Gretchen Kalwinski

See Me Improving at Stop Smiling

2010-12-07T17:44:00.000-06:00

Travis Nichols has written a book of poetry titled "See Me Improving" and to celebrate its launch, some of us will be performing previously untold "talents and amateur attempts" at his book release party at Stop Smiling, tomorrow, Wednesday December 8, starting at 6:30 p.m. (1317 N. Milwaukee Ave). I'm told that among the amateur skills being celebrated are: mixology, headstands, and for my part, I'll be demonstrating my newfound adeptness at applying "smoky eye" makeup. See above for the dramatic difference that it can make. For more info, go to Travis' blog, See Me Improving.

Ragdale residency

2010-08-19T18:10:00.000-05:00

In November 2009, I received a Ragdale Artist Residency and spent a spectacular three weeks there, working on my short fiction collection in Lake Forest, Illinois, writing, thinking, dreaming. Some pics are attached, and here's a Literago post I wrote on my time there.

Chicago Tonight books roundtable

2009-12-15T22:51:00.003-06:00

A few hours ago, I had fun appearing on Chicago Tonight (as Literago.org co-founder) to chat about books to give/read during the holidays. My fellow roundtablers Professor Al Gini and author Brigid Pasulka had impressive lists to share and now I have WAY too many books on my "to read" list. The video is here, and all of our lists of recommended books are archived here.

New short story in Proximity Magazine

2009-11-22T11:53:00.001-06:00

A new short story I published in Proximity Magazine is up at their site, along with the beautiful illustrations of Rob Funderburk. (Reading it over, I'm realizing it needed several more drafts, at least, but anyway.)

Interview with Amy Guth of ChicagoNow

2009-08-04T14:43:00.007-05:00

During last week's Printers Ball, I spoke on camera with Amy Guth of ChicagoNow's Chicago Subtext about the Ball, Chicago publishing and books, and Literago.
Gretchen Kalwinski at Printers' Ball from Amy Guth on Vimeo.

Printer's Row, audio

2009-07-30T22:50:00.005-05:00

At last month's Printer's Row Book Fair, I was invited by the Poetry Foundation to read a poem from the Poetry Tour at the Printers Row Book Fair. Audio from the event is archived here.

WLUW interview

2009-07-30T16:10:00.005-05:00

This week, I spent a fun 10 minutes talking to Mike Stephen with WLUW's Outside the Loop radio show for their literary-themed edition (to correspond with the Printers Ball). Some info is here, and the direct link to the streaming audio is here.

Book review for Stop Smiling, 7/28/09

2009-07-30T16:03:00.003-05:00

Just published: a new book review for Stop Smiling, of Nelson Algren's Entrapment. The mag does a thing called "Two Takes," where they have two writers review the same book; then they publish the two reviews alongside each other. Beth Capper wrote the "alternate take."

Vosges Catalog; Valentine's Day; Gypsy-Theme

2009-07-11T19:50:00.000-05:00

I recently did some copywriting for Vosges Haut Chocolat's catalog -- the Gypsy-themed Valentine's Day issue. It's not available online, unfortunately, but here are some excerpts from the mailer, "A Book of Chocolate Love Spells."

[The word Gypsy refers to the Roma people, a wandering ethnic group that originated in northern India around the 9th century. A creative people who live outside modern rules of ownership and property; the world is their home to wander.]

[Gypsies are said to travel with magic carpets and snakes and are notoriously private--it is almost impossible for an outsider to penetrate a gypsy band. Because so much of gypsy lore is shrouded in secrecy, popular culture tends to either romanticize or demonize them, focusing on their mystical powers.]

[The Gypsy woman was a muse for Bob Dylan's "Spanish Harlem Incident." He sings "Gypsy Girl in the hands of Harlem / Cannot hold you to its heat / Your temperature is too hot to taming feet are burning up the street..."]

[The pagan practice of men showering their sweethearts with roses started when early practitioners of herbal medicine learned that eating rose hips (the fruit of the rose that remains after the petals have fallen) assisted in many aspects of female health. So on Valentine's Day, bask in the knowledge that by enjoying roses, you are taking part in an ancient ritual.]

--Gretchen Kalwinski

Cavalier Inn, Website Copy

2009-07-11T19:45:00.001-05:00

Cavalier Inn
(About Us section of website)
Serving the North Hammond neighborhood and Polish Community for generations

Known simply as The Cav by those who frequent it, this Polish restaurant and bar has served the North Hammond neighborhood and Polish community for generations. The Cav is owned and managed by Wally and Mary Kasprzycki and their son, Wally. Wally Sr. arrived in the United States in 1938 and opened the Cavalier Inn 1949. The Cavalier Inn thrives not only because of the consistently wonderful Polish food (best pierogis and potato pancakes in town), but also to the welcoming atmosphere instituted by Wally and Mary, and carried on dutifully by their son.

There is something for everyone at The Cav. It accommodates the after-work dinner crowd, who fill up the paneled back room in the rear of the building, sitting in the cafeteria style tables, chatting with neighbors and friends, and waiting for their food. There is also the evening bar crowd who come in after 5 for a boilermaker. Then there is the late-night straggler who sits at the bar and keeps Wally company (or is it vice versa?). Finally, there is the Saturday afternoon crowd, who stop in for a plate of pierogis and game of pool.

The atmosphere in every scenario is the same-welcoming and accommodating. Located off the intersection of Gostlin and Torrence in Hammond, across from the Roller Dome, The Cav is easier to find these days due to outdoor ornamental lighting, facade improvements, and a new blacktop parking lot. The Hammond Urban Enterprise subsidized those improvements through the Business Facade Rebate Program. The City of Hammond contributed to the neighborhood by repaving Torrence streets and sidewalks and adding ornamental street lights. The decor includes wood carved Polish eagles, figurines in traditional folk dress, pictures of cavaliers, and a photograph of Wally Jr., a High School All-American in his Northwestern football uniform. The eclectic jukebox features Bear Down Chicago Bears Polka, God Bless Our Polish Pope, In Heaven There is No Beer, as well as tunes from Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Elvis Presley, John Cougar Mellencamp, and NSync.

There is more than just old-fashioned quaintness to The Cav; there is a history inherent in the walls of this building. Wally is not only a business owner and an immigrant, he is also a sponsor of many other immigrants since World War II. Wally sponsored hundreds of families from Poland and enjoys his patriarchal role in the community. The Cav serves as a comfort zone for those immigrants and their families, because it is the business owned by their first friend in the United States, and a familiar gathering place for many unsure new American citizens. The food is generous and filling. The menu includes pierogis, potato pancakes, czarina, stuffed cabbage (golabki), sausage and sauerkraut (kielbasa z kaputsta), lake perch, and American dishes such as burgers and chili. Mary Kasprzycki runs the kitchen with Dina and Teresa. She works approximately 12 hours per day six days a week or a total of 76 hours per week with her husband, intermittently greeting friends that come to eat. Two nights a week, Mary stays up until the wee hours of the morning making pierogis with her kitchen help.

A cavalier is a symbol of pride for Polish people. A Cavalier's Cross of Merit is Poland's highest civilian honor and a mark of distinction. Therefore, the Cavalier Inn is a gallant and proud name for a small-town restaurant and bar. When you visit, look for the kindly bartender with soft eyes and his friendly and stylish wife, who is responsible for so many well-fed Polish immigrants, their children and grandchildren in Northwest Indiana. On the cold winter days ahead you'll want plenty of meat and potatoes, pork chops, fish, and "kraut", and the Cavalier Inn does them just right.

Moi, in Chicago Tribune (o so briefly)

2009-06-10T12:53:00.005-05:00

Last weekend, I read with a group of authors--authors way, way more illustrious than I; Bill Savage, Stuart Dybek, Marion Coleman, Marc Smith, Ellen Wadey, Peter O'Leary--at a Printers Row Lit Fest event presented by the Poetry Foundation. The Trib listed it here, along with my bio.

The Chicago Poetry Foundation presents the Chicago Poetry Tour Premier. Saturday 5 p.m. Arts & Poetry Stage.
Gretchen Kalwinski: The co-founder and managing editor of the literary Web site Literago.org. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Stop Smiling, The Chicago Reader, Chicago Magazine and Punk Planet.

Time Out Chicago; Issue 217 : Apr 23–29, 2009

2009-05-07T18:12:00.003-05:00

I wrote a few pieces for Time Out Chicago's recent "DIY issue," including an article about making your own deodorant (so cheap!) and another about teaching myself to sing that actually inspired me to start voice lessons at the Old Town School of Folk Music.

Time Out Chicago; Issue 209; Features; Polish drinking

2009-02-26T14:59:00.000-06:00

....Also for the TOC Polish issue, I co-wrote an article on how to drink Polish. Nadrowie!

Time Out Chicago; Issue 209; Features; Polish-American essay

2009-02-26T11:46:00.005-06:00

For Time Out Chicago's "Polish Issue," I wrote articles about growing up Polish-American in Chi-town and old-school versus new-school Polish Chicago.

Time Out Chicago; Issue 209; Features

2009-02-26T11:27:00.000-06:00

I pitched a "Polish Issue" of Time Out Chicago that was published last week. In cahoots with that, I posted this at the Time Out Chicago blog: "TOC's Polish Roots are Showing"

Time Out Chicago; Issue 206; Feb 5, 2009

2009-02-05T14:58:00.002-06:00

In Chicago, wintertime spa visits are crucial. For Time Out Chicago's Spas issue, I got to enjoy spa treatments and write about Lisette Paez, maestro nail-technician at the Four Seasons, plus spa-etiquette, and DIY spa treatments.

Time Out Chicago; Issue 206; Feb 5; Travel

2009-02-05T14:38:00.000-06:00

In celebration of Abe Lincoln's 200th birthday, I spent a weekend in Springfield, Illinois, and wrote about it. Now, I never need to go back to Springfield, Illinois. Whew.

Time Out Chicago; Blog post; Jan 12, 2009, New Wave Coffee

2009-01-12T11:52:00.004-06:00

I'm thrilled to have a new coffee shop in my 'hood, and posted about it on the TOC blog.

Time Out Chicago; Issue 201; Jan 1, 2009; Travel

2009-01-01T14:43:00.002-06:00

Birmingham, Alabama: it's prettier and hipper than you thought. Here's my travel essay about what to do during a weekend trip to the Magic City.

Literago.org posts

2008-11-11T19:53:00.003-06:00

I co-founded and edit this literary website. My posts can be found here.

Obama in Grant Park

2008-11-05T19:45:00.001-06:00

I attended the historic Obama rally in Grant Park last week and wrote a TOC blog post about it the next morning. (Mine is the last-and longest-post).

Joe Pug at Hideout

2008-10-03T21:03:00.001-05:00

A TOC blog post about a Joe Pug show at the Hideout.

Glossed and Found event

2008-08-15T19:43:00.003-05:00

A TOC blog post about a beauty event I attended in the South Loop.

WGN Radio; July 25, 2008

2008-08-07T22:07:00.006-05:00

After my Time Out Chicago article titled "Concrete Canvas" was published last month, WGN Radio asked Lauren Weinberg (Time Out's Art and Design editor who wrote most of the rest of the Public Art feature) and myself to appear on Nick Digilio 's show on Friday, July 25. It was fun; we chatted about illegal/public art for about a half hour; Nick was super interested in the subject and asked good questions and even told us about a piece of public art or two we'd not heard of before. (Eventually, I'll figure out how to add the audio to this site but that hasn't happened yet.)

Time Out Chicago; Issue 178; July 24, Street Art

2008-07-28T17:49:00.006-05:00

Features article about street artists: "Concrete canvas"
Features article; a street art tour: "Going, going, gone"
Features article; gang signs vs. street art: "Writing on the wall."

Literary lunch with Stuart Dybek

2008-05-15T19:39:00.000-05:00

A TOC blog post about a lunchtime program hosted by Stuart Dybek at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Time Out Chicago; April 2008, Food and Drink

2008-04-15T15:10:00.001-05:00

Two new restaurant reviews for Time Out Chicago, below.

Crepes Cafe
410 S Clark St
Loop/West Loop, Chicago | Map

312-341-1313

El: Blue, Brown, Orange, Pink, Purple (rush hrs) to LaSalle | Directions
Description
Those who crave the stuff of San Francisco crêpe stands can find a suitable substitute until their next Bay trip at this cheerful Loop café. The $7–$12 price point may seem stiff for a little French pancake, but savories (mushroom, beef Stroganoff) come with salads and desserts are a la mode. Plus, while the namesake crepes may be thicker than the lacy-edged ideal, they’re jam-packed with fillings, the best of which include a seafood-studded frutti di mare option. Hours--Lunch (Mon–Fri).

Papa Smiles
This charming south side ice cream parlor/candy shop is owned and managed by “Papa” Ron Kozak, whose mother ran a beauty shop in the building. The quaint decor—an old-fashioned soda fountain, jukebox, and walls plastered with historical photos of the 'hood—hearkens back to a simpler time. We recommend the generous portions of Homers & Hershey ice cream (especially pistachio), Papa’s greasily delicious chili- and corn-dogs and housemade taffy apples (peanut, pecan, walnut). Eat outside on benches or at antique tables loaded with games for the rugrats.
6955 W Archer Ave between Newland and Sayre Aves (773-788-0388). El: Orange to 62H Archer bus. Bus: 62H. Lunch, dinner: 12-9pm daily during late March through November (weather permitting). Average item: $3.

Time Out Chicago; Issue 163 : Apr 10–16, 2008

2008-04-10T22:38:00.008-05:00

Time Out Chicago / Issue 163 : Apr 10–16, 2008

The scene

  Hillary Clinton at the Civic Center in Hammond, Indiana, March 28, 2:32pm By Gretchen Kalwinski 

Borderline state Most of Indiana votes Republican, but Northwest Indiana (a rust-belt region that calls itself a Chicago ’burb) is populated with blue collars and union Democrats. Due to the state’s increasingly important May 6 primary, Hillary Clinton planned a Gary, Indiana, stop; but after Gary Mayor Rudy Clay endorsed Obama, she rerouted her Hoosier Economy Tour to Hammond, mere miles from Obama’s South Side base. Bobby Kennedy was the last presidential candidate to visit Hammond, so thousands turned out with signage: NWI IS CLINTON COUNTRY and 2 FOR 1: HILLARY AND BILL: KEEPING THE DREAM ALIVE. Undeterred by Clinton’s posse being two hours late, the crowd ate concession-stand hot dogs and politely endured a high-school chorus’s Beatles/ Footloose medley during the wait. Clinton’s talk was crowd-appropriate: “It was from Northwest Indiana that so much of the steel came from that built this country;” “My campaign is about jobs, jobs, jobs.” She invoked Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, rumored to be her potential VP, and Bush-bashed—“Won’t you be happy to see him walking out of the White House?”—while the crowd cheered wildly. One sign-holding mom scolded her daughter when she slumped back in her chair, saying, “This is history: Stand up!”

Time Out Chicago; Features; Polish bars

2008-02-28T20:59:00.005-06:00

Time Out Chicago / Issue 157 : Feb 28–Mar 5, 2008

Global drinking | Poland

Warsaw packed: Vodka abounds as do bottles of Zywiec and Okocim. Na zdrowie!

By Gretchen Kalwinski

POLE POSITION Martini Club’s cold vodka and hot bartenders may make you a little lightheaded.

PHOTO: MIREYA ACIERTO

The Polish party spot Martini Club (4933 N Milwaukee Ave, 773-202-9444) nestles in the blue collar ’hood of Jefferson Park, but it’s attempting to draw an upscale, clubby crowd. Exhibit A: swank decor like gilded mirrors, a translucent bar lit up underneath by red lights, a DJ area near the front window, glowing red candles, leather booths, exposed brick, disco balls and laser lights. In a city that abounds with Polish shot-and-beer joints, this bar reaches out to those whose names may not end in ski while still retaining its Polish roots.

As is the custom for any Polish bar, the place is stocked with impossibly good-looking female bartenders (who understand just enough English to chat with non-Poles). Before 9pm, the joint’s littered with men buying drinks and watching the bartenders and whatever game is on the TVs; the mood is mellow, and occasionally someone uses the free Wi-Fi to type on his laptop.

Poles are a naturally suspicious people—hey, their country has been invaded a lot —so non-Poles may receive a standoffish reception. But once a drink is ordered and cash is out on the bar, bartenders get chatty and smilingly suggest vodka drinks from their menu. “You been here before?” one minidress-wearing bartender asks a man sporting an outfit and a baseball cap in the Polish flag colors of white and red. “You want me to tell you best drinks on menu?” He does.

Beer drinkers go for bottles of light, crisp Zywiec (ZHIV-yetz), or Okocim (oh-KO-chim) on draft, which tastes “cleaner and sharper” than the bottled stuff, according to one friendly old man who downs the traditional vodka shot before taking a sip of his beer. Another shot option: the gold-colored Krupnik ($3), a honey-lemon vodka infused with herbs. This stuff burns as it travels down the pipes, but many Polish bartenders (and grandmothers) tout it as a cold remedy; “It’ll kill whatever germs you’ve got,” says Mark (Marek in Polish), a first-generation Pole in his fifties whose parents met in a post-WWII relocation camp. He speaks Polish, “but not as well as I used to,” he says.

After a few drinks, Marek loosens up enough to try some Polish on the bartender, so he says “thank you,” “Dziekuje” (jane-KOO-yeh), and clinks glasses with his friend while reciting the traditional Polish toast, “Na zdrowie” (nah STROH-vyeh), which means “to your health.”

Soon there are signs the boisterous birthday party in the back booths threatens to take over the bar—the place is suddenly full of balloons, the TVs change from sports to European music videos and laser lights flash around the bar. “I’m out of here,” Marek says, laughing, and though the bartenders try to press another drink on him, he leaves to make more room for the young Poles, who are toasting, “Sto lat!” (“100 years”), to the birthday girl.

--------------------

Slow burn

Pick up our two favorite Polish vodkas.

PHOTO: SHMURA CAMPBELL

Zubrowka (joov-BROOV-ka), pictured, is an herby-tasting vodka infused with bison grass grown in Poland’s Biaowie forest; there’s a blade of it in each bottle, which gives the stuff a pleasing greenish-yellow color. Poles like to drink it with apple juice or cider. Get it for $4 per glass at My Place on Milwaukee (3394 N Milwaukee Ave, 773-286-4482).

For straight-up great-tasting vodka, go for the sharp, clean, no-aftertaste Wyborowa (veh-bo-ROW-va). It holds its own against Belvedere and Ketel One—but costs substantially less. Grab a 750ml bottle for $12.99 at Foremost Liquors (2300 N Milwaukee Ave, 773-278-9420).

SIMILAR SPOTS

Zakopane (1734 W Division St, 773-486-1559). The same old men have been drinking Polish beer and mid-range vodkas here since time began. Only now there’s an actual bathroom door instead of a sheet, an improvement made sometime in the late ’90s.

Cavalier Inn (735 Gostlin St, Hammond, IN, 219-933-9314). If you’re hitting traffic on the way back from Michiana, exit I-90 for reliable Polish drinks—Zywiec (beer), Zubrowka (bison-grass vodka) and jezynowka (blackberry brandy). Order some pierogi to soak up the booze before heading home.

Karolinka Club (6102 S Central Ave, 773-735-0818). This polka joint serves Tyskie, a popular lager often sweetened with raspberry or strawberry syrup.

Accent Café (700 N River Rd, Mount Prospect, 847-298-2233). On weekends, young Poles here drink the Polish flag shot—cherry juice with vodka.

Time Out Chicago; Issue 154 : February 7, 2008, Dating

2008-02-15T19:59:00.004-06:00

Worst Firsts
An overeager cowboy. A man with a broken penis. A guy who gleefully recounts tales of his cocaine arrests. Readers went on terrible first dates with these freak shows so you don’t have to. Illustration by David Opie

Lonesome cowboy
I took a ballroom-dancing class in college (long before the Dancing with the Stars craze). The only cute guy in class was also the best dancer, and since I was the best of the ladies—no great compliment, since most of our classmates couldn’t hold a beat to save their lives—we shot each other relieved looks when we occasionally wound up as partners. We didn’t talk much between rumbas, cha-chas and waltzes, but his tall, broad-shouldered physique wasn’t lost on me, nor his chivalrous demeanor, nor his Wranglers and gray T-shirts that fit oh-so-well. And damn, that guy could move his hips. After a particularly invigorating tango in one of the last classes, Brett asked me to dinner. When he walked up to the house that night, my roommates and I were on our screened-in front porch drinking mint juleps. They spotted him first—and their jaws dropped. We were used to grunge guys, and Brett had forgotten to mention that he was an actual cowboy (grew up in Montana; spent summers on a ranch), so his idea of ‘dressing up’ was a tucked-in checked shirt, huge belt buckle, cowboy boots and tight jeans. In 2008 Chicago, that’d be hot, but in 1997 Indiana, it was super embarrassing to be seen with him. We dined at an Irish pub, where my fears were confirmed: He was extra-Christian (I was going through an atheist phase), familycentric (I hated kids) and very sweet (only a bad-boy cowboy would’ve done the trick for me). I never called him back, not even after he left daisies and a sweet card on my porch. But Brett and I will always have tango.—Gretchen, Logan Square

Time Out Chicago; Features; Spas Issue

2008-02-07T20:06:00.002-06:00

Time Out Chicago / Issue 155 : February 14, 2008 - February 20, 2008

The spa issue
This sunless, freezing weather is giving me a case of the grumps
Meditation bath at Kaya Day Spa
I had high hopes for this treatment’s ability to boost the serotonin levels that seasonal affective disorder depletes. It promises to “ground the mind and body” and “soak away the cares of the world” with the scents of sandalwood, pine and lavender. I was led into a private room with a huge bathtub, and crawled into the (already drawn) bath with 48 massaging water jets and colored lightbulbs that can be set to coordinate to your preferred mood: blue for serenity, red for creativity, etc. I chose orange (for energy) and I dug the idea until I started thinking I could easily create a similar experience for a lot less money in my own tub by plugging in colored Christmas lights nearby. Also, the sides of the tub were very high and very vertical, which forced me to sit upright—not terribly comfy. But I did emerge from this aromatherapeutic treatment relaxed, if not a tiny bit giddy. 30 minutes for $45.
— Gretchen Kalwinski
Acu-energetic therapy at exhale
Since I’m a SAD sufferer and get lethargic and cranky in winter, any treatment that claims to produce “a sense of wonderful expansiveness and a profound state of peace” has me at hello. When I entered exhale (freezing, pissed at public transit), the staff gave me a robe and chamomile tea while I waited in the quiet room for my acupuncturist. She asked about my food cravings and energy levels; since I complained of insomnia and stress, she told me that my adrenal gland—which helps to regulate stress-managing chemicals—was overtaxed. To fix this, she inserted 15 needles into my forehead, wrists and feet, then pressed vibrating tuning forks to those points to “align my chi.” Outside, a friend waited in a warm car to drive me home. Who cares if it was the tea, quiet room, acupuncture or ride? At the end of the session, I truly felt happier. 60 minutes for $150.
— Gretchen Kalwinski

Dry skin

Death Valley’s got nothing on my parched skin
SCRUB A DUB DUB The herbal body wrap at Chicago Male starts with exfoliation—all the better to get moisture into your skin.
PHOTO: PATRICK SABLAN

Remineralizing and moisturizing marine algae wrap at Allyu
Unless I moisturize fiendishly during winter, my legs turn crocodile-esque, so I hoped this wrap would make up for all those times I jumped out of the shower and skipped body lotion. In the treatment room, the aesthetician dry-brushed my body with a rough loofah; applied an alpha-hydroxy and seaweed mixture to “draw out toxins”; and wrapped me in foil while she zapped zits using a “Tesla current” wand (surely Nikola Tesla never imagined his invention would be used for pimple popping, but the painless procedure did result in a clearer complexion). I felt relaxed afterward, sure, but was unconvinced my skin’s moisture level had improved. True, my man noticed my smooth legs, but that was just because I shaved (another thing I don’t usually bother with during winter). 60 minutes for $100.
— Gretchen Kalwinski

Reflexology massage at the spa at the Four Seasons Hotel
This treatment, basically a fancy foot massage, purports to “enhance circulation and help balance body and mind.” With my general malaise, sleepiness and cold feet this time of year, I’ll take all the balancing I can get. While working on my tootsies, my therapist told me reflexology stems from the idea that every body part has a corresponding point on the feet, and if you activate those pressure points, you’re “working from the inside out” to restore balance. Afterward, I was led to a relaxation room to recline on silk pillows and feast on Champagne and chocolate-covered strawberries. There’s no question I felt relaxed and had warmer feet; all I want to know is, when can I move in? 25 minutes for $65.
—Gretchen Kalwinski

Time Out Chicago / Issue 149 : Jan 3, 2008, Detox

2008-01-02T19:00:00.001-06:00

Detox
The toxic avenger
A stressball attempts to pulverize her poisons with seven days of high-end healing.

