October 2, 2013

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY October 2, 2013 ¬ Student Led, Neighborhood Read ¬ Since 2003 ¬ Southsideweekly.com ¬ free

A Hall Reborn, a Neighborhood Altered Thalia Hall & the future of Pilsen

IN CHICAGO

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

In fall 2013, the Weekly reformed itself as an independent, student-directed organization. Previously, the paper was known as the Chicago Weekly.

Editor-in-Chief Executive Editor Managing Editor

Harrison Smith Claire Withycombe Bea Malsky

Publisher

Harry Backlund

Senior Editor Christopher Riehle Features Editor Patrick Leow Politics Editors Osita Nwanevu Stage & Screen Hannah Nyhart Editor Music & Video Zach Goldhammer Editor Visual Arts Editor Katryce Lassle Photo Editor Lydia Gorham Online Editor Gabi Bernard Layout Editor Olivia Dorow Hovland Associate Editors Ari Feldman, John Gamino, Sharon Lurye, Spencer Mcavoy Staff Writers Bess Cohen, Emily Holland, Jason Huang, Jack Nuelle, Stephen Urchick Staff Photographer

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 Happier Hours in South Austin

TIF funds have been criticized for being used to oil big-business deals in hot real estate markets like River North, instead of promoting development in downtrodden neighborhoods like they’re supposed to.

Well, it looks like the city finally used the money from tax increment financing in a neighborhood that needs new business. Unfortunately for Rahm’s PR arm, that new business in South Austin is a liquor store run by a felon. The Tribune reported on Saturday that Frederick “Juicy” Sims, a convicted drug dealer with ties to the Vice Lords, got over $100,000 in TIF grants to open a liquor store on West Madison Street in April. Alderwoman Deborah Graham helped lift a moratorium on new liquor licenses in the area, so that no small business would be hampered. A letter to Sims from the Department of Community Development sums up our attitude to the situation nicely: “Thank you for reinvesting in the City of Chicago!”

Transformers 4 wraps filming in Chicago

Michael Bay has been slowly blowing up Chicago—sorry, Hong Kong—for the past couple months. For the filming of “Transformers 4: Age of Extinction” his crew has set fire to cars, shattered windows, and generally attacked the city with pyrotechnics all over the place: Uptown, the Loop, McCormick Place, and now Pilsen. On Wednesday afternoon, on the Chicago Canal near West 29th Street and South Damen Avenue, the Chicago portion of the filming ends with supposedly its largest explosion to date. It’s not to miss, mostly because Mark Wahlberg could show up.

Not Quite Hell

There are people out there—maybe even as many as a lot of them-clamoring to see the South Side’s own Kwame Raoul become Lieu-

Camden Bauchner

5706 S. University Ave. Reynolds Club 018 Chicago, IL 60637

Contact the editor at editor@southsideweekly.com

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

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A Quinn Always Pays His Debts

The Governor, meanwhile, might consider that assessment a touch on the generous side. Fed up with that chamber’s inability to so much as touch the State’s burgeoning deficit—despite his repeated attempts to gets lawmakers in the mood by unleashing “Squeezy the Pension Python”— over the summer Pat Quinn tried a more hands-on approach.

He stopped paying them. The President of the Senate then sued, arguing that it was not exactly constitutional for the Governor to withhold people’s livelihoods because he disagreed with them. Last Thursday, Cook County Circuit Court Judge Neil Cohen agreed and ordered Quinn to pay up with interest. Quinn vowed to fight the ruling, but apparently he forgot to inform the State Comptroller, who forked over all of the ill-gotten cash overnight. The empty threat failing to leaven his numbers, the frustrated Quinn has since turned his attention to a happier subject: gang violence. The Governor has been vocally considering sending the National Guard to curb Chicago’s killings. Why not? When lawmakers and the polls have got you down, nothing lifts the spirit like a little invasion.

In this issue

Joy Crane annotates demolitions..................................................................................4 Osita Nwanevu compiles votes on violence .................................................................6 Patrick Leow investigates Thalia Hall.......................................................................8 Stephen Urchick crosses the distance.........................................................................14 Jack Nuelle gets to know Willis Earl Beal...............................................................16 Jackson Roth on Mountaintop.......................................................................................17 Harunobu Coryne chats with Mike Reed...................................................................18

SouthSideWeekly.com

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tenant Governor, or so the State Senator keeps telling us. “A lot of people have been calling me…hearing rumors,” Raoul recently intimated, correctly guessing that the quickest way to quash rumors is talk about them to the Sun-Times. Raoul admitted that the Governor wasn’t one of citizens on his call sheet, but rebuked skeptics who had maintained that the Chicago pol has too little rural appeal to be Quinn’s running mate. “A lot of the people who asked me to run were from downstate,” he insisted. Keen though he was to trumpet his ability to boost the unpopular Pat to victory, Raoul stressed that his life would not, strictly speaking, be over if he didn’t get the nod. “The state Senate hasn’t been an awful place for me,” he said, sanguinely adding, “It’s not the worst place in the world.“

october 2, 2013

Letter from the Editor T

his paper is for the South Sider. ¶ A few months ago, when the South Side Weekly was still called the Chicago Weekly and our publishing situation was still in flux, that name was tossed around.

“The South Sider”: true to our audience and our content, what we’ve been for the past ten years and what we’re recommitting ourselves to for the decades ahead—long-form journalism that covers arts, culture, and politics on our side of the city.

In the end we decided against that name, partly because it’s so hard to say exactly who a “South Sider” is, let alone what the “South Side” is. In the months of reporting that went into last week’s Best of the South Side issue, for example, many people we talked to had different thoughts on what the South Side was, and on who could rightfully claim this place as home.

The city has used Madison Street in the Loop as a north–south dividing line since 1908, though Roosevelt Road, which caps the southern end of Grant Park, has been a traditional marker; today, many who claim to live in the “South Loop” make their homes north of Roosevelt along Printers’ Row, occupying a part of the city that could reasonably be called part of

the South Side or part of the Loop itself.

Twenty blocks south, some in Bronzeville claim that their neighborhood is synonymous with “South Side,” that most any other place claiming that label is, to a certain extent, “inauthentic.” A few administrators at the University of Chicago shy away from the regional “South Side” label altogether, preferring to think of the university’s Hyde Park–Kenwood home as an independent, free-floating community.

Such an idea is, of course, untenable.

There are no “independent” neighborhoods on the South Side—there may be pockets of relative homogeneity, sure, but cross a street, a park, or a rail yard and there’s another neighborhood, another pocket. Each is almost certainly more complicated than

the standard storylines would have it, and each is tied together to all the others surrounding it, populated by South Siders like all the rest.

Over the past few months, and to a lesser extent over the past decade as the Chicago Weekly, this subject matter—the South Side and South Siders—has been said to be something different from the staff of this paper. Our editors, writers, and photographers are UofC students. Many of us are originally from other states; some are from other countries. We are “outsiders,” it has been said. We are “not from here.” As a geographic fact, this much is true. True as well is the fact that we are now, as residents of the South Side, produce a publication for the South Side as a whole.

We do this not as an “activist publication,” though in the past few weeks that term has been applied to us. Some have asked as well if we’re a “labor paper,” a “paper for the black community,” or a voice for the UofC. At bottom, we are simply a South Side publication, a news magazine, specifically, activist only insofar as we believe that the South Side is home to stories

that deserve to be told and deserve to be read. These stories we tell are not simple news reports, but aim to say something more about the people and places we cover.

Call it long-form, magazine style, or new journalism, if you will; all are labels for a type of journalism that strives to cover its subject matter with thoughtfulness, honesty, and—ultimately—compassion.

LeRoy Bach, a musician profiled in one of this issue’s stories, recently asked, “How can you sneak into another person’s reality and have them be glad for it?” In so many words, this is the basic problem of journalism, and one that the Weekly in particular faces consistently.

We hold, however, to the fact that the reality of the South Side is one shared by all South Siders, journalists and students included, and that this reality may be captured through reporting, in words and in images. Those that fill these pages are only the first sign of things to come. In these stories, as in all others, we strive to be honest. We hope you hold us to it.

October 2, 2013

Harrison Smith ¬

South Side Weekly 3

Here to Fall

The end of Pierce Tower & St. James Church Joy Crane Photos

by

Jonah Rabb

Last year, news of exploding ceramic toilets and water outages in the dormitory resounded as the final blow to an already precarious infrastructure. Gaining the attention of citywide news outlets, the fiasco, since known as Exploding-Toilets-Gate, proved one flush too many for University administrators seeking to address low housing retention rates. But being the first dorm built after the depression didn’t seem to come with a culture of austerity: residents were compensated $5,000 each to spend at the campus bookstore, and another $110,000 was divvied between the houses for “community funds.” An undisclosed amount was spent on new toilets, presumably.

“It’s kind of sad. I was about to be a Fourth Year, I was in housing all three years. It is kind of sad that they couldn’t rehabilitate the building or save it in some way shape or form,” reflected University of Chicago student Marley Linsey at the demolition party. “But in other ways I think this will be more helpful in the long run, to have a building that actually,” he paused, interrupted by the loud crash of the wrecking ball colliding with another bay window, “...works.”

A wall running half the length of 55th Street sectioned off Pierce Tower from its surrounding landscape, just one of many elements of the building that—rightly or wrongly—grew to represent the disconnect between the University and greater Hyde Park. Built during the infamous Urban Renewal project that flattened 53rd Street, the brutalist structure resembled a fortress shielding the University community from the “urban forces” thought to skulk north of 55th Street.

