Concerts

Jalen Kobayashi, aka JaefKae Credit: Peoples Streets

I met Jalen Kobayashi in 2017 through Young Chicago Authors’ Louder Than a Bomb poetry festival, where for years we were on separate teams, expressing ourselves through spoken word and sometimes even competing against each other. We’ve since become close friends, connecting through our gifts with the pen and our shared passion for Black liberation. We’ve supported each other’s creative journeys, and we had each other’s backs on the front lines of the fight for justice for marginalized identities during the uprisings of summer 2020. 

Jalen is a northwest-side native, raised by the blocks of Albany Park and the lively Humboldt Park streets. He carries the proud boisterous aura of where he comes from, the family lineage that trails behind him, and the legacy he wishes to create. In addition to his work as a poet and activist, he’s also an artist, producer, and musician, recording and performing as JaefKae. Now 22, he started making music at 14. He brings the same unstoppable energy to it that he does to everything he touches: he already has a catalog of more than 200 songs, and on January 17 he self-released his seventh album, Richcraft.

I’ve been there for much of his growth, and I’ve witnessed his craft blossom into what it is today. He’s a music-making machine: he records, mixes, and often produces his own material, and he’s even coined the name of a new genre. The sound he calls “kongri” is a futuristic fusion of American-style hip-hop, Afrobeats, dancehall, reggaeton, and other elements, with a heavy emphasis on percussion. 

JaefKae has a lengthy performance history too, which includes opening up for some of the biggest names in hip-hop: he read a poem at a Chicago Ideas Week event in fall 2015 where Common launched the anti-violence video “Put the Guns Down,” and he shared a bill with Pusha T and Nas at Wintrust Arena for a Red Bull Music Festival concert in November 2018. But while he’s brought his music to venues throughout the city, he’s received very little recognition for his efforts.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Alycia Kamil: Did you know from a young age that you wanted to be an artist?

JaefKae: I’ve known since I came out of the womb that I was going to be a rapper. When I was six years old, I dressed up as a rapper for Halloween. When my mom took me out for trick-or-treating she would go, “How are you going to be a rapper, and you not rapping? You need to rap.” So at every house I would go up to, I would pull out a piece of paper and spit a verse. My rap name was J.J Jones at the time. People were like, “Wow, this kid is crazy—why is he on my porch rapping?” 

After that my family has always encouraged me to perform and make songs. My auntie would babysit me, and I would just make her listen to my raps. When my parents got home, she would be like, “Listen to this rap that Jalen made!” So from a young age, I knew what I was going to do. 

How much of an impact do your words on paper have on your words on the mike, and vice versa? And can we ever expect to see some more poetry from you? 

I have a plan to incorporate spoken word in my next album—a poem to introduce us to the album, and one to take us out. I also want to release more poetry; there’s so much in the vault that never made it out to the ether. The poetry on the page is the poetry on the mike. There’s the rhythm and the poetry. So I make them work in tandem all the time and become best friends. 

Do you remember how old you were when you made your first song that solidified your passion to become a professional musician?

It was called “Blow Your Mind.” I was going by the name Young Mind or Bright Young Mind at the time. It was over a beat that my dad made—he’s a real hip-hop head. He used to be a producer and an MC as well. I freestyled over that beat and made that song. I had a little bubble microphone—it was really cheap, but it got the job done. I didn’t have a compressor at the time, so I put a sock over it so my Ps and my Ss were filtered right.

Who are some of your musical influences?

Honestly, I’m feeling great. The albums beforehand all have central themes, but they were more of compilations, besides Out the Window, which I released in 2021. I’ve been working on the songs for Richcraft since last year. This is an album that I made for myself with different components, spiritual and metaphysical, combining them all so that listeners can relate to them. They might be going through a tough time, hear the song “Malanga,” and think, “Oh wow, anything I want, I get—that’s it.” Those words can empower them.

What’s the story behind the name Richcraft?

People say witchcraft is bad; people have so many ideas about it. There’s more to the root of it: people who are psychic, have visions, dreams, praying grandmothers, dance, are good at cooking, all these different things that go into metaphysical aspects. I think that’s where I got the name, from the metaphysical aspect of getting money, the “rich” and my craft. The craft of what I’m doing is rich. Not just “witchcraft” and “rich craft” together to rhyme, but the actual way that I’m putting together the songs—my discipline of making music—is rich.

Walk us through your songwriting process, from knowing which beat you’re going with to recording the song.

If I get a beat from one of my external producers, I listen to it for a while. Ride around listening to it, play it while I’m in the shower. Then I’m like, “OK, here it is. Here’s the song.” It just comes, and it comes naturally. 

No, I didn’t feel nervous. I was anticipating what the response would be because I haven’t done this in a long time. You know, I made my little albums when I was a freshman in high school, where I produced songs on those. I would go to the library and people would be like, “Oh no, this ain’t it, let me help you.” That’s actually how I got some of my first producers. 

Hearing my beats now, having other people hear them, I was excited. Even the songs I didn’t produce, I still mixed and mastered. I sat there when there was no song, just an empty Logic file and the metronome clicking. When it’s time and you need the world to hear the music that’s in your heart, then you put it out. You’re not scared.

You coined a new genre called “kongri.” What made you come to this discovery, and what are some songs on your recent release people can listen to in order to hear it? 

I’ve had this idea for about three years now. This is an exclusive about kongri, because nobody has come up with it but me! So congri is a dish from Cuba—it’s made around the Caribbean, but it originated in Cuba. It’s a mixture of black beans and white rice. Not a mixture like once both are finished you put it together, but you put everything in a pot and it’s mixed that way. 

The kongri aspect of what I’m doing is combining the elements of hip-hop with my Caribbean roots—along with keeping up with traditional styles of heavy bass, lyricism, Auto-Tune, rhyme, fast pace, and flow. Very heavy on the percussion as well on the album. You’ll hear that on “Malanga,” “Stealth,” “Lava,” “Blow It,” and even a bit on “Sometimes.” You’ll hear the cowbells, bongo, conga, and different percussions. It’s about paying homage and combining both sides of where I’m from.

You mentioned you want people to feel like they can manifest their biggest desires while listening to this album. And what are some specific songs on the album that utilize that manifesting power the most? 

When I say that [something is] going to happen, that’s because I’ve already envisioned it happening. That’s because I’ve done the work to make it happen. That’s because I’ve put other things in place to make it happen. “Malanga” is a perfect example of that. The spiritual work I do—I see, I listen, I have visions, I have dreams. 

For people who maybe don’t feel like they could have those same visions, “Malanga” is telling you that you can. “Anything I need, guaranteed / No wait for the ripe, my green yellow banana.” What that means is if I have the fruit already, and it’s the fruit of my labor, I don’t need to wait for it to ripen. I just need to open it, enjoy it, and go as far as I can. 

My artistry is my activism. After the summer of 2020, and realizing that the words I said could get me maliciously targeted and dragged and brutalized by the police, I realized that things are at much bigger stakes than they seem. It’s not important to always be in the cameras, at the actions with the megaphone. So now my music, I’m empowering the youth and the community with high vibrations and frequencies that are real. In my music, I don’t talk about killing people, shooting, or selling drugs—my music is meant to empower. I empower people through positivity, not just false positivity. I talk about real shit. 

At the same time, the way I go about it is the way I want people to go about it in their everyday life. All of these songs are still tied back to Black liberation, to the plight of Black people and African-descended people in America and the Caribbean. 

We can experience so much pain, strife, and erasure. What’s something you want to see for Chicago citizens? What are some words to give to up-and-coming artists and the youth of the city, being a young person yourself?

First one, Chicago citizens, we need a long life. The age disparity between the west side and the north side, the age disparity between Black people and white people in this city, is so much more than just something you see on paper. It’s in real life. 

Our babies are too young to be doing drugs. Too young to be worried about getting shot, and thinking they won’t be anything in life when they grow up. The pressure put on our young people, specifically Black people in this city, is you either make it out of the hood or you’re going to die. 

The last thing, as a young person who was born and raised in this city, I’m just very hopeful all of the time. I’m a very hard-praying person that things change for the better. We need to start putting each other on and stop putting each other down. 

You see a lot of rappers that claim to do anti-violence work but talk about killing people in their songs. Rappers who claim to fight for Black women but refer to them in derogatory terms, enabling abusers in the space. You cannot have both. So hold people accountable in your circle. When you see somebody who is struggling and putting in the work just like you did, make that connection. Build with each other and get in how you fit in. That’s my word on that.

Fifty years from now, what do you see yourself doing, and what would you have hoped to accomplish by then?

Fifty years from now? Damn! I want to have made all the music I wanted to make. I want to have made instrumental music. Yeah, I want to be able to play instruments, make jazz music, and stuff like that. I want to have my own record label and bring a new generation of artists who are like-minded and similar in style. 

