Fast-forward five years and it seems that this artistic ménage à trois has disbanded.

In preparation for his debut at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery in the West Loop, Butzer gave a presentation last Wednesday at the Cochrane-Woods Art Center that demonstrated a reactionary shift in his style.

In the dim light, Butzer gripped the lectern, a cable-knit cardigan draped over his thin shoulders. “I have something entertaining for you,” he began, “something that is entertaining for both you and for myself.” Appearing before the crowd in round wire glasses, corduroys, and a striped polo shirt tucked conspicuously into Jockey boxer briefs, the artist looked like a more stylish Buster Bluth. He removed a stack of folded paper and explained he would read lines from the writings of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus—first in German, and then in English—in conjunction with slide images of his work. “So sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.” The audience perked up their ears in anticipation.

He paused and flicked on the projector to reveal an image of one of his paintings: smoke gray with two rectangular outlines encroaching on one another.

“The sun is wide as a human’s foot,” he read. After clicking for the next slide, Butzer slowly turned over a new sheet from his stack of paper.

“If everything that exists should become smoke, even nostrils would still distinguish it.” The audience squirmed as he deliberately read the phrase forcefully in German, paused for effect, then repeated the phrase in English.

Butzer’s recitation held the audience in rapt puzzlement. Each slide deviated only slightly from the ones preceding it—a slight thickening of the ubiquitous black rectangles, a miniscule variation in the gray hues.

These paintings are nothing like the vibrant cartoon-like work he completed in the mid-2000s. In fact, it seemed as though his work had undergone a complete genre swap: Butzer’s self-proclaimed “Science Fiction Expressionism” now reads as stark non-fiction. But Butzer insisted, “I see [the paintings] as similar to everything I did before. [The audience] should react and be irritated by it.”

The exhaustive exploration of the formal black and gray paintings is essential to Butzer’s artistic process. “If it seems familiar to you then it’s new…[The repetition] is how you can get closer to the birthplace of painting.”

When asked about his shift in aesthetic, he answered without batting a lash: “I wanted to escape the dualism of polychromatic and monochromatic.” He looked at the projector screen, and said, “These works inhabit color. They are primary colors living in the painting inside—not being added on the surface.” The audience gazed blankly at the flat gray paintings, trying to fully comprehend this assertion.

An attendee asked about the black rectangular forms, but Butzer see it that way. “I have never painted a rectangle in my whole life because I do not believe in earth-bound geometry,” Butzer asserted, somewhat opaquely. “I calculate coloristic values rather than geometry. I would call the paintings round, even. I paint over these laws and calculate every bit of it and paint over again and again. It’s about annihilation. It burns away measurements because they are round.”

Continuing the theme of annihilation, Butzer told the crowd that he only draws inspiration from dead artists and cited Raphael as his latest artistic muse. “I cannot accept the [artists] that live,” he said. “It’s not my job to like other artists.”

Jamie Keiles

Three types of people turned out last Sunday for the Chicago Boat, Sports & RV Show: boat people, family people, and conventioneers.

The boat people flocked to McCormick Place for the boats. They bought boats (last year’s floor models), sold boats (“Rock-bottom boat show prices!”), and complained about things that were not boats (“Starbucks coffee is frou-frou!”). Atop the convention center’s lake-blue carpets landed boats formed a maze. In the alleys between the vessels, boat people talked shop, comparing specs on the various yachts, pontoon boats, and cabin cruisers on display.

The family people were not there for the boats. Children ran rampant and unsupervised across the convention floor, fingerprinting waxed fiberglass, kicking RV tires, and fishing for trout in the Huck Finn Trout Pond—basically a glorified baby pool with fish in it. For these kids’ parents, the boat show was merely this weekend’s alternative to a babysitter or a trip to Chuck E. Cheese’s.  From the sidelines of the show, the parents sipped sodas and looked relieved that the convention center’s attractions provided a momentary respite from the trials of parenting.

The conventioneers working the booths looked exhausted. For some, Chicago was nothing more than the fourth of many stops on the national boat show tour. Vendors arrived on Thursday equipped with bags of free giveaways, but by Sunday were running low on both energy and stock. They distributed the remaining promotional materials with an air of lethargy. Frequently, these giveaways had only tenuous links to boating. A kiosk advertising boat slips in Michigan offered free ChapStick. The Shedd Aquarium representative distributed chamois. Visitors enthusiastically hoarded these giveaways in promotional tote bags provided by Progressive, the show’s premier sponsor.

