Concerts

Nestled on the southwest side near 51st and California, the Gage Park Latinx Council’s Community Cultural Center is housed in a red brick storefront with shiny reflective windows that bear the organization’s acronym “GPLXC” in purple. The organization was founded in 2018 by Samantha Alexandra Martinez, Antonio Santos, and Katia Martinez.

Inside, accent lamps and LEDs illuminate black, pink, and beige walls. Potted plants, shelves filled with multicolored YA books, games for children, photos of community members, motivational messages, and student artwork make up the bulk of the center’s furnishings. Deeper in the space’s interior, sparkly purple tinsel curtains hang from two walls—the remnants of a Euphoria-themed Pride party organized by teens in the center at the end of “Queer Riot” last September, one of GPLXC’s summer programs for young adults. 

Diego Garcia, 20, sat across from me on one of the many sleek gray couches arranged inside Gage Park’s community-led cultural center, which turned two years old last fall.

“I first entered the Gage Park Latinx Council in February of 2021. One of their organizers had asked me if I wanted to volunteer with them to distribute . . . I think it was 1,200 pounds of food on a weekly basis. And I was like, yeah, like, that’s a lot of food. You guys need help,” he said and laughed. 

The space was empty besides the two of us and one other young staffer, who sat at a table in the back, working on a laptop. It’s here, sitting on the couches, where Garcia detailed how he became program manager of the five-year-old community mutual aid experiment slash nonprofit. 

Garcia gestured to donated items on shelves. 

“We distribute COVID tests, masks, soap, and toothbrushes because we know that these are the necessities people need on a daily basis. And also we acknowledge that the work we do is just a Band-Aid to the issues that are happening in the neighborhood but this work is still needed.”

GPLXC describes itself as a queer, femme, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and Latinx-led grassroots organization rooted in abolition and mutual aid. They provide programs that range from a culturally specific food pantry to children’s art classes, summer organizing internships, and more—all to fill the gaps in community programming and resources that they see their southwest side neighbors experiencing.

Garcia smiles a lot when he talks and speaks about his history of Gage Park organizing, as if it were just another after-school extracurricular that a kid might fall into, like basketball or clarinet. 

“I started organizing when I was 16 years old” out of a church, he said. “That was the only space I had. So we would register people to vote.”

When Garcia realized there wasn’t a safe space for youth like himself to congregate, he volunteered at Immaculate Conception Church, sweeping the floor to pass the time. Soon he started meeting other young folks in the church, and they would organize fundraisers for victims of violence. One time they raised $6,000 in a day for a five-year-old. 

By 2020, Garcia and GPLXC’s small team were already collaborating before he was a bona fide member. They organized a march of over 3,000 people for Black Lives Matter in the summer of 2020 by hanging a few flyers and posting online. Local artists and activists flooded the streets with them, and a Black-owned vegan restaurant from Little Village started distributing free food.

Garcia started helping GPLXC run its weekly food market not too long afterward. “I just showed up, and I volunteered for a couple of weeks. And that’s when they opened their arms to me.”

Gage Park sits in the middle of Brighton Park, Back of the Yards, and West Lawn. Its population is just shy of 40,000 residents and is primarily made up of Mexican American working-class families living in multigenerational homes (mostly bungalows). The neighborhood’s restaurants, auto shops, hair salons, government services, pharmacies, and other businesses are concentrated along 51st from Kedzie to Western and Kedzie between 51st and 59th.

Gage Park has been heavily Catholic for about the last century, when, in the 1920s, the neighborhood attracted Anglo-Slavic immigrants enticed by the southwest side’s several newly established national Roman Catholic churches. The land is also surrounded by three railroads, so bustling businesses like World’s Finest Chocolate, the Royal Bottling Company, and Central Steel and Wire Company settled in the area, attracted by the nearby transportation. But in 1966, Gage Park made national headlines as part of the first open housing experiment for Black residents when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a march from Gage Park High School to Marquette Park for integration.

White residents and visitors attacked the march, throwing rocks and bottles and spitting on marchers. In the months after, the American Nazi Party organized a series of protests and a “white people’s march.” As white flight spread in the 1960s and 70s, the neighborhood’s middle-class—predominantly made of European immigrants from Germany, Poland, Lithuania, and Ireland—transitioned to 91 percent Latinx and working-class, and today it is the second largest Latinx neighborhood in Chicago outside of Little Village.

Despite feeling gratitude that integration allowed Mexican immigrants to make a home in the area, the organizers running GPLXC said that they still lived in the shadows of the white Europeans who built Gage Park and then fled.

“[We saw] that when white people left, resources also left,” Martinez said

Gage Park is rich in public and charter schools, but their scarce public amenities otherwise reflect the level of divestment locally.

“The Gage Park Field House is a big building that could potentially be a community center. But it’s not; it looks quite abandoned,” Martinez said. The fieldhouse used to house the Chicago Public Library, but the library was downsized to a small storefront in the 90s when the neighborhood transitioned to mostly Black and Brown. “We’ve gone inside that building, it’s pretty deteriorated,” Martinez said “Our park is also very deteriorated.” 

On Western, she continued, there’s a government agency where WIC and SNAP recipients go for food support. “But every time I pass outside during the summers, there’s a long line of people just waiting there.”

The past two decades of Chicago news headlines about the neighborhood detail shootings and intermittent gang violence. Today, many residents of the southwest side face food insecurity, gun violence, and negative health effects from nearby factory pollution. 

GPLXC originated in 2018 when a group of youth who grew up in the neighborhood organized art and literacy programs in the Gage Park Library after it went without a children’s librarian for five years.

“I grew up in this neighborhood, and one of the few things we could do for free, coming from like a single mom household, was going to the library and storytime, games and all that,” Santos said. “That disappeared for many years.” 

The group started occupying space at Gage Park Library and led art projects for youth aged six through 12 rooted in social justice or Latinx identity and culture, and spaces quickly filled. “We had 70 youth consistently showing up to a small storefront.”

And that’s where it all started, Santos said. From there, they grew and started to see more in their community, particularly about how city resources are unfairly distributed. 

Take their mercadito, for example. In 2020, some people from outside the community did weekly food pantry pop-ups for a couple months and then stopped when government funding ran out. But the pop-ups had already become a food source community members relied upon, 51 percent of who live below the poverty level. “People are still hungry. People have always been struggling to access food,” Santos said. 

The organizers connected with Grocery Run Club, a community-driven fresh produce initiative, soon after the funding ran out. They started receiving 50 boxes of food weekly in a local parking lot. As of fall 2022, Grocery Run Club has provided 200 boxes of food weekly for GPLXC to distribute. GPLXC expanded their partnership to include the Pilsen Food Pantry and even secured a $25,000 grant for the market. They used the money to purchase groceries directly from a neighborhood mom-and-pop grocery store, making sure fresh items like tortillas and vegetables are available every week. GPLXC has distributed food to over 20,000 families in the past three years. 

Now, their goal with the program is to help the community create local systems of food. 

“So it started off as like, ‘Oh, cool, we don’t have a children’s librarian,’” Santos said. “And then it was like, ‘Oh, we also don’t have a food pantry. We also don’t have a queer space. We also don’t have art programming. We also don’t have X, Y, and Z.’ And that’s how our programming developed pretty organically into what it is today.”

The sheer scope of programs GPLXC offers is a reflection of how dynamic the space is. Martinez said that when it comes to stories of violence and other difficulties faced by those on the southwest side, they generally aren’t told by the residents who live there. So Martinez wanted the center to be a space where community members could articulate new narratives, educate their community, and facilitate self-expression.

When formal government entities provide community services, it’s usually more of a transactional experience than a relationship. The patron arrives seeking a specific type of support, and if they meet certain criteria set by the agency then they’re granted it. GPLXC did not want to replicate that sterile experience of receiving aid and has made a point to invest in neighborhood relationships and demonstrate community consistency.

