14 East 2019 Anthology by 14 East

Anthology 2018-2019

2018-2019 Anthology Madeline Happold Marissa Nelson Editor in Chief Community Engagement Editor

Cody Corrall Managing Editor

Nikki Roberts Associate Editor

Dylan Van Sickle Associate Editor

Chris Silber Associate Editor

Melody Mercado Associate Editor

Francesca Mathewes Associate Editor

Megan Stringer Associate Editor

Jenni Holtz Staff Illustrator

MiKayla Rose Price Director of Development

Natalie Wade Multimedia Editor

Meredith Melland Web Developer

Amy Merrick Faculty Advisor

Heather Bland Social Media Editor

◊◊◊ Compiled and edited by Madeline Happold and Cody Corrall. All rights to material published in this magazine belong to the individual authors or artists. Any reproduction or reprinting may be done by their permission only.

Table of Contents Our Music My Body Brings Conversations About Consent to Music Festivals, Shows...................................................................... 4 The Missing........................................................................................ 16 Malt, Shakes and Milkshakes............................................................ 22 We Should All Be Dancing................................................................. 25 The Butterfly Effect: Setting OCD Thoughts Free............................. 28 Drifting Under the Radar.................................................................. 31 A Walk Up Michigan.......................................................................... 37 This Device Cures Heartache............................................................. 53 50 Years Later: Lessons in Activism from the Young Lords............ 58 DePaul’s Secret Zine Scene................................................................. 67 I’m a Bruja.......................................................................................... 77 Navigating Activism and Autism...................................................... 80 Have You Gotten Your Flu Shot?....................................................... 84 Under the Needle: Young Consumers Turn to Preventative Botox.. 90 Blood, Bodies and Binaries: Trans Women in Horror...................... 96 Friends: Are We Still There for Them?............................................... 101 Why We Still Root for Tonya Harding............................................... 109 Farewell, depaulsecure....................................................................... 117 More Than Just a Bank....................................................................... 121 The Revolution Will Not Be Televised................................................. 129 The Chicago Stick-Around.................................................................. 134 Afrofuturism: Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture for Black Artists............. 138 Visions from Voicemails...................................................................... 143 “Guilty Pleasure” Music Is Just Another Way to Shame Women for Their Music Taste........................................................................... 147

From the Editor When my professor and 14 East advisor Amy Merrick announced the creation of 14 East my sophomore (and first) year at DePaul, I knew I had to be an editor, a contributor, a reader, anything to be involved. Two years later, 14 East has become a space of security, strength and support to me. I hope it has for others, as well. It has been a joy watching the magazine grow from the corner of the 12th floor of 14 East Jackson to our current newsroom in the DePaul Center. I’ve watched investigative projects take form, digital storytelling flourish and the staff members multiply. Each year our community expands, deepens and learns as we grow into the publication. This year, 14 East blossomed. It was a year of trial and error, of reflection and revision, of believing and dreaming of what the magazine could – and did – become. I’m honored to work with a staff whose ambition matches their hearts. Their love and dedication breathes life on screen and into these pages. The anthology has been my special 14 East project since its formation – I’ve jokingly (and not-so-jokingly) referred to it as my baby. When the murmurs of an anthology were discussed at Thursday meetings that first year, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into when I feverishly replied I would love to design that. Taking the life that lives online into a physical print format is a privilege and an honor. It gives me – and readers – the pleasure of revisiting pieces that exemplify the caliber of writing at 14 East. This year, our anthology takes you back to the ‘90s, up and down Michigan Ave. and through the musical history of Black resistance. 14 East isn’t a magazine; it’s a community. A thank you to those that believe in the publication as much as we do – the contributors, readers and supporters who keep us afloat. We hope you continue to grow alongside us. These words are our roots.

Thank you, Madeline Happold 3

Our Music My Body Brings Conversations About Consent to Music Festivals, Shows Marissa Nelson May 4, 2018

Cody Corrall

A young woman with honey brown hair walked slowly across Columbus Drive. Careful and measured, each step appeared more hesitant than the last. The glow of stage lights and street lamps lit up the dark summer night in Grant Park. Pairs of music fans sprinted past the young woman. They raced from one stage to another as Lollapalooza’s 2017 Saturday night headliners took the stage. The young woman moved steadily toward the stage, unaffected by the rush around her. Meggi Lampen stood behind a fold-out table draped in purple fabric and speckled with buttons reading, “my cleavage is not an invitation to dance with me” and “I feel safe when there are clear and enforced anti-harassment policies.” Situated under the tent-covered Lolla Cares section of the festival — a space dedicated to organizations promoting causes like environmentalism and political activism — Lampen watched as concertgoers moved between stag-

es, hoping one would stop by her table. She was volunteering for Our Music My Body (OMMB), a campaign that promotes consent in Chicago’s music scene. The young woman caught Lampen’s attention. Lampen, or the large sign above her head that read “Our Music My Body,” must have caught the young woman’s attention, too. She deviated from her path to visit the table. Lampen gave what she calls her “elevator speech” to the young woman about OMMB — the campaign was created to start the conversation about consent in music spaces and she’s at Lollapalooza to promote awareness. Once Lampen finished, the woman relaxed, leaning onto the table with one arm. She told Lampen that she hadn’t been to Lollapalooza since someone sexually assaulted her at the festival a few years back. Her cheeks now wet with tears, she said she came this year because she liked the lineup and refused to let her perpetrator have any more power. “I could tell that she needed to talk,” Lampen said. “She wasn’t looking for someone to be like, ‘Oh you’re great, let me give you a pep talk.’ It was more like, ‘This is what I’m going to do, I need someone to hold me accountable. I’m so glad you’re here if I need you.’”

In and out of the music scene, harassment and violence is all too prevalent. Lampen is a junior studying psychology at DePaul University. She began volunteering for OMMB shortly after the Chicago campaign launched in spring 2016 to promote consent in music spaces. She volunteers at venues and festivals a couple times a month. When at shows, she’s usually with another volunteer. They arrive early to set up, making buttons and attaching OMMB pins to booklets with tips for consent and sexual violence resources. When people arrive, Lampen and the other volunteer start conversations about consent — how to ask for it and why it’s important. Lampen said people are usually open to talking and are glad the campaign is there. Sometimes they even share their experiences.

“Out of 509 people surveyed at the end of 2017 by OMMB, there were 1,286 reports of harassment. That’s 2.5 experiences of harassment for every person surveyed.” “People will come up and be like, ‘I was just in the pit and someone just grabbed my ass,’” Lampen said, laughing nervously. Not because it’s funny, she clarified, but because the commonplace of sexual harassment makes her uncomfortable. “It’s not even like, ‘This happened like two years ago and I’m still struggling with it.’ It’s like, ‘This is so ironically exquisite that you’re here because I need you right now.’ A lot of women have said that.” Matt Walsh, OMMB co-founder, works at Between Friends, a nonprofit that works against domestic violence by providing services to support people experiencing abuse including counseling, teen education programs and a crisis hotline (1-800-603-4357). Since going to shows in high school, Walsh remembers seeing nonconsensual touching, particularly toward his female and gender nonconforming friends. Kat Stuehrk, a OMMB co-founder, worked at Rape Victim Advocates (RVA), a nonprofit that supports sexual assault survivors through counseling, therapy, advocacy, and education programs. Stuehrk, who often went to shows growing up and had friends in bands in, noticed the same thing: in terms of sexual harassment and violence, not everyone feels safe in music venues and at festivals. In 2016, Stuehrk, Walsh and the two organizations began working together to address the trend of harassment they saw in Chicago’s music scene, creating the OMMB campaign. Now the campaign has over 20 volunteers. Out of 509 people surveyed at the end of 2017 by OMMB, there were 1,286 reports of harassment. That’s 2.5 experiences of harassment for every person surveyed. Harassment reported spanned from groping and sexual assault to coerced drinking and physical violence at music events. 92 percent of females surveyed reported experiencing some form of harassment and 60 percent of transgender people reported physical, homophobic harassment at music events.

Maggie Lampen

However, experiences of sexual violence in the music scene aren’t unique to Chicago. Music fans around the world are speaking out about their experiences. After 11 cases of sexual assault and one case of rape in July 2017, Swedish music festival Bravalla canceled its summer 2018 event. In August 2017, Suzannah Weiss told Glamour that sexual assault was ruining music festivals for her, sharing multiple incidents of uncomfortably forward men ignoring her dissent at Belgium’s Tomorrowland music festival. In December, a man sexually assaulted a 19-year-old woman at Falls festival in Tasmania, and on New Year’s Eve at Rhythm and Vines festival in New Zealand, a man was caught on video groping a woman’s breast. Teen Vogue features editor, Vera Papisova, was groped 22 times while reporting at Coachella this year. Of the 54 women Papisova spoke with, all reported being sexual harassed at the festival. As the Time’s Up movement continues to promote awareness of sexual misconduct across disciplines, the voices of survivors are becoming louder. Their shouts echo through the halls of Congress, studios of Hollywood and gymnasiums of athletic hubs. Now, the music scene.

In May 2017, punk band PWR BTTM member Ben Hopkins was accused of sexual assault on social media. Hopkins denied the allegations in a Facebook post in May 2017. In November 2017, indie band Pinegrove went on a hiatus amid sexual assault allegations against Evan Stephens Hall, band frontman. Hall apologized in a Facebook post in November 2017. Alternative rock band Brand New ended its European tour prematurely in November after allegations of sexual abuse and harassment against frontman Jesse Lacey arose on Facebook, including the solicitation of explicit photos from a minor. Lacey apologized in a Facebook post in November 2017. And in December 2017, indie pop artist Timothy Heller said singer Melanie Martinez sexually assaulted her. Martinez denied the allegations on Twitter in December 2017. “Women, femme-identified people and transgender folks are experiencing gender-based and sexual-based violence at really high rates. It’s like part of the daily life experience and what’s unusual is confronting it,” said Christina Perez, an associate professor of sociology and discipline director of the study of women and gender studies at Dominican University. Rape culture — attitudes about sex that trivialize and normalize sexual violence, Perez said — is largely responsible for this. “The music scene, then, might be the epitome of that. What is going on there is certainly an expression of what’s going on in so many spaces.” Alicia Maciel is familiar with Chicago’s music scene and the possibility of sexual harassment that comes with it. As a marketing major at DePaul University, she has promoted festivals like Riot Fest and venues like Metro and Lincoln Hall and is the manager for The Chicago Vibe, a student music media outlet. Once while attending Riot Fest, Maciel remembers a man darting his arm in front of her while she ran into the crowd, wrapping his arm around her side. She elbowed him. “He literally did it because he thought it was fine and it wasn’t so I hit him,” Maciel said. “If he thought it was fine to touch me I literally had no problem elbowing him.” While photographing a Freddie Gibbs show at Metro last June, Maciel said a man reached for her butt after shouting, “Where are all the white girls at,” in a crowd of mostly men and people of color.

Maciel, who identifies as Hispanic, spoke with security. They kicked the man out. Aggravated by both of the men’s audacity to touch her body, Alicia shared her experiences without hesitation—as if unwanted touching and grabbing at shows happens so frequently that it doesn’t phase her anymore. When Maggie Arthur interned at RVA, she began volunteering with OMMB. At the end of 2017, Stuehrk left RVA to study at the French Pastry School in Chicago. Though she is still involved with OMMB, Arthur took over her position at RVA and her formal role in the campaign. Arthur grew up going to punk shows in Indianapolis. She remembers being one of few girls at the shows and felt uncomfortable by the way she and others were treated. “When I was younger, women at punk shows filled one of two roles,” Arthur said. “Either holding their boyfriends jackets in the back or trying to be one of the dudes in the front. Neither one is a great place to be.”

Women who chose to participate in the front were often disrespected by men and got pushed out of mosh pits. While this isn’t sexual harassment, Arthur points out, it is sexism. Being in the scene for a while now, she says she knows what to expect, but is still hyper-aware of her surroundings. “I take a survey of the room and see if there are any other femme looking people there to almost position myself closer to them as a silent act of solidarity or something,” Arthur said. “So there’s always that consciousness of where are my exits, where are my people.”

“‘Sometimes I feel like I can’t be very present and in the moment because I’m kind of trying to weigh all of those things in my brain,’ Arthur said.”

Sometimes, Arthur said, she feels like she needs to act a little bit tougher. She crosses her arms against her chest and stands tall with her feet rooted to the floor so others can’t push her around. She glues her focus to the stage. At the same time, she feels like she has to watch those around her. She wonders if they will talk to her and thinks about how she will react if they do. “Sometimes I feel like I can’t be very present and in the moment because I’m kind of trying to weigh all of those things in my brain,” Arthur said. At concerts and festivals, it isn’t unusual for hundreds of people to stand shoulder to shoulder, squeezed into a small space. In fact, the confined environment of music shows is often thought to be a part of the experience. However, in tight spaces it is easy for unintentional touches to become purposeful and nonconsensual, Arthur said. By talking about consent at shows, she hopes to create a safer, more comfortable space for everyone attending. “There have been instances when people have come up and been like, ‘I’m glad you guys are here because this shit has happened to me many times and I didn’t know who to tell.’ It’s not exactly a disclosure but it was just something that happened,” Arthur said. “It was just like picking up your mail — just a mundane detail that they’d had to deal with as the price of entry for going to shows.”

Developing Our Music My Body Before OMMB was known as OMMB, RVA and Between Friends organized at Pitchfork in 2011 when the festival booked Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (known as Odd Future), a hip hop collective Walsh said has “hateful” and violent lyrics. Pitchfork gave the two organizations a booth at the festival that year to talk about violence against women. In 2014, Walsh and a few others at Between Friends mobilized the #GetConsentAtRiotFest campaign to encourage attendees to talk about consent — or the lack of consent — at music festivals. This initiative helped jump-start the campaign in 2016 when Walsh and Stuehrk debuted OMMB at Pitchfork, distributing buttons and asking attendees to share what they think safety and consent looks like at music events. “We are just trying to be your cool cousin to have the conversation with, to be like, ‘Hey, don’t grab someone,’” Walsh said. “Plain and simple.” Approaching its third summer, OMMB talks about consent at shows across Chicago and works with venues and festivals to create anti-harassment statements and policies. It has worked with Lollapalooza and Riot Fest to release anti-harassment statements. However policy, Walsh said, runs deeper than hanging a sign on a venue’s wall. It’s educating staff about harassment and training them on what to do when violence occurs, which has proven to be a more difficult task for the campaign to accomplish. “We have offered to work with any venue or festival about how they are training their staff and how they are engaging with fans if they have experienced sexual violence and we have not gotten very far,” Walsh said. “It’s frustrating because we are literally offering up free services,” Stuehrk said. “We just want you to be able to go to a music festival and have a good time and not be worried about somebody else’s bulls—t.” Stuehrk and Walsh hope their efforts get festival organizers to start

“‘We are all music fans, and the last thing we would want is for someone to have anything get in the way of them getting to enjoy a show at our venues — especially something to the extent of harassment or assault or abuse because that doesn’t just ruin a night.’” thinking about their ethical responsibilities. Right now, the organizers seem to be more concerned about their legal responsibilities, according to Stuehrk. There are enforceable policies pertaining to drugs, alcohol and weapons at festivals, so Stuehrk and Walsh think there should be policies for harassment, too. Lollapalooza, Riot Fest and Pitchfork did not respond to multiple email requests about the OMMB and anti-harassment policies. “It’s not an easy fix, but there’s really no excuse to not have anything,” Stuehrk said. OMMB also works with local venues, particularly Subterranean, Schubas Tavern and Lincoln Hall. All three venues developed anti-harassment policies with the campaign and invite volunteers to talk about consent at shows held in their venues. Dan Apodaca is the talent buyer at Schubas. He’s been working with OMMB since September 2017 to integrate the campaign into Schubas and Lincoln Hall. “Safety is a huge thing for us,” Apodaca said. “We are all music fans, and the last thing we would want is for someone to have anything get in the way of them getting to enjoy a show at our venues — especially something to the extent of harassment or assault or abuse because that doesn’t just ruin a night.” Over the past six months, OMMB has begun volunteering at shows held at Schubas and Lincoln Hall. Apocada hopes the campaign’s presence encourages concertgoers to speak up if they experience harassment or assault. In the coming months, Apodaca wants to work with OMMB to create policies surrounding harassment for staff and attendees.

“Right now, we have a cover-all approach in that if you have any kind of issue please don’t hesitate to let us know and we will absolutely address it,” Apodaca said. “I think based on what we have talked about with OMMB there is a lot of benefit to having specific commitments laid out.” Creating concrete policies pertaining to harassment at Schubas, Lincoln Hall and other venues or festivals could benefit their reputation and bottom line. 84 percent of those who responded to OMMB’s 2017 survey said they “prefer a music venue where the staff and security have been trained in violence prevention and crisis intervention.” 75 percent of those surveyed said they would “prefer a music venue with well-displayed signs that clarify the venue’s anti-harassment policy.”

What about the DIY music scene? OMMB isn’t the only organization mobilizing to end sexual harassment in Chicago’s music scene. The F12 Network is a group that works to prevent sexual violence in Chicago’s art and music scenes, particularly in DIY spaces (independent venues, often located in apartments, basements and old industrial buildings). F12’s efforts formed from a desire in the DIY scene for safer environments. Instead of putting their efforts toward intervention, F12 emphasizes prevention, offering free workshops for DIY venues and organizations about conflict, de-escalation and nonviolent communication. One workshop, called Let’s Make a Plan, works with DIY venues on an individual basis. It goes through a variety of sexual violence scenarios that might occur when running a venue, allowing the DIY space to develop a response strategy specific to its location. F12 also creates educational resources such as zines, radio PSAs and posters about how to navigate and de-escalate situations of violence. “We try to encourage venues to take up the charge themselves. We don’t try to mediate conflict,” said Sasha Tycko, an organizer at F12. “We think that conflict resolution is most effective when the people directly involved are a part of the solution.” Until last summer, OMMB and F12 existed independently, doing complementary work in separate spaces. In July 2017, Tycko and

other members of F12 spotted OMMB volunteers holding posters at Pitchfork Music Festival. Intrigued, they stopped by OMMB’s table to learn more about the campaign. Seeing similarities in the work both do, F12 invited OMMB to be a part of a campaign they were preparing to launch in the fall called #100Venues. At the beginning of 2018, OMMB kicked off its collaboration with #100Venues. “They are on the music festival and venue level, where we work almost exclusively with DIY, grassroots or community led venues and organizations,” Tycko said. “So we’re trying to together bring this kind of sexual violence prevention work to 100 venues in 2018.”

The Conversation Extends Beyond Chicago So Chicago has anti-harassment campaigns — what about everywhere else? In February, Bonnaroo Music and Arts festival announced on Twitter that it is working with Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) to educate festival attendees about sexual assault. Irene LaTempa, the Community Builder at Bonnaroo, said RAINN helped them create infographics about sexual assault and harassment prevention that have been shared online. The same information will be displayed around Bonnaroo’s festival grounds. “Going forward we are exploring possible trainings on [festival grounds] with RAINN or additional leaders in sexual health, consent, autonomy, sexual assault and harassment prevention at The Well, one of our new Plazas in the campgrounds which is dedicated to all things wellness,” LaTempa said. Performers have also begun taking a stand against sexual harassment at their shows. In August 2016, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam stopped in the middle of a song at Wrigley Field when he saw a man in the crowd harassing a woman. In August 2017, Sam Carter, Architects singer, called out a man he saw grope a woman who was crowd surfing at Lowlands Festival in the Netherlands. Drake stopped his performance while singing “Know Yourself” at Sydney’s Marquee in November when he saw a man groping a woman in the audience.

Public call-outs by performers like Drake and Eddie Vedder stand out to OMMB volunteers like Keely Brennan. She began volunteering with the campaign in January, but has been working with RVA as an advocate since 2013. At first mention she said she likes when artists take a stand in such a public manner. After a short pause, she rephrases her thoughts. “I guess I appreciate that in a way,” Brennan said. “In another way I think it can be problematic because it also shines a spotlight on the person who is being harmed.” Keely would rather an artist begin their show by saying they won’t tolerate harassment of any form or, if OMMB is tabling, mention their support for the campaign. This way the expectation of consent is set at the beginning of the show and unwanted attention is not brought to the person being harmed. Though all spaces should be safe, Brennan emphasized making the arts a safe space because it can often be where people turn when they don’t fit in anywhere else. “You know we are like the Island of Misfit Toys,” Brennan said, referencing the indie and punk music scenes she grew up a part of. “We come together because it’s a place for us to belong and share an experience of music. When someone makes us feel unsafe and causes harm, we can’t participate in the same way anymore.”

How to Start The Conversation Yourself OMMB is starting the conversation about consent with venues, festivals and audience members because harassment is not just one party’s responsibility to address, it’s everyone’s — and everyone can do something about it. Venues and festivals can develop anti-harassment statements and policies; performers can make it clear that they don’t tolerate harassment at their shows; and audience members can educate themselves on what consent looks like, how to ask for it and what to do if you or someone around you experiences harassment. If you’ve experienced sexual violence you can call the RAINN hotline at 1-800-656-4673 or the National Domestic Violence hotline at 1-800-799-7233 for help.

