Joe Swanberg, 32, is a writer and director (and actor and producer and editor and cinematographer) who has managed to fund and release 16 full-length films since 2005, and has become known as one of the fathers of the low-key, low-budget “mumblecore” genre. His recent movie, Drinking Buddies, is currently at a very respectable 82 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Interview by Gwynedd Stuart
Photographs by Ryan Lowry

I always liked movies. Freshman year of high school I read John Pierson’s book Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes. It introduced me to the world of independent filmmaking. I started watching Spike Lee’s movies and Jim Jarmusch and Hal Hartley, Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith—all of the big 90s American indie filmmakers.

I graduated high school in ’99 and went to film school at [Southern Illinois University]. I went down there wanting to make Reservoir Dogs and that’s just not what that school’s attuned to. We had to shoot 16-millimeter. I had to edit on Steenbeck flatbed editors. I conformed my own negative. We finished the film prints. It was a very rigorous, old-school film program.

When people ask me “Should I go to film school or not?,” I say go—because you’re gonna make a lot of terrible movies in an environment where everyone’s making terrible movies. That is such a healthier thing to do than to make terrible movies in a professional environment. It’s a great excuse to vomit out all of your bad, pretentious ideas.

The first thing I did when I graduated was I went to the Telluride Film Festival. I was accepted to their student symposium. It was the most amazing postgraduation experience any film student could possibly have. Stephen Sondheim came in and talked to us, Herzog, Errol Morris, Rolf de Heer, Chloe Sevigny.

Then I went to work for the Chicago International Film Festival. I was just booking hotels and flights for the visiting filmmakers, but what was cool about that job is that I was technically considered part of the programming department, so I got to see how a film festival works. I went back to the festival the following year and in the meantime I’d made my first movie. So the second year I was really paying attention because I had a movie I was going to be submitting soon, Kissing on the Mouth.

I went to SXSW with Kissing on the Mouth in 2005 and met the Duplass brothers, Andrew Bujalski, Ti West, David Lowery, Spencer Parsons. There’s never been a five-day period where I met so many people who would be important to me for the rest of my life. I went to Austin, had this amazing experience, met all these amazing people—and then came back to my day job [in web design]. Most of us did. Bujalski was working at a bookstore, I think. Ti West was working at Diesel jeans in New York. It was like we had this anomaly week where we felt like filmmakers, then the harsh reality of our day jobs kicked in.

Then there was Hannah Takes the Stairs. It came out in 2007. I’ve been a full-time freelance filmmaker since. I don’t have a “job” still. My life is dependent on whatever the next movie is and whether that succeeds or not. My wife [Kris Swanberg] is a filmmaker as well, so when money comes in, we know how to squirrel it away for times where there is no money coming in. It’s a weird career. Money comes in big chunks and then there’s six months with no chunks. But the chunks get bigger every year.

Emily Teeter, 60, is an Egyptologist, research associate, and curator at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, where she’s in charge of special exhibits.

Interview by Aimee Levitt
Photographs by John Sturdy

I got interested in Egyptology sort of late, by other people’s standards. I was in college. I got interested, really, because of the whole hieroglyphic language system. I thought, how cool would that be to be able to read what they were writing about themselves? To be an Egyptologist means you can read the language, as opposed to an archaeologist, who does field method and doesn’t necessarily know how to read Egyptian.

People say some of the richest archaeological sites are museum basements, and it’s true. We have 50,000 Egyptian and Nubian objects—our whole collection is about 300,000 objects—and some of these things have never really been looked at. The process is, you identify an object, you look at it, you translate the inscriptions, and try to make sense out of what the object is. With Egyptology it’s so immediate because if we have a statue or something of a person with his name, or her name, and especially the job descriptions, we can usually find other monuments of that person in other collections throughout the world. So we build up these enormous family trees, these big genealogies.

All these things are really, really important to specialists, but a lot we wouldn’t necessarily put in the galleries. Let’s see what we’ve got here: Here are some written records. These are Islamic pieces. That’s a mud brick from the time of Rameses II. Here’s a human head.

This piece, on the bottom right, it doesn’t look very exciting. It’s a piece of stone with ink—very cursive hieroglyphic writing called hieratic. The thing that’s so fascinating is that this is the first labor strike in history. It dates to about 1180 BC. It talks about how there were men from a particular village—their job was to build tombs for the royal families. And it says they were in the Valley of the Queens, which is in Thebes, Luxor, and they were building tombs for the king’s sons. They weren’t paid, and they walked off the job. It says they went out of the Valley of the Queens and walked down to another temple called the Ramesseum, and they say they sat down on the floor of the temple and put their tools down and said, “No more!” They did a sit-in! The story breaks off there, but the tombs were later finished so presumably they won the strike.

Egyptology has, of course, been affected by the political situation, but it’s not as affected as most people might think. If you read the American press, you think that the whole country is in flames. There are some areas that are not very stable. But, for example, the University of Chicago has a field mission in Luxor that’s been there since 1924. They went out on schedule. And most people in areas like Thebes, Luxor, areas that have been very calm, it’s really not affecting them—other than the issue of if they have graduate students, because the universities do not want graduate students to be going out when there are travel advisories. So yeah, it’s difficult, but it seems to be stabilizing. We think. Perhaps we’re looking at the new normal in Egypt. But our hearts go out to the Egyptians because this is very, very tough for them.

Jen Richards, 37, helped build Chicago’s reputation as a center for contemporary classical music as managing director of Eighth Blackbird and president of New Music Chicago. She’s now working full-time to change public perceptions of transgender people.

Interview by Deanna Isaacs
Photographs by John Sturdy

When I first came out as trans about two years ago, I started networking with other trans people and learning about the issues the community was facing. I found that my skills were very much in need, in terms of organizing, in terms of providing platforms for other people to tell their stories.

The stakes were so much higher in that world. I saw friends getting fired, getting kicked out of their homes, being harassed on the street. The very first event I went to after I came out was a memorial service for a 23-year-old woman who was found in an alleyway with a bullet to the head.

So many issues collide around trans people and trans bodies: racism, classism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia. I started to put more and more energy into waging those battles.

The trans umbrella includes any form of gender variance, but there are subtle distinctions between transgender, transsexual, genderqueer, cross-dressing, transvestitism. A lot of the community, once they get to the point where people assume they’re the gender they’re presenting as, basically disappear. You no longer see them. Chicago has a particularly vital community; I work with a little over a hundred out, visible trans people who are engaged in some form of activism.

I launched several websites. The first was “We Happy Trans,” a couple years ago, which provides a platform for trans people to tell their own stories, but particularly ones that focus on the positive aspects of the trans experience. I also created a website for people to share stories about dating, WTF Trans Dating, and another to tell love stories about trans people: Trans Love Stories. And I do a podcast called Sugar & Spice with one of my closest friends, Bailey Jay, who happens to be one of the world’s most famous transsexual porn stars—kind of an advice and news podcast.

