Chicago Reader print issue of January 9, 2025 (Vol. 54, No. 14)

NEW YEAR, NEW ATTITUDE

THIS WEEK

03 Reader Letters 03 Editor’s Note We need a resolution.

04 Feature The midwestern charm of Charis Listening Bar 05 Reader Bites The Youngster bagel sandwich at R&A Sourdough

06 Migrants A city contractor with a poor track record of resolving complaints

10 Clean water The MWRD’s newest member

12 Isaacs | On Culture A former City News Bureau reporter’s encounter with Jimmy Carter ARTS & CULTURE

13 Comic Zachary Cahill’s new experimental book guides readers through Paris.

14 Review At Hyde Park Art Center, six local artists challenge conventional notions of landscape. THEATER

15 Preview The creators of Shucked talk about creating a queer and multiracial look at small-town America.

FILM

17 Feature The Picture Restart series at Chicago Filmmakers will feature monthly screenings of a newly organized and restored archival collection.

19 Moviegoer A New Year’s resolution MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

20 Galil | Feature The best overlooked Chicago records of 2024

22 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including Melvin Taylor, Pan•American & Kramer, Daniel Knox, and Background Character

26 Gossip Wolf A private collection of 10,000 Chicago show tapes finds a public home, and four locals heat up the dead of winter with new music

27 Jobs

27 Services

(Clockwise from top le ) Film canisters in the attic of Chicago Filmmakers JAMES HOSKING

(Top right) A line of migrants wait to enter Chicago’s largest migrant shelter in Pilsen on Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2023. SEBASTIAN HIDALGO FOR BORDERLESS MAGAZINE Maya Lagerstam as Storyteller 1 and Tyler Joseph Ellis as Storyteller 2 in Shucked MATTHEW MURPHY AND EVAN ZIMMERMAN Detail of the cover of Nüde’s Pink COURTESY NÜDE

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POETRY CORNER

IT IS EASY TO KEEP A SECRET IF NO ONE WANTS TO LEARN IT

By Karl Michael Iglesias

in this universe we are not alone & the government had a hand in killing men they bestowed national holidays too & named universities after & eventually every human practices a loose craft of living & the recipe to your folktale lemonade & the vanishing of pursed summer days & a private shower routine that qualifies you as a choreographer & a mustard

curtained anthem you know all the words to & the brief technique behind the basic meal you mustered

& how the first time you were asked what you wanted to be when you grew up, you responded,

a hot dog vendor & the spontaneous main event that no one requested & you whisper

five fingers meant for a throat & breaths clinch each other & in a tree trunk

a squirrel hides the spring seeds & what you pray for in a rush becomes & boxes of apology letters are airdropped by cinder-velvet helicopters & the parachutes open like unfolding arms like a letter filled with empty letters & between hurdled stars & quantum pasture, the contents

disappear into a time feed ripped open & an ear slurs into the new year & the daybreak is cinched & we are children after all caretaking the earth’s dementia

New year, new you? Making resolutions seems like a good way to assess and set goals for oneself, but we all know how it can go.

January 1, 2025: I will stop eating meat and walk the dog in the park every day.

January 3, 2025: I will walk the dog in the park every other day and stop eating meat.

January 6, 2025: I will pet the dog and curl into a ball on my living room floor every day.

We might lack discipline, some of us, and perhaps we set ourselves up for swift failure when we set the bar too high. A Pew Research Center study last year found that 13 percent of the Americans they surveyed near the end of January had not kept any of their New Year resolutions.

For many of us the beginning of the calendar each year represents a bit of hope and a chance to reroute. But 2025 came around with some baggage that won’t go away by streamlining our pantry organization or buying a new gym membership.

Karl Michael Iglesias is a Puerto Rican actor, director and writer from Milwaukee, WI, who now resides in Brooklyn, NY. His poetry can be read in the Florida Review, RHINO, the Brooklyn Review, the Madison Review, the Hong Kong Review and the Academy of American Poets, to name a few. Karl is the author of the poetry chapbooks CATCH A GLOW and The Bounce—both available from Finishing Line Press.

Poem curated by Demetrius Amparan. Demetrius is a music artist and poet from the south side of Chicago. He is a nonprofit leader and father to daughters Ella and Addison. His latest work, Hold Me Down, released August 2024.

A weekly series curated by the Chicago Reader and sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.

Fall Hours

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More Light! Exhibition

Chicago design duo Luftwerk’s immersive interpretation of Aram Saroyan’s poem “lighght” transforms the Poetry Foundation gallery into a dynamic lightbox.

Open through February 15, 2025

Learn more at PoetryFoundation.org

We’re entering this year with a sense of dread, or ignoring the dread, or just clinging to thoughts like these: “Pet videos as a form of self-care,” “At least I woke up this morning,” or “I wonder how much it would cost to drive to Panama.”

I can’t tell you what this year will bring for you but I can o er you hope: you’re exactly in the right place and this is the right time.

There’s been hundreds of years of revolutionary change in this country. Change is hard and messy, but victories can be found. There

Find us on socials: Facebook and Bluesky: chicagoreader X: Chicago_Reader Instagram and Threads: chicago_reader

Linkedin: chicago-reader

We accept letters to the editor for publication consideration. m letters@chicagoreader.com

are many people that are like you, who want to help and not feel powerless.

In the coming months, we’ll be there to make sure that you’re informed about all the work that Chicago nonprofits, community groups, and citizens are doing to safeguard our people and way of life, including defending undocumented neighbors, reinforcing the right of bodily autonomy, and championing the work and lives of trans and nonbinary people in Chicago. We’ll keep an eye on our leaders and hold them accountable. We’ll keep an eye on our culture makers to ensure that our readers know about the innovations that Chicagoans create in the worlds of thought, science, and the arts. And we’ll continue to do so with the wry sensibility and tough but fair outlook that marks a true Chicagoan. Keep reading, keep learning, and we’ll keep bringing you more stories of Chicago—the best place in the world to make change and sustain hope. v

—Salem Collo-Julin, editor in chief m scollojulin@chicagoreader.com

CORRECTIONS

The Reader has updated the online version of the December 26 Gossip Wolf column by Reader senior writer Leor Galil. The story was updated to reflect that Gia Margaret did not give permission in advance for the group 41 to sample “Hinoki Wood.” v

FOOD & DRINK

The midwestern charm of Charis Listening Bar

Founder Alex Jandernoa hopes his forthcoming vinyl and cocktail bar will be a Bridgeport staple for generations.

By S. NICOLE LANE

In the 1920s, jazz kissa, or listening bars, began popping up in Japan, and by the 1950s, they had become quite popular in the country. Kissa embraced the concept known commonly as hi-fi in the United States: to immerse oneself in music and truly listen to sound. At listening bars, music is typically played on vinyl and high-quality sound equipment, while the venues themselves are small and intimate with low lighting. These aren’t bars for talking, just listening.

There aren’t many listening lounges in Chicago, but they do exist. Parachute HiFi’s food outshines the music, Shogun is a 12-seated membership club, and Dorian’s focuses more on live music.

Longtime Chicagoan Alex Jandernoa felt a gap in this scene and decided it was his time to create the type of listening bar he wanted to see.

“When I was looking around Chicago, I really thought that there was kind of a dearth of a place where you can go in and grab a drink and listen to a record and not have to buy a whole dinner,” Jandernoa says. “Traveling around, I have seen some really beautiful listening bars, but none that took a more casual approach to it. They’re either very intensive, based on the Japanese kissa cafes where you sit in reverence and listen, or they’re very dance-focused.”

Instead, his forthcoming bar, Charis Listening Bar, will have a midwestern spin, creating a more laid-back environment where drinks can be shared and music listened to; there isn’t a requirement on how either should be enjoyed. “It’s a little 1,200-square-foot bar, so it’s more about just vibing with the DJ, which I think is sometimes lost nowadays,” says Jandernoa. He mentions how music is secondary in the

trons can buy records. On Friday nights, visitors can expect a vinyl-focused DJ, and on Saturdays, Jandernoa and his sta will be behind the decks.

“Our goal is to truly be a midwestern listening bar, where we have that midwestern Chicago bar attitude of, everybody’s welcome; anybody can come and sit. We have some a ordable cocktails, but [we] really pay attention to the sound quality so that everybody gets a high-quality sound experience,” Jandernoa explains.

and pasilla chile.

“Our goal is to be a space where everybody can come, and you can bring your friends that are maybe California sober, or, if you want a longer night out, you can order a really cool NA drink in between your rounds and stay out a little longer and listen to more records,” Jandernoa explains. In a neighborhood of dive bars, Charis will be refreshing for those who don’t always want to get cross-eyed but still want to socialize with friends.

restaurant industry. Although more and more places are investing in better sound systems, music still tends to be shoved into the corner.

“The DJs are kind of hidden away, or they’re separated at their booth,” he says. At Charis, the records will be at the bar.

Charis’s staff will include music director Drew Mitchell, who runs 606 Records in Pilsen. Every month, Jandernoa and Mitchell will source a monthly drop of records from behind the bar. Mitchell will also have a small satellite store at the bar where pa-

Jandernoa comes from a background in food and spirits, as well as music. He started out as a cheese maker in northern Michigan and then worked for Banhez Mezcal in Oaxaca, Mexico. His mom grew up a few blocks from Motown in Detroit, and his dad followed the Who around during the Tommy tour. Jandernoa is naming the bar after his mom’s middle name, Charis, to represent his childhood growing up seeing music as an art form. He says that music was probably the highest of any art form to him, and food and beverage were a close second.

His parents have been married for almost 50 years, and throughout the bar, patrons will see photographs of them that range from their Alaskan travels on their BMW motorcycle to their adventures living in Australia for many years.

“They traveled all over China and Spain but have always kind of remained very grounded and midwestern,” he says.

Inspired by his parents’ adventures, Jandernoa will also open the Midwest Explorers League, a wine and vinyl club located inside of Charis.

“It’s all about collecting new vinyl from around the world and cool, affordable wines. And so one of the big things—and why we’re honoring my parents—is they’ve always welcomed everyone to their table,” he explains. That philosophy translates to the drinking side of things at Charis. He and beverage director Gina Hoover are creating 12 in-house cocktails, all of which will also be o ered spirit-free.

“Willy Warnock” is Charis’s take on a Penicillin, a cocktail mixing ginger and lemon. The Warnock uses smoked winter gourds, an ode to the man who “pioneered giant vegetable competitions at the Chicago World’s Fair,” says Jandernoa.

Another cocktail will be the “Palörtma,” a Paloma with Malört, lemongrass,

Jandernoa has lived in Bridgeport for five years and says, “While I’ve loved all the neighborhoods I’ve lived in Chicago, this is the first place where I’ve really felt like a neighbor.”

Three out of the five current staff members also live in and around the area.

He says, “I really love what Bridgeport is becoming. It’s not kicking families out. It’s kids coming home, getting apartments, having slightly more left-wing politics than their parents, and bringing in people from di erent parts of the city or the country. And everybody here really does love Bridgeport, which I think is cool. I wanted to find a neighborhood [for the bar] that would have that feeling, and it just so happened that I got to live in it.”

Moreover, since he’s opening the bar where he lives, Jandernoa wants folks to know that this is the goal—Charis is his passion project. “This is where I want to retire,” he says. “I wanna be the old guy that gets to see the babies and the babies’ babies, you know, and have three generations come into my bar.”

And in Bridgeport, that’s how many businesses run. Behind the counter at Maria’s, you can often spot Maria Marszewski herself with her glamorous makeup, and at Bernice’s, you can catch Bernice’s son, Steve Badauskas, serving up stingo on Wednesday nights. It’s the type of neighborhood where you’re actually able to get old and gray and welcome three generations to a bar.