The architects behind the replacement dorms, Campus North, have emphasized their efforts to angle away from such a separatist legacy. During a press conference in July, Jeanne Gang, the head architect of the new dorms, talked about the open corner on 55th Street, and how her group seeks to open that space as to allow for greater fluidity between the community and students. But parallels between Gang and her predecessor Harry Reese suggest that the break with Pierce’s troubled past may not be entirely clean with the demolition of the building. Like Reese, who was also commissioned to design numerous other Hyde Park properties, Studio Gang is designing many of the properties on 53rd Street and beyond in an effort to make Hyde Park a “destination” for students and faculty, as Gang put it during the press conference. Such developments are met with mixed applause from the non-University affiliated residents of Hyde Park.

As Chloe Saddler, a Third Year at the UofC, watched the wrecking ball smash in the window that was her first year dorm room, she expressed a mixed bag of emotions. “It’s great to see my old house come back to together and to see that although the physical building is gone we have a bond that is still here,” she said, gazing down from the fifth floor heights of a parking lot roof across the street from her late dorm. The demolition party, hosted two weeks ago by the College Housing Office, brought together past and present members of this community of scholars to celebrate the milestone moment of the beginning of the demolition. But despite the bay window views of her first year in college having been just reduced to a mere hole in the wall, for Saddler, the structure itself was immaterial: “Seeing everybody grow of the structure is great.”

The tower’s name comes from Stanley “Schnitz” Pierce, an alum and star Maroon halfback from between 1911 and 1913, who left the bulk of his capital to the University after his passing. Foreshadowing the University of Chicago’s “Scav” tradition—the four-day epic scavenger hunt started in 1987—locating Schnitz’s funds was a treasure hunt in its own right. Schnitz’s lawyers were instructed by a note found in the eccentric ex-football player’s safe to dig in his backyard for the money, whereupon they unearthed $20,000 in antique gold coins. From Schnitz’s lawyers’ first shovel of dirt to the rubble that remains, the excavating spirit of the Pierce community endures.

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october 2, 2013

“What drew me to St. James is the steeple. I saw it, I came in, I wasn’t going to just walk by. I just felt that when I came back here to volunteer, I was home,” said Cathy Moore, speaking from the church food pantry where she has been volunteering for nine years. At 200 feet, the St. James steeple has stood as the highest point in Bronzeville for 133 years. Well-renowned Irish-American architect Patrick Kelly, who has welded god and mortar together in other Chicago landmarks, such as the Holy Name Cathedral church downtown, designed a house of worship that would come to host one of the most diverse Catholic parishes in the city.

It is from under the active Green Line tracks, peeking through the wired gates and up past the church rubble, that a present-day onlooker may try to conjure what Patrick Keely’s contemporaries regarded as the architect’s “Achievement in Art.” In the shadow of the debris lie spire turrets created from local Joiliet limestone which once housed twenty bells themselves imported from the East Coast The largest bell weighed 500 pounds and its crash and chime could be heard from eight miles away. As the earth begins to rattle with the force of a southbound train overhead, the Cathedral slumbers.

In 1972, just three days before Christmas, a fire ravaged St. James, damaging the front of the sanctuary and the original altar. Some of the original Tiffany windows and other art glass melted onto the church floor, and parishioners reportedly carried pieces of glass with them until restoration was complete four years later. The remnants of the windows, physical cuts of the cathedral’s past, were then mixed into the building’s foundation.

Out of the shards was forged a new, more modern interior to replace the gothic revival aesthetic of the former St. James. Walls were painted white and translucent panels replaced the missing art glass windows. The parish pushed on.

From when the demolition was announced last year to the raising of the construction fence this June, parishioners at St. James have been torn on how to move forward despite the physical erasure of the Cathedral’s history. To date, ceiling tiles have been ripped away, windows caved in, and the central congregation space reduced to a rubble heap, though the spire is still standing. Yet, while Moore professed that there has indeed been a slight dip in the 300-person congregation, St. James is still as active as ever. “I think it is a miracle what happens with less than 300 parishioners,” she said, while watching her volunteer staff hand out sandwiches during the pantry’s lunch hour. “I feel very blessed to be here. So it’s not the building to me, it’s the parish, it’s the parishioners, it’s the staff, it’s Father Edwards, it’s everybody.”

October 2, 2013

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South Side Weekly 5

How the South Side Votes

Leading up to the October 16 council meeting, the first in a three-part series profiling the voting records of South Side aldermen. When it comes to addressing South Side violence, the city’s aldermen are mostly of the same mind and have cast uniform votes on gun control and other anti-violence legislation. However, the similarity of their voting records belies both real disparities between the rates of violence in their respective communities as well as the outspokenness of some members on certain anti-violence strategies and initiatives. Next week: Education.

Osita Nwanevu Illustrations by Hanna Petroski

Carrie Austin 34th Ward

Ricardo Muñoz 22nd Ward

Howard Brookins Jr. 21st Ward

“My grandson called me: ‘Granny, you gonna be upset. Jaylin got shot down the street.’…That boy just came home from school. That was devastating. I didn’t even know.”

—On the murder of Jaylin Johnson, a friend of her grandson’s, in Roseland, September 15, 2012 (Chicago Sun-Times)

“One of the things we do very effectively in the spring and summer is we encourage people to develop block clubs. Because a lot of times, neighbors know each other as ‘the driver of the red car’ or ‘the grandma of the gangbanger,’ but don’t know each other as Mr. Martinez, Ms. Caldwell, Mr. Washington, Mr. Linares, and that way, when neighbors know each other and come together as a block club, we’re able to prevent the crime and not necessarily just react to it.”

—On “ holistic” anti-crime strategies in the 22nd Ward, April 10, 2013 (CAN TV)

“I won’t be able to stop my members from calling for his head because the public is calling for our heads. The clock is ticking on all of us.”

—On public disapproval of Superintendent of Police Garry McCarthy’s handling of the city’s crime, February 25, 2013 (CBS 2)

Austin has been a vocal supporter of Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy’s “Operation Impact” initiative, which implemented foot patrols in twenty designated neighborhoods. In June, she came under fire for suggesting that Illinois Republican Senator Mark Kirk’s 2012 stroke influenced his June proposal for the arrest of 18,000 Gangster Disciples.

Muñoz is a member of the Stop Concealed Carry Coalition, an alliance of gun control advocates throughout Illinois, as well as the City Council’s nine-member Progressive Reform Coalition, which includes support for “well-trained, fully staffed public safety departments” among its policy objectives.

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Brookins has been one of the most vocal critics of Superintendent McCarthy’s handling of the city’s crime, a fact that earned him the criticism of Chicago Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed, who, in March, cited Brookins’ recent work as a defense attorney for a member of the Gangster Disciples as an example of the alderman “talking out of both sides of his mouth.” However, in recent months, Brookins has been supportive of McCarthy’s “Operation Impact.”

George Cardenas 12th Ward “Why not use drones in safe passage??”

—A tweet referencing an article on the non-military uses of drones in The Telegraph, August 27, 2013 (DNA Info) Safe passage is a city initiative aimed at providing safe routes of transportation for children traveling to school through violent neighborhoods. Cardenas recently proposed implementing $5 “safety and security” fee charged on Commonwealth Edison electric bills to raise $70 million dollars for the hiring of 700 additional officers. The August violent crime rates of 12th Ward neighborhoods South Lawndale (0.7 per 1,000), McKinley Park (0.4 per 1,000), and Brighton Park (0.4 per 1,000) are among the lowest in the city according to police data.

Toni Foulkes 15th Ward

JoAnn Thompson 16th Ward

Michael R. Zalewski 23rd Ward

James Balcer 11th Ward

“It’s your son out there, and he’s a gangbanger with a gun on him…How is that my fault? I didn’t raise him. I just get pissed off when they say, ‘Where are these nogood aldermen?’ I’m like, ‘Hey, we’re living in this environment, too.’ ” —On constituent complaints about council inaction on violence, September 15, 2012 (Chicago Sun-Times)

“Overall in Englewood, the good people outweigh the bad...I get on the defensive because I’m always getting asked how I can stop the violence. If I could stop the violence, it would have been done a long time ago. All I can do is put trust and faith that the police department will somehow put an end to it.”

—On violence in her home neighborhood of Englewood, September 15, 2012 (Chicago Sun-Times)

“I did tell [Superintendent Garry McCarthy] that…you know, every time they show a map in these newspapers about the shootings and the killings, there’s a big blank spot out on the Southwest Side, which is great.”

—At a community meeting convened by the Garfield Ridge Neighborhood Watch, July 15, 2013 (Southwest Chicago Post)

“Crime is always a problem, gangs, graffiti, drugs, bad buildings…you work to contain them and if people cooperate…and work with the police we’re able to eradicate.

Their tips have helped lead to the arrest [and] convictions of [gang members].”

—On infiltrating gang circles to work with potential targets of violence, August 7, 2013 (ChicagoTalks)

Zalewski is a regular speaker at events held by the Garfield Ridge Neighborhood Watch. According to police data, Garfield Ridge’s violent crime rate for the month of August (0.3 per 1,000) is among the lowest in the city. Zalewski is the father of State Representative Michael J. Zalewski (D-Riverside), a staunch gun-control advocate.

Balcer is the chairman of the City Council’s Public Safety Committee. In February, he drafted an ordinance to create a $1 million dollar police tip program funded by city businesses and community organizations.

