From the outside, Wicker Park’s Empire Liquors, the brand-new bar in the old Reservation Blues space, doesn’t look like much. It’s an anonymous building, the windows seemingly half-assedly covered in black butcher paper. But inside, the window coverings are actually part of a flat wooden art piece with tiny jagged slits that make you feel like you’re peering out at the cold, cruel world from inside a magical woodland womb. White-painted tree stumps serve as stools and tables. Spindly silver chandeliers glow like sullen moons reflecting off mirrors set in the ceiling. Tiny votives on every table flicker like fireflies. Erich Ginder’s white resin antler coatracks line the walls.
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The opening of Elm Street Liquors’ gothy little sister last Friday night was packed with well-heeled women with fancy dye jobs and important-looking jewelry casting flirty glances at men with expensive jeans, expensive haircuts, pronounced pectorals, and dull eyes. I sat in a secluded nook in the back with a couple of friends and a young graffiti writer known as Kram, who said he’d snuck his way in by peeking at the guest list while pretending to tie his shoe. Above us twinkled a chandelier made of crystal long-stem roses, one of many cool sculptural touches that make the place look like a mock-up in a cutting-edge design catalog. Giant oblong leather tiles laid out like bricks cushioned our backs. And on the floor in front of us a drain waited patiently, just in case someone had to lean over and puke.
The next night Salem Collo-Julin led about 20 people out to 1934 W. North Avenue, warning us that we very well could get arrested for what we were about to do, which was stage an homage to the protests that happened when The Real World came to film here in 2001.
A half-dozen models—real women, not praying-mantis-shaped clothes hangers—shuffled stiffly into a dimly lit room in designer Anne Novotny’s brushed cotton twill A-line tunics, sliding their feet through a thin layer of sand coating the floor. They coiled together, forming a circle, then broke off into little workstations made of heaps of rusted detritus and piles of sand. Donning rustic-futuristic eyepieces, sinister rubber aprons, and tools of suspect function, they got to work measuring, sweeping, weighing, and scooping up sand and depositing it into handmade cotton pouches, then emptying the pouches onto a small dome.
The audience gave the performance a standing ovation. It was pretty heavy-handed for a fashion show, but who says fashion has to be frivolous? If we toil for nothing we get no pleasure, Novotny seemed to be saying. Amen to that.
