Anton Bader/flickr

Several years ago in Viroqua, Wisconsin (pop. 5,079), a group of serious radio-heads started a community station. The station, Radio Driftless, is now on FM and broadcasts full-time, and since they hit the airwaves, Viroqua has had the radio bug. This Wisconsin town sounds like a sound guy’s fairy tale, but the story doesn’t end here. Someone left Viroqua for the city.

Last Thursday, snow fell, quieting the pothole-laden Hyde Park streets. The world took on a muffled quality—it was like hearing through a curtain of radio static. Outside of the Southside Hub of Production (SHoP), a notice read, “Please come in to talk about community radio.” Inside a large multipurpose room with art on the walls, four people had gathered, presumably there to talk about talking.

After waiting for stragglers, Gabriel Piemonte, editor of the Hyde Park Herald, greeted the group and started discussing his vision for the community. Piemonte worked on Radio Driftless in Viroqua and knows what can be done with community radio. He wants to start an Internet radio format station called Bughouse Radio, based on the Driftless model, where locals can produce their own radio programming.

“I have been thinking about community radio for a while,” he said. “It has tremendous potential.” He told the small group that the meeting marked “the launching of the idea.” That idea, he said, was to create a “station focused on local voices.” He continued, “My hope is that in a fairly short period of time we’ll be able to find people who want to be those voices.”

Piemonte is excited—he too has broadcast fever. He regaled the group with tales of Viroqua, where a passion for radio is contagious. “They have a license and a tower,” he said. “They’re broadcasting FM, and they have a substantial local donor. They also have online radio: radiodriftless.org. They have a full commercial license and they’re being supported by this tiny community,” Piemonte said, pausing for breath. Viroqua’s a place where community radio has a very loyal audience—a large percentage of the small town is involved with supporting the station in some way.

“That’s another dimension of what’s exciting about bringing community radio,” Piemonte continued. “Being part of the network of radios that’s coming up. We’ll have access to communities on the South Side that you otherwise wouldn’t have access to.”

Piemonte believes a grassroots radio station could have a very positive impact on Hyde Park. “In places where community radio is really earnestly pursued, it really enhances the neighborhoods in a tangible way,” he said. Piemonte thinks SHoP would make for a good host to the radio because it already brings together a host of South Siders with varied interests in the arts and community development.

It begins with a few people and a great deal of enthusiasm. A number of community organizations have expressed interest, including the Hyde Park/Kenwood Transition Initiative, First Unitarian Church (which hopes to broadcast their “First Forum” speaker series), and the Hyde Park Players (who put on the popular performance “An Evening of Horror & Suspense.” ”We are starting from here,” Piemonte said, though he admitted, “we don’t have anything yet.”

What’s the next step for Piemonte? Recruiting voices, setting up an online station, and working on building content and a following of listeners. He hopes to start with a podcast and a partial broadcast schedule, and work on developing a full schedule before eventually becoming a low-power FM station. Although the station is still getting its sea legs in Hyde Park , Piemonte thinks the idea should take hold in the neighborhood. “Hyde Park is a perfect venue, there’s so much going on here,” he said. “If [the new station] isn’t going to get the average Hyde Parker listening and coming out, there’s no point.”

Elizabeth Szwaya

“Oh, I’m not proud,” George Kagan says. “I don’t like the idea of pride.” But it’s hard not to imagine a justified hint of it as he weaves the tale of his 62 handcrafted radios, which are now on display at Hyde Park’s Southside Hub of Production (SHoP).

A diminutive, neatly dressed man, Kagan parts his frosty hair to the side and studies his subjects from behind large, round eyeglasses. As he points out the salient features of a few particular radios, he takes periodic sips of coffee and glances at the floor to gather his thoughts. Every word and movement is deliberate. His quirky project and demeanor have piqued the curiosity of the audience at the South Side Hub of Production who have assembled to see the man behind the towers of radios.

His creations come in all colors, shapes, and sizes, though each one carries the clean lines and vibrant hues characteristic of Kagan’s style. He uses salvaged parts from factory- and foreign-manufactured radios, uniting plastic with wood and juxtaposing the industrial and natural, the contemporary and classic. He draws on the Art Deco period, automobile design, and the Golden Ratio.

