Reclaiming our resettlementon March 2, 2020 at 9:37 pm

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Jasmine isn’t the official flower of Syria, but many Syrians have claimed it as their own nonetheless. As the humanitarian crisis in their country has driven millions to flee, the flower represents a tangible connection to home. There’s perhaps no better place to see that connection than Syrian Community Network‘s afterschool program, where children in kindergarten through sixth grade create jasmine-tinged art as a way to express themselves and cope with the challenges of displacement, all while exploring their individual stories and identities.

Syrian Community Network was founded in Chicago in 2015 and serves more than 3,000 refugees every year through chapters based here, as well as in San Diego, Phoenix, and Atlanta.

The Chicago chapter’s afterschool program supports students in overcoming the barriers that come with the experience of refugee resettlement, including language, social isolation, poverty, acculturation, and navigating a new school system. The program offers play, homework tutoring, and art making.

Photographer and art therapist Farah Salem recently spent time with the children, their teachers, and their parents to document an art-making class and tutoring session. v

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Reclaiming our resettlementon March 2, 2020 at 9:37 pm Read More »

Gossiping with Caleb Hearonon March 2, 2020 at 9:30 pm

In between acts at his comedy variety show, Caleb Says Things with Friends, Caleb Hearon takes a seat. “Y’know, this is my show. I could just sit here and talk about me for the next hour,” he says. “I won’t though . . . unless?” He takes a pause, raising his eyebrows and theatrically looking around the room, as if hoping someone will let him do it. “Haha, yeah, that’d be crazy,” he continues, “. . . right?” Pausing again, Caleb covers the microphone with his hand, scanning the crowd, waiting for a cheer. “If anyone shouted anything at all, I’d keep going,” he laughs.

The 25-year-old Missouri native is a gifted storyteller with spot-on timing and the ability to create punchlines about anything. He’s got a commanding presence on stage, compelling and energetic, as he walks the audience through the tiny moments of embarrassment involved in his most recent hookup, or explains why politicians shouldn’t be cool or hot. He’s booked roles on Work in Progress and Fargo, has a very funny Twitter account with more than 75,000 followers, and has toured his shows across the country.

I sat down to talk with Caleb about Roseanne, his Intro to Judaism class, and the benefits of gossip.

Did you watch TV shows that represented the south growing up?

Well a lot of people don’t consider Missouri the south. I would consider myself midwestern. My favorite TV show growing up was Roseanne, and I stand by that. I don’t stand by Roseanne herself, she’s lost it. That show growing up was so cool and important to me, they just had queer people in the middle of nowhere, and they were picked on a little bit, but only in a loving way. They were accepted, there were multiple queer characters, and it was the only thing I saw in TV or movies that looked like the life we were living besides Erin Brockovich, and even that was just one movie, and that’s really more a story about how corporations kill people.

What did you think of Chicago growing up? Was it the place to go? Was it at all on your radar?

I mean, my only relation to Chicago was when it was mentioned in Roseanne, because they were close. I was always thinking of New York. It was always the place. Especially growing up closeted, I was like, “You gotta go to New York. That’s where people are gay, people get to be gay in New York.” So I was always thinking of New York, and then as I got older and got really into comedy, I was still thinking New York, it’s where Saturday Night Live is, it’s where everything happens, and I was fully gonna move. I was gonna move there after school, and then a few guys from my college improv team were like, “We should go to Chicago,” and I was like, “Yeah, I guess everyone I like did spend some time there doing comedy.” So I said, “Sure, I’ll go to Chicago.” And it was the best decision I ever made.

You’ve been here for almost three years now. How has your relationship with the city changed?

The biggest change is that people are asking me what I want now. No one cared what I wanted when I moved here. I think comedians in Chicago, our drive is to pitch ourselves as everything. We’re stand-ups, we’re improvisers, we’re actors, we’re on screen, we’re on stage, you have to pitch yourself as everything because there’s no legitimately big industry here. There’s great shows that come through town, there’s amazing casting agencies, there’s Second City, but in terms of the coasts, the big money, out there you have to narrow it down and be like, “Here’s what I do.” When you start looking at going out there, the question becomes “What do you want?” When you move to Chicago, you tell everyone you want everything just so you can get anything.

