March 4, 2015

2 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MARCH 4, 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 Managing Editor Deputy Editors

Bea Malsky Hannah Nyhart John Gamino, Meaghan Murphy

Politics Editors

Music Editor Stage & Screen Editor Visual Arts Editor

Editor-at-Large Contributing Editors

Osita Nwanevu, Rachel Schastok Jake Bittle Olivia Stovicek

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

Staff Writers

Staff Photographers

Staff Illustrators

Jack Nuelle, Stephen Urchick 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 Camden Bauchner, Juliet Eldred, Kiran Misra, Siddhesh Mukerji Jean Cochrane, Lexi Drexelius, Wei Yi Ow, Amber Sollenberger, Javier Suárez, Teddy Watler, Julie Wu

Editorial Intern

Clyde Schwab

Webmaster Business Manager

Shuwen Qian Harry Backlund

Lauren Gurley, Robert Sorrell Bess Cohen Maha Ahmed, Lucia Ahrensdorf, Christian Belanger, Mari Cohen,

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.

Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 1212 E. 59th Street Ida Noyes Hall #030 Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773)234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly Read our stories online at southsideweekly.com

Cover photo by Juliet Eldred.

IN CHICAGO Standardized Testing for All CPS and the CTU were on the same side of a battle on Monday against a common enemy: standardized testing. CPS announced that it would have no choice but to give the state-mandated, Common-Core-tied Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) test to all third through eighth-grade students. Otherwise, it risks losing over $1.4 billion in state and federal funding for the district, since the Illinois State Board of Education, in an attempt to comply with the federal mandate that ninety-five percent of students in a district be tested, rejected its repeated requests to find an alternative to fully administering the test this year.

In less than a week, schools will have to begin giving the test, where previously CPS had planned to defy the mandate by delaying full testing for a year and implementing a pilot program to test only ten percent of schools. CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett had said she was concerned that not all students would have the experience with technology needed for the test, which will be computer-based for all but third- through fifth-graders. CPS did ask all schools to prepare to administer the exam just in case. While CPS may have been forced to surrender and is now asking students to comply with the test in a letter to families, the CTU and anti-standardized-testing parents and activists continue to fight and are urging families to have their students opt-out of the PARCC exam.

Please Make a Decision, Toni Toni Preckwinkle worried more than a few Chicagoans on Monday

when she told the Sun-Times she was “staying out of ” the mayoral runoff and did not have an endorsement. She made things only a little better when she called the paper back to clarify that she hadn’t said that “she would never take a position in the mayoral race, but only that [her] position was unchanged.” This political calculus— faced by Bobby Rush, Michael Pfleger, and others—is familiar by now: if Emanuel wins she will have to work with him. If she endorses Garcia, her floor leader, and he loses, her own initiatives as Cook County President may start running into more obstacles from Emanuel. Still, Preckwinkle should publicly take a side.

Get Well Soon, Derrick Last week, hometown hero Derrick Rose, who was recently featured in a Powerade commercial as a boy riding a bike from Englewood to the United Center, suffered his third major knee injury in four years.

It was the second surgery on his right meniscus, the same injury that ended his season back in late 2013. This time he had the torn meniscus removed, which will mean he recovers faster, but could face long-term issues down the road. For now, the ten-minute operation appears to have been a success; “sources” close to Rose—one wonders how close, exactly— reported that it felt like getting a pebble out of your shoe, and the star point guard is currently expected to return in four to six weeks, in time for the playoffs. Bulls fans will surely be hoping that some of the burden can be alleviated by this season’s breakout phenom, Jimmy Butler—just kidding, he’s also injured (elbow sprain, three to six weeks).

IN THIS ISSUE wheels to the people the knotted heart of angela jackson

This is emotional honesty backed up in full by righteous anger. sarah claypoole...4

“There will never be a shortage of kids in need of bikes.” emeline posner...8 dewayne perkins, professional funnyman

staying curious

“My purpose is not to guide the eye of the viewer to see this or that.” emiliano burr di mauro...5

“Just when they think, ‘Oh, he’s one of those safe black people,’ I punch them in the face with comedy.” mark hassenfratz...11

the aftermath: getting there

activists protest inhumane

We consider some of the top factors that motivated parents’ choices after the CPS closures. lauren poulson and olivia myskowski...6

treatment at homan aquare

“If there are other individuals that have been victimized and brutalized in this building, we need you to come forth.’’ theresa campagna...12

guns, taken as gospel

The nonviolence of the civil rights movement turns out to be inseparable from the use of guns as self-defense. christian belanger...13 the runoff

The scale of the task that Garcia faces cannot be underestimated. patrick leow...14 pullman earns national monument status

Pullman could finally see the revitalization that preservationists have been working toward for years. andrew koski...16 close encounters with the furred kind

That’s not a dog! emily lipstein...19

MARCH 4, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

BOOKS

The Knotted Heart of Angela Jackson A

n organ opens sweetly—texturing the space of the song, accompanied by backup singers and other instrumentals—before the voice of Barbara Lewis, nineteen at the time of the initial recording in Chicago’s famous Chess Records studio, begins. It is from this song, “It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time” —warm, full, and nostalgic—that poet Angela Jackson fittingly takes the title of her newest poetry collection, which explores the intersection of emotion, memory, and politics.

On Saturday, February 21, the Logan Center for the Arts, the University of Chicago’s Arts + Public Life, and the UofC’s Center for Study of Race, Politics & Culture co-sponsored a party and reading celebrating the book’s release. In some ways, the event became a retrospective of Angela Jackson’s work and life more broadly, as a series of speakers emphasized the poet and playwright’s importance as a mentor for successive generations of black Chicagoans.

Speaking immediately preceding Jackson’s reading was Haki R. Madhubuti, a Black Arts Movement contributor and author. Madhubuti is the founder of Third World Press, the largest independent blackowned press in the United States, located in Chatham. He spoke to Jackson’s lifelong interest in creating and promoting black art; they met over forty years ago, when eighteen-year-old Jackson joined the Organization of Black American Culture as a freshman at Northwestern University. It is Madhubuti’s press that published Jackson’s first book, Voodoo Love Magic. When Jackson followed him onstage, she spoke fondly of the quintessentially Chicago arts scene that she has lived in: her forbearers and her descendants together form what Madhubuti called a “cultural family.”

This interest in history and literary inheritance runs deep in It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time. The only titled section of the work, “Suite: Ida,” is named for Ida B. Wells-Barnett, whose journalistic efforts in documenting lynching in the Jim Crow South are refracted throughout the section’s poems, depicting a cultural landscape preoccupied with violence against black bodies. The poems also include repeated reference to Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruits”, the blues singer Bessie Smith, Gwendolyn Brooks, Aretha Franklin, and, eventually, W.E.B. Du Bois.

One way that Jackson engages with 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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The Chicago poet releases new work

BY SARAH CLAYPOOLE

her predecessors is through their writings, most strikingly displayed in “The Smoke Queen,” a sharp response to Du Bois’s famous “Song of the Smoke” regarding gendered experience of race. She engages with the legacy of prior black creators, giving Gwendolyn Brooks a stirring eulogy (“Who can remember a time when your language / Did not dignify what or who was diminished?”). Neither does Jackson shy away from the private corners of cultural figures’ lives—one poem, “Did Ida B. Wells Ever Pass Bessie Smith on the Boulevard?” plays with the physical proximity of both women as an access point to the indignity Jackson

finds in their deaths, each reflecting a “final violence.”

Jackson’s own family—her parents, cousins, nieces, and eight siblings—receive heavy attention in the first sections of It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time, and this composed the majority of the material she read at the collection’s release. Her voice curved over and across words, reminiscent of the blues, the trill something like Bessie Smith in her most famous recording, “Nobody Knows When You’re Down.” Jackson has a poet’s cadence, careful and sharp, that highlighted the lyricism of these visual and evocative reflections, particularly of “Perfect

Pears” and “The Fabric of Our Lives,” each deriving power from the specificity of its scene.

That specificity speaks to one of the greatest strengths of It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time. The political—especially inequality rooted in gender and racial difference—is more than polemical. A strong indictment of “American Justice” (a poem in which Jackson harkens back to Maya Angelou by declaring as chorus-line “I sing because I am not free”) is so effective because it is rooted in the personal and concrete. The epidemic of young black men dying becomes the story of a student of Jackson’s, presumably from Kennedy-King College, where she taught until retirement.

Flawed societal conceptions of rape are also illuminated in the image Jackson paints of uncomprehending observers on an “L” platform, giggling “at the sight of public sex” despite the woman’s “mouth stretched wide as the river she was drowning in.”

Perhaps most compellingly, Jackson cannot distance herself from the tragedies she notes—the scene of the rape causes her to ask, finally, “Did she look like me?” Another poem describes the aftermath of Emmett Till’s death with a particular interest in his mother, whom the speaker empathizes with: “How articulate was this wrecked flesh! / The remains of her boy, once beautiful. / Then ruined. / She left the casket opened.” The line between the mother’s sorrow and her own sadness blurs, pulling the reader into the grief, horror, and defiance.

This is emotional honesty backed up in full by righteous anger.

Personal and collective memory intermingle freely in Jackson’s verse. In “Her Memory Coming Home,” the poet recalls a relationship as a “knot of time.” Jackson runs with this stance on the histories richly outlined in the collection, treating poems as individual threads entangled with other experiences, formative historical events, and literary predecessors. It is this knotted heart of the collection that grants it strength.

Though often lovely as individual threads, It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time gains power through its obsessive tangles— the constant revisiting of Mississippi, of Chicago, of Gwendolyn Brooks and Ida B. Wells, and our own “lopsided land:” fruitful territory for a collection of startling political and emotional poignancy.

VISUAL ARTS

Staying Curious A

courtesy of varda caivano

Painter Varda Caivano at the Renaissance Society

s shown by the latest exhibition at the Renaissance Society by Buenos Aires-born and London-based painter Varda Caivano, abstract art still very much has an audience. At the opening of the exhibit last week, entitled “The Density of the Actions,” the patrons were noticeably confounded, enchanted, and unsettled by art on display. And not without cause—her paintings are imaginatively filled with colors, lines, and forms that are both intricately incoherent and effortlessly comprehensive.