From Japan to Chicago, Charis will be a true listening bar in the city. With no membership fee, long food menu, or dance floor, patrons can enjoy the sonic coziness alongside a curated cocktail menu.

And since fine drinks, records, and conversation run in Jandernoa’s blood, finding a barstool at Charis will no doubt feel like the warm, midwestern hug we’ve all been waiting for.

Jandernoa is hoping to bring Charis’s to drinkers and audiophiles alike as soon as mid-January. “Fingers crossed!” he says. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Find more one-of-a-kind Chicago food and drink content at chicagoreader.com/food.

The Youngster at R&A Sourdough is a bagel sandwich with plain schmear, your choice of sausage or hot-honey bacon, egg frittata, cheddar, and hot sauce. But let’s get this out of the way: There are a few key customizations needed to make this a bagel sandwich worth talking about. The Youngster should be built on a sea salt bagel. The correct choice of meat is bacon. And, most importantly, the plain cream cheese spread should be subbed out for their silky smooth roasted poblano schmear.

FOOD & DRINK

it’s on the brink of too salty (in a good way) until the crackly crust gives way to thick, filling layers of egg and bacon. It’s messy and slippery but does everything you need a breakfast sandwich to do, leveled up by that warm-green poblano schmear and kicked up to ten by the hot sauce.

This Ravenswood corner bakery doesn’t have room to dine in (although they open patio seating during the warmer months).

The resulting combo makes for an absolute punch of salt and heat. At first bite,

Luckily, the Youngster travels fine for pickup or delivery, but enjoy it ASAP to avoid the salt crust dissolving, and pair it with a dark roast co ee, served black. —TARYN MCFADDEN R&A SOURDOUGH 1938 W. Lawrence, $10.75, 773-9426405, randasourdough. com v

Reader Bites celebrates dishes, drinks, and atmospheres from the Chicagoland food scene. Have you had a recent food or drink experience that you can’t stop thinking about? Share it with us at fooddrink@ chicagoreader.com.

MONDAY NIGHT

FOODBALL

THE LINEUP:

The Reader’s weekly chef pop-up series, now at Frank and Mary’s Tavern, 2905 N. Elston, Avondale

Follow the chefs, @chicago_reader, and @mikesula on Instagram for weekly menu drops, ordering info, updates, and the stories behind Chicago’s most exciting foodlums.

13 The revenge of Pizza Dom and Death by Dough @deathbydough

Jan. 20 Islands collide with Filipino-Hawaiian Panlasa @_panlasa

Jan. 27 Greet the magic hour with Twilight Kitchen @twilightkitchenrp

Feb. 3 Master the sandwich arts with Quicky Nicky’s @quickynickys

Feb. 10 A heartfelt valentine from Deep Cut Pierogi @deep_cut_pierogi

Feb. 17 Xicágo Cevichería rises @xicagocevicheria

Feb. 24 Get hot and wet with A Beef with Berger @pat.kaisertiger

Mar. 3 The return of Johnny’s Table, feat. Eat Ghosts @johnnys_table @eat.ghosts

Mar. 10 The fine Boricubexican filigree of Mother Prepper @mother_prepper

Youngster bagel sandwich at R&A Sourdough

NEWS & POLITICS

CITY CONTRACTOR

‘FAILED’ CLIENTS AS MIGRANT SHELTER COMPLAINTS MOUNTED, STAFFERS SAY

Chicago is phasing out Favorite Healthcare staffi ng after paying the agency $342 million to oversee its shelter system.

By EMELINE POSNER

This story was a collaboration between the Investigative Project on Race and Equity and Borderless Magazine.

Reina Isabel Jerez García filed a grievance with the City of Chicago last fall when sta started serving smaller meals at the city-funded migrant shelter where she and her teenage son were staying.

Dinner was a scoop of rice and a couple of pieces of meat at the Super 8, a compact motel building on the far north side. The city’s main shelter contractor, Kansas City-based Favorite Healthcare Sta ng, opened the shelter at the

The Super 8 on the far north side opened as a shelter in July 2023 and was run by Favorite Healthcare Staffi ng.

Super 8 in July 2023.

Other changes at the shelter worried Jerez, 40, a lawyer and advocate for the rights of victims of violence in Colombia. Amid increasing threats from guerilla groups, she and her family left the city of Cúcuta to seek asylum in early 2023.

She said shelter staff, who worked for Favorite, wouldn’t let anyone, even kids, take more than two bottles of water a day. Staff were also blocking residents from bringing in donations of winter clothing, though the temperature was dropping, and the shelter wasn’t providing any to arriving families.

“The treatment was terrible,” said Jerez. As she and her son, then 16, awaited the arrival of the rest of their family—Jerez’s husband, two younger sons, and an adopted daughter—she organized with other residents to push back against the changes.

In grievances filed later that year, another migrant parent said that Favorite sta blamed the food shortage on the city. “I don’t believe that the government told them to only give us a spoonful of rice,” the resident wrote in Spanish in a December 2023 grievance, adding that workers treated residents with hostility. “Enough with the xenophobia.”

Parents at the Super 8 filed 12 grievances between August and December 2023, most alleging misconduct by the shelter manager, a Favorite contractor. They urged city o cials to intervene. But Jerez said she and her neighbors never heard back about their complaints. Over the last two years, the City of Chicago built an unprecedented shelter system to provide safe, temporary lodging and resettlement resources to incoming migrants like Jerez and her family.

But as complaints against shelter staff poured in, the city passed off much of the work of overseeing that system to Favorite

contractors, according to a review of hundreds of pages of public records, including contracts, invoices, and emails, obtained by the Investigative Project on Race and Equity and Borderless Magazine.

The analysis of grievances filed in the last half of 2023 revealed a poorly attended system. Contractors let complaints sit for weeks or months without response and rarely recommended discipline for sta members accused of misconduct.

Migrants’ allegations against staff ranged from cruel treatment and threats of eviction to more serious charges of discrimination based on migrants’ sexuality or nationality and the denial of emergency medical care or accommodations for medical or disability needs. In some cases, sta accused of misconduct—such as the shelter manager at the Super 8—were assigned to investigate and respond and close out complaints filed against them, records show.

The Investigative Project and Borderless found that these records also included several grievances likely filed by other contracted shelter sta , who alleged that their coworkers or supervisors were enforcing shelter rules unevenly, acting inappropriately with residents, or, in one case, serving meals that had been plated with rotten chicken.

Meanwhile, in dozens of interviews with the Investigative Project and Borderless, residents and sta expressed disappointment with city oversight. Several described the shelters as a “toxic” and “hostile” environment, where people got leadership positions out of favoritism rather than experience working in resettlement services or with asylum seekers. Some said that attempts to improve conditions or report misconduct were either ignored or led to retaliation.

“Their needs are met as far as shelter and food, but we really don’t help them,” said a former contractor, who requested anonymity because they were scared of losing future contract work opportunities. “We really don’t. We try our best, but like, there’s nothing we can do for them.”

At its peak in January, the city’s migrant shelters housed just under 15,000 residents, more than a third of them small children, according to city data. They slept on bunk beds in small motel rooms and cots in congregate spaces in field houses, former schools, and industrial buildings.

The city’s reliance on Favorite to sta these shelters has come at a high cost. Since September 2022, more than $3 of every $5 spent on migrant care—roughly $342 million—has

gone to Favorite for sta ng and oversight. For months, the city defended its contract with Favorite.

“Favorite is our solution,” Department of Family and Support Services (DFSS) first deputy commissioner Jonathan Ernst told the Chicago Tribune in August.

The following month, Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson increased the city’s contract with the company by another $100 million.

However, Johnson announced in late October a plan to shut down most of its migrant shelters by the end of the year while integrating 3,000 remaining beds into the city’s existing homeless shelter network. That network will accept migrants who have arrived in the United States within the last 30 days but will no longer guarantee them beds—and Favorite will be phased out as a shelter contractor, said DFSS Commissioner Brandie Knazze. (Per a December 18 WBEZ report, Knazze planned to step down from her position on December 31.)

City o cials have continuously praised the city’s work in caring for newly arrived migrant families over the past two years. “We fought back and showed the world just how welcoming we can be,” Johnson said at the October press conference announcing the end-of-year shelter closures.

Before the announcement, experts called to overhaul the system and its contract with Favorite.

“It’s time for the city to step back and evaluate the shelter system and try to figure out how to improve it,” said Nicole Hallett, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. Before the announcement, she said, “There’s no reason why these contractors should just get renewed contracts over and over again without any review of the work they’ve already done.”

Records Denial

The city’s migrant shelter system has remained shut off from public scrutiny. Few organizations are allowed to provide services inside the shelters. Under the terms of its contract, Favorite must seek approval from the city before making public statements, and its contractors are barred from speaking to the press. City o cials and Favorite spokespeople declined multiple interview requests about the grievance process but, in written responses, defended their e orts to improve their QR code-based grievance system since it launched in June 2023.

“Favorite takes its role in the grievance

process for its employees and new arrivals very seriously,” Favorite senior vice president Keenan Driver wrote in an emailed statement. “To that end, Favorite worked with the City to review and update the grievance processes at the shelters in late 2023 to ensure more rapid processing and a safe environment in the shelters for workers and residents.”

One of those late 2023 improvements was to hire two full-time Favorite contractors who would be “solely responsible” for resident grievances, according to Julie Gilling, director of policy and advocacy at DFSS. Previously, responsibility was split between “a few team members overseeing operations at new arrivals shelters,” Gilling wrote in an email response.

More recently, the average response time for grievances decreased to 13 days, according to DFSS spokesperson Brian Berg. In a statement, Berg wrote that the shelter grievance system is “vastly more responsive and e ective in addressing the needs of our residents than it was at the inception of the mission.” Berg is no longer with DFSS.

The Investigative Project and Borderless have been unable to independently corroborate these improvements. The O ce of Emergency Management and Communications (OEMC), which maintains grievance records,

denied a public records request for more recent grievance records. That denial is under review by the Illinois Attorney General’s public access counselor.

Many Complaints, Little Action

The grievance data reviewed by the Investigative Project and Borderless tell a di erent story. Records show that DFSS employees identified themselves as responding to just 29 of 244 grievances filed from the city’s migrant shelters between June 2023 and early January 2024. The remainder of the grievances were marked as being resolved by an assortment of Favorite contractors, including shelter managers, site captains, and project managers.

Nearly two of every three complaints identified some form of sta misconduct, WBEZ first reported.

Records show that over the six-month span, response to complaints was inconsistent and slow, with an average time of 35 days.

Favorite contractors monitoring the city’s grievance portal rarely recommended disciplinary action for sta accused of misconduct, suggesting a “corrective action” in just 24 of the 215 cases Favorite investigated.

One of those sta was the shelter manager of the Super 8. Migrant parents accused him

Reina Jerez García embraces her husband, German Medina. EFRAIN SORIANO/BORDERLESS MAGAZINE

NEWS & POLITICS

continued from p. 7

and other staffers of limiting kids’ access to water, barring donations of clothing, and threatening families with eviction. Records indicate that the manager closed out earlier grievances. (The Investigative Project and Borderless are not naming the manager because he could not be reached for comment.)

But in mid-December, one of the city’s newly onboarded grievance counselors—another Favorite contractor—reviewed the grievances and recommended “corrective action” for the shelter manager and the project manager for “failing to communicate with residents in a professional manner” and not ordering enough food for shelter residents.

Only a handful of the records indicate what corrective action was recommended or who administers discipline. However, those records show incidents and discipline being handled with little or no city intervention.

One example: A mother in a family shelter in Hyde Park wrote that after she asked for a glass of milk for her young child, she was mocked by a project manager and other sta over her requests for milk and told to take off her sweater. In her grievance, she asked for help pressing charges against the sta .

sionalism and respect” that was “interfering” with shelter operations.

