Emerson Dameron

"Jazz is a good metaphor for democracy," says Tom Tresser, lead organizer for the Creative America Project. His Saturday morning conference begins with poet Eileen Cherry Chander's rousing selection from Langston Hughes' "Jesse B. Simple" stories, which suggests that any good symposium needs an infusion of "jazz" and "jam." For its part, this session's first act is punctuated with inadvertent bursts of experimental noise. Mics feed back brutally. The Orange and Green Lines rumble overhead. A few audience members, whom the free Dunkin Donuts coffee hasn't fully awakened, give Tresser skeptical backtalk. At one point, he leads us in a mumbling reading from the Declaration of Independence. "Maybe we'll need some rehearsal," he quips.

But Tresser's a slick speaker. In his earlier days, he managed Chicago's Pegasus Players and performed Shakespeare. When his PowerPoint presentation gets off to a rickety start, he recites some classic monologues as he clicks away at his laptop. Soon enough, his vision of political power for the "creative class" gains steam. At his behest, the crowd channels its pride and Bush-era frustration into hokey slogans.

We get "Create a New USA." We get "Creativity Is American." We get "We are ImagiNation," a favorite. We do not get "Create Change," the slogan for Columbia College, on the campus of which this talk takes place. Many crabbier Columbia pupils flippantly interpret "Create Change" as a promise of deadening barista-dom. Tresser wants to squish that strain of thought.

He gravitated toward Creative America in 1990, in response to philistine rabble-rousing from Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, which still taints discussion of large-scale arts funding. Tresser encourages creative types to run for public office, to put their hearts and ingenuity into innovative decision-making writ large. His stats show how radical this is: While 38 million Americans toil in what author Richard Florida calls "creative industries," their representation in government is infinitesimal. Functional illiteracy flourishes like kudzu, and recent legislation shamelessly encumbers the First Amendment.

By the time Tresser steps aside, we're invigorated. He passes the mic, allowing each attendee a brief introduction. James Hill, a veteran organizer from Harold Washington's day, is perhaps the most humble person here. Washington's ragtag mayoral campaign comes up repeatedly, as does the Vietnam War, although the conference skews young. One dry, purposeful speaker says he recently read a few quotes from his boss in a local paper. "Almost everything he said was a lie," he remarks. The boss appraised the company at double its worth. "I wish that had been reflected in my bonus," says the employee who showed up today, he explains, because "I still believe in people."

(2005-05-17)

Also by Emerson Dameron

The Last Howl
"When your lover is still inside you," says a curly-haired woman with an air of placid self-importance, "after he has ejaculated. That's when you do it."
(2005-05-03)

Getting Personal
"First off, I want to thank you for having me," says University of Berkeley professor and rhetorician Marianne Constable, her British accent finely tempered by decades on campus. "Were it not for the second person, all of you here today, there would be no first person, me."
(2005-04-19)

Soul Vegetarian
This South Side cult favorite evokes a dingy dive bar, in that you can watch a wall-mounted TV while you wait for seating, and, well... that's it
(2005-03-15)

Moto
Homaro Cantu, the executive chef at the minimalist Asian eatery Moto, dishes food with the cerebral abandon of James Joyce and the creepy technological obsession of William Burroughs
(2005-03-01)

Chick unlit
(2003-12-16)

Subterranean sport
(2003-04-15)

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