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mexican art: going arizona postal

Banksy’s Movie Debut Dogs Help Man Get A Bone

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ROBUSTI

n a world of oversaturated fash-

ion trends, ever-changing moments

of ‘what’s now’ Robust is the pub-

lication that’s foundation is based on

actually living an artistic lifestyle.

Not just observing it. Robust’s con-

tent caters to a readership interested

in full-grown food for thought along

with a sweet tooth for eye candy, with

a Chicago twist. Robust is for the

cultured reader that demands more from

their magazine. Those with the desire

to read about relevant social issues,

fashion phenomenon and what to look out

for in the future from the culturally

inclined world. Robust is the magazine

that serves as the intersection that

all the different avenues and back al-

leys of artistic culture meet; we just

put it all out on front street.

mexican art: going arizona postal

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By: Jonathan J. Cooper and Paul Davenport, Associated Press WritersPHOENIX (AP) - Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law the nation’s toughest leg-islation against illegal im-migration Friday, a sweeping measure that supporters said would take handcuffs off police but which President Barack Obama said could violate people’s civil rights.The bill, sent to the Republican governor by the GOP-led Legisla-ture, would make it a crime under state law to be in the country illegally. It would also require local police officers to question people about their immigration status if there is reason to sus-pect they are illegal immigrants.Brewer, who faces a tough elec-tion battle and growing anger in the state over illegal immigrants, said the law “protects every Ari-zona citizen,” and said the state must act because the federal gov-ernment has failed.“We in Arizona have been more than patient waiting for Wash-ington to act,” Brewer said after signing the law. “But decades of inaction and misguided policy have created a dangerous and unaccept-able situation.”The bill takes effect in 90 days after the current legislative ses-sions in the next several weeks.Obama said in Washington that he’s instructed the Justice De-partment to examine the Arizona bill to see if it’s legal, and said the federal government must

enact immigration reform at the national level — or leave the door open to “irresponsibility by oth-ers.”“That includes, for example, the recent efforts in Arizona, which threaten to undermine basic no-tions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and their communi-ties that is so crucial to keeping us safe,” Obama said.Civil rights activists have said the bill would lead to racial pro-filing and deter Hispanics from reporting crimes.Brewer said she wouldn’t tolerate racial profiling.Hundreds of protesters gathered at the State Capitol complex Fri-day calling on Brewer to veto the legislation.Demonstrators have been camped outside the Capitol since the measure passed out of the Legis-lature on Monday. Their numbers have grown steadily throughout the week, with buses bringing protest-ers from as far away as Los Ange-les.About a dozen supporters of the measure also gathered.U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, a Demo-crat who opposes the measure, said he’s closing his Arizona offices at noon Friday after his staff in

Yuma and Tucson were flooded with calls this week, some from peo-ple threatening violent acts and shouting racial slurs.The bill’s Republican sponsor, state Rep. Russell Pearce of Mesa, said Obama and other critics of the bill were “against law en-forcement, our citizens and the rule of law.”Pearce said the legislation would remove “political handcuffs” from police and help drive illegal im-migrants from the state.“Illegal is illegal,” said Pearce, a driving force on the is-sue in Arizona. “We’ll have less crime. We’ll have lower taxes. We’ll have safer neighborhoods. We’ll have shorter lines in the emergency rooms. We’ll have small-er classrooms.”Arizona has an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants and is the state with the most illegal border crossings, with the harsh, remote desert serving as the gateway for thousands of Mexicans and Central Americans.Other provisions of the bill al-low lawsuits against government agencies that hinder enforcement of immigration laws, and make it illegal to hire illegal immigrants for day labor or knowingly trans-port them.

MexicaN ART GOING PostalArizona’s Gov.

passes toughest law against il-legal immigra-tion IN THE U.S.

Photo: ‘Stopped in their tracks, caught in the system’Mexican immigration will be most impacted by Arizona’s new law.

WORLD

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PICTURE STORIESBelow are a few pieces on dis-

play at the National Museum of

Mexican Art in Chicago. Mexican

artists from around the world are

featured in the exhibit. Most of

the art depicts cultural strug-

gles that arise from the rocky

relationship between Mexico and

America. The most prominent issues

are escaping to the U.S., poverty

on both sides of the border, drug

trade and women abuse.

Celia Alvarez, ‘Stories your mother never

told you’

Victoria Delgadillo,‘A prayer for Juarez’

Marcos Raya,‘Los hijos de la Mala Vida’

Street art in Chicago’s Little Village.