The center’s annual summer art club serves middle schoolers and brings in local artists from similar cultural backgrounds and distinct artistic mediums (like screen printing or sculpting) to introduce students to another way of thinking about themselves and the world. “[We] not only do art as a way to learn about art and be artists, but also as a way to process emotion, to process some of the grief and some of the pain that might have come up from the pandemic,” Martinez said. 

For a while, GPLXC also ran a mural project with local teens and young adults. Gage Park is very industrial and, because of it, giant gray buildings dominate the skyline and take up space that might otherwise be used for public expression. GPLXC leveraged their power as an organization to convince business owners to trust them and their students with public walls and space. Because of that, the group has painted ten murals over the past two years in their community.

The mural project beautified the neighborhood and let young residents assert their cultural and queer pride locally with vibrant colors and political messages. 

Another program of theirs called Documentografia runs in partnership with the Chicago History Museum, where ten young people come in every summer to learn photography skills and capture their community through their eyes, all to be archived at the museum. 

This program started when the museum was “called out” by Gage Park youth for not having any Latinx representation in the museum’s neighborhood archives, only records of theEuropean immigrants who were there before, or records about the violence against Black people. There weren’t stories about Black and Latinx families currently living there. 

“[So we said,] We’re gonna capture our own images,” Santos said. “We’re gonna do our own oral histories, we’re gonna ask our own grandparents to sit down and have the oral history recorded so that we can get these stories collected. Because obviously, the museum hasn’t been doing that for the last 50 years.”

The young adults have documented things like young queer friends in love. Santos points out that while we all have access to a lot of cultural images of white, heterosexual, cisgender teen romance, the moment that gaze is focused on a Black or Brown queer youth, the topic is shrouded in more mystery, and images of it aren’t as readily available in their young people’s communities. 

In GPLXC’s Queer Riot summer internship program, teens spend a few weeks learning about Black and Brown queer history in Chicago. During the latter half of the program, they’re given a budget to throw whatever event or organize any action that moves them. 

Last year, the group held a sex education program for high schoolers in partnership with University of Chicago medical students from the Latinx association. 

The organizers also coordinate regular all-ages family occasions like board game nights, slime parties, art markets, and other well-attended family-friendly events. 

Although space is limited for each of these events, the siblings of any student who participates in a program will automatically be invited to enroll. 

Santos feels that their model of sharing public history and education on queerness and more is slowly radicalizing their community. 

“The 55-year-old grandmother coming into the food pantry sees our Pride flag on top of the building and sees the ‘defund the police’ sign in the window and is forced to kind of come face to face with these things that are oftentimes propaganda,” he said. “And the way that these things are taught to our communities . . . there’s a lot of communal unlearning that we’re trying to do.”

The organizers say Gage Park’s families have been more than receptive. The center has a good reputation among young people because of how they prioritize giving young people autonomy and power; so youth essentially recruit themselves by word of mouth. Youth often reach out to the center on their own to inquire about what programs are available. Once they release an application for any program, they have no trouble filling up those spots. 

Not everyone in the programs is from Gage Park; they draw participants from all across the southwest side: from Englewood, West Lawn, Back of the Yards, and Brighton Park. 

The group was introduced to grant writing in their second year, and the center is run by four full-time staff members, a local contracted photographer, contracted artists, college interns, and community partners. They pride themselves on catering to such a wide age range of folks. 

The youngest person they served was a three-year-old who attended their art program. During different workshops or the weekly market, grandparents come out to receive food. 

“I think that’s something super beautiful that I haven’t seen any other organization do in the southwest side,” Garcia said. 

Read More

The early months of the COVID pandemic left many of us settling into wherever we happened to be living, but Katherine Paul, who makes music as Black Belt Eagle Scout, hit the road. Journeying from Portland, Oregon, north to the Swimonish Indian Tribal Community on Washington’s Puget Sound, Paul returned to the home of her youth. Full of cedar trees and ever-present rivulets of fog, Swimonish was a sacred refuge for her, jewel-like and precious. But Paul’s return to her ancestral homeland came with many dualities: joy and grief, gratitude and sorrow, comfort and yearning. Those experiences inform her new third album, The Land, the Water, the Sky. Opening track “My Blood Runs Through This Land” crackles like leaves underfoot with a swampy, reverberating guitar line that pays homage to Paul’s Pacific Northwest heroes Nirvana and Hole. Her layered vocal tracks tangle into a grunge-fueled morass, culminating in a climax of cinematic proportions. “Sedna” reimagines the origin story of the Inuit sea god of the same name, while “Nobody”—a critique of the lack of Native representation in pop culture—rings with the sweet refrain, “Nobody sang it for me like I wanna sing it to you.” 

Much of The Land is a gracious tribute to Paul’s ancestors, but she also makes room for kinships beyond blood. The lulling “Salmon Stinta” features a vocal cameo from Phil Elverum of Mount Eerie and the Microphones, who was married to Paul’s late mentor, artist and musician Geneviève Castrée. Though The Land offers a glimpse of Paul’s rich inner life, it’s as much a sonic trek through the generations and age-old traditions that reverberate in her bones. Listening to The Land feels like viewing the world through Paul’s eyes—an experience that’s wrenching but nevertheless beautiful.

Black Belt Eagle Scout’s The Land, The Water, The Sky is available through Bandcamp.

Read More

Nestled on the southwest side near 51st and California, the Gage Park Latinx Council’s Community Cultural Center is housed in a red brick storefront with shiny reflective windows that bear the organization’s acronym “GPLXC” in purple. The organization was founded in 2018 by Samantha Alexandra Martinez, Antonio Santos, and Katia Martinez.

Inside, accent lamps and LEDs illuminate black, pink, and beige walls. Potted plants, shelves filled with multicolored YA books, games for children, photos of community members, motivational messages, and student artwork make up the bulk of the center’s furnishings. Deeper in the space’s interior, sparkly purple tinsel curtains hang from two walls—the remnants of a Euphoria-themed Pride party organized by teens in the center at the end of “Queer Riot” last September, one of GPLXC’s summer programs for young adults. 

Diego Garcia, 20, sat across from me on one of the many sleek gray couches arranged inside Gage Park’s community-led cultural center, which turned two years old last fall.

“I first entered the Gage Park Latinx Council in February of 2021. One of their organizers had asked me if I wanted to volunteer with them to distribute . . . I think it was 1,200 pounds of food on a weekly basis. And I was like, yeah, like, that’s a lot of food. You guys need help,” he said and laughed. 

The space was empty besides the two of us and one other young staffer, who sat at a table in the back, working on a laptop. It’s here, sitting on the couches, where Garcia detailed how he became program manager of the five-year-old community mutual aid experiment slash nonprofit. 

Garcia gestured to donated items on shelves. 

“We distribute COVID tests, masks, soap, and toothbrushes because we know that these are the necessities people need on a daily basis. And also we acknowledge that the work we do is just a Band-Aid to the issues that are happening in the neighborhood but this work is still needed.”

GPLXC describes itself as a queer, femme, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and Latinx-led grassroots organization rooted in abolition and mutual aid. They provide programs that range from a culturally specific food pantry to children’s art classes, summer organizing internships, and more—all to fill the gaps in community programming and resources that they see their southwest side neighbors experiencing.

Garcia smiles a lot when he talks and speaks about his history of Gage Park organizing, as if it were just another after-school extracurricular that a kid might fall into, like basketball or clarinet. 

“I started organizing when I was 16 years old” out of a church, he said. “That was the only space I had. So we would register people to vote.”

When Garcia realized there wasn’t a safe space for youth like himself to congregate, he volunteered at Immaculate Conception Church, sweeping the floor to pass the time. Soon he started meeting other young folks in the church, and they would organize fundraisers for victims of violence. One time they raised $6,000 in a day for a five-year-old. 

