Shakey Ground

`Those who say the arts are dead in Chicago mean that it's dead for them. In other words, nobody wants to buy their painting, their sculpture, their fiction, so they say that art is dead."

So speaks Brendan Baber, 27-year-old former editor of Chicago-based arts magazine 3rd Word. Between gulps of coffee and bursts of frenzied laughter, he is equal parts cynic and naive idealist, profane loon and scholar. The relationship between Baber's mouth and his cigarettes is symbiotic; neither is without the other for long. Son of Playboy columnist Asa Baber and a playwright who has had six profit-turning plays produced, he's no stranger to the naysayers of Chicago's arts scene.

When he says that he used a "mad-prophet-in-the-desert management" at 3rd Word, one smells the air of truth mingling with his smoke. Since the first issue, a 24-page, square-shaped, black and white flipbook of sorts, Baber led its bimonthly evolution into a 62-page, full-color, full-size magazine, sporting interviews with "Dumb and Dumber's" Jeff Daniels, Chicago band-du-jour Loud Lucy, and a five-page piece on artists with AIDS. It took him 12 issues and two years to do it, all with a skimpy editorial budget of $800 per issue.

But as of 3rd Word's March issue, Baber went back to the desert. Resigning over mounting disputes with publisher Penelope Larsen-Hillman over editorial direction, three other core staff members followed him: contributing editor Eric Spitznagel, associate editor Tracey Pepper and contributing writer Tracie Richardson.

Talking about his departure, he assumes a melancholy tone. "This last issue was extremely difficult. There were directions that (the publisher and the art department) wanted to take the magazine in that I firmly disagreed with. When it came down to it, they had more votes than me and I was faced with this decision:

"Do I actively help dismantle my dream or do I walk?"

That dream was shared by others 2 1/2 years ago, others who thought that something major was missing in Chicago publishing. A vast expanse of the local cultural landscape lay unexplored between the realm of free arts weeklies like NewCity and the Reader and commercial ventures like Chicago magazine.

"A lot of people were sensing the same need, the same gap," says Baber. "NewCity wasn't quite as sophisticated two years ago as it is now. The Reader was a lot snottier two years ago... Chicago magazine? Give me a break. Chicago magazine was, if possible, less hip than it is now."