August 17, 2016

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY AUGUST 17, 2016 ¬ ARTS, CULTURE, POLITICS ¬ SOUTHSIDEWEEKLY.COM ¬ FREE

Gwendolyn Brooks • Noname • Hieroglyphic Being Southwest Side Demographics • Mental Health Basketball • Anti-Violence in Back of the Yards

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

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Cover photo by Luke White

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

Obama Library Destined for Jackson Park After All After a months-long decision process, no details of which have been made available to the public, the Obamas and the Obama Foundation have decided on Jackson Park as the site for the Barack Obama Presidential Library (whatever that is). The library, which will be designed by the architecture firm behind the University of Chicago’s nearby Logan Center, will occupy a portion of the park that stretches from 60th to 63rd Streets along Stony Island, part of the former site of the 1891 World’s Fair and currently home to a baseball field and a running track. The selection of Jackson Park over Washington Park came as a surprise to some commentators who had pointed to Washington Park as the favorite for the site, given the UofC’s redevelopment efforts in the neighborhood and the enthusiasm for the library among community leaders. However, Obama Foundation chairman Marty Nesbitt said the “iconic location” of Jackson Park made the difference in the end, though he also claimed that the $220 million annual economic boost the library is expected to bring to the South Side will benefit more than just the Woodlawn neighborhood.

Clarke’s Goes Dark After an exhausting, despairing summer that of course included what was the hottest July on record—yes, ever, in the world—August arrived with a breath of fresh air: a story of simple delight, of excitement, of emotional highs, of the secondhand adrenaline that comes with watching a story well-told, of witnessing actions that drive you to ask, How is it possible for a mere human to pull this off ? No, we are not talking about the Olympics. We are talking about the saga of Clarke’s Diner, 1447 E. 53rd Street. After years of unparalleled mediocrity—the sort that is not just a decent diner’s due, but that gives you a milkshake two hours after ordering, or tries to pass off strawberry jam for lingonberry—2016 emerged as a reverse-banner year for the twenty-four-hour restaurant brought to Hyde Park in 2011 by the UofC, neighborhood developer <i>extraordinaire</i>. The incremental differences between the various stages of temporary and permanent closure that the diner passed through in May are too subtle for this brief note to do them justice. What’s crucial to know is that all seemed well after the June reopening—until last week, when the UofC announced the diner’s eviction. Their justification? Clarke’s had paid rent just once since November. It took the UofC ten months to serve the eviction notice—nearly as long as it usually took to be served a milkshake at Clarke’s. A UofC spokesman told DNAinfo that the UofC would soon announce a new tenant for the space, but Clarke’s owner Tom Tsatas has other plans for this story’s narrative arc: “I can promise you the community is in store for quite a surprise. Stay tuned.”

This Is Fine Over one thousand Chicago Public Schools employees, including five hundred teachers, received layoff notices this month—but don’t worry. That’s at least how many employees were let go last year, and the year before, and the year before that. As in previous years, CPS officials now say most of the laid off teachers will be hired into the one thousand teaching openings across the district. So even though Forrest Claypool promised principals during budget meetings in July that after a difficult year, there would be no large-scale layoffs this summer—he probably just meant, no more layoffs than usual, anyway. After all, CPS can’t get soft—no more relying on millions of dollars from the state that don’t come when schools need them. “That was last year,” Claypool said in July. And now it’s this year. Funny how it feels the same.

IN THIS ISSUE the weight of the word

She did not believe in waste. quraysh ali lansana........................4 like it was yesterday

“Ain’t no one safe in this happy city.” efrain dorado.................................6 so much noise to be heard

It’s a vision for healing in rhythm, in dance. christopher good..........................8 under the radar

The growing Asian-American presence on the Southwest Side offers the city a glimmer of hope. daniel kay hertz..............................9 for wounds long unseen and neglected

“This is a game changer.” sara cohen.......................................10 aau basketball: more than a convenient villain

“Horrible, terrible AAU basketball. It’s stupid.” evan moore......................................12 speed bumps on the road to progress

Is stopping crime really as simple as installing speed bumps and traffic circles? naomi ezquivel...............................13

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AUGUST 17, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

The Weight of the Word An excerpt from “Revise the Psalm: Work Inspired by the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks”

BY QURAYSH ALI LANSANA

I

moved to Chicago in 1989, leaving behind an ugly experience in broadcast journalism and the contempt for the state of Oklahoma only natives can truly appreciate. I arrived with two suitcases, a folder full of poems, and big dreams of reinventing myself as a poet in the city that fed some of my guiding lights: Malcolm X, Haki Madhubuti, and Gwendolyn Brooks.

In 1993, while working with the programming committee of Guild Literary Complex, one of the Midwest’s most significant literary centers, I was asked to help develop an idea Ms. Brooks was cooking up with Complex founder, poet Michael Warr. She wanted to hold an annual open mic poetry contest and award the winner of said contest $500 of her own monies. Not Illinois Poet Laureate cache, but a personal check from her pocketbook. This is how I met Ms. Brooks, swaddled in the democracy and generosity of her spirit.

Two years later, while driving her home after the third Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award contest, I mentioned I was considering a return to academia to complete my B.A., abandoned in 1985 at the University of Oklahoma. She enthusiastically reminded me that Prof. Haki Madhubuti, her publisher and founder of Third World Press, was at Chicago State University and that I should look at no other place. I was reserved about her suggestion initially, remembering my bankrupt attempt of a manuscript Third World Press rejected only a year earlier.

Noting my hesitation, Ms. Brooks offered to speak with him about school, not my manuscript.

Neither Ms. Brooks nor I knew at the time that within a year we would workshop weekly in the conference room of the center created in her honor.

Madhubuti founded the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University in 1990. He also initiated the Brooks Conference for Writers of African Descent 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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in the same year. I had met Prof. Madhubuti previously, on the floor of his flagship bookstore and African-centered school. He was what many of my Black male friends wanted to be when we grew up: a builder of positive reality.

In spring 1997, Ms. Brooks sat with eleven young poets of varying levels every Tuesday evening for two and a half hours.

It was joy. It was torture. It was Prof. Madhubuti who convinced Ms. Brooks to lead this one last semester-long poetry workshop. Unfortunately, it was to be her final collegiate class.

Ms. Brooks in workshop was a marvel and a wonder. She was an igniter of mind riots. She dropped morsels of ideas: clippings from newspapers, poems by authors she admired, assignments in traditional forms, then sat back and watched us scramble, scrap, and heave. All the while a mischievous, wide grin on her dimpled face, rubbing her hands in delight. She loved instigating, agitating. My work benefited from her firm nudging. It also benefited from her fierce red pen.

Ms. Brooks made it very clear that revision is a part of the creative process, and clearly her work is proof of that mantra. She did not believe in waste. Hers was a hand of precision, and she often spoke of laboring for months over a single word.

The piece (facing page, left) that begins with the short poem by Langston Hughes (eventually titled “baggage”) was inspired by the work of my close friend and The Walmart Republic co-author Christopher Stewart. What is printed here is a later draft, very close to the way the poem appears in my first book, Southside Rain. In one of the many earlier drafts, Ms. Brooks commented on the fifth stanza by writing: “not ‘slipping’ into? Doesn’t an ‘orifice’ have a wall?

