Autumn 2009 Midway Review, with my article about the Olympics

The 2009 Midway Review is out, but unfortunately not up on our website yet. Here's a photo of the cover for now, and a re-posting of my article on the aftermath of Chicago's Olympic bid:


NO LITTLE PLANS: CHICAGO’S NEXT OLYMPIC MARATHON WILL BE REVITALIZING THE SOUTH SIDE

I.

It was humid, the first Tuesday of July, and President Zimmer was sharing his lunch break with a bullhorn and a crowd of protesters.

A handful of South Side residents, University of Chicago students, and representatives from the Illinois Single-Payer were marching against the closing of a University of Chicago Medical Center Clinic on 47th St. The protest, led by South Side Together Organizing for Power on the corner of 58th and Ellis Ave, was typical: The marchers chanted, "health care is a human right!” and circled the Administration Building while University employees darted in and out of the front entrance.

But one set of small, black and white posters carried a slightly different message: “Better clinics—No Olympics Games.” This slogan became incorporated into another chant as the group continued to pace along the street.

The protest was primarily about criticizing the Medical Center for disregarding poor people—this much was clear. But less obviously, it also implicated the city's Olympic bid—and the bid's potential cost for taxpayers—as a big part of the problem of Chicago’s health care disparities.

The protestors won’t be using this argument anymore; Chicago lost the Olympic bid last month with a surprisingly low number of votes from the International Olympic Committee, and the city has not indicated that it will pursue another after garnering last place against Madrid, Rio de Janeiro (the winner) and Tokyo.

But for those who opposed the Olympic bid this summer, the Games became a proxy for all of Chicago’s public works ills: the failing school system, the broken transit model, gang violence, health care disparities. The colorful Chicago 2016 banners adorning Washington Park loomed over these South Side community issues leading up to the Oct. 2 bid decision, and continued to hang somberly for sometime after the city’s loss, begging the questions, When will the park district take them down? And What will the city do next in this beautiful park, and the dismally low-income neighborhoods at its borders?

In Chicago’s failed quest for the Olympic bid (a loss Mayor Daley blames partly on “dart-throwing” nay-sayers), the opponents asked, “how can we fund an Olympics when our public schools are failing? How can we send thousands upon thousands of tourists into South Side communities that we’re afraid to enter ourselves?” while supporters championed the injection of private money into the veins of the city’s transit map and business corridors. With the Games behind them, I want to see these two groups come together, because they have a lot in common. Both want Chicago to prosper and be worthy of global acclaim, and both understand that this won’t happen until we reverse the trends of heightened gun violence, failed schools, crowded clinics that unfortunately under girded the city’s aspirations.

II.

For Tom Tresser, the No Games Chicago member who brought the "Better Clinics..." posters to the July 2 protest, the issue of poor medical services and the 2016 Olympics were inextricable.

Tresser has been a community activist and “angry tax-payer” for the past decade, first as the founder of Protect our Parks, and now with No Games. When he learned of the city’s plans to place major Olympics venues in public parks, he said his background fighting for public land compelled him to get involved in the anti-Games efforts.

"We have the same goals," he said of his organization and the amalgam of South Side and healthcare activists and Hyde Park residents gathering outside of the University bookstore. "We're trying to make the city better from a grassroots level, and one of the things [No Games] has been saying all along is that we want better trains, better schools, better clinics—and not the Games."

But if you ask many disappointed supporters of the city’s bid, the Olympic Games would have been exactly the financial stimulus to make those improvements—and revitalize the South Side communities that have historically been forsaken by public programs in particular—far more than Chicago could have on its own.

In fact, without the promise of international tourism, private donations, and the millions of dollars in federal spending to improve the city’s security and transit systems past Olympics host cities received, Chicago seems to be back at the starting line, with little more than a bruised ego to show of it, or so one would think. But it is wrong to assume that the Olympics would necessarily have brought to the city, along with inspiration and global notoriety, the impetus for sweeping social improvements. One obvious reason is that the money raised to fund and insure Chicago’s bid came from a different pool—one of private businesses, zealous citizens, and friends of Mayor Daley—than the money that the University of Chicago Medical Center or the Chicago Transit Authority are likely to receive.

