April 1, 2015 | The Food Issue

2 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 1, 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 indepth 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 Osita Nwanevu Executive Editor Bess Cohen Managing Editors Jake Bittle, Olivia Stovicek Politics Editors Christian Belanger, Rachel Schastok Education Editor Mari Cohen Music Editor Maha Ahmed Stage & Screen Lucia Ahrensdorf Editor Visual Arts Editors Lauren Gurley, Robert Sorrell Contributing Editors Julia Aizuss, Austin Brown,

Sarah Claypoole, Emeline Posner, Hafsa Razi Social Media Editor Emily Lipstein Web Editor Andrew Koski Visuals Editor Ellie Mejia Layout Editors Adam Thorp, Baci Weiler Senior Writers: Patrick Leow, Jack Nuelle, Stephen Urchick Staff Writers: Olivia Adams, Max Bloom, Amelia Dmowska, Mark Hassenfratz, Maira Khwaja, Jeanne Lieberman, Zoe Makoul, Olivia Myszkowski, Jamison Pfeifer, Kari Wei Staff Photographers: Camden Bauchner, Juliet Eldred, Kiran Misra, Siddhesh Mukerji, Luke White Staff Illustrators: Jean Cochrane, Lexi Drexelius, Wei Yi Ow, Amber Sollenberger, Teddy Watler, Julie Wu Editorial Intern

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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.

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IN CHICAGO A week’s worth of developing stories, odd events, and signs of the times, culled from the desks, inboxes and wandering eyes of the editors Mastiff Malady, Dachshund Disease: Dog Flu Strikes Chicago There’s been an outbreak of canine influenza among dogs in the Chicago area, and it’s clear that the Second City’s pups are in peril; Dr. Natalie Marks, a veterinarian at Blum Animal Hospital, has reported seeing between five and fifteen cases a day recently, and a few dogs have died. Dog flu isn’t usually fatal, but it’s undoubtedly serious: symptoms include high fever and pneumonia. The disease is highly contagious to other dogs, with almost all exposed dogs becoming infected, though some are carriers and show no symptoms; humans can’t get sick but can help spread the illness. It’s worth asking your vet about getting the vaccine, but keep in mind that it takes some time to fully protect a dog, and, like the human flu vaccine, it cannot be given to those who are already ill. If there were ever a time to resist Fido’s imploring eyes as he begs to go to the dog park, this is it.

A Runoff Update The last of the snow has melted, and Rahm’s hard-working paid campaigners are running up and down South Side boulevards sticking “I’m With Rahm” signs into freshly thawed ground. The weather may be growing milder, but you couldn’t say the same about the mayoral runoff, which has taken some unexpected turns in the last week. Garcia took on an offensive stance during the second mayoral debate, informing Rahm that he is “not the king of the city.”

Rahm was met with jeers at a NAACP event, and outrage when he tried to pull out of an open forum at Chicago State University. But two days ago, a poll by Ogden and Fry put Rahm a solid thirteen points ahead of Garcia, and the next day Rahm received an unlikely blessing from Alderman Fioretti. Biggest takeaway from this week’s runoff coverage? Rahm on reporters– “I hate you all equally.”

All Fat, No Meat While the April 7 mayoral runoff election is undoubtedly important for the future of the city, arguably just as important for the city’s future is the fact that April is now officially Bacon Month in Chicago. This decree comes courtesy of the city government (which, surprisingly, has nothing better to do), in partnership with Baconfest Chicago (which, unsurprisingly, has nothing better to do).

Events will feature bacon tastings, bacon cocktail tastings, bacon cooking classes, bacon painting classes, and,

yes really, a series of Kevin Bacon movie nights. If any of this tickles your fancy, see baconfestchicago.com for more information. If you find this celebration frivolous and unnecessary, know you’re not alone.

Where in the World is Lona Lane?

Lona Lane, alderman of the 18th ward, is gone. Was she ever here? Unclear. What is known is that, rather than choose to attend such awkward and uncommon formalities as “electoral debates” or “public forums,” the alderman has instead taken the private route, something that might well lead to news headlines like such completely serious and non-speculative articles as “Is Vladimir Putin Dead?” earlier this month. Of course, while comparisons between Lane and Putin are somewhat premature, one can’t help but notice the two share a great amount of dedication to mystique, power, and complete inaccessibility to the public.

And why not? If the strategy has worked so well for Putin, there’s no way for Lane to lose the upcoming runoff.

Animals of Chicago Cook County isn’t just home to Bulls, Bears, Cubs, and whatever kind of animal Southpaw is: an abundance of wildlife lives in nature preserves around the area and in places covered more by concrete than by grass. Now that it is finally spring here in Chicago, nature continues its slow reclamation of the city as frogs splash into thawed ponds, coyote pups are born, and migratory birds continue their journey south. Six different species of frogs and toads live in the area, hopping around wherever there is fresh, unpolluted water. These lovable amphibians are crucial parts of the food chain, since they eat bugs and other small animals and are eaten by herons, raccoons, and other large animals.

While spring is a time for rebirth, the herd of buffalo slated to be introduced to Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie near Joliet won’t be around until October. Like the frogs in Cook County, the buffalo are also a crucial part of the ecosystem, as their grazing makes room for native bird habitats. While most people would be less used to seeing buffalo around the region than they would be to seeing frogs, both are native to the region. As farming increased in the region, the prairie disappeared, and the bison along with it; but re-introduction and land restoration projects like the ones going on at Midewin provide man-made solutions to this man-made problem.

Read our stories online at southsideweekly.com

Cover Art by Teddy Watler

APRIL 1, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

WELCOME

THE FOOD ISSUE Early this year, foodies from across the city and around the country converged on over 250 of the city’s best eateries for the eighth annual Chicago Restaurant Week. Fewer than two dozen of this year’s participating restaurants were located on the South Side. For nearly two weeks, those interested in exploring perhaps America’s greatest food town were led to believe—by breathless reviews and top-heavy maps published and promoted by the city’s tourism office and the local press—that most of the food in the city worth eating lay north of Roosevelt.

To believe that commonplace rendering of our city’s food culture is to believe that the South Side and the nearly one million Chicagoans who call it home lack culinary traditions and talent worthy of wide attention. As we at the Weekly have endeavored to demonstrate in this, our first-ever Food Issue, nothing could be further from the truth.

Although this issue covers ground from Pilsen to Pullman and tracks South Side eats from farm to table, we’ve only scratched the surface of the food culture this part of the city has to offer, a culture defined by an array of cuisines as rich and diverse as ourselves and the stories we have to tell. These pieces are mere morsels—a sampling drawn from a vast feast we hope you’ll start digging into if you haven’t already.

As journalists, we at the Weekly are incredibly fortunate to belong to a community that puts so much on our plates so often. This week, this is especially true.

milk and honey in the desert

net positive

an anti-epic

It can be difficult to convince farmers that a social justice mission is worth decreased sales. maha ahmed...6

“This is not a normal system.” julia aizuss...20

“Don’t expect love…love sounds obscene when you say it.” robert sorrell...30

small garden, big city

“They can just bury me over in the garden someplace.” christian belanger...10

sweet fortune

Yes, the little slips of paper in each golden morsel were shipped directly from China and never, ever lie. will dart...14

the buzz around the south side

Chicago is the best place in the state of Illinois for honeybees. eleonora edreva...16

the history of the potato chip

“The wind would blow down plumes of white smoke with the sweet smell of freshly cooking potato chips onto the expressway” sammie spector...22 in praise of mac

& cheese eggrolls

“The Dream Cafe’s fate is tied to the eggroll trio.” kevin gislason...24 rib tips, served for sixty years

Each piece is tender, smoky, and messy, with gobs of fat throughout. clyde schwab...25 make way for pushcarts

Perhaps street vendors just make better tamales than restaurants do. emeline posner...26 change is brewing

all beer tastes the same

“Reminiscent of...wheat!” jake bittle...18 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 1, 2015

the bible’s body and soul

“The play laughs not only at religious fanaticism, but also at religious authority. lucia ahrensdorf...32

“There’ve been wars plotted in coffeehouses.” hannah nyhart...28

troubled recovery

A list of Colm McCarthy’s works sounds like a vigil. stephen urchick...34 old haunts and new stories

”I think it’s an interesting conversation to ask someone about a ghost.” mark hassenfratz...35 out of prison, to the polls

The population of ex-offenders remains a vast, underrepresented demographic. will cabaniss...36

HOUSING

IN THIS ISSUE

Sweet Beginnings 3726 W Flournoy St

Lagunitas Warehouse 2607 W 17th St

Bow Truss Coffee 1641 W 18th Street

Golden Dragon Fortune Cookie Factory 2323 S Archer Ave

Maria’s Packaged Goods and Community Bar 960 W 31st Street

Pilsen Community Market W 18th St

Salty Prawn 1400 W 46th St

Currency Exchange 305 E Garfield Blvd

Dream Cafe 748 W 61st St Englewood Garden S Normal Blvd & W Englewood Ave

Lem’s BBQ 311 E 75th St

Greenline Coffee 501 E 61st St

61st St. Farmers Market 6100 S Blackstone Ave

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Milk and Honey in the Desert Can farmers markets fix Chicago’s food equity problems?

BY MAHA AHMED

6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 1, 2015

O

juliet eldred

nce a month during harsh Chicago winters, the 61st Street Farmers Market transforms the warehouse-like Experimental Station on 61st and Blackstone into a space of hustle, bustle, fresh produce, and made-to-order meals.

People are chatting and catching up, joking around and getting their blood pressure taken. Many customers and vendors are on a first-name basis. Everyone is carrying around and exchanging oddly colored money that looks like it came out of a Monopoly box, and the friendly atmosphere adds to the sense that one is standing inside a utopia of healthy food.

Connie Spreen, who lived in Woodlawn from 1988 to 2007 and now lives in Kenwood, launched the market in the summer of 2008 after realizing that “there really was nowhere to get any food in the neighborhood.” As a PhD student at the University of Chicago, Spreen recalls having to travel more than a mile north in Hyde Park for food that wasn’t “chips and soda pop.” After empty promises from city officials to build supermarkets in the ward, she decided to do what she could to bring healthy food to Woodlawn and surrounding communities; eventually, she settled on the farmers market model.

Many—in fact, most—farmers markets around the South Side were started with the same mission as 61st Street: to provide fresh and healthy food for areas lacking easy access to mar-

FOOD kets or grocery stores. In other words, to carve out a space for food oases in places that were, and are, otherwise considered food deserts.

As winter comes to an end and Chicago becomes warm enough to set up tables and tents outside, farmers markets around the city enter a state of transition. The Experimental Station, Pilsen Community Market, Hyde Park Handmade, and The Plant’s Monthly Market in Back of the Yards are among those taking place indoors through April before moving outdoors and running on a weekly schedule for the summer and early fall.

As a part of an ongoing effort to engage with food politics in the city, the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) is curating this year’s city-run markets and will release a full list of their own and independently run markets in the coming weeks. Both city-run and independent markets tend to run with similar goals in mind—many market-running entities, like the Pilsen Community Market, Experimental Station, and DCASE, take into consideration communities’ access to affordable, fresh foods.

A 2009 study by Canadian scholars Kristian Larsen and Jason Gilliland found that bringing farmers markets to food deserts is effective both in increasing available healthy food options and lowering the price of food for residents in general. But these ends can’t be reached by simply plopping markets down in the streets of low-access areas, hoping people will line up to buy artisanal breads, aquaponic-farmed microgreens, and ethically produced honey. The on-the-ground realities of implementing farmers markets in the context of social justice complicate and challenge the idea of health utopias, like the one on 61st Street has managed to cultivate.

T

he United States Department of Agriculture defines a food desert as a geographic area that qualifies as low-income and low-access: twenty percent of residents (or more) are below the poverty line, and at least a third live more than a mile away from a supermarket. There are three clusters of food deserts in Chicago: one on the West Side (including Austin and parts of the Near West Side), one on the South Side (including parts of Englewood and West Englewood, Washington Park, Auburn Gresham, and Ashburn), and one on the

Far South Side (including South Deering, Pullman, South Chicago, Beverley, Washington Heights, and Riverdale).

Market vendors often have a hard time selling at farmers markets in these areas, especially when the market is just getting started or hasn’t yet fully developed. This is often because markets are more expensive than grocery stores and supermarkets, with prices for organic or sustainably-grown produce sometimes double or triple those of their mass-produced counterparts. One resulting roadblock is an unpredictable turnout; it can be difficult to balance the number of customers that shop each day with the number of vendors selling.

Spreen, from the 61st Street Market, said that bringing vendors to the South Side is more difficult than it would be in a place like Lincoln Park or Logan Square. One vendor she has drawn to 61st Street is Al Mikell of Ellis Family Farms, based in Ann Arbor. Mikell said that he’s had “terrible experiences” selling in similar areas, that people in food deserts with new farmers markets “don’t come out” and buy food. “When people aren’t buying food, farmers and other vendors don’t profit and have no incentive to sell at those markets,” he said.

The first couple of years that the 61st Street market was in existence, only one hundred to three hundred people cycled through per day—last year’s average was 1,300. With initial numbers like those, it can be difficult to convince farmers that a social justice mission is worth decreased sales. “Those farmers, during those first years, really bought into the mission, and I bought them beer at the end of the day,” Spreen said. “You have to think about ‘How can I create a real sense of community amongst them so that they feel connected to the place and it’s not just a business transaction?’”

Many vendors that sell at South Side markets in low-access areas such as Englewood and Garfield Park—vendors like Growing Power and Urban Canopy—share these markets’ visions of food justice. Yet even for them, the lack of customers at some markets on the West and Southwest Sides can be demoralizing and deter them from selling there, leading to the dissolution of those markets.

But now that many markets accept electronic LINK card payment, low-income customers for whom the transition from paper food stamps to LINK’s electronic balance became a barrier to markets’ healthy food access

are now better off. Spreen worked with the city to implement electronic LINK payment—also known as SNAP and EBT—at markets in 2010. Additionally, markets have a matching program: a customer spends, say, ten dollars and is automatically given an extra ten dollars to spend at the market. With this matching program in place, a person can buy up to fifty dollars’ worth of food for twenty-five dollars at some markets.

Both LINK and matching programs make farmers markets more equitable across income levels, and this summer almost all markets in Chicago will accept LINK as payment for fresh produce, meat, and dairy, in addition to having double value matching.

Still, information about the LINK and matching programs rarely reaches those who stand to benefit the most, raising a question Isabel Rodriguez-Vega, who tables for Urban Canopy at the Pilsen Community Market, said she encounters often: “Why do I have to pay so much?” A good question, and part of the answer, Rodriguez-Vega said, is to drive prices down by having more vendors selling at each one. But what about the initial problem: drawing vendors to markets in low-access areas?

Rodriguez-Vega, Spreen, Mikell, and many others who run and sell at these markets believe that the answer lies in more food education and community outreach, which both lead back to the issue of funding.

According to Spreen, most markets are not-for-profit. Both the Experimental Station and Pilsen Community Market (PCM) have 501(c)3 status, which allows them to receive large donations from private funders. But while the Experimental Station has been successful in acquiring grant money— Spreen works with the city and other markets to implement tactics she has used, and the 61st Street market is considered the best on the South Side by many in the business—PCM’s biggest roadblock is funding. Kelly Fitzpatrick’s position as market manager is the first paid position PCM has created, and until they gather enough money to hire a full-time community outreach worker, their market will remain inaccessible to many of the people it wants to help.

The 61st Street market has begun drawing from the health sector for funding in exchange for tracking consumer data. At every market, customers have the option of getting their health

metrics taken, and the market keeps track of these numbers—blood pressure, height, and weight—from week to week, correlating weekly changes with the types of food customers are buying with their LINK cards. In exchange for their data, customers receive five market dollars, plus five more for signing up with a project called South Side Diabetes. Spreen said that health insurance agencies like Harmony and the University of Chicago Medical Center are interested in this data, and this new area of collaboration between separate sectors of city life helps both thrive. On the customer side, this sort of tracking can be helpful, but also runs the risk of being invasive and patronizing.