By 2020, Garcia and GPLXC’s small team were already collaborating before he was a bona fide member. They organized a march of over 3,000 people for Black Lives Matter in the summer of 2020 by hanging a few flyers and posting online. Local artists and activists flooded the streets with them, and a Black-owned vegan restaurant from Little Village started distributing free food.

Garcia started helping GPLXC run its weekly food market not too long afterward. “I just showed up, and I volunteered for a couple of weeks. And that’s when they opened their arms to me.”

Gage Park sits in the middle of Brighton Park, Back of the Yards, and West Lawn. Its population is just shy of 40,000 residents and is primarily made up of Mexican American working-class families living in multigenerational homes (mostly bungalows). The neighborhood’s restaurants, auto shops, hair salons, government services, pharmacies, and other businesses are concentrated along 51st from Kedzie to Western and Kedzie between 51st and 59th.

Gage Park has been heavily Catholic for about the last century, when, in the 1920s, the neighborhood attracted Anglo-Slavic immigrants enticed by the southwest side’s several newly established national Roman Catholic churches. The land is also surrounded by three railroads, so bustling businesses like World’s Finest Chocolate, the Royal Bottling Company, and Central Steel and Wire Company settled in the area, attracted by the nearby transportation. But in 1966, Gage Park made national headlines as part of the first open housing experiment for Black residents when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a march from Gage Park High School to Marquette Park for integration.

White residents and visitors attacked the march, throwing rocks and bottles and spitting on marchers. In the months after, the American Nazi Party organized a series of protests and a “white people’s march.” As white flight spread in the 1960s and 70s, the neighborhood’s middle-class—predominantly made of European immigrants from Germany, Poland, Lithuania, and Ireland—transitioned to 91 percent Latinx and working-class, and today it is the second largest Latinx neighborhood in Chicago outside of Little Village.

Despite feeling gratitude that integration allowed Mexican immigrants to make a home in the area, the organizers running GPLXC said that they still lived in the shadows of the white Europeans who built Gage Park and then fled.

“[We saw] that when white people left, resources also left,” Martinez said

Gage Park is rich in public and charter schools, but their scarce public amenities otherwise reflect the level of divestment locally.

“The Gage Park Field House is a big building that could potentially be a community center. But it’s not; it looks quite abandoned,” Martinez said. The fieldhouse used to house the Chicago Public Library, but the library was downsized to a small storefront in the 90s when the neighborhood transitioned to mostly Black and Brown. “We’ve gone inside that building, it’s pretty deteriorated,” Martinez said “Our park is also very deteriorated.” 

On Western, she continued, there’s a government agency where WIC and SNAP recipients go for food support. “But every time I pass outside during the summers, there’s a long line of people just waiting there.”

The past two decades of Chicago news headlines about the neighborhood detail shootings and intermittent gang violence. Today, many residents of the southwest side face food insecurity, gun violence, and negative health effects from nearby factory pollution. 

GPLXC originated in 2018 when a group of youth who grew up in the neighborhood organized art and literacy programs in the Gage Park Library after it went without a children’s librarian for five years.

“I grew up in this neighborhood, and one of the few things we could do for free, coming from like a single mom household, was going to the library and storytime, games and all that,” Santos said. “That disappeared for many years.” 

The group started occupying space at Gage Park Library and led art projects for youth aged six through 12 rooted in social justice or Latinx identity and culture, and spaces quickly filled. “We had 70 youth consistently showing up to a small storefront.”

And that’s where it all started, Santos said. From there, they grew and started to see more in their community, particularly about how city resources are unfairly distributed. 

Take their mercadito, for example. In 2020, some people from outside the community did weekly food pantry pop-ups for a couple months and then stopped when government funding ran out. But the pop-ups had already become a food source community members relied upon, 51 percent of who live below the poverty level. “People are still hungry. People have always been struggling to access food,” Santos said. 

The organizers connected with Grocery Run Club, a community-driven fresh produce initiative, soon after the funding ran out. They started receiving 50 boxes of food weekly in a local parking lot. As of fall 2022, Grocery Run Club has provided 200 boxes of food weekly for GPLXC to distribute. GPLXC expanded their partnership to include the Pilsen Food Pantry and even secured a $25,000 grant for the market. They used the money to purchase groceries directly from a neighborhood mom-and-pop grocery store, making sure fresh items like tortillas and vegetables are available every week. GPLXC has distributed food to over 20,000 families in the past three years. 

Now, their goal with the program is to help the community create local systems of food. 

“So it started off as like, ‘Oh, cool, we don’t have a children’s librarian,’” Santos said. “And then it was like, ‘Oh, we also don’t have a food pantry. We also don’t have a queer space. We also don’t have art programming. We also don’t have X, Y, and Z.’ And that’s how our programming developed pretty organically into what it is today.”

The sheer scope of programs GPLXC offers is a reflection of how dynamic the space is. Martinez said that when it comes to stories of violence and other difficulties faced by those on the southwest side, they generally aren’t told by the residents who live there. So Martinez wanted the center to be a space where community members could articulate new narratives, educate their community, and facilitate self-expression.

When formal government entities provide community services, it’s usually more of a transactional experience than a relationship. The patron arrives seeking a specific type of support, and if they meet certain criteria set by the agency then they’re granted it. GPLXC did not want to replicate that sterile experience of receiving aid and has made a point to invest in neighborhood relationships and demonstrate community consistency.

The center’s annual summer art club serves middle schoolers and brings in local artists from similar cultural backgrounds and distinct artistic mediums (like screen printing or sculpting) to introduce students to another way of thinking about themselves and the world. “[We] not only do art as a way to learn about art and be artists, but also as a way to process emotion, to process some of the grief and some of the pain that might have come up from the pandemic,” Martinez said. 

For a while, GPLXC also ran a mural project with local teens and young adults. Gage Park is very industrial and, because of it, giant gray buildings dominate the skyline and take up space that might otherwise be used for public expression. GPLXC leveraged their power as an organization to convince business owners to trust them and their students with public walls and space. Because of that, the group has painted ten murals over the past two years in their community.

The mural project beautified the neighborhood and let young residents assert their cultural and queer pride locally with vibrant colors and political messages. 

Another program of theirs called Documentografia runs in partnership with the Chicago History Museum, where ten young people come in every summer to learn photography skills and capture their community through their eyes, all to be archived at the museum. 

This program started when the museum was “called out” by Gage Park youth for not having any Latinx representation in the museum’s neighborhood archives, only records of theEuropean immigrants who were there before, or records about the violence against Black people. There weren’t stories about Black and Latinx families currently living there. 

“[So we said,] We’re gonna capture our own images,” Santos said. “We’re gonna do our own oral histories, we’re gonna ask our own grandparents to sit down and have the oral history recorded so that we can get these stories collected. Because obviously, the museum hasn’t been doing that for the last 50 years.”

The young adults have documented things like young queer friends in love. Santos points out that while we all have access to a lot of cultural images of white, heterosexual, cisgender teen romance, the moment that gaze is focused on a Black or Brown queer youth, the topic is shrouded in more mystery, and images of it aren’t as readily available in their young people’s communities. 

In GPLXC’s Queer Riot summer internship program, teens spend a few weeks learning about Black and Brown queer history in Chicago. During the latter half of the program, they’re given a budget to throw whatever event or organize any action that moves them. 

Last year, the group held a sex education program for high schoolers in partnership with University of Chicago medical students from the Latinx association. 

The organizers also coordinate regular all-ages family occasions like board game nights, slime parties, art markets, and other well-attended family-friendly events. 

Although space is limited for each of these events, the siblings of any student who participates in a program will automatically be invited to enroll. 

Santos feels that their model of sharing public history and education on queerness and more is slowly radicalizing their community. 

“The 55-year-old grandmother coming into the food pantry sees our Pride flag on top of the building and sees the ‘defund the police’ sign in the window and is forced to kind of come face to face with these things that are oftentimes propaganda,” he said. “And the way that these things are taught to our communities . . . there’s a lot of communal unlearning that we’re trying to do.”

