I interviewed the Abbot of the Wu-Tang Clan RZA who was doing press for his new movie.  An edited version of this was originally published in Extra.

—

Hip-hop producer, actor, and author RZA (aka Robert Fitzgerald Diggs) talked to Extra about his new film The Man with the Iron Fists, which he co-wrote, directed and stars in as a kung fu fighting blacksmith.

Casey Brazeal: Are you the man with the Iron Fists?

RZA: What, me personally? Well, I play The Blacksmith, a character who’s making weapons for everybody. Basically, without being the cause of death, he’s a source of death. And he knows better, but because he’s trying to help somebody else, he’s actually hurting others. Eventually, The Blacksmith gets forced into a position where he has to enter the violence himself.

But, there’s no one ‘Man with the Iron Fist.’ It’s a metaphor, so when you read the credits it says I play The Blacksmith.

CB:  How would you describe the story to someone who doesn’t know what to expect?

R: There are seven clans, a shipment of gold, and they all want to get their hands on it. That’s the driving thread of the film. You know, when money comes things get funny, kid.

CB: As an actor, it must be fun to write yourself a great role.

R: [Laughs] Well, I’m happy the producers wanted me to play this role. Originally, I wrote it with myself in mind, but it was a little different. Originally, The Blacksmith did not appear until late in the film. He was shrouded in mystery.

CB: You and Kanye West collaborated on a song called White Dress for this movie. How was that?

R: It’s for a beautiful scene with Lucy Liu. I took a bite off a scene I saw [director Quentin Tarantino] do in Kill Bill, when Lucy Liu first enters the House of Blue Leaves before the showdown with the Crazy 88. I gave her a shot like that in my movie. Except instead of coming into a restaurant with all these killers behind her, she’s coming into a bathhouse, full of beautiful girls.

So I showed Kanye the scene, and he was like, ‘Oh man, this is cool.’ Then I gave him the music and I said, ‘You can add to it if you want,’ because people love when me and him collaborate.

CB: Thinking about making a movie and all that collaboration, whether it’s with Kanye or the actors, do you feel like your background with the Wu Tang Clan prepared you for that?

R: I know it did. That totally prepared me.

Dave Bautista, Russell Crowe, those dudes are Wu Tang fans, and I would tell them the stories. I’ll give you an example. We were having a bad day, I mean, it looked like we were going to lose a day of shooting and I couldn’t afford that on our tight budget.

I was talking to Big Boy Russell and I said, ‘You know, I’ll never forget one day when Old Dirty Bastard and I were recording.

ODB came into that studio crazy late, and I was pissed off. But, he went right to the vocal booth and recorded the whole song in one take, and there’s a part in the song where he goes, [Sings] ‘Shame on a n**** who try to run game on a n****. Huh-cha-cha-cha-chop-POW!’

Now, to me he messed up right there. [Laughs] And I said, ‘Yo, do that part over,’ and he’s like, ‘Nah, that’s phat.’ And he was out, and I was stuck with it. But … people love that part!

And after that story we went and shot in eight hours what should have taken us two days. Russell Crowe took ODB as someone to study for the character and he went crazy. You’ll see this scene where Russell Crowe’s character is introduced.  You’ll see his great performance and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Lake Street Dive, a four-piece band makes pretty songs with sexy stand up bass hooks that stay in your mind for days.

I saw them play with my girlfriend’s band (Midnight Moxie) a few weeks ago and I had to get their album.

Watching the show live, I assumed that the songs had been written by the female lead singer with the smooth torchlight voice but when I looked at the liner notes I found out that the songs were mostly written by the other members of the band. Each  player had contributed a few songs to the album. This blew me away, not because the singer wasn’t the main writer*, but because of the consistently high quality of the music by different authors.

It’s not that the songs all sound the same, they don’t. But they do all have the same singer regardless of the writer, and the instrumentation changes based on the needs of the songs, not because one or another of the band members wants to play guitar on the song she/he wrote.