Spreen and Fitzpatrick agree that funding is more difficult to come by for their independent markets than it is for those curated and incubated by the city government. Many private organizations get bored of “the mission” after a couple of years, especially if that mission doesn’t seem to be reaching its goal within a short amount of time—which they rarely do. On the other hand, markets organized by the city are funded publicly by the city government’s budget, and get a head start because DCASE runs the market for three seasons before passing management off to a community organization.

Last October, DCASE received almost $89,000 in grants from the USDA’s Farmers Market Promotion Program to support “producer-to-consumer” food initiatives over the next two years. The money will go to markets in Englewood, Pullman, and Austin: all neighborhoods in food desert census tracts. Christine Carrino, the public relations and marketing director for DCASE, said that food deserts are one of the city’s primary concerns when deciding where to place the markets that they “incubate” for three seasons, along with the concern of whether the community can sustain that incubation.

But despite the somewhat more accessible funding, city markets are run by one person only: Program Coordinator Yescenia Mota. As Spreen said about the difficulty of creating markets that last, “even if you get a bunch of funding thrown at you, it takes constant commitment and a lot of dedication” to run just a single market. So how could a single person coordinate between nineteen and twenty-two successful markets that truly help combat food inequity?

APRIL 1, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

COMIC This summer, the first ever in which all city-run markets will accept LINK as payment, will give us the answer. As the city gears up to announce the full list of this season’s markets around the city, Mota answers her office phone more and more rarely.

T

he Pilsen Community Market, a site similar to 61st Street, is in its indoor season until April 19. Inside Honky Tonk BBQ on 18th and Racine, market manager Kelly Fitzpatrick was on duty helping vendors find space to set up, dealing with technical difficulties, and offering a warm, welcoming conversation to every person who entered the building.

The sense of community at PCM is perhaps even greater than at Experimental Station. Shoppers take breaks to sit at the bar and order a drink, and at one point a moment of silence is asked of the crowd for a family that was active in the market that passed away—not one person in the crowded restaurant spoke for an entire minute.

PCM was started seven years ago in a collaboration between Pilsen residents and the Chicago Community Bank. Ron Gordon, one of these founding residents, is now on the PCM board. He wanted to start a local market that would bolster a sense of community, and learned the bank was already planning to do the same thing out of its parking lot. Because the market initially took any vendors that were interested in selling there, it became a platform for local business incubation.

“There’s really an emphasis on creating a community space here,” said Fitzpatrick. “That’s why we’re not called the Pilsen Farmers Market.”

Alexandra Curatolo, owner of the health food store Belli’s and a PCM board member, believes that though the market is more community-based than vendor-based, the shoppers there aren’t as reflective of the community as the board members had envisioned.

“Though eighty to ninety percent of the people who shop here are from Pilsen, it’s not as diverse as we would like,” Curatolo said.

Specifically, aspects of the market aren’t reflective of Pilsen’s Mexican population—though some vendors are Mexican-owned and Pilsen-based, many of them speak of “neighborhood change” leading them to cater to a more

mixed audience at the market. Seven out of the eight PCM board members are white, and one is black. Fitzpatrick said this fact is something she and others struggle with. “We’re trying to embrace the existing culture without being offensive,” she said, but this aspect of the Pilsen market demonstrates that, albeit for different reasons, they face similar problems to many other South Side markets in reaching their intended audiences.

Because many organizations that run and sell at farmers markets on the South Side are not-for-profit, Spreen believes that these markets are “a public service.” When their reach goes beyond market days through partnerships with elementary schools, local musicians, yoga groups, and the health sector, it’s not hard to believe that farmers markets are a first step toward creating cohesive communities and healthier food options for low-access areas.

But as noble as a market’s aims might be, the economics at play in some of them on the South Side— what keeps them afloat and functioning—aren’t always conducive to the market managers’ goals of food equity. In a farmers market culture where many organizers and vendors believe that the solution is increased education about healthy food and the benefits of fresh produce, it is possible to forget that these initiatives aren’t the sole means to a better community.

“Farmers markets are not the solution to food deserts,” said Kathleen Morrison, professor of anthropology and social sciences at the UofC. “Food deserts come about because of structural inequities like poverty and racism. And to the extent that we don’t address structural inequities, we’re only going to be putting Band-Aids on a wound.”

Still, as Morrison pointed out, farmers markets in their current incarnation only became popular in the United States in the last twenty years, and have only recently been thought of as viable ways to address complex questions of inequality. In this short time, South Side markets like 61st Street and PCM have managed to carve out spaces of community gathering, mourning, and bonding—and, just maybe, have begun to tackle the symptoms of health inequality.

8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 1, 2015

APRIL 1, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

Small Garden, Big City Two urban farmers talk church greens, Englewood, and a not-very-pathetic peach tree.

BY CHRISTIAN BELANGER

D

on Ross, an Englewood native, has been running a farmers market in the neighborhood for slightly over twenty-five years. Ross’s house and farm are on West Englewood Avenue, a little more than a block west of the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church. As I arrive, he steps eagerly out to greet me, and leads me around to the side of his house to his garden, an untilled plot of hard soil bordered by wood chips, about twenty feet by forty feet.

What do you grow here?

DR: Everything. Cucumbers, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, squash, and I have a peach tree in my yard, and it’s unbelievable. They say you can’t grow that stuff in the city...yes you can! And we have a permit to use the fire hydrant.

When did you start?

DR: I’ve been doing it off and on all my life. And you know we grow the stuff, give it away to people in the neighborhood, people will give us a dollar or whatever. We would take that to buy seeds with. And like I said, all the little

10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 1, 2015

kids got older, this and that, and they left me hanging. And I decided to just continue doing what I was doing, and I turned it into a farmers market.

Do you make any money off of this?

courtesy of john ellis

DR: People holler about Englewood, Englewood, but it’s bad all over. People talk about the games and stuff. It’s games around here, but like I said I been here all my life, who don’t I know?

I don’t care where you go, it’s bad. I just mind my own business and here I am. I would never move, I’ve been here all my life. They can just bury me over in the garden someplace. When I leave they just bury me over here.

Ross goes inside his house and pulls out a stack of papers, his permits and licenses.

DR: I make a few pennies. Nothing big, big, big. I just like to help the community out and stuff. I believe I give away more than I make. But that’s how I am.

I just do what I do, and I love it! Sometimes I get out here, man, and be here all night sometimes. It’s unbelievable, the stuff that I grow.

I’ve got all kinds of permits, and this and that. These are my permits to use the fire hydrant. When the police show up, they think you’re stealing water. This is a letter from the department of agriculture. I notarize things for senior citizens of the community. You see I don’t be playing with them. I’ve got everything.

What was it like growing up here?

Do you have another job too?

FOOD

liana sonenclar

DR: At Chicago Public Schools. I’m something like an all-star. I do security, I help clean up. At 51st and Elizabeth, a school called Second Chance. It has kids, you know, they messed up in life.

You know, pregnant girls and stuff, this and that. The age range is from sixteen to twenty-one. I’ve been working going on fourteen years now. You can say I teach, because I talk to the kids, try and mentor them, this and that. I don’t make no whole, whole, whole lots of money. Something else I do too, I get a couple kids from the community to help me over the summer. They make three or four hundred bucks, because I’m only up there three or four months out of the year. A little something to help them out.

Ross walks through his house, pointing to pictures of his now-grown nieces and nephews. On the back porch, he leans against the railing and points to a tree, a vanity license plate emblazoned with “The Dip” fastened to its trunk.

Now this right here is a peach tree. I planted that tree about eight years ago, maybe nine years ago. When I first turned that tree, for the first year or so it didn’t do nothing. Once it growed up, sometimes there’d be so many peaches

on that tree it’d be pathetic. Sometimes I gotta take two by fours and prop it up, the peaches would be so heavy.

The peach tree is named The Dip? DR: That’s my nickname. I don’t know where I got that from. It’s even on my card, see? It’s because back in the day my mom say I was always nosy, dipping in people’s business, this and that, so she named me Dippy. And people been calling me that sixty years now. Sometimes I think it’s my real name. I guess that’s where it came from. It’s the Rowan Trees Farmers Market, really, but I’m the only one who really do everything, so I just say it’s Dip’s.

Ross walks downstairs and half a block east along the street, where one of the other gardens stands. A “Rowan Trees Garden” sign is affixed to the fence in front of it.

Now this is another little spot. This just a little small garden. This is where we had our parties for our senior citizens, but all the people died over the years.

The children growed up. These kids now, they don’t want to do nothing.

Another man, wearing overalls, walks out from an adjacent building.

DR: This is John Ellis, this is one of my partners.

JE: How’s it going?

We walk into the garden, mostly covered in grass and wood chips.

DR: I wish you could have seen this years ago. Tires, abandoned cars, condoms.

[To Ellis] How do you help out with the Rowan Trees garden site?

JE: Well, actually, it’s a long story. I started at a personal law firm downtown to help an old client who owned this hotel and all the buildings down here. He was a slumlord. He was a terrible client, and he was dying. He needed help, and it was something a lawyer couldn’t do.

But I had experience working in prisons and as a nurse and all these other things.

And they said, “John, go on down here and secure this place.” So I came down here and secured the front. And that’s when I met Dip and, to make a long story short, I decided to stay.

And at that point, I thought, I’m a person who knows how to do rehab and I can do that here. I also knew that

lower-income people loved everything that yuppies did, I used to sit there in my wing-chair smoking on my pipe and I was very worried because all this horrendous stuff was around here. And so I dredged up my memory. I grew up in Montana, on a ranch, and so I knew something.

Then I decided I’d put grass here. We didn’t own anything, but we thought, we’ll just fence it in. Spend a thousand, fence it in. And we’ll plant grass. Anyway, then Dip came along and said, I want to do corn. I said, “Dip, if I let you do corn in that back lot, you can tie a mule to my back porch and I’ll never get any sleep at night.” We never spoke for five or six months. Anyway, we finally came to a resolution. We had huge raised beds from here to the back and from there to the back, and compost piles. And that’s when the old tale about everyone here’s from Arkansas or Mississippi really came home, because they’re here and they came over showing their kids what a compost pile was and what this was and so on. Just because they went down to Arkansas or Mississippi for summer doesn’t make ‘em haulers of water or drawers of wood.

But the experience of being there and being around green things, they liked that. They really dug that. Ultimately, Dip started a farmers market which spun off from the original society.

Did he make a lot of money off the market in the beginning?

JE: Oh, good grief, I think the second year he was going it was something like $5000 in one summer. That was on farmer’s market coupons alone. He cleared $5000 out of the bank. I couldn’t believe it. I knew that some money was coming in. Yeah, it’s a money-maker.

Is it still a money-maker?

JE: Yes, it is. It could even be better.

The problem that we’re running into right now, the city’s actually dropped regulations on a lot of the community gardens. Which they probably should, I don’t know that they’re all obviously appropriate. And frankly, the current administration has done us no good.

We’re not getting any help from nobody.. We applied for a grant to get maybe $800 to help us get some lia-

APRIL 1, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

COMIC bility insurance. The creeps over there, Teamwork Englewood and LISC, they couldn’t help us, ‘cause they had their own market. They gave them $35,000 to start a farmers market.

The city did?

JE: LISC. Which is?

JE: Political patronage by other means.

LISC stands for Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a nation-wide nonprofit organization that aims to support community development.

It’s called Teamwork Englewood here, one of the new community programs.

This is very poorly understood by the electorate of Chicago, but there’s an agency called LISC, it’s well-supported by the Ford Foundation, all of the corporations. And this is way the corporations take care of all the mayoralties in all the cities like Pittsburgh, Chicago. They give it to LISC, and [LISC] dish[es] it out. Anyway, they were supposed to help us, and of course they did not, because they had their own select freaks. So they went on for a couple of years. Smashing failure. Because they put their strawberry gelatos and everything else over there at the health clinic.

DR: People thought the church was doing all this [pointing to his own garden]. People would come down here: “I’m coming to get some of the church greens.” We would give it to ‘em. For years they thought it was the church.

They got all kinds of praise. It was in the newspaper.

JE: The ministry does not live in these neighborhoods. They live out in Hazel Crest and everyplace else. Their congregants do too. They are here to get cheap rent, old cathedrals, and so on that they run, so they can run around and say that they are community leaders. Community leaders! And they ain’t. In fact, it was so bad, I can take you to Michelle down the street, and describe how one of the church functioners came out there with a gun, started walking around with a gun, started threatening her husband, told

him to get out of the garden. Oh yeah!

The church!

DR: And we get to barbecuing out there. We have firemen, police cars, they know we’re cooking. Even all of the gangbangers, but like I said, we know all of them. John knows just as many as I know.

JE: We’re all gangbangers! No, I mean, seriously, if you live in the neighborhood, everybody right here is BD [Black Disciples], go across Drexel all of them are GD [Gangster Disciples].

But that’s Chicago.

Ellis gestures across to the houses lining the opposite side of the street.

JE: That one’s empty. That has been empty and will be empty again, I’m sure. All these were abandoned. That one was abandoned. That is basically— well, it’s not abandoned, but it’s empty. So we just don’t have the oomph that we need for neighbors. We’ve got some, but I don’t know. It’s going to take a little bit more than that to keep this thing really going. In its heyday, it was really a heyday.

And good grief, we have no parks in this neighborhood. This place is relatively park-free. We did have a YMCA, but it was torn down years ago. We have one, but unfortunately it’s across gang lines. We also have seven aldermen within Englewood. In this neighborhood, it’s been so gerrymandered, you can’t possibly do anything. It’s divide-and-conquer. It’s gonna take a long time to correct this whole mess.

The good feeling people should understand is people do understand these things. We’re out here, we’re doing it.

Churches aren’t doing it, I can tell you that.

This garden is something, at least?

JE: Yeah. People identify with this because it’s them, it’s themselves, they know that. They don’t have to dress up fit to kill and put a gun in a holster and go into church. This is them. And the kids’ll understand it, too.

501 W. Englewood Ave. Saturday, May 9, 8am-3pm. Every Saturday. LINK accepted. (773)297-4766.

12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 1, 2015

APRIL 1, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

alex pizzirani

Sweet Fortune 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 1, 2015

F

ortune was not smiling on me the day that I found Golden Dragon. It was a very snowy Monday in late March, and I was wandering around an unfamiliar part of Chinatown with two dollars in my pocket, a gallon of ice water in my boot, and a nasty hangover sloshing around my noggin. Coming around the corner, I caught a potent whiff of vanilla and rising dough. My luck was starting to turn.

Golden Dragon Fortune Cookies has been a major supplier of crunchy cookies and ancient Chinese wisdom for at least thirty years.

It does most of its business in bulk, shipping millions of fortunes to restaurants and markets in Chicago and beyond, but intrepid walk-ins are also welcome—if they know where to go.

The factory’s only viable entrance is a small loading dock (don’t be deterred by the idling trucks and fork lifts), the kind that looks like it doesn’t really expect visitors. In-

Golden Dragon’s cookies turn a day around

BY WILL DART side and to the right of this dock is a small receiving office that also looks like you’re not allowed inside. The combined effect of this double layer of the foreboding, “you-shouldn’tbe-in-here” vibe is that, when you do walk brazenly through the plastic sheeting and then into the unmarked office—as I did a couple of Mondays ago—you feel like an insider, like a favorite nephew of the owner who hasn’t visited for a long time.

