SSW 10.16.13

2 South Side WeeklY ¬ october 16, 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 Fly You Fools

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 Editors John Gamino, Patrick Leow, Spencer Mcavoy, Christopher Riehle Politics Editor Osita Nwanevu Stage & Screen Hannah Nyhart Editor Music and Zach Goldhammer Video Editor Visual Arts Editor Katryce Lassle Contributing Editors Ari Feldman, Josh Kovensky, Sharon Lurye, Meaghan Murphy Photo Editor Lydia Gorham Layout Editor Olivia Dorow Hovland Online Editor Gabi Bernard

At Sunday’s Chicago Marathon actor Sean Astin, of “Goonies,” “Rudy,” and “Lord of the Rings” fame, finished with a nothing-record time of four hours and thirty-one minutes. Dennis Kimetto, a former Kenyan farmer (we’re sure he and Samwise talked shop about growing seasons in Middle Earth and Eastern Africa) won the day with a Chicago course-record of 2:03:45. Only three people have ever run 26.2 miles faster than Kimetto. But can Kimetto save the Goonies or single-handedly drag a Hobbit up the lava-soaked slopes of Mount Doom? Probably not.

At Auction Banksy—the world’s best-paid, perpetually pixelated street vandal— made waves last week when he announced that he was schlepping to New York from his London lair and taking up a kind of artistic residency on Manhattan’s streets. Cue the media circus: CNN abandoned Boehner to break in for special coverage, and Colbert publically invited Banksy to deface his studio. Any surface graced with this arty dodger’s spray-paint can go for hundreds of thousands of dollars online. The press frenzy intensified when Banksy, who combines a flair for the dramatic with Vader–esque voice distortion, took to YouTube to report that he had sold several canvases to unsuspecting tourists for sixty bucks a pop. The only American customer he identified was “a man from Chicago” who strolled up to the artist’s accomplice, said something to the effect of, “I just need something for the walls,” and walked away with four pieces. If he hung on to the stencils, he can probably spring for a Lake Forest roof to go with them. If not, the manhunt is on. Your move, Art Institute.

Calling Roll 496 elementary students from closed CPS schools are missing. They

Senior Writer Stephen Urchick Staff Writers Bess Cohen, Emily Holland, Jason Huang, Jack Nuelle Staff Photographer Camden Bauchner Business Manager

are not enrolled in CPS, Chicago charter, or any other form of school, unless “to be determined” is some newfangled pedagogical institution.

The reports obtained by WBEZ in an open records request, also indicate that hundreds of schools across the system are now receiving students that were meant to enroll in designated “welcoming schools.”

So much for all the fanfare about increased investment, Safe Passage programs, and better academics. Un-bolstered by the improvements touted for official welcoming schools, some receiving schools perform even worse than those shuttered. As for the 496 missing students, WBEZ writes, “Officials have said district employees have called, written and gone door to door looking for them.” Maybe they just need some new bells.

The Paper Chase This past year Tom Dart, the Cook County Sheriff, lost track of three prisoners. Among those getting a brief and unexpected chance to stretch his legs was a man in the middle of a sixty-year murder sentence. At a Wednesday press conference, Dart blamed Cook County Clerk Dorothy Brown. He claimed that it wasn’t law enforcement’s fault that inmates were lost in the bureaucratic shuffle and released.

Dart demanded digitalization, insisting that Cook County’s carbon-copy paperwork is shameful. Equipped with an annual budget of $100 million, Brown’s explanation for why a system documenting 10,000 inmates is still stuck in the Jazz Age is that her requests have met some vague resistance. A statement reassured WBEZ that the Clerk’s office was “very much in the digital age.” Files for a single inmate can sometimes be ten-inches thick. Dart is asking questions.

“When do you think the last time this changed? [sic] Probably the 1920s, 30s maybe?” Armed with that tranquilizing wit, Dart might just work miracles

In this issue

Harry Backlund

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

high rise stories

east side schools

“ You are invited inside.”

“When they built this school, they should have thought ahead.”

emily holland............4

bess cohen..................8

Contact the editor at editor@southsideweekly.com

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

Cover: Photo by Camden Bauchner. Design by Bea Malsky.

Correction: Due to an editing error, the wrong version of last week’s cover story was placed in print. We regret the typos.

extinct entities

“Keep going! Dance for your ancestors!”

dove barbanel..........13

kevin coval’s schtick

“His are poems that feel like they would not suffer from the addition of a beat.”

jake bittle................15

ping-pong club

“A good shot has something of three aspects: power, spin, and surprise.”

brian ng....................11

groun(d)

“I’m a black boy with a bag of candy. You roamin’ with a gun.”

lauren gurley..........12

jack cella

south loop oysters

“I was sort of overwhelmed, but also enthusiastic about what this said about the place and life around here.”

“But the oyster house’s oysters, unsurprisingly, still shone the brightest.”

john gamino..............16

chelsea leu...............18

October 16, 2013 ¬ South Side Weekly 3

Where People Live Stories from the projects By emily holland

illustrations courtesy of voice of witness and artist julien lallemand

P

ublic housing in one of the most prosperous nations on Earth shouldn’t become the backdrop of a human rights crisis. And yet it is so—everyone knew it was for nearly as long as Chicago’s housing projects existed. “High Rise Stories,” compiled by Audrey Petty, tells of the pitfalls of the projects, straight from the men and women who lived there.

Narratives are culled from interviews with people young and old, who once lived in the city’s now defunct high-rise housing projects.

Generally synonymous with gangs and ghettoes, “the projects” used to have an unwelcoming aura. To outsiders, it seemed as if too few people got out, and no one who could avoid them ever went in. Unfortunately, this was exactly what allowed the crisis to proliferate.

Donnell Furlow, one of the interviewees and a former resident of Rockwell Gardens, a Near West Side development taken down in 2006, might have said it best: “I didn’t think nobody really cared about what we went through in the projects.”

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Names like Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor Homes became (and still are) shorthand for institutionalized poverty and despair. But their former inhabitants have arresting and singular stories, narratives of joy, sorrow, loss, and redemption that are as important to the human catalogue as any.

And now, after the demolition of the high rises and the forced diaspora that ensued, outsiders are finally beginning to listen.

In a way, “High Rise Stories” represents a world slowly being rebuilt.

“You are invited inside,” Petty writes

at the end of her introduction. In as many chapters, twelve different survivors of the high-rise projects do just that, sharing family histories and the difficulties inherent in their living situations, confiding ambitions and the ways these dreams were fostered or quashed. A team of interviewers, including Petty, collected the stories, which she later edited. During a panel at the Hull House Museum, Petty said she had envisioned a book containing the thoughts of the interviewees on public housing, but it turned out most of them wanted to talk

literature

about their families instead. They wanted to speak about whom they were proud of, whom they’d been disappointed by, whom they loved and how much. We get a collection of beautifully rendered portraits, from which individual personalities emerge.

A surprising theme across the interviews is the positive sense of community the speakers often felt in their homes, which, despite the evident volatility of the projects, made them ambivalent about finally leaving them behind. Dolores Wilson, age eighty-three, tells of how her son Michael used to beg to go to church with their neighbors, the Montanes family, who had “four or five” children themselves.

When Wilson’s husband, a custodian at their home in Cabrini-Green, was transferred to a different building in the complex, the family had to move, Wilson “cried the whole time” at the prospect of leaving her other nextdoor neighbor, Queenie.

Dolores and Queenie “were like sisters,” and Queenie’s entire family, along with some other “guys in the neighborhood,” helped the Wilsons transfer their possessions.

Another Cabrini resident, Paula Hawkins, described it as being “like a family reunion all the time.” She “knew nearly everyone in the building,” and had a neighbor named Carmen who was always making homemade ice cream next door. Several others describe children being left unattended, but just as many recount how easy it was to secure childcare in a community about as well connected and close-knit as the projects could be.

The women, many of whom became mothers in their teens, often shared the same concerns. Extended families lived in close quarters, and multi-generational households were the norm. Hawkins says of her grandmother: “She stayed in our life, she was in our business, and I just thank her.”

Nevertheless, darkness plagued the buildings and the lives of their young people, and it is these sad tales that “High Rise Stories” tells most prominently. One of the

most memorable accounts is that of Furlow, thirty-one, who didn’t realize anyone outside his community cared about public housing residents. His account is gripping; it shows how so much trouble could begin so easily. He speaks honestly about his inculcation into gang and drug culture at the hands of his older brother’s friends. He was eleven the first time he smoked a joint, he says. “I’ll come over there and peek around the couch at [his brother’s friends] and they’ll be like, ‘Hey, come here, lil nigga’...

They give me the joint. I look at the joint.

And I think, I’m going to do what you just did. I’m going to hit the joint. I’m gonna inhale it. I’m gonna exhale it.” By the time he was in high school Furlow was “learning how to clean guns, how to shoot a gun, how to hide a gun, how to bag up cocaine and how to shake dope.”

“The streets” and his neighborhood were “the world to [him];” from the time he was “three years old, maybe four,” he knew no other.

Dawn Knight, forty-eight, had known another world. She tells the story of her family moving into the Robert Taylor Homes when she was thirteen.

She “didn’t understand the elevator and the hallways smelling like urine, the writing on the walls, men just standing under the building. It was scary.” In 1984, her little brother was “shot dead in an elevator.” In fact, several interviewees recount taking the stairs day after day because the elevators were often broken or unsafe. Police were a constant presence but they were unlikely to interfere in violent encounters unless it was a matter of protecting their own. After a policeman was shot and killed in 1991, Knight recalls, officers conducted a door-to-door apartment search, but they did so in the wee hours of the morning and without warrants.

