El mejor Lugar Before Cobertura de Noticias Y Cultura Latina en Chicago.
A medida que el gobernador de illinois, jb pritzker, busca poner fin A un program is Estatal deguro de Salud before adultos inmigrants de bayos gengresos qe that ha destacado como un model, unuevo Estudio prelimit suggiere otorga otorga Impulse financial a los hospitals y pude ayudar a todos los patient.
Illinois proportions seguro médico a unas 40,000 persons Que no tienen estatus legal en is unidos o Que no cumpn con los requisitos before me Seguro de Salud público integral, como medicaid y medicine. El Objetivo: Prevenir un costoso viaje a la sala de Emergencia de un hospital al pagar but attenión Preventiva.
Essay Esfuerzo eats tendo un efecto domin. En un nuevo estudioInvestigadores de la Universidad de Chicago (UIC) Y de la Universidad de California en los ángeles (UCLA) Encontraron Que la Llamada Deuda Incobrable, O Deuda Que Los Hospitales No Pedden Recuperar, Dysminuyó en promiois en. 2023, Y Potentials Hasta Un 25% en Hospitals de condados con la mayor inscripción en los plans de Salud before inmigrants del Estado. Before El Hospital Promedio, una dysminución del 15% en la deuda Incobrable equivale a alrededor de $ 1.5 million.
Areasha Martínez-Cardoso, Assistant Professor de Cyncias de la Salud pública en uic y líder del equipo de investigadores, también comparó illinois con Indiana y wisconsin desde 2017 Hasta 2023, Período que abarca antes y deskuro inmigranttes en Illinois. Los estados vecinos no contban con este tipo de programs, y la deuda Incobrable de los hospitals allí of mantuvo relativations Constant, según encontró el Estudio.
Aresha Martínez-Cardoso, Professor Adjunta de Cyncias de la Salud pública en la universidad de chicago y Principal Author del Estudio Sobre la deuda en Los Hospitales.
La dysminución de la deuda Incobrable en illinois ocurrió en partte porque miles de inmigranttes tenían seguro, según el Estudio. En otras palabras, los hospitals fueron compensados but la atción médica Que brindaron, en Lugar de teon facturar a patient no aseuralrados Que no podar but sueción o que no pagarían, lo quotbiha a la acumulación de los los.
Martínez-cardoso expresó su esperanza de que suicigación proportions una idea del impacto a corto plazo de asegur a los inmigrants.
“A veces Hay Que Gastar Dinero Before Ahorrar or Remove Plazo”, Dijo Martínez-Cardoso en una entrevista. “Y Está Alineado con nesseros Valores Como Estado cuidar a nuestros resididtes”.
EN 2020, Andrea Kovach, Abogada del Shriver Center on Poverty Law, Que Abogó But La Creación de unuro de Salud Estatal Primero before ancianos de Bajos mandosos Sin importer su estatus migratorio, mention que el Estudio es uno de los poCos information que damsmo asegur a los inmigranttes en illinois ha ayudado financial a los hospitales, y lue está en jugo as essay program desaparece.
El Estudio that Presenta Mientras los legisladores de ilinois negotian un presupporting estatal que comienza el 1 de julio. Debido a las presupporter press y la Incertidumbre en relación a los fundos federals before UNA Variedad de Programas, Pritzker No Incluyó El Program de Beneficios de Salud before adultos inmigrantes en su presuppu back to en ferto. EL Program ASUREGA A Person de Bajos Ingresos de Entre 42 y 64 años de edad.
El Movimiento Ha provocado indignación Entre Algunos Defensores, Legisladores y Patients, Aunque Algunos Republicanos han cuesdoado But Qué El Estado Está Cubriendo Los Costos Médicos de Personas Que No Son Ciudadanos Estadunidenses.
Más de 30,000 inmigrants están a punto de perder la cobertura A Partir del 1 de Julio. El Program Le Costó Al Estado Cerca De $ 487 Millones EN 2024. Comzetó en 2022, cuando pritzker amplió el Programs Estatal deguro de Salud before Incluir a persona desde los 42 años de edad. Ha propu repento seguir asegalando a ancianos inmigranttes de bayos inglesos que tengan al menos 65 años.
Una Portavoz del Department de Salud y Servicios family de illinois (ids) que administra los planet de Seguro de Salud before inmigrants, rechazó una petición de entrevista con altos functionarios. En un compicado, dijo los programas han proportionado “Acceso fundamental a la atción médica before the miles de resididtes de ilinois anteriorments no tenían seguro, lo kue ayuda a los proveedores atienden a esos clients”.
La Senadora Estatal Graciela Guzmán, Demócrata de Chicago, Expresó Su esperanza de Que El Estudio refuerce el Argument de Que debería seguer asegalando a los inmigranttes. Los Hallazgos Illustran cómo los programas han ayudado a estagabilizar la Salud de las comunidades, comentó, recordando a un inmigrant de 46 años de edad está recibeto Quimiotherapy before trave leukemia. Está a worko de perder sugoro de Salud Estatal.
“El Plan de Respaldo before Esa Familia essebesbulments mudarse”, Dijo Guzmán. “ES LIFE TODO LO QUE POSSEEN. SON DELEMENTES Realmete Increíblements Difíciles Sobre Cómo Juntar Dinero before Asegurears de Que El Esposo, El Familiar, Tenga La Atención EN Julio”.
Cuando los hospitals acumulan deudas, eso poddería perjedicar a todo. Podrían Verse bonds a Recortar Servicios o Reducir el acreso a la atción médica de otras manras, según los hallazgos preliminar de martínez-cardoso.
Menos Deuda Incobrable en toda la industry de la Salud ayuda a control los costos before CADA patients, desde el rico hasta el Pobre, affirmó martínez-cardoso. Y ESO AFECTA A LOS Tipos de Servicios Assocures EN Su Hospital Comunitario Local.
“¿PUDEN CONTRATER Más Obsteras/Ginecólogos? ¿Tengo Que Esperar UN BETWEEN VER A ALGUEN MESSE BEFORE VER A ALGUEEN, O TIPO DE EQUIPO QUECESITO?”, Cuesionó Martínez-Cardoso.
MIENTRAS LOS Legisladores elaboran el presupporto Estatal, Martinez-Cardoso Espera Que Hallazgos Information Sus Decisiones.
Kristen Schorsch Cubre la Salud de la región before wbez.
Traducido but La Voz Chicago con artificial integencia (he)
As Top Prep Football Prospects Continue to Lock in Offers while they they’re Still Vaable in The Portal Era, two more of the state’s top 20 juniors are off the recruiting board.
Edge Rusher Joey Quinn, A Key Member of Mount Carmel’s Class 7a Championship Team Last Fall, Has Committed to Vanderbilt, while Defensive Lineman Daniel Howard Has Picked Iowa State.
Both are Three-Star Prospects. Quinn, A 6-Foot-6, 250-Pounder, Is No. 15 in the 247sports.com composite ranks of illinois juniors. Howard, WHO IS 6-2 and 285 pounds, is rack 18th in the states.
National Recruiting Analyst Clint Cosgrove Likes the Fit for Both Players with their Respective College Programs.
“That’s a great pickup for (Vanderbilt),” Cosgrove Said of Quinn. “He’s a Kid, with my size and length – with his Physical Tools – he would have blown up.”
But Quinn’s Not JUST A Player whose Measurables Check the Right Boxes.
“You Watch Him Play, He’s A Technician,” Cosgrove Said. “He stays with great Pad Level, Stays Connected, is able to Change Direction and Make Plays.”
Plus, Cosgrove Added, “He’s A High-Motor Kid. He’s an Impressive Pass Rusher.
“There’s the so much upside and so Much to like it.
AS RECRUITING Becomes More National and Less Local, Quinn Is Also Vanderbilt’s Second Chicago-Earea Recruit in Two Recruiting Cycles. The First Was Quinn’s Teammate, Senior Quarterback Jack Elliott.
While the caravan have produced plenty of Power four talent in recent years – with more on the way – Howard’s Recruitment a breakthrough for lane. The Champions Enjoyed A Resurgency Under Coach Dedrick Dewalt, Who Stepped Down After Last Season, and Now Top College Programs Are Starting to Notice.
New Lane Coach Desires Conley, Who Was Promoted from Assistant Head Coach and Defensive Coordinator, Wasn’t Surprised to See Howard Up at A Power Four School.
“SAW IT IN DANIEL HIS FRESHAN YEAR,” Conley Said. “He kept Getting Bigger, Getting Stronger, Developing his game.
Cosgrove Also is Bullish on Howard.
