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On a cloudy afternoon a couple of Saturdays ago, faint lyrics could be heard echoing down Marshall Boulevard, which exits Douglass Park on the park’s south side. The sound was not coming from any of the bands performing at Riot Fest inside the park, but a small crowd had gathered under the shade of nearby trees to watch the performer: an older woman playing guitar in front of a banner that read NO RIOT FEST. 

🎶 We don’t want your Riot Fest, no

We don’t want that tall black fence, no

We want trees and the singing lark

Give us back our Douglass Park 🎶  

It had been a few years since organizers held the first People’s Fest, a celebration of a growing movement to protect Douglass Park from privatization, but the scene was familiar. A group of residents set up tents, hung banners, and assembled a small stage. They greeted onlookers with friendly smiles and offered fresh produce, activities for kids, and live music—free and open to all. 

The focus of their protest was taking place simultaneously just blocks away. Concertgoers, fresh off the CTA, streamed into Douglass Park’s already torn-up fields for another year of Riot Fest.  The ticketed, for-profit music festival that includes punk, alt-rock, and hip-hop bands has caused tens of thousands of dollars in damages to the park in previous years and—along with other summer festivals—left neighborhood residents without a park for weeks on end.

But on that Saturday, the residents who spent their summer lining up to speak at park district board meetings, writing letters to city officials, and collecting petition signatures were still—perhaps at peace in each other’s company. They set blankets down over patches of green and settled in for a long afternoon featuring a variety show of their own. 

The next song was an acoustic cover of the 1937 folk song “Hello Stranger” by Chicago-based “tape explorer” Magic Ian. Rapper Veg@ P played a set from his newly released EP D@zed and Confused. Johnny Marshall performed some stand-up. The Black queer punk trio Bussy Kween Power Trip gave an exhilarating performance. Slowly, the crowd of bobbing heads grew. 

I found myself starstruck by The Breathing Light, an Alabama-bred, unapologetic Afropunk trio. 

Their electric sound sent shockwaves through the air. Drummer Dwayne Robinson wore a shirt that had a Blue Lives Matter flag with the words “Burn this flag” underneath. Their presence was fitting for a much larger stage at a festival like the one occupying     Douglass Park. 

“A lot of it has to do with what it means to be a successful band,” front man Kyle Ozero told me. “Some people think it makes you successful to play at a show like Riot Fest . . . but we don’t care enough about that.”

The band was fearless about the repercussions of speaking out against one of the largest independently owned music festivals in the country. Speaking out is actually their brand. 

Pointing to his shirt, Ozero told a story of when he pissed some people off after visiting Hollywood Forever, the iconic resting place of Hollywood’s biggest stars.

“I made a sign and got in front of Johnny Ramone’s grave site and called him a racist,” Ozero said, with obvious pride. With Riot Fest, it’s nothing different for the band. 

“It’s disappointing to see punk-inspired, counterculture-inspired bands playing at a fest like that,” Julie Aziza, another band member, said. “Even for it to be named Riot Fest as though it’s something radical . . . it’s ‘gentrification fest’ at this point.” 

On a bench, Jorge Angel, a resident who’s been living across the street from Douglass Park for ten years, sat pensively.

“We’re hoping to get more signatures,” he said in Spanish, nodding to the table in front of him with stacks of petitions. As of publication, Concerned Citizens of Riot Fest in Douglass Park, which Angel is active with, has gathered close to 3,000 signatures in support of removing the large music festivals from Douglass Park. 

But Angel was frustrated from an incident earlier that day when he was standing outside his porch with two kids on his watch. Parked in front of his house, he says, were two Riot Fest-goers snorting what appeared to be cocaine off the hood of their cars. 

“I have nothing against people who do that,” he said. “I just think they need to respect the residents who live here.” 

Several tables with local vendors were spread throughout the grass. Some were selling handmade jewelry, scarves, and candles. A group of abolitionists known as the Chi Capys were selling T-shirts for donations to people who are incarcerated. 

One vendor who asked to speak anonymously said they used to go to Riot Fest before the festival was kicked out of Humboldt Park by angry residents, but they stopped going when the makeup of the audience changed. 

“It’s mostly white people now, and they’re rude and disrespectful,” they said. “They don’t take into consideration the people around the neighborhood in addition to the lack of organization by the festival.”