The remainder were closed without recommendations for further action.

DFSS did not respond to questions about specific grievances or disciplinary procedures.

“DFSS is encouraged by the fact that shelter

specific questions about its grievance policies. “Favorite temporary sta are subject to Favorite’s internal HR policies, and Favorite temporary sta help support and implement the City’s resident grievance processes,” Driver, Favorite’s senior vice president, wrote in the emailed statement. “Favorite is committed to

An investigation by Favorite contractors found that the project manager’s actions constituted a “potential abuse of authority” and a “serious matter that cannot be ignored.” Several weeks later, according to the grievance notes, other Favorite supervisors gave those staff members a “write-up” and a “counseling” session. Records indicate the investigators called and sent several emails to the mother but did not speak with her before closing the complaint.

Favorite contractors did recommend terminating sta once in response to allegations of a sta person yelling at a child. In one other case, city o cials recommended terminating a security guard over allegations in grievances that he was having a relationship with a resident in his shelter. In another case, Favorite contractors recommended that a supervisor with eight complaints be transferred to another shelter after identifying a “lack of profes-

residents have and continue to engage with our resident grievance process,” a department spokesperson wrote in a statement. “It means the process is being clearly communicated across the system, shelter residents feel comfortable raising their concerns and feel comfortable doing so.”

But experts say that oversight in the shelters shouldn’t be dependent on people filing complaints. “The number of actual complaints was probably ten times that amount,” said Hallett, the director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic. “But you have a population who doesn’t speak English, who may be moving from shelter to shelter, so may not be invested in complaining about a particular shelter, who may not have the wherewithal or the time or the resources to file a complaint.”

Favorite did not respond to the Investigative Project and Borderless’s findings or

The Investigative Project and Borderless interviewed 11 current and former shelter sta ers who worked for Favorite and security contractor GardaWorld about their experiences working in the shelters. All of them spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were contractually barred from talking to the press without permission or feared it could cost them future work opportunities. Most worked contracts in federal shelters for unaccompanied migrant children before taking work in Chicago. Three said they left the job over concerns about how the shelters operated. Three other workers said their contracts were not renewed after they brought up issues they encountered with shelter operations or with coworkers.

Before the city launched its web-based grievance portal in June 2023, shelters distributed paper grievance forms to give to residents, said Jordan, a Favorite case manager who started working for the city-run shelters that January. The Investigative Project and Borderless are using a pseudonym for the worker, who asked that their name not be used out of fear of being denied future contract work in migrant shelters.

continuous quality improvement and is constantly reviewing its policies and procedures to enhance the resident and sta experience.”

Staff Fear Retaliation

Grievance data reviewed by the Investigative Project and Borderless included at least ten complaints likely to have been filed by shelter sta . Most concerned supervisors’ treatment of them or the residents under their care, records show.

For example, one grievance came from a staffer assigned to serve food, who noticed that a batch of chicken smelled rotten. A manager told sta to wear gloves and put the food out as is, the staffer alleged. “Not even to animals would we serve rotten food,” they wrote in the complaint. “Would [the project manager] eat rotten food?”

“A lot of residents would want to do grievances, and they’re like, ‘Nothing ever happened, do they even read this?’ ‘Who can we talk to?’” said Jordan. “I didn’t know how to explain that we were just stuck there, that everything would stop at the shelter manager. Nothing would proceed after that.”

The creation of a web-based portal that allowed anonymous submissions alleviated some of Jordan’s concerns about residents’ grievances.

However, the city’s grievance portal was designated for residents, not staff. DFSS’s Gilling acknowledged that staff could have filed some grievances via that portal, because it could be accessed by a readily available QR code. In an email, Gilling wrote that the “most direct and e ective way” to address concerns would be to reach out to their supervisors. But Jordan said that without a formal grievance system, they and their coworkers continued to worry about grievance response and potential retaliation.

Some of the Favorite contractors working as

Reina Jerez García, with her husband, German Medina, and sons Victor, William, and Yefferson. EFRAIN SORIANO/BORDERLESS MAGAZINE

supervisors or grievance counselors worked directly in the o ces of DFSS and OEMC and were given city email addresses, records show. Jordan said that caused confusion when reporting problems. “The people that I was talking to [about issues in the shelters], I thought were from the city,” Jordan said. “But I don’t even know if I ever got to the city. We didn’t know who we were talking to.”

After submitting a complaint about poor shelter leadership, Jordan said that a supervisor told them to monitor quarantine rooms in addition to their usual caseload of more than 40 families. The quarantine shift started three hours before their case management shift.

Jordan quit in October 2023.

“The way things were being handled [in the shelters] was not appropriate,” said Jordan, who previously worked in federal shelters for unaccompanied migrant children. “I had never worked under sta that was just so unqualified to be in their role.”

“Favorite just failed as a company to its client and to its staff,” a second contractor told the Investigative Project and Borderless. “Many good staff left that really wanted to make a di erence, but they were pushed out.”

City Leans on Favorite

Favorite Healthcare Staffing is one of three sta ng companies that has supported Chicago’s migrant response since 2022.

The city first signed a contract with Favorite in September 2022 to staff shelters for migrants, shortly after Texas o cials announced that they would send asylum seekers to Chicago, among other cities.

Colorado-based Jogan Health sta ed makeshift shelters in hotels across Chicago and the suburbs on behalf of the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS) starting in September 2022, records show. The company, which was founded the year before, was a subcontractor of state crisis response vendor Innovative Emergency Management.

After launching an emergency rental assistance program for asylum seekers, the state closed those shelters in April 2023. That funding “eliminat[ed] the need” for state-run shelters and sta ng services, a spokesperson for IDHS said. Later that year, IDHS reversed course and announced plans to open more shelters, this time using the services of GardaWorld.

GardaWorld has previously staffed migration facilities, including federal shelters for children arriving at the border unaccom-

panied. Favorite has provided staff for ten immigration facilities since 2012, including federal shelters for unaccompanied minors, according to an internal document submitted to the City Council’s Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights in early 2024. Jogan did not advertise shelter sta ng or immigration experience and the company did not respond to requests for comment.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Favorite developed a reputation as a company that could remedy large staffing gaps in a pinch. The staffing agency signed more than $1 billion worth of contracts to sta developmental facilities, senior housing for veterans, and even prisons throughout Illinois.

Both Favorite and Jogan had recent run-ins with labor and employment law, however. In 2020, the U.S. Department of Labor ordered Favorite to pay back more than $3 million in unpaid wages to contracted employees in Florida. In September 2022, the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment issued a citation to Jogan Health for its “willful” failure to pay overtime wages totaling more than $7,000 to a contractor working at a COVID-19 vaccine site, according to public records obtained by the Investigative Project and Borderless.

As the rate of migrants sent to Chicago has fallen, the local shelter system has shrunk. Earlier this year, Favorite managed more than two dozen shelters. Now, 12 city- and state-funded shelters are hosting around 4,400 migrants, according to the most recent city data. Ten of those are operated by Favorite and three by IDHS and GardaWorld. Earlier this year, the city transitioned two shelters from Favorite to local nonprofit management.

The city continues to use Favorite contractors to manage its grievance system, DFSS confirmed.

Residents in shelters operated by other companies have also filed grievances about shelter conditions, according to records obtained by the Investigative Project and Borderless.

In the first half of 2024, migrants at a state shelter staffed by New Life Centers and GardaWorld in Little Village submitted 32 unique complaints about conditions and staff conduct. One staff member also filed a grievance. That shelter closed down in early November.

The records did show the date of submission and the outcome for each complaint but not the date of closure.

However, records show that contractors fired by Favorite were rehired by GardaWorld to work in the shelter, which was located in a

former CVS store on Pulaski Road.

One of the contractors, a Favorite security guard, was recommended to be fired in December 2023 after two complaints were filed alleging that he was having an inappropriate relationship with a resident, records show. Three months later, that security guard had a new position at the Pulaski shelter where a female resident complained that he entered her room without permission and started commenting on her physical appearance.

“Having a worker like him is scary,” the resident wrote in the grievance. Within three days the security guard was fired from the Pulaski shelter, according to the grievance file notes.

“IDHS takes the safety of all shelter residents seriously and prioritizes the dignified treatment of all,” the agency wrote in a statement. “IDHS is also constantly reviewing and evaluating its shelter policies and operations to best serve its residents and maintains open communications with the City of Chicago.”

When asked about the grievance process in state-run shelters, both IDHS and GardaWorld pointed to the city. IDHS uses the city’s grievance system, spokesperson Daisy Contreras confirmed. That means that all resident grievances from state-funded shelters also go to the Favorite contractors responsible for reviewing and responding to grievances in the city shelters. GardaWorld has no “visibility into either the grievances or the process,” a spokesperson for the company wrote.

GardaWorld did confirm that one of the two contractors rehired after dismissal from the city shelters has since been terminated. Both IDHS and GardaWorld declined to comment on specific grievances.

Life Beyond the Super 8

Reina Isabel Jerez García said she never heard anything from the city or Favorite contractors about the grievances she and other parents filed at the Super 8 shelter, even after grievance counselors determined that shelter sta were responsible for shortchanging residents on meals.

Several weeks later, in January 2024, Jerez said the shelter manager gave her and her 17-year-old son a week to leave Super 8. She said that sta had written her up for violating a shelter rule prohibiting parents from leaving their kids unattended. She felt that the writeup was retaliation for her role in organizing and submitting grievances. “They were throwing people out in the streets in winter,” Jerez said. “This was inhumane treatment.”

NEWS & POLITICS

At the time, Jerez was the only support and source of income for her and her son. Her husband was still traveling toward Chicago with their two younger sons. While she waited to receive federal work authorization, she had found under-the-table work tutoring children.

“There’s a lot of legal holes,” said Benjamin Anderson, a social worker and volunteer at the Super 8. “These people are vulnerable, and their rights are not being protected, and violations against them are not being investigated.”

Anderson helped Jerez file her grievances and said he heard complaints from other residents, including one about the shelter manager stopping a parent and child in quarantine from leaving to seek medical care.

Ten months after being evicted from the Super 8, Jerez and her family were settled on the city’s far south side. A shelter worker helped her pin down an apartment in January, and she used the state’s emergency rental program to put down three months’ rent. Her husband and two younger sons joined them earlier this year, as have her nephew and his small family.

She tried to hang on to the work she had found near the Super 8. However, in February when she traveled north to pick up her pay, her boss sent her to a new address, and a man she had never met assaulted her, she said. She filed a police report and a restraining order against the man and was too scared to return to her job.

Jerez says she hopes to build on her advocacy work in Colombia by creating an organization to support migrants here in Chicago and ensure their humane treatment in shelters.

“They’re not overseeing them, they’re not inspecting [the shelters],” Jerez said. “I’d like to propose that the City of Chicago meets with residents in the shelters every month to ask them, ‘How are you feeling?’ ‘How are they treating you?’”

“If I knew the language, I would say this all in English, truly,” she laughed. “I have so many things to say . . . I’ll have to spend a year studying to prepare myself to say it all.” v

Jonathan Torres, Katrina Pham, and Martha Contreras contributed reporting. This investigation was supported with funding from the Data-Driven Reporting Project. The Data-Driven Reporting Project is funded by the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications.

m letters@chicagoreader.com

NEWS & POLITICS

The MWRD’s newest member

Sharon Waller, the body’s first water engineer, plans to make a splash.

By KACIE FAITH KRESS

The cozy back room of the Atlantic Bar and Grill in Lincoln Square looks like a mix between an Irish pub and a grandma’s house. It’s a blend of exposed brick, wood counters, tables with checkered cloths, and shelves cluttered with old Christmas decorations, kitchen products, and liquor. On this early December day, a fiddler plays folk music

and groundwater shortages across the midwest.