I believe in the freedom of our people, the liberation of our people, the empowerment of our people, our traditions, and where we come from. I don’t believe our history started with war. So I want to work with people who can eventually get to that way of thinking. I want to have been able to help them navigate the music business and produce them. I want to sit back and let them do the real soul cleaning. Fifty years from now, I want to be somewhere where people can’t find me. I want to have a big happy family and be able to look back and say, “This was all worth it.”

Read More

Jalen Kobayashi, aka JaefKae Credit: Peoples Streets

I met Jalen Kobayashi in 2017 through Young Chicago Authors’ Louder Than a Bomb poetry festival, where for years we were on separate teams, expressing ourselves through spoken word and sometimes even competing against each other. We’ve since become close friends, connecting through our gifts with the pen and our shared passion for Black liberation. We’ve supported each other’s creative journeys, and we had each other’s backs on the front lines of the fight for justice for marginalized identities during the uprisings of summer 2020. 

Jalen is a northwest-side native, raised by the blocks of Albany Park and the lively Humboldt Park streets. He carries the proud boisterous aura of where he comes from, the family lineage that trails behind him, and the legacy he wishes to create. In addition to his work as a poet and activist, he’s also an artist, producer, and musician, recording and performing as JaefKae. Now 22, he started making music at 14. He brings the same unstoppable energy to it that he does to everything he touches: he already has a catalog of more than 200 songs, and on January 17 he self-released his seventh album, Richcraft.

I’ve been there for much of his growth, and I’ve witnessed his craft blossom into what it is today. He’s a music-making machine: he records, mixes, and often produces his own material, and he’s even coined the name of a new genre. The sound he calls “kongri” is a futuristic fusion of American-style hip-hop, Afrobeats, dancehall, reggaeton, and other elements, with a heavy emphasis on percussion. 

JaefKae has a lengthy performance history too, which includes opening up for some of the biggest names in hip-hop: he read a poem at a Chicago Ideas Week event in fall 2015 where Common launched the anti-violence video “Put the Guns Down,” and he shared a bill with Pusha T and Nas at Wintrust Arena for a Red Bull Music Festival concert in November 2018. But while he’s brought his music to venues throughout the city, he’s received very little recognition for his efforts.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Alycia Kamil: Did you know from a young age that you wanted to be an artist?

JaefKae: I’ve known since I came out of the womb that I was going to be a rapper. When I was six years old, I dressed up as a rapper for Halloween. When my mom took me out for trick-or-treating she would go, “How are you going to be a rapper, and you not rapping? You need to rap.” So at every house I would go up to, I would pull out a piece of paper and spit a verse. My rap name was J.J Jones at the time. People were like, “Wow, this kid is crazy—why is he on my porch rapping?” 

After that my family has always encouraged me to perform and make songs. My auntie would babysit me, and I would just make her listen to my raps. When my parents got home, she would be like, “Listen to this rap that Jalen made!” So from a young age, I knew what I was going to do. 

How much of an impact do your words on paper have on your words on the mike, and vice versa? And can we ever expect to see some more poetry from you? 

I have a plan to incorporate spoken word in my next album—a poem to introduce us to the album, and one to take us out. I also want to release more poetry; there’s so much in the vault that never made it out to the ether. The poetry on the page is the poetry on the mike. There’s the rhythm and the poetry. So I make them work in tandem all the time and become best friends. 

Do you remember how old you were when you made your first song that solidified your passion to become a professional musician?

It was called “Blow Your Mind.” I was going by the name Young Mind or Bright Young Mind at the time. It was over a beat that my dad made—he’s a real hip-hop head. He used to be a producer and an MC as well. I freestyled over that beat and made that song. I had a little bubble microphone—it was really cheap, but it got the job done. I didn’t have a compressor at the time, so I put a sock over it so my Ps and my Ss were filtered right.

Who are some of your musical influences?

Honestly, I’m feeling great. The albums beforehand all have central themes, but they were more of compilations, besides Out the Window, which I released in 2021. I’ve been working on the songs for Richcraft since last year. This is an album that I made for myself with different components, spiritual and metaphysical, combining them all so that listeners can relate to them. They might be going through a tough time, hear the song “Malanga,” and think, “Oh wow, anything I want, I get—that’s it.” Those words can empower them.

What’s the story behind the name Richcraft?

People say witchcraft is bad; people have so many ideas about it. There’s more to the root of it: people who are psychic, have visions, dreams, praying grandmothers, dance, are good at cooking, all these different things that go into metaphysical aspects. I think that’s where I got the name, from the metaphysical aspect of getting money, the “rich” and my craft. The craft of what I’m doing is rich. Not just “witchcraft” and “rich craft” together to rhyme, but the actual way that I’m putting together the songs—my discipline of making music—is rich.

Walk us through your songwriting process, from knowing which beat you’re going with to recording the song.

If I get a beat from one of my external producers, I listen to it for a while. Ride around listening to it, play it while I’m in the shower. Then I’m like, “OK, here it is. Here’s the song.” It just comes, and it comes naturally. 

No, I didn’t feel nervous. I was anticipating what the response would be because I haven’t done this in a long time. You know, I made my little albums when I was a freshman in high school, where I produced songs on those. I would go to the library and people would be like, “Oh no, this ain’t it, let me help you.” That’s actually how I got some of my first producers. 

Hearing my beats now, having other people hear them, I was excited. Even the songs I didn’t produce, I still mixed and mastered. I sat there when there was no song, just an empty Logic file and the metronome clicking. When it’s time and you need the world to hear the music that’s in your heart, then you put it out. You’re not scared.

You coined a new genre called “kongri.” What made you come to this discovery, and what are some songs on your recent release people can listen to in order to hear it? 

I’ve had this idea for about three years now. This is an exclusive about kongri, because nobody has come up with it but me! So congri is a dish from Cuba—it’s made around the Caribbean, but it originated in Cuba. It’s a mixture of black beans and white rice. Not a mixture like once both are finished you put it together, but you put everything in a pot and it’s mixed that way. 

The kongri aspect of what I’m doing is combining the elements of hip-hop with my Caribbean roots—along with keeping up with traditional styles of heavy bass, lyricism, Auto-Tune, rhyme, fast pace, and flow. Very heavy on the percussion as well on the album. You’ll hear that on “Malanga,” “Stealth,” “Lava,” “Blow It,” and even a bit on “Sometimes.” You’ll hear the cowbells, bongo, conga, and different percussions. It’s about paying homage and combining both sides of where I’m from.

You mentioned you want people to feel like they can manifest their biggest desires while listening to this album. And what are some specific songs on the album that utilize that manifesting power the most? 

When I say that [something is] going to happen, that’s because I’ve already envisioned it happening. That’s because I’ve done the work to make it happen. That’s because I’ve put other things in place to make it happen. “Malanga” is a perfect example of that. The spiritual work I do—I see, I listen, I have visions, I have dreams. 

For people who maybe don’t feel like they could have those same visions, “Malanga” is telling you that you can. “Anything I need, guaranteed / No wait for the ripe, my green yellow banana.” What that means is if I have the fruit already, and it’s the fruit of my labor, I don’t need to wait for it to ripen. I just need to open it, enjoy it, and go as far as I can. 

My artistry is my activism. After the summer of 2020, and realizing that the words I said could get me maliciously targeted and dragged and brutalized by the police, I realized that things are at much bigger stakes than they seem. It’s not important to always be in the cameras, at the actions with the megaphone. So now my music, I’m empowering the youth and the community with high vibrations and frequencies that are real. In my music, I don’t talk about killing people, shooting, or selling drugs—my music is meant to empower. I empower people through positivity, not just false positivity. I talk about real shit. 

At the same time, the way I go about it is the way I want people to go about it in their everyday life. All of these songs are still tied back to Black liberation, to the plight of Black people and African-descended people in America and the Caribbean. 

We can experience so much pain, strife, and erasure. What’s something you want to see for Chicago citizens? What are some words to give to up-and-coming artists and the youth of the city, being a young person yourself?

First one, Chicago citizens, we need a long life. The age disparity between the west side and the north side, the age disparity between Black people and white people in this city, is so much more than just something you see on paper. It’s in real life. 

Our babies are too young to be doing drugs. Too young to be worried about getting shot, and thinking they won’t be anything in life when they grow up. The pressure put on our young people, specifically Black people in this city, is you either make it out of the hood or you’re going to die. 

The last thing, as a young person who was born and raised in this city, I’m just very hopeful all of the time. I’m a very hard-praying person that things change for the better. We need to start putting each other on and stop putting each other down. 

