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ISSUE 13 ART & MUSICKING DIY ART SUMMER 2020 FREE Letter from Table of contents the editors Joshua Virtue • Jackie’s House Egon Schiele . 3 To our loyal, disloyal, and first-time readers, EDITOR IN CHIEF 2020 pt Bell 4 Noah Jones Serengeti • Ajai . Album The Sick Muse is an independent publication devoted to underground musicians, artists, and activists in ONO • Red Summer Jordan Reyes . 5 Chicago. We ask why people make the art they do, and investigate how artists shapes and is shaped by the FEATURE EDITORS Releases environment around them. We print interviews, essays, illustrated lyrics, photographs, paintings, sketches, Dan Shukis Jeraf • Throw Neck Louis Clark . 7 manifestos, poetry, prose, prose-poetry, poetry-prose, comics, dialogues, and other knick-knacks from the Victoria Parra Chicago landscape. NNAMDÏ • BRAT Noah Jones . 8 LYRICS EDITOR Apologies for the drought, Winter Issue turned to Spring Issue turned to Summer Issue...the seasons may Jol(ene)isha Whatevr Catching Up with Lesage Williams Nhu Do & Victoria Parra . 11 change but our inconsistency remains the same. But, to our credit, as you may have noticed, there’s been this worldwide pandemic going on. Due to this unfortunate crisis, the issue will be a digital release only, with Dan Shukis 14 POETRY EDITOR Goth Disco: A Q&A with Chicago’s Own Pixel Grip . no print distribution. Also you may have noticed an uprising against police and state violence led by the artist Black Lives Matter movement with renewed passion after the killing of George Floyd. The Sick Muse stands Jesi Gaston Samantha Riott talks “The Ever Corrosive Question of Why?” in support of all calls to dismantle the current police apparatus rooted in violence, authoritarianism, and interviews Noah Jones . 17 white supremacy, and radically transform our conception of ART DIRECTORS society’s conception of collective security. Our editors all Natalia Rios Glitter Moneyyy Trades Malort for That Fine Cali Tree have been involved in the mutual aid responses to Covid-19 Benjamin Karas and the efforts to protest the current police state and seek Jol(ene)isha Whatevr and Noah Jones . 19 justice for George Floyd, and thus we have fallen a little behind on our publishing schedule. But fear not, going COVER ART “Inland “ by Esra Esra Kalk forward we return to our quarterly issues. Stillness in La Villita: a Collaboration project between Yollocalli, Enlace, & The Kickback Victoria Parra . 22 This issue we asked for submissions on the theme “Chicago BACK COVER ART community looking out”, connecting local art and perspectives to Noelle Davis (Xander Black) Live Music is Not Dead Yet! . 25 places outside Chicago, near and far. Kicking things off, pt f. wd: Creating a Downstate Home for the Sonic Avant-Garde the collage on the cover and the piece to the left is by the WEB amazing Esra Esra Kalk, who lives in Istanbul, Turkey and www.thesickmuse.com Eddie Breitweiser . 27 found us on Instagram. You may find two more of Esra’s pieces to on Page 29 & 30. Follow Esra on instagram @ EMAIL esraesrakalk. Page 17 has an interview with Samantha To: Alex Karsavin . 29 [email protected] poetry Riott, an artist from Brooklyn who came through Chicago Stephanie Galicia 30 on tour. Page 19 catches up with Chicago’s Glitter Moneyyy ostensible . recently moved to California. Page 27 discusses pt.fwd, an FB: @Chisickmuse organization forging a relationship between Chicago and IG: @Sickmuse.chi Beekeeper Pt . 1 Oux . 31 Bloomington-Normal. lyrics Strange Fear Bitter Marry . 32 We have a Patreon to help cover costs along with the support we get from sponsors. If you can, please visit our Patreon to Eroded Samantha Riott . 33 become a patron and support Chicago arts! Adele Hink 35 comics Soma . "Superego" by Esra Esra Kalk The Sick Muse Gender Custom Aim Ren Beland . 36 The Sick Muse 13 © 2020 Authors, Artists, & Photographers Jackie’s Serengeti’s House Ajai by Egon Schiele by pt Bell Chicago emcee Serengeti has wrought the Kenny Dennis saga with an arresting level of specificity. It’s impossible to comprehensively Joshua Virtue is both the proletariat and the vanguard. Two weeks summarize the body of work, spread over many albums, in fewer words into the Covid-19 crisis, they posted: “Hey I know no one gives than the work comprises. The saga is an embellished, artisanal map as a shit about music rn but I’m very angry at the government and big as the territory it’s intended to represent. my mom, grandma, and little sister in Florida have no income. I’m putting together a rather caustic album at the speed of light to Notwithstanding, a summary that does no justice to the Kenny Dennis support them in these trying times.” Two