An Other Worldly Production

Photo by Daniel Belli, credit 1 below

Last year, I spent a lot of time wondering what to make of an otherworldly performance that’s hit all three of Bridgeport’s art centers -- scenes from a non-conventional opera called Thunder, Perfect Mind staged by NON:Op Open Opera Works.

I first saw a scene from it at the Zhou B. Arts Center performed by 6 young women, all delicate in white.  Three of them were seated on chairs mounted high on the walls, playing stringed instruments.  Underneath, on the floor, the other 3 women seemed to play another set of strings, strung from the ground to the ceiling like a great terrestrial harp.

The performance was beautiful, but hard to grasp, like something spoken in a language being invented while you watched, just past the limits of your intuition.

Photo by Ron Wachholz, credit 2 below

Which is why I’d come to see it, really, at the suggestion of Deirdre Harrison, who’s had a long career in musical theater.  She’d just stepped in to help the composer, Christopher Preissing, orchestrate the players, to help them spin a way to think their performance.  For the scene at the Zhou B., she knew the young instrumentalists perched on the walls would need some point of mental reference, so she’d given each of them a scrap of paper with a line from the text on it to repeat to themselves during the silences.

For I am the first and the last…

the whore and the holy one…

Photo by Brittany Tepper, credit 3 below

Thunder, Perfect Mind is titled from an ancient Gnostic text that had been dug up from the Egyptian desert in the 1940s.  It was part of a whole lost library that had been buried in giant clay jars for some 1,800 years.  Even after the jars were found, the Nag Hammadi texts were jammed up in intrigues over ownership for decades before they started to filter out into the world.  They were just becoming available to Coptic language scholars in the 1970s, and then to the public in English translation in the 1980s. That’s when Christopher Preissing first read some of them, when he was still in school.

Preissing was a graduate music composition student, writing a dissertation on the history of opera.  He was studying its conventions so he could test them later.  He would step outside the traditions of composition, explore expressive notations, subvert the way social hierarchies had been worked into the seating arrangements and the theater itself.

The Gnostic scriptures also held a counter cultural appeal.  For almost 2 thousand years, the Gnostics were known mostly from the wild accounts early Christian Church Fathers gave of their beliefs.  

Those accounts were always suspect, the Fathers were using them to establish an orthodox church by defining it against degenerate heresies.  Though as the Nag Hammadi texts became available, some of the Fathers’ most outrageous accounts, of Bible stories turned on their heads, of the Biblical God willfully blasphemed, turned out to be pretty accurate.

The library is also diverse, it presents a whole range of lost possibilities, of paths not taken, rediscovered in an age when people are suspicious orthodox authorities and how they assert the truth.  Preissing found himself drawn to the hymn called Thunder, Perfect Mind in particular because it evoked a feminine voice, and it read like a riddle.  The divine speaker describes herself in impossibilities and paradox.

I am the mother of my father and the sister of my husband -- he is my offspring.

Photo by Scott Johnson, credit 4 below

In 1992, he got a grant to make an opera from it.  Even after the first performances, he has never entirely stopped working on it.  It has continued to grow in scope and dimension as scenes are elaborated in public practice sessions around town.  Today, Thunder, Perfect Mind, the opera, is a site specific immersive performance for a 12 member chorus, percussionists, street performers, orchestral musicians and 2 sopranos, one of whom is an aerialist who will descend through the heavenly spheres to earth, and re-ascend into the divine fullness in the end.

In the shock of more recent history, ancient squabbles over divine metaphysics and the esoterica of avant-garde opera may sound beside the point.

1800 years ago, a Gnostic would say that is the point: that the so called real world isn’t actually real.  That the powers of this world aren’t just ignorant of reality, they’re constitutionally incapable of understanding it, they sense it vaguely when they spot a true spirit in other people, then they’re jealous of it, they persecute it.  But those rare souls who have that spark of the divine spirit can be restored to the divine wholeness by remembering where they came from.

Modern people are less interested in escape to transcendence in general, and the Gnostic answer in particular is elitist and radically anti-cosmic, dismissing the material world we live in as a disastrous mistake.

But Gnosticism arose in a world that had compelling parallels to the world we live in now.  The latter centuries of the Hellenistic-Roman era are sometimes called an age of anxiety, menaced by threats of barbarian invasions, plagues, even financial catastrophes.  But they were also an era of unprecedented cultural ferment and change.  Like in our own era, change was disorienting to navigate for the individual person, and the Gnostics expressed the crisis of dislocation in a startling way.  But they also show that human instinct for hope.

Photo from Hubble Space Telescope, credit 5 below

Gnosticism was a trend of thinking, not a church with clear boundaries, and the so called Gnostics were enthusiastic speculators about the origins of the world and the human condition in it.  Some of their accounts focus on the story of Sophia, or Divine Wisdom.

They start with the perfect divine Wholeness, or indescribable Depths, whose qualities begin to emanate outward in pairs, male and female.  Sophia is part of the last pair. She sins, she falls from grace, she launches a whole chain of catastrophe.

The exact nature of her sin is some form of willfulness.  She wants to create on her own, without her consort, or else she wants to contemplate the original Depths without permission.  She becomes pregnant, like the emanations before her, except she gives birth to a monstrosity, an abortion.  A divine Limit gets summoned up, and Sophia’s abortion is cast out to the other side of it.

Photo from Hubble Space Telescope, credit 6 below

It has various names, Sophia’s abortion, sometimes it’s just called the Demiurge.  But outside, in the dark, it’s scared, it’s alone, it doesn’t know where it came from.  It creates the material world to comfort itself.  It creates a whole host of celestial powers, to serve as its minions – they rule the spheres of the planets and stars, they make mischief in the sphere below the moon.  The Demiurge declares itself God and feels powerful.  But it’s never really confident in that feeling.

The Demiurge creates mankind out of filth, and breathes life into it, gives it a Soul.  But our souls are just an animating principle, our appetites, our lower passions, our perceptions of the material world.  We’d have no access to the divine realm at all except that Sophia, from some divine purgatory where she waits for her own redemption, scatters some of her light into humanity.