The Missing Emma Krupp May 4, 2018

Emma Krupp

Looking for Answers at the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office. In 2006, Garry Henning’s 12-year-old grandson Quadrevion — Dre for short — disappeared near the family’s Milwaukee home. He had gone outside to play with a friend and never returned, gone “without a trace,” his grandfather said. Wracked with grief, the family filed a police report and waited for news. Dre and his best friend, 11-year-old Purvis Virginia Parker, were found dead of an apparent drowning 27 days later. “There is never closure,” Henning told me. “Yes, I know where he’s buried. But I still wonder why. I still wonder how. And what about other family members who have not found their bodies?” It’s that sense of familiarity — knowing what it’s like to grieve without answers — that brought Henning as a volunteer to The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office’s second annual Missing Persons Day, held Saturday, April 28, in its office on Harrison Street. Here,

families with loved ones missing for more than one month could file police reports, talk to emotional support counselors and offer DNA samples to be entered in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons Database with the hope that their efforts might lead to identification. Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Ponni Arunkumar said the event mirrors similar efforts from other large metropolitan areas like New York City, which launched its Missing Persons Day in 2014. “We are a central location in a big city and through hosting this event, we will be able to help lots of people in the Chicagoland area and surrounding suburbs, surrounding counties,” Arunkumar said. On the day of the event, a procession of organizations — chaplains, The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and many others — flanked the walls of the office’s sun-drenched lobby to offer iterations of emotional support to attendees. Henning, for instance, is a volunteer at Team Hope, a branch of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that provides counseling services to families of missing children. Others came to represent their own experiences with missing loved ones, like Jeff Skemp, whose 13-year-old daughter Rachel (“bubbly, smart, a bit of a hippie,” he said) went missing from Bolingbrook in January 1996, or Shelia Bradley-Smith, whose 3- and- 10-year-old grand-nieces Tionda and Diamond Bradley were last seen at 35th and Cottage Grove in 2001. The lineup of volunteers sat in front of a series of prints on the wall depicting people smiling and dancing or posing in formal wear, photos that looked more like something you’d see on a fridge than the wall of a county medical examiner’s office. “People have a lack of compassion,” Bradley-Smith said. Her jean jacket was emblazoned with pins depicting the faces of missing people, a swath of black-and-white images studding indigo denim. “They’ve become desensitized [to the fact] that this really does happen. And it doesn’t just happen to a certain race, or creed or color.”

Emma Krupp

Bradley-Smith came to the event with a cadre of family members, including a teenaged cousin named AJ Carr. Together, Bradley-Smith and Carr talked about how over time, the community — once robust in its support of the missing Bradley sisters — seems to have forgotten about them. The vigils, originally meant to bring home two small girls, are now held for 20- and 27-year-old women. Over time, their memory fades at the edges of public memory; the news reports slow. But this sense of distance, natural for the outside observer, is an impossibility for the Bradley family. “It was 17 years ago, but every anniversary date I relive the same feelings, the same pain,” Bradley-Smith said. “I remember what I had on that day. I remember what the breeze felt like. That’s only because that day is frozen in time. We’re frozen in time.” One by one, the volunteers echoed a similar sentiment: you cannot understand what it’s like to lose someone this way until you go through the process yourself, they said. “People divorce,” Henning said. “Some people become reclusive.” He gestured to himself. “I know it’s hard. I know, because I almost lost my mind.” Other little-discussed side effects: you forget to eat, take your medication, bathe. You may face hours of interrogation from the police.

Sometimes, the police don’t call you back. And although the public will sympathize, they can only fathom glimpses of your grandson Dre, who loved football and wanted to join the military like his dad someday, or your daughter Rachel, who was smart enough to teach herself to read at just three years old. They will forget how Tionda laughed at everything, “even if someone broke their leg, until she realized how serious it was,” Bradley-Smith said. Public tributes and memorials help — Henning, for instance, runs a football league in his grandson’s memory — but sometimes, the best system of support comes from the inside. Skemp said he tries to attend memorials for other missing people, and has been to events for Diamond and Tionda Bradley. All said they had been to multiple iterations of events like this one in an attempt to connect with families and friends of the recently missing. “We have a saying,‘We will loan you our strength until you’re strong again,’” Henning said. “These families here, you really feel sad for them. You hope that they have something, some kind of hope. I always tell them: don’t lose hope. Don’t lose hope. Don’t lose hope.” Last year’s event, which drew more than 100 attendees, led to the identification of one body in the morgue. This year, 10 people brought DNA samples in for testing; a spokeswoman for the Medical Examiner’s Office said the results are pending. Now, as before, the families and friends wait. Among those who brought DNA is Balqees Hamden, who came to the event from suburban Westmont with her mother. Speaking matter-of-factly, she told me her brother, 43-year-old Constanteen Hamden, has been missing since December 7, 2017, when he took a half-hour break from his job at a car dealership and disappeared — no signs, no phone calls, nothing. He’s a people person, and it’s out of character for him to go more than two weeks without checking in. “We’re just looking for answers,” Hamden said. So far, no major news outlets have picked up his story, and it’s been difficult for detectives to find leads because he doesn’t carry an ID or use social media. Still, his sister and mother remain hopeful he’ll be found alive.

Emma Krupp

“And although the public will sympathize, they can only fathom glimpses of your grandson Dre, who loved football and wanted to join the military like his dad someday, or your daughter Rachel, who was smart enough to teach herself to read at just three years old.” I asked if they’d had a chance to talk to any of the volunteers about this; the younger Hamden shook her head no. They’d only just ascended from the basement, where DNA sampling was being conducted. Then, as if on cue, Shelia Bradley-Smith walked up to Hamden’s mother, who was sitting quietly behind us in a metal folding chair. Crouching to eye level, she inquired about the circumstances that had led them to Missing Persons Day. What was the name of their loved one? Were they trying to raise awareness about his case? To this, Hamden nodded. “OK, well have you given DNA?” she asked. “Have you given a DNA sample? OK, OK.” She rattled off a to-do list — she will get them media, she will help them learn how to talk to police. Slowly, she listed her phone number while the two Hamden women scribbled it into their notes. It was important, she said, that they know she was there to help. “Tionda and Diamond Bradley up there? Those are my nieces,” Bradley-Smith said, pointing at the girls’ blown-up portraits hung on the back wall. “You’re not alone in here.”

Malt, Shakes and Milkshakes Agathe Muller May 18, 2018

Cody Corrall

Rich, creamy, thick, velvety, summer, indulgent â&#x20AC;&#x201D; just a few words that come to mind when thinking of milkshakes. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a sweet, nostalgic flavor that brings you back to your childhood. Just like when my family and I drove west down Route 66. We did it months into our move to the United States, because to us, that famous road going from Chicago to Los Angeles was America at its finest. We stopped at a diner in the middle of nowhere and got burgers and shakes. My chocolate shake came in a wide triangular glass, topped with never-ending whipped cream straight out of the dispenser. I remember pausing for a split second, not being quite sure what to do first. Should I sip the shake through the striped red and white straw, lick the cream or just scoop a dollop of the droopy chocolate fudge running down the glass? This memory, forever engraved on my heart, is shared by many. Milkshakes are the typical American drink we have all seen in movies, commercials, music videos and much more. Flexible to each of our own liking and taste buds, it blends together nostalgia and comfort.

While many of us have enjoyed a milkshake on a hot summer day, hardly any of us know where this tasty treat came from. Just like the deep dish pizza, Italian beef sandwich or the famous Chicago-style hotdog, Chicago is also home to the milkshake. In the late 1870s, London-born brothers William and James Horlick settled in the United States and made Chicago their new home. They founded the J & W Horlick’s Food Company to create dried whey and malt powder to be used as a nutritional supplement. Soon after, they received a patent to allow their malt powder to be mixed with fresh milk for infants. Malt powder then became a famous invention created right in the heart of Chicago, indirectly laying the foundation for shakes all around the city. But it wasn’t until the year of 1922 that the milkshake became a mainstream American culinary staple. It happened when a Walgreens employee in Chicago, Ivar “Pop” Coulson, took an old fashioned malted milk (milk, chocolate, and malt) and added a few scoops of ice cream. The experiment was simple, but the result was an exquisite, fluffy beverage that quickly became popular with kids and adults throughout the country Here is the original printed Walgreens Recipe from the 2017 Chicago Food Encyclopedia: “In a frosty malt can, combine 1 ½ ounces chocolate syrup, 3 #16 dips of vanilla ice cream and 5 ½ ounces cold milk. Add one heaping tablespoonful of malt powder. Place can on mixer only until mixed. Do not over mix. Pour into a 10-ounce glass, about ⅔ full. Top with a generous portion of whipped topping. Serve remainder of malted in a shaker along with the glass to the guest with straws and a package of fountain cookies.” In the 1930s, after gaining prominence in malt shops, milkshakes started to become the go-to drink on a diner menu. Margie’s Candies, at 1960 N. Western Ave. has been serving its delicious shakes and ice cream topped with decadent chocolate fudge since 1921. Milkshakes’ journey was not over quite yet. In the 1950s a milkshake machine salesman named Ray Kroc bought the exclusive rights to a milkshake maker from inventor Earl Prince. Kroc went on to use automated milkshake machines to speed up production in a major fast-food chain he purchased from the McDonalds brothers. It commercialized milkshakes even broader than Chicago.

Bruce Kraig, co-author of the “Chicago Food Encyclopedia,” says that milkshakes are part of the larger story of how important Chicago is to the history of American food. Kraig said that the dairy plays a very important role in the early 1880s as dining places for young women who worked in the many businesses in downtown Chicago and led to cafeterias. Chicago in the late 1900s was the national center of grain shipping, so making malted wheat and barley was natural. Chicago, as its name indicates “wild onion”, has always been centered around food, so it falls naturally that it would commercialize milkshakes. “When I could treat myself to a milkshake when I was little, my favorite place was a soda fountain on a street corner near where I lived in the Bronx (172nd and Claremont Parkway),” Krag said. “In those days, there were many candy stores, drug stores, soda fountains that served milkshakes as well. And in NYC delis are everywhere, so it was not hard to find a good one,” he said, flipping through the pages of his book. From quaint ice cream parlors to pop culture, milkshakes became appealing to the eyes of many, from a kids drink to an overly-sensualized object used in music videos. Nostalgia? An adult twist to a kids’ treat? Are spiked shakes not enough? Nonetheless, there is no better way to finishing an article about milkshakes than to incorporate a recipe. Enjoy all the delicious ice cream parlors in the Windy City, and create delicious memories. My very own *decadent* milkshake recipe: No need for nonsense like cups and teaspoons. Treat yourself to the quantity you want! Your favorite kind of chocolate ice cream (in my opinion Häagen-Dazs) Your favorite kind of Butter Pecan Ice Cream (in my opinion Häagen-Dazs) A shot of Amaretto (because why not?) Top it off with a homemade whipped cream (please make it yourself. It taste so much better and a little muscles won’t hurt!) Put a striped red and white straw in, Sip, relax and enjoy!

Milkshakes by Marianna Rossi, The Noun Project

We Should All Be Dancing Megan Stringer May 18, 2018

Cody Corrall

It usually starts this way: in an unfinished basement, low-slung string lights grazing the frizz on your hair, surrounded by the hesitant yet eager pulse of other teenage bodies at the dance party. Some young boy will get excited about a beat (Death Grips) and overdo it, stomping the concrete ground to a pulp and shaking an old family’s shotgun house. I wanted to join, restless to fit in, but wasn’t sure I was cool or confident enough to move my body in that way. I was more worried about being crushed. Standing shy in a corner with a best friend, this is how I learned to dance. One uncertain foot at a time, I moved my body to some electric rhythm, stepping in tune with careful consideration. I spent a slow year dancing around basements, in concrete corners, jumping to my own beat and hoping to God I had a friend to go along with. Eventually I realized it was more weird if I didn’t dance at all than if I just made a fool of myself. I began to grow more silly — throw an arm over my head, a leg in the air, an in-and-out head bump with a friend. I was finally fitting in, and it was okay to be weird. But 17-year-old Megan didn’t know what dancing could do for her until she saw 3-year-old Harper Mars dance and jump on her brother’s bed — “Shake it off, shake it off!”

I had stumbled my way into a babysitting gig my senior year of high school. Harper Mars and her brother Samson were my charges every Saturday for a grueling nine hours straight. Harper had a developmental disorder and could be particularly hard to look after, especially when the elder Samson was learning, leaving Harper behind. She was nearly nonverbal, had difficulty walking straight, and couldn’t put her shoes on — at least a year or more behind the others her age. But Harper Mars could dance like no other. Bouncing on the bed, her bobbed blonde haircut swinging up and down, she never looked more in control of her movements than when the toy radio shouted Taylor Swift. She could move like this for hours without getting tired, the grin stretching across her face, not understanding a single word of the song but not needing anything more than the the agency over her body the dance provided, a confidence she couldn’t yet feel in words.

BomSymbols, The Noun Project

At future basement dance parties, sometimes the night after a day of dancing with Harper, I began to connect the two. If Harper wasn’t embarrassed to dance, I certainly didn’t need to be. We’d take a break every 45 minutes or so to cool down. We were just there to have fun, but our bodies were working hard, and craved the cool night air of the backyard porch after “Dance Yrself Clean.” When my body is still working hard, there’s no better break from physical and mental strain than coming home on a weeknight, blasting “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” with my roommates, and totally letting go of anything else I was thinking about. For the

four minutes and three seconds it takes to listen to “Green Light” by Lorde, I can feel better returning to my normal life afterward. Since then, dance parties have grown from something I feared into something I wanted to host myself. Nothing has brought such autonomy over my own body like dancing surrounded by trusted friends and good music. I can move and jump and kick however I want just because it feels good — this is how we build confidence in ourselves. We should all be dancing, and teaching our kids how to dance. And if you need a nudge to do so yourself, I’m certainly not judging you. I’d rather just dance with you.

“Nothing has brought such autonomy over my own body like dancing surrounded by trusted friends and good music. I can move and jump and kick however I want just because it feels good — this is how we build confidence in ourselves.”

Cody Corrall

The Butterfly Effect: Setting OCD Thoughts Free Mikayla Rose Price May 25, 2018

Aleksandr Vector, The Noun Project

The butterfly effect is the theory that any small event, such as the the flutter of a butterfly’s wing, affects the outcome of the universe. This scientific theory that can be applied to my mind and the way in which it thinks. Every thought is a butterfly, except instead of the tingly feeling in the tummy, it’s also dozens of moths swarming in my mind. I have obsessive compulsive disorder, commonly known as OCD. OCD, like many other mental illnesses, is often improperly used as adjectives. OCD specifically has been stereotyped as a clean freak, germaphobe. Although OCD can manifest into this and lead to these types of behaviors, it is much more than that. It also is a very different and personal experience for each person who has OCD. It usually first starts with recurrent, unwanted and uncontrollable thoughts. These are the moths. Everybody experiences random, strange thoughts, but what makes it OCD is when they feel stuck inside the mind, like a terrible itch that won’t go away. Anxiety is caused by these infesting thoughts, and compulsions are played out in attempt to reduce this anxiety, whether it be a repetitive physical action or ritual thoughts. The obsessions are not just limited to thoughts and can be unwanted images or impulses. Un-

fortunately, these compulsions do not require much relief, if any, which is why the condition can be lifelong. The Mayo Clinic states that OCD can be caused by biology, genetics, and/or environmental factors. Imaging studies have shown differences in the frontal cortex and subcortical structures of the brain in patients with OCD, according to National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). The brain also does not respond normally to serotonin. Because of this, it is a co-occurring disorder, meaning it is often accompanied by another illness or disorder. The World Health Organization ranked OCD as one of the top ten most disabling illnesses of any kind, “ in terms of lost earnings and diminished quality of life.” About 1 of every 40 adults suffers from OCD. People can begin to feel initial symptoms of the disorder during their college years. “Stress doesn’t cause OCD, but college stress can trigger OCD in students who are predisposed to it,” according to BeyondOCD.org. College comes with new responsibilities, standards, culture, norms, and other academic pressures. For many, however, they may not be aware that they have this condition. Schools strive for perfection, and students can feel like a failure if they fall anything short of it. We are taught to have this mentality, but for people with OCD it becomes debilitating, we just cannot realize it through our own mind — OCD can often go untreated or undiagnosed. I was diagnosed when I was in seventh grade, but only because my mom is a counselor and is aware of the patterns of different mental illnesses. For a kid I was anything but carefree. While my friends would be careless, I had my every step planned out. They never had to worry about the butterflies. To them, butterflies were beautiful. We would catch them in our nets but I could not seem to let them go, no matter how hard I tried. I would obsess over the butterflies. Just as the theory goes, my mind wonders how my one decision would change the outcome of my life. For major life decisions, this kind of planning is a bright idea. However, I analyzed my every move, thinking over and over again before I could make a decision, ultimately making it hard to function. My life was so black and white, all right or wrong, trying to eliminate

any wrongs. But if there was a wrong, I would spin into a downward cycle. The more you think about a thought, the longer it lingers. It adds fuel to the fire. One form of therapy for OCD is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Some of the strategies used are â&#x20AC;&#x153;recognizing the connection between automatic thoughts, emotions and behavior replacing dysfunctional beliefs with more rational and adaptive ideas, and learning new tools for dealing with stressful situations,â&#x20AC;? according to Rush University Medical Center. It is a balance between psychotherapy and behavioral therapy, which helps patients reframe their thinking. The main point is to find the source of the negative thinking and reframe it into something more positive. CBT coping skills include deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, weighing the pros and cons of a specific decision and setting goals for oneself. My OCD still sneaks up on me, and as I go through different life changes it manifests in new ways. Sometimes I do not even recognize it until I share my thoughts with someone whom I trust and also understands OCD. It makes me question my present reality, the hopes of my future, and my whole past becomes a guilt trip. Suddenly, I embody everything I never wanted to be, while simultaneously feeling every fear in my stomach. This will pass, I say, but I cannot believe those words. Knowing when it does, soon enough they it will come again. But like butterflies, my thoughts can fly, in and out of my mind. Some stay longer than I want them to. Many I never invited in. Some days it gets so bad, that I float away with them, not allowing me to function and makes going through my day feel nearly impossible. Although my OCD may never fully disappear, reminding myself that I do not have to take responsibility for what I think helps me. Keeping CBT in my practice, as well as my prozac, and my close friends and family, helps me get through the days that feel unlivable. Although the butterflies will continue to fly, learning that I do not have to control them sets me free.

Butterflies by Milinda Courey, The Noun Project

Drifting Under the Radar Samantha Smith July 13, 2018

Sam Smith and Cody Corrall

A look inside Chicago’s Streeting community I lower myself with difficulty into Karl’s 1990 Nissan Silvia 240SX and watch as the seatbelt automatically buckles me in, no hands required. In the drifting community, the lower the better. The car itself has just been driven from Virginia to Illinois where Karl plans on streeting it. Streeting, in layman’s terms, is the act of drifting on, well, a street. Any street that has enough bends in it to accommodate the sliding of the car from one end to the other is a dream. As opposed to street racing or the drifting you see on the track, streeting isn’t about competing. It focuses on style, culture and having fun while driving. Like the strokes of a paintbrush, the swiveling of the wheel is carefully and meticulously drawn out to rotate the car perfectly. It truly is an art form, and that’s coming from someone who previously had no knowledge of cars—seriously, I once poured engine fluid where wiper fluid should have gone.

“I just kind of bomb into a corner as fast as I can and then just like flick the car into it and then,” Anthony, an avid drifter, claps before going on, “kind of happens. To me, it’s part of driving.” According to Drive Tribe, a blog dedicated to cars and driving, Japanese drifting culture originated in the mid-‘80s with the so-called “Drift King” Keiichi Tsuchiya. A short film called “Pluspy” highlighted his drifting skills and caused drifting to popularize throughout Japan. Drifting then made its way to the U.S. and became popularized through “The Fast and the Furious” franchise, out in 2001. These movies centered around driving as fast and reckless as possible, misrepresenting the original style in Japan. This is the biggest cause for tension among the car community in the US, as many aren’t aware of the technique and skill required for drifting. Drift competitions now live in the U.S. as well. One event, Final Bout, is a weekend long competition to find out who can drift the best. The drivers go out in teams and drift in tandem with one another. They’re judged based mainly on style of car and drift, and the more Japanese inspired the better! There are four competitions, three held in the U.S. and one in Japan. The Midwest competition features a few teams from Illinois. It takes a level of skill and concentration to be able to swivel your car from side to side, which is why Karl doesn’t listen to music while driving. His attention is completely on the road. Even if he wanted to listen, there are dials for a turbo where his radio should be, so his only option is a bluetooth speaker connected to the cage behind him. The turbo isn’t necessary for drifting; in fact, it’s more suitable for drag racing. It’s simply there to recycle exhaust from the engine and funnel it back to create more power. But power isn’t necessary for the art, it’s just a preference for those who crave the extra boost. “If you can’t drift with 90 horsepower, 400 horsepower ain’t gonna help you,” Karl said.

The cage, however, is a huge aspect of safety that goes into any professional drift car, as well as some street cars, like Karl’s 240SX. “The whole body of a car, as you go over bumps and stuff, like believe it or not, it’s actually twisting and flexing all the time,” Karl said. Although cars are made of metal, if one flips there’s not much to prevent it from crushing someone inside. Therefore, a cage is used to hold the car to its shape in an accident. Karl’s takes up the entirety of the back seat and has an ‘I love the nineties’ sticker on it. While turbos and cages come in handy, they aren’t essential for streeting. There are only a few things that you need to drift. First: rear wheel drive. “Think of it as a shopping cart. Unless you really whip it around the corner, the back wheels aren’t gonna move,” Karl told me, “but if you’re pushing a shopping cart you can easily make it slide all over the place.” The second feature that cars need to drift is a differential that isn’t open. A differential basically controls the spinning of the wheels, and a closed differential locks them up so they gain traction and the car moves forward. All you need to know is that with an open differential your back tires will keep spinning and you’ll end up in dizzying circles, probably doing a burnout. “There’s not really any specific rules for it unless you’re with your group of people you’re comfortable driving with,” Anthony said, “because obviously you wanna learn other people’s driving styles if you’re gonna be comfortable driving inches from their door.” That’s what’s called tandeming in the world of drift. Going in tandem with someone is more of a bonding experience than anything. “You learn their style and then you eventually try to get on their door while they’re sliding and keep the same line they have,” Anthony said. There’s more reason to go in groups than just to tandem with them. It’s also a tactic to keep out of trouble. The mindset is basically: they can’t catch us all!

If caught drifting on the street, you can get a ticket for reckless driving. According to the Illinois Reckless Driving website, your license can be suspended if you already have two strikes against you. Anthony’s been busted for streeting before. For six months, his license was suspended and he had a driving curfew in place after that. He doesn’t seem too upset over it, though, simply calling it “dumb.” There are a few cars that make for ideal drift cars. Karl’s Nissan is one of them. Anthony has a Mazda Miata, which according to Karl, is not the best drift car. “You can drift a Miata,” Karl said. “It kind of sucks.” Anthony’s response: “No, it doesn’t.” Let it be known Karl’s first car was a Miata. The car itself lies on a smaller frame, the distance between wheels is about 89 inches, and it has only 90 horsepower. It is possible to drift, and some (Anthony) might say it takes more skill to do so. However, his Miata currently sits atop four wooden blocks, as it has no tires.