That’s how the women in the office treat you, anyway. Golden Dragon’s employees are exceedingly pleasant, exuding a friendliness so warm that it borders on the familial; if you were to sit down for any stretch of time while shopping, you’d probably be offered a cup of tea and asked about your day. Even with my somewhat invasive questions about the establishment, and general distrust of foods holding secret messages, the woman who sold me my cookies

FOOD

was endlessly happy to confirm that, yes, Golden Dragon makes all their wares on site, yes, Golden Dragon has been around a long time (“much longer than you!”), yes, these are authentic Chinese cookies and, yes, the little slips of paper in each golden morsel were shipped directly from China and never, ever lie.

Well. Sort of. The truth is that fortune cookies—and the messages inside them—are not Chinese, or even Chinese American. According to historian and fortune cookie expert Yasuko Nakamachi, the treats are probably from Kyoto, brought over by Japanese immigrants to California in the late nineteenth century.

It fits: the Japanese have a rich histo-

had has been a stale imitation of the thin, crispy platonic ideal that is a Golden Dragon original. Their other product, almond cookies (twenty for a dollar!), are also excellent, with a cloying, buttery flavor that lingers in the back of the mouth for days afterward. Orgasmic when paired with coffee.

Nice as they were, the employees of Golden Dragon would not permit me to explore the factory floor and discover the mysterious process by which fortunes are made. I was not allowed to inspect the dragon-fire kiln in which the cookies are baked, or the giant vat of shimmering Luck into which each cookie is dipped before being packaged and shipped.

It turns out that every restaurant fortune cookie you’ve ever had has been a stale imitation of the thin, crispy platonic ideal that is a Golden Dragon original. ry of putting fortunes in their food.

Known in Japan as o-mikuji, these fortunes traditionally contain both charms and curses (it’s rare to find a malevolent fortune in the modern Chinese restaurant variety, but if you do get a bad fortune, you can neutralize its effects by attaching the paper slip to a pine tree). Fortune cookie production was then co-opted by the Chinese during World War II, and spread across the States after returning GIs got a taste for them.

About the taste: it’s subtle. The hint of vanilla aside, the primary appeal of eating a fortune cookie is usually in getting to the slip of paper inside. But biting into a fresh Golden Dragon cookie is a revelatory experience: it turns out that every restaurant fortune cookie you’ve ever

Ancient Chinese secrets, I guess.

So I tumbled out into the cold streets of Chinatown once again, two dollars poorer, still vaguely queasy behind the eyes, but with a dozen golden cookies stuffed into my coat pocket. I quickly devoured them on the train ride home, and read the messages inside, and felt better. “You will become better acquainted with a co-worker.” “You will come into money soon.” “Smile often, and see what happens.” The 55 was waiting for me at the bus stop.

Golden Dragon Fortune Cookies, 2323 S. Archer Avenue. Monday-Friday, 7am-3:30pm.

APRIL 1, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

FOOD

The Buzz Around the South Side Beekeeping takes off, in backyards and community groups alike

BY ELEONORA EDREVA

T

here are several things that South Side beekeepers tend to agree on: urban beekeeping is far better than its rural counterpart, interest in beekeeping is growing every year, and bees are a hobby that is very easy to get hooked on. No matter how they each got started in the world of bees, every one of them was sucked in and soon found a niche within the surprisingly large beekeeping community on the South Side.

Greg Lane, a Hyde Park–based beekeeper, was a furniture maker before a request from a customer for a beehive unexpectedly sent him headfirst into the world of bees. He began to do research on honeybees in order to build a hive well suited for them, and found that a lot of conflicting information about bees was being spread around, which pushed him to figure them out for himself. “They’re very compelling creatures. I’ve been really fascinated with them ever since,” Lane says.

These days, he keeps hives in his backyard and runs the Chicago Honeybee Rescue, removing honeybee colonies that establish themselves in places they can’t stay and relocating them into hives where they can be kept safe and healthy. As far as he

knows, he’s the only one doing this work on the South Side. “The South Side could definitely benefit from a more organized community of beekeeping,” he says .

But while the community may be disorganized, he also acknowledges that he’s been receiving more and more calls from South Side residents seeking information and resources about beekeeping. Interest is growing, and he couldn’t be more thrilled.

Jill Murtagh and Edie McDonald are the founders of the Historic Pullman Beekeepers and seasoned apiarists—Murtagh has been beekeeping under McDonald’s mentorship for over a decade and McDonald has been a beekeeper on the South Side for over thirty years. Every January, the two of them teach a six-week class on beekeeping at the Pullman Community Apiary. Once someone completes the class, they become a member of the apiary and can keep their bees within it if keeping them at home isn’t possible. Murtagh says that their classes have become extremely popular, mirroring the success of beekeeping classes around the city from organizations like the Chicago Honey Co-op and the Garfield Park Conservatory.

With community and rooftop gardens, aquaponic farms, and backyard chicken coops springing up around the city, the recent popularity of beekeeping can be partly attributed to the trendiness of urban agriculture as a whole. Murtagh, however, also credits the success of beekeeping to how easy it is to start and get into.

“With a minimum investment and in a limited space, people can start right away after taking a class,” she says.

16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 1, 2015

“When I learned that beekeeping is a profession or hobby that is passed on through storytelling, it deeply resonated with me because most everyone is interested in storytelling. It doesn’t require more than people having an interest,” says Brenda Palms Barber, the founder and CEO of Sweet Beginnings. This project, a subsidiary of the North Lawndale Employment Network, uses beekeeping as a method to help ex-offenders reintegrate into society and the job market, and is an enterprise that sticks out among the backyard beekeepers and community organizations that make up a majority of the South Side beekeeping scene.

Palms Barber says that Sweet Beginnings landed on honey “almost by accident,” while searching for a business idea that would teach the ex-offenders marketable skills and generate revenue for the non-profit. The idea of teaching beekeeping and selling the honey was suggested to her; she liked the uniqueness of the endeavor and that it was a type of work that “would enable people from all kinds of academic backgrounds to still be successful.”

Sweet Beginnings has been a huge success, training 385 ex-offenders since its inception, of which only four percent have returned to prison—a remarkable feat when compared to the national recidivism rate of sixty-five percent. Palms Barber is also proud of the response that people have had to the honey the beekeepers produce. “It really did change the way that people thought about local honey,” she says, “It really doesn’t have to come from a rural area—urban honey is cleaner than rural honey.”

Every one of these beekeepers is quick to point out the benefits of urban beekeeping over its suburban and rural counterparts. The prevalence of Colony Collapse Disorder— the much-discussed phenomenon of widespread honeybee disappearance—is much lower in urban areas, making urban beekeeping all the more important.

“Chicago is the best place in the state of Illinois for honeybees,” Lane says matter-of-factly, “Illinois is a state full of industrialized agriculture, which is terrible for bees.” Low levels of herbicides and pesticides, and the biodiversity of an urban environment—important for the production of better tasting honey—make cities excellent places for beekeeping.

Murtagh agrees with this analysis, and believes that the South Side in particular is perfectly suited to beekeeping. The disused industrial sites around the Far South Side are perfect for keeping hives, shown by the fact that the Pullman Community Apiary stands on the site of the former Pullman Factory. She also says the South Side’s “wonderful natural plants and prairie areas are very well-suited for bee forage and honey production.”

With the urban beekeeper community expanding and awareness of the importance of honeybees spreading, beekeepers are hopeful that interest in the hobby will continue to grow.

When asked about her views on the future of beekeeping, Murtagh gave an optimistic response: “I think that people will decide that keeping bees is just an interesting and profitable a hobby as keeping a dog or learning to crochet.” Here’s to a future of less barking and more buzzing.

APRIL 1, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

All Beer Tastes the Same

F

or our Food Issue, the Weekly elected not to simply identify and profile the various independent breweries that dot our side of the city. Instead, we chose to take the fall for our readers by trying brews from a selection of South Side breweries. I, your humble writer, was watched and documented (in perfect sobriety) a lengthy tasting session that brought Weekly staff members past and present to booze-induced madness. By the end, I could hardly make out what they were saying, much less make sense of it. I have attempted to transcribe their impressions of a roster of beers hand-picked from across the South Side. What follows are the musings of your dear Weekly staff on a robust (but by no means complete) selection of South Side beers. Fair warning: We know nothing about beer. We hope, though, that our thoughts are a serviable jumping off point for your own exploration of the South Side’s brews. So hop to it. vice district

A spacious taproom and independent brewery serving the South Loop, but don’t let that discourage you. Started by two neighbors out of little more than a sense of curiosity, Vice now offers almost a dozen beers with funky names like “Metrosexual Chocolate Stout.” Brewery motto: “Share Your VD Responsibly.”

HABITUAL IPA One of the brewery’s

year-round offerings, this “Black IPA” intends to hearken back to the (apparently real) beer tradition of the Pacific Northwest. Heavy notes of chocolate and malt. Overall staff impression: divided Politics Editor 1: This is awful. This tastes like black coffee.

Aspiring Editor: Bitter aftertaste, aggressively so, but it’s smooth going down so I don’t feel bad about it.

Politics Editor 2 (likes Malort): I don’t want to finish mine.

Deputy Editor 1: Ugh, I can’t drink this.

ARDENNES Apparently quite popular among South Loopers, this Belgian blonde heads Vice District’s tap list. Okay, I’ll be honest. I don’t know anything about this beer. It was golden-looking. Overall staff impression: half enthusiastic, half dismissive ARIANNA

Arts Editor 1: I like the other one so much better.

Editor-in-chief: Kind of sugar-watery.

Deputy Editor 2: I like it.

Editor-in-Chief: Really robust, great aftertaste. Overall positive.

Managing Editor: Mm, smells chocolatey. My favorite so far. I would drink this.

Patrick (quit the Weekly in 2013): My favorite so far.

Aspiring: Mine too.

Layout Editor: Pretty aggressive as a whole.

Contributing Editor 1: Ewwwww!

Managing: I really like dark beer. All the things that dark beer is like, I like.

Patrick: Charcoal, burnt leaves.

Mmm. Really dark, not too heavy.

Aspiring: This is a lame beer. An unrealistically positive beer.

Managing: It’s just too ripe for me.

Politics 1: It tastes like it should be cheap, but I bet it’s not cheap.

Arts Editor 2: When we were talking about things tasting like candy, this actually does taste like pink bubble gum.

Contributing Editor 2: I like it!

Contributing Editor 3: It’s got a good aftertaste slash finish.

Contributing 1: Can I have more?

18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 1, 2015

Reviews from a somewhat sober South Side Weekly editorial staff

BY JAKE BITTLE

ellie mejia

marz

This small Bridgeport brewery, less than a year old, has already earned recognition in the city’s alt-weeklies for their wide selection of sour beers and for the fact that they (somehow and for some reason) aged a mushroom stout in a soysauce barrel. Self-styled as a collective, the brewery takes pride in its Bridgeport roots as well as in its niche flavors. Not pictured in this article are the bottle labels, which are beautiful.

BUBBLY CREEK SOUR A Berliner

Weiss named for the famously polluted South Branch of the Chicago River. The inaugural entry in Marz’s South Side Sour line. Straw-colored, very sour, and full of lemon and other citruses. Overall staff impression: alienated Deputy 1: I don’t like this one.

Deputy 2: Why does it taste like kombucha?

Aspiring: Are we drinking?

Patrick: Wanna swap? This tastes like butt.

JUNGLE BOOGIE A wheat ale with a

full, orange coloring and a “complex malt character,” whatever that means. Another from Marz’s early selection—though John, the Weekly’s only self-styled beer “expert”--doesn’t say so here, he likes it.

Enhanced by an infusion of rooibos tea.

Overall staff impression: very positive Editor-in-chief: I didn’t realize how good this was until I tried the other one.

Patrick: It tastes like gummy worms!

Gummy worms! It tastes like gummy worms.

Anonymous: No, vodka gummy

Aspiring: Smooth, almost greasy. I like it.

Contributing 2: There’s definitely citrus.

Contributing 1: It tastes like Mike’s Hard!

Managing: Yeah!

Arts 2: Tastes like watered-down yet more effervescent milk.

Patrick: All I want is a Miller High Life.

Politics 1: This is a beer for people who don’t like beer.

Editor-in-chief: Very fruity. bears. A little like that...don’t write that down.

Contributing 2: I don’t like flowers, and this beer is too flowery. It tastes like Turkish delight, in that Turkish delight has flowers in it.

Contributing 1: This is the best beer I’ve ever tasted!

Politics 1: It’s sweet.

Politics 2: It tastes like [3 Floyds Brewing Co.’s] Gumballhead.

Arts 2: It’s not bubbly enough, it’s kind of soapy. Jake? It’s kind of soapy.

Layout Editor: The labels, though.

You can’t deny.

Politics 1: What is craft beer?

FOOD horse thief hollow

This Beverly brewery offers about ten beers of varying styles and flavors, available on tap and in growlers to-go. Maybe it’s just the light, but everyone’s faces seem to get redder the moment you step inside. Also, they have great sweet potato fries. While we got the beer, most of the restaurant watched ABC’s coverage of the St. Patrick’s Day parade, cheering whenever a shot of Beverly came on.

KITCHEN SINK IPA A pale ale whose

owners claim it was “born out of friendship and humor.” Takes its name from the wide variety of hops it contains. A vivid, almost unnatural copper color.

Overall staff impression: uncertain Politics 2: Tastes like Nilla wafers.

Arts 1: It’s okay...it coats your tongue in a weird way. Refreshing, but kind of a little bitter.

Politics 1: Halfway toward being a dark beer.

Arts 1: Yeah, like it can’t commit.

Aspiring: I’m not sure if it’s noncommittal or if it finds a happy medium.

Arts 2: Yeah, like, why does it have to choose?

Managing: I can’t drink it. It tastes like the stuff that gets left in the sink after you do the dishes.

Politics 1: Isn’t that implied by the name?

[Managing Editor denies that this comment was inspired by the name of the beer] Arts 1: I could see it as dishwater, maybe.

Editor-in-chief: I agree.

Layout: Dishwater, or kitchen sink?

Politics 2: I don’t know.

Deputy 1: It’s okay.

lagunitas

We chose to save the largest and most widely available of South Side breweries for last. The Weekly profiled Lagunitas’ enormous new Willy Wonka-style factory and taproom last year when the company moved into a huge warehouse on the west end of Pilsen. The brewery pumps out nine year-round beers (including the ubiquitous IPA) and nine seasonal beers.

OLDE GNARLYWINE: I’ve never had

wine or beer, so I don’t feel qualified to talk about this wine-beer. I’ve been told that “barleywine” is actually just a kind of beer, and that this beer is one of those.

This beer is noticeably red and features notes of caramel. Overall staff impression: divided, again Patrick: AAAAAHHH! Politics 2: Oh my god, this is actually toxic.

Layout: Pretentious. Wait, I haven’t tried it yet.

SUCKS Originally conceived as a sub-

stitute for Lagunitas’s popular Brown Shugga beer, this brew has since been given a run of its own. According to the company, it contains a complex taste reminiscent of cereal. Overall staff impression: positive (!)

Patrick: I liked the first three beers, but the rest sucked.

Arts 1: Feels lighter, in a good way.

Definitely one of the better ones.

Contributing 3: This is the best out of

Contributing 1: I like it a lot!

Managing: Why? Anonymous: Because it tastes really good! Wait, don’t write that down!

Editor-in-Chief: Ew. Arts 1: Wow, this is good. Peppy!

Patrick: I just want a Miller High Life.

Editor-in-Chief: I really don’t like it.

Deputy 1: It has the good kind of sweet aftertaste.

Aspiring: It lingers, but is that a good thing? Snapchat this.

Politics 1: Not completely terrible. all the beers.

Politics 1: It tastes like beer.

Editor-in-chief: Flowery, right? Sour and flowery.

Politics 2: It tastes like cough syrup.

Deputy 1: That’s a good start.