You see a lot of rappers that claim to do anti-violence work but talk about killing people in their songs. Rappers who claim to fight for Black women but refer to them in derogatory terms, enabling abusers in the space. You cannot have both. So hold people accountable in your circle. When you see somebody who is struggling and putting in the work just like you did, make that connection. Build with each other and get in how you fit in. That’s my word on that.

Fifty years from now, what do you see yourself doing, and what would you have hoped to accomplish by then?

Fifty years from now? Damn! I want to have made all the music I wanted to make. I want to have made instrumental music. Yeah, I want to be able to play instruments, make jazz music, and stuff like that. I want to have my own record label and bring a new generation of artists who are like-minded and similar in style. 

I believe in the freedom of our people, the liberation of our people, the empowerment of our people, our traditions, and where we come from. I don’t believe our history started with war. So I want to work with people who can eventually get to that way of thinking. I want to have been able to help them navigate the music business and produce them. I want to sit back and let them do the real soul cleaning. Fifty years from now, I want to be somewhere where people can’t find me. I want to have a big happy family and be able to look back and say, “This was all worth it.”

Read More

Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol on June 3, 1968, out of anger that he wouldn’t produce her play/manifesto Up Your Ass. Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968, out of anger at the senator and presidential candidate’s support of military aid for Israel.

In Jean Stein’s 1982 oral history of Warhol’s Factory It Girl, Edie (as in Sedgwick), Barbara Rose, the wife of artist Frank Stella, recalls her husband’s prediction of the outcome of these two events: “Bobby’s going to die and Andy’s going to live. That’s the way the world is.” He was of course correct. (Rose also maintains that “the shooting was a suicide attempt; [Warhol] provoked it.”)

Andy Warhol in Iran Through 2/19: Wed 1 and 7:30 PM, Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2:30 and 8 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; open captions and ASL performance Fri 2/10 8 PM, open captions, audio description, and touch tour Sat 2/11 2:30 PM; North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie, 847-673-6300, northlight.org, $30-$89 (students $15, subject to availability)

The messy nexus of celebrity, politics, and personal trauma forms the spine for Brent Askari’s speculative two-character play, Andy Warhol in Iran, now receiving a scintillating production at Northlight under BJ Jones’s direction. As Reader contributor Jack Helbig wrote about in our winter arts preview issue, Northlight’s staging is one of two current plays riffing off real events in Warhol’s life in the Chicago area right now—the other is Vince Melocchi’s Andy Warhol’s Tomato, featuring a young Warhol (or “Warhola,” as he was then still known) at Buffalo Theatre Ensemble at College of DuPage. 

The Warhol we meet in Askari’s play, set in 1976, is several years post-shooting. After not painting for a few years following the failed murder attempt, he’s back making very lucrative silkscreen portraits for celebrity clients, in part to support his magazine Interview. And he’s come to Iran to take Polaroids for such a portrait of Farah, Empress of Iran and third wife of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

That part is all based on fact. The fiction comes in when Warhol (Rob Lindley) warily answers the door to room service (caviar is dirt cheap in Iran, so who can resist?), only to find himself facing a handgun and an angry revolutionary, Farhad (Hamid Dehghani), disguised as a waiter. From that point on, Askari’s play shares some glancing characteristics with Katori Hall’s 2009 play, The Mountaintop, in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spends his last night on earth at the Lorraine Motel, where a maid turns out to be a harbinger of King’s fate.

Askari’s play is a highly watchable and often quite funny piece. Of course, we know Warhol didn’t die in Iran. Instead, he died at 58 of complications from gallbladder surgery in 1987—a surgery made complicated by the earlier damage caused by Solanas’s bullet. 

According to Taylor Mead, a writer and performer in Warhol’s films who was also quoted in Stein’s book: “Andy died when Valerie Solanas shot him. He’s just somebody to have at your dinner table now. Charming, but he’s the ghost of a genius. Just a walking ghost.”

That certainly feels like an apt description of Lindley’s Warhol at first. He enters through the audience, and tells us, “Oh hey, I don’t really like talking in public. I’d rather just sit and watch—like you.” Lindley, who rocks the artist’s famous silver wig (designed by Natalia Castilla) nails Warhol’s air of fey distraction, the affected manchild who, even after years as an art world superstar, seems starry-eyed himself about things like having dinner at the Ford White House (which is where he made the connection with the Shah and Empress in the first place).

He’s also about as apolitical an artist as you can find, telling his would-be captor, “I find politics abstract.” But that’s part of his appeal as a target for Farhad, who tells Warhol, “You’re the most decadent artist alive.” “Oh, thank you,” Warhol responds, without a speck of irony. There is irony, however, in the fact that Farhad’s group doesn’t really want much more out of the kidnapping attempt than publicity, which is something Warhol understands quite well. (And really, what was Solanas’s attack but a reaction to being denied a slice of Warholian superstardom?)

As is de rigueur in two-character, one-set plays of this nature, the point of the story is that both these men will reveal more to each other (and thus to the audience) than they intend, and may in fact find that they are less far apart psychologically and emotionally than they imagined.

Warhol and Farhad both carry literal scars of their trauma. Lindley’s Warhol pulls up his shirt to show the surgical map Solanas’s attack left on his torso (along with the girdle he has to wear to hold his battered internal organs in place), while Farhad’s back carries deep indentations and welts from the torture he endured at the hands of SAVAK, the Shah’s brutal secret police force. Despite Barbara Rose’s assertion to Stein, the Warhol we meet in Askari’s play seems not so much in love with death, but afraid of a painful life. (And given Solanas’s radical politics—she created the SCUM Manifesto, allegedly standing for “Society for Cutting Up Men”—it’s not surprising that Warhol would shy away even more from anything with a hint of political revolution.)

For Warhol, falling out of favor with the old Factory gang is also painful, as is being blamed for his muse Sedgwick’s death by overdose a few years earlier. Mike Tutaj’s projections cleverly mimic the repetitions of Warhol’s own prints at the top of Todd Rosenthal’s faded-but-luxurious hotel-room set. They also provide a handy way to give us a visual timeline of events and people in Warhol’s life, as well as images depicting the history of Iran. Yet paradoxically, Lindley’s Warhol also shuns the public eye, preferring to stay holed up in his room. (This too, according to Interview editor Bob Colacello, tracks with the real Warhol.)

Both men in Askari’s play also lost their fathers at a young age. It seems that art became Warhol’s surrogate daddy, while Farhad seeks to avenge the death of his own dad and free his country from the grip of the Shah’s dictatorship. That Iran would end up facing another kind of authoritarian regime after the 1979 revolution doesn’t go without mention, though Dehghani’s character breaks the fourth wall to deliver a quick and dirty history of the ways that his country has been subject to coups, invasion, and exploitation by Western powers and corporations (i.e., oil companies) for decades. (Askari’s own father is Iranian and Shiite Muslim, and his mother, as he told Helbig, “was an Episcopalian New England WASP. So growing up was with those two very distinct cultures, and I didn’t quite fit into either camp.”) 

Askari has fun inserting Warhol’s own observations on himself, such as “If you want to know about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” Yet as the 90-minute play progresses, both Lindley’s Warhol and Dehghani’s Farhad unpeel their layers. 

The latter has studied literature in the United States, which Warhol takes as a sign that he cares about art at least as much as politics. And he’s far from a cliche of revolutionary rage. Dehghani, who is a veteran of Iranian theater with an MFA in directing from Northwestern, shows us the fear and uncertainty driving Farhad. He doesn’t really want to hurt Warhol, but he knows that failure will make him a target of both the Shah’s police and his revolutionary cohorts. 

It’s clear that neither can feel fully alive without investment in something bigger than themselves: art (and, sure, the access to celebrity glamor it provides) in Warhol’s case, and the quest for justice in Farhad’s. These are literally the only things keeping them going in the face of so much emptiness and despair and loss around them.

Farhad quotes T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” but Andy Warhol in Iran ends neither with a bang nor a whimper. Instead, the image of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian woman who died under suspicious circumstances in September after being arrested by the “morality police,” takes over at the end of the play. (In his program bio, Dehghani dedicates his performance to “the first female-led revolution in history.”) It’s a sobering way to close out a play about two people who start out invested in the power of fame to change their worlds, yet find a fleeting moment of quiet empathy through surprisingly similar personal circumstances.

Read More

Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol on June 3, 1968, out of anger that he wouldn’t produce her play/manifesto Up Your Ass. Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968, out of anger at the senator and presidential candidate’s support of military aid for Israel.

In Jean Stein’s 1982 oral history of Warhol’s Factory It Girl, Edie (as in Sedgwick), Barbara Rose, the wife of artist Frank Stella, recalls her husband’s prediction of the outcome of these two events: “Bobby’s going to die and Andy’s going to live. That’s the way the world is.” He was of course correct. (Rose also maintains that “the shooting was a suicide attempt; [Warhol] provoked it.”)

