The Photography of

RAY METZKER





























Ray Metzker's Chicago photos,taken during the mid-20th Century, capture a grey, dusty city, haunting in its geometry. Metzker's Chicago is place of secret loneliness, dreary urbanity and action. His black and white images are odes to post-war Chicago, before the city got fancy.

See Ray Metzker's work at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.

CHICAGO HOUSE BREAK



These tracks are a slice of Chicago house music from 1980-1995. House music was born in Chicago and these early tracks by artists like Larry Heard, Ron Trent, Fast Eddie, and Farley "Jack Master Funk" gave birth to a music phenomenon that took the world by storm. These early tracks are raw, experimental, and funky. Check the way artists combine the James Brown sample-crazy breaks of late 80s hip hop with the beats of house music to create something called 'hip house'. Hip house was the life-blood of Chicago house parties and school dances in the late 80s and early 90s. House music was also a staple of Chicago top 40 radio, and every night the music's jacking rhythm could be heard pouring out of apartment windows and car stereos. This music is the foundation for all modern dance music, and like it or hate it, it all began in Chicago.

CHICAGO FOOD

SOUTHSIDE CHI

*CANDY DILL PICKLES

Food in Chicago is specific - There is a correct way to eat a hot dog, a special kind of dough for deep dish pizza, and hundreds of ethnic food traditions that slam into each other like an elegant wrestling match. Food in Chicago is a crazy quilt, a hodge-podge of style and substance. And in some cases, Chicago food offers up ideas so radical in their awkwardness, so unique in their flavors that they must be illuminated.

It’s time to discuss the Southside pickle phenomenon.

Chicago is the most segregated city in the country. Unlike New York City and LA where cultures seem to jump into a blender and coagulate, Chicago is tribal in the purest sense of the word. Immigrants have been migrating to the Midwestern hub for a few hundred years. Dozens of ethnic groups from Europe, South America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, have all carved out little hamlets within the city walls. Before the 1960s, Chicago was essentially a black and white city with a strong working class immigrant aesthetic. Most middle class immigrants sought work in Chicago’s stockyards or hundreds of factories that created everything from cookies to football helmets. Chicago now contains immigrants from every country on the planet, and this diversity is what makes Chicago so interesting. That being said, Chicago is still segregated on racial lines, with the Northside remaining a bastion of whiteness and the Southside an enclave of blackness. These lines, while invisible, are very real when talking about culture, lifestyle and snack food.

Enter the pickle and its friends Kool-Aid, Now and Later, Jolly Rancher, and peppermint stick. The pickle, while nothing more than a small cucumber soaked in vinegar brine, has achieved legendary status within the invisible boundary of Chicago’s Southside African American community.In Chicago, a pickle is not just something eaten with a pastrami sandwich; it is a briny vehicle for youthful experimentation and hilarious creativity. For decades young people on Chicago’s Southside have been combining pickles with candy, Kool-Aid, and other snack foods to create tastes and flavors that are uniquely Chicago. This pickle experimentation can be traced to the great migration of southern black workers in the middle of the 20th Century. Pickling in the South has long been an easy and delicious way to preserve perishable food items. People in the Southern United States pickle everything from peaches to pigs-feet. What differentiates Chicago pickle enthusiasts from their southern brethren is the youthful insanity of the flavor combinations.

One such combination is the peppermint-pickle. One of the longest standing pickle experiments, this delicacy has its roots in Chicago, and continues to be a popular treat for kids and adults on Chicago’s Southside.The peppermint pickle is made by removing the top off of a large kosher dill pickle and inserting a candy-cane sized peppermint stick into the pickle's cavity. The result is a salty, sweet, mint flavored, crunchy treat that is both funky and delicious. The acid from the vinegar in the pickle brine melts the peppermint stick, and allows the astringent peppermint flavor to soak deep into the pickle.There are variations of this treat that include placing a Jolly Rancher hard candy, or Now and Later taffy within a large pickle. These candy pickles reached fever pitch during the mid-1990s when Kool-Aid pickles began making the scene on Chicago’s Southside. These pickles, again having roots in the deep-south, combine kosher dill pickles with packets of strawberry, cherry, or fruit punch Kool-Aid. The pickles are placed in a large jar filled with extra sweet Kool-Aid and left to soak for up to a week. The candied pickles were invented by African American school kids in southern states like Georgia and Mississippi, and as their popularity grew, they made their way to Chicago. In Chicago, these candy colored, sweet-tart pickles can be found in candy houses, corner stores and neighborhood shops all over the Southside. This childhood delicacy has now become so popular that Kool-Aid pickles have been used in gourmet BBQ joints from Los Angeles to New York City, and were even featured in the food section of the New York Times.

Chicago is still a town where childhood experimentation and cultural gastronomy can slow dance together and concoct something as wonderfully tasty as the candy pickle.

CHICAGO MUSIC

STATIC DISCOS

>>ESTADO FUTURO<<
& THE FESTIVAL OF LATIN ELECTRONIC MUSIC

On August 27-29, 2009, get a taste of the future at the Festival of Latin Electronic Music in Chicago. The festival will feature live music, DJ sets, workshops and speakers focused on the Latin electronic music scene. The three day event celebrates a diverse range of electronic music and showcases modern Latin culture in all of its eccentric glory.