This may seem to be a small thing, but it’s not a given with all bands, and it really works for this one. They have a dynamo singer and it would be a bummer to sit her down for a song.

—————–

*As the singer in a band, I guess I give my counterparts extra credit because I naturally identify with them. Maybe it’s natural for folks watching any kind of popular music to identify most with the singer.  He/she stands in the middle, he/she tells the story, and he/she doesn’t have a trap set in front of her/him or a flute blocking her/his face. That doesn’t mean that person is the most important part of the band, it just means she/he attracts the most attention. 

My band, H for Hombre, has a gig this Friday (June 15th) at the Goose Island on Clark, and it’s got me thinking about writing and making music.

—

The thing about writing songs that you’re gonna sing is that you always cast yourself in the lead role.

It’s a lot of fun to do that Orson Welles thing, where you develop the point of view in your writing and then bring that point of view across with your own voice. Listening to a song you wrote come together is infinitely more satisfying than getting a cover to work.  Because when you’re singing your own song, you are bringing across something that was just a notion before. The words on paper are just a tease, songs are to be heard and hearing something you thought up is the most fun part of the process. It’s better than writing, editing, or performing.

The problem is if you’re the singer for all your songs you  can only be who you are, and sometimes you’re the wrong person for the part.

If I wrote a song about a jockey it would be bullshit, or it would have to be funny, because I’m very tall.  That song would have a crack in it from the beginning and any work I did on it would be building on that cracked base.

So sometimes you as the singer get in the way of you as the writer.

Amanda Singing "When You're Gone"

I probably started a hundred songs with a man’s complaints about a woman. I will probably write a hundred more. Conflict is the source of a compelling story and that’s the absolute easiest conflict for me to build a song around.

But before to long that genre of song starts to sound unbalanced and worn thin. I really wanted to give the object of all that male aggression a chance to answer back.

And that’s where Amanda comes in.  She really is like an actor in the way she can embody a song.  She can be sexy, she can be mean, she can give as well as she takes, but the most important difference is the simplest she sings with a woman’s voice.

The song is beyond simple, it’s essentially “A Hit the Road Jack” rehash, but the performance makes a huge difference in it.

Last Friday, the Free Write Jail Arts and Literacy program held a book release and art show for the young men and women in its program. What makes this gallery show different from others is that all the featured poets, painters and artists created their work while in the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center, where many of the artists are still held.

The book being released, entitled Escape Route, is the fifth anthology that Free Write has put together. In its introduction, program directors Amanda Klonsky and Ryan Keesling describe what they feel Free Write does for the people involved: “Our workshops provide students with a supportive space for self-expression and community-building inside an institution that can feel lonely and isolated.”

Free Write Instructor Elgin Bokari Playing Piano before the Poetry Slam

The book release was held at High Concept Laboratory at 1401 W. Wabansia, where original copies of the work of dozens of poets and visual artists featured in the book were up on the walls.  The event also featured a poetry slam.

Roger Bonair, a poet and a teacher in the program, hosted the live performance. He acknowledged the difficulty of reaching or materially changing the life of a person in the detention center, but went on to say that that change isn’t the only aim of the program. Free Write also looks to help students define themselves not just by whatever crime put them into jail, but also as something more. “Maybe they still think of themselves as a hustler, but maybe now it’s, ‘I’m a hustler and a poet, a hustler and a painter, or a murderer and an MC.’”

The poetry itself is often grim, a lot of young people dealing with difficult situations, but at the same time, much of it is aspirational.  It’s full of young men and women hoping to be better or do something else with their lives. What it’s not full of is irony or artifice.

The first lines from this poem by Kenneth L. are an example of that sincerity.

“Life will be tough 

if you don’t believe to change

Life will be tough 

if you don’t receive the change 

Life will be tough

from now til then.”

Free Write’s work is ongoing.  Information about the program is available on their website, freewritejailarts.org.

 This article was originally published in Extra Newspaper.  It’s available in English and Spanish on their website.

