SSW 03.11.15

2 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 11, 2015

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is a nonprofit newsprint magazine written for and about neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. We publish in-depth coverage of the arts and issues of public interest alongside oral histories, poetry, fiction, interviews, and artwork from local photographers and illustrators. Started as a student paper at the University of Chicago, the South Side Weekly is now an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side, and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists.

Editor-in-Chief Bea Malsky Managing Editor Hannah Nyhart Deputy Editors John Gamino, Meaghan Murphy Politics Editors Osita Nwanevu, Rachel Schastok Music Editor Jake Bittle Stage & Screen Olivia Stovicek Editor Visual Arts Editor Lauren Gurley, Robert Sorrell Editor-at-Large Bess Cohen Contributing Editors Maha Ahmed, Lucia

Ahrensdorf, Christian

Belanger, Mari Cohen, Social Media Editor Web Editor

Emily Lipstein Sarah Claypoole

Visuals Editor Head Photographer Layout Editors

Ellie Mejia Luke White Adam Thorp, Baci Weiler

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

Max Bloom, Austin Brown,

Amelia Dmowska, Mark

Hassenfratz, Maira Khwaja,

Jeanne Lieberman, Zoe

Makoul, Olivia Myszkowski,

Jamison Pfeifer, Hafsa Razi,

Sammie Spector, Kari Wei Staff Photographers Camden Bauchner, Juliet

Eldred, Kiran Misra, Siddhesh Mukerji Staff Illustrators Jean Cochrane, Lexi

Drexelius, Wei Yi Ow,

Amber Sollenberger, Javier Suárez, Teddy Watler, Julie Wu

IN CHICAGO A Later Library A fortuitous national monument designation for Pullman? Check.

Simultaneous endorsements from the Tribune and Sun-Times days before the start of early voting? Check. A conveniently-timed decision on the Obama library? Not so fast. Rahm’s chances at winning a second term have been partially held aloft by a series of fortunate events, but the announcement of the location of the Obama Presidential Library will not be one of them. Sources told the Associated Press on Monday that the Obama Library Foundation, spooked by the mayor’s shaky standing in the polls and unwilling to politicize the process any further, has decided to wait until after the runoff on April 7 to reveal the chosen location of the presidential library instead of making an announcement later this month as originally planned. Monday did hold some good news for the administration on this front—the Chicago Plan Commission approved the transfer of land in Washington Park and Jackson Park to the city. If City Council approves the move, the UofC’s proposed sites in both locations will officially be in play.

Not So Fast Toward the end of last year, a study commissioned by the Tribune found that red-light cameras in Chicago, despite causing a fifteen percent decrease in angle and turning crashes, had actually caused a twenty-two percent increase in rear-end collisions, presumably as a result of overzealous braking by drivers eager to avoid a fine. This

queering black history the norfolk expansion

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Clyde Schwab

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Shuwen Qian Harry Backlund

lost places in film and life

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Cover photo by David Schalliol.

It’s Spring Months into winter in Chicago, the fear begins that maybe this one will last forever, that it will be gray always, that the sun will only come out when it’s so cold it hurts. Maybe Lake Michigan will never thaw but will act as a giant ice block for fish, pollutants, and the occasional shipwreck. Brawls over dibs will turn into generational feuds. They’ll have to spray-paint the river on Saint Patrick’s Day. Take heart, fear not, unlock the door to the part of you that hopes. It just hit fifty degrees for the first time in months, and we’ve already changed wour clocks to follow the sun.

The sidewalks are puddled, the men are in shorts [The author saw one man, in one pair of shorts —Ed.] Everyone seems to have agreed to pretend that a temperature fifteen degrees colder than the legal minimum for a Chicago apartment is warm. In a week and a half “spring” is official, but it hasn’t been this hot since Christmas, and Rainbow Cone’s already open: it’s all melt from here.

IN THIS ISSUE Englewood’s residents would be able to breathe deeply, but not on 57th and Normal. andrew lovdahl...4

The paper is produced by an all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring, with breaks during April and December. Over the summer we publish monthly.

week, Rahm announced—in a shrewd concession either to statistics or voters—that red-light cameras at twenty-five intersections, mostly on the South Side, would be removed. Nevertheless, over 300 red-light cameras still remain throughout the city, making the program the largest of its kind in the nation. To add insult to injury, Chicago’s intersections also have the nation’s shortest yellow-light times, at three seconds on the dot.

“Do you engage with the environment, or do you just remain in the truck and continue to observe?” emma collins...8 after punk

My dad was a punk, now he’s a lawyer. Your dad could have been a punk, now he could be a lawyer too. willekes cronin...9

“We’re here to support LGBTQ people in the black community, and black people in the LGBTQ community.” jean cochrane and maha ahmed...10 the gospel of albertina walker

“People know my name all around the world, but here I’m just Albertina.” jamison pfeifer...12 all too human

This is his first collection of short stories, and the rhythms of the short form evade him. linus recht...13 the dgainz saga

“I want to show it’s colorful where we from too.” ryn seidewitz...14

potted plants, public parks

Allyson Packer is gripped in the tendrils of her own ambitious social practice. stephen urchick...16 freepu$$y and free angel

She’s pissed, and, unfortunately for her detractors, when angry she sounds nothing short of excellent. kari wei...17 real cops, real responsibility

House Bill 3932 would subject the UCPD, one of the largest private police forces in the country, to the Freedom of Information Act. zoe makoul...17 MARCH 11, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

The Norfolk Expansion

A

david schalliol

map will tell you that a neat line runs from Chinatown down How was it decided that to Englewood, straight as an arrow along Stewart Avenue and Canal Street, lightly defining the borders of Bridgeport, Englewood should be partially fed Canaryville, and Armour Square along the way. Experience will tell you otherwise.

The line is the great wall of Chicago: a formidable railroad emto private industry for its own good? bankment several yards high and often a whole block across. At any

BY ANDREW LOVDAHL

4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 11, 2015

given moment, somebody is probably passing through its echoey shadow, where sunlight has scarcely shone since the Industrial Revolution. Always the trains run overhead: coal cars, the clattering Metra, the Lake Shore Limited on its nightly Rust Belt tour. Their passage shakes loose an inexhaustible supply of detritus from the tunnel ceilings: pigeon down, muddy icicles, chips of rotten paint. In 2015, just as in 1915, South Siders have learned to live with its busy racket.

A different set of challenges begins at 47th Street, where the structure swells, practically becoming a neighborhood unto itself—in size, it approximates Chinatown. Inside sit piles of shipping containers, train tracks, and machines that shuffle the containers around.

Spreading both east and west, reaching over a quarter mile in width, the space maintains all the way to Garfield Boulevard. From above, this lends it the bulging appearance of an unfortunate mammal stuck

DEVELOPMENT

halfway through the bowels of a snake.

This is the Norfolk Southern Railway’s intermodal shipping yard, and it is not being digested. Quite the contrary—rail shipping is booming in America, and executives at Norfolk (a titan of eastern rail transportation, recently valued at eleven digits) have long been preoccupied with how to expand their Chicago yards.

According to a plan that was fully formed in 2008 and received the city’s emphatic blessing in 2013, the facility will spread south of Garfield by almost a hundred acres. The increased cargo capacity would give Norfolk’s operations a tremendous shot in the arm: more employees, more material, more noise, and more profit. The only thorn is that people still live in those hundred new acres, which comprise the northeastern corner of Englewood.

Every year the story makes a brief round through the news; every year, these articles take on a sharper tone of inevitability. But the neighborhood is still a neighborhood: houses still stand on the streets, and lights still come on in their windows in the late-winter nights.

Before Norfolk’s recent ambitions brought attention to this patch of the South Side, it was a place somewhat forgotten by time. It enjoyed a solitude born of peculiar city planning. Bounded snugly to the east and west by Norfolk viaducts only five minutes’ walk apart, and capped on the south by yet another viaduct, the area has few outlets to the world at large. This creates the feeling of a private courtyard or some alternate urban dimension, tucked secretly into a fold of the map like the middle of the trick page in Mad Magazine.

According to its inhabitants, this isolation bred peace of mind—a happy exception among the many woeful narratives of Chicago’s midcentury population crisis. “We’re all by ourselves,” one resident serenely explained to Tribune reporters in 2011.

“And nobody has bothered us.” Another went so far as to compare it to Mayberry, the neighborly setting of the Andy Griffith Show. Among the comely old frame houses and wide-open spaces, the brake-light sea of the Dan Ryan seems far away; so does Englewood’s commercial center, nearby at Halsted and 63rd.

H

istory has not furnished this subsection of Englewood with a name, but it seems to want one. As a stop-gap measure, sociologist and photog-

From one perspective, the Norfolk expansion is a model of civically responsible policy for land use and the accommodation of industry.

But from another, the events of the Area are unsettling for precisely the same reason: they might serve as a template for further projects under the banner of “necessary sacrifices.” rapher David Schalliol has taken to calling it “The Area.” A University of Chicago graduate student with far-flung interests, Schalliol learned about the Area’s crisis the old-fashioned way: by walking through it.

Realizing that a flurry of demolition activity was in progress in a small space, he began to investigate and meet residents “simply by spending time in the neighborhood.” His interest grew into a film project (also called “The Area”), which chronicles the neighborhood’s days of reckoning. A short teaser released in early 2013 displays the emotions prevailing at a time when the expansion project suddenly seemed like a concrete reality: dissent, dismay, resignation, and gallows-humor exuberance.

Onscreen, the Fourth of July rolls around. “It’s the last one,” muses one resident after another, each wondering who will be left to celebrate the holiday next year. But sorrows are drowned in the lavish incandescence of crate upon crate of fireworks, likely acquired across a certain state line. As the camera lingers on houses lit up by the strobing display, it will be a stony viewer who is not moved by a sudden flash-forward cut to footage of one of those houses quietly buckling at the hands of a Caterpillar.

