Nonprofit Grant Writing

During my time as a volunteer grant writer and blog editor for the Chicago Underground Library (now Read/Write Library), I co-penned several successful grant proposals along with the organization's executive director. Among these were a successful Richard H. Driehaus Foundation grant and a successful Community Arts Assistance Program (CAAP) Grant in 2010.

2010 CAAP Grant

1)       Describe your past, present and planned activities as an organization.  (Cite performances, exhibits, publications, venues, dates, etc.)   How are you qualified to accomplish the proposed project(s)? See "Artistic Merit," page 7.


Our programming is intended to help make Chicago culture more inclusive, accessible, collaborative and fun. The Chicago Underground Library has developed and participated in many events designed for all age groups as well as writers and publishers at all educational and socio-economic levels. These events include Orphan Works, an event which invites artists from all disciplines to re-interpret little-known and anonymous works; and the Science of Obscurity event celebrating unpublished and in-progress works as lead-up event for the Printers' Ball. 2010 will mark our fifth year as a lead partner in the annual Printers' Ball, which attracts 2,000 people and is coordinated with the Poetry Foundation, Columbia College Chicago's Center for Book and Paper Arts, and over 200 local and national publishers and literary organizations. 2010 will be focused on outreach. We plan to increase our partnerships and expand existing relationships with Alternative Press Center, Marwen, Open Books, the Intuit Museum of Outsider Art, Chicago Literary Alliance, Center for Book and Paper Arts, No Coast, and other independent innovative libraries across the U.S. We also plan on developing programs for teachers, artists-in-residence, and workshop leaders who want to provide access to the collection, but for whom transportation to the library is an issue. Volunteers will curate a selection of materials tailored to curricula or students' neighborhoods about Chicago, independent media, technology, art, zines, writing, collaboration, and other relevant subjects.

2)     Provide a mission statement.  Discuss your artistic vision for this organization and explain what you plan to accomplish through its work.  See "Artistic Merit," page 7.   Please refer to "Glossary of Terms," page 8.

The Chicago Underground Library provides an open forum for creative exchange between all producers and patrons of Chicago's independent media, facilitating collaboration and awareness between diverse communities. Through innovative and inclusive approaches to acquisitions, cataloging, and programming, we illuminate connections and provide both a historical and contemporary context for the creation of new local media.
 
We provide a reading room and community space where all of our collection can be accessed, in addition to a social online catalog that that traces connections between every book and every user who wants to read it, complete with maps of where the item was produced in Chicago and space for users to add their own historical notes which will be incorporated into the catalog records. Our collection development is Chicago-specific, incorporating everything from such well-established publishers as Poetry magazine and University of Chicago Press to zines about art made by seventh and eighth graders at a social justice high school. We're 100% inclusive, without making quality or importance judgments. We take absolutely everything, as long as it's from the area. We catalog by every single person who contributed and compile exhaustive lists of subjects so that one can see how publications are linked and how communities have developed over time. We serve as a companion to traditional repositories; an alternative but parallel history that is interwoven and even frequently overlaps with established, mainstream collections.

3)   Describe the project for which funds are requested. Please attach sketch of proposed project if applicable.  See "Quality of Project Plan," page 7.

Funds will be used for fees associated with securing 501(c)(3) status, namely filing form 1023 with the IRS since we have funded the rest of our incorporation fees out-of-pocket. In keeping with our outreach focus for the coming year, funds will be used to expand activities to get the word out to users and producers of local media as well as potential volunteers. We have identified a number of large-scale public events where we could maximize our visibility among our target group of community organizations, working and aspiring artists and writers, students, and especially everyday Chicagoans who may or may not already be involved in cultural production. These include literary events, neighborhood festivals, and arts festivals. We will be printing bookmarks for distribution at events, schools, businesses, and organizations throughout Chicago. We would like to commission new artwork from Chicago artist Grant Reynolds for our website and promotional materials, such as  t-shirts and buttons (to be purchsed at a later date) that strengthen our brand identity and recognition. Funds will also be used to maintain our online newsletter service provided by YourMailingListProvider. We currently have a 500-person mailing list that we plan to grow exponentially over the next year via the aforementioned events and new programming, and we send out 1-2 updates a month, depending on our programming activities.

4)     Address issues related to starting a nonprofit organization: Who will serve as your board of directors? List their qualifications and describe plans for development.  Where do you plan to operate, how do you plan to attain revenue, etc.? See "Quality of Project Plan," page 7.

