The Gateways Festival Orchestra: The Color of Concert Music

The event described below is part of a series of initiatives of the Anti-Racism Taskforce of the Northern Illinois Conference of the United Methodist Church.  See below for details. The color of concert music is white. Its gender: male.  So goes the popular perception.  To start a conversation on t.....continued>
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Beauty in the Time of Pandemic

Below is a 3:30-minute video of a small but momentous occasion.  My son Aaron—a wonderful musician and talented teacher and conductor—leading the Gage Middle School orchestra, Riverside, California.  He’s been teaching there for 20 years and thousands of students. When he first got to Ri.....continued>
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Pentecost Means No “Supremacies”

We celebrate the Church’s “birth” on Pentecost Sunday, the day the promised Holy Spirit arrived.  This year we celebrated on May 20th, a Sunday where at my church—one of the most diverse in America—its large Filipino group took charge of the service.  The VIDEO below sh.....continued>
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Ornette Coleman: Lessons in Freedom (excerpt)

This is the first of 16 short excerpts from my radio series Voices and Freedoms: A History of Jazz.  Based on my book of the same name, the series (and book) were produced at the University of Virginia in the nation’s Bicentennial Year.  The show, syndicated by the Intercollegiate Broadcasting.....continued>
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Ronald L. Fair: “We Can’t Breathe”

May 2020 Update:  Another “I-Can’t-Breathe” incident. I could not watch the video of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 26, 2020.  But I heard it while my wife described to me what she was seeing: a police man with his knee on the neck of an already-subdued bl.....continued>
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Songs by DAN GUZMAN: “CBS”

“CBS” (COOL BLACK SICKNESS) a song DAN GUZMAN co-wrote and performs with Brad Hoskins.  Fat Cats, Moses in the desert with the Great I Am, bleeding seas, and things tumbling from the sky.  Apocalyptic dread.  Cool grooves.  It not only sounds good—it&#.....continued>
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VIDEO: Sen. Dick Durbin visits Emmanuel House

Update:  IN APRIL 2018, EMMANUEL HOUSE MERGED WITH LONG-TIME PARTNER ORGANIZATION THE JOSEPH CORPORATION TO BECOME The Neighbor Project.  THIS INCREASED THE NUMBER OF FAMILIES SERVED FROM AROUND 25 AT THE TIME OF SENATOR DURBIN’S VISIT TO NOW, IN 2020, A NUMBER APPROACHING 3000.  WATCH A VIDEO.....continued>
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The Neighbor Project Recieves $2 Million Grant

Posted on March 29, 2024 by Richard Guzman

Note:  In addition to the honor reported below, read about how The Neighbor Project’s precursor, Emmanuel House, was named one of the Top 100 Most Innovative social change organizations in world in 2016, and how executive director Rick Guzman was recognized as the Emerging Leader of the Year in 2023.  These and many other honors and accomplishments mark The Neighbor Project as one of the finest organizations of its kind in the world.

 

The VIDEO below shows around 15 minutes of a 34 minute news conference announcing another momentous event for The Neighbor Project (TNP): receiving a $2 million grant from Yield Giving, the organization of billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott.  I urge you to watch a video of the entire press conference because what’s been left out may be as important as what’s been left in.

The story took up much of the front page of Tribune-owned Aurora Beacon and was widely covered in Chicagoland media. Go to the Yield Giving website for more coverage, as well as this group’s philosophy on giving and who to give to. Yield Giving was established by MacKenzie Scott.

TNP’s executive director Rick Guzman announces the award and details the selection process before turning things over to four staff members who read some of the criteria for the award and some comments from peer reviewers who graded TNP on how well they met those criteria. I fade out after David Blancas, Chief Equity and Operating Officer, opens his remarks on how peers graded TNP on equity.  During her portion of the news conference Cynthia Rica, Networked Savings Program Manager, read a review which said every community should have a program like TNP.  Miguel Rivera, Director of Property Management and Real Estate, read a review saying, “It was really a pleasure to read this application” because of the talent and deep knowledge of the staff.  So in the interest of time only Jerria Donelson’s remarks were fully included. Jerria has been with TNP for a long time, even during the years when it was just Emmanuel House. She read comments asking how well the community was represented in TNP organization, included those who had been in its programs.  Jerria was a graduate who has risen to a manager position, Homebuying Counselor Program Manager.  She’s brought other family members and friends into TNP’s programs. It was a moving tribute from a long-time friend.  “The Neighbor Project has brought generational wealth into my family,” she said.