The organizers say Gage Park’s families have been more than receptive. The center has a good reputation among young people because of how they prioritize giving young people autonomy and power; so youth essentially recruit themselves by word of mouth. Youth often reach out to the center on their own to inquire about what programs are available. Once they release an application for any program, they have no trouble filling up those spots. 

Not everyone in the programs is from Gage Park; they draw participants from all across the southwest side: from Englewood, West Lawn, Back of the Yards, and Brighton Park. 

The group was introduced to grant writing in their second year, and the center is run by four full-time staff members, a local contracted photographer, contracted artists, college interns, and community partners. They pride themselves on catering to such a wide age range of folks. 

The youngest person they served was a three-year-old who attended their art program. During different workshops or the weekly market, grandparents come out to receive food. 

“I think that’s something super beautiful that I haven’t seen any other organization do in the southwest side,” Garcia said. 

Read More

The early months of the COVID pandemic left many of us settling into wherever we happened to be living, but Katherine Paul, who makes music as Black Belt Eagle Scout, hit the road. Journeying from Portland, Oregon, north to the Swimonish Indian Tribal Community on Washington’s Puget Sound, Paul returned to the home of her youth. Full of cedar trees and ever-present rivulets of fog, Swimonish was a sacred refuge for her, jewel-like and precious. But Paul’s return to her ancestral homeland came with many dualities: joy and grief, gratitude and sorrow, comfort and yearning. Those experiences inform her new third album, The Land, the Water, the Sky. Opening track “My Blood Runs Through This Land” crackles like leaves underfoot with a swampy, reverberating guitar line that pays homage to Paul’s Pacific Northwest heroes Nirvana and Hole. Her layered vocal tracks tangle into a grunge-fueled morass, culminating in a climax of cinematic proportions. “Sedna” reimagines the origin story of the Inuit sea god of the same name, while “Nobody”—a critique of the lack of Native representation in pop culture—rings with the sweet refrain, “Nobody sang it for me like I wanna sing it to you.” 

Much of The Land is a gracious tribute to Paul’s ancestors, but she also makes room for kinships beyond blood. The lulling “Salmon Stinta” features a vocal cameo from Phil Elverum of Mount Eerie and the Microphones, who was married to Paul’s late mentor, artist and musician Geneviève Castrée. Though The Land offers a glimpse of Paul’s rich inner life, it’s as much a sonic trek through the generations and age-old traditions that reverberate in her bones. Listening to The Land feels like viewing the world through Paul’s eyes—an experience that’s wrenching but nevertheless beautiful.

Black Belt Eagle Scout’s The Land, The Water, The Sky is available through Bandcamp.

Read More

When The Revival theater opened its doors in 2015 at the corner of 55th Street and University Avenue, its intent was to pay homage to improv’s earliest roots. Paul Sills formed the Compass Players in that exact spot, bringing his knowledge of his mother Viola Spolin’s theater games (outlined in her seminal work Improvisation for the Theater) to the stage for paying audiences. This season, they have traveled far from their roster of improv shows, classes, jazz, and comedy by welcoming two plays from Definition Theatre. The second is the Chicago premiere of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Fairview (opening April 27), and the first is Alaiyo, which is playing now through February 26. 

Alaiyo Through 2/26: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Sun 2/12, 7:30 PM; no show Thu 2/9; The Revival, 1160 E. 55th St., definitiontheatre.org, $20

The play, written by Micah Ariel Watson in the most literal sense, tells the story of an idealistic African American college student who has a crush on her classmate, who is from Africa. Watson frames the unrequited romance as a metaphor for the loss and longing left within African Americans for Africa after the Middle Passage. African American history in relation to the reclamation of lost African identity is summarized at the opening of the play in a projected slideshow, like a Black CliffsNotes, outlining the continued desire to un-orphan the community from the Motherland, reconstructing memory by donning scraps of kente cloth, shedding slave names in favor of African names, wearing natural hairstyles, and in this era, exploring our DNA through 23andMe. 

A spectacular Felicia Oduh plays Ariel—Young, Gifted, and Black and brimming with book knowledge about her history, yet still remaining unmoored with a gnawing feeling of not being “Black enough.” Enter Kofi (brilliantly played by Patrick Newson Jr.) onto whom she projects the embodiment of “real Blackness” due to his birthright. As Ariel desperately pursues Kofi, her hope is that their love will somehow provide her with spiritual communion, transmuting her perceived faux-Blackness into the “real” thing. One wonders if the character name “Ariel” is not only a nod toward the playwright’s middle name but also to the Disney version of The Little Mermaid, in which the title character gives up her own voice for legs, every step she takes as painful as walking on glass just to be “Part of Your World,” as the Disney song goes.

Ariel’s vision of Blackness is largely fueled by the 1961 film version of A Raisin In The Sun. She identifies with the romance between Beneatha Younger (Diana Sands) and Joseph Asagai (Ivan Dixon) in which Asagai proposes to Beneatha and asks to romantically whisk her away to Africa. As clips from the film play upon the stage, they serve to underscore the limitations of Ariel’s worldview and her naivete of playing out this fantasy on her unwitting classmate. Oduh is delightful as the lovesick Ariel, mooning over her crush, vacillating between plots to catch his eye and half-hearted attempts at finishing her homework. 

Unsurprisingly, Kofi promptly friend zones Ariel, which only serves to heighten her obsession. Watson’s dense text is structured in a rapid-fire poetic way that drops references to Black culture or other imagery every few seconds, which serves several purposes. One is to outline how Ariel uses her academic knowledge to construct a facade of “authentic” Blackness as an armor to shield against her own deep insecurity over her identity. The repetitive cadence also serves to heighten our sense of the degradation of Ariel’s obsessive mental state, evoking feelings of stress and being overwhelmed. This method works effectively, and Oduh masterfully navigates the tongue twisters and dense, unwieldy monologues in a way that feels easy and natural. 

Unfortunately Watson’s writing relies too heavily on this particular device, creating two drawbacks. One, the audience is set at a remove, attention split between watching the play intellectually, part of the brain working overtime to identify and dissect every reference, every allusion, every bit of symbolism and alliteration, etc., leaving little opportunity for silence, reflection, and full absorption of emotional impact. The other is that profound conclusions and parallels are often spoonfed and repeated ad nauseam, the text desperately overexplaining and pleading, like Ariel, to not be misunderstood. The play is telling a story instead of being a story.  

The small black-box theater space has turned its orientation from lengthwise to longways, adding risers for the chairs, which from an audience perspective presents challenges. For the play, a significant part of the action happens on the floor level and was not visible at all from my vantage point. A person in front of me who was considerably taller occasionally stood up to gain a better view. A walkway that runs directly behind the stage, separated only by a transparent pink backdrop, makes you part of the show should you have to make a bathroom run. Other than those quirks, the new look works fairly well. 

And despite the problems with the text, Alaiyo works. Director McKenzie Chinn provides some exquisite direction, heightening Ariel’s obsessive cycling with punctuations of humor and embodying the depths of her despair with poignant movement pieces choreographed by Victor Musoni, chilling lighting choices by Eric Watkins, and haunting sound design by Willow James. Oduh and Newson sync perfectly, creating the illusion of the perfect pairing for us that Ariel sees in Kofi, who remains an unwitting participant in her vision regardless of his own intent. Newson masterfully balances the easy, self-assured charm of his college-student persona with the darker, complex manifestation of the shadows of Ariel’s psyche.  

Alaiyo is a play that offers an intimate and unique perspective on Blackness, history, gender, love, and identity that packs a powerful punch. In A Raisin In the Sun, Asagai nicknames Beneatha “Alaiyo” which means “One for Whom Bread—Food—Is Not Enough.” This play is recommended for everyone—but especially for Colored Girls Who Have Sometimes Felt Simultaneously Too Much—and Not Enuf. 

