“Eyeth—get it? In the Deaf storytelling tradition, utopia is called Eyeth because it’s a society that centers the eye, not the ear, like here on Earth.”

That’s the opener to “Ear vs. Eye: Deaf Mythology,” one of the many brief lessons sprinkled between the chapters of Sara Nović’s realistic fiction novel True Biz, released March 29 by Random House.

Charlie Serrano is a Deaf high school student in Ohio. Her cochlear implant has created language deprivation and family strife rather than improved hearing, but after her parents’ divorce, Charlie gets the opportunity to enroll in the fictional River Valley School for the Deaf, experiencing Deaf culture for the first time over the course of the book. Unfortunately, River Valley is at risk of losing its funding and shuttering. 

The point of view switches in third person between Charlie and other main characters with each chapter, denoted by the ASL symbol for the first letter of their name, but even when readers can’t focus exclusively on her point of view, chapter-break lessons allow us to look over Charlie’s shoulder at her coursework or research.

“Eyeth may be a pun, but it’s not a joke—it’s a myth.”

This particular lesson—meant to reinforce that Deaf culture is a culture, as well as to provoke questions about accessibility and designing a Deaf world—is one of many in Nović’s new book. They never feel dry or preachy, but I suppose I was primed to be interested from the get-go. 

I’m hearing, but learning the basics of American Sign Language (ASL) was an early quarantine hobby for me, and around the same time, my TikTok algorithm steered me deep into DeafTok. My “For You” page was full of Deaf creators, a wonderful mix of mini ASL lessons, stories, skits and jokes, and more. As immersive as TikTok, YouTube, and other resources can feel, I knew my experience of Deaf culture was still very limited and very online.

True Biz by Sara Nović
Random House, hardcover, 388 pp., $28, penguinrandomhouse.com

When I read the synopsis of True Biz—which is an expression in ASL that means “real talk” or “seriously”—I snatched the book up, and I was delighted to see the illustrations and bite-size lessons as I flipped through the pages.

Since Nović herself is Deaf, it initially feels like these teachings, like the Deaf mythology page, come directly from her to the reader. But the further you get into True Biz, the more you can tell that the lessons are for Charlie, from the other characters that Nović brings to life. 

We learn lessons like “Spelling Doesn’t Count,” on the American Sign Language (ASL) alphabet, and “Deaf President Now,” a history lesson about a student protest at Gallaudet University, from the syllabus of Dr. February Waters, a CODA (Child of Deaf Adults) and the headmistress at River Valley. We learn “Body Language,” a page full of illustrated instructions for signs like “naked,” “flirt,” and a range of other (dirtier) sexual words and actions, perhaps from Austin Workman-Bayard, Charlie’s mentor at school, whose family have been Deaf for generations. We also learn from Charlie herself, who encounters new concepts in the Deaf world and subsequently looks up Wikipedia pages such as “Black American Sign Language (BASL).” My personal favorites are her awestruck observations of her Deaf friends: Charlie marvels at their ability to ride the bus while signing with both hands, highly adept at balancing without holding on.

As Charlie gets more acclimated to River Valley, so too do we get acquainted with Charlie, her peers and family, and Deaf culture.

Nović’s writing is smooth and easy, even while jumping between perspectives. She balances dialogue in ASL, spoken English, and over text, with italics and alignment indicating who’s communicating. It’s interesting to read Deaf characters written by a Deaf author, as the use of sound as a key sense and descriptor is altered, but it’s no disadvantage. A key theme is language/sound access, and in many cases, Nović only lets us know what Charlie knows, creating vulnerability and slowing the pace of many conversations. A frequent refrain is Charlie seeing or hearing only a long blank space, signing or saying, “What?”, and someone having to repeat themself or fingerspell. 

Both in the chapter-break lessons and in the narrative sections, Nović manages to cover many intense topics without it feeling too jarring: bodily autonomy, Deaf “cures” and medical trauma, eugenics, anarchism, marital and family struggles, the cochlear implant debate, and more. In fact, Nović’s writing feels so steady that she never gives a true sense of urgency to even the most high-stakes parts of the plot, and the ending wasn’t as satisfying as I hoped. Still, True Biz is a page-turner, an intriguing character exploration, and an honest survey of the basics of Deafness.

It might be imperfect, but I finished the book ready to recommend it and full of renewed excitement for learning ASL, eager to consider how I too might work toward the ideals of Eyeth in my own everyday life.

