Summer Camp for Grown-Ups | Camp Wandawega

[from Design Bureau Issue 15] 

CAMP WANDAWEGA
Elkhorn, Wisconsin

Once a bootlegger’s getaway that was transformed into a brothel, then a wholesome family holiday spot, and then a retirement home for priests, it’s clear that Camp Wandawega has had many lives. Now it’s been reborn again as a summer camp with grown-up appeal, and it’s proving popular with Chicago-area creative types needing fresh air and inspiration.

Tereasa Surratt and David Hernandez—both creative directors at ad agency Ogilvy + Mather—took over the property in 2003. Surratt, author of Found, Free and Flea (Random House), and Hernandez, who attended a different version of Camp Wandawega as a kid, gave the camp and its furnishings an authentic but curated Americana update. “The aesthetic we are going for is a sort of American historic summer camp of the 1920s to the ’60s with a bit of Wisconsin lodge,” says Surratt. “It’s basic Americana. I try to stay away from anything crafty or kitschy. If you look at any American lake house that has been in one family for several generations, you get this layered effect from the decades they spend their time there.”

Naturally, the camp has become a favorite for fashion editorial shoots, but Surratt says it’s meant to be enjoyed. “Everything is honest to the space, humble and modest, nothing decadent, nothing Victorian,” he says. “You’re not afraid to get it dirty. You can walk in with sandy feet.” Accommodations include a treehouse, a teepee, a log cabin, the lake cottage, and more—all bedecked in junkstore gems, 20th century artifacts discovered by Surratt. It’s far from fussy.

A Scene In Between

[From Nothing Major, 9/2013]

Author Sam Knee documents the sartorial influence of Morrissey, Stephen Pastel, Sterling Morrison's boots and the roots of UK indie fashion of the '80s in his new book, A Scene In Between: Tripping Through the Fashions of UK Indie Music 1980- 1988.

Pastels at Onion Cellar

Popular recent interpretations of the '80s often include new wave angles, fluorescent colors and Miami Vice-inspired louche looks. But of course, style in the music underground was evolving in a much different way. Members of the UK indie scene, in particular, adopted styles inspired by the Byrds, the Velvet Undergound and other unsung heroes of rock and pop's original revolution. Even today, one can see traces of this indie look in bands and fans—many of whom have no idea of the roots of their chosen aesthetic. A new book, A Scene In Between: Tripping Through the Fashions of UK Indie Music 1980-1988, chronicles the emergence of this style from the ground up. It includes dozens of photos, both professional and amateur, shining a light on this DIY music movement's fashion component. We queried Sam Knee for more background and to see if he could narrow '80s indie in the UK down to five types. He did!

The indie scene in the '80s had a real affinity for the '60s in terms of look and sonic aesthetic. Do you think this worked against it being taken seriously? In other words, did it come off as a rehash—rather than something new? Or was it also expressing a wish to revisit those '60s revolution values?
The '80s UK indie bands clearly had a deep fascination for all things '60s but with a distinct '80s bent, they weren't total revivalists. The '60s were in the air and seen as a utopian escape from Thatcher yuppie Britain. Remember that this mythological era was less than twenty years before and hazy fading glimpses of it were to seen regularly in all towns and cities across the land. Sixties clothes were available for pennies in charity shops and hard to resist. The indie scene was the last extension of the new wave DIY era before the whole E thing set in around 88. It couldn't have existed without the new wave, post punk preceding as inspiration as well as '60s isms. 

What were Morrissey's love beads all about? He seemed very taken with the '50s, but then the beads kind of went in another direction.
Morrissey had his own unique fashion sense plucking select sartorial elements with suggestive knowing flare from a cornucopia of sources. I guess the 501's and quiff were James Dean via Billy Fury. The beads, gladioli, floaty blousy shirts were a hodge podge mash-up of Quentin Crisp, Oscar Wilde, Joe Orton, poetic bohemian flamboyance with an added contemporary ironic Dole reality. Morrissey chic took hold of the nation's youth and soon became a fashion sub genre in its own right, eventually becoming a cliché that he's never shook off.

This "indie" look wasn't the only thing going for music subcultures at the time... What else was happening? I remember that the cowpunk look, for one, was big for a while with the bolo ties, etc.
The UK in the early/mid '80s was literally infested with youth sub genre underground scenes and movements. You had Goth which peaked around 83 then became increasingly commercial. Elements of the goth type look tipped over into cool foreign bands like The Birthday Party, Gun Club and of course The Cramps. These three were big here in the UK prior to the homegrown indie explosion and their fashion slants bled into bands such as MBV, JAMC around 83/84.

The mod revival kicked off in 79 and steadily grew and grew throughout the decade to become a vast self contained underground network of bands, fanzines, clubs. Mod was huge! I was a bit of a scruffy longhaired mod and crossed over into this scene quite frequently, this was the era of indie/mod crossover that died out around 88 also. The mod scene carried on regardless of course as every year was 64/65. 

Why do think that Velvet Underground/Byrds look was so influential? Was VU a complete package—sound, look, attitude—kind of a code word for entry into the underground?
Both bands evoked an exotic mystery and cool that '80s disenchanted teenagers could relate to and form fashion direction from. Far from the glossy mainstream horror of Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, etc. the VU and Byrds lured a gateway to parallel realities.

JAMC brought the stark menace of early VU into the youths consciousness via Pastels, Subway Sect, Fire Engines and Hamburg-era Beatles. The look was already going on but they refined it into their own around 84/85 and became the Creation Records roster template. Johnny Marr was a leading exponent of The Byrds look also as well as early Primal Scream, so it was becoming a youth trend circa 84-87.