Our working board is made up of librarians and arts professionals including directors and event coordinators, writers, editors, and visual artists. As our organization develops, we will assemble a board of advisors made up of recognized business, legal, arts, library, and education professionals with longstanding histories of community support. We have a strong volunteer group who have wholly supported all activities of the project so far. We've researched and examined organizations with committed volunteer communities and have structured our participation management to reflect best practices. Every volunteer is encouraged to bring their own ideas to the table. We plan to create 1-2 paid positions over the next two years for administration and programming. We are operating rent and utility-free out of a fringe theater located in a church and have a multi-year commitment from the theater and church to maintain that relationship since we serve the community. Without rent, we will be able to focus on saving money raised through events and our upcoming "sponsor-a-book" program in which users will contribute $75 to have their name included in the book's catalog entry as "Name Here thinks this book is worth saving." We recently established a finance committee who will plan our budget and explore future creative fundraising. We will apply for grants for conservation plans and materials, acquisitions, and project-based positions. We will also expand our internship program for library students.

5)     How do you expect your organization to benefit from obtaining 501(c)(3) status? See "Potential Impact," page 7.

With 501(c)(3) status, we will be able to raise funds for collection preservation, programming, and greater community outreach while continuing to build on our own internal infrastructure to create a sustainable, lasting organization. We will apply for specific grants for archiving equipment and space expenses that will allow us to create conservation plans for our existing collection in addition to raising funds for an acquisitions budget to actively build the collection, which will directly benefit the Chicago publishers from whom we purchase. We would also like to fundraise for hiring a fulltime staff. We have relied exclusively on donations of printed material and volunteer time and labor up to this point. We work hard to be neutral and serve a broad audience, unlike many independent press collections with political agendas. We also make sure that we avoid any perceived favoritism to people or publishers. 501 (c)(3) status will ensure that we maintain our neutrality and lack of individual promotion by creating boards and volunteer communities who hold each other accountable so that no one's personal interests direct the development of the collection. Planned expansions for special projects include: The Storefront Theater Project, a collection of materials from Chicago's theater community; a children's and YA area where kids can see work produced by people their own age; and eventually an audio/video collection from musicians and filmmakers provided we develop the infrastructure.

6)     Are there plans for additional organizational development initiatives beyond obtaining federal tax-exempt status? If so, please describe.  See "Potential Impact," page 7.

 We are currently exploring which professional library organizations to join, which conferences to attend and present our model at, and are in the process of organizing our volunteers into more specific committees. Conferences identified include ones on the subject of library science, nonprofit technology, and the future of media. We are actively working to recruit more professional volunteers who have experience in education and community outreach, as well as people from communities where English is not the first language. This is a new model, and we want it to be able to be replicated by organizations in other cities. We have already begun discussions with potential groups in Canada and Seoul, Korea who are interested, including cities throughout the US. We plan to keep up our conversations with these other organizations and hope to eventually be able to provide our library catalog software, built on Drupal, as an open source catalog that any community library can use. A number of our volunteers have become actively involved in local technology networking groups for nonprofit workers and librarians and we are constantly showing our model and asking for feedback from groups who have more experience than we do and from the kinds of people who would be regular users. Our next catalog will serve as social networking platform for users and publishers alike, but also as a history project where users can add background and context for individual items.

closerlook Portfolio

Hello, Ms. Jaworek, Ms. Coakes, et al. at closerlook! Thank you for this opportunity to present some of my writing samples, and for taking the time to review my candidacy. I've included several clips from my 15 months at Groupon, as well as some professional art writing I've done to demonstrate my range across widely disparate subject matter and directives.

Live Groupon clips

Speculative Groupon work

Art writing across several platforms

Nonprofit Grant Writing

Writing for an Exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center

Over the last several years, I've done quite a bit of writing for visual artist Matthew Woodward, including grant and exhibition proposals, project outlines, and artist statements and essays. Most recently, I wrote all the materials that accompanied a solo show at the Chicago Cultural Center's Michigan Avenue Galleries, View from the Birth Day, which ran from April 7 to July 15 of this year, and was the result of a successful proposal I also wrote. A medium-length version of the statement appears in the photograph above, which was blown up and mounted on the gallery wall, and an abbreviated version appeared on the Cultural Center's events site. The full body of the essay appears below, for the sake of comparison.

