Gregg Bordowitz: Drive presents a series of essays and texts surrounding Gregg Bordowitz's films Fast Trip, Long Drop and Habit. Images from Bordowitz's installation Drive, exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago April 6-July 7, 2002, are also featured.
Bordowitz made a big splash in 1993 with Fast Trip, Long Drop. It featured a blend of documentary footage and fictional narrative to focus on his HIV positive diagnosis, the diagnosis of a friend's breast cancer, and the recent deaths of his grandparents. Instead of creating a somber ode to mortality, Bordowitz offered a darkly humorous essay on history, illness, AIDS activism, and representational strategies.
Habit (2002) is the sequel to Fast Trip, Long Drop. It follows the regimens, routines, and thoughts that result from Bordowitz's decade of life as a person with AIDS. Coupled with this are new interviews with some of the same faces featured in Fast Trip, Long Drop, the introduction of new friends and confidants, and extensive footage of AIDS activists in South Africa fighting and organizing to gain access to the same drugs that are keeping Bordowitz and many of his friends alive. The tone of this film is slower from the earlier one, reflecting a change in the tenor of AIDS activism, the fact that South Africa 2001 is not New York 1992, and the new domesticity and responsibility that governs Bordowitz's life today.
For the book, Brodowitz assembled a collection of authors whose views on AIDS and/or aesthetics he greatly respects. Topics range from critical assessments of his films, to the moralizing tenor found in popular images of homosexuality and AIDS, the current state of the aesthetic avant-garde, political activism, race and its complicated relation to sexuality and public policy, living with illness, and a short fiction work on the mental space of illness.

From the Arkestra to his experiments with synthesizers, Sun Ra was one of the most inventive jazz musicians in history. Yet until now, there has not been a collection of his earliest writings that reveal the beginnings of his work as philosopher, mystic, and Afro-Futurist. This new volume unveils over forty newly discovered typewritten broadsheets on which Sun Ra expounded his wholly unique philosophical message.
While in Chicago during the mid-1950s, Sun Ra preached on street corners and occasionally created scripts to accompany his lectures--intricate texts that invoke science fiction, Biblical prophecy, etymology, and black nationalism. Until this point, the only broadsheet known to exist was one given to John Coltrane in 1956. These newly unearthed writings attest to the provocative brilliance that inspired Coltrane. Sun Ra annotated many of them by hand, and together the sheets reveal fascinating new aspects of his worldview.
"The Wisdom of Sun Ra "is an invaluable compendium of writings by one of the most intriguing and influential jazz figures of the century.

Light and darkness transform city buildings into surreal structures: an ordinary gray concrete building in plain daylight changes at night into a mysterious monolith or, under a blue-tinted lens, into an ethereal edifice. Swedish artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff harnessed these transformative powers of light to create a powerful spectacle that presents Chicago architecture from a wholly original perspective in this collection of striking photographs. "Red Empty (Chicago 2003)" is the latest in a series of urban-centered works spanning from Bangkok to Santa Fe in which von Hausswolff set 1000-watt red spotlights against the architecture of run-down, abandoned buildings to generate spectral real-world monochromes. His images explore intermediate realms through these otherworldly images - worlds traced by psychic residue that re-write the history of particular sites. "Red Empty" is a compelling visual work that transforms Chicago architecture into sculptures of light, shadow, and stone.