October 9, 2013

2 South Side WeeklY

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october 9, 2013

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

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

In fall 2013, the Weekly reformed itself as an independent, student-directed organization. Previously, the paper was known as the Chicago Weekly.

Editor-in-Chief Executive Editor Managing Editor

Harrison Smith Claire Withycombe Bea Malsky

Senior Editor Christopher Riehle Features Editor Patrick Leow Politics Editors Osita Nwanevu Stage & Screen Hannah Nyhart Editor Music & Video Zach Goldhammer Editor Visual Arts Editor Katryce Lassle Photo Editor Lydia Gorham Online Editor Gabi Bernard Layout Editor Olivia Dorow Hovland Associate Editors Ari Feldman, John Gamino, Sharon Lurye, Spencer Mcavoy Staff Writers Bess Cohen, Emily Holland, Jason Huang, Jack Nuelle, Stephen Urchick Staff Photographer

Camden Bauchner

Publisher

Harry Backlund

Ventra

Ventra, as best as we can tell, is not a real word. It’s a vague set of letters suggestive of movement. So it’s an unfortunate coincidence, then, that the real word ‘ventra’ resembles most closely is “ventral,” an adjective signifying things close to one’s abdomen – the precise location of the acute nausea churning away in many a Chicago commuter trying to make sense of the city’s transit overhaul. Ventra’s launch has been, to put it mildly, troubled—hobbled by bureaucratic mishaps sometimes as humorous as they are frustrating. Last Thursday, Crain’s Chicago Business regaled Chicagoans with the misfortunes of one Al Stern, who received 267 Ventra cards in the mail over the course of two days. Upon publication of the story, the CTA called Stern to inform him that each delivered card had canceled the previous one, rendering all useless. They’ve since given Stern a working card and a compensatory $50 dollars, which might be well spent on “The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka.” Obviously, most riders are dealing with far less surreal glitches, some of which have added a touch of percussion to many a daily routine: the mad tapping of faulty scanners, the mashing of override buttons on buses, and maybe a few despairing smacks to the forehead for good measure. But despite the setbacks, the CTA’s still managed to process nearly a million new Ventra accounts and estimates that Ventra users accounted for nearly a third of all rides as of last Wednesday, a not insignificant pair of feats. Only time will tell if the Ventra rollout will get better or worse from here—and there’s not much of it left. Outstanding Chicago Cards will be rendered unusable on November 15 with disposable cards following suit a month afterwards.

Father, Son, and Holy Cow

For going on half a millennium now, the Eucharist has been a touchy subject. These days, though, the major threat to wholesome communion with our lord and savior doesn’t come from Teutonic heretics, but from hard-rocking North Side foodies. Kuma’s Corner, an upscale burger joint, differentiates itself from other establishments where yuppies overpay for grass-fed beef by billing their creations as tributes to heavy metal bands.

Because presumably coating Kobe beef in battery acid as an ode to me-

Contact the editor at editor@southsideweekly.com

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

Correction: Last week’s review of “The Distance Between” did not fully identify the artwork photographed in its accompanying image.

The photograph of the disco balls was a shot of “Monk-Raven Space Station,” a piece by Cauleen Smith. Smith was one of five artists whose work was exhibited as part of “The Distance Between.”

Cover photo courtesy of University of Chicago Photographic Archive, asas02223, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

Shutdown Works for Some

Unless you’ve been hanging on every word sputtered by Sean Hannity since last Sunday, you’ve probably been working under the impression that the federal shutdown has been hardest on those who are already the worst off. But at least one purportedly penniless Chicagoan caught a major break when the government unexpectedly took one. Oak Park entrepreneur (read: serial fraudster of the silver screen) Kevin Trudeau was slapped with a $37 million fine back in 2005 and has yet to pay a cent of it. The “Infomercial King” once made obscene profits off making patently false claims in just about every media outlet imaginable. Last week, Trudeau came into a Chicago court claiming he was “penniless and homeless” and “couldn’t remember” where that pesky $100,000 in golden bars might have gone. Judge Robert Gettleman wasn’t buying it, pointing to recent credit card charges that included $900 spent on cigars, a couple of $200 haircuts, and over a thousand bucks spent on “luxury meats.” After federal officials discovered that until recently Trudeau had also been in possession of a sprawling Oak Park Mansion (complete with a butler and two personal chefs), they said enough was enough. Or at least they would have.

Trudeau’s sentencing has been “indefinitely delayed. ” On his latest court date, calls to FTC’s lawyers offices went unanswered. A disembodied voice cheerfully made clear that fraud accusations are on hold until “the government resumes operation.”

In this issue

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

tallica tested badly, the braintrust over at Kuma’s Corner divined the next best thing. In the name of Scandanavian rock troupe Ghost, the chef “reverently places” a communion wafer atop a cheeseburger and swamps it in a red wine reduction. The wrath of God of ensued; with the Tribune editorializing and Catholic periodicals kvetching. In penance, the restaurant sent a check for $1500 to Catholic Charities. Wisely deciding that feeding poor people shouldn’t paid for with fake blood money, a spokeswoman preemptively refused to accept it on moral grounds. Owner Michael Caine was unruffled by the religious fervor, saying, “we bought the wafers on Amazon; they’re not blessed by anyone... does everyone forget that God might have a sense of humor?”

norfolk expansion

“In Englewood, Norfolk Southern has acquired ninety percent of the property it needs.” jon brozdowski..........4

victor navasky

“Trust me, my dear, that’s not a grip of passion.” isabel gold.................5

aldermen

&

education

“No issue has divided Chicago as deeply in the past year as education.” osita nwanevu............6

sun ra

When you came to his concert you knew what to expect and how to let yourself extend into that spiritual type of music, spiritual jazz.

zach goldhammer.....8

old dusty’s records

women! a comedy

redmoon theater

suicide narcissus

“ You don’t think they call me the elusive Johnny Twist for nothing, do you?” sharon lurye..........12

“...some horrors are simply too unforgiving for guiltless laughter.” stephen urchick......14

“...massive, mammoth, spectacle productions, both indoors and outdoors...” bea malsky................16

“The hole never gets any larger and the expanse of ice never gets any smaller.” katryce lassle..........18

October 9, 2013

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South Side Weekly 3

politics

Containing an Expansion

By Jon brozdowski

“T

he mayor’s thrown us under the bus,” Howard McRae says with a declarative ire. It’s a Sunday, and McRae and the rest of the residents at the end of an Englewood culde-sac on 58th Street clamor to condemn a particularly disruptive neighbor.

That neighbor is Norfolk Southern Railways, the nation’s largest rail freight company east of the Mississippi, and at the start of the summer it seemed poised to complete a swift and uncompromising takeover of land in Englewood. Norfolk Southern wanted to expand the size of their 47th Street rail yard by close to eighty-five acres, and with Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s support, the City Council quickly approved the sale of 105 city-owned lots in the area to them.

In particular, city officials like Alderman Willie Cochran, the initiative’s main sponsor, touted the economic boon the expansion could provide. But it is less clear how this is meant to benefit Englewood itself. Many residents reeled at the underhanded private land acquisition that left them unaware of Norfolk Southern’s expansion until it was sure to take their homes.

This anger is palpably evident in McRae, middle-aged and comfortable in a black sweatshirt. He says he’s lived on this part of 58th Street for a long time, and that Norfolk Southern’s decision to encroach upon Englewood homes has been nothing but trouble for residents. He even suspects that Norfolk Southern has been the cause of the recent influx of rats on the streets near his house, because construction has contracted their territory.

But the sound of jackhammers doesn’t displease everyone. “Well, I’ve got a much better view now,” Milton Bryant says, pointing at the fifteen-foot steel wall that lines the back of his yard. Sporting a work shirt and bandana, he eagerly explains that before Norfolk Southern developed the property, he had to live with a landscape of eroded dirt for more than twenty years.

Although he still has reservations about the air quality and vibrations from the yard’s heavy machinery, he supports Norfolk Southern’s work in the neighborhood. He believes that the development

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will increase the value of his property by more than three percent. Official support helps, too. “[Alderman] Roderick Sawyer's been through here a lot, and he's really helped mitigate some of the impact,” he said. Bryant received some money from Norfolk Southern to prepare his house for the vibrations, and remains hopeful that the expansion will help to revitalize the blocks around his house.

Leading the fight against this Norfolk Southern expansion has been Sustainable Englewood Initiatives, a group that has served as a gathering place for residents concerned about the environmental impact associated with the new rail yard.

Its president, John Paul Jones, points to a July 17 article in the Chicago Tribune that helped change the tone of the conversation. Sustainable Englewood had commissioned a modeling of the potential effects that the expanded rail yard would have on the neighborhood’s air quality.

Englewood already has one of the highest rates of asthma cases in the city; the article reported that it was possible the soot level resulting from diesel emissions would exceed a federal safety limit, in a swath of land nearly a mile wide. “[The article] made our concerns reasonable,” Jones says.

Armed with substantial pro bono legal expertise, they argued that Englewood’s already fragile environmental health could not withstand the emissions from the expanded rail yard.