The exhibit was curated under the direction of the Hyde Park Kunstverein, a community arts initiative headquartered at SHoP. Laura Shaeffer, SHoP coordinator and fellow member of the First Unitarian Church, approached Kagan about displaying his work, and he agreed to sign on. He says he was curious to see the “public reaction,” and because he wanted to get the radios out of his apartment, which he described as “nonfunctional” after years of building and tinkering.

Kagan grew up in Hyde Park and attended the University of Chicago, earning his bachelor’s degree in psychology. One summer between terms, he looked for a job that would pay him for his love of crafting, and found work in a factory that manufactured recording devices. Initially he imagined that he would work on a piece from start to finish, but to his surprise and disappointment, he was assigned a single task on the assembly line. Reflecting on the experience, he sighs. “It was alienating, very much so.”

His experience in the throes of industrial production and the available yet rusting equipment of public wood shops jointly inspired his radio project. The spark was an advertisement for the postwar German radio manufacturer, Grundig, which was reviving the production of their elegant wooden radios. Kagan thought: “If they can do it, why can’t we?”

Kagan built his first radio in 1997 on his kitchen floor, then moved his operations to a wood shop in Washington Park. As Chicago’s public wood shops closed due to a lack of funding, Kagan moved around. He blames the closures on the disinterest of area youth in woodworking and their preference for basketball. Although, he admits, “Sport is… a performing art,” he believes that in order for an art to qualify as a craft, there must be a tangible product—the result of the union of human foresight and the material world. You can’t write your name on a free throw.

In the end, Kagan says that while building the radios was not a source of pride, it was “satisfying work.” However, after a devastating divorce in 2009, Kagan abandoned the radios to return to psychology, wanting “to understand what went wrong.” He has read 42 books in the past two years—research for a novel he plans to write on spousal abuse. How long will he spend on this new project? He replies simply, “Writing a book is harder than building a radio.”

When asked what motivates him to undertake these numerous projects, he pauses to exhale. After a moment, he responds: “Probably the fear of ignorance…it’s a part of humanity. My motivation’s probably the same as yours.”

Southside Hub of Production, 5638 S. Woodlawn Ave. Through December 31. For more information, e-mail info.southsidehub@gmail.com

Mehves Konuk

Black SUVs glint in the sunlight, tall skyscrapers provide the most friendly of bland backdrops, and a woman with a faint Chicago accent speaks in platitudes about the greatness of Chicago and the “history behind it we’ve never been able to escape.”

The good guys are riding in the SUVs; the bad guys are taking bribes and killing children. The superheroes—the well-worn tropes, the marvels of so many generations—have landed in Chicago. A minute into the pilot episode of The Chicago Code, and you can bet that nothing you haven’t already heard about Chicago will ever make it onto the program.

But in an America that has outgrown real Marvels, the superhero has taken on a new form. Instead of arachno-sapiens we look for more believable heroes—the people we actually look to for protection: the police. This trend is not new, as the FBI, the CIA, the LAPD, the NYPD—even 24’s fictional CTU—have given us guardian angels, conjured up in the comfort of our own imaginations. While such shows have at times broached moral ambiguity, they leave no doubt of the face of the greater good fighting against unquestionably evil forces. It is surprising, then, that it has taken so long for a show to be made about the Chicago Police, considering Chicago’s historical abundance of grand tales filled with twisted, grandiose crooks and the loyal stewards of the law who fought them.

However, the Chicago Code has at last been made, and already, half a dozen episodes in to the first season, gained the 9/8c slot on FOX and a considerable fan base, despite a weak ad campaign. But the show has also left many wondering whether the Chicago Police are really the superheroes in the SUVs, and why they should be portrayed as such if they are not. As a program that purports on its website to “follow the Windy City’s most powerful and respected cops” weaving at break-neck speed through offices, cars, alleys and rundown houses, it’s true that the show follows the cops outside the Loop to locations around the city. Indeed, the show has been much lauded for its use of Chicago itself as a character. Yet the slick and shiny Chicago we are given isn’t far off from, say, Michael Bay’s treatment of the metropolis in the upcoming “Transformers 3,” ignoring the realities of the city and its inhabitants.