Later in 2013, however, Norfolk sought to reject the stereotype of an arrogant private enterprise on the warpath against citizens. Its representatives stunned more or less everybody who was paying attention by announcing that the company would not only implement comprehensive environmental protections in and around its intermodal facility, but would also prepare a multimillion-dollar package of grants to a variety of neighborhood organizations.

Sherwood Park, for instance, received a donation toward its long-term upkeep; local elementary schools got funds to enrich science and technology education; a retired viaduct along 59th Street was deeded to those who will see it converted into a groundbreaking linear park.

In the years leading up to the 2013 announcement, organizations had expressed concerns about the expansion—Sustainable Englewood, the Resident Association of Greater Englewood, Blacks in Green, Englewood United Methodist Church, Northwestern University’s legal clinic, the Respiratory Health Association of Metropolitan Chicago, and more. Together they launched and sustained a campaign built on twin pillars of facts and feeling. Affronted residents drafted demands, appeals, and statements of principles. Medical experts were on hand to substantiate claims of health hazards, and legal staff caught City Hall in a trap of sorts by unearthing an earlier commitment to develop Englewood in a firmly residential direction. The city could not ignore this torrent of civic spirit. Municipal offices dragged their heels in approving Norfolk’s blueprints, and the company’s 2013 surprise announcement was the eventual result.

This event scattered the campaign’s coalitions. It was a great day for South Side environmental justice, but the silver lining had a cloud: Norfolk still wanted its hundred acres, and the city was more inclined than ever to agree. Englewood’s institutions were enriched, and its residents would be able to breathe deeply, but not on 57th and Normal. That was the deal, and to some extent it has burned bridges.

Sustainable Englewood and the office

of 20th Ward Alderman Willie Cochran exemplify the optimistic point of view.

Visitors to their respective websites will be hard-pressed to find a sour note in their discussion of the Norfolk saga. Cochran makes a clean-conscience statement in celebrating the expansion of “the transportation and logistics industry in the 20th Ward.”

Sustainable Englewood’s site celebrates its 2013 “Victory!” in forging “a positive and mutually beneficial partnership,” but describes the expansion itself as a done deal.

Neither organization responded to a request for comment on the fate of those still living in the Area.

What these residents are doing, largely, is buckling. Norfolk began buying private property for the expansion as early as 2008, speedily acquiring a majority of it from eager sellers who may or may not have understood the scope of the plans involved. At the time of the 2013 concessions, the company had about ninety percent of the occupied lots and one-hundred percent of the vacant ones, having bought the latter from the city.

But today, according to Robin Chapman, Norfolk’s director of public relations, the figures have hardly been revised. “We have acquired about ninety-five percent of the property needed to complete the project,” Chapman wrote in an email, “and have been in negotiations with the remaining property owners.”

Those owners—at least twenty in number—have assembled under a new banner, the Englewood Railway Coalition, with an ardent and vocal critic of Norfolk at the mast: Steven Rogers, a professor of finance at Harvard Business School who grew up in (and continues to maintain) MARCH 11, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

camden bauchner

an Area residence. The house has been in his family nearly sixty years, its ownership passed from his grandparents to his mother to himself. Asked about the origins of the Coalition, and what perspective it brought to bear that existing organizations could not, he quickly broached the heart of the matter: “We are homeowners who do not plan to sell our homes.”

“I feel like the Norfolk Southern concessions were a positive outcome of the negotiating process,” says long-time resident Dorothy Payne. “The organizations should be lauded for their victory, but it should also be noted that it is an outcome that did little to nothing to help those who still live in the affected area.” Payne has voiced her intention to be “the last one out” of the Area and has long played a leading role in educating her neighbors about the expansion, rallying opposition to it, and documenting potential abuses and violations in connection with its progress. Asked to describe her motivations, she explains that it was religious faith that led her to become involved in her community, and affront that led her to defend it. “I was emboldened by how the train company disrespected neighborhood residents at the beginning of the displacement process,” she recalls. “I decided to take a stand.”

Rogers expressed mixed gratitude at Norfolk’s announcement of compliance and investment. He attended the donation ceremony for Sherwood Park and offered his thanks to representatives, qualified with a remark that “this community needs a dona-

6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 11, 2015

tion of seven figures” (as opposed to the five doled out that day). When asked last month about his assessment of Norfolk’s concession package, he replied that he had conducted research on Norfolk’s bottom line and concluded that it was “one of the most profitable [and] least philanthropic companies in the world.”

Simply continuing to live in the Area might sound like a form of passive resistance, but it is becoming increasingly mighty in practice. Norfolk has begun preliminary work on the land it does own, resulting in an environment that is at best stressful but is sometimes nothing short of outrageous. The land is, after all, a live construction site interrupted occasionally by inhabited homes. Rogers observes that street signs have gone mysteriously missing and wonders how an ambulance would locate one of his neighbors in a time of need.

At least one house seems to have been demolished without attention to the active gas lines, which spewed methane skyward until neighbors could smell it inside their own homes. According to Rogers, People’s Gas told residents they hadn’t been contacted to cap the gas lines. Payne walked outside one day and encountered a construction worker answering the call of nature in the open air.

“At the beginning, the contractors that Norfolk Southern used in the community were helpful,” she remembers, wondering if Norfolk’s patience is nearing an end. Rogers anticipates an eminent domain action, through which Norfolk could essentially sue

the homeowners for obstructing the greater good. If the courts agree, they would have the power to compel the holdouts to sell their homes quickly for a reasonable price.

Rogers says the Coalition is prepared to persuade them otherwise.

For the time being, the Coalition is trying to spread its message to a larger audience. It has produced documentary materials about the families remaining, and uses a Facebook page to publish reflections on the historical context of the expansion.

Whereas earlier debate surrounding the project was of a measured, political nature, the authors of these new materials are not afraid of touching nerves. Norfolk’s agents are described as “rogue bandits,” City Hall is accused of serial South Side apathy, and the Coalition is intent on linking their cause to the civil rights movement. No stone is left unturned; several recent Facebook posts highlight the uncomfortable facts that Norfolk’s Virginia headquarters are adjacent to a Confederate monument site, and that many of the railroads that comprise Norfolk’s network were originally laid through black slave labor. These are grievances not easily addressed with a giant novelty check.

J

ust as there are competing perspectives on the immediate events in the Area, there are competing perspectives on its larger implications. From one, the Norfolk expansion is a model of civically responsible policy for land use and the accommodation of industry, a story of suc-

cessful negotiation. But from another, the events of the Area are unsettling for precisely the same reason: they might serve as a template for further major projects in residential areas under the banner of “necessary sacrifices.”

More broadly, a cavalier attitude toward the land of marginalized neighborhoods is not hard to detect in recent headlines. A pricey helipad is under construction in riverfront Bridgeport; the UofC made multiple Obama library proposals involving public land under the (correct) assumption that City Hall would support them. The most extreme case is probably in inner-city Detroit, where a billionaire is busily acquiring a square mile of East Side residential land and converting it to a bizarre forest of decorative trees for reasons yet to be fully understood.

This is not to suggest that large-scale land appropriation is a new beast in the city.

Schalliol looks back on Chicago’s recent history and quickly finds “large institutions reshaping the city to meet broader economic and social objectives, including the construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway, the creation of the University of Illinois at Chicago campus, and the construction— and then demolition—of large-scale public housing.” These projects all affected larger regions than the Area, but what’s different with Norfolk and its contemporaries is that private interests are now originating and directing the plans, accepting the bulk of costs, liabilities, and—of course—eventual profits. The city’s role is to cooperate and enjoy the new tax revenue, not to pursue a particular agenda of transportation, education, or housing. This new paradigm will likely not go overlooked by other cities with high vacant acreage; businesses may be newly emboldened in their pursuit of urban territory, and municipal governments may be more inclined to sign it away.

Englewood is the exception to a rule: a historically residential neighborhood in a city whose history is inseparable from industry. Chicago has a strong tradition of resilient blue-collar culture that grapples with the problem of situating health, happiness, and morality in harsh industrial surroundings. This is, for instance, what Stuart Dybek is concerned with in his short story “Blight,” which recounts a South Lawndale revitalization campaign under the first Mayor Daley that seemed like “a grudging admission that among blocks of factories, railroad tracks, truck docks, industrial dumps, scrapyards, expressways, and the drainage canal, people had managed to wedge in their everyday lives.”

DEVELOPMENT That’s good for South Lawndale, but Englewood demands to be understood in the context of a different urban dream: shady streets, urbane attractions, and peaceful bustle. For the majority of its history, the neighborhood was a fashionable and stately place with a green-colored name; the tracks that run over Garfield used to have pleasant passenger stations with long stone staircases down to the street, and Green Line trains used to be more than just occasional guests. The neighborhood had little to do with the world of industry.

So by what magic was Englewood transformed into a landscape that must be partially fed to a company for its own good? Rogers, head of the Coalition, contends that the city would never dream of permitting a Norfolk-style land acquisition in wealthier areas like Ravenswood and Lincoln Park, and concludes that Englewood is institutionally perceived as a second-class neighborhood. He alleges a biased viewpoint that believes that once a neighborhood has fallen on hard times, it has to some extent forfeited its own self-determination, and ought to accept development in any form. Such thinking would lead officials to dismiss the Area as an insignificant territory in a game of much larger stakes, a sleepy little haven whose residents are suddenly seeing it through rose-colored lenses now that it might be on the chopping block.

The foundation of this viewpoint doesn’t exactly meet the Building Code.