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This article was co-published in partnership with The TRiiBE.

For as long as Chicago has been on the map as a dominant cultural hotbed, the city’s Black population has been a target of lucrative exploitation and racist scapegoating from right-wing and mainstream news, gossip blogs, and fringe hip-hop media. 

On Instagram and Twitter, for example, thousands of posts pop up when searching for any artist or buzzword pertaining to Chicago drill music. Varying from local to overseas-based accounts, each post contains tabloid-styled headlines that either sensationalize Chicago’s gun violence or spread unsubstantiated rumors and lies about the world of drill music as an extension of it.

Recently, hip-hop gossip blogs en masse circulated misinformation across social media about Parkway Gardens, aka O-Block, being sold and set for demolition in 2023. Consequently, this incited derogatory jabs against Black Chicagoans, particularly Parkway Gardens residents. 

Public comments under each post were filled with anti-Black sentiments such as “Place is a shithole known for crime and murder” and “That’s why purge season is gonna start Oblock close in 2023 and in January Illinois has no bail for violent crimes it’s over get ya grips stay dangerous.” Another wrote, “Don’t die for the block yo momma renting,”  invoking bars from Grammy Award-winning Brooklyn rapper Jay-Z’s 2017 track, “The Story of OJ,” in the name of cliché moralism.

Not only does the spread of online misinformation lead to real-world harm, but it also gives legs to fearmongering tactics specifically aimed at Black communities—as we continue to see with the ongoing Republican-funded campaign against the SAFE-T Act. 

Mainstream media is certainly not immune to irresponsible news aggregation, sloppy reporting, or rushing to get stories out for clicks. But when it comes to hip-hop gossip blogs, the damage is intensified toward Black audiences as many of them, unknowingly or otherwise, play a role in the frequent misinformation campaigns against Black Americans.

“It’s hurtful because they already go through enough and they have enough going on,” Alderperson Jeanette Taylor (20th Ward) told The TRiiBE, referring to the constant trauma experienced by Parkway Gardens residents and ongoing disinvestment in the community.

“I don’t think people understand that they’re used as people’s talking points. [Atlanta-based rapper] Soulja Boy was on his tour bus and wanted to see O-Block ‘cause that’s what they call it in rap culture,” Taylor said. The community is often referenced by local rappers such as Chief Keef and the late King Von. “But that’s home to some people. That’s the only home they know.”

Formerly a gated community, the Woodlawn-based Parkway Gardens housing complex was completed in 1955. It’s home to many esteemed Black Chicagoans in addition to Chief Keef and King Von, including OTF Records general manager Ola Ali; former First Lady Michelle Obama; rappers Cupcakke, Boss Top, Shoebox Baby, who is painted in a famous mural in the neighborhood that is drawing global tourism but has drawn ire from some residents in the neighborhood. The area is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The neighborhood grew to infamy in the turbulent 1990s; the height of power and organization for Chicago’s most notorious street gangs and also the disastrous War on Drugs. The Black Disciples (BDs) became the dominant gang at Parkway Gardens, marking their territory from the 6300 to the 6500 block of South King Drive as “WIIIC City (Wild, Insane, Crazy)”. 

As a younger generation of kids who grew up in Parkway Gardens were born into the escalating gang war between the nearby rival Gangster Disciple factions between the late 2000s and early 2010s, WIIIC City would be rechristened by the younger BDs as “O Block” in honor of their slain member Odee Perry.

As soon as the rumors began to spread offline among Parkway Gardens residents, Taylor said she received dozens of calls from upset constituents. She informed Emerald South Economic Development Collaborative president and CEO Ghian Foreman, who also serves as president of the Chicago Police Board. She collaborates with him on issues related to Parkway Gardens and Related Midwest, as the realty company owns properties in the South Side neighborhood.

Misinformation about O-Block being sold dates back to April 29, 2021. That’s when the Sun-Times first reported that Related Midwest put the apartment complex up for sale. The news crossed over to the hip-hop blogosphere when, during that same month, Englewood-bred superstar Lil Durk declared on Twitter that he wanted to buy the property. “I’ll buy it don’t matter how much it is,” he tweeted in his reply to Chicago-focusedblog Kollege Kidd’s post on April 30, 2021.