Who might the sartorial hero of the indie kid in the '80s be? You mention John Cale/Sterling Morrison in your intro.
Contemporary wise it was early Orange Juice's Edwyn and James Kirk, Stephen Pastel's a big influence on the whole era and Bobby Gillespie. '60s wise Love, VU, Byrds, Pretty Things, John's Children.

And who for women?  
Contemporary wise Marine Girls, Dolly Mixture, Talulah Gosh plus '60s sirens Nico, Kitchen Sink dramas, Jean Seberg in Breathless.

Some of these bands were hailing from smaller towns, where did they get their threads? 
As the look was generally second hand (in a pre vintage world) indie scenesters relied heavily on charity shops/jumble sales and old fashioned outfitters carrying old stock from the '60s (now known as deadstock). Shoes were trickier, so a trip to an outlet of Shelley's Shoes for their Chelsea Boots was required or D.M shoes which you could get anywhere cheap or Clarkes Desert Boots.  

Did folks play up their look mainly for live gigs and club DJ nights, or was it a 24-7 thing in the UK?
This was how people lived and looked. There was no stage wear as such or any kind of dressing up, this was it. 

Can you give us five examples of different looks from the 81-88 era and what elements defined them?
1- You had the Orange Juice look which dabbled with Americana, Gabardine shirts, Pendelton plaids crossed with a English public school, aristocratic twist ie: cable wool cardigans, cravats, Tweeds.

2- JAMC look circa 84/85 consisting of black leather box blazer jackets, black leather drainpipe trousers, creepers, stripy T-shirt or tatty check shirt all combined with a big fuzzy backcombed hair. Cool.

3- The Morrissey. Voluminous floaty blousey shirts half done up to show off your beads and flower chain, tatty original 50l's bought easily from secondhand meccas such as Flip in Covent Garden London or Kensington Market stalls that specialised in American rag. D.M shoes or old brogues easily acquired for little expense plus fifties style quiff for total worship.

4- The Sterling Morrison. Head to toe black. Either chelsea boots or engineer boots (penned as King Hatreds by the man himself). Skinny jeans. Black roll or turtle neck and lank greasy moptop of hair covering eyes and face to add an antisocial slant. This look was hugely popular across indie scenesters and '60s garage enthusiasts.

5- The Anorak. Largely pioneered by Stephen Pastel the look was very evocative of the early '60s art student/beatnik style. Sixties anoraks were easily acquired in various fabrics/colourways and were often reversible with quilting. Worn over, for example, a stripey Breton Tee, with a pair of straight leg cords and desert boots oozed '60s youth angst topped off with a srcuffy, shortish mop of hair. Pretty happening.
 Felt B/W by J C Brouchard 1986

What happened in 88? What killed this scene and accompanying looks?
The indie scene here was winding down and evolving into other sartorial chapters...

E rave culture came along and increasing interest in the US indie scenes with the rise of the Sub Pop, Am Rep, Sympathy, TreeHouse, Homestead etc. etc. type bands. 

Will the next book have more American acts? 
Yeah it'll have some, most importantly Beat Happening and the embryonic Olympia K scene among others. I'd like early pics of the Watch Children from NJ, Crystalized Movements if anyone has any out there? 

Can you think of any bands still pulling off the 80s indie look? 
Mmm pass on that one, I'm waay outta touch.

Preview A Scene In Between at Cicada Books

 and 

order online from Amazon UK.

Giving Age the Ax

If you want an inkling of what the scene in Wicker Park was like ten years ago, this speaks to that. I covered a project by artist/activist Jenny Sheppard. She now resides in the Baltimore area. The Saverio Truglia photos were amazing.

August 22, 2002

Plug in, turn up, feel better.

By John Dugan

Seated in a padded metal chair, the woman on the videotape strums downward on a white electric guitar, slowly, on every beat, eliciting a sound that echoes around the room. Another seated woman joins in tentatively with her guitar, playing a similarly odd chord. Both concentrate on a fragile, rudimentary rhythm, which only seconds later collapses. Then, with some encouraging words from a youthful voice off-camera, they begin again. Ching. Ching. Ching.

The electric guitar, says artist Jenny Graf Sheppard, is by and large "a male-, youth-, pop-dominated object." But her current endeavor, "The Guitars Project," puts the six-strings in very different hands. Twice a week from January to mid-May of this year, Sheppard led a group of women in their 70s and 80s in improvisation. The core members of her ensemble--Lodelin, Minna, Eleanor, Marion, Alice, and Carolyn--are all regular visitors to the Council for Jewish Elderly's Adult Day Services Center in Evanston. Typical events at the center include field trips, dancing, or strolls around a secure area. But for those five months, "Jenny--Guitars" was a highlighted event on the dry-erase board.

Physically, the half dozen seated players holding an assortment of guitars vaguely resemble something Glenn Branca might have thought up, but Sheppard's project has another, less visible layer--at least a few ensemble regulars have Alzheimer's. "I was interested," explains Sheppard, "in inserting older people with memory problems into a situation where that person has agency."

The Guitars Project weaves together Sheppard's long-term interests in art that explores the creative aptitudes of the elderly and in improvised experimental music. Her father was an eminent gerontologist who worked with labor unions and employers on age issues and researched the societal effects of aging. "I had one of those dads," says Sheppard, "who would bring me along and say, 'What do you think?'" Over the years, Sheppard did her own homework on the subject, and found one book, Heidi Ehrenberger Hamilton's Conversations With an Alzheimer's Patient: An Interactional Sociolinguistic Study, particularly illuminating. Conversations is unusual, says Sheppard, in that it explains the logic and structure behind how people with Alzheimer's express themselves.