The Norfolk expansion has abundantly demonstrated that Englewood already has a conscientious community capable of expressing and fighting for its needs, which is ostensibly one of the key objectives of blight-fighting and development in the first place. Norfolk and City Hall are preaching the benefits of increased property tax revenue, but that is a reductive line of thinking. After all, what neighborhood in Chicago wouldn’t be more profitable if it were transformed into a business enterprise? Why not flatten Roscoe Village, which is just about as large as the total land that Norfolk Southern desires, and open a flagship IKEA? Moreover, one cannot look at a neighborhood that has fallen from a former splendor and conclude that its current residents are culpable for these ills. To manhandle a neighborhood in dire straits is, in practice, to penalize the people who are still living there—those who have not given up on it. A hypothetical homeowner in the Area circa 2010 is a person who suc-

camden bauchner

cessfully kept up a house through extremely tumultuous circumstances, kept up with their property taxes through the Great Recession, and stuck around in hopes of seeing change for the better. (Rogers and Payne have emphasized that many of their neighbors’ homes were in the middle of renovation and improvement when the crisis hit.) This is the behavior of a civic exemplar. If their final reward is a firm invitation to leave, the message is clear: why bother?

The most ominous part of the map detailing Norfolk’s official plans is a remark proposing to “LOWER GARFIELD BLVD AS NECESSARY,” with the same designation for 59th Street. These streets may soon be charmless subterranean thruways much like the local section of 51st Street, which is simply a quarter-mile series of underpasses devoid of anything

to distract the eye. All other local streets from 47th to 61st will be closed at either end of the yard, if they are not already.

Factor in the Dan Ryan running nearby and parallel to the obstruction, and the result is an enormous no-man’s-land across which friendship, cultural exchange, and basic continuity are deeply discouraged.

Expect to see more of what’s on display in Fuller Park, which, many years ago, was the first casualty of the shipping yards’ expansion. That expansion, combined with Dan Ryan construction, created one of Chicago’s loneliest, most luckless neighborhoods; Norfolk continues to appropriate small parcels of the neighborhood for its own use, casting doubt on the long-term stability of the shipping yard’s borders.

It is a further sticking point that “BLVD,” from the plan mentioned above, means “Boulevard,” or, in the language of

the Chicago Plan (the great post-Fire document which envisioned a wholesome city both rational and natural), a bold artery of greenery within the system of lung-like parks designed to relieve the gray city’s tensions. Soon the Norfolk complex may form an artery of a very different sort, running both literally and symbolically at a right angle to the one endorsed by Daniel Burnham.

Most of the Plan, of course, was never realized: most Chicagoans walk out their doors and find a city that falls short of their (and Burnham’s) ideals. Meanwhile, members of the Englewood Railway Coalition walk out their doors and find their neighborhood dug up. “Living around the trains may have always been loud,” Dorothy Payne writes from the Area, “but now the noise is deafening.”

MARCH 11, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

“Nacelle” at Blanc Gallery

BY EMMA COLLINS

8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 11, 2015

Lost Places in Film and Life A

woman sits in the driver’s seat of a moving van, holding a page of printed text between her thumb and forefinger. She lights a cigarette, pauses, and then introduces its glowing end to the paper, watching flakes of ash fall into her lap as serenely as if they were falling snow.

This is the opening scene of “Nacelle,” a video installation at Blanc Gallery by former University of Chicago MFA student Marco Ferrari. It centers on a small film crew that spends most of the video enclosed in the back of a moving van, stopping to collect B-roll footage at five locations in and around Chicago. As the video progresses, the scene in the van becomes increasingly chaotic—equipment clatters to the floor and hands entangle themselves in rope. The five locations in the video mirror this collapse of order, each introducing a new element of confusion. The DeKalb Wind Turbine Farm reminds the crew of their paradoxical attempt to capture immaterial emotions and ideas using mechanical equipment. The Cook County Department of Corrections’ Division XI Facility taunts them with an impenetrable facade, reflecting an essential concern in filmmaking: how to represent an interior using a medium that deals exclusively in exteriors.

The bedlam reaches its climax on Lower Wacker Drive. “Lower Wacker was this kind of representation of what was happening inside the minds of these characters, so it was a very dark, eerie environment,” explained Ferrari in a post-opening interview.

Ferrari’s work is as much a meditation on existence as it is a commentary on the limitations of film. The film crew’s futile attempt to find and represent meaning highlights the void that underlies objects without meaning or signification. The crew asks the material world to show them something that feels like spiritual, emotional, or intellectual greatness, both in order to affirm

that film is a worthwhile pursuit and that they, as human beings, are more than just their bodies. Finding nothing but blank, silent physicality, they descend into a state of disarray, chaos mounting within the truck as the barriers to real comprehension become increasingly severe at each location.

Ferrari says “Nacelle” asks the question: “Do you engage with the environment, or do you just remain in the truck and continue to observe?” It might be more accurate to say that his piece asks: can you genuinely engage with the environment?

And is there any meaning beyond observation?

Because the gallery played the video on a continuous loop, the initial scene could have easily been the film’s ending. When you invert the video this way, the answer to the question of meaning is simple: it doesn’t exist. The film crew’s struggle to find and represent meaning devolves from a straightforward pursuit into nonsensical fumbling in the back of a truck, a movement tracked by visual representations of the written word. Each time the truck stops and the driver opens her door, fragments of paper covered in text fall onto the street. The beginning of “Nacelle,” viewed as its final moment, turns this trickling loss of intelligibility into a flood symbolized by the literal destruction of language—a smoldering page.

But, as Samuel Beckett famously wrote in The Unnameable, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Ferrari doesn’t let his suspicion that existence is utterly meaningless stop him from taking a serious look at real-world issues. Superimposed on his existential concerns in both “Nacelle” and his other films are more literal questions about the relationship of people to places. In his 2013 video Skyway, he addresses de-industrialization in East Chicago and its effect on the individual.

“I definitely don’t want to come across

as saying there is a correct use of place,” he says, “but in an area like Skyway, where you really see the environment being affected by how we engage with it, and then being kind of forgotten about, and then being re-activated with casinos, being there is very heavy, visually heavy. Even the air is heavy.”

Ferrari includes shots of himself in the video in order to emphasize the alienation he sees such misuses of place causing. While he resists making prescriptive statements about uses of place, Ferrari’s work as a Film Fellow at Black Cinema House—part of Theaster Gates’s initiative to reinvigorate the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood—is evidence of his preferences.

After meeting Gates at an MFA critique, Ferrari sought his help launching an outdoor projection project in the Woodlawn neighborhood that would “really just get in touch with the neighbors there and reflect a little bit what’s going on in terms of development, because a lot of changes are happening on the South Side.” Gates, in turn, offered Ferrari the curatorial position at Black Cinema House and proposed a version of Ferrari’s projection project made in conjunction with BCH, slated to appear in early June.

“There are a lot of empty spaces,” Ferrari says. For a moment it’s unclear whether he is referring to the vast emptiness “Nacelle” suggests or the empty lots of Greater Grand Crossing. “But maybe it’s a time for us to kind of pause and think exactly how we want to reform the neighborhoods.”

Though film crew of “Nacelle” may not have been able to find meaning in physical places, the artist himself hasn’t quite yet given up hope.

Blanc Gallery, 4445 S. King Drive. Saturdays, 1pm-3pm. Through May 1. (773) 3734320. blancchicago.com

VISUAL ARTS

After Punk “Until It Becomes Us” at Ordinary Projects

BY WILLEKES CRONIN

courtesy of the artist

I

was supposed to meet Jesse Butcher on Saturday afternoon for a tour of his new gallery exhibit, “Until It Becomes Us,” but he was running late. When he arrived, he told me that his bus had been stopped in a riot: protesters had managed to block traffic entirely on Homan Avenue until police broke them apart. Butcher was split between admiration for the rioters’ passionate collective action and irritation at the thirty-minute traffic jam he had endured, an ambivalence that echoed strongly in his exhibition, presented by Ordinary Projects at Mana Contemporary through March 20.

The words “PIG CITY” are spray-painted, silver and metallic, in an amateurish scrawl across a large, white canvas in the back of the gallery. The phrase can easily be read in conjunction with Chicago’s recent Homan Square controversy, but while Butcher sees the recent public response to police brutality in dialogue with his work, he says that he started using the term years ago, without reference to a single incident or even a particular city.

More tellingly, the canvas does not read “All pigs must die.” It names a condition rather than provoking action, and this passivity undercuts and complicates the piece’s incendiary slang.

“I know some people who would say, ‘I’m glad I live in a pig city,’” says Butcher.

His affinity for graffiti is not due to the medium’s ability to send a message, nor the allure of having one’s work visible citywide,

but in the naïve, reckless gesture toward ownership inherent in petty vandalism.

“When you’re a kid, you go and write on a wall and it’s like ‘I did this, this is mine,’” he says. Even though a site’s real owners might paint over the tagger’s work, traces of the rebellious, facile claim to possession remains.

ascribe a set of politics. It gestures toward the forms and strategies of past avant-gardes—punk rock, second-wave feminism, Chris Burden’s “I Became a Secret Hippie”—and reproduces them skeptically, agnostic about their capability to actually affect change and humorously aware of their own situation. Still, the work expresses a

The irony of a former-delinquentturned-artist hanging his formergraffiti-turned-art in a formerlyabandoned-warehouse-turnedgallery was not lost on this writer nor, I hope, on the artist himself.

The interest that Butcher takes in these small, personal, short-lived victories is striking. The irony of a former-delinquent-turned-artist hanging his former-graffiti-turned-art in Mana Contemporary’s formerly-abandoned-warehouse-turned-gallery was not lost.

When asked if his work is political, Butcher shrugged. The work is certainly not nonpolitical, but it doesn’t have a singular, directional charge to which one could

small satisfaction in the very fact of its own circumscribed, temporary nature.