Wouldn’t that prevent through—slipping?”

How hardheaded was I? The edits she

suggests here fail to manifest in the final version.

On the same draft she wrote the following regarding the sixth stanza: “rich, fatty soul food is also soft, so teeth could hardly be cut upon it.”

These lines remain unchanged in the draft printed here. However, I finally caught on for the published version: or would you collect them, while struggling to remember the stuff that makes us whole.

Additionally, Ms. Brooks and I tinkered with the second stanza of the draft printed here, and ultimately agreed to jettison “the mattresses of mom and dad” for “your parents’ mattresses.”

A

ddressing current events in verse was important to Ms. Brooks, as any student of her work is acutely aware. “smolder” (facing page, right) was born not only of an assignment, but of the evening news hitting literally very close to home.

1995 and 1996 saw a rash of Black church bombings, in mostly Southern states, but a few in the North and Midwest as well. The First Baptist Church of Enid, Oklahoma, located three blocks south of the church in which I was raised, was leveled by a slightly disturbed gentleman who claimed he was simply “copy-catting.” Regardless of his motives, he displaced and disrupted the lives of many relatives and old family friends.

My people were on edge for weeks. I penned the first drafts (the first stanza and most of the final stanza in the version printed here) in Chicago.

Perhaps a month after the First Baptist bombing I went home for a visit. While sitting in the cluttered, historic landmark that was the living room of my eccentric aunt, the late Marie Adams (we called her Aunt Ree), I realized the depth of her struggle to forgive (one of the cornerstones of Chris-

tianity) this crazy dude who blew up any church, let alone a church in our hometown: he got a white face but he got blood just like mine Ms. Brooks immediately gravitated toward the quote. It made the poem human, personal. Something that was second nature for her.

Her comments on the bottom of the page refer to edits I implemented for the third stanza. In an earlier draft, the poem closes: while a cross burns the saints meeting place she prays for better days in the ashes of 1996 The draft printed here seems unwieldy, particularly the second line. She compared the drafts, and, after much discussion, we met in the middle for the finished product: aunt ree has lived through the mississippi of sheeted heads soiling family hands she say he got a white face but he got blood just like mine she prays for better days in the ashes of 1996 while a cross burns the saints’ meeting place

LIT

COURTESY OF CURBSIDE SPLENDOR

At the conclusion of the semester, the class, now the Gwendolyn Brooks Writers Collective and only nine in number, initiated a tradition by taking Ms. Brooks out to dinner. She reciprocated, inviting us to a meal that next Christmas. It was at our spring/ summer outing in 1999 that her ill health was becoming apparent. She was very frail, and, uncharacteristically for Ms. Brooks, did not have much of an appetite. We worried that she didn’t like the restaurant. She didn’t, but there was more to it than this. Prof.

Madhubuti, who was always very protective of Ms. Brooks, was more tight-lipped than usual.

That August, my wife Emily, my two

sons (now four), and I went to visit Ms. Brooks at her condo the day before we moved to New York City. I had been accepted to the MFA Creative Writing Program at NYU, a graduate school journey Ms. Brooks helped initiate and further. She crafted recommendation letters on my behalf and mailed them to Sharon Olds at NYU and the late Michael Harper at Brown. She was weak and clearly in pain, though gracious and playful as always. She loved my sons, and demanded to be either the first or second person phoned upon their births. She was second for both. The photo I shot of her with Emily, Nile, and Onam sitting on her piano bench is bittersweet joy. It is one of the last photos of Ms. Brooks. She joined

the ancestors three and a half months later.

Helping to carry her casket through Rockefeller Chapel was among the most difficult tasks I’ve experienced. I sobbed with the weight of her, of the inverted metaphor.

She held me up, both prior to and after our loveship began, through marriage, births, my first teaching gig, and my first book. The blizzard raging outside the chapel was also metaphor, also very Gwendolynian.

Ms. Brooks chose me, and Baba Haki groomed me to become director of the Brooks Center. This was my dream job since attending my first Black Writers Conference in the early nineties. This was the work I was built for since eighth grade, when her poetry and this new art called hip-hop changed my

way of seeing. I was honored to help guide that remarkably special space for nine years, and loathe the way it ended. That is another essay.

I led workshops, taught class, or held meetings in her conference room, the conference room of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center, almost every day for nine academic years. It was both an honor and a chore. But, most of all, I loved to open the door to the Center when no one was in but the two of us. Revise the Psalm: Work Inspired by the Writings of Gwendolyn Brooks, edited by Quraysh Ali Lansana and Sandra Jackson-Opoku, will be published by Curbside Splendor in January 2017.

AUGUST 17, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

MUSIC

Like It Was Yesterday A review of Noname’s “Telefone”

BY EFRAIN DORADO

F

atimah Warner, better known as Noname, constructs her own unique world of feeling with her debut mixtape Telefone—a long-awaited statement from one of Chicago’s finest emerging talents that finds itself yearning to playfully capture the abstract between life and death.

Noname began her career cutting her teeth at Chicago art hubs YOUmedia and Louder than a Bomb, but became a breakout hip-hop artist in her own right following her standout verse on Chance the Rapper’s “Lost.” On this mixtape she asserts her poetic mastery with soft-spoken rhymes and songs that vividly illustrate her world: lyrics portray her surroundings as full of despair and desolation, even as instrumentals maintain a buoyant atmosphere of glitz and glitter. By creating a musical world that balances between life and death, Noname calls attention to the correlated beauty of both. “All my n——s is casket pretty/ Ain’t no one safe in this happy city,” she says on “Casket Pretty,” mediating a blatantly dark subject matter with subtle reminders of the city’s bliss.

While Noname does address citywide and sometimes worldwide issues, the way she compresses them into personal anecdotes broadens the emotional range of the tape, presenting loss as more than mere tragedy. On tracks like “Casket Pretty” and “Shadow Man,” the raw lyrical exposition of her chosen topics, when cushioned by flamboyant instrumentals, allows the heaviness to scan as relatable.

On many tracks, Telefone feels hopeless, but Noname’s lyrics and music also carry the listener to moments where it feels

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like her hopes couldn’t be higher. “Casket Pretty” and the tape’s opener “Yesterday” reveal a fascination with the beginnings of adulthood, when one’s mistakes suddenly have the potential to become lasting.

“Diddy Bop,” on the contrary, travels/ to days of childish bewilderment and the music of P. Diddy. On a feature verse, Raury says, “Happily making my accident/ Mama gon’ whoop on my ass again.” and Noname shares similar experiences—her youthful missteps were also met with a belt, but not without the reassurance of love: “For stealing that twenty dollars like ‘baby, just ask me’/ Mama say she love, love, loved us.”

On “Yesterday,” Noname expresses feelings of debased nostalgia in light of the loss of Brother Mike, an influential Chicago poet whose impact on the city’s hip-hop scene is everlasting. “Me missing brother Mike, like something heavy/ Me heart just wasn’t ready/ I wish I was a kid again,” she says, But even as she grieves, Noname refuses to let her grief obscure what Brother Mike taught her: rather, the visions and memories of him soften the loss and ignite reassurance in times of doubt. “When the sun is going down/ When the dark is out to stay/ I picture your smile, like it was yesterday.” Here she adds yet more nuance to the mixtape’s treatment of loss, expanding its emotional horizons beyond mere tragedy.