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When The Revival theater opened its doors in 2015 at the corner of 55th Street and University Avenue, its intent was to pay homage to improv’s earliest roots. Paul Sills formed the Compass Players in that exact spot, bringing his knowledge of his mother Viola Spolin’s theater games (outlined in her seminal work Improvisation for the Theater) to the stage for paying audiences. This season, they have traveled far from their roster of improv shows, classes, jazz, and comedy by welcoming two plays from Definition Theatre. The second is the Chicago premiere of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Fairview (opening April 27), and the first is Alaiyo, which is playing now through February 26. 

Alaiyo Through 2/26: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Sun 2/12, 7:30 PM; no show Thu 2/9; The Revival, 1160 E. 55th St., definitiontheatre.org, $20

The play, written by Micah Ariel Watson in the most literal sense, tells the story of an idealistic African American college student who has a crush on her classmate, who is from Africa. Watson frames the unrequited romance as a metaphor for the loss and longing left within African Americans for Africa after the Middle Passage. African American history in relation to the reclamation of lost African identity is summarized at the opening of the play in a projected slideshow, like a Black CliffsNotes, outlining the continued desire to un-orphan the community from the Motherland, reconstructing memory by donning scraps of kente cloth, shedding slave names in favor of African names, wearing natural hairstyles, and in this era, exploring our DNA through 23andMe. 

A spectacular Felicia Oduh plays Ariel—Young, Gifted, and Black and brimming with book knowledge about her history, yet still remaining unmoored with a gnawing feeling of not being “Black enough.” Enter Kofi (brilliantly played by Patrick Newson Jr.) onto whom she projects the embodiment of “real Blackness” due to his birthright. As Ariel desperately pursues Kofi, her hope is that their love will somehow provide her with spiritual communion, transmuting her perceived faux-Blackness into the “real” thing. One wonders if the character name “Ariel” is not only a nod toward the playwright’s middle name but also to the Disney version of The Little Mermaid, in which the title character gives up her own voice for legs, every step she takes as painful as walking on glass just to be “Part of Your World,” as the Disney song goes.

Ariel’s vision of Blackness is largely fueled by the 1961 film version of A Raisin In The Sun. She identifies with the romance between Beneatha Younger (Diana Sands) and Joseph Asagai (Ivan Dixon) in which Asagai proposes to Beneatha and asks to romantically whisk her away to Africa. As clips from the film play upon the stage, they serve to underscore the limitations of Ariel’s worldview and her naivete of playing out this fantasy on her unwitting classmate. Oduh is delightful as the lovesick Ariel, mooning over her crush, vacillating between plots to catch his eye and half-hearted attempts at finishing her homework. 

Unsurprisingly, Kofi promptly friend zones Ariel, which only serves to heighten her obsession. Watson’s dense text is structured in a rapid-fire poetic way that drops references to Black culture or other imagery every few seconds, which serves several purposes. One is to outline how Ariel uses her academic knowledge to construct a facade of “authentic” Blackness as an armor to shield against her own deep insecurity over her identity. The repetitive cadence also serves to heighten our sense of the degradation of Ariel’s obsessive mental state, evoking feelings of stress and being overwhelmed. This method works effectively, and Oduh masterfully navigates the tongue twisters and dense, unwieldy monologues in a way that feels easy and natural. 

Unfortunately Watson’s writing relies too heavily on this particular device, creating two drawbacks. One, the audience is set at a remove, attention split between watching the play intellectually, part of the brain working overtime to identify and dissect every reference, every allusion, every bit of symbolism and alliteration, etc., leaving little opportunity for silence, reflection, and full absorption of emotional impact. The other is that profound conclusions and parallels are often spoonfed and repeated ad nauseam, the text desperately overexplaining and pleading, like Ariel, to not be misunderstood. The play is telling a story instead of being a story.  

The small black-box theater space has turned its orientation from lengthwise to longways, adding risers for the chairs, which from an audience perspective presents challenges. For the play, a significant part of the action happens on the floor level and was not visible at all from my vantage point. A person in front of me who was considerably taller occasionally stood up to gain a better view. A walkway that runs directly behind the stage, separated only by a transparent pink backdrop, makes you part of the show should you have to make a bathroom run. Other than those quirks, the new look works fairly well. 

And despite the problems with the text, Alaiyo works. Director McKenzie Chinn provides some exquisite direction, heightening Ariel’s obsessive cycling with punctuations of humor and embodying the depths of her despair with poignant movement pieces choreographed by Victor Musoni, chilling lighting choices by Eric Watkins, and haunting sound design by Willow James. Oduh and Newson sync perfectly, creating the illusion of the perfect pairing for us that Ariel sees in Kofi, who remains an unwitting participant in her vision regardless of his own intent. Newson masterfully balances the easy, self-assured charm of his college-student persona with the darker, complex manifestation of the shadows of Ariel’s psyche.  

Alaiyo is a play that offers an intimate and unique perspective on Blackness, history, gender, love, and identity that packs a powerful punch. In A Raisin In the Sun, Asagai nicknames Beneatha “Alaiyo” which means “One for Whom Bread—Food—Is Not Enough.” This play is recommended for everyone—but especially for Colored Girls Who Have Sometimes Felt Simultaneously Too Much—and Not Enuf. 

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Chicago native Mare Ralph has been a board member at Girls Rock! Chicago since 2021 and a camp organizer since 2019. From 2014 till 2018 they lived in Louisville, where in 2015 they began working with Rockshops, a weekend-long music camp that had launched the year before as part of the festival Louisville Outskirts. In 2016 the camp expanded to a week and became Girls Rock Louisville, which last year changed its name to Out Loud Louisville to better welcome trans and gender-expansive youth. 

Ralph is also a guitarist, and they’ve played in several Chicago bands—most famously Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, which they joined in 2006. A tour-van accident in 2009 (which Ralph describes as “life-changing”) stole the group’s momentum and led it to dissolve in 2012, but it also spurred Ralph to return to school. They’ve since finished a bachelor’s in education and a master’s in urban planning and policy, and today they work as a housing policy organizer for Chicago-based nonprofit Housing Action Illinois. 

What really got me involved when I was in Louisville was coming to understand the radical politics that are also a major part of Girls Rock Camps and Queer Rock Camps. And part of that is an idea of taking up space and recognizing that the music that you create has value—even when and sometimes because it does not conform to the highest technical standards. 

I recognized that not only could I be a part of this camp, but that many of my experiences allowed me to be uniquely helpful—growing up as a queer person in a small town and being able to reflect on my own ability to use music to help me through tough times. 

Camp also provided a space for me where I began to recognize that I identify as nonbinary. Often it was campers that I saw being out and being themselves and openly talking about their identities and who they are—that experience was really inspiring and helped me to recognize that about myself. 

My feeling is that young people are in a process of figuring themselves out and figuring out who they are. And ultimately, what our camp strives to be is a safe place to do that. 

Sometimes we’ll see a returning camper from the previous year, and they’re coming in with different pronouns, a different name, and different ideas about who they are. That’s really rewarding, that young people feel like this is still a place for them. 

And that’s also true on the side of organizers and volunteers. To put it frankly, going from being someone who identified as a woman while playing in bands, to then being someone who identifies as transmasculine or nonbinary, it’s not as if the patriarchy opens its doors. I’ve been really grateful for trans boys who come to camp and still feel like it’s a place where they belong. 

A couple years ago, I remember a friend asking, “This is something you’re super involved in, and I know that in your personal life you’re striving to be seen and have your identity affirmed by the outside world. Is it annoying to be wearing a Girls Rock! Chicago shirt?”

That first weekend camp, I remember we were hanging out before the concert, and I was with another volunteer who’s a drum instructor and a band coach. One of the campers—a maybe ten-year-old drummer—turned to her and said, “Are there more boys in bands than there are girls?” 