“Until It Becomes Us” is aware of the problematic nature of its own existence— including the Pilsen gentrification necessary for the gallery’s establishment—but Butcher doesn’t let unresolved problems prevent him from producing the art he is able to produce. Rather, the exhibition shows Butcher utilizing his temporary sovereignty over Ordinary Projects for the

small joy of production and exhibition. He does not oblige himself to resolve the contradictions in that action.

The exhibition includes a video Butcher took of himself several years ago that begins with the artist writing “PUNK IS DAD” on a drywall structure. Then he tears the wall down. The message is quite literal for my generation: my dad was a punk, now he’s a lawyer. Your dad could have been a punk, now he could be a lawyer too. They probably tore down walls together and yelled things like “Anarchy in the U.K.!” and “Our band could be your life!”

It’s been over thirty years and not only do most governments still exist, but England is still staunchly capitalist.

But tearing down walls is still pretty punk. Even if my dad was a total sellout and I’ll probably be a total sellout too, I can still think that tearing down walls or wearing masks or writing my name on stuff is cool for the gesture alone—even if the gesture is hypocritical or fails to convey meaning. Punk can be dead or dad or whatever, but “Until It Becomes Us” is still cool, because rebellious action doesn’t necessitate a coherent message to justify itself: sometimes you just want to make your mark somewhere.

Ordinary Projects, Mana Contemporary, 2233 S. Throop St. Monday-Friday, 9am5pm; additional hours by appointment.

Through March 20. info@ordinaryprojects.org MARCH 11, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 11, 2015

COMEDY

MARCH 11, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

FAITH

BY JAMISON PFEIFER

W

est Point Baptist Church, the longtime home church of gospel legend Albertina Walker, sits squarely next to Ellis Park in Bronzeville. Just a block north at 35th Street, a commemorative street sign reads “Albertina Walker and the Caravans Drive,” marking this span of Cottage Grove a homage to the “Queen of Gospel” and The Caravans, the gospel group with which she grew to international acclaim.

It was here at West Point Baptist that Walker first began singing in the church choir at age four, and where she remained a member all her life, even as she catapulted to fame with The Caravans in the 1950s (she remained prominent in gospel music until her death in 2010). Even today, nearly five years after her death, Walker’s history with the church is still deeply felt; some of the members continue to affectionately refer to her simply as “Queen,” and many still recall the wisdom and experiences she shared there.

West Point Baptist’s senior pastor, Reverend Bernard Jakes, recalls, “She used to say to me, ‘People know my name all around the world, but here I’m just Albertina.’ ” Though Walker did just one record with the West Point choir, a 1981 release of “God Is Our Creator” with Savoy Records, West Point Baptist—as any congregant will tell you—was her home church.

Walker shared much more than music with West Point Baptist. She made it a point to cultivate relationships with church members old and young. Kemarius Lee, a younger congregant, told me, “Every year she would make it a point to see me before [I left for] college.” Marcus Johnson, a longtime congregant and friend of Walker’s, sat with her every week in the second-row pew.

Johnson says that, despite her level of fame, “When she sang in the choir, she just wanted to be a part of the choir.”

Another congregant, Robert Nichols, who sits on the church’s board of trustees, first met Walker back in 1986 when he owned a restaurant in Baton Rouge. Walker had told Nichols that he should give her a call if he ever made it to Chicago, and when Nichols relocated in 2002, he did just that.

He joined the congregation at West Point Baptist upon Walker’s insistence. When Walker developed health issues in the early 2000s and stopped singing regularly with the church, Nichols would sometimes accompany her to various concerts. “Even

The Gospel of Albertina Walker

anna belle newport

though she was on oxygen [at the time], when that spirit hit her, you’d often see her go and take that oxygen mask off,” he says.

Today, Walker’s legacy lives on in Chicago through the Albertina Walker Scholarship, which she helped found in 1988 to offer financial support to musical students—Johnson was on the original scholarship committee.

To bolster this legacy, Nichols and the church are hoping to have Ellis Park renamed after Walker. A proposal has been submitted, but nothing has yet to come of it. While the possible renaming of the park remains uncertain at this point, Walker’s musical influence persists—both within West Point and within gospel music at large.

“One of the things that she instilled in me was the importance of keeping the traditional sound of gospel music,” says Shantram Hawkins, the musical minister at West Point Baptist. Most modern churches have moved away from traditional gospel, which, as Hawkins explains, is gen-

12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 11, 2015

erally comprised of three-chord harmonic progressions and in some way or another addresses the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is not necessarily the case for plenty of today’s inspirational worship music. As musical director, Hawkins has tried to bridge the generational gap in church music, incorporating some contemporary praise songs into the service while still adhering to classic gospel songs for the bulk of the program. (Still, some of the older members at West Point Baptist recognize the trend toward a more contemporary rock style within the church’s music.)

Though he recognizes Walker’s insistence to maintain the music’s tradition, Hawkins still considers her to be a “fused gospel singer—a bit of traditional gospel with blues, and at times she would use jazz phrasing for certain songs.”

“Nobody else has that style,” says Howard Williams, another member of West Point’s congregation. Williams himself has been singing with the choir for nearly fifty years and he, more than some of the other

congregants, emphasizes the generational aspect of Walker’s music. “Younger generations have not experienced really tough times like we experienced coming up. How do I put it? When you hear songs like she sings, we can really identify with it because we’ve experienced so much of it. And I guess that’s why we have such deep feelings about it,” he says.

Hawkins says that the most important conversation he ever had with Walker was when she told him not to completely abandon that traditional style: “She told me, ‘Don’t ever forget about the older generation.’ ” Soon after Hawkins became West Point’s musical minister, Walker began singing less frequently with the choir due to her ailing health. He recalls that one of the last songs she ever sang with the choir was the traditional hymn “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.”

“When she would sing it would be so full,” he says. “It would be like Jeremiah said in the Bible—it’s like fire in the bones.”

BOOKS

All Too Human Joseph G. Peterson’s ambitious new short story collection falls flat

BY LINUS RECHT

P

rofundity is a dangerous thing to chase. It’s a bit like chasing one’s own tail, in that its circular motion is naturally opposed to the vertical movement depth requires. There’s nothing shallower than the desire to be profound.

Twilight of the Idiots, a new collection of short stories by Joseph G. Peterson, proclaims its ambitions toward profundity with such gusto—a Nietzschean title and epigraph, plus an invocation of Homer on its back cover, for starters—that it feels unfair to expect it to live up to these intentions. But it’s clear from the get-go that Peterson, a Chicago-area writer with four novels under his belt, is aiming high.

At first glance, an interesting unifying motif emerges in the form of calls to action from mysterious sources (vagrants, hallucinations, alcohol, the Muse, and so on). There are universal concerns: mothers and fathers, the relations between men and women. In other words, suitably rich material for an ambitious project.

Peterson’s choices, however, quickly limit the collection. Despite there being eleven stories, we get only male narrators and protagonists. In a collection that makes pretensions of saying something about men and women, love and loss, life and death and the rest of it, this is problematic, limiting, and lopsided.

The damage done by the gender imbalance is doubled by the uniform disdain Peterson’s menfolk have for womankind.

These are angry stories of immaculately beautiful women leading men to ruin, of cheating wives, of traitorous mothers and girlfriends, of older women preying on young boys, of men relentlessly misunderstood and tormented by nagging. There are exceptions—specifically, the few stories that exclude women entirely: a cop on-duty, an ex-soldier (men’s work, surely), and a few murderous gangsters (same thing).

More troubling is when these tendencies emerge in full: the further down the

socioeconomic ladder, the more regressive attitudes the character spouts. This feeds into another disconcerting aspect of Peterson’s work: the odd and severely off-point attempts at a blue-collar dialect. Even ignoring the occasional dissonantly hifalutin’ phrase thrown in, these sections seem like an educated person’s fantasy version of how commoners speak; one can only assume their sexist conservatism is meant to feel somehow innate. The use of this device is hardly progressive, but more importantly, the rhythm in the dialogue is so off that the effect doesn’t even work as intended. The stories that lean more heavily on the dialect are easily the most painful.

Really, though, it seems that Peterson is not playing to his strengths in this collection. This is his first collection of short stories, and the rhythms of the short form evade him. The shorter stories in the collection are almost all dialogue, with heavy use of clichés and archetypal characters.

Perhaps this is intentional, to give the stories more of a “universal” quality, but for reasons already mentioned, these pretensions largely land with a thud. Even if the characters’ voices, regardless of their ages, weren’t so oppressively similar, the dialogue in the shorter pieces all seems insufficiently motivated, the characters’ decisions too arbitrary. Nearly all of the stories end with somebody dying, too, which is this form’s equivalent of ending every scene in a movie with somebody leaving a room.

This is a shame, because the one piece that gives itself a little more room to breathe, “Rawfish,” is easily the best of the lot—not coincidentally, it avoids many of the pitfalls mentioned thus far. It’s a simple story of a boy’s first job, somewhat reminiscent of John Updike’s “A&P.” Granted, an immaculate virgin/grizzled harlot dichotomy scaffolds the story and threatens to derail it: Charlie takes the fish restaurant job to impress a “dauntingly pretty” girl with “fragrant hair” (she’s devoid of per-

sonality, of course), and has as a coworker, Beverly, an older woman with a “thick coating of makeup” and “fake lashes” who nearly propositions the sixteen-year old narrator. But the narrative voice holds convincingly, and the story moves swiftly, with interesting exchanges and clever details.

Motivations are allowed to arise and subside organically, the plot grows in suspense, and in the end, Beverly’s dignity somehow manages to overcome the indignities of her characterization.