Samantha Smith

“It’s more of a square shape, so what that means is the rear end of the car, when it flicks out, it’s gonna wanna flick the other way faster because it’s got less length and throw to it.” Anthony explained to me, although I’m not sure I could truly understand unless I was behind the wheel. His car reminds me of the ocean, not only because of the color, but also because it’s what I’ve always imagined myself driving down an Italian beach at sunset. But Mazdas are, in fact, Japanese cars, and in this case they’re here to drift and speed past people on the highway.

That’s because the streeting is heavily based in the original Japanese culture and style. Japanese drift cars—like Karl’s— can’t be imported to the U.S. until 25 years after their original production due to U.S. safety standards, but that doesn’t stop people from driving into the U.S. with their banned cars and racing them on our tracks. But Katerina, a car enthusiast, informed me that there’s a price to pay for the talent and work put in to maintaining these cars. Drifting seems so secretive to the general public, and that’s because it is. Those who own nice cars have a deep fear of being stolen from. It’s not uncommon for jealousy to arise when dealing with expensive car parts. “It’s so much cooler if you can drive and your car looks really cool while you do it,” said Katerina. “It’s about the money; you want to work hard, you want to put the money into your car, you want to be like, ‘I worked hard to have this,’ not, ‘I just picked up a piece of s—t car just cause I can drive.’” Although the drive to keep culture alive is strong, there’s a strange hatred toward those who copy the look of another driver’s car. It seems contradictory, especially when so many within the community have the same heart shaped sticker on their windows. (Never the body, don’t want to ruin the paint!) There is, however, a rift within the subcommunity. If you’re not in the sweet spot with the right car and skills, you’re an outsider. On one hand, there are those who have the money to buy the cars, but lack the skills needed to drift. On the other hand, there are those who can drive but don’t get the recognition because their car doesn’t meet standards. “It’s so much cooler if you can drive and your car looks really cool while you do it,” said Katerina, a car enthusiast. “It’s about the money; you want to work hard, you want to put the money into your car, you want to be like, ‘I worked hard to have this,’ not, ‘I just picked up a piece of s—t car just cause I can drive.’” Those standards are heavily based in the original Japanese culture and style. Oddly enough, Japanese drift cars—like Silvia’s— can’t be imported to the U.S. until 25 years after their original produc-

tion due to U.S. safety standards, but that doesn’t stop people from driving into the U.S. with their banned cars and racing them on our tracks. Drift culture, while divisive, is pumping blood to the hearts of every wide-eyed, hand-gripped and mind-focused drifter out there. Editor’s note: middle names were used in this article to protect subjects’ identities and privacy.

Samantha Smith

A Walk Up Michigan Chris Silber July 27, 2018

Cody Corrall

Many journeys begin with a Google Search. Something piques our curiosity, and we take a simple step to learn more. I typed four words into the search bar: â&#x20AC;&#x153;South Michigan Ave Chicago.â&#x20AC;? I know North Michigan Avenue well. I have worked on the world-famous Mag Mile for almost two years. Tourists from around the world visit, pack shopping bags, walk through Grant Park and discover the joys of deep dish and Chicago dogs. The street brims with activity and fantastic noise. I, admittedly, did not know much about South Michigan Avenue, and a quick Google search left me unsatisfied. I found numerous property listings and stories on the Loop and River North, but it seemed the road south of the Loop had been forgotten. I knew one end of the street so well, but what about the other? Google did give me a starting point. Beyond the popular stretch of road from River North through Grant Park, Michigan Avenue continues uninterrupted through five more miles of Chicago neighborhoods. One of the most famous streets in the world dead-ends at the base of a railroad yard in South Chicago. It then reemerges south of the railroad tracks and continues all the way to the Calumet River on 127th Street.

I decided to walk north on Michigan Avenue from its first dead end at 63rd Street to its opposite end at Oak Street in River North. I wanted to see where the avenue took me and document whatever I came across. This is the story of my 8.5-mile journey up Michigan Ave.

Washington Park

Early Wednesday afternoons are quiet. I only hear the noise of the cars at the base of Michigan Avenue. Here is where the mighty road dead-ends into 63rd Street, a few blocks east of a Red Line stop and a few blocks west of a Green Line stop. The neighborhood is Washington Park, home of the large park bearing the same name and the DuSable Museum of African American History. I begin walking north on Michigan.

Chris Silber

This part of Michigan Avenue is defined more by churches than storefronts. I pass several residential developments named after St. Edmund, and two large churches dominate the corner of Michigan and 61st Street. St. Edmundâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Episcopal Church has been operating from this location since 1940. St. Anselmâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Catholic Church across the street broke ground in 1924. As I continue, I pass an empty, fenced-in patch of grass. Several plots of land in Washington Park have no homes. At its height in the

1950s the neighborhood held 57,000 people – today’s population is somewhere around 12,000. The steep decline in population was caused by several factors, including changing industrial and commercial job centers in the city, white flight from South Chicago and city-mandated slum clearance. Many sites of former low-cost apartments were turned into non-residential community areas or simply left undeveloped. Today’s population is predominantly poor, with an average household income of $22,085. Almost 25 percent of the neighborhood’s housing units are vacant. I walk past the WBGX Gospel radio station and then go under L tracks a bit before 59th Street. There are no L stops in Michigan Avenue’s expanse, but the Green Line passes over the road twice. This specific track is the Ashland branch, which was originally constructed between 1905 and 1908. I pass William W Carter Elementary on 58th Street and hear children playing at recess. I pass a small food mart and a little Islamic Education Center, and arrive at the intersection of Michigan and Garfield. Two men are selling personal hygiene products from the back of a truck.

Chris Silber

“I sell soap that you wash up with,” said the man with a plaid jacket. “Like bars and cologne, to make you smell good.” Across the street on Michigan is a large construction project. A mixed-income housing project focusing on the community’s art scene called the Cleo Art Residencies broke ground here in January with Mayor Emanuel in attendance. The city has invested over $7 million into this housing project. It takes a few minutes to cross Garfield Avenue. After I do, I meet a few men doing yard work. One of them lives on the property. “I’ve been living in the neighborhood going on six years,” he said. “My daughter’s been here longer.” He said he loves the neighborhood and knows his neighbors. He claims the house next door to him used to be the residence of the legendary musician Nat King Cole. “See that house there, you should take a picture of that. He was the most famous singer.”

Chris Silber

Did Nat King Cole really live in this house? It is hard to say. Cole lived in Chicago as a child, and his family moved a few times. Cole

definitely did live and go to school less than a mile from this residence, and even lived on the corner of Michigan Avenue and 47th Street. I pass Greater Bethesda Baptist Church. The building was once a Jewish temple called the B’nai Sholom Temple Israel. The eastern part of the neighborhood was originally settled by German Jews in the 1890s. The outside is still adorned with the Star of David. At this time of day the neighborhood is quiet. The occasional pedestrian crosses my path, and a few neighbors converse on front porches. It is a nice spring day, so some people are simply sitting outside and reading.

Chris Silber

At this point I have been walking for about an hour. As I reach the northern border of Washington Park on 51st Street, I stop and grab some lunch. The restaurant is Shark’s Fish and Chicken, a chain prominent in South Chicago. I got six wings, fries and mild sauce. It is delicious. The cashier tells me to be careful. I’m carrying an expensive-looking camera and the area doesn’t have the cleanest track record regarding crimes and robberies.

“They wanna cause a scene, get your attention, they’re gonna get that s—t. They don’t give two s—ts. I seen them get a guy, this construction guy. He had all these tools and stuff in his truck. One of the guys was talking to him, the other went and stole his stuff, like a power drill. They sold it for ten dollars.” I finish my meal, listening to local patrons’ conversations as a midday soap opera plays in the background. I get up and go on my way.

Grand Boulevard I cross 51st Street and officially enter the Grand Boulevard Community. Originally, there was a street called Grand Boulevard – the street has gone through two name changes since and was changed to Martin Luther King Drive after King’s death in 1968. Grand Boulevard is the southernmost section of Bronzeville. Grand Boulevard was at the heart of Chicago’s African-American culture in the early 20th Century: Richard Wright, Louis Armstrong and Dr. Daniel Hale Williams all called Grand Boulevard home. At its peak in the 1950s, over 100,000 people resided in the neighborhood, which is less than two square miles in area. Today the population is about 21,000 people. Like Washington Park, this stretch of Michigan Ave holds several churches. St. Elizabeth Church was home to the first publicly recognized African-American Catholic priest in the United States, Father Augustus Tolton. On the intersection at 45th I run across a relic of Chicago’s past. Two of Chicago’s richest meatpacking families — the Swifts and the Morrises — married into each other in 1890, and in 1892 they built a large mansion at this intersection. It has gone through the hands of multiple people and organizations in the past hundred years, including former 19th Ward Alderman John Powers, the Chicago Urban League and the Inner City Youth and Adult Foundation. I come across an interesting business called Chi Turf. They sell artificial turf in the city and have different varieties named after neighborhoods.

The Green Line passes over again at 40th Street and I come to the edge of Grand Boulevard at Pershing Road.

Douglas The Douglas community encompasses the northern section of Bronzeville. The community is named after famous Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas, who ran for the presidency against Abraham Lincoln in 1860. The Senator owned seventy acres of land between 34th and 35th streets in the 1850s. During the Civil War the Union built Camp Douglas, a training facility and Confederate prison, between 31st and 33rd street. I come across The South Side Community Art Center early on in my tour of Douglas. The center was opened during the Great Depression in 1940 with the help of the Works Progress Administrationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Federal Art Project. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt gave the dedication speech at the same building the center calls home today. The South Side Community Art Center is the only remaining art center created by the Federal Art Project.

Chris Silber

Just north of 36th Place I come across the massive Chicago Public Safety Headquarters. When it was built in 2000, it was considered

one of the most technologically advanced police headquarters in the country. Originally just the headquarters for the Chicago Police Department, the Chicago Fire Department also moved in in 2011 as a cost-saving measure by the city. WGN reporters prepare to do a video shoot outside the building as I walk by. Just north of the Headquarters is the De La Salle Institute, a preparatory school with an incalculable influence on Chicago. De La Salle Alumni include five Chicago mayors: Frank J. Corr, Martin H. Kennelly, Richard J. Daley, Michael A. Bilandic and Richard M. Daley. Students loiter outside the school as I walk by. The Illinois Institute of Technologyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s campus Borders Michigan Ave to the west. IIT first opened its doors in 1893 and its current campus was largely the work of world-famous architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. On this spring morning the facilities are empty and the grounds are green. The universityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s school year ended in early May. At 31st Street I meet a woman with a reflective vest and aviator sunglasses. She works for Safe Passage Chicago, a city program that provides a safe route home for students before and after school. She sees my camera and is happy to pose for a picture.

Chris Silber

31st Street is also the point where Michigan Ave finally becomes a two lane road, where it continues as such through its endpoint in River North. At 28th Street I meet a bus driver who is taking a break to stretch out. His name is Patrick Coogan, He says he only works as a city bus driver part-time. He is also a location scout for NBCâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s television shows and owns an apartment building in the city. I tell him I grew up in Ohio, and he proudly informed me that he once met the legendary Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes.

Chris Silber

The Community of Douglas comes to an end at 26th street. This street also marks the end of Bronzeville.

Near South Side It is in the Near South Side Community that Michigan Avenueâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s surroundings grow significantly in height and density. The area has had an ever-changing presence in the city. Once the site of a Native American settlement, the community was settled by blue-collar Illinois & Michigan Canal workers in the 1850s. Wealthy businessmen built mansions in the community later in the 1800s and subsequently left at the turn of the century for quieter residences further

from the Loop. The Near South Side then became a vice district with a distasteful reputation for gambling and prostitution leading into World War I. Mercy Hospital and Medical Center just north of 26th Street was the first chartered hospital in Chicago, with roots tracing back to 1852. President Theodore Roosevelt was treated for a gunshot wound here.

Chris Silber

The community hosted the 1933 World’s Fair at the height of the Depression. After decades of population decline from the 1960s to the 1980s, a real estate boom ushered in a large population increase from the 1990s to present day. I pass over the Stevenson expressway and see McCormick Place, Chicago’s main convention center, to the north. The expressway lies mostly over the same Illinois & Michigan Canal that the original settlers of the area dug. I now enter into Chicago’s historic Motor Row district. During the auto boom in the first half of the 20th century, the strip of Michigan Ave from 14th to 22nd Street became the go-to location in Chicago to buy and repair cars.

I come across a brick building that is famous for a few reasons. Built in 1936, it originally housed the exclusive Illinois Automobile Club. It later housed the Chicago Defender Headquarters and now acts as an event production space. There are notably fewer places of worship in this community. Second Presbyterian Church is the first of only two churches I pass in Near North Side. Second Presbyterian Church has been operating from various locations in Chicago since 1842. The current building was built in 1872. I have been walking for a long time now and I am getting a bit tired. The sun is unrelenting, my hand is cramping up from taking pictures. I stop at a little store called Green Leaf Market just south of 16th street and buy a can of iced tea. I come across Old St. Mary’s Catholic Church next. The church was constructed in 2002, but the St. Mary’s Parish has been operating since 1842, when St. Mary’s Cathedral was built in the Loop. The church opened an elementary school in 2004.

Chris Silber

Near South Side is bustling with construction. A 47-story high-rise is under construction between 13th and 14th streets. The building will hold over 500 rental apartments. The permits for the construction project were an estimated $119 million.

I reach the end of the Near South Side at Roosevelt. From the intersection Grant Park and the towers of River North come into view.

The Loop Most of Michigan Ave in the Loop borders Grant Park to the east with dense, tall buildings to the west. The park is lined with several famous monuments, fountains and sculptures. The park has been a designated area for public use since the origins of Chicago. In 1839, it was designated that the area west of Michigan Avenue be “public ground forever to remain vacant of buildings.”

Chris Silber

This part of the walk is beautiful. The historic center of the largest city in the Midwest towers to the left and the greenery and monuments of the park to the right. Soon I pass the Auditorium Theatre. The theater was designed by the famous architecture duo Adler and Sullivan and completed in 1889. It played a large role in Chicago being named the site of the 1893 World’s Fair. The streets are getting busier as I continue north. The street comes to life in the warmth while food vendors pile on side streets.

Chris Silber

I reach the Art Institute, which is buzzing with people. A group of tourists are posing for a photo and ask me to take a few pictures with their phones. I ask a man where they’re from. “We’re Indian!” is all he says. The Loop continues after Grant Park for a few blocks and the skyscrapers overwhelm the senses. Light reflects off the windows and filters down onto the street. I meet a man in a wheelchair and chat with him for a minute. “My name’s Albert, like Fat Albert,” he says.

Chris Silber

The Loop ends at the Chicago River. Michigan Ave passes over the DuSable Bridge into the Near North Side and marks the beginning of the Magnificent Mile.

Near North Side After four hours of walking I finally reach River North, the southeastern section of the Near North Side community. This is the center of Chicago retail and home of some of the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most famous buildings. I first visit the bust of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, historically regarded as the first resident of Chicago. Point du Sable settled at the mouth of the Chicago River and established a successful trade settlement in the 1790s. Though he sold his property in 1800 and moved to the Missouri area, his settlement eventually blossomed into modern Chicago.

Chris Silber

The wide, pedestrian-friendly sidewalks are lined with flowers and greenery. The rain from the day before seems to have livened up the plant life, which stands in contrast to its metallic and concrete surroundings. 50

I walk by a Rolex store and think of the wide range of places I have walked through today. A few short hours ago I was walking along vacant lots and now I am passing stores that sell watches worth more than my college tuition. The Allerton Hotel on Huron Street was built in 1924, and was the first Chicago skyscraper to have pronounced setbacks as it got taller to conform with a new zoning ordinance passed in 1923. I pass the Old Chicago Water Tower and come across the John Hancock Center. The Hancock Center was the second-tallest building in the world when it was completed in 1969. Its bold shape and X-braced exterior are prominent in nearly every skyline photo of the city. Michigan Ave is Chicagoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s stage. It is the setting for Chicagoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s greatest triumphs and humble roots. Millions of feet have walked its sidewalks, from the men selling soap on Garfield Blvd to the birthday girl outside the Water Tower Place.

Chris Silber

I come to Michigan Avenueâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s end as it intersects with Oak Street and dissolves into Lake Shore Drive. I walked through the streets of six communities, learning about their history and meeting their residents along the way. As I look south at the road I just spent my day walking up, I cannot help but feel more connected with the city I call home.

Chris Silber

This Device Cures Heartache Cody Corrall August 24, 2018

Cody Corrall

Warning: this piece discusses child abuse and domestic violence Bing Liu did not want to make a personal documentary. Minding the Gap, Liu’s second project which won the Breakthrough Filmmaking Award at Sundance, started as a survey film about skateboarders across the country and their relationships with their fathers. The film shifted its focus to his hometown of Rockford, Illinois — where it turned into a living, breathing depiction of toxic masculinity and the ways in which young men cope with their abusive pasts. And at some point, Liu realized he couldn’t keep his story out of it forever. Rockford is an old factory city in the Rust Belt where Liu grew up with his single mother. It’s just two hours away from Chicago, where he would later move to major in English at UIC and try to become a teacher. In his youth, Liu’s mother remarried to an abusive man and stayed with him for 17 years and, in a desperate attempt to escape his home life, Liu turned to skateboarding.

Liu spent his teen years trying to take his body back. He gave himself bruises of his own making and found solace in the shared stories of abuse with the people he skated with — creating a supplemental family. “Now that I’m older and I feel like I have a different definition of family, that wasn’t really family,” Liu said of the relationship with his friends. “That was an excuse to be not alone but also not be vulnerable. I liken it to New England hockey fans at a bar — they’re not alone but they’re interacting through this medium of beer and hockey. There’s diminishing returns within the idea that skateboarding is as connective as family.” He also absorbed himself in media: music by The Mountain Goats, books like Catcher in the Rye, Perks of Being a Wallflower and films like Kids and Gummo acted like support networks and things to bond over with his friends. During this time, Liu filmed everything. He started by making skate videos of his friends and quickly turned into a therapist. In many ways, Liu attributes this to the beginning of what would later become Minding the Gap. “I was crashing couches and driving across the country just sort of searching,” Liu said. “I was sitting people down for the first time, strangers, and helping them work through things. It was like these indie-movie tropes of connecting with people.” Liu has a personal relationship with everyone in the film and he doesn’t shy away from it. There are serious interviews cut alongside them chatting like old friends. He doesn’t pretend to be an objective documentarian because he’s personally invested in these stories, these people, and it makes for a more authentic picture. “This is more real than pretending the fourth wall exists,” he said. Liu realized that while abuse was common among the skaters he talked to, everyone was at a different stage of the healing process. Oftentimes, abuse was played as just a part of life. It was normalized to the point of numbness, or it had hardened like an impenetrable shell over time.

For Keire, a younger skateboarder and one of the focal subjects in the film, it was still raw. Like the others, Keire turned to skateboarding to escape a home of abuse. He formed something resembling a family, a community through skating on a board with “this device cures heartache” etched in Sharpie on the bottom. “The ones that stuck with me we’re people who had talked about it for the first time,” Liu said. “With Keire, he hadn’t quite hardened. He was beginning the journey of processing it and that’s specifically what I saw myself in.” At the same time, Keire is coming to terms with the death of his father. Once an abusive figure in his life, he still maintains a love for him in an effort to forgive and to deal with his past. Near the end of the film, he compares his relationship to his father with skateboarding, something that hurts him but he still does because he loves it. The tone of the film changes when it’s revealed that Zack, another subject in the film, is abusive with his girlfriend Nina. What started as a project about how deep seeded abuse and harmful masculinity can be ended up showing those things manifesting in one of its protagonists in real time. Zack, like many of the other skateboarders Liu met, had hardened over his abuse. Of course his dad beat the s—t out of him, of course the cops were called. That’s just life, right? “I think the root of a lot of unresolved feelings is just this paradox of having these people in your lives that are scripted to love and to receive love from — and [then] to feel pain from them,” Liu said. “It’s really confusing and no one lays it out like that when you’re a kid. If you’re lucky you can see it like that when you get older and then work through it, but for many people it just becomes more twisted and something hardens and it becomes harder to access.” Liu started to lose faith that Zack could access these emotions, maybe he was too far gone to see how his own behavior became abusive. He found himself struggling with how to hold Zack accountable while still portraying him, and the topic of abuse, complexly.

Courtesy of Hulu

“I had to answer the question, “What gives me the right to go there?’” Liu said. “I was looking for a way to be vulnerable. How do you be vulnerable when you’re the one telling the story? And then it became about control; how do I give up control?” For Liu, giving up control was addressing his own trauma head-on. His interview with his mother is one of the most powerful moments in the film, and it looks completely different from anything else in it. The lights are harsh on his mother as Liu confronts her about the abuse that went on for so long. There are cameras on both of them, taking the audience out of the fourth wall and bringing them into the moment: the reactions, the pauses, the silence. At the height of Zack’s arc in the film he confesses, “You can’t beat up women but some b—ches need to get slapped sometimes, does that make sense?” It’s followed by a cut to Liu, looking at his mother — both of them sitting in the silence. Liu’s mother was trapped in the cycle of abuse with Liu’s stepfather, too. She was so blinded by his mask of sweetness and her fear of being alone that she couldn’t see the bigger picture. Growing up, she saw her parents fighting and she wanted to be different from them. But abuse doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it’s all consuming and seeps out in unexpected, complex ways.

“‘I was looking for a way to be vulnerable. How do you be vulnerable when you’re the one telling the story? And then it became about control; how do I give up control?’” With Minding the Gap, Liu is broadening the mainstream discussion of abuse. Abuse contains the multitudes of emotions and it affects everyone differently because of that. As an English major, a lover of language and a filmmaker, Liu wants to have more open conversations about abuse — because it’s in the silence that trauma is able to thrive. “Movies that are about domestic violence and child abuse are just tonally and emotionally stomach wrenching the whole way through, but the actual experience of growing up with abuse is more of a colorful wheel of emotions,” Liu said. “You still have hope and joy and pain — it just sort of becomes the ether of growing up, it doesn’t define you. I think that’s one way I thought about doing Minding the Gap differently and bringing these themes of violence. How do you make a film about domestic violence that’s bigger than ‘Did he hit her?’”

