If you’re involved with art or music or writing in Chicago and keep at it for any length of time, odds are you’ll meet everyone else involved sooner or later. I’d first met Jeremy Kitchen, the head librarian at the Chicago Public Library’s Richard J. Daley Branch and host of its semiregular Punk Rock and Donuts shows, a decade ago through the artist Tony Fitzpatrick. Last year, after a chance meeting at Jackalope Coffee in Bridgeport, not far from the library, he invited me to be a guest on his radio show Eye 94, which airs Sundays and Thursdays on Lumpen Radio, with monthly live shows at Pilsen Community Books.
Eye 94, named for I-94, the highway that connects Chicago and Detroit, where both Kitchen and Sack grew up, began in 2017. It’s also a publishing venture: the hosts solicit original writing for their website.
Kitchen started Punk Rock and Donuts after working on a project with the design firm IDEO, which led to a library conference in Aarhus, Denmark, and inspired him to create a nontraditional event at his own branch in Bridgeport. He partnered with January Overton and John Almonte of Jackalope Coffee; they supply the coffee and doughnuts at every show. The program has proved so popular that other branches have started having their own punk-rock shows, but Kitchen is quick to give credit to the CPL administration and his collaborators for its success.