These public health concerns formed the backbone of what was possibly Sustainable Englewood’s finest victory. On August 15, Sustainable Englewood and other concerned parties gave a public testimony at the Chicago Plan Commission’s hearing on the railyard expansion. With some critical help from the Northwestern Environmental Advocacy Center, Sustainable Englewood argued Norfolk Southern had acted with a lack of transparency or meaningful commitment toward local residents.

The committee postponed a decision on Norfolk Southern and the approval of tax incremental financing for one month, in order to address neighborhood concerns.

This was a notable achievement for the opposition, considering that the commission normally rubberstamps the zoning amend-

october 9, 2013

patrick leow

The forecast for Norfolk Southern’s impact on Englewood remains hazy. ments that arrive on its table.

During that time, Sustainable Englewood sought more community input.

Leading a series of meetings in libraries and churches around the neighborhood, they brought different groups and residents together to prepare a substantive case for the commission once again.

Soon afterward, Norfolk Southern surprised everyone at a September 19 commission meeting by announcing a series of wide-ranging concessions. They promised “immediate upgrading” of lift equipment and “cutting-edge pollution controls by 2018” for trucks in the yard, significantly curtailing diesel emissions. They also promised to contribute $3 million toward local sustainability projects, job training in Englewood, and the upkeep of nearby Sherwood Park.

The agreement also stipulates the creation of a new ERA walking trail in Englewood, converting elevated rail track into green space as part of a $30 million, ten-year project by the city of Chicago.

Residents at the community meetings had hoped for such a project, modeled after the Bloomingdale Trail on the North Side, for which the city awarded a $50 million construction contract in August.

“You’ve gone way beyond expectations,” Plan Commission Chairman Mar-

tin Cabrera Jr. said of Norfolk Southern's concessions to Englewood. Jones would gladly concur. Touting the announcement of these promises as “an amazing day,” he was evidently pleased. “The community stood up, the city listened, and the railroad came to the table to find a better way,” he said.

Yet thirty residents were still refusing to sell their properties as of October 2. Seeing as Norfolk Southern has already acquired ninety percent of the property it needs, and has the approval of the City Plan Commission—and even some of their opponents—the expansion now seems inevitable.

Still, the nature of its impact remains unclear. The gifts that came along with the expansion will eventually run dry, and residents will look to the rail yard's potential to bring real economic benefit to Englewood.

It seems that's now up to the city and Norfolk Southern. ¬

By Isabel Ochoa Gold

October 9, 2013

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South Side South Weekly Side Weekly 5 5

How the South Side Votes

by Osita Nwanevu illustrations by hanna petroski

No issue has divided Chicago as deeply in the past year as education. From last September’s Chicago Teachers Union strike, which left the city’s 350,000 students homebound, to the closure this year of fourty-nine Chicago Public Schools, the city’s South Side aldermen have had ample opportunities to sound off about how recent events affect their communities. These eight comments encapsulate the stakes the South Side holds in the city’s various education debates.

Leslie Hairston 5th Ward

Roderick Sawyer 6th Ward

Toni Foulkes 15th Ward

Carrie Austin 34th Ward

“I don’t need [Emanuel’s] permission to run my ward. [The mayor and CPS] were suggesting sites for the school without talking to me first…I was never opposed to having an alternative school in my ward because South Shore needs one.”

—On her opposition to the proposed opening of a Magic Johnson Bridgescape School in Chicago’s South Shore due to an alleged lack of appropriate permits and the opposition of residents in the school’s immediate vicinity, September 6, 2013 (DNAinfo)

“I am not attempting to demonize the Mayor. I am certain that he believes that he is doing what is in the best interest for our children. The problem is that I do not know enough about his vision to agree or disagree. Is the goal of the upheaval that a student in a poor neighborhood can get the type of education that can send him to the Ivy League or is the goal that he is trained for a job?

—From an open letter on school closings, May 21, 2013 (6thwardchicago.com)

“It’s going to be a fight in Englewood. No doubt. Those people are not gonna sit back and be rolled over.”

—On reports of the recommendation of eighty CPS schools for closure, March 11, 2013 (ABC 7)

“They are going to feud. The children are already the Hatfields and the McCoys.

They are not going to stop.”

—On the closing of Songhai Elementary Learning Institute and the merging of its student population with its bitter rival, Curtis Elementary School, May 22, 2013 (Chicago Tribune)

The decision by Bridgescape to open instead in Roseland, in the 34th Ward, rankled area parents. This past February, Hairston was one of thirty-five aldermen to sign a City Council resolution calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion for the 2014-2015 school year. The ward’s Enrico Fermi Elementary School has closed.

Sawyer was another signatory to the charter school moratorium resolution. The ward’s Elihu Yale Elementary School has closed.

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Foulkes was another signatory to the charter school moratorium resolution. The Ward’s Elaine O. Goodlow Elementary Magnet School has closed.

In addition to Songhai, two other schools have closed in the 34th Ward: Alfred David Kohn Elementary School and West Pullman Elementary School. Austin was another signatory to the charter school moratorium resolution.

politics

ricardo muñoz

Willie Cochran 20th Ward

Ricardo Muñoz 22nd Ward

“It is just unfortunate they don’t show more respect for the alderman in any of the decisions that they make. There should have been briefings before it became public.”

—On the lack of communication between Mayor Emanuel, Chicago Public Schools, and city aldermen in the lead up to the release of the school closing plan, March 21, 2013 (Chicago Tribune)

“It’s obvious that the Board of Education here is playing with the numbers to their advantage, saying that they’ll be saving millions and millions and millions of dollars. There’s no real rhyme or reason as to how they’re gonna be saving this much money.”

—On the admission by CPS that it had overestimated the resulting savings for its school closure plan by $122 million dollars, May 6, 2013 (WBEZ)

Cochran was one of four co-sponsors of the charter school moratorium resolution.

In October 2012, Cochran founded the 20th Ward Education Task Force, a group of school staff and community residents that meets monthly to discuss education in the ward. The Ward’s Betsy Ross and Austin Sexton Elementary Schools have closed.

Muñoz was another co-sponsor of the charter school moratorium resolution. He is a member of the City Council’s Progressive Reform Coalition which, according to its statement of principles, supports high-quality public education that focuses on providing fair and equal resources for neighborhood schools with wrap-around services, funding for early childhood development, and strong youth programs.

George Cardenas 12th Ward

Michelle Harris 8th Ward

“I just thought they should have stayed in the classroom, and just give negotiations a little more time, instead of this gamesmanship going on that I see…It’s not about money. It just seems that way.”

—On his opposition to last year’s eight day Chicago Teachers’ Union strike, September 10, 2012 (CBS 2)

“My community doesn’t have as many children as we had twenty-five years ago, when working families were raising children. I have a lot of retired people living within my boundaries. It’s a reality of the world we live in. It’s all about the numbers. The numbers don’t lie.”

—On her general support for the CPS closure plans, March 21, 2013 (Chicago Sun-Times)

Cardenas has faced heavy community opposition over the past year for his support for the opening of a new school run

by Concept Charter Schools in McKinley Park, owing to a perceived lack of local involvement and questions about the proposed site’s environmental safety.

Harris has argued that shifting population centers necessitate the closure of some schools in predominantly black neighborhoods.

michelle harris

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Who Knows Sun Ra? Charting the legacy of the space-jazz pioneer by zach goldhammer

“T

his is not an open forum, is it? It ain’t, right?”

The man seated behind me last Saturday at “Reality Has Touched Against Myth”—an esoterically-entitled panel discussion on the life and work of Sun Ra, one of the patron saints of avant-garde —has been grumbling this question over and over for the past ten minutes, to no avail.

An image of Sun Ra dressed in his best space suit, staring blankly beneath a marquee bearing his name, is being projected onto the Logan Center screen, looming over the talking heads seated on stage. Will Faber, a University of Chicago musicologist, and Cauleen Smith, an influential experimental filmmaker in residence at the Washington Park Arts Incubator, have prepared a film presentation.

It’s one work from a series of short films which were directly inspired by Smith’s extensive research into the Sun Ra archives in Chicago. The film uses Sun Ra’s interpretation of “Somewhere Over The Rain-

bow,” a discordant, free-jazz interpretation of Judy Garland’s signature tune—as its soundtrack. It’s a haunting reinvention of the show tune, highlighting Sun Ra’s natural gift for subverting and refracting obvious melodies and rhythms. The audience, however, remains restless. Students and attendants of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival shuffle in and out of the screening room.

On stage, the panelists shed some light onto the life of the notoriously mysterious and introverted Sun Ra. Art Hoyle, a trumpeter who played in Sun Ra’s Arkestra in the fifties, presents Sun Ra as a shrewd businessman. He suggests that the bandleader’s infamous claim to having been born Saturn was a promotional gambit, a means of differentiating Sun Ra and his nascent group from other similar bands in the South Side scene. Allison Schein, meanwhile, frames Ra as a prolific creator, highlighting the immense body of Sun Ra recordings which her organization curates.

Yet none of these individual shards manage to crystallize into a whole.

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Finally, the back row interlocutor shouts his question: “This is not an open forum, right?”