This was tabled upon the announcement of the police department’s own new tip program. In February, Balcer called for hearings on the effects of violent video games.

Foulkes, like Cardenas, is a member of the Council’s Progressive Reform Coalition. According to police data, West Englewood, part of which is located in the 15th Ward, has the second highest violent crime rate in the city (3.0 per 1,000) for the month of August.

According to Chicago magazine, Thompson is one of twenty-one aldermen who have never voted against Rahm Emmanuel in a full council meeting. She is likewise a firm supporter of Emmanuel-led crime initiatives like the “school safety zone” ordinance proposed in June, which would create gun-free zones around schools and safe passage routes. The ordinance, which Thompson co-sponsored, will likely pass in the next Council term.

October 2, 2013

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South Side Weekly 7

W

iping her hands on an apron as she strides out of the kitchen, the single employee on duty at Josefina’s Bakery turns down “Vas a Llorar Por Mí,” the latest single from Banda El Recodo De Cruz Lizárraga. The same evening sees students from Benito Juárez Community Academy slouched over benches in nearby Dvorak Park, next to a hassled mom whose shouts of “¡Cuidado!” fall on the deaf ears of her boisterous son.

Men stream out from citizenship classes in Casa Aztlan, a longtime home of social activism in the neighborhood.

A block away from all of this is Thalia Hall, a sprawling nineteenth-century building at the corner of 18th and Allport that has recently found new owners.

A partnership headed by Bruce Finkelman, owner of North Side establishments Longman & Eagle and the Empty Bottle, along with The Promontory, a soon-to-open venue in Hyde Park, bought the complex earlier this summer for $3.2 million.It’s September 28, a Saturday night when Dusek’s, the restaurant and the anchor tenant of the entire complex, finally throws its doors open to the public. The dinner crowd has yet to arrive, but there are about sixty well-dressed patrons choosing from a beer list dominated by Belgian imports.

Featured that night is a pan-roasted skirt steak with sautéed matsutake mushrooms paired with a Czech dark lager, a nod to the area’s Bohemian heritage. Acclaimed Longman & Eagle chef Jared Wentworth sends a tiny cup of compressed apple, cucumber, and pork belly around the restaurant. There’s an air of subdued class about the whole operation, and the clientele looks perfectly at home with all of it.

On the face of it, then, the entrance of Thalia Hall seems a straightforward portent of great change, where the arrival of well-to-do white interlopers and the businesses attending to their needs prices a neighborhood out of the reach of a predominantly low-income Mexican-American population that has called Pilsen home since the 1950s.

B

ruce Finkelman is terse, even defensive when confronted with the idea that his newest project could find itself out of sync with the neighborhood that surrounds it. He’s had a long history in Chicago dining, with runaway successes in earlier ventures like Logan Square’s Longman & Eagle, meaning he’s eager to add to his burgeoning gourmet empire. Thalia Hall represents the latest feather in his cap, and his confidence shows in the way that

he carries himself.

Previously, most of his business holdings have been discrete, individual projects dedicated either to entertainment or food.

Thalia Hall, however, will house Dusek’s, a grand theater, a seventeenth-century-themed punch bar named Punch House in the basement, and two outside tenants— Modern Cooperative, a modern furniture store specializing in 1960s home décor, and Belli’s, a food store dedicated to local produce.

Given the variety of business interests contained under one roof, Thalia Hall proves difficult to classify. This contributes to Finkelman’s outright rejection of the idea that his vision of Thalia Hall could prove to be an outlier in the Pilsen neighborhood.

“This place has been here longer than the neighborhood’s been here, so if it doesn’t fit into the fabric, [Pilsen is] really in trouble,” Finkelman says.

The physical longevity of the building means that Finkelman’s assertion is difficult to quibble with. Opened in 1892, Thalia Hall is an unchanging fixture at what was once the center of Czech pride in Chicago. Still, in a neighborhood which as of the 2010 Census remains more than eighty percent Hispanic, and where the median income hovers around $25,000, there are fears that this incarnation of Thalia Hall will not be culturally or economically accessible to Pilsen residents.To that end, Finkelman describes an active process of trying to ensure that Thalia Hall is rooted in the neighborhood. He insists that he is no fly-by-night operator, either: “Empty Bottle, and Empty Bottle Presents, have been doing things in Pilsen for about fifteen years. We’ve done shows down here, gallery openings, all sorts of things. These are places that we’ve been going to for quite some time. It was a natural progression.”

The purchase of Thalia Hall represents at least a temporary end to a saga that has dogged the property for the past decade.

In the past five years alone, Thalia Hall

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has battled through several lawsuits filed against Dominick Geraci, its colorful former owner. Geraci was eventually forced to declare bankruptcy, and in March of 2012 Thalia Hall faced foreclosure.

Finkelman acknowledges that the large task of integrating Thalia Hall into the neighborhood is going to demand more than a recount of his professional history.

He’s keen to describe a hyper-local hiring process. “My bartenders live down the street from here, the girl who’s doing some of the designing in the basement meets me at an old bar across the street. This is where they live.” The emphasis on staff having pre-existing links to the neighborhood crops up again and again.

Craig Golden, Finkelman’s business partner, recalls how they roped in a local artist. “A guy was out hanging posters on the street, and we brought him into the space because he’s a printmaker,” Golden says. “That’s part of what we want to do— to collaborate with artists in the neighborhood.”

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elson Soza has concerns about what the space is going to mean for the future, for the wider neighborhood of Pilsen, and for the lower-income residents that live in the blocks surrounding 18th Street.

He’s the head of the Pilsen Alliance, a social justice organization started in 1998 that describes its main mission on its website as “community preservation.” The precise nature of that preservation is in little doubt. A conversation with Soza consistently returns to economics. He emphasizes maintaining support for working-class and low-income groups in the neighborhood.

“Thalia Hall coming into the neighborhood is a big marker,” says Soza. “It’s a big development. It signals to me a consolidation of the gentrification project.”

It’s clearly an emotive and complicated subject for Soza, and he treads lightly in elaborating on the statement.

Gentrification, he says, “means that people with better incomes are going to be living in a place.”He hews religiously to an economic definition of gentrification: not once does he attempt to raise the specters of race or culture. In fact, he explicitly debunks the idea that his work with the Pilsen Alliance is meant to maintain the Mexican makeup of the neighborhood.

Picking his words carefully, he explains what exactly the Pilsen Alliance is trying to preserve. “Gentrification to us is not just Mexican people getting kicked out

of an area,” he says. “It’s about people with more resources, influence, and education moving the old residents out, and those residents can come in many colors.”

He strongly believes that there are things Finkelman can do to mitigate some of the ill effects associated with the arrival of a higher-end clientele.Specifically, he made two concrete demands to Finkelman after the purchase, both of which, he believes, would have ensured that poorer residents maintained an active stake in the success of the property.First, noting the eight apartments above the main theater space in Thalia Hall, he wanted a commitment to ensuring that a portion of those residences would be affordable. “We wanted twenty percent of the apartments rented for people who had fifty percent of the state’s median income, low-income people making $22,000 a year.”

Secondly, he raises the issue of employment in the local community. “We asked them to help us create a program that would create a pipeline of local people to fill the jobs that he has,” he says. “For instance, he needs waiters, cooks, drivers.

Is there a certain level of skills that is necessary so that we could help steer people from the community to those jobs?”There’s a palpable dissatisfaction with the way that those concerns were addressed by the Finkelman team. “On the units, people are already living there, so [Finkelman] said, ‘I don’t know if I can do anything about that,’ ” Soza says. “Of course he can, but okay.

On the jobs, ‘We’re definitely going to do something.’ ” There’s a wry smile, as he continues by describing how Finkelman said he was going to handle local employment: “ ‘We’re going to put a listing on Craigslist.’ ” His exasperation with the project shines through when he wonders aloud why Finkelman picked Pilsen to begin with. “It’s surprising that they selected this place,” he says. “That tells me a lot. It tells me that to them, this is the Wild West. It’s open space, it’s free for them to be the anchor for change.”

When I ask Finkelman why he selected Pilsen specifically, he replies, “You’d be surprised how much it is that a project picks you. A business acquaintance of Craig [Golden] showed him this property, he took a walk through, called me and told me to get my ass down here. When we started working on it, it just became a no-brainer to do.”

Despite his misgivings, Soza is seeking a way to make it work for Pilsen. The

A Hall Reborn, a Neighborhood Altered Bruce Finkelman, Nelson Soza, & what Thalia Hall means for Pilsen

By Patrick Leow Photos and cover

by Lydia Gorham

Pilsen Alliance head Nelson Soza

October 2, 2013

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South Side Weekly 9

project is already well underway, and so he frequently revisits themes of community, cooperation, and acceptance.“I have a great hope, personally, that Thalia Hall will succeed as a business,” Soza says. “We wish him all the success in the world, we want him to succeed. Because if he succeeds and we are real partners, then we will all succeed.”

Thinking about the changes ahead, Soza is restrained, gravely nodding as he accepts that it is better for the Pilsen Alliance to be proactive in shaping the discussion, rather than rejecting every proposed change in the neighborhood.“We don’t just want to be the anti-people. You want to be the for-people,” Soza says. “Folks like Mr. Finkelman and other leaders in the business community can play a huge role, so we’re excited that we’ll have a chance to continue working with him. Hopefully.”