Andy Warhol in Iran Through 2/19: Wed 1 and 7:30 PM, Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2:30 and 8 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; open captions and ASL performance Fri 2/10 8 PM, open captions, audio description, and touch tour Sat 2/11 2:30 PM; North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie, 847-673-6300, northlight.org, $30-$89 (students $15, subject to availability)

The messy nexus of celebrity, politics, and personal trauma forms the spine for Brent Askari’s speculative two-character play, Andy Warhol in Iran, now receiving a scintillating production at Northlight under BJ Jones’s direction. As Reader contributor Jack Helbig wrote about in our winter arts preview issue, Northlight’s staging is one of two current plays riffing off real events in Warhol’s life in the Chicago area right now—the other is Vince Melocchi’s Andy Warhol’s Tomato, featuring a young Warhol (or “Warhola,” as he was then still known) at Buffalo Theatre Ensemble at College of DuPage. 

The Warhol we meet in Askari’s play, set in 1976, is several years post-shooting. After not painting for a few years following the failed murder attempt, he’s back making very lucrative silkscreen portraits for celebrity clients, in part to support his magazine Interview. And he’s come to Iran to take Polaroids for such a portrait of Farah, Empress of Iran and third wife of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

That part is all based on fact. The fiction comes in when Warhol (Rob Lindley) warily answers the door to room service (caviar is dirt cheap in Iran, so who can resist?), only to find himself facing a handgun and an angry revolutionary, Farhad (Hamid Dehghani), disguised as a waiter. From that point on, Askari’s play shares some glancing characteristics with Katori Hall’s 2009 play, The Mountaintop, in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spends his last night on earth at the Lorraine Motel, where a maid turns out to be a harbinger of King’s fate.

Askari’s play is a highly watchable and often quite funny piece. Of course, we know Warhol didn’t die in Iran. Instead, he died at 58 of complications from gallbladder surgery in 1987—a surgery made complicated by the earlier damage caused by Solanas’s bullet. 

According to Taylor Mead, a writer and performer in Warhol’s films who was also quoted in Stein’s book: “Andy died when Valerie Solanas shot him. He’s just somebody to have at your dinner table now. Charming, but he’s the ghost of a genius. Just a walking ghost.”

That certainly feels like an apt description of Lindley’s Warhol at first. He enters through the audience, and tells us, “Oh hey, I don’t really like talking in public. I’d rather just sit and watch—like you.” Lindley, who rocks the artist’s famous silver wig (designed by Natalia Castilla) nails Warhol’s air of fey distraction, the affected manchild who, even after years as an art world superstar, seems starry-eyed himself about things like having dinner at the Ford White House (which is where he made the connection with the Shah and Empress in the first place).

He’s also about as apolitical an artist as you can find, telling his would-be captor, “I find politics abstract.” But that’s part of his appeal as a target for Farhad, who tells Warhol, “You’re the most decadent artist alive.” “Oh, thank you,” Warhol responds, without a speck of irony. There is irony, however, in the fact that Farhad’s group doesn’t really want much more out of the kidnapping attempt than publicity, which is something Warhol understands quite well. (And really, what was Solanas’s attack but a reaction to being denied a slice of Warholian superstardom?)

As is de rigueur in two-character, one-set plays of this nature, the point of the story is that both these men will reveal more to each other (and thus to the audience) than they intend, and may in fact find that they are less far apart psychologically and emotionally than they imagined.

Warhol and Farhad both carry literal scars of their trauma. Lindley’s Warhol pulls up his shirt to show the surgical map Solanas’s attack left on his torso (along with the girdle he has to wear to hold his battered internal organs in place), while Farhad’s back carries deep indentations and welts from the torture he endured at the hands of SAVAK, the Shah’s brutal secret police force. Despite Barbara Rose’s assertion to Stein, the Warhol we meet in Askari’s play seems not so much in love with death, but afraid of a painful life. (And given Solanas’s radical politics—she created the SCUM Manifesto, allegedly standing for “Society for Cutting Up Men”—it’s not surprising that Warhol would shy away even more from anything with a hint of political revolution.)

For Warhol, falling out of favor with the old Factory gang is also painful, as is being blamed for his muse Sedgwick’s death by overdose a few years earlier. Mike Tutaj’s projections cleverly mimic the repetitions of Warhol’s own prints at the top of Todd Rosenthal’s faded-but-luxurious hotel-room set. They also provide a handy way to give us a visual timeline of events and people in Warhol’s life, as well as images depicting the history of Iran. Yet paradoxically, Lindley’s Warhol also shuns the public eye, preferring to stay holed up in his room. (This too, according to Interview editor Bob Colacello, tracks with the real Warhol.)

Both men in Askari’s play also lost their fathers at a young age. It seems that art became Warhol’s surrogate daddy, while Farhad seeks to avenge the death of his own dad and free his country from the grip of the Shah’s dictatorship. That Iran would end up facing another kind of authoritarian regime after the 1979 revolution doesn’t go without mention, though Dehghani’s character breaks the fourth wall to deliver a quick and dirty history of the ways that his country has been subject to coups, invasion, and exploitation by Western powers and corporations (i.e., oil companies) for decades. (Askari’s own father is Iranian and Shiite Muslim, and his mother, as he told Helbig, “was an Episcopalian New England WASP. So growing up was with those two very distinct cultures, and I didn’t quite fit into either camp.”) 

Askari has fun inserting Warhol’s own observations on himself, such as “If you want to know about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” Yet as the 90-minute play progresses, both Lindley’s Warhol and Dehghani’s Farhad unpeel their layers. 

The latter has studied literature in the United States, which Warhol takes as a sign that he cares about art at least as much as politics. And he’s far from a cliche of revolutionary rage. Dehghani, who is a veteran of Iranian theater with an MFA in directing from Northwestern, shows us the fear and uncertainty driving Farhad. He doesn’t really want to hurt Warhol, but he knows that failure will make him a target of both the Shah’s police and his revolutionary cohorts. 

It’s clear that neither can feel fully alive without investment in something bigger than themselves: art (and, sure, the access to celebrity glamor it provides) in Warhol’s case, and the quest for justice in Farhad’s. These are literally the only things keeping them going in the face of so much emptiness and despair and loss around them.

Farhad quotes T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” but Andy Warhol in Iran ends neither with a bang nor a whimper. Instead, the image of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian woman who died under suspicious circumstances in September after being arrested by the “morality police,” takes over at the end of the play. (In his program bio, Dehghani dedicates his performance to “the first female-led revolution in history.”) It’s a sobering way to close out a play about two people who start out invested in the power of fame to change their worlds, yet find a fleeting moment of quiet empathy through surprisingly similar personal circumstances.

Read More

In her first campaign for mayor, Lori Lightfoot was something of a cipher, someone Chicagoans could project any number of feelings or impressions upon. 

She was an experienced lawyer who had undertaken a few public-facing roles. She tapped into popular discontent with the politicians running against her and won in a landslide.

Lightfoot is more animated on the stump talking about neighborhood investments than she is about any other issue, even if, as the Tribune reported, many of the largest initiatives of her signature Invest South/West initiative were planned after she took office.

And it is meaningful and important that Chicago elected a gay Black woman to lead its government after decades of homophobic, racist, and chauvinistic politics. But her tendency to repeatedly say things that simultaneously alienate both sides of an issue, compounded by the often-displayed harshness of her personality, her inexperience managing the staff and bureaucracy that manage the nation’s third-largest city, and the inescapable difficulty in connecting with the public have made her reelection anything but certain. 

Despite how removed elected officials are from people’s daily lives, Lightfoot is no longer a cipher. Chicago will soon see if voters give her another term.

The Reader interviewed Lightfoot on Jan. 13, after she hosted an interfaith prayer breakfast honoring Martin Luther King Jr. 

Gettinger: You faced an unprecedented confluence of crises in your first term: the pandemic, the George Floyd uprising, a restive City Council, just to name a few. How do you navigate that as a new mayor?

Lightfoot: Very carefully. Look, it has been unprecedented. We’ve had a lot of headwinds, some of which were clearly unexpected and beyond our control, top among them a global pandemic that turned everything that we understood as our role upside-down. There’s no playbook for that.

Luckily, we have a very well-prepared Department of Public Health. Luckily we built a very good, strong team—not just subject matter experts but people who are truly committed to service. And we have grown together. We as a mayor’s office, we as a city government, but we as a city—we’ve been through life together. Every facet of it in these past four years.

My primary focus in the early days of the pandemic was really focused on three big buckets. One was to make sure that our healthcare system didn’t buckle, because at that time we were seeing what was happening in China and other parts of Asia. We were seeing what was happening on the West Coast and starting to see what was happening in New York and the surrounding area. 