At the center of the room is the reason why everyone’s here. Sharon Waller is the newest addition to the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD) of Greater Chicago—and the first water engineer ever elected to MWRD. The event is a fundraiser to celebrate her election.

“I’ve never met anyone like her,” says 22-year-old Nikki Koziol, a recent University of Illinois Chicago graduate and Waller’s newly hired environmental data analyst.

The MWRD bills itself as a “special purpose government agency” responsible for wastewater treatment, stormwater and flood management, and water infrastructure projects across Cook County. The body will take on just about any water-related issue in the greater Chicago area, meaning its work touches Lake Michigan as well as local rivers and streams.

istration, where use of the phrase “climate change” is banned and environmentalism faces existential threats like the possible gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But Waller is undeterred. She plans to educate local municipalities on funding options they currently have available—like the federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law—and alternative options should Trump take federal action, such as the State Revolving Fund for drinking water and wastewater projects.

Water reuse is Waller’s special passion.

“Illinois has positioned itself to be independent of the whims of [the] federal administration,” Waller tells me. “The Illinois Environmental Protection Act, Illinois Department of Public Health, and Illinois Department of Natural Resources have been thoughtful to create standards and policies that would withstand federal whims. But they need help. They’ve been sorely underfunded for years.”

and classic holiday tunes. Twenty or 30 people mill around with wine or Guinnesses in hand, eating homemade desserts.

The room is filled with cardboard trifold displays educating guests on various waterrelated issues facing not just Chicago, but the entire region—from PFAS pollution control legislation to flooding in the south suburbs

“Climate resiliency, water reuse . . . people are talking about” these issues, says Cindy Skrukrud, a volunteer on Waller’s campaign with a PhD in biochemistry who worked on clean-water issues with the Sierra Club for 20 years. “The Board of Commissioners needs to think about these ideas and work with their excellent staff to start putting them into practice.”

Waller is ready. She knows this work will be challenging under Trump’s second admin-

Waller hopes that with more funding and “person power,” state codes—some of which predate the 1972 Clean Water Act—can be updated. Doing so wouldn’t just change things in Chicago and Illinois but also further downstream. “I’m trying to get us to think, as a state government, about our water in terms of quality,” Waller says. “It’s not helpful that we flush a billion gallons of water down the Mississippi as fast as we can push it away because this is causing the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico and

Terrence J. O’Brien Water Reclamation Plant METROPOLITAN WATER RECLAMATION DISTRICT OF GREATER CHICAGO/FLICKR

harmful algae blooms throughout the state.”

Water reuse is Waller’s special passion. On the bar counter, next to a pan of homemade brownies, is a display detailing the processes

of water distilling, cleaning, and reuse in easily digestible diagrams. There are pictures of Waller’s homemade setup: a blue plastic kiddie pool sitting in the sun, hooked up to

a complex tubing system and a large metal contraption.

With chocolate on her fingertips from the desserts she’s been cutting for guests, Waller uses her pinky to turn the pages of one of the binders. She explains how the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency is now authorized to repeal the prohibition on water reuse but hasn’t done so. “Illinois is the only state in the United States of America—and the only place that I’m aware of in the entire world—that makes water reuse illegal,” Waller says. Organizations including the MWRD are founding an Illinois chapter of the WateReuse Association, and Waller hopes that it can apply pressure in the right places to encourage the o cial repeal of this prohibition.

She points out that 98 percent of water is recycled per day on the International Space Station. In New York City, the Domino Sugar factory redevelopment is designed with water reuse capabilities. The water treated in the building is redistributed for everything except potable uses and excess is discharged back into the river. Systems like these vastly help

reduce combined sewer overflows, mitigating flooding within the city and improving water quality of the adjacent body.

In Chicago, implementing water reuse facilities like these in developments along Lake Michigan would aid climate change and help safeguard the Great Lakes—84 percent of the country’s fresh water supply.

And for proof of the potential of water reuse, Waller’s supporters need not look any further than the large jar of pumpkin-colored liquid sitting in front of the trifold. This is Waller’s e uent kombucha, made from reused water.

Eileen Brodaski, a local mom and artist who learned about water-related issues through her friendship with Waller, pours a shot glass of the cloudy liquid. She notes that not only is this the first e uent drink she’s ever tried but that previously she didn’t even know the meaning of the word.

“Turns out it’s delicious,” she says after her first sip. “Peachy!” v

COMMENTARY

ON CULTURE

Get me rewrite!

City News Bureau covers Jimmy Carter.

By DEANNA ISAACS

News of former president Jimmy Carter’s death on December 29 had me rummaging through a drawer I hadn’t opened in 40 years, searching in vain for notes from the day I met him.

I didn’t find them, but this is what I remember: It was late summer or early fall, 1981. Carter had been out of o ce since that January, defeated mostly by raging inflation he’d inherited from his Republican predecessors, but also by the long Iran hostage crisis that so magically ended the day Reagan took over the presidency. He’d come to Chicago to visit his eldest son, Jack, who was working at the Board of Trade.

I was working at City News Bureau, the infamous journalism boot camp, which was then housed in a large, dingy o ce in a weirdly Gothic, down-at-the-heels building at 188 W. Randolph. It was a job I’d taken not to learn how to be a reporter, which I already knew—or thought I did, having worked as one in another city. What I needed to learn was how to be a reporter in Chicago, which was something else entirely.

The hard-drinking, poker-playing, scruple-free boys club days at City News— which had inspired Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht’s 1928 Broadway play, The Front Page—were behind it by then. But not totally. It didn’t hurt, for example, to have a bit of a connection if you wanted to get hired there. And I had one: a friend’s cousin who’d worked at City News years earlier and knew the general manager, Chicago newspaper veteran Jim Pene . He escorted me to the legendary journalists’ hangout Riccardo’s and introduced me to Pene over drinks, which got me an interview and the job. All he hoped for in return, it turned out, was a little help with his research into the female orgasm, a request I laughed o as the world’s worst seduction line.

So on the day Jimmy Carter came to Chicago to visit his son, I was a rookie street reporter— the bottom rung of the City News hierarchy. I would show up at the o ce in the morning without any idea of what the day might hold, get my list of assignments, and then be back out on the street. City News had no computers then and there were no cell phones; the

first part of the daily challenge was figuring out how to get where you had to go (public transportation encouraged), and finding the nearest pay phone so you could stay in touch with your puppet masters in the o ce and call in your report to a “rewrite” who would pound it into a story on a typewriter. It would then be dispatched to the city’s major newspapers and broadcast outlets, who would re-report it.

Pene had a closed office but the rest of the space at 188 was mostly a big open bullpen run by city editor Paul Zimbrakos, a staunch City News lifer with the emphatic mustache and eyebrows of Groucho Marx. The phones were hot: tips would come in and Zimbrakos would bark out orders; on this day he knew what floor Carter would be on when he sent me out to cover the story which, to the best of my memory, was unfolding at the Board of Trade.

The only things that counted at City News were access, accuracy, and timeliness. You had to get the story, you had to get it right, and you had to report it before anyone else.

In this instance, a mob of press, including the bulky, pushy television crews, had already been corralled in the lobby. I headed, unobtrusively as possible, to a bank of elevators, and rode to the floor the tipster had mentioned. When the door opened on another kind of bullpen, mostly empty, Carter was there, standing alone at a little distance. What to do now? I picked up a phone on one of the empty desks, frantically hoping the

ubiquitous “dial 9” would open an outside line, and called the o ce for orders, then walked over and said hello. Carter turned to me, all toothy grin, cornflower-blue eyes, and rapt attention—as if he really wanted to hear what I had to say. We exchanged a few words before one of his people noticed and hurried over to shut it down. If I ever find my notes I might be able to tell you what those words were; what stuck in memory was his unusually intense focus.

The building at 188 W. Randolph has been landmarked and renovated and is now a stylish apartment tower. The once-buzzing bullpen might be someone’s cozy home. City News Bureau and Jimmy Carter are gone, and—in a turn of events that could surprise even a jaded City News veteran—Donald J. Trump is about to move back into the White House. Happy 2025. v

188 W. Randolph, former home of City News Bureau DEANNA ISAACS

Learn more at ogre.red/press/books/2024chapbook-cahill-zachary.

ARTS & CULTURE

Unsettled landscapes

R“POSITIONS: NEW LANDSCAPES”

Through 2/23 : Mon–Thu 10 AM–7 PM, Fri 10 AM– 4: 30 PM, Sat 10 AM– 4 PM, Sun 11 AM– 4 PM, Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell, hydeparkart.org/exhibition-archive/positions-new-landscapes

While humans have always impacted the land they live on and with, colonialism and capitalism are two phases of human activity that have caused drastic environmental changes and accelerated climate catastrophe. Visual representation has long been central to controlling and exploiting land, a connection implied in the definition of landscape as both the literal shaping of land and an aesthetic framework that has guided art and imaging practices such as painting, photography, and cartography. To visually perceive and represent land was to also render it an object of dominion: not to see ourselves within or part of the land but rather to envision the land as property to be owned and subjugated. This idea is neither fixed nor eternal but instead can be contested and reconfigured, as the artworks in the exhibition “Positions: New Landscapes” at Hyde Park Art Center attest. Curated by Mariela Acuña, the exhibition features work by Kelly Kristin Jones, Lydia Cheshewalla, Norman Long, Elsa Muñoz, zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o’neal, and Leticia Pardo, each of whom propagate their own seeds for unsettling the colonialist and capitalist approaches to land and landscape. Upon entering the second-floor gallery, viewers encounter a crucial reimagining through Cheshewalla’s ephemeral installation Unforgetting How to Speak With You . Stemming from her interest in midwestern prairie ecosystems, constellations of seeds, leaves, and pods (including sunflowers, maple samaras, acorn hats, pine cones, thistle heads, and more) are arranged into organic compositions that link across the length of the wall. For Cheshewalla, an Osage artist from north-

At Hyde Park Art Center, artists challenge colonialist and capitalist approaches to land.

By GREG RUFFING

eastern Oklahoma now based in Chicago, the piece is also closely connected to her ongoing gathering practice which forges a connection to place and honors kinship with the nonhuman world. The majority of the materials were gathered from around Chicago, with a few inclusions from prairie environments in Nebraska. Together they speak to a broader regional ecology and to the artist’s individual relationships with and experience of living alongside many different kinds of beings. While some compositions are intuitive, others grow out of close study and seem attuned to shapes that are inherently expressed by the material itself, illuminating Cheshewalla’s reverence for these elements as independent entities with their own agency and their own lifeworlds unknown to us. Rooted in ethical frameworks of environmental justice and Indigenous land stewardship, she meticulously tracks her sourcing of materials and returns them to the land after exhibition so they can continue their natural cycles of existence.

Cheshewalla’s Unforgetting is the only piece in the show to incorporate organic elements of the landscape in their rawest forms, while the rest of the exhibition deals more directly with notions of representation and mediation. This isn’t to find fault with the latter, as each artist brings their own unique perspective to interrogating the social construction and function of landscape images. In the case of Long and dumas-o’neal, identity and history converge in works that challenge spatial exclusion, segregation, and related aspects of anti-Blackness—which both artists confront through an intimately embodied connection to land as its own potent refusal of separation.

are social issues too, Calumet encapsulates the vital critique articulated in sociologist Nathan Hare’s landmark 1970 essay “Black Ecology”: written at an historical juncture of the Black liberation movement and the emerging environmental movement, Hare’s analysis reinforces that ecological destruction is endemic to racial capitalism, and that environmental concerns don’t only apply to preserving pristine nature in rural or wilderness areas but are equally important to consider in diversely populated, dense urban areas.