Cabela’s, an outdoor sporting outfitter, laid out one of the show’s more impressive spreads. At their booth, attendees fondled portable chairs, salivated over outdoor cookware, and camped momentarily in the display tents underneath the corrugated metal sky of the convention center. Touching the products was permitted. Though if it were not, it is doubtful that guests would’ve kept their hands to themselves.

One attendee, an Illinois resident who had just purchased a lake house in Indiana, attended the boat show in hopes of learning more about pontoon boats, a purchase he hopes to make in the future. Like many others, however, he seemed skeptical of the show’s capacity to turn a profit.  “I had a great time,” he explained.  “But I’m not really sure what kind of person actually buys a boat at these things.”

[Show as slideshow]

Mueller, a priest from the UofC’s Orthodox Christian Fellowship, came to bless rooms in honor of the recent feast day of Theophany. The holiday celebrates the Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River, and according to Orthodox tradition, the practice of blessing the home represents the ongoing sanctification of the material world.

Mueller has performed the annual blessings at UofC dorms for four years. As of Friday morning, he had blessed seven rooms and expected to carry out nearly 20 more by the end of winter.

In one room, Mueller began to sing in front of a makeshift altar he placed on a desk. The tenants participated in the ceremony, contributing names of deceased loved ones and listening to the prayer. Mueller placed the incense stick into the bowl of holy water and showered the room, droplets splattering across dressers and walls.

The students stepped forward to receive the priest’s blessing. Mueller dampened their heads with holy water as he held up a carved wooden cross. He then anointed the doorway with oil and once more sprinkled water on the heads of the students.

Though they had different reasons for requesting the room blessing, the students enjoyed the ceremony. One resident, Alexandra Mathews, explained, “Growing up with the Orthodox tradition, I always feel a bit of comfort when my house gets blessed because it provides security.” For some of the other, though, this was a new experience. Alexandra Bassen, who is not Eastern Orthodox, got her room blessed because she thinks “It [is] a culturally enriching experience.”

The oil, bowl, stick and cross returned to Mueller’s bag. He then departed, passing a pile of pink pillows and a display of paper cutout snowflakes, on his way to bless another room.

A third grader, Paul Jr. was the youngest in a game that marked the start of the indoor season for Chicago Youth Lacrosse, an organization that offers lacrosse programs for children of all ages around the city. Friday night saw the kids in the gleaming Chicago Indoor Sports arena at Pershing and Ashland. Half an hour before the games were set to start, parents with children decked out in large helmets and thick padding started streaming in. Adults swapped stories of Christmas vacations in faraway places, as kids fidgeted with helmets and equipment in anticipation of the opening whistle.

One ten-year-old boy hopped nervously as he waited for his father to arrive with his helmet. “Only two blocks away,” his mother assured him. “He’ll be here soon.” Twenty minutes later, dad ran in, large sports bag in tow. With his team already two goals down, the boy sprinted onto the pitch with excitement and trepidation etched into his face.

“I had no idea this game even existed till three years ago,” Paul said, “but my son enjoys it so much.” He explained that CYL has seen incredible growth over the past couple of years, an indicator that the sport is no longer a sole preserve of the East Coast. He explained the draw for his son: “Playing up with older kids teaches him to be aggressive, to not get pushed over. It’s a great sport and a good thing for him.

Only one girl was out on the field, ably “manning” the goal for the team in sky blue jerseys. On the other side of the field, her brother stood in the opposing goal. Family tensions came to a height at the end, when her brother made a mad dash forward in an attempt to score on his sister. His shot whizzed by her, narrowly missing the net. Already several goals down, he sprinted all the way back to his post as the final buzzer sounded.

(Justin Bianchi, ArtistJ/flickr)

95th and Dan Ryan is the end of the line. The farthest point south on the map of the ‘El,’ it is also where Michael Pleasance was killed in 2003. He was unarmed and standing in place when a police officer shot him in the head.

On New Year’s Day, one of the many Occupy offshoots, Occupy the South Side, organized a demonstration at the ‘El’ stop to protest police brutality and intimidation of minorities. Occupy the South Side was acting in solidarity with their counterparts in Oakland, California, where a similar protest was held.

