MESSAGE TO OUR FOLKS BOOK REVIEW, GRAFFITI ART & MORE INSIDE
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SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent nonprofit newsprint magazine written for and about neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. We publish in-depth coverage of the arts and issues of public interest alongside oral histories, poetry, fiction, interviews, and artwork from local photographers and illustrators. The South Side Weekly is dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists. Volume 4, Issue 29 Editor-in-Chief Hafsa Razi Managing Editors Julia Aizuss, Andrew Koski Director of Staff Support Baci Weiler Deputy Editor Olivia Stovicek Senior Editor Emeline Posner Politics Editor Adia Robinson Music Editor Austin Brown Stage & Screen Editor Nicole Bond Visual Arts Editor Rod Sawyer Editors-at-Large Maha Ahmed, Christian Belanger, Jake Bittle, Mari Cohen, Jonathan Hogeback, Ellie Mejía Contributing Editors Maddie Anderson, Maria Babich, Mira Chauhan, Bridget Newsham, Adam Przybyl, Carrie Smith, Sam Stecklow, Margaret Tazioli, Yunhan Wen Video Editor Lucia Ahrensdorf Radio Producers Andrew Koski, Lewis Page Social Media Editors Emily Lipstein, Bridget Newsham, Sam Stecklow Visuals Editor Ellen Hao Deputy Visuals Editor Jasmin Liang Photography Editor Jason Schumer Layout Editor Baci Weiler Staff Writers: Sara Cohen, Christopher Good, Rachel Kim, Ashvini Kartik-Narayan, Michal Kranz, Anne Li, Michael Wasney Fact Checkers: Eleanore Catolico, Sam Joyce, Rachel Kim, Adam Przybyl, Hafsa Razi, Carrie Smith, Tiffany Wang, Baci Weiler Staff Photographers: Denise Naim, Jason Schumer, Luke Sironski-White Staff Illustrators: Zelda Galewsky, Natalie Gonzalez, Courtney Kendrick, Turtel Onli, Raziel Puma, Lizzie Smith Data Visualization: Jasmine Mithani Webmaster
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IN CHICAGO
A week’s worth of developing stories, odd events, and signs of the times, culled from the desks, inboxes, and wandering eyes of the editors
A “Transformational” Plan On Wednesday, at the South Shore Cultural Center, where they got married twentyfive years ago, Barack and Michelle Obama revealed the design of the planned Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park. Not just a single building but a campus, the presidential center has a museum, a forum, a library, and even a proposed athletic center and CPL branch, according to the renderings portrayed with a gentle watercolor style. However, the changes brought to the adjacent neighborhoods may not be as gentle. According to Obama, this is a “transformational” plan, and it is in his intention to upgrade Jackson Park so that “when you drive through the park,” it will no longer “feel different than Lincoln Park does.” Along with the promise of “transformation” comes fears of gentrification, if not a new round of dislocation. Although Obama has promised to employ local residents, and has formed an Inclusion Council of leaders from civic and corporate groups, no binding mechanism is at work to ensure as much—namely the Community Benefits Agreement so many groups are agitating for. Now more than ever, Barack, people love you, but they also need more than just promises. Alderman Lopez Threatened After eleven people were shot on one city block in Back of the Yards last weekend, in what police describe as a gang retaliation shooting and the city’s worst mass shooting in years, rookie Alderman Raymond Lopez made a statement to the effect that “no innocent lives were lost” in the mass shooting. Lopez, whose 15th Ward covers a baffling, gerrymandered splatter of corners of Gage Park, West Englewood, Brighton Park, and Back of the Yards, was echoed online by commentators dismissing, or even celebrating, the deaths of alleged gang members. Potentially as a result of his comments, Lopez has now entered CPD protective guard after local gang members made credible threats against him. We don’t question Lopez’s motives in so harshly condemning gun violence, but as ward resident and occasional Weekly contributor Naomi Ezquivel tweeted, “There are no easy answers to any of these issues. But ‘just let them kill each other’ is at the bottom of the barrel of shitty responses.” Ebony Takes LA Last week, the executives behind Ebony Magazine, the historic black-owned lifestyle magazine founded in 1945 by John Johnson, announced that it will be moving to Los Angeles. After seventy years, neither of Johnson Publishing’s flagship publications will be produced out of Chicago ( Jet magazine had already moved to LA). Ebony is not the only major publication to abandon Chicago in recent years—Playboy Magazine also left the city for LA in 2012. In addition to the relocation, the magazine has fired a third of its staff, including its editor-in-chief and managing editor. This raising the question of just who will be writing the magazine’s articles. Especially given its recent, wellpublicized difficulty with paying its freelance writers on time—or at all. CVG Group, the Austin, Tex.-based investment company that now owns Ebony and Jet, promises to pay its freelancers the money it owes them. According to DNAinfo and the Tribune, CVG Group chalks up the late payments to confusion with its purchase of Ebony Media Group. Ebony’s recent payment and subscription troubles aside, Chicago will feel its absence.