But the Olympics have already forced Chicagoans to see the South Side in a different light, even as the IOC plots the path of the Olympic torch through Rio de Janeiro. Indeed, as disappointed or celebratory as we may be over the outcome, we must not forget that Chicago’s near South Side exists; it is a cluster of low-income, high-crime neighborhoods surrounding one of the city’s largest greenscapes, a gorgeous park designed by urban planning legend Fredrick Law Olmsted, and caught in a century-long economic decline. If citizens on both sides of the bid are serious about making Chicago an even safer and more prosperous place to live, and a hot-spot for international tourism, they won’t take down their 2016 banners or protest fliers, but remember what they stand for—and what communities they effected most.

III.

Take Washington Park, the small neighborhood of roughly 13,000 residents and a median household income of $15,000 according to the U.S. census, located just west of the proposed sites of the Olympic Stadium and Aquatic Center.

If you talk to Brandon Johnson, his neighborhood has forgotten how beautiful it is. With its 372 acres of park land and 20 minute train ride from the Loop, it’s little surprise to community leaders like Johnson, executive director of the Washington Park Consortium, that the neighborhood attracted international attention as the proposed site of the 2016 Olympic stadium in Chicago’s bid.

“Now that we’re getting attention from some famous people,” Johnson said in an interview in June, “the neighborhood is remembering it’s attractive again.” Johnson was not just talking about members of the IOC. He expected Mayor Daley and other North Side-dwellers to recognize Washington Park’s potential as more than a blighted neighborhood; more than a wilderness dotted with vacant lots dividing Hyde Park and the El Trains.

True, the bid committee had serious improvement plans for Washington Park tied to the Olympic bid, including an 80,000-seat stadium, that now must be discarded. And the city would probably have pumped thousands of public dollars into a redevelopment of 55th street between State St. and Cottage Grove, the thoroughfare that thousands of spectators would have taken on their way to the stadium.

But Washington Park has plans of its own, drawn up over the summer by community activists and Alderman Willie Cochran’s office, and dubbed the Quality of Life Plan. This proposal details on how community members want to see their home develop over the next decade, and was created in partnership with the non-profit community development organization Local Initiatives Support Coalition (LISC) and a steering committee of neighborhood volunteers that began brainstorming back in the late 1990s. It was quietly unveiled last May, while debates over how the Olympics would be funded began heating up in City Hall.

The plan has little to say about the spectacle of the Olympics, besides expressing hope that the Games would bring skilled jobs and visibility to the community. Instead, it stresses after-school programming for neighborhood youth, bringing businesses to Washington Park’s main streets, and planting community vegetable gardens in now- empty lots.

If Chicago’s businessmen, cultural leaders and Mayor Daley can get behind vegetable gardens the way they got behind gymnastics, the Olympics may yet leave a legacy in Washington Park. And Woodlawn, Bronzeville, South Chicago, Grand Crossing—not to mention other pockets of urban poverty that were counting on the Olympics to remind Chicago that it has more to offer than the glistening Lake and bustling Loop.

They asked for affordable housing in Woodlawn and Bronzeville, where gentrification slowly threatens to push poor people out of their homes; more-widely accessible transportation to connect the city’s north and south; stronger clinics to support residents who can’t afford primary care. We couldn’t bring the Games to Chicago for all our banners or the support of President Obama, but this city has an Olympic-sized task ahead of itself still. Community revitalization is more of a marathon than the sprint and stumble Chicago took toward Oct. 2, but I don’t think there is anyone in this city who wouldn’t benefit if Chicago actively played that game, starting with the near west and south sides.

The bid committee often invoked a famous phrase, uttered by Chicago’s urban-planning legend Daniel Burnham, to demonstrate that Olympian aspirations were in the city’s history: “Make no little plans…make big plans, aim high in hope and work.” Why shouldn’t this advice still ring true?