Smith, interrupted mid-sentence, is taken aback, but tentatively offers her mic to the man. The speaker, a long lanky man with a graying beard, declines: “Nah, I can project my voice.” He continues. “I just wanted to say that I think some of the people who lived [through] the period here can speak on that type of musician.” The audience begins to murmur in agreement, as control of the room is wrested away from the artists and academics on stage. “It was a mindset for that era. [They] projected a mindset for self-study. When you came to his concert you knew what to expect and how to let yourself extend into that spiritual type of music, spiritual jazz. For us that have lived during that period...[Sun Ra] was part of spiritual of a quest. And I am sure I can get an amen on that!”

The disjointed audience at Logan Center of the Arts gradually unites.

“Amen.”

M

ay 22, 2014 will mark the hundred-year anniversary of Sun Ra’s birth. The idea of celebrating this hundred year mark is a strange tribute to a man who was always skeptical of the concept of birth in the first place.

Nonetheless, the irony has not stopped the Arkestra, which is still lead by Sun Ra’s sideman, Marshal Allen, from touring and promoting the centennial of Sun Ra’s “arrival on Planet Earth.” The Arkestra, whose original leader passed away in 1993, has already played anniversary shows in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and—just this past Saturday—in New York, all cities where Sun Ra became famous for his extravagant stage shows and pioneering avant-garde jazz recordings. To date, however, the Arkestra has not scheduled a centennial show in Chicago, the city where Sun Ra got his start.

Will Faber, a PhD candidate in the music department at the UofC and an avid Sun Ra fan remembers, “I used to tell peo-

feature ple that one of my favorite things about Chicago was that you could go to Jazz Record Mart and buy Delmark’s cassette issue of Sound of Joy for ninety-nine cents.”

John Litweiler, a Chicago-area jazz critic who worked at the Jazz Record Mart in the 1960s, remembers first hearing about Sun Ra and “thinking he was just some oddity out there on the South Side.” It was only later on, after Sun Ra had moved out of Chicago, Litweiler got his first chance to see Sun Ra live.

“He would come on stage wearing these robes you know, and it was a circus but also a total joy” For Cauleen Smith, who moved from LA to Chicago to delve more deeply into her research on Sun Ra, it seems that the fans of his music in Chicago are among the most zealous she has ever met, “everyone here wants to tell you their story about him or about the time they saw they saw Sun Ra on stage.”

All these eager voices, all the people who are so quick to tell their own version of the musical and spiritual legacy of Sun Ra and his time on the South Side of Chicago, makes sorting through the narrative of his time here a difficult task. Ultimately, it’s builds to a question: who really knows Sun Ra and to whom do all these stories belong?

S

un Ra moved to Chicago in 1946, having left Birmingham to escape its extreme racial prejudice and meet his musical idol, Fletcher Henderson, godfather of swing. Back then, Sun Ra still had his birth name, Herman Poole Blount, though his friends knew him as “Sonny.”

He had grown up listening to Henderson records and knew Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins’ solos on those records by heart.

Blount was known as a child prodigy on the piano from a young age, and after briefly studying music education at Alabama A&M, he decided to move to Chicago to find his idol in the flesh. He moved into an apartment in Washington Park.

No memorial has been made to this site— as Cauleen Smith says, “Chicago is not a city that’s really into plaques and mantles.”

While living in Washington Park, Sonny began playing with Fletcher Henderson’s band. But by the late 1940s, Henderson’s traditional swing was no longer the thing, and even bebop, swing’s faster-paced and less danceable successor, was being pushed to the limits of its sonic possibilities. The question of how to push

beyond these limitations would dictate the narrative of jazz’s evolution throughout the next decade. In New York, Miles Davis – working off of theories developed by composer George Russel - would famously help develop a new language for jazz – based around modes rather than rapid-fire chord changes. This new style was called “modal jazz” and incorporated scales, or modes, with ancient Greek names like Dorian and Phrygian - into their compositions. These experiments, which Litweiler credits first to Davis’ 1954 recording, “Spring Swing,” culminated in the landmark 1959 album, Kind of Blue.

While Kind of Blue has become known as the modal jazz album, and one of the most famous and acclaimed jazz albums of all time, less critical attention has been paid to Sun Ra’s modal work in Chicago. Beginning in the mid-1950s, the Arkestras began to record their own modal compositions. According to Faber, these modal theories were not based around formalized theoretical texts, but were more deeply connected Sun Ra’s own belief in the “vibrational and mystical significance of scalar relationships and tonal centers” The band wasn’t told to play in Phyrigian or Dorian or any of those things— Sonny was always more interested in Ancient Egypt than Ancient Greece—and sometimes they weren’t even told what key to play. As Art Hoyle remembers the band durng this period, sometimes they were just told to play in “space key.”

The idea of space and the Cosmos soon became increasingly prominent in Sonny’s work.. “From Sonny Blount to Sun Ra – the Chicago Years” a survey of Sun Ra’s early writings and recordings, records a vision that Blount had received, initially, in college . According to an account written his diary, “he had a dream in which he was summoned by robed figures” who had transported him through a “narrow beam of light until they all reached their destination—the planet Jupiter.”

Sun Ra was initially ashamed of these visions after one of his classmates at Alabama A&M had stolen his diary and read the Jupiter account aloud to his peers, mocking him.

Years later, though, as the leader of the Arkestra in Chicago, things changed. The first major change was his name. Blount legally declared his name to be Le Son’yr Ra, usually shortened to Sun Ra, became increasingly vocal about his own outer space origins—he would begin telling people that he had not been born in Birmingham, but rather had been sent down to Earth

all photos courtesy of university of chicago photographic archive, special collections research center, university of chicago library.

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from his home on Saturn . This new embrace of cosmic imagery paralleled changes in his music. While still greatly indebted to swing, as well as popular songs and melodies, Sun Ra started to experiment more and more with modality, dissonance, and free improvisation. He also became one of the first jazz musicians to incorporate synthesizers, electric keyboards, and modified instruments into his performance. Yet even as Sun Ra became more and more invested in experimentation and his cosmic persona, he never quite abandoned his identity as a musician firmly rooted in the city of Chicago. “Springtime in Chicago” still ranks among his prettiest compositions, and may be a midwestern response to the]jazz standard “Autumn in New York.” “Chicago[,] USA,” a strange tone poem to Sun Ra’s adopted city, was also recorded with local vocal group the Lintels and submitted in a contest to become the city’s official theme song. It didn’t win, but still stands as a fine tribute to the city and especially to the South Side, rattling off the stop names of an old Loop-bound Green Line train: Jackson Park, University, Cottage Grove.

Though much of Sun Ra’s national reputation would be built after he moved his band from Chicago to New York, there were a few who kept his legacy alive in Chicago. Phil Cohran, who played trumpet and “sun harp” in the Chicago-era Arkestra, left the band and chose to remain in Chicago, where he become a founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Cohran and the AACM are among the most prominent forces shaping jazz discourse and performance in Chicago today. Though Cohran’s AACM and Sun Ra’s Arkestra represented two separate movements within Chicago jazz. Cohran himself still speaks candidly of his debt to “Sonny.” In breaks between songs at a Washington Park Arts Incubator performance last spring, he took the time to tell his audience about his mentor, “Sonny,” who “broke the borders down that were in my head. He taught me to really play.”

ne of the most important aspects of Sun Ra’s time in Chicago was a strange friendship. Not long after moving North, Sun Ra met Alton Abraham, a precocious, fourteen-year-old mystical scholar. According to John Szwed’s seminal biography of Sun Ra, “Space is the Place,” “Abraham was philosophical by nature, serious and scholarly, with a deep interest in science, metaphysics, and Bible scholarship.” He clicked with Sun

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Ra—who at the time was still going by the name Sonny—and the two quickly became inseparable. Together they ransacked bookstores in Woodlawn and Hyde Park, looking for new means to advance their own esoteric learning.

“They were autodidacts, self-taught scholars,” says Cauleen Smith, praising the pair. “They taught themselves everything and studied everything on their own… they studied numerology, Egyptology, astrology, astronomy, all of it.” The duo soon began sermonizing in Washington Park.

Abraham was also a musician himself and soon became intensely interested in the new sounds that Sun Ra’s groups were creating. He had a better mind for business than Sonny did, and soon became his friend and manager. As John Litweiler recounts, one of the most important parts of Abraham relationship with Sun Ra was his role as promoter, “he kept the band working, playing shows every night, when a lot of other groups were left hungry.” The partnership eventually lead to the founding of El Saturn Records, an independently owned record label dedicated to recording and distributing Sun Ra’s music.

Yet Abraham and Sun Ra’s partnership continued to build a movement that went beyond just music. Together, they continued to develop their own pan-religious, transhistorical ideology. As Szwed tells it, they “talked to whoever would listen and argued over matters of ultimate concern with other groups who met there—Garveyites, Communists, fundamentalist religious groups of every stripe, all of whom had their regular spots in the park.” As quoted in Szwed’s book, Abraham recalled that those who critiqued the quasi-Messianic duo said, “ ‘Next you’ll be saying you’re gods!’ We replied we were, gods-in-the making.”

As it turned out, despite their divine aims, neither man was immortal. Sun Ra died in 1993, and Alton Abraham passed six years later. Yet it was the latter whose death led to a sea change in Sun Ra’s reputation in Chicago. Abraham, through his work managing El Saturn Records, had collected a massive and invaluable personal collection of Sun Ra’s records, manuscripts and ephemera, much of which cluttered the shelves of his own home.