The exhibition consists of seven large paintings, all of which are untitled and spread out, mounted across from one another on two long walls. Caivano’s use of grey and charcoal is front and center in the series, each piece creating a different sense of both time and space through the shadowy gradients. The juxtaposed lines and forms are reminiscent of strange landscapes, manmade and natural alike—yet they never decisively emphasize one mood or tone over another.

The space also features two vitrines on either side of the gallery, each filled with numerous preliminary sketches, which Caivano refers to as “works on paper.” She declines to refer to them as drafts as she does not consider them in any way inferior to her later work.

The space was designed in collaboration with architect Peter St. John and is arranged to mimic a sort of ongoing dialogue between the pieces.

“There is a conversation between the work in how [the paintings] resonate with and contrast each other to the point where it feels like all of the paintings are only one work,” Caivano says.

For the show, she points towards both the color grey and charcoal as two of her most recent inspirations. After showing at the International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2013 and starting a sixmonth long scholarship in Rome, Caivano began seriously experimenting with the two elements hoping to be more specific in her intentions and to “reduce the number of possibilities,” simultaneously striking a contrast to the vibrant, colorful works she had been working on previously.

The impulse to see something tangible in Caivano’s work reflects the inherent desire of a viewer to make sense of the abstraction presented before them. Yet Caivano does not consider such an undertaking—which could be mistaken by other artists as an unfortunate side effect of the style itself—as inferior to any other type of experience one has when viewing her work.

“My purpose is not to guide the eye of

the viewer to see this or that, to make them consume the work as a commodity...it’s much more to have an experience, a visual experience that people find interesting to look at, or uncomfortable as well,” she said when I spoke to her a few days before the opening of the gallery.

The priority placed upon the visual experience Caivano hopes to afford to the audience reflects her experience painting.

She works on many pieces at the same time, returning time and time again to the same canvases in her studio—adding, taking away, and unapologetically manipulating.

“The image you see at the end is very much something that comes from the back to the top. There are paintings that are behind the paintings; it has to do with this idea of mental mapping,” Caivano says. These mental maps are front and center in the exhibition, where the physical techniques create an image that looks like it has endured numerous revisions without trying to make a polished product for consumption.

“It has to do with the idea of the memory of the image and of the fabric of the canvas itself: you might do something and then you might erase it, but it’s still kind of there.

It’s something that you revisit in a different way,” she says.

Caivano’s growing success in the international art scene begs the question of the role of exposure in her relationship with her own work.

“If I am making the painting, I am not the one who is also going to be judging the painting. The viewer has their own experience with my work, and I have my own,” Caivano says.

She says she tries to step back from her role as viewer as much as she can, and that this act ultimately changes the path of the painting when returning to her role as artist.

Above all else, her work and work ethic represent a drive to practice more, to research more, to explore more, and to eventually understand more about abstract art.

When asked if she ever reaches a place of satisfaction within her work, she does not answer definitively.

“If somehow you find yourself in a very well-known territory, a bit lost, it’s a really good sign because it means you can go somewhere new...I would say to stay curious is the most important thing.”

The Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Ave. Through April 19. Tuesday-Friday, 10am5pm; Saturday-Sunday, noon-5pm. Free.

(773)702-8670. renaissancesociety.org

BY EMILIANO BURR DI MAURO MARCH 4, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

The Aftermath: Getting There Percent of Students Enrolling in Designated Welcoming Schools Designated Welcoming School STAYED at its current location

Designated Welcoming School MOVED to location of closed school

Designated Welcoming School MORE THAN 1/2 mile away from student’s residence

Designated Welcoming School WITHIN 1/2 mile from student’s residence

53%

53%

AVERAGE / BELOW-AVERAGE safety at Designated Welcoming School

56%

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83%

76%

ABOVE-AVERAGE safety at Designated Welcoming School

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79%

Report shows safety and proximity to home were key factors in families’ decisions on where to send kids after schools closed

I

n January, the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research released a report titled “School Closings in Chicago: Understanding Families’ Choices and Constraints for New School Enrollment.” The report, which is available online, presented a variety of data on how families chose where to send their kids for the 2013-2014 school year after Chicago Public Schools closed the doors of forty-seven elementary schools.

In a two-part series, the Weekly aims to provide contextual background and reporting on some of the report’s findings. CPS assigned designated “welcoming schools” for all students whose schools had closed, but parents were not required to send their kids to these schools. Last week, the Weekly wrote that though the welcoming schools were rated higher than the closed schools—a key part of the city’s claim that the school closings improved students’ educational prospects—not all welcoming schools were significantly higher rated than the closed school they replaced, and that the test-score-based rating system itself was disputable. Nor did all parents choose to send their kids to the welcoming school, preferring other schools for a variety of factors, leaving some kids at schools with lower ratings than the closed school. This week, in the second installment, we consider some of the top factors that motivated parents’ choices as to whether to send their kids to the welcoming school—safety, proximity to home, and transportation among them—as well as CPS’s efforts to address these concerns with the Safe Passage program.

EDUCATION

Transportation in CPS

BY LAUREN POULSON

T

he Chicago Public School system provides very little transportation of its own; school buses are provided in rare cases, for children with special needs, for those who cannot attend their neighborhood schools due to overcrowding, and for some students who attend certain magnet and selective enrollment schools. With limited school busing, most children in the system walk, have their parents drive them, or take public transportation. So when CPS closed forty-seven elementary schools, it is not surprising that distance and transportation were important considerations in parents’ choices about where to send their kids for the 2013-2014 school year.

Some paths to school are expensive, long, or dangerous. The report cited multiple parents who were worried about fighting or gang-related activity, and even that their

School Closings and Safe Passage

BY OLIVIA MYSZKOWSKI

E

ach weekday morning and then again in the afternoon, on sunny days and in polar vortices, Chicago’s neighborhood streets are scattered with Safe Passage workers. The program, a CPS effort to keep students safe as they travel to and from school, employs adult monitors to guard routes known for violence or gang activity. With the recent closures, parents and community leaders expressed concern that students traveling further between home and school would face increased safety risks. In response, and with support from the municipal and state governments, the Safe Passage program has been continually expanded since the closings, most recently to a total of 133 routes in the fall, up from ninety-three in the 2013-2014 school year.

This fall’s $10 million expansion, funded by then-Governor Pat Quinn, came after the program had already been expanded for the 2013-2014 school year—the first

children might possibly be mistaken for gang members. It also cited multiple parents for whom cost of transportation was an issue, whether this was because parents had jobs and could not take the time off to drive their children, or because they had multiple children and the costs of CTA added up too quickly. In cases where routes seemed prohibitive, some parents ultimately sent their children to lower-rated schools than those that had been shutdown.

In order to address transportation needs, CPS offered bus transportation to welcoming schools that were more than 0.8 miles from the student’s previous, closed school. However, according to the report, students were actually less likely to attend these six schools than their counterparts that did not provide transportation, likely because these schools were still in far away, unfamiliar neighborhoods. Furthermore, the CPS-provided buses usually picked up at the closed school site, not children’s homes, which further complicated transit efforts.

Transportation was not central to all parents’ decisions. Even when transpor-

tation is regularly provided within CPS, it is not always used. Chris Hewitt, Local School Council (LSC) member for Brentano Elementary School, which met CPS criteria for shutdown but ultimately stayed open, told the Weekly that this was the case when Brentano was a magnet school, “few or no students” from outside its neighborhood boundaries took the offered transportation.

Cassandra Vickas of the LSC for Courtenay Language Arts Center, an elementary school that merged with Stockton Elementary School at Stockton’s location after the school closings, also said she doesn’t “think transportation has had a significant impact on kids getting to school, [either] before or after the merger.” Hewitt and Vickas believe that the lack of public school transportation provided by CPS has not negatively affected parents to the degree that the report found.

Although transportation may have been central to some parents’ decisions in the wake of the shutdown, it was not a universal concern, and a variety of factors influenced families’ choices about the best schools for their children.

year following the closings—with a significant portion dedicated to supporting Safe Passage workers stationed on routes near recently closed CPS sites, shepherding students to their designated “welcoming school.” The report states that in 2013 CPS spent $7.7 million to hire an additional 600 Safe Passage employees to patrol paths near closed schools, which, according to the City, doubled the program, begun in 2009 as part of CPS’s Culture of Calm safety initiative.

CPS has also recognized that not all students attend their assigned welcoming schools. In June 2014, CPS announced its fiscal year 2015 budget, which (separate from the $10 million increase funded by the governor) included $1 million to support six new routes for schools that attracted students from closed schools, even though they had not been “designated” welcoming schools. According to the city’s press release for this fall’s expansion, “there had been no major incidents involving students on Safe Passage routes near schools during the program’s operational hours” after the program doubled for the 2013-2014 year.

The program has grown steadily in size since its inception, but this fall’s investment marks Safe Passage’s biggest expansion to date. For students with limited transporta-

tion options and who walk to school, Safe Passage is intended as a safety net, an assurance to parents that community members are keeping watch over their children as they trek through the neighborhood each day. CPS hires Safe Passage workers through the community groups who live near the routes they monitor.

“It is so important to hire community organizations that are very familiar and already entrenched in the communities where these schools reside,” CPS’s Chief Safety and Security Officer, Jadine Chou, said in a DNAinfo article from August when Safe Passage celebrated its five-year anniversary.

CPS sent Safe Passage maps to all families with students displaced by school closures. According to the report, though some families’ safety concerns were quelled by the Safe Passage expansion, some were not. Interviewers found that when parents decided whether or not to enroll their student in their assigned welcoming school, safety inside and outside the school building was a primary factor. In some cases, students were enrolled in non-welcoming schools because parents felt the commute was safer. The report suggests that better tailored neighborhood Safe Passage plans could be a solution to this issue.

In selecting schools for their children, the top criteria parents considered were:

Is it close to home?

Is the commute safe?

What are the transportation costs?

66%

students enrolled into their designated welcoming school

$10,000,000 additional funding for Safe Passage in the 2014-2015 year

1,900

number of Safe Passage workers

MARCH 4, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

O

ver the last sixteen years, Pilsen’s Working Bikes cooperative has redistributed more than 50,000 bikes across the world. A decade and a half ago, those bikes flowed from a two-car garage on Claremont Avenue; today they’re refurbished in a two-story warehouse on Western Avenue. If lined up end to end, those 50,000 bikes would make a continuous line from the shop on Western up to the avenue’s north end, down all the way south, and back to Working Bikes’s front door— nearly fifty-five miles of bikes.