At Hampshire College, where Sheppard studied film, video, and installation art, her thesis was a piece that incorporated audio and video footage of three elderly women in a nursing home. For another project she worked with Hilda Gorenstein--aka "Hilgos"--a painter and 1923 School of the Art Institute graduate then in her 90s and in a nursing home suffering from extreme memory loss. Sheppard visited and worked with the painter, ultimately mounting Hilgos-related shows featuring her own work together with Gorenstein's drawings and paintings at nursing homes and senior centers in Chicago, at SAIC, and at a New York gallery.

Since getting her MA from SAIC in 1998, she's taught there and at UIC, and played guitar with two of the more out-there underground bands in Chicago: the enshrouded Bride of No No and the improvisational, dark-wave Metalux. In the last couple years she's shown only one art piece, a motion-detecting sound-and-black-light installation called "reflex lux." "I wanted to do a project like this," she says. "But being in two bands and working, I hadn't made the time until this last semester."

Sheppard's avant-leaning musical endeavors directly inform the project. "It is really related," she says. "With Metalux, there was a similar idea in picking up the guitar and thinking, 'How am I going to interact with this object?' In Metalux, there's tension between us and our instruments. We use them, but we're alienated from them." With the CJE ensemble, Sheppard says, "we had to accept all the range of emotions they had with the instrument." This, she admits, is another way of saying, "We don't focus on the fact that you are just dusting around the strings" but concentrate rather on group participation.

Over the five months of the project, Sheppard recorded portions of the rehearsals on a portable four-track or videotaped them. Her intention all along has been to remix the material as an audio piece--she's currently working in residence at the Experimental Sound Studio to produce something from the raw rehearsal recordings--and a more finished video installation will also likely emerge from the material.

In July Sheppard showed four studio-quality color portraits of the women taken by Saverio Truglia and a nine-minute video piece in the "Synesthesia" show at Carrie Secrist Gallery, which is up through August 31. Truglia's photos are disarming--as comic as they are sweet, highlighting the incongruity between the elderly women and their electric guitars. Conversely, says Sheppard, "the video is about focusing on moments of action, something dynamic, even when somebody mistakenly plucks two strings." She loops small sections of the rehearsal footage to concentrate on the interaction between the women.

Only one of the players is an experienced musician: Eleanor, 88, was trained on piano and violin, and was once the organist at a suburban temple. And except for some valiant attempts by Eleanor--a naturally charismatic leader--to organize the ladies around her clapped-out tempo, the ensemble plays like thorough novices. Meeting three of the guitarists after a session, as they view their portraits for the first time, it's clear that they have their own theories about the project. "I don't play the guitar," says Minna upon being told she's been doing just that twice a week for several months. But the subject of music elicits vivid memories: Lodelin recounts decades of singing "sacred music" with her husband; Minna wishes her eldest son--"an expert in stringed instruments"--were around; Eleanor authoritatively announces that she's always preferred classical guitar.

The women are clearly enamored of Sheppard and thrilled to be involved in something so different from their regular routine. They have a barrage of questions for her--about her life and about the project. "Did it accomplish for you what you wanted it to?" they ask. She nods. "Some really beautiful sounds came out of it."

"At our age," says Minna, "I think to start something we've never done before is a good thing."

The Libertines

Back in the days when the Reader had ample pages to fill it encouraged writers to go long whenever possible. I'm glad I had the opportunity to riff on the Libertines.

How Much Chaos Is Too Much Chaos? 

So far the Libertines are still a step ahead of their own cloud of dust.

By John Dugan

The Libertines at Metro, 10/9

Must the show always go on? In the late 80s, when I was in high school, I drummed for a punk band called Indian Summer. We had two gigs booked in the last few months before I left for college, but our singer and guitarist both refused to play--they were feuding, and the guitarist claimed to have come down with mono. Determined to leave northern Virginia on a high note, I decided that the shows must go on and enlisted two buddies home from college to fill in. The new guitarist was a local star--a semipro skater who looked like a blond version of Ian McCulloch. He learned four of our originals and added about five covers to our repertoire, turning us from Dischord-model punks into a college bar band with taste. The new singer stood way off to one side of the stage and sang at the wall. Our sets were tight, but the audiences looked stunned--I'm sure they would've gotten angry if they hadn't been so confused. People were still razzing me about it ten years later.

If you've read one word about the Libertines, you already know who they've had to replace onstage, time and time again. Front man Pete Doherty has made such a mess of himself and the band with an excruciatingly well-publicized addiction to crack and heroin that he makes Keith Moon look sensible. Repeated visits to treatment centers in London don't seem to have helped, and this summer Doherty aborted a detoxifying stay at the Thamkrabok monastery in Thailand after less than a week. Upon his return to the UK he was promptly arrested for possession of a switchblade. Last Saturday, when the Libertines came to the Metro, Doherty was an ocean away--his side project, Babyshambles, played a gig in London on October 6.

The Libertines stumbled straight into the big time with their 2002 debut, Up the Bracket, and even without Doherty's antics they'd probably be the most talked-about band in Britain right now--their second full-length, The Libertines (Rough Trade), hit the UK charts at number one when it came out this summer. Mick Jones of the Clash produced both albums, Peter Perrett of the Only Ones has joined them onstage and in the studio, and last fall former Creation Records boss Alan McGee signed on as their manager. The band's been held up as London's "authentic" answer to the Strokes--organic, spontaneous, unhinged, and enthralling. The British music magazine NME, no doubt hard-pressed to find an appropriately hyperbolic metaphor after squandering so many on Starsailor and the Darkness, has said the Libertines rock "like God on an angel dust bender."

Of course, Chicagoans may never get to see the band in one piece. The Libertines have managed a few shows in the States with Doherty: in April and May of 2003 they played New York, Seattle, Philadelphia, Boston, and the Coachella festival in California and appeared on Letterman. But coleader Carl Barat had already been forced to front the band alone before Up the Bracket was even finished, and in June 2003 the band drafted a guitar tech to finish a European tour. Doherty was also absent for the Libertines' first proper U.S. tour that summer, just as he is for the second. Meanwhile Babyshambles missed scheduled gigs in July and August and canceled another in Scotland this month.