This book is as addictively readable and exciting as any fantasy I’ve read. It’s different from a lot of that stuff for a number of reasons, one that stands out is there’s no fellowship in The Name of the Wind.

There are love interests and side characters, but it’s not the story of a troupe. It’s a kind of fictional autobiography of one man, Kvothe. This character is the meat and meade* of the story, which swells and crashes with his fortune. It’s painful when Kvothe is in a destitute world of urban poverty, energizing when his luck or intelligence pulls him through a tight spot, and crushing when his arrogance pushes him back in.

A story about one person is an important break from the Tolkien template, which so much of fantasy riffs on.  The readers not following a group of dwarves or The Fellowship of the Ring makes a big difference in the way the world comes across.

It’s a fantasy world, but it’s a very lived-in one. People work a great deal in the book and that is something that is missing in a lot of literature.  Kvothe is an actor, singer, barkeep and student at different times in the story and he deals with each job not in the high-flown magical way (though magic does exist) that we might imagine in some idealized world. He and the other characters in this book really work, sometimes just for drinks and tips.

There is real work throughout the story.  The book gives time to every phase of Kvothe’s life, and by the end it is clear the story will not end that life before the book is finished. That’s not to say there’s no climax. The book builds and uses all of its pages and adventures to reach an exciting conclusion to a base story and a narrative without pausing for information dumps.

It’s a classic adventure story in that it wrestles with the same themes and ideas as many of the great stories, featuring an orphan seeking adventure and love in a magical world, but it’s the realness of the world that makes the book most exciting. Kvothe is a hero of legend and song, but he still has to pay rent and try to get girls to pay attention to him.  And I was as excited about that as any dragon or dagron slaying (or whatever the name of the creature that exists in this world is). The dagron slaying is good.  The way that a very real world supports and builds the story of a single character is better.

 ——

*I stole this expression from George R. R. Martin who has also written glowing reviews of the book.

Saturday, May 19^th was the rare night that was hotter than the day that preceded it.

This phenomenon, while uncommon, is not unheard of. Because almost all heat on land comes from the sun, you might think it would take a volcanic eruption or some other extreme event to make it warmer at night, but this Saturday it was a combination of two different but everyday processes: one is heat shielding and the other is shifting weather systems.

Heat shielding occurs in cities that have a high density of concrete and asphalt, which creates what Science and Technology calls “urban heat islands.” These materials hold heat longer and release it over a long period of time, so cities are often warmer than their surrounding rural areas where green spaces let off heat more quickly.

Large bodies of water (like Lake Michigan) can also cause warm nights because water holds heat longer than earth.  Even an outdoor pool can warm the air around it in the early evening after a hot day.  In Chicago, people often think of this process as having the opposite effect, making it “cooler by the lake.” That coolness is generally caused by the breezes coming off the water or by water staying cooler after cold weather in the same way that it retains heat after warm weather. In the early fall it is sometimes warmer by the lake.

As for Saturday’s warm night, the lake and the asphalt may explain some of the extra heat, but that’s just one of two processes going on. By itself, the urban heat shield doesn’t explain why it actually got hotter at night. It makes sense that cities would be closer to their daytime temperatures at night than rural areas, but they should be at least a little cooler.

The second process has to do with normal patterns in the weather. The air in a given place has certain characteristics, like temperature, moisture level and density. In a three dimensional space where the air shares those properties, the air can be thought of as one mass, and the weather in that air mass is generally the same.

These air masses are continually moving. Denser, high-pressure air masses expand and push out into less dense low-pressure air masses. The border between two weather systems is called a front.  If the weather changes dramatically it is because a front has passed through the area and is now in a new weather system.

So going back to Saturday, we had a warm air mass pushing into the area coupled with heat being released by the asphalt and concrete of the city, creating a warmer night than the day it followed.

This article was originally published in Extra Newspaper.  It’s available in English and Spanish on their website.

This is a short story I wrote for  Ragbag Magazine. Last month’s issue was all audio/visual so I recorded myself reading the story out loud. Here’s that audio and a slightly edited transcription of the story. 