Politics 2: No, that’s it. That’s the end.

Deputy 1: It’s not actually that sweet, but it’s...it’s.

Arts 2: It kind of tastes like trash.

Patrick: Except not at all.

Politics 1: All beer tastes the same.

slapshot

This brewery is based near a rail yard in South Lawndale, close to the city limits.

Their beer, however, is available not only at a number of Chicago locations, but also west of the city as far as Rockford. Much like Vice and other small breweries, much of the appeal here seems to be the fact that every one of these beers (and there are quite a few) has some kind of punny or otherwise obscure name.

MCLAUGHLIN’S REDEYE Supposed to

contain hints of both coffee and beer (see below). The other main flavor is chocolate, but somehow none of my fellow staffers noticed this. As I listened with virgin ears to their overwhelmingly simplistic, coffee-focused opinions, I was forced to ask: did my peers have any idea what they were talking about? Overall staff impression: coffee Politics 1: I don’t want to drink this.

Arts 1: Oh god, this is bitter. This one tastes like actual coffee.

Contributing 3: I love this, it tastes just like coffee.

Politics 1: Coffee. The worst.

Arts 1: I don’t like coffee, so this one...

STICK IT TO THE NUTS A pea-

nut-themed beer with a name that will not be dignified with further commentary. The label claims that this beer, whose muse is “ooey gooey sticky icky peanut butter,” is a cut above the other peanut beers out there (there are apparently many). I can verify that this beer has both the color and scent of peanuts or peanut butter. Overall staff impression: peanuts (?)

Politics 2: This is actually good. It tastes like malt.

Deputy 1: It doesn’t taste like peanut butter.

Arts 1: John, it’s not even supposed to taste like peanut butter.

Contributing 1: Amazing!

Contributing 2: Oh, I love coffee.

Contributing 1: Actually, it tastes like espresso!

Arts 2: It’s really coating my tongue.

Editor-in-Chief: I love how sweet it is.

Managing: Yeah, it’s like, sweet coffee.

Editor-in-Chief: Actually, it’s more like Kahlua. Bad aftertaste.

Politics 2: It’s like a mouse decomposing in your apartment.

Deputy 1: Sweet, oily taste. Dark.

Managing: Wait. It’s like an iced coffee taste.

Deputy 1: That’s because the beer is cold.

Arts 2: No, it’s true, iced coffee does taste different.

Layout: Like an element of peanut.

A high element of peanut.

Contributing 1: Wait, it tastes like Reese’s Pieces!

Deputy 1: It doesn’t taste like peanut butter, and I eat peanut butter every day.

Aspiring: I would not have noticed that this is nutty.

Layout: That’s probably true.

Patrick: I hate peanut butter.

Arts 1: IT DOESN’T TASTE LIKE PEANUT BUTTER! Arts 2 (allergic to peanuts): This was disgusting.

[Politics Editor 2 mimes slitting throat.]

Managing: Even the label looks gimmicky.

APRIL 1, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

FOOD

The Salty Prawn brings fresh, sustainably grown shrimp to Chicago

Net Positive S

ia Xeros leaned forward, brandishing a small net over an open tank. “I can’t catch him,” she said, peering at the three translucent shrimp scuttling around the bottom of the tank. “He doesn’t like being caught.” A momentary battle ensued between prawn and woman: “Oh yeah, hide with the other ones. That’s a good idea.” She bent further over the tank, net at the ready. “They’ve kind of been babied,” she explained.

It only took a few more moments for the net to emerge victorious, holding an abnormally large shrimp, ten inches long, that climbed to the rim of the net with multiple legs wiggling.

This was Pepe, the mascot of The Salty Prawn, Chicago’s one and only sustainable saltwater shrimp farm.

“If you hear something different, let me know,” said Xeros, the co-founder of The Salty Prawn along with Kate Purvis.

Although a couple of other farms raise shrimp in Indiana, The Salty Prawn operates in the city itself, in the basement of a former industrial meatpacking facility in Back of the Yards. Now a vertical farm and sustainable food business incubator known as The Plant, the building is home to nine other tenants besides The Salty Prawn, ranging from Arize Kombucha to the Great American Cheese Collection.

While the for-profit tenants focus on their businesses in the space given in The Plant, the nonprofit organization Plant Chicago does research and development work both for its tenants and sustainable food production and

20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 1, 2015

BY JULIA AIZUSS energy conservation in general. Both Xeros and Purvis worked in this vein for The Plant before setting up shop in the basement a year ago.

Farms like The Salty Prawn’s, Xeros and Purvis had noticed, were “usually in the middle of nowhere,” like those shrimp farms in Indiana.

“Why can’t we start it here?”

Xeros recalled thinking. “We have the market, we have the background.

Why not try it?”

“It” is a “biofloc” saltwater system contained in three large, circular tanks, each fourteen or fifteen feet in diameter, in a 1400-square-foot space in a humid room shared with The Plant’s aquaponics farm. These open-air vats, which carry about 8,000 shrimp each, aren’t too photogenic; each is filled to a height of twoand-a-half feet with orange-brown water, which Xeros euphemistically describes as “different-colored.” That’s how the biofloc technology works: Xeros and Purvis cultivate harmless protein-filled bacteria (the source of the color) for the shrimp to eat. The shrimp then excrete toxic ammonia and nitrate, which the bacteria clean from the system, controlling the water quality. The shrimp help out too— when they molt, the shells they shed disintegrate and bring calcium back into the water. They never get rid of the water in the vats, Xeros said, and the biofloc system requires far less feed.

With the system set in place, tak-

ing care of the shrimp is “not simple,” Xeros said, but fairly routine: their shrimp come from a pathogen-free hatchery in Florida and are about eleven days old when they arrive, at which point they look, if anything, like grains of dirt, but jumpier. While one of the large tanks is being cultivated for them, these baby shrimp live in a small nursery tank for about a month. Splitting up the weekdays, either Xeros or Purvis tests the water chemistry of the large tanks every morning, and every day they scrape the bottoms of the tanks to make sure there’s no leftover feed. Once or twice a week they weigh each batch of shrimp to determine feed size. Much of their time is devoted to research.

“We do a lot of research in general,” Xeros said. “This is not a normal system.”

Of course, with the rest of their time they sell shrimp. Their harvests are usually small, consisting of five to twenty pounds of shrimp to process and prepare for delivery. The Salty Prawn doesn’t have a large enough supply for retail, though Xeros said they plan on expanding, and have been in talks with wholesalers.

“We’re still in startup mode, proving the concept and making sure we know how to grow shrimp,” she said.

For now, their dealings within The Plant and the local area are enough. Nana, an organic restaurant in Bridgeport, is a regular client, and The Salty Prawn shrimp never last long at The Plant’s Monthly Markets—in March they sold five pounds

FOOD in half an hour, harvested another three pounds, and were clean out of that too an hour before the market ended. Once The Plant establishes a retail shop, shrimp will be available there as well. Just a couple weeks ago the company made their first delivery as a member of Hooked on Fish, a sustainable seafood delivery service.

In keeping with The Plant’s goal of fostering interaction between its tenants, Xeros said they eventually planned to sell to other tenants within The Plant, like Pleasant House Bakery. They’re helping out The Plant itself, too: The Salty Prawn’s shrimp water is used in an algae bioreactor upstairs, where tubes filled with greenish water clutter the windows.

“It’s a nice little network of connecting people,” Xeros said.

Given these business choices, not to mention the close affiliation with a sustainability-focused nonprofit, it’s no surprise The Salty Prawn isn’t a typical for-profit company— it’s a benefit corporation, a type of for-profit that prioritizes social and environmental impact and has been around in Illinois since just 2013.

“Profit is not necessarily the only thing we use to base our [business] decisions off of,” Xeros said. “We have social, economic, environmental responsibility.”

Sustainable loop systems, benefit corporation responsibilities, partnerships with The Plant—what’s the result? How do the shrimp taste? Bluntly, immediately, confidently, Xeros replied: “Different.”

The Salty Prawn delivers shrimp within four hours of harvest, and restaurants use their shrimp within forty-eight hours of delivery, so it’s never frozen and fishy-tasting.

“We’re told it’s a lot fresher tasting,” Xeros said, and sweeter than usual. “As soon as it’s frozen, it loses that sweet taste.”

However they taste, one thing’s for certain: Pepe the mascot won’t join his fresh, unfrozen brethren.

Pepe and the other two shrimp he shares the tank with are from The Salty Prawn’s first ever harvest, and they’re a good display for the people who come through The Plant on weekly public tours.

“They’re from our first batch,” Xeros said, watching Pepe cling to her net, “so we’re kind of nostalgic.”

APRIL 1, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

FOOD

The History of the Potato Chip “A

Leonard Japp’s popular creation has deep roots in Chicago history

s I grew up, Jays faded into a childhood memory. My commutes to Hammond, IN when I went to Purdue Calumet rekindled my love for Jays. I would pass by their factory near I-94 south. On cold January days like today, the wind would blow down plumes of white smoke with the sweet smell of freshly cooking potato chips onto the expressway,” writes Park Ridge “Yelper” Mike O. about his unfaltering loyalty to Jays snack products.

The Jays Foods potato chip factory once stood in the Rosemoor neighbor-

BY SAMMIE SPECTOR hood on 99th Street, but it extended its reach as far as the expressway with its strong smell of delicious grease. With a golden physique, crunchy crackle, and the slogan “You can’t stop eating ‘em,” the potato chips of snack manufacturer Jays Foods have been deliciously appealing to the Midwest since 1927.

However, what most distinguishes Jays is the enduring nostalgia nestled in the hearts of Chicagoans, especially those who lived close to the 99th Street South Side factory.

22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 1, 2015

Closed in 2007, when Jays was sold to the food distributor Snyder’s, the factory is surrounded not just by fond memories but also by intriguing history. In 1927, after a series of odd jobs, including prizefighter and cemetery plot salesman, Minnesotan Leonard Japp turned to snack food. He created the modern-day Jays potato chip by frying potatoes in oil rather than lard, making the taste we have come to recognize: thin, crunchy, and deepfried.

The story of how Japp went from street peddler to factory owner in-

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cludes none other than Al Capone, who encouraged Japp to open factories and mass-produce his snacks for Capone’s speakeasies. The potato chip entered the trade about a year later, when Capone urged Japp to make them after tasting them in Sarasota, New York, where potato chips were first invented.

In keeping with the the TV dinner trend of the age, Mrs. Japp herself included her dinner recipes, which naturally included potato chips as an ingredient, on the back of every bag.

Originally named “Mrs. Japp’s Chips” for Japp’s wife, the name was changed to Jays in 1941 due to anti-Japanese sentiment during World War II. Despite a rocky ride full of ups and downs, Japp saw great success with his Chicago business, which provided the craved snack throughout the Midwest.

His family business’s prosperity was indicative of the need for an on-the-go snack that had not yet been introduced to the market before the late 1920s.

After a solid start, Japp almost lost everything in the stock market crash and Depression, but he fortuitously won it all back on a lucky racehorse. Later on,

President Kennedy invited Mr. Japp to lead a seminar in the Soviet Union on his ready-to-eat potato chips.

In 1986, beaten by bigger brands, the Japp family resigned themselves to moving on and sold their family business to Borden Inc. Years later, the family bought back their family name with the hope of returning to greasy glory, only to realize they were entering a market defined by trans-fat naysayers and the new “organic” trend. In the mid-90s, Jays fell once more into decline and finally went bankrupt in 2004. It is now owned by Snyder’s and produces in small quantities, yet remains true to only selling in the Midwest.

Japp died in 2000 at ninety-six.

Remembered as a kind boss, he was said to have known everyone in his South Side factory by name, with employees remaining by his side for more than thirty years. The city knew him as the classic American entrepreneur, one of Chicago’s oldest and favorite relics from bygone times.

Even though the factory has left

the South Side, the name lives on through oral histories of the good vibes and good smells when passing by—not to mention through Snyder’s online ordering site.

“They used to give us pencils, I remember,” says Lee Bey, Associate Director of Special Projects at the Arts Incubator, as he remembers his own class trips to the factory. “When we were coming home, you knew it, you could smell it on the expressway.”

Upwards of 500 jobs were lost when the factory closed its doors in 2007, but Chicago’s residents haven’t lost their memories of when those doors were open. As Bey recounts, “One of the things that marks some of Chicago’s areas are the smells, especially the South Side. And Jays was one of them. You definitely knew you were in the Southeast because of Jays.”

Whether they reminisce about school field trips or the commute home, esteem for Leonard Japp or cravings for his potato chips, South Side residents have a special place in their hearts, and stomachs, for Jays.

APRIL 1, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 23

Dream Cafe serves soul food with a healthy twist in Englewood

E

nglewood’s Dream Cafe and Grille is built around fresh, made-from-scratch, and locally sourced food, but it is not trying too hard to impress you. It’s one of two storefronts in a neglected little strip mall, and only a single canvas sign above the doorway betrays its existence. “Opening this spring, (Serious this time),” it says. Even the logo, featuring the Chicago flag, is inconspicuous.

Inside Dream Cafe retains the low-key look. Save a few charming details (a chalkboard menu, tables painted by a local children’s art class), it’s plain and clean. A modest flow of people trickles in and out, picking up sandwiches and homemade cheesecake for dinner. The manager, a veteran of Hyde Park’s Dr. Wax records, plays smooth soul music at low volume.

Perhaps the Dream Cafe’s appearance is so muted because the focus rests firmly on the food itself.

Everything is made-to-order in plain view behind the counter. The chicken sandwich is served still bubbling from the fryer on a crumbly yellow bun.

The homemade fries are cut thick and salted just right. Down to the last leaf of lettuce, everything is absolutely fresh. The house style is comfort food, minus the usual sense of unhealthy excess and executed with an elegant simplicity. Everything is served on

24 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 1, 2015

julie wu

In Praise of Mac & Cheese Eggrolls

BY KEVIN GISLASON

red plates that somehow demand to be photographed.

But you can’t talk about Dream Café without talking about the eggrolls. By far the most extravagant dish, the Supreme Dream Eggroll Trio proudly tops the menu. For $3.99, you can sample fillings of jerk chicken, collard greens, and mac & cheese, no substitutions. The paired dipping sauces—applesauce, honey-sriracha, and buttermilk ranch, respectively— are just as formidable.

The eggroll trio is the brainchild of culinary genius/madman Chef Russell Moore. Along with Howard Bailey, the Dream Cafe’s owner, Moore has been serving fresh, healthy food to Englewood for over two months since the cafe’s opening on Martin Luther King Day. Beyond the name, MLK inspires the cafe’s sense of community pride and civic engagement. In addition to sourcing his produce locally, Bailey has offered free soup for ballot receipts on Election Day, and free appetizers for Selma ticket stubs.

The Dream Cafe’s fate is tied to the eggroll trio, certain to become a signature item just by virtue of its weirdness. The weirdness is risky, perhaps, topping off a much more conventional menu, but there’s no doubt that it’s justified. The unlikely marriage between the fried, flaky wraps

and the southern fillings quickly becomes natural. The sauces are good enough to warrant use on fries when the eggrolls run out. Picking a favorite is akin to picking a favorite child, but the taste of thick, savory mac & cheese filling against cool ranch might have a slight edge.

While the sandwiches and entrees are quite impressive, these transnational monstrosities are something special. The eggrolls are so excellent, in fact, that they cast a slight shadow over the rest of the menu. The two-word menu items like “Cheese Burger” and “Veggie Tacos” are hardpressed to match the ostentatious splendor of the appetizer.

One wonders whether Chef Moore might be holding back, whether he might profit from venturing farther off the deep end, whether the Dream Café might not demand a little more flashy self-indulgence. Then again, more culinary pyrotechnics would risk losing sight of the unpretentious simplicity that defines the restaurant. Perhaps the Dream Café is destined to serve good, straightforward American and Caribbean food, crowned by one exceptional novelty item. It would be greedy to ask for more.