A

le xandra Curatolo and Tiffany Paige are the two tenants occupying the eastern commercial end of Thalia Hall, young women who glow when talking about the neighborhood that they both call home. Both have a significant history of grassroots involvement in the neighborhood, with interests in local food and art, respectively.

The similarities run deep. Both have lived here for eight years, but beyond the mere fact of residency, they have both also nurtured community organizations dedicated to making Pilsen a more livable neighborhood.

Tiffany Paige runs Modern Cooperative, the first store to open in Thalia Hall, relocated from its former location a few blocks east. It’s a tastefully put-together space dominated by fall colors—orange, amber, brown—and it looks right off the set of “Mad Men.” In a tour of the space, she shows off her fierce desire to support and cultivate local artists.There’s a mural by local artist Ruben Aguirre she’s particularly excited about, a tangle of red, green, and gray that commands attention just inside the entrance of the store. Aguirre’s mural was commissioned by Paige, who picked the artist because of his strong ties to the neighborhood.

“He did the sides of Simone’s Bar, and he also has a mural or two on 16th Street, on the viaduct. Because street art is such a big part of the culture of Pilsen, we had this idea to take outside street art and bring it in.”

Aguirre is not alone in the store. He’s only one of twelve artists from Pilsen whom Paige has chosen to display in her

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space. It’s a deliberate decision made in the hope of having Modern Cooperative be a showcase for the vibrancy of the Pilsen art world, in addition to its regular business.

The names of residents keep rolling off the tongue. Tammy States Love is responsible for the paintings hanging on the wall; the light fixtures in the window were made

by Raymond Barberousse. The store sells tote bags made by Jeff Munie out of recycled material, some of which came from a monastery in Niles, Illinois. The monastery was originally built by St. Procopius Holy Trinity, across the street from Thalia Hall.

Additionally, Paige is an integral portion of Vintage on 18th, a nine-month-old collaboration between five different thrift and vintage stores that lie clustered on a fourblock stretch of 18th Street. “We’re all friends, we all support each other, so why not market each other’s stores?” she asks.

“We wanted to show all of Chicago that we’re a strong and vibrant business community.”

Her voice wavers a bit as she remembers that it was the strength of the art community in Pilsen that drew her to the neighborhood almost nine years ago. “We all highlight local artists,” she says. “Sometimes if someone comes in and thinks I carry clothes, I can say ‘No, but here’s a map showing where all the other stores are.’ ”Curatolo, Paige’s soon-to-be neighbor, is the president of the Pilsen Community Market, a weekly farmers’ market that takes place every Sunday in the Chicago Community Bank parking lot adjacent to Halsted Avenue.

Her dog Belli is the inspiration for the name of her first business—Belli’s, Thalia Hall’s local food store—and he strains at the leash whenever a potential new friend walks by. On this particular Sunday at the farmers’ market, friends are not in short shrift—2pm sees at least five families sitting on a quiet patch of grass, kids ringing the bells on their bikes, the bravest among them squatting, crowding around the pooch.

Once it opens on October 18, Belli’s will stock local food products available from the farmers’ market, as well as organic produce from around the region. Curatolo takes an obvious pride in how this store grew out of the Pilsen Community Market and its participants and patrons, who value locally-sourced food.

When it comes up in discussion, both Curatolo and Paige readily acknowledge the existence of gentrification. However, they say, Pilsen’s change is distinct because this change came from within, from resi-

dents of the neighborhood.

“The thing I like about the way Pilsen is going is that it’s not Starbucks,” Curatolo says. “It’s locally supported.”

Paige also brings up the lack of impersonal coffee chains as evidence for the healthy way in which change occurs in the neighborhood. “I live in Pilsen because I like that it isn’t over-gentrified, that there aren’t chain coffee shops. If you look at all of the businesses that have opened recently, they all live in the neighborhood.”

That may be so, and walking down 18th Street still means being treated to a long string of locally-owned establishments. On the basis of new businesses like Dia de los Tamales and Market Supply, Pilsen localism looks to be a wellspring that is unlikely to dry up any time soon.

That being said, Pilsen’s unique combination of affordability and history of bottom-up change might be threatened by the arrival of a complex headed by a person who readily admits that his interest in setting up shop in the neighborhood was a fairly recent development. There’s a long way to go before Finkelman can prove a strong and consistent record of commitment to the community. As it stands, Thalia Hall could be perceived as just another portion of his influential business holdings.

A

ny discussion of Pilsen’s future is incomplete without a mention of Danny Solis, 25th Ward alderman and a long-time power broker within the community. Even as one of the most powerful men serving on the City Council—he’s served as the president pro tempore and is the chair of the Zoning Committee—there is a burgeoning sense in Pilsen that Solis cares very little about helping the majority poor, immigrant Mexican population of the neighborhood.

Solis first ascended to the City Council in 1996, a community organizer who had unimpeachable credentials when it came to fighting for working-class and immigrant Mexican Americans. His personal history reads like a laundry list in insurgent crusades on behalf of the disenfranchised: a first-generation American, he was a frequent participant in the anti-war protests of the Vietnam War, and co-founded the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO), a community development organization that emphasizes education.

The group now operates thirteen charter schools in Chicago. As its co-founder and executive director, he was instrumental in passing the 1986 federal Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), an im-

portant first step for many undocumented immigrants seeking amnesty on American soil.

However, in recent years, the safe shoals of grassroots support for Solis within Pilsen have gradually eroded. For all the talk of how change will happen on the neighborhood’s own terms, the perception is that the exigencies of Solis’s political position might mean that change happens faster than anyone anticipates.

Nelson Soza explains that the Mexican base of the alderman’s support is now shakier than ever before. To Soza, there is little sense that Solis, and the rest of the City Council, are responsive to the needs of the poorest members of his community, people who rely most on the government for basic services. “A lot of people would like to see him do certain things differently,” Soza says, pointing out the recent CPS closures as an example of a city government that chooses to ignore its poorest. “When you close fifty schools, when you have to move 30,000 kids in areas of high crime and violence, that’s serious business. And to think that’s not going to have negative consequences is just out of your mind.”

Most tellingly, Solis’s purported lack of support amongst Pilsen residents is borne out in his election results. In 2011’s April run-off election, facing challenger Cuahutémoc Morfin—especially vocal in his desire to see Pilsen represented by someone from “El Barrio”—Solis lost every single one of the eight precincts that make up Pilsen east of the Pink Line CTA tracks. He won only 36.9 percent of the neighborhood’s votes, the closest race Solis has ever had to run.

Even without majority support from the Pilsen residents who once formed the cornerstone of his appeal, Solis still managed to win re-election by nearly ten percent. That is in large part thanks to the convincing margins he racked up in the non-majority Hispanic portions of the 25th Ward; without the 76.5 percent of the vote from Chinatown’s three precincts, or the 80.1 percent he won from University Village, Solis could quite easily have lost his re-election bid.Both Alderman Solis and his office were unable to be reached for comment.

Instead of trying to repair the relationship between himself and Pilsen voters, Solis seems to be seeking a whole new constituency.

The prospect of losing another election will loom less menacingly after the recent round of redistricting takes effect in 2015.

Then, the center of gravity of the 25th

Ward moves northward toward downtown, taking in the lofts at Roosevelt Collection in the South Loop, Solis’s borders stretching as far north as Wa s h i n g t o n Boulevard.

In fact, Thalia Hall’s muc h-hy p ed entrance into the neighborhood could not have happened without Solis’s active intervention, Soza says. “[Solis is] the Zoning chair, in charge of developments, in charge of whatever happens in the city,” Soza says.

“He’s powerful.

Thalia Hall had to go through him to get the right zoning permissions.”

If Soza’s hunch is correct, then the arrival of Thalia Hall does lend some credence to the idea that there is going to be very little political resistance to the prospect of a gentrified Pilsen. Although Solis has set his sights elsewhere, the fact that he could benefit from a demographic turnover in Pilsen appears to be a given.

P

erhaps it is still too soon to tell what effect Thalia Hall is going to have on the neighborhood. After all, newly engaged couples have only dreamed about furnishing their homes with Modern Cooperative’s lime-green couches for two weeks; a waitress working on Dusek’s opening night explained that it’s going to be a while before the restaurant gets into its groove; and Belli’s and the music hall, the jewel in the crown, have not even opened.

Yet given the sheer size of Finkelman’s investment in Thalia Hall—its purchase and subsequent renovation—it’s probably a safe bet that Finkelman intends for the historic

building to stick around. What exactly this will mean for Pilsen is a matter of interpretation. Where Soza sees Thalia Hall as “free to be an anchor, to have gentrification circle around [it],” Curatolo insists that a single business simply doesn’t have that kind of power, gentrification instead being “a citywide problem that is policy-driven.”

It is entirely possible they that are both right. The dynamics of a neighborhood do not fall neatly into a diametric opposition between poor immigrant and well-to-do white outsider. Both private and political interests play a role in determining neighborhood character.

But if, a decade from now, Pilsen’s cheap taquerías and weekend carnitas prove to be a remnant of a distant past, a sepia-toned refuge for old men like those who currently recall the neighborhood’s Bohemian past with a smile and some faraway fondness, maybe Thalia Hall’s rebirth will be remembered as a sign of Pilsen’s latest transformation.