This collection was, reportedly, tossed out after Abraham’s death and left in a dumpster by his late spouse. The collection was recovered by John Corbett, a Chicago area music writer and Sun Ra obsessive, after he found out about the trashed treasure through a mass, anonymous email,

feature according to a 2008 Chicago Reader article. Corbett was not able to be reached for comment by press time.]

Seeking to preserve the collection, Corbett worked throughout the new millennium to find a proper home for the music and artwork that was left behind. Part of this treasure trove now forms the “the Alton Abraham Collection” a subset of the Chicago Jazz Archive, which is maintained UofC’s Special Collections Research Center and managed by Corbett vs. Dempsey, a North Side gallery space co-founded by Corbett in 2004. In the past decade, the collection has been the focus of several milestone publications and exhibitions, including the 2008 exhibit “Pathways to Unknown Worlds” at the Hyde Park Arts Center and the essay collection “The Wisdom of Sun Ra.” For some of Chicago’s Sun Ra fanatics, then, Corbett’s preservation work has made him something of a savior.

“T

hat’s all bullshit,” says James Stubbs-Abraham, one of Alton Abraham’s sons and current co-owner of El Saturn Records, when I call him to ask him about Corbett’s recovered collection. According to Stubbs-Abraham, those possessions belong to his father’s estate, which he believes was looted by “a covenant of thieves.”

James and his brother Alton Stubbs were being trained by their father to take over El Saturn during the years leading up to his death. James never met Sun Ra and was mostly uninterested in “the weird old records with the Afrocentric women on the covers” that he remembers seeing in his father’s house growing up.

Before moving to 1994, James had been in L.A. trying to pursue his own music career. Up until 1994, he was interested in hip-hop and had moved to L.A. to try and work with rap legend Eazy-E. When he returned to Chicago, though, his father sat him down and began to give him and his brother lessons on how to become “a strong, positive black man.” The lessons included instruction not only in the art of free-form jazz but also lectures on “sound, color, dimensions, metaphysics, and alchemy,” says James, as well as Bible study. “Everyday we had to read from the Bible, chapter by chapter, verse by verse.”

As with all of Alton Abraham’s endeavors, these abstract diatribes were also paired with practical considerations about how to run a record label. James’ job was to “deal with the release of [El Saturn] material and making sure band members got their mon-

ey.” According to James Abraham, when his father’s estate lost the recordings and material, El Saturn was effectively left in the dust.

James is currently working with an attorney to try and stake a claim to what he believes is his, though he yet to file his claims in court. During the Q&A session at the Sun Ra panel this past Saturday, however, Abraham saw a chance to pub-

When I ask Faber whether he believes the material should be held by the university, rather than in a more public place, he responds that the question doesn’t quite address the complexities of the situation.

Faber, who in addition to being a scholar, is also the board president of the Live the Spirit Residency and organizer of the Englewood Jazz Festival, and says he does not believe this is just a narrative of “the Uni-

“

“...everyone here wants to tell you their story about him or about the time they saw they saw Sun Ra on stage.”

“ licly voice his opinions before an audience.

Speaking later on the phone, Abraham stated “We want to do something about this, we want to re-release all the material that was on Saturn Records....We want to tie the knot and bridge the gap and not be controlled by other people’s interest.” In the meantime, James is working as a real estate agent and a part-time actor. He still maintains the “Friends of Sun Ra & Alton Abraham El Saturn Records” Facebook page and manages the day-to-day affairs of the label, but he is hoping for a more substantial change to be made.

“I’m just waiting here for all my cards to turn a royal flush.”

Whether or not Stubbs-Abraham’s claims are true, there is still some room for debate about where the Alton Abraham collection should be placed. At the Arts Incubator, Smith expresses some reservations about having the material kept in a private university setting. “Chicago is a working-class city, and though there are many great universities here, not everyone has access to those institutions, especially now. It used to be that you could just walk to the Regenstein and check out whatever you wanted. Since the nineties, you haven’t been able to do that at any university library” Today, Sun Ra and Alton Abraham—who some speculate, once studied in the Regenstein stacks—would have to request special admission just to see their own collection.

versity versus ‘the community.’ It’s not as simple as that.” Litweiler, similarly, views the Regenstein’s Special Collections as invaluable to Sun Ra fanatics. “There’s a guy there that I see all the time, always wearing a Sun Ra shirt. He shows up every week to pour over the archives, just trying to see if he can find something new.”

The debate over who owns Sun Ra’s music and who has the right to tell his story may never end. During Saturday’s panel discussion, the impromptu Q&A session soon became a soapbox for everyone who thought they knew the real Sun Ra. It seemed like everyone in the audience claimed to be the one who saw him play out on 59th and Prairie, or rapped with him about metaphysics and the cosmos, or who really understood all that stuff about Saturn.

Smith, however, was the one who ultimately reigned in the crowd with a story.

“Sun Ra used to do this thing during practice with his band, he’d play this one note that was off, like in a minor key or something, and he kept playing that note until everyone in the band heard and started doing the same thing, until they got it.

It was an exercise in listening. It brought people together.”

October October 9, 2013 9, ¬ 2013 South ¬ Side South Weekly Side Weekly 11 11

Johnny Twist

By Sharon Lurye

O

sharon lurye

“You don’t think they call me the Elusive Johnny Twist for nothing, do you?”

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n a storefront in Woodlawn there’s a faded, almost illegible green sign that reads ‘Old Dusty’s Records.’

Inside that store, there are probably records. Somewhere. But when you knock on the door, and the owner lets you in, what you’ll step into is not so much a record store as another dimension. There are racks of CDs and videotapes, toy cars, children’s shows, necklaces, African art, Afrocentric books, a rice cooker, body oils and soap, an iron, and an organ piano. And there are rows and rows of framed, black-and-white photographs depicting blues legends like Ma Rainey, Ike and Tina Turner, Elmore James, and Hound Dog Taylor. Visitors are greeted by a colorful sign: “Hotep, welcome to JT’s old dusty, Mississippi/ Chicago Museum and Culture Center of Afro-centric/heritage and rhythmic urban, delta, rocka boogie blues!”

Taped to the wall are yellowed newspaper clippings and a dozen photographs of a man with a 1958 Flying V Gibson guitar. In some he’s simply playing the guitar wildly, while in others he throws it behind his head, or poses with the guitar and a suitcase that says “Thunder and Lightning.”

A poster proclaims: “Live at the Check(er?) board / great guitarist Johnny Twist with Thunder and Lightning V/S Buddy Guy with HURRICAN(E?) / A blues show you don’t want to miss.”

The man in the photograph stands in the store: Johnny Twist himself. He is much older now—how old, who knows— and wears Pan-African clothing, with a cap on his head and thick wooden necklaces dangling on his exposed chest. He greets his visitors with a “Hotep!” and a fist bump.

He is, in his own words, a “living legend.”

But it’s unlikely many outside of his neighborhood know he’s still around.

There is almost no mention of this museum anywhere on the Internet; he refuses to have pictures of himself or the museum

Music taken, or to give out a phone number; he has no Wikipedia page, and on YouTube there is just one video that shows his face, a clip from an eighties German TV show with the title “Elusive Chicago bluesman Johnny Twist.” Some might be skeptical about his status as a “legend.”

Still, if you’re doubtful about his claims to fame, he’ll whip out a binder full of papers, with a print-out of every website or newspaper that’s ever mentioned his name, however briefly.

“Anywhere Johnny Twist goes, the cameras go, because of my legendary career,” he says, snapping out a yellowed newspaper. “Now, they don't give you a two-page write-up in the Chicago Defender if you're a nobody.”

Nothing is quite chronological in his museum-slash-culture-center-slash-art gallery-slash-yard sale. Johnny Twist can’t quite tell you when he was born, when his first album came out, or when he opened his record store, which has always been a museum as well. But, if you ask, he’ll give you a tour—starting, of course, with himself.

“Well let’s face it, I’m a great guitarist, and most of your great guitarists came out of Mississippi,” he says, when asked where he was born. “That’s not a bias, but it’s a fact. That’s why this is a Mississippi Blues and Chicago Delta Blues Museum.”

He was born on Highway 61, the main artery of the Mississippi Delta and the major drive of the circuit for that Delta Blues sound. He laughs when asked about his birth year.

“Nobody knows that,” he says. “Y'all don't even have that information. You don't think they call me ‘Elusive Johnny Twist’ for nothing, do you?”

He started playing piano at age eight or nine, then moved on to the bass guitar and the lead guitar, “so when you hear me playing guitar you hear me playing three instruments at once.” His music career took off sometime in the fifties, at the same time that artists like Little Walter and Ike and Tina Turner were shaking up the music scene. He recalls the segregation he faced when he was playing in clubs in East St. Louis: “When I went to St. Louis, let me tell you, St. Louis was a segregated town,” he says. “You couldn't go into theaters. It wasn't no such a thing as blacks playing in clubs, you had to go into the back room and sit down, till you come back out on the stage.”

“Now, it's no way you could go to St.

