SSW 11.27.13

2 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY NOVEMBER 27, 2013

IN CHICAGO

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

The Weekly is distributed across the South Side each Wednesday of the academic year.

In fall 2013, the Weekly reformed itself as an independent, student-directed organization.

Previously, the paper was known as the Chicago Weekly.

Editor-in-Chief Managing Editor

Harrison Smith Bea Malsky

Senior Editors

John Gamino, Spencer Mcavoy Osita Nwanevu Hannah Nyhart

Politics Editor Stage & Screen Editor Music and Zach Goldhammer Video Editor Visual Arts Editor Katryce Lassle Associate Online Sharon Lurye and Contributing Editor Contributing Editors Ari Feldman, Josh Kovensky, Meaghan Murphy Photo Editor Lydia Gorham Layout Editor Olivia Dorow Hovland Senior Writers Staff Writers

Senior Photographer Staff Photographer Staff Illustrators Business Manager

Bess Cohen, Emily Holland, Stephen Urchick Dove Barbanel, Christian Belanger, Jake Bittle, Jon Brozdowski, Emma Collins, Jason Huang, Jack Nuelle, Isabel Ochoa Gold, Paige Pendarvis Camden Bauchner Luke White Isabel Ochoa Gold, Hanna Petroski, Maggie Sivit

A week’s worth of developing stories, odd events, and signs of the times, culled from the desks, inboxes, and wandering eyes of the editors MJ’s Mansion

The auction for Michael Jordan’s $30 million Highland Park mansion has been postponed from last Friday to December 16, due to buyers’ lack of stamina exploring all seven acres and sporting facilities. Legend Point’s exercise room that once trained a “breakfast club” of teammates has been converted to a regularly filtered cigar room; the sweet smell of His Airness’s legendary sweat has likely dissipated. Air J expressed requisite regrets: “It’s a special place with incredible people...

But my kids are grown now, and I don’t need a large house there anymore.” 56,000 square feet being appropriate for himself and his three children, he’s now downsized to a modest 28,000-square-foot home in Florida for himself and his new former-model Cuban-American wife.

Give Us a Zoo!

There has never been a zoo on the South Side. It’s true. Some taxidermied animals took over Jackson Park during the 1893 World’s Fair, but that’s it. Even the West Side had a zoo once, though they closed the Union Park Menagerie right around the time the Lincoln Park Zoo really started taking off. Now—without any competition in Chicago—the Lincoln Park Zoo is really hitting it big. A newborn red kangaroo, the first to be born at the zoo, is peeking out of its mother’s pouch. Welcome to the world, joey, and we hope to welcome you to the South Side too someday. The ballparks at Washington Park are nice, but why not a kangaroo colony?

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

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

Cover photos by Camden Bauchner Correction: A November 13 article on Mana Contemporary, a national arts organization that recently opened a space in Pilsen, contained a number of errors due to editing mistakes. Mana inhabits all of its nine-story building, much more than the 6,000 square feet that was originally stated. The gallery also plans to expand to Miami, Los Angeles, and London; it does not have plans for a San Francisco location. Its café, not Café Jumping Bean, serves dual roles as a gallery and coffee shop.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Aldermen Will Burns (4th) and Edward Burke (14th) want to classify e-cigarettes as “tobacco products,” subject to all the same restrictions placed on their low-tech predecessors.

E-smokers would no longer be allowed to smoke in public places and sales to minors would be prohibited, though it’s unclear how or why they weren’t already. This is in tandem with Rahm’s proposed seventy-five-cents-a-pack increase in cigarette taxes, which would give Chicago the highest combined state and city tax in the country. The increase itself has met with some opposition, but Rahm’s $7 billion budget, which assumes $34.2 million in new revenues, passed a pair of City Council committees without issue last Monday.

Ice Cream Thievery

There was no motive, no reason for the crime besides what was probably a pretty intense craving for sugar. The job was quick—the thieves were in and out of the Dunkin’ Donuts in mere seconds—and the getaway had been planned long in advance. But something went wrong when Ryan Schmidt and Fabian Ayala tried to steal two (2) quarts of ice creams. Police chased the perps down and found them high as kites—on pain pills. After spending a night in Cook County jail, the two were released on $10,000 bail, with electronic home monitoring.

But you can bet your bottom dollar they got a few bites of that delicious, delicious ice cream.

IN THIS ISSUE

Harry Backlund

editor@southsideweekly.com stagescreen@southsideweekly.com music@southsideweekly.com visualarts@southsideweekly.com

The Question of E-Cigs

a10

bUcKIngHam

WEST WOODLaWn

graffITI WaLL

“Each successive bite made me nervous with the burden of description.”

“I will tell any administrator in CPS: don’t rest on your laurels, always be ready for what’s going to happen.”

“The event’s bulletin announced that ‘ billions in tax dollars have been invested to produce today’s West Woodlawn ghetto.’ ”

“The graf culture has a built in curatorial system.”

osita nwanevu.......4

BESS COHEN..............6

anaT cOHEn

“She sways in more contemplative pieces, dances through more upbeat numbers, her clarinet an extension of her arms.”

bess cohen............12

ARI FELDMAN...............8

JON BROZDOWSKI.........7

maYOr 1%

cOnSUmIng SpIrITS

“Lydersen spends a great deal of time giving oppressed groups a chance to make themselves heard.”

“And, well, you’re pretty ugly too—that’s why I love you.”

jake bittle............13

isabel ochoa gold...........14

NOVEMBER 27, 2013 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

Keeping It Real North Side “cool” merges with Hyde Park

BY OSITA NWANEVU

T

he announcement late last year that Charlie Trotter’s chef Matthias Merges had been enlisted into the University of Chicago’s push to import some North Side cool into Hyde Park excited foodies, students, and long-time residents alike. The effort to upscale Hyde Park out of its reputation as a stuffy ivory tower enclave wouldn’t be complete, many reasoned, without “real” restaurants—as if places like Rajun Cajun and Ribs n’ Bibs were either non-corporeal entities or could be considered dining establishments only by technicality.

The first of Merges’ projects, A10, opened early this month and I can confirm that it is, indeed, a “real” restaurant. There are walls, a ceiling, and waiters, and they do, in fact, serve food. It is also “real” in ways that Hyde Park’s other restaurants are not. It is awaiting a Zagat rating that the majority of the neighborhood’s restaurants are never going to get. It offers valet parking and wood-fired snails. It is frequented by chatty people who love—and talk loudly about how much they love—“real” restaurants. Their cufflinks and tie bars tend to glint in the candlelight. And, speaking of candlelight, it is beautiful. The interior is all grey brick and wood with a ruggedness that’s well offset by the aforementioned table candles, large windows that let the sun pour in during the day, and colorful rugs that hang on the wall. It seems like a cross between a saloon and a well-tended, well-furnished den, the kind of place one might see feted in Esquire—a “real” magazine.

The confidence embodied by A10’s décor is mirrored by its menu which features dishes like pheasant agnolotti and chicken liver mousse for dinner and lobster crepes and “pork belly au-vou-lent” for its Sunday brunches. But this confidence is undermined by a few kinks in the dining experience. The wait staff is as diverse as the surrounding neighborhood and, on the whole, friendly. But there’s a stiffness in their service. I was congratulated for choosing each dish in my dinner (“A fine choice, sir;” “Excellent!”) and treated, upon finishing my order, to a solemn, and near-Shakespearean “well done” by one

waiter. More amusingly, those who don’t opt to take something from A10’s respectable drink menu can expect to be poured enough water to drown in over the course of a meal. Take a sip and a busser is sure to speedily come up to your table and top-off your almost completely full cup—or, better still, stand next to your table in anticipation of your next sip as you raise the glass to your lips.

Between these episodes, the swank Lou Reed cover playing somewhere overhead, and the menu prices—$22 for a typical large plate—I got the sense that I, a two-and-a-half year veteran of Harold’s Chicken dinners and pad thai carried out in Styrofoam boxes, might not be ready for the new kid on the block, with its hundred-dollar wines, and candles, and reservations. Naturally, I figured the only way to find out would be to dive headfirst into the menu, taking on some of the most intimidating items being offered.