Working Bikes, in spite of its crammed-but-navigable shop, has a relatively straightforward mission statement: to save bikes from the scrap pile, to repair them, and to distribute them where they are most needed. These bikes come from all over the Midwest; from scrap yards, bike drives, and individual donations alike.

The mountain bikes, whose tires and build are suited for rural roads and heavy loads, get shipped to partner organizations in Africa and South America, where local mechanics repair and distribute them. In 2014, 6,288 bikes were shipped to six organizations abroad.

The Chicago-bound bikes are fewer (1,130 in 2014), in part because they must be repaired and given safety evaluations before distribution, a job that Working Bikes’ partner organizations handle internationally. Imagine an adult, back hunched, knees splayed, tottering down the shop aisles on a streamered children’s bike. Safety check concluded and laughter subsiding, the bikes are tagged and stacked in the storeroom to be driven to a local partner organization.

Though most are distributed through community organizations, there are also bikes set aside for people who have the need for a bike but not the means. Individuals who qualify can walk in with a co-pay of twenty dollars and a referral from a social worker or case manager, and walk out with a refurbished bike, helmet, city-grade lock, and a year of free repairs.

“It’s funny,” Working Bikes manager Paul Fitzgerald said. “A lot of people interact with only one of our organization’s facets, and will think of us as only that. So custom-

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Wheels to the People

ers will frequently think of us a place where they can buy a used bike for far less money than other places, but they won’t know that we also ship bikes. Or, they’ll know that we ship bikes, and then they’ll ask us why we don’t do anything in Chicago.”

When the numbers show that Working Bikes donates one bike within Chicago for every six shipped overseas, it becomes easy to think of Working Bikes as an organization with a focus abroad. But Working Bikes has a community presence that isn’t quantifiable in quite the same way. As Working Bikes has grown over the years, its community initiatives have expanded alongside the growing bike movement on Chicago’s South Side.

How a Pilsen workshop distributed 50,000 bikes from a cycling desert

BY EMELINE POSNER

stuffed with bike maps, magazines, and calendars for local rides.

There is rarely a moment of stillness here. Customers flow in and out the door, walking the rows of bikes with heads tilted, admiring the restored Schwinns and Raleighs. In back, behind the rows of colored bikes and boxes of handlebars, pedals, and horns, volunteers shuttle back and forth be-

Working Bikes, in spite of its crammed-but-navigable shop, has a relatively straightforward mission statement: to save bikes from the scrap pile, to repair them, and to distribute them where they are most needed.

T

he Working Bikes shop is bikes from floor to ceiling—it contains around 1,500 of them between its two floors. Spruced up bikes are lined up for sale in front, while irreparably damaged frames and other unlikely sales hang from the rafters. The walls are lined with racks of spare parts and shop volunteers’ bikes. Where wall space goes unclaimed by metal, references abound: there are pictures of people riding bikes both fancy and funky; articles about bikes; posters with bikers’ maxims; shelves

tween the workspace and the racks of spare parts. They’re hard at work, but their concentration is light-hearted; clinks of nuts and bolts are interspersed with chatting and laughter. On the other side of the shop, volunteers sit crouched, sorting derailleur gears and brake mechanisms.

Fifteen years ago, when founders Lee Ravenscroft and Amy Little operated out of their two-car garage, you wouldn’t have seen such activity. The two took weekly trips to the scrap yard, stacking the salvaged bikes in the bed of their pickup truck and fixing

them up at home.

Ravenscroft had been surprised by the high rate of bike abandonment in Chicago at the time. He wanted to send the salvaged bikes to countries in South America and Africa, where bikes are largely unaffordable, often costing more than a quarter year’s salary.

“Bikes abroad,” Ravenscroft said, “can be the difference between employment and unemployment, a way to get to school or to a medical center more easily, even a means of generating electricity.”

As bike enthusiasts—Paul Fitzgerald, Working Bikes’ manager, among them— were drawn in to the operation, donations and shipments increased and Working Bikes made the move from the Claremont garage to a shop on Western. From there, it shifted south several times before settling in 2009 in the warehouse on 2434 S. Western, where they sell around two thousand used bikes, and service around a thousand more, annually.

Along the way, Working Bikes has increased its local initiatives: the front service shop opened officially in 2011, and Working Bikes offered its first summer educational programs in 2013. The Annual Christmas Bike Sale, which sells children’s bikes for five to ten dollars apiece, sold ninety-five more bikes in 2014 than the year before.

That growth has stemmed from, and demanded, changes that go beyond location.

Marie Akerman is Working Bikes’ communications and development manager, and their first non-mechanic hire. “We didn’t really pick up the phone until about a year and a half ago when we hired Marie,” co-founder Ravenscroft chuckled. “Which was a problem, because people would call wanting to know about hours, or whether

BIKES

juliet eldred

they could drop off a bike at a certain time, and wouldn’t always reach us. And those kinds of calls are important for us.”

This year’s annual report provides bright visualization of the data for the distribution of bikes and other Working Bike statistics, giving literal and figurative color to what was last year a black-and-white PDF, and, before then, not available online. This past month, Akerman traveled to South America to visit several of the partner organizations on Working Bikes’ behalf. Working Bikes may be getting more organized, but they still don’t always pick up the phone.

In recent years, the building itself has also undergone a renovation. Until the summer of 2013, the professional mechanics and volunteers shared a workspace on the second floor, which often led to overcrowding and frustration according to both volunteers and

staff. The second floor is now the domain of the mechanics, the first floor that of the volunteers.

Hanging on one wall of the new volunteer workspace is a sign: “Brandon’s Bike Shop,” spelled out in wrenches and various bike parts. Brandon Bernier was a dedicated Working Bikes volunteer who passed away several years ago. His parents, recognizing how much Brandon had cared about the shop, made a donation from his memorial fund to Working Bikes; Working Bikes decided to put the money toward a more unified volunteer space in his memory. Brandon’s Bike Shop now serves as a center of work and learning, filled with grease-covered hands and half-dismantled bikes.

On a Saturday afternoon, volunteer coordinator BK Elmore paced that workspace in a whirl of energy and sarcasm, offering guidance. When a volunteer was thrown off by the structure of the front hub, Elmore was there in an instant: “Did I hear you say you didn’t know what you were doing?

Nope, don’t be so defeatist. I want you to say, ‘I’m ready to learn.’” Within minutes, Elmore had explained what had gone wrong, offered a solution, and was off to check on the progress of a bike on the other side of the shop.

Despite the ever-increasing number of bike donations and active volunteers, Working Bikes remains an intimate space, one where names are remembered over numbers.

When asked how many mechanics Working Bikes employed, Fitzgerald paused, listing their names and ticking them off on his fingers one by one before answering: two fulltime, four part-time, and one who doubles as a driver.

T

he ward that Working Bikes calls home, the 25th, is a cyclist’s haven. It boasts regular community rides, three Divvy stations, a half-mile of barrier-protected bike lanes and eight more of conventional lanes, three hundred bike racks, two bike corrals, and four bike shops.

Alderman Danny Solis, whose rides are featured on posters on the shop walls, is a vocal advocate for bike- and pedestrian-friendli-

MARCH 4, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

BIKES

juliet eldred

ness.

But the 25th Ward is an exception on the South Side, not the rule. In many wards farther south and west, there are areas to which bikeways and Divvy stations don’t extend. But in the last few years, the South Side has seen an increase in number and activity of bike advocacy groups, and in turn, in bike lane installations: forty-three percent of buffered lanes installed in 2014 were installed on the South Side, according to Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) data. CDOT’s 2020 Bike Plan calls for a bike network that comes within a half-mile of every Chicagoan residence, but 2020 is still a ways away.

Last May, Working Bikes partnered with Angela Ford of the Tony and Alicia Gwynn Foundation to distribute five hundred recycled bikes to Bronzeville youth. “I saw so much joy on the faces of those kids,” said Ford, “many of whom were riding a bike for the first time. It was incredible.”

Ford, Bronzeville born and raised, recounted a childhood of adventures by bike and the surprise she felt upon returning to Bronzeville as an adult and finding its streets devoid of bikes. Years later, her son’s 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MARCH 4, 2015

request for a bike inspired her to get one of her own, and several years later she ditched her car.

Ford takes a position that is distinct from most other South Side bike advocates, who often call attention to disparities in bike resources between the North and South sides; she sees the lack of bikes on the South Side as a manifestation of the electronic age in which we live. “Look at all these handheld devices,” she exclaimed, “Kids don’t want a bike for their birthday when they can get something electronic.”

And their parents? Older generations, said Ford, were raised to value the convenience that a car offered. The driver’s license symbolized the transition from child to adult; it rarely made sense for the bike to carry over into adulthood.

Both Ford and Working Bikes have expressed interest in continuing the distribution annually in different neighborhoods.

I asked Ford how sustainable she thought this relationship could be, given that the Bronzeville distribution nearly doubled Working Bikes’ local distribution from 681 bikes in 2013 to 1,130 last year.

“It’s sustainable from our side,” she an-

swered. “We’ll always have the money necessary to collect the bikes and to fund the project; Working Bikes will always have the heart. And there will never be a shortage of kids in need of bikes.”

Working Bikes also works closely with several Chicago bike shops whose agendas of sustainability, education, and redistribution align with their own: Blackstone Bicycle Works, West Town Bikes, and the newly opened Bronzeville Bike Box, a shop run out of a shipping container on 51st and Calumet Avenue.

“The growth of our local work was partially a decision on our part, partially a reflection of change: more Chicagoans recognize the health and societal benefits of cycling,” Akerman said. “But Working Bikes is one of many local organizations that can help schools, programs, and community organizations to include cycling in their programs.”

Bill Depenbrock, a former Working Bikes volunteer now active with Bronzeville Bike Box, recognizes how close-knit the community of bike shops on the South Side is. “We share resources and mechanics; we go to each other’s rides and fundraisers.” In

2013, Working Bikes donated seventy-six bikes to Blackstone Bicycle Works and eighty to West Town Bikes.

For Oboi Reed, co-founder of the Slow Roll Chicago chapter and an avid cyclist, these shops are key for their tangible contributions to a bike-friendly South Side.