The human Spirit is a divine shard that’s embedded in us, it’s alien to our world, and we’re born in a condition of flesh-bound forgetfulness.  But when we hear the truth about where we really came from, our spirit responds, it remembers.  It knows.

The Gnostics didn’t believe that all people have that divine shard.  Or else we don’t have it in equal quantities. In some people, the spiritual principle is so weak or absent they are essentially just animate creatures, slaves to their material natures.  Some are in an intermediate condition, they’ve got enough spirit to be reasonable, to exert their will, they’re soulful creatures, but not truly spiritual.  The Gnostics are an elect minority of truly Spiritual beings.

These Gnostics were a great irritant to those Orthodox Fathers who were trying to build a church where everybody could participate just by faith in something they didn’t understand.  And that Gnostic Spirit is a strong rhetorical device.  Because if you don’t recognize the truth when you hear it, it’s probably not your fault, and you won’t be convinced by arguments, you’re just not equipped to know.

Meanwhile, down here in the cosmos, the Demiurge and his demons do have some vague perception of that spiritual element.  They recognize it in Eve and her daughters.  They know they don’t have it, and they’re jealous, they chase her, they rape her trying to get it, they persecute her wherever they catch a glimpse of it.

Preissing’s opera tells the story of Sophia and Eve like a double answer to the identity riddle posed by the hymn, Thunder, Perfect Mind.  The production starts with Sophia, setting out for redemption. She descends to earth, through the spheres of the planets, accumulating worldly qualities like heavy clothing.

Preissing’s Eve has wandered from the countryside into a big city, looking for adventure, but she’s quickly lost.  She wanders disoriented, she’s abused and assaulted, she sinks deeper and deeper into confusion, shame and fear.  When they meet, Sophia will relay her message, she’ll tell Eve of her true nature, remind her who she really is.  Sophia will re-ascend into heaven, restored.   Eve will stay behind.

In the opera, the results of their encounter, the nature of any transformation is left open ended, which is fitting for a terrestrial production.  So is the urban setting of Eve’s travails.  The urban condition has been one of the great themes of modern life; it is also a link into that ancient world where Gnosticism emerged.

Photo by Takashi Hososhima, credit 7 below

When Alexander the Great conquered the Persians in 331 BC, he said he was after more than glory, he wanted to integrate the known world – East and West – into a single cosmopolitan culture.  And he achieved that, he laid the ground for a new kind of empire, one built from a network of cities whose residents would be citizens of the world.  That condition exerted a dramatic psychic change.

The world had seen big empires before.  The great empires of the Near East, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians all helped lay the ground for imperial rule that wouldn’t just exploit conquered territories, siphoning off tribute and slaves.  Over centuries, they’d begun to build the bonds of trade, establish roads and postal systems.

In the west, Greek traders had been settling in foreign ports for centuries.  After Alexander’s conquests, they emigrated in much larger numbers, forming a leadership class in cities across the empire.  The Greek language became a lingua franca spoken across the realm. The Greeks also brought a common currency and cultural institutions like the gymnasia, which acted as secondary schools, teaching Greek literature and philosophy.

Some speculate that the alphabet the Greeks had adapted from the Pheonecians was a more versatile way of writing that helped them to develop new ways of thinking, especially abstract thinking, that they now brought with them across the empire.  Others have ventured that it was the dislocations of conquest itself that nudged ancient peoples to develop a capacity for thinking in universal terms.

Traditional cults had worked to guarantee the safety and integrity of small societies.  But once the town walls were razed, the local king deposed, the people sent into exile, their gods were either discredited, or else they were set loose from their parochial roles.  Exiles, soldiers and traders brought their gods along on their travels, and picked up new ones along the way.  People from all walks of life, cut adrift from all variety of old traditions, would appeal to universal gods as personal saviors.

A host of religious philosophies pushed abstract thinking to its limits, imagining a sphere of divine perfection so entirely transcendent from the earthly realm it was virtually indescribable.  The rational man might perceive it through the logos (“the Word” in the Gospel of John), a rational principle that mediates between the two realms, penetrating the cosmos, giving it shape and coherence, and resonating through the human mind.

At any rate, travel, trade and communication were all a lot easier in the new era.  The results were stimulating, but profoundly disorienting.  Geo-political boundaries were opening up, the population was more mobile, ideas that had been floated among philosophers a few centuries earlier seemed to penetrate further and more deeply into the populace, including a whole new concept of the universe.

It’s said that ancient peoples saw Heaven fitting over the earthly plain like a dome, regal but not all that distant, and there were clear axes for communication with the gods who dwelled in it.  The Ptolemaic universe exploded the dome, replacing it with a much vaster construction of planetary spheres and a realm of stars much further away.  The divine powers they expressed seemed indifferent to the passion and strife of the terrestrial sphere, maybe even hostile.

In the 1950s, the historian Eric Dodds evoked the anxiety of the age in a record of questions posed to an oracle – he says oracles had surged as the world became more changeable.  “Am I to become a beggar?” one record reads.  “Will I be sold as a slave?”  “Am I under a spell?”  “Are you God?  Or is someone else God?”

  

Gustav Caillebot, Paris Street, Rainy Day

The great scholar Hans Jonas thought Gnosticism expressed a spiritual condition of profound pessimism.  It reminded him of the existential alienation current in his own era. In fact, here in Chicago while Jonas was studying the Gnostics, a whole school of sociology was writing lyrically about the experience of urban life, and the psychic changes it affects on modern people.

The Chicago scholars would observe that in the modern city, life takes on a certain superficial quality, as people brush shoulders with uncountable numbers of strangers on the street each day, they each size each other up, read each other in an instant based on hints of dress and demeanor.   That pageant itself becomes fascinating and invigorating, there are whole genres of painting and literature spent observing it.

Each person traveling it can realize potentials that would be suppressed or ignored in small town life, because tradition and social conventions are much weaker in the big city than they are in the small town.  Those potentials express in good ways and bad ones: there are more artists, realizing their creative potential, and more juvenile delinquents, unrestrained by disapproving elders.