A word with Dennis O’Connor, a Sergeant from the Chicago Narcotics team, indicates how blatantly false the Chicago Code seems to anyone who has lived the part. “The show is much more melodramatic than real life,” he said. “For example, it’s against departmental policy in Chicago to have car chases now, we only do them in the most serious of cases.” In the real Chicago, a car chase request has to be approved by a supervisor before it can go ahead. “The Chicago Code just shows the highlights of being a police officer,” said Mr. O’Connor. “We do have exciting chases sometimes. My scariest one was probably one we did from West Rogers Park to O’Hare at 2:30 in the morning, but these don’t happen every day.”

This “highlighting” extends to the relationships within Chicago’s institutions of law enforcement: the Chicago Code creates intrigue where there is none. According to O’Connor, Ryan’s portrayal of pandemic corruption running riot in the bodies of mean-fisted millionaires with large backsides in leather seating, is an unnecessary and exaggerated stereotype. There is no need for a superhero to save Chicago from an evil alderman, such as Mr. Gibbons in the show, because there are many aldermen in Chicago—none with nearly as much power as Gibbons. “We all want the same thing,” said O’Connor.

While the show seeks to create a singular vision of crime in Chicago, the narrative simply doesn’t match up to reality. The writers attempt to shore up the dubious actions of Chicago’s criminal organizations and link them to the corrupt alderman’s office, but this tidy narrative proves dissatisfying. In fact, Chicago’s criminal activity has more mundane, though persistent, causes than simply a corrupt city official controlling the entire city’s underworld. A member of the Chicago Police’s Bureau of Administrative Services who wishes to remain anonymous, offered more realistic insights about the hungry, doped-up criminals that populate America’s third largest city. “A lot of violent crime is associated with drugs,” he said. “There’s a strong correlation between the use of hand guns and drug abuse.”

The reason for this is twofold. First, there is the plight of users. “There’s a lot of misguidance in the sentencing process. Despite the overcrowding of prisons, having a $10 bag of crack is treated like a huge felony. The culprit cannot participate in society. He can’t vote, he can’t get loans for college,” says the source. Crime isn’t a means of grabbing political power; it’s the only way some know how to get by. “The state spends money on punishment rather than rehabilitation,” continued the officer. “How else is an unemployable felon to fund a habit that no one is helping him flee from?”

Second, there are the gangs that dominate the South Side drug scene. “Ever since the high rise projects were torn down [since the implementation of Mayor Daley’s ‘Plan for Transformation’], the South Side has seen a lot of drug related violence,” the officer said. “Small drug businesses have moved to neighborhoods where they establish cultures of fear in order to claim territory,” and the ensuing land grabbing can have dreadfully gory consequences. But ugly syringes and tired users hardly feature at all amongst the tough mean bad guys in the series that claims to show us the “Chicago Way.”

The treatment of gang violence by real police presents another departure from the image of ever-present heroes that populate comics. “We typically don’t participate in how gangs do business,” our source said. “If one gang does something to another and there’s a risk of retaliation, we have policemen saturate the hot area but they try and stay uninvolved.” This is not the story that the Chicago Code tells. Inter-gang rivalry is non-existent in the show, failing to address the zip code segregation in Chicago. The facts that, as our source notes, “certain areas in the South and West sides are completely excluded from the city’s economic system” or that Englewood has the highest population of mentally ill people in Chicago (which may correlate to its high incidence of crime), is not an issue in this program that purports a unified code, or grand narrative, for all of Chicago, as opposed to the layers of codes that criss-cross neighborhoods.

The tradition of portraying the city as a cohesive industrialized metropolis is one that dates back to the Chicago of steel mills and stockyards. And it is this portrayal that the Chicago Code uses, pumping $25 million into Chicago’s economy in the process. It seems like everyone should be happy—more people attracted to one of the only two large cities in America whose population is declining, jobs for all, tourists attracted, Chicago back on the city radar—so what is it that tickles the conscience? That systemic poverty is not addressed, that drugs and guns abound, and people are being deluded into thinking that the bad guy is a shadowy alderman whose oily fingers have Chicago in their grip, and the good guy is the police detective shouting “Great Scott!” from somewhere atop his moral high ground. But what’s true is important too, and when reality hits us, we’ll have to put the superheroes away.

by Alex Boyd

“Please note that some of our sounds effects are a bit loud,” the warning read. “If you have sensitive ears, you might want to keep an eye on the trash can lids.” This note, displayed during “An Evening of Classic Horror and Suspense in the Old Time Radio Tradition,” seems a bit distant from the realities of today’s horror industry, where ear-piercing screams and suspenseful heavy breathing dominate. Yet the audience gathered at the Experimental Station last Friday to experience the Hyde Park Players’ performance quickly settled into the more old-fashioned approach. The program consisted of five scenes adapted from short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, W.W. Jacobs, and Charles Dickens. The undulating pitches of actors’ voices, trashcan lids, gravel, and a child’s toy whistle suddenly held a fantastic power over the audience members, allowing the visually calm scene onstage to provoke palpable suspense and chaos. Since it was a taped radio production, rather than watching actors in period costume flit across the stage in terror, the audience was held in grave attention purely by the strength of sound.