Louis and they wouldn't tell you about Johnny Twist Williams, ‘cause I am Johnny Twist Williams,” he adds “I'm the one knocked all the doors down in St. Louis and let other black people come to play in those clubs, ‘cause I refused to go back into the back room. I say if my fans love me”— he slaps his chest—“which they proved that they did, I say I'm going out and sit amongst them. And they said you can't do that, so I said to my drummers, take that high hat down.”

Around the late fifties or early sixties he made his way to Chicago, where he performed with his wife Alzelda and recorded for labels like Checker and Weis. He continues to recount the clubs he played, and the artists that he met.

“I know more entertainers than anybody living,” he insists. “You know who's in the cotton patch with all these peoples? When I came from St. Louis and came to Pepper's Lounge, on 43rd and Vincennes, Muddy Waters heard me and called me his son.

‘Cause I was going down on the bandstand, hear what I'm saying? I was dancing and singing and playing guitar at the same time.”

Walking down the cramped path between his merchandise, he reaches a section of the store devoted to the street that was synonymous with Chicago Blues: Maxwell. His tone is bittersweet and nostalgic as he looks over the decades-old photographs of musicians on the street: “This is Maxwell Street,” he says. “All my friends, they’re dead.”

He points to a black-and-white picture of a man seated with his guitar. Most of the photographs, including this one, show the musicians staring at the camera and their wrinkled, black-and-white faces have a world-weariness that seems to encapsulate the blues.

“This little guy is L.B. Banks,” says Johnny. “He came out of Leland, Mississippi, from 61 Highway. He's playing in what we call J-Town, which is Jewtown, down on Maxwell. All these people played Maxwell Street. They're here. This is your blues.”

“

Another photograph shows a musician standing on his toes, clutching his guitar, almost lifted from the ground in the throes of his performance. “This is Pat Rushing,” says Johnny. “That's him, that's his glory.

As far as he got.”

Other photographs are anonymous.

In one, an old woman in a simple country dress and bonnet gazes at the camera, her acoustic guitar taking up more space in the photo than she does.

“A lot of these people ain't got what you call names,” explains Johnny. “This goes back a ways. But you can see she's playing a folk guitar, and my guess is that's gospel, because most of the time the ladies down there would be singing gospel. Blues and gospel are sisters and brothers.”

He hopes that anyone visiting his museum, he says, “would learn that black peoples have done some wonderful things to the music world here in the United States of America. To tell you the truth, we are the only ones that have a truly rooted American music.”

Johnny spots the obituary notice of his friend Jack Meyers taped to the wall, and takes a different trip down memory lane.

Jack Meyers, he says, was “one of the best baritone players in Chicago,” and was a collaborator on one of his major contributions to the world of blues: his arrangement of “Wang Dang Doodle” for Koko Taylor in 1965. The single features Taylor’s inimitable voice, howling out: “We gonna romp and tromp till midnight / we gonna fuss and fight till daylight / we gonna pitch a wang dang doodle all night long.” The song’s all-star lineup included Meyers on bass, Fred Below on Drums, Willie Dixon and Taylor on vocals, and Buddy Guy and Johnny on guitar.

“I want to you know that phenomenal record we did, and I say phenomenal, that I arranged along with Willie Dixon,” says Johnny. “It's one of the best blues arrangements, excuse me, in the world. Now somebody had nerve enough to say, some new version of ‘Wang Dang Doodle’ was the best….How you gonna outdo a phenomenon like that? Do you know who else was on ‘Wang Dang Doodle’? Buddy Guy.” He laughs out loud. “So I'm going

...when you hear me playing guitar you hear me playing three instruments at once.

“

to ask you, who can come up with a better ‘Wang Dang Doodle’ than that? You let me know.”

Beyond the Maxwell Street section there are two more rooms, stuffed full of more minutiae and memorabilia for when the museum expands. There’s also a recording studio somewhere in there, if you can reach it.

“These are two rooms that I can't take you into right now,” he says. “There's tons of entertainers in there, you can see. Here's a room full, right there is a room full. Right now that's a recording studio. It's kind of my private studio. I'm sure we're going to help other blues people to record.”

Johnny has no plans to retire. He’s trying out new songs on the organ at the front of his museum, and moonlights as a spiritual “Star Teacher,” putting out lectures on DVD under the name “Brother Ba Ba Bekitembatu.”

“There's no such thing as officially retired because once you're a legend like that, you don't retire, what you do is have other avenues in life,” he says. “You know how blessed I am to be standing here talking to you when all my comrades are dead? Or walking around on a stick, or cane, or dialysis machine?”

As the aging photographs attest, this place is a monument to a past that’s fast being forgotten. Musicians no longer gather on Maxwell Street to sing the blues, or praise the Lord with gospel; the University of Illinois has taken over most of that area.

Checker, a subsidiary of the great Chess label, shut down in the seventies. The great music stars born in the Mississippi Delta are quickly aging out. But Johnny Twist’s strange museum brings that history back to the spotlight.

“Now I tell you this,” he says, pointing to the front door. “You see when people walk through this door here? They are out of the Matrix. When you go back out there, you are in the Matrix. And when you go back in here, spirituality is in here, very great, and we are not going to be sitting here and be lying to you. We are gonna tell you the truth.”

But when you leave Dusty’s, rightly or not, it does feel like you’re stepping back into reality. It’s hard to know if everything you just heard was really true. What is undoubtedly true is that, right under your nose, in an overlooked storefront at 64th and Cottage, there stands an utterly unique testament to one of the greatest eras of music in American history. ¬

October October 9, 2013 9, 3, ¬ 2013 South ¬ Side South Weekly Side Weekly 13 13

Comedy of Terrors By stephen Urchick

“WOMEN! A Comedy” at Dream Theatre

dream theatre

W

e seated ourselves to the sound of screaming goats, bleating out the "Heys!", "Yeahs!", and other long-drawn notes from popular songs and music videos. Dream Theatre, in Pilsen, chose to open the house to their play anthology “WOMEN! A Comedy” graciously early. They also chose to project above their stage these and other leavings from YouTube: exploding Disney princesses, parodies of nineties women's exercise tapes, snatches of beauty pageants that ached for intervention from the Department of Child Services. Dream was obviously priming the crowd and the crowd shamelessly smirked at the girl failblogs— the aggregations of humiliating stumbles, slips, and slides—safe in the thought that it was all intended to ready them for louder laughs.

Written by Jeremy Menekseoglu, played by fourteen actresses and one actor, “WOMEN!” seemed poised to make a good time of spoofing the stereotypes suggested by the preshow screenings. Each of the seven, short plays luridly caricaturized their principal participants. Like the screaming livestock mocking well-loved tunes, each play irreverently down-dressed

well-traveled archetypes: insultingly brainless high school beauty queens; a twitchy, obsessive, kohl-eyed redhead; an obnoxiously self-important young mother, to name a few. Like the videos that prologued the night, “WOMEN!” ostensibly encouraged us to read the characters' cringeworthy awkwardness as social slapstick, to resist the temptation to sink into our seats and instead try to take pleasure in the personaes’ pain.

The first play, “1950’s Impromptu Dinner Etiquette”, introduced the troupe, its idiosyncratic multimedia set-design, and a thin, oily sheen of anxiety that slicked every subsequent joke. “Etiquette” exploded that early suggestion of slapstick, undermining its own genre of exploitative situational comedy. Never far beneath the humor lay everything from quiet suffering to outright trauma. Rendered as a classic Coronet educational film, “Etiquette” situated its middle-aged, steel-haired patriarch amongst digital props and furniture.

Once the title card and credits had faded and the lights went up, a black-and-white parlor kept playing above, on the stage backdrop. The technique lent a disturbing immediacy to the red-cardigan presence

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below, appropriate for the bachelor's gradual reveal as creep and outright rapist. The harmless suggestion to bring wine instead of beer graded into the more sinister preference for sitting his host's daughter on his knee, then to a discussion of the proper technique for noncommittally grazing the hostess's breasts. The audience chuckled at the gulf between the reel's pedagogical hopes and the actor's satyrish tactics. But the chortles were at best uneasy when he demonstrated how to harmlessly, playfully pelvic thrust. On the hostess herself, whom he summoned through the stage door, despite the obvious discomfort in her strained for-film smile.

The airhead antics of the second play's Texan pageant princesses were played as jokes but sparked distress. As contestants butchered a speech from “Antigone,” danced with gruesome panache, and cited platitudes about community service and abstinence advocacy, it grew harder to believe that they were once competent, confident humans. The action implied so many successive homecomings, proms, and bedroom brutalizations—crushingly grim origins for the hapless prancing less than ten tenuous feet before us. Unspoken, these

everyday atrocities shadowed the contenders' clownish comedy. As you watched their sorrow and grief glide closer to the surface, the show grew unendurable. The play concluded absurdly, introducing a hamburger grinding machine into which pageant participants would ultimately be dumped. A last-minute cameo by the previous play's patriarch in the guise of judge announced the elephant lurking hugely in the room.

By mischievously dumping symbolic red ribbons over the pageant-mistress's head, he demonstrated his belief that this was all tremendously funny, light as a practical joke. He embodied the central tension. In laughing at these broken souls—repackaging them as heavily-made up leftovers—we would toss in with the echo of a molester and affirm his gaze.