“In a small community it is the normal man, the man without eccentricity or genius, who seems most likely to succeed,” Robert Parks wrote in the 1920s. “The small community often tolerates eccentricity.  The city, on the contrary, rewards it.”

So the urban world is larger, in a wonderful sense, but more dangerous.  It is much harder to pick a course through the infinite variety and find meaning in it, much easier to skate through life on that distracting surface, oblivious to things that really matter.  It is easier to get lost.  This is the landscape Eve wanders in the scenes from Thunder, Perfect Mind -- a maze of urban streets, flickering with images and false idols -- sinking deeper into distraction and despair.

Photo by Scott Johnson, credit 9 below

Jonas links Gnosticism to a crisis of purpose in the ancient world.  He says that in the classical polis, the independent city-state, the citizen knew he was an essential part of a larger social whole.  He might be bound by its limits, he might be just a small part.  But his being helped to constitute and maintain a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts.

As cities were overtaken by empire, the citizen becomes a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world.  He is still part of the whole, but as it becomes more vast, he is reduced to insignificance.  He can still participate in it, sync up his rational capacities with that principle evident in the cosmic order.  But his actions matter only to himself, he is like an actor playing a part on a stage.  “A role played is substituted for a function performed,” Jonas writes.  He may play it well, or play it badly.  Either way, it makes no impact on the stars.

For Parks, the sociologist in Chicago, the modern city is also a whole, more than the sum of its parts, more than a meeting place of individuals.  It is a state of mind, he writes, a body of customs and traditions, and the sentiments that inhere in them.  Where Jonas ties the psychic change of the ancient city to the dislocations of empire, Parks attributes the effect of the modern one to the mechanisms of urban life itself.

He believes those mechanisms are organic, tied to “the vital processes of the people who compose it.”  But since the city is also a center of trade and industry, they include the rationalizing tendencies of industrial society, especially the division of labor, the tendency to specialize.  They make the urban person more dependent on other people in a sense – where he performs one part of a process, he relies on others to complete most things.

But the nature of the connection has changed.  In a village, people are bound together by complex emotional connections – ‘bonds of sympathy’ is Parks’ term.  In the city, these are replaced by simpler, rationalized relations based on common interest.  Bonds of interest are more volatile than the other, more complicated kind.  They can be adjusted more easily as situations change, but they also leave individuals more vulnerable to being dismissed if they are not particularly useful, or at all annoying.

Every small town has its oddballs, Parks observes.  The peculiar character, who might not command the highest respect, but who is tolerated, looked after, maybe even with some affection.  He’s an oddball, but he’s our oddball.  In the city he might find his way into the right circles and become an exceptional artist, or a billionaire entrepreneur.  Or he might just never find his function at all, and drop out from the bottom of the machine.

George Bellows, The Cliff Dwellers

Jonas believed that the material world the Gnostics wanted to escape was rational, in a demonic way.  It was a world defined by law and order, but it was “rigid and inimical order, tyrannical and evil law.”  It was “devoid of meaning and goodness,” it was “alien to the purposes of man and to his inner essence.”  Like existentialists in his own era, the Gnostics wanted to defy this tyranny, to be true to their inner essence, to live authentically.

Modern people seem to have more or less continued on the trajectory that extends the logical principle to further and further ends.  The rational, instrumental pursuit of interests reigns supreme.  It’s helped us accomplish amazing things.  It’s made our horizons much larger, but it’s made individuals smaller, it’s made the powers of this world, in government and in business, powerful to the extreme.

We still have a sense, like the Gnostics, that their powers don’t rule the whole of reality.  We know that there is some inner voice that we have, maybe not expressed in all people in the same way, but it is the link to some more authentic existence.  And when we hear it in music, for instance, or see it in art, we recognize it – or we hope we will.

I don’t think it’s accidental that when we’re talking about “authentic” experience we’re less likely to call on the spirit, we’re more likely to say something’s got soul.  We really mean that lower element.  Not the airy, the distant, the detached, but the embodied person, connected to passions, deeply embedded in the material world and its sympathies.

It’s as if that logical principle has become too ascendant.  We’ve pursued the good things it has to offer, we’ve learned to detach ourselves, to be objective, so we can see a bigger picture than what’s visible from where we stand embedded in our parochial lives.  We’ve learned to recognize that the kind of social judgment and outright bigotry that thrive in small societies ruled by sympathies are corruptions to root out.

But pursued to its ends, rational detachment becomes dangerous and proud, ignorant of that field of goods outside its reach.

I think that authentic reality is something we make up amongst ourselves.  It’s a kind of music, or a subtle language that is constantly being invented and elaborated among the people speaking it.  The process of making up the language is most obvious in art.  I think that’s what Preissing, and Deirdre Harrison and the young musicians in white were all doing that night at the Zhou B. Center.

But it is something that goes on all the time, whether we’re conversing easily with people who seem most like us, or whether we’ve got to stretch to understand how they can be so backward, or annoying, to recognize them as being essentially like us.  We have that capacity to know.

For more information about NON:op Open Opera Works visit www.nonopera.org. For more information about Thunder, Perfect Mind visit http://www.nonopera.org/WP2/thunder

Photo from Hubble Space Telescope, credit 11 below

Photo Credits:

1.  By Daniel Delli (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

2. By Ron Wachholz, performance from Thunder, Perfect Mind at the Ear Taxi Festival, Harold Washington Library, 2016

3. By Brittany Tepper, performance from Thunder, Perfect Mind at the Chicago Loop Alliance

4. By Scott Johnson, performance from Thunder, Perfect Mind at Feed Salon, 2016

5. By NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

6. ESA/Hubble [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

7. By Takashi Hososhima from Tokyo, Japan (Day 4: Stars #1) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

9. By Scott Johnson, performance from Thunder, Perfect Mind at Feed Salon

11. By NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Modern Jazz and New Vision for the Public Library

Frank Chapman has had a long career as a jazz pianist, playing in the be-bop style of Charlie Parker.  He shakes off the suggestion that jazz is for sophisticates, he says be-bop came out of dance halls.  In fact, he learned to play it in jail, where he found himself as a 19 year old, surrounded by older musicians from Saint Louis and Kansas City.  They’d all been locked up for drug charges, not violent crimes; they passed the time playing modern jazz.

