16 posts tagged “chicago”

Chicago pals Daniel Tucker and David Meyers found a way for my Madison/Chicago commute to function as something more than just a private two and a half hour meditation. They are both roasting and peddling coffee as small scale cottage industries. The fair trade organic beans are being supplied by Madison’s own Just Coffee. And guess who is driving regularly enough to make the deliveries? Yes, yours truly!

 

Tonight I made the first of probably quite a few more deliveries. Three bags @ 150 pounds each. I did not notice any appreciable increase in gasoline consumed. At least not on the highway. The stopping and starting in the city with a fully loaded vehicle does eat gas quickly. Still, this is a very good way to stack added value to the energy being consumed through transporting only myself, and to do my part in cultivating micro-economic activity and increased self-sufficiencies. Helping out in this way also gives me a reason to connect with more people in Madison–in this case, the fine people at Just Coffee. Their enterprise started out as an expression of their solidarity with the Zapatista rebels. These ragtag Madison activists found that the best way for them to get justly grown coffee from Chiapas to North American markets was to buy, roast, and sell it themselves through their own company. Now they have fair relationships with growing co-ops in other countries. The coffee I delivered was grown in Peru and Nicaragua. Check out the Just Coffee “politics” page.

 

The final bonus is that David is paying me in fresh roasted coffee.

 

The only downside is the smell inside the car. Unroasted beans do not have much of an aroma. Instead, there is the earthy but not terribly pleasant smell of burlap sacking. Drag.

Hope some of you can make it out to this event. I will be there at night. Looking forward to seeing friends and collaborators, meeting new people, and visiting with keyholders, current and past. Matthias the radical poet activist is gonna be working the grills!

MESS HALL SUMMER PARTY

What happens when you launch acts of generosity into the world? How can they form the basis for growing circles of reciprocity and trust? Almost 6 years ago, the founders of Mess Hall, receiving the offer of a $1-a-month storefront, committed the space to this and subsequently many other experiments in culture, conviviality and exchange. The originary gift arose from property owner Al Goldberg’s desire to further incubate the arts community of Rogers Park. Given this opportunity, we make space and time available to projects not likely to pass the test of marketability or even authorized fundability. Come celebrate generosity with us at the best summer party ever!

SATURDAY JUNE 27, Mess Hall, 6932 N. Glenwood
4:00 pm - ?

DON’T MISS IT!! Come celebrate generosity with us at the best summer party ever!

Savor the flavor of Bobby Seale BBQ recipes! http://www.bobbyqueseale.com/
Pick up a copy of the book Let’s Re-Make the World: http://letsremake.info/blog/2009/04/a-new-book-project/
Bring kids and plastic bottles with caps to make Lava Bottles. Eat! Drink!
Toss into and grab from The Swap: bring stuff to give away/take stuff home with you.
FREE FAMILY PORTRAITS! ETRATOS LIBRES DE LA FAMILIA! 무료초상화들! libérer les portraits de famille! freien Family Porträts! RETRATOS DE FAMILIA! GRATUITOS WOLNY RODZINA PORTRETY! ...teach us how to write “free family portraits” in other languages!
ReFab Happening from noon to 5:00

DETAILS BELOW…

Featuring culinary & political recipes of Bobby Seale, as found in Barbeque’n with Bobby.
Here’s an excerpt:

DECLARATION: BARBEQUE BILL OF RIGHTS
WHEN IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT it becomes necessary for us, the citizens of the earth, to creatively improve the culinary art of barbe-que’n in our opposition to the overly commercialized bondage of “cue-be-rab” (barbecuing backwards); and to assume, within the realm of palatable biological reactions to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle us, a decent respect for all the billions of human taste buds and savory barbeque desires; we the people declare a basic barbeque bill of rights which impels us to help halt, eradicate, and ultimately stamp out “cue-be-rab!” As the commercialized backwards “bottle-back” recipe methods pursue and invariably evince a design to reduce our backyard-picnics into burnt, half done, bland, badly seasoned, improperly pit-qued entrees, then it is the right of we the barbeque lovers of the world, to alter the cue-be-rab phenomenon and creatively change our recipe process for a more righteous saucy, down-home, wood-smoking, delectable, baste-marinating, barbeque’n methodology.