But Doherty hasn't been kicked out of the Libertines, and Barat has said that he's welcome back anytime--provided, of course, that he's clean. The two front men are best friends, and though on the records Doherty takes the lion's share of the lead vocals, they're credited as cowriters on most of the songs. Onstage they often share a mike, pressed together nipple to nipple, their T-shirts ripped off--a guileless intimacy that makes these pretty boys look "gayer than the Scissor Sisters" (NME again). In the summer of 2003, Doherty burglarized Barat's apartment and spent two months in prison, but as soon as he was released the pair met for a drink--and the Libertines ended up playing an unannounced gig that night. The British music press has printed every detail of the band's sordid, heartbreaking story, and who can blame them? This isn't some puffed-up scandal about a pop band cuffed by bobbies for public urination--this is actual drama.

Partway through the Libertines' set at Metro last Saturday, my date said, "They're playing as if they have something to prove." And they do. The new record is a mess, a beautiful loser, sometimes sustained by charisma alone. The riffs constantly seem like they're about to fall apart, and the unvarnished production accentuates the plunking of picks on strings. It's lovable in its own way but ultimately a step down from Up the Bracket and the subsequent I Get Along EP. In a phone interview Barat insisted that the band "felt optimistic" making it, but the music tells a different story--the brash confidence of Bracket has given way to hesitation and insecurity. It's not the record it seems to want to be--and it's maddening to hear such a great band falling so clearly short of its potential. Even the mix sounds wimpy next to the sound the Libertines get from their current touring setup, which uses a wall of four amplifiers for the two guitars alone.

Compared to their loose but enthusiastic gig at the Empty Bottle in August 2003, the Libertines were all business at Metro, and they were better for it. With minimal banter between hearty swigs of Jameson's, they stormed through 23 songs in about an hour and a half. Every few numbers Barat, bassist John Hassall, and replacement guitarist Anthony Rossomando would fall into a huddle with drummer Gary Powell, as if it were fourth and goal with seconds to go. And when they cranked back up after each of these little conferences, they nailed song after song with bravado and purpose. (Rossomando, the band's "American cousin" as Barat calls him, is also in Boston's Damn Personals--and, in the interest of full disclosure, seven years ago he played trumpet with my old band Chisel on one tour.)

I've never seen Doherty sing live (except on TV), and I know I'd miss his onstage chemistry with Barat if I'd ever felt it in the first place. But Barat's voice, slightly deeper and coarser, is fine by me, and he has no trouble moving between careless cool, romantic nostalgia, and fevered intensity. As a front man he more than held his own on Saturday: on "What a Waster" he sounded electrified, and to kick off the lead riff of "Last Post on the Bugle" he spun on his cowboy boots like a figure skater.

The band opened with the jangly rave-up "The Delaney," a B side that's also on the EP. "Some run from trouble, some meet it halfway," Barat sang--a lyric it'd be hard not to hear as addressed to his absent friend. For the rest of the night the band skimmed the cream from the new album and combined it with some more top-shelf B sides and the best songs from Bracket. Tunes like "What Katie Did," which sounds tentative and disorganized on The Libertines--it's obvious the band couldn't pound everything into shape during the short stints Doherty was around to record--were absent from the set entirely. The Pogues-y punk of "Mayday" stopped and started precisely, and the brooding "Road to Ruin" was so much better than the album version that I didn't realize it was the same song until I got home and went back to the CD. A year ago at the Bottle the band had met cries of "Where's Pete?" from obnoxious fans, but at Metro nobody heckled at all.

The set wrapped up with "Boys in the Band," "The Good Old Days," and "What a Waster"--huge-sounding songs, with backing vocals from Hassall beefing up the melodies and plenty of Powell's endearingly overdone, tom-heavy drum fills. The encore was even more impassioned, tearing from a snotty version of "Horrorshow" to a blazing "Narcissist" and then into "What Became of the Likely Lads"--one of the brightest spots on The Libertines, where Barat and Doherty trade lines and wonder "What became of forever? We'll never know." Finally the band machine-gunned away that aftertaste of regret with "I Get Along."

Though Barat has proved that he and the band can make it with or without Doherty, he barely seems to have considered whether he could do it without his cowriter in the long run. "I've got a few nice ones on the new record," he says. "But maybe I'll have to. I don't know, we'll see." He may find out sooner than he'd like. Doherty doesn't appear to be making great strides toward recovery. And in September, Babyshambles released a tune online called "Gang of Gin" that calls out both Barat and Alan McGee by name: "I'll tell you my story / The treachery, it bores me / Carl and McGee both promised me / It would not happen this way."

In the Libertines bio at tiscali.co.uk, Mick Jones is quoted as saying, "I think they're the most important band in Britain today." But it's worth remembering that the Clash was hamstrung by drummer Topper Headon's drug problems even as it seemed poised to conquer America with Combat Rock. The Libertines are effectively down a man already, and they don't have anything like London Calling under their belts yet.

Mick Jones file

A friend of my brother just met Mick jones of the Clash which sent me back to the archives for some Mick pieces from the past.  I can't seem to find my interview, but will keep at it.