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Louis Sullivan believed that the psychic pressures of a particular age were embodied in its buildings. American architecture, Sullivan thought, suffered from generations of imitative European colonial forms that lacked the indigenous structures and symbols of an autonomous architectural school. Because of this, it became his directive to mark a juncture where American Architecture separated itself from European classicism, abolishing imitation, and beginning anew with an authentic North American style. This movement proved to be controversial among Beaux-Arts traditionalists but wildly influential nonetheless--so influential that it wasn’t long before an entire industry of facsimile sprang up, dedicated to the mass production and widespread mail-order distribution of inexpensive, prefabricated Sullivan-esque architectural embellishments.

This industry of replication eventually put Sullivan out of business completely.

My new body of work is a reaction to the Chicago Cultural Center’s 2010 exhibition Louis Sullivan’s Idea, inspired by these Sullivan-esque designs and the larger industry of mass-produced architectural embellishment that surrounds them. The work is crafted using the reductive drawing method, beginning not with blank paper or canvas but with a dark surface ground created using such materials as graphite, dirt, grease, and spackle. The light of an object is then applied to the surface by removing the ground using an eraser or sandpaper, working, erasing, and re-working the spaces that are created again and again. By using repurposed construction and industrial materials, the work is an act of rethinking the material aspects and contextual relevance of the Edifice. The pieces’ large scale restores to these mass-produced elements the status of monument native to the Edifice, but, in this context, they become a monument to the efficiently made, speedily distributed, and uniform--a uniformity which defies geography, geology, and philosophy, and which defines a nonclassical American-ness that is completely new and lies outside the classical Edifice.

In Victor Hugo’s 1831 epic The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Claude Frollo famously prophesied that “the book will kill the edifice,” that the machined page would supplant the monumental structure as the great record of human thought. Frank Lloyd Wright in his 1901 treatise The Art and Craft of the Machine acknowledged the power of the machined page, but, unlike Frollo, saw it as a beacon of hope, a weapon that could defeat a meaningless mass-produced repetition of classical ideals and deliver 20th-century architecture from “complete, broadcast degradation of every type and form sacred to the art of old,” a mechanically reproduced and therefore philosophically bereft neoclassicism. That the machine, with its promise of canonizing these new American ideals in print and in steel, would immediately co-opt and syndicate this new American Edifice, just as it had with the European, was not anticipated: Sullivan’s own designs, like the classical designs he and Wright had railed against, were quickly knocked off, mechanically reproduced, and widely disseminated via mail-order architectural distributors.

It appears, then, that Claude Frollo was right: both systems, mechanical reproduction and mail-order distribution, originate with the page. Within the infrastructure of a staggeringly far-flung, publicly funded postal system, replicated architectural embellishments disperse just like the pages of a book--a book that millions now read, a book no longer a singularity, meticulously hand-copied by generation after generation of monks sequestered in a remote abbey. A national postal system serves literacy the way a sacred singularity never could; similarly, a mail-order building contradicts the classical Edifice in every way. The structure is divorced from any mode of deliberation and place on the part of its creator. The deliberation and place become arbitrary, with the user--not the creator--arbitrating design in an act of democratic reclamation. So, just as Sullivan searched for a democratic architecture that rejected empty replication of classical European ideals, he was driven out of business by a democratic mode of consumption.

This raises the questions: Through Sullivan’s loyalty to the architectural singularity, was he relying on outdated classical modes even as he attempted to leave them behind? Was he reaching, but just not far enough? Was the very idea of the Edifice, embodiment of the great spiritual and philosophical pressures of its time, a classical institution in and of itself, now completely irrelevant to American-ness?

It’s possible that the emergence of a mail-order architecture was itself the elusive valve Sullivan sought to turn, behind which the real psychic pressure of a young, industrial America pressed for release: the need to mass-produce and disseminate an independent national identity as cheaply, efficiently, and uniformly as possible. This need lies at the very core of America’s melting-pot ideals--the need for something easy to copy that could help make us all exactly the same. This body of work focuses on this mechanically reproduced architecture and the questions it raises with the intent its producers never brought to its manufacture.  

Published Work for Groupon

Groupon's editorial department could easily outnumber a small nation's army, and many, many people's red pens go into shaping each deal's content before it goes live on the site (that is, if the city planning department doesn't pull it for one of a million reasons first). Here are a few live deals that I contributed significant unaltered portions to.