THE BASIC “RIGHTS” OF HICKORY SMOKE PIT BOBBY-QUE’N
CERTAIN “RIGHTS” ARE ABSOLUTELY BASIC to pit-smoking. You’ll see them repeatedly in the recipes that follow, but here they are in summary form. If you follow these basic steps, your barbequed meats will always come out tasting qued down to the bone.
1. Preparing Baste-Marinades: Always use recipe amounts of hickory liquid smoke.
2. Marinating Meat Entrees: 30-minute hot marinade, or 4 hours at room temperature or overnight in refrigerator.
3. Baste-Soaking Hickory Wood Chips: Spread out over white-ash-hot charcoals for smoke-flavor barbequing.
4. Sear Seasoning: Browning and sealing in any coated meat seasonings before pit-basting.
5. Constant Basting: Baste meat entrees with blended hickory flavored marinade (do not use sugar content sauces).
6. Cover Top Pit: Keep down after each basting method and adding more baste-soaked hickory wood chips as needed.
7. Glaze on Barbeque Sauces: Only after meat entree is mostly cooked and/or done

From the intro of the book: Let’s Re-Make The World
This book is a collection of documentation and writing around exhibitions and seminars that took place over several years and one ocean. It represents collaboration between the organizers, Ydre Nørrebro Kultur Bureau (YNKB) and The Library of Radiant Optimism for Let’s Re-make the World (Brett Bloom + Bonnie Fortune), and the participants at those exhibitions and seminars. It represents ideas bubbling up and then fading or conversely, gaining traction and sustainability among a dispersed group of practitioners. It represents a beginning. The book will serve not as a definitive guide to a movement, but as a compendium of ideas for social change, cultural work, organizational strategies, and poetic gestures that have been brought up at the four events catalogued here. Those events are:

The Radiantly Optimistic Poster Show, YNKB, Copenhagen, Denmark, December 16, 2006 – February 15, 2007.
The Radiantly Optimistic Poster Show II + Ungdomshuset Poster Show (co-organized with Malene Nielsen), Mess Hall, Chicago, IL, June 2007.
What We Know of Our Past. What We Demand of Our Future: A three-day gathering to talk about socially-engaged, political, and critical artwork, its international
iterations, history, and future, Mess Hall, January 18-20, 2008.
Let’s Re-make the World III: For 3 days YNKB was transformed into a seminar installation with, a kitchen (Folkekøkken) serving free food, a dining room, a hotspot, and
a seminar space with a “democratic wall” constantly collecting statements from the participants. Six invited international speakers from England, Germany, and the
United States, presented and discussed critical art projects for social change, followed by statements from the participants and the Sunday workshop worked out a joint
statement. Havblik Audio and Peter Dacke played experimental music closing long days of discussion, YNKB, February 22-24, 2008.

Start with a ReFab Happening, noon-5:00: What is ReFab?
ReFab uses the talents of book artists and new media artists to repurpose objects that otherwise might just go to the landfill. Here’s how it Works: Part exquisite corpse, part homage to Henry Ford, ReFab is a collaborative art workshop that seeks to repurpose unwanted items and give them new life. YOU bring an unwanted item to Mess Hall, anything from a gum wrapper to a broken television set – no object is too insignificant or too unwieldy – and place it on a conveyor belt. WE will then work on it in an assembly line of sorts, each of us will use a set amount of time to manipulate the object provided. The objects may be painted, burned, encased in wire, printed on, exorcised, pierced, decoupaged, filled with candy, anthropomorphized, photographed, gift wrapped, played like a musical instrument, written about and/or dipped in wax. The item will be documented as it undergoes its transformation, and before-and-after pictures will be displayed on the ReFab website.