Sabrina Nixon, a former Cabrini-Green resident, put it this way: “The thing about ambulance and police at Cabrini is that when there were reports of

shooting, they’d come eventually, but they didn’t come right away...[Shootings were] the norm, so to speak. I’m sure that’s how a lot of [the authorities] looked at it. ‘They’ll just kill each other off.’ They didn’t care.”

Attitudes like those toward the police officers and the general distance between the city apart and the rest of Chicago ring loudly throughout the narratives in “High Rise Stories.” “We just didn’t like outsiders,” Furlow says. Residents knew that the police, at least, “are always going to look at [people from the projects] as gang members or terrorists.” Knight remembers being asked by a reporter at one point which Robert Taylor building she lived in, and which was “the worst.” “This let me know,” Knight says, “how the outside world really saw us.” She later moved to Minneapolis, and was frightened to see a black man “hugged up” with a white woman, thinking the police were going to interfere. She had never seen an interracial couple before.

The book, of course, arrives in the wake of the Plan for Transformation, the Chicago Housing Authority’s initiative to dismantle the massive high-rises in favor of “Housing Choice Vouchers” (which subsidize rentals in the private market) and planned mixed-income housing. By 1998, when a vast number of Chicago’s public housing units failed viability inspection, the effects of what is known as “warehousing the poor” could no longer be ignored. “In so many critical ways, place matters in Chicago,” Petty writes. The intuition behind the plan and the vouchers is to give families the opportunity to occupy safer and more diverse communities: to alleviate, somewhat, the stranglehold of functional segregation, which continues to grip the city today.

Still, the accounts in “High Rise Stories” demonstrate that this, too, has not been without its problems, and that more attention is needed to help the projects’

former residents succeed. The resettlement process was fraught with its own small tragedies; Dolores Wilson describes how she was ordered to pack up and leave so hastily and with so little assistance that she wasn’t able to keep many personal mementoes, such as wedding pictures and trophies that her husband’s marching band had won. Ashley Cortland and Tiffany Tucker, like many other former project residents with Housing Choice Vouchers, moved out only to find their new buildings had been foreclosed on. For Tucker’s family, this happened “again and again.”

But probably the biggest dilemma caused by the scattering of the project communities is the loss of the few positive aspects of living there: the social bonds and resources that came from having family and friends so close at hand.

M i x e d-i ncome communities are not inherently better at increasing all sources of opportunity.

Lloyd “Peter” Haywood, a former resident of Stateway Gardens, reports that his new neighbors are unfriendly, and find him suspicious. After “figuring out CHA people were going to be living there,” one of them, a “white guy” of “a different class, different income,” put a “for sale” sign in his window. As for Stateway, Peter says it was “people helping people.”

People helping people—this is the simple mission of books like “High Rise Stories.” It may not be a social program or a housing subsidy, but the collection of interviews nevertheless offers something important. It encourages a dialogue, bringing people of different backgrounds together to listen and share. It validates the experience of those who, for a long time, have been disenfranchised and ignored. Perhaps now the outsiders will start to care a little more. ¬

October 16,¬2013 ¬ South Side Weekly 5 October 16, 2013 South Side Weekly 5

How the South Side Votes

by Osita Nwanevu

illustrations by hanna petroski

Chicago’s South Side aldermen are united in their support for greater economic development in their wards. But substantive differences exist between them on how to achieve that goal.

Big-box retailers, the use of tax increment financing, gentrification, and the presence of affordable housing are all among the most contentious areas of the city’s economic policy.

These quotes illustrate the stakes the South Side holds in debates over such economic issues.

The final part of a three-part series.

Pat Dowell 3rd Ward

Roderick Sawyer 6th Ward

Howard Brookins Jr. 21st Ward

Leslie Hairston 5th Ward

“I reject the notion that we need, as a matter of absolute fact, other demographic populations to improve our community.

We welcome diversity of population into Bronzeville to live in our residential areas and also to invest in our economy, but overcoming segregation has always been more difficult in black communities than in the general population. So, it is unfair to compare the transformation of predominantly black communities like Bronzeville to other changing communities like Pilsen.”

—On the “non-white” gentrification of Bronzville, a historically African-American neighborhood, January 9, 2013 (Chicago Magazine)

“I was a bit frustrated…this past summer with not being involved directly with the summer youth Chicago program that was administered by the mayor’s office. None of those jobs came through our office… but at the last minute Jackie Collins and Dodd Trotter came through with jobs from the state and we were able to employ about sixty youth in the 6th Ward. But I am concerned about that because that was a stroke of good luck.”

—On the 6th Ward’s underrepresentation in the One Summer Chicago program, which connects city youth with summer job opportunities, October 2, 2013 (CAN TV)

“Back at the height of the real estate boom, when everybody appeared to be working…

African-American unemployment in the city of Chicago was at seventeen percent.”

—On structural unemployment in the city, October 9, 2013 (CAN TV)

“We’re talking about human life here. And we’re talking about deplorable living conditions.”

—On conditions in some buildings in the Chicago Housing Authority’s “Housing Choice Voucher” program, which aims to provide subsidies for affordable housing to low income families, July 1, 2013 (Chicago Reporter)

Dowell is the member of the City Council’s Paul Douglas Alliance, named after the liberal former alderman, Senator, and mayoral candidate. The Alliance lists support for “worker’s rights including the right to organize, living wages, and benefits” as a plank of its platform. She was also a chief critic of the way Mayor Emanuel intended to set up the Chicago Infrastructure Trust, an ambitious plan to attract private investment for public projects that the city could not afford to fund.

Roderick Sawyer is co-chair of the City Council’s Progressive Reform Coalition, which supports the establishment of “an economic policy focused creation and preservation of living-wage and prevailing-wage jobs with adequate benefits, leave and security to support a family.” He was also the primary sponsor of a recent ordinance calling for greater oversight of the privatization of city services, expressing “significant concern” over the lack of scrutiny paid to privatizing parking meters and the tolls on the Chicago Skyway.

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Brookins has been a long-time supporter of bringing big-box retailers like WalMart and the jobs they could provide to the South Side. In 2011, Brookins was elected chair of the Council’s Black Caucus after the previous chair, 27th Ward Alderman Walter Burnett, was pushed out of his seat over his aggressive advocacy for new affordable housing.

Hairston is a supporter of the Chicago Alliance to End Homelessness’s “Plan 2.0: A Home for Everyone.” In addition to decreasing the roughly 6,500 strong homeless population in the city, this initiative also calls for an increase in the amount of affordable housing stock, for housing to become available to former criminal offenders, and the rapid return of the homeless and temporarily displaced to more permanent housing situations.

politics

Will Burns 4th Ward

Toni Foulkes 15th Ward

Michael Chandler 24th Ward

Willie Cochran 20th Ward

“It doesn’t make sense to build communities exclusively of low- and moderate-income people. The 4th Ward remains a unique place because of its racial and economic diversity.”

—On his reluctance to support new affordable housing units in the 4th Ward, April 24, 2013 (Streetwise)

“People buy cars, apartments because they can afford it. Then hours can get cut to five a week.”

—On her support for worker protections and the unionization of Sears employees at the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago (WOCC)/Fight for 15 rally, July 15, 2013 (Progress Illinois)

“The most important thing about that character in the community is that they have stabilized the community to the point where I can advocate for reinvestment and redevelopment.”

—On the movement of middle-class gentrifiers to Englewood, February 12, 2013 (Marketplace)

Burns has been a booster of the University of Chicago-led Harper Court development project in his 4th Ward and has defended the use of TIF funds for the project. He is also the chief political force behind the current construction of mixed-income housing units and Wal-Mart at 47th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue.

Last year, Foulkes was one of seven aldermen to vote against a $1.7 billion dollar infrastructure trust fund proposed by Mayor Emanuel on the grounds that Englewood residents had little to reason to “trust” the proposal, citing a lack of clear objectives.

She was also the primary sponsor of a 2012 resolution that expressed support for the Organization United for Respect at WalMart.

“A lot of it is that you have these communities that are very poor, times are hard, and people get desperate. The stakeholders need to bring some economic justice to our communities. Even back when Martin Luther King was staying on the West Side, he was saying it would take $2 billion to turn around. He couldn’t do it, and he was a much better man than I am.”

—On the relationship between poverty and violence on the South Side, May 16, 2013 (Chicago Reader) Chandler’s 24th Ward hosts “Citizen Task Force Committees” tasked with crafting policy proposals and recommendations on a number of different policy areas including “Economic Development” and “Housing.”

Cochran has been a key booster of the Chicago Sports Village, a facility in his ward planned to open in the autumn of 2014 that would provide space for various recreational activities and athletics including fencing, bowling, track and field, and BMX. The project would be primarily financed through TIF funds, and supporters estimate it could create as many as 800 jobs.

October October 16, 201316, ¬ 2013 South ¬ Side South Weekly Side Weekly 7 7

Groundbreaking

At a polluted lot on 104th Street, a plan to ease crowded schools

By bess cohen

photos by camden bauchner

Addams Elementary School was designed for 480 students. Around 866 are currently enrolled.

A

t three o’clock on a recent Friday afternoon, the playground at Jane Addams Elementary School exploded with action.