October October 2, 2013 2, ¬ 2013 South ¬ Side South Weekly Side Weekly 13 13

Walking the Line Stephen urchick

T

he crowd at the Washington Park Arts Incubator stood quietly and attentively. They were even a little drunkenly reverent from the host’s generous booze offerings that afternoon. They had slogged through a cool September evening’s rain and gale for the flagship gallery event in The Distance Between, a joint exhibition simultaneously installed on and beyond the Midway. It aimed to celebrate Washington Park, the titular distance the dual venues straddle: Logan to the east and the Incubator to the west. Tomeka Reid—jazz cellist, and one of five featured artists—played at the center of the crowd’s loose constellation. Her increasingly busy, brooding melodies merged gradually with recorded audio captured from the 55th and 63rd Street L stations. Reid’s bowing grew violent, anticipating an oncoming train’s wind-whipping horsepower. The cello’s tense buzzing produced a chest-constricting overpressure that approximated the engine’s rumble. It seemed something truly had jumped the tracks at Garfield. The composition dove, churned, and plunged until the speakers shivered with the train’s arrival, nearly drowning out Reid’s climax.

Her cello railed indignantly, demanding to be heard. Spectral brakes squealed on.

A mellower, more skeptical line rapidly dampened the piece’s velocity. Distant passengers disembarked as we exited from our respective reveries and noticed that Reid had altogether stopped playing. Her bow was at rest.

That soothing song came from little over a mile away, at the Logan Center. For five movements, Tomeka and her partner Fred Lonberg-Holm had been blindly improvising from across a live-stream. Beyond the other’s vision, Reid’s Washington Park Suite hinged as much on each musician’s keen hearing as it did a lag-free Internet connection. Reid was working from a wild sketch of a graphic score. The Suite couldn’t survive the momentary displeasure of unnamable computer gods, deities to which Reid jokingly admitted praying.

In composing the Suite, Reid summoned inspiration from local sources.

She found music in the Green Line. She incorporated twitters from birdlife in abandoned lots. She composed a ballad

for Jesse Binga—King Drive banker and Great Depression martyr—using only notation suggested by the five letters of his surname. These efforts brought her work into communication with one of the exhibition’s more compelling subtexts: radically re-conceptualizing Washington Park as a location and a boundary. Many University of Chicago students and not a few Hyde Park residents perceive Washington Park and the outlying neighborhood as a forbidden space and a dangerous place. Locals on either side of Cottage Grove tend to let their projected discomfort or extant disinterest render the street impermeable. Even Reid herself admitted to spending much of her time at Logan.

Most simply, The Distance Between was a showcase for the five artists in the University-sponsored Arts and Public Life residency program. The residency’s intent was to speak largely about the artists’ “expanded social practice” treating issues of “race, politics, and culture.” Its summative exhibition accordingly seemed to spotlight the art’s context more brightly than the objets themselves. Couching the art as an exploration of the region’s underappreciated aesthetic potential was intended as a novel, more specific, and more sympathetic vehicle for paradigmatic change.

Lassoing the two park-bracketing venues by Wi-Fi, Reid’s Suite existed as part of the exhibition’s vaunted “park crossing” program—an afternoon-long attempt to replicate amongst gallery-goers the five artists’ commute between their twin galleries and two workshops. The crowd at the Incubator was enticed to hear the same performance again at Logan, baited with ample food and drink, guided by bus, bike, and walking tour. Even though the day’s wet weather scrubbed the latter two options, attendees still made the effort and a showing—persistently sustaining audiences 20 to 30 large in both galleries. Bright, warbling milieus of grad students, professional staff, worldly people from around Hyde and Washington Park shared headphones and floor space around the walls, swapped thoughts and ideas. Yet you couldn’t shake the sinking doubt that the people who came were the people who already cared: socially-minded scholars, an

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Stephen Urchick

aesthetically keen camera club, folks that routinely walk the park under discussion.

Were these attendees the people who needed convincing they wouldn’t be jumped an hour before sundown walking west past Cottage Grove? They certainly weren’t the sort who had trouble feeling they belonged before musical performances and installation art, thick sculptural canvasses and painterly photography.

Those folks slipped past the Incubator’s windowed walls that afternoon, gliding through the drizzle, tracing Tomeka’s bowstrokes with their eyes. Resident artist LeRoy Bach admitted to loving those windows. “It’s like a fishbowl,” he said.

But Bach quickly qualified his love for the Incubator’s street-side gallery, its literally invisible barrier. “There’s so much foot traffic going by here,” he mused. “I hope

people feel welcome coming in.” The Distance Between seemed to ride on the same hopes; if it couldn’t convince pedestrians to risk walking behind inch-thick sheet glass, it could hardly propel them into another neighborhood.

Bach—composer, musician, and organizer of unpredictably sized n-tets—represented the residency program’s only white artist. He signed onto the residency well aware he would be asked to grapple with the question posed most plainly by fellow resident Cecil McDonald: “How did LeRoy end up with all these black people?”

Bach needed to inject himself into problems of racial and social justice. “How can you sneak into another person’s reality and have them be glad for it?” he asked. Tapping white vocalist Tim Kinsella to record CD tracks arranged by black composer and

jazz artist Marvin Tate seemingly landed him far from the mark. Kinsella’s throaty, contentedly apathetic croonings smack of plaid, cuffed jeans, and privilege. Substituting vocals in a guitar-strumming, half-whispering, unmistakably bougie vein for religiously soulful voices or abused blues most jarringly chilled Devonte’s in a Coma. An instance of gang violence, and the ensuing grief simply sounded like a linear progression of rubber stamps, stages of another week-long news cycle. A mother’s eulogy, a teacher’s poem, a mayor’s speech turned steel-cold under Kinsella’s eerily affectless voice. His smooth, untroubled easiness borders on callousness. Devonte reads as a reflection on how unsympathetic reporting has rendered shootings, their collateral body counts horrendously mundane.

During the crossing, whilst traveling Washington Park by bus, passengers demonstrated that they were anything but unsympathetic. They knowledgably detailed a recent early-evening playlot driveby, and had plenty of offended grumblings on the attack’s execution (“…why can’t they do their banging when everybody’s in

bed?”). Vocally sick to their stomachs, they articulated deep-seated desires to go out and do something (“…I don’t know how I’m going to make a difference, be an active participant!”). Their mindfulness and sense of injustice sounded hard-baked, and brought to question the exhibition’s efficacy as an educational instrument. Their teeth weren’t too sharply set on edge by Devonte. When they hung up their headphones and stepped back from the wall-mounted iPods looping Kinsella, it remained hard to believe that their spines contracted with new insight and a twinge of righteous furor. They had committed themselves to the problem long ago. Kinsella’s limp, degraded imploration to “put your guns on the table and come serve the Lord” was very much preaching to the choir.

In addition to the crossing itself, the curators of Distance programmed five artists’ talks to further solicit sojourns to either gallery and sustain engagement beyond the first gaze. But some nights garnered distressingly sparse audiences. And on the evening of the final talk, although the room was packed, whole flocks of first-

year undergraduates were whisked away to Logan’s deeper recesses for “Chicago Life Meetings.” They didn’t only miss out on the complementary fish dinner. They also skipped a stirring and hilarious conversation with resident Avery R. Young—an hour and a half that might have added more color to their understanding of the South Side than the sum total of their orientation experiences.

There’s a fruitful comparison between these students and the good-looking white twenty-somethings featured in Cecil McDonald and Young’s de melon eaters, on display at Logan. The latter quizzically consume watermelon wedges, seemingly comparing experiences and overthinking texture, flavor, and finish. Several of the party pore weightily over books on black culture, despite signs tacked to the bookshelves asking that they request assistance first. Vigorous chiaroscuro gives the piece dangerous suggestions of blackface. The leftmost melon-eater broods, his beard dissolving into blackness and his chin and cheek suggestively shadowed. Both the subjects and the real-to-life students have

approached their tasks with candor and the best of intentions. They try, too hard and without proper guidance, and therein begin to risk offending.

Young spoke at length about the gallery experience—how he didn’t compose art with an audience in mind, how he expected the beholder to “do the work” needed to access his pieces. “I’m not where a lot of motherfuckers are, and I’m not going back to them.” Yet, The Distance Between had other ideas. Its discourse about crossing very physical spaces, about reconstituting their perception, mirrored a hope to span less literal ones. The Distance Between strove to “go back” and ferry over those lingering on either side of Washington Park. Though technically competent and artistically impressive, it seemed to speak most often to those already up to navigating these spaces. Whether by guided steps or crash course, The Distance Between seemed to fall flat in teaching attendees to walk its namesake. Much of its audience already strolled along.

Logan Center Family Saturdays MONTHLY BEGINNING OCT 5, 2013 Family-friendly matinees and interactive arts workshops for a variety of ages, all presented in partnership with local artists, arts organizations, student organizations, and academic departments.

OCT 5, 2013 Jupiter Quartet NOV 2, 2013 International Children’s Film Festival: Topsy Turvy Tales JAN 18, 2014 Lee England Jr. FEB 22, 2014 Third Coast Percussion’s “The Color of Sound” MAR 22, 2014 Eth-Noh-Tec MAY 31, 2014 “Fiddlin’ with Stories” with Charlotte Blake Alston & John Blake Jr.

SAVE UP TO 50% on Family Matinees with the

Logan Family Performance Series Pass!

With the family series pass any combination of four children and adults can attend up to five Family Matinees for a discounted rate of $75.

2-4:30 pm / Register for free workshops and purchase family passes or single tickets to matinee performance at ticketsweb.uchicago.edu.