“Bikes and cycling,” he said, “can be used as methods of transforming neighborhoods.

We can change the narrative and change the perception.”

Most of the South Side cycling groups that have emerged in the last decade profess agendas of social change: equity in distribution of bike resources for black communities and between North and South Sides, community revitalization, health, and environmental action. Alongside Slow Roll in its social change endeavor are the South Sidebased groups Red Bike & Green, whose Chicago chapter opened in 2011; the Major Taylor Cycling Club, which appeared in 2008; and Friends of the Major Taylor Trail, which dates back to 2003. The leaders of these groups recently wrote an open letter to the Mayoral Bicycle Advisory Committee, calling for a commitment to equitable distribution of bike resources and allotment of tax dollars to black communities on the South and West sides.

Though Working Bikes does not take part in the more political efforts underlying the local bike movement, they serve as a valuable partner for those who do.

“Working Bikes is an important bike shop, more than anything because they are a community bike shop,” Reed said. “They’re family.” Reed has a three-part Slow Roll series planned for the month of May; the first will ride from Working Bikes, the second from Blackstone, the third from West Town Bikes.

B

ack in the shop one evening, Elmore, the volunteer coordinator, was struggling to locate a brake cable of proper thickness and length. “That’s the problem with taking mostly used parts,” he joked, “it becomes a game of trial and error, and there’s often more error than trial.”

Working Bikes has found an awful lot of success through trial and error over the years, but it’s a matter of working with what you’ve got. There may not be one singular path—one perfect brake cable—towards bike equity in Chicago, but there are several that will work just fine.

COMEDY

Dewayne Perkins, Professional Funnyman

BY MARK HASSENFRATZ

B

eyoncé takes the stage in a fury of passion and grace that quickly and hilariously descends into hobbled flailing and spasms. Luckily, Jesus shows up to give her a hand.

This surreal staging is the brainchild of Marquette Park native Dewayne Perkins. Since his recent graduation from DePaul University, Perkins has found his place in Chicago’s comedy circuit with a sketch group, Bleep That Bleep, and a Second City Training Center show, No Selfie Control.

Perkins writes and performs his own material in both contexts.

The center of Bleep That Bleep’s performance at the Chicago Sketch Fest this January was Perkins’s sketch Beyoncé featuring Jesus, in which the title characters switch places. As it turns out, Beyoncé is a better savior than Jesus, but not even Jesus can do what Beyoncé does. Other sketches from Sketch Fest had similarly bawdy religious themes, as Perkins considered the first dick-pic carved into stone tablets on Mount Sinai and an episode of MTV True Life starring the biblical Jonah.

No Selfie Control, which opened last week and will be performed Saturdays

courtesy of dewayne perkins

through May 2, is a more personal show exploring the concept of identity. Perkins proves himself a versatile performer—from a child on a field trip seeing rapping Abraham Lincoln to Jesus Christ in Beyoncé’s body to a school principal presenting a performance by the Wes Anderson Feminist Club, he is always a riot and a half.

Perkins often presents shorter sketches during No Selfie Control about things he wishes he could say and do but are inappropriate to mention in real life, such as referring to black beans as “Negro beans” at Chipotle. He also showcased his impeccable dance skills in a sketch about the Chicago Flame Department as a fellow cast member poured a cup of water on him.

Beneath Perkins’s silliness lies a serious intent to fuel open dialogue about issues of race, gender, and sexuality. As a gay black man, Perkins has found breaking into the comedy world difficult. “You have to make your own seat at the table,” he said.

There’s not necessarily a chair for you. The comedy world is made for white males.”

The pressure of an unfair and unequal industry forces Perkins to be quicker, sharper, and funnier; he tries to make

his own opportunities by writing original material. There is a sense of rebellion in Perkins’s sketches: by playing authority figures such as Jesus and other biblical figures he actively invites the audience to laugh at them. Comedy has also made it easier for Perkins to lure people into more serious issues.

“Just when they think, ‘Oh, he’s one of those safe black people,’ I punch them in the face with comedy,” he said.

Perkins tackles daunting issues in a silly manner, and he is brilliant at diffusing tension with humor. In No Selfie Control, Perkins plays a gay man re-coming out to his parents, claiming in the sketch that being gay carries an enormous amount of pressure and that he’d rather be straight.

“Being straight is like swimming one lap in a swimming pool, and being gay is like swimming ten laps in a pool full of glitter! And glitter is basically just little gay pieces of glass!”

In Perkins’s hands, comedy becomes a tool for social change by making heavy subjects less uncomfortable to talk about.

“It opens people’s minds to different personas of blackness and gayness,” he said.

The Marquette Park native talks comedy, identity, and No Selfie Control

MARCH 4, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

POLICE

Activists Protest Inhumane Treatment at Homan Square

BY THERESA CAMPAGNA

B

etween one and two hundred people gathered this past Saturday in front of the Homan Square warehouse on the West Side to protest alleged inhumane treatment by the Chicago Police Department. The large building at 1011 South Homan Avenue was named last week by two Guardian investigations as a “black site,” where arrestees are tortured and detained without phone calls or access to legal counsel and without being booked. The newspaper pointed to a 2013 story from the Tribune that found one fortyfour-year-old man had died while in police custody at the site.

At this weekend’s protest, organized

by Chicago Anonymous and the Stop Mass Incarceration Network, community organizer Otis Buckley told the crowd, ‘’If there are other individuals who have been victimized and brutalized in this building, we need you to come forth.’’

Several activists also made demands Saturday of the CPD and Mayor Rahm Emanuel: to allow the community to inspect Homan Square within the next few days, to organize a public town hall meeting to be held within ten days, to immediately book all people arrested in Chicago, provide phone access to attorneys, and make public records of all arrests, and to open a public investigation into previous activities at the Homan Square facility.

Last Sunday the CPD issued a threepage statement, saying, “Homan Square is a facility owned and operated by the Chicago Police Department since 1999. It serves a number of functions, some of which are sensitive and some of which are not, however it is not a secret facility.”

Emanuel, under pressure from the upcoming runoff election, was campaigning Saturday and did not discuss Homan Square. The mayor did say last Thursday that the CPD does not operate a black site like the CIA. More protests were planned for this past Monday and upcoming Thursday by We Charge Genocide and the Chicago Light Brigade and by the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. On Monday, protestors called for reparations to the families of police torture victims in Daley Plaza, and on Thursday, protestors will call for a shutdown and investigation of Homan Square outside of the facility.

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Above, activists outside Homan Square on Saturday with a call from the Stop Mass Incarceration Network to boycott schools and work on April 14 in protest of police brutality nationwide.

theresa campagna

“We are human beings above everything. How can you guys sit here and condone that this inhumanity and this police state go on?

You guys have family, you guys have kids.

You’ve got to think about that.”

—Community organizer Rush Perez, left, addresses the CPD.

PARKS

Pullman Earns National Monument Status

luke white

Obama designates neighborhood's historic district for preservation

O

n February 19, President Obama— with Mayor Emanuel at his side—announced the designation of Pullman as a National Monument to a crowd of cheering supporters at Gwendolyn Brooks Preparatory Academy. For the Emanuel campaign, the announcement was a valuable pre-election coup: “Rahm hasn't just fought for a national park in Pullman.

He's fought for new opportunity and new jobs in Pullman and for every Chicagoan in every neighborhood,” said Obama. For residents of Pullman, who have been working to have the area recognized by the National Parks Service, the moment was the culmination of a five-decade grassroots movement to preserve the neighborhood’s rich historical and architectural value.

Under the American Antiquities Act, the President has the power to declare historic landmarks as national monuments by public proclamation and “may reserve as a part thereof parcels of land, the limits of which in all cases shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected.” For Pullman, this means that the historic district will become a part of the National Parks Service, albeit a smaller one than a full-fledged national park.

BY ANDREW KOSKI The National Parks Service will maintain portions of Pullman similar to the way it looks after the Washington Monument or the Statue of Liberty. The combined area will be bounded by 103rd and 115th Streets to the north and south, and Cottage Grove Avenue and the Norfolk and Western Railway line to the west and east.

The National Park Service will control the already federally owned Clock Tower and Administration Building, while the State of Illinois will maintain ownership of the Hotel Florence and residents will continue to own the row houses and small businesses in the community.

"Essentially the national monument designation means the Clock Tower Building will be improved into a visitors' center, and the National Park (Service) rangers will provide security and interpretive services for tourists," Kayce Ataiyero, a spokeswoman for House Democrat Robin Kelly, who represents Pullman, told the Tribune. She said the designation will not have a major effect on the everyday lives of Pullman’s residents.

The Pullman National Monument will receive a modest yearly budget from the

federal government, which will go toward programming and maintenance costs, but the monument will rely primarily on support from private donations for funding.

The National Park Foundation, the official charity of the national parks, has announced that $8 million in donations has been received so far. “The gifts will help jumpstart critical projects at the new park,” the Foundation said in a press release, “including the establishment of a visitor center, educational and experiential exhibits, and programming in the Administrative Clock Tower Building designed to engage schoolchildren, the community, and visitors about the importance of Pullman to America's collective history.”

Although the specifics for the National Park Foundation’s plan to revitalize the area have yet to be announced, it’s clear that their direct influence will be limited to the historic district of Pullman, despite the state of many long-distressed homes outside of the district itself.

F

ounded in the late 1870s, Pullman was designed to fit company owner George Pullman’s ideal of a better industrial American society. He envisioned a company-owned town where his workers

and their families could live in brick row houses with access to amenities such as a school, library, and theater. He also wanted to shield his workers from the moral indecencies of nearby Chicago, and discourage the influence of the organized labor movement.

Not everyone, however, shared George Pullman’s idealistic—and often paternalistic—vision of paradise. His control was overbearing, even at times tyrannical. In his 1885 exposé of Pullman in Harper’s Monthly, Richard T. Ely asked: “Are we not frequently trying to offer the gilded cage as a substitute for personal liberty?”

When workers walked out in 1894 over wage cuts without reduced rent, it sowed the seeds for the event that put Pullman on the map: the Pullman Strike—a boycott by railroad workers against Pullman car-carrying trains that ended with a federal injunction, military invervention, and the deaths of thirty strikers in clashes with federal troops.