Pent-up energy from the day and week came pouring out of the small building and stuffy trailers that make up the East Side school as sprinting students, visiting alumni, and chatting families gathered in the open lot surrounding Addams’ small jungle gym.

The grandmother of an Addams student pointed at the trailers. “This used to be a playground,” she said. “When they built this school, they should have thought ahead.” One of her daughters, a 2005 graduate of the school, nodded beside her.

At Addams as well as at Gallistel Language Academy, a magnet elementary

school four blocks north at 104th Street and Ewing Avenue, trailers have been erected to serve as satellite classrooms, an initiative to relieve the overcrowded schools.

Addams is a single-floor building meant for 480 students, but about 866 students are currently enrolled, putting it at 180 percent capacity. And Gallistel, at 193 percent capacity, is the fifth-most crowded school in the city. The school had to place many of its 1,300 students in rented spaces nearby, including the top floor of St. Francis de Sales High School, a two-block walk from the main campus. Students must go back and forth between buildings throughout the day.

The most recent school report cards, published in September, place Gallistel on probation, a designation that is in part due

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to the limited resources available for students there. The mother of a sixth grader at Gallistel said that her son’s teacher did not allow students to bring textbooks home for homework because they didn’t have enough copies to risk the books not being returned.

As the only two elementary schools in the East Side, a sliver of land that runs between the Calumet River and the Indiana state line, Addams and Gallistel have been overcrowded since the nineties. On September 15, however, Mayor Emanuel held a brief press conference at Gallistel to announce that the city would build a new school five blocks east, at 104th Street and Indianapolis Avenue.

To the parents, children, and teachers assembled there, he announced, “Since the early nineties, people have been talking

about adding a new school. And we’ve been deferring and deferring. Well, the days of deferring are over.”

T

he site of the new school—a culde-sac at the end of tree-lined 104th Street—is empty, though a few years ago it held a gas station. A single sidewalk separates the fallen fence of the lot from roaring Indianapolis Avenue, the highway that divides the East Side from the industrial tip of Indiana; to the east, the smoke stacks of a power plant can be seen through the smog of the Chicago Skyway.

The city purchased the land in 2009 from relatives of former 10th Ward Alderman Edward Vrdolyak. Known as “Fast Eddie,” Vrdolyak had been a longtime powerbroker in the 10th Ward, which con-

education from state funds; Alderman Pope, on the other hand, said that it could cost up to $65 million.

Pope attested that he worked to establish a TIF district in the ward to raise money for the project in recent years, but it “was not robust enough to be the answer.”

With state funding now in place, Pope insists that a new school is the best solution to the East Side’s overcrowding problem.

“The state has come up with the money, and I think it makes sense.”

A

tains all of the East Side, until he was sentenced to ten months in federal prison in 2011 for arranging to profit illegally from a Gold Coast real estate deal.

As the conviction was only the most recent in a long string of charges and complaints against Vrdolyak—the seventy-sixyear-old has been censured multiple times for misconduct as a lawyer, and in 1960 was briefly suspected of attempted murder— some community members were suspicious of the city’s purchase.

Suspicions were only fueled by environmental concerns surrounding the property. In addition to the air pollution from the Skyway, underground gasoline storage tanks remain from the lot’s years as a gas station. Andrew Mason, a spokesperson for the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, has confirmed that as recently as July 2011, “soil samples showed a small, but still significant reading of benzene” coming from one leaking 5,000-gallon tank buried at the site.

Benzene, a carcinogen found in gasoline, can contaminate both underground water wells and the air. State law requires that the contamination be cleaned up before the school is built, and Mason says that the city has hired an environmental consultant to begin the remediation process. Once the tanks are removed and the

land is deemed clean by the Illinois EPA, a “No Further Remediation” letter will be issued, and construction can commence.

Speaking on the phone last week, 10th Ward Alderman John Pope called many of the controversies that have sprung up around the project “non-issues,” brought up during the 2011 mayoral and aldermanic elections as “political footballs” to complicate a project that was necessary for the East Side.

Alderman Pope dismissed Vrdolyak’s connection to the site. “I don’t care who holds the property,” Pope said. “[People are just] trying to stir things up.” As for the site’s polluted past, he pointed out that tainted land is not uncommon in Chicago.

“We’ve been at this for probably ten years,” said Pope, who has been alderman of the ward since 1999. Getting a new school in the area has been “one of my highest priorities,” he said. He and CPS expect construction to begin in 2014.

The new school on the East Side is not the only project underway to address overcrowding in Chicago’s public schools.

CPS published a Request for Proposals in August to kick off the process of contracting new charter school operators to ease overcrowded schools. A list of priority communities—including Midway, McKinley Park, Little Village, and Ash-

burn—are slated for new charter schools; the East Side is not on the list.

Rather than building a new school, however, some parents of Gallistel and Addams students have suggested simply expanding the existing schools. But both Pope and a spokesperson at the mayor’s office ruled this idea out as more costly than building a new school.

“That much density doesn’t work,” Pope said. “That model does not fit anything.”

Both the Gallistel and Addams buildings were built in the early twentieth century, and Pope declared making certain improvements to such old structures “physically impossible.” CPS has already shelled out millions of dollars to rent the overflow spaces for Gallistel, making the use of these spaces difficult to sustain. CPS’s $665 million deficit raises the stakes.

Many of the roadblocks in the story of this new school, Pope said, were financial.

Clearing the land to begin work on the new school required an initial investment of $7 to $8 million dollars, and the available money necessary to continue the project has come and gone.

Estimates for the project as a whole differ. City spokesperson Rachel Kruer stated that the project will cost approximately $35 million, much of it coming

ll of this, though—the moral, financial, and environmental concerns, the back and forth between policymakers, the decisions about what “makes sense”—is not manifested back on the crowded playground at Addams Elementary.

The prevailing response among parents was that they had either heard nothing about the new school or had only heard vague rumors. A mother at Addams who, like many others, spoke mostly in Spanish, said that she had heard rumors of a new school to relieve Addams, but rumors only.

“I’d like a paper telling us what is happening,” she said as her daughter ran up to her, ready to head home.

I mentioned the new school to an eighth grader near the jungle gym and his face lit up. “Oh yeah,” he said, “I heard it was gonna be a Catholic school.”

When I spoke to Assistant Principal Daniel Alvarez, he shook his head and fidgeted with his keys, saying that the administrators of the school don’t know anything more than the parents.

Cipriano, who didn’t give his last name, has owned Jalpa Auto Repair on 103rd Street and Indianapolis for twenty years. He said he had not been approached about the school that will share a parking lot with back wall of his garage. “The ground was shaking” when the old structures were demolished on the site, he said.

“We just hear it is going to open, but we don’t know when.”

This uncertainty is all too familiar a feeling in the playgrounds and classrooms of Chicago’s schools. In the recent school closings, community meetings were organized in all of the areas at risk of being affected by the district’s actions. Meetings were meant to be forums for community input, but a two-minute time limit on individual comments, among other limitations, caused many parents, teachers, and students to feel that their input was not taken into account when the final decisions were made.

One Gallistel mother put her feelings

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bluntly. “When you’re poor and don’t speak English, what you say don’t matter.”

Alderman Pope says that the city will hold a similar round of community meetings to discuss the options for parents leading up to the opening of the new school.

Some aren’t optimistic that these meetings, like those held before the closures, will have an effect.

Sue Garza, a counselor at Addams and an area vice president for the Chicago Teachers Union, reported that attendance at Addams’ Local School Council meeting last week was higher than usual. It was parent, teacher, and student input that made the meeting go on for almost five hours.

“They’re worried about the boundaries, about who’s going to be cut out of Jane Addams,” she said.

They’re also worried about what will happen to the existing schools. Though Kruer says “the city and CPS are one hundred percent committed to upgrades to the current buildings,” Alderman Pope found it necessary to clarify.

“I cannot honestly, rightfully say that the old school will get all the bells and whistles [that the new school will],” he said. “We are looking for capital dollars to improve Gallistel, but there are still additional needs.”

That prospect outrages many community members, Garza included. “That’s basically saying Gallistel is a lost cause—so

what happens to them?”

“We basically have been left in the dark,” Garza says. “Two months ago the TIF money was taken away and it wasn’t going to happen, and two days before the press conference it wasn’t going to happen.”

Garza also expressed concerns for teachers at Addams and Gallistel, grounding her skepticism about what CPS officials are saying now in the events of the past year.

When more than 2,000 CPS teachers and staff lost their jobs this summer, Addams’ lost seven teachers, leaving the school with three empty classrooms and forcing the students that would fill those classrooms into other, more crowded classrooms. Addams’ kindergarten classes have about thirty-four students each, despite CPS’s stated commitment to capping classes at twenty-eight.

Having mentioned this, Garza then did some quick math. If the new school relieves Addams of 400 students and Gallistel of 700, the schools would lose nine and twenty teaching positions, respectively.

“The union wants to guarantee that those teachers follow the students,” she said.

She also expressed concern that this effort to relieve overcrowding may set off a vicious cycle of overcrowded classes being relieved and then being deemed underutilized. “We don’t want to be told we’re underutilized.” Nothing yet suggests

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that there is a great chance of this—in fact, CPS has placed a five-year moratorium on school closings. Considering the tide of closings in the past year, however, it’s no surprise that such a possibility is on educators’ minds.

I

n the coming months, CPS will work with the Public Building Commission to design a three-story school building with room for 1,200 students. The design is not yet complete, but will include “physical and acoustical barriers...to create more separation and buffer the noise” from Indianapolis Avenue, and entrances on the west side of the building to avoid the street’s congestion.

