how a venue implodes, or doesn't

a logan square spontaneous combustion

Getting into some local Chicago stuff here. There’s been a lot of talk in the community this past week about an embattled venue founder/owner after he was accused of allegation last week. A lot of people are feeling reasonably betrayed by this as he was such a self-postured stalwart of the general Leftist/Artistic/ACAB cause in Logan Square. Having been thinking on it now for a couple days I wanted to write a little something something here because in light of the allegations everyone seems to have the same question of who can they trust and who won’t let down the cause. I can’t say I have any of the answers really,—and what is an answer anyways?—but I did arrive at something sort of like an answer through writing this. So let’s get into it, starting with a crowd you probably shouldn’t put your trust in…

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Every September, ~15,000 frat brothers are parachuted into Wrigleyville¹, and the epidemic of aidropped dick picks to the surrounding area drives away the neighborhood families like an annual Chernobyl disaster, like a fog of testosterone around a Crossfit gym (Wrigleyville has one), a pulled tendon in the local area (Wrigleyville has hundreds of pulled ligaments).

Guys, dudes, men, fellas, bros,—straight, gay, and bi,—almost all of whom discovered they were attractive enough to warrant a couple swipe rights when they were 18 and haven’t since been able to detach their capacity for intimacy from the apps where they first thought it was possible to be loved for their image, at an age when, let’s be frank, they love their images, prowl all up and down Clark Street. Thousands of twenty-something guys who mix Vicodin with their Mountain Dew, sneeze out their Zyns on the sidewalk, saying nothing much at all for a long time and then finally putting a hand on their foreheads like they have a headache, saying simply and curtly: “bro.” 

Very few of them have experienced loss yet in their personal lives so they’ll continue on like this for a couple years. But at least they have each other.

Last Friday night I took a stage shift at a Palmer Square restaurant where I packaged to-go orders, ran food to tables, carried bus tubs down flights of stairs, etc. A stage shift,—pronounced st-ahh-j, for those of you outside the know, outside the industry,—is a sort of second interview wherein you work on the floor for a couple hours at a restaurant on one of its busiest night of the week without pay while your interviewer eyes you from across the room with a certain air of menace and skepticism. Not their fault. You’re one of a dozen who need this job. You might just get some free food at the end of it, you might even get the position. The job market in Chicago right now is brutal. Unemployment’s around 6.2%, one of the highest rates in the country.

After the shift ended, with my shift meal in a soggy paper bag, I dodged some halloween decorations carried along by the wind slapping pedestrians all down Armitage and caught a bus up to

ft cald

’s place in Avonsdale where their dog Mimosa, a pit bull mix in a pearl necklace, pranced around me while I scarfed down this cold burger with Ty occasionally breaking in with, Stop, Mimo, or No Mimo don’t eat his food. There was italian sliced meat on the burger too for some reason. Anyways, burger was excellent.

Some shit had gone down earlier in the week. Everyone’s talking about it. We were talking about it in the apartment. Ty and KP had been drinking for a minute, so the talk had become impassioned. KP seemed genuinely betrayed by the news and the same seemed true of the other femme presenting BIPOC folks I know around the city. The same question over and over again: Who can you trust? Like, who can you even trust?

The founder/owner of one of the popular venue spaces/art galleries for up-and-coming queer acts of color,—and remember, this is Chicago, these people are literally the lifeblood of the art scene here,—who had in recent months been harassed by the Chicago PD over permits, who had postured himself as a champion of minority artists, who had the tremendous support of the underground black and queer art scene, both financially and spiritually,—a gofundme started a couple weeks back for legal costs in their fight against the city,—was last week accused of graphic rape against a performer sometime last fall. On a yoga mat, to top it off. Having deleted my instagram at the start of the month I hadn’t gotten the full picture, at least until talking with KP about it. Didn’t know it had been that bad. Christ.

I’d been texting my friend about it earlier in the day too while I walked slightly dumbfounded by the news to the Lincoln-Belmont Library to return an overdue library book. She had canceled a comics event she was hosting there that night, was in the market for a new spot to host her reading, and had whipped together a comic a day or two after the news dropped that put the crisis into perfect clarity in a way only she can.

And so the venue has immediately and irrevocably collapsed in on itself.

What’s baffling about its downfall, its collapsing in on itself so immediately, is that the guy in question was such a champion of a collective cause. He wasn’t just a profile on a screen. He seemed legit, like a champion of underdogs throughout the city. He was fighting the power.

I met him once outside Cole’s one June night while I was smoking a cigarette after a couple drinks and he showed me around the space after the performances had ended. He seemed normal, was very eloquent,—more than anything he seemed exhausted. A police car rolled up after I had left and three cops entered to ask him about permits. So many talented artists had been close with him, had worked with him. They thought they knew him.

From what I heard, after the implications of what he’d done to the performer,—in the performance space, I might add,—fully dawned on him, like a chemical headache, like something bordering on guilt, he had full-on exploded across a Whole Foods grocery, gone up like a firework. Spontaneous combustion. A massive fireball in the shape of a man,—a quick flash,—in the freezer section, leaving not much behind except tatters of Depop thrifted clothes and soot against the windows. The TV dinners in the freezers had been untouched. Only one shopper had been seriously burned.

