Tag Archives: Tuesday Funk

The South Side is a myth: Tuesday Funk, July 5th, 2016

Chicago, Communities, Politics, , ,

16thstreettower

With The Frunchroom taking up most of my live lit energy in the last year, I didn’t have as much time as I liked to do live readings. I’m trying to get back into the habit and reading at Tuesday Funk earlier this summer was a good way to do it.

This idea was kicking around in the back of my brain for a while. It felt appropriate for this series since it’s held in a Far North Side neighborhood that was not only adjacent to some of the issues discussed but also more likely to have an audience that was open to hearing it.

A couple notes: There are a couple of time-specific references in this piece, so know that I’m speaking of earlier this summer, not now. I changed a couple instances of “there” to “here.”

And if you like watching and listening to things rather than reading them, scroll to the bottom of this post to watch the video.

—

There are a handful of books I recommend to people who want to understand Chicago. And, yes, I’m starting this piece off with a reading list but, look, if you don’t like anything else I have to say at least I’ve given you some options for something better. Think of it like Amazon’s recommendation list in reverse. “People who also disliked this reader at Tuesday Funk bought the following…”

Anyway, if you want to understand Chicago politics start with American Pharoah, Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor’s biography of Richard J. Daley and Fire on the Prairie, Gary Rivlin’s book about Harold Washington. If you want to know more about the sectarian, tribal mix of people who call themselves Chicagoans you can’t do much better than Studs Terkel’s Division Street: America. And if you want to understand Chicago’s influence and status as an innovator in everything from architecture to television to literature, read The Third Coast by Thomas Dyja.

Those four books are a great place to start, but they mostly tell you about the past. Natalie Y. Moore’s book The South Side, released just this year, is required reading about Chicago because it tells you about our present and updates the past that Cohen, Taylor, Rivlin, Dyja and Studs all explore.

What’s so essential about Moore’s book is how it argues against myth through a mix of facts and memoir. Against a historical context, Moore explains her own experiences with segregation, the real estate crisis, gun violence, political movements, the decline of the middle class – black and otherwise – and Chicago as the epicenter of social change, good and bad. Moore’s life experience fills in the gaps between headlines and stereotypes. Within chapters like “Notes from a Black Gentrifier,” “Kale Is The New Collard” and “We Are Not Chiraq” lives the nuance of stories often untold.

It’s the kind of nuance that’s tough to fit into a headline, especially headlines about the South Side. The more I thought about it, the more I realized the South Side defies easy explanations.

***

The other day I was talking with these two guys named Max Grinnell and Bill Savage. Max is a writer, professor and University of Chicago graduate. Bill’s a professor, too, as well as a renowned Chicago historian, writer/editor and former bartender. We were talking at that well-known gathering spot for gadflies, loudmouths and public intellectuals called Twitter.

Anyway, about a week ago, Max mentioned his former Hyde Park residency and noted, in an aside, “to some, that’s not the ‘real’ South Side.” Bill replied that “people who say Hyde Park is not the South Side promote a narrow view of the South Side they otherwise despise.”

They’re both correct though I’m not sure such a view is limited to those on any particular side of Chicago. For some who’ve never ventured south of Roosevelt, there’s a desire to convince themselves there is good reason never to have done so, to paint the South Side with the broadest brush possible or tell themselves that Hyde Park has something other South Side neighborhoods do not – like museums or a university or lakefront.

For some who live there, this reaction is something akin to an internal pathology borne of anger: surviving a lack for jobs and feeling overwhelmed by the violence that’s a part of some areas becomes a badge of honor others won’t be allowed to claim.

To make it very clear, the South Side contains multitudes.

31st Street Beach is great if you love water and clean beaches, but hate crowds.

For sheer beauty, heading south on Lake Shore Drive beats the drive north any day, especially if you end up at Promontory Point and walk around.

Maria’s in Bridgeport is one of the city’s great bars.

Vito and Nick’s in Ashburn serves one of the best thin-crust, tavern-style pizzas.

Lem’s in Chatham is barbecue, period, end of sentence.

You can tour a damn submarine at the Museum of Science and Industry.

Pullman contains the city’s only national monument and you can get one of the best burgers and ice cream cones in Chicago at Top Notch Burgers on 95th Street and Rainbow Cone on Western and 91st, which are within five minutes of each other in Beverly.

And that’s just the stuff that Channel 11 will cover. Nevermind the stuff only locals know and oh by the way there’s going to be a presidential library down here in a few years so go now and beat the crowds.