But the biggest project lately has been the Trans 100, which I launched last March. It’s basically a list of 100 trans activists doing work in the United States.

This is a big deal, because the most well-known event in the trans community takes place in November every year. It’s called the Transgender Day of Remembrance. People gather throughout the country, and they read aloud the names of all the known murdered trans people in the last year, and it’s usually several hundred names. It’s a very somber, disconcerting experience.

For that to be the defining moment of community building within our population is really depressing. So what I wanted to do was to set up something that is about celebrating those who are living and actually doing the work in the community.

We launched that last year. There were more people from Chicago on the list than from any other city: Trisha Holloway, who works with the Howard Brown Health Center; Channyn Parker, who’s at the TransLife Center at Chicago House; Nino Dorenzo, who works at National Youth Pride Services; Christina Kahrl, who’s a sports reporter for ESPN; Ellie June Navidson, who’s an activist and writer; Rebecca Kling, who’s a performance artist. There’s a huge range of people here in Chicago doing some really incredible work, and a whole generation of us now who realize that unless we stand up and make ourselves known, the violence that happens, against younger trans people especially, isn’t going to change.

What I want to do next is start a new organization to give out grants directly to trans individuals in order to help them create arts and media projects. For instance, if there’s a trans singer-songwriter who wants to record an album about their experience, we could give a grant to them. A filmmaker who wants to do a documentary about their experience, or a theater, to commission a trans playwright. Anything that’s created by trans people that honestly reflects their story, their issues, and their perspective.

I grew up with a very traditional family where boys did certain things and girls did different things, and those worlds weren’t supposed to overlap at all. I internalized that. I went into therapy several times, to try and get rid of [my trans identity]. I wanted to believe that I was just a cross-dresser. That this wasn’t real. All the stories I heard about being trans were so tragic, and I didn’t want that. I remember someone told me once flat-out, “Don’t consider transition unless your only other option is suicide.”

That was kind of the standard within the online communities, that it’s so awful— you’re going to lose your family, you’re going to lose your friends, you’ll lose your job, you’ll have to hide your past. And that’s part of the reason that once I did transition, and found that I was actually much happier. I wanted to start creating positive stories, to let other people know that it doesn’t have to be that dire, that you don’t always lose everything, and that if you do lose some things, we all encounter life changes for various reasons and ultimately it’s worth it. I wouldn’t trade the happiness I feel now for any of the things I’ve lost.

Lyra Hill, 26, is a comics artist, filmmaker, and the creator of the Brain Frame series at Constellation, where cartoonists perform their comics. The result: a new artistic medium.

Interview by Peter Margasak
Photographs by Ryan Lowry

Night City is a dream narrative that I wrote when I was still in school at SAIC. It’s a bit of a nightmare experience. This is a comic I translated into a performance at the second Brain Frame. The comic is only six pages long and there’s a character who appears at the beginning, Llama Man. It’s a character I use a lot in my work. He was the antagonist of my recurring childhood nightmare and now I see him as a psychopomp, like a guide from the world of the conscious to the unconscious.

When I was in school I made a costume of this character and for the performance I wore the costume. I’ve used this character in several subsequent performances. I use a monster voice, a wireless microphone, and a smoke machine whenever I do a Llama Man reading. My father taught me how to walk on stilts when I was young and he would build stilts for me, so I had a knowledge basis already.

The first time I read a comic performatively was a month before the first Brain Frame, at a poetry and prose reading series. And in doing so I started receiving all of these other ideas about other ways to translate my comics into performances. It was a time of great inspiration. I thought that it was the perfect opportunity to take advantage of these ideas and to see what my friends might do presented with the same options. For the first show [in July 2011] I thought: Who makes weird comics and is fun to watch? Who are my most theatrical friends? The show was such a hit that the people who lived at the space said, “Oh, you should keep doing this,” and I said, “OK, maybe I’ll do it every other month.” Five minutes later I heard them telling people that it was definitely going to be happening every other month.

At the beginning I had to recruit most of the readers. I spent a lot of time convincing people. Now—because those people have been to the show—they understand that there are no boundaries, and I want them to do weird stuff, but in the beginning it was difficult to convey my goals. A lot of the success has been due to the naivete of the readers. Cartoonists are not people who are onstage in front of their friends very often, so when the audience sees a clear novice, shaking and worried, there’s a warmth to the whole undertaking and a generosity of spirit. That generosity is still very potent in the show, but I see this new professionalism coming in as well, and I want to quit before that professionalism overtakes the naivete. I keep getting more and more applications, which is unfortunate because the show is booked until the end, which is in August 2014.

The aim of the show became clear to me as I was producing it. I was thinking back and I wondered if the only reason I wanted to do it was to have a venue to try my experiments. As the show went on I had more faith in the community. More and more people are making comics specifically for the show that are based in performance. It feels like a new medium, which is the most exciting thing. It’s so rewarding to see other people pick up on that and work in their own ways to advance the possibilities.

I have to keep expanding my own repertoire, and I have to keep bettering myself and my work. At this point I see that happening in longer performances, in full-length performances with a real theater setting, and I can’t do that at Brain Frame. Brain Frame is so much me working—things like writing e-mails, making posters, promoting, and getting equipment—and I want to use that time now for my own work.

Amir George, 26, studied filmmaking at Columbia College, served as a programmer for Black Cinema House, founded the local screening organization Cinema Culture, curated the touring film program “Black Radical Imagination,” and serves as a production assistant at Little Village High School, as part of the citywide program Free Spirit Media.

Interview by J.R. Jones
Photographs by Todd Diederich

I’m from Englewood, 75th and Stewart. My father, he did photography. My mom was a postal worker. I always had an interest in film from my parents being into movies. I had the chance to make a movie in high school. It was supposed to be an adaptation of Macbeth, but done like a Law & Order-type show. That’s what made me go into film school. But it started, probably, [with] my father just taking me out to movies and letting me play with his camera.

I started looking into internships, and I found out about Chicago Filmmakers. I went there, and I met Patrick Friel. I was his intern for a while and I learned how to program. So that made me set up my own thing. Cinema Culture is a grass-roots film organization. A lot of people whose work we show, they can’t get into the festivals—but they have good movies. So, we give them an audience and expose people to work that they wouldn’t have seen.

Another one I’m doing currently, outside of the Cinema Culture, is “Black Radical Imagination,” an experimental film program of African-American filmmakers. Who is telling the stories about black people, and how are these stories being told, and what are these stories about, and what type of images or language are you using? So we’re doing this program, there’s an Afrofuturist theme to it. It’s showing Mae Jemison, the first black woman to go in space; it’s showing these people who exist in this postmodern black experience of being alienated. But that’s just part of being an African-American in general.

