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February 12, 2010 (Vol 7, #06)

In This Issue:
• Weekend Traffic: What's Happening This Weekend and Beyond
• In Other News: The Best from Our Topical Blogs
• The Party Line: Fifty Years of Folk
• Sausage Links: Hipsters Everywhere
• Administrivia: Fine Print, Etc.

Weekend Traffic
NICE BEARDS. Life as Lincoln, a documentary about Lincoln impersonators, premieres tonight at the Siskel Center.
DIRTY MARTINIS. The Hyde Park Art Center hosts Cocktails and Clay tonight.
TORN PAGES OhNo!Doom hosts a show of illustrated fairy tales Saturday night. Read more in A/C.
BUY LOVE. The Handmade Market gives you a chance to shop for your sweetheart Saturday.
PACZKI DRUNK. Bennison's Bakery in Evanston hosts a paczki eating contest Saturday.
DRAGON HEARTS. It's the Chinese New Year Sunday, which means Valentine's Day starts with a dragon parade.
HEAVY METAL. The Empty Bottle hosts a screening of Anvil: The Story of Anvil Sunday night.
SWEET TALK. The History Museum hosts a discussion of the city's new wave of candymakers Tuesday -- with samples!
...and so much more. Check out the full listings on Gapers Block.

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In Other News
Too busy reading searching for the perfect snarky Valentine's Day card to keep up with GB? Here's some of what you missed.

A/C, our arts & culture section:
A local filmmaker blogs from Cairo; Open Books and Marwen do more with less; I Am A Camera; a convention of painters talking about painting; a filmmaker brings Hollywood to Englewood; Steve at the Movies reviews The Wolfman, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, Valentine's Day, Life as Lincoln, Saint John of Las Vegas and Still Bill.

Drive-Thru, our food & drink section:
What is Chicago's most Seattle-like coffee shop?; make your own candy hearts and eggrolls for Valentine's Day; James Beard loves Calumet Fisheries; honeycrisps aren't the only apples out there.

Mechanics, our politics section:
A green plan for paratransit in the face of CTA service cuts; a No Games Chicago journalist is barred from Vancouver; Daley wants to give more power to the city inspector general; William Kuntsler: Disturbing the Universe impresses at its premiere; Daley wonders where the war protesters are; this is going to be a bad year for teachers.

Tailgate, our sports section:
The Fire host an indoor soccer tournament; video reports from the Chicago Auto Show; the Bulls' Rose gets bruised; Big Hurt hangs it up; Gapers Block Crit bike racing series details.

The Party Line

Fifty Years of Folk

"Chicago should hope that the [University of Chicago] Folk Festival becomes a permanent part of the musical scene." --Chicago Daily News, 1961

The University of Chicago Folk Festival begins today.

In the 1950s, young Midwest urban pioneers -- that's right, our cultural ancestors -- were struggling to make some sense of the poverty that they were often exposed to on our city streets. They could look, they could try to help, but they could not quite touch, could not precisely feel. They accessed the feeling through folk art and music.

Accordingly, I was trying to reach Laroy Inman of Inman and Ira, the rare black performer at the first University of Chicago Folk Festival in 1961 [PDF], to get an authentic black comment on this problem of alienation. But I couldn't quite touch him, either. I will keep trying.

Folk music was part and parcel, the artistic portion, of that fiery solidarity for plain folk that began with the Progressive Movement and has continued to this day.

I would have contacted Mike Fleischer, impresario of the venerable Flying Fish record label for comment on this, but he died in 2004. Mike was the original head of the University of Chicago Folklore Society and first chair of the festival. He persuaded Studs Terkel to emcee the first show. Mike was a great fixture of the Chicago music scene and he's sorely missed.

In the meantime, I was very happy to chat with J. Seymour Guenther, who is now in Austin, Texas. Seymour came into folk as a student at U of C, and ended up working with Mike Fleischer at Flying Fish.

"That would have been about '85. I was head of the [folk festival] committee, a student at U of C. Mike wasn't there when I got involved in it. Bruce Kaplan (head of Flying Fish) remained involved in the festival. Meeting him through the festival, I then went on to work for him. Then Mike moved back to Chicago from Florida a couple of years after, got involved again both in the festival and Flying Fish."

What about this affinity to the poor? How did that influence folk, bluegrass, and so on?

"It's not just an affinity for the poor and needy. If you're at the U of C, you're butt up against the ghetto and it's kind of the home of one of the original streams of American folk music, with the blues around there."

There is a kind of dividing line, though. Black culture can come in, but it can't stay. And whites can't go out.

"The university did away with any kind of black culture in that neighborhood. There used to be music joints on 55th, but the university pretty much cleared all that stuff out, and so you had to go to Checkerboard Lounge or Theresa's to get your fix. It was like this adventure where you crossed the line.

"I remember going down to pick up the son of Howard Armstrong; there was this kind of house band in the early days of the festival, called Martin, Bogan & Armstrong. Howard had a son who played bass with him. I remember pcking him up in this really derelict place under the El tracks on 63rd to take him to an interview on WBEZ, then onto the folk festival [at Ida Noyes and Mandel Hall]. Howard later moved to Detroit, and Ted Bogan lived in a senior project not too far from Hyde Park.

"It was kind of like all these people coming from all over the world, we pick them up at the airports, but these people in the adjacent neighborhoods we had to kind of like go get 'em.

"There've been a number of folk festivals like [this one], but it's the one that has endured. I'm just struck by how they've kind of kept to the same sort of concept, same sort of acts, how little has changed. There are other festivals that came out of folklore societies, like the Philadelphia Folk Festival, but for the time when folk music was a big deal, it is the surviving thing."

The festival runs through Sunday.

Sausage Links

• Hipster Wife-Hunting.

• Hipster Puppies.

Administrivia
This is the Party Line, a weekly email from GapersBlock.com, a Chicago-centric website. The Party Line newsletter is edited by Andrew Huff; the column is by Peter Zelchenko. Pete's opinions are his own and don't necessarily reflect those of Gapers Block or the rest of its staff (although sometimes they do). Don't fire till you see the whites of their eyes. We're always looking for new events, ideas and fancy business card holders. Send your ideas to inbox@gapersblock.com.

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