Dream Cafe and Grille, 748 W. Halsted St. Mon-Sat, 11am-8pm.

(773)891-5334. dreamcafeandgrille.com

Rib Tips, Served for Sixty Years

FOOD

Chicago’s oldest barbecue shop is as popular as it’s ever been

BY CLYDE SCHWAB

“I

’ve worked here since I was around eight years old. I came down one day to ask my grandfather to buy a toy or something like that, and he gave me an apron and told me that I’d work from this day forward.”

So says William Lemon, grandson of James Lemon, one of the original owners of Lem’s BBQ. Along with a blast of the smoky smell of the restaurant’s dual hickory smokers, William is one of the first things to greet a visitor to this storied barbecue joint.

People pack the interior of the restaurant at all hours of the day, starting immediately when it opens at 1pm.

During the lunch hour, smoke fills the air inside the restaurant, which is largely free of decoration. The most noticeable thing in the restaurant is the enormous meat smoker, which stays full of slab upon slab of meat throughout the day. Customers line up outside the door as employees chop rib tips, slice hot links, and take order after order.

The flood of customers isn’t new, either: it’s the reputation and history that keep people coming back. Founded in 1954 by brothers Bruce and Miles Lemon, Lem’s is the oldest operational barbecue shop in Chicago. James Lemon opened the current location at 75th

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Street and Prairie Avenue, on what in 1968 William called the “new black Wall Street,” after being introduced to the barbecue business by his brothers. The restaurant’s original location on 59th and State Street closed in the 1980s after three decades of business.

“My grandfather came down here mid-thirties,” said William. “Times was rough in the South, so they came up here as [young men] with a third grade education and tried to make something out of [their lives]. And most of our customers are people who’ve been here generation through generation. Their parents brought them here, their parents’ parents brought them here.”

“This was a business that started as just two brothers trying to provide for themselves during hard times,” he said. “You know most African-Americans who came up here from the South, they came up here to live a better life and I don’t think they envisioned sixty years later that it would still be going.”

Lem’s storied history is evident not only in the constant lines out the door of the restaurant, but also in the taste of the food itself—in every rib tip, hot link, and drop of mild sauce soaked in white bread. When the brothers who founded Lem’s came to Chicago from Mississippi, they brought Mississippi barbecue with

them.

“The sauces are a recipe of my great-grandma, and the rubs and spices are a recipe from my uncle,” said William. The rib tips, slathered in this sauce and chopped off the end of a spare rib, are cheaper than the meat from the slab, but the tips at Lem’s are a specialty—as one customer put it, they’re “the best in the fuckin’ world.”

Each piece is tender, smoky, and messy, with gobs of fat throughout. Steak fries form a bed underneath the tips in a sea of mild sauce (applied by dipping a thick brush in a steaming tub of sauce and brushing the tips, links and fries) whose tangy, vinegary taste forms a sharp contrast to the thicker taste of Harold’s and Uncle Joe’s.

It’s the constancy and consistency of this recipe that’s earned Lem’s a permanent reputation in the Chatham community and beyond. Since the earliest days, says William, the crowds have never slowed down, and they show no signs of doing so.

“The business has stayed the same or gotten better over the years,” says William. “Food is always going to be food. When you’ve got a good product, it doesn’t matter how the community changes, people are still going to come and get good food. The restaurant business goes up and down, but if

you’ve got good quality, this tends to stay the same.”

But even though the appeal of the restaurant has remained steady through the years, William noted that Lem’s may soon enter a new era.

“I definitely see the restaurant growing, and our goal for 2015 it to try to turn it into a franchise and open a few more locations,” he said. “My grandfather was old-fashioned so he kept things the same, but my Aunty is in charge now and she’s willing to let things grow and do new things.”

Even if the structure of the business changes, William says that Lem’s place in the community, and in the Lemon family, definitely won’t.

“Some aspects might change, but I don’t think this store will, I think this store will stay the same,” he said.

“Hopefully, thirty to forty years from now it will still be going and I can see my grandson or granddaughter run the business. That’s my only vision right now. I’m third generation, and now I see the importance of it and what they labored for and I want to keep it going myself.”

Lem’s Bar-B-Q, 311 E. 75th Street.

Monday,Wednesday, Thursday, & Sunday, 1pm-1am; Friday & Saturday, 1pm-3am.

APRIL 1, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 25

Make Way for Pushcarts

BY EMELINE POSNER

F

lavia has been selling tamales and champurrado on the corner of 28th and Pulaski for six years now. She’s out by 5am to serve the early risers and back in again as soon as her food sells out, often in as few as three hours. She prefers the winter because what she sells is warm and sweet, but she does fine year-round— well enough to support her two children back in Mexico and to put one through college. Though her business has garnered hundreds of faithful customers, it is not legal.

The Chicago municipal code offers only two kinds of licenses for pushcart vendors. One authorizes the sale of uncut fruits and vegetables, the other the sale of frozen desserts that have been “manufactured, prepared, or wrapped in a licensed food establishment.” But down 18th Street, 26th Street, and Blue Island and within pockets across Chicago, one finds troves of carts loaded with fixings for tacos, tamales, and elote, with containers of chili-sprinkled pineapple and coolers of aguas frescas. None of these foods are permitted by either city-issued license, but the carts have long been community staples.

Two years ago, Flavia was fined by the police for selling food without a license. Despite the setback, she decided to keep at it. Vending food allows her autonomy and flexibility that she did not have as a factory worker; it allows her to speak Spanish, her native language. And, with no restaurants in the immediate vicinity, her cart is convenient for residents who head to work before the sun rises.

Flavia’s incident with the police was enough to encourage her to start attending meetings of the Asociación Vendedores Ambulantes (AVA), a Little Village based organization that

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Food pushcarts inch their way towards legality in Chicago advocates for vendors’ rights and street vending regulation reform.

The AVA was founded in 1992 in response to a spike in police harassment against vendors, which at its worst culminated in police dumping bleach on vendors’ carts. The organization seems to have become more active in the last half decade under Vice President Vicky Lugo’s guidance—she joined five years ago and is the only member who speaks fluent English in addition to Spanish—and with the recent uptick in interest in food policy.

The organization currently has around eighty members, a fraction of the total vendors in Chicago, which a conservative estimate from the AVA puts around fifteen hundred.

In 2012, the AVA joined forces with the University of Chicago Law School’s Clinic on Entrepreneurship, a branch of the libertarian civil liberties law firm, Institute of Justice.

26 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 1, 2015

Earlier that year, the Clinic had run a campaign called My Streets My Eats.

The campaign advocated for reform of restrictions placed on pushcarts and food trucks alike, but ultimately only secured legal status for food trucks.

“We were excited about our success with the food trucks,” Institute of Justice clinic director Beth Kregor told me, “but, once again, the pushcarts were just kind of left out of the conversation. And as hard as the vendors tried to learn about proper food handling, there was just no license they could get. The police were hounding and harassing them for a license that didn’t exist.”

On those grounds, the AVA and Institute for Justice formed the Street Vendors Justice Coalition. Rather than pushing for a new license, they revised the existing ordinance for mobile frozen dessert vendors. (The new ordinance replaces “dessert” with

“prepared foods”). If approved, the revisions will effectively render pushcarts legal–so long as the vendors are licensed, the food is prepared in a licensed kitchen, and the carts are up to the standards of the Health Department.

The revised ordinance proposal offers a win-win situation for vendors and the City of Chicago: a few strikethroughs and added words would legitimize pushcarts as micro-businesses and would likely increase city revenue through licensing fees. But the ordinance, introduced into City Council in May of 2014 through the support of Aldermen Roberto Maldonado and WillieCochran of the 26th and 20th Wards, respectively, has been sitting in bureaucratic limbo for the past year, leaving its supporters questioning its future.

But the ordinance has not been disregarded by the City Council according to Maldonado’s office. The alderman’s Chief of Staff Kathleen Oskandy said that the Mayor’s Office has been meeting with the Latino Caucus over the last few months to iron out minor concerns.

“Right now, we’re just working on the language of the ordinance and deciding on the fee for the vendors’ license. The Mayor’s Office had set it at $500, but we want to see the fee at half that at the most.”

The current license fee stands at $275; Maldonado originally proposed that the fee be reduced to $100.

After hearing back from the mayor’s office, final changes will need to be approved before the ordinance is brought back to members of the Latino Caucus not in attendance at earlier meetings. Oskandy did not know how long it would take for the ordinance to be officially approved.

In the meantime, “e.a.t.” spots– newspaper stands turned “healthy

FOOD food kiosks” in the Loop–have closed within just months of opening. The stands had been the first recipients of the new Emerging Business License, which, according to a city press release, was created “in order to allow new, innovative businesses to launch when activities don’t fall under the current license structure.” The “new, innovative business” in this case had the same objective as pushcart vendors have always had–to sell prepared foods; but the stands fell victim to the harsh winter, according to the e.a.t. spots Facebook page.

“The lesson from the e.a.t. stands is that you never know who’s going to make it work,” said Kregor. “It can be shortsighted and limiting to give permission to one person with one idea instead of letting different people try it out and see who survives and who really grabs the customers.”

The revised ordinance also has the potential to resolve conflict between city and local policy. According to Lugo, the severity of law enforcement against vendors depends not on city law but on the local police force and alderman. Pilsen vendors, for example, may sell most prepared foods without any trouble. Regulations in Little Village are more strict; vendors are generally permitted to sell cut fruits, aguas frescas, and snacks, but not tamales or tacos. Lugo maintains that it was a change of police commander five years ago that rooted out all street vendors from the Back of the Yards neighborhood. But you would be hard-pressed to find any of this detailed in the city code.

Inconsistencies of this kind may explain why Flavia has only been given one fine in her six years of vending, while Rosemary of Tacos de Cabeza, stationed in southern Little Village, went as far as to secure a peddling license to avoid harassment from local police. Maneuvering City Hall was not easy, she laughed, but the police don’t bother her now that she has a peddling license. But the fact still stands that, until City Council approves the prepared food license, her tacos are no more legal than Flavia’s tamales and champurrado.

As elected officials work on finalizing the ordinance, the AVA continues to meet weekly in its president’s Little Village garage. Only three ven-

dors have shown up to the first meeting of the year and the coolers in the back of the room run intermittently, drowning out voices, but Lugo speaks clearly and there is a nearly tangible optimism about the progress made in the last several years.

They discuss several potential locations for shared kitchens before Lugo directs the conversation towards concerns that have been circulating about the revised ordinance.

Food safety is the major concern expressed outside the vending community. However, the Street Vendors Justice Coalition worked closely with the Health Department when revising the ordinance to ensure mobile vendors are held to the same standards as restaurants. And a recent study published by the Institute of Justice concludes that mobile food vendors in seven major American cities were consistently awarded marks from the Health Department equal to or higher than those of brick-and-mortar restaurants.

Some concerns come from vendors themselves. Due to the ordinance’s new regulations, vendors serving prepared foods would be required to have a cart of non-porous material, which generally cost $3,000 at bare

minimum. Flavia, whose cart is currently not up to those standards, says that an investment in a new cart is a worthy trade-off for the city recognizing her business as legitimate. But vendors in more pushcart-friendly neighborhoods are less willing to fork over thousands for new carts.

“Pilsen vendors aren’t so much in favor of the revised ordinance because they’re able to sell whatever they please, and they don’t see any harassment from city inspectors or police.

But when you come to Little Village or Back of the Yards,” Lugo said, “where vending is limited or not allowed, we have a lot of support for the ordinance.”

Another concern is that street vendors may have an unfair advantage over brick-and-mortar restaurants, which require much more initial capital and cannot move from place to place.

“26th Street, where there are more vendors, I think, than any other place in Chicago, has been touted by the mayor as a very vibrant business district, second only to the Magnificent Mile in terms of its sales taxes,” said Kregor when I asked her to address this ‘unfair advantage.’ “It really falls flat to say that having sidewalk

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vendors destroys local business.”

When Lugo brings up the pushcart-restaurant concern up for discussion at the AVA meeting, a vendor suggests that perhaps street vendors just make better tamales than restaurants do. This is met by laughter and agreement from other members.

Before wrapping up the meeting, Lugo reminds the present members that many successful businesses had small beginnings. She cites the department store chain Saks 5th Avenue, whose founder was an immigrant and began his career as a cloth peddler. Of course, the point of legalizing pushcarts is not to uniformly push vendors towards commercial success. What would happen, she jokes, if, upon the passage of the ordinance, all mobile food vendors decided to open up restaurants?

What matters is that vendors have that same possibility to achieve success from small beginnings and, more importantly, the right to earn an honest living; that vendors are recognized as providing a valuable service to Chicagoans and contributing to community vibrancy. It’s all within reach–it’s just a matter of waiting for the ordinance’s passage through City Council.

APRIL 1, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 27

Change is Brewing

zelda galewsky

Coffee shops have become shorthand for gentrification. Can the South Side’s newest mean something else?

BY HANNAH NYHART

B

ow Truss Coffee Company opened their Pilsen location without a lot of fanfare this past August. It was a quiet start, store lead Erik Czuprinski said, so much so that in late March, “we still get people coming in saying, ‘Oh my god, I didn’t even know you guys were here.’ ” It wasn’t until January that anonymous handwritten signs appeared, propped up in the store windows overnight: “This is what gentrification looks like!” “Fresh roasted gentrification served here.”

Owner and founder Phil Tadros pressed no vandalism charges, and ex-

pressed surprise at being targeted: Bow Truss was a local Chicago business, he told news. He invited the anonymous discontents to step forward for a dialogue. He also announced that the shops would begin serving an eight ounce coffee for one dollar. It wasn’t clear what this meant for a shop whose smallest size typically sells for $2.50, but it seemed to be gesturing toward access, a lowering of the shop’s entry price.

No one seemed more surprised about the pushback that spurred Bow Truss’s dollar coffee offer than the company itself. “If you live in Chicago

28 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 1, 2015

long enough, you’re going to hear that word, ‘gentrification,’ thrown around at some point or another in some conversation,” says Czuprinski, who lives in Pilsen. “But honestly, when we were opening up this shop that wasn’t even really in our heads at all.”

As Chicago’s coffee culture has boomed, coffee shops have become a kind of shorthand for gentrification: to note that there are more coffee shops on a block than there were ten years ago is to suggest that the block is probably richer, whiter, and hipper than it used to be. A piece in RedEye on the Bow Truss scuffle begins, “The coffeehouse is the international hub of hipsterdom.”

In 2004, after years of lobbying by 5th Ward Alderman Leslie Hairston, a Starbucks opened at 71st Street and Stony Island Avenue, the first time the chain had reached south of Hyde Park.

Hairston had fought to prove that the location could be profitable, and the

Tribune quoted her on its opening: “You are officially a neighborhood when you get a Starbucks.”

In the decade since Hairston got her Starbucks, the South Side has seen more than a dozen coffee shops open.

In the past five years alone, Jackalope opened in Bridgeport, Nitecap and La Catrina in Pilsen, Robust in Woodlawn, Plein Air in Hyde Park, and Kusanya in Englewood. Bridgeport Coffee expanded into two more locations, in Hyde Park and the South Loop.

Flecks Coffee opened and closed in Chatham. The same summer that saw Bow Truss open on 18th Street brought Currency Exchange Café to Washington Park and Greenline Coffee to Woodlawn. What those shops have and will become, besides “hubs of hipsterdom” depends not just on where they are, but what they seek to build.

Looking at some of the youngest shops, there are other common threads on what a coffee house can mean for

FOOD

a neighborhood: a place to form community, a safe spot, a space for exchange. Tess Kisner, the general manager at Currency Exchange, calls the shop “a breeding ground for new ideas, innovation, gatherings, performance.”