I put together a program by naming it first. I have a program for an experimental film festival, and it’s called “The Clarity of Obscurity.” So it’s like, “OK, let’s try to find some films that could fit with this title.” But [a film] has to mean something. It has to show something that I wouldn’t be used to seeing.

Sometimes I have my own work in the programs, depending on what the program is. Like “Black Radical Imagination,” we needed futurist films—“Well, I’ll make a futurist film.” I just try to show people what’s out there and make what’s not out there, I guess.

With Cinema Culture it’s more about creating audiences, or bringing these unknown filmmakers to people’s attention. But in relation to Black Cinema House, that audience and that space was there. “What needs to be in this space? What type of movies do we need to show here?” There are people that come that you don’t expect to come. You had people that was just fans of Theaster [Gates, the artist who founded the space]. You had people that was real cinema buffs. You had film students that just wanted to see what it was about. You had community people, neighbors live across the street, they just wanted to see what was happening in this house. And that audience kind of cultivated itself.

Julia Pham, 25, a self-taught chef, operates Relish Underground Dining in her apartment and works at True Nature Foods, where she sells organic juices, produce, and meat. She’s used those experiences to explore the use of local ingredients in ethnic cooking—and to build an eclectic community of food lovers.

Interview by Brianna Wellen
Photographs by Ryan Lowry

I moved around a lot as a kid. My parents got divorced when I was two. When I was eight I moved in with my dad in San Jose, California. It was pretty rough there. My dad found out that my brother had a meth addiction when I was 15 and my brother was 17, and my brother left home and left me there with my dad. Things were really strange and awkward. So I moved in with my mom for six months. Things were also rough there. She kicked me out of her house when I was 16. No one took me in except for my aunt here in Chicago, who owns [Vietnamese sandwich shop and bakery] Ba Le. I’ve been here ever since.

I don’t talk to my parents. We have a weird relationship. They just don’t get what I do. But I’m really close to my aunt; she’s like my mom. I worked for her for six years. I started out as a cashier at Ba Le, then five years into it I became a manager and her public representative. So I learned how to manage the kitchen and the front of the house, and I talked to people about our identity in the Vietnamese community. I learned a lot from that job, a lot about business and what people want when they go out to eat. I drew a lot of inspiration from my aunt because she was managing a lot of it herself. I was always trying to match that.

Before I became manager, my grandfather had passed away. I learned about my grandfather’s history and was completely blown away. He started Ba Le in Vietnam and came to America and started teaching people how to run their own businesses. There are Ba Le bakeries all across the country. That really resonated with me, and I wanted to explore food on my own.

I left Ba Le to go back to school. I was going into art education at the time, but when I was there I just felt like that was not the place for me. Because I hadn’t had a conventional life, this conventional path wasn’t working. So I left and started working in different kitchens, and along the way I just felt really unfulfilled because I had this voice inside of me saying, “Make this, make that,” and at work I was just making whatever my bosses wanted me to. I really needed an outlet. I had a dream about serving people in my apartment, and I woke up and just said, “OK, I can make that happen. Let me find a bigger space, let me find dishes and a table, and I can just do it myself.” And that’s what I did. I moved into this apartment, and I started Relish.

I never felt a need to go to [culinary] school, because when I was in school for art I didn’t feel a strong need to make art. School has always made me feel creatively stunted. I figured I would just make my own education by working and getting to know different business owners and chefs and farmers.

With Ba Le, a lot of being there really helped me think deeper about my heritage and the culture that lies within food and how I can translate that through my own cooking. Where I work now, True Nature, is a great place for someone like me because I get fresh local produce all the time, so I’m working with some of the best midwestern produce, and it’s going straight to my diners.

I started shopping at the Andersonville Farmers Market and talking to the farmers there and it got this stew started in my brain to experiment with different ingredients. Every week I got something different that I was unfamiliar with, and I made a dish out of it, and I came back to the farmer and talked to them about it. It was a true educational experience for me. The ingredients were really my instructors.

A lot of people come to the dinners because they hear about it from friends. It’s great because the conversation just keeps going, and there are characters at the table that I get to know and everyone else gets to know. It’s a good communal experience where people who would sit next to each other but wouldn’t normally talk to each other finally get together and share their different backgrounds. I’ve met some crazy-talented people here. I would never approach them at a bar or a restaurant or anything like that, so it’s really cool that I can connect with them. I’m learning more and more through these people because I see that they have odd jobs too or they have a certain specialty. It really helps me see that they appreciate my food.

Afaf Ahmed, 41, was a translator in Sudan and Cairo and an activist for the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. In 2004 she came to Chicago with her husband and teenage son (a second son was born here). When we spoke, she was preparing to open Abu Daoud Cafe, the city’s first Sudanese restaurant, in Wicker Park.

Interview by Mike Sula
Photographs by John Sturdy

I was born in Kordofan, Sudan. It is in the desert, close the equator, so it rains like six to seven months a year. Many people there are farmers. They farm hibiscus, sesame, peanuts, durum.

I’m from a big family. From my mom’s side we are eight. I am number five. I’m the black goat of the family. I’m a hustler. I’d rather be an American. I can say anything about the government; they can’t do anything.

When I was young I very much liked English. Natively I speak Arabic. I just found it’s very easy to learn a language. I have a BA in English and then I did another year [of] translation as a subject. Because I was very good speaking English I used to get chances translating for the NGOs [nongovernmental organizations]. One of the languages I [picked up] is the Eritrean language, because [the Eritreans] used to immigrate to north Sudan, running from the war. I got to translate for a Yugoslavian company; they were building highways in Sudan. So I picked [up] the Bosnian language. The managers in that project speak English, but the workers from Yugoslavia speak no English.

Words stick in my mind. I will always remember a word being said the first time.

I had to learn Spanish. Do you know why I learned Spanish? I learned Spanish to solve my son’s murder. Two years [after moving] here I lost Khalid. We used to live in Logan Square. [In] Logan Square everybody speaks Spanish. When I go to any group and say, “Do you know about my son’s murder?,” they speak to each other in Spanish and then to me in English.

I’m hanging out in the street spending the rest of the time with the police. That’s all I was doing. No work. After 18 months we had six witnesses. They do speak English but when it comes [time] to speak about the crime they speak in Spanish.

Where I grew up we never had a murder. People go and die in war. We lost two million people. First of all we don’t have guns. People in my country were not violent. In Sudan my son could not be killed.