GET THE LOOK:

Stephanie Flora is wearing a vintage

bowling shirt, leather jacket from AKIRA

Chicago, American Apparel black leg-gings, Forever 21 leapoard bra and

American Classic red bandanna.

“Illegal is ille-

gal”

WORLD

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START YOUR DAY OFF WITH THE CAPTAIN

Stencils by JSC

Chicago, IL (773) 636-4808

Call for yours today.

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7 • ROBUST

ART

By: Jessie Garza

It’s a man with a camera, an extremely odd character named Thierry Guetta that guides the viewers through the Banksy film, “Exit Through the Gift Shop.”

Known for his reclu-sive and incognito behav-ior, British street artist Banksy, the dubs the film “a Banksy film” keeps his char-acter intact. To his follow-ers satisfaction and simul-taneous disappointment.

Even though viewers may be disappointed to find that Banksy’s profile still remains a mystery, the film open s up a new realm to his underground world and is one of his best works yet. It’s a film that looks like a documentary but feels like one big joke. Most of his work has an un-dertone of smart-ass and sarcasm to it.

The entire project spans almost a whole decade and jumps to several continents. “Exit” depicts Mr. Guetta’s descent into the street art world, with the help of his Parisian artist cousin, Space Invader.

The film is a wonderful exploitation of trend fol-lowers and gullible collectors. Guetta, who starts off as just a tag-along to his more developed col-leagues, ends up having his own art show in LA in 2008.

The event titled “Life is Beautiful” is nothing more than a display of blatant knockoffs and cut-and-paste pop trash that’s oh-and-ahed over by lemming like admir-ers. Banksy is one of the few street art-ists that have profited significantly for their antics. Other similar artists include Shepard Fairey, Fafi and KAWS.

The end of the movie leaves the viewer with a hidden message, ei-ther know your stuff or prepare to be swin-dled for following the crowd.

Thierry Guetta, L.A., 2008

Thierry Guetta, L.A., 2008

Thierry Guetta

Banksy

Banksy

ART

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SHOW OFF

By Jessie Garza

In June of 2010, after spending 18 years as the Rock N’ Roll music guru critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, Jim DeRogatis announced his resignation. As one of America’s top music authorities, DeRoga-tis is heading towards new ventures. In light of his resignation from the Sun-Times he has become apart of the faculty at Colum-bia Chicago and a blog-ger for Vocalo.org. Robust caught up with DeRogatis and talked about his in-fluences, how he hopes to help the music critics of the future and where that future of music criticism is headed. Jessie Garza: Why are you interested in teaching at Columbia College?

Jim DeRogatis: When I was a senior in high school, I had a journalism class. I was driving my journal-ism teacher crazy with all these questions about what is the new journal-ism and what is the role of investigative report-ing, what is the differ-ence between criticism and journalism. Finally he said, “You are a pain in my butt. Just don’t come to class anymore. Go in-terview a hero in your chosen field, write it up, you’ve already got you’re a. Stop bothering me.” And so I reached out to Lester Bangs who was a critic I admired enormously, was a true inspiration to me as a great writer, as a great thinker and every bit as exciting as any rock mu-sician I loved. I spent a long and really encourag-ing day with him. Philip Seymour Hoffman portrays Lester, and Cameron Crowe who directed that film [Almost Famous], it’s kind of autobiographical of his story. He and Lester had a very similar experience to the one I had when he was 17 in 1972, I met Lester when I was 17 in 1982. I always just thought that this guy who was a hero

for me and obviously for many other people like Cameron Crowe, he was just so encouraging and kind and spent so much time with me. You know that day changed my life at 17, and I kind of felt this calming thing to, you know, try to do the same.

JG: Is there a reason your class is being of-fered in the English dept. rather than Jour-nalism?

JD: I’ve taught the class twice already. And you know there are a couple of film students, graphic artists, couple of fashion design students, some jour-nalism, some broadcast stu-dents, and computer game design students. No matter what art form they’re hoping to get into they’re going to have to be good writers. At some point they’re go-ing to write that pitch for a couple million dollars to make their movie. They’re going to have to critique the other designers in the fashion shows they’re a part of, at some point they’re going to write a perspec-tive for developing a video game, and they have to be good writers. And by being a good critic you become a better artist. To express to me what it is about this book, this movie, this album that you love clearly, con-cisely, colorfully is going to make you better suited to create. Oscar Wilde has a famous essay that’s called ‘The Critic as Artist” now here is one of the best nov-elist, playwrights and poets of his generation, Victorian England. Who made the ar-gument that actually crit-ics role was more important than any artist and this was partly tongue-and-cheek. But he was saying, essentially, that any old fool can create but without the critic to say, “This is where it fits in the broader context, this is what it means and this is why it’s important. The art doesn’t really exist.” I don’t 100% believe that. Writing an album review is not the same as recording. But you know it’s important

part of the artistic discus-sion and it’s the part that I’m more passionate about.