IN THIS ISSUE ancient to the future
Steinbeck evokes the adventurousness, range of expression, and sheer verve of these five virtuosos. sam clapp..........................................4 beyond the boundaries
Exploring the power of personal narratives in graffiti art rod sawyer.....................................6 a crisis of coverage
His talk felt more like a quarterly board meeting than an attempt to solve a humanitarian crisis. jake bittle......................................8
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Cover photo by Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times
MAY 10, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3
LIT
Ancient to the Future
A review of Paul Steinbeck’s ‘Message to Our Folks: The Art Ensemble of Chicago’ BY SAM CLAPP
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n Chicago, at least, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) has started to seem like a part of the arts establishment. A Power Stronger Than Itself, George Lewis’s landmark history of the Black music collective, came out in 2008. And in 2015, a blowout fiftieth anniversary concert series and a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art further solidified the group’s legacy. With all this institutional ticker tape falling, it’s easy to forget what the AACM actually is: an insurgent arts collective, a case study in the use of communal organization to create visionary work. They’ve stuck to the same collectivist principles for over half a century, building a cohesive international community while writing a wealth of strikingly original music. Message to Our Folks, Paul Steinbeck’s new history of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the collective’s flagship band, vividly illustrates the AACM’s core value of interdependent creative practice. The Art Ensemble was a model of the AACM’s musical, cultural, and economic philosophy, and in the course of its career became one of the longest-lived and most celebrated experimental music groups in history. In this first comprehensive work on the Art Ensemble, Steinbeck evokes the adventurousness, range of expression, and sheer verve of these five virtuosos who, clad in African body paint, shamanistic garb, professorial jackets, and white lab coats, circled the globe playing—according to their motto—“Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future.” Steinbeck, an assistant professor of 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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music theory at Washington University in St. Louis, pieces together this first scholarly study of the Art Ensemble with an array of source material culled from over a decade of research. Using magazine and journal articles, ephemera like concert posters, and dozens of interviews, Steinbeck assembles a convincing argument that the Art Ensemble of Chicago was the most radical, and visible, exponent of the AACM’s values of social and musical interdependence. He starts the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s story before the beginning, with the mass exodus of southern Black Americans to northern industrial cities in the Great Migration of the early 1900s. Steinbeck vividly describes the “black belt” of the 1950s, recounting the cosmopolitanism of the city within a city, with its Southern-style social life of bustling promenades, churches, and nightclubs. Three of the Art Ensemble’s members—Malachi Favors, Joseph Jarman, and Roscoe Mitchell—grew up in Chicago, each enraptured by church music and the South Side jazz scene. They honed their chops and jazz fanaticism in the Army, and then met in music theory classes at Wilson Junior College. These three young musicians found their Chicago community in Richard Abrams’s Experimental Band. This group—influenced by the “weird records” of Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, and John Coltrane, as well as new currents in classical composition— evolved into the AACM in response to a few decisive economic and political shifts that hit the South Side in the 1960s. Amid slowing population growth and economic downturn, the city of Chicago passed an
ordinance requiring clubs to pay a high fee to host large bands, a law that encouraged nightclubs to hire DJs. When the 1964 Civil Rights Act required the city’s two musicians’ unions to merge, the white North Side branch shuttered its South Side office and favored white musicians within the union. Alarmed by these changes but seeing an opportunity to channel the creative energy contained within The Experimental Band and other groups, Richard Abrams and three other musicians—Phil Cochran, Jodie Christian, and Steve McCall— wrote the charter for a nonprofit called the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. The AACM limited its membership to Black musicians, and— vitally—required its members to play only original works, most often in concerts that resembled classical recitals more than jazz gigs. They termed their musical product “creative music,” rather than “jazz,” a term they regarded as having been used by the white music industry to package Black music. By the mid-sixties, Chicago had its own organization to train young musicians, employ working players, and bolster the African-American community’s pride for its artists. The foundation of the AACM energized Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, and Malachi Favors. They soon formed groups, quickly gaining acclaim from critics, if not necessarily the public. Soon, trumpeter and St. Louis transplant Lester Bowie catalyzed the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble when he walked into an open AACM jam session. The always-memorable Bowie maybe summed up the spirit of the