So I was very concerned that we did not have a health care system that buckled and was not able to manage itself to manage the patients who were in need, because that was one of the dire predictions that was resonating across the media in that early time. So the health care system and making sure that that didn’t happen was very much on my mind. And not surprisingly, another area of focus was health care workers and first responders. Your health care system is going to fail if the workers are not safe and protected. So we did a lot in those early days to make sure that we were shoring up those vital essential workers: first responders, police, fire, EMTs. That was also really important. 

And then also in our city, making sure that our most vulnerable residents: our seniors, our homeless, the people who were not connected to health care—those most vulnerable residents were the worry of many of us, me included, and making sure that we were doing everything that we could right away to reach out to them. That’s why we decompressed homeless shelters. That’s why we worked hand in hand with Sheriff Dart to ensure the Cook County Jail didn’t become a leading COVID hotspot. 

And then fanning out from there, as we started seeing data from testing rolling in and understanding who was getting sick, who was dying—I’ll never forget for the rest of my life—in early April learning about the fact that Black people in this city were dying at seven times the rate of every other demographic. That was the ultimate call to action. 

The election of a Black lesbian was historic, and you were elected with a lot of support from the LGBTQ community. Can you talk about the policies you’ve enacted to make Chicago more welcoming to the LGBTQ community?

Well first of all, I think that it’s important that I lead by example and that I’m unapologetic. You know well that over the arc of our history there have been prominent leaders from our community who never say the words, “I am gay.” That’s not me. And so I think that part of it is really important.

I cannot tell you the number of parents who come to me, usually pulling me aside and whispering in my ear, “My son/my daughter has come out. We admire you.” Because, look, I think a lot of straight parents who didn’t have that vision for their child, didn’t know that that was a possibility. When they learn—even if they’re accepting—they’re worried about: “What kind of life is my child going to have? Are they going to be happy? Are they going to be able to have a family? Will they be accepted? Will they have the kind of life that I envisioned for them?’”

And what I hope is, through me as a role model, that I’m able to show, “Yes, yes yes”—the answer to all those questions. Vanquish those fears, because there is, in this moment in our time, even as we’re in this tough time—and I don’t underestimate that, for our community that is under siege, particularly our trans brothers and sisters—that those parents who are out there and particularly our children see that there are people like me who’ve fought that fight, come out on the other side of it, and are better for it, frankly. And that they can now walk in the path that was blazed for me and that I am hopefully blazing for them.

In your 2018 framework for LGBTQ Chicago, there was a promise or a proposal of shelters for LGBTQ kids in the city. That hasn’t happened. What have you done to address homeless LGBTQ youth?

I think the thing that we have done is make sure that we are supporting those existing places, both with beds but, importantly, programming in places of connection. Because when I was campaigning back in 2018 for example, I went to a shelter up on the north side, just north of Addison on Ashland, and remember thinking, “These folks need help and resources.” And what I heard from the people who ran the shelter and employees is that young people, and particularly young people of color, were coming from all over the city because those resources weren’t there.

Now I’m not going to tell you we’ve done everything yet. We haven’t. But we have made sure that resources are flowing, that supports are there, even though this is a very tough time. I’m very painfully aware that a certain percentage of the people who are living on the street are the people from my community, LGBTQ youth, who left their homes or were thrown out of their home because they sought to live their authentic life. I think there’s still a lot more work that we must do, and I am 100 percent committed to doing it.

Particularly funding—I think of it as earmarks for transgender Chicagoans and that kind of stuff. What is your administration doing to address the high rates of unemployment, off-market employment, homelessness—particularly for trans people in Chicago. What are you guys doing to invest in that community?

First and foremost, we have to start with a values statement. We have to recognize and say, “Our trans brothers and sisters deserve the same access to the benefits of this city as everyone else.” The values statement is critically important, then we have to back it up with real, concrete, tangible actions. Again, making sure that, for example, on my advisory committee, that we have members of the trans community that are front and center.

Who’s on it?

It’s a pretty diverse group, and they’re not shy. But making sure that I’m hearing directly from them about the continuing challenge of their community. I’m, obviously, a lesbian, but I’m not a trans woman or man, and I don’t get to pretend that I have captured and understand fully the unique challenges that they face on a day-to-day basis. Making sure that I am present in those communities and that people see me with my trans brothers and sisters. 

And then again, it’s about putting your money where your mouth is, making sure that we are putting money into resources. It’s also about raising the necessity with other institutions within city government who need to be there to support the trans community, notably the police department. We can’t live in a world where trans lives don’t matter. We can’t live in a world where trans women in particular are getting assaulted and murdered and those cases are falling by the wayside. 

One of the things I’m proudest of is increasing the number of liaisons from the police department to the LGBTQ+ community and making sure that we are focused on supporting trans lives. We have a member of our community who is a senior leader in the police department in a community policing role. So making sure that our presence is noted, that this is a priority for me, and that we are holding ourselves, each and every department, accountable to be responsive to the needs of that and other vulnerable communities in our city.

Do you think the relationship between you and the Chicago Teachers Union can be repaired? 

If I see, and they articulate, a commitment to putting our children first, a commitment to respecting the voices of parents as the first principles, the core principles around which they rally, then absolutely. I think there’s ample opportunity for us to reach common ground because that’s where I’m at. That’s where I’ve always been at. Our kids come first. Creating safe, nurturing environments for them has to be the primary work that we’re about. And we would love the partnership of the CTU, but I think we’re, right now, on different planets.

Another historic first is the fact that civilians will be elected to police district councils. How do you intend to engage with the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability and the district councilors to improve public safety, both in terms of crime and police misconduct?

I think that their primary focus should be, as embedded in the ordinance, to help decipher the various levers of accountability and to be a voice for community members who need constitutional policing. An emphasis on “constitutional,” because they need a police department that sees them and respects them. They need a police department that understands the most-important tool that officers have is being a champion of a community. And I think, to me, that’s got to be the primary focus and work of the commission. 

And I’ve said it to the interim group of commissioners. I’m going to say it again, over and over again, because I believe that, to me, is their highest calling.

How can the city address homelessness and ensure we’re comprehensively and sustainably getting people the homes they need to survive and thrive?

I think we have laid the groundwork for that in these first four years. Our relentless work on closing the gap in affordable units across our city is critically important, and that goes to address the issue. I think our seven-fold increase in the amount of services that are now available to residents of our city at no cost is a part of it. I think our monumental investments in substance abuse addiction treatments are a big part of it. Because you know as well as I do, people are on the street for a variety of reasons. Some of it’s financial, some of it’s mental health, some of it’s substance abuse, and sometimes it’s all of the above. 

So we’ve done, I think, important work and brought the biggest investments in the city’s history, but we know that there’s more work to do, and this is a very complicated problem. We are fortunate that we don’t see the proliferation of homeless people on our streets like we see in other cities across the country, particularly on the West Coast and the Northwest Coast, despite sometimes the hyperbolic language that we hear from some. 

But we got a challenge, and I firmly believe, particularly as we sit here in January—it’s not as cold as it usually is this time of year, but none of God’s children should be living on the streets in cold weather, hot weather, or in any weather. It’s not a life that supports them in what I hope are pursuits to live out their best lives and to really be a part of the fabric of our city. It pains me when I go by and see the encampments. It pains me when I see the way in which people are suffering. 

But it’s not just about “do I have enough units?” It’s about making sure that we’re forming a relationship with the people, that we have the wraparound services to help them see the virtue in moving through the various stages of housing to get to a place of independent living.

In the next four years, what will you do to improve CTA reliability, frequency, safety, and comfort?

The reason that we’ve made progress and we’ve seen the numbers of violent incidents of crime go down in the last few months of 2022 was a number of things that we put in place. Number one is that we sat and listened to the frontline workers: the bus drivers, the people who work in the rail section of CTA. And they told us what they felt like they needed to feel safe. That’s important. In the dark old days of the summer of 2020 when we heard from Amalgamated Transit Union members: “We don’t feel safe. We don’t want to come to work. We don’t feel like we’re going to be protected.” We have to be constantly listening and engaging with them because the people who are closest to the challenges are closest to the solutions.

The other reason we made progress is because what we heard from those workers, from riders, is we want more police on the CTA. We want uniformed officers to be present. Heard it loud and clear. We’re delivering that. 

The CTA also, frankly, has to step up its game, and it has. You can’t just issue rider alerts; you’ve got to go out to communities. You also have to listen. You’ve got to be part of the solution. You’ve got to bring the non-uniformed security personnel. And you’ve got to keep being diligent all the time.

Read More

In her first campaign for mayor, Lori Lightfoot was something of a cipher, someone Chicagoans could project any number of feelings or impressions upon. 

She was an experienced lawyer who had undertaken a few public-facing roles. She tapped into popular discontent with the politicians running against her and won in a landslide.