I wrote 100% of the merchant profile for Nelly Spillane's, the entire last paragraph of the writeup section.

I also wrote 100% of this merchant profile for Super Spa.

I wrote 100% of this deal for The Original Retro Brand Apparel--that includes the deal and merchant descriptions as well as all of the microcopy, which is written to be used across multiple platforms. 

I contributed the In a Nutshell section microcopy as well as the introductory "humor lede" to this Trevi Nails writeup.

I wrote the humor lede for this Hidden Valley Animal Adventure deal, too. 

I've also written speculative work for training purposes at Groupon.

And, in addition to all that, I've written email subject lines and microcopy headers for literally thousands of deals, all within snug character limits and all adhering to strict styling guidelines.

Speculative Work

Although it doesn't appear published on the site, the work I have written for various training purposes at Groupon may offer a unique view of my skills--these pieces are untouched by the usual army of proofreaders, line editors, site administrators, and humor editors that usually have a hand in shaping every final product. My expertise as a Groupon copy editor ensures each one is 100% aligned with house guidelines and standards for accuracy, grammar and formatting guidelines, and legality. Having sole creative control over them means I've been able to keep the mandated signature "Groupon humor," which many readers find so disconcerting, to a tasteful minimum, while adhering to the company's style directives and proprietary terminology to paint a engaging experiential portrait using active language and vivid imagery. 

Merchant Profile: Watermarc

Merchant Profile: Brown's Brewing Company

Complete Writeup: Sea Kayak Georgia

Merchant Profile: Brown's Brewing Company

In 1993, the 150-year-old warehouse that now houses Brown’s Brewing Company stood gutted and empty on a scarce-visited street. But Garry and Kelly Brown had big plans for the structure—they envisioned not only the region’s first brewery restaurant but also a community hub that would become an integral part of the local economy and ecology. Today, Brown’s beers boast several World Beer Cup medalists among their ranks, including the Whiskey Porter aged in oak bourbon barrels and the Oatmeal Stout, which brought home the prestigious gold medal in 2004.

Both the brews and the menu of burgers, pastas, and seafood incorporate locally sourced ingredients whenever possible. Brown’s takes their commitment to sustainability even further by composting their kitchen scraps, recycling, and growing the bulk of their own hops in nearby Hoosick Falls, where they often host their annual Hopfest hop-picking celebration. Other community gatherings find a home in Brown’s private-event spaces, with the Trojan Room playing host to smaller get-togethers, and the two-story split-level Revolution Hall, designed in the spirit of a European beer hall, accommodating corporate conferences, wedding receptions, and celebratory Grendel roasts.

Complete Writeup: Sea Kayak Georgia

Title: $25 for a Half-Day Coastal-Marsh Kayak Tour from Sea Kayak Georgia (Up to $55 Value)

Micro for email digest (140-character hard maximum):  6,000 acres of dunes, beaches, and subtropical forests accessible only by boat beckon kayakers across Georgia's shimmering coastal estuaries

The ancient Phoenicians invented boats so they could expand their lucrative jetpack trade into distant lands. Explore terra incognito with today’s Groupon: for $25, you get a half-day kayak tour from Sea Kayak Georgia in Tybee Island (up to a $55 value).

Helmed by long-time paddlers Marsha Henson and Ronnie Kemp, Sea Kayak Georgia’s staff equips seafaring adventure-seekers with kayak and paddleboard rentals and guides them on excursions through Georgia’s pristine coastal-marsh islandscape. The half-day trip begins with an orientation, where chaperones brief advanced and beginning kayakers alike on the basics of kayak navigation and how to ask the way to the library in colloquial egret before transporting them to the launch site. Groups then set out across the calm, shimmering waters of Georgia’s coastal estuaries toward Little Tybee Island, a protected, uninhabited preserve reachable only by boat. There, hiking legs take over for paddling arms, exploring Little Tybee’s more than 6,000 acres of dunes, beaches, and subtropical forests home to myriad long-legged waterfowl, including the endangered wood stork, as well as bald eagles, tree frogs, and alligators. Upon their return to Sea Kayak Georgia, explorers can take advantage of the facility’s showers to rinse salt from their feet and any naturally occurring saltwater taffy from their hair.