AT THE LOGAN CENTER 915 EAST 60TH STREET AT DREXEL AVENUE

logan.uchicago.edu 773.702.ARTS

LoganUChicago

October October 2, 2013 2, 3, ¬ 2013 South ¬ Side South Weekly Side Weekly 15 15

Polishing a Rising Star Willis Earl Beal’s “Nobody Knows” Jack Nuelle

O

n his new album “Nobody Knows,” Chicago born artist Willis Earl Beal has made some changes. His musical past is anything but stable and his first effort, 2012’s “Acoustimatic Sorcery,” reflects that fact.

Recorded on a busted karaoke machine in a small apartment in Albuquerque, between Beal’s medical discharge from the military and a stint living with his grandmother on the South Side of Chicago, the record is all garbled vocals and chaotic guitar. It is a soundtrack of a wandering soul, at once casual and pleadingly desperate, one man’s struggle to express his inner world through music.

For Beal every performance is a conversation, a specific and personal event.

The structure of the songs doesn’t matter, at least not really. Take the track “Evening’s Kiss,” from his debut. On the album it’s slow, almost whispered. The vocals lilt over minimalist guitar that often bends out of tune The lyrics needle and burrow; they don’t punch, and they don’t cut. When Beal performed the same song live on Jools Holland’s British talk show in 2012, he turned it into something completely different. It’s similarly minimal but also more impassioned, a bellowed, wrenching anthem of loss and abandonment. His voice pounds like a freight train—all stone and soul and deep, billowing pain. The tears he sheds towards the end of the performance feel like a testament to the song’s newfound emotional weight.

What he shares rises from within him and bursts forth, ignoring conventional formats. It makes sense. He honed his craft singing a cappella on El platforms and street corners around Chicago. A rough cut of the opening to “Nobody Knows,” “Wavering Lines,” is available on YouTube, and is markedly different from later performances (notably a live one at 2012’s Pitchfork festival) and the recorded track on the album. It all seems to flow from some inexhaustible inner source, the

Ben Pobjoy

words, even the tune, some ongoing dialogue between Beal and his disjointed muses—his loneliness, his need for searing catharsis—that frame his world. Listening to Beal always feels a little voyeuristic, like it isn’t meant for our ears. Or at least it did.

With “Nobody Knows,” Beal has an actual album on his hands: less of a heartfelt

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confessional and more of a meat-and-potatoes, “this was recorded in a studio” album.

In a way, it suffers from this streamlined approach. Sure, it’s more tuneful and polished and there are tighter vocal harmonies and arrangements. But somehow it feels like Beal is ascribing to a set image, one that he may not have drawn up for himself.

This is not to say that “Nobody Knows” is a bad album. It isn’t. In many ways it is far better than “Acoustomatic Sorcery.” Beal utlilizes his expressive, soulful roar to far greater effect and the tighter arrangements and instrumentation make for a smoother listening experience. He can sing, and there are no doubts about that here. Album opener “Wavering Lines” skips and stings, slow-burning and defiant. Tracks like “Too Dry to Cry” are modern spirituals: rhythmic, sparse, and eerie, littered with handclaps and non-lyrical vocal gymnastics. “Coming Through,” which features Cat Power, is all 70s soul: chiming chords, walking bass line, confident and sunny.

Beal is rising, as he should. He’s a rare talent, owing as much to Marvin Gaye and Bill Withers as he does to Tom Waits and his musical experimentation; owing as much to Delta Blues greats as he does to spoken word pioneers like Gil Scott Heron. Deep emotion is woven into every rambling utterance. He’s a poetic and soulful showman in his own obscure sideshow. With his sophomore effort, however, the old fear rises: that faced with the specter of success and courting the mainstream consciousness, Beal’s own intensely unique and off-kilter style might become muted and warped into some pale imitation.

Luckily with this record that’s not the case; it’s only a step away from Beal at his roughest. It’s varied, and a more polished approach to recording. The essential spirit is still there. It just doesn’t feel as spontaneous, as earnest, or as necessary. Beal is making surer music now, for fans, for record companies, but thankfully still for himself, and that’s what keeps this record fresh. So in the end, if this rise eclipses his meandering beginnings, so be it.

It’s just a bittersweet farewell.

The Dream Seduced

Michael Brosilow

Martin Luther King, Jr. revisited at Court Theatre Jackson Roth

“A

merica is going to hell,” cries a disgruntled Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in a motel room as thunder crashes outside. The opening minutes of “The Mountaintop” set the tone for Katori Hall’s play, a fictional portrayal of King’s stay at the Lorraine Motel on April 3, 1968, the eve of his assassination.

The play originally premiered in London in 2009 and the latest incarnation, directed

by Ron OJ Parson and starring David Alan Anderson as King and Lisa Beasley as the motel maid Camae, is running at Court Theater through October 13.

The play revolves around a conversation between King and Camae, who has answered King’s request for a cup of coffee. King is visibly nervous. Upon arriving he does a quick sweep of his room, looking under beds and fidgeting with lamps, checking for listening bugs planted by the FBI. The search prompts the audience into the awareness that it’s 1968, not 2013. In an age when every fourth-grader in Amer-

ica can recite the “I Have a Dream” speech, it can sometimes be difficult to remember that King was not part of the establishment, but a threat to it. Today, a high school ten blocks north of Court Theatre is just one of the many that bear the activist’s name.

But to the public of the play’s world, King is a radical revolutionary—not the saintly figure honored with a federal holiday.

When Camae arrives with his coffee, King is friendly and flirtatious and the two begin to chat. Jovially, he jokes about his foot odor and borrows cigarettes but betrays a world-wearyiness about his work.

Casual jokes about King’s death – “I’ll keep working ‘till it kills me” – are hurled like grenades at the audience. It is never clear if King is attempting to romance Camae, or just being a flirt. Either way watching King, often presented as the paragon of morality, seduce, whatever the ends, adds more tension to the already fraught scene.

But King’s more idealistic attributes are not absent from The Mountaintop. King gives

several rousing speeches to Camae championing civil rights, the poor, and an end to the War in Vietnam. As an actor, Anderson fluidly combines the human and the ideal into one coherent character. A compellingly complex view of King emerges, bringing to light both his originally revolutionary character and his personal failings, and offering a refreshing vision of a man who is too often subject to a saint-like portrayal that is respectful but reductive.

Beasley’s Camae is an equally complex and interesting character who proves well matched to Anderson’s King. Though seemingly just a humble hotel maid, she is intelligent, funny, flirtatious and sharp.

She teases King and offers him cigarettes while playing devil’s advocate by espousing a philosophy that mixes Booker T. Washington’s preference for economic independence with Malcolm X’s calls to violence.

Like Anderson, Beasley has an excellent emotional range: she can switch from playful to serious on the flip of a dime.

The play’s strangest aspect, which initially strikes one as a dubious break from realism, is how the plot unfolds in its later stages. After supernatural elements make an entrance around the halfway mark, King’s fate is revealed to him. While this plot twist initially feels a little forced, “The Mountaintop” rebounds. When King is compelled to face his fate, and ultimately accept it, the play’s second act begins to shine. The unidealized portrayal of King throughout “The Mountaintop” allows us to empathize with him as he struggles to accept his role as a martyr. This struggle, brilliantly scripted and acted, forms the play’s climax and, despite the wacky non-realist interruptions, “The Mountaintop” retains its tragic elements, achieving a simultaneous sense of both the humanness of King, and the magnitude of his sacrifice, that is easily the play’s greatest triumph.

October 2, 2013

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South Side Weekly 17

Still Fresh

People, Places & Things reinvent a legacy Harunobu Coryne

I

f the idea came to you—that is, if you had in your head a bunch of obscure records from Chicago’s early, hard-bopping days, and wanted somehow to crank them through a twenty-first century free-jazz machine, so as to shock the life out of them and breathe new, freaky life into its place—do you think, after all that, it would be worth the effort?

Similarly, if you took an old 1957 composition by the arcane John Jenkins, cut out two bars of the melody, looped them at triple-speed, then bore a hole into the audience’s skull for a few minutes with a pair of high-powered modernist saxophone-drills, then receded comfortably into sweet, nearly straight-ahead bop, would it hurt in a good way?

Also, who ever heard of Madman Jones?

The answers to these questions are: yes, yes, and Mike Reed.

Five years ago, Reed and his quartet released their first album, Proliferation, under the moniker People, Places & Things. The project then, as it sort of is today, was to call out the little-known artists who burned short and bright in 1950s Chicago—singular talents who helped to make the city a hub of experimental music and laid the groundwork for later groups like the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

As the album’s title suggests, the aim was continuity in part, innovation in part: both drummer and composer, Reed built new sounds off the work of artists that few aside from musicians and critics were familiar with, like saxophonists John Jenkins (a prolific side-man and composer who all but vanished from the scene in the early sixties), Tommy “Madman” Jones (who played Chicago nightclubs for decades but has largely escaped lasting fame), and Frank Strozier (a Tennessean whose involvement in the Chicago avant-garde propelled him to a solo career in New York). The band has released four albums in the meantime, tinkering with the balance between inventive covers and original compositions. Their latest, “Clean on the

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Corner,” in 2012, featured six “new” pieces compared to the three on “Proliferation.”

I met Reed last Thursday at his Logan Square venue, Constellation, where People, Places & Things were performing ahead of their Saturday performance in the Hyde Park Jazz Festival. Before greeting me, he had to set down a tall, ceramic pot on a table by the front door. The pot was full of gumbo.