Sprint

St. Pat’s Invitational

There’s no gun anymore. Now the race starts with a loud electric beep. So, hearing the beep, he dives in.

He doesn’t arc over the water or break through a tiny piece of the surface; he falls in and ends up deeper than he should be. He’s still moving diagonally down when he sees other swimmers break the surface of the water. He doesn’t hear anything. The race just started and he’s already behind.

He breaks his streamline and starts to kick. He can tell he’s too deep. There’s no time to waste, this is a sprint, so he begins his first stroke. Unfortunately, he’s not really pulling himself forward, he is clawing his way up to the surface, fighting instead of riding the little momentum he got from the dive.

Pressure builds up in his chest. He wants to breathe, but he’s still too far from the surface, so he starts his second stroke.  His head breaks the surface and he takes a kind of straight ahead gasp, exhaling and inhaling before bringing his head back into the water.

His right then left arm comes around, back in front of him. His strokes are coming in a strange rhythm. It’s a frantic lope.

Now at the surface racing, he almost feels like this is what he practiced for. He’s kicking and pulling and looking forward out of his goggles, which have just a moderate amount of water in them.

But that comfort is only going to slow him down, and he thinks kick and pull and does more thrash and flail. But he flails mightily and purposefully and as he comes under the flags almost ready for the first turn, he sees the man in lane five coming back toward him, already off the wall.

He’s two body lengths back, there are still three more laps to swim, and this is a sprint.

—

David Christian weighed 110 pounds when he started high school. At 5’8’’ David was no shorter than most of the other incoming freshmen, but his voice wasn’t cracking yet and he felt very young.

David didn’t lean on his physicality. He never thought of himself as a physical force.  But in high school, where people seemed to be looking at each other more closely, and where the folks were just bigger, size and strength got to the front of his mind more often.

It took a crappy play and the better part of a semester to make him vulnerable enough to be talked into joining the swim team.

“Come on man, you’re tall.”

It didn’t start out being very much of his life. He was a terrible swimmer. Of course, he didn’t know that going in.  He had never needed to think about being terrible at swimming before. But he was personable, made a couple jokes, and the seniors decided they liked him.

So he swam the whole year and became more of a mascot for the team than an important teammate.  David said the cheer, he swam third in the JV relay, and he tried not to disqualify.

It’s not that bad to be a terrible athlete when you’re a freshman, because usually someone else is terrible too.  But as the season wore on, a lot of those terrible swimmers became ex-swimmers.

Then the season ended and Christian – everyone on the swim team was called by their last name – “Christian” was still pretty bad, and now the seniors were gone.

The rest of freshman year went pretty well. That spring and summer he grew five inches and gained twenty-five pounds.  When he came back as a sophomore he was taller than most of his high school.

He had also spent a season playing water polo (watching, really) and he was a lot more competitive than he had been.  He never liked losing, nobody does, but in water polo when you lose you are shoved under, you’re manhandled and it’s galling.  He was still thin, weak and slow, so he got as much shoving under as he could stand. After the season ended, he set about trying to become less weak and less thin, so that eventually he could be less slow.

His first idea was to do pushups.  Pushups were the most boring, difficult way he could think of to work out, so he pointed himself in that direction. The first week he did them, he gave himself terrible acne.  It took him another week to realize he couldn’t do them before bed and go to sleep in a sweaty heap.

He swam in the summer programs. They were far away. It took more time to get there on the bus than he spent in the pool.

He showed up on time, he stretched, and he worked the practices. He led his lane.  He pushed his intervals, and in every way he could think, he beat his body up.  He was breaking himself down as much as he could, straining his muscles and his breath, wanting, willing himself to move faster.

After practice he would come home and stink like chlorine. His hair got nasty and dry. First it turned blonder, then it frosted with a kind of white tip. His skin dried out and pieces of it flaked off in uneven little white sheets.