But despite its historic significance, the fight to save the neighborhood has been a long one. In 1960, consultants to the South End Chamber of Commerce recommended that Pullman be demolished between 111th and 115th to make way for industrial expansion. Citizens fought to save their community, reactivating the Pullman Civic Organization that same year. In 1971, Pullman was designated as a National Historic Landmark, and it later received similar state and local designations. Although the historic district had been saved from demolition, these designations did not come with a steady stream of government revenue.

Pullman residents formed the Historic Pullman Foundation in 1973 and purchased the Hotel Florence—a massive red brick Victorian hotel—to save the building from demolition and to preserve its legacy as one of the original structures built by the Pullman Company. The Hotel and the Clock Tower and Administration Building were sold to the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency in 1991 as part of an effort to refurbish and preserve the architecture of the historic district of Pullman, but progress has been slow and the buildings are still in need of major repairs. The Clock Tower and Administration Building still hasn't fully recovered from a fire in 1998.

Although it’s unlikely that National Monument status will spell an end to those preservation efforts, the increased funding and tourism the designation could bring might lighten the load of area preservationists and ensure that the town’s storied past is presented to visitors well into the future.

MARCH 4, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

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R

unning through the heart of Chicago’s political debate is an angry river, well-worn and deepened throughout its modern history. On one side of that seemingly eternal divide stands a white politician primarily committed to economic growth, one who downplays the political importance of race and typically ends up enacting policies directed toward attracting the college graduates and businesses that populate a vibrant and successful Loop. On the other is the minority politician who points out the gross inequities associated with those policy priorities and instead calls for safer streets, open schools, and an economic strategy that is geared toward neighborhood growth.

This divide appears to only have been exacerbated by the first round of 2015’s election, with Rahm Emanuel and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia occupying comfortable roles within that dichotomy. Over the past months, a pale enmity in both campaigns has dripped through every public statement, every radio advertisement, and every mailer.

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The Runoff Disrupting the traditional narrative of Chicago mayoral elections

BY PATRICK LEOW Garcia, now the standard-bearer for a movement of Chicagoans deeply distrustful of the mayor’s claims that he has improved lives over the past four years, has embraced the notion that Emanuel’s administration embodies the worst of corporate excess that makes victims of ordinary Chicagoans.

That campaign theme was front and center on Election Night. Acceptance speeches often function as bromides thanking volunteers and supportive family members, but unlike fellow candidate Bob Fioretti, who lovingly acknowledged that his wife Nicky has always been by his side, Garcia was far keener in going straight for the jugular.

“Today, we the people have spoken,

not the people with the money and the power and the connections,” he proclaimed.

“They’ve had their say for too long.” Armed with a laundry list of Rahm Emanuel’s transgressions, he made it clear that this was to be a referendum on Chicago’s recent past. “It’s wrong for the mayor to cut our police, then use the money to give corporations one hundred million dollars in tax breaks. It’s wrong for the mayor to cut our neighborhood schools.”

For their part, Garcia’s critics, Emanuel foremost among them, have also been determined to cast a stormy cloud over this election season. A week before the election, super PAC Chicago Forward blanketed

the city with television ads condemning Garcia’s vote for “the largest property tax in Chicago history,” concluding on an ominous note: “Chuy Garcia. Out for himself.

Not us.” Before that, columnists at the Sun-Times gleefully pondered the ethical ramifications of an extraordinarily welltimed exposé of Garcia’s sponsorship of a lucrative county contract for a law firm that represented his son pro bono. Mary Mitchell, a prominent Sun-Times editorial board member, opined: “The legal services were free [for Samuel Garcia], making the arrangement look like old-school Chicago politics.”

The upcoming runoff election is not about to be defined by a belated conversion to positive politics, and both men are expected to continue with the same broad strategies that led them to this present moment. Emanuel’s campaign was based on huge spending for television, radio, and mail advertising, as well as high-profile endorsements. Emanuel has already bought $591,395 worth of television time since the start of the runoff race, and he has given

ELECTION

no indication that he is going to deviate from his public election routine of greeting members of the public at “L” stops each morning and seniors on a few afternoons.

Because of the sheer surprise that comes with pushing as well-known a political figure as Rahm Emanuel into a runoff, national attention for Garcia’s campaign has never been higher. He has used this bully pulpit to pour further scorn on Mayor Emanuel. During a recent interview with MSNBC, his very first words to a national audience were to insist that Emanuel had failed Chicago. He has since increased the intensity of his attacks on the mayor, coming close to describing his mayoralty as being founded on evil intentions.

“Discrimination [is] business as usual for the Emanuel Administration,” he said in a press release about recent CPS school board actions. “Emanuel has gone to the wall to defend a wealthy venture capitalist... while he’s defending discrimination against working mothers.”

Based on first-round election results, each candidate has a core constituency based along racial and income lines. Emanuel’s strongest showing during the first round of the election came in largely white precincts by the lakefront north of Navy Pier, and he triumphed in census tracts with a median household income of over $60,000 by seventeen percentage points.

Conversely, Garcia’s strongest areas are very strongly correlated with the number of Latino residents; he won fifty-six percent of the vote in Hispanic-majority census tracts.

Broadly speaking, there are two constituencies that will go a long way in deciding this election. One has been consistently picked up by election prognosticators, who believe that the thirty-four percent of South and West Side African-American voters who collectively voted for Willie Wilson and William “Dock” Walls will be key in deciding who becomes mayor. Aaron Renn, an urban affairs analyst who frequently writes about Chicago’s politics, lays out Garcia’s challenge among black voters succinctly: “Unless [Garcia] makes inroads in the city’s black sections, where Emanuel captured a first-round plurality, he won’t win.”

The scale of the task that Garcia faces cannot be underestimated. Of the twenty wards in which Garcia did the worst, seventeen are majority African-American. He received a smaller percentage of the vote in wards like those centered on Roseland and

Austin than in white and conservative ones like Norwood Park in the city’s far Northwest Side “Bungalow Belt.” Why black voters appeared unreceptive to Garcia’s appeal during the first round of the election is up for debate, but he will certainly have to diminish the mayor’s advantage among black voters if he is to emerge victorious on April 7.

However, apart from African-American voters, there is another constituency that is effectively unaffiliated with either campaign, and that betrays a potential weakness in the conventional calculus that white voters will turn out to vote for Mayor Emanuel.

Emanuel has very curiously neglect-

gan Square were the lowest among mainly white wards, all of them performing below the citywide average (which at about thirty-three percent was itself significantly lower than last election’s forty-two percent, although similar to previous elections).

More detailed analysis must still be done at a precinct level to figure out the specific political activity of this growing segment of the city’s population, but it appears that neither campaign is doing much to appeal specifically to them. They are a constituency that is unlikely to be attracted by the promise of lower taxes and economic growth so beloved of Emanuel’s wealthy lakefront. By virtue of their age and the relative safety of their neighborhoods, neither are they likely

posed weakness in far-flung communities disrupted by school closings and largely disconnected from the rhythms of the central city might potentially be overblown, and that Garcia cannot simply rely on Latino voters to carry him to the mayoralty.

With just over a month left in this runoff election, there is strong evidence that voters are in large part guided by unchangeable affiliations like geography, race, and income. This systematic interpretation is given greater credence thanks to Chicago’s stark segregation, where the effects of the mayor’s policies are felt very differently from neighborhood to neighborhood. As such, it is unclear how much vigorous campaigning actually matters in an electorate

With just over a month left in this runoff election, there is strong evidence that voters are in large part guided by unchangeable affiliations like geography, race, and income.

ed to address the political concerns of the young, well-educated, and mostly white constituency that has provided much of the city’s population and economic growth in the very recent past. Mostly concentrated along the Milwaukee Avenue stretch of the Blue Line, with growing South Side enclaves in places like Pilsen, these new arrivals have fueled the growth in Chicago’s college-going population. In 2000, a shade over twenty-five percent of the city’s population had at least a bachelor’s degree. As of 2008–2013, that proportion has grown to over thirty-four percent, far outstripping national growth in college graduation rates.

And still, even though they have been the first responders to the city’s burgeoning attractiveness, they have been almost entirely missing from recent political debate. Voter turnouts in the five wards that include and surround Wicker Park and Lo-

to place a high priority on CPS graduation rates or better beat patrols.

But Garcia may have his own peculiar weaknesses beyond this: he has seen uneven success in attracting Latino support.

According to analyses performed by Scott Kennedy at Illinois Election Data, some of the mayor’s biggest improvements from his 2011 performance came in overwhelmingly Latino parts of the city. Although his citywide vote share declined by almost ten percent from his 2011 baseline, there were eight wards in which he actually did better than in 2011. Latinos make up the majority racial group in six of those eight wards.

Most notably, Emanuel improved his vote share by fifteen percent in the 13th Ward, a part of the far Southwest Side containing the neighborhoods of West Lawn and Clearing that is almost three-quarters Latino. This suggests that Emanuel’s sup-

this static, as evidenced in the first round by polls showing that Garcia’s and Emanuel’s vote shares were virtually identical in December and February. Expect Chuy Latino loyalists to respond to Emanuel’s expensively produced ads with antipathy, while wealthier whites treat a potential Garcia mayoralty with fear.

But Chicagoans are unpredictable creatures in the voting booth, and there are still significant open questions left in this race. How far will voter turnout drop in a runoff election? Will there be a consistent trend in how black voters respond to both candidates? Are their respective bases truly locked up? Polls conducted after the first round of the election indicate that both candidates are effectively in a dead heat right now, with enough unpredictability to make definitive proclamations foolhardy.

MARCH 4, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

BOOKS

Guns, Taken as Gospel I Remembering armed resistance and the civil rights movement

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BY CHRISTIAN BELANGER

n his epilogue to This Nonviolent Stuff ’ll Get You Killed, journalist Charles E. Cobb Jr. describes how Stokely Carmichael, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party, was roundly condemned by other leaders in the civil rights movement after his call for Black Power in 1966. The founding of the Black Panther Party and other groups advocating for black militarism is often seen today as an unwelcome injection of radicalism into a movement founded on something akin to Gandhi’s principles of nonviolent resistance.

In this book, however, Cobb shows that this narrative is overwhelmingly false.

There was a longstanding tradition of armed resistance within the black community before the 1960s. The nonviolence of the civil rights movement turns out to be inseparable from the use of guns as self-defense.