early AACM best when talking about that experience. As Steinbeck quotes, “I said this is home here. As a musician there’s always a couple of dudes you can hang with. But here was thirty or forty m—f—s all in one spot. I mean Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, and Abrams, eccentric-type cats.” Throughout his narrative of the band, Steinbeck situates the group’s philosophy of musical and financial interdependence in context, describing the strategic decisions that in accumulation helped the Art Ensemble rise to the top while maintaining its eccentric practice. The group began its international career in 1969 when Lester Bowie and his wife, successful R&B musician Fontella Bass, sold off their possessions to fund a group trip to Paris. There, the Art Ensemble found its first wide audience in the Black expatriate American jazz clubs. French music press adored the group, thanks in part to the political climate in Paris, which was still electrified by the mass Leftist uprising of May 1968. Many journalists assigned a positive moral value to experimental jazz, viewing Black Americans as symbols of the Civil Rights movement. Despite (or perhaps thanks to) this confused coverage, the Art Ensemble was soon signed to French record imprint BYG Records. Now renamed the Art Ensemble of Chicago and joined by drummer Don Moye, the band began touring the continent, bringing in money on a financial model of collective ownership that allowed them to reinvest in the band. After returning to the U.S., they allowed each other ample time to work with their side projects while periodically coming together to work on Art
Ensemble music. Over the course of the 1970s, the Art Ensemble became the AACM’s most popular group, touring several continents, releasing a torrent of albums for several decades, and becoming one of the most popular international acts in jazz— experimental or not—until they retired for good in 2010. Steinbeck enriches his historical reading of the band’s career with three detailed musical analyses of two albums and a concert film. Members of the group played a vast array of instruments: Mitchell and Jarman principally saxophone, Bowie trumpet, Favors upright bass, and Moye a vast drum set augmented with hundreds of small percussion instruments. But they also employed scores of “little instruments”— noisemakers, horns, chimes, and more— that furnished a limitless palette of sonic possibilities. In his musical analysis, Steinbeck provides a precise and illuminating picture of the interplay between the players, as well as the group’s complex and intuitive improvisational strategy, which employed what Steinbeck calls “intermusical” techniques, such as quoting melodies from different periods in the history of jazz. Steinbeck also investigates the group’s “intermedia” techniques—elements like spoken word, elaborate costumes, and the theatrical antics—that place the group’s music in some transcendent place between music, poetry, and performance art. These chapters of analysis break down the complex architecture of the Art Ensemble’s style to reveal the musical and emotional concerns that propelled the group throughout its career: joy, sorrow, virtuosity, restraint, gonzo humor, cosmic wonder. Since the Art Ensemble officially stopped performing in 2010, collective memory of the group’s exploits has faded— after all, Bowie died in 1999, Favors in 2004, and Mitchell, Jarman, and Moye are all in their seventies. Steinbeck performs a vital role in drafting a comprehensive study of the group, but his book’s success in telling the Art Ensemble’s story raises a whole new set of questions about the details of the group’s career. Steinbeck covers the band members’ early years with a measure of psychological insight that evaporates as the story progresses to the group’s more lucrative decades. The book left me wondering how success changed the Art Ensemble’s group
dynamic and relationship to the AACM. And Steinbeck provides just enough information about the band members’ side projects to tantalize the reader. Can we hear more about Joseph Jarman’s intense Buddhist practice and Malachi Favors’ role as elder statesman of the Chicago creative music scene? Let’s hope that Message to Our Folks is the first in a long line of books that shed light on the AACM’s great players and groups. An anecdote that neatly illustrates the AACM’s whole philosophy comes near the book’s end. In the 1980s, Lester Bowie lived in New York City, where he had a falling out with a young Wynton Marsalis, the talented young trumpeter who worshipped the traditional jazz of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Marsalis thought Bowie didn’t respect jazz heritage, Bowie regarded Marsalis as a sellout, and soon the two were regularly exchanging hostile words in the pages of magazines. Marsalis even used his role as senior creative consultant to Ken Burns’s Jazz to diss Bowie. In that documentary’s sparse coverage of the AACM, the narrator says, that the Art Ensemble “attracted its largest following among white college students—in France,” a claim that Steinbeck dismisses as inaccurate, considering the group’s development of a global audience in the 1970s and 1980s. The feud came to a dramatic head when Marsalis showed up at a Bowie gig, trumpet in hand, to challenge Bowie to an old-school improvisation battle. Bowie didn’t take the bait, imperiously calling Marsalis “boy” and chiding him for interrupting. “Rebellion is the actual tradition of jazz,” Bowie said in an interview. The Bowie-Marsalis feud has all the ideological clarity of a political cartoon, and demonstrates the anti-establishment mentality that characterizes the AACM. When the ever-spiritual Malachi Favors added the phrase “Ancient to the Future” to the group’s slogan “Great Black Music,” his choice of words implied not only that the band’s group improvisations spanned the history of music, but also that the sounds they recorded today would be ancient—and vital—in some distant future. ¬ Paul Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks: The Art Ensemble of Chicago. The University of Chicago Press, 2017. 336 pp.
