“Tired of having the same hairdo as every other ghetto bitch?” didn’t sound like an article you’d read in the newspaper. It sounded like something you’d hear on a rap tape. But none of us had ever read anything like it–so raw, so smart, written by a black public high school student for an audience of his peers.
There were 90,000 publications listed in the Standard Periodical Directory last year–and many more were unlisted. Is it too much to ask that there be at least one (a) written mainly by and for young people from the ghetto, (b) not insulting to their intelligence, (c) not boring, and (d) widely distributed?
The ultimate goal of Subway and Elevated was to revive public places in America–and to call attention to their necessity–by placing works of beauty and value there that were impossible to obtain in stores. “The medium is the message,” said Marshall McLuhan. We taped our paper to subway trains and stations.
I gathered $4,400, enough for 3,000 copies (I called every printer in the phone book to find one cheap enough). We also bought 15,000 posters and glue to do every major artery in Chicago.
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I didn’t wait for benefactors (they never came anyway). Three of my more stable friends agreed to go in with me on renting a space. We looked for someplace big and cheap on the south or west sides, but nothing was listed in the papers, not even the Defender. We settled for a giant basement called the “Vision Village.” I wanted to rename it “The Suburbs” because it was in Wicker Park. People were constantly coming over, sometimes with bags of food, sometimes with nothing. Friends donated couches, a linoleum dance floor, and books for a small library. We had exchange students visiting from Brazil and Japan and a chamber of commerce for young entrepreneurs.
I was in charge of the writers’ workshops. All narcissistic young writers fantasize that they’re part of a generation like the Beats or a scene like the Harlem Renaissance, using the media and entertainment biz to engineer their popularity. In my (our?) version of a literary movement, the group would be based not on what we wrote, but on where we wrote–not in cafes, bookstores, or sites on the World Wide Web, but in public places. About 40 people came to our first reading at State and Van Buren. Passersby stopped to listen. “What the hell are they doing?” One of the writers painted three-foot cardboard fish and hung them in nearby trees.
“You could enter a series of ten lyrical video-graffiti-journalistic-PhD-screenplay-CD-novels. One extraordinary sentence on a folded-up napkin–or in 20-foot letters hanging off the Sears Tower!” read the contest guidelines. “The format is entirely up to you, but don’t think you’re going to win just by doing what you already do. You have to grow. You have to push yourself.” Emphasis was placed on “how cleverly you get your words to people who wouldn’t ordinarily read or listen to them. Teaming up is encouraged! (Photos, tapes, or press clippings of the work(s) are fine, but keep in mind, it’s your words and how you hustle them that matters.)”