“The Thing I Really Love About Him is he has a lot of Length,” Cosgrove Said. “HIS ARMS Are Long, he’s explosive off the ball.”
Conley Said Howard Can Play Anywhere on the line, from nose tackle to three-technique to one-technique to defensive end. And cosgrove Said Howard’s athleticism sets Him apart from Other Interior Linemen.
“You love a guy who can defy against the Run and Rush the passser,” Cosgrove Said. “He’s a guy who can be in on all three downs … … he’s a kid who will continue to cameop.”
As for Iowa State, “I Think Is Great Fit,” Cosgrove Said. “They have the Culture for Chicago Kids.”
Chicago’s Doc10 Film Festival-One of the Only Documentary-Exclusive Film Fests in the Country-is Celebrating Its 10th Anniversary at A High-Presture Time for the Art.
The Festival Programs A Highly Selective List of 10 Films and Screens say Through Sunday. Yet Filmmakers Say the Surge of Streaming Sites Like Netflix and Hulu Has Figited Demand Away from More Complex or Highly Political Docs and Toward Commercialized Films Featuring Cults, Pop Stars and Celebrities.
This year, the industry is braing for the most Change, as federal cuts to the national endowment for the arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities Will Mean Less Seed Money Avilaable to Kick-Start Projects.
“It is an existential threat. It is a crisis,” Said Anthony Kaufman, Senior Programmer of Doc10, which Has a Reputation for Showcasing Films that end up on Oscars shortlists.
“I KNOW LOTS OF FILMERS WHO HAD FILTS THAT WERE, AND NOW The Government is Going Back and Saying to say, ‘We’re Rescinding Your Funding.’ They’ve already spent the money.
SHIP WITH FINDING AND DISTRIBATION THREATS LIOMING LARGE Over the industry, Doc10 Filmmakers Remain Optimistic About Their Work in Chicago.
“You are all we are almost starting over,” Kaufman Said. “Obiviously, there was a time in the American movie industry before was pbs. There was also a time when there are no stree, and there was no distribution for document.
It is with these threats looming over the industry, the doc10 filmmakers saying the optimistic and eager to show their work in chicago and participate in postshow talkbacks.
Emmy-Winning movie Geeta Gandbhir, Whose “The Perfect Neighbor” Examine A Florida Shooting Caught on Bodycam Footage, Said This is a moment for Filmmakers to Collaborate-to Pool Resources and Rally Arund Arund at Like111 Documentaries Can Still Be Made.
“My Own Company Had a Project That Just Got Its Grant Cut,” Gandbhir Said “The Grant Got Cut, and We Had to Stop Working. But Did That Me Gave Up Completely? No.”
Geeta Gandbhir (Center) Created the New Documentary “The Perfect Neighbor,” Which Highlights the Dangers of Stand Your Ground Laws. Here, She Attends the Television Academy Honors with Viridiana Lieberman (Left) and sad affession.
Phil McCarten/Invision/AP
This Year’s DOC10 examplifies the thought-provoking films being crafted, Kaufman Said. Highlights Include Works About Unjust Laws, Unraditional Love and A Cult-Classic True Crime Show from the 2000s. There will Also be free Screenings Through the DOCS ACOSS Chicago Program at Venting Around the City, Like the Chicago Cultural Center and the National Museum of Mexican Art.
Here are a Few Standouts of the Fest:
‘The Perfect Neighbor’
Gandbhir’s “The Perfect Neighbor” chronicles the story of Ajike Owens, A 35-YEAR-Old Mother in Ocala, Florida, Who was Shot and Killed by Her Neighbor. The incident stemmed from a dispsput over Kids Playing in a Field and Garnered Attention Stand Over Stand Your Ground Laws.
“The film Organically Highlights the Dangers of Stand Your Ground and How That Law and the Castle Doctrine Laws are used by People who are embolded by saying,” Gandbhir Said. “When you look at the Numbers, it’s the it’s About 700 Additional People Killed A Year Because of Castle Doctrine Laws.”
Netflix is set to distribute “The Perfect Neighbor,” But First, Gandbhir Wants to Show the Film as Many Festivals as Posible and Offer Audiences the Forum for Talk-Backs.
“The Perfect Neighbor” Screens at 3:30 pm May 3 at the davis theater, 4614 N. Lincoln Ave.
‘Mistress Dispeller’
Directed by Hong Kong -Raised Filmmaker Elizabeth Lo, “Mistress Dispeller” Has Already Won Awards on the Festival Circuit. This doc is a love story with an interesting twist.
“IT’SBOUT THIS NEW INDUSTRY THAT’S EMERGED IN CHINA,” SAID LO, “WHERE IF YOU FIND OUT OUT YOUR SPOUSE IS Cheating on you, instead of directly confronting saying, you can this woman Called a ‘mistress dispensation’ to your family. Their Mistress and Kind of Influenza say to end the affair. “
It took lo about four years to pull this doc together. It is shot in real time from the point when a wife, Mrs. Li, Hires Mistress Dispeller Wang Zhenxi to Repair Her Mariage. The movie Takes Viewers on a Journey as the “Dispeller” Befries Mrs. Li, Her Husband and HIS Mistress – and the eventual outcome.
“When I set out to make this film, i wanted to use the film as a way to know mainland china,” Lo Said. “I THOUGHT THE BEST WAY TO THE KNOW A CULTURE IN THE DEEEPEST WAY IS THROUGH OUR LOVE STORIES, BECAUS THAT’S WEHEN WE’RE MOST VULNERABLE.”
“Mistress Dispeller” Screens at 4 PM May 4 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.
“Predators” Tackles the Rise and Fall of the Popular Television Show “to Catch a Predator.”
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
‘Predators’
Director David Osit Tackles the Rise and Fall of the Popular Television Show “To Catch a Predator” in this Documentary. The original series, hosted by Chris Hansen, was designated to literally catch abuses by staging fake-ups where unSuspecting child predators be caught in the ACT and Surprised by Cameras, Interviews and Police.
“I never set out to make a film about Catch a predator, ‘But i One Day Discovered the Online Fandom Community of the Show, Which is Very Small but Very Passionates,” Osit Said. “Watching RAW Footage (of the Show) was always really profound to me. I was a very intense emotional back-and-forth, watching it going from feeling for some of these guys, whict the show really make you feel, and then feeling disgusted to. HOLD BOTH WAS A KIND OF EXHAUDING ENTERPRISE. ”
HIS Own Emotional Connection LED HIM TO DIVE DEEPER. On its face, the film appears to be a typical trime doc. Howver, The Award-Winning Osit Said “Predators” Lets Viewers Perthink What they Know A Series That Birthed Spinoffs, Remakes and HEARTING TRENODING WHERE REGULAR SET-and SOMESTEMES ATTAK-Child predators.
“We’re not used to watching reality television, Documentaries or TRUE CRIME TELEVISION. We’re not used to watch this stuff with nuance and (engaging) with it in a way that that is requires contemplation,” Osit Said. “But the raw footage had all this contemplation as a part of it, and i thought, ‘what if i coulued create a movie where you’d have to be with both?’”
“Predators” Screens a at 8:15 pm May 2 at the davis theater.
The dancers — eight of them — are young, lean and eager to please.
The man directing them was that way too, years ago. He’s 65 now, and the sharp edges of his dancer’s physique are long gone.
The dancers wear ballet slippers. His shoes are clunky, with Velcro straps that can be loosened to accommodate badly swollen feet.
Choreographer Frank Chaves, seated in a motorized wheelchair, has no sensation from the chest down. His arms must do the work that his legs once did.
“The anger and the frustration, and the sheer just wanting to scream,” Chaves tells the dancers during a recent rehearsal at the Red Clay Dance Company studio in Woodlawn.
Chaves is talking about “Temporal Trance,” a piece he choreographed when he was co-director of the critically acclaimed but now-defunct River North Dance Company. His mother’s death from pancreatic cancer in 1998 provided the emotional heft for the piece. But the silent scream Chaves wants his dancers to convey could just as easily come from his own physical struggles.
He’s here in Chicago for two weeks, rehearsing “Trance” with South Chicago Dance Theatre for one performance, May 3, at The Auditorium in a special presentation of the work. The same night, the dance company will present Chaves with its Cultural Hero Hall of Fame award.
It took him three days to get here, in a specially equipped minivan from his home in Sarasota, Florida. He is staying in a hotel that allowed a hospital-type bed to be wheeled into his room.
But Chaves is not helpless. He is thriving, he says, in a way that he wasn’t even in his able-bodied life — even as the rare spine condition that has stolen his mobility worsens.
“This whole season has been a real gift from the universe,” he says. “I’m feeling really good and I’m feeling really happy.”
