reminder... the project is opening may 2

HOKIN CENTER GALLERY & ANNEX
May 2 to June 13

623 S. Wabash, 1st Floor, Chicago, IL 60605
Gallery Hours:
Monday-Thursday: 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Friday: 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Opening reception: May 2, 5:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

poster 29 dillinger escape plan 2004

april 15th, originally uploaded by rebecca ann rakstad.

Kyle Reynolds
It was a long day of picking up dog and cat shit at the shelter. My two best friends picked me up and we headed straight for the Fireside. No booze or dope for the night but I didn’t even care, I was just happy to get the hell out of work. We arrived to the show and there was already a huge line. My friends’ mom let us borrow her credit card to get tickets online so we didn’t have to worry about it selling out. SWEET! We got in and soon Planes Mistaken For Stars hit the stage. Great name but what a shitty band! A pit had already started. It was going to be a long night. Next up was Decahedron, who was so much better. At the end of their set they picked up two laptops, smashed them and talked about how technology was destroying music. They threw the broken pieces into the audience, who started smashing them even more. A kid right behind me was waving a big piece around until a bouncer came and kicked him out. What a fucking dickhead! By then the heat was starting to get to me. It had to have been 100 degrees in there. It was sold out and everywhere I looked someone was smoking a cigarette. The next band was The Bronx, who totally fucking slayed everyone’s faces off. The kids went wild! Everyone was dancing and going nuts. After one of the songs the singer talked about taking a piss and seeing a fly in the bathroom. He wondered “what the fuck are you doing in the dirty ass Fireside Bowl bathroom when there are hundreds of bbq’s going down outside.” He then dedicated the next song to the fly. Fucking awesome! The rest of the set was totally amazing. They finished and I made my way up to the front to see who I came to see, The Dillinger Escape Plan. They hit the stage and opened with Panasonic Youth, a new song. They sounded like how a riot looks. The kids went fucking crazy! I had never seen anything like it. My life was changed forever. I feared for my life that night. They put danger back into Rock n’ Roll that night (which is missing a lot these days but to me is a main part of rock). The guitar player was swinging his guitar around so much that he sliced a kids face open. He had blood dripping down his face. He turned to me and said, “this is the best night of my life!” wow, it felt so good to be alive. The band just kept tearing through song after song. The guitar player ripped down a tile from the ceiling with his pointy guitar head. I don’t know how my body was surviving all the heat. My friend yelled out to me “it’s so hot in here my eye lids are sweating.” I realized that mine were too. I didn’t even think that was possible and too this day I haven’t experience that again. The band did an encore and I knew that I had just seen the best show in my life. I felt completely changed. After all these years of going to show I can honestly say that I have only seen one better show than that. But that’s a whole other band and a whole different all ages venue. That will be shut down probably by the time you’re reading this. Thanks for all the wonderful memories mister Fireside Bowl. R.I.P.

poster 27 teen idols 2001

april 15th, originally uploaded by rebecca ann rakstad.

Nicholas Rouley
“Teen Idols were headlining one of those early shows that began at something like 4 or 5, with 6 bands on the bill. I remember several shows like that where I’d be at the fireside for something insane like 7 hours straight. Anyway, Joey Ramone had just passed away and when the Teen Idols were almost done with their set they told the crowd to stick around for something special. Then members from all the other bands came up on stage and everyone began playing Ramones covers. The entire place was singing along, pumping their fists, just paying tribute and having fun. Although it may sound a little corny and clichéd and I remember thinking how punk rock it was to be at the fireside watching this moment take place.”

poster 30- they really loved music

april 10, originally uploaded by rebecca ann rakstad.

said by craig olson of Traluma and Rollo Tomasi

"I distinctly remember my first show there. It was August 5th 1995, a hot sunny day. We had played Champaign the night before. We rolled up and were hanging outside before the show. Sonny from the V.S.S. was sitting on the sidewalk just chilling out, so we struck up a conversation. The anticipation of the show was almost as exciting as playing itself. The bill: Braid, V.S.S. Traluma, and International Hoodwink. I had arrived!! I couldn't sleep after that show I was so hopped up on adrenaline from playing to people who were there because they really loved music. "

poster 26- holy grail

april 6th, originally uploaded by rebecca ann rakstad.

said by craig olson of Traluma and Rollo Tomasi
"A lot of the young kids I talked to towards the end of its run viewed a show at the bowl as the proverbial 'holy grail" of the Chicago punk/indie scene."

poster 28- geodesic cave

april 6th, originally uploaded by rebecca ann rakstad.