Lightfoot is more animated on the stump talking about neighborhood investments than she is about any other issue, even if, as the Tribune reported, many of the largest initiatives of her signature Invest South/West initiative were planned after she took office.

And it is meaningful and important that Chicago elected a gay Black woman to lead its government after decades of homophobic, racist, and chauvinistic politics. But her tendency to repeatedly say things that simultaneously alienate both sides of an issue, compounded by the often-displayed harshness of her personality, her inexperience managing the staff and bureaucracy that manage the nation’s third-largest city, and the inescapable difficulty in connecting with the public have made her reelection anything but certain. 

Despite how removed elected officials are from people’s daily lives, Lightfoot is no longer a cipher. Chicago will soon see if voters give her another term.

The Reader interviewed Lightfoot on Jan. 13, after she hosted an interfaith prayer breakfast honoring Martin Luther King Jr. 

Gettinger: You faced an unprecedented confluence of crises in your first term: the pandemic, the George Floyd uprising, a restive City Council, just to name a few. How do you navigate that as a new mayor?

Lightfoot: Very carefully. Look, it has been unprecedented. We’ve had a lot of headwinds, some of which were clearly unexpected and beyond our control, top among them a global pandemic that turned everything that we understood as our role upside-down. There’s no playbook for that.

Luckily, we have a very well-prepared Department of Public Health. Luckily we built a very good, strong team—not just subject matter experts but people who are truly committed to service. And we have grown together. We as a mayor’s office, we as a city government, but we as a city—we’ve been through life together. Every facet of it in these past four years.

My primary focus in the early days of the pandemic was really focused on three big buckets. One was to make sure that our healthcare system didn’t buckle, because at that time we were seeing what was happening in China and other parts of Asia. We were seeing what was happening on the West Coast and starting to see what was happening in New York and the surrounding area. 

So I was very concerned that we did not have a health care system that buckled and was not able to manage itself to manage the patients who were in need, because that was one of the dire predictions that was resonating across the media in that early time. So the health care system and making sure that that didn’t happen was very much on my mind. And not surprisingly, another area of focus was health care workers and first responders. Your health care system is going to fail if the workers are not safe and protected. So we did a lot in those early days to make sure that we were shoring up those vital essential workers: first responders, police, fire, EMTs. That was also really important. 

And then also in our city, making sure that our most vulnerable residents: our seniors, our homeless, the people who were not connected to health care—those most vulnerable residents were the worry of many of us, me included, and making sure that we were doing everything that we could right away to reach out to them. That’s why we decompressed homeless shelters. That’s why we worked hand in hand with Sheriff Dart to ensure the Cook County Jail didn’t become a leading COVID hotspot. 

And then fanning out from there, as we started seeing data from testing rolling in and understanding who was getting sick, who was dying—I’ll never forget for the rest of my life—in early April learning about the fact that Black people in this city were dying at seven times the rate of every other demographic. That was the ultimate call to action. 

The election of a Black lesbian was historic, and you were elected with a lot of support from the LGBTQ community. Can you talk about the policies you’ve enacted to make Chicago more welcoming to the LGBTQ community?

Well first of all, I think that it’s important that I lead by example and that I’m unapologetic. You know well that over the arc of our history there have been prominent leaders from our community who never say the words, “I am gay.” That’s not me. And so I think that part of it is really important.

I cannot tell you the number of parents who come to me, usually pulling me aside and whispering in my ear, “My son/my daughter has come out. We admire you.” Because, look, I think a lot of straight parents who didn’t have that vision for their child, didn’t know that that was a possibility. When they learn—even if they’re accepting—they’re worried about: “What kind of life is my child going to have? Are they going to be happy? Are they going to be able to have a family? Will they be accepted? Will they have the kind of life that I envisioned for them?’”

And what I hope is, through me as a role model, that I’m able to show, “Yes, yes yes”—the answer to all those questions. Vanquish those fears, because there is, in this moment in our time, even as we’re in this tough time—and I don’t underestimate that, for our community that is under siege, particularly our trans brothers and sisters—that those parents who are out there and particularly our children see that there are people like me who’ve fought that fight, come out on the other side of it, and are better for it, frankly. And that they can now walk in the path that was blazed for me and that I am hopefully blazing for them.

In your 2018 framework for LGBTQ Chicago, there was a promise or a proposal of shelters for LGBTQ kids in the city. That hasn’t happened. What have you done to address homeless LGBTQ youth?

I think the thing that we have done is make sure that we are supporting those existing places, both with beds but, importantly, programming in places of connection. Because when I was campaigning back in 2018 for example, I went to a shelter up on the north side, just north of Addison on Ashland, and remember thinking, “These folks need help and resources.” And what I heard from the people who ran the shelter and employees is that young people, and particularly young people of color, were coming from all over the city because those resources weren’t there.

Now I’m not going to tell you we’ve done everything yet. We haven’t. But we have made sure that resources are flowing, that supports are there, even though this is a very tough time. I’m very painfully aware that a certain percentage of the people who are living on the street are the people from my community, LGBTQ youth, who left their homes or were thrown out of their home because they sought to live their authentic life. I think there’s still a lot more work that we must do, and I am 100 percent committed to doing it.

Particularly funding—I think of it as earmarks for transgender Chicagoans and that kind of stuff. What is your administration doing to address the high rates of unemployment, off-market employment, homelessness—particularly for trans people in Chicago. What are you guys doing to invest in that community?

First and foremost, we have to start with a values statement. We have to recognize and say, “Our trans brothers and sisters deserve the same access to the benefits of this city as everyone else.” The values statement is critically important, then we have to back it up with real, concrete, tangible actions. Again, making sure that, for example, on my advisory committee, that we have members of the trans community that are front and center.

Who’s on it?

It’s a pretty diverse group, and they’re not shy. But making sure that I’m hearing directly from them about the continuing challenge of their community. I’m, obviously, a lesbian, but I’m not a trans woman or man, and I don’t get to pretend that I have captured and understand fully the unique challenges that they face on a day-to-day basis. Making sure that I am present in those communities and that people see me with my trans brothers and sisters. 

And then again, it’s about putting your money where your mouth is, making sure that we are putting money into resources. It’s also about raising the necessity with other institutions within city government who need to be there to support the trans community, notably the police department. We can’t live in a world where trans lives don’t matter. We can’t live in a world where trans women in particular are getting assaulted and murdered and those cases are falling by the wayside. 

One of the things I’m proudest of is increasing the number of liaisons from the police department to the LGBTQ+ community and making sure that we are focused on supporting trans lives. We have a member of our community who is a senior leader in the police department in a community policing role. So making sure that our presence is noted, that this is a priority for me, and that we are holding ourselves, each and every department, accountable to be responsive to the needs of that and other vulnerable communities in our city.

Do you think the relationship between you and the Chicago Teachers Union can be repaired? 

If I see, and they articulate, a commitment to putting our children first, a commitment to respecting the voices of parents as the first principles, the core principles around which they rally, then absolutely. I think there’s ample opportunity for us to reach common ground because that’s where I’m at. That’s where I’ve always been at. Our kids come first. Creating safe, nurturing environments for them has to be the primary work that we’re about. And we would love the partnership of the CTU, but I think we’re, right now, on different planets.

Another historic first is the fact that civilians will be elected to police district councils. How do you intend to engage with the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability and the district councilors to improve public safety, both in terms of crime and police misconduct?

I think that their primary focus should be, as embedded in the ordinance, to help decipher the various levers of accountability and to be a voice for community members who need constitutional policing. An emphasis on “constitutional,” because they need a police department that sees them and respects them. They need a police department that understands the most-important tool that officers have is being a champion of a community. And I think, to me, that’s got to be the primary focus and work of the commission. 

And I’ve said it to the interim group of commissioners. I’m going to say it again, over and over again, because I believe that, to me, is their highest calling.

How can the city address homelessness and ensure we’re comprehensively and sustainably getting people the homes they need to survive and thrive?

I think we have laid the groundwork for that in these first four years. Our relentless work on closing the gap in affordable units across our city is critically important, and that goes to address the issue. I think our seven-fold increase in the amount of services that are now available to residents of our city at no cost is a part of it. I think our monumental investments in substance abuse addiction treatments are a big part of it. Because you know as well as I do, people are on the street for a variety of reasons. Some of it’s financial, some of it’s mental health, some of it’s substance abuse, and sometimes it’s all of the above. 

So we’ve done, I think, important work and brought the biggest investments in the city’s history, but we know that there’s more work to do, and this is a very complicated problem. We are fortunate that we don’t see the proliferation of homeless people on our streets like we see in other cities across the country, particularly on the West Coast and the Northwest Coast, despite sometimes the hyperbolic language that we hear from some. 