Soon, Texas-based blog Say Cheese TV picked up the topic, but deeply misrepresented the issue with falsehoods. To an audience of 300,000 followers, Say Cheese TV tweeted on April 29, 2021, that “O-Block will be disbanded and relocated,” without citing a source. 

In May 2021, AllHipHop and Media Take Out ran with it, publishing on their websites that O-Block was sold for an “undisclosed amount” to “some mogul” or “corporate group,” but neither specified who. To make matters worse, some larger and more reputable hip-hop publications such as The Source, Hot New Hip Hop (HNHH), and HIPHOPDX further spreadthe misinformation by citing Say Cheese TV in their respective online articles.

The fake story about O-Block resurfaced again in September 2022, around the same time that the “purge” law misinformation campaign took off. This time around, Say Cheese TV and a litany of fringe hip-hop accounts such as RapTV and Daily Loud added an additional lie: that Parkway Gardens “will be set for demolition in January 2023.” Say Cheese has since deleted the tweet, but also shared the inaccurate news about the SAFE-T Act. The latter has not been deleted.

To this day, none of these outlets have circulated the June 2021 follow-up story from the Sun-Times, which reports that Related Midwest took Parkway Gardens off the market. As of Sept. 27, Parkway Gardens is still listed on Related Midwest as one of their properties. 

“Maybe the plan is to get families to get their moving papers and move,” Taylor said. Born and raised out south, and elected 20th Ward alderperson in 2019, she said she believes the mass circulation of lies regarding Parkway Gardens may have something to do with the owners wanting to “take the heat off themselves” when it comes to the years of severe neglect by Related Midwest. 

“I’ve always thought that. Even in my late 20s, I’ve always thought the plan was to make it a gated community again,” she added.

Taylor also noted that Parkway Gardens is located near so many landmarks, including the University of Chicago’s ever-expanding campus and the forthcoming Obama Presidential Central. 

“I was looking at it like this was not a kid sitting in his basement finding something to do,” Taylor said about the false narratives about Parkway Gardens. “This was some adults who put this together to get the pressure off what’s actually going on at Parkway. So instead of addressing it, you make up some stuff.”

Since she was elected in 2019, Taylor said she’s attempted to work with Related Midwest, believing that they simply “just don’t know” or understand what’s happening in Parkway Gardens. But now she thinks that it needs new management in order for them to take responsibility and “do what they’re supposed to do.”

“Honestly, if Related Midwest doesn’t get it together then the Urban League and the NAACP could sue them. ‘Cause I’m just tired. And there are people who’ve been there 40 years who were born and raised there who are just tired. I don’t live there, but I feel their pain,” Taylor said.

What’s The Word TV, one of Chicago’s popular and respected hip-hop blogs, chose not to post about Parkway Gardens. Cordero “Cody Mack” McKee, who owns What’s The Word TV and works as director of content at Power 92.3, said there was no reliable source to verify the alleged news.

“We’re living in this age where people want clicks. If I tweet out a fake story about O-Block and I put it out first, I’m getting hella engagements, hella likes. My next tweet, I can charge people promo because now I got clout,” Cody Mack said. 

Listed in the bios of many of these hip-hop and culture blogs are the words “promotion” or “advertisement.” Selling ads and promos while building engagement and followers with shocking headlines and videos has become a lucrative business for some of them, ranging from small companies such as Daily Loud to multinational corporations such as RapTV. Others are seemingly random accounts, without websites or any public information about owners, that also post graphic and violent content.

None of these blogs, however, list any trained journalists on their staff or seem to follow any journalistic ethics.

“Some people really don’t care if your page is valid,” Cody Mack explained. “They just know that people are coming to your page so I need to figure out how their interaction can be valuable to me.”

Chicago native and MTV’s True Life Crime host Dometi Pongo said that fake stories circulate online easily because of the negative stereotypes about the city related to gun violence, which is a popular deflection topic for conservative media pundits and politicians alike.

“It’s the same thing that happens when police brutality happens. ‘Why are you crying about this when y’all kill each other?’” Pongo explained, comparing whataboutery comments aimed at Black Chicagoans as a deflection from systemic issues that plague predominantly Black communities like Parkway Gardens. 