Then, when the summer ended and he couldn’t spend all day on the bus, he tried to cross train.  He ran stairs, he ran in the park, he ran home from school with a book bag full of books.

His body didn’t seem to change much.  He got faster at running home.

—

Then came the actual swim season and the real practices.  Now he wasn’t making things up as he went along.  He was doing the things that were actually supposed to make him a better swimmer with his actual team.  Putting in the laps, the work and the time.

Coach talked about winning the work out, and David ate that shit up. But he didn’t see great times at the first few meets.

He felt better. His starts and turns were better, but he wasn’t swimming varsity times.

He wouldn’t have asked for anybody’s advice. He was embarrassed at what they might say. But they offered advice. “It’s early in the season,” they said. “You’ve been working hard. You’re breaking your body down now for races that come later on in the year.” “You’re in good position.” “It was 1.06, but it was clean.” “Don’t worry, you have nice balanced splits.”  “You want to peak at the right time.”  “Wait ‘til Conference.” “Wait ‘til taper.”

He couldn’t make himself believe that stuff. Swimming’s not subjective.  You’re good or you’re not. He knew what he wanted and he knew he didn’t have it.

He was getting good at practice.

The year before, practices had left him exhausted. Now he could lead practices, he could push as hard as anyone in his lane.  He asked for harder intervals. Yeah, it pissed off his lane, but he did it anyway. David still left practice exhausted, but now it was because he was pushing himself.

He had more meets and more mediocre results. Mercifully, time passed. He got over the hump of the season without noticing.  David pushed through the hardest practices of the season and afterward jogged home.  He broke his body down.  He wrecked the thing in traditional swimming style, hoping that he could come into his taper with more strength, more energy and more speed.

And then he was in taper, and he felt the boost in energy. Suddenly, he was restless in class.

Taper is the part of any training regimen when you practice less so that your body can restore itself and heal. You let your muscles rebuild. Boxers taper before big fights, marathoners run shorter distances in the week before an important race and swimmers swim less and less yards as they approach their final meets.

David wasn’t going to swim in sectionals or state.  He wasn’t fast enough to make that cut.  But he had conference coming up, and that was his Olympics.

—

On a Tuesday in an afternoon algebra class while everyone else was in the sleepy haze of an after lunch class, David fidgeted in his chair.  He had already asked to go pee once and walked around the halls.  Now he was out of excuses to leave class.

His body wanted work and practice, but during taper he didn’t practice enough to satisfy it.

Then the bell rang and he was free.  He went to his locker.  He already had his books for history, but why not? The locker is high school’s version of the fridge – you always look in whether you want something or not. He opened the locker.  It held a spring jacket and a stack of papers, folders and other things that might have been important.

He closed his locker. He went to class. Class dragged on. Class ended. He went to the locker room. He put his suit on. And for a blink, he swam.  He felt good, he felt fast, then it was done.

Walking back into the locker room, David wasn’t satisfied with his effort, but he did feel strong. After practice, he went through his daily routine: rinse, towel off, dress, run home.  But this was taper, so no running.  With that in mind, David was walking when he opened the door, stepped out of Sacred Heart College Prep onto Clark Street and got very wet.

He wasn’t thinking about the weather; he was in his routine. The water woke him up. Newly wet swimmer skin stinks of chlorine that can never be totally washed off. As he walked down the sidewalk, the light of the street lamps sparkled in his eyes. David reached behind his head for a hood but this jacket didn’t have one. Whatever, six blocks, he thought.

David got home, went into his room, peeled off the clothes he was wearing and fell asleep. Two hours later, he woke up when his mother came home from work.  David put his head out the door of his room and told her he’d make himself something to eat later.  They didn’t usually eat together anyway.

When he woke up again it was morning and he was sick.

His throat felt sticky and full. His eyes had sandmen that started by his nose and worked all the way out to the far side. He rubbed them. The left eye was less gross, less welded shut than the right, so he worked on that one first. Eventually he opened it, but the world wasn’t any prettier with his eyes open so he put his head back on the pillow.