The volunteer and I just looked at each other. The recognition of the years of being asked if you’re the merch girl, or just shitty comments from sound dudes or whatever—that sort of recognition, in the look that we shared. But also, how amazing to be learning an instrument without any knowledge of that sort of added pressure or baggage! To just be choosing an instrument, thinking this is what I want to play, this is what I want to explore. It’s pretty awesome.

Being the person who’s helping everybody get their instruments on before they go onstage is so rewarding. And again, this 13-year-old doesn’t care how many records my band sold 15 years ago. They don’t care who we played with, or who our booking agent was, or all that stuff that seems so important and so necessary and infiltrated my mind during so many years of playing in a band. 

I’m talking to this kid and saying, “You’re gonna get up there. It’ll probably sound a little different than when we were playing in the classroom,” just reminding a kid of the chord changes in their song. Just saying, like, “You’re gonna be great, and everyone is going to be so excited to see you and celebrate you.”

That’s such an accomplishment, for a kid to be able to get onstage and perform something that they’ve created—a song that they’ve created with other campers that they maybe didn’t even know a week ago. And I’m able to say, like, “I’ve been there. I get nervous too before going onstage. But remember, you can look out into the crowd and see your band coach and your guitar instructor. Everyone’s gonna be cheering for you.” 

It’s a great reminder to me as a 41-year-old—yeah, I can make something up, and that can be something that stays in your head and you’re singing to yourself. Maybe the first three years in Louisville, every year, there was at least one cat-themed song. Which were really awesome!

Campers can come into camp without the framework of “I’m going against the grain, and I’m gonna be in a band,” but even if that’s not present, there’s definitely awareness of societal expectations. And so there are these little feminist anthems that always end up coming out at camp. 

Like Chicago, Louisville is a very segregated city. The “Ninth Street Divide” is what people call it—the West End of Louisville is historically Black. And we had campers coming from very different socioeconomic backgrounds. Sometimes you’re not sure, musically, what people’s backgrounds are—one camper can be coming to learn their third instrument, while someone else has never held a drumstick. 

We began to more directly confront the divide that was being reflected in our camp—of having volunteers that were mostly white and mostly coming from a rock background—and really working to decenter whiteness and build leadership among our volunteers and musicians that were people of color and specifically Black women. Louisville has a badass history of Black feminism, as the world has come to see in the past few years.

One thing we started thinking about is, while it’s awesome that this 12-year-old is really obsessed with Queen and might hear a Queen song at camp, it shouldn’t only be that kid who has that moment of recognition. And so as part of our applications, we started asking all our campers their three favorite songs at the moment, and then we put together a playlist that we would play during lunch. So that every person had that moment of hearing a song. The campers were not aware that was the reason we were asking for these songs, but we just wanted to make it clear that whatever your jam is, it’s welcome. 

Stage fright is always something that we’re dealing with. Something that we stumbled upon as a really good, low-key way to introduce performing was karaoke. Thank God for YouTube—you can just look up “Losing My Religion karaoke,” and there’s a video that has all the lyrics.

We started doing this every day after lunch. So we’re doing karaoke, and one camper chose the Adele song “Rolling in the Deep.” It starts off, she’s singing, and slowly, everybody that’s hanging out in the gym just starts clapping along to the beat. And then the chorus starts up, and it’s a very powerful song—you know, what a crescendo—and every single camper, people who went to school right down the street in the West End and kids who were coming from the suburbs, everyone knew this song and was sharing this and just singing along as loud as they could. Those moments of pure joy and fun, and singing along with your friends to a song that you love—you can’t plan that.

The camp that happened just after the Parkland school shooting, a group of maybe 14- or 15-year-olds ended up writing a song calling for gun control. And you had people who were coming from a perspective of thinking about school shootings and not feeling safe in school, and also people who have gun violence as a part of their daily lived experiences in these historically neglected redlined communities. 

[Let’s Rock!] is taking place at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago. That church is really doing a lot of awesome things for the community—it has a great history of organizing. Gwendolyn Brooks taught writing classes there. In the late 60s, the church organized with the Blackstone Rangers in workforce development programs. 

All the restrooms are all-gender restrooms, so it’s a very welcoming space as well. And huge and beautiful—the first time I took a tour of it, we’re on the third floor, and I was like, “Is that a basketball court?” It has a full basketball court on the third floor! 

[Let’s Rock!] is a really good way to get to know more people and to make friends. We don’t often have opportunities as adults. Our campers often are, like, this is a stop on their summer of basketball camp or ballet or whatever. 

The first year we had an adult camp in Louisville, we were warned by our friends at the Nashville camp that there was a high proportion of divorces coming out of the Ladies Rock Camp—an indication of how empowering the experience was! It resulted in people prioritizing their own well-being and their own mental health and making positive choices in their lives, and in some cases leaving marriages that they weren’t happy in. I can’t guarantee that that will result—I mean, we won’t put it in the marketing materials, maybe just to reassure any spouses or long-term partners. . . . 

The other thing that’s really been cool is getting to know people who have bands and play regularly. I hate to say it, but I am not scouring the Reader for Early Warnings every week the way I was 20 years ago. And so it’s been great to learn about cool bands that are women or gender-nonconforming or trans folks. Through the rock-camp ecosystem, people have been able to plan tours and find couches to sleep on. It’s a really special supportive environment of musicians.

[What drew me to Girls Rock] was joining together with women and gender-nonconforming and trans people to recognize each other and just acknowledge—we’ve all had experiences of not feeling like we quite belonged in the music scene. We’re able to come together and share what we know with young people. 

That was, for me, the beginning of returning to playing music for the reason I started when I was a sad teenager—trying to express how I felt about the world around me.

Correction: The print version of this story misstates the closing day of Let’s Rock! as Sunday, February 20. The correct date is Monday, February 20.

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Like most Chicagoans, I’ve only been half-heartedly following the race for mayor. So on January 31, I settled in to watch WGN’s mayoral debate and see who the best candidate was.

An hour and a half later, I was both outraged at some of the things I heard and relieved that it was over. I was saddened at the prospect of Chicago’s future with the possibility of some of these candidates at the helm. Overall, it was a poor night for Chicago.

I heard a lot of the same old tried-and-failed ideas. Many candidates promised more police and tougher penalties. We hear these same things every election cycle. And how is that working out? Illinois has some of the strictest gun penalties in the country. If an individual possesses a firearm, discharges one, or discharged one to cause the death or serious injury in the commission of a felony, judges are required to add 15, 20, or 25 years, respectively, to their sentence. Despite that, Chicago still has violent crime and high rates of murder.

Doesn’t it seem like this strategy has failed? It’s lazy politics. Candidates can shout for tougher penalties and longer sentences all they want, but this only expands mass incarceration. It does nothing to stop the violence and crime. It’s a good sound bite, but a failed policy.

Some candidates would have you believe that the violence is widespread in Chicago. While violence can and sometimes does spring up anywhere, the highest concentrations of violence are in neighborhoods like Little Village, Englewood, West Garfield Park, and Fuller Park. It’s concentrated in mostly Black and Brown neighborhoods, which experience many forms of disadvantage, from poverty to segregation, food and job deserts, and high unemployment. 

When Paul Vallas talks about putting 500 new cops out there, I wonder if he’s talking about these neighborhoods. He certainly isn’t walking down the streets of any of these neighborhoods in his commercials.

Willie Wilson’s comments were particularly distasteful. He likes to say, “Take the handcuffs off the police.” It’s tone-deaf. Most people, especially in Black and Brown communities, are afraid of having interactions with the police. Yet he evokes the image of someone slipping the leash off an attack dog.

Wilson said that the police should go after criminals and “chase them down like rabbits.” What kind of Chicago does he want to preside over? We have laws, and people have rights. We don’t hunt people down like animals in this country. We don’t need this kind of rhetoric. People who break the law are human. 

The police Wilson wants to uncuff will be invading disadvantaged and underserved Black and Brown communities. I am sympathetic to his son having been killed. I can’t imagine the hurt and pain he must have. But it sounds like he wants to use the city’s resources for vengeance. This, more than anything else, should be disqualifying.