“It’s a never-ending cycle because multiple stories continue to come out that reinforce this narrative,” Pongo continued.

He also mentioned the use of memes and jokes online, which often spreads misinformation further. 

“People started making jokes and saying, ‘Damn, Durk lost India and O-Block in one day.’ So now the meme is traveling,” Pongo explained. “So even if the news story is corrected, the meme is funny, so it’s gonna keep traveling.”

There’s an unhealthy obsession with Parkway Gardens in hip-hop culture. Part of it comes from the allure that Chief Keef and King Von have given it through years of glorifying their territory and its violence in their raps. It’s similar to the natural curiosity fans had for other housing projects turned into hip-hop landmarks by native lyricists: Jay-Z and Marcy Projects in Brooklyn, and Juvenile and the Magnolia Projects and Master P and the Calliope Projects in New Orleans. 

“Chicago is a hot place for the blogs because of the national stigma of “Chiraq,’” Rolling Stone hip-hop reporter Andre Gee said. The city has birthed some of the most impactful music and cultural figures of the last 20 years. Therefore, Gee said, it’s easy for Chicago to become a character in the hip-hop sphere.

“We know gun violence is pervading just about every American metropolis, but Chicago rap has garnered such a worldwide following. It’s given us the names of their hoods and even nonartists with mere proximity to the rappers have notoriety,” Gee explained. “It’s easy engagement because fans are eternally invested in the myth of ‘Chiraq.’”

For celebrities, blogs, and social media personalities who continue to use O-Block for content creation and engagement, Taylor has a strong demand.

“When are you going to invest in our community while you’re making us feel like a circus?” she asked. “We ain’t no circus act. These conditions were created. And they weren’t created by the people in Parkway. They were created by the institutions who are paid to serve them. So that says something about our evil-ass system.”

One solution to holding hip-hop and culture blogs accountable could be suing them for defamation. This happened recently with rapper Cardi B’s case against blogger Tasha K, who published “multiple false and defamatory statements” about her.

But that can be challenging since the owners of many of these accounts keep their identities separate and untraceable from the content they produce. 

“If the kitchen ever gets too hot, they can just rebrand with a new page. Outside of [DJ] Akademiks or Shawn Cotton, we don’t know the people running these pages, so it’s easy for them to evade accountability for tactless ‘reporting,’” Gee said. 

Another solution, Gee explained, is to teach students how to spot misinformation online. In 2021, Illinois became the first state to require by law that schools teach media literacy in curriculums across every grade level, but laws like this are uncommon across the rest of the country.

“In theory, the best thing to do would be to stop paying attention to these pages, but that’s as likely as turning around a speeding 18-wheeler on a dime,” Gee said. “Schools now need to be more cognizant of this environment and help kids be more discerning and know what to look for before believing what they see.”

What Taylor wants the fans and the rest of the world to know is that Parkway Gardens is more than a meme or high-profile gang territory.

“These are real families and real people in Parkway who deserve to live in peace and in safe conditions like everybody else,” she added.

The TRiiBE examined seven prominent hip-hop and culture blogs that have posted content about Chicago drill and to an extent, Black Chicago issues, and whether they’ve done so responsibly or not.

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The American Writers Museum’s newest exhibit, “Dark Testament: A Century of Black Writers on Justice,” is named after a book of poems by Pauli Murray, a writer, lawyer, activist, priest, and professor. While Murray inspired people like Chief Justice Thurgood Marshall (he called her work “the Bible” of the civil rights movement) and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who drew on Murray’s work for her legal brief, she is largely unknown by the public. (Murray was LGBTQ+ and wrote extensively about gender and sexuality, and used she/her pronouns to describe herself.)

“Her work has been crucial, but it’s often been invisible,” said Dr. Keidrick Roy, the exhibit’s lead curator. Roy spent the last five years getting a PhD at Harvard, studying how African Americans have taken up the ideals of American liberty, progress, and justice in their writings since the nation’s revolutionary era of the 1700s. “And so in this exhibition,” Roy continued, “it’s only fitting to prominently feature Murray and her life and her work as an organizing theme, to help us pay attention to the things that we observe but we don’t really see.”