But denying the real South Side also includes Hyde Park or, say, Beverly depends on the tired idea that there are nice neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods – that the problems that plague our city stop at boundaries that are a bigger concern for real estate agents than criminals. It also means denying the nuance within neighborhoods, the prosperity that often lives close to danger.

I live in Morgan Park which is about as far on the southwest side as you can live and still be in Chicago. On the whole, it’s pretty nice with some areas you might diplomatically call “dicey.”

Last week, four people, including a pregnant woman were shot and wounded in Morgan Park.

But the day after that I walked block after block, taking pictures of the historic bungalows, Queen Anne homes and old mansions that populate the neighborhood, blocks that contain more than a few Chicago landmarks and designs by Frank Lloyd Wright. The sun was out.

Three days ago, a man was shot in Morgan Park by the father of his ex-girlfriend. This happened roughly a mile from my tree-lined street with its well-maintained lawns, some professionally so.

I’m barely a block from a park which holds an easter egg hunt every year. It was on this street – my street – two years ago that a couple of guys robbed me at gunpoint two doors down from my house. When a lawyer for one of the guys showed up in my driveway with a subpoena, the first words out of his mouth were “This is a beautiful street. I can’t believe you got robbed here!”

Yeah, me neither.

I could tell you about the pro-am cycling event Morgan Park will host in a little over a week, the annual art walk in October or the live lit series much like this one that I host once a quarter.

I could tell you about all that in an effort to convince you that even within a particular neighborhood nothing is all good or all bad or remind you of the times people have been shot in tourist districts downtown or what we’d call a riot in one neighborhood is called a post-game celebration in another but sometimes it feels like I’m belaboring the point, which is this:

Myths are stories we tell ourselves to explain things that seem far away, things we don’t understand. For a lot of people, the South Side is a myth.

Are there very real problems of poverty and violence in some parts of the South Side? Yes. Let me state unequivocally that there are people living in some places here who would leave if they could escape it. But those blocks – and they are blocks not neighborhoods – are no more or less representative of the entire South Side than Edegwater, Rogers Park, Lincoln Park, Lakeview or Wicker Park are completely representative of the North Side.

That’s what’s always struck me: how often problematic areas on the North Side are referred to by their neighborhoods, while shootings are often said to be happening on the South Side. When good things are happening on the South Side, we often speak of them as exceptions or grade them on a curve. Residents of visitors describing a restaurant or bar as “pretty good for the South Side” is literally why we can’t have nice things.

***

Natalie Moore’s book The South Side is a welcome corrective after years of reporting that has focused on the negative of that part of the city. It doesn’t offer easy explanations. Instead, it embraces the complexity of its subject and describes how policy becomes personal. At some point, if you want to get people to stop believing in myths, you have to replace them with your own stories based in science, fact and experience.

While few of us are ever going to write our own book on the complex parts of Chicago we love, we’re all capable of creating the culture we want. Even if it takes a bit of nuance.

METX 204 at 16th Street Tower image by vixla via Creative Commons license.

Collecting a few old things

Fatherhood, Media, ,

I spent the better part of the afternoon rounding up many of the media appearances and live readings I’ve done in the last seven years: WBEZ spots, Paper Machete readings and even a Chicago Tonight back in 2010. A few are missing because I haven’t had time to track down the audio –  the glorious fun I’ve had doing You, Me, Them, Everybody and the quick shots at 20×2, specifically. Eventually, I hope to add them all.

Doing so meant I finally got around to posting a couple old bits. First is “You’re Only Old Once,” an essay I performed at Tuesday Funk, my friend Bill Shunn‘s reading series at Hopleaf. I tend to do more personal pieces there and this one about approaching middle-age had been kicking around in my head for a little while.

Then there’s “Mark Wahlberg Hates America.” Claire Zulkey‘s Funny Ha-Ha was an occasion for me to go all out so I used a startling amount of vulgarity and then rapped a little. It’s definitely one of those pieces that’s better performed than read, which is why I hesitated to post it at all, but it’s also one of my favorites because it’s so ridiculous.

“You’re only old once” – Tuesday Funk 8.7.2012

Fatherhood, , ,

Here’s an essay I read at Tuesday Funk, my friend (and acclaimed sci-fi author) Bill Shunn‘s reading series at the Hopleaf. You can see me deliver it in this YouTube clip (warning: language).

Here are three things I said to my wife last night:

“Do you have idea what’s going on with those weird bare patches in the lawn?”

“The nice thing about having these shoes for working in the backyard is there’s almost no tread on them so when I step in dog shit it wipes right off.”

And the third thing is honestly not worth quoting in its entirety but it involved the phrase “Well, when we were in our 20s…”

And then I took a fish oil pill.

