Feral House's video: Mother Chicago: Truant Dreams and Specters over the Gilded Age by Martin Billheimer

Chicago history as told by the relics of her forgotten people and places. The observed made real to exorcise the hauntings of do-gooders and social engineers. Mother Chicago is the story of three institutions – an obscure juvenile experiment called the Chicago Parental School, the great Municipal Sanitarium, and Dunning, the amalgam of poor house, asylum, and cemetery that occupied the far northern boundaries of the City. This sector of quarantine and detention built on stolen lands acted as a limiter on the production of dreams and an orphan zone for people cast adrift by societal decree. Mother Chicago tells the story of the corporeal specters used against the working class: redlining, property speculation, and racism. Like the game of snakes and ladders, the City lays her traps for the unlucky on a numbered grid – easy to navigate yet impossible to escape. Martin Billheimer was born in Chicago's working-class Uptown neighborhood, then a hotbed of radical activism. Billheimer founded the semi-notorious noise-punk band the Devil Bell Hippies in 1983 and participated in anti-fascist organizing in the music scene. After dropping out of high school, he continued his education working as a dishwasher, house painter, construction worker, and furniture mover. He writes on culture, art, and politics at Counterpunch online and The Chiseler. Mother Chicago is a kaleidoscopic romp through America’s most intriguing and confounding city, a city of recent ruins and distant cultures, where the past keeps erupting into the future. In prose that summons the ghostly voices of the machine age, Martin Billheimer excavates the moral core of Chicago by investigating what it did to its own lost children, the kids who were born losers at the game of late-capitalism, the exiles and runaways, the orphaned and unwanted, in a place where the city became the stern parent of its own savage history. --Jeffrey St. Clair, author Born Under a Bad Sky, editor CounterPunch Magazine "Martin's style is fascinating and engrossing, and his subject is rendered in a kind of shadow that feels both totally mythic and undeniably attuned to that of its time and place. Reading it feels investigative, like a long journalistic piece, while being much more invested in impression than in detail." - Bryce Lucas, Manager, Seminary Co-op Books, Chicago