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Since January 2020, vocalist Julian Otis and Elastic Arts executive director Adam Zanolini have programmed AfriClassical Futures, a series offering an antidote to the overwhelming whiteness and deadness of the classical canon. Each AfriClassical concert invites a Black artist working in or springboarding from the Western classical tradition for an intimate live performance and conversation, though the exact form is up to the artist. Cellist Olula (who formerly performed as Olivia Harris), who came aboard as a curator of the series in its second season, explained this approach to Adam Zanolini for Elastic’s newsletter: “Because this is a ‘Western classical music’ series, it’s very important that we don’t bring in those hierarchies, that we don’t prop up the structures that we’re trying to fight against. . . . I want to continue to see a more expansive approach to [the question], ‘What is classical music?’” Previous AfriClassical guests have included chamber collective D-Composed, Milwaukee-based violin-and-cello duo Sista Strings, pianist and polymath Charles Joseph Smith, prolific composer and string player Renée Baker, and singer and composer Ayanna Woods, who’s behind some of the most engrossing choral music being written in Chicago right now. (Musical talent may be a family trait; her sister is Jamila Woods.) Next up in the series is the Honourable Elizabeth A. Baker, a Florida-born multi-instrumentalist and electronics artist whose cerebral, slow-developing music constantly reinvents itself. When she premiered her work “Strange Loops” here in October, the performance managed to amuse several AACM musicians—no small feat—by employing overlapping scales in different keys and directing musicians to bounce Ping-Pong balls inside a piano and use the bodies of other instruments as resonators, either by singing or blowing their horns into them. Ever out of the box, Baker will use this solo set to spotlight a harmonics guitar (specially designed by experimental luthier John C.L. Jansen) and the 16-channel speaker system at Elastic Arts, which the Chicago Laboratory for Electroacoustic Theatre installed just before the pandemic shutdown.

Elizabeth A. Baker, Sat 5/21, 8 PM, Elastic Arts, 3429 W. Diversey #208, $15, all ages

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Q: I’m a straight guy, married to a straight woman for 15 years. Several years back, I opened up to my wife about my fantasies of her sleeping with other men. I was nervous about bringing it up. Her views on sex had always been traditional, and she had always expressed a very strict idea of monogamy and commitment. So, I was extremely relieved when her reaction was intrigue rather than disgust. She was curious about it and wondered if I really wanted it to happen or if it was just something I wanted to keep in our rotation of dirty talk. Fast-forward to this week, and my wife tells me she is interested in exploring this. (Note to other guys who want this from their wives: be respectful, don’t pressure, and give her time to think about it. Your patience might be rewarded!) Here is the problem: We both have careers that could be complicated or damaged by the stigma around “cheating.” I know about all the apps out there, but we live in a large city, and there is a nonzero chance that we might run into someone on the apps we are connected to professionally or socially. Are any of the apps out there geared toward folks who want to go about this carefully? Is it possible to minimize the risk of professional or social embarrassment here, or is this just something we must accept to pursue this lifestyle? —Hooking Up, Seeking Help

A: There are lots of dating apps for people and/or couples looking for casual sex and/or kinky sex (Feeld, 3Somer, #Open, et al.), and lots of people—single and partnered—looking for casual and/or kinky sex on regular dating apps (Tinder, OKCupid, Christian Mingle, et al.). But hookup/threesome/swinger apps, while perceived as sleazier, are a safer bet for a couple like you and your wife.

While there’s no way to eliminate your risk of being recognized on an app, HUSH, anyone who spots you on Feeld looking for extracurricular dick was on Feeld looking for and/or offering up a little extracurricular dick of their own. The threat of mutually assured destruction—if they gossip about you, you’ll gossip about them—is usually enough to restrain bad actors, as is the threat of the obvious follow-up question. (“Wait, why are you on Feeld?”) And most people on hookup apps aren’t bad actors, HUSH, but fundamentally decent people like you and your wife, i.e., singles and couples looking for a little fun, not for an opportunity to hurt anyone. A friend or a relative or a coworker who spots your wife in a bar with a strange man—or in the lobby of a hotel or on her way into your apartment—is likelier to cause you headaches than one of your fellow perverts online.

To minimize your risk of being spotted and outed on the apps, HUSH, don’t post face pics and only share them after you’ve established—to the best of your ability—the person you’re talking to isn’t a bot, a pic collector, or an extortionist. Again, there’s no way to fully eliminate the risk, but at a certain point you have to trust your gut and take a risk. You also have the option of creating a profile in a city you visit regularly but don’t live in, HUSH. After you’ve found and vetted a few good candidates, get yourself some airline tickets and a hotel room and have those drinks in a bar that a colleague, a fan, or your father-in-law is unlikely to walk into.