Groundbreaking will not begin until the Illinois EPA gives its clearance, but if construction does begin in 2014, the school’s doors are expected to open in fall 2016. According to Alderman Pope, as the school’s opening approaches, “the [attendance] boundaries will be drawn based on most current demographic information to ensure that they’re as beneficial as possible,” meaning that they will be drawn to ensure the target number of students are transitioned to the new school.

Garza, who lives a block away from Addams, suggested making the new school a middle school for the sixth through eighth grades, a move that would, she said, relieve overcrowding in the elementary

schools and make the transition that comes with having a new school in the neighborhood more straightforward. Students could graduate from Addams and Gallistel, move on to this hypothetical new middle school, and then attend nearby George Washington High School or a magnet school elsewhere in the city. It would not disrupt students’ learning in the same way that changing schools mid-elementary school might.

When asked if she had presented this idea to CPS, Garza’s response was one of exasperation. “Nothing’s been presented formally because no one knows who to present it to,” she said.

Garza is doubtful that the many processes that will be undertaken to improve Chicago’s schools will be, as CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett puts it, “an open conversation with the community.”

Garza conceded, however, that the city is organizing forums for community input. “Barbara Byrd-Bennett is forming community meetings for hearings about overcrowding,” she said. “So we can wait to hear what they have to say.”

On the playground at Addams, though, parents are skeptical.

Still standing next to her daughter, the grandmother pointed again at the school.

“I really don’t know what their plan is,” she said. “I just think they don’t think ahead.” ¬

Ping-Pong Diplomacy by brian ng

B

ehind an ajar back door, two graying men play Chinese chess on a wooden board. The small room, held by a foam ceiling and walls of propped-up green acrylic boards, is the home of the Chicago Chinese Table Tennis Club, safely tucked away on West 23rd Street.

Still, says club founder Phil Wong, the club is no secret. (“I think you’re the sixth reporter to come along.”) His chess opponent proudly announces that he is an alumnus of the University of Chicago, a graduate student who assisted Nobel laureate Yuan T. Lee on studies of chemical kinetics, in which beams of molecules collided to demonstrate properties of chemical reactions.

“But doing the research needed clearance, and I wasn’t a citizen,” he says, “So I quit.” All of this occurred decades ago, back when America maintained few connections to mainland China. “Around 1971, the year of Nixon’s Ping-Pong Diplomacy,” he says, “the Maroon devoted an entire issue to table tennis.”

Behind him, on the two Ping-Pong tables that occupy most of the club’s spartan confines, particles congregate and collide. The white ball becomes inseparable from its trajectory; arms swing and jut; legs lurch and leap; sneakers squeak as they are dragged on the floor. The players, clad in a uniform of stained sweatshirts and headbands, are mostly Chinese, many of them well beyond middle age, and most of their returns strong and unforgiving. Wit rules here, a wit that manifests itself in the sparse chatter between points.

“See. You’ve improved so much.”

“Eh.” “You should’ve seen yourself two years ago, trying to beat your brother-in-law in such poor form.”

parks & rec

Waiting challengers sit on the benches, nodding and doling out applause to spectacular spars. The club is small enough to run on honor, not reservations—the losing player is switched out after each match, and even then players rarely have to wait for more than two matches. Whiteboards propped against the wall notate the status of members’ dues—six months of down payment warrants a key to the premises.

Wong came to Chicago in 1959, taking classes at UIC and working in a factory at Bell Labs. During the sixties, he began taking up table tennis seriously and joined amateur tournaments in different cities. The club began around 1993, when a basement lot opened.

“I was friends with the landlord and gained his trust to operate the facilities,” says Wong.

A manila folder in a drawer stores photos of the venues they have occupied in search of low rent, and contains more photos of members posing with top-ranked players. “We’re for community more than for profit,” Wong continues. “Once we received enough members, we lowered the monthly fee from $50 to $30.”

On the Ping-Pong table, the battle continues. Kris, a middle-aged player from Bulgaria, tall and bulky in his neon sweatshirt, is characterized by Wong as “our best non-Chinese player.” He started playing at twelve, “considered to be quite late,” and started coming regularly four years ago. “When I routinely got my butt kicked,” Kris adds. We watch the battle from the bench.

“Age isn’t really an issue,” he says. “What matters is experience and control. A good shot has something of three aspects: power, spin, and surprise. Each shot has a different amount of each characteristic.”

Kris says that the club has provided him a forum in which to develop his skills. “There aren’t a lot of young players here, but this is where they should be if they’re serious,” he says. “The players here are not just good but unique. Their technique is often unorthodox, not the kind you would teach. It’s special that balls return to you as if bearing signatures, as if no other player could have performed them.” ¬

Great Minds Click Alike by amelia dmowska

A

s the overhead lights slowly fade away, the first photograph is placed on the glowing display case, a structure that serves as an easel, both lighting and framing the piece. A hush descends on the Washington Park Fieldhouse, subduing the cries, hugs, and sounds of kisses on cheeks that filled the space moments ago.

A middle-aged woman holds prints in front of the light and calls out their titles one by one while judges examine the photographs on offer: a disparate array of images that includes portraits of Chicago blues musicians, reclining lions, boat docks, flower petals, and skyscrapers.

About every other month, on a Tuesday night, the Washington Park Camera Club hosts a friendly photography competition. It’s a chance for members to both showcase and constructively critique their current work. During typical meetings, the members share their knowledge about photography by discussing various camera techniques, hosting “how-to” workshops, and organizing photo-taking outings to areas like the Morton Arboretum, forty minutes west of the city in Lisle, IL. The Camera Club, founded in 1955, is the oldest primarily African-American photography club in Chicago. Although the meetings have always been focused on the serious discussion of photography, the thirty members, who are generally middle-aged and older, also treat each other like an old family, snacking on chips and exchanging smiles, cheering various camera brands and booing the mention of others.

“This club is an outlet for people of like minds,” says Duane Savage, the club’s president, who joined four years ago in order to pursue his side interest in photography. “It’s

for anyone interested at any level, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a master photographer. It’s about providing instruction for camera techniques and sharing a passion.”

The members converge on Washington Park from all over Chicago to share this passion, predominantly from areas close by, but also from the south suburbs and the North Side. The club’s oldest member and historical committee chairman, Fred Loft, grew up in the area and has been part of the club for forty-two years.

While its character hasn’t changed much over time, the club is working on many new technological improvements. They’re currently planning the renovation of the fieldhouse’s now-unused darkroom into a digital print lab. The members are also discussing creating a new, independent offshoot of the club specifically designed for youth on the South Side.

They plan on lending out cameras and digital equipment to teenagers so that they can document life on their streets and in their homes.

Support seems to be the club’s central motif. Cheers, applause, and embraces burst into the room once more when the judges announce the winning image in the competition. The award goes to Philip Thomas for a dramatic portrait of a shirtless muscular man shrouded in shadows, whose upward gaze draws the viewer’s eye and creates a tense, striking composition. As the competition concludes, the meeting ends as it began, with warmth, light, and friendships that develop like photographs. illustrations by isabel ochoa gold October October 16, 201316, ¬ 2013 South ¬ Side South Weekly Side Weekly 11 11

Were You There?

Trayvon Martin at the UofC’s Arts Incubator

By Lauren Gurley

“I

’m a black boy with a bag of candy. You roamin’ with a gun.” These are the words that anyone sitting on the Garfield Green Line station platform on Saturday night heard emanating from the Arts Incubator across the street.

These words are also the lyrics from a song called “groun(d),” a tribute to Trayvon Martin composed by Avery R. Young, who led upwards of a hundred people in a performance that included singing, swaying, wailing, laughing, stomping, and clapping.

There on the border of Hyde Park—one of the whitest and safest neighborhoods on the South Side—and Washington Park— one of the blackest and most violent— it was hard not to be reminded of the conditions of Trayvon Martin’s death.

Avery R. Young, an exuberant and well-dressed artist who, at thirty-nine years old, can’t sit still, is one of the current artists-in-residence for the UofC’s Arts and Public Life initiative. His latest project, “groun(d),” which came to fruition on Saturday night, is both a memorial to Trayvon Martin and a protest of the questionable circumstances surrounding his death. “I heard about the story [Martin’s] and I knew I had to respond,” Young writes in an interview, published by the Arts Incubator.

The three-hour performance was inspired by the jazz and gospel of twenties and thirties “race records.” In song after song, Young and two of his collaborators urged audience members to join along in the repetitive refrains. One of the pieces that referenced black hangings had audience members rocking back and forth in their seats, repeating the line “Were you there?” Another, the phrase: “Stand right here. Stand my ground. Go nowhere.”

“This is music to represent us as a peo-

ple, no matter what happens to us,” Young said, wiping his forehead off with a paper towel after a performance that had him stomping his boots and jumping up and down. Some of the pieces seemed unrelated to Martin’s death and more a promotion of Young’s latest album, but nobody seemed to mind.

The opening also drew the audience to the unveiling of Young’s installation pieces, dedicated to Trayvon Martin on the Incubator’s lower floor. Biographical details from Martin’s life and death—including the ubiquitous hoodie, a bag of Skittles, and Arizona iced tea—were prevalent throughout the show, reminding us not only of the seventeen-year-old boy from Florida, but also the mantra “We are all Trayvon Martin,” or as Obama said, “Trayvon Martin could have been me.” One installation in a small nook of the gallery included a noose above oversized bags of spilt Skittles. Another featured a giant hanging microphone sculpture plastered with Arizona wrappers.