People are asking me a lot right now, “Where do you see yourself in five years” or “What do you want, what’s your dream?” And I feel like I’m supposed to say SNL, or supposed to say a sitcom in my name, or a feature film about this one pivotal experience that I had. But I don’t know, I want to make things with people I like. Long term, I’d love to have enough of whatever I need to help people I believe in make their stuff. Money, resources, name recognition, whatever it takes for me to say, “Here are the people I love in Chicago and they want to make this thing.”

You work a lot with the comedian Holmes Holmes, and it’s so fun to watch the two of you together onstage.

Holmes works from a pretty erratic, frenetic energy, she’s like the energizer bunny, she’s on a different beat. I feel like I’m more contained, I’m not capable of the things she is. I sit on the stool and whisper. She’s bouncy. But it’s fun hosting with her, because we’re different energies but have the same idea of how to move the show along.

I love stool-based comedy. I was glad to see you sitting.

I like it a lot, too, and I didn’t allow myself to physically talk and sit for so long because Maron did it, and I would watch him do stand-up and be like, “Fuck, now he owns stools!” But also he owns a type of comedy that is genuinely how I like to perform. I like to sit, I like to talk, I like to feel comfortable with the audience. For a long time I fought that, because I was like, “Someone is already doing that,” but that’s stupid. You gotta do your thing.

There’s a story you told about dating at your show Caleb Says Things with Friends that I loved so much.

Gay people are interesting. I think I thought, growing up, that coming out would be a giant party, just spending a bunch of time with very interesting, intellectual people, and of course I would be one of those people by virtue of coming out. And then you realize that a lot of gay people are just like a lot of people of any other sexuality, which is to say they’re boring, and not fully realized, and that you also are one of those people. Coming out doesn’t absolve you of the work of coming of age, of figuring yourself out.

The stories you tell about hooking up are so funny because there seems to be so much stress involved in how you process it happening.

Sex is embarrassing! Everyone should be mortified that they’re doing it.

I heard on a podcast you said you took an Intro to Judaism class at a synagogue in Chicago. What first hooked you?

I have no plans to convert, but I do believe that

to be liberal and Jewish is correct. Every Jewish person I’ve met is so cool. The biggest thing about Judaism as a faith to me is the insistence on refusing certainty and answers. My favorite part of my Intro to Judaism class was the old Catholic woman who took it to disprove it. Her name is Mary, she takes it regularly, and everyone is cool with it. Everyone’s like, “Mary’s here to talk about Catholicism,” and they’d relegate a little time at the end of the class for her to talk about it. It was the funniest thing in the world to me, but she was based in so much love and respect, she’d be like, “I love being here, I love everyone here,” but every once in a while she’d be like, “In my church . . .” And they’d be like, “That’s crazy, Mary.” I think about her, I don’t know, five-six times a day.

One thing I’ve noticed in your videos on Twitter is gossip, from your Hogwarts video to your Jonathan series. Is gossip a space that you feel is your wheelhouse?

Well I think people are their truest and most excited selves when they’re talking about others. And I think the most fun to me in comedy is finding a little truth in how people communicate. And gossip is when people are doing those little things. It’s for some reason so subversive, it’s so taboo, we fight being people who gossip, we fight being people who talk about others, we fight negativity, we’ll be like, “I hate to talk about this person, but . . .” and it’s like why! Talk!