“Are you here for the action?” Mark Clements wanted to know. It was hard to tell which of the people standing in the station on New Year’s Day were there for the protest, waiting for a bus, or just standing around. After exchanging a few glances, a small circle formed and the logistical details were hashed out. The protestors split into two groups, on either side of the station, and joined the shuffling crowd coming up from the south.

“Indict, convict, send the killer cops to jail. The whole damn system is guilty as hell,” they shouted in unison, carrying banners and picket signs. One sign read “DON’T TASE ME BRO.” Among the 60-plus protesters were a middle-aged radical bookseller, a twenty-something bakery worker and political activist, and a street preacher. The demonstrators huddled close by the walls of the entrance to battle the freezing temperatures and keep a corridor open for CTA customers to pass.

“We are not here to be disrespectful,” a woman representing Occupy the South Side declared, talking into a microphone. “We are here to be powerful.” She spoke out against the violence and racial profiling committed by Chicago police, and read out a proposed New Year’s resolution for law officers, that they might protect and serve without torture or terror, and report incidences of police misconduct without delay.

Clements stepped up to tell his story. As a teenager, he was beaten by police until he confessed to a crime he didn’t commit. After 28 years in prison, his conviction was finally overturned. A little later, Emmett Farmer took the mic. His son was shot by a police officer last June. “We want justice! It’s on video, it’s on tape. We gotta stand together.”

The protesters demanded more accountability among those on the force. One woman asked the police to adopt the slogan that the city asks its residents to abide by: “If you see something, say something.” If they ask non-uniformed citizens to “snitch on our neighbors to make our communities safer,” she wondered why law enforcement officers aren’t reporting wrongdoing among their ranks.

Surveillance was a common thread in their speeches, as they called for greater vigilance among everyday Chicagoans to halt the abuse. It’s not without complications, though—according to one speaker from the Campaign Against Police Sexual Assault, when a woman recorded her discussion with two investigators on her BlackBerry to support a sexual harassment complaint against another officer, she was charged—but not convicted—with criminal eavesdropping. The case underscores the conflict between the watchful eye of the law and the citizen-watchdogs who denounce abuses of power, which the Occupy movement as a whole has brought to the fore, Images of clashes with riot police from the Occupy demonstrations around the country have become ubiquitous, capturing the misuse of force in high resolution.

As the rally wrapped up, a leader thanked the Chicago Police Department for not arresting them. A few officers stood in a line, watching the protesters disperse.

Lauren Hunter Thomas

Dan Labovitch was no stranger to the “visor, pacifier, and huge pants” look back in the day. But aesthetics come and go with the movements that define them, and Labovitch, one of the founders of ravearchive.com, can certainly attest to that. Now that he wears wristwatches rather than kandi bracelets and slacks rather than phat pants, Labovitch has turned to preserving the legacy of rave culture.

Labovitch first launched the online archive in 2008, in order to catalog the music and ephemera of the party scene from 1991 to 2000. It’s no small project. Labovitch and co-founder Adam Dorfman, have had to collect, organize, and upload thousands of gigabytes of music (originally recorded on mixtapes), in addition to scanning flyers and fan zines from across the continent. But, he is quick to emphasize, it’s a labor of true, discerning love: “I’m not objective when it comes to [collecting] this stuff, because I value what I went through, and that [music] is the stuff I want to put out there.” Labovitch is true to his word, motivated by his dedication to the subculture rather than the desire for profit—he covers out-of-pocket the operating costs not offset by donations.

Rave music isn’t a totality—it’s a subculture made up of subcultures. Under the umbrella of rave, there are many different kinds of dance music, including techno, house, trance, and Labovitch’s personal favorite, jungle. But what is behind all these types of rave, then? Well, for one thing, there’s the power of “repetitive beats.” According to the 1994 British Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, a piece of legislation created to empower police to break up large parties, this was a fundamental feature of  the various subcategories of rave. While the statute’s definition points to the music’s appeal, to Labovitch and his fellow enthusiasts, it is also a sad symptom of the public’s reductionist interpretation of the genre’s concerts. For Labovitch and the more than 8,000 on his website’s forums, rave is about a lot more than thumping drum machines and glowsticks. Nonetheless, that particular law, was both the beginning of the end for ravers and an example of the attitude that they reveled in resisting. In other words, the community was strengthened by persecution.