For 30 years after that, Chapman played in New York, the nation’s jazz capital, but he has lived in Bridgeport since 2011, and one day soon, he will perform a show at the Richard J. Daley branch of the Chicago Public Library (3400 S. Halsted).  The date has not been nailed down yet, but it will be the next in a series of music shows for adults that Branch Manager Jeremy Kitchen launched last fall.  It grew out of an experiment in programming at the Chicago libraries.

The explosion of the internet has inspired some creative soul searching among librarians in general.  A public repository of books seems less necessary to supporting a literate public, now that the internet gives easy access to oceans of information.  Libraries have found new roles, like providing digital access, and promoting informational literacy – a step beyond the ability to read, informational literacy includes the ability to find what you want from out of the superabundance, to evaluate and use it.  And the physical library is still a great asset.

Recently, researchers at Heidelberg University ranked 31 world class library systems, from Stockholm to Sao Paulo to Singapore, based on features that contribute to the vitality of the Informational City.  The ranking gave equal weight to features of the digital library (like e-documents and digital reference services) and the physical library (particularly its architectural presence, and its spaces for learning, meeting, play and work -- the book collections weren’t one of the factors on the list).

After all, the Information Age has not been built on media alone.  It is said that the advent of the printing press and the wide circulation of new media helped give rise to a new kind of public sphere.  People began to understand themselves to be part of a common conversation -- they might be geographically dispersed and socially stratified, but they were also participants in the ebb and flow of public opinion.  Books, pamphlets and newspapers made that common conversation possible.  But so did the coffeehouses and clubs where they were debated and discussed.

When the Heidelberg researchers ranked world library systems, the Chicago libraries came out first among the cities in the United States, and third in the world, after Vancouver’s and Montreal’s.  Chicago scored slightly better as a physical library than it did on the digital scale.  That’s testament to decades of capital investment.  Mayor Daley’s Library Commissioner, Mary Dempsey, enjoyed overseeing the construction or renovation of 44 libraries in the 75 branch system.

Then Mayor Emanuel came in on a promise to be tough about the budget, and he seemed to see the library as an easy target for cuts.  He first proposed to make half his staffing cuts from library personnel, even though library operations represented just 3% of the city budget.  Commissioner Dempsey resigned.  Emanuel picked an IT executive from the San Francisco library system to replace her.

But Commissioner Brian Bannon has shown no interest in replacing Chicago’s physical libraries with a cheaper collection of e-books. Several of his technology projects make spaces for new patrons, like the YOUMedia Center for teens, and the MakerLab, a temporary skunkworks project that won a Chicago Innovation Award last year.

In fact, Bannon has outsourced a big piece of the library’s IT work, signing a 3 year contract with BiblioCommons to maintain a state of the art digital catalog system.  He told Library Journal that the contract wouldn’t just provide a better catalog, it would cut the need for in house technical expertise so librarians could spend more time curating the collections and engaging the community.

In June, the CPL Foundation won a million dollar grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to try a more innovative way to develop library programs, in partnership with a firm called IDEO, and the Aarhus Library system in Denmark.  Aarhus is a city a tenth the size of Chicago, but it’s known worldwide in library circles for its progressive programs.  IDEO is a high profile innovation consultancy known for its “design thinking” approach.

Design thinking explores what people want, and how they actually use things, and proceeds by trial and error: you don’t spend months analyzing a problem and drafting an ideal solution, you start by brainstorming a bunch of ideas, trying them out, discarding the ones that don’t work without wasting too much time on them, and building on the ones that do.

Jeremy Kitchen has been particularly active with the library’s experimental programs.  He served as children’s librarian at the Richard J. Daley Branch in Bridgeport for 7 years; he was promoted to Branch Manager shortly before Commissioner Bannon was hired in early 2012.  Last summer, Kitchen was part of a team who traveled to a library conference in Aarhus, and got a glimpse of the Danish model firsthand.  Some of Aarhus’ innovations deploy digital technology in new ways.  But Kitchen says what struck him most was the role the libraries played as community space.

The Danes stood back to reassess the purpose of their libraries too, back in 2010, which was also a time of budget cutbacks.  They determined they wanted their libraries to cultivate a society of innovation to further Denmark’s globalization goals.  Libraries would be places of learning, but also places of creative inspiration, fueled by participation in arts and performance, and just by putting patrons into contact with other people who might have different tastes and opinions than their own.

Under the Gates Foundation grant, the Chicago libraries tried 3 prototype projects with broadly similar aims.  Kitchen organized one of them at the Daley Branch in collaboration with the Valentine Boys and Girls Club: it was a sort of creative projects fair for teens.  The library auditorium was set up with stations where the kids could try different activities.  Some involved technology – like a station with musical instruments and music apps that are available free on the internet.  Kitchen says the most popular stations were analog – like the electric typewriter with a long scroll of paper in it, where people could add a sentence or two on an Exquisite Corpse style narrative.

Since then, Kitchen and the team have continued to take the design thinking model on the road, trying out projects at branch libraries in other neighborhoods.  In one of them, a group of teenage boys took selfies.  That was at Legler Library in West Garfield Park - one of the city’s grandest regional libraries at the center of one of its most dangerous neighborhoods.  The teens were all tattooed.  So is Kitchen -- his forearms are covered with colorful kid-friendly designs from his days as a children’s librarian, including a gentle looking giraffe, and a unicorn with a balloon.  They ended up trading stories and documenting their tattoos.

Though “documenting” suggests a structured purpose, Kitchen emphasizes the project was deliberately unstructured because the point is not to recreate an instructional environment like school.  The point is to engage the kids in a project they want to do, to encourage them to see the library as a resource they want to use, even as a safe place to hang out.