Dance, he says, “is the absolute best medicine, and it really just breathes life into me.”
Members of South Chicago Dance Theatre rehearse “Temporal Trance” at the Red Clay Dance Company studios.
Gotta dance
It was 1993, and a young Frank Chaves saunters downtown — movie-star handsome, his hair styled into a pompadour.
“As soon as I hear music, my head just fills up with steps,” he tells an interviewer as part of a 1993 documentary about River North Dance Company, where Chaves was, at the time, the associate artistic director.
Chaves was born in Cuba, but like so many Cubans, his parents moved the family to Miami. Chaves’ home as a child echoed with the clattering rhythms of salsa and merengue. He didn’t consider a life in dance until after taking a jazz dance class in college.
Choreographer Frank Chaves at Red Clay Dance Company studios.
“I was like a kid in a candy store. I couldn’t get enough of it,” he says.
He trained in Miami, joined his first dance company there, then got hired in New York to dance with Ballet Hispanico. He spent two years dancing and teaching in Philadelphia, before making his way here in 1985 and eventually to Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, then a 10-year-old company whose dancers were known for their versatility and physicality.
Mark Reeves, Chaves’ partner of 32 years, remembers marveling at Chaves’ strength (on stage with another dancer) — before Reeves had any romantic interest.
“They had this very physical duet, where they would run and jump and catch each other,” Reeves recalls. “It was almost like dance wrestling.”
Reeves keeps a photograph of Chaves performing an aerial version of the splits.
Frank Chaves was among the company of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, seen here with dancer Leslie Stevens.
“That was really the cream of the crop for me,” Chaves says of Hubbard Street. He traveled the globe with the company.
But just a few years in, Chaves found himself limping during a piece that required lots of backstage running. Exploratory surgery didn’t turn up anything unusual.
“I just wasn’t able to handle eight hours a day of dance and performances,” Chaves recounts. “It was incredibly painful (emotionally). I’d just found my stride, and I felt like I really had many years left in me.” Chaves was 33 at the time.
The Chaves style
The dance world cliché goes something like this: A dancer dies two deaths — the one when he stops breathing and the one when he stops dancing.
The lucky ones find another way to keep going.
Sherry Zunker, a dancer/choreographer Chaves had first met in the 1980s, convinced him in 1993 to work with her at River North Dance Chicago, then a small, up-and-coming company where she was the artistic director.
Frank Chaves and Sherry Zunker at River North Dance Chicago
Courtesy River North Dance Chicago
“As a dancer, he was such a great mover. He also had a gift for choreography,” Zunker recalls.
Chaves was an accomplished dancer, but at River North, he would become a legend.
“Frank has a very rare gift for tapping into the human experience, finding a movement that resonates with anyone. So you don’t have to be an educated dance audience,” says Ethan Kirschbaum, who danced with River North from 2011 to 2015.
Or as Lucia Mauro, a former Chicago dance critic and now a filmmaker put it, Chaves’ work was the perfect experience for a “first date.”
Perhaps they saw something of themselves in the intimacy on stage.
“There’s just something about two bodies and the limitless possibilities of what can be done,” Chaves says of his reputation for dazzling partner choreography.
Cuban rhythms, jazz, American standards and other-worldly music accompany Chaves’ choreography.
No single word defines Chaves’ style. In one of his works, dancers start out lying on the stage in a blue mist, twitching and squirming like new life forms emerging from the primordial soup. In another, the dancers straddle and leap over folding metal chairs. At one point, each dancer’s arms and torso are pinned within a chair, and yet each is still able to dance — as if foreshadowing Chaves’ later ability to thrive in a wheelchair despite his disability.
In 2001, Zunker departed River North Dance, and Chaves became sole artistic director. The company’s reputation continued to grow. There were tours of Europe, Israel, Russia.
Jessica Wolfrum Raun spent 14 years dancing with River North. Audiences stomped their feet in Germany. They wept with joy in Russia, she says. “It was like we were movie stars.”
And Chaves was their acclaimed director.
“His whole being was filled with a desire to express himself through movement … ,” Mauro says. “And he didn’t shy away from the messy and erratic phases of love, loss and grief.”
Choreographer Frank Chaves leads a rehearsal of “Temporal Dance” earlier this week with members of South Chicago Dance Theatre.
Life-changing news
As a choreographer, Chaves was now more of a spectator. No jumps, no heavy lifting. So the weakness in his left leg went away — for a time. When it returned in 2005, he went to his doctor, who ordered an MRI.
The diagnosis: syringomyelia, a rare condition where fluid-filled cavities develop within the spinal cord, putting pressure on the cord. In time, the cyst can grow, as it has in Chaves’ case, compressing and damaging the spine.
In the 2009 documentary, “Every Dancer Has a Story,” Chaves reveals how he imagined his future self in a wheelchair.
“I have pictured myself though and I have pictured myself still creating beautiful, beautiful things,” he says.
Six surgeries followed — not to cure, but to try to corral the disease. Doctors described Chaves’ case as “particularly aggressive.”
“To see a disease just kind of take all of that (movement) away and (it) being a really cruel fate for a dancer. To lose the use of his legs, it’s heartbreaking,” says Reeves.
Chaves refused to stop working. When he could no longer walk, even with a walker, he got fitted for a wheelchair.
“When I first saw myself in the mirror in the chair, that was an especially low point,” he says.
When the elevators occasionally broke down at River North’s rehearsal space, Chaves was unable to be in the room where the magic happened.
“I’ve done my time in terms of running a company,” Chaves told the Sun-Times at the time. “But I plan to continue choreographing for other companies, and for River North, if it’s right for the situation. My imagination is still intact. I also will be focusing on my health.”
River North Chicago Dance Company in “Temporal Trance” in 2015, choreographed by the company’s Artistic Director, Frank Chaves.
Later that year, Chaves and River North gave their final performance — to a sold-out audience at The Auditorium theater. Among the pieces, “Temporal Trance.”
Chaves came on stage for final curtain calls. Raun, who describes Chaves as “like a second dad,” held his hand.
“People flew from all over to see River North’s last show …,” Raun says. “The love pouring from the audience was palpable.”
The company folded about a year later.
Frank Chaves choregraphed “Underground Movements” for River North Dance.
A new normal
Chaves and his partner moved to Florida in 2021. The house has a ramp and a hospital bed. Chaves still buttons his shirts, but needs Reeves to put on his pants, socks and shoes. It takes Chaves two hours to get ready each morning. He takes a handful of medications daily.
“Seeing his face grimace or hearing him moan or say how badly he feels — and there is nothing I can do — that is really challenging,” Reeves says.
And yet, in Chaves’ head, bodies leap, jeté and pirouette unfettered. He’ll recline his electric wheelchair, earbuds in place. He’ll lift his arm like a conductor.
“He’s seeing the dance in his head, and so his eyebrows go up; you’ll see him smile,” Reeves says.
Chaves is still working, just not in the old way. He recently returned from a five-week stay in Atlanta, where he choreographed a piece for Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre.
Coming home
In 2009, Kia Smith, now the founder and executive artistic director of South Chicago Dance, was a student at Western Michigan University, where Chaves was an adjunct professor. Chaves set “Temporal Trance” for the university’s students. Smith has never forgotten the performance.
“It’s this beautiful embodiment of everything Frank is known for. The partnering is very daring. The women are being pushed up into the air, they’re in the splits, upside down,” she recalls.
Kia Smith, right, remembered seeing Chaves’ piece, “Temporal Trance,” when she was in college in 2009. She never forgot it. Smith, the founder and executive artistic director of South Chicago Dance Theatre, invited Chaves to work with her dancers to perform “Trance” May 3 at The Auditorium theater.
Smith wanted to stage the work in Chicago, but not without Chaves. So she asked him if he would come.
“Getting on an airplane? We haven’t even attempted that for well over a decade,” Reeves says.
But Chaves was determined to return to Chicago.
“There really wasn’t a question; we were going to make it work somehow,” Reeves says.
And so last week, the couple set off in their converted minivan for the trip.
The teacher teaches
Chaves rolled into the Red Clay Dance studio (held there and not at South Chicago Dance’s Hyde Park studio because the latter isn’t wheelchair-accessible) this past week, a Starbucks coffee cup in one hand. During the three-day trip, he’d managed a total of only a couple of hours of sleep, he says.
Applause and starstruck stares greeted him. He toggled into the rehearsal space, maneuvering his wheelchair to face the dancers.
Members of South Chicago Dance Theatre rehearse “Temporal Trance” at Red Clay Dance studio.
“My best method is to walk and talk initially,” he says, adding that he was looking for lots of detail and “nuance.”