The narrator leaves the story with a

new respect for her and for himself, a new lease on life. We leave the story with hope for this author, that he may tap into his strengths more effectively, and furthermore raise himself above some rather puerile hang-ups, predominantly about women.

Until he can do that, it can’t surprise us that his most convincing vignettes come in the voice of a sixteen-year-old boy.

Joseph G. Peterson, Twilight of the Idiots.

Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. 226 pages.

MARCH 11, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

Behind the scenes with the South Side's foremost music video director

The DGainz Saga

BY RYN SEIDEWITZ

“W

alking down the block / Sippin’ on that pop,” Enyce freestyled the first lines of his song “Life Good (Soda Pop)” last summer at his producer and director DGainz’s house. DGainz helped Enyce turn those two lines into a full song and video that garnered national attention and a Pitchfork “Best New Music” award. Enyce and DGainz form an unlikely duo—a twelveyear-old kid from the West Side paired with the 26-year-old producer who produced a string of videos that helped to catapult then sixteen-year-old Chief Keef to worldwide fame.

Enyce is undoubtedly destined for success—he is bright, outgoing, and talented— but the main creative force behind “Life Good” is DGainz, who worked with Enyce to write and produce the song and whose vision drives the irresistible video. It rivals and mirrors many videos produced for adult musicians.

blones

DGainz filmed the video for “Life Good” in North Lawndale, Enyce’s neighborhood, in saturated yellows against the backdrop of Chicago’s streets. Children dance in empty lots with cracked concrete and against run-down houses with boarded up windows. He contrasts the youthful optimism of Enyce and his friends with a less-than-glamorous backdrop.

“Life Good” was conceived of during a hangout session between several of the stars of the movie Three at DGainz’s house.

The group was freestyling and eventually Enyce spit out the first few lines of the song that now has more than 160,000 views on YouTube. When DGainz filmed Enyce performing and put it on Instagram, the response was immediately negative. People messaged DGainz proclaiming the death of hip-hop at the hands of a twelve-year-old rapping about soda. DGainz decided to take that negativity and turn the song into something positive. It worked: the same people

14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 11, 2015

who had originally hated the song quickly changed their tune and sent him praise for it. “It’s funny how the world works,” he said about the turnaround with a sigh.

D

uan Gaines, known by his stage name DGainz, has been producing and making videos for rappers on the South Side for six years. He’s worked with rappers from Lil Durk, who now has a record deal at Def Jam Records, to Chief Keef, to Enyce himself. He serves up small pieces of life on the South Side through his honest and simple videos featuring musicians who never hesitate to acknowledge their roots.

Gaines lived in Chicago’s housing projects until he was twelve. He dropped out before starting high school and spent much of his time taking care of his single mother and four sisters. He distracted himself by watching music videos and recording them over VHS movies they had in the house.

“We got cable and I didn’t know how to act,” Gaines said with a laugh. “I think that was what made me record every music video originally, because living conditions weren’t good—I didn’t know when this cable was going to get cut off.” In this way, he inadvertently began to teach himself how to make music videos.

He made his first beat when he was fifteen on his cousin’s PlayStation, and by the time he was sixteen, he became friends with a boy on his block who told Gaines that he was a rapper. “He started playing me his music and I was like, ‘Man, I need to be a part of this,’” Gaines said.

Gaines and his family eventually moved thirty blocks south, from 63rd and Drexel to 95th and Parnell, and he lost touch with the friend who had introduced him to rapping. It was farther south, though, that Gaines came into his own.

There he met and began to work with Lil Durk, who would eventually introduce him

MUSIC

to Chief Keef.

“I was still broke. I didn’t have anything,” he said. But he began to gain respect: people wanted to work with him, and they were willing to pay for the opportunity. When he was twenty, Gaines reconnected with his father and half-brothers.

He helped his brother form the Buck 20 Brick Boyz, for whom he would film his first music video, “I Really Lived Dat.” In video-making, Gaines found his real passion: he could use the visuals to add another dimension to his work, contrasting the subject matters of the songs with simple, intimate imagery.

As Lil Durk started getting noticed, so did Gaines. Thanks to Lil Durk, people were paying Gaines for studio time and asking him to make their videos. One of those people, an up-and-coming fifteenyear-old Chief Keef (Keith Cozart), began to reach out to Gaines through Facebook to work with him. Gaines was initially skeptical—Chief Keef ’s music was very different from the songs he’d shot and produced in the past. It was more explicitly violent than previous work Gaines had done: the word “bang” and gun clicks ran consistently through Keef ’s early work. Still, Lil Durk introduced the two, and Gaines was impressed by Keef ’s attitude; he agreed to make a music video with Keef.

Gaines had no idea that Keef was so young. “I remember the day of [the shoot], I hit him up, I asked him could he pick me up,” Gaines remembered. “He was like, ‘Man, I can’t pick you up because I’m not old enough to drive.’” Gaines ended up taking the bus to his first video shoot with Keef.

The video, “Bang,” was a departure from Gaines’ previous videos. It was faster and more violent, shot in saturated greens and oranges, though it still retained the simplicity Gaines consistently focuses on— capturing Keef rapping surrounded by a crew of people.

The video got 400,000 views in the first two months, the most views Gaines had ever gotten. But at the time, Gaines still didn’t quite grasp the popularity Keef was gaining. “I thought it was really the hood watching the video on repeat,” he admitted. They released the video for “Aimed at You” in November 2011. The month af-

ter Gaines released the video, he got a call from his friend: “He was like, ‘man they killed shawty, they killed Keef.’”

Rumors flooded the Internet. Overnight, Keef ’s songs became wildly popular.

Eventually, Gaines learned that Keef hadn’t actually been killed, though the police had shot at him and he’d been arrested. Keef spent 30 days in jail and was then put under house arrest at his grandmother’s house. By the time he left jail, he was famous.

While on house arrest, Keef and Gaines shot “I Don’t Like,” the song that was to make Keef known nationwide, a glaring metaphorical middle finger to the police who had kept him on house arrest.

Due to spatial constraints, the video isn’t as visually impressive as Gaines’s previous work. Gaines admits that he initially didn’t want to upload the video; it didn’t reflect his vision as a director the way he wanted it to.

His friends convinced him to release the video, and, just before he went to bed at midnight, he released it. By 6am, it had made it onto World Star Hip Hop, a popular hip-hop entertainment website. An hour later, Gaines woke up. “I got on Twitter, I was like ‘what the fuck is going on?’” he said.

After that, Gaines shot the video for “Love Sosa.” At one point in the video, Chief Keef raps alone in front of a mirror; at another he raps in just his underwear, slightly out of frame. Gaines catches more intimate moments like this, such as Keef pulling his sweater over his mouth and laughing at a text on his phone. He pairs Keef ’s violent, often angry songs with vulnerable, intimate shots of the young rapper whose age almost never shows in his lyrics but is often highlighted in Gaines’ early videos. Like many of Gaines’ videos, “Love Sosa” is a video of subtle, unexpected contrasts. It now has over forty million views on YouTube.

Gaines’s craftsmanship came on display on the video for his newest song, “Dope Like,” a collaboration between himself and his long-time friend Wheatie. It’s his first video of 2015 and a good example of his style—sleek, simple production that focuses exclusively on the rapper and what he’s rapping. The atmosphere on the set of the shoot is somewhere between a par-

ty and a concentrated work environment: Gaines runs around in his usual uniform— jeans and a t-shirt emblazoned with his own logo—preparing for the shoot while his friends and family, who will appear in or help him with the shoot, filter in and chat with one another.

The shoot takes place in a house on the corner of 54th and Michigan Avenue.

From the outside it looks like a regular town house, but inside, it is a bare-bones studio, an otherwise empty house crowded with recording and video-making equipment. The air is thick with smoke that can be seen in tendrils through the floodlights.

Brimming with video and recording equipment, this space has clearly been used by Gaines many times before.

The concept for this video is simple.

Gaines and Wheatie rap against a white background with their crew surrounding them. When it comes time to film, Gaines switches out of his typical uniform for a livelier, hipper outfit complete with bright yellow, rubber Converse sneakers. With his change in outfit comes a change in personality. In real life, he is unassuming, goofy, and a little shy, but on camera, he transforms. He delivers his verses with a confident swagger and dances gleefully around Wheatie.

Gaines’s videos are where he really shines.

They are simple, unadorned, beautifully shot slices of life on the South Side.

T

hrough these videos and his music, Gaines uses his life on the South Side to channel his creative energy through thoughtful, careful artistry. Life in this part of the city, he says, is often difficult. He doesn't hide from that fact, but instead uses it to lend a unique character to his music and videos.

In recent years, Gaines has traveled across the country filming videos and producing music. But his roots remain in Chicago. For his movie, Three, he traveled the country looking for young actors but only found them when he returned home. The majority of the cast are Chicago natives.

“I want to be an all-around music mogul,” he said. Wherever he goes, though, he says he’ll still be the 15-year-old kid who made beats on his cousin’s PlayStation, and that he’ll bring the whole South Side with him.

“I want to show it’s colorful where we from, too,” Gaines says.

MARCH 11, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

GREENERY

Potted Plants, Public Parks “(Provisional) Park” problematizes houseplants at the Co-Prosperity Sphere

BY STEPHEN URCHICK

F

or artist Allyson Packer, there’s a lot more than soil in the pot of a houseplant. “I really like to think of them as little, tiny pieces of land,” she said, “that are kind of moving throughout the city.”

Land implies histories, strategies of use and care, and a pretty firm distinction between what belongs to one guy and what belongs to another. Packer’s latest art installation, “(Provisional) Park,” unites nearly a hundred of these sovereign plots around one idea: the rhetoric of possession and public space.