Kitchen, who was once a social worker, says the young men who came in for the project don’t have a safe place to hang out – they’re immersed in an environment where one bad decision, their own or someone else’s, could change their lives at any time.  His description of the way their surroundings limit their lives hints at the value the library could have if it could open a sense of access to a broader sphere.

Media alone doesn’t do that – the kids already have access to media.  Last summer Wired magazine published a feature about how social media helps inflame gang violence in Chicago neighborhoods, it can just tie people in to a vicious feedback loop.  We all need some sense of a larger world, a sphere of possibility that extends beyond the place we’re standing at any given moment.  The Danish model of the physical library as an inspirational space seems to aim for something like that.

Back at the Daley Branch, Kitchen says the idea to open the auditorium as a neighborhood performance space was directly inspired by his visit to Aarhus.  The music shows aren’t curated performances that the public ought to hear; they are an opportunity for a creative neighborhood exchange.  The first show, in October was by Fast Decay, a punk band from Back of the Yards.  Kitchen says 50-60 people attended, including small children and senior adults – many of whom would probably never hear punk rock in its usual habitats.

Next, you’ll have the opportunity to hear Frank Chapman perform modern jazz.  It sounds like a promising show, whether you’re already a jazz fan, or just open to hearing something new.

Bob Dain Brings Vintage Guitars and Local Equipment Back to Bridgeport

 312 Vintage Guitars has only been open for 4 months, and it is already on the map. It’s been featured on DNA Info, mentioned in TimeOut Chicago, and this Tuesday, March 26, it will play host to a live segment for the You and Me This Morning show on WCIU.

Its 35th Street location doesn’t see crowds of pedestrians strolling past, but it is visible to streams of drivers making their way to the Dan Ryan Expressway, and it’s the kind of shop drivers will stop for. Owner Bob Dain, age 26, says he watched one customer drive by, back up, park and walk in off the street. He bought 2 guitars on the spot – a Gibson Les Paul, because he’d had his eye out for one, and a Fender Stratocaster, because he liked the price. He paid over a thousand for each instrument, then went back on his way.

Dain’s career, in fact the span of his life, fits within the emerging market for vintage guitars. The year he was born, Gibson Guitar was a tired brand struggling under foreign ownership and a diminished reputation, production was down to 1 model of electric guitar, and the company was bleeding money. That was 1986, the year Gibson was purchased by a couple young guys with business degrees. Their turn-around plan centered on the company’s heritage, and the reissue of “classic” guitars.

By 1994, the heritage plan was working. Sales had multiplied sevenfold and CEO Henry Juszkiewicz was telling the New York Times he had visions of making Gibson the biggest instrument maker in the United States – a position once traded among Chicago firms.

The Chicago makers lost their lead in the 1960s and 70s, when the center of guitar manufacture moved to Asia. But in the 1980s, Asian buyers holding strong currency also had an appreciation for old American made instruments, and prices were on the rise.

In 1999 Eric Clapton auctioned 100 of his instruments to raise money for a drug and alcohol recovery center, and set record prices. One of his Fender Stratocasters raised $450,000. In 2001, when he held a second auction, retail giant Guitar Center paid $959,000 for his favorite Stratocaster, then made its money back by selling well made copies of it.

Reissues of classic designs, peppered with fabulous prices for celebrity instruments, stoked a market for originals through the 2000s, or at least through that part that was exuberant. Looking back in 2011, Guitar Afficionado observed that a vintage Les Paul Gold Top Gibson was worth $5,500 in 2002; 4 years later, in 2006, the same instrument could fetch $85,000. Then the price crashed to about $30,000, so if you’d bought it in 2002 you’d still be pretty happy, maybe less so if you’d bought it much later than that. Today, Dain says a top quality equivalent from the late 1950s might raise $50-60,000 at auction.

Dain is a musician himself, his band, The Sweeps, plays clubs from Simone’s to the Double Door. He plays vintage instruments, but he is less likely to buy a rarefied specimen in perfect condition than to buy something that is interesting for other reasons, and modify it for his own use.

Dain bought his first vintage guitar at a church estate sale when he was 15, a couple years after Guitar Center bought its Clapton Stratocaster. Vintage Gibson’s were beyond reach for most teenagers by then. Dain bought an Airline brand electric guitar, made by Chicago based Valco Manufacturing Company in the 1950s and 1960s. Dain describes it as having a particular tone, playability, and a “New Agey, Jetson’s type” look. Today, big names like Jack White of the White Stripes and Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys play them. But back then, he says, they were still undervalued.

Dain’s been buying and selling vintage instruments ever since. The crash in prices in the late 2000s made a lot more bargains available. And the market has widened, buyers have come to appreciate more instruments, for more various reasons.

Dain recently sold a Grestch Fury amplifier built by Valco in 1968. Valco was known for its mid-market brands. In 1968 it was going out of business, it assembled the Gretsch Fury from parts it had lying around the warehouse. Today the amp is hard to find, but it’s also appreciated for its clear sound, and the fact it handles effects pedals very well, a quality that wasn’t realized in 1968.

Dain sold the Fury over the internet for $1,800, even though he says they can fetch $2,500 - $3,000, depending on their condition. He says the guy who bought it from him turned around and posted it on a European classifieds list for $5,500.

From the 19th Century, Chicago was a dominant force in the mass production of musical instruments of all kinds, and for some of the same reasons it came to dominate other industries: its innovation in modern production techniques, its situation as a logistical center, but also its place as world capital of the mail order catalog. The catalogs all offered large selections of instruments. In fact Sears Roebuck & Co once acquired the Harmony Company, one of the nation’s largest instrument makers, in a bid to corner the ukelele market. The Airline guitar Dain first bought was a brand that Valco made for Montgomery Ward.

Amplified guitars were developed on parallel tracks in Chicago and Los Angeles in the 1920s, partly to make them audible through the din of dance orchestras. In Los Angeles, the National String Instrument and Dobro Manufacturing companies both developed self-ampliphonics, but the Chicago firm Stromberg-Voisinet, which started out in the 1890s, making mandolins, is credited with making the first electric guitar for commercial production in 1928. By the mid-1930s, National and Dobro merged and migrated to Chicago to be near the center of things.