JG: What are some of the changes that are going to come out of the changes of cultural criticism?

JD: I think the big thing that’s going to happen is we’re going to have ex-tremes. At one extreme we’re going to have tweets, or whatever they become, but essentially 150 characters, 40 word headlines as whole stories. And at the other, we’re going to have great long-form journalism, cre-ative non-fiction, if you will, like the current New Yorker, there’s a great sto-ry in there about an 1850s expedition to the North Pole by balloon that failed. And you look at it first and say, “I don’t know if I’m interested in this” but the first paragraph is so amaz-ing that 7,000 words later you wish it hadn’t ended. And it sucks you in and it’s incredible. What’s going to disappear is the middle. Right now, entry newspapers are the middle and they’re being edged out. Obviously, I’m more passionate about the long-form of journalism than I am about the tweets, and I think there will always be a place for people who want to dig deep, just as there will always be books. I’d like to get more involved in that end of things as well.

JG: How did you end up re-viewing music?

almostfamous

Jim DeRogatis and his miniature car hobby.

ART

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(DeRogatis interview cont.)

JD: Well I was always an obsessive fan with obses-sive opinions to inflict on people. From that day with Lester, at that point I was already writ-ing record reviews for my high school newspaper, all through college I did a fanzine, back in the days before blogs. You put out an 8 ½ x 11 Xeroxed fanzine, 10 or 12 pages. You went to Kinko’s in the mid-dle of the night when your friend was work-ing and you’d mail off 500 copies on the key-card and you brought it to the rock club and handed it out. I did that all through college and began my career as a journal-ist at a paper called the Jersey Journal in Jersey City. I was a beat and investigative reporter, I was chas-ing down mob stories and crooked politicians and jail riots and fires in the night. And I was do-ing my fanzine the whole time. I always wrote about music, I always collected music obses-sively. I always played in rock bands. I played it on college radio, it was all part of the same impulse to me and then eventually I was able to make that my beat and my living.

JG: Why use Vocalo? Any-thing about the system that you like in particu-lar, since it’s in it’s starting phasing so it’s real interesting that you use it?

JD: Well that’s one of the things that I like about it, it’s a work in progress so the people that are working with Vocalo are going to be able to determine what it is and what it becomes. I think the message be-hind it is real vision-ary, “I’m going to find real talented people, hard working people and I’m going to let them loose. Maybe they’ll be a mess at first but even-tually they’re going to

build something great out of it.” Vocalo is a part of Chicago Public Radio, which I think is the most noble and worthy jour-nalistic institution in Chicago, one of the best in the country. Certain-ly it’s faith in towns opinion means the world to me. From Tori giv-ing us an hour on WPEZ to us now reaching 90 sta-tions across the country and maybe someday doing exactly what Ira is do-ing with “This American Life.” That’s incred-ible. To be blogging for the same place that I ‘m broadcasting and to be helping everybody who is trying to build Vocalo into whatever it will be-come is a big thing.

JG: What’s the best Chi-cago music venue, in your opinion?

JD: When I first came to Metro, it was the first Chicago rock club that I ever stepped into and it’s still one of my fa-vorites. I love Schubas, Empty Bottle, and The Hideout. I adore Reg-gies in the south loop. Martyrs is fun, the Abby Pub is killer. Chicagoans don’t realize how lucky

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they are. This truly is the greatest music city in America in terms of independent, non-corpo-rate music venues; great independent labels. Incredible mom and pop record stores. Chicago is the best city in the world and people liv-ing in Chicago take it all for granted. And we

shouldn’t because it’s a community under siege. The mayor would love the entire city of Chicago to look like Navy Pier, a big tourist at-traction, corporate venues, all House of Blues all the time. The business is moving towards Ticketmaster, Liv-enation; one giant corporation con-trolling the coun-try. We ought to stop and thank the music people in this city every-day for the choices

we have, cause it’s not easy. And they don’t hear that enough.

“everytime I walk into a rock club or theater I want to have a life changing experience , I want to walk out a different person than when I walked in”.

ART

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On Model:Jean dress from Topshop, Shoes: Mi-chael Kors

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On Model:Jacket: The Hun-dres, Wolf Shirt: Crooks & Castles, Shoes: Alife, Hoodie: American Apparel

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On Model:Ben Sherman button-up shirt, Jeans; Levi, Shoes: Nike Dunks

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