I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I remember people in my country saying [if] somebody [has] been killed and he didn’t get justice, his soul would be roaming. I’d been feeling Khalid is roaming around me all the time. As soon as the jury said guilty I felt like a big heavy thing dropped [off] my chest. If you ask me now what I want from that guy [who was convicted of killing Khalid], I feel sorry for him. Do I hate him? I feel he is a victim. There is no big difference between him and Khalid. His mom brought three kids from Cuba for a better life in America.

After all I have seen in that last decade, I thought, I just want to do something with my heart. So my project is food. When I was 11 years old I cooked for my whole family. And we are four girls and four boys and mom and dad and sometimes grandparents. My grandmother, she is a good cook. She is somebody very good in using herbs.

Boka Restaurant Group veteran Benjamin Schiller, 33, developed the cocktail programs at GT Fish & Oyster and the Girl & the Goat. Currently he’s beverage director with the Fifty/50 crew and a partner in their latest venture, the Berkshire Room.

Interview by Kate Schmidt
Photographs by John Sturdy

I was always intrigued by movies, like on AMC, where you’d see someone look at a bottle of wine and instantly know whether it was good or bad and everything about it. That world was just so foreign to me. And so when I had a chance to study wine at 21, I dove in.

Paula Houde was the person who hired me [at the Peninsula]. She came out of Charlie Trotter’s, and she must’ve had a soft spot for people who have no idea what they’re doing. I worked in the wine bar area downstairs. It took me a while, but eventually I got it. I just kept working hard and showing up and eventually, I guess, I was pretty proficient at my job.

I remember I saw in all these magazines bartenders on the east coast [and] west coast going to farmers’ markets, picking out fresh fruit, making their own syrups, and using all these crazy spirits I’d never heard of. And I was so impressed and just so envious of those guys. I think this was in ’06, ’07.

I’d party sometimes with friends and I’d try to batch out a cocktail or make something and it was always horrendous. But when I got to In Fine Spirits I got a chance to work every day at it. That’s where I really found my stride. A couple years ago I went and took my sommelier exam, and I passed that, but I decided not to pursue it.

I started at Boka just as a bartender, and I guess they were happy with what I was doing. They brought me in one day and said, “Hey, we’re opening a restaurant with Stephanie [Izard] and would you be interested in heading up the beverage program?” I met with Stephanie and she was really cool. Everyone was really excited about the Girl & the Goat, but this was before the Girl & the Goat turned into the juggernaut it became. So I headed up that program, and obviously that was the most successful restaurant in the history of food, pretty much.

From there they asked me to do GT Fish & Oyster. I worked at GT every day for the first month just so that the reviews would be positive, so I would be there making all the drinks for all the food critics.

I had gotten to a point where I had a lot of very, very serious people, very, very affluent people, people with a ridiculous sum of money come to me and say, “How much would you like?” Pretty much just like that. “If I would write you a check, what would it be?”

Abby Titcomb, 28, dropped out of art school and left her bartending job to fold beer cases for Three Floyds Brewing. Now she’s the only woman on the small team of brewers and has made her mark with her own specialty beer, Das Kleine Schwarze Einhorn.

Interview by Brianna Wellen
Photographs by Ryan Lowry

I am from a really small town in northern Wisconsin: New Richmond. I went to the University of Minnesota for two years, then transferred to the Art Institute of Minnesota for photography. And then I just kind of got bored. I ended up absolutely hating photography—I’m not sure why that happened. I need to be challenged a lot. There was nothing doing that up there. I came down here for my birthday. I’d never been here, and I had so much fun that I was like, “Fuck it. I’ll move.” So I got to Chicago in August of 2007.

I was bartending, but I wanted to do something that produced something. I wanted to see my work. I was at dinner at the Bristol one night, trying to figure out my life, and I was like, “Holy shit. I love beer, I love talking about beer, I love drinking beer. Why don’t I make beer?” So I talked to a couple people in the industry, just wondering, where do I start, what do I do? They directed me toward Siebel Institute [of Technology], the brewing school. I actually got hired at Three Floyds in 2010 building boxes—making beer cases. They knew I went to Seibel, and they knew I had a passion for it. I moved over to the brewing side in January of 2011.

When I first started brewing, I thought, there aren’t many women doing this—people are definitely going to notice. I knew I wasn’t the first. This isn’t a new concept—women brewing—there have just been fewer. It’s the same job, you have the same exact ability as everybody else. I’m all for women and I’m really adamant about it, but at the same time, let’s not victimize ourselves. I never got any opposition that was like, “You can’t do this.” We absolutely should be celebrated, but I think good brewers in general should be celebrated. It’s never men vs. women; it’s not a battle.

I’ve never been involved in an industry where the people are so passionate about what they do. The drinkers are so involved and so in love with the beer. I had a little bit of an inkling of people who drink beer and love beer, but people love this shit to a point where it’s obsessive. We love you, thank you so much for loving us, but I’m sorry that we can’t make Zombie Dust every day. Don’t take it personally, we love you.

We all make every beer, but we’re given the opportunity to make “our beer” that we wanted to make personally. Mine was Das Kleine Schwarze Einhorn, the Little Black Unicorn. It’s a black lager schwarzbier. That’s the only one I really have claim to now, but I have a lot of ideas.

I love PBR. We get a lot of shit for it. I remember my first Dark Lord Day, I brought a six pack of PBR out of the cooler, and I was walking it into the office for the dudes who were running the shit downstairs and people were like yelling and jeering at me: “How dare you do this!” I was like, “Bitches, I work here.” Once you’re drinking all these nice beers, it’s nice to have a PBR to cleanse it. It is palate fatigue all the time.

Max Temkin, 26, is a designer and game developer. He’s one of the eight creators of the hugely popular Cards Against Humanity (“A party game for horrible people”).

Interview by Phillip Montoro
Photographs by John Sturdy

Thank you for not asking what my favorite card in the game is. Every interview, that’s the first question.

I started making games in college. There was no business behind it; I just wanted to play with my friends. We had a bunch of Nerf guns, and we made this game based on this dream we had of seeing one kid getting chased across the quad by 50 kids. This was in 2005, my freshman year at Goucher College in Baltimore.

This game, called Humans vs. Zombies, is like this big game of tag. Everyone runs around trying to avoid the zombies, the zombies try to tag everyone. It goes 24-7, all day, every day, everywhere on the campus, for like a week. It was superfun, superintense.

As soon as we started playing we realized how political and subversive it was—that really any kind of play, especially play in public, is inherently political, because you’re agreeing to act in a way that’s not the normal way to act, and you’re showing people a way to behave that’s not the normal way to behave. You’re showing people this really loving, playful, intimate way of acting with people. And for people to literally be just tear-assing down the quad, running for their lives—they really care. It really made an impression. It was like, wow, there’s something really powerful and subversive and radical here.