Today on WORT's noon time show, A Public Affair, host Chris Dols had a much needed conversation by phone with Bob Quellos, an architect and Chicago citizen who is helping with the activist effort No Games Chicago. This was the first time I've heard in Madison a critical discussion of the City of Chicago's effort to woo the International Olympic Committee and the 2016 Summer Games. The reason it is important that this analysis be heard in Madison is because our city has become part of Chicago's official Olympic bid, having officially been named as the site of several competitive events. The governor and the mayor are on board. There has been virtually no voice on the issue other than that of those who are already sold on the idea. Predictably, from the get-go they have deployed the usual boilerplate about tourism and economic boons.

Missing is any analysis that takes into account what hosting the Games will probably mean for Chicago, and, in turn, how the crushing fiscal burden left on Chicago by the Games might affect the surrounding region. Including Madison. This lack of analysis is major problem given the anxiety bourgeois Madison feels regarding poor and working class people moving to Madison from the nearby big cities of Milwaukee and Chicago. How the economic and living conditions in those cities are managed and, in this case, maybe worsened substantially, should be of concern to people (and activists) here precisely because the demographic shifts in Madison probably correspond to those changing conditions.

Instead of blindly considering a Chicago Summer Games an automatic good, and, in the worse cases, simultaneously bemoaning the outsiders who are bringing to Madison new levels of violence and lawlessness, we should be thinking through the operations that make the nearby big cities unlivable, driving poor people out. This would include such strikingly neoliberal developments like hosting a summer Olympics. Unfortunately, even during the conversation on-air there wasn't much time spent on the regional ramifications, but it was a good start.

You can listen to the broadcast here.

Until last week, it had been more than ten years since I had attended a Southern Graphics Council conference. I just hadn't invested the time in keeping up with the field of official printmaking. This year, with the conference being hosted by Columbia College, the decision to attend was easy. David Jones, Andrew Whatley, and the whole organizing crew did a super job. Special props go to Jennifer Yorke for coordinating the many associated exhibitions. I was happy to help in the small ways I could, and get reacquainted with SGC from the perspective of a minor player in the host institution. That all said, the single panel I managed to attend, Printmaking as a Medium for International Collaboration: Vietnam and China, was on the basic side. It was useful for artists beginning to wonder how international contact and exchange happens, but not terribly useful for those of us who are already engaged in projects at an international level, and are looking to discuss with others the challenges, contradictions, deeper issues that follow. The demos that I peeked in were over full, pretty much as I recall my past SGC experience. Seems like there should either be more demos scheduled or have some cc tv for the overflow crowd. Or, maybe that's just the reality, the way it's gotta be, given the physical limits of bodies around a work table or press, and the marginal benefit of craned necks. I had only about 35 minutes to make the rounds of the vendor fair. The wares on offer were impressive, both gear and finished prints. I was happy to see Tom Huck there flacking his kick-butt woodcut prints. I managed to spend a buck on some amazing washi made by a single-man operation in a small town north of Tokyo, at $15/sheet. Pics of the vendor fair were posted to Printereseting.

There were lots of openings on Friday. I made remarks at the student show, Global Print, and then trekked over to the reception for the sprawling, combined installation of the miniture books show, the Aussie prints show curated by Fred Hagstrom, the International Print Center NY show, and the skateboard graphics show. From there, it was over to the Green Lantern in Wicker Park, from which I didn't leave until late. One of the reasons I stayed for a while was the people and me feeling social.

Roman, Bryce, and Abby from InCUBATE helped with the happy mood. I had fun quizzing Roman and Abby about their masters theses. Anne Elizabeth Moore had Chicago and Providence supporters and collaborators in the room.

A few days ago writer, teacher, and curator Bert Stabler posted to the gochgo list a link to a video document of the remarkable Piñata Factory project, which he, his public school students, and many others helped make happen. Mike Bancroft initiated the project. You especially gotta love the broad daylight stealth 'Streets & San' truck deliveries. Equal parts service work, social activism, anti-authoritarian provocation, and classroom student art project, Piñata Factory inspires. Check it out on Current.

