they’re doing, where they’re moving to, what their intentions are.” Matallana had made perceptiveness—a player’s ability to work

northside college prep students

the grapevine and know the state of play—a resource, in addition to the fake money in their hand.

During the run, a bevy of referees each shadowed four players at a time, approaching them to draw cards that dictated how many tiles, forward or backward, a single player could move.

The circulation of referees effectively made travel around the board turnbased. Matallana’s ordinal directions of education, housing, health, and finance found space on the board as pillars, each bearing a box of chance cards. Players who passed the pillars drew prompts that might ask them to fundraise for a new library, find a soulmate, or obtain a one-time reimbursement on account of contaminated water in their district. Four governmental “directors” managed the transactions for these cards, acting like the bank in a traditional Monopoly game.

“You start finding out the rules by playing,” explained Matallana. He

gave new players only a simple pitch: “You can become the wealthiest, healthiest, and savviest player of the game.” Referees prevented infractions and enforced the requirements on the chance cards, only offering explanations if they were asked for them. Matallana was thrilled the players took them to task, and put pressure on the rules of the game.

“We had some players that were questioning the cards!” He laughed.

“They are actually questioning every segment of the game, which is great!”

Players had no trouble figuring out that they could hire other players to gather the money generated by the “property” available for purchase on each hexagonal tile. Holding property obligated visitors on that tile to pay the deed-holder a set amount, or else. Real estate magnates arose, with small cohorts of wage-laboring players, themselves content to earn their share of lucrative rents.

However, the players who owned the tiles nearest the pillars could draw the greatest number of chance cards— able to travel past education, housing, health, or finance at no charge.

As often as the pillars hit players up for money, they also furnished the lone opportunities to obtain enduring modifiers (become a doctor, enter into a degree program) or to challenge the incumbent district representatives and mayors and step onto the political scene. The three largest landholders enjoyed the greatest mobility, the greatest access to the pillars, and ultimately managed to divide the mayoralty into a triumvirate.

Matallana leaned in over his laptop and played back another interview to demonstrate.

“So, we know you’re a new resident, but how has it been—getting acclimated to the space?”

“I’ve interacted with the mayor a couple of times. I just seem to be going back and forth over his property. But he’s given me a job, so I feel like he’s a pretty generous man.”

“Would you feel you’re going back and forth, though?”

“I’m stuck. I’m pretty stuck!”

“Is this a problem you wish the mayor would address?”

“I’m not sure it’s the mayor’s fault.”

She shifted her weight, looking casually to her other side. “I think it’s just the way of life here.”

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BOOKS

There Are More than Just Children Here A review of Mark Dostert’s Up in Here

BY MEAGHAN MURPHY

W

ith Up in Here: Jailing Kids on Chicago’s Other Side, Mark Dostert returns to the detention center where he once volunteered as a student chaplain. Then, interpreting scripture for a cluster of quiet, studious residents came with a sense of duty and idealism. That idealism evaporates his first day on the job. As Dostert quickly realizes, the responsibilities of a “children’s attendant” are those of a jailor.

He seems surprised and even offended by every detail of his job. He expected to serve as a kind of cell block counselor, mentoring young boys over games of chess on the value of impulse control while a real guard stood silently in the background. He is appalled at the way Audy Home supervisors run their show: “Children sanitizes the more accurate labels—juveniles or inmates—that we’re instructed not to call the boys…Sleeping in a room must not scar a boy’s soul compared to sleeping in a cell. Glancing into the rectangular brick-walled chambers, hardly wider than my arms’ span, I can’t deny that they are cells, damn it.

And in cells live inmates.”

By his own admission, Mark Dostert is an outsider at the Cook County Department of Corrections.

A native of suburban Dallas, and a graduate of the Moody Bible Institute with a Masters in early modern European history from the University of North Texas, Dostert was not an obvious choice for the “children’s attendant” position at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center.

Up in Here, which chronicles the year he spent working at the Audy Home (the detention center’s original and lingering moniker) in the late 1990s, is aware of this mismatch.

In the book, Dostert positions himself as the everyman’s social anthropologist. His allusions to “Chicago’s other side,” and references to Alex Kotlowitz (journalist and author of There Are No Children Here) and William Julius Wilson (famed sociologist of both University of Chicago and Harvard University) do not go unnoticed. But Dostert is the central character in his story, and this ultimately serves to distract the reader.