So that’s sort of what Cards Against Humanity was born out of. It was just taking these taboo or inappropriate topics and making fun of them and making light of them, which really got us going. It was something we made for ourselves, just like Humans vs. Zombies, and over time, as we played with more people and shared it, it just got bigger and bigger.

Our business decisions are all informed by our values about the game and the world we want to live in. So the business model for Cards is that we give the whole game away for free on our website as a download—you can just make it on your home printer—and then we also sell the boxed version. It’s done really well; I’m pretty sure right now it’s the top-selling, best-reviewed, and most-wished-for toy or game on Amazon.com, which is crazy.

We’ve never publicly talked about our sales numbers. Honestly, I don’t even know them. The way we try to think about the success of the game is, “What kind of opportunities does it give us in our lives?” So for me, I’ve been able to do much less freelance work and get to make my own interesting art and projects and games. One of the nice effects of the way we’ve kept the game independent and self-published it is that no one can tell us what we can and can’t write or how we can design it or what we can do, other than the eight of us. And that’s pretty cool. To me that’s the biggest sign of the success of the game, that we can creatively say anything we want with it.

My job within the company is doing a lot of the public-outreach stuff, so I do interviews, I design the website, I post on our Twitter. All eight creators have equal ownership of the company, and we split everything pretty much equally, so people do tend to keep honest and put a lot in. We write the game together, and never edit or write without all eight of us there—it’s just part of the ethic of the game. And we do it by consensus. We try not to vote on something if there’s even one person who really disagrees with a writing choice; we try to workshop it and find some middle ground.

Claiming ownership over ideas is kind of a dumb concept, because these things are all remixes and they all existed in the culture long before we were around. I collect board games, and out of curiosity we’ve done some historical research on games like Cards Against Humanity, and the earliest one we were able to find and buy was a game from the 1890s called An Account of Peter Coddle’s Visit to New York. One player has a little booklet, and he tells a story about this hobo named Peter Coddle going through New York, and everyone else has little slips of paper with the funny answers, and they put their answers in, and you pick the winning one. It’s Cards Against Humanity from the 1890s, and they’re all hilarious—they’re like, “A bucket of clams” and “A common dog.” They’re all such quaint 1800s things, but most of them are really subversive. If I had to guess, this was a game that ancient people were playing, carved in rocks or something—it’s just filling in a blank with something that’s not supposed to be in the blank. It’s just funny! It must have been discovered at the same time language was discovered.

Blank cards are something that our fans ask for a lot. People can write their own answers on them and put them in the game. My opinion on this, having written a lot of Cards Against Humanity cards and also read a lot of fan cards, is that people are terrible at writing Cards Against Humanity cards. They’re not funny, and they ruin the game when they write their own cards. Everybody thinks their inside jokes are funny, and they’re not. We test them, or we play them, and they’re horrible.

Oscar Antonio Rivera Jr., 24, is the coordinator and head mechanic for Bikes N’ Roses, a youth-led bicycle program organized through the Albany Park Neighborhood Council. The community-centered program offers bike mechanic classes and bike repair through its shop at 4749 N. Kedzie.

Interview by Julia Thiel
Photographs by John Sturdy

I grew up in Kelvyn Park, which is not a place where your mother would probably let you hang out outside as a kid. So the deal was, “Can I go ride my bike?” And I’d just ride far away. I would ride my bike closer to Logan Square, where it was a little more populated, more communal, less dramatic gang violence. It was safer for me to be riding around Chicago than idling in my own neighborhood.

One day my dad took me to Navy Pier, and I thought, oh man, that was easy. So I started doing that on my own. Of course, my parents didn’t exactly know I was riding all the way to Navy Pier and back. Get to Navy Pier and think, how much further can I go? Soldier Field, McCormick, 31st Street—just pushing it a little further and further every time.

When it started, the Bikes N’ Roses program physically looked like a blanket and an adjustable wrench in the park. It’s a youth-led organization created by teenagers who would hang around the Albany Park Neighborhood Council. Before I got here, they would sometimes get together, go to parks, and service people’s bikes for free. Just flipping them upside down and trying their best right then and there. It was trial and error.

They were around for about a year before I became a part of the team. I came in and realized that there wasn’t actually an experienced mechanic working with them, so I said, I want to volunteer for you guys. And they just hired me.

They had, on their own—a group of teenagers without a coordinator—somehow gotten a $20,000 grant from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. The CCHD we’re no longer a part of, and that’s because we’re part of another coalition that fights for human and refugee rights and same-sex marriage rights [Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights]. We were put into this dilemma. We refused as a whole to stop supporting the coalition, which caused us to lose the funding from the CCHD.

We got a grant for a summer youth employment program, which allowed me to hire 15 mechanics between the ages of 16 and 21. They’re all low-income youth. Then I cycled through about another 45 that were taking our class—so me and the 15 youth were teaching this bicycle mechanic class.

The bike shop opened up July 1. That grant money is now gone, so we’re trying to create fund-raiser rides, stuff like that, to continue running the shop. Hopefully getting vendor accounts, which will allow me to sell parts and accessories as well as offer service. Now that we have a storefront, we are actually fixing people’s bikes. We’re a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, so we run the business off donations, pretty much.

Lamar Johnson, 17, lives in Englewood and is a senior at Crane Tech, a west-side high school, where he was captain of the football team and is a star wrestler. It’s only his third year at Crane, but he’ll graduate in June in part because of the high school credits he earned in a summer Upward Bound program. Crane Tech is closing in 2015, and now has fewer than 150 students.

Interview by Steve Bogira
Photographs by John Sturdy

I was a bad little kid. I hung around with a bad crowd, and I got influenced a lot. But my mom and my dad stayed on my case with every little thing I did, and that’s what made me stay on track.

I took an Upward Bound program at Northeastern the summer after eighth grade. I’m not going to lie—what really made me get into the program was that the man who came to our school said we’d get a stipend check after we finished. I had to take a bus and train to the north side. My mom and dad were on me like white on rice—my mom woke me up at five o’clock every morning, “C’mon, get dressed, you gotta go to school.”

That program completely changed my life around. We was taking college classes, and the work was hard, but I was still getting A’s. I was like, “Man, I can actually do this.” People can say you can do stuff, but when you see it for yourself, it’s different.

I never had dreams about being a football player. But when I graduated out of eighth grade, me and my dad had a heart-to-heart conversation. He said he saw the athlete in me. He played football at Crane, and he said he knew some good coaches here.

My dad loved Crane. He used to tell me stories about it—about how the football team was so spectacular. This is a huge school, they can fit 2,000 kids, and he told me the school was packed back then. It was 120 guys trying out for varsity! They had to limit that down to 55.

When I got here it was only about 500 kids in the school, and they was going through the phases of closing the school down. That made it hard, ’cause there wasn’t a lot of guys that wanted to play football.