I started with the chicken liver mousse, one of their small plates, which was served in a cup with a marsala gelatin on top and, dauntingly, accompanied on the side by an olive oil saltine—less a cracker than a large tortilla chip—roughly the size of one’s forearm. I was at a loss as to how to eat it all, until I remembered how my waiter had startled me by speedily and silently placing a spoon and small plate on the table over my shoulder a minute or so earlier. With the spoon, I scooped out the mousse onto the plate and proceeded to break off chips of the saltine for dipping, essentially making myself an expensive plate of nachos. The marsala gelatin portion of the mousse tasted familiar and sweet—like apple pie filling without the apple—while the liver portion tasted like, well, ground up chicken liver, a strong flavor alien to me and many but not without its fans. But put together, the two halves of the mousse achieved a pleasant, accessible, and only mildly meaty balance. Unfortunately, the dish’s components were all out of proportion. There was more saltine than I would have needed even if I had intended to finish the mousse, which I didn’t given that there was far more liver than the gelatin I’d relied on to soften its flavor.

4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY NOVEMBER 27, 2013

stephanie koch

I had slightly better luck with the main course: a dark blood sausage—“boudin noir” in the menu’s French—with pickled squid, an ink vinaigrette, and Hollandaise sauce. The sausage was delicious to a point—dense and rich but just a touch

too dry, though the generous dabs of Hollandaise managed to compensate for that.

Again though, there were compositional flaws. The two tiny pieces of squid on the plate tasted softly of the lemon mixture they had been pickled in—a flavor almost

FOOD

stephanie koch

as delicate as their texture. There should have been more. Additionally, the sausage was accompanied by a heap of fairly mushy greens. They might have been collards, or spinach, or both, or neither. It was hard to say, given the overpowering flavor of the highly acidic and sour vinaigrette they had been drenched in. Here, the constant supply of water was greatly appreciated—I had to down two and a half glasses through my puckering lips to make it through the dish.

Still though, the sausage was enjoyable.

I’d also opted for a simple and picture perfect side of brussel sprouts and beef tongue. The sprouts had been roasted beautifully while the tongue—cured and sliced into thin strips that looked and tasted a bit like bacon—was just salty enough to provide a sharp and satisfying counterpoint to the sprouts’ earthiness. The dish was also supposed to contain chile and tonnato—an Italian tuna, anchovy, and caper sauce—and maybe it did. The tongue could have been cured in them; the sprouts could have been roasted in them. But both flavors seemed missing in action to me—which was, actually, fine. The dish was uncomplicatedly good as it was and a decent respite from the boudin noir plate’s complex flavors.

My dessert was also simple: big and dumb, but decadent olive oil doughnut holes that, quite literally, brought me to tears—mostly because they were as searingly hot as I was impatient to dig in, but possibly also because they tasted absolutely sensational—not too precious for words, but close enough that each successive bite made me nervous with the burden of description. How to illustrate, embody, consecrate the best fried dessert on the South Side? Is this overgenerous? Maybe. Your

critical faculties take a real hit when both your eyes and mouth are watering. But consider the dish’s components. To begin with, the doughnuts are coated in sugar.

Not the powdered kind that’d muff up the pricey blazers and tops of A10’s clientele.

Straight sugar—the kind you can pour in the coffee you’re offered when you order them. Surprisingly, this doesn’t drown out the plate’s subtleties. It is easy, for instance, to do a lemon dessert sauce poorly—an overpowering sweetness or tanginess can drown out the weaker flavors in a dish.

Here though, the doughnuts’ lemon curd sauce—drizzled over the top in just the right amount—left enough room on the palate for the doughnuts’ light and novel olive oil flavor. Each and every doughnut was, moreover, texturally perfect – hitting the sweet spot between fluffy and dense indicative of a perfect fry.

This was an unexpected end to my meal. I’d walked into A10 ready to be wowed by something audacious. I was about to leave floored by a bowl of doughnut holes. But not before having yet another glass of water, this time poured by a scruffy and affable young busser.

“How’d you like your meal, dude?”

“Dude.” At once, the stiffness that had pervaded the meal dissipated. I felt myself easing more comfortably into my seat, relaxing my posture from that of a “real” restaurant-goer, to that of a “dude.” I answered him warmly and honestly.

“Not bad, dude. Not bad at all.”

A10, 1462 E. 53rd Street. Closed Mondays.

See websites for hours. (773)280-1010. a10hydepark.com NOVEMBER 2013 SIDE SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5 NOVEMBER 27, 2013 27, SOUTH WEEKLY 5

EDUCATION

Back to Buckingham Revisiting a closed school for special needs students

BY BESS COHEN

O

n the phone last month, Dr. Otis Taylor did not sound like a man who had just lost his job. He didn’t point any f ingers and he did not express remorse. In fact, he sounded like he might have been smiling. “I’m done with this part of my life,” he said, speaking of his four years as principal at Buckingham, a former CPS school. “It’s in my past, it happened.”

Buckingham Special Education Center, in Calumet Heights, was one of forty-nine schools CPS closed this fall, making Dr. Taylor one of forty-nine principals who were either relocated or laid off. When the Week ly wrote about the school in May, the fate of Buckingham and other schools slated to close was still undecided, and Buckingham parents and staff were still hopeful. They had faith that their school ’s unique position would keep it open: Buckingham was one of only three public schools in Chicago that exclusively served students with emotional disorders from kindergarten through the eighth grade. Their case was made even more compelling by the fourteen miles separating Buckingham and Moses Montef iore, where students would be relocated—a far greater distance than that bet ween any other closing school and its designated welcoming one.

When a public hearing was held in April to discuss the proposed clo-

sure, hearing off icer Cheryl Starks concluded that CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett “failed to consider pertinent additional information on the safety impact that the long commute will have on Buckingham students.”

Starks recommended against closure.

A month later, the school board voted against that recommendation.

“I will never forget there was never any empathy at all,” said Taylor, thinking back to the process leading up to the f inal vote on school closures.

“I wasted my time going to those hearings.”

Still, he is proud that he defended his school, and disappointed by those he says were too concerned with keeping their jobs to do so. “How could I not speak up?”

C

PS data indicates that only sixty-t wo percent of the roughly 11,000 students affected by the closings were enrolled in their designated welcoming schools on the t wentieth day of school this year. About thirty percent were enrolled in other CPS schools, and about 500 students’ enrollment whereabouts remained unknown. CPS has made efforts to track down these missing students, but with little success.

Moses Montef iore Academy, near the Medical District on the West Side, was designated to receive students from both Buckingham and

6 SOUTH6 SIDE SOUTH WEEKLY SIDE WEEKLY NOVEMBER NOVEMBER 27, 2013 27, 2013

Near North Elementary School, thus consolidating the three public therapeutic elementary schools in Chicago into one.

Families also had the option of enrolling their children in private therapeutic day schools or in general education neighborhood schools, which may be closer to home but not necessarily equipped with the resources needed to support children with emotional disorders.

When asked how many Buckingham students ended up enrolling at Montef iore, Principal Anthony Chalmers said, “We haven’t really done a breakdown of that.” He estimated that of the thirty-f ive students Montef iore received from Near North and Buckingham, f ifteen were from the latter. A CPS spokesperson later clarif ied that fourteen Buckingham students enrolled at Montef iore, but one has since dropped out. She did not have further information on why this student left, or whether he enrolled elsewhere.

Though these thirteen Buckingham students are now in a new school—one nearly t wice as large as where they were before—some of their old support systems remain intact. According to Chalmers, six teachers, one social worker, and one security guard were transferred from Buckingham to Montef iore. He was positive about the transition overall, and Dr. Taylor, who

worked with Dr. Chalmers for the f irst few months of the school year to ease the transition, conf irmed that “supports were in place.”

Unlike many other schools affected by the closings, Buckingham has no students unaccounted for. CPS has conf irmed that fourteen former students now attend private therapeutic day schools, and that t wo are in district schools. The remaining nine students matriculated to high schools around the city.

Yet it remains diff icult to f igure out where they have actually gone.

One private therapeutic school administrator said CPS had offered placement in her school to three students, not necessarily from Buckingham, but that those students never enrolled in her school. She did not know where they had enrolled.

When asked if her school received any students from Buckingham, the secretary at one South Side neighborhood school said no one really knew where all the new students were from.

It was too chaotic in those f irst few days because “kids were coming from every where.”

Though the school year is now a few months in, the challenges of transition remain. Taylor offers some succinct advice to his former employer: “I will tell any administrator in CPS: don’t rest on your laurels, always be ready for what’s going to happen.”