Q: There’s a story making the rounds on Reddit about people getting those metallic “bejeweled butt plugs” all the way into their asses and needing pretty intense intervention to get them out, ranging from partners pulling them out with their fingers (the unfun kind of double penetration) to actual surgery in a hospital (only fun for a very select few). The blame, apparently, is the fact that the base of these toys is rarely wider than the widest party of the head, which is pretty damning, and that lubed metal is slipperier than lubed silicone. So here are the operative questions: Are metallic bejeweled butt plugs safe or not so much? Are silicone bejeweled butt plugs any safer? Are there any safe bejeweled butt plug options out there? The world isn’t going to stop being obsessed with sparkly butt toys any time soon, so we’re going to need to find a way to do it safely. —Insertion Toy Extraction Messy Situation

A: I’ve seen those jeweled butt plugs in shops and in photos online—they’re usually made from stainless steel and have glass “gems” mounted at the end of an alarmingly narrow base—but I’ve never actually seen one in person. Or in a person, at least not in person. But knowing what I do about butts (and how they relax after some play), and knowing what I do about plugs (a flared base is your first line of defense against a trip to the ER), I would’ve worried too much about losing one to use one. As for safe bejeweled butt plug options, ITEMS, you’re going to want a flared base and a jewel that’s at least the size of Cullinan I Diamond, the fist-sized rock on the Queen of England’s royal scepter, which come to think of it . . .

Q: As you’ve surely heard, the conservative Supreme Court majority plans to overturn Roe v. Wade. While my wife and I were lamenting the state of this fucking country, she mentioned that nobody ever hears men talking about the abortions that kept their lives on track—even though that’s obviously a very common thing that happens. How many guys shat their pants after a condom failed during sex with a woman they weren’t that into? How many prominent men knocked up their mistresses or assistants or babysitters? How many Republican boys have pressed a wad of their parents’ money into a girl’s hand because having a baby would ruin his future? These men need to speak up. I’m not expecting actual Republicans to do so, but perhaps there are men out there who are willing to speak up and admit what we all know: Men benefit from abortion while bearing none of the shame associated with it. It’s time we heard from them. I’m sorry I don’t have a catchy name for this or a cute sign-off. I’m so tired and the world is falling apart. —Men Should Speak Up About Abortion

A: Now for some real worries. We are weeks away from American women being stripped of a fundamental constitutional and human right. And we face the prospect of an out-of-control and illegimate Supreme Court stripping us of a host of other rights: the right to contraception, the right to same-sex marriage, the right to interracial marriage, even the right to have sex for pleasure—you know, the sex most people have most of the time. In Lawrence v. Texas (2003), the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws that criminalized not just consensual gay sex, but consensual sex between men and women that wasn’t open to conception as well.

While it should be enough to hear from women who’ve benefited from safe and legal abortion—and it should be enough to know that women die from unsafe and illegal abortions, and enough to know that banning abortions doesn’t stop women from getting abortions—I happen to agree that cis men who support abortion rights and have benefited from them need to speak the fuck up about reproductive freedom.

“There are millions of men whose lives would have been worse without abortion,” the writer Jill Filipovic wrote on Twitter last week. “Men who wouldn’t have found their big loves, wouldn’t have their kids, wouldn’t have been as successful, wouldn’t have taken big risks” if they had become fathers before they were ready. To those men, to all men, Filipovic says, “This is your fight, too. Get in it.”

And gay men? The exact same arguments being used right now to strip women of the right to decide when and whether they want to bear a child—abortion isn’t within the “history and traditions” of the United States, abortion isn’t a right enumerated in the Constitution, abortion is a moral question—can and will be used to strip us of the right to have sex and the right to marry. Republican assholes are passing laws in red states right fucking now that force women to give birth to their rapists’ babies against their will. Don’t for a second think these same assholes won’t pass laws forcibly ending your gay marriage or throwing your gay ass in jail for getting your gay ass fucked. This is our fight, too, faggots.

Q: Is there a website where we can legally find out how to buy the abortion pills you’ve mentioned on the podcast? —Make It Stop

A: Everything you need to know about abortion pills—how they work and where to get them—can be found at plancpills.org. And anyone using those pills at home needs to read Dr. Jen Gunter’s essay “Your Medical Team Cannot Tell If You Had a Self-Managed Abortion” at vajenda.substack.com. And everyone should read Jill Filipovic’s advice on what we can do right now to fight back (“Get To Work, Get Informed, Get Brave”) at jill.substack.com. And if you can afford to donate to the National Network of Abortion Funds, now would be a great time to do so. They’re at abortionfunds.org. And finally: don’t vote Republican, don’t fuck Republicans.

Download the Savage Lovecast at savagelovecast.com.

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Credit: Coco Picard

In a new exhibition, longtime collaborators Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger created an immersive multimedia installation that explores intimacy, distance, and the fluctuations between. The above comic captures their reflections on making together and materials in play. Text from the comic is transcribed here to ease readability.