Now up at the Co-Prosperity Sphere in Bridgeport, her work recasts personal plots of earth, the well-loved leaves and tendrils sprouting therein, as a collective experience for everybody’s enjoyment. It’s a plan that has stretched feelers across a growing community of contributors, and it’s also shot deep roots through Packer’s own daily living.

Admittedly, the pitch for “(Provisional) Park” sounds simple enough: turn what’s nominally an art gallery into a respiring, photosynthesizing green space. The Co-Prosperity Sphere will operate on the same policies as the Chicago Park District for a month. Packer’s “(Provisional) Park” is open from six in the morning to eleven in the evening. Kids and dogs are welcome. Patrons are expected to dispose of their waste in the designated trash and recycling receptacles.

The proposition ultimately materializes as a jungle of ferns and potted palms, mosses and cacti arranged sculpturally across repainted and repurposed furniture. A tent and picnic tables chill in the place of plexiglass display cases and pedestals. Jump ropes on metal hooks grace the walls as opposed to

stephen urchick

minimalist canvasses. A few UV-generating grow bulbs shine brightly from the overhead track lighting. There are even prospects of putting in a basketball hoop and a swing.

“Maybe,” says Packer, slitting her eyes and squinting at the ceiling, “there’s somewhere good for load-bearing in here. Somewhere.”

However, this description shortchanges “(Provisional) Park.” Staring at a kumquat sapling for ten minutes won’t make Packer’s journey to fetch it and care for it, or her plans to return it, any more or less visible.

The little white placards Sharpied in with each plant’s hometown are only the slightest point of departure for telling the whole tale.

The vast majority of the plants that define the “(Provisional) Park’s” greenery have been borrowed. Packer jokingly considers the request to loan that clover on your windowsill to a gallery space for four weeks just weird and quirky enough to succeed. She remains amazed that local Bridgeporters, other Chicagoans, fellow artists, and arts institutions have banded together so readily to furnish her with foliage. Some plants come from as close as neighbors of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, others from large, institutional gardens (Plants, Inc. in Logan Square, the University of Chicago greenhouses). Some have arrived from as far away as a ranch in Kansas.

“I have a carbon-paper receipt pad,” explained Packer. “I write them out a receipt for everything they’re loaning me. They get a copy, and I get a copy.” At the end of the month, the owners will either gather their plants from the “(Provisional) Park” or arrange with Packer to have them dropped off at their doorstep.

“It’s been a lot of driving,” Packer

16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 11, 2015

laughs.

However, she hardly considers the journeys, or the meticulous organization needed to make good on her vows of safekeeping, too burdensome. Appointments for pick-up and drop-off are opportunities to satisfy the curiosity that drives her art.

“I haven’t even had to ask anyone about their plants,” she said. “They want to tell you the story about how they got it, or where it came from, which has been really cool, I think.”

The visits become pretexts for peeking into different spheres of experience and encountering people from whom she might not otherwise get the chance to hear.

“I like seeing where they came from, and what people’s spaces are like!” Packer says.

Every carload of domestic shrubbery Packer has imported into her “(Provisional) Park” comes down to her in a thicket of history. Each plant has a unique provenance, betokens a promise and a future transaction.

The plants also require that Packer seriously accommodate herself—over the month of the exhibition—to their particular upkeep.

She shrugged. “Yeah, it’s just me and a watering can.”

The burden of hand irrigation, the need to physically superintend the “(Provisional) Park” for the Chicago Park District’s generous operating hours, translate into a heroically mundane obligation. Packer’s been gripped in the tendrils of her own ambitious social practice.

“I’m having to establish a new rhythm in my life for this month while I’m taking care of all these things,” she said. “More than any other project I’ve ever done!”

The theoretical punch of “(Provisional)

Park” hides out in the role that Packer plays to make the show happen. One of the initial prompts for the project, according to Packer, was the sudden scarcity of public space in the wintertime. Sleet and snow had made her realize just how much she—and a vast number of citizens—relied on those spaces (for reading, for relaxation, for socialization). In trying to engineer a park using the gallery as a petri dish, Packer grew attuned to the elements that characterize free and open sites.

Civic engagement shimmers through the sheaf of carbon-paper receipts she holds.

They’re living documents of an interest in collective creation. Moreover, the sheer energy Packer will commit to keeping her “(Provisional) Park” open is a kind of political will.

The undertaking proves that Packer means what she says when she claims interest in the implicit social contracts surrounding the public-private divide.

“I think for me the most satisfying moments artistically are,” said Packer, “when the art kind of blurs—when the line is blurred between the art, and my life.”

Packer’s art is built around a public policy. She creates an apparatus where the tensions between private life and that public policy lie a little closer than usual to the surface of perceptible, daily experience. “(Provisional) Park” isn’t just a goofy call for office-desk succulents. It asks, instead, if its visitors aren’t themselves much more than walking, talking pots of clay—if they haven’t been curated through a series of understated relationships with the city of Chicago at large.

Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219-21 S. Morgan St. March 6 through April 3, daily, 6am-11pm. provisionalpark.org.

FREEPU$$Y and Free Angel

Advertised as an EP on heartbreak, Angel Davanport’s new mixtape is more about control

A

BY KARI WEI

ngel Davanport deserves to be famous. Unfortunately, society’s probably not ready for her, but that’s not her fault. Belligerently and defiantly titled FREEPU$$Y, her latest EP opens with the phrase, “you ain’t never ever had a love like this before,” and it’s true. Written on the heels of significant emotional pain, the mixtape is Davanport’s effort to reclaim herself, her heart, and her righteously beloved sexuality. If listeners walk into this expecting thirty minutes of non-threatening lamentations from a woman missing and needing her man, they’re in for quite a shock.

That’s not to say the EP isn’t relatable.

Despite being only five tracks long, each one clocking in at a little over four minutes, FREEPU$$Y covers an incredibly wide spectrum of human emotion. “Follow the Leader” is dripping with the relaxed self-assurance of someone who knows what she has to offer, someone so confident in her fire as an emcee that she decides to spend the entire first track crooning vocals instead of spitting rhymes.

With lines like, “I know what you live for / you cliffhang on every word,” it’s a good choice; Davanport the songbird sounds enticing enough to be haunting, particularly when layered over CHI-VII’s dreamy, reverb-heavy production.

“Caesar,” the third song, has Davanport fully acknowledging the toll of her heartbreak, as well as the power dynamics that preceded it. Unlike “Follow the Leader,” in which she compels her audience to be vulnerable, “Caesar” describes the reverse. This time it is Davanport whose walls are down, and it is Davanport struggling to cope with someone else’s hold on her. Even when exposed and in pain, though, she never admits defeat: “You’re Caesar now, but who’ll you be in time?”

The EP’s final track, “PILLOW TALK,” is written in capital letters, which fits the furious, spitfire drive that Davanport works into every line she raps. She’s pissed, and, unfortunately for her detractors, when angry she sounds nothing short of excellent.

“PILLOW TALK” has only the faintest

DEFIANCE

Real Cops, Real Responsibility UCPD accountability could change drastically with the passage of HB 3932

R remnants of the trancelike, wistful sounds that defined its predecessors. The bass is heavier, the beat is heavier, the rhymes are heavier, even her vocals are heavier, hungrier, more urgent and unforgiving.

“Why you fuckin’ playin’ / why you fuckin’ playin’,” Davanport repeats, and you can hear how fed up she is by the world’s refusal to either be serious or take her seriously (or both). “I don’t need no savin’,” she adds. The EP about “heartbreak” ends with these words, followed by “I’m so high / I’m so gone.” It’s a battle cry for her freedom, along with the freedom of everything she is and everything she stands for.

There aren’t as many people who know Angel Davanport’s name as there should be, but those who do respect it as that of a true emcee, without the need for the “female” qualifier that shouldn’t—and wouldn’t—exist were she not in such a stubbornly male-driven industry. Listening to FREEPU$$Y and other such gems from Davanport and the rest of her collective, Rapper Chicks, one has to wonder why such a qualifier is ever necessary, and hope that an industry that has previously kept its terrified doors firmly shut to her and her comrades—Psalm One/Hologram Kizzie, Fluffy, Ill-Esha—will have the sense to open them in welcome before the Rapper Chicks break them down.

“I am your leader,” Davanport sings, and you can almost hear her smiling as she says it. She isn’t our leader, not quite yet. But she should be.

BY ZOE MAKOUL

epresentatives Barbara Flynn Currie of the 25th District and Representative Christian L. Mitchell of the 26th District have introduced House Bill 3932, which would subject the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD), one of the largest private police forces in the country, to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which requires government agencies to share internal information with inquiring citizens.

HB 3932 would effectively amend the Private College Campus Police Act, which lays out terms, requirements, and qualifications for campus police officers while also granting university police the power of “municipal peace officers and county sheriffs.”

Under the proposed bill, university forces would share not only the powers of their public equivalents, but also their obligations toward transparency.

Representatives Currie and Mitchell were unavailable for comment.

While the UCPD declined to comment on HB 3932 specifically, Jeremy Manier from UofC’s News and Public Affairs Department says, “The University is committed to making information about UCPD activities available to the public, and we do so through a variety of channels. We are continuing to evaluate these processes to ensure that the information is as accessible as possible.”

The UCPD has faced accusations of racial profiling and unfair police tactics since its founding in the 1960s. While UofC had security guards for campus buildings as early as the 1930s, it wasn’t until 1968 that the International Association of Chiefs of Police helped transform the security department into a full police department.

In the last decade, while the crime rate in Hyde Park-South Kenwood has dropped significantly (nearly fifty-five percent from 2004 to 2013), claims of police mistreatment from African-American and Latino students and neighborhood residents have charged unjustified hostility. Out of nearly 65,000 residents under UCPD’s six-and-a-half mile jurisdiction, only about nine percent are

ian moore

UofC undergraduates, and fifteen percent are graduate or professional students.