Sex: Old News and Youthful Problems

What is who supposed to want when? That's the convoluted question the two subjects of this post are trying to answer. This holiday weekend I was [too lazy] too busy, to get much studying done, but I did read an excellent NY Times article by Daniel Bergner, author of The Other Side of Desire, and watch a video posted by Maymay, who is among other things a sex-positive activist doing a lot of good, interesting work.

In "When Desire Fades," Bergner discusses the pathology and treatment of low sex-drive in middle-aged women. As sexologist Lori Brotto demonstrates how increased mindfulness can help women feel more sexual, Bergner's intimate writing-style meanders between the growth of Brotto's own interest in sex research to the unique and often discomfiting cases of her patients. I read Bergner's book on sexuality over the summer, and likewise found the sympathy and candor with which he treated each case-study, which included a pedophile and a foot-fetishist, as much dangerous and off-putting as the stories were enlightening. Likewise in this article, I first wonder, with a little bit of embarrassment and prudishness, why he must mention a patient "who lost her virginity in her 50s" or an artist who becomes aroused from painting, before I am grateful that he takes those risks. Addressing desire is dangerous enough in an academic or journalistic setting (see this eye-opening interview with Benoit Denizet-Lewis for more on the stigma surrounding such endeavors); addressing lack of desire, and "what women want to want" should be all the more difficult, but Bergner does it with finesse.

On a different note, in the video posted below, maymay addresses the fear of youth sexuality at KinkForAll Washington DC. Though the demographic at issue for him is a far cry from the middle-aged women Bergner and Brotto interview, maymay hits upon several common themes surrounding the damaging way society presents sexuality information:

Sexual Adultism - KinkForAll Washington DC from maymay on Vimeo.

I'm interested in the ways both of these news items highlight the precarious position the idea of sex holds in today's popular imagination. Bergner's essay notes that the DSM's description of hypoactive sexual desire disorder fails to "reckon with women as complex sexual beings,"—instead using false and limiting assumptions about how women should be sexual to judge disorder—and maymay's lecture demonstrates how youth are denied access to positive cultural assumptions about sex and sexuality solely because of age and a strong culture of sexual protectionism.

Though the dichotomy between the desired and the taboo is old news, sex has only recently (slowly, over the last 40 years) become something that people young and old are expected to be having, and expected to want to be having— but not talking or thinking too hard about. We all know the script; it's supposed to be charming, breathy, seamless, steamy, and, if you talk to a rapper or the writers of Gossip Girl, there's supposed to be a lot of it. And though maymay's points are prescient, youth are not altogether restrained from information about sex. In fact, information is everywhere; it's just that the only message being consistently conveyed is, to paraphrase one particularly inappropriate grandfather of popular culture, who embodies enough social stigma against desire and age on his own: "Fuck a lot of women."

So why is it that only now (and with a lot of push-back from conservative opponents of everything from comprehensive sex-education to erotica and non-normative sexuality), that we are beginning to talk about the spectrum of issues that can constitute or deny satisfaction? Possibly because we now know that the script breaks down, and as Bergner and maymay both argue, it breaks down in the predictable places where we have a gap in collective knowledge about what we want and why. It's gap stretched even further by the willful denial that variety exists, that people's wants and needs can and should vary, and the tendency to pathologize what we are afraid to accept, and medicate what we are afraid to explain.

Cheers to the journalists and activists who want to change this culture.


UPDATE: The solutions to these problems might just be in the kitchen! ...Probably not, but just in case, here's the cover of the cutest holiday gift I bought yesterday for someone special when he gets back to the States (Shh, don't tell!)

"Yes, I'm writing this all down..." I interview Allan Sekula and the Renaissance Society's Hamza Walker on new photography exhibit

Renaissance Society introduces Sekula to Chicago arts scene

Photographer Allan Sekula struggles to document a place that doesn’t exist. In his new series, “Polonia and other Fables”, on display at the Renaissance Society, Sekula travels from the University of Chicago’s Pick Hall to a Polish pig farm to trace the co-mingling of national identities, capitalism, labor, and globalization in America and beyond.