The interplay between the tape’s ideas constitutes an existential push-pull, with acceptance and contentment emerging as themes as Noname searches for self-worth.

“Forever” is an uplifting ode to belief as Noname attempts to accept herself despite high aspirations, “I’m trying to re-imagine

abracadabra for poverty/ Like poof I made it disappear/ Proof I’m made of happiness.”

On “Forever” and at other points throughout the tape, she adopts the mantra of “everything is everything” from Lauryn Hill, who herself claimed simply that, “change, it comes eventually.” Despite her feelings of powerlessness in a bleak world, her missed opportunities on “Reality Check” and feelings of unrequited love on “Freedom Interlude,” Noname still manages to find light within and around herself.

Noname’s peak as a wordsmith comes with “Bye Bye Baby,” a personified narrative of an abortion. In the Bible, Exodus 3:8 finds God promising the Israelites liberation from slavery in Egypt and deliverance to a spacious land flowing with milk and honey: Noname spins this into a parable for child care, intoning, “My baby need some milk and honey,” itself an allegory for a home birth control remedy. She presents this first from a mother’s perspective, then allows herself to speak as the unborn child in the second verse. To come to terms with her decision, she speaks through this baby to fulfill the absence of love: as Noname later said herself on Twitter, “I wanted to make a song that brought love into the narrative of abortion.” It’s a heartbroken sentiment that still manages to depict optimism within despondence.

To Noname, death is not final, nor is it fearful—rather, by portraying the beauty that lies within and around it, she transforms loss into something blissful and worth exploring, despite the pain that comes with it. ¬

MUSIC

So Much Noise to be Heard A review of Hieroglyphic Being’s “The Disco’s of Imhotep”

BY CHRISTOPHER GOOD

O

ne of the most striking motifs found in The Disco’s of Imhotep, the newest album by Chicago musician Jamal Moss (stage name Hieroglyphic Being), isn’t musical at all: it’s a single word. “Kmt,” a simple anglicization of Egyptian hieroglyphs, is scattered throughout Moss’s discography.

Here, it lends its name to “The Sound of KMT,” but earlier this year it served as the title for a collaborative album with his cousin Noleian Reusse in a project called Africans with Mainframes.

Kmt (sometimes spelled “kemet”) has nearly as many meanings as Moss does aliases. It serves as the name of Ancient Egypt as a whole, for one thing, but the basic hieroglyph at its core, km, also connotes darkness, blackness (in the form of “Crocodile Skin”—also the title of a track on Disco’s).

But if the aforementioned definitions weren’t enough, there’s often one more: termination, an ending symbolized by burnt charcoal.

This doesn’t necessarily apply to the tracks of Disco’s: they don’t have beginnings or endings so much as start and end times.

Songs fade in and out, but you can imagine the jams they were excerpted from spiraling out for hours in either direction. But in this respect, “kmt” is an apt metaphor for Moss’s career: he’s been focused on his sound for years, and in all likelihood, he’ll be focused long after the tastemakers have moved to shine the light on someone new. But it’s this dedication that makes Disco’s one of the most rewarding techno listens in recent memory.

The recent acclaim Disco’s has received has been a long time coming, of course.

Since the turn of the decade, hardly a year has passed without several of Moss’s fulllengths hitting record shops—and even when not shuffling pseudonyms, he can be found speaking at panels, touring, or maintaining his Mathematics imprint. It’s enough to prompt Discogs commenters to wonder where he finds the time to sleep.

So it’s with good reason that at this point Moss has earned a reputation as an innovator in Chicago electronic music; it’s hard to

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point to another artist producing anything of the same quality with the same frequency of release. The side-chained chimes of cuts like “The Shrine of the Serpent Goddess” might evoke artists like Actress (now a labelmate of Moss’s at Ninja Tune), for instance—but from its intricate percussion to the squealing synths, Disco’s is unmistakably a Hieroglyphic Being LP. And yet, for all the ink that’s been spilled on Moss’s status as an outsider or iconoclast, Disco’s puts his knowledge of the scene’s past and respect for its champions on full display.

The influence of mentors like Steve Pointdexter bleed throughout almost as clearly as the tape hiss: consider the breakbeat snares of “Sepulchral Offerings,” which pin a slasher-flick arpeggio to a bassline like a butterfly to a corkboard, or the dog-whistle frequencies of “Spiritual Alliances.”

Much has been made of Disco’s gritty soundscape, from the tape hiss to the clipping kicks. But it’s hard to overstate how good a decision this is: what the album loses in accessibility, it gains in sheer dynamism. Some of Moss’s peers—that is, lo-fi revivalists who conflate understatement with poignancy— record music that is frustratingly distant, as if the listener were sitting on the curb outside the club. But listening to “Nubian Energy,” in contrast, is like listening to a subwoofer with a stethoscope. It’s anti-background music; it commands attention.

It’s for this reason that Moss’s description of Disco’s as “Sound Healing,” a claim made in the album’s press release, is initially a surprise. Doesn’t “healing” belong with burnt-out hippies or helicopter parents convinced that Mozart makes babies smarter?

Yet the case Disco’s makes is not for the therapeutic, but for the cathartic. It’s a vision for healing in rhythm, in dance. And at a time when music is both weaponized (the “enhanced interrogations” of Guantanamo Bay) and commodified (the furniture music of your local H&M), it’s a more powerful statement than ever. ¬

DEMOGRAPHICS

Under the Radar

A growing Asian-American presence on the Southwest Side

BY DANIEL KAY HERTZ

C

hicago is a city obsessed with neighborhoods, neighborhood boundaries, and neighborhood character, and therefore with neighborhood change. Demographic trends, from the rapidly declining black populations on the South and West Sides to the gentrification of the Northwest Side, get a lot of play in the media and in conversation. Which is why it’s weird that we’re in the middle of a demographic transition that is already of historic importance for the city and almost no one is talking about it.

Which is: the Southwest Side, first a bastion of European immigrants and their descendants, and then of Mexican immigrants and their descendants, is now gradually filling with Chinese immigrants and their descendants.

In 1990, there was virtually no presence of Asian-Americans east of the Dan Ryan into the South Loop or Bronzeville, or south of Pershing (39th Street), except for Hyde Park. (I’m going to say “Asian-American” here, because those are the census numbers I have, though it appears that nearly all of the Asian-Americans in this part of the city are of Chinese descent.) There was no significant (over 10% of residents) presence east of Racine (1200 West) or so, or south of 31st Street.

By 2010, there was a continuous band of Asian-American population down Archer Avenue, the backbone of the Southwest Side, nearly all the way to Midway Airport, as far south as 51st Street and as far west as Cicero (4800 West). There were continuous pockets of neighborhoods over 10% Asian-American stretching from the lake to California Avenue, more than four miles away—and a nearly continuous stretch from the lake to Damen, more than three miles away, that were over 20%.

If it seems that I’m making a big deal out of a few percentage points in some areas, it’s important to note that historically, Chicago-area segregation has led to situa-

tions in which many neighborhoods would have virtually no representation from one or more ethnic groups; that was certainly the case with Asian-Americans on most of the Southwest Side. Breaking that barrier from “none” to “a few” is a notable step.