Perhaps the most noteworthy piece in the gallery was a video installation showing the profiles of a number of young black men in dark brown hoodies morphing into one another. The video not only confronts viewers with the racist claim that all black men look the same, but also calls for interrogation of the racist narrative that associates black men with violence. “A hoodie,” Young writes in the interview, “never has been associated with violence or fear. Black or brown skin inside the hood is associated with fear...If I look at American history, I should feel suspicious of any white man in a hood.”

As an exhibit, “groun(d)” succeeds because it doesn’t just point to the tragedy of one boy and his family. For Young, every parent, child, and gun-owner in Ameri-

12 South 12 Side South WeeklY Side WeeklY ¬ october ¬ october 16, 201316, 2013

ca is necessarily involved and responsible for creating change. Beyond the hoodie, Young’s work considers the vernacular language, gang violence, and music culture associated with black men, relating this cultural narrative back to Martin’s story.

One part of a collage reads “Serve Cullud Musik,” and another “Were u derr when de jury came bak + said not guilty.” Through his words and melodies and images, Young

breaks these stereotypes down for viewers both white and black, seemingly calling for a new black solidarity. “I think the work is layered enough so that anybody can take something from it,” Young says. “What they take, I don’t know...This here breathing be a struggle sometimes, but as long as you are here doing it, find a foundation and stand on it.” ¬

visual arts

Unfurling the Past By dove barbanel

B

araka de Soleil scoops the soaking wet fragments of a Paul Laurence Dunbar poem out of the bucket in front of him and solemnly offers them to each of the audience members crouching beside him in the dark. “Listen!” he says conspiratorially as he swirls the water in the bucket. “Listen!”

Soleil was in the midst of one of three newly commissioned performance pieces presented Saturday, October 12 at the University of Chicago’s Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, part of an ongoing exhibition entitled “Unfurling: Five Explorations in Art, Activism, and Archiving.” The exhibition is curated by Daniel Tucker and Rebecca Zorach and based upon their Gray Center-funded project “Never The Same,” a historical archive collected from Chicago’s art communities.

“Primarily what they’re doing is creating an archive that consists, mostly, of interviews and ephemera that relate to visually and politically engaged art in Chicago, from the late sixties to now,” said Mike Schuh, program coordinator at the Gray Center.

The idea for the performances arose when Tucker and Zorach invited the artistic collaborative Extinct Entities to create an installation specifically based on an interview with Kelan Phil Cohran, founder of the Affro-Arts Theater, a shortlived performance venue on the South Side. Cohran, a former trumpeter in Sun Ra’s Arkestra in Chicago, opened the Affro-Arts Theater at 39th and Drexel in December of 1967. The theater was a dynamic performance arts space but also a meeting place for civil rights activists and political radicals like Stokely Carmichael. The venue was closed down by the city in 1968, allegedly as a result of this influence.

The theater’s story immediately stood out as one worth focusing on, according to Anthony Stepter, one of the founders of Extinct Entities and the evening’s host.

“This was an instance where one of the folks from the archive talked about a space that no longer exists. We thought that the space was really interesting, and sort of near and dear to our interests,” Stepter said. “Of course, there were other options but we thought that this one was super, super rich.” Extinct Entities in turn used the interview and the story of the theater as

Baraka de Soleil and a wake of sodden newspaper clippings. courtesy of the gray center for arts and inquiry

inspiration for commissioning the night’s three performance pieces. Each performer interpreted the concept of the Affro-Arts Theater differently, though all shared a level of political and social engagement in their pieces.

Alexandria Eregbu performed first, before an intimate audience of artists and locals in the Gray Center’s spare, loft-like exhibition hall. Her performance was simple and understated, more a spontaneous discussion of the issues on her mind than a composed piece.

“What I’m most interested in is opening up a dialogue,” Eregbu began as she calmly paced back and forth before the audience. “What’s been on my mind is this intersection between education and athletics, and how it influences you.” Eregbu delved into her backstory before conversing with the audience about the role athletics played in shaping their own identities as children. One audience member recounted how her father forced her to play tennis in Nigeria to prepare her for college life in the States, and another explained how she had joined the track team to fit in after a difficult move, prompting a discussion of athletics as inclusive and art as exclusive.

“A lot of my work is about sharing, and I thought it was important to create a comfortable environment for that with the audience,” Eregbu explained privately after the performance. In that way she succeed-

ed, digging into the audience’s past as if she were curating a spontaneous archive of interviews to share.

Baraka de Soleil performed next, with a more composed yet highly creative piece that actively engaged the audience. He began by putting aside the two canes he uses to help himself walk, instead pulling himself across the room with ropes to sit before a bucket of water. What followed was a fast-paced mix of chanting, dancing, and the plastering of wet newspapers and poems all over the floor. By the end of the piece he had coaxed half of the audience to join him in dancing and snapping to a soul-influenced track, cajoling them with cries of “Keep going! Dance for your ancestors!”

Aside from its considerable entertainment value, Baraka’s piece stayed relevant to the political themes connected to the Affro-Arts Theater, as he travelled through history from slavery to Dunbar’s poetry to the civil rights era. At the same time his plastering about of poems and absurdist breaks into dancing seemed to imply that the literal content of these histories was less important than the spirit they evoked. Ultimately his most resonant question, asked to each audience member as an invitation to dance, was “Do you feel it?” Most did.

For the final performance, Tomeka Reid played several original pieces for cello, inspired by the theater as well as the

history of Washington Park. Her performance was accompanied by cryptic voiceovers from Cohran and Washington Park residents (“Too many people are following the past. The past is dead.”) blended with electronic feedback. Her playing alternated between slow, echoing melodies and abstract improvisation layered over several delayed loops of cello parts. Though she was never difficult to listen to, the performance was chaotic at times, which worked well as a representation of both the tumult of the late sixties and the difficulties in recalling such a distant past.

Considering that the Affro-Arts Theater was only open for a short time several decades ago, it seems remarkable that such varied and creative material could surface from its story. By the end of the night, though, the story itself was never told—the three performers perhaps intentionally obscured the content of Cohran’s interview, instead using the emotional ideas that the theater evoked to drive their creativity. In a way this was the most honest approach.

Thousands of buildings have disappeared from the South Side over the years, all with their own obscure histories, but the Affro-Arts Theater was part of a social movement. Extinct Entities demonstrated that though the physical space is gone, through dance, music and conversation we can still feel that movement. ¬

October October October 16, 201316, 3, ¬ 2013 South ¬ Side South Weekly Side Weekly 13 13

Many Faces

One Woman

By stephen urchick

W

e cringed with the old man sinking toward the stage in agony. His words grew fainter as the stony-faced teenager looming above tightened the grip on his rheumatic hands.

He croaked out weak promises on his honor, by his God—regretting the impotent punches he first threw at this young quarry. As his knees touched the ground, his tormenter released his vice-like fist and left him huddled limply below.

The audience at eta Creative Arts Foundation, in Greater Grand Crossing, wasn’t cowed into silence by the pain visible in the man’s every crumpled joint. It wasn’t silenced by the dead relentlessness readable in each hollow of the boy’s itchingly self-certain face. It was amazed that only one actress stood on stage, exclusively responsible for this high-tension moment— that this scene’s no-nonsense adolescent shared the same, single (female) body with his assailant, all the observing onlookers, and the girl protagonist over whom this showdown occurred.

“The Resurrection of Alice” is a one-woman play written and performed

by Perri Gaffney. Played across stages in the titular Alice’s life—from early age to late motherhood—the action unpacks her arranged marriage to a rural South Carolinian economic potentate and longtime benefactor, Mr. Luthern Tucker. Gaffney not only plays a host of variably-aged Alices, from the nebulous 1930s into the civil rights movement, but also all of her tale’s

interlocutors, companions, and antagonists.

We accompany Alice as she copes with the psychological trauma of effective prostitution and rape, negotiates the exigencies of three unwanted children, reconnects with her lost lover, and slowly recovers her identity from her senile and abusive husband. Alice is obliged to sacrifice her own romance and unprecedented scholastic triumph on the marriage altar for her family’s honor and survival. Tucker’s aid to Alice and her crushingly impoverished family remains contingent on his pedophilic infatuation with her.

With minimal mise-en-scene (a bench, a mason jar, a book, a leaf of paper) and no attempts at quick-changes or costuming, Resurrection surpasses straight monologue through Gaffney’s sheer expressiveness. A thirteen-year-old Alice—in a believable tone and register for a girl of her age—narrates the confrontation between the fiftyish Tucker and her steely, spin-the-bottle crush Isaac. Her exposition only gives the sparsest details and structure needed for a story.

Instead, Gaffney’s emotive precision and highly kinetic acting animate the invoked persons, projecting presences and settings out of recounted memories. Gaffney’s face ages decades within seconds, producing gaunt, sallow depressions on-demand, plowing fields of agonized wrinkles with tractor-like efficacy. She’ll then snap her skin back taut over her cheekbones, and assume the drawn, thin, drum-like stare of

14 South 14 Side South WeeklY Side WeeklY ¬ october ¬ october 16, 201316, 2013

a smug, muscled man, coltish and brutal.

These swift transitions precipitate the confrontation’s tense interchanges.