He prepared to set the dancers in motion: “A five, six, seven, eight …”
The section they were rehearsing has a muscular, tribal rhythm to it — propelled forward with the guttural blare of what sounds like a didgeridoo.
Mostly, Chaves nodded in time to the beat, occasionally stopping the dancers to offer a suggestion.
“This is like a silent scream, but we certainly see it in your body,” he said at one point.
Members of South Chicago Dance Theatre rehearse Frank Chaves’ “Temporal Trance.” “All of us are taking this very seriously because this is his opportunity to bring his work back to the world and we want to do it justice,” once dancer said.
Chaves’ arms rise in a swirl when he wants the dancers to go bigger, bolder.
“Let it ripple up all the way along the spine,” he urges.
He can’t demonstrate that, of course.
“I have the vision, I have the words to describe it, but (the dancers) are my body,” Chaves tells the Sun-Times.
“In some ways, he is better than other choreographers because he has to be so expressive with the details,” said dancer Chloe Chandler during a break in the rehearsal. “All of us are definitely taking this very seriously because this is his opportunity to bring his work back to the world and we want to do it justice.”
Frank Chaves, shown here in rehearsals with South Chicago Dance, has said that “Temporal Trance” deals with the frustration, anger, and the sense of helplessness he felt when his mother died of pancreatic cancer in 1998. But it could just as easily convey the feelings he’s experienced dealing with a rare and worsening spine condition.
The Auditorium show will be the first time “Temporal Trance” will be performed in Chicago since the 2015 farewell.
Before the Monday rehearsal ends, Chaves has the dancers run through the entire third section.
He tells them to breathe in deeply because “it’s a long build.”
And when the leaping, the stomping, the spinning are finished, all that can be heard is a chorus of spent, panting dancers.
Chaves leads a round of rapturous applause. There are giddy smiles all around.
“That was awesome! That was the bomb!” Chaves says. “I can’t imagine the level it will get to when you get to the stage!”
“DOES THIS LOOK LIKE FUN TO YOU? Being A Mrs. Somebody?”
Michaela Kell Is A Bad Boss with Control Issues and Terrible Boundaries. But as this episode Makes Clear, She’s Also a Woman who fell in love with a man and quickly lost herself in his gilded world. It would be so Much Simpler if she were the nefarious villain devon assumed. But at this point in SirensNobody’s Perfect or Entirely Evil. They all just have broken wings that need fixing.
As Dreamy and Surreal As “Monster” was, “Persepper” BRINGS THINGS CRASHING BACK DOWN TO Earth. It Throws All Our Main Characters Together for One Final Night That’s SO Chaotic I Completely Forgot About Michaela’s Gala. How Can It Outdo Peter’s Miserable Clam Chowder and (Mountains of) Bread Dinner Party? I guess we’ll find out.
UNIL THEN, LET’S UNPACK THE AFTERMATH OF ETHAN’S PROPOSAL, WHICH IS A DISASTER. Simone’s Rightly Furious He Thoughting Her Dad, Bruce, Here Waled Be Romantic. As she points out several times in this episodes, she explicitly told Him they don’t speak for what are obiviously painted reasons. Ethan’s flabbergasted that anyone, let Alone a poor girl from Buffalo, Waled Turn Down New England (Thrice!) Most Eligible Bachelor.
MAKING MATTERS WORKE AND WEIRDER, Michaela Walks ino this bizarre skene – Looking gorgeous in a shade of emerald green julianne should have on retainer – and is met by an Awestruck Bruce. “We’ve Known Each Other a Very, Very, Very Long Time,” he inssists, gazing at her reverently. It ‘s unsettling moment Michaela Handles Well-especialy well it becoms clear that bruce thinks that she’s his long-dead wife and that they shoulder, and quote, “fuck.” The Vibe Simply Could Not Be Worsse or Weirder for A Mariage Proposal. Simone gets the hell out of there.
By the time she runs into the Cliff House Kitchen and Straight Into Peter, I don’t blame her for almost forgetting why he’s trying to apologize. It has been only a couple of hours SINCE he tried to kiss her, but so much has HAPPENED SINCE THEN IT REALLY DOES SEEM THE SMALLEST OF POTATOES, relatively speaking. Simone Finally JUST ASSURES HIM SHE Won’t Tell Michaela. “I have nor much to love as you do, so it’ll be one secre,” she Says. Famous Last Words.
As rude as it was for Michaela to Say Devon’s “in Last Place” when it is comes to people simone wants to see (and probably Untrue Given Bruce’s UnwelCome Presence), Simone Need Some Advice From Kiki. AS we have saw in the episode’s opening flashback Schene, Michaela Told at Her Job Interview that she was once just a girl from fresno who worked her ass Off for the Same Law-Scholar Scholarship Simone Eventually Got. Michaela wasn’t born into this cashmere lap of luxury at all. But she know what it means to marry a man who was – and what it would be to do the same.
Michaela doesn’t Outright tell her not to marry ethan, but it’s Clear what she really thinks. “When you’re a mrs. someone, your life gets huge. But you get very tiny,” she admits. Also, with no financial freedom of her own, her “Whoo Life Hinges on his Approval.” With that, Michaela Makes a Far More Tempting Proposal to Simone: The Opportunity to Chair Her Conservation Foundation in New York City for Triple Her Current Salary. IT’S almost as if Michaela’s offering an esca hartch that than she – a Persephone whose temps trapped her in a sinister world – can’t use herself.
Simone, nor Thrilled by this as she was horrified by ethan, Accepts. But first, Michaela Asks, Hillaryusly, “Can We JUST DO 30 Seconds of Admin Before You Dump Him?” She Still Wants to Prove Peter’s Infidelity, Which She’s Sure She Can If She Can JUST BREAK INTO HIS ELECTRONIC Devices. But Simone Suggests HIS Personal Phone Sine’s Usually Unlocked. Handy! Wen Michaela eventually finds it tucked bellows more piles of bread, she dials the unsaved number in Peter’s recent calls – which, of courtes, is his son’s.
Meanwhile, Simone’s Emotionally Taxing Evening Shows No Signs of Letting Up. Although she’s firm while breaking with Ethan, he Throws a prissy Little tantrum (Glenn Howrton’s Specialty) About not recagating this version of her. “You’re like, dinner“He sputters. Simone’s not swayed.
With this context in mind, Simone’s subsequent convo with devon flips the first episode’s dynamic on its head. This time, when Simone Calmly Sayys She Never Wants to See Their Father Again, ITS impossible to blame her. Well, at least for me; Devon’s Agog. “You don’t feel any Responsibility for Him?” She asks. Simone Scoffs: “He didn’t Feel Any Responsibility for AS A Kid.” What’s More, She Sayys, HISGLUNITCE NOT ONLY LED TO HER Growing Up in Foster Care But to Her Own Suicide Attempt. “He’s the Reason (Mom) Killed Hersself. He’s the Reason i TRIED to Kill MySelf. woof.
This is the Third Scane in As Many Episodes of the Sisters Coming to Terms with their past, but it is undenibly effective. Neither Should have had to deal with any of it, but they did and the ways they had to make May Haunt say forever. Still, Simone Has Apparently Done Some Work Toward Bettering Her Mental Health. Wenn Devon Brings Her Untouched Klonople, for Example, Simone Says She and Her Long-Term Psychiatry Workhed on a Gradual to Reduce Her Medication Intake. Oh! Like Michaela, It Waled Be Way Easier for Devon IF Her Immediat Impression of Simone as a brainwashed damsel in distress were the truth, but reality is rarely so Black-White. With everywhere finally out on the table, Everything contains far more shades of gray than eather of saying.
Reeling, Devon Takes off to the Beach to be Alone. Almost immediately, she’s trailed by Captain Morgan, Maried Raymond, and, to All Their Annoyance, that random Gardener she boned in the Morning. (Not to be crass, but devon must be really Good in Bed.) Josh segarra’s a little to be good at playing dopy with hearts of gold becuse i fout myself sympatizing with ramid a little too. He Clearly cables About Devon; He also doesn’t seem to underestand how many many unhealthy choices he encourages, from their sporadic hookups to the Blackout binge Drinking that Landed Her in Jail. But when she was a takes out her frustration on Him to the point of saying if he “walked into the ocean right now and drown, i’d be better off,” I winced right along with Him.
Inside, Michaela’s Doing Her Best to Keep Bruce Calm AFTER he Emerges from Peter’s Sad-Man Crow’s Nest High as a kite and paranoid as hell. Simone Simone Tries to Help When She Stumbles Upon the Concerning Skene, but HER FATHER HAS FORGOTTEN WHO she, Claimimg Simone is ”dead. ” To KEEP HIM FROM FURTERTER, Michaela Plays Along With His Fantasy That HIS Wife, Letting Him Poetic About Their Tumultuous Relationship. Remember his wife just may be a human being.