By Gretchen Kalwinski

Yeah, yeah—everyone’s busy. But my insane schedule causes me bodily harm. There’s that persistent tension headache and cough. And the fainting episode on the El. And the trouble sleeping. When chest palpitations began, my doc said these symptoms were anxiety related, and suggested slowing down. Great, but who has time? To see if I could get a quick fix, I went hardcore, doing a detox treatment every day of the week. Bonus: These treatments require little effort on my part other than a cobra pose…and an occasional dash to the bathroom.

SUNDAY colon cleanse
After scaring myself silly reading online gut-cleansing forums and viewing photos of toothed intestinal parasites, my adventure begins with Ultimate Cleanse, a series of pills with ingredients such as dandelion that are taken to “release accumulated toxins in the body” and combat “low energy.” User forums say the first day is the most, um, urgent, so I stay home, close to a toilet, and boy am I glad—I visit the loo seven times today. I don’t see any fanged parasites, thank God, and I do feel lighter and more energized by day’s end. Whole Foods (locations citywide, wholefoods.com). $28.95.

MONDAY ear candling
Proponents of this folk-medicine treatment claim it clears gunk from sinuses, so during lunch I visit Elizabeth Adam Salon. While I lie on my side, an aesthetician inserts a conical candle in my ear, lights it and trims the end until the flame is 4 inches from my ear. At the end of the half-hour treatment, she shows me my earwax gob: disgusting. But my congestion doesn’t improve. Next! 845 N Michigan Ave, suite 908E (312-988-9611,elizabethadamsalon.com). $68.

TUESDAY Ionic Foot Bath with Detox Pedicure
At Silken Tent, I put my feet in a tub of water with a noisy black Aquavida “array,” a contraption designed to stimulate glands in the feet, drawing out toxins like aluminum, lead and mercury (which can cause headaches, insomnia and poor mental concentration, respectively). My water turns orange, (other common shades are black and green), but no one in the salon can explain why, and the Aquavida website says the water changes even without your feet due to “chemical interactions.” Hmm, sounds fishy. However, an amazingly detailed pedicure and reflexology treatment follows. I’m so mellow afterward that friends at dinner note my tranquil state. 2300 Chestnut Ave, Glenview (877-774-5536, thesilkentent.com). $105.

WEDNESDAY hot yoga
I’ve done this type of yoga before and know to expect an intense, 105-degree session at Bikram Yoga Chicago. During the sweaty poses, I relish in knowing that hot yoga not only improves strength and flexibility, it also opens pores, energizes the body and releases toxins through sweat. Postworkout, I’m a wet noodle and sleep like a baby. 1344 N Milwaukee Ave, third floor (773-395-9150, bycic.com). $15.

THURSDAY Enercupping therapy with acupuncture
My headache is no longer raging, but I’m still having palpitations. When I say that to my acupuncturist at Ruby Room, she focuses on acupuncture, since she says cupping is more for increasing circulation and “promoting the free flow of qi [vital energy],” while needles “calm the shen [spirit] and unblock stagnation” that causes tension issues like headaches and chest-tightness. She presses warm cups on my back, then painlessly pokes my arms, legs and forehead with needles. Afterward, the palpitations have lessened and the headache is gone. Good thing, since I’ve got a wine party to attend. If only acupuncture could hurl a preemptive strike against my inevitable hangover. 1743–45 W Division St (773-235-2323, rubyroom.com). $150.

FRIDAY ESPA detox body envelopment
Today’s after-work treatment at the luxurious Peninsula Spa is supposed to stimulate the lymphatic system and help purge whatever environmental toxins you carry around (bus exhaust, heavy metals, etc.) First I’m scrubbed with a dry brush, then lathered with a mix of seaweed, clay and ginger. A layer of plastic and hot towels comes next to get me sweating, which helps draw out those toxins. My therapist has magic hands—only problem is the oils she uses to give me an (amazing) scalp massage render my locks greasy, and she says I shouldn’t shampoo till tomorrow to allow the oil to moisturize my scalp. Since I’m now a greaseball, I bail on a gallery opening and opt for bed. I feel so pampered that for once I couldn’t care less about my social obligations—a liberating thought. 108 E Superior St (312-573-6860, chicago.peninsula.com/pch/spa.html). $155.

SATURDAY mind detox
I’m loving my spa lifestyle, but I’m sick of being touched by people I don’t know, and am relieved that today’s treatment involves only me, my apartment and my boyfriend. This detox is a mind-cleanse (prescribed by our Chill Out editor who knows about these things). The idea is: no phones, stereos, TVs or computers, so we proceed with brunch making and newspaper reading, free from white noise. We’re so into kicking it Amish-style that instead of turning lights on at dusk, we light candles, which allows for few activities except taking a walk and smooching by candlelight. We’re so relaxed by bedtime that we vow to repeat this monthly.

POST DETOX, my tension headaches are gone, my chest palpitations have quieted and I’m two pounds lighter. It’s hard to tell which treatment did the most good, but my instincts say the mind detox and acupuncture were the most effective, so I’ll continue with those on occasion. But now I know that my doc was right: Sometimes “balance” can be less about chichi spa treatments and more about simple downtime—and in the end that’s way more satisfying than being manhandled by strangers.

Time Out Chicago; Michael Anthony Salon & Day Spa

2008-01-01T19:12:00.000-06:00

Michael Anthony Salon Spa Wicker Park

Venue: Michael Anthony Salon Spa Wicker Park
Times: Daily.
Address: 2038 W Division Damen and Hoyne Sts Bucktown/Wicker Park, Chicago
Phone: 773-772-0707
Travel: El: Blue to Division, Red to Division. Bus: 70 Division, 50 Damen.
Website: michaelanthonyspa.com
The newest Michael Anthony outpost is luxuriously calm despite its strip-mall location. Downstairs from the hair salon is the tranquil spa (offering massages, facials, hand/foot care), where our bod was treated to a Body Polish, leaving us buffed and baby-smooth, before the Hot Stone Massage got us dozing. (True, our room was somewhat frigid and the masseuse pulled our hair but we’ll chalk that up to newness.) Best of all was the shower-room, complete with jetstreams and fragrant Aveda products galore.

Time Out Chicago; Issue 146 : Dec 13, 2007, New Years

2007-12-27T18:48:00.002-06:00

New Year's Eve
Toasts and jams
Whether 2007 brought you stock-market pain or new-baby pleasure, our dinner, party and morning-after options will help you ring in 2008 the right way—even if you’re an NYE hater.

Illustrations by Jude Buffum

Your year
You broke up—now hook up

Your relationship went up in flames just in time for NYE. Think you’re going to miss out on that stroke-of-midnight smooch? We don’t think so. The plan: Zone in on places that are sans snuggly couples and full of your type. Just try to pick one where you-know-who is unlikely to show up: 2008 is about a new batch of cuties, not drama, right?

NICE PIECE OF GLASS The Bottle Bar is a great place to make googly eyes at hotties.
Photo: Jessica Dixon

Your night
Dinner
Get some single friends together and go somewhere with close quarters or a communal environment. The proximity to your fellow diners, coupled with liquor, could get strangers talking, and if you’re lucky, touching. Even though it’s not presenting anything special for New Year’s and not taking reservations, small-plates haven Avec (615 W Randolph St, 312-377-2002) is a good choice: The tables are so close together, you’re practically seated in your neighbor’s lap. Wicker Park tapas joint People (1560 N Milwaukee Ave, 773-227-9339) will host an NYE dinner at $130 per person that includes four courses such as wild mushroom soup, duck breast with serrano ragout and a chocolate parfait. This spot also has a long communal table, great food and a young, friendly crowd—all crucial ingredients for a meal with possibilities, if you catch our drift.

Partytime
For the evening’s main event, you’re looking for booze aplenty and pretty people. And preferably not some cheeseball hotel bash hosted by middle-aged radio jocks that advertises itself as “the party of the year.” Not that we ever succumbed to that in high school or anything. Ahem. Chichi lounge krem (1750 N Clark St, 312-932-1750) hosts festivities for $125 that include high-end cocktails (Belvedere vodka and Veuve Clicquot) and hors d’oeuvres. Also up north, Lakeview’s Bottle Bar (950 W Wolfram St, 773-665-5660), which offers 99 different kinds of bottled brew, is having a “beer lovers” NYE bash and serving “only Gold Medal winners from the World Beer Cup” (everything from Chimay to Olde English). But never fear, beer haters: Bottle also will have an open bar with premium vodkas and rum. Both of these bashes will include all the elements—swank decor, great music, flowing liquor—to get the talky, sexy vibe going.

If these places sound too high-end for your down-homey tastes, and you’re wondering where the regular, jeans-wearing folks go for a drunken and raucous New Year’s bash, one answer (okay, maybe not the right answer) is the fete at Hogs and Honeys (1551 N Sheffield Ave, 312-377-1733). It might not be the classiest party in town, but it’s $50 per person and its motto—“Be yourself so you don’t have to go home by yourself”—seems apropos for your goal to hook up tonight. That ticket includes a buffet, an open bar, a Champagne toast and yes, darlings, bull rides. Hey, we didn’t say getting some one-night-stand action included maintaining your dignity.

Morning after
On the first morning of 2008, you’ll want to get both grub for your belly and candy for your eyes. HotChocolate (1747 N Damen Ave, 773-489-1747) delivers both. With its seasonally inspired fare like a scramble with in-season veggies and cinnamon-sugar eggs, combined with the cute, friendly singles who often sit at the bar, it’s hard to go wrong. Or try Orange (3231 N Clark St, 773-549-4400), which specializes in classic American egg dishes and fresh-squeezed juices. It also specializes in long waits, which can bring up natural topics for flirting (the ridiculous wait, the menu). If you got lucky and found a boy- or girl-toy on NYE, you can always eat in. Plan ahead by hitting Sweet Thang (1921 W North Ave, 773-772-4166) the day before. This bakery has some of the best, flakiest croissants around; we love the chocolate, almond, turkey and Swiss, and spinach varieties.—Gretchen Kalwinski

Hater option
If you’re bored by the party or dinner thing, the hater choices for newly single folks on the Eve basically boil down to one of two paths: (1) The black book: Meet up with an ex-love you had great chemistry with (not the one you just split with, fer crissakes) at your friendly neighborhood dive bar like Logan Square’s Whirlaway (3224 W Fullerton Ave, 773-276-6809), and celebrate with the regulars, complete with noisemakers and cheap Champagne in plastic glasses. Then, bring the ex home, while knowing full well that nothing will come of this except hot, one-night lovin’. (2) Wallowing: Stay at home and steep in melancholy whilst enjoying your vices, whether of the booze, cigarette or cupcake variety. Watch films about romance gone bad (Casablanca, Annie Hall, A Heart in Winter, The Apartment, Vertigo, Match Point) while booing and hissing. Let 11:59 become midnight with no ceremony whatsoever; maybe even go to bed before 12 to give the middle finger to 2007. That’ll teach ’em.—GK

Bad at Sports interview about Literago

2007-12-15T16:43:00.001-06:00

BadatSports sat down and interviewed Genie and I about why we started Literago.org and what we hope to accomplish. Such great fun talking to these ladies!

Time Out Chicago, NOW Massage Studio

2007-11-11T19:08:00.000-06:00

NOW Massage Studio

Address: 2141 W Webster Ave between Hoyne Ave and Leavitt St Bucktown/Wicker Park, Chicago
Phone: 773-276-5278
Travel: El: Blue to Damen. Bus: 50 Damen, 56 Milwaukee, 73 Armitage.
Website: nourhy.com
Prices: $85 for 60-minute service, $45 for 30-minute service.
Nourhy’s cottage-esque studio in Bucktown (plus the presence of her pooch) disarms clients even before she employs her light, practiced touch to her reflexology, massage, and craniosacral treatments. Nourhy uses organic sheets, towels and oils and has an intuitive knowledge of what the client needs: She blended several treatments for us, and our stress levels—not to mention our shoulders—dropped immediately and stayed that way for days.

Eco-Maniac, Features article; Time Out Chicago

2007-08-16T22:17:00.001-05:00

Time Out Chicago / Issue 129: August 16–22, 2007

Apartments Issue
Eco maniac
Use plants, water filters, organic sheets and other earth-friendly goods to give your entire apartment a green sweep.

By Gretchen Kalwinski

Kitchen
Refined recycling Rubbermaid is fine, but plastic ain’t good for landfills—plus, it’s not all that attractive. For separating paper and (non-funky) plastic recyclables, try Nice Home’s metal bins (pictured, above) in colors like baby blue bright or orange. $19.99–$29.99 at Target (locations throughout the city, target.com).

Bag it Our Old World grandmothers reused plastic baggies. We should, too. After washing, hang ’em on a nifty Countertop Bag Dryer, a multipronged wood contraption shaped like an upside-down cone. $19 at gaiam.com.

Hit the bottle Bottled water wastes plastic and oftentimes is just repackaged tap water anyway (ahem, Aquafina). By installing a filter that attaches to your faucet and toting a reusable bottle, you save plastic and cashola. Brita filters are easy to install; just screw the attachment onto your faucet and change filters when the little warning light flashes. $19.97–$39.97 at Home Depot (locations throughout the city, homedepot.com).

Got any herb? Grow cooking herbs (mint, basil, parsley) in your kitchen window—you won’t waste plastic packaging and won’t have to buy tiny bunches of herbs at jacked-up prices. Gethsemane Gardens has a range of herbs and cute pots to transplant them into once you’re home. $3.99–$8.99 at Gethsemane Gardens (5739 N Clark St, 773-878-5915).

Photo: Sarah McKemie

Bathroom
In hot water Take shorter showers or get a luxury low-flow shower head, which can save about 4,000 gallons of water per year. $59.99–$89.99 at Bed, Bath & Beyond (locations throughout the city, bedbathandbeyond.com).

Shower power Buy a hemp shower curtain. Sure, the light tan color is a little drab and it’s pricier than PVC (vinyl) ones, but you don’t need a liner, hemp is naturally resistant to mildew and bacteria, and the EPA reported in 2002 that PVC shower curtains “can cause elevated indoor-air toxic concentrations.” $99 at Bean Products (1500 S Western Ave, 312-666-3600, beanproducts.com).

Skin deep Since conventional body products often contain cheap, synthetic and potentially toxic ingredients, using organic products is a no-brainer. Treehugger.com recommends making sure that you buy only products that have the USDA Organic seal, which means the product is truly free from synthetics and supports organic farming and agriculture. Dr. Bronner’s and Aubrey Organics never test on animals and led the fight for the USDA seal. We recommend Dr. Bronner’s Pure Castille Peppermint Soap (pictured, right) and Aubrey Organics Camomile Luxurious Volumizing Conditioner. $12.49 and $13.78, respectively, at Whole Foods (locations throughout the city, wholefoods.com).

Bedroom
Sound asleep Drown out serious noise pollution from the El and nightime sirens with the soothing trickle of a waterfall fountain lulling you to sleep. No need to rely on white-noise machines—the Art Institute gift shop has a gorgeous fountain made of slate. $115 at the Art Institute gift shop (111 S Michigan Ave, artinstituteshop.org).

Sheet sandwich Use chemical-free organic cotton sheets to avoid skin irritation and aggravated allergies. The Haven “Hotel Collection” at Macy’s is available in a variety of soothing neutrals and has a 400 thread count. $49.99–$59.99 on sale at Macy’s (two locations in the city, macys.com).

See the light Choose soy candles instead of paraffin ones, which produce carcinogens and soot. Tatine’s soy varieties, like creeping moss and ginger grapefruit, smell fabulous. $15–$24 at tatinecandles.com (online shop opens mid-August).

Photo: Martha Williams

All rooms
Air fresheners Not only do these plants absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen, they also help to clean the not-so-fresh air that drifts into apartments near highways or busy streets. Garden centers and nurseries throughout the city always have a supply of the best air-filtering plants: English ivy, spider plants (pictured, above), peace lilies and rubber plants. $4.99–$32.99 at Grand Street Gardens (2200 W Grand Ave, 312-829-8200, grandstreetgardens.com).

Clear the air If you’re not into houseplants, buy an indoor air purifier instead. Sharper Image has a wide variety of nonhideous ones. $149.95–$499.95 at Sharper Image (835 N Michigan Ave, 312-335-1600).

Pull the plug Your TV and stereo, as well as cell-phone and camera chargers, gobble energy even when not in use. For simplicity’s sake, plug your electronics into a surge protector, and just flip the switch when you head out for the day.
$9.99–$39.99 at Best Buy (locations throughout the city, bestbuy.com).

Slash your paper trail You can get off any company’s catalog mailing list by calling its 800 number. To opt out of prescreened offers for credit or insurance, visit optoutprescreen.com.

Time Out Chicago; Features article; Gambling tips

2007-08-09T22:28:00.002-05:00

Time Out Chicago / Issue 128: August 9–15, 2007

The Gambling Issue
Easy money
Don’t go all in without studying these sure-fire hints.
By TOC staff
Despite many of our less-than-stellar efforts in the casinos, we managed to pick up a few tips on the most popular games from some experts, gaming industry workers and a few amateur players who’ve lost a lot of money, but picked up some tricks along the way.

By: Gretchen Kalwinski
Roulette
Keep it simple
A guy who is "a gambling expert, if 'expert' means someone who's lost a shitload of money gambling" reports that, “Roulette has 800 ways to bet, so the best thing you can do is bet on red or black, since you’ll win half the time. But the payout’s lousy.”

Play the odds
An executive at a gambling-machine company says to, “Try to find a single-zero roulette table—called European roulette. The ‘house’ edge or advantage is almost half of a double-zero table.”

Slots
Give yourself some credit
“Don’t leave a machine with credits in it,” says that same executive. “I’ve walked hundreds of casino floors throughout the world and I am constantly amazed at the number of machines I’ve found with credits remaining.”

Butt in
A library worker and blackjack ace lets us in on a slots secret; “My partner’s stepmom, a.k.a. the Lurker, is an astonishingly successful slots player. She says machines with ashtrays full of mashed-up cigarette butts are ready to pay out, since ‘someone was getting really frustrated pouring money into it.’ ”

Tip for a tip-off
“I’ve heard some machines are programmed to win," our former Lake Tahoe casino worker source divulges, "So, tip the person working in slots and ask them to suggest machines. The casinos won’t put those machines in really obvious spots, so avoid the really huge machines.”

Just say no
A law student and semi-professional gambler snarks, “Don’t play slots because people will see you, and you’ll look like an idiot for playing the slots.”

–Gretchen Kalwinski

Time Out Chicago; Music article; Pitchfork tickets

2007-07-18T22:30:00.000-05:00

Time Out Chicago / Issue 124: July 12–18, 2007

Music
No Pitchfork tickets? No problem
Yes, Pitchfork is totally sold out. But there still might be ways to get in.

By Gretchen Kalwinski

If you put off buying tickets to Pitchfork, you’re outta luck. These tips below, however, might help procrastinators rock out.

1. Craigslist (chicago.craigslist.org/tix) Sure, it’s obvious, and prices will be jacked up. But when’s the next time Yoko Ono will play alongside Aesop Rock, the New Pornographers and De La Soul in your backyard?

2. Volunteer Many vendors could use help, and you’d get in for free once you’re done for the day. Here are some people looking for help: Busy Beaver Button Co. (buttongal@busybeaver.net); Chicago Conservation Corp—you’ll help to recycle (Aicha_Menendez@hotmail.com).

3. Be a roadie Hey, those amps aren’t going to plug themselves in. Local bands are probably set, but some acts probably could use a little help with setup. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to be, you know, hot. “[Roadies should be] really attractive, with an SAT score of at least 1550,” says Ramesh Srivastava of Voxtrot. Is he kidding? We’re not sure, but he did say anyone interested should e-mail the group at voxtrot@voxtrot.net.

4. Tailgate or sneak in (shhh!) It might be possible to see/hear performers from the playlot and swimming pool in Union Park. And not that we’re advocating illegal acts, of course, but two years ago, it was easy to sneak in from the pool area. Last year, however, organizers wised up and heightened security. So, trespass at your own risk.

Venus Zine; Spring 2007, Mother's Day

2007-05-12T17:16:00.005-05:00

Yo mama, you rock!

Venus Zine gives a Mother’s Day shout-out

By Venus Zine Staff
Published: May 12th, 2007 | 6:49pm

TO: LINDA KALWINSKI
FROM: GRETCHEN KALWINSKI, VENUS ZINE WRITER
Lately, I've been thinking about how über-DIY my mom is. I have fond memories of my hippie-parents building their own garage and cutting labels off clothing to protest advertising. But my mom's Lately, I've been thinking about how über-DIY my mom is. I have fond memories of my hippie-parents building their own garage and cutting labels off clothing to protest advertising. But my mom's Do-It-Yourself attitude wasn't just ’60s counterculture-nonconformity, it was necessity. She came from scrappy immigrants who re-used every plastic baggie, every piece of aluminum foil. Then her father died when she was 16, and DIY took on a whole new meaning for her family — making their own clothing, canning vegetables and fruit actually helped the 6 of them survive. During my childhood, she managed to work full-time while also making clothing and costumes for us kids, designing her own "Snugli" before they were popular, cooking from scratch, baking elaborate birthday cakes in the shapes of trains and animals, and still attending every game, every dance performance. Even now, when it's no longer financially necessary, she re-uses materials, gardens, and makes clothing herself. I believe that every creative urge, every cooking, yoga, or gardening impulse that my siblings and I have, we owe to the DIY street-cred instilled by my amazing mother when we were kids.

Profero, Inc, Press Release, 2007

2007-04-01T23:18:00.001-05:00

Profero, Inc. Press Release

Contact: Jean Lareau Profero, Inc.
1-888-4 Lean 5S
www.ProferoInc.com

For Immediate Release Chicago, IL Profero, Inc. Adds New Office to Accommodate Growth
CHICAGO, IL (April 6, 2007) — Profero Inc., a leader in Lean Enterprise methods, will be adding a new office space to their organization in April 2007. Profero will retain its main corporate headquarters in Chicago’s Printer’s Row neighborhood, but the new space in the historic Monadnock Building will allow for Profero’s recent expansion and growth.

Profero has enjoyed a number of recent successes. In the past year, they have expanded their client base and given dozens of workshops, trainings, and lectures in locations across the country. They have also launched a 5S Supply site , and are gearing up to launch a redesign of their main website. All these projects have led to more jobs, added income, and a need for additional accommodations.

Profero’s Tony Manos is optimistic about the added space. “In the past year, we’ve found that the office in Printer’s Row wasn’t large enough to accommodate all our clientele, staff, and storage needs. So, we decided that it was time to commit to additional space which will also foster better client-consultant interactions.” Built in 1893, the Monadnock building is a famed piece of Chicago Loop architecture, known for its “nationally acclaimed melding of historic character and modern technology.”

The Monadnock is also ideal for Profero since the building’s varied suite-sizes can grow as Profero grows. Manos stresses how the new Monadnock office will foster Profero’s continued expansion; “The additional space points to our recent gains and will give us more flexibility to suit our growth,” he says.

# # # About Profero, Inc.:
Profero, Inc. coaches, guides, and delivers excellence via quality and process improvements including Lean Enterprise. Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, Profero performs services all over the world. For more information, see www.ProferoInc.com.

Time Out Chicago; Books Article; O Street

2007-03-15T12:05:00.002-05:00

Time Out Chicago / Issue 107: March 15–21, 2007

Chicks and balances

A debut author upends chick lit with an unflinching look at poverty.

By Gretchen Kalwinski

If there existed a polar opposite to chick lit, Corrina Wycoff’s O Street (OV Books, $17.95) would exemplify the genre. The debut author isn’t interested in romanticizing love, motherhood, hardship—or anything at all, come to think of it.

O Street collects ten short stories about Beth Dinard, who spends her Newark childhood caring for her mentally ill, homeless, junkie single mother. “Visiting Mrs. Ferullo” shows Beth following a neighbor home, longing for the home-cooking aromas that waft from the woman’s apartment. In “The Wrong Place in the World,” adult Beth is in Chicago trying to stabilize her life even while her brutal memories affect her relationships and attitudes about class and work. When she gets a phone call informing her of her mother’s death, it triggers a relapse into old, destructive patterns. It’s tempting to read the tightly linked stories as a novel, but Wycoff stresses the importance of the form.