Lollapalooza 2011, Saturday: Big Audio Dynamite
  by John Dugan on Aug 6, 2011 at 7:55pm

Michael Jackson once asked us "Who's bad?" and the Lollapalooza crowd was in a similar state of mind today. You couldn't call the return of this underrated post-Clash band fronted by Mick Jones highly anticipated by the masses, at least not by current generations. But for many of us coming of age in the mid-'80s, BAD was an exciting, boundary-pusher in its attempt at a fusion of hip-hop, dub, sampling and drum machines with a British punk sensibility. We came to BAD as Clash fans but BAD's first two albums stood on their own, and still do. Many of the band's earliest tunes still sound fresh today. The likes of "Dial a Hitman" hasn't been bested in over two decades. If you never thought you'd experience the '80s line-up of the innovative act, you were in luck today. For this reunion, Jones was accompanied by MC/sound system maestro Don Letts, bassist Leo Williams and drummer Greg Roberts. Logically, then, the band stayed close to its early '80s output from This is Big Audio Dynamite and No. 10, Upping Street. It seemed invigorated. Letts stalked the stage and rapped in an upbeat reggae MC style and Jones hip-swiveled like a '50s rocker, telling bits of stories with a perpetual grin on his face. The band rocked up its tunes, playing down their drum machine beats and B-boy production, and instead putting Jones and his lead guitar player's amps at the fore. Jones seemed so loose and at ease. The band even debuted a new ditty about the financial crisis titled something along the lines of "Rob Peter to Pay Paul," which was more of a jangly rocker than a typical BAD street beat concoction. But the band was best when digging into its own "E=MC2," "A Party," "C'mon Every Beatbox," first tune ever "The Bottom Line," theme song "BAD" and later period hit "Rush." Big Audio Dynamite may not be back on the map, but for those in the know, they never left.

 

Southern Diplo-macy

 [I profiled Diplo for Time Out Chicago back in 2005 or so in advance of a visit to Sonotheque, which ended up being Sonotheque's biggest night up until that point. It was bananas.]

Diplo dabbles in doc film and daydreams of retirement  

Diplo, real name Wesley Pentz, is the main American proponent of Rio's favela-rooted funk carioca/baile-funk culture, which we at Time Out Chicago can't seem to shut up about. So it's only natural that he's joining baile-funk king DJ Marlboro for the MCA's TropicÁlia: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture festival.

With various mix-CDs from his Philly label/collective Hollertronix, his production on M.I.A.'sArular album and new stature as a remixer to Beck, Gwen Stefani and Bloc Party, Diplo has brought the Miami bass–derived homegrown dance music of Rio into the hipster solar system. But he has more music coursing through him, including a new, jaw-droppingly good Fabric mix-CD, slated to be released by the label wing of the London club where, incidentally, Diplo fatefully met M.I.A.

"Basically it's about me growing up in Florida," Diplo says of his latest, as he chats with us on his cell phone while runningerrands in Manhattan. The disc sums up his influences without regard for geography. "All that techno stuff on there, I kinda felt like that was Miami bass until I found out it was from Detroit a couple of years ago," he laughs. On the disc, he jumps from Detroit electro to Rio funk to booty bass back to ghetto tech, then sprinkles indie snippets like Cat Power and Le Tigre.

He plans to release (through Turntable Lab) a live set from an upcoming Brazilian festival, to show his love for pop, his solo creations and Brazilian street music. Tomorrow, he's jetting to Rio, so today he's getting a camera, film, dropping off original tracks for a new 12-inch at Turntable Lab...and ordering a pineapple roll for lunch in Chinatown. "I might hire a cinematographer when I get there," he says.

Just as Diplo is poised to hop from cult figure to star status, he changes mediums. The DJ plans to spend the next few months filming a documentary on Rio de Janeiro's baile-funk scene. "I don't want it to be seen just as a trend," he says. "I want to make sure that people see the energy level as well, not just the drugs and the gun culture around it. It's like kids making a whole music industry out of nothing."

The road to Rio has been indirect. Diplo grew up near Daytona Beach, where he turned on to the rave scene. "I'm talking about the big pants, the glow sticks," he says of the fairground gatherings of his youth. Diplo soaked up Orlando's budding club scene and he picked up a love for "fun, bouncey shit" before Disney dominance and curfews crushed it. The first chance he had, he set off to Philadelphia, where he enrolled in Temple University's film program. He then dropped out of the program to become a schoolteacher, but soon quit "because I was making more money deejaying and I got caught up in the bureaucracy at the school," he says. A teaching-assistant stint in Japan taught him where not to be. "I need spontaneity and it's not spontaneous there," he says. "In Philly, there's always a stolen car running into a stop sign or something."

Establishing himself in the gritty city wasn't easy. "Three or four years ago when I first started getting up there, kids didn't like me," he says. "I couldn't get my own night; they didn't like my style. That's why I started Hollertronix. Now I think I represent what the kids want, so all the young kids like me."

This year, Diplo's southern hemispheric sensibility has come into vogue. Rather than cash-in personally, he wants to inspire a grassroots scene: more white labels and more kids doing club nights. "I think that Chicago is probably one of the only cities that has a real underground, that has different DJs and different followers...but that's about it," he says. "Club culture is dead everywhere else in America." But he doesn't see himself a part of that culture at 40. "I want a life where I can raise kids, catch shrimp and live off the land."

Calvin Harris, Alter Ego

Back in 2008, I sat down with Calvin Harris in Miami before taking in a modestly attended live band set. In 2012, Harris pulled in $42 million dollars as a DJ. 

Time Out Chicago, 2008. 

One of our missions at this year’s Winter Music Conference was to meet Calvin Harris in between the live sets he and his band played in Miami. The Scottish singer’s I Created Disco was our favorite crossover record of 2007—full of pop hooks, party-boy attitude and banging beats on tunes like “Acceptable in the ’80s” and “Colours”—in which the singer advises ladies against a monochrome palette. We figured that when we found Harris—who recently recorded with Kylie Minogue—surely we would be buried in an avalanche of babes, bottles and controlled substances.Instead, we ended up in a swag room in a hotel penthouse chatting with a polite young guy who likes the Sugababes. Could this really bethe Calvin Harris? Read on.

