unbillable hours: volume 1
photos of Uptown in the 70's, the psychedelic healing industry gone mainstream, the disposability of women
This is a new casual series where I share what media has been impacting what I’m thinking about and writing about this week. You can probably see how these influences shape what I write down. More importantly, I might influence you into finding something you find interesting, too.
Psychedelic-assisted therapy is everywhere, including where it’s not even legal yet. I almost crashed my car the first time I passed the “Innovative Ketamine” storefront in Lakeview. When I was in grad school, there was talk of studies recruiting and promising preliminary findings, but we weren’t as burgeoning professionals allowed to openly support this trend. As a harm reductionist, I found it exciting, while also being angry at some imagined Bay Area project called, like “Highr” in a former home foreclosed on due to the owner being in prison for selling weed. But let’s just say in some fantasy the wrong was righted: am I an old crank for feeling skeptical about the safety of all of this?!
Power Trip is the first season of an investigative journalism series from the New Yorker exposing the institutions (above ground and below board) taking psychedelic healing mainstream. I cannot recommend it highly enough, especially for therapists and those with any connection to the business of healthcare. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. Huge content warning for sexual assault and abuse.
2.What does it mean to get 'woman'd'?
Rayne Fischer Quann is maybe my favorite culture writer. It is humbling, nay, devastating that she’s 20 years old, but these insights could perhaps only be made by someone 20 years old. In this piece, she expands on a tweet about the humorously short lifespan of the likability of women in the public eye for i-D. According to Rayne, overexposure to a female celebrity automatically warrants criticism that is not qualitative or reasoned, but as she puts it “vibes-based”. Negative engagement with celebrity is fuel for a popular type of intellectual, too-cool social media personality, but highlights the disposibility of women because they are commodities in and of themselves- not just their image, their work, or any removable qualities.
Uptown is my favorite neighborhood. It’s also, in my opinion, the funniest neighborhood that transplants land in because they see cheap rent on the North side and then proceed to have no language for what they experience walking down Broadway. On it’s face, it’s simply a confusing place. It’s the kind of neighborhood that’s diverse not because of some magical, sustained integration, but because of 1000 independent variables shifting in overlapping periods of time. 20th century Uptown was a place in which you could trace all the city and federal causes to their permanent effects. From the Deinstitutionalization Act of 1963 ousting masses of people from psychiatric institutions (concentrated in the neighborhood) to the MCO being built downtown on the East Asian business turf causing them to settle on Argyle, to cold war proxy interventions in Cambodia giving Southeast Asians a persistent foothold in the area. It’s where everything happened. At the end of the 60’s, the original Rainbow Coalition began in Uptown (the only place it could) and chemically changed the nation. But today’s Uptown was really created in the 70s, through a mashup of a booming white Appalachian migration, mass evictions by arson, American Indian displacement from land and settlement in the neighborhood, a few bombings, the (then multi-cultural) Latin Kings, the finality of white flight, Puerto Rican Chicagoans being pushed up and out of the Near North side, the cobbling together of social services and SROs, and every people’s liberation movement you can imagine.
This week, I found Bob Rehak’s work photographing in Uptown from 1973-1977 and I don’t remember how. I am deeply grateful for the existence of these portraits and neighborhood snapshots. His captions offer interesting context. I swear I have seen some of these people doing some of the same things on the same blocks, just 50 years older. They’re also beautiful images, so even if you’ve never been to Chicago, they’re well worth a look.
I have a vested interest in Uptown because my grandparents met at a dance at the Aragon Ballroom. In true Uptown fashion, they both lived on the West side but never ran into each other there. Everything happens in Uptown.