I was also interested to listen to Chuy García and see if he had any new ideas. He didn’t. He said, “Downtown is the engine that runs the city,” and called Loop investment, “building a more equitable Chicago.” Is that what equity means to him—investing in the richest parts of the city, when a quarter of the city does not have rail service, or when neighborhoods like Englewood are struggling to hold on to even one grocery store? Our policy cannot be one of neglect and disinvestment. 

Politicians love the status quo. Punishment is the most consistent response to urban crime, violence, and poverty. All you have to do is look at the nightly news to see that these policies have failed.

Black and Brown Americans are less likely to live in communities with strong institutional support. Exclusionary housing policies and discrimination pushed Black Americans into segregated neighborhoods. The government and the private sector neglected these communities, leaving them with underfunded schools, food deserts, lack of quality healthcare, unemployment, and poverty.

We need to understand the harm caused by widespread disinvestment and abandonment. We need to focus on poverty, segregation, disinvestment, and the widespread availability of guns to people who shouldn’t have them.

I only really heard one candidate speak about investing in neighborhoods and that was Brandon Johnson. He spoke about workforce development and investing in small businesses. He seems to understand the need to shift from punishment and focus attention on the policies that create and sustain poverty in the first place.

Johnson spoke about crime anxiety in Chicago, and he is correct. Community violence translates into fear of public spaces and leads families to leave their neighborhoods if they can afford to. In many of these neighborhoods, large numbers of adults are currently incarcerated in the justice system. This overwhelms the adults and institutions that remain and leaves young people who live there vulnerable to the violence of others.

The city must find ways to invest in these disadvantaged communities. It must help Black and Brown small businesses get off the ground to help build a sense of community and employ people from the neighborhoods. The city also must incentivize developers to build in underserved communities. We need to push for affordable housing. Many vacant lots can be bought cheaply and developed. As heavily taxed as the city is, we need to offer tax credits to developers who come to these communities.

Fifty percent of all 911 calls are for nonviolent issues. These calls should not be handled by the police but by certified experts and community members. This would allow for more police presence in the areas that need them and allow members of the community to be treated as something other than suspects. We need to find alternatives to police for nonviolent calls. We have to explore what can exist rather than what does exist.

We also need more mental health clinics. We cannot discount the significance of community issues, addiction, and undiagnosed mental health issues. We need services for trauma related to community violence and we need to develop strategies to shift funding to culturally competent providers of treatment and healing.

The next mayor needs to reach out to Chicago’s youth. Young people want to be politically active. We need to help them form community organizations that interrupt violence and empower young people to lead change efforts in their schools and communities. The youth need understanding and simply to be heard. The mayor needs to listen—not just to understand the root causes but also the root consequences of exposure to them. How can anyone feel like our leaders really care about us when they won’t even take the time to listen?

Lastly, Ja’mal Green said that “hope is not a plan.” In and of itself, that is true. But hope is also an important form of resistance, both political and personal, and it reaffirms what is possible and what is worth fighting for. 

Hope is a political activity and a large part of what will inform voters’ choices for mayor. There is hope that they will follow through on their promises, hope that they will listen, hope that they will not follow failed policies but build communities, especially in the most underserved communities. 

Hope must be a part of everyone’s plan. 

Anthony Ehlers is a writer incarcerated at Stateville Correctional Center.

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John Mossman has a scary new movie, but he’s not just trying to scare us. Good Guy With a Gun (not to be confused with a 2020 short with the same title) is a feature-length drama/thriller slated for a regional premiere February 27 as part of the Midwest Film Festival at the Gene Siskel Film Center.

A gun owner and hunter who favors “commonsense gun control,” Mossman says his goal for the film is to open a more nuanced discussion about firearms and the dangers of America’s macho-mythic gun culture.  

I’ve seen it and can report back: I am scared.

Mossman, an actor, director, writer, producer, and teacher of those trades, grew up in the circus town of Baraboo, Wisconsin. In 1998, he and actor/director Kathy Scambiatterra (who’s also his wife), cofounded the actor-centered Chicago theater company, The Artistic Home, where he’s still an ensemble member and she is artistic director. A self-described “citified redneck,” he considers the NRA “a terrorist-enabling organization” and says outrage over the January 6 insurrection prompted him to make this movie. But its origins go back a decade. 

“Ten years ago, I had a dream of being a shooter,” Mossman says. “I had never had that dream before, and I’ve never played any of those games where you do that, but I was walking through some sort of suburban rolling wooded area shooting people. And after I’d done that, I realized there was no answer for my deeds, no redemption, and I was going to have to kill myself. It was a terrible dream.

“I hadn’t written in six months, but I woke up and went downstairs at 4:30 or five o’clock in the morning. I tried to write something . . . but I couldn’t do it. I was trying to figure out, from that dream, how could you represent the mind of someone who does that, without making them a demon the entire time? Two and a half hours later, I hear my wife upstairs crying. I said, ‘What happened?’ and she said, ‘Someone just shot 20 kids in Sandy Hook.’

“I was so traumatized, I couldn’t tell her that I had that dream. I didn’t tell anyone for years. I felt, somehow, like I had penetrated some crack in time or in the universe. I’m the son of an engineer, show-me people, so I didn’t believe in that sort of thing, but it was so upsetting that I didn’t tell anybody.”

Mossman says he tried, for years, “to find a way to work that out of my system.” Then, when January 6 happened, “I sort of combined those two [events]. To be honest, this [film] is a bit of an exorcism.”

Good Guy With a Gun (shot in less than a month in Chicago and Lockport) packs a lot of Chicago talent, including Mossman, who, in addition to writing and directing, cast himself as one of the film’s two villains, and Scambiatterra as a church lady—a minor role with a major message. Steppenwolf’s Ian Barford is a neighbor with benefits, John LaFlamboy shows up as a shrewd cop, and Joe Swanberg—oh, spoiler alert.

It would be a disservice to the jarring turns and ramped-up tension in the last half of the film to divulge too much of the plot, but it follows a bereaved mother (deftly played by Tiffany Bedwell) and her teenage son, Will (Beck Nolan), on a sojourn from Chicago to a small midwestern town where Will makes a friend (Jack Cain) and falls under the influence of what appears to be the town’s prevailing tough-guy-with-a-gun culture.  

There are many realistically awkward moments in this film; they struck me as one of its strengths. And its opening scene of urban violence could have literally been pulled from our daily headlines. But the evil forces here—Dan Waller as the racist, sexist, homophobic Duke, and Mossman as his equally warped buddy, Riggs—are so grotesquely extreme and demonic that someone needs to take them out. 

This may or may not work at cross-purposes with Mossman’s main intention, which is to take on “the simplistic idea implied by ‘good guy with a gun’ philosophy”—the idea that “someone could take another’s life and then be OK with it for the rest of their life.” This is false, Mossman says: “You’re not asking them to be a savior, you’re asking them to be a sacrifice. They will never be the same. To pretend that they are is a cheap betrayal of the human spirit that the gun industry shamelessly embraces.” 

Mossman is trying to book film festivals in red and purple states and wants to see what the reaction will be there. But he says the greatest interest in the film is coming from outside of the U.S. He thinks that’s because the rest of the world is “just trying to unravel this weird phenomenon that is America and its love affair with, and worshipping of, firearms.”

I’m afraid it’s because they think it’ll confirm the image of America they already have: gun-besotted, dangerous, and despicable.

That’s scary.

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Chicago native Mare Ralph has been a board member at Girls Rock! Chicago since 2021 and a camp organizer since 2019. From 2014 till 2018 they lived in Louisville, where in 2015 they began working with Rockshops, a weekend-long music camp that had launched the year before as part of the festival Louisville Outskirts. In 2016 the camp expanded to a week and became Girls Rock Louisville, which last year changed its name to Out Loud Louisville to better welcome trans and gender-expansive youth. 