Dostert chalks up his own ineffectiveness as an attendant to the fact that he is white. The kids give him a hard time. He’s an outsider, a “newjack.”

But the reader is left wondering: if Dostert’s outsider status disqualifies him from being a good Audy Home attendant, why should it qualify him to write a book on the subject?

Up in Here hits its narrative stride when it shows the interactions between Dostert and the other attendants, or between him and the residents themselves. In an early chapter, an attendant engages Dostert in a discussion on the spiritual origins of racism, encompassing his belief that Eden was found in Africa; Ethiopians are the original Israelites, the people of the Hebrew nation. Dostert listens, transfixed, as the attendant explains, “We’re hated because we’re God’s chosen. See D., the white man took more than our gold and diamonds. He took our identity. We don’t know who we are. If we did, there wouldn’t be so many black kids locked up in this building.”

It’s a compelling passage. Dostert hears Edison out and, in doing so, deepens the character of Attendant Edison. Not just a gruff rule-follower or a renegade rule-breaker (the two molds Dostert uses for his colleagues),

Edison has spiritual beliefs and political philosophies. Unfortunately, this early chapter is the book’s high point. The rest of the book devotes too much time to the procedural details of Dostert’s daily “eight hours” at the Audy Home. Too little attention is given to any subject other than Dostert himself.

Dostert tries—through vignette scenes of card games and confinement, medical transfers and recreation hour—to humanize the characters that cross his path. But some combination of his admittedly crushed idealism and his rigidly chronological style of writing prevents that human element from coming through. Up in Here is uncomfortably focused on Dostert’s own humiliation, “Retaining my dignity by not taking shit from children...now seems my only possible mission here.”

Dostert lasts a year on the job before he decides that he was never meant to succeed in the Audy Home— for success would entail molding to Cook County’s masculine ideal of a rule-enforcing, detached, and everappropriate attendant. “The Audy Home goads us to such—wishing bad upon kids who have already had more bad happen to them than the rest of us combined. I’m not Mother Teresa after all,” he writes.

More than that, Dostert is no social scientist, no William Julius Wilson. He has little to offer in the way of structural critique. The Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center is the largest of its kind.

It is under constant fire for overcrowding, mistreatment of residents, lack of transparency, and general conditions that violate both federal code and basic common sense. Dostert pays some attention to the administrative shuffle

and passes judgment on the attendants he sees as “too rough” with the kids.

But he comes short of a cogent, critical look at the detention system itself.

Where the book shies away from structural critique, it should make up for it in unlocking characters., to allow the Chicago of “conventions, parades and postcards” to begin to see the Chicago that jails kids, the Chicago that Dostert considers “the other side.”

To be an effective attendant, Dostert doesn’t have to be Mother Teresa. To be an effective armchair sociologist, he doesn’t even have to be William Julius Wilson. But for an effective book, Dostert would need to offer a take on his surroundings that reached beyond his immediate experience, something Up in Here barely achieves.

Mark Dostert, Up in Here: Jailing Kids on Chicago’s Other Side. University of Iowa Press. 254 pages.

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BULLETIN 11th Ward TIF Illumination In Chicago, over $400 million of real estate taxes are redirected to tax increment financing (TIF), a method of funding development projects that is commonly used across the city. The pitch for TIF goes like this: once a TIF district’s property tax revenues exceed a certain limit, the revenue over the limit is redirected towards a development project. In a number of cases, the TIF funds go to businesses, in which case, the district gains economic activity at the expense, opponents say, of city services. The TIF Illumination Project will discuss the 11th Ward TIF this Thursday, continuing an effort that has brought the project to twenty-nine wards so far. The event is co-hosted by community activist and TIF critic Maureen Sullivan, who is running for 11th Ward

alderman against Patrick Daley Thompson, a rising member of the Daley clan. Community Room of First Trinity Lutheran Church, 643 W. 31st St. Thursday, December 4, 7pm-9pm. tifreports.com/2014/11/22/11thward (Adam Thorp)

Steppin’ for Justice Southside Together Organizing for Power (STOP) is having its fourth annual benefit, Steppin’ for Justice.