Time Out Chicago: There’s a sense of humor on your record—do you think the album will translate in the U.S.?
Calvin Harris: There’s two reasons I don’t think it translates. The album is not very focused; it’s all over the place and people like something that’s concise.… Also, I haven’t been here much. I haven’t had a chance to speak to anyone at great length. Hopefully I’ll right the wrongs with the second album.

TOC: You seem to have come out of nowhere. How were you discovered?
Calvin Harris: After many years of sending demo CDs and stuff, I gave up sending demo CDs. It was pretty much on MySpace—trying to meet a guy that wrote a song that I liked by the Sugababes. I was into [reaching out to] people that were in the music industry and making them my private showbiz friends, to get me on to people’s records and stuff.

TOC: Were you taking that approach as a songwriter?
Calvin Harris: I was thinking of myself then as a producer. It was only once I got signed to a record deal that things became a bit confused. When I got signed, I was a producer making backing tracks. So I added this guy, who works for EMI publishing—which was ideal—and he liked it, so that’s how it all started. They set about getting me a record deal and they did that with Sony and now they think I’m a artist. Within months, I was starting a band and being a frontman, trying to learn those skills.

TOC: So, this wasn’t your life dream?
Calvin Harris: Far from it. I was singing on the songs because I couldn’t find anyone else to sing on them. I guess it’s quite obvious why they would see me as a singer. It kind of got out of control.

TOC: Maybe what you do stands out because you weren’t intending for it to be the final product?
Calvin Harris: There’s no showboating; there’s no sort of Mariah Carey vocal gymnastics or anything like that.

TOC: You could do actual gymnastics…
Calvin Harris: That’s incredible, like Pink. She does that! I saw a video of her at Wembley Arena— she was up in the sky upside down singing on a trapeze.

TOC: Is there an autobiographical quality to the album?
Calvin Harris: It’s all made-up stuff. I’ve not done or thought any of those things on the album. It’s kinda funny.

TOC: What inspires your songs?
Calvin Harris: I try not to write funny songs, or things that are ironic, but I think they kind of are. Which is strange, because it’s not what I intended. I think my default method is to try and adopt somebody else’s outlook on life so that I don’t get found out. And nobody really knows who or what I am, which is bad, because I end up acting like a fucking idiot and people think I’m an absolute prat.

TOC: Can you give an example?
Calvin Harris: With the song “The Girls,” I thought it was so clearly made up and clearly not the case, you know. It just seemed obvious. I guess people who saw the video or heard the song thought, Who the fuck does this guy think he is? There are whole album reviews based around that one song. [They said] “He thought he could do this and this and this, mix it and produce it and it would still be good, well it’s not, it’s a one out of ten,” stuff like that.

TOC: Did you consider using a different name?
Calvin Harris: It isn’t my real name. I could tell you my real name, but I don’t see the point. It’s Adam.

I Created Disco 

is out now on Almost Gold.

Spotlight On: 6 Chicago Jazz Artists

I profiled six jazz musicians for Michigan Avenue magazine in July, 2013. Here's a piece on Chicago jazz drummer Mike Reed.

MIKE REED
Refurbishing jazz history and setting the stage for the next chapter.

“I grew up being a person of the daytime, but now I’m a person of the nighttime,” says Mike Reed. The drummer/composer/bandleader/presenter’s night-owl conversion took place in the late ’90s: Listening to WBEZ (which used to play jazz until 4 am), he’d hit a circuit of small venues, taking in (and often jamming in) live gigs. “It would be the [Green] Mill; it would be Bop Shop; it would be Velvet [Lounge]; it would be Rosa’s, the Deja Vu. There was a time when I could just do that every night.” It was in the sessions of that era that Reed soaked up the influence of players like Von Freeman drummer Michael Raynor, with whom he later took lessons. “He would always let me play first, and I got to play with the heavy guys who came through. It was great and also awful for me because I’d get my ass kicked.”

These days, the Evanston-bred 39-year-old (who has recorded with Roscoe Mitchell as well as Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra) is a bandleader in his own right. Part of the original intent for his People, Places & Things group was “rediscovering and repositioning lost moments of Chicago hard bop”—but in the context of a modern group. Chicago’s role in jazz of the late ’50s and ’60s is something that Reed keeps in mind, and he sees the benefits of the Windy City’s close-knit, creative community. “The energy comes from the people, not from the products.” Reed, a key figure in that community, maintains a dense schedule. His trio Sun Rooms jets to Brazil in August, and larger group Living By Lanterns plays Sardinia later that month. People, Places & Things has a new record out late this summer featuring six guests collaborating on pieces in Amsterdam (which is kind of a second home for Reed), and he’s also a member of the Chicago Jazz Festival planning committee.

More recently, he’s the prime mover behind Constellation, a new venue on Western Avenue with a name borrowed from a Chicago soul label of the ’60s. Focusing on progressive styles and improvisation, Constellation books everything from jazz to classical and electronic, filling the void of a “profile” venue. “There can’t be a weekend where there’s not jazz in there,” Reed explains.

Daniel Clowes / Modern Cartoonist

I interviewed Daniel Clowes for Nothing Major, where I am editor. 

If there’s an artist one doesn’t associate with triumphant returns, it is Daniel Clowes. The comic book artist and graphic novelist’s career has been characterized by wry humor, a darkly underground viewpoint, and dramas that are far from life-affirming in groundbreaking comics such as Eightball, Ghost World, and Mister Wonderful. The Chicago-raised Clowes broke into the mainstream with 2001’s Terry Zwigoff-directed film adaptation of Ghost World. But he’s not known for writing Hollywood endings. This week, however, he returns to Chicago a much bigger deal than he ever thought with a new exhibit, "Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes" at the MCA, looking back on his career in more than 150 works dating from 1989. 