Hamza Walker, director of the Renaissance Society, says that Sekula and his challenging social photography make him a perfect candidate to exhibit at this contemporary art museum space.

“Allan Sekula is one of the foremost photographers working in a social documentary vein,” says Walker. “But he’s very under-represented in the United States [and] he’s never had a show in Chicago.”
Renaissance Society: ‘An artist’s museum’

Though the Renaissance Society does not have a permanent collection, Walker says the Society’s chief role in the contemporary art world is to contextualize the works of living artists about art historical-movements the way a museum might; this distinguishes the Society from other galleries. “Our exhibitions represent a critical first-response to these works.”

But Walker is wont to share the Society’s methods for selecting artists: “It’s a secret process that involves incense, oddly weighted bronze coins, very thin leather straps, and a little bit of rice. Those things are deciphered on a platypus pelt, but the freshness of the pelt is also very important… are you writing this down?”

Platypus pelt or not, Sekula rose to the challenge of exhibiting in the Renaissance Society’s unique gallery space. “Because [the gallery] is free, people can come back if they’re on campus, and you can expect that people will spend time in your exhibit maybe not during a continuous period, he says. “I think of the whole installation as a work in itself, so I’m always thinking about the specific quality of the space. The hallways and entry way are really key to me.”
‘Discourse on the value of a humanities degree’

When visitors enter the gallery, they are met with the photo of a young woman—an art student—on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. According to Sekula, wrapped up in this single image, the exhibit’s opener, is a discourse on the value of a humanities degree, the intersection of the art world and finance, and the state of capitalism in the wake of the recession. “She spoke to me because she had some background in photography. She could have been one of my students, working to make a living here…”

Other works in the exhibit more opaquely address the other keystone of Sekula’s series—“Polonia.” Polonia, says Sekula, describes both the locations where Polish immigrants settle outside of Poland and the imaginary embodiment of their country. Because Poland wasn’t recognized as an independent nation until 1918, and suffered colonial domination throughout its history, Polonia has arguably existed for much longer as the locus of Polish national identity.

“Poland hasn’t had its own history—there are these blanks, periods where the language was outlawed,” and episodes of Polish diaspora during the nation’s communist and post-war periods, Sekula said.

But in addition to documenting “Polonia” in and out of the United States, Sekula’s photos speak to the universality of the immigrant experience. “Part of American history is the history of immigration, especially in the Midwest and Chicago. Today you have people coming to work in the industrial jobs that the Poles worked in. I wanted to show who is falling into the roles once occupied by the Poles, and playing them today.”

To do this, Sekula sought inspiration in Chicago—and on campus.
Sekula’s Chicago inspirations

One photo in the Eastern corner of the gallery depicts what Sekula and Walker both call a peculiar campus ritual—University students and staff gather around to watch the high-noon shadow of Dialogo, the bronze sculpture by Virginio Ferrari in front of Pick Hall on May 1, which is rumored to form the shape of a hammer and sickle.

“That event with the shadow is just ready-made irony,” Sekula said. “People come to see that rumored apparition of the hammer and sickle at noon on May Day. Some look to be more conservative, some to be more hip, young, politically liberal or left. I like to look at it as a physiognomy of the University community,” he said; in that sense, the piece puts the University’s conservative and liberal personas in tension, and suggests its role in global economic affairs.

The statue may not cast the exact shadow of a hammer and sickle, Walker adds, “But it’s near enough to activate wishful thinking, which can’t be discredited. Who would show up for this rumored event?” On the opposite wall is a photo of the 2009 May Day Parade in downtown Chicago. “You’ve got this working-class protest going on at exactly the same time—and you can see that the issues of immigration and labor rights are hopelessly intertwined.”