Skateboards by Oleksandr Panasovskyi, The Noun Project

50 Years Later: Lessons in Activism from the Young Lords of Lincoln Park Francesca Mathewes September 28, 2018

Courtesy of DePaul Special Collections Archive

The Walgreens at the corner of East Armitage Avenue and North Dayton Street in Lincoln Park was not always a Walgreens. A quick glance east and west on Armitage affirms that many things that are not what they used to be in, say, 1968. The Starbucks, the LUSH Cosmetics, the boutique gown shops and massage therapy practices. The people were different, too. Today, streets in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood are lined with private gates that lead to million-dollar single-family homes and boutique clothing shops whose occupants and patrons are more often than not, wealthy and white. It’s not the Lincoln Park that José “Cha Cha” Jiménez remembers. “You see nothing but white folks here,” he said. “That’s not by accident.”

Jiménez is a founding member of the Young Lords, an activist group that was started in Lincoln Park in 1968 and fought to empower Puerto Ricans and fight against city development plans that were destroying their communities. DePaul University has been home to a collection of newspaper clippings, photographs and protest flyers from the Young Lords’ active years in the John T. Richardson Library Special Collections Archives since 2001 when Omar Lopez, the former Minister of Information for the group, donated them to the university. From Friday, September 21, through Sunday, Sept. 23, the Young Lords reunited at DePaul University for a 50th Anniversary in the heart of Lincoln Park, at an institution that played a significant role in the gentrification that the Young Lords fought so hard against. In fact, the McCormick Theological Seminary administration building — which later became the site of a major Young Lords protest — was acquired by DePaul in 1975. The event, open to the public, sold out. I stand in a crowd of DePaul freshmen in the Explore Chicago class — focused on activists and activism after 1960 — huddled around Jiménez on a steamy, late summer day in mid-September, on the corner of Armitage and Dayton. Jiménez is dressed in all black — down to the flat cap atop his head and the rim of his glasses. Time, protests and prison stints have aged Jiménez in those 50 years since 1968. But standing there, on the streets he called home, there is still a sharp focus in his eyes, as if he is seeing an entirely different scene. Perhaps because before there was a Walgreens, before the Starbucks and boutiques, the area from North Clark Street up to North Racine Street and from West North Avenue all the way to West Addison Street was a primarily Puerto Rican neighborhood. But even Puerto Ricans who occupied Lincoln Park back in those days — in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s — had already been displaced from elsewhere in the city.

A Pattern of Displacement Jiménez’s own family had previously lived further south, closer to the iconic Holy Name Cathedral in what is now River North, before they were forced out by “urban renewal.” “We kept moving up to Old Town around the Carl Sandburg Village area, but that neighborhood was knocked down, and from there we came here [Lincoln Park],” Jiménez said. The Puerto Ricans that were pushed into Lincoln Park were often met with hostility and prejudice from other ethnic communities in the area, he continued. “We started organizing ourselves for protection because we were getting beaten up by the local groups who were here for years. Italians, German gangs,” Jiménez said. “We couldn’t go to North Avenue beach. We couldn’t go to certain restaurants. There were places we just couldn’t go to. Benny’s Pizzeria? We couldn’t go in and sit at the counter.” But Jiménez also voiced some understanding for these other groups, suggesting that this conflict was not to blame on either Puerto Ricans or other groups in Lincoln Park, but was rather reflective of a larger problem at work. “[They were] a community, too,” he said. “[Other ethnic groups in the area] thought that we were invading their community. But we were being pushed into it.” The pushing was being done by a process called “urban renewal.” Urban renewal is name for a process in cities that means a process of redevelopment in areas that are determined as “urban decay.” Specifically, then-Mayor Richard J. Daley’s “urban renewal” plans that began after World War II, said Jiménez. Thus, the Young Lords surfaced as a street gang. The word “gang” carries a lot of weight, especially situated in the city of Chicago. But their motivations and activities differed from those often associated with gangs today, said Jiménez.

“Time, protests and prison stints have aged Jiménez in those 50 years since 1968. But standing there, on the streets he called home, there is still a sharp focus in his eyes, as if he is seeing an entirely different scene.”

Courtesy of DePaul Special Collections Archive.

Members of the Young Lords are often pictured in garb similar to that of other activist groups at the time: black leather jackets, turtleneck and combat boots, with the addition of their iconic purple berets. “We said we wanted name recognition, we wanted territory. It wasn’t like gangs today that want to sell drugs — we used drugs, later — but we were basically looking for territory,” he said. “They were fighting for civil rights in the South, and for us it was a gang fight, but we also just wanted to be able to go sit at Benny’s and get a slice of pizza.”

On September 23, 1968 — Grito de Lares, Puerto Rican Independence Day — under the leadership of Jiménez, the Young Lords rebranded themselves as a human-rights movement, specifically focused on self-determination for Puerto Rico, anti-colonialism, controlled neighborhood development and the general empowerment of marginalized peoples. “We were fighting for our parents and for our aunts and uncles who were being evicted from their homes,” Jiménez said. “That’s kind of how we got involved with this big land grab issue that is still going on today.” Throughout 1968 and ’69, the Young Lords took part in several movements as well as coordinated their own efforts to stand against segregation and gentrification in Chicago. Just after their inception, they broke into and vandalized the Department of Urban Renewal Office and overtook a meeting of a group called the Lincoln Park Community Conservation Council, appointed by Mayor Daley to oversee development in the neighborhood. They threw chairs and shouted “down with urban renewal,” which served as fuel for what became a “preplanned riot” against offices and businesses owned by participants in urban renewal. The Young Lords modeled themselves after — and later, partnered with — the Black Panthers and began holding political education classes for community members in their homes, where they would discuss current political movements and philosophies. The Young Lords picketed the 18th Street Police Station after Jiménez was arrested following the 1969 takeover of the Urban Renewal Office, one of several times that Jiménez was arrested following a protest. They began programs at the Armitage Avenue Methodist Church — which is now the Walgreens on Armitage and Dayton — including a free breakfast for children every day, a free health clinic, a Puerto Rican cultural center and a free community daycare. They marched with 10,000 people from Halsted to Armitage, into Humboldt Park to stand with Don Pedro Albizu Campos, a Puerto Rican attorney and politician who lead the Puerto Rican independence movement.

Courtesy of DePaul Special Collections Archive

These were busy years for Jiménez and the Young Lords, who, by the way, were in their late teenage years and early 20s during this time. And perhaps most famously, in May of 1969 the Young Lords led a complete takeover and week-long sit-in of the McCormick Theological Seminary administration building until a list of demands were met, including investment by the city into free health clinics and low-income housing facilities in Lincoln Park.

What’s Changed? “This has been a recurring theme in the story of the Young Lords: that the real pushback, the real fight, was not with other ethnic groups or rival gangs in the street. It came from the top, down.” Keep in mind, this was all 50 years ago. But step off the Armitage Brown Line stop onto East Armitage Avenue right now, and it’s hard to say that much has changed. Friday opened the 50th Anniversary event in McGrath Arena with a keynote dialogue, including Jiménez himself as well as Óscar López Rivera, a Puerto Rican independence activist who was held as a political prisoner for 40 years before being pardoned under the Obama administration. Dr. Jacqueline Lazú, a professor in the Department of Modern Languages at DePaul University, was the main event organizer, as well as the moderator for the opening panel. Excited undergraduate volunteers scurried around the flow of professors, faculty and who appeared to be some of the original members of the Young Lords or subsequent activist groups, clad in the group’s iconic purple berets. The dialogue covered a lot of ground, beginning with the root of the Young Lords’ mission and the mission of similar activist groups: to end the vicious cycle of displacement that Puerto Ricans and other ethnic groups have been forced into by systematic forces in the United States.

“When we’re talking about Puerto Rico, the small archipiélago that is Puerto Rico, we have to be conscious of one fact: there are five million Puerto Ricans outside of Puerto Rico and the number of Puerto Ricans remaining Puerto Rico becomes smaller and smaller,” Rivera said, in response to a question by Lazú in regards to the importance of unity in modern activist movements. “Why is it important to remain unified?” “It’s important because if a Puerto Rican lives — whether it’s in Hartford, St. Paul, Minnesota, whether it’s in California, wherever it is — or that Puerto Rican, as strong as they identify themselves, there is the hope and possibility of coming together,” Rivera said. “The importance of this is we have been displaced historically. It started in 1901 when the U.S. government took Puerto Ricans out of Puerto Rico and sent them to Hawaii the the southwestern states of the U.S. for one purpose: they wanted to take that land and use if for sugarcane and for military purposes.” What Rivera is getting at is the idea that this goes further back than Lincoln Park, or neighborhoods before that. The issues the Young Lords dealt with and that activists still deal with today are tied to century-old acts of colonialism by the United States. This has been a recurring theme in the story of the Young Lords: that the real pushback, the real fight, was not with other ethnic groups or rival gangs in the street. It came from the top, down. “The Chicago Police Department was probably the worst enemy we had in 1967,” Rivera said. Rivera lived in Humboldt Park at the time. “The community in that time was a very marginalized community. We were an eviscerated community, a community without a voice, because we were not allowed to put out our identity.” But here we are, 50 years later, many of the same groups dealing with many of the same issues. In the past six months alone, families immigrating from Central America were torn apart by federal agencies at the U.S border. The Chicago Police Department has shot and killed 92 people over the past six years, about 80 percent of which were black males. And a full year after Hurricane Maria devastated the island of Puerto Rico, it is now known that nearly 3,000 people

lost their lives in the wake of the disaster — with little response by the U.S government. It goes back to the first time I spoke to Jiménez, in front of the Walgreens that was not always a Walgreens, when he was standing amongst spas and luxury cars that used to be his battlegrounds, in the reality he fought to prevent. “It’s about what the people believe in,” he said. “You can’t have a revolution without the people, and that’s what the Young Lords believed. We believed in a people’s revolution.”

DePaul’s Secret Zine Scene Madeline Happold October 5, 2018

Courtesy of DePaul Special Collections Archive

Sprawled across the university quad were tables of mismatched, pamphlet-like publications. Some were black and white with grainy imagery and chaotic font calling for abortion rights. Others were saddle-stitched and erotic-poetry themed. Some tables included neat rows of chronicled publications, while others were piled with one-off issues. People walked between rows, flipping through pages and swapping booklets. It was the Underground Press Conference: the meeting ground of the ‘90s zine scene, the mail order, underground press movement dedicated to unapologetic artistic freedom. It was an abnormally pleasant day for the middle of August in Chicago. DePaul University’s head librarian Kathryn DeGraff and conference founder Batya Hernandez moved swiftly through the crowd, grabbing as many copies of zines as they could carry. This was DePaul history, zine history. It needed to be archived. In August 1994 and ‘95, DePaul hosted the Underground Press Conference (UPC), defined as a gathering of “editors, publishers, writers, mail-artists, archivists and educators to discuss the crucial

role of the Underground Press Conference in a new era of zines, corporate links and interactive technology,” according the conference’s program. The conference was the first of its kind, gathering zine creators — zinesters, they were nicknamed — to talk artistry, free speech, independent publishing and alternative culture. Like any artistic movement, it wasn’t meant to last. After two years at DePaul, and one at the Chicago Cultural Center, the Underground Press Conference disbanded. While short-lived, it became a paper trail to an arts and zine movement now memorialized in DePaul’s library catalogues and followed by trendy zine fests nationwide.

The Zine Queen It was May 29, 1992, and the day of Hernandez’s graduation from Columbia College Chicago. The single mother, now fiction-writing graduate, had no plans to celebrate, but her ex-in-laws offered to watch the kids for the night. She hit up Smilin’ Jim’s — owned by a friend’s brother, the bar had become a place to blow off steam and hang out for Hernandez. There, she met Shane Bugbee, editor of “Naked Aggression.” He mentioned he was looking for a fiction editor and thought Hernandez would be perfect for the position. (Though Bugbee said he does not remember asking Hernandez to be an editor for his zine, he does remember meeting Hernandez and introducing her to self-publishing.) Hernandez was less convinced. Why did Bugbee coincidentally need a fiction editor, and what even was a zine, anyway? Bugbee told her to wait, he had some submissions outside in his car. He returned with two U.S. mail bags full of little, stapled paper books. Intrigued, Hernandez took the mail bags home, flipped through the submissions and was hooked. “It was so [do-it-yourself],” said Hernandez. “That’s what I loved about it. I loved all the people from all around the world that I was meeting through the mail.” So what is a zine? According to programs distributed at UPC, a zine is a “self-published, non-commercial publication done by a variety

of individuals… zines are among the most democratic of media, requiring not much more than having some idea or something to say.” Zines’ do-it-yourself (DIY) nature is lo-fi and outlandish, with collage designs, spitfire commentary and short life spans. Most zines are touch-and-go, their candidness contained to, at most, a handful of issues.

Madeline Happold

The UPC definition is deliberately broad, said Hernandez, to include any handmade publication on a variety of topics, like punk music or photography. But zine creation today is much different than in the mid-‘90s — digital zines allow for cheaper, faster distribution and more interactive design elements like gifs, videos and links. Most noticeably, there is the absence of physically flipping through pages. “It’s [a] self-produced, self-made, DIY publication, whether it’s an internet publication, an e-publication or a paper publication,” said Hernandez. “But the classic zine is the Xerox [scan] with the staples.” Zines inspired Hernandez to start her own underground press, Mary Kuntz Press, with friend Gabriele Strohschen. The feminist

zine — the title is a variation of “happy vagina,” but you can use your imagination — featured the moniker of an old suffragette photo to have the appearance of an “old, established press.” “The whole thing was a prank,” said Hernandez. “It was very feminist; very in your face.” Strohschen also had her own zine, “WISdom,” an extension of her community organizing group World Independence Society. She got involved in spoken word performances at the now-closed Weeds Tavern, where she met Chicago poet David Hernandez, Bayta Hernandez’s husband, who introduced the pair. Through the press Hernandez formed a community with other zinesters, but their only correspondence was through snail mail or email. There was no personal connection or face to match a written voice. In 1994, Hernandez and Strohschen decided to gather a copy of “Factsheet 5,” a quarterly zine that reviewed other zines from across the world, and bulk-mailed roughly 5,000 surveys to gauge interest in an in-person conference. They received around 1,500 replies.

Underground is not Mainstream The number of responses was a call to action for the zinesters. At the time, David was a visiting professor at DePaul and wanted to find a way to host the conference at the university. He took the letters of interest to his creative writing colleague Ted Anton. “It was partly a conference on issues, partly a book sale and partly a how-to about zine[s],” said Anton. Tim W. Brown, editor of “Tomorrow Magazine,” which printed from 1982 to ‘99, was asked to join the committee, now comprised of the Hernandez pair, Strohschen and Anton. With his experience, he worked with Hernandez on marketing and corresponding with other zinesters. “[UPC] was a way to learn about the subject as well as to sort of promote your product,” said Brown.

The term “underground press” was first used to define radical anti-war newspapers that circulated between 1964 and 1973 (take DePaul’s own counter-culture newspaper, The Aletheia, for example). How the phrase recirculated in Chicago literary communities is lost to its members, but the definition remains similar. According to Hernandez, underground was just not mainstream. It was building your own community, separate of mass media culture. Anton brought the proposal to DePaul’s librarians Kathryn DeGraff and Stephanie Quinn, who were interested in hosting the event at DePaul. With some funding from the Illinois Arts Council, dorm rooms donated by the university and a $25 admission charge, the first UPC was set to take place August 12-14, 1994, with a second annual conference the following year. In each of those two years, the conference brought roughly 300 community members and zinesters from California to New York. The events even gained larger attention, after being featured in the Chicago Reader and now-defunct Chicago City Pages.

“‘It felt like a circus, a kaleidoscope of activity,” said Anton. “It was very exciting; things were scary.’”

“I had three or four of them stay out of my house on mattresses on the floor,” said Strohschen. Featured zinesters and readers included Jen Angel of angsty rock and anti-capitalist zine “F—tooth,” R. Seth Friedman of the zine reviewer “Factsheet 5,” Mike Brehm of “Storyhead,” Chip Rowe of “Chip’s Closet Cleaner” and more. The conference even distributed its own “U-Direct” zine, including think-pieces on zine creation, raunchy poetry and sarcastic op-eds. The conference included informational seminars with eclectic topics like “Feminism, Post-Feminism and Grrldom,” “Is the Internet All It’s Cracked up to Be?” and the beginner’s basic “What’s a Zine? And How Do I Make One?” Saturday night would feature a free Underground Ball at the Bop Shop with Sunday bringing the Outdoor Underground Lit Sale and Read-In. There were zine swaps, discus-

sions on free speech and outdoor poetry readings on the surrounding university streets. “It was either buy a beer or buy a little zine,” said Strohschen. The conference wasn’t without its controversy, either. One seminar included a panelist stripping naked in front of participants. Another panelist wrote obscenities on the school blackboard — to which was later amended to say, “Let us all f–k peacefully.” Debates could turn argumentative, with the amalgamation of zinesters questioning free press, who had the right to publish and what separated artistry from obscenity. “It felt like a circus, a kaleidoscope of activity,” said Anton. “It was very exciting; things were scary.” The conference helped Anton turn his short story into the novel Eros, Magic and the Murder of Professor Culianu. He remembers reading the opening scene on Kenmore Street outside DePaul’s Schmitt Academic Center as people walked by, not listening. “All of a sudden it gave me a greater urgency, like I’ll make sure every word is good if I have to publish it,” said Anton. “That’s sort of how I changed my whole style and it became a book. So it was very cool, the Underground Press, in the evolution of my style.”

Zines — Who Started Them, Anyway? The Chicago underground poetry and zine scene of the ‘90s wasn’t all snaps and zine swaps. Trying to break into the scene included a bit of hazing, and arguments weren’t uncommon at readings. “It was rough and tumble,” said Strohschen. “It wasn’t always nice.” Surrounding the conception of the conference was the quintessential artist debate of underground versus mainstream. Some participants were wary of the the event’s connection to the university as an institution, or the “Belly of the Beast,” according to the Bubbafesto for the UPC — a spoof on the conference’s manifesto written by a so-called Father A. Wolfgang of the Church of Bubba.

“People questioned even the idea of having a conference because it was somehow selling out, especially being affiliated with the university,” said Brown. Some, like Bugbee of “Naked Aggression,” argued about the conference’s accessibility. Since the event charged an admission fee, he argued it excluded low-income voices from the Chicago scene. And once the conference fee was collected, where was the money to go? The Bubbafesto echoes the anti-capitalist sentiment of the conference: “Tell your readers where the money goes. Demand financial statements from things like the Underground Press Conference and ‘Factsheet Five’ — see where the money is going, and hold them accountable for the profits made in the scene.” UPC also promoted free speech and free press, which brought a variety of competing voices. Arguments would rise over seminar topics or opposing viewpoints. There was also disagreement over seminar topics — which ranged from “How Do I Pronounce ‘Zine’?” and “What Will I Get If I Make One?” to “F—k ME!?! F—k YOU!!! Settling Your Difference in the Zine World” — with some arguing topics were too beginner-focused. “I think a few people kind of got into each other’s hair, but by-andlarge it was very amicable,” said Strohschen. Strohschen left the planning committee after the 1994 conference. Other organizers got tired of the long volunteer hours and were ready to settle into more stable, “adult” jobs, according to Strohschen. They also got tired of the community backlash and “flame wars” that could spark in online chatrooms, according to Hernandez. At the 1995 conference, Steven Svymbersky, owner of well-known zine bookstore Quimby’s, and zinester Dan Kelly pranked the event, distributing a fake conference program after Saturday’s keynote address. The alternative conference program included spoof seminars like “The Reviewer’s Dunk Tank” and panelists including the likes of Kurt Cobain and The Professor from Gilligan’s Island. In 1996, UPC’s third and final year, the conference partnered with the city’s Independent Comics Expo (ICE) for a final event at the

Chicago Cultural Center, but by then the scrappy DIY charm began to fade. Slam poetry and e-zines were on the rise, and print was too expensive and time-consuming in comparison. For Hernandez, the event had run its course. The Underground Press Conference had blossomed then vanished, just like the zines that scattered DePaul’s quad those two August weekends. “We captured something at the heyday and the end at the same time,” said Hernandez.

‘The Rest is Zine History’

Courtesy of DePaul Special Collections Archive

“Much like Doc Martens or the lovable Winona Ryder, zines have made their comeback.” Almost 25 years later, DePaul’s Special Collections Archives still houses a collection of over 300 zines from the two-year conference. Students are allowed to sit in the special collections room and check out one box at a time, whether to peruse or to study.

But the zines weren’t moved immediately to the library archives following that warm August conference in ‘95. Due to the unique nature of zines, the archival and organizational process is complicated. Instead, those copies collected by DeGraff and Hernandez were kept in boxes and moved to storage for almost a decade — until Bradley Adita came along. Adita was a zinester himself, making zines in high school after receiving one from a mutual friend (Adita’s first zine was all about juggling). As a student at the University of Iowa, Adita heard about the conference after curating his own art and zine shows. So in 2004 Adita, now a Chicago resident, visited DePaul in hopes of sifting through the collection. He found dozens of boxes filled with unorganized zines. The library had yet to create a finding aid, or index, for the collection. Adita volunteered. “I didn’t really know what I was getting into until it was happening,” he said. Size matters when organizing the collection, said Adita. Zines were categorized by themes, such as music, poetry or politics. The full system and cataloging took roughly a year, with Adita visiting the library every other week to help sort. He said zines serve as a means of connection and inspiration for creator and reader both. Much like Doc Martens or the lovable Winona Ryder, zines have made their comeback. Despite the fears of those at the conferences, the internet didn’t kill zines. Instead, it offered a new platform for creation, while driving those that wanted to move off screen back to the paper product. In 2010, Chicago Zine Fest seemed to revitalize the sense of community started by the Underground Press Conference. The zine fest, now in its ninth year, includes a zine fair, readings and featured workshops. In May, DePaul hosted an event in partnership with Chicago Zine Fest on the history of its zine archives, which sold out less than 24 hours after being advertised. Quimby’s in Wicker Park still remains a haven for local zinesters to sell and share their work. The bookstore also hosts Zlumber Party,

an all-night zine-making event where zinesters stay overnight at the store. E-zines, or online zines, are also a popular medium due to their interactivity and low production cost. In the mid-‘90s, though, before technology and social media made it easier to connect, zines thrived as social currency and connection. Zines were an intricate string of pen pals exchanging little booklets via mailbox, when checking the mail was more than just bills and coupons. “Factsheet 5” listed thousands of zines — and those were simply the ones recorded. The Underground Press Conference sat at the moment between Xerox and internet. In a ‘95 Underground Press Conference U-Direct letter from the editor, Hernandez reflected on the conception of the conference: “I thought maybe we could really build an international zine community. I thought maybe we could even get academic and mainstream individuals to help out with resources. One long term zinester said it’ll never work…. I don’t take no for an answer very easily and when my husband David Hernandez was teaching for a semester at DePaul he suggested asking them for a space and maybe a little cash… ‘No way.’ The rest is zine history.”