To be fair, this alone isn’t especially dramatic in the context of Chicago neighborhood change. Certainly in the white flight era, a neighborhood’s racial makeup could transition much more quickly, and the gentrifying parts of Logan Square, say, may appear more unrecognizable to a decades-long resident than sections of Brighton Park that have gone from zero to eight percent Chinese-American in twenty years.

But there are several reasons, I think, that this movement is really notable. First, for many years Chicago has been seen by many as culturally and politically divided into three major ethnic groups: Black, Latino, and white. In fact, the city was notable for how evenly divided the population was between those three groups, and for the extent to which their segregation allowed racially-specific geographic political representation. But though Asian-Americans have been in Chicago for a long time— in 2012, Chinatown celebrated its 100th year—they are only now beginning to reach a point where the population is large enough, and geographically concentrated enough, to demand that kind of local political representation.

Already in the 2010 district remapping, neighborhood organizations were able to lobby—unsuccessfully—for a ward around Chinatown that would have been over 40% Asian-American. And in the March primary elections, one of the people asking for that remap, Theresa Mah, beat out a Latino candidate for the Democratic nomination for a state legislative seat. By the 2020 remap, it seems very hard to imagine that there will not be an Asian-American majority, or strong plurality, seat on City Council, bringing a kind

DANIEL KAY HERTZ

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DEMOGRAPHICS

of ethnic representation to City Hall that that community has lacked until this point.

Second, the growing Asian-American presence on the Southwest Side offers the city a glimmer of hope for a demographic problem that it seems to not yet realize it has: the dramatic national decline of Mexican immigration. That was a key factor in Chicago’s poor showing in recent census estimates of total populations, as Latin American immigration had essentially been keeping Chicago afloat demographically since at least the 1990s.

The major beneficiary of that influx was the Southwest Side, where predominantly Mexican-American families rejuvenated neighborhoods whose white ethnic occupants were either aging out or moving to the suburbs. But now it appears that Mexican-Americans are following Lithuanian-Americans down Archer Avenue past the city limits, and without new arrivals, it’s unclear what will happen to those gateway neighborhoods. Between 2000 and 2010, Pilsen lost a quarter of its Latino population, or 10,000 people—far more than the 850 white people it gained, and so probably not explained primarily by gentrification. Little Village, which was certainly far away from the gentrification frontier in 2010, lost 10,000 Latinos as well. As the 850 number suggests, gentrification isn’t likely to spread too far down Archer Avenue in the near future. Rather, Chinese-Americans appear to be the most likely candidate for keeping the Southwest Side demographically healthy.

Third, Asian-American residents haven’t just spread west from Chinatown; they’ve also spread east, to Bronzeville.

While I’ve written about how one of Chicago’s longstanding (and, of course, deeply and transparently racist) patterns of neighborhood change—non-Blacks never move in significant numbers to Black-majority neighborhoods—is being threatened by

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Hispanics, whites, and Asian-Americans in spots all over the city, nowhere has a Black-to-another-ethnic-group transition gone farther than in northern Bronzeville.

The area bounded by the Stevenson Expressway, the lake, King Drive, and 31st Street was 73% Black in 1980, and just 55% Black (and 36% Asian-American) by 2010. The census tract just to the west has gone from 96% to 73% Black, and 1% to 13% Asian-American, over the same period; just to the south, in the Lake Meadows area, the numbers are 92% to 75%, and less than 1% to over 18% respectively.

Again, these are a far cry from the total demographic overhaul that we’re used to seeing in some areas—but nevertheless, it puts the city in completely uncharted territory. As far as I can tell, this is the first real racial desegregation of a Black neighborhood in the history of Chicago that did not involve the wholesale government-led demolition of Black housing, as in Cabrini-Green. And the implications for Bronzeville go beyond the Chinese-American community, since creating a substantial non-Black presence may open the doors to people of other ethnic backgrounds as well, especially in an area adjacent to the rapidly gentrifying South Loop.

Finally, there’s another point to be made here, which is that it’s very odd that all of this has flown so far under the radar.

When discussing this in the past, I have suggested it was because most media outlets only really care about neighborhood change when white people are involved, either as colonizers (gentrification) or evacuators (white flight). A transition from one group of people of color to another group of people of color just doesn’t rank. This article originally appeared on City Notes, a blog about urban issues by Daniel Kay Hertz.

See more at danielkayhertz.com or follow Daniel at @DanielKayHertz.

For Wounds Long Unseen and Neglected

A community triage center in Roseland aims to provide alternatives for individuals with mental illness.

BY SARA COHEN

W

hen individuals with mental illness live in underserved communities, without adequate mental health care, they often seek antidotes elsewhere: many try to self-medicate with alcohol or illegal substances; some resort to retail theft or other petty crimes to get by; for others, a mental health crisis may escalate to a point where they become a threat to themselves or others.

In Chicago, the police are the first to respond in nearly all of these instances, and in areas without easily accessible treatment facilities, police frequently transfer individuals with mental illness to emergency rooms or the Cook County Jail.

“The unfortunate problem is, the police across the country have become a very bad taxi service—or I guess we should now say Uber service—for people with mental illnesses,” says Mark Heyrman, a clinical law professor at the University of Chicago and former president of Mental Health America of Illinois. “What’s really often needed for a huge percentage of folks is some place to go to be safe for a while, and then be connected to other services.”

As part of a new push towards citywide behavioral health reform, the Cook County Health and Hospitals System (CCHHS) worked with Toni Preckwinkle’s Justice Advisory Council to introduce an alternative that’s more like what Heyrman describes. The twenty-four-

hour Community Triage Center (CTC) in Roseland, which opened on July 26, aims to provide an stable and immediately available environment for individuals with mental illness and those recovering from substance abuse.

“If we have resources in the community that can provide immediate intervention and de-escalation, there will be less people that come into the jail,” says Cara Smith, a spokesperson for the Cook County Sheriff ’s Office, which has also been involved in the triage center undertaking. “There will be a new option for the law enforcement.”

According to Kenya Key, chief psychologist of Cermak Health Services (the CCHHS provider at Cook County Jail), the CCHHS chose Roseland as the site of the CTC after analyzing the home zip codes of people with behavioral health conditions brought to emergency rooms or detained at the jail, identifying the Far South Side as an area in dire need of expanded care.

“We believe the community stakeholders all see the need for a triage center in the area,” says Key. The CTC staff includes on-call psychiatrists from CCHHS and licensed clinicians, social workers, nurses, and peer counselors contracted from Community Counseling Centers of Chicago. They offer care to self-presenting individuals regardless of insurance status, including those brought in by friends, family, or

MENTAL HEALTH

law enforcement, and those released from the jail. The triage process begins with an overall mental and physical health assessment, after which a patient in crisis is appropriately stabilized. Then, before release, the CTC staff assigns each patient a case manager and an outpatient behavioral health specialist for continued care.

Unlike hospital visits, which may span multiple days with around-the-clock surveillance but involve little actual care, visits to the CTC are generally not meant to exceed twenty-four hours.