Our collaboration developed organically. We were both ceramic students at Illinois State University but did not collaborate (or date) at the time. We worked cooperatively as many craftspeople do, sharing tasks like making clay and firing kilns. We are both from large families where cooperation is necessary. 

A few years later, we started living together and working on collaborative performance pieces. Those performances grew out of a shared interest in performance and each other. 

The silhouette is very present in “Loving Repeating.” The silhouette is made from tracing a shadow. A shadow is a reminder that a body is present and a silhouette is a reminder that a body is gone. What is missing causes loneliness. In “Loving Repeating,” there is a large painted mural of our silhouette repeated many times to form a pattern. That pattern is then pushed into a forced perspective, creating an illusion of the mural receding into space. Some may see a hint to the infinite in this receding in space. 

“Loving Repeating: New Work by Miller & Shellabarger”
Through 9/3: Mon-Thu 10 AM-7 PM, Fri 10 AM-4:30 PM, Sat 10 AM-4 PM, Sun 10 AM-1:30 PM, Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell, 773-324-5520, hydeparkart.org

The name of the exhibition comes from a Gertrude Stein novel, The Making of the Americans. She talks about history being made by the repetition of the everyday over generations and that is a type of infinity. She also suggests that love is tied to loving the way that another [person] is repeating. These ideas of togetherness and separation run throughout most of our collaborative efforts.

We’ve done two other similar shows like the one at the Hyde Park Art Center. The ashes of both are included in [“Loving Repeating”] in their pine box urns. Like those shows, all the work—excluding the murals—are made of paper and after the show ends will be burnt and placed in a pine box urn.

We talk about our collaborative work all the time and everywhere: at breakfast, on walks . . . We have art dates where we hash out details about this and that. We’ve been working collaboratively for almost 30 years, so it comes easily—but it really always has. We’ve also had very separate solo art practices since the very beginning.

Don’t force your collaboration. If you give your work time and attention it will grow.

Miller & Shellabarger’s artist page at Western Exhibitions
westernexhibitions.com

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For Chicago-based director Donterrio, the late-00s musical Passing Strange represents a road map for how an artist—no matter the medium in which they create—can live their life. 

The show’s story of a Black musician’s coming-of-age depicts “what happens once you have this crazy dream as a teenager to be an artist, and this is how you end up if you don’t cede to the message,” he explained. 

Porchlight Revisits: Passing Strange
Wed 5/18, 7 PM and Thu 5/19, 1:30 and 7 PM; Ruth Page Center for the Arts, 1016 N. Dearborn, porchlightmusictheatre.org, $49.

Donterrio has been at the helm of Porchlight Music Theatre’s new production of Passing Strange, which will be presented this Wednesday and Thursday as part of the company’s ongoing Porchlight Revisits series, highlighting musicals that have fallen off the theater community’s radar.

Opening with much acclaim on Broadway in February 2008, Passing Strange was created by musician and playwright Stew. (Heidi Rodewald collaborated on the music.) The show depicts the life of a young musician—simply referred to as “the youth”—and his struggles with love and work as he searches to find his voice as an artist. Songs bridging numerous musical genres are interspersed throughout. The narrator, identified as “Stew,” was originally portrayed by Stew.  

The show was essentially a primer on how to be “a healthy, well-rounded artist,” according to Donterrio. “It says, ‘Watch out for these things. Spend time with your family. Be careful of the people who don’t love you back.’”

Passing Strange ran on Broadway through July 2008 and was nominated for seven Tony Awards, winning one for Best Book, and also received three Drama Desk Awards. But even after Spike Lee filmed two performances for a 2009 movie, Passing Strange has only rarely been performed in subsequent years. (The now-defunct Bailiwick Chicago—not to be confused with the also-defunct Bailiwick Repertory—produced a critically acclaimed staging of the show in 2011, directed by Lili-Anne Brown.)

Porchlight artistic director Michael Weber suspects the show’s original marketers had a difficult time selling the show since it “was a live, personal piece written for Stew to perform himself.” The Broadway milieu, he added, “is more tourist-based and more international-based, and they want to see things with the biggest-name actors or the biggest-titled shows like Wicked or Phantom of the Opera.”

Passing Strange, Weber noted, is a “thinking person’s show—it is very nuanced in terms of the vision it is trying to expound upon, and I think that made it a little difficult for people to put in a nutshell what the experience is. . . . I think that, had they had a star that everybody knew, it would have had a different life, but on the other hand, it would have lost everything it had [with] Stew there on stage.”

Donterrio, for his part, embraced the challenge of Passing Strange being so intrinsically interwoven with the personality and memories from its creator.