Over the next decades, Chicago’s guitar makers were a case study in agglomeration effects. Companies like Harmony, Kay (heir of Stromberg-Voisinet) and Valco (heir of National Dobro) sold guitars and amplifiers under dozens of brands, they occasionally merged, acquired or succeeded one another, and they consistently made parts, amps or whole instruments to be sold under one another’s brands.

They all prospered on the post war triumph of the guitar. They built acoustics for the folk movement, electric guitars and amps for blues and rock and roll. In the mid 1940s, the Harmony Company, which first set up shop on the present site of the Civic Opera building in 1892, moved its production to 3633 S. Racine, on the edge of Bridgeport’s Central Manufacturing District. It produced up to 350,000 instruments a year in the early 1960s – and it couldn’t produce them fast enough.

Under the British guitar band invasion, demand would not stop growing. But the fade-out of American made guitars was a staggered effect that started while sales were still peaking. One commentator observes that the Harmony Company found itself confronted with a choice between building its production capacity to meet the clamor for instruments, and making the market wait. He says it took the second option, effectively stepping aside to let cheap foreign imports fill the gap.

It was another Chicago businessman who saw the opportunity to fill that gap with inexpensive Asian made guitars. Jack Westheimer established connections with Japanese guitar makers in the 1960s, and sold them through Sears, JC Penny’s and Montgomery Wards. In the early 1973 he created a Korean based manufacturer, originally called Yoo-Ah, then Cor-Tek, it is still one of the largest guitar makers in the world.

Kay and Valco merged, then went out of business together in 1968, when Harmony’s sales were near their height. Then by the early 1970s, Harmony was struggling. Gibson was seeing record sales in the early 70s, but by 1975, Harmony stopped production, auctioned the contents of its warehouse, and licensed its name to Asian imports. In 2009, the Northbrook based Westheimer Corporation bought the name back and has began to reissue a series of “classic” Harmony guitars.

A decade after Harmony wound down, Bridgeport helped launch a new era of instrument manufacture. Ian Schneller, a sculptor trained at the School of the Art Institute, moved into a former lamp factory on Archer Avenue [a building his web-site describes fondly as a “labyrinth of funny little spaces”] in 1986. He began to build musical instruments, first for his own band, and for the bands of friends, under the name “Specimen Products” -- a wink to the anonymity of modern production.

Over time, especially after he’d moved shop to Wicker Park during 1994, he became known for his distinct designs and his skills as a luthier. In 2005, after years of fielding resumes from aspiring guitar builders, he launched the Chicago School of Guitar Making, which has trained over 1,000 students so far. In fact, Bob Dain was one of them. He took a class in guitar repair in 2011 to solidify skills he’d picked up working on instruments on his own.

Dain moved from the suburbs to Bridgeport in 2006, because he’d heard there were cheap rents, and because it would bring him closer to the clubs where his band plays. When he was ready to open his own retail store, Bridgeport was a natural location. There is a density of musicians in the Pilsen- Bridgeport area, he observes, including music studios at all points of the compass (from Hinge Studios in Pilsen and 35th Street Studios to the west, to Alien Audio in Canaryville) but no place to buy guitar strings. Until now.

Dain says that today, about half his sales are still made to Asian buyers over the internet. And it seems only fair that Asian buyers should help finance Bridgeport’s new guitar shop, and the synergies that are already circulating through the shop.

Pete Galanis, a Bridgeport based studio musician has arranged to teach guitar lessons at the shop; Ken Bonner, who also lives in the neighborhood, provides expert services in amplifier repair. Now Bonner is starting up his own business, Bridgeport Amplifier Co, to make boutique, hand wired equipment.

Dain’s display case features other local, small batch brands. Souldier brand guitar straps have appeared on the Grammy’s and episodes of Saturday Night Live – they are hand tooled from a manufacturing facility in the Carroll Street corridor. Daredevil is a brand of special effects pedal made from a musician’s apartment in Logan Square. Dain met the guy who makes them at a gig; he carries Daredevil’s pedals because they’re hand-wired, well finished and “do what they do very well.” Soon, he will also carry Emperor brand speaker cabinets – known for their sturdy, dovetail construction and custom sizes -- they are built from a plant in one of the historic warehouses that line Pershing Road.

Dylan Patterson, who founded Emperor Cabinets once told GearWire that Chicago is a great market for custom equipment, because nearly everyone in Chicago seems to be in some kind of band. 312 Vintage Guitars is already reaping the benefits, and doing its part to multiply the effects.

An Afternoon Entertainment on Lituanica

Maybe you’ve seen the gothic windows and heavy wooden door of the former funeral parlor on Lithuanica, and wondered what goes on inside. It’s better than you might guess.

At least it was last Sunday, a dark, miserable day -- it was a perfect day for Romantic entertainment. Paul Lewis and Steven Weintraub, the hosts, had invited a roomful of guests to hear Ryan de Ryke, a baritone, sing Schubert’s Die Wintereisse, while Paul accompanied him on piano.

This was only the second time I’ve been a guest at Paul and Steven's apartment. Steven is a Master of Yiddish Dance who performs on both sides of the Atlantic. Paul is Principal Pianist for the Joffrey Ballet.

The first time, they were throwing a Gorey Halloween party. I went dressed as a child being devoured by mice. When I first got there, all the other guests were dressed as Edwardian gentlemen. They wore precisely-shaped whiskers and cravats tucked into waist-coats, they were carrying canes with silver handles, or wearing glossy black riding boots.

It wasn’t clear if they were in costume. The quality of their clothes was too good. And they were in persona. They were making gentle conversation with accents. (“Well done!” they would chuckle, if someone made a particularly smart remark.)

It was a little disconcerting. But it was also a fabulous Halloween party.

Steven and Paul’s friends include dancers and musicians, and a number of steampunks. If you have never met a steampunk before, which I hadn’t, they are members of a sort of futurist movement, but launched from an earlier age -- one based on steam-power and equipped with brass gadgets, as if technology had gone a different way. And in general, they wear better clothes.