I asked him about the project, which might conceivably be described as paying homage to old Chicago. Did he think he was recreating anything?

“No.” “Not at all?”

“No, not ‘not at all’,” he said, sighing.

Later I would read a somewhat irritable post from three years ago on Reed’s blog, in which he asks why so many journalists repeatedly pose the one obvious question: why 1950s Chicago? “My first thought,” he writes, “is just to say ‘read the fucking liner notes!’” He goes on: “Of course, I’m not that crass, and do my best to explain…again.”

And he did, again: “You hope that some of those things live on through the experiences and the people, but you can’t recreate it. It’s gotta be whatever it is.”

“I mean, you can listen to it,” he added later, “and it’s obvious that we’re not recreating.”

Which is true. As you read up on the secret world that gave Reed his source material, you realize just how stupid it is to talk vaguely about a single “Chicago sound,” and what it actually means for a jazz piece to be reinterpreted by later musicians. More than a few of the artists who inform Reed carry a reputation among jazz-heads for being practically impossible to imitate, let alone recreate.

Strozier was one of them; on one 1959 track by the MJT+3 quintet, an Oscar Brown, Jr. composition called “Sleepy,” he comes in bending and snapping with the classical precision and blues fixation of a latter-day Sidney Bechet, fresh out of the Memphis swelter. The People, Places ver-

october 2, 2013

sion is different. It takes a couple of minutes before you catch anything recognizable; in the meantime, you get to hear saxophonists Greg Ward and Tim Haldeman try to out-spook each other, descending from the ethers like a slow fog.

Ward and Haldeman have gotten marks for their on-stage rapport, but you really need to see them live to get the full effect.

The band’s Saturday set at the jazz festival featured a treatment of South Sider David Boykin’s “Big and Fine,” a slow, bluesy number that at first seems like a vehicle for Haldeman’s tenor, until Ward starts trailing in, his face as puckered as Haldeman’s is stoic, and suddenly you have fat, wet honks talking to flurries of old New Orleans, and there it is: fifty years of musical continuity. It’s a triumph, about as cool to watch as the band’s bassist, Jason Roebke, scatting to himself during a solo.

The other renditions are no less vexing.

Take Tommy “Madman” Jones: lounge lizard extraordinaire and darling of the Chicago Defender and half the jazz clubs in south Chicago. A man of expansive taste, Jones left behind a range of recordings that show off his hard-bop credentials, an ear for danceable hits, and a kinky musical mind. In 1958, he released (on his own record label, Mad, which he opened out of a Hyde Park location the year before) “Snake Charmer,” a piece of exotica that put him in front of the mic with an all-rhythm band, shrieking, “Snakes! Snakkeeessss!

Creeping! Crawling! SLITHERING! SLIIIDINNNG!” in between snatches of hisses and laughter that call to mind Ken Page’s “Oogie-Boogie” from “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”

Jones (who died in 1993) never really stopped producing, and in 1961 he put out a ballad called “F.A.” that exists nowhere on the Internet. Reed found it (or some-

Isabel Ochoa Gold

one brought it to him), and he pitched it to his band, who sculpted it into the sweetest number on their debut record. Given how different Reed’s covers can be from their source material, it’s impossible to conclude what the original tune sounded like just from hearing his version. Still, when Jones lent his horn to straight-ahead jazz, as he does on a treatment of “Autumn Leaves,” the result could be surprising: a tone just clean enough to call refined, but without wiping away that nasty, barwalking sound. It’s no wonder that the band was able to tease “F.A.” into a real modernist work—a duet between Ward and Haldeman, who build their modal improvisations over a skeleton of plodding baselines and Reed’s soft brushwork. Jones, who returned home from Europe a few months before his death, and ailing from several years of hard-gigging, gave one telephone interview as a penultimate act. “You are the second person to show some interest in my work,” he told the reporter, allegedly between huffs on an oxygen mask. “And what is it, thirty or so years later? I had just given up completely.” But twenty years on, that sound remains fresh.

I asked Reed if the band’s recent work on more new music marks a departure from the original, quasi-historical project. He said things are ongoing.

“It’s important to keep those stories and people,” he said. “If you don’t know that stuff, then you’re kind of worthless, because you’re not really telling a good story when you get up there and play.”

VISUAL ARTS Bombay Sapphire Artisan Series At least 21 and enjoy visual arts? Gallery Guichard’s Artisan Series opening offers a way to enjoy Friday. The Artisan Series, sponsored by Bombay Sapphire in partnership with Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation, is a nationwide competition for emerging and mid-level visual artists to display their work at Art Basel, an international art show in Miami Beach, Florida. Finalists from nine cities, as well as two online finalists, will display their work at the show. Gallery Guichard will display the work of thirty-two semifinalists from the Chicago area, selected from 378 submissions. Enjoy music, food and cocktails at the event, where the Chicago finalist will be announced and will discuss their work at 8:30pm. Gallery Guichard, 3521 S. King Dr. Opens October 11, 7-10pm. Through November 10. Hours by appointment only.

Free. (773)-791-7003. galleryguichard.com (Sarah Manhardt)

“I Heart Art” Fundraiser Featuring a live DJ, quality finger foods and a variety of artwork from students, the South Chicago Art Center’s annual fundraiser will have you yelling, “I Heart Art!” The Art Center’s “I Heart Art” fundraiser gives blossoming artists, some as young as six, a chance to display their unique work for families and friends. Additionally, the fundraiser is an integral part in continuing the free, year-round visual arts programs for youth around the South Side. In neighborhoods filled with gangs and violence, the proceeds from the event will go directly toward helping over 3,000 children stay safe and active with the Art Center’s programs. Be sure to snag one of the Art Center’s signature “happyartini” drinks before attending the special discussion starting at 6pm with Chicago arts personality Theaster Gates. South Chicago Art Center Satellite Studio, 2003-07 S. Halsted St. Wednesday, October 16, 7-9pm. $50. (773) 731-9287. happyartcenter.org (Lexi McCammond)

Pilsen East Artists’ Open House Art is awesome, and in October, Chicago Artists Month, the focus is on the people that make it. On October 11 and 12, Pilsen will take their usual 2nd Fridays event up a notch.

Not only are the galleries open, you can also take a self-guided tour of the working artists’ residences and work spaces.

Similar to going to Oz and peeking at the man behind the curtain – except instead of a disappointing old wizard, there are artists who make real creative magic happen. There will be performances, curated shows, and opportunities to talk with the working artists. Galleries, residences, and studios will all be open, offering a rare chance to see what goes on behind the scenes in Pilsen. Pilsen, along Halsted Ave. and 18th St. October 11-12. Friday 4-11pm; Saturday 11am-7pm.

Free. chicagoartdistrict.org (Olivia Dorow Hovland)

The Endangered Species “Beautiful, but without hope,” is Raub Welch’s assessment of the black man in America. Through looming three-dimensional collages, Welch takes on the task of redirecting society’s perception of the black man. Welch sees an image of aggression, simplicity, and thoughtlessness linked to the black man today. Above all, he seeks to reunite a notion of beauty with the black male subject. Within this framework, Welch tackles the themes of masculinity, sexuality, slavery, mental poverty, and, finally, futility. To span these nuances of beauty, Welch turns to collage and pairs portraits of the black man—photographs he takes of black male models— with images of nature, Christianity, human anatomy, text, and relics of black culture. But the show’s ominous title begs the question: is this simply an elaborate farewell to the beautiful black man, or is there hope after all? DuSable Museum, 740 E. 56th Pl. October 18-March 30. Tuesday-Saturday, 10am–5pm; Sunday, noon-5pm. Free-$10. (773)947-0600. dusablemuseum.org (Sasha Tycko)

Anode “Anode” is defined as the starting point of a current, or the beginning of a flow. Artists Saul Aguirre and Miguel Cortez use the concept of “flow” to generate a discussion on the creation of relevant social critique. Aguirre makes use of multiple traditional mediums to create images that explore societal collaboration and cooperation; Cortez utilizes modern digital techniques and equipment to create his “new media”-centered side of the dialogue. Both artists draw on their Latin American roots to address the role of heritage and ethnicity in cultural discourse, but the art isn’t explicitly Latin American. The show is meant to make viewers

contemplate how we approach social discourse and critique, something which may be shocking to some. There will be an opening event at 5pm on Saturday, October 5. Sol Studio, 2233 S Throop St., Suite 206. October 4-November 6. Studio open by appointment only. Free. (312) 282-3777. saulaguirre. com (Eric Green)

STAGE & SCREEN The Watsons Go to Birmingham The just-premiered “The Watsons Go to Birmingham” comes in a year and season that mark the 50th anniversary of dual climactic moments in American race relations, one charged and triumphant, the other tragic. It is the latter that provides the historical hook that the film hangs its fictional hat on. The Watsons, a middle-class black family from Flint, Michigan, journey to Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. The trip is a pilgrimage to the altar of grandmotherly reform, an attempt to straighten out wayward son Byron, the eldest of three children. Instead, the visit proves cataclysmic for the whole clan after unexpected tragedy brushes the family: their grandmother’s church is that targeted in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. The attack killed four girls a few years older than the fictional family’s youngest daughter, killings for which some Klansmen were only just indicted in 2001. The Institute of Politics presents the film alongside a discussion with writer and producer Tonya Lewis Lee. Mandel Hall, 1131 E. 57th St. Monday, October 7, 3pm. Free.