Sea Kayak Georgia advises adventurers to wear clothes and shoes they don’t mind getting wet, and to bring along sunscreen, drinking water, and snacks. Half-day tours convene at 8:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. daily March–October, and at 10:30 a.m. November–February. Reservations re required, and can be made via telegram, telephone, or singing telegram sung over the telephone.

Merchant Profile: Watermarc

Watermarc’s executive chef and owner Marc Cohen boasts quite the culinary trophy shelf, having been accumulating accolades since his days as a member of Johnson & Wales University’s gold-medal-winning Chine des Rotisseurs Culinary Olympic team. Since then, he has dazzled both East and West Coast diners with his distinctive “modern American cuisine where seafood rules.” At Watermarc, Cohen seamlessly blends the cutting edge with the classic, featuring innovative items such as the seafood sausage appetizer with cannellini beans and fluffy mustard alongside such classic fare as the filet three ways, which showcases traditional oscar, wellington, and diane preparations in a trio more powerful than the Three Tenors covering “We Will Rock You.”

With an open-air dining room, outdoor patio, and second-story terrace opening onto Peppertree Lane, Watermarc offers a mix of environments where diners can relax with one of the eatery’s original cocktails or upwards of 100 wines. The Hot Lips martini burns with Smirnoff Passion vodka and sliced jalapeño tempered by frosty mango puree and grenadine; in the classic Hemingway, sophisticated Bacardi light rum and maraschino liqueur look on coolly as grapefruit and lime juices grapple with one another amid the rocky terrain of an icy tumbler. Watermarc opens its doors and, weather permitting, front windows for lunch, dinner, and late-night noshing, as well as for private parties on the terrace.

Smells Like Paper Machete

I had a super fun time returning to the Paper Machete show this past Saturday to talk about Nirvana, 1991, and 2011's inevitable 20 year anniversary retrospectives in the media. Something happened where not all of the show ended up being recorded, so my piece won't get podcasted, and so I wanted to post it here:

Only a month into the new year, 2011 is already a significant one. It's the year of the most hyped and possibly also the actual worst snowstorm in Chicago history. It's the year that, along with the very last few days of 2010, people turn old enough to drink that have never lived in a world without continuous, uninterrupted new seasons of the Simpsons on TV. It's the last year before the end of the world, of course. And it's the year that, this coming September, will mark the 20th anniversary of the song that changed everything, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," by Nirvana, and their album, which also changed everything, "Nevermind," and so many others.

The year 1991 reads like a book of saints in the alternative canon. There's the two other wings of the late-'91 alternative rock power-triptych, Pearl Jam's "Ten" and Soundgarden's "Badmotorfinger;" there's REM's "Out of Time", Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Blood Sugar Sex Magik", the Pixies' "Trompe le Monde", to name just a few, which will make 2011, in addition to all those other things, a landmark banner year for documentaries and retrospectives.

By this fall, we can expect to see . . .

In 20 Words or Less

My friend Matt Higbee and I have a writing game we play at work sometimes where we use a random prompt (it's an improv theater, so there's a lot of those) to try and write a story in 20 words or less. It started because I wanted to put together a new piece to read at Two With Water's Rx Reading Series. I was going to be traveling most of the week leading up to the reading and I wanted to get something started before I left. The theme of the reading was "Orientation."

We didn't discuss what we were doing,

Cultural Center Exhibit Proposal for the Artist Matthew Woodward

In Spring 2010 I wrote this for my friend Matt Woodward. It was pieced together from earlier statements and proposals, new thoughts and notes from Matt, new research and thoughts of my own, and mostly-accurate intuition regarding how he thinks about his work. He'll be showing new work at the Chicago Cultural Center Michigan Avenue Galleries in April-May 2012.


"The city is made, forgotten, and made again, / trucks hauling it away haul it back"  -Carl Sandburg, The Windy City

"Over the last year I have been building a body of work around the moldings and wrought iron details of the American Renaissance and Beaux-Arts movements of the turn of the twentieth century, an era which employed the conventions of European classicism to glorify the advent of a new Golden Age of progress through industrialism while constantly and necessarily shedding the accoutrements of the past in order to advance and perpetuate its own motion. The White City of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago represented a crowning achievement of American Beaux-Arts at the same time it stood in stark contrast to...

Left of the Loop Part III: Where Have All the Pioneers Gone?

the West Loop, circa 198?