Courtesy of DePaul Special Collections Archive

I’m a Bruja: How Wicca Taught Me to Love Nature and Myself Melyssa Guzman October 26, 2018

Jenni Holtz

Bruja. Witch. These two words mean the same thing but both can cause people to feel uncomfortable. Some may only associate Brujas or Witches with Halloween characters and nothing else. In “Hocus Pocus” the witches lure children and take their life while in “The Conjuring” the witch Bathsheba killed her child for Satan. In “American Horror Story: Coven” there are witches from different cultures and practices, but they have supernatural powers. In the movie “The Witch,” witches are depicted as child killers who feed off animals. It also portrays the practice of witchcraft in a negative light. Media only portrays witchcraft and witches as evil. Brujeria dates back to Spanish colonization when healers were referred to witches because they did not believe in a Catholic God. During the Salem witch trials, which occurred in the 1600s, two women stated they were possessed by the devil and blamed other

women of witchcraft. Growing up Catholic I was taught that people who practiced witchcraft were evil and worshipped Satan. I feared the pentacle symbol, the five points on the star that represent: fire, water, air, earth and spirit, or anything that was related to the devil. However, I always had an affinity for astrology and horoscopes. I also found rituals and potions both alluring and stimulating. It was not until my sophomore year of college when I discovered moon rituals. Moon rituals is using the phases of moon to help with manifestation of goals. When starting a moon ritual, I have my crystals, sage for cleansing and artifacts that represent my goal. I always make sure to cleanse the energy of my area and I say all my goals out loud to the moon. I learned that each moon phase represented different energies. For example, the new moon, when the moon is near the Earth and sun, is about new beginnings. This could mean starting a new venture or wanting a fresh start in life. Each new moon and full moon I would sage myself and my healing crystals and then I would write my intentions. I began doing this practice for a year while collecting crystals such as amethyst, rose quartz, opal, tourmaline, and onyx. I craved more information, so I began searching different spells to conduct with each moon phase. While searching for spells I discovered Witchcraft, Wicca and Paganism and I felt so connected to all three of these religions. I secretly read articles about these practices as well as performed more rituals. I draw the pentacle on my wrist with sharpie for protection against negative energy. The reason why I feel so protected with the pentacle is because I feel like the Goddess with the four elements are guiding me on a right path. It was not until June 2017 that I finally proclaimed myself a Bruja and that I practice Witchcraft. Just to clarify, Wiccans are not all witches and witches are not all Wiccans. I believe that religion is a personal journey that should bring peace, love and comfort. I cannot say I am Wiccan nor can I say I am Catholic. Personally, my beliefs are a mixture of Catholicism and Wicca, but I practice Witchcraft. I have a firm belief in La Virgen de Guadalupe, which is a prominent figure in Catholicism. However, I do not live my life by the Bible nor do I go to church, but I do believe in heaven. Wicca is an earth-based religion that believed in one-ness with the Earth. Wiccans believe in summerland where the soul goes to reflect on its past life.

When I do rituals I cast a circle that include the four elements (fire, earth, air and water) as well as my pentacle that is shaped by pink peonies, which are my favorite flowers. I do a basic ritual with white candles that represents purity, hope and peace. Black candles represents protection and banishment of negative energy. If I do a money spell, a spell to attract more money into my life, I include green candles and I use my spell book to say some chants. Each spell also needs to be done under a certain moon phase and should be conducted at midnight. I do my rituals in my room with the lights off and just my Christmas lights on. The most important thing is to feel both comfortable and powerful. I always tell myself that I am a magical being. Now that I am a proud Bruja I do get upset when people start to ridicule me by calling me a Satan worshipper or evil. Sometimes people are scared that I will hex them or hurt them in any manner. But the number one rule is The Rule of Three, which means that whatever energy a witch puts out into the universe they will receive times three. I only put out positive energy so that it can be returned times three. Those who are Wiccan never harm animals or innocents; this ties to The Rule of Three. I also have encountered people who try to coerce me into Christianity through guilt. Certain family members are still having a hard time grasping the idea of me practicing Witchcraft while being a hybrid of Wiccan and Catholic. Other family members like my mom and my tia (aunt) have accepted me and are generally curious. Ever since my transition from strict Catholic to Wicca, I feel more passionate about my spirituality. Moreover, my discovery of Wicca has taught me to love nature and myself, including all my imperfections. I meditate almost every day and I make sure to make time to talk to the universe and the Goddess. I am still on this journey and I am constantly learning about this spirituality.

Navigating Activism and Autism Elle Lynch November 2, 2018

Cody Corrall

If you scroll through images on social media on the day of a Womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s March or a March For Our Lives, you will see so many people that they start to look like ants. Aerial images offer a look at millions of protesters holding signs some quite clever, and others with powerful messages. Everyone is smashed together, but united by a shared passion. This commonality almost makes everyone one. A few people stick out, though. These are the people that stand in front of the rest to make speeches, read poetry and chant into a microphone or megaphone. They unite the crowd with words of wisdom and action, fighting for a change. When I see that person on my feed, I am in awe. How can they craft words and ideas together so perfectly? The words sound beautiful, but they also inspire people to take action. Maybe the speaker has stage fright, but it does not show. After such feelings of admiration, I begin to sink. Since I have autism, expressing ideas all with perfect eye contact is everything this disorder hinders. The autism spectrum features a wide range of disorders including Aspergerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, a more high functioning type, or atypical autism, formally known as Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS). Through all of these disorders, though, most

of those affected will experience a hard time communicating. The National Institute of Mental Health specifies other symptoms such as restricted interests, repetitive behaviors, and having trouble connecting with or understanding others. In terms of a diagnosis, I was a late bloomer. No one in my family suspected I could be on the spectrum. At eight, I was diagnosed as bipolar after my mother saw the obvious manic and depressive behaviors. Although my mother believed the bipolar diagnosis, autism never crossed her mind. She just thought I was a quirky little girl who had an extreme hatred of her clothes getting wet. The only time autism ever sprung up in conversation was from my lovely older sister. I had an outburst over something menial, and she retaliated by yelling symptoms of the disorder. Our mother felt I had a disorder besides bipolar, but not autism. It better not be autism.

Jacopo Bonacci

At seventeen, I was full of inexperience and relentlessness. Even before I explained the case, those I told could already smell it. I smelled something else, though. With the cocktail of awkward socialization, obsessiveness on certain topics, and misinterpreting statements, I knew another diagnosis would be laying at my feet. After begging her for a diagnostic test, mom agreed and I was analyzed for hours. She gave us the gist of what each test would look like, yes the inkblot test was one, but the last test gave me a week long freeze. I was going to have to take an autism test. These results were supposed to be official in two weeks. The doctor who tested me was the same one who gave me my results, but this was a new office and not at all bland. It was dark and only illumi-

nated by fairy lights. My older sister joined myself and my mother to support me. She was the one who got me into this mess (I’m seriously kidding). The answer: I am certainly bipolar, but I have a tinge of autism. After that “A” word the doctor quickly followed up yelling, “But high functioning!” This made no difference. At this time, I pummeled through a phase of wanting to be America’s First Lady à la Jacqueline Kennedy. To me, she embodied the ’60s dream. She had the elegance, the style and a gripping life story. I was not seeking out tragedy, but I somehow wanted all of the grace she had. Those dreams were dashed. No politician, especially one as regal as JFK would marry an autistic girl. My imaginings of being hand in hand with a glamorous senator turned president faded into the bygone. No pillbox hats, no campaign trails and no carrying a man’s legacy. Many months of shame ensued in which I gave my family instructions never to tell anyone of my diagnosis. I started to withdraw from school to the point that I tried to find the soonest way to graduate. From January to August I laid in bed. Some days I wrote, some days I slept. Honestly, I was happy. No social interactions might be a terror to some, but I felt rejuvenated. For those months, I collected my thoughts, and thought about things I hadn’t in a while. Amid memories and thoughts dating back to seventh grade, my feminism was reignited to its fullest crescendo. I read feminist books, wrote feminist essays, and watched feminist documentaries. Jacqueline Kennedy took the backseat to Gloria Steinem, Ellen Willis and Malala Yousafzai. Reading Kim Gordon face off against sexism in Girl in a Band spoke to me, as did watching She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, a documentary covering major events in the timeline of second wave feminism. Bitch and Bust became my dream publications. Unapologetic and empowered, I felt liberated. Liberated enough to be a woman and liberated enough not to apologize for my autism. But the actual activist part was missing. Marching through streets and waving creative signs put a chill in my body, but it seemed a necessary step in a feminist’s life. I would be the activist… who doesn’t do any activism. One key factor across the spectrum is difficulty communicating ideas. This fact glares me in the face whenever I listened to Jessica

Valenti, a feminist writer and founder of feministing.com. Valenti paints pictures that are both smart and beautiful for a large platform — a platform I could never handle.

“Unapologetic and empowered, I felt liberated. Liberated enough to be a woman and liberated enough not to apologize for my autism.” Autism diagnoses have spawned a great number of speakers and activists, see Temple Grandin, who advocates awareness and better education for children with autism. Rosie King championed the needs of those on the spectrum by giving a Ted Talk to raise awareness. Maybe one day I will have the opportunity to speak in front of a crowd, but at this moment it seems like torture. Maybe I won’t stand up in front of millions of people to spread my views, but I can write. Writing is what makes me feel more involved with the world around me. Whether I reach one person or one thousand people, I morph into a strong person. Gloria Steinem started her career in journalism, then moved onto speaking and organizing. I should get my feet wet in writing, then maybe I will magically grow the guts to stand in front of millions.

Have You Gotten Your Flu Shot? Melody Mercado November 9, 2018

Natalie Wade

In 2009 Kevin Itima was lying in his bed, unable to move. Everything hurt, even opening his eyelids caused him great pain. For ten days he lay in solitude, unable to eat or drink as he waited for his sickness to break. “I thought the flu only affected older people,” said Itima. “I never thought it would happen to me.” The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that during the 2017 flu season 80,985 people ages 18-49 were hospitalized with the flu and 2,873 ultimately died from influenza-associated illnesses. Although infants, children and seniors are more susceptible to the flu, it is possible for healthy, young adults to contract and be hospitalized and/or die from the virus. The CDC recommends that everyone six months and older should be vaccinated for the flu before the end of October. If someone still has not received the flu shot, it’s not too late. The flu typically starts to peak in December and can last through February, so getting the shot before finals begins can protect you over the course of winter break.

However, many people don’t get the flu shot. According to Tara Haelle, a health and science reporter/author, the top three reasons she sees people skip the vaccine are lack of time, they don’t think it’s a big deal, and they feel funny after the vaccine is received.

The Flu is Not a Cold When Itima contracted the flu during his junior year at Jackson State University, he had passed it off as the common cold. Not realizing the seriousness of his illness, he continued to attend track practice until he woke up two days later in a wretched state. The flu and the common cold are both respiratory illnesses, but couldn’t be more different. Often associated with the common cold because of similar symptoms, the flu can unfortunately be passed off as a general illness. “It’s annoying [the common cold]. You’ll need to pop some Sudafed or a Tylenol, but it’s not going to kill you,” said Haelle. “The only person that’s ever going die from the cold is somebody who has a very very seriously impaired immune system.” The flu, according to Haelle, is an entirely different animal. While the flu causes high fevers, aches, chills and a cough like a cold, it’s also attacking your whole body. It can also turn into pneumonia, and with serious complications, the flu can attack your internal organs. “Yes, most of those people [who die] had some kind of preexisting condition, but not all of them. Every single year there are hundreds and hundreds of people who die from the flu who had nothing wrong with them,” said Haelle.

Why Get the Vaccine Unlike the measles and polio vaccines, which are more than 90 percent effective, it’s no secret that flu vaccine effectiveness varies from year to year, which according to Haelle makes the vaccine substandard. Despite getting the vaccine individuals can still contract the flu.

Jenni Holtz

“It’s actually a pretty lousy vaccine, not because we have lousy scientists, but because it’s [the flu] just a really amazing evolutionary organism and it’s very good at evading our immune system, and has been for thousands of years,” said Haelle. So why get the flu shot? Ideally the vaccine stops someone from getting the flu, but most importantly the vaccine significantly decreases the chances of hospitalization and death. According to Haelle, instead of spending two weeks in bed feeling like you can’t move, the flu shot enables someone to be able to continue on with everyday life. “Both of my kids had the flu vaccine last year, both of my kids got Influenza A, both of my kids got flu B, both of my kids missed one day of school each for those,” said Haelle. “Had they gotten the flu without the flu shot, they most likely would have missed at least a week of school for each of those.” For Itima, getting the flu not only took him away from school, but took away valuable time from his collegiate career. It took him months to get back the fitness he lost during his 10-day battle with the flu. Time, he says, he couldn’t afford to miss. Losing productivity, according to Haelle, is a major disadvantage with the flu. The vaccine greatly decreases the chance of someone having to miss out on work, school, and extracurricular activities. “If you know you don’t have time to spare, then why take the chance and not get the shot?” said Itima, who is now a real estate broker in Chicago.

Misconception One of the greatest misconceptions and reasons why people skip the flu vaccine is because people think the shot actually gives you the flu. “They feel crappy when they get it,” said Haelle. “People will say you get the flu or it makes them sick, well it doesn’t make you sick and it doesn’t give you the flu.”

The vaccine stimulates your immune system, which can cause a headache, a slight fever or nausea. These side effects are normal and mean the vaccine is doing its job. This “imitation infection” leaves your body with the memory of how to fight the virus in the future.

The Spray For those that have a great phobia of needles there is still a way to get the flu vaccine. The vaccine nasal spray is available for young adults, but the effectiveness of the spray has varied compared to the shot. “Essentially, they are the same according the CDC,” said Haelle. “But we have more data on the shot than the spray… we have more data going back more years that supports their effectiveness.” Some protection is better than none and if needles greatly deter someone from getting the shot, than it doesn’t hurt to get the spray instead, according to Haelle.

There’s still time As the quarter comes to an end and holiday travel increases, the more people someone is likely to come in contact with. “You can have it for a couple of days before you show any symptoms,” said Haelle, “So you are going about your day. Going shopping, giving your grandmother a hug, holding your new baby nephew, and you just exposed all of them to flu.” Itima can’t pinpoint who gave him the flu, but he knows in the days leading up to his symptoms there were multiple people sniffling and coughing. Itima also says if ever knew he would have gotten this sick, he would have taken the time to get a flu shot. “Even though it’s not one of our strongest vaccines — it’s arguably one of our worst vaccines — it still offers protection and that protection can save your life,” said Haelle. “If you are not interested in saving your life, at least take some interest in saving the lives of others around you that you might transfer the flu to.”

The CDC offers a vaccine finder where anyone can input a zip code to find places offering flu shots in their area. DePaul University students can get the flu shot at Presence Sage Medical Group and will be billed to your health insurance. The out of pocket fee is $44. Getting the flu shot before winter break can help protect students from the flu during the highest travel season of the year. Being vaccinated will not only protect students but others as well, while providing peace of mind while enjoying a relaxing break at home.

Under the Needle: Young Consumers Turn to Preventative Botox Mackenzie Born December 21, 2018

Natalie Wade

Shanna is 29, but she’s been getting Botox injections since she was about 26. “I guess I noticed I was getting a little bit of wrinkling around my eyes,” said the Chicago resident, who prefers to be identified by her first name only to remain anonymous. For Shanna, one of the best parts of the Botox treatments are the way they’ve changed her face in photos. No longer does she have to use any kind of filter or Photoshop to hide wrinkles — Botox fixed that. “In my circle of friends, everyone has had some sort of work done,” said Shanna, who estimates she gets Botox about every six months. “And pretty much all my friends who don’t do it probably should.” Shanna isn’t alone — more women and men in their 20s and 30s have turned to preventative Botox to eliminate signs of aging, a

strategy aimed at treating wrinkles and creases before they really form to keep them at bay. Because Botox temporarily paralyzes the muscle in the injection area, the toxin is also used to treat conditions like excessive sweating or migraines. But preventative Botox is solely focused on targeting unwanted wrinkles, usually on the face. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, Botox was the No. 1 performed minimally-invasive procedure in 2017, up 2 percent from 2016 with 7.23 million Botox procedures performed in the U.S. alone. “I have absolutely seen an uptick in the number of younger patients coming in for Botox treatments,” said Dr. Lorri Cobbins, a board-certified plastic surgeon at The Aesthetic Institute of Chicago. “I’ve always had a somewhat younger patient base, whether it be for surgery or injectables. However, over the past year it has really increased.” The average age of Dr. Cobbins’ younger Botox patient is 26, most of whom are female and who she believes take the time to educate themselves on how to look younger for longer. Cobbins explains that many of her younger patients have started and continued with Botox treatments because of the rewarding results. “You are decreasing muscle contraction within the area that is being treated,” said Cobbins. “With continued use over time, this will decrease the appearance of frown lines, which can make us look older or angry.” Botox minimizes your ability to make “angry faces,” according to Cobbins, such as furrowing your brow. “As you age you will be training yourself not to frown which can keep a person looking fresher and younger,” said Cobbins. Ali Nezam, managing partner at Beautify Med Spa in Chicago, said his practice has also seen a recent change in the age of Botox clients. “About 40 percent of our clientele are people in their 20s. And out of that 40 percent, I would say 60 to 70 percent are 20-25 years old,” said Nezam.

He added that the shift towards younger Botox customers has taken place over the last two to three years. “In the beginning, people had stigma towards fillers and injections,” said Nezam. “But it has become more publicized through social media and advertising and more doctors talking about the reasons for preventative Botox.” The trend that both Nezam and Cobbins have seen is no secret to Allergan, the pharmaceutical company that owns the Botox product. Allergan will reportedly be launching an advertising campaign at the end of 2018 aimed at getting more millennials interested in preventative Botox. According to Allergan’s 2018 Medical Aesthetics Day Presentation, the campaign will ask millennials if they are “bo-curious,” and will focus on creating interest and conversation around the Botox product while convincing a younger demographic of customers that this product is “not your mama’s Botox.” “After more than 15 years on the market, we’re going to invest in Botox in ways we really never have before,” said Carrie Strom, Allergan’s senior vice president of medical aesthetics, during the company’s investor-focused presentation. “The campaign will continue to normalize Botox. It’s going to make it fun and easy to talk about it — fun to talk about it with your friends and family and easy to ask for it by name from your medical provider.”

Botox is a top-selling product for Allergan, and according to CNBC, Botox continued to lead company sales in the third quarter of 2018, generating $879.7 million for Allergan and exceeding the company’s sales projections for the quarter. Botox generated $2.8 billion in sales in 2017, and Allergan projects that the facial injectable market will double by 2025. An ad campaign focused on younger customers also comes after facial injectable use by millennials in the U.S. has more than tripled since 2014. Allergan expects that there will be over 1 million millennial facial injectable users by 2018, who are driven by more buying power than previous generations have had and more interest in preventing signs of aging. “Millennials are one of the generations with the highest disposable income in the history of the U.S.,” said Juan Mundel, assistant professor of advertising at DePaul University. “I think that this is a part of a bigger industry trend in which a number of health companies are starting to focus on millennials.” Botox treatments can be pricey, depending on who is injecting the Botox and how many units of Botox a client is getting. According to Dr. Cobbins, sessions typically range from around $150 to $350 or more for younger clients who don’t require large doses, and the average Botox treatment will last up to three or four months before the client needs to return for another session. Based on these numbers, a hypothetical client who started Botox treatments at the age of 25 and continued until the age of 65 would spend $18,000 on Botox injections over the span of 40 years. That’s assuming they wait the full four months between sessions, receiving three treatments a year at the lower-end cost of $150 per session. But for some younger clients like Shanna, the cost of Botox isn’t really the priority. “It’s absolutely worth it, so I would pay more if that’s what it cost,” she said. “I would not ever look for a discount. It’s my face.”

Anna Ulyanov, an aesthetics nurse injector at Lincoln Park Aesthetics, agrees that a younger demographic of customers are willing to spend their money on Botox treatments. Ulyanov has been administering Botox injections for almost four years, and believes that Botox is becoming much more conventional and accepted among consumers. She’s seen clients as young as 18 years old come in for injections, and even some “Botox parties,” where a group will come in together to receive Botox before an event like a wedding.

“Based on these numbers, a hypothetical client who started Botox treatments at the age of 25 and continued until the age of 65 would spend $18,000 on Botox injections over the span of 40 years.” “It’s always been important to everyone to look their best and feel their best,” said Ulyanov about Botox. “It’s more acceptable and widely known now and no one keeps it a secret anymore.” Social media has played a vital role in Botox becoming less of a secret and more of a beauty trend, increasing exposure and helping make the conversation around Botox more widely accessible and prevalent. Dr. Cobbins believes that social media has contributed to the rise in the number of younger Botox clients at her practice, who are more willing to discuss their experiences with Botox and are open to sharing their “before and after” appearances. Allergan has also recognized digital and social media as an important tool in their marketing efforts, enabling a key demographic of millennials who are “unapologetic and unafraid of aesthetics.” During their 2018 Medical Aesthetics Day Presentation, the company reported there were currently 3.3 million Instagram posts with the hashtag #botox, and that there have been over 50 million Google searches on medical aesthetics. “This generation is a lot more open, so they are the right people to go after because it is already out there and on their radar,” said Mundel. “With previous generations, you needed to be more tactful and careful not to offend them, but with this younger generation, it’s more ‘If I can fix it, let me grab it with both hands.’”