Rick Guzman’s comments were marked by five words: “gratitude,” “responsibility,” “leverage,” “investment,” and “partnerships.”  “We can’t afford to lose a penny,” he says.  “We don’t just plan to double this money’s effects but to grow it exponentially.” He’ll do it partially by investing in the partners that helped get TNP where it is today, partners like The Community Fund, the City of Aurora, and The Dunham Foundation.  His gratitude to them glowed. “We literally would not exist without the Dunham Fund. It was the Dunham Fund that suggested Emmanuel House and The Joseph Corporation merge [to form The Neighbor Project], then gave us a grant that put us on a firm financial footing.” In giving thanks for partners and saying a substantial part of this $2 million was going to be invested in them, Guzman also talked about the programs it has started with those partners. For example, with the Community Fund there is now a Closing the Gap program, aimed at giving extra help to bridge people into home ownership, and in particular aimed at closing the immense racial wealth gap between whites and blacks.

Again, what’s been left out may be as important as what’s been left in, so you’re urged to watch the video of the entire news conference.  You may also look at TNP’s full, written press release on The Neighbor Project website, or Here on this site.

MacKenzie Scott

In his thank you’s Rick acknowledges his wife Desiree, who co-founded Bryan House with Rick nearly two decades ago as a living memorial to Rick’s youngest brother Bryan Emmanuel Guzman. He acknowledges his step-mom, Linda, my wife.  And me, too: “his greatest cheerleader.” In the toast ending the conference he thanks TNP’s newest donor, MacKenzie Scott.

This award is the third major award for the Emmanuel House / The Neighbor Project organization. In 2016 Emmanuel House was named one of the “Top 100 Most Innovative” Social Change Organizations” in the world.  In 2023, Rick Guzman received the “Emerging Leader Award” from the national Neighbor Works organization.  And now this.  The Neighbor Project is now consistently regarded as one of the finest organizations of its kind in the nation, but one of Guzman’s favorite lines is that it’s an organization that wants to “flip the script.”  For all its honors it’s the people it serves that are the real heroes, the real leaders helping to create real wealth and stability for the marginalized in our society.

♦  I also left out of the video below Rick Guzman’s “90-second elevator speech,” which was a requirement of the grant application.  It is essentially a shortened version of his 2023 TNP Gala talk which I posted on this site under the title “The Affordable Housing Crisis.” Watch it for an important take on what’s wrong with “affordable housing.”

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Li-Young Lee: Furious Versions

Posted on March 1, 2024 by Richard Guzman

This article is part of two series: one on Chicago writers, the other on the many people I brough to North Central College during my time as director of its Cultural Events program.

Born in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1957 to Chinese parents, Li-Young Lee eventually settled in the U.S. with his family, first in a small Pennsylvania town, then in Chicago.  The stormy and fascinating saga of these moves—having in large part to do with his father’s incarceration as a political prisoner in Sukarno’s jails—is recounted in Lee’s memoir The Winged Seed (1t995), which was recently adapted for the stage by David Mura.  Because of these early experiences with flight, Lee’s poetry, even as it seeks to find images strong enough to rest on, seems always to convey the feeling of continual searching, especially for the father, that extends into the past, permeates the present, and marks out uncertain roads into the future.  One of the featured poets in Bill Moyer’s beautiful Power of the Word series, and one of 34 poets celebrated in Moyer’s Power of the Word, Ll-Young has become one of the preeminent poets of his generation.  His first book, Rose (1986) won the 1987 Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. His second book, The City in Which I Love You (1990) won the Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and his subsequent five other books (and counting) have also been richly honored.

David Starkey and I put Lee’s “Furious Versions” in our book Smokestacks and Skyscrapers: An Anthology of Chicago Writing, investing eleven full, and precious anthology pages to it.  It was more than worth it: beginning with the lines “These days I waken in the used light / of someone’s spent life, to discover / the birds have stripped my various names of meaning entire: / the soarriw by quarrel, / the dove by grievance….” and containing a remarkable meeting “in Chicago, Little Chinatown,” where “who should I see / on the corner of Argyle and Broadway / but Li Bai and Du Fu,” those ancient great writers he describes as “two poets of the wanderer’s heart.”

“Wandering” may be too light a word to describe “Furious Versions,” though that’s what it does, furiously, seamlessly, attempting to understand, perhaps reclaim, those names stripped of meaning.  I think often of Li-Young.  We were close for a while before wandering away from each other.  I had him speak at a national conference I held in Chicago at the Blackstone Hotel. The room he spoke in had elaborate filigreed cove moldings. “I kind of feel I’m on the inside of a wedding cake,” he began, “which is fine because frosting is my favorite food.” I brought him several times to North Central College, once to read, then to teach a series of workshops on poetry, where I heard him say once: “The more I try to write poems the less I know about how that’s done.” He called me up once, saying, “I’ve been asked to give a commencement speech. Richard, what exactly is that?”  It may have been at the University of Massachusetts, and after I talked about such speeches for a minute, he exclaimed, “God, to I have to give advice!”  I said that since they’d invited a poet to speak, I thought reading poems would be appropriate. “I can do that?” he replied.  And at his home in Chicago, a three-flat where his mother and his brother’s family also lived, I had dinner. I loved Donna, his wife, whose twin sister had married Li-Lin Lee, Li-Young’s brother.  At dinner we discussed their new enterprise. Li-Lim, a painter would paint and Li-Young would write words, a poem, over the painting.  “The paintings have been done a while,” Li-Lin said, and standing up and reaching over the table to knock on his brother’s forehead, he said, “Where are the words, Li-Young, the words?”