Gaffney’s ability to rapidly contort her body and shift across the stage, then return to her exact former position, allows her to ghost the play’s varied personae into existence. Her movements delineate schoolrooms, wedding crowds, the stairs from bedroom to armory. She builds spaces from mere motion and credible characters from body language. Isaac on high can therein menace Tucker on the floor; a compassionate teacher can sit close to her abused understudy and share in her tears; an indignant Alice can believably sight a Winchester between Tucker’s fear-shot eyes.

Gaffney’s technique is hardly a stand-in for elaborate staging, yet it confers its own unique devices and advantages. Isaac and Tucker are concisely presented as foils and rival lovers, mentor and mentee become reassuringly intimate—literally one and the same—while Alice’s option of murdering Tucker is elegantly suggested as suicide.

The cast grows as the story progresses; a crush of characters inhabit an increasingly busy stage. Gestural motifs help keep them clear: a mother worries her invisible apron to pieces, the teacher-mentor regularly nudges up her glasses, a hand sits in the hollow of the pregnant Allie’s back.

Gaffney’s many thrown voices are only overdone when she feels the need to spoof a crooked, misogynistic preacher, an elderly seductress, or the pickling, froggish

Tucker himself. Shifts between characters, journeys between states and cities and their attached cadres blur and run into the final confluence. New, constructive figures join, support, and speak with her. The busyness of the play’s ending reads as the exultant vivification of Alice’s dark, lonely marriage.

Only by preserving her voice, introducing her grown children’s voices, and summoning the voices of friends and siblings, does Alice regain control of the play. Alice constructs a world around her and populates it with those she loves and wishes well, transcending the writ penned for her at an early age with a new, second childhood in later life.

It’s not an easy story to tell. Alice talks in her own distinct voice, but she is asked to compete with so many intervening presences that clamor over her. Clashes between the figures in her life—like Tucker’s humiliation at Isaac’s unsympathetic hands—often relegate her to the background. Alice’s initial tale gets hijacked. Her resurrection is the recovery of her identity, the reimagining of an authentic narrative—ultimately fashioned from foreign threads, but woven into something happily hers. 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

screen & stage

Kevin Coval and the Loose Cannon By jake bittle

W

hen I first read Kevin Coval’s poetry, I was worried that he might be a schmuck. The way he interrogated and explored his Jewish identity in all lowercase on the pages of his new book, “Schtick,” came off as somehow meek. However, when I met Coval at the Seminary Co-Op bookstore thirty minutes before he was to give a reading from “Schtick,” the first words to come out of his mouth were not schmuck, but Chuck—specifically, Chuck D, the rapper Coval cites as the inspiration for the name of Louder Than A Bomb, the teen hip-hop poetry festival he co-founded in 2001.

I was shocked by the force and vivacity of Coval’s poetry when read aloud, as well as the intensity of his person: he maintains eye contact for several minutes at a time and swears liberally. When I re-read “Schtick” after speaking to him, the poems seemed to shout where they had once whispered. These poems are not just about being “playful with language” (per Coval’s characterization). They’re also, fundamentally, about the identity of the poet.

The poetics of identity—particularly, the unusual identity of someone influenced by both Jewish heritage and hip-hop culture—is a defining idea for Coval. He has been influenced by both cultures, especially the latter. Chicago is (in his opinion) the greatest city in the world because its people are “hustlers.” His snapback hat reads “DOPE.” He can (and does) talk extensively about Chance the Rapper. When he reads his poetry to his rapt audience, his voice rises and falls in a way that recalls Aesop Rock; his are poems that feel like they would not suffer from the addition of a beat.

“I’m a poet who tries to understand and wrestle with on paper the aesthetic

foundations of a culture that I was reared in,” explains Coval. “Inevitably, it’s going to read as hip-hop.”

This relationship between black identity and Jewish identity is explored a great deal in “Schtick.” The book both adores and maligns its author’s heritage; when I told him I was Jewish too, Coval said, “Sorry about that.”

Coval, however, has been exploring his Jewish identity in poetry since the early 2000s. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d had a yarmulke under his snapback.

Many of his poems recall Passover Seders and dive unabashedly into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

On this and many other issues Coval is unapologetically polemical. He describes himself as an “anti-colonialist anti-imperialist anti-Zionist;” after the reading, he tells the audience the story of how he was fired from a brief artist’s residency at the UofC Newberger Hillel Center down the street. Literature is another subject on which he and the University of Chicago might not see eye to eye. “The Western Canon is dull and wack as fuck,” he tells me. ”Leave that dusty ass shit on the shelf.”

In expressing all of his opinions, Coval is never anything but passionate. He reads to twenty-five people as if he were reading to 25,000. Plenty of people claim they don’t care what other people think of them, but in talking to Coval, one gets the startling sense that in his case this might actually be true. There is nothing about him that suggests a need for others’ approval. He is entirely self-motivated, which is a desirable quality for a man whose day job is to give teens from Chicago’s disparate and desperate backgrounds a way to define and express themselves in opposition to what Coval considers an oppressive whiteness.

courtesy of young chicago authors

Coval’s bio names Louder Than A Bomb “one of the largest youth gatherings on the planet.” Young Chicago Authors, the organization that puts on the monthlong festival (and of which Coval is artistic director), hosts not just Louder Than A Bomb but also year-round open mic events and high school arts programs and residencies.

“Because Chicago is as segregated as it is, the students I was meeting who were doing incredible work all over the city wouldn’t get to meet each other unless there was a central space created,” said Co-

val. “Myself and a group of teaching artists and poets and classroom teachers who were using this new canon [of] hip-hop poetry to re-engage on people in their own education wanted to offer this counter-narrative.”

It is when Coval talks about this work, more than when he talks about his own poetry, that his passion is most visible. “Building solidarity and community in these schools is the most powerful experience for me,” he says from beneath the brim of his snapback. “I didn’t know much about poetry until I started teaching it, to be honest.” ¬

October 16, 2013 ¬ South Side Weekly 15

The Bookseller

An interview with Jack Cella

By John gamino

“J

ack is the soul of the bookstore. Many others have contributed to the growth and success of the store, but Jack has made it what it is.” Now, after forty-three years as general manager of the Seminary Co-Op, Jack Cella has retired.

Few people can say they remember the Co-Op without him— not even Katy O’Brien-Weintraub, assistant manager of the store, who supplied the above quote to the Los Angeles Times in 2009, and who has known Jack since 1973. The store was founded in 1961, and Jack began working in 1969. He was named general manager the very next year. The Co-Op has grown, expanded storefronts, and moved over the years, but it has always remained an essential part of the inquisitive tone of the Hyde Park neighborhood. It’s as much a part of it as the Gothic architecture, the tree-lined avenues, and the small, stately brick homes.

I sat down with Jack a few days before he retired, in the break room of the new building, which opened last year. Copies of Jhumpa Lahiri’s new novel, “The Lowland,” lined the shelves. Another employee was finishing

up his lunch.

Jack and I spoke about the store’s history and character, its changes and its concerns. Recently the Co-Op changed its membership program to cut the ten percent discount from the first $100 of purchases per year, citing “financial challenges affecting independent booksellers everywhere.” But again and again, he stressed how the store can continue to survive, even improve, if it only listens to those who stalk its shelves. He was in the midst of a recollection about the old building when he suddenly stopped, his eyes brightening, and asked: “But what do you think? Do you remember the old building?”

I knew the old Co-Op building for only a few years, but I still miss it terribly: the curt wooden steps, the cloistered hall, the happy wanderings. I still haven’t gotten used to the new design, but Jack is right. There’s a reason for optimism. This is still a bookstore you can walk into and know you’re in Hyde Park.

You first came to Hyde Park [in 1967] to study at the Divinity School. What was that like?

in other cities, what I really like to do is go into independents and see [what they’re like]—if it’s a good independent bookstore, you’ll know you’re in Town A versus Town B versus Town C. It’s distinct to the community that it’s in. And it tries, by inventory and selection and services, to fit well into its local community. I think we’re very lucky because we have an exceptional community that we try to fit into.

I found both the university and the Divinity School great places. There’s a wonderful faculty and wonderful students, and I have nothing but fond recollections. The border between being a student and then working at the bookstore simultaneously and then shifting to the bookstore more and then shifting to the bookstore entirely was porous. There was no real decision made.

I think most people who work in bookstores, and spend a lot of time working at them, probably didn’t think they were going to do it as long as they have done it.

It’s sort of a job where people often think, “Well I’d like to work in a bookstore for a while,” but I think very few people say—in fact I don’t know of anybody—who’s said, “I’d like to work in a bookstore and make it a career” [laughs].

What drew you to the Co-Op? Well, I think the books certainly. I’ve always liked to read, and think, and discuss the way most people in this community do.

I still remember the first time I came to the university, the first day or two, going

down to Harper Library, which was before the Regenstein Library, and just looking at what seemed like miles of stacks. I was sort of overwhelmed, but also enthusiastic, enthusiastic about what this said about the place and life around here.

But when I first started at the Co-Op it was a lot smaller than it is right now. We were only open four hours a day, five days a week. It’s a consumer cooperative…so it grew very, very gradually.

How has that community changed?

I think it’s stayed pretty constant, although it’s grown as more people have come in. But I think the community involvement in the cooperative has been pretty strong, almost from the beginning. We’re never going to be able to run the kind of operation that’s as good as people would want, or expect.

Because I think the expectations in this community are very great (appropriately so). But I think as long as we are thinking carefully about what customers want in a bookstore, as long as we keep our eye on that and listen to what people say, I think we’ll improve and our fit in the community will grow.

