Neighborhood News
“De Tocqueville talks about the two strains in the American spirit, one Ben Franklin individualism and the other Jefferson-style democracy,” Hank De Zutter reflected, “and he warns that too much individualism is going to make the country ripe for despotism, a top-down “this is best for you.’
But that’s just a rule of thumb. It’s not how it has to be.
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Where did this news tip come from? Margie Korshak damn sure didn’t phone it in. Kup got it from “Newstips,” a community tipsheet that De Zutter and Thom Clark are now publishing at Malcolm X College. It’s one of the services that De Zutter and Clark’s Community Media Workshop has set in motion to prevent a news vacuum in life beyond the lakefront.
De Zutter and Clark asked the local leaders to let them know whenever their groups did something eventful. That’s how the Bucktown action showed up in Kup. David Cristeal, director of the Near Northwest Neighborhood Network, mentioned to De Zutter the rally his block club was planning against drugs. Bells went off. De Zutter, who’s worked for daily papers and knows what they want, recognized “the proverbial good story–righteous rage, confrontation, the “good people’ trying to take back the streets in a novel way.”
For six years in the mid-80s, Clark edited The Neighborhood Works, a pushy little antiestablishmentarian monthly paper whose editorials (by Clark) attacking the proposed world’s fair a few years ago won a Lisagor Award. The Community Media Workshop is an idea he and De Zutter hatched, Clark says, “over several years of Friday night poker games.”
Coda: The Cuban Salsa Crisis
Thanks to the U.S. State Department, we can look forward to a peaceful weekend in Grant Park. Orquesta Aragon, Fidel Castro’s notorious cha-cha-ing cat’s-paws, won’t be there at Viva! Chicago to infuriate one portion of the audience and subvert everyone else.
“I understand politically why the Cubans here don’t want them,” said Negrete, “but it’s a loss to musicology, it’s a loss to ethnomusicology from my point of view. . . . It’s a style of music as only they can do it, you know? They represent the root of Afro-Cuba. Where the other groups are fusion groups, you know, like Ruben Blades, from Panama. So it’s going to be a loss.”