These resources come at a time when the city’s mental health services are having a crisis of their own. In 2012, Mayor Rahm Emanuel shut down six of Chicago’s twelve public mental health clinics, including four on the South Side. Since then, budget cuts caused two state-run mental hospitals to close, and even privately operated facilities that have been serving more low-income patients through the Affordable Care Act and the expansion of Medicaid have either reduced staff and programs or gone under entirely.

Smith says these closings have had a devastating effect on those who depended on these facilities for medication, rehabilitation, and therapeutic services over the past four years.

“There’s no capacity in the community, or very little, and so law enforcement, when faced with someone who’s in a mental health crisis, has virtually no option but to arrest them and bring them to a jail,” she says. “And we saw the population of mentally ill people in the Cook County Jail explode.”

According to Key, twenty to twenty-five percent of detainees at Cook County Jail receive psychiatric and substance abuse treatment from Cermak Health Services, but the Chicago chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness reports that up to sixty percent of all detainees have underlying behavioral health conditions. Furthermore, jail conditions are often traumatizing and may hinder recovery, causing some vulnerable mentally ill individuals to cycle back into the justice system after release Key recognizes that these deep-rooted issues in Chicago’s behavioral health infrastructure, will not be resolved easily, but she believes the CTC pilot marks an important first step in the direction of reform.

The CTC depends upon the coop-

“People should be cared for in their community. They should not have to turn to the criminal justice system to receive care.”

– Cara Smith, Cook County Sheriff’s Office

ELLEN HAO

eration of law enforcement for these interventions, which may present a notable hurdle given that Chicago police have been criticized for incidents of aggression against individuals with mental health problems. However, Heyrman points to

research by Linda Teplin of Northwestern University that found that police are more likely to respond to nonviolent individuals in mental health crises without arrest or hospitalization when they have the option.

“The police have a great deal of dis-

cretion with many of these crimes, including trespassing, etc., to not take people to jail but to take them to the mental health system,” Heyrman says.

Plans for the CTC were first officially announced in late February of this year, though Preckwinkle and CCHHS CEO John Jay Shannon had been coordinating efforts after seeing research on the positive effect triage centers had had in on other communities. San Antonio, Minneapolis, and Salt Lake City have all reported reductions in emergency room space occupied by mentally ill individuals, as well as multimillion-dollar savings, after implementing the triage center model.

“This is a game changer in terms of our long-term goals of creating healthier communities and addressing the unjust incarceration of people who are mentally and medically ill,” says Smith, the spokesperson for Sheriff Tom Dart. But she also says the collaboration between Dart, Preckwinkle, and CCHHS has further to go in its long-term plan to address behavioral health needs in underserved communities.

“We are trying to provide health care to people, many of whom never have had health care coverage and never have engaged in preventative health care before,” she says. “So it’s not going to happen overnight.”

Currently, the CTC in Roseland only has the capacity to serve a dozen patients a day, but if successful, the triage model could be expanded. Other recent mental health reform efforts have included more Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training for police officers. The training is intended to teach officers how to respond to situations of mental health crises without excessive force or unnecessary detainment.

The CCHHS has also developed a Behavioral Health Consortium through which six community providers collaborated to connect individuals to need-specific care, and has worked to further integrate behavioral health care with primary care providers and clinics.

“People should be cared for in their community. They should not have to turn to the criminal justice system to receive care,” says Smith. “We will not be able to end the criminalization of mental illness or unjust incarceration of mentally ill and vulnerable people until we have built capacity in the community to care for people.” ¬

AUGUST 17, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

AAU Basketball: More Than a Convenient Villain Why can’t Illinois schools recruit local basketball talent?

Evan Moore While watching the NCAA tournament this spring, you may have noticed that none of the teams in the tourney were from the state of Illinois.

But if you follow college basketball, or to an extent high school basketball, you probably already know that Chicago players still seem to end up playing deep into March. Some of those players end up on championship teams, like Anthony Davis (Kentucky), Jahlil Okafor (Duke), and Jalen Brunson (Villanova).

When an anomaly becomes a trend, the institutions most affected will need someone or something to point the finger at. So when Illinois teams can’t get the top players needed to make a deep run in the tourney, a lot of locals ask: who’s to blame? Decent coaches who are bad at recruiting, blue blood programs that simply have more to offer, or AAU basketball programs? These days, at least, AAU is the convenient villain.

The Amateur Athletic Union, commonly known as AAU, is a federation that oversees youth sports across the United States. During the off-season of high school basketball, kids can play for AAU “club teams” that travel to tournaments, often with hopes of attracting college coaches. AAU teams in Chicago include Mac Irvin Fire, Hoopville, and MeanStreets.

Ballyhooed prep stars hold in their hands the careers of the coaches recruiting them, and they bring in billions of dollars to colleges and universities. These kids know the impact they have. When journalists, bloggers, and fans scoff at this notion, they tend to forget that they are complicit in creating a system in which the kids have turned the tables on them.

To many basketball observers, though, AAU

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¬ AUGUST 17, 2016

basketball has become one of the most polarizing aspects of high school basketball and college recruiting, since they think it ends up being the reason local kids would rather help out-of-state schools win NCAA titles. Especially because, the criticism goes, AAU has created a system that controls where a blue chip prospective player ends up attending college, often because coaches get too much of a say.

Some of those same folks also blame AAU for breeding entitled and privileged players. No less a superstar than Kobe Bryant told ESPN: “Horrible, terrible AAU basketball. It’s stupid. It doesn’t teach our kids how to play the game at all, so you wind up having players that are big and they bring it up and they do all this fancy crap and they don’t know how to post. They don’t know the fundamentals of the game.”

But there are different perspectives, too.

Dwayne E. Walton coached AAU basketball in Chicago for nine years with Illinois Warriors. He says that AAU has its drawbacks as well as its strengths.

“Overall, I believe it helps,” says Walton. “I believe it can benefit kids by giving them exposure to others in their class, showing them where they are in comparison to others in their age group,” Walton said. “The biggest negatives are that it takes away from opportunities that high school teams used to have to develop team chemistry.”

Walton also cautions those parents who believe that AAU can get their kid an automatic scholarship.

“The proliferation of so many programs has many kids and families believing that because a kid is on an AAU or traveling team, he is an elite player, whereas he just may be average,” he says. “That creates an unrealistic expectation on the kid, and causes problems with individual development and recruitment.”

Leroy Willis coaches AAU basketball in Chicago’s south suburbs. He takes a hard line on what AAU is, and what it should be.

“Kids and families choose AAU teams based on popularity. They think because a few talented players are affiliated with these big name programs, then they will get this fancy uniform and automatically become great,” Willis says. “Kids are attracted to winning versus learning the game. That’s when parents and adults should intervene and steer kids down the right path if they are truly passionate about the game.”

Meanwhile, DePaul basketball coach Dave Leitao believes that AAU’s alleged involvement in decisions about where prospects attend college isn’t as large as the program’s detractors would have you believe.

“I wouldn’t even say [it’s] AAU, it’s just people around the game and around players who may or may not have anything to do with recruiting,” Leitao said. “[What’s]

challenging is that when you recruit a young person, there are a number of people around them you have to recruit just as hard.”

Leitao, who had several Illinois-born players on his roster this past season, says that dealing with AAU, or local community power brokers, is a part of the process.