An actor mentioned after the show that the group was hoping National Public Radio would air the production, but on Friday night, those in attendance at the sold-out show were the main benefactors. Paul Baker, the founder of the Players and producer of the show, said of the choice of format, “We hope that people are intrigued by the mechanics being fronted in this way. A lot of people are intrigued by the homage to old-time radio style.”

Whether intrigued by the creative choices of the production or by the ghoulish subject matter, it is clear that the Hyde Park community responded enthusiastically to the idea. After the show, audience members shook themselves out of the auditory trance that the Players created, and left the Station with the reverberation of trashcans in their ears.

Screenshot from "Studs in a Soapbox" (courtesy of Media Burn)

Most college students grew up around camcorders and YouTube, but there was a time when no one outside of the major networks was able to inexpensively shoot video or easily broadcast it. On Thursday, May 6th, the Fund for Innovative Television (FITV) gave a screening at the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center of documentary clips from their expansive archive of tapes from early expeditions into independent television. FITV founder Tom Weinberg, executive director Sara Chapman, and UofC film professor Judy Hoffman led an informal and democratic discussion in the spirit of the original videos. The two-hour event was well received by the audience, who indulged Weinberg and Hoffman’s request for interruption with enthusiastic questions.

In 2003, FITV started the Media Burn archive, a not-for-profit that works both to preserve quickly degrading tapes and to share their invaluable and unique footage with the world through a free website (mediaburn.org) with a large selection of documentary video. In a modest basement on the Northwest Side, a 6,000-plus video archive spans three decades, the entire country, and beyond. Most of these tapes come from Weinberg’s work with public television to broadcast non-traditional documentary video in programs such as “The 90s,” a national show that assembled short clips to capture the new decade, and “Image Union,” a weekly show that began in 1972 and still takes submissions of short films for its program every Saturday night. The advent of independent television came with the invention of the Sony Video Portapak, a relatively inexpensive and portable device that freed the medium from the major stations. Weinberg and Hoffman spoke with nostalgia as they remembered the time of video revolution, when they were, as Weinberg put it, “turning the cameras around on the media.”

The screening began with a lighthearted clip of Muddy Waters performing at the old Checkerboard Lounge in 1981. But the presentation quickly moved on to more politically charged work, such as “The World’s Largest TV Show” and “Four More Years,” which, respectively, covered the 1972 Democratic and Republican National Conventions. A team of videographers was able to get onto the floors of the conventions in order to interview both the attendees and the media outlets that were covering them, as well as to document the emotionally intense anti-war demonstrations being staged outside. Other notable clips included Nelson Algren and Studs Terkel (who donated his own footage to Media Burn).

Though Weinberg and Hoffman certainly have personal investment in the project—many of their own tapes are in the collection—they strongly advocate the use of the footage for historical research. The videos are primary sources that speak to a history ignored by the popular media. For instance, Media Burn screened “Jane Byrne’s Easter at Cabrini” from 1981, in which Byrne, the first and only female mayor of Chicago, defeated in 1983 by Harold Washington, attended a rally at Cabrini Green as part of her campaign to clean up the public housing development, an area notorious for gang activity, crime, and violence.

She was conspicuously out of place, awkwardly singing as she received the words to a hymn through her earpiece, and causing a good deal of dissatisfaction within the crowd. No mainstream media attended; Media Burn has the only video record of the event.

The objective of Media Burn is difficult to describe because their purpose is not in a specific mission, but in video itself. The grainy image, the shaky shot, the disfigured audio—aspects that our technology-savvy generation might condemn as signs of “low quality”—are essential to the aesthetic, social, and cultural mission of independent television. The videos were not shot under a major network. No extra lighting was used. They had no narrators in their documentaries, presenting only what Weinberg calls a “video scrapbook.”