I mean I’ve been on the receiving end of texts about me, from friends that meant to send it to someone else. It’s a thing that happens. And I love it. I mean, it was hurtful. It’s good that you’re talking about me, because it means you don’t hate me so much that you’re gonna stop being my friend. You hated something I did and you care about me enough to get over it with someone else so we can hang out again next week. That to me is wonderful. I think gossip is so good and important and fun. I think I like to play with it so much because everyone loves it, a lot of people pretend not to, which is even funnier, and it’s just the best way to explore stories. v

Gossiping with Caleb Hearonon March 2, 2020 at 9:30 pm Read More »

Submarine kangaroos and space pirate birthday partieson March 2, 2020 at 9:00 pm

It’s balmy in the Children’s Garden of the Garfield Park Conservatory, a welcome respite from the blustery chill of winter. It’s Sweet Saturday, so visitors can sample coffee beans, lemon, papaya, and prickly pear, among other edible treats, and there’s the tumult of children playing.

Amidst the cacophony of children at work, there’s another form of clatter at the back of the garden: the unmistakable sound of typewriter keys being punched, of carriage returns being zinged.

I’m facing six poets behind six typewriters sitting at a long table covered in black cloth. Beside their typewriters are an array of notepads. They’re busy punching keys, staring at the tiny sheets of paper rolled between the platen and the paper bail, some blank, some half-filled, some waiting for just one more line.

Most of the poets type with their pointer fingers and the occasional middle finger only, an emphasis not on speed, but on deliberateness.

There’s yelling and the clanging of the metal grating where children play above us and wait for a twisted slide that empties right by the poets’ table. At one point an ant crawls across the spare topic list behind the table. A few spots of crumbled earth land on my notebook. The occasional drip of water or flower bud falls from above. The distant rolling of the el shudders in the background.

And this is all in just the first five minutes.

I settle in and get ready to watch the poets from Poems While You Wait.

Started in 2011 by Dave Landsberger, Kathleen Rooney, and Eric Plattner, Poems While You Wait now has two dozen poets in its stable and has become a staple of Chicago events and locales. Perhaps you’ve seen them at the Field Museum or the Adler; the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum or the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; a summer festival, a street market, a book fair, a library, a theater, even a wedding.

It’s simple: Give them a topic and $5 and come back in a quarter hour to get a fresh, hot-off-the-press poem written just for you. A smudge, an uncorrectable error, it’s part of the authenticity.

Normally the money goes to Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit literary publisher started by Rooney and Abigail Beckel, but because the museum is free on this day, so are the poems.

People walk by and ask: How does it work? Are you volunteers? Do I write the poem or do you?

The poets explain the process–often it’s explained by Rooney herself. Once it’s been established who does what, the person gives the poet a topic: family, coffee, palm trees, emergency medicine. With the younger crowd there’s usually some negotiation. “What do you want a poem about?” a parent will ask, and their child will shrug or blush or whisper something. It’s one poem per household, so siblings will often have to agree to a subject; or, because a poet’s creativity knows no bounds, multiple topics can be lumped together like scoops of ice cream. What does a poem about submarine kangaroos sound like? What about tacos and cats? A space pirate birthday party? No topic is too weird.

The group’s objective is to provide patrons with a “magical, unexpected, unpretentious, and decontextualized encounter with poetry.”

I recall the Czech poet Miroslav Holub’s affirmation that “there is poetry in everything. That is the greatest argument against poetry.”

There are other arguments against poetry, too: it’s ambiguous, inaccessible, magniloquent (whatever that means); our attention spans aren’t built anymore for the commitment and concentration it requires. Or so the arguments go. We see and feel the poetry of the world; we’re in love with the poetic, but we’re afraid of the poem.

This chasm is precisely what Poems While You Wait aims to bridge, to coax the public into remembering what it’s like to enjoy reading poems, to revel in language and the way someone sees the world, even if only for a few dozen seconds.

“I don’t care about being corny: it’s magic,” Rooney says. “Everybody who came here today is like, ‘I’m going to go to the conservatory, I’m going to look at plants,’ and that’s already kind of magical. But then you come here looking at plants and on top of that suddenly you can walk up to a poet, and be like, ‘Write me a poem about plants.’ And that suddenly memorializes and activates and alters the great moment you already came out to have, and I think there’s some kind of alchemy to that.”