These always came hard for Li-Young, who—as the magazine cover and quotation to the left from a Poetry Foundation article suggest—were always tied up with some connection to God. Any person is many things at once. Any scene is many things at once. Once he was telling me about another thing feeding his insomnia.  “I was thinking, Richard,” he said. “who is Donna, really? What does she mean?”  What is the right word and context of words around it that can make it mean all the things it could mean all at once. Language is multi-vocal, and somehow this multifariousness, this richness of meaning relates to the richness of God, so that searching for the meanings stripped from his names by the birds is a search to restore richness, to speak and see the multiple ways God speaks and sees and is.  Me speaking about me is truly not enough.  The “I” that speaks with God and like God is after much bigger things…and smaller things, too.

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What Eli Heard: A Birthday Sermon

Posted on January 18, 2024 by Richard Guzman

I had lots of trouble preparing the sermon below.  I struggled perhaps because I was trying to do so many things, chief among them being to speak about the scriptures of the day and emphasizing transitions during a landmark time in my life.  I was preaching on my birthday, my 75th birthday. In spots, my delivery is softer and slower than it’s ever been.

The year leading up to 75 was a tough one for me. I remember being as frustrated as I’ve ever been at times, and I often felt like I couldn’t keep up. On the other hand, the year had also been incredibly busy.  We took 10 major trips, worked a lot on race issues, and ended the year doing a kitchen remodel, where I carried in and out of the house 1000 pounds of tile, and laid a tile floor, all the while hearing my brother’s voice saying, “You’re almost 75! You have no business laying a tile floor!”  My wife was there helping all the way, but still I guess there was some excuse for feeling tired out, even old, something I’d rarely thought about before.

Three of the four main lectionary readings for this particular Sunday had to do with momentous transitions.  And I speak about each one, moving backwards through the Bible from the Epistle reading, to the Gospel reading, to the Pslam, and finally to the great 3rd chapter of I Samuel.  The Psalm (139: 1-6) gives us comfort.  In this case, it’s comfort even in the midst of great transitions, because God knows all your thoughts and hems you in, protecting you, from behind and out in front.  Speaking about transitions also made it hard to prepare and deliver this sermon.  I don’t plan to transition out entirely—though you never know, of course. I plan to be as much help as I can for as long as I can, but at 75 you have to be thinking about succession plans. Afterwards, a friend who had watched online texted me, saying, “We often talk about succession but don’t take action. We need to work on that soon because our congregation consists mostly of senior citizens.”  That’s a problem hardly unique to our church, though. (My friend added, “You were awesome.”)

I Samuel, chapter 3, begins stunningly, telling us that in those days the Word of the Lord was rare and there were no visions.  Time for a transition. Eli is the second to last Judge of Israel, and chapter 3 tells of the transition between him and his young charge Samuel, who becomes Israel’s last Judge and first prophet, the one who anoints Israel’s first two kings, Saul and David.  In chapter 3, God calls Samuel three times during the night, and Samuel, thinking it’s Eli that’s calling goes to him the first two times. Eli realizes that its God calling Samuel.  If he calls again, Eli tells Samuel, simply say, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.

One of my favorite writers, James Baldwin, has written that one of the greatest things we can do for each other is to bar the way to spiritual ease.  We get comfortable, or busy, or otherwise distracted in life and forget the spirit, or just don’t hear higher callings very much anymore. The famous sentence “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening” suggests three questions we can ask each other.  In the short run they’re challenges. In the long run they’re a form of encouragement.  We can encourage each other by asking: Have you asked God to speak to you? Have you asked yourself who you serve? And are you listening to the God who may be speaking to you?  Maybe not speaking in actual words, or course, but reaching you deeply in any of the many ways God can.  And that question about who you serve is crucial, too.  Bob Dylan’s nutty song “Serve Somebody” says that no matter who you are, what you do, where you sleep, what you like to drink, everybody has to serve somebody.  The song’s chorus holds out two choices: “It may be the devil or it may be the lord / But you got to serve somebody.”  In between those two choices there’s a bewildering array of masters, which makes it hard to hear who’s calling you and for what.  Eli—old, tired, blind, and troubled—nonetheless could hear God calling Samuel. He could hear a momentous transition coming.

♦ Go HERE for a complete list of sermons, like “Pentecost Means No ‘Supremacies,’” “Sacred Doing,” and “Theology and Race.”

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