“Documentary is often equated with the quest for social justice. But is that idea that you can point a finger at a very clear wrongdoing even possible anymore?” In Walker’s interpretation, Sekula’s images suggest that, thanks to globalization, no one can view injustices with the distance of a photographer anymore.

“Sekula’s work is also an indictment of that ethical lens,” he says. “That’s what makes Sekula extremely important—his reflection on the genre.”

By Rachel Cromidas, third-year in the College

Welcome to the College[.uchicago.edu]

Baby needs a brand new website.



I've signed on with Susie, my awesome co-worker from the News Office, and one other student journalist to bring the College of the University of Chicago a re-vamped homepage with regularly updated articles and profiles about student life. Like the story that's up now—my article on the recent, student-driven campaign to invite Michelle Obama to campus. I've copied the text below. We're looking for more student contributors (and I'm looking for ways around the limit on how many hours a student may be employed... let you know how that works out!), so please contact me for information. As you may see from my unfortunate little foray into photography on the College site, we are particularly in need of students who are skilled behind the camera.

--

Dear Mrs. Obama...

Organization of Black Students and Student Government hope video-letter campaign will bring Michelle Obama back to Hyde Park.

When second-year Edward James met Michelle Obama, he was struck by how tall she was. They took a photo together at a campaign event in his hometown of Sarasota, FL, in 2008, and "she towered over me."

Last Wednesday, James got the chance to record a personal video to the First Lady, inviting her back to Hyde Park, her former home. "I told her that I’ve grown since that time," he said, "and it would be really nice to stand next to her again."

James is just one of several dozen students who issued Michelle Obama a personal invitation to speak on campus as part of a video-letter campaign they dubbed "Ask Michelle Obama out to Homecoming!"

The Organization of Black Students (OBS) and Student Government (SG) sponsored the event, held Oct. 29 in the Reynolds Club. OBS hopes the video messages will convince Mrs. Obama to deliver the 2010 George E. Kent Lecture.

The Kent Lecture is named for the late George E. Kent, a professor of English Language and Literature. The annual lecture has featured many African-American luminaries, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Angela Davis, Cornel West, and, most recently, sociologist William Julius Wilson.

According to James, the OBS political chair, Susan Sher, the First Lady’s chief of staff, told the organizers that it would take an invitation of epic proportions for Mrs. Obama to visit. OBS began its efforts last spring, when organizers sent Mrs. Obama a letter. Sher, a former administrator at the University of Chicago Medical Center, responded, suggesting that the group share more of "what students have to say."

"It became clear that sending a letter was not enough," said fourth-year Chris Williams, the SG vice president for student affairs. "We needed a unique and loud message from the University community." Williams cited the 1,000 Valentine's Day letters that University of California, Merced students wrote to invite the First Lady to speak at their commencement last year as evidence that the campaign would work.

Michelle Obama was a natural choice to deliver the lecture, according to James. James said OBS is inspired by her work to connect the University to the South Side community as founding director of the University Community Service Center.

"Michelle Obama is big on community service, big on giving back, whether that’s going to public schools in D.C. and reading to children, or planting an organic garden in the White House," he said. "Now it’s not uncommon to see [college] kids mentoring in the Kenwood, Bronzeville, and Woodlawn areas. These are neighborhoods that have in the past had an antagonistic relationship with the University, but through her help and her great work we are becoming better stewards of our community…[Mrs. Obama] is a beacon of hope for a lot of people, including this community."

Though the Kent Lectures are facilitated by University students, James added that the event is always open to the public, and usually packs Rockefeller Chapel with students and people from all over Chicago. Besides exposing the student body to influential public figures, the Kent Lecture series has often brought together the University and its South Side community—a goal Michelle Obama pursued during her time in Hyde Park, James is quick to point out.

He said one video message to Mrs. Obama stood out in particular because it was made by a student who grew up on the South Side. "She said Mrs. Obama had been a role model to her. I think that’s great, to have somebody [like Michelle Obama] whom you can relate to, somebody who can see the world from your vantage point."