POLITICS

Investing in West Woodlawn

Blacks in Green envisions a future for West Woodlawn community development

BY JON BROZDOWSKI

W

est Woodlawn was granted tax increment financing (TIF) district status by the city in 2010. Yet TIF-directed development has been poorly received by the local nonprofit environmental group Blacks in Green, which has been advocating for community-based development projects since 2007.

On November 21, the group held a forum entitled “Who Owns West Woodlawn?” to publicize the results of an extensive survey of the neighborhood’s development potential. crafted by three of their Urban Planning interns.

Crafted by three Blacks in Green urban planning interns, the report shows that twenty-five percent of West Woodlawn residents have left the neighborhood since 2000. Over half of those who remain spend more than thirty-five percent of their income on rent. To answer the titular question of the forum, Blacks in Green offered a startling statistic: only forty-two percent of West Woodlawn taxpayers live there; the rest are either elsewhere in Chicago or out of state.

About sixty like-minded activists, experts, and residents gathered at Dyett High School for an hour and a half of presentations by Blacks in Green and Derek S. Hyra, and another hour of break-out sessions on reclaiming, developing, representing, and conserving West Woodlawn.

In her welcome address, Blacks in Green founder Naomi Davis told the audience that her “question of the century” is “Where is your village?” Blacks in Green, like many environmental groups, she says, hopes that independent local economies might strengthen community spirit and allow for an escape from the environmentally and socially destructive forces of capitalism. Davis’s activism has been inspired by her grandmother’s accounts of the self-sustaining community she grew up in; she and the rest of Blacks in Green argue that if goods and services were all provided by locally owned businesses, the money would circulate dozens of times within the community of West Woodlawn and help grow its economy.

Davis invited Hyra, an associate professor at Virginia Tech, to serve as the fo-

jon brozdowski

rum’s keynote speaker. He came to discuss the effects of what he calls the “new urban renewal” of Bronzeville. The city’s TIFbased plans for economic revitalization, Hyra said, come at a heavy political cost to the neighborhood residents. A “micro-level segregation” of a community results when development does not meet the needs of the current residents, but instead brings in wealthier residents who can afford the housing and have interests in very different services.”

The event did not shy away from strong rhetoric. Its bulletin announced that “billions in tax dollars have been invested to produce today’s West Woodlawn ghetto” through “race-based dispersal, market manipulations, government-sanctioned mortgage fraud, subsidized violence, guaranteed profits to slum lords, reduced community services accompanied by increased property taxes,” and other schemes.

Hyra was comfortable providing community-based answers to these wrongs, like contractual negotiations between community leaders and real estate agencies and the construction of neutral spaces to

which both native residents and newcomers are drawn to facilitate healthy development of a new community.

“You guys are going to have to cut deals” with the city’s TIF committees, he said. It will take trade-offs and solidarity, because the developers are likely to “try to divide and conquer, get all of the nonprofits to compete” for funds in order to divide the community. But, he encouraged, “don’t let them get away with giving you crumbs.”

The audience was well acquainted with his proposed solutions and the difficulties associated with each of them, but this event went beyond the raising of public awareness. It also sought, in subsequent sessions, to empower residents so they would walk away with the skills they needed to take back their community. These four breakout sessions focused on “how to avoid the displacement of gentrification”; “how to own, develop, and manage your village properties”; “how to decipher the political actions and trends impacting West Woodlawn”; and “how to fight back against the banks.”

Willie “J.R.” Fleming, of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign, spoke

about keeping one’s home and preserving affordable housing, and gave articulate crash-courses on the law that governs bank foreclosures, explaining why Chicago decides to demolish properties rather than going through the complex process of eminent domain. “I’m not pointing the finger at the federal government,” he says. “But we have a lot of bad legislation and policy.”

Tom Tresser, the Chief Tool Builder with CivicLab, a nonprofit group for the promotion of civic engagement and government accountability, spoke about tracking government actions, including the City Council Plan Commission and Finance & Zoning Committees. The Plan Commission, as he explained, tends to approve everything the mayor puts forward, so residents have to campaign hard to secure any funding from TIFs. Mirroring the practical approach of the last few presentations, Davis hesitated to call the event a success. For her, “everything lives in momentum that’s created… after the event. So the event in itself is not inherently relevant except that it can trigger action.”

NOVEMBER NOVEMBER 27, 2013 27, SOUTH 2013 SIDE SOUTH WEEKLY SIDE WEEKLY 7 7

End to End On the eve of a demolition, remembering twenty-five years of Hyde Park back-alley graffiti

BY ARI FELDMAN

H

ere’s the romantic version: Mario Gonzalez, Jr., aka Zore, was hanging out across from the Museum of Science and Industry one day in 1989 when he was approached by a couple of kids. They were all at a gathering for Chi-Rock Nation, an organization that aims to create outlets for young people to be creative and artistic—the “Rock” is for Respect Our Creative Kids. The pair introduced themselves: Desie and Sensei.

“We have paint,” they informed Gonzalez.

He asked to see their paint, and when they handed it over he popped it in the trunk of his car.

“They started crying and shit,” Gonzalez told me. “Never tell anyone you have paint.”

Desie and Sensei had been interested in painting with Gonzalez, who at that point had, by his own measures, quite the reputation up and down the city of Chicago. “There was a time when I literally had all the walls on the South Side,” he said.

“I had a monopoly on the South Side.”

No wonder these “toys,” as inexperienced artists are referred to in the graffiti world, wanted to paint with him so badly.

“We got a wall,” they told him. “[My crew and I] were like, ‘Okay, do it,’ ” Gonzalez recalls. They told him the spot they had in mind: an alley just north of 53rd Street in between South Blackstone and South Kimbark Avenues, sandwiched between several floors of condos and a McDonald’s.

That McDonald’s became a Mobil gas station, which will soon become a 267-unit high-rise development. Demolition of the existing property—including the graffiti wall—is set to start this December.

Back in 1989, Chicago graffiti saw little daylight. Most writers were active under overpasses and bridges, on “L” trains and in the abandoned factories and industrial sites that dotted much of the city. Walls were rare—you were more likely to get arrested painting on property that didn’t belong to the city, and your artwork was less likely to survive. But Desie and Sensei were intent on hitting this wall. And they did.

T

he first prominent graffiti in Hyde Park happened in the early seventies, when artists, often locals, began doing murals underneath the Metra tracks. Jon Pounds, executive director of the Chicago Public Art Group, says that these individuals were primarily interested in expanding the use of murals to Chicago at a time when they were beginning to become popular on the coasts. CPAG, founded in 1971, is an organization that is responsible for putting up the vast majority of the city’s public art installations.

“Since 1972, the types of materials employed have expanded to include spray paint, mosaics, direct application mosaics, and high-resolution digital prints,” Pounds wrote in an email.

Back in the day, Gonzalez assures me, the paint was everything.

“Graffiti writers were the first World

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Wide Web,” he said. “We would paint graffiti in one city and three days later somebody in Australia would show up with a response.” These kinds of global conversations were happening in Hyde Park through the seventies and into the late eighties, when Gonzalez and some friends founded SB Crew. (The SB was originally for Spray Brigade, but, like many other graffiti crew names, it can be turned to almost any phrase whose words start with S and B.) “Everybody wrote, everybody had style in the seventies,” Gonzalez added.

“Like, even little kids.”

The crew was made up of “leftover guys from the eighties and leaders of the new school in the nineties” who were painting all over the South Side. They got their start hitting train cars, especially what is now the Pink Line—the canvas most accessible from Pilsen, where Gonzalez grew up. The crew, he claims, was the first to “bomb” the underpass near Promontory Point (where he would go after school to pick up girls) and many of the Metra underpasses.

By the time he was approached by Desie and Sensei about the 53rd Street wall in 1989, Gonzalez was a student at the SAIC. He ended up giving the kids back their paint to make them stop whining, and then let them show him their newfound spot.

They began painting, with Gonzalez giving them tips on how to make their pieces look good. A few other members of SB Crew put their marks on the alley, but then they, as well as Desie and Sensei, moved on to bigger and better things. They still came

back every now and then to do some maintenance: putting up small pieces and painting over the shoddier tags left by amateurs.

“We left it to the toys,” Gonzalez said.