Join me this evening at the Hyde Park Art Center for a Talking Point event featuring Elvia Rodriguez-Ochoa. She'll be giving an overview of the history of polvo and a bit on her own studio practice. Polvo is the long time Pilsen-based collective endeavor of Elvia, Miguel Cortez, and Jesus Macarena-Avila. Polvo has been an exhibition space, publishing collective, and art group, and exists for the moment mainly as a mailing list, website, and occasional magazine.

The Zapatista movement in Chiapas broke into global public consciousness fifteen years ago this past New Year's Day. On the first day of 1994, the day NAFTA went into effect, through an armed uprising the EZLN made public their resistence to the signing of that treaty, and their militant resistance to the Mexican government's anti-indigenous policies. The term 'neoliberal' from that moment on gained increasingly widespread use in the North American left's analytical vocabulary. The EZLN struggle was one of the factors informing polvo from the outset. The three artist-organizers saw parallels between the Zapatista analysis and the kinds of inequities and speculative investment going on around them in Chicago.

It's a changed world in some significant ways, but the critiques advanced over the years by the EZLN remain largely correct. Mostly, conditions have gotten only worse and/or more urgent for the world's poor and working people, and especially the indigenous peoples. Good time to revisit!

6:00-8:00 PM @
Hyde Park Art Center
5020 S. Cornell Avenue
Chicago, IL 60615
t: 773-324-5520

Already there’s been quite a bit of writing, remarking, and blogging on the Obama victory as a sort of national catharsis. But like the fluid identity of Obama himself, the emotional healing enters the picture from any number of angles. Here’s mine.

Forty years after the Chicago Police, under orders from Mayor Richard J. Daley—remembered by more than a few from that time as an out and out racist—beat down the anti-war demonstrators in Grant Park during the DNC and in the process established definitively a split between the New Left and the Democratic Party, the younger Mayor Daley welcomed supporters of Barack Obama downtown for the election night celebration party, whether they had tickets or not. He did this knowing full well he was putting his fate into the hands of a young leader who, if he’d had the curse to stand before the throngs in defeat, or worse, perceived criminal theft of an election, would have had the responsibility to quell an unfolding riot, if not a new civil war.

This act of faith on the part of Richard Daley the Son, seemed to offer another dimension to the feeling of this election’s seeming resolution of long-standing divides:  after ’68, Nixon, the ineffective Carter, the victorious Reagan, the centrist Clinton, and the nightmare that is Bush the Younger, is the Left back in the fold of the Democratic Party? It is a fair question, because the activist Left put in some serious work for the Obama campaign, in the meantime shelving work on many other struggles. Also, there is the plain reality of the incessent right wing chatter/incantation of the names Bill Ayers, ACORN, and Jeremiah Wright—names, groups, and lineages (SDS, Weather Underground, Alinsky-style organizing around poverty issues, black liberation theology) to which, really, only the activist Left are positively attached. When such associations were used to attack Obama many leftists felt a righteous responsibility to contribute to the campaign, no matter the falseness or prespostureousness of the charges. In other words, just as it assisted Obama in uniting the rest of the fractured social body to form a single voting majority, the Right did an excellent job of driving the activist Left directly into the waiting arms (and stacks of phone bank lists) of the Obama campaign.

The activist Left will be disappointed with Obama. We all know that. But the present day Left’s aversion to party politics—and to the Democratic Party in particular—may not soon return to its pre-Obama state. For one thing, the paranoid Right won’t silence its chatter anytime real soon, and may even amplify it in the coming months. Every time Bill Ayers is trotted out as a bogeyman, the Left has a responsibility to respond, if only to defend our own history. But each response probably will, conveniently for Obama and the revitalized Dems, contain at least a trace defense of Obama, and therefore remain somewhat positionable within that camp. The regional, ideological, cultural, and, most importantly, political marginalization of the Right is one consequence of this united Center-Left. And for that I will not complain.