But we got a challenge, and I firmly believe, particularly as we sit here in January—it’s not as cold as it usually is this time of year, but none of God’s children should be living on the streets in cold weather, hot weather, or in any weather. It’s not a life that supports them in what I hope are pursuits to live out their best lives and to really be a part of the fabric of our city. It pains me when I go by and see the encampments. It pains me when I see the way in which people are suffering. 

But it’s not just about “do I have enough units?” It’s about making sure that we’re forming a relationship with the people, that we have the wraparound services to help them see the virtue in moving through the various stages of housing to get to a place of independent living.

In the next four years, what will you do to improve CTA reliability, frequency, safety, and comfort?

The reason that we’ve made progress and we’ve seen the numbers of violent incidents of crime go down in the last few months of 2022 was a number of things that we put in place. Number one is that we sat and listened to the frontline workers: the bus drivers, the people who work in the rail section of CTA. And they told us what they felt like they needed to feel safe. That’s important. In the dark old days of the summer of 2020 when we heard from Amalgamated Transit Union members: “We don’t feel safe. We don’t want to come to work. We don’t feel like we’re going to be protected.” We have to be constantly listening and engaging with them because the people who are closest to the challenges are closest to the solutions.

The other reason we made progress is because what we heard from those workers, from riders, is we want more police on the CTA. We want uniformed officers to be present. Heard it loud and clear. We’re delivering that. 

The CTA also, frankly, has to step up its game, and it has. You can’t just issue rider alerts; you’ve got to go out to communities. You also have to listen. You’ve got to be part of the solution. You’ve got to bring the non-uniformed security personnel. And you’ve got to keep being diligent all the time.

Read More

For immediate release

Chicago-area media strategist and nonprofit executive Solomon Lieberman has been hired as the new CEO and publisher of the Reader Institute for Community Journalism (RICJ), which operates the 51-year-old newspaper, Chicago Reader. He will take the reins mid-February from Tracy Baim, who announced her intent to leave last summer.

Lieberman, who has a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University, most recently worked as founding executive director of the Institute for Political Innovation, a national think tank that researched and advocated for nonpartisan election reform. Previously, he served in several capacities at the nonprofit Better Government Association in Chicago, most recently as vice president of strategy and civic engagement. He has a bachelor’s of arts in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“We are very excited about the media savvy, passion, and business-development acumen that Solomon brings to this job,” RICJ board chair Eileen Rhodes said. “He has worked in nonprofit Chicago journalism, and built a successful nonpartisan organization with national reach. Our hope is that he continues to grow the RICJ nonprofit, strengthening the infrastructure needed to lead this legacy newspaper for the next fifty years.”

“I keep pinching myself,” Lieberman said. “I get to follow Tracy Baim’s lead, serve a beautiful, interdependent community of makers, members, readers, leaders, business owners and donors, and support community journalism at its finest.”

The nationwide six-month search for the leader of RICJ was conducted by the Morten Group, LLC. The board of directors of RICJ interviewed the top candidates, and made the final decision. Morten Group, a national consulting firm based in Chicago, focuses on executive placement and transitions, and racial equity integration and strategic planning.

“The past four years have been more than challenging,” said Baim. “When it became independent from the Sun-Times, we first had to rebuild the business side of the organization. The next challenge was surviving during the early phase of the COVID pandemic, and most recently, in May 2022, we were finally able to obtain full nonprofit independence. Now it’s time for the next phase, bringing in more resources to stabilize and thrive. I am excited for what Solomon will bring to this equation. I am also very confident in the incredible team we have built at RICJ and our Chicago Independent Media Alliance (CIMA) project. I am proud of the work I have done to build both the Reader and our local media ecosystem, and I plan to continue to advocate for community media.”

“We can’t thank Tracy enough for her passion and dedication to saving the Chicago Reader—several times over the past four and a half years,” said Rhodes. “Tracy, who has been doing community journalism for 39 years, including as co-founder of Windy City Times, was the right person at the right time. I have been so happy to work by her side, as board treasurer and then chair, as we met the incredibly difficult challenges of keeping the Reader alive.”

Since Baim took over as publisher of the Chicago Reader in 2018, the organization has moved to strengthen its infrastructure and has diversified its revenues, distribution, leadership, and staff. It has tripled in revenue, more than doubled its number of employees, and has expanded its print and online readership. In 2018, there was one person of color on the team. Current leadership consists of 57 percent people of color, 57 percent LGBTQ+, 15 percent disabled, and 86 percent female, nonbinary, or trans. Of the overall staff, 47 percent are people of color, 33 percent LGBTQ, 8 percent disabled, and 67 percent female, nonbinary, or trans.

For more information on RICJ and the Chicago Reader, see www.chicagoreader.com. For CIMA info see www.IndieMediaChi.org.

Read More

For immediate release

Chicago-area media strategist and nonprofit executive Solomon Lieberman has been hired as the new CEO and publisher of the Reader Institute for Community Journalism (RICJ), which operates the 51-year-old newspaper, Chicago Reader. He will take the reins mid-February from Tracy Baim, who announced her intent to leave last summer.

Lieberman, who has a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University, most recently worked as founding executive director of the Institute for Political Innovation, a national think tank that researched and advocated for nonpartisan election reform. Previously, he served in several capacities at the nonprofit Better Government Association in Chicago, most recently as vice president of strategy and civic engagement. He has a bachelor’s of arts in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“We are very excited about the media savvy, passion, and business-development acumen that Solomon brings to this job,” RICJ board chair Eileen Rhodes said. “He has worked in nonprofit Chicago journalism, and built a successful nonpartisan organization with national reach. Our hope is that he continues to grow the RICJ nonprofit, strengthening the infrastructure needed to lead this legacy newspaper for the next fifty years.”

“I keep pinching myself,” Lieberman said. “I get to follow Tracy Baim’s lead, serve a beautiful, interdependent community of makers, members, readers, leaders, business owners and donors, and support community journalism at its finest.”

The nationwide six-month search for the leader of RICJ was conducted by the Morten Group, LLC. The board of directors of RICJ interviewed the top candidates, and made the final decision. Morten Group, a national consulting firm based in Chicago, focuses on executive placement and transitions, and racial equity integration and strategic planning.

“The past four years have been more than challenging,” said Baim. “When it became independent from the Sun-Times, we first had to rebuild the business side of the organization. The next challenge was surviving during the early phase of the COVID pandemic, and most recently, in May 2022, we were finally able to obtain full nonprofit independence. Now it’s time for the next phase, bringing in more resources to stabilize and thrive. I am excited for what Solomon will bring to this equation. I am also very confident in the incredible team we have built at RICJ and our Chicago Independent Media Alliance (CIMA) project. I am proud of the work I have done to build both the Reader and our local media ecosystem, and I plan to continue to advocate for community media.”

“We can’t thank Tracy enough for her passion and dedication to saving the Chicago Reader—several times over the past four and a half years,” said Rhodes. “Tracy, who has been doing community journalism for 39 years, including as co-founder of Windy City Times, was the right person at the right time. I have been so happy to work by her side, as board treasurer and then chair, as we met the incredibly difficult challenges of keeping the Reader alive.”

Since Baim took over as publisher of the Chicago Reader in 2018, the organization has moved to strengthen its infrastructure and has diversified its revenues, distribution, leadership, and staff. It has tripled in revenue, more than doubled its number of employees, and has expanded its print and online readership. In 2018, there was one person of color on the team. Current leadership consists of 57 percent people of color, 57 percent LGBTQ+, 15 percent disabled, and 86 percent female, nonbinary, or trans. Of the overall staff, 47 percent are people of color, 33 percent LGBTQ, 8 percent disabled, and 67 percent female, nonbinary, or trans.

For more information on RICJ and the Chicago Reader, see www.chicagoreader.com. For CIMA info see www.IndieMediaChi.org.

Read More

Safe consumption sites (SCS), also known as overdose prevention sites, are places where people can use drugs, safely and without threat of arrest or stigma, in the presence of folks trained to respond in case anyone accidentally overdoses. SCS supply sterile paraphernalia, reducing the risk of infection and disease, and guests can test their drugs for fentanyl before consuming. 

As a harm reduction worker once reminded me, safe consumption sites have existed as long as humans have been doing drugs, with or without permission from the law. Whenever drug users come together to support each other–whether in a private home or public park, watching someone’s back when they nod out, making sure they’re on their side, administering the opioid-overdose reversing medication naloxone if someone needs it–that’s a safe consumption site. But being able to operate in the daylight, without fear of prosecution and with access to funding and social and medical services, would be safer.

In 2022, the number of Chicagoans who died from accidental overdose was higher than the number who died by guns. Also in 2022, Representative La Shawn Ford introduced the Overdose Prevention Pilot Act, calling for state support to open SCS sites in Chicago.