We, like the original independent television makers of the seventies, are in a time of major technological change, with the internet as a tool for the spread of information and video. Media Burn has taken advantage of this progress by making available to the public their sometimes political, always captivating mixture of Chicago history, Americana, and the quotidian.

The leader in the Talking Head movement has undeniably been Fox News Channel, also known, apparently, as “The Most Trusted Name in News.” From 5 to 10pm every weeknight, Fox lays waste to political discussion by offering up the perfect trifecta of talking heads: Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity. The three serve up so much inane conservative vitriol that any viewer with even a mild respect for reason is likely to feel fatigued.

But really, abusing Fox News is beginning to feel so prosaic. It would be unfair to exclude MSNBC, a network that has tried so hard to follow Fox’s example that it has trotted out its own series of nightly talking heads: Chris Matthews, Ed Schultz, Keith Olbermann, and Rachel Maddow.

The problem is not that there are opinion shows. Any interesting news medium will offer opinion in some form or another. It is, rather, a series of problems that accompany these talking heads that make their existence and context so insidiously harmful to journalism.

Problem the first: The universality of talking head programs on at least Fox News and MSNBC, which, combined, share nearly two-thirds of the cable news viewers (interestingly, Fox News leaves MSNBC completely in the dust, with more than three times the amount of viewers.)

Assuming that most people work from 9 to 5pm, these cable news channels have strategically designed the programming to give viewers a very strong exposure to punditry, and a cursory experience with actual reporting. By sandwiching Shepard Smith, a reasonably responsible reporter, between the likes of Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, Fox is offering a morsel of neutrality with a beginning and ending emphasis on rage and conservatism.

On this issue, MSNBC is far worse than Fox. From 5 to 10pm, it offers an uninterrupted stream of talking heads, with news being delivered in the form of liberal analysis.

This promotion of opinion over actual reporting would be somewhat less disturbing if it weren’t for problem the second: the lack of diversification among the talking heads of different networks. MSNBC, between 5 and 10pm, supplies an endless stream of (generally frustrated) liberals, a rapidly increasing trend for the channel which started putting together the line-up in 1999 and has most recently added Maddow in 2008 and “The Ed Show” in April of this year.

One can only assume this trend from MSNBC has been a self-conscious reformulation of its network identity into a liberal rebuttal to Fox News, whose highest-rated shows include “The O’Reilly Factor” and “Glenn Beck.” Beck, who moved to the network in January, may have spurred “The Ed Show.” Or perhaps it was the dropping out of soft-hearted liberal Alan Colmes from “Hannity & Colmes,” which caused network heads to simply drop the entire back-and-forth debate schtick and reward Hannity with his own hour.
This undiversified stream of ideological political thought is dangerous, in that it allows its viewers to marinate in a self-satisfied, comfortable, and familiar political rage, without being encouraged to rationally question the statements being made.

Neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer, whose blog, “The Frontal Cortex,” explores interesting correlations with neuroscience in everyday life, touches on an issue with this in a post called “Information Addiction.” Here, he quotes the research of Yale political science professor Larry Bartels, who found that, when a sample group of Republicans were asked what happened to the deficit during the Clinton presidency, the more media-savvy Republicans were just as likely as the less media-savvy to proclaim that it increased.
Lehrer posits that this is because “it didn’t jive with their preexisting models. Not only was this information not addictive—it was actively repellent.” He goes on to note, “The same thing is happening right now with health care reform. I enjoy reading all these articles about uninformed conservative voters getting upset about ‘death panels’ or telling senators to ‘keep the government away from Medicare’. Why? Because those facts enrich what I already believe—they confirm my lazy liberal stereotypes. So while I’m “addicted” to this information, I’m not particularly interested in any dissonant alternative views. I’m not emotionally motivated to seek them out.”

If you can watch hours of commentary dismissing your ideology, or hours confirming it, which seems more appealing? With such choices, MSNBC and Fox News have created a citizenry that has no tolerance of or interest in the views of the other side. This helps explain how Fox News was voted both the most (30%) and least (26.2%) trusted news source in a recent poll by Sacred Heart University.