Organized by the OMCA in Oakland, "Modernist Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes" opens at Chicago’s MCA this Saturday and features two commissioned works resembling windows on a Chicago frozen in the 1970s of Clowes's youth.

Clowes and curator Susan Miller give an artist talk Saturday, June 29 at 1pm; tickets are $10.

We called up the cartoonist, now residing in Oakland, to talk about his early days, keeping the inspiration flame burning, and underground culture pre-Internet.

Nothing Major: This show has been touring for a little while. It started in Oakland, right?
Daniel Clowes: Yeah, I don’t know if it counts as a tour when it’s only in two places. It’s like two points make a line rather than a pattern or something.

I guess if you have to go sleep somewhere else that’s not your house it’s a tour.
I had to get on a plane to attend it, so I guess that’s a tour. 

Your work has been very much about sending up pretension, and now you’re the guy having the retrospective; you’re the one with your name on the marquee. Are you able to have a healthy appreciation for that success or does it make you uncomfortable at all?
I mean, I guess sort of the thesis of my early work was: Why aren’t these comics in the museum instead of this other stuff?—never actually imagining that would happen. Now that it’s happened, you get that weird feeling of like ‘Uh oh, can I make anything happen? Did I sign a pact with the devil and then have him erase my memory or something?’ It just seems so unlikely. I have no real response. I can’t accept it as anything other than just some weird quirk.

 Eightball No. 8. 1992.

Right, it’s like your worldview was shaped at a certain point, and even if the world’s completely changed you still have the same worldview.
Yeah, I just can’t even grasp the reality that something I would have imagined, this ludicrous possibility, could ever take place. 

Photo: Abigail Huller 

You went to Pratt, right?
Yeah.

You were probably around some people that were more ambitious to make it in the art world.
Yeah, everybody. I never thought of ever being in a museum or gallery, none of that. It never appealed to me in the slightest, I never ... the idea of being seen by only a few people in a gallery rather than dozens in print somehow didn’t appeal to me at all.

Was it a kind of a populism in that you wanted your work to be wildly available, or was it more like your image of yourself? They wouldn’t be interested in you, therefore you have to find a different audience that would be?
I mean, that wasn’t even a self-image. It was a world I never thought of as an outlet for what I was doing. I like the idea of ‘Here’s my comic; have one.’ It’s just something that anybody can read. You know, it would be out there in the world. This was certainly before we had the ability to send photographs of our genitals to strangers in other countries. You know, it seemed like having a pen pal or something. I just thought of having a comic that some kid in Omaha, Nebraska could read really felt like you were reaching out to the world

New Yorker cover. 2010.

In the ‘90s, whether one was a fan of indie comics or underground music, you really had to hustle to find it especially if you weren’t in a major city, and you'd form these connections, these bonds with these people because you’d actually have to write letters to get something.
Yeah yeah. I mean, I always think of the ‘90s as the golden age of that because there were certain worlds and places to aggregate that sort of stuff. When I was growing up in the ‘70s, we were all just alone. There would be you and one of your friends trying to find something about Sam Fuller movies or something and it was just so difficult and you’d never be able to see them. You’d just wait until they were on TV or you’d find some film book that listed them or something. You just had no idea. Then years later, you’d meet the other five guys who were like you, who were living in their cities and it just felt like ‘Oh my god, how did we ever figure anything out?’ It’s all stuff you can find in 30 seconds now.

Yeah, or you could watch the complete movie. 
Right, get bored with it.

 
Eightball 17 (cover), 1996. 

Eightball, if it came out now, people would find out about it on blogs. I’m wondering, does the way the discovery process has changed, does that pose challenges for you as someone who’s in publishing, just in terms of how you think about the final product of what people are going to get?
You know, to me, when I was growing up, the way I learned about everything was I would go to a used bookstore and I’d just look at all the spines and you’d have no idea what any of them were. You’d go to the humor section, which is where they put all the cartooning stuff, and you’d see this one kind of weird spine and something made you take it down and every once in a while, couple times a year, you’d find something that was ‘Oh my God what is this, I know nothing about this, this is something I’ve got to figure out what this is.’ That was always such a profound moment for me and I’ve realized that that’s not gonna happen anymore. That’s what I was always kind of hoping for was that my stuff would just wind up in used bookstores and some 16-year-old in 2018 would find it, and I realized that’s not going to happen. It’s hard to connect with some version of myself out there in the world. I don’t imagine myself actually going to used bookstores in 2013 if I was 16 years old. I can’t really envision the final aspect of the process of the reader picking up the book and reading it. 

Does the idea of presenting your work on the iPad or anything like that have any appeal? I know it sounds terrible but also, you’re also probably a realistic person on some level. This person that’s discovering stuff might be looking at it on an iPad.
I guess I don’t like the idea of it being too easy somehow. I don’t feel like I need everybody to read this stuff, I need people that are actually going to connect with it and really pay attention to it to read this stuff; that’s all I’m really interested in. I don’t like the idea of it being just like ‘Oh I’m going to try this. Oh I’ll read a couple pages and now I’m going to check my email and now I’m going to read this other thing.’ I’d rather, I don’t know, if there’s a way to make it so people who read stuff on an iPad really sit down and read the whole book at once... I don’t know. I’ve never read anything on an iPad. 

I haven’t read more than a page or two.            
Yeah, I'll read like my email or something.

The Death Ray (cover), 2011.  

Right. When I got into Eightball, one of the things, now that I'm a little more socialized is...
Good for you.