SCS are the opposite of the abstinence-only approach most of us are familiar (and therefore comfortable) with when it comes to reducing drug deaths, but evidence shows that in neighborhoods where they’re allowed to operate, overdose deaths are reduced, the number of ambulance calls for treating overdoses lowers dramatically, and HIV rates decrease. According to the Drug Policy Alliance, “more than 100 evidence-based, peer-reviewed studies” link SCS to outcomes like “increasing entry into substance use disorder treatment” along with other medical and social services, “reducing the amount and frequency that clients use drugs,” and “reducing public drug use and syringe and/or other drug paraphernalia litter.”

It’s not so much my answer has evolved as I have a personal lived experience where, in the neighborhoods in which Black people in particular live, drugs have been a very sore, hurtful, harmful, damaging experience to so many.

On January 30, 2023, WBEZ released their Chicago mayoral candidate questionnaire, which included the question, “Would you support setting up ‘safe consumption sites’ where people use pre-obtained illegal drugs under the supervision of trained health workers?” 

Five of the nine candidates answered yes; Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Representative Chuy Garcia chose “other,” and Commissioner Brandon Johnson and former CPS CEO Paul Vallas replied “no.” 

In his response, Johnson further elaborated: “Given Chicago’s history, these sites would most likely be on the South and West sides, further burdening already struggling neighborhoods. There are other ways to address the drug epidemic and aid those in need, while also protecting our communities.” However, later that morning, when a Twitter user asked Johnson if he does, in fact, support SCS, Johnson replied: “Yes, and it’s not either/or. It’s ‘we need more.’ I’ve lost family to mental illness, addiction, and homelessness. I want to go beyond safe consumption sites to address mental health care and [the] unhoused. I also believe sites should be accessible to those in need throughout our city.”

That afternoon, I asked campaign spokesman Ronnie Reese if Johnson would be up for an on-the-record conversation about where he’s at with SCS. Within 15 minutes, Johnson called my phone: we spoke for about half an hour. Below is our conversation, lightly edited and condensed.

Prout: I’ll start out just by asking you just straight up: Do you support safe consumption sites in Chicago?

Johnson: Yes, I do support safe consumption sites in Chicago, and I also want to make sure that there’s some real equity with these sites. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but my eldest brother died from untreated trauma, addicted and unhoused. I have another brother who is also struggling with addiction.

These individuals who are struggling like my brother—they’re parents. They’re attached to other lives. And so we have to treat the entire family, right? We know those who are struggling with addiction, they do have triggers. And in some cases, those triggers have a profound impact on the other people in their lives. Making sure that there’s childcare services, there’s counseling for families–they’re gonna need it.

With the WBEZ answer, just to be clear, is that an answer you don’t stand by? Did you say no, and then your view has evolved since answering that question? 

It’s a combination, right? Like sometimes these spaces don’t allow for the context that I need to offer up a full answer. When you have multiple siblings who are struggling with addiction–I’m gonna date myself–you come home and your VCR or your class ring is stolen, or your coat is gone. Or you have children who have to figure out who to feed themselves, because, you know, their parents who are struggling with this addiction are not healthy enough to support their family.

Let’s talk about it this way. I have an older brother who died addicted and unhoused. How do I talk to my niece, nephew and his grandchildren about how their father or grandfather may have overdosed, and his brother, me, was trying to figure out a safe way for a drug to be administered? You know what I’m saying? These dynamics are complicated. Drugs have been used as a means to harm neighborhoods, and they’ve become the economic drivers for some individuals who believe that’s the only pathway to survive. So you have neighbors selling drugs to their neighbors in areas where schools are not funded, access to health care not available, transportation, jobs, accessibility–all of that is missing. It’s not so much my answer has evolved as I have a personal lived experience where, in the neighborhoods in which Black people in particular live, drugs have been a very sore, hurtful, harmful, damaging experience to so many. 

And so, it’s not either yes or no. It’s like, well, I support these sites if it’s done in an equitable way, and we’re providing other services to communities that have had to live through the drug market. [Funding a safe use site] in the same community where a neighborhood school was not fully funded–you understand? The contradiction that exists in our society?

Once a week, I go to the Chicago Recovery Alliance in East Garfield Park to pack Narcan kits, sterile crack pipes, and sterile needles. It was counterintuitive at first: I thought, “But if you want to protect people, don’t you want to have them not using? Isn’t it just going to make their addiction worse? Isn’t this going to promote other people using more, or introduce people who haven’t used before?”

But conversations with Black people who live on the west side changed my mind. When one woman was talking about why she carries Narcan, she said, “People are overdosing in my front lawn. I might as well have the ability to bring them back.” 

Now Narcan is becoming more socially acceptable, and is understood as a harm reduction tool. Safe consumption sites are still different. Right now there’s much more caution, more concern.

Yeah, you’ve laid it out well. The first thing I thought about when you were describing the evolution of this approach, is how we’re telling children, “Drugs are bad, say no to them. But we want you to come visit this site so that you can see how people use them safely.” I’m a parent and a teacher, I have family that’s struggled–it’s hard for me. 

A nephew snuck into one of my house parties. I didn’t get a chance to see a lot of [as he grew up] because it was what his mother thought was better: to keep him away from everybody associated with his father, including his uncle and his aunts. Now his uncle is running for mayor. He’s gonna read that his uncle is trying to figure out how to have safe consumption sites for individuals who are struggling with an addiction, and it was that very addiction that kept him from being able to have a father growing up. 

Can you talk a little bit more about what you mean by the “equitable distribution” of safe consumption sites?

We want to make sure that the sites are available in the neighborhoods that the individuals who are suffering from addiction live in. You want to eliminate as many barriers as possible.

Individuals who are struggling with an addiction, maybe they need a safe space where they can engage in that particular substance. But you know, these are individuals who are often already unhoused, right? Or they’re housing insecure, to say the least. So what are we doing to put people on a pathway where they’re not relying on this space? Where they can live, and work, and be part of their families?

My brother who’s still alive, he tells us he doesn’t want to continue to live with this addiction. That’s what he shared, and we always want to believe in that, believe him when he says that.  So what type of support that we surround him with in order to secure the type of life that he desires, one without addiction?

I’m interested in what you said about how families need support. NA and AA groups talk about addiction being a family disease. Some folks I know on Lower Wacker and in the Loop have lost custody of a child as they’ve tried to deal with their own addictions. Can you talk specifically about what support for families that have a loved one who’s addicted might look like, especially when that person is a parent?

That’s powerful. It’s a really powerful question. My brother, he’s got a few children. But his youngest daughter is the person you can really see really struggling. I’m trying to condense this as much as I possibly can, but it’s pretty fresh. 

The woman that my brother has this child with, she passed away. So the only parent she has is my brother now. Because of his addiction, there’s this question around suitability, right? But then there becomes this question, like, “Where? Where does this child go? Does she go with the brothers’ family? Her mother’s family?” How do you have a centered, focused support system for a child who will need adults to help her process losing a parent and having a parent who’s here, but who’s unavailable because of this addiction? 

It’s not just having counseling, though I think that’s going to be important. But whatever place is best for a child to be who has a parent who is addicted, what are the arrangements that can be made that keep and maintain connection and support that is safe for everyone? Because the challenge with my brother is the addiction. He’s a great human being. 

One of my own brothers struggles with addiction, so my heart goes out to you and yours.

Thank you for that. You know how hard it is as a family: I don’t know the extent to which you and your family deal with your brother, but with my brother who’s still living, he has children. It’s placed a great deal of stress on my niece. As a family, we bear the responsibility for being the support system for his children. I want to make sure as a city, we are committed to equity in how we deliver services to the communities hit hardest by disinvestment, which often leads to the type of addiction that we’re seeing explode in these neighborhoods.

I don’t know if I should go off the record for this, but you know, there are some people who, no matter what the situation is, they’re just a jerk. [Laughs] In this case, my brother is not a jerk! People probably will question my thinking on this, but outside of his addiction, he’s not a bad parent. I know that sounds like an oxymoron to some, but it’s not like he doesn’t have the ability to sit down with my youngest niece and work through with her with her homework when she’s getting frustrated or just being a typical little girl. And so, when we talk about support systems, I don’t know if it’s always best for parents to be completely removed and out of the picture entirely as they go through a restorative space, a healing space, even as they work through the addiction. [Groans] I’m sorry! There’s no simple way to put it.

I think that’s a rich answer for a complicated question. 

It’s about equity, and it’s also about seeing it through the lived experience of poor people, of Black people, or brown people, or families that have been ripped apart as a result of addiction and drugs. Thank you for indulging me and giving me the opportunity to express this–the complication of all these decisions, provide context to the nuance, and why “yes or no” is not always the best way to be able to work through something that is dynamic as a safe site.

Read More