Working Classical
Andreas Kapsalis and Goran Ivanovic.
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by Leah Williams Wright
A duo specializing in the tradition of guitar performance will grace Southern Illinois this weekend.
A pair of Windy City acoustic instrumental musicians, Andreas Kapsalis and Goran Ivanovic, bring their cocktail of different genres to the Rustle Hill Winery in Cobden on Friday, March 12. The pair is also slated to play Sunday, March 13 at Walker's Bluff near Carterville.
According to the duo's official website, the pair's sets include a combination of modern, classical, worldbeat, and jazz, among others.
Kapsalis plays in a steel-string ten-finger tapping guitar style, while Ivanovic leans more toward the nylon-string classical version of the instrument.
Last year the two released an album, Guitar Duo.
Kapsalis told Modern Guitar magazine that even though he and Ivanovic come from different backgrounds, they are able to jibe harmoniously in their music.
"There's an element, especially in the compositional vibe of the duo, which is very cinematic in nature," Kapsalis told the magazine. "There's a strong element of storytelling to what we do."
Ivanovic agreed, adding: "It's important for us to try and describe the music in the best possible way before the show. When people read that I play Balkan or classical music, they get one mental picture. When they see the saxophone on the cover of the CD, they associate that with jazz, so we try and call ourselves Baltic-classical-acoustic-jazz, and that tends to sum things up."
For more about Kapsalis and Ivanovic, log on to <http://www.AkgiDuo.com>...
There's a Riot Going On
In 1970, SIU was the site of one of the largest Vietnam War riots in the nation. A few months later, a stunning ninety-minute shootout took place between Carbondale police and a local chapter of the Black Panther Party.
Two panel discussions will explore each of these explosive events in detail.
The first, The 1970 Student Rebellion, will take place Wednesday, March 24 at 7 p.m. in SIU's Lawson Hall Room 171. Panelists will include Brian Clardy, Georgeann Hartzog, Ray Lenzi, Robbie Lieberman, and Hugh Muldoon, some of whom were involved in the peaceful protests that quickly exploded into mass violence.
The second discussion, Black Power in Southern Illinois, takes place Thursday, March 25 at 7 p.m. in SIU's Lawson Hall Room 171. SIU professor Angela Aguayo and authors Jeffrey Haas and Jakobi Williams will join the panel-- the latter two have written books about Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton.
Rare historical video and photos from 1970 will augment the discussions.
The definitive versions of these local stories are told in H.B. Koplowitz's classic book, Carbondale After Dark, while another excellent book about those times in Carbondale is Allan H. Keith's Days of Dissent. The Cliffs Notes version:
Large, edgy demonstrations broke out at SIU in May 1970 after the Kent State Massacre, where National Guard troops opened fire on peaceful Vietnam War protesters in Ohio, killing four unarmed persons. When the tense atmosphere in Carbondale ripped open, several days of riots, hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, martial law, beatings, and mass arrests resulted. Koplowitz quotes then State's Attorney Richard Richman describing the situation as "a fascist police state brought on by students who act like a bunch of Hitler youth, and the over-reaction from police officers."
A Black Panther Party chapter was also active in Carbondale, headquartered at 401 North Washington Street. On November 12, police stopped a van; a man in the vehicle shot an officer then ran toward the Northeast side of town. Shortly thereafter, a man wounded a police officer near the Black Panther Community Center. Two men were apprehended running from the Panther headquarters. "Then," Koplowitz writes, "shots were fired from inside the house, and all hell broke loose."
Koplowitz's accounts are riveting. Pick up Carbondale After Dark at all Carbondale bookstores and many other retail establishments, and attend the discussions for additional perspectives about SIU's radical heritage...
Word Up
Award-winning journalist Jeff Biggers has a new book, Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland (Nation Books, 320 pages, hardcover, $26.95). The Shawnee Group Sierra Club will sponsor a lecture by Biggers Saturday, March 6 at 7 p.m. at the Mississippi Flyway. Biggers's talk is free and open to the public, which is welcome to come early and dine before or during the discussion.