As the party progressed, the gentlemen were joined by ladies in corsets, drapery and fringe. A guest in a wild, flowing beard, a kilt and a helmet, holding his mask and goggles so he could better converse, told me one inspiration of the movement had been a boys’ novel penned before the First World War. The boy hero was bionic, but his powers were impressive to his era. He could pull a cart, faster than a horse!

Paul and Steven have only recently moved into the old funeral parlor. It seems perfect for them. You enter through a small anteroom – at Halloween, a mechanical crow burst from a cabinet to warn you into foreboding as you as you arrived.

Then you passed into a parlor and reception hall. It has stucco walls, stained glass windows, a chandelier. It’s decorated with treasure from travels around the world. (And through time.) There are masks and vases from Southeast Asia, a working victrola in perfect condition, and a particularly graceful art deco lamp. Pride of place goes to Paul’s piano. There are sofas and clusters of chairs for guests to gather during the entertainment.

There was entertainment for the Halloween party too. It began with a duet recitation of Edward Gorey’s alphabet of children who all come to horrible ends. (“A is for Amy who fell down the stairs, B is for Basil assaulted by bears.”)

For the finale, Ryan de Ryke, the baritone, performed The Borgia’s Are Having an Orgy, with Paul, the host, on piano. Paul had done the arrangement himself.

So a month later, when Paul and Steven sent out invitations for “A Winter’s Journey Salon,” to feature a more complete display of Ryan’s powers, gloom or no gloom, who would stay home?

“This is exactly what we hoped for when we moved here!” Steven told us, looking over his crowded parlor just before the program started. The room is perfect for intimate performance.

It turns out that Ryan de Ryke is a leading performer of Leider, a genre of German romantic song. Die Wintereisse is a masterpiece of the genre. A piece in 24 poems, composed by Wilhelm Muller, and set to music by Franz Schubert, who finished the composition just before his death at age 31.

The poems describe a young lover whose beloved has fallen for someone else. He’d once been her family’s favorite suitor, but the new suitor is richer than he is. He leaves her house unnoticed in the middle of a winter night, and stalks into a frozen landscape. Every feature of it seems to resonate with his misery, his brief spurts of courage, and his lapse back to despair.

They’re sentiments indulged in a different era. “They’re sentiments I might have indulged in a much younger era of my own life,” Ryan agrees after his performance. But he adds the imagery means more as he performs it.

Ryan is very tall and Germanic looking. He is wearing a black suit, his expression is somber. The performance is a physical feat, you can see it when you are sitting that close to him. He sings about hot tears melting ice, and the perspiration trickles down his face in rivulets.

“Amazing,” one of Paul’s violinist friends says, after it’s finished. He’s a professional, he’s heard parts of Die Winterreisse performed before, but he says it’s rare to hear it performed in its entirety. Later, Ryan will say he’s done it 60 times or more. It’s the piece he suggests, whenever he is asked.

Afterwards he will find a tall glass of water, while the guests mingle, drink wine, feast on sweets, and speculate about performances to come. Before we all head back out into the gloom on Lituanica.

The Bluesman and the Bar

Rockin’ Johnny Burgin and his band will be playing at Bernice’s this Saturday, Sept 24th. You should go and hear them, they’re a fresh blues band with traditional roots. And you should show up before the music starts to get a feel for Bernice’s, it's a thinking man's drinking bar.

I walked in and saw Johnny playing there last year – I couldn’t believe it. The last time I saw him play was in the 90s, we were both in our 20s, and he was probably playing at the old Checkerboard Lounge – a respectable venue at 43rd and Vincennes.

People used to say he was really going somewhere with that guitar. He’d learned blues at clubs that don’t exist anymore, playing with older black guys, many of whom have died. He built his own following at Smoke Daddy’s as Wicker Park’s “urban hipster experience” was taking off. “All the blues musicians came out,” Johnny says. “People who didn’t like blues liked our band.”

Then sometime around 2001 he dropped off the face of the earth. Or he seemed to – he’d settled down into a quiet suburban lifestyle for awhile.

Now he’s back. He’s got a band with as much “classic upbringing” as he had, and they’ve been accumulating great reviews. They play all over Chicago and the Midwest, from BluesFest to Berwyn, with occasional European tours.

But it seems most appropriate to see them at Bernice’s. Johnny says a lot of people from his Smoke Daddy days have turned up there. They have things in common, the bar and the bluesman. The most literal one being that they’re both making comebacks.




The Bar:
There’s been a bar at 3238 S. Halsted since Prohibition. It was called Adam’s Place, until John Badauskas bought it in 1965. He named it after the woman who would be his wife. There’s a painting on the wall of a black haired beauty they say is the spitting image of young Bernice – it was already there behind the bar when John bought it.

Halsted was a different street back then. It was filled with stores and bustling with traffic. You could go outside and hail a cab, John’s son Steve recalls. That was significant, because the bar was also situated in a different drinking culture.

Steve Bedauskas grew up in his father’s bar. He recalls 9 other bars between Bernice’s and the 4 corners of 31st Street. He can name at least another 7 to the south. And Bernice’s opened at 10 in the morning: patrons would come in on their lunch break, or they’d come in to drink before work.

There weren’t a lot more people in Bridgeport then, they just spent more of their time drinking in bars. And maybe no one would argue the neighborhood was better off when half the population patronized taverns every day, starting at 10 in the morning.

But the culture where people came out regularly to rub shoulders, not to preen and pose the same way you might at a Saturday night club, but to shoot-the-shit and build tavern-style camaraderie, seems good for the civic cement.



Steve took over Bernice’s 12 years ago, after his father died, with help from his brother Mike, who mans the bar 2 nights a week. By then, the regular crowd had dwindled down to 1 or 2 guys. “It was depressing,” Steve admits, recalling long lonely evenings behind the bar.

Before he was a full-time barman, Steve was a machinist -- he specialized in equipment for binding books -- he’s good with his hands. He took up painting around the time he took over the bar. He’d paint on the cardboard the beer came in.