Registration recommended. (773)834-4671. politics.uchicago.edu (Hannah Nyhart)

Theater East. Through October 5. Friday-Saturday, 8pm. $20.

(773)753-4821. thenewcolony.org (Meaghan Murphy)

The Resurrection of Alice Artist Perri Gaffney brings a crowd to the stage at eta Creative Arts Foundation this fall, even though her show is a solo one. In a two-act adaption of her novel by the same name, the artist embodies over a dozen characters. Gaffney switches seamlessly between what feels like a village-full of personalities that orbit around the title character, Alice.

The young woman’s path toward college is cut short by the revelation that her parents have arranged her marriage in return for much needed financial stability. Based on the true story of a friend of the author’s mother in rural South Carolina just half a century ago, Gaffney’s performance enthralls rather than preaches, pulling in the audience with every switch of posture and tone. In a story of resilience in the face of a life imposed, the actress’s slew of evocative portrayals is a triumph in and of itself. eta Creative Arts Foundation, 7558 S. Chicago Ave. Through October 20. Friday-Saturday, 8pm; Sunday, 3pm and 7pm. $30. (773)752-3955. etacreativearts.org (Hannah Nyhart)

The Mountaintop Court Theatre offers an intimate imagining of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last night that veers toward the supernatural while illuminating the human. See review page 17. Court Theatre, 5535 S Ellis Ave. Through October 13. Check website for showtimes and pricing. (773)753-4472. courttheatre.org (Jackson Roth)

House of Yes “The House of Yes” has a new home in the Logan Center, and a new matriarch in director Audrey Francis. This weekend, five UChicago students will show you just how posh one suburban home can become when Marty Pascal comes back for Thanksgiving dinner. It’s sure to be worthy of remembrance; Mrs. Pascal’s youngest son Anthony has just arrived unexpectedly from Princeton, her daughter Jackie-O has recently returned from a stint in a nearby hospital, and there will even be a hurricane descending on their proper home neighboring the Kennedys’. Marty has informed his family that he will be bring a friend along, secretly his fiancée Lesly, who works a quaint job at a doughnut shop. She’ll find an exclusive home with a unique family politics, a striking social consciousness, and a troubled pursuit of normalcy.

This one-act pitch-black comedy is sure to challenge even the most stoic of viewers. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Through October 5. Thursday-Friday, 7:30pm; Saturday, 2pm and 7:30pm. $8 at the door, $6 in advance. (773)702-2787. arts.uchicago.edu(Jon Brozdowski)

WOMEN! A Comedy “WOMEN! A Comedy” is a comedy about women. It’s actually pretty self-explanatory. See, “WOMEN! A Comedy” features fourteen Chicago actresses in a collection of short plays. These plays are comedic. These actresses are funny.

Direction is by Jeremy Menekseoglu, Anna W. Menekseoglu, and John J. Enright. “WOMEN! A Comedy” is a slight departure from the Dream Theatre’s usual offerings of eerie dramas and reimagined children’s tales. But rest assured, this funny and female fare will showcase “bloody and blackly comedic exploration” of all that is mystical, political, beautiful, and dysfunctional. And lesbian cowboys. Dream Theatre, 556 W. 18th St. Through October 13. Thursday-Saturday, 8pm; Sunday, 7pm. $17-$20. (773)552-8616. dreamtheatrecompany. com (Meaghan Murphy)

B-Side Studio Two of the North Side’s quirkier, buzzed-about companies have taken the classic 70s sitcom and brought it live to the South Side. The Inconvenience and the New Colony, with some help from the University of Chicago’s summer residency program, have written four episodes and they’re performing them live at the Logan Center for the Arts (previous episodes are taped and posted online—live audience laugh-track included). The “sitcom” focuses its energy on applying good writing to an expected plot. The McNamara brothers are both dreamers and schemers, trying to save their South Side recording studio from the brink of bankruptcy by enlisting their assistant, musicians, and their landlord’s wife to record a new brand of “song poems.” “B-Side Studio” captures the slightly antiquated charm of the sitcom—the firecracker dialog, the 70s color palette, the ability to eloquently juggle humor with race relations and national tragedies—without making the whole thing too meta. And with four separate episodes, one show will surely leave you wanting more. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St.

MUSIC EPMD Nostalgia for hip-hop’s “golden age”—the late eighties/early nineties era of dusty, boom-bap drums and rhymes focused almost exclusively on “sucka emcees”—has been on the rise lately. Perhaps no group has profited more from these glory day yearnings than EPMD, which has been touring and producing more or less continuously since 1986. Sonically, they have evolved somewhat, but their group image has remained true to their original formula (just take a look at their album titles over the years: “Strictly Business,” “Unfinished Business,” “Business as Usual,” “Business Never Personal,” “Back in Business,” “Out of Business,” “We Mean Business”...).

These NY hip-hop veterans are sure to put on a good show, but the more exciting part of the night may actually be the opening acts. EPMD is touring alongside some of Chicago’s most promising underground talents: the jazz/hip-hop fusion group J. Davis Trio, Rhymespitters Freestyle Battle winner SamIam the MC, rising star Pugs Atomz, and Fake Shore Drive favorite, Vic Spencer. Reggies Chicago, 2109 S. State St. Thursday, October 3, 8:30pm. $15-80. 17+. (312)9490121. reggieslive.com (Zach Goldhammer)

Ernest Dawkins’ entire musical career has been dedicated to two things: commitment to freedom in musical expression, and honoring the cultural history of the African Diaspora.

The name of Dawkins’ new “We Free Trio” is a perfect encapsulation of these themes. Dawkins made his reputation in the early seventies as the leader of the New Horizons Ensemble, a sextet which deftly tightroped its way between vanguard experimentalism and mainstream modernism. His musical prowess and his interest in pan-African collaboration lead to him to travel out to Mozambique and South Africa to perform with artists there. Now, back in Chi-town and stripped down to a trio sound, Dawkins’s performance this Monday at the Washington Park Arts Incubator will provide him with yet another opportunity to play the sound of freedom for a hometown crowd. Washington Park Arts Incubator, 301 E Garfield Boulevard. Tuesday, October 1, 6:30pm – 9pm. Free. (773)702-9724. arts.uchicago.edu/artsandpubliclife/ai (Zach Goldhammer)

Remembering Jodie Christian Jodie Christian had one of the longest active careers in Chicago jazz, consistently recording and performing throughout the Windy City for nearly sixty years. He was one of the co-founders of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a collective which helped revolutionize the Chicago jazz scene and remains a vital force in both performance and music education today. Last year, Christian was selected to receive the Walter Dyett Lifetime Achievement Award but unfortunately passed away months before the event, leaving his wife to take the honor in his absence. Now, more than a year and half after the legendary pianist’s death, Christian will be receiving a second great honor in the form of a concert commemorating his life. Brad Goode will be leading a musical tribute to the Chicago jazz pioneer and will be performing alongside Windy City luminaries Marlene Rosenberg, Miguel de la Cerna, Alejandro Urzagaste, George Fludas and Xavier Breaker. West Pullman Park, 401 W. 123rd St. Friday, October 11, 7 PM. Free.

(312)427-1676. jazzinchicago.org (Zach Goldhammer)

Del Corazon Festival ¿Te gusta la musica mexicana? If you answered “si,” check

out the Mexican Indie Music Soundcase this weekend at the Del Corazon Festival the National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen. The show will feature Chicago debut of James Lopez, a singer/songwriter who moonlights as a professional model and Broadway actor, and Madame Ur y Sus Hombres, a cabaret-rock group hailing from Baja California. The show will also feature the U.S. debut of Jazmin Solar, a Mexico City native who adds an Afrocuban flavor to experimental electronic music. The National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th St. Saturday, October 5, 6-30pm – 12am. $15-20.

(312)738-1503. nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org (Zach Goldhammer)

Ernest Dawkins’ We Free Trio

WHPK Rock Charts WHPK 88.5 FM is a nonprofit community radio station of the University of Chicago, broadcasting to the South Side of Chicago for over sixty years. Once a week, the station’s music directors collect the book of playlist logs, where DJs record each song they play during their shows. They tally up the plays of albums added within the last few months, and rank them according to the number of plays that week.

Compiled by Rachel Schastok and Charlie Rock

Artist / Album / Label 1. Coliseum / Sister Faith / Temporary Residence 2. Hunx and His Punx / Street Punk / Hardly Art 3. Raspberry Bulbs / Deformed Worship / Blackest Ever Black 4. The Dentists / Some People are on the Pitch They Think It’s All Over It is Now [Reissue] / Trouble in Mind 5. Mammoth Grinder / Underworlds / 20 Buck Spin 6. Dustin Wong / Mediation of Ecstatic Energy / Thrill Jockey 7. Mind Over Mirrors / When the Rest are Up at Four / Immune 8. Terry Malts / Nobody Realizes This is Nowhere / Slumberland 9. Pink Frost / Sundowning / Smart Like Virus 10. Northless / World Keeps Sinking / Halo of Flies 11. Ultimate Spinach / Ultimate Spinach / MGM 12. Cleaners from Venus / Blow Away Your Troubles [Reissue] / Captured Tracks 13. Wrekmeister Harmonies / You’ve Always Meant So Much to Me / Thrill Jockey 14. Rectal Smegma / Become the Bitch / Herrie 15. Ramming Speed / Doomed to Destroy, Destined to Die / Prosthetic

October 2, 2013

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South Side Weekly 19