*
Watching the Republican television commentators tonight was alternately baffling, wince-inducing, and just plain infuriating. Baffling, because they just didn’t seem to get it. Not a single one of them whom I saw—Karl Rove, John Bolton, Bill Bennett, Pat Buchanan, Tom Delay, and others--acknowledged their failures and looked in the mirror. I can’t help thinking, don’t they want to know what went wrong and why they lost? For example, Rove smugly reminded viewers that Democratic Congressional leadership has earned negatives right down there with his old boss, W. But he never stopped to consider the possibility that Pelosi’s disapproval numbers might have something to do with the fact that in one of her first (non) acts as House Speaker, she took impeachment ‘of the table.’ Their pathetic attempts to cast early doubt on an Obama administration by continuing the very lines of attack that earned them the evening’s national electoral doghouse caused me to wince out of a combination of embarrassment and irritation. The infuriation came when after the election had been called and the discussions turned to how Obama’s achievement stands in the context of the struggle for racial justice in America. John Bolton’s first remark on this topic to BBC telejournalists was a belligerent demand that Europeans never again accuse America of having a racial problem—as if all racial problems were done with, and, furthermore, that he and his extremist wingnut gang had something to do with solving this problem! Others spoke of having lifted the ‘excuse’ of racism—as if they could take credit for this positive turn in American social evolution! Unbelieveable.

*
The world is getting to know Chicago. The faces we saw at the Grant Park celebration? That is Chicago, and that, Sarah Palin, is the real America. It is the America I love seeing. And what about the bullet-proof glass behind which Obama delivered his victory speech? That, too, is Chicago—specifically, the South Side, where in some parts a majority of one’s consumer purchases may be conducted through bullet-proof glass. I know it was a Secret Service thing, and it wasn’t to protect against a stick-up, and they had them polished to near-liquid invisibility, but having made my home on the South Side for more than a decade, I must say, it was the slightest bit ghetto. You could even say, as far as bullet-proof protection goes, it was ghetto fab. Which is also very Chicago. These were to the world of bullet-proof glass what glittering, spinning rims are to the world of hydraulic rides.

*
In the discussions of an expanded Democratic electorate, it is worth noting that the election to the US Senate of the Udall cousins in Colorado and New Mexico marks a return as much as it does a departure. Sure, Obama broke ground as an urban-based, minority candidate who found success in the West, but the Udalls bring the federal political profile of the mountain west back to its progressive roots. Being the sons of Mo Udall and Stewart Udall, putting conservation on the federal agenda runs in their blood. Hopefully, the younger Udalls will bring to the Senate a full backlash against the evisceration of America’s wilderness heritage and the deliberate despoilation of western government land under the Bushites. This is an incredibly important moment for such issues, as last minute orders on use of federal lands—sometimes impossible to undo—have become standard fare for lame duck presidents in recent administrations.

*
On the morning of Election Day I had my semi-regular meeting with my language tutor/coach, a native of Beijing. The day’s discussion of course went straight to the elections. Never having voted, and not having grown up in a society with elections, he had many questions for me. When are the votes counted? Is a winner announced the same day? If this is a federal election, then why do all the states have their own voting rules, hours, and machines? In my halting Mandarin and spotty knowledge about the ins and outs of election operations, I tried to explain the American way. He described the Chinese way, by contrast, as really simple. You never vote. There are elections for representatives to the National Congress, but they are never announced, never publicized, there are no campaigns, and most people hear about them only after the fact, if at all. And there is no information about what the representative then does or says. Worse yet, in the various congresses, all votes are taken by a show of hands, which serves to encourage super majorities and frequently unanimity, especially on sensitive measures. So it is true—China is not a democracy. On the other hand, how would it even begin, should the CCP decide to start an electoral process? Does India’s system work any better? By and large, the Chinese do not think so.

So here it is. In twenty-four hours or less we may have elected Barack Obama president of the USA. Besides the Grant Park party for a million, and the four years of occasional traffic snarls that would accompany a President Obama traveling by motorcade and/or helicopter to and from Hyde Park, there is the feeling (already!) of a let down.