THE PUBLIC NEWSROOM UPCOMING WORKSHOPS Thursday, May 11 4pm–8pm Public Newsroom is open 6pm Workshop on Photography and Narrative Led by Englewood Photographer Tonika Johnson Thursday, May 18 4pm–8pm Public Newsroom is open 6pm Workshop on the Art of Oral History Led by Timuel Black and Audrey Petty Suggest a workshop topic at bit.ly/PNSuggestion CITYBUREAU.ORG/PUBLICNEWSROOM THE EXPERIMENTAL STATION 6100 S. BLACKSTONE AVE
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Beyond the Boundaries Exploring the power of personal narratives in graffiti BY ROD SAWYER
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t Chicago Zine Fest, which took place this past weekend at the CoProsperity Sphere in Bridgeport and the Plumbers Union Hall in West Loop, I shared zines that included photography of graffiti in Minneapolis, a subject I’ve explored in depth here in Chicago. The purpose of this photo essay is to explore the power of personal narratives within Chicago communities through the use of graffiti. Personal narratives give insight into the conditions people live in and the experiences that have shaped their views and opinions—and are all the more powerful when they share the stories of those often ignored and silenced. This project explores the narratives of educators, activists, organizers, artists, and people who use forms of self-expression to process, communicate, and share their stories within their communities. Graffiti has given many people from low-income neighborhoods the opportunity to create a new path for themselves. There is often a lack of access to formal art training in these neighborhoods because of the scarcity of resources and opportunity, as well as the high cost of pursuing a career in art. Graffiti gives artists the chance to engage in self-expression and to connect with others who are working outside of the boundaries of what is formally considered “art.” Through graffiti, kids from Black and brown communities have the opportunity
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DESI MUNDO to express their personal stories, to expand their world beyond their neighborhood, and to share these stories with others around Chicago and beyond. These images feature two Chicago graffiti artists and one from the Bay Area in California. Omen74 is originally from Gary, Indiana but has a long history of participating within Chicago’s writing scene. Bel2 is a writer, artist, and teacher in Chicago. Desi Mundo is the founder of the Community Rejuvenation Project (CRP) in California, a mural arts organization that works towards mural creation, renewal, and community engagement. ¬
DESI MUNDO
VISUAL ARTS
Graffiti gives artists the chance to engage in self-expression and to connect with others who are working outside of the boundaries of what is formally considered “art.” OMEN74
BEL2
OMEN74
MAY 10, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7
ALYSSA SCHUKAR FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
A Crisis of Coverage New York Times panel reflects failings of reporting on Chicago violence and solutions BY JAKE BITTLE
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ast week the New York Times came to Chicago to host a two-hour conversation about the city’s gun violence crisis. The event, “Chicago at a Crossroads,” was announced as an attempt to “work to turn the tide of violence” by “exploring realistic, promising strategies” and starting “provocative discussions.” It was produced in collaboration with the University of Chicago Crime Lab, which works with the Chicago Police Department to study patterns in the city’s violence though data analysis, and sponsored by, among other entities, Chase Bank. “Too many people are dying in Chicago. Let’s change that,” John Eligon, one of the Times reporters who 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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hosted the conversation, wrote on Twitter in advance of the event. This was not the first stanza in the Times’s intervention on the subject of Chicago violence. Almost a year ago, the paper sent a team of journalists to Chicago to cover every shooting that took place during what turned out to be a historically violent Memorial Day weekend. The heavily promoted reporting project led to a multimedia feature, “A Weekend in Chicago,” and a series of subsequent stories that followed up on the aftermath and impact of particular shootings. The goal of this coverage, the paper said, was to “help people better understand why this violence
is occurring and what needs to happen to end it;” implicit in that statement and in the marketing for the package was a judgment passed against the violence coverage produced by Chicago’s two daily newspapers, the Tribune and the Sun-Times. But the Times did not tell the story of Chicago’s violence in an innovative or unprecedented way; indeed, its coverage of this violence fell short in the same way that local coverage has fallen short for years. “A Weekend in Chicago,” in profiling every shooting that occurred over Memorial Day weekend, adopted the same logic of saturation that many Chicago publications have long followed in covering violence.
The thinking behind this kind of coverage is that the best way to understand this farreaching crisis is to leave no story untold, to track each and every shooting and murder as it happens. As former Weekly editor-inchief Bea Malsky wrote two years ago, the news website DNAinfo Chicago sought to raise the bar for this blanket kind of violence coverage when it launched in 2012: the website trumpeted its in-person coverage of every city homicide as the new standard for crime reporting. The website created a timeline and map (which it still updates) cataloging every shooting since 2010; its reporters visited every crime scene they could and wrote daily stories about violence in various neighborhoods. But five years on, the website has largely pulled out of in-person reporting about violence, instead sourcing its numerous stories about shootings in Chicago neighborhoods from police reports. By doing so, DNAinfo has picked up what has long been a standard practice for violence reporting in the city. As violence has overtaken public discourse in Chicago in recent years, the Tribune and the Sun-Times have tackled the challenge of covering shootings with saturation models that resemble DNAinfo’s, but with varying amounts of in-person reporting involved. In 2015 the Sun-Times started a “Homicide Watch” with an individual story for every gun homicide—the vertical’s motto was that “attention must be paid to each [murder]”—but since then has slipped back into producing mostly wire stories about individual events (“Man, [age], wounded in [neighborhood] shootings”), sourced almost exclusively from police blotters and occasionally expanded with details from the medical examiner’s office. Instead of pumping out an individual story for every shooting, the Tribune, in addition to maintaining its own homicide map, publishes stories that chronicle one night or one weekend’s violence. These stories recount police interviews at crime scenes and conversations had among bystanders and mourners, frequently describing the hardships of life in communities where violence is most prevalent; often, because of the short amount of time the reporters can spend in the neighborhood of the shooting, the period of interest in these stories begins when shots are fired and ends when the crime scene is taken down. The Tribune’s alternative publication RedEye also pursued a homicide tracker and map, which it discontinued in 2015.