A parent of an AAU player, who did not want to be named for fear of a damaged reputation, told me that exposure to major colleges and universities was one of the reasons she signed her son up. And even though she hasn’t been around AAU long, she sees why it has critics.

“I’m sure all of these boys, mine included, begged to be a part of this very expensive ‘opportunity’ with hopes of scouts being at the events,” the AAU parent said. “Well, we had our first weekend tournament and college coach seats were empty.”

The parent went on to say that she will stick with it to see how it plays out.

“This also, in my opinion, encourages the ‘I’ mentality in hopes of recognition, and the team aspect is lost with these young men chasing some sort of stardom,” the parent said. “We signed up for this, we’re going to stick it through, and I truly hope my opinion changes by the end of it. I want to see my son benefit from this whole experience in that he is a better player and has more insight on the true competitiveness involved in wanting to play college and professional sports.”

As the AAU season has kicked off in the past few months, Willis decided to not field a team because he wants his players to work on the fundamentals instead.

“I’ve recommended that all my boys spend this AAU season training, conditioning and improving on their individual skills to prepare for next year,” Willis said. “But I may enter them in a couple local tourneys just to keep them sharp.”

Observing a system or a culture that leaves certain colleges on the outside looking in while other programs thrive will inevitably lead people to ask: Why do schools like Duke and Kansas snag future NBA players, while U of I, DePaul, and other Illinois schools struggle to land recognizable players?

Premier programs like Duke and Kansas probably have their own thoughts about AAU, but college basketball is a highly competitive, results-driven industry, and it’s clear that for these schools, winning games is the bottom line. For programs that benefit from the AAU system, then, the end may justify the means.

Evan F. Moore is a reporter at DNAinfo Chicago. He grew up on Chicago’s South Side in the South Shore neighborhood.

His work has been featured in The Tribune, The Reader, Redeye, and many other publications.

Find him at evanfmoore.wordpress.com or @evanfmoore.

COLUMN

Speed Bumps on the Road to Progress Alderman’s new plan to reduce crime in Back of the Yards misses the bigger picture

Naomi Ezquivel

A

ccording to recent reporting by DNAInfo, 15th Ward Alderman Raymond Lopez has proposed using around $400,000 from the ward’s infrastructure budget to install traffic circles and speed bumps in Back of the Yards (particularly in the area around Davis Square Park) in an effort to combat crime. The idea, according to Lopez, is that putting speed bumps and traffic circles on intersections around major parks will “restrict the amount of traffic coming into the [park] area,” “a definite deterrent to those gang members accustomed to driving in, shooting and speeding out.”

The area surrounding Davis Square Park (at 44th Street, just west of Ashland) is known as “Halo City,” home of the “Latin Saints” gang, which used to be known as just “The Saints” when the neighborhood was dominated by Polish immigrants. Currently, 47th Street serves as the rough boundary between Latin Saints territory and the territories of other nearby gangs, such as La Raza, Two-Six, Satanic Disciples, and others.

Gang conflict has been an issue in Back of the Yards for decades. Even though the neighborhood’s demographics have changed considerably over the years, the problem persists. One has to ask, is stopping crime really as simple as installing speed bumps and traffic circles?

The answer: of course not. There are multiple root causes of gang violence in this area, but none of them have to do with pavement.

According to the 2010 census, over one-third of Back

of the Yards residents were under the age of 18. This is much higher than the 22 percent average citywide. Not all gang members are under 18, and certainly not all individuals under 18 are in gangs, but the prevalence of youth gangs in splintered factions tied to both imagined and real geographic boundaries must be addressed. Alternatives to gang life, like after-school activities, can provide a stepping stone, but according to a 2015 survey by the Resurrection Project, around 60 percent of youth are not participating in afterschool or youth programming, even though “100 percent of focus groups targeted violence as a major hindrance for youth and families.” Program costs, lack of information about available programs, and safety concerns were listed in the survey as top barriers for parents in terms of their children’s participation.

To add insult to injury, a city-run mental health clinic on 43rd and Ashland was closed in 2012, along with five others across the city. Cuts to public schools have left many area students with less access to counselors and nurses. To put it simply, it’s a perfect recipe for youth gangs to flourish: a high concentration of youth in an area struggling with poverty, a lack of accessible youth programming that could provide an alternative to gang life, a lack of mental health services to combat PTSD and other ailments, and a lack of support staff at schools to help mediate conflicts before they escalate. The safety nets that can help deter gang activity are being whittled away year after year, budget cut by budget cut.

Apart from the preventative measures that could help combat crime in Back of the Yards, another challenge includes dwindling numbers of police officers throughout the city. Earlier this year, Alderman Lopez procured help from the Cook County Sheriff ’s Office by having additional law enforcement personnel deployed throughout the neighborhood, but residents were divided over this decision.

Some were grateful for the extra police presence, while others just felt it was merely a band-aid for a much larger and more deeply-rooted problem. The Cook County sheriff deployment was only temporary. Statistics regarding stops and arrests during this period aren’t immediately available.

And even when police officers arrest suspects for violent crimes, such as weapons violations, there are many documented cases involving the offenders getting probation, early parole, or light sentences. In 2013, there were thirteen people (including a toddler) shot in a single incident in Cornell Square Park in south Back of the Yards. One of the shooters had been previously convicted of a weapons offense in 2012, but instead of spending three to seven years in jail, he was given a four-month “boot camp” and released back into the public, only to help perpetrate the Cornell Square

NAOMI EZQUIVEL

Park incident about a year later.

Suffice it to say that there are many challenges to combating Back of the Yards crime. Speed bumps around a park won’t affect any of those issues. In fact, they may just prove to be more of a hassle. Shooters don’t always use vehicles. Many times they are on foot. Even when they use vehicles to conduct a drive-by shooting, they aren’t always worried about damage to their getaway vehicle. However, speed bumps can be problematic for responding emergency vehicles, such as police cars and ambulances, and are at minimum an inconvenience for area residents who are not involved in criminal activity.

As a public safety employee and Back of the Yards resident, I simply don’t see $400,000 worth of speed bumps and traffic circles making much of a dent in crime statistics if the root causes behind crime aren’t sufficiently addressed.

Also, the speed bumps and traffic circles will only be added near Davis Square Park, yet there are other parks that have had shootings within the last few years (Cornell Square Park, Little Venice Park, etc.), not to mention all the shootings that occur on blocks that are nowhere near a park.

The funding comes from the infrastructure budget, so I understand that it can’t necessarily be re-appropriated for youth programming or mental health, etc. But as Alderman Lopez is a staunch supporter of Mayor Emanuel, who shuttered our mental health clinics and public schools, and continues to advocate for public school cuts, I don’t foresee him fighting hard for the amount of preventative programming and community resources we require.

Hopefully I’ll be proven wrong.

This column was originally published on The South Side Spotlight, a blog run by Naomi Ezquivel, on August 6, 2016.