Despite its looming presence, the UCPD is currently protected as a private force, outside the bounds of FOIA. While people can file complaints about the UCPD to UofC’s Independent Review Committee (IRC), made up of university affiliates and community members, the IRC, while releasing an annual report of the claims against the UCPD, has no power to enforce changes to UCPD practices.

Out of one hundred and thirty complaints presented against the UCPD since March of 2005, ninety-nine were heard by the IRC. Sixty-four of these were filed by men, and seventy-seven were filed by African-American community members.

The Campaign for Equitable Policing (CEP), a campaign of students and residents seeking UCPD reform, has charged the force with racial profiling and impunity. Asked about the bill, member Nicolas Adalpe identified transparency as one of the major goals of the campaign. Subjecting the UCPD to FOIA, he wrote, “will go a long way towards ensuring accountability and fairer policing to communities that sorely need both.” He added, “We…hope that the University can follow through.”

MARCH 11, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

BULLETIN First Mayoral Runoff Debate Rahm Emanuel’s failure to acquire a majority last Tuesday launches him and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia into an unprecedented runoff campaign. Between February 24 and April 7, Garcia and Emanuel will have to compete for the many Chicago voters—about one in five—who opted for neither of them in the first election. The campaigns have agreed to hold three debates in order to try and peel off some of these votes; the first will be held at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics and broadcast on NBC-5 and Telemundo. Emanuel and Garcia have both released statements in anticipation. Garcia expresses hope that as the unlikely challenger, he will be able to properly introduce himself to Chicago residents, something he struggled to accomplish as one of five candidates in the February 24 election.

Emanuel’s statement contains a promise to present a clear difference between himself and Garcia, and perhaps, in his mention of the “five healthy debates” already held, a note of exasperation. Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago, 5707 S. Woodlawn Ave. Saturday, March 16. politics.uchicago. edu (Adam Thorp)

Women Warrior Wednesdays: Accessing Resources for Female Veterans Women’s History Month is upon us, and the Women’s Business Development Center is celebrating by hosting a unique open house event to raise awareness of the resources available to female veterans in Chicago. Partners will deliver short presentations about opportunities for veterans hoping to start businesses, continue education, or take advantage of social services. Both recognizing the service of female vets and providing a multitude of future prospects (entrepreneurial, educational and otherwise) for them, the casual event should be an invaluable aid for former servicewomen. Jackson Park Boardroom, 1452 E. 53rd St. Wednesday, March 18, 6pm-8pm. Free. (312)853-0145. wbdc. org (Zoe Makoul)

WTF Is the IWW The International Workers of the World have spent more than a hundred years playing an important role on the left wing of the labor movement. Their goals include creating “One Big Union” and abolishing the wage system. The Chicago branch of the IWW is conducting a roughly three-hour, presumably well-run, workshop on how “to hold meetings that are shorter, democratic and more productive”. The workshop will also provide content for the meetings by introducing attendees to the IWW and the group’s arguments for the importance of class consciousness and workplace organizing. Chicago IWW Office, 1700 S. Loomis St. Saturday, March 14, noon-3pm. Free, donations encouraged. iww.org/branches/US/IL/chicago (Adam Thorp)

local artists. A community panel, “The Cause & Solutions for Gun Violence,” will take place afterward, moderated by Quincy Roseborough, executive director of EmpowerMen, Inc. The admissions ticket is twelve dollars, though it’s possible to become a “platinum sponsor” for $1000, and the vaunted “swag bag sponsor w/ social media mention” title is a mere fifty. Harold Washington Cultural Center, 4701 S. King Dr. Saturday, March 14, 2pm-6pm. $12. (773)9167059. (Christian Belanger)

Stand Up for Reparations The City of Chicago does not dispute that officers of the CPD, over the course of two decades, have tortured people.

Lit cigarettes, beatings, and hand-cranked generators were used to force confessions, which led to convictions and long prison terms. Some settlements have been paid to victims, and some officers have been sentenced to time in prison, but most are protected by the statute of limitations.

Activists have been pushing for a municipal ordinance that would include a formal apology, financial compensation for survivors, and funding for memorial programs. By filling City Council meetings with supporters of the ordinance, Chicago Torture Justice Memorials hopes to apply pressure to the city government—and, specifically, to Chicago’s runoff-bound mayor. His opponent Chuy Garcia has endorsed the ordinance and promised to give it a hearing. City Hall, 121 N. LaSalle St. March 16, 10:30am; March 18, 10am. chicagotorture.org (Adam Thorp)

Midwest Urban Farmers Summit To early residents of Chicago, urban farming would have been nothing remarkable. When the city was little more than a trading post, residents ate what they could grow, trap, or hunt. Even as the city grew, many cottages surrounding its stockyards and lumberyards kept a small garden or chicken coop. Only in the second half of the twentieth century did supermarkets begin to dominate. In recent years, however, neighborhood gardens have replaced vacant lots with greenery, and chickens once again sun themselves in backyards. Shuttered factories and empty lots have found new life with commercial food production operations like The Plant, a “vertical farm” offering space for vegetable plots, cheese makers, and more. The Plant will soon host a conference offering presentations covering topics unique to farming in the shadows of great cities.

Experienced farmers will offer presentations on practical agricultural topics including rooftop and small plot cultivation, urban beekeeping, and cold-weather farming, as well as entrepreneurial ventures like forming cooperative networks and marketing products. The conference will also offer networking and social opportunities. The Plant, 1400 W. 46th St. March 14, 9pm; March 15, 1:30pm. $10-$30 donation, preregister online. (773)772-4142. midwesturbanfarmers.org (Sean Maher)

Citizenfour Screening After interviewing international criminal and civil liberties demigod Edward Snowden in Hong Kong, the journalist and director Laura Poitras packed her bags and moved to Germany. Setting up complex security protocols to protect her data from surveillance, she began to edit what eventually became the basis for the Academy Award-winning docu-thriller Citizenfour, showing at the Logan Center on March 13. The global saga of the movie’s production matches the saga of its protagonist: from Hong Kong to Russia and Germany, Poitras’s team poignantly and eloquently dissects fears about the new role of technology and surveillance in society as it eludes the authorities in real time. Citizenfour is a fully modern take on what subversion looks like in the context of the twenty-first century security state. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., Room 201.

Friday, March 13, 3pm. Free with online ticket reservation.

(773)702-2787. politics.uchicago.edu (Will Cabaniss)

2nd Annual Stop the Violence Talent Showcase This Saturday, the Harold Washington Cultural Center will host its second annual talent showcase, created to raise awareness of and discuss solutions for local violence.

Local Twitter and Vine star Pimp Tunechi will host, while twelve-year-old musician Dorian Adams, who founded the event last year, will perform, along with a number of other

STAGE AND SCREEN Redmoon Theater’s The Devil’s Cabaret In Dante’s Inferno, the third circle of hell is characterized by its never-ending rain. Cold and unrelenting, it extinguishes hope and happiness. After a brief experience with this circle earlier this year on the Chicago River, Redmoon Theater is determined to take back control of hell and orchestrate the fantastical fiery spectacle it has been working to create.

This spring, Redmoon will present The Devil’s Cabaret, a spectacle recognizing “the Devil’s ‘greatest accomplishments’—The Seven Deadly Sins,” housed in the Redmoon warehouse. In the middle of the room, a rotating thirtyfoot-tall crane equipped with stages for performances will serve as the centerpiece. Always ambitious, Redmoon promises aerialists, puppets, and craft beer, a “special appearance by God.” Whether you want to take advantage of the Lagunitas beer bar, or seek an experience with the Great One, the event is sure to be memorable. Redmoon Theater, 2120 S. Jefferson St. Fridays, March 27–April 10, 9pm-12am. $25. Tickets available online. 21+. (312)850.8440. redmoon.org (Lucia Ahrensdorf)

Whiplash Fresh-faced jazzer Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller) wants to

18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 11, 2015

be the next Buddy Rich or die trying. And Terence Fletcher—Neiman’s teacher at the elite Shaffer Conservatory — seems perfectly willing to oblige him. Chairs are thrown.

Faces are slapped. A surprisingly well-executed rugby tackle is performed. This, says second-time writer-director Damien Chazelle, is what greatness requires. You may not agree. Regardless, Whiplash is a gripping film, and, next week, it’s coming to a theater near you—the Beverly Arts Center’s fantastic BACinema (they sell beer at the concession stand, if that helps sway you). J.K. Simmons won Best Supporting Actor for his terrific turn as Fletcher, the film’s bald-headed, black-clad and bad-tempered Conductor from Hell, but Whiplash owes most of its success to the polish and musicality of its Oscar-winning editor, Tom Cross.

With quick cuts and pathological attention to detail—the camera’s focus is divided, nervous—Cross turns musical performance into a kind of combat. “Easy listening” this is not. Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th St. Wednesday, March 18, 7:30pm. $7.50, $5.50 for members. (773)445-3838. beverlyartcenter.org (Will Dart)

Kazuo Ishiguro in conversation with Aleksandar Hemon Kazuo Ishiguro is a superstar of English prose. Blending American, Japanese, and British sensibilities, his work has sold millions of copies and been translated into over thirty languages. His best-known novel, The Remains of the Day, was awarded the prestigious Man Booker Prize for Fiction. On March 25 at the Logan Center for the Arts, Ishiguro will read from his latest novel, The Buried Giant.