In Long’s audio and video piece Calumet in Dub (2024 edit), such embodiment manifests through the artist’s practice of walking and active listening in his local landscape, which informs the field recordings that supply his experimental sound art. As a meditation on the Calumet region he calls home, Long’s work grows out of extensive research on the history of industry in this section of Chicago’s south side, including how burgeoning steel and manufacturing sectors prompted the movement of Black workers to the area during the Great Migration. Field recordings are interspersed with audio feedback derived from sonic translations of data layered together with delay, reverb, and other effects. Connecting the sounds of dub to Black diasporic culture and experiences of dislocation and rupture, Long’s soundscapes reveal the varying shapes and temporalities of the audio as it drops in and out, echoes, and repeats. Meanwhile, the video cuts between imagery of the barges and factories which evince the Calumet River’s heavy industrialization since the late 19th century, and details of its natural surroundings that continue to adapt modes of survival and regeneration. Composed of sandy soil remnants from ancient dune deposits, the Calumet region has a distinct biodiversity and sits at the confluence of three major North American biomes: boreal forests, tallgrass prairies, and broadleaf forests. Yet it is also simultaneously the site of some of the nation’s worst ecological degradation and pollution—conditions to which predominantly Black, poor, and working-class residents are disproportionately exposed, sparking a hotbed of environmental justice activism. Illustrating how ecological issues

Social aspects of ecology also animate dumas-o’neal’s photographic works, which are presented as a thoughtful array of traditionally wall-mounted pieces and two pieces displayed on pedestals low to the ground. Images of Lake Michigan and other bodies of water are seen in dumas-o’neal’s collages of her own 35mm color prints and various visual sources (familial, archival). The color palette, textural film grain, and approachable scale conjure a distinct softness and tranquility. However, dumas-o’neal’s photographs also highlight potential variations in Black relationships to landscape. While the land may be a site of trauma or violence—for example, in legacies of segregation and racist attacks that extended to access to natural spaces such as lakes and beaches—the totality of Black experience is not reducible merely to that oppression. As dumas-o’neal’s work embodies and reveres, the land may also be a site of transcendent joy, togetherness, rest, respite, and rejuvenation—all of which make a claim on belonging in those spaces despite and against the prejudiced forces through which Black inclusion has historically not been assured.

The exhibition is rounded out by Jones’s erasure pieces which seek to intervene in the reproduction of picturesque landscape paintings and idyllic southern plantation sites whose visual iconography conceals their violent pasts, Muñoz’s painted homages to the replenishing and healing capacities of controlled burns, and Pardo’s embossed prints of symbolically loaded rubble from the U.S.–Mexico border. Whether tending the land as a beloved relative, a source of cathartic repair, a contested mark of exclusion, or a focal point of loss and devastation, these six Chicago-based artists make an indispensable argument for repositioning our understanding of human actions and relations as embedded within, not separate from, the natural world. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Unforgetting How to Speak With You by Lydia Cheshewalla TRAN TRAN

THEATER

‘Lookin’ for a window, not a wall’

The creators of Shucked on their “multiracial, queer-positive look at rural America”

By DAVID ISAACSON

ABroadway musical about corn, with music and lyrics by a pair of veteran Nashville hitmakers, might not strike the prospective ticket buyer as possibly transgressive in any way. But Shucked, which opened January 7 at the CIBC Theatre, is a multiracial, queer-positive look at rural America.

The play—which wears both its corniness and its liberal attitudes on its gingham sleeves—takes place in the appropriately named Cob County, a place so isolated a wall of corn literally surrounds it. But once a corn blight threatens the inhabitants’ livelihoods, our protagonist, Maizy (yes, another corn pun), sings ruefully, “We build walls / Around our homes, around our hearts / Built ’em tall / So what’s inside won’t fall apart.”

The corn crisis has Maizy “lookin’ for a window, not a wall,” and she sets out alone into the wide world to find a fix for her town’s

BY JAMES IJAMES

agricultural woes. Her hero’s journey brings her to the big city of . . . Tampa, where “everyone’s a Tina or a Tam’ra.”

“I see a lot of myself in Maizy,” Brandy Clark, coauthor of the show’s tunes, says. “When I moved to Nashville from Morton, Washington, it was so different to me. It felt much like I think Tampa feels to her.”

When Clark was growing up, Morton was as dependent on the lumber industry as Cob County is on corn. Clark’s allegiance to where she grew up (“a place with one blinking stoplight,” she says) makes her sensitive to the dangers of dissing the small-town U.S. “Even though Morton, Washington, is not quite Cob County,” she says, “when it would feel like Morton to me, I knew that we were hitting the mark.”

Clark’s move to Nashville came with another profound personal shift: she realized she was a lesbian. And here her story coincides with that

A boisterous Southern cookout sets the scene for a Black, queer discovery of self and resilience in this Pulitzer Prize-winning, five-time Tony nominated “uproarious reimagining of Hamlet” (The New Yorker).

“This is what I was raised in: pig guts and bad choices.”

As Juicy grapples with his identity and his family at a backyard barbecue, his father’s ghost shows up asking for revenge—on Juicy’s uncle, who has married his widowed mom—bringing his quest for joy and liberation to a screeching halt. James Ijames has reinvented Shakespeare’s masterpiece, creating what the New York Times hails as “a hilarious yet profound tragedy, smothered in comedy,” where the only death is the patriarchy. Tyrone Phillips, Founding Artistic Director of Chicago’s famed Definition Theatre, directs.

JANUARY 11 - FEBRUARY 23

Danielle Wade (L) as Maizy and Miki Abraham as Lulu in Shucked MATTHEW MURPHY AND EVAN ZIMMERMAN

THEATER

continued from p. 15

of her friend and cowriter on Shucked’s lyrics and score, Shane McAnally. McAnally—one of Nashville’s top songwriters, having penned over 40 number-one hits—also hails from a tiny town: Mineral Wells in Texas. He also writes lyrics that favor strong narratives and piquant wordplay. And he also came out as gay in a country music industry where that was an anomaly. “I got a lot of strength from him,” Clark told the Los Angeles Times last year, “because I met him around the time I was coming out, and I thought, well, man, it’s one thing to be a lesbian in Nashville—but it’s another thing to be a gay man walking into these rooms with all these guys in camo. I figured if he could be out then I could be out too.”

When Shucked book writer Robert Horn—a gay man himself—was looking for a songwriting team for his country musical project, he must have felt simpatico with Clark and McAnally. But he was also familiar with their music. “I don’t know if a lot of people know this,” says Clark, “but Robert chose Shane and I based on a song that was on my first album that Shane and I wrote called ‘Pray to Jesus,’ and that’s about . . . I mean it’s not necessarily [about a small town], it’s about America, but I think of it as small-town America.”

Indeed that song, in which the trailer-living narrators “pray to Jesus and play the lotto,” has a direct counterpart in Shucked . The second act of the musical opens with the cast revealing that “He turned water into wine/We turn corn into shine/Yeah, we love Jesus/But we drink a little.”

By this point in the play, Maizy has returned from Tampa with a smooth-talking swindler who promises to save the rural county from its troubles. If that scenario sounds familiar, it’s no surprise. Clark’s first performing experience was appearing in The Music Man in high school, and she says that show “is in my DNA. The Gordy character [in Shucked ] is Harold Hill, 100 percent . . . the con man comes to a small town and fleeces them.”

Just as Clark evokes Morton, The Music Man’s author Meredith Willson was conjuring up his hometown of Mason City, Iowa, in his 1957 musical. And just like Clark, he had to find the right balance between poking fun at the realities of small-town life without unduly mocking small-town people. It is a balancing act that Clark has navigated successfully in songs like “Pray to Jesus,” “Homecoming Queen,” “Big Day in a Small Town,” and several other hits.

“I think small-town America sometimes

gets pigeonholed as this bigoted place, small-minded. And it’s not always,” she argues.

“I mean, there’s small-minded people everywhere: in the small towns and the big towns.”

Indeed, both she and McAnally had for years avoided telling people in the industry about their sexual orientations, for fear that they would be sabotaging any potential success in country music. But when they did come out of the closet, they both found something surprising: acceptance, and burgeoning careers.

Embracing both their country roots and their queer identities allowed them to create better music, and led to the savvy amalgam that is Shucked

For Robert Horn, that amalgam is about bridging the very di erent worlds he and his husband come from. “I am a native New Yorker married to a small-town Georgia man,” he told TheaterMania, “and we weren’t sure at the beginning if our families would get along. I knew there would be cultural di erences. But once we broke bread, the things we have in common bubbled to the surface and I’ve grown to love these people for who they are. So, I wanted to write a show about how small-town America deals with intellectual America.”

Finding the right synthesis, however, took ten years of development, and earlier iterations of the play struggled to find the right voice. “The first out-of-town we did was in Dallas,” says Clark, referring to a version directed by longtime Chicago director Gary Griffin. “That was an all-white cast. And we played on some major stereotypes. Because it started [as an adaptation of] the TV show Hee Haw, and so when we took it to Dallas, the show was called Moonshine: That Hee Haw Musical. And we really thought we were in on the joke. And what we found out is that we were not. We had a lot of politically incorrect things going on in the show, and I’m glad that we had the chance to fix those things, because it made for a much better show. And I think that a multiracial cast makes for a much better show, because it represents the world more accurately, and it represents small towns more accurately.”

In its new form, the play found a welcoming home on Broadway, garnering nine Tony nominations, with a win for breakout star Alex Newell, who became the first openly nonbinary artist to win the award for best featured actor in a musical. (Newell and the rest of the Broadway cast do not appear in the road

version.) But now the play has been touring to Richmond, Virginia; Fayetteville, Arkansas; and other rural-adjacent venues. Could a country musical with a queer perspective be accepted there, as Clark and McAnally have been accepted by country music fans?

“I think it’s being received better on the road than it even was in New York,” says Clark. “It’s kind of hard to get a lot of straight men to the theater, but people said that our show did that: that women could bring their husbands. And I think we need to laugh right now, and it does that for people.”

Clark may be referring obliquely to the election of the Wall-Builder-in-Chief. Certainly, there were not many laughs among the cast when the show opened on election night in Clark’s adopted hometown of Nashville. “I was there the next night,” says Clark. “And, you know, there were people that were upset about the election. And I think that it did bring some joy. I know that there were cast members who were crying before the show, and I think being able to go out and do the show just put some wind in their sails.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

The cast of the North American tour of Shucked MATTHEW MURPHY AND EVAN ZIMMERMAN

RPICTURE RESTART

Chicago Filmmakers, 1326 W. Hollywood, monthly: 1/ 18, 2/ 15, 3/25 at 6 PM, future dates TBA, $10, chicagofilmmakers.org/picture-restart

FROM THE ATTIC TO THE BIG SCREEN

The Picture Restart series at Chicago Filmmakers will feature monthly screenings of a newly organized and restored archival collection.

By JOSHUA MINSOO KIM

Ben Creech was shuffling around the Chicago Filmmakers attic when he stumbled upon a gem of a film, Analogies: Studies in the Movement of Time. Creech, who is the head projectionist at Northwestern’s Block Cinema, was excited to see the 1977 short based on information found online. In it, director Peter Rose experiments with a percussive soundtrack—made of struck piano strings, footsteps, drums, and more—to structure his images. Rose had a lofty goal: to “discover the next stage in the evolution of thought.” But when Creech opened the plastic can that housed the print, there was a di erent film about seeking transcendence: a documentary on porn called Raw Images. This was the organizational state of the 16 mm print collection at Chicago Filmmakers: unwieldy and mislabeled. Brenda Webb, the executive director of Chicago Filmmakers, tells me that the collection’s origins are in Ron Epple’s Picture Start, a film distribution company based in Champaign, Illinois. Throughout the 70s and 80s, Epple’s business

carried numerous independent, animated, and experimental films that were primarily rented by educational institutions. When film rentals started to decline with the rise of video, his company became unsustainable. “Picture Start was looking for a not-for-profit organization to take over the collection,” Webb tells me. “We accepted responsibility.”