We on the Left knew all along that we would be disappointed by an Obama presidency. And yet we jumped on the grassroots end of the campaign, contributing time, labor, creativity, and money

1) because of Sarah Palin
2) for the chance to elect a man embodying the multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial American reality
3) because anybody the Right negatively links to Bill Ayers and ACORN deserves our support
4) because it is about time we had president who is from a Northern big city
5) and because...did I mention Sarah Palin???

It will surely be a sweet defeat of the Right, but it won't be a victory for the Left. I've read and mostly bought into the analysis that FDR's early administration was a pitch-perfect co-optation of the socialist Left by the Democratic Party liberals. But never did I understand the conditions of that cooptation until now. I can see it happening. Bill Clinton's presidency didn't even offer the pretense of a Left, or rather only granted the most pathetically shallow lipservice (such as playing Fleetwood Mac at the inaugural ball), and as a result the radical activist underground went its own way in the Nineties, coming out in full flower in Seattle in '99.

But here we have the prospect of a president with the talents and vision to bring new and needed programs into being, and Congress that just might be willing to go along. Not another New Deal, but at least some kind of serious re-investment in the national body. Naomi Klein's words, quoted on John Cusack's blog, are worth keeping in mind.

"I have been talking about the need for a progressive shock doctrine in speeches a lot. I call it disaster populism and the key difference is democracy. The right has been using shocks to suspend and sidestep democracy, declaring states of emergency and the progressive use of shock to enlarge and deepen the democratic space to bring more people into the political process. This is why it is important to remember that the New Deal did not come only from kindly elites handing it down from on high, but also because those elites were under massive popular pressure from below. We can all use shock and crisis to move the political direction of the country, but the progressive route is a democratic one, the right is an authoritarian one, even if it takes place within an electoral democracy."

So how can we maintain a distance from the candidate we supported and worked for, now that the Right is reduced to a fringe element? How does the Left, as the ascendent extreme, demand and get the results that the social conservatives never were able to?

I'll be pondering this thought as I drive in the opposite direction, away from Chicago and Grant Park, listening to the election returns on the car radio.

Two mini-vacations have thrown me off the blog path.

Two pics to show where we went, neither of which was terribly far. These weren't exactly 'staycations' but they weren't entirely new adventures, either. We spent a couple of days in the Sylvania Wilderness, which is something like a small patch of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, and then a few more in the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park. These were second visits to both.

First, from the Sylvania Wilderness of Michigan's U.P.

....'cause the vandals took the handle.

Last Thursday I joined two associates for a tour of Chicago's Haymarket history, led by the knowledgeable Nicolas Lampert.  We began with a stop at Waldheim Cemetary, final resting place of Emma Goldman 

and the site of the monument to the Haymarket martyrs. The lefty gravemarkers, with wonderful inscriptions having to do with the long struggle for justice and dignity, are simply amazing. The collection of famous radicals keeping company in death and memory is a wonderful act of imagination that strengthens their claim on history from the other side of the grave. I love that Emma's marker is only a few steps away from her one-time rival associate, and later respected colleague,
Emma and Voltairine were both radicalized by the injustice suffered by the Haymarket martyrs, even though they went off in very different philosophical directions. Their markers offer themselves as evidence of Haymarket's role in the proliferation of anarchist thought and action, in a way rendering true August Spies's last words, "The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you throttle today!"

We ended the tour at the site of the incident, marked by a sculpture in what is now the West Loop. The new monument is not what you would call radical. Rather it serves to memorialize the histories of all involved, whether law enforcement or labor organizers. Blandness might therefore be expected. But in between Waldheim and the West Loop, we made a stop at the Chicago Police headquarters on South Michigan. There, near the building entry, stands the policeman's statue, which over the decades had been toppled at least three times. After years of assault by radicals, and years in storage, without a good place to put it, now it lives outdoors once again, but in the fully protected environs of the police parking lot. According to Nicolas, the current pedestal is about the same size as that of the original. Can you imagine toppling that? The first time it took a street car jumping the tracks and crashing it, and then decades later the Weathermen used bombs.