An August Update

Since our last blog entry, May 3, 2021, many things have changed both for the world and for Ear Taxi Festival, while some things seem eerily familiar.  The weather finally warmed up—it usually takes awhile in Chicago!—and has stayed warm.  Many of us got the COVID-19 vaccination, while unfortunately some of us got COVID itself.  We (well, some of us) stopped wearing masks indoors once case numbers dropped.  Concerts with in-person audiences began happening again.  Most importantly for Ear Taxi Festival, we finalized and announced our line-ups both for the Mainstage and Spotlight Series.  Lurking in the background the whole time was the Delta variant.  Cases have started to rise again, break-out infections are occurring (though dramatically less frequently than infections of the unvaccinated).  Masks have come back.  No one knows the future (with the catastrophic exception of the officially inevitable climate change); but here we are.

I don't believe in a sort of techno-fetishism or solutionism, nor am I especially inclined to be optimistic about much of anything.  However, the substantial benefit of curating Ear Taxi Festival over the last almost-two-years, and the (let me emphasize: extremely tiny) silver lining of the pandemic, is that we are all incentivized to make new connections—Zooming with someone who is in a place very far from you has become as common as your masked trip to the convenience store.  As the Ear Taxi Festival team considers and reconsiders its schedule, deals with logistics, etc., one particular thing has struck me time and again, something so blatantly obvious as to be nearly invisible: Chicago is a very big city with a lot of people.  Before the pandemic, many of us tended to stay in our lanes—we went to our friends’ shows, we collaborated with the people we knew, we attended venues we were familiar with, etc.  An explicit goal for Ear Taxi Festival in 2021 is to foster encounters that might otherwise not have happened.  I challenge all of us to take a close look at Ear Taxi Festival’s line-up, to familiarize ourselves with the venues, to commit ourselves to attending shows of musicians we did not previously know about, and to go to concert spaces we’ve never been to.

Both a distinct positive and a bewildering disadvantage of Chicago is how neighborhood-y it is.  I live in Humboldt Park, I have *the best* neighbors, and I love living here.  And people in all parts of Chicago are happy about where they live.  All of the city’s neighborhoods—Austin to Lincoln Park, Englewood to Rogers Park—have rich cultures, deep histories, and residents with vastly different backgrounds.  All our neighborhoods have distinct geographies, restaurants that have been there forever, people who have lived in the same place most of their lives.  Now, let’s be clear-eyed: urban areas always come with more than their share of challenges, and Chicago is no exception.  Some of our communities suffer from police violence, gun violence, a history of redlining, economic inequality, under-resourcing, systemic racism, and a host of other problems.  One way we can begin collectively to address the challenges our city faces is to make sure we have the best possible sense of what the city is.  There are probably areas of the city you’ve never been to, regardless of how long you’ve lived here, and we can change that.  Living as we do in a world that has been altered profoundly by the last year and a half, this is a change we can all make in ourselves.  We hope Ear Taxi Festival can be a part of this for you!

—Michael Lewanski