“In a linked-story format, I can present other points of view as short pieces of contrast,” she says. “I wanted to structure the book so that it begins and ends with a death, because I wanted it to read as a cycle. Linearity, to me, seems more of a construct than cycles.”

A single mother herself, Wycoff says the stories should not be confused with autobiography.

“They are based on a political truth: Single mothers fall through the cracks in this country, and the cracks grow in proportion to these women’s economic challenges, making inaccessible the so-called American Dream,” she says. “When my son was born, I’d not yet gone to college, and money was extremely tight. I drew on that experience…but by the time I wrote about it, [I] had changed enough that it didn’t resemble my ‘real’ life at all.”

In one scene, a depressed Beth wishes that she could “grow into someone new—someone who could easily have had two parents, good breeding, hearty suppers and piano lessons.” Passages like these strike unexpected chords. Though many contemporary narratives deal with women’s physical and spiritual transformations, few do so at the poverty level. This is, of course, no grand coincidence: Poor women face even more barriers than their male counterparts in getting their stories told.

“The second of these I wrote when my son was two years old,” says Wycoff. “I wrote it, in part, in reaction to all of the sentimental, dreamy writing about motherhood. ”

In Chicago, Wycoff met UIC’s Cris Mazza, an award-winning author who has waged a one-woman war against the chick-lit genre. Since then, Mazza has become both her creative muse and mentor.

“Twelve years ago, I read How to Leave a Country, and decided I needed to read everything she’d ever written,” Wycoff says. “She was the reason I chose to go to college and, later, graduate school at UIC, and she helped me see that the disparate single-mother stories I’d written could be linked.”

Because of the book’s gravitas (the title story is especially harrowing), getting O Street published wasn’t easy.

“I got about seven rejections over the course of four years, all from small presses,” she says, “many of whom called the collection ‘too dark.’”

Indeed, Wycoff portrays the gritty, sorrowful elements of her characters’ lives head-on and offers no easy solutions—no one’s riding up on a white horse, but neither are the stories bleak. Instead, drama and tension are delivered in such a subtle but detail-infused way that the reader becomes invested in Beth’s plight early on in the collection. The collection will likely elicit Dorothy Allison comparisons for its depictions of poor women and lesbian relationships, .

Wycoff is working on a novel now, and is planning another about teaching at a community college.

With chick lit down, it looks like the vaunted “university novel” may next.

Wycoff reads this week.

Punk Planet; Book Review; Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs

2007-03-06T16:03:00.001-06:00

The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs
Written by: Irvine Welsh
Review by: Gretchen Kalwinski

In Bedroom Secrets, Danny Skinner is a rakishly handsome, carousing restaurant inspector living in Edinburgh, plugging away just fine until Brian Kibby arrives as his co-worker. Kibby is seemingly unthreatening--quiet with "cowlike" eyes and a bit of a mama's boy, but generally inoffensive. However, Skinner immediately hates Kibby with an intensity that even he doesn't understand. Via his contempt and competitiveness, some of his long-languishing problems, long-clouded by booze begin to rise to the surface and throw his whole life into upheaval and disarray. He begins to pester his formerly punk-rock mother about his father's identity, (which she'll only jokingly give as Joe Strummer of The Clash), and throws away whatever was left of his relationship with Kay, a beautiful dancer who's been finding his drinking bouts increasingly tiresome.

Skinner eventually puts a curse on Kibby that results in the Star Trek and model train-obsessed boy beginning to suffer the damage of Skinner's abusive lifestyle. This sets in motion Kibby's declining health and Skinner's gleeful indulgences in even more booze, drugs, fighting, and sexcapades. Simultaneously, Skinner's search for his father's identity takes him to San Francisco and back via information he learns in a book penned by an obnoxious TV chef. Once he returns home, Kibby starts approaching death and begins to learn the ins-and-outs of the curse and how he might be able to reverse it.

This is Welsh's eighth novel centering around gritty, urban environments and one common critique of his work is that he's never departed from stock characters and themes from Trainspotting. It's true that the ho-hum-by-now grit is Welsh's schtick, but he's also got substance in spades. For all of his stock use of transgressive
content -- booze, drugs, orgies, sickness (and gratingly flagrant use of the c-word, by the way) -- Welsh knows how to tell a story in the old-fashioned sense of the word, a narrative that subtly builds tension in increasingly complex characters, delivers unexpected plot twists and resolutions, and conjures a reader's genuine investment in outcomes. Few writers handle the-beauty-of-ugliness themes as well as Welsh and the warm humanity of his deft language coupled with his insights into ego and the dark side of human nature makes Bedroom Secrets a compelling read.

--Gretchen Kalwinski

Centerstage Chicago; Theater Review; Once Upon a Time

2007-02-13T15:39:00.001-06:00

Once Upon a Time (or the Secret Language of Birds)

Joe Meno injects Redmoon's aesthetic with his particular brand of unsentimental yet pathos-laden humor.

Tuesday Feb 13, 2007
by Gretchen Kalwinski

Redmoon Theater is known for its outlandish productions that employ puppets, carnival aesthetics, gymnastics and whimsical, otherworldly sets and costumers. But sometimes their performances can suffer from a lack of narrative arc—the fantastical, beautiful scenes are entertaining in their own right, but aren't always held together by a strong plot.

But for "Once Upon A Time," Redmoon hired a writer to piece together parts of their concept and form a cohesive script. Enter Joe Meno, acclaimed Chicago novelist and playwright, who also has a penchant for the whimsical. Meno promptly injected Redmoon's aesthetic with his particular brand of unsentimental yet pathos-laden humor, creating a modern fairy tale about Emily, a lonely and lost girl living in a tenement in the 1920s. After realizing she can speak to and understand the chirping of birds, her loneliness is eased.

The engaging plot that follows revolves around the theft of "all the world's birds" and the corresponding loss of human dreams. With some clues to guide them as to the whereabouts of the stolen birds, Emily and her friend Bruno (a retired wrestler and giant) embark on a dangerous quest to retrieve them.

The lovely and unusual set is comprised of a small puppet theater at center stage and a large screen above, which the puppet action gets projected onto. Narrator Lindsey Noel Whiting does double-duty providing voices for all the characters, while the puppets—made up of entertaining, disproportionate photos—are maneuvered by puppeteers via sticks. All this is set against local musician Kevin Donnell's haunting atmospheric music.

The puppet theater itself is an intricate masterpiece, which the audience crowded around when the play ended. Aside from the illustrations and little mini-sets built into it, the theater also employs a clever, wheel-driven mechanism (designed by jack-of-all trade artist Erik Newman) for moving panels of scenery back and forth on hemp-string. Others members of the stellar artistic team include director Frank Maugeri, Kass Copeland (puppet theater design), Seth Bockley (assistant director), Tracy Otwell (toy theater design), Angela Tillges (art director) and Jim Lasko (Redmoon founder).

The ticket price is a bit steep: $30 for adults and $15 for tots. But the haunting mood that Redmoon creates with its visual dynamism, along with the warm humanity of the tale, makes it a perfect wintertime family outing that's well worth the cost of admission.

"Once Upon a Time (or the Secret Language of Birds)" runs through April 8 at Redmoon Central, 1463 W. Hubbard Street, Chicago. Shows 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Sunday; 3 p.m. Saturday-Sunday, $15-30; call (312) 850-8440.

American Library Association, Web Brochure

2007-01-01T15:17:00.000-06:00

American Library Association
Advocacy Registry Homepage: Our Nation’s Libraries Need More Advocates!

Your voice is crucial in making the case for libraries. You – the library patron, the library Friend, the library lover – are the heart and soul of the library community, and you can capture the attention of decision-makers like no one else. By subscribing to the Advocacy Registry, you will have access to a full range of benefits and advocacy tools including:

Online Action Kit (Also available to ALA members).
Key Message Web site (Also available to ALA members).
Best Practices Web site (Also available to the public).
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Centerstagechicago.com; Theater review; Sonia Flew

2006-12-30T15:49:00.001-06:00

Sonia Flew
Steppenwolf Theater

By: Gretchen Kalwinski

At age 15, Sonia, the main character in Sonia Flew, was an unwitting participant in "Operation Pedro Pan," a secret 1959 CIA disinformation program designed to overthrow Castro by scaring middle-class Cuban parents into shipping their children to the US amidst false promises of a prompt reunion.

Sonia never saw her parents again, but survived foster homes and the struggles of assimilating into American life to eventually marry a second generation Jewish doctor, (his father was a Polish Jew who fought in WWII), work for the public defender, and live a comfortable, middle-class life in Minneapolis with her husband and children. But, in the opening living-room scenes, Sonia's life is again thrown into the confusion, panic, and disarray of wartime-upheaval via a shocking announcement from a family member that thrusts her back into 1950's Cuba. Inevitably, Sonia is forced to grapple with issues of loss, memory, and familial betrayal all over again.

Written by Melinda Lopez and directed by Steppenwolf associate artist Jessica Thebus, Sonia Flew brilliantly illustrates the ways that immigrants must partially forget their pasts in order to start anew in their adopted country. It also sets up some clever parallels between the Castro regime, World War II, and the war in contemporary Iraq. The standout part of the play is the sharp, witty dialogue delivered by stand-out actors, coupled with the intelligent political and cultural references that weave together complementary time periods and political events in a thoughtful, deeply felt manner. Sonia's flackback monologues delivered on a darkened stage are especially powerful, as the audience is given access to the moments of her traumatic past that are informing her seemingly irrational reactions to present-day events.

Occasionally, the play hits you over the head with some of the paralells between the US conflicts with Cuba, Germany, and Iraq, providing conclusions that were a bit too "easy." For example, during one "flashback" scene, the metaphor to today's political climate and leaders was already perfectly evident, yet one character's dialogue unnecessarily spelled it out for the audience, amping down the effect of the scene. As a viewer who enjoys the opportunity to figure connections out for myself, I found it disappointing to have the answers handed to me.

Otherwise, Sonia Flew is a polished, professional performance that investigates issues of identity and memory, immigration and cross-cultural families with nuance and intelligence, both informing and provoking its viewers.

"Sonia Flew" runs through Feb 4 at the Steppenwolf's Downstairs Theater, 1650 N. Halsted Street, Chicago. Shows 7:30 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday; 3 p.m. Saturday-Sunday; $45-55; call (312) 335-1650.

CenterstageChicago; Review; A Christmas Carol

2006-12-04T11:53:00.001-06:00

Centerstagechicago.com; Theater Review

A Very Chicago Christmas

Attending the Goodman Theater's annual production of "A Christmas Carol."

Monday Dec 04, 2006 by Gretchen Kalwinski

Pictured in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol adapted by Tom Creamer directed by William Brown are (l to r) Martin Yurek (Ghost of Jacob Marley) and Jonathan Weir (Ebenezer Scrooge).

photo: Michael Brosilow

I'll admit it: I'm one of those holiday-nerds who cues up my iTunes holiday playlist the day after Thanksgiving. Even so, I haven't attended the Goodman Theatre's long-running annual production of "A Christmas Carol" since I was a kid, carted in from Northwest Indiana on a class field trip. The reason is twofold: One, the crowds, and Two, the germy half-pints who tend to make up a large portion of the audience.

This year I decided to throw caution to the wind and see the Dickens classic on the weekend following Thanksgiving with my mom. We had some extra time before the show and could have checked out the Macy's Christmas windows kitty-corner from the theater (and with a Mary Poppins theme), but as Marshall Fields die-hards we turned up our noses at the opportunity and passed them by with nary a second glance.

Instead, we walked to Dearborn and Washington to take in the Chriskindlmarket (an outdoor holiday bazaar sponsored by the German American Chamber of Commerce of the Midwest) at the Daley Center. Chriskindlmarket usually runs during the month before Christmas and shows off a big, lighted tree, craft and gift booths, and even Santa Claus.

Some of the crafts embrace the cheeze-factor, but there are also a good amount of delicate hand-carved and glass-blown ornaments, pretty lace tablecloths and artfully clever puppets and toys—and foodstuffs; among other delectable offerings were brats with kraut, apple cider, almond-apricot strudel and sweet-cheese fritters.

Satiated, we made our way to the Goodman, listened to the carolers in the lobby, and took our seats. A fun fact: "A Christmas Carol" has been running since 1978 but the company changes it up a little every year to keep things fresh. I found that the timeless play was even better than what I remembered as a kid: The authentic sets were spot-on, the flying and ghostly effects were clever, and Scrooge was a deliciously cranky (and funny) curmudgeon, backed up with a talented and believable cast.

Years of honing the production means that the look of the sets is authentically Dickensian and are neither amateurish or overdone. They even managed to find a Tiny Tim who was legitimately cute instead of cloying.

More than that, the whole experience felt communal in a really good way, and the layout and intimate size of the Goodman lends themselves to that vibe. Though I'd originally balked at the idea of hoards of kiddies, I didn't mind the ones I ran into; it was refreshing to attend this well-worn production with a gaggle of tots who were probably seeing their first play ever and it lent some extra jubilation to the event. The lessons in A Christmas Carol may seem to be "true meaning of Christmas" cliches, but hey, some tales bear repeating, and the morals are well-worn ones that aren't bad to be reminded of now and then, right?

After the production, we tried to go to Petterino's, the legendary bar and restaurant attached to the theater, but it was too busy, so we opted for the Atwood Cafe around the corner in the Hotel Burnam instead, and sipped on an overpriced spiked cider and Manhattan, watching the State Street passerby.

And that soft fuzzy buzz you feel? That's how you truly know that the holidaze have arrived.

Guidebook rating: It goes without saying that all holiday-nerds should attend the production at least once to kick-start their holiday season. But even if you're not a holiday nerd, and are made to attend in order to appease family members or out-of-towners, you're going to have a blast. Make the most of being downtown by checking out the Macy's windows and sucking down a cold-weather drink at Petterino's or Atwood Cafe.

Stats: A Christmas Carol runs two hours and five minutes including one 15-minute intermission. It generally runs the Sunday after Thanksgiving through Dec. 20.

Time Out Chicago; Book Review; Twilight

2006-12-01T16:06:00.001-06:00

Twilight, by William Gay

A word of warning: William Gay's third novel Twilight isn't for the faint-hearted, so don't bother with it if you can't stomach necrophilia, grave-robbery, and some gruesome beatings and murders. Billed as a southern-gothic fairy tale, the story is set in 1950's Tennessee and opens with sister and brother Corrie and Kenneth Tyler's discovery that something is amiss with their recently-buried father's grave and that the foul, creepy undertaker Fenton Breece likely has something to do with it. Their father was a legendary bootlegger and abusive drunk but the Tylers are respectful of his memory, so they begin a graveyard-investigation to find out what Breece is up to.

Their detective work leads them to reveal evil on a more massive scale than they've ever encountered. The duo contacts authorities with evidence against Breece but are shunned because of their low-class standing, so they decide to blackmail the undertaker and escape the town forever. Naturally, Breece strikes back by sending the sinister town-thug—a known murderer named Granville Sutter—after them, forcing Kenneth to flee to the mysterious Harrikin woods, with the goal of reaching a safer town on the other side.

The chase through the Harrikin is where Gay's storytelling and descriptive skills are most evident. Here, Kenneth encounters various backwoods folks (a fierce old coot, a witch) and these passages showcase his lyricism and dynamic, true dialogue. This is also where the good-versus-evil themes hit their stride; in one chilling scene, the witch suggests that in Kenneth's stirring up of the world's wickedness, he "got it on you, ain't ye?"

The hunt eventually comes to a climax and Sutter catches up with Kenneth, which is where Gay makes an egregious decision in terms of plot believability. The Harrikin portion preceding was so well-rendered that you're looking for a cleverly hellfire-and-brimstone scene but instead you're in the realm of Scooby-Doo. It's a huge disappointment and knocks this otherwise original and gorgeously, (if gruesomely) executed book down a few fatal notches.

Punk Planet; Book Review; We Don't Need Another Wave

2006-10-28T09:57:00.001-05:00

We Don’t Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists
Edited By: Melody Berger
Publisher: Seal Press

Editor and founder of The F-word zine Melody Berger compiled this collection of essays to critique the ways that contemporary feminism is discussed in the media. “We don’t need another wave,” she writes in her introduction. “We need a movement.”

The foreword is by Bitch Magazine editor and founder Lisa Jervis, who says that the “wave” terminology has outlived its usefulness and is often used by the mainstream press to position 2nd and 3rd wavers as “anti” one another, (i.e., 2nd Wavers reject humor and sex; 3rd Wavers aren’t politically active). Jervis’ take is that the idea of a simplistic generational divide serves no one, and that we should keep discussing the main point—gender justice—while retaining myriad voices and opposing perspectives that move in the same direction: forward.

Topically, the essays run an impressive gamut—covering everything from Latina reproductive rights activists, a critique of the GLBT wedding industry, the organization of sex worker rights, one woman’s reclamation of sexuality after abuse, and the inherent issues of being one-half of an interracial lesbian couple. One of the contributors is Jessica Valenti, who runs a blog called feministing.com, and writes with intelligent passion about the image problem of the word “feminist” and why women shouldn’t shrink from it, in her piece, “You’re a Feminist. Deal.”

Another stirring essay is by Kat Marie Yoas, who grew up in a trailer park, and later ended up in academia. Yoas grapples eloquently with the complexities of living simultaneously in two disparate worlds, including identity-confusion, class-anger, and insulting assumptions made and spoken by her colleagues. In “Steam Room Revelations,” writer, teacher, and filmmaker Courtney Martin tells of coming to term with body issues and self-consciousness via a raucous group of older women who frequent the steam room at her local YMCA.

What’s thrilling about the collection is how firmly grounded in activism the contributors are. The diverse bylines are made up of educators, artists, poets, filmmakers, founders of non-profits, students, performers, all who live and breathe the issues they’re writing about. I’d nitpick that several of the confessional poems embedded in the collection don’t serve it well, but mostly this is a gaggle of brash, fun, enlightening, fearless, and on-point essays by people working in the trenches of contemporary feminist issues, and for that it’s well worth your lunch money. ---Gretchen Kalwinski

UR Chicago; Sounds Interview; Christine Baze

2006-10-12T12:48:00.001-05:00

UR Chicago / Sounds section

Interview with: Christine Baze
By: Gretchen Kalwinski

Christine Baze wants to reach every “woman and every man who has a woman in their life that they love” so that she can scare the hell out of them. With good reason -- she's trying to prevent other women from suffering as she did in 2000, after being diagnosed with cervical cancer and having a hysterectomy 10 days later, throwing her life and musical career into disarray.

During recovery, Baze learned about cervical cancer and HPV (high-risk types of the virus cause cervical cancer and low-risk types cause genital warts). She also watched Harold and Maude, a film famous for its humorous morbidity and spirited, 79-year-old Maude. Inspired by Maude's yellow umbrella, Baze began playing music again and decided to incorporate cervical cancer awareness into her message. She started the nonprofit organization Popsmear.org and the Yellow Umbrella tour, an annual musical benefit that educates women about preventing cervical cancer.

HPV is extremely common -- almost 80 percent of women will get the virus by the age of 50. It gives no symptoms and is transmitted through sexual contact. Annual Pap tests are supposed to catch precancerous cells but they don't always do so, and Paps don't test for HPV, so it's important to get both the liquid Pap and HPV test. “People say, 'It's too invasive to get in the stirrups or get a finger up my butt,'” Baze says. “But you know what's really invasive? Getting a radical hysterectomy or internal radiation. Getting a Pap or an HPV test -- that's going to save your life.”

Having HPV doesn't mean you'll get cervical cancer: The immune system usually fights off the infection. But when high-risk types of HPV persist, precancerous cell changes can occur and cause cervical cancer. However, because it is one of the few types of cancer for which the cause is known, Baze says it's beatable. “We've got the answers and we can't say that about any other cancer.”

Baze's initial reaction to her own diagnosis was disbelief. “I was healthy and having the time of my life,” she recalls. “After the disbelief was incredible horror and anxiety.” But her compassion made her an activist. “Cancer disempowers you because your own body is betraying you,” she says. “But after chemo I felt so empowered and started getting onstage saying, 'Hey ladies! Pay attention! This can save your life.' It worked -- and now I'm in my fourth year of touring around the country doing essentially the same thing.”

This fall, Baze and headliner Kaki King (previous lineups featured Ben Folds and the Samples) will perform in 35 U.S. cities, including Chicago. The tour is also sponsored by companies doing work related to cervical cancer, such as Digene, the makers of the HPV test.

Baze, whose new album, Something New (Lime Green), mixes jazz with electronica, says her musical sensibilities shifted post-cancer. “I was trained as a classical pianist and did that for 20 years, then just before cancer my music had a nonsensical, whimsical attitude,” she says. “Now the songs come from a place of deep appreciation of my life. These days I think about the gift of cancer, the enlightenment that comes with it.”

The tour reflects the same spirit. “We're celebrating the passion of music and the passion of life,” Baze says. “Even the venues and promoters have been so supportive; these guys come up to me at the end of the night like, 'Hey Christine, what's that test? HPV? I gotta tell my wife.' And they write it on their hand to remember, which is so cool. If that happens once every show, everything I'm doing is worth it.”

Words: Gretchen Kalwinski

The Yellow Umbrella Tour hits Schubas (3159 N. Southport; 773/525-2508) October 14; Something New is out now

For more SOUNDS coverage, pick up the latest issue of UR Chicago in streetboxes now

Time Out Chicago; Book Review; Children's Hospital

2006-10-11T16:13:00.001-05:00

Book review published in:

Time Out Chicago / Issue 85: Oct 12–Oct 18, 2006

The Children’s Hospital
By Chris Adrian. McSweeney’s, $24.

Forget everything you know about doomsday lit. In his debut novel, Chris Adrian turns the concept on its head with his disaster tale of a flood covering the earth with a seven-mile-deep layer of water, leaving the inhabitants of a magically engineered and angel-commissioned children’s hospital as the only survivors.

The hospital staff members continue to dutifully perform their jobs attending to sick children, sure that they’ll soon hit land. The protagonist is Jemma Chaflin—medical student and all-around tragic figure—whose entire family has previously perished by either gruesome accidents or suicide, leaving Jemma to believe that anyone she loves is cursed. As months pass, they float uneasily, fighting madness, suspicion and fear, eventually shedding their Old World ways and breaking from the social order they instituted. Jemma stands out when she starts exhibiting mystical healing powers and is whispered to be everything from a Jesus figure to a demon.

The 600-page tome is flabby in parts and heavier editing could’ve excised the slow midsection. But Adrian has a way with weirdly arresting images, and the religion found here is of the palpable, God-fearing, apocalyptic kind, all sprung from his singular imagination.

—Gretchen Kalwinski

Venus Zine; Vodcast; Renegade Craft Fair

2006-10-04T14:11:00.002-05:00

Venus Zine
Video Podcast from Renegade Craft Fair
Evidently, I lisp.

Stop Smiling; Article: Jean Shepherd

2006-09-30T21:08:00.002-05:00

Stop Smiling Magazine
Issue #27 / September 2006

In Shep We Trust: Jean Shepherd Remembered
By: Gretchen Kalwinski

“We spend most of our lives trying to outlive our pasts,” Jean Shepherd claimed in a radio broadcast about encountering raw clams, an unheard-of food in the meatloaf-Indiana of his youth. “And we never do quite expunge the past.” Known as “Shep”, Jean Shepherd (1921-1999), was a raconteur, writer, and actor, but his true legacy was his genius for weaving everyday events into goosebump-inducing radio narratives. He created a magnificent intimacy with his listeners in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Radio producer Harry Shearer notes; “He told supercilious East Coasters stories about the Midwest, not the romanticized Midwest of small-town life, but a Midwest that we didn’t know existed—the Midwest of steel mills, of tornados.” Broadcaster Joe Frank, a former insomniac, claims that Shepherd “had such a positive, life-affirming humanity that it gave me a genuine sense of comfort…. that made it possible to fall asleep.”

Shepherd grew up in Hammond, Indiana, a mill town bordering Chicago’s South Side, gaining mainstream fame for the film “A Christmas Story,” based on his short story collection, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash. In 1955, he moved to New York where he began his radio show, but Shepherd’s voice retained his origins, and his crooning; (“After you’re gone, dere ain’t no denyin,’) contained the unmistakably nasal undertones of South Side Chicago and Calumet Region. He read poetry and organized listener pranks, often while kazoo-playing, with show topics ranging from his scorn of advertising, love of pickles, or the White Sox. But his best-known are those about kid-dom in the rustbelt Midwest. One show compares a steel mill to Dante’s sixth circle of hell; “I’m gonna tell you people about how different life is outside of the PJ Clarke and martini-drinker orbit. I worked on the bull gang in a steel mill… in a town that hangs like a rusty barnacle from the South Side of Chicago.” In Excelsior You Fathead!: The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd, Eugene Berman notes that Shepherd "tickled the better parts of your mind" because he knew just when to pick up speed or change course. This skill is the ability to make a dollar out of fifteen cents, and Shepherd had it in spades. His improvisational mastery led to friendships with Jack Kerouac and Charles Mingus; he collaborated with Mingus on his 1957 album, The Clown.