He started to fall asleep again but he remembered about practice.  You couldn’t practice if you didn’t go to class that day, so he sat up again and started working on his right eye.  Eventually, it opened and he got out of bed.

“I checked on you, but I couldn’t wake you up.” His mother told him as he got ready to leave for the day. He didn’t have anything to say back.

—

Wednesday practice didn’t go as well as Tuesday practice did. But, it was taper so it was short. He gutted it out and went home.

He felt just as bad on Thursday as he felt on Wednesday. He gave his friends a wide berth, particularly teammates – nobody should be sick for conference. Practice felt shitty, but he was good at practice now and he could get through them on bad days.

Friday, he felt better. Maybe he would be healthy again by conference on Saturday. Taper was fucked. But, if he could be healthy by conference…

It wasn’t about taper, it was about conference.

—

Conference

He hears the beep and he’s off. For a long moment, he’s in the air, holding his body tightly in the streamline. He hits the water, glides, still in streamline, then, feeling himself slow down, he kicks.  He feels the pressure in his chest.  He wants to breathe but instead lets a little air out of his lungs.

His head breaches the surface of the water and he takes his first stroke, feeling the water in his hand. He still wants to breathe but doesn’t. The next stroke starts out as strong as the first but comes out a little short.  He finally turns his head to breathe on his third stroke.

Don’t slow down your kicking, keep the pace. He can see the swimmer in lane four. He’s right next to him, they are stroke for stroke, he must have dived a little to the right of the center of the land because they are very close. Now the other swimmer is a half stroke ahead of him. He shouldn’t have looked.

Ahead, the wall is coming, five strokes away, maybe six.

David tries to turn up his turn over, bring his arms through the air more rapidly.  He takes what will be his last breath before the wall.  He pulls, flips, and as he does the somersault that makes the turn, he can feel that his body is a little too close to the wall.  He unfurls awkwardly but with all the power he can muster.

Still, three laps to go.

—

He dropped seven seconds off of his best time.

At a higher level this would be a miraculous improvement, something beyond hoping for. But David wasn’t swimming at a very high level. Coming off the low base of JV swimming, it’s more like respectable.

Every swimmer mainly races himself, herself, or the clock. It’s as individual as a sport can be. Sure there’s a team, but you can barely hear them cheering. There are no cheerleaders, no fans at swim meets. When you compete, you mostly look down at the bottom of the pool.  It shouldn’t matter too much what place you come in. Seven seconds is the thing, and it wasn’t bad.

But David came in fifth.

In honor of the upcoming C2E2 comic convention this weekend I thought I would put up a quick post about comics. I love comics and comic culture, but it can be intimidating.  There are so many stories, and fans who have dedicated so much time to them, that it can seem like a lot of work just to check something out.  To make things worse, the world of comics is full of terms nobody else uses.  To remedy this, I’ve created a short glossary of words and phrases used in the industry.

————————

Sequential Art – This term, which I first came across in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, refers to any kind of work where images are collected in sequence and show the passing of time.  This could be a Spiderman comic or it could be a series of frescos telling a biblical story.

Graphic Novel – A graphic novel is a novel told in a single book through words and pictures, such as Blankets, or Watchmen

Ongoing Series – An ongoing series is a comic book series that has no predetermined end point.  It’s a serial that generally comes out every month, like Amazing Spiderman, or BPRD.  Sometimes abbreviated to “ongoing.”

Miniseries - A short series of comic book issues that tell one story.  Not part of an ongoing series.

Maxiseries – A long series of comic book issues that tell one story.  Not part of an ongoing series.

Issue – A soft-backed magazine-style episode of a comic.  Issues are often 18-22 pages long.

Continuity – The over arching story of a character or universe that ties many comics together.  If Spiderman breaks his arm in Amazing Spiderman and appears in a Captain America book with his arm in a cast, that is an example of a continuity between the two ongoing series.

Penciler – The first visual artist to draw the story.  Someone who creates the initial drawings of the comic, generally with a pencil.