Dark Testament is an immersive experience that has been two years in the making. It opened to the public on September 22 at the American Writers Museum (AWM) downtown and explores racial injustice from the Civil War through the Civil Rights movement from the perspective of Black writers such as Octavia E. Butler, Ida B. Wells, Ethel Payne, Lorraine Hansberry, and Ann Petry, among many others. At the project’s start, the curation team—made of writers, journalists, academics, and poets—had a series of conversations with a variety of African American scholars in Black studies, which expanded the aim and reach of that project, birthing its four central organizing themes: Citizen, Justice, Violence, and Joy. “This project has been a dream come true,” Roy said. 

Courtesy American Writers Museum

The presentation stretches across three of the museum’s gallery spaces. When visitors enter, they first step into the Meijer Gallery, where they’ll find on the right a chronicle of major Black American writers, with physical copies of influential works highlighted from each phase. The works What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, written in 1852 by Frederick Douglass, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written in 1861 by Harriet Jacobs, represents the period from 1850-1865 entitled “Slavery and Freedom,” for example. Ida B. Wells’s The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States represented the era between Reconstruction and Jim Crow (1865-1919). Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison is highlighted in the section on the years 1940-1960, a period defined by international conflict and integration.

Across from those mounted texts, 16 brilliantly colored five-foot-tall portraits are installed side by side, filling up the entire width of the gallery’s wall. Visitors can interact with the art using an augmented-reality app on their phones. Large multicolored portraits depicting the likes of Ma Rainey, Douglass, Wells, and James Baldwin are painted or quilted in various complementing styles by local artists, many of whom are associated with the Chicago Public Art Group. 

One of the painters, Bernard Williams, oversaw the completion of the 16 portraits and said that he commissioned artists—Damon Reed, Dorothy Irene Burge, and Dorian Sylvain, and himself—that he thought would “do well with creating dynamic portraits,” as the painters have experience creating outdoor murals in Chicago and painting portraits. Dorothy Burge is the only fabric artist among the group.  

In a section of the Conant Readers hall, a larger exhibition room, there’s a component that examines the significance of the Black press, Black newspapers, and Black publishers. “Black press has been central to the distribution of Black thought since its founding,” Kiedrick said, since writers like Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois used the Black press as a mechanism to  distribute their ideas. He noted that the Black press increased the capacity for transmission of ideas within Chicago but also across the country, connecting Black people in different regions of the country who wouldn’t have interacted otherwise. 

“You have people in the south reading the Chicago Defender for instance, and that encouraged aspects of the Great Migration,” Roy said.“The Black press provided a space for Black leaders to emerge in a variety of capacities, and to have a public facing national voice that Black folks paid attention to.”

Myiti Sengstacke-Rice is the fifth generation of publishers in her family. Her great-granduncle was Robert Sengstacke Abbott, the founding publisher of the Chicago Defender and inventor of the Bud Billiken Parade, and her grandfather was a publisher of the Defender as well. Her father is renowned photographer Bobby Sengstacke. She donated a walking cane, a camera, and countless photos from her late family members to the exhibit. 

“Writers are really clamoring for great spaces to be able to express what they’re seeing out there in the world. And you know, they need good platforms for that,” Sengstacke-Rice said.

The last part of the exhibit is in the Rubin Writers Room, where an intimate video presentation shows contemporary writers discussing the resonance of works from the past. Meanwhile, actors from Congo Square Theatre Company act out quotes from each text on screen. 

The museum considers this their most ambitious presentation to date.

“The larger movements have a lot of different Black intellectuals, writers, men and women alike, who were really thinking deeply about the American Enlightenment ideals upon which the nation was founded,” Roy said. “And they should be celebrated as philosophers.”

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“For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.” —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Imagine my surprise when, as a preteen girl with a budding interest in film—for whom the galaxy of the Hollywood star system was an accessible inroad to the vast universe of cinema—I checked out Joyce Carol Oates’s 2000 novel Blonde from the library, thinking it was a straightforward biography of the mythical star.