It also brings me to problem the third: the loss of civil discourse. Within these opinion shows, it is an absolute priority that the host be right within the context of the program. Not that the host be discussion-oriented or curious—that the host appear correct. This is framed by the choices for interviews, which, if they get too out of hand or thought-provoking, are often interrupted by the spitting, screaming host and occasionally a demand that the sound people “cut the mic”—a favorite method of O’Reilly.
No mature adult society should be exposed to as much screaming and interruption as ours presents us with on a daily basis from cable news. One can see the effects trickling down into our everyday political life, with screamers at town hall meetings and Joe Wilson’s now infamous “You lie!” line during President Obama’s health care speech to Congress.

Throughout the summer, the best health care debate I saw was not on any cable news channel. Rather, it was Jon Stewart’s interview with Betsey McCaughey, the journalist often credited with starting the “death panel” rumor. Before the discussion, McCaughey came to the stage with the bill in its entirety, and she and Stewart quoted and read from it, exploring different interpretations of an article.

While Stewart disagreed with his guest, he never yelled, and the discussion was actually productive—it highlighted much of the obscurity behind the health care debate, which is that the language of the bill can be open to interpretation, leading to disagreements about the reality of the situation.

With the television news satirist taking the reins of respectful and serious debate, it’s not difficult to understand how Stewart was recently voted “America’s Most Trusted Newsman” in an online Time Magazine poll. Rather than bemoaning the results, we should consider, with hope, what they mean: a growing legion of Americans are tired of irrational discussion and divisive punditry. More people are seeing the contrast, even if it needs to take place on a comedy news show.

My hope is that the current talking head-itis pandemic can be checked by a growing influx of disillusioned young people either finding their way into the mainstream news, or ignoring that which is not useful. I put it to my generation. We are inheriting the garbage, and now we need to take it out.

Brackman describes the Chabad House, part of a network of Jewish centers often based on or near college campuses, as “a home away from home, a place where students of all backgrounds and levels of observance can feel comfortable.” He got the idea for the radio show from colleagues at other universities. The show will run for an hour and a half every Wednesday, starting with a test show on June 3 from noon to 1:30 and continuing at the same time from June 17 on. Brackman’s target audience is the Hyde Park Jewish community, as well as University alumni and Internet listeners via WHPK’s online stream. He says the show’s appeal is “Jewish radio with someone you know,” as opposed to the hundreds of anonymous online stations for other genres.

Brackman’s plans for the show are vague, but he plans to include Jewish holiday celebrations, callers, news, and music. “When people think of Jewish music, they think of klezmer,” he says. “But with the arrival of people like Matisyahu, there’s a whole variety of Jewish music.” He’s not too nervous about filling an hour and a half every week with a loose mix of content, although he admits he has no background in radio. “Except I know how to talk,” he adds.

Moore is the reporter covering the South Side for Chicago Public Radio. She works out of a storefront in Englewood, next door to Joe’s Style and Mo’s Clip barbershop and across the street from a Klassy Hand Car Wash. Chicago Public Radio’s South Side bureau is located in a converted storefront church, the only visible vestige of which is the slightly raised floor at the rear of the office that now supports a recording studio instead of a pulpit. Moore, rapt at her computer screen, sits at a desk behind a heavily barred door and windows. An alert, petite woman, Moore is currently covering the R. Kelly trial downtown, which keeps her shuttling from Englewood to the courthouse often and on short notice. She says of the Englewood location: “It is a presence in the neighborhood, though people don’t come knocking on my door every day with stories.” It’s also convenient: “I do a lot of work out in the field, and I can have interviews in the studio here. It’s easier for people to come by.”

Moore grew up on the South Side of Chicago, attending school in the Beverly neighborhood. She attended Howard University in Washington, D.C. and continued on to get a graduate degree in journalism at Northwestern University. She’s been back in Chicago for the past two and a half years, freelancing for some time before landing at Chicago Public Radio.

Moore brings a unique perspective to her reporting. In 2006, she published a book titled “Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation,” which she co-authored with fellow journalist Natalie Hopkinson. It is mostly a piece of social criticism, exploring a composite cultural character to whom the two women have given the moniker “Tyrone.” It describes men who, in the words of Washington Post reviewer Evelyn White, display “a cavalier disregard for convention,” men who are “often disparaged as sidekicks to their more forceful male peers. Yet in their attention to everyday issues of survival, such men play an important role in the black community. Disdainful of the integrationist gains of the civil rights movement, Tyrones favor entrepreneurial endeavors over establishment jobs.” Moore considers herself a “black feminist in the Hip-Hop Generation,” and brings this unique background to her reporting of the South Side.