T

he toys inherited it. Around 2006, a few kids from Hyde Park started a graffiti crew—IDC—whose name, like that of any good crew, has come to mean many things, such as “I Define Creative” or “I Destroy Chicago.” It depends on who’s spelling it out.

The crew was founded primarily by the late Chris Gary and a couple friends while they were taking art classes at Gallery 37, through CPS’s after-school Advanced Art Program. It was the winter, and they were juniors in high school.

“I guess they were just sitting around in painting class and talking about how they wanted to start a graffiti crew,” said Shawn Bullen. “They started throwing out names and the first name that came up was I.D., for—I believe it was for ‘Indirect Disrespect,’ or something like that, or ‘I Dream.’ It pretty much just came out of nothing, people just sitting around coming up with ideas, and, you know, making meaning out of a couple letters.”

Bullen was introduced to the group when Gary saw him scribbling on the bleachers during a Laboratory School basketball game and invited him outside for a smoke.

“So man, I’m trying to start this graf crew,” Gary said.

“I didn’t know jack shit about graffiti,

GRAFFITI

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Hundreds of artists from all over the world have left their marks on the wall. but Chris was kind of the one who introduced it to me,” said Bullen. “He was like, ‘You wanna be in this?’ So I said yes, and some weird-ass graffiti crew started and now it’s an art collective and people think its real.”

Bullen became one of the main leaders of IDC, and the 53rd Street wall was their de facto home base. They began hanging out there after school and on weekends.

It was a safe spot to get stoned or drink without getting hassled too much by cops, but there was a much more obvious draw: a constantly evolving and changing gallery of graffiti artwork.

“The graf culture has a built in curatorial system,” said Eric Guo. He is friends with many of the people in IDC, and when he’s not working at Hyde Park Produce he is gathering funding for public art projects.

“It’s a whole lot of politics of course, but it’s about gaining respect through technical skill, artistic content, and creativity.

The writers are the curators, covering up whatever they don’t like. Other writers in turn can cover those pieces up, etc. The ‘curatorial integrity’ is built up over time through this ongoing cycle of creation and destruction.”

The members and friends of IDC jumped feet first into this cycle, throwing up tags on the 53rd Street wall and critiquing, in their own way, the artwork that would appear on it.

“We would just talk a lot of shit about other people’s artwork to the point where it was like, well, we better step our game up so we can actually do something as good as this,” Bullen said. “Working towards being good enough to even paint on that wall

was this huge thing.” They sketched all day long, coming up with elaborate ideas for their first big piece.

Bullen and his crew finally painted something on the wall, in the summer of 2007. But when they went behind the McDonald’s the next day to revel in their artwork, the guy whose piece they had painted over had already returned the favor.

“We all came back, all pissed off and sad, and we were like, ‘Man, it’s the greatest thing we ever did and it’s painted over in a day,’ ” he said, chuckling.

The guy showed up later and gave them a hard time for having painted over his piece the day before. They talked it out, however, and made peace.

“He eventually was like, ‘Yeah, but I respect what you guys do cause I can see that you’re getting a lot better,’ ” recalls

Bullen. “Graffiti, in a lot of ways, is a bunch of guys trying to be tough who are really a bunch of softies who just wanna make art and get to know each other.”

“The wall brought a lot of very talented graffiti artists from all over Chicago together,” said one Hyde Park tagger, who asked to remain anonymous. “It was usually a friendly gathering—I don’t know of too much graffiti crew beef. But it was a way for amateurs to get better—you get to learn from watching other people paint, because painting, in itself, is its own art. And you got to see different styles. It’s a pretty, like, family-oriented community if you stay out of the trouble.”

The IDC family grew up and spread out across the continent, with members going to Canada, San Francisco, and the East Coast. I asked Bullen how “real” IDC can

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be with its membership spread so thinly.

“If a company had no office and no registration but was very active and many people knew about them and they were getting paid under that name—occasionally—it would be real,” he said with a laugh.

“I always say, it’s as vague as an idea and as real as a company.”

Chris Gary, IDC’s founder, died in a freak boating accident in August of 2010.

He was known as ‘Crusto,’ ‘Rusty,’ or ‘Rustoleum’ to the walls he wrote on. After Gary’s memorial service, Bullen brought people behind the McDonald’s so they could pay tribute in the graffiti community’s traditional way: creating a memorial in paint. He set out a big bag filled with spray paint cans and let people draw whatever they want. Many people who partook in the alleyway memorial had never tagged a wall before. Portraits of Gary and tributes such as “In Rust We Trust” were put up. Messages from loved ones, interspersed with Gary’s many monikers, dotted the wall from end to end.

“The wall was completely covered in his name and images of him, and it stayed that way for months—no other artists touched it,” Alice O’Keefe, a friend of Gary’s, told me in a Facebook message.

“Every year on August 6, Chris’ death date, I lay some flowers there.”

Bullen told me that a guy who had once threatened to beat him and Gary up for painting over his piece near the Metra tracks came by the memorial to paint and pay his respects.

Each year since Gary’s death, the greater IDC community has come together to celebrate his life at the wall. This past summer they had a party and over a hundred people showed up. “The cops came through and they didn’t even care,” Bullen said. “They just told us to try and keep it down.”

on his alley.

The promise of impermanency that mark“Usually there would be regular changes, because one group would follow on another group, and paint with rollers, comes with each piece is being and I noticed that people would come with plans,” he told me. “It wasn’t just all sponthey had worked out what they made good on in a profound way— taneous, were gonna do.” the years, Check’s garage has all graffiti looks the same when it’s beenOver tagged more than a few times, but the next day kids would come and paint over white. Now, he says, “It’s understood broken up, spread across a large pile itthatin you don’t do that.”

I asked Check what he thinks should happen in light of the wall’s demolition. of rubble.

“I really think that a space should be

I

n the 53rd Street wall’s heyday in the nineties, paint ran from Kimbark to Blackstone—on both sides of the alley. Now the painted area is just the northernmost wall of what is now the Mobil gas station property. A little over 120 feet long, it runs from the building that houses The Sit Down restaurant to the parking lot of MAC Property Management’s offices.

The entirety of the wall, and the adjacent gas station and parking lots, are set to be demolished this winter in order to make way for Vue53, a hotly contested high-rise development. The building, at thirteen stories, will have retail stores on its first floor with entrances facing 53rd Street; the back of the building—where the wall is currently—will be used for truck deliveries. The development is backed by the University of Chicago—it’s another step in 53rd Street’s controversial makeover, which is gradually making Hyde Park’s center a much flashier place.

The neighborhood also used to be a much rougher place than it is today. One of Chicago’s most famous gangs, the Blackstone Rangers, now known as the Black Peace Stone Nation, or the Stones, was started in neighboring Woodlawn and still has many members who live in the area.

10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY NOVEMBER 27, 2013

They were some of the first to deface the city’s walls, along with other gangs—it was a way to mark territory and spread influence.

“The first people to hit it were the gangbangers,” Gonzalez said of the 53rd Street wall.

That’s the unromantic version of the wall’s genesis story: just another alleyway getting tagged by criminals. And there was no lone Creator, just a bunch of different guys who claim they were the first.

“It’s organic,” Gonzalez said. “It’s like the pizza or the hotdog. Ain’t nobody started it, but you have, like, twenty people claiming it.”

Joe Check has lived with his wife in a house on South Blackstone Avenue, right next to the alleyway’s eastern entrance, for forty years. For at least twenty-five, he said, people have been coming almost every day to paint the wall. A retired school social worker, Check remembers the almost simultaneous appearance of the distinctive symbols in the alley and in his students’ notebooks.

“It was similar styles of lettering, stuff that I can’t read,” he said with a smile. He watched with fascination as more and more young people began to leave their painted

provided,” he said. “It can be supported by the community.”

“I don’t know how many people will be impacted by the loss of the graf wall,” Eric Guo wrote. “The wall is filling an admittedly niche demand at the moment. I feel that the major consequence to the community at large will be that far fewer practiced writers would come to Hyde Park.”

For whatever reason—perhaps as opposition to the university’s corporatism, or because of its intellectual reach, or just due to a certain brand of cultural awareness its inhabitants share—Hyde Park owns a kind of subversion that is acutely represented by this wall of graffiti.

