Milkcrate Bandstand: A Background (8/26/20)

The Ortizes

I’m currently living with the Ortizes, a tight-knit group of my best friend, Maria, and her siblings and their partners, the family being once dubbed “The Working Class Tenenbaums” by a friend.  However, while eccentric like the fictional family from director Wes Anderson’s 2001 film, “The Royal Tenenbaums,” the Ortizes don’t come from financial wealth that, for the Tenenbaums, enables their eccentricity; they not only all work hard, but work jobs that serve others.  Maria’s older brother, Dan (‘Brother Dan’) is a physical therapist at a hospital.  He was trained a few months ago to be on the COVID-response team, where members would help turn patients onto their stomachs in order for them to more easily breathe.  Dan’s spouse, Megin, is a public university psychology professor and researcher; administrating testing and researching drug addiction and treatment in under-resourced communities.  Dave works at a grocery store; Maria is a community college English professor and the chair of the department; her spouse, Martín, only a couple years back, a cab driver, is now a plumber.  Growing up, their dad (Errol, an artist) earned his living as a janitor, and their mom (Kathy, now a baker at large grocery store) had an in-home daycare service in their small apartment. 

In this time of the coronavirus, the disparity between a worker’s place—their value—in this capitalist society is laid bare for us to see:  Who has to be exposed to the risk of the virus?  Who has to worry about losing their jobs? Being evicted?  And who doesn’t?

Dan, Dave, and Martín have to take the risk of going out into the world to physically do their jobs, and while Megin and Maria work from home, Megin has concerns about tenured faculty being “RIF”ed (“reduction in force,” a legal way to lay off tenured professors), and, with the added burden of remote teaching, Maria weighs what the extra challenges that remote-learning means for both herself and her—often disenfranchised—students.  As of right now, Maria’s union is planning on striking if the colleges do not enforce a wholly-remote learning, as the hybrid-teaching and on-campus staff has already seen two cases of the virus—and the semester hasn’t even begun.  Why this hybrid system for student services, when it could all be done remotely? I ask Maria.  “Enrollment numbers,” she responds. 

Enrolling students in-person means a guaranteed tuition (where remote enrollment might fall through), which means the administration will get their six-figure incomes while continuing cutting classes for adjunct faculty, exploiting tenured professors, and putting student services and other college staff at risk. 

A college complicit in its capitalist affair, the University of Edinburgh is offering a twenty-percent-off discount on tuition fees if undergraduates enroll in a postgraduate program next semester.  Meanwhile, I’m halfway across the world, international fees paid, having gone an entire semester (arguably, my most important semester) without the resources the college tied to my tuition, with no refund in sight.  My class has seen multiple teacher strikes—which means that the instructors haven’t been receiving fair contracts, either.  Who’s making bank here?  And yet, the university’s response to any ask of compensation is, “university policy,” and “take it up with the SPSO.” 

It’s a maddening reality, all around.

Capitalism is a morally bankrupt system.

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The Setting

A few months ago, the three Ortiz siblings and their spouses pooled their money together in order to afford a place to live in and own (as combining incomes, at this point, is the only way any of them would be able to own); each with their own separate units, plus one (the garden unit Joe and I are temporarily staying in) for the Ortiz parents to eventually move into.  The three-flat they purchased on the Northwest side of Chicago is now legally known as “The San Telmo Treehouse, LLC.”  It is Chicago-old: You can see its flickering glow of its glory days—the built-in hutches, hardwood floors, ornamental doorknobs; the quaint-yet-grand light fixtures.  The front staircase, carpeted, looks exactly like it would have when it was built in 1914.  The property could still stand to see some work done, but is exactly off-perfect enough to be comfortable.

The backyard has a small lawn and garage, but the adjoining side-lot hosts mint, raspberries, a pear tree and cherry tree, and a whole yard of overgrown flowers and plants.  There’s a slew of stray cats that roam the yard; Sansa, a stray tuxedo cat with white paws, is often seen climbing the trees and stalking along the tops of fences and roofs.  Her litter lives in the seen-better-days shed next at the end of the yard.

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The Talent Show (Milkcrate Bandstand)

In the face of being quarantined, within a country whose sanity is hanging by a thread, amongst protesting and working, studying, I wanted to collaborate with the Ortizes to make art that doesn’t cost a nickel, to pool our creativity to make something bigger than the sum of its parts—art that one cannot purchase or own, but only experience, for it is in that experience wherein its value lies. 

July 14th, when I propose a San Telmo Treehouse talent show (or, as we know it now, Milkcrate Bandstand), the building’s occupants jump at the chance to make this night happen.  Ten days later, our first show debuts.

Back in Portland, when I started the “For What It’s Worth” project, looking for inspiration and a task, I asked Maria what sign I could make her.  That’s when she proposed “The Royal Ortizes,” based on their friend Joel’s, “The Working Class Tenenbaums” observation.  I reworked the idea, and on a window I found on the side of the road in Portland, painted the first “The Highly Regarded [etc.]” sign.  Later, when a date was set that Joe and I would return to Chicago, I asked Maria to pick up any old storm windows she came across in an alley.

“Didn’t I tell you?!” she responds to me—then, arrived two photos of piles, stacks of wooden-framed storm windows.  The family inherited about thirty of them when they bought the place, all being stored in the attic. For the talent show, I used seven of these old storm windows to make signs for each of the performers (including another “The Highly Regarded Ortizes” window).  On the July 24th performance, I borrowed a projector from Megin that shone light through the windows, and a larger image of the window was projected onto the wall.  Because you could only view it fully from the side, on the August 7th performance, I put the projector behind the window, and a white sheet on the front of the window, so the bedsheet held the image of the projection, and a slightly dimmer, out-of-focus image was also projected onto the garage behind it.  I’ve never done anything like this, so it was a bit of trial-and-error. 

The windows were held up by leaning on the legs of a ladder, on top of my papa’s (mom’s dad) old Pepsi crate (again, all on-the-spur trial and error); the ladder was set at the right height by placing it on a rotting wooden pallet, and under a bunch of books (an art history book, several Marx texts, and three copies of Studs Terkel’s “Working” fittingly added to the scene).

For every act, I switched out the windows to fit the performer.  The windows include a bit of information about the performer, some of it inside-joke related that an outsider might not understand, but for the most part, all of us did.  The seven windows read:

“The Highly Regarded, VeRnerable, Well-Well-Well Established Ortizes”

"It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Megin Wardle"

"The Magnanimous Mewer of Mirth:  Martín, The Boy Who Cast the Toilet to Hell"

"The Sagacious, Perspicacious, Mysteriously Loquacious Josephino"

"The Awe-Inducing, Silence-Reducing, Hot Air Producing: Brother Dan, The Trumpet Man"

"The Abstruse, The Unknowable, The Maria!!!  A Lovely Lady"

"Kick Out the Cats, It's...Demolition Brother Dave; A Heckler Most Honorable"

The July 24th show had acts including a trumpet piece, dance act, dramatic reading of a TS Eliot poem, a ventriloquist sketch, a tag-team stand-up comedy routine, and a juggling act, with a raffle that was rigged (each winner got a prize—objects that were lying around Maria’s apartment—that was suspiciously personal to them; Maria’s idea).

The August 7th show had similar, but much improved routines, with two added singing/musical acts and a slide show, and the incorporation of “Feats of Strength” challenges between each act.

So far, we’ve had two shows, and we plan on keeping it going.  We’d like to open it up to more people, when that becomes a safe option (“We should invite [their sister] Lulu next time!  But she can’t play the violin.  Your ‘talent’ can’t be something you’re actually good at.  Her talent should be parallel parking.”)