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In “If It Bleeds It Leads,” her article about DNAinfo and violence coverage, Malsky argued that all these blanket models, whether or not they are founded on inperson reporting, are ill-fitted to tackle a crisis like Chicago’s. Instead of reporting on every individual shooting, she suggested more publications ought to “see past the narrative charisma of violence to view it on quieter, more systemic levels.” To the extent that it reached beyond individual shootings, the Times’s Memorial Day coverage reached a familiar set of conclusions: gang violence is caused mostly by a lack of economic opportunity and social support, the dividend of disinvestment from social services in the communities where this violence is now entrenched. Coverage of violence in Chicago’s daily papers sometimes provides these explanations too, often quoting them straight from gang members or relatives of the deceased. But in focusing on the events of a given scene or a given night, this coverage too rarely names the larger forces that lead to violence, and even less rarely traces how they work. It pays lip service to the idea that the city’s gun violence crisis has systemic origins, but still treats this violence as an endless series of random acts. When its usefulness is questioned, publications frequently justify this blanket coverage through an appeal to “raising awareness”: to quote Mary Schmich of the Tribune, “unless people understood...how all of these shootings added together imperil the city, nothing in Chicago would change. But coverage that only gestures at the conditions that cause gun violence without articulating what decisions brought those conditions into being—closing mental health clinics, for instance, or closing schools, or scattering public housing residents across the city— will only be of limited use in compelling people to take action. Of course Chicago’s daily newspapers also produce fuller accounts of the city’s violence, beyond scoreboard and crime scene reporting: the Tribune, for example, recently explored how trauma from violence affects the mental health of the city’s young girls, and took a dive at the end of last year into the life of Tavon Tanner, a ten-year-old who was shot while playing on his porch. The Sun-Times and the Times both produced longer stories about life in the 11th District on the West Side, which housed the largest concentration of shootings last year. There is little doubt that the daily papers would do more in-depth and investigative reporting on violence if they had the
resources, but both of their newsrooms have been gutted in recent years, and they are increasingly under-resourced and stretched thin. This meant that the Times, with its well-resourced team of reporters and advanced multimedia platform, was able to devote more attention to the shootings it tracked during Memorial Day weekend than the cash-strapped Chicago papers can possibly devote on a regular basis. But for all this extra oomph, the Memorial Day project did little to advance the conversation around gun violence. The Times “live event,” coming nearly a year after the Memorial Day package, fell short in the same way its coverage did: its assemblage of voices offered no surprises and did little to push the fight against violence forward. After treating themselves to finger food in the venue lobby, its hundred-or-so
focusing especially on last year’s extreme spike in homicides. Ludwig recently discussed the so-called “Laquan effect,” the idea that fallout from the Laquan McDonald video caused police to make fewer street stops and thereby emboldened criminals, on WBEZ, but he admitted that the Crime Lab has more or less no idea what led to such a sudden increase in gun murders. Using police data to form quantitative analysis of a humanitarian crisis is a practice that can best be described as “insufficient,” but Ludwig’s choice to focus on last year’s spike in violence as a baffling, fascinating anomaly made his talk feel more like a quarterly board meeting than an attempt to solve a humanitarian crisis. He finished by urging the city to try everything necessary to “avoid having another 2016,” saying nothing of the less statistically interesting violence
After treating themselves to finger food in the venue lobby, its hundred-or-so well-dressed, mostly white attendees went home no closer to solving the gun violence crisis than they were when they arrived, and the perspectives presented on stage went more or less unchallenged. well-dressed, mostly white attendees went home no closer to solving the gun violence crisis than they were when they arrived, and the perspectives presented on stage went more or less unchallenged. The first of these perspectives was that of Jens Ludwig, director of the UofC Crime Lab, who started the evening’s discussion after introductory remarks from two highranking Times editors. Ludwig, as might be expected of someone who is in charge of something called a “crime lab,” introduced the audience to Chicago’s violence crisis through a quantitative review of patterns in the homicide rate over the past few years,
of 2015, 2014, and the years before that. Then he opened the floor to the evening’s three proposed “solutions” to gun violence: law enforcement, social services, and trauma care. The law enforcement panel brought together Kim Foxx, the Cook County state’s attorney; Kenneth Johnson, the CPD commander of District 7 in Englewood; and Sean Malinowski, the deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department. Johnson and Malinowski touted the collaboration between LAPD and CPD on new datadriven police strategies, some of which have been piloted in Johnson’s district. Johnson