Set in a fantastical version of medieval England, it follows an elderly couple that seeks to reunite with their grown son and to reclaim their faltering memories, all the while exploring themes of love, mystery, and regret. Following the reading, Ishiguro will discuss his work with Chicago-based writer Aleksandar Hemon, an accomplished and original novelist in his own right. The Buried Giant is available (and heavily discounted) with the purchase of a ticket. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Wednesday, March 25, 7pm. $10-$30. (773)702-2787. arts.uchicago.edu (Kevin Gislason)

Bound Groups of people have the same skin color and facial features, so of course they have the same ideologies and behaviors, right? Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, this common misconception seems to happen more often than not when considering African and African-American cultures and identities. Considering the fact that Africa is a continent with defined borders and almost 2000 different languages, this idea that Africans and African-Americans are automatically best friends upon meeting is just ridiculous. Kenyan-born writer and director Peres Owino explores the tensions and disparities between these two groups in feature documentary Bound. Expertly combining a little history, some storytelling, and a few facts, Owino offers her audience a different kind of story about the lives of African and African-Americans. Be sure to come out and join Owino for a Q&A after the show. The DuSable Museum, 740 E. 56th Pl. Friday, March 20, 7pm-9pm. $10.

(773)947-0600 (Patricia Nyaega)

High Art Directed by Lisa Cholodenko (known more recently for The Kids Are All Right), High Art documents the roller-coaster relationship between Syd (Radha Mitchell), an editor of a photography magazine, and her neighbor, retired photographer, and celebrity Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy).

A chance encounter slowly leads to friendship and the breakdown of Syd’s uninspiring relationship with James (Gabriel Mann) and Lucy’s with Greta, a heroin-addicted former actress played by Patricia Clarkson. An exploration into sexuality, power structures, and drug addiction, the textured characters and artful cinematography of High Art provide a thoroughly chilling but entrancing experience. It garnered widespread critical acclaim upon its release and received the 1998 Sundance Film Festival’s Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. The landmark film is presented by Chicago Filmmakers’ Dyke Delicious Series at Doc Films.

Doc Films, 1212 E. 59th St. Saturday, March 21, 4pm. $5. chicagofilmmakers.org (Clyde Schwab)

VISUAL ARTS

Marwen Lab 2014-2015 As far as titles go, “Marwen Lab 2014-2015” is not one to offer much confusion. The exhibit, presented by the Chicago Art Department, is a culmination of works completed by participants of the 2014-2015 Marwen Lab program.

Founded in 1987, the program has been providing free art lessons, college planning, and career development for students in grades six through twelve at almost three hundred different Chicago schools. This year students were lead by teaching artists Matt Austin, Julia Klein and Christian Ortiz. With an appreciation for learning, a motivation for truth, and a pure and honest desire to share the experience of art and art making, “Marwen Lab” is sure to be a hit.

Chicago Art Department, 1932 S. Halsted St, Suite 100. Opening reception March 13. 6pm-10pm. Closing reception March 20, 5pm-7pm. Free. chicagoartsdistrict.org (Patricia Nyaega)

Killed For years, the question of Northern Ireland’s independence has plagued British and Irish relations. Otherwise known as “The Troubles,” this conflict has taken over 3,500 lives since its “official” beginnings in 1969. Colm McCarthy, an Irish-born, Wisconsin-based photographer and printmaker started to work on his series, “Killed,” in 2008, in response to the 250 children lost to the conflict. For this tribute, McCarthy researched each child extensively in order to separate them from the violence that ultimately took their lives. The purpose of “Killed” is not to make a political statement, but rather to display the pointlessness of the violence. Uri-Eichen Gallery, 2101 S. Halsted St. Opening reception Friday, March 13, 6pm–10 pm. Through April 3.

(312)852-7717. uri-eichen.com (Jola Idowu)

Master Builders: Architecture, Art, and Autism

To celebrate Autism Awareness month, Project Onward is mounting “Master Builders,” an exhibition of work that engages the relationship between art and architecture as it is expressed by the work of artists living with autism. Project Onward is a nonprofit that provides studio and exhibition space at the Bridgeport Art Center for artists with mental and developmental disabilities, about half of whom are affected by autism spectrum disorders. The multimedia show includes meticulously crafted sculptural models, blueprints, and drawings representing architectural forms. Some of the work is locatable in the physical and cultural worlds, such as a detailed model of Hogwarts by artist Janno Juguilon, featured on the project’s website, and precise drawings of architectural landmarks; other pieces are inspired by the artists’ vivid architectural imaginations. A concurrent exhibition will be on view at The Cliff Dwellers, 200 S. Michigan Ave., on the 22nd floor. Bridgeport Art Center, 1200 W. 35th St., 4th Floor. March 20-May 9. Tuesday-Saturday, 11am -5pm. Opening reception Friday, March 20, 6pm-9 pm. Free. (773)940-2992. projectonward.org (Kirsten Gindler)

MUSIC) Jazz/Hip-Hop Exploration at the Promontory The birth and growth of jazz was an integral part of the South Side’s history in the twentieth century, and the renaissance of hip-hop has been an integral part of its history in the twenty-first. David Boykin, a renowned saxophonist and Promontory regular, has put together a series attempting to show “the shared aesthetics” of these two genres. The latest installment in this series will pair South Side-based rap duo Primeridian, whose lyrics treat “harsh, contemporary themes with positive inspiration for the youth,” with Boykin’s own jazz-based group, the David Boykin Expanse. A DJ set from DJ Ayana Contreras will serve to round out this musical conversation between the “genius” of the two genres. The Promontory Chicago, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. Thursday, March 12, 8pm. $10. (312)8012100. promontorychicago.com (Jake Bittle)

Mariachi Night at Thalia Hall If you’ve ever listened to Mariachi music, you know to expect a rich, brass-heavy sound and a bouncy rhythm that makes an excellent soundtrack for happy occasions. Next Friday, Thalia Hall invites Chicagoans to join Mariachi Aztlán for an evening filled with the music: a free jam

CALENDAR session, and a night “of song and celebration.” Mariachi Aztlán is one of three student Mariachi groups from the University of Texas Pan-America and has performed extensively in and out of southern Texas (recent collaborators include the Chicago Lyric Opera). Attendees for the Thalia Hall show are encouraged to bring their own musical instruments and play along with members of the group.

Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St. Friday, March 20, doors 6pm. Free. (312)526-3851. thaliahallchicago.com (Elizabeth Bynum)

#OREOFEST at Reggies DJ Oreo has plenty of famous friends: as the official DJ for rising stars Vic Mensa and Chance the Rapper, Oreo is at the center of the hip-hop collective SAVEMONEY’s local universe. His latest project is OreoFest, a Chicago hip-hop bonanza featuring famous and almost-famous pals alike, with special guests including Cago Leek, Katie Got Bandz, Alex Wiley, Leather Corduroys, and many more.

“This line up for #oreofest is looking pretty good,” Oreo tweeted recently, adding, “definitely a first time in chicago that some things are going to happen,” and, “You’ll have to be there to find out.” Hard to find a directive clearer than that. Don’t miss this one. Reggies Chicago, 2105 South State St. Saturday, March 14, doors 9pm. $15-20. 18+. 312-9490120. reggieslive.com Updates available @djoreo90 (Olivia Myszkowski)

Dazz Band at The Promontory Created by a merging of two Cleveland funk bands in the seventies, the critically acclaimed group Dazz Band has hybridized funk, jazz, and soul to make an infectious, eclectic dance music that’s won them international acclaim.

Their name, a portmanteau of “danceable jazz,” reflects the balance of synthesized, poppy rhythm and the impressive trumpet and saxophone talent of the band’s core members.

With a number of hit singles, including “Let It Whip” and “Let It All Blow,” Dazz Band found great popularity in the eighties, winning a Grammy for Best Performance by a Group or Duo. To experience the best of 1980s funk-jazzpop-soul, come to The Promontory this Sunday. Promontory Chicago, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. Sunday, March 15, 8pm. $20-$40. (312)801-2100. promontorychicago.com (Lucia Ahrensdorf)

Slum Village at the Shrine Despite the absence of two of its founding members, Slum Village is still a more prominent group than usual for the Shrine, which usually features more locally-based artists.

Hailing from Detroit, SV was founded in 1996 by high school buddies Baatin, T3, and the late J Dilla, and it quickly became a staple of the Detroit underground oldschool funk-and-soul rap scene. Dilla gained recognition while working with the production team Ummah to produce hits for A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul and Common, and in 1998, the group received further acclaim when opening for Tribe on tour. Over the next decade they released a slew of albums. Sadly, Dilla, who became wildly famous for his critically acclaimed solo work (especially Donuts), died in 2006, while Baatin, whose masterful beats guided the group’s rhymes, died in 2009. Since then, though, the band has forged onward, returning with the release of Villa Manifesto in 2010 and Evolution in 2013.

Catch them this Sunday as they keep on marching. The Shrine, 2109 S. Wabash Ave. Sunday, March 15. $32. 21+. theshrinechicago.com (Clyde Schwab)

Get Out of the Car at Reggies Get Out of the Car styles itself as a straightforward exploration into the heart of rock and roll. The band (and its name, perhaps?) originated from a discussion/argument/ fight between founding members Mindy Thomas and Karl Kuhn about what makes rock and roll worth anyone’s time.

Get Out of the Car released Mission, their first full-length LP, in 2014. With Kuhn on guitar, Thomas on vocals and bass, and Seagan Brien on drums, the group began producing jams bridging Detroit garage-rock and “Prairie School freak outs” to reflect all the grit of Chicago rock itself. Though the sound can seem harsh at first, a few quick listens to Get Out of the Car’s tracks reward the listener with catchy hooks, backlit atmosphere, and driving rhythm to send you on a nostalgic trip for some old time rock and roll. Let’s just hope those old days aren’t gone forever.

Reggies, 2105 S. State St. Thursday, March 19, 9pm. $5. 21+. reggieslive.com (Clyde Schwab)

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