Biggers, who comes from a family of Southern Illinois coal miners, penned an excellent essay in the recent edition of Springhouse, the regional history and literary journal. In it, Biggers assails the violent stereotypes with which Southern Illinoisans are often saddled because of the seemingly neverending string of outlaw tales the region produces (Charlie Birger, the Shelton Brothers gang, Charlie Harris, Herrin's deadly coal-mining strikes, Carbondale's Vietnam War riots).
Biggers sees far more sinister crimes in Little Egypt-- those perpetrated against the entire population, and its environment, by coal-mining operations.
Certainly, it's a complicated knot. Coal-mining jobs-- especially after valiant labor-rights campaigns-- brought the first real economic prosperity to Little Egypt. As writer/photographer Lee Buchsbaum documented in these pages some years ago, due to the living standards directly and indirectly raised by coal, mining became not so much a profession as an identity, a way of life-- to this day, many people aspire to work in the mines. They celebrate mining at the Old King Coal Festival. Miners often go in on their days off just to enjoy the camaraderie and because they love what they do, and out of gratitude for what mining has done for their families. Plus, in an area with few living-wage jobs, mining is among the few professions that afford people the opportunity to live here.
Biggers, however, sees a Faustian bargain. Mining companies have often brutally or at least cynically exploited their workers as well as the environment. Burning coal produces dirty power that poisons the air (causing asthma, among other conditions) and water (mercury from coal exhaust has fallen into lakes and streams, rendering fish dangerous to eat in all but small quantities, especially for children and pregnant women). Today's largely mechanized strip-mining uses explosives and bulldozers in lieu of miners, and leaves the land devastated, including Biggers's ancestral homestead in Eagle Creek, which his family settled in 1805.
The work itself is dangerous, leading to hundreds of thousands of work-related deaths, injuries, and diseases like blacklung. (Biggers tells Nightlife that his own grandfather survived a mine explosion and cave-in, and now suffers from blacklung).
Besides, Biggers notes, the coal is actually owned by outside interests, so the overwhelming majority of Southern Illinois's coal wealth enriches people who live nowhere near this region.
After adding up all the adverse effects of mining, Biggers thinks it's time for the region to transition to something else.
Jeff Biggers.
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"The so-called prosperity from coal mining is deceptive-- remember, the coal industry peaked in 1918 in Illinois, and since then, Southern Illinois has been subjected to the whims of the outside market, absentee landlords, and coal companies-- most of the mineral rights in Southern Illinois were bought up in a land-grab by Chicago and outside coal companies by 1905-- and the boom-bust cycles that have left our region in poverty, with few economic opportunities," Biggers tells Nightlife. "In a line: Coal-mining, especially strip-mining, has kept out any other sustainable industries, and put a stranglehold on the region, preventing any diversification of the economy. Less than three-thousand miners are employed in Illinois today, our communities are boarded up, coal miners have seen their property values and homes get devalued and lost, schools have been consolidated and closed-- at the same time, billions of dollars of coal have been mined and trained out of the region."
It's really no longer a matter of choice. "All coal-mining communities know that for the first time in twenty-five years, utilities' coal stockpiles have increased during the summer, absentee coal companies are cutting jobs and idling higher-cost mines to keep their stockholders happy in a period of slumping demand, and recent U.S. Geological Survey estimates place peak coal production as early as 2020," Biggers says.
Biggers's solution is not simply to stop mining-- which he admits isn't realistic-- but to replace it with government-jumpstarted green industries.
"Coal-mining, which provides forty-five percent of our electricity nationally, will not end tomorrow," Biggers says. "Every coal miner deserves a right to a sustainable livelihood; given the legacy of our coal miners, I also believe no coal miner should be displaced from his or her job until we develop clean-energy alternatives. This means that coalfield residents, like all Americans, deserve a road map for a feasible transition to clean-energy jobs--including a Coal Miner's G.I. Bill for retraining and a massive reinvestment in sustainable economic development in coalfield communities-- before we reach a point of no return....
"And today, instead of making false promises of more boom-bust jobs in a heavily mechanized industry... why aren't politicians recognizing the huge boom in the clean-energy market and helping coalfield communities get their fair share of the clean-energy jobs, and the investment funds? Why aren't they advocating for a G.I. Bill for coal miners and former coal miners, to get education and retraining, and help launch the weatherization programs with electricians, plumbers, construction workers, or massive reforestation programs with the same bulldozer drivers? Why aren't we setting up a manufacturing base to build solar panels and wind turbines-- not just use them?.... The time has come for a transition to clean-energy jobs."