The team was kinda shaky, they weren’t winning no games. My dad told me to keep up the legacy. So I gathered up all the players I could—“Come and play football with us.” That’s how we got our team. Now we’re like a family. That’s our motto: One team, one family.

Our coaches put that in our mind-set, because we don’t have Catholic-school numbers. You go to them Catholic schools, they have like 50 guys on their football teams. We got 20, 22. He said, “No matter how many guys you have on the field, if you have a family on the field, they can win games.”

A coach told me that wrestling and football go hand in hand—that if you do wrestling, it’s going to help you with conditioning, with technique. For the first four matches, I was losing. I didn’t know what I was doing. He was like, “You ain’t got no passion about it.” That night I got on YouTube, looked up wrestlers, watched WWE [World Wrestling Entertainment], and I got a passion about it. And that’s when I started winning. Last year I qualified for state, but I didn’t get to go. Something about paperwork.

I’m glad I’m doing sports because I don’t have time to goof around and get in trouble. I live on the other side of the city, in Englewood, so I have to get up at five o’clock. I take the 63rd Street bus to Western, and the Western bus to Jackson. After school I have practice till six o’clock. By the time I get home it’s eight o’clock. Then I have to do all my homework. That don’t give me much time to sleep.

I’m talking to a couple of colleges right now: Alabama, Eastern Illinois, Nebraska, Augustana, and Lake Forest. I never heard of Lake Forest before. I looked it up on the computer. I looked at their football players. All I seen is white guys.

I didn’t know how I felt about that. I ain’t got nothing against white people, but I’m used to having a little color around me. I don’t want to say anything that offends them. They probably don’t listen to the music that I listen to. But I have a couple of white friends, and they act just like me, they listen to the same stuff I do. So I’ll probably find some type of group.

If their football team is anything like our football team, we’ll all be a brotherhood. If it’s a lot of white guys on the football field, then I’m just a brother from another mother. If they’re anything like our team, then I’m going to be OK.

I feel like I need to go to college—because if I do, it’s gonna make my little brothers want to go to college. And if they go to college, it’s going to make my little sister go to college. And once they graduate, their kids are going to go to college, my kids will go to college. It’ll start up a whole new generation for our family, because none of our family went to college. It feels like I could actually make a change, so I try to stay on track. You don’t want to mess up because that could start a chain reaction.

Linda Lutton, 42, is an award-winning education reporter for WBEZ. Last year she spent five months reporting for This American Life on Harper High, the Englewood school where 29 current and former students were the victims of gun violence in a single year.

Interview by Ben Joravsky
Photographs by John Sturdy

I’m from Minneapolis-Saint Paul. I had one grandparent on each side of the river there. That’s good training for journalists—you see both sides right away.

I’ve always been drawn to cities and other cultures. I’ve always had an interest in politics, urban issues, and race relations. At age ten I’d tell people I wanted to be a cultural anthropologist. When I was in fourth grade a lot of Laotian refugees moved to my suburb and enrolled in my school. My best friend was Laotian. I became really involved in that community. That was the first foreign language I learned.

I went to the UW-Madison and majored in English and urban studies. In 1992—my junior year—I came to Chicago to study with an urban studies program. I lived in Uptown. It was like a boot camp training for journalists. They walked us through every issue facing the city by bringing us to neighborhoods where those issues were playing out.

After college I knew I wanted to be a reporter in Chicago. But I didn’t think it was possible without knowing Spanish. So I went to Guatemala. While I was there I volunteered as an international observer of refugees returning from Mexico. For nine months I lived in a huge tent with hundreds of other people in a refugee camp. I washed my clothes in the river.

When I returned to Chicago I moved to Pilsen. I still live there with my husband, [muralist] Hector Duarte, and our three children.

My first job as a writer here was with the Chicago Alliance for Neighborhood Safety. They were pushing for community policing. I wrote about things like whether or not fast-track demolition helped communities reduce crime. I remember I went to a press conference where Mayor Daley announced that Englewood Hospital would be demolished. I asked the only on-topic question. Everybody was asking about other things, whatever the issue of the day was. By the time I got back to my office there was a message from the mayor’s office. They said I’d been disruptive at the press conference. My boss said, “What happened?” I said, “Nothing—I was just asking about the thinking behind demolishing more buildings in Englewood.”

That was my introduction to how the press works in Chicago. Meaning, you will get pushback from the government about the questions you ask and the things you want to know about and the issues you are looking at.

I have come to understand this is routine. But I still think it’s an offense to democracy. Today every education reporter in Chicago gets calls and complaints about their work from the CPS press office. I’m willing to listen to any person’s perspective, but I won’t be intimidated by someone who’s paid to control the press.

I became education reporter at WBEZ in 2008. Before that I’d covered education for the Daily Southtown newspaper. And before that I wrote about politics, schools, neighborhood development—you name it—for the Reader and other publications.

I’d like to be known for reporting from the streets. I spent five months on and off reporting from inside Harper High for This American Life. We were writing about the 29 current and former students who were shot—eight of them killed in one year. I interviewed the principal at the funeral for her eighth student. The audio was haunting. The principal broke down.

Abraham Levitan, 35, is a bandleader, piano teacher, a cappella vet, and comedic savant. He has fronted the local indie pop-rock bands Pearly Sweets & the Platonics and Baby Teeth and is the founder of Piano Power, a collective of music teachers that does house calls. He cohosts the Hideout’s monthly game show, Shame That Tune, composing songs on the fly that celebrate the contestants’ most embarrassing moments.

Interview by Kevin Warwick
Photographs by John Sturdy

I was very much an eager beaver. At my first [piano] lesson—it was the week before my sixth birthday—I got a pencil with a keyboard on it as a present. And I was excited about that.

I tootled along until I was 12. I asked my piano teacher whether it would be possible to start incorporating rock fare into lessons, because I was already playing by ear. I remember being at my grandma’s house and watching the video for Cheap Trick’s “The Flame,” the late-80s power ballad, and having this moment where I thought, I could go over to the piano and figure that out.

My teacher’s response was, “If you want to start incorporating more REO Speedwagon and Chicago, I see no reason why we couldn’t do that.” I thought that was a pretty dated response. I don’t know what I would’ve been happy to hear in that moment. Hair metal would’ve been a start, for sure. I decided the piano-lesson scene wasn’t swinging enough.

I did sing in two a cappella groups: the Spizzwinks and the Whiffenpoofs. When I got to Yale as a freshman, I found out that if you stuck it out with a cappella, by senior year you could do this world tour for three months. Coming from the midwest, I didn’t know it was not the nerdiest possible thing you could do; there’s this culture where it was cool to say what your favorite Rodgers and Hammerstein musical was.