said that the use of a new technology called ShotSpotter, which analyzes shooting scenes to predict where the next shootings will occur and who they will target, had resulted in a sixty percent reduction in shootings in Englewood this February compared to last February. This number has been paraded by CPD as a breakthrough, but had Ludwig still been on stage he might have clarified that statistically it means very little. The number of shootings in a given month can vary widely for many reasons, and it will be impossible to tell if ShotSpotter is truly effective until its impact is measured over multiple years. Foxx was hesitant to call the new technology “fair,” saying that law enforcement was only one part of the solution to the city’s violence. She proceeded to give the night’s only real endorsement of publicly funded social services as a solution for the violence crisis: the city’s most distressed communities, Foxx said, would only be healed by investing in education, employment, and mental health, so that young people no longer have to turn to gangs for guidance and the mentally ill can access full treatment. Foxx’s remarks garnered hearty applause from the audience, unsurprisingly; after all, few people besides Donald Trump and John Kass really believe that law enforcement alone can solve the city’s violence crisis. Johnson and Malinowski also gave nods of agreement but maintained that CPD’s technological innovation provides the best route to a nearterm reduction in violence. There was something more than a little ironic about the fact that Foxx said far more about public social services than the panelists on the “Solutions from Social Services” that followed immediately after. The conversation was mostly a back-and-forth between Arne Duncan, the former Chicago Public Schools CEO and U.S. Secretary of Education who is now managing partner at a nonprofit called the Emerson Collective, and Autry Phillips, the executive director of an organization that has led street-level intervention initiatives to curb violence in neighborhoods across the city. Duncan and Phillips agreed that society as a whole has failed the young men who are driving the city’s violence, but differed on the best strategies for helping them: Emerson Collective’s work has sought to turn young adults’ lives around through employment training, while Phillips’s organization seeks to resolve gang disputes through mediation and relationship-building. MAY 10, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9
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Neither spoke much about the importance of funding in the areas Foxx mentioned—Duncan, who as CPS CEO experimented with the school closure strategy pursued by his successor Barbara Byrd-Bennet and Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2013, spent much of his time on stage talking about how to fund and scale the model of the Emerson Collective, which was founded and is largely funded by Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’s widow. He later told the Reader’s Maya Dukmasova he thought school closures had had “not much” of an effect on Chicago’s gun violence. The third “social services” panelist, Anuj Shah, assistant professor of behavioral science at UofC’s Booth School of Business and another Crime Lab researcher, only discussed his research on behavioral therapy programs that teach young men to think before they shoot; such therapy is not really “social service,” and Shah seemed out of place on the panel, to put it mildly. His academic angle, combined with Duncan and Phillips’s focus on nonprofits, meant that little time was spent discussing the role of the public sector in mitigating a crisis like Chicago’s, despite Duncan’s experience in government. In the final conversation, Selwyn Rogers, Jr., the director of the forthcoming trauma center at the University of Chicago Medical Center, laid out his plans for a hospital that will engage with surrounding neighborhoods in preventative measures against gun violence in addition to treating actual victims. Rogers seemed conscious that a hospital cannot “solve” a gun violence crisis on its own, but the promise of the trauma center somehow led him to close out the evening by saying he felt optimistic about the fight against Chicago’s gun violence crisis, even as the evening’s previous conversation had underscored just how massive and intractable a problem the city’s violence has proven to be. Thus the event ended with only one panelist having actually made the case for reversing the disinvestment and socioeconomic neglect that has scarred the communities where violence is now most prevalent. Even when disinvestment was discussed as a driving factor in the violence, it was talked about as though it appeared out of nowhere and was not the result of political decisions. Of course, despite Eligon’s ambitious tweet, the Times organizers did not
10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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literally think that a series of panels would bring about an end the city’s gun violence problem. Nevertheless, there was something truly bizarre about the idea that “solving” a dramatic increase in gun violence was a problem that merited a TED-talk-style event in the first place, especially one hosted in a plush auditorium with wine and snacks available afterward. To arrive in a city and host a “provocative” conversation about a humanitarian crisis is perhaps even more insulting than the claim that a multimedia package covering every Memorial Day shooting will “raise awareness” in a way previous local coverage hasn’t. Just as the people who live in the South and West Side communities where violence is entrenched do not need more stories to be written in order to “raise their awareness,” they rarely hesitate to say what forces they believe contribute to gun violence and how this violence can be combated. Yet the event still portrayed violence