The show's most benign humor remained murky and the general pitch tacked towards inky-black. A showdown between two incompatible roommates—a free-booting, shampoo-stealing, Cheeto-appropriating loafer, and the tense ginger of previous mention—ends in double homicide. “My Roommate, My Nemesis” pursues the latter subleaser's comment that she knew she would have to kill her flat-

screen & stage mate to its impossibly literal extreme. She chivalrously produces two knives, one hiltfirst to the enemy, calmly topping the diners’ wineglasses. The preceding fight has been raucous fun for all but the involved parties. The duelist's gesture appears ridiculous right down to the homicidal count of three. Locked in a moment of mussedhaired, sweat-beading fear at the moment of death, they mutually admit their wrongs. Neither blinks nor stays her hand.

Given the laughter that resulted from the moments contributing to this grand human waste, the feeling after lights-down was especially sickening.

“New Friend” asks that the audience introduce itself into one of these outrageous, outlandish dramas and contemplate the plot's inhospitable contrivances. It asks us to occupy the shoes of the titular friend: a one-armed lesbian who stood uniquely un-outrageous among the plays’ caricatures. Confused by an inept coffee-shop hipster's excruciatingly direct advances, she finds herself in the latter's home that night, pawn to a crackbrained scheme to murder the hipster's domineering Catholic grand-

mother by shock and heart-attack. The friend betrays no witty, exaggerated fear, attempts no bumbling escape plan. Instead, the audience was struck by a viscerally articulated wave of breathless exhaustion, glassy-faced terror, and debilitating panic.

The character recognizes this dangerously dysfunctional environment for what it is.

By responding to the imminent danger humanly instead of comically, the friend puts “New Friend” into correspondence with the previous plays. Premeditated entrapment is not a joke. The knife beneath the hipster's pillow—which she proceeds to idly wave around—is not a joke. What's funny for the friend about the grandmother appearing in the bedroom door with a pump-action Winchester, murdering the granddaughter atop her, and succumbing to cardiac arrest before she can finish the job? The play laser-lit its grim-faced practicality when the one-armed friend understandably struggled to dislodge the heavy corpse slowly suffocating her. "Don’t you die on me!" became the anthology's single grimmest pun.

“WOMEN! A Comedy” was no

laughing matter. Though the plays were ridiculous, rambunctious, and raunchily overacted, each invariably featured agonizing assaults on a bruised soul or a trivialized life. “WOMEN!” demanded that you laugh to defuse plunging embarrassment, nagging horror, and the dissonance between its elbow-nudging rhetoric and grisly action behind it. You suffered to laugh at this suffering, knowing it was sourced from a character's deep-rooted distress and disturbance, extant social ills—that it invariably ended in figurative and literal casualties. After all, “WOMEN!” wasn't purely a work of fiction. There are such real, live, cardiganed creepers who inspire the sketch lampooning them; there are those who self-annihilate by daily enacting easy tropes and clichés. Somewhere there are disasters playing out on some dismal fairground stage, where the bewildered protagonists don't dissolve into unbidden tears only for the express enjoyment of the crowd below. “WOMEN!” reads as the breakdown of the pleasure-in-pain model, illustrating that some horrors are simply too unforgiving for guiltless laughter. ¬

October 9, 2013

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South Side Weekly 15

We Show Up with Big Machines A Q&A with Redmoon By bea malsky

A

t Redmoon Theater there is little separation between construction and performance; it’s an animal that willingly rolls over and offers up its mechanical underbelly, equal parts absurd and endearing. After a summer of workshops and parades in Chicago parks, Redmoon is preparing for a winter season in its new 57,000-square-foot warehouse in East Pilsen.

This is a turning point for the company—Redmoon’s business has been in immense ephemeral events, art interventions that trespass into public spaces and create scenes on a massive scale. This summer’s centerpiece was the Sonic Boom, a giant rolling podium of speakers with a fifteen-foot flamethrower in the back. Past projects have included a lantern procession along the Chicago River and a five-story tall shadow puppet show on the façade of the Museum of Contemporary Art. The new headquarters, nestled by the river in the Cermak Creative Industries District, offers Redmoon, for the first time, a home to stage indoor shows that match the scale of its outdoor work. Part of Redmoon’s trick is bringing fantastic creations into mundane places; the shift to an indoor space brings with it the challenge to translate this spontaneity to a static stage.

Frank Maugeri, now Producing Artistic Director, has been with Redmoon for the past eighteen years. He is brash but well-spoken, calm amidst the chaos of a Redmoon soiree. He took a moment away from the company’s concluding summer party to munch on some pistachios and chat with the Weekly about soapboxes, spectacle, and Redmoon’s future.

South Side Weekly: I was looking at your schedule for the upcoming series—it looks really exciting—and I’m wondering how the new space will influence what Redmoon is and what you do.

Frank Maugeri: One of the struggles that Redmoon had in the past was that we were doing two things, really. We were doing big, grand, outdoor spectacle events, and then we were doing more intimate productions. Those were for 150 or 200 people, and they felt much more like theatrical experiences, and what was confusing for our audiences was that it felt like the brand was being blurred. People weren’t sure: was Redmoon a mask and puppet company that did these little shows, or were they a big spectacle company that did enormous work, most often for free, in public spaces

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throughout the city? So this space permits us to now do one type of work, which is massive, mammoth, spectacle productions, both indoors and outdoors. So there’s no confusion about what we are in the world, which is fundamentally a Chicago spectacle company that’s doing very grand, ambitious productions, both here in this space and then out in the world.

SSW: Is “spectacle theater” a formal category?

FM: Yes. It’s a formal genre in Europe, where there are many large-scale spectacle companies doing big, outdoor work for the masses. It’s less common in America, in large part because it’s not a funded medium in America. We’ve had to develop, over many years, a bunch of different rev-

october 9, 2013

bea malsky

Swings at the concluding summer celebration. enue models for work that we’d like to do around the world, principally for free. The indoor work that we’re doing in Pilsen between late October and early May is during a season when free outdoor work is impossible. The core mission of the theater is to do that free outdoor work. This building is here to do that. These shows, our open-access build shop, everything that we’re doing is driving towards summers of urban interventions, which this party is the culminating moment of.

SSW: Can you tell me a bit more about your work this summer?

FM: What we set out to do over the past four months, at sixteen different events, was to devise a machine—the Sonic Boom—that would be a platform for peo-

ple in various neighborhoods. We’ve added onto it a bunch of our general aesthetic, so there’s drums all over it; it’s a parade item.

It lifts up and down, and it shoots fire, and it’s a really wild machine. And that machine, alongside free drumming and poetry workshops for close to 100 people, would parade through neighborhoods.

We’d eat together, and then we would do a show using the drummers from the workshop alongside our professional rappers and singers and poets and artists. We went there, one could argue, because those were the neighborhoods that people were not going to. The idea is that we can take that same product, the Sonic Boom, and take it to Englewood and to Bucktown Arts Fest.

SSW: When you’re going into these neighborhoods that aren’t otherwise getting this

screen & stage

al zayed

Speakers atop the Sonic Boom in Redmoon’s new Pilsen space. kind of arts programming, how do people find you?

FM: We show up with a big machine, and we show up many hours in advance. So we start constructing the machine and running the workshops. We gather people to us. We build trust. And then we host celebrations. We don’t just show up and do a show and then leave. We spend time wherever we go and really build trust and relationships with people, and find ways for them to really engage with the experience.

SSW: Someone called the Sonic Boom a “soapbox” during the ceremony. Is that accurate?

FM: Yes! That was the original intention of mine. I love Studs Terkel; I’m that kind of guy. I’m a first amendment guy. I really think you should say what you think, in public places. And express yourself however you want in public spaces. The Sonic Boom was, in my mind, a giant mechanical soapbox. Now, it’s a twenty-first century

interpretation of a soapbox, which is pretty wacko, but nonetheless fairly accurate and cool.

SSW: There’s something fairly steampunk about your aesthetic. Where’s the mechanical inspiration coming from? Why do you reveal your gears?

FM: Our tagline, our motto, our statement, is “engineering wonder,” and we firmly believe that when you reveal to people how things work, it helps them understand bet-

ter two things. First, that our contraption is not in any way magical; it’s a man-made device that has magical results. And secondly, it says to people: “you could make this too.” So one of the major reasons we don’t disguise anything is so that we can say that anyone can make something amazing. You just have to sit down with the stuff and start putting it together and see what happens. ¬

October 9, 2013

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South Side Weekly 17

visual arts

Humility Calls

The Renaissance Society addresses environmental agency and futility by katryce lassle

A

t summer’s end, the swelling anticipation of the new academic year overtakes the UofC campus and, seemingly, all of Hyde Park. But none of the Orientation Week din makes it past the heavy wooden doors of Cobb Hall, mostly empty on the Friday morning before classes begin. In the Renaissance Society gallery on the fourth floor, the only sound that echoes through the space is the metronomic crack of a pickaxe on ice.