Tim W. Brown's Left of the Loop is in one sense a frontier story. If, as it is described in Frederick Jackson Turner's essay "The Frontier in American History," the frontier is a sparsely populated margin at the far edge of established settlement, then the West Loop in the Eighties fits the bill. Although the neighborhood bears no resemblance to the "meadows, timberland, mountain ranges, water systems and clean skies" traditionally associated with the frontier, Stark and Spungkdt are, by Spungkdt's own estimation, the only inhabitants for at least four square blocks or so; their Little House comes equipped with a huge industrial steel sliding gate, and their Prairie consists of weeds snaking up through cracks in the concrete.

Left of the Loop Part II: The Bone Chute

The most haunting image from the Post-Industrial Urban Apocalypse of Tim W. Brown's Left of the Loop is the bone chute located across the street from the loft. While some meat distributors and restaurant supply warehouses still remain in the neighborhood these days,  many of the large meat packing plants have now been converted into luxury lofts and tourist-destination restaurants. In the Eighties, however, the meat-packing industry was in full swing in the West Loop, making stray dismembered animal parts one of the notable features of Spungkdt & Stark's landscape.

"Perhaps the best reminder of the neighborhood's character and purpose was what Stark and I called the 'bone chute.' A fiberglass device sticking out of a wall of the packinghouse across the street, the bone chute's conveyor belt ferried the spinal columns, skulls, ribcages and pelvises of countless slaughtered cattle into the back of a dump truck parked underneath. All day long the bones, still red with flesh, would drop into the truck; with each thud, the truck bed echoed through Sangamon Street like an over-sized bass drum. Then, promptly at three, the truck would pull out, empty its bones somewhere, and return for the next day's load. Although curious, we never found out where the bones were shipped."

Sounds like something out of And the Ass Saw the Angel. Brown was even able to dig up and scan a picture for us, circa 1985. "Notice in the background," says Brown, "that the Bloomingdale's/900 N. Michigan building near the John Hancock Center has yet to be built."

Left of the Loop Part 1: Ish Spungdkt, Kill Your Pets, & The Strangers

210 N. Sangamon Avenue is a parking lot. The address of Ishmael Spungkdt and Stark's (no first or last name, just Stark) loft in Tim W. Brown's 2001 novel Left of the Loop is a dramatically different place for visitors today than it was in the Eighties when it was Spungkdt and Stark's  post-apocalyptic urban playground. If you walk down Sangamon to Randolph, you'll see a few holdouts from the old neighborhood -- meat packers, restaurant supply warehouses, and Adults-Only shops -- still there in between the Starbuckses and trendy restaurants . But SUVs and young adolescent trees line the 200 block of Sangamon now, and the parking lot at 210--walled-in, gated tight, and completely empty -- is surrounded by galleries, swanky architects' offices, and lofts. "Historic Loft Living, Great Views, 15 Floor Plans, Rooftop Sundeck, Vintage Architecture," reads the big yellow banner hanging on the Lake Street Loft building, clean and ivy-covered on the northeast corner of Lake and Sangamon.

Historic indeed.

If there's anyone that can tell you about Historic Loft Living in Chicago's West Loop, it's Tim W. Brown. Left of the Loop is the fictionalized account of Brown's years spent living in a barely-habitable artists' loft in the bombed-out wasteland that was the West Loop in the Eighties, the only permanent residents for several square city blocks of broken-down industrial scrabble peopled by hobos,  smacked-out ragtag punk outfits, sometimes-identifiable animal parts that found their way out of trucks and dumpsters behind meat packing plants (see: bone chute), and lots and lots and lots of broken glass.

"Chairs Are Architecture; Sofas Are Bourgeois": A Study of Eurocentrism, Modernism, and IKEA

It falls apart before you get done putting it together. It’s so crappy that some moving companies refuse to touch it. And according to Ed Norton in that movie I hate, a house full of it is a sure sign that you’ve sold your soul to corporate Satan. But we’ve all got our IKEA furniture; we’re attracted to its clean modern lines the way little kids with Cheeto fingers are attracted to your new white shirt. I go to that joint and I buy the HELL out of that crap. Every time I do, though, I think about how the popularization of mass produced, inexpensive Modern design via IKEA involves phenomena that extend beyond any discussion of quality or taste.

Early 20th century Modern design, like its late 20th century IKEA revival, begins as a European export. And like a ship full of plague rats or a pile of blankets festering with smallpox, it arrives on distant shores with something nasty crawling unseen just below its smooth faux-teak surface.

