What Uni Does To Us

Coming in to my fifth year at Uni High, I feel as though I'm finally qualified to talk about what the place is actually like. I don't think many people really dislike Uni as a whole, but then very few people have an entirely positive view of it either. Those people tend to get made fun of, unfortunately. Like so many others, I have to admit that I've often wondered what it would have been like to go to Central or UHS instead. Maybe I would have known more people, gone to more parties, had more fun. On the other hand it's not a given that anyone who has good friends here would have found any at another school; maybe I would have spent a lot more time by myself. As time has gone I've mostly accepted that for me, any other high school experience is unknowable, and that I need to try to make peace with the one I'm having.

While Uni may not be known for great parties, there's still something to be said for the tight-knit quality of the social scene here. It's a true cliche that people know each others' names here, and while we tend to devolve into cliques by freshman year most people can at least hold a conversation. You do really feel like you have some sort of connection to almost everyone, even if it's just some small thing you did together as sophomores. And of course the teachers are fantastic, and the small size lets you feel like you have much more personal connections with them than might be possible at a larger high school.

That said, I think there are still a few things worth complaining about. The small size in particular is a double-edged sword; while it can be comforting it can also be isolating, and many Uni students feel very cut off from the rest of the world. There's definitely a bubble around us, with the opportunities to interact with people who aren't middle-upper class white/asian kids being pretty limited. It feels sometimes like there are a few background types everyone shared, and people who don't quite fit in with those are often isolated. Even within our tiny bubble, it feels like there are some pretty intense splits running roughly along such ridiculous divides as future choice of major or past middle school. In particular the STEM and humanities kids tend to keep with their own kinds, with all the future doctors, lawyers, and other upper-class miscellany shifting around amorphously. It's a very strange split but it's one that gets voiced pretty often, and one which I have to admit I'm not immune to. My friends tend to be the ones who plan on teaching English or sociology, not doing research in biochemistry. If there's a good side to this split it's that it is probably based more on personality type than actual prejudice -- the kinds of people who really value science (and money) tend to act differently than those who really value the arts (and meaningful conversation). Needless to say, in the real world the split between being a professor of chemistry and a professor of history isn't as big as it seems in the minds of most Uni students.

When all is said and done it's hard to weigh conclusively whether going to Uni is a good idea or a bad idea. Certainly a lot of people get a lot out of it; but then there are others who spend five years mostly alone and learn to hate everything it stands for. It's up to individual students to decide whether the relationships they've built here make up for what they've missed out on elsewhere. I'll never know if Uni was really the best place for me, since I can't measure the way I've grown here with how I would have grown at Central, but as the specter of college looms and I'm starting to realize all the people, places, and little quirks that I'll miss about the place, my answer is starting to look like a yes.

Local Music

As Ms. Majerus pointed out, my last post on what makes C-U worth living in more or less skimmed over music. Since we do have an uncommonly good music scene here, I figured I would make amends by doing a whole post on it. Of course I've never been allowed inside a lot of the venues (bars, the Canopy Club, etc), so this is going to be somewhat incomplete, but I'll try my best to give a decent overview of what people our age can see.

Personally I've been going to shows since I was about 13, which sounds impressive until you realize that that was four years ago. Needless to say I've missed out on a lot, but even in the time I've been here there've been some exciting changes. Probably the biggest is the opening of Error Records, an all-ages venue that's so far managed to get a lot of good shows. The genres are mixed but tend to run in the indie/hardcore region. In particular they seem to have the best record with out-of-city bands, which otherwise tend to be pretty poor, at least at shows where minors are allowed (unless you're really into high school Evanston sludgecore). Some of my favorite indie bands I first discovered playing in front of an old move at Error Records. It also doubles as one of my main sources of clothing; several of my t-shirts were bought in my excitement after seeing a particularly good band. This paragraph's recommended band: Muscle Worship, a Kansas hardcore/psychedelic outfit with no less than 3 bass guitars. I first saw them play at Error Records in front of a projection of Star Wars IV, which fit them surprisingly well. 

Error Records might be my favorite venue in town, but there are some other great options as well. Recently I went to a combination art/music show at the Art Party studio, which had some great local and out-of-town bands. I've never heard of the place before and I'm not sure they do these kinds of things routinely, but it was still nice to see. Some businesses like the Red Herring and Error Records (undoubtedly the best record shop in town) also have occasional shows if you check their schedules. Then there are the frequent house shows, which take place over two or three hours inside someone's private home, which is temporarily opened to the public. Unless you know the people involved the best way to find out about them is usually on either Facebook groups or Smile Politely's weekly "Overture" section. None of these venues is necessarily consistent, but put together they mean that if you want to go to a show on any given weekend, you can, and that's a very important thing to have if you want a really strong local music scene in a town like this. Recommended band: Acker, a local instrumental band that makes very good use of a cello in a rock setting. I've seen them a few times, always at small venues, and they're always a lot of fun. Their recorded stuff doesn't quite have the same energy, unfortunately. The members themselves are also great guys. 