“It was not significant, and it still to this day is not significant. It was started by toys and maintained by my crew, and then it went back to the toys,” maintains Gonzalez. About fifteen years ago he moved to San Francisco, and his artwork is now found in galleries all over the world. He’s had pieces shown in South Korea, Germany, Bangkok, Italy, and at Miami’s Art Basel. He gives off the feeling that when he left Chicago (“It would be insane to live in the same place your whole life”) he left the entire city to the toys.

Writers from the older generations

GRAFFITI

Hyde Park owns a kind of subversion that is acutely still come by the wall every now and then “There’s other graf walls in the city. walls of the alley, leftover tags that were to paint the kinds of pieces that put other There’s plenty of bridges and abandoned not washed away as easily as others, and graffiti glyphs to shame. Hundreds of art- buildings to go and practice in,” Shawn you’ll see those, too. You’ll see the street represented by ists have painted something on that wall— Bullen told me. He will be back in Chicago lamps, the ones that give unparalleled, alpeople from all over Chicago and all over this January—he moved to San Francisco beit orange, lighting for the paintingstel. the world. But with the demolition of the a few years ago—to create a retrospective You can touch the chipped-cement top of this graffiti wall. camden bauchner

wall, the promise of impermanency that comes with each piece is being made good on in a profound way—all graffiti looks the same when it’s broken up, spread across a large pile of rubble.

“There is no category named Eternal,” Jon Pounds wrote me. “Nothing is permanent—do we really think Cloud Gate will exist in 500 years? OK—it’s permanent.

After twenty years, we’ll decide.”

A team of marketers and building designers at Mesa Development LLC. has already made the decision of the 53rd Street wall’s impermanency. They still face a small but vocal faction of resistance from the community, but there is one question that neither side has attempted to answer: will there be another wall?

of the 53rd Street wall, a painted epitaph.

This summer he’s going to be running a three-month long project to bring more public art to the South Side called—what else?—“I Decorate Chicago.”

“I figure life will go on normally,” he said.

W

hen you visit the alleyway behind where the closed Mobil gas station is, where the McDonald’s used to be, where a 135-foot building may soon rise, you’ll see flakes of paint littering the ground next to the wall.

You’ll see the cleansing gray paint, the canvas on which a piece has come to life— someone will reapply it there soon. There are some vague marks on the northern

the low wall, and cut yourself on it if you’re not careful.

“That’s just a regular wall that would get tagged or bombed,” Gonzalez informed me. He added, with a little more heart, “It has many stories, I’m sure.”

At the end of our conversation, Bullen left me with this image: when they tear the wall down, you’ll be able to see the paint strata on the wall’s surface, padding its northern face like a horizontal tell.

“There’s inches upon inches of paint there,” he said.

NOVEMBER 27, 2013 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

MUSIC

Screaming the Clarinet Anat Cohen teaches and performs jazz’s lost instrument at the Logan Center

BY BESS COHEN

T

aking center stage in the Logan Performance Hall, Anat Cohen evoked the image of earlier leading ladies of jazz: of Billie, Ella, or Dinah standing in front of her band, about to sing you a story. And when she raised her clarinet to her lips, she might as well be singing.

Out flowed the story, the carefully crafted emotions of a virtuoso, but filtered carefully through a skinny black horn raised high in the air.

On a few occasions, Cohen raised her hand to shield her eyes from the spotlight, commenting at one point, in her thick Israeli accent, “it feels like an immigration department.”

Cohen is no stranger to the spotlight.

She has been voted “Clarinetist of the Year” by the Jazz Journalists Association for the last six years. She has released and co-released eleven albums since 2004, performs regularly at jazz festivals around the world and in New York City clubs, and is widely regarded as a true jazz star on both clarinet and saxophone.

As part of this year’s Hyde Park Jazz Festival, Cohen played an astonishing midnight duet with Brazilian guitarist Douglas Lora. That night, Rockefeller Chapel felt like an intimate gathering of old friends, but tonight her performance took on a completely different, but equally evocative, character.

Cohen is constantly moving, changing levels with variations in pitch and volume.

She sways in more contemplative pieces, dances through more upbeat numbers, her clarinet an extension of her arms. Her bright red fingernails popped up and down the horn and out from her black draped blouse, her dark curls bouncing with them.

She sometimes chatted with the pianist while the drummer soloed, or vice versa. She frequently stepped away from

the front of the stage to observe, with a look both of pride and of pure enjoyment, celebrating what her band mates do as individuals. In a master class after her performance, Cohen stressed the necessity of “choosing the people who make you sound like who you are.”

Her song choices demonstrate the various sides of her personality as well.

“Anat’s Dance” by pianist Jason Lindner seemed like an homage to the cohesion of the group. When Cohen introduced “All Brothers” by drummer Daniel Freedman, she clarified that it was not just for her two biological brothers Yuval and Avishai— with whom she plays as The 3 Cohens— but for everyone: sisters, brothers, all of us.

She concluded, “I ask you to do something nice for somebody today…even if it is just a smile.”

The set also brought together Brazilian choro music and more classic jazz, with two pieces by Brazilian composer Milton Nascimento, paired with “Nightmare” by Artie Shaw and Edith Piaf ’s “La Vie En Rose.”

Cohen’s final solo on “La Vie en Rose” was reminiscent of Ella Fitzgerald’s 1957 “Air Mail Special.” She jumped from musical allusion to complete improvisation and back, without a breath or pause or thought, and finally concluded in a slower ascent to a pitch that strained the upward limits of the instrument itself.

What Cohen does is not old-fashioned, though some would consider her instrument an anachronism on its own.

There are, of course, masters of jazz clarinet from the golden days of yore—Benny Goodman, Sidney Bechet, Artie Shaw— but wielding a clarinet at the front of a jazz quartet is something of an anomaly today.

There is a particularly vehement argument against the clarinet as a jazz instrument,

12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY NOVEMBER 27, 2013

which Ms. Cohen cites as the reason she put down the clarinet in favor of the saxophone as a teenager.

During a master class after her performance, dressed and holding herself more casually, Cohen decried this trend. “As long as the teachers tell the students the clarinet is not a part of jazz, we are hopeless. I will fight for it. I will yell.”

Kamila Muhammad, whose tight curls create the same shape as Cohen’s, was called upon to participate in the master class and has also been told that the clarinet does not have a role in jazz music. A graduate of Whitney Young Magnet High School in Chicago, she is now a sophomore studying the clarinet at Northwestern under the tutelage of Victor Goines, the prominent jazz saxophonist and clarinetist who sat behind her.

Kamila has played clarinet for ten years and knows how a master class is supposed to go. “I play for her…and then she rips into me.” She admitted that Cohen is an idol of hers and, unsurprisingly, she seemed nervous.

After Cohen answered a few questions and declared that she was a very informal person to the small audience assembled in Logan’s Performance Pent House, Kamila and a blues guitarist named Derek stepped up to play. The two had never met before and exchanged only a few words to decide that they would play “Bag’s Groove,” a simple, blues-based tune made famous by Miles Davis’s quintet in the mid-fifties.

Kamila and Derek made a funny pair, she dressed in business casual and he in just khakis and sneakers. Kamila closed her eyes and Derek smiled to himself as they passed the focus between themselves wordlessly, though not entirely seamlessly.

After playing a few choruses, their eyes agreed upon an end, and the audience

marveled at what they had been able to create with so little knowledge of one another and such subtle communication as they went along.

“Communication is the hardest thing in any situation,” Cohen told them. “With music, with friends, with lovers, with your dog.” She agreed that it was hard but essential to “let go of my ideas and go to this new musical moment,” encouraging them to “treat it as a gift.”

Beyond communication, Ms. Cohen stressed the importance of being conscious of every sound, “even of what happens to a note when you’re done playing. Does it evaporate?” she challenged them.

What followed was consistent with Kamila’s prediction. “Let’s do some exercises...that will make you uncomfortable to become comfortable,” Cohen began. Each minor suggestion she made—a change in volume, octave, articulation—made a world of difference in the expression of what might otherwise have become a repetitive melody.

When they began again, Cohen stopped them. “No tapping,” she nagged and pointed at Kamila’s foot, her built-in metronome.

These comments from Cohen illustrated a larger struggle to reconcile her classical training with jazz’s instinct for improvisation and informality.

“My teacher told me you can’t play jazz and classical, but you should be able to do both,” she said. “It’s all music.”

What distinguishes jazz, Cohen says, is that “you want to be able to scream into the instrument, you want to cry into it, to laugh.” Indeed, she combines the technique of the “legit school” with the screaming and dancing and laughing she does when the clarinet is not poised at her lips.