STOP is a community-based organization that fights to protect the human rights of South Side residents, and is behind the campaign for a trauma center at the UofC Medical Center. STOP also runs programs directed at youth, with an emphasis on leadership development for those affected by displacement, incarceration, and criminalization. All funds raised

by Steppin’ for Justice will support programs such as Fearless Leading by the Youth (FLY). Tres Banquet

Hall, 1528 E. 63rd St. Friday, December 5, 9pm-2am. stopchicago.org (Denise Parker)

Equity and Urban School Improvement Education reform efforts, urban school reform, and community involvement in schools are among the topics to be discussed at an event co-hosted by the Chicago Community Trust and Kenwood Academy.

Event organizers at Generation All, created by the Chicago Community Trust as an initiative to create quality public high schools, promise an opportunity to “share your perspective on how we can move forward as Chicagoans in shaping the future of our public education system.” Come to Kenwood Academy for a chance to voice your ideas for education.

Kenwood Academy High School, 5015 S. Blackstone Ave. December 3, 6pm-7:30pm. Free, RSVP recommended.

(312)616-8000. (Clyde Schwab)

STAGE & SCREEN Gli Ultimi (The Last Ones) Screening On December 5, allow yourself to be transported— with no harm done to your bank account—from Logan Screening Room 201 to 1930s Udine, a city in northeastern Italy. Gli Ultimi (“The Last Ones”), an Italian film first released in 1963, received high praise from the likes of Italian artists Pier Paolo Pasolini and Giuseppe Ungaretti for its simple yet “profoundly poetic” portrait of a young shepherd living in an impoverished Italy. Through a lens of post-neorealism, directors Vito Pandolfi and David Maria Turoldo capture on screen their country’s historical struggle to reconcile progress and tradition.

Despite acclaim from the film community, the film found little commercial success; the few remaining copies were discarded or left to deteriorate until 1991, when a case was made for the film’s restoration. Gli Ultimi, now restored, will finally get its long overdue U.S. premiere just south of the Midway. The screening will be followed by a discussion with archivist Luca Giuliani. Logan Center, 915 E. 60th St. Friday, December 5, 7pm. Free. (773)702-8596. arts.uchicago. edu (Emeline Posner)

KINOSONIK #2 Olivia Block, a critically acclaimed electroacoustic composer and artist, and Tomeka Reid, Chicagobased classical and jazz cellist who doubles as an active jazz organizer and educator, are uniting to present Black Cinema House’s second installment of KINOSONIK. As at the previous event, featured artists Joseph Clayton Mills and Marvin Tate, the artist pair will study four films selected from the Chicago Film Archives and provide live scores to accompany them. The films range from a single shot of a mining explosion shot by the Reserve Mining Company to an educational film by Encyclopedia Britannica about the forces that cause erosion on Earth. Join them for yet another interesting exploration in film and music. Black Cinema House, 7200 S. Kimbark Ave. Sunday, December 7, 4pm. RSVP recommended. blackcinemahouse.org (Clyde Schwab)

Christmas on the Air

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This year, you don’t have to just settle for The Nutcracker, A Christmas Carol, or even those questionable Santa Clause movies starring Tim Allen to get in the holiday spirit. Find a new holiday classic in the Midwest premiere of Christmas on the Air, now playing every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday through December 28 at Provision Theater. The music and stories are the ones you remember from your childhood, but this time around they will be presented on a different stage. In this alternative holiday-season carol, you’ll meet Yolanda and Percival B. Frank, two radio show hosts doing their annual Christmas broadcast. Following their on-air broadcast and on-stage romance, the viewers are transformed into a live studio audience in the heyday of radio and become witnesses to the timeless spirit of Christmas

magic. Just sit back and prepare yourself for those sweet sounds and sights that will surely bring you those warm and fuzzy feelings this holiday season.

Provision Theater, 1001 W. Roosevelt Rd. Through December 28. Fridays and Saturdays, 8pm; Sundays, 3pm. $28. Student, senior, and group discounts available.