There’s something generous and democratic about Poems While You Wait: there are no agents, no editors, no journals, no publishers. There is only the writer and the reader. It is, according to Plattner, a “total demystification” of poetry and the poem, even of art: “It’s not this hermit sitting alone staring down into this dark hole of poetic bullshit.”

The poets occasionally stop to snack and apply hand sanitizer. At one point a poet’s finger starts to bleed (metaphor!). Antibiotic ointment is applied, followed by a Band-Aid, and the poet starts typing again. The finger will heal, but the poem cannot wait.

The clamor of children is noticeably less intense and the list of topics dwindles to nothing. The last wave of commissioners comes by to pick up their poems. The poets stand up, stretch, pack up their typewriters. Eighty-three poems today.

Someone asks the poet to read her poem aloud to him: “I want to hear it in your voice.”

As they walk away, twin sisters pantomime their poem’s lines about how twins look at each other.

A patron pulls a poet aside to talk jazz.

On the table sit unclaimed poems, common at a free event, according to Plattner. They’re orphaned children, writing sent into the void, like most writing. They’re also a reminder of what makes Poems While You Wait special: a word, a line, an answer that’s waiting for someone to ask. v

Submarine kangaroos and space pirate birthday partieson March 2, 2020 at 9:00 pm Read More »

5 Things to Do in Chicago This Weekendon March 2, 2020 at 5:00 pm

Fun Chicago Events, Festivals, & More This Weekend

It’s no secret that every month, Chicago puts on amazing events that will seriously upgrade your weekends. But it’s not always easy to decide what to do and where to go! What are a couple of fun things to do in Chicago this weekend? That’s where we come in.

We have the inside scoop on all of the latest events, festivals, and parties happening this March. Finding parking can be a hassle, but we got you. Other than that, we’re just here to show you fun Chicago events this weekend!

Jurassic Quest

March 6 – 8 @ Navy Pier

See life-sized models of dinosaurs and other extinct creatures at Navy Pier this weekend when Jurassic Quest comes to Chicago. Tickets are $24 for kids and adults!

CHIditarod

March 7 @ West Town and Ukrainian Village

Also known as the Chicago Urban Shopping Cart Race, this fun run through Chicago’s West Town and Ukrainian Village takes place on the same day as the real Alaskan Iditarod, except this race consists of teams of five costumed people collecting food for charity, and every year is a blast.

360 Sky Yoga

March 7 & 8 @ 360 CHICAGO

Practice your sun salutations from 1,000 feet closer to the sun at 360 CHICAGO’s 94th-floor yoga class. 360 Sky Yoga welcomes yoga enthusiasts from all skill levels to a one-hour weekly class led by 360 CHICAGO’s professional instructor. Participants will be led through meditation and gentle flow movements to awaken the senses, stretches, breath-centered movements and morning sun salutations. Registration is $18 and includes a General Admission ticket to the observation deck, so feel free to stick around after the class and take in the amazing views! 360 Sky Yoga sells out every week because the class is crazy cheap and they’re kind of a big deal now, so be sure and register well in advance! Special sessions with guest instructors are held once per month.

Peach Presents: The Spot (Weekly Queer Hangout)

March 8 @ Elixir Andersonville

The Spot is a free, weekly hangout for LGBTQIA+ women, trans folks and non-binary folks every Sunday at Elixir Andersonville. The Spot features a curated dining and cocktail menu for purchase (including vegetarian/vegan options and mocktails) in a relaxed lounge atmosphere with big screens, the best local DJs bringing the good vibes, guest bartenders, and occasionally special viewings, hosts and performers.

Flour Power: A Bake Sale with Purpose

Sunday, March 8 @ The Ivy Room

Join us for the first-ever Flour Power: A Bake Sale with Purpose in support of International Women’s Day. Hosted by The Rowe Club, a women-focused hospitality group from Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, all proceeds from this bake sale will go to Women Unite! Women Unite is an organization that is committed to amplifying the voices and work of under-resourced and under-represented groups. Get tickets for $20 today!

At UrbanMatter, U Matter. And we think this matters.

Tell us what you think matters in your neighborhood and what we should write about next in the comments below!