“There came Death hurtling along the Boulevard in waning sepia light,” begins Oates’s haunting prelude. I was perplexed. I’d known that Marilyn Monroe had died young and that she’d faced a lifetime of struggle. With images of Lorelei Lee and Sugar “Kane” Kowalczyk dancing, singing, and playing ukulele in my head (these roles from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes [1953] and Some Like It Hot [1959], respectively, feature prominently both in Oates’s novel and Andrew Dominik’s controversial adaptation of it), I hadn’t fully comprehended the gravitas of Marilyn’s allure past the multitude of cheap clothes and home-good tchotchkes on which her face was plastered.

But just as the hazy, clip-art likenesses of Marilyn on rhinestone-studded T-shirts and aluminum signs aren’t accurate representations of the star as a person, nor is Oates’s novel or any of its adaptations. “Mr. Melville obviously lacks the realist’s conviction that the bare facts of human life are in themselves eloquent,” wrote esteemed critic and biographer Carl Van Doren in an essay on Moby-Dick for a 1924 issue of The Bookman literary journal, “and so permits himself to lean a great deal upon certain misty symbols to give his meaning its rich colors and ominous shadows.”

Rich colors certainly distinguish the meaning of Marilyn, from her bright red lipstick to the Technicolor glamor of films such as Gentlemen and the earlier Niagara (1953), as do ominous shadows. Just as death hurtles along at the beginning of Oates’s book, a montage of severe chiaroscuro shots depicting how the white light of Marilyn Monroe is illuminated against those shadows—set to the film’s correspondingly portentous score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis—begins this controversial adaptation. New Zealand-born, Australia-based writer-director Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford [2007], Killing Them Softly [2012]) started adapting Oates’s novel in 2011, with Jessica Chastain at one point attached to star as Marilyn, the part which later went to Cuban actress Ana de Armas.  

What’s there left to say about why Blonde is controversial? It’srated NC-17, the first film of its kind to be released on a streaming service; there’s nudity, sex scenes, and, most disturbing, several scenes depicting sexual and physical violence against the main character. And there’s not one but two scenes shot from inside a vagina as it’s being prepared for an abortion. 

Thus some viewers have criticized the film for what it’s not and what it could never be—a revisionist history that would somehow make Marilyn’s life and legacy less sorrowful. These viewers would likely prefer that Blonde focused more on facets of her personality (or, should I say, persona; much of Blonde the novel and the film are about Marilyn Monroe the construct versus Norma Jeane the person) and career that audiences could perceive as contrary to the myth of Marilyn as a poor little rich girl whose extraordinary beauty made her susceptible to exploitation from both men and the entertainment industry at large. Many also make note of Monroe’s intellectual curiosity, pointing that out as something a less offensive text would have chosen to highlight.

Such criticism, however, is not about the film, but rather the ongoing mythology surrounding Marilyn the construct, which is inherently what Oates’s novel and Dominik’s film seek to epitomize. The former has said that Monroe is her “Moby Dick, the powerful galvanizing image about which an epic might be constructed, with myriad levels of meaning and significance.” Monroe is in turn the American public’s white whale, that which we seek to dominate and claim as our own. The discussion over depictions of Monroe are often less about the depictions themselves and more about who has the right to tell her story and what version of the story it should be.

Dominik follows his source material faithfully, altering it only by omission. (The novel is several hundred pages long, so naturally a screenwriter would need to be prudent about what to keep in and what to leave out. Joyce Chopra, for example, directed an adaptation of the novel for television in 2001, largely focusing on the same sections of the book that Dominik does with a few key differentiators). It starts at the beginning of the story, with the troubled mother of little Norma Jeane Baker planting in her daughter’s head the false hope that her absent father is actually a Hollywood titan. Those familiar with the lore will recognize the image of her supposed father hanging on the wall of the dilapidated bungalow where she and her mother reside; she grew up thinking that her father was Clark Gable, a prophetic misconception that would come full circle when she costarred with him in John Huston’s The Misfits (1961).

These parts are especially fraught. Norma Jeane’s mother, Gladys Pearl Baker (Julianne Nicholson, who’s harrowing in the turn), is shown trying to drown her daughter in a bathtub, which results in the mother being institutionalized and Norma Jeane being sent to an orphanage. The film glosses over other facets of Monroe’s early life, such as her first marriage at age 16 and when she was discovered as a pinup model for cheesecake magazines, jumping instead to her first movie audition. Before the latter event, she’s raped by the studio head (implied to be Darryl F. Zanuck from 20th Century Fox); after, she’s ghoulishly mocked during the screen test. This passage is in color, one gimmick of the film being that it’s in color when it depicts Norma Jeane and in black-and-white when it’s Marilyn. That preternatural intelligence that so many claim goes unrecognized is on display during her screen test, as she compares the script of the film she’s auditioning for to Chekhov, which prompts condescending scoffs from the male studio employees. 