“Growing up, it was the youth culture,” Labovitch recalls. “You’d drive way out to one of these things and people would just be super nice…if drugs were your thing, they’d take care of you…or it would be as simple as giving someone a ride home.” Labovitch attended his first parties in 1996 at age 16, about seven years after the pioneering acid house parties in Manchester and London. He recalls the way the internet fostered connections across the rave community, which was particularly helpful given that he knew “at most a half dozen kids in the scene from [his] high school class of 800.” It also made finding a ride to a far away show much easier. Ravers could “get online and meet people from different states, different cities…and that way you’d have a way to get to the party and a couch to crash on after.” And, most importantly, for someone like Labovitch, whose adolescence in Palatine, Illinois wasn’t particularly rocky, a rave was an experience comparable to off-roading at 90 miles per hour.

Today, Labovitch has “a pretty straight job in insurance,” he says. Yet he brings little of the office home with him to the home he shares with his wife (an archival librarian by day), Dexter the Rottweiler, and a gray cat. The house is a vault for the WWII buff’s military history books and model war planes, as well as the physical relics that ravearchive.com has cast into cyberspace for eager IP addresses to cache. Balancing a bottle of Arcadia Ale in the crook of his elbow, Labovitch flicks gently through the tapes nestled tooth-to-jowl in a cabinet of 72 two-foot deep drawers. He’s looking for a tape by DJ Snuggles, a significant name in jungle music. When he finds the tape, he succumbs to nostalgia, meticulously rifling through an arresting wealth of artifacts: flyer after flyer, file boxes of zines whose Xeroxed pages trumpet the initials of now-infamous chemicals, and the first very neon issue of Reactor, a magazine that served and defined Chicago rave culture in the early 90s. As artifacts pile up, he sighs, without a hint of resentment, “We jungle fans were always at the back of the warehouse.”

Speaking to the character of the rave movement, Labovitch is careful to acknowledge the air of cliché that has developed around its credo of “Peace, Love, Unity and Respect.” But he is also adamant that this is the essential character of the scene that gave him no small number of euphoric nights. Frankie Bones, a founding father of the American rave scene, is credited with first stating the mantra. At a party in 1989, he got on the speaker system to break up a fight and said, “If you don’t start showing some peace, love, and unity, I’ll break your fucking faces.” When asked about Bones’s reaction to the archive, Labovitch is modest: “He gave us an atta-boy.” Rave musicians, he says, “are just glad somebody’s trying to keep track.”

The concert, entitled “Tomorrow’s Music Today,” showcased the works of five UofC PhD candidates: Yuan-Chen Li, Dylan Schneider, Andrés Carrizo, Gary Desorbo, and Andrew Jasinski. Hailing from such far-flung locales as California, Panama City, and Taiwan, they were all drawn to the University by professors and well established composers Shulamit Ran and Marta Ptaszynska. The teachers’ touch was evident throughout the evening as all of the compositions featured a juxtaposition of frenzied, chaotic playing with moments of sustained eeriness. However, at its core, each piece was fueled by the composer’s personal drive.

The evening opened with “Motion 2010” by Yuan-Chen Li, a piece inspired by a series of fireworks shows in Paris and Chicago. According to Li, “I was immediately drawn into the sequence of gestures…which disappear right away like musical sound.” In performance, the piece reflected this imagery with climaxes linked together by smaller pulsations of melody. Dylan Schneider’s piano quintet, on the other hand, followed a  distinct narrative—one scene, “Raging Bull,” incorporated Latin and Spanish dance rhythms to convey its story.

These pieces did not resemble the “classical” music of Mozart or Beethoven. Rather, dissonance and atonality abounded. At times daring, dramatic, and even strange, these pieces tested the listener’s ear. Andres Carrizo’s pieces for solo viola, “Resquebrajamientos” (“breakages”), were characterized by ferocious, repetitive chords, in one section reduced to the abrasive, scratchy noise of a bow literally scrubbing the strings. Similarly, Andrew Jasinski’s “Blue Sclerae” was dashed with snare rolls and cymbal scrapes, concluding with a single, ironic chord on the harmonica, provoking a surprised chuckle from the audience.

At the end of each piece, the composers were welcomed onstage to receive the generous applause of the audience. After the final composition, the crowd approached all the composers and congratulated them on their hard work. The aspiring artists were embraced and showered with praise, the din swelling into the evening’s final crescendo. (Chelsea Leu)

After a series of lengthy introductions, the tall, 73-year-old woman walked daintily up to the podium.  She thanked the speakers for their fulsome praise before adding, modestly, that the oft-recited list “makes me feel just a tiny, wee bit posthumous.” Oates continued, “I spend so much time in solitary confinement with my own thoughts, it’s nice every once in a while to go out and remember that there is another world out there.”

