Are they really named after that building on Halsted?

[I'm having a total writing slump, I apologize for the wonky wording of this. It was written on two different days about two different shows and probably shouldn't have been combined]

"Alright, fifteen more minutes of this and then we go away."

The song that is playing, and that has been playing, is a looped polka constructed from one (or perhaps many) unrecognizable songs from children's television, with creepy, warped laughter layered over it.

Hteeth is on stage. I can't tell if Hteeth is one or two guys, because there is one guy fiddling with electronics and another crouched behind an amplifier. The guy who isn't hiding jumps off the stage and into the crowd, most of whom stand with awkward stares, some of whom nod their heads, and tells me:

"In Abu-Ghraib, they make men wear hoods over their faces."

"Uh huh." I'm waiting for the joke, expecting it to be horrible (like some tacky, offensive thing intended to shock me).

"They make them wear hoods so they can't see, and stick them in these storage containers, like 4 by 6 feet, or smaller, and play Barney songs over and over for upwards of ten hours at a time, just to fuck with them."

I'm pleasantly surprised. They're giving us a taste of torture.

When he walks away I go to the bar. A friend of mine is over there with someone who is freaking out. They're both high. The song has been playing for ten minutes now. It's working.

The Select Media Fest was put together by the people who run the Lumpen zine and the the Terry Plumming record/cd-r label, and they're a confrontational bunch. Last year's festival was centered mostly around Bridgeport, which they dubbed the Community of the Future. Although they played the fest as a celebration of Bridgeport, the neighborhood where a lot of them lived and worked, they aren't (and weren't) really that naive. Bridgeport was (and is) a very insular, mostly white, mostly blue collar neighborhood on Chicago's South Side and while some Lumpens, like founder Ed Marzewski, had lived there a long time, most were just moving in, many of them from Wicker Park. For anyone unfamiliar with Wicker Park, here's a brief synopsis: artists move into working class neighborhood, yuppies follow, artists get priced out and have to find new digs in another working class neighborhood. Although it wasn't their intention, the flight of Lumpen cholos was seen by many residents as a sign that what happened in Wicker Park would happen in Bridgeport and that "Community of the Future" was seen as a comment that the neighborhood's past didn't matter to these new people, as if this place was unenlightened and they were going to make it special.

"Turn off the fucking lights. Turn off the fucking lights and turn this way. Turn off if you want us to play the way we're suppose to play and be seen."

There was another very confrontational part of the fest at Reversible Eye, and it wasn't the rail against the houselights by one of the members of Columbia, MO's Warhammer 48k. It was "The Freak is The rock show", a musical sitcom by Drew Zigler. It was performancre art squared, as if Paper Rad raped The PRDF and they were trying to scare people into having fun. There were googly eyes and glitter explosions, teleconferences with monsters, and the live birth of multiple spraypainted Daylo babies, all being filmed in front of a hipster crowd for the Youtube generation. It was massive, bleeding off the stage in every direction. The door was blocked with no way out, and if you didn't like it, you still had to deal.

Overall, though, this year's festival was a lot more low-key than last years (perhaps because of the massive undertaking of this year's Version Festival, put on by the same people). It was also a lot less neighborhood-centric with shows in West Town, Bridgeport, Ukranian Village, Wicker Park and whatever neighborhood South Union Arts is located in. But where Version is a festival of art, Select is a festival of media, and most media festivals aren't confrontational at all. There are movies and maybe bands and people sit or stand and watch. Select created an answer to this by having video shot live and bands playing in nontraditional ways in nontraditional parts of regular concert venues.

Tonight's free show at the Empty Bottle ended the festival and served as a release party the new Terry Plumming double-comp Bacon is the Inside Outside World. This show was full of scumbag noise groups, from the garage dreck of David Diarreah to the fuck-the-place up theatre of America's Meth Problem. It also featured the danceable experimentation of Waterbabies, weirdo hip hop by Brenmar Someday, and the always above par Insect Deli. Hteeth tossed out some serviceable but not-new noise and Assdroids played but I missed them.

Peep the album, it's one lp, one cd-r and a lot of art/propaganda/propagandart by familiar Terry Plumming artists, including Al Burian, John Polacheck, Elisa, Party Steve, Carpet of Sexy and all of tonight's bands.


Here's a video of Warhammer 48k, where they rip shit. At the Reversible Eye show, they sounded more like sludgy grunge music, like a darker version of Alice in Chains. Maybe someone really should have extinguished that un-turnoffable light.