Often blurring fact and fiction, Shepherd often lied about or withheld actual biographical information; repeatedly denying the existence of his two children, who he abandoned along with his first wife. Shepherd gleefully disdained “suits” and enjoyed playing the disenfranchised gadfly. He sometimes lapsed into ranting and buffoonery, calling women chicks and portraying the gender as daffy biddies, and it’s assumed that the warmth in his storytelling probably wasn’t present in his personal life. In Hammond, Shepherd’s name inspires mixed emotions. The town has a community center in his name, and many revere him as “Hammond’s Most Famous Resident.” Others revile him for characterizing them as provincial, working-class stiffs; “If Chicago is the city of broad shoulders, then Northwest Indiana is its broad rear end.” But the region was his bread and butter, and in the rest of the world, he’s only marginally known. In 1999, Shepherd died alone in Florida with his past so emphatically shed that his obituary read: “no survivors.”

If you squint, a nighttime drive through Hammond is a Venice of glistening marshes and rivers. Cheap hotels flash neon, and lumbering freight trains blow whistles, while smokestacks on Lake Michigan pump smoke and blue-orange flames around the neighborhoods. Despite himself, Shepherd couldn’t shake these childhood impressions, and spent his life using his voice to drift into people’s nighttime consciousness. Being immortalized by his similarity to the Calumet Region would be bittersweet to Shepherd, but the words he broadcast through the night air voiced a desolation and ugliness so intense that it became beautiful, and he managed to transcend the smokestacks, hovering in listener’s minds like a pervasive cloud. --GK

Time Out Chicago; Book Review; Alligator

2006-09-21T19:19:00.001-05:00

Book review published in:
Time Out Chicago / Issue 82: Sept 21–Sept 27, 2006

Alligator
Lisa Moore. Black Cat, $12.
By: Gretchen Kalwinski

Alligators are only incidental to Lisa Moore’s novel, but the symbolism of a deceptively slow-moving monster is apt in this tale. Alligator’s plot creeps along more quickly and desperately than apparent, and there are a lot of murky happenings taking place beneath the surface.

The vividly drawn characters include eccentric, aging filmmaker Madeleine, recently widowed Beverly, teenage ecovandalist Colleen, Russian thug Valentin and disastrously unlucky lonely guy Frank. They’re all oddballs: Colleen ritually watches beheadings on the Internet so that the victim is not alone; Madeline is crazed with finishing a film about “everything” before she dies; and Frank is a desperately hardworking hot-dog vendor. Though the plot is nonlinear, with constantly shifting perspectives, Moore inhabits the disparate worlds of her characters elegantly. The challenging structure adeptly builds tension as simultaneous events move the plot along, and there is the building sense that all are heading toward strangely connected climactic events. Moore’s prose is tight, tough and stunningly original; when an ex-lover booty-calls, he craves a “languid tussle.” Midway through, we were invested enough in the characters to enter the throes of page-turning headiness, even though we still weren’t sure how they were connected.

A prizewinning short-story writer, Moore makes her first turn as a novelist with this book and she succeeds magnificently for the most part. Our only beef came at the end: We were engaged and waiting for the kind of emotional wrap-up that someone like Eugenides delivers, but the last five pages fell flat. We just wish she hadn’t taken us nearly to the finish line only to stop short and meander off the track. —GK

Centerstagechicago.com; Theater review; Pantomime

2006-09-15T20:54:00.001-05:00

Pantomime
Switching racial roles...with so-so results.

Tuesday Sep 19, 2006
By: Gretchen Kalwinski

This two-man play follows Harry Trewe (a British hotel owner in Tobago), his black employee Jackson Phillip, and the tale of what happens when Harry proposes that they put on a play satirizing the Robinson Crusoe story to entertain the hotel guests.

Nobel Prize-winning playwright Derek Walcott is known primarily for his poetry, but in this 1978 play, currently produced by Pegasus Players, he fleshes out the implications of what happens when racial roles get switched. Almost the entire first half of the play is sucked up by Harry trying to wheedle Jackson into a role reversal: Harry will play (black) Friday and Jackson will play (white) Crusoe. At first Jackson wants no part, but once he concedes he throws himself into his role with such gusto that Harry worries it could be perceived as offensive, not "something light" as he'd intended. He pulls rank on Jackson, telling him to scrap the plan and get back to work, which Jackson takes as typical imperialist behavior. By that point, the servant-master roles have been effectively flipped and they begin to lash out at one another.

Problem is, when their interaction starts to get melodramatic in the second act, the high emotion isn't believable. This isn't because 1978 was so different from now: The themes are still important. But here they come across as heavy-handed versions truisms. The mechanism of "sage person of color teaching uptight Caucasian how to truly live" is such a cliche at this point that it seems like vaudeville.

The conventional direction brought little innovation to the table; maybe several decades ago the literalness of the script translated differently, but this production never rises above surface level. Walcott's script is intelligent and insightful (if a bit drawn out and thunderous) and the set design is good, if not inventive. Andre Teamer and Kipp Moorman (as Jackson and Harry, respectively) work hard with what they've got, yet their characters never quite evoke the intended response, and the wink-nudge ending doesn't feel earned by the earlier parts of the play.

Pegasus Players is to be commended for taking on serious social issues here, not to mention its admirable goal of filling the theatrical needs of the Uptown neighborhood. But the group missed the mark in "Pantomime," despite good intentions. Some inventiveness, nuance and subtlety would go a long way in polishing their next production.

Playing at the Pegasus Players; 1145 W. Wilson Avenue, in the O'Rourke Center at Truman College; (773) 878-9761; $17-$25. Playing through October 22, 2006; 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday; 3 p.m. Sunday.

Venus Zine, Profile of Julie Shapiro

2006-09-10T20:19:00.004-05:00

Venus Zine / Fall 2006

Listen up!

Audio artist Julie Shapiro shares her thoughts on the current radio renaissance and shows how you can get in on the action

By: Gretchen Kalwinski

As managing director for Chicago’s Third Coast International Audio Festival, an annual and on-going celebration of documentary and feature audio works, Julie Shapiro is an expert on fascinating radio segments, but her girlhood listening was uber-ordinary; "Typical for a white Midwestern Jewish girl,” she laughs. “Billy Joel, Neil Diamond, Peter, Paul, and Mary." Shapiro began working with TCIAF in 2000. There, with executive director Johanna Zorn, she chooses radio documentaries for their competition, hosts "Listening Room" events, and travels to worldwide radio conferences, which has been life-changing: “It’s opened my ears and mind to audio work from all over the world, and stretched my mind about the power of sound.”

Shapiro did a college radio show at Transylvania University, where she played typical indie stuff of its time; Husker Du, Uncle Tupelo, The Slits. During the 90’s, she lived in Boulder, Colorado, Portland, Oregon, and Durham, North Carolina, where she worked in a record store and public radio station and played drums, which helped her become “more receptive to sound” and led to her appreciation for experimental artists like John Cage and Meredith Monk. "I got into composition and very beautiful spacey sounds."

An audio artist herself, Shapiro produced a tribute to model-horse collectors titled, “Are There Any More Rare, Plastic Ponies?,” which was picked up by TCIAF’s Re:sound. (thirdcoastfestival.org/resound_2005_june.asp). She also runs an audio-blog called notetheslantoftheovals.blogspot.com, and, apart from TCIAF, hosts Lissenup!, a listening event that began as a potluck, where she plays beloved audio pieces including one by Benjamen Walker (about a Darth Vader impersonator) and another in which Brooklyn student Natalie Edwards does a tongue-in-cheek investigation of prostitution. She’s currently considering new Lissenup! venues and the use of blindfolds to engage the senses.

Shapiro claims that we’re in a radio renaissance, evidenced by the number of younger people, journalists, and filmmakers exploring the field. “Radio's being recognized as an art form as well as a source for news and information, like in the pre-TV days. And, being surrounded by radio stories at TCIAF, I'm constantly learning--whether about blood feuds in Albania or one guy's encounter with a blind dog in Wyoming. Being able to help bring these stories to many more ears has been such a privilege. And a blast.”

Julie’s Advice on Producing Audio Segments

--Equipment
There's tons of used equipment online. The basics are: a microphone, recorder, and editing software, such as Audacity. (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/).

--Choosing a Story
Listen to many different styles of radio, and learn to be critical. (See transom.org, prx.org, and radiocollege.org.) Be careful with personal stories - they're often not that interesting to others. Make sure your story's really a contender for audio, and isn't just a spoken print piece. Think about stories that will surprise people or show them something new about the world.

-- Interviewing
Ask simple, straightforward questions. Watch for sounds that may disrupt conversations, like barking dogs, or humming refrigerators. It's ok to ask someone to repeat something or to stop wriggling in a squeaky chair. Always gather more tape than you think you'll need, and keep recording as long as possible. (Very often the best tape materializes after the "real" interview ends.)

--Putting Words Together with Music/Background Sound
Use the medium to its fullest! Sounds can play as important a role in telling your story as the narrative, [because] they're crucial to setting scenes. Music can add a lot to a listening experience but can also be a huge liability; don’t use the same songs you've heard in dozens of other radio stories. (No more Yo La Tengo!) In general the old adage "less is more" applies.

-- Editing
Writing is very different for radio than for print. Write like you talk - keep sentences simple and use words you usually use when you speak. Cut out every bit of tape you don't absolutely love. Then cut some more. If you're using narration keep it minimal and let the subjects of your story speak for themselves and move the story along. But don't leave out crucial information that'll help a listener understand the full context the story takes place in. Try to show, not tell. This is easy to do in radio, because you can actually include a clip of, say, a dog barking.

--Where to Send Your Finished Audio Segment
My advice to someone who wanted to get a serious start in radio would be to get an internship somewhere, not to start making stories cold and sending them around. That said, it's much better to contact any show or station you're hoping to work with BEFORE you produce anything, to find out what sort of work they're seeking; (most stations and shows' websites have contact info for this). Besides getting work onto airwaves, you can make a podcast and, or post it at prx.org, (a web-based marketplace for public radio pieces), where it can be reviewed by peers, and possibly picked up by a radio station. You can also just invite a bunch of friends over for a potluck, open a couple bottles of wine and beer, and have a listening party. ----GK

Stop Smiling; Article, Third Coast International Audio Festival

2006-09-03T21:14:00.002-05:00

Stop Smiling Magazine

Issue #27
September 2006
The Third Coast

By: Gretchen Kalwinski

The Third Coast International Audio Festival (TCIAF) began in 2000 as a Chicago Public Radio project with the goal of celebrating the “best feature and documentary audio work heard worldwide on the radio and Internet.” TCIAF has myriad components including an annual conference and competition, and a website that archives Re: sound, a weekly radio program. TCIAF produced the cd that accompanies the Midwest issue, and here’s what executive director Johanna Zorn had to say about the Midwest tie-in.

How did you choose the pieces for the cd?
We wanted to offer a variety of examples, so we picked some favorites that demonstrate the versatility of the radio form. There are four tracks, and three of them were made by producers from Illinois or Michigan. The stories are all over the place! There's a first-person narrative by a young gay boy trying to find his way in the world, and a documentary about a town in Arkansas that's forever changed by the appearance of a bird. The topics are very different, but what they all have in common is that sound plays an essential role in each story.

Who were some of the producers and artists?
Some may surprise you--for instance, writer Rick Moody and musician Sujfan Stevens. Artists from other mediums have a growing interest in using audio to tell stories and make art; we're witnessing a renaissance in using radio as a storytelling medium. Now, the tools for audio production are relatively low-cost; anyone can podcast through the Internet, and there are more radio programs out there inspiring folks who never took a journalism class to pick up some equipment and get busy.

Why did you choose the name “Third Coast Festival”?
While other cities may stake their claim to the third coast, we felt the title was especially fitting for a festival rooted in the heart of America's Midwest and headquartered on Navy Pier in Chicago, right where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan. So the third coast is literal, another name for our prime location, but since we're an international festival, we also hope it evokes coasts throughout the world. ---GK

Venus Zine; Review of Neko Case, Joanna Newsom show

2006-09-01T20:40:00.002-05:00

Venus Zine / September 1, 2006

Neko Case, Joanna Newsom, and Martha Wainright at McCarren Park Pool, August 24, 2006

Three performers crank it out in an abandoned pool, despite the ominous weather

By: Gretchen Kalwinski

John Lennon once described New York as the center of the universe, saying that, “If I was living in the time of Rome, I’d go to Rome. But I’m living now, so I’ll be in New York.” Freelance work being a bit slow in Chicago right now, I had this in mind when I hopped a red-eye to NYC to visit a pal. We got $2 sandwiches at the deli on the corner in her Brooklyn ‘hood, then hopped on the train to McCarren Park Pool where Joanna Newsom and Martha Wainwright were playing a 6 p.m. show headlined by the superb Neko Case.

The pool, unused for 20 years and three times the size of an Olympic one, has only recently been used as a venue, (to much controversy, since Clear Channel is sponsoring the shows). We got there amidst threatening rain clouds, and plopped down on the crumbling edge of the old pool just as the rain started full throttle and the charismatic Wainwright started to play. She began with the pensive “Far Away;” “Green grass blades are all on fire / I own the crack that's in the wind,” and later did a rocky-version of the standard “Stormy Weather” in a small homage to the increasing sea of umbrellas and ponchos. She was sweetly apologetic about the weather, yelling to the crowd, “You guys are such troupers; thank you for staying…Wish we had bathing suits.” As she wound up the set with “Baby,” she noted that she wasn’t going to be touring for a while “cause I need to make a new fuckin’ record!”

When Newsom walked onstage in her ‘70s sun-dress, the sky was clear, and the rain was drying from the peeling paint bottom of the decrepit pool. With a voice that the New York Times describes as “froggy, girlish” and my friend Meghan calls “Lamb Chop-esque” (the puppet, not the band), Newsom charmed the cheerful gaggle of hipsters with her weird, winsome songs, warbling in “Emily,” “I saw you last night by the river / I dreamed you were skipping little stones across the surface of the water / frowning at the angle where they were lost, and slipped under forever / in a mud-cloud, mica-spangled, like the sky'd been breathing on a mirror.”

By the time Newsom finished, the sky was clear. It was almost too bad, we thought, because it could’ve been great to see force-of-nature Case belt out songs during a thunderstorm. But to no one’s surprise, Case was magnificent anyway. She played a nice mix from her albums Furnace Room Lullaby, Blacklisted, The Tigers Have Spoken, and Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. Almost immediately, she played one of my favorites, uh “Favorite,” and the crowd began visibly swooning as she sang, “I thought you were golden / I thought you were wise / Caught you returning / To the house you caught fire.” One girl, evidently moved by the spirit, started waltzing by herself in an empty part of the pool, and three art-girl rockers began dancing near her with a spazzy mix of mod and country moves. In “Set Out Running,” Case threw back her head to bellow, “Want to GET it all behind me / you know everything reminds me / can’t be myself without you / wanna crawl down deep inside,” and I realized that the only trouble with her performances is that she makes it look so easy that people think that if they throw their heads back and belt it out, they can sound that way too. Hence, leaving the shows, you often see folks mimicking her singing with the same lusty abandon but without her blessed vocal chords. Ouch.

Case was in punchy spirits and kept referencing unicorn tarot cards that were recently gifted to her. “The unicorn oracle is guiding every decision I make tonight — even my clothes,” she informed the crowd. “Unicorns have this sexual power that I think is harnessed from every 12-year-old girl in the world. Basically when they’re not humping their Pink Panthers, they’re looking at unicorns and they don’t know why….” We left the show elated and I’m catching tonight’s red-eye back to Chicago.

So, in short, my visit did just what I wanted:
Jolts of confusion, in a good way: check. (Newsom).
Goosebumps from a favorite performer: check. (Case).
Celebrity sighting: check. (Jimmy Fallon was at the show).
New music introduction: check. (First time hearing Wainright live).

Back to ye olde Midwest, and my big, affordable apartment go I, fresh with invigoration. Thanks and kiss-kiss, NYC.

Photo Credit: Meghan Hickey

Time Out Chicago; Feature article: SKALD competition

2006-07-20T21:17:00.002-05:00

Time Out Chicago / Issue 73: July 20–27, 2006

The tell-tale art

The annual SKALD competition brings the art of storytelling out of the dark ages and onto the stage.

By: Gretchen Kalwinski

Photograph by Calbee Booth

Back in the days of Vikings, skald was a term for someone who told stories and performed poetry in exchange for jewels, cash and other booty. Evidently, human nature hasn’t changed much in the past few centuries: The annual SKALD storytelling competition, which offers such modern treasures as a $150 gift certificate from Borders and $250 in cash, has grown so popular that even the City of Chicago wants to get in on the action.

SKALD was born out of a 1999 WNEP Theater (a theater and comedy troupe) audition in which an actor told a two-minute story instead of performing the usual monologue or scene, WNEP’s founding director Don Hall recounts. These auditions were so entertaining, and company members were so eager to do it again, that storytelling quickly became its own show, SKALD. “In fact, most wanted to do it once a month,” Hall says. “I knew then that the concept had legs and decided to make it an annual thing.”

In past years, stories performed ranged from the irreverent—like the one about a man who gets a desk coffeemaker and becomes the office stud—to the creepy, like “a school janitor who used a classroom doll to…pleasure himself,” recalls SKALD competitor Rebecca Langguth. “It sounds darkly funny, but was heartbreaking.” Hall’s favorite story was performed by Jonathan Pitts about Pitts’s father David (an Ice Capades performer who skated with a chimpanzee named Spanky), and the duo’s encounter with a serial killer. “It was a true story, and Pitts showed the audience a blowup of the 1960s newspaper article at the end of his tale,” Hall says.

At this year’s SKALD, Hall hopes WNEP’s new partnership with the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs will lead to its biggest turnout yet. The city sponsorship means SKALD’s program is greatly expanded from last year, so this event includes more than the big storytelling competition on July 29. There’s also the MAELSTROM contest on July 28 (see sidebar), in which competitors are given ten seconds to create a three-minute story based on audience prompts. Young’uns will hear some tales at KIDSKALD, and a panel composed of storytelling experts such as Leah Guenther, executive director of Dave Eggers’s 826CHI writing program, and Greg Allen, the founding director of the Neo-Futurists. In addition, Hall will lead free workshops for adults while WNEP member Jessica Rogers teaches kids on Monday 24 and Tuesday 25.

In past years, competitors were admitted on a first-come, first-served basis, but this year’s high demand forced Hall to hold auditions. “We whittled it down to the best 16—six for MAELSTROM and ten for the [main] SKALD competition,” he says. SKALD contestants have six weeks to prepare their story, and Langguth says she plans to use every moment until then. “Last time I participated [in 2001], I practiced with an egg timer,” she says.

She also almost passed out from nerves. “I can still remember pulling the host aside and telling him that I didn’t think I could go on,” Langguth says. “Five years later, you’d think I’d have some kind of calm, but just thinking about it makes me nauseous. Maybe that’s what makes it such a wonder of a thing. Folks standing up and sharing something of themselves. It’s very intimate, in a way.” SKALD is about sharing stories, but it also involves competition. Yet Langguth’s got nothing but love for other participants: “Every year, there are new stories that break your heart or make you bust a gut. Last year, [eventual winner] Brad Norman told a fantastic story about a man who likes to bake. He made the most delicious chocolate-and-peanut-butter cake, and shared it with the audience afterwards.”

When asked about how she plans to demolish these other talented competitors, Langguth says, “It’s not about annihilation. I really want everyone to tell the best story, if only for my own entertainment.”

But then she quickly adds, “Don’t get me wrong—I want to win! Badly!” Just goes to show that things haven’t changed that much in the past few centuries: People still rally when booty is involved.

SKALD’s story time runs from Monday 24 to July 29. For more details, visit www.wneptheater.org/_html/skald7.html.

Stories on the spot

How good are this year’s MAELSTROM contenders? We gave four of them an idea and 10 seconds to improvise the beginning of a tale for us.

Competitor: Scot Goodhart Suggestion: “Cigarettes on the beach” Chrissie goes to the beach to “get fucked up.” The idea was that she and James would fill a Styrofoam cooler with Natural Light Ice and Marlboro Mediums, then take the 78 to the beach. They’ve been together for two months; he just moved in with Chrissie and her daughter Kaytlyn, who’s not his. The first thing I heard Chrissie say was, “It’s God’s fucking ashtray is why!” just before she swung at the guy confronting her about where she was depositing her butts. The last thing I heard her say as she was placed in the patrol car was, “I just wanted to get fucked up.”

Competitor: Mike Rosolio Suggestion: “Antlers” There are a few circumstances that no one, no matter how battle-hardened and worldwise, can be totally prepared to deal with. One of these is waking up in a foreign country. The world makes so much sense when you’re stationed in a log cabin–themed hotel in Seattle, and the clarity and comfort found there enhance the stark contrast of stepping off of a train car, blurry eyed from sleep deprivation and $2 mojitos, expecting to see the San Francisco Bay and finding instead the cruel beauty of British Columbia. While there wasn’t actually any danger of being detained against my will, and I was able to find a ticket back to the Golden State within a few hours, the point is instantly made that the future, no matter how scheduled it seems to be, is impossible to know, and that it might be among the wishes of fate to deliver you to the land of socialized medicine.

Competitor: Michael Brownlee Suggestion: “Breakneck” Samantha’s aching lungs fought to pull in enough oxygen to keep up with her pumping legs. “Faster. I need to go faster.” The footsteps behind her were closing in quick. She lowered her head and pushed herself harder. She could hear the panting breaths of her pursuer. She arched her back and lunged for safety. It was too late. She felt the hot hand on her back and cringed as she heard those awful, breathless words: “Tag. You’re it.”

Competitor: Cholley Kuhaneck Suggestion: “The postman rings twice” I don’t like getting mail. This offends my mail carrier. He tried marking all my mail return to sender. I was happy to see it go. He stuffed anything that was not addressed to anyone in particular in my mailbox. It backfired on him. He now had to move beyond Newtonian physics to make everything fit. Finally, he put my mail in everyone else’s mailboxes. All night my neighbors came by with pieces of mail for me. I put a note in my mailbox. “I promise I’ll get my mail weekly.” He left a note, “Write it a hundred times.”—Gretchen Kalwinski

Time Out Chicago; Feature excerpt; Lake Michigan Activities

2006-06-22T22:16:00.001-05:00

Time Out Chicago / Issue 69: June 22–June 29, 2006

10 things we love about the lake
Lake Michigan defines Chicago, both literally and figuratively. We think it’s time this underappreciated wonder got its props.

By: TOC Staff
Excerpt by: —Gretchen Kalwinski and Rod O’Connor

...2. It’s our own public water park
The lake offers plenty of ways to hold your own personal X Games. Howza ’bout kayaking? You can join Chicago Kayak (www.chicagokayak.com), which offers free rentals to members and departs from Leone and Wilson Beaches up north. You can get a yearlong club membership and a free introductory lesson—which is required to join the club—for a mere $130. If windsurfing is more your speed, Windward Sports (www.windwardsports.com) offers private lessons for $50 an hour from June–September. But for our money, the most exciting water sport is kitesurfing, in which harness-wearing participants combine surfing and kite-flying to navigate a board propelled by a huge kite. Chicago Kitesurfing (www.chicagokitesurfing.com) launches from Montrose Beach, and offers expert instructors, classes and equipment. All that’s required is water and wind (no waves needed). It’s a pricey hobby— a three-hour lesson (with equipment provided) costs $150–$250, and if you decide to buy your own gear, you’ll pay $1,000 to $3,000—but as any adrenaline junkie knows, you have to pay to play.

Plain, old-fashioned surfing is an option, too. Every day, Lake Michigan longboarders watch cold fronts closer than Tom Skilling, and when the winds hit 25 miles an hour, it’s time to slip on the wet suit in search of the perfect wave—calendar be damned. “I surf all year round, until the lake freezes over,” says Jim Hoop, 43, Chicago’s unofficial surfing ambassador. “I’ve surfed excellent waves on New Year’s Day.” If you wanna join the fun, hit Third Coast Surf Shop in New Buffalo, Michigan (269-932-4575, www.thirdcoastsurfshop.com), for lessons. And since surfing isn’t allowed in Chicago proper, head to Michigan City or Whiting in northwest Indiana, good spots when there’s a west or north wind.