Nevertheless getting the part as a result of the rape, Marilyn’s star is soon on the rise. Here begins the most hallucinatory part of the film, wherein she enters into a ménage à trois with Charlie “Cass” Chaplin Jr. (Xavier Samuel) and Edward G. Robinson Jr. (Evan Williams), boys about town with daddy issues (being the sons of their respective seniors) and substance abuse problems. This sexual and emotional algebra problem eventually yields a pregnancy, something Marilyn had long yearned for; however, realizing that her mother’s mental health issues could be passed down to her child and having been offered a part in Howard Hawks’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, she undergoes her first abortion. The relationship between the three is perhaps the most embellished aspect of whatever parts of Marilyn’s real life exist in this allegorical rendering; she allegedly was involved with the men, but not in a sexually charged throuple as depicted in the film. 

Then she meets her second husband, the Ex-Athlete, baseball legend Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale), who is possessive of Marilyn and becomes abusive toward her, especially after the stunt for Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch (1955) that found her standing atop a subway grate, letting her white dress blow up in front of thousands of onlookers. Next comes her relationship with The Playwright, Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody, excellent in the role), who appeals to Marilyn’s intellectual side; he seems genuinely interested in her notes on his play After the Fall. They soon wed, and a relationship that seems idyllic becomes fraught after Marilyn suffers a miscarriage of their much-wanted child. 

Now in an emotional free fall and separated from Miller, Marilyn enters into an affair with President John F. Kennedy, which becomes the symbol of her impending demise. She’s brutally assaulted by the president, then forced to have an abortion against her will, all leading up to the day Death comes knocking with its special delivery. 

Blonde2/4 starsNC-17, 166 min.Streaming on Netflix

I’d argue that Blonde exists independently of some criticisms that have been leveled against it but not that it’s always a good film. One can’t deny the boldness of Dominik’s artistic choices. The visual delineations between Norma Jeane and Marilyn Monroe, for example, are successful, even striking. Other choices, like the frequent shifts in aspect ratio, are ambitious but not as affecting. 

Some are outright disastrous, as in multiple sequences where what looks like a 3D ultrasound of a baby does a Malickian song and dance in an attempt to impart the meaning of life upon its poor, defenseless mother. Shots during the honeymoon phase of Miller and Monroe’s marriage (meant to mimic real-life photographs of the two) are almost unbearably schmaltzy, especially as Cave and Ellis’s nightmarishly ethereal score plays alongside it. 

Naturally the question of whether Dominik, a male director, is qualified to depict such specifically female issues has arisen. I can’t make a case for the film being feminist one way or the other, if only because that isn’t the point. Dominik’s depiction of Marilyn’s suffering, excessive though it may be, is aggressively confrontational in such a way that some have termed broaching on torture porn. An alternate viewpoint could be that it’s intentionally repellant at times to underscore the depths of her hardship. I can’t help but think that in many ways it’s us, the viewers, who are still asking too much of Marilyn: we want to acknowledge her pain, but not too much, attempting to forge a balance that may not have existed. Perhaps we want Marilyn to have been a certain way in spite of her pain, which represents yet another projection onto the eternally blank slate. 

We search not for the real Marilyn Monroe but the idea of Marilyn that conforms with our respective image of her. Thus the demand that such an undertaking be wholly representative is difficult at best, hypocritical at worst. “Blonde . . . is a work of fiction and imagination,” writes literary critic Elaine Showalter in a review of the novel, “and Oates plays with, rearranges, and invents the details of Monroe’s life in order to achieve a deeper poetic and spiritual truth.” Whether or not Oates and Dominik succeeded in doing so is, like the mythos of Marilyn, ultimately a matter of personal interpretation, of belief in one’s conviction. To again quote Moby-Dick: “Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.”