Artists from Mexico’s Static Discos label will be featured at this annual Chicago music fest. Static Discos is a contemporary Mexican music label committed to melting headphones and minds with its wide spectrum of electronic music. When discussing electronic music and its multitude of sub-genres, Mexico rarely comes up in conversation. Contrary to popular belief, Mexico is not just awash in chicken dances, cowboy suit Norteno and nostalgic Mariachi. Mexico has long been an exporter of progressive pop and indie-music, and it should be no surprise that Static Discos’ catalog is deep with sonically adventurous concoctions. The music on the label ranges from improvisational electronic jazz, glitch pop, minimal Detroit style techno, and deep house. The artists on the Static Discos label have a deep understanding of music history, and they are brazen in their desire to take Latin music into the 21st Century.









The Festival of Latin Electronic Music will be a wonderful opportunity to hear what Latin musicians think the future will sound like. Judging from the work on Static Discos, the future will be delicious, like an elotes plugged into a modular synth.

For more information on Static Discos or the Festival of Latin Electronic Music, visit staticdiscos.com.or www.myspace.com/fmelchicago.

CHICAGO JAZZ BREAKS




Here are some tasty Chicago jazz flavored breaks from a time when music still had soul.

Chicago soul-jazz, recorded in the 1960s and 1970s, sounds undeniably Midwestern, but it also has a global perspective where its rhythm and feel are concerned. The musicians who were laying down these tracks respected Chicago's blue collar, blues roots, but they also aspired towards the melting pot of the great metropolis.

These are the sounds of the city.

DESIGN IN CHICAGO

CODY HUDSON& Struggle Inc.

In the early 1990s, every teenager in Chicago was skateboarding and writing graffiti. High schools all across the stinking onion were filled with young hearts of every economic strata and race, all scrawling color and pushing boards across the gray city streets. Urban culture connected kids to their environment, and for these Chicago dwellers, graffiti and skating was a way of celebrating the city. Curbs, run down parks, and parking garages were skateboard arenas, and old rusted milk trucks and subway tunnel walls were galleries to be painted. The skateboarding graffiti kids were not destroyers of the city, they were some of its greatest advocates.

Chicago's urban culture figures prominently in the work of artist and designer Cody Hudson. For years Hudson has created groundbreaking post modern designs for companies such as Burton, Chocolate Industries, Gravis, and Stussy. His design work combines his love for graffiti and skate aesthetics, with a ravenous understanding of late 20th Century pop culture ephemera. Hudson also celebrates Chicago in his work, with architectural iconography and Midwest themes cropping up in many of his pieces. As owner and art director for Struggle Inc., Hudson continues to develop a design language of unquestionable originality and style. Cody Hudson’s work is a tasteful eyegasm.














Flipping through the Struggle Inc. design website is the graphic equivalent of shaking candy out of a Christmas stocking. The work flows, postures, and shimmers on both the screen and the page. Hudson’s typography is narrative, his palate is mack truck bold, and his text is filled with in-jokes and obtuse humor. He comes from the post modern school of design, where irony fondles earnestness, and mixtape graphics are as aesthetically relevant as Bauhaus design principles. In Hudson's world, skateboard decks are meant to hang on gallery walls, and paintings are things to be displayed on city street corners. When not working on pieces for worldwide solo exhibitions, group shows, clothing graphics, or print design, the artist can be found enjoying the occasional can of Old Style. By no means a recluse, Hudson is an avid collaborator, and has worked with like minded artists such as Juan Angel Chavez, Evan Hecox , and Mike Genovese.

Chicago is not a town famous for its graphic design, or its graffiti, but artists like Cody Hudson, with Old Style in hand, are helping to change perceptions.

CHICAGO MUSIC

THE SUBTLE LION :

JEFF PARKER





Jazz in Chicago was at one time a life blood, a force of unrepentant innovation and creative spirit. Louis Armstrong cut Chicagoan’s domes in half with blazing solos, Miles Davis plugged the nickel with post bop madness, and Maurice White slapped the tubs in the Ramsey Louis Trio before going on to form Earth Wind and Fire. Chicago is a town of improvisation. One has to improvise in a city so diverse, yet so culturally segregated. In 2009, there is a new breed of young lions firmly placing Chicago jazz on the map.

Jeff Parker, a Berkley School of Music graduate, and one time record store clerk, has been slugging through the Chicago jazz and improvised music scene for well over a decade. The guitarist has worked as a sideman in countless jazz groups, and in the late 90s he helped introduced a generation of indie-rockers to jazz via his tenure in the super-group Tortoise. Parker is a guitarist of incredible tone, skill and feel. He sites A Tribe Called Quest, Charlie Parker, Harold Land, Sun-Ra, Sonny Clark, and Hank Williams as some of his favorite artists. Parker’s guitar playing is not filled with the pompous solos, or smooth jazz goo found in many jazz guitarist’s play books. To watch Jeff Parker solo is to watch a process of organic self discovery. Each note is new, exciting, frightening and unexpected. Parker remains one of the least virtuosic virtuosos in Chicago jazz. Chicago's Thrill Jockey Records has released a handful of Parker's recordings, including The Relatives and Like Coping. When not playing jazz or improvising, Parker often experiments with beat making and instrumental hip hop. His beats are playful, jazzy and childlike in their funkiness. There is a definite nod to modern beat masters like Madlib and J-Dilla in his unique instrumental pastiche.

Parker continues to perform with artists such as Scott Amendola, Charlie Hunter, Chad Taylor, Rob Mazurek, and Tortoise. Those unfamiliar with Parker's playing will have the opportunity to see him at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago, where he will join Tortoise for a rare live performance. Parker and Tortoise perform at the Pitchfork Music Festival on July 17 at 8pm.

For information on Jeff Parker and his music, visit
http://www.myspace.com/peffjarker.