...there’s kind of an element of loneliness and alienation being kind of the raw materials in those stories that I related to. Now that you’re in a different part of your life, do you find that you’re writing different things and what are the sort of themes that have replaced those for you?
I’m not sure anything has replaced them. I’m still spending eight hours a day in a room by myself looking at a piece of paper trying to make sense of something. As you get older your anxieties expand to all different areas of your life, but I think the same kind of core emotions are there in some ways. I have a family, so that’s somewhat different than being an isolated guy in his little one-bedroom apartment in Wicker Park, twenty-some odd years ago.

Eightball 18, 1997. 

I was looking at some of the Mister Wonderful stuff and it’s a more grown up version of being very isolated.
Oh yeah, which is far worse too. When you’re young and isolated there’s always that hope, but when you’re middle-aged it’s not going to get much better 

Basically ‘This is what it’s all going to be like?’
Yeah, that Mister Wonderful story. I think young people read that as like ‘Oh what’s the big deal? If that date doesn’t work out he’ll try somebody else,’ and I think people, my age or older, who read that, it’s really almost like a horror comic where it’s like ‘Oh man, if this one doesn’t work out he’ll never be able to summon the energy to ever try that again.' You know what it’s like. 

A lot of what you’ve done is completely invert what DC comics or old Marvel comics were about, which was an all-powerful, gifted superhuman, dealing with things of major consequence to the world like the existence of the world.
Yeah.

 
Wilson, 2010. 

If you flip that around, it’s like barely acceptable guy on the fringe who’s just trying to get one lucky break in his life, right? That’s the complete inverse of it.
I certainly see that as occasionally a criticism of my work. ‘His work is just about the most downbeat losers and who wants to read about that?’ I often think that my characters—I think of them as just average normal people. And I’ve got to assume that more than half the people who make that accusation are probably far worse off than the character they’re talking about.

Right, right.
It’s like they’d love to be that guy. 

I was thinking more like they’re kind of unexceptional.
They’re self-aware or sort of intentionally not self-aware in some way, or they have something that makes them controlling in some way.

Do you think that’s still what interests you as far as subject matter, that’s not going to ever change? 
No, no, it changes all the time. I mean, I’m interested in finding characters that sort of keep me attached to them for a long time. There’s certain characters, that you—that seem like they’ll yield something and after a couple pages you think ‘ah I’m not really connected to this person.’ I try to kind of start with a character that’s really kind of like a bull in a china shop, like someone who’s really either self-destructive or has some quality that’s compelling, like you want to see what’s this guy going to do. Not necessarily to like the guy starting out, but just to feel like he’s going to be interesting and that, sort of through the process of the story, try to figure out what his, a way to like this guy, a way to sort of connect with his humanity in some way. That’s why often the stories start off really kind of reckless and funny and wind up a little more, I wouldn’t want to say sad, but with a slightly different tone than the way they began.

Your background could be described as Mad Magazine and punk rock, which of those do you think is more important to you?
They’re almost the same thing but I mean, Mad Magazine is in my DNA. That was literally how I grew up. Probably the third image I saw after my parents was Alfred E. Neuman’s face everywhere in my home. I feel like I know those, you know like the same way you would know what it’s like to walk around your old neighborhood where you grew up or something. They’re just all in the pathways of my brain. And punk rock, the way I sort of experienced it, which was not as a sort of political thing the way it was in England. To me it just seemed like this ridiculous sort of expression of ‘We hate all this idiot crap we’re stuck with here in late '70s culture.’ A certain number of us just did not respond to all that, what was popular at the time, and it seems like this great rejection of it. It really sort of started and ended with The Ramones for me. I was always just trying to capture that feeling I had when I first saw them. All the other bands I was interested in, they never would approximate that in some way. Nobody ever captured that same feeling for me. In the long run, that was sort of all I took away from it.

 
The Christian Astronauts, 2009.

That’s as pure as you can get then. Start with the best and finish it out. When I was reading Eightball I remember trying to picture what life was like where the author was living that he would create these characters.
Sure. 

Were you really influenced by where you were living at the time? Were the characters in Eightball drawn from people you would see on the sidewalk?
I’ve always tried to draw—I don’t like to say draw from life or I don’t want to use sketches and photographs, although I used to back in those days sometimes. I want the world to look the way it looks when I’m just recalling something or thinking about something. I want it to have that slightly filtered quality where it’s as much of my own vision as possible because that’s what I like to see in other artists. So I’d spend all day walking around Chicago over in Hyde Park growing up or Wicker Park where I lived when I was in my 20s. That was absolutely the way I saw the world. When I look at those old comics, it’s just pure Chicago; it just hits me. They almost smell like Chicago.

Right, right.
It’s clearly what it’s all about. 

Photo: Terry Lorant

I've read about you being hyper-tense and almost hyper-anxious about the drawing you’re working on, and how that translates into the feeling that would come from the image at the end of the day. That would be hard to do all the time over the long run. Do you have to summon that feeling of anxiety—or does it just kind of depend on the project?
It’s sort of the part of the process the anxiety gets placed on. It smooths down a line. It started out where just figuring out how to tell the story in panels produced the anxiety. How in the world do you do that? And then once I got comfortable with that it was how do I get these characters to look perfect and these lines to look perfect, and I was really struggling to achieve something that was in my head that was beyond my capabilities. And so there’s this tension between what I wanted it to be and what I was able to achieve, and then at a certain point I was able to hit that more times than not and then the tension becomes on all of these, like you’re trying to make it not look sort of comfortable. You want the images to always be exciting so you feel some kind of electricity when you’re looking on the pages, and that became sort of the focus. So there’s always some level of anxiety; it just sort of shits places. The thing I’ll say that makes me less anxious now is when I screw something up I know I can fix it. I don’t freak out about it because I’d be like 90 percent done with a page and I’d screw something up and I just couldn’t look at it and I would throw it away and start it all over. That’s a terrible use of your creative energy because you just dissipate all of your energy and you can’t get it back.