Impossible to work

Last night was the 3rd annual Printers’ Ball, hosted by the Poetry Foundation at the Zhou B. Center. It was really awesome, until the cops shut it down (around 10:30 or so). This was the best possible event anyone could have hoped for. For my own part, I walked out with about 20 pounds worth of print for free (and distributed 280 copies of Try Less Hard). My plan had been to get there early, leave for dinner and then come back right as the party should really have been getting started. Sadly, the police had a different notion of the way the evening would go.

I noticed early on that the off-duty police who were working security were wearing Kevlar vests and behaving in a rather aggressive manner considering the fact that it was a party for independent print culture. I didn’t really think much of it at the time, though it was the first sign that things were not going to go according to plan. More and more people started arriving, so I left with friends to eat that dinner. When we got back, the police had already kicked everybody out and were preparing to put big orange stickers on the front doors, letting the world know that the venue was closed for business, effective immediately.

I stuck around for a while longer, and eventually ended up at the HotHouse (where the goal for the evening was to finish off all remaining alcohol behind the bar). The gossip I heard was that the Zhou B. Center didn’t have any of the proper licenses to throw this sort of party. In addition, the gallery on the 3rd floor was supposedly also selling alcohol (the liquor license at Zhou B. is only for the main floor). To round it all out, it appears that the artists’ studios might not be totally legal either.

The police clearly had been waiting for the right opportunity to shut the Zhou B. Center down. I guess they want to let it be known in Bridgeport that if you throw a party, you have to dot every i and cross every t. That said, lumpen’s Version Festival has been having events at the Zhou B Center for a while now, and they throw some rather big parties relatively frequently. How is it that Version doesn’t get shut down for selling alcohol without a license (and assuredly without checking IDs), or having performances in spaces without Public Place of Amusement licenses? I highly doubt that lumpen is paying someone off to keep their events going. I think they’ve just been lucky and underground enough to escape the eye of the CPD.

While I think it’s ridiculous that a party thrown by Poetry got shut down (all I wanted to do was get drunk and read), it does appear as though the Poetry Foundation was just a group that threw a well publicized party and the police thought it better to shut down a highly publicized event than a less highly publicized one. That doesn’t change the fact that the people who organized the event (which was primarily the Poetry Foundation and the Chicago Underground Library) put the last few months into getting everything ready for a party that got shut down right as it was getting started. It seems ridiculous to put so much labor into shutting down the Zhou Brothers when there are so many more pressing issues in this city. It will definitely be interesting to see how this plays out, especially considering how much the Mayor likes the Zhou Brothers.

It was pretty crazy, but nobody can say that the Poetry Foundation is too elitist now. The police are after ‘em.

For other opinions, see CJ Laity’s angry take and Chicagoist’s pro-police interpretation.

UPDATE: Cancer Bitch (whom you may have heard on WBEZ) was also at the Ball, and wrote up her experience here.