My First Fireside Bowl by Grant Reynolds

I’d been living in Chicago for about a year before my friend Jared took me with him to a Fireside show. It was my first time and really I was pretty disinterested in the bands on stage, most of which I had probably never heard of at the time. I was, however, thrilled by the building itself. Still young to the city I was a fresh receptor to its varied stimuli, its mysteries shedding themselves to me daily and by the minute. Walking into the Fireside Bowl that night was the urban equivalent of repelling down into some long lost geodesic cave. There was no way any band could have competed with the experience.
After spending some time checking the place out I came across an abandoned box of zines at a merch table in the back. I dug through to the bottom for something good, but the only thing to hold my attention was a tattered copy of something called Burn Collector by someone named Al Burian. It was the eighth issue, particularly thick, with a nice weight to it. The yellow cover had been softened from use and held the blanket texture of long circulated dollar bills or paper having been run through the washing machine. The dog-eared pages were already starting to let go of the staples binding them together, giving off a wafting history of many good reads. I knew I had to have it, but I’d already spent the last of my money at the door. Surveying the room I noted everyone else’s interest was being funneled toward the stage opposite me. I casually slipped the zine into my back pocket and walked away, rejoining the crowd to watch the rest of the show.
It wasn’t until a few months later that I actually opened and read my stolen find. With my first year of art school coming to a close I saw myself returning home to Peoria, where my dad had already secured me a summertime job working the cash register at some dismal little drug store. It was a miserable existence and the absence of Chicago in me was almost greater than its presence when I’d lived there. It seemed that nothing in the world could be as terrible as the circumstances befalling me. But when I began to read those first few pages of Burn Collector #8 I not only recognized the author as he toiled at his own terrible job, but also realized things could certainly always get much, much worse. Still years away from my own experiences of living on other people’s couches, of joblessness and hopelessness fueled only by coffee and handfuls of the other roommates’ food, Al’s words gave off an exoticism, something I would only later understand as the residue of biting humor left from hard times. Like a byproduct leftover from processing the natural resource of menial labor, the best stories have always come from the worst positions in life.
Soon after that Al and I became pen pals, trading zines and comics throughout the years, until he, too, moved to Chicago. Then working together on The Skeleton News, a local underground paper, we became friends and eventually collaborators on our own sci-fi comic, Singularity. The comic brought us closer still, and unfurled into long meandering walks around the city. We had both been butting our heads against something dreadful in our lives, a dead end or maybe a fork in the road, but neither had an answer as to what it might be, much less how to get around it. All that mattered was that there was someone else who understood.
And then, just like that, Al moved away again, back to North Carolina. There wasn’t much in the way of planning, he just made up his mind and left the next day. I guess he’d found a way to get around that something blocking his path. The last time I saw him we were sitting across from each other in a coffee shop, mostly not talking, as he waited for his ride to Chapel Hill to pick him up.
Now, of course, there are no shows at the Fireside Bowl, only bowling. And much like before, when I’d left Chicago that first time for a summer to go back to Peoria, I can feel his absence as I sit alone in the coffee shop, across the table from me, slouched in the booth: an Al Burian-shaped hole.

postcard for gallery show

april 6th, originally uploaded by rebecca ann rakstad.

my first time printing a photograph using photopolymer.

mark your calenders for may 2nd!

poster 24- nothing but gravel

april 1st, originally uploaded by rebecca ann rakstad.

i moved to indiana from 2000-2003, this was also the period when the city was threatening to demolish the fireside. they wanted to expand the park that was next door. every time i would come back home and go to a show this is what brian would say to me.

poster 25- brian peterson

april 1st, originally uploaded by rebecca ann rakstad.

said by angel ledezma