“Suicide Narcissus,” the Renaissance Society’s current exhibit, features six installments by eight international artists, each vastly different in medium and execution. One of the two video installments, “Spatial Intervention I,” by artists Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch, is projected on a hanging screen in a dim, naturally-lit space, and features a man in a seemingly endless field of ice chipping away at the spot beneath him with a pickaxe. The sound permeates the entire space with its constant, jarring cracks as the man on the screen fruitlessly whacks away at the ground underneath him. The hole never gets any larger and the expanse of ice never gets any smaller.

“Suicide Narcissus” posits that we are frustratingly ignorant of our privilege as humans to invent our reality; that while our existence on earth is ultimately fleeting, we have the power at hand to determine what physical and environmental legacies we leave behind. “For all of our knowledge,” Hamza Walker, associate curator and education director at the Renaissance Society, asks in the exhibition’s conceptual essay,

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“how well do we understand ourselves, especially in light of our status as a force of nature?”

Perhaps the most intriguing piece in “Suicide Narcissus” is the one that curator Hamza Walker and artist Lucy Skaer try the hardest to prevent us from seeing.

Titled “Leviathan’s Edge,” the piece features the full-sized skeleton of a humpback whale, encased on all four sides in drywall, with only a few vertical three-inch gaps in the walls allowing viewers to peek inside. This construction prevents viewers from seeing the entire skeleton from any angle, forcing them instead to use the visual puzzle pieces they gather to construct the full skeleton in their imaginations. It’s a reminder of the vast world of species that exists in an environment totally uninhabitable to humans. The subject, the whale, is an object of popular fantasy and charity, one people have fantasized about, tracked, killed, imprisoned, and studied. But the strangely-presented skeleton points to the vast disconnect that still exists between humans and the world we’ve tried for so long to understand, suggesting a perpetual divide.

Another piece, Katie Peterson’s “All the Dead Stars,” looks blank from afar. But the large black panel becomes self-explanatory as one approaches it from the entrance.

Up close, thousands of small white dots painted on aluminum create an earth-like map. As the title suggests and the written description confirms, the dots represent all of the recorded dead stars as seen from our perspective on Earth. And while the

october 9, 2013

tom van eynde

A still from “Spacial Intervention I,” a short film by Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch. piece itself is subtle, its message speaks more forcefully: we strive to know more, to explore further, to reach the bottom of the ocean or the edge of the universe, conveniently ignoring that this knowledge can only preserve us for so long.

“Suicide Narcissus” is a minimalist exhibition that is best viewed slowly. The Renaissance Society’s gallery space, which changes drastically from show to show, promotes no specific sequence of viewing.

For “Narcissus,” the entrance is extended with drywall panels on either side. Four rooms flank a central hallway, each one designed specifically for the works it displays.

The gentle encouragement toward choosing paths, making various rounds of the space, and engaging with the pieces in different orders is a subtly effective way for the curator to involve viewers in the overarching discussion that “Suicide Narcissus” attempts to lead. The pieces themselves are powerful enough to conjure heavy mental storm clouds on a sunny end-of-summer day; their arrangement only heightens the sense of gloom.

While this exhibition is up, the Renaissance Society will not be a cheery place. “Suicide Narcissus” reminds its

viewers of their futility, ignorance, and insignificance. In such a way, it challenges: the very representation of those qualities is a call to action. We, as a uniquely insightful and powerful species, must consider how we’d like to be remembered, especially considering that in recent history we’ve grown from blissfully ignorant to painfully aware of our impact on our planet. To Yuri Stone, marketing associate at the Renaissance Society, the exhibition represents a very generation-specific struggle to engage with our environment in a productive way.

“I look at this exhibition very differently than my father would, or my grandfather,” he explains. He’s right, and this sentiment highlights the unique dilemma that we face when trying to create a bright and meaningful future from a history of mistakes.

Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Ave., Cobb Hall 418. Through December 15, Tuesday-Friday, 10am-5pm; Saturday-Sunday, noon-5pm. Free. (773)702-8670. renaissancesociety.org

VISUAL ARTS Torture and Isolation in the CPD The memory of police torture carried out by Chicago police officers under Jon Burge still weighs heavy. “Torture and Isolation in the CPD” explores the cases, which continue to develop through recent court settlements. The artists draw on a combined experience: one was raised in Jon Burge’s Chicago; the other grew up in Iowa with a police officer father. Christopher Urias and Kathy Steichen, printmakers and owners of Uri-Eichen gallery, display foiled prints inspired by the racism, torture, activism and anger surrounding Burge. Uri-Eichen Gallery, 2101 S. Halsted St. Friday, October 11, 6pm-10pm; Saturday, October 19, noon-8pm; Sunday, October 20, noon-6pm. Free. (312) 852-7717. urieichen. com (Eric Green)

Recess For some of us, recess was the only upside to going to school. “Recess,” the upcoming exhibition at the South Side Community Art Center, aims to explore youth, play, and imagination as fundamental and ever-relevant parts of human experience, despite the sometimes-crushing weight of day-to-day life. The “Recess” experience aims to create a space in which artists and viewers can daydream and imagine freely, inspiring creative energy and providing a much-needed break from business as usual. Featured artists include Caitlin Cherry, Krista Franklin, James T. Green, David Leggett, Christina A. Long, Cecil McDonald, Jr., and Avery R. Young as well as artists exhibited as part of SSCAC’s permanent collection. South Side Community Art Center, 3831 S. Michigan Ave. October 11-November 9. Free. (773)373-1026. southsidecommunityartcenter.com (Bailey Zweifel)

The Endangered Species “Beautiful, but without hope,” is Raub Welch’s assessment of “the vanishing black man in America.” Through looming three-dimensional collages, Welch takes on the task of redirecting society’s perception of the black man, one he sees as all too often linked with aggression, simplicity, and thoughtlessness. Above all, he seeks to identify a notion of beauty with the black male subject. Within this framework, Welch tackles themes of masculinity, sexuality, slavery, mental poverty, and, finally, futility. To span these nuances of beauty, Welch turns to collage and pairs portraits of male models with images of nature, Christianity, human anatomy, text, and “relics” of black culture. But the show’s ominous title begs the question: is this simply an elaborate farewell to the beautiful black man, or is there hope after all? DuSable Museum, 740 E. 56th Pl. October 18-March 30. Tuesday-Saturday, 10am–5pm; Sunday, noon-5pm. Free-$10. (773)9470600. dusablemuseum.org (Sasha Tycko)

Light and the Unseen Light—it is the source of all that is visible. A symbol of

clarity, an image of goodness, that bright, guiding speck in the sky. So how do you show that light can illustrate the exact opposite? The Hyde Park Art Center’s newest exhibition, “Light and the Unseen,” highlights the work of artists who use light to explore ideas of vision, the cosmos, and the unknown depths of the human mind, soul, and spirit. Juxtaposition of dark and light, harsh contrasts, and alignment of light in the artwork reveal light’s complex relationship to the human experience, both physically and psychologically. Explore and appreciate the discovery of the unknown through this paradoxical, yet intriguing, artistic theme. Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Through December 1. Monday-Thursday 9am-8pm; Friday-Saturday 9am-5pm; Sunday noon-5pm. Free. (773) 324-5520. hydeparkart.org (Angela Moon)

State of Mind Imagine this: it’s the late 1960s in California and conceptual art has emerged. This is not the stuff of the “midcentury modern” aesthetic; this is counter-culture, avant-garde, and freedom of expression. Away from the art-world galleries of New York, experimentation (of all kinds) was happening in California. This October, the University of California’s Pacific Standard Time initiative and a whole host of institutional partners are bringing their exhibition “State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970” to Chicago. An in-depth survey, this exhibition challenges the very definition of art and artist, as well as the places of academic and institutional structures within the art world. With more than sixty artists and collectives, “State of Mind” will explore the formation and lasting impact of this important strain of modern art.

Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. October 3-Janu-

ary 12. Tuesday-Wednesday, 10am-5pm; Thursday, 10am-8pm; Friday-Sunday, 10am-5pm. Free. (773)702-0200. smartmuseum.uchicago.edu (Meaghan Murphy)

STAGE & SCREEN A Time There Was A composer, conductor, and pianist (and a singularly remarkable Briton), Benjamin Britten is the subject of upcoming documentary “A Time There Was.” Filmmaker Tony Palmer shows the life of this renowned twentieth-century composer in a film that combines biographical elements, musical excerpts, and old rehearsal footage in classic black and white. The film bears witness to Britten’s accomplishments as a composer, his works, and his life-long joy and passion for creating music. As John Ardoin of the New York Times puts it, it is a film that “takes us into the minds of men of music and...is the most absorbing film ever made about a composer.” Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Friday, October 11, 7pm. (773)702-2787. filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu (Angela Moon)

Kevin Coval The words of the young performers at Chicago’s annual Louder Than a Bomb poetry festival reverberate across the nation. They speak of heartache, growing pains, poverty, and triumph. Each year the voices of hundreds of teenagers take center stage as they pour their hearts out at the microphone.