She began by reading a story from her collection, “Sourland,” which chronicles a widow’s encounter with a male interloper. At first Oates’s storytelling seemed perfunctory. But as the tale progressed, the thrill of the plot and the strength of her prose seemed to mesmerize even the fabulist. Her hands quavered with her heroine’s, her body shrank with fright before bristling with rage, and she performed the antagonist’s Slavic accent with gusto.

Oates dropped humor into the conversation, alternating between pearls of wisdom and witticisms as effortlessly as Tina Fey. In response to loaded questions about grief, Oates would occasionally answer with self-deprecating schtick. She reenacted a series of hysterical scenes from her recent memoir, mimicking the antics of well-meaning friends as flawlessly as the condescension of her cats.

After the reading was over, attendees frantically picked up tomes they had stashed under chairs. A sizable group huddled around a card table that sagged under the weight of about a tenth of Ms. Oates’ oeuvre.  Oates was generous with her time, but no one in the queue stayed long. They were careful not to linger, as if afraid that the hours Joyce Carol Oates spent in Hyde Park had just cost posterity ten glorious pages. (Christopher Riehle)

Courtesy of describe the fauna

When I arrived at the Archer Ballroom last Saturday, it wasn’t long before I found myself locked in a stranger’s kind, firm embrace. Now familiar with my host, Teddy, I was led into his home. While recovering from my abrupt, hearty welcome, I took a look around and absorbed the particulars of the space. It’s a ballroom, to be sure, with a wide expanse of polished hardwood, vaulted ceilings nearly forty-feet high, and a whimsical light fixture made of twigs and bulbs hanging from the exposed rafters. But more remarkable than its airy loft aesthetic is its distinctly vital agenda. A small colony of impromptu bedrooms are arranged in a corner. While most of the square footage has been turned into a multilateral performance space, not a few indicators of domestic existence cheerfully remain: a self-installed kitchen with a row of compost-bins, a window nook with some viperous houseplants, and a wicker papasan chair. Teddy, an affectionate, pajama-wearing cellist, eventually relinquished his handhold, but as I proceeded to mingle with his friends, I realized I still hadn’t been released.

In its latest iteration, the Archer Ballroom is about two years old. Once a Lithuanian cultural center, the ballroom fell unto hard times until an architect bought the building and recognized its potential as an arts space. It cycled through residents until a group of students from Oberlin Conservatory saw the listing online during their senior year and decided to transplant their community of artist-musicians from Ohio to Chicago. “I wanted a place where we could run around and…foster a community,” Teddy explained. “I didn’t want to live in a tiny two-bedroom in Lincoln Park, you know?” Previously, the space was known as the Texas Ballroom, a raucous epicenter, which, as new resident Zivi Kreiger put it, was “basically like the Archer Ballroom on speed…literally…but they were evicted for illegal underground venue stuff…the landlord got fined, like, fifty thousand dollars, too.” “When Sam and I contacted the landlord,” Teddy corroborates, “well, we’re pretty young, and he was suspicious and made us write essays, like a college application.” The number of artists-in-residence at the Ballroom grew quickly, as Teddy, Sam, and others drafted a squad of eclectic, kindred spirits into their circle and its concomitant vision.

The spirit of the Archer Ballroom is perhaps best manifest in a weekly collaborative music initiative called Outside Forces. Each Monday evening, a ragtag assemblage of musicians and other sound-makers get together to make music, or sometimes just noise. Kreiger, who runs a studio out of the facility, records each session. Kelsey Tucker, a resident photographer and classically trained pianist, insists that Outside Forces is less an ambitious artistic endeavor than a kind of open, communal therapy. She says, “When we bring in new people sometimes they’ll ask, ‘What key should I play in?’ or, ‘what’s the time signature?’ But that’s all sort of irrelevant.” Nick Davis, a musician and frequent houseguest, describes Outside Forces as “Alcoholics Anonymous for musicians.” Outside Forces played publicly for the first time on Saturday at the Writers’ House Project launch party that the Ballroom hosted. Their tonal menagerie of classical, jazz and electronic instruments came together as a coherent, but evolving whole, so that the performance was as exhilarating as it was poignant.