BOOKS

Reign of the Tiny Dancer

BY JAKE BITTLE

C

hicago’s mayoral office has long been home to larger-than-life characters: since the second World War it has seen two unstoppable Richard Daleys, the iconic Harold Washington, and now one Rahm Emanuel, the energetic “tiny dancer” who swooped back into Chicago after serving as President Obama’s chief of staff. Even though we are hardly halfway through Emanuel’s term, we can already see that he, too, will make the history books. What history will say, however, is another matter.

Veteran journalist Kari Lydersen in her new book, “Mayor 1%,” has already stepped into history’s ring. Lydersen, who has written about Chicago for The Washington Post and The Economist, among many other publications, argues that we will remember Emanuel for his economic elitism and his neglect of the needs of the ninety-nine percent. After tracking Emanuel’s eventful rise to mayoral power through Congress and the Obama administration, Lydersen profiles the various interest groups and populations Emanuel has slighted and stomped on during his two years in office.

The eighty-five pages Lydersen spends profiling Emanuel’s pre-mayoral life (including his years spent campaigning for Bill Clinton and on Wall Street) don’t break much new ground, and, indeed, are mostly compiled from biographies and news stories that others have already written. But then the book turns mostly to Lydersen’s first-hand reporting. She lays out a litany of Emanuel’s mistakes, covering his offenses against the mental health movement, the protestors who picketed the 2011 NATO conference, the CPS teachers’ unions, the janitors and workers at O’Hare Airport, and the taxpayers who should have been the rightful beneficiaries of the city’s TIF development funds.

Lydersen tells the story of each of these groups, focusing on memorable characters and the struggles of unions and communities: these include Karen Lewis, the all-star leader of the teachers’ unions, and the late Helen Morley, the fearless matriarch of the mental health movement. For much of the book, Emanuel is actually offstage: Lydersen spends a great deal of time giving oppressed groups a chance to make themselves heard.

By far the best and most clearly argued

chapter is the one on the mental health movement, to whom the book is dedicated. Lydersen shows—citing individual stories of loss and strife, as well as larger financial statistics about how little money the closings saved the city—that by closing six mental health clinics across the city, Emanuel wrecked the lives of both individuals and communities while failing to establish any sort of meaningful dialogue with his constituents about the closings.

Here she gives some of the most biting indictments of Emanuel in the whole book— or anywhere, for that matter.

The chapter on the janitors at O’Hare, a jarring story drawn along clear battle lines, is also argued with clarity and power.

Lydersen relates how the hardworking janitors at O’Hare were laid off by Emanuel, who skated around the unions in order to hire a cheaper non-Chicago contractor to do the airport’s janitorial work.

But while the other chapters are compelling and filled with memorable characters, too, their arguments are not as tightly constructed. Lydersen often does a good job of explaining how Emanuel is able to avoid confrontation and debate with citizens on certain issues, but fails to explain why Emanuel is actually wrong. The debate over the motives of the teachers’ union, for instance, is far from closed: there are many different opinions about whether the unions are a productive or a destructive force for the school system on the whole.

Many times, however, Lydersen does not mention the argument of either side, but rather narrates the (often slippery) progress of the debate itself. This paints a portrait of Emanuel as a neglectful and often unfair leader, but does not always convince the reader that Emanuel’s policies are necessarily the wrong ones.

Still, the strength of its accusations (and the quality of the research that backs them up) makes “Mayor 1%” an important work. It is opinionated yet comprehensive, and even if it does not prove that Emanuel is wrong about every issue, it will last because it has managed to give a voice to those who have long been denied one. In many ways, it is as much about us as it is about our mayor.

“Mayor 1%,” Kari Lydersen. Haymarket Books. 220 pages.

NOVEMBER 27, 2013 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

ANIMATION

The Spooky Ones Chris Sullivan’s exploration of darkness in animation

T

o create his animated film “Consuming Spirits,” Chris Sullivan grasped a needle and prodded at grotesque, vividly colored puppets—which were drawn on paper sandwiched in layers of glass—for fifteen years. Millimeters at a time, twenty-four frames every second, Sullivan brought his characters to life— or, some sort of life. He rolled their paper eyes, bloodshot with colored pencil. He twitched their paper hands, drenched in hangnails, withered with varicose veins; he twirled their paper fingers about cracked cups of paper coffee.

Divided into five parts, the film centers around three characters in northern Appalachia: varicose vein-stippled Earl Gray, whose advice on his gardening radio program drips with meaning; middle-aged, bloodshot-eyed Gentian Violet, who typesets at the newspaper when not caring for her suicidal cancer-ridden mother; and Victor Blue, voiced by Sullivan himself, an ambitionless man who clumsily attempts romance with his coworker Gentian.

“I know: I’m pretty ugly,” Victor coos to Gentian. “And, well, you’re pretty ugly too—that’s why I love you.”

Gradually, these imperfect characters’ lives begin to converge: through corpses in deer-suits declared shamans by local museums, and florets of Destroying Angel mushrooms; through bed-ridden nuns, reclaimed pick-up trucks, and bottles of Allagash beer.

Sullivan, who refers to himself not as an animator but “a filmmaker who animates,” constructed a vast, meticulous world that oozes with detail. On Thurs-

isabel ochoa gold

BY ISABEL OCHOA GOLD

day and Friday evenings, when he visited the University of Chicago to promote his film, the vats of sharply defined minutiae that made up his fictional world seemed to permeate the world of the audience as well.

In a dimmed classroom, members of Fire Escape Films listened to Sullivan while picking at complementary samosas with frail sporks. They rolled crumbs between their thumbs before precariously pouring on fuchsia sauces. Sullivan himself tugged at his shirt, a graphic tee depicting the Italian cartoon chicken Calimero. “E’ un’ingiustizia però!” the shirt claimed: “It is an injustice, though!”

“I like to have people fidget with things,” Sullivan would later tell the students. “I like to have them twitch. No one actually ever just sits still and talks.”

Sullivan paused, and tugged again at the sleeve of his shirt. “Well, that is, except when you’re breaking up with someone, I suppose.”

Sullivan showed clips from his current animation project, an exploration of life and relationships in the International Space Station. At one point, he paused the film and pointed to suspended steamy clouds that spewed from characters’ mouths and bodies. Sullivan has been thinking a lot about steam lately.

“These clouds were actually inspired from a road trip I had a long time ago, in the dead of winter,” Sullivan said. “We passed this one cat that was recently run over. Steam was flowing so profusely from its stomach. It was somewhat beautiful—it was awful, of course. But it was also beautiful.”

14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY NOVEMBER 27, 2013

Much of “Consuming Spirit’s” details are culled from the very details that envelop Sullivan’s own life: the plaque on the shaman’s display in the film’s museum is essentially equivalent to a plaque Sullivan found in the Field Museum. The watercolor-veined Earl Gray’s gardening radio show was heavily influenced by rural-Illinois-produced gardening shows that Sullivan himself would regularly watch.

“One thing I’ve found about these gardening programs, or programs like Car Talk: they don’t actually want to talk about mushrooms. They don’t want to talk about cars. They just want to talk, period. But no one can call up and say, ‘Hello, yes, my heart is breaking.’ They say, ‘Well, I seem to have this fungus on my tree.’ Or they say, ‘Yes, I’ve got this Volkswagen that’s acting up:’ but they’re all metaphors.” Sullivan paused, and looked down at his hands, not notoriously veined. He rubbed at his knuckles. “It’s nice to pretend.”

Later, Sullivan resumed pondering the urge for people to talk. “People like to talk; they will say anything. So much of what we say [is] just little adages from television or movies. It’s a bit disconcerting: ‘Better safe than sorry.’ ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover.’ They’re all the same. They mean nothing. We fill our lives with just stuff. If I go to a party filled with plumbers, the conversation all night would turn to plumbing.

And, okay, I’d find that completely trivial and ridiculous. But if I go to a party of filmmakers, we would only talk about film, which is probably just as trivial and ridiculous as plumbing.”

In Sullivan’s film, the characters do

distract themselves with talk of fungus, of dying trees. But the substance underneath leaks free from every bushel of shepherd’s purse. Victor calls to the radio show and asks about taming a deer in his backyard, but quickly reveals his urge to run away and live in the wild with the deer.