Even with all of these available venues, if you look up shows around town it might seem like there's not too much going on. That's because the music scene is currently in the dry spell preceding the year's biggest musical event: Pygmalion. Some of you have probably been to Pygmalion before; it's one of the absolute best parts of the year for people who live in Champaign, and if you have any interest in indie music you've probably at least heard of it. Every year it brings in some of the best bands in the country, from of Montreal. to Warpaint to Grizzly Bear to Dinosaur Jr. Local favorites Elsinore are also a perennial presence. This year's lineup is especially deep, allowing there to be two separate days of headliners. Chvrches, Deafheaven, Panda Bear, and, most excitingly, the local band American Football, which is reforming just for this show after breaking up around 15 years ago. Their eponymous album is one of the most famous pieces of music to come out of Champaign, to the point where I've heard it even though I was 3 when it came out. The people who were actually around to see them live seem even more excited. I've seen individual members of the band play in various groups around town, and they all seem to be as good as ever. If only the organizers of Pygmalion had managed to pick up Slint, they would have had a perfect year.

Believe it or not, though, there was a time before Pygmalion. The venerable rock festival only started up ten years ago, missing out on the careers of some really incredible local bands. Like I said before, I wasn't around for most of this, and not a lot of books have been written on the history of the Champaign-Urbana music scene, but I do know bits and pieces of history. From what I understand the city had a kind of golden age of publicity in the 90's, as the success of bands like Nirvana and REM convinced record executives to search through college towns for the next big thing. We had a few near-stars, and a few fairly tragic stories, but we never quite ended up becoming the "next Seattle." What we got instead was much better: the 90's and early 2000's produced a ton of really great bands and musicians, which we get to enjoy even if most of the nation ultimately didn't (which might not have been a bad thing; look what happened to Kurt Cobain). Some particular standouts include American Football, Braid, Hum, the Poster Children, and Tortoise (technically Chicago-based but the members are from Champaign). These are all very talented and influential bands, and I would recommend any one of them. However, my final recommendation goes to Absinthe Blind, which I think is one of the best examples of the kind of shoegazy dream pop that's extremely indicative of the Champaign-Urbana scene. I first found this band at a local showcase at Error Records on the Saturday of Pygmalion two years ago. It ended up broken on the ground by the end of the day, but I managed to track down an online copy of their album Rings, and I have to say I agree with the person who sold it to me in saying that if you want to hear our local scene, you need to listen to Absinthe Blind.

(I'm going to tack this on here since I don't plan on writing another post about how great Champaign County is, but if anyone still doubts our artistic chops I just want to point out that Roger Ebert, David Foster Wallace, and Dave Eggers, three of the most influential voices of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century, have all lived in Urbana. Let's see Bloomington do that.)

Where We Live

Champaign-Urbana is the kind of place where residents really enjoy talking about where they live. Usually these conversations take the form of mutual complaints and promises to move to Chicago or Seattle. (Having never lived in any of the places people talk about moving to I can't say whether or not people complain about those too, but if there is a place no one wants to leave then East-Central Illinois is not it.) Sometimes I understand that all too well; I have to admit I'm one of the people who daydreams more about going to some exciting liberal arts college on a coast than spending another four years of my life in the midwest. At some point spending too much time here is bound to swallow up the little bits of bohemian street creed I get for having lived briefly in Europe. My repertoire contains a lot of the old overdone complaints (the bipolar weather, the lack of water, the distance from other cities, the midwestern over-politeness) in addition to some more abstract personal ones: the way the sky here dwarfs the tiny trees and buildings on the ground, and the way the empty flatness of the place hits me sometimes with the realization that we're all alone on a massive spinning orb (especially when it's dark and the wind is particularly harsh). But then you can say that for a lot of places, and as my time here is (probably) coming to an end, I'm starting to appreciate that this one in particular might not be as boring as people make it out to be.

When people are feeling generous towards our cities, the University is usually the first thing that gets brought up. While the contrarian part of me wants to skip that entirely since everyone's heard it all before, I think it's still worth pointing out how lucky we are to have the Quad, and the Bell Tower, and the libraries, and Boneyard Creek, and the entire sprawling nexus of enjoyable culture that springs indirectly from a massive population of young people and professors: the state streets, the Food Co-Op, the Art Theater, all the music, all the art, all the restaurants. If it weren't for the university we wouldn't have any of that, and the whole town would look like Decatur. You might not all want to go to the U of I, but everyone who lives here has to at least respect that it's responsible for much of what makes this community different so much else.

That's not to say that the university is responsible for everything there is to like about our area. If you're really sick of this town, and you're willing to drive a bit, I highly recommend visiting some of the smaller towns in and around Champaign county. Almost all of them have something to offer, from Homer Soda Company, to the Sidney Dairy barn, to Allerton in Monticello, to the inexplicable naval museum in the extremely landlocked Sadorus. I guarantee you that anywhere you go there will be something of interest to see or do, even if you have to use your imagination a bit. Even Rantoul has the reindeer ranch, which is worth at least one quick trip. I guess I should be encouraging you to bike to these places, since driving just to see the botanical garden in Mahomet seems a bit wasteful, but if I said that no one would even think about going anywhere further than the Savoy 16 -- which, by the way, is the one good thing about living in Savoy (we don't even have library access because the city council hates both taxes and learning, although they did lose their crusade against the MTD, so we now have bus service again).

Of course there are still a lot of things that I haven't brought up that make this place far from hellish, and not quite as dull as people make it out to be, but if you aren't exploring the U of I and/or the surrounding cities, you aren't making much of an effort to enjoy this place at all. Especially to the people who plan on leaving in a year or two and never coming back (and again, I'm probably one of them), just remember that this is still where you live, and possibly where you're from. A big part of all of us has been formed in Champaign County, and no matter how close to an ocean you move, that's not going to change -- so you might as well get to know what made you.