Through impressive historical scholarship—focused primarily on the memories of community organizers who entered southern communities as outsiders—Cobb crafts a compelling, convincing case that, in the struggle to attain civil rights, guns were often as integral as gospel songs, even if the latter captured the popular imagination more effectively.

The first few chapters of Cobb’s book are a history lesson, tracing the path of black militancy in the United States. Cobb emphasizes the persistent fear of armed black insurrection among white leaders and politicians, including the especially fascinating worry that liberated slaves would seek revenge against their former masters.

Thomas Jefferson gets a particularly harsh, albeit fair, treatment. Cobb correctly points out the cruel irony of the author of the Declaration of Independence asking John Adams, “Are our slaves to be presented with freedom and a dagger?”

Additionally, Cobb attributes much of early black militancy across centuries—by which he means organized, armed resistance to white supremacy—to war and its aftermath. War was an opportunity for black soldiers to show that racist misconceptions about them (their ability, their loyalty) were unfounded. Black veterans returning home often had a renewed sense of the importance of democratic ideals. Tragically, though, early attempts at black armed resistance were often met by disproportionately vicious levels of white terrorism, the

vengeful flipside of Jefferson’s more benign worry.

The failure of Reconstruction was not simply an inability to implement more egalitarian public policy, but rather a direct result of “a decade of savage campaigns of violence carried out both by local governments…and by vigilante terrorists.” In this environment, armed resistance was not a method of acquiring liberty, but rather a necessary tactic for survival.

Most black leaders argued, however, that a move towards greater freedom would, to quote Frederick Douglass, require the use of “the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.” Then, too, World War I and II—the latter especially, with its idealistic fight against the fascism of the Axis powers—provoked a newfound thirst for freedom among black veterans returning home. This desire was especially acute among this particular group, as many veterans grew up during or immediately after a time historians often refer to as “the nadir” of race relations in America. An era that began around 1877, with the failure of Reconstruction, and lasted well into the 20th century, it was characterized by widespread attempts to disenfranchise black people, which often manifested through the twin forces of institutional discrimination and white terrorism.

Black veterans returning home refused to accept the system of white supremacy that had controlled the entirety of their lives up to that point, and Cobb marks the decision by groups of armed black veterans to assert their right to self-defense as the moment “where the modern civil rights movement truly begins.”

Though the historical background is a horrifically fascinating and worthwhile read, the book’s excellence truly emerges when Cobb begins to explore the civil rights movements of the 1960s, and the attendant tension between the armed, local black citizens of the deep South and educated, genteel organizers of the civil rights groups initially committed to nonviolence, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The overall thesis of his book that arises out of this tension—that the concept of nonviolent resistance was inextricably linked to a much older tradition of armed resistance—is well supported, with reams of

CALENDAR BULLETIN First Mayoral Runoff Debate

personal interviews and incisive analysis of the campaigns of terror many white southerners waged against black activists, and the various ways in which these activists responded.

Cobb recounts one illustrative example, writing on how Margaret Block, an organizer with the SNCC, was asked by her host, eighty-six-year-old Janie Brewer, what the SNCC stood for. Block recounts Brewer’s reaction to the acronym: “And she stopped me. [She said,] ‘You said nonviolent. If somebody come at you, you ain’t gonna do nothing.’…She pulled up a big ole rifle…She kept a big rifle behind the chair… ‘Shit, we ain’t nonviolent.’ ” Activists from these groups were acutely aware that they were coming into a region ravaged by years of a particular, violent kind of white supremacy, and that it would be futile and counterproductive to pry the guns away from the hands of those who had needed them for so long. Brewer’s remark is also prophetic in another way: assassination and, less fatally, intimidation attempts were an inescapable reality for many activists, regardless of their origin.

The matter-of-fact way in which Cobb devotes a single sentence to the death of Medgar Evers—shot by a hidden gunman in the driveway of his own home—is a tragic example of the commonality of such events.

Even the most ardently nonviolent organizers were reluctant in their efforts to convince locals to lay down their arms.

This was partially due to the need to gain respect and local support, but locals often also changed how incoming organizers perceived guns. Cobb tells the story of Dave Dennis, an organizer with CORE who, in response to an explanation of the group’s nonviolent philosophy, was simply told: “This is my town and these are my people.

I’m here to protect my people and even if you don’t like this I’m not going anywhere.

So maybe you better leave.” The only reply Dennis could muster was, “Yes, sir.”

Cobb also briefly tackles the question of how nonviolence came to be seen as the predominant form of civil rights resistance.

Even Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., after all, kept guns in his home. According to Cobb, nonviolence gained in popularity after the student sit-ins against segregation that began in a North Carolina Woolworth’ss: “The quiet dignity of well-dressed students who sat in or picketed, not retaliating even while being attacked, won sympathy for the

civil rights movement and inspired other student activists to follow their lead.” The imagery and message of nonviolence was, it seems, inherently appealing; King’s oratory touched a broader base than Janice Brewer’s brusqueness.

At the end of his epilogue, Cobb writes: “But there was a time when people on both sides of American’s racial divide embraced their right to self-protection, and when rights were won because of it. We would do well to remember that fact today.” This is the first time he comes close to making anything like a normative appeal to the reader. The murkiness of his injunction, though, is slightly worrying. Is this simply an exhortation to the reader to forgo the all-too-common mythologizing of the civil rights movement for a clearer view of the past? Or is it instead asking today’s activists to adopt the principles and practices of armed resistance groups? Cobb’s intention in illuminating the forgotten past of the civil rights movement is clearly not completely apolitical but one is left wishing he had devoted a chapter or two to explore the implications of his work, especially after the ending seems so tantalizingly unfinished.

Cobb was himself a field secretary with the SNCC, though he admits in the afterword that he “never subscribed to nonviolence as a way of life.” Regardless, the book, while at times personal is not memoir. With a few minor exceptions, Cobb keeps the tone descriptive, which only works to emphasize the breadth and depth of his research. That is not to say that this is a dry, academic work. Cobb has a tendency to anchor his chapters using vivid, bloody stories of black resistance, and the evenness of his tone only serves to highlight the grotesque nature of his material.

Nevertheless, the centerpiece of the book, and the reason it works so well, is its vast, convincing array of historical evidence. This is full-blooded revisionism—at least as applied to popular ideas about the civil rights movement—and Cobb rises to the challenge brilliantly. With this particular work of historical journalism, Cobb has produced a valuable corrective to misconceptions about civil rights, restoring a sense of balance to the historical record.

Charles, Cobb Jr. This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed. Basic Books. 320 pages.

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)8530145. wbdc.org (Zoe Makoul)

Restoring Justice: Film Screening and Community Discussion The third entry in the six-part documentary series The School Project, Restoring Justice is a ten-minute film exploring the gradual reform of punitive policies in CPS schools. Created by youth filmmakers from Free Spirit Media, the documentary charts the movement within CPS schools from the harsh, ineffectual disciplinary systems that gave rise to terms such as “the school-toprison pipeline,” to the eventual emergence of restorative justice, characterized by its focus on problem solving through peer mediation, as a viable and popular alternative successfully championed by grassroots organizations. After the screening, there will be a community discussion and panel, moderated by Xavier Ramey of the University of Chicago’s Community Service Center.

North Lawndale College Prep, 1313 S. Sacramento Ave. Thursday, March 5, 5:30pm-8pm. Free. RSVP requested. restoringjustice.eventbrite.com (Christian Belanger)

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, noon3pm. Free, donations encouraged. iww.org/branches/US/IL/ chicago (Adam Thorp)

STAGE AND SCREEN

Obama Presidential Library Hearing

Daisies

Never before has city parkland been so contested. Despite public support for the construction of the Obama Presidential Library on the South Side, civic organization Friends of the Parks objected after the Chicago Park District allocated twenty acres of green space along Stony Island Avenue for the project. The issue will be presented at a hearing for a third go-around on March 9, this time on the floor of City Hall. Facilitated by the Chicago Plan Commission and open to the public, the hearing will have immediate implications for the University of Chicago in its bid to gain the library foundation’s favor. What’s at stake? Nothing less than the contentious economic development a presidential library could potentially bring with it, and the spiritual resting place of Barack Obama’s legacy. Come decide for yourself. City Hall, 121 N. LaSalle St. Monday, March 9, 11am. Open to the public. (312)744-5000. cityofchicago.org (Will Cabaniss)

Daisies, filmed in 1966 by Věra Chytilová, is the hallmark of the Czechoslovakian film miracle. A bizarre film, it documents two teenage girls, both named Maria and played by Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová, through a series of pranks. Though it was banned by Czech authorities for depicting “the wanton” and wasting food (Chytilová was banned from working in Czechoslovakia until 1975), the innovative film was released two years before the Prague Spring, a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia. Avant-garde film programmer and founder of Cinema 16 Amos Vogel described it as, “the most sensational film of the Czech film renaissance . . . a philosophical statement in the guise of a grotesque farce.” Join Doc Films for a screening of this milestone film on Sunday. Doc Films, 1212 E. 59th St. Sunday, March 8, 7pm. $5. docfilms.uchicago.edu (Clyde Schwab)

International Women’s Day 2015 Global Strategists Association, an organization that works to increase African-American participation and engagement in politics, global affairs, and leadership, will host its second annual International Women’s Day event, with the theme (and hashtag) #WomenMakingitHappen. The event’s three speakers are Dr. Margaret King, director of the nonprofit Economic Recovery Institute and a Chicago State University professor with a focus in international studies; Clyde El-Amin, a higher education professional; and Krupa Patel, who works as the International Relations Manager for the DeVry Education Group and has conducted volunteer projects around the world. If the speaker’s backgrounds are any indication, the event will address women’s leadership and empowerment in a political and international context as it urges action for the advancement of women.

Little Black Pearl, 1060 E. 47th St. Saturday, March 7, 10am-1pm. $20 if purchased online on EventBrite; $25 at the door. facebook.com/globalstrategistsassociation (Mari Cohen)

Love Battles The cover of Doillon’s most recent film, Love Battles, shows a couple smeared in mud, legs and arms contorted around each other, copulating in the muddy waters of what appears to be a swamp. This Monday, the wrestling match comes to Hyde Park. French director Jacques Doillon famously said, “I don’t want to express my opinions through the cinema,” but this doesn’t mean he didn’t create controversial and interesting work, and it hasn’t stopped critics from expressing their opinions on his films. Generally, they see them and say they are good.

