Jason Schumer
Author: Christopher Good
Out of Order
From child DJ to engineer to world tour artist, Jana Rush works backwards
Willis Glasspiegel
From the day she got her first ghettoblaster while growing up in Chatham, Jana Rush—aka JARu—has always been connected to Chicago music. Her ascent into the scene reads like folklore: at ten years, she called Kennedy-King’s WKKC 89.3 FM to schedule an audition. “Once they were done laughing,” Rush tells me, the DJs showed her the ropes, and juke icon Gant-Man took her under his wing. By 1996, Jana had put out a single and a split 12” with DJ Deeon on the legendary house label Dance Mania, where she was billed as “The Youngest Female DJ.”
Deeon Does Deeon
Talking mixtapes, Daft Punk, and Dance Mania with a ghetto house don
Christopher Good
There’s something unusual about DJ Deeon’s Friday night set at Pilsen’s Fiesta del Sol: it’s clean. Tonight, his stage is within earshot of neon-lit carnival rides and family friendly attractions, so the raunchiest matter has been scrubbed out, presumably for the children’s sake. But as the bobbing and juking of the crowd suggests, even some conveniently placed backspins can’t dampen a cut like “Let me Bang.”
Ramping Up at Big Marsh
A Southeast Side slag field reborn
Christopher Good
When you reduce 11599 S. Stony Island to its individual components, it’s simple enough: wood, mulch, concrete, clods of dirt. But the Bike Park at Big Marsh, like any good bike park, is more than the sum of its parts. Since its opening last November, the park’s stairs, ramps, curves, and jumps have become a two-wheeled proving ground—and the only space of its kind on Chicago’s South Side.
A Complicated Wild
A collection of essays that highlight humans’ inextricable link to nature
Wildness: Relations of People & Place is a rare bird. It’s a collection bound not by genre or intended audience, but by a singular theme: that “human and wild communities are entangled, and can work toward collective health and self-renewal.” And so, across four parts and two-dozen essays, editors Gavin Van Horn and John Hausdoerffer recast mankind as a part of nature, one of many species, hitched to everything else in the universe.
Calumet Fisheries
A no-frills fishery endures the test of time
Christopher Good
Like some of the best restaurants, Calumet Fisheries is famous for being unassuming. It still sits where it has for the last seven decades, with the 95th Street bridge down the road and the scaffolding of the Chicago Skyway downriver. The surroundings have transformed over the years—the shack currently overlooks twin industrial silos—but the same words are emblazoned under the same red shingle roof, and the same fresh catches lie inside.
BARCing up the Right Tree
Bronzeville dog owners are on a winding path to bringing a dog park to the South Side
Katia Perez
Dogs on the South Side shouldn’t need to drive all over the city to get out more and exercise.”
Speaking Truth to Power
For twenty-one years, Dr. Lyn Hughes has been making black labor history visible in Pullman
Jasmin Liang
The National A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum, which sits across from Corliss High School on 104th and Maryland, occupies a unique space both citywide and nationwide. After twenty-one years in operation, it remains the only black history museum in the country to focus specifically on labor history.
Fugitive Dust
Dirty Energy at the MoCP
Terry Evans
In the middle of an empty room was a Plexiglas cube—and at the bottom of the cube, a fine sheet of black powder. An imaginary moonscape? An abandoned terrarium? Perhaps anticipating these questions, Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann, the Chicago-based artists behind the installation Prevailing Winds and Relative Distances, pasted several pages of text around the room.
So Much Noise To Be Heard
A review of Hieroglyphic Being’s "The Disco’s of Imhotep"
One of the most striking motifs found in The Disco’s of Imhotep, the newest album by Chicago musician Jamal Moss (stage name Hieroglyphic Being), isn’t musical at all: it’s a single word. “Kmt,” a simple anglicization of Egyptian hieroglyphs, is scattered throughout Moss’s discography. Here, it lends its name to “The Sound of KMT,” but earlier this year it served as the title for a collaborative album with his cousin Noleian Reusse in a project called Africans with Mainframes.