Biggers places little stock in possibilities provided by coal-gasification and carbon-sequestration projects like FutureGen. Mechanization means few jobs, peak coal means a dwindling supply, and the mining itself is too bad for the environment.
"And Southern Illinois, instead of being blindsided by so-called clean-coal technology-- a marketing slogan first used in Chicago in the 1890s, and trotted out every decade or so-- should be in the forefront of this just transition," Biggers says.
All that said, people in this region can quickly grow defensive toward any suggestions that might further shrink mining opportunities when they provide in many cases the only option for living-wage work. So how has Biggers's family and local friends received the book?
"Local family support has been wonderful," he says. "I think folks really appreciate my nearly ten years of research in showing the overlooked contributions of rural folks and our woodland culture in Southern Illinois. I feel my book doesn't simply look at the dark side of the coal industry, but the bright side of our wonderful Southern Illinois history and heritage, which I feel has been often overlooked, and the resiliency of our ancestors and present-day citizens."
For more information about Biggers and Reckoning at Eagle Creek, visit <http://www.JeffBiggers.com>.
Back, for a moment, to Springhouse: This time out editor Gary DeNeal published a memorial to Ben Brinkley, as well as several poems (showing the source of sons Hugh and Brian DeNeal's interest in verse, they of the Woodbox Gang). Physician Tom Martin pays tribute to some amazingly rugged old local men who eschew modern medicine and its cleanliness standards as luxuries for the weak. The new issue also features some great soup recipes by Dixie Terry, an essay about the value of time by Rebel Without Applause, and a letter to the editor from the editor of Nightlife.
Read excerpts from Springhouse at <http://www.SpringhouseMagazine.com>.
But that's not all-- winter 2010 has proven a productive time for area authors.
Carl Rexroad, who owns the Bookworm with his wife Kelly, also notes that SIU Press has reissued two local classics by John W. Allen (Legends and Lore of Southern Illinois and It Happened in Southern Illinois), plus a brand-new tome of local interest: Giant City State Park and the Civilian Conservation Corps: A History in Words and Pictures by Kay Rippelmeyer (232 pages; cloth, $34.95; paperback, $19.95). Rippelmeyer used to pen a regular Nightlife column about local nature and history. Look for more information in coming issues.
And purchase all of the above, including Reckoning at Eagle Creek, at the Bookworm in Carbondale...
War
The SIU Student Programming Council will hold a battle of the bands Thursday, April 15 in the Student Center Ballrooms. Applications for musicians who'd like to participate are due Monday, March 22 at 4:30 p.m. in the SPC offices on the third floor of the SIU Student Center. For more information, call SPC at (618) 536-3393 or visit <http://www.SPC4Fun.com>...
A battle of the bands will take place Fourth of July weekend at the A.C. Brase Grandstand at the Arena Park in Cape Girardeau. The entry fee is $100, and the winner takes home a $5,000 prize.
The contest is open only to fifty musical acts, and the registration deadline is March 15.
For more information, email <ZiggyWizard89@yahoo.com>.
TV Eye
Herrin residents and natives who would like to remember the city for reasons other than what Paul Angle documented in his classic Bloody Williamson: A Chapter in American Lawlessness now have a two-DVD video documentary that tells a far more positive story.
In 1957 the Herrin Tigers basketball team won the Illinois state championship. Local filmmaker Richard Kuenneke and historian Gordon Pruett created a two-part documentary, A Magical Season: The 1957 Herrin Tigers. Part I consists of a nineteen-minute piece about the season, while Part II synchronizes Chet Townsend's play-by-play WJPF radio broadcast of the championship game with video. Starting players Richard Box and Ivan Jefferson also provide commentary.
Kuenneke and Pruett are reissuing A History of Herrin, Illinois, originally issued on VHS as part of the Herrin centennial in 2000, as part of A Magical Season.
Buy the disc in local stores or through the Herrin Chamber of Commerce for $24.95 at <http://www.HerrinIllinois.com> or (618) 942-5163...
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