“If people look at the core of the story that’s there, it’s the story of any artist,” he explained. “With our production, we’re kind of able to dig into that. I think we’ll be able to open up to a new audience and we don’t have to rely on Stew’s being and his physicality, [and] the way he sang the material. We can just do the material, be honest to it, and it can kind of be like Pippin, where it can be any performer.” 

Donterrio further described the cast as “a roomful of multifaceted artists. The actors are [regularly] directors and costume designers, for example. They do other things as well, so it’s been a really fun creative process. It will be a really fun show to experience.”  

The Porchlight Revisits series has been featuring stagings of little-seen musicals since 2018. According to Weber, Passing Strange demonstrates that Porchlight is programming not just a retrospective of forgotten vintage shows but important and compelling shows that did not have a chance to connect with audiences.

“Passing Strange is definitely one of the newest shows we’ve done in the Porchlight Revisited series,” Weber said. “[But] it will always be a mix of the lesser seen shows that we think deserve a second look.”

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Editor’s note: Chicago playwright, novelist, actor, director, and disability rights activist Susan Nussbaum died April 28 of pneumonia at 68. Playwright Mike Ervin, who collaborated with Nussbaum as cowriter on the comedy revue The Plucky and Spunky Show and whose 1999 play, The History of Bowling, was directed by Nussbaum, remembers his friend and mentor.

Everybody should read Susan Nussbaum’s novel Good Kings Bad Kings right now. Drop everything you’re reading or doing. 

Not only will it be one of the most satisfying reads you’ve had in a long time, but you’ll  understand why so many of us in the disability community are so broken up about her recent death.

When you read Susan’s book, you’ll hear clear and powerful voices telling the story of disabled teens in Chicago who have been dumped in a dead-end, state-operated segregated school for disabled youth. In the end, you’ll be sad that there is no more of this writing to come.

What comes through loud and clear in this book and all Susan’s writing about disability is her intense love for the disability community. But she wasn’t a touchy-feely, huggy person in the least. She expressed that love by undertaking projects that were exhilarating to those who participated in them. That project could be a street protest or a mutual support group for disabled girls or any number of other things.

I owe a debt to Susan for a lot of things, but mostly for getting me involved in the Chicago theater scene more than 30 years ago. My impact on Chicago theater may not have been monumental, but its impact has been monumental on me. I’ve met some of the finest, most admirable people I’ve ever known, and had some of the most fun, while doing my theater work.

Susan (and another guy whose name I don’t remember) wrote a disability-themed sketch comedy called Staring Back that was produced at Second City e.t.c. in 1983. Susan performed in it, too. I was jazzed up watching it. I’d never seen disability matters handled with such skewering humor! It was about time! That was the kind of stuff I wanted to write.

A few years later, Susan asked me if I wanted to write her next show with her. Of course I jumped at the chance. The result was another disability-themed sketch comedy called The Plucky and Spunky Show, which was produced at the good old Remains Theatre in 1990. The cast included Susan and another wheelchair user, a Deaf person, and a blind person.

I had never written for stage or been involved in theater in any way before then. Hell, I’d only seen a handful of plays. But I went on to write a play called The History of Bowling and it was produced at Victory Gardens Theater in 1999 and 2000. Susan was the director both times. After that, a play Susan wrote called No One as Nasty appeared at Victory Gardens and I helped with the production. These plays featured protagonists with disabilities. 

I’m real proud of all that. What I enjoyed most about being a theater collaborator with Susan was that our senses of humor were so in sync. We were both big fans of sarcasm, dark humor, and absurdity. Working on a show with her was exhilarating for me because it was a lot of laughs.

I have one more Susan story to tell. It doesn’t have anything to do with theater but it must be told.

Susan proudly called herself a socialist. She once told me that her dream partner who could satisfy her every need would be a “Marxist-Leninist wheelchair repairman.”

So of course Susan was one of the people who arranged for some disabled people from Chicago to travel to Havana to break bread with some disabled Cubans in 1988. Once again I was fortunate to be included in one of her projects. One day we Chicagoans were sitting outside in Cuba having lunch in perfect tropical weather. Susan began dictating a letter to another woman in our group, who was armed with a pen and writing pad.

Susan dictated, “Dear Esteemed Comandante.” The rest of us at the table ribbed her mightily for writing a letter to Fidel, telling him how enamored we are with his country and inviting him to visit us. What a hopelessly gringo thing to do, we all said. Good luck getting that letter to Fidel, and even if you do, fat chance he has time to meet with us. He’ll probably just laugh about what gringos we are.