We were booked to sing at the governor’s mansion in New Jersey. And Geraldo was there. I was the emcee, so in between songs I would say one-liners like, “If you want to take the Whiffenpoofs home with you, there are two ways to do that, the second of which is to buy our CDs, available in the back.” Geraldo saw me do my shtick, came up afterwards, took off his name tag, and said “I think you’ll know what to do with this.” Very beguiling.

We had a regular Monday-night gig at this old bar in New Haven called Mory’s. One night Barbara Bush would be there. And I’m serenading her. As a means of accumulating bizarre experiences, I’m superfortunate to have been a part of that.

When I moved to Chicago, I bought a book called Start Your Own Band. And I tried to follow it—not everything. One piece of advice was, “Make a flyer with some of your best lyrics. And leave it on every table in the bar, so people have something to take home.” People are naive in different ways, especially at 22. I felt like if I checked every box on the business side, the rest would take care of itself.

I envisioned a linear process. And you quickly realize the real reasons you make art. It is certainly not the path where every year you make more money, get promotions. Ultimately, every creative endeavor has to be self-sufficient in the fulfillment scale.

The thing I’ve put the most effort into was writing original music and fronting a band. And I was feeling like I was banging my head against the wall. As Kanye says, “When you try hard, that’s when you die hard.”

There’s a line, and every band that I played with was at least flirting with it. Even lyrically there’s this line where you don’t want to get too close to novelty. And I was not always really good at believing it was there. I played with Bobby Conn for a long time. He toes [the line] and is aware of it, and I think he’s been victorious with negotiating his relationship with it. One thing I tried to beat out of myself in my 20s is cleverness for its own sake—that doesn’t advance the story.

I learned that your perception of what you do and other people’s perceptions are completely different. Baby Teeth was meant to be this pop band, very simple songs, and people thought it was completely bizarre. Like prog doo-wop or something. It popped the bubble of thinking I was going to be commercially successful. Because huge stars do not confuse anybody. That’s the genius of somebody like Sheryl Crow. She can stand in front of thousands of people and convey something incredibly simple that’s hard to misinterpret—like a John Deere tractor. Everything I’ve made has been outside of that category.

I started teaching piano in 2001 and began Piano Power in 2007, when I started bringing in other teachers. We have about 300 kids right now and 18 teachers. A lot of kids come to Piano Power from other experiences where they’ve been pushed through a method without enough checking in on whether their love of music is deepening or eroding. Our kids tend to work with teachers who have a strong interest in making sure they love what they’re doing. Most of the time that comes with being superinteractive.

Mica Alaniz, 28, is the Chicago representative for Red Bull Music Academy, which promotes and supports underground electronic music. Alaniz helped bring British experimental electronic musician Actress to the Empty Bottle and dub-techno artist Andy Stott and house-music act Octo Octa to Lincoln Hall.

Interview by Tal Rosenberg
Photographs by Todd Diederich

I’m third-generation Chicagoan on my dad’s side and second on my mom’s. My dad is a custodian at O’Hare and my mom used to work for AT&T, doing secretary work and things like that. I’ve lived within the same 20 miles my whole life. I wouldn’t say I’d never leave, but I don’t think I’d leave permanently. The city’s in my blood.

I wasn’t really exposed to music when I was young. It wasn’t until high school that I started getting interested. My first job was an internship when I was 17. Godspeed You! Black Emperor came to Chicago. It was an 18-and-over show, and they played with Black Dice. It was three months before my 18th birthday, and I was pissed. I thought that if I worked for the people who put the show on, hopefully that won’t happen again. I only had three months to go; I don’t know why I was so impatient.

So I worked for the promotions company that booked for the Fireside and the Bottom Lounge—the old Bottom Lounge, over on Sheffield. I interned. I didn’t really do anything—I got water and updated the website. But it was the first time I’d really gotten to look at what goes into these things, the first time I’d seen a contract or promotional material. Through osmosis and through observing I started to understand, “Oh, this takes a lot of organization and a lot of e-mailing.”

Putting on a show is somebody’s full-time job. It becomes easier the more you do it, but it’s still a lot of work. If it all aligns in the right way, it doesn’t look like any work has gone into it at all. To your average spectator, it’s just their evening out. And the moment you realize there’s someone frantic and running around, that’s when something’s gone wrong. That’s when someone’s not showing up or something’s not working right. That’s when you’re like, “Oh, that’s what’s behind the smoke and mirrors of a good night out.”

I was exposed to club culture through friends. In college I listened to average indie rock, and then I started getting a lot more interested in what else was out there. At that point I’d already started working in event production—I did shows, special events, proper concerts. Two and a half years ago, I had been doing my own nights in a lot of rooms in town. I was doing a night at Beauty Bar, and people involved in Red Bull came to that. They were looking for people who were already doing the kind of events that they were interested in doing. It was smarter than them having to train someone—my learning curve was nil. I knew the brand—they’re behind some interesting artists—and I get to do what RBMA is known for but with a Chicago taste.

The position I have is Ms. X, and there’s one in every major city. I feel like each particular representative has their own style. My taste has always been different from year to year. I’m hoping that I’m not booking the same things two years from now that I was booking two years ago.

Nate Boylan, 35, teaches high school science by day and makes footwork tracks under the name Boylan by night; he’s a member of DJ Rashad’s Teklife collective. London electronic label Planet Mu included his song “Bullet Proof Soul” in the second volume of its “best of Chicago footwork” compilation, Bangs & Works.

Interview by Leor Galil
Photographs by Ryan Lowry

I got my master’s degree in biochemistry. I started substitute teaching and ended up liking it a lot, so I went back and got certified to teach high school. I’ve been nine years at Thornwood, down in the south suburbs. It was a lot more fun than sitting in a lab and doing research for someone else’s work. I actually feel like I’m making a difference. You can change kids’ lives.

We have this thing called senior project, where they determine what kind of career they want to do. I help kids produce music. Some of them want to be rappers and some of them want to be producers. I help them make a beat. I’ll bring in my hardware, we’ll work about 15 hours, and then they have something to show for it.

I got into footwork because I like house music and ghetto house. I ended up talking to DJ Rashad on MySpace—this is like ’04—’cause he had a lot of tracks back then I loved. We’ve been friends ever since then.

I showed him my stuff. My stuff wasn’t really that good, but he was real supportive. He had a studio at his house, so I’d be making tracks at his house. I’m very heavily sample based. It’s hard to get clearance on that stuff, but I don’t worry about any of that. It’s like music hunting. Last.fm’s a really good place to go. If you like listening to a track by Lenny Williams—who’s old soul-disco—and you’re like, “Oh, OK, so what else sounds like Lenny Williams?,” Last.fm [shows you] tracks that are similar, artists that are similar. You just start digging deep. That’s the hardest part, literally ten or 15 hours of work. From there I chop it into the pieces I want, put it into the MPC. The track takes like an hour.