“It’s what maybe a bar used to do,” says Paula Hammernick, Greenline’s manager, “or a small general store.

People come together, they meet, they have business interactions.”

“Historically, coffee shops have been a place where people gather and talk,” says Czuprinski at Bow Truss.

“There’ve been wars plotted in coffeehouses.”

seven teenagers, who spent the months before opening building out the shop and refurbishing sets of bright yellow chairs, now a sleek dark wood.

This summer, Hamernick hopes to hire twenty youth across Greenline, Sunshine, and other nearby businesses. When Hamernick talks about the coffee shop as a space for exchange, she cites a group of regulars—entrepreneurs and activists—who turned their casual run-ins at the shop into the beginnings of a non-profit. Their first project focuses on juvenile justice.

Hamernick frequently recalls a time when 61st Street was a com-

head turner: one huge open room, with a window view of the kitchen in back.

The blue and white ceramic tabletops were commissions, made in Mexico.

Elements from the signage to the robust bookcases are refurbished in the style of Theaster Gates, who runs the University of Chicago’s Arts Incubator next door and started Currency Exchange as a private business. The space is leased from the University.

“With this type of avant-garde development that’s happening, we’re kind of under a microscope,” says Manager Tess Kisner. “People are like, ‘Is this gonna work?’ ”

While Greenline works to show that Woodlawn can support a business, Currency Exchange has set about proving that their business supports Washington Park.

If you buy into Hairston’s Starbucks metric, Greenline and Currency Exchange have declared their neighborhoods legitimate with their presence. They seek to create communal places in areas that don’t have many, and, in doing so, prove that the neighborhood can support such a space.

Greenline Coffee is a project of Sunshine Gospel Ministry’s business incubator, which looks at neighborhood development through a kind of “teach a man to fish” model: they hope to get the businesses they coach to a level where each entrepreneur can hire somebody.

Last summer the shop employed

mercial corridor; blown up photos on Greenline’s walls feature nearby intersections in the 1940s. Today, that main drag is a far cry from a commercial center, which is part of the point.

“At the time we started considering it, there weren’t too many other coffee shops in the area,” says Hamernick, “so this was sort of a demonstration project to investors.” The goal was to break even, and Hamernick says they’re “pretty much there.”

One CTA stop north, Currency Exchange also sees their block as a proving ground. The shop advertises coffee, biscuits and a $10 “Blue Plate Special” from big front windows. It’s a

Kisner says the shop had three target audiences in mind: neighborhood residents, the artists working in and with the Incubator next door, and kids from the UofC a few blocks away who, she says, are beginning to make it across the park. While Greenline works to show that Woodlawn can support a business, Currency Exchange has set about proving that their business supports Washington Park.

“It’s an old school neighborhood, and we’re a new school spot,” says Kisner. Pricing has been a consistent concern. “Are people gonna pay $7 for a grilled cheese, or are they gonna laugh at that?” Alongside their $3 bottomless

coffee, Currency Exchange offers a $1, eight ounce cup to go. The first day of the store’s soft opening last June was geared toward Washington Park residents; Kisner says they flyered a five block radius, propped the door open, and offered free coffee. The staff is largely black and mostly local—Kisner commutes from the North Side, but her hires are mostly from Washington Park, South Shore, or near Gates’s Dorchester Projects.

Like Greenline, Currency Exchange imagines its neighborhood transformed. As Kisner puts it, “We kind of plopped ourselves down on this abandoned block.” Those storefronts near Currency Exchange that aren’t vacant hold Gates-driven arts-development projects at various stages of completion. The café is part of a constellation of businesses-to-be that foreshadows a very different stretch of Garfield Boulevard. Greenline, for its part, hopes to bring commerce back to 61st Street, their shop acting as an unofficial incubator to Sunshine Ministry’s official one. But in the meantime both cafés, not yet a year old, have the blocks that they do, and their own space as their canvasses.

“Everything is handcrafted here, and intentional,” says Kisner. It’s not just the tabletops: the rest—from the café’s fusion (southern and Mexican) menu, to their table service, to their $1 coffee—feels intentional too. The menu says that the café knows where it is (“Soul food, comfort food,” says Kisner). The table service says that they are committed to an elevated experience in a neighborhood with few restaurants.

And the eight ounce coffee? “People take advantage of it or they don’t.

We don’t make any money on the dollar coffee, we might even lose a few cents. But it was about having that neighborhood service,” says Kisner.

APRIL 1, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 29

I

’ve worked at the same campus coffee shop for three years. Tucked into the basement of the UofC’s Divinity School, it’s a lot of things: a place where physicists come to drink espresso, a shop that slows so much in the summer months that customers can linger at the counter, a longtime seller of dollar coffee. When I ask Greg Chatterley, my boss, about the things he thinks a coffee shop can be, he echoes the ideas of Czuprinski, Kisner, and Hamernick about community.

“I think it can get a little idealistic,” he says, “but there’s a precedent for it—I think it’s something that’s possible to achieve.” But he qualifies: “You have to do a lot of different kinds of work to make a coffee shop into that. It’s not something that happens organically. Otherwise, it’s just another luxury good.”

The space behind the counter at Bow Truss looks like the workshop of an impeccably neat mad scientist, and in a way, it is. Bow Truss is nerd coffee; as Czuprinski explains it, the company began when owner Phil Tadros asked Chicago-area professionals what their ideal coffee company might look like, and then let them run with it.

Today, the company is a roaster popular enough that Czuprinski says they’re relocating their roasting drum in favor of a model twice as large.

“The demand has just skyrocketed so hard that our roastmaster can barely keep up,” he says. The larger drum will also support three new locations set to open this year, each in a different Chicago neighborhood. This is a roaster with fans, buyers, and momentum.

“You kind of let the product speak for itself,” Czuprinski says.

My biggest requirements for coffee are that it be hot and in front of me, but even I can tell that Bow Truss’s basic eight ounce drip is something special. At a shop that sells pour-overs, drip isn’t even the good stuff, but this is: delicious, complicated, potentially habit forming. Can you get it for a dollar? Nobody in the shop is sure.

Though various outlets reported the pricing shift, Tadros’s announcement didn’t come with clear guidelines.

Czuprinski says he gave the special to anybody who asked, and charged regulars who came in for their $2.50 cup

a dollar instead. The lower price was never advertised.

As for the space, the lines are clean; the minimal seating and tables are mismatched, but with an eye to continuity. There are no bathrooms, and the original shops (in River North and Lakeview) didn’t have Wi-Fi. Czuprinski says it’s an in-and-out model: “There are so many artists and young professionals in the neighborhood that want good coffee. However, they don’t need to be at our shop all day. They have their own studios, they have their own gigs that they need to get to, they have their own places that they need to be.”

But exchange is still part of Bow Truss’s vision. In the window sits a small communal table, the kind that would encourage getting cozy with your fellow patrons. “He doesn’t want people sitting all day,” Czuprinski says of Tadros, “and he also doesn’t want people just looking on their phones, on their laptops—he wants people to sit around and have a conversation with somebody else.” So, plan your war, but do it before the coffee runs its course.

What should a coffee shop be?

Greenline, Currency Exchange, and Bow Truss have built very different spaces: a business working to prove its community is a good investment, another working on a community-to-be, and a showroom for coffee that’s better than everyone else’s. In Greenline, I interviewed Hamernick over the register, stepping aside every few minutes for customers. Parents and kids came in for smoothies, a teen slipped behind the counter for his paycheck. From Currency Exchange, Kisner put the phone down occasionally to orchestrate the private event that would have the shop closed all day; when we’d set up the call, the café was readying for an after-hours birthday party, balloons and favors already strewn.

Czuprinski and I talk early one afternoon, long after the shop’s morning rush. His co-worker buzzes around, keeping everything sharp. This is one of the things Czuprinski likes about the Pilsen location: it’s slow, you can have a conversation. The shop is immaculate, and there are no interruptions. We have the place to ourselves.

30 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 1, 2015

An Anti-Epic

Director Jacques Doillon brings his newest to Doc Films

BY ROBERT SORRELL

“W

hen I’m absolutely dead you can stop,” proclaims a young unnamed French woman played by Sara Forestier, one of the main characters of Jacques Doillon’s Love Battles.

Unlike the request directed at her unnamed lover and combatant (James Thierrée), the film itself never deals in absolutes. The characters’ backstories are shady, their names left undisclosed, and one gets the sense that the characters don’t understand much more than the viewers do. As the female character (referred to merely as “elle,” she/her in French) says at one point, “I want to understand my sadness.” The viewer wants to as well yet is almost always thwarted.

“I was told everywhere that this film was un-financeable, and I realized that no one wanted to make it regardless of money issues,” Doillon mused before the Chicago premiere of Love Battles at Doc Films on March 16. Dressed casually in a leather jacket, his scruffy gray hair at shoulder length, Doillon appeared at the film society at the end of a retrospective series of his work that began in early January. Yet despite the financial difficulties, Doillon said, he believes Love Battles is one of the five or six most important films he’s created.

Considering that he has over forty director credits to his name, this is no mean distinction.

Though a renowned director, Doillon’s most recent film had problems finding financing and distribution due to the taboo mix of graphic

sexual content and depiction of a couple engaged in “love battles,” physical fights. These battles, brawls interspersed with kissing and eventually sex, range widely in emotion and tone.

At moments they are terrifying, such as when the man slams the woman’s head into a cabinet and for a second any playfulness disappears; at other times their violence is replaced by tender kisses and embraces.

Doillon has focused on uncomfortable and unmarketable projects throughout his career, perhaps most famously in Ponnete, a film about a four-year-old girl dealing with the death of her mother and featuring almost entirely amateur child actors.

However, unlike Ponette, death is almost never on the surface of Love Battles; it lurks in the peripheries and flows in the subtext instead. Although Elle’s father has died right before the beginning of the film, she seems to worry more about her past relationship with her father than his death.

The event forces her to reconsider not mortality, but love, of different varieties and from different people. Yet there is always a hint of pain, a hint of something that cannot be fixed, a deep-seated bitterness.

“Don’t expect love...love sounds obscene when you say it,” Elle mentions at one point, her voice laced with condescension that encapsulates the competitive dynamic present between the two in many scenes even when they aren’t fighting. They are constantly challenging each other, yet at moments, their antagonism disap-

SCREEN

lexi drexelius

“I was told everywhere that this film was unfinanceable, and I realized that no one wanted to make it regardless of money issues” –Jacques Doillon pears and they melt into each other’s embraces, lips and bodies melding.

There is a radical tenderness in these moments that is part of the film’s determination to treat its two characters as human beings, not creatures defined by their battles, their situations, or their sadness.

Body language and placement is used throughout the film in the way that words or technical manipulations are often used in mainstream cinema. As Doillon said after the film, “It seems to me that bodies need to speak...at the risk of sounding pretentious, it’s like choreography.” To achieve this, Doillon asked a lot of the

main actors’ bodies. They slide along hardwood floors on their backs, roll in muddy rivers. At one point the man lifts the woman up high enough that she can drape her legs over his shoulders and straddle his head, her groin in his face. All of this besides the pugnacious bits where, among other things, the two punch, scratch, slap, throttle, crush, and wrestle each other. And much of this they do in varying degrees of nudity.

The film required an extreme level of intimacy and trust, not to mention physical fitness. The actors who finally agreed to the roles were in fact dating (although Doillon noted that

he was worried throughout the filming process that the two would break up, which they eventually did two weeks after filming ended), and their creative role in the film is almost equal to the director’s. Doillon dreamed the thing up, but Forestier and Thierrée built it with their bodies and their sweat. In the Q&A after the screening, some audience members wondered if using actors in this way was exploitative. Doillon responded, “If filmmakers can no longer steal from their actors, where are we going?”

Love Battles has a renegade, rebellious feel to it; its ambition and the director’s unflagging dedication to an idea echoes other adventurous filmmakers such as Werner Herzog, except instead of dragging a steamship over a mountain, Doillon turns his focus to something much more intimate and personal, almost anti-epic. Most shots in the film are shot from a relatively close to medium range, keeping the background to a minimum. And only five actors appear in the film in all.

With characteristic wit, when asked what he planned to do next, Doillon replied that he planned to exit the theater to great applause. Regardless of applause, Doillon received a surprising number of positive comments for a film that has garnered so

little support thus far. One audience member said that after seeing much of Doc’s series, it was his favorite Doillon film, and even went as far as to ask how he could financially help Doillon make more films.

It’s of course impossible to know how many audience members hated the film and didn’t speak up, or how many merely felt a bit more tepid.

Doillon himself is quite aware that the film is not for everyone. As he mentioned, probably only around 150,000 people have seen the film, and probably only 10,000 of them liked it. That, he said, was enough for him.

Love Battles is a film that does not justify its existence through audience response. It is a film that may make viewers feel uncomfortable and strange; it is a film that does not pass judgment on the more “strange” or unconventional aspects of its characters. Many viewers may find the characters distasteful, but Doillon does not. That isn’t his job.

“Being a filmmaker is complicated enough,” he said. “To aspire to be a moralist or something else is not something I can do.” Doillon says he sees his work mainly as technical.

He constructs films, and organizations like Doc Films set them up on a screen. It’s up to the audience to decide what to do with them.

APRIL 1, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 31

The Bible’s Body and Soul

BY LUCIA AHRENSDORF

I michael brosilow

The Good Book presents an intersection of religious scholarship and faith

32 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 1, 2015

n the atrium-shaped Court Theatre interior, the charismatic, sarcastic Professor Miriam Lewis, played by the engaging Hollis Resnik, introduces her Biblical Studies class—and the play, The Good Book—to the audience with an impassioned monologue. In the style of “that college teacher who changed your life,” she insists that the students eliminate all that they think they know about the Bible, then eloquently describes their quest: to illuminate the dark corridors of biblical mystery.

As soon becomes evident, even for the professor, this rejection of all emotional association with the Bible is impossible. The play, in exploring the influence of the Christian Bible in the United States, highlights its deep embedment in our society and our culture, and as a result, in our personality and unique search for meaning.

The playwrights Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson, who were also behind Court’s award-winning An Iliad, proposed an idea for a play exploring the Bible’s history to the University of Chicago’s Court Theatre in 2012.

After approving it, as part of a move to collaborate more closely with the UofC and its resources, the Court put the playwrights in contact with the Divinity School’s dean, Professor Margaret Mitchell.

The genesis of the performance in a scholarly setting in part mirrors the environment of the project’s creation .

It was in Mitchell’s office in the Divinity School that the ideas in the project deepened and evolved through conversation between the scholar and the artists. The collaboration lasted over three years, with Peterson and O’Hare immersing themselves in the Divinity School’s intellectual and social sphere to gain a better understanding of the culture surrounding the study of religion. They sat in on classes, interviewed students, and spent time in the coffee shop.

Of the partnership, Mitchell says, “One of the things that…really excited me about the project all along was that they weren’t just looking for a high-level fact checker, they were looking for a kind of creative collaboration at a higher level of thinking.”

Soon after the Court Theatre’s approval of the project, the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry decided to support the experimental project with their Mellon Collaborative Fellowship for Arts Practice and Scholarship, which seeks, in part, to combine forces between scholars and artists. The Gray Center took on the financial responsibility for the meetings between the professor and the playwrights, allowing them to become a significant part of the script’s development.

Leslie Danzig, the curator at

STAGE

the Gray Center, and David Levin, the director of the Gray Center, pioneered the collaboration. “As part of our support we continually ask questions,” Danzig says of their role. “How is this potentially transformative for the faculty member and the artist?

There are ways that we generously try to challenge everyone who’s involved to participate in the collaboration in unexpected ways. So there’s a kind of ethos there.”