Naomi has been a homeowner and resident of Back of the Yards since 2014. She currently works in the public safety field and is passionate about social issues, especially immigration reform, public education, and mental health. She also serves as a board member for UNION Impact Center.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY NATALIE GONZÁLEZ

AUGUST 17, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

EVENTS

BULLETIN Pilsen Economic Development & Housing Meeting La Casa Resource Center, 1815 S. Paulina St. Wednesday, August 17, 6pm–9pm. Free. Register at bit.ly/2bf60Qr. (312) 666-1323. resurrectionproject.org Join residents, business owners, and community organizers as they discuss the future of Pilsen’s new Quality of Life Plan. Led by the Pilsen Planning Committee and the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Great Cities Institute, the discussion will focus on plans for housing and economic development. ( Joe Andrews)

Demo Night Chicago: Public Engagement Robert R. McCormick Foundation, 205 N. Michigan Ave., #4300. Thursday, August 18, 6pm–8pm. Free.

RSVP at bit.ly/2bgsFhW. demonight.org Seeking a more democratic approach to project planning, the Illinois Department of Transportation has asked the University of Illinois at Chicago for some advice. Join the discussion at this month’s Demo Night as they reveal eight recommendations for more publicly engaged planning, and how their advice can be applied to other businesses and organizations. ( Joe Andrews)

Anti-Violence Back to School Jam 2016 Universal Family Connection Inc., 1350 W. 103rd St. Friday, August 19, noon–4pm. Free.

RSVP at bit.ly/2bro3n2. (773) 881-1711. ufcinc.org Join Universal Family Connection for a funfilled family day! Get free school supplies, school physicals, haircuts for boys under 17, and manicures for girls. The Chicago Boyz Acrobat Team, featured on “America’s Got Talent,” will perform. (Adia Robinson)

Date Night: Southside With You Preview Screening Harper Theater, 5238 S. Harper Ave. Thursday, August 25, 7pm. Doors open 6pm. $25.

Purchase tickets at bit.ly/2bgq6h0.greatmigrationcentennial.com Watch the President and First Lady, Barack and Michelle Obama, fall in love in this early screening of Southside With You. Each ticket 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ AUGUST 17, 2016

comes with a small popcorn and drink, and proceeds go to the Black Metropolis National Heritage Area Commission. A discussion will follow the screening. (Adia Robinson)

Aquinas Literacy Center Tutor Training Aquinas Literacy Center, 3540 S. Hermitage Ave. Friday, August 26, 6pm–9pm; Saturday, August 27, 9am–4pm. Free. (773) 927-0512. aquinasliteracycenter.org The McKinley Park-based Aquinas Literacy Center is seeking volunteers to spend 90 minutes a week tutoring adult immigrants in the English language. Contact info@ aquinasliteracycenter.org to sign up for this two-day tutor training session. No other language skills required. (Hafsa Razi)

54th Annual Englewood Back 2 School Parade 56th St. and Halsted St. Saturday, August 27.

Parade assembly 8:30am–10am; procession 10:30am. Free. (773) 619-7247 or (312) 2885935. englewoodparade.org Possibilities—not circumstances—are the focus of this historic parade that has encouraged South Side kids to take pride in their education since its creation by Willie Pittman in 1963. The parade, which is the second oldest African-American parade in the city, ends in Ogden Park. (Bridget Gamble)

#FindingBlackJoy Scavenger Hunt Bing Art Books, 307 E. Garfield Blvd. Saturday, August 27, 11am–3pm. Individuals $6 , groups of two $10, groups up to five $20. Purchase tickets at bit.ly/2b9h693. kedu.life Explore the beauty of the South Side with this car-less scavenger hunt. Items focus on nature, black culture, and black business.

One team will walk away with a trophy, but everyone is invited to enjoy food and drinks afterwards. (Adia Robinson)

African Festival of the Arts Washington Park, 5100 S. Cottage Grove Ave. September 2–5, 10am-10pm. General admission $15. Kids $5, seniors $10, families $35. Weekend pass $40. (773) 955-2787. aihafa.squarespace.com This Labor Day weekend, see Washington Park transform, reinvented as an African village. Afro-folk tunes on two stages, museum-quality artifacts, and a children’s pavilion with games, music, storytelling, and crafts are

just a few of the activities this festival has to offer. (Bridget Gamble)

10th Ward Labor Day Parade and Festival Festival: Steelworker’s Park, E. 87th St. and Lake Michigan. Friday, September 2 – Sunday, September 4. Parade: 104th St. and Ewing Ave. Saturday, September 3, 12:30pm–2pm. Free.

(773) 768-8138. aldssg.com Join 10th Ward Alderwoman Susan Garza for a free parade and three-day festival to commemorate the end of summer, the contributions of Southeast Side workers, and the power of union solidarity. Contact nicole.garcia@cityofchicago.org to learn how to sponsor, participate in, or volunteer at the parade. (Hafsa Razi)

VISUAL ARTS Video! Video! Video! Zine Festival 2846 W. 21st St. Thursday, August 18, 7pm–10pm. Free. bit.ly/2aZA973 Join DIY Video! Video! Video! Zine for the second night of a five-day festival celebrating DIY film of all kinds. Contemporary moving image work from around the world will be shown, alongside a large selection of Chicago’s own makers. Video titles are wide-ranging and almost universally amusing, from Stephanie Kang’s Tuna Rice Balls to Krister Larson’s Titan of Wokeness. (Corinne Butta)

Reinventing Ourselves from Another Point of View Art NXT Level Projects / 33 Contemporary, 1029 W 35th St., 4th floor. Friday, August 19, 7pm–10pm. Free. (708) 837-4534.

33contemporary.com Join curators Sergio Gomez and Didi Menendez, alongside jurors Howard Tullman, John Seed, and Nicki Escudero, for the opening of this competitive art exhibition. Over twenty-five self-portrait artists have rendered and reinvented themselves in non-traditional points of view. Come to congratulate the winners. (Corinne Butta)

Industry of the Ordinary Summer School Final Exhibition MANA Contemporary, 2233 S. Throop St., 4th floor project space. Friday, August 26, 6pm–9pm.

Free. (312) 850-0555.

manacontemporarychicago.com Young artists working in non-traditional mediums such as performance and installation are brought together by the Industry of the Ordinary Summer School (housed at MANA this year) to collaborate and learn new art-making strategies. This exhibition is the culmination of their work this month and will feature work in a range of media.

(Carrie Smith)

Head Cleaner Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Sunday, August 21, 6pm–8pm. Free. (773) 7026082. arts.uchicago.edu/logan-center.

Aquil Charlton, currently an artist-in-residence at the Logan Center, produces and performs in “Head Cleaner”: a mixed media, audio-visual event. It takes place in conjunction with the current exhibition on display at the Logan, “Resonant Objects”, and is sure to resonate both sonically and topically with the show’s focus on the social and spatial conditions governing urban environments.

(Corinne Butta)

MUSIC Pilsen Fest 18th Street and Blue Island Avenue. Saturday, August 20, noon – Sunday, August 21, 10pm.

Free, suggested donation at entrance. pilsenfest.com The second annual Pilsen Fest, formerly known as Unison Festival, will celebrate its second annual iteration this weekend at the intersection of 18th Street and Blue Island. Steps away from the wide selection of paletas from La Michoacana and the comforting rice and beans from La Casa del Pueblo Taqueria, festivalgoers will be able to walk between the Fest’s three stages.