(312)455-0066. provisiontheater.org (Emiliano Burr di Mauro)

Plaid Tidings: A Forever Plaid Christmas If you find yourself in need of some 1950s-style close-harmony warbling, catch a performance of Forever Plaid: Plaid Tidings at the Beverly Arts Center. Started as a tongue-in-cheek off-Broadway musical revue, Forever Plaid features a crew of high school boys with dreams of recording an album who perish in a tragic bus accident and return from the afterlife. In this installment, the legendary Plaids find themselves on earth once again to “put a little harmony into a discordant world” in what the Beverly Arts Center calls “the best of Forever Plaid tied-up in a nifty package with a big holiday bow on top!” The show also features holiday standards, including a take on The Ed Sullivan Show featuring the Rockettes, the Chipmunks, the Vienna Boys Choir, as well as a “Plaid Caribbean Christmas.” Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th St. Friday, December 5, 7:30pm; Sunday, December 7, 3:30pm. $22, $20 for BAC members.

(773)445-3838. beverlyartcenter.org (Clyde Schwab)

VISUAL ARTS Thick slice, decadent ration Sometimes charcuterie can be as thought-provoking as it is delicious. Starting December 6 at the Slow gallery in Pilsen, Matthew Kayhoe Brett and Ji Soo Hong will explore the liminal space between revulsion and yearning in “Thick slice, decadent ration.”

Hong, a self-identified cheesemonger, playfully produces collages similar to drawings and doesn’t shy away from polarizing views on meat. Brett casts and isolates, a careful craftsman focusing on the often-overlooked “glue” that joins things together.

Both artists emphasize artistic tools rather than the hand of the artist. Slow will host them as part of its commitment to “slightly nerdy” contemporary art, in an exhibition in partnership with ACRE. After this, you’ll never look at processed meat the same way again. Slow, 2153 W. 21st St. Opening reception Saturday, December 6, 6pm-9pm. (773)645-8803. paul-is-slow.info (Arda Sener)

SWAMP THING Be honest with yourself: you hate Christmas.

Everyone does. The lines at the store, pretending to like your grandma’s fruitcake, and seeing how everyone else has someone under the mistletoe. Make Yuletide a bit less sucky and a bit more swampy with “SWAMP THING: A Cajun Christmas” at Hoofprint Workshop. Skip the gingerbread exterior and get right to the wild side—sharpen your fangs with Gator’s Blood mulled wine as you bask in the live dance party with local musician Dorian Gehring. Support local artists and feed the procrastinating shopper in you with the collections of original art, apparel, and gifts. Cleanse your palate of peppermint-flavored everything with homemade gumbo. Take a break from staring at Yule logs and dive into the bayou with original art and comics.

Plus, Cajun beats the cold every time. Hoofprint Workshop, 2433 S. Oakley Ave. Saturday, December 13, 6pm-10pm. (773)896-4326. hoofprintworkshop.com (Mark Hassenfratz)

Washington Park through Our Own Eyes They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but can a thousand words capture what a community is all about? Washington Park residents have collaborated with UofC student organization South Side in Focus to capture a snapshot of life in their corner of Chicago. Last spring, the group brought together nar-

CALENDAR ratives from neighborhoods all over the South Side.

This time around, the group worked with Chicago Youth Programs, a program started by Northwestern medical students, to curate a multimedia installation featuring photographs, oral narratives, and video taken and produced by CYP teens and parents. The exhibition culminates in an exploration of everyday life through the eyes of the participants. Guests are encouraged to join in building the narrative by bringing their own photos. Currency Exchange Café, 305 E. Garfield Blvd. Thursday, December 4, 4:30pm-7:30pm.

Refreshments served; RSVP on Facebook for dinner.

(773)855-9163. cexcafe.com (Kristin Lin)

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. November 15-December 6. Monday-Friday, 12pm-5pm; Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, 1pm-5pm. (773)373-1026. sscartcenter.org (Michelle Gan)

Krampusnacht at Co-Prosperity Sphere In keeping with Chicago’s obsession with Germanthemed celebrations of Christmas (see: Christkindlmarket), the Co-Prosperity Sphere will ring in the holiday season with Krampusnacht. In its second year, the Christmas-ish event is inspired by a devilish creature, Krampus, Germanic folklore’s equivalent to a lump of coal. Yes, that’s right, naughty children are carried off in Krampus’s lair in a sack that looks a lot like the one in which Santa carries gifts for nice children. On the night before the Feast of St. Nicholas, Co-Pro will bring the tradition to the South Side, with an an exhibition devoted to the horned, pointytongued beast, which will likely include many much scarier renditions of the Where the Wild Things Are cast. There will also be a photo booth, costume contest, plenty of glögg (mulled wine), and a traditional Krampuslaufen—when drunken celebrants dressed as Krampus will run through the streets and, hopefully, not actually kidnap the children of Bridgeport.

The Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S. Morgan St. Friday, December 5, 8pm-midnight. $10; $5 with a Krampusrelated costume or constructed Krampus head for display.

21+. (773)837-0145. coprosperity.org (Bess 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 MexicanAmerican border and the history of migrants in California. This second half of the installation can be found one door down from Uri-Eichen at the Al DiFranco Studio. In accordance with the exhibit’s theme, the music of Joe Hill, an early-twentieth century Swedish-American labor activist, will be played around 8pm at this neighboring venue. UriEichen 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)

MUSIC

Danny Brown at Thalia Hall In case you missed it (you probably didn’t), there is a triple-threat venue in the heart of Pilsen, home to Dusek’s Board and Beer, Punch House, and the public event space that is Thalia Hall. On December 12 the venue will play host, fittingly, to a trifecta of Midwest artists: Danny Brown, Lucki Eck$, and Matchess will all burn it down as part of the Red Bull Sound Select Presents program. The otherworldly sound of Matchess will be sure to unmoor you from your workweek before the hazy music of Lucki Eck$ blisses you right out. These two will both serve as prelude to an explosive performance from tried-and-true rapper Danny Brown. Watch out, though: the Red Bull Select series is a first-comefirst-served event, and they are careful to remind potential attendees that entry is not guaranteed. An additional insider tip: if you RSVP ahead of time your ticket price is $5—if you get in, that is. Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St. Friday, December 12, doors 8pm. $5. 17+. (312)526-3851. thaliahallchicago.com (Elizabeth Bynum)

Rocket Man Gets a Salute Again Listen up, acrobats and lovers—just when you thought you were never gonna fall in love again, Brian Harris is coming back to Reggies. The seasoned performer with a penchant for the spectacular will don his bowler hat and rose-tinted glasses as Simply Elton once again this season, this time to wow audiences with a performance of the Glitter King’s best-loved eighties hits. “Elton in the 80’s” is sure to be this winter’s best opportunity to embrace your inner whimsy while still acknowledging the hard knocks of real life. Harris’s show should feature classic tunes like “Candy by the Pound,” “Poor Cow,” and “Angeline.” Spiteful children, fascist faces, legal boys, all—on December 14 at Reggies, it doesn’t matter who you are. Everyone can relive the magic of Live Aid 1985. Reggies, 2105 S. State St. December 14, doors 5pm, show 6pm. $10. 21+. (312)949-0120. reggieslive.com (Olivia Myszkowski)

South Side Big Band at The Promontory It’s been too long since the South Side has had a big band to truly call its own. Even the South Side Big Band, a group founded by composer and producer Tom Tom Washington in tribute to the legendary olden days of Chicago’s South Side jazz and blues scene, has refused to play here since the band’s conception in the early nineties. Given this long sabbatical away from the South Side, it will be a truly momentous occasion when the South Side Big Band comes home for a night at the Promontory. Spirits will be alight when Tom Tom and his crew of twenty-two other musicians, featuring seasoned veterans from the sixties and seventies as well as younger mentees, bring the soul of the South Side back home.

Hyde Park actor and singer Maggie Brown will also be joining the group as a vocalist. Come for what will undoubtedly be a historic first (re)appearance and the culmination of a quarter-century of weekly rehearsals. Leave knowing that these cats have heart for miles, and that you were there to see them return to their roots. The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. Saturday, December 20, 8pm. $15-$20. (312)8012100. promontorychicago.com (James Kogan)

The Genius of Jazz & Hip Hop Vol. 1 David Boykin, long-time Chicago composer, saxophonist, and founder of Sonic Healing Ministries, is pairing up with some more recent additions to the South Side music scene for one night at the Promontory. Rapper Noname Gypsy, drummer James Woodley, and DJ Ayana Contreras will blend their beats with Boykin’s smooth, limitless sound, filling the space with a new jazzy, hip-hop blend. The two styles of music will combine smoothly to form a new sound that both old-school and new-school Chicagoans should look forward to exploring. The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. Thursday, December 11, 8pm. promontorychicago.com (Denise Parker)

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