Of course, in covering South Side news for Chicago Public Radio, her scope extends far beyond the world of hip-hop—though when the two convene, such as in the case of the R. Kelly trial, it is certainly to her benefit. “I try to present a range,” she explains. And she does: in a piece about the opening of a Starbucks in the neighborhood of Bronzeville, which is seeing new growth, Moore claims that “many middle-class black households are attracted to Bronzeville for its proximity to downtown and the lake—home sales have increased sixteen percent in the last two years and continue to climb despite the national housing market slump.” However, she observes that class conflict may be imminent as wealthier residents clamor for more upscale retail while the lower-income sector is looking for “grocery stores, so they don’t have to go way down to Fairplay and shop. Or go down here to this 200 Cut Rate Liquor. They sell food, but they high,” as put by longtime Bronzeville resident Frederick Thomas in an interview sound clip in the article. Moore illustrates what it ultimately comes down to for the new ward alderman: “[Pat] Dowell realizes that there are new residents who hunger for a Whole Foods while others don’t.”

This phenomenon is growing across the South Side, where gentrification looms and developers are navigating what has proved to be an, at times, uneasy relationship with the established neighborhood. Moore presents a dynamic view of the neighborhood, trying to create as much of a multi-dimensional depiction as possible.

Another complex issue that Moore tackles is that of the Chicago Housing Authority’s recent—and dramatic—makeover. The CHA’s Plan for Transformation has upset and engaged many residents on the South Side, and Moore has been covering the public housing debate since sixty-eight families got relocation notices and a much shorter period of time to move than is usually allotted to residents. Since then, the head of the CHA has resigned and been replaced as families try to navigate the public housing system.

Moore says that the particulars of radio journalism prove helpful in the field: “When you tell someone that you’re from some publication, they tell you everything that’s wrong with that publication. When I say I’m from Chicago Public Radio, they say, ‘I love the radio!’ People trust Chicago Public Radio.”

Radio journalism, for Moore, is a different kind of storytelling than print journalism. She uses tricks that are specific to the medium, such as underlying her speech with ambient noise from the place that she’s reporting on: “something like the noise of an air conditioner—we don’t usually notice that.” Radio journalism is much more of a performance medium than print; Moore describes “switching scenes,” as if the sounds she uses are a kind of theatrical backdrop that can be changed at will.

In listening to Moore’s pieces, there is a very real sense of place. With a couple of seconds of school cafeteria noise, we’re transported to Percy L. Julian High School, where students are talking about the violence prevalent in the school community that a new principal is working hard to squelch. In another article, Moore talks over the chatter of the scene inside of the Chicago Recovery Alliance truck parked at 47th and Vincennes where Cheryl Hull distributes free clean needles, condoms, and alcohol pads to drug users to prevent spread of disease. As Moore goes into details about a new drug to prevent heroin overdose, we never leave the distribution truck—a locus for the people who most need it.

Moore says that Chicago Public Radio covers stories that people want to listen to—stories that are relevant, interesting, and human. “We don’t do a lot of crime,” she says, “We get a lot of phone calls saying, ‘if I want to know about crime, I’d watch the evening news.’” And Moore knows that there’s much more to the South Side than what’s on the evening news.

Photos by Ellis Calvin

Chicagoland commuters know what it means to be “on the go.” With help from a little melody and a pair of headphones, the traditional stopping and starting of the daily commute on the CTA becomes a mobile stage onto which passengers saunter on and off to the beat, a sort of mechanical ballet. Of course, the transit system was never intended to appeal to the performance enthusiast, but it was enough to inspire one of Chicago Cable Access television’s “Chic-A-Go-Go”’s many dances, “The El Train,” in which “on the go” becomes “on the go-go” with a little help from some guest performers, a stage, and, most importantly, a group of youthful backup dancers.