With more than 600 titles to their name, Chicago Filmmakers was then tasked with distributing these obscure films. They worked with a New Jersey company called Transit Media which stored and shipped out prints based on orders. Over time, rentals dwindled to only one or two a year, and when Chicago Filmmakers relocated to a firehouse in 2017, there wasn’t space or justification to shelve a largely unrented archive. The films were left in the attic.

Creech originally became interested in this collection through research done by his colleague, curator Michael Metzger. “He’s very good at examining long spreadsheets and finding interesting films in them,” Creech

explains. The two were looking for a rare 1988 short by Robert F. Gates called Communication From Weber. Centered around the titular Albert Michael Weber—who the director described as a “derelict-politico, artist-collagist, and communicator”—the work was part of Metzger’s extensive research on historical films depicting trans lives onscreen. No other copy seemed to exist outside this archive, and it wasn’t going to be easy to find it here either. Various people, myself included, have reached out to Chicago Filmmakers over the past decade to watch these films. I was told that everything was too disorderly to proceed, but Creech found a way in. He struck up a conversation with the organization’s recent programs manager, Leila Sherbini. He and Metzger wanted to see some works, and Sherbini later brought a box containing Lisa Crafts’s joyously erotic animation Desire Pie (1976). (The Block ended up screening this film later in 2024.) During these initial viewings, Creech noticed that a lot of films had shrunken leaders (the strips that are attached to the

beginning or end of the film proper). “Films would grind up inside the projector,” Creech tells me, “so I recommended archival strategies to preserve the work.” Sherbini said there weren’t enough resources for the endeavor. Learning this, Creech struck a deal with Webb: He would do repairs on the film prints in exchange for the opportunity to watch these films for research. Webb agreed. Throughout 2024, both he and Metzger watched numerous films from the collection, but the truth was that Metzger’s programming scope couldn’t accommodate many of their discoveries. And so Creech pitched another idea: a monthly film series held at Chicago Filmmakers, with works exclusively from the attic. “No one should let me do this,” he first thought of the proposition. His role as a projectionist meant that he was largely working behind the scenes and should perhaps stay that way, but after encouragement from others, he realized that there was no better person for the job than him. “Nobody in Chicago Filmmakers knows anything about the films,” he says. “You can’t

Creech offered to repair the fi lm prints in exchange for the opportunity to watch them. JAMES HOSKING

Projectionist Ben Creech in the attic of Chicago Filmmakers with old 16 mm fi lm prints

JAMES HOSKING

watch them, and there’s a one-line description in the spreadsheet that’s usually incomplete.” Creech started planning for a year’s worth of programs, and the first series, titled Her Expansive Self, shows on January 18.

Creech is leading the series with a program of women filmmakers, especially since the collection was dominated by men. Webb noted how certain films in the collection were specific to Chicago too, and suggested bringing some of those works into the fold. These parameters guided the curation of the first program, but the five films that will be shown are also unified by a theme of multiple identities and the entanglements, resistances, and freedoms found within them.

The striking black-and-white short film On

was living in a foreign body without access to spoken language,” she tells me. She had to receive therapy to recover lost connections and has found the process painful yet fascinating. “[It] certainly makes me relate to Threshold from the experience of a body that I did not know back then.”

Also in the program is Cathy Cook’s Bust-Up (1988), a riotous portrait of the late Holly Brown, an Australia-born, Milwaukee-based singer, comedian, and dancer who was well-known during Milwaukee’s golden age of drag in the 1980s. When I speak with Cook on the phone, she tells me stories of how they first met at parties, and how Brown’s Bette Davis character was the starting point for the film. The goal was to challenge gender roles and stereotypes, and Cook knows now that Brown would identify as a trans woman today. (Cook had never seen trans lives depicted on film prior to making Bust-Up). She also explains that the title comes from a phrase that Brown shouted, and then she ends our conversation with an emphatic anecdote: “Holly loved her boobs.”

The third film in the program is Jo Bonney and Ruth Peyser’s Another Great Day (1980), an animated film that depicts a housewife who “moves in this world of distorted values [. . .] only able to recognize her own despair.”

film’s demolished buildings. Today, she has a di erent view. “As an older woman now, I’m more concerned about how women should get back what they’ve been robbed of.” In talking with these filmmakers, I’m struck by how much their works have evolved in meaning and significance. That the program concludes with Maya Deren’s influential Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) is apt: Its vague plot and dreamy visuals are reminders that there are a multitude of ways to navigate life but also interpret one’s journey through it.

the Threshold of Liberty (1992) was made by Heidi Tikka while she was a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). In the early 90s, she worked with local avant-garde filmmaker legends like Michelle (Shellie) Fleming and Sharon Couzin and was interested in discourses surrounding feminist issues. “I used a simple random generator that I programmed,” she tells me of the film’s poetic script, “and then chanted the resulting text by myself.” She considers the actual images an afterthought to the poem, and with the film’s references to Luis Buñuel’s surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou (1929), she wanted to suggest “the impasse of representational strategies for reaching the experience of shock.” She also sees the film in a di erent light after a recent brain hemorrhage. “After the stroke, I

The two met at art school in Australia before arriving in New York during the late 1970s. In revisiting the film in light of this program, they’re saddened by how the issues explored in the film are still relevant today. “Forty-four years ago we felt that the world was changing and people were becoming more tolerant, more open to accepting that women should have an equal place in society,” they explain. Made with paint, ink, and collaged photos, both Bonney and Peyser consciously opted for a “raw and aggressive” style to “match the inchoate feelings of the woman.” They recognize how the film is a depiction of postpartum depression, which was something never acknowledged back in the day. Motherhood, they tell me, was always portrayed positively, and they sense now the great fear they felt in how it and domesticity could encroach on individual and artistic expression.

Another Great Day is followed by Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa’s Ruins Within (1992), a gorgeous work previously described in the Reader as a “transcultural fever dream about belly dancers and male spectators.” When I contact Saeed-Vafa about the work, she’s extremely pithy. “My goal was to show how women can participate in their own destruction,” she tells me, revealing the symbolic imagery of the

The Chicago Filmmakers Picture Start archive has proven illuminating for everyone who’s dug through the collection. Alexander Stewart and Lilli Carré of the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation first stumbled upon the collection in 2010, and they considered it extremely formative to their understanding of animation in general. “These films presented a picture to us of what experimental animation as a genre might be,” Stewart explains, citing Sara Petty’s Furies (1977) and Larry Cuba’s Two Space (1979) as “instantly galvanizing.” Though the two learned a lot from classes at SAIC, it was through this trove that they had a better handle on experimental animation’s lineage. Still, there are more works to be discovered. Last year, Creech found the playful animated film Rockers (1990) by Ed Counts; it ended up on the Eyeworks Festival’s slate.

This entire project, however, is about more than just showing extraordinary films. Creech tells me that the rights situation is a gray area for these works. Webb says that filmmakers could have asked for their films back, but that very few have contacted Chicago Filmmakers to acquire them. And Webb couldn’t reach out to them either: The contacts were listed on a now-corrupted zip drive. Creech has consequently been reaching out to filmmakers of the works he is showing, and he has a very specific plan: “I’m going to invite them to join us for the screening, run the show, do a Q&A, and then return their film at the end of the night.” Some of the filmmakers, like Cathy Cook, had no idea what happened to their print after Ron Epple’s death in 1993. She doesn’t even have a personal copy of Bust-Up . And so Creech likens the Picture Restart series to a classic, old-school neighborhood screening, the kind where people bring in their works and take them home at the end of the night. Consider him a mediator of such an event—just one that’s decades in the making. v m letters@chicagoreader.com

continued from p. 17

Creech in the projection booth at Chicago Filmmakers JAMES HOSKING

FILM

Welcome back, moviegoers!

I spent much of the holiday break not being a Chicago moviegoer, but an international one. My husband and I enjoyed a week abroad in Budapest following a 12-hour layover in Amsterdam. While the trip wasn’t as cinematically robust as some of our previous journeys, we did manage to have a few interesting experiences.

Our first stop in Amsterdam was the Eye Filmmuseum, where there was, ironically, an exhibition on American avant-garde film in the 1960s. It was an incredible exhibit in a large, open-air space, with sections allocated to such avantgarde filmmakers as Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Shirley Clarke, Andy Warhol, Marie Menken, Bruce Conner, and Yoko Ono. Each station showed short films by each filmmaker on a loop; we watched a few in their entirety, including Menken’s dazzling Arabesque for Kenneth Anger (1961) and Conner’s found-footage masterpiece Report (1967). The latter was especially interesting to watch in Amsterdam, as it’s all about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a distinctly American tragedy. It reverberated around the world, of course, but, as I felt when walking through the Anne Frank House, there’s a specific feeling to encountering so intimately something that happened so far away, both in time and distance, but about which you’re still aware.

In Budapest, we saw Pedro Almodóvar’s latest, The Room Next Door—opening here on Friday— at a Hungarian multiplex (Cinema City, a chain specific to central and eastern Europe) that reminded me of the AMC River East. You know those movie star montages on the ceiling of the concession stand area and on the sides of the hallways? They had those, too. One particularly interesting combination was Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock from The Proposal (2009) with Jim Carrey from Liar Liar (1997). We were lucky, because The Room Next Door was the only film

A still from The Room Next Door (2024)

being shown in English (notably, it’s Almodóvar’s first English-language film) with Hungarian subtitles. Everything else, even some of the arthouse fare, was dubbed. The film itself is almost transcendental; Almodóvar’s transition from provocateur to philosopher has been an honor to witness.

My New Year’s resolution is to see on average one movie in a theater per day. Perhaps I’m being too ambitious, but as of this writing (January 5), I’ve seen four movies in the theater and plan to make up the day I missed (New Year’s Day, of all days, because I was recovering from a bad cold) with the Godfather trilogy screening this weekend at the Gene Siskel Film Center as part of their Settle In series. One of the films I saw was Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour (2015), also part of the Settle In series, coming in at a little over five hours. Honestly, I’m not sure if Hamaguchi’s plodding melancholy is for me, but I’m glad I saw it.

The other films I saw were Frederick Wiseman’s Basic Training (1971) and Primate (1974) at the Film Center and Howard Hawks’s 1928 silent film A Girl in Every Port, presented by the Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre with live musical accompaniment by David Drazin, whose score was inspired. I won’t go too much into the Wiseman films now—there’s more to come about those as the Worlds of Wiseman series runs through the month—but the Hawks, also part of a new matinee series at the Music Box centered on the director, was very charming. I wouldn’t say Hawks is a blind spot, but I’m nevertheless excited to consider him so pointedly throughout the series.

Happy New Year, and until next time, moviegoers! —KAT SACHS v

The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film bu , collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to o er.

YEAR IN REVIEW

The best overlooked Chicago records of 2024

Algorithms can’t teach you about your neighbors and the great music they’re making—there’s no substitute for seeking out the new and unfamiliar.

By LEOR GALIL

In an October essay for the New Yorker , critic Kyle Chayka tried to unpack what he called “online recommendation culture.” It often manifests itself in curated lists of films, music, or books, whether presented in TikTok videos, old-fashioned listicles, or personal email newsletters. And I can’t decide what counts as an “overlooked” Chicago release without taking it into account.

I’ve thought a lot about the newsletter aspect of this culture. I know plenty of people who run newsletters, and I subscribe to dozens. I like to read critics who are writing about what compels them, not just what’s been assigned to them. I like learning about cultural phenomena foreign to me. And of course I’ve created a newsletter, Object Permanence, using the Button down platform. Though I put it on pause not long after the Reader resumed weekly publishing last spring, I’d been interviewing people who’ve been subjects of Wesley Willis songs.