The original idea for the project was born from O’Hare and Peterson’s personal fascination with the powerful text’s history and growth in society. Mitchell said that one of the first questions she posed to the playwrights, a question that arguably drove the three years of conversations between the three thinkers, was, “What is this Bible you’re talking about?”

O’Hare’s original interest in writing the work was fueled by frustration, struggle, and a desire to conquer a text that seemed to attack him.

“I had been reading the Bible on my own for a while before the play commission came along. I wanted to know it as well as my enemies—those who were attempting to disenfranchise me as a gay atheist man and those who use the Bible against gay people and non-Christians.”

Though O’Hare’s relationship to the Bible has been complicated, he makes clear that the play is in no way an attack on the text or the people who find personal meaning in its pages, but rather an exploration of the mystery and danger of the book that can be so comforting for some and harmful for others. The play highlights the imperfection of the work and its interpretation, yet in the end the characters learn to develop their own personal truths from the text, bringing them both comfort and affirmation.

The play’s two main characters reflect a core belief of the work: people have unique and deeply personal relationships to the Bible, especially in America. Both characters give insight into different, albeit radical, approaches to religion and the importance of

the Bible in their own personalities and histories. Mitchell believes that in large part, this importance placed on the Bible is related to our ideas about mortality and fundamental human nature. She attributes this to the fact that “the Bible itself is death-defying.

There’s historical surprises and ironies that are trans-generational.”

A young redheaded Irish-Catholic teenager growing up during the Vietnam War, Conner, played by an energetic Alex Weisman, seeks to reconcile his self-discovery and place in the world with the rigid, ancient traditions of Roman Catholicism and his desire to become a priest. At one

interesting contrast to those of the two characters. With jaunty songs and jokes, the history of the Bible is presented as a musical about a series of random events. The tone is incompatible with the reverence and respect shown by Conner as he allows the words to rule his life and choices. Although it is not incompatible with Miriam’s understanding of the text’s history, it nonetheless contains moments of true lyricism and higher truth that do not fit into her treatment of the Bible as an analytical puzzle to be solved. This more spiritual part of the Bible confronts Miriam as she encounters the passing of her mother and

“The Bible itself is death-defying. There’s historical surprises and ironies that are trans-generational.” point he tries to recreate the shroud of the temple, but is frustrated by the historical distance. Miriam, the Biblical scholar, though a self-proclaimed atheist, cannot separate herself from her Lutheran upbringing and becomes increasingly aware of her intolerance of people of faith in her classroom.

The third storyline in the play is a biography of the Bible. It recounts its history through interspersed comedic skits highlighting the haphazard choice of scrolls, clumsy translations, and loss of text that all contributed to the collection of pages we call the Bible today. “The Bible really is a character that grows up and develops through the play,” Mitchell says. Indeed, she describes the central concept of the play as “the cyclone of Biblical effects,” which the two central characters struggle with and, in the end, conquer in their own way.

This third storyline serves as an

her own death.

Both characters are endearing in their own way, and their relationships with themselves grow through the lens of their relationship to religion. The Bible itself functions as an intimidating object, acting as a mirror to reveal truths about the characters. The play is not about the book itself, but rather about the characters and their personal struggles, complicated and ameliorated by this text with a strange history.

Despite the serious content, including the prominent role of death, the play makes use of comic elements.

Mitchell was pleased at the audience’s response to the comedy and felt it provided a different perspective on the seemingly grave study of religion. “I was loving how much people laughed, because it is a very funny play in a lot of ways, while also having a lot of deep pathos to it. Religion is funny. Internal to the religious tradition that I know

and study is a tremendous amount of humor, some of which is gentle and some of which is biting and bitter; we who study religion laugh all the time.”

The playwrights were deliberate with the humor, O’Hare says. “Lisa and I both inject humor into everything we do. To me the human condition is unbearable without being able to laugh.”

As the Bible evokes such strong feeling, laughter in the play was a way to dilute the passion and allow one to forget one’s history with the text. Mitchell argues that it makes the play and the topic more approachable: “People encounter their culture not just with either a solemn nod or a solemn shake of the head, but with bemusement and wonder and with frustration, a whole range of human emotions.”

The play laughs not only at religious fanaticism, but also at religious authority. Some of the funniest jokes in the play are directed toward pretentious academics, their lofty opinions of themselves, and their hypocrisy.

In addition, this question of authority is portrayed as both amusing and fruitless, as different groups claim understanding of a book that is beyond understanding and beyond historical grasp.

The play also gives insight into a field that is not familiar to most audiences. Bible scholars are not often protagonists, and the Bible itself, especially its history, is not frequently examined analytically in art and public spaces. In that way, the play also serves to educate. However, as Mitchell emphasizes, “Court Theatre is not room 106 in Swift Hall. There’s a difference between art and scholarship, but the collaboration between the two that this project has represented I hope will both make theatergoers more interested and thought-provoked about the academic study of religion...People will talk about it, and that’s where the life of scholarship and the life of art join common cause.”

Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. March 19-April 19. $35-$65. Discounts available for seniors and students. (773) 753-4472. courttheatre.org

APRIL 1, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 33

Troubled Recovery

Colm McCarthy’s “Killed” documents child casualties from the Irish Troubles

BY STEPHEN URCHICK

A

list of Colm McCarthy’s works sounds like a vigil. Each screen-printed metal plate bears a terse, no-nonsense title: “Anthony McDowell, aged 12, shot by British soldier, Belfast, April 19th 1973,” “Breda Devine, aged 1, killed by RIRA car bomb, Omagh, August 15th, 1998.” On display at the URI-EICHEN Gallery in Pilsen, McCarthy’s exhibition “Killed” is a series of portraits of children who died during the Troubles, an open conflict in Northern Ireland lasting from 1969 through the turn of the century. McCarthy’s work is apolitical. He’s trying to pin down and focus these otherwise anonymous young faces for posterity, almost in memorial. Working from Wisconsin, exhibiting now on Chicago’s South Side, he’s looking to take his art back to Ireland, the country of his childhood holidays. The Weekly wrote McCarthy to learn more about his show and his larger challenge to fix in time a fraction of the 200-plus slain youth.

“Almost all of these kids are just lost to history—except to their friends and families, obviously,” McCarthy said. “So, I wanted to bring them back, larger than life and in color, so that people could look at them, and know their names, and know what happened to them.”

Each plate features its titular child, set usually against one of two types of backgrounds: a local cityscape or landscape, or the tessellated logo of a football club. The kids themselves dominate the foregrounds, amounting to half or twothirds of every composition. Their wide, open faces smile hugely in a disarming direct address to the viewer. McCar-

thy juxtaposes their candor, however, with the sketchily-rendered silhouettes of military helicopters buzzing matter-of-factly on the horizon.

McCarthy recounted seeing such army hardware growing up: “They are in there because I always remember them when we would be driving through Fermanagh and Tyrone on our way from Dublin to Donegal...It was just incredibly eerie to me as a kid. The army towers, the barbed wire, and the fear that something could kick off at any second.”

The Westland Gazelles, the Boeing Chinooks, the armored personnel carriers and the inevitable shrapnel and bullets don’t simply exist as representations. They also find their way into the very media on which McCarthy worked.

He executed the majority of the works in “Killed” on thin metal rectangles cut from aluminum, steel, and zinc.

“It’s a cold, hard, and insensitive material.”

The choice of metal began with what McCarthy discredited as a “nonsensical technical consideration.” He’d hoped that the show would be easier to pack and transport if done on metal.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “they weigh a ton and are immensely fragile...I don’t even know what magical force causes paint to cling to metal!”

The sheer material isn’t striking as a denunciation of the implements of war.

It does much more to drive home the regularity and mundanity of encounters with potential violence. Aluminum, steel, and zinc are the substances that support the images of “Killed.” They are the art’s underpinning elements—an unavoid-

34 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 1, 2015

able fact about its creation that the figures we see cover up, get in front of, or move away from. The physical citation of armaments is as seemingly natural and essential to the making of “Killed” as McCarthy’s own ominously mythical experience of the machines themselves.

“We’d be driving along these country roads and you’d just see a Gazelle hovering in the distance. They were just a part of the landscape.”

McCarthy’s reintegration of “Killed’s” happy children to this bleak and divided landscape required painstaking work and research.

“It’s been incredibly difficult to find good background information about the vast majority of these kids,” he said. “Information on the more recent ones can be found easily enough, but the further you go back—and most of them are from the seventies and eighties—the less information there is. Often there is nothing at all. History doesn’t record ‘unremarkable’ people.”

McCarthy has thus been working mostly from tiny, poor-fidelity captures.

“I mean, 1.5 inch by 1 inch, 72ppi images made from the –nth generation of copies of original snapshot photographs that weren’t very good to begin with.”

Mainly a photographer by practice, he’s committed himself to what he admits is a “rather ridiculous” process of printing, retouching, scanning, enlarging, and reprinting. The goal is to correct and clarify the images he can reliably source into a result that’s big and sharp and ready for screen-printing.

“I felt obligated to each one I worked on to do the best I could for

them, and find out as much about their lives as I could.”

In elaborately repairing the images, McCarthy attempts much the same thing in the library as he does in the studio. While not a metaphor outright, the difficulties behind tracking down graphical materials, finding articles and literature about the subjects—finding the time and money to stay in Ireland— map in resonant ways onto “Killed” as a finished product. The staticky stories and historical fog McCarthy has pushed through can be read in each face. The kids are still slightly blurred and mussed; cheeks and brows become oblong fields of color or darkness. They’re present and arresting, but still indistinct—carefully, exhaustingly reconstructed echoes.

“Killed” is more than a collection of portraits. It’s an ongoing grappling with the record for a very recent tragedy. The politics of the Troubles, the documentary apathy that some 3,500 total deaths can inspire, made McCarthy’s endeavor to find the grins and the sparkling eyes strenuous. The project genuinely pivots the audience’s gaze back onto the real costs of the crossfire by meeting it halfway with thoughtfully researched, sympathetically recovered snapshots of hope and growth.

“These children were blameless innocents swept up in something that was entirely beyond them,” McCarthy said.

“I wanted to do right by each of them and give each of them a portrait that I felt did them justice.”

URI-EICHEN Gallery, 2101 S. Halsted St. Through April 3. By appointment. (312) 852-7717. uri-eichen.com.

VISUAL ARTS

Old Haunts and New Stories

A surreal exhibition on loss and failure

BY MARK HASSENFRATZ

W

hen I entered the ever-changing ACRE gallery for the opening of “Endless Rest,” the usually sparse room was filled with a circle of lumpy vases, a wall covered in fake ivy, and photographs of an abandoned house.

On the largest wall was a live projection of Blair Bogin’s ghost storytelling, but we’ll get to that later. For such a small room, it was crowded, and I felt everyone looking at the works on display knew something about them I didn’t.

Jessica Harvey’s lumpy white vases were gathered around a photograph taken by the artist of a full moon on a cloudy night. The photograph seemed to be the center of a portal created by the arrangement of the vases. The ivy was obviously artificial but placed on the walls as if it had always been there.

Harvey’s work centered on a failed utopian community of artists called Birdcliff, near the site of the legendary Woodstock Music Festival in upstate New York. A graduate of Columbia College, Harvey has spent several residencies in locales ranging

courtesy of acre

from St. Louis to Iceland and has since taken on the Chicago art scene.

“It was supposed to be a self-sustaining community, but there was a lot of conflict within the group and it split up,” said Harvey. “I’m interested in the mythology of the place, and the matriarch of it, Jane Whitehead.”

Harvey’s photographs show the empty rooms of the now-abandoned Birdcliff house where these artists once lived—a letter Harvey found in the house hangs on one gallery wall, a document of unrequited love sent from a woman Maria to her lover Raul, who felt that their tie had been broken.

Another black and white photograph shows pottery made by the artists of the community. The lighting in the latter photograph brought to mind a flashlight shining into the darkness, which made the pottery appear less like vases and more like living beings, crowding toward the light. The vases in the center of the room called back to those vases found in the artist commune, made lumpy and sad to better reflect the commune’s demise.

This theme of deterioration and

loss tied this piece in with Blair Bogin’s work, which is primarily concerned with ghost stories. There was not enough space in the gallery proper to accommodate her work, but she avoided the issue by turning her own van into a performance space in an alley next to the gallery.

People came into the van to tell ghost stories they knew, and Bogin acted out her interpretation of the story as she heard it using copied photographs and paper cutouts of people, most notably Whitehead, from the Birdcliff commune. She called it, “live animation of ghost stories.” The idea was to create an interactive, down-toearth experience of modern ghost stories using photographs of figures from Harvey’s part of the exhibit, which also served as Bogin’s inspiration.

“I…am interested in ghosts,” Bogin said. “I think it’s an interesting conversation to ask someone about a ghost—it’s asking them about much deeper beliefs and much broader views of how they see the world.”

“I think it’s stupid to say that I know anything about anything,” Bo-

gin continued. “I’m interested in the idea that time doesn’t exist, which means that everything that ever happened is happening right now, simultaneously. Therefore, whoever has been in this van ever is in this van right now, we’re just not on that dimension with them.”

When I entered the van I stumbled upon a story (or many stories, if you agree with Bogin’s idea of time) already in progress. Jesse, a visitor, was telling Bogin about a song he heard in a recurring dream of his. As he hummed the tune of it, she made the figures dance around in the room in time with an eerie ballet.

Returning to the main exhibit room, I finally put together all of the working parts of the exhibition. The artists clearly felt moved by the losses they had seen while researching their work and, in turn, translated it into something relatable to anyone. At the ACRE exhibition all these ghosts and failed bonds of human interaction were finally laid to their “endless rest,” but that didn’t mean we couldn’t continue to experience them.

APRIL 1, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 35

POLITICS

Out of Prison, to the Polls

Can ex-offenders create an effective voting bloc?

BY WILL CABANISS

“I

got my GED in prison,” explains Tony Marshall, who was released in 2011. “I got a food and sanitation license. I even got a few college credits.” Four years later, Marshall is still out of work. “It’s a catch-22,” he said.

Marshall’s situation is common among ex-offenders. Perhaps the most devastating consequence of the modern American penal system has been its failure to prevent repeat offenses, entangling offenders in a seemingly endless feedback loop between freedom and incarceration. For those fresh out of prison, like Marshall, a secure job is hard to find, whether it has been four days or four decades since their release.

Teamwork Englewood is a community center that provides support to ex-offenders seeking a job. “[The prison workers] usually just give each of them ten dollars and put them on a bus or something,” said Johnny, a case manager at Teamwork Englewood who declined to give his last name. “What they need is employment, housing, and family support. How much can you do with ten dollars?” But opportunities are scarce, as government programs that facilitate ex-offenders’ reentry into the community mainly provide resources for job seeking, but not the jobs themselves.

Some ex-convicts have started to turn to the electoral system in the hopes of producing change. Illinois is one of only fifteen states and the District of Columbia to automatically restore every prisoner’s right to vote upon release, including that of the nearly 68,000 people released from the state prison system between December of 2014 and December of 2015. Yet the population

of ex-offenders remains a vast, underrepresented demographic in the city of Chicago—enfranchised, but dispersed and unable to consolidate power. That gap between opportunity and representation is reflected in the ambitions of Ziff Sistrunk, an Englewood resident and ex-offender who says his goal is to organize Chicago’s formerly incarcerated into a cohesive voting bloc to influence the mayoral and aldermanic runoffs on April 7.

Were the city to provide more job openings specifically for “hard-toplace” individuals, Sistrunk says the promise of stability would prove more attractive than the allure of drugs and crime. Should his plan materialize, Sistrunk’s agenda would involve pushing for more concrete opportunities for ex-offenders in addition to those the city already offers, placing them in jobs on construction sites, in the Parks Department, and in schools.

Organizing a group as dynamic and transient as Chicago’s ex-offender community is a tough task, and Sistrunk’s goal of bringing together men and women from across all fifty wards is an ambitious one. But as criticisms of the criminal justice system reach a peak nationwide, it may be the moment for a movement like the one he envisions.