as a “tide” that has come from nowhere, a plague against which the whole city is united in a fight. The Times’s choice to center police officers and professors at a discussion of that crisis and to have only two Black Chicagoans who are not involved with law enforcement as speakers implied that the people enduring the greatest burden of the city’s violence are somehow not qualified to speak about how it can be solved. Chicago’s violence is complex, but it is not impossible to understand, nor would it be impossible to solve. Yet somehow twoplus hours of discussion featured almost no sustained acknowledgment of the very obvious facts about the crisis Chicago is facing. Any real resolution will require being honest about these facts, and about the conditions that have created the crisis. As Foxx and Rogers suggested, it will require remedying Chicago’s staggering socioeconomic inequity and restoring to its neglected communities everything— jobs, education, mental health care, social services, humane law enforcement—that has for so long been denied them. Perhaps this is simply too obvious, and that was why it went unspoken for most of the event, or perhaps the event was, in truth, not actually part of the fight against gun violence. As Duncan himself said, echoing other panelists: “We can’t just be in an auditorium studying the problem—we have to be on the battlefield.” ¬
BULLETIN People United for Action Power Event The Silver Room, 1506 E. 53rd St. Saturday, May 13, 12pm–2pm. (773) 947-0024. bit.ly/ PUAPower Join People United for Action (PUA) for an event featuring Barbara Ransby, a political activist, writer, and historian. This event will rally for impacting the electoral and policy-making process through mobilizing under-represented and low-income families—as PUA puts it, the time for political leadership of this kind is “inescapable.” (Roderick Sawyer)
Mothers in Business West Pullman Library, 830 W. 119 St. Saturday, May 13, 11:30am–1:30pm. Free. bit.ly/MothersinBusiness Are you a mother who has a great business idea, but no idea where to start? Then this short course is for you! The one-day course will run through the basics of business management and help you begin your journey toward self-employment. (Bridget Newsham)
Chicago Food Policy Summit 2017 South Shore Cultural Center, 7059 S. South Shore Dr. Thursday, May 11, 9am–4pm, after hour social 5:30pm–7pm. Free, donations welcome. Register online or from 9am–10am at the event. chicagofoodpolicy.com The Chicago Food Policy Action Council’s twelfth annual summit on the future of the food economy will focus this year on implementing the Good Food Purchasing Program (GFPP), an initiative developed to guide cities toward locally sourced, environmentally sustainable food. The program will begin at 10am with community leaders sharing examples of food-focused projects and programs that support their communities, followed by smaller focus groups that will cover the GFPP, urban agriculture licensing, and community land access and control. (Adam Przybyl)
Spring into Action The Annex at New Life Covenant Church Southeast, 7757 S. Greenwood Ave. Saturday, May 13, 1pm–3pm. (773) 285-1731. newlifesoutheast.org In this interactive event, counseling services at New Life Covenant Southeast hopes to break some of the stigma around mental health. This workshop will teach participants how to distinguish between mental illnesses and mental health issues, and help participants develop the tools needed for long term mental wellness. Bring plenty of questions! (Adia Robinson)
“Raise the Barn” May Crop Mob Earl’s Garden Mae’s Kitchen, 6914 S. Perry Ave. Saturday, May 13, 10am–1pm. slowfoodchicago.org Advocates for Urban Agriculture and Slow Food Chicago are gearing up for their second day of volunteering at urban farms and gardens. They’ll be helping out at Earl’s Garden Mae’s Kitchen, a community garden project in Englewood. Whether you’re a seasoned gardener or can’t tell cabbage from kale, come learn new skills, make friends, and support local agriculture. Be sure to bring your garden clothes, closed-toe shoes, and a water bottle. (Adam Przybyl)
VISUAL ARTS Geometric Complexions Zhou B Art Center, 1029 W. 35th St. Friday, April 28–Friday, June 9. (773) 523-0200. zhoubartcenter.org The Sergio Gomez-curated exhibit, entitled “Geometric Complexions,” features thirteen artists working within a visual tradition originating as early as 1908 with Cubism. The exhibit will showcase a range of techniques and approaches to the medium. (Bridget Newsham)
EVENTS
Spring 2017 Exhibition at Yollocalli Arts Reach Yollocalli Arts Reach, 2801 S. Ridgeway Ave. Friday, May 12, 5:30pm–7pm. Free. yollocalli.org The Yollocalli Arts Reach is hosting their 2017 Spring Exhibition—stop by to see and listen to the amazing work made during the Spring Session by Camera Flux, Your Story, Your Way! and Street Art Studio. Snacks will be provided. (Bridget Newsham)
Thursdayboy on Friday with YAW Currency Exchange Café, 305 E. Garfield Blvd. Friday, May 12, 3pm–4pm. Free. (773) 855-9163. currencyexchangecafe.com The host is Yaw Agyeman, an Artist-inResidence at Arts + Public Life and Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture. YAW is a well-regarded musician and theatrical performer, and is sure to amaze. Drink specials will be available at the café. (Bridget Newsham)
Decolonizing Architecture Swift Hall, 1025-35 E. 58th St. Friday, May 12. 2pm–6pm. Free. (312) 972-5691. criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu This half-day-long Critical Inquiry Symposium will bring together Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, and Eyal Weizman with the Palestinian/Israeli art/architecture/ design collective “Decolonizing Architecture.” Theaster Gates will also be there as a respondent. Community activists and representatives of Palestine Legal and Black Lives Matter will all take part. ( Joseph S. Pete)