A few days later, a stop on our itinerary was a rehabilitation hospital in Havana. As we spoke to the head doctor, our tour guide, Lilia, mentioned the letter. And the doctor said, “I’m a member of the Central Committee. I’ll see Fidel this afternoon. I’ll give him your letter.”

On the day we were to head back to the states, Lilia said, “I’m gonna miss you guys. Can we have a little party in the hotel lounge?”

So we all gathered in the hotel lounge and after a few minutes, in walked Fidel and his entourage, which included the rehab doctor. Fidel stuck around for two hours and talked with us about the Bible, public transportation, and a whole lot more. Earlier in the trip, Susan developed lung congestion and spent a couple days in a Havana hospital receiving respiratory therapy. Susan told Fidel about her hospital stay and mentioned that she received a bill for $250. Fidel apologized and said the only reason she received a bill at all was because she wasn’t a Cuban citizen. Susan assured Fidel that she wasn’t complaining about the bill. How much would two days in the hospital with respiratory therapy cost in the U.S.?

Shortly after Fidel left, the rehab doctor returned to the lounge and picked up the phone. He said to Susan, “I’m calling the hospital, Fidel said to cancel your bill.”

Can you see why so many people miss Susan so damn much?

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Walking down North Avenue with his bulky Home Depot purchases in tow, George Blakemore sparkled in a glistening metallic-toned ensemble he painted himself. “I think that we all are artists,” he said. “We all use our imagination and we all are creative. There was a Black gentleman that died called Mr. Imagination who would say everything begins with the mind. When you saw me and thought, ‘I would like to take a picture of this gentleman,’ it started from your mind. And so, even though you are a reporter for the Reader, that’s an art too because you are creating. 

“We all are artists because everything comes from the mind. And during the COVID-19 that was good therapy for me, and it would be good therapy for everybody to do something creative. Some people might sew, and might sing, and might dance, and all of that is using your imagination,” Blakemore said, always generously bringing his attention to the person he’s talking to. It is fair to say he interviewed me as much as I interviewed him on that bright Sunday afternoon earlier this spring. 

Activist and artist George Blakemore on North Avenue in Spring 2022. Credit: Isa Giallorenzo

“I paint Chinese umbrellas and I do canvas also. During my birthday party, they had a lot of my artwork there. A lot of people who came over made a purchase, and some of them gave me a little present,” says Blakemore, grateful for the 80th birthday party that the organization Ex-Cons for Community and Social Change (ECCSC) had just thrown for him. 

“I just thought it was wonderful that these young men and women were there to honor me. They are ex-offenders who are free now, and they’re doing good things in the Black community. I like to push positive things because there’s so much negativity that’s going on in our community. This is a grassroots organization whose founder, Tyrone Muhammad, stayed in the penitentiary for 21 years. Now he’s out trying to make positive contributions,” Blakemore explained.

An activist himself, Blakemore reminded me he’d been featured in the Chicago Reader 2015 People Issue, which presented him as “The Concerned Citizen.” That profile by Deanna Isaacs showcased Blakemore’s extensive history of attending meetings of local governing bodies and speaking his mind whenever he could. “The citizens have a responsibility and the elected officials have a responsibility. All of the above have dropped the baton,” he said in the article. 

A jaunty scarf and hat in a similar design complete the ensemble. Credit: Isa Giallorenzo

In his activism, Blakemore—a former civics teacher—fights for Black people to receive goods, services, contracts, and jobs in Chicago and Cook County. He considers those to be reparations that the Black community deserves. Having arrived in Chicago in 1970 at the end of the Great Migration, Blakemore said he has mixed feelings about the city he now calls home. “I’m working to make a better, more inclusive Chicago, where all people can benefit from living in this beautiful global city,” he said.

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As a child I hated subtitles. The words constantly multiplying and changing on the bottom of TV screens distracted me from the scenes in shows and movies. Sometimes the white words overlaid on a black background moved at a quicker pace than what the characters onscreen were actually saying and spoiled what was to come. I’d rather the educators who screened educational specials at school turn the boxy 90s televisions off altogether.

Obviously, a distaste for captions spoke to my privilege as a nondisabled child who had an option to dislike them in the first place. But surprisingly, subtitles have grown on me as an adult. As a lover of many things Black, I love watching films created in other countries like Nigeria, South Africa, and even France (shout-out to Netflix’s Lupin). As my film and TV palate has expanded, I’ve learned of the innate multiculturalism of most Black folks in the African Diaspora (not just in America) that translates onscreen. It is quite common for scenes in these films to have characters who converse in Pidgin English (a mix of a local language and a version of English) or two other languages separate from English altogether. As much as body language is also a very communicative tool, missing even a few words can shift an understanding of what’s happening in a story. Subtitles help put the pieces of these conversations together.