Inker - The artist who goes over the art of the penciler with the darker ink line.

Colorist – The person who creates the color palette for the comic, filling in any colors for the book.

Trade Paperback - Comic book series are often collected into larger volumes.  These books often collect five issues into a single, soft-cover, trade paperback.   This term is also sometimes abbreviated to “trade.”

Trade Waiter – A person who prefers to read stories collected into trade paperbacks, rather than read individual issues as they come out.

Fanboy – A term for zealous comic fans.  Often used pejoratively to describe fans that are obsessed with continuity and averse to change.

Creator-Owned – Creator-owned comics are original content with characters that belong to the artists and writers who create the comics.  They are generally made outside the two largest comic companies, Marvel and DC.

Work For Hire – This term exists in contrast to creator-owned work and refers to a penciler, writer, or other artist who works on licensed properties for a company.  For example, any original comic work on Star Wars would be work for hire, unless the penciler was George Lucas.

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If you think of any terms I have left out please let me know in the comments. I would love to make this a bigger and better resource.  If you would like more comic book content you can check out some of the reviews I have done at World’s Strongest Librarian.

Beloved blog readers,

I’m working on about a million projects right now, so this is a quick roundup and link dump.

I have been writing graphic novel/comic book reviews for Josh Hanagarne over at World’s Strongest Librarian.  It’s the spiritual stepchild of the Book a Week project on a site that a lot more people read.  My first two reviews are of Sweet Tooth and Blast Furnace.  I’m thinking the next entry will be on a collection of some of my favorite black and white comics.

I also just turned in an interview with Irish tenor Paddy Homan for New City, and continuing the Irish theme I’m writing  a cover story on St. Patrick’s Battalion for Extra. I hope both will run St. Patrick’s day week.  If they do, I’ll post links in the comments.

There are a number of other projects I’m working on, including a couple original comics of my own. I have written scripts for these, but I need a comic artist. So, if you have an interest in that or know somebody who wants to draw a comic about a goat in the cutthroat world of ingredient purchasing I would be happy to talk to them about that. Also in the comic book vein, I recently interviewed great penciler Emma Rios, and I’ll be covering C2E2 for Extra again this year, so look forward to that.

Finally, H for Hombre is back in action.  We played a show back in February. We recorded a down and dirty, quick and dirty mix-tape/album, that maybe you’ll be able to buy (for cheap). We will play at my brother’s wedding next week (holy crap, my brother is getting married next week). We will play a show that you all can come to on April 7^th at Goose Island in Wrigelyville.

Thanks so much to anyone checking in on this site and my writing. I ain’t quit yet, I got more stuff for you.

The Latino Caucus of alderman is considering opening up to non-Latino alderman who have majority Latino constituencies.  This move could expand the eight member group to as many as 15.

When asked by Extra if this move would benefit the Latino Caucus Alderman Daniel Solis said, “It would be beneficial to the caucus, but more importantly it would be beneficial to the constituency.”  Alderman Solis went on to say, “It would create a better awareness (of Latino issues) for those aldermen with majority Latino constituencies.”

This plan to expand the caucus is contingent on the agreement of the current caucus members and the interest of non-caucus members in joining the group.  Solis said he thought it likely that the caucus would agree and that there would be some non-Latino alderman interested in joining.

The seven alderman who may be invited to join the caucus include Ed Burke of the 14th Ward, John Pope of the 10^th Ward, Richard Mell of the 33^rd Ward and four others. If these aldermen were willing to join it would not only increase the numbers of members in the Latino Caucus it would also bring influential members of the city council into the group, Solis suggested.

The plan to expand the caucus follows the city’s recent redistricting. This process redrew the wards, and using the new map and the census data it was to identify seven wards with majority Latino populations and non-Latino aldermen.  When asked about the timing of this move Alderman Solis said, “It’s a good time, but we haven’t decided yet.”  The Caucus has to convene to make an official decision, Solis said he thought that decision would come before the end of the first quarter of this year.

This article is also available en Español