weeks later, Jackie’s saga, but hopefully provides entre to the latest entry Ajai: Geti plays House drops on Bandcamp, proceeds going directly to their O’Douls and brauts-obsessed, 60-year-old, Polish-American Chicagoan mother with the encouragement for listeners to donate directly to Kenny Dennis; Kenny’s secret past as part of Chicago’s (fictional) 90’s her Venmo or Cash App (@jacqueline-virtue and $JacquelineVirtue, GOAT rap collective The Grimm Teachaz is revealed; he loses everything respectively). in failing to rekindle his rap career—his friends, his family, his job, his sobriety, his sanity, and his wife (first, to Tom Selleck, then to a plane This record is revolutionary. It is mutual-aid. But it doesn’t sacrifice crash), which is where the tale left off at the end of Geti’s last 2018 Kenny 6e hooks for message. In fact, Jackie’s House is an outright BANGER. release . The album begins slowly, hypnotically, until the toms of “Boxspring” In Geti’s latest addition to the Kenny Dennis saga Ajai, we flashforward hit and rip it apart like your peaking. Virtue’s lyrics enter like a Ajai, Cover Art by Andrew McAlpine skipping-rhyme. Tenacity weaved throughout. “Squirrel” hits with three years. Now, Kenny runs a food truck in Minneapolis, gleefully Paul Revere energy, “if you ain’t with the revolution steer clear,” binding his psychic wounds with street fashion tapestries: Supreme sweats inspired by Rammellzee, Guess x A$AP Rocky skinny jeans, the Having been adjacent to sneakerheads for so much of my youth, and being Jackie's House, Cover Art by Elisabeth Sclawy-Adelman but the warning is self proclaimed: “wake up, America, we’re wracked with an affinity for grim material histories, I recount to you the here!” Their clarion call is not a demand, but a threat, to all those Balenciaga jacket with the spikes on the shoulders. The fledgling hype beast sells that selfsame jacket to Ajai, a more established hype beast. most ambitious conceit I encountered on the album: At one point, Ajai’s who have allowed for this precarity, to put the powers that be nameless wife and her healthcare industry colleagues discuss the fraught on warning. In epic repetitions, the final salvo: “I swear to God Ajai and Kenny convene but once, online, for the sake of that sale. Before that meeting, Geti spends the first half of the album microscopically relationship between pharmaceutical prices & Medicaid payments. Ajai I’ll take the m*therf**kers with me though.” They’ll put the whole selfishly interrupts with a non-sequitur about the Nike Doernbecher 8’s, one movement on his back if necessary. mapping the extent of Ajai’s emptiness. Ajai is a fashionista so obsessive that it’s doubtful there’s anything else within him, beyond that’s actually all too pertinent given the sneaker line’s material history. But the compulsion to cop the next exclusive name-brand drop. Given that pertinence is lost on all parties. I could drop a full-page article about the Tracks like “Fenti Face” and “Phil” (featuring everyone’s favorite significance of that vignette, alone, its content, its frame, its wit… uncle, Rahim Salaam) warm like summertime. Porch-packers just the motormouth, hypertechnical flow with which Geti describes him, maybe he’s a foil to Kenny’s dense but meandering free associations. waiting for shelter-in-place to be lifted and the kids to fill backyards Chicago hip-hop wunderkind Joshua Virtue (whose album is reviewed on the with beer and exuberance. “12 Million Wulong!” features fellow But Ajai could also be a grim portent of what’s to come for Kenny, now that the longest threads of his history have been severed. previous page of this issue as it turns out) retweeted a link to The Chicago WHY? Records footsoldiers Ruby Watson and Malci in solidarity Reader’s review of Ajai, commenting with deceptive simplicity, “This album against those who “cross the street when you see ‘em begging for Ajai is an actual book”. It is not a book being rapped. It is raps, it is a book, its something to eat / just like a Colonizer would.” The writing on is an exemplary display of Geti’s mastery of engrossing storytelling, perspective, and narrative irony. Geti presents characters and settings as present as anything in Ellison, as embodied as your next-door-neighbor or a parent. Hearing Ajai, you might never realize Jackie’s House Ajai in first person but once, to have Ajai tell us some specifics about A perfect Covid companion, encompasses the you were being beat over the head with the latest chapter in the next great strange times we find ourselves in. Remaining as catchy and vital his taste in fashion. Ultimately, he reveals that “Those are just clothes. I like the way that I look. I like the people in line.