Chayka describes recommendation culture as “both a reaction against and an extension of the tyranny of algorithmic recommendations, which in the course of the past decade have taken over our digital platforms.” In another sense, though, recommendation culture is a continuation of what’s been happening all along—it just used to happen at traditional news outlets, which employed journalists whose insights would help you choose what to watch, read, or listen to.

When news media suffer, though (and they’ve been suffering for decades now), culture journalism gets cut first. At the publications still standing, you’ll be lucky to find any remaining sta devoted to music, theater, cinema, visual art, or literature, and freelance budgets aren’t faring any better.

Most critics and culture reporters enter the

music and made the Fine Arts Building, where Newcomer sold his wares, feel a little more familiar.

It feels radical to emphasize the human element in music, and not just because music journalism is in such dire shape. Capitalist tech has made certain platforms feel inextricable from certain art forms—have you ever caught yourself saying you’re watching Netflix, instead of naming the movie or show?

In music, the biggest culprit is Spotify, which actively encourages listeners to treat songs as anonymized audio wallpaper. The company’s anti-art machinations have inspired dogged reporting by Liz Pelly, who just published the book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

field because they care about it, so in many cases they don’t stop writing about the arts even when they can no longer make a living doing so. Over the past few years, I’ve noticed more and more music writers launching newsletters to continue doing the work they love as opportunities at traditional outlets dry up.

In January 2024, Condé Nast laid o roughly a dozen Pitchfork sta ers, including longtime news director Evan Minsker, and announced that for some reason it would be folding Pitchfork into men’s magazine GQ . Two months later, Minsker launched the punk newsletter see/saw, which publishes feature-length interviews with marginal bands and short record reviews, all of which you could consider “recommendations.”

I’m 100 percent behind music journalists pursuing their craft through nontraditional means, whether a newsletter with thousands of subscribers or a zine that a dozen people might buy. But I also worry about what it means for music coverage to disappear from news outlets and general-interest publications with broader reach—because let’s face it, most potential readers will never hear about that newsletter, much less that zine.

Music journalism offers a window into a shared world. When it covers local artists and scenes, it can help humanize the people in our communities—it can remind us that our neighbors are real people with ambitions, faults, virtues, and dreams. Media and tech so often encourage us to look at strangers as nuisances, if not as security threats; I turn to the arts to give me a richer read on the world. Great music journalism can open my eyes the same way. Reader contributor Hannah Edgar recently wrote an obituary in the Tribune for Performers Music store owner Lee Newcomer, which transported me into the world of sheet

Last month, Harper’s published an excerpt from Pelly’s book about Spotify’s Perfect Fit Content program. This initiative prioritizes pleasant, cheaply licensed drivel recorded specifically for the platform’s playlists, allowing Spotify to keep an even greater share of its revenue. Its royalties are already insultingly meager, and last year it demonetized all tracks that hadn’t received more than 1,000 streams in a 12-month period.

It’s unbelievably depressing that one of the most powerful forces in the music ecosystem prioritizes tracks by made-up artists that are intended to be ignored. And the situation feels even more revolting when you consider the overwhelming volume of great music that never reaches the ears of the people who’d love it. This is why I’m perfectly comfortable ignoring the most popular artists in the world and focusing my professional energy on the interesting and underdocumented music being made in Chicago.

In his New Yorker piece, Chayka makes the preposterous claim that “recommendation culture” faces a challenge in that “there are only so many things to recommend.” That sounds like a him problem, honestly, not a reflection of any world I’ve ever lived in. Worthwhile cultural output is a deeper pool than most people can imagine, and it’s constantly being refreshed from every direction.

For more than a decade, I’ve capped the year by writing about my favorite overlooked Chicago releases. This ongoing project is an argument I’m making to this city—to its inhabitants and its media outlets—that we should expand and update our collective understanding of Chicago music. But it’s also a way for me to confront my blind spots. Every release on this list deserves a stand-alone story, but I didn’t write a thing about them in the Reader

this past year, and neither did anybody else. This is an inexact science, of course. And this piece doesn’t even represent all the Chicago music I loved in 2024 but didn’t manage to cover—I’m always learning more about what I missed yesterday or several months ago. I can think of no better recent example than Chicago anti-imperalist slam band Torture—like most folks, I missed their album “Enduring Freedom” when it came out in 2023, but I caught up as they became a critical favorite and cult phenomenon last year.

Please consider this list as more than just a collection of recommendations for specific pieces of music that came out in 2024 and didn’t get the love they deserved. Consider it a recommendation of the act of listening widely, of seeking out the new and unfamiliar, of learning to surprise yourself. I recommend all of it.

Answering Machines | The Big Catch

Answering Machines play shaggy, upbeat midwest punk with jittery abandon. The Big Catch sounds cruddy, but in a charming way—the band’s basement-show fidelity can’t obscure

MUSIC

the clarity of their purpose, which is to bang out as many quick-and-dirty hooks as possible in a 90-second song. The snotty vocal harmonies on “Pizza Driver” add a sugary garagepop rush to the barreling ri s and relentless drums.

Menace4hire | Side Opposite North

Chicago rapper Menace4hire dropped four projects in 2024. My favorite is the third, the

six-song EP Side Opposite North, which came out in November. He drapes his bars loosely atop dusty samples cranked to red-line volumes, and even when his instrumental tracks threaten to overwhelm his voice, his casually zonked cool dominates the vibe. Menace4hire gets a couple assists from Kaicrewsade, whose September full-length, Yvette, is one of my favorites of the year (and includes contributions from Menace4hire).

Nüde | Pink

Arty alt-rock duo Nüde nearly bookended the year with their two most recent EPs, January’s Pink and November’s St. Jude’s Telegram . Both releases set a pretty high bar, but for the moment Pink has the edge—Ruby Lucinda and Luke Clohisy hop between gnarly, streamlined grunge and feral posthardcore like they’ve been playing both since the 90s.

Plus Plus | ++

Chicago has no shortage of shoegaze bands, but Plus Plus (also styled “++”) are one of just a handful to leave a lasting impression on me. Mononymous front woman Abigail sings with ghostly a ectation over doomy instrumentals that owe as much to Yob as they do to Mazzy Star.

Prathloons | Incredible Things in High Speed

Collin Dall’s indie-rock project is indebted to the aesthetics of midwest emo—galloping loops of guitar, glum songwriting—without being trapped by them. Incredible Things in High Speed gets a dose of mature refinement thanks to Dall’s taste for postrock grandeur, which makes for a welcome contrast with emo’s adolescent energy. This splendor is ornamented in lovely ways by his collaborators, in particular Audrey Alger-Daniels and her gentle violin.

And ve runners-up:

Decoteau Black, Sam Feared for His Son. Fortune Friedman Hemberger Krimstein & Smith, They Have No Respect.

Freddie Sunshine, Still Processing

Intoner, Intoner

White Orchid, Bacchante Skip Will Be the Rage. v

PICK OF THE WEEK

Chicago bluesman Melvin Taylor is a jewel hidden in plain sight

MELVIN TAYLOR

Fri 1/10, 8:30 PM, FitzGerald’s, 6615 W. Roosevelt, Berwyn, $20. 21+

THERE WAS A TIME when every blues club in Chicago hosted at least one house band with a hidden gem—a musician who might’ve been little known among casual fans but who sold out shows in Europe or worked as a sought-after support player for marquee names. Some might argue that this time isn’t over, because blues artists who are stars elsewhere can be readily found at regular gigs at local clubs such as Rosa’s Lounge, Kingston Mines, or the newly reopened Lee’s Unleaded Blues.

Guitarist Melvin Taylor is one of these gems. He toured with the late John Mayall a few years ago, and he has a reliable following in Europe, but here in his hometown he gigs mostly in the same sorts of clubs he’s been playing since the 1970s. The Mississippi-born slide guitarist and flat-picker is a versatile player in the Albert King mode: Whether leading his Slack Band or playing in another group, he keeps the melody going while pushing his smooth, incisive guitar phrasing to center stage. Who needs theatrics when you can hit all the notes just right?

Taylor was born in 1959, and three years later his family relocated to Chicago, where he first picked up his instrument at age six. After learning from relatives (including his great-aunt, pioneering gospel and rock guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe), he began working in local bands at 12. In 1980, pianist Pinetop Perkins asked him to join the Legendary Blues Band, formed by musicians who’d recently quit Muddy Waters’s group. They went on to tour Europe, where Taylor found success on his own and subsequently released his first two solo albums, 1982’s Blues on the Run and 1984’s Plays the Blues for You (both on French label Isabel Records). Taylor has since released six more studio albums, several of which have been reissued by UK label Pure Pleasure over the past decade (last year it put out an LP version of 1995’s Melvin Taylor & the Slack Band). He’s also

Recommended and notable shows with

working on a new record to be released in 2025. Taylor and his band can frequently be found at Rosa’s when he’s not touring, and he’ll bring some regular collaborators along for this show at FitzGerald’s. Settle in for at least two sets of straight-up dreamy guitar blues. And if you can’t make it out this week—or if you want to keep the good times rolling—Taylor will support Buddy Guy on Thursday, January 16, during the blues icon’s annual residency at Buddy Guy’s Legends. —SALEM COLLO-JULIN

THURSDAY9

Daniel Knox Lee Ketch opens. 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $15, $5 livestream. 18+

“Listen to me ramble, listen to me sing / Listen to me, I don’t owe you a goddamn thing,” Daniel Knox sings on “Vinegar Hill,” from his 2021 album, Won’t You Take Me With You. It’s a delight to do just that: the formerly Chicagoan pianist, composer, and songwriter has built a catalog of moody, evocative, and endlessly rewarding work over the past decade and a half. His baritone voice is as smooth and rich as a wooden bar polished by a hundred years of elbows, drinks, and desperate hope.

Knox’s artistic tastes and pursuits are eclectic. Along with his original music, he’s released tribute albums to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Twin Peaks. He’s collaborated with director David Lynch on a retrospective of the filmmaker’s work (they met while Knox was working at the Music Box Theatre in 2007). He’s devoted a whole section of his website to his painstakingly organized thoughts on the entire Star Trek franchise. I’m especially fond of his deadpan and apparently sincere 2019 cover of “Princess Leia’s Life Day Song,” which originally appeared in the notoriously cocaine-fueled and surreal 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special Now based in Portugal, Knox is focusing on film and multimedia work. This spring he released a song on the soundtrack of horror flick Tarot, and on his Patreon you can find his audio commentary on The Wizard of Oz and his take on the music from the 1985 Sesame Street movie Follow That Bird, an album he’s calling The Bluebird of Happiness This holiday season, Knox gave fans the choice to lose Whamageddon in style: On Bandcamp he’s released a scratchy, mesmerizing lounge-jazz version of Wham’s love-it-or-hate-it holiday classic, “Last Christmas,” accompanied by the original instrumental “Lost Christmas,” which packs a power ful punch of nostalgia and loss into just over a minute. Together, they demonstrate the seamless weaving together of darkness and whimsy that’s the source of much of Knox’s appeal. A true nerd’s nerd, he draws you in with pop-culture camaraderie before he shivs you in the kidneys with raw emotion—and the blade goes in so smoothly that you welcome the pain.