Allergan’s new ad campaign aimed at younger men and women also comes as a handful of toxin competitors have popped up, posing a potential threat to Botox’s 70 percent market share. Allergan has continued to emphasize the importance of Botox as a household brand name product that is known and trusted among consumers, and their push to market to millennials and efforts to raise brand awareness make sense in the face of increased competition. The Botox toxin is also a trade secret that is closely guarded by Allergan, and many companies who have tried to recreate the toxin have failed, giving Allergan a major advantage in the facial injectable market. There is still much unknown about the long-term health effects of injecting a toxin into the human body, as Botox has only been on the market for 15 years. The powerful botulinum toxin itself, which Botox is derived from, is heavily regulated by the Center for Disease Control and is considered a potential agent of use in bioterrorism, as a small amount of the toxin can paralyze a person’s breathing muscles and lead to suffocation. Still, it doesn’t appear that potential long-term health repercussions take precedent over the immediate benefits of Botox treatments for some customers, especially considering Botox’s profits and the substantial increase in millennial facial injectable use. “Botox still has an opportunity to connect with young consumers because of this obsession we have with being youthful,” said Mundel. “I don’t think people would necessarily go in and get their face pierced by a needle with Botox if they weren’t afraid of the consequence of not doing it.”

Blood, Bodies and Binaries: Trans Women in Horror Jenni Holtz January 18, 2019

Jenni Holtz

Warning: this piece contains spoilers “Would you f—k me? I’d f—k me.” Buffalo Bill says to themself in a mirror as they apply makeup, tuck and dance around the room while their hostage tries to escape. Buffalo Bill is one of the most famous transgender characters in film history. And they’re a serial killer. While compiling a list of films that feature transgender, gender non-conforming and crossdressing characters, I found a surprising number of horror films with trans women as antagonists. For most genres, gender-bending characters are smaller characters who crossdress and don’t necessarily identify as trans. In horror, though, trans characters like Buffalo Bill are essential to the main plot. They are nearly always a serial killer or monster and although their actual identity isn’t always addressed, their presentation is modeled after trans women. Their trans identity is meant to incite fear in viewers. Trans women in horror are presented as abject beings — or anything that is considered gross because it is outside of the self. Think of all

the bodily fluids that suddenly become grotesque when they’re no longer part of the body: blood, vomit, hair, etc. These things cross the boundary of self and not-self because they are not human, only pieces of it. Trans bodies — not unlike intersex bodies, Black and Brown bodies and disabled bodies — are abject due to their transgression of social boundaries. At their core, they are in opposition to the white, able-bodied, cisgender, heterosexual man who is the image of the default, normative person in Western societies. Trans people challenge the comfortable boundaries of society by way of crossing gendered lines and sometimes sitting between or outside of them depending on hormones, surgery and gender expression. In a society that strictly constructs two genders, people who disrupt that binary are viewed as abject beings. Horror capitalizes on this fear with its depiction of transgender characters — specifically the murderous trans woman trope.

“Trans bodies — not unlike intersex bodies, Black and Brown bodies and disabled bodies — are abject due to their transgression of social boundaries.” Horror movies provide a vehicle for viewers to project their own struggles with fear, loss and death and to be able to engage with those feelings in a contained manner that is socially acceptable. By making trans women objects of fear, films like these reinforce harmful ideas about trans identity. Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film Psycho (1960) is considered one of the first slasher films ever released. Norman Bates, the killer, dresses as his mother and kills a woman in an infamous shower scene. Bates has become the inspiration for a television series and three more movies. He dresses as a woman to hide his identity from investigators. Though Bates isn’t exactly a trans character, Psycho turns his crossdressing into a sign of murderous tendencies. He is less affiliated with what is now thought of trans identity, but Bates was one of the first film representations to associate crossdressing with a tendency to kill.

Paramount Pictures / Graphic by Cody Corrall

In Dressed to Kill (1980), transgender identity is equated with mental illness. The killer, Bobbi, is a transgender woman with bipolar disorder. When manic, she dresses as a woman and kills the occasional woman. When depressed, she presents in a more masculine way and is nonviolent. Bobbiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s therapist denies her gender confirmation surgery and believes her trans identity is a result of bipolar disorder, a fact that is discussed at length in the murder investigation. Bobbiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s trans identity is completely written off as a side effect of her bipolar disorder â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and until the past decade, transgender identity was listed as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used by psychologists for diagnosis.

MGM / Graphic by Cody Corrall

In Sleepaway Camp (1983), there is a serial killer on the loose at a children’s summer camp. The now iconic twist ending is that the killer is Angela, one of the young children at the camp. Angela was assigned male at birth and their abusive parents force them to dress as a girl. The reveal that Angela has a penis is the dramatic climax and is supposed to explain why they’re a murderer. The film does not distinguish between child abuse and transness, leaving viewers with the message that trans people are only trans because they were abused. While it is true that many trans kids are abused as a result of their identity, they are not trans because they have been abused. Sleepaway Camp conflates the two, providing no alternative explanation for Angela’s violence. Instead, Angela’s killing is attributed to transness and there are two sequels that solidify Angela as a trans woman who commits murders at campsites in their spare time.

American Eagle Films / Graphic by Cody Corrall

Much like Dressed to Kill, Silence of the Lambs (1991) has a psychologist character, Hannibal Lecter, who explains that their violent patient is transgender because of their mental illness. Silence of the Lambs is more ambiguous in its view of trans people, though. Clarice, the detective on the case, even argues that Buffalo Bill isn’t violent just because they’re transgender. Even so, one of the most frightening scenes involves Buffalo Bill applying makeup and tucking their penis while preparing to murder a captive woman. Scenes like this create an association between fear and trans women.

This representation of trans women in horror has real-world implications. It leads to people thinking of trans women as less than human because in their minds, they become monstrous things made of only the abject. Misguided views like these lead to violence in the real world, as evidenced by the alarming murder rate of trans folks, especially trans women of color.

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Friends: Are We Still There for Them? Meredith Melland February 1, 2019

Cody Corrall

The pioneering twentysomethings hangout sitcom has been hanging out with viewers for twentysomething years now After airing a decade-long run of 236 episodes and spending a cool 15 years in syndication, Friends is turning 25 in 2019. Despite its datedness, Friends retains a fervent fan base and is drawing in new followers, one ‘The One’ at a time. But what is it about the show that continues to appeal to people, and how does it play out in today’s landscape?

A Show For Young People, About Young People The Friends treatment was pitched as Insomnia Cafe by creators David Crane and Marta Kauffman, who were still running HBO show Dream On with Kevin Bright, but whose CBS sitcom Family Album had been cancelled. They wanted to write about young peo-

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ple living together in the city after college, when “your friends are your family.” “Before Friends, there hadn’t been a television show that focused on just people in their 20s and people who were connected not for an obvious reason,” said Bri Mattia. Mattia, a second-year grad student at DePaul, is writing about NBC’s “Must-See TV” lineup on Thursday prime time for her media and cinema studies thesis. “Must-See TV” started shortly before Friends, but it came into its prime in autumn 1994 when Friends and ER were added to target the liberal and urban 18 to 34 year-old demographic. ER was an instant hit and began drawing in 30 million viewers a week with its prestige camera work, exciting cast and intense, quickly-paced medical plot lines. Friends aired earlier in the night and received around 20 million viewers in its first season, but grew in popularity when new viewers watched episodes in summer reruns. That summer, Friends entered the Zeitgeist, and the show still occupies it today. Mattia said that Friends is on the Star Wars or Harry Potter level of common knowledge, popularizing “we were on a break,” “the friendzone” and being “lobsters.” Linguists have even studied how the show has affected the way we speak. “It has that weird familiarity, even if you did not grow up watching it,” Mattia said. Mattia always loved Friends as a “cotton candy” watch and was happy when it debuted on Netflix in 2015, but was surprised when it began coming up in her life recently. “Other people in my program who knew I like Friends would always come up to me and be like, ‘Why are like my 18-year-old students telling me their favorite show is Friends?’” Mattia said. “I have friends that tell me, ‘I started dating this guy, and he watches an episode of Friends every night before he goes to sleep?’” This is not a unique experience. In December, Friends made headlines again when the world thought it would be taken off Netflix

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in 2019 — only to have the company reveal it made a nonexclusive $100 million deal with WarnerMedia to stream it through the year’s end. Resident youth icon Hayley Kiyoto tweeted at Netflix in Friends’ defense. Though Netflix keeps viewership data under lock and key, social media and other factors indicate that teenagers are watching it, Mattia said. For example, Friends was the most-referenced show in Tinder bios in the U.S. in 2018. She thinks part of its popularity with young people is the vibrant real life it presents, in contrast to something like Eighth Grade, which depicts the loneliness of this generation’s online social life. “It’s got like no social media, no technology,” Mattia said. “I think the rise of ’90s nostalgia has to do with that a lot.” Alexis Resendez, a senior at John Hancock High School, was ahead of the curve when she watched Friends in syndication at night on Nickelodeon. All the good parts are from the first season, she said. “I feel like it’s overrated, just because I was watching it long before everyone else started watching it again,” Resendez said. Though she’s no longer into it, she knows a lot of people her age who are watching it now on Netflix, she said.

Reliving The Fantasy For Mark Kwiatkowski, his 15 year old daughter binge-watching Friends on Netflix was the tipping point he needed to stage a Friends pop-up in his arcade bar, Replay in Lincoln Park. “It being on Netflix helps because young people get exposed to it, and honestly, lots of people were bending our ears,” Kwiatkowski said. Kwiatkowski often takes inspiration from his kids when planning and designing pop-ups at Replay, which has opened 12 pop-ups in 14 months. After observing the success of Saved By The Max, the Saved by the Bell pop-up restaurant that originated in Wicker Park

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and other pop-ups in Brooklyn, he began working on plans for popups for his 12-year-old son’s shows, The Simpsons and Rick and Morty. Replay’s “Moe’s Tavern” pop-up was a big hit, so Kwiatkowski started to look for other cultural references that were connected to bars and arcades. The bar put on a St. Paddy’s “Paddy’s Pub” from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a Fortnite bar, a “May the 4th” Star Wars bar and several Dunder Mifflin Office parties before starting the Friends pop-up in November. “It was a huge hit,” Kwiatkowski said. “There were lines, constantly lines for the photo op on the couch.”

Benjamin Skigen

After a few weeks of planning, Replay works with a group of six primary artists in the week before opening to build the given pop-up’s world. Currently, they’re working on turning the bar’s interior into the medieval realms of Game of Thrones for a pop-up beginning February 1, complete with the iron chair, maché dragons and Dothrakiquiris. For Friends, they staged vignettes from the show: Central Perk in the back bar, Joey and Chandler’s apartment on one side, complete

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with La-Z Boys, foosball table and canoe, the theme sequence fountain and Central Perk couch with umbrellas on the other side and Monica and Rachel’s periwinkle apartment in the elevated deck. Kwiatkowski noted that the setup had been fairly easy because of the everydayness of the setting and extensive amount of content, and he was glad that the show’s women-skewed audience helped balance out the arcade bar’s demographic. “There was plenty of 21-year-olds,” Kwiatkowski said, “but there was plenty of 30 and 40s as well, people that grew up, who watched Friends when they were teeneagers or early 20s.” The bar hosted events like a Friendsgiving night, karaoke every Wednesday, trivia, a foosball tournament and a Sunday Funday where they served the Moist Maker sandwich. A couple even asked if they could get married in the Friendstopia. “It was awesome,” Kwiatkowski said. “They made it very lowkey for us.”

Where does Friends fit now? As Friends aged and the U.S. culture surrounding it changed, criticism rolled in, even as diehard fans persist and young adults flock to stream it. Critics of the show claim the show is gimmicky, repetitive, unfunny and a privileged too-period depiction of New York City in the ’90s. Friends was filmed and written as a multi-camera sitcom where the action is filmed with multiple cameras at one time, sometimes on a stage in front of a studio audience. Single-camera sitcoms are shot more like comedy films, using multiple takes, varied lighting/ locations and faster jokes. Alongside The Big Bang Theory as one of the last mainstream multicams, Friends seems slower and more situational than later single-cam comedies like The Office or The Good Place. Many of the show’s plot lines rely on gendered stereotypes and lack diversity, even compared to multicam NBC peer Will & Grace. Jay-

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Z’s “Moonlight” video directly parodies “The One Where No One’s Ready” with an all-star, all-black cast and points out that Friends may draw attention away from more diverse or realistic shows. “There’s a lot of gay panic material there that is very much of its time,” Mattia said. “But it’s hard to understand why a show with so much of that stuff is popular with an audience that doesn’t remember that time.”

“Out of a decade featuring a tech revolution, a polarizing presidency, classic teen movies and multiple athlete crime scandals, a TV show with a purple apartment and a Comic Sans-ish font is what has been chosen from the ’90s to be passed down and continually obsessed over.” However, others claim that the show’s characters are written with good intentions and that its dreamlike state and datedness hearken back to a social pre-technology era: prime escapism. “It’s like, what if you could afford this apartment in New York City and your friends would be your family and you never had to go home for Thanksgiving?” Mattia said. Hoping to appeal to Friends lovers and love-to-haters alike is Friends!: The Musical Parody, coming to Broadway in Chicago for a few weeks on February 13. Tobly McSmith, who wrote this show and six other pop culture parodies with Bob McSmith (no relation), remembers feeling a distance between his adolescent experience and the youth of Saved by the Bell and Friends. “We grew up watching Friends and idolizing them and thinking New York was somewhat like that, but when we moved here, it was nothing like that,” McSmith said. The duo met in New York 16 years ago, wrote a Saved by the Bell musical parody 14 years ago and charged nothing for a bar audience

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to see it. Bayside!: The Saved by the Bell Musical found its way off-Broadway, and since, the duo has created a 90210 musical, a parody of Showgirls and a Full House show with a Bob Saget. They usually spend four to five months watching the show of choice and writing before bringing it to their composer, Assaf Gleizner. “We kind of approach each parody different depending on the TV show, and Friends is very driven by their love, so that’s what drives our show,” McSmith said. “Which is ironic, because it’s called Friends.” The “loving lampoon” follows the arc of the six friends’ lives in New York City, all the while alluding to the cast’s future, product sponsorship, wacky guest stars and the more unbelievable aspects of the show. “We definitely included pivot, the Moist Maker, Fat Monica, flashbacks into their childhoods for sure, Marcel the Monkey is there and also Janice, if you remember her,” McSmith said. “And a Gunther, who should not be considered a person.” They could not include everything from the show’s 10 seasons and chose to leave aspects out. “What we did stay away from is their homophobia and their jokes that nowadays don’t work,” McSmith said. “We decided to not even really strongly address them because they were just tasteless in some places.” Though some of the other McSmith parodies have inclusive updates (Slater is gay in Bayside! and Michael Scott is played by a woman in the duo’s new The Office production), they left Friends relatively intact. They wanted to keep the show relatively family-friendly and not anger the fans. “The Friends fans are truly the most fanatic about a TV show and need it to be right in their eyes, so we felt like we couldn’t go too far with the jokes,” McSmith said. Out of a decade featuring a tech revolution, a polarizing presidency, classic teen movies and multiple athlete crime scandals, a TV show

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with a purple apartment and a Comic Sans-ish font is what has been chosen from the ’90s to be passed down and continually obsessed over. “There’s no news in it, there’s no changing of economies, so it really is something you can watch and take your mind off all of that stuff,” McSmith said. Whether it’s the show’s timelessness, nostalgia, appeal to multiple generations or status as a comfort food show that can be used to forget about the world and fall asleep, Friends has been there, and it will still be there for our eyes throughout 2019 if we want it.

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Why We Still Root for Tonya Harding Cody Corrall February 1, 2019

Andrew Parodi

“Sometimes I think that this could be a fairy tale. Not the happily ever after type we tell each other to make ourselves feel better — but one of those strange, dark tales where monsters eat little children.” These are the first lines spoken by an unnamed screenwriter in Tonya & Nancy: The Inside Story, a 1994 made-for-TV movie about the infamous skating scandal between Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan that became an international phenomenon just three months prior to its release. The film was met with lackluster reviews, and the real life story it depicted would only get more convoluted in the months following. But while Tonya & Nancy was the first film that chronicled this moment in history — it was far from the last. Harding’s messy life and controversial decisions would become the inspiration for a countless number of reinterpretations in the 21st century — and Harding would evolve from being the most hated woman in America to a sympathetic, complicated muse.

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But let’s start at the beginning. Harding grew up in East Portland, Oregon in the 1970s. She was raised by her mother LaVona Golden, a waitress trying to make ends meet, and her father Albert Gordon Harding who took on odd jobs or was unemployed due to poor health. Money was tight and tensions were high for most of Harding’s childhood. Harding started skating lessons at the Lloyd Center Mall at age three. When Harding started showing promise, Golden took on the role of a Kris Jenner-esque “momager.” Harding’s success was her success — so Golden paid for her lessons and hand-sewed her costumes in the hopes that she could become something bigger than their circumstance. In retrospect, Harding describes her mother as abusive. By the age of seven, emotional and physical abuse from Golden was just something she normalized. Golden has since stated she once hit Harding on the rink out of anger, but she mostly refutes any allegations of abuse. Harding was no stranger to abuse. In her 2008 autobiography The Tonya Tapes, Harding claims that her half brother Chris Davison routinely molested her as a child and later called the police on him after harassing her when she was 15, which led to his arrest. In an interview with Rolanda Watts, Harding said that Davison was “the only person I’ve ever hated.” When Harding was 16, Golden and Albert Harding filed for divorce. Shortly after, Harding dropped out of high school and focused on skating full time. Throughout the 1980s, Harding started making a name for herself in the competitive skating scene. She placed in U.S. Figure Skating Championships from 1987 to 1989, competed in the 1989 and 1990 Nationals Championships and won the 1989 Skate America competition. On February 16, 1991, Harding became the first American woman to land a triple axel. She won the 1991 U.S. Ladies’ Singles title with a rare 6.0 technical merit score — the first since Janet Lynn in 1973.

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Things were going great for Harding. She was winning and on a clear path to a future of success. Her talent had shone brighter than her unappealing demeanor and less than prestigious background that judges ridiculed her for. She was in control of her life and her narrative for once. And then she wasn’t. At around this time, Harding married Jeff Gillooly (who has since changed his name to Jeff Stone) and she found herself trapped in another web of abuse. When Harding’s career was doing well, they were happy. When it wasn’t, Stone turned possessive, entitled and violent. “I was afraid of him, but I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” wrote Harding in The Tonya Tapes. As she did with her mother, Harding normalized her husband’s abuse and stayed with him through potentially dangerous circumstances. She felt she had no other options, but in some way, violence was all that she knew. “He hit me, but [my mother] hit me, but they loved me,” said Harding in 30 for 30: The Price of Gold. Just like her mother, Stone was invested in Harding’s success. Harding was able to feed into his dream of a better life with her success but it ultimately tore them apart after she failed to medal at the 1992 Winter Olympics. Harding left Stone in 1993, but they still remained in each others lives because of the systems of abuse that consumed their relationship. If Harding won at the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championship, she would garner a spot on the the Winter Olympic team and potentially $1 million in appearance fees and endorsements if she were to get the gold, which would be life changing for both Harding and Stone. But Harding’s talent wasn’t enough — Stone wanted to ensure her win by any means necessary so that he could get the money and Harding for good. Her biggest competition at the time was Nancy Kerrigan, the previous year’s champion. Kerrigan started just as

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young as Harding but had every advantage Harding lacked. She was wealthy and grew up in a healthy, loving home and was much more palatable to judges and the audience at home than the brashy, rude Harding. This juxtaposition of character was heavily used in the media. Kerrigan became the princess and Harding the trashy redneck — they were easy to categorize and thus easy to pit against one another. And even if Harding’s technical skills were good, she would still be penalized by the judges for her homemade costumes, use of metal music in her routines and bad behavior that contrasted the image of a distinguished figure skater — an image that Kerrigan fit to a T. So Stone paid two of his friends and Harding’s bodyguard — Derrick Smith, Shane Stant and Shawn Eckardt, respectively — $6,500 each to ensure a Harding win. On January 6, 1994, Stant swung a 21-inch baton over Kerrigan’s right knee. Later dubbed “the whack heard ‘round the world,” the impact forced Kerrigan to withdraw from the championship and her title. Two days later, Harding won the Ladies Championship title and a spot on the Winter Olympic team. Kerrigan, even though she was unable to compete, was also selected for the team. The following week, the FBI began an investigation on Kerrigan’s attack. Eckardt confessed to the FBI and implicated Harding, Stone, Stant and Smith. Eckardt and Smith were then arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit second-degree assault. Stant, who went to his home in Phoenix, Arizona to flee, was caught and he surrendered to the FBI. Throughout all this, Harding was still training for the Olympics like nothing had happened. Everyone thought she did it, or helped orchestrated it, or at least knew about the plan at some capacity. Trashy Tonya tried to ruin sweet, precious Nancy’s career. It perfectly fell in line with what the public already believed about each of them.

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Tonya & Nancy: The Inside Story movie poster

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“I’m for Tonya. What about you?” Katha Pollitt wrote in her 1994 column for The Nation. “You have to like a woman who gets reamed out by prissy sports-writers because she smokes, peroxides, wears loud nail polish and teeny tank tops, and says she wants to win a gold medal at the Olympics for the money.”

“Kerrigan became the princess and Harding the trashy redneck — they were easy to categorize and thus easy to pit against one another.” Because of the controversy, Harding was unlikely to receive any of the lavish endorsement deals she expected. But she still skated. She didn’t want the money anymore, she was there to prove herself to everyone who doubted her. She wanted to win. On January 31, 1994, Stone stated that Harding approved the Kerrigan plan. He later pleaded guilty to racketeering for a 24-month sentence. Gillooly’s attorney accused Harding of conspiracy after a restaurant owner found Stone and Harding’s trash and gave it to the FBI. The trash revealed incriminating notes allegedly in Harding’s handwriting, which included the phone number of Kerrigan’s practice arena along with her training times. Harding sued the U.S. Olympic Committee in attempts to stop a planned hearing to decide whether or not she should participate in the Olympics. Harding ultimately dropped the lawsuit and the committee canceled the hearing — Harding was allowed to skate in the Olympics. Kerrigan won the silver medal at the 1994 Olympics and Harding, still under investigation, placed eighth after one of her laces breaks. It was the third highest rated sports event in television history at that time. In March, Harding went back to Portland and plead guilty to conspiracy to avoid further prosecution. She was sentenced three years probation, paid $160,000 in fines and resigned from the U.S. Figure Skating Association. In June, Harding was banned for life from the U.S. Figure Skating Association and was stripped of her 1994 national figure skating title.