Gracing the airwaves since 1996, “Chic-A-Go-Go” is a Chicago-based dance show whose mission is to make your feet move. Although its premise very much resembles that of a kids’ show, including a puppet host named Ratso who tells cheesy jokes alongside his fresh, young co-host Miss Mia, the show’s charm attracts audiences of all ages and from all fronts throughout the Chicagoland area. “Go-Go” has also had its fair share of original performances, which have included both local Chicago artists and big-time musicians ranging from ‘50s and ‘60s jazz and R&B icons to present electronic beat shakers like Dan Deacon—possibly looking for promotional exposure from a not-for-profit organization by signing up for the show but, judging by the pre-recording and lip-synching that performances entail, are most likely just looking for a good place to get down. The same can be said for the dance show’s audience count. Although child-friendly, the show is geared towards those who can consider themselves “kids at heart”; teenagers, parents, and grandparents—anyone willing to make the drive to Chicago Access Network Studios in the West Loop—are guaranteed a good and ample amount of time on the air.

“It’s fun for people to be on television,” says South Shore resident Jake Austen, founder of “Chic-A-Go-Go.” Taking inspiration for the show from past programs such as “Soul Train,” “American Bandstand,” and Chicago’s own “Kiddie-A-Go-Go,” Austen is all about diversity, whether it be music style (and trust me, anything that can be danced to is fair game) or the makeup of his audience. Attendees and performers are encouraged to be as wacky as they’d like so long as kids can see it, and Austen, a father himself, could not be more dedicated to making the show live up to its twelve-year legacy. In fact, over the course of its history, the show has only been cancelled once, which was, coincidently, the day his son Noble was born two years ago. Since then, he’s been dancing around on the show alongside his older daughter Maiya, 5, who has even dabbled in some of her own puppetry. “It’s fun for kids to see how TV is made, I think—and it’s fun for grown-ups to see how TV is made also—but I think it’s nice to demystify TV,” says Austen.

“Chic-A-Go-Go” has over the years danced its way into the hearts of many Chicagoans thanks to its laid-back, fun-loving attitude. “We’re not as concerned about what goes on the air as we are about what’s its like to be on the show,” says Austen, and it’s because of this attitude that people keep coming back every month to check out a taping. Even Pitchfork Media is interested in adding the show to their online TV lineup in the near future, but until then, an array of past episodes is available on YouTube. “People can do whatever they want, and it’s really loose and fun. We do it because it’s a really nice thing to have in Chicago as a part of the music scene. It’s this free party that you can go to once a month.”

For more information about “Chic-A-Go-Go” and how to attend one of its tapings, check out www.roctober.com/chicagogo/

Q: What extracurricular activities did you participate in at the UofC?
A: The Giving Tree, Doc Films, [as a] projectionist. I also worked at the Film Center.

Q: Which dorm did you live in?
A: Shoreland, [during] my first year.

Q: What was the most valuable thing you learned from your experiences at the UofC?
A: To always ask questions—about yourself, about your life, about the quality of the life you are living and whether you are getting what you want out of it.

Q: Who was your favorite professor at the UofC?
A: I was lucky to [have] taken a class taught by Mr. Leon Kass, and another by Mrs. Amy Kass. Mrs. Kass was actually my major adviser. But perhaps the most dynamic and engaging professor I was fortunate enough to have studied under was Mr. James Redfield, who taught one of my Core classes in my first year.

Q: What was your favorite library to study at?
A: I rotated libraries according to my mood or how much studying I actually needed to get done: Harper, the Reg, or Crerar.

Q: Did you participate in Scav Hunt? Or the Polar Bear Run?
A: I completed Kangeiko one year and still have the T-shirt to prove that I was crazy enough to get up at an ungodly hour every morning for a week in the dead of winter and run around in the cold.

Q: What advice do you have for UofC students?
A: One of the things I recall most of the student body when I was at the UofC was that people took themselves very seriously, myself included. I guess the best advice is always one you wish you had taken yourself. Given that, I would say, try to enjoy life, school, everything that is happening to you precisely at this particular moment as much as you can.

Q: How did you get from the UofC to “Project Runway”?
A: I was a journalist for six years in Europe and decided, rather suddenly, that I wanted to pursue fashion as a career. So, I quit my job, packed my bags, returned to the U.S., and enrolled in Parsons School of Design in New York.

Q: Name one fashion faux pas you hated when you were at the UofC?
A: I’ve probably committed every fashion faux pas in the book, and a trend I hate one season will be one I love the next.

Q: How do you stay fashionable in the cold Chicago weather?
A: Layer, layer, layer. The added bonus of layering is that you can take something off if you decide it doesn’t actually look good.