It’s Now: North Lawndale BBQ and Celebration 3346 W. 16th St. Saturday, May 13, noon– 5pm. Free. Food will be provided. Email Jonathan Kelley at jkelle27@uic.edu for more information. bit.ly/itsnowBBQ Celebrate the beginning of the transformation of a formerly vacant building on 16th Street into a community museum in North Lawndale this Saturday. Join the party for food, community
resources, music, and the beginnings of a new mural, designed by artists at Stateville Prison. (Emily Lipstein)
Renegade Craft Fair, Chicago Pop-Ups Renegade Craft Fair, 1817 S. Halsted St. Saturday–Sunday, May 13–May 14, 11am–6pm. renegadecraft.com This Mother’s Day Weekend, celebrate “all things handmade” with a pop-up that has nearly as many vendors as Renegade’s usual seasonal craft fairs. Peruse a selection of artisan crafts, as well as food trucks, DIY workshops, craft beer, and more, while listening to DJ sets from Lumpen Radio. All are welcome; treat yourself and the maternal figure in your life to a special shopping experience. (Adia Robinson)
MUSIC Noise // Drone // Punk Show Maushaus, 21st St. and Throop St. Friday, May 12. Doors 7pm, show 9pm. $5. Message Facebook event for address bit.ly/ NoiseDronePunkShow This Friday, Maushaus’s walls will shake with drone, electro, metal, punk, and experimental sounds. The night’s acts will include Hack, Curse, Dirty Junk, Trash Catties, Blood Rhythms, Black Sandwich, and The Pornography Glows. (Maddie Anderson)
Jugrnaut Presents: Lil Jake and Friends
STAGE & SCREEN BACinema: First Nations Film and Video Festival Beverly Art Center, 2407 W. 111th St. Wednesday, May 10, 7:30pm. Free. beverlyartcenter.org The 2017 First Nations Film Festival comes to the BAC to screen its two featured films. Set in 1976, Rhymes for Young Ghouls concerns Native American children under the age of sixteen who are forced to attend the residential school St. Dymphna by government order. It will be followed by the festival’s featured short film, Jane & the Wolf. Karrmen Crey will give an introduction, and refreshments will be provided. (Roderick Sawyer)
Clybourne Park University Church, 5655 S. University Ave. Friday, May 12–Sunday, May 14 and Friday, May 19–Sunday, May 21. Fridays and Saturdays, 8pm, Sundays, 2pm. $12, discounts available for seniors and students. hydeparkcommunityplayers.org The Hyde Park Community Players present Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer- and Tony Award–winning play Clybourne Park. Norris’s tale picks up where Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun left off, using biting satire to unpack white flight and gentrification over two generations in a fifty-year timespan. Stay after the May 14 performance to discuss the play with the play’s cast and crew. (Nicole Bond)
I Am Not Your Negro
Reggies, 2105 S. State St. Saturday, May 13. Doors 8pm, show 9pm. $5 for first 50 people to RSVP, $10 at door. RSVP at jgrntliljake. rsvpify.com
Ida Noyes Hall, 1212 E. 59th St. Saturday, May 13, 7pm and 10pm; Sunday, May 14, 3:45pm. $5, $3 group discount. docfilms. uchicago.edu
Spend the thirteenth of the month watching Chicago rapper Lil Jake From 13th do a special “end-of-semester” performance, including features from Just One, Sante DuBois and other secret special guests (more of his friends?). Don’t sleep on this Chicago Sleepers production! (Maddie Anderson)
Raoul Peck’s film shows how race in America does matter using media depictions and archival footage from past and present. Presented in part by the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, with a panel discussion following the 7pm screening. (Nicole Bond)
Various Artists Independent Film Festival: Call for Submissions
Through Sunday, May 14. Enter code: SPRING20 to receive twenty percent off late submissions entry fee. For full guidelines, visit variousartiststv.net/vaiff The next round of submissions for this independent film festival welcomes contributions that are “100 years old or 100 days old,” and of all genres, as long as they’re under forty-five minutes. As with the last round, the festival promises cash prizes and celebrity judges who will review all submissions. ( Jake Bittle)
Chicago Home Theater Festival Locations and times vary. Sunday, May 14– Monday, May 29. Bronzeville: Sunday, May 14; Kenwood: Thursday, May 18; Hyde Park: Sunday, May 21; Englewood: Monday, May 22; Pilsen: Tuesday, May 23; South Shore: Saturday, May 27. Free–$65. chicagohtf.org The Chicago Home Theater Festival has merged art and culture with community since 2012, with over five hundred artists and 5,000 neighbors convening in dozens of neighborhoods to share meals and experiences in each other’s homes. Against the backdrop of a hyper-segregated city, the gatherings center on connection and inclusion. This year’s festival offerings span a wide range of interests from the poetry of Frankiem Mitchell and Orin Frazier to tarot reading from healer Rhonda Wheatley, along with many other performances to suit practically every palate. Hosts include Northwestern professor E. Patrick Johnson, WBEZ reporter Natalie Moore, artist and DIY impresario Mykele Deville, and TRACE artists Marcus Davis and Alexandria Eregbu. (Nicole Bond)
BACinema: The Red Turtle Beverly Art Center, 2407 W. 111th St. Wednesday, May 24th, 7:30pm. $9.50, $7.50 members, $4 children under 12. beverlyartcenter.org This Academy Award-nominated animated film eschews dialogue to tell the story of a castaway who tries to escape a deserted tropical island on a bamboo raft. He runs into the eponymous Red Turtle, which changes his life. The Chicago Film Critics Association named it last year’s Best Animated Film. ( Joseph S. Pete) MAY 10, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11
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