Time Out Chicago; Feature; Strange Lake Tales

2006-06-22T22:00:00.001-05:00

Time Out Chicago / Issue 69: June 22–June 29, 2006

Strange but true lake tales
You may think you know all about Lake Michigan, but we dredged up some offbeat lake lore that is sure to float your boat.

Excerpt by: Gretchen Kalwinski

Making waves

You know how when you look across the lake, the other side looks really, really far away? It is. But some dude swam across the lake in 41 hours. See, ultramarathoner Jim Dreyer was running out of terrestrial body-punishing feats of endurance, so in 1998 he took to the water. Swimming the 65 miles between Two Rivers, Wisconsin, and Ludington, Michigan, in a little less than two days, he smoked the previous Lake Michigan distance record (held by IIT research chemist Ted Erickson, who swam the 44 miles from Chicago to Michigan City, Indiana, in 36 and a half hours). Though he was already a marathon-trained athlete, Dreyer had to add “meteorological expert” to his resumé in order to look out for potential hazards on the lake. But his real secret weapon: replaying Aerosmith and Beatles tunes in his head while he swam. (We’re hoping it was the older, pre–“I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” Aerosmith.) After a blitz of media attention, Dreyer continued his long-distance swimming in the four remaining Great Lakes and nabbed 13 world records, all to raise funds for Big Brothers Big Sisters and the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum (www.shipwreckmuseum.com) in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Here’s the kicker: He’d only learned to swim in 1996. Traumatized by water after almost drowning as a toddler, he finally decided to venture to his local swimming pool, where a kindly lifeguard gave him beginner’s lessons. “My swimming career had real modest beginnings, for sure,” Dreyer said. He plans to keep undertaking running and swimming challenges for charity; track his progress at www.swimjimswim.org. —Gretchen Kalwinski

Time Out Chicago; Book Review; Afterlife

2006-06-01T21:41:00.001-05:00

Time Out Chicago / Issue 66: June 1–June 8, 2006

Afterlife
By Donald Antrim.
Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, $20.

Review by: Gretchen Kalwinski

This is not your typical memoir: Each of Antrim’s stylistically unconventional essays, originally published in The New Yorker, revolves around an image or object that spurs memories of his dysfunctional family: a landscape painting, an expensive bed on which Antrim is unable to sleep because he’s convinced it’s “alive with my mother…pulling me down into the bed to die with her.”

His alcoholic mother, Louanne, was both anchor and burden to her family, forever drawing them to her and pushing them away, even to the extent of twice marrying and divorcing Antrim’s father. The book is lush with the details of how alcoholism and other dysfunctions (e.g., depression, affairs) leave their imprint on families. “Grandiose hopes and dreams” were, Antrim writes, “the story of my alcoholic family.”

As Antrim self-deprecatingly examines how the past affects his present, the scenes with Louanne’s blackouts, guilt trips and assertions of her artistic merit (as an avant-garde seamstress) emerge as the most engaging, even while the spine chills at her misguided “image of herself as a heroine on a journey.” Antrim’s storytelling skills are undeniable: He ripples outward from themes into darkly humorous insights on kin, work and addiction, always returning to his premise with heavier baggage.

The patchwork chronology provides no distinct time line as a guide, and the order of events is perplexing; readers are obliged to piece together the puzzle of Antrim’s life themselves. Yet what the chapters lack in narrative momentum, they make up in thoughtful, cynical, deeply felt revelations. —GK

Centerstagechicago.com; Interview; Bookslut

2006-05-22T13:34:00.001-05:00

Centerstage Chicago

Bookslut (Interview)
Monday May 22, 2006
By: Gretchen Kalwinski

Jessa Crispin is a literary lass extraordinaire, and her Bookslut readings are icing on the cake.

Basic stats: Features three or four fiction or non-fiction authors, in conjunction with the smart, irreverent tone of Bookslut.com
Incorporated: 2003
Website: http://www.bookslut.com
When: Once a month (exact dates and locations vary)
Fringe benefits: Free!
Up next: May 24, 2006 at Hopleaf: Michelle Tea, Elizabeth Merrick, Gary Amdahl.

Jessa Crispin is a literary lass extraordinaire. She is the editor and founder of Bookslut.com, a "monthly webzine dedicated to those who love to read" that's known for offering sharp, thoughtful and acerbic reviews of fiction and non-fiction, author interviews, commentary on publishing trends and literary news. It also contains the Bookslut blog, and Crispin's authoritative tone and occasionally-biting commentary have made for her reputation as a successful and devoted literary blogger (the Bookslut site boasts 7,000-8,000 daily readers).

Crispin began the Bookslut website while living in Austin, Texas, where Bookslut.com began to gain momentum. Crispin also runs the monthly Bookslut Reading Series, which has featured such authors as Marisha Pessl, Luis Alberto Urrea and Kirby Gann, and usually features readers who have already been reviewed by Bookslut.com. Last year, Crispin made Wired's list of the "10 Sexiest Geeks," and in 2003, Bookslut.com was awarded as one of Time Magazine's "50 Best Websites." Centerstage chatted with Crispin about the origins of Bookslut.com and how the Bookslut Reading Series ties in with the website.

What's the most memorable Bookslut reading thus far?
Our first reading was with Shalom Auslander, who wrote Beware of God, and since it was the first one I had no expectations, but she completely rocked it; she's just a very good performer. I didn't know how that night was going to work out actually; because we had Beth Lisick, a feminist writer named Paula Kamen who wrote All in My Head and a scholar named Peter Manseau who wrote Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son. Lisick was the first reader and she opened with a story about um, fisting. Peter was hilarious about it when it was his turn though. He got up there and was like, “how do I insert fisting into this?” I was worried, but it turned out fine.

What did you set out to do with the Bookslut website?
I just kinda started it to kill some time at my day job; I never would have imagined that it would have become what it has.

How does the site inform your choices for the reading series?
The readers kind of depend on who the publishers will send. It's gotten a little better now, but when we were starting and trying to get writers it was like pulling teeth.

Does this mean that by you use more authors at big publishing houses rather than smaller ones, because the bigger ones can cover traveling expenses?
Not really, with some of the writers we've taken up collections and helped pay travel costs that way. We actually get a lot of small press writers and it seems that bigger publishers are LESS likely to cover travel expenses. Also, we've had a longtime relationship working with small houses, as opposed to bigger ones who are like “who the hell are you, again?”

What book are you reading now?
Pearl by Mary Gordon, who we are trying to get for July. It's a novel about an American girl who chains herself to a flagpole in Dublin on a hunger strike but no one can figure out what she's protesting.

I heard that your parents are kind of reserved and don't say the name of the site out loud.
Right, they just call it “the site”. After we made Time Magazine's list of best websites, my father was at their church and they have this part of the service where you pray for people, and offer “concerns and congratulations.” My dad started to say, “Oh, my daughter got this award” and then he was like, “Oh wait,” and tried to work around the name of the site, but by then people were already starting to ask him all kinds of questions.

Who are some upcoming readers that you're excited about?
May's reading with Michelle Tea and Elizabeth Merrick will be great, and the June reading will be a good nepotism month because the readers have all written for Bookslut.

Chicago Reader; Cover article; Exotic Feline Rescue Center

2006-05-20T22:40:00.004-05:00

Chicago Reader / May 2006 / Road Trips Issue

(Chicago Reader photos can be found at the link below; these were taken by Lara Kalwinski).

His Wild Kingdom
Joe Taft's 200 big cats get to live out their lives in peace. He gets to live a lifelong dream.

By: Gretchen Kalwinski

JOE TAFT WANTS his bedroom back. For four months it’s been inhabited by a baby tiger named Max, while Taft, who’s 60, crashes on the couch. “I can’t get him out of my house until I move these other cats into the new pens being built,” he says. “Then I can finally have a bedroom. The walls are pretty raggedy in there.” He means claw marks, like the ones in his kitchen and living room. Taft walks into the bedroom and pushes open the sliding door to the pen where Max is. The tiger immediately dives for his ankle. “Now don’t bite your dad,” he says. Max then tries to get his paws around Taft’s head.

Taft is director of the Exotic Feline Rescue Center in Center Point, Indiana, which provides homes for big cats—lions, tigers, panthers, pumas—that have nowhere else to live out their lives. The cats come from across the country, primarily from government agencies such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the state Department of Natural Resources, which take the animals from owners who’ve neglected or abused them— sometimes circus people, mostly private individuals. Taft can’t take all the cats he gets calls about. “There are a number that we don’t take that are put to sleep,” he says. “Several cats that we didn’t take remained where they were and got in trouble—bit people or escaped. Some of them were placed in other centers.” Taft usually won’t take a cat he doesn’t have room for, but Max was a special case—the DNR rescued him when he was just seven weeks old.

The EFRC has been operating since 1991, when Taft moved to Center Point with two tigers and a leopard. It’s now home to 200 cats on 110 acres. Taft doesn’t advertise, but word of mouth brings him around 7,000 visitors a year, most of them kids on school trips. There aren’t many other reasons to visit Center Point, a sleepy place 240 miles southeast of Chicago that’s like a ghost town—the main drag has a boarded-up general store and antique shop, a diner with no patrons. But that’s exactly what Taft wanted. When he was scouting properties he told the real estate agent, “I’m looking for a place with no neighbors.” With good reason. Taft put the butchering area right at the entrance to make it easy for farmers to drop off sick or dead livestock, so the first thing a visitor often sees is a blood-spattered employee hacking up a cow with a chain saw. And the area reeks of urine, feces, and rotting meat, though the rest of the center just smells like an ordinary zoo. At one point while Taft’s giving a tour of the center he walks up to a ten-foot pile of mostly eaten carcasses on pallets. “One of the most unending jobs we have around here is waste control,” he says, squirting charcoal lighter fluid on the heap. He lights one match after another and tosses them on the pile, and finally flames shoot up. A barbecue smell fills the air.

The center’s head butcher and assistant director, Suzanne Taylor, takes the admission fee from visitors, then warns people not to get too close to the fences or put their hands through the mesh. “If a cat appears distressed by your presence walk away quickly,” she says. “If it turns its back end toward you it’s going to spray—and that’s when you should run.” But people keep coming because the EFRC provides a more intimate experience than a zoo. Around 130 cats are on display in the main visitors’ area, and 30 more are down the road in overflow pens in the yard behind Taft’s house, which also contains the EFRC’s offices. People who want to watch the cats at night can pay $120 to sleep in his extra bedroom, from which they have a great view of three of the tigers in the lighted backyard. Another 35 cats are in a restricted area an eighth of a mile away because they’re aggressive. “This tiger killed his trainer,” Taft says, as he walks past its pen. “Those two tigers sticking their heads around the bend are extremely aggressive. We don’t let anybody near them.” The chain-link fences separating people from cats are 12 feet high and topped with barbed wire. Visitors walk through the narrow pathways of the main visiting area unsupervised by staff. Near feeding time tigers sometimes stalk them, licking their chops. Taft says that the enclosures are more than sufficient to keep the cats on their side and that because the animals are well fed they’re not dangerous.

Taft’s affinity for big cats goes back to childhood. Raised in Colorado, he loved the Denver Zoo and remembers when it first opened outdoor enclosures for its cats. During his undergraduate studies in philosophy at Indiana State University one of his professors talked about having once kept a lion as a pet, and shortly afterward Taft stopped at a pet store near his apartment. “I asked them about keeping big cats, and they said, ‘Oh, sure, that’s something that people can do.’” He says he started fantasizing about “driving around with a wellbehaved cheetah in a Lotus.” He bought his first cat, an ocelot he named Ozzie, from the pet store. Soon he dropped out of college and moved to Chimayo, New Mexico, where he could let Ozzie run unleashed in the national forest—something he says he’d never do now. “My education began with Ozzie—living with her was a tremendous learning experience,” he says. “I also read a lot of books on animal behavior, on keeping pet ocelots, about people who’d spent time with the circus, and books like the ‘Born Free’ group, which was a series of books and then movies by Joy Adamson, whose husband was a game warden in Africa. They raised three orphan lion cubs who pretty much ran loose. I also went to places where they kept cats and saw how other people did it. I went to zoos—I’ve always been a big zoo fan. I went to Texas, where there are a lot of private owners and facilities, a few of which were nice and many that were horrifying. I’ve also visited facilities in the Las Vegas area, Ohio, New York, Illinois, Indiana.”

After Ozzie died Taft got a leopard, Taaka, from a private owner in California who’d kept her in the parking lot next to her mobile home. Taaka had the “run of the house most of the time” during the two decades she lived with Taft. “I probably spent the first two years thinking that I’d made a terrible mistake and being halfway afraid to be home,” he says. But that changed. “She’d sleep on my bed in the winter.” Taft stayed in Chimayo for 20 years, running a construction company and working as an excavation contractor. But he knew he wanted to open a rescue center. “All I ever wanted to do is share my life with cats,” he says. He wanted a place where he could give the animals a lot of room to move around, and he knew he could do that in Indiana. He also knew he’d have access to plenty of livestock there. Taaka and two tigers in tow, he drove back to the midwest. Today the EFRC has 11 fulltime and 2 part-time staffers and a $375,000 yearly operating budget. Last year visitors’ fees brought in approximately $135,000; additional money came from fund-raisers like the Run Through the Jungle 5K Walk/Run as well as memberships, sponsorships, grants, and the sale of T-shirts, hats, and magnets with cat images on the Web site. Vet care costs $15,000 per year—there’s a clinic in the office basement for the vet, who lives nearby. The center’s cat food may be essentially free, a gift from the local farmers, but Taft says processing it costs approximately $35,000 a year, since one staffer “does nothing but go around and pick up dead livestock.”

The cats go through 3,000 pounds of meat per day. “If we weren’t able to process our own livestock,” he says, “if we had to do some kind of commercial carnivore diet, we wouldn’t be able to do this.” Taft’s construction skills come in handy at the center. “A large part of [keeping cats] is being able to build,” he says. His formal education hasn’t proved particularly useful, but he prefers hiring people with relevant degrees. “If they’ve stuck it out for four years in school, then they’ll probably stick it out for a while on a job,” he says. “The college grads we’ve had are better at record keeping, noticing aberrant behaviors, noting the onset of illness and disease. And they make more astute observations about mating cycles and all the attendant aggression—and certainly make for better tour guides.”

Rebecca Rizzo, a 24-year-old staffer wearing glitter eye shadow and blood-and-feces stained cargo pants, studied zoology. “I always loved animals, wanted to work with big cats,” she says, “so I put two and two together and found this place.” The work is primarily feeding and cleaning. “It’s just loading carts and pens and remembering who eats what, cleaning the cages. Sometimes I butcher up deer and calves.” Nine of the 11 staffers are women. “We’ve had guys interview but the pay is just not there, and to guys that is usually a big issue,” Rizzo says. “Some of them also had trouble working under women. And I think the cats are just used to women.”

Taft and his staff spend as much time as they can educating people about the plight of the cats. He occasionally gives lectures, and Jean Herrberg does presentations at schools. The center also publishes a seasonal “Cat Tales” enewsletter and offers guided field trips, a volunteer program, and credit and noncredit internships. Many of the volunteers and interns are from Indiana University, staff and students who drive the 35 miles from Bloomington to build cages, clean pens, and sometimes prepare meat for the cats. Taft has no interest in having anyone train the cats. “We don’t try to teach our cats to do anything,” he says proudly.

ALL EXOTIC-CAT rescue centers are supposed to be licensed by the USDA. The EFRC is, and the agency periodically inspects it. DNR officials have also checked it out. “The animals all appeared to be well cared for,” says the department’s Linnea Peterchaff, who went to see how Max was doing this past winter. “Their cages provide a lot of space in a natural habitat, with plenty of room for the cats to walk around and jump on platforms. Some even have ponds in which the cats can swim and play. The cages and perimeter fence were all secure.” She calls the staff “very knowledgeable.” In 15 years there’s been only one accident at the center, and Taft says it was because safety procedures weren’t followed. The pens have two sets of paired guillotine-style slide gates that allow workers to open the outer one and set down food, then close the outer one and raise the inner one so the cat can get it. They also use the gates to corral the cats while they clean the pens. “This kid had worked for a while and was cleaning a cage, and instead of paying attention to what he was doing, he got distracted,” Taft says. “He started looking at this beautiful girl who’d walked up—he pulled on the cable to open the slide gate and was standing there looking at her with the door open. The tiger came up to him, grabbed his shoulder, dragged him to the feeding pile, and bit him in the butt.” Taft was nearby, and when he heard the girl scream he ran toward the cage yelling. He says as soon as the tiger heard him it let go of the guy. “I picked up the shovel and a bucket that we used for picking up poop, because having those things in your hand does a lot in terms of managing them and making them move around. Not that I ever hit them with the shovel or anything, but having something in your hand always impresses them. You’ll see that sometimes circus trainers have just a little stick in their hand, and cats respond to it. So I went in, and the tiger backed off from me, and I pulled him out.” After getting cleaned up at the hospital, the guy went back to work. Taft says he’s never been seriously injured in 41 years of dealing with wild cats. “I’ve only gotten cuts and scrapes. Had a good chunk of hand sliced off by a lion’s claw once. It hurt like hell but wasn’t life threatening.”

Just because a rescue center is licensed doesn’t mean it’s well run. Taft has two leopards that came from a man who ran a center near LA. “When state and wildlife officials went to his home—which was not where he was supposed to have cats—they found almost a hundred dead lions and tigers and other cats in really bad shape,” Taft says. “A lot of them were babies. With babies you can make money by letting people take pictures with them or by selling them, but once they’re grown you have to feed and house them, and they become a liability.” According to a New York Times story, the man was sentenced to two years in prison. The guy who owned Max had a USDA license to breed and sell his animals, but after the DNR raided his property last fall they seized most of his 24 tigers and other exotic animals. According to an Associated Press story, the head of the DNR called the conditions there “horrific.”

Taft, who frequently accompanies DNR, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and USDA officials on rescue missions, thinks the main reason cats wind up being mistreated is that people have unrealistic expectations about what owning them entails. “People that get these animals don’t realize how big they are,” he says, “how aggressive they are, and don’t realize the kind of care or food it takes to feed them.” Despite the abuse he’s seen, Taft believes some people can handle them as pets. “I know people who do a really good job with these cats,” he says. “It is very important that people be able to develop relationships with animals, and if people aren’t able to build relationships with animals, then there’s a lot of things about them and about us that we’ll never know.” He goes on, “I think there are direct and strong parallels between the way animals behave and the way people behave—and I’m not trying to be anthropomorphic here. I mean, we all deal with aggression and flight and hunting one way or another— providing our sustenance, dealing with social interaction. And animals do all of this just like we do. So I think a relationship with animals with that in mind opens us up to learning things about ourselves, and that understanding in turn helps us understand animals in a better light.”

TAFT ISN'T MARRIED and has no children. “At least none that are bipeds,” he says. As he’s walking through the pens he sees three male lions scuffling and chastises them: “Now daddy told you to stop that!” One of the lions comes up to the fence and roars in his face. “Tucker, do not growl at me!” Taft says, looking offended. “Do! Not! Growl!” A moment later Tucker begins nuzzling Taft’s leg through the fence, suddenly an amorous house cat. Taft walks past a leopard. “Hi, Kayla,” he murmurs. Kayla hisses, baring teeth. “It’s OK, sweetie,” he says, chuckling. Taft is usually the only staffer who goes into a pen with a cat. “We make sure that there are two people there, and one is outside the cage to call for help or close doors,” he says. “You certainly have to always have that awareness that it is a wild animal, that they do have this potential for aggression, that they are bigger than you are, and that if they’re becoming aggressive you’re not going to hold up to them or be more aggressive than them. Some people will tell me, ‘Yeah, I’ll just go in there and back it down.’ But these are animals that take down multi-thousand-pound prey, like 2,000-pound water buffaloes. They’re certainly not going to back down to a 200-pound man.” The only other precaution Taft takes is to be armed with his bucket and shovel and “my awareness.” Asked what makes him different from exotic-animal lovers like Timothy Treadwell, the subject of the documentary Grizzly Man, he says, “Well, if Max would decide to eat me he could eat me—and I’d make sure that he’d still be locked in the cage. It’s the exposure of other people to risk and the exposure of the animal to an escape potential. To be in the audience where some idiot walks an unleashed tiger through a bunch of people, that’s nuts. I’m not getting on the same side of a fence with a strange tiger, nor would I let anyone get that close to one of my tigers.” Yet he confesses that there are “a handful of cats that I go in the cage with just because we’re friends and I want to spend time with them.” They include Kiki, a spotted leopard. “She was one of the three cats that was with me when I first started this place,” he says. “When I come to her cage she will stand up on her hind legs and hug me. You know, that’s pretty special.”

Chicago Reader; review, Festival of the Lakes

2006-05-20T22:37:00.004-05:00

Chicago Reader
May 2006

FESTIVAL OF THE LAKES

In its 1980s heyday northwest Indiana’s AugustFest brought the Guess Who, the Marshall Tucker Band, and Koko Taylor to industrial Hammond, but in later years it started to draw a seedy crowd. By the time the city canned it in 2000, it was known locally as “CritterFest.” Its replacement, the three-year-old, family-friendly Festival of the Lakes, focuses on the area’s water—lakes Michigan, Wolf, and George. And since the city has been working on turning brownfield sites into green space, the festival highlights those improvements with outdoorsy events. Wolf Lake has carnival rides and a pontoon outing alongside its music stage (Cheap Trick, the Temptations), and the Hammond Marina showcases a Lake Michigan bird sanctuary and hosts a floating polka party. George Lake has the most weirdly intriguing attraction: the new $40 million Lost Marsh Golf Course. Formerly a slag heap, Lost Marsh is now full of rolling hills and cleaned-up water hazards, though it’s still flanked by smokestacks and oil tanks. Is there anything more American than standing in a fairway that used to be a toxic hill, hot dog and lemonade in hand, watching geese fly beneath a hovering cloud of pollution? Wed-Sun 7/19-7/23, Hammond, Indiana, 219-853-6378 or thefestivalofthelakes.com. —Gretchen Kalwinski

Centerstagechicago.com; Venue Review: Newberry Library

2006-04-16T17:18:00.000-05:00

--published in: Centerstagechicago.com, April 2006

Review of: Newberry Library
60 W. Walton St., Chicago
Tel: (312) 255-3504

Just uttering the word "Newberry" inspires knowing looks, as this independent research library doubles as a revered Chicago cultural institution. Founded in 1887 by Walter L. Newberry, the Chicago businessman's ideal library was one that was free and open to the public. Admission is still free and open to the public...with a few caveats. Books cannot be checked out and readers must be over 16 and must be researching a topic that is covered in the library's collection. (However, one-day passes are given out to curious booklovers who want to peruse.)

The evolving collection focuses on the humanities, centered primarily on Western Europe and the Americas. Reference librarians offer in-depth research assistance; their services can also be garnered for genealogical research, one of the most frequently used Newberry resources. The extensive public programming includes author events, concerts and exhibits. A seminar schedule of classes designed for adults changes seasonally and includes courses in genealogy, jazz, Chicago history, Victorian culture and public art. But don't keep your nose buried in a book, as the building itself is a treat: Designed in 1893 by Henry Ives Cobb, the lobby and several of its rooms were restored to its original turn-of-the-century state in 2001. At the same time, the columns were redecorated and a grand chandelier was installed in the elegant Ruggles Hall, which is often rented out for events or weddings.

If you don't have a specific area of research in mind but want to check out the building, try the bookstore (just inside the Walton Street entrance) first. It's filled with books on everything from Chicago history and architecture to calligraphy to literary fiction, and is stocked with gift items for the bibliophiles on your list.

Reviewed By: Gretchen Kalwinski

Venus Zine; Book Review; Memoirs of a Muse

2006-03-27T11:34:00.003-06:00

Published in Venus Zine, Spring 2006

Memoirs of a Muse by: Lara Vapnyar

This first novel by Lara Vapnyar tells of a modern muse living in New York and obsessed with the great Russian writers, Dostoevsky in particular. The main character Tanya emigrates from Russia to the States, after deciding in adolescence that she is not gifted in her own right and asking, “could I fight death by living my life to the utmost degree?”

Tanya’s ideas about muses went far back into childhood, when her grandmother warned her about the trials and tribulations of the role. Still, Tanya is so impressed (and turned on by; she masturbates while thinking of Dostoevsky) the great writers that she decides to achieve immortality by inspiring another person’s work. Vapnyar’s lyrical style is notable for its fine detail, economy of words, and tight, crackling dialogue, best evidenced in the gender-interplay between Tanya and Mark Schneider, the writer that (in the absence of Dostoevsky), she takes up with. Mark is confident, with well-honed tastes in everything from coffee to clothing to architecture, and he enjoys schooling Tanya on the tenets of his sophisticated world, paying for her clothes and food, and letting her live with him. In turn, she listens to his childhood memories, discusses his work, brings him coffee while he writes, sleeps with him, and undresses the way he requests, until the affair turns up its eventual pitfalls.