Death of Print vs. Print ♥ Digital: Jettison Quarterly, Couture, and Advertising

If you roll up a copy of any major American newspaper and hold it to your ear, what many people say you will hear is the swan song of print as a viable mass medium for information dissemination. While you don't seem to see new print magazines launching nearly as often as you see new online magazines launching, the former is never far from the latter, influencing content, infrastructure, formatting...

This is especially apparent when you look at a magazine like Chicago's Jettison Quarterly, an online arts, entertainment and culture  magazine that reads exactly -- exactly -- like a print magazine.

Yes, true, you can get a thumbnail view of all the pages and pick the page you want to go to...

Chicago 101: Intro to Segregation

Last week,the Guardian ran a video from Ed Pilkington highlighting what he calls the “recent” spike in gang- and violence-related murders of children on Chicago’s South side.

I sent the video around to people I know. For those unfamiliar with Phillip Jackson, the response to the first three minutes was usually to the effect that he must have spent a significant portion of his life trapped in a cabinet, and must have gone to college on the moon, to honestly believe that President Obama is somehow connected to or responsible for Chicago’s racially disparate violence simply because his house is south of Roosevelt Road. Those more familiar with Jackson and his work, however, know that he’s no fool.

Jackson’s claims that all Obama has to do is “say the word” to stop the violence do indeed appear to come from someone who’s looking at American socio-political issues from the outside in, and certainly someone with a loose handle on Chicago’s long history of political corruption and institutionalized segregation. It may come as a surprise to some readers, then, to learn that Jackson is (unlike Obama) Chicago born, raised, and educated, and is the founder of Black Star, a education and support coalition for disadvantaged youth with headquarters in the Bronzeville neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side.

"Death of Print:" Life (and Archiving) Inside the Paradigm Shift

I recently spoke to my friend Colin Horgan about the CUL for a True/Slant article he was writing, and the conversation turned, as conversations often do, to the practical and metaphysical questions raised by the differences between online and print media.

Specifically, what happens to literature as part of an ever-changing community landscape when it becomes, via the web, geographically non-specific? How does this affect an organization like the CUL, whose mission is "to map the evolution (historically and contemporaneously) of Chicago’s communities and movements and encourage the production of new media by providing context, inspiration, and programming designed to support collaboration?" The internet provides a convenient, free-or-cheap alternative to zine making, book making, and small-press printing in the form of blogging. The blog or website format offers not only a more economical, environmentally-friendly, and widely-distributed option for publications which, in the pre- or proto-internet era, would have naturally utilized the print medium, but also some other features as well: with blogging, there's very little time commitment required. You don't have to think about layout, format, how you're going to duplicate and distribute your product--you just type whatever you want in the box, and hit "publish."

As a result, there are jillions of bloggers globally disseminating their thoughts on any and everything who would never have bothered with print, some with and some without connections to literary and cultural communities in their region.

Doodleganza at the MCA

I got to the MCA early without checking to see what new work they were showing. I wanted to be surprised, like when you go out of your way not to learn anything about a movie you know you want to see, so you can be atwitter with anticipation. After wandering through Liam Gillick's Three Perspectives and a Short Scenario installation, an expanse of negative space traversed by huge prison-or-enclosure-like structures echoing with pulsing, mechanically repetitive instrumental guitar crunch rock, however, I was feeling overwhelmed, like I'd stumbled onto a set built for an avant-garde stage production of Repo Man starring actors of inhumanly gigantic proportions. I felt tiny! I sat in the cavernous Puck Cafe nibbling a $5 Rice Krispie Treat feeling bullied by contemporary art, thinking that Liam Gillick had probably wanted me to feel that way, and wishing I could ask him what I did to make him so mad at me. There was really no way, I realized, for me to respond to this work and its creator personally at all.
This was all very discouraging.
"The aesthetics of social structures and consumption and the estrangement of the viewer/spectator are like, super significant themes in contemporary art," I thought, "But if only someone would think of a way for contemporary art to also be participatory, accessible, and fun..." Then I noticed it was almost 6:00, time to walk across to the other side of the Puck Cafe for Doodleganza hosted by Ezra Claytan Daniels, and realized that since the Puck Cafe is huge enough to probably double as a stadium for at least one kind of professional sport, I had better get moving.