I fucking love being old.

Last night, my wife and I were talking about this piece and I told her I’d been trying to work up some ideas around the notion that I’d grown old before my time and she said to me “No. No, I think it is your time.”

And she’s right. First, I am 37 years old. I am seven years past the age when the youth of America are supposed to stop trusting people my age. Second, my other idea for this piece was an explanation of why I don’t like going to public pools which is just about the most old man thought one can express other than “Alright, who touched the thermostat?”

It’s become clear to me that I am living the life of a man twice my age. Note the following:

1. Yesterday morning I got up at 545am so I would have enough time to put some fertilizer on our lawn before going to work.

2. I listen to the AM all-news channel quite a bit. I used to turn it on strictly for “traffic and weather on the 8s”…and then started listening for the headlines…and pretty soon I had memorized the commercials for services that prevent identity theft.

3. I got a hammock for Father’s Day. It was something I asked for and it made me deliriously happy. To put it another way, I was given a gift that facilitates me lying down for an extended period of time.

4. A couple weeks ago, I sat in my driveway in one of those folding lawn chairs and drank. Now, granted, my wife was with me. And we talked about our life together with our daughter, our work, our hopes and our dreams. But mostly we sat in our driveway in a couple of cheap-ass lawn chairs and drank until it got dark. The only thing missing were black socks that came up to my knees but who wants to wear that in this heat, I ask you?

Oh and speaking of drinking, I drink scotch. I’d rather drink scotch than almost anything else. Walking around with a glass of brown liquor into which you have put nothing else except maybe ice is a pretty good signifier that you have stopped trying to impress anyone with your knowledge of fine wines or cocktails infused with something.

5. I love mowing my lawn. I find it calming in a way that yoga, massages or sunsets do not offer. (Also, I’m not too keen on massages because of all the touching.) Mowing the lawn offers me both a sense of accomplishment and the restoration of order amongst chaos. When my neighbor has occasionally mowed our front lawn – in a gesture of pure goodwill and admittedly he does a really nice job of it – it’s completely freaked me out and made me nervous. He might as well be doing it while wearing a pair of my pants. It makes my blood pressure go up a little.

Oh also, I have high blood pressure. When you find out you have high blood pressure, you learn the proper phrase is not “My blood pressure is kinda high right now” the way you might say “Yeah, I’m feeling a little bloated today” or “I’m a little out of shape, gotta get back in the gym.” You just have it for the rest of my life. Like how you’re never not an alcoholic. I’m like an alcoholic but for heart disease. Although the main difference here is although I have high blood pressure, I can control it with diet and exercise but there are few things that make one feel old like a physical condition that needs to be controlled with diet and exercise.

So…I’m old. But rather than find it confining or condemning, I find it liberating.

Before I go on, I want to note something here: This is not a screed against youth. The world needs youth. Without youth and folly, the world does not dream the impossible. You can draw a short, straight line from the same lack of impulse control that makes kegstands seem like a good idea to thinking you can take something the size of a Mini Cooper, strap 76 pyrotechnic devices onto it, launch it into space, know you will lose contact with it for a full seven minutes during which it heats up to 1600 degrees with only a parachute able to withstand 65000 pounds of force to slow it down and then LAND IT ON MARS in a space roughly the width of Vermont.

(I only had room for about ⅓ of the amazing aspects of that Mars landing so do yourself a favor and Google “Seven Minutes of Terror” and watch the video about it.)

Anyway, what I’m saying is youth and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is awesome.

And that same spirit of adventure you have in youth should carry you throughout your life. But the one thing about youth that you should not carry with you forever is the notion that all options need to be on the table. This doesn’t mean that you never try new things or stop learning. In fact, trying new things may be what makes you happy. But that usually falls under the headings of “I like books and reading” or “I like staying physically active” because when you stop doing those things you get all moody and feel like something’s missing in your life and then when you finally pick up a book on the Spanish Civil War or learn how to throw a javelin you remember “Oh right, I like me when I do this stuff.”

Still, at some point, you have to know yourself. You have to know what you’re good at, what you love, and what makes you happy and you have to do those things provided they don’t visit harm on you or the people you love. And some of those things are cool or make you seem smart. But a bunch of them probably aren’t.

I would love to read and understand A Brief History of Time enough to be able to explain significant portions of it to someone. But I was never particularly good at science. I love what science produces and the awe it inspires but grappling with the larger concepts like black holes and the uncertainty principle make my head ache. Eventually, I’m going to get through A Brief History of Time but now it’s because it’s an obstacle I’d like to overcome not because I think it will mean I understand particle physics. I’m never going to understand particle physics. Probably best to move on from that.