When I travel around and go to bookstores

16 South Side WeeklY ¬ october 16, 2013

All of the employees here work on the sales floor; we don’t have any offices. That’s by design. That sort of shared responsibility for the cooperative and its growth and well being over time has really stood the place in pretty good stead.

On the subject of design, what do you miss most about the old building?

I don’t miss a whole lot. Well, I spent so much time there I was very comfortable with the place, that sense of being surrounded by books and turning corners. But within a few days of moving in here I honestly don’t think I missed much about the other place at all. It took some getting used to, because things were in different places.

In the other place the arrangement was in part determined by supporting columns

and pipes we had to avoid, and bookcases were built around things. Here it’s essentially an empty room. We tried to come up with something that wouldn’t feel like one big room, but replicate the sense of discovery the other one had. That’s why the shelves are at angles and whatnot. There’s also practical reasons for that; in the other place we were in a basement and didn’t have to worry about loadbearing capacity of the floors, but here, the code is such that we can’t have too much weight in any one spot—[laughs]—or the floor will not sustain it! So that in part determined design, but also a sense of people being surrounded by books, and turning corners and finding things they didn’t expect to find.

We don’t have to worry about water, which was a constant problem. Although in the forty-some years I was there we were never flooded at all. There was a pump because we were below ground, but that was electric. So if there had ever been a heavy rainstorm and power out at the same time there would have been a problem, but there never was. The power went out a lot, and there were a lot of heavy rainstorms over the years, but they never coincided. I think we were very lucky in that way.

I was in a class recently taught by Hanna

books whatever Starbucks charges—would be so successful…

Books are still relatively inexpensive for what you get. And I think good value, for the money.

One thing I sense, and that I’d like your perspective on, is that there seems to be an almost charitable attitude towards independent bookstores now—that they’re going away, and that there’s more of an obligation to go to them to show support.

“We want to survive, but we only want to survive as a good bookstore” Grey [president of the UofC from 1978 to 1993], in which she praised the CoOp for that very same thing—for being a place you could wander around in and happen upon a book you might never otherwise find. This has been integral to the Co-Op, and its members, for a long time.

Can a bookstore still work like this when the market price for books is so high?

I don’t really know if [the cost of a book] has gone up more than the cost of infla-

tion. I remember when I first started here you could find hardcover books for $4.50 or $3.50 or something like that, or a lot of paperbacks for 45 cents or 75 cents, and that is dramatic. That’s quite a big change now.

I think books are, for what you pay for them, a pretty good value. You can go back to them, you can resell them, you can give them away. I like to go in coffee shops quite a bit, but who would have predicted ten years ago that the $3.50 cup of coffee—or

Well, that’s an interesting way to put it. I think there’s certainly much more focus now—I don’t know how far this will go—on the virtue of shopping locally, and not just for books.

Because of the life that retailers, of different sorts, bring to the communities they’re a part of.

They do make neighborhoods more lively, and interesting to walk through and live in. So I think there is more of an awareness about supporting small businesses, of whatever sort, as long as hanna petroski they’re providing the services that people want. And that I think is really key. Those of us who work in brick-and-mortar bookstores are constantly thinking of ways to give people good reasons—and I mean genuinely good reasons—to shop locally. It’s not, I think, this sort of moral feeling that maybe you should support your local retailers. There have to be good reasons for doing that.

You’ve asked for a lot of feedback from customers in the last few years on how to

go forward as a bookstore. And this summer you announced a new membership program [changing the structure of the member’s discount]. What was the decision process for that?

That was actually a board committee that dealt with that. They’ve been thinking for quite some time about how the Co-Op is to survive, and be financially healthy, in an era when bookstores are disappearing.

There used to be many more bookstores than there are now, that’s for sure. We want to survive, but we only want to survive as a good bookstore; a bookstore people would be happy to go into.

This is an attempt to see if this would help, this new discount program. It’s not written in stone, and I think the board is anxious to hear reactions, like those of us who work here…The goal is to make sure that we can continue to do what people like, at a time that is very, very difficult for bookstores.

The university is certainly a large part of this customer base, but do you know how many other customers you have from the South Side, or the rest of Chicago, or beyond?

That’s a very good question, and we do have customers from all over. We try to focus on the immediate environment: the university, Hyde Park and Kenwood, and the South Side of Chicago. That is what we strive constantly to please...We focus on our local community, and try and fit in as snugly as we can, and if we do that well, then I think we become attractive to people outside the local community as well. And we absolutely need that to survive, and to be able to produce the store that serves our community.

You spoke of feeling overwhelmed by the number of books in the old Harper Library. It reminds me of a scene in Virginia Woolf’s novel Jacob’s Room, where, amidst the countless collection of books at the British Museum, one leaf of poetry is pressed flat against another, “hoarded beyond the power of any single mind to possess it.” One can never hope to read it all. What’s it like to have sold it all?

Oh—I mean it’s stimulating. You’re constantly overwhelmed by the amount of things you should read or should know.

But you know you just have to make some decisions. ¬

October 16, 2013 ¬ South Side Weekly 17

food

Consider the Oyster By chelsea leu

T

he twentieth-century food writer M.F.K. Fisher had her first oyster at a boarding school Christmas party. In her book The Gastronomical Me, Fisher remembers swallowing the mollusk with adolescent daring before sweeping out to dance. “Oysters are simply marvelous!” she thinks giddily to herself. “More, more!”

I was thinking of this indulgent attitude when I entered the Chicago Oyster House in the South Loop for the second time, having visited after its opening in May. The words “The world is your oyster, but oysters are our world,” are printed on one of the walls of the restaurant, and as if to emphasize this point the bar is backed by a floor-to-ceiling map of the world. The main dining room is all tablecloths and glassware, with crisp minimalist lines that echo the restaurant’s stylized oyster logo.

Recessed lights and lounge music add to the atmosphere of laid-back elegance.

Once seated, it took my friends and I a while to decide what we wanted to eat.

The menu is replete with all manner of seafood, but the disjointedness of the offerings made it difficult for us to find our bearings.

Sushi rolls sat incongruously on the menu next to clam chowder and crab legs, and the conceptual connection between them seemed tenuous.

Owner Rick Cheng made the link between the items clear when he explained to me that the restaurant’s previous incarnation was Triad Sushi Lounge, a South Loop staple for nine years. He decided to pursue a new concept after noticing that, though Chicago has a plethora of sushi restaurants, it lacks “a true oyster house.”

To ease this transition for Triad’s regulars, Chicago Oyster House has preserved Triad’s sushi bar.

Cheng’s decision to switch to oysters was one born of savvy attention to the changing tastes of Chicagoans. Having attended the Guinness Oyster Festival for the last five years, he noted that the festival has consistently sold out of tickets. “Best yet,” Cheng told me, “the festival sells out oysters by 6pm, with several hours of festivities to go.” True to its name, his restaurant offers a rotating selection from over sixty varieties of oysters, sourcing them from both coasts.

chelsea leu

We decided to start with a slew of oysters and a simple bowl of clam chowder. The oysters arrived first, nestled in their shells in a tray of ice and served with lemon, champagne vinaigrette, and ketchup. Shortly after, the clam chowder arrived with three clams, still in their shells, the meat waiting inside like a small treasure.

The soup was thick, much heartier than the watery soup I had tried a few months before.

On my first visit, most of the dishes I’d tasted were delicate and light, with garnishes highlighting the subtle flavors of the seafood itself. Apparently, this approach has since been discarded. The soft-shell crab we ordered was served deep-fried, as was the perplexing Fire Cracker Tuna, supposedly a sushi dish. The tuna within the rolls had been cooked through, lending it the disarming texture of red meat.

18 South Side WeeklY ¬ october 16, 2013

The grilled scallops, too, were draped with a coat of garlic soy butter sauce, which turned out to be both heavy and incredibly salty, though the accompanying lemon slice helped to cut some of the punch.

We paid homage to Triad Sushi with an order of Chicago rolls, a concoction of salmon, tuna, yellowtail, cucumber, and avocado, drizzled over with spicy mayo.

The sushi was decent but forgettable, almost an afterthought on the menu. This feeling was reinforced in an ungraceful moment when I had to exchange the knife and oyster fork I’d been using for wooden chopsticks.

But the oyster house’s oysters, unsurprisingly, still shone the brightest. The Blue Points were big and briny, while the Malaspinas came in dark knobbly shells, huge and succulent. Best were the Virginia-sourced Rappahannocks, which left a

sweet, warm aftertaste. The Stingrays, cool and delicate, were less flavorful.

The service shone as well. Our waiter deftly guided us through the menu, and she brought us our dishes within minutes of our ordering them.

Later in her book, Fisher writes about becoming sickened by the shallow indulgence of the Christmas party, hoping never to see an oyster again. Though my own return visit to Chicago Oyster House hadn’t quite lived up to my expectations, my reaction wasn’t quite so severe. We had so enjoyed the oysters we’d had at the beginning of our meal that we ordered another round to finish off the night. More, more! Chicago Oyster Bar, 1933 S. Indiana Ave. (312)225-8833. chicagooysterhouse.com

VISUAL ARTS Bronzeville Art District Trolley Tour Take advantage of this October’s unseasonably warm weather with the last installment of this year’s Bronzeville Art District Trolley Tour. After spending some time at Gallery Guichard’s exhibit on the African Diaspora, “Different Strokes,” you and your fellow art and trolley lovers will be whisked away to four other great Bronzeville galleries—Faie African Art, Blanc Gallery, the South Side Community Art Center, and the Radcliffe and Elliott Hunter International Art Gallery—to visit and explore their own unique collections of African-American, African, and Diasporic art.