“It’s just...” Victor wavers on the phone, attempting to stuff books and figurines into a cart. “I have too much stuff— good stuff.”

More than any plot twist, what Sullivan would like you to care about are his characters—to love them for the imperfect, gruesome things that they are.

“Sometimes, when I watch bad films, particularly children’s films, the main characters yell to each other, ‘C’mon everyone, we’ve got to go to this planet to save Billy!’”

Sullivan shrugs. “Or not, you know?”

Instead, he admires the approach of John Cassavetes, “who says that life ‘just kind of happens to you.’’’

Much of the life that happened to Victor, Earl Gray, and others did in fact “just kind of happen” to Sullivan himself.

“Some things were prophetic: I did get divorced, and I did move into the house that I [raised] my children in.” Sullivan also grew up in a foster family in the presence of alcoholics.

“Yes, I think I’d say this is a historical fiction—” Sullivan paused, and grinned. “My own actual story, though, is much weirder.”

“But I’m actually not that dark of a person at all. I make dark art,” reassured Sullivan. “It’s those who write the snappy, witty stuff: they’re the spooky ones.”

VISUAL ARTS Human Rights Day Show URI-EICHEN Gallery is celebrating and challenging what it means to be a human in today’s world with the Human Rights Day Show, featuring a display of drawings by labor cartoonist Mike Konopacki. Konopacki has published six collections of his drawings; this exhibition will showcase drawings from his most recent collaboration with Paul Buhle and Howard Zinn on the comic-based history text “A People’s History of American Empire.” At 7:30pm, Joe Isobaker and Ruth Needleman, both activists, will lead a discussion on American Imperialism. Live music will be provided for those audience members not completely downtrodden by the continuing human struggles outlined and discussed at the event. URI-EICHEN Gallery, 2101 S. Halsted St. Friday, December 6, 6pm-10pm. (312)852-7717. uri-eichen.com (Katryce Lassle)

A Sherman Beck Retrospective The South Side Community Art Center will be honoring renowned South Side artist Sherman Beck in an upcoming retrospective, presenting a collection representative of Beck’s career from 1955 to the present. Starting in the late sixties, Beck was part of the radical AFRICOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), a group of artists whose mission was to join the black cultural movement through visual arts. Beck has been a working artist for most of his life—he still frequently exhibits his work—and the South Side is vastly better for knowing him. Join the SSCAC in paying tribute to one of the South Side’s most influential artists, and maybe even have a conversation with the man himself.

South Side Community Art Center, 3831 S. Michigan Ave. Through December 12. Wednesday-Friday, noon-5pm; Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, 1pm-5pm. (773)373-1026. southsidecommunityartcenter.com (Katryce Lassle)

In the Hood Cesar Conde, a Filipino-American Chicago artist, transforms personal experiences into artworks conscious of the human condition, and based in a discussion of individual uniqueness and mutual understanding. His next project, “In The Hood—Portraits of African American Professionals,” examines the American perception of racial stigmas in reference to the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, a black Florida teenager killed while wearing a hoodie. The exhibit features several oversized portraits of black professionals wearing hoodies, painted against stark black backgrounds.

The presentation implores viewers to juxtapose racial identities imposed by society with the common humanity of all people, regardless of their attire or race. 33 Contemporary Gallery, Zhou B Art Center, 1029 W. 35 St. Through December 14. Monday-Friday, 10am-5pm. Free. (708)837-4534. 33collective.com (Olivia Adams)

Interiors and Exteriors Pre-World War II surrealism and post-war avant-garde, while spurred by quite different sentiments in France and abroad, remain tightly bound in art history. The former paved the way for the latter in many ways, with the era’s prewar anticipation and post-war dejection both pressing artists (and ordinary citizens) to find new and creative ways to escape, modify, or challenge individual realities. Curated by UofC art history PhD students Jennifer Cohen and Marin Sarvé-Tarr and featuring works from the Smart’s collections as well as the UofC and Northwestern libraries, the exhibition confronts the complex differences that emerged at the time between personal expression and political life. While art and politics have changed drastically since the second World War, “Interiors and Exteriors” is sure to highlight the common threads in artistic expression that have endured.

The Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. December 17-March 16. Tuesday-Wednesday, 10am-5pm; Thursday, 10am-8pm; Friday-Sunday, 10am-5pm. Free. (773)702-0200. smartmuseum.uchicago.edu

STAGE & SCREEN Third Ward TX The Rebuild Foundation’s weaving together of art, community, and urban planning has yielded visible innovation on the South Side, but more than a decade before founder Theaster Gates practiced in and on Greater Grand Crossing, Houston artists were exploring many of the same ideas.

Project Row Houses in Houston’s Third Ward began in 1993 as effort by local artists to transform their community via art, with a block and a half long lot of abandoned row houses as their material. “Third Ward TX,” a 2007 PBS documentary deals with both the empowerment the effort yielded and the

ARTS CALENDAR unexpected and unwelcome shifts in demographic that the real estate market offered in response to a newly habitable zone of city. Rebuild project Black Cinema House shows the film in conjunction with the school of the Art Institute of Chicago, in a setting uniquely charged to grapple with questions of what it means to use art to transform a community.

Black Cinema House, 6901 S. Dorchester. Sunday, December 1, 4pm-6pm. Free. RSVP recommended. blackcinemahouse.org

Solistas Open Mic Three-year-old musical showcase “Get Off the Couch” this summer began a new, twice-monthly series, “Get Off the Couch Presents.” The mobile event jumps out of the living room to traverse Chicago’s neighborhoods, widening the showcase with an open-mic format, scattering regulars among local newcomers. With its upcoming Pilsen “Solistas” show, the series will break-away from its focus on the singer-songwriting set to welcome spoken word, in a clear aim to push the open-mic format outside its usual, soulful-staring, beanie-wearing bounds. Recent Pilsen addition La Catrina Café will host, filling its bright and cozy space with the sounds of broken hearts. Come in from the cold for a hot drink and a live spin on the coffeeshop soundtrack. La Catrina Café, 1011 W. 18th St. Tuesday, December 3, 7:30pm.

(312)434-4040. (Hannah Nyhart)

An Iliad Already in the title a disarming modesty is in place. It’s intimate: an Iliad, this Iliad. Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare—the duo who adapted the twenty-four-book epic poem “The Iliad” into the ninety-five-minute one-man show “An Iliad”—aren’t interested in contending with Homer for the definite article. The drama of this performance, directed

by Court Theatre’s Charles Newell, doesn’t derive from the struggle between the Trojans and the Greeks, or even from the rage of Achilles, but from the anxiety of one man who, having represented the bloodshed, the waste, and the tragedy of the Trojan War thousands of times across thousands of years, finds himself straining to make the ancient story present to us—and to himself—again. See full review online. Court Theatre, 5525 S. Ellis Ave. Through December 8.

See site for showtimes and prices. (773)753-4472. courttheatre. org (Spencer Mcavoy)

A Christmas Memory and the Thanksgiving Visitor Strict seasonalists—those sticks in the mud who insist on celebrating popular holidays in order—will have a new thorn in their side this winter, as Provision Theater presents its adaptation of Truman Capote’s short stories “A Christmas Memory” and “The Thanksgiving Visitor” at the same time.

The charming tales are loosely autobiographical, and detail the close friendship between a young boy and his elderlybut-young-at-heart cousin. The show opens November 20, but those who like to gripe about the modern elongation of the “Christmas Season” can hold off until they deem Christmas cheer appropriate: the run will continue through December 29, when every mall in America will be well on their way to hawking Valentines merch. Provision Theater, 1001 W. Roosevelt Rd. Through December 29. See site for showtimes. $10-$32. (312)455-0066. provisiontheater.org (Hannah Nyhart)

A Christmas Carol, Abridged In an increasingly blustery winter, you can’t blame Dream Theatre for keeping cozy in their wheelhouse. The company once again displays its talent for reinventing the classics, but their rendition of a Christmas Carol will keep closer to the original than their typical, enthusiastically contorted fare.

Rachel Martindale directs a rendition that takes its words directly from Dickens’ 170-year-old holiday tale. Running at just over an hour, the show keeps the focus on those words by dressing them sparsely. Three actors—Stephen Fedo, Christian Isely, and Rachel Martindale—perform amid minimal furnishings. Dream Theatre creative engine Jeremy Menekseoglu does not appear to be featured, unless he’ll be making an appearance in abridged form as Tiny Tim. Dream Theatre Company, 556 W. 18th St. November 29-December 29.