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Harding remained in the limelight for better or for worse. She managed wrestlers Eddie Guerrero and Art Barr and even became one herself, returned to skating while angry audience members booed and threw batons on the ice, did various high profile (and paying) interviews and even placed third on season 26 of Dancing With the Stars. But what is truly remarkable is how this story of someone so publicly hated and villainized has become the inspiration of several contemporary works, most of which see Harding as a sympathetic, misunderstood heroine. In 2008, Tonya and Nancy: The Rock Opera premiered in Portland and later toured in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. The show is a dark comedy based on the events of the Harding story. “The story is in a sense beyond satire, since the level of absurdity and melodrama in the real events is already so high,” according to the show’s website. Harding even went to a performance. “She got onstage and said everyone here deserves a big applause,” Elizabeth Searle told The New York Times.

Perlisima Shoeder, The Noun Project

In 2014, the Harding story was turned into a full comedy in the form of Tonya Harding: The Musical written by Jesse Esparza and Manny Hagopian. The United Citizens Brigade Theater hit characterized Harding as a woman sick of her lousy husband and being forced to share the spotlight with goodie-two-shoes Kerrigan. Also in 2014 was The Price of Gold, part of ESPN’s 30 for 30 series which focused on Harding’s issues with class in a sport that reeked of the elite.

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In 2017, Dan Aibel’s play T. told the Harding story without Kerrigan at all. Kerrigan was referred to as “Horseface” by the characters but was never on stage — further feeding into the narrative of Harding being a misunderstood dark horse. The most notable fictionalization of Harding’s life was the 2017 film I, Tonya which similarly saw Harding as an unlikely and unlikable hero attempting to overcome her circumstance tooth and nail. The film is based on “irony free, wildly contradictory, totally true interviews” with the story’s key players — and Harding (Margot Robbie) never lets the audience put the blame solely on her. The film garnered Allison Janney acclaim for her portrayal of Golden at the Oscars, Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild Awards, BAFTAs, Critics’ Choice Awards and the Independent Spirit Awards. Margot Robbie was also recognized for her portrayal of Harding at the Critics’ Choice Awards and AACTAs. “America…you know they want someone to love, but [they] want someone to hate,” said Harding at the final scene of I, Tonya. “And they want it easy. What’s easy?” And there is something so uniquely American about Harding’s story. Regardless of how one feels about Harding or whether or not one believes she had something to do with the attack, Harding couldn’t care less. She wanted to make a name for herself and she did so in a way that was truly her own. She was known not just for her skating prowess, but for her very persona — one that was entangled in the various complexities and contradictions that made up her life. Everyone has an opinion on Harding, but when it comes to a lasting image — Harding has the gold.

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Farewell, depaulsecure Charlotte Foley February 8, 2019

Natalie Wade

I was smack dab in the middle of my freshman year of college when I was informed I had violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. I received an email on March 4, 2016 with the subject line DMCA Complaint — Dean of Students Office. The email contained a set of three pleasantly passive aggressive attachments with “information related to your wireless access on DePaul University’s network.” I clicked on a PDF with the name “DMCA Violation Letter” followed by my own name. I still wasn’t sure what I had done to warrant this ominous email but I was certainly curious. The letter claimed I had engaged in illegal file sharing on DePaul’s network and doing so was a violation of the DMCA and DePaul’s Acceptable Use Policy. Only I hadn’t engaged in illegal file sharing on DePaul’s network — I hadn’t seen the tiny lime logo on my desktop since I was 17 years old. The next attachment was a copy of the complaint processed by the Computer Security Response Team which detailed my name, my username, the date of the infringement, the reporting organization, my IP and MAC address and the network/protocol used. The report also included the name of the illegally shared song that had been detected on my laptop — “Dark Horse (Feat. Juicy J)” by Katy Perry. It all came crashing back.

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I was a mix of embarrassed and infuriated. I was simultaneously being punished for my top 40 leanings and my high school vice of using LimeWire. Why couldn’t I have been busted for downloading some obscure but phenomenal record? How would the Computer Security Response Team judge my taste? My access to DePaul’s network depaulsecure was stripped until I deleted the file. With shame I dragged “Dark Horse” to the recycle bin on my desktop and emailed the Assistant Dean of Students that the illicit data was gone. A week passed and I was still banished from using depaulsecure. Finals were fast approaching and I was beginning to worry that I would not have access to the network during the constant cycle of studying, taking exams and studying some more. I was a wireless nomad wondering from Starbucks to Whole Foods searching for any public WIFI network I could find. I couldn’t bear to think about my mother screaming from Kentucky about how much data I was using. Eventually I resorted to begging for friends’ campus connect logins to cheat my prolonged exile.

Natalie Wade

I wrote another email to the Dean of Students office — this time with more urgency. Finals were next week and I was going to need unequivocal access to the internet. I received a reply from Ellen in the Dean of Students office later that day explaining that my wireless privilege would not be restored because I now had another DMCA violation under my belt. Attached to Ellen’s email was another round of passive aggressive PDFs. The first attachment was a copy of my new complaint from the Computer Security Response

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Team. I immediately scrolled to the bottom itching to know what song my downfall was this time — “Royals” by Lorde. I didn’t know if I was more frustrated that my high school mistakes were being unearthed one by one or how basic the Computer Security Response Team must have thought I was. The second attachment was a student conduct charge letter. According to Ellen, it was critical that we meet to discuss the situation. I thought that it was about time. I had no clue how or why my Lorde phase of junior year was coming back with such a vengeance and I thought of the hundreds of songs I had illegally downloaded over the years. Was I going to have to comb through my entire music library down to the last shameful Glee cover? We set a meeting for March 15, 2016 for 9:30 a.m. The meeting was prompt — Ellen suggested that I take my laptop to the tech support desk in the library because even if I dragged the LimeWire icon to the recycle bin the software might not necessarily be erased from my computer. I had made it 11 days without depaulsecure and it was time to end this madness.

“I didn’t know if I was more frustrated that my high school mistakes were being unearthed one by one or how basic the Computer Security Response Team must have thought I was.” I was worried I might snap my laptop in half if I had to explain my embarrassing situation one more time. The poor technician on duty politely listened to me rant about DePaul, authority and how much I had begun to loathe technology. I handed over my laptop to the technician and within a few minutes my desktop was free of the torrent software that had been holding my internet access hostage. A simple click and drag and my depaulsecure worries were over. Two weeks later all I could do was laugh at the ridiculousness of this technological saga. The email chains! The snarky PDF attachments! All for a now painfully obvious mistake I made as a kid. I read a Popular Science article that explained how permanently deleting something is much harder than you think. When you drag a file to

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the recycling bin and empty it that doesn’t mean it’s gone from the computer forever. Until new data is downloaded to replace the old, the file will still be there. It was another reminder — much like my unfortunate experience with the DePaul Dean of Students Office — that the internet is forever whether we like it or not. Our online lives hold much more weight than we care to admit. I can’t remember when I became so dependent on access to the internet but it seems to dominate most of my actions for the day. I can’t remember the last best moment I witnessed without the lens of a phone camera but I wish I could.

Google

As abstract and nebulous as a wireless network is, depaulsecure made me question the extent of personal responsibility and reminded me that what we leave online is just as much a reflection of ourselves as our actions. Last Friday DePaul retired the depaulsecure network. The school will now usher in a new era of monitoring student internet usage in the name of eduroam. One has to wonder what we will be remembered for in the future. Will it be for our contributions to society? Our style? Maybe our humor? Or will it be for illegally downloading Katy Perry hits online? Either way — I’ll just be glad to be remembered.

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More Than Just a Bank Camille Squires February 8, 2019

Jenni Holtz

Chicago’s Last Black-Owned Bank is Doing its Part to Close the Racial Wealth Gap Illinois Service Federal bank in many ways looks like it should be a thing of the past. The main office, with its mid-century modernist architecture and wood paneling, looks unchanged from the 1960s. In the lobby, bank tellers chat with customers in a way that is not corporately friendly, but genuinely familiar, as though everyone who walks in is an old friend. And in perhaps the greatest anachronism of all, the bank itself is independent; instead of hundreds of branches around the country, the bank has only two — one in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood and the other in Chatham. In the past few years, Illinois Service Federal has faced obstacles that should have relegated it to history, but it has survived largely because of its central mission: to be a bank specifically for Chicago’s African-American community. Now the last of its kind in the city, the local bank is evolving to be able to serve African Americans into the future.

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A Bank For and By the Community Illinois Service Federal (ISF) traces its origins back to 1934, when a group of 13 Black Chicagoans pooled their money together after being denied loans at other banks because of their race. The founders recognized that racist lending policies at larger banks were plaguing many in their community, and so opened ISF with the purpose of serving as a source of capital for Black residents of the city, and helping them to keep that capital within the community of their neighborhoods. Now, some 87 years later, the mission of ISF remains largely the same, though carrying out this mission has not been without challenges. After serving as a community pillar for decades, ISF fell victim to the economic recession of 2008-2009, and ultimately the bank went up for sale in 2016. It was purchased by Groupe Nduom, a multinational conglomerate started out of Ghana, that has holdings in Europe, Africa and North America. Paa Kwesi Nduom, leader of Groupe Nduom, recognized the important role ISF played in the community and invested $9 million in June of 2016 to keep the bank from going under. Things finally turned around for the bank in 2017, and in July of 2018, ISF was fully absorbed into Groupe Ndoum, changing its name to GN Bank after its new owning partnership. Today, the bank manages about $130 million in assets according to FDIC reports, and offers mortgages, business loans and other financial products to mostly African-American customers on Chicagoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s South and West sides. Social conditions have changed for African Americans since the early days of ISF, but enough economic and political inequality remains that many believe there is still a need for a Black-owned bank in Chicago. Ron Evans, manager of ISFâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Chatham branch, says he has seen discriminatory lending firsthand.

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“When I worked for some of the bigger lenders, I saw that some of them just don’t want to lend in our neighborhoods,” Evans said. He recalls stories of people who came to ISF for loans, after being inexplicably denied elsewhere, despite having sufficient funds and good credit. Even when they do offer loans to African Americans, national commercial banks have had a history of doing so in a way that is unjust. In 2017, Chase Bank paid a $55 million settlement for a claim that they systematically charged Black and Latinx customers higher interest rates for mortgages between 2006 and 2009. In addition to helping customers overcome barriers to accessing capital, GN Bank works to help keep capital concentrated within communities. “One of the positive things about being able to offer our community loans is keeping our neighborhoods owned by the people who live there,” Evans said. This is another way in which they differ from bigger banks; with mortgages specifically, ISF takes a holistic approach to applicants, and takes into consideration what a loan would mean for the wider community. “We’re better off letting someone who’s going to live in the neighborhood get [a home loan] at a cheaper price than buy it back from someone who doesn’t even live in the community for twice as much,” said Evans. Even as GN Bank sets its sights on expanding nationwide, they remain committed to their roots in Chicago. Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom, the bank’s new chairman, has said that the head office will always remain on the South Side of Chicago. This conscious effort to reinvest bank funds back into the same racial and geographic group serve the bank’s ultimate goal of building community wealth. When individual African-American families have the financial knowledge and the access to capital necessary to maintain and build wealth, the entire community is strengthened in the present, and over the long term.

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The Wealth Gap For all Americans, wealth is a key driver of economic security because it determines stability over a longer period of time than income. Financial assets — stocks, bonds, real estate and other durable goods — have a greater impact than income on a family’s economic trajectory across generations because their effect is cumulative; as financial assets increase in value over time, each generation that inherits the wealth does better than the previous one. But the key is to have those financial assets in the first place, and in the United States there is a great disparity in which racial groups have access. According to a recent study done by the Institute for Policy Studies, the average middle-income white family in 2017 has eight times as much wealth as a middle-income Black family. Another study found that if this trend continues at the same pace as today, it would take a Black family 228 years to build the wealth that the average white family has today. In actuality, things are trending to become even worse; when durable goods such as cars and furniture are excluded, the median Black household actually lost 75 percent of its wealth between 1983 and 2013. If these declines for Black households continue to escalate, in four years white households could own 68 times more wealth as Black households. In their 1995 book Black Wealth/White Wealth, sociologists Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro explain how even after these official state policies, like housing discrimination, voter discrimination laws, etc., were removed, they still left Black Americans economically unempowered. “A history of low wages, poor schooling, and segregation,” they wrote, “affected not one or two generations of blacks but practically all African Americans well into the middle of the twentieth century.” Economic disadvantage is passed down generationally just like advantage, and the position that African Americans were in throughout much of this country’s history has a significant drag on economic prospects of African Americans today, despite other gains in equality.

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Resolving the wealth gap is a crucial part of reducing overall inequality in this country, but the steps to closing the gap are complicated and multifaceted. One important step is for more African Americans to be involved in the banking system and equipped with knowledge to make sound financial decisions.

“Economic disadvantage is passed down generationally just like advantage, and the position that African Americans were in throughout much of this country’s history has a significant drag on economic prospects of African Americans today, despite other gains in equality.” This is something that GN Bank CEO Bob Klamp believes passionately. “You need to bring an understanding of the ways to help educate the unbanked, and the majority of people in our community are unbanked,” Klamp said. The population of “unbanked” citizens that Klamp observes locally is also reflected at the national level. A 2015 FDIC survey found that 55 percent of Black households in the US were unbanked or underbanked, meaning they did not have an active checking or savings account in a traditional bank. Unbanked people tend to instead handle their finances through payday loan services or check cashers, which often have exorbitant interest rates, and do nothing to aid a person in building wealth over time. Under Klamp’s leadership, ISF takes active steps to educate Chicagoans about finance. They host monthly workshops in the lobby of the bank, where people can come in and ask advice. They also host more targeted educational sessions, such as a first-time homebuyer session hosted in the Chatham branch in 2018. According to Senior Officer Aakaash Srereddy, these events are well-attended. In addition to these formal events, the bank simply also just goes out into the community to make their presence known.

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“Sometimes on a Sunday morning, we’ll attend a church service of one of our customers, and end up talking about talking about the financial products we have with the congregation,” Klamp said. The most impactful interactions, Klamp says, are often one-on-one. Even if they can’t help a person right away, they at least want to provide them with financial education. “Here, we’re able to work with the individuals to show them how to improve their credit, how to apply for a loan, and hopefully at that point in time they’ll understand the process.”

Part of the Solution, but Victims of the Problem While Black-owned community banks like ISF can be a resource to help Black Americans close the racial wealth gap, they have also suffered a number of losses in the past few years that indicate just how fragile financial institutions can be in communities historically deprived of capital. The number of Black-owned banks nationally has declined in the past 15 years, and now only 23 remain nationwide. In 2016, Chicago’s other main Black-owned bank — Seaway — closed despite the community’s best efforts to keep it open, and ISF was close to shutting its doors after years of decline. The bank was hit hard by the nationwide economic recession of 2008, as African Americans fared much worse than other groups in the housing market crash. This included Black homeowners who banked with ISF. “Our losses from defaults were way above the national average,” Evans said. It was this series of events that led to the $9 million investment from Groupe Nduom that ultimately proved crucial to the bank’s survival, according to Aakaash Sreereddy. “[The Groupe Nduom shareholders] helped us clear the bad loan portfolio at the bank and gave us freedom to operate freely without the excess baggage of these loans,” Sreereddy said.

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“Some of the Black-owned banks did not invest in technology and security which led to the decline in customers which in turn reduced the deposits. While purchasing the bank in 2016, Dr. Nduom vowed to make the bank a viable alternative to Chase and Citibank. GN Bank understood the importance and invested in its infrastructure.” “Everything is changing for the better: deposit-wise, programs, IT, resources,” Evans said.

Camilla Squires

Looking to the Future With a New Customer Base The key to continued growth, Evans said, is to attract younger customers who will grow with them into the future. Currently the majority of depositors are over the age of 50, but GN Bank is currently investing resources in improving online and mobile banking to meet the expectations of younger customers. Within the past year, they have rolled out a new mobile app with improved security, and set up mobile wallets for debit cards, allowing users to connect their cards to Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, etc.

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According to Sreereddy, GN Bank has seen a slow increase in younger customers in the past year. This may be indicative of a commitment to community banking that may be taking hold more broadly among Black millennials. In 2016, rapper and social activist Killer Mike went viral on social media for a series of interviews he gave in which he called on people to bank locally instead of putting their money in large commercial banks. The video inspired a Twitter hashtag called #BankBlack, and resulted in upwards of $20 million in new deposits, according to OneUnited, a Black-owned bank in New York. Bob Klamp said that ISF did not experience a similar windfall as a result of this movement, but they remain confident in their ability to attract younger customers. Attracting younger customers, improving financial literacy and keeping capital within a community by investing in homeownership and small businesses are all strategies that will help Blackowned banks continue into the future and may work to help close the racial wealth gap. But Black Americans also need more opportunities to amass wealth. Policy changes at the state and federal level can create better equity in terms of income, education and job opportunities, but ultimately in order to build financial wealth, people need to be able to engage in the financial system without fear of discrimination. Historically, Black-owned banks like Illinois Service Federal have been key actors in improving the economic prospects of African Americans in the past, and despite threats to their survival. Now as GN Bank, the institution is doing all it can to adapt to the current landscape of American banking and continue to be a promoter of Black wealth into the future.

Money bags by Luiz Carvahlo, The Noun Project

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The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, But It Will Have a Playlist Nyah Hoskins February 15, 2019

Natalie Wade

At my Catholic grammar school, we had morning prayers and announcements over the PA system every day. The routine was normally a scripture reading, reflection questions, a religious song and then the morning announcements. I walked into school on the first day of Black History Month and saw so many faces that looked like mine and my classmates. The walls were covered with paintings and photographs of prominent Black figures who impacted the world in their fight for liberation. That morning was like every other morning; I zoned out of the scripture reading and I recited the prayer as if it was muscle memory, but the song of that day was different. I heard the familiar voice of my older cousin leading the song, “Oh Freedom!” over the PA system. No more mourning, no more mourning No more mourning over me And before I’d be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave And go home to my Lord and be free

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Blackness, music and revolution are bound together by Black oral tradition. Music is an Africanism or an integral part of all cultures of the African/Black diaspora. Music was — and still is — used to tell stories, share information or pass down traditions from generation to generation. Later on that month, my school held its annual Black History Month Celebration. The kindergarten through eighth grade classes had to perform some expression of staged art to commemorate the work of Black people. At the beginning of this ceremony, my third grade teacher lead us in a song we all seemed to know by heart. Lift every voice and sing ‘Til Earth and heaven ring Ring with the harmonies Of liberty Known by many as the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was written as a poem by author and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson, then later put to music by his brother, John Rosamond Johnson. The lyrics convey a sense of reflection on the past, while looking forward into a potentially bright future. Similar to “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the political song “Strange Fruit” started as a poem. “Strange Fruit” was created as a reaction to the influx of racialized attacks in the United States. Racialized violence in the United States mostly revealed itself through lynchings. From 1882 to 1968, 4,743 lynchings were recorded and over 85 percent of those victims were Black. Lynchings and other forms of racialized violence often went unrecorded, so these numbers were likely much higher. Contrary to the victim demographic, Abel Meeropol, a white Jewish man, wrote the poem that sparked the musical rendition, which was composed by his wife. Billie Holiday was performing at Cafe Society when Barney Josephson, the founder of the club, presented the song to her. What followed was later considered Time Magazine’s Song of the Century. Southern trees bear strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

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Later covered by Nina Simone in 1965, the power of the song and the pervasiveness of racialized violence continued to impact Black Americans. Musically, James Brown entered my life through HGTV soul music box sets. A song I never heard sung in an inside voice makes it back into my mind whenever I needed it the most. Say it loud: I’m black and I’m proud! Say it loud: I’m black and I’m proud! The power in saying — no — shouting, exclaiming the lyrics, “I’M BLACK AND I’M PROUD!” is a huge slap in the face to racism. Taking pride in something that has been demonized, in something that people have built entire structures against, taking pride in the counter-narratives of Blackness, is revolutionary. Every Sunday, my parents would fill the house with reggae music. The lyrics of Bob Marley would reverberate through the house for hours. Marley has a hefty discography, most of which reflect only an aspect of the Black experience. “War,” a song Marley adapted from Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie’s 1963 speech to the League of Nations regarding Benito Mussolini’s siege of Ethiopia, always gave me chills. The combination of the words of the speech and the heavy reggae influence combine two worlds. It made separate struggles feel universal. Until there no longer First class and second class citizens of any nation Until the color of a man’s skin Is of no more significance than the color of his eyes Me say war Conceptions of Blackness tend to be static. Situating Blackness solely in the United States isolates the global realities and repercussions of life as a Black person. Marley, along with other reggae artists, gives a voice to the Black diaspora in the Caribbean. My freshman year of college, I was ranting about how so many Black movements isolated Black women and queer folx. After taking some classes and doing intense reading, I discovered the world

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of Black feminism. Intersectionality, a concept coined by Kimberle Crenshaw, interrogates the way multiple marginalized identities function in creating a specific experience under systems of oppression. In the same year, Queen Latifah released her single, “Ladies First.” Latifah, along with London rapper Monie Love, emphasized the role of Black women in different facets of their lives. Who said the ladies couldn’t make it, you must be blind If you don’t believe, well here, listen to this rhyme Ladies first, there’s no time to rehearse I’m divine and my mind expands throughout the universe Beyonce’s release of Lemonade, closely followed by Solange’s release of A Seat at the Table, left me shook beyond repair. Visually, Lemonade left an impact on the realm of Black aesthetics. The song “Freedom” felt too familiar on my first listen. I’ma wade, I’ma wade through the waters Tell the tide, “Don’t move” I’ma riot, I’ma riot through your borders Call me bulletproof “Wade in the Water,” a popular Negro spiritual, emerged during the Underground Railroad. The song describes the journey enslaved Black people took to freedom. Beyonce’s nod to Negro spirituals brings the journey towards liberation full circle. On September 30, 2016, I cried through my first listen of A Seat at the Table. Solange was able to convey every emotion I couldn’t verbalize, let alone write a whole album on. The album seamlessly combines the pro-Black confidence of “I’m Black and I’m Proud,” while centering the intersectionality presented in “Ladies First.” Alongside her striking lyrics, the interludes strengthen the album’s impact. The aesthetics during this era solidified Solange in a league of her own, while simultaneously amplifying different depictions of Blackness. The track “F.U.B.U.” is titled after a Black owned fashion company. The abbreviation stands for “For Us By Us,” and that is the energy that is conveyed in the song.