Rashad really put me on to Juke Trax. I don’t know if a lot of people still understand how important Juke Trax was to the whole movement of juke and then to footwork. If you go on iTunes and just type in Juke Trax, it goes all the way back to the early 2000s: DJ Clent, DJ Rashad, DJ Spinn. It’s basically the Dance Mania of juke tracks. When I got my first EP [2011’s Look to the Sky], it had one track that [Rashad] made and three tracks that I made. That was always my goal. It wasn’t a huge advance. It’s not a huge amount of royalties. It’s a feeling you can’t really describe other than you did it, you know? You did it.

Looking back on it, some of that stuff’s OK—like, I can do better. You always evolve. If you don’t evolve as an artist, why bother being an artist? I look back and I go, “That sounds a lot different than it does now.” But you can still essentially hear me in my recordings. They’re kinda heavy. Some people are a little more light-handed with drums. My drums are real heavy, they’re a little off. Like, some people are real tight; some people have a real natural rhythm. My rhythm’s not forced, but it’s mine. I walk heavy, I’m a big boy—my drums are big, claps are loud. Sometimes people say stuff’s too loud, but I like it the way I like it.

Tomeka Reid, 35, is a cellist, composer, and curator who’s worked extensively with flutist and bandleader Nicole Mitchell, singer (and 2012 People Issue subject) Dee Alexander, and drummer Mike Reed’s chamber improv group Loose Assembly. She organized the first Jazz String Summit this past spring, and she’ll release her first recordings as a leader in 2014.

Interview by Peter Margasak
Photographs by John Sturdy

I worked at the HotHouse—I was the supershy door girl—and I met a lot of musicians there. I had always wanted to be an improviser, but I came to formally study cello rather late to be professional. I was very much a one-track mind about learning these concertos, these sonatas, the orchestra repertoire. Even though I wanted to play other styles, I felt to be a real bona fide cellist I had to learn these things. For a long time I felt I had this kind of inner conflict—can I do both? But the universe was kind of pushing me in this one direction, so I was like, OK, maybe I should honor that. Every year I allowed myself to go in that direction more, and I think with quitting my job [teaching middle and high school orchestra at the University of Chicago Lab School] I realized this was what I really wanted to do.

Since I left [in 2011] I’ve been able to tour a lot more. No complaints, but I’ve been a forever side person. It’s been great—I’ve been able to play on a lot of cool projects, and I love collaborating with people. I’ve been pushing toward composing more, and the best way to get those things heard is to have your own group. But when I was working and gigging so much I didn’t have the time for it. Or I didn’t feel really ready. Now I have pieces and I know a lot of great musicians I can work with. I would like to play my own music more. I had been commissioned to write pieces for the Great Black Music Ensemble, and then the Chicago Jazz Ensemble asked me to write a piece. That was the first time I had ever written for that kind of straight-ahead group. It was a learning experience throughout. I’m a cello player, and I’ve worked in orchestras, but not big bands, so it was about learning how do you match this voice with that voice. It was new for me.

Right now I feel like I’m in a time of exploration. This year has felt like a year of firsts. When the year started I was doing a bunch of touring; it wasn’t really until March that things kicked off with me doing things at the [U. of C.’s] Arts Incubator. I wanted to do something in tribute to [tenor saxophonist and Velvet Lounge owner] Fred Anderson, because the Velvet was one of the first places I played in the city. So I played a tribute concert to him there. From March until May I was busy trying to gather money and figure out how to get this summit going. I had access to the Logan Arts Center, so I would practice there a whole bunch, and I was asked to write music for the soundtrack to a film about the Chicago imagists. So I spent a lot of time at the Logan writing music for that. Just to have a dedicated space to work on it was great. I had never composed this way—they just gave me words, and then I came up with little snippets that tried to match the words. I still haven’t seen the film to see how it fit together, but they said it worked. I also curated a monthly jazz series there that was supposed to end in August, but a lot of people were showing up, so they extended it until January.

Nnamdi Ogbonnaya, 23, drums in Para-Medics, Itto, Pisces at the Animal Fair, and My Dad; he plays bass in Water House and Nervous Passenger; raps in the Sooper Swag Project; and releases avant-pop solo albums under the name Nnamdi’s Sooper-Dooper Secret Side Project. He also studies electrical engineering at UIC and is part of the Swerp Records collective, a group of DIY musicians and artists that originated in the south suburbs.

Interview by Leor Galil
Photographs by Ryan Lowry

I was in band in middle school and high school, symphonic marching band and jazz band. I wasn’t very good in jazz band. I think if people in high school would see me play now they would be like, “What happened? He was kind of bad.”

I hated taking lessons. I never practiced what they wanted me to practice, which shows in my playing ’cause I don’t really have the technique you would if you had studied classically or in jazz. I just kind of mix everything I’ve seen in videos or watching other people.

Every drummer has pretty much seen every Gospel Chop video. I really like watching gospel drummers ’cause the fills they do are so crisp. Even their rolls—their double rolls are just perfect. I feel like gospel music incorporates every genre of music. Like, those are like punk beats they play in church in breakdowns, and they play jazzy things. I feel like gospel has taught me not be scared to try everything.

When I first started it was just something to do, but now it’s like an addiction and I don’t know how to do anything else that well. I feel like I’m slowly getting somewhere. I still don’t feel like I’m good at drums but I know that I have my own thing going on.

I was born in California, then I moved to Ohio, and then I moved to the suburbs of Chicago. I just moved to Chicago a year and a half ago. I was commuting from the burbs to go to school and it was the worst thing. Trying to do homework or anything on the train for an hour and a half—especially on the Red Line, ’cause you get these crazy-ass people fuckin’ smokin’, old dudes yellin’, and people shittin’ and peein’ in corners. There’s a special place in hell for people of the Red Line.

I have a year left at UIC, hopefully—electrical engineering. I wanted to do something I didn’t think I could do, and that seemed to be one of the hardest things that was also interesting to me. I have a lot of friends that teach music and every time I brought up that I wanted to switch to music they’re like, “No, you have your own style. Don’t try to learn other people’s styles. Learn something else practical.” I listened to them. When I’m done with school I am gonna focus 100 percent on music. School is the only thing stopping me from trying to do all the things that I want to do musically. But I’m not mad about it ’cause I really want to get this degree.

I want to tour a lot more. I want to get my solo band going. I played two solo shows. They were all right. People liked them but I personally didn’t think they lived up to their potential. I want to do, like, extravagant, Justin Timberlake-level shit. I don’t wanna be on this bottom tier forever. I love DIY touring and staying at people’s houses, but I want to get to a point where I can make money.