See site for showtimes. $13-$18. (773)552-8616. dreamtheatrecompany.com (Hannah Nyhart)

MUSIC Chuck Inglish, Kings Dead, Tayyib Ali, Kidd Tha Chicagoan, ClarkAirlines The slow-and-smooth-as-molasses flow of Chuck Inglish will be gracing Reggies’ Rock Club on Thursday, December

5. The rapper, who forms one half of the eighties revivalist duo, the Cool Kids, is also an exceedingly innovative producer who helped update the boom-bap sound with a low-end twist, tailor-made for hip-hop’s millennial generation. Inglish will be joined on Thursday by Kings Dead—the Boston-based collegiate rap duo formerly known as The Dean’s List, along with Philly’s Tayyib Ali, and the local underdog, Kidd Tha Chicagoan (not to be confused with Chance collaborator and crooner, BJ the Chicago Kid) and, lastly, the aspiring-ball-player-turned-rapper, ClarkAirlines.

The show could end up being a hodge-podge display of hiphop acts who really have very little to do with one another.

Still, this reviewer holds a small sliver of hope that the five performers somehow end up uniting and forming a rapping megazord of disparate dopeness. Reggies Rock Club, 2105 S. State St. Thursday, December 5, 7pm. $12-$15. 18+. (312)9490120. reggieslive.com (Zach Goldhammer)

Rudresh Mahanthappa Have you ever wished that you could hobnob with your favorite jazz musicians and compare notes about your favorite records? Hyde Park Jazz Festival and University of Chicago Presents Jazz at the Logan have teamed up to make your dreams a reality. Next Thursday they will be premiering their new Listening Sessions program, in which they invite performers to Logan’s ninth floor Performance Penthouse to informally present and discuss records of their choosing.

This week, Rudresh Mahanthappa, famed alto saxophonist and scholar of Indian Carnatic music, will be coming to hang out with the crowd at Logan. Don’t miss your chance to schmooze with a jazz master. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., Penthouse Salon. Thursday, December 5, 7pm. Free.

(773)702-2787. (Zach Goldhammer)

Syleena Johnson In the mid-nineties, the perpetually almost-famous Chicago soul singer Syl Johnson was seeking a renaissance of recognition. After having his songs sampled in countless numbers of hip-hop tracks, sixty-year-old Syl wanted the rap generation to know who he was. In order to win over the younger audience, Johnson pulled his then-eighteen-year-old daughter, Syleena, into the recording studio for his 1994 comeback album, “Back In The Game” and for the duet follow-up, “This Time Together For Father and Daughter.” Nearly two decades later, Syleena seems to have inherited her father’s knack for bittersweet success. Despite six well-received solo albums, she is best known for the hook on Kanye West’s 2004 hit, “All Falls Down.” The chorus was originally intended to be a sample of Lauryn Hill’s “Mystery of Iniquity”; Syleena was just hired to re-record Hill’s part after West was unable to clear the sample. Johnson’s latest album, “Chapter V: Underrated” underscores the singer’s bitter feelings about her tepid success. Will Syleena now have the chance to find her own fame, or will she continue to perform in the shadow of others? The Shrine, 2109 S. Wabash Ave. Friday, December 6, 9pm. $15. (312)753-5700. theshrinechicago.com (Zach Goldhammer)

Handel’s Messiah Written in 1741 and performed in Hyde Park annually since

1930, Handel’s “Messiah” returns to Rockefeller Chapel this December. Chronicling the birth, passion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ, the three-part oratorio uses baroque melody style coupled with text from the King James Bible and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, and is one of the most performed choral works of all time. The chapel is completely packed every year with audience, orchestra, and two choirs—the University Chorus, Motet Choir, and the Rockefeller Chapel Choir. The resulting sound is both deafening and undeniably glorious. The oratorio features soloists soprano Kimberly Jones, alto J’nai Bridges, tenor Trevór Mitchell, and bass Will Liverman and is conducted

by James Kallembach. Rockefeller Chapel, 5850 S. Woodlawn Ave. Friday, December 6, 8 pm; Sunday, December 8, 3 pm. $5$45. (773)702-2100. arts.uchicago.edu (Bailey Zweifel)

The Callahan Foundation Presents: A Tribute to the Motown Greats On Saturday, December 7, the UIC forum will be hosting a swanky tribute to America’s most legendary and influential soul music label, Motown Records. Herb “the Kool Gent” Kent, Chicago’s beloved and ubiquitous radio personality, will be hosting the event, which will feature a cast of thirty-two performers paying tribute to the golden years of Berry Gordy’s label and its stars. Emerging star Avery Sunshine will also be performing. The price of admission for the event is a bit steep—tickets range from $45 for basic access to $85 for VIP—but the cost ultimately goes to a good cause. The Callahan Foundation, which is putting on the event, is raising money for the “Stop the Violence Scholarship Fund.” The fund, which was founded last year in honor of Hadiyah Pendleton, seeks to college scholarships to nine high-achieving high school students in financial need.

Proceeds will also go to more general charity work done by the Foundation, which also hosts a toy and coat drive during the holiday season. UIC Forum, 725 W. Roosevelt Road.

Saturday, December 7. $45-$85. (312)413-9875. uic.edu/depts/ uicforum (Zach Goldhammer)

Hopera: Hip Hop Opera, Holiday Spectacular “I pull out my Beretta / He walks up to the closet / He comes up to the closet / Now he’s at the closet / Now he’s opening the closet…” For those of you who reveled in the 2005 hiphop masterpiece that was R. Kelly’s infamous “Trapped in the Closet” thirty-three-part series, another interpretation of hopera, or hip-hop opera, is coming to Chicago for the fifth year. “Hopera: A Hip-Hop Opera,” will feature performances by professional musicians from the Hoperaworld Entertainment group as well as Chicagoland performers drawn through open auditions, which were held last month.

The entire performance will be produced, conducted, and directed by Adrian Dunn, a highly accomplished award-winning singer and producer. Dunn has studied and worked internationally in the field of operatic music, including stints in the Centro Studi Lirica Opera Festival in Novafeltria, Italy, as well as the Sibelius Academy of Music in Helsinki, Finland. St. Martin’s Church, 5700 W. Midway Park. Friday, December 13, 7:30pm. $10 advance, $15 door, $8 student. (312)927-8409. hoperaworld.com (Olivia Adams)

WHPK Rock Charts WHPK 88.5 FM is a nonprofit community radio station at the University of Chicago. Once a week the station’s music directors collect a book of playlist logs from their Rock-format DJs, tally up the plays of albums added within the last few months, and rank them according to popularity that week.

Compiled by Rachel Schastok and Charlie Rock Artist / Album 1. Throwing Muses / Purgatory/Paradise 2. Graham Lambkin & Jason Lescalleet / Photographs 3. Oozing Wound / Retrash 4. Purling Hiss / Paisley Montage 5. Spray Paint / Spray Paint 6. White Fence / Live in San Francisco 7. Hunx & His Punx / Street Punk 8. Whores / Clean 9. Manatees / Neat Freak 10. Pizza Time / Quiero Mas 11. Gino and the Goons / Oh Yeah!

12. Slurp’s Up / text me when you get this 13. Running / Vaguely Ethnic 14. Skeletonwitch / Serpents Unleashed 15. Cleaners From Venus / Blow Away Your Troubles [reissue]

NOVEMBER 27, 2013 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

Perfect Holiday Gift!

SAVE 50% with a Family Pass Any group of four can attend up to five 2013-14 Family Matinees for a discounted rate of $75 ticketsweb.uchicago.edu 773.702.ARTS

Logan Center Family Saturdays Free art workshops and fun for the whole family every month!

PLUS: Family Matinees DEC 15 Holiday DIY Art Workshops JAN 18 Lee England Jr. FEB 22 Third Coast Percussion’s “The Color of Sound” MAR 22 Eth-Noh-Tec Storytellers APR 12 Interactive Workshop Day* No matinee MAY 31 “Fiddlin’ with Stories,” Charlotte Blake Alston & John Blake Jr. JUN 28 Wendy Clinard Dance’s “Chicago’s Watershed: A 156-Mile Choreography” JUL 12 Ase Youth Storytelling Concert Buy Family Passes and register for free workshps at ticketsweb.uchicago.edu!

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