Not surprisingly, the theme of the night was collaboration. In concert with the Writers’ House Project, a new fund to create a residential writers’ collective, were writers, musicians, filmmakers, and even a burlesque director. The atmosphere was so open and cooperative that at times it was difficult to distinguish the performers from the spectators. In this spirit, David Snyder recited an erasure poem based on Jacques Derrida’s seminar “The Politics of Friendship,” stripping its abstruse erudition to a core of sentimentality, a self-conscious gesture “perhaps unduly human.”

The Archer Ballroom is, above all, a home. So Saturday night’s event was a bit anomalous for the Ballroom, but as a free platform for expression, it really exemplified the kind of program these folks are trying to push. Home to some prodigious chefs, photographers, musicians, dancers, producers, and you name it, the Ballroom has stepped up as a space to promote arts education and experimentation. The Ballroom is a different thing for everyone involved. Kreiger described the Ballroom as a hub; Tucker called it a playground; Davis thinks of it as “sentient…like the belly of a huge…thing.” I think the sheer earnestness of the place lends itself to a gripping and emblematic first impression; to me, the Archer Ballroom will always feel like a great, big hug.

Courtesy of Mike Killion

For most Chicago residents, the lakefront is the last place you’d want to be caught on a blustery day.  But the sharp winds and crashing waves off Lake Michigan beckon a small but dedicated group of surfers to the shore, donning wetsuits and ready to dive into the icy waters. It may seem unlikely that such a coastal pastime would catch on in land-locked Illinois, but surfing’s got a real following here.

“Surfing here in Chicago and northwest Indiana is definitely a different and sometimes strange experience,” says Mike Killion, an enthusiastic member of the burgeoning Lake Michigan surfing community. “Next to casinos and steel mills, sky-lined roads…and then you’re right there in the lake surfing.”

Surfing in Chicago is nothing new; according to Killion, the sport can trace its local roots to after the post-War period, when servicemen stationed in the Pacific returned to Chicagoland determined to transplant their newfound hobby to the Midwest. After a childhood trip to San Diego piqued his interest in the sport, Killion began trekking to beaches in Illinois in 2005.  But for three decades, surfing was illegal in city waters. The Chicago Parks District banned “non-motorized flotation devices” from Lake Michigan after a fatal rafting accident took the lives of four young women. This ban kept Chicagoans from taking to their boards. When city resident Jack Flynn was ticketed for catching a few waves off the 57th Street Beach in 2006, he organized a campaign to petition the Parks District to reopen the lake. Three years later, the petitioners’ efforts materialized and the ban was lifted.

Though the repeal of the ban was a cause for celebration for Chicago’s surf community, the decision came with some restrictive caveats. Surfing and other non-motorized activities like boogie boarding and kite-surfing are limited to the 57th Street and Montrose beaches during the summer.  But during the off-season, the free surf zone expands north to Osterman Beach and south to Rainbow Beach.

Fortunately for surfers who hope to enjoy their sport away from crowds of summer beach-goers, the winter off-season coincides with prime lake surfing weather. “Most of the time our best waves are in the winter months when most normal people like to stay inside and keep warm,” said Killion. Photos of the surfers often feature men and women returning to land with jagged bits of ice hanging from their wetsuits like badges of honor.

The Chicago surfing community been making as many waves as they’ve been catching. National and local media outlets have published a number of stories on the surfers, winning respect for them from all over the country.  Killion, for one, has capitalized on the attention by publishing a photoblog as well as founding an online periodical called Great Lakes Surfer.  Even the area’s tourism industry has recognized the potential of Lake Michigan surfing. Last summer, Kimpton boutique hotels in Chicago offered $220 surfing packages that included transportation beaches and drinks to unwind afterwards. However, a hotel spokesperson says that Kimpton is not planning to continue the program in Summer 2011.

Killion voices little concern over the fluid shape and size of the surfing culture. “I’m confident that lake surfing here will continue to grow and progress into something new and creative. I don’t think it’ll blow up huge…its a pretty relaxed scene.”

At the 57th Street Beach the fleeting nature of some of their mainstream acclaim will not stop the surfers from enjoying the waves. The inclusion of 57th Street Beach on the Parks District’s list of permitted surfing locations has carved out a distinct role for the South Side and Hyde Park in the expansion of this intriguing city spectacle. Killion sees the area as distinctly suited to keep surfers satisfied: “57th has Promontory Point reaching out and allowing the wave energy to slow down and wrap in around it…Waves are just as good here or even better than the ocean.”