However, the reasons why a modern-day woman would choose this role instead of pursuing her own path, are left unanswered. After all, which of us in adolescence had a declared passion, other than the prodigies or geniuses? Why did Tanya lack the curiosity to find and develop a talent of her own, rather than glomming onto some dude? We never discover why Tanya decides on such a lazy route at such a young age. To be sure, muse-dom is a complicated notion to tackle, especially since muses are usually female and have roles similar to that of “kept” wives and mistresses. In the latter half of the book, Tanya begins to understand what her role entails, and Vapnyar handles the contradictions of a muse’s role with intelligence and dry humor and earthy, womanly insight.

-- Gretchen Kalwinski

Northwest Indiana Times; Colds vs. Allergies

2006-03-22T22:08:00.002-06:00

Nose plugged up and coughing?
BY GRETCHEN KALWINSKI
Times Correspondent | Monday, March 20, 2006

Ah, spring. With warmer temperatures approaching, most of us are thinking happily of spending more time outdoors amidst the trees and flowers.

For others, however, the season also beckons massive amounts of sniffling, sneezing and general misery in the form of seasonal allergic rhinitis or hay fever that may be mistaken for a cold...[click here for rest of article]...

Centerstagechicago.com; Venue Review; Corbett vs. Dempsey

2006-03-13T16:42:00.001-06:00

Venue review published in March 2006, Centerstagechicago.com

Corbett vs. Dempsey
(Art Gallery)
1120 N. Ashland Ave., Chicago
Tel: (773) 278-1664

Corbett vs. Dempsey focuses on a niche that has somehow gone virtually untapped by other galleries: Chicago artists. Emphasizing Chicago painting and works on paper from 1940-1970, the gallery has a specific interest in "great regional art, and art that maybe hasn't had its day." The quiet subplot of each CvD show is that Chicago is and has been a major city for world class art, and the success of CvD's exhibitions back up this conviction. Since owners John Corbett and Jim Dempsey enjoy scavenging and storytelling, the exhibitions often emphasize the artist's back story. For example, Corbett and Dempsey once traveled to a warehouse in Florida to track down a lead on WPA artist Eve Garrison. This trip led to the discovery of a huge body of Garrison's work and a successful CvD show, and the detective work involved in tracking down the paintings became an integral part of the way that Garrison's work was explained to gallery visitors. It has also exhibited the work of Chicago Imagist Philip Hanson, the paintings of Robert Amft and the feminist nudes and figures of Linda Kramer.

Longtime friends and collaborators who initially collaborated on a Sun Ra project, Corbett and Dempsey have different and complementary curatorial styles at openings. Corbett springs around like an energetic cat, making introductions and talking excitedly about the work, while Dempsey's quiet friendliness put everyone at ease. The airy gallery space above Dusty Groove records affords an expansive view of Wicker Park's East Village, and is smattered with varied architectural salvages and art finds, further evidence of the gallery's emphasis in uncovering overlooked artifacts.

Reviewed By: Gretchen Kalwinski

Venus Zine; DIY article, Guerilla Drive-Ins

2006-03-10T21:35:00.003-06:00

Venus Zine
Spring 2006

Guerilla drive-ins These groups are reviving the lost pleasures of the drive-in movie

By: Gretchen Kalwinski

When was the last time you watched a movie with a bunch of strangers under the stars? Drive-in movies have been phasing out since their heyday in the ’60s and ’70s. They were popular because of the inherent romance in watching a film under the stars, snuggled up with siblings, friends, or paramours under blankets. Contemporary technology allows an extremely high-quality home entertainment experience, but it has come at the cost of estrangement from fellow movie-goers. So some radical folks began their own “guerilla” drive-in movie collectives as a DIY way to enjoy the intimacy and communal nature of drive-ins, with the added bonus of being able to show whatever films they damn well pleased, usually free of charge!

One of the most organized groups is the Santa Cruz Guerilla Drive-In in Santa Cruz, California (guerilladrivein.org). In 2004, they started showing films such as “The Third Man” and “The Gleaners and I” on vacant walls of abandoned buildings for friends and strangers to enjoy. The Santa Cruz drive-in doesn’t actually involve cars, however — movie-watchers bring lawn chairs and blankets to the given location, where they view the film via a projector and high-powered speakers.

The nation-wide MobMov collectives — short for Mobile Movie — (mobmov.org) take the term “drive-in” a bit more literally. They use technology similar to that used in ye olden days, utilizing an FM transmitter to broadcast the movie’s sound into car radios, so that, as organizer Bryan Kennedy notes, “there is no sound pollution at all.” Because of this, says Kennedy, they are rarely bothered by law enforcement. He thinks that the MobMov idea (now active in 12 U.S. cities) has caught on because of “the sense of community you get when you come, the experience of sharing something unique with strangers.”

Most groups have guidelines for if and when they are approached by police or upset neighbors, since, as the Santa Cruz group notes, “good neighborly relations are an important element of DIY culture.” In Kennedy’s experience, a law enforcement confrontation “has never happened--if it did, I would just show them my papers, and if they asked that I stop the movie, I would.” The Santa Cruz group notes that the best defense to hassling from cops is to “know the laws restricting amplified sound and rules restricting access to public space after dark, and have people on hand who have experience with non-violent communication.”

Most collectives agree that the real issue at hand is one of public versus private space. The Santa Cruz Guerilla Drive-In notes on their website that; “Beyond showing great movies and bringing a broad community together, our mission is helping to reclaim public space and transforming our urban environment into the joyful playground it should be.”

Kennedy from MobMov echoes the sentiment, saying, “A drive-in is much more than just a movie projected on a wall like at your local cineplex. In a cineplex, you have this huge public space, yet interaction is frowned upon, so it is not appreciably different than watching the movie by yourself. In the drive-ins of old, some people would roam around and visit each other, while others would sit in the privacy of their car, unperturbed. With a drive-in, you can select the level of interaction you want. It’s a much more customizable experience.”

Plan Your Own Guerilla Drive-In

Location, location, location. The Santa Cruz group suggests that you scout out a dark location near a smooth, light surface, in areas that are either full of warehouses or under bridges to minimize the chance of interruption.

Zee technicalities.

Determine whether you’ll use speakers or a radio transmitter, and then scrounge for speakers, amplifier, and projectors. Additional technical information about projecting films can be found on the Santa Cruz Guerilla Drive-In and MobMov websites.

What ya gonna watch?

Make a list of films to choose from. Some groups have subversive or political themes, while others make a specialty of documentary or foreign films.

If you build it, they will come.

Let people know when and where the screening will take place. This can be done via a website, e-mail distribution list, or fliers on local bulletin boards.

Dealing with authorities.

The Santa Cruz group always has a few “cop tamers” on hand to serve as police liaisons. He explains, “A good cop tamer has experience with non-violent communication and a good understanding of applicable laws.”

Northwest Indiana Times, Book Feature, LaPorte, Indiana

2006-02-20T15:00:00.001-06:00

Published in the Northwest Indiana Times, on Monday, February 20, 2006

An Outside Appreciation
The book 'LaPorte, Indiana' offers a glimpse into the history of small-town Midwest

BY: Gretchen Kalwinski
Times Correspondent

Only expecting a quick meal and cup of coffee when he first visited a LaPorte, Indiana diner in the summer of 2003, magazine editor Jason Bitner instead found himself with a new book project. B & J’s American Café is a classic slice of Americana with its authentic soda fountain, jukebox, wooden phone booth, vintage Coca Cola memorabilia, and standard diner fare like hamburgers, salads, peach cobbler, and rhubarb pie.

After ordering one of the famed cinnamon rolls, Bitner took a look around the diner and happened upon a stash of thousands of photos tucked in the back room with a sign inviting patrons to peruse or purchase the images (available for 50 cents apiece). The photos were the remnants of the Muralcraft photography studio located on the 2nd floor of the same building and run by Frank and Gladys Pease from the late 40s to the early 70s. B & J’s owners John and Billie Pappas took the photos out of storage in the early 90s, planning to “clean out storage” but kept them around when they saw how much people enjoyed sifting through them, looking for long-forgotten photos of themselves, friends, or family members. Bitner was entranced by the discovery, and describes the images as, “an enormous visual survey of the Midwest a generation back.”

To be sure, Bitner already had a propensity for this kind of project. As the co-creator of Found Magazine, (www.foundmagazine.com)--a “show and tell” magazine that publishes found photos, discarded school-kid notes, doodles on scraps of paper, and other found miscellany sent it by readers worldwide—he revels in such discoveries, which he calls, “the accidental archive of an entire town.” For Bitner, a fire had been lit, and he couldn’t get the photos out of his mind. Though he’d only planned to pass through LaPorte for the County Fair and demolition derby, he ended up spending two weeks in B & J’s looking through images in amazement at the magnitude of the archive, and the almost-painterly beauty of the photographs. The end result of Bitner’s enthusiasm is a book of selected portraits titled LaPorte, Indiana, which is being released by Princeton Architectural Press in April 2006.

Bitner found the book idea to be an easy sell. “People love photos of other people,” he explains. “I was in New York, and stopped at a publisher who I knew was into photo books, and said ‘Hey, I’ve got something that you might like.’ I dumped out the envelope of images on the table, and at first, there were two people standing there, then three, four, five. Right away people got really excited and started trading them around the table saying ‘That looks like my grandfather! That looks like your boyfriend!’ That is also what it’s like at the diner, once you start looking, you just want to see more and more. It’s amazing—I’ve never gone to an archive where I saw photos all by one person.”

Photographer Frank Pease was by all accounts a nice guy who enjoyed his job. He was also an excellent craftsman and as Bitner puts it, “an accidental historian.” One of Pease’s former clients remembers him as “really nice, down to earth, very patient.” His wife Gladys helped him in the studio by greeting customers in the lobby, and helping to prep them with grooming and makeup before they went before the camera. The photos themselves are interesting not only for their comment on the time and place (mostly 40s and 50s, in small-town Midwest) but because of their old-fashioned formality and idealism. The poses varied only slightly, with 8 or so poses for men and 8 for women, with a few variations for children and couples. Pease obviously had great technical skills, but it is clear that at some point, he zoned in on a certain “look,” and, Bitner notes, “didn’t waver from it in 2 ½ decades.” The poses and lighting are not natural ones but are instead traditionally classical—the men are wearing ties, the women often hold a flower, or tilt their heads in imitation of movie-star glamour.

Bitner has spoken with several of the subjects of Pease’s photos, including Hugh and Kathy Tonagel, whose somber engagement photograph is at the forefront of the book. “Hugh told me that Pease was trying to impress upon them that this was a really weighty moment. Like, ‘You guys are getting married, and this is the photo that is going to represent that forever. This is a really important moment and I want you to be here and present and understand what it is you’re sitting for.’ [Pease] also had a process in place for setting up the studio, getting the lighting right, people getting their hair done just-so—there was a gravity to the process.”

Part of the delight of the archive is that it is not limited to only the shots that ended up being used, but also the myriad, back-to-back proofs from the sittings. The mistakes and glitches are all there—a couple bursting out in open-mouthed laughter at the camera, an accidental wild-eyed grin from a teenage boy, and a young boy raising his finger in a politician’s pose. After Pease’s death in the early 1970s, much of his equipment was donated to the local high school or given away and Muralcraft Studios was eventually renovated to become a large apartment. Another striking facet of the archive is how idealized the images are, and that they seem to tell a story about the ideal way that each of the subjects wish to see themselves. “Nowadays, it’s different,” Bitner says. “There are so many cameras around and people are so comfortable in front of a camera. Back then, there was definitely a feeling that film was a little more precious, and I think that when people took a portrait, they were more interested in creating an image for public history; their public face. Nowadays there are a lot of cameras around and people are so comfortable in front of a camera, and that sense of a public face doesn’t seem as important as it was then. But these photos were definitely not intended to be private or intimate shots; these were shots that were intended for an audience.”

LaPorte, Indiana contains about 150 images of LaPorte residents in the 50s and 60s in various stages of life. Some were taken for specific events like graduations, engagements, first communions, and anniversaries. Other people posed with objects that conveyed their individuality; a nurse or military uniform, a musical instrument, a radio microphone, or prayer book. Still others simply seem inexplicable, like the one of two elderly men in suits preening for the camera while one affectionately straightens the other’s tie. The end result of the book is a crossbreeding of several genres; because of the beautifully displayed images, it easily functions as a coffee table photography book. It is also of interest to history buffs and found-art aficionados alike. It contains approximately 150 photographs and a forward by both Bitner and writer Alex Kotlowitz who calls the images, “Distinctly middle American. Open. Unassuming. Sturdy.” Kotlowitz goes on to intuit that although the images were taken in a time when the country was perched on intense conflict, the people in these portraits “seemed impervious to the upheaval around them.” Famous Hoosier John Mellencamp weighs in on the book’s back cover, musing that “the grace and dignity one sees in their faces should be a source of hope for us all.”

With about 22,000 residents, LaPorte is a small town. Incorporated in 1835, LaPorte’s business development began in the late 1850s, after the railroad came to town. The town has six surrounding lakes and some notable architecture, including the Romanesque LaPorte County Courthouse and the Door Prairie Barn, a “round barn” which was recently placed on the National Registry of Historic Places. While agriculture and manufacturing have been the primary industries, the current economy is increasingly relying on tourists who visit to enjoy the lakes and the famed LaPorte County Fair each July. According to Fern Eddy Schultz of the LaPorte Historical Society, LaPorte is going through a time of re-evaluation, “trying to make plans for what is best for it in the future and how to implement them.”

But aside from water-recreation offerings, and an abundance of maple trees that have earned it the title of “The Maple City,” Schultz notes that LaPorte is otherwise “very much like most towns its age and size in the Midwest.” Indeed, residents and historians alike seem to agree that there is nothing terribly out of the ordinary about this peaceful Midwestern town. These extraordinary photos of mid-century Midwest, then, seem to be extraordinary for their very ordinary-ness. These are people carrying out their lives in the midst of a rapidly changing world. There is a father surrounded by wife and kids gazing worriedly into the camera, a toddler playing with his ears, a girl graduating from high school. These are optimistic portraits of real people with quirks and flaws who gain love and lose it, experience birth, death, and all the rituals of life.

LaPorte, then, is all of us. We’d value this discovery from any town. But the people of LaPorte happened to have a better archive than most of us, along with the impeccable foresight to preserve it. It is of note that the images were made public via the enthusiasm of a non-native, a testament to the idea that we oftentimes overlook what is right under our noses. With his outsider’s perspective, it seems that Bitner was in a unique position to be able to see facets of the archive that were regarded as everyday by those familiar with them. He notes that, “I think that a lot of times it takes an outsider to make people appreciate what they have. If these were from my town, I know that I’d be looking for photos of family or friends, and I wouldn’t be so interested in the guy at the end of the block. When you’re so close to something you may not understand the greater significance.”

Several hundred photos were purchased for the book, but most photos remain in boxes in the back room of B & J’s. The count has only dwindled down to about 17,000 from the original 20,000 and the archive is basically intact. “The vast majority are still there,” Bitner notes, “And they want them there; it’s a document of their community.”

Centerstagechicago.com; Venue Review: Vive La Crepe

2006-02-20T11:17:00.001-06:00

Published on Centerstagechicago.com, February 2006

Vive La Crepe

Chicago needs more restaurants that offer crepes, a perfect foodie option that can incorporate almost any ingredient and made either sweet or savory. For the practical, it's also worth noting that the crepe is easily transported, much like the beloved burrito and hot dog. Evanston's Vive La Crepe (right next to famed jazz venue Pete Miller's Steakhouse) gets points for consistency; its thin crepes are light, but sturdy enough to soak up the juices. You'll find spinach-ricotta and varied seafood options, but the chicken marsala ($9.25) and the New York strip mushroom ($11.25) crepes are the best of the savory bunch.

For dessert, the old standby Nutella crepe is nicely topped off with vanilla ice cream and hazelnuts for $5.95. Other sweet tooth favorites are the strawberry with sour cream and apple-cinnamon crepes (both $6.25). Seating about 40, the sunny decor's French bistro touches include a striped awning and vintage posters, along with vibrant paintings and black lacquered chairs. Crepes can be ordered to-go, and the menu includes beer and wine; skillets with eggs, potatoes, and meat; and a smattering of sandwiches and salads for those odd folks who can't find a crepe variety here to get excited about.

Reviewed By: Gretchen Kalwinski

Centerstagechicago.com; Venue Review: Unique So Chique

2006-02-10T11:07:00.001-06:00

Published on Centerstagechicago.com, February 2006

Unique So Chique Tea & Chocolate Room

This Uptown tearoom offers its take on a formal British tea, boosted by a wonderful atmosphere that takes the experience beyond just tea-sipping. Tea drinkers first pass through the charming clothing, jewelry and gift boutique to reach this small tearoom, which seats 22 in a plant-filled space artfully decorated with vintage English undertones. In addition to the more than 35 standard varieties of earl grey, green, fruit, peppermint and decaf brews, Unique goes the extra mile by offering a variety of organic teas and a yerba mate blend (a plant known for its gentle energy boosting quality).

Tea, available from 3-5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday, takes on a pleasant mix-and-quality here. Unlike most tea services, you have the option of a cream tea service (just scones and tea) for $6.95; light tea, which adds sweets, for $8.95; full tea traditional for a well priced $11.95; and the $15.95 full tea exotic service, which steps up the traditional sandwiches with varieties like chicken with apricot and walnut. Reservations recommended. In addition to afternoon tea, Unique So Chique serves soups, sandwiches and more than 10 varieties of quiche on Tuesday-Friday, as well as weekend brunch. Those without the time to settle in with a cup should take their tea to go, sided by a a lemon bar or jumbo "muffin cookie." Afternoon tea is served from 3-5 p.m. Choose from cream, light and full tea, which include a range of of scones, sweets and finger sandwiches, and cost between $6.95 and $11.95 per person. Call for reservations.

Reviewed By: Gretchen Kalwinski

Time Out Chicago; Book Review; Ruins of California

2006-02-09T13:41:00.001-06:00

Book review published in:
Time Out Chicago / Issue 50: Feb 9–Feb 16, 2006.

BOOK REVIEW: The Ruins of California
By Martha Sherrill.
Penguin, $24.95.

The Ruins of California begins with the divorce of seven-year-old Inez Ruin’s parents in 1969 and chronicles 1970s California life through her eyes. Her home split in half, she travels between her father Paul’s elegantly bohemian existence in San Francisco and her primary home in suburban Los Angeles with her mother Connie, a dancer described as “one of the great flamencas of her generation.”

Sherrill’s depiction of 1970s California is vivid, and the Ruins epitomize the decade’s multicultural ideals. Her Peruvian-Mexian mother gave up dancing for the creature comforts of suburban life, while her hippie half-brother Whitman grew up on a commune to become a surfer.

And in stark contrast stands the blue-blooded grandmother Marguerite Ruin, who coaches Inez on niceties like music lessons, horseback riding and afternoon tea. Her father Paul’s string of beautiful girlfriends soon begins introducing new ideas to Inez—Buddhism, tarot cards, love beads, motorcycles—that form crucial coming-of-age impressions. As time passes, their bond becomes increasingly intense. And though Paul prefers being a friend rather than a father figure to Inez—offering pot, speaking frankly about sex and inflicting few rules—it becomes clear that if she is to break out of her role as a passively observant deer-in the-headlights it will be via her distant but loving father.

Everywhere, the accoutrements of the 70s are present, particularly the sensibility that nothing is a “big deal.” Throughout, Inez becomes much like California itself: a receptive guinea pig, a litmus test for the new. Surfing and beaches are omnipresent, and Sherrill brilliantly uses the movement of water as a tool for her unfettered prose, which is as languid as the era. Despite constant action—births, deaths, affairs ending and beginning—the language and pace make events simply wash over and leave faint impressions. This style lends complexity to the story and catapults the reader into a new set of realizations. It’s akin to riding a wave and landing on a calm Californian beach where everything is suddenly different, but you’re not exactly sure what has changed.

—Gretchen Kalwinski

Venus Zine; Author Interview; Elizabeth Merrick

2006-01-15T13:42:00.002-06:00

Interview with Elizabeth Merrick, novelist, for Venus Zine, January 2006.

Elizabeth Merrick
Novelist Elizabeth Merrick chats with Venus about her new novel, Girly, starting her own press, and remedial math

By: Gretchen Kalwinski

Brooklyn-based Elizabeth Merrick is a writer, editor, writing teacher, creativity consultant, independent publisher, blogger, feminist, and founder of two reading series. Her personality is representative of New York City’s energetic power and creativity, and though she purports to be “deeply lazy,” it’s hard to buy the claim. Here’s an extended laundry list of her accomplishments—after receiving a BA from Yale, an MFA from Cornell, and an MA in Creativity and Art Education from San Francisco State, she founded and began curating the well-known and women-focused Cupcake Reading Series, followed by the launch of the Grace Reading Series in September 2005. She is the editor of the upcoming Random House anthology called This is Not Chick Lit, a collection of new short fiction by literary women authors, (read: authors NOT writing with a fashion-mag mentality). She has taught classes at Cornell and NYU and began her own writing school several years ago, where she teaches students in the Brooklyn area how to tap into their intuitive and creative powers, along with conveying her extensive knowledge of technique and craft. The cherry on top is that she just started a small press called Demimonde Books, with its initial release being her first novel, Girly—a 524-page tome that was published in December 2005.

Girly takes place mainly in rural Pennsylvania, and depicts the unfolding of events in several women’s lives, most primarily the lives of the Hart family women, made up of Racinda Hart, her psychologically damaged sister Ruth, and out-of-it mother Amandine, who became a born again Christian when Racinda was a baby. The themes of Christian fundamentalism, and spiritual and sexual awakening pervade the novel, which was called “smart, sharp, and on the edge” by Hannah Tinti, the editor of the brilliantly unpretentious One Story Magazine. When I talked with Merrick, she was relieved to finally have a few days off, after a year of 12-hour work-days spent getting Demimonde Books up and running.

In Girly, there are 7 different points of view with women’s voices being the dominant ones. Was it your intention to use so many points of view from the get-go, or did that just gradually evolve during the writing process?
It was definitely my intention. Part of writing it was that I was very much interested in NOT writing a typical first novel or just write a novel to write one. I wanted to write something that resembled the books that blew me away. One of those authors for me is Louise Erdrich, who is Faulkner-ian; I actually think that she takes Faulkner to the next level. She is commanding and I loved the sense of a community telling a story—this community of characters. I loved finding things from one character that the other characters don’t know about. That to me was the most interesting part, interesting part of the endeavor of writing a novel. I really loved that part of it.

You said you wrote Girly because you were looking for a book on the shelves that you wanted to read, and couldn't find it, so you decided to write one. So I wanted to find out what you think Girly offers that other books might not?
In the late 90’s, publishers were putting out a lot of amazing fiction which isn’t as true now—it’s gotten a lot more corporate. But the book that I wanted to read was one of these epic books (that are mainly written by guys) that are formally ambitious and long, like David Foster Wallace for instance. I wanted to see a version of those books by a woman of my generation, and one that took into account Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich; our epic women writers who are amazing and who have carried literature a step further into the 20thth century. I couldn’t find that book, so I tried to write it and am not sure if I got there, but I tried and it’s a decent effort and people seem to like it well enough. I think Girly is challenging in certain ways—the language is dense, for instance. I tried to make it beautiful but hope that the story still grips you. A lot of times there is not a category of books like that by women. There are women writers who are in their 40s or 50s who have been writing dense epic books forever, and they aren’t nearly as well known as they would be if they were men. Joanna Scott is one who comes to mind—she is amazing but yet a lot of writers and a lot of people in publishing aren’t aware of her work. Although, some young guy writers are often aware of her work. I think David Foster Wallace has said that she is one of our best living writers. And the same thing happened with Paula Fox; she is in her 80s now, but she only got back into print because Jonathan Franzen introduced a book and made a big fuss over her. So there are these women producing serious literature but who fall through the cracks; with women artists, that’s the way it is, you know. That’s what the Guerilla Girls are making such a big noise about, and you spend decades of your life battling this stuff to whatever degree you can.