As Michael Keaton showed us in Multiplicity, the more you keep trying to segment yourself, the less like you you become. It seems really obvious that doing what makes you happy means you should just do those things. But it isn’t. It’s hard to know that when the world is constantly telling you what it thinks will make you happy. The world is usually wrong, but it’s kind of a loudmouth about it so it can be hard to tune it out.

There is nothing cool about enjoying the mowing of one’s lawn. Or sitting in cheap patio chairs in your driveway. Or listening to AM 780. Or going to the gym purely to stave off a heart attack.

..Scotch is pretty cool…

But all of these things – among many others – make me happy. So I’m free from thinking that on a Saturday in August I should be, say, in a mud pit at Lollapalooza when what I’d really like to do is mow my lawn, sit in my hammock and drink a glass of…well, honestly, every summer I make an official Summer Back Porch cocktail. This year it’s the Kentucky Buck, the base of which is brown liquor, specifically bourbon. But to make it you have to muddle a strawberry in lemon juice, add Angostura bitters and simple sugar, shake it thoroughly and pour it over ice before topping it off with ginger beer. When it’s finally made, it’s a pinkish color and garnished with a lemon.

Ah, what the hell. You’re only old once.

“Supergirls” – Essay Fiesta 8.15.2011 / Tuesday Funk 5.3.2011

Comics, Fatherhood, ,

This was a piece I read first at Tuesday Funk, my friend (and acclaimed sci-fi author) Bill Shunn‘s reading series at the Hopleaf. I read it in a slightly different form at Essay Fiesta a few months later. I don’t usually repeat pieces like that but I wanted another crack at performing it since I didn’t feel I’d quite done it justice the first time. Honestly, this is a piece that works best in front of an audience of comic geeks or, failing that, with visual aids. I didn’t have that in either case (though the Tuesday Funk crowd was pretty close) so the fact that this piece worked at all is a testament to my ability to mine cheap laughs out of the words “bosomy” and “pantsless.”

For my previous thoughts on the intersection of comics and fatherhood, read Comic Books are for Girls and Pink.

Watch this piece:

Since February, my wife and I have been the parents of an amazing little girl named Abigail. Many months before she was born, I began to obsess over how we’d raise her in a “pink is for girls, blue is for boys” culture. My hope is we’ll raise Abigail to figure out her own identity and pursue her own likes and dislikes, irrespective of the expectations of others. I realize this is akin to saying “And hopefully she will someday own a unicorn” but that’s my hope.

My biggest concern with the color pink is the princess culture that seems to accompany it. Everyone in this room looks pretty intelligent – in addition to being incredibly good-looking – so I don’t need to go into all of the pitfalls here. But suffice it to sabuy I don’t want to raise a daughter who expects to be saved by a handsome prince. Frankly, I’d be happy if the sum total of my daughter’s experiences with princesses involved getting to the end of a level of Super Mario Brothers and getting annoyed because the one she is looking for is in another castle.

But I realize some of the girly pink stuff is going to be inevitable. My wife once told me “Our daughter might like pink and Barbies” in a tone that left unsaid the words “and that’s OK” as well as “and you might just have to suck it up and deal.” I’m certainly aware of the irony of burdening her with all my expectations in an effort to help her avoid those of others. If she’s going to be her own person then I need to tread lightly lest I send her running into the Disney Princess section of Toys R Us and have her emerge covered tiara to toe in wee royal garb.

This has not, however, stopped me from conceiving of alternative options for her.

Obviously the surest way to get a kid interested in something is to, in some way, suggest that it is somehow “bad.” So merely suggesting princesses are dumb isn’t going to work. When I first got out of college, I was a substitute teacher for classes that ranged from 1st to 8th grade. When I was trying to correct the behavior of younger kids it wasn’t enough to tell them not to do something. You have to redirect their undesired behavior to something positive. So if one of your charges was getting into an argument with another kid you would break it up but then, say, walk them over to the bookshelf and have them pick out a book.

So if the dominant societal culture dictates my daughter is inevitably going to gravitate to women in unrealistic costumes with fanciful backstories who operate from positions of authority steeped in tradition…isn’t it possible I could interest her into comic book superheroes instead?