Bruce eventually wears himself out and goes to sleep, peter and michaela get to have first frank conversation in what seems like a very long time. Peter Comes Clean About Going to His Grandson’s Christtening; Michaela Insists She Wants Him to Have a Relationship with Her Kids If they Might Hate Her. They Say they love each other. IT SEEMS Good, or at Least More Real.
IT”s too bad the night ends with that Vanity Fair Photographer Showing Up With A Sneaky Pic of Peter and Simone Kissing! That’s though the episode closes with a thumbs -fully tumbling over over chekhov’s cliff, Michaela Getting that Photo Feels like the Most Crushing Blow for Her and Simone Both.
• props to the hair, makeup, and coostuming departments for differentiation kiki’s Simone from pre-Michala Simone, who showed up to the Island with a scraggly ponytail, a gray button-down, UNEVEN SKIN, and Scrawled tattoos. (Props also to milly alcock, who expertly modulates her performance throughout this episode.)
• Once Again, i am Begging for the Cliff House Staff to Turn the Sound off your Phones. Your bosses Can’t Ask you what your texts how if they don’t know you got a Text!
• Best Raymond Line/Josh Segrora Delivery is tied between his at being mystaken for bruce’s Caretaker (“I’m a manager at a falafel balls with a 4.6 on yelp, thank you very much”) I’ll just burn the restaurant down ”).
Richards’s convictions, and his aspirations for psychedelics, prompt questions about the objectivity of such research. Rick Strassman, a psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico who conducted psychedelic research in the early nineties, suggested to me that at least some of the researchers came to the study with “a mission” to demonstrate the spiritual and psychological value of psilocybin. He pointed to the risk of selection bias: those who volunteer are likely to be “spiritually hungering for a mystical experience,” which increases the chance that they will have one. “I would not think that a stodgy Talmudic scholar would want to participate,” he told me. “For them, it’s the word and the law. Spiritual experience alone is not that important.” In 2020, Matthew Johnson, a Johns Hopkins researcher and a co-author of the religious-leaders study, made similar warnings in an article titled “Consciousness, Religion, and Gurus: Pitfalls of Psychedelic Medicine.” He wrote of “scientists and clinicians imposing their personal religious or spiritual beliefs on the practice of psychedelic medicine.”
“I can do this the quick way or the dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun way.”
Cartoon by Benjamin Schwartz
When Priest stepped into the psychedelic-session room at Johns Hopkins, he felt both excited and anxious. The vibe of the space was more living room than clinic; it had a cozy couch for participants to lie on, vaguely spiritual-looking art work on the walls, and a small statue of the Buddha on a bookshelf. Richards, who has a wide, toothy grin, was one of two facilitators, or “guides,” present to supervise the experience. Priest told me that, before he took the blue capsule that Richards offered him in an incense burner shaped like a chalice, he admitted to feeling nervous. He couldn’t recall exactly what Richards said in response, but he remembered the message that he received: You should be nervous. You’re about to meet God.
The cross-pollination of religion and psychedelics has a long history. In the psychedelic community, it is virtually an article of faith that hallucinogenic plants and fungi played a role in the visions and mystical experiences that helped give rise to some religions. The Eleusinian Mysteries, the annual rite honoring Demeter that was performed in Greece for nearly two thousand years, climaxed with the consumption of a potion called the kykeon, which was said to give participants visions of the afterlife and enable them to commune with their ancestors. Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD, in 1938, suspected that the recipe included ergot, the fungus on which his discovery was based. (Demeter is the goddess of agriculture and fertility; ergot grows on grain.)
In the New World, peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, and the seeds of the ololiuqui—a type of morning glory—have had sacramental uses for millennia. In the early aughts, scientists dated two specimens of peyote, found in a cave near the Rio Grande, at more than five thousand years old. After Spanish colonizers arrived, the Catholic Church banned the use of mushrooms in Aztec rituals; the Nahuatl word for them—teonanácatl—translates roughly as “flesh of the gods,” which must have sounded like a direct challenge to the Christian sacrament. The practice continued underground, however, and similar customs persist today.
The U.S. banned peyote in the late nineteenth century, but the Native American Church, which fuses Indigenous and Christian beliefs, fought a prolonged legal and legislative battle for the right to use the peyote cactus in its ceremonies. The effort ended successfully in 1993, when Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Since then, two churches that originated in Brazil have secured the right to use ayahuasca during ceremonies in the U.S. Psychedelic churches, some sincere in their spiritual convictions and others not so much, are opening at an accelerated rate. Lawyers in the newly formed Psychedelic Bar Association say that this trend has been encouraged by the Supreme Court’s expansive approach to religious liberty.
In 1962, Walter Pahnke, a Harvard graduate student who studied under the psychologist and psychedelic advocate Timothy Leary, administered either a pill containing psilocybin or a placebo to twenty volunteers, mostly Protestant divinity students. The volunteers then sat in the basement of Marsh Chapel, at Boston University, and listened to a Good Friday sermon piped in from the pulpit above them. Of the ten volunteers who received the drug, eight reported powerful mystical experiences. In the placebo group, one did. The researchers’ definition of mysticism mirrored the one in “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” a 1902 collection of lectures by the psychologist and philosopher William James, who experimented with nitrous oxide. James associated mystical experiences with a sense of well-being, timelessness, ineffability, and unity with “ultimate reality.”
Pahnke’s published research failed to mention that, as participants recalled years later, one person fled the chapel and headed toward Commonwealth Avenue, possibly to spread the word of Jesus to passersby; he had to be restrained and given an injection of the antipsychotic Thorazine. Another participant, Huston Smith, was a leading scholar of religion. “Until the Good Friday Experiment,” he told an interviewer in 1996, “I had had no direct personal encounter with Him/Her/It.”
Griffiths, Richards, and their colleagues were inspired in part by the Good Friday Experiment. In a study published in 2006, they administered psilocybin to several dozen volunteers, who then filled out surveys that included a “Mystical Experience Questionnaire.” The questionnaire drew on Pahnke’s experiment and James’s writings. The researchers ultimately concluded that psilocybin could reliably occasion mystical experiences.
Priest’s psychedelic journey at Johns Hopkins followed norms that have become common in modern psychedelic research: After several preparatory sessions with two guides, the participant swallows the capsule, lies down on a couch, and dons a pair of headphones and an eye mask, to encourage an inward focus. The facilitators say little, but share words of advice or comfort if the experience turns frightening; “in and through” is a common refrain. Although touch is considered a boundary violation in conventional psychotherapy, psychedelic therapists sometimes offer a hand to hold or a pat on the shoulder. Consent for touch is discussed in advance and reiterated in the moment; participants and facilitators also rehearse touch beforehand. After the Hopkins and N.Y.U. sessions, participants filled out multiple questionnaires and wrote a narrative of their experience. The next day, they returned for an “integration session,” to help make sense of what can be a confusing experience. They could also participate in a follow-up psilocybin session. Of the twenty-nine participants who completed a first session, five did not return for a second.
Like virtually all the religious leaders I spoke with, Priest reported an encounter with the divine. His session began with gorgeous visuals—fractal patterns that reminded him of mosaics in a mosque. Then a spiralling current of electricity seemed to take up residence in his left thigh. He felt it move powerfully up his body and lodge in his throat. “I thought my Adam’s apple was about to explode,” he told me. Both guides could sense his distress and one reached out to comfort him. (Priest later spoke publicly about a guide touching his head, which drew criticism online, but a university review of video recordings contradicted Priest’s account.)
To Priest, the touch felt like the ritual Christian gesture of the laying on of hands. He remembers a guide holding his feet as the electrical sensation intensified. “It blew out of the top of my head, and then I started making these sounds that felt religious and spiritual and sacred,” Priest recalled. “I realized I was speaking in tongues, which I had never done before. Speaking in tongues is not an Episcopal sort of thing.”
Looking back, Priest described the experience in distinctly religious, but not strictly Christian, terms. “I would say now that my throat chakra had been blocked for a long time,” he said. “I just felt blocked in what I was preaching.” Priest described the quality of his encounter with the divine as “erotic.” So did a couple of other participants; one talked about having “a spiritual orgasm.” Priest also spoke of a reversal of gender roles. “The divine felt more masculine, and I felt like I was experiencing it the way a woman would,” he told me. “It felt so foreign to me as a man that I felt this must be how a woman experiences sexuality.” After the session, a friend came to pick Priest up and was surprised to find his face flushed. “I looked completely different,” Priest said. “I was like a new creation.”