Ralph is also a guitarist, and they’ve played in several Chicago bands—most famously Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, which they joined in 2006. A tour-van accident in 2009 (which Ralph describes as “life-changing”) stole the group’s momentum and led it to dissolve in 2012, but it also spurred Ralph to return to school. They’ve since finished a bachelor’s in education and a master’s in urban planning and policy, and today they work as a housing policy organizer for Chicago-based nonprofit Housing Action Illinois. 

What really got me involved when I was in Louisville was coming to understand the radical politics that are also a major part of Girls Rock Camps and Queer Rock Camps. And part of that is an idea of taking up space and recognizing that the music that you create has value—even when and sometimes because it does not conform to the highest technical standards. 

I recognized that not only could I be a part of this camp, but that many of my experiences allowed me to be uniquely helpful—growing up as a queer person in a small town and being able to reflect on my own ability to use music to help me through tough times. 

Camp also provided a space for me where I began to recognize that I identify as nonbinary. Often it was campers that I saw being out and being themselves and openly talking about their identities and who they are—that experience was really inspiring and helped me to recognize that about myself. 

My feeling is that young people are in a process of figuring themselves out and figuring out who they are. And ultimately, what our camp strives to be is a safe place to do that. 

Sometimes we’ll see a returning camper from the previous year, and they’re coming in with different pronouns, a different name, and different ideas about who they are. That’s really rewarding, that young people feel like this is still a place for them. 

And that’s also true on the side of organizers and volunteers. To put it frankly, going from being someone who identified as a woman while playing in bands, to then being someone who identifies as transmasculine or nonbinary, it’s not as if the patriarchy opens its doors. I’ve been really grateful for trans boys who come to camp and still feel like it’s a place where they belong. 

A couple years ago, I remember a friend asking, “This is something you’re super involved in, and I know that in your personal life you’re striving to be seen and have your identity affirmed by the outside world. Is it annoying to be wearing a Girls Rock! Chicago shirt?”

That first weekend camp, I remember we were hanging out before the concert, and I was with another volunteer who’s a drum instructor and a band coach. One of the campers—a maybe ten-year-old drummer—turned to her and said, “Are there more boys in bands than there are girls?” 

The volunteer and I just looked at each other. The recognition of the years of being asked if you’re the merch girl, or just shitty comments from sound dudes or whatever—that sort of recognition, in the look that we shared. But also, how amazing to be learning an instrument without any knowledge of that sort of added pressure or baggage! To just be choosing an instrument, thinking this is what I want to play, this is what I want to explore. It’s pretty awesome.

Being the person who’s helping everybody get their instruments on before they go onstage is so rewarding. And again, this 13-year-old doesn’t care how many records my band sold 15 years ago. They don’t care who we played with, or who our booking agent was, or all that stuff that seems so important and so necessary and infiltrated my mind during so many years of playing in a band. 

I’m talking to this kid and saying, “You’re gonna get up there. It’ll probably sound a little different than when we were playing in the classroom,” just reminding a kid of the chord changes in their song. Just saying, like, “You’re gonna be great, and everyone is going to be so excited to see you and celebrate you.”

That’s such an accomplishment, for a kid to be able to get onstage and perform something that they’ve created—a song that they’ve created with other campers that they maybe didn’t even know a week ago. And I’m able to say, like, “I’ve been there. I get nervous too before going onstage. But remember, you can look out into the crowd and see your band coach and your guitar instructor. Everyone’s gonna be cheering for you.” 

It’s a great reminder to me as a 41-year-old—yeah, I can make something up, and that can be something that stays in your head and you’re singing to yourself. Maybe the first three years in Louisville, every year, there was at least one cat-themed song. Which were really awesome!

Campers can come into camp without the framework of “I’m going against the grain, and I’m gonna be in a band,” but even if that’s not present, there’s definitely awareness of societal expectations. And so there are these little feminist anthems that always end up coming out at camp. 

Like Chicago, Louisville is a very segregated city. The “Ninth Street Divide” is what people call it—the West End of Louisville is historically Black. And we had campers coming from very different socioeconomic backgrounds. Sometimes you’re not sure, musically, what people’s backgrounds are—one camper can be coming to learn their third instrument, while someone else has never held a drumstick. 

We began to more directly confront the divide that was being reflected in our camp—of having volunteers that were mostly white and mostly coming from a rock background—and really working to decenter whiteness and build leadership among our volunteers and musicians that were people of color and specifically Black women. Louisville has a badass history of Black feminism, as the world has come to see in the past few years.

One thing we started thinking about is, while it’s awesome that this 12-year-old is really obsessed with Queen and might hear a Queen song at camp, it shouldn’t only be that kid who has that moment of recognition. And so as part of our applications, we started asking all our campers their three favorite songs at the moment, and then we put together a playlist that we would play during lunch. So that every person had that moment of hearing a song. The campers were not aware that was the reason we were asking for these songs, but we just wanted to make it clear that whatever your jam is, it’s welcome. 

Stage fright is always something that we’re dealing with. Something that we stumbled upon as a really good, low-key way to introduce performing was karaoke. Thank God for YouTube—you can just look up “Losing My Religion karaoke,” and there’s a video that has all the lyrics.

We started doing this every day after lunch. So we’re doing karaoke, and one camper chose the Adele song “Rolling in the Deep.” It starts off, she’s singing, and slowly, everybody that’s hanging out in the gym just starts clapping along to the beat. And then the chorus starts up, and it’s a very powerful song—you know, what a crescendo—and every single camper, people who went to school right down the street in the West End and kids who were coming from the suburbs, everyone knew this song and was sharing this and just singing along as loud as they could. Those moments of pure joy and fun, and singing along with your friends to a song that you love—you can’t plan that.

The camp that happened just after the Parkland school shooting, a group of maybe 14- or 15-year-olds ended up writing a song calling for gun control. And you had people who were coming from a perspective of thinking about school shootings and not feeling safe in school, and also people who have gun violence as a part of their daily lived experiences in these historically neglected redlined communities. 

[Let’s Rock!] is taking place at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago. That church is really doing a lot of awesome things for the community—it has a great history of organizing. Gwendolyn Brooks taught writing classes there. In the late 60s, the church organized with the Blackstone Rangers in workforce development programs. 

All the restrooms are all-gender restrooms, so it’s a very welcoming space as well. And huge and beautiful—the first time I took a tour of it, we’re on the third floor, and I was like, “Is that a basketball court?” It has a full basketball court on the third floor! 

[Let’s Rock!] is a really good way to get to know more people and to make friends. We don’t often have opportunities as adults. Our campers often are, like, this is a stop on their summer of basketball camp or ballet or whatever. 

The first year we had an adult camp in Louisville, we were warned by our friends at the Nashville camp that there was a high proportion of divorces coming out of the Ladies Rock Camp—an indication of how empowering the experience was! It resulted in people prioritizing their own well-being and their own mental health and making positive choices in their lives, and in some cases leaving marriages that they weren’t happy in. I can’t guarantee that that will result—I mean, we won’t put it in the marketing materials, maybe just to reassure any spouses or long-term partners. . . . 

The other thing that’s really been cool is getting to know people who have bands and play regularly. I hate to say it, but I am not scouring the Reader for Early Warnings every week the way I was 20 years ago. And so it’s been great to learn about cool bands that are women or gender-nonconforming or trans folks. Through the rock-camp ecosystem, people have been able to plan tours and find couches to sleep on. It’s a really special supportive environment of musicians.

[What drew me to Girls Rock] was joining together with women and gender-nonconforming and trans people to recognize each other and just acknowledge—we’ve all had experiences of not feeling like we quite belonged in the music scene. We’re able to come together and share what we know with young people. 

That was, for me, the beginning of returning to playing music for the reason I started when I was a sad teenager—trying to express how I felt about the world around me.

Correction: The print version of this story misstates the closing day of Let’s Rock! as Sunday, February 20. The correct date is Monday, February 20.

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