Paintings on cardboard were a genre for a series of art shows, “Bridgeport Primitive,” as Steve put it once. Some of his early works are on the wall of his bar.

Meanwhile, he set about building a new base of regulars. He started an open mic night right away, drawing on his musician friends. More recently he launched Stingo on Wednesdays – that’s Bingo, MC’d by Steve. It turned out to be wildly popular.

Now Steve doesn’t have time to paint. He jokes that he still runs the bar basically as a non-profit. But he has created a bar that draws one of the best assemblies of character in Bridgeport.

I was just there last week. I spent an evening talking to Chopper, a union carpenter with impressive mustaches who favors the vehicle his name implies, and to Carl Segvich, Bridgeport’s most persistent Republican candidate, and to John Salhus, an artist, who pays the bills with a job doing fine art restoration for a company on Cermak Road.

I first walked into Bernice’s 5 years ago. I’d walked by it for a year before I went in. It looked dark through the window, and the door is locked, you have to ring a bell to get buzzed in. But that night I had conversations I can still repeat to you now.

One of them was about Bridgeport’s racist reputation. I was still new in the neighborhood. I can’t remember how I brought it up, or why I thought it was a good idea. But my fellow conversationalist wasn’t perturbed. He thought a second, then he said “A lot of that reputation’s deserved.”

He grew up in Canaryville, which isn’t known for racial tolerance either. He described chasing black kids out of his neighborhood with his friends, but then he described getting beat up himself by the kids at Armour Park, and knowing while it was happening that it was basically the same thing.

He also had happy memories – of hunting rats in the ruins of the stockyards. “That was our wilderness!” he told me warmly. And touching present concerns. His 16 year old daughter wanted to get her face pierced. He was against it; she thought he was a tyrant.

“What do you think about that?” he asked, as if I might have some insight into the custom. I thought he should hold her off as long as he could – who ever regrets that they didn’t get pierced sooner? But I don’t know how it turned out.

And that’s still one of the best examples I can think of what Bernice’s is like. It isn’t the "hippest" bar in Bridgeport. It’s probably not the most authentically “Bridgeport” of bars. But it’s like the pumpkin patch where Linus might finally have been justified, it’s the most sincere.




The Bluesman:
As a kid learning guitar in South Carolina, Johnny Burgin didn’t know a career in music was possible. Then, as a college student in Chicago, someone brought him to a west side blues club and he heard Taildragger play. “It changed my whole direction,” Johnny says.

Soon, he was playing with Taildragger at his west side gigs; then he was touring the country with Howlin’ Wolf drummer Sam Lay. He describes it as a “tried and true career path,” learning by playing with the older guys who’d mastered the form.

“It’s a conservative style of music,” Johnny says, describing the blues. “It’s not incredibly hard to understand. A lot of people can play it. It’s how you choose to execute a simple set of rules.”

That’s where the musician’s individuality comes in, “to play with style, with feeling,” that’s what the west side audiences loved. “You listen to records, and there’ll be a riff, and you think ‘The audience must have been going crazy when he did that!’”

Blues music doesn’t play on popular radio anymore, it hasn’t for a long time. But when Smoke Daddy’s opened in Wicker Park in the mid-90s, Rockin’ Johnny (a nickname he acquired as a college radio host) got a regular gig there Monday nights, just as Wicker Park was booming. He built a following, introducing an unlikely crowd to a traditional form.

Ten years later, Johnny emphasizes the ways the scene is the same. When he began playing shows on the road, he says fans showed up with CDs he’d made in the 90s. And there’s a new crop of exciting young musicians out there.

But he admits some of the clubs have closed. Some of the musicians he knew have died. Or more alarming, they’ve gotten old. “I have a vision of them, playing strong like a bull!” he says.

Maybe Johnny is reluctant to focus on what’s changed because blues aficionados have been mourning the blues for decades. In the 60s and 70s, some fans fetishized the pre-war players; in the 90s, some fetishized the guys who’d been around to play with Little Walter and Howlin’ Wolf.

It’s a sentiment that’s easy to ridicule. And when I first saw Rockin’ Johnny at the Checkerboard, I ridiculed it. I’d just ducked out of divinity school, I was looking for an article to write. I thought the “real feeling” that was supposed to animate the blues sounded like a gnostic concept, something rarefied, and recognizable only to the select. Which seemed wrong, if blues really got its power from being a working man’s music.

Since then I’ve seen the same sentiments better treated in books: sociologists parsing the Chicago blues “scene,” and historians tracing the white man’s re-definition of a popular black form. I wouldn’t argue that they’re wrong about social dynamics.

But I’m more sympathetic to the experience of the person who loves the sound. I can imagine the same critiques applied to the sphere of Bernice’s – it would discern social posturing in the conversation I just described, or in my claims to know sincerity when I see it. But that critique always brackets the feeling of the buzz from the beer, and the impact of the conversation itself.

Johnny admits the “classic upbringing” he enjoyed, touring as a sidemen with the masters, is less available today. “But it’s not all over now, just because Honeyboy Edwards (the last guy who could claim to know Robert Johnson) is dead.” There is still a new crowd picking up on the form.

His west side heritage still helps him. When he flies into Europe for instance, having a leading guitarist from Chicago is a big addition to a club’s line-up -- a link to the style of Howlin’ Wolf.

But his own favorite guitar player is Django Reinhardt, an ethnic gypsy who recorded in the 30s and 40s. He brings it up as an example of how older forms persist, they get picked up and absorbed by younger players. If the old clubs close, new fans find it on YouTube.

If anything, Johnny is optimistic there’s more opportunity now. Recording technology is cheap, and social media puts marketing power in the musician’s hands. “My last CD cost $3,000, and they played it on XRT. So it was engineered well enough to play on a major radio station.”

His next album will be produced by Delmark, a Chicago label that’s home to Junior Wells and Magic Sam, to bring a traditional form to a new audience. “Every 10 years, a new group of musicians discovers the blues,” Johnny says with confidence.

It’s true, he admits, some people think of it as another generation’s genre. “In the 90s I proved that was wrong,” he says. “I’m going to do it again in the 10s.”