Subtitles are also quite useful for those of us looking to become more confident in speaking another language. I am years from my high school days of studying French and even further from my days learning Spanish in grammar and middle school. Immersing myself in non-American entertainment has renewed my interest in remembering and enhancing my French-speaking skills; it’s also made me want to learn local languages like Bantu people’s Lingala, which isn’t as readily available to learn unless you are in community with Congolese or other Bantu people. Those once-pestering words on the bottom of television screens I now see as an opportunity to refresh and expand my communication.

As beneficial as they may be, subtitles have their faults. Late last year, conversations around Netflix’s Squid Game, one of the streaming service’s most viewed series, brought to light how poor transcriptions in the show completely shift the understanding non-Korean speakers likely have of the storyline. As a native English speaker, it’s a question I often ponder: Are the subtitles presented accurately capturing what’s being communicated onscreen? Still, I’d argue that turning on your subtitles here and there is a great start to expanding your knowledge of other parts of the world.

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“Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman.” The repetition is a summoning spell which repeats the past in the present. Horror is a sound you can’t stop saying.

Bernard Rose’s 1992 film Candyman repeats its summoning spell as an echo that turns words into sounds and back again. Set around the Chicago housing project of Cabrini-Green, the movie features protagonist Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen), a white anthropologist studying urban legends. She becomes fascinated by the story of Candyman, a Black artist in the 1890s who painted the picture of a white woman, fell in love with her, and was duly murdered. His hand was cut off and replaced with a hook and his genitals smeared with honey and exposed to bees. 

Candyman supposedly haunts Cabrini-Green, which stands on the ground where he was killed. If you look in a mirror and say “Candyman” five times, he appears, whispering loving, terrifying promises. “I am the writing on the wall, the whisper in the classroom.” Tony Todd’s incredibly sensuous voice drips with honey and blood. To say his name is to summon forth a sweetness of sound and terror; the pain, as he says, is “exquisite.”

Philip Glass’s soundtrack for piano, pipe organ, and chorus mirrors the repetition in the summoning spell. His iconic minimalist iteration, sketching the same figure over and over like images in glass, forms a backdrop for the boxes of Cabrini-Green, stark identical apartments and identical apartments stacked. Glass’s insistent, stark hum collapses, at key moments, into the white noise buzz of massed bees, the carefully ordered divisions of space and sound pressed together into a single trauma crawling on the rib cage, an iron hook dragged through a honeycomb.

The most famous theme from the film is “Music Box,” in which Glass’s characteristic repetition mirrors the tinkling loop of a child’s toy. “Music Box” is introduced early in the film; it’s the background music for one of Helen’s interviews, in which an informant tells her the story of Candyman. 

Per the informant, a woman was babysitting when a lover came over. The babysitter tells him the story of Candyman, the story in the story culminating in the repetition of the name and the wet sounds of death. 

Glass’s music is a theme for the baby. But its maddening loop is also an auditory mirror of the loop of story which is also the loop of history. The past is a story repeating in the present. Horror is a sound you can’t stop saying.

Nia DaCosta’s 2021 Candyman sequel/reboot is scored by Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe. His incidental music is influenced by Glass, holding up a kind of buzzing electric mirror to Glass’s crystalline compositions. 

Lowe does reproduce one piece from the original score, though. Glass’s “Music Box” theme is used in a scene that reprises and retells the events of the previous film. 

In a flashback sequence told through artist Kara Walker’s eerie shadow-puppet cutouts, we see Helen Lyle start to investigate Candyman and then go insane. She makes snow angels of blood and throws a child into a fire. 

Glass’s music tinkles and chimes as the words grind on, echoing the horror story campfire tale of the first movie. The story the shadow puppets tell here is garbled, though; in the “real” events of the first movie, Candyman, not Helen, was the murderer, and the baby lived. To reflect this, Lowe adds ambient hiss and echo. The music box fades toward white noise buzz, space and sound collapsing into a single trauma, a bloody hook dragged through a honeycomb.

The “Music Box” theme has a final, clearer rendering at the end credits of the 2021 film. By this point we’ve walked again through the razed, gentrified landscape of Cabrini-Green. The baby rescued in Candyman, artist Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), has become ensnared in the story, learning to his sorrow that Candyman isn’t one ghost, but a genre, or a hive. A Black man who moves into a house in the wrong neighborhood; a Black boy executed for a crime he didn’t commit; a Black man accused of putting razor blades in candy—they all die and are born again as a story of death. Racist violence repeats in a predictable path, like a bee following a scent trail. 

Kara Walker’s puppets reprise each story in a ritual of dark and light as the music box repeats its unending theme. The movie is the music is a sound is a story is a word. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. Horror is a sound you can’t stop saying.