Now you can see his latest, for free, and form your own opinion about the director, who will attend the screening in person to introduce the film and answer questions after the screening. Open minds necessary, mud-wrestling not condoned. Doc Films, 1212 E. 59th St. Monday, March 9, 7pm. Free. docfilms.uchicago.edu (Robert Sorrell)

Possession Andrej Żuławski’s 1981 “horror psychodrama spectacular” has recently been restored and will be shown in an advance screening this Friday at the UofC’s Film Studies Center. This intense, over-the-top film features

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CALENDAR actress Isabelle Adjani’s phenomenal performance—one for which she won the Best Actress award at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival. On the surface level, the film follows the relationship between an international spy and his wife as they navigate divorce, but the cult classic soon devolves into a series of hysterical, disturbing events.

Possession, which will be shown in 35mm film, will be preceded by two short films as well—Hand Movie, directed by Yvonne Rainer in 1966, and Pulling Mouth, directed by Bruce Nauman in 1969. The screening will be the first in a two-part series presented by the Department of Cinema and Media Studies 2015 Graduate Student Conference, Performing Bodies: Gesture, Affect, and Embodiment on Screen. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Friday, March 6, 7pm. Free. (773)7022787. filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu (Maha Ahmed)

Birdman: or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) After a successful night at the Academy Awards, where it took home the Best Picture Oscar, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman will be making its way to Max Palevsky Cinema. The film gained widespread critical acclaim following its release, with particular attention paid to the acting of Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, and Emma Stone. Powered by these outstanding performances and a layered story, Birdman is an ambitious technical showcase that tells the tale of Riggan Thomson (Keaton).

Thomson, a washed-up actor known for playing the superhero Birdman, is working hard to reinvent himself as a Broadway actor, director, and producer. In the meantime, he battles his family, costars, and his own ego — not to mention the voice in his head. Come for the hype surrounding the movie, but stay for the award-winning cinematography and Antonio Sánchez’s jazzy score.

Doc Films, 1212 E. 59th St. Saturday, March 7, 7pm and 9:30pm; Sunday, March 8, 3:30pm. $5. (773)702-8574. docfilms.uchicago.edu (Shelby Gonzales)

ously disappears while on tour, eventually landing with his “Arkestra” on another planet. He decides it’s well suited for an African-American colony, and so he “returns to earth in his music-powered space ship to battle for the future of the black race and offer an ‘alter-destiny’ to those who would join him.” After Space, director John Akomfrah’s The Last Angel of History—an exploration of the relationship between Pan-African culture and science fiction—will be shown. Originally released in 1996, the movie digs into the works of black cultural figures such as Sun Ra and Octavia Butler, discussing the ways in which their works emerged as centerpieces of the Afrofuturism movement. Black Cinema House, 7200 S. Kimbark Ave. Friday, March 6, 7pm. Free. RSVP recommended. blackcinemahouse.org (Christian Belanger)

Task of the Translator Google Translate is not an infallible tool. Though handy for words and short phrases like “Hi!” and “Where can I find the bathroom?”, when asked for more complex grammatical structures with subjunctives and relative clauses, what it spits back may not make much sense.

That’s why David Bellos, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton University and an award-winning author, thinks that translation has a greater future in the pencil-wielding hands of humans than in the cyber-hands of computer programs like Google Translate.

After all, scholars have been translating the works of ancient writers for thousands of years and don’t show signs of stopping any time soon. A steadily growing field that often goes overlooked, translation lies at the foundation of more than just the humanities. Bellos’s lecture “The Task of the Translator” promises a thorough treatment of just how translation keeps the world running smoothly and how it is at the heart of all we do. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Thursday, March 5, 6pm. Free.

(773)702-2787. arts.uchicago.edu (Emeline Posner)

VISUAL ARTS

Intolerance The theatrical release poster for D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance describes the film as a “colossal spectacle,” and this could not be more accurate. Lithely weaving four parallel plots together, Griffith’s masterpiece creates a grand picture of humanity’s intolerance throughout history.

From a short melodrama about crime to the story of Jesus Christ’s death, the film paints an intricate picture of mankind’s apparent tendency toward intolerance and its consequences, leaving the film to be interpreted as an exposé of racism’s ethos or an apology for mankind’s — or even Griffith’s earlier films’ — racism. Somtow Sucharitkul, director and founder of the Bangkok Opera, will be accompanying the silent masterpiece on the grand piano. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Saturday, March 7, 7pm. Free. (773)702-2787. arts.uchicago.edu (Kanisha Williams)

The Good Book What do you do after you transform one of the most famous poems of all time into an Obie Award-winning one-man show? You move from the twenty-four books that comprise the Iliad to just one book: the Bible. The duo behind An Iliad, Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson, have reunited to transform one of the most famous books of all time into The Good Book. Commissioned by Court Theatre and premiering next month, The Good Book is the first original play developed entirely with Court. Though rooted in the UofC (the Divinity School is to thank for scholarly help, the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry for workshopping), the play itself roams far and wide to explore faith, stories, and religious crisis: from a teenage aspiring priest to a Biblical scholar, from sacred spaces to university offices, from ancient Mesopotamia to medieval Ireland and the American suburbs. Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. March 19-April 19. $35–$65. Discounts available for seniors and students. (773)753-4472. courttheatre.org (Julia Aizuss)

Space Is the Place & The Last Angel of History Science fiction fans, rejoice! On March 6, Black Cinema House will be showing a double feature: the 1974 movie Space is the Place followed by short documentary The Last Angel of History. Space is the Place, written by and starring Sun Ra, begins when the Chicago jazz legend mysteri-

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Endless Rest Much like the utopias they hope to copy, self-sufficient artist communities rarely seem to be anything more than a dream. They are established with the hope of permanence, but are eventually met with the realities of a world that champions a strict supply and demand chain of multifaceted skills that fall far outside the realm of artistic creation and thought. Following the story of Jane Byrd McCall Whitehead and Byrdcliffe, her failed Woodstock, New York artist colony, artists Jessica Harvey and Blair Bogin explore the vulnerabilities of love and failure in the combined exhibition, “Endless Rest.” A joint effort in photography, video animation, and mixed audio, “Rest,” which opens on Sunday at ACRE Projects, hopes to tell a story of both loss and preservation.

ACRE Projects, 1913 W. 17th St. Sunday, March 8, 4pm8pm opening reception. Through March 30. acreresidency.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. Friday, March 13, 6pm–10 pm opening reception. Through April 3. (312)852-7717. urieichen.com (Jola Idowu)

Carmen Parra: Suave Patria Though she traveled throughout Europe—studying at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome and learning from master printmakers in Paris—Carmen Parra reserves the utmost devotion for her home country of Mexico in her artwork. In her exhibition at the National Museum of Mexican Art, “Carmen Parra: Suave Patria,” Parra explores her love of Mexico through an exploration of

the nation’s natural wonders, religious icons, and shared symbols (the royal eagle, the monarch butterfly, and the Main Aztec Temple feature prominently in this exhibition’s prints). Parra’s visual exploration of her country’s most compelling national images reveals her many influences, from her European training to her early exposure to Mesoamerican arts. National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th St. Friday, March 20, 6pm opening reception.

Through August 9. Free. (312)738-1503. nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org (Meaghan Murphy)

Bridgeport Art Center’s Third Annual Art Competition For the past month, Chicago artists-turned-judges Amanda Williams and Monika Wulfers have taken off their smocks and put on their critic’s caps for the Bridgeport Art Center’s third annual art competition.

The judges have now selected a number of the works submitted by amateur and professional artists, living and working within one hundred miles of Chicago, to be put on display at the Bridgeport Art Center. The selected pieces, which include a full array of media—photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, and mixed media— will be unveiled on Saturday evening alongside a spread of prizes of up to $3,000, drinks, and food. Come see the artwork for yourself and size up these Chicagoans’ talent.

Bridgeport Art Center, 1200 W. 35th St., 4th floor. Through April 5. Monday-Saturday, 8am-6pm; Sunday, 8am-12pm.

Awards ceremony Saturday, February 28, 7pm-10pm. Free.

(773)247-3000. bridgeportart.com (Lauren Gurley)

ArtShop Every year, the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) dedicates Gallery 5 to ArtShop, and each time Gallery 5 is filled with the artistic creations of kids from all across the South Side. The ArtShop is an extension of Pathways, an arts education program based out of HPAC that serves CPS students from kindergarten through 12th grade.

The program aims to enrich students with rigorous art training, and provide them with the opportunity to refine their talents and showcase their work to large audiences. ArtShop is one of the showcasing events for teens involved in the Pathways program. Every work is entirely self-directed: the artists execute their vision with no source material. The title of this year’s ArtShop is “Collective Possibilities”—each piece is inspired by a myth of each student’s choosing, including their own imagination. Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Avenue Chicago. Through April 19. Monday-Thursday, 9am8pm; Friday-Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, noon-5pm. Free.

(773)324-5520. hydeparkart.org. (Kanisha Williams)

The Density of the Actions Density is the distribution of a mass per unit of volume or, for London-based, Argentine-born artist Varda Caivano, the substance of labor that can be packed into each square inch of canvas. Her first solo exhibition in the states, “The Density of the Actions”, will open at the Renaissance Society on February 22. Each piece in the series presents a rumination on the physicality that it took to make the painting—layers of paint are “rubbed, scratched, and reworked” so that each stroke is dense with time, invoking not just one moment, but many. The exhibition is sure to be dynamic, the paintings “vulnerable, unfolding, failing, becoming, and disappearing.” The Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Ave. Through April 19.

Tuesday-Friday, 10am-5pm; Saturday-Sunday, noon-5pm.

Free. (773)702-8670. renaissancesociety.org (Kristin Lin)

Until it becomes us Rituals—actions and beliefs prescribed by traditional, regulatory performance—are both personal and communal. Jesse Butcher, an artist and current photography instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, intends to showcase his investigation of private rituals, beliefs, mantras, and longings in his solo exhibition, “Until it becomes us.” This is Butcher’s first solo exhibition in Chicago since 2010, and is sure to be a culmination of his most recent exploratory work, which starts from the claim that we are all “cognizant islands longing for a personal Pangaea.” Ordinary Projects at Mana Contemporary Chicago, 2233 S. Throop St., 5th floor.