My plan was to acquire five appropriately iconic comic book covers featuring female super heroes and use them as art in our daughter’s room. My hope was that the imagery would carry with it a certain magisterial air that would seem an acceptable substitute for the elaborate sashes and gowns of princesses. And as she grew up, my daughter would inevitably have questions about these characters and we’d share their stories, discuss their heroics and, in doing so, gently reinforce the values of self-reliance, sacrifice and adventure – all of which seemed to run counter to princess culture. Eventually she would decide uh…for herself that superheroes were cool and princesses drool.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Scott, this all sounds kind of sneaky.” To which I would respond “Yes. Yes it does.”

Anyway, I realized early on that this wasn’t a perfect alternative. There’s plenty of problematic imagery – particularly when it comes to women – in comic books. So I came up with a list of traits that would help guide me to the responsible choices:

[Fair warning to the non-geeks in the audience: This next bit is going to get super-nerdy. If the last thing you saw involving someone with a cape was Phantom of the Opera now might be a good time to go get a drink from the bar or hit the bathroom.]

1. EACH CHARACTER SHOULD HAVE HER OWN IDENTITY AND NOT BE DERIVATIVE OF A MALE CHARACTER
Even though this would knock out some perfectly acceptable options – Batgirl, She-Hulk, Mary Marvel – it seemed to run counter to this whole exercise if the entire list suffered from Ms. Pac Man syndrome and my daughter equated female identity with little more than lipstick, false eyelashes, a beauty mark and a hair accessory. (As an aside, how many of you remembered that Ms. Pac Man had a mole?)

2. EASY DOES IT ON THE CLEAVAGE
Obviously, female superheroes are going to have boobs. And for uh…whatever reason it seems that a predominant number of them have large boobs. Clearly, for women who are predisposed to saving the Earth there is some kind of correlative genetic marker for large breasts. There didn’t seem to be much of a way around this but at least it could be managed. So I resolved to favor women who wore shirts, jackets, jumpsuits or perhaps battle armor. It also meant Power Girl wasn’t making the cut.

3. NO ONE WITH AN “AND THEN SHE WAS EVIL” PLOTLINE
It would have been great to put Jean Grey up on my daughter’s wall: a female hero whose greatest power derived from the use of her mind? Perfect! Up until the point where she turns evil, becomes Dark Phoenix and commits genocide by wiping out an entire planet.

4. PANTS ARE PREFERABLE TO NO PANTS
I felt we were doing our daughter a disservice if we suggested to her that the world at large is OK with a young woman who parades around in underpants and fishnets. We’d really just be setting her up for two possible careers: pop singer or magician’s assistant. I’m not saying either of those is bad, but it seems kind of limiting. So this meant Black Canary was out and so was Zatanna – who I think was an actual magician’s assistant at some point.

The corollary to this rule was that shorts were also acceptable so obviously the X-Men’s Jubilee was a possibility. Then again, I had to ask myself whether I wanted to endorse jean shorts as a fashion choice.

But when I got down to the business of making my list based on these rules, I found sticking to them was pretty much impossible. Even my wife thought I was being a little too restrictive. On the turning evil issue she said “I think it’s OK to have been evil at some point; there is an important lesson there. Everyone gets to make mistakes, no one is born perfect and we all get a shot at redemption and triumph.”

What I eventually realized was trying to shield my daughter from pantsless, bosomy, infrequently evil characters was going to prevent my daughter from figuring out why these rules were important all on her own. By creating a set of rules about what was OK I was working against my own efforts to instill in her a contrarian spirit. Or, as my friend Veronica put it, “Well behaved women rarely make history. This covers not wearing pants.”

So yes, there might not be Supergirl if there hadn’t been a Superman first but that doesn’t mean she’s any less dedicated to truth, justice and the American way. And I came around to the notion that it’s OK that Wonder Woman isn’t usually wearing pants because she inspires others to be strong, powerful women. And Buffy Summers saved the world a lot, even if she once had to kill her vampire boyfriend to do it. All three of them made the list.

Rounding out the top 5 were the Invisible Woman from the Fantastic Four and Elastigirl from The Incredibles. Both are mothers with a strong sense of family. I figured it was valuable to teach my daughter that moms are superheroes, too.

The act of making this list was what finally made me realize the problem I originally set out to solve didn’t need fixing. If we’re otherwise smart about how we raise our daughter then she won’t need her father to save her anymore than she’ll need a prince to do so. She’ll make her mind up all by herself. There’s plenty that’s problematic about princesses of the Disney variety, sure, but there’s also Princess Leia and Zena: Warrior Princess. And just as the pictures of the women we’ve chosen to hang on Abigail’s wall aren’t to be judged solely by their costumes so to are princesses to be judged by more than the color of their gowns.

Though I still think she’s going to be heartbroken when she finds out we won’t let her leave the house pantsless.