So, you’ve got a big presence on the Web—I especially enjoy the “Remedial Math” section of the Grace Reading Series Web site, where it talks about the fact that the New Yorker bylines are 79% male, versus 21% female and it lists different statistics of male versus female bylines. You’ve also stated that part of the problem is that literary men simply don’t enjoy reading literature by women, and I just thought that was fascinating. Can you talk more about that? I haven’t done a study myself on that but there was an informal poll, I think in the UK Guardian, where they asked men what books they had recently read and the guys came up with books by men, you know, basically the men had read books only by men whereas women had read books by men and women. I’m okay with this. I think that if men don’t want to read books by women that’s okay with me, they’re grown-ups, it’s fine; it is not my job to be telling anyone what kind of taste they should have. I am in no way interested in that. What I am interested in is equal pay for equal work. And that is why it always comes down to those numbers. And that 21% at the New Yorker is a very strange status quo because it is representative—it really does tend to be only about 20% women across the board. And it’s fascinating that it is so consistent! Even with the young upstart literary magazines that are certainly not making a lot of money and are very much not part of mainstream pop culture, it's still only about 20% women. And I can tell you right now that people paying for MFA’s are more than 20% women. And English majors certainly make up more than 20% women. There’s a weird disconnect that happens when we get to the job, and the paycheck and the authority of the byline.

I think all those figures you just mentioned point to how difficult it is financially to be a woman writer, because, like you said, many women are paying for writing degrees and not getting any work—how do you work rent into that equation?
Yeah I started looking at the bylines in graduate school and counting them because I was thinking; “Wait a minute, what’s the plan?” It’s not like it was some political cause. It was very practical—it’s like I need to pay rent when I leave graduate school and was thinking, “This is not a very good plan!” You see it’s just thematically so predictable, and then you start to realize that it’s bigger than just you…I know tons of freelancers—brilliant women—paying rent by writing for Cosmo Girl or Elle Girl when they want to be writing for Harper’s and they should be writing for Harper’s, and Harper’s would be a hell of a lot more interesting if these women were in it. But for whatever reason that didn’t happen. I think that Harper’s is especially insidious on the issue of women’s bylines. I have a friend that told me that the gender ratio of men to women over at Harper’s is like a Star Trek convention. [Laughs].

This might be a whole separate conversation, but do you think that literary men are perhaps less interested in reading literature by women because women tend to tell the stories of their lives a bit more—not even necessarily autobiography—but stories adjacent to the lives they’ve lived?
It’s possible, but the thing is, of course women should be telling those stories! It’s been only 35 years since the 2nd wave of feminism. Women didn’t get to go to Yale until 1969. So it has really only been this one generation and yet, the rightness of the idea of men and women being equal and being equal partners in relationships etc, etc. is so true and so right that [society] has adjusted to that very quickly because things simply work better. But the changes are so huge that it's a lot for people to deal with, I think men especially. So, because it’s only been 35 years, of course we need to tell all these stories, because they are so important and fascinating, but these stories are not valued yet. No one cares what happens to a 12-year-old girl, really. And that is very sad, but very true if you look at the policies in our country, especially where children are concerned, and you look at the gender inequalities that still exist. It’s a blind spot that we have. And what are valued are male stories—it’s just still kind of true. And guys naturally want to write their own experience and read their own experiences, and—lucky them!!—their experiences are more valued! And win awards! And are granted authority. And it’s interesting because we just got the news today that the James Frey book is largely fabricated. In his book there is vomiting and serious drug use and crazy arrests, and that book was considered serious literature. And it was so funny to me when Girly came out, because as a teacher, I think I give my students optimism and belief and trust in their intuition, all that kind of stuff. I’m a bit airy-fairy and part of Girly was narrated by a goddess and the book has this very strong spiritual belief. So it was really funny to me, this kind of literary Pollyanna in my everyday life that the reviews of Girly say things like “it’s so dark with massive drug use and filthy sex.” And there is not actually that much of that stuff in there! I mean there is some drug use but people mostly smoke pot, and it was very funny to me that because I’m a woman the reviews read that way and people are sort of shocked and reviewing it like, “it is so dark and bleak and nihilistic.” Whereas for a guy, reviews for that kind of book with dark themes read like, “he’s the next inheritor of literature after Dave Eggers.” So I got a big giggle out of that because my regular life is so herbal tea and optimistic, and then I got to be like this deep, dark, hot Sylvia Plath lady with those reviews.

Your book is being published by Demimonde Books, a press that you started up, and the stated mission is “to focus on risk-taking literary prose of exquisite quality.” I was wondering how you decided to start your own press, and if you have a staff or it’s a one-woman show at this point?
Oh my gosh, what an adventure! I just had my first week of slight downtime in a year because Demimonde Books has been taking 12 hours a day, which is not my natural bent; I am actually deeply, deeply lazy. I recently took a little personality quiz, one of those Myers-Briggs things and found that I am the personality type that is introverted and really spaced out and idealistic and on another planet, the kind of person that can’t find their keys. So I was laughing so much because starting a press is all about all those kinds of details, the business end of things and organization. And I have the reading series and my workshops and have way more going on than one person who was practical about how much person could actually do at one time. But I really wanted to do it all, so I just did it, and people really showed up to help. I have people helping out with publicity, and Emberly Nesbitt, who is an editor of the Grace Reading Series, is also an editor at Demimonde and we’re looking at manuscripts now, which is a really fun generative phase as opposed to production, which is getting everything out and at the right time and the right phase. I also have some administrative help at the press and there is a lot of crossover with the Grace Reading Series. With my workshops, too, it can be hard with the phase we’re in to find a space that celebrates gorgeous writing but that doesn’t have literary one up-man-ship which I cannot stand. I am not interested in a “literary lifestyle”. I am interested in the writing, which to me is something that is really earthy and connected to all the old stories and it has to be funny and has to be a place where there isn’t ego, and those are kind of ugly and uncomfortable places sometimes, but can also be fun and delightful places. All of that is really different from a publishing cocktail party, which can be fun, but is not where I live and thrive.

You have three more books coming out on Demimonde in 2006, right?
Yes, we’re going to publish three books, but it might carry over into 2007. Something that I’ve learned about publishing is that it’s always better to wait until you have all the pieces, so it’s looking more like late 2006, early 2007. Plus, I found this really amazing literary cookbook, actually sort of a dirty literary cookbook, by someone who lives in Park Slope and works in publishing. It is these sexy recipes with a literary bent, but we’ll see what happens.

Since your book is the first published by Demimonde and since it runs approximately 500 pages, I was wondering what the editing process was like?
It's been edited by a few different people, one of them was Emberly, the editor at Demimonde. People were really generous with their time in editing it; I was really grateful. And actually, the director's cut is 700 pages. But this 500-page version I'm pretty happy with. So, the Grace Reading Series has been going on since September 2005, is named after your grandmother, and has featured Beth Lisick and Jill Solloway among others.

What is unique about the reading series other than the fact that it is women-centric?
Well, the series is only once a month with one or two writers, so that there is a clear vision of trying to focus on literary books by women that are crafted with care and thought, and that are substantive. It is a way to focus attention on them because they don’t get it in bookstores, and they don’t get it in book reviews, (we have statistics on this on the Grace Web site—most of the review space goes to male writers). And a lot of attention goes to commercial women writers and “fashionista lit.” So, it’s an activist wing in many ways, without being dreary, like a fun activist wing. Also, we just started a book club where we do review recommendations of 3 books a month. We started doing that because I was finding that everyone—from my friend who is a comp lit major at Yale and conceptual artist, to my very cool hairdresser, to friends in academic publishing— were telling me that they’ve given up on contemporary fiction because, “every thing I happen upon is crap.” This has to do with publishers being so big and corporate and kind of out of touch with the community of serious readers and just trying to sell the latest Paris Hilton book or whatever. This seemed like a shame to me, because there are still wonderful books being published, but there is a disconnect there. So Grace is a way for people to find out what those books are and how to get them so that they can start reading again. It was my little way to do that.

You have a writing school that is run out of your living room?
The writing school just turned 2 years old. It’s grown a little bit, so now I just have the advanced classes at my home, and the rest are taught at a location in Park Slope and SoHo sometimes, too.

What is the demographic of those classes?
It’s funny—it’s mostly women. For awhile I wondered if that was because of all of my other endeavors, but I think it also has to do with what I specifically offer to students. The big thing I give to people as a teacher (underneath all the craft and everything else), is how to quell through the terror and doubt of “Why do I have any right to say this at all? Why would anyone ever be interested?” Women feel that and it’s paralyzing! And part of the reason is that stories about 12-year-old girls DON’T win Booker prizes.

Right; their fears are justified!
...And they DON’T see those bylines in the New Yorker. And maybe they’re not thinking about that consciously but that is what they’re battling with. And so all those years that I battled with that in Girly, to get to the point where I was comfortable with my own authority as a writer, I learned things that I am able to help my students with. And it’s so rewarding to see it work and it’s amazing to see women start to progress and trust themselves as writers. Everything is kind of condensed down to this foundation class that I require students to take first. When I started teaching these workshops that is what I came up with, and it is a progression that takes you through both getting to your creativity and opening up that intuition. Then very quickly in the 3rd or 4th week I move into all of the craft stuff and progression on a curriculum, which is pretty much wholly missing from workshops in academia! Really, no one gives you this stuff! Emberly and I laugh all the time, because all of the years in workshops, no one ever told you how to do that stuff; you had to figure it out on your own. You’d go to workshops and people would critique this or that but then you never knew, “OK, how do I then go home and do that?” So, there was no way I was going to teach an insipid, ineffectual writing workshop; it had to be really essential information that was going to work. So I boiled it down and it works—people become productive writers who know how to write stories that people want to read and are able to craft a beautiful sentence. It’s almost to the point where I’m present, but the process carries the students along almost on their own, once they get this information.

Seeing your students’ progress must be ridiculously rewarding for you.
Oh, my god! My crew right now is really working hard, and they recently had a reading at Lolita Bar where they each read for 5 minutes and all of their friends came, and I was so blown away that I could not speak. And they are so much better than most of these review copies I get—everyone was electrified, and I was like a dorky mom cheering at a game or something.

How long have you been writing—did you write as a kid?
Well, I think writing was always my natural strength. But, because it was something that came easily and got me things like good grades in English, I didn’t trust it. I kinda wanted to be a punk rock bassist and then I was a film major. But then I figured out that you had to be really extroverted for those things, and deal with all of these physical irritations like lighting and microphones. So, after trying a bunch of different things, it became clear to me that I wasn’t just writing because of praise or whatever, and I could do what I wanted, and be as expansive as I wanted and not have to lug around a camera and mic all the time.

Speaking of music, I know you like Sleater-Kinney, Bjork, and PJ Harvey; do you listen to music while you’re writing?
In the early phases, yes. I’ll drive and drive and drive and the stories will show up. And then at a certain point, the music will start jangling and I’ll hear the characters speaking, and I’ll have to turn the music off. What the music does is get me into my right brain—all of the intuition stuff—and then once I can access that and the story is there, I turn it off. The music for me is the way to feel unconstricted .

Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?
I'm glad we got to talk about the women writers who have gone before, because for me, that is where the sanity is. Even Demimonde is linked to that—it's all part of a larger picture. Also, I wanted to mention that I think magazines like Venus are so important because that is a place for curious women writers, especially young women writers to write about and hear about a broader range of topic beyond “how to take a bath” or whatever the features are in the women’s magazines. I just think that it is so important to have these spaces because that is where women really get to express different ideas and ways of life. I’m so grateful for what you guys are doing, because a lot of women have no stuff that is in magazines like Venus or Bust. I taught a class at Cornell titled “Women’s Secret Stories” and one woman in the class was from Louisiana and had always been anti-choice and I started bringing in magazine articles for the class about women, like Margaret Cho for example, and her world was turned upside down.

Right, and once you plug these women into stuff that they don’t hear about in the mainstream, give them those tools, you’re helping to bridge a gap to everyone they know, too.
Then, the really fun thing is that what they then come up with! I experienced the same thing with the writing of Girly. I would read every interview with Margaret Cho and listen to Sleater-Kinney and PJ Harvey, and every little bit of something like that, that I absorbed it like it was encouragement to me, that, “Yeah, you CAN do something that is not going to fit into ‘Must See TV’.” And now, from all of those women doing amazing things, things like Grace are formed, which is another place for women to come together. For me, I don’t know if I could survive the Bush administration if I wasn’t working hard on this stuff. It’s the only way that I can think of in my own little way, to push for an alternative version of the story.

For more information, visit elizabethmerrick.com

Centerstagechicago.com; Venue Review; South Shore Cultural Center

2006-01-13T18:19:00.004-06:00

Venue review published in Jan 2006, Centerstagechicago.com

South Shore Cultural Center
7059 S. Shore Dr., Chicago
Tel: (773)256-0149

Originally built in 1906 to house the uber-exclusive South Shore Country Club, the South Shore Cultural Center was rescued from demolition by ardent community members in the early 1970s and bought by the Chicago Park District in 1975. Since then, the SSCC has been restored and was made an official Chicago Landmark in 2004. In the mid-'80s, an advisory council was formed to make recommendations to the Park District and develop recreational and cultural activities at the Center, which, to this day, maintains its presence as a "people's palace for arts and arts partnerships."

It is easy to see why the community fought so hard to preserve SSCC. The buildings are visually spectacular, utilizing both the glamorous "resort" architectural style common in Florida and California and the Classical Revival and Adamesque style, heavy with stucco and plaster ornamentation, which restoration crews were instructed to maintain. These grandiose rooms and buildings, along with the unique location on a lakefront beach, make the SSCC a true gem of Chicago's far South Side. Diverse programming ranges from gospel aerobics, stepping classes and ballet to ceramics, documentary film screenings, culinary arts (through the Washburne Culinary Institute) and extensive music courses.

With the Old Town School of Folk Music, the SSCC presents events such as Afro Folk Live!, an initiative to expose Chicagoans to African culture through educational programming. The reinvigoration of the grounds and buildings has not gone unnoticed by the community, and groups and individuals are increasingly renting out the Solarium, Paul Robeson Theater and Oak Room for events. The elegant plot of land that houses the SSCC buildings includes a club building, gatehouse and stable, in addition to a nine-hole golf course, tennis courts and bird-friendly nature sanctuary on the small peninsula behind the buildings.

Reviewed By: Gretchen Kalwinski

Centerstagechicago.com; Guide; High Tea

2006-01-13T11:26:00.001-06:00

Published on centerstagechicago.com, January 2006

Take Your Afternoon Tea
High tea puts an end to the mid-afternoon slump

By: Gretchen Kalwinski

In 1840 England, the 7th Duchess of Bedford realized that she got a bit groggy in the late afternoon hours (in those days, lunch was served at noon, dinner at 8 p.m.). To combat the fatigue, she began telling servants to bring tea, pastries with cream, finger sandwiches and scones to her room between 3 and 4 p.m. As this became a regular practice, the Duchess began inviting friends to her daily soiree. By the late 1800s, the idea had taken off, and afternoon tea became a widespread ritual for the wealthy. These days, the tradition is carried on in tearooms and upper-echelon hotels across the world...and in Chicago.

Drink to Old World charm at Russian Tea Time
Started Klara Muchnik and her son, Vadim, Russian Tea Time is a nook-ish spot located within a two-block radius of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Jewelry Row and the Art Institute, making this a wise choice for an afternoon breather. The mahogany mirrors and candelabras on the wall evoke a true sense of the gothic Old World, and the sweets (sesame crunch and walnut cookies and mini crepes) are fantastic. Tea service, available from 2:30-4:30 daily, costs $19 per person and also includes scones with cream and lemon curd and a savory course of tea sandwiches. Since it is small, reservations are recommended, but the selection of 30 teas is worth it, with the blood orange and passion fruit varieties as standouts.

Sip on the North Side at Unique So Chique Tea & Chocolate Room
Tea drinkers first pass through a charming clothing, jewelry and gift boutique to reach this small tearoom, which seats 22 in a plant-filled space artfully decorated with vintage English undertones. In addition to the more than 35 standard varieties of earl grey, green, fruit, peppermint and decaf brews, Unique goes the extra mile by offering a variety of organic teas and a yerba mate blend (a plant known for its gentle energy boosting quality). Tea, available from 3-5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday, takes on a pleasant mix-and-quality here. Options range from the cream tea service (just scones and tea) for $6.95 to the $15.95 full tea exotic service, which steps up the traditional sandwiches with varieties like chicken with apricot and walnut.

Go the mom and pop route at Urban Tea Lounge
A true mom and pop joint, owners Cece and Hank Anderson offer a homemade cafe menu stocked with family recipes and an afternoon tea service served any time of day. Though the couch- and easy chair-filled atmosphere is a casual one, the afternoon tea options are anything but skimpy, with 70 varieties of black, green, white, oolong and chai teas. At $15 per person (two-person minimum), you can choose between Tier 1, tea and subtly sweet scones with preserves; Tier 2, creative and tasty finger sandwiches and spreads (cucumber, mint butter, nutella and apple); and Tier 3, a dizzying array of cakes and pastries. The atmosphere is almost like that of a European cafe: customer play checkers and chess, spontaneously start conversations with strangers at the next table, then go back to doing their own thing.

Take a break from shopping at The Drake Hotel
Located on the Magnificent Mile, the Drake's afternoon tea provides a haven for overworked shoppers. Standout teas include the chamomile, mint, and Irish Breakfast, and the delicate sandwiches (roast beef and tomato, egg salad, ham and asparagus) are light and hit the spot. In addition to the formal (and pricey, at $28.95) afternoon tea service, an unobtrusive harpist plays classical tunes and jazz standards; champagne is available for an extra $7 per person. Tea is taken daily from 1:30-5 p.m. in the elegant Palm Court room, which has a fountain in its center and a mixture of Eastern and British decor like folding screens with painted birds, antique furnishings and an elegant mahogany bar.

Ladies who lunch should do tea at the Walnut Room
There's no mistaking the ladies-who-lunch glamour of Marshall Field's seventh-floor room. The afternoon tea service, available seven days a week from 2:30-5 p.m. (but call to verify), costs $19.95 and offers a champagne option. The Walnut Room pours sturdy teas (green, black, oolong and herbal) from the Whittard of Chelsea line that come sided with the requisite light savories, imported Devonshire cream, cakes and raisin scones. But the real story is the Old-World crowd that turns out for this event. Field's has always been a haven for well-manicured European ladies (rich and poor) who both work and shop there, and one hopes that their no-nonsense and elegant presence won't be lost with the upcoming change of ownership.

Try the grandiose option at The Peninsula Chicago
The Peninsula hotel offers similar ambience (cellist, pianist) and menu (extensive green, black and herbal teas and finger sandwiches) as other afternoon teas, but the location in the majestic Lobby room gives the Peninsula an advantage over smaller or more humble locales. The enormous room's sipping setting comes complete with pillars, tall windows, high ceilings, golden draperies and attentive servers. The divine lemon tarragon scones are a perfect match with the gunpowder Chinese green tea. Order this combo, daintily sip and tea, and enjoy the indulgence. The $26 tea service offered 3-5:30 p.m. weekdays, 2:30-4:30 p.m. Saturday and 4-6 p.m. Sunday; champagne costs an additional $9 to $11.

Do It Yourself
Though high teas have a reputation as fancy affairs, it's easy to host one. Gather a selection of black and herbal teas, spread some cream cheese, dill and cucumber on white or wheat bread with the crusts cut off, and make or buy tea biscuits to serve alongside some fresh fruit. Scones from a bakery are optional; serve with an assortment of jams and preserves. Sugar cubes provide another nice touch, and soymilk with honey is surprisingly good in almost any variety of black tea. Arrange a buffet table along with some flowers, plants and reeds, for a decadent feeling. Serve around 3 p.m. to stay within tradition.

Centerstagechicago.com; Venue Review; Parrot Cage

2006-01-12T17:36:00.001-06:00

Venue review published on Centerstagechicago.com, January 2006.

Parrot Cage
7059 S. South Shore Dr., Chicago
Tel: (773) 602-5333

Located inside the South Shore Cultural Center, the Parrot Cage takes its name from the displaced parrots residing in nearby Hyde Park. The restaurant is an offshoot of the Washburne Culinary Institute (also housed within the SSCC), where advanced students gain real-world experience by working as kitchen and wait staff.

Swiftly gaining a reputation as a romantic restaurant, the elegant architecture of the SSCC helps to illustrate the point. The building that houses the intimate dining room was built in the Mediterranean Revival architectural style, and is laden with elegant black and white mosaics. In the winter months, the large, arched windows look onto the snowy grounds, and during the summer there is a view of the lakefront and expansive nature walk. As for the menu, only locally grown, fresh ingredients are used. Chef Brian Jupiter takes inspiration from global dishes, treating them with a classic American flair. The selection is extensive, with seven starters, seven entrees and a handful of desserts. Standouts include the chicken and Serrano ham croquettes with haricot vert salad ($6), the goat cheese gnocchi with spinach, sweet potatoes and shallot thyme cream ($15), and the pan-roasted salmon with braised cabbage, bacon, apples and mustard sauce ($17). The pear bread pudding ($6) and pineapple sorbet are light and deliciously sweet.

Since Washburne is a culinary institute in practice and learning actually takes place in the kitchen, a high standard for quality is evident in the precise and deliberate dishes. The educational aspect of the restaurant is nearly invisible, and the small, instructional moments are subtle: Never fear, you're among a gang of pros, here. Reservations are recommended.

Reviewed By: Gretchen Kalwinski

Time Out Chicago; Book Review; My Sister's Continent

2005-12-29T18:39:00.001-06:00

Published in Time Out Chicago Magazine / Issue 44: Dec 29, 2005

My Sister's Continent
By: Gina Frangello.
Chiasmus Press, $12.
Review By: Gretchen Kalwinski

After her twin sister's mysterious disappearance, narrator Kirby Braun responds to a therapist's mistaken diagnoses of her family—laden with sexual secrets and feminine angst—by carefully piecing together details from Kendra's life. While sifting through memories, Kirby muses, "How do I tell the story of a life...that is outside my own experience, wrapped in shatterproof glass and secrets that have everything to do with me?"

While Kirby is complacent and domestic, Kendra was passionate and bohemian. Devastated after an injury ended her promising career at the New York City Ballet, Kendra returned to family in Chicago only to become increasingly withdrawn before disappearing entirely. Though Kirby was considered the "good" twin, she is inwardly troubled: no career, a banal sex life and health problems that become a serious threat to her wedding plans. It is difficult to deal with female sexuality without exploring issues of body, consumption and purging (of food, thoughts, memories), and the novel's strength is how intricately these themes are linked. Between Kirby's digestive troubles and Kendra's depression, both girls lose weight rapidly, mirroring one another's bodies even while their personalities conflict.

Kendra's sadomasochistic relationship with an older man functions as a "therapy of humiliation," and it is in these scenes that Frangello's lush and poetic style is at its most lyric. The cat-and-mouse style of their coital dialogue is an annoying but necessary device in conveying their sex games, and during one particularly sophisticated conversation, Kendra muses, "I prefer my sex less civilized and urbane than this cigarette-lighting Noël Coward routine you call being direct."

Frangello's debut novel is akin to a woman's archeological dig into another life, as well as a modern retelling of Freud's famed "Dora" story. As such, it cannot help but be rather bleak, evoking a similar anomie as The Ice Storm and The Virgin Suicides. It is also an intriguing and darkly psychological look at and investigation of identity, the façades that cloak us and the complicated habitat of private, inner lives. —GK

Centerstagechicago.com; Venue Review: La Amistad

2005-12-16T22:00:00.001-06:00

Published on Centerstagechicago.com, December 2005

La Amistad

Sometimes, you just want some reliable Mexican grub. The residents of the Ravenswood neighborhood get their fix at the trusty mom-and-pop La Amistad: a taqueria that bills itself as "Mexican and American food" and delivers a menu made up of the basics. Taco-stand afficianados will appreciate that La Amistad has consistently non-gristly meat, and that the basics like chicken burritos, steak tacos, chiles rellenos and cheese quesadillas are solid and flavorful. The efficient service translates to a lot of carry-out business, and when I lived in Ravenswood, there was always a trail of people, myself included, who exited the train and walked directly into La Amistad to place their dinner order, and sip a horchata while waiting.

The "American" portion of the menu includes burgers, fruit shakes and pancakes, all priced between $2 and $5. The restaurant services a large breakfast crowd, and locals will wait in line for not only the eggs prepared Mexican-style with salsa, peppers and tortillas, but also for the pancakes, bacon and hash browns. The inside is small but clean, and filled with healthy plants and glittery fabric flowers. There is a large table in front, 10 spots at the counter, and five booths with velvet paintings of wolves and eagles hanging above. Families usually occupy a booth or two in daytime hours, and late nights and mornings are taken over by folks who may have had a beer too many, and need a hearty antidote.