Come for the collard green egg rolls (courtest of Faie) and Bombay cocktails (courtesy of Guichard); stay for an evening of cultural exploration. Gallery Guichard, 3521 S. King Drive.

Friday, October 18. 5:30pm-9pm. Donations encouraged. (773) 791-7003. galleryguichard.com (Katryce Lassle)

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, noon8pm; Sunday, October 20, noon-6pm. Free. (312) 852-7717. urieichen.com (Eric Green)

groun(d) Local artist avery r. young takes on the controversial Trayvon Martin case in his new exhibit “groun(d)” at the Washington Park Arts Incubator. Part memorial, part analysis, the exhibit is meant to honor the life of Trayvon while challenging the all-too-common devaluation of black bodies. Full review on page 12. Washington Park Arts Incubator, 301 E. Garfield Blvd. Through November 10. Monday and Wednesday, noon-3pm. (773) 702-9724. arts.uchicago.edu (Carmin Chappell)

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)

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

STAGE & SCREEN Top of the Heap Former Yale Repertory Theatre member and occasional

soft-core-porn star Christopher St. John wrote, directed, produced, and starred in “Top of the Heap,” the iconic 1972 film that focuses on the struggle of a young black policeman in Washington D.C. dealing with racist colleagues and contemptuous, estranged family and friends. Frequently grouped with other low-budget blaxploitation movies, “Top of the Heap” takes a nuanced, subtle approach in dealing with serious issues facing African-Americans in the latter half of the twentieth century. This classic piece of cinema has also had a strange, arduous journey to its screening in Chicago. It has taken presenter Floyd Webb over thirty years to finally bring the movie to the city after the Writers Guild revoked its U.S. distribution due to arguments over script credit. The screening includes a Skype conversation with Christopher St. John. Black Cinema House, 6901 S. Dorchester Ave. Sunday, October 4, 4pm. Free. blackcinemahouse.org (Christian Belanger)

The Resurrection of Alice Artist Perri Gaffney brings a crowd to the stage at eta Creative Arts Foundation this fall, 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 revelation 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)

’63 Boycott

A reporter presents a microphone to a crowd of black students, ranging in age from elementary to high school.

Bright eyes and nervous smiles capture energy waiting to burst out into the open. “Why are you out of school today?” the reporter inquires. “Because it’s freedom day!” exclaims a small child near the front of the crowd. October 22 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 Chicago Public Schools boycott, an overwhelming effort of 200,000, including many South and West Side CPS students to protest the discriminatory solutions to overcrowding offered by the Chicago Board of Education. These policies pinpointed the predominantly black neighborhoods of the South Side, and included shortened school days and permanent mobile classrooms, in addition to historic shortages in resources for black schools. On Tuesday, the DuSable Museum will host a teaser showing of the not-yet-completed Kartemquin Films documentary, “‘63 Boycott,” chronicling the historic march.

DuSable Museum, 740 E. 56th Pl. Tuesday, October 22, 6pm.

Free with online reservation from 63boycott.com. (773)9470600. dusablemuseum.org (Olivia Adams)

Anis Mojgani “Come closer,” urges Anis Mojgani, “come into this.” So starts a piece that begins many of the poet’s sets. Youtube is littered with clips of Mojgani at international festivals and intimate performances, university campuses and cafés.

From behind various states of shavenness and the occasional pair of glasses, Mojgani’s eyes glint and his mouth keeps a perpetual half-smile. Twice winner of the National Poetry Slam, Mojgani travels from Austin to perform an hour-long set at the Logan Center this Wednesday. The UofC’s slam poetry group, Catcher in the Rhyme, hosts the poet and will follow his feature with their weekly open mic. Mojgani gracefully attains the elusive magic of slam, when word and gesture are so in tune that you would be surprised to find one without the other. Come into this.Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Wednesday, October 23, 7:30pm. Free.

(Hannah Nyhart)

Englewood International Film Festival Now in its third year, the Englewood International Film Festival garnered entries from over one hundred filmmakers worldwide. The event, created by local filmmaker Mark Harris, aims to transform the neighborhood through entertainment. Films screened span a variety of titles, from Harris’s own “Black Coffee, No Sugar, No Cream,” to “Frat Brothers,” starring Lil Romeo. Panelists include producers Sharon King and Craig Harris. Despite its namesake, the festival’s center will fall just south of Englewood, which lacks a theater. All film screenings will take place at the Chatham 14 Theater in Chatham, while panel discussions will take place in locations across Englewood, including the

Hiram Kelly Branch Library and Team Englewood High School. Chatham 14 Theater, 210 E 87th Street. October 24-27.

Free-$8. See site for schedule and locations. eiff.org (Eric Green)

MUSIC 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 their 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. Sundays, 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 S. State Street. Wednesday, October 16, 7pm. $16-$20.

(312)949-0120. reggieslive.com

D.A. Smart, feat. Blaq Ice and LSD In a 1993 Tribune article titled “Why Chicago Artists Have Been Outcasts of the Hip-Hop World,” two journalists interviewed several Chi-Town hip-hop artists who were struggling to break into the mainstream. One Windy City MC searching for an audience was Common Sense, and though he had just released his debut album on a New York label, he would still have to wait a few years before he found an audience outside of the Midwest. Once he shortened his name to Common, though, he became one of the most critically acclaimed voices in hip-hop. Yet the main focus

of the 1993 piece was not Common; it was DA Smart, a verbose hardcore rapper who would never really found an audience outside of the South Side. Smart’s one full-fledged “hit” was a song called “Walk Wit Me,” which presented a brutally real analysis of Chicago’s gangs and their respective territories within the city. DA’s portrait of Chicago is raw and unadulterated. Though he dismisses “the sociologist who be telling me the city died,” he provides his own critically studied accounts of the “South Side...where GDs and BDs and Blackstones don’t coincide.” Today, DA Smart is still spitting brute reality back at the faces of those who don’t dare to ignore him. Come witness a Chicago legend as he takes the stage this Thursday at the Checkerboard Lounge.

The Checkerboard Lounge, 5201 S. Harper Court. Thursday, October 17, 2013. +21. 8pm-midnight. (773) 684-1472. thecheckerboardlounge.com (Zach Goldhammer)

Troubled Island In 1949, William Grant Still, known as “the dean of African-American composers,” finally witnessed the premiere of the opera he came to consider his life’s work. “Troubled Island,” an opera with a libretto co-authored by Langston Hughes about the Haitian revolution, was well-received by its audience and earned the performers twenty-two curtain calls. The press, however, heavily criticized the piece and the work has not been performed in full since its premiere. The South Shore Opera Company of Chicago, in celebration of their fifth anniversary, will be presenting the Chicago premiere of this work and the first time the opera has been staged in full since 1949. A conductor who has worked with numerous orchestras internationally, Maestro Leslie Dunner will be conducting a cast including baritone Kirk Walker, contralto Gwendolyn Brown, tenor Cornelius Johnson, and soprano Dana Campbell. South Shore Cultural Center, 7059 S. South Shore Drive. Saturday, October 19, 6pm. $35-$50.

(773)723-4627. southshoreopera.org (Noah Kahrs)

WDCB Presents: A Special Appearance of The Dracula All-Stars Philly Joe Jones’s debut 1958 record, “Blues For Dracula,” ranks among the weirdest jazz albums ever made. For the most part, the record is made up of straight-ahead hard bop jams showcasing the rhythmic prowess of the former Miles Davis Quintet drummer and his new all-star band, featuring Nat Adderley and Johnny Griffith. The strange part of the record, however, is the opening title track, which features an eight-minute monologue in which Joe Jones tries (and fails) to put on a credible imitation of Bela Lugosi’s classic Dracula. This Halloween, WCDB and the Jazz Showcase will be raising this strange performance piece from the dead with their presentation of The Dracula All-Stars, a spooky supergroup featuring Bill Overton (AKA “Count Orloff ”), Art Davis (AKA “the Count of Bebop”), Kelly Sill (AKA “the Warlock”) and Tom Muellner (AKA “Dracula’s son’s son in law, 2nd cousin removed [sic]”). The Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth Court. Wednesday, October 30, 8pm-10pm; 10pm-midnight. (312)350-0234. jazzshowcase.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. Tender Trap / Dansette Dansette / Slumberland 2. Gas Rag / Human Rights EP / Beach Impediment 3.John Bellows / Fast Hits / Special Needs 4. Big Zit / Demo / s/r 5. Las Taradas / Son y se hacen / RGS 6. Kevin Drumm and Jason Lescalleet / The Invisible Curse / Glistening 7. Una Bèstia Incontrolable / Observant com el mon es destrueix / La Vida Es Un Mus 8. Astral Gunk / Straight Up James Dean / Nervous Service 9. Die Vögel / The Chicken / Pampa 10. The Julie Ruin / Run Fast / TJR/Dischord 11. Technicolor Teeth / Sage / Cowabunga 12. The Chipmunks / Chipmunk Punk / Excelsior 13. Mammoth Grinder / Underworlds / 20 Buck Spin 14. Perfect Pussy / I Have Lost All Desire for Feeling / s/r 15. The Blind Shake / Key to a False Door / Castle Face

October 16, 2013 ¬ South Side Weekly 19