They found his wallet four isles away, half buried underneath Roma Tomatoes,—the only way they knew it had been him. The Whole Foods staff picked up the tatters of his clothes and mopped up the mess while the manager, a large man in a Whole Foods polo scratched his head talking to a homeland security officer making a report on the whole situation. 

Crazy thing to explode like that inside a store. Good riddance. If only no one else had been hurt. They got too close, filling their cart with their groceries for the week, not knowing what would happen. You can’t trust someone who could explode like that. The problem is it could be anyone. Who can you trust? From everyone I talked to who knew him, those who had events in the space he ran, those who knew him well,—but not well enough,—the same question: Who can you trust?

Monsters lurk behind the backlit glow of profile pictures, but also behind the backlit glow of trusted local institutions, it turns out. There’re few of them, sure,—monstrous people are more few and far between than they may seem to be, but they’re out there all the same. With every relationship clouded now by these digital portraits which so bind us to one another, as I’ve said before, every relationship’s become a parasocial one. We feel connected to the spaces where we feel seen and appreciated, where people can be themselves and exhibit their works,—and then something like this happens and we’re deterred from everyone we know, every space we’ve existed in, because the trust we gave so foolishly was so easily and monstrously betrayed. The hurt doesn’t leave. The assumption of the worst remains.

This is how a scene shrivels away. Makes me wonder if the neoliberal project of isolating us from one another isn’t a good thing. We’re dangerous to one another, aren’t we? How can we trust? Things like this happen, have always happened; bad people are revealed where you wouldn’t expect, so we become frightened of one another and we become frightened of our safe spaces. Bad apples are few and far between but they rot away our feelings of trust.

Rumor has it too, that the physical space of the venue,—the spaciness of the space,—went soon after, though it didn’t explode. The space imploded. Except something happened. Wait, there are people in that space,—

There are truly abominable people behind supposed safe spaces, so how safe can any space be? There are truly abominable people behind the faces that are presented to us as supportive in a generalized way? How can we trust? It’s a real question that ought to be reckoned with, because if we can’t trust anyone anymore through the kaleidoscope of our currently cybernetic social world, then the capacity for real friendship through these final venues available to us in our day and age are diminished out of a sheer impossibility of trust.

—and the people inside the space were pushing shouldering carrying the walls back to their original place, preventing a singularity and/or the creation of a black hole at the center of that lot in Logan Square where Space.01 sits. The space is protected. The collective won’t let it die completely,—the people may change the name, may change the format, may change the location, but the dream of a support-social network for artists in historically oppressed groups won’t die. I don’t know if it can be killed. The striving forward to a better more comfortable future will continue; it may bleed but it’s heart beats on. The powers that be have been trying for centuries to hammer it into stillness and if they haven’t yet, they won’t ever.

Perhaps the relationships we have online cannot be classified as “friendship,” or “acquaintanceship,” or even “parasocial relationships,” but a secret fourth thing: an interaction between two fictional characters, the classic two figments of our imagination, you and me. Who knows who’s actually typing these words to you right now? Who knows who’s reading them? So as a first rule of thumb: no trust should go to online accounts and profiles based on digital aesthetics or symbolic championing.

The same question sits down and makes itself comfortable: who can you trust?

The answer, I think, is that you can still trust the scene, trust the people who are pushing those walls back, who won’t leave a burning building if it’s the last place they can comfortably call home; you can trust the collective whole of people expressing themselves, sharing the space, sharing the cause itself, even if you must always remain weary of its champions.

I started this piece with a description of Wrigleyville. Like Wrigleyville, Logan Square also has its annual domestic import. Like New York and LA, Chicago’s the bottom of a regional funnel, in this case the midwest, where the wayward souls hoping to make something of themselves and join up with likeminded people end up,—and Logan Square’s the place in Chicago where the hopeful artists gather by the thousands (for better or for worse) in an excited communion, hopeful of connection, like a digital camera to the dark side of the moon.

Perhaps my title to this piece was too dire. It might not be my place to talk about this at all, even, with only really one foot in the scene,—but hey, you know, this is my substack and it’s been on my mind. The Space.01 incident is a blow to the scene, it absolutely is. It won’t kill the scene though. I don’t know if anything can. The scene will evolve on. A scene can disappear, of course. But if anything, it’s because living in a society full of people is going to always turn into a bit of a game of whack-a-mole against bad apples at the end of the day, and then the scene just disperses out across an area and creates new ones. Refugees find homes. They always do.

In this case, the Space.01 scene is likely destroyed. Done. It’s gone. Kaputt. In a puff of smoke. I say ~likely~ because there’s a chance, I suppose, that he could hand it off to someone else to run, someone who can carry on the cause,—but whether that handing off is successful is in doubt because of just how ingrained he was as the image of the venue. If it is truly, unequivocally gone, though, it will just encourage migration to some other place more communal and less centered around such an embattled individual, and you know, that’s probably for the best..

Next year, Book Club is opening a two story venue space in Lakeview, I think, maybe there’s something there but who knows. It’s pretty close to Wrigleyville...

Anyways, here’s a good snapshot of new york city subway crime.

And here’s a fascinating art exhibit.

Until next time,

xoxox

1. Wrigleyville being the Chicago neighborhood surrounding Wrigley Field,—every dog park within a three mile radius also happens to be called Wriggley field