Reviewed By: Gretchen Kalwinski

Venus Zine

2005-12-05T19:24:00.000-06:00

New Year’s Celebrations 2006: Off the beaten path

Some festive DIY options for ringing in the new year without breaking the bank

By Dina Zwiebel & Gretchen Kalwinski
Published: December 21st, 2005 | 11:38am

OK, so it’d be easy to head to your favorite bar or your neighbor’s New Year’s Eve party and nurse a splitting headache the next day while you crawl around looking for hangover food. We’ve all done it before and we’ll do it again. However, if you’re broke or simply looking for an alternative to the standard bar or hotel New Year’s “bash” — which is, let’s face it, usually overrated — Venus is at your rescue with some creative alternatives for welcoming 2006.
FOR OUTDOORSY TYPES OR THOSE ON A BUDGET
Gaze at the moon and stars reflecting off the water
Find a beach, any beach. Bring friends and arm them with cheap champagne and lots of blankets — or hats and gloves if your beach happens to be in a cold climate. Build a fire if you think you can get away with it, watch the stars, and wish upon them. Count down to midnight. Dance madly on the sand when it arrives.
Enjoy a mob-ridden light show
In many cities, there are free fireworks shows. Although the idea of a large crowd may be off-putting, it may also be a great way to feel the humanity. Ring in 2006 with an elated mob.
See a quirky theater production
Many theaters don’t have shows on this night, since they don’t want to force actors to work on a holiday. But some eclectic, smaller theaters put on a show for the fun of it. The Neo-Futurists in Chicago, for example, offer a $30 theater-n-appetizer combo for their brand of speedy, off-the-wall, somewhat-improv short plays.
Gaze at your navel
Yoga studios all over the country host non-alcoholic New Year’s Eve nights that include yoga and meditation, chanting, drum circles, Bikram sessions that end at the stroke of midnight, massage, and Reiki. If you are tired of waking up with the dizzy residue of heavy partying on the first day of the New Year, check yoga studios and spas in your neck of the woods to find out how to have a holistic, conscious beginning to 2006.
PARTY IDEAS
Not feeling like investing a Benjamin to drink the night away at a bar on NYE? You can put that money toward a marvelous party with yourself as the generous host. Your guests will thank you for saving them money, and you will be proud to display your DIY talents at the last/first party of the year.
Create a residential transformation
• Nothing says it’s the holidays like a whole lotta lights. Swear against switches and lamps tonight and set the room on fire with strings of lights strewn across tables, bookshelves, and chairs. They cost little but they add a huge element of merriment and celebration. Also, decorate surfaces with glittery confetti to give things that extra party feel. It doesn’t take much effort but you’ll feel like you’re in a sparkly world that looks nothing like the home you’re used to.
• Most of us have at least two screens in our homes: a television and a computer. Don’t save the TV for the last 10 seconds of 2005. Use it in your design scheme tonight. Display some DVDs on those screens. Choose some with interesting visuals (anything from an old Japanese movie with big robotic monsters to the work of Michel Gondry) and play them on mute.
Set the mood
Weren’t iPods created to show off your awesome musical tastes at a party? Create a splendid playlist for your friends to enjoy and admire you for. Or else, make it seasonal with some jazz — Ella Fitzgerald Wishes You a Swinging Christmas always does it for me!
Class up your beverage
Whether or not your guests want to get liquored up tonight, they can still look great sipping (or chugging) it down!
• Make it a sweet year by wetting the rims of their glasses and stick on some sugar crystals or crushed-up peppermint candies.
• A little garnish goes a long way: Keep some maraschino cherries and orange, lime, and lemon slices handy for whenever someone wants a cocktail refresher.
Tasty morsels to chase the hangover away
You can always go with the standard crudités with dip or hummus, but why not spice things up a bit?
• Head for the heat-and-serve part of the supermarket for this one. Just buy those pre-made crescent rolls (usually in the dairy case), and use the dough and your imagination to make some interestingly shaped hors d’oeuvres. Sprinkle on some diced bell pepper, onions, and cheese, or stuff them with broccoli and cheddar. Then put ’em in the oven for the appropriate time.
• Another not-from-scratch idea: Some supermarkets, like Trader Joe’s, sell pre-made pizza dough. All you have to do is spread it out on a pan, apply olive oil, add some sauce, cheese, and your choice of veggies or meats. Pop it in the oven and when it’s ready, cut into squares. This one can be easily veganized.
• If turning on an oven is too much cooking for you, how about providing your guests with some homemade trail mix? You can make all sorts of mixtures — sweet and savory — and set them in bowls throughout your digs. For instance, jazz up trail mix with chocolate chips and almonds, mix up a bowl of saltiness with pretzels, peanuts, and rice crackers, or indulge your sweet tooth with a bowl of chocolate chips, toffee bits, and marshmallows.
• And, hell, everyone loves a potluck!
While away the time
It’s always fun to exploit the New Year theme. Here are some ideas of how to get your guests jazzed about the year ahead:
• Give everyone a few pieces of paper. Tell them to make up a few “top 10 of 2005” list ideas and write them down. For example: “top 10 hook-ups of the year” or “top 10 new foods I tried this year.” Put them all in a hat, shake ’em up, and have each guest choose one and list their choices.
• Reserve one table as a shrine to old man 2005 and another to welcome baby ’06. Have your guests bring a brand-new candle and a relic of 2005. It could be a magazine cover showing Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt or the Gwen Stefani CD they wish they hadn’t bought. Place the objects on the 2005 table surrounded by pre-lit candles and put the new candles on the 2006 table. Once the clock strikes midnight, blow out the candles on 2005 and ignite 2006 with the candles your guests have brought.
HOMEBODY OPTIONS
Host a Steve Carell Fest
Who didn’t love Steve Carell playing Brick Tamland in Anchorman and Andy Stitzer in The 40 Year Old Virgin? Watch the two DVDs back to back with your other Brick-and Andy-loving friends with snacks and drinks. Try to remember the best lines from the movies and bring in the New Year by speaking “Brick and Andy.” For example:
“So how was your 2005?”
“Yeah, there were horses, and a man on fire, and I killed a guy with a trident!”
Another example: “What happened to [insert girl’s name]?”
“That girl was a ho … for sho’.”
Whip Up Delectable French Drinks
Make do with cheap beer, white wine, or champagne, but splurge on some strawberry or cassis (black currant) liqueur to concoct quasi-luxurious drinks with some friends. There are no strict rules for how much liqueur you use, so just mix according to taste.
• The French combine strawberry liqueur with beer to make demi-fraises, which sounds bizarre but is uniquely tasty. Even those who do not normally care for the taste of beer may take a liking to the demi-fraise. It is possible to be creative and compose a demi-cassis or demi-any fruit.
• For a kir, combine a bit of cassis liqueur with white wine. This cocktail is usually enjoyed in France before a meal, but armed with a kir, you can bring in the New Year with some sass and class.
• Or take it up a step and ring in the New Year with a kir royale by combining cassis liqueur with champagne. The New Year will look good with pinkish-purplish, sweet champagne.
SOME OTHER EXAMPLES OF DIY AND HOMEBODY IDEAS FROM CORRESPONDENTS AND COMPADRES ’ROUND THE GLOBE
• "I was born and raised in Hawai'i and when midnight comes around, tons and tons of firecrackers are set off. The tradition is probably due to the large Asian population on the islands, and so many firecrackers go off that a lot of the time, there are asthma and air pollution warnings. I remember one New Year's where the smoke was so thick, it was dangerous to drive. The next day, there's usually a story or two on the news about a firecracker injury and someone being taken to the hospital on account of their hand being blown off." — Kristina, Chicago
• “In south Dallas they fire their guns in the air — oftentimes they sound quite automatic. My family stands at the door but we don't step out — we want to hear, but not get impaled by falling bullets.” — Robert, Dallas
• “I was in Edinburgh, Scotland, a few years ago for Hogmanay [Scottish street festival with music and fireworks], which should be known as Snogmonay, since everyone on the streets kisses (snogs) each other and teenagers are puking up hard cider in the parks. Thousands of people turn out for it.” — Meghan, Brooklyn
• “I remember one New Year’s Eve, where I was a driver in a car full of friends. I forgot where we were heading, but we passed several small towns along the way — it was a good two-hour drive at least. During that trip, as we passed each town, we got to glimpse their firework display from the interstate. It was really quite an experience — town after town, each one lit up along the way. Definitely something I'd recommend, although it sucked to be the driver, as I missed a lot.” — Felix, Chicago
• “Last year I went to a huge AA party in SoHo where only soda and water were served and we danced the old year away to a DJ in a church basement. Celebrity sightings and the like — can't tell you who, of course. Got hit on by a guy in Debtors Anonymous, who told me I looked like a Russian princess.” — Kasia, New York
• “I joined the Chicago polar bear club [a group of people who jump in the icy water of Lake Michigan] a few years back, and the year before that I went canoeing.” — Erik, Chicago
• “My mom always made pigs-in-blankets at home, and then my parents bark outside at midnight. My sister and I, of course humiliated, would stay inside, content with all the mini hot dogs and canned croissants.” — Mordecai, Chicago
• “I’m not sure what we’re going to do for New Year’s Eve, but I bought the DVD for Kylie Minogue’s concert for a friend, so we’re gonna pre-party it up with Kylie at home.” — Amy, Chicago
• “My family and I pile into the basement best-suited for a party and eat tons of food before we dance for hours. At midnight we count down and then congratulate each other on a year’s worth of living gone well — decided by the amount of life left in us. All the while, the young’uns are trying to steal Jell-o shots only to realize how much of an acquired taste they are. We then dance and drink until we are all spent, and the next day, the strong will gather to eat the leftover food and regale in stories of the previous night.” — Tony, Chicago
Whatever kind of New Year’s merriment you choose, we at Venus send you good tidings and well-wishes for 2006.

Venus Zine; Interview; Edith Frost

2005-11-23T12:54:00.001-06:00

Venus Zine, November 2005

Interview with Edith Frost

The Chicago musician's new album, It's a Game, evokes a country carnival by Gretchen Kalwinski Edith Frost’s brand-spanking-new album, It’s a Game, the long-awaited follow-up to 2001’s Wonder Wonder, was released by Drag City on November 15, 2005, with a corresponding CD release party at Chicago’s Hothouse and a glowing, full-page review in the Chicago Tribune.

Known for her heartbreak-y tunes and melancholy, wistful lyrics, Frost is used to fielding questions from journalists about her relationships. She's matter-of-fact about a recent breakup on her massive blog, edithfrost.com, and a recent post expresses frustration that her relationship status gets so much attention. I chatted with Frost at her Chicago apartment in the Ravenswood neighborhood, where we drank Hefeweizen and chewed the fat about Chicago weather, the new album, blogs, stupid jobs, and pets.

So I’ve listened to It’s a Game, and I wanted to tell you that I think it’s so beautiful and melodic.
Thank you. … I like it too.

Do you have a favorite tune on the album?
Well, “Emergency” and “Playmate” are the ones that — when we were talking about what to put out on mp3 — we talked about showcasing. I’d been thinking about those two, and then one day Rian Murphy [Drag City’s head of staff] just yelled out in the studio, “Everybody, what’s the one?” And they were like, “Emergency! Emergency!” “Playmate” is a super old song; it was written nine to 10 years ago. I actually played that when I first starting playing out with my own songs, when I was in New York.

I was wondering if you have daily rituals for getting work done, or do you wait for inspiration to strike?
Rian says that I used to do that a lot more. When he met me and when we were recording Calling Over Time, I guess I was sitting with a guitar every single day. I was just sitting every day playing folk and country tunes for the sake of playing. I really don’t do that any more, like I used to. I don’t practice regularly.

Is it because it is so second nature to you that you don’t even need to make a ritual of it?
No, I should be doing it! I should, because then I’d write a lot more songs. I should definitely get back into that habit. Because if you’re dealing with the music every day, then something is more likely to come of that than sitting and watching All My Children. (Laughs) Well, you never know, there might be something you could use from that show? (Laughs)
There was a quote from the show today that I loved. Something like, “You got me pregnant and now you’re dumping me?!” In that one, the guy was a sperm donor. Like, he was like the family doctor, so he didn’t actually screw her. He impregnated her by insemination. Still pretty shocking.

When I'm home writing during the day, I’ll turn on the judge shows sometimes. They’re a problem for me.
Those I can get sucked into, those and Elimidate, because it’s always on after South Park, which I love. I Tivo that, and so I get Elimidate at the end. At some point, I got sucked into the reality shows. My theory was that I’d start watching all of them and eliminate one every week until I’m down to the One True Reality show that I really love, but I’m still Tivo’ing all of those. My favorite is Big Brother. I don’t really watch-watch them, but I just work right here on the couch and have them on out of the corner of my eye … I swear I’m not … oh well.

I wanted to ask you about public versus private personas, because your music is introspective and wistful, but you’re also out in public mode pretty often, blogging and performing, so do you think of yourself as more of an introvert or extrovert?
Well, my natural inclination is to be a total homebody. I can be perfectly happy just being at home and doing the little projects that I do. And, with the blog, from my perspective, it doesn’t seem that revealing or that I’m giving away too much. When I first started it years ago, I was blabbing too much and using too many names. I keep going back and forth, with “I want a private life, I don’t want them to know everything” and then just talking about everything on the blog. But it was just a matter of learning how to go about it and assuming that who you were talking about was going to read it. And performing is cool, because you get feedback. I do well at it, by my standards. In other words, I get a lot of fulfillment from it.

Had you played with any of the musicians that you worked with on It’s a Game before?
Yeah, pretty much. Lindsay [Anderson], Josh [Abrams], and I had opened for Cat Power three years ago, and Ryan Hembrey is someone who I’ve been working with ever since I moved to Chicago. Mark Greenberg is someone I’ve also known forever, too. He worked on Wonder Wonder and also Love is Real. Jason [Toth], the drummer, is in Manischewitz, and I’d done a tour a while back with them. I have the worst luck with drummers — they always go onto bigger and better things. Like, my first drummer in Chicago was Glenn Kotche and he’s in Wilco now, and then Gerald Dowd who plays with Robbie Fulks, who has about 365 gigs a year. And Adam Vida who is in US Maple. There is just this trail of drummers behind me.

So your last album came out in 2001, four years ago, and a lot of reviewers so far have fixated on the four years between that one and the new album. I thought that seemed sort of weird …
Yeah, I did too.

Because it seems to put out the expectation that you’re supposed to trump out a record a year or something.
Well, the others were like a year and half or two years apart, so maybe I’d set up these expectations by cranking out stuff a little faster. But to me, the time just flew by so fast — it didn’t seem like four years. I think if I’d had it together a bit more, it would have been maybe three and a half years instead, but that’s it.

Do you find yourself going through seasonal cycles of productivity versus simmering?
Well, if I’m touring I’m not writing, and I don’t write when there is something going on with my family. Basically, almost anything can distract me from making music. Your Web site has the heading of “roller skating enthusiast.”

How frequently do you roller skate?
I haven’t in a while — I need to get back into that.

Do you think you’d ever like to skate with a roller derby like the Windy City Rollers?
No, but I bet they’d like me to. I mean, I’m a really good skater. Oh, I shouldn’t say that because there are really good skaters who could say, “No, you’re not.” I mean, I can skate. But I don’t have health insurance, and that is one of their requirements. Also, the roller derby is just not my thing. I’m more into wanting to be a wannabe figure skater. I like doing jumps and spins.

You’re from a warm climate, and it’s getting to be wintertime in Chicago. Do you have coping mechanisms for Chicago winters?
I don’t know — the winter seems to go very fast for me. I got used to the cold because I lived in New York for six years. There, it seemed like worse, sloppier winters, since it was on the ocean. It’s colder and more bitter here, but more tolerable, I think. And I learned in New York how to dress: three pairs of socks, hose under the long johns, pants, blah, blah, blah. I get more bothered by the really gross hot weather. I finally broke down and bought an AC this summer, during that weekend when it was 94 degrees all weekend. Y’know, in Texas, everybody knows that you don’t live without an air conditioner — you just don’t do it! And here, it’s more like you don’t live without heat. All of the buildings I’ve lived in have had good heat but not automatic AC, like in Texas. But, coming from a place where there weren’t really seasons — where it was just hot, hotter, or maybe not as hot — I do like Chicago’s defined seasons.

This is a big apartment building. Do your neighbors ever hear you singing and playing and complain?
It’s a really quiet building and no one has ever complained. Also, I don’t jam that loud; I don’t do the amp too much, just sometimes to make sure it works. I think that if they were going to complain, it would actually be about the incessant TV. I don’t think they hear me; we have pretty thick walls. I don’t hear them, except for little footsteps from above and their cats sometimes.

I hear my landlord’s bassett hound sometimes, when it’s chasing toys across the hardwood floors.
I can’t have a dog in this apartment. I’ve had cats in other apartments, but not here. Really, if I could I would, because they’re so fun, but when I tour and go away, it’d be such a drag for the cats. If I was living with someone it would be different. It wouldn’t be like I was putting this creature in the position to be really lonely. My best pal just got a dog, Lois, so I live vicariously through her, and Drag City has Easy; she is a pitbull who is the sweetest. So I get a lot of pet privileges.

I love offices with dogs. Venus shares space with this skateboard company, and the owner rescued these two greyhounds that are always there.
Greyhounds are so damn big, though!

Yeah, but these two are really mellow and sweet. They sleep in the sun for most of the day, and I’ve only seen them be high strung when they hear a vacuum cleaner.
Yeah, the great nemesis of all dogs — they say it’s the postman, but no!

How do different producers’ styles affect the sound of your albums?
Well, Rian has produced all but the second album, Telescopic, which was done by Neil Haggerty, and they had very different styles. Rian is a lot more of the kind of guy who will gather all the pieces and musicians together and say, “Work your magic!” Whereas Neil was a lot more structured about things. He took detailed notes, even to the point of changing structures a little bit, like adding longer middle parts or whatever. And he was really really specific about what he wanted. And they’re all great ideas, so it worked out. But Rian is a lot freer with bringing people together and letting them work. And he does come up with ideas for arrangements that I wouldn’t necessarily come up with myself. His talent really lies more in being the conduit or the facilitator.

Kind of like throwing all of the ingredients in the pot and letting them work together?
Yeah, and he’s really good about knowing who might sound good together. And he just keeps it light and jokey. He’s a funny guy.

Must be comforting to have a producer who you can trust to go with their instincts like that.
It’s really cool to have worked with Rian for so long. To have him know the language, you know? He knows what is best for it and what will make the music sound good, because he’s heard it for so long, so he knows what works and what doesn’t work.

Were you a musical kid?
My mom had me in lessons periodically. I took some cello and piano when I was a kid, and I got a little guitar when I was 14. And she always had a piano and was always hanging out with orchestra people. And my dad has always been really into jazz and classical stuff, and he turned me onto a lot of stuff too. My mom always had a lot of records around: Joni Mitchell and Carole King, Leonard Cohen, Dylan, Led Zeppelin. But yeah, there was always music around, and that was fortunate for me, but I was in Mexico from fourth to ninth grade, and they didn’t have a music program there. So when I moved back to Texas for high school, the other kids had already been in the programs, and I really wasn’t prepared to read music or play an instrument in band or anything. I missed out on the schooling in the early years, kind of caught up, took music lessons at University of Texas, and tried to make up for it. But there are still big holes in my knowledge of music — like as far as the technical part of it, even though I’ve taken all these classes, and I should remember all this theory and stuff. But that’s never been very natural for me. I do a lot better just with three chords and banging around.

I know that a while back you weren’t getting international distribution. What’s going on with that?
Yeah, yeah, they got me a better distribution deal since the last album, but it’s only been in the last six months or year. It used to be that if there was a store that had my stuff, they had it as imports, for the most part. I used to go there and hear, “I’ve never heard of you. I haven’t seen your records. Where do I get your records?” It should be a lot better now, I’m hoping. I’ve never had a bad tour [in Europe], but it’s been a little lacking as far as prepping them for who the fuck I am! (Laughs) But there are always these weird little pockets of fans, like in Stockholm, I had like fuckin’ 20 superfans, with lighters, singing along to every word, but that’s an anomaly.

Where do you like to play in Europe?
Paris has always been great. London I’ve only played once, but it was awesome show. When I played Spain, I had so much fun there, because I speak Spanish — since I used to live in Mexico — and it made it a lot easier to joke with the audience. Sure, they didn’t know who the hell I was there, but I had the advantage of being able to joke with them and speak to them. The show there was a super-fun show.

That’s right, you speak Spanish. I read that you moved around a bit when you were a kid, in Texas and Mexico.
Yeah, the order was San Antonio, Austin, Guadalajara, Austin, San Antonio, Austin, New York, then Chicago. And there were about five different homes in every place.

You’ve maintained your blog for 10 years, you were on the Internet before most people even knew what the Internet was, and you once had a day job as a programmer. Do you still do that work to make extra cash?
No, well, the last little freelance thing that I did was with Drag City, helping them with their Itunes, uploading data entry, but that’s just song titles and stuff, not like “programming.” As far as Web stuff, I just do my own site now. I like separating my fun from my work (laughs). The best job I ever had was as a courier, when I was using my van to drive packages from like downtown FedEx to the airport. It was for a shipping company. I was a substitute-courier for Adam Jacobs, this Chicago character who tapes concerts. And so it was no brainwork — just picking up, signing for the packages, driving them out somewhere while listening to the radio. It was so removed from any of my responsibilities in my real career — the music — that I really [enjoyed] that shit work.

That sounds like a dream day job for a creative person — just being able to zone out.
Yeah, stupid jobs can be really fun like that if you don’t have to worry about what you’re doing so much. Working in music could be a drag if you’re just being immersed in music all day and having to do it for your vocation, too. I think it takes a lot of dedication to keep things separate.
Yeah, it makes you value what you’re doing for the love of it as opposed to the money. I’ve been lucky, because more and more over the years, the music has moved from being hobby to work. Even my tax lady can say so, and then she can take more of a percentage! It’s hard, but the more I work at it the more I can do that. If I got off my ass and played more shows, I could make a pretty comfortable living. It’s just that I’m lazy and I like to avoid working.

You were just playing some shows with Calexico in Austin. How did that go?
I met them in Tulsa — we played there and then Fort Worth the next night — and then we played Austin. It was a blast, it was so fun. I didn’t have copies of It’s a Game with me, so I was just talking it up and playing some songs off of it. I had the pedal-steel player from Calexico, and “Playmate” was actually one of the songs that we were doing. He would come up at the end and we’d do “Mirage” and “Playmate” on pedal steel. It was sooo pretty. I don’t know how they do that, those guys. Pedal steel seems like a really hard instrument to me. But it was perfect.

Many of the tunes on the new album are hinged on heartbreak or a love-affair ending. Do people make assumptions about you and your love life based on that?
Yeah, it’s part of the mythos or whatever. I don’t like it — I wish that my thoughts were a little less rooted in the real (laughs). But the thing is that it’s just the topic that is easiest for me to write about. I have all of these aspects of my life — friends, family, hobbies — but I just don’t choose to write about them. The way I see it is that you write a sad song and you can kind of “validate your feelings” and then you can leave it behind and it becomes just a pretty song eventually — you know, after a few weeks. I just really like sad songs. Some of my favorite songs are really broken-heartedy kind of songs. It’s just ... yeah, why do people like that, why is that enjoyable? I don’t know (laughs). I envy the people who can just make up a story and write really vivid imagery and can take you to a place that they haven’t even necessarily been. I can do that somewhat — a little bit — but that is harder for me. It is easier for me to just pull from my own e-mail or things I’ve said or things I overheard. Plus, the songs do tend to be patched together a lot, because I’ll just write like three phrases down or something when the thing is going on. And then, in a notebook, piece of paper, or on a computer or something and might not come back to it till much later. There was one, “My Lover Won’t Call” — I literally had every word of that for 10 years, and it took me that long to finally stumble across it and say, “Oh, I could finish that” (laughs). So, in that way, the albums end up being much more at a distance than what is going on in my head at the moment, because it is so pieced together time-wise. So the songs are not necessarily about what’s happening at that time period.

You’re actually mining old scraps of paper, moments, and journals?
Yeah, by the point that I am pulling it together and actually making it into a song, that is definitely not the point that I’m actually going through the heartbreak. When the heartbreak is happening, I will tend to write stream-of-consciousness shit, but I’m not in a state where I want to actually sit down and do a demo or figure out chords or anything. It’s just like “bleh, bleh, bleh,” and then I’ll come back to it and be like, “Hmm, that rhymes!” I have to go through [the scraps of paper] later and attempt to pull something out of it that makes sense. It’s just about the discipline to do that.

Top photo © Drag City
Bottom photo © Eric Ziegenhagen