Performances will represent a vast array of genres, from Latin American indie rock to cumbia to punk to Mexican folk, as well as art exhibits, panels with community organizations, local breweries, craft vendors, and much more. Come celebrate the “preservation of Pilsen’s historic legacy,” and bring your family, too. (Maha Ahmed)

Izzy True Club Soda. Saturday August 20, 8pm–11pm. $5. facebook.com/clubsodachicago. Message for address on day of show. clubsodachicago@gmail.com

EVENTS Ithaca, New York’s rising rock quartet, Izzy True, will be bringing their scruffy grunge-pop to Club Soda in Pilsen this Saturday, joined by No Men and Oops from Chicago’s own DIY scene. Check Izzy True’s new album Nope, out on Bandcamp now, for a taste of their laid-back riffage and lead singer Izzy Reidy’s no-nonsense vocals. (Austin Brown)

The Heart Institute with Derrick Carter Punch House, 1227 W. 18th St. Wednesday, August 17, 9pm–2am. (312) 526-3851. punchhousechicago.com Even as he’s produced cut after cut of remixes and house tracks for his European fans, Chicago house legend Derrick Carter has simultaneously shored up a reputation as a mixing mainstay in his hometown. This Wednesday, he’ll be bringing a groovier and more downtempo selection of beats and tunes to the Punch House for a new series, “The Heart Institute.” Lovers of dance or dance music, along with lovers in general, are encouraged to attend. (Austin Brown)

The Era Hamilton Park, 513 W. 72nd St. Saturday, August 27. Doors 4pm, show 5pm. Free. facebook.com/events/531838310346987 Chicago’s premiere footwork dance crew The Era will bring their talents to a new context next Saturday the 27th. They’ll be recasting their skills in footwork battles and shows of skill, which they’ve honed and shown off for the past few years throughout Chicago and even on the stages of Pitchfork Festival and Lollapalooza, into a performance that Era member Litebulb described to the Weekly as a “day in the life of a footworker.” (Austin Brown)

Cat Power Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St. Tuesday, August 30. Doors 8pm, show 9pm. $35 standing room, $50 balcony, $420 opera box. 17+. (312) 5263851. thaliahallchicago.com Cat Power—whose sound over the years has veered from DIY folk to Delta Blues-inspired cover albums to her current stage, approximating something adjacent to synth-pop— comes to Thalia Hall to, according to the event listing, promote her most recent album Sun. Nothing, of course, is wrong with this, as Sun is one of her finest albums, but it was released four years ago and she stopped in Chicago to promote it once before in 2013.

So, really, there’s no telling what this show will be, though that shouldn’t prevent you from attending. (Sam Stecklow)

Young Dolph with Cap1 Reggies, 2015 S. State St. Tuesday, August 23, doors 8pm. $17 general admission, $50 VIP, $50 meet-and-greet with Cap1, $75 meet-andgreet with Young Dolph. 18+. (312) 949-0120. reggieslive.com Chicago-born, Memphis-bred promethazine-soaked booming trap rapper Young Dolph brings his King of Memphis tour to Reggies in the South Loop to regale us with his stories of the grind. He’s joined by Chicago-based 2 Chainz protégé Cap1, whose HotNewHipHop profile notes that “he enjoys eating chicken wings at the strip club.”

(Sam Stecklow)

Ari Brown at Jazzology Experience Jazzology Experience, 2423 E. 75th Street.

Friday, August 19, 9pm–11:30pm. (773) 7416254. jazzologyexperience.com This late-night show at South Shore’s Jazzology (The Artist Formerly Known as Mo Better Jazz), still based out of the Quarry, will feature Chicago-based jazz saxophonist and pianist Ari Brown, a prolific artist who’s toured with the legendary Elvin Jones and collaborated numerous times with the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic. ( Jake Bittle)

STAGE & SCREEN Alternative Histories of Labor: At the River I Stand

5561. rebuild-foundation.org “Diana Ross: Boss” gets the—boss, perhaps?—celebration she deserves with the last screening of BCH@BING’s August series, a sing-along, outdoor showing of the seventies classic. Lawn chairs, warmed-up singing voices, and general enthusiasm all welcome. ( Julia Aizuss)

Hyenas Studio Movie Grill Chatham 14, 210 W. 87th St. Thursday, September 1, 7pm. $6. blackworldcinema.net Those who enjoyed BWC’s screening of Touki Bouki last month would be missing out if they didn’t view Djibril Diop Mambéty’s follow-up. The two decades between the films didn’t lessen Mambéty’s trenchant exploration of power and desperation: Hyenas tells the story of a woman who will help out her home village only if the locals execute her former lover. ( Julia Aizuss)

Collected Voices Film Festival: Love Songs The Silver Room, 1506 E. 53rd St. Thursday,

September 1, 7pm–9pm. Suggested $5 donation.

(773) 947-0024. collectedvoicesfilmfest.com Collected Voices, a festival centered on the intersection of race, class, gender, and other issues that seem to divide us, features works

by Chicago-based artists. Saving Dreams, about a singer who lands in abusive relationship on her path to stardom, is the feature film for the night’s Black Love theme. Come early, at 6:30, for a pre-screening showing of music videos and short films on the same theme. (Carrie Smith)

The Year of Magical Thinking Staged Reading Augustana Lutheran Church, 5500 S. Woodlawn Ave. Friday, September 2, 8pm. $5. hydeparkcommunityplayers.org The Hyde Park Players’ Friday Staged Readings series continues with a one-woman play adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking, an exploration of mourning, written the year after Joan Didion’s husband passed away and during her daughter’s ongoing medical struggles. This meditation on death is followed by snacks and discussion, so multiple forms of catharsis will be available. (Carrie Smith)

Lit Issue 2016 Release Party

Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Thursday, August 25, 7pm. Free. (773) 7022787. southsideprojections.org If you ever thought of labor movements as “mostly white and mostly male,” South Side Projections’s new film series, inspired by a resurgence in labor activism, should serve as a corrective. Northwestern art historian Huey Copeland will kick off this first installment, a 1993 film about the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike that played a part in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. ( Julia Aizuss)

BCH@BING: Diana Ross: Boss – The Wiz The Muffler Shop, 359 E. Garfield Blvd. Thursday, August 25, 8:30pm–11pm. (312) 857-

Saturday, August 20, 6pm | Free Tacos, coffee, & drinks | Poetry & prose readings Experimental Station | 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. AUGUST 17, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

call for submissions Ode to the City is publishing a magazine in September.

If you live in Chicago, send your stories, poems, and art to

odetothecity@gmail.com

by August 31.

Join us at our upcoming events:

Tuesday, August 23

Friday, August 26

Saturday, August 27

Party Noire & Black Joy A Conversation with Photographer RJ Eldridge

“This Is Modern Art” Book Release Party with Kevin Coval & Idris Goodwin

The Importance of Art on the South Side A Community Conversation

6:00–8:00 PM

@ BING Art Books 307 e garfield blvd. chicago, il, 60637

7:00–9:00 PM

@ Young Chicago Authors 1180 n milwaukee ave. chicago, il, 60642

1:00–3:00 PM

@ Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative 1450 e 70th st. chicago, il, 60619

for our full calendar and more information, visit

odetothecity.org Ode to the City @odetothecity_chi