When Knox lived in Chicago, he liked to wander through downtown in the wee hours, playing the pianos he’d found in the lobbies of hotels until someone asked him to leave. It’s great to have him back, if only for a night. —MONICA KENDRICK

FRIDAY10

Pan•American & Kramer The Shape Of and Chelsea Bridge open. 8 PM, Chop Shop, 2033 W. North, $31.31. 18+

Multi-instrumentalist and producer Mark Kramer, better known as just Kramer, has built a subcultural legacy by making music with and for other people. His reputation rests on several things: He played in Bongwater with Ann Magnuson and Shockabilly with Eugene Chadbourne; he toured as a mem-

ERIC KRIESANT

ber of Ween and the Butthole Surfers, among others; he founded New York indie label Shimmy-Disc, whose catalog includes Boredoms, Gwar, and King Missile; and he produced crucial albums by the likes of Low, Daniel Johnston, and Galaxie 500. “I never feel as though I’ve really given anything of value to others unless I’m producing other [artists’] music, or collaborating as an artist with others,” Kramer recently told UK music site Silent Radio. As an example, he referred to his recent work with Mark Nelson, guitarist- vocalist for ambient postrock group Labradford, who also records and performs as Pan•American. Kramer and Nelson’s joint album, Reverberations of Non-Stop Traffic on Redding Road , came out on Shimmy-Disc in March 2024, and though it feels like a Pan•American record, it doesn’t feel like a solo Pan•American record—both artists’ fingerprints are all over its drifting, gently percolating notes, but it’s part of the point that

MUSIC

you can’t tell who did what. The creeping darkness of the album’s plaintive, sometimes solitary guitars engages in a slow-motion tug-of-war with its soothing, ruminative warmth, and neither is ever dominant. Reverberations is a resilient record in the simple fact of its existence, which argues for the restorative power of meditative encounters even in the worst of times. —LEOR GALIL

Melvin Taylor See Pick of the Week on page 22. 8:30 PM, FitzGerald’s, 6615 W. Roosevelt, Berwyn, $20. 21+

SATURDAY11

Background Character

$50K Check headline; Background Character and Modern Daybreak open. 10 PM, Cole’s Bar, 2338 N. Milwaukee, $13. 21+

Arty Chicago punk trio Background Character just celebrated five years as a band by headlining a show at Gman Tavern, and they’re still just as eager to try new ideas as they were on day one. In November, they self-released their fourth album, Recordings 2024, a year’s worth of material with no theme or through line other than the band’s cheeky, omnidirectional creativity. Throughout Recordings 2024, front person Jenny croons like a doo-wop singer and growls like the band might bust out a gnarly djent breakdown at any moment (which they never do). Drummer Bash and bassist Salem are just as good at surprising you with their charming left turns, confidently leading Background Character into lite disco (“Funkle Magic”), shambolic lounge (“Evangelical Cats”), and postwar pop (“Transfemme Elvis”). Everyone in Background Character has the talent to pull off this sort of whimsical nonsense, and they also clearly share a gleeful excitement about making music—something I wish more bands had. —LEOR GALIL

Black Duck, 60 Strings

8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $20, $5 livestream. 18+

Guitars of one sort or another reign supreme on this double bill of local trios. Under the name 60 Strings, pedal steel guitarists Justin Brown, Jordan Martins, and Sam Wagster use technical purism to enable formal experimentation. They confine their playing to the traditional techniques associated with country music and eschew all outboard effects—even amplifier reverb. But the music they’ve developed over a couple years of intense workshopping and occasional gigging (this is only their third concert since their live debut at Elastic Arts in May 2023) isn’t country at all, nor does it fit neatly into any other genre. Instead, 60 Strings have orches-

Daniel Knox MARIANA CASTRO

Background Character

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trated patient unisons, stately melodies, and layered atmospherics into a celebration of the pedal steel guitar’s purely sonic potential. They’ve already recorded at Electrical Audio, but the products of that session have yet to be released.

Bill MacKay, Douglas McCombs, and Charles Rumback have a collective musical résumé so immense that it could fill a book, encompassing myriad manifestations of jazz, rock, and folk as well as stylistic hybrids of every imaginable shade. As Black Duck , the three of them improvise on stark, indelible themes similar to those Tom Verlaine played on his instrumental records, turning them into slow-boiling performances that twist and turn but maintain a lucid dramatic arc. On their self-titled album, released by Thrill Jockey in 2023, everyone in the band plays guitars, but onstage Rumback handles all the drumming and McCombs doubles on baritone guitar to cover the bass frequencies. —BILL MEYER

WEDNESDAY15

Urika’s Bedroom Part of the Tomorrow Never Knows festival, which runs Wed 1/15 through Sun 1/19 at Lincoln Hall, Schubas, Sleeping Village, Metro, Gman Tavern, Judson & Moore, the Hideout, and Color Club. Lipsticism and Starcharm open. 8 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $20. 18+

Since the 1960s, psychedelic folk oddballs such as Pink Floyd cofounder Syd Barrett and Animal Collective have tuned in to the link between gently wide-eyed pseudo children’s music and quietly cross-eyed sounds for the eccentric. Los Angeles songwriter Tchad Cousins, aka Urika’s Bedroom, is well acquainted with that sort of dreamy Alice

in Wonderland –style aesthetic, and you can see it in the distorted anamorphic bunny on the cover of his debut album, November’s Big Smile, Black Mire (True Panther/Virgin). Cousins communicates the smile in the record’s title through melodic guitar strumming, dreamy trip-hop beats, and mannered, intimate vocals that together evoke the indie pop of Camera Obscura or a significantly more laid-back Trent Reznor.

On “Junkie,” feedback whine and snarling noise infiltrate the comforting nod-along beat and relaxed, droning melody, so that baleful muck slides around and into your ears. The sweet melody of “XTC” gets a dark counterpoint in ominous ersatz strings that recall the screeching murder violins of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho . And when guest vocalist Vivian Buenrostro mutters so ly about “plastic-shaped beaded eyes” on the spoken-word number “BSBM,” it feels like drifting off to sleep in a roomful of horror-movie dolls about to come to life. Urika’s Bedroom maintains a vibe on the edge between sweet rest and faery delirium throughout Big Smile, Black Mire; the songs blur and fray around the edges but never depart meaningfully from their starry, midtempo grooves. Over the course of an album or live set, you might find that a little boring, but if you’re on Cousins’s wavelength, you won’t want the ominous

Tchad Cousins of Urika’s Bedroom JACK DIONE

SINCE 1892

SISTAS WHO KILL

SPEED RACK CHICAGO

JOY OLADOKUN THE BLACKBIRD TOUR

REBIRTH BRASS BAND + LOWDOWN BRASS BAND

WINDOWS95MAN + LUNA

BEN BAILEY

RUBBLEBUCKET

YEAR OF THE BANANA TOUR + HANNAH MOHAN

YAKUZA PLAYS GOLEM

STARS SET YOURSELF ON FIRE 20TH ANNIVERSARY TOUR + LYDIA PERSUAD

BARN DANCE APOCALYPSE

EIVØR

NORTH AMERICAN TOUR + SYLVAINE

ADAM CONOVER THE NIHILISM PIVOT TOUR

THE DEAD BOLTS + TELESCREENS / THE COURTS

MICHAEL MARCAGI + ASHLEY KUTCHER

REGINA SPEKTOR

THE MC TAYLOR GOLDSMITH SHOW

LIME CORDIALE ENOUGH OF THE SWEET TALK TOUR

INTERVALS

MEMORY PALACE TOUR 2025 + VOLA / DAVID MAXIM MICIC

LAST DINOSAURS

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A MURDERER

MARC BROUSSAR TIME IS A THIEF TOUR + KENDRA MORRIS

PARIS PALOMA CACAOPHONY TOUR

GOSSIP WOLF

A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene

CHICAGO MUSIC FANATIC Aadam Jacobs began recording local shows in the early 80s and kept at it obsessively for more than 30 years. He’s never sought to monetize this work, though artists have occasionally incorporated his recordings into licensed releases. The Replacements live album Not Ready for Prime Time, for instance, used some of Jacobs’s audio to flesh out a soundboard recording of the band’s January 1986 performance at Metro Not Ready for Prime Time originally appeared on the 2023 Rhino box set Tim: Let It Bleed , and Rhino issued the live album as a stand-alone LP for Record Store Day 2024. (Both releases include liner notes by former Reader staff writer Bob Mehr.)

Jacobs taped concerts for his own satisfaction. Though he sometimes shared his recordings with the musicians, even giving them copies for free, in most cases no one else heard them. His archive exceeds 10,000 shows, and in recent years it’s taken on a mythic status, particularly a er WBEZ published a Curious City story on Jacobs in 2019. In 2023, the Chicago Underground Film Festival debuted a documentary about Jacobs by Katlin Schneider called Melomaniac

people who are willing to work on this stuff.”

So far Jacobs has given the Internet Archive about 100 DAT recordings and at least a decade’s worth of CD-R copies of old

The story and the documentary both raise the question of the future of Jacobs’s archive and how to preserve it. An answer emerged late last year, when the Internet Archive began uploading the Aadam Jacobs Collection

“I don’t have enough life le in me to digitize everything I have,” Jacobs says. “And it’s just decaying. So before everything falls apart, it needs to be digitized. There’s no sense in me holding onto the vast majority of what I have for potential release someday. So it’s best if it gets out of my hands, so that it can live on beyond me.”

Jacobs had been facing these concerns for years, and this past fall he hosted an Internet Archive representative at his home. “I knew that they had the facility and the drive to work on this,” he says. “I haven’t found any other organization that is as interested or has the

show tapes. The Aadam Jacobs Collection formally came into being on November 30, at which point it retroactively subsumed a couple dozen of Jacobs’s recordings that one way or another had already found their way into the archive. The collection is part of the site’s Live Music Archive, and the first newly uploaded recording was a June 1988 Cubby Bear set by rootsy Boston punks Scruff y the Cat

As of this publication, the Aadam Jacobs Collection has 171 entries, but it’s growing by the day as the Internet Archive team processes Jacobs’s recordings. Each post includes detailed information about the material, o en including the equipment Jacobs used and the method of digitization. In some cases, Jacobs provided additional context: A recording of Reggie Watts at Constellation on July 13, 2013, notes that Watts gave three performances at different venues that day and that

Jacobs captured them all. Jacobs says he’s regularly in touch with the Internet Archive to fill in gaps in the metadata accompanying the material. “Questions come through pretty often,” he says. “I’m pretty much in regular contact with them—more often than my family.”

The Aadam Jacobs Collection already includes big-name indie artists such as Sebadoh , Björk , and the Breeders mixed in with local artists, among them Eleventh Dream Day , the Eternals , and Health & Beauty . At the current uploading rate, it’ll take more than five years to get everything online. “Before I was in contact with them directly, I was told that my archive will be the largest single person’s archive that they’ve dealt with,” Jacobs says.

Jacobs hasn’t been involved in the Internet Archive’s preservation process, beyond answering questions about metadata. “I’m glad it’s happening,” he says. “There’s very special occasions that are up there right now, within just these first uploads—very special occasions that I don’t know why I’d want to keep them to myself.”

TRADITIONALLY, THE MUSIC BIZ goes into hibernation by the time end-of-year listicle season peaks in mid-December. That said, “the music biz” usually means big labels, and Gossip Wolf reliably finds local artists putting out cool new music in the dead of winter. On Friday, December 27, Mississippi label Earth Girl Tapes issued People Talking , the wild debut EP from Chicago hardcore four-piece Cucuy, which features front man Ralph Rivera (the Bug, Raw Nerve) and drummer Lily Glick Finnegan (also a well-known improvising musician). Two days later, avant-garde R&B producer and singer Megiapa dropped the engrossing Push EP , which began as a sampling exercise—all of its tracks borrow from the same song.

On Wednesday, January 1, rock band Rotundos self-released a self-titled album, whose shaggy songs punctuate shoegaze’s wall of sound with posthardcore’s explosive climaxes. The same day, indie-pop group Arts & Letters put out the breezy, loungeinflected album One Is a Lucky Number Too, and they’ll celebrate with a headlining set at Fallen Log on Thursday, January 9. Silje Sweets and Woodrow Hart & the Haymaker open; tickets are $10 and the all-ages show starts at 8 PM. —LEOR GALIL

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JOBS

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