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On a cloudy afternoon a couple of Saturdays ago, faint lyrics could be heard echoing down Marshall Boulevard, which exits Douglass Park on the park’s south side. The sound was not coming from any of the bands performing at Riot Fest inside the park, but a small crowd had gathered under the shade of nearby trees to watch the performer: an older woman playing guitar in front of a banner that read NO RIOT FEST. 

🎶 We don’t want your Riot Fest, no

We don’t want that tall black fence, no

We want trees and the singing lark

Give us back our Douglass Park 🎶  

It had been a few years since organizers held the first People’s Fest, a celebration of a growing movement to protect Douglass Park from privatization, but the scene was familiar. A group of residents set up tents, hung banners, and assembled a small stage. They greeted onlookers with friendly smiles and offered fresh produce, activities for kids, and live music—free and open to all. 

The focus of their protest was taking place simultaneously just blocks away. Concertgoers, fresh off the CTA, streamed into Douglass Park’s already torn-up fields for another year of Riot Fest.  The ticketed, for-profit music festival that includes punk, alt-rock, and hip-hop bands has caused tens of thousands of dollars in damages to the park in previous years and—along with other summer festivals—left neighborhood residents without a park for weeks on end.

But on that Saturday, the residents who spent their summer lining up to speak at park district board meetings, writing letters to city officials, and collecting petition signatures were still—perhaps at peace in each other’s company. They set blankets down over patches of green and settled in for a long afternoon featuring a variety show of their own. 

The next song was an acoustic cover of the 1937 folk song “Hello Stranger” by Chicago-based “tape explorer” Magic Ian. Rapper Veg@ P played a set from his newly released EP D@zed and Confused. Johnny Marshall performed some stand-up. The Black queer punk trio Bussy Kween Power Trip gave an exhilarating performance. Slowly, the crowd of bobbing heads grew. 

I found myself starstruck by The Breathing Light, an Alabama-bred, unapologetic Afropunk trio. 

Their electric sound sent shockwaves through the air. Drummer Dwayne Robinson wore a shirt that had a Blue Lives Matter flag with the words “Burn this flag” underneath. Their presence was fitting for a much larger stage at a festival like the one occupying     Douglass Park. 

“A lot of it has to do with what it means to be a successful band,” front man Kyle Ozero told me. “Some people think it makes you successful to play at a show like Riot Fest . . . but we don’t care enough about that.”

The band was fearless about the repercussions of speaking out against one of the largest independently owned music festivals in the country. Speaking out is actually their brand. 

Pointing to his shirt, Ozero told a story of when he pissed some people off after visiting Hollywood Forever, the iconic resting place of Hollywood’s biggest stars.

“I made a sign and got in front of Johnny Ramone’s grave site and called him a racist,” Ozero said, with obvious pride. With Riot Fest, it’s nothing different for the band. 

“It’s disappointing to see punk-inspired, counterculture-inspired bands playing at a fest like that,” Julie Aziza, another band member, said. “Even for it to be named Riot Fest as though it’s something radical . . . it’s ‘gentrification fest’ at this point.” 

On a bench, Jorge Angel, a resident who’s been living across the street from Douglass Park for ten years, sat pensively.

“We’re hoping to get more signatures,” he said in Spanish, nodding to the table in front of him with stacks of petitions. As of publication, Concerned Citizens of Riot Fest in Douglass Park, which Angel is active with, has gathered close to 3,000 signatures in support of removing the large music festivals from Douglass Park. 

But Angel was frustrated from an incident earlier that day when he was standing outside his porch with two kids on his watch. Parked in front of his house, he says, were two Riot Fest-goers snorting what appeared to be cocaine off the hood of their cars. 

“I have nothing against people who do that,” he said. “I just think they need to respect the residents who live here.” 

Several tables with local vendors were spread throughout the grass. Some were selling handmade jewelry, scarves, and candles. A group of abolitionists known as the Chi Capys were selling T-shirts for donations to people who are incarcerated. 

One vendor who asked to speak anonymously said they used to go to Riot Fest before the festival was kicked out of Humboldt Park by angry residents, but they stopped going when the makeup of the audience changed. 

“It’s mostly white people now, and they’re rude and disrespectful,” they said. “They don’t take into consideration the people around the neighborhood in addition to the lack of organization by the festival.”

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