Kevin Coval started it all. Cofounder of Louder Than a Bomb, contributor for WBEZ, and poet in his own right, Coval has helped a generation of Chicagoans speak up in the rhythms of slam. This Saturday, Coval takes the mic himself at the Seminary Co-op to read from his most recent book, “Schtick: These are the Poems, People.” At 4pm, slam poetry meets its maker. Seminary Co-op Bookstore, 5751 S. Woodlawn Ave. Saturday, October 12. 4pm-5pm. Free. (773)752-4381. semcoop.com (Olivia Dorow Hovland)

Red Letter Jesus In what one might call an ambitious thrust at the one-man show genre, Brad Sherrill embodies Jesus Christ, offering a play composed entirely of Jesus’s preachings as recorded in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The play represents a shift for Sherrill, who has previously performed the gospel of John for national audiences. With little division between audience and performer, the show strives to grant the modern attendee the disciple experience, but twenty-first century tools will make an appearance: Sherrill will be joined onstage by a multimedia presentation featuring depictions of Jesus and sweeping shots of Israel, Palestine, and Jordan. The show is ninety-five minutes long with no chance to stretch, but to be fair, Jesus probably didn’t offer an intermission either. Provision Theater, 1001 W. Roosevelt Rd. Through October 13. Friday-Saturday, 8pm; Sunday, 7:30pm. See site for prices. (312)455-0066. provisiontheater.org (Hannah Nyhart)

B-Side Studio Two of the North Side’s quirkier, buzzed-about companies have taken the classic seventies sitcom and brought it live to the South Side. The Inconvenience and the New Colony, with some help from the UofC’s summer residency program, have written four episodes, and they’re performing them live at the Logan Center for the Arts (previous episodes are taped and posted online—live audience laugh-track included). The “sitcom” focuses its energy on applying good writing to an expected plot. The McNamara brothers are both dreamers and schemers, trying to save their South Side recording studio from the brink of bankruptcy by enlisting their assistant, musicians, and their landlord’s wife to record a new brand of “song poems.” “B-Side Studio” captures the slightly antiquated charm of the sitcom—the firecracker dialog, the seventies color palette, the ability to eloquently juggle humor with race relations and national tragedies—without making the whole thing too meta. And with four separate episodes, one show will surely leave you wanting more. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., Theater East. Through October 12.

Friday-Saturday, 8pm. $20. (773)753-4821. thenewcolony.org (Meaghan Murphy)

The Resurrection of Alice Artist Perri Gaffney brings a crowd to the stage at eta Creative Arts Foundation this fall, even though her show is a solo one. In a two-act adaption of her novel by the same name, the artist embodies over a dozen characters. Gaffney switches seamlessly between what feels like a village-full of personalities that orbit around the title character, Alice. The young woman’s path toward college is cut short by the reve-

lation that her parents have arranged her marriage in return for much needed financial stability. Based on the true story of a friend of the author’s mother in rural South Carolina just half a century ago, Gaffney’s performance enthralls rather than preaches, pulling in the audience with every switch of posture and tone. In a story of resilience in the face of a life imposed, the actress’s slew of evocative portrayals is a triumph in and of itself. eta Creative Arts Foundation, 7558 S. South Chicago Ave. Through October 20. Friday-Saturday, 8pm; Sunday, 3pm and 7pm. $30. (773)752-3955. etacreativearts.org (Hannah Nyhart)

The Mountaintop “America is going to hell,” cries a disgruntled Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in a motel room as thunder crashes outside.

The opening minutes of “The Mountaintop” set the tone for Katori Hall’s play, a fictional portrayal of King’s stay at the Lorraine Motel on April 3, 1968, the eve of his assassination.

The play originally premiered in London in 2009 and the latest incarnation, directed by Ron OJ Parson and starring David Alan Anderson as King and Lisa Beasley as the motel maid Camae, runs at Court Theatre through this weekend.

The production retains the night’s tragic elements, achieving a simultaneous sense of both the humanity of King, and the magnitude of his sacrifice, that is easily the play’s greatest triumph. Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Through October 13. Check website for showtimes and pricing. (773)753-4472. courttheatre.org (Jackson Roth)

MUSIC Remembering Jodie Christian Jodie Christian had one of the longest active careers in Chicago jazz, consistently recording and performing throughout the Windy City for nearly sixty years. He was one of the co-founders of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a collective which helped revolutionize the Chicago jazz scene and remains a vital force in both performance and music education today. Last year, Christian was selected to receive the Walter Dyett Lifetime Achievement Award but unfortunately passed away months before the event, leaving his wife to take the honor in his absence. Now, more than a year and half after the legendary pianist’s death, Christian will be receiving a second great honor in the form of a concert commemorating his life.

Brad Goode will be leading a musical tribute to the Chicago jazz pioneer and will be performing alongside Windy City luminaries Marlene Rosenberg, Miguel de la Cerna, Alejandro Urzagaste, George Fludas, and Xavier Breaker. West Pullman Park, 401 W. 123rd St. Friday, October 11, 7pm. Free.

(312)427-1676. jazzinchicago.org (Zach Goldhammer)

Felabration In 2008, the Broadway premiere of “Fela!”—a musical celebrating the life and work of Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti—was met with near universal acclaim. No one’s praise, however, was quite as vociferous as that of Questlove, the drummer for the legendary Roots crew, who sent out a mass email to industry insiders (later reposted on his website, okayplayer.

com) declaring that “Fela!” was “the BEST MUSICAL EVER CREATED” and urged everyone to see the play “IMMMMMMMMMMEEEEEDDDDDDIIAAATLY [sic].” Perhaps some of this enthusiasm has carried over to the creation of this year’s “Felabration” at The Shrine. Questlove, who will be hosting his own DJ set later this week at The Shrine, helped put together a short documentary about Fela’s music which is now posted on the Shrine’s website as a promotional trailer for the event. This year’s annual Felabration will be the fifth hosted by the Shrine and will feature records from Fela and his musical collaborators, all of which will be mixed by DJs Tone B. Nimble & Dee Money.

There will also be performances by Songstress Ugochi and the Ayodele Drum and Dance Ensemble. The Shrine, 2109 S. Wabash Ave. Friday, October 12th, 9pm. +21. Free with RSVP. (312) 753-5700. theshrinechicago.com (Zach Goldhammer)

Curtis Black Quartet This quartet has been playing a regular Sunday night set at Jimmy’s for over twenty-three years. The core members of the group, trumpeter Curtis Black and drummer Doug Mitchell are two men who have long been an integral part of the Hyde Park community. The titular Black has been the Newstips editor for the Community Media Workshop since 1998, while Doug Mitchell, the bearded bard of Hyde Park lore, has worked as an editor for the University of Chicago Press since 1977. Mitchell also helped published one of the seminal books on Chicago jazz, “A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and African-American Experimental Music.” They even played with a few of the AACM musicians back in his undergrad days, when the University’s Reynold’s Club was still a major hub for jazz performance.

Together, Black and Mitchell have used their band’s regular Sunday sets as a proving ground for many of the South Side’s up-and-coming players. Currently, they are performing with Tim Stine on guitar and John Laurel on bass. Jimmy’s (Woodlawn Tap), 1172 E 55th St., Sunday (weekly), 9pm. +21.

Free. (773) 643-5516 sites.google.com/a/curtisblack.net/www/ (Zach Goldhammer)

Flatbush Zombies Since forming in 2010, these drug-obsessed MCs from Brooklyn have been leading the charge to raise NYC hiphop up from the grave. While they have not reached quite the same degree of acclaim as fellow Beast Coast crews, Pro Era and A$AP Mob, they have nonetheless caught a lot of attention for their neo-psychedelic, horror-movie influenced music videos and their heavily experimental approach to rap music. Their second mixtape, “Better Off DEAD,” which dropped at the end of September, shows the group exploring even murkier material than before. Surprisingly, they even take a short break from the drugged-out-terror rap schtick and make an explicitly political turn, lambasting hometown mayor Bloomberg on “Amerikkan Pie.” Come watch the living dead walk their way down Reggies’ stage next Wednesday and witness the future of hip-hop. Reggies, 2105 South State Street. Wednesday October 16th, 7pm. $16-20. (312) 949-0120. reggieslive.com

WHPK Rock Charts WHPK 88.5 FM is a nonprofit community radio station of the University of Chicago, broadcasting to the South Side of Chicago for over sixty years. Once a week, the station’s music directors collect the book of playlist logs, where DJs record each song they play during their shows. They tally up the plays of albums added within the last few months, and rank them according to the number of plays that week.

Compiled by Rachel Schastok and Charlie Rock Artist / Album / Label 1. Rotting Christ / Κατά Τον Δαίμονα Εαυτοΰ / Season of Mist 2. Lord Dying / Revocation / Relapse 3. Armed for Apocalypse / Road Will End / Candlelight 4. Primitive Man / Scorn / Relapse 5. Desert Sessions / Vol. 9 + 10 / Ipecac 6. Unwound / Kis Is Gone / Numero Group 7. True Widow / Curcumambulation / Relapse 8. Nmesh / Nu.wav Hallucinations / AMIDISCS 9. Darkthrone / Underground Resistance / Peaceville 10. White Widows / s/t / Sacrament Music 11. Howl / Bloodlines / Relapse 12. RAGANA / Unbecoming / s/r 13. Vattnet Viskar / Sky Swallower / Century Media 14. L. Pierre / The Island Come True / Melodic 15. Black Tusk / Tend no Wounds / Relapse

October 9, 2013

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South Side Weekly 19