Two weeks before the run-off, Sistrunk was struggling to mobilize his target population. Yet he still has national designs for Greenslate, his fledgling organization, foreseeing a presence in states across the Midwest and an impact on the presidential election of 2016.

Ultimately, whether a movement takes shape in the coming weeks and years may rest not just on the ability of ex-offenders to organize, but on how much faith the demographic places in municipal government. “I follow all the elections. The aldermen say they’ll help you. You put them in office, they don’t help you,” Marshall lamented. “It’s an honor and privilege [to vote], but things don’t change.”

Julie Wu contributed reporting.

36 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 1, 2015

APRIL 1, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 37

BULLETIN Introduction To Restorative Justice In recent years, restorative justice—the community engagement philosophy that emphasizes diplomatic mediation over punishment—has provided spaces that serve as low-stress, conflict-free forums for high school students across Chicago to constructively engage with their peers. This coming Monday, the CivicLab will host a workshop on restorative justice with a focus on peace circles, in which participants (moderated by a facilitator) take turns speaking within “safe spaces for authentic youth.” The instructor will be Nancy Michaels, associate director of Roosevelt University’s Mansfield Institute for Social Justice and Transformation. The workshop will conclude with a peace circle of its own. The CivicLab Chicago, 114 N. Aberdeen St. Monday, April 6, 6:30pm-8:30pm. $10. civiclab.eventbrite.com (Christian Belanger)

Landlord Training Workshop If you’re a landlord hoping to learn how to improve your management, look no further than the Bridgeport Citizens Group’s free landlord workshop for property owners and managers on April 16. Co-taught by the Department of Buildings and Law, Community Investment Corporation, and the Chicago Police Department, the workshop will cover leases, rental agreements, riders, background checks, rental history, and inspections. You can reserve a seat by registering online on EveryBlock (go to chicago.everyblock. com and search the event name), and the registration form offers the option to write questions that will be anonymously answered at the event. 9th District Police Station, 3120 S. Halsted St. Thursday, April 16, 3pm-6pm. Free. (312)508-8852. chicago. everyblock.com (Mari Cohen)

Fourth Annual Bridgeport Clean and Green On Saturday April 18, the Palmisano and McGuane Park Advisory Councils will be leading a clean up of Bridgeport in honor of Earth Day. Volunteers will clean up Palmisano and McGuane Parks, as well as much of Halsted, 31st, and 35th Streets. While various instruments of trash destruction (bags, some gloves, “other tools”) will be provided, participants are encouraged to bring their own sunscreen, though the weather forecast does say it’s going to be “mostly cloudy” and fifty degrees. Breakfast snacks will be served. McGuane Park Field House, 2901 S. Poplar St. Saturday, April 18, 9am-1pm. Children should be accompanied by adults. (773)719-6655. chicago.everyblock.com (Christian Belanger)

Pilsen Community Town Hall Chuy Garcia handily won the 25th Ward in 2015’s municipal election: Rahm Emanuel trailed him by twenty points in the ward, which includes the West Loop and parts of Pilsen, Heart of Chicago, Chinatown, and Little Italy. The Pilsen Alliance, a self-described progressive organization that has sometimes been critical of Emanuel, is holding a mayoral forum pitched especially at the residents of the 25th Ward. Emanuel is apparently passing on the opportunity to contest the 25th’s decision this February. According to the Pilsen Alliance, Emanuel declined their invitation to attend, but Garcia, former alderman

from the nearby 22nd Ward, will be there. Joint appearances by the pair in the campaign have been sparse; this will be a mayoral forum less one mayor. Rudy Lozano Library, 1805 S. Loomis St. Thursday, April 2, 6pm. (312)243-5440. thepilsenalliance.org. (Adam Thorp)

VISUAL ARTS Imaginary Landscapes Returning to a space of your past is the best way to wipe away the rose-colored nostalgia tint from your glasses. Through Imaginary Landscapes, Mana Contemporary presents an exploration of the relationship between space, time, and memory. Four Midwest-based artists delve into the uncertain space at the nexus of the three, and the result is a collection of sculptures and images gathered by Chicago-based curator Allison Glenn. Lisa Alvarado’s work features elements of shamanism as she critiques cultural appropriation and assimilation; Assaf Evron toes the line between photography and sculpture; deconstructing the mundane, Robert Burnier explores failed utopia; and, last but not least, Caroline Kent harnesses narrative and storytelling to ruminate on what it means to be an outsider in another country.

Delve into the uncertainty that spans space and time. Mana Contemporary, 2233 S. Throop St., 4th floor. April 4-May 31. Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm.

Opening Reception April 4, 6pm-9pm. (312)8500555. Free. manacontemporarychicago.com (Kristin Lin)

Nature’s Matrix Like many of their fellow artists, Charles Heppner and Diane Jaderberg have turned to nature for inspiration. Instead of capturing the astonishing might of an ocean, or the tranquility of a peaceful sylvan landscape, they channel elements from nature and turn them into visual motifs, repeating and abstracting them to create pieces which are not just strange but nearly unrecognizable. Also important for their work and their new installation is the interaction between technology and nature, which is mirrored in Heppner’s use of digital media and computer software to create prints. Their joint exhibition, “Nature’s Matrix,” is taking place at the Hyde Park Art Center, where the two have been studying and creating since the mid 2000s. Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. April 5-July 5. Opening reception Sunday, April 19, 3pm-5pm. (773)324-5520. hydeparkart.org (Robert Sorrell)

Joe Hill 100 Years Part 4 Since his 1915 execution before a firing squad in Utah, Swedish-American labor activist and songwriter Joe Hill has become emblematic of the struggle of itinerant workers in the United States.

To mark the hundred-year anniversary of Joe Hill’s death, the URI-EICHEN Gallery in Pilsen will be showcasing the politically charged works of a dynamic duo of social activist artists: the late Colombian cartoonist Jorge Franklin Cardenas and the New York-based painter James Wechsler.

Cardenas’ work, which includes caricatures of Che Guevara, John Lewis, and Francisco Franco, will be displayed for the first time in over forty years, after being released to the public by his Hyde Park-based daughter-in-law. Weschler will showcase his “Freedom of Information” series of paintings, inspired by the FBI’s Cold War era files on artists and writers. URI-EICHEN Gallery, 2101 S. Halsted Ave. Opening reception April 10, 6pm-10pm. By appointment through May 1. Free.

(312)852 7717. uri-eichen.com (Lauren Gurley)

38 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 1, 2015

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. Through April 3.

Opening reception Friday, March 13, 6pm–10 pm.

(312)852-7717. uri-eichen.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. Through August 9. Opening reception Friday, March 20, 6pm. Free. (312)7381503. 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, 8am12pm. 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 every year 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. Through April 19. Monday-Thursday, 9am-8pm; 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)

MUSIC Katrina and the Waves at Reggies Ah, the one-hit wonder—is there any easier path to immortality? In fifty years we may not remember the individual members of Katrina and the Waves, but you can bet we’ll remember the opening “Ow!” of their worldwide hit “Walking on Sunshine,” which remains one of the most impossibly happy songs to come out of the 1980s. Come out to Reggies this Thursday to rock out for four unforgettably peppy minutes, and possibly a whole other hour of lesser-known tunes by Katrina and company. Obscurity—it’sstartintofeelgood!

Reggies Chicago, 2105 S. State St. Thursday, April 2, 7:30pm. $10. 21+. (312)949-0120. reggieschicago. com (Jake Bittle)

Too $hort at the Shrine West Coast rap pioneer Too $hort will return to Chicago for a solo show at The Shrine, one of the city’s premier urban nightclubs. A contemporary of Tupac and Biggie, $hort rose to prominence during the Golden Age of Hip Hop. The licentious adventures with women in his X-rated debut Born to Mack (1987) overshadowed his more socially conscious songs such as “I Want to Be Free” and “The Ghetto.” Yet verses like “[y] ou think Oakland, California is a city of punks/it only takes a second, to pop the trunk,” warning of the perils of gang violence, showcase $hort’s skill as a visceral storyteller. Though he’s going on forty-eight, the native son of South Central will no doubt still go hard on stage. The Shrine, 2109 S. Wabash Ave. Thursday, April 16, 10pm. $25. (312) 753-5681. theshrinechicago.com (Eleanore Catolico)

Billy Branch at the Promontory Chicago harmonica blues musician Billy Branch is back in town next weekend at the Promontory.

Born in Great Lakes, Illinois, Branch moved to LA at the age of five but returned to study at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where the iconic

CALENDAR Willie Dixon discovered him. Since then, Branch has played on over 150 recordings, including twelve of his own, been nominated for several Grammies, and won a variety of awards including one Emmy, two Chicago Music Awards, and multiple W.C. Handy Awards from the Blues Foundation. In addition to his prolific career, Branch assisted in the creation of the Blues in Schools Program, which teaches students about the blues and its origins. The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. Saturday, April 11, 8pm. $12 for standing lounge, $17-$22. promontorychicago.com (Clyde Schwab)

Mo Better Jazz presents Victor Garcia Septet Victor Garcia got his start as a musician at the tender age of four, when he started playing the piano. It’s unsurprising, then, that the Tribune has called him “a chameleon on trumpet,” capable of engaging with jazz, blues, gospel, and various other genres of music. A self-taught trumpeter whose resume of past musical partners includes Aretha Franklin and the Temptations, Garcia splits his time between teaching at a number of Chicago universities and freelancing at festivals and concert halls across North America. This Friday, the Promontory will host his Victor Garcia Septet, the jazz ensemble that has allowed Garcia to expand his already-colorful sound by writing music for more instruments while maintaining the stand-alone excellence that has earned him recognition as one of the city’s premier soloists. The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. West. Friday, April 3, 8pm. $15. (312)801-2100. promontorychicago.com (Christian Belanger)

Fortunate Youth at Reggies In an age where you can’t spit without hitting an iPhone and most people are too disillusioned to spit anymore anyway, one might think that reggae is long, long gone. But fear not: enter Fortunate Youth, a band known both for its unusual instrumental arrangements (“multiple harmonies, boisterous solos, heavy keys,” its website declares) and for its long career on the nation’s reggae tour circuit. Joined by fellow reggae acts Hirie and Highdro (the latter boasts a 300-week consecutive performance streak), Fortunate Youth are sure to provide the (still) frigid citizens of Chicago with some kind of uplifting atmosphere via performances that have been described (by them) as “unforgettable.” Reggies Chicago, 2105 S. State St. Thursday, April 9, 8pm. $15-$18. 17+. (312)9490120. reggieschicago.com (Jake Bittle)

day, April 2, doors 7:30pm. $5. (773)655-6769. coprosperity.org (Julia Aizuss)

Pieces and Players Book Launch Hyde Park-based, award-winning novelist Blue Balliett is celebrating the release of her seventh novel, Pieces and Players, this upcoming Saturday at 57th Street Books. Just like her first novel, Chasing Vermeer, Pieces and Players starts with a high-profile art heist. This time, however, thirteen pieces have been stolen, including a Vermeer and a Manet, and nobody knows where they went or who may have taken them. Beloved characters Calder, Petra, and Tommy, familiar from Chasing Vermeer and its sequels The Wright 3 and The Calder Game, join Zoomy (from The Danger Box) and Early (from Hold Fast) to investigate and use their puzzle-solving skills to save the day. 57th Street Books, 1301 E. 57th St. Saturday, April 4, 3pm. (773)684-1300. semcoop.com (Emily Lipstein)

(Provisional) PORK Closing Barbecue Do you love green leafy objects but hate going outside to view them? If so, you’re in luck—the Co-Prosperity Sphere is hosting a temporary indoor park cobbled together from a collection of houseplants on loan from local Chicagoans.

Whether you have an allergy to the sun or an attraction to people who think parentheses are neat, (Provisional) Park will surely amaze you with its multiple walls and chic clientele. Bring books, friends, and dogs; spend the afternoon admiring foliage or contemplating the deeper questions in life (look wistfully into the ferns so your crush knows how deep you are). But the month-long installation closes on April 3, so be sure to stop by for the (Provisional) PORK Closing Barbecue.

Take home your plants or adopt a new one (first come, first serve). Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S. Morgan St. Open through April 3, closing picnic Friday, April 3, 7pm. Free. (773)655-6769. coprosperity.org (Morgan Pantuck)

Cry Baby A classic tale of star-crossed lovers with a 1950s Baltimore twist, Cry Baby boasts an incredible cast, including Johnny Depp, Amy Locane, Susan Tyrell, Iggy Pop, and Polly Bergen. The film depicts the chaos that descends upon Baltimore as teenage heartthrob “Cry-Baby” Wade Walker (Depp), leader of the local delinquent subculture the “drapes,” and local “square” Allison (Locane) fall in love. Amidst song, the two orphans battle

against the traditional structure of their small town to show their friends and family the nature of their affection. Captured with all of John Waters’ infectious wittiness, the film is a fresh take on the teen rebel and romantic comedy genres, not to mention a cult classic. Playing in Logan Center’s Film Studies Center as a part of a graduate conference, the film will follow the shorts I, An Actress and A Study in Choregraphy for Camera.

Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Saturday, April 4, 7pm, doors 6:30pm. Free. (773)702-8596. filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu (Itzel Blancas)

The Imitation Game Time is ticking for the British Allies in the Academy Award-winning film The Imitation Game, soon to be screened at Beverly Arts Center. The Germans will surely win the war unless a group of mathematicians-turned-code breakers led by Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) can decode their secret messages. The team works against the clock to build a machine that will crack the uncrackable German Enigma codes, battling time, questioning what it means to have power and act ethically in times of war, and, in Turing’s case, responding to allegations of homosexuality (illegal in the United Kingdom at the time) in order to do so. Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111 St. Wednesday, April 8, 7:30pm. $7.50, $5.50 for members. (773)445-3838. beverlyartcenter.org (Emily Lipstein)

Redmoon Theater’s The Devil’s Cabaret In Dante’s Inferno, the third circle of hell is characterized by its never-ending rain. Cold and unrelenting, it extinguishes hope and happiness. After a brief experience with this circle earlier this year on the Chicago River, Redmoon Theater is determined to take back control of hell and orchestrate the fantastical fiery spectacle it has been working to create. This spring, Redmoon will present The Devil’s Cabaret, a spectacle recognizing “the Devil’s ‘greatest accomplishments’—The Seven Deadly Sins,” housed in the Redmoon warehouse.

In the middle of the room, a rotating thirty-foottall crane equipped with stages for performances will serve as the centerpiece. Always ambitious, Redmoon promises aerialists, puppets, and craft beer, and a “special appearance by God.” Whether you want to take advantage of the Lagunitas beer bar, or seek an experience with the Great One, the event is sure to be memorable. Redmoon Theater, 2120 S. Jefferson St. Fridays, March 27—April 10, 9pm-12am. $25. Tickets available online. 21+.

(312)850.8440. redmoon.org (Lucia Ahrensdorf)

STAGE AND SCREEN We Grew Up Here Local band Paper Thick Walls may now be defunct, but its music lives on in a film about the struggle to retain truthful memories. Band members Eric Michaels and Kate Schell sing and star in We Grew Up Here, a 2014 film by Chicago-based filmmaking collective 15 in the Dark that literalizes the figurative: the musician protagonist, played by Michaels, realizes his past is being erased not from his mind but from real life. Throughout last year, We Grew Up Here made the rounds at several festivals, including the Chicago International Movies & Music Festival; catch it in its city of origin at the Co-Prosperity Sphere, as South Side Projections’ first spring event. A Q&A session will follow featuring Schell and director Kevin Pickman, and Schell will perform new music after the screening, making new memories in the process.

Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S. Morgan St. Thurs-

APRIL 1, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 39