Through March 20. Opening reception Friday, February 20, 6pm-9pm. ordinaryprojects.org (Zach Taylor)

Objects and Voices: A Collection of Stories Rummaging through a family attic, you might find collections of past significance that have accumulated with the long-settled dust. After seeing these disparate objects in the same space, patterns of meaning begin to emerge.

“Objects and Voices” is exactly this type of eclectic collection, a celebration of the objects both forgotten and validated by time. Curated by a diverse array of individuals ranging from university professors and artists to graduate students and professional curators, this show is the second of the Smart Museum’s fortieth anniversary exhibitions. Curator Tours, led by some of the twenty-five collaborators featured in the exhibition, will give you a foray into micro-exhibitions like “Fragments of Medieval Past” or “Asian/American Modern Art.” It might be worthwhile to add this exhibition to your own collection of memories. Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. Through June 21. Tuesday-Sunday, 10am5pm; Thursday, 10am-8pm. Opening reception Wednesday, February 11, 7:30pm-9pm. (773)702-0200. smartmuseum. uchicago.edu (Kristin Lin)

Ground Floor Marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Hyde Park Art Center, “Ground Floor” features artworks from prominent Chicago MFA programs, and showcases of emerging talents so new they haven’t even begun their careers yet. The twenty artists, selected from over one hundred nominations, represent a wide range of mediums, forms, and universities: Columbia College, Northwestern, SAIC, the UofC, and UIC. These artists have also had the chance to exhibit at September’s EXPO Chicago in HPAC’s booth. This unique program, showcased throughout the entirety of HPAC’s ground floor gallery space, offers the chosen artists a helpful push toward a career in the art world; “Ground Floor” alumni include two artists who have recently displayed artwork at the Whitney Biennial. Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Through March 22. Monday-Thursday, 9am-8pm; Friday-Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, 12pm5pm. Free. (773)324-5520. hydeparkart.org (Sammie Spector)

MUSIC Chrisette Michele at the Shrine Chrisette Michele’s creative output over the last half-decade has been nothing short of prodigious, an overload of expression that reflects a breakout from her days filling in rap hooks in the mid-2000s. Now a fully developed diva, Michele has the swagger of an A-list singer and the artistry to back it up. Last year’s The Lyricists’ Opus is both a traditionally sensual R&B album and an exercise in this newfound attitude: “Some days I wish I was Ye or Drake,” she sings on “Art,” “but truth is I got a bit of both / ‘cause I wasn’t born with a funk to fake.” When she plays City Winery this week, one can expect to hear that same self-assertiveness powering lush strings and carrying Michele’s own soaring vocals. Come down to the Shrine afterward for an after-party with further performances and DJ sets. The Shrine, 2109 S. Wabash Ave. Friday, March 6, 10:30pm; after-party 10pm-4am. $45.

(312)753-5681. theshrinechicago.com (Will Cabaniss)

Xavier Breaker at the Promontory It would hardly be an overstatement to say that Xavier Breaker, jazz drummer, composer, and arranger, is the most exciting young drummer in Chicago. Having started drumming at age five in church, the prolific musician is now helping to reinvigorate the Chicago jazz scene. A South Carolina native, Breaker received a B.M. degree from the University of Southern Carolina but then moved north to study jazz at Northern Illinois University. His coalition combines classical, gospel, R&B, and jazz influences in clean but exciting tunes, and it will feature a host of other local musicians accompanying Breaker on trumpet, guitar, bass, and piano. Join them at the Promontory this Friday in a performance sponsored

by South Shore jazz promoter Mo Better Jazz. The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. Friday, March 6, 8pm. $15.

WILDLIFE (312)801-2100. promontorychicago.com (Clyde Schwab)

Prog Jazz Night at Reggies In a throwback to the seventies, Reggies has dedicated this Sunday’s show to prog jazz, a genre that has been developing for at least forty years as a “modern” take on classic jazz. Out to prove that the style has stayed fresh since Miles Davis and Gary Burton introduced it to the world, Reggies has lined up a show that should promise even the most ardent fans of fusion something they haven’t heard before. Streetdancer, the brainchild of Chicago-born bassist Kest Stanciauskas, has been bringing a Lithuanian flair to the world of American jazz since its formation in 1973 and shows no signs of slowing down. If a knockout performance from one of Chicago’s greatest living jazz legends doesn’t catch your interest, the night promises to offset Stanciauskas’s wild energy with a smoother sound from The Humble Organisms, an organ-heavy group with a penchant for breathing new life into old classics. Reggies, 2105 S. State St. Sunday, March 8, 8pm. $5. (312)949-0120. reggieslive. com (Jon Sorce)

Close Encounters with the Furred Kind javier suarez

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)801-2100. promontorychicago. com (Jake Bittle)

88 Fingers Louie at Reggies The punk band 88 Fingers Louie is poised to bring real punk back to the band’s hometown of Chicago. Formed in 1993 by vocalist Denis Buckley, guitarist Dan Wlekinski (aka “Mr. Precision”), drummer Dom Vallone, and bassist Joe Principe, the band disbanded after three years due to fights between band members, reformed in 1998, and disbanded once again in 1999. Punk is punk.

Afterward, Principe and Precision formed the popular punk band Rise Against. During their on-again-offagain period, 88 Fingers pumped out various songs and records composed of fast beats, harsh guitar and catchy riffs, all interrupted by wailing vocals not so different from those of their successor. Whether you’re reliving your 1993-96 nostalgia (good times) or in need of any old punk rock show, come check out the re-re-reformed 88 Fingers Louie at Reggies next Friday. Reggies, 2105 S. State St. Friday, March 6, 8pm. 17+. $15-$20. (312)9490120. reggieslive.com (Clyde Schwab)

The Persian Concert The Middle Eastern Music Ensemble, affectionately referred to as MEME, is taking the Logan Center stage one more time, back by popular demand. Directed by the brilliant Wanees Zarour, this fifty-piece orchestra celebrates the contemporary, traditional, and folk music of Persia (modern-day Iran and Afghanistan).

Compositions by composers such as Majid Derakhshani, Homayoon Khorram, Hossein Dehlavi, and others will be performed. Tender banter will be had between the orchestra members in between the numbers, and hearts will break over the power of a densely ornamental and lyrical music repertoire, the full-bodied representation of a centuries-old culture. Logan Center, 915 E. 60th St. Sunday, March 8, 7pm. Free. (773)702-2787. arts.uchicago. edu (James Kogan)

The Chicago coyote: neighbor or nuisance?

I

n 2007, customers fled from a Quiznos on Adams St. in the Loop when a coyote snuck in through a propped door and sat down in a refrigerated beverage case. The coyote didn’t bother anyone, but he didn’t buy a sandwich either, so about an hour after his entry, Animal Control came to relocate him to a more appropriate location.

Most Chicagoans may not think that their city contains animals more wild than rabbits and squirrels, but what these innocents do not know is that they live firmly entrenched in coyote territory. Since at least the early 1990s, coyotes have been present in the city’s suburbs; soon after their arrival, they started to make their way into the city proper. According to Dr. Stan Gehrt, director of the Urban Coyote Research Program, Illinois experienced a growth in coyote populations in the early 1990s, forcing individual coyotes to find territories in areas that are not typically favored or are usually considered inhospitable; namely, in the city. Lucky for the coyotes, Chicago is abundant with food, allowing the population to thrive and grow.

“It became a favorable place for them to live,” said Gehrt, “but they were initially reluctant. They were forced into the city. They didn’t go voluntarily. …Right now, Chicago has its own distinct population of coyotes that grew up in the area. They’re a thriving population. …Everyone in Chicago is potentially living with coyotes.”

The Urban Coyote Research Program has tagged over 867 and collared over 440 coyotes since 2000, but they’re not the only

BY EMILY LIPSTEIN

ones keeping track of the animals. Civilians can report sightings on coyotemap.com, a website that features a map of locations where people have spotted coyotes, and also aggregates news stories about animals in the area. Coyotemap.com claims that they have “received the most reports of coyotes on the north side from Lake View, Roscoe Village, Albany Park, Lincoln Park, Uptown, and Ravenswood, extending to the near north suburbs of Evanston and Skokie.” The website also reports that people have seen coyotes on the South Side, too, but in far fewer numbers than areas north and west.

It is possible that coyotes make the North Side and the suburbs their home more than the South Side, but the disproportionate number of sightings in the area could partly be due to underreporting. (On this note, Chicago Animal Control did not reply to requests for comment.) However, according to Gehrt, and to other eyewitness reports, these coyote populations are not unique to the North and Northwest Sides. “As you move around the suburbs and north and west and south, there’s a sequence of forest preserves in Cook, DuPage, Will, and Lake Counties,” he said. “[The coyotes] are in a lot of green space areas, and that’s where they’re completely saturated.”

According to coyotemap.com, coyotes have been seen in South Chicago, Pullman, Bronzeville, and University Village. Chicagoans have also spotted coyotes in both Washington and Jackson Parks; however, neither park’s supervisor was able to comment on the

presence of coyote populations in the parks.

Residents in and near Hyde Park have been spotting coyotes for years, including in Jackson Park, at the South Shore Cultural Center, and even on the UofC campus. A source who asked to be anonymous told the Weekly about her encounter near the Midway Plaisance. “A few years ago walking my dog very early on a summer morning, I saw a group of coyotes—probably five—around the generator for the ice rink. That same summer, I saw another pack running towards Cottage Grove and the park. Again, there were about five running on the Midway at Ellis.”

Much like other animals, what primarily attracts coyotes to certain areas in the city is food. “If the food supply is good, then the female will produce more offspring and keep them in the brood for longer,” Gehrt explained. “People need to realize that regardless of where they live, there’s a potential for coyotes to be living in the same area.” But how can you make it less likely that you’ll run into a coyote on your block?

“Just control access to their food,” Gehrt answered. “If there’s no food available, then coyotes will not go there. It’s in our control.”

The upshot of this advice seems to be that even though coyotes probably don’t have strong opinions about putting ketchup on hot dogs and can’t cheer on the Cubs at Wrigley (the wrong choice, anyway), they’re still Chicagoans, through and through. They’re not going anywhere; we just need to learn to live with them.

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