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Wikimedia Commons

When you feeling all alone And you can’t even be you up in your home When you even feeling it from your own When you got it figured out When a nigga tryna board the plane And they ask you, “What’s your name again?” Cause they thinking, “Yeah, you’re all the same” Oh, it’s for us The sense of community in “F.U.B.U.” reflects the Black experience. The negative and positive experiences we have is something specific for us. The song highlights the specificity and uniqueness of the Black experience. Black music’s conjunction with revolution goes way back. Like, way before Tidal, Spotify and Apple music were even thought of. The presence of music in the never ending journey for Black liberation has been a key part of its history. The shift in my life from being the child who listened to her elder’s music to the elder with the great music taste has been interesting. The eight-year-old girl hearing and loving historical songs has evolved into a playlist junkie who combines different genres and time periods to elicit a specific set of emotions.

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The Chicago Stick-Around Dylan Van Sickle February 22, 2019

Natalie Wade

Think of jobs people can extract a whole career from and it’s natural to be drawn to the trades — plumbers, electricians, mechanics — unless you’re thinking of Chicago. Here, politics is a trade, and some on City Council have made careers out of a four-year job. The longest being that of Edward M. Burke, alderman of the 14th Ward, dean of the city council and the 35th alderman to face corruption charges since the 1970s. For 50 years Burke has represented the 14th, making him the longest serving alderman in Chicago history by a full term — history that wouldn’t have been made if he were living somewhere else. Unlike other major cities like Phoenix, New York City and Dallas, Chicago does not subject its council members to term limits. Instead, aldermen can serve for as long as they want — so long as they are elected. Chicago’s aversion to term limits has allowed aldermen to preside over their wards for decades, and with the city’s history so steeped in corruption, this unlimited tenure has the ability to push elements of our dark past into the present.

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Today, 30 percent of Chicago’s aldermen have served on the city council for at least 15 years — and six, including Burke, have been there over a quarter of a century. While efforts to establish term limits for the mayor and Illinois state representatives receive bipartisan support, many in Chicago’s city council are settled in for the long haul. But with 11 suburban communities in Cook County now embracing term limits for their officials, can that momentum shift toward Chicago? Outgoing alderman and current candidate for Chicago Treasurer Ameya Pawar seems to think so. In 2011, Pawar was elected to represent the 47th Ward, taking over a council seat previously held by longtime Alderman Eugene Schulter. Shulter was elected in 1975 at the age of 26 and maintained that same position throughout the bulk of his working years. In direct contrast with his predecessor, Pawar has committed to a self-imposed, two-term limit and remains so even after receiving over 80 percent of the votes in his ward’s 2015 election. With that 30-point jump from his first term, Pawar clearly found some recipe for success in his ward. Sticking around could have even spared his constituents in the 47th from the nine-candidate race to replace him. Leaving, however, does fulfill his wish to “bring a fresh set of eyes and ideas to this office.” Although Pawar is vying to remain in city hall as city treasurer, his two-term policy feels like an unfamiliar concept in a council with over half of its members seeking a third term or beyond. Granted, it’s not too difficult to understand why people stay. Despite being the first point of contact for public grievances, Chicago’s most powerful part-time job offers a six-figure salary, generous pension and a voluntary cost-of-living increase. There are also no laws barring council members from holding down certain jobs in the private sector, like 44th Ward Alderman Tom Tunney’s several Ann Sather restaurants or Burke’s recently raided law firm. Still, it’s a privilege Chicago’s council members have been exploiting since the waning years of the Gilded Age, with the most colorful

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example coming from John “Bathhouse John” Coughlin — number two on the list of longest-serving aldermen. Along with Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna, Coughlin hosted the First Ward Ball — a political fundraiser started in the late 19th century known for uniting prostitutes, police and politicians alike. The pair, referred to as the “Lords of the Levee,” ran Chicago’s red light district in tandem with their legislative duties before police shut it down in 1912. Despite Coughlin’s reputation and the closing of the Levee, he was reelected to the city council a total of 19 times. While he ran the 1st Ward in a scarcely-regulated, expanding Chicago, it’s an interesting daydream to wonder how the city would have fared if he gave up his seat after two or three terms.

“It’s not too difficult to understand why people stay. Despite being the first point of contact for public grievances, Chicago’s most powerful part-time job offers a six-figure salary, generous pension and a voluntary cost-of-living increase.” But with Pawar leaving this year, we now have some broad idea what a distinct, controlled beginning and end could look like in the city council. As alderman, Pawar helped pass an ordinance protecting single-room-occupancy hotels, worked with Mayor Emanuel on TIF reform and was co-chair on the panel that crafted the paid sick leave ordinance. While Pawar now has his sights set on another position in city hall, his two-term limit did not make him completely immune from indulging joining his long-serving peers — at least when it comes to attendance. In a joint analysis from WBEZ and The Daily Line, Pawar, along with veteran aldermen Patrick J. O’Connor, George Cardenas and Carrie Austin, have a city council attendance rating under 50 percent. “I’m proud of my record and I personally don’t know that it makes a whole lot of sense to be voting on every single sidewalk cafe, stop sign, every minor adjustment that we make, and so I’ve been on the

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record of that,” Pawar said to The Daily Line and WBEZ. Attendance aside, the lack of term limits on the city council have helped turn some aldermen into pension millionaires. According to an Illinois Policy report from July 2018, four aldermen have collected over $1 million in pension payments and 15 currently receive over $100,000 of taxpayer-funded money per year. Pension laws allow aldermen to receive maximum benefits after 20 years of service — roughly 10 years faster than other participating city employees. Other workers also stand to make just 70 percent of their final pay, compared to 80 percent for those on the council. One person interested in shaking up the city council is directly related to the mayor that helped pass the 1991 plan responsible for this. Bill Daley, mayoral candidate and brother to former six-term Mayor Richard M. Daley, wants to shrink the city council from 50 to 15, bar members from having other jobs and cut them off after three terms. Whether Daley wins or not, Chicago residents will still be served by a city council in flux — with two aldermen under federal investigation and an uncertain mayor’s race with 14 candidates. What is more certain, however, is that the ten largest cities in the U.S. have all adopted term limits — except for Chicago.

Natalie Wade

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Afrofuturism: Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture for Black Artists Natalie Wade March 1, 2019

Natalie Wade

Throughout the winter quarter, DePaul University’s Center for Black Diaspora displayed a film festival series centering around the cultural aesthetic of an often overlooked genre, Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism combines African culture and artistic taste with elements of science fiction to create something that is beautiful, creative and promotes the self expression and representation of Black artists. “Whether through literature, visual arts, music or grassroots organizing, Afrofuturists redefine culture and notions of Blackness for today and the future,” said author Ytasha L. Womack in her book “Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture.” “Afrofuturism combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity and magic realism with non-Western beliefs.” Similar to the overwhelming majority of genres, sci-fi is majorly white-dominated, therefore it is very rare to see a person of col-

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or take on a lead role. This is especially true in mainstream film, but Afrofuturism breaks away from these misguided norms putting Black people at the forefront of these stories. “It’s creating Black presence in the future,” said Juelle Daley, assistant director of the Center for Black Diaspora and the coordinator of this event. “One of the key factors in distinguishing [Afrofuturism] is that the characters that are in the future are Black characters. They’re not absent from it and they’re not the background.” The recent success of the 2018 film Black Panther has brought a lot of attention to the subject, but the concept is not a new one. These themes have been seen in the form of art, music and literary works since before the term “Afrofuturism” was coined by Mark Dery in his essay “Black to the Future,” published in 1993. “Black Panther, the Marvel movie, was kind of one of the reasons,” said Daley when asked if the new film had inspired the theme for this year’s film festival. However, it was not the only thing that inspired this year’s lineup. Cultural events like Afropunk and literary works from authors like Ytasha L. Womack and Octavia Butler were also large players in Daley’s decision.

Supa Modo The first film screening was of Supa Modo directed by Likarion Wainaina in 2018. It was heart-wrenching and opened my eyes to some harsh realities. The main character, Jo, is a nine-year-old girl from a Kenyan village who is suffering a terminal illness. Her mother, a strict but loving midwife, does her best to keep Jo comfortable. Despite her illness, Jo dreams about one day becoming a superhero. The village rallies together to help this little girl’s dream become realized, while also helping support her mother. The culture of the village in this film is what makes it so powerful. The way everyone helps take care of one another, building props and sewing costumes in order produce their very own superhero movie starring Jo, is what makes Supa Modo stand out amongst other films that similarly deal with grief.

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Natalie Wade

But what makes the film “Afrofuturistic?” There is a very mysterious element of magic realism and fantasy. As we start to wonder after a series of unexplainable events, could Jo really be a superhero? The ambiguous ending — after an unexpected but uplifting twist — leaves us wondering.

3 Short Films Pumzi, directed by Wanuri Kahiu, was an example of Afrofuturism in a more obvious way. The science fiction elements in the film are inarguable, with advancements in technology, the aftermath of a war for water and an authoritarian society at the brink of collapse, all playing a critical role in this short film. Something that sets it apart — apart from a Black cast — is the incorporation of stylistic elements in order to create costumes and makeup design that reflect African culture, not unlike some of the costume design seen in Black Panther. The heroine sets off on a journey outside the walls of the dehydrated unground society after a mysterious soil sample is left on her desk is found to have an abnormally high water content. She travels through what looks like a barren wasteland in search of any hope for the future. Short but effective, this film makes you consider the resources we often take for granted and serves as a warning for the future.

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“Sci-fi is majorly white-dominated...but Afrofuturism breaks away from these misguided norms putting Black people at the forefront of these stories.” Next, was the film Swimming In Your Skin Again directed by Terence Nance, a film that leans toward experimental stylistically, its content is very thematic and its sequences are dreamlike. The film doesn’t have as much of a dialogue between characters. It flows more like a poem and the bold colors, musical accompaniment and a variety of displayed performance arts create an air of surrealism and mysticism. Through the African American lens, this film creates a metaphor between motherhood and the ocean, along with adulthood and nature. This film also speculates what could be some major issues in the future if we do not respect nature. The series of shorts concluded with Kwaku Ananse, directed by Akosua Adoma Owusu. The films draws a parallel between the popular Ghanaian fable “Anansi the Spider,” and the life of a young girl named Nyan Kronhwea. Nyan, while is struggling with recent the death of her father, finds out he was living a double life. This short emphasizes that like Ananse who appears in the fable as both man and spider, there are two sides to everyone, everything and every story. The vibrant color and beautiful cinematography in the short film emphasize an element of other worldliness that adds to the fantasticalness of the film.

Touki Bouki Touki Bouki, directed by Djibril Diop Mambety is a classic African film from the 1970’s. It’s famous for its avant-garde style that pushes it into the realm of experimental, new wave-influenced filmmaking. Beyoncé and Jay-Z even pay homage to the film in a promo for their 2018 On the Run II tour. The story is about a couple trying to migrate from Senegal in order to enjoy the life of luxury, that they assume is waiting for them in Paris. They do so by stealing and scamming, but their escape does

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not go quite as planned. The structure of the narrative is non-linear and editing is sometimes fragmented and looping, the sound design reflects that and was likely the foundation for editing the film. Within this complex film are many messages, themes and metaphors, such as immigration, tradition and both African and French culture. One of the most compelling parts of watching this film is sorting through all the information and messages being given to you and finding the meaning behind it, in order to piece together the puzzle that is Touki Bouki or “the journey of the hyena.” The final film in the series, Last Angel of History, directed by John Akonfrah, will be screening March 7th from 4:30-6:00 p.m. in the Richardson Library JTR 300.

Natalie Wade

The Center for Black Diaspora is currently planning a follow up to the winter film festival with an art exhibition, in the Spring, featuring a variety of different creative works by Afrofuturist artists. “We’re trying to highlight practitioners. . . to bring in real people that you can sit and meet and talk to,” said Daley. “They’re going to be engaging with people who come [to learn] about how Afrofuturism, as a theme, is represented in their work, whether they’re a musician, a visual artist, a novelist or a musical composer.”

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“Guilty Pleasure” Music is Just Another Way to Shame Women for Their Musical Tastes Nikki Roberts March 8, 2019

Natalie Wade

When I opened Spotify and shuffled my music library, the first 10 songs to play were by skate punk band Anti-Flag; heavy rockers Black Sabbath; witch house electronic duo Crystal Castles; 2010 pop icon Ke$ha; genre-defining death metal band Death; scene phase icons My Chemical Romance; pop punk band The Copyrights; grindcore band Pig Destroyer; southern rockers Creedence Clearwater Revival; and mainstream rapper Juice WRLD. With a Spotify library as dense and diverse as mine, it can sometimes be overwhelming to pick an artist or genre that fits my mood or activity, let alone decide on which song to listen to. To narrow down my choices, I’ve created playlists that range from “dad rock” or “get sad, loser” to the all-encompassing, 300+ song playlist aptly titled “my s—t!” As I began to comb through my music library and add songs to my newest playlist entitled “pop punk jams,” I noticed there was an option to set my playlist to secret opposed to having it displayed publicly on my personal Spotify profile.

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While many people are unaware that they can search for their friends on Spotify and dig through their public playlists, I enjoy checking out the songs my friends listen to when I’m in the mood for hearing something new. It had never occurred to me to hide my playlists from my profile, or that some of my friends may have secret Spotify playlists they’d be embarrassed about if a nosey music lover like myself discovered them. However, according to an informal online survey I conducted that recorded responses from 120 music listeners, half of the 94 respondents who said they create playlists using streaming services reported that they also create private or secret playlists that only they can access and listen to. Usually, these playlists are meant to hide listeners’ “guilty pleasures” from prying eyes. The survey did not define what a “guilty pleasure” was and, instead, allowed respondents to report their get you made fun of within your social circle” to “music that doesn’t align with my image.” One participant who works in college radio wrote that everyone in the college radio scene “listens to artists most people have never heard of, so if you do listen to more popular artists, it’s expected that you keep it private.” Ninety percent of the respondents in this survey said they listen to music they label as “guilty pleasure” listening, and 66.2 percent of respondents said they’d be embarrassed if a friend or family member discovered their secret pleasure artists. The top three genres that respondents associated with “guilty pleasure” were pop music, Top 40 music and rap music. Nearly 87 percent of respondents said they listen to their “guilty pleasures” while they are alone. When asked to name a few of their secret listening pleasures, common artists named were female pop and rap icons like Ke$ha, Lady Gaga, Cardi B, Taylor Swift and Bhad Bhabie, as well as boy band groups like One Direction, Jonas Brothers and 5 Seconds of Summer. One glaring similarity links these artists together: their fan bases are primarily young and female. Personally, I have never aligned myself with the term “guilty pleasure” because I see no reason to feel guilty or embarrassed about the things I enjoy, whether it be a chart-topping pop song or an ob-

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scure metal song that isn’t available on streaming services. However, sometimes outside pressures can manipulate music lovers into second guessing their tastes — especially if they’re young women. From choosing a hamburger over a salad, treating themselves to a trip to a salon or even indulging in Top 40 hits, the ways that women choose to find pleasure have always been viewed as lesser pleasures with disposable, mass appeal. When our patriarchal society reinforces that common female pleasures are synonymous with the term “guilty pleasure,” this conveys that the things women enjoy are lesser, disposable forms of pleasure. When this is translated to guilty pleasure music, the result is that the music-listening masses equate music with female fan bases, such as pop music or boy bands, as lesser, disposable genres of music. The result of this is toxic to the development of young girls, who may feel pressure to keep their interests to themselves or to feel guilty about the ways they choose to indulge in pleasure. Michelle Chester, who wrote a dissertation on female One Direction fans and their identity as fans of boy bands, says that many of the women she interviewed while writing her thesis spoke about being shamed for aligning themselves with a predominantly female fan base. All the women that Chester interviewed were between the ages of 18 and 22, so many of these women felt internalized shame after parents or friends would chide them for being “too old” to enjoy boy bands, or referring to them as “fan girls.” It wasn’t until these women began interacting with other members of boy band fan bases through online platforms like Twitter and Tumblr that they began to realize there was no reason to be embarrassed about their musical tastes. “By seeing that other girls who were their age had the same interests, they began to question why they were ashamed in the first place. The creation of the fan culture allowed for these girls to not only feel less ashamed about their interests, but also introduced them to basic concepts of feminism,” said Chester. Unfortunately, female-fan dominated pop music isn’t the only genre widely associated with “guilty pleasures.” Almost any subgenre of music that is targeted towards young women receives a bad rep and, too often, this music is cast aside as low-brow or a fleeting

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“When our patriarchal society reinforces that common female pleasures are synonymous with the term ‘guilty pleasure,’ this conveys that the things women enjoy are lesser, disposable forms of pleasure.” trend because of its enthusiastic female audience. As a fan of pop punk and pop rock, Chester herself has experienced discrimination against her own musical preferences based solely on the composition of her favorite artists’ female fan bases. “I personally have always been an active member of the pop punk community, so I could see the difference when I tell people that I’m a fan of All Time Low,” said Chester. “All Time Low is known for having a very intense female fan base. Even though they’ve been successful and around for years, changing their sound and working with so many huge names within the punk community, they’re always seen as being more low-brow or guilty pleasure specifically because [of] what guys in the community have deemed ‘fan girls.’ So similarly, a lot of pop music is seen as guilty pleasure because of its target demographic being that of women.” In order for young female music lovers to feel accepted within the larger music community and not just within their respective fan bases, we have to stop categorizing our listening pleasures as “guilty pleasures” just because the artist’s primary fan base doesn’t align with how we see ourselves. By ditching the term “guilty pleasure,” more young female fans will learn to embrace their music taste for what it is instead of feeling as though their favorite artists fall under some lesser second-tier. So, go ahead: listen to that Ariana Grande bop in secret, or be bold and let all your friends know that you’ve been listening to Thank U, Next non-stop for a week. Not only will you learn to embrace your own pleasure completely guilt-free, but you’ll also pave the way for others who are still stuck needlessly putting their favorite tunes on private playlists. Music notes by Icon Lauk, The Noun Project

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Visions from Voicemails: How Stranded Civilians Found Their Sound Richard Requena March 15, 2019

Richard Requena

A$AP Rocky fans Aubrey Dupiton and Anthony Santana — AKA Tony Santana — were just two freshmen from Evanston High. They enjoyed rapping along to his tracks word for word. Soon after, they wanted to make their own verses, too, and recorded them by any means necessary — even if it meant recording them on voicemail. Flash forward to November of last year. Santana and Dupiton have gone from voicemail verses to their very first track. They are now known as Stranded Civilians, the “most handsome rap duo of all time.” Or at least Tony Santana says they are. “We had been making music solo, but we decided to come together,” said Santana. “It just made sense to do it, because [Dupiton] is like a brother to me. I wanted to make music with my brother and to make memories with my brother.”

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With just a single to their name, Stranded Civilians were able to pack the house at the Subterranean for the release of their EP, Teenage Dreaming. And they didn’t stop there. Stranded Civilians returned to the Subterranean just last month and have two major DePaul events under their belts, including the preview for Fest 2019.

Richard Requena

Whether you’ve seen them perform or watched their music videos, you may be familiar with Santana from a class in the Loop Campus. Santana is a sophomore majoring in economics at DePaul, and Dupiton is also in his second year majoring in graphic design at Oakton Community College. Santana and Dupiton may not be studying music, but their passion for it is what has fueled their projects over the last year. Both Santana and Dupiton come from immigrant families, and they highlight that experience in their music. Dupiton’s parents are from Haiti, and Santana’s dad is from from Nigeria. “There was always a heavy influence when it came to music,” Santana said. It’s his family and home that influence his music “to be cultural and to have integrity.” Rappers like Common, Mos Def and Black Thought rapped on things that mattered most to Santana. He admires the way these rappers have been able to weave activism into their lyrics, which helps make people aware of social inequalities.

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Santana says Stranded Civilians also make music on serious topics. In the song “Candy Beam” for example, Santana raps on race issues in education. Really I’m just trying to feed the Diaspora Trying to get rich and head back to Africa Because here in America, My people flipping with the spatula Or trying to get a bachelor. Santana doesn’t see DePaul as progressive but admits that it’s better than other schools. At the same time, he adds, “I can’t complain what I signed up for.” Even so, Santana says he values being multi-faceted and having interests in a variety of topics, whether it be economics, music or history. Santana says that Stranded Civilians are, in essence, just a duo of high energy, goofy funny guys. Still, Santana hopes to “take his people to the Grammy’s one day,” but is also happy where his music is now. “My mom is proud of me and my dad is proud of me, and that in itself is a big thing,” Santana said. Stranded Civilians have big plans for their future. They plan to drop their first album in May and outdo their EP by holding their next release party at a bigger venue. This time around, Santana and Dupiton want their new work to be more conceptual to revolve around a common theme. “Stranded Civilians are for the people,” said Santana. “We live for the art, and we don’t clout chase. We care about the people and we don’t hurt no one.”

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Left to right: Meredith Melland, Mikayla Rose Price, Marissa Nelson, Francesca Mathewes, Cody Corrall, Madeline Happold, Megan Stringer, Melody Mercado, Jenni Holtz, Heather Bland, Dylan Van Sickle, Natalie Wade Not Pictured: Chris Silber, Nikki Roberts

Special thanks to the Student Activity Fee Board (SAF-B) funding â&#x20AC;&#x201C; without these contributions, the anthology would not have been possible.

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