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Several decades after the metamorphic transition from silent to sound, a 1981 article in the New York Times observed that “a live musician is rarely seen at a movie except as a member of the audience.” 

That’s not untrue with regards to one Dennis Scott, who can often be found sitting in the first few rows of the main room at the historic Music Box Theatre. But unlike other audience members, he’s enjoying the movie after playing in between showtimes on the majestic theater organ affixed to the left of the screen, a sonic behemoth that for many is now an essential fixture of the experience.

The aforementioned Times article was about the dearth of live silent film accompaniment, a tradition lost to its heyday but which has since enjoyed periods of revival in limited exhibition venues. Scott has been the Music Box Theatre’s house organist since 1992; in 2011 he started a monthly silent cinema series that continues to this day.

“It was the music,” he says of his deep affection for the pastime. “I always just loved the music, and I loved the sound of a theater organ.”

Scott is one of several musicians in and around Chicago for whom live silent film accompaniment is a regular gig. Another in this cadre is Dave Drazin, who accompanies on the piano and has done so at the Gene Siskel Film Center for nearly 40 years, a job he landed quite fortuitously. 

“They were showing something—I don’t know what—but I just walked in, and there was a piano on the side. I asked the house manager if it would be alright if I played the piano for the movie, and he said he would ask the director. He came back and said OK. So I just played, and then the director said, ‘We need a guy like you.’”

A longtime hot jazz aficionado who studied music in college, Drazin has often utilized his predilection for extemporization, improvising scores on the spot. Jay Warren, president and cofounder of the Silent Film Society of Chicago, takes another tack, the traditional photoplay organist instead referring to his accompaniment as a “compiled score.” 

Warren relies on themes for different parts of the film, a tactic imparted by his “unofficial mentor” Gaylord Carter, a renowned organist, film accompanist, and composer who is credited with having helped revive public interest in silent cinema, leading to its initial renaissance.

“One thing we [learned] is not to overplay the film,” says Warren. “You want to be the background. You want to embrace the film; we don’t want to be the star of the show. You should forget about us.”

For Scott, who for many years worked in advertising and PR and thus knows how to captivate an audience, authenticity is key. He prides both himself and the theater on maintaining high standards of exhibition that honor the nuances of silent cinema.

“In this part of the country, [we do] the most authentic presentation of silent films, because we can do 35-millimeter. We can also do variable-speed 35-millimeter, which very, very few places can do. If a film is shot at 20 frames per second, we can show it at that speed.”

He’s especially proud of the organ itself, which he and his husband spent three and a half years restoring. Soundwise it’s digital, with all the effects viewers would have heard back in the 1920s; the console, however, is from 1929, like the Music Box itself. 

Scott, Drazin, and Warren are the most prolific working accompanists in Chicago, whose names you expect to see connected with a silent film screening; however, they aren’t the only ones. 

For example, Chicago-based musician Maxx McGathey has recently composed and performed original live scores for Robert Wiene’s 1924 film The Hands of Orlac and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1927).

A few weekends ago, internationally celebrated musicians Min Xiao-Fen and Rez Abbasi accompanied the 1934 Chinese silent feature The Goddess for an event copresented by the Silent Film Society of Chicago at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts.

Comfort Film, a program of Logan Square’s Comfort Station, offers a yearly Silent Film and Loud Music series. Past pairings include Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), with music from Kassi Cork, Vince McAley, and Anthony Forgrase; F.W. Murnau’s Faust (1926), with music performed by Mexican rock band Los Black Dogs; and ​​Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 film Within Our Gates, accompanied by Paul Giallorenzo and Ben LaMar Gay.

“[It’s] a way to expose our younger audience to these classic films.” says Comfort Film programmer Raul Benitez. The limitations are none; participants are given free rein both in selecting the film and devising their accompaniment. “Every screening is a surprise,” he says. “We even had a band edit a film.”

Keyboardist Kassi Cork doesn’t consider herself especially well versed in silent cinema, but she was nevertheless drawn to the prospect. “There is a history of music performance, primarily organ and piano, for silent film accompaniment that has always intrigued me as a pianist,” she says. “I grew up in a town that still had an organist play before movie showings, and there has always been something magical about that.”

Though new to it, Cork’s process in imagining an accompaniment is similar to that of seasoned practitioners. “While watching the film I create an outline of the overall plot, including mood and ideas it might give me.”

As far and wide as silent film accompaniment reaches in Chicago, spanning melodies from the silent era to music not yet even conceived during that time, there’s one thing these musicians have in common: the film is the thing, the guiding force behind what they do. 

“People ask me if I look at the screen,” remarks Scott. “I say, I always look at the screen, that’s more or less my sheet music.”

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