Not everyone in the study left their session with such theological clarity. A Catholic priest from Mexico told me about hearing directly from Jesus, but a Protestant minister said with a shrug that “there was nothing particularly Christian about it.” The Buddhist roshi told me that her experience was “not life-altering” but led her “into a completely nonconceptual realm,” which she could find no words to describe. Rita Powell, now the Episcopal chaplain at Harvard, declined a second session, because her first, at N.Y.U., brought her face to face with “the abyss.” Speaking about her experience on a Harvard panel about psychedelics and religion, Powell said that her facilitators had not prepared her for something so dark. One of them “kept trying to reassure me that experiences of psilocybin were good, and beautiful, and unitive,” she said. “It seemed like kind of sloppy hippie stuff about love and harmony.” She said that, at one point in her session, she was “nowhere”: “There was neither color nor its absence. There was no form, or its absence. There was not fear. There was not joy. There was not revelation. There was nothing.” She described it as “maybe the hardest thing I had done in my life,” something that took her to “the furthest limit of human capacity.”
A peer-reviewed academic paper, “Effects of psilocybin on religious and spiritual attitudes and behaviors in clergy from various major world religions,” appears in Psychedelic Medicine this month. Its senior authors are Bossis and Stephen Ross, a psychiatry professor at N.Y.U. Swift, the funder who helped debrief some of the participants, also sent me a narrative account that highlights themes from sixteen interviews. It reads almost like a psychedelic oral history. Interviewees tended to report “authentic spiritual or religious experiences,” the account notes. A priest is quoted as saying, “I wasn’t dreaming, I wasn’t imagining, I wasn’t hallucinating.” Many participants likened their experience to those of historical and scriptural figures. “I was able to experience what the mystics were for some reason able to experience spontaneously,” a pastor said. “I don’t think that . . . my experience was less than theirs.”According to the interviews, the divine was not usually embodied or visible but, rather, felt as a presence that suffused reality, or as a sense of oneness. “I realize my very pulse is God, my very breath is God,” a rabbi said.
Several participants were surprised to encounter imagery or dogma outside their own faith. A Congregationalist minister described turning into an Aztec god and then the Hindu god Shiva. No one I spoke to, not even the rabbis, described seeing the stereotypical God of the Old Testament. And many of the religious leaders, men and women alike, experienced the divine as a feminine presence. Participants characterized God as “soothing,” “maternal,” or “womb-like.” A United Methodist pastor from Alabama called this “mind-blowing.” (Jaime Clark-Soles, the Baptist Biblical scholar in the study, told me, “God struck me as a Jewish mother at one point, which is funny, since I’m a Jesus follower.”) One of Priest’s fellow-Episcopalians, a man, reported, “I had a total deconstruction of patriarchal religion.”
It was common for participants to gain an appreciation for religions other than their own. “All the truths are in all the religions,” one rabbi said. “The active ingredients are all the same.” A Congregationalist who previously had little patience for charismatic expressions of Christianity—“the hands in the air, the talking, speaking in tongues, and all the weirdness”—observed after his session that “pathways towards the truth are even more varied than I thought.” Some felt a marked tension between the conventions of their faith and the immediacy of their psilocybin experience. “I think I have less tolerance for institutional religion now,” a Presbyterian minister is quoted as saying. “There are other ways to connect with the divine.” Here was the entire history of world religions in a nutshell: orthodoxy and authority in tension with the direct spiritual experience of the individual.
Sughra Ahmed, the only Muslim in the religious-leaders study, told me that she was petrified before her first session. Like many others, she was apprehensive about what she would learn about herself. She also feared that her participation would be considered taboo in her community of British Muslims. “Would they think I was bringing shame on us as a people?” she told me. She asked that the researchers obscure her identity in their papers, and for years she spoke to no one about her experience. But more recently she concluded that, for the sake of her personal authenticity, she needed to go on the record.
Ahmed, who is in her forties, has a round, open face and speaks in complete paragraphs. She grew up in the North of England, the daughter of immigrant Pakistanis. She went to the mosque after school every day; her parents prayed at home and fasted for Ramadan. She studied English language and literature at university and was working in I.T. when 9/11 happened. Determined to better understand both the roots of Islam and the sudden surge of prejudice—she remembered people treating her “as a security threat” when she was boarding a bus—she earned a graduate degree in Islamic studies. For a time, she wore the hijab. She was the first woman to chair the Islamic Society of Britain, and then became an associate dean for religious life at Stanford, leading prayers and preaching ecumenically at a church on campus.
Ahmed describes herself using a feminine honorific given to religious scholars or teachers: ustadha. She volunteered for the study in part because her faith wasn’t represented among the participants. “Someone had to be the Muslim seat at the table,” she told me. But, as the only Muslim, she felt that participating meant “stepping into a space not designed with you in mind.” She had also read that psychedelics had shown promise in the treatment of trauma, which the Muslim community knows something about.
Early in her first session, Ahmed told me, she felt God right behind her. “Like, if I turned around, I would bump into God,” she said. “There’s a verse in the Quran in which God says, ‘I’m closer to you than your jugular vein.’ The jugular is the life-giving source. God was with me the whole time.” For her, God was neither masculine nor feminine. “God was above gender, above everything . . . an existence, not a figure,” she said. “And God was love.” Her epiphany was a familiar psychedelic trope, but that did not make it any less profound. “It was just mind-blowingly clear how wrong we have it as human beings, and how we need to nurture love, to put it at the center of our engagement with humanity and animals and the planet,” she told me.
Ahmed said that, during her second session, “it dawned on me that the womb is the center of everything.” The memory still makes her heart beat faster, she said. “How incredibly glorious that women should have this exclusively and not anybody else! So why don’t we have a culture where we drop down at the feet of these women in awe and love and respect?” When I asked whether some Muslims would regard these ideas as heretical, she laughed. Not in her reading of Islamic scripture, which often accords women great respect—but yes, she said, in some Muslim cultures they might. “In Islam, we prostrate to God and no one else,” she said.
For years after her psilocybin sessions, Ahmed felt unmoored, as though she were struggling to regain her sense of equipoise and purpose. In her community, those who knew about psychedelics tended to lump them in with other illicit drugs. She felt that she could not talk with anybody, not even her family, about her experience, even though it was one of the most important in her life. She also felt that the team at Hopkins hadn’t done enough to help her make sense of the experience. She called the sessions “extractive”—“they were extracting data for the study”—and wished she’d had a chance to process them with people who looked like her. She found herself drifting away from prayers and rituals, and what little tolerance she’d had for misogyny and patriarchy was gone.
In 2007, Jayson Dobney, an Iowan with a master’s degree in the history of Musical Instruments, from the University of South Dakota, Moved to New York to be a curator in the department of musical instruments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For decades, there had ben whispers in guitar circles of a vast trove of twentieth-centenary guitars, in private hands, anyone in the tri-state are-an El Dorado of Coven strats and martins of impeccable Provence. Eve in Vermillion, South Dakota, Dobney Had Heard the Rumors. Coming east, he wanted to learn more, especally becase the met’s instruments department, for all its heirlooms (the World’s Olditet Piano, Three Stradivarius Violins, A Mayan Double Whistle), possessed almost not.
In 2011, Dobney Put Together an EXHIBIT CELEBRATING THE WORK OF THE Italian American Luthers who has been designated and built the archtop guitars Beloved by Jazz Musicians. Seeking Objects for the Show, He Met a Record Producer and Guitar Maven Named Perry Margouleff, Who Said That He Might Have a Few Instruments to Share, As Anonymous Lender. Dobney visited a warehouse outside the city where, in a reception area, Margouleff Showed Him Eight Guites. “It was just like that when i, as a curator of the met, came to visits, i had no idea what was actually there. I just saw eight guita,” Dobney Told me recently.
Unseen that day was the rest of the Collection, the one that so many People Had wondered About. ALSO UNSEEN: The Man Who Ouns it, Dirk Ziff, a wealthy publishing heir and financier with a reputation, too a connoisseur and a guitarist who had recorded and toured with Carly Simon. Few People were aware that the two men had spent decume working together to assemble what is now recagenable as the world’s fineste.
Dobney Had some insight into the Power that Such Objects Might Possess. Early in his meture, dobney, whose thessis at south Dakota was titled “Innovations in American Snare Drums: 1850–1920,” Got Ringo Star to the Museum HIS GOLD-PLANT LUDWIG SNare (GIVE to Him by Ludwig, After the Beatles’ 1964 APPEARCE ON ” Sullivan Show ”Juiced Sales). “Everyone was shocked that there was a line out the door just of People who wanted to get their Photo take with a little drum in a case,” Dobney Said.
He finally Met Ziff in 2019, when ziff came to the museum for a private tour of “Play it loud,“ an ejibition of the Totemic Rock Instruments, which was a collaboration between the met and the rock & roll of fame. ZIFF and Margouleff Had lent eleven guita, and margouleff Had also wrangled the instruments (and cöperation) of Jimmy Page, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, and Eddie Van Halen. Ziff and Dobney Spent Hours Together, Talking Gear. Margouleff Had Long Believed that the Ziff Collection Should Be Shared With The Public and Had Floated the Idea of Building a Museum, but Ziff Preferred a Low Profile, and Patience. “We’ll get to that,” he was. Generally, The Big Institutions Look Down on Guitars. Margouleff Told Me, “After the Guggenheim Did An Exibration on the Art of the Motorcycle, i Said to the Guy there, ‘You Should Do Guites.’ He Said, ‘Over My Dead Body.’ As Jimmy Page Says, guita were terramed by the brush of rock and roll. US. ”
A J-50 Acoustic Guitar Made by Gibson in 1955 and Played by Mississippi John Hurt.
“Play it loud” was among the most well-attended exhibrations in the Museum’s History. Max Hollein, Who Had Started As the Met’s Director the year before, had a mandate to modernize the programming and attatract a new generation of visits and donors. A Few Months After the Show Closed, Hollein Made a Trip to the Warehouse. This time, Ziff and Margouleff opened the vault.
“That was my eureka moment,” Hollein Told Me. “The Collection Blew with Away. I Thought, This should and must be at the met.“The Guitar, he Said, is” One of the Most -Not the Most – Aconic American Objects of the Twentieth Century. “
Last Year, Ziff and Margouleff donated the collection to the met. In the sprout of 2027, the museum will open a permanent gallery devoted to the evolution and cultural impact of the American Guitar.
One Sunday Last Month, I Paid A Visit to the Warehouse, in a Light-Industrial Area. “You were never here,” Margouleff Said, Ushering with Inside. It was his Winking Way of Confirming That I’d Honor A Promise Not to Reveal Its Location. Margouleff Had on Jeans and a Faded Crocker Motorcycles T-Shirt. He has sidebarns and long Gray Hair, and Wears Honey-Tintted, Oversized Jackie O. Glasses. He Carries Himself With the Assurance of a Man Who Knows His Business and Can Fix Anyding and Has Met a Certain Subsette of Everybody – the is, All the People He’d Want to Meet, which is another way and ha more than one bob dylan Story. He doesn’t suffer fools or jerks, has exacting standards in matters Lutheristic and Otherwise (Italian Food, Wine, Manners, Business Dealings), and Since Childhood Has Consider Essentially UNEMPLOYable. He’s A Car Buff, Too, and Built a Dune Buggy when he was nine. One of the His Measures of Character is the Degree to Which You Truly Care About Guitars, but he is not a snob. He wants everyone to play, Event Poorly. He is married (he and his life live in connecticut) but has never wanted kids. The guitars are His children.
Margouleff LED with Through a tidy workshop and into a reception are with a kitchenette and a wall of a half-dosen supersized vox amps. “No One Knows What’s in the Collection,” he Said. “We try to keep it as private as humanly postible. SOMESTEMES People Reach out to me and offfer me something, and i Think, You’re trying to sell with something already Own.“Ziff Once Got a Call from A Dealer Offering Him the Highly Coven” Brock Burst “1959 Les Paul Custom, Named for A Collector. The Dealer Asked for Half Money, not knowing that ziff already Had the brook burst under the bed he was sitting on.
Margouleff’s Pronouns to Blur Ownership and Agency. SOMESTEMES WHEN he Says “i,” he Means “we,” as in he and ziff, or really “he,” nor in just ziff. A Patron-Steward Dynamic Pereins. In the Early Days, Margouleff’s Counterparties DOubted that “Dirk Ziff” Ziff isn’t merely the moneybags, but he has another Life: Family, High Finance, Various Passionate and Enterprises. (He is the principal owner of the World Surf League, The Governing Body of Pro Surfing.) Margouleff is the Guy on the Ground. One Collector Reference to Him as “Dirk’s Guitar Pimp.” Margouleff would Prejt “Guitarcheologist.”
“I am the owner, and technically the gift to the met is from,” Ziff Said. “But i think of it as a gift from bot of us, Because we have done this together, over the court of almost forty years.”
Margouleff was nine years old desh, in 1969, his brother, who was eighteen, took Him from their home on long island to see who perform “Tommy.” The Music was galvanizing, but what really seized his so -so -called and sound of Pete Townshend’s Red Gibson SG special. “I was abducted by the Guitar,” Margouleff Likes to Say.
A Week Later, Margouleff’s Brother Persuaded Their Parents to Take Back to the City, to Manny’s Music, on the Stretch of West-Eighth Street Known As Music Row. They Emerged with an SG Like Townshend’s. By the time margouleff was twelve, he was a regular glas-fogger on music row. He Noticed Some Things. One was that it used to be at we buy guita sounded better than the new one acres the street at manny and the yet Cost than Half as Much. The rock guitarists he admired seed to the older ones, too. Another was that that is the sow of THose guita Hanging there on bailing wire, strung up by their headstocks, Knocking against one another, filled Him with sadness, of that oters might feel we encountering a box of abandoned puppies. He thought, I have to say. I have to find i say good homes.
“He had a quick tempe, but who in these parts does not?”
CAROTON BY FRANK COTHAM
That Summer, Margouleff Earned JUST ENOUGH WORKING Construction to Purchase His First Collectible Guitar, A 1963 Gibson Johnny Smith ARCHP, for Eleven Hundred Dollars, From A Local Buffy Russell Hirsch, WHO BECAME HIS FIRST GUITTOR. A Year Later, Margouleff tracked down a 1963 Gibson Firebird, like the one he’d seen Johnny Winter Play at the Beacon. By the time margouleff was fourteen, he’d workhed his way into the good graces of the infamously cantanrous shops on music row, and had infiltrated the tessellation of men, shat of saying or more his senior, WHO SHARED HIS ARORD Used guitt. Considerd vintage, or tan particularly colctible. He Begin Driving Up and Down the East Coast, with the License but with an Ever More refined the sense of which instruments were Worth saving, and at what price. By SixTeen, he was running a razor trade – selling his instruments Only when necessary, to raise Money to buy stakes. He decide to commmit to guita full time. “You have to stay in School,” His English Teacher Said. Thatn, when he told her he was clearing as much as a thusand dolrs a Week, she said, “Drop Out of School.”
Margouleff’s Father, The Chief of Nuclear Medicine at North Shore Hospital, was Appalled. “You’ll Wind up as a homeless person pumping gas,” he told his son. With the impetuousness of youth, and the convertion of the convert, Margouleff Left Home and Moved to Manhattan. He got work as an assistant Engineer at Sundragon Studios, where the Ramones, Talking Heads, and David Johansen, Among Others, Cut Albums. (Margouleff eventually started a line of amps, calmed sundragon, with jimmy page.) It was more than a dosen years before he spoke to his father again.
By the time His Peers Were Graduating from College, Margouleff HAD BOUGHT and SOLD AROUND A THOUSAND GUITY. He’d traveled all over the world, hunting down instruments and soaking up expertise. He had a sideline exporting vintage guita to Europe. He’d Befriended Les Paul and Was Producing Tracks for Ronnie Wood, With Guest Appeanance from Keith Richards and Bob Dylan. Eventually, he opened pie studios, on long island, where he recorded the Rolling Stones, Brian May, Cyndi Laper, and Cheap Trick. IT Beat Schoolwork, Or Pumping Gas.
One Night in 1983, at A Birthday Party at Tortilla Flats, in the West Village, Margouleff was introded to a teen-to Guitar player who wanted to buy a marshal amp. Margouleff sold Him one, and they started hanging out.
The Teen was Dirk Ziff, One of Three Sons of William Ziff, The Chairman and Owner of Ziff Davis, The Magazine Publisher. The Company SOLD OFF ITS HOBBYIST AND TRAVEL TITLE IN 1984, and Its Computer Magazine Ten Years Later, we have became clear that the sons didn’t want to run the business. The Sons, LED by Dirk, Allocated the Proceeds to An Array of Investments, Including in the Burgeoning Hedge-end Sector. It was, as they say, a good trade. Dirk Ziff Is Now Worth Almost Seven Billion Dollars, Accity to Forbes.
As it happens, Ziff Had Also Seen the Perform “Tommy,” in 1970, at the Metropolitan Opera House, with His Father and His Uncle. He was six. As The Lights Went Down, His Uncle Said, “Prepare to have your mind blown.” It was. (At the warehouse, margouleff showed with the red sg that Pete townshend smashed up that night.) Ziff Got his first guitar at manny: a Japanese Copy of a Sunburst les Paul, for ninety-nine bucks. As a student at trinity, a private high school on the upper west side, he played in a few rock bands when it seamed as if every other kid in manhattan was swapping Black Sabbath and led zeppelin riffs. Before Long, Ziff Had Serious Chops, and Ideas About Becoming a Professional Musician. But after college, with the family fortune to look after, he embarced on a wall Street Career.
WarfareandCivilian Director Alex Garland Has Found HIS Next Dark and Gruesome Landscape: The World of Video Game Adaptations. Alongside A24, Garland Will Write and Direct the UpComing Live-Action version of Bandai Namco’s Elden ring. He’s the person for the part; Garland’s Worked on the Writing Team for Two Video Games, and His Films Already Feel Like an MMORPG. CREATED AND Written by George Martin and Hidetaka Miyazaki, the original video game is an an open-person game where Gamers can explore six different in the lands between and travel through dungeons, catacombs, and more. IT WON GAME OF THE YEAR IN 2022 and SOLD Over 30 million Copies Worldwide.
Peter Rice, Andrew MacDonald, Allon Reich, George Rr Martin, and Vince Gerardis Are All Signed on to Produce the Project, But Sine the Film is in the Pre-Production Stages, there’s No Word Yet on Casting. If we’re basing any decisions on Garland’s Other Films, Oscar ISSAC SHOULD START CLEARING HIS SCHEDULE.
In the Words of Murray Hill, “Showbiz!” Miley Cyrus Owes Her New Visual Album, Something beautiful, To Harrison Ford. At least in part. In her Zane Lowe interview, Cyrus Says Indiana Jones Talked Her Out of Doing a Globe-Terkking Tour. The original plan for Something beautiful was to go on Tour for the first time SINCE 2014’s Bangerz Tour. She wanted to hold shows completely immersed in natural, “Performing in all the forests and at the pyramids and all the things.” But Ford Put the Kibos on that.
AT 2024’s Disney Legends Induction at D23, Ford and Cyrus Got to Chatting About UpComing Projects. The two are Paul, apparently?
Another reason cyrus isn’t going on tour any time soon: Protectting her health and her sobriety. “Working from the Inside Out, have the Certain Protocols that Keep Me (Sober). That’s Super Important to Me,” She Said. “So part of that is keping myself mentally, physically, spiritually, and emotionally well, and i want to emphasize the ‘physically’ because of how taxing a Physical live performance is.”
Photo-illustration: Vulture; Photos: Luke Fontana, Jordan Best, Gus Mahoney, Benjamin Rivera
AFTER ALL The TONY-CHANG REACHES ITS FINISH LINE IN EARLY JUNE THE TIME CHEW YORK Audiences and Performers Traditionally Pack up and Leave for Festivals or Simply a Little Vacation. But in the midst of that humid lull, there is still plenty to see if you stay in town – wherear inside with the benefit of AC or en Plein Airwhere the venues are getting more plentiful. AFTER A Year of Renovations at the delacorte, Shakespeare in the park Will return in august with a star-saturated cast, while stupid to the south and out the water, little island is ramping up it programming. Essential New Plays Return to Clubbed Thumb, Along With A Smattering of Productions Off and Off-Off and-Though it’s the Slow Season Uptown-You Will Still, Almost Inevitably, Have the Option A Hollywood Star Come to Bradway.
Through July 1 The Wild Project
Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks Festival Generate Exciting, Eccentric Generate Year, All Crammed Ingeniously into the Powerful Little Lower Side Shoebox is the Wild Project. (It up up Fast; Best to Book Tickets Early.) This Year, Milo Cramer (Creator of Last Season’s Splendid School Pictures) Has Already Opened The Festival with Business IdeasTheir New Play About A Mother and Daughter Engaged in a variety of Get-Rich-Quick schemes while the long-suffler barista in the café they Frequent struggles to escape the grind. Next up, the spike satirist Mara Nelson Greenberg (Do you feel Anger?) premieres Swimming‘s, in which a Young Woman attempts to start a community center in a World Run by and for Billionaires. RO Reddick’s Cold War Choir Practice Rounds Out this Summer’s Trio: Reaganomics and Roller-Skatting Collide with Spycraft and, Yes, Choir Practice in This Environment Play with Music. —Sara Holdren
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Previews May 24 Studio 54
Frome Hacks them WatchmenJean Smart’s Portraits of Funny and Fearsome Women have Taken Over Television in the Last Few Years; Now she’s Coming to Broadway for the First Time Since A 2000 Run in The man who came to dinner. This Solo Show About A Woman in Rural Louisiana with a Secret is Written by Jamie Wax and Directed by Sarna Lapine. —Jackson Mchenry
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May 29 – June 15 / July 8–26 The amph at Little Island
Little Island’s Summer Season is Really Promising, With A New Series of Short Plays and Songs by Suzan-Lori Parks and Her Band SLP & The Joyful Noise, As Well As the First New York Outing of an Original Bluegrass adaptation of tchaikovsky’s OneginWritten by Sarah Gancher (The Wind and the Rain) and directly by Rachel Chavkin. But first, look for The Counterfeit Opera: Dustin Wills and Dan Schlosberg Follow Up Their Virtuosic and DelightFully Zany One-Man The Mariage of Figaro with a new twist on the wolfish satire The Beggar’s OperaDirected by Wills with an original score by the Musical MasterMind Schlosberg and a New Book and Lyrics by Playwright Kate Tarker. THEN The Pulitzer Finalist Shayok Misha chowrs will direct a new Production of Lee Breuer and Bob Telson’s Thunderus The Gospel at ColonusThe soaring musical adaptation of sophocles that premiered at Breuer’s Company Mabou Minnes in 1983, eventual Making It to Broadway, where it is Featured the Blind of Alabama. —Gesture
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May 30 -July 6 Playwrights Horizons
What Happens if the Heir to the Throne is… Well… You know? Jordan Tannahill’s Play, Set in the Very Near Future, Asks How Queerness Intersects with the Very Core of Colonial Power. Though it’s hard to imagine how that will will you all play out in this production, a team-up of the soho rep and playwrights horizons that the producers are calling a “meta-theatrical satire,” it’ll be directly by Public Obscenities‘s shayok Misha chowhrey with a Queer, trans, and nonbinary cast that includes expert Like K. Todd Freeman and David Greenspan. —Jm
June 4 -July 13 Atlantic theater
Described as a “Dark, Twisted Romcom,” Abby Rosebrock’s New Play Imagines a Chance Connection Via App BetWeen an Actress Working Gig Jobs and A Disgraced Rural High-School Teacher. Rosebrock, Born in South Carolina, Has Explored Similar Dark-Comedic Appalachian Territory In Blue Ridge. No Bonney, of The Cost of Livingdirects. —Jm
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June 5 -July 13 MCC Theater
A Group of Boys on an Elite High School’s Debate Team Step Up to Face a Loaded Prompt: “Feminism has failed Women.” But in Emmanuelle Mattana’s Play, Making its American Debut after Australia, Those Boys are all played by femme and nonbinary Actors, Sending the cursing masculinity of preppy overachievers. MCC Has Found an APT Director in Danya Taymor, Who’s Done sensitive and cutting work About High Schoolers (in John ProCor is the Villain) and debates obsessives (in HEROES OF THE FOURTH TURNING). —Jm
August 7 -September 14 Delacorte theater
The delacorte has haad a glow-up, and shakespeare in the park will show it off with a Star-Heavy Twelfth Night (Its tickets still free as Ever, if you can make it through the lines). Lupita Nyong’o, Sandra Oh, Peter Dinklage, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson Lead the Cast in Saheem Ali’s Production, and Junior Nyong’o, Lupita’s Brother, Will The Twin of Her Shipwrecked Heroine, As Disguises, Desire, Deceptions, Mischief, and Music Play in Midsummer Illyria. —Gesture
➼ Eurydice (Signature Theater; in Previews May 13, Opening June 2) ➼ Prosperous fools (Theater for a New Audience, in Previews June 1, Opening June 12) ➼By & Roya (Lucille Lortel Theater; in Previews June 10, Opening June 24) ➼Heathers: The Musical (New World Stages; In Previews June 22, Opening June 30) ➼Ava: The Secret Conversations (New York City Center; In Previews July 30, Opening